Editorial, January 2013
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue thirty-two of Lightspeed!

First of all, an apology for an error we made in our November issue. In that issue, we ran a story called “La Alma Perdida de Marguerite Espinoza” by Jeremiah Tolbert. The problem is, in proper Spanish, the title should have been “El Alma . . .” rather than “La Alma . . .” Despite our best efforts to proof everything—including checking the Spanish—that slipped through the cracks. So apologies to all of our Spanish-speaking readers who that no doubt bothered. (And thanks to the folks who pointed out the error.)

On January 1, the nomination period for the Hugo Awards opens. The 2012 Hugo Awards will be presented in San Antonio, TX during Lone Star Con 3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention (Aug. 29-Sep. 2). Nominations close on March 10, 2012. Anyone who has a supporting or full membership of Lone Star Con 3 as of January 31, 2013 and all members of Chicon 7 (last year’s Worldcon) may nominate works. If you didn’t attend Chicon 7, and you don’t plan to attend Lone Star Con 3, you can still nominate by purchasing a supporting membership. Nominations may be submitted through the online ballot at lonestarcon3.org/hugo-awards.

If you’d like to reference a list of all Lightspeed stories (and other material published by yours truly in 2012), visit my personal website at johnjosephadams.com/blog. There, I’ve sorted everything into their proper categories (short story vs. novelette, etc.), including material from my 2012 original anthologies, Armored and Under the Moons of Mars.

Also, if you are planning and eligible to vote for the Hugos this year, you’re eligible for some free stuff! Just visit johnjosephadams.com/blog for details.

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

We have original fantasy by A.C. Wise (“With Tales in Their Teeth, From the Mountain They Came”) and Kristine Kathryn Rusch (“Purity Test”), along with fantasy reprints by Daniel Abraham (“The Cambist and Lord Iron”) and Jeffrey Ford (“Daltharee”).

Plus, we have original science fiction by Matthew Kressel (“The Sounds of Old Earth”) and Jonathan Olfert (“Lifeline”), and SF reprints by Cherie Priest (“Addison Howell and the Clockroach”) and Theodora Goss (“Child Empress of Mars”).

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella will be “The Fear Gun” by Judith Berman, and of course we’ll have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling authors Cory Doctorow and Daniel Handler (a/k/a Lemony Snicket).

Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for The Red Knight, the debut fantasy series from author Miles Cameron. 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 Epic: Legends of Fantasy, 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 the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor), Wastelands 2 (2013, Night Shade), and Robot Uprisings (2013, Doubleday). He is also the editor of Nightmare Magazine and is the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

The Fear Gun
Judith Berman

1

The dawn found Harvey Gundersen on the deck of his house, as it had nearly every morning since the eetee ship had crashed on Cortez Mountain. There he stood a nightly watch for the fear storms. On this last watch, though, the eetees had worn him out—an incursion at the Carlson’s farm and the lone raider at his own well, where the black sky had rained pure terror—and fatigue had overcome him just as the sky began to lighten. When Susan shook him awake, he jerked upright in his lawn chair, heart a-gallop.

She gripped red plastic in her hand. For an instant, Harvey was sure that his worst suspicions had proved true, and his wife had learned how to bring on the bad weather. But even as he swung up his shotgun, finger on the trigger, he saw that what Susan pointed at him was not a weather-maker, not even an eetee gun about to blast him to splat, but the receiver of their landline phone. The cord trailed behind her.

Susan’s gaze riveted on the shotgun. Harvey took a deep breath and lowered the barrel. Only then did Susan say, flatly, “Your brother’s calling.”

“What does he want?”

She shrugged, two shades too casual. Harvey knew Susan and Ben plotted about him in secret. His pulse still racing, he carried the phone into the house and slid the glass door closed so Susan could not overhear. He stood where he could keep his eye on both Susan and the eetee-infested mountains.

As he slurped last night’s mormon tea from his thermos, liquid spilled onto the arm of his coat. Strange that his hands never shook while he held a gun.

“Hello, Ben,” he said into the receiver.

“Nice work last night, Harve,” said Ben. “Good spotting. You saved some lives there, buddy.”

Although Harvey knew better than to trust his brother’s sincerity, he could not repress a surge of pride. “I watch the weather, Ben. I can see it coming five miles off. And I look for the coyotes. They track the eetees. They keep a watch on them. The coyotes—”

“Sure, Harve,” Ben said. “Sure. I’ve never doubted it. You’re the best spotter we have.”

“Well, thanks, Ben.” Harvey seized the moment to describe how, two days ago, the coyotes had used telepathy to trick a van-load of eetees over the edge of the road to their deaths. As long as Ben was de facto dictator of Lewis County, for everyone’s good Harvey had to try to warn him what was happening out there in the parched mountains.

But Ben cut him off before he’d even reached the part about the eetee heads. “Harvey, Harvey, you sound pretty stressed. What about you come in and let Dr. King give you something for your jitters? You tell me all the time how jittery you get, keeping watch day and night. I’ll tell you honestly I’m worried, Harve. Come in before you mistake Susan for an eetee, or do something else we’ll all regret.”

What a lying fuck Ben was. Ben just wanted Dr. King to trank him stupid with Ativan. If Ben were truly worried, he wouldn’t force Harvey and Susan to stay out here in this horribly vulnerable spot, where Harvey was exposed to bad weather two or three times a week. That was what made him so jittery. But it was always, “Sorry, Harve, you can’t expect anyone in town to just give you food or gasoline or Clorox, or repair your phone line when the eetees cut it, not when supplies are dwindling by the day. We all have to contribute to the defense of Lewisville. Manning your observation post—the closest we have now to the ship—is the contribution we need from you.”

What Ben really wanted was for the eetees to rid him of his troublemaker brother. And on the day the weather finally killed Harvey, Ben would send a whole platoon of deputies out to De Soto Hill to take over Harvey’s house and deck. Ben would equip them with the eetee weapons and tools he kept confiscating from Harvey. Can’t hoard these, Harve, my men need them. Lewisville needs ’em.

Ben’s invitation to visit Dr. King, though: Harvey couldn’t afford to pass that up. Although the timing of the offer was a little too perfect . . .

“Ben, I’d rather have a couple of deputies to spell me than a pass for a doctor visit. What about it?”

“You know how short I am of manpower.” Ben sighed. “I’ll work on it, but in the meantime why don’t you come on in?”

“Okay,” Harvey said. “Okay, Ben, I’ll stop by Dr. King’s. If I can get Susan to stand watch for me. You know how she is these days. I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave the observation post that long, do you? How can you be sure eetees won’t come in daytime?”

There was a moment of silence at the other end. Then Ben said goodbye and hung up.

Harvey swallowed a few more gulps of mormon tea, feeling the ephedrine buzz now, and returned outside for recon. First he checked the weather. No fear-clouds on the horizon that he could detect. But lingering jumpiness from last night’s raid, and the scare Susan had given him on waking, might obscure an approaching front.

His video monitors showed him the view toward Lewisville, from the north and front side of the house. At this distance the town was a tiny life raft of houses, trees and grain elevators adrift on the rolling sea of golden wheat. The deck itself gave him a 270-degree view west, south and east: over the highway and the sweep of fields below De Soto Hill, and of course toward the pine-forested mountains and that immense wreck.

Harvey cast around for the Nikons, only to discover that Susan had usurped his most powerful binoculars and was gazing through them toward the mountains. Anger stirring in him, he picked up the little Minoltas. Through them, the world looked quiet enough. The only movement was a hawk floating across the immaculate blue sky. But Harvey never trusted the quiet. The eetees might avoid the desiccating heat of daytime, but they were always stirring around up there. Plotting the next raid. And the coyotes—

If only he could spy into those mountains as easily as the eetees’ fear-storms roared into his own head.

The nape of Harvey’s neck began to twitch. “Do you see something?” he demanded. “Are the coyotes—”

“I’m looking for Fred,” Susan said coldly, without lowering the binoculars.

“Fred is gone.” Now the anger boiled in Harvey’s gut. “You should be watching for eetees, not pining after your lost dog.”

“Fuck your eetees! Fred is out there somewhere. He wouldn’t leave us and never come back!”

Her voice had turned flat and uncompromising, and Harvey knew one of her rages was coming on. But he could not rein in his own fury.

“If you care so much,” he said, “why did you let him loose?”

Susan finally turned to stare at Harvey. She was breathing hard. “I didn’t let Fred out.”

“Oh, so the coyotes unbuckled his collar?”

Deep red suffused Susan’s face. “Fuck you,” she screamed, “and fuck your coyotes!” She slammed the binoculars onto the deck, she reached toward the rifle—

Harvey grabbed his shotgun and aimed. How stupid to leave his rifle propped against the railing, out of reach—

Susan threw the rifle onto the deck, and then the tray holding the remains of his midnight snack; she kicked over his lawn chair and the tripod for his rifle, and upended the box of shotgun cartridges he’d been packing with rock salt. “Shoot me, Harvey!” she screamed. “Shoot me! I know you want to!”

Harvey snatched up his rifle but did not shoot. At last Susan stopped her rampage. She stared with fierce hatred through her tangled, greasy hair, panting. “I didn’t let Fred out, you moron. You did.” Then she flung herself in her own lawn chair and picked up a tattered and yellowing issue of last summer’s Lewisville Tribune.

The shakes took Harvey. While he waited for the waves of fever cold to recede, he gritted his teeth and said to her, “I’m going to do my rounds now. Just keep an eye out, okay, Susan? That’s all I ask? Watch for eetees, who want to kill us and steal our water, and not for your dead dog?”

When she did not answer, he heaved open the glass door again and stalked into the house. Susan might as well be using a weather-maker, the way she kept terrifying him. Harvey was jumpy enough today. He just had been lucky that last night’s raider had probably stolen its weather-maker from a higher-ranking eetee and wasn’t skilled in its use. And by now Harvey had learned to keep his distance and rely on his rifle and sniper’s night-scope. So the lightning strike of blind terror had fallen short. Harvey had caught only the peripheral shockwave—although that that had been horrible enough.

Weather-maker was what Harvey called the weapon. Other people called it a fear gun. Dr. King and Joe Hansen, putting their heads together, had suggested that the gun produced (as quoted in a bulletin distributed by the sheriff’s office) “wireless stimulation of the amygdala, mimicking the neurochemical signature of paralytic terror.” But no one had yet been able to figure out the insides of those whorled red pendants, and no one could do with them what the eetees did, not even Harvey, who was so hypersensitive from repeated exposure that the weapon affected him even when he wasn’t its target. Even when they weren’t being used. (When Dr. King told him that human researchers had for years been able to produce a similar if weaker effect with a simple electrode, Harvey had, next time he was alone, checked his scalp for unfamiliar scar tissue. But if Susan or Ben had had such an electrode implanted, they had also concealed the traces well.)

Harvey unbolted the connecting door that led from the kitchen into the garage. As angry as Susan’s abdication of responsibility made him, this was the opportunity he needed. She would read and re-read her Tribune for hours, trying to pretend that the entire last year hadn’t happened.

In the garage he quickly donned his rubber gloves and plastic raincoat. He raised the lid of the big chest freezer, long emptied of anything edible, and heaved out the large tarpaulin-wrapped bundle, humping it into the pickup bed. The raider’s corpse hadn’t frozen yet; Harvey just hoped it had chilled sufficiently to last until he reached Dr. King.

Then he stripped off his protective gear and gave it a swift rinse with Clorox in the utility sink. On the cement floor beside the sink, still at the end of its chain, lay Fred’s unbuckled collar of blue nylon webbing—a testament to Susan’s lies.

Harvey fetched last night’s newly scavenged eetee gun from the wheel well of his pickup, where he hoped this time to keep it hidden from Susan and Ben. Next, after checking the yard through the front door peephole, he bore the ladder outside to begin his daily inspection of the video cameras, the locks and chains, the plywood boarding up their windows, the eetee cell that powered the house (one of the few perks Ben allowed them).

It hurt Harvey to think about Fred, happy Fred, the only one of them unchanged since the days before the eetees had come to Earth. When he and Susan had been happy, too, in their dream house with the panoramic view atop De Soto Hill. Fred was just one dumb, happy golden retriever with no notion of the dangers out there in the mountains. More likely the coyotes had gotten Fred than the eetees—not that it made any difference.

Sweating, his scalp twitching, Harvey made his way downhill through dry grass and buzzing grasshoppers. He righted the black power cell (how he’d had to argue with Ben to keep two), slipped on a spare adapter to re-connect the cell to his well pump, and refilled the salt-loaded booby traps the raider had sprung. All the while he searched the trampled ground for the raider’s missing weather-maker, but still without success. Had the coyotes taken it? There couldn’t have been bad weather without a weather-maker . . .

Finally he was climbing the hill again, eager to return to his deck. On his deck he was king—at least, on the deck he had a chance of seeing death before it peered at him with its yellow, slime-covered eyeball.

He had nearly reached the house when a new sound stopped him in his tracks. A shape thrashed through the tall thistles along the driveway. Adrenaline and ephedrine together surged in Harvey’s veins, making his hands tremble like grass in the breeze.

But even as he pulled the eetee gun from his waistband and clutched at his rifle with his other hand, he saw that what rustled onto the driveway was not an eetee. It was not even a demented coyote come to grin mockingly at him and then zigzag wildly away into the fields, tongue flapping, while Harvey tried in vain to ventilate its diseased hide.

“Fred!” Harvey whispered in horror. Fred dropped what he was carrying and wagged his tail.

Dust, burrs, and thistledown clung to Fred’s copper-colored rump, and he smelled like rotten raw chicken. As he approached Harvey, his tail-wagging increased in frequency and amplitude until his entire hind end swung rapidly from side to side. Fred tried to nose Harvey’s hand, but Harvey shoved him away with the point of the rifle.

The swellings and bare patches in the fur were unmistakable. The biggest swelling rose at the base of Fred’s skull.

Just like the coyotes.

Eetee cancer, Harvey called it. Ben said that was just more of Harvey’s paranoia. No other spotters had seen it.

But their posts—the ones still manned, anyway—lay miles further from the shipwreck.

Harvey had only one choice. It was pure self-defense.

Fred lay down and smacked his tail on the ground. His eyes pleaded as if he knew what Harvey intended. But Harvey remembered the coyotes and their gleeful eetee hunts, and he hardened his thoughts as if pummeled by stormy weather. He slipped off the safety. His finger tightened on the trigger—

Footsteps rasped behind him. He spun and found himself staring into the short, ugly red bore of another eetee gun.

“Don’t you dare shoot Fred, you fuck,” Susan hissed.

Oh, Harvey, stupid, stupid—the video monitors on the deck—Ben must have given her a gun, knowing she would someday use it—

They stood there aiming at each other. Harvey could see in her face that this time she really would do it. She was going to splatter him over Fred, and Ben would get his way at last.

The blazing July sun heated his skull like a roast in an oven. Susan’s gun did not waver. Harvey willed himself to breathe.

Fred thwacked his tail another couple of times, then pawed playfully at Harvey’s foot. A lump pushed up suddenly in Harvey’s throat and he had to blink several times to clear his vision. In a thick voice he said, “Look at Fred, Susan! He’s sick! You don’t want us to catch it, do you? You don’t want us to get all freaky like the coyotes, do you?”

“You,” Susan said, “already have.”

Bleak inspiration came to Harvey. He forced himself to drop his rifle and eetee gun, slip the shotgun from his shoulder to the ground, raise his hands. “I could take Fred to Dr. King. Maybe she would look at him.”

“She’s not a vet and he’s not sick.”

“Yes, he is! Susan, look at those tumors!”

Her gaze did flick toward Fred, growing the slightest bit uncertain. “Abscesses.”

“Then he needs to have them cleaned. At least.”

Something broke in Susan then. Her lip trembled. She blinked. She looked at Fred. Fred crawled toward her and wagged his tail some more. Tears began to roll down Susan’s cheeks. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a wave of sympathy rushed through Harvey. He had loved Fred, too.

“What do we have,” Susan said in despair, “what do we have that she would take in trade?”

And there it was: the first acknowledgement in months that their world had changed forever. Harvey’s hands were shaking again, but he managed to gesture at the garage. Susan looked at him askance, then, gun still trained on Harvey, backed toward it. Harvey followed, though he hated leaving his guns behind. Fred lay beside them, thumping his tail.

When Susan pulled back the tarpaulin in his pickup bed, she gasped and jerked her hand back as if bitten. “Harvey, Ben will kill you! And me, too, you asshole!” Which was probably not just a figure of speech.

Susan said, wiping at her tears with a filthy hand, “Promise me, promise me, Harvey, that you aren’t going to hurt Fred. That you won’t let her hurt him.”

“I won’t,” Harvey lied, trying again to swallow the lump in his throat. “Promise me that while I’m gone, you’ll keep watch?”

Susan said nothing, but this time Harvey felt as if she might actually do it. Donning his raincoat and gloves and now rubber waders as well, Harvey took Fred’s collar out into the yard to buckle it around the dog’s neck. As he urged Fred into the back of the pickup and chained him there, Fred tried to lick him in the face. Up close, the stench of carrion was enough to make Harvey gag.

Two presents for Dr. King, just sitting in the back of his pickup for anyone to discover. What risks he was taking today! Harvey had survived this long by trusting his fears and keeping a close eye on the weather. By being infinitely careful. Today he was throwing all caution to the winds.

But he couldn’t afford to nod off the way he had this morning. He needed Dr. King’s little pills. And he couldn’t let Susan keep Fred here.

Harvey wondered whether on his return he should just shoot Susan before she learned he’d had Fred put down. She would try to kill him again when she found out.

He didn’t want to shoot her.

Maybe, he thought, looking at the happily panting Fred, just maybe he would turn out to be wrong about Fred’s tumors. Maybe Dr. King would tell him they weren’t contagious. The coyotes’ fur had grown back, after all, and most of the swellings had vanished.

Or maybe that notion was just Fred trying, the way the coyotes did, to control Harvey’s thoughts.

One last task before departing: Harvey picked up the thing Fred had brought home. He dropped it in his Weber. Up close, the lump of rotting eetee flesh looked like raw hamburger, had the consistency of custard, and smelled like the bottom of a Dumpster. Golden retrievers had such delicate mouths; Fred hadn’t left so much as a tooth mark in it.

Sweltering in his raincoat and waders, Harvey poured on the gasoline provided by the sheriff’s office. As he dropped in the match, and flames sheeted up from the charcoal bed, Fred began to bark in agitation. So he did not hear Susan’s shouts until she rushed up to him waving the Nikons. “Look, Harvey! Look!”

He dropped the lid on the grill to char Fred’s little present to a cinder. Then he pulled off his befouled rubber gloves, took the binocs, and peered in the direction she pointed.

The highway had been dust-blown and empty for a year. Now, vehicles climbed over a rise three miles away, popping into view one after the other like an endless chain of ants: trucks, fuel tankers, humvees, and Bradleys carrying helmeted men and women. The convoy ground steadily along, heading toward Lewisville.

Susan said, almost sobbing, “It’s the Army. Oh, God, Harvey, they’ve come to save us at last.”

“Save us?” Harvey said. “What Army?”

2

Colonel Jason Fikes could see right away that something was fishy about the town. Since the liberation of Earth he had been traveling what was left of America—the devastated cities, the suburban wastelands dotted with grim encampments of refugees, the endless reaches of fallow farmland. The trip from Spokane, chasing the rumor of another downed ship, had been no different. They had passed mile after mile of fields grown up into weeds. At scattered houses and small towns, women stooped in gardens and men, shotguns in hand, sullenly eyed the convoy. Or sometimes they ran after the convoy, begging for gasoline, for medicine, for food, for rescue.

The locals’ plight ought to have grown more desperate the closer he got to the mountains and the starship. Fikes had seen the classified reports from Yosemite: starving refugees reduced to eating eetees, then each other.

But when the convoy came over a rise and Lewisville itself came into view, everything changed. Weeds gave way to neat furrows of golden wheat. Cattle grazed along the streamside meadows. And in the town itself, healthy children clustered in front of well-kept houses, staring at the convoy until adults rushed to herd them inside. Yes, most of the lawns had been dug into gardens, and only a handful of vehicles seemed to be working, and the grass in front of the county courthouse was dry and yellow now; but it had been mowed.

You could suppose they had carefully rationed supplies since the war, that they had their own hydro dam or windmill farm. Or you could glance eastward to that mile-long wreck atop the ridge, and you could draw another conclusion.

“They’ve been scavenging,” said young Lieutenant Briggs beside him, eager as a preacher pouncing upon evidence of fornication. “We’ll have to search house-to-house.”

Briggs had not seen the Yosemite reports and did not yet know the enormity of their orders. Fikes nodded wearily. “They’ll try to hide as much as they can.”

During the approach to Lewisville he had spotted a feral cat crouched in the roadside weeds, a pair of crows pecking at a dead owl. But no eetees had showed themselves. On this brilliant summer morning, the distant shipwreck looked no more menacing than a junked car. In Fikes’ experience, though, the eetees didn’t surrender and they didn’t admit defeat. If even a single one had survived, sooner or later it would test his soldiers. Still, they would have to wait on more urgent tasks.

Fikes gave the order to halt in front of the courthouse. There waited a knot of local men bedecked with an arsenal of rifles, shotguns, and semi-automatic small arms. Neatly dressed and clean-shaven, they looked like Norman Rockwell banditos who’d just staged their own revolution.

Or rather, Norman Rockwell meets the Sci-Fi Channel: half of them bore red splatterguns. Eetee weapons. That would make Briggs happy. A weight descended onto Fikes’ shoulders.

As Fikes climbed out of his humvee, one of the locals stepped forward. This was a lean man in a sheriff’s khaki uniform and badge, with cowboy boots, a straw cowboy hat, and mirror shades to complete the ensemble. The only weapon the sheriff carried in plain view was a holstered .45.

“Howdy, folks,” he drawled. “Welcome to Lewisville. I’m Ben Gundersen, Lewis County sheriff.”

Fikes held out his hand. “Colonel Fikes,” he said. “U.S. Army.”

Sheriff Gundersen put out his own hand, and the two of them shook. “What brings you fellows to Lewisville?”

Under the circumstances, the question was an odd one. Fikes said, “Your community is in proximity to a downed enemy vessel, Mr. Gundersen. Assessing that threat and mounting an appropriate response is our immediate priority. But our long-term mission is to restore services and connect you to the outside world again.”

“No offense,” said the sheriff, “but with all the satellites gone, we haven’t heard much news since last summer. Who’s the U.S. Army taking orders from these days?”

“The President has installed a Provisional Congress until new elections can be held,” Fikes said. “Meanwhile, the Army is authorized under the Public Safety Act to take charge here.”

“You’re talking about the U.S. President. The U.S. Congress.”

“That’s right,” said Fikes.

One of the other banditos called out, smirking, “Didn’t they nuke Washington? I thought that was one good thing come out of all this.”

“Yes,” Fikes said. “Washington was destroyed. Now, may I ask if you have spotted survivors from the wreck? Has your town come under attack?”

“Survivors?” Gundersen tipped his hat back and scratched his forehead. “Well, now. We shot us a few last winter. They come down near town and found we weren’t easy pickings. If there’re any of ’em left, they pretty much leave us alone. They’d be camped out in the mountains, I guess.”

“Have you seen enemy aircraft at all? Any other vehicles?”

“I guess most of their fighters crashed with the ship,” Gundersen said. “Lost their guidance systems or something. Haven’t seen any recently, anyway.”

“But you think they still have some?”

The sheriff shrugged, inscrutable behind mirror shades. “Could be.”

Since his childhood in Baltimore, Fikes had learned there were large swaths of the U.S. where well-scrubbed white people said “gosh,” “shucks,” and “you bet” without irony. But this sheriff wasn’t just a folksy good ol’ boy.

He was plain bullshitting.

Fikes had already noted that Gundersen hadn’t addressed him as “sir” or “colonel,” and that the pole on the courthouse lawn bore no flag.

Reluctant to take the inevitable next step, Fikes bent to read the plaque on a nearby statue of buckskin-clad men. Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, openers of the American West, passed through Lewis County on October 3, 1806.

If the sheriff and his gang had been just your posse comitatus militia types hoping to secede from the federal government in its time of weakness, Fikes’ task would have been simple. Sooner or later he’d have won over the townsfolk with liberal bribes of booze, chocolate, condoms, antibiotics, disposable diapers, toilet paper. The sheriff he would have defanged first of all; in Fikes’ experience, those with a taste for power were easily seduced by another helping of the same.

But the solution to the problem this town presented would not be so easy to accomplish.

Not that Fikes’ orders weren’t clear or that he shrank from enforcing them. From what he had read in the Yosemite reports, from the panic still electrifying headquarters in Colorado, the rule he must now impose could not be too draconian. It was up to him, he had been told, to ensure that nothing like the Yosemite massacres ever became necessary again.

Fikes knew, however, that he could end up as lost in a repeat of Yosemite as that hapless colonel had been. In the slaughter at Upper Pines, the Yosemite rebels had demonstrated unequivocally that human beings could wield that most dreaded of eetee weapons, the handarm of the eetee elite, the fearmonger. The Army, on the other hand, had never learned how to operate the weapon—had no defense against it. The rebels who had understood the weapon had all been killed. Army scientists, such as they were now, had offered only useless speculation: perhaps the ordinary silent communication of eetees was a form of telepathy; perhaps eetees operated their terrible weapon, too, with some kind of thought wave.

No one understood how eetees used the guns. How could he anticipate by what means human beings would acquire the skill?

But he had to anticipate it. He had to prevent it. If possible, he had to acquire the power for the Army.

At least his first items of business were clear: separating the townspeople from their eetee toys, disrupting their lines of communication, bringing them firmly under Army control.

Fikes straightened. “Mr. Gundersen, may I ask how you dispose of enemy remains?”

He thought he had pegged Gundersen, but the pride that lit up the sheriff’s face surprised him. “We’re real strict about that, colonel. I’ll show you our health ordinances. Can’t risk some kind of strange disease, I tell people. We built a special crematorium to incinerate the bodies. We use bleach to clean up anything we take from them.” He nodded toward a splattergun in the waistband of one of his deputies. “We could use more Clorox, now that you mention it.”

Fikes nodded. “That’s all very well, Mr. Gundersen, but our scientists can’t yet say what potential disease vectors would look like, how they might spread, or how they could be destroyed. I must stress that anyone in your town who’s had contact with the enemy, living or dead, is required to report to us. Any items of wreckage that people have picked up must be turned over. That includes your weapons, I regret to say. The Army will assume the burden of protecting the town from this point onward. I have strict orders on this matter. And I do have the authority to search every house. It’s a vital matter of public health.”

The sheriff opened his mouth to reply. Before he could speak, Fikes said, “After you hand over your splatterguns, I believe I’d like to start by taking a look at those pickup trucks over there. Is it possible you’re still running them on gasoline?”

3

The Army had kept Reggie Forrester awake all the first night with the roar of tanks and trucks and the stink of diesel exhaust, which over the last year had become unfamiliar and offensive. In the morning, he dragged himself two blocks over to the highway and discovered that, just as he feared, the soldiers had moved into his warehouses. Armed sentries already surrounded them. “Move along, sir,” the sentries had said. Chasing him—the mayor!—off his own property. Probably Ben had suggested the location, stone bastard that he was.

Reggie headed out to learn what else was befalling his town. His dismay only compounded. Searches and detentions had started before breakfast. “Quarantine,” the Army called it, but they did not name the disease they feared.

From Bob Fisher’s distraught wife, Reggie learned that soldiers had “quarantined” Bob, stolid city engineer, when he’d showed up for work. And they had abruptly confiscated the networked eetee power cells that since last winter had supplied the town with electricity and pumped its artesian wells. Municipal power shut off in mid-morning, and tap water would cease flowing once the water tower emptied.

They hadn’t consulted Reggie or anyone else at City Hall, or warned the townspeople what was coming.

From Estelle Gordon, administrative secretary at the community college, Reggie heard that the Army was cleaning out Joe Hansen’s lab. Everyone brought their salvage to Joe, and it sat around while he and his students figured out what it was supposed to do. That morning the Army confiscated all of it, and all of Joe’s notes, and they hauled away Joe, too. But so far as Estelle had been able to determine, they hadn’t taken Joe to the so-called “quarantine facility” in the junior high school. No one knew where Joe was now.

Joe’s students protested his detention. Angry townspeople joined them, demanding restoration of water and power. Shockingly, the Army tear-gassed them and hauled the lot off to quarantine.

By afternoon, when Reggie went to lodge an official protest with Colonel Fikes, unease had rooted deep in his belly. He told himself, though, that if he didn’t try something, he would only prove his irrelevance. Ben might be the Big Man now, savior of Lewisville, but Reggie Forrester wasn’t going to allow anyone to outdo him when it came to looking after the everyday needs of Lewisville’s citizens.

When Reggie pulled up in front of the courthouse, the soldiers first evicted him from his Ford Excursion, then confiscated it. “Contamination,” they said, when they found the black disk where the engine block had been. They refused to tell him what kind, but by now Reggie was certain that the disease issue was entirely fiction. No one in Lewisville had contracted an inexplicable illness, had they? Moreover, that morning, through the fence surrounding his warehouses, Reggie had spotted soldiers installing eetee power cells in their humvees. He now realized these must have been the ones confiscated from the town.

At least the soldiers did not march Reggie away at gunpoint. In fact, when he indignantly identified himself as Lewisville’s mayor, they led him inside to their colonel. Reggie enjoyed a moment’s relief at this belated acknowledgement of his importance. The fact that the colonel now occupied Ben’s office also tickled him. Ben would not like that at all.

But then the interview, if that was the word for it, started. The colonel threatened Reggie with the ridiculous quarantine, stressing its indefinite nature. He then cited Reggie’s warehouses, filled with wrecked fighters and heavy weaponry that had not yet been stripped or adapted to human use. Sweating, Reggie denied having anything to do with the contents of his warehouses. He had never touched any of it. He just rented space to people. But the colonel showed no interest in his protests.

Then Fikes suggested that detention was not inevitable. He offered Reggie an incentive for cooperation, an unspecified place in the new administration. The sort of position, Colonel Fikes said, that Reggie deserved.

Flattering. But Reggie was not naïve. The world was piss or be pissed on, and right now Reggie Forrester, sad to say, was not in a position to piss on anyone. His status had been on a dizzying downward slide since the start of the war, and now he would have to wiggle hard to avoid the hot yellow stream that gravity was pulling his way. To escape it, he’d have to make himself not just useful but indispensable to the new regime.

Which was fraught with its own dangers. He wondered if the colonel had interviewed Ben yet, and what incentives he might have offered Ben.

That evening, Reggie slipped through backyards to Paula’s house. He was shocked to see how few people had evaded the Army’s tightening net. Those who’d made it to the meeting perched on Paula’s sofas and chairs and shared their news. The Army had rounded up the network of spotters guarding Lewisville, including Ben’s own brother, and replaced them with their own people. The colonel had posted new rules at the county courthouse. Electricity would be down until the town was reconnected to the national grid. Drinking water would be distributed between 8 and 11 a.m. at the corner of Main and Third, no other uses of water except as authorized for agricultural production. A blanket curfew would be enforced between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m.; no civilian was allowed on the streets during those hours for any reason at all. No assembly of more than eight civilians except under Army auspices. Reggie counted: including himself, this meeting numbered nine.

“The right to assembly,” Jim Hanover fumed, “is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution!” Jim had been a lawyer.

Flora Bucholter was distraught. “Just how long will it take to hook us up to the grid? How do they think they’ll be able to protect the lines? What’s the point of taking away our electricity?”

“That salvage doesn’t belong to the Army,” said Dave Sutton, whom Ben often used to float ideas. “It belongs to the people who risked their lives bringing it back—who’ve fought to keep the town safe!”

That predictably set off the ever-volatile Otis Redinger. “Dave’s right! We’ve worked hard just to survive! We’ve been listening to other folks on the shortwave, we know what it’s like in the rest of the country. It’s totally lawless. Now these people show up and say, ‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help you—’” (that drew a chuckle) “—but they’ve brought their lawlessness with them. All they’ve done is destroy or steal everything we’ve fought to preserve. This is an illegal military occupation by an illegal government. We’ve managed to protect our community from aliens. Now we have to protect it from dangerous human beings as well!”

Several people applauded this impassioned speech, and Otis’ face grew red from embarrassment. But then Todd Myklebust, always a wiseass, said, “Ah, sedition. Is that right enshrined in the Constitution, too?”

For a moment the meeting lapsed into nervous silence. Otis and Todd had spoken out loud what the others had only come up to the edge of saying. Then everyone started talking at once.

Up to this point in the discussion Ben had stayed silent. That was his style: remain above the fray, the calm militia commander. Now he put down the footrest of Paula’s plush blue recliner and rocked into an upright position. The uproar stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Everyone turned to look at him.

“George,” Ben said, “you’ve been doing some reconnaissance. Why don’t you tell us what you’ve learned?”

Although no one would guess it to look at him, unshaven, shambling George Brainerd had once been an Army Ranger. His skills had immeasurably aided both Lewisville and Ben’s wartime ascent to the top of the town’s chicken-coop ladder. He was not, however, one of Ben’s acolytes. (Although George had not gotten up to offer that easy chair to the mayor, either! Reggie was squeezed between Dave and Flora on the sectional sofa.)

Now Ben’s question made George look unhappy. “Their communications equipment isn’t much better than ours. I didn’t see anything fancier than off-the-shelf shortwave. No cell phones and they haven’t set up any dishes, so my guess is that the military hasn’t launched new satellites yet. No indication of aircraft, not even a recon balloon. They may patch the lines out of Lewisville for landline service, but that’ll take time.”

“Until then,” Ben said, “we take away their radios and they’re completely isolated.”

“Sure,” said George, looking unhappier. “If we take away all of them.”

“Then we eliminate them,” Otis said.

“You mean kill them?” Flora said. “Otis, you are a bloodthirsty son-of-a-bitch.”

Otis shifted uncomfortably. “Well, probably they’d surrender long before that.”

“What do we do with them when they do surrender?” George asked. “Or if they don’t? What will the Army do when an entire battalion disappears after going to look for a downed eetee ship?”

“We could get the enemy to do the job for us,” said Otis. “We could send them into a trap. Then no one would know we were involved.”

“So,” George said, “you want to set up your fellow human beings so aliens can kill them for you?”

Silence fell on the room. Apparently even Otis felt that sounded nasty.

Then George said, “What do you think, Mr. Mayor?”

That was, Reggie knew, an appeal for his help. Reggie was flattered. And usually persuading people to a course of action was something he liked to do, something he was good at. But tonight the power of his words was far less important than their real-world consequences. When one boat was going to sink, and you didn’t know whether it would be Ben’s or the Army’s, you needed to make very certain you had a place on both boats.

He sighed audibly and rubbed his forehead. “I agree with George that you have to think about the long term. Unless we have weapons that provide a decisive advantage over the Army—that would allow us to keep the Army and everyone else out of Lewisville for the foreseeable future—all an attempt at secession will accomplish is make our situation worse.”

So far, so good. No one could accuse him either of pushing for Otis’ little revolt, or of siding with the evil invading Army. People were turning from Ben to Reggie. Ben looked sour but not yet angry.

“You want to hand them a petition?” Jim said. “We, the undersigned, protest your wholesale abuses of civil rights, the U.S. Constitution, and common decency?”

“Oh, sure,” Reggie said. “As a first step. But we need something that will make it worthwhile for them to negotiate—in earnest—instead of rounding us all up. I’ve been wondering, why is the Army spending all its resources to gather up not just every last piece of eetee salvage, but nearly every person who’s worked with it? Does anyone here believe this disease nonsense? I think instead they’re looking for something, but they don’t yet know what it is.”

George had leaned forward and was listening intently. Flora said, “And you think that if we could figure out what that thing was, if we could find it first, it would give us an advantage in negotiations?”

“Maybe they’re searching for a key that activates the fear guns,” said Dave.

Jim objected, “We’ve been looking for it for a year and turned up squat. How do you propose we find it now?”

His ploy was at least half working, Reggie thought. They were listening. They were beginning to think twice. Reggie the voice of reason, Reggie the idea man. When he saw George opening his mouth to add to the discussion, he even began to hope they two could convince the others to forego the uprising altogether.

But then George abruptly shut his mouth. And Otis burst out, “Reggie’s right! We force them to negotiate! We do it right away, while we still have some weapons. If we get back what they’ve taken, they’re at a disadvantage. Look: a few hundred of them, fifteen thousand of us. Ben, they can’t keep control if we don’t let them—”

“No, no,” Reggie said, “that isn’t what I was saying—” But like Otis, Jim, Dave, Todd and even Flora had turned back toward Ben. They looked to Ben to decide the fate of Lewisville.

Oh, how that burned Reggie.

And now Ben spoke. “I’ve heard some good points. We can’t throw away the lives of our men. We do have to think about the long term. But we can’t let things go on the way they’re heading. We take our weapons back, we force new terms on the Army, but no big battles. That’s not a winning proposition.”

So that was the decision. They fell to planning how they were going to break into Reggie’s warehouses. Reggie had a physical sensation of sliding uncontrollably down the hen house ladder toward the guano at the bottom. And here he had thought the Army’s arrival might make Ben a little circumspect.

To ensure his own survival, he had to get rid of Ben one way or the other. But how to do so safely? He couldn’t simply go to Colonel Fikes and report tonight’s meeting. For one thing, Reggie had made no secret of his afternoon visit to the colonel. Ben would be keeping a close eye on Reggie now.

It was amusing to imagine Ben sweating at hard labor in “indefinite quarantine,” somewhere deep in a government reservation with nothing but sagebrush and jackrabbits for a hundred miles in every direction. It was considerably less amusing to contemplate what Ben might do to avoid such a fate. A bullet, say, speeding into Reggie’s back from out of the shadows. Such things had happened in the last year.

At last Ben concluded the meeting by saying, “Now, folks, we’ve got to be off the streets before curfew. Be careful going home.”

Reggie left with George through the back door. Jim Hanover followed them. They skulked along the shadows between Paula’s raspberry patch and the Fortescues’ pole beans. Far away, a coyote yipped into the chill of evening.

“Good try,” George said to Reggie in a low voice.

Wondering why George had suddenly dropped his opposition to the ridiculous plan, Reggie glanced back at him. That was why, framed in Paula’s candlelit kitchen window, he saw Ben and Otis talking. Otis appeared to be very excited. So Ben had a second, secret plan, one catering to Otis’ enthusiasms.

“It wasn’t good enough,” said Reggie.

George went his own way, but Jim followed Reggie silently home, saying goodbye only at Reggie’s front door. Jim’s own darkened house stood across the street. Jim would now, Reggie thought, keep watch through his windows. Another of Ben’s deputies was no doubt already guarding Reggie’s back door.

4

Annoyed, but not wanting to argue in the hearing of the security guard, Anna King buzzed George Brainerd into the morgue corridor. George was discreet and sympathetic to her work. But she preferred no witnesses, and no interruptions.

She waited to finish the last careful slice exposing the corpus minutalis—so she had named the organ, in honor of its resemblance to hamburger—before she buzzed George through the door of the autopsy room as well.

“Pee-yoo!” said George, and then, shambling closer to peer over her shoulder, “Holy shit, doc, that’s fresh kill.”

The sight of him kindled anticipatory warmth on Anna’s skin. Pavlovian conditioning. She firmly ignored it and turned away to pick up her digital camera. “Yes,” she said, snapping photographs of the minutalis, “and I want to keep working on it while it still is fresh. You know how fast they deteriorate. Now, what’s so important that it can’t wait until morning? Haven’t our Army friends instituted a curfew, and doesn’t it start in about five minutes?”

“I was kinda hoping I could stay here.” He grinned at her.

“You’ll be cold.”

“Not my idea of romance, either,” said George. “The drawers are a bit small for two people.”

He almost made her smile. At the same time—it must be fatigue that rendered her so vulnerable—his words caused her throat to constrict. Did he really think their trysts in empty hospital rooms, never the same one twice, deserved the term romance?

The glass partition on the far side of the table reflected its own judgement: herself, brown-haired and petite, neat in her spotless lab coat and face mask; him in unkempt flannel shirt and baggy jeans, face unshaven, hair uncombed. At least today he wasn’t sporting his usual assortment of firearms.

They had nothing in common outside of bed. She still felt awkward saying his given name. Her sleeping pill, was how she thought of him. Since the starship had crashed on Cortez Mountain, it was either George, Ambien, or a long wakeful night in the morgue.

“Doc,” he said, staring down at her prize specimen. He rocked back and forth on his heels. “This isn’t the best time to have an eetee in your morgue.”

She picked up her scalpel again. “What, is the sheriff on the warpath?”

“Ben—fuck no, it’s the Army you should worry about.”

“They’ve been here already,” she said, beginning to sever the major nerves leading from the minutalis to the brain proper.

“Here? In the morgue?”

“We gave them a tour of the hospital today. Don’t look so horrified. They didn’t unzip any body bags, and they were kind enough to give us diesel to run our generators. Is that all you came here about?”

George was still rocking on his toes. Usually he stayed relaxed, even irreverent, under the worst of circumstances. “Ben wants to know if we can have some kind of strong narcotic, like in a hypodermic or something.”

“What are you boys up to now?” she asked, but she didn’t expect an answer. She knew such little favors were the quid pro quo that enabled George to keep Ben from shutting down her research altogether. Still, she wondered if the timing of this particular request should give her cause for hesitation. Even she had noticed the discontent abroad in Lewisville.

“I can give you some Fentanyl. But I’ll have to get it from upstairs. Is tomorrow morning soon enough?”

“Sure,” said George. “I guess.”

But he showed no sign of leaving. She thought she had made it clear that she had no time for him tonight. Unfortunately, she could not rely on the eetee itself, sliced open from sagittal crest to cloacal canal, to drive him away. Such sights and smells did not disturb George.

Anna leaned over the table for better access to the left posterior pseudothalamic nerve. It required concentration to sever cleanly, running as it did through a layer of tough and slimy dura. Naturally George chose that moment to pick up one of her scalpels and prod at the section of skin and skull she had sawed out for access to the creature’s brain stem. The mucous that protected a live and healthy eetee’s skin had dried to a hard, yellowish crust. As George poked at it, a flake of the crust dropped onto the table.

“Get your hands away!” Anna said. “You aren’t even wearing gloves!”

He pressed on the flake with the scalpel, crumbling it, and frowned. “Doc, I’ve handled a lot of dead ones in the last year. I’ve been covered in splat. I’ve had ’em keel over on top of me and vomit in my face. If they were going to make me sick, wouldn’t it have happened already?”

They had discussed this topic before, but today there was a new, speculative tone in George’s voice. “You’re wondering about the Army’s quarantine regulations?” she asked. Again George did not answer. “Well, perhaps they’re justified—in principle. There are plenty of diseases with a long incubation period, and if you didn’t know what to look for, you couldn’t spot the infection.”

“As you’ve said. AIDS. And mad cow disease.”

“Creutzfeldt-Jakob,” she corrected.

“And kuru.”

Surprised he had heard of an obscure disease of New Guinea cannibals, Anna glanced up. George had been doing a little research on his own? She knew George wasn’t stupid, despite his unkempt, sometimes goofy persona. In his own way, he was one of the smartest people in Lewisville.

“But those are hard to catch,” George said. “A quarantine wouldn’t have much effect. And no one here has been eating any eetee brains.” Then he reverted to form. He poked at the minutalis, making it quiver like Jell-O, and grinned again. “Sure looks like it would cook up good on a grill, though.”

Anna had not eaten dinner. The image was unfortunate. Her mouth watered and her stomach grumbled. She sliced away the last of the dura, and at last was able to slip her gloved hand beneath the minutalis and lift it onto the scale.

One-point-five-four kilos. A middling weight. From the accounts of Ben’s deputies and her own labors here, she had become convinced that variation in the size of this particular organ correlated with social or military rank. The eetees with the very largest minutalis were always the ones carrying the fear guns and directing the others. Her first theory had been that the minutalis manufactured dominance pheromones, but then she had begun to wonder about the magnetic anomalies, and the odd rabbit-ear deposits of metallic compounds in the sagittal crest—

George tapped his scalpel on the metal table. “Doc, we haven’t talked about it in a long time—have you or Joe Hansen made any progress on how the eetees use the fear guns?”

“Oh, sure,” she said, removing the minutalis to a tray under the hood. She started to wash it down with ethanol. “Molecular microwave transmitters. Proteins with encapsulated crystalline segments, manufactured inside specialized neural tissue. That’s how the eetees communicate with each other, too.”

“What?” The stark astonishment in his voice made her turn. “Have you said anything about this to anyone else?”

“I’m being sarcastic, George,” she said crossly.

“But you have a theory.”

“Guesses. Flights of fancy. I’m not a neurochemist or a molecular biologist, or, for that matter, a physicist, and I don’t have the resources—”

“But you have evidence—”

“Nothing worth the name.”

George gazed down at the eetee. “Too bad we couldn’t ever bring you a live one and do the CAT scan thing. See what lights up when they do different things.”

“No, on that particular idea I’m in complete agreement with the sheriff.”

The last thing in the world Anna wanted was a live eetee to experiment on. She did not even like George in her morgue. She wanted it cold, silent, and stark, filled only with her well-tended garden of the dead. She wanted to keep dissecting her specimen, taking it apart organ by organ, slice by tiny slice, protein by protein. Over the dead she had total control.

But she also wanted George to stay. She wanted to touch his warm flesh and feel his hands on her own skin. It was the only thing these days that made her feel like a human being.

“What’s really on your mind, George?” she asked.

“Doc,” he said, “I know you aren’t going to like this. You need to clean out your lab. Tonight. Get rid of your friend here. Destroy all your samples and slides. Remove all your files. Hide them—incinerate them.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Anna said.

“It’s not Ben you’re dealing with anymore. The Army is confiscating everything that came out of that ship—”

“So I’ve heard. They want the goodies for themselves.”

“They are also quarantining anyone who’s worked with eetee goodies, and anyone who’s had contact with eetees dead or alive.”

“Not to mention anyone who protests the policy,” Anna said. “It’s not a real quarantine, George. If the Army was serious about an outbreak, the first people they would isolate would be those with the greatest exposure. And that’s you deputies.”

“I disagree that they’re not serious,” George said. “They are extremely serious. And very soon someone will tell them about Dr. Anna King and how she trades pharmaceuticals for eetee corpses in good condition. How you have a whole fucking eetee research project down here.”

“I keep a very clean lab,” Anna said. “They can check it if they want. I can’t believe the Army could be less sensible than the sheriff on the subject of basic research.”

“Oh, yes, they could be,” said George. “You know, don’t you, that Joe and all of his files have disappeared?”

Anna had heard, but she’d dismissed it as a wild rumor. The thought of ignorant soldiers ransacking her lab, her refuge, her life—destroying a year of work—terrified and enraged her. She tried to push the thought away. “I’m happy to share everything I’ve learned, though I’m sure people elsewhere with better equipment have found out a whole lot more than I have.”

“Suppose,” George said, “sharing is not the goal. Suppose they want to know everything you’ve learned, and then make sure no one else ever sees that information.”

“But what could they possibly want to conceal? It’s not as if the eetees are a secret!”

“Look,” said George, “the Army comes here, to an enemy crash site, but instead of going after the eetees, they devote all their manpower and attention to this—whatever it is. It’s important, a real disease, a—a real something. Maybe they don’t know exactly. Maybe they know the symptoms but not the cause—maybe they don’t know whether it’s a disease or an effect of eetee technology. But whatever this quarantine is about, for them it is taking precedence over everything else. They are serious about it.”

Anna tried once more to dismiss George’s arguments. She found she could not. She gazed wistfully at the minutalis and her waiting culture plates. “Well, then,” she said, at last, “I suppose I should take a look at Harvey Gundersen’s dog.”

“His dog?!”

“Harvey claims the dog has an eetee disease.” Anna grimaced. “That the coyotes have it, too, and they have developed not just dementia but telepathic powers. Yes, I know what it sounds like—but today he brought in the dog, and it does have some odd lumps. I said I’d do biopsies and what blood work I have the facilities for.”

“You have it here? Jesus, Anna, get rid of the dog, get rid of the eetee. Now! I’ll help you. They will come here. Your only hope is to make sure they aren’t ever able to pin this on you. Trading drugs is only a nasty rumor. You have never dissected an eetee.”

“No, George. If the dog really has an eetee disease, it needs studying and I need to tell the colonel whatever I can find out. If people are in danger from it, I’d be criminally irresponsible not to!”

“You are not listening to me,” George said. “They will take your notes and your little jars and they will take you away, too, and if I’m right they’ll take you so far away I will never see you again.”

“That’s melodramatic.”

“Anna,” he said, taking hold of her shoulders. “Please.” It was a violation of their unspoken protocol. He never touched her when she was working. The warmth of his hands percolated all the way through her lab coat and sweater. She held her own messy hands away from him.

The thing about George, the thing that had made the whatever-it-was between them possible, was that he never seemed scared. Now he was showing his fear. She didn’t like it. She certainly didn’t want George to know what she felt: how terrified she had been since the eetees had come. How, maybe, she loved him. That would be making the emotions real. That would be letting a live monster into the morgue.

She said, coolly, “Suppose Harvey Gundersen is even halfway right? You’d be asking me to trade the health of perhaps everyone on Earth for my personal safety.”

“Yes,” George said. “Let someone else figure it out.”

She shook her head and glanced one last time at her beautiful, doomed specimen. “Help me with the dog. Then I’ll clean everything out of my lab, as you want.”

5

The four humvees wound upward through the hills. Up on the mountain, about eight miles away now, the wreck sprawled like a giant trash-can lid someone had hammered onto the ridgetop. Corporal Denise Wyrzbowski watched it as best she could while wrestling her humvee along the unpaved road. No sign of activity at this distance. She distrusted the quiet, though; eetees were always busy with something.

The rolling terrain blocked the line of sight beyond the nearer slopes, but at least here it was grassland, dry and scant. Up ahead, pine trees accumulated with altitude until deep forest blanketed the highest ridges. Too much cover for the enemy.

