Editorial, April 2013
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue thirty-five of Lightspeed!

Just as we were going to e-press with this issue, we got the good news that Lightspeed is again a Hugo Award finalist for best semiprozine, and your humble editor is again a nominee for best editor, short-form. We’re extremely honored to be nominated again, so please allow me to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who voted for us. 

Speaking of awards, in case you missed the news last month: The Nebula Award nominees for this year have also been announced, and Lightspeed has two finalists in the short story category: “Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream” by Maria Dahvana Headley and “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” by Ken Liu.

So congrats again to Ken and Maria, and also to all of the other nominees for both the Hugo and Nebula.

In other news, your humble editor had two new anthologies come out recently. The first, from Tor, is The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, featuring original stories by Diana Gabaldon, Seanan McGuire, Austin Grossman, Naomi Novik, and many others. For more information, visit johnjosephadams.com/mad-scientists-guide.

Also just out is Oz Reimagined: New Tales From the Emerald City and Beyond, which I co-edited with former Realms of Fantasy editor Douglas Cohen. It features all new stories by Jane Yolen, Seanan McGuire, Tad Williams, Orson Scott Card, and many more. Plus, the cover and each individual story is illustrated by Lightspeed illustrator Galen Dara. To learn more, visit johnjosephadams.com/oz-reimagined.

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

We have original science fiction by Desirina Boskovich (“Deus Ex Arca”) and acclaimed indie bestseller Hugh Howey (“Deep Blood Kettle”), along with SF reprints by Kathleen Ann Goonan (“A Love Supreme”) and the legendary Robert Silverberg (“Schwartz Between the Galaxies”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Anaea Lay (“The Visited”) and Swedish sensation Karin Tidbeck (“A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain”), and fantasy reprints by Bruce Sterling (“Dinner in Audoghast”) and Christopher Barzak (“Smoke City”).

We also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling authors Jane Yolen and Brandon Sanderson. And for our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella is “Bellony” by Nina Allan, and our featured novel excerpt is The Red: First Light by Linda Nagata.

Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan. 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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Before I go, just one last thing. Remember that custom-built ebookstore I told you about back in the February editorial? Well, it’s now finally up and running! So if you’d like to purchase an ebook issue, or if you’d like to subscribe directly from us, please visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in both epub and mobi format.

And don’t worry—all of our other purchasing options are still available, of course; this is just one more way you can buy the magazine or subscribe. You can, for instance, still subscribe via Amazon.com or from our friends at Weightless Books. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all of our subscription options.

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 The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, 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. 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.

Bellony
Nina Allan

For Chloe Mavrommatis

It was further than it looked on the map. Even on a Thursday afternoon, when there was less on the roads than usual, even in Janet’s new Audi, the drive from London to Deal took her almost two hours. Terri left the car in the station car park, which was close enough to the centre and less expensive than the metered spaces along the front. It was a hot day. She walked down through the town, past the pedestrianised shopping area and then across Beach Street to the promenade and pier entrance. There were plenty of people about, and Terri guessed that many of them were on their holidays.

Like so many English seaside resorts, the town was both charming and drab. There were a number of newer chain stores in the precinct, but the narrower side streets were mostly crammed with dismal-looking tourist shops selling the kind of cheap souvenirs you would never dream of buying unless you were killing time in a place like this. The once-resplendent Georgian terraces showed similar signs of wear and decay, the peeling paintwork and faded awnings a familiar outward sign of more general neglect. There was a resigned insularity about everything. People seemed to be enjoying themselves, but in a restrained manner that spoke of predictable pleasures, of aging relatives and wet Sundays, of a cloying tranquillity whose inevitable end was the claustrophobia of stasis and the need for escape.

Terri felt both exalted and frightened. New places excited her; no matter how unpromising they appeared on the surface, there was always something to be discovered, a story that could be written. Terri believed that if you returned from an assignment empty-handed, it was not the place that had failed but the imagination. It was this appetite for the seemingly mundane that had produced her initial successes at the magazine where until a week ago she had worked as a junior feature writer. It was only with hindsight that she realised the editor had made use of her, keeping her in line with vague promises whilst continuing to fob her off with assignments so outrageously turgid that no one else was interested in covering them.

She excelled at such work and even enjoyed it, but she had come increasingly to resent the implications of being taken for granted. Now, in this small and faded town on the east Kent coast, she began to wonder if the editor had guessed her level all along. The Allis Bennett story was her first good idea for an assignment since taking the decision to go freelance. But now that she was here in Deal, she feared the town and most likely the subject had exactly the same qualities of dullness and parochialism as all the jobs that had been foisted on her while she was working for the magazine.

She did a turn of the pier, then started along the promenade in the direction of Walmer, the smaller residential suburb that lay immediately to the south of Deal. Walmer had its own castle and its own history, but the building developments of the nineteen-sixties made it impossible to tell where one town now began and the other left off.

Walmer had been the home of the children’s writer Allis Bennett. She had lived there for thirty years, and then she had disappeared. Nobody had seen or heard of her since. Terri had told herself there had to be a story in that, that stories about missing persons always sold. Now she was starting to think the best thing you could do with a place like this was go missing from it. The thought made her smile, and all at once her spirits began to rise.

She was looking for a missing person. Even if she failed in her search it would make an interesting story. Perhaps she would go missing herself, at least for a while.

Terri first read a book by Allis when she was ten. The book was called Bellony, and was about a girl who finds a doorway to another universe. The girl in the story was named Vronia. Her sister Annabel had recently died, and Vronia invented a game with a door in her house as a way of being with her again. The door itself was ordinary—just a side door leading to the concrete passageway between Vronia’s house and the house next door—but the act of passing through it was not. In Vronia’s imagination, the world on the other side was always different from the world from which she emerged.

The book was unlike other books Terri had read, where children pursued adventures in magical realms full of vampires and talking animals. The worlds behind Vronia’s door appeared at first to be the same as the world she had left. It was only gradually that the differences became apparent. Usually these differences were small but they coloured everything—everybody wore the same clothes, say, or speaking aloud in public was illegal.

At the climax of the book, Vronia became trapped in a world where no one recognised her. In this version of reality, her sister was alive but every time Vronia tried to speak to her she disappeared.

Terri found the story frightening, but this did not stop her reading it. The book came into her life shortly after she went up to senior school. Her closest friend Melinda had been sent away to a girls’ boarding school in Dorset, and Terri for a time felt very alone. She came to identify strongly with Vronia, who wore glasses and had few friends, and she searched for more books by the same writer, Allis Bennett. Those that she found, she enjoyed. She liked the way that inexplicable things could happen in Allis’s books and not be resolved.

When she was older she discovered that Allis Bennett had once been Alicja Ganesh and that she had been born in Poland. She had written ten novels for children altogether. Her one adult novel was a semi-autobiographical work, about a Polish writer who flees to England to escape the Nazis. The small number of critical essays that had been written about Allis all suggested that the darkness and ambiguity in her stories had its source in her childhood in Nazi-occupied Europe, and in the fact that her parents and sister had died in concentration camps.

Bellony, the strange-sounding title of the novel Terri had loved as a child, turned out to be the name of the street in Warsaw where Allis’s family lived before the war.

Terri walked on along the promenade, taking note of the sights she had read about and was trained to look out for: the castle, the bandstand, the blue Art Deco dome of the old Regent Cinema. Once she was clear of the town, there were fewer people. The tide had begun to go out, and the beach seemed to stretch for miles. Like most of the beaches on the Kent and Sussex coast, it was notable only by being featureless, an unvaryingly flat expanse of shingle. But the landward edge, a strange, tangled hinterland of tamarisk and valerian, sea kale and exotic orange flare-ups of kniphofia, was interestingly wild, an unkempt no-man’s-land between the coastline and the countryside beyond.

She looked out across the stones to where a small power boat was drawn up on blocks, surrounded by a chain of its rusting entrails. Just beyond it was a row of beach huts, painted alternately in yellow and white. It was like a scene straight out of A Letter from Sabine, one of Allis’s novels that had been set on this part of the coast. A memory came to Terri then of the first time she had read Sabine and the pleasure and the mystery she had found in it. She supposed it was no coincidence after all that she was here. Allis’s writing had first become important to her during a time of change, and this also was a time of change. She had resigned from her job and finally she had found the courage to end her relationship with Noel, her boyfriend for the past five years. She had known for eighteen months that Noel wasn’t right for her. Leaving him had been the right thing but it still wasn’t easy. She was on her own, as she had been alone before, when Melinda had been sent off to Broadhurst.

It had been Allis’s stories that had helped her last time. Now it was Allis herself she felt drawn to. Since making the decision to write about her, she had increasingly come to think of her as a friend.

Allis’s house was on Wellington Parade, a little over a mile from the centre of Deal. The access to the houses was very narrow, over an unmade strip of raked-over shingle and sand. Some of the dwellings were new-build, uninspiring seventies chalets with red-tiled roofs and plate glass windows. But most of the houses here were older than that, a disjointed assemblage of post-war prefabs, colonial-style villas dating from the nineteen-thirties and clapboard bungalows with gently rusting cast iron verandah rails. They formed an intriguing spectacle and something wholly unexpected. In the mismatched incongruity of styles there was for Terri something almost dreamlike, as if each house was a concrete expression of its owner’s fantasies.

Here at last she began to see what might have attracted Allis to this place and caused her to stay. She knew Allis had been attached to the town because she had set several of her books here, or at least in an imaginary place that looked exactly like it. It was a kind of miracle, the way she had transformed this rather tired seaside town into somewhere special. And yet even as she was thinking this, it occurred to Terri that what Allis had done was not after all so different from what Terri was trying to do here herself. She was looking for the story behind the story. For Allis Bennett as for Terri, even the most ordinary things had the potential to become extraordinary if you described them properly.

It was strange to think that Allis had once walked where Terri was now walking, maybe even thinking similar thoughts.

Allis’s house was right near the end, one of a pair of Victorian semis that had been built as mirror images of each other. The house on the left had a freshly painted pink exterior and the flagstones that formed a path to the door looked recently scrubbed. The house on the right, Allis’s house, was in a state of decline. The yellow paintwork had faded to a bleached ochre. Instead of a neat strip of lawn, there was overgrown grass. The windows, long unwashed, were spattered with grime. Terri felt drawn to the house instantly. As she came closer, she saw that the signboard of a local estate agent had been hammered into the ground to the right of the gate. The house was being advertised as “To Let.”

She walked back along the front in a kind of daze. When finally she reached the car she called the agent, who confirmed that the house was still available, but on a short lease only. The long-term tenants had recently vacated and the owner was thinking of selling.

Terri said that would be fine.

“How soon could I move in?” she said.

“Well,” the agent hesitated. “Normally we would expect references. And I should warn you it’s a bit run down. Don’t you want to see inside? I could drive you round there now if you like.”

“I don’t have time, I’m afraid. But so long as the roof is watertight, there’s really no problem. It’s the house’s position I’m interested in. It’s perfect for what I need.”

She told the agent, whose name was Cahill, that she was prepared to pay three months’ rent up front if it would hurry the process along. “You’re more than welcome to check my references, but I’d like to move in next week if I can.” She gave him the contact details for the magazine’s finance office and the letting agency that handled her flat in Camden. She felt tempted to take Cahill up on his offer of showing her the house, but made herself hold back. She did not want her initial impressions of the place muddied by the blandishments of an estate agent.

On the drive back to London, she made a pretence of reflecting calmly on the day’s events, but in reality she was barely able to restrain her excitement. The idea of living in Allis’s house was like a dream come true. It was not just that it would bring her closer to Allis in ways she had never previously imagined; she believed she might also find the peace and solitude she needed to help her work out what kind of writer she wanted to be.

She would be getting away from London, and away from Noel. Everything had happened so quickly it was hard to take in.

Allis arrived in London soon after the war. She was taken in by relatives in Highgate, where she met and married an Englishman, Peter Bennett. Peter Bennett was a keen weekend sailor, and it was his idea that they should move out of London. After a couple of months’ searching and some minor disagreements, they finally agreed to settle on the house in Walmer. Two years later, Peter Bennett was drowned in a sailing accident.

Allis stayed on in Walmer, which she said she had grown used to. By then she had sold her first novel, which was published to favourable reviews and some small success. She could perhaps have made more of this, but her strong dislike of publicity made her a difficult author for the publisher to promote. She disappeared soon after her fiftieth birthday. Of those who were interested, most believed that, like her husband’s, her death had been from misadventure. Allis liked to walk along the foot of the cliffs, and it was easy to get caught by the tide unless you were careful. A small number of people suggested that she might have walked into the sea deliberately, but in the end the speculation died down. Allis’s books had been popular for a time, but she had never been famous. The quietly abandoned house, with its ordered rooms, left no hint of violence.

When seven years had passed and she had not returned, Allis was declared legally dead. The house in Walmer was sold, and the money divided equally between the relatives in Highgate.

The new owner was a Turkish businessman based in London. Like Peter Bennett, he was keen on sailing, and bought the house as a weekend retreat, but he soon found that he was too busy to spend much time there. It took longer to get to Walmer than he had bargained on, and he spent enough time on the road as it was. He decided the most sensible thing would be to rent the place out.

Terri moved in on the Wednesday. She had spent the weekend packing up her flat in Camden. Some of her stuff went into storage, but most of it she found she was happier getting rid of. She wanted to make a fresh start. She arranged to sub-let the flat to Janet, who had been her best friend on the magazine. Once the six-month tenure ran out, Janet could either renew it in her own name or let the flat go. Terri had decided she wouldn’t go back there, whatever happened. The place would always mean Noel to her. If she wanted to return to London, she would find somewhere else.

She travelled down to Kent by train. She had thought about hiring a car, but in the end had decided not to. Allis had never learned to drive, and for the next couple of weeks Terri wanted to put herself in Allis’s shoes. Knowing she would have to carry everything had made her selective about the things she brought with her. It was surprising how much she had been able to fit into a rucksack and two large holdalls. Walmer station was closest to the house, but there was the matter of the keys, which she had arranged to collect directly from the estate agent. It was only a short walk from Deal station to the agency office and, even though her luggage was heavy, Terri managed without too much difficulty, but Alan Cahill reacted to her arrival on foot with a kind of incredulous amusement, as if she had just stumbled in from China.

“If you hold on just a moment, I’ll run you down to the house,” he said. “You can’t possibly walk.”

He glanced again at the bulging holdalls. He looked to be in his early fifties. Terri noticed he was wearing cufflinks, and had the blandly smooth good looks of a host on a television chat show. Terri could tell that he was curious about what she was doing there, that for people like Cahill the very fact of her being alone and without a car would give cause for suspicion.

She wondered if people in the town had looked at Allis in that same way when she first arrived. Terri had managed to find a photograph of her from that time, a small, nervous-looking woman in a badly fitting plaid dress, her dark hair tugged back from her face in a bedraggled bun. Later photographs showed her looking more acclimatized, her hair clipped in a neat gamine crop, her figure fuller and her face less gaunt. She seemed altogether less foreign.

Terri’s first impulse was to tell Cahill she would prefer to make her own way out to Allis’s. But the thought of lugging the holdalls was not appealing and so she gave in. She was thankful it was just a short drive. She was uncomfortable with the agent, and had no wish to become more closely acquainted with him. She gazed determinedly out of the window for the entire journey, refusing to respond in more than monosyllables to his hopeful gambits about the weather, the comfort or otherwise of her train journey, the shortage of available parking.

“Would you like a hand with your stuff?” Cahill said as he brought his car to a standstill in front of the house.

Terri did her best to smile, then shook her head. “No thank you,” she said. “You can drop me here.” She wished he would just go. She most emphatically did not want the agent inside the house with her.

“Well, you know where we are.” He handed her the keys, four of them on a key ring, the house’s number scrawled in bold indelible pencil on the cardboard fob.

She hauled her luggage out of the boot and on to the drive. Cahill backed his car and then turned it around, manoeuvring with difficulty in the narrow access road. Terri waved to him briefly, waiting until he was out of sight before approaching the house. Once the car was gone, it was perfectly quiet. The tide was far out, the horizon blurred by heat haze. Now that she had returned here to live, the place felt different, subtly enchanted, as if it had decided to trust her with some of its secrets.

There was no one at all to be seen. Suddenly she found it easy to imagine that Allis was close by, watching. She would be an old lady now, but that was no reason to presume that she was dead.

The front door would not open at first, and for a moment Terri thought Cahill had given her the wrong set of keys. But suddenly the lock gave way and she was inside. The hallway was stuffy with heat and the air smelled stale. Dust motes danced in the angle of light from the open door. There was a pile of junk mail on the doormat. Terri carried her things inside and shut the door.

There were eight rooms in total, arranged over the two floors: a sitting room at the front, with two smaller reception rooms and the kitchen downstairs, three bedrooms and a bathroom on the storey above. The place had been hoovered and cleaned, but there was a down-at-heel air to everything and she could see at once that the house was in need of many minor repairs. The furniture was a depressing mix of nineteen-forties utility and modern flatpack. Terri went from room to room, feeling vaguely disappointed and wondering how much of this junk, if any, had been in the house when Allis was still living there.

As well as the front door key, there was a key to the kitchen door at the back, and another, smaller key that opened the gate to the side access passage where the bins were stored. There was a fourth key, which seemed not to fit anything. For the first time since deciding to rent the house, she asked herself what exactly she had hoped for in coming here. The house was just a shell, after all; by itself, it could tell her nothing. She wondered if she had invested it with too much power, if she had talked herself into believing it was the key to a mystery in order to give herself an excuse for running away from London and all the painful decisions of the last few months.

As if to press home the point, her mobile started ringing. The room’s sparse furnishings made it sound aggressively loud.

She flicked it open and glanced at the screen. The caller was Noel. She felt immediately flustered, at a disadvantage. In her mind, Noel had already receded into the past. The idea that he might call her here hadn’t entered her head. She wished she had thought to block his number.

As it was, she picked up, knowing that if she didn’t, he would call again.

“Where are you?” he said. He gave no greeting, not even a simple hello, but Noel was like that. He said what was on his mind, regardless of whether you needed or wanted to hear it.

“It doesn’t matter where I am,” Terri said. “I needed to get out of London for a couple of weeks.”

“Is it true that you’ve quit your job? I phoned the office first, but Janet said you left last week.”

“Yes, it’s true. I should have left ages ago.” She wanted to say it had been him, or more accurately put her final row with him, that had finally given her the courage to hand in her notice. The prospect of going freelance had terrified her and she kept finding excuses not to do it. Splitting up with Noel had turned out to be easy by comparison. Once that had been accomplished, she found she was able to take care of the other business as well.

“You’re not serious?” Noel said. “How on earth are you going to manage?”

“I’ve got some jobs, pieces to tide me over. And I’m working on new stuff already. Anyway, I’ll be fine.” She felt angry at herself for answering his questions, for feeling she had to justify herself in front of him. She felt like asking him what the hell it had to do with him, but if she did there would be a row and as far as she was concerned that part of her life was over. She hated what he was doing, trying to make out that nothing had changed, trying to draw her back into his life by the simple expedient of ignoring everything she said.

It was what he always did, a kind of inverted bullying.

“Can I come and see you in your bolt hole?” he said. “I’m sure it’s very cosy.”

“No, Noel, you can’t,” she said. “Goodbye.”

She broke the connection. Her heart was racing. The thought that he might find out where she was, was appalling.

After a couple of seconds, she switched off the phone. If shaking Noel loose meant she had to cut herself off from the world for a while, then it was a price worth paying. It occurred to her that Allis would not have had a mobile phone, and that if she was serious about trying to re-enter Allis’s world, then she should give up her mobile also.

For all her love of the place, as a foreigner and a writer Allis Bennett must have been isolated here. Had she welcomed that isolation, or had it been forced upon her? Did she have any friends in the town at all? One of the difficulties of writing about Allis was that no one seemed to have known her very well.

Allis had never remarried and rarely travelled. It was as if her life had been divided into two acts: there was before-Walmer, where she had lived in the world and terrible things had happened to her, and then there was Walmer, where everything came to a standstill and her life appeared to enter a cul-de-sac. There had been a third act also, of course: the event or sequence of events that had brought about Allis’s disappearance from Walmer and whatever it was that had happened after that. Action, reaction, synthesis. Terri found she could hardly imagine what it must have been like for Allis, to arrive in a foreign country among a host of strangers who could have had only the shallowest understanding of what had happened to her. For most people, the present becomes the past only gradually, but for Allis there had been this sudden and irrevocable division, potently symbolized by her final, one-way crossing of the English Channel.

Had Allis taken to writing as a way of coming to terms with her life, or had writing been a part of her life already? Terri had no idea. She hoped that this was something she would find out in time.

She opened one of her holdalls and took out the small folder of photographs and newspaper clippings that was all the material on Allis she had been able to amass so far. She dug around in it until she found the photograph of Allis as a new immigrant, the Allis of the plaid dress and untidy bun. She propped the photo on the mantelpiece in the smaller of the two back sitting rooms, the room she had already decided would serve as her office. The room overlooked the garden, and seemed private from the rest of the house.

She wondered which room Allis had worked in, where she had written her novels. Once again, Terri hoped she could find out.

She spent the next couple of hours unpacking her things and trying to give the house a feeling of home. There was a gateleg table in the front sitting room, which was sturdy enough to be used as a writing desk yet small enough to be easily moved. She dragged it through to her new office and set up her laptop, arranging her books and papers on the melamine shelves that lined the chimney alcove. Because of the problems of transporting them, she had been forced to severely ration her choice of books, but the sight of those she had brought made her feel immediately uplifted. The room now had a purpose to it. She could even begin to believe she might succeed, not only in this assignment but as a freelance writer.

Once everything was unpacked, she ventured outside. As she deposited her few bits of rubbish in one of the dustbins, she noticed there was a side door in the access passage, an alternative entrance to the house that from its position should have led directly into her office. Terri knew already that no such doorway existed, at least not on the inside of the house. The door had a lock, and Terri tentatively tried it with the last key on her key ring, the odd fourth key she had been unable to find a use for. The key fitted but it would not turn. She decided that the door must have been sealed, the doorway bricked and plastered over from the inside. Such things were commonplace, especially in older houses. At least she now knew what the fourth key had been for.

The discovery pleased her. It was small and it was meaningless, but it was something about the house she had found out for herself. At the very least, it felt like a start.

It was getting towards evening. The sky was a mottled pink. The back garden was badly overgrown, a chaotic mass of blackberry thorns and nettles and seeding grasses. Among the waist-high scrub there were stands of goldenrod and speedwell and cow parsley, the same kniphofia she had seen on the beach. Terri smelled the scents of wild meadows, the dry-grass, pollen-rich aroma of so many lost summers. She thought of the way she and Melinda had drifted apart. There had been tears, and there had been letters, and then there had been the slow, cruel erosion of time. This gradual dissolution of their closeness was something Terri still found painful and shocking, even in retrospect. In it, she could see everything she needed to know of transience and eventual mortality.

She remembered an image that often came to her when she thought about this, the image of two trains stopped at a station on opposite platforms. There was a girl looking out of the window of one of the carriages, catching the eye of a girl looking out of the compartment opposite. They held each other’s gaze for a long moment, a moment in which worlds arose and possibilities extended. Then the trains moved off in opposite directions and they never saw each other again.

The image was from one of Allis’s books, The Hurdy Gurdy Man. When Terri had first read it, she cried, because it seemed to describe exactly what had happened to herself and Melinda.

She turned to go inside, thinking she should get herself something to eat. She saw with a start that she had not been alone, that there was a woman in the next-door garden, taking washing off a rotary clothesline and placing it into a yellow plastic basket. The woman nodded to her briefly and then disappeared indoors.

Terri made supper, then spent the rest of the evening going through her Allis file, arranging the material she had in date order, then dividing it between four new files. Each of the files related to a different aspect of Allis’s life. She hoped eventually to fill these files with new material.

At some point she realised she had completely forgotten about Noel’s phone call. Thinking about him directly brought him no closer, and she found that to get any sense of him she had to conjure him up, like a character in a book she had read some time ago and mostly forgotten.

She went to bed late, choosing the main bedroom at the front of the house, which had a wonderful view of the sea and that she felt certain must have been Allis’s. She listened to the midnight news, the sound of the waves through the open window as constant as radio static.

It was a hot night. She tossed and turned for a while in the unfamiliar bed, then fell soundly asleep.

Arranging and rearranging the facts, Terri came to the conclusion that Allis’s disappearance had one of three causes: she had met with sudden death, she had gone off with a new lover, or something unwelcome had emerged from her past.

Terri did not believe that Allis had been murdered or drowned; the former was too bizarre, and in the case of the latter her body would have been bound to come ashore eventually. The same was also true of the suicide theory.

It was more likely that Allis had met a new man, but this still did not explain why she had abandoned her home and all her possessions. The evidence showed that Allis had left the house suddenly and without preparation. There had even been a load of washing still in the machine.

Aside from a few book signings in London, Allis had rarely left the town. Her life spoke of order and planning, not random impulse. It seemed unlikely to Terri that she would have altered her behaviour so radically, even for a new lover, unless some crime had been committed.

She entertained brief visions of Allis falling for a murderer, a bank robber, some man on the run, but then supposed her imagination was getting away with her. This left only the past. Terri made a list of the most likely reasons a person might have for wanting to disappear. There were many possibilities, but most of these could be categorized under one of three main headings: love, money, and fear. She had already discounted the man theory, and it was also a matter of record that Allis had not been in debt. It was one of the first things the police had looked into, and it had been shown that, although Allis was by no means rich, she was certainly comfortable. Her books brought her in a reasonable income, especially since the most popular, The Carousel, had been adapted for film by the Children’s Film Foundation. She owned the house in Walmer outright. Her accounts all stood securely in the black.

The police had kept a track on her bank accounts for several months after her disappearance, waiting to see if there were any withdrawals. There were none. Allis’s money, along with her house, had passed duly into the hands of the Highgate cousins.

What could have frightened or disturbed Allis Bennett so badly that she had made herself disappear without a trace?

It was true that Allis’s past was filled with tragedy, that she had lost her parents and her sister at a young age. As she reread Allis’s stories and studied the background to her life, it became increasingly clear to Terri that the loss of her sister Hanne had been the defining event of Allis’s life, and that most if not all of her books were to some extent attempts to come to terms with it.

She had never spoken much of Hanne directly, but there was a surviving photograph of her. It was in sepia tint, and showed a girl of about thirteen wearing a dress with a round white collar and metallic buttons. The girl’s hair was cut in a pageboy, the front bangs secured with a tortoiseshell slide. The image was charmingly old fashioned, although Terri supposed that at the time Hanne’s hairstyle would have seemed rather daring and thoroughly modern. The idea that this girl had been deliberately killed, swept up by forces beyond her control and beyond any normal comprehension, that she had been smashed on the rocks of history, was still dauntingly horrific. It reminded Terri that Allis had also been a victim of these crimes. Her past had haunted Allis all her life, but the worst had already happened and she was not to blame for any of it.

What more was there to run from? Terri knew there must be something. The very fact of Allis’s disappearance was proof of this. She knew also that there would have been clues. The clues would have most likely been in the house, because this was the last place that Allis had been seen. The police had been over the house many times, but it occurred now to Terri that if they had missed something, it would not have been through negligence, but because they hadn’t known what to look for.

They would have been looking for signs of disturbance, of what was commonly referred to as foul play.

But what if the clues to what happened had been more subtle?

They needed someone who had known Allis better. Or another writer.

She decided she should telephone Alan Cahill. She knew it would have been more polite to arrange a proper appointment, to go into the office, but she found she still felt hostile towards Cahill and didn’t want to see him face to face. She was aware that Cahill had done nothing to earn her dislike—if anything, it had been the opposite—but there were things about him that annoyed and repelled her. His conventionality, his boring good looks, his particular brand of masculinity, subtle yet patronizing—in Terri’s mind Cahill had become symbolic of everything about the town that was anti-Allis.

It was Cahill’s secretary that answered the phone, but she put Terri through to Cahill almost at once.

“I’d like to know some more about the house,” she said to him. “How long have you been the agent?”

“Is something wrong?” said Cahill. “I did warn you it was in need of attention.”

“The house is fine,” said Terri. “This is just some research I’m doing. Can you tell me how many people have lived here since the house has been on your books?”

She could sense him tensing up almost at once, as if the very idea of research, of anything that could not be accommodated on a spreadsheet, aroused his suspicion.

“I don’t think I can help you. The information we hold on our clients is confidential.”

“I’m not talking about your clients. It’s the house I’m interested in. All I want is a bit of background.” She wished she could come up with a harmless rationale for her enquiry, something that would satisfy the agent without her having to tell him about Allis. She did not want to talk to Cahill about her project. “I’m writing an article about the town.”

This at least seemed to make some sense to him. Cahill told her that he had taken over the business from his father ten years before, and that the house had been on their books throughout that period. There had been three sets of clients during his time as manager. The first, a family of four, had been there since his father’s time. The couple after that were Spanish, both teachers at a college in Dover. The most recent tenant had been a retired doctor.

“He was only there for a couple of months,” said Cahill. “He needed somewhere to stay while he looked for a property to buy in the area. We found him a lovely little place in the end, just up the road on Prince Charles Terrace.” He sounded very pleased with this outcome, and Terri suspected it had been his sale. A mad thought came to her, that he hoped she would include this information in her article.

“Do you think the doctor would mind if I had a word with him?” Terri asked.

“I shouldn’t think so. He’s a nice old chap, very friendly. But I don’t think he’d be much use to you. As I said, he’s new to the area. If you really want to know about the house you should speak to the lady next door to you. Judy Whitton, her name is. She’s lived there for years. I know that because we employ her as a cleaner for our short-let properties. She’s completely reliable.”

“That’s useful to know. Thank you.” She ended the call. She was beginning to feel guilty about Cahill, who had been perfectly pleasant to her and more helpful than he could have realised. She guessed that Judy Whitton was the woman she had seen in the garden the first evening she was there, taking down her washing from the rotary dryer. She tried to remember what she had looked like, but could recall only the way she walked, the stout figure oddly graceful in its navy moccasins. Terri supposed she had been in her sixties, older than Alan Cahill but younger than Allis.

Terri went outside to the garden, vaguely hoping that the woman might be there again, but there was no sign of her or of anyone, not even a new crop of washing on the rotary dryer. She walked round to the front of the house and rang the bell. She waited on the doorstep for a couple of minutes, standing on tiptoe with her face to the glass, but when it became clear there would be no reply, she went back inside. She felt disappointed and frustrated, as if information was being kept from her deliberately, although she knew that Judy Whitton was probably just out shopping.

She tidied the kitchen, washing up the plate and mug she had used for her lunch, then set out for a walk along the beach. She had grown used to taking a walk every day. She had developed the habit initially in imitation of Allis, who had stated more than once that her walks along the coastal path were essential to her working routine. But within a couple of days she found herself looking forward to the walks not only for the exercise but as a way of channelling her ideas and bringing her thoughts into order. She liked to think that this was how it had been for Allis too.

Also, the landscape itself seemed to invite exploration. The level path, the glittering sea, the cliffs rising in the distance were for Terri an epitome of vanished freedoms, of the English summer and the urge to wander, exactly as they had been in Allis’s stories. She walked south towards Kingsdown, taking the well-worn path that would, if she followed it for long enough, eventually bring her to the ferry terminal at Dover. It came to Terri that if she were to board one of the ferries, it would in theory be possible to walk all the way from Allis’s house in Walmer to the house on Bellony in Warsaw. The idea was fascinating to her and a little frightening. It gave the sense that if you walked long enough and far enough you might travel back in time as well as distance.

Terri smiled. She was beginning to think like Allis. She wondered whether Allis’s unconventional cast of mind, her compulsion to stretch an idea to the very limit of its credibility was a tendency she had been born with, or whether the war had permanently altered her view of things. More than one critic had suggested that it was her marriage to Peter Bennett and the feeling of safety it provided that had given Allis the confidence and security to begin expressing herself in writing, but Terri did not believe it. Allis might have loved Peter Bennett while he was alive, but he had produced no lasting impact on her work. Allis’s first subject was being alone, coming to terms with solitude and drawing strength from it. With his mousy hair and his clean shirts and his buttoned-up Englishness, Peter Bennett had been a brief and incidental accompaniment.

She thought about the main character in Allis’s novel Orinoco, a boy called Toby who loved ships and lighthouses, anything to do with the sea. He had fallen in love with an angelfish, and drowned. It seemed at least possible that Toby had been modelled on Peter, but far more than any superficial similarities with her dead husband, Toby Chowne resembled Allis herself, or rather the quintessential Allis character: a shy and lonely child marooned in some strange aftermath of loss.

Terri was beginning to realise that there was far more to Allis’s story than could be covered in a single article. She thought there was at least the possibility that she could persuade a publisher to commission her to write Allis’s biography. If this happened, it could be life-changing. So much for Noel’s sneering doubts about her ability to make a go of it alone.

She stepped off the path and began walking across the beach towards the edge of the sea. A narrow white line of surf flowed back and forth over the pebbles at the tideline, robbing them of their protective opacity. They emerged jewel-bright from the water, glistening in the harsh white sunlight, the pearlescent greys, veined greens, and polished ambers of Murano glass. The stones tumbled and slid beneath her feet, their rolling clack and crunch as smoothly satisfying as the rattle of barley sugars shaken together in a jar. The sky was a vast blue vault. The surface of the sea flashed like tinfoil, its undulating meniscus a snare for the sun. The wind had dropped completely, and the rising heat of the day had begun to induce in Terri a mild euphoria. She had foolishly come out without a hat. She had one back at the house, a tatty green straw boater she had discovered hanging on a nail just inside the cupboard under the stairs. She had a feeling about the hat, that it might be one of the few things left in the house that had actually belonged to Allis.

At Hope Point the path divided in two, climbing straight on towards the head of the Down or turning left to thread its way along the foot of the cliffs. Terri did not like the lower path. The sight of the sheer white cliffs towering above her made her afraid. She came to a standstill, thinking how easily a person might be caught by an encroaching tide.

Could this be how Allis had died? She hated to think so. She could not bear to think of her terror, realising that she was trapped and there was no way round. She would have tried to swim, of course, only the sea would have driven her back into the cliffs. From where Terri stood, she could just make out the grey slate roofs of the first cottages on the road to St Margaret’s at Cliffe. The skyline was blurry with heat haze, and to Terri it seemed for a moment as if the cottages were floating in thin air. Their roofs were sharply triangular, rigid as stage sets, flat as the cardboard façade in a children’s theatre. There was a toy theatre in Allis’s novel The Carousel. Terri mopped at her face with the back of her hand. The sweat was pouring off her, strands of hair were plastered to her forehead and neck. She turned back the way she had come, cutting diagonally across the shingle and heading for the cracked strip of asphalt that ran up from the head of the beach towards the Kingsdown Road. The road was shaded by trees, and was much easier to walk on than the shingle. She was back at the house in a little under half an hour. She went straight upstairs to the bathroom and stepped into the shower. She turned the cold tap almost all the way over, letting the fierce, hard jets bombard her skin with coolness. She leaned against the wall, her eyes half closed, listening to the sound of the water striking the tiles. The feeling of distance that had assaulted her at the cliff edge gradually receded. It was as if she was absorbing reality through her skin along with the moisture.

She dried herself and put on fresh clothes, then made herself a cup of tea and went to sit in her office. As she pushed open the door, she had the brief but strong conviction that someone was inside, waiting for her, but it was clear as she looked about her that the room was empty. She shook her head and the room seemed to spin. She supposed she was still feeling the effects of sun exposure. She opened the window as far as it would go, filling the office with the combined scents of bleached seaweed and exhausted buddleia. The afternoon heat was gradually beginning to subside. She noticed that the speedwell and ragwort she had placed in a jug on the windowsill had all wilted, and she felt a brief flash of annoyance at herself for being so thoughtless, for leaving the jug in the full glare of the sun. The jug was ugly, an Art Deco imitation she had found in one of the kitchen cabinets, its squat lines mitigated only by the modest presence of the wildflowers.

She wondered if the house was getting to her, the self-imposed isolation. Apart from Cahill and the girl on the supermarket checkout, she had not spoken to anyone since her brief conversation with Noel the day she arrived.

She briefly considered ringing Janet, but decided against it. Janet would be pleased to hear from her, but she would also see her call as an opportunity to bring Terri up to date with magazine gossip. Terri had no wish to hear it, at least not yet. To be drawn back into that world so soon after leaving it would only be a distraction. But neither did she want to talk to Janet about Allis. She felt proprietorial towards Allis, protective even. She had the sense that to talk about her to anyone else would be to betray her in some way, that it might even damage her ability to write about her.

She had felt that way about her subjects before, but never so strongly. She decided she would have an early supper then make an attempt at redrafting the opening of her article. She straightened the papers that were already on her desk, separating the photocopied cuttings from the handwritten notes. As she was doing this, something slipped from between the pages and fell to the floor. When Terri bent to pick it up, she saw it was the photograph of Allis’s sister Hanne. The photograph of the girl in the white-collared dress was one of the few surviving images from Allis’s life before the war, and Terri had made an enlarged copy of it before leaving London. The picture had been used to illustrate almost every known article on Allis, and had also appeared as an inset on the book jacket for her final novel, East Wind, which had also been her only novel written for adults.

East Wind was a strange book. It was presented as a novel, as fiction, but seemed to draw so heavily on Allis’s own experience that it was a memoir in all but name. Yet there were certain details that had been altered for no obvious reason, and other things that didn’t sound right, the way the uncle had joined the Nazi party, for instance. On the few occasions when she had mentioned them in public, Allis had invariably portrayed her family as vehement opponents of everything Hitler stood for.

Terri had studied the photograph of Hanne so often she would have said she remembered it in every detail. Hanne in East Wind was characterised as a shy girl, but hugely intelligent, a mathematical prodigy who had already won a number of regional chess tournaments. Somehow this depiction of Hanne had never corresponded with the impression Terri drew from the photograph. The Hanne of the picture looked younger and less self-aware, a child with a Mickey Mouse watch and a tortoiseshell slide. The watch especially had struck her as odd. She had researched the detail, and discovered that the first Mickey Mouse watches had been manufactured by Ingersoll in 1933. It was therefore possible that Hanne had owned one, but now, as Terri prepared to return the picture to the folder where she kept all the other Allis photographs, something else occurred to her. The online article she read had informed her that there was not just one type of Mickey Mouse watch, but many hundreds, that the prototype had proved so popular that scarcely a year went by without Ingersoll, and later Timex, who took over the company, bringing out some new variant or design. There were enthusiasts who collected Mickey watches exclusively.

The article had included pictures of several of the most popular designs, ranging from the original Steamboat Willie right through to a digital model from the 1990s. Something about one of them looked familiar, and although Terri had meant to check it, she never had.

She booted up her laptop and navigated her way back to the watch site. The photograph of Hanne had lost some of its sharpness in the process of being enlarged, but the details were still quite clear, the design of the watch more easily discernible. With the photograph beside her on the table, she scrolled through the various images, searching until she came to the one that had reminded her of the watch Hanne was wearing in the photograph. She checked it against the picture, clicking on it to enlarge it until she was sure.

The watch on the screen was a Mickey Mouse “Mod” watch, with a white strap and oversized buckle. It was identical with the watch on Hanne’s wrist.

The caption that went with the picture said that the Mickey Mouse “Mod” watch first appeared in 1968. Allis’s sister had died in 1944. Whoever the child in the photograph was, it couldn’t be Hanne.

Terri felt herself overcome by a feeling of unreality, of dissociation, reminding her of how she had felt on the beach in the glare of the sun. None of this made any sense. She looked at the photograph again, and the idea came to her that it was Noel, that Noel had found the photograph and doctored it in some way. It would be easy to achieve if you knew Photoshop, and Noel did. He could have altered the photograph to frighten her or ruin her article. Perhaps he had even discovered where she was, and was hoping she would run to him for help.

But that didn’t make sense either. Even if by some awful chance Noel had found out where she was, he knew nothing about her Allis project. So far as Terri could remember, the subject of Allis and her books had never once been mentioned between them.

She needed time to think. She returned the picture to the file and went to make supper. Afterwards, she sat and watched television. Normally she judged television to be a waste of time, but on that evening she found some comfort in familiarity. The chat shows and sitcoms and home improvement programmes were inanely repetitive, but they were proof that the world was still out there, that she could rejoin it any time she chose.

Terri wondered if that was what Allis had done, after all: simply rejoined the world, in another place and using another name, bored with the life she had made for herself and curious to try out another.

She found it difficult to get to sleep. The house itself seemed wakeful, as if it too had been disturbed by her discovery. Terri had not looked at the photograph again before going to bed, but once she was there it was all she could seem to think about.

If the child was not Hanne, then who was she? Had the photograph originally been used by mistake, with all its subsequent uses a simple repletion of that same mistake, or was there something more sinister behind it? Perhaps there was no surviving photo of the real Hanne, so a picture of a girl who resembled her had been used instead.

Perhaps there was no Hanne at all.

The thing that disturbed Terri most was the fact that Allis could not have been in ignorance of what had happened. Even if she had never read the articles, she would surely have seen her own book jacket. She would have known the child in the photograph was not her sister.

But all the evidence suggested it had been Allis who supplied the photograph in the first place.

Terri felt certain that, however inadvertently, she had stumbled upon something important, that the photograph and Allis’s disappearance were somehow connected. From the standpoint of the job she had come here to do, the thought of such a breakthrough was thrilling. And yet there was something—a darkness—that made her uneasy.

The room was full of shadows. In her perplexed state of mind, Terri found it was all too easy to start thinking of them as ghosts. The sea whispered through the open window, and when she got up to close the curtains, she saw its surface was dancing with phosphorescence.

In the end, she slept without realising that she slept, her conscious thoughts entwining themselves with the more lateral, instinctive thinking of her dreams. When she woke, it was full day. Her first thoughts were of the photograph. She wanted above all to see it, to prove to herself that she had not been mistaken. She pulled on a T-shirt and jeans and went downstairs. When she entered the office she knew at once that something was different, but could not work out immediately what it was. Then she realised it was the hat, the green straw boater. It was lying on the table next to her laptop.

She reached for it cautiously, picking it up by the brim. She realised to her dismay that she could not say with one-hundred percent certainty that she had not put the hat there herself. She had been thinking about it, after all.

The idea that she had left the hat on her desk and then forgotten having done so was after all less worrying than the alternatives. Which were either that the house was haunted or that someone had broken in during the night.

She remembered the feeling she had had the evening before, that she was not alone in the house. She looked carefully around the room, aware that her palms were sweating and that her breathing had become more shallow. When she saw movement outside the window her heart knocked in her chest and she almost cried out. Her first thought was that it was Allis, come to pay her back somehow for trespassing on the past and all the secrets she had intended to stay hidden. Then she saw it was the woman from next door, watering the roses in her back garden.

Terri dashed through to the kitchen, aware that she had not combed her hair and that she was wearing yesterday’s clothes but determined she should not let it matter. She knew she had to speak to Judy Whitton at all costs. She did not want to let her get away again until she had at the very least established contact.

“Excuse me,” she called. She stepped out on to the overgrown lawn. The woman turned at the sound of her voice. She was wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt dress and the same navy moccasins that Terri had seen her wearing the week before. She was stouter than Terri remembered, the loose skin of her forearms mottled with liver spots. But her salt-and-pepper hair was neatly styled, and her lightly made up face looked alert and not unintelligent. She was as tidy and well kept as her house and garden.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” said Terri. “My name’s Terri Goodall. I’m the new tenant here. I was hoping I could speak to you for a moment.”

“How can I help you, dear?” said Judy Whitton. “Everything all right for you, is it? I know the place is in a bit of a state. The doctor had to get the plumbers in at one point.” Her voice was clear and firm, with traces of an East London accent.

“Oh no, thank you, the house is fine.” Terri smiled in a way she hoped was reassuring. “I’m writing an article about the woman who used to live here. I spoke to the letting agent, Alan Cahill? He seems to think you might remember her.”

“Mrs Bennett, you mean?”

“Yes, Allis Bennett. She was a novelist. She wrote books for children.” Terri didn’t like to hear Allis spoken of in this way, as Mrs Bennett, an ordinary housewife, indistinguishable from Whitton herself. She felt anxious to establish at once that Allis was different.

“I don’t know too much about that. My kids are all grown and gone. But I helped Mrs Bennett’s nephew sort out the house, you know, after she left.”

“Do you have any idea where she might have gone?” Terri felt like cheering aloud. Alan Cahill had been right: Judy Whitton had known Allis, had spoken to her. She had been living here at the time of Allis’s disappearance. The fact that she knew nothing of Allis’s writing might even be an advantage. She would have noticed other things, details that critical articles never mentioned. Her insights would be valuable and unique.

“Not a clue. I went through all that with the police at the time. You’re not from the police, are you? If you are then I’ve got nothing to say.”

Terri shook her head at once. She knew she had to calm down, that her rapid fire questioning was making Judy Whitton feel like a crime suspect. Much more of it and she was liable to clam up. But she sensed that Judy Whitton was the breakthrough she needed and it was difficult to restrain her excitement. “I’m not from the police. I’m a journalist. I read all Allis’s books as a child. I’m interested in what might have happened to her.”

“Just bored sick of this place, I reckon. She was never exactly what you’d call settled.”

“Really? I’ve heard she didn’t like to travel.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean in her mind. She didn’t join in much. She preferred her own company. Once her daughter moved up to Nottingham, she got even worse. I had a feeling she might have gone there, but the police said not.”

“Her daughter?”

“Yes, Joanne. She married a chap she met at college. There was some kind of row between her and her mum, I reckon. Not that Mrs Bennett ever said, but sometimes you just know these things, don’t you? It’s hard for a kid though, growing up without a father. There are bound to be problems.”

Terri couldn’t think what to say. She felt stunned by what Judy Whitton was telling her. None of the articles had mentioned children. Terri felt she had been deceived in some way, although who had done the deceiving she could not tell. She had no reason to believe that Whitton was lying. What would be the point?

It was as if the world had divided in two: on the one hand there was the Allis she had read about, the solitary writer with the dead sister and the tragic past, on the other there was Mrs Bennett and her daughter Joanne.

Which of these women was real and why had Allis lied about her daughter? It came to Terri that both versions of Allis could be real, or neither of them, that the real Allis was the sum of the two. And just because Allis had chosen to remain silent about her daughter did not mean she had lied about her. Just because she had chosen to make some aspects of her life public in the form of novels did not mean that Allis had relinquished her rights to a private life.

The business of biography was complex, more complex than Terri had known when she started out. She had begun with the idea of uncovering a mystery. Now she was starting to see that the act of unveiling was also an act of destruction. She had wanted only good things for Allis. By writing her article she had wanted in some measure to repay Allis for the pleasure and comfort her books had brought to her as a child. But what was happening now was something else. It was like tugging on a piece of loose wire and bringing the whole house down.

She supposed she could stop now if she wanted to, but she knew she would not. If she cared more about the story than she cared about Allis that was something she would have to learn to live with.

“Do you think Allis felt isolated here? I’m sure you know about what happened to her during the war.” Terri knew that in order to get the most from her, she had to win Whitton’s confidence. She hoped that by asking Whitton’s opinion, she might start to open her up. People liked to say what they thought, much better than they liked to answer a direct question. That was something Terri had learned from her very first interview.

“The little Jewish mite, you mean? I knew she was killed in the Blitz, but Allis was only a child then. Lots of people were killed in the bombing, and it wasn’t as if the girl was her real sister or anything. I don’t see how she could have felt isolated. Her grandparents lived here in Walmer, you know. Allis stayed with them every summer before the war.”

“But that’s not possible,” Terri exclaimed. The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. “Allis Bennett was born in Warsaw.”

“Not her.” Whitton said. She laughed through her nose, a kind of snorting chuckle, as if she was trying to suppress her amusement at something vaguely illicit. “You must have got your facts mixed up somehow. It was the little Jewish girl that was from Poland. Allis’s parents took her in just before the war started. They were running all kinds of schemes then, trying to help the children who had been transported. Allis didn’t have any brothers or sisters of her own and I suppose her mum and dad thought it would be nice for her, to have someone her own age to play with. Anyway, you see how it worked out.” She paused. “If you’re really interested, you should look in the attic. She left the place just as it was, you see. All her clothes and furniture and things, no one knew what to do with it all. We gave most of her clothes to Oxfam and her nephew sold a lot of the furniture but there was a whole load of other stuff we just packed into boxes and stuffed in the loft. I remember there were tons of old letters. So far as I knew they’re still up there.”

“Thank you so much,” Terri said. “This is just what I needed.”

“No need to thank me, dear. I doubt you’ll find anything much. She was just a normal woman, Mrs Bennett. She wasn’t mad or anything, not like some of these ones you read about. She just kept herself to herself.”

“Do you think I could come round and see you? Once I’ve had a look at the letters, I mean? It’s so helpful, speaking to someone who actually knew her.”

“That’s fine by me, dear. Just remember I’m out Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s my WI.”

Terri thanked her again and went back inside. She sat at the kitchen table, toying with a slice of toast and waiting for the kettle to boil. She made coffee, then poured it away after only three sips. If Whitton was telling the truth, then everything she had heard or read or believed about Allis Bennett until that morning had been an invention. Allis had treated her own life as one of her fictions: She had discarded the truth and fabricated a whole new past for herself based around the identity of the refugee child her parents had adopted during the war. Alicja Ganesh was just another character she had created, only this time with Allis Bennett’s own face and body.

What Terri did not understand was why she had done this. Had the truth seemed so dull and inadequate that Allis had simply exchanged it for a story she liked better, stretching certain details to the limits of their believability the same way she did in her stories?

Or had she rewritten her past to make it fit with the image of herself she liked to present to her readers through her books?

She could not bring herself to believe she had done it for money. Terri realised she ought to boot up her computer and transcribe the conversation with Whitton, get the details down on paper before they were lost, but she knew she could not settle to anything until she had been into the attic. There was a set of steps in the understairs cupboard, pushed in against the wall behind the vacuum cleaner and an ancient wooden clothes horse. Terri dragged them out of the cupboard then carried them up to the landing and set them up beneath the loft hatch. She mounted the steps and pushed up the boards. The hatch was stiff, and made a dry cracking sound as it came away. Dust and small bits of debris cascaded down. Terri coughed, fumbling for the light switch on the central joist.

The roof space was hot and smelled stale, reminding her of the way the house had been when she first entered it. The thickness of the dust made it obvious that no one had been up there in years.

There were ten boxes in all, three wooden tea chests, the rest cardboard cartons from the local supermarket. It would be impossible to move them without help, the tea chests especially. Terri brushed dust from her hair and wondered whether it would be best to pay someone to help her or try and bring down the boxes’ contents bit by bit. She opened one of the tea chests at random. The hardboard lid had been secured with tin tacks but was easy enough to work free. The chest was full of clothes: a paisley dress, a woollen overcoat with an Astrakhan collar, a wedding gown. They smelled strongly of the mothballs they had been packed in. Terri replaced the lid. The sight of discarded clothes always made her think of dead people. The second chest was packed with ornaments. They were wrapped in pages from the Walmer Herald, all dating from the summer Allis had been declared legally dead. Terri unwrapped a china teacup, a cigarette case, a model horse. The horse was about six inches high and made of tin. The brightly coloured paint had worn away down to the metal in several places, and there was a small dent in one of its flanks. Terri recognised it at once as the tin horse in Bellony. It had belonged to Vronia’s dead sister Annabel.

She thought briefly of asking Alan Cahill to help her, then dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Instead she called a man from the Yellow Pages, a number picked at random from the House Clearance section.

“I don’t actually want a house cleared,” she said. “I just need to get some boxes out of an attic.” The man said it would cost her twenty pounds.

Two hours later the boxes were out of the loft and lined up neatly in one of the back bedrooms. Terri spent most of the next three days going through them. She went to bed each night feeling physically drained yet so mentally preoccupied she found it difficult to switch off. The whole of the upstairs floor was now covered with piles of oddments and paper and bundles of letters, the scraps and tag-ends of what had once been the life of Allis Bennett. Even after she had showered and changed, Terri felt filthy with dust and newsprint. She barely stepped outside for the whole three days.

Yet in spite of her exhaustion, she felt triumphant. She knew she had found what she had been looking for: a story so remarkable that no one had guessed at it, let alone written it down. She also felt buoyed up with the knowledge that this was precisely the kind of writing she wanted to do. She had thought of the project from the start as the search for a missing person and at the time she had meant that literally, but she now knew there was more than one way of going missing. Uncovering the truth about Allis was proving to be one of the most thrilling experiences of her life.

Three of the boxes contained books, many of them Allis’s own first editions. Terri had purchased paperback reprints of those novels of Allis’s that were still available, but seeing the originals aroused in her a depth of emotion she could not have predicted. It would have been easy to lose herself in them for hours, but she forced herself to save them for later. The books and clothes and household effects were fascinating and they would add colour to her account, but they could not tell her much. They told her that Allis collected Victorian paperweights, that she read Shirley Jackson and Elizabeth Bowen, that the spinning top and the wooden monkey in The Carousel had material counterparts. They could tell her what Allis had liked but not what had happened to her. Terri knew she had to press on.

There were more than two hundred letters from Joanne, a whole box of them. These ranged from the postcards Joanne had sent to Allis while on trips with her school right through to the brief notes posted from Nottingham after her marriage. These last letters were few in number and subdued in tone, entirely lacking the detail and spontaneity of the much longer letters written while Joanne was at college. The underlying tension was palpable, although its source was never specified. There was no mention of Poland or the war, or even of Allis’s books. The Allis of Joanne’s letters was Mrs Bennett.

In the box with Joanne’s letters was a crumpled white envelope containing a tortoiseshell hair slide, a Girl Guide badge, one half of a return train ticket from Walmer to Tenby and a bunch of loose photographs. One of the photographs showed a young man with floppy fair hair cradling an infant. Terri guessed that this must be Peter Bennett holding his daughter. Another photograph was clearly the original of the photocopied reproduction she had in her office downstairs, the picture of the girl wearing the Mickey Mouse watch. The photograph was in colour. A caption scrawled on the back identified the subject as Joanne.

The other photographs were less interesting, snapshots of Walmer Castle and the bandstand at Deal. Like the books and ornaments, they told her very little. Terri had hoped there might be a picture of the Jewish girl, something that confirmed her existence, but all the photos had been taken long after the war.

Terri feared she had come to a dead end after all. She stared at the contents of the last of the boxes with a mixture of disappointment and perplexity. In contrast with the others, which had been packed selectively and with care, this final carton appeared to contain a random assortment of stationery and other inconsequential bits and pieces. Terri could not understand what had made Judy Whitton and Allis’s nephew single out such rubbish for preservation. It wasn’t until she flipped open one of the notebooks that she realised that what she was looking at was the contents of Allis’s desk on the day she disappeared. Everything was there, right down to the last paperclip. Terri found it incredible that these things had remained in the house, that the police had not removed them long before. She supposed then that the police had not been much interested. There was no body and no sign of violence. Allis was an adult and had broken no laws; if she wanted to disappear, there was nothing to stop her.

The notebook had been dated on the front cover and contained the draft outline for what was clearly to have been a new novel. The book was set in London and told the story of a girl named Linney. Linney’s parents were unable to have more children of their own, and so decided to take in a child of the Kindertransport, one of the thousands of Jewish children sent to England by their parents to escape the Nazis. Linney resented the newcomer and did everything to make her life a misery. In the end the Jewish girl went missing during an air raid. The story had been left unfinished, but there was enough for Terri to see that here at last was Allis Bennett’s true autobiography. Far from loving her adopted sister, she had disliked her intensely and wanted to be rid of her. It was only once she was gone that she realised what she had done. It was impossible to know what had really happened the night of the bombing, but it was clear that Allis had blamed herself for the girl’s death and had gone on doing so. She had blamed herself so much she had relinquished her own identity. It had taken her thirty years to confess the truth.

Terri felt she could weep for Allis. The story itself was sad but understandable; most children feel resentful of strangers, at least to begin with. It was Allis’s reaction that was extraordinary. From a private domestic tragedy, she had constructed a whole new universe, a reality from which she had been prepared to exclude even her own daughter. Terri did not like to imagine how lonely she had been.

Still none of this explained the suddenness of her disappearance. Her fantasies had evolved over years and had survived every change in her life up until that time; she would not have abandoned them without a reason. Terri continued to sift through Allis’s desk litter, her phone bills and old library cards, convinced the answer had to be there somewhere but as uncertain as ever as to what she was looking for. When she came upon the airmail letter in its slim blue envelope, she almost discarded it, half-convinced that she had looked at it already. The letter was handwritten, in the angular copperplate script that was familiar to Terri from the letters of a German girl she had had as a pen friend back in secondary school. The envelope was addressed to a Miss A. Clowes. It had been postmarked in Antwerp, just seven days before Allis went missing. Terri thought at first that the letter had been delivered to Allis in error, until she began reading and realised that Clowes had been Allis’s maiden name.

My dear Miss Alice Clowes,

I hope you will forgive me, but I have been to considerable trouble to procure your address! My name is Rosa Steen Ringmark and my sister was Hanne Steen. I believe that Hanne was legally adopted by your parents, Arthur and Marie Clowes, in the summer of the year 1942. Hanne and I were very close as sisters. When we were told that only one of us was to be sent abroad with the transport, we were heartbroken. It was not the idea of war that terrified us but the idea of separation. Indeed it is still this parting from Hanne at the railway station that embodies the terror of war for me, more even than the things that came later.

I did not hear of my sister’s death until some years after the war. Until that moment, I had always cherished the hope that we would be reunited. I found it impossible to accept that we would not be, and in truth, this is why it has taken me so long to go in search of Hanne’s second family. However, as I have grown older, I have come to realise that I will never feel complete until I can hear Hanne spoken of by another, someone who knew her and was close to her during those final years when we were apart. Time is running out for all of us; if it is possible, I would like to make recompense for my delay before it is too late.

It is for this reason that I would like to invite you, as a sister, to spend some time with your second family. I know this letter will come as a shock to you and that it will maybe awaken memories of what must rightly be called the darkest time for all the peoples of Europe. But I can only hope most sincerely that you can find it in your heart to accept. Your acceptance would mean everything to me and might perhaps be useful to you also.

Please write to me soon, if only to assure me that you have received this letter.

With heartfelt greetings,

Rosa Steen Ringmark (Mrs)

Terri knew the letter would have horrified Allis. It was not just her guilt over Hanne, but the thought that the lie she had made of her life might now be exposed. The thing Allis cherished most of all was her privacy, the privacy she needed in order to write. Rosa’s letter spelled the end of everything. She would have felt she had no option but to run.

The only mystery that now remained was where she had gone. Terri had no idea how she could discover this. She still believed Allis must have left clues, but for the moment she was out of ideas. She had already searched the house from top to bottom. She wondered if it was worth looking in the loft again and went downstairs to fetch the ladder, wondering why she was bothering when she knew there was nothing to find.

The attic was as empty as she had known it would be, the dust already settling over the clear patches on the floorboards where the boxes had stood. She replaced the hatch and took the ladder back downstairs. It was then that she realised she had never searched the cupboard under the stairs. She leaned the ladder against the wall and began dragging the cupboard’s contents out into the hall. The cupboard was stuffed with all the junk such cupboards usually contained: a vacuum cleaner, a broom, a mop and bucket, the gargantuan clothes horse. There was a plastic crate packed with tins of shoe polish and furniture wax, a food blender still in its box. Terri thought it highly unlikely that any of these things had belonged to Allis; rather they had amassed themselves organically in the wake of each successive batch of new tenants. In either case, as evidence they were worse than useless.

When the cupboard was finally empty, Terri wedged open the door with a folded scrap of cardboard and went inside. It was a large cupboard, larger than normal. It was difficult to see all the way to the back, even with the aid of a torch. She took a hurried step backwards, convinced for a moment that she had seen something move, but it turned out to be an old skipping rope, twisted about its handles like a dust-grey snake. Even once she had established it was not alive, the skipping rope gave her a peculiar feeling. For some reason she was sure it had belonged to Hanne Steen. She left it where it lay and began backing out into the hallway, feeling her way along the wall with the flat of her hand. A foot or so from the cupboard entrance, she felt a bump in the plasterwork. Terri shone the torch where her hand had been and saw that the paper that had been used to line the cupboard had started to peel away. The surface beneath looked like wood. Terri tore at the paper, which came off easily, peeling away from the wall in an intact mass.

There was a door in the wall, a gloss-painted, panelled door set flush with the frame. Clearly whoever had papered over it had done so on purpose. Terri found the idea fantastic and a little frightening. Why would anyone hide a door, unless it was to stop someone passing through it? Terri remembered that Vronia’s father had done this in the end, with Vronia’s door in Bellony. She saw that the inside handle had been removed. There was a square opening just above the keyhole where the shaft should have fitted. Terri slipped two fingers into the opening and pulled backwards, but the door would not budge. She tried again, bracing herself against the floor and tugging more forcefully, but the door remained immovable and she realised it must be locked. She imagined herself trying to cut out the lock with a hacksaw and wondered what excuses she would make if Alan Cahill had her in court for criminal damage.

Sorry, your worship, only I was trying to saw my way through to another universe.

It was thinking of Alan Cahill that made her remember the keys, the mysterious fourth key on the key ring for which she had yet to find a discernable purpose. Cahill had never explained what the key was for.

She fetched the keys from where she kept them in the kitchen. She tried not to hope too much but she could not help herself. She was already certain the key would fit the lock and she was right. The key turned smoothly and with a satisfying thump. Terri found she could use it as a handle. She pulled the door open and towards her. Light flooded in, its sudden and unexpected presence stunning her eyes and revealing the blacker depths of the cupboard as a humdrum arrangement of sloping walls and faded wallpaper, a predictable accumulation of cobwebs and dust. Directly in front of her Terri saw the two dustbins and coil of green hosepipe that were in the access passage to the side of the house. The key had been for the disused side door after all. For reasons unknown, it appeared that the door could only be unlocked from the inside.

Old houses were just like that, they had quirks. Terri emerged into the daylight, feeling foolish and covered in dust. The day was hot and bright as the days before it but a cooling breeze was blowing in off the sea and the air was heady with the scents of tamarisk and bergamot. Terri knew she should go back inside and tidy away the junk in the hallway but for the moment she couldn’t be bothered. She’d had enough of trawling through rubbish. She needed a break.

She locked up the house and set off along the promenade. Instead of taking her usual route towards Kingsdown and St Margaret’s she went in the opposite direction, towards Walmer Castle and Deal. She walked along briskly, enjoying the feel of the wind against her face. The tide was a long way out; children dashed about on the exposed sand, playing Frisbee or hunting for shells. The area around the bandstand was packed with tourists, but once she was past the pier, the path quickly became less crowded. The coast beyond the town was completely unpopulated. The cliffs of South Foreland were more dramatic, but to Terri the featureless wilderness to the north of Deal was actually more beautiful. She felt glad to be out in the open. The wide landscape stretching before her made her realise how strangely she had been behaving this past week, as if her own self had been usurped, leaving her mind as a repository for the fantasies of Allis Bennett. The odd episode with the door had been like the breaking of an enchantment. It had literally let in the light. She felt better than she had done in days. Perhaps it had been a mistake to isolate herself so completely. She decided she would call Janet that evening and tell her the whole story. It would be good to have someone she could bounce ideas off, and Janet was someone she trusted more than anyone.