She didn’t feel comfortable here. She wasn’t a country girl. She had fought house to house in the San Bernadino Valley with seized eetee firearms and makeshift body armor, but that was familiar freeway-and-subdivision country. You recognized what belonged and what didn’t. Up there in the forest, she wouldn’t know whether a sudden flight of birds was a nature show or an eetee ambush.

Not that she hadn’t seen new sights in the Valley: eetees roaring along Figueroa Avenue in a Lincoln Navigator; eetee muckamucks cavorting in a swimming pool full of yellow slime; eetee grunts dead and bloated in an alleyway, lunch for a pack of feral dogs.

Movement in the sky. She tensed, then recognized it as a vulture rising on an updraft. Roadkill nearby? “What’s that?” she asked the guide, a prim Nordic-looking local named Otis Redinger.

He turned to cast a disinterested glance in the direction she pointed. “Probably a dead gook,” he said. “Or maybe a jackrabbit.”

“A dead eetee?” Adrenaline stirred in her blood. “What could kill them out here? In the middle of nowhere?”

Redinger shrugged. “They lose their body suits, get a puncture, they’re pretty vulnerable.”

“Vulnerable, my gold-plated ass!” Wyrzbowski remembered how two of the mucousy little freaks had ripped apart Lieutenant Atherton with their bare talons while hopping up and down with glee. Silently: that was the really freaky part. Everyone knew they had some kind of mind talk.

Redinger said, “A ruptured body suit, and they’re only good for a few days in the heat. Sheriff thinks they’re short of water and fighting over it. We had a dry winter, no rain at all since May—and there’s only a few small lakes up there. In town, we get our water from 300 feet underground.”

“How often do you get expeditions coming after your water?”

He shrugged again and pointed. “Turn left up here.”

A narrower gravel road led away through the hills. Wyrzbowski swung the humvee onto it, the others followed, and they began to bounce along in earnest, raising a column of dust visible to any eetee on the mountain. She glanced back. At this distance, the town had almost disappeared. A line of trees followed the course of a single winding stream. Yesterday, she had glanced over a bridge and seen that streambed almost dry. Lucky Lewisville: a year of drought, a moat of waterless grassland ten miles deep.

She thought about the water jugs they carried with them, about a shipload of eetees dying of thirst, and despite the blazing heat she took a hand from the wheel to pull on the helmet of her body armor.

A fence had been running along the right-hand side of the road. Up ahead, it bent right again and marched away across the hills, dividing fallow farmland from patchy brush. The bushes looked green. Further on, she could see the silvery foliage of cottonwoods and willows. She wasn’t a Campfire Girl, but she could guess what trees meant out here.

Water.

She braked, and the line of hummers behind them did the same. In the back seat, Lieutenant Briggs glanced around nervously.

“What’s the deal, Redinger?” she snapped at the guide. “Your sheriff claimed there was a big cache of eetee machinery abandoned here. Unguarded. But there’s water here, right? And you still say there’s no eetees camped out?”

Redinger looked offended. He was pulling out a Ruger Mini-14 that the colonel had given him leave to carry today. “We poisoned it,” he said.

“Poison?” Briggs said, leaning forward.

“That’s right. We dumped fertilizer in the pond. They can’t take it. We saw ’em die when they tried to drink or swim in the creek, too much farm runoff. One of our doctors said it must be their, ah, electrolyte balance.”

Well, gee, that could explain what had puzzled idiots like Atherton: why the downed eetees hadn’t spread out into the California farmland. They’d stayed in the suburbs for treated water fresh from the tap.

“So if it’s safe,” she asked Redinger, “why do you suddenly need the gun?”

“Eh?” He looked at his firearm. “Oh. Sometimes one of ’em gets desperate. You get some sick gooks hanging around, waiting to die.”

Wyrzbowski glanced into the back seat. “Sir?”

Briggs leaned back, nodded. “We go in. Be careful.”

She put the hummer in motion again, slowly. Soon the road dead-ended in a dirt turnaround. Beyond that lay cattails and a sheet of greenish scum about fifty yards across, hemmed in by leafy brush and cottonwoods. Way, way too much cover.

Along the shoreline at different points, she could see the hardware the locals had mentioned, gargoyle surfaces peeking through the foliage. From here she couldn’t recognize anything, but it was enough to give the colonel a real hard-on.

She personally wished he’d worry less about a few power cells falling into civilian hands than the vicious castaways on the mountain, every one of them as eager as the Terminix man to commit mass destruction on H. sapiens. Sure, the Army desperately needed all it could gather up, both to fight eetees and to keep control of restive civilians (and they did always seem to be restive). Everyone had heard about the hushed-up disaster at Yosemite: refugees so hungry they were eating eetees, who’d used some never-specified but terrifying eetee gewgaws to slaughter soldiers and loot their supplies.

Still, the colonel wasn’t the one who had to drive his ass around right under eetee sights.

One day, Wyrzbowski thought, the so-called liberation of Earth would become a reality. She would never again have to inhale the stink of eetee splatter on a hot day. She would never again have to wonder when the next fearmonger would flatline her brain. She would never again have to worry about restive civilians shooting her in the back, or about participating in sleazy deceptions like this quarantine scam of the colonel’s. She would go back to being a citizen of a goddamn democracy, all Homo sapiens are created equal, all eetees are vulture food.

She would lay in the shade, pop a cold beer, eat a hamburger.

“Let’s go,” said Briggs. Wyrzbowski pulled down her visor and rolled out of the hummer into low crouch, and the other five followed her. At least Briggs had enough sense to put on his helmet.

A trail led along the shore in both directions. Briggs sent one group right, another left; she got the left-hand job. Some soldiers stayed with the hummers to guard them; others headed away from the pond altogether, up the slope.

Her six worked slowly along the grassy trail. She sweltered inside her armor. The sun raised a sewage-y stench off the stagnant pond, and horseflies the size of mice dive-bombed their heads. Insects in the grass fell silent as they approached and buzzed loudly again after they passed.

They reached the first pile of hardware without incident. Wyrzbowski took off a glove and gingerly touched the squat, lobed central piece. It was cool to the touch and, on the shady side, sweated condensation. Still working, whatever it was. She duck-walked around it. On the far side, a tube four inches in diameter snaked through the grass toward the pond. Her guess: some kind of purification unit.

Further along the trail, other globby Tinkertoys shone inscrutably in the sun. A lot of working hardware here. It didn’t look all that abandoned, whatever the locals claimed.

Shouts. She twisted around. They came from the hummers, but she couldn’t see well through the foliage. A plasma rifle opened up, setting a tree ablaze. And then eetee fire caught a hummer and blew it apart like the Fourth of July.

Wyrzbowski dropped on her belly and elbowed swiftly back to the others. “Back!” she hissed.

Her soldiers spread out among the trees, belly-crawling through the grass. Now the whole pond side was jumping with eetees in body suits. No, the gooks hadn’t left their little water-treatment plant unguarded.

More fire from the soldiers at the turnaround, but not as much as there should be. She reached a rotting stump, balanced her rifle, whistled the signal over her mike. While Preston and Weinberg played rear-guard, the rest chose their targets deliberately. She sighted on the nearest of the eetees hopping toward Briggs, who stood as motionless as a department-store mannequin. She pressed the trigger. Got the hopper—whoops, a little splatter on the lieutenant. Other soldiers near Briggs had turned deer-in-the-headlights, too, perfect targets. Just like Atherton. There must be a mind-bender in this crew.

Wyrzbowski tried to sort out the pattern as she picked off a second hopper. Eetees descended the hillside beyond the humvees; more had popped up on the other side of the pond—but those soldiers were returning fire, so no mind control over there. A whistle from Weinberg to the rear. Enemy on their tail, too, but her group wasn’t pissing their pants in cold terror.

Up there, then. On the hillside. She whistled another signal as she splattered a third eetee.

The other five came crawling to her. She raised her visor and whispered, in case the eetees were listening to radio. “There’s an officer up there. We’re going to get it.”

The six of them spread out again, creeping through grass and brush away from the pond. The eetees attacking them from the rear didn’t figure out what they’d done and joined the action at the humvees. Now Wyrzbowski could see the muckamuck, resplendent in the egg-sack slime of its body suit, wielding its red fearmonger while flunkies covered its spindle-shanked ass. Poor freak: A year ago it had been one of the exterminator kings of the galaxy, and now here it was on guard duty at a polluted frog pond. She wondered if the eetee mind-benders could hear human minds, if they took pleasure in the terror they caused.

She wriggled forward, hoping she wasn’t already too close to the muckamuck. One of the hopper flunkies must have sensed something. It turned toward her soldiers. Silent communication and a rush of excited hopping. A bush in Phillips’ direction burst into a flutter of shredded leaves. Someone, she thought Merlino, fired back, burning two of the hoppers.

The flunkies had left their muckamuck exposed, but it had also turned its glistening head in their direction. Searching. Not much time, Wyrzbowski thought, and right then the terror boiled out of the back of her skull.

It spilled like ice into her guts, congealed her limbs into stone. Time stopped. The hillside sharpened into impossibly sharp focus, cutting itself into her consciousness: light and shadow on a patch of wild rose; the gym-socks smell inside her helmet; a horsefly crawling across the visor.

She knew she just had to focus. Sight on the chest. Press the trigger. That’s all she had to do.

An eetee landed on her back, then exploded drippily onto her armor. Concrete encased her hands, her arms. She heard someone whimpering and knew, from experience, that it was herself. Your buddies cover your back, but you have to face down your fear by yourself. Just focus. Breathe. Press the trigger, press press press. And her finger moved—

The weight dropped from her limbs. The ice melted from her body and left her, gasping, in the hot sunlight. She managed to raise her head. The muckamuck was nowhere to be seen, though its fearmonger had come to rest in a rosebush. She grabbed a handful of grass to wipe the viscous blobs clinging to her visor, and then scooped up the fearmonger for her collection. Four officers and counting.

The grunt eetees fled the hillside. She whistled. One by one, Weinberg, Preston, and Bernard appeared. Then Merlino dragged toward her through the brush. He’d taken a burn on the shoulder plate of his armor. “Phillips?” she asked. He shook his head.

She couldn’t think about that now. She pointed down the hill, toward the single remaining humvee. As they ran at a crouch, Weinberg supporting Merlino, she took stock. It looked better than she’d expected. The party on the far side of the pond was still kicking, targeting the eetees trying to pick off survivors at the turnaround. The hoppers must have known their grand and mighty mind-bender was now only a nasty spray of goobers, because as soon as her party came up behind, they turned and fled altogether.

Briggs was gone. It was Sergeant Libnitz who gave the orders: the wounded in the humvee, others to jog behind.

Redinger appeared out of nowhere to lope beside her. He didn’t have so much as a singe-mark on him despite not being armored, but he was stinking wet from pond water. She raised her visor; she needed the air. She was soaked inside her armor, too, but from sweat.

“How come you’re still alive?” she asked.

“Jumped in the pond and swam to your side,” he gasped.

“Clever,” she said. Redinger didn’t fool her. The Lewisville militia had sent them into the ambush. When the reckoning came, she would make sure to splatter this prick for Phillips. She wished, not for the first time, that she knew how to use her red souvenir. She would make this little fuckhead shit himself, she would make him weep, she would feed him suffering and degradation. Then she would splatter him.

Adrenaline and the rush of hatred kept her moving until they reached the junction. And then the humvee in front of her stopped. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Libnitz was shouting.

She stopped, panting and dizzy from the heat. Then saw what he swore at.

Back in town, five miles away, black smoke coiled into the flawless blue sky. She made her way to Libnitz. “Can’t raise anybody on the radio,” he said.

6

Out the café’s back window, Alexandra Gundersen could see the Neanderthals coming out of their caves to beat their chests. It was the Big Noisy Machines the Army had driven into town; now Ben and his boys worried that their dicks were too small. So now they had to kill something, or make a big explosion. Nothing made your little dick feel bigger.

“I’m so sorry, colonel,” she said to the Army man. “They’re all lent out right now. It’s been such a popular book. I’ll try to get one for you by tonight. In the meantime, let me check those other books out for you.”

The colonel responded to her warm tone with a slight relaxation of posture. The lightening of his expression was not yet sufficient to call a smile. While Alexandra stamped his books, she glanced through her lashes at the window again. Ben and his unter-cavemen had separated and now walked in different directions. Her twin James aimed straight toward the café’s back door. It was, unfortunately, too late to escape.

She handed Colonel Fikes his books and smiled again, and this time he did smile in return. He would be back. She knew her customers, and, for better or worse, she knew men.

The colonel headed through the adjoining bookshop toward the front door, even as brother James pushed through the back into the café.

“Good morning, Sandy,” James said cheerfully.

Her twin used her childhood nickname only to annoy her. Since these days he preferred the proletarian Jim, she paid him back in kind. “Hello, James.”

James stared at her customers significantly. Despite the Army’s prohibition on civilian assembly, and the loss of power that made it impossible to open her café (only locally grown herbal or mormon tea anyway, alas), she could still let up to seven civilians and any number of soldiers into the bookshop. She no longer sold books or videos these days, with no new stock arriving in the foreseeable future, but she did lend them out, and since the demise of TV and radio, her store had always been busy. “Can we talk?” said James.

Alexandra waved at her assistant, deep in conversation with a soldier, to signal her departure. “Come on,” she said to James. She led him through the door marked Private, into her stockroom’s little office. “What do you want, James?”

“We need your help,” he said.

We meant Ben, of course. How flattering that when Biggest Dick caveman needed a woman’s help, he still thought of his ex-wife—though he was too cowardly to show up in person.

“I can’t imagine what use I could be to you deputies.”

“The Army stole some things from us,” James said, “and we need to get them back.”

“You mean your weapons.”

“Sandy,” James said, “we’ve been protecting you with those weapons.”

“Isn’t the Army going to take over that job?”

“Are they acting as if they came here to fight eetees?” James’s foot jittered suddenly as Alexandra fixed him with a frown. “And what will you do when you need protection from the Army?”

The soldiers had come yesterday: hard men, and a few women, too, in desert camo and heavy boots, laden with guns. She hadn’t liked them. But they hadn’t dragged her off to “quarantine.” When the very first tanks rolled into Lewisville, Alexandra had undertaken serious thinking on the subject of boss cavemen and the very biggest rocks. By the time the soldiers showed up at her door, her shop and house had been cleared of all eetee artifacts. She had smiled and offered them tea.

They had frightened her nevertheless.

“I don’t particularly like this . . . occupation,” she said. “But the soldiers are acting under orders from our government.”

“Our government?” said James. “The eetees nuked our government. These folks are enforcers for a military dictatorship.”

“And just what is Sheriff wonderful Ben Gundersen setting up? How much has he been promoting your precious civil rights and rule of law?”

James’s foot jittered again. Poor James. He fancied himself such an independent thinker. But when the other cavemen start heaving around rocks and grunting, you have to join in. Otherwise they might think you have a really little dick.

Okay, so it wasn’t the actual, physical dick (obviously, in Ben’s case!) that determined where you stood in Neanderthal hierarchy. It was all the subtle, almost imperceptible inflections of display, of action and reaction, dominance and deference, intimidation and submission, and meanwhile the metaphorical dick grows bigger and bigger. Fear, manipulation, and mind control. The boss caveman is created by attitude, his, theirs. Hers—although she had at last won free.

“I grant you,” James said, “Ben’s gone overboard sometimes. But he’s kept the town together in difficult times, he’s really done a tremendous job. He’s preserved . . . civilization here, when the war turned the rest of our country into rubble.”

Alexandra knew there was some truth in what her brother said. Behavior that was bad for a marriage might be less bad for a town. Because of Ben’s diligent ruthlessness, she could sleep at night, she could still open up her store and serve customers. But it wasn’t the whole story, was it?

“Order,” she said, “is not the same as civilization. Order is about the strong controlling the weak. Civilization is about protecting the weaker from the stronger, about us all living together in empathy, cultivating the connections between us—”

“Sandy,” said James, “empathy is what we’re after. We want the Army folks to empathize with our point of view.”

“With the aid of weapons,” she said sharply. James made no reply, but he jiggled his foot again. “I don’t want part of it. I’m a civilized person. I won’t participate in violence against fellow human beings, moreover against people who are serving my country. And I thought I had made myself clear. I have no interest in doing anything for or because of Ben, ever, I want to have no connection with him at all, ever again, and this is his plan. Don’t tell me it isn’t.”

“Don’t make this personal—”

“It is personal. It’s all personal. You want to belong to a cause that’s bigger than you and, and—then you don’t have to think about your actions. Your violence is good, theirs is bad. And then it’s a big flashy Hollywood story, small-town heroes fight off aliens and the bad Army guys at the same time. But it all begins with you, James, and me, and Ben. Good and evil begin in each person’s heart and mind. That’s the story.”

James began to laugh. “You and Ben were a Hollywood story, all right. The problem was, you both wanted top billing.” Alexandra flushed, enraged at his mockery, yet another betrayal of her, his twin sister. He ducked his head and said, hastily, waving his hands, “No, no, forget about Ben, okay?”

“How can I? This is all about him, and his ego. He just can’t stand not being the one on top!”

“It’s only about Ben for you, Sandy. And doesn’t that mean you’re making it all about you?” That stopped her. James went on: “It’s the town that needs your help. Your neighbors. Individuals. It’s your choice to do good and not evil to them.”

“And you,” she said coldly, “are so sure this is for their own good.”

“What good has the Army done for Lewisville so far? What happens to your business when they’ve locked away half the town? Do you think they’ll go on differently than they’ve begun?”

No, that did seem unlikely. Alexandra looked away.

After the divorce, exhausted and alone, she had convinced herself that what she had most wanted was the opposite of her life with Ben. She wanted to live quietly. She wanted a loving world founded on empathy, not conquest. Starting up her café-bookstore had been part of it, a microcosm of her ideal of civilization, bringing people together for the exchange of ideas and fellowship. And hadn’t she been successful at that, at least in a small way?

But, to tell the truth, it was boring. And while she dwindled into a mousy spinster, the bookstore lady, the war came along and metamorphosed Ben into gun-toting action hero. Not that she could ever have fought the eetees the way he had. She had no physical courage and would sooner pick up a poisonous viper than a gun. But—admit it, James was right—she hated being out of the spotlight. She hated Ben hogging the stage.

And now, wriggling up from the dark depths of her psyche, came this self-destructive impulse to prove herself to Ben. To the town. To prove she was useful in this new caveman world of fear and guns, and not just in the sad, lost world of civilization, where she had known she was Ben’s superior.

Had Ben known she would feel such an impulse? Had he known she would be more afraid of the strange cavemen, the Army soldiers, than the cavemen she knew?

Fear, manipulation, and mind control. Good old Ben. Once she had admired that will toward dominance.

Then, James said, “Maybe you’re afraid you won’t measure up.” Reading her mind, too—he was her twin, after all.

Strange how knowing what was in someone else’s mind ought to give you empathy for that person. Instead it seemed as if only the weak could sustain empathy. The strong couldn’t resist the temptation to use their knowledge to get what they wanted.

Defeated by James and Ben, by her own attitude, Alexandra said, “All right. Tell me what you want me to do.”

And so that afternoon, clad in a clingy flowered sundress and straw hat, her long blond hair spilling over her shoulders, Alexandra walked up to a pair of beefy soldiers and smiled. “Excuse me? Officers? I wonder if I could get into the warehouse.”

One of the soldiers swiveled his head toward her, so she could see her reflection in his sunglasses. She still looked pretty damn good. The soldiers’ guns turned her stomach queasy and her hands cold, but, she told herself firmly, what was in their minds mattered more.

“We’re not officers, ma’am—” the soldier began, politely.

“Oh!” she said. “Of course! How silly of me! You’re not the police!”

“—but no,” he went on, “we can’t let you into the warehouses.”

“But you see,” she said, “I rent space in one. For some of my overflow.” He was staring politely but blankly at her. “I own a bookstore, you see? The only one in town. And your colonel, Mr. Fikes, came in today and we started talking about Lewis and Clark, and whether they should be admired as brave explorers, or whether they were just the vanguard of genocide and colonial oppression, and he asked for a book about them.”

She smiled again at them. Their body language was changing subtly but unmistakably: shoulders relaxing, faces turning towards her. Excitement mixed with terror rose in her. They were falling for it . . .

“I recommended Undaunted Courage to start with, but, as you can imagine, it’s a popular book around here, at least since there hasn’t been any TV. I didn’t have any copies left in the store, but I know there are some out here in the warehouse. So I came out here to pick up a copy for the colonel. You can check with him if you like.”

Part of her still hoped the soldiers would send her away, and she would be able to tell James she had done her best. But she was also fiercely willing them to submit.

He nodded. “All right, Ms.—?”

“Alexandra Hanover,” she said, using her maiden name.

“I’ll have to accompany you.”

“Oh, that’s fine!” she said, and smiled her most glorious smile at him. And she followed him across the parking lot between the tanker trucks, and through the big roll-up door.

The space inside was cavernous, dark and cool. The soldiers had shoved aside quite a few of the pallets and shelving units to make room for their equipment, and the smells of diesel oil and sweat mingled with the older dusty scent of dried peas. The guard accompanying her paused to explain their mission to a man leaning over a trestle table—probably a genuine officer.

The man at the table looked her up and down with a hard, suspicious stare, but Alexandra smiled at him, too, with just the right mixture of hopeful inquiry, submission to his authority, and winning, wholesome cheerfulness. (Oh, it was going to work. All those years with Ben had been good for something after all.) Then he, too, nodded.

She and her guard threaded their way around pallets laden with sacks of dried peas, heading toward the back of the warehouse. The shelving units that she rented stood against the wall at the back, next to a locked metal door that led outside.

Next came a part that depended on her own physical quickness, something she had never had to rely upon before. But excitement propelled her now. She no longer wanted to turn back.

“Could you help me?” she asked the guard. “I have a bad back.” The guard glanced at her. She pointed. He still wore his sunglasses, so he wouldn’t be able to see the nervous tremor in her hands. “It’s in that box there, on the second shelf.”

He bent over, reaching for the box. Alexandra opened her purse and took out the vet’s tranquilizer dart that James had given her. The guard started to pull the box off the shelf. She reached over and stabbed his neck with the dart.

“Hey!” he yelled, turning swiftly toward her. She backed up, but before he could take a single step, his knees buckled and he pitched face forward onto the concrete floor.

That looked as if it hurt. But she could not help smiling. She had done it!

She reached in her purse again and took out the key that James had given her, doubtless Reggie Forrester’s. She slid back the deadbolts and opened the door.

The gravel lane behind the warehouse was deserted except for a skittering stray cat. For a moment she thought the soldiers must already have arrested Ben’s deputies. Then behind her, inside the warehouse, a commotion erupted: people yelling, booted feet clomping at a run across concrete.

And then brother James rose out of the brush on the far side of the lane and ran toward the back door. A line of Lewisville deputies followed him. Two tremendous explosions detonated at the front of the warehouse, one right after the other. A blast of heat and smoke and a rain of debris rattled across the interior of the warehouse. Alexandra jumped outside through the doorway.

Alexandra thought: People were being shot, even killed. She had helped it happen. It was a betrayal of everything she thought she stood for. Why was she so excited?

But then, at that same moment, moving so unbelievably fast that she barely had time to register what happened, a dark shape roared across the sky, shrank into a distant speck. Another deafening explosion—

The deputies all ducked belatedly. “Raid! Raid! Eetees!” James shouted. Now gunfire and screams echoed from inside the warehouse.

Then a band of eetees, all thin heads and long froggy legs, came around the corner of the warehouse and started shooting.

She had never seen them in the flesh. They weren’t supposed to come out in daylight! Terrified, she flung herself back inside, crawled away among the pallets into the darkest corner she could find, and wedged herself behind a row of fiberboard barrels, arms over her head. Smoke filled her nose and mouth. Explosions echoed through the warehouse, more yelling and screaming, the crash of metal shelves overturning.

Then she heard a sound right nearby.

She looked up. One of the aliens squatted atop a stack of barrels. It apparently hadn’t seen her yet. It gazed out from its high vantage point into the chaos of the warehouse. The alien wasn’t any larger, really, than a Great Dane or a teenage boy. It had long legs and arms and wore some kind of glistening translucent all-over covering like a wetsuit, and its taloned glove held a long-barreled red pistol. It smelled like slightly rancid raw chicken. Alexandra looked at its narrow chest for one of those red whorled pendants James had once shown her, carried by the high-ranking eetees, that could paralyze this entire warehouse full of men. She did not see one.

She must have made a sound—whimpered, perhaps—because the eetee turned and glanced down at her. Its narrow face was unreadable behind the slimy protective sac. Its pistol was aimed at her negligently, as if she were no threat at all, but she really did not like guns.

As angry as if it were Ben, Alexandra threw her weight into the stack of barrels. The eetee toppled to the floor along with all the rolling, tumbling sections of its unstable perch. The pistol flew from its hand, fell and struck Alexandra’s hip. Her first instinctive reaction was to bat the horrible object away from her; then, fumbling, she grabbed for it and caught the wrong end.

The eetee scrabbled to its feet, heaving barrels aside. Alexandra reoriented the pistol with two clumsy, shaking hands, and took aim. She clearly did not inspire fear: Instead of ducking behind a barrel or throwing itself to one side, the eetee fixed Alexandra with its egg-yolk gaze.

Icy blackness swept her mind, it stopped her breath and froze her limbs—

But the eetee didn’t, it surely . . .

The overwhelming weight of her terror crushed the half-finished thought toward nothingness, and all that Alexandra could grab hold of was her desperate rage. She was so tired of being on the sidelines, the one not in control. She realized she had squeezed her eyes shut. She forced herself to open them. There was no blackness except on the backs of her eyelids.

Mind control she understood.

She pressed the button on the red pistol and the eetee exploded, showering the wall above her with great gobs and ropy drips of what looked like snot.

“Take that, Ben,” she whispered.

Civilization is a wonderful thing, but survival trumps it every time.

Then a human soldier, a black woman, pushed through the barrels toward her to offer a hand. “The warehouse is burning! Come on!”

The soldier took the red pistol from Alexandra’s now nerveless hands and tugged her through an obstacle course of tumbled communications equipment, pooled blood, dead human and alien bodies, and furiously burning sacks of dried peas. At last they burst onto the smoke-filled parking lot. The remains of the Army’s fuel trucks still blazed brightly. Soldiers pushed her down behind a tank.

“This the one who let the militia in?” one of them said.

“She splattered the froggy with the fearmonger,” her rescuer told them. “Lucky for you.”

But there had been no fearmonger.

As the flood of paralytic terror receded, dragging cold shakiness in its wake, Alexandra’s last thought but one rose back into sight. The eetee hadn’t carried a fear gun. It hadn’t needed one to shoot her full of abject terror.

Noise and commotion went on for a long time after that: the burning diesel, eetee aircraft sweeping overhead, explosions, missiles screaming into the sky, shouts, rattling gunfire. Alexandra knew Ben’s plan had gone entirely wrong, and she was, plainly and simply, screwed. Ben and his deputies were even more screwed, if they weren’t already dead. Now Lewisville really would suffer a military occupation. They would all be herded into camps.

Still, right at the moment she felt like God looking down on creation. She had killed an eetee.

Her brain could not leave alone the image of that clouded alien face at the moment she had pressed the trigger.

All this time she’d been hearing about Ben and his deputies—so brave to venture out, over and over, against such a terrible weapon—and it turned out there was no such thing as a fear gun.

The red pendants must be just some kind of officer’s insignia. It said you were authorized, you had the ability or the training to wield terror. But as for the fear itself—

It all begins and ends in the mind.

7

Fred crossed the dry, thistly lawn and stopped in front of the old brick building with the flagpoles that Harvey would never let him piss on. In hot weather the children stayed away and the building usually sat empty, but now the strangers had brought grownup people there. Fred hoped Harvey might be one of them.

Fred dropped his burden to sample the air for Harvey’s scent. The air was still heavy with the acrid taste of yesterday’s conflagration. He reared on hind legs to put his nose to the windows. No one had opened the mesh coverings, but the sashes had been raised so he could smell all the guests packed inside. There were even more than at the big barbecues Harvey and Susan used to hold. The people were not enjoying this party, though. Many stood in line in front of a table. The rest sat around on cots or folded blankets, glum, angry, or fearful.

Fred recognized some of the people. Mister Mayor drifted along the line of people, talking. Fred could tell that Mister Mayor felt glum and fearful, too, but he soothed the others with his warm smooth voice that had always reminded Fred of cow fat.

At the table at the head of the line sat the woman vet who had kept Fred tied up in the cold hard room. With her was the otherwise nice man who had helped with the big, long, nasty needle. Now the vet-woman had a lot more needles with her, and the nice man—as well as some of the strangers—were helping her, sticking needles in each person and writing things down.

Near the table Fred noticed Alexandra, who had stopped coming out to Harvey’s a long time ago. Alexandra hadn’t liked Fred’s nose, even when he’d sniffed her crotch in the friendliest way. Alexandra had already gone through the line and now she was smiling and being friendly to some of the strangers.

Ben was not talking to the strangers or to Alexandra. Ben had a leash between his feet and hands and he could only shuffle along. Several strangers led him forward to get stuck with a needle. Fred hoped Ben would be okay. The night before, he had smelled Ben, angry and afraid, through a basement window in the building with the big statue.

At last, in the far corner, Fred located Susan, and nearby, Harvey. Harvey sat on a cot and stared miserably at the wall.

Fred remembered the old days when he and Harvey had romped for hours in the cool of the evening, when the two of them had been joyously happy together. Then Harvey had grown afraid: so afraid of the world and of Fred, he thought he should kill Fred, even though he didn’t want to.

Fred so much wanted Harvey and Susan to be happy again. When Harvey got the present Fred was trying to give him, he would quit being so miserable and alone. He would know that he didn’t have to be afraid of Fred.

Fred picked up the present in his jaws again and loped around the corner of the brick building. A couple of the strangers’ trucks pulled out of the driveway. Their occupants paid no attention to him.

Toward the back of the brick building it was cooler and shady. A cat turd lay under a bush. For a moment, he thrust his nose against it, intrigued. Then he recalled his mission. He would not be able to go home if he failed, not while Harvey and the vet-woman wanted to kill him.

He continued to the back door of the place where the children used to eat. The sweet odor of old garbage lingered here, but there were also fresh smells where cans of oil, bags of potatoes, and crates of stale crackers and raisins had rested on the cement for a few moments. Most interesting was the delirious scent of raw meat. Someone had recently killed a cow.

From inside the building, Fred could smell boiling potatoes. He trotted up to the door itself. Two sweaty strangers guarded it. Fred put down the present and wagged his tail.

Hello, he said to them, in the new way he had learned.

They glanced down. “Hey, boy,” said one of the strangers. Fred wagged his tail some more and the stranger patted him on the head. The stranger liked him. Most people liked Fred.

I like you, too, Fred told him, wagging some more. Will you open the door, please?

The stranger pulled open the door. He didn’t look down as Fred picked up his present and trotted inside. It was just the way it had worked with Harvey and Susan, and at the big building that was kind of like the vet’s. The nice man hadn’t noticed he was letting Fred out. It was because he had wanted Fred to be happy, even though he was afraid Fred was sick.

None of them would be afraid of Fred anymore if they understood that Fred wasn’t sick, he had just learned to do some new things.

They would learn new things, too. They would all be happy once they understood each other. They would stop being afraid of each other, and hating each other, and trying to make each other do things. Like him, they would take off their leashes and run joyously, rapturously free.

At least, that’s what he hoped they would do. But people were sometimes unaccountable.

Fred followed the scent of raw meat into a big kitchen where there was a lot of stainless steel. Men and women chopped potatoes and onions, and big pots of water steamed on the burners. More strangers with guns stood around, making sure the men and women didn’t go outside. The strangers were looking forward to the meat, too.

Don’t bother about me, Fred told them, and no one did, because they didn’t want to. It was a little sneaky, a coyote trick.

Off to one side, one of the men was spilling a bowl of stinky chopped onions into a big vat of ground-up raw meat, ruining its smell. Why don’t you stop and talk to your friend? Fred asked him, knowing, because of the new way, that it was what the man really wanted to do.

He couldn’t do this to the coyotes. They would have caught on right away. But, except for Harvey, the humans didn’t know yet that Fred was talking to them, or that he was trying to get them to do things, just for their own good. Until then he could be a little sneaky.

Fred trotted over to the vat of ground-up cow and dropped in the present he had carried all the way from the vet’s.

“Hey!” the man yelled, suddenly noticing him. “Get away from there! How’d you get in?” But he wasn’t really mad.

Fred backed away and lay down, wagging his tail. The man began mixing the pungent onions in with Fred’s present. By the grill, a woman shouted, “You almost done with that hamburger?”

© 2004 by Judith Berman.

Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Judith Berman's short fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and Black Gate. She has also published a novel, Bear Daughter, and a collection, Lord Stink and Other Stories. She is also well-known for her essay, "Science Fiction Without the Future," which appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction. Learn more at judithberman.net.

Impulse
Steven Gould

CHAPTER ONE

Millie: The Underlying Problem

It was more of a lodge than a cabin but “cabin” is what they called it. The walls were made of heavy, thick logs, after all. The main living area was a broad space leaking from kitchen to dining area to a two-story-high lounge arranged around a tall, fieldstone fireplace.

Millie sat on one of the couches, staring out the windows, and frowned. It was snowing outside—big, fat, fluffy flakes—but she really wasn’t noticing.

She was alone in the room and then she wasn’t.

Davy was wearing a tropical-weight suit with the sleeves of the jacket rolled up on his forearms. He unrolled them as he asked, “What’s wrong?”

Millie sighed, her eyes tracking up to the ceiling before returning to Davy’s face.

Davy glanced up to the second-floor landing. “The usual?”

Millie jerked her thumb up. “Go look at her door.”

He sighed. “She is an irritation of the spirit . . .”

Millie completed the phrase, “. . . and a great deal of trouble.”

Davy vanished. After a brief pause Millie heard laughter drift down the staircase. Millie stood and jumped, appearing beside Davy in the upstairs hallway.

A sign, scrawled on butcher paper, was tacked to a closed bedroom door. It said:

HELP!

BEING HELD PRISONER BY TELEPORTING ALIENS!

KEPT FROM NORMAL LIFE.

SEND FRIENDS.

ALSO ICE CREAM.

Davy was shaking his head and still laughing.

“Stop it!” Millie said. “You’re not helping!”

“You gotta admit, she is funny,” Davy said. “Takes after me that way.”

Millie snapped. “What—you think you’re funny?” She pulled at Davy’s arm, leading him back toward the landing.

Davy raised his eyebrows at Millie and grinned.

“Okay, she is funny, but the underlying problem is no less a problem.”

Davy’s smile faded and he jerked his chin down toward the kitchen, and vanished.

Millie followed to see him putting the kettle on.

“What choice do we have?” Davy said. “I mean, really?”

Millie shook her head. She felt like she should have an answer but she didn’t.

Davy hugged her and that was good . . . but the underlying problem was still no less a problem.

And it could only get worse.

CHAPTER TWO

Cent: “But it will kill you dead, just the same.”

I don’t really exist, you know.

We live in the Canadian Rockies, sixty miles south of the Arctic Circle. I was born here, in this house. Mom and Dad paid a nurse midwife to live with us for the last month of the pregnancy. Dad was prepared to transfer Mom to a hospital if things went wrong, but things “worked out,” as did I, apparently. Mom said it was definitely “work.”

But there’s no birth record. No birth certificate. No Social Security number.

We’re in the middle of nowhere. The second largest city in the province is a hundred miles to the southeast, but I’ve never been there. Next nearest town is 140 miles north: Old Crow. No roads to Old Crow, it just has an airstrip and the river.

No roads to our house, either. It was built by a billionaire as a hunting lodge at the head of a mountain valley using helicoptered labor. We get moose, caribou, deer, wolves, lynx, and rabbits. Starbucks? Not so much.

The walls are heavy logs, two feet thick. The roof is steeply pitched anodized steel to keep the snow from piling up. It sloughs off the snow in the winter until the bottom floor windows and doors are buried. One year the snow rose high enough to cover the second floor, but Dad melted it away, making sure that the chimney, ventilation stacks, upper doors, and triple-glazed windows remained clear.

There’s a log-surfaced helicopter pad, but Dad does nothing to keep it clear, no matter what the season. Moss, brush, and small trees are taking it over.

Dad doesn’t care. That’s not how he rolls.

He does spend a lot of the summers fixing up the lodge itself—that and the springhouse out back.

The springs are the reason the billionaire built the lodge here: one hot, one cold. One tasting of sulfur and one tasting like a deep breath of winter. We don’t need a hot-water heater—the hot spring provides bath, washing, and soaking water―though it leaves mineral stains in the tub. We drink from the cold spring and use it to make showers less scalding. For two-thirds of the year we run hot spring water through radiators to heat the house, and all year round we use the temperature difference between the two springs to generate electricity.

That was Dad’s doing. I think back when it was a hunting lodge, they had a diesel generator. But it was rusted solid when Dad bought the place. The billionaire had become a mere millionaire during the economic meltdown and a vacation home that required two-hundred-mile round-trips by helicopter became something he couldn’t afford.

Dad’s not a billionaire, but then he doesn’t need a helicopter to get here either.

The electrical generator came from an Icelandic power company that built it as a proof-of-concept device at one of their geothermal wells. When they upgraded that installation to the megawatt commercial version, Dad bought the prototype for mere thousands of dollars.

When I was little, I named it Buzz since that’s what it does, sits in the basement and buzzes. To be fair, it also gurgles, hisses, and thumps, but for a four-year-old, buzz is as entertaining a word as ever there was, especially if you add extra “zzzzzzzzzzzz” at the end.

And then one day, when I was fifteen, it stopped buzzing.

I was watching an old anime on my desktop, but the screen blipped out along with the lights and then I was sitting in the dark, listening to the DVD drive spin to a halt.

I heard Mom yell from her office across the hall. “Davy!”

Dad’s voice answered from downstairs, “Yeah, yeah. I’m on it!”

I felt my way over to the door and opened it. The battery-powered emergency light in the stairwell had come on. The windows were dark—it was late afternoon and October, and what little dusk light was on the southern horizon was blocked by the ridge on the far side of the valley.

Dad had just come out of the library when I tripped down the stairs. He smiled briefly at me. “Hey, Cent. Pretty dark up there, I bet.”

“You think?” I said. “What’s wrong with Buzz?”

He shook his head. “Not sure. Let’s go see.” He reached out to ruffle my hair.

I was styling it these days with a lot of gel and I slapped his arm away. “Rule one, Daddy! How many times do I gotta tell you?”

He laughed again. “Don’t touch the hair. Right. Sorry.”

I swear he does it just to mess with me.

When he opened the door at the top of the basement stairs, I heard a high-pitched beeping noise, one I’d never heard before. I started to take a step down and Dad grabbed me by my collar and pulled me back.

“Damn!” Dad said. “Well, at least we know what’s wrong with Buzz. Don’t go down there.”

“What’s that alarm?”

“Halogen detector. There’s a leak in the system. The Freon is leaking out.” He was no longer smiling.

I knew about the Freon. The hot water from the spring boils it to vapor, which expands through the turbine generator. The cold spring water condenses it again. I’m homeschooled, so the generator has been the source of many science lessons: state changes of matter, Boyles law, electromagnetism.

“Freon isn’t poisonous, Dad.”

“No. But it will kill you dead, just the same.” The serious look on his face eased at my expression. “Definitely not poisonous. We’re okay up here. Let me give you a clue: Freon is heavier than air.”

I thought about it for a moment. “Ah. Like water?”

“Like water you can’t see or feel or smell, yes. Which means?”

“The air is on top. The Freon fills up the basement and pushes the air out.”

He grinned, big. “On the nosey, little posy.”

“You’d pass out, eh?”

“Before you died. Heard about a shrimp boat with a refrigeration leak down in the hull. Different members of the crew kept going down into the hold to see what happened to the previous guy. The coast guard found the vessel going in circles, everybody suffocated.”

I eyed the stairs dubiously. “You sure we’re okay?”

He got that look on his face and smiled.

“No!” I said. “I don’t need another real-life math problem!”

He led me back upstairs where we found Mom typing at her computer. She had a laptop with a battery. She didn’t have to stop what she was doing because Buzz was busted.

“What’s wrong with Buzz?” she asked.

“Leaking Freon,” Dad said calmly.

“And displacing all the air in the house!” I said.

Mom’s eyes widened and she looked at Dad. Dad shrugged. “Not very likely, but Millicent is going to calculate the answer to that.”

Mom raised her eyebrows and pushed a pad of paper and a pen toward me across her desk.

Dad said, “Assume an eight-foot-high ceiling. The generator room is twelve by ten feet. It’s about a quarter of the entire basement.”

I did that part in my head. “Nine-hundred-sixty cubic feet. How much Freon?”

Dad jumped and I don’t mean he bounced in place. He disappeared, vanished. I said something under my breath, which caused Mom to sit up straight and give me “the look.”

“Sorry. I was watching my show. I already did homework today.” I sounded whiny. I hate sounding whiny. I tried again, with a more reasonable voice. “I work hard, don’t I?”

“The look” faded and Mom said, “Yes, honey, you do. But you know your father. He never finished school. He’s one of the smartest men I know but he has this thing about education.”

“Tell me about it. If I hear the phrase ‘teachable moment’ one more time, I’m gonna barf.”

Dad reappeared at my elbow, a manual and a sheet of paper in his hand. “Had to go to the library for the Material Safety Data sheet. Didn’t know the density.”

I looked at Mom and sighed heavily. Dad put the books on the desk by the notepad and slid a chair over for me to sit.

It was dark, but when he pulled the bedroom door all the way open, the emergency light from the hall shone across half the desk.

“Dad! This is Buzz’s manual―you went into the basement!”

He shrugged. “As you said, it’s not poisonous. I held my breath. Wasn’t in there more than five seconds.” Mom and I both gave him “the look” but after so many years, he’s impervious. He reached down and tapped the notepad.

I sighed and sat down. The manual specs said the generator was charged with 175 pounds of Freon, the ozone-safe R-22 version. The Material Data Sheet told me the density, and when I converted, I got .225 pounds per cubic foot. That seemed pretty heavy but I double-checked it. “Must be a big molecule.” I grabbed Mom’s laptop and called up a calculator. “Seven hundred and eighty cubic feet. Uh, in the generator room that would displace the air up to, uh, six and a half feet off the floor.”

Dad held his hand over his head. “Worse than that, I think. You didn’t account for altitude.”

“Oh.” I blushed. As I’d said, we’d already done Boyle’s law but I’d forgotten. I knew the conversion factor for our forty-five hundred feet of altitude by heart. “Okay.” I multiplied the figure by 1.18. “Call it 920 cubic feet.” I tapped away. “It would fill the room to seven and two-thirds feet.”

Mom spoke. “I guess we don’t have to worry about the whole house.”

I felt the need to make up for my earlier slip. “Really, not even the basement. When we open the door to the generator room it will flow out into the other rooms and be less than two feet high. Not a problem if we don’t lie on the floor.”

Mom turned to Dad. “You won’t leave it there, will you?”

Dad shook his head. “I’ll twin to a higher altitude and suck it out. But before it all leaks out, I want to find out where it’s leaking, so we can fix it. Hopefully without hauling the thing back to Reykjavik.”

“We can put the stuff from the freezer on the porch,” Mom said, glancing at the window. It was eighteen degrees Fahrenheit outside and would probably drop another ten degrees before morning. “But the stuff in the refrigerator needs not to freeze. Ice chest?”

Dad shook his head. “I’ll go get a backup generator. I’ve been meaning to for some time, but Buzz has been so reliable and I’ve been worried about carbon monoxide.”

“Well,” Mom said. “Since it looks like we’ll be without power for a while—” She looked at me. “—Let’s go shopping.”

“Clothes?” I asked, hopefully.

“You’ve got plenty of clothes,” Mom said. “I’m thinking lentils . . . about nine tons.”

Yes, I have enough clothes. I know that, but it’s not the clothes I’m interested in. It’s the people—the clerks, the other customers, the people walking by on the streets. Mom and Dad never let me spend significant time with other people.

It’s like being in a cult.

Mom said summer so that meant Southern Hemisphere. I changed out of my sweater into a T-shirt and put on running shoes. When I came out onto the landing Mom was waiting, jeans and a T-shirt like me, plus a cotton work shirt and a broad-brimmed hat.

“Africa?” I asked.

“Australia.”

“Let me grab my shades.” I had to fumble in the dark but I found my snowboarding shades and grabbed a Yomiuri Giants baseball cap.

When I came out again, Mom opened her arms and I walked into her embrace. When she let me go my ears popped, the sun was blazing down, and I could smell a feedlot. I put on my glasses and hat. It’s warm enough at home, with the hot spring radiators, but in the depth of winter you’re always aware of the cold at the edges, in the corners, near the windows.

At least for the moment, the sun felt as good as Mom’s embrace.

It was a small town, I could tell. There was a train yard with large grain silos, a passenger station, and a railroad museum. An old-fashioned railway water tank sat among eucalyptus trees. Old-fashioned letters spelled Kalgoorlie Bitter across one square face, with a small image of a foaming beer stein. A street sign below said Allenby Street. Across the road was a Chinese restaurant, and my stomach rumbled.

I pointed at it and Mom shrugged. “Perhaps. Business first.”

Her business was near the grain silos at the office of the Co-operative Bulk Handling Group. A passenger train pulled in while Mom was inside and I watched people get off. Many of them went into the train museum or headed into the restaurant.

I overheard enough to determine that the train had come from Perth and would continue on to Kalgoorlie, and that a few of the passengers were doing the entire run across the continent to Sydney.

Mom came back outside with a man who said, “Down this way. We loaded ’er up yesterday arvo.”

The accent was broader than I was used to. We’d been to Perth and Sydney and Melbourne but this was more like Crocodile Dundee.

He led us around the corner to where a medium-sized dump truck stood outside warehouse doors. He stood up on the step and stuck his head in the open window. “Yair. Keys are in ’er.”

“Great,” Mom said. “I’ll have it back in four hours?”

“Tomorrow morning be all right,” he said, grinning broadly. “This your daughter?”

Mom nodded. I stood up and nodded politely. His face was like an old piece of leather, lined and tan. I tried not to stare. I don’t get to see people much, not up close.

I started to get in on the right-hand side of the truck and froze in the doorway when I realized it was right-hand drive. I knew there was something odd about the traffic I’d been watching. I got into the seat and slid under the wheel to the passenger side, banging my knee on the stick shift.

Mom followed me in, started it up, and pulled out into the wrong-side-of-the-road traffic like she drove here every day. She took a piece of paper out of her shirt pocket and handed it to me.

“You’re the navigator.”

We left the town of Merredin, Western Australia, on 94, the Great Eastern Highway, but only as far as the first exit. Mom drove south a mile, and turned off onto a weed-filled dirt road lined with high brush on both sides. It curved away from the paved road and Mom pulled off as soon as it was out of sight of the highway.

“Watch out for snakes,” she said.

“Great,” I said. “Visit exotic Australia. Get bitten by an exotic snake. Die exotically.”

Mom jumped away, vanishing like a lightbulb turning off.

I climbed out the window and up onto the roof of the cab. After what she’d said about snakes, I wasn’t going anywhere near the bushes.

Mom was in the back of the truck, intermittently. That is, she was picking up burlap sacks one at a time and disappearing, reappearing, grabbing another sack and repeating.

They were stenciled CBHG Yellow Lentils fifteen kilos. I did the math while I watched Mom empty the truck. Nine tons of lentils, presuming she meant English tons, would be about 545 bags. Mom was doing one every five seconds, though she took an occasional break. Straight through, it would have taken about forty-five minutes, but she slowed down near the end. The truck was empty in an hour and ten minutes.

She was sweaty and dusty, too.

“Back to the warehouse?” I said.

She shook her head, vanished, and reappeared, a bottle of cold water in each hand. She handed me one and guzzled the other, sprinkling some of it over her hair.

Before driving back into Merredin, she drove a half hour further out of town and the half hour back. “Mileage,” explained Mom. “Don’t want them to think I’m too local if we buy more.”

We listened to a call-in show on the radio, entertained by the accents. “Why do they pitch their sentences up at the end, like every line is a question?” I asked.

Mom shook her head. “Don’t know. I’ve heard the same thing in parts of the UK. It’s just a variant. I’m sure we sound odd to them, too.”

We gave the truck back to the man at the co-op and he returned a fat envelope. “Darn. Halfway hoping I’d get to keep your deposit.”

Mom smiled and thanked him, and said, “I may need another nine tons next month. Will they still be in season?”

“You like your lentils, I guess. There’ll be some in our warehouse for at least a month after the last harvest, too.”

We went to the Chinese restaurant then, but I was yawning like a fiend by the time we’d eaten. It was early afternoon here, but well after midnight at home. After Mom paid, we went to the restroom and she jumped us home from there.

I barely remember falling into bed. I don’t remember taking off my shoes, but they were in the closet when I woke up which means, of course, that Mom pulled them off. I would’ve kicked them into the corner.

It was gray outside. The sun was up as high as it was going to get and it still hadn’t cleared the far ridge. The sky was clear, though, and you could see the whole valley, trimmed with evergreens and draped with heavy white snow, except where our local elk herd had used their hooves to cut through to the grass on the flat.

It wouldn’t be long before the elk moved down the mountain to the river valley for the winter.

This time of year the light never wakes me. Instead it was a grinding noise, like a snowmobile or an off-road motorbike, that brought me out of sleep, and I realized Dad must’ve made good his promise to bring in a backup generator. As I moved downstairs the sound got louder, but it was still a background noise, not overwhelming.

Dad had spread newspaper on the dining room table and was fiddling with some mechanical parts. He smiled at me. “Sleep okay? You guys were back late.”

I made my noncommittal noise: half grunt, half hum. “Where’s Mom?”

He looked around, then said, “Oh, that’s right. She’s organizing the warehouse.”

The warehouse was on the outskirts of a small town in Michigan, a steel building thrown up by one of GM’s vendors right before the local plant was shut down. Dad bought it cheap, and never used.

I gestured at the parts. “Too noisy downstairs?”

He shook his head. “It’s not the noise in the basement. It’s the noise outside, where the exhaust pipe pokes though the wall. Need to get a longer pipe. Run it above the roof, perhaps.”