She walked as far as the edge of the golf links and then decided it was time to be heading back. She had eaten nothing since breakfast and she was starting to feel faint from lack of food. The tide was on the turn. A man was approaching along the coast path, walking his dog. The dog was a pot-bellied beagle with a greying muzzle. It moved along with its nose to the ground, stopping every couple of yards to sniff at the grass. The man was elderly and walked using a cane. Terri thought he looked vaguely familiar. She supposed she must have seen him in the town. The man came closer and began to wave to her. Terri waved back, although it felt strange to be greeting someone she did not know.

She came to a standstill as he approached her. The odd feeling of familiarity did not diminish.

“You’re thinking you know me,” the man said. “It’s written all over your face.” He smiled. His face was rubicund, weather beaten. Terri guessed he was a practised walker, in spite of the cane. She laughed, a little uncertainly, though she sensed no threat from the man.

“I don’t know,” she said, and laughed again. “I can’t know you really. I know hardly anyone here.”

“I’m Alan’s father. Alan Cahill? We looked even more alike when we were both in our youth.” He held out his hand for her to shake it and told her his name was Michael. Now that he had revealed his identity she could see the similarities at once. She guessed the father had been very good looking, his features less conventionally handsome than the son’s, but with a ruggedness that lent them extra appeal.

“You’re renting Allis Bennett’s old place, aren’t you? Alan told me. I hear you’re going to write about Allis.”

Terri nodded and confirmed that this was so. She could not remember saying anything to Alan Cahill about her Allis project; indeed, she was sure she had not. She supposed Judy Whitton had told him. She knew that small towns were notorious for their gossip. It came to her that Michael Cahill was the first person she had met who had talked about Allis without being prompted. A week ago she would have been eager to question him, but now suddenly she felt too tired. The questions could wait. There was no reason to suppose that Michael Cahill was planning on running away.

“It was nice to meet you,” she said. She turned to go, but Michael Cahill appeared not to have heard her.

“I remember her when she arrived,” he said. “I was only just married myself then, but I lost my head a little, even so. I thought Allis was very beautiful, but it wasn’t her looks that made me fall for her. She still had a foreign accent then, which I found attractive, but I’d met Polish girls during the war so it wasn’t that, either. She had an atmosphere of tragedy around her. I think I had the idea that she knew more than other girls, that she would understand me better. I used to see her on her walks, and sometimes I would follow her, just so I would get the chance to say hello to her. We would sit together sometimes, out on the headland, and a couple of times we had tea together in St Margaret’s. It was all perfectly harmless, and I knew from the start it would never go anywhere. She liked me, and I think she appreciated my friendship. But she wasn’t interested in me, not in the way I wanted. I suppose I was lucky things never went any further. It would have made a terrible mess for everyone.” He was staring out to sea, shading his eyes with one hand. The beagle snuffled and pawed at the long grass at the edge of the golf course. “It was as if she was really somewhere else. She talked to me about her sister, more than once. I don’t think she ever got over the fact that she had survived the war and her sister had not.”

Terri stared at him blankly. Her mind felt paralysed by shock, a kind of mental concussion. It was as if he was compelling her to believe that the earth was flat.

“You’ve got it wrong,” she said at last. The words spilled out all at once, rebounding off the sallow grass like pellets of gravel.

“Perhaps,” said Michael Cahill. He seemed unaware of the impact his words were having on her. “I didn’t really know her all that well. I don’t think anyone knew her properly, not even her husband. It was tragic that he died so young.”

“What about her daughter? People say they were close?”

“Daughter? There was no daughter.” Michael Cahill’s eyes widened and for the first time he looked surprised. His eyes were larger than his son’s and very bright, the colour of amber. “Allis never had any children. After her husband died she lived alone.”

Terri found herself unable to speak. For a moment it was as if she could sense the world rotating as it spun on its axis. It made her feel nauseous, seasick. Her eyes filled up with tears. She quickly wiped them away with the back of her hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go.”

She strode off along the path, stumbling in her haste to get away. She knew her behaviour must have seemed rude, but it couldn’t be helped. Better for him to think that she was rude than that she was crazy. It was only when she came into sight of the town that she began to feel calmer.

The air was cooler now and the tourists had begun to disperse in search of food. Terri stopped by the seafront supermarket and inserted her debit card into the cash machine there. As it dispensed the ten pound note she had requested, her bank balance flashed up on the screen. She had checked it online that morning and the two amounts tallied to the penny.

Whose world was she in, exactly, and did it matter? What had happened when she stepped through the door? Could it be possible that Vronia’s door in Bellony, like the tin horse and the wooden monkey, had a counterpart in the world Terri chose to call real?

In Allis’s novel, the worlds that Vronia visited seemed just like her own, revealing their difficulties and dangers only with time. Perhaps the same would be true of this one. Or perhaps Allis’s version of her life really had been the truth, all along.

Terri knew the first thing she had to do was get something to eat. Then she would call Janet as planned and talk things over with her. She did not know yet how much she would tell her but that didn’t matter. What mattered most, at least for the moment, was to establish that Janet existed and still remembered her.

© 2010 by Nina Allan.

Originally published in Blind Swimmer.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Nina Allan’s stories have featured in the anthologies Best Horror of the Year #2, Year’s Best SF #28, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2012. Her story cycle The Silver Wind was published in 2011 and was named as one of that year’s Top Ten book choices by the editors of the British Science Fiction Association’s critical journal Vector. Her most recent book of stories, Stardust, will be available in 2013 from PS Publishing. Nina lives and works by the sea in Hastings, East Sussex.

The Red: First Light
Linda Nagata

LINKED COMBAT SQUAD, EPISODE 1:

DARK PATROL

“There needs to be a war going on somewhere, Sergeant Vasquez. It’s a fact of life. Without a conflict of decent size, too many international defense contractors will find themselves out of business. So if no natural war is looming, you can count on the D.C.s to get together to invent one.”

My orientation lecture is not army-standard. I deliver it in the walled yard of Fort Dassari while my LCS—my linked combat squad—preps for our nightly patrol. Since sunset the temperature has dropped to 95-degrees American, for which we are all grateful, but it’s still goddamn hot, with the clinging humidity of the rainy season. Amber lights cast glistening highlights on the smooth, black, sweat-slick cheeks of Sergeant Jayne Vasquez, who arrived by helicopter along with a week’s worth of provisions just four hours ago.

Like the rest of us, Jaynie Vasquez is wearing a combat uniform, body armor, and the gray titanium bones of her exoskeleton. Her finely shaped eyebrows are set in a skeptical arch as she eyes me from beneath the rim of her brown LCS skullcap. I suspect she’s been warned about me—the notorious Lieutenant James Shelley, United States Army—her new commanding officer here at Fort Dassari.

Not a problem. Knowledge is a good thing.

“So how do the D.C.s go about inventing a war?” I ask her.

She answers in the practical manner of an experienced non-com: “Above my paygrade, sir.”

“Worth considering all the same. I imagine it goes like this: All the big defense contractors, the D.C.s we love to hate, get together—not physically, but in a virtual meeting. At first they’re a little cold—that’s the nature of a defense contractor—but then one of the D.C.s says, ‘Come on, now. We need someone to host the next war. Any volunteers?’”

“Yes, sir,” Specialist Matthew Ransom says with a grin as he presents himself to me for a mandatory equipment check.

“This is serious, Ransom.”

“Sorry, L.T.”

I initiate the check anyway, making an inventory of his gear and confirming that every cinch on his exoskeleton is secure while I pick up the thread of my story:

“‘Any volunteers.’ That’s a joke, see? Because a D.C. will never allow a war in their own country. Rule one: Don’t kill off your taxpayers. War is what you inflict on other people.”

“That’s the truth, sir,” Jaynie says in a bitter undertone as she initiates an equipment check for Private First Class Yafiah Yeboah.

Maybe I’m getting through to her.

“Anyway, the joke works, the ice is broken, and ideas start getting tossed around until one of the D.C.s says, ‘Hey, I’ve got it. Let’s do a war in the Sahel. It’s good, open terrain. No nasty jungles. It’s not quite desert, and we’ve already got a figurehead in Ahab Matugo.’ This sounds pretty good to everybody so they agree: the next regional war, the one that will keep them in business for another three or four years, or even a decade if things go well, is right here in Africa’s Sahel, between the equatorial rainforest and the Sahara.”

I reach the last point of inspection, crouched in the mud beside Matt Ransom’s left boot where it’s strapped into the exoskeleton’s floating footplate. Everything looks good, so I slap his thigh strut and tell him, “You’re clear.”

The frame of my own exoskeleton flexes as I stand. There’s a faint sigh from the joints as the struts alongside my legs boost me up with no effort on my part, despite the eighty-pound pack I’m carrying on the rig’s shoulder bone. The mechanical joints release a faint, sterile scent of mineral lubricant, barely detectable against the organic reek of mud and dogs.

I turn back to Jaynie. She pauses in her equipment check and asks, “So now the defense contractors have to get the war started, right?”

“First they have to choose up sides, but a coin toss will do it. China winds up as primary backer of Ahab Matugo, and an Arab alliance takes the status quo—”

“L.T.,” Ransom interrupts, “you want me to clear you?”

“Yeah. Go ahead.” I run my gloved hand over my skullcap as he begins tugging on cinches and checking power levels. I’m remembering the buildup to this war, watching it happen while I served my first combat tour at the tail-end of Bolivia. I try hard to keep my voice calm. “So we Americans . . . we don’t jump in right away. We have another war to wind up first, so we promise to intervene when humanitarian issues demand it—but we don’t discuss what side to come in on because it doesn’t fucking matter. Everyone knows we don’t understand the local politics and we don’t give a shit anyway. There’s nothing in this region we want. The only reason we’re jumping in is so that our defense contractors can keep their shareholders happy. The American taxpayers will listen to their hoo-rah propaganda media outlets and pony up the money, blaming the libruls for the bad economy, while brain-draining the underclass into the army because hey, it’s a job, and even the D.C.s can’t convince Congress to spend ten-million dollars each on a combat robot when you can get a fully qualified flesh-and-blood high-IQ soldier for two-hundred-and-fifty thousand.”

Ransom steps back. “You’re clear, sir.”

I ignore him. “And that, Sergeant, is the reason we are here at Fort Dassari, squatting in a country where we’re not wanted and we don’t belong, and it’s why we get to go on a hike tonight and every night through hostile terrain, giving other people who also don’t belong here a chance to kill us. We are not here for glory—there isn’t any—and there’s nothing at stake. Our goals are to stay alive, to avoid civilian casualties, and to kill anyone with an interest in killing us. In nine months, no soldier has died under my command and I’d like to keep it that way. Is that understood?”

Jaynie keeps her face carefully neutral. “Yes, sir, that is understood.” And then, because she’s not about to be intimidated by a male lieutenant five years her junior and with a quarter of her combat experience, she adds, “Guidance described you as a crazy motherfucker, sir—”

Behind Jaynie, Yafiah claps a hand to her mouth, stifling a snort of laughter.

“—but they promised me, no matter how much of an asshole you are, they won’t walk us into an ambush.”

I smile pleasantly. “They’ve come close a few times.”

As the most northeastern in a line of remote border forts, we are more exposed than most. The fort itself is our shelter, our base of operations. Its fifteen-foot-high walls enclose the housing unit and a yard just big enough to park two tanks—not that we have tanks—but we do have three ATVs stored under an accordion canopy.

Our mission lies outside the walls. We do interdiction—hunting for insurgents filtering down from the north—while the insurgents go hunting for us. Guidance doesn’t always spot them in time, which is one reason we keep a pack of five dogs. They’re not official army issue, but the motto of the linked combat squads is Innovation – Coordination – Inspiration . . . meaning as an LCS we get leeway to come up with our own strategies.

“One more thing, sir,” Jaynie says as I turn away. “Is it true you’re cyborged?”

“It’s just an ocular overlay.” I touch my gloved finger to the corner of my eye. “Like built-in contact lenses, but they receive and display data.”

The gold line tattooed along the curve of my jaw is an antenna, and tiny audio buds are embedded in my ears, but I don’t mention those.

“You’re not linked to the outside world, are you?”

“From a warzone? Not a chance. The only link I’m allowed is to Guidance.”

“So you’re hooked into Guidance even when you’re not wearing the helmet?”

“You got it. Everything I see, everything I hear, gets piped straight upstairs.”

“Why is that, sir?”

Not a discussion I want to get into right now, so I turn my attention to the last of our little crew. Private First Class Dubey Lin is standing on the catwalk, nine feet above the ground, peering through a machine-gun port at the surrounding trees. Dubey over-relies on organic sight, but he’s always ready to go on time and he never argues. Actually, he never says much of anything at all. “Dubey!” I shout. “Get down here.”

“Yes, sir!”

He jumps nine feet to the ground, letting the shocks of his exoskeleton take the impact and startling the dogs, who are so wound up in anticipation of the night’s patrol that they lunge at each other. Vicious growls erupt as they spin around in play fights. Ransom gets in on it, launching a few kung-fu kicks and chops in Dubey’s direction, flexing his exoskeleton’s leg and arm struts, but Dubey ignores him, as always.

In the LCS ranks, we’ve nicknamed the exoskeletons our “dead sisters” because all the parts except the floating, boot-shaped footplates look a lot like human bones. Shocked struts with knee articulation run up the outside of the legs to the hips. Across the back, the rig takes an hourglass shape to minimize profile, ending in a shoulder-spanning arch that easily supports both the weight of a field pack and the leverage that can be generated by the slender arm struts.

Packets of microprocessors detect a soldier’s movements, translating them to the rig in customized motion algorithms. A soldier in an exoskeleton can get shot dead and never fall down. I saw that in Bolivia. And if there’s enough power left in the dead sister, it can walk the body back to a safe zone for recovery. I’ve seen that too. Sometimes the dead just keep walking, right through my dreams. Not that I’d ever admit that to Guidance.

Jaynie pushes me a little harder. “So if Guidance is listening in on everything you say, sir, why do you keep talking shit?”

“We have to play the game, Sergeant. We don’t have to like it. Now, helmets on!”

We all disappear behind full-face visors tuned to an opaque black.

Tiny fans vent cool air across my face as I watch an array of icons come up on my visor’s display. They assure me I’m fully linked: to my skullcap, to my M-CL1a assault rifle, to each one of my soldiers, to my angel, soaring invisibly high in the night sky, and to my handler at Guidance. “Delphi, you there?”

Her familiar voice answers, “Gotcha, Shelley.”

They don’t call us a linked combat squad for nothing.

I use my gaze to shuffle through the displays of each soldier in my LCS, confirming that they’re linked too.

Technically, every linked combat squad should have nine pairs of boots on the ground, but at Dassari we’ve never had more than six and, due to personnel transfers, we were down to four before Jaynie got here. The army likes to brag that every LCS soldier is an elite soldier, meeting strict physical and intellectual requirements, with a demonstrated ability to adapt to new systems and circumstances. Translated, this means we’re chronically shorthanded—and no one gets a night off.

“Let’s all stay awake,” I say over gen-com. “It’s been too quiet these past few nights. We’re due.”

“Yes, sir!” Ransom answers like this is good news. Yafiah swears softly. Dubey kicks at the ground in frustration. Only Jaynie doesn’t get it.

“You know something we don’t?” she asks over gen-com.

“Just a feeling.”

Ransom says, “Sometimes God whispers in his ear.”

“L.T.,” Yafiah pleads. She knows what’s coming, and so do I, but I don’t try to rein him in. Ransom is my favorite redneck of all time. He loves everyone, but he’ll still kill anybody I tell him to without hesitation. His way of explaining the world may be non-standard, but his enthusiasms have kept us both alive.

“Ma’am, this here is King David,” he informs the sergeant. “Saul don’t dare touch a hair of the man’s head and Goliath can’t get his bullets to fly straight when the lieutenant’s around, because James Shelley is beloved of God. Do what L.T. tells you and you might live long enough to see Frankfurt one more time.”

Ransom is six-three. He has a hundred pounds of muscle over Yafiah and a year more experience, but as far as she’s concerned, he’s the dumb little brother. She turns the blank black face of her visor toward Jaynie and says, “Don’t worry none about Ransom, ma’am. He’s kind of crazy, but he’s good in the field.”

Jaynie sounds honestly puzzled when she asks me, “How can you be King David, L.T.? Because I would have sworn that we were Goliath.”

“Goliath,” I murmur, using my gaze to select the encyclopedia icon from my overlay, because the truth is, I don’t really know the Bible story.

But before I can listen to the abstract of the Goliath entry, Dubey surprises us all by actually speaking. “King David played his own game,” he says, his shy voice amplified over gen-com. “And he didn’t lose.”

Good enough for me.

I whistle at the dogs. The fort’s gate swings open. We head out into moonlight, the five of us, Dassari LCS. The fort will defend itself while we’re away.

We spread out so we can cover more territory, and so one bomb blast, one rocket, won’t take out all of us. The primary weapon we carry is the M-CL1a, also known as the Harkin Integrated Tactical Rifle, yielding an acronym only a gamer could love. The HITR uses AI sights to fire both a 7.62mm round, accurate to 500 meters, and programmable grenades from the underslung launcher. We’re also armed with a handy assortment of hand grenades—frag, flashbang, smoke. Subtlety is not our talent. We’re rigged to hit fast and hard. Powered by the dead sisters, with photomultiplier-based nightvision to see where we’re going, we’re able to make a sweep through the entire district on most nights.

Near the fort the land is flat, and much of it is cultivated, marked off by tall fences that protect sorghum fields and tree farms from roving goats and wandering cattle. But after a couple of kilometers, the farms end. Then, it’s mostly scattered trees that look a lot like the mesquite I saw in Texas. We’re well into the rainy season, so all the trees are leafed-out and where there used to be bare red ground between them, wild grass is growing almost head-high. The dogs run through it, hunting for rogue soldiers.

A light wind sighs past, setting the grass swaying around me. I know it’s rustling, but my helmet’s audio pickups are set to filter out white noise, so I can barely hear it, while more distinct sounds reach me clearly: the panting of the dogs, the lowing of cattle, a bird’s piping call.

With the grass so tall I can’t see very far, but I keep a map overlaid on my visor with the position of each one of my soldiers marked. The map is constantly updated with data gathered by my angel—a toy drone with a three-foot wingspan, piloted by a semiautonomous AI. The angel watches over us. Everything within range of its camera eyes is recorded, and the raw video boosted to Guidance. In offices in Frankfurt, Charleston, and Sacramento, our handlers scan the raw feed, while Intelligence teams run analytical programs to pick up any bogeys human eyes might miss.

There’s always something to see. This is the Old World. People have made their homes here since the beginning of time and they’ll probably still be here come the last day—which might not be as far off as we’d like to think.

Yeah, apocalyptic thoughts come a little too easily these days.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter how empty this land looks, it is inhabited. People live here, raising their children and their livestock, most of them pretending there isn’t a war in progress. We don’t want to shoot them.

So with the angel’s help we’ve developed a census. We know the names of everyone living within twenty-five kilometers of the fort. We know their facial details, along with their height, weight, gender, posture, and age. We know where they live, what they do for a living, and how they’re related to the people around them. Using the census, the angel can ID an individual in low light, from over a kilometer away, with his back turned, and once we’ve got an ID we go on our way. It’s rare that the people here even see us, unless we’re on the road.

But if the angel turns up someone who’s not in our census? Then we move in.

Not every stranger is an enemy. Smugglers pass through, and so long as they’re not carrying weapons or proscribed tech, we let them go. Same for the refugees wandering south out of the Sahara. We talk to them all, and add them to our records.

But it’s the insurgents we really need to find, before they find us. It’s a game of hide-and-seek, and the better the angel gets at spotting people, the better the enemy gets at looking like nothing at all.

So when I get a sudden premonition of danger—a heart-pounding, muscle-tensing certainty that something seriously bad is very near—I visualize a red light. My skullcap picks up the image and displays it on the visors of everyone in my squad. They freeze. Jaynie and Dubey tap into my visual feed right away like they’re supposed to. Yafiah and Ransom take a little longer, but within a few seconds we’re all looking ahead toward one of our district’s rare, rocky outcroppings. It’s an anomaly in the flat landscape: a wide, irregular formation that rises only a little higher than the low trees around it. I’m pretty sure it’s natural, but it looks like it could be the remnant of an ancient pyramid, reduced to a shapeless lump after thousands of seasons of rain.

My handler, Delphi, hasn’t said a word since we linked up at the fort, but the moment I break routine she speaks, “What have you got, Shelley?”

I focus on the words, A feeling. It’s a phrase I’ve practiced, so the skullcap picks it up easily and translates it for Delphi.

She tells me what I already know: “The angel’s got nothing. I’m bringing it in for a closer look.”

“They’re in the high ground,” I say in the softest of whispers, letting the helmet mic compensate for lack of volume.

Delphi doesn’t like my “feelings” because she can’t explain them, but she’s been with me twice when I’ve sensed an imminent ambush, so she doesn’t argue.

I tap into the angel’s infrared feed as it soars on silent wings high above the outcrop. I’m looking for bright points of heat, but I only see our soldiers and our dogs, scattered in an arc on the east side of the mound.

One of our dogs, the cream-colored female we call Pearl, is two meters in front of me. Alerted by my posture, she’s standing still, testing the air with her nose. I hiss at her, urging her to move ahead. She trots forward willingly, but then she freezes just short of the mound. My helmet audio enhances her low growl.

“Fuck,” Yafiah whispers over gen-com. “I want to launch a grenade up there.”

So do I, but we can’t do it. If it’s just a farm kid out on a lark, we could all wind up in prison—and the only reason I’m in this uniform is because I desperately do not want to be in prison.

“Easy,” I warn Yafiah.

I wish I could put skullcaps on the dogs. Then I might be able to get an image of what they’re sensing. But the defense contractors refuse to outfit strays. They don’t want to get fined if the equipment gives false results, so they’ll only cap a dog if it’s specially bred and trained—and that kind of dog costs twice as much as a soldier. Our LCS isn’t authorized.

I hiss at Pearl again, but she lowers her head and looks back at me, refusing to advance any farther.

We’ll have to go in ourselves.

I visualize an approach path: me and Yafiah moving directly in, Ransom circling around the back, and Dubey and Jaynie providing cover from opposite sides. Ransom picks it up and takes off fast, staying well back from the mound as he circles around it. Yafiah moves in, until we have only thirty meters between us as we cautiously advance.

“There it is, Shelley,” Delphi says in her businesslike voice. She sends me a still image, with a red circle around a faint heat signature she’s spotted in the rocks at the top of the mound.

It’s just a gray spot. Its shape doesn’t tell me anything, but I know it’s human because its temperature mimics the surrounding rocks: a ghost soldier, camouflaged from the angel’s infrared sight by a hooded suit with a thermal coating.

I shift back to angel sight. The heat signature is so repressed I can barely see it until the AI in the angel enhances the image. Then I can see it as a cocked arm, death clutched in its right hand.

“Yafiah!” I shout. “Fall back!”

Powered by her dead sister, she jumps backward four meters, dropping flat in a dense stand of tall grass. The dog, Pearl, whirls around and flees past me as I take aim with my M-CL1a. A glowing, golden point is moving across the screen of my visor. There’s no way I could see the grenade on my own, but my system AI, using data from the angel and from the helmet cams, has plotted its path for me. An open circle marks my aim. I align the circle with the point, fire a short burst, and drop flat as a concussion booms over my head and lightning flashes. I’m up again as soon as it passes. From the top of the mound an assault rifle chatters and then, his voice low and happy, Ransom says over gen-com, “That’s two for me, L.T.”

We’re not done yet.

Delphi finds another ghost about twelve meters away from me, near the bottom of the mound. This one’s a gleaming, shapeless blur, much easier to see—probably just someone crouched under a worn-out thermal blanket.

I close the distance, using my dead sister to bound in a crazy zigzag, the joints muttering and my pack creaking against the frame as I go. My target sees me coming. Maybe he panics. Maybe he’s just cocky. But he drops his thermal cover and shows himself. I’m all of twenty-three, but in the green glow of nightvision he looks to me like a skinny teenage kid as he sights down the barrel of his assault rifle and starts firing.

I’m moving fast. His first bullets don’t get anywhere near me, but he shifts his aim and closes the gap while I fire back. I aim from the hip, using the bead in my visor to get the right line. The trigger drops away from my finger as my system AI takes over. A single shot, and the kid flies backward, hitting the slope behind him.

“Slam!” Ransom bellows over gen-com.

“Check it out,” I warn him.

“Don’t worry, L.T., there’s no one left up top.”

“Approaching,” Jaynie says.

I spot her on my map. “Gotcha.”

She walks out of the tall grass, her weapon aimed at the body of the kid, lying face down, the back of his head blown out.

“Signs?” I ask.

“No. He’s dead.”

She crouches beside the body and uses her arm hook to flip it over. There’s a bullet hole right between his eyes. “Shit, your AI is good.”

I can’t feel it directly, but I know my skullcap is working, stimulating my brain to produce a soothing little cocktail, a mix of all-natural brain chemicals that puts an emotional distance between me and what just happened.

I suck fortified water from a tube hooked to a bladder in my pack, while Jaynie searches the body. We’re particularly interested in written orders, and data sticks. Up above, Ransom searches the two that he killed. I watch the feed from his helmet cam. Both are kids; only one has a thermal suit. That’s not a piece of equipment we want to leave lying around, so I send Dubey to help collect it, along with the weapons.

Kids like these are not fighting for Ahab Matugo. He’s a modern, secular leader, and they hate him for it. They hate us too, of course. And they hate the people of this district, because those people put up with us. They’ve been indoctrinated in hate and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some D.C. is behind it, encouraging it, financing it, to make sure soldiers like us have something to do. Rumor is, Intelligence broke a similar scheme in Bolivia, but that investigation was iced to save corporate reputations.

I call Yafiah. We whistle for the dogs, and together we make a sweep of the mound, confirming that no one’s still hiding.

After we distribute the captured weapons between us, we move out, resuming the night’s assigned route. Just a few minutes later, the angel picks up a new presence. This one is riding a moped and isn’t trying to hide, so we get a quick ID.

“Jalal the gravedigger,” Delphi says.

“Did you call him?”

“Checking . . . No. No notification was made. He’s come on his own initiative.”

“I don’t like that much initiative.”

Jalal is a local contractor. The army pays him to handle enemy bodies, but he receives notification of a job only after we are away from the vicinity.

“Delphi, how does Jalal know we’re not the ones lying dead on the ground?”

“He knows your rep, Shelley. But you’re authorized to conduct a field interview.”

With a thought, I switch to gen-com. “Converge on my location. Leash the dogs on your way in.”

Already I can hear the whine of his moped. Maybe he’s following the smell of gunpowder, or maybe he just reasoned from the direction of our gunfire that the mound was the most likely site of the battle.

We take up positions in the grass, eight meters apart, crouched to reduce our profiles . . . because I don’t want to find out too late that Jalal has changed sides. The dogs lie quiet. They’re loyal to us. They know where their next meal is coming from.

I watch with angel sight as the moped draws near. Jalal is driving in the dark. Without using any lights, he’s weaving around trees and skirting the brush, pushing the moped at a fast clip. I don’t see any weapons on him, and the angel doesn’t indicate any, but he has a backpack.

I creep through the trees, putting myself in a position to intercept him.

The crunch of the tires is louder than the electric engine. When he’s almost on me, I step into the open. My HITR targets his face.

He’s so startled he jerks the front tire of the moped. The bike skids, and almost goes over. “Shelley! Goddamn!”

Jalal’s eyes are veiled by the narrow, gleaming band of his farsights. It’s an easy guess that they’re capable of nightvision, so I’m not surprised he can see me in the dark—but he can’t see through my visor, so how the hell does he know it’s me?

Shit. I bet he’s got his own height and weight profiles.

I say, “You got here quick.”

He answers in a local dialect, which my helmet translates in its usual creative fashion. “I am going to the city. Leaving before sunrise. Need to do the job soonest. Right?”

I eye his backpack. It could hold grenades, or explosives. It’s more likely though, that it holds shrouds.

“You can’t take three bodies on that bike.”

He blinks. Then frowns. “Three?”

“Three.”

“Okay, then. Long night for me.”

“Delphi, send him the map.”

There’s a glimmer in the screen of his farsights as the data comes in.

“Thank you, Shelley.”

He tries to get the bike going again, but I put the footplate of my dead sister against his front tire. “Tell me what’s going on. What have you heard?”

The surface temperature of his cheeks and forehead jumps a notch. He glances around, trying to figure out where my soldiers are, but he can’t see them. When he speaks again, it’s in a whisper, though my helmet amplifies it, so it’s easy to hear. “Shelley, my uncle, he called my mama. He said twelve soldiers from the north likely coming the next night or two. Seen them at a neighbor farm. Don’t know the name.”

“To the north?”

“Yes. North. I don’t know more.”

Twelve. No wonder Jalal is out here. He’s no fool. He’ll bag the bodies, bring them in, bury them long before dawn, bill the army, and then he’ll get the hell out of here, because if the rumor is true there’s an excellent chance that when the insurgents come through, they’ll target him as a collaborator.

“Work fast,” I advise him, taking my foot off the tire and stepping back, out of the way.

“I will, Shelley. Thank you.”

As he takes off, I imagine Intelligence engaged in a flurry of activity trying to locate a dozen rogue soldiers just north of our district.

Until they find something, it’s not my problem.

Delphi says, “Cleared to continue.”

My people reappear. We let the dogs off their leashes and go on our way. No one else tries to kill us.

We get back to the fort just as the last stars are fading in a velvety blue sky. The fort detects us, recognizes us, and opens the gate as we approach. The dogs run to drink water.

I’m tired. We’re all tired, but no one talks about it. We clean the dead sisters and our weapons, then plug them into power racks in the bunkroom. We restock the bladders in our packs with fortified water, getting them ready to go again. In the village cemetery, the sun will be rising over the fresh graves of three kids younger than I am, by years. I try to feel guilt, remorse, regret . . . but nothing’s there. Guidance makes sure of that.

If robots were cheaper, we wouldn’t have to be here.

There are only two shower stalls and two toilets. My house rule is that the less you get paid, the sooner you get to shower, so Dubey and Yafiah go first. “Five minutes!” I yell at them from the hallway.

Yafiah yells something back. Her voice is muffled, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t yes, sir.

I step into the kitchen, pick up five aluminum bowls, and head outside.

The sun isn’t quite up, so it’s only around ninety in the yard. When I open the door, the dogs are sprawled under their canvas canopy, but as soon as they see me, they’re up and swarming. I pop the tops on five cans of dog food, fill the bowls, and become god-of-the-pack as I distribute the day’s rations. It takes them about thirty seconds to finish eating. I have my dad send us mange treatments, birth control pills, and pills to knock out their fleas and parasites; their food I buy from a local supplier. It’s all worth it.

I take the bowls back in. Jaynie’s in the tactical operations center, still in her sweat-encrusted t-shirt and pants. She looks up and nods as I pass by. Command requires the TOC to be staffed at all times when we’re not wearing helmets.

Dubey is already done in the shower. He crosses the hall ahead of me, wearing only shorts and his skullcap, disappearing into the bunkroom. Ransom has taken over the empty shower stall, while Yafiah is still running water. “Hurry it up, sweetheart,” I yell at her.

“I still got thirty seconds, L.T.”

She probably does. She’s pretty obsessive about things like that.

“When you get out, go relieve the sergeant.”

I wait for her disgruntled “yes, sir,” and then I take the bowls into the kitchen. By the time I’ve got them washed, Jaynie is taking a shower, and the second stall is open.