“Wouldn’t that just make it louder up by our bedrooms?” Dad got that look in his eye, and I said quickly, “Just yes or no. I don’t want another physics lecture!”

Dad grinned. “Okay. No. It wouldn’t make it louder, not if the mounting brackets were dampened.”

“Fine.”

I made it all the way through cooking pancakes, buttering them, and pouring the syrup before I asked, “Okay. Why would an exhaust pipe sticking up above the roof be quieter?”

Dad grinned. “Up there the noise doesn’t have anything to reflect off of. The sound waves exit the pipe in a hemispheric pattern mostly up. Down where it’s coming out now, it echoes off the ground and the snow and the trees and even the springhouse. So we’re hearing it pretty loud.”

“Buzz was never that loud,” I said.

Dad pointed at the pipe before him. “And as soon as I get this piece welded we can get back to Buzz. Well, welded and reinstalled, and the Freon charged back into the system.”

“And you’ll get rid of the noisy generator?”

“Oh no. We’ll keep it for backup. Hopefully we won’t have to run it much.”

Mom showed up shortly after that. She was wearing shorts, a tank top, boots, and work gloves, and she was sweaty.

Dad brushed the damp bangs back from her forehead. “You done already? I said I’d help.”

Mom kissed him. “You load sixteen tons, whaddya get?” She flexed a bicep. “It’s better than a gym, any day.”

I said, “I thought it was nine tons?”

“Cultural reference,” Mom said. “Mid-twentieth century. Tennessee Ernie Ford.” I must’ve looked even more puzzled because she clarified. “He was a singer. ‘Sixteen Tons’ was a song.”

“Oh,” I said. “Old stuff. Like Green Day?”

Dad choked.

“Or Beethoven?”

Mom said, “Somewhere in between. When you’ve eaten, we need to distribute some lentils.”

“What climate?”

“Pakistan. The mountains. Pretty cold. Also,” she gestured toward her head.

I grimaced. “Hijab.”

She nodded and looked at Dad. “I’ll want your help transporting, okay?”

“Where are you working?”

“The IRC refugee camp on the border, west of Peshawar.”

“The one Patel works at?” Dad said.

Mom nodded. “The UN supplies have not been getting through. In the south, the Pashtun militias are diverting them for profit, and on the Afghan side, it’s a tossup between the Taliban and the poppy growers.”

“Pretty dangerous area.” Dad’s voice was mild, but he was frowning.

“We’re distributing from the women’s clinic compound. No men allowed. The main problems are outside camp, as usual. Safe enough inside.”

“Okay. While you change, I’ll get this to the welder. Be back in a bit.”

I dressed warmly—long underwear, my snowboarding pants, a fleece pullover. Over these I put on the traditional pants, tight at the ankle, baggy at the hips, and the knee length tunic, then the headscarf. I’d gone with Mom several times into areas where women wore the full burka, veil and all, but I wouldn’t have to today.

Mom jumped me to the interior of a canvas tent, a large ten-by-ten structure over a dirt and gravel floor. It was cold, and the only light was a Coleman lantern Mom brought with her. My ears popped, but not as badly as they had in Australia, which meant the altitude was more like the mountains, where our house was. There were plastic drums and collapsed cardboard boxes stacked across the back, but the tent was mostly empty.

Mom pointed at a tied-shut door flap. “It won’t be dawn for another two hours. We’ll be distributing through that door.”

Dad showed up after that, with a folding screen, six feet high, eight feet long. He set it up close to the door so they could jump discretely from behind it, if necessary, after the distribution started.

Working together, they took a half hour to bring all the lentils from the warehouse. Dad was bringing two bags at a time and he jumped much faster than Mom, flicking in and out without pausing. Of course, he’s been doing it far longer. I dragged the sacks within reach of the door and began stacking them. Our breath was still steaming but I wasn’t cold anymore.

Dad left after all the lentils had been brought in and stacked. Mom jumped out and came back with cartons of plastic bags and big measuring scoops. “Two liters each, right?”

We’d filled about fifty of the transparent bags, ready to hand out, when there was a scratching at the flap.

Mom tensed and then said, “As-salaam alaikum.”

The voice on the other side was a woman’s. “Bonjour, c’est moi, Magrit.”

Mom relaxed and untied the tent flaps. The sun was hitting the surrounding peaks and the air that flowed through the door was markedly colder, not warmed by all our activity. Magrit was a tall woman wearing khakis and a white medical clinician’s coat buttoned all the way up to the neck. She had a wool scarf wrapped up over her chin and ears, and her arms were crossed, her hands tucked up into her armpits. A stethoscope stuck out of one pocket.

“Good morning, Doctor,” Mom said.

Magrit took a step back. She wasn’t looking at us, but at the stacks of burlap bags visible past the screen. “Sacredieu! They told me, but . . . I saw this place last night, late, before I came to bed—empty! How?”

Mom did that thing she does, that therapist thing. She nodded her head and said, “That must be very disturbing.”

“How did you get this into the camp? Les soldats are checking all vehicles.”

Mom said, “I would think that whoever moved it here would want to keep their methods a secret, so les soldats could not stop the food.”

Magrit opened and shut her mouth a few moments, then exhaled heavily. “There are women waiting for clinic hours. I will send them over, yes?”

“Yes,” Mom said. “Merci beaucoup.”

The women spoke Pashto and mostly it was “ma-nana” which I figured out pretty quick means, “Thanks.” Some of them asked “Ta la cherta rahg-ley?” Mom answered, “Ze la Canada.”

Mostly, though, I tied a loose knot in the tops of the bags and passed them over, smiled, and bobbed my head. The word spread and by midmorning the line snaked around the compound formed by the clinic’s tents, and out into to the camp proper.

I wasn’t the only one handing out the lentils. Five other women, recruited by Magrit, were filling bags and handing them out. The line was moving at a slow walk, but there was no end in sight.

After a consultation with Magrit, a covey of young girls my age began carrying plastic bags outside the clinic to where a line started for men—orphaned boys, bachelors, or widowers—who couldn’t come into the compound. This line was small, though, because the camp was largely filled with women whose men had died in the fighting, or who had fled from their own husbands and fathers and the Taliban’s strict application of religious rule. “And also,” Magrit said, “they’re men. Some of them would rather be hungry than collect the food. Women’s work.”

At one point Mom disappeared behind the screen and came back with a mug of hot tea, heavily sugared. She took over my job while I drank it behind the screen, grateful for the hot drink, and at the same time, ashamed. The women helping us wore extra clothes, shawls, men’s shirts, but they were still woefully underdressed for the temperature.

“Let me bring some hot tea to them,” I said, pointing at our helpers.

Mom reached out and tugged my chador forward, over my bangs. “Okay. There are Styrofoam cups over the sink. Oh, and while you’re there? Use the bathroom. I just saw the latrine and you don’t want to go anywhere near it.”

Mom jumped me home from behind the screen. I put the large kettle on and, while it heated, used the bathroom and washed my hands multiple times. Mom got me inoculated for everything but as she’d pointed out, I’d brushed hands with hundreds of people just this morning.

I brewed the tea in a plastic pitcher and sweetened it almost syrup thick. When I came out from behind the screen and began handing out cups, I think they thought I was bringing water, but when I tipped the pitcher steam rose in the air. They cradled the cups and breathed in the steam and smell. When one of them tasted it her cry of surprise started the others sipping.

The line ran out before we ran out of lentils and Mom sighed in relief. She did a quick inventory and told Dr. Magrit, “Almost five hundred kilos left. For the next emergency.”

Dr. Magrit nodded. “There is always another. But the army says they’re coming to deal with this latest problem with the militias. The UN has a large convoy waiting for their escort.”

We tidied the tent, stacking the bags neatly, and when Magrit went to do rounds, Mom jumped us away.

Dad came into the kitchen swearing. “The weld is still leaking. I have to get the part machined from scratch.”

Mom and I were in our bathrobes. We’d used the hot tub on the upper deck to cook the chill from our bones. There’s something decadent about sitting in 110-degree water while fluffy, fat snowflakes are falling all around you. But this time it hadn’t been as good because of the noise and smell of the generator exhaust, which was way worse than the slight smell of sulfur that comes from the hot spring.

When I thought about the girls and women in the refugee camp I felt really petty complaining, but I still said, “Can’t we go stay someplace else while that thing is running? It’s smelly and loud.”

Dad and Mom looked at each other, then back at me. Mom looked sad and Dad looked grim. I knew his answer before he spoke.

“No. We can turn off the generator at night, though. The fridge will be okay for seven hours.”

Right. As if I cared about the refrigerator.

We never slept anyplace else. We’d go places but we’d always come back quickly. I was trying to remember if there was ever a time that I’d spent the night away from home, even when Dad taught me survival camping. Sure we gathered and cooked our own food, but how real is it if you get tucked into your own bed every night?

The next morning Dad went off to get his part made and Mom said, “Your room . . . clean it.”

“Mom!”

“It looks like a laundry and a library exploded. You have shelves, use them. Put up your clean laundry and start washing the dirty stuff, if you can tell which is which. They’re all jumbled together.”

I opened my mouth to protest but she raised her hand. “Seriously. Do it. I’ve got some meetings so I won’t be back until this afternoon, but you should be done by then.”

“I need more shelves.”

“You need to cull your collection. If you’re not going to read it again, put it in a box. We’ll donate it to a reading program.”

“Dad said I could have another shelf.” Dad has books all over the house. You don’t see him culling his collection.

Mom sighed. “One more shelf isn’t going to do it. Okay—one more shelf unit, but you’ll have to move your boy-toy posters.”

“No!”

“It’s the only wall space left.”

“We could put the shelf in front of one of the windows.”

“Absolutely not!”

“I don’t see why—”

Mom jumped away.

It’s not fair.

Oh, yeah, I can see that we really shouldn’t put bookshelves in front of the windows. There’s a great view down the valley, and in the summer I would want it open. But jumping away in the middle of an argument really isn’t fair.

Dad does it, too.

If I could jump, it might be different. I’d fantasized about disappearing in the middle of one of their lectures often enough.

When I was a little girl, maybe four years old, I would stand in front of my mother and say, “Mommy, I’m going to jump!”

Mom would cover her eyes with both hands and I would quietly walk to another part of the room or into another room entirely and say, “Boom! I jumped!” And she would drop her hands, gasp in amazement, and say, “Wow, you jumped!” If I was in the room with her still, she would say. “There you are!” And if I’d left the room, she’d say, “Where did she go?”

I wasn’t going anywhere. At this rate I would never go anywhere.

I stomped up the stairs to my room. I was still in my pajamas: sweatpants and a T-shirt. I tried to slam the door but it caught on a pile of clothes, books, and DVD cases. I groaned. Bad enough that she left in the middle of the argument, but the fact that she was right about the room only made it worse.

I kicked at the pile, trying to shove it aside, and jammed my toe on a book wedged up against the shelf by the door.

“Shit!” I yelled, hopping around on the other foot. I didn’t care that I wasn’t supposed to say that. At that moment I wouldn’t have cared if Mom and Dad were standing there listening. It would be hard for them to bug out in the middle of that one emphatic word.

The posters were old, dating back to when my idea of what a girl’s room should look like was based on girls’ rooms in movies and television shows. I don’t think I’d ever been inside an actual girl’s room. Mom’s mother lives in an apartment in one of those retirement communities now and though Mom once showed me the house she grew up in, we never saw inside. Even if we had, the room she’d had as a girl would’ve been different.

Mom told me, though, that when she was my age, she had pictures of Rick Springfield, Andrew McCarthy, and Tom Cruise. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “But this was pre-Scientology, Risky Business Tom Cruise.”

I had three posters: the Jonas Brothers, Zac Efron, and Rupert Grint. Rupert’s too old but that smile and those shoulders and that hair! I didn’t really care about the Jonas Brothers or Zac, not anymore, but when I was balancing on my desk chair to take Rupert down, the chair rolled sideways while one of the pushpins was still in. The poster ripped diagonally down through his face and I banged the jammed toe when I landed.

“Fuck!” I yelled. It was so loud I imaginedit echoing through the mountain valley, the elk lifting their heads to listen. I ripped the rest of the glossy paper down and crumpled it into a ball. Then I did the same thing with the other two posters and slung the damn chair across the room where it knocked a lower shelf out of one of my bookcases and spilled more books across the floor.

I started crying and this made me mad. Mom’s a family therapist by training. There no stigma attached to crying in our house, though it makes Dad uncomfortable, but I hated how it made my eyes puffy. Also, the thought of Mom comforting me or asking me those open-ended therapy questions while I was still mad at her really pissed me off.

My bed is chest high with a reading nook underneath, with cushions and a light. It’s been my hiding place, my crying place, my safe place since I was little. I hadn’t used it in months but I wanted to crawl into it and bury myself in the cushions. I even crouched to do so but then I saw my snowboarding pants lying across the entrance, where I’d kicked them off the day before.

“To hell with this,” I said, and got dressed instead.

There’s a covered walkway at the back of the house that becomes more of a tunnel in the winter. It’s mostly used to reach the springhouse but it continues up the mountain from there, a steep stairway, steps of squared timbers set into the ground. I use it for exercise, when the house gets to be too much, pushing the snow off to the sides until it’s banked high enough to keep even the blizzard-driven snow out. The stairway leads to a pavilion fifteen feet square, a hundred yards up the slope, where the mountain shelves a bit and the black spruces and sub-Alpine fir thin out. It’s glorious there in the long summer days, if there’s a breeze to keep the mosquitoes away. In the dead of winter it’s lethal, especially when the wind blows. But now, in the fall, the temperatures were still above zero, though the snow was piling deep.

The pavilion marks the top of my snowboard run, which curves north, down a gully, through a birch grove, and down a natural half-pipe that’s a series of short waterfalls in the summer. At the bottom it winds down one more steep slope before curving around to the valley floor, a hundred yards below the house.

I’m not supposed to snowboard unless Dad has checked the run, making sure all the rocky areas are deep under snow and there’s nothing dangerous around. All of the Yukon is grizzly territory and they like to hibernate near the tree line. Despite the snow, this was early enough in the year for grizzlies to still be active.

So, too early, and you can run into grizzlies. Too late, and the temperatures get to forty below zero. Fahrenheit or centigrade. Doesn’t matter. That’s the place where it means the same thing on both scales. Do the math—Dad made me do it.

I hauled my board up the stairs, kicking through some of the newer drifts, my coat open and my hat off. I knew I’d be sweating by the time I reached the top. The snow was even deeper than I’d expected, since the freak storm we’d had back in September dumped three feet and the temperature had never risen high enough for it to melt.

I took the first run slowly. I was breaking so many rules. Dad hadn’t checked the run. I was supposed to be cleaning my room. And I wasn’t wearing a helmet.

Dad would stroke if he saw me.

I only had one biff, not really a boomph, when I buttslid out of a carved turn, cutting up short to avoid a rock sticking out of the snow. The rest of the run was clean, and now that I’d marked the rock in my head I could shred the whole thing at speed. There was even a cornice to the left after I exited the pipe that would let me bust huge air above the last steep pitch down into the valley.

I didn’t even look in the windows as I climbed up past the house. Dad might think I was with Mom and vice versa, but if either of them saw me or realized my board was gone from the back hall, I was busted anyway.

I was gasping by the time I reached the top again and I sat until my breathing slowed and I was feeling the chill. I buttoned up and snapped my bindings over my boots and started down the slope, aggressive, keeping closer to the fall line. I hit air twice in the pipe and remembered to cut hard at the bottom so I could catch the cornice. To hit the right part of the slope below I had to cut hard, right before the lip, and under the pressure of the turn I felt something shift below my board. I was airborne when I heard a deep thudding sound overlaid with a sharp crack.

I hit the steep slope below, my knees bending to absorb the landing shock, and risked a glance upslope.

The entire cornice, fifty yards across, had let go. As avalanches went it was small, but it filled the last slope, funneled even tighter by the near-vertical cliffs on each side. I couldn’t cut sideways out of its path.

My only hope was to get down before it caught me. I steered straight down the fall line and leaned forward, putting my arms behind, slipstreaming.

I might have made it but a slight bump in the slope concealed a loop of willow branch. It wasn’t thick but it was ropy tough, and even though it broke, it took me down, tumbling, to fetch up against another drift just in time to watch tons of snow bear down on me.

“Sorry, Dad,” was all I had time to say.

It’s the air in front that hits you first, driven by the snow. The blast popped me into the air and then the snow was all around and pushing me down, down, down . . . and then I hit something and everything was dark.

I wasn’t unconscious so the darkness surprised me a little. I’d fallen in deep powder and the snow conducts the light surprisingly well, but not this time. I thought there must be tons of snow above me, but I didn’t feel any pressure. I’d wrapped my arms around my face, to keep an air pocket, which is one of the things they say you should do. Now I thrust forward, hard, trying to make the air space bigger while the snow was still soft. But the snow gave way and my hand hit something hard and smooth. I kept thrusting, pushing the snow . . . and then there was light coming in from where the snow had cascaded away from me, and I saw a stretch of carpet, a stack of underwear, and six paperback books.

I was in the reading nook under my bed with about two cubic yards of snow.

I’d jumped.

CHAPTER THREE

Davy: Wet Dream

Davy had the dream, again, the one where the scars on his chest were fresh, and if he tapped just below his right collarbone, there was a solid disk-shaped lump under the skin. In the dream he felt the tingle in his throat, the coughing, followed almost immediately by the nausea—the titanic heaving of his stomach muscles as he vomited—and he woke up on a steeply pitched roof on the south shore of Martha’s Vineyard in ice-cold, driving rain.

The vomit, at least this time, was only in the dream and once fully awake, he flinched back to their bathroom, swearing loudly. Despite being awake now, he couldn’t stop his fingers from probing the old scar below his right collarbone, but the old device had not magically reappeared below the skin.

Millie sat up in bed, abruptly, a sharp intake of breath. “Davy?”

In the dim illumination that leaked from the bathroom nightlight, Davy saw her patting the bed beside her, searching for him.

“Here,” he said. “It’s all right. Had the dream again.”

“Oh,” she said. “Just the dream?”

“No, dammit.” He took off his wet pajamas and groped for a towel. “They’re having a northeaster on the Vineyard.”

“You haven’t done that in a while.” Millie sank back against her pillow. “So, on the rooftop in the rain? That’s good.”

He snarled at her through the towel.

She laughed. “Sorry. I mean that if it’s unpleasant enough, we stand a chance of getting rid of the compulsion. They spent so much time making it unpleasant everywhere else. It’s good to counter that.”

Davy picked up the wet pajamas and threw them violently into the laundry bin. “Too bad they replaced the building, then. Falling to the foundations from three stories up would be really unpleasant.”

“At least they didn’t rebuild it exactly. You wouldn’t want to reappear in someone’s bedroom.” Millie said reasonably.

The current owners of the property had torn down the flood-damaged old mansion sixteen years before and replaced it with a two-story beach house.

“I’m going to soak in the springhouse,” he said. “Chilled.” Come with me? He didn’t voice the thought. It wasn’t fair to wake her up in the middle of the night as it was.

“Come back to bed soon,” she said. Her voice trailed to a whisper by the last and she smacked her lips and closed her eyes.

She was breathing deeply, sound asleep, when he came back. He was thoroughly warmed by the hot spring, overheated in fact. He toweled dry, put on dry pajamas, then slipped between the sheets carefully. She made an “mm” sound and resumed her deep breathing.

He stared at the ceiling until dawn.

CHAPTER FOUR

Cent: “I thought Dad was the ruthless one.”

The second time was like this:

“Why is there a water stain on the library ceiling?” Dad asked.

Shit. I had an answer ready but I hadn’t expected that particular question.

“I was cleaning my room and I took some water in to scrub out a stain in the carpet. I’m sorry, I tipped over the bucket.”

The question I’d been expecting was “Why is your carpet wet?”

I’d disposed of the snow in the bathtub, running the shower hot to melt it. My room never looked better. I’d gotten to the books soon enough to keep them from getting soaked but, as noted, a substantial amount of snow melted into the rug—more than I’d realized.

I’d run three loads through the laundry. Mom was right. The dirty clothes were mixed up with the clean and all of it was wet. Also the cushions in the reading nook. Between loads, I’d also culled three cartons of books that I would never read again.

I am so over vampires.

Mom looked surprised, pleased, and finally suspicious when she saw my room. On the grounds that the best defense is a good offense, I said, “See? Boy-toy posters gone. I get that new bookshelf, right?”

She pulled open a drawer at random. It was full of clean, mostly folded T-shirts—shirts that had been on the floor that very morning.

“A new bookshelf. Right.”

Dad jumped to IKEA Funabashi in Japan, since that was the time zone that still had a store open, and purchased a matching shelving unit. I told him that I wanted to put it together so he left the unopened flat pack in my room. But instead of leaving, he leaned against the doorframe.

“Dad.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t need, or want, an audience.”

He looked mildly offended. “Oh. Okay.”

I felt guilty but I really didn’t want him to discover just how wet the carpet really was.

Yes, I would tell them eventually. Well, maybe not about the avalanche. But about the jumping, certainly. I finished assembling the shelf and putting the rest of the books up. That lousy generator was still chugging away in the basement so I turned up the living room stereo to drown it out. After an hour of this, Dad, shouting to be heard over the music, said, “Okay! We can go someplace.”

You’d almost think he preferred the grind of the generator to Electroclash.

I turned the music down. “Where?”

Mom stuck her head over the railing of the upstairs landing, a surprised look on her face.

“Someplace quiet,” Dad said.

“Someplace with people?” I said.

“Someplace warm?” Mom suggested, walking down the stairs.

“Mall of America,” I said.

Dad said, “No.”

“Why not?”

“Surveillance cameras. Thousands.”

“Wear a disguise,” I said. He has disguises. So does Mom.

Dad got a stubborn look on his face. “No.”

“Well, where do you want to go?” I said belligerently.

He frowned at me. “Queensland.”

“It’s night there,” said Mom. “And you both need to calm down. You don’t mean overnight, do you? One of the islands on the Great Barrier Reef?”

Dad backtracked. “Uh, not overnight.”

“That sounds wonderful,” I said. “We could go snorkeling in the morning. And I could do some marine science units.”

Mom bit her lower lip. I could see she liked the idea.

Dad got that wild, desperate look in his eyes. He lifted his hand to his collar and I winced. He wasn’t going to pull out the big gun, was he?

He did.

“You see these?” Dad pulled his shirt collar to one side, exposing two parallel scars, three-inches long, just below his right collarbone.

“Yes, Dad. I see them. I’ve seen them. I’ve heard the story.”

Mom stepped closer. “Davy, your concerns are real but you need to stop doing that.”

Dad’s voice rose, “She’s got to realize how dangerous it is out there!”

I didn’t think we’d be going to Queensland.

Dad was captured once by some nasty supersecret multinational corporate group. They put a device in him to try and condition him, to control him. It was nasty and it went on for months. Eventually Mom got him out, but he’s been super paranoid ever since.

“I do know, but it’s not dangerous everywhere,” I said. “I was in Pakistan two days ago and Australia the day before that. Do you expect me to live in this house the rest of my life? I need to make friends.”

“You have friends!” he said.

“What friends?”

“What about Awrala and Xareed?”

“Awrala has two babies and a husband who is afraid of us. Xareed is married with sons. He’s almost twice my age.” I like them both. They live in Somalia and I’ve known them since I was little, but they’re more my parents’ friends. “I need to go to school. I need to know girls my age.” I pulled out my big gun. “I’m an overbright, undersocialized, discipline-challenged teenager who is going to grow up to be a maladjusted sociopath at this rate.”

Mom’s eyes went wide and her hand went to her mouth. I guess she hadn’t realized I was listening when she’d said that to Dad.

“You aren’t going to school. It would be like staking you out for the bastards!” Dad’s eyes were wide, the whites showing all around, as bad as I’d ever seen him.

“You can’t follow me around all my life to protect me!” I said.

“Wanna bet?” he yelled.

“Stalker, much?” I yelled back.

Mom started crying and I flinched.

I mean, I flinched so good, I was upstairs in my reading cubby.

That was the second time.

I heard Mom scream, then Dad—a startled, hoarse yell.

I almost screamed myself.

Now they know how it feels.

They started calling my name. Mom even said the old line, “Where did she go?” but there was nothing playful about it. I almost stayed there, under the bed, but the note of desperation in their voices was too much.

I walked out onto the landing and said, “Boom. I jumped.”

Mom’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile, but she remembered. She got it.

Dad’s knees buckled and he sat down hard on the floor. Relief, I guess.

Before they said anything, I said, “Unless you’re willing to chain me up or cut me open and put one of those things inside me, I’m going to school.

“Now, do you want to be a part of that or do I have to do it alone?”

[End Excerpt]

From Impulse by Steven Gould.

Published by arrangement with Tor Books.

Copyright © Steven Gould, 2013.

All rights reserved.

For more information about Impulse, or to buy the book, please visit tinyurl.com/ImpulseBook

Steven Gould is the author of the frequently banned book Jumper, as well as Wildside, Helm, Blind Waves, Reflex, Jumper: Griffin’s Story, 7th Sigma, and Impulse as well as several short stories published in Analog, Asimov’s, and Amazing, and other magazines and anthologies. He is the recipient of the Hal Clement Young Adult Award for Science Fiction and has been on the Hugo ballot twice and the Nebula ballot once for his short fiction. Jumper was made into the 2008 feature film of the same name with Samuel L. Jackson, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson, and Hayden Christensen. Steve lives in New Mexico with his wife, writer Laura J. Mixon (M. J. Locke) and their two daughters, where he keeps chickens and falls down a great deal. He just returned from Doha, Qatar where he discussed writing and science fiction with Qatari college students.

Interview: Cory Doctorow
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and blogger—the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of Tor Teen novels For The Win and the bestselling Little Brother. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London.

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

What do you think of Disney acquiring Lucasfilm?

I’m kind of bummed about it. It just seems to me that we’ve entered this winner-take-all world where things that are a little bit successful become very successful, and then become mega-successes, and then merge with all the other mega-successes. I don’t know. It feels like the finance industry or something to me, and it seems like it’s somehow intimately related to it—this seems like a finance-driven decision rather than an artistic-driven decision or a creative decision.

One of the things that freaks me out is that any publicly-traded corporation that acquires an asset for $4 billion is going to be as risk-averse as possible about that asset. Not to say that Lucas was a real risk-taker, but I think that Disney has always been at its best when it took risks, and that one of the downsides to the increasingly high stakes associated with each individual project—you know, the businesses may have always been high-stakes businesses, but now every project is a high-stakes project—is that they’re super risk-averse.

They always end up acting like dicks. That seems like a universal outcome of having billions of dollars at stake, is that anytime anyone suggests doing anything that might have a bad outcome, your risk-management people and your lawyers come along and say, “No, you’re absolutely obliged to act like a total asshole to these people, just in case it turns out that they might cost you money down the road, because there’s so much at stake here.” It just feels like something that is just going to be about making sequels to sequels to sequels to adaptations to sequels, as opposed to inventing new cool stuff.

So now one company—Disney—owns Star Wars, Pixar, and Marvel, in addition to all the Disney characters—basically the collective happy childhood memories of several generations.

Yeah, I’m less worried about that. I’m actually totally non-precious about that. I mean, your memories are your memories, and I’m totally unsympathetic to people who say that having seen the crappy prequels to Star Wars reduced their enjoyment of the first three. To me, the thing that actually reduced my enjoyment of Star Wars and the two sequels was just watching them as an adult instead of a kid, and I realized a lot of the things that I thought of as really interesting and great were either clichés, or that they had a superficial appeal but the more you thought about them the dumber they got.

I’m more bothered about the fact that if you look at Disney’s pattern of acquisitions, they’re acting like Procter & Gamble, they’re acting like a packaged goods company. In fact, less innovative than a packaged goods company. Basically their whole business plan is about amassing huge amounts of capital, putting it into brands—that is to say, things that have already-understood audiences and understood profiles—and then doing as little as possible to upset the apple cart. In fact, I think they’re more likely to try to keep all of those things intact and to not ever upset or worry the people who grew up on them, because basically their whole approach is to maximize the amount of revenue they can get from you by continuing to spin out infinite variations on the theme of whatever it was you liked last time.

It seems like going back to Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom, you’ve had sort of a love/hate relationship with Disney. Is any of that love still there?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I always say with Disney that I love the sin and I hate the sinner. They produce some amazing media that I really love, as you might have gathered if you’ve read the two novels and the novella I wrote that are really about Disney parks—Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Makers, and “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.” The thing that they do that I love is their dark rides. I actually think immersive automated environments are an art form. I don’t think many people take them very seriously, and I think Disney at its best has taken them more seriously then anyone in the history of the world, and that when they are taking it seriously they do an incredible job with it. I just think that the rest of their media is a lot less interesting. I continue to be totally blown away by their immersive environments—both the rides and the parks that the rides are in—but I also continue to be absolutely distressed by their legislative agenda and by other elements of their corporate culture.

You recently participated in the Humble eBook Bundle. You want to tell us about that?

Sure. It comes out of something called the Humble Indie Bundle, which was for videogames. When they started in 2010, there was a group of independent videogame developers who thought, if we get some of our friends together and we put together a bundle of about six videogames without any DRM, and we say to people, “You come and you name your own price, and you can also use a slider to designate some or all of the money that you give to charity,” and then we’ll add some game-like mechanics to the way that the pricing model works. For example, we’ll have a leaderboard of the top spenders. We’ll show you how people are spending by operating system. We’ll break that down in real-time, so you can really see, for example, how Team Mac is performing against Team Linux, and maybe feel some team fellowship there and bid up your team, which I think worked pretty well.

And we’ll also reserve some of the videogames for people who give more than the average, which of course will continually drive the average up. And the first one of those, in 2010, did $1.25 million in the first week—they were two-week-long promotions—and closed a little over a $1.5 million. By the time they hit Humble Indie Bundle 6 in 2012—the most recent one—they did $4.5 million in the first week and closed at nearly $5 million. And that’s pretty amazing. I mean, that’s just unheard of for games that fundamentally . . . you know, a decade ago we’d have called them shareware games. And to pull in 5 million bucks for half a dozen shareware games in a couple of weeks? Unheard of and just amazing. And they trade on a bunch of things. One is the bundle’s reputation for excellence. Part of it is the charitable dimension—people do like raising money for charity. And some of it is this game-like mechanic for pricing.

So they came to me because one of their nominated charities was one that I had been very closely associated with and that I used to, in fact, work for, a group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a civil rights group. They’re kind of like the ACLU of the internet. And EFF had been the beneficiary of a lot of donations from Humble Bundle, so much so that one of EFF’s employees actually left to go work for Humble, and he happened to be one of my former students, Richard Esguerra. He went to Humble, and they started talking about ebooks and he got in touch with me and said, “Would you be interested in helping us do an ebook one?” And I said, “Of course.”

So I volunteered for them, and I put them together with a bunch of authors and agents, and we filled out a really amazing bundle. And actually, one of the things that I find sad but hopeful is that some of the best works that we had chosen for the bundle and that authors and agents had agreed to, the publishers vetoed. Because of all the big six publishers, only Tor would allow us to put their books in the bundle. Everyone else said without DRM they couldn’t let us do it. And that meant that we had authors who were multiple New York Times #1 Best Sellers whose books we couldn’t use even though they wanted them in there.

I’ve since heard from some of those writers that they’ve gone back to their publishers and said, “No more book contracts with you until you let me get a piece of the millions of dollars that are sitting out there waiting for me if only I’m willing to sell my books in the way that my audience wants to read them, without DRM.” And since DRM doesn’t stop piracy—because all DRM is easily broken—it doesn’t make any sense to me. It seems like this is a purely ideological decision, and yet this ideology is anything but harmless. It’s costing authors potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so I think that the subsequent bundles are going to be even better. We ended up raising just about $1.25 million, which is a little less but not bad relative to the first of the Humble Indie Bundles. And I really hope that we’ll follow in their trajectory, and that we’ll head up towards those same dizzying $5 million heights within a couple of years. And certainly I’d be happy to continue to curate these bundles for the gang. I had a great time doing it.

Do you see that model as the future of content distribution?

There’s an aspect of the Indie Bundle that’s part of the de facto reality of all digital content distribution today, which is that everybody is already naming their own price for digital media, in that it takes the same number of clicks to pirate media as it does to buy it. It’s a recurring motif among people who want to buy things that the buying process is very cumbersome. For example, for audiobooks you either have to have an account with Audible or you need to download OverDrive. No one will just shut up and take your money. Like, “Give me your credit card number, I’ll give you an MP3.”

So everybody is already naming their price, except the only two prices they are now allowed to name are “full retail” and “zero.” Nobody’s allowed to name a price in between. And so I think one of the insights of the Humble Bundle is that there actually is a pool of people who would like to name a price somewhere in between. I also think that, in a world where all payments are in some sense voluntary—in the sense that people could get it without paying for it, and the likelihood of them being caught is so small as to be indistinguishable from zero—that the strategy that we use to get money from audiences has to revolve around convincing people instead of coercing them, because we can’t coerce them. They can always choose to just opt out of the system.

All the strategies we use for convincing are pretty much the opposite of the strategies we use for coercing. Coercing only works—you only get efficiency—if you coerce people in bulk by making examples of a few transgressors. In other words, you coerce people by putting a couple of offenders’ heads on pikes and convincing people that you’re such a big, bad troll that unless they opt into the system that their heads will be up on pikes too. So that’s the opposite way that you convince them that you’re the kind of person who they should voluntarily give money to. You convince them that if they don’t give you money that you’re going to come after them tooth and nail, and that’s not acting like the kind of person that other people want to voluntarily pay.

And so whatever it is that people do in the future, it won’t necessarily be Humble Bundle or even recognizable as Humble Bundle, but some of the principles that inform the design of Humble Bundle will carry over, and those principles will include performing generosity and performing trust in a way that creates reciprocal arrangements with audiences, that creates a kind of reciprocating social contract with audiences that causes them to treat you in the way that you’ve shown them you’d like to be treated and that you’re prepared to treat them.

Speaking of going after people tooth and nail, that brings us to your new novel, Pirate Cinema. What’s that about?

Pirate Cinema was inspired by a legislative event in the United Kingdom, where I live. In 2009, they introduced legislation called the Digital Economy Act, which includes something called “three strikes,” which says that if you’re accused—without proof—of three acts of copyright infringement, you and your family get disconnected from the internet.

This legislation was introduced right around the same time we had a report from our champion for digital inclusion, a woman named Martha Lane Fox, whose government posting is to make sure that everybody in the country has access to the internet. She commissioned a Price Waterhouse Cooper study into a follow-up of a trial program where people who lived in government housing—in very vulnerable populations in the north, where the local economy and industry have collapsed—they followed it up to see what happened when those people were given internet access and compared them to their neighbors who hadn’t been given internet access, so they had a naturally occurring control population experiment that they could use to analyze the impact of internet access.

They found that for these people who had been given internet access, everything we use to measure the quality of life went up for them. Their kids not only got better grades, but they were more likely to go on to post-secondary education and to be socially mobile. The parents got better jobs and had more disposable income, and so there was better nutrition, and their health outcomes were better. They were less socially isolated, they were more civically engaged, and more politically engaged. Really the whole raft of human experience improves when you give people internet access, so it follows that when you take away people’s internet access, you confiscate those benefits too.

It’s bad enough to say, “If you watch TV the wrong way we’re going to take away your access to civic engagement, education, employment, and health.” But it’s even worse to say, “If you live in the same house as someone who is the named subscriber for a DSL modem that has been accused—without proof—of being involved in someone—possibly not even someone who lives in your house—watching TV the wrong way, we’re going to take away all these benefits.” This was just wildly disproportionate and really just evil.

It passed without debate because they snuck it into the final session of Parliament, just before they dissolved the Parliament for the election. And it had passed in other countries in the same way. In New Zealand, the way that they passed it was as a rider to the Christchurch earthquake bailout, the bill that was passed to free up resources to help save the people dying in the rubble of Christchurch. They snuck it in there.

This made me so furious that I decided I would write a book about it. So I wrote this novel called Pirate Cinema, and it’s about a kid who lives in one of these northern towns, these rust belt towns, a town called Bradford that was once the center of the textiles industry. His name is Trent, but he calls himself “Cecil B. DeVil” after Cecil B. DeMille, the movie producer, because he makes movies. But he doesn’t make movies the way they did in Spielberg’s era, where they had Super 8 cameras, like that Spielberg movie. He doesn’t make them the way they did in my boyhood, with VHS cameras. He makes them the way that you can if you’re a kid in the 21st century, namely by downloading other people’s movies and recutting them, and making new movies out of them.

And he’s very good at it, and it totally consumes him, and people love what he does and it’s very popular, and like many consumed, passionate adolescents, he gets careless, and he forgets to use the proxy that hides his internet identity from the snoopers that are used to catch pirates and disconnect them. And so his family gets disconnected, and his dad loses his job, and his mom loses her disability benefits, and his sister can no longer get the grades that she was getting and probably won’t make it into university, and so he’s really effectively destroyed his family.

And he runs away to London, the way the hero of so many British novels do, and he joins a gang—a kind of “ha ha only serious” youth gang of anarchist freegan squatters—who make their own movies and show them in underground movie theaters, not just “underground” in the sense that they are all on the down low, and you have to know who to ask, and it’s all with a wink and a nudge, but “underground” in the sense that they break into beautiful vaulted brick Victorian sewers and turn them into cinemas—pirate cinemas—and these screenings become a citywide and then a nationwide phenomenon—everyone’s doing them, everyone’s making their own movies.

But even though they think that they can no longer engage with the law, that they can just ignore the law, what they discover is that just because they’re not interested in the law doesn’t mean that the law won’t take an interest in them, and very soon the law’s gotten much worse, to the point where people are going to jail just for downloading. When I wrote that, that was science fiction, but two or three weeks ago, Japan passed legislation which says that if you download copyright-infringing material, you can go to jail for two years. Which effectively means that if you click the wrong link on Youtube, you go to prison. Japan also provides for ten years in prison if you upload copyright-infringing material.

And so as these laws get worse, Trent and his friends decide that what they’re going to do is actually prevent new laws from being passed, and that the way that they’re going to do that is by bankrupting the entertainment industry with systematic piracy. So rather than just pirating things in a slapdash way, they’re going to pirate the things that cost the movie industry as much money as possible. So when new movies open, they’re walking up and down the ticket line in Leicester Square—which is kind of our answer to Times Square—and walking up to people in line to buy the ticket to the premiere screening, and they are handing them SD cards with copies of the movie on it, and a note that says, “If you buy a ticket, they’re just going to use the money to screw up our country. Here’s a copy of the movie, go watch it at home, make your own mixes, and come show them at one of our showings.” And, you know, jailarity ensues, because clearly the entertainment industry isn’t going to take that lying down, and that’s when the novel really starts to kick off.

And I understand that these underground showings are an actual phenomenon, and you attended some of them?

Yeah, there are underground showings, the pirate cinema movement is real, and I was in a pirate cinema in a squatted pub in East London, much like Zeroday, the pub that Trent and his friends live in. One of the people who lived there, Jamie King—who founded a novel distribution company called Vodo that distributes science fiction movies online—he actually was a great source for information on the ins and outs of squatting in London, and some of the stories of what happens to these squatters were taken right from his life story.

So this is a book that could be seen as glorifying teenage runaways, premarital sex, trespassing, recreational drug use, and computer crimes. Did you get any pushback on that, or have any misgivings about including any of that?

I certainly haven’t had any pushback. This is a book about a kid who lives in an unjust society and who tries a variety of strategies to deal with it—some of them smart, some of them not smart—and in some cases doing the not-smart thing ends up getting him into a lot of trouble, which I think is true to life, and in the spirit of a lot of good Young Adult literature. So I’m not at all bothered about it. Some of it is presented as romantic, but none of the stuff that I think of as a bad idea is presented as a good idea. It’s just presented as the kind of thing that a 17-year-old who is really upset might do.

Do you ever get letters from kids who have been inspired by your books to become hacker anarchists?

Yeah, all the time—at least to become hackers, and political activists. My first Young Adult novel Little Brother had an afterword with a bibliography for kids who want to get involved in learning how security works, learning how computers work, learning how to program them, learning how to take them apart, learning how to solve their problems with technology as well as with politics. And the number of kids who have written to me and said that they became programmers after reading that, I couldn’t even count them. I’ve had similar responses to my second Young Adult novel, For the Win, and I’ve also heard from kids who’ve read Pirate Cinema. In fact, we published an editorial by one of them on Boing Boing—an anonymous reader who makes her own movies out of Japanese anime, and who talked about what drives her and how the book resonated with her.

Do any of those fans have websites?

For Little Brother, if you go to craphound.com/littlebrother and just click on the remixes tab, there’s a whole ton of these that I’ve collected over the years.

So in Pirate Cinema, the protagonist Trent writes, “I realized that the press always asks the same questions, so I’d just plop down on the sofa with my laptop and my headset and take the call while Jem fed me so much jet fuel it was a race to see whether I could finish the interview before I attained lift off and sailed into gabbling, babbling coffee orbit.” Is that how you actually do interviews?

[laughs] A little bit. I mean, my friend Steve Gould, who wrote the novel Jumper, which became the not-very-good movie Jumper, went on a press tour when the movie came out, and he’s said the reason it’s called a “press” tour is because it’s like being pressed between two boards. And it is true that most of the questions are the same, but I don’t mind answering them because I find that talking about the stuff helps me think it through. It’s a productive task for me.

I do actually really dislike writing out the same answers over and over again. For some reason, typing the same block of text twice feels remarkably wasteful in a way that saying the same thing twice doesn’t. Maybe because if you say it a lot it gets better, because you can inflect it better, and you can practice it. Whereas if you type the same thing over and over again, I don’t think you get better at it. I mean, maybe you get better at typing, but you don’t get better at expressing the underlying ideas.

So I’ve often thought that what I might do for the so-called email interviews—which I just hate, I hate the kind of “Well, I’ve just got a few quick questions for you,” and the quick questions are questions that are quick to type but not quick to respond to, like “What is art?” or “What is virtue?” or “How should the world be governed?” I mean, that is a very quick question, but not necessarily a quick question to answer—I’ve often thought that what I might do is take all the questions I’ve been asked before in writing and just post them on a public page, and whenever anyone asks to email interview me, say, “You may ask me two questions that aren’t in this list. You can use this list as much as you like, and you can ask me two more, but with the understanding that as soon as I answer them for you, I’m going to add them to that page.” Because it just seems to me that a lot of email interviews, the real underlying pitch is, “Will you write me five short essays that I can publish under my byline?”

Well, and what you just described is what Trent does in the novel.

Yeah, well, if it’s a good idea in real life, it’s a good idea to beta test in fiction.

So you just wrapped up your book tour. Do you have any funny stories from the tour that you want to share?

I’m trying to think of any particularly funny stories. I mean, I’ve had funny road stories before. I got interviewed once when I was on tour with For the Win. I was in San Francisco, and I had an interview scheduled at 5 a.m. with a British newspaper. My friend Aleks Krotoski was writing for the Independent in London—and obviously 5 a.m. on the West Coast is a reasonable hour in London. I’d had room service bring up breakfast, and I had to get dressed while I was talking to her, because I had to get out of the hotel right after we were done and go to the airport, and so I answered her Skype call sitting down at my desk—still not dressed—and she said, “You’re naked.” And I went, “Shit! The camera is on.”

I was at the desk, so you just saw sort of halfway up my chest and up. It wasn’t anything that you wouldn’t see on a beach, certainly, and it wasn’t anything particularly embarrassing, except that I’d answered the video phone naked, essentially. And so I went and turned the camera off. And I kept walking around the room, and getting dressed, and eating my breakfast, and answering her questions, and carrying the laptop around as I did.

And then I was finally dressed, and I’d eaten my breakfast and was finishing up the interview, and I sat down again and put the laptop down again and looked, and the camera light was still on. And I said, “Aleks, has the camera been on the whole time?” And she said, “Yeah, I didn’t want to embarrass you.” And I’m like, “You could have just told me.” [laughs] And again, she’s a very good friend. She’s a good friend of my wife’s. She stayed over at our place. She’s seen me get out of the bathroom with a towel around my waist, and I’m sure she didn’t see anything much ruder than that. But it was a bit embarrassing.

And then the other one was, I did a signing in Austin. And I think it was also on a For the Win tour. And a guy came up, and I said, “So what can I write in your book?” And he said, “Drama hobbit.” And I said, “Drama hobbit?” And he said, “Yeah, drama hobbit.” And I was like, “Really?” And he was like, “Drama hobbit.” And so I drew this “drama hobbit,” a hobbit that was very dramatic—a little guy with a pointy hat and pointy ears and furry feet and a kind of knife, and he had drama lines coming out of him, which in hindsight probably looked a bit like stink lines.

And I handed the book to him and he said, “What’s that?” and I said, “It’s a drama hobbit.” And he said, “No, no, no. Draw Mohammed.” It was “Draw Mohammed Week,” and it was during the Danish cartoon thing. But so I’ve always wanted to do a “Drama Hobbit Week” where everybody draws the most dramatic hobbits they can, but I’ve yet to convince anyone else that it would be a good idea.

You have a new nonfiction book coming out called Information Doesn’t Want to be Free. You want to tell us about that?

Sure. I mean, my agent has just started to get offers on it—because he just started shopping it—and I haven’t heard much from him because he lives in New Jersey and has no power or water or heat, and has been talking about barbequing his cats, but as far as I know the sales process is in the offing and the book will be out at some point. It’s a short business book about copyright, and it’s meant to be three sensible things that you can take into your understanding of copyright as you structure your business around the digital age.

The first thing is that if you let someone else put a lock on your file, and if that person doesn’t give you the key, that lock can’t be there for your benefit. That lock will eventually be used against you. And so, for example, Apple and Audible won’t allow you to sell audiobooks without their DRM on it—without their digital lock on it. And because it’s illegal to remove a digital lock, what that’s really doing is tying all of your customers, as someone who makes audiobooks, to their platform.

And so if later on someone has a better platform, what you are doing is guessing or hoping or betting that all the people who have ever bought your audiobooks in the old platform follow you to the new one, even though it means maintaining two separate library management tools, or else throwing away all their old audiobooks, including the ones you sold them. So as someone who invests in making this media, if you’re a publisher or studio or a newspaper or a record label, you really need to focus on making sure that you’re not handing control over your business to a company who doesn’t really contribute to the business, they just put locks on it.

The next piece of advice is that although fame won’t make you rich, you can’t get rich in the arts without fame. On the one hand there are lots of people whose works have been widely downloaded and who didn’t make any money from it, but all the people who made money in the arts made money by being widely known to their audiences. And the internet allows us to have all kinds of paths to have our work discovered and shared among audiences, and promoted within those audiences. It’s still up to us to figure out how to turn that into money, but without the fame you don’t even have the opportunity to do that.

And the copyright laws that the entertainment industry has been agitating for—particularly the ones that make it more expensive to operate any of these services like Blogger or Google or Facebook or Youtube, because they require that you pay unimaginable armies of lawyers to make sure that nothing uploaded infringes on copyright—that what those end up doing is putting independent distribution and independent audience discovery outside of the reach of individual artists, such that you always have to sign up with a label or a studio or a publisher to get a decent deal, or to reach an audience at all, and that when they control all of the distribution channels and all the audience discovery and audience interaction channels, that they can basically command incredibly abusive terms from the artists that they deal with. And so it’s really in artists’ interests that the intermediaries—the people who sit between us and our audiences—have low barriers to entry, so that they’re continuously being disrupted and there are lots of new businesses entering all the time and vying for our business.

And then the third one is that information doesn’t want to be free but people do, and that when we focus on the question of “information” when we make internet policy, instead of recognizing—as you see in Pirate Cinema—that the internet is really fundamentally about everything that we do in the 21st century—not just how we entertain ourselves—that we end up putting everyone at risk. That designing devices, for example, to prevent copying involves designing devices that hide things from their users. You can’t design a device that when you say, “Copy the file please, HAL,” it says, “I can’t let you do that, Dave,”—you can’t design that device in a way that’s effective if there’s a program called “HAL 9000” on the desktop that you can just drag into the trash. So it has to be able to hide programs and processes from users.

And once you start doing that, once you start designing devices so that they hide things from their owners, you get into really serious trouble, because the devices that we use, we use them for everything. They’re not just our entertainment tools, they’re how we live our whole lives, and they know lots of things about us. They know where we are, and who we talk to, and where we’ve been. They know all the secrets of our lives, and so we really want to be sure that they’re honest servants and that they’re not hiding things from us and that they’re not disobeying us when we tell them to do things.

I saw that Amanda Palmer wrote an introduction to the book.

Yeah, and so did Neil Gaiman.

And recently there was this big brouhaha online about the way that Amanda handled her Kickstarter campaign. What was your take on that?

Yeah, I was on tour when that happened. I have to say that I didn’t really understand the brouhaha, particularly. It seems to me that what she wanted was to allow people in different cities who had bands and who loved her music to come and perform with her, in the same way that sometimes authors who are coming to town will say to their publicist, “You know, there’s this other author who’s not as well known as me but whose work I really admire. Maybe that author would like to interview me on stage?” I’ve done a ton of those gigs, and I’ve done them in the other direction too. And it’s often the case that when an author is brought to town they’re paid for it—or at the very least they’re selling a book—and the author who’s the kind of junior partner in that, they do it not for money, they do it because for them it’s an opportunity to I guess ride on the other author’s coattails a bit, and also it’s a mutual aid situation—“I’ll help you a little and you help me a little.”

I don’t doubt that Amanda could have paid for musicians to go around with her, or could have arranged things so that she didn’t need as many musicians, but I think that what she did, she did from a fairly generous impulse. The people who complained about how she was organizing that part of her business weren’t the people who she was nominally exploiting. It wasn’t like there were people who showed up to perform with Amanda Palmer, went backstage afterwards, saw her lying in a bathtub full of hundred-dollar bills, and went, “Oh my god, I’ve been robbed.” They were instead people who, when Amanda announced, “I would like to get some local performers to come up on stage with me so I can promote these people to the audiences that come out to my gigs and so that we can all perform together, we can play together,” those people jumped at the opportunity. They even queued up to audition for that opportunity, competed for the chance to be on stage at an Amanda Palmer gig and to be within the penumbra of her performance.