I pitch my clothes into the steam cleaner on top of everyone else’s—everything but the skullcap—and I start the load. I’m still wearing the skullcap when I step into the shower. A glance over the partition shows me that Jaynie is still wearing hers too. Good. We’re required to wear the skullcaps only when we’re rigged, but in a combat zone we’re allowed to wear them all the time if that’s what we want to do—and I would not trust an LCS soldier who didn’t want to.

The skullcap is always working, whether Guidance is riding us or not. The handbook says the brain stimulation it provides is non-addictive, but I think the handbook needs to be revised. The only time my skullcap comes off is during the ninety seconds in the shower when I have to wash my scalp with a depilatory.

I let the many-times-recycled hot water run over me for almost a minute, working up to the moment. Then I draw a deep breath and slip the skullcap off.

I start counting seconds to distract myself as I rinse it in the shower stream. It’s made of a silky fabric with an embedded microwire net, and it’s shaped like an athletic skullcap, so it covers from the forehead to the nape of the neck, without covering the ears.

When my count reaches twenty, I hang it on a hook.

I think I psych myself out. It doesn’t make sense that my mood can spiral so far downward in just a few seconds . . . but it does anyway. As I grab a shot of depilatory from the dispenser, a hollow, black panicky despair is spawning inside my chest.

I rub the depilatory over my head and over my face where a beard would grow if I let it, focusing on my count while hot water sluices over my shoulders. I count, so I don’t have to think. At seventy, I tilt my head back under the stream, and at ninety, I slip the cap back on, pressing it close to my freshly hairless scalp.

I’m safe for another twenty-four hours.

I hated wearing the cap during my initial LCS training—I felt like someone was always looking inside my head—but I don’t care anymore. I don’t have anything left to hide.

Jaynie’s getting dressed when I step out of the shower. I look her over. She’s maybe five-eight, lean, with small, pretty breasts already hidden under her t-shirt. Her skin is dark, but not as dark as Yafiah’s. Mine is brown. Dubey and Ransom are the palefaces around here.

Jaynie notices me watching and laughs. “That’ll go away soon,” she says as she steps into clean pants.

“Got to enjoy it while I can.”

Lust is brain chemistry, but so is the way you feel about your sisters and brothers. You might love them, you might die for them, but unless you’re a twisted fuck, the last thing you want to do is have sex with your siblings. That’s incest revulsion, and though I’ve never seen it mentioned in a manual, every LCS soldier knows that Guidance has figured out how to mimic the sensation in our heads. It might take a day or two to kick in, but it always happens. We don’t live with other men and women, we live with brothers and sisters. I’m an only child, but since I’ve been in the linked combat squads I’ve learned what it’s like to have siblings. We are a celibate crew.

I’ve been asleep maybe three hours when I hear Jaynie shouting from the hallway in her best sergeant’s voice: “Rise and shine, children!” She hammers on my door. “Command has a new game for us to play. It’s called patrol-the-road and you’ve got twenty minutes to get underway, so move!”

Basic training isn’t all that far behind me. I’m on my feet and halfway into my pants before I remember who’s in command at our little fort. “What the hell is going on?”

I button up and throw the door open, but Jaynie has already disappeared from the hallway. I can hear Ransom and Yafiah cursing in the bunkroom across the hall. Not a word from Dubey, but I’m sure he’s up and getting rigged.

The tactical operations center is next to my room. That’s where I find Jaynie. “What is it?” I ask, leaning in the door.

She’s standing in front of the desk, watching the big monitor as she straps into her dead sister. “A contractor’s convoy—they’re from Vanda-Sheridan—is due on the western perimeter of our district in ninety minutes or so, bringing in equipment to assemble a new listening station east of us. It’s a priority project, and it’s up to us to make sure the road is clean.”

“Fuck!” I stomp over to the desk to review and acknowledge the order. “I hate defense contractors. They’re fucking parasites. And Vanda-Sheridan’s a fucking beast. When I was in Bolivia, I swear to God their local agent was selling satellite data to the enemy. Vanda-Sheridan is a prime example, Sergeant, of a defense contractor happy to play both sides to prolong a conflict. And now here they are in Africa! Looking after the bottom line.”

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 Linda Nagata.

From The Red: First Light by Linda Nagata.

Published by arrangement with the author.

All rights reserved.

For more information about The Red: First Light, or to buy the book, please visit http://www.mythicisland.com.

Linda Nagata grew up in a rented beach house on the north shore of Oahu. She graduated from the University of Hawaii with a degree in zoology and worked for a time at Haleakala National Park on the island of Maui. She has been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and lately a publisher and book designer. She is the author of nine novels, including The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for best first novel, and the novella “Goddesses,” the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.

Interview: Jane Yolen
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Jane Yolen (Foiled, Curses! Foiled Again) is the author of over 300 books, including Owl Moon, The Devil’s Arithmetic, and How do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? Her books and stories have won an assortment of awards—including two Nebulas, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott Honor, the Golden Kite Award, two Christopher Medals, and a nomination for the National Book Award.

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.

One of your new projects is a pair of graphic novels called Foiled and Curses! Foiled Again. How did those first come about?

Years and years ago, I was a college fencer, and I had a fencing foil that, after I graduated from college, I had with me; you know, I took with me to my apartment in New York City. And I had a date in Grand Central Station with someone, carrying my fencing foil, and lost it in Grand Central Station. Years later, fast forward to a granddaughter who was taking fencing, and I tell her this story, and she said, “Oh, can you write a short story about that?” So I started to write a short story, and the short story stalled. Meanwhile, my agent had introduced me to a new, up-and-coming editor of graphic novels, who was starting the line for The MacMillan Group, and when I told him the plot of this aborted short story, he said, “Write up what you have, give me a proposal. I love it.” That’s how it started.

So what was the creative process? Did you write a script, were you involved with the artwork at all? How did that work?

Well, the first thing I did was to contact my friend Neil Gaiman [laughs] and said, “Send me a manuscript,” so then I would know what they look like. Because the process of writing and the look of the manuscript is as different from a novel manuscript as it would be from a play or a movie script. And I realized very quickly how interdisciplinarian it is. You have to work very closely with the artist. You have to tell the artist what’s in your head, how you see the finished book. And he [Mike Cavallaro] was someone who had already done a number of graphic novel projects and comics. And so, in a sense, he taught me a lot.

Could you give an example of a specific thing that the two of you worked out together?

Very often, I wanted a lot of close-ups, so that, at the beginning of Foiled and the beginning of Curses!, Foiled Again, we’re sort of close-up with Aliera, and she’s breaking that Fourth Wall, she’s looking out at the reader and saying, “This is who I am. This is what I think,” and he said, “We’ve got to get her moving; we’ve got to get her doing stuff, not just turning and cocking her head.”

In Foiled, why did you decide to make the character color-blind?

Just like the old Wizard of Oz, I wanted everything black and white, and then when she saw the faeries, a burst of color. As I was going through it the second or third time for the revisions, it occurred to me that it didn’t make much sense unless she was color-blind. Otherwise, why is she, who is really our eyes here, not seeing things in color, why is everything in black and blues and gray tones?

Was there any pushback on that? Or did everyone love the idea?

Nooooo. The editor thought that was great. And she was tough to please. She had me revise the book seven separate times. And the seventh time I sent it in, and I was waiting to hear from her, figuring it was going to be another seven times before we got there, I came home and there was a message on my answering machine, and it said, “Oh, Jane Yolen. Oh, Jane Yolen. You are sooo good. Sooo good.” And that’s how I knew that she had accepted the manuscript at last. And I kept the message for about a month and a half, until my oldest granddaughter, who was living with me at the time, dumped the message. [Laughs]

Wow.

I used to listen to it when things weren’t going so well.

I thought Foiled did a really good job of portraying a contemporary American teenager, and you just mentioned that your granddaughter had been living with you: Is the character based on her at all or is it based on someone else you know?

It’s based somewhat on her younger sister, who is a fencer. Glendon, who was living with me at that time, was already out of college, so her younger sister was still in elementary school but with delusions of teenhood. So Maddison Jane, who was a fencer, was the one. The first book is dedicated to her.

In what ways do you think teenagers’ lives have changed since you first started writing?

Oh gosh, I first started writing in the sixties, so there’s a lot of change. It’s a lot more open, it’s about all sorts of things, including sexual matters. Including whatever there is, especially now that they can fill out everything on the pages of Facebook or whatever. There is absolutely no understanding of privacy or any sort of dividing line between what one thinks and what one says.

Do you think that young adult literature is doing a good job of keeping up with that reality?

Some of it. Some of it is still mired, like Stephenie Meyer, is still mired in, I’d say, the 1950s. Harry Potter, maybe the 1970s. But then there’s a lot of stuff that is really . . . Holly Black’s books are very definitely “now,” Francesca Lia Block definitely “now,” David Lubar definitely “now.” In the 1950s-60s, when I was growing up, in the first writing for young people, there were hardly any teenage books. And the ones that were out there were “sweet sixteen” kind of teenage books, which wasn’t anything really revelatory or hardhitting, and there weren’t any people of color who were great heroes in the books, there weren’t people of different gender choices in the books, there weren’t girls being the great heroes in the books. A lot of change has happened since then, which has also started its own counterchanges. There’s been a lot of backlash.

You mentioned that there’s been this backlash, and I saw that one of your books was burned on the front steps of the Kansas State Board of Education—

Yep, Kansas City, but that was a while ago. That was twenty years ago.

But what was the situation with that?

Well, it had a gay man in it who was one of the heroes. It was taken out—I think it was by the Fred Phelps people—and they took out my book; Magic Johnson’s book on AIDS; and a book about gay men and women in history, who had done important things in history, and they brought along the hibachi, put the hibachi on the steps of the Board of Education, took the books out of the library, and burned them.

You mentioned that was twenty years ago; does that sort of thing still happen?

Oh yeah, I mean we still have—especially with the Tea Party or the really right wing zealots of one kind or another who feel that the way that you protest is to not say, “I don’t want my child to read this,” but “I don’t want your child to read this either.” And that happens very often at the school board level where people go in, and they insist that books get taken out of the school library, and very often what happens is, they have a town meeting or they have an educational board meeting where people can come and vent, and then very often the book is returned to the shelf. But what happens afterward, someone from the administration, maybe the principal, maybe the superintendent of schools, comes to the teachers, the librarian and says, “Look, we spend a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a lot of money on this process. Be a little more careful next time. So, okay, we won the battle, but don’t use that book again, don’t use books like that again. We’re not going to fight this battle for you next time,” is what they’re hearing.

When one of your books is being attacked like that, is there anything that you as an author can do?

You can write to the teacher or the librarian or the school in support. You can, if you live close by, go physically support them. You can write a piece for The Huffington Post or the New York Times or your local newspaper or go and get interviewed by their local newspapers. Put it out on Facebook or Twitter these days. Get other people, other authors, other illustrators, other readers, other librarians and teachers to show support. Make sure that the ALA, the American Library Association, knows about it, because they’ve got a huge and important committee on books that have been censored or banned.

I was thinking if someone burned one of my books, I just might go burn their house down.

[Laughs] Well, I’m enough of a Quaker not to want to do that. [More laughter] But I’m enough of a snark to want to go and say a lot.

You mentioned Harry Potter, and on Wikipedia, they quote a 2005 interview in which you said that Harry Potter seems somewhat reminiscent of your novel Wizard’s Hall, and that if J.K. Rowling would cut you a large check, you would cash it. So I was just wondering if she ever set you a check.

No, no, I’m pretty sure she never read my book. You know we were both using tropes, fantasy tropes: the wizard school, the pictures on the wall that move. I mean, I happen to have a hero whose name was Henry, not Harry. He also had a redheaded best friend and a girl who was also his best friend, though my girl was black, not white. And there was a wicked wizard who trying to destroy the school who used to have been a teacher in the school. But those are all fantasy tropes, and I was making a joke: It was in context of talking about how we all stand on the shoulders of giants. How we all borrow from the best, and we probably have borrowed from the same places. And I joked, and I said, “If she wants to cut me a rather large check, I would be absolutely pleased.”

Well, that context is mysteriously absent from the Wikipedia page, maybe someone should amend that.

Well, you know, never mind. It’s really pretty silly anyway.

But, I mean, that must just drive you crazy when people say, “Oh, J.K. Rowling, she was the one to think of the wizard school idea, and that’s why it was such a big success.”

There’s even a book that came out way before hers where children go off to a witch school or a wizard school by going on a mysterious train that comes in, that no one else can see except, you know, at a major British [station], I don’t know if it’s Victoria Station or Kings Cross. These things are out there. Diana Wynne Jones had a wizard school, for goodness sake, years before, the Chrestomanci books. This is not new. And it’s one thing for kids not to know it—it’s another thing for librarians to go, “Oh! This is new, oh my gosh, look at those wonderful, wonderful, funny names for candies.” I mean, have they not read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? It’s a very British thing to do.

Well, is it just the luck of the draw, do you think? Or why was Harry Potter so much more high profile than a lot of these other wizard school books?

You know, if we understood that, we’d all be gazillionaires. It was a phenomenon, and a phenomenon, by nature, cannot be expected, cannot be explained, and cannot be redone. Goodness knows, publicity departments and publishing companies have tried forever to make it happen. You can’t make a popular culture thing just happen.

Speaking of pop culture, Madonna, back in 2004, wrote a children’s book, and she explained her motivation as “I’m starting to read to my son, but I couldn’t believe how vapid and vacant and empty all the stories were. There’s, like, no lessons, there’s, like, no books about anything.”

Yes, so she wrote a series of vacuous and vacant books for children with morals that hit you over the head. Every star thinks that writing children’s books is easy, and for them, in some ways, it is, because, one, either they get someone to write it for them, or they write it themselves and it’s ghastly; and two, they can have a big sell-through at the beginning because it’s the star power that does that. But only a couple of the big-name stars have actually had books that backlisted well because they were actually well written. Julie Andrews had a couple. Alan Arkin had one, and Jamie Lee Cutis has had four or five picture books, children’s books, she takes quite seriously.

In this article, they quote you as saying, “I’ve been thinking about getting out my pointy bra and brushing up on my singing and dancing ’cause there’s no good pop music out there.”

Yeah, people are really going to pay a lot of good money to see me do that. [Laughter] Who knows, it could become an internet sensation. If Gangnam Style can be, why not me, right?

So I saw on your blog that you were recently in Minnesota to give a talk about religion in children’s books. What sort of things did you talk about?

I was asked to talk about religion in books. I was supposed to do it at a multi . . . church-synagogue-mosque kind of thing that they have every year and basically I was talking about books that I said—not that promulgated religion, not that sometimes even talked about religion, but talked about the numinous, talked about the moral underpinnings of society, books like The Giver by Lois Lowry. Book like War Horse, books that in any other context you could call religious, except that they’re not talking about how to worship in a particular way.

Well, I mean, one of the things that I really like about fantasy and science fiction is it seems to me that it does offer this sense of the numinous and the transcendent that I think is just—

Absolutely.

—innate, but it doesn’t have the same sort of sectarian problems, or you know, the values can evolve more than it can with a traditional religious text.

Sometimes in science fiction, though, science becomes what religion is in some books, and sometimes there is a heavy moralistic flavor, especially in the earlier science fiction and earlier fantasy. I think though we have grown into wonderful storytelling that just absolutely can’t be beat these days. I think some of the stuff that’s coming out under the aegis of young adult fantasy, science fiction, these days just is stunning stuff.

I don’t know if you saw this: There was a news story where somebody sent an angry letter to fantasy author Scott Lynch, and this letter said, “Your characters are unrealistic stereotypes of political correctness. Real sea pirates were vicious rapists and murderers, and I’m sorry to say it was a man’s world, and it is unrealistic wish fulfillment for you and your readers to have so many female pirates. And I saw in an interview that your first book was actually a nonfiction book about female pirates—Pirates in Petticoats—so I was wondering what you thought of that.

Yes, and I’ve written, so far, three and a half books with female pirates in them. Yeah, they were more of an anomaly. They were fewer female pirates than there were male pirates, but the greatest pirate was a female, Madam Ching, who had, I don’t know, twenty thousand boats, or maybe it was five thousand boats and twenty thousand men under her control in the China Seas in the nineteenth century. There were women pirates—it’s undeniable. Some of them were actual queens who had navies under their command; some of them were running pirate syndicates—Lady Killigrew in England did that; some came from a pirate family, that would have been Gráinne O’Malley in Ireland who actually had a sit-down with Elizabeth I who wanted her to give up her pirate ways.

Why do you think there’s just this general problem with people not understanding women in all these different roles throughout history?

Yes, well, because some of their roles were greatly hidden over the last three or four centuries. So the books that were written were not written about them, or the stories that were told were not about them, or people would say, “Well, this really didn’t happen,” and this person, for whatever reason, is saying this really didn’t happen. Yes, the majority of pirates in general were thieves and cutthroats and people who could not fit into a general community without causing mayhem. On the other hand, pirate boats, for the most part, were much more democratic than the English Navy. Most pirate boats, you could vote the captain out. You would get shares, large shares of the proceeds, divided pretty equally. When men came onto pirate ships, they would find articles that spelled out exactly what punishment is for, in some—it was punishment if you hurt any captains, it was punishment if you sexually abused any captain. This was all spelled out in the article.

I think speaking of women in unexpected roles like that, you also have a book called Queen’s Own Fool—could you just talk about that?

I was wandering around with my husband and, I think, some friends who had come to visit us in Scotland. We had gone to Stirling Castle to show them—Stirling Castle was slowly being tarted up, it had been pretty much a ruin—and it was slowly being brought back, and so whoever was the curator had started putting up little signages, and one said, “Mary Queen of Scots had three female jesters.” I was stunned. I didn’t know there were female jesters, much less Mary Queen of Scots had three of them. And it started me thinking about a novel about Mary Queen of Scots’ jesters, and I started researching it with a friend. We didn’t know very much about them. One was called Jardiniere, I remember, she was French. One was called La Folle, and one I can’t remember what [editor’s note: Governance], but they clearly were three different kinds, more or less, we decided, the three different kinds of fools that normally a royal personage would have. One would be the jester: the one who was allowed to say things that could puncture pomposity and could say things to the king or queen or the prince or whoever they were serving without fear of being taken out and having their throats slit. Other people couldn’t say those things. The second kind was very often a dwarf. Or somebody badly handicapped. For some reason, in the Middle Ages they found this sort of person extremely funny just because of how they looked and how strangely they acted. And then the third we decided would be a—because of whatever the name was and I’ve lost it right now—would be less of a fool and more of a teacher. Perhaps a tutor of some kind. But along the way, we discovered that there were a lot of people who had female fools. Queens especially would have female fools because they didn’t want to have males in their entourage.

You referred to the seven gaunt cows that currently afflict the publishing industry. Do you want to just talk about what you meant by that?

That’s based on the Biblical story of Joseph in Egypt interpreting the pharaoh’s dream. The pharaoh dreamed of seven beautiful cows, and then he dreamed that seven gaunt cows came and devoured the seven beautiful cows, and Joseph interpreted this to mean that right now we’re having seven years of plenty, but soon there will be seven years of famine. If we plan now and put away great stores of the excess that we have, when those years come, we will be ready for them. It’s a prophetic dream, he told the pharaoh, and that’s what they did. The problem for publishing now is that those seven or ten or twenty or however many years of enormous growth and enormous monetary rewards have basically come to an end, much of it due to really stupid business practices and the rise of the internet and the ebook and people downloading free books. And piracy.

Well, I guess I actually have the list that you gave of the seven gaunt cows here, maybe we can just run through them quickly.

Please do, because that’s such an old piece I don’t remember it.

So you said: multinational companies, Barnes & Noble, Thor Power Tool Amendment, zero dollars to school libraries, overproduction of books, television-driven merchandise, and the super-saturation of slush piles.

Right. And see, none of that says ebooks, but that’s been the last—you know, and piracy, that’s the last thing. Do you want me to go over those one at a time?

Or maybe pick one or two, if you’d like to elaborate on them.

Well, the multinational companies means more publishing in fewer hands. This means that they’re looking for a particular kind of book, one that’s going to sell very well, so the small, important, literary novel or the small, important book of poetry is not going to get published except maybe privately or in smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller copies with fewer and fewer outlets because of the big guys, and we’ve just seen now Random House and Penguin are about to amalgamate. They don’t allow, within their company—they don’t allow editors to go to an auction against one another for a particular new book. If one person in the company has turned down the book, it’s considered dead at that company. No one else is allowed to look at it. So there are fewer and fewer outlets for authors and illustrators and bookmakers. The slush pile has to do with the ease with which you can now, with a single tap of your finger, send out a manuscript to twenty places at the same time, and so everybody’s doing that. Instead of having your manuscript go to one place at a time, which takes about three or four or five months before you hear, it’s going to a lot of places at the same time. That seems to be good from the author’s point of view, but what actually it means for the editors is that they are getting, since a person can send it to twenty places at the same time, they’re getting everybody sending them one of the twenty manuscripts, so their piles of slush, of unsolicited manuscripts, is higher than ever. Their response to that has been—and slush means unsolicited, in other words, not from a known writer or a known agent or somebody’s mother’s best friend—that has meant that many publishers refuse to read any unsolicited slush manuscripts at all.

Given all the problems in publishing, how do you feel about your kids following you in the business?

My three children all write children’s books. My son Adam also writes adult books. I wish they’d get real jobs. [Laughter] Yeah, they all do it, and they all do something else, too. My daughter, Heidi, is also my PA, she organizes me. My son Adam is a professional musician, a web designer, a poker player, and a novelist. And he is also a composer and writes lyrics. My son Jason is an award-winning photographer but he also writes, he does—he illustrates children’s books with his photographs, but he also is writing magazine articles and is about to write his first book, along with his brother, sister, and me, for National Geographic.

Would you say to all the aspiring writers out there that they should develop a sideline in a more respectable field, like poker playing?

[Laughs] Yes. Or have rich parents.

You recently became the first woman to ever give the Andrew Lang Lecture at St. Andrews University. Can you tell us about that?

Well, Andrew Lang was an amazing late nineteenth, early twentieth century writer. He had written essays, he had written short stories, he had written poetry, novels. He even worked on a novel with H. Rider Haggard, who was a friend of his, but what he’s most famous for, it turned out, was a series of twelve books that he actually didn’t write. Those were the Coloured Fairy Books: The Blue Fairy Book, The Green Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, The Orange Fairy Book, etc. The not-so-hidden secret was that it was really his wife who had done most of the retelling of the stories or the translation, and so it’s a cadre of other women who did it. He simply edited it and because he was a very well-known folklorist, they used his name to front the books. And he had an attachment with St. Andrews and Scotland. He’d gone to university there, he had been, I think, a, like a trustee there for a while, and he lived there. He lived at St. Andrews in the wintertime, summered in London, which is a very bizarre way of doing it actually. London is vastly too hot in the summer, St. Andrews is vastly too cold in winter. And there’s a street named after him, he’s buried in St. Andrews, etc. And after his death in 1912 they started a lecture series in his name. Each person who gave the lecture had to lecture on something that Andrew Lang was interested in, and since he was interested in everything, you know, historical things, poetic things, literary things, folkloric things, it was very easy to get people to do the lecture. And the lectures have been going on since 1927, not every year—there’ve only been twenty-two lectures—but they’ve included people like John Buchan who wrote The 39 Steps, a lot of academics, and in 1939, a month after I was born, the lecture was given by an Oxford don named J.R.R. Tolkien. He talked on fairy stories. He gave a very famous essay on fairy stories that was, for me, one of the iconic pieces that I read when I was first getting interested in folklore, and lo and behold, last spring they asked me if I would give the next Andrew Lang Lecture, and I had just finished doing an introduction for The Folio Society’s elegant, expensive, illustrated version of The Olive Fairy Book, and I was thrilled. They brought me over to give a lecture, and I was told I was the first woman, since 1927, to give a lecture.

What do you make of that, being the first? Did you have any thoughts about that?

I had a lot of thoughts about that. Like, do you know who you missed? Isak Dinesen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Angela Carter, and, you know, on and on and on, who’ve died. You also did not ask A.S Byatt or Marina Warner or Maria Tatar or any of the . . . Katharine Briggs, who died, great women of British folklore. I mean, it’s astonishing to me who they didn’t ask. That they asked me was a great honor, but the honor was all to me. I’m not sure I brought any honor to them.

It seems especially bizarre that, over the course of ninety years, they never ended up having a woman—especially given the fact that, as you said, his wife actually is the one that had written the books that he’s most famous for.

I did point this out in my lecture. I did also offer them some names that they might think of having, including Terri Windling, and Katherine Langrish, and Elizabeth Wein, and people like that.

Do you imagine that there’s someone who was just born who will grow up reading your lecture the way you grew up reading Tolkien’s?

Well, one could devoutly hope so.

All right, so that pretty much does it for our questions. So, just to wrap things up, are there any other new or upcoming projects that you’d like to mention?

Let’s see. I’m hoping that I’ll do a third Foiled book, probably called En Garde!, but they have not signed up for it yet. A lot depends on how well the second book does. I’m working on a Hansel and Gretel as twins in the Holocaust, it’s called The House of Candy. My son Adam and I are working on a trilogy for upper middle grade kids called The Seelie Wars and the first book, The Hostage Prince, will be out this fall. I have a book called Trash Mountain, which is a talking animal novel for kids about the war between the red squirrels and the gray squirrels, which is pretty brutal, actually. The war, that is. The gray squirrels can outfight and can have more babies than the red squirrels. They also carry a virus that doesn’t affect them, but kills the red squirrels. This is true. This is all true. This is why the red squirrels are dying out. But what they don’t know, the actual red—uh, gray squirrels are that there are black squirrels coming and they are bigger and feistier and can outfight and are not affected by the virus, so the grays will probably have their comeuppance at some point. Anyway, that was the basis for my writing the book, but it’s not about the actual war. It’s about talking animals.

Any short stories coming out, maybe in an anthology in February?

I am going to have a story in Oz Reimagined called “Blown Away,” which takes place in Kansas, a sort of reimagined Kansas in which, well, I’m not going to give it away. But it has circuses and freaks, a couple of people from a freak show, and not one but two twisters and a couple of surprises. Especially what happens to Toto.

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 (and its sister magazine, Nightmare), is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, 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. 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: Brandon Sanderson
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Brandon Sanderson has published seven solo novels with Tor—Elantris, the Mistborn books, Warbreaker, and The Way of Kings—as well as four books in the middle-grade Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians series from Scholastic. Two novellas came out in 2012: Legion and The Emperor’s Soul. He was chosen to complete Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series; 2009’s The Gathering Storm and 2010’s Towers of Midnight were followed by the final book, A Memory of Light, in January 2013. Tor Teen will release the YA fantasy The Rithmatist in May 2013, and Delacorte will release the YA post-apocalyptic Steelheart in September 2013. Currently living in Utah with his wife and children, Brandon teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University.

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.

As we’re recording this, the release of A Memory of Light is just days away. So what will you be doing on the day that the book comes out?

Well, I’ll probably be sleeping at first, because the night before I’ll be doing a midnight release party, and those tend to go pretty late. And then I’ll be flying—I believe Minneapolis is the first stop. And I’ll be doing a signing there that evening.

Tell us about the midnight release party.

Well, for quite a while now, my fans have wanted me to do midnight releases, and so what we do is we pick a bookstore. It’s been BYU bookstore for a while, since it’s the only local independent in Provo. And we’ll go there and I will pre-sign all the books to make it easy on people, and then we have a party. At midnight we start selling the book. People can grab their book and take off with it, or they can come and wait in the extremely long line to get it personalized by me. We do number the books at the release party, which is also kind of fun.

And Robert Jordan’s widow will be there, right?

Yes. Harriet’s coming for the first time. She’s going to come on down and we’re going to have her sign all the books too. We’ll do a Q&A reading thing beforehand, and then Harriet is going to go back to the hotel and go to bed while I sit around and sign books until 5 AM.

Are people camped out on the sidewalks already?

Yes, they are indeed. Someone really wanted book number one, so he came I think a good two weeks early and started camping. It’s not particularly pleasant outside in Utah in December and January, so these are real troopers.

Have you been over there to bring them hot chocolate or anything?

I haven’t yet. I usually stop by once or twice during the lines, but I haven’t stopped by as of yet. I live a lot further from BYU than I used to.

I think a lot of fantasy and science fiction fans have grown suspicious about whether and how long-running series are going to end. And I think a lot of people are probably wondering, is this really the end of The Wheel of Time?

The honest truth is, I don’t get to say. It’s Harriet’s story now, not mine. Harriet and I have talked about it, though, and both of us feel that this should be the ending. The last thing Robert Jordan wrote was the last chapter of this book. I don’t think Robert Jordan would have wanted us to go further, and I think that if we went on, it would be too much of me having to take over. For these last books—that were really just one book in his notes—I’ve been able to follow his outline fairly closely. And yes, there were holes and things like that, things I had to do, but I had an ending in sight, which was the ending he’d written, and that has guided me all along. That kept it in the realm of being his story that I’m writing, rather than my story that I’m taking over.

Do you think people are going to be satisfied that this pretty much ties up most of the loose ends and there’s not a huge cliffhanger at the end or anything like that?

Yeah, I felt when I first read it that it was a satisfying ending. I felt it was the right ending. It’s been my guidepost for all the work I’ve done on this. There are going to be some holes. Robert Jordan told fans before he passed away that he didn’t want everything wrapped up neatly with a bow. And so there are no major cliffhangers, but there are some indications of things that happen after the series, things that continue on. He had planned to write a sequel trilogy, and people are aware of that. So naturally there are going to be holes regarding some of the characters he was planning to put in that trilogy.

What if somebody wants to know how the story ends, but they don’t want to read all fourteen books? Could they jump straight into this one?

I would really not suggest that. If people wanted to jump in, the place that I would suggest jumping in would be book eleven, which is the last one Robert Jordan wrote, and which is the one that really starts to take the focus toward an endgame. If there are Wheel of Time fans out there that read the first few books and then said, “I’ll finish it when the series is done” and things like that, book eleven might be a good place to come back to it. That one’s called Knife of Dreams.

I heard that one chapter is around 50,000 words long and contains seventy to eighty viewpoint characters. Is that true?

It’s actually a bit longer than that, but has fewer viewpoint characters. I think it’s about 70- or 80,000 words. There are around seventy viewpoint shifts, but there are a lot of repeated viewpoints. So yes, there’s this massive chapter. It’s one of the things I planned from the beginning, and like a lot of things that I tried that are a little out of the mainstream for the series, I pitched it to Harriet and said here’s why I think it would work and why I think it will be a great chapter. And she went ahead and let me get away with it—as she frequently did in working on these. So yes, there’s a big, awesome, meaty, long chapter at the end of the book. It’s not the last chapter, but it’s one of the last chapters.

I heard you say that this book contains a lot of big battles, and since you’re not a big military history buff like Robert Jordan was, you needed some help with those sections. Who did you consult with and what sort of details did they give you?

Harriet is friends with Bernard Cornwell, and went to him for a bunch of advice on this, so we used him as a military expert. Also, Robert Jordan had two assistants. One of them is a military historian. He knows the military; he’s been in the military. Those scenes were very heavily looked over and edited by him.

I imagine you must have had to endure a lot of people being like, “Hey, man, you don’t know Rand al’ Thor, man.” Have you just had to develop a thick skin for that?