The thing that’s confusing about the arts is that it’s both a business and a cultural activity, and there are lots of things that we do in the arts that are not economically rational. I have neglected my own work—rather a lot, in fact—to do things like read young writers’ books so that I could write reviews and blurbs for them, sometimes dropping everything to get a blurb in on time for an author that I really believed in. I didn’t have any rational expectation of making money from that, and the author who asked me was going to make money directly as a result—or at least believed that they would make money directly as a result—of my writing the blurb.

The reason I did that was not a commercial reason. The reason I did it was a cultural reason. It’s because the arts consist of a cultural conversation as well as a series of economic transactions, and those can’t be interrogated according to the same criteria. That’s not to say that you can’t do the wrong thing in a cultural context, but something that might seem wrong or exploitative in an economic context in many cases I think looks great and right in a cultural context.

Another new book you have that came out recently is Rapture of the Nerds, which is an adult SF novel you wrote with Charles Stross.

Yeah, Charlie and I took about seven years writing that one. It started as a pair of novellas, the first one published in SCI FICTION and the second one published in Infinite Matrix, and also in Lou Anders’ short-lived novella zine Argosy. The first one was called “Jury Service” and the second “Appeals Court,” and they’re books about the Singularity, but they’re books about what happens to the people left behind after the Singularity.

They’re kind of the inverse of the Left Behind novels about the Rapture—there are these fundamentalist Christian religious adventure novels called the Left Behind series that are tremendous bestsellers, and they’re about the lives of the sinners who are left behind on earth after the final trumpet blows and all the godly people are sucked up to heaven, leaving nothing behind but the godless. Except in our story, all of the people who are rational and godless and secular and technophilic get sucked up into “the Cloud.” Their brains get uploaded to a giant computer literally in the sky—the bones of the solar system have been taken apart and reassembled into a huge Dyson sphere around the sun, with only one hole in it that tracks the earth like a lighthouse beam.

And the people who are left behind are people who, because of religious conviction or because of suspicion of technology, refuse to send their brains up to the Cloud. It’s a kind of comic adventure about one of those people, a guy named Huw, who’s a Welsh potter and technology hater, who is delighted to find himself chosen for jury service to evaluate a new technology that’s been sent down from the Cloud—from the posthuman intelligence, the Cloud—to earth, and that some people have actually assembled, and he gets to help choose whether or not that technology will be allowed.

And from there things get very funny and very weird and very madcap. He’s a kind of Rincewind figure who runs all around the world and gets entangled in all these conspiracies. So the first two novellas were really well received, and Tor asked us if we would be interested in adapting them to a novel. So we wrote a third novella that’s longer than the first two put together, and then did a complete rewrite of all of them to make them fit into one book. And that’s Rapture of the Nerds. It came out in September, and did very well, I think.

I’ve heard you say that this book kind of charts your change in perspective from being very optimistic about the Singularity to being more skeptical. What’s happened that’s made you change your mind about that?

I guess it has to do with my feelings about where my identity is—who I am and whether or not I would still be me if I were inside a computer. Those feelings have changed over time as, for example, I’ve grown older and had to ask questions like, “Am I still me now? Am I still the me that I was ten years ago?”, and also as I’ve watched my daughter grow up. All of those experiences have changed my sense of the extent to which the lived experience of a conscious human being can be successfully simulated in silicon, and whether or not, having been transitioned to silicon, you would still be recognizable as you, or whether something important will have been lost—not a soul, but rather some element that informs your cognition or your sense of self that is in some way inherently embodied.

You also have a story that you’re doing for Neal Stephenson’s Hieroglyph project.

Yeah, I really need to get working on that one. I’m working on a story about “burners”—people who go to Burning Man—who experiment with a 3D printer that they can leave on the playa—on the gypsum desert—that harvests gypsum dust and turns it into a yurt over the couple of months that it takes for Burning Man to start, using solar energy. And so this autonomous, habitat-building, 3D printer robot gives them the idea of building one that can print out using lunar regolith—moon dust. And they land a lunar printer on the moon using private space exploration vehicles, and they direct its operations from a ground-based wiki that can bounce new messages to it—new firmware to it or new instructions to it—using ham radios that bounce signals off the moon. And over the course of a generation they direct its operations to build a lunar habitat that their grandchildren can move into.

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

Well, Homeland is the sequel to Little Brother, and that’ll be out in February. I’ll be on tour with that as well, for three to four weeks, I think, and mostly on the West Coast, in the Southwest, and the South. Those who have followed my tour this time around will know that I’ve stuck to the Northeast a lot. I actually got the last plane out of Boston before the hurricane hit, and my publicist and publisher have said, “We’re going to try to keep you in warm places that are unlikely to have extreme weather events during the next tour.” Because the last thing you want to do when you’re on these tightly scheduled tours is get snowed in. So if you live in the South, or the Southwest, or the West Coast, keep watching this space.

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 Epic, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars, 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 the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor), Oz Reimagined (2013, 47North), Wastelands 2 (2013, Night Shade Books), and Robot Uprisings (2014, 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: Daniel Handler (a/k/a Lemony Snicket)
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Daniel Handler is the author of the literary novels The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, and, most recently, Adverbs. Under the name Lemony Snicket he has also written a sequence of books for children, known collectively as A Series of Unfortunate Events, which have sold more than 60 million copies and were the basis of a feature film. His intricate and witty writing style has won him numerous fans for his critically-acclaimed literary work and his wildly successful children’s books. His latest book is Lemony Snicket’s Who Could That Be at This Hour?, the first in a new series called All the Wrong Questions.

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.

Last year you wrote a piece called “13 Observations Made by Lemony Snicket While Watching Occupy Wall Street From a Discreet Distance.” What motivated you to write that piece?

Um, I guess watching Occupy Wall Street from a discreet distance, and also Occupy Writers—the organization—asked me if I would write a piece, and I said no, because I didn’t think I had anything to say. And then I was swimming laps at the place where I swim laps and I had a rude experience with a clearly successful capitalist, and it ticked me off, and so I thought, “I can write something about what’s wrong with capitalists being greedy,” and it went from there.

What sort of reaction did you get to that piece?

Well, I’m not as plugged in to the online world of social networking as I might be, so probably most of the reaction I was shielded from. But some people told me they liked it, and Rachel Maddow liked it, I guess, and then I ended up on The Rachel Maddow Show, which was curious.

Yeah, so what was it like going on The Rachel Maddow Show?

It was strange, because I don’t think of myself as a political figure, and I was worried that I would be called upon to have the kind of fake expertise that many people have on those political shows where someone who actually doesn’t know what they’re talking about just has an opinion. And I was grateful that we really didn’t talk much about politics, so that I didn’t have to come up with opinions that I later would have to stand by.

Does that make you really nervous going in front of a camera, or have you done enough public events now that it’s no big deal?

I’ve done it a lot—I have a kind of self-hypnosis thing that I go through where I say, “No one cares!” That’s what I tell myself over and over. The first time I was on TV it was a disaster, because I was nervous, so after that I just began to say to myself, “Who cares? No one is watching. It doesn’t matter. No one watches TV,” and I convince myself of that before I go on.

I don’t know if you saw this, but there was this recent J.K. Rowling quote where she was asked why she doesn’t use more tricks to avoid paying taxes, and she said, “I’m indebted to the British welfare state . . . When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net . . . was there to break the fall, and I cannot help feeling therefore that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty check.” As an author yourself, what do you think about that?

I did hear about that, and I was proud of Ms. Rowling, and I also don’t live in the West Indies, so I’m glad that neither of us headed for the hills. [laughs] I didn’t have a hardscrabble youth the way she did, and so I have not had to rely on public assistance, but I’m certainly in favor of it and try not to duck paying taxes any more than is necessary.

Well, I think it’s really striking that she’s this billion-dollar industry now, and if it weren’t for welfare and arts grants as well, this whole Harry Potter phenomenon which has done so much for young adult literature wouldn’t have existed at all.

No, it’s absolutely true. I think she’s a prime example of public assistance being well worth the investment. I mean, the amount of business that she’s created in Britain I’m sure far outweighs the taxes that people paid that went to her.

So regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement, what do you think about the current situation with that and where do you think things are headed?

Oh gosh, I don’t know. I mean, I continue to watch from a discreet distance, and I would be loath to speak for a movement of which I’m not officially a part. But it does seem like they’ve had quite a bit of triumph in just having income inequality end up being an issue in this campaign. I mean, the widening gap between rich and poor in America has been going on for a long time, but it’s never been discussed as a top shelf issue that presidential candidates have to deal with. And it seems to me like it’s the first time that a very successful businessman actually has to account for his success, and how he pays for it, and what kind of effect it has on other people. I mean, previously successful businessmen ran for president all the time, and it went without saying that they must be geniuses, and now actually it seems if anything a bit of baggage for him. So that seems like a triumph for the movement to me.

Speaking of politics, the name Lemony Snicket actually came out of politics, in a way. Can you tell us about that?

[laughs] I don’t know if that counts as coming out of politics, but I was researching my first novel for adults, which is called The Basic Eight, which is about a girl in high school who kills a boy in high school, and part of it is about the media uproar that follows, and I was interested in cultural commentary, and I began to contact groups that like to appear on TV and state their opinion on things they don’t know about. A lot of those groups are conservative, and I was on the phone with a conservative organization and I wanted their materials sent to me, but I had a sudden thought that I shouldn’t be on their mailing list permanently, and so the woman on the phone asked me my name and I just said the first thing that came into my head, which was “Lemony Snicket,” which was not a name that I’d ever heard before or ever thought of before.

And I thought to myself—during the pause that followed on the phone—I thought, “That was a really terrible name to say. Out of all the fake names you could have given, that’s the least believable one.” And then she just said, “Is that spelled how it sounds?” And I said, “Yes,” and I said, “Read that back to me,” because I had no idea how it sounded like it was spelled. And that was the first time that the name Lemony Snicket existed, and I began to use it for various pseudonymous, prankish things.

I was in my early twenties, and a friend of mine made me some Lemony Snicket business cards for my birthday, and I used to give them out at bars, and I used to write long, rambling letters to the editors of newspapers and sign them “Lemony Snicket.” And so then years later when I started writing for children, it occurred to me that it would be fun to write them and publish them under the name of the narrator rather than the name of the author. And then I had this name lying around gathering dust. So I guess it had its roots in politics, slightly. I don’t know if making fun of right-wingers when you’re in your early twenties really can count as a political movement. [laughs]

Years ago I saw you on tour for A Series of Unfortunate Events, and it was certainly the most entertaining book appearance I’ve ever seen, and even just one of the most entertaining public appearances of any kind I’ve ever seen. You talked about how Lemony Snicket couldn’t be there because he’d been bitten in the armpit by a giant bug, and you played the accordion, and I was just wondering if you did that same routine at every stop? Did the routine develop over time?

Well, much of it I’m still doing. The presentation kind of waxes and wanes and evolves and devolves, but definitely Lemony Snicket is never able to make it to a book appearance, and so I am his stuttering, suspicious stand-in. And that just came from when the first book was being published under the name of Lemony Snicket, and we had these mysterious photographs of Lemony Snicket, and the publisher said, “What are you going to do when we send you to a bookstore and they say, ‘Lemony Snicket is here,’ and you’re not a mysterious person who doesn’t show his face?” And I said, “I don’t know.” And they said, “Well, we think you should figure that out.”

So they sent me to go see some other authors present, and I watched another children’s author present and I thought she was terrible. And she told me later that what she liked to do was to dispel the mystery behind writing. And I thought, “Why would you want to dispel the mystery behind writing?” I mean, the mystery of writing is kind of, “Where do these stories come from, and these mysterious ideas?” But the actual writing is someone sitting at a desk writing, which is very boring. And so I thought, “What can I do to increase the mystery of writing rather than decrease it?” And the answer proved to be what has become a kind of stuttering, performance art thing. But I’m glad you liked it.

You did this thing where you said you had the bug that bit Lemony Snicket, and you took out a box, and then inside that was a smaller box, and then inside that an even smaller box, and then you were running around showing this plastic beetle or something. And the kids loved it, but I was just wondering, have you ever had kids just start crying or freaking out when you’re running around showing them this big, plastic bug?

I guess sometimes, yeah. I’ve learned that the really good bookstore for a crowded children’s event will have a plan for when a child vomits. I’m sure some people have cried. Most people enjoy it, but some kids get so excited they vomit. And you know you’re at a good bookstore when they say, “So here’s our plan if somebody vomits, and here’s what we’re going to do, and here’s how it’s all going to be fine.” Because there’s nothing worse than a child vomiting and nobody has the slightest idea what to do.

The first time you stepped in front of a crowd like that, and were planning to tell them that Lemony Snicket couldn’t be there but you would play the accordion for them instead, did you have any trepidation about how that would go over? Did it go over well from the start?

I didn’t really have any trepidation because I was certain the whole thing would be a disaster. I mean, I agreed to write books about terrible things that were happening to children over and over again and then publish them under a ridiculous name. I thought the whole thing was certainly going to be a commercial disaster. And, I mean, you asked me about the first time that I performed in front of a crowd like that, but the first hundred times I performed it, it wasn’t a crowd at all.

The first Lemony Snicket event that I ever did had two people—it was at a huge chain bookstore in Michigan, and they’d set up a million folding chairs in this room that was like the size of a football field, and there were two people—two adults—sitting in the back. And so I did my whole shtick, feeling like a moron, a sad moron. And then the two people came up to me and they said, “We’re actually from the other bookstore, and we hate your books, and we just were so curious who in the world could be behind them.” And I thought, “Yes, this is exactly what I thought would happen. Everyone would be horrified.” It was kind of satisfying.

Wow, that might be worse than George R.R. Martin’s story about Clifford the Big Red Dog drawing more people than him when he did a book signing.

Clifford the Big Red Dog I bet still has a pretty enormous following. I wonder how that would go with Clifford the Big Red Dog versus George R.R. Martin now.

Yeah, right. Have a cage match.

Ha!

So the A Series of Unfortunate Events books were recently re-released with some bonus material. Could you tell us about that?

Yeah, we put a few volumes in paperback, and we put a kind of penny dreadful magazine in the back, which had a serialized story and some comics by Michael Kupperman, and some other things like that. The books hadn’t been in paperback really, they’d only been in those hardcover gothic novel editions, and so I thought, well, if they were in paperback, they’d probably look like penny dreadfuls—something full of exclamation points and lurid stories. And I’d just experienced the work of Michael Kupperman, who I think is amazing. For a while he had a comic strip about The Adventures of Snake and Bacon—a snake and a slice of bacon who try to solve crimes. So he did a serial story for that. That was fun.

So who’s better at solving crimes, the snake or the piece of bacon?

Well, the snake only says, “Sssss!” over and over again, and the bacon says things like, “Crumble me in a salad.” So neither of them really do a very good job of solving crimes. It’s an almost completely deflated detective story from the start, which is why I liked it.

Actually, speaking of crime stories, tell us about your new series, All the Wrong Questions.

Yeah, All the Wrong Questions is about Lemony Snicket’s childhood and apprenticeship in a secret organization. A Series of Unfortunate Events was kind of a take on a gothic novel, and All the Wrong Questions is kind of a take on a noir novel. So he’s in a fading industrial town, and he’s solving a very complicated murder involving a stolen, mysterious statue. There’s kind of a femme fatale in the figure of Ellington Feint, who’s a young girl who is either plotting with Mr. Snicket or plotting against him, depending on the way it goes. It’s a four volume series, and the first volume is out in stores now.

What are some of your major influences when it comes to noir fiction?

Well, Raymond Chandler is definitely the king, for me. I started reading him when I was young, and then I returned to him recently as I started thinking about this idea, and I just think he has a beautiful way of making mysteries alluring and having all the kinds of philosophical and moral digressions that the Snicket books have, so it seemed like a good fit. Charles Willeford is another really great one. Dashiell Hammett.

Dashiell Hammett certainly seems to be an influence in terms of the missing statue.

Sure. Well, I mean, I think out of all those kinds of mysteries, the most interesting MacGuffin is the Maltese Falcon, and so there’s a black statue in this that kind of tips its hat to that.

Were there any references in the book that were just really amusing to you, or just really obscure?

Well, I try to bury as many references as I can. Some are only references to things I think I could find, so I get to have endless layers of reference, and one of the things I like about going on tour and meeting my readers is, I meet readers who have found things I wanted them to find, found things I didn’t want them to find, and then found things I didn’t put there. [laughs]

So the book is illustrated by an artist known as Seth. How did he get involved with the project?

I stalked him basically and asked him to do it. I’ve admired his work forever. He’s a graphic novelist who I’m sure will be familiar to many geeks in our audience, and while I was working on the first volume in All the Wrong Questions, I saw a drawing he did on the cover of Poetry magazine that was kind of a lonely seaside town that looked exactly like the lonely seaside town that I was writing about. So he was coming to WonderCon in San Francisco, where I live, and I’d never been to WonderCon, so I thought, “I’ll just go there and he’ll be signing books, and maybe the line won’t be so long that I could actually talk to him.”

I don’t know why I thought WonderCon would be different than it was. People had told me that it was kind of a smaller, brainier Comic-Con, so I guess I assumed that it would be dedicated more to the arty end of graphic novels rather than comics, but when I walked in there I was immediately surrounded by people in stormtrooper costumes, and I thought, “Oh, this is funny.” And then I went and found Seth, who likes to dress in old ’30s suits, so he was sitting lonely, utterly ignored, while people were meeting guys in Spider-Man costumes and going to re-enactments of certain battles in the Star Wars milieu, and so I said, “Hello,” and introduced myself, and said that I admired his work and asked him if he would want to work on something with me, and then we kept in touch, and he foolishly said yes.

So when you go to an event like that, do people recognize you, or do they not know what you look like well enough since you sort of hide your face on the books?

I guess I’m recognized sometimes. In San Francisco, I think I’m recognized as much for having grown up there as for anything I’ve done, so it’s a great check on your ego, because you’ll be sitting in a restaurant and then someone will say, “Aren’t you Daniel Handler?” and you’ll say, “Yes,” and so then they’ll say, “Yeah, my sister dumped you in 8th grade.” [laughs] And I didn’t go to WonderCon as any kind of presenter or performer or anything, I just went to see Seth, and my wife was on a panel about her own work, and so I don’t think I was recognized that day. Also, if you’re surrounded by stormtroopers, no one’s looking at you.

In the book, the characters start to get into an argument about whether books like The Lord of the Rings are good or not, and one character starts complaining that the wizards in these kinds of stories never seem to be very helpful. Which side would you take in that argument?

Well, far be it from me to argue against a wizard—that just seems foolhardy. You never know what a wizard will do when he becomes irritated. But yeah, I think of all literary genres, probably the fantasy one was the one that was least alluring to me when I was young. I think I have a lot more respect for it now than I did when I was young, but when I was young I always thought, “Why doesn’t the wizard just fix stuff?” The wizard is always explaining, “I have unlimited power, but it’s you, young person, who has to go and climb this mountain or battle this thing.” And I always thought, “Really? The wizard can’t help you just a little bit?” [laughs] I mean, I understand that narratively you don’t want the wizard to say, “There’s someone threatening our kingdom, but luckily it’s not a problem because I’m a very powerful wizard.” But from the point of view of the reader, I always thought, “What are you hanging around for?”

What do you think of fantasy and science fiction now? Do you have any particular stories or authors that you’re a fan of?

I tend to go into the past with literary genres, so with science fiction and fantasy I tend to read more from authors who are dead. But I remain a big William Gibson fan. I think he’s always interesting. And I like a lot of writing that has a touch of that but maybe doesn’t neatly fit into the genre. Like, Rachel Ingalls is one of my favorite writers, and she’s American, actually, but she’s lived in Britain forever, and her stories tend to have strange things happening in them, but you don’t find them in the science fiction section of the bookstore. Kelly Link is like that—she’s another great American writer.

I mean, it’s always that weird thing with science fiction that many of the good authors get promoted by marketing departments or literary critics out of science fiction into literary fiction, and then everyone says, “Oh, science fiction doesn’t have any good writers,” because if you’re a good enough writer they decide you’re not science fiction, so it’s like an endlessly circular argument.

Are you familiar with the term “slipstream”? It sort of sounds like what you’re talking about—literary fiction that has some strange aspects to it, maybe not quite fully science fiction or fantasy, but it has something unusual or strange happening in it. We actually talked about that in our Junot Díaz episode and talked about the same thing you were talking about, where writers sort of get promoted out of the genre and thus it’s sort of this self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yeah, and I think it happens in every genre. You know, if you decide Margaret Atwood isn’t a science fiction author and you decide that Paul Auster isn’t a mystery author, you can’t then complain that those genres don’t have good enough writers in them. And then of course there’s just kind of the ghetto that so many writers who like to write about unearthly things end up in, where they’re not taken seriously or noticed by a certain segment of the audience that would love them, because they’re put in that category.

So do you think you would ever write science fiction or fantasy yourself?

I guess what I wrote would probably be more of the slipstream category that you’re talking about. I mean, certainly I’ve written a bunch of books where things that can’t possibly happen are happening—I mean, as the author of a book in which a baby climbs up an elevator shaft using only her teeth, I feel I can’t say, “No, I would never write a fantasy book!” . . . because that’s fairly outlandish. But I don’t have any idea for a book now that takes place on another planet, for instance. But that’s probably because the books I write take place on an Earth that is so unrecognizable that the idea of calling it another planet just hasn’t occurred to me.

I’ve heard some writers say that once they become parents they have to stop writing stories about children in danger, because it just becomes too nerve-wracking. As a parent who writes a lot about children in danger, what do you think about that?

Well, for me having a baby was a tremendous boon in writing about terrible things happening to children because—I mean, he’s not a baby now, he’s nine years old, but when you’re a new parent you spend the majority of your time brainstorming about dangerous things that can happen to your child. You learn to enter a room with a crawling baby looking for things that are on the ground, looking where the electrical outlets are, looking for a bunch of things that never occur to you before you have a child. And I think as someone who was then in the later stages of A Series of Unfortunate Events, I just needed to brainstorm all the time about terrible things that could happen to children, and having a child kind of kept me in that zone. So yeah, I certainly don’t think I’ve become gentler on children since I had one. My son is terrified of my own books, though. He refuses to read them. So maybe that tells you something.

You wrote eight drafts of the film adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events, none of which were used. Based on those sorts of experiences, do you have any advice you’d pass along to other writers?

I don’t know. I mean, I wouldn’t go so far as to say the drafts weren’t used. The drafting of a screenplay is kind of an evolving process, so I was fired and then someone came in to rewrite my script a few more times, so there’s some lines that remain, but . . . what can I say about that? It was a long, dramatic experience. The only thing I think is that some writers who are hired to adapt their own work kind of assume it won’t be a challenge, and I think it always is.

I think everyone who works for Hollywood has that experience sometime, which is that they are being driven totally to the edge by films and development and it’s stressful. But films are really expensive, so if you are in charge of making a $200 million film, you’re going to be nervous, and if you’re nervous then you’re going to want to make sure that the script can’t go wrong, and you’re going to be a nervous person bossing around a screenwriter, and you’re probably going to be unhappy. [laughs]

Are there going to be any more movies based on the series?

I mean, they hired me to write a few drafts of the second one, and they say that they continue to work on it. I never know whether to believe them. But it seems there’s always somebody interested—the ball gets passed to someone who’s interested, so we’ll see.

I don’t know if you saw this New York Times review, but they wrote, “Lemony Snicket has burned us before. Like The X-Files, Lost, and countless other conspiracy-driven sagas, Snicket’s thirteen volumes of A Series of Unfortunate Events left fans with far more questions than answers.” What do you think about that? Do you think that you burned people?

Burned? Gosh, I don’t know. I mean, I’m just interested in stories that ask more questions than they answer, and I understand that some people feel the other way and that’s fine. I never thought that I was writing a book that everybody would love. I tend to hate books that everybody loves. So I’m sorry someone feels burned, but also, I mean, if you’ve ever actually been burned, for instance—like, if your skin has come in contact with something really, really hot, I think that’s a way worse feeling than experiencing a piece of culture that you find unsatisfying.

Well, you’re sort of damned if you do and damned if you don’t, right? Because if you leave any mysteries, people want to know the solutions to the mysteries, but then no solution to a mystery is ever as intriguing as the mystery itself. So people are going to be dissatisfied either way.

Well, I think it goes back to the conversation about, do you want to dispel the mystery of writing or do you want to keep the mystery alive? Because mysteries are more intriguing than solutions, and so this new series is all about asking the wrong questions, and some of those questions lead to more questions, and some of them get answered, and some of them are never answered, and I can understand people who get frustrated by that, but oh well.

I mean, what did you think of the endings of Lost and The X-Files? And do you think that you’re doing something different with the mysteries in your books?

I honestly don’t remember the ending of The X-Files, because I kind of ended up falling off that boat. But in the gothic novels I read that fueled A Series of Unfortunate Events, there’s always lost threads and dark shadows that never get explained, and certainly now in reading noir to prepare for All the Wrong Questions, there’s also those kinds of mysteries that don’t quite fit together, and I think that’s way more alluring. There’s a famous story about when Howard Hawks was making The Big Sleep and they suddenly realized there was some part of the plot that they didn’t understand. They said, “How could he have known about this and gone over there in the middle of the night?” And so they called Raymond Chandler and said, “We don’t understand why this would happen,” and Raymond Chandler said, “How would I know?” Which I really liked.

It’s kind of a sad commentary on book reviewing culture that in The New York Times they’re reviewing a book and they have to compare the ending of the books they’re complaining about to TV shows, that they couldn’t come up with any actual book endings to compare it to.

Yeah, I guess. I mean, I guess it shows more respect for TV? And I welcome literature being brought into the mainstream culture and not kind of ghettoized as this hopelessly arty art form that we can only compare with other classics of literature. You know, I think it’s nice that people can think across different media and see things they have in common. But I admit, having a book compared to the last season of Lost is not maybe my favorite thing that’s ever happened to me.

Yeah, that was a low blow. I mean, come on.

[laughs] Yeah, I try not to—I mean, I’m not one of those writers who refuses to read his reviews or anything, but I’m also not a writer who obsesses over it, and I’m not much of a self-Googler. You’re always going to get stung. You can always find someone who’s hating on you for some reason. And, I don’t know, life’s too short.

You recently wrote an introduction for Chris Van Allsburg’s new book, The Chronicles of Harris Burdick. How’d you get involved with that project?

It’s kind of an embarrassing story, but when I was young I saw The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, which is—I guess I should explain for those who are unfamiliar—is a children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg in which he says, “These are some illustrations that a mysterious man brought. They’re just full-page illustrations with a caption, and there’s a matching story, but the man never reappeared, and so we don’t know what the stories are.” So they’re just these very striking images and strange captions, and you’re forced to kind of invent the story in your head.

And I saw it when I was a child, and I never forgot it, but I also never saw it again, and I never really examined my memory of it—the way you do when you were a child. And so when the Lemony Snicket series was starting, I was talking to the publisher about how important mysteries are, and I said, “When I was a child I saw this book that was nothing but illustrations, and the stories were missing, and it was so intriguing. And, you know, I always wondered what happened to that author.”

And he said, “That’s Chris Van Allsburg. He’s one of the most famous children’s authors working today, and that is a book that’s meant to fool 8-year-olds, and you’re almost 30. Get a grip on yourself.” But I always thought it was a testament to the power of that book, that even though I hadn’t really thought about it concretely for a long time, that the mystery had lurked in my mind.

So a couple years ago, Chris Van Allsburg’s publisher had the idea of asking a bunch of writers to write the stories that might go with these images, and they contacted me. And I said I wasn’t interested in writing a story that went with one of the images, but I would be interested in writing a new introduction, because it was the introduction of the original book, all about this mysterious author, that intrigued me so much when I was young. So then I got to write a new introduction explaining the existence of all these other stories, which was fun to do.

One piece of advice you give to new writers is to get a job where you can steal paper, except now that everything’s going digital is there something else that new writers should be stealing instead?

[laughs] I guess if I started encouraging people to steal their computers from work, that seems quite irresponsible. I don’t know. I mean, I’m still a paper person. I print all my work out when I’m reading it, and I recommend that writers do that, so I still think you should steal stuff from work. But I think when you’re a writer, the important thing is to find the time to write, because you probably need to write one book and throw it away—if only one book. You need to get a lot of bad writing out of the way before you can get the good writing done. And so you just need a job where there’s time to do that.

So my best job that I had before I was published was when I was an executive assistant to a man that was dying in the hospital. So I had absolutely nothing to do but sit in an office, and occasionally the phone would ring from increasingly distant business acquaintances, and I would have to explain to them in muted tones that he was sick and not likely to come back to the office at all. But the rest of the time I worked on my novel. And I actually think the kind of aura of doom that hung over it was very helpful to me as a beginning novelist as well. So I guess I could suggest: Try to work for someone who’s dying. You get a lot of time.

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

Well, now it’s just this book. I’m on tour for this book now, so I’m excited about Who Could That Be at This Hour? And I’m going around and asking children mysterious questions, and hopefully not leaving them burned.

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 Epic, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars, 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 the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor), Oz Reimagined (2013, 47North), Wastelands 2 (2013, Night Shade Books), and Robot Uprisings (2014, 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: Alexandra Knickel

Artist Spotlight: Alexandra Knickel
Galen Dara

Alexandra Knickel is a freelance illustrator and miniature-artist based in Germany.

Could you give us a little background into how your own interest in art began and your decision to pursue a career in the arts?

Like most artists and illustrators, I’ve had an affinity for painting and drawing since early childhood days, I doodled a lot with my crayons, not to mention my teachers were always annoyed at me for drawing little critters instead of actually listening to what they were saying. But hey, it was so much more interesting than math and other stuff. ;)

I always wanted to do something with painting, or at least something creative. Unfortunately, in the process of growing up, with all the struggles life brings, painting or being creative had moved very, very far into the background, to the degree where I stopped for years.

It was around 2000 when I slowly got into painting again. I was very into sewing clothes by that time and I might have stayed within that creative field. But due to a pure accident I found out that there was something called “a graphics tablet.” I remember I was like, “Oh my god! I can paint on my PC,” and there it went. ;)

So from that day on, I tried to learn from tutorials and books to improve as an artist. I had some years in between where I did not have enough time to paint as I liked, but nonetheless, slowly and steadily I worked my way up.

Unfortunately, there was no clear path to becoming a freelancer in that field. I always loved the idea of being my own boss, so in 2010 I decided to dare to take the step and become a fulltime illustrator.

You are a sculptor as well as a digital painter (sorry folks, these are only for sale in Germany). Did one come before the other?

I think I am—at this point—more a digital painter than a sculptor. I found sculpting a fantastic and relaxing hobby due to all the stress of painting. Yes, I know, that might sound totally crazy for a lot people. But painting on a business level can be quite exhausting and sometimes you lose the special feeling for it. It’s all about deadlines, trying to be quick, even quicker, technique, calculations, etc. So doing miniatures is a relief. It’s not important how good they are or if anyone else besides me likes them. I just sculpt, paying attention to nothing else but pure enjoyment. ;)

Some of your sculptures are whimsical fairy creatures and others are delightfully realistic food miniatures. How much do these sculptures relate to your illustrations, and how much are they some other creative outlet entirely? Is there a balancing act between them for you?

Hmm, that’s a very good question. I’m not quite sure, to be honest. Thinking of the realistic food miniatures, I was just fascinated on the first sight. How can something so tiny look so realistic? I found it challenging to find the right chalk color to enhance the realism. I spend days on getting the right colors for my “brezels” or figuring out how small I can make things. The food miniatures or dollhouse miniatures per se have a strange fascination to them and they always draw me in.

For the other miniatures, like my fairies in a bottle, it might be the wish to do something cute. That’s something that you can find in my paintings as well. On one side, I like to do all the regular fantasy stuff, portraits and also from time to time something creepy, but then again I feel that urgent need to paint something cute. I really like if I make people smile because of a cute character.

These tiny fairies are maybe another step in that direction because you can have them with you, wherever you go. I had a commission for a fairy once that was heart-warming. It was for a woman who lost her mother and she wanted to have a fairy as a reminder of her mom watching from heaven. These are the moments you feel you can really touch people with your art.

So about the balance between painting and sculpting, at the moment it works quite well. But maybe I’ll start to do miniatures professionally and just paint as a hobby. Who knows. ;)

What is your relationship to digital vs. traditional art mediums? For your sculptures you use polymer clay and for your illustrations you work digitally using Photoshop and Painter on a Wacom Cintiq. Was your initial training in digital mediums? Have you ever played around with any 3d digital software? Likewise, do you ever break out traditional paints to experiment with?

Oh, I love traditional media! Sadly, I am not that good at it. I do watercolor paintings from time to time and I dabble in oils when I find the time; it’s so intuitive and I love the haptics of it. I think traditional media has some special sort of spirit.

Don’t get me wrong, I love painting digitally. It’s great because it’s faster, it doesn’t smell, its clean, it has the undo function. But then again, at the end you have something sterile (might not be the right word for it), which even if you print it out on the best possible museum quality canvas, it’s just . . . it lacks haptics, smell, and it’s most of all not really one of a kind. I must admit it’s not easy to explain in English. I’m “Oh, two hearts in my chest” concerning this topic.

There are a lot of advantages to working digitally and I wouldn’t want to stop, but I still think that there will always be something missing. As an example, when working with traditional media I can use my hands to create nice effects, I can have the color run down or make parts thicker by using pastouse color. Working digitally, I of course can simulate this with custom brushes or with the help of Painter’s relatively realistic brush engine but it will never have the same feeling to it.

Nonetheless I think one can do both to get the best of every side. =)

Yes, I started directly with digital painting, mostly because besides being a painter I’m a geek sitting at my PC. ;) It came quite naturally. Oh my, yes, I tried 3D programs like ZBrush or Poser back in day, but really I’m an idiot when it comes to 3D. I do not even understand Google Sketchup—and I have been told this is the easiest program to start with. I leave 3D to all the people who are really awesome at it.

You have some amazing game art and character designs. Are you a gamer yourself? What are you playing these days? Do you find illustrating for a game different than doing cover work?

Thanks for that compliment! As already mentioned, I’m a geek. Totally. I started as a 8-year-old child on a C64. Since that day, I have played everything that was fantasy-related. I always had a special love for RPGs. Later on, I played MMORPGs, starting with the first game that came out in 1998 called Meridian 59. Nowadays, I don’t have much time for it, but I recently fell in love with Guild Wars 2. It also has some of the best concept art I have ever seen. (Along with the awesome art of The Witcher and classical pieces like Keith Parkinson’s art for Everquest.) Offline I still like to play Dragon Age I.

I think game or concept art differs from doing regular illustrations, and most of the time I find it more difficult as well. But that might be because I’m fairly new to concept and game art; I still have a lot to learn.

At the moment I work mostly for browser games doing either character illustrations or icon graphics. I’d say game art is a bit more about designing than illustrating. You need to think in a practical way as well. You also need to keep in mind that the whole design is consistent through the gameworld. Illustrating, I would say, is more about “storytelling.”

What does a typical “work” day for you look like? What are some things you do if you find yourself stuck on a project? Where do you find your inspiration and motivations?

A typical day doesn’t start too early. ;) I have my first two cups of coffee within thirty minutes of waking. Usually I’m reading my emails, visiting my social media pages like Facebook or deviantART, writing estimates of costs and checking for possible clients in search of an illustrator. If so, I’m applying for that job. After those things, I start working. At the end of the workday, (which is usually not before 10 p.m.,) I enjoy watching a TV series or a good Blu-ray movie.

I figured out that for me, the easiest way to avoid getting too stuck on a project is to work in parallel on at least two different pieces. You always suffer from “blind eyes” once you’ve worked on a piece longer than two hours. The best for me is to then take a break from one piece and switch to working on another one. So usually I’m jumping between paintings three or four times a day.

A lot of inspiration I find through my clients’ stories and ideas. I see myself more as a sort of “converter,” trying to give a face to what their mind created, to grab that feeling, trying to dive as much as possible in the story or the character. I’m working a lot for self-publishing authors and small publishers and usually I try to read their manuscripts to a certain degree to get to this point. Sometimes I even come up with a dozen extra ideas.

When doing private pieces, I do not really look for inspiration, to be honest. I just start to paint and see what happens.

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

Puhh . . . well . . . I started digital painting doing anime-style work. ;) So back in those days, I would say the ladies from Studio CLAMP influenced me a lot.

Other than that, I wouldn’t say that I had one specific artist that influenced me. There are so many amazing artists out there doing inspirational art, with their own unique styles, I could never decide. I utterly love the works of Brian Froud. But also the works of John Howe, Alan Lee, Keith Parkinson, Todd Lockwood, and Linda Bergkvist, of course. I’m also a fan of “nowadays” concept artists like Kekai Kotaki or Daarken, just to name a few.

For the sculptures I would say Angie Scarr and Sue Heaser when it comes to miniatures, as well as the awesome Shiflett Brothers, most known for their fantasy sculptures.

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

Hmmm . . . I must admit I dunno. I think besides basic improvements, my work hasn’t changed that much through the years. Well . . . ok besides the fact that I’m not doing anime style anymore. ;)

What are you working on these days?

Lets see, what’s on the workbench . . . I have a nice private character commission here, which is soon to be finished. Also I’m working for a medieval-styled Facebook social game, which will be released next year. Other than that, I am preparing for a local Christmas market creating some new miniatures. And last but not least, I am working on several new homepage and logo designs.

Galen Dara likes to sit in the dark with her sketchbook, but sometimes she emerges to illustrate for books and magazines, dabble in comics, and hatch wild collaborations with friends and associates. Galen has done art for Edge Publishing, Dagan Books, Apex, Scapezine, Tales to Terrify, Peculiar Pages, Sunstone, and the LovecraftZine. She is on the staff of BookLifeNow, blogs for the Inkpunks, and writes the Art Nerd column at the Functional Nerds. When Galen is not online you can find her on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, climbing mountains or hanging out with a loving assortment of human and animal companions. Follow her on Twitter @galendara.

The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics
Daniel Abraham

For as many years as anyone in the city could remember, Olaf Neddelsohn had been the cambist of the Magdalen Gate postal authority. Every morning, he could be seen making the trek from his rooms in the boarding house on State Street, down past the street vendors with their apples and cheese, and into the bowels of the underground railway, only to emerge at the station across the wide boulevard from Magdalen Gate. Some mornings he would pause at the tobacconist’s or the newsstand before entering the hallowed hall of the postal authority, but seven o’clock found him without fail at the ticker tape, checking for the most recent exchange rates. At half past, he was invariably updating the slate board with a bit of chalk. And with the last chime of eight o’clock, he would nod his respect to his small portrait of His Majesty, King Walther IV, pull open the shutters, and greet whatever traveler had need of him.

From that moment until the lunch hour and again from one o’clock until six, Olaf lived and breathed the exchange of foreign currencies. Under his practiced hands, dollars became pounds sterling; rubles became marks; pesos, kroner; yen, francs. Whatever exotic combination was called for, Olaf arranged with a smile, a kind word, and a question about the countries which minted the currencies he passed under the barred window. Over years, he had built nations in his mind; continents. Every country that existed, he could name, along with its particular flavor of money, its great sights and monuments, its national cuisine.

At the deep brass call of the closing gong, he pulled the shutters closed again. From six until seven o’clock, he reconciled the books, filled out his reports, wiped his slate board clean with a wet rag, made certain he had chalk for the next day, paid his respects to the portrait of the king, and then went back to his boarding room. Some nights he made beans on the hotplate in his room. Others, he would join the other boarders for Mrs. Wells’ somewhat dubious roasts. Afterward, he would take a short constitutional walk, read to himself from the men’s adventure books that were his great vice, and put out the light. On Saturdays, he would visit the zoo or the fourth-rate gentleman’s club that he could afford. On Sundays, he attended church.

He had a reputation as a man of few needs, tepid passions, and great kindness. The romantic fire that the exotic coins and bills awakened in him was something he would have been hard pressed to share, even had he anyone with whom to share it.

Which is to say there could not be a man in the whole of the city less like Lord Iron.

Born Edmund Scarasso, Lord Iron had taken his father’s title and lands and ridden them first to war, then to power, and finally to a notorious fame. His family estate outside the city was reputed to rival the king’s, but Lord Iron spent little time there. He had a house in the city with two hundred rooms arranged around a central courtyard garden in which trees bore fruits unfamiliar to the city and flowers bloomed with exotic and troubling scents. His servants were numberless as ants; his personal fortune greater than some smaller nations. And never, it was said, had such wealth, power, and influence been squandered on such a debased soul.

No night passed without some new tale of Lord Iron. Ten thousand larks had been killed, their tongues harvested, and their bodies thrown aside in order that Lord Iron might have a novel hors d’oeuvre. Lord Biethan had been forced to repay his family’s debt by sending his three daughters to perform as Lord Iron’s creatures for a week; they had returned to their father with disturbing, languorous smiles and a rosewood cask filled with silver as “recompense for his Lordship’s overuse.” A fruit seller had the bad fortune not to recognize Lord Iron one dim, fog-bound morning, and a flippant comment earned him a whipping that left him near dead.

There was no way for anyone besides Lord Iron himself to know which of the thousand stories and accusations that accreted around him were true. There was no doubt that Lord Iron was never seen wearing anything but the richest of velvets and silk. He was habitually in the company of beautiful women of negotiable virtue. He smoked the finest tobacco and other, more exotic weeds. Violence and sensuality and excess were the tissue of which his life was made. If his wealth and web of blackmail and extortion had not protected him, he would no doubt have been invited to the gallows dance years before. If he had been a hero in the war, so much the worse.

And so it was, perhaps, no surprise that when his lackey and drinking companion, Lord Caton, mentioned in passing an inconvenient curiosity of the code of exchange, Lord Iron’s mind seized upon it. Among his many vices was a fondness for cruel pranks. And so it came to pass that Lord Iron and the handful of gaudy revelers who followed in his wake descended late one Tuesday morning upon the Magdalen Gate postal authority.

Olaf took the packet of bills, willing his hands not to tremble. Lord Iron’s thin smile and river-stone eyes did nothing to calm him. The woman draping herself on Lord Iron’s arm made a poor affectation of sincerity.

“Well,” Olaf said, unfolding the papers. “Let me see.”

These were unlike any currency he had ever seen; the sheets were just larger than a standard sheet of paper, the engraving a riot of colors—crimson, indigo, and a pale, delicate peach. The lordly face that stared out of the bill was Moorish. Ornate letters identified the bills as being valued at a thousand convertible guilders and issued by the Independent Protectorate of Analdi-Wat. Olaf wondered, as his fingers traced the lettering, how a protectorate could be independent.

“I’m very sorry, my lord,” he said. “But this isn’t a listed currency.”

“And how is that my problem?” Lord Iron asked, stroking his beard. He had a rich voice, soft and masculine, that made Olaf blush.

“I only mean, my lord, that I couldn’t give an exchange rate on these. I don’t have them on my board, you see, and so I can’t—”

“These are legal tender, issued by a sovereign state. I would like to change them into pounds sterling.”

“I understand that, my lord, it’s only that—”

“Are you familiar with the code of exchange?” Lord Iron asked. The dark-haired woman on his arm smiled at Olaf with all the pity a snake shows a rat.

“I . . . of course, my lord . . . that is . . .”

“Then you will recall the second provision of the Lord Chancellor’s amendment of 1652?”

Olaf licked his lips. Confusion was like cotton ticking filling his head.

“The provision against speculation, my lord?”

“Very good,” Lord Iron said. “It states that any cambist in the employ of the crown must complete a requested transfer between legal tenders issued by sovereign states within twenty-four hours or else face review of licensure.”

“My . . . my lord, that isn’t . . . I’ve been working here for years, sir . . .”

“And of course,” Lord Iron went on, his gaze implacable and cool, “assigning arbitrary value to a currency also requires a review, doesn’t it? And rest assured, my friend, that I am quite capable of determining the outcome of any such review.”

Olaf swallowed to loosen the tightness in his throat. His smile felt sickly.

“If I have done something to offend your lordship . . .”

“No,” Lord Iron said with something oddly like compassion in his eyes. “You were simply in the wrong place when I grew bored. Destroying you seemed diverting. I will be back at this time tomorrow. Good day, sir.”

Lord Iron turned and walked away. His entourage followed. When the last of them had stepped out the street doors, the silence that remained behind was profound as the grave. Olaf saw the eyes of the postal clerks on him and managed a wan smile. The great clock read twenty minutes past eleven. By noontime tomorrow, Olaf realized, it was quite possible he would no longer be a licensed cambist.

He closed his shutters early with a note tacked to the front that clients should knock on them if they were facing an emergency and otherwise return the next day. He pulled out the references of his trade—gazetteer, logs of fiscal reports, conversion tables. By midafternoon, he had discovered the location of the Independent Protectorate of Analdi-Wat, but nothing that would relate their system of convertible guilders to any known currency. Apparently the last known conversion had been into a system of cowry shells, and the numbers involved were absent.

The day waned, the light pouring into the postal authority warming and then fading to shadows. Olaf sent increasingly desperate messages to his fellow cambists at other postal authorities, to the librarians at the city’s central reference desk, to the office of the Lord Exchequer. It became clear as the bells tolled their increasing hours that no answer would come before morning. And indeed, no answer would come in time.

If Olaf delayed the exchange, his license could be suspended. If he invented some random value for the guilders, his license could be suspended. And there was no data from which to derive an appropriate equation.

Anger and despair warring in his belly, he closed his station; returned his books to their places, cleaned his slate, logged the few transactions he had made. His hand hovered for a moment over his strongbox.

Here were the funds from which he drew each day to meet the demands of his clientele. Pounds sterling, yen, rubles. He wondered, if he were to fill his pockets with the box’s present contents, how far he would get before he was caught. The romance of flight bloomed in his mind and died all in the space of a breath. He withdrew only the bright, venomous bills of the Independent Protectorate of Analdi-Wat, replacing them with a receipt. He locked the box with a steady hand, shrugged on his coat, and left.

Lord Iron, he decided as he walked slowly down the marble steps to the street, was evil. But he was also powerful, rich, and well-connected. There was little that a man like Olaf could do if a man of that stature took it as his whim to destroy him. If it had been the devil, he might at least have fallen back on prayer.

Olaf stopped at the newsstand, bought an evening paper and a tin of lemon mints, and trudged to the station across the street. Waiting on the platform, he listened to the underground trains hiss and squeal. He read his newspaper with the numb disinterest of a man to whom the worst has already happened. A missing child had been found alive in Stonemarket; the diary of a famous courtesan had sold at auction to an anonymous buyer and for a record price; the police had begun a policy of restricting access to the river quays in hopes of reducing accidental deaths by drowning. The cheap ink left more of a mark on his fingers than his mind.

At his boardinghouse, Olaf ate a perfunctory dinner at the common table, retired to his room, and tried in vain to lose himself in the pulp adventure tales. The presence of a killer among the members of the good Count Pendragon’s safari proved less than captivating, even if the virtuous Hanna Gable was in danger. Near midnight, Olaf turned out his light, pulled his thin wool blanket up over his head, and wondered what he would do when his position at the postal authority was terminated.

Two hours later, he woke with a shout. Still in his night clothes, he rushed out to the common room, digging through the pile of small kindling and newspaper that Mrs. Wells used to start her fires. When he found the evening newspaper, he read the article detailing the sale of the courtesan’s diary again. There was nothing in it that pertained directly to his situation, and yet his startling, triumphant yawp woke the house.

He arrived at work the next day later than usual, with bags dark as bruises under his eyes but a spring in his step. He went through his morning ritual rather hurriedly to make up for the time he had lost, but was well prepared when the street doors opened at eleven o’clock and Lord Iron and his gang of rank nobility slouched in. Olaf held his spine straight and breathed deeply to ease the trip-hammer of his heart.

Lord Iron stepped up to the window like an executioner to the noose. The woman on his arm this morning was fair-haired, but otherwise might have been the previous day’s twin. Olaf made a small, nervous bow to them both.

“Lord Iron,” he said.

Lord Iron’s expression was distant as the moon. Olaf wondered if perhaps his lordship had been drinking already this morning.

“Explain to me why you’ve failed.”

“Well, my lord, I don’t think I can do that. I have your money here. It comes to something less than ten pounds, I’m afraid. But that was all the market would bear.”

With trembling hand, Olaf slid an envelope across the desk. Lord Iron didn’t look down at it. Fury lit his eyes.

“The market? And pray what market is that?”

“The glass blower’s shop in Harrington Square, my lord. I have quotes from three other establishments nearby, and theirs was the best. I doubt you would find better anywhere.”

“What do they have to do with this?”

“Well, they were the ones who bought the guilders,” Olaf said, his voice higher and faster than he liked. He also ran on longer than he had strictly speaking intended. “I believe that they intend to use them as wrapping paper. For the more delicate pieces. As a novelty.”

Lord Iron’s face darkened.

“You sold my bills?” he growled.

Olaf had anticipated many possible reactions. Violence, anger, amusement. He had imagined a hundred objections that Lord Iron might bring to his actions. Base ignorance had not been one of them. Olaf’s surprise leant a steadiness to his voice.

“My lord, you sold them. To me. That’s what exchange is, sir. Currency is something bought and sold, just as plums or gas fixtures are. It’s what we do here.”

“I came to get pounds sterling for guilders, not sell wrapping paper!”

Olaf saw in that moment that Lord Iron genuinely didn’t understand. He pulled himself up, straightening his vest.

“Sir,” he said. “When a client comes to me with a hundred dollars and I turn him back with seventy pounds, I haven’t said some Latin phrase over them. There aren’t suddenly seventy more pounds in the world and a hundred fewer dollars. I buy the dollars. You came to sell your guilders to me. Very well. I have bought them.”

“As wrapping paper!”

“What does that matter?” Olaf snapped, surprising both Lord Iron and himself. “If I invest them in negotiable bonds in Analdi-Wat or burn them for kindling, it’s no business of yours. Someone was willing to buy them. From that, I can now quote you with authority what people are willing to pay. There is your exchange rate. And there is your money. Thank you for your business, and good day.”