Yes and no. I mean, I was part of Wheel of Time fandom before I was given this project, so I know Wheel of Time fandom, if that makes sense. So when the Wheel of Time fans pick on certain characters—it’s usually Lan or Mat—they’ll say, “Hey, you don’t know Lan.” Well, I do know Lan, and my interpretation of Lan differs from yours. We could spend hours on forums discussing our different interpretations of characters. Nothing’s changed from the time that I was just a fan to writing now. We would have had that same big, massive discussion on that forum back then as we talked about our different interpretations. And that’s one of the factors people have to deal with in me picking up the series as a fan. I am going to bring my interpretation as a longtime fan of these characters. In some cases they’re spot on with what most people think. There haven’t been many complaints about my Perrin, for instance. And in some cases, there are complaints and they’re right. My early Mat was off. I acknowledged this. I looked at what people were saying, but in other cases, such as Lan, they’re wrong. [Laughs] What can I say? I’m a fan too, and we will have these arguments about whether this character would do this or that character would do that, and you’ll find that in any community.

On the other hand, I do get complaints, and in some cases the complaints are legit. I’m not Robert Jordan, and I can’t do some of the things that he did, simply because I don’t have his life experience and in many ways I’m not as good a writer as he was. He was a fantastic writer at the end of his career, after having grown and progressed for decades, and I’m a new writer. I’ve only been doing this for ten or fifteen years or so now, so I’m not as skilled. In some cases I just have to apologize and say I can’t do it the way that he would do it. I have to try to do it the best way I know how to do it. Anyone who has gripes like that, they’re legit gripes and that’s a good reason to not like the books, and I’m fine with that. And if that really bothers you, then hopefully we can get the original notes released. That will be Harriet’s decision. After the fact, I would like to release them, so that those for whom my interpretation was not good, or my failings ruined the experience for them, they can at least look at what Robert Jordan had and imagine their own story.

I’ve heard you have 50,000 unread emails in your inbox. Don’t you worry about all the exciting business opportunities in Nigeria that you’re missing out on?

Yeah, that’s not even my spam box. I’m bad with email. I’m so bad with email. Fortunately, I do have people combing those inboxes, watching for important emails that come my way, and I try to read a lot of the fan mail. It’s hard to answer it all, but I try to read it, at least. I love what social media has done. It creates this great connection between author and reader, which is wonderful, but it also means a lot more opportunities to do things other than writing. And it seems like the last thing I need in my life are more reasons to not be writing. People who know me know that sometimes you have to send a dozen emails to actually get ahold of me. That’s just part of dealing with a guy who spends most of his time trying to focus on the storytelling.

I saw that you recently filmed yourself writing the opening prologue of your new Stormlight novel. You want to tell us about that?

Sure. I mean, I’ve talked about all of this stuff that goes on with social media and whatnot, and I like the interaction that you can get. Some artists that I like, they’re doing this thing where they’ll film themselves painting a piece, and you get this awesome thing where you start with the blank page and then you see in fast motion them painting the whole thing. Dan Dos Santos did this for the cover of Warbreaker, one of my novels. You can find this sped-up video of him painting the whole thing and it’s awesome. I can’t really do that with writing. It’s not nearly as engaging to watch someone typing as it is to watch someone creating this amazing piece of art out of nothing, but I wanted to try it and see what it was like. And so I picked a scene—it’s not actually the prologue. It’s one of the scenes that won’t be a spoiler. I do these things called “interludes” in the Stormlight Archive where I basically write short stories in the world and put them between major sections of the book. I screen-captured myself typing that out, starting with my little outline that I did for it, then typing the whole thing out. Theoretically, I will film myself doing the revisions. The idea is just to put those things up as something fun that people might enjoy—probably sped up a bunch, since it took me six hours to write the scene. It might be helpful to new writers, I don’t know. It might be just a curiosity, but it’s something I wanted to try.

Did it make you self-conscious at all knowing that people were going to be watching your process in action?

Yeah, it totally makes you self-conscious. Mostly it’s the spelling. I’ll be typing along and I’ll see that I spelled some word wrong, and I’ll be like, “Ah man, I should know how to spell that.” So I’ll just use the Microsoft Word spellcheck thing. It does actually keep you focused, though, because every time your instinct is to go check your email or go check your browser, you’re like, “Oh, wait a minute, I’m filming. I probably should not do that.” So that was nice.

In an earlier episode, we were talking about how it seems like there’s a disproportionately high number of Mormons who get into writing science fiction. Do you have any ideas why that might be?

Oh boy, I don’t know. We all have our pet theories, right? I think it’s probably—if you really looked at it—something pretty innocent. Such as, I bet you’ll find a disproportionally high number of Mormons in all writing fields, just because there’s a high focus on literacy in the community, so a lot of people end up writing. There’s probably some confirmation bias going on, if that’s the right term. You don’t remember if somebody is a Jewish writer as much as you remember they’re a Mormon writer. And so you start seeing us pop up all over the place. But it is something we discuss. Is it real? I don’t know.

The other thing is that BYU does have a science fiction/fantasy writing class that was started because of Orson Scott Card. He didn’t actually end up teaching it the first time, but it was started because of him, and then he couldn’t end up teaching, so someone else took it over. And it’s been going now for over twenty years. And it could also just be that if you see one successful person doing it, it makes it that much easier for you to do it. I got published in part because a writer came and taught that class while I was at BYU. This writer is Dave Wolverton. He also writes as David Farland. He taught the class and he was a real person who wrote, right? And he was making a living at it. When everyone before had told me you can’t really make a living as a writer, I saw somebody really doing it and I said, I could do this too. Those are lots of theories. Those are the theories from being on the inside and looking at it. I’m sure people who are on the outside can come up with lots more tongue-in-cheek reasons. I’ve read them myself and get a chuckle out of them.

And you’re actually teaching that writing class now, right?

I am teaching the writing class now. I took it over from Dave. After he retired, there was one more teacher for a couple years and then I took it over. I’ve been doing it for ten years now.

Do you put that same focus on writing as a career?

Yeah, I do. Because at a university, when you take creative writing classes, you’re going to get lots of craft discussion. And I try to do craft discussion, but you’re going to get very little real-world professional advice. So I try to give the real-world professional advice, because I’m the one who can give it. I did actually have a grad student post all my lectures online last year. It was part of a project for another class. If you go to writeaboutdragons.com, he posted all of those as YouTube videos. So you can see what my lectures are like.

I understand that BYU actually has its own science fiction magazine? Have you had any involvement with that?

Yeah, I was editor of that for a couple of years. It’s a semiprozine. It was started by the same group who took that first class twenty years ago or more now. We call them “the class that wouldn’t die.” They continued on meeting, started their own writing group, started up The Leading Edge, which is the magazine. And it’s just handed down from student to student from them, and they just kept doing it. It’s a fun magazine. It taught me a lot about publishing and about writing, actually. Nothing teaches you about writing faster, I feel, than reading other people’s horrible work and realizing it’s much like your own, and you need to be doing stuff better than that.

It seems like most of the writers that I know are either naturally short story writers or naturally novelists, and you definitely fall into the latter category. I was actually wondering, have you written more published short stories or unpublished novels?

Definitely more unpublished novels, yeah. Because short stories, if you use the technical definition of short story, I think I’ve actually only ever written one. Everything I write goes into at least novelette length. I wrote one for Charlaine Harris. She wanted a story from me for an anthology that sounded like a lot of fun, Games People Play, and so I wrote an actual short story for her. That’s just how it came out. Everything else I’ve done is novelette or novella. I really like novellas. I love reading novellas, I love writing novellas, because they really are just short novels, right? You do all of the sorts of things you do for a novel, but you do them in a short form. Whereas a short story is a completely different art. It’s the difference between learning to drive down the green and to putt. You’re using similar tools, but there’s so much difference there that becoming a good short story writer takes a lot of work in different ways. I’m very naturally a novelist, but I can apply a lot of my same skills to the novella form, and have been very pleased with how some of my novellas have turned out because of that.

Do you want to tell us a bit about some of the novellas that you’ve written?

Sure, I’ve had two novellas come out this year. One’s called Legion. I did that one with Subterranean Press. It was me trying my hand at some more thriller-esque modern day things. It’s about a camera that can take pictures of the past, and it gets stolen. And a very interesting individual gets hired to track it down. His name is Stephen Leeds. I came up with this idea for someone who was a genius and who could read up on a subject and become an expert at it in a very short amount of time. But in order to store all this information in his brain, what he does is he creates this hallucination—another person—who is actually a repository for that information, who then follows him around and gives him advice in those situations. So if he wants to learn a new language, he can study it, and then this person will appear next to him who becomes his interpreter in that language. He runs into people and has to have his hallucinatory interpreter—his figment, as he calls them—translate for him so that he can understand, and things like that. It was just a wacky fun idea. So that’s Legion.

The other one that I have I’m really proud of. If you’ve never tried any of my work, the thing I would suggest would probably be this. It’s called The Emperor’s Soul. It’s the story of a woman who uses forgery magic, and who is hired to create a forgery of the emperor’s soul magically, because he’s been wounded in the head and is brain dead. There’s just a shell left there, and the people who are keeping him in power want to have a forged soul placed into him so that no one will know that he’s been wounded, so they can keep on ruling the empire.

I understand you’ve also had work in some of the fine anthologies edited by John Joseph Adams?

I have. In fact, John has two of my shorter works. One is one of these interludes from the first Way of Kings. And it stood fairly well on its own—we just named it after the character Rsyn, and it’s in John’s anthology Epic. And in fact, the scene that I video recorded is actually a new interlude with Rsyn for the second volume. So that’s pretty cool. I also have a story that I co-wrote with a friend of mine in Armored, the anthology. Again, I don’t have the military expertise, but I wanted to write this military science fiction story, and so I went to a friend in the military—who is also a writer—and we did the story together.

In addition to writing, you’re also the co-host of the Writing Excuses podcast. And I understand that Mary Robinette Kowal actually flies from Chicago to Utah just to tape the show?

Yeah, the podcast is successful enough—we have an Audible sponsorship—that we can actually afford airfare and things like that, which is pretty cool. And so we fly Mary out. Skype is a wonderful tool, but when it’s a show that you really need the energy of the hosts together—and that’s kind of what we focus on—we need to be there in person, we find. So we do it in person.

What are some recent topics or guests that you’ve covered?

Right now we’ve got four ways the industry is changing and how to write a secret history—secret history is kind of a subset of alternate history. We’ve got one where we had listeners send us in questions and we answer the questions. We do things like: What are your embarrassing early projects? How do you tell if your idea is too big for the story you’re working on? How do you avoid discouragement? How do you handle multiple magic systems in one book? And then we have a few before that where we brainstorm stories together, and then talk about how we would outline them, and things like that. There are all sorts of things on there. We have a lot of editors and other writers on as guests. We’ve broken down all kinds of writing topics from outlining, to how to do characters, and all these different things. So if you’re interested in writing, go look it up. There’s a ton of archives. I think we’re starting our eighth season or something like that.

I saw you’re also starting up a writer’s retreat called Out of Excuses?

Yeah, Mary suggested this, to do a writer’s retreat. People have been asking about doing this. I like to try to do one thing like this every year. In the past, I’ve been doing one with Kevin J. Anderson, which is called Superstars Writing Seminars. This year I wanted to try doing something a little more hands-on with some students. Mary’s parents have a vacation home next to their actual home, I think, or they own two houses—I don’t even know how it works, you’d have to ask Mary. Anyway, they rent it out for vacationing and things like that, and we’re going to be renting it and holding a seminar in it. We will meet with listeners and all write together, and hopefully record some episodes of Writing Excuses and help people out.

Can people still apply to that?

No, we sold out in like nine minutes. [Laughs] Maybe in a future year, but yeah, I think it was actually like nine minutes. There’s only twenty spaces for it, so it went really fast.

You’ve also been involved recently with the Waygate charitable foundation. You want to tell us about that?

Waygate is a foundation run by Wheel of Time fans. A number of Wheel of Time fan organizations have long been involved and have a good history with charitable work. Recently, they decided that if they’re going to be doing this, and having the amount of money flowing through and toward charities that they were doing, that they should make it official, tax-wise. They actually started a company and made it a nonprofit, did all the things they needed to do. I’ve been working with them. They put me on the board. This year we’ve been focusing on Worldbuilders, Pat Rothfuss’ charity, which is a fantastic charity for Heifer International, which buys llamas and things in developing countries and teaches people how to take care of them so they can sustain themselves off of livestock they’re given and things like that. It’s a fantastic charity, so we’ve been working with that to try to do some good where we can.

And just to wrap things up, are there any other new or upcoming projects you’d like to mention?

I’m hard at work on the second Stormlight book. That’s actually been my focus for the last five or six months, ever since I finished the last Wheel of Time book. It will continue to be my focus following the tour that I’m doing. I do also have a couple of projects that I started working on years ago, before the Wheel of Time came my way, which I had to put on hold until now. Both are YA books that I’ve written. One’s called The Rithmatist. It’s coming out from Tor in the summer. And then in late summer I’ve got one called Steelheart, which is a really awesome superhero apocalypse sort of book, that’s coming out from Random House.

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 (and its sister magazine, Nightmare), is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, 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. 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: Armand Baltazar

Artist Spotlight: Armand Baltazar
Galen Dara

Armand Baltazar is an illustrator, animator, fine artist, and storyteller currently living in California. Starting out in advertising and editorial illustration, Armand eventually made his way to Hollywood working as a concept painter and animator for Dreamworks, Disney, and Pixar. He currently is turning his storytelling skills to making an illustrated book, Collidescope Chronicles.

You have taken a pretty interesting path to get where you are now! Let’s see, you started out in Chicago training as a fine artist, then worked as an advertising and editorial illustrator. After some soul searching, you moved to California to pursue book illustration, then ended up getting tapped by DreamWorks to work on Prince of Egypt, which launched you into a career as a concept artist for all the big animation studios. Did I get that all correctly? What do you point to as key moments (or individuals) that helped you become the artist you are now?

In general that is correct. I’ll clarify a few points. I began my career in animation as a traditional background painter on Prince of Egypt. My skill set expanded with each movie, as color keys, lighting design, and layout design were added to my toolbox, so to speak. This all culminated with visual development for the films. Essentially, visual development and concept art perform the same function in terms of preproduction design for a film.

I had many great teachers, experiences, and fortunate circumstances that helped me on the road to my career. My passion started as a kid with drawing, comic books, and movies. In high school I had an inspiring and encouraging teacher, Paul Gavac, who pushed me. I attended Art Center College of Design because so many of my heroes had come from there, artists like Syd Mead, Ralph McQuarrie, Mark English, etc. There I learned a lot about painting, drawing, design, and narrative illustration from many great teachers, but Steve Huston and Richard Bunkall were very influential to me. My early years at DreamWorks, I was mentored by a group of artists from diverse backgrounds: Ron Lukas, a traditional oil painter trained by Russian Impressionist Sergei Bongart; Paul Lasaine, a master Matte Painter and Production Designer; Marcos Mateu-Mestre, a comic book, animation layout, and concept artist extraordinaire; and Sam Michlap, a veteran Layout, Visual Development, and Production Designer were all instrumental in my formative years in animation.

It sounds like storytelling has always been one of your driving passions. You went to California (Art Center College of Design) initially to become a book illustrator and now have come full circle with this new illustrated book project of yours, the Collidescape Chronicles. What can you tell us about this book and what brought you to this moment?

The book has been a labor of love for the last two years. I’d tried on at least two failed occasions to write and illustrate an adventure story like the kinds I’d loved in my youth: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Treasure Island, Dune, and of course Star Wars. In both of those previous outings, I hadn’t created anything that made me passionate. When I began to write Diego and the Steam Pirates: Book One in the Collidescape Chronicles, something important had changed in my life. I was both a father and I found a story within me that I was impassioned to tell my son. It was essentially a story about a father who strove to make a better world for his son and a son who found the courage and the adventure to fight for it. Newly ignited, the words and the pictures began to flow. My schedule allowing, I hope to complete book one this year!

Working in-studio on animated films seems like such a collaborative experience, with constant close association with many other artists and creatives. What is that like and how do you compare it to personal projects where it is just you working on your idea (i.e., Collidescape Chronicles)? Is there a difference in how you come up with ideas (and problem-solve) when you are working on one vs. the other?

The foundation of working on large-scale endeavors like films and a personal project like my book is the same. That is to say, designing and creating in service to the story. In film, I’m serving the vision and story of the director, but with additional guidance by individuals that he or she has placed their trust in, namely the production designer and the art directors. It is uniquely collaborative. In my own project, I must serve the story and vision I’ve laid out for the book. In one sense, it’s easier, but in another, it is more difficult, because all of the responsibility falls on me. Writing, designing, and illustrating are demanding disciplines to coordinate together and I am my own worst critic! I’ve found working for myself on my own projects to be the most rewarding and, at times, challenging experience.

Your painting, Death of the King, is featured as our cover art this month. What an intriguing piece of visual storytelling it is! The woman in white, the Beast stabbed in the back. Where did the concept for this one begin? (And will we be seeing more of the story at some point?)

It is part of a short story . . . a kind of dark little fairy tale I’ve been kicking around for a few years. It is a story about a princess and her two brothers, who venture into the dark woods where their father the King had disappeared many years before. There is strife with the neighboring kingdom, as people there have gone missing . . . apparently a mysterious creature has made its home there . . . I’d been reading about how certain addictions changed people into monsters, making them unrecognizable to their own families. I used that as the basis for my dark and tragic little tale. I hope to complete new art and finish the story after the first Collidescape book is completed, so stay tuned.

Who are some of the artists that have influenced and inspired you?

There are many and with great diversity, here are some I look at all the time. N.C. Wyeth, Sergio Topi, Moebius, Frank Frazetta, Edward Austin Abbey, John Singer Sargent, Ilya Repin, Joseph Clement Cole, Frank Booth, Phil Hale, J.C. Leyendecker, J.W. Waterhouse, Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt . . . too many to list here!

With your diverse background, what is your advice to young artists embarking on their education and/or careers?

Know that if this path has chosen you, it will be one wrought with challenges and hard work. Though I’ve been fortunate to have found some success, success is not the end goal. Creating the art that makes you happy and fulfilled is! That is what propels you through the challenges and makes the hard work feel more like play in hindsight. The truth is, the cliché is absolutely right: “It’s the journey that counts!”

What are you working on right now?

I’m working on a new animated feature for Pixar and I am working diligently to finish my first illustrated adventure that one day I hope to share with you all!

Thank you, Armand! It was a pleasure talking with you.

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.

Deus Ex Arca
Desirina Boskovich

It was a crystalline morning in early June, and the sky was wide as a saucer.

It was a beautiful day for the arrival of the box.

Ferocious rains had come the night before, leaving the air fresh with dew. The Greater Springfield Farmers’ Market was swinging into gear outside the mall. At the far end of the blacktop parking lot, an array of tents and tables had been erected, staffed by vendors from across southwest Missouri.

Mr. and Mrs. Yamamoto were there, with radishes, cucumbers, yellow squash, and salad greens. Their teenage son helped bag the vegetables, and Mrs. Yamamoto’s mother made change. Jeff Finley, of Finley Farms, sold grass-fed beef and unpasteurized milk from a freezer in the back of his Chevy pickup. Miss Amelia offered hand-poured candles, and herbs in plastic pots. A Mennonite family sold fresh produce from their sixteen-acre farm. Their sons wore suspenders and broad-brimmed hats; their daughters wore ankle-length dresses and bonnets sewn from stiff white mesh. There were red potatoes, green tomatoes, fist-sized strawberries, and fresh baked bread.

Jackson Smith, aged seven, also happened to be at the farmers’ market that day. He was there with his parents, and his little sister Emily, aged two. Their father pushed Emily in the stroller; their mother held Jackson’s hand, as they wandered from table to table.

Jackson was in the second grade. His bowl-cut hair was straight and fine, so blond it was almost white. His eyes were round and blue. There was a gap between his two front teeth; his parents assumed the gap would disappear as he grew up, but in fact it never did. He played Little League and collected rocks. He had a special bond with the family cat, Scottie—a fat lazy tom who purred and slobbered when you picked him up.

Jackson waited patiently while his mother talked to Miss Amelia, who loved to talk about her candles.

Then he saw it: the box.

The box was sitting on the asphalt, just to the left of Miss Amelia’s folding table.

Jackson couldn’t remember ever seeing a box like this before. He broke away from his mother’s grasp, and, wiping his palm on his jeans, he went over to inspect the box.

It was about the size of a shoebox. It was matte charcoal in hue, a name-evading shade that hovered indistinctly between black and gray. Jackson squatted in front of the box. He poked it, then laid his palm flat on top. Nothing happened, although his fingers left faintly visible prints of moisture. These quickly evaporated.

He picked it up. It was heavy, but not unexpectedly so.

“Mom, look what I found,” he said, and hoisted the box onto Miss Amelia’s table.

What happened next is hard to describe. Except that, in the instant it was happening, it felt like the most natural thing imaginable.

The table, along with all the candles and herbs carefully arranged upon it, simply disappeared. It didn’t fade. It didn’t crumble. It just popped out of existence. Where there had been a table, there was now something else, and that something else was air.

When the table disappeared, the box sat on the ground. It didn’t fall to the ground. There was no slam, no thud, no clunk. The box sat on the ground as if it had been sitting there all along.

Jackson’s mother screamed. Jackson’s father rushed over, still pushing Emily, who cackled with glee at the bumpy ride.

Miss Amelia gazed in shock at where her table had been. “Well, I never,” she said. She bent over to pick up the box . . .

. . . and turned into a giant celery stalk.

Where there had been Miss Amelia, there was now something else, and that something else was a column of celery, measuring approximately five feet and five inches, its limpid green fronds rustling gently in the breeze.

The box sat beside it.

The Yamamoto’s teenage son, who’d seen the whole thing, rushed over. He joined Jackson and Jackson’s parents, who were staring down at the box. Then, before anyone could stop him, he nudged the box with his foot.

Nothing happened.

He touched it with the tips of his fingers.

Nothing happened.

Mr. Yamamoto ran over, yelling. He grabbed his reckless teenage son by the shoulder and hauled him back toward the safety of their tent, lecturing him in Japanese about the importance of thinking before one acts.

They were almost there when Mr. Yamamoto simply disappeared. His son turned into a toaster.

The box didn’t move.

Mrs. Yamamoto and her mother tottered over to the spot where Mr. Yamamoto and his courageous son had been standing just a moment before. Mrs. Yamamoto began to wail. Her mother shouted warningly at everyone who tried to come near them. The toaster just sat there.

Jackson’s parents backed away a few steps—and then a few steps further. When Jackson finally noticed, he backed away, too.

Jeff Finley came over to see if he could lend a hand. He’d pulled hapless cars out of the mud in his Chevy pickup and he’d helped countless cows through labor. And—though no one knew about this but his wife and his two teenage stepdaughters, certainly not Jackson—he’d even built a survival shelter in his own backyard and stocked it with bottled water, canned tuna, and guns. He was so rightwing he was liberal, and so leftwing he was conservative. Ever since his first wife and only son had died in a car accident eleven years ago, he’d considered himself immune to pain. In short, he assumed he was prepared to deal with any eventuality.

But he’d never imagined anything like the box.

He picked it up, of course; it was impossible to believe that the box had anything to do with the things that were happening at the farmers’ market. In fact, it was impossible to believe those things were happening at all.

The moment he picked it up, he winked out of existence. The box remained on the ground, as it always had.

Jeff appeared a moment later, standing on top of the mall. According to observer measurement, approximately 1.7 seconds had passed since he’d disappeared from the parking lot. But according to Jeff’s measurement, he’d been gone much longer. He’d seen things no human should ever see, perhaps things no human had ever seen. He stumbled over to the edge of the roof.

“Look! On the roof!” someone shouted, from down in the parking lot. Just then, Jeff jumped.

It was not a very big mall. The fall broke his bones, but didn’t kill him—at least not right away.

Meanwhile, pandemonium ruled the parking lot. Shoppers rushed around, screaming and crying. A Mennonite girl sprinted toward the sidewalk, white tennis shoes flashing beneath her dress. A loose dog ran among the cars, barking frantically, trailing a useless leash. Vendors leaped into their cars and sped away, leaving behind their tables and tents without a second thought. Already, a major car accident had jammed the nearest intersection. Something, somewhere, was on fire; smoke billowed toward the sky. The intertwined wail of sirens rose and fell in the distance, and a fire truck’s horn blared like an oncoming train.

Jackson picked up the box and cradled it close to his chest. His father comforted his mother, and his mother comforted Emily, who’d begun to cry.

They didn’t run to the car. They walked. Jackson’s father, holding the stroller. Jackson’s mother, holding Emily. Jackson, walking five paces behind them, holding the box.

They climbed into their station wagon, exercising the utmost calm. Jackson’s father navigated carefully through the chaos of the parking lot, then out into the traffic jam of the street. Jackson’s mother sat beside him, reciting a nursery rhyme that Emily loved. Her breath was jagged, but her voice was soft.

In the backseat, Emily sat in her car seat and cried. Jackson sat next to her, the box on his lap. He wore his seatbelt, even though no one had reminded him. He watched out the window as telephone poles and brick buildings and gas stations flew by.

By the time they had returned home and pulled into their driveway, Jackson’s mother had stopped saying the nursery rhyme, and Emily had stopped crying.

As they got out of the car, Jackson realized something.

Neither of his parents had touched the box. And neither of his parents had touched him.

He walked carefully up the stairs, still holding the box, and placed it gently beneath the bed.

They came for the box the next day, as Jackson assumed they would. (He’d seen movies, after all.) A procession of unmarked black SUVs squealed into the cul-de-sac and screeched to a halt outside Jackson’s house. Before the vehicles even stopped, soldiers in black body armor piled out. They’d been briefed to expect the worst.

Jackson’s mother and father opened the door for the soldiers, so they wouldn’t have to kick it down. They stood aside as the soldiers rushed up the stairs.

Jackson stood open-mouthed in the middle of his bedroom, as the shouting soldiers piled in. He pointed silently: underneath the bed.

The first soldier got on his knees and reached underneath. He turned into a bobby pin the size of a trumpet. The second soldier followed his lead. He turned into a yellow toy pickup truck. The third soldier disappeared. The fourth dissolved into a puddle of gray goo. The fifth also disappeared. The sixth became a tuna sandwich.

The seventh fished out the box.

He stood, transfixed, holding the box at arm’s length. His mask obscured his face, making it hard to be sure, but he seemed shocked.

Jackson sat on the bed and crossed his arms.

The seventh soldier handed the box to an eighth soldier, who promptly exploded: a fountain of blood, guts, and brain matter, misting across the room like hairspray. The seventh soldier let out a strangled scream, and picked up the box again. He carried the box down the stairs, flanked by the soldiers who’d survived.

After they left, the house was deadly quiet. In fact, the entire neighborhood fell into a soundless stupor, a stillness it hadn’t known in years.

Jackson sat alone in his room and played with the yellow truck, pushing it across the rug. A few hours passed. He curled up on the bed and fell into a dreamless sleep until he woke to the sounds of his family eating dinner downstairs without him.

He took a bite of the tuna sandwich, but it tasted bland, and the crust was stale.

He missed the box.

The black SUVs returned a week later. This time, they were coming for Jackson.

They brought a man with them. The man was reedy and balding; he wore a pink collared shirt and a turquoise striped tie. He looked like a math teacher, but he was actually a psychologist. His job was to explain things to Jackson’s parents.

In soothing tones, he clarified that this was nothing less than a matter of national security. The box was incredibly powerful, with untold applications. The box could wipe out entire foreign armies, but it was impossible to control. And so far, Jackson was the only one who’d been able to reliably interact with the box without suffering any ill effects.

The phenomenon was astonishing and inexplicable, but their scientists would get to the bottom of it. In a way, it was for Jackson’s own good.

Of course, if Jackson’s parents weren’t amenable to reason, there was always the army.

Jackson’s mother cried hysterically, clawing her face and dragging her fingers through her hair. But Jackson’s father appeared surprisingly stoic. He said, “That’s just the way it is. That’s just the way it has to be.” He said it again and again.

The man who looked like a math teacher climbed the stairs to collect Jackson, followed by the soldiers in body armor. Jackson’s father restrained Jackson’s mother. He held onto her even when Jackson emerged at the bottom of the stairs, escorted by his entourage. Jackson’s mother fought Jackson’s father, biting him and scratching him, calling him awful names that Jackson had never heard before, not even on television.

Jackson stood awkwardly to the side, next to the man who looked like a math teacher, flanked by the soldiers in body armor.

His mother broke away from his father’s grasp, and dashed over to Jackson.

“No!” his father shouted.

So Jackson knew for sure what he’d suspected ever since the day in the station wagon.

His mother threw her arms around him, touched his face, mussed his hair, kissed his forehead, and rubbed her snotty tears all over his neck. “I’m sorry for being such a terrible mommy,” she hiccupped.

The soldiers yanked her away, and the man who looked like a math teacher pulled Jackson through the house, toward the front door.

Jackson looked over his shoulder all the way to the car. They stuffed him into a black SUV that looked like all the others. As they pulled away from the curb, his mother stood in the front yard, sobbing. Other than the hysterical crying, she seemed fine.

Later that week, the man who looked like a math teacher was transformed into a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

They took Jackson to a strange place full of cramped rooms with stainless steel tables and glaring white walls. They tried to run tests on the box, but it was dangerous, so they ran tests on Jackson instead. They pricked his finger. They took samples from his skin and hair and stools. They gave him shots, with long glistening needles thin as thread, liquid glistening at their tips. They strapped him down so he couldn’t move, and put him inside an MRI machine for hours at a time. It was terrible inside the machine; he closed his eyes and imagined that he was inside a spaceship instead, on his way to a distant star. They gave him new shots and did it again. They attached electrodes to his skull; they wrote down number after number. No one talked to him except the psychologist. (Not the same one who’d become a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.) The psychologist interrogated him for hours, trying to make him recount everything he could remember since birth.

They watched Jackson from the other side of mirrored glass and made him touch the box.

He lost weight. He couldn’t sleep. His head hurt all the time. Sometimes at night, he would lay awake and cry. He hated this place so much, and he missed his old house, where the stairs creaked in just the right places, the closets were cozy and smelled like cedar, and the wall-mounted gas heater provided the perfect place to curl up in the winter, especially in the mornings before school, especially while eating cereal. Most of all, Jackson missed his mother. He missed his father. He missed Emily. He missed Scottie, especially the way he used to jump in bed with Jackson and purr like an engine while he licked his paws, making sure to get in between the toes.

He knew the researchers were watching him all the time. He’d seen movies, after all. But no one ever came when he cried.

All he had was the box.

He told the box about Emily, who he’d hated at first because she was a baby and everyone loved her more, but whom he now loved with all his heart. He was her older brother, and she depended on him. That’s what their parents said, anyways. He told the box about his rock collection, which already embarrassed him; he was ready to move on to a more exciting collection, like beetles or bottle caps.

The box never said anything, of course. Jackson didn’t expect it to. But talking to it still made him feel better.

In a way, he began to feel like he understood it.

He made the mistake of saying this to the latest psychologist. (They were on iteration number four by this time.) She pounced like a hawk. “What do you mean? When you say you understand the box, are you saying you feel like you might be able to explain it? Unlock it? What exactly have you come to understand about the box?”

She brought in others. They crowded around Jackson, in front of the mirror that he knew was actually a window. There were more psychologists on the other side, taking notes. They questioned him every day for weeks. Jackson was older now, but he still couldn’t find the words for what he wanted to say. He didn’t understand what the box did, or how it did it, or why. He didn’t know how to control it, or how to make it stop. He didn’t even know how to open it; as far as he could tell, it was perfectly seamless.

It was more like he understood how the box felt.

They kept Jackson in that place for five years. Then they let him go.

But they kept the box.

During his years at the research facility, Jackson had changed. He’d gotten taller, and his hair had grown darker, and he was becoming strong. But he still had that gap between his two front teeth.