“You made up the price,” Lord Iron said. “To place an arbitrary worth on—”

“Good God, man,” Olaf said. “Did you not hear me before? There’s nothing arbitrary about it. I went to several prospective buyers and took the best offered price. What can you possibly mean by ‘worth’ if not what you can purchase with it? Five shillings is worth a loaf of bread, or a cup of wine, or a cheaply bound book of poetry because that is what it will buy. Your tens of thousands of negotiable guilders will buy you nine pounds and seven shillings because that is what someone will pay. And there it is, in that envelope.”

Never before in his life had Olaf seen nobility agape at him. The coterie of Lord Iron stared at him as if he had belched fire and farted brimstone. The fair-haired woman stepped back, freeing his lordship’s sword arm.

I have gone too far, Olaf thought. He will kill me.

Lord Iron was silent for a long moment while the world seemed to rotate around him. Then he chuckled.

“The measure of a thing’s worth is what you can purchase with it,” he said as if tasting the words, then turned to the fair-haired woman. “I think he’s talking about you, Marjorie.”

The woman’s cheeks flushed scarlet. Lord Iron leaned against the sill of Olaf’s little, barred window and gestured Olaf closer. Against his best judgment, Olaf leaned in.

“You have a strange way of looking at things,” Lord Iron said. There were fumes on his breath. Absinthe, Olaf guessed. “To hear you speak, the baker buys my five shillings with his bread.”

“And how is that wrong, my lord?” the cambist asked.

“And then the wineseller buys the coins from him with a glass of wine. So why not buy the bread with the wine? If they’re worth the same?”

“You could, my lord,” Olaf said. “You can express anything in terms of anything else, my lord. How many lemon tarts is a horse worth? How many newspapers equate to a good dinner? It isn’t harder to determine than some number of rubles for another number of yen, if you know the trick of it.”

Lord Iron smiled again. The almost sleepy expression returned to his eyes. He nodded.

“Wrapping paper,” he said. “You have amused me, little man, and I didn’t think that could be done any longer. I accept your trade.”

And with that, Lord Iron swept the envelope into his pocket, turned, and marched unsteadily out of the postal authority and into the noon light of Magdalen Gate. After the street doors were closed, there was a pause long as three breaths together and then one of the postal clerks began to clap.

A moment later, the staff of the postal authority had filled the vaults of their chambers with applause. Olaf, knees suddenly weak, bowed carefully, closed the shutters of his window, and made his way back to the men’s privacy room where he emptied his breakfast into the toilet and then sat on the cool tile floor laughing until tears streamed from his eyes.

He had faced down Lord Iron and escaped with his career intact. It was, no doubt, the greatest adventure of his life. Nothing he had done before could match it, and he could imagine nothing in the future that would surpass it.

And nothing did, as it turned out, for almost six and a half months.

It was a cold, clear February, and the stars had come out long before Olaf had left the Magdalen Gate authority. All during the ride on the underground train, Olaf dreamed of a warm pot of tea, a small fire, and the conclusion of the latest novel. Atherton Crane was on the verge of exposing the plot of the vicious Junwang Ko, but didn’t yet know that Kelly O’Callahan was in the villain’s clutches. It promised to be a pleasant evening.

He knew as soon as he stepped into the boarding house that something was wrong. The other boarders, sitting around the common table, went silent as he shrugged out of his coat and plucked off his hat. They pointedly did not look at him as Mrs. Wells, her wide, friendly face pale as uncooked dough, crossed the room to meet him.

“There’s a message for you, Mr. Neddelsohn,” she said. “A man came and left it for you. Very particular.”

“Who was he?” Olaf asked, suspicion blooming in his heart more from her affect than from any guilt on his conscience.

“Don’t know,” Mrs. Wells said, wringing her hands in distress, “but he looked . . . well, here it is, Mr. Neddelsohn. This is the letter he left for you.”

The envelope she thrust into his hand was the color of buttercream, smooth as linen, and thick. The coat of arms embossed upon it was Lord Iron’s. Olaf started at the thing as if she’d handed him a viper.

Mrs. Wells simpered her apology as he broke the wax seal and drew out a single sheet of paper. It was written in an erratic but legible hand.

Mr. Neddelsohn—

I find I have need of you to settle a wager. You will bring yourself to the Club Baphomet immediately upon receipt of this note. I will, of course, recompense you for your troubles.

The note was not signed, but Olaf had no doubt of its authorship. Without a word, he pulled his jacket back on, returned his hat to his head, and stepped out to hail a carriage. From the street, he could see the faces of Mrs. Wells and his fellow boarders at the window.

The Club Baphomet squatted in the uncertain territory between the tenements and beer halls of Stonemarket and the mansions and ballrooms of Granite Hill. The glimmers behind its windows did little to illuminate the street, perhaps by design. From the tales Olaf had heard, there might well be members of the club who would prefer not to be seen entering or leaving its grounds. The service entrance was in a mud-paved alley stinking of piss and old food, but it opened quickly to his knock. He was bundled inside and escorted to a private sitting room where, it seemed, he was expected.

Of the five men who occupied the room, Olaf recognized only Lord Iron. The months had not been kind; Lord Iron had grown thinner, his eyes wilder, and a deep crimson cut was only half healed on his cheek. The other four were dressed in fashion similar to Lord Iron—well-razored hair, dark coats of the finest wool, watch chains of gold. The eldest of them seemed vaguely familiar.

Lord Iron rose and held his hand out toward Olaf, not as if to greet him but rather to display him like a carnival barker presenting a three-headed calf.

“Gentlemen,” Lord Iron intoned. “This is the cambist I mentioned to you. I propose that he be my champion in this matter.”

Olaf felt the rictus grin on his face, the idiot bobbing of his head as he made small bows to the four assembled gentlemen. He was humiliated, but could no more stop himself than a puppy could keep from showing its belly to beg the mercy of wolves.

One of the four—a younger man with gold hair and ice-blue eyes—stepped forward with a smile. Olaf nodded to him for what must have been the fifth time.

“I am Simon Cole,” the gold-haired man said. “Lord Eichan, to my enemies.”

At this, Lord Iron raised a hand, as if to identify himself as one such enemy. The other three men chuckled, and Lord Eichan smiled as well before continuing.

“Our mutual acquaintance, Lord Iron, has made a suggestion I find somewhat unlikely, and we have made a wager of it. He is of the opinion that the value of anything can be expressed in terms of any other valuable thing. I think his example was the cost of a horse in lemon mints.”

“Yes, my lord,” Olaf said.

“Ah, you agree then,” Lord Eichan said. “That’s good. I was afraid our little Edmund had come up with his thesis in a drug-soaked haze.”

“We’ve made the agreement,” Lord Iron said pleasantly. “Simon, Satan’s catamite that he is, will set the two things to be compared. I, meaning of course you, will have a week to determine their relative worth. These three bastards will judge the answer.”

“I see,” Olaf said.

“Excellent,” Lord Iron said, slapping him on the back and leading him to a chair upholstered in rich leather. It wasn’t until Olaf had descended into the chair’s depths that he realized he had just agreed to this mad scheme. Lord Eichan had taken a seat opposite him and was thoughtfully lighting a pipe.

“I think I should say,” Olaf began, casting his mind about wildly for some way to remove himself from the room without offending either party. “That is, I don’t wish that . . . ah . . .”

Lord Eichan nodded as if Olaf had made some cogent point, then shaking his match until the flame died, turned to face Olaf directly.

“I would like to know the value of a day in the life of His Majesty, King Walther,” Lord Eichan said. “And I would like that value described in days of life of an inmate in the crown’s prison.”

“A day in the life of the king expressed in days of a prisoner’s life?”

“Certainly you must agree that life is valuable,” Lord Eichan said. “You wouldn’t lightly part with your own.”

“Well, certainly—”

“And you can’t suggest that the king is the same as a bread thief.”

“No, I wouldn’t—”

“Well, then,” Lord Eichan said. “It’s settled.”

“Come along, my boy,” Lord Iron said, clapping Olaf on the shoulder. “I’ll see you out.”

“One week!” Lord Eichan said as Olaf and Lord Iron stepped from the room and into the corridor. Lord Iron was smiling; Olaf was not.

“My lord,” Olaf said. “This is . . . I’m not sure I know how to go about something like this.”

“That’s why I got you a week to do it in,” Lord Iron said. “The rat-licker wanted to limit it to three days.”

“I don’t know for a certainty that I can accommodate you, my lord,” Olaf said.

“Do your best,” Lord Iron said. “If we lose, Simon, Lord Eichan is going to kill me. Well, and you, for that.”

Olaf stopped dead. Lord Iron took another few steps before pausing and looking back.

“He’s what?”

“Going to kill us,” Lord Iron said. “And take five hundred pounds I’ve set aside in earnest as well. If we win, I’ll kill him and bed his sister.”

Olaf, unthinking, murmured an obscenity. Lord Iron grinned and pulled him along the dim corridor toward the back of the club.

“Well, you needn’t bed his sister if you don’t care to. Just do your best, boy. And be back here in a week.”

With that, Lord Iron stepped Olaf out the door and into the cold, bleak alley. It wasn’t until the door had closed behind him that Olaf realized Lord Iron hadn’t recompensed him for the carriage ride.

In the morning, the whole affair had the air of a bad dream. Olaf made his way to Magdalen Gate as he always did, checked the ticker tape, updated his slate. What was the value of life, he wondered. And how was one life best to be measured against another.

And, behind it all, the growing certainty that Lord Eichan would indeed kill him if he couldn’t find an acceptable answer.

Twice before noon, Olaf found he had made errors in his accounting. After bolting down the snowy street after a woman who had left with ten pounds fewer than she deserved, Olaf gave up. He wrote a note claiming illness, pinned it to his shuttered window, and left. He paused at the tobacconist to buy a pouch and papers.

In his room at the boarding house, Olaf sketched out every tack he could think of to address the issue. The most obvious was to determine how much money the state spent to keep His Majesty and how much to run the prisons. But objections to that arose almost immediately; was that a measure of the worth of life or of operational expenses appropriate to each career? He considered the relative costs of physician’s care for king and prisoner, but this again was not a concern precisely of life, but health. Twenty years coughing and twenty years free from illness were still twenty years.

For three days, he ate little and slept less. He ventured out to the library to search among the stacks of books and periodicals for inspiration. He found nothing on which he would have been willing to stake his life. Lord Iron had done that for him.

On the morning of the fourth day he rolled the last pinch of tobacco into the last paper, wet it, rolled it, and sat on his bed unable to bring himself to the effort of lighting the thing. Despair had descended upon him. He saw the next three days stretching before him in a long, slow sleep.

It was how he imagined the prisoners felt who had so occupied his thoughts. But he, at least, could go out for more tobacco. And beer. And good, bloody beefsteak. If he was to live like a prisoner, he might at least eat like a king. It wasn’t as if he’d give himself gout in three days’ time, no matter how richly he ate or overmuch he drank.

Something stirred at the back of his mind, and he found himself grinning even before he knew why.

All that day and the two after it he spent in a whirl of activity, his despair forgotten. He visited physicians and the budget office, the office of the prison warden and the newspaperman who most reported on the activities of the king. The last day, he locked himself in his rooms with an abacus, a stub of pencil, and sheaves of paper.

When he came to the final accounting, his heart sank. He went through his figures again, certain that somewhere in the complexity of his argument, he had made an error. But the numbers tallied, and as little as he liked it, there was no more time. Putting on his best coat, he prepared the argument in his mind. Then, papers tucked under his arm, he went out past his silent fellow boarders and the stricken countenance of Mrs. Wells, down to the wintery street, and hailed a carriage to carry him back to Club Baphomet.

The furniture of the sitting room had been rearranged. A single table now dominated the space, with five chairs all along one side like an examiner’s panel. The three judges sat in the middle with Simon, Lord Eichan on the left and Lord Iron on the right. Lord Eichan looked somewhat amused, but there was a nervousness in his movement with which Olaf identified. Lord Iron looked as relaxed as a man stepping out of a sauna; the wound on his face was visibly more healed. Glasses of wine sat before each man, and cigars rested in onyx ashtrays when the gentlemen of the club weren’t making better use of them.

A straight-backed wooden chair faced them, a small student desk at its side. Olaf sat and arranged his papers. The eldest of the judges leaned forward and with a smile more at home on the lips of a procurer spoke.

“You may proceed, sir.”

Olaf nodded his thanks.

“I will need to do just a bit of groundwork before I present my analysis,” he said. “I hope you would all agree that a man who decries embezzlement and also diverts money into his private accounts is not actually opposed to the theft?”

The judges looked at one another in amusement.

“Or, similarly,” Olaf went on, “a woman who claims to embody chastity and yet beds all comers is not, in point of fact, chaste?”

“I think even Lord Eichan will have to allow those to stand,” the eldest judge said. “Your point?”

“My point, sirs, is that we judge people not by what they claim, but what they do. Public declarations of sentiment are not a fit judge of true character.”

“You are preaching,” the youngest of the judges drawled, “to the choir. There is no group in the nation more adept at saying one thing and doing another.”

Olaf smiled awkwardly.

“Just so,” he said. “I will move forward. I have come to the determination, after careful consideration, that a day in the life of His Majesty the King equates to nineteen and three-quarter hours of a prisoner of the crown.”

There was a moment’s silence. Simon, Lord Eichan blinked and an incredulous smile began to work its way onto his countenance. Lord Iron sat forward, his expression unreadable. One of the judges who had not yet spoken took a meditative puff on his cigar.

“I was never particularly good at sums,” the man said in an unsettlingly feminine voice, “but it seems to me that you’ve just said a prisoner’s life is more valuable than that of the king?”

“Yes,” Olaf said, his belly heavy as if he’d drunk a tankard of lead. The eldest judge glanced at Lord Iron with a pitying expression.

“Let me also make some few observations,” Olaf said, fighting to keep the desperation from his voice. “I have met with several physicians in the last few days. I am sorry to report that overindulging in strong liquor is thought by the medical establishment to reduce life expectancy by as much as five years. A habit of eating rich foods may reduce a man’s span on the earth by another three to four years. A sedentary lifestyle by as much as eight. Indulging in chocolate and coffee can unbalance the blood, and remove as many as three years of life.”

“You have now ceased to preach to the choir,” said Lord Eichan. And indeed, the judges had grown more somber. Olaf raised a hand, begging their patience.

“I have used these medical data as well as the reports of the warden of Chappell Hill Prison and the last two years of His Majesty’s reported activities in the newspapers. I beg you to consider. A prisoner of the crown is kept on a simple diet and subjected to a mandatory exercise period each day. No spirits of any kind are permitted him. No luxuries such as coffee or chocolate. By comparison . . .”

Olaf fumbled with the sheaves of papers, searching for the form he had created. The eldest judge cleared his throat.

“By comparison,” Olaf continued, “in the last two years, His Majesty has taken vigorous exercise only one day in seven. Has eaten at banquet daily, including the richest of dishes. He regularly drinks both coffee and chocolate, often together in the French style.”

“This is ridiculous,” Lord Eichan said. “His Majesty has the finest physicians in the world at his command. His life is better safeguarded than any man’s in the realm.”

“No, sir,” Olaf said, his voice taking on a certainty that he was beginning to genuinely feel. “We say that it is, much as the embezzler claims honesty and the wanton claims virtue. I present to you the actions, as we agreed. And I would point out that His Majesty’s excesses are subject only to his personal whim. If he wished, he could drink himself insensible each morning, eat nothing but butterfat and lard, and never move from his seat. He could drink half a tun of coffee and play games with raw gunpowder. Unlike a prisoner, there is no enforcement of behavior that could rein him in. I have, if anything, taken a conservative measure in reaching my conclusions.”

A glimmer of amusement shone in Lord Iron’s eyes, but his face remained otherwise frozen. Simon, Lord Eichan was fidgeting with his cigar. The eldest judge sucked his teeth audibly and shook his head.

“And yet prisoners do not, I think, have a greater lifespan than monarchs,” he said.

“It is impossible to say,” Olaf said. “For many criminals and poor men, the time spent in the care of the crown can be when they are safest, best overseen, best clothed, best fed. I would, however, point out that His Majesty’s father left us at the age of sixty-seven, and the oldest man in the care of the crown is . . .”

Olaf paused, finding the name.

“The oldest man in the care of the crown is David Bennet, aged eighty. Incarcerated when he was sixteen for killing his brother.”

He spread his hands.

“Your argument seems sound,” the eldest judge said, “but your conclusion is ridiculous. I cannot believe that the king is of lesser value than a prisoner. I am afraid I remain unconvinced. What say you, gentlemen?”

But before the other two judges could answer Olaf rose to his feet.

“With all respect, sir, the question was not the value of the king or the prisoner, but of the days of their respective lives. I was not asked to judge their pleasures or their health insofar as their discomforts are less than mortal.”

The effeminate judge lifted his chin. There was a livid scar across his neck where, Olaf imagined from his knowledge of men’s adventure, a garrote might have cut. But it was Simon, Lord Eichan who spoke.

“How is it that a king can be more valuable than a prisoner, but his days be less? It makes no sense at all!”

“There are other things which His Majesty has,” Olaf said. He had warmed to his topic now, and the fact that his own life hung in the balance was all but forgotten. “A prisoner must take his exercise; a king has the power to refuse. A prisoner may wish dearly for a rich meal or a great glass of brandy, but since he cannot have them, he cannot exchange pleasure for . . . well, for some duration of life.”

“This is a waste of—”

“Be quiet,” the eldest judge said. “Let the man have his say.”

“But—”

“Don’t make me repeat myself, Simon.”

Lord Eichan leaned back sneering and gripping his wine glass until his knuckles were white.

“It’s a choice every man in this room has made,” Olaf went on, raising his arm like a priest delivering a homily. “You might all live as ascetics and survive years longer. But like the king, you choose to make a rational exchange of some span of your life for the pleasure of living as you please. A prisoner is barred from that exchange, and so I submit a greater value is placed on his life precisely to the degree that strictures are placed on his pleasure and his exercise of power.

“Gentlemen, ask yourselves this: If I had two sons and saw that one of them kept from drink and gluttony while letting the other run riot, which of them would you say I valued? The prodigal might have more pleasure. Certainly the king has more pleasure than an inmate. But pleasure and power are not life.”

“Amen,” said Lord Iron. It was the first time he had spoken since Olaf had entered. The silence that followed this declaration was broken only by the hissing of the fire in the grate and rush of blood in Olaf’s ears.

“Your reports were accurate, Lord Iron,” the drawling judge said. “Your pet cambist is quite amusing.”

“Perhaps it would be best if you gave us a moment to discuss your points,” the eldest judge said. “If you would be so kind as to step out to the antechamber? Yes. Thank you.”

With the blackwood door closed behind him, Olaf’s fear returned. He was in the Club Baphomet with his survival linked to Lord Iron’s, and only an argument that seemed less and less tenable with each passing minute to protect him. But he had made his throw. His only other hope now was mad flight, and the door to the corridor was locked. He tried it.

What felt like hours passed, though the grandfather clock ticking away in the corner reported only a quarter-hour. A pistol barked twice, and a moment later Lord Iron strode into the room. The door swung shut behind him before Olaf could make sense of the bloody scene. His gorge rose.

“Well done, boy,” Lord Iron said, dropping something heavy into Olaf’s lap. “I’ll have you taken home in my personal carriage. I have Lord Eichan’s sister to console this evening, and I won’t be needing horses to do it. And I thought you should know: it wasn’t unanimous. If His Majesty hadn’t taken your side, I think we might not have won the day.”

“His Majesty?”

Olaf’s mind reeled. The face of the eldest judge resolved itself suddenly into the portrait he kept at his desk.

“You did well, boy,” Lord Iron said. “Your country thanks you.”

Without another word, Lord Iron unlocked the door, stepped out to the corridor, and was gone. Olaf looked down. A packet of bills squatted in his lap. Five hundred pounds at a guess, and blood smeared on the topmost bill.

He swore to himself in that moment that he would never answer another summons from Lord Iron, whatever the consequences. And, indeed, when the hour arrived, it was Lord Iron who came to him.

The weeks and months that followed were if anything richer in their tales of Lord Iron. While traveling in the Orient, he had forced a barkeep who had fallen into debt to choose between cutting off one of his infant daughter’s toes or three of his own fingers in lieu of payment. He had seduced six nuns in Rome, leaving two of them with child. He had ridden an ostrich down the streets of Cairo naked at midnight. Of the untimely death of Lord Eichan there was no word, but apart from removing the portrait of the king from his desk, Olaf took no action. The less he personally figured into the debaucheries of Lord Iron, the better pleased he was.

Instead, Olaf plunged more deeply than ever into his work, his routine, and the harmless escapism of his men’s adventure novels. But for the first time in memory, the perils of the heroines seemed contrived and weak; the masculine bravery of the heroes seemed overstated, like a boy who blusters and puffs out his chest when walking through the graveyard at dusk.

Clifford Knightly wrestled an alligator on the banks of the great Nile. Lord Morrow foiled the evil Chaplain Grut’s plan to foul the waters of London. Emily Chastain fell gratefully into the mighty arms of the noble savage Maker-of-Justice. And Olaf found himself wondering what these great men would have done at Club Baphomet. Wrested the gun from Lord Iron? From Simon, Lord Eichan? Sternly spoken of God and truth and righteousness? Olaf doubted it would have had any great effect.

Winter passed into spring. Spring ripened to summer. Slowly, Olaf’s discontent, like the nightmares from which he woke himself shouting, lessened. For weeks on end, he could forget what he had been part of. Many men who came to his window at the postal authority had traveled widely. Many had tales to tell of near misses: a runaway carriage that had come within a pace of running them down in the streets of Prague, a fever which had threatened to carry them away in Bombay, the hiss of an Afghan musket ball passing close to their head. Olaf had tales of his own now, if he ever chose to share them. That was all.

And still, when autumn with its golden leaves and fog and chill rain also brought Lord Iron back into his life, Olaf was not surprised.

It was a Tuesday night in September. Olaf had spent his customary hours at the Magdalen Gate postal authority, come back to his boarding house, and eaten alone in his room. The evening air was cool but not biting, and he had propped his window open before sitting down to read. When he woke, he thought for a long, bleary moment that the cold night breeze had woken him. Then the knock at his door repeated itself.

His blanket wrapped around his shoulder, Olaf answered the door. Lord Iron stood in the hall. He looked powerfully out of place. His fine jacket and cravat, the polished boots, the well-groomed beard and moustache all belonged in a palace or club. And yet, rather than making the boarding house hall seem shabby and below him, the hallway made Lord Iron, monster of the city, seem false as a boy playing dress-up. Olaf nodded as if he’d been expecting the man.

“I have need of you,” Lord Iron said.

“Have I the option of refusal?”

Lord Iron smiled, and Olaf took it as the answer to his question. He stepped back and let the man come through. Lord Iron sat on the edge of the bed while Olaf closed his window, drew up his chair, and sat. In the light from Olaf’s reading lamp, Lord Iron’s skin seemed waxen and pale. His voice, when he spoke, was distant as a man shouting from across a square.

“There is a question plaguing me,” Lord Iron said. “You are the only man I can think of who might answer it.”

“Is there a life at stake?” Olaf asked.

“No,” Lord Iron said. “Nothing so petty as that.”

When Olaf failed to respond, Lord Iron, born Edmund Scarasso, looked up at him. There was a terrible weariness in his eyes.

“I would know the fair price for a man’s soul,” he said.

“Forgive me?” Olaf said.

“You heard me,” Lord Iron said. “What would be a fit trade for a soul? I . . . I can’t tell any longer. And it is a question whose answer has . . . some relevance to my situation.”

In an instant, Olaf’s mind conjured the sitting room at the Club Baphomet. Lord Iron sitting in one deep leather chair, and the Prince of Lies across from him with a snifter of brandy in his black, clawed hands.

“I don’t think that would be a wise course to follow,” Olaf said, though in truth his mind was spinning out ways to avoid being party to this diabolism. He did not wish to make a case before that infernal judge. Lord Iron smiled and shook his head.

“There is no one in this besides yourself and me,” he said. “You are an expert in the exchange of exotic currencies. I can think of none more curious than this. Come to my house on Mammon Street in a month’s time. Tell me what conclusion you have reached.”

“My Lord—”

“I will make good on the investment of your time,” Lord Iron said, then rose and walked out, leaving the door open behind him.

Olaf gaped at the empty room. He was a cambist. Of theology, he knew only what he had heard in church. He had read more of satanic contracts in his adventure novels than in the Bible. He was, in fact, not wholly certain that the Bible had an example of a completed exchange. Satan had tempted Jesus. Perhaps there was something to be taken from the Gospel of Matthew . . .

Olaf spent the remainder of the night poring over his Bible and considering what monetary value might be assigned to the ability to change stones to bread. But as the dawn broke and he turned to his morning ablutions, he found himself unsatisfied. The devil might have tempted Christ with all the kingdoms of the world, but it was obvious that such an offer wouldn’t be open to everyone. He was approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

As he rode through the deep tunnels to Magdalen Gate, as he stopped at the newsstand for a morning paper, as he checked the ticker tape and updated his slate, his mind occupied itself by sifting through all the stories and folk wisdom he had ever heard. There had been a man who traded his soul to the devil for fame and wealth. Faust had done it for knowledge. Was there a way to represent the learning of Faust in terms of, say, semesters at the best universities of Europe? Then the rates of tuition might serve as a fingerhold.

It was nearly the day’s end before the question occurred to him that put Lord Iron’s commission in its proper light, and once that had happened, the answer was obvious. Olaf had to sit down, his mind afire with the answer and its implications. He didn’t go home, but took himself to a small public house. Over a pint and a stale sandwich, he mentally tested his hypothesis. With the second pint, he celebrated. With the third, he steeled himself, then went out to the street and hailed a carriage to take him to the house of Lord Iron.

Revelers had infected the household like fleas on a dying rat. Masked men and women shrieked with laughter, not all of which bespoke mirth. No servant came to take his coat or ask his invitation, so Olaf made his own way through the great halls. He passed through the whole of the building before emerging from the back and finding Lord Iron himself sitting at a fountain in the gardens. His lordship’s eyebrows rose to see Olaf, but he did not seem displeased.

“So soon, boy? It isn’t a month,” Lord Iron said as Olaf sat on the cool stone rail. The moon high above the city seemed also to dance in the water, lighting Lord Iron’s face from below and above at once.

“There was no need,” Olaf said. “I have your answer. But I will have to make something clear before I deliver it. If you will permit me?”

Lord Iron opened his hand in motion of deference. Olaf cleared his throat.

“Wealth,” he said, “is not a measure of money. It is a measure of well-being. Of happiness, if you will. Wealth is not traded, but rather is generated by trade. If you have a piece of art that I wish to own and I have money that you would prefer to the artwork, we trade. Each of us has something he prefers to the thing he gave away; otherwise, we would not have agreed on the trade. We are both better off. You see? Wealth is generated.”

“I believe I can follow you so far,” Lord Iron said. “Certainly I can agree that a fat wallet is no guarantor of contentment.”

“Very well. I considered your problem for the better part of the day. I confess I came near to despairing; there is no good data from which to work. But then I found my error. I assumed that your soul, my lord, was valuable. Clearly it is not.”

Lord Iron coughed out something akin to a laugh, shock in his expression. Olaf raised a hand, palm out, asking that he not interrupt.

“You are renowned for your practice of evil. This very evening, walking through your house, I have seen things for which I can imagine no proper penance. Why would Satan bother to buy your soul? He has rights to it already.”

“He does,” Lord Iron said, staring into the middle distance.

“And so I saw,” Olaf said. “You aren’t seeking to sell a soul. You are hoping to buy one.”

Lord Iron sighed and looked at his hands. He seemed smaller now. Not a supernatural being, but a man driven by human fears and passions to acts that could only goad him on to worse and worse actions. A man like any other, but with the wealth to magnify his errors into the scale of legend.

“You are correct, boy,” he said. “The angels wouldn’t have my soul if I drenched it in honey. I have . . . treated it poorly. It’s left me weary and sick. I am a waste of flesh. I know that. If there is no way to become a better man than this, I suspect the best path is to become a corpse.”

“I understand, my lord. Here is the answer to your question: The price of a soul is a life of humility and service.”

“Ah, is that all,” Lord Iron said, as if the cambist had suggested that he pull down the stars with his fingers.

“And as it happens,” Olaf went on, “I have one such with which I would be willing to part.”

Lord Iron met his gaze, began to laugh, and then went silent.

“Here,” Olaf said, “is what I propose . . .”

Edmund, the new cambist of the Magdalen Gate postal authority was, by all accounts, an adequate replacement for Olaf. Not as good, certainly. But his close-cropped hair and clean-shaven face leant him an eagerness that belonged on a younger man, and if he seemed sometimes more haughty than his position justified, it was a vice that lessened with every passing month. By Easter, he had even been asked to join in the Sunday picnic the girls in the accounting office sponsored. He seemed genuinely moved at the invitation.

The great scandal of the season was the disappearance of Lord Iron. The great beast of the city simply vanished one night. Rumor said that he had left his fortune and lands in trust. The identity of the trustee was a subject of tremendous speculation.

Olaf himself spent several months simply taking stock of his newfound position in the world. Once the financial situation was put in better order, he found himself with a substantial yearly allowance that still responsibly protected the initial capital.

He spent his monies traveling to India, Egypt, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the unworldly underground cities of Persia. He saw the sun set off the Gold Coast and rise from the waters east of Japan. He heard war songs in the jungles of the Congo and sang children’s lullabies in a lonely tent made from yak skin in the dark of a Siberian winter.

And, when he paused to recover from the rigors and dangers of travel, he would retire to a cottage north of the city—the least of his holdings—and spend his time writing men’s adventure novels set in the places he had been.

He named his protagonist Lord Iron.

© 2007 by Daniel Abraham.

Originally published in Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories, edited by John Klima.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Daniel Abraham (www.danielabraham.com) has published sixteen novels and almost three dozen short stories. He is also adapting George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones into graphic novels. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, and has won the International Horror Guild award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James SA Corey. He lives in New Mexico.

With Tales in Their Teeth, From the Mountain They Came
A.C. Wise

She woke with the words I love you on her tongue, speaking them aloud to an empty room.

They tasted of smoke and ash drifting over a far-distant, muddy field. The War that had taken her lover had lost him. She knew he was dead, because she’d never spoken the words aloud before.

He’d whispered them in her ear countless times—lying side-by-side in the furrows of their sheets, offered on summer days, spoken in the midst of roof-drumming rainstorms keeping her from her dreams. She’d smiled in return, meaning to answer every time. But she found her teeth locked, her lips stitched closed. He would squeeze her hand, echo her smile with sad patience, and say, Some day. When you’re ready.

Ten years passed in a single, conjoined heartbeat. Then news came from beyond the Mountain. The papers were full of men and women dying in rain-battered fields. Her lover read them, and every day carved deeper lines around his mouth, and between his eyes.

Over breakfasts of buttered toast, his untouched, he read to her of mud-spattered corpses, of bright poppies trampled beneath heavy-soled boots, and children crushed the same way, until their skin no longer hid their bones. He read of mass graves, of torture, and atrocities, and leaving grew in his eyes. When she wanted to ask him to stay, fear once more stitched her lips closed.

She held him as long as she could in their house by the sea. But hands pressed to his skin, and stubborn lips and teeth refusing to shape words, could only hold him so long. His love was vast; it encompassed strangers, dying in fields he’d never seen. He went to War. Her love was small, and encompassed only him. She stayed behind.

I love you.

Now she could say the words until her throat bled with them; he would never hear.

Moonlight streamed through the window, illuminating soft-rumpled sheets. She wrapped arms around her body, surveying furniture and knick-knacks that would never mean as much, absent of his hands. She retraced his footsteps; she fit the whorls of her fingertips into the ghost of his touch.

There was nothing to hold her here anymore. No hands pressed to her skin, no words waited to be spoken.

She packed, and left at dawn. The absence of words had lost him, but there was a place she’d heard of in tales where she could drown herself in them. Abandoning the house by the sea, she set out for the Library on the Mountain.

The Librarians shaved her head. They called her Acolyte. They gave her a new name, Alba, which they told her meant dawn. And they assigned her the duty of dusting and caring for the books in the Main Hall.

She never saw the Librarians, only their shapes, buried in deep-hooded robes the color of the sky just before sunrise. They wrote words on slips of paper, and dropped them into her hands. Their instructions given, the Librarians hid their fingers in their voluminous sleeves again, and turned away.

“Wait!” Alba called after them.

The word echoed, vast and terrible, shocking the Library’s silence. She put a hand over her mouth, expecting a hood to drop, baleful eyes to fix her, and a hand to point her back the way she’d come. Instead, a single finger emerged, brief, thin, and pressed to invisible lips inside a hood.

“Shh.”

Footsteps made arcane patterns in the dust. The Librarians withdrew, leaving her alone.

Alba memorized the Librarians’ slips of paper—directions to the Main Hall, to a small cell she could call her own, to the Refectory where Acolytes and Novices took their meals. There were other scraps, telling her where she could and could not go. Acolytes were not allowed beyond the Main Hall, the Primary Stacks, and the First Archives. The Reading Rooms, the Second Archives, the Restricted Section, and the Vaults, were for Novices, Apprentices, and Librarians alone.

“Why?” Alba asked her neighbor at one meal.

The dour man, his skin the color of his porridge, glared at her with sunken eyes. He snatched his bowl, and scuttled away, as though Alba’s single word bore the seeds of a plague to infect the Library’s stillness and bring it crashing down. After that meal, Alba never saw him again.

Alba tried to be content with what she was allowed; after all, it wasn’t without wonder. The Main Hall was vast, filled with floor to ceiling shelves, wooden leviathans lit by tall, narrow windows. They held volumes, packed tight, their spines of every color and texture—cloth-bound, leather-bound, and clapped between boards of thin wood tied with rough twine.

Alba dusted, striving to lose herself in repetitive motion, telling herself it was everything she could desire. Still, when she paused to wipe sweat from her brow, she would remember the particular scent of her lover, like sharp spice and incense. She would feel his shirt—heat-damp from a day in the garden—as he put his arms around her. When she ran a hand over the stubble of her hair, she would remember the back of his neck, fresh from a haircut. Once, when she bit her tongue, she remembered the way his would flick out between his teeth at the beginning of a laugh.

Ten years, and never once, and always, always, his patient response: When you’re ready.

She counted books, making her own patterns regardless of the Librarians’ arcane system. She used dust to stop tears. Trailing her fingers across the alternating textures and shades, Alba came to know the books, her books—calf-skin green from linen mauve. Day in and day out, she greeted them as old friends.

And for a while, Alba was content. Until one of her books went missing.

Perhaps she’d miscounted? But, no, more books disappeared each day. The loss tugged at her. She’d come here to sate herself on words, and now they piled up behind her teeth, question on question. This last, the question of where her books had gone, broke the dam.

At the long Refectory tables, scattered with multi-hued light from the stained glass windows, Alba leaned close to the nearest Acolyte. “Have you noticed books missing?”

After so long in silence, the words scraped her throat, but it was a relief to speak. Not even the horror in her dining companion’s eyes could make her regret it.

“No.” The Acolyte pressed his lips tight, returning to his porridge to contemplate the transit of his spoon around the circumference of his bowl.

“Who understands Librarians?” Another Acolyte said; it was the longest reply Alba received.

Mostly the Acolytes and Novices cast their eyes down, and pretended they hadn’t heard. Frustrated, Alba pushed away from the table, leaving her meal half-finished. She glared at the assembled Novices and Acolytes. Didn’t they understand War raged on the other side of the Mountain? Hadn’t they lost loved ones, too?

She wanted to shout, wanted to shake the Library’s foundations, and felt a hypocrite for even thinking it. What right did she have to call words to her defense now? Alba turned on her heel, and stalked away. At the Refectory door, a woman, a Novice by the particular gray of her robe—smoke, rather than dust, as Alba’s, or pre-dawn light, as the Librarians—stopped her.

The Novice’s fingers touched the bones of Alba’s wrist just below her sleeve. Her lips emitted the barest whisper.

Alba leaned close, “What?”

The Novices had perfected the trick of not moving their lips when they spoke. The Apprentices, as Alba understood it, were worse, with a system of Morse code tapped on errant desks and shelves, mouse-foot soft. The Librarians had their scrolls.

“What?” she said again.

She spoke louder this time, reveling in the sound, and the pained look it drew from the Novice’s face. She knew the price of silence, and they would, too.

“Come.” The Novice jerked her head, a frightened fish, startled by a diver cutting the deep.

The Novice’s fingers withdrew from Alba’s skin, and Alba regretted the harshness of her word. The Novice tucked her hands into her sleeves, making a seamless continuum of smoke-gray cloth. She led Alba past the First Archives and the Primary Stacks.

At a plain, wooden door, the Novice put a finger to her lips. Alba’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth; she couldn’t have spoken if she had wanted to. The door opened on a garden.

In the middle of winter Mountains, no snow touched delicate branches heavy with blossom and slick, green leaves. Birds, jewel-bright, stitched the air above the courtyard, silent as the rest of the Library. The air smelled of honey-suckle.

“One day, the Library will burn,” the Novice said.

Her voice was hoarse, as though she hadn’t used it in years. She caught Alba’s hands, a touch in place of a plea, and closed her lips tight over her teeth. Alba looked at the long fingers holding hers, and the wrists, almost visible beneath the sleeves. The Novice snatched her hands back, hiding them in smoke-gray again.

“I don’t understand,” Alba said.

“The Library. It will burn. The Library always burns.”

With a tilt of her head, the Novice indicated a bench. They sat.

“Can I trust you?” The Novice glanced at Alba side-wise.

Like a thaw, Alba heard the melt in the Novice’s voice. How many years of silence had she borne? Alba’s pulse thudded, the beat of her heart reaching toward this woman, so afraid of words.

“Don’t you want to know my name, first?” Alba tried a smile.

“Eleuthere,” the Novice said.

“Alba.” Alba touched the Novice’s hand, warm skin against warm skin.

“You asked about the books,” Eleuthere said.

She ducked when she spoke. It was more than fear of words. The Novice hid her hands, and kept her lips over her teeth, everything about her careful. It wasn’t the care of fear, though; it was the care of a woman holding eggshells in her hands, not wanting to break them.

“The Librarians steal the books to save them.” Eleuthere raised her sleeve. Black text, tiny and dense, crowded her skin up to her elbow.

“I found out what the Librarians were doing, and asked them to use me. I wasn’t supposed to tell.”

Alba touched a finger to the words. They shivered, a tiny storm beneath her touch.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The Fifth Song of Solomon. It’s a book.” Eleuthere lowered her sleeve. “They’re all books, the Librarians. They’re making me one, too. The Library will burn, but this way, the books will go on.”

Since arriving here, Alba hadn’t heard so many words, piled one on top of each other. Lightning traced her veins.

“Who would burn a Library?”

“Soldiers.” Eleuthere lowered her gaze, ducking her head again.

The word thudded against Alba’s heart. Her lover, the scent of him, his hands rattling the paper as he read to her the latest horrors of the War. Alba realized she was standing when Eleuthere spoke, standing, too.

“I’ve upset you, I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t.” Alba shook her head, wishing for dust now against rising tears.

Eleuthere reached for her shoulder, but Alba stepped out from under it. “I have to go.”

Her footsteps clattered, clumsy and un-schooled to silence. She ran, paused at the door, and glanced over her shoulder at her.

Words piled up, but once again her lips stitched themselves closed.

I’m sorry.

Such a simple phrase, but it turned her tongue to lead. Eleuthere opened her mouth, but Alba didn’t dare wait to hear what she had to say.

Eyes stinging, she fled the garden.

Alba counted her sorrow with her books. She ran fingers over multi-colored spines; there were more missing every day. She breathed dust, and let it fill the corners of her eyes. Silence squeezed the breath from her lungs, and threatened to break her bones.

After three days, she sent a note to Eleuthere, passing it hand to hand along the Refectory table under the leaf-scatter light: I’m sorry.

She hoped Eleuthere would give her the chance to say it aloud. The panic that had sent her running from the garden had faded, and she felt foolish. Silence had cost her everything once. She needed words, needed to give them voice, and let them fill the raw corners of her being, leaving no room for regret.

Eleuthere came to her past dusk, past dust, pressing a hand flat to Alba’s door. She didn’t knock. Alba let her into the stone space just big enough to hold a narrow cot. There was nothing else, no mirror to show Alba how gray she’d become, taking on the Library’s hues. There was only a high window, arched, and a fading candle wax-stuck to the sill.

“There’s more,” Eleuthere said.

She pressed her lips against her teeth. The now familiar gesture made Alba realize she’d never seen Eleuthere smile. Alba closed the door. She sat on the bed, leaving space for the Novice. Eleuthere joined her; their knees touched, because there wasn’t room for anything else.

“It’s okay,” Alba said. “It’s safe here.”

“I shouldn’t have come.” Eleuthere started to rise, but Alba caught her hands.

“Stay.” She gripped bony, warm fingers, asking Eleuthere, asking her vanished lover.

Asking him not to go to war, asking the world not to change.

The tension left Eleuthere, and Alba freed one hand, pushing back Eleuthere’s sleeve. She brushed the words with her thumb, reading of mermaids, damned sailors, and shipwrecks.

“There’s more,” Eleuthere said again.

Alba looked up, lips stilling on salty words. Echoes of bird-cry sounded in the stone room, chased by crashing waves. Sea-spray touched her cheek. Eleuthere skinned back her lips. There were minute words carved onto the Novice’s teeth.

“And more.”

Eleuthere stood, and in a smooth motion, pulled smoke-gray robes over her head. She turned, revealing words on naked flesh—here a paragraph on her lower back, there a scroll around her ankle. A sestina spiraling around her breast, a hymn, trailing down her spine, all as full of taste, smell, sound, as the ocean written on her arm.

“It’s beautiful.” Alba breathed out.

“I wanted someone to know.”

With a pained look in her eyes, Eleuthere reached for her robe. Alba caught her inked wrist. Words, so many words, one could never keep silent faced with them. Where Alba’s fingers touched Eleuthere, her skin tingled. Alba traced the text with her gaze, following each line spiraling around Eleuthere’s body until she reached the Novice’s face.

There were words enough to fill the empty spaces, and chase the ache from between her bones. She met Eleuthere’s eyes—black as ink. Eleuthere didn’t pull away; Alba kissed her.

Her tongue traced teeth, gathering the tale of a witch who spent all winter stitching shapes out of skin, and by summer had three fine children. She trailed fingers down spine, learning a dozen names for god. Her palm sweat-slicked the skin on Eleuthere’s lower back, and a poem about drowned children, and little black dogs, and yellow rain boots soaked through her.

Hungry. No, thirsty. She drowned.

She fixed ravenous lips to Eleuthere’s skin. Tales, verse, song—the Library itself—pounded through her, filling her years of not speaking with words sounding of forgiveness.

Alba’s bones reverberated—each rib a shelf, her skin vellum, her blood ink. It built inside her, shivering, humming, until she couldn’t hold it in anymore, and it poured from her in perfect harmony. She sang the Library, sang with volume upon volume of soon-to-be-burned lore.

As the sun rose beyond the high, arched window, Alba laid her head in the hollow between Eleuthere’s shoulder and throat, cheeks wet with tears. “We have to save the Library.”

Alba took Eleuthere’s hand to feel the song of words written on the Novice’s skin. It wasn’t love; that word was gone and done for her. That word was too small, and there were other words to take its place.

“I want to go deeper,” Alba said as they walked the Library’s silent halls. “I want to find the Librarians.”

Eleuthere stopped, Alba’s hand slipping from hers. In this light, Eleuthere’s eyes were the same dust gray as her robe.

“Why?”

“They shouldn’t keep this secret.” Her fingers traced the words on Eleuthere’s arm. “I want to help. If others knew, I’m sure they’d want to help, too.”

Doubt moved like clouds through the Novice’s eyes, but after a moment, she nodded. Whatever conviction had brought Eleuthere here, Alba saw a hint of it now, as the Novice straightened her spine.

“Here.” She led Alba to a wooden door, arched like the one leading into the garden courtyard.

“Is there a key?” Alba asked.

Eleuthere made a sound, almost a sigh, reminding Alba of turning pages.

“Recite a verse.”

A moment of panic seized her. Alba closed her eyes, and tasted Eleuthere’s skin—not the salt of it, but an inky bitterness that made her think of deep sea creatures in lightless places, and stone ground so fine it became like water. The words flooded her tongue, her lips, and Alba spoke them to the lock.

She pushed open the door. Shadows crowded beyond the arch, and stairs went . . . Alba couldn’t tell the direction. Vertigo swept her. She stood on the edge of a precipice, poised to fall; she stood at the base of a mountain, waiting to climb.

Alba put a foot on the first step, fighting the sensation of flying and falling. Eleuthere followed. The steps ended in a room as vast as the Main Hall. Light came from globes—starlight soft—drifting in mid-air, suspended from nothing.

Eleuthere touched Alba’s arm, making her pause. Light caught in the Novice’s eyes, and traced the curve of her mouth. Both were unutterably sad. Eleuthere had forgotten to hide her hands in her sleeves. The words on her skin shone.

“Are you sure you want this?” The empty spaces took Eleuthere’s voice, swallowing it.

Alba could see how years in the Library might take someone’s voice completely. The words here, the words she’d gathered from Eleuthere’s skin, they were too beautiful for all this silence.

“Why?” Alba said.

“You might not like what you see.”

Alba brushed Eleuthere’s arm. Words shivered beneath her palm. Alba imagined the pain of them, carved into the Novice’s flesh.

“Were you sure?” Alba asked.

Eleuthere shook her head. The ink of her eyes, dark again in the room’s soft glow, seemed on the verge of spilling over.

“Are you sure now?”

Eleuthere looked down, lips pressed tight over her teeth, so Alba barely heard her words. “It’s worth it.”

Alba gripped the Novice’s hand. “Show me.”

Eleuthere led her past shelves holding tablets, scrolls, past shelves of etched, delicate glass, and carved blocks of wood. Shadows piled behind and before them; they could never see more than one shelf ahead.

Alba resisted the urge to peer beyond the cluster of globes, searching the shadows for gray-robed Librarians, sleeping upside down like bats.

“How did you find this place?” Alba said.

She glanced at Eleuthere, sidelong. The globes turned the Novice’s head into a moonlit field of stubble.

“I got curious. I explored.” Eleuthere shrugged.

The motion seemed designed to slip her from beneath Alba’s gaze. More silence to regret—Alba had never asked what brought Eleuthere to the Library.

“When I found what the Librarians were doing, I asked them to make me like them.”

“What exactly are they doing?” Alba hadn’t taken her eyes from the Novice, watching her as they passed by shelf after shelf, deeper into twilight reaches. Something in Eleuthere’s voice made her think there was more to the story than the Novice had yet told.

“Saving the books.” Eleuthere pointed. “Any way they can.”

Alba stopped in her tracks, stopped her breath, and nearly her heart. Dead men and women, packed shoulder to shoulder, filled the shelves. They were naked, skin inked-dense. Their eyes were stitched closed, their mouths, too. There were words in the thread.

Some looked ancient, flesh cured as though by ages of desert sand. Others appeared fresh. If not for the stitches binding them, they might open their eyes. Alba’s fingers slipped from Eleuthere’s. She moved closer, wonder-caught, then her heart skittered, missing a beat.

Her lover. Her lover, gone and lost to the war. Her lover, with words inked onto his skin, crowded among the Library’s dead.

His eyes were stitched closed, his hair shorn. Words covered his scalp, circled his throat, dripped down his chest and erased the memory of her palm resting over his heart. He’d become tome, volume. In death, he’d become the Library’s lifeblood—flesh for paper, ink for bones.

“Alba!”

Eleuthere’s voice was behind her, a million miles away. Alba had pulled away, running. She skidded to a halt, and stared open-mouthed at her lover. She expected his lips to part, breathe her name, or speak patient-sad as always.

One day. When you’re ready.

Tears blurred her vision. Alba’s palm slapped his feet, her foot finding the shelf below him. She climbed. Eleuthere’s hand caught her ankle. Alba twisted around, kicking out as hard as she could. Eleuthere dodged the blow, and refused to let go.

“They killed him!”

“No.” Eleuthere pulled; Alba slipped.

Her palms, slick with sweat, lost their grip, and she tumbled backward. Eleuthere broke her fall, and they both crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs. Alba struggled, trying to rise, climb to him again and rip the thread from his lips, kiss them, tell him she was sorry.

Eleuthere wrapped her arms around Alba, pinning her, grip unshakeable.

“Stop.” Eleuthere’s lips next to Alba’s ear stilled her.

She sagged in the Novice’s arms, weeping. “They killed him.”

“No, they collect the dead. The soldiers won’t burn other soldier’s bodies. They’re afraid of vengeful ghosts. The Librarians bring them here, mark them as they mark themselves to keep the books safe.”

Eleuthere rocked Alba as she spoke, smoothing prose-dense palms over Alba’s scalp, her back, her trembling shoulders.

“We can’t just leave him there. We have to get him down.”

Alba’s breath hitched. She couldn’t draw in enough air. There wasn’t enough space beside the grief, beside the guilt. She’d tried to fill herself with words, and it wasn’t enough.

“Who was he?” Eleuthere asked.

“He . . . I loved him.”

The words ripped her open all over again, leaving the wound of him fresh and bleeding.

“He wouldn’t burn a Library.” Alba scrubbed tears from her eyes.

“War changes people.” Eleuthere’s etched teeth showed fierce in the globes’ moon-colored light, her ink black eyes hard.

“You go to war for an ideal, an idea, and it breaks you. You come back a ghost, haunted, dreaming of flame. You come back sick, hating ideas. What are books but ideas? You start to believe if you burn them, it will stop the pain.”

Alba stared at the Novice. The ghost of flames lay deep in the blackest part of Eleuthere’s eyes, ink-drowned, but still there. The Novice lifted her sleeve, bringing the words on her wrist inches from Alba’s face.

“There are scars under the ink,” she said. “I came to the Library to burn it, years ago.”

“You were a soldier.”

“The books, the words, saved me.”

“Show me how?” The words slipped, small and pleading into the space around them.

Eleuthere’s gaze didn’t waver. She lowered her sleeve, unpitying. “I already did.”

Alba caught her breath. Words, singing through her skin, words filling her, burning her to ash, and building her anew. She tried to hold onto the sensation, tried to remember love was small, and these words were vast enough to swallow her whole.

Her heart tripped on memory, regret. She could scale the shelf, pull her lover down, run. She could hide deep in the Mountains.

And live on what? Words never spoken?

The words here lived—shouted onto paper and skin, pressed into her bones with Eleuthere’s hands, with her sweat, with her teeth and tongue. Alba’s books in the Main Hall were crowded with words. Her dead lover was wrapped in them. They were worth speaking; they were worth saving.

“Show me again,” Alba said.

The hardness in Eleuthere’s eyes faded, the fire dimming to smoke again. The corner of her mouth lifted in a smile. She held out a hand, and Alba took it, enfolding herself in Eleuthere’s arms. The Novice’s words sang against her skin.

There is a story they tell, of the day the Library burned, and the day the Library was born. An Acolyte and a Novice became Librarians in the deepest, most secret reaches of the old Library. They returned from those reaches, dust-soaked, sweat-streaked, and shouted into the Library’s silence. They shocked the old Librarian’s hoods from their heads, revealing ink dense skin.

“Look,” they said. “Listen. We will tell you how to save the Library. No more secrets. No more silence. No more fear. These words are for everyone.”

And so they wrote on skin. They carved in teeth. They inked burial shrouds, and mummy wrappings. Where flesh had decayed, they etched in bone. They scrawled on living flesh, too, recorded prose and poetry in the beat of heart and blood.

Not just Librarians, but Novices, Apprentices, and Acolytes. They gathered the living and dead, working feverishly, scorning sleep to breathe poetry, shout verse. They pulled books from the shelves—ancient scrolls, fat leather tomes, skinny cloth-bound volumes, and wooden panels. They piled them high in the Main Hall. They smashed glass globes and clay tablets, breathing in dust. It wasn’t a funeral, but a wake; not a murder, but a celebration.

Hand in hand, inked skin to inked skin, the new Head Librarians stood by the pile they had made. Together, Alba and Eleuthere threw the first match. Not a holocaust, but a pyre—a joyous Viking blaze sending the books spiraling up to the stars. Each Librarian, Novice, Apprentice, and Acolyte threw a match in turn. The books roared; they wept. They laughed. And they sang.

Words danced on sweat-slick skin and flashed from carved teeth. Shedding their robes, naked, the Librarians, Novices, Apprentices, and Acolytes, marched out into the snow, carrying the dead on their backs. Alba’s lover lay draped across her shoulders, his legs bound around her waist, his arms about her chest in a last embrace. Eleuthere walked beside her, holding Alba’s hand. The other denizens of the Library followed behind them.

Laughing, shouting, crying, singing, living and dead, they streamed down the Mountain to meet the soldiers climbing up with torches in their hands.

Wild and fierce, they were Librarians all. Flame lit, they were beautiful. With the dead strapped to their backs, with love and madness in their eyes, they met the soldiers, who stopped, and stood aghast to find the Library already in flame.

The Librarians, who were also books, who were a Library of blood and skin and bones, embraced the stunned soldiers. They touched lip to lip, and breathed tales. They quieted ghosts with song, with fairy stories, with ancient histories, and new philosophies. They poured words from skin to skin; they crowded the empty spaces inside the war-haunted women and men until the ghosts had no choice but to flee.

They lay together in the snow, and their burning skin melted it around them. When the soldiers rose again, they were weeping, and laughing. They were Librarians, too. They joined the parade of mad women and men flowing down the Mountain, carrying words, an unstoppable tide to drown in beauty the world.

That is the legend of the old Library, written in the stones of the new Library, built into the side of a cliff overlooking the sea. The halls there echo with the crash of waves. No one is forbidden to speak in the new Library. There is laughter. The words of the books lining the walls are shouted aloud—Alba and Eleuthere, the Head Librarians, encourage it.

The walls are white stone. The Librarians’ eyes and robes are sea-glass green. The pages of the books taste of salt. They taste of sweat and ink, printed on a lover’s skin. Gathering words on the tongue, straight from the source, is encouraged here, too.

One day, men and women may come with torches in their hands to burn this Library down. But the books, the words, will go on and on.

© 2013 A.C. Wise.

A.C. Wise was born and raised in Montreal, and currently lives in the Philadelphia area. Her work has appeared in publications such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, the Best Horror of the Year Volume 4, and Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. In addition to her fiction, Wise co-edits the Journal of Unlikely Entomology, an online magazine dedicated to fiction about bugs. The author can be found online at www.acwise.net, and on Twitter as @ac_wise.

Daltharee
Jeffrey Ford

You’ve heard of bottled cities, no doubt—society writ miniscule and delicate beyond reason: toothpick spired towns, streets no thicker than thread, pin-prick faces of the citizenry peering from office windows smaller than sequins. Hustle, politics, fervor, struggle, capitulation, wrapped in a crystal firmament, stoppered at the top to keep reality both in and out. Those microscopic lives, striking glass at the edge of things, believed themselves gigantic, their dilemmas universal.

Our research suggested that Daltharee had many multi-storied buildings carved right into its hillsides. Surrounding the city there was a forest with lakes and streams. And all of it was contained within a dome, like a dinner beneath the lid of a serving dish. When the inhabitants of Daltharee looked up, they were prepared to not see the heavens. They knew that the light above, their Day, was generated by a machine, which they oiled and cared for. The stars that shone every sixteen hours when Day left darkness behind were simple bulbs regularly changed by a man in a hot air balloon.

They were convinced that the domed city floated upon an iceberg, which it actually did. There was one door in the wall of the dome at the end of a certain path through the forest. When opened, it led out onto the ice. The surface of the iceberg extended the margin of one of their miles all around the enclosure. Blinding snows fell, winds constantly roared in a perpetual blizzard. Their belief was that Daltharee drifted upon the oceans of an otherwise frozen world. They prayed for the end of eternal winter, so they might reclaim the continents.

And all of this: Their delusions, the city, the dome, the iceberg, the two quarts of water it floated upon, were contained within an old gallon glass milk bottle, plugged at the top with a tattered handkerchief and painted dark blue. When I put my ear to the glass, I heard, like the ocean in a seashell, fierce gales blowing.

Daltharee was not the product of a shrinking ray as many of these pint-size metropolises are. And please, there was no magic involved. In fact, once past the early stages of its birth, it was more organically grown than shaped by artifice. Often, in the origin stories of these diminutive places, there’s a deranged scientist lurking in the wings. Here too we have the notorious Mando Paige, the inventor of sub-microscopic differentiated cell division and growth. What I’m referring to was Paige’s technique for producing super-miniature human cells. From the instant of their atomic origin, these parcels of life were beset by enzymatic reaction and electric stunting the way tree roots are tortured over time to create a bonsai. Paige shaped human life in the form of tiny individuals. They landscaped and built the city, laid roads, and lurched in a sleep-walking stupor induced by their creator.

Once the city in the dome was completed, Paige introduced more of the crumb-sized citizenry through the door that opened onto the iceberg. Just before closing that door, he set off a device that played an A-flat for approximately ten seconds, a pre-ordained spur to consciousness, which brought them all awake to their lives in Daltharee. Seeding the water in the gallon bottle with crystal ions, he soon after introduced a chemical mixture that formed a slick, unmelting ice-like platform beneath the floating dome. He then introduced into the atmosphere fenathol nitrate, silver iodite, and anamidian betheldine, to initiate the frigid wind and falling snow. When all was well within the dome, when the iceberg had sufficiently grown, when winter ruled, he plugged the gallon bottle with an old handkerchief. That closed system of winter, with just the slightest amount of air allowed in through the cloth, was sustainable forever, feeding wind to snow and snow to cold to claustrophobia and back again in an infinite loop. The Dalthareens made up the story about a frozen world to satisfy the unknown. Paige manufactured three more of these cities, each wholly different from the others, before laws were passed about the imprisonment of humanity, no matter how minute or unaware. He was eventually, himself, imprisoned for his crimes.

We searched for a method to study life inside the dome but were afraid to disturb its delicate nature, unsure whether simply removing the handkerchief would upset a brittle balance between inner and outer universes. It was suggested that a very long, exceedingly thin probe that had the ability to twist and turn by computational command could be shimmied in between the edge of the bottle opening and the cloth of the handkerchief. This probe, like the ones physicians used in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to read the hieroglyphics of the bowel, would be fitted out with both a camera and a microphone. The device was adequate for those cities that didn’t have the extra added boundary of a dome, but even in them, how incongruous, a giant metal snake just out of the blue, slithering through one’s reality. The inhabitants of these enclosed worlds were exceedingly small but not stupid.

In the end, it was my invention that won the day—a voice-activated transmitter the size of two atoms was introduced into the bottle. We had to wait for it to work its way from the blizzard atmosphere, through the dome’s air filtration system, and into the city. Then we had to wait for it to come in contact with a voice. At any point a thousand things could have gone wrong, but one day, six months later, who knows how many years that would be in Dalthareen time, the machine transmitted and my receiver picked up conversations from the domed city. Here’s an early one we managed to record that had some interesting elements:

“I’m not doing that now. Please, give me some room . . .” she said.

There is a long pause filled with the faint sound of a utensil clinking a plate.

“I was out in the forest the other day,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” he told her.

“What do you do out there?” she asked.

“I’m in this club,” he said. “We got together to try to find the door in the wall of the dome.”

“How did that go?” she asked.

“We knew it was there and we found it,” he said. “Just like in the old stories . . .”

“Blizzard?”

“You can’t believe it,” he said.

“Did you go out in it?”

“Yes, and when I stepped back into the dome, I could feel a piece of the storm stuck inside me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“How did it get inside you?” she asked.

“Through my ears,” he said.

“Does it hurt?”

“I was different when I came back in.”

“Stronger?”

“No, more something else.”

“Can you say?”

“I’ve had dreams.”

“So what,” she said. “I had a dream the other night that I was out on the Grand Conciliation Balcony, dressed for the odd jibbery, when all of a sudden a little twisher rumbles up and whispers to me the words—‘Elemental Potency.’ What do you think it means? I can’t get the phrase out of my head.”

“It’s nonsense,” he said.

“Why aren’t your dreams nonsense?”

“They are,” he said. “The other night I had this dream about a theory. I can’t remember if I saw it in the pages of a dream magazine or someone spoke it or it just jumped into my sleeping head. I’ve never dreamt about a theory before. Have you?”

“No,” she said.

“It was about living in the dome. The theory was that since the dome is closed, things that happen in the dome only affect other things in the dome. Because the size of Daltharee is, as we believe, so miniscule compared to the rest of the larger world, the repercussions of the acts you engage in in the dome will have a higher possibility of intersecting each other. If you think of something you do throughout the day as an act, each act begins a chain reaction of mitigating energy in all directions. The will of your own energy, dispersed through myriad acts within only a morning will beam, refract, and reflect off the beams of others’ acts and the walls of the closed system, barreling into each other and causing sparks at those locations where your essence meets itself. In those instances, at those specific locations, your will is greater than the will of the dome. What I was then told was that a person could learn a way to act at a given hour—a quick series of six moves—that send out so many ultimately crisscrossing intentions of will that it creates a power mesh capable in its transformative strength of bending reality to whim.”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

There is a slight pause here, the sound of wind blowing in the trees.

“Hey, what ever happened to your Aunt?” he asked.

“They got it out of her.”

“Amazing,” he said. “Close call . . .”

“She always seemed fine, too,” she said. “But swallowing a knitting needle? That’s not right.”

“She doesn’t even knit, does she?”

“No,” she said.

“Good thing she didn’t have to pass it,” he said. “Think about the intersecting beams of will resulting from that act.”

She laughed. “I heard the last pigeon died yesterday.”

“Yeah?”

“They found it in the park, on the lawn amidst the Moth trees.”

“In all honesty, I did that,” he said. “You know, not directly, but just by the acts I went through yesterday morning. I got out of bed, had breakfast, got dressed, you know . . . like that. I was certain that by mid-day that bird would be dead.”

“Why’d you kill it?” she asked.

There’s a pause in the conversation here filled up by the sound of machinery in the distance just beneath that of the wind in the trees.

“Having felt what I felt outside the dome, I considered it a mercy,” he said.

“Interesting . . .” she said. “I’ve gotta get going. It looks like rain.”

“Will you call me?” he asked.

“Eventually, of course,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

Funny thing about Paige, he found religion in the latter years of his life. After serving out his sentence, he renounced his crackpot Science and retreated to a one-room apartment in an old boarding house on the edge of the great desert. He courted an elderly woman there, a Mrs. Trucy. I thought he’d been long gone when we finally contacted him. After a solid fifteen years of recording conversations, it became evident that the domed city was failing—the economy, the natural habitat, were both in disarray. A strange illness had sprung up amid the population, an unrelenting, fatal insomnia that took a dozen of them to Death each week. Nine months without a single wink of sleep. The conversations we recorded then were full of anguish and hallucination.

Basically, we asked Paige what he might do to save his own created world. He came to work for us and studied the problem full time. He was old then, wrinkles and flyaway hair in strange, ever-shifting formations atop his scalp, eye glasses with one ear loop. Every time he’d make a mistake on a calculation or a technique, he’d swallow a thumbtack. When I asked if the practice helped him concentrate, he told me, “No.”

Eventually, on a Saturday morning when no one was at the lab but himself and an uninterested security guard, he broke into the vault that held the shrinking ray. He started the device up, aimed it at the glass milk bottle containing Daltharee, and then sat on top of the bottle, wearing a parachute. The ray discharged, shrinking him. He fell in among the gigantic folds of the handkerchief. Apparently he managed to work his way down past the end of the material and leap into the blizzard, out over the dome of the city. No one was there to see him slowly descend, dangerously buffeted by the insane winds. No one noticed him slip through the door in the dome.

Conversations came back to us eventually containing his name. Apparently he’d told them the true nature of the dome and the bottle it resided inside of. And then after some more time passed, there came word that he was creating another domed city inside a gallon milk bottle from the city of Daltharee. Where would it end, we wondered, but it was not a thought we enjoyed pursuing as it ran in a loop, recrossing itself, reiterating its original energy in ever diminishing reproductions of ourselves. Perhaps it was the thought of it that made my assistant accidentally drop the milk bottle one afternoon. It exploded into a million dark blue shards, dirt and dome and tiny trees spread across the floor. We considered studying its remains, but instead, with a shiver, I swept it into a pile and then into the furnace.

A year later, Mrs. Trucy came looking for Mando. She insisted upon knowing what had become of him. We told her that the law did not require us to tell her, and then she pulled a marriage certificate out of her purse. I was there with the Research General at the time, and I saw him go pale as a ghost upon seeing that paper. He told her Mando had died in an experiment of his own devising. The wrinkles of her gray face torqued to a twist and sitting beneath her pure silver hair, her head looked like a metal screw. Three tears squeezed out from the corners of her eyes. If Mando died performing an experiment, we could not be held responsible. We would, though, have to produce the body for her as proof that he’d perished. The Research General told her we were conducting a complete investigation of the tragedy and would contact her in six weeks with the results and the physical proof—in other words, Mando’s corpse.

My having shoveled Daltharee into the trash without searching for survivors or mounting even a cursory rescue effort was cause for imprisonment. My superior, the Research General, having had my callous act take place on his watch, was also liable. After three nerve-wracking days, I conceived of a way for us to save ourselves. In fact, it was so simple it astounded me that neither one of us, scientific minds though we be, didn’t leap to the concept earlier. Using Mando’s own process for creating diminutive humanity, we took his DNA from our genetic files, put it through a chemical bath to begin the growth process, and then tortured the cells into tininess. We had to use radical enzymes to speed the process up given we only had six weeks. By the end of week five we had a living, breathing Mando Paige, trapped under a drinking glass in our office. He was dressed in a little orange jump suit, wore black boots, and was in the prime of his youth. We studied his attempts to escape his prison with a jeweler’s loop inserted into each eye. We thought we could rely on the air simply running out in the glass and him suffocating.

Days passed and Paige hung on. Each day I’d spy on his meager existence and wondered what he must be thinking. When the time came and he wasn’t dead, I killed him with a cigarette. I brought the glass to the very edge of the table, bent a plastic drinking straw that I shoved the longer end of up into the glass and then caught it fairly tightly against the table edge. As for the part that stuck out, I lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and then blew the smoke up into the glass. I gave him five lungfuls. The oxygen displacement was too much, of course.

Mrs. Trucy accepted our story and the magnified view of her lover’s diminutive body. We told her how he bravely took the shrinking ray for the sake of Science. She remarked that he looked younger than when he was full sized and alive, and the Research General told her, “As you shrink, wrinkles have a tendency to evaporate.” We went to the funeral out in the desert near her home. It was a blazingly hot day. She’d had his remains placed into a thimble with some tape across the top, and this she buried in the red sand.

Later, as the sun set, the Research General and I ate dinner at a ramshackle restaurant along a dusty road right outside of Mateos. He had the pig knuckle with sauerkraut and I had the chicken croquettes with orange gravy that tasted brown.

“I’m so relieved that asshole’s finally dead,” whispered the Research General.

“There’s dead and there’s dead,” I told him.

“Let’s not make this complicated,” he said. “I know he’s out there in some smaller version of reality, he could be filling all available space with smaller and smaller reproductions of himself, choking the ass of the universe with pages and pages of Mando Paige. I don’t give a fuck as long as he’s not here.”

“He is here,” I said, and then they brought the martinis and the conversation evaporated into reminiscence.

That night as I stood out beneath the desert sky having a smoke, I had a sense that the cumulative beams generated by the repercussions of my actions over time, harboring my inherent will, had reached some far flung boundary and were about to turn back on me. In my uncomfortable bed at the Hacienda Motel, I tossed and turned, drifting in and out of sleep. It was then that I had a vision of the shrinking ray, its sparkling blue emission bouncing off a mirror set at an angle. The beam then travels a short distance to another mirror with which it collides and reflects. The second mirror is positioned so that it sends the ray back at its own original source. The beam strikes and mixes with itself only a few inches past the nozzle of the machine’s barrel. And then I see it in my mind—when a shrinking ray is trained upon itself, its diminutive-making properties are cancelled twice and as it is a fact that when two negatives are multiplied they make a positive, this process makes things bigger. As soon as the concept was upon me, I was filled with excitement and couldn’t wait to get back to the lab the next day to work out the math and realize an experiment.

It was fifteen years later, the Research General had long been fired, when Mando Paige stepped out of the spot where the shrinking ray’s beam crossed itself. He was blue and yellow and red and his hair was curly. I stood within feet of him and he smiled at me. I, of course, couldn’t let him go—not due to any law but my own urge to finish the job I’d started at the outset. As he stepped back toward the ray, I turned it off, and he was trapped, for the moment, in our moment. I called for my assistants to surround him, and I sent one to my office for the revolver I kept in my bottom drawer. He told me that one speck of his saliva contained four million Daltharees. “When I fart,” he said, “I set forth Armadas.” I shot him and the four assistants and then automatically acid washed the lab to destroy the Dalthareen plague and evidence of murder. No one suspected a thing. I found a few cities sprouting beneath my fingernails last week. There were already rows of domes growing behind my ears. My blood no doubt is the manufacture of cities, flowing silver through my veins. Crowds behind my eyes, commerce in my joints. Each idea I have is a domed city that grows and opens like a flower. I want to tell you about cities and cities and cities named Daltharee.

© 2008 by Jeffrey Ford.

Originally published in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels, The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His story collections are, The Fantasy Writer's Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. Crackpot Palace, a new collection of 20 stories, was recently published by Morrow/Harper Collins. Ford writes somewhere in Ohio.

Purity Test
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

My feet are scraped and bleeding, my slippers shredded and almost useless. The dress hangs in tatters around me. No longer white, it still bears the pearls along the bodice, and I hope I can keep them close and sell them in whatever town I find myself in.

Provided I find a town. Provided I ever leave these woods.

I have traveled for two days, surviving on puddle water and berries, hoping that the sounds I hear behind me aren’t my father, Roland, and the dogs.

I was but a child when Sutton came to the Keep. He seemed like an old man even then, with a beard that trailed to his knees and white hair that fell about his shoulders. His fingers were long and fine, but his back was broad, like a laborer’s, and his skin was rough to the touch.

His eyes frightened me. They were a pale blue, so pale that, in a certain light, they seemed clear. When I mentioned them to my mother—she was alive then: alive, vibrant, and beautiful—she laughed.

“Of course, Micheline,” she said in her lilting accent, using—as she always did—her people’s version of my name. “He is magic. It is fitting he has devil’s eyes.”

My father said my mother was a witch, but she had no true magic powers. She knew the gentle arts—herbs for healing, mostly—and she had an enchanting laugh. Men were drawn to her, and women too. She had a personality that overshadowed all others, and dwarfed my father’s.

Apparently my father had once loved her. Perhaps he loved her still in the days surrounding Sutton’s arrival, but he did not trust her. If my brother and I had not had my father’s auburn hair and freckled skin, his green eyes and his hooked nose, he would have disavowed us as another man’s children, as he had done with my younger sister. She had the misfortune to look like our mother: nut-brown eyes, features delicate and small, and black hair so thick it hung in waves down her back.

She was just a babe when Sutton arrived, and my father hadn’t yet denied her, but in hindsight, it is clear the poisoned thoughts were already in him, twisting him, marking him, making him a man incapable of warmth.

My mother’s death the following year—giving birth to yet another dark-haired babe, a boy who would not live till dawn—completed my father’s transformation. From that night forward, I never saw him smile nor speak a kind word.

The Keep was my father’s. It had been his father’s, and his father’s father’s before him. A large, rectangular building with four small towers, it looked more like a castle or a fortress. But we called it the Keep because it had once been part of a larger complex, filled with granaries and great houses and stables.

They had all crumbled before my father was born, but the ghosts of them remained, leaving their stone footprints on the property. A guard-tower, which had once been part of an acres-long wall, still stood, empty and dust-covered. My brother and I used to explore it before my father hired a nurse after my mother’s death—a nurse who taught me how to stitch and sit quietly and never, ever reveal my innermost thoughts.

The guard-tower had four levels, and a winding staircase that made its way around the interior like braids on a maiden’s nape. The top level had an arching ceiling, and a view that extended for miles on all sides. My brother and I often hid up there from our mother, and she would pretend she could not find us, although our footprints littered the dust, and our giggles echoed through the levels below.

My father gave Sutton the guard-tower as a home. Suddenly my brother and I were forbidden to go within sight distance of the place. We would sneak to the edge of the woods and watch as laborers brought all manner of strange things inside—tables made of shiny material we had never before seen, boxes of foul-smelling roots, and cloth so thin it seemed as if it weren’t woven at all.

Later, the horses would arrive—and cats and dogs—never to be seen again. Other animals as well, things I didn’t recognize, with horns and snouts and short, stubby legs. They would vanish into the first floor of that tower, and sometimes we would hear cries and wails as if the very depths of hell had opened.

But that was after Mother had died. Before, there were no animals, and Sutton would join us at feasts. My mother would tease him—“What miracle have we performed today, Mr. Sutton?”—and he would answer her, telling her of sparkling air or reading stray thoughts. One evening, she made the mistake of laughing at him, and from then on, he would disavow miracles, claiming he did simple magic and nothing more.

My father believed Sutton’s magic was not simple. My father believed Sutton could return our family to its former glory—castles and land and serfs. My father would no longer be a small lord, but a great leader, a warrior-chieftain who might one day unite the other lords, and take on the name of King.

My father never saw that goal—we still have warring lords, arguing tribes, and no unity at all—but he came close.

He came desperately close.

And then I ran away.

But I get ahead of myself.

There were years between my rebellion and my mother’s death, years in which my father grew harsher and colder and more ambitious; years in which the strangeness of Sutton’s Tower grew; years in which entire buildings appeared behind it, all of them emitting horrible yowlings and fetid odors, and sometimes, a river of blood.

My father gave my sister to a convent when she was three. Years later, I asked him about her, and he claimed that while she was my sister, she was not his daughter, and he had no obligation to her. I visited the convent once, and no one had heard of her.

She is lost. I do not know why or how.

I asked my brother, but he no longer cared. He became a soldier after my mother’s death. At the age of ten, he wielded a sword twice his size. From then on, I saw my brother only at meals.

He was not allowed to speak to me, and soon he refused to meet my eyes. The closeness we had felt vanished. He became a stranger who drank too much, laughed too hard, and fought recklessly.

When my father started thinking of my brother’s marriage, using my brother’s life to establish alliances, I thought little of it. It is the way among lords—the firstborn must make a good match, whatever the cost.

The women paraded before my brother were often not women at all. Some were mere children. The two years that separated my brother and I seemed like a gulf then. While I still spent time with my nurse learning demure ways to defer to my future husband, my brother had already seen our entire corner of the world.

My father would hold feasts to honor the families who brought their daughters to the Keep seeking an alliance. I attended, but was not allowed to speak unless spoken to, and certainly could not discuss anything with the newcomers.

I did not understand enough of life to fathom my father’s concern with purity. I believed him obsessed with pureness of heart. He did not care about anyone’s heart, having lost his own. He cared only that the woman who married his son was a virgin, and he did not trust doctors and midwives to determine it was so.

So when the young women and their fathers left the feasting hall with my father and Sutton, I thought it a common enough custom. I did not understand the protestations of some lords, the unwillingness of many to even come to our small Keep.

Once I overheard some soldiers speculating about my father’s determination. The soldiers believed that my father investigated the girl’s private parts the way a midwife would, while the girl’s own father looked on.

But the soldiers were as naïve as I was, only in a different way. They did not understand what a midwife later told me—that a girl’s virginity could not always be determined with a look or a touch, that sometimes, a virgin had no proof of it, condemning the innocent girl to charges of promiscuity when, in truth, she had never lain with a man.

The midwife who told me this also confided that she believed this happened to my mother. The wedding night, the midwife said, was a disaster. No blood had spilled on the white sheets, so everyone thought my mother’s maidenhood had not been intact at the time of the wedding.

Yet for her entire marriage, my mother claimed she had never touched a man other than my father.

I am exhausted. This forest seems to run forever. The wind echoes in here, whispering through the branches of the mighty oaks that hid the sun. The ground is rugged. I move slower now; my feet so sore that I limp even though I try not to.

I can no longer run.

I look at the tall trees, at the welcoming thick branches with their wide forks, and remember what it was like to be a child, hiding among the leaves.

I think of hiding now. It would be so easy. I would tie what’s left of my shoes to the shreds of my dress, then wedge my bare feet against the rough bark. I would wrap my hands around an easy-to-reach branch, and climb, pulling myself upward until the leaves hide me from the ground below.

My father wouldn’t find me. Neither would Roland or the others.

But the dogs would. I’d seen them tree a cat many times at the edge of the forest, surrounding the trunk, their paws scraping against the bark, baying and howling and barking until someone came.

I used to laugh at the dogs, but I do not now. I think of my father’s cleverness, his intense determination to get whatever he wants, and I shiver.

I continue to stumble forward. I cannot hear the dogs.

I am gaining a fragile hope. Perhaps they have returned to their pen. Perhaps my father has returned to his Keep.

Perhaps this final humiliation will break him.

But most likely, it makes him stronger. My father thrives in adversity.

He made his greatest mistakes when he believed the world was his for the taking.

She was tall, like my mother, a woman full grown. A few years older than my brother, she was still unwed. Her fiancé—a man of honor, her father said—had died on the battlefield, and she had mourned him, which was unusual in an alliance that had been arranged from birth.

Her name was Opal, and I thought her the most beautiful creature I had seen. Her hair was so blond it was almost white, and it accented her chiseled cheekbones and sky blue eyes.

She did not smile. She made it clear she had no desire to come to our little Keep and see our pretend kingdom. She did not want to be the lady of this land.

She would, she told my father, eyes blazing in defiance, mourn her lost love for eternity.

“Fine,” my father said to her, “I do not care how you feel, only that, should the alliance be made, you do your part and produce sons.”

She spat at his feet.

Her own father apologized for her. He believed the union advantageous to both families. We had adjoining property, and weaker lords on either side. We could mount an army, he said, and take even more land. He was too old to lead. He would leave that to my father, so long as both families shared in the spoils.

The bargain was made before my brother ever saw his intended.

Not that it mattered. He was smitten from the moment he first looked at that stunning face. She slapped him when he got too close, and after he recovered from his shock, he slapped her in return.

My father laughed.

“Passion,” he said. “It guarantees sons.”

But there were no sons. There was no marriage. Opal would not submit to my father’s ministrations. Her own father pleaded, saying there could be no alliance without a guarantee, but she refused.

My father came to me for the first and last time in my life.

“Do you know your mother’s potions?” he asked.

“Some,” I said. “I was too young to learn most of them.”

“A sleeping potion is all I need,” he said.

I could do that.

I felt so pleased to help my father. Finally he had turned to me. Finally he had noticed me.

I would do anything he wanted.

I completed the potion in the space of a morning, and tested it on the nurse. She slept deeply, but continued to breathe—always a risk with a sleeping potion. Then I took it to my father.

He thanked me, and said no more.

But I knew he had plans, and I knew they concerned Opal. He had a servant pour the potion in Opal’s wine at that night’s feast. She yawned within minutes, excused herself, and was nearly asleep before she reached the guest quarters.

I excused myself as well, snuck into the guest quarters, and hid across the hall from her room. I wanted to know what my father was up to.

Around midnight, when the feast had dissolved into a drunken party, my father and Sutton came up the servants’ stairs. My father unlocked Opal’s door and went inside. Sutton remained in the hall.

He did not see me, but then Sutton never saw me. His gaze always skimmed past me as if I were a servant, beneath his notice, someone who did not exist.

Still, I did not move. I scarcely breathed.

After a moment, my father exited the room, the sleeping Opal cradled in his arms. He was a strong man, but he had trouble with her weight. Her arms and legs dangled, her hair trailing to the floor. Her feet were bare, her nightdress barely covering her torso.

She slept as soundly as Nurse.

The men tiptoed down the stairs, and I followed as closely as I dared. They wound through the back corridors, past the still hot ovens, toward the yards.

I hated the yards. The stench was abominable—pigs, and cows, and chickens running free. This late, the animals slept, all except one sow who lifted her head from the putrid muck and watched as the men hurried by.

I gave the pigs a wide berth. But the sow put her head down before I passed, and did not watch me at all.

The men went beyond the yards to Sutton’s Tower. My father set Opal on an old stone garden seat and remained with her, while Sutton opened the doors to one of the tower’s new sections. Then Sutton stood aside.

I circled along my old secret path, moving closer so that I could see. I ended up on the edge of the woods, and hid behind an old stump covered with weeds. I made no sound at all. My father did not see me, and Sutton never would.

The fresh scent of evergreen and crushed grass cleared the stench of the yards from my nose. The ground was damp with late-night dew, soaking my slippers within moments. But I didn’t mind; I liked the night and the darkness. I would have enjoyed it more, if it weren’t for the strangeness of my father and Sutton.

They both stared at those open doors. My father leaned against the back of that bench, hands clenched, Opal forgotten behind him. Sutton shifted nervously.

“Perhaps you should move, milord,” he said.

My father nodded, then stepped aside, heading away from me.

At that moment, a light flared inside the new room. The yellow edges of it caught Sutton as if he were a thief. The light came closer and closer, almost blinding in its intensity.

I squinted, and crouched even lower beside the trunk. The light illuminated the dried leaves, the drops of water on the broken blades of grass, the rich brown of the earth near my feet. I wasn’t sure if the light illuminated me as well.

Fortunately, my father did not see me at all. Neither did Sutton. They were staring at a white horse that had emerged from the doors, a white horse with a long horn. From the tip of that horn came the bright light. The horse had blue eyes and a mane the pale colors of the rainbow. The colors shifted with each of the horse’s movements.

Sutton moved to the side, out of the way of the horse. My father placed a hand above his eyes, shielding them.

The horse pranced forward. It paused for a moment. It did not look at the bench.

It looked at me.

I crouched even lower, but I felt the brightness of that light upon me. I raised my head ever so slightly. The horse had not moved, but one of the bright blue eyes held mine.

I shook my head, thinking, No, please, stay away, don’t let them see me.

The horse whinnied, nodded, then turned as if it were guided by unseen hands. It returned to the building, sliding through the doors, and disappeared.

The light slowly faded, but left reflections across my eyes.

“They lied,” my father said. “The unicorn did not go to her. She is not a virgin.”

“It is understandable, given her advanced age—”

“It is not understandable,” my father said. “She has been misrepresented.”

He walked to the doors and pushed them closed. Sutton hadn’t moved.

“Either the virgins are too young,” Sutton said, “or you cannot come to terms with their fathers. Perhaps you should take this one, demand a greater bride price since she is damaged—”

“I will not condemn my son to relive my life!” my father snapped. “I have told you this.”

“Then betroth the boy to a young one. Have him marry her the moment she comes of age.”

“We’ll have to retest her.”

“But the difference is that these fathers know what you’re doing. They won’t allow their daughters to be tainted.”

My father sighed. Then he shook his head, and started back toward the Keep.

“What of the girl?” Sutton asked.

“Leave her,” my father said. “She no longer matters to me.”

I waited until Sutton disappeared into his tower, and the lights went out. Then I roused Opal as best I could. She was much bigger than I was, so I could not carry her even if I had the strength.

Instead, I let her lean on me as if she had had too much ale, and helped her back to her room. With luck, she would remember nothing of the trip when she finally awoke.

But I did. The magical horse with its ability to find pure women, my father’s unwillingness to treat Opal with the least civility, and the vehemence in his voice when he spoke of his own life made me leery.

Soon my brother found himself engaged to a child of ten. The wedding, planned three years hence, predated my own by only a few months. He is wed now, though not happily. His young wife is a shrew, and he sees her only to perform his duties or so he says.

I vowed I would not have such a marriage. I vowed I would have warmth in my life, and laughter, like we had when my mother lived.

Although I made these vows, I was not sure I could keep them.

Then my father introduced me to Roland.

Roland was a tall man with broad shoulders that tapered into a narrow waist. His eyes crinkled in the corners, and his smile softened his face. He too carried the blood of my mother’s people—the black hair and the dark, dark eyes—but he did not have their ways.

His land lay between my father’s and the sea, most of it forest, all of it valuable. If he allied with my father, he would become part of a clan that extended from the shore to the hills—the most land in all the south.

My father wasn’t yet a king, but he was becoming the largest landowner in the entire country, almost large enough to raise an army equal to that of those who called themselves his betters.

With Roland’s help, my father would finally be in position.

The nuptial negotiations went on before I met Roland, but I did not care. I had always known I would marry to serve my father’s dynastic needs. I had no control over that. I merely hoped I could stomach the union my father chose.

When I met Roland, I was pleased to find him handsome and overjoyed at his tenderness when he took my hand, the softness in his voice when he spoke my name.

There would be affection in this marriage, affection and warmth and laughter. I could build a home as my mother had, and stop thinking about the darkness that was growing around the Keep.

By the time I met Roland, I had stopped walking all over my father’s land. I particularly avoided Sutton’s Tower—not because of the strange horse they called a unicorn, but because of the corpses I sometimes found near the wood.

The cat was strange enough. I had discovered it, with its small head and tiny horn, the twisted back and the stunted tail, shortly after my mother’s death. But the dogs, protrusions around their mouths, half formed wings on their backs, disturbed me most. I imagined I saw suffering still in their dead eyes.

The screams and squeals that came from Sutton’s Tower took on a sinister cast for me after that night with Opal, and despite the beauty of the unicorn beast, I realized Sutton was dabbling in something that threatened us all.

For I had no doubt he created these beasts with a particular goal in mind, just as he developed this unicorn to serve my father’s fancy.

I did not think of the virginity then. I thought of it as part of a parcel of a woman’s purity of heart rather than the goal of Sutton’s experiment.

At that point, I also did not think of the quick way in which the unicorn had found me.

I thought, once I met Roland, my life was set.

The morning of my wedding—yesterday morning—I stood in my dressing room as the seamstress stitched me into my gown. The wedding dress had a thousand seed pearls for a thousand years of happiness, and a necklace of full-sized pearls sewn into the collar. They matched the pearls along the veil, as did the pearls on the cuffs of my sleeve.

The hairdresser coiled my thick hair around my face, pinched my cheeks, and showed me my reflection in the looking glass. A woman full grown—a beautiful woman, whose skin was as luminous as the pearls, whose softly glowing cheeks reflected the color of her rich auburn hair, whose eyes shown with the light of a thousand-year future—stared at me from the glass.

I did not know that my drunken father had revealed a secret to my bridegroom the night before.

“When you are my son-in-law,” my father whispered, “I will show you how to become rich. I have a beast that approaches only virginal women and shuns those who are not. I used it to ensure the purity of my son’s bride, and I shall lease it out to other fathers who want to do the same.”

That morning—yesterday morning—I was not thinking of the unicorn or my hung-over father. I fantasized about life away from the Keep, about the life I would build with my husband-to-be, about the children we would have—dark-haired girls who looked like my mother, and auburn-haired boys who would remind me of my brother before my father took him away.

I was preparing for happiness, as if it were my due.

As I went down the back stairs to the Great Hall where the guests and the priest waited, my brother found me. His left eye was swollen shut, his cheek speckled with blood, his knuckles raw.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and swept me into his arms.

I was too surprised to struggle. “What’s going on?”

“Roland,” he said with a touch of bitterness, “insists.”

That was enough for me. I would do what Roland said because he was going to be my husband, because I was beginning to believe I loved him, and because I thought he could do no wrong.

Together my brother and I tucked my veil into my bodice, and twined my train around his hand. Then he carried me through the kitchens and into the yards, careful to keep the foul muck from touching me or my dress.

The pigs were awake. They grunted as we passed. The chickens fled, making a half-hearted attempt to fly, and the cows simply looked over their shoulders, surprised that anyone would try to disturb them.

My heart pounded. My mother’s people had a separate wedding ceremony, one that came first, one that guaranteed the union would not be sullied by its brush with the church.

I hoped Roland wanted that, because the other thing—the unicorn—meant he did not trust me, he did not believe me, he needed proof before our first night together.

I had kept myself pure. I had not touched another man. My father would not allow me to be alone with Roland—“You must watch her,” my father had said. “She is tainted by her mother’s blood.”—so in no way could I be impure.

But my word did not count. Women like Opal had twisted my father further, made him believe even less. But I wouldn’t have expected it of Roland.

The moment my brother carried me out of the yards, however, I saw how wrong I was. Roland’s lovely face had a bruised cheek, and the corner of his mouth carried dried blood.

My brother had defended me, and lost. As his price, he had to fetch me to this hideous place so that a creature not created by God could attest to my virginity.

Sutton stood beside the doors, as he had that awful night with Opal. My father stood beside Roland near the fence.

“What caused this?” I asked my brother.

He told me about the drunken conversation, the creature my father had Sutton create to do his bidding, and the allure it held for Roland.

“Roland merely wants to see it work,” my brother said. “This is his best chance.”

Those words should have soothed me.

They did not.

My brother carried me to the stone bench. “It’s just a formality,” he said in an apologetic tone. “You’ll be all right.”

Perhaps I would have been. Perhaps the moment would have passed swiftly, and I would have forgotten Roland’s betrayal, my father’s willingness to show off his toy, and Sutton’s desire to humiliate all women.

But I remembered my first view of the unicorn. It had been an impressive beast from a distance, and I feared it up close. What did it do to determine virginity?

I knew the woman lived after the test—my brother’s wife was proof of this—but was she changed? Had my brother’s wife been a charming child, only to become a shrew after the touch of that ethereal light?

Had she been burned by a spawn of Satan, created by a man who was in league with the devil?

Had the experience so warped her mind that she never trusted again?

I turned on that stone bench, my dress catching on the rough edges, holding me in place.

Sutton opened the doors, and the light flared, as it had before. Only this time, I could see inside the building, see the stable filled with hay, the white horse—the unicorn—and the perfection of its equine face. The blue eyes seemed natural in the light of day, and the pale rainbow hues of the mane seemed a product of the torch that burned atop that strange horn.

The unicorn pranced toward me, its head lifted, its tail up, as if it were coming toward someone it knew and loved.

And, God help me, I raised my hands to my mouth, as terrified—more terrified—than I had been that night in the woods. I could scarcely breathe.

Please, no, I thought. Don’t come near me. Don’t hurt me. Please.

The unicorn stopped in confusion. It looked over its shoulder at Sutton, then at my father, and finally at me.

A tear traced its way down my cheek. Please . . .

The unicorn nodded, tilted its head, and I felt a warmth, an understanding. Perhaps—

The word was not mine. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut and cowered, preparing for the touch of that magic light. Instead, I heard a whinny and my father’s cursing, and then Roland—Roland!—screaming, “You liar. You barbaric liar! You promised me a virgin bride, a good girl, and what do we have? A whore. A whore in virgin white.”

I opened my eyes.

My father was staring at me as if he had never seen me before. My brother started walking toward the yards, his back to me, as if I no longer mattered.

Roland grabbed my veil and yanked it off my head. His hand held my hair, pulling it so hard my scalp ached.

He raised his hand to cuff me, and I came alive. I punched him in the stomach, then kicked him in the knee, making his leg crumble. I shoved him away, tugged my hair from his grasp, and ran toward the forest.

“Stop her!” Roland shouted.

“Why would you want to do that?” Sutton asked. “She’s not what you want.”

“I never said I wouldn’t marry her,” Roland snapped. “She just has to be punished for her betrayal, so that it would never happen again.”

My betrayal. Mine? What about his? Who had that loving man been, that hero of my dreams, the husband who would take me from all of this?

A figment of my imagination?

A lie?

I had done nothing, and he had accused me of betrayal.

I kept running, hoping my father would defend me. It was a false test, he would say, created to ferret other men’s lies.

But he said nothing. Finally, Sutton shouted, “Milord, we need her. She must not get away!”

“She is her mother,” my father said, his voice half-hidden beneath my ragged breathing, my panic. “I should have known.”

And then I was in the trees, my dress catching on bark. I ripped the bottom half away and kept running, tears flowing down my cheeks.

“We’ll never catch her now,” Roland shouted. “Get the dogs!”

I hit a clearing and slipped on a patch of dirt. My feet went out from under me, and I landed on my back. The dirt moved. I was sliding downward. I hit a rock at the bottom, tumbled forward, and struggled to catch my breath.

Behind me I heard nothing.

I had a few moments. If they were going to get the dogs, I had only a few moments. But I had to outthink them. If I could stay away from the dogs, I could run through the woods and maybe make it to the shore, and my mother’s people.

Or if I came out near a village, I could sell the pearls, and get enough gold to buy food, new clothing, maybe even a horse. I could live on my own somewhere else, where there was no magic, no family, and no betrayals.

For the first time, I thanked my father for all his fox-hunting conversations at the various feasts. I knew how foxes somehow escaped the dogs. I had tricks that I could at least try.

I ripped my dress, strung some of the shredded pieces down a side path, then backtraced my steps. I held the dress up so that it wouldn’t catch any more and headed forward, crossing a small stream so that the dogs would lose my scent.

Then I hurried deep into the forest, always moving, never stopping, forever listening, for barking, baying, and the sounds of the hunt.

I am near collapse. A few berries, little water, no rest. I doubt I can keep going much longer.

Yet the forest continues forever. Perhaps there is no end to it. Perhaps I’ll die in here, alone, unmourned, spoken of as the humiliation of my family if I’m ever spoken of again.

I keep thinking I hear dogs, but they’re not barking. They crash through the woods, occasionally huff as if something pricks them. I never think of dogs as silent creatures, hunting with determination.

Maybe my father didn’t take Roland’s suggestion. Maybe I’m fleeing for no reason.

Maybe no one is searching for me at all.

That thought makes me stop. I bend over, trying to catch my breath. Little spots dance in front of my eyes. I stand, brace a hand against a tree trunk, and blink, hoping I don’t pass out.

The crashing, ever so faint. I have heard it since yesterday.

The dogs bay when they tree a fox. They bark when they get close, letting their masters know that the fox is within sight.

This part of the forest is too dense for horseback riding. My father, Roland, my brother, they would have to come on foot.

I cannot hear them, either.

The idea that they would not come hurts more than the idea that they’re chasing me. It merely confirms that I have no value. That I am nothing to my father, my brother, and a man I once thought my beloved.

I am nothing.

The huffing gets even closer, and I see something white through the trees. White, yet filled with the colors of the rainbow.

My breath catches. I blink, wondering if I am so exhausted that I’m seeing visions.

Then the unicorn steps into the patch of trees. Its flank is scratched, its mane filled with leaves and burrs. It stares at me, the blue eyes filled with knowledge.

Stop running. Please.

The voice in my head is not my own. I lean against the tree, using it to hold me up.

I am so sorry. I didn’t know turning away would make them abandon you.

“How can you speak?” I whisper.

I don’t speak. I have thoughts. I can share them with women like you. It’s part of the magic.

The unicorn bows its head. The horn—which is not flaring with light—nearly hits a tree branch.

I didn’t want them to hurt you. I thought if they let you go, you would be safe. I didn’t realize until too late you belonged to them.

“Not any more.” My voice is weak, even though I’m no longer trying to whisper.

It’s better this way. You have no idea how cruel they are.

Because I closed my eyes. I did not want to see. They were part of my home.

But I wanted to get away. I wanted a perfect, happy life with Roland.

“How did you escape?”

They didn’t close the door. I followed you. They didn’t even realize I had left.

But they would. My father guards his possessions, at least the ones he values. The ones he doesn’t value get lost.

Like my sister.

“They’ll come for you.”

Yes.

Unlike me. They won’t come for me.

But they won’t catch me if I don’t want them to. We can stay together.

“Why would I stay with you?” I ask, then wince at the cruelty in my speech. Cruelty that hides some truth. Why would I stay with this thing? I don’t even know what it is.

I don’t know what I am either. Except that I do not fit there. Neither do you. We are of a kind, and we are alone. Let us stay together. I will help you travel, and you will help me learn. And somehow, we will stay away from them.

A shiver runs through me. “You read my thoughts.”

When they’re powerful enough.

“Only mine?”

Yes.

The unicorn raises its head. Our gazes meet. Its blue eyes are gentle.

It has never ever been cruel to me. In fact, it is the only one in my life who has ever heard me or done as I asked.

I step forward, hand extended. “May I touch you?”

Yes.

I do. The hair on its nose is rough beneath my fingers, like horsehair. The horn does not flare with light, but looks very solid.

The unicorn watches me, its body trembling.

Except for our breathing, the woods are silent. Not even a bird chirps. And no dogs bark, no humans crash through the bushes.

No one knows where we are.

“Have you ever seen the sea?” I ask.

I do not even know what a sea is. It continues to watch me, its mane shifting from red to pink to white to blue.

“It’s where my mother’s people live.” Where everyone laughs with joy, and doesn’t judge, where they marry not in front of a priest, but by clasping hands and vowing eternal love.

I believe in love, it says.

“So do I.” I smile. That’s enough, at least for a beginning.

I put my hand on its flank.

Together, the unicorn and I walk through the forest, away from my father’s land, across Roland’s, all the way to the sea.

© 2012 Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has won a couple of Hugos, a few more Asimov’s Readers Choice Awards, an AnLab award, and a couple Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice awards—and that’s just in the last few years. Her novels have hit the USA Today bestseller list, the Wall Street Journal and Publisher’s Weekly lists, and the extended list of the New York Times (before anyone was allowed to say the extended list was important). She’s also had bestsellers in Great Britain and France. WMG Publishing has just reissued all of her fantasy novels, including the seven volumes of the extremely popular Fey series (with more to come). She’s also writing two science fiction series—one in the Retrieval Artist universe and one in the Diving universe—two mystery series under the name Kris Nelscott, two goofy fantasy romance series as Kristine Grayson, and one really strange futuristic romance series as Kris DeLake. And that doesn’t count editing the new anthology series, Fiction River. No wonder she never leaves her house.

The Sounds of Old Earth
Matthew Kressel

Earth has grown quiet since everyone’s shipped off to the new one. I walk New Paltz’s empty streets with an ox-mask tight about my face. An acidic rain mists my body, and a thick fog obscures the vac-sealed storefronts. Last week they hauled the Pyramids of Giza to New Earth. The week before, Stonehenge. The week before that, Versailles and a good chunk of the Great Wall. But the minor landmarks are too expensive to move, the NEU says, and so New Paltz’s Huguenot Street, seven centuries old, will remain here, to be sliced to pieces in a few months when the planetary lasers begin to cut the Earth apart.

I pump nano into my bloodstream to alleviate my creeping osteoarthritis and nod to a few fellow holdouts. We take our strolls through these dusty streets at ten every morning, our little act of rebellion against the mandatory evacuation orders. I wave hello to Marta, ninety-six, in her stylishly pink ox-mask. I shake hands with Dr. Wu, who performed the op to insert my cranial when I was a boy. I smile at Cordelia, one hundred and thirty-three, as she trots by on her quad servo-legs. All of us have lived in New Paltz our entire lives and all of us plan to die here.

Someone laughs behind me, a sound I haven’t heard in a long time. A group of teenage boys and girls ride ancient turbocycles over the cracked pavement toward me. They skid to a halt and their eager, flushed faces take me in. None wear ox-masks, which is against the law. I like them already.

“Hey shinhun!” a boy says. “Do you know where the frogs are?”

Before I can answer, an attractive girl with a techplant on her cheek blows a dreadlock of green hair from her eyes and says, “We heard some wankuzidi has an old house where he keeps a gose-load of frogs.” A boy pops a wheelie and another takes a hit of braino from an orange inhaler. A third puffs a cigalectric and exhales fluorescent smoke.

“Behind my house I have a pond with a few frogs still alive,” I say.

“Xin!” she exclaims. “How ’bout you ride with us? I’m Lin.”

These kids are as high as orbitals, but it’s not as if I have much left to lose. “Abner,” I say.

And just like that I’m hanging on to her waist as we speed toward my house over broken roads no ground vehicle has used in decades. The wind in my face feels exhilarating.

“We’re from Albany,” Lin says, “We tried taking the old Interstate down, but after Juan got tossed when he hit a cheeda crack, we decided to go local. Took us yungyeh!”