His family had changed, too. His mother’s strawberry blonde hair had gone white. His father had gone gray. His parents rarely spoke to each other, or anyone else. They spent long minutes staring into space. They fought strange fights, like chess games played by mail; move and countermove took hours. The house would be filled with silent tension, while one of them worked up the energy to make a cruel remark. Sometime later, the other would rouse themselves and angrily respond. Their arguments took days.

Jackson’s sister Emily was seven now, and as pretty as an angel. She talked constantly and laughed at everything. She didn’t seem to notice their parents’ fights. The made-up Emily that Jackson kept in his head while he was at the facility turned into the actual Emily, and he loved her even more than he’d loved the pretend one. She’d forgotten Jackson while he was away, but now she was crazy about him. She followed him everywhere, up the stairs, down the stairs, into the kitchen, out to the backyard, chattering the whole time. She demanded he carry his bowl of cereal out to the bus stop with her in the morning, and wait with her until the school bus came; he waved with his right hand and held his Wheaties with his left, until the bus disappeared around the corner. Every night, Emily made him sit next to her bed until she fell asleep.

Scottie was old now, but he hadn’t changed much, except that he was fatter than ever.

Jackson didn’t go to school. He was too far behind. He asked his parents once if he should try to catch up; they just shrugged. So he stayed at home all day, left to his own devices.

He decided to build a tree house for Emily in the backyard. He made his mother drive him to Home Depot and help him buy the lumber. He asked his father if he could use power tools; his father said, “Maybe.” That was good enough. He got to work sawing, sanding and hammering; Emily helped in the afternoons, and no one stopped them. The tree house went up in a week. After that, Jackson lay in the tree house all day, reading dusty novels and waiting for Emily to get home from school.

One day, the box showed up instead.

Jackson was stretched out on the knotty pine floor of the tree house, surrounded by old pillows and scratchy blankets, when he felt: something. A tickle, a shadow, a foreboding.

It was the box. It sat there as if it had sat there all along.

Jackson sat up, folded his knees beneath his interlocked arms, and waited for something to happen.

Nothing did.

“Hello,” he said experimentally, remembering all those conversations they’d had—he and the box—back when he was in that room surrounded by mirrored glass. Until this moment, those awful years had seemed like a bad dream.

The box didn’t answer, as it never had.

Jackson tucked the box beneath the crook of his left arm and climbed down the ladder. He let himself in the back door without making a sound, and walked past his mother, who was sitting at the table staring into a cold cup of coffee. He tiptoed up the stairs and tucked the box beneath his bed. Then he went back outside, walking past his mother for the second time. She never looked up.

Back in the tree house, he sat cross-legged and waited patiently for the groan and fart of Emily’s school bus.

The soldiers came for the box, as he’d expected they would. They took it away, and he sighed as he watched them go, not knowing if the feeling in his chest was relief or dread. His parents never even asked why the special forces were back. But Emily did.

He told her it was too complicated to explain.

“Mom and Dad told everyone that you were dead,” she said.

“Maybe I was.”

“I don’t like that,” she said. “Don’t say it.”

“Okay.”

The box returned. This time it popped into being on his dresser. The soldiers came and retrieved it, but the box returned again. This time it appeared on top of the refrigerator. Jackson’s mother had a panic attack, and had to be sedated; his father dialed a phone number, and the soldiers came, but the box returned yet again. This time it materialized on the breakfast table. Emily was sitting there, eating Nutella on toast. She laughed.

“Don’t ever touch that box,” Jackson told her. He took both her hands into his own, and gazed into her blue eyes with all the force he could muster. “Do you understand? Never touch the box.”

“Jeez, I know,” she said. “I’m not going to touch the box.”

Then the soldiers came, but the box kept coming. One time it arrived in the bottom of Jackson’s closet. He didn’t even know it was there until the black SUVs arrived and the soldiers rushed up the stairs, the robots bumbling slowly behind them. (By this time, they’d developed a mechanized transportation strategy, to minimize carnage.)

One day, Jackson noticed that every other house on their block was empty. The roofs were caving in, the windows were broken, the doors were boarded up, and the grass was knee high. He didn’t know if the people who lived in those houses had died, or if they’d all just moved away. It was no longer a very desirable neighborhood.

Later, he looked more closely and realized that two of the houses across the street had become the skeletons of dead dinosaurs. A third was made out of gingerbread. A fourth hovered two feet above the ground. A fifth was only there on Wednesdays.

One night, Emily came to Jackson’s room. She was nine now, and she wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore. In fact, she wasn’t afraid of anything. But tonight, she seemed worried.

Jackson lay under the comforter, reading a novel. Emily sat on the bed, her back to the wall, and stretched her long skinny legs across the blanket, draping them over Jackson’s legs so he couldn’t move.

The box sat on top of his dresser; it sat there all the time now. They’d given up on coming back for it. Or maybe there was no one left to come back.

“Jackson?” Emily said. She was picking her cuticles.

“Yes.”

“Will you always protect me from your box?”

“It’s not my box,” he said. But he glanced guiltily toward it.

“Then why does it always come back to you?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t belong to me. It just found me.”

“Then it’s yours.”

“No. More like I’m its.”

“But you can keep me safe.”

“Of course I can,” he said.

“And what about everyone else?”

“What about them?”

“Why didn’t you keep them safe, too?”

“Because I don’t have that power.”

“So what powers do you have?”

Jackson gazed at Emily, wondering if he could ever know what she really felt about him. Was he a failed superhero, or a sympathetic villain? Maybe it didn’t matter. “I don’t know my powers yet, Emily,” he said. “But I will always keep you safe. I promise.”

“Okay,” she said. She stopped chewing her bottom lip. She fell asleep on the floor next to his bed. Her white-blonde hair was turning brown, like his.

The next week, Scottie disappeared. No one saw him go.

Maybe he dematerialized. Maybe he ran away. Maybe he just crawled under the shed and died of old age.

Emily cried and cried, but Jackson was the saddest; he didn’t tell Emily that Scottie had always loved him more, even though it was true.

The next week, part of their mother disappeared.

The other part remained at the kitchen table, where she’d been sitting for weeks now. This part was translucent and two-dimensional, and shimmered into nothing when Jackson and Emily tried to talk to her. Sometimes she looked almost solid, but she no longer spoke.

“I’m sorry,” Jackson told the ghost that was part of his mother. “This is all my fault. I should never have touched that box.”

For a moment, he thought she was looking at him, but then she blinked and flickered into nothingness. He waited for a while, but she didn’t come back.

After that, Jackson and Emily began spending all their time in the tree house. It felt safer there. They talked about everything; both felt old beyond their years.

“Time doesn’t really exist,” Jackson said. “I figured this out when I was in the place. They said I was there for five years, but I know it wasn’t five years. It might have been a month, and it might have been twenty years, but I know it wasn’t five.”

“But I was five years older when you came back.”

“That stuff is just on the outside.”

Another time, Emily asked him: “What do you think everything is actually made out of?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, none of this is real, right? It’s made out of something else, like Legos, or a dream.”

“I guess it could be real.” It didn’t seem likely.

Some time after that, they heard their father screaming. They peeked out the door of the tree house. Their father was standing in the backyard, and he was howling. His voice proclaimed a level of anguish that most people never feel in their lives. His noiseless syllables spoke of mental agony deeper than he’d ever imagined possible. Finally unconstrained, he released the pain in its raging totality.

One of his arms was missing. Blood spurted from the empty socket. It shot out pressurized, like water from a fire hose. He ran in frenzied circles, spraying the backyard with blood. He kept on screaming. Then his other arm disappeared. Then a leg. He hopped around the backyard on his one remaining limb, blood spewing from three orifices, still screaming. Then his head disappeared. A moment later, the rest followed.

Some time after that, the house went away too.

The box went with it. But it showed up in the tree house two days later.

It was crowded in the tree house, especially because Emily took care not to get too close to the box. But at least they had a place.

Emily didn’t go to school anymore. The school had become something else.

Mostly they just sat in the tree house and talked.

“Remember when you asked me what everything is made of?” Jackson said.

“Yeah. Did you figure it out?”

“I think so. Everything is everything. Like, everything is made out of everything else. So it doesn’t matter what things are. Because they’re all the same thing.”

“So the things that disappeared are still here, really?”

“Yeah. They just became part of something else.” Jackson knew that when she said “things,” she didn’t really mean “things.”

The neighborhood had changed. Everything in it had turned into something else. But there was a store two miles away that still worked. It was a long walk, but it was too dangerous to drive: The streets were full of strange creatures and oversized objects and vast crevices where things had disappeared. And the car could always turn into something else, too. A lot of cars had.

So Jackson set out for supplies on foot, carrying a backpack. No one used money anymore; it was too weird. They just asked for things. Sometimes they appeared. Sometimes they didn’t.

This time, they did. Jackson filled the backpack with chips and cheese and candy bars, and hiked back home. Lately he’d been feeling these overwhelming waves of déjà vu. He felt it now. Which was odd, because he was sure he had never encountered a three-legged bear that hopped down the street like a frog, or a box fan the size of a house.

As he climbed the ladder to the tree house, he called out: “Hello? I’m back. Emily? I’m back.”

But there was no one in the tree house. Except the box, of course.

Then he noticed the doll. It lay on the stack of ratty blankets that Jackson and Emily had made into a makeshift bed. He picked up the doll. He’d never seen it before.

The doll had blue eyes and light brown hair. It looked like Emily.

Jackson flung the doll out of the tree house. It landed in the backyard with a thud. He climbed down after it and kicked it across the yard. He ran around in crazed circles, crying in agony the way his father had done once before.

“I told you not to touch the box!” he screamed. “I told you not to touch it! You promised!”

He threw his face to the sky and howled. He beat the trunk of the tree that held the tree house until his knuckles bled. He screamed all the curse words he could remember, the way his mother had done when they first took him away.

But he knew he was being unfair. Maybe Emily hadn’t touched the box. Maybe touching the box didn’t really matter; lots of things in the world had never touched the box, and the box didn’t seem to care.

Maybe she’d just run away.

He waited in the tree house for a long time. It might have been a month. It might have been five years. It might have been twenty.

But Emily never came back.

There wasn’t anyone else anymore. And time seemed to be turning itself inside out.

He antagonized the box, trying to make something happen. He kicked it. He hit it. He dropped it. He slammed it against concrete. He rested his palm flat against the top and meditated for what felt like hours.

Nothing happened.

Nothing at all.

Then one day the tree house became the MRI machine. Jackson was lying inside it. He was tied down, and he couldn’t move.

He closed his eyes as tightly as he could, counted to ten, and opened them again. Still here.

Had he been in the machine the whole time?

They pulled him out.

But they weren’t the same they. They’d transcended themselves. And so had he, he discovered as he looked down at what was now himself.

They were un-things in un-time. They existed on the razor sharp edge of the present, which is just as difficult as it sounds. But it wasn’t like that, either, really.

They released him. They hovered around him, trapped in the mirrored glass. The panel of psychologists all over again, as if like they’d always been.

“We must admit, we’re confused,” they said.

“You’re confused?” (Was Jackson speaking? He was, but it wasn’t like that either, really.)

“Why didn’t your world like our gift?”

“Because it killed everyone?”

“That’s not our fault. We put the secrets to the universe in that thing. It was all in there! Everything any advanced civilization has ever wanted to know. Time travel. Teleportation. Immortality. Alchemy. ESP. This was the greatest gift of all time! You always talk about wanting to meet that guy, God? Well, here we are. And you don’t just get to meet us. You could be us. All you had to do was reverse-engineer one little box.”

“Why couldn’t you just tell us about what was in the box? You know, like, explain it to us in words?”

“We can’t use words,” they said, glaring at him with pity and scorn.

“You’re using them right now.”

“Not in the least,” they said, and he saw that they were right. Whatever words they’d used were the ones he’d given them to tell a story he already knew.

“The box was so simple it transcended language. The box was as elegant as we could possibly make it. The box—well, the box was perfect.”

“You ruined my life,” Jackson said. “And the entire world. But I guess I don’t take that quite as personally.”

They talked amongst their un-selves in their not-words.

“We’re going to try again,” they said. “That last time really must have been a fluke. We mean, come on! It was just one little box. Someone on your planet has to be able to figure it out. Or maybe we just need to test it further.”

“Please, whatever you do, do not test it further.”

“We’ll get it right! We mean, you’ll get it right.”

“Am I dreaming?” he asked. He’d begun to think he was.

“Of course,” they said. And they gave him a shot, strapped him down, and put him back into the machine.

He closed his eyes and dreamed he was a box. A box about the size of a shoebox, with a matte charcoal hue that hovered indistinctly between black and gray; perfectly seamless despite the fact that it contained multitudes.

A tow-headed little boy peered down at him.

It was a crystalline morning in early June, and the sky was wide as a saucer.

© 2013 Desirina Boskovich.

Desirina Boskovich has published fiction in Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy Magazine, and Clarkesworld, and in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard and Last Drink Bird Head. She is an ’07 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop. Find her online at desirinaboskovich.com.

A Love Supreme
Kathleen Ann Goonan

Ellie Santos-Smith grabs a clean white coat as spring dawn brightens her worn Oriental rug and streaks with sun her only luxury, a grand piano.

She runs a comb through her jet-black hair, cut short because she thinks that makes her look older. Her smooth skin glows with 20-ish health, though she is 47.

Patients distrust young doctors. Nanomed infusions keep her body young, her mind sharp, and mitigate her crippling agoraphobia. She has worked hard to be able to live in a minuscule apartment in The Enclave, a safe, low-population-density bubble in Washington, D.C. In this small, pure paradise, the incredibly rich claim more cubic feet than most people in the world can dream of, dine on rare organic food, and ingest the most finely tuned infusions.

She hates herself for needing this. But she does. If she is to help anyone, if she is to put her hard-won training to use, she does. She can walk to the Longevity Center for her frequent infusions and, after that, to her job as an emergency physician at Capital Hospital without being trapped in a car, a subway, a plane.

Her phone rings. “Dad?” His voice gravelly, odd. Not that she’s heard from him in a long time.

“Hi, hon.”

She thinks blue for a moment. His eyes, tear-shimmered blue beneath a thatch of sun-whitened hair, all those years ago. He had been abruptly summoned from his marine biology kingdom the day her mother was murdered, as Ellie watched, during the First East Coast Riot. He’d fled back to his undersea haven soon afterwards, leaving her to Grandma and boarding schools.

“Can we talk later? My infusion is overdue; then I’m working emergency till seven,” she says. She imagines him in the teak cabin of his Key West-anchored sloop, stubbornly aging.

“Never mind.” He hangs up.

Same old game. She should be used to his gruff elusiveness, but it always hurts. Her father, a celebrated marine biologist with a worm named after him, quit academia once she got her college scholarships and spent decades painting bizarre ocean creatures, gaining a small international following.

Downstairs, the doorman smiles. She steps out into her safe haven, a few tree-lined blocks of historic mansions, townhomes, restaurants, and shops bounded on one side by Connecticut Avenue and patrolled by security professionals (thugs, to her mind) for which she pays a hefty neighborhood fee. They keep out the homeless, the hungry, the desperate, and the different. Once outside this discreet, invisible boundary she will have to pass through a few blocks she calls The Gauntlet, which throbs with the dense crowds that now fill most of the cities on Earth, before reaching the hospital where she works. Only her nanomed infusions keep panic at bay.

In front of her, a lone bicyclist splashes through puddles, and nearby Don Stapleton descends the broad stairs of Forever, a 1900-vintage condominium mansion of 30 wealthy centenarians, some of whom worked hard to establish The Enclave. He waves. “Doc! Lovely morning!”

Trapped. She could swear he hacks her schedule. White dreads halo his dark, handsome face. “Coffee on the veranda?” She glances over at the broad Victorian porch, with wicker chairs, hanging ferns, and eight limber residents sun-saluting as Ella Fitzgerald sings.

Six hundred million centenarians—C’s—the last recipients of Social Security. It is the lifeline of most C’s but only slightly augments the wealth the people in Forever acquired during successful professional lives.

“Thanks, but I’m late.”

“I’ll walk with you. We have a new offer.”

Her throat constricts. “Sorry, but no.” The work, she knows, would be a nightmare. Perpetually on call for a household of detail-oriented hypochondriacs; crushed by constant, whimsical, impossible demands. She walks faster toward her job in the Hospital Center, where her patients are poor and in desperate need of her skills. They are the people to whom she has devoted her training and her life.

Don persists. “You got Mrs. Diyubski an emergency infusion. Cut through red tape, saved her life—”

“I’m not a boutique M.D.”

“You are a nanomedicine expert. Fewer patients might be less stressful for you. That could be a great change, given your phobia.”

Nosy bastard. He smiles. “Public information. I’m sending the offer.” The ping in her ear registers its reception, and Don falls behind.

In a few blocks she is at Dupont Circle. The implanted microchip that gives her access to The Enclave now signals with a low beep that she is unprotected. She takes a deep breath. Masses of children, teenagers, everyone young. Shanties, ever-milling crowds, food lines, rank odors, and a constant assault of raised voices, ugly music, honking horns.

The phone. Her father, calling back. “We need to talk. I’m dying.”

A break in her stride. “Where are you?”

“Hospice at Sunnyland. Hepatocellular carcinoma.” The words roll off his educated tongue.

“When were you diagnosed?”

“Three months ago.”

She rages. “Why didn’t you call? It’s not too late. Regeneration infusions—” Her brain teems with nanomed therapies. Most out of his financial reach, since he has stubbornly avoided anything other than mandatory insurance, and his age—85—precludes expensive life-extending measures.

“I’m ready to go, Ellie. They give me two, three days. I just want you, now.”

I wanted you then. All those years. You were gone. You didn’t love me. “I need to talk to your doctor.”

That gravelly laugh. “You’re kidding, right? I was diagnosed by a nurse-practitioner after an ambulance ride foisted on me by a well-meaning neighbor. I’m in the benevolent hands of the state. Deprived of a death at sea. No docs at Sunnyland.”

No surprise, that. “I can’t jump on a plane.”

“It’s okay. I reap what I’ve sowed.”

Her urge to get to him, to see him, brings her to sudden tears, surprising her. But she’d been taken off a plane in a straitjacket when she was 12. Even first class didn’t help.

“You don’t understand. It’s not that.” It’s not our past, our hopeless inability to communicate.

“Hon, you may not think so.” He hangs up again.

She’s always urged her father to live with her. “In that bubble? No thanks.” A relief, and they both know it. She can’t live with people. Her short marriage hammered that home. Her only close companions are dead musicians and her piano, which she plays long into the night.

Ellie surfaces from their conversation angry, without her insulating defenses, to endless oncoming faces, roaring buses, choking exhaust. She’s powerless. He’s stubborn, and she’s let his stubbornness kill him. You can control everything else in your life, but you can’t control your father.

Damned if she can’t.

She recalls recent nanomed updates and rearranges these components in the work of art that is her own mind. Heart pounding, she makes it to the door of the Infusion Center, passing the block-long line of those hoping for an insurance reprieve, shows her card, and slips inside.

The receptionist is new. Ellie takes a deep breath and rolls the dice. It’s not like her, but she has no choice. “Add 17 and 43.”

“That’s not allowed.”

“I’m Code R-1.” Ellie hates exposing herself to pity. Her expensive infusions are government compensation to victims of the deadliest riot in U.S. history—the riot in which Ellie’s mother died, the riot that began a decade of turmoil around the time the world’s population passed eight billion.

Few people, not even professionals like Ellie, can afford what she gets: life extension, nanomed components updated in real time. Nanomeds could be manufactured cheaply. Prices are kept high. The official explanation is the cost of R&D and the experimental nature of nanomeds. The real truth is overpopulation and a fear of more C’s.

She lies on a gurney in the infusion room. Designer nanomeds maintain her phenomenal memory—a double-edged sword, for those memories trigger panic. After Ellie witnessed her mother’s murder, her psychiatrist pressured her father to allow therapeutic memory mediation—erasure. Her father refused, wanting Ellie to have that choice when she was older. For that she is thankful. Those memories make living in her bubble imperative, but they are her. Her infusions are a balancing act, holding the possibility of neuronal damage, but she has the authority to design her own cocktail.

Adding 17 and 43 will radically change the balance, removing her fear. She will probably be able to leave her bubble, get on the plane. She is not sure what other changes might occur. Her carefully constructed life could fall apart.

“Doc, you know you can’t do this.” John, her regular nurse.

“You know I can.”

“It’s dangerous. This isn’t like you. The latest bulletin—”

“I know. Paradoxical effects from these latest upgrades. I have to fly tonight.”

John sighs. “You want to listen to jazz during the infusion?”

“Of course.” Slight sting of needle. She closes her eyes, and memories assail her.

Lavender dusk limned by a horizon of bare brown trees. Stopped on the Beltway. Ten lanes of static oncoming lights, the usual soothing interlude between kindergarten and supper. Ellie strapped in her seat, killing 3-D aliens, Mom up front chanting “A Love Supreme” with John Coltrane, head bobbing, still in her white coat after a day in the hospital. Then she gasps.

Striding down an exit ramp: An army of people flows among the cars. Ragged clothes, muffled chants. A bat, smashed windows, her mother sprawled over the seat screaming, “Don’t hurt my niña!”

Blood spatters her mother’s white coat and Ellie’s video screen.

Years later, driving while in medical school: A flood of oncoming lights. The world under construction, always—cranes, barrels, trucks of supplies to accommodate people, who keep appearing, appearing, filling every space in great towers and on vast artificial islands. Ellie wants to help, like Mother. Driving through fear will make her strong. Finally, strength fails. She flips; can’t function. The usual infusions are ineffective. City centers needing her expertise have become unlivable.

In D.C., after a long, difficult search, she finds her oasis. The price? She can’t ever leave.

“Doc?” She opens her eyes and wonders—when did I stop being able to live? She sits up. “I shouldn’t be jittery right after an infusion”

“You knew you were taking a risk. I’ll take a blood sample.”

“No time. And John?”

“Doc?”

“Don’t use Coltrane again.”

“I didn’t.”

There is no way she can avoid her shift in the emergency room; there is no one to take her place. She leaves the Infusion Center and makes a plane reservation for a flight after her shift while striding New Hampshire Avenue. Only a block to the hospital, and now post-infusion, throngs effuse love, do not seethe with malicious intent, do not lie in wait to make deadly, unexpected moves.

She arrives at the hospital and is relaxed, surprised to be breathing easy as she is scanned in and checked for weapons. She pushes her arms into her white coat and grabs a chart. It is paradoxically frightening to feel so utterly good in this whirring hellhole, where daily she strives, with heartbreakingly limited success, to deprive death of its staggering bounty.

She slips inside a curtained space. “Mr. Billings?” He lies on the exam table, unshaven face bruised, a police officer beside him. “What happened?”

The cop says, “He started a bar fight. Not the first time.”

“Not true.” Billings glares at the cop.

“He never remembers.”

“She broke my arm.”

“That’s a lie.”

Ellie says to the cop, “You’ll have to step outside.”

“He’s dangerous. He just exploded—”

“Out.” She begins her exam. “Your arm?”

“Hurts like hell.”

Ellie shines a flashlight in Billings’s eyes. “Where’d you get this scar on your forehead?”

“Incoming. Ten years ago. Everybody else died.”

“Sit up.” She hammers his knee. “Been treated for PTSD?”

“Borderline. They won’t pay.”

“I’m ordering pain meds and an X-ray of your arm. I’ll be back in a little while.”

Her next patient needs a kidney update. She sits on the table, puffy, staring at her knotted hands. Ellie has become a technician, enjoined from stepping outside finely drawn boundaries. Care is rationed. HMOs have made medicine a corporate algorithm, doing the greatest good for the most people.

Her M.D. gives her the power to override tics in the system. She knows how far she can push the limits and which procedures are too expensive, will tip the balance and get her censured.

The kidney treatment is out of bounds. Ellie hesitates, approves it. “You’ll feel better soon.”

Tears in the patient’s eyes. “I thought—”

“New protocol.”

Boutique doctors practice as they see fit because the rich bypass the corporate algorithm. As she leaves the patient, she can’t help checking Forever’s offer, the one Don Stapleton keeps pushing. Staggeringly huge. She couldn’t possibly provide services worth that. The C’s would devour her. And she would be treating them . . . forever. The same people. Her emergency skills would atrophy. A trap.

But one more override and she might be out on her ass. She knows that her recklessness is because of her infusion. She just needs to make it to the end of her shift. After an hour she gets Billings’s results. “Fractured ulna. This bone,” she tells him, touching it. “I’m ordering a mending infusion.”

“Hear that?” Billings yells. The cop is startled awake.

Ellie asks Billings, “How would you like to stay out of bar fights and feel better?”

“Can’t afford it.”

“I only need your consent. You’ll get neuroplasticity meds and counseling. You have to promise me you’ll go to counseling or it won’t work.”

“You sure, Doc? I mean—”

“I’m sure.”

Billings reminds her of her father—at the mercy of the unfeeling algorithm. He’d had choices, though, more choices than Billings.

She has always avoided thoughts about the tangle of their lives. Except,she thinks, surprising herself, they come out through my fingers. Hours and hours and hours at night. They come out when I improvise, play jazz. They’re not as far away as I think.

Filled with momentary wonder, she draws back the curtain, where the eternal next patient sits. Everything seems so preternaturally sharp, so full of potential for too much thought that she aches for her shift to end.

On the red-eye, Ellie stares out the window of the plane at a solid unending glare of light all the way down the East Coast, imagining all those people, and does not go fetal. She does not scream.

She has not called her father.

As she steps from the cab at Sunnyland, she feels as relaxed as if she had run 10 miles on a treadmill. High-rises surround her, receding grids of light blocking any other view. Twenty thousand elderly live here on 30 acres, a template reproduced nationally. Those living here did not watch their pennies. They cannot catch the wave of technology for a long-term ride.

Ellie will always have a job. The life she worked for is bright and assured, an enviable personal future. A future where she will hide from time, emotion, and change.

Irked at her thoughts, she grabs her bag and enters the lobby of her father’s building. On the hospice floor, visitors nap in chairs, maintaining vigil. Outside her father’s room, a whiff of whiskey as she passes two chatting, weathered men in fishing caps. Inside, strings of colored lights, low revelry, and Coltrane’s sax wailing for the second time in 24 hours, this time no dream. Her fingers flex in a near-unconscious riff. She spots her father in a reclining chair.

His face, frighteningly thin, is lit on one side by a blinking blue light. A faint smile plays across his face; a beer is in his hand. She flies to him: “Dad!”

He blinks, grins. Flash of overwhelmingly blue eyes, and she is once again 5. “Ellie! Come to see the old man off after all, eh?”

“I’m getting you out of here.”

“Good god, Ellie. I’m getting morphine! Don’t mess with it.”

“It’s not funny. Give me a more detailed diagnosis.”

“Certain and welcome death. Internment in the sea. Making room for younger people who are happy to be alive.”

“You can recover.”

Her father says gently, “This is hospice. Four days of rationed grace. They know how to mete it out fine. No needles, no tubes, no machines. I skipped that. I probably got whatever I have long ago when I was torturing rare marine organisms instead of coming home to see you. Fair play.”

“Fair play? I missed you, Dad, of course I did. I needed you. But that has nothing to do with your choosing to die. What have they done so far?”

He shrugs. “Two infusions last month. Standard issue. They didn’t work.”

“You didn’t call.”

He speaks slowly, as if to a child, with equal emphasis on each word. “I just didn’t want to.”

She grasps it all, his terrible stubbornness and hers, and opens her phone.

“What are you doing?”

“Calling an ambulance.”

“Ellie, Ellie. No one will pay for it. And where do you think you’ll take me?”

“An infusion clinic. I’ll pay.”

“Not even you have that much money.”

“I have a new job offer. I’ll take care of you. I’ll sell my apartment—it’s worth a lot. We can live in the centenarian house—beautiful—interesting people. You’ll love it—”

“Don’t tell me what I’ll love.”

She sees a sheen of sweat on his forehead. She is a bit ashamed, but not enough to stop. She shouts, “You’re a foolish old man!”

He smiles. “I hope so.” He waves. “Keep talking, everybody, she’s just my daughter.” Chatter resumes. He says, quietly, “You might think that I don’t know you, Ellie, but I do. Remember that summer you spent with me after college, when you were deciding what to do with your life? Yes, too brief, but I know you like I know myself.” He pauses for a breath. “You have to do what moves you, and what moves you is your job. As it is. Whatever you’re doing, however crazy it looks to me, it works. Don’t sacrifice that job to help me. I don’t want it.

“Second point—don’t interrupt. I’m getting tired. I’ve had a great life. Despite our . . . tragedy. I don’t want to live anywhere but on my boat. If you do anything without my consent, I will never forgive you. I’m serious. And I don’t ever again want the kind of pain I’ve had the past six months.”

“I wouldn’t have let you have that pain!” To her surprise, Ellie begins to cry. “You hid it from me. You didn’t want my help. What has my life been about if I can’t even help my own father? You’d rather die than have my help.” She drops to the bed, covers her face, and sobs.

“Ellie, look at me.”

She wipes her face on her sleeve. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I haven’t seen you cry since your mother died.”

“You haven’t seen me much. Holidays. Birthdays.” She hears the 10-year-old in her voice, her two annual summer weeks at sea with her father ending once again.

“Fair shot.” He pauses. “It’s over. The oceans are polluted beyond repair.”

“You can help restore them! You—”

“This place that seems so awful to you, this is what it’s like everywhere now. Even worse. I’ve been all around the world. I’ve done my part. I’m proud that a worm is named after me.” He draws a deep breath, coughs, looks at her squarely. “I’m proud of you. Your mother would be so proud of you.” Another long pause while she grabs a tissue, blows her nose, wipes her face. “You can do one thing for me.”

“What?”

“Let’s move this party to my boat. I was kidnapped. I don’t want to die here. Order somebody to bring a piano to the dock and you can play me out. I haven’t heard you play in a long, long time. It’s like heaven to me. It always reminds me of the first time I went diving.”

“But—”

“That’s all I want of you. We can’t get back the years I wasted. Do this for me, please.”

She waits for the old anger, the old rage, to bubble up and spew out. Her hand moves toward her phone, then stops.

You know how to improvise.

Instead of the ambulance call, there is a memory, one of many she has hugged to herself all these years, refusing to release it. It’s the new infusion that allows it to surface, she knows, but that does not make it any less valuable.

A winter day at her grandmother’s. The holidays. She is playing the piano. She begins with one learned set piece, Bach.

Then there is a shift. She hears her mother as if she were music, Coltrane, jazz. She threads new notes to Bach, adjusts cadence, moves into new space. Improvises. Loses herself in sound, falling snow, her father, leaning on the piano as tears roll down his face.

She remembers that she played for hours.

She looks directly at him, seeing him as if for the first time: a person separate from herself, from her needs, from her ways of making her own life small and safe.

She nods. “All right, Dad. Let’s go.”

© 2012 by Kathleen Ann Goonan.

Originally published in Discover Magazine.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Kathleen Ann Goonan is the author of seven novels, the most recent being This Shared Dream (Tor, July 2011). In War Times (Tor, 2007) won the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2007; it was also the American Library Association’s Best SF Novel of 2007. Previous novels were finalists for the Nebula, Clarke, and BSFA Awards. Angels and You Dogs, a short story collection, will be published by PS Publishing in 2012. She is working on her eighth novel, Hemingway’s Hurricane, and is a Visiting Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.

Schwartz Between the Galaxies
Robert Silverberg

This much is reality: Schwartz sits comfortably cocooned—passive, suspended—in a first-class passenger rack aboard a Japan Air Lines rocket, nine kilometers above the Coral Sea. And this much is fantasy: the same Schwartz has passage on a shining starship gliding silkily through the interstellar depths, en route at nine times the velocity of light from Betelgeuse IX to Rigel XXI, or maybe from Andromeda to the Lesser Magellanic.