The stascreen around my property makes my fifty acres of forest flicker like water in sunlight. It’s a matter of pride that I keep it functioning at high efficiency; after all, I designed the damn technology. When we pass through the screen’s charged threshold, I take off my ox-mask, and breathe deep. The kids smile when they smell the fertile earth, the decaying leaves.

“It don’t smell like this in Albany,” Lin says.

We park the cycles on the overgrown grass and I lead them into the woods behind my house. The kids stare up at the huge maples and birches and fall quiet.

“The frogs croak loudest at sunset and before it rains,” I say. “That’s when the males are trying to attract a mate.” The kids giggle as they leap over branches. “If you really want to hear them, you should stay until it gets dark.”

“You got anything to eat?” a boy says. “We haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

I search inside the house and return with some readimades, pretty much all you can buy on Earth these days, while the kids shudder and wobble as they inhale braino. The green-haired Lin wanders off to vomit in the trees.

“Is she going to be all right?” I ask a boy.

“Oh, Lin always pukes after her first hit. Want some?” He offers a red inhaler, but I decline.

We sit beside the pond, all of us squeezed on a log. Lin sits next to me, and I pop up the straw of the readimade for her. “You okay?” I say.

“Yeah, I always get all shunbeen when I deepen.”

“It’s probably none of my business,” I say, “but shouldn’t you kids be in school or something?”

“School closed four months ago,” she says. “Not enough teachers.”

“So what do you do all day?”

She wipes saliva from her cheek and shrugs. “I don’t know. This.”

Another boy goes off to puke in the woods.

“What about you?” she says. “You live here all by yourself?”

I nod.

“And what do you do all day? Hang out with the frogs?”

“Most of my time I just try to keep the stascreen working.”

“That your job or something?”

“Used to be. I was a stascreen engineer for fifty-one years. I designed the nanofilters that keep ecosystems like this free of envirotoxins. But the NRDC laid me off four years back.”

“Why? This place is xin!”

I smile wanly. “Because toxfiltering’s a dead business now. People are only interested in making new life, not preserving the old.”

She seems to take me in for the first time. “And how old is this place, Abner? These trees look cheeda ancient.”

“I know that when my ancestor built this house four hundred years ago, the frog pond was already here.”

She sighs. “Fucking NEU making you leave this place?”

“They’re making everyone leave.”

She throws a rock into the pond, and a dozen frogs squeak away in fright.

“Please,” I say, gently touching her arm. “You’ll scare them off.”

“How long?” she says, giving me a tender look, and I’m not sure if she means the frogs or my eviction.

“Soon.”

The kids grow hungry again. I had been saving some hard-to-find vegisteaks for my grandkids, but they haven’t visited in ages. As I grill them on the deck the smoke rises through the trees, and the dipping sun sends girders of light through the branches.

The kids inhale more braino, howl with laughter, and Lin pukes again. And when they tire, I glimpse something desperate in their bloodshot eyes, something I’ve seen in the expressions of Cordelia and Dr. Wu and Marta and the other holdouts. Regret doesn’t spare you just because you’re young.

“You cycled all the way from Albany for this?” I ask Lin.

“Nothing but dust and skyscrapers there,” she says. “No real trees. We heard this was xin. Do you have kids, Abner?”

The question catches me off-guard. “Yeah, a son and daughter. And two grandkids. You sort of remind me of my granddaughter, Rachael.”

She pauses to consider this. “They come here lots?”

“Not anymore.”

“Why not? I’d be here every day.”

“They’ve moved.” I point to the sky.

She frowns, and her body sags like an old tree. “We’re moving too.”

“New Earth?”

She harrumphs. “Nah, that’s only for rich kids. We’re going to Wal-Mart Toyota.”

“Haven’t heard of it.”

“You wouldn’t. It’s like cheeda ancient, one of the first orbitals. But you gotta go where they send you, or else, you know?”

“I know,” I say, staring at the upside-down trees reflected in the water.

Night creeps over the forest and the frogs begin their mating calls in earnest. The croaking rises to a din, and the kids pause and listen. The glorious stars emerge, and I’m not sure if it’s my imagination, but the frogs seem to plead to them, over and over again, “Save us, save us, save us!”

We listen for a while, until the frogs tire. “It’s late,” I say. “It’s a long way back to Albany. Why don’t you kids stay? There are plenty of beds.”

So we head inside. I set them up with fresh linen I haven’t used in years, and during the night I hear fucking and shuffling and laughing as I pour myself tumbler after tumbler of rye whiskey until I pass out. Late in the night, I hear someone whimpering outside my door, and I rise groggily from bed. Lin sits in the hallway, her eyes as red as cinders as she looks up at me.

“I’m sorry,” she says, wiping away tears. “I didn’t know that was your bedroom.”

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” she says as she climbs to her feet.

“You okay?”

“I was just thinking. You don’t know us, Abner, but you welcomed us into your home.”

I shrug. “This place was made for guests.”

She stares at the walls. “Must have been beautiful, when it was full of people.”

I nod. “It was.”

She stands there, and again she reminds me of my granddaughter who I never see. I want to hug her and tell her the future will be xin, that everything will work out, eventually. But I’m too drunk to lie. “It’s late, Lin. Go to bed.”

A tear rolls down her cheek. She nods and turns away. I close the door, feeling as if I’ve missed something important. It takes me forever to fall back asleep.

The next morning, the kids are gone. The house looks as if a tornado has blown through. But one bedroom has been tidied, and there’s a note on the nightstand.

“The frogs are beautiful. You are beautiful. Thank you for a perfect day. —Lin.”

I hold the note in my hand and stare out the window into the empty yard. I already miss their laughter.

Several months before I received the evac order, I visited New Earth for the first time. My son Josef played the guide and took me to the Ishibuto-Mori preserve, a dense rainforest on the northern hemisphere. Giant sequoias planted a few years ago had already grown hundreds of feet tall, carrion flowers had been gengineered to smell like cotton candy, and the rains came precisely at 2:00 p.m. every day.

Clear plexi walls kept us safe on a paved path that led us, like Dorothy to Oz, to John Muir Mall. It was a palatial marketplace where they seemed to have anticipated every human need. Food, clothing, jewelry, a pub, an immersion cinema, a spa. All was here, square in the middle of the rainforest. A holohost welcomed us to the mall’s courtyard and carefully explained, as if he were speaking to children, how Old Earth had become uninhabitable, how humanity’s first home was ruined forever because Those Before had no appreciation for the natural world. But the Ishibuto-Mori Corporation, along with dozens of other companies, were hard at work ensuring that New Earth avoided this fate.

As my son and I ate oversized burgers in the courtyard of Pfizer’s McDonald’s, I noticed that no one looked up when Earth rose above the forest canopy. Before the next scheduled rain we left for home.

Josef’s family lived in a spacious and many-windowed apartment on the ninety-seventh floor of a three-hundred-story tower. Luxury condos like these, Josef said, were popping up all over New Earth. My heart warmed when I saw my grandkids, Rachael and Pim. It had been several years since I’d seen them in person—they didn’t visit Earth anymore. Today was Pim’s twelfth birthday.

My grandson blew out his candles and we all shared papaya cake. On cues from my daughter-in-law, a shining mahogany andro poured coffee, brought out cookies, and cleared the dirty dishes. I felt like a princely CEO. On Earth natural grain was absurdly expensive and hard to come by, but on New Earth it seemed as plentiful as the scheduled rain.

“Pim’s not the only one celebrating today,” Josef said, in between sips of coffee. “Tell Grandpa the good news, Rach.”

My granddaughter beamed and said, “I got a full scholarship to GE Sinopec!”

“GE Sinopec?” I said.

“An orbital university!”

“Oh, wa!” I said. “A full scholarship? That’s xin!”

“As a reward,” Josef said, “Esther and I have decided to buy Rach a small lobber. You’d be surprised at how affordable they’ve become.”

“I can visit Mom and Dad on weekends,” Rachael said, “and fly back to school on Sundays. And Grandpa, there’s this low-fuel maneuver called a Hohmann Transfer that lets you fly over to Old Earth in a couple hours. Me and Leva are definitely headed there when they start dismantling it, to get a closer view.”

“Rachael,” Esther said with an admonishing tone. “Why don’t you see if Grandpa wants more coffee?”

“He’s got coffee. And isn’t that what you bought the andro for?”

“Rachael, don’t be rude!”

“But, Mom, his cup is full!”

“Rachael Kopperfeld!”

“Please!” I said. “Yes, yes, they’re dismantling Old Earth. It’s no gaise secret. Why does everyone avoid that subject around me?”

“Because every time we bring it up,” Josef said, “you go on a rant about how they’re tearing down your home.”

I stared at my son. “It was once your home too, if you remember.”

Josef frowned. “That was a long time ago, Dad.” He waved his hand at his apartment. “This is my home now, and I’d like to have a nice birthday for Pim.”

“Is the frog pond still there, Grandpa?” Pim asked.

“Yes! It’s been a struggle to keep the pond free of toxins, but the frogs still croak away on summer nights. Do you remember when you used to put them in boxes to scare the hell out of Grandma Shosh?”

He giggled. “And Rach used make up silly names and marry them.”

“They got so loud some nights,” Rachael said, smiling, “that my ears would ring the next morning.”

I shook my head and stared down at the plate of cookies. “Those poor creatures don’t know that their ancient home will soon be destroyed.”

“Not destroyed,” Josef said. “Dismantled. There’s a difference.”

“Countless species will be killed. I don’t know what you call that.”

“Some death will occur,” Rachael said. “But the Geoengineers are making heroic efforts to save every documented species.”

“Heroic?” I said. “Rachael, the cradle of humanity is being left to rot.”

“I love Earth too, Dad,” Josef said, “but the air is poison. The soil is toxic. You spent your whole gaise life trying to clean it, and for what? So we could watch Mom die slowly from the Tox?” He paused and took a deep breath. “I want a better life for my kids, and your Earth can’t give that.”

I put down my cup. “Since when did it become my Earth? Once, it was ours.”

Esther loudly sipped her coffee, a sign she was not amused by the conversation.

“Grandpa,” Rachael said, “it’s not just the toxins, it’s the overpopulation. We used up all the matter in the asteroid and Kuiper belts to make New Earth. We need Old Earth’s mantle to build more colonies. And besides, it’s natural.”

“Natural?” I said as my belly grew hot.

“Yes.” Rachael sat up straight and looked at her mother, as if she had been preparing this for weeks. “In living creatures, new cells are born from old ones, then the old cells die. But life continues. Your body’s cells have replicated themselves dozens of times. Old Earth isn’t ending, Grandpa, it’s rejuvenating. The old cell is giving birth to a new one. And when the old cell dies, its contents are broken up and recycled. That’s the course of life. The body of Old Earth will be gone, but its essence lives on.”

I stared at my family, all of them willing to throw away the priceless Earth as if it were an obsolete piece of technology, and disagreed.

Three days after Lin’s visit, I set my car down in central Albany. In a foggy rain, I wander past empty skyscrapers, drifts of windblown debris, and vac-sealed buildings, kicking up clouds of gray dust. On Livingston Avenue I meet a holdout who introduces herself as Helen. A sickly looking kitten walks at her heel.

“Not many kids left,” Helen says, her voice muffled by a scratched ox-mask, “Green hair, techplant on her cheek, neh? Yeah, that’s Lin Bar-Martin. Yeoung’s kid. Hangs out with a bunch of liumangs. If I recall, her father Yeoung worked in nanotesting.”

“A scientist?” I ask.

“Ha! No, they tested nano on him.”

“Oh. Where do they live?”

“Nowhere.”

“What do you mean? She’s homeless?”

“As if. No, plenty of places to live here. She’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“To Wal-Mart Toyota. An orbital.”

“You mean, for good?”

“Where’ve you been, baichi? No one comes back to Earth.”

“What about her friends?” I hate myself that I can’t remember their names. “Are they still around?”

“Haven’t seen a kid in days. The whole north side of the city shipped off to Wal-Mart Toyota. Heard the place is dreadful. They abandoned it mid-construction because they found better ways to build colonies using nano.”

“But the kids were at my house three days ago!”

“And they left two days ago. A fleet of ships took ’em away like it was a parade.”

And then I know why the kids cycled all the way down to New Paltz over dangerous roads, and I know the look in Lin’s eyes when she was crying outside my door that night, the feeling that I’d missed something. That was Lin’s last day on Earth. The kids wanted to see a piece of ancient Earth before they left it forever.

“Thank you,” I say to Helen.

I pet the sick kitten, then I leave her empty city. By the time I arrive home, it’s getting dark. There’s a strange car in the driveway, and a young woman sits on my porch. For a moment, I think it’s Lin. But then I recognize my granddaughter’s dark hair.

“Hi, Grandpa.”

“Rach, what are you doing here?”

“I came to say hi.”

I hug her hello. “You came all the way here just to say ‘hi’? Why didn’t you call? I could have prepared dinner.”

“It was kind of a last-minute thing.”

“It’s great to see you! You look good, Rach.” The wicker chair creaks as I sit beside her. “How’s school?”

“It’s tough, but otherwise xin.” We stare at the overgrown grass as a wind whispers through the trees. “The grounds look really healthy.”

“I try.”

“I remember when I used to sit on your lap and you’d tell me the silliest stories.”

“I’d say come on over, but I think you’re too big for that now.”

She smiles, but it quickly fades. “Grandpa, the NEU can spot a flea from orbit. There’s nowhere to hide.”

“I don’t plan to hide. I plan to stay right here.”

“They’ll force you out.”

Beyond the trees, a troublesome spot on my stascreen wavers. “Maybe I won’t give them the chance.”

“Grandpa . . .” She puts a warm hand on mine. “You and I disagree on a lot of things. Promise me that when the time comes, you won’t do anything stupid.”

“Rachael . . .”

“Promise me.”

When I look at her I see the child she once was, the girl who married frogs and danced in fields of sunflowers. “I’m sorry,” I say, “but this isn’t your Earth. You don’t understand.”

“Maybe I understand more than you.” She leaps to her feet. “Neh, I have to go.”

“Already? You just got here.”

“I have an exam in the morning.”

She hugs me, squeezes a little too hard. “Goodbye, Grandpa. I love you.”

And in seconds her lobber is flying up into the sky. I watch it recede until it’s just another star. Out back the frogs croak louder than I’ve ever heard them.

I sit on the wet grass under the stars, hugging a bottle of rye. Yesterday, another hurricane blew through the area, a product of Earth’s new gravitational partner. A decade ago they would have burnt the storms away with their orbital lasers, but Earth just isn’t worth it anymore. They didn’t even bother to give the hurricane a name.

The storm washed away the dust, and the moon and New Earth lay hidden below the horizon. And in the dark, how beautiful is the sky! The stars are so bright they cast shadows, their points are so clear I feel I could pluck them like apples from the sky. Jupiter rises slowly in the east, bright as an angel. And the Milky Way swaths gloriously across the heavens. If I could leap into the sky, I’d fall into it forever.

“Ashey,” I say to my cranial, “Play ‘Grandkids Visit, Summer ’98.’”

A holo projects over my eyes. Little Rach sits on my knee, giggling. Birds chirp in the summer sun. The smell of roses. A soft breeze on my cheeks, all under the warm comfort of a well-functioning stascreen. “Can we sit under the sunflowers again?” a five-year-old Rach asks a much younger me.

Sunlight trickles through fans of yellow petals as I follow her into my field of sunflowers. She sits on the ground beneath their giant blooms and says, “I want to live in your house, with you, Grandpa. I never want to go home.”

I watch her draw a house in the dirt with a stick. “Like this one,” she says.

“Ashey, play ‘Shoshanna’s 60th Birthday.’”

Years earlier, Shosh opens the ancient oak door of our house. Everyone yells, “Surprise!” As my wife throws her hands to her mouth and shrieks, she drops a glass bowl. It shatters, and everyone chuckles nervously. A tear of happiness rolls down her sallow cheek. Even this far back she’s already showing signs of the Tox.

I excelled at removing the worst pollutants from environments, but with all my knowledge I still couldn’t protect my wife’s body from them.

“You devil,” she whispers to me, embarrassed. “I thought you had forgotten.”

“Never,” I say.

“Damn. That bowl was expensive.”

“I’ll make it up to you.”

“Oh, yeah?”

I lean in to kiss her, and I feel the press of her soft lips even after the recording ends.

“Ashey, play ‘Josef’s first steps.’”

Our same house, decades earlier. Shosh, younger, healthier, Tox unmanifest. Little Josef bravely climbs to his feet, takes two teetering strides, then falls. Shosh leaps to publish the holo on the net for all to admire. She struts pridefully over to me and smiles. “Kid learns fast. He’s already better at walking than you are.”

My ancient self giggles.

“Ashey, pause playback.”

Google-Wang Colony spins into view far above. I’d recognize the corporate colors from a billion miles away. I take another quaff of rye, then lay back on the wet grass. Cold moisture soaks into my back. Bank of Zhong Guo Colony winks distantly across the sky, and even though it’s hundreds of miles up I think I can hear it tearing roughly across the Cosmos. I sit here, watching the stars, until New Earth rises, spoiling the glorious night.

I approach my house, plasteel container in one hand, rye in the other. I pour the liquid in the plasteel container into the foyer, and the hydrocarbon smell burns my nostrils.

With a small lighter I set flame to a soaked rag. I toss it into the house. For a moment, the rag burns like a candle, guttering in a bedroom. Shadows dance across my ancient walls like memories. A pang of dread hits me. Is this really what I want?

But it’s too late. The foyer erupts in flame, and I leap back. In seconds the fire roars louder than the frogs ever have. The heat singes my face as the house burns.

And just like that, I destroy the home that my fifteenth generation great-grandmother built four hundred and seventeen years ago.

With the stascreen shut down, the fire corkscrews freely into the sky. A column of smoke arcs away for miles, lit by the light of New Earth. Once, this would have aroused a hundred suppressor-bots into action. Now, what is another fire when all will soon be ash?

My ancient house burns to the ground. It takes a while. So I sit beside the pond. The frogs are quiet, perhaps watching the flames with me. I think of Rachael, and the promise I made to her. And I think of Lin.

At dawn, when the police arrive, the only thing left of the house is a pile of cinders. The air is foul with soot as armed men read me the evac order. They bind me in plasticuffs and escort me off my property. They seat me inside a small craft, and the young man across from me, in bulky police regalia, offers me anti-nausea nano for the trip to space. I was hoping to glimpse my property one last time as we lift off, but there are no windows. This is a prison ship.

I paid a hefty fine and was ordered to take “reintegration” classes, then I was set free. The process seemed rote, and I suspect I’m one of thousands. Josef rented me an apartment in his condo for an absurd price, and he and Esther have been inviting me over nightly for dinner as if nothing at all has happened. Rachael calls from time to time to see how I’m fitting in.

When I’m not skipping the reintegration classes or finding excuses not to join Josef and Esther for dinner, I spend my time watching as the Earth gets sliced open like a piece of fruit, as geometric chunks are carved out of its pulpy flesh ten thousand kilometers at a time.

This evening my telescope and datafeeds focus on the Earth’s northern hemisphere.

“It’s time,” Ashey warns. By piggybacking illegally onto satellite proxies, I have real-time access to the Geoengineers’ datanet. On my holoscreen a green light flashes twice, the signal from the Foreman. In Pan Mandarin, translated on my screen, the Foreman says, “EDHL-22, begin the first longitudinal cut at your discretion.”

A full minute’s pause. Then a blinding flash. A molten orange circle of light moves south along the seventieth longitude line for minutes, and even from this distance it’s so bright it leaves spots in my vision. The cutting pauses as the laser’s gyroscopes realign. Then it slices across the fortieth latitude line, just under an emptied New York City.

The laser traces out a great rectangle over the course of an hour. Then the grav-beams tug the huge section out. Like ice cream, the molten core drips toward Earth’s center. By technology I don’t pretend to understand, the layered walls of Earth don’t collapse into the new space, but stay fixed. And the white-hot core, from what I’ve read, is being artificially cooled, eleven-point-five degrees per day.

I wonder if any of the holdouts, like Cordelia or Marta or Dr. Wu or Helen and her kitten, escaped the mandatory evacs. As they slowly floated into the sky, would they think they were flying up to meet God?

Over several hours, lasers break the chunk into hundreds of pieces.

“That one,” Ashey says, highlighting a point in my vision.

The land that was my home is shunted up to Trump-Dominguez Colony. It will be used, the datanet says, as a counter mass so the colony can maintain its highly sought-after earth-forward views. Four and a half billion years, of algae and antelope, of brontosauri and bison, of woolly mammoths and glaciers, of trees and earthworms and amphibious frogs just to become a paperweight so the rich can wake up to their plastic earth.

That night, I dream of frogs screaming.

Years pass. Old Earth is gone, every last piece used up.

Today, I sit next to Josef, Esther, and Pim in an amphitheater of thousands. Rachael is graduating from GE Sinopec with a B.S. in Applied Biology. We sit through an endless procession of names. Pim and I converse a bit. His voice has deepened, and he looks more like a man these days. He’s polite, and humors me, but I sense universes between us. I know this world isn’t mine anymore.

After the ceremony, we eat dinner at an expensive restaurant, and the low-g does horrors to my stomach. Rachael, in her graduation gown, has been staring at me the entire meal. “Grandpa,” she says, “will you come with me for a ride after dinner? I’d like to show you something.”

Her mother smiles.

“I’ve had too much to eat. I’m a little tired. Maybe next time?”

Josef glares at me. “Dad,” he says like he’s scolding a child, because that’s what I’ve become to all of them.

I sigh. “What did you want to show me?”

We head outside to Rachel’s lobber, a frighteningly small vessel, and I climb into the passenger seat as eagerly as a man to the gallows. I was never good with zero-g. I try to hide my shakes as we leap off GE Sinopec and dive down to New Earth.

“For my graduation thesis we had to recreate an Old Earth ecosystem,” she says, “as part of the bioprojects to save as much life as we can.” I examine her face in the reflected light of the planet. She is beautiful, my granddaughter. From under her rolled up sleeve I see the glint of a techplant, expressly forbidden by her father. I smile.

“So I chose your backyard,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“Specifically, the lake behind your house, with all the frogs.”

The lobber dips over a deciduous forest, and we descend tens of miles. My stomach feels like I left it back at the university.

“I didn’t tell you,” she says, “because I knew how you were always going on about New Earth.” She holds her breath, and when I say nothing, she says, “and also because I really wasn’t sure if it was going to work.”

“What was going to work?” I say. We swoop over fields of swaying grass, muddy swamps and dense forests.

“Let me show you.”

We set down in a field beside a thick wood. There are deep depressions in the mud, a sign of many previous landings. The sun hangs low on the horizon, and its orange light spills through the trees. She leads me into the woods, down a winding path, pausing to make sure I’m still with her, to warn me of a treacherous branch or root. The air here smells of mulch and earth and abundant life. She smiles, and suddenly it’s like she’s a toddler again, leading me into a field of sunflowers.

And then I hear them.

Frogs. Thousands of them, croaking away with strange voices. We approach a small lake, not too different from the one that was once in my backyard.

“I came by your house when I knew you were away.” She looks apologetically at me. “And I collected, um . . . specimens. They’re not the same frogs, of course,” she says. “They have genes better suited to this particular environment. But they’re direct genetic descendants. Essentially, these are your frogs’ great-grandchildren.”

The sound of their croaking rekindles memories of a thousand summer nights.

“I did it for school, of course,” she says, “but also I did it for you, Grandpa. I remember sitting beside your lake on summer evenings, listening to the frogs. Those times, when we were all together, are some of the happiest I remember. I wanted to bring a little of that here, to New Earth, for you. Now that I’ve got the population stabilized—and a passing grade.” She laughs. “I could finally show you.”

I am flabbergasted. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say yes.” She waves her hand and a long document arrives in my vision.

“What’s this?”

“A deed,” she says. “I used a few connections at school, and I got a little financial help from Mom and Dad. Well, a lot of help. But I bought this land. And now I’ve transferred the deed to you. These fifteen hectares are yours, Grandpa. It’s my gift.”

I’m stunned. “Rach, it’s beautiful.” I reach to hug her.

She whispers in my ear as she squeezes me, like she used to on summer nights on my porch so long ago, “I thought perhaps you could build a house here.”

The frogs croak. Their sound is different, a little strange. And the trees are arrayed a bit too neatly. This isn’t my Earth. It never will be. But I think of green-haired Lin and her friends, and Pim, and Josef and Esther, and Rachael, all coming to visit.

“Yes,” I say. “A big house, with plenty of room for guests.”

© 2013 Matthew Kressel.

Matthew Kressel’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Electric Velocipede, and the anthologies Naked City, The People of the Book, and After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia, as well as other markets. In 2011 he was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for his work publishing the speculative fiction ’zine Sybil’s Garage. When he’s not designing websites or setting up computer networks for a living, he’s learning to play the trumpet or teaching himself Yiddish. He co-hosts the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in New York alongside Ellen Datlow, and has been a long-time member of the Altered Fluid writers group. His website is www.matthewkressel.net.

Addison Howell and the Clockroach
Cherie Priest

An Eyewitness Account by Petra Oberg (1902–1996), Resident of Humptulips

Addison Howell didn’t so much arrive in the town of Humptulips as appear there sometime around 1875. He had money, which set him apart from everybody else—because everybody else was working for the logging company, and mostly they didn’t have a pot to piss in, as my Daddy put it.

At first, Mr. Howell didn’t make much of a stir. He built himself a house, way outside of town, a big three-story place set back in the hills—and you couldn’t see it until you were right on top of it, what with all the trees. He had a wife with him at one point, but she died up there. Folks said he’d murdered her with an axe, but there was never any proof of that and we didn’t have any law at the time nohow, not a sheriff or anything, much less a jail, what with less than three hundred souls. We had a mayor, though—a fellow named Herp Jones—and I think if Herp could’ve rounded up enough warm bodies, he would’ve seen to a lynch mob. But everyone he might’ve asked was either working or drinking, so I guess that didn’t happen.

The town gave Mrs. Howell a Christian burial in a little plot back behind the only church we had, and her guilty-as-sin husband paid a pretty penny to have a crypt built up around her. It was a real big deal, because nobody else in town had ever gotten a crypt, and only about half the folks who ever died even got a tombstone. That rankled a bit, even though he gave a tithe in honor of our St. Hubert, protector of woodsmen. But then Mr. Howell went back to his house in the trees, and for the most part, nobody hardly ever saw him again.

But a few years later, as I heard it, after he’d been out of people’s minds, laying low so to speak, Addison Howell was out and about doing whatever it is a wicked man does on a Sunday, and he came across a homesteader’s camp just off the old logging road. There was a wagon with a broken axle, and two dead men lying beside a campfire. It looked like they’d been tore up by wolves, or maybe mountain lions, or some such creature. But inside the wagon he heard a little girl crying. He looked inside and she screamed, and she bit him—because like attracts like, I suppose, and the girl had a bad streak in her too. That’s why he took her home with him.

She was maybe eight or nine when he brought her inside, and legend has it she was mute. Or maybe she didn’t feel like talking, I couldn’t say. But we all thought the girl was too scairt to speak after wild animals all ate her family, and thought it a scandal that he took her in rather than bringing her into town. No matter what a bad seed she might’ve been, Mr. Howell was worse for having lived longer.

Anyway, he raised her as his own, and they lived together in the house in the hills, and nobody ever visited them because everybody knew they were doing evil things up there. If they weren’t up to mischief, they would’ve just moved to town like civilized people.

But people started telling stories about hearing strange noises out there at night, like someone was whacking on metal with a hammer, or sawing through steel. Word got around that he was building a machine that looked like a big bug, or a lobster, or something. It had a big stack on top and it was steam powered, or coal powered, or anyway it was supposed to move around when he was sitting inside it. The stack was strange, they said, because it curved back into the machine. That made a lot of the folks down at the tavern laugh. I don’t know who was fool-headed enough to get close enough to listen, but somebody did, and somebody talked.

Of course, I worried about the girl, and later on, the mayor and some friends of his, all of them with guns and itchy trigger fingers, went up to that house and demanded to know what was going on up there. For all they knew he was summoning Satan, or beating up that girl, or raising whatever kind of hell I just don’t know.

Addison Howell told them they were welcome to look around, so they did. They didn’t find anything, and they were mad about it. They asked the girl what was going on, but she wouldn’t say nothing and they thought maybe she was scared of Howell, and that’s why she wasn’t being helpful. But she was a teenager by then, or old enough that she could live there with a dirty old man if she felt like it, and people’d look askance, but no one would take her away.

Not long after that, Addison Howell went into town to do some business—he was over at the logging foreman’s place, and nobody has any idea why, or what they were talking about. They got into some kind of fight—the foreman’s wife overheard it and she came out and saw them struggling, so she took her husband’s shotgun and she blew the back of Addison Howell’s head clean off, and he died right then and there.

The foreman went and got Herp Jones, and between ’em, they figured it was good riddance. They decided they should just leave him in the crypt with his wife, since there was a slot for him and everything, and that’s what they did. They wrapped up his body and carried it off.

When they got to the crypt, they found that one of the doors was hanging open—and that was odd, but they didn’t make nothing of it. They thought maybe there’d been an earthquake, a little one that wasn’t much noticed, and the place had gone a little crooked. It happens all the time. But inside the thing, they found the floor all tore up. There used to be marble tiles down there, and now they were gone. Nothing but dirt was left.

I expect they wondered if someone hadn’t gotten inside and stolen them. Marble might’ve been worth something.

They didn’t worry about it much, though. They just dumped old Addison Howell into his slot, scooted the lid over him, and shut the place up behind them. Then they remembered the girl who lived at Howell’s place—nobody knew her name, on account of she’d never said it—and they headed up there to let her know what had happened.

I think privately they thought maybe now she’d come into town and pick a husband, somebody normal and good for her. There weren’t enough women to go around as it was, and she was pretty enough to get a lot of interest.

When they told her the news she started screaming. They dragged her into town to try and calm her down, but she wasn’t having any of it. Around that time there was a doctor passing through, or maybe Humptulips had gotten one of its own. Regardless, this doctor gave her something to make her sleep, trying to settle her. They left her in the back room of the general store, passed out on a cot.

And that night, the town woke up to a terrible commotion coming from the cemetery behind Saint Hubert’s. Everybody jumped out of bed, and people grabbed their guns and their logging axes, and they went running down to the church to see what was happening—and the whole place was just in ruins. The church was on fire, and the cemetery looked like someone had set off a bunch of dynamite all over it. The Howell crypt was just a bunch of rubble, and there was a big old crater where it used to be.

And by the light of the burning church, the mayor and the logging foreman and about a dozen other people all swear by the saints and Jesus too . . . they saw a big machine with that ridiculous tall black stack curving back into itself . . . crawling away—and sitting inside it was the demon Addison Howell, driving the thing straight back to hell. Some said he was laughing, some said he was crying. We were so glad he was leaving, no one followed him, and it would have been difficult to track him anyway because no smoke belched from the black stack.

That’s how it happened, and it’s God’s honest truth. As for the girl, when they went back to tend to her in the general store, she had fled. That’s how we knew she had no innocence in her, either. We went looking, but we never found her. Most everyone thought she’d finally gone to join her family, and in the same way: devoured by beasts in the forest. If she had ever come back, we would have treated her like a ghost.

A Brief Perspective from Historian Julia Frimpendump, University of Washington Professor

My research began with the church, as perhaps the most accurate repository of information. Though Saint Hubert’s was in fact subjected to a fire in 1889, it did not burn in its entirety and most of its records were preserved. I found a record of burial for a woman named “Rose M. Howell” on October 2, 1878, lending credence that the story of Addison Howell may hold a grain of truth; but there is no record for Mr. Howell’s death, nor any subsequent burial.

After consulting with an archeo-industrialist in Cincinnati, I have concluded that the peculiar device known locally as “the clockroach” was very likely intended for use in the logging industry. Its forward claws suggest a machine capable of carrying tremendous weight, and the multiple legs imply that it could have traversed difficult terrain while successfully bearing a load.

Based on this information, one could speculate a kinder story for the tragic Addison Howell. It’s reasonable to guess that he might have been a lonely man who, driven west, adopted an orphaned girl, and in his spare time he devoted himself once again to the very thing that had been his downfall back east: tinkering . . . eventually coming up with this peculiar engine, which might have revolutionized the industry—perhaps even the history of the internal combustion engine—had it been adopted and mass-produced. His conversation-turned-argument with the logging foreman may have been some patent dispute, or an altercation over the invention’s worth—there’s no way to know.

The casual record-keeping and insular nature of a tiny homesteader’s town has left us little with which to speculate.

However, the remains of a marble crypt can be found in Saint Hubert’s churchyard. The church’s present minister, Father Frowd, says that it collapsed during an earthquake well before his time—and to the best of his knowledge, it was salvaged for materials.

As for the wagon with the murdered occupants and the sole surviving child, evidence suggests that a family by the name of Sanders left Olympia, Washington, intending to homestead near Humptulips in 1881. This family consisted of a widower, Jacob, and his brother, Daniel, and his brother’s daughter, Emily. The small family never reached Humptulips, and no record of their demise or reappearance has ever been found.

In one tantalizing clue located (once again) via Saint Hubert’s, a spinster named “Emily Howell” reportedly passed away in 1931, at the estimated age of sixty. Her age was merely estimated because she never gave it, and she passed away without family members or identification. She was found dead alone in the large home she kept outside the city limits—her cause of death unknown.

But she is buried behind the church, and her tombstone reads simply, “Emily Howell, d. 1931. She never forgave us, and never forgot him.”

“Pioneer Myths and Lore in Peninsular Victoriana”: An Exhibit at the Stackpole Museum of Prototypical Industry (Port Angeles, Washington)

The Olympic Peninsula has long been home to a number of Native American tribes, including the Hoh, the Makah, and the Quileute; but it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that it became settled by white homesteaders. Primarily these homesteaders were farmers and loggers, lured by the Homestead Act of 1862 and the promise of a temperate climate.

Though much can be said about the Native traditions and myths, this exhibit focuses on the rural homesteaders and their inevitable bedtime or campfire stories—some of which were regarded with a seriousness that borders on the charmingly naïve or dangerously optimistic, as evidenced by the items on display. Highlights of the collection include the “Clockroach” (1953.99) created by Addison Sobiesky Howell (America, born 1828 in Chicago, IL, died 1899 in Humptulips, WA). The “Clockroach,” built in 1878(?) was a one-man, quasi-lobster-shaped vehicle allegedly designed and driven by the aloof, peculiar craftsman whom the townsfolk of Humptulips came to believe was a minion of the devil himself. Howell’s early past is mostly unknown to historians, but it is believed that he worked as a designer and consultant at a factory that produced train parts, before a falling out with the owner of the company led to his trek from Chicago to Washington State.

The “Clockroach” was discovered by loggers in 1903 abandoned by the side of a remote road in the forests of Washington State, overgrown by moss but otherwise marvelously intact. A private collector bought the “Clockroach” and upon his death in 1953, the museum acquired the piece at auction.

The “Clockroach” measures 40 feet long by 15 feet wide and is composed primarily of steel, cast iron, rubber tubing, and glass. The nature of the machine’s mechanical operation has been the subject of some debate, as it does not conform to the known properties of the internal combustion engine. Indeed, experts have concluded that the “Clockroach” could not have run on gasoline or, as some have postulated, a wood-fed furnace. Speculation that Addison had stumbled upon a safe hybrid steam-powered energy alternative in creating his curiosity has yet to be substantiated by evidence. What it did run on, or whether it ever really worked at all, remains a mystery.

The museum understands the fascination that the “Clockroach” holds for “children of all ages,” but due to liability issues, we can no longer allow anyone to climb the machine. Please remain behind the safety rope at all times. Remember that for energy conservation reasons, we now close at 3 p.m.

© 2011 by Cherie Priest.

Originally published in slightly different form in

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, edited by Ann VanderMeer & Jeff VanderMeer.

This version © 2012 by Cherie Priest.

Originally published in Steampunk Revolution, edited by Ann VanderMeer.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Cherie Priest is the author of a dozen novels, including the steampunk pulp adventures Ganymede, Dreadnought, Clementine, and Boneshaker. Boneshaker was nominated for both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award; it was a PNBA Award winner, and winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Cherie also wrote Bloodshot and Hellbent from Bantam Spectra; Fathom and the Eden Moore series from Tor; and three novellas published by Subterranean Press. In addition to all of the above, her first foray into George R. R. Martin’s superhero universe, Fort Freak (for which she wrote the interstitial mystery), debuted in the summer of 2011. Cherie’s short stories and nonfiction articles have appeared in such fine publications as Weird Tales, Publishers Weekly, and numerous anthologies. She lives in Chattanooga, TN, with her husband, a big shaggy dog, and a fat black cat.

Lifeline
Jonathan Olfert

The day I meet my Lifeline is hot and dry, even for New Dakar. Dust chokes the air and filters the red sun to a washed-out orange that slathers its paint onto the road and the walls. Sand rolls across the pavement. A wind curls into the open front of the teahouse. I sit just inside. The wind washes over me and drops its load of grit across my face. I forsake the balcony in favor of a wall at my back. What little I have, I have it because I make that my rule. I see everything coming, and I leave myself nowhere to run. I don’t anticipate running, but I’ve known people whose Lifelines turned out to be sociopaths. Or just everyday enemies.

I pray this one isn’t, but even an enemy would be something.

Lifeline, Inc. set up the meet for me. It gave me a name, nothing more: Gereth. Gereth is late, and I wonder where he lives, what train or rickshaw he’s taking, or whether he lives close enough to walk. I just got off the phone with Tay. She said the blues took down a truck full of guns on the expressway to downtown New Dakar. Her brother runs a truck like that. Maybe Tay will need a shoulder to cry on tonight. I’m not her type, chromosomally speaking, but a girl can dream.

Either way, if my Lifeline is taking the expressway, he may not make it past the Dallaire exit. Traffic backs up in the low lanes, the domain of internal combustion and rubber tires and sixteen cars crammed side by side. Things get bad enough, a shootout or something—and I wonder how familiar those truck drivers were with their cargo—things get bad enough, and you’ll see: even the high air-lanes, the ones full of shiny things, they’ll back up too. Some Norwester drivers will risk taking stray lead through the Suspension, but enough won’t. They get jittery, floating overhead, and it feels like the silver river is about to flood its banks and drop on you like the rain we haven’t had in years.

I’ve got my back to the teahouse’s side wall, and the waiter steps into the corner of my eye from the kitchen. He approaches. I’m still looking outside. “Can I take your order?”

That’s polite, and it feels like he’s mocking me. There’s no menu. Old men loaf around another table, but you can find the same old men and the same table in any teahouse, upscale or down. Their teacups match. Maybe this place costs more than I think. Lifeline, Inc. picks their meeting points to be socially and financially neutral, a rough middle point between the two participants. My pulse quickens. It’s entirely possible that my Lifeline has money. “Just some water for now, thanks. I’m waiting for someone.” Why not. “And make it spring. None of this recycled.”

I’m still not looking at him, not full on. His eyebrows quiver, but he’s good. I haven’t tasted spring water in years. On the other hand, I spent this much on the clothes, the taxicab, and the afternoon off work at the factory. Even if my Lifeline turns out to be as poor as me, I can afford a glass of water from somewhere other than the waiter’s bladder by way of an EverFilter. “And some ice. Spring.” As far as I can tell, I sound nonchalant, but not like I’m trying to sound nonchalant.

“That will take a moment.”

“I can wait.” I still haven’t looked at him. I think if I do, he’ll see that I don’t feel like I belong in a restaurant of any kind. I want to make an impression on my guest. My Lifeline.

The waiter makes the right noises. As he turns away to serve another table, a man steps up onto the patio. My back goes stiff, and my sari bunches up between my spine and my chair. I know this is him—not with the half-mystical recognition some Lifelines feel at first glance, but because he looks lost. He has a couple decades on me and more than a couple pounds. His skin is too red; he’s not used to the sun, and he didn’t plan well. His clothes are pure Norwester. I’m amazed he walked; he must have parked nearby, a car with Suspension and a really good burglar alarm.

He takes off his hat and steps under the awning. His eyes flick around the teahouse. The corners tighten as he takes in the old men, all of whom are watching him. I can see him wondering if this is a trap. Wouldn’t be the first time a Lifeline appointment went bad, for whatever reason. One point of connection isn’t good enough when you’re sewing or hammering nails: You can turn the pieces every which way. A piece of thread connects me to this man. Where it goes from there is up to him, me, and everyone around us.

His eyes settle on mine and lock. He approaches, hat in hand. “Excuse me,” he says. He’s muting his uptown accent on purpose. “Are you Habiba?”

That he’s a Norwester is an unpleasant surprise; I’ve lost friends to uptown indenture, workhouses and the blues, but this man is a person like any other. He’s my connection to really any other kind of life. He’s rich. A well-connected Lifeline can be exactly that. A mentor, a sponsor, a business partner, a friend. I smile and mean it. “And you’re Gereth.”

The Norwester takes a seat opposite me. The tabletop is scuffed but intact, the chairs don’t creak, and yet he’s wondering where to put his hands, his elbows. I wonder if he’s ever come this far south. “I almost didn’t accept, you know. I mean, my life is fairly prosaic, but I don’t feel some great gaping need. I have friends, a wife, children—” His eyes catch mine again, with the vaguest hint of a question, the tiniest flicker of apprehension. I know some people treat the Lifeline service as a way to meet potential partners, and here I am, a relatively attractive female meeting alone with a man.

“You’re not looking for anything,” I say, completing his thought.

“Exactly.”

“And I’m not bait, Gereth—I’m gay.” I grin. “No interest in seducing you for your money.” I applied because it doesn’t cost anything unless your Lifeline agrees to meet, and then you split the bill. The technology didn’t used to be this cheap. And I could really, really use a change. Any change.

He chuckles and relaxes. The waiter reappears, too quickly for my ice cubes to be made from anything other than recycled water. He smells a large tip. The Norwester doesn’t look at him either. “Give me the tea,” says Gereth. “The one you brew around here. The good stuff.”

“Right away, sir.” The waiter vanishes.

“I heard about this tea,” says my Lifeline. “How it keeps mosquitoes away. To do that uptown, I’d need to raid half a pharmacy and sleep with a net.”

I laugh. “You’re fidgeting. Are you still nervous?”

“Well, I don’t really know. I mean . . . nobody knows what this is supposed to be, right? The Buddhists and the Mormons have their take on it, my friend is a physicist, and my daughter smokes so much FedDope that her opinion makes about as much sense as theirs. And there you are, all calm and collected, like you’ve met your Lifeline a dozen times.”

I sip the water. I can only describe it in terms of what it’s not. What’s the opposite of flat, recycled, chemical, choked by outgassing pipes? This water is like new life. “I don’t think it works that way. One to one, you know? You’re my only Lifeline, I’m your only one. I think I’m just curious. I didn’t expect you to be a—” I gesture at his clothes. He looks down and realizes that his wardrobe is a poor fit for this neighborhood.

“With a name like Gereth?”

“Plenty of people down here name their kids things like that. But yeah—if you want to just let this pass, y’know, let this go, no harm done.” He’d paid his half already, after all. “My dad met his Lifeline, hasn’t spoken to him in twenty years. His job didn’t let him associate with people like us.” And I already know I’ll catch all kinds of grief for my Lifeline being a Norwester. Grief, and requests for help, usually too heart wrenching to decline. I can live without that.

He frowns. “Point taken. But let’s see where this goes. Um, let’s see. I’m a fairly minor policy writer at the Department of Energy. Got a wife, two kids—here.” He takes out his wallet and shows me a picture. Some rich people swear by 3D, but in my mind you can’t beat a flat photograph. I’m charmed to see a man from uptown carrying something that cost less than a yuan to print, and treasuring it. His wife is thin, with tightly curled hair. She looks quite a bit like me, if you imagine her with darker skin. The necklace she’s wearing, I couldn’t buy with a month’s wages. The children are well-fed adolescent boys. One is biologically theirs, at a guess. The other boy’s features are sharper, his build heavier, his skin darker. I remember about ten or twelve years back, when adoption was the newest social responsibility craze in uptown. Regulations were amended, and our orphanages cleared out. School crowding went down. I got to learn to read.

“Your son—he looks familiar.”

“We took him from an orphanage a few districts from here, when he was two.” Gereth’s eyes soften, and a smile plays around his lips. “The deworming was a nightmare, but we never looked back.” I blink. It sounds like he’s talking about a dog—but I know how bad our orphanages can get. I wonder if he decided to adopt for compassion’s sake or society’s. “He didn’t even know he was adopted until he was seven or eight. Ah, thank you.” The waiter has returned. Gereth takes a sip of the tea and pauses.

“May I get you anything else, sir?”

“The tea I asked for. I wanted the good tea.”

“This is the good tea, sir. This is the Norwester tea.”

“This is Sansiphor—I could brew this in my kitchen.” Gereth sets the teacup down on the saucer with finality. “Get me the other tea, the kind that keeps mosquitoes away.”

“I’m sorry, sir. We don’t carry that tea anymore. This tea is better. It’s the—”

“The Norwester tea, yes.” Gereth sighed. “I was hoping for something a bit more authentic.”

The waiter smiles. He has won. Tracking down the other tea would have taken him into the hot sun for an indeterminate length of time. The customer is grudgingly satisfied, and the waiter may still get his tip. “Anything else, sir?”

“Chicken salad sandwich, light on the mayo, black pepper, bit of cucumber.”

The smile vanishes. I know he will be running from store to store in the area, looking for chicken salad, mayonnaise and cucumber. A place like this might have one or two, but those aren’t common ingredients around here. Gereth is oblivious. “Very good, sir.” The waiter leaves, and Gereth grins at me.

“So, Habiba—tell me about yourself.”

I’m a little indignant, a little bored, and still a bit curious. I don’t want to talk about myself. I could tell him about the factory, or raising my sister, or the string of girls I’ve loved and lost. I could tell him about the singing lessons. Instead, what comes out is—

“The blues got my friend’s brother today with a truck-full of weapons.”

I take a slug of the water. It’s still cold, but the ice cubes have become oblong, like pills. I swallow some by accident, but I’m used to swallowing FedDope. Not the same grade as what his daughter takes, no doubt, but enough to dull the job, the heat, and the sirens at night. Since the government gives it out for free, I take it. I’m clean right now, since night before last. I wanted to come at this with a clear head. Gereth rocks back in his chair; his hand finds the teacup and he drinks mechanically. “Your friend’s brother is . . .” He glances at the table of old men.

“He’s Freedom Brotherhood, yeah. Probably won’t be happy that my Lifeline is a Norwester. Or maybe he will.” Suddenly I’m on the absent waiter’s side, running store to store with him, begging for chicken salad to feed the man who might tip well. That’s all in my head, but the resentment is real. “I mean, whatever this connection is, it could be good, it could be bad. Could mean we knew each other before we were born, could mean we’re destined to end up with each other, could mean we’re supposed to be the best of enemies. All the machine said is—there’s a connection. Anyone can be your friend, or your enemy. Tay’s brother would look at this and say, I’m meant to be your nemesis. Or the mechanism of your defeat.” I smirk, and suddenly I’m enjoying his discomfort. I’m also enjoying showing off a hard-won vocabulary. He gulps the tea. “But don’t take it personally. These old men, they could be my friends, they could be my enemies. You want to be my friend? Let me tell you about myself.”

Then I lay it all out: the factory, the one-room school, the secondhand palmtop that doesn’t grip my skin properly, the nights on the street when I get off work and the bus doesn’t run. The money troubles, the gunfire. My friends selling their bodies, either as hookers or bit by bit to the organ choppers.

And it’s not enough. I can never tell this man enough for him to understand me. He’s scared. The old men are catching the edges of this, and they’re angry. Maybe angry at Gereth for being here, maybe angry at me for breaking some kind of code of silence. They glower and drink their tea, and stop pretending not to listen. It’s possible they think I’m begging.

Maybe I am.

“So maybe you weren’t looking for anything, Gereth. I was looking for someone—anyone—who could make my life a little less like it is. A friend, an enemy, a lover, whatever. Escapism.”

I grind to a halt. I don’t realize how long I’ve been talking until the waiter steps up. For the first time I look straight at him. His top button is undone, and sweat stains his belly and armpits. I’m fairly sure these are recent developments. He’s breathing hard, but his tray holds a perfect chicken salad sandwich. “Your sandwich, sir,” he says.

Gereth ignores him, and after a moment the waiter deposits the sandwich in front of him and stalks away. “You wanted your Lifeline to be something to hold onto? That’s a bit of a dream, Habiba. It’s like you want someone else to share responsibility for your life on a whim.” He’s afraid of the old men, and he’s afraid of me, but now it’s his turn to be a little bored.

“You knew my name and you knew we averaged out to this neighborhood. You expected anything else?”

“I expected—I don’t know, I expected to feel a connection. My friends who used the Lifeline machine, they felt it when they met their Lifelines. My mother’s Lifeline had been dead for a week when she used the machine, and she felt something at the grave. I used to think it was wishful thinking, but now here you are, Habiba, here you are wanting to feel something at least as badly as my friends ever did, and you’re not feeling it any more than I am.”

“And you know how I feel?”

“Yes, I think I do. Nothing ‘intuitive’ or ‘metaphysical’ or ‘telepathic’ or whatever—” He gestured mockingly with both raised hands, index fingers extended, hands shaking back and forth. “Nothing like that. But what’s to keep me from understanding you?”

“I don’t understand you, Gereth.”

“Yes, well, you’re young. I’ve taken some psychology. I don’t think it’s hard to learn to understand the world.”

“Are you going to eat that?”

He blinks and looks down at the sandwich. The lettuce leaf is beginning to wilt. The heat is melting the mayonnaise, sending oily drips down the side of the bread. His hesitation is all the answer I need. I reach over and grab the sandwich. His hand snaps out and closes around my wrist. He’s fast—too fast even for a man who spends his time on tennis and squash. Muscle-memory chips, perhaps.

Chairs grate against the floor. The old men are standing up. “I have this,” I snap at them. Gereth misunderstands and pulls, drawing me over my edge of the table. The water glass shatters on the floor. Lukewarm water splashes my bare feet. Gereth blinks at the noise and lets go, and I settle back into my seat. The old men snarl in forgotten languages and sit down too. Gereth, I realize, was the only person sitting down.