There are no starships. Probably there never will be any. Here we are, a dozen decades after the flight of Apollo 11, and no human being goes anywhere except back and forth across the face of the little O, the Earth, for the planets are barren and the stars are beyond reach. That little O is too small for Schwartz. Too often it glazes for him; it turns to a nugget of dead porcelain; and lately he has formed the habit, when the world glazes, of taking refuge aboard that interstellar ship. So what JAL Flight 411 holds is merely his physical self, his shell, occupying a costly private cubicle on a slender 200-passenger vessel which, leaving Buenos Aires shortly after breakfast, has sliced westward along the Tropic of Capricorn for a couple of hours and will soon be landing at Papua’s Torres Skyport. But his consciousness, his anima,the essential Schwartzness of him, soars between the galaxies.

What a starship it is! How marvelous its myriad passengers! Down its crowded corridors swarms a vast gaudy heterogeny of galactic creatures, natives of the worlds of Capella, Arcturus, Altair, Canopus, Polaris, Antares, beings both intelligent and articulate, methane-breathing or nitrogen-breathing or argon-breathing, spiny-skinned or skinless, many-armed or many-headed or altogether incorporeal, each a product of a distinct and distinctly unique and alien cultural heritage. Among these varied folk moves Schwartz, that superstar of anthropologists, that true heir to Kroeber and Morgan and Malinowski and Mead, delightedly devouring their delicious diversity. Whereas aboard this prosaic rocket, this planet-locked stratosphere needle, one cannot tell the Canadians from the Portuguese, the Portuguese from the Romanians, the Romanians from the Irish, unless they open their mouths, and sometimes not always then.

In his reveries he confers with creatures from the Fomalhaut system about digital circumcision; he tapes the melodies of the Achernarnian eye-flute; he learns of the sneeze-magic of Acrux, the sleep-ecstasies of Aldebaran, the asteroid-sculptors of Thuban. Then a smiling JAL stewardess parts the curtain of his cubicle and peers in at him, jolting him from one reality to another. She is blue-eyed, frizzy-haired, straight-nosed, thin-lipped, bronze-skinned, a genetic mishmash, your standard twenty-first-century-model mongrel human, perhaps Melanesian-Swedish-Turkish-Bolivian, perhaps Polish-Berber-Tatar-Welsh. Cheap intercontinental transit has done its deadly work: All Earth is a crucible, all the gene pools have melted into one indistinguishable fluid. Schwartz wonders about the recessivity of those blue eyes and arrives at no satisfactory solution. She is beautiful, at any rate. Her name is Dawn—O sweet neutral nonculture-bound cognomen!—and they have played at a flirtation, he and she, Dawn and Schwartz, at occasional moments of this short flight. Twinkling, she says softly, “We’re getting ready for our landing, Dr. Schwartz. Are your restrictors in polarity?”

“I never unfastened them.”

“Good.” The blue eyes, warm, interested, meet his. “I have a layover in Papua tonight,” she says.

“That’s nice.”

“Let’s have a drink while we’re waiting for them to unload the baggage,” she suggests with cheerful bluntness. “All right?”

“I suppose,” he says casually. “Why not?” Her availability bores him: Somehow, he enjoys the obsolete pleasures of the chase. Once, such easiness in a woman like this would have excited him, but no longer. Schwartz is forty years old, tall, square-shouldered, sturdy, a showcase for the peasant genes of his rugged Irish mother. His close-cropped black hair is flecked with gray; many women find that interesting. One rarely sees gray hair now. He dresses simply but well, in sandals and Socratic tunic. Predictably, his physical attractiveness, both within his domestic sixness and without, has increased with his professional success. He is confident, sure of his powers, and he radiates an infectious assurance. This month alone, eighty million people have heard his lectures.

She picks up the faint weariness in his voice. “You don’t sound eager. Not interested?”

“Hardly that.”

“What’s wrong, then? Feeling sub, Professor?”

Schwartz shrugs. “Dreadfully sub. Body like dry bone. Mind like dead ashes.” He smiles, full force depriving his words of all their weight.

She registers mock anguish. “That sounds bad,” she says. “That sounds awful!”

“I’m only quoting Chuang Tzu. Pay no attention to me. Actually, I feel fine, just a little stale.”

“Too many skyports?”

He nods. “Too much of a sameness wherever I go.” He thinks of a star-bright, top-deck bubble dome where three boneless Spicans do a twining dance of propitiation to while away the slow hours of nine-light travel. “I’ll be all right,” he tells her. “It’s a date.”

Her hybrid face flows with relief and anticipation. “See you in Papua,” she tells him, and winks, and moves jauntily down the aisle.

Papua. By cocktail time Schwartz will be in Port Moresby. Tonight he lectures at the University of Papua; yesterday it was Montevideo; the day after tomorrow it will be Bangkok. He is making the grand academic circuit. This is his year: He is very big, suddenly, in anthropological circles, since the publication of The Mask Beneath the Skin. From continent to continent he flashes, sharing his wisdom, Monday in Montreal, Tuesday Veracruz, Wednesday Montevideo, Thursday—Thursday? He crossed the international date line this morning, and he does not remember whether he has entered Thursday or Tuesday, though yesterday was surely Wednesday. Schwartz is certain only that this is July and the year is 2083, and there are moments when he is not even sure of that.

The JAL rocket enters the final phase of its landward plunge. Papua waits, sleek, vitrescent. The world has a glassy sheen again. He lets his spirit drift happily back to the gleaming starship making its swift way across the whirling constellations.

He found himself in the starship’s busy lower-deck lounge, having a drink with his traveling companion, Pitkin, the Yale economist. Why Pitkin, that coarse, florid little man? With all of real and imaginary humanity to choose from, why had his unconscious elected to make him share this fantasy with such a boor?

“Look,” Pitkin said, winking and leering. “There’s your girlfriend.”

The entry-iris had opened and the Antarean not-male had come in.

“Quit it,” Schwartz snapped. “You know there’s no such thing going on.”

“Haven’t you been chasing her for days?”

“She’s not a ‘her,’” Schwartz said.

Pitkin guffawed. “Such precision! Such scholarship! She’s not a her, he says!” He gave Schwartz a broad nudge. “To you she’s a she, friend, and don’t try to kid me.”

Schwartz had to admit there was some justice to Pitkin’s vulgar innuendos. He did find the Antarean—a slim, yellow-eyed, ebony-skinned upright humanoid, sinuous and glossy, with tapering elongated limbs and a seal’s fluid grace—powerfully attractive. Nor could he help thinking of the Antarean as feminine. That attitude was hopelessly culture-bound and species-bound, he knew; in fact the alien had cautioned him that terrestrial sexual distinctions were irrelevant in the Antares system, that if Schwartz insisted on thinking of “her” in genders, “she” could be considered only the negative of male, with no implication of biological femaleness.

He said patiently, “I’ve told you. The Antarean’s neither male nor female as we understand those concepts. If we happen to perceive the Antarean as feminine, that’s the result of our own cultural conditioning. If you want to believe that my interest in this being is sexual, go ahead, but I assure you that it’s purely professional.”

“Sure. You’re only studying her.”

“In a sense I am. And she’s studying me. On her native world she has the status-frame of ‘watcher-of-life,’ which seems to translate into the Antarean equivalent of an anthropologist.”

“How lovely for you both. She’s your first alien and you’re her first Jew.”

“Stop calling her her,” Schwartz hissed.

“But you’ve been doing it!”

Schwartz closed his eyes. “My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with five hundred alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.”

“Next trip travel with your grandmother instead.”

“Go away,” Schwartz said. “Stop lousing up my fantasies. Go peddle your dismal science somewhere else. You see those Delta Aurigans over there? Climb into their bottle and tell them all about the Gross Global Product.” Schwartz smiled at the Antarean, who had purchased a drink, something that glittered an iridescent blue, and was approaching them. “Go on,” Schwartz murmured.

“Don’t worry,” Pitkin said. “I wouldn’t want to crowd you.” He vanished into the motley crowd.

The Antarean said, “The Capellans are dancing, Schwartz.”

“I’d like to see that. Too damned noisy in here anyway.” Schwartz stared into the alien’s vertical-slitted citreous eyes. Cat’s eyes, he thought. Panther’s eyes. The Antarean’s gaze was focused, as usual, on Schwartz’s mouth: other worlds, other customs. He felt a strange, unsettling tremor of desire. Desire for what, though? It was a sensation of pure need, nonspecific, certainly nonsexual. “I think I’ll take a look. Will you come with me?”

The Papua rocket has landed. Schwartz, leaning across the narrow table in the skyport’s lounge, says to the stewardess in a low, intense tone, “My life was in crisis. All my values were becoming meaningless. I was discovering that my chosen profession was empty, foolish, as useless as—playing chess.”

“How awful,” Dawn whispers gently.

“You can see why. You go all over the world, you see a thousand skyports a year. Everything the same everywhere. The same clothes, the same slang, the same magazines, the same styles of architecture and décor.”

“Yes.”

“International homogeneity. Worldwide uniformity. Can you understand what it’s like to be an anthropologist in a world where there are no primitives left, Dawn? Here we sit on the island of Papua—you know, headhunters, animism, body-paint, the drums at sunset, the bone through the nose—and look at the Papuans in their business robes all around us. Listen to them exchanging stock-market tips, talking baseball, recommending restaurants in Paris and barbers in Johannesburg. It’s no different anywhere else. In a single century we’ve transformed the planet into one huge sophisticated plastic western industrial state. The TV relay satellites, the two-hour intercontinental rockets, the breakdown of religious exclusivism and genetic taboo have mongrelized every culture, don’t you see? You visit the Zuni and they have plastic African masks on the wall. You visit the Bushmen and they have Japanese-made Hopi-motif ashtrays. It’s all just so much interior decoration, and underneath the carefully selected primitive motifs there’s the same universal pseudo-American sensibility, whether you’re in the Kalahari or the Amazon rain forest. Do you comprehend what’s happened, Dawn?”

“It’s such a terrible loss,” she says sadly. She is trying very hard to be sympathetic, but he senses she is waiting for him to finish his sermon and invite her to share his hotel room. He will invite her, but there is no stopping him once he has launched into his one great theme.

“Cultural diversity is gone from the world,” he says. “Religion is dead; true poetry is dead; inventiveness is dead; individuality is dead. Poetry. Listen to this.” In a high monotone he chants:

In beauty I walk

With beauty before me I walk

With beauty behind me I walk

With beauty above me I walk

With beauty above and about me I walk

It is finished in beauty

It is finished in beauty

He has begun to perspire heavily. His chanting has created an odd sphere of silence in his immediate vicinity; heads are turning, eyes are squinting. “Navaho,” he says. “The Night Way, a nine-day chant, a vision, a spell. Where are the Navaho now? Go to Arizona and they’ll chant for you, yes, for a price, but they don’t know what the words mean, and chances are the singers are only one-fourth Navaho, or one-eighth, or maybe just Hopi hired to dress in Navaho costumes, because the real Navaho, if any are left, are off in Mexico City hired to be Aztecs. So much is gone. Listen.” He chants again, more piercingly even than before:

The animal runs, it passes, it dies. And it is the great cold.

It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.

The bird flies, it passes, it dies. And it is—

“JAL FLIGHT 411 BAGGAGE IS NOW UNLOADING ON CONCOURSE FOUR,” a mighty mechanical voice cries.

—the great cold.

It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.

“JAL FLIGHT 411 BAGGAGE…”

The fish flees, it passes, it dies. And—

“People are staring,” Dawn says uncomfortably.

“—ON CONCOURSE FOUR.”

“Let them stare. Do them some good. That’s a Pygmy chant, from Gabon, in equatorial Africa. Pygmies? There are no more Pygmies. Everybody’s two meters tall. And what do we sing? Listen. Listen.” He gestures fiercely at the cloud of tiny golden loudspeakers floating near the ceiling. A mush of music comes from them: the current popular favorite. Savagely he mouths words: “Star  . . . far  . . . here  . . . near. Playing in every skyport right now, all over the world.” She smiles thinly. Her hand reaches toward his, covers it, presses against the knuckles. He is dizzy. The crowd, the eyes, the music, the drink. The plastic. Everything shines. Porcelain. Porcelain. The planet vitrifies. “Tom?” she asks uneasily. “Is anything the matter?” He laughs, blinks, coughs, shivers. He hears her calling for help, and then he feels his soul swooping outward, toward the galactic blackness.

With the Antarean not-male beside him, Schwartz peered through the viewport, staring in awe and fascination at the seductive vision of the Capellans coiling and recoiling outside the ship. Not all the passengers on this voyage had cozy staterooms like his. The Capellans were too big to come on board, and in any case they preferred never to let themselves be enclosed inside metal walls. They traveled just alongside the starship, basking like slippery whales in the piquant radiations of space. So long as they kept within twenty meters of the hull they would be inside the effective field of the Rabinowitz Drive, which swept ship and contents and associated fellow travellers toward Rigel, or the Lesser Magellanic, or was it one of the Pleiades toward which they were bound at a cool nine lights?

He watched the Capellans moving beyond the shadow of the ship in tracks of shining white. Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, they coiled and swam, and every track was a flash of golden fire. “They have a dangerous beauty,” Schwartz whispered. “Do you hear them calling? I do.”

“What do they say?”

“They say, ‘Come to me, come to me, come to me!’”

“Go to them, then,” said the Antarean simply. “Step through the hatch.”

“And perish?”

“And enter into your next transition. Poor Schwartz! Do you love your present body so?”

“My present body isn’t so bad. Do you think I’m likely to get another one some day?”

“No?”

“No,” Schwartz said. “This one is all I get. Isn’t it that way with you?”

“At the Time of Openings I receive my next housing. That will be fifty years from now. What you see is the fifth form I have been given to wear.”

“Will the next be as beautiful as this?”

“All forms are beautiful,” the Antarean said. “You find me attractive?”

“Of course.”

A slitted wink. A bobbing nod toward the viewport. “As attractive as those?”

Schwartz laughed. “Yes. In a different way.”

Coquettishly the Antarean said, “If I were out there, you would walk through the hatch into space?”

“I might. If they gave me a spacesuit and taught me how to use it.”

“But not otherwise? Suppose I were out there right now. I could live in space five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes. I am there and I say, ‘Come to me, Schwartz, come to me!’ What do you do?”

“I don’t think I’m all that much self-destructive.”

“To die for love, though! To make a transition for the sake of beauty.”

“No. Sorry.”

The Antarean pointed toward the undulating Capellans. “If they asked you, you would go.”

“They are asking me,” he said.

“And you refuse the invitation?”

“So far. So far.”

The Antarean laughed an Antarean laugh, a thick silvery snort. “Our voyage will last many weeks more. One of these days, I think, you will go to them.”

“You were unconscious at least five minutes,” Dawn says. “You gave everyone a scare. Are you sure you ought to go through with tonight’s lecture?”

Nodding, Schwartz says, “I’ll be all right. I’m a little tired, is all. Too many time zones this week.” They stand on the terrace of his hotel room. Night is coming on, already, here in late afternoon: It is midwinter in the Southern Hemisphere, though the fragrance of tropic blossoms perfumes the air. The first few stars have appeared. He has never really known which star is which. That bright one, he thinks, could be Rigel, and that one Sirius, and perhaps this is Deneb over there. And this? Can this be red Antares, in the heart of the Scorpion, or is it only Mars? Because of his collapse at the skyport, he has been able to beg off the customary faculty reception and the formal dinner; pleading the need for rest, he has arranged to have a simple snack at his hotel room, a deux. In two hours they will come for him and take him to the University to speak. Dawn watches him closely. Perhaps she is worried about his health, perhaps she is only waiting for him to make his move toward her. There’s time for all that later, he figures. He would rather talk now. Warming up for the audience he seizes his earlier thread:

“For a long time I didn’t understand what had taken place. I grew up insular, cut off from reality, a New York boy, bright mind and a library card. I read all the anthropological classics, Patterns of Culture and Coming of Age in Samoa and Life of a South African Tribe and the rest, and I dreamed of field trips, collecting myths and grammars and folkways and artefacts and all that, until when I was twenty-five I finally got out into the field and started to discover I had gone into a dead science. We have only one worldwide culture now, with local variants but no basic divergences—there’s nothing primitive left on Earth, and there are no other planets.Not inhabited ones. I can’t go to Mars or Venus or Saturn and study the natives. What natives? And we can’t reach the stars. All I have to work with is Earth. I was thirty years old when the whole thing clicked together for me and I knew I had wasted my life.”

She says, “But surely there was something for you to study on Earth.”

“One culture, rootless and homogeneous. That’s work for a sociologist, not for me. I’m a romantic, I’m an exotic, I want strangeness, difference. Look, we can never have any real perspective on our own time and lives. The sociologists try to attain it, but all they get is a mound of raw indigestible data. Insight comes later—two, five, ten generations later. But one way we’ve always been able to learn about ourselves is by studying alien cultures, studying them completely,and defining ourselves by measuring what they are that we aren’t. The cultures have to be isolated, though. The anthropologist himself corrupts that isolation in the Heisenberg sense when he comes around with his camera and scanners and starts asking questions, but we can compensate more or less, for the inevitable damage a lone observer causes. We can’t compensate when our whole culture collides with another and absorbs and obliterates it. Which we technological-mechanical people now have done everywhere. One day I woke up and saw there were no alien cultures left. Hah! Crushing revelation! Schwartz’s occupation is gone!”

“What did you do?”

“For years I was in an absolute funk. I taught, I studied, I went through the motions, knowing it was all meaningless. All I was doing was looking at records of vanished cultures left by earlier observers and trying to cudgel new meanings. Secondary sources, stale findings: I was an evaluator of dry bones, not a gatherer of evidence. Paleontology. Dinosaurs are interesting, but what do they tell you about the contemporary world and the meaning of its patterns? Dry bones, Dawn, dry bones. Despair. And then a clue. I had this Nigerian student, this Ibo—well, basically an Ibo, but she’s got some Israeli in her and I think Chinese—and we grew very close, she was as close to me as anybody in my own sixness, and I told her my troubles. I’m going to give it all up, I said, because it isn’t what I expected it to be. She laughed at me and said, ‘What right do you have to be upset because the world doesn’t live up to your expectations? Reshape your life, Tom; you can’t reshape the world.’ I said, ‘But how?’ And she said, ‘Look inward, find the primitive in yourself, see what made you what you are, what made today’s culture what it is, see how these alien streams have flowed together. Nothing’s been lost here, only merged.’ Which made me think. Which gave me a new way of looking at things. Which sent me on an inward quest. It took me three years to grasp the patterns, to come to an understanding of what our planet has become, and only after I accepted the planet—”

It seems to him that he has been talking forever. Talking. Talking. But he can no longer hear his own voice. There is only a distant buzz.

“After I accepted—”

A distant buzz.

“What was I saying?” he asks.

“After you accepted the planet—”

“After I accepted the planet,” he says, “that I could begin—” Buzz. Buzz. “That I could begin to accept myself.”

He was drawn toward the Spicans too, not so much for themselves—they were oblique, elliptical characters, self-contained and self-satisfied, hard to approach—as for the apparently psychedelic drug they took in some sacramental way before the beginning of each of their interminable ritual dances. Each time he had watched them take the drug, they had seemingly made a point of extending it toward him, as if inviting him, as if tempting him, before popping it into their mouths. He felt baited; he felt pulled.

There were three Spicans on board, slender creatures two and a half meters long, with flexible cylindrical bodies and small stubby limbs. Their skins were reptilian, dry and smooth, deep green with yellow bands, but their eyes were weirdly human, large liquid-brown eyes, sad Levantine eyes, the eyes of unfortunate medieval travelers transformed by enchantment into serpents. Schwartz had spoken with them several times. They understood English well enough—all galactic races did; Schwartz imagined it would become the interstellar lingua franca as it had on Earth—but the construction of their vocal organs was such that they had no way of speaking it, and they relied instead on small translating machines hung around their necks that converted their soft whispered hisses into amber words pulsing across a screen.

Cautiously, the third or fourth time he spoke with them, he expressed polite interest in their drug. They told him it enabled them to make contact with the central forces of the universe. He replied that there were such drugs on Earth, too, and that he used them frequently, that they gave him great insight into the workings of the cosmos. They showed some curiosity, perhaps even intense curiosity: Reading their eyes was difficult and the tone of their voices gave no clues. He took his elegant leather-bound drug case from his pouch and showed them what he had: learitonin, psilocerebrin, siddharthin, and acid-57. He described the effects of each and suggested an exchange, any of his for an equivalent dose of the shriveled orange fungoid they nibbled. They conferred. Yes, they said, we will do this. But not now. Not until the proper moment. Schwartz knew better than to ask them when that would be. He thanked them and put his drugs away.

Pitkin, who had watched the interchange from the far side of the lounge, came striding fiercely toward him as the Spicans glided off. “What are you up to now?” he demanded.

“How about minding your own business?” Schwartz said amiably.

“You’re trading pills with those snakes, aren’t you?”

“Let’s call it field research.”

“Research? Research? What are you going to do, trip on that orange stuff of theirs?”

“I might,” Schwartz said.

“How do you know what its effects on the human metabolism might be? You could end up blind or paralyzed or crazy or—”

“—or illuminated,” Schwartz said. “Those are the risks one takes in the field. The early anthropologists who unhesitatingly sampled peyote and yage and ololiuqui accepted those risks, and—”

“But those were drugs that humans were using. You have no way of telling how—oh, what’s the use, Schwartz? Research, he calls it. Research.” Pitkin sneered. “Junkie!”

Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. “Economist!”

The house is a decent one tonight, close to three thousand, every seat in the University’s great horseshoe-shaped auditorium taken, and a video relay besides, beaming his lecture to all Papua and half of Indonesia. Schwartz stands on the dais like a demigod under a brilliant no-glare spotlight. Despite his earlier weariness, he is in good form now, gestures broad and forceful, eyes commanding, voice deep and resonant, words flowing freely. “Only one planet,” he says, “one small and crowded planet, on which all cultures converge to a drab and depressing sameness. How sad that is! How tiny we make ourselves, when we make ourselves to resemble one another!” He flings his arms upward. “Look to the stars, the unattainable stars! Imagine, if you can, the millions of worlds that orbit those blazing suns beyond the night’s darkness! Speculate with me on other peoples, other ways, other gods. Beings of every imaginable form, alien in appearance but not grotesque, not hideous, for all life is beautiful—beings that breathe gases strange to us, beings of immense size, beings of many limbs or of none, beings to whom death is a divine culmination of existence, beings who never die, beings who bring forth their young a thousand at a time, beings who do not reproduce—all the infinite possibilities of the infinite universe!

“Perhaps on each of those worlds it is as it has become here. One intelligent species, one culture, the eternal convergence. But the many worlds together offer a vast spectrum of variety. And now, share this vision with me! I see a ship voyaging from star to star, a spaceliner of the future, and aboard that ship is a sampling of many species, many cultures, a random scoop out of the galaxy’s fantastic diversity. That ship is like a little cosmos, a small world, enclosed, sealed. How exciting to be aboard it, to encounter in that little compass such richness of cultural variation! Now our own world was once like that starship, a little cosmos, bearing with it all the thousands of Earthborn cultures. Hopi and Eskimo and Aztec and Kwakiutl and Arapesh and Orokolo and all the rest. In the course of our voyage we have come to resemble one another too much, and it has impoverished the lives of all of us, because—” He falters suddenly. He feels faint, and grasps the sides of the lectern. “Because—” The spotlight, he thinks. In my eyes. Not supposed to glare like that, but it’s blinding. Got to have them move it. “In the course—the course of our voyage—” What’s happening? Breaking into a sweat, now. Pain in my chest. My heart? Wait, slow up, catch your breath. That light in my eyes—

“Tell me,” Schwartz said earnestly, “what it’s like to know you’ll have ten successive bodies and live more than a thousand years.”

“First tell me,” said the Antarean, “what it’s like to know you’ll live ninety years or less and perish forever.”

Somehow he continues. The pain in his chest grows more intense, he cannot focus his eyes; he believes he will lose consciousness at any moment and may even have lost it already at least once, and yet he continues. Clinging to the lectern, he outlines the program he developed in The Mask Beneath the Skin.A rebirth of tribalism without a revival of ugly nationalism. The quest for a renewed sense of kinship with the past. A sharp reduction in nonessential travel, especially tourism. Heavy taxation of exported artefacts, including films and video shows. An attempt to create independent cultural units on Earth once again while maintaining present levels of economic and political interdependence. Relinquishment of materialistic technological-industrial values. New searches for fundamental meanings. An ethnic revival, before it is too late, among those cultures of mankind that have only recently shed their traditional folkways. (He repeats and embellishes this point particularly, for the benefit of the Papuans before him, the great-grandchildren of cannibals.)

The discomfort and confusion come and go as he unreels his themes. He builds and builds, crying out passionately for an end to the homogenization of Earth, and gradually the physical symptoms leave him, all but a faint vertigo. But a different malaise seizes him as he nears his peroration. His voice becomes, to him, a far-off quacking, meaningless and foolish. He has said all this a thousand times, always to great ovations, but who listens? Who listens? Everything seems hollow tonight, mechanical, absurd. An ethnic revival? Shall these people before him revert to their loincloths and their pig roasts? His starship is a fantasy; his dream of a diverse Earth is mere silliness. What is, will be. And yet he pushes on toward his conclusion. He takes his audience back to that starship, he creates a horde of fanciful beings for them. He completes the metaphor by sketching the structures of half a dozen vanished “primitive” cultures of Earth, he chants the chants of the Navaho, the Gabon Pygmies, the Ashanti, the Mundugumor. It is over. Cascades of applause engulf him. He holds his place until members of the sponsoring committee come to him and help him down: They have perceived his distress. “It’s nothing,” he gasps. “The lights—too bright—” Dawn is at his side. She hands him a drink, something cool. Two of the sponsors begin to speak of a reception for him in the Green Room. “Fine,” Schwartz says. “Glad to.” Dawn murmurs a protest. He shakes her off. “My obligation,” he tells her. “Meet community leaders. Faculty people. I’m feeling better now. Honestly.” Swaying, trembling, he lets them lead him away.

“A Jew,” the Antarean said. “You call yourself a Jew, but what is this exactly? A clan, a sept, a moiety, a tribe, a nation, what? Can you explain?”

“You understand what a religion is?”

“Of course.”

“Judaism—Jewishness—it’s one of Earth’s major religions.”

“You are therefore a priest?”

“Not at all. I don’t even practice Judaism. But my ancestors did, and therefore I consider myself Jewish, even though—”

“It is an hereditary religion, then,” the Antarean said, “that does not require its members to observe its rites?”

“In a sense,” said Schwartz desperately. “More an hereditary cultural subgroup, actually, evolving out of a common religious outlook no longer relevant.”

“Ah. And the cultural traits of Jewishness that define it and separate you from the majority of humankind are—?”

“Well—” Schwartz hesitated. “There’s a complicated dietary code, a rite of circumcision for newborn males, a rite of passage for male adolescents, a language of scripture, a vernacular language that Jews all around the world more or less understand, and plenty more, including a certain intangible sense of clannishness and certain attitudes, such as a peculiar self-deprecating style of humor—”

“You observe the dietary code? You understand the language of scripture?”

“Not exactly,” Schwartz admitted. “In fact I don’t do anything that’s specifically Jewish except think of myself as a Jew and adopt many of the characteristically Jewish personality modes, which however are not uniquely Jewish any longer—they can be traced among Italians, for example, and to some extent among Greeks. I’m speaking of Italians and Greeks of the late twentieth century, of course. Nowadays—” It was all becoming a terrible muddle. “Nowadays—”

“It would seem,” said the Antarean, “that you are a Jew only because your maternal and paternal gene-givers were Jews, and they—”

“No, not quite. Not my mother, just my father, and he was Jewish only on his father’s side, but even my grandfather never observed the customs, and—”

“I think this has grown too confusing,” said the Antarean. “I withdraw the entire inquiry. Let us speak instead of my own traditions. The Time of Openings, for example, may be understood as—”

In the Green Room some eighty or a hundred distinguished Papuans press toward him, offering congratulations. “Absolutely right,” they say. “A global catastrophe.” “Our last chance to save our culture.” Their skins are chocolate-tinted but their faces betray the genetic mishmash that is their ancestry: perhaps they call themselves Arapesh, Mundugumor, Tchambuli, Mafulu, in the way that he calls himself a Jew, but they have been liberally larded with chromosomes contributed by Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, Africans, everything. They dress in International Contemporary. They speak slangy, lively English. Schwartz feels seasick. “You look dazed,” Dawn whispers. He smiles bravely. Body like dry bone. Mind like dead ashes. He is introduced to a tribal chieftain, tall, gray-haired, who looks and speaks like a professor, a lawyer, a banker. What, will these people return to the hills for the ceremony of the yam harvest? Will newborn girl-children be abandoned, cords uncut, skins unwashed, if their fathers do not need more girls? Will boys entering manhood submit to the expensive services of the initiator who scarifies them with the teeth of crocodiles? The crocodiles are gone. The shamans have become stockbrokers.

Suddenly he cannot breathe.

“Get me out of here,” Schwartz mutters hoarsely, choking.

Dawn, with stewardess efficiency, chops a path for him through the mob. The sponsors, concerned, rush to his aid. He is floated swiftly back to the hotel in a glistening little bubble-car. Dawn helps him to bed. Reviving, he reaches for her.

“You don’t have to,” she says. “You’ve had a rough day.”

He persists. He embraces her and takes her, quickly, fiercely, and they move together for a few minutes and it ends and he sinks back, exhausted, stupefied. She gets a cool cloth and pats his forehead and urges him to rest. “Bring me my drugs,” he says. He wants siddharthin, but she misunderstands, probably deliberately, and offers him something blue and bulky, a sleeping pill, and, too weary to object, he takes it. Even so, it seems to be hours before sleep comes.

He dreams he is at the skyport, boarding the rocket for Bangkok, and instantly he is debarking at Bangkok—just like Port Moresby, only more humid—and he delivers his speech to a horde of enthusiastic Thais, while rockets flicker about him carrying him to skyport after skyport, and the Thais blur and become Japanese, who are transformed into Mongols, who become Uighurs, who become Iranians, who become Sudanese, who become Zambians, who become Chileans, and all look alike, all look alike, all look alike.

The Spicans hovered above him, weaving, bobbing, swaying like cobras about to strike. But their eyes, warm and liquid, were sympathetic: loving, even. He felt the flow of their compassion. If they had had the sort of musculature that enabled them to smile, they would be smiling tenderly, he knew.

One of the aliens leaned close. The little translating device dangled toward Schwartz like a holy medallion. He narrowed his eyes, concentrating as intently as he could on the amber words flashing quickly across the screen.

“. . . has come. We shall . . .”

“Again, please,” Schwartz said. “I missed some of what you were saying.”

“The moment . . . has come. We shall . . . make the exchange of sacraments now.”

“Sacraments?”

“Drugs.”

“Drugs, yes. Yes. Of course.” Schwartz groped in his pouch. He felt the cool, smooth leather skin of his drug case. Leather? Snakeskin, maybe. Anyway. He drew it forth. “Here,” he said. “Siddharthin, learitonin, psilocerebrin, acid-57. Take your pick.” The Spicans selected three small blue siddharthins. “Very good,” Schwartz said. “The most transcendental of all. And now—”

The longest of the aliens proffered a ball of dried orange fungus the size of Schwartz’s thumbnail.

“It is an equivalent dose. We give it to you.”

“Equivalent to all three of my tablets, or to one?”

“Equivalent. It will give you peace.”

Schwartz smiled. There was a time for asking questions and a time for unhesitating action. He took the fungus and reached for a glass of water.

“Wait!” Pitkin cried, appearing suddenly. “What are you—”

“Too late,” Schwartz said serenely, and swallowed the Spican drug in one joyous gulp.