I take a bite of the chicken salad. “This is delicious,” I say with my mouth full. “Look what I was willing to do for fresh cucumbers, soft bread, and meat that wasn’t grown in a vat. Nothing to hold onto, need to rely on myself. I don’t like doing that, but you gave me no choice. How could I ever count on a man who thinks he knows me after twenty minutes? This, right here, is why I don’t go with men.” It’s not. I’ve never been attracted to men, but right now I can use the ammunition. “Or at least not Norwester men.” I cram half the sandwich into my mouth and grin at him.

Silence falls in the teahouse.

“For this, I drove all the way down here? So I can watch a little brown girl talk with her mouth full?” Gereth snorts and pushed back his chair. He throws a bill on the table—enough to cover everything and more. For that much money, he could probably have me. He walks onto the balcony, and now that his back is turned I see the outline of a gun inside his jacket, in the small of his back.

“You came here carrying?”

He turns back in the sunlight. To him, I must be sitting in darkness, inscrutable. “You can never be too careful, my friends said.”

“Wise friends. If they were a bit wiser they would have told you to keep your back to the wall. You don’t know which way the wind blows around here.” I look around. Between the old men and the waiter, and maybe me, enough people have hurt in their eyes that Gereth clued in. New Dakar isn’t Greater Arabia or United Tennessee—I don’t have to cover my head or let a male relative speak for me—but the old men remember that you don’t grab a woman who doesn’t want to be grabbed. You don’t bring a gun when you go meet her. You don’t talk about deworming their grandchildren, and you especially don’t do any of those things when you’re a Norwester who’s wandered far from uptown. “You know, I might have figured out part of why we’re Lifelines.”

“And what’s that?”

“So I can walk you to your car and so you can get home to your family in one piece.”

The stakes finally dawn on him as he looks into the darkened teahouse. His hand shifts towards the gun, but he thinks better of it. “If that’s all my Lifeline’s good for this time, it’s a lot.”

“It’s only good once.”

“That might be a shame.”

“Well, I’ll remember the chicken salad.” I stuff the rest of the sandwich into my mouth and join him on the balcony. “Where’d you park?” I say.

I have friends that can kill the locators on any car made in the last twenty years. I’ve always wanted to drive. Stealing my Lifeline’s car might be the gateway to a whole new life. He’s a Norwester. He’ll never come back here, and I’ll never go uptown. Maybe that’s the way it should be. We don’t want him here. He didn’t eat the sandwich. It’s the straw and the camel—that’s the way Norwesters are with us. They ask so much, and we give until it hurts, and they think so little of it. They’re never satisfied with our best. Even the enormous tip is an insult of sorts, a rich man showing off to the little people. The waiter would probably help me carjack Gereth.

But on the other hand, I make that happen and every other possibility dries up.

“Sir, you forgot your receipt.”

Gereth turns, and the waiter discharges a KovalevSauer PCL-42 set to automatic fire. A good, simple gun, made in the last days of Federated Europe—or it could be one of Guangdong’s endless clones. The waiter is no hardened fighter, no trained revolutionary, but for this he could join the Brotherhood or the Brown Sons, no questions asked. He points at Gereth and sprays, and I lurch aside. A slug creases my thigh, biting through my sari. I stay on my feet. Gereth isn’t so lucky.

Everyone you meet could be your enemy. Or your friend.

I kneel beside him. I’m not overcome with emotion; I’ve seen people die before. I brush aside his hands and pull the wallet from his pocket. For the moment I ignore the cash. I’m looking for something else.

I hold the family picture above his face where he can see it, and use my other hand to shield his eyes from the sun. “You took one of ours,” I say. “Sure, you gave him a home, food, taught him to read an’ all—but you still took one of ours and made him one of yours.” Now I let him grab the picture. His hands are shaking, weak. He can’t speak. “You take what you like from us, but it’s never good enough. Your son won’t ever measure up, will he? I’ve known kids who come back, adopted uptown and dropped off down here as soon as a new fad hits. And you wouldn’t have liked the tea. Good thing you can buy the pharmacy.”

It’s hard for me to remember my anger as I watch him die in the street. Now I take his car keys and the cash from the wallet. The bills are patented RenminBucks from Tsien Industries, high-value corporate-backed currency. With this minor policy writer’s billfold I could buy half the teahouse.

“Thanks for being reliable, Gereth.”

I stand and leave Gereth in the dirt. The waiter is standing there, shaking with rage and adrenaline, the KovalevSauer’s barrel half-raised and smoking. I don’t know if he lost someone to the blues or to uptown indenture. Nearly everyone has. I don’t know him, and I don’t know why he did it, but he’s standing in for all of us. We’re all fools to hope for something better from the Norwesters, collectively or individually. But we hope anyways, and then they step on us and don’t even notice. Gereth talked to me like an equal, but actions are what count.

“I want to talk to your manager.”

© 2013 Jonathan Olfert.

Jonathan Olfert studies political science and international relations at Carleton University, Ottawa. His research focuses on how non-Western forces shape events in Africa and the former Soviet Union through networks of revolution and human trafficking. He studied creative writing under Bruce Wayne Jorgensen, karate under Sensei Terry Olfert, and astrophysics under the mistaken assumption that he enjoyed calculus. He recently convinced an opera singer to accept a 250-year-old diamond ring. His influences include Ursula Le Guin, Antonio Gramsci, Steven Erikson, and Flannery O’Connor. He is a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with troubling leftist tendencies. His first novel, a dark fantasy involving mental illness, gods’ conspiracies, revolution, and the forces of entropy, has achieved its third draft.

Child-Empress of Mars
Theodora Goss

In the month of Ind, when the flowers of the Jindal trees were in blossom and just beginning to scatter their petals on the ground like crimson rain, a messenger came to the court of the Child-Empress. He announced that a Hero had awakened in the valley of Jar.

The messenger was young and obviously nervous, at court for the first time, but when the Child-Empress said, “A Hero? What is his name?” he replied with a steady voice, “Highest blossom of the Jindal tree, his name is not yet known. He has not spoken it, for he has as yet seen no one to whom he could speak.”

The Ladies in Waiting fluttered their fans, to hear him speak with such courtesy, and I said to Lady Ahira, “I think I recognize him. That is Captain Namoor, the youngest son of General Gar, who has inherited his crimson tongue,” by which I meant his eloquence, for an eloquent man is said to have a tongue as sweet as the crimson nectar of the Jindal flowers.

Lady Ahira blushed blue, from her cheeks down to her knees, for she had a passion for captains, and this was surely the captain of all captains, who had already won the hearts and livers of the court.

“Let the Hero’s name be Jack or Buck or Dan, one of those names that fall so strangely on our tongues, and let him be tall and pale and silent, except when he sings the songs of his people to the moons, and let him be a slayer of beasts, a master of the glain and of the double adjar.” The Child-Empress clapped her hands, first two and then four, rapidly until they sounded like pebbles falling from the cliffs of the valley of Jar, or the river Noth tumbling between its banks where they narrow at Ard Ulan. And we remembered that although she was an Empress and older than our memories, she was still only a child, hatched not long after the lost island of Irdum sank beneath the sea.

“Light upon the snows of Ard Ulan, he is indeed a slayer of beasts,” said the captain. The Ladies in Waiting fluttered their fans, and one sank senseless to the floor, overcome by his courtesy and eloquence. “He wounded two Garwolves who approached him, wishing to know the source of his singular odor. He wounded them with a projectile device. They are in the care of the Warden of the reed marshes of Zurdum.”

“This cannot be,” said the Child-Empress. “The Hero must go on his Quest, for that is the nature of Heroes, but he must not harm my creatures, neither the Garwolves singing in the morning mist, nor the Ilpin bounding over the rocky cliffs of Jar, nor the Mirimi birds that nest in the sands of Gar Kahan, nor even the Sloefrogs, whose yellow eyes blink along the banks of the river Noth. He must not bend a single wing of an Itz. Let us give him a creature to speak with, who can learn his name and where he has come from. Let us send him a Jain, and with her a Translator, so that he will perceive her as resembling his own species. Is there one of my Translators who would travel with the Jain to meet the Hero?”

All three of the court Translators stepped forward. From among them the Child-Empress chose Irman Adze, who was the oldest and most honored, and who signaled her willingness to make such an important journey by chirruping softly and nodding her head until her wattles flapped back and forth.

The Child-Empress said to Irman Adze, “Your first task is to remove his projectile device and replace it with the glain and the double adjar, so that he is suitably equipped but can cause no great harm to my creatures and the citizens of my realm.” Then she turned to the court. “And let us also send an Observer, so that we may see and learn what the Hero is saying and doing.” The Observers whirred and flew forward. She selected one among them and entered its instructions.

“And you, Captain,” said the Child-Empress, turning to Captain Namoor, “because of the pleasure you have brought us in announcing the arrival of a Hero, you shall be permitted to wear the green feather of a Mirimi bird in your cap, and to proceed after the Chancellor on state occasions.”

His training prevented Captain Namoor from blushing with the intensity of his emotions, but he must have blushed inside, for not one in a thousand receives the honor that the Child-Empress had bestowed upon him. Lady Ahira squeezed my upper left hand until it went purple and I winced from the pressure.

“What beast shall he slay, great-green feather of the Mirimi bird?” asked the Chancellor, in his ponderous way. He fancied himself a poet. The Ladies in Waiting hid their ears with their fans, and even the Pages giggled. His words were so trite, and not at all original.

“What beast indeed?” asked the Child-Empress. “Since I have said that none of our creatures must be harmed, let us send our own Poufli.” Hearing his name, Poufli rose from where he had been lying at the Child-Empress’s feet and licked two of her hands, while the other two stroked his filaments.

“Go, Poufli,” said the Child-Empress. “Lead the Hero on his Quest, but allow him eventually to slay you, and when you have been slain, return to me, and I will think of a way to reward him that is appropriate for Heroes.”

The next day, the Jain, with the Translator strutting beside her and the Observer whirring and darting around them, left for the slopes and caverns of Ard Ulan, where the Hero had awakened. Poufli bounded off in the opposite direction, to where the Child-Empress intended that the Hero should encounter his final Obstacle.

We watched, day after day, as the Hero traveled across the valley of Jar. The images transmitted by the Observer were captured in the idhar at the center of the Chamber of Audience. I preferred to watch in the mornings, when the mist still hung about the bottoms of the pillars but the dome high above was already illuminated by the rising sun, and the Mirimi birds were stirring in the branches of the Gondal trees. I would splash water on my face from one of the sublimating fountains, eat a light breakfast of Pika bread spread with Ipi berries, drink a libation made from the secretions of the Ilpin that were kept at court, and then sit on one of the cushions that the Child-Empress had provided, watching, with the other early risers, as the Hero performed his ablutions and offered his otherworldly songs to the gods of his clan.

As the Observer transmitted, the Translator interpreted for the Hero and simultaneously showed us what he saw, so we were confronted with our own landscape made strange, like the landscape of another world. The Ipi bushes, the yellow Kifli flowers that grew at the edges of the reed marshes of Zurdum, the waters of the marshes, all were flatter, as though they had lost one of their dimensions, and they lacking many colors of the spectrum. The Jain had become tall and pale, although the Translator did not disguise her undulations. The Observer had become organic. It bounded rather than flew, and was covered with a fine brown fur.

“Dog! Come here, dog!” we heard the Hero say, and “Would you like something to eat?” to the Jain, whose articulations he listened to with care, as though she were speaking a language he did not understand.

I preferred these quieter, intimate moments, although each day, in the late morning or early afternoon, the Child-Empress sent the Hero an Obstacle: once, a swarm of Itz to sting him, so that he swelled up and the Jain had to cover his arms and legs with the leaves of an Ipi bush soaked in marsh water; once, two Habira that he fought off with the glain and clever use of a flaming reed; once, a group of warriors from the town of Ard, so that he would know he was approaching the towns and cities where the citizens lived. Once, the citizens came out of a town to offer him welcome, placing a garland of pink Gondal flowers around his neck and giving him cups of the intoxicating liquor that westerners make from an iridescent fungus they call Ghram, which grows on the roots of the Gondal tree. Once, he was placed in a cage at the center of the town, and the citizens came to see him, until he said a word that was the name, they told him, of an ancient god who was still secretly reverenced.

As court Poet, it was primarily my responsibility to create the events and Obstacles of the Quest, although the Child-Empress was an enthusiastic collaborator. After my morning viewing, I would go to her chamber. However early I went, she was always lying upon her couch, absorbed with matters of state, attending to the wellbeing of the citizens. But she would put aside her work, waving away the Chancellor and the Courtiers that were gathered around her, and say to me, “Good morning, Elah Gal. What have you thought of for my Hero today?”

The morning that the Hero reached the court of the Child-Empress, the Translators occupied themselves with interpreting us to the Hero. We looked at ourselves in the idhar, translated. We were still ourselves, yet we were no longer ourselves—Lady Ahira still blushed blue, although her knees were stiffer, and an entirely different shape. The Courtiers were stiffer as well, more angular—and silent. I must admit that I did not miss their chirring. Many of us were only partly visible, and the Translators themselves appeared only as a shiver in the air. The Pages still ran back and forth behind the cushions where we sat, but on two slender legs, like Ilpin. I had to remind myself that they would not fall—they were only translated.

The Child-Empress was still herself, still a child, still an Empress, and yet how different she was. Substantial parts of her could no longer been seen, and when she clapped, it was with only two hands.

“That must be what a child of his species looks like,” whispered Lady Ahira, and would have whispered more had not the Hero walked in, with the Jain at his side and the Observer, grown positively shaggy, by his feet.

“Welcome, visitor from another land,” said the Child-Empress. “Do you come from far Iranuk, or fabled Thull? Tell us what land you come from, and your name.”

“No, ma’am,” said the Hero. “My name is Jake Stackhouse, and as far as I can make out, unless the stars are lying to me, I’m from another planet altogether. What planet is this I’ve landed on?”

“Planet?” said the Child-Empress. “This is Ord, the crimson planet. Have you truly learned to travel across the darkness of space? You must be a great wizard, as well as a great warrior.”

“No, ma’am,” said Jake Stackhouse. “I’ve got no idea how I ended up on your planet, though I sure would like to find out, so I can go home again. And I’m not a warrior or a wizard, as you call them. I’m just a ranch hand, although I’ve had a few knocks in my life, and learned how to take care of myself.”

“You do not know your way home?” said the Child-Empress. “I am sad that you are not able to return to your clan, but what is a misfortune for you may be fortunate for us. I have heard that you fought the Garwolves and defeated the warriors of the western marshes. Surely you are the most courageous man on Ord. I ask for your aid. We are threatened by a fearsome beast, called a—” I suddenly realized that when we had created this encounter, the Child-Empress and I, we had not given our beast a name “—a Poufli. This beast is ravaging our eastern cities and towns, eating and frightening our citizens. If you will defeat this beast, I will give you ten hecats of land, and one of my Ladies in Waiting to be your mate.”

Captain Namoor, who stood next to the Chancellor, turned orange down to the tops of his boots. Let him, I thought. A little jealousy would do him good.

“I don’t want a mate, ma’am. Just this girl here, who’s traveled for the last three days, the strangest days of my life, at my side. She’s saved my life a couple of times, I reckon. I don’t know her name, so I call her Friday.”

“You would have that female for your mate?” said the Child-Empress. “Then know, Jake Stackhouse, that she is a priestess of her people, the Jain of Ajain, from the far north, where the river Noth springs from the mountains of Ard Ulan. To mate with her, you must win her in battle with the glain and the double adjar. Are you willing to fight for her, Jake Stackhouse?”

I could not help blushing pink with surprise and appreciation. What an improvisation this was, not the words we had created together and so carefully rehearsed, but the Child-Empress’s own, created at that moment. Around me I heard a scattering of applause as the court realized what had just happened. I applauded as well, pleased with her spontaneity. How honored I was that my Empress, too, was a poet.

“All right,” said Jake Stackhouse, “I’ll fight this Poufli for you, and then fight for the girl I love best in all the world. I never thought I’d marry a green bride, but underneath that skin of hers, she’s as sweet and loyal as any woman of Earth.”

“It is well,” said the Child-Empress. “Defeat the Poufli for me and I will give you ten hecats of land by the upper reaches of the river Noth, where the soil is most fertile, and I will ensure that the Jain becomes your mate. Now, take some refreshment with us, Jake Stackhouse.”

The Pages brought platters of the roasted fruit of the Pandam tree, and a sauce made from the sap of the Pandam, and stuffed roots, and the sweet lichen that grow on the roofs of the houses of Irum, in the south, and Ghram that had been brought from Ard for the Hero’s Feast. The Hero sat on a cushion, with the Jain beside him and the Observer at his feet, and told us stories of his planet and the place he had spent his childhood, the Land of a Single Star. He spoke of towns in which warriors battled each other with projectile devices, thieves who stole from transport vehicles, and herds of creatures that stretched over the plains so you could see no end to them. He spoke of females so beautiful they were given the names of flowers. The Ladies in Waiting were so eager to hear his stories that they listened without respiring, and some of the more delicate Pages swooned or emitted the scent of marsh water. I myself, Elah Gal, the court Poet, listened and recorded, so that these stories of another planet could be placed among the Tales of the Heroes, which my ancestress Elim Dar had begun when the Child-Empress herself was only a dream of her parent’s physical manifestation.

Grief and consternation spread throughout the court on the day the Observer transmitted the tragic news: the Hero was dead. His body was brought back to the palace, and three Healers examined him to determine the cause of his death. They reported their findings to the Child-Empress. Poufli was not to blame. He had played his part both enthusiastically and with care. The Hero’s wounds were minor. But his dermal layer, when they examined it, had been covered with red spots. He must have had a reaction to Poufli’s emissions, or perhaps to the touch of his filaments.

But Poufli was not to be consoled. He lay submerged in one of the palace fountains, beneath the translucent fish from Irum, refusing to eat, refusing to sleep, as had been his custom, at the foot of the Child-Empress’s couch.

The court grieved. The Courtiers put on their white robes of death, and I myself put on the death robes that my mother had worn when her spouse of the second degree had chosen to demanifest. The Ladies in Waiting would not blush. Lady Ahira postponed the celebration of her union of the fourth degree with Captain Namoor, for which luminous mosses had already been grown on the walls of the Chamber of Audience. The Pages stood silent, neither giggling nor emitting scent. By orders of the Child-Empress, the murals on the walls of the palace were muted, until only faint outlines reminded us of their presence. The palace Guards wore mourning veils, and drifted around the halls of the palace like gibhans of the dead. The Jain was inconsolable, and filled the halls with the mourning wail of her kind. A cold wind seemed to blow through everything.

I sat beneath the Jindal tree in the palace garden and tried to create a poem about the Hero, but how can one commemorate defeat? The Child-Empress herself would not leave her chamber. I went in once a day to try to consult with her, but she simply sat by the aperture, looking out at the garden. I did not wish to interrupt her contemplations. Even the Chancellor stood by her couch without stirring, waiting for her to emerge from her grief.

On the seventh day, she came into the Chamber of Audience. She wore robes as red as the Jindal flowers, and she had adorned her arms with bracelets of small silver bells, which jingled as she moved. Poufli was at her side, pushing his noses into her robes.

“Citizens and creatures,” she said, “you are sad because the Hero has died. We cannot now celebrate his victory, nor follow with fascination the story of his life here on Ord. Is this not so?”

The Ladies in Waiting, the Courtiers, the Guards, the Pages, all nodded or waved or emitted to signal their assent.

“But we should not be sad,” she said. “To watch the triumph of the Hero would have been like listening to a poem by Elah Gal, or watching the blossoming of the Jindal flowers, or attending the union of Lady Ahira and Captain Namoor. It would have been most satisfying. But there is another sort of satisfaction, when Elah Gal pauses and there is silence, or the blossoms fall from the Jindal tree, or lovers part in sorrow after their time together has ended. Do we not take satisfaction also in the passing of things, which we can no more control than we can control the way of the Mirimi bird in the air, or the way of two loves once they are mated? The death of the Hero reminds us of our own demanifestations. This too is a poem, perhaps a greater poem than the Hero’s triumph would have been, because it is more difficult, and to understand it we must become more than ourselves.

“Let the Hero, whose physical manifestation our Healers have so artistically preserved, be placed on a pedestal of stone from the quarries of Gar Kahan, beneath the branches of the Jindal tree in the garden, where their blossoms will fall upon him. And let us celebrate the death of the Hero! Let us celebrate our own demanifestations, which are to come. Let the Jain be returned to her clan so that she can differentiate and deposit her eggs, and let her offspring be raised at court, in recognition of the service that she has performed for us. Let Elah Gal create a poem about the Hero, a new kind of poem for a new time, and let it be included in the Tales of the Heroes. And let us all celebrate! Come, my friends. Let song and laughter and blushes return to the palace! But I shall withdraw, for I have important work to do. Tonight, as the moons rise over Ord, I shall begin to dream, so that, in your children’s children’s lifetimes, another Child-Empress will be born.”

For a moment, there was silence around the Chamber of Audience. Then, the murals on the walls began to glow. The Ladies in Waiting began to clap and laugh and blush. The Pages leaped into the air and landed again on their toes, emitting the scent of Kifli flowers. The Guards cast off their veils and clashed their disintegrators on their shields, so that they rang through the halls. Everywhere, there was the sound of joy and of wonder. I myself could not keep my orifices from misting. To live at a time of the dreaming! The Hero had indeed brought us something greater than we could have imagined.

I wondered, for a moment, if I would become one of those poets who are celebrated for having created what no other poet could have—if I would create the poem of the Child-Empress’s dreaming, of her becoming no longer a child but the full essence of herself, until eventually she emerged in the perfection of her non-physical manifestation. But then my humility returned. Such poems were still to be created. The first of them would be about the Hero, of how he had died and yet fulfilled his Quest.

But today was a day of celebration. We sang and danced in the Chamber of Audience, celebrating the union of Lady Ahira and Captain Namoor. At the height of the festivities, the Child-Empress withdrew. But we knew now that it was not to contemplate her grief but to begin an important new event in her life. And we leaped higher and turned faster with joy, while the Musicians played their kurams and their dharms, until night fell and the mosses illuminated the ancient murals, and the moons rose, and the Jindal flowers spread their fragrance over the palace.

© 2009 by Theodora Goss.

Originally published in Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, edited by Delia Sherman & Christopher Barzak.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; and Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards.

Author Spotlight: Judith Berman
Moshe Siegel

In your novella “The Fear Gun,” we witness post-failed-invasion humanity squabbling over resources, social rank, and power. Were the human survivors bound more tightly together during the invasion—which occurs before the narrative begins—than in the aftermath? Do you think our natural inclination in the face of such a civilization-ending attack would be to draw closer together, or splinter into “everyone-for-themselves”?

They submitted to the sheriff’s leadership in part out of fear, the way people will give up civil rights in wartime or other national emergencies (or what are promoted as national emergencies). But they were also more cohesive with the sense of common purpose that comes in disaster or wartime.

I think both tendencies are part of human nature, but show themselves more or less strongly depending on the individual and the circumstances . . . we’ve all seen examples of each in the aftermath of disasters. In theory it’s the job of social institutions to keep the worst of human impulses in check and harness aggression and the urge to dominate for the wider social good. But when social institutions break down, all bets are off. Part of what “The Fear Gun” explores is that condition of flux.

Human survivors were quick to adapt and incorporate alien technology into their society as a means of rebuilding, yet they were unable, in the majority, to understand or utilize the “fearmonger” weapon. Does the revelation that fear comes from within—and humanity’s insistence on fetishizing alien doodads as inscrutable sources of power—suggest our general lack of introspection when confronted with the unknown?

The flip side of a sense of identity or community is a sense of Other, and whether it’s your personal fears or social anxieties, there’s nothing more common than projecting it outward. And there’s nothing more Other than alien invaders . . . Curiosity, empathy, and imagination are some of the tools the characters in the story (and humanity as a whole) have to deal positively with the unknown, but those are hard to bring into play when you are already terrified.

Alexandra believes that “only the weak” can “sustain empathy,” whereas “the strong” cannot “resist the temptation to use their knowledge” for exploitation. She explains to James that “good and evil begin in each person’s heart and mind.” Do you think there could exist any variety of global event (be it a pandemic, global economic collapse, or widespread natural disaster) that holds the potential to override humanity’s thirst for interpersonal dominance, or are we simply hard-wired for such?

We’re hard-wired for it, some individuals more than others. But we’re hard-wired for other things at the same time, as Alexandra points out.

When the desperate Yosemite survivors consumed alien flesh, they assimilated the eetee’s fear-mongering abilities and the end result was a massacre. Fred the dog, in contrast, acquired alien telepathy and used it to manipulate humans via feelings of happiness and contentment. Is this a commentary on the “unaccountable” nature of humanity—i.e., another example of empathy’s exploitation—versus Fred’s simpler, canine instincts?

Well, canines are social animals, too, and can have a pretty hierarchical pack structure. And dogs, some breeds more than others, can be aggressive and violent both toward humans and their own kind. So they aren’t meant as a contrast with humanity in that sense. That Fred is a tail-wagging golden retriever and he and his owner loved each other is more important for the story. In fact Fred loves everyone and everyone loves Fred. He could perhaps have been a human character, except that his plot function depends in part on his dog’s interest in smelly dead things.

“The Fear Gun” explores events through a diverse cast of characters, in the spirit of much longer works—for example, Stephen King’s The Stand or Harry Turtledove’s alternate-history writings. Did you find it a challenge to contain so many fully-developed characters and perspectives in the limited format of a novella?

“Challenge” is kind of an understatement. Not only does it have a series of viewpoint characters, the dog and his seemingly over-the-top paranoid owner are the only reliable narrators. And even Fred’s picked up a bit of trickiness. I had actually tried to write the story on the model of Richard Linklater’s film Slacker, in which a secondary character in one scene becomes the viewpoint character of the next section, but I couldn’t quite pull it off. The movie doesn’t have a plot, whereas I was constrained by mine.

Do you have any upcoming projects that you’d like to tell us about?

For the past few years I’ve been specializing in unfinished novels, so I’m a little nervous about trumpeting my work. I am pretty excited about my current project, a YA fantasy novel about family secrets and environmental destruction that’s set in the contemporary Pacific Northwest. In some ways it could hardly be more different from “The Fear Gun,” but there’s a fair amount of science behind it and there are common themes with my SF stories—about the ways people relate both to technology and to the natural world, and about the dark side of human nature.

Moshe Siegel works as a slusher, proofreader, and interviewer at Lightspeed, interns at the pleasure of a Random House-published author, freelance edits hither and yon, and is a Publisher’s Assistant at Codhill Press. His overladen bookshelf and smug e-reader glare at each other across his home office in upstate New York, and he isn’t quite sure what to think about it all. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.

Author Spotlight: Daniel Abraham
Jennifer Konieczny

Could you tell us what inspired your story “The Cambist and Lord Iron”?

This was originally a commissioned piece for an anthology called Logorrhea, where the schtick was that all the stories would be based on a winning word from the National Spelling Bee. Back in 1977, John Paola won the 50th National Spelling Bee with the word “cambist.” I’d been reading a lot of popular economics books at the time, and so I picked that one for mine.

Why write a fairy tale of economics? And could you recommend other short stories or novels that also focus on economics?

I came to economics late in life, and I’m tremendously fond of it (especially in some of its more modern, biology-based forms). The ideas in even pretty basic economics are fascinating and often counter-intuitive and delightful. Also, since I sometimes forget how to write short stories and have to relearn the skills, it’s nice to have a familiar structure like a three-test fairy tale to work from.

The books I’d recommend that involve economics are Dorothy Dunnet’s House of Niccolo series, or if you’re looking for nonfiction, Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan.

The Cambist insists that anything can be expressed in terms of anything else. What’s the oddest exchange you’ve ever made?

A copy of Sandman issue #1 for a peculiar deck of cards.

If you could exchange a day of your life for someone else’s, whose would it be and what do you think the rate would be?

Hillary Clinton. I think she’s a fascinating woman with a broad and deep life experience, and I believe that being her for a day would teach me more about the world and how it works than I’m likely to learn in the next four years of my own life. I suspect the exchange rate would be pretty good. My days are comparably calm, restful, and low-stakes. I’d be buying education, she’d be getting a vacation, and we’d both come out ahead.

In addition to short stories, you’re known for your novels. What do you enjoy most about writing shorter works? Longer?

There are some ideas that only work in short story form. If you tried to pull them out to novel-sized, they’d feel padded and dull. And then there are some ideas that need a hundred thousand words to get where they’re going, even if you’re standing on the gas the whole way. Either way, what I like best is making a story that I’m proud of. I manage it on occasion.

What’s next for you?

Well, I’m writing an epic fantasy series called The Dagger and the Coin, collaborating on a Hugo-nominated space opera called The Expanse, and doing a Star Wars tie-in novel. I’m adapting A Song of Ice and Fire as comic book scripts, and I’ve got a couple short stories in the next few months. So I’m thinking next is probably a cup of coffee.

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: A.C. Wise
Robyn Lupo

The opening of “With Tales in Their Teeth, From the Mountain They Came” is pretty much the definition of a hook opening. How did you come up with it? What was the genesis of this story?

This is going to sound terribly cheesy, but . . . it came to me in a dream. Or rather it came in that odd, interstitial space between waking and sleeping. Once I had that opening, all the other bits that had been floating around trying to be a story came together. But I should back up a bit. The true genesis of the story was an “overheard” Twitter conversation between John Klima, Lynne Thomas, and Charles Tan. They were talking about dentist appointments, I believe, but I hijacked the conversation because the image of librarians with tales etched on their teeth wouldn’t leave me alone. Part of the story also came from wanting to pay tribute to Ray Bradbury, his passion for story, the idea of being drunk on words, and of course the theme of book burning. The Twitter-inspired imagery and the Bradbury-inspired imagery came together around the dream fragment and voila!

It seems that Alba’s grief led her to the Library, but she almost rebels against its ways initially. Can you tell us more about this?

I see Alba as someone constantly fighting her own happiness. She has trouble opening up, and trouble letting go. Even though she wants the Library to heal her, she is afraid of being vulnerable. It’s easier for her to fight the Library’s ways initially, rather than giving up control. Ultimately, she and the Library end up changing each other, and it requires them both to give ground.

What books do you think were in the Library?

All of them. Every book ever written and dreamed. And they’re all the perfect version the author had in their head, the wild and gorgeous thing they fell in love with and so desperately hoped the book would grow up to be, transported directly to the page.

There seems to be a connection between what should be saved, i.e. the books in the Library, and what should be let go, in the case of Alba’s first lover. Can you tell us more about that?

Again, I think it comes back to Alba’s fear of being vulnerable, and her fear of letting go. In order to heal, she has to become part of something larger—the books and the Library, the vast store of human knowledge and dreaming. It’s not so much that Alba’s lover isn’t worth holding onto, but he’s part of her old life, and symbolizes her fear of letting go in multiple senses of the words. Giving yourself up to something larger isn’t without risks. Her lover gave himself up for the cause of the war, and lost his life. If you never risk anything, you may never lose, but you’re unlikely to gain either.

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: Jeffrey Ford
Andrew Liptak

Hi Jeffrey—thanks for taking a couple of minutes to speak with us about your story “Daltharee”! What can you tell us about its origins?

I think what it was that helped me come up with this story was the idea that there is so much going on around us that we miss—not so much the size difference, as it is here—the ant we unknowingly crush, etc., although that’s part of it, but just the other cultures and signs and matrices of knowledge that, because we are unaware, they remain invisible to us. We live in a world of worlds, but we rarely see beyond where our own begins and ends. I think it was something like that, but also, once I had that idea, somewhere along the line Kandor the bottle city insinuated itself into my thinking and that was it. I was writing my way into another world.

While reading this story, I was reminded of another story, “Microcosmic God” by Theodore Sturgeon. Is there any connection between the two?

There very well could be a connection between the stories for you and probably some other readers—those who know both stories—but, alas, I’m not one of them. I’ve read Sturgeon before and admire his stories, but unfortunately I don’t know that one.

Paige is the only person to travel between the larger world and the smaller one. He’s persecuted in one, and the savior of another: Is there a religious element embedded in the creation of such worlds?

Again, I don’t mean to be coy, but I’m not sure. “There could be” is really my best answer. If you’re of a religious mindset or if on an analytical lark you decide to read the story from a religious mindset, perhaps. Maybe it’s Science as the new Religion, but I never had that in mind when writing. Seriously, the last person to trust with an answer to that question is the author. It would be a lot more fruitful and interesting to find out what other readers think along those lines. Maybe some of your readers will weigh in on that question. I’d love to see their answers and ideas about it.

Paige’s original efforts spell out disaster for his tiny world: How and where should people meddle with the natural world, if our understanding is less than perfect?

This is a really good question and one that’s pertinent in the real world. I’m totally pro-science, but I’m also aware of the human hubris that can sometimes get in the way—sometimes out of ego, sometimes in an attempt to try to do “the right thing.” And let’s not forget to try to make a profit. So I see now plans by reputable scientists to try to reverse global warming by doing things like seeding the earth’s oceans with huge amounts of iron. Maybe it would work, but think about the possibility on that grand a scale for problems to arise. How about Genetically Modified Crops, which are now found to be giving rise to super weeds and super insects, which are modifying themselves to compete with the new crops. That whole thing could lead to a rather big “Oops!” moment. I read about plans to implant tech devises in humans. Questions? How about all the weird side effects caused by a lot of these drugs big pharma pushes on people? Of course many of these medicines are miraculous and life-saving, but a lot of them are also useless and dangerous. Science is truly wonderful, but you have to remember that it’s a tool used by humans, who are sometimes blinded by their own bullshit. Interesting irony, which is always good for fiction.

What do you have coming up next that we should keep our eyes out for?

My latest book, in which “Daltharee” appears, is a collection of twenty short stories—Crackpot Palace. It has a new, unpublished novelette in it and author’s notes on each of the stories. In addition to that book, I have had recent stories in the anthology After, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (Tor); the July/August 2012 issue of F&SF; and Ghosts: Recent Hauntings, edited by Paula Guran (Prime Books). There are also short stories forthcoming in the anthologies Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (Tor); Hauntings, edited by Ellen Datlow (Tachyon); The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, edited by John Joseph Adams (Tor); Oz Reimagined, edited by John Joseph Adams and Doug Cohen; and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade).

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal, Tor.com and he can be found over at andrewliptak.wordpress.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.

Author Spotlight: Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Robyn Lupo

How did “Purity Test” start for you?

It started from an invitation into an anthology that never got off the ground. I had never thought of writing about unicorns before, so I had to really work on this. I didn’t want to write the same old thing as everyone else. That’s always my goal in an anthology, to have the somewhat different story that somehow fits the guidelines.

Unicorns have been tamed now for a long time; removed from their roots as symbols of wild purity and made rather . . . cute. What made you think to reboot this, and are there other mythological creatures/characters/etc. you’d like to see rebooted?

If you look at the “originals” (and I put that in quotes because the original myths are usually lost in time), mythological creatures are rarely cute and cuddly. Even when they’re pretty, there’s some kind of bite to them. So I thought about doing a unicorn that both went with the myth and against it. That’s harder than it sounds. Unlike many other mythological creatures, cute unicorns have really invaded our psyche.

As for other creatures that need rebooting—that’s the cool thing about fantasy. We can always reimagine all of the myths. We can update them or revert to what we believe is the original myth. The key is to keep the story current, somehow, whatever that means.

You draw on the perception of the feminine mystique. Can you tell us more about this?

When I think about unicorns, I think about girls and horses. (Girls love horses.) Then I moved to the whole idea that a unicorn can identify a pure or virginal woman. Which led me to the idea that cultures throughout history and currently seem to be obsessed with sexually innocent women, often at the expense of those women. Whenever I think about things like that, I get a little angry. Generally, that anger shows up more in my Kris Nelscott mystery stories or the mystery short stories I write for the Dell Magazines. Rarely does it appear in my fantasy. But it did here—or you wouldn’t have asked the question.

Can you tell us more about how you saw the relationship (or lack thereof) between Micheline and her father?

Naw. I think this one stands on its own. I hope the reader catches exactly what that relationship is, without me spelling it out too much.

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: Matthew Kressel
Robyn Lupo

Can you tell us how this story arose for you?

The story formed from two different seeds. My girlfriend and I stayed at a bed and breakfast in New Paltz, New York, the day after hurricane Irene blew through the area. New Paltz got hit pretty bad, and entire farms and bridges had been washed away. That night we sat on the porch, drinking wine, watching the stars slowly turn. The place had a frog pond, just as in the story, and also as in the story, the moon wasn’t up, and due to the storm, all the dust had been washed from the air. The stars shone brighter than I have ever seen, and I swear you could read by the light of Jupiter rising above the trees. I was overcome with the sense of just how beautiful everything was, and how fragile our environment is.

The other seed has a somewhat more mundane explanation. I had watched a documentary of the dismantling of the old Yankee stadium and the construction of the new. And I thought, how could they tear down this place full of so much history, the literal House that Ruth Built? It was such a sin. To me, the new stadium was (and is) an antiseptic and plastic version of the original. The documentary captured my feelings not just about Yankee stadium but the way we take so many things for granted, and how some are happy with cheap plastic substitutes. I felt I had to write about this.

The bridging of the generations in the story seems both unexpected and appropriate. How did you hit this balance? Can you tell us more about how you see this relationship?

I struggle with a similar bridge in my own life, coming from a conservative Jewish background and being mostly secular in my adult life, yet feeling a strong connection to this immense history and culture. It’s impossible to be raised as a Jew and not have a sense of connection to the past, even if you are a non-believer. To me, Rachael in the story, though she is far removed from her grandfather’s life, remembers the natural beauty of Earth her grandfather showed her in her youth and she brings that into the present, but adds her own color and experience to it. It’s what I try to do with my own culture and history.

Do you think you’d be one of the holdouts? Do you see the holdouts as being a particular type of person?

I think part of me would like to fly around in Rachael’s lobber, touring all the orbitals and the new forests of New Earth. On the other hand, by that time in history, that type of space travel might be as old hat as driving a car today. I don’t know if I’d go to the extremes that Abner does, but I would be hesitant to leave humanity’s cradle to rot.

The holdouts are, to me, those people who see value not in superficial appearances, but in substance. Their Earth is old and dying. It’s not shiny and new like New Earth. But the holdouts have an emotional connection to their land, and to the Earth. Do we abandon an aged parent or grandparent because they are no longer healthy? The holdouts see Earth as their aged grandparent and therefore it’s unthinkable to leave her.

You’ve been a storyteller for some time now. Do you have any advice for the newbs? What’s an average day of writing like for you?

I used to read a lot of books on writing, searching for some profound secret that all successful writers shared. And while perusing a bookstore, one book said, “Why are you reading this book? Why aren’t you writing?” That hit me pretty hard. I immediately put the book down and went home to write. There is no magic pill you can take, no shortcuts or tricks. There is nothing that will make you a better writer other than hard work. All else is commentary.

As far as my own writing goes, I have no “average” day at the keyboard. Some days I’m pulling teeth to get three paragraphs. Other days I look up from the screen and hours have passed. But I try to spend several hours every morning writing. I think it’s important to stick to a schedule.

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: Cherie Priest
Earnie Sotirokos

The story of “Addison Howell and the Clockroach” took three perspectives to get to the “complete” picture about what happened in Humptulips during the late 1800s. Why did you choose to present it this way?

Initially, this was a piece for The Thackeray T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities—wherein I was to take an artifact and treat it like a museum piece . . . and museum pieces go through many hands. I liked telling the story of an object through three of the people it affected; it seemed like a tidy (and entertaining) way to go about it.

The separate viewpoints both contradict and confirm each other. How can a narrative benefit by not always following a straight line?

I’m a big fan of leaving a little narrative wiggle room, and in this case, you can choose to believe whichever viewpoint you prefer. They’re all credible, after a fashion, and they all undermine one another just a tiny bit, which I enjoyed.

The power source for the clockroach appears to be lost to time. Do you think anything as significant as clean, alternative energy has slipped through our fingers from that time period?

I rather strongly doubt it. Perhaps it was paranormal, and it’s just as well that the technology is long lost.

Much of your fiction takes place in the Pacific Northwest. What makes this area of the US such a compelling backdrop for you?

I lived there for six years, and I wrote this story while I lived there. I often prefer to write about places where I reside—or at the very least, places I’ve visited extensively. Also, I saw the word “Humptulips” on a map and it gave me the giggles.

What can we expect from you in the future?

More steampunk (most notably, next year’s Fiddlehead from Tor) . . . as well as a return to my gothic roots. I’m back in the southeast, so I predict more than a few ghost stories coming up in the next few years.

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, playing video games, or reading slush, he enjoys penning fiction based on those influences. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.

Author Spotlight: Jonathan Olfert
Earnie Sotirokos

“Lifeline” takes a hard look at the social divide in the world you created. How did you come to address this issue through fiction?

I had a professor once who looked for a special kind of local soap in a gigantic Ghanaian market. The soap repelled mosquitos and thus prevented malaria. But the vendors only offered him the “good” soap—Dove, I think it was. Maybe Irish Spring. It was better because it was American, and the special local soap was nowhere to be found. Certain parts of Africa have grown and flourished, but in Ghana you can still find this kind of post-colonialism right beside one of the best-performing stock indexes in the world. It stuck in my craw that a whole culture could subordinate itself to mine for no reason. And if I had enough money to travel over there and live in the manner to which I’m accustomed, I would be upper-class by default. That makes me profoundly uncomfortable.

Explaining the elaborate process involved with putting together a chicken salad sandwich and getting a fresh glass of water helped depict what day-to-day life is like for Habiba. What made you choose food and drink to shine light on her situation?

I believe we’re defined by how much we consider the needs of those below us—our employees, our children, our obstacles. Selfishness is a matter of forethought. As a missionary in the best and worst parts of California, I spent a lot of time around people of widely different social classes. Most people treat food as a right, whether they’re talking about tilapia or a can of off-brand tuna—and the closer they get to the tilapia end of the spectrum, the more they feel they deserve it. When I do that, I’m ashamed; when I see other people do it, I’m furious.

The adoption of less fortunate children became very trendy on New Dakar. Do you think something like that could ever catch on in our culture?

There’s no doubt we see people as a commodity. It’s the covenant of Cain: Betray your brother, and profit from it. By the most reputable numbers, about fifteen thousand slaves enter the United States every year—some to pick fruit, some to be forcibly trafficked between brothels and sporting events, some to serve as unpaid domestic laborers. That’s a low-end estimate, and many of them are underage. I spent two years as an executive for a student activist group, coordinating efforts with other organizations, and I saw a single trend permeating the activist community. People contribute the absolute minimum amount of time, effort and money, unless someone else is watching. Mostly, it’s to make themselves feel better. Cleanse your conscience for the price of your pocket change, and get a bake sale muffin in the process. So yes, people really are that selfish when it comes to doing good—and yes, we’re that blind when it comes to children’s welfare. I just showed my Scout troop the Kenneth Branagh film Rabbit-Proof Fence. Go watch it, then ask whether people could act as I’ve portrayed.

You don’t ever really reveal what the Lifeline between people is. Why did you choose to keep us guessing?

I was inspired by the classic Heinlein story “Life-Line,” in which a scientist invents a machine that can predict his time of death. He never explains how it works—how could he?—and it’s only important because of how people react to it. (Incidentally, my subconscious is really, really smart. Years and years after reading “Life-Line,” I remembered the story, but not the title or the author. The ripped-off title was a complete accident, so it’s good that our titles mean vastly different things. Ironic, really.) I felt it would distract from the idea that anyone in the world could be your best friend or your worst enemy. These connections exist; the Lifeline machine, however it works, just facilitates those connections. I was heavily inspired by a piece of Mormon folk theology that doesn’t translate well to technology. You know when you meet someone and they’re utterly familiar to you, even though there’s no way you could have met before? Mormons teach that we existed before we were born, and many believe that when you have that kind of instant recognition and connection with someone, you might have known them before mortality. This is why, in the story, Buddhists and Mormons have certain speculations about how the Lifeline machine works. The bottom line is that, for the purposes of this story, the people are what’s important, not the technology.

What can we expect from you in the future?

I’m featured in the upcoming Masked Mosaic anthology of superhero stories from Tyche Books, with a story about a supervillain on the Akwesasne First Nations reserve. I’ve written around 300,000 words of my novel, and pared it down to 150,000. I’m working on short stories about nanotech STIs and necromancers, so expect those themes at some point. I have only one real ambition: to treat speculative fiction as something that can heal and expand the soul, like Guy Gavriel Kay or Kage Baker. Basically, I want to write Earthsea. I’m not Le Guin and this isn’t 1968, but I’m trying to improve my skills to match that sort of ethos.

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: Theodora Goss
Christie Yant

You explore the idea of poets and poetry as being something much larger in Elah Gal's world than they are in ours. She actually orchestrates the events that she will eventually document. Where did this idea come from, and is it one that has greater meaning for you outside this story?

The idea really started with thinking about the "of Mars" books and what they would actually look like from a Martian perspective. After reading Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, it's hard to take the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels seriously, although they're still fun to read. But I thought about what would happen if those sorts of adventures, the human being on Mars adventures, were staged, were performance. I think there's something Ursula Le Guinish about the idea: Le Guin, whom I read avidly as a teenager, taught me that the alien perspective may be nothing at all like our own. In this case, poetry is indeed more important for the aliens, although human societies have also had court poets. There was a time when if you went to war, you took your bard along to sing about it. Bards had magical powers, back then. And I do still believe that poetry is magic, that in a sense it makes the world: Stories create our perception of reality. So yes, I think there is a larger theme at work here, although I hope the story itself is simply fun as well.

You recently had a story published in Under the Moons of Mars, an anthology based on the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs. When I started reading "Child-Empress of Mars" I was convinced I was reading a Barsoom story, it seemed to fit so well in that world, while being wholly original. Were you directly inspired by the work of Burroughs for this story, or do you think there's a larger cultural or literary influence at play for both of you?

For this particular story, I was much more influenced by the IDEA of Burroughs' Barsoom than the reality. I'm not really writing about his Mars here. I'm writing about the idea of the Mars adventure story, which he is certainly associated with—but there were many Mars adventure stories written. I think the larger influence for me would actually be Bradbury and Le Guin, whom I mentioned above. They were essential to my experience of science fiction as I was growing up, and they critiqued, in their different ways, the hero-meets-bug-eyed-alien ethos. They taught me to assume that the aliens have a valid perspective, and a perspective that is perhaps more interesting, and more important to explore, than our own. In my own Barsoom story in "Under the Moons of Mars," I took the Burroughs characters and plot line much more seriously, although even there I showed that John Carter doesn't know everything that's going on—in the mind of his own calot, even. I tried to show that peripheral characters have their own stories, which may be very different from what we assume is the main narrative.

The world-building in this story was so detailed—you created the flora, the fauna, the architecture. What was that process like for you? Was this a world you'd conceived already, or were the details created as you went?

I created the details as I went, and then I went back and revised, of course. But really if you look closely you'll see that what I've done is given you a bunch of words—Martian words—and you have to figure out what you think they mean. So you're really creating the world inside your head. I half-created it, and you create the other half. I asked so much of the readers here, and yet, isn't that the fun of it? Being asked to do something like read parts of a story in an imaginary language and yet understanding it, being able to visualize it? At least, I think that's fun. I hope readers think so too . . .

I wanted to learn a little more about the history of your story, and what I discovered is that some gorgeous multi-media art had been created based on "Child-Empress of Mars" to benefit the Interstitial Arts Foundation, and that you had co-edited the first in the Interfictions series. Can you tell our readers a little about what interstitial art is, and what about it drew you to participate with the Foundation?

Yes, several works of art were created for an auction benefiting the Interstitial Arts Foundation. C. Jane Washburn created a sculpture of the Child-Empress. She was gorgeous! Laramie Sasseville created an amazing bookmark, and Connie Toebe created one of her wonderful boxes, called Dream of the Child-Empress of Mars. Later, several friends got together and bought me another Washburn sculpture, the poet Elah Gal, which is one of my most prized possessions. Interstitial art is art that exists between genre boundaries, and I think my story is exactly that. It's science fiction—sort of? Or maybe it's an interrogation of science fiction. Or maybe it's an interrogation of fiction. But it definitely plays with generic conventions. Not that I was thinking of that when I wrote it. I just thought of what a pleasure it would be to write something so strange and complicated. It was a challenge I set myself. But I became involved with the Interstitial Arts Foundation, and co-edited the first Interfictions with Delia Sherman, because I wanted to work with this sort of art. I think it's exciting stuff, and of course the pieces created for the auction are also excellent examples.

What's next for you?

I'm currently working on a novel based on a novella called "The Mad Scientist's Daughter," which is about all the daughters of the mad scientists: Mary Jekyll, Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau, and Justine Frankenstein. It's about how they meet in late nineteenth-century London, and the adventures they have together. It's a pleasure to write, and gave me an excuse to go to London last summer. That novella will shortly be reprinted in a book called The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination. In a way, I'm doing what I did in "Child-Empress," telling you that although you think you know the story, you don't. There's another story, another perspective, and if you listen, I'll tell you what it is . . .

Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, an occasional narrator for StarShipSofa, and co-blogger at Inkpunks.com, a website for aspiring and newly-pro writers. She lives with her husband and daughters in a former Temperance colony on the central coast of California.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in February, in Lightspeed . . .

We’ll have original fantasy by Genevieve Valentine (“Abyssus Abyssum Invocat”) and M. Bennardo (“The Herons of Mer de l'Ouest”), along with fantasy reprints by Marly Youmans (“Prologomenon to the Adventures of Childe Phoenix”) and John Crowley (“Exogamy”).

Plus, we’ll have original science fiction by C.C. Finlay (“The Infill Trait”) and Carrie Vaughn (“Harry and Marlowe Escape the Mechanical Siege of Paris”), and SF reprints by Robert Reed (“Eight Episodes”) and Maureen F. McHugh (“Interview: On Any Given Day”).

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella will be “The Happiest Dead Boy in the World” by Tad Williams, and of course we’ll have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, and feature interviews.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed. Thanks for reading!