The nightmares go on and on. He circles the Earth like the Flying Dutchman, like the Wandering Jew, skyport to skyport to skyport, an unending voyage from nowhere to nowhere. Obliging committees meet him and convey him to his hotel. Sometimes the committee members are contemporary types, indistinguishable from one another, with standard faces, standard clothing, the all-purpose new-model hybrid unihuman, and sometimes they are consciously ethnic, elaborately decked out in feathers and paint and tribal emblems, but their faces, too, are standard behind the gaudy regalia, their slang is the slang of Uganda and Tierra del Fuego and Nepal, and it seems to Schwartz that these masqueraders are, if anything, less authentic, less honest, than the other sort, who at least are true representatives of their era. So it is hopeless either way. He lashes at his pillow, he groans, he wakens. Instantly Dawn’s arms enfold him. He sobs incoherent phrases into her clavicle and she murmurs soothing sounds against his forehead. He is having some sort of breakdown, he realizes: a new crisis of values, a shattering of the philosophical synthesis that has allowed him to get through the last few years. He is bound to the wheel; he spins, he spins, he spins, traversing the continents, getting nowhere. There is no place to go. No. There is one, just one, a place where he will find peace, where the universe will be as he needs it to be. Go there, Schwartz. Go and stay as long as you can. “Is there anything I can do?”Dawn asks. He shivers and shakes his head. “Take this,” she says, and gives him some sort of pill. Another tranquilizer. All right. All right. The world has turned to porcelain. His skin feels like a plastic coating. Away, away, to the ship. To the ship! “So long,” Schwartz says.

Outside the ship the Capellans twist and spin in their ritual dance as, weightless and without mass, they are swept toward the rim of the galaxy at nine times the velocity of light. They move with a grace that is astonishing for creatures of such tremendous bulk. A dazzling light that emanates from the center of the universe strikes their glossy skin and, rebounding, resonates all up and down the spectrum, splintering into brilliant streamers of ultra red, infraviolet, exoyellow. All the cosmos glows and shimmers. A single perfect note of music comes out of the remote distance and, growing closer, swells in an infinite crescendo. Schwartz trembles at the beauty of all he perceives.

Beside him stands the seal-slick Antarean. She—definitely she,no doubt of it, she—plucks at his arm and whispers, “Will you go to them?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“So will I. Wherever you go.”

“Now,” Schwartz says. He reaches for the lever that opens the hatch. He pulls down. The side of the starship swings open.

The Antarean looks deep into his eyes and says blissfully, “I never told you my name. My name is Dawn.”

Together they float through the hatch into space.

The blackness receives them gently. There is no chill, no pressure at the lungs, no discomfort at all. He is surrounded by luminous surges, by throbbing mantles of pure color, as though he has entered the heart of an aurora. He and Dawn swim toward the Capellans, and the huge beings welcome them with deep, glad, booming cries. Dawn joins the dance at once, moving her sinuous limbs with extravagant ease; Schwartz will do the same in a moment, but first he turns to face the starship, hanging in space close by him like a vast coppery needle, and in a voice that could shake universes he calls, “Come, friends! Come, all of you! Come dance with us!” And they come, pouring through the hatch, the Spicans first, then all the rest, the infinite multitude of beings, the travelers from Fomalhaut and Achernar and Acrux and Aldebaran, from Thuban and Arcturus and Altair, from Polaris and Canopus and Sirius and Rigel, hundreds of star-creatures spilling happily out of the vessel, bursting forth, all of them, even Pitkin, poor little Pitkin, everyone joining hands and tentacles and tendrils and whatever, forming a great ring of light across space, everyone locked in a cosmic harmony, everyone dancing. Dancing. Dancing.

© 1974 by Agberg, Inc.

Originally published in Stellar 1, edited by Judy-Lynn del Rey.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Robert Silverberg—four-time Hugo Award-winner, five-time winner of the Nebula Award, SFWA Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame honoree—is the author of nearly five hundred short stories, nearly one hundred-and-fifty novels, and is the editor of in the neighborhood of one hundred anthologies. Among his most famous works are Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside, Nightwings,and The World Inside. Learn more at www.majipoor.com.

Deep Blood Kettle
Hugh Howey

They say the sky will fill with dust in a bad way if we don’t do something soon. My teacher Mrs. Sandy says that if the meteor hits, it’ll put up enough dirt to block the sun, and everything will turn cold for a long, long while. When I came home and told Pa about this, he got angry. He called Mrs. Sandy a bad word, said she was teaching us nonsense. I told him the dinosaurs died because of dust in the sky. Pa said there weren’t no such thing as dinosaurs.

“You boys watch,” he told me and my brother. “That rock’ll burn up. It’ll be no more than a flash of light. I’ve seen a million shooting stars if I’ve seen a dozen.” Pa stopped rubbing his rifle and traced a big arc in the air with his oil-stained rag. “She’ll hit the sky and light up like fireworks, and the worst she’ll do is leave a crater like that one down in Arizona. Then we’ll show them suckers how we watch over our land.”

Only Pa don’t use the word “suckers.” Pa uses worse words for the invaders than he ever did for Mrs. Sandy. He never calls them aliens. Sometimes he says it’s the Russians or the Chinese or the Koreans. He believes in aliens about as much as dinosaurs.

Pa spat in the dirt and asked if I was taking a break or something. I told him “nossir” and went back to oiling my gun. He and my brother did the same.

Pa says our land is fertile because of the killin’ we soak it in. That’s why things grow as tall as they do. The little critters are killed dead and give their life to the soil.

I seen it every year when we plow it under for the new crops. When I was a boy, before father let me drive the John Deere, I’d play in the loose soil his plowing left behind. Acres and acres for a sandbox. The dust he kicked up would blot the sky and dry my mouth, but I’d kick through the furrows and dig for arrowheads until my fingernails were chipped or packed full of dirt.

Where he hadn’t yet plowed, you could see the dead stalks from the last harvest. The soil there was packed tight from the rains and the dry spells. Pa used to laugh at the newfangled ways of planting that kept the ground like that by driving the seeds straight through. It weren’t the way the Samuels tended their land, he told us. We Samuels dragged great steel plows across the hard pack and the old stalks and we killed everything in the ground. That was what made the land ready again.

When I was younger, I found half a worm floppin’ on top of the ground after a plow. It moved like the tail on a happy dog, but it was already dead. Took a while for it to realize, was all. I pinched it between my fingers and watched it wind down like the grandfather clock in the great room. When it was still, the worm went into a furrow, and I kicked some dirt over it. That was the whole point. The little things would feed the corn, and the corn would feed us, and we would all get taller because of it. Pa, meanwhile, drove that tractor in great circles that took him nearly out of sight; the dust he kicked up could blot out the whole Montana sky, and my boots would fill up with gravel as I kicked through the loose furrows he left behind.

Pa only believes in things he can see. He didn’t believe in the meteor until it became brighter than any star in the sky. Before long, you could see it in the daytime if you knew where to look and squinted just right. The people on the TV talked to scientists who said it was coming straight for us. They had a date and time and everything. One of them said you could know where it would land, but that nobody wanted a panic. It just meant people panicked everywhere. And then it leaked that the rock would hit somewhere between Russia and China, and Pa reckoned those people were panicking a little worse.

He called it a rock, not a meteor. Like a bunch of people, Pa don’t think it’ll amount to much. Folks been predicting doom since his grandpa was a boy, and the world outside still looked pretty much the same.

This was before we got “First Contact.” That’s what they called it even though the rock hadn’t set down yet. It was nothing but a phone call from what I could tell. On the TV they said it was coming from the other side of the rock. That’s when even the scientists and all the smart people started acting a little crazy.

First Contact happened back when Mrs. Sandy was still our teacher. We listened to the news at school, I talked to her, and I didn’t tell Pa any of what I learned. It made him angry hearing about the demands, but Mrs. Sandy said it was the best thing that ever happened to our planet, them deciding to come here. She told me a lot before she left and the substitute took her place. She was going to be one of them that welcomed the invaders, even sold her house and bought a pickup with a camper back. I eventually reckoned Pa was right to call her some of those bad things.

But I did sort out a bunch between the TV and what Mrs. Sandy said. The rock weren’t no accident like the scientists used to suppose. It was aimed. Like the stones I chucked after a plowing, trying to hit one rock with another. The invaders, they was right behind the big rock.

Mrs. Sandy liked to say that our governments would make the right choice. And all of a sudden, the same channels on TV that I watched for news showed new people. They wore headphones and spoke funny and argued over what to do. My brother wouldn’t stop asking about the little flags in front of each of them, and I had to tell him to shut up so I could hear.

The invaders were giving us a choice, it sounded like. All they wanted was half our land and for us to get rid of all of our weapons, and they would leave most of us alone. They gave a date. It was the same one the scientists had already figured. The rock could be moved, they said. It didn’t have to hit. It could go into orbit, and then we could have it for our own.

On a different channel, men with suits and ties argued real loud over how much the rock was worth. They used words I’d never heard of before, something more than “trillion.” I knew what gold and some of the other valuable things were, but some were called rare and sounded like they were from Earth. I couldn’t sort out how something that could kill us one day could be worth so much the next, but the invaders said the rock only needed a nudge.

When I turned thirteen, Pa said I was finally old enough to drive. He taught me in the old pickup with the missing tailgate and the tires that were always starving for air. It was a shifter, which seemed a hard way to start driving, but Pa believed in learning the worst to begin with. I had to yank up on the steering wheel to push the old clutch all the way in. Damn thing made it so my arms would be as sore at night as my legs. Pa cursed every time the gears growled, and it was hot in the truck even with the windows down. But I got to where he would send me to fetch the mail. And once I’d mastered the old pickup, he taught me on the John Deere, and I learned to plow. Pa was right that it made driving the tractor easier. But it was still scary as hell.

The first time you drive something so big, you wonder if one man ought to be able. There was a red lever that went from rabbit to turtle, and Pa would stand in the cabin with me and yell for me to nudge it up. But we were already bouncing around something fierce. The noise was terrible. And looking back, I couldn’t see the house through the haze I was stirring. It weren’t even like we were moving so much as the great big tires of the tractor were spinning the Earth beneath their knobby treads. Pa would bend over the seat and knock the red lever up, and the bucking would grow worse. The steering wheel jittered side to side, and I had to clutch it just to stay in my seat.

But like the truck, my fear of the tractor didn’t keep. Before long, Pa hitched the great plow to the back, twenty-four feet wide, and I learned how to kill the soil to make it ready for planting. The seat would bounce me along like I was in a saddle, and the radio would blare in the little cabin that smelled like my dad when he was sweaty. I did circles like I was mowing grass, but twenty-four feet at a time. The mesa behind our house would disappear behind the dust, and it got so I couldn’t see the cliffs along the back of the homestead. But I could see the soil in front packed hard and tight, and I could see out the side where I’d already been. Plowing was a lot like mowing—I just had to overlap where I’d been before.

“Not too much overlap,” Pa would tell me. The price of gas had gone way up since First Contact, and too much overlap meant an extra run for no good reason. And so I bounced along and put death in the soil. I cut the worms in half and made things ready for planting. Now and then, a deer would startle across the loose furrows, legs having a hard time of it, and white rabbits would dash from the thrush. The rabbits were the dumbest little things. They would dart back and forth in front of the tractor—they could see me coming, but they couldn’t make up their minds. I would yell and yell at them, but they would just jitter back and forth until the tractor went over them and then the plow. Turning in my seat, I always expected a tuft of white to spit out somewhere, but the soil that kicked up would just turn a little red.

“That’s where the corn would grow the tallest,” Pa would say when I told him how dumb the rabbits were. The blood in the soil was a good thing. That’s when you knew it was ready.

The cliffs behind our house were a source of constant play, and they had a funny name. Too Close for Comfort, they were called. I reckoned kids made up that name, but it was a real thing. Scientists called it that. Men who were supposedly smart had come up with it.

When I was a boy too young to drive—before I turned thirteen—they came from the university and dug in the dirt at the base of the cliffs that rise up behind our land. They found so many bones beneath the dirt that they couldn’t take them all. Steve Harkin and I plotted to sneak in one night and nab a skull or two, but the men in the shiny city trucks with no 4X4 put a stop to that by giving us a skull each. It weren’t as fun without the danger and flashlights, but we got our skulls.

I remember cradling that great hunk of bone as heavy as stone and asking one of the university men there why they were digging there.

“This here was a buffalo jump,” the man told me. He reminded me of Mrs. Sandy, and he had this clipboard with all kinds of little squares full of numbers and was the smartest man I ever spoke to ’cept for my Pa.

“The buffalo used to come over this cliff and smash into the rocks down here,” he told me and Steve Harkin. “That’s where these bones came from.”

Steve thought that was pretty cool. We gazed up at the cliffs that I had known all my life, the ones that delayed the sunrise in the morning, and I saw them different for the first time. I asked this man from the university why buffalo were so dumb.

“Oh, buffalo aren’t dumb,” he claimed. I was about to argue with him, but then he explained. “Indians used to chase the buffalo to the edge of the cliff in great herds,” he said. They tumbled off hundreds at a time and smashed their legs so they couldn’t walk. While they squealed and snorted and tried to pick themselves up on busted bones, the Indians would run in with spears and jab ’em in the neck.

Steve whistled. I asked the man if that was real.

“Very real,” he said. “The people who used to live here long before us called it pishkun.”

“Pushkin,” Steve Harkin said. “What does that mean?”

“It means ‘deep blood kettle,’” the man told us. He pointed to where the men and women were digging in these funny squares with ropes and stakes marking everything off. “You can still see the blood in the soil,” he said.

I didn’t know if that man from the university was playing with us or not, but I told him we needed to go. That skull he’d given me was getting heavier and heavier the longer he talked.

The people on TV with the little flags and the headphones reminded me of white rabbits in the plow season. You could watch ’em go back and forth on the screen. Everyone wanted the gold and the trillions and trillions and trillions and all the rare Earth stuff. But nobody wanted to give up their land. And the invaders insisted on half. They wanted half or they would take it all.

People on the TV argued about why the aliens would do something like this, why they would let the rock hit us and kick up the dirt and make things cold, but I knew. I reckon I knew better than most. Just the year before, I’d watched a movie about invaders coming down. They’d made a different kind of contact. There were fights with lasers and explosions and our side found a way at the end to lick them for good.

It was a good movie, but those invaders were dumb. I tried to picture us Samuels taming our plot of land something like that. Pa and Riley and me would take to the soil with guns and shoot the worms one by one. And the worms would fight back with the rabbits, the deer, the turtles, and the foxes. And I could imagine them swarming us and licking us good. They were dumb, but there was an awful lot of them.

Which was why we used the plow. It was why we throw the dirt up into the air. We make all things die in the soil so when we put in our own seed, that’s all the life there is. And where the ground is reddest, that deep blood kettle, the corn reaches up so high you think it might leave us behind. And that’s what the rock will do, plow us under. It weren’t going to be like that movie at all.

Mrs. Sandy used to say before she left town that the dust would kick up and blot out the sky if the rock fell, but she didn’t think we would let that happen. Mrs. Sandy always thought the best of people. She even liked my Pa, no matter what he called her. Me, I wished she would come back from wherever she went. I’d like to have her sit in the John Deere with me and feel it buck and buck and chase down those rabbits too dumb to move. I’d take Mrs. Sandy by the hand and lead her to the cliffs on the edge of our land and show her the piles of bones and see what the Indians had done.

But Mrs. Sandy was gone, and nobody went to school no more. And outside, the spot of light in the sky had grown so bright that it was like a star in the daytime. The people on the TV moved like rabbits. They were chased like buffalo. And you didn’t need to know where to look no more to see that something bad was coming.

© 2013 Hugh Howey.

Hugh Howey is the author of the acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel Wool, which became a sudden success in 2011. Originally self-published as a series of novelettes, the Wool omnibus is frequently the #1 bestselling book on Amazon.com and is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller. The book was also optioned for film by Ridley Scott, and is now available in print from major publishers all over the world. The story of Wool’s meteoric success has been reported in major media outlets such as Entertainment Weekly, Variety, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Deadline Hollywood, and elsewhere. Howey lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife Amber and his dog Bella.

Smoke City
Christopher Barzak

One night, I woke to the sound of my mother’s voice, as I did when I was a child. The words were familiar to my ear, they matched the voice that formed them, but it was not until I had opened my eyes to the dark of my room and my husband’s snoring that I remembered the words were calling me away from my warm bed and the steady breathing of my children, both asleep in their own rooms across the hall. “Because I could not stop for death,” my mother used to tell me, “he kindly stopped for me.” They were Dickinson’s words, of course, not my mother’s, but she said them as if they were hers, and because of that, they were hers, and because of that, they are now mine, passed down with every other object my mother gave me before I left for what I hoped would be a better world. “Here, take this candy dish.” Her hands pushing the red knobbed glass into my hands. “Here, take this sweater.” Her hands folding it, a made thing, pulled together by her hands, so that I could lift it and lay it on the seat as my car pulled me away. Her hand lifted into the air above her cloud of white hair behind me. The smoke of that other city enveloping her, putting it behind me, trying to put it behind me, until I had the words in my mouth again, like a bit, and then the way opened up beneath me, a fissure through which I slipped, down through the bed sheets, no matter how I grasped at them, down through the mattress, down through the floorboards, down, down, down, through the mud and earth and gravel, leaving my snoring husband and my steadily breathing children above, in that better place, until I was floating, once more, along the swiftly flowing current of the Fourth River.

When I rose up, gasping for air, and blinked the water from my eyes, I saw the familiar cavern lit by lanterns that lined the walls, orange fires burning behind smoked glass. And, not far downstream, his shadow stood along the water’s edge, a lantern held out over the slug and tow of the current, waiting, as he was always waiting for me, there, in that place beneath the three rivers, there in the Fourth River’s tunnel that leads to Smoke City.

It was time again, I understood, to attend to my obligations.

History always exacts a price from those who have climbed out to live in the world above. There is never a way to fully outrun our beginnings. And here was mine, and he was mine here. I smiled, happy to see him again, the sharp bones of his face gold-leafed by the light of his lantern.

He put out his hand to fish me from the river, and pulled me up to stand beside him. “It is good to see you again, wife,” he said, and I wrapped my arms around him.

“It is good to smell you again, husband,” I said, my face pressed against his thick chest. They are large down here, the men of Smoke City. Their labor makes them into giants.

We walked along the Fourth River’s edge, our hands linked between us, until we came to the mouth of the tunnel, where the city tipped into sight below, cupped as it is within the hands of a valley, strung together by the many bridges crossing the rivers that wind round its perimeter. The smoke obscured all but the dark mirrored glass of city towers, which gleamed by the light of the mill-fired skies down in the financial district, where the captains sit around long, polished tables throughout the hours and commit their business.

It did not take the fumes long to find me, the scent of the mills and the sweaty, grease-faced laborers, so that when my husband pulled me toward the carriage at the top of the Incline Passage, a moment passed in which my heart flickered like the flame climbing the wick of his lantern. I inhaled sharply, trying to catch my breath. Already what nostalgia for home I possessed had begun to evaporate as I began to remember, to piece together what I had worked so hard to obscure.

I hesitated at the door of the Incline carriage, looking back at the cavern opening, where the Fourth River spilled over the edge, down into the valley, but my husband placed two fingers on my chin and turned my face back up to his. “We must go now,” he said, and I nodded at his eyes like chips of coal, his mustached upper lip, the sweat on his brow, as if he were working, even now, as in the mill, among the glowing rolls of steel.

The Incline rattled into gear, and soon we were creaking down the valley wall, rickety-click, the chains lowering us to the bottom, slowly, slowly. I watched out the window as the city grew close and the smoke began to thicken, holding a hand over my mouth and nose. An Incline car on the track opposite passed us, taking a man and a woman up to the Fourth River overlook. She, like me, peered out her window, a hand covering her mouth and nose as they ascended the tracks. We stared at each other, but it was she who first broke our gaze to look up at the opening to the cavern with great expectations, almost a panicked smile on her face, teeth gritted, willing herself upward. She was on her return journey, I could tell. I had worn that face myself. She had spent a long year here, and was glad to be leaving.

They are long here, the years in Smoke City, even though they are finished within the passing of a night.

At the bottom, my husband handed me down from the Incline car, then up again into our carriage, which was waiting by the curb, the horses nickering and snorting in the dark. Then off he sent us, jostling down the cobbled lane, with one flick of his wrist and a strong word.

Down many wide and narrow streets we rode, some mud, some brick, some stone, passing through the long rows of narrow workers’ houses, all lined up and lean like soldiers, until we arrived at our own, in the Lost Neighborhood, down in Junction Hollow, where Eliza, the furnace, blocks the view of the river with her black bulk and her belching smoke. They are all female, always. They have unassuming names like Jeanette, Edith, Carrie. All night long, every night, they fill the sky with their fires.

Outside, on the front stoop of our narrow house, my children from the last time were waiting, arms folded over their skinny chests or hanging limply at their sides. When I stepped down from the carriage onto the street, they ran down the stairs, their arms thrown wide, the word “Mother!” spilling from their eager mouths.

They had grown since I’d last seen them. They had grown so much that none of them had retained the names I’d given them at birth. Shauna, the youngest, had become Anis. Alexander was Shoeshine. Paul, the oldest, said to simply call him Ayu. “Quite lovely,” I said to Anis. “Very good then,” I told Shoeshine. And to Ayu, I said nothing, only nodded, showing the respect due an imagination that had turned so particularly into itself during my absence. He had a glint in his eyes. He reminded me of myself a little, willing to cast off anything we’d been told.

When we went through the door, the scent of boiled cabbage and potatoes filled the front room. They had cooked dinner for me, and quite proudly Anis and Shoeshine took hold of either elbow and led me to the scratched and corner-worn table, where we sat and shared their offering, not saying anything when our eyes met one another’s. It was not from shame, our silence, but from an understanding that to express too much joy at my homecoming would be absurd. We knew that soon they would have no names at all, and I would never again see them.

We sipped our potato soup and finely chewed our noodles and cabbage.

Later, after the children had gone to bed, my husband led me up the creaking stairs to our own room, where we made love, fitting into one another on the gritty, soot-stained sheets. Old friends, always. Afterward, his arms wrapped around my sweaty stomach, holding me to him from behind, he said, “I die a little more each time you are away.”

I did not reply immediately, but stared out the grimy window at the rooftops across the street. A crow had perched on the sill of the window opposite, casting about for the glint of something, anything, in the dark streets below. It cawed at me, as if it had noticed me staring, and ruffled its feathers. Finally, without turning to my husband, I said, “We all die,” and closed my eyes to the night.

The days in the city of my birth are differentiated from the nights by small degrees of shade and color. The streetlamps continue burning during the day, since the sun cannot reach beyond the smoke that moves through the valley like a storm that will never abate. So it always appears to be night, and you can only tell it is day by the sound of shift whistles and church bells ringing the hours, announcing when it is time to return to work or to kneel and pray.

No growing things grew in Smoke City, due to the lack of sunlight. On no stoops or windowsills did a fern or a flower add their shapes and colors to the square and rectangular stone backdrops of the workers’ houses. Only fine dusty coatings of soot, in which children drew pictures with the tips of their fingers, and upon which adults would occasionally scrawl strange messages:

Do Not Believe Anything They Tell You.

Your Rewards Await You In Heaven.

It Is Better That Others Possess What I Need But Do Not Understand.

I walked my children down the road, past these cryptic depictions of stick men and women on the sides of houses and words whose meanings I could not fathom, until we came to the gates of the furnace Eliza, whose stacks sent thick plumes of smoke into the air. There, holding the hands of my two youngest, I knelt down in the street to meet their faces. “You must do what you are told,” I instructed them, my heart squeezing even as I said the words. “You must work very hard, and never be of trouble to anyone, understand?”

The little ones, Anis and Shoeshine, nodded. They had all been prepared for this day over the short years of their lives. But Ayu, my oldest, narrowed his eyes to a squint and folded his arms over his chest, as if he understood more than I was saying. Those eyes were mine looking back at me, calling me a liar. “Do you understand, Ayu?” I asked him directly, to stop him from making that look. When he refused to answer, I asked, “Paul, do you understand me?” and he looked down at his feet, the head of a flower wilting.

I stood again, took up their small hands again, and lead them to Eliza’s gates, the top of which was decorated with a flourish of coiled barbed wire. A small, square window in the door opened as we stood waiting, and a man’s eye looked out at us. “Are they ready?” he said.

I nodded.

The window snapped shut, then the gate doors began to separate, widening as they opened. Inside, we could see many people working, sparks flying, carts of coal going back and forth, the rumble of the mill distorting the voices of the workers. The man who had opened the gate window came from around the corner to greet us. He was small, stocky, with oily skin and a round face. He smiled, but I could not manage to be anything but straight-faced and stoic. He held his hands out to the little ones, who went to him, giving him their hands as they’d been instructed, and my heart filled my mouth, suffocating me, so that I fell to my knees and buried my face in my hands.

“Stupid cow,” the gateman said, and as soon as I took my hands away to look up, I saw Ayu running away, his feet kicking up dust behind him. “See what you’ve done?” Do not look back, I told Ayu with my mind, hoping he could somehow hear me. Do not look back or you will be detained here forever.

Then the gates shut with a metallic bang, and my small ones were gone from me, gone to Eliza.

The first month of my year in the city of my birth passed slowly, painfully, like the after effects of a night of drunkenness. For a while I had wondered if Ayu would return to the house at some point, to gather what few possessions he had made or acquired over his short lifetime, but he stayed away, smartly. My husband would have only taken him back to Eliza if he found him. That is the way, what is proper, and my husband here was nothing if not proper.

We made love every night, after he returned from the mill, his arms heavy around my waist, around my shoulders. But something had occurred on the day I’d given up the last ones: My womb had withered, and now refused to take our love and make something from its materials.

Still, we tried. Or I should say, my husband tried. Perhaps that was the reason for my body’s reluctance. Whenever his breath fell against my neck, or his mouth on my breasts, I would look out the window and see Eliza’s fires scouring the sky across the mountaintops, and what children we may have made, the idea of them, would burn to cinders.

“You do not love me anymore,” my husband said one night, in my second month in the city; and though I wanted to, badly, I could not deny this.

I tried to explain. “It is not you, it is not me, it is this place,” I told him. “Why don’t you come with me, why don’t we leave here together?”

“You forget so easily,” my husband said, looking down into his mug of cold coffee.

“What?” I said. “What do I forget?”

“You have people there, in the place you would take me.”

I looked down into my own mug and did not nod.

“It is what allows you to forget me, to forget our children, our life,” said my husband.

“What is?” I asked, looking up again. Rarely did my husband tell me things about myself.

“Your bad memory,” said my husband. “It is your blessing.”

If my memory were truly as bad as my husband thought, I would not have been returned to the city of my birth. He was incorrect in his judgment. What he should have said was, Your memory is too strong to accomplish what you desire, for I would not have been able to dismiss that. It is true, I wanted nothing more than to eradicate, to be born into a new world without the shackles of longing, and the guilt that embitters longing fulfilled.

But he had said his truth, flawed as it was, and because he had spoken this truth we could no longer look at each other without it hovering between us, a ghost of every child we had ever had together, every child I had taken, as a proper wife and mother, to the gates. They stared at me for him, and I would turn away to cook, clean, mend, to keep the walls of the house together.

Another month passed in this way, and then another. I washed my husband’s clothes each day in a tub of scalding water. The skin on my hands began to redden, then to peel away. I began to avoid mirrors. My hair had gone lank and hung about my face like coils of old rope, no matter how I tried to arrange it. I could no longer see my own pupils, for there was no white left in the corners. My eyes had turned dark with coal dust and smoke.

One day a knock at the front door pulled me away from the dinner I was making for my husband’s return from another sixteen-hour shift. When I opened the door, a man from the mill, a manager I vaguely recognized, was standing on my stoop. He held a hat against his protruding stomach, as if he had taken it off to recite a pledge or a piece of poetry. “Excuse me,” he said, “for interrupting your day. But I come with sad news.”

Before he could finish, I knew what he would say. Few reasons exist for a mill manager to visit a worker’s wife.

“Your husband,” he said, and I could not hear the rest of his words, only saw the images they carried within them: my husband, a slab of meat on the floor of the mill, burned by Eliza. My husband, a slab of meat on the floor of the mill, dragged away to be replaced by another body, another man, so that Eliza could continue her labors.

“You will need time to rest, of course,” the manager said. “I’m sure it is quite a shock, but these things happen.”

I nodded, dumbly, and stood there, waiting for something.

“We will be in touch, of course,” said the manager as he stepped off my stoop back onto the cobbled street.

If I would have had any sense left in me, I would have done what Ayu had done, I would have run away as fast as possible, I would have done what I had done before, a long time ago, when I’d left the first time, with my mother’s hand raised in the air above her cloud of white hair, waving behind me.

Instead, I sank down into my husband’s chair in the front room and wept. For him, for our children, wept selfishly for myself. What would I do without him? I could feel him all around me, his big body having pressed its shape into the armchair, holding me in its embrace.

Within a week, a mass of suitors arranged themselves in a queue outside my door. They knocked. I answered. One was always waiting to speak to me, big and hulking like my husband had been, a little younger in some cases, a little older in others. Used up men and men in the process of being used. They wanted me to cook, clean, and make love to them. I turned them away, all of them. “No thank you,” I said to each knock, glancing over their shoulders to see if the line of suitors had shortened. It stretched down the street and around the corner, no matter how many men I turned away.

There was a shortage of women, one of the suitors finally informed me, trying to make his case as a rational man, to explain himself as suitable for someone like me. There were many men in need of a good wife.

“I am not a good wife,” I told him. “You must go to another house of mourning,” I told him. “You must find a different wife.”

The suitors disappeared then. One by one they began to walk away from the queue they had formed, and for a while my front stoop was empty. I went back to sitting in my husband’s chair, grieving.

My memory was bad, he had told me, but he was wrong. My memory kept him walking the halls and the staircase, my memory refused to let go of him completely, as it had refused to let go each time I left. I die a little more each time you are away, he had said the first night of my return to the city. Now he was dead, I thought, there would be no more dying. Upon realizing this, I stood up from his chair.

Before I could take a step in any direction of my own choosing, though, a knock arrived at the front door, pulling me toward it. How quickly we resume routine, how quickly we do what is expected: A child cries out, we run to it; something falls in another room, we turn corners to see what has fallen; a knock lands upon a door, we answer.

Outside stood three men, all in dark suits with the gold chains of pocket watches drooping from their pockets. They wore top hats, and long waxed mustaches. They wore round spectacles in thin wire frames. I recognized them for what they were immediately: captains of industry. But what could they be doing here, I wondered, on the front stoop of a widow at a forgettable address in the Lost Neighborhood, down in Junction Hollow.

“Forgive us for intruding,” they said. “We do not mean to startle you.”

They introduced themselves, each one tipping his hat as he delivered his name: A.W., H.C., R.B. All captains’ names are initials. It is their badge of honor.

“We understand,” they said, “that you have recently lost your husband.”

I nodded, slow and stupid.

“And we understand that you have turned away all of the many suitors who have come requesting your hand in marriage,” they continued.

I nodded again.

“We are here to inquire as to your plans, madame, for the future,” they said, and took their pocket watches out to check the time, to see if the future had arrived yet. “Do you mean to marry again?” they asked. “Do you plan to provide us with more children?”

I shook my head this time, and opened my mouth to ask the purpose of their visit. But before I could form one word, they tapped at my chest with their white-gloved hands.

“Now, now,” they said, slipping their watches back into their pockets. “No need for any of that.”

Then they took hold of my arms and pushed me back into my house, closing the door behind them.

Within the passing of a night I became sick with their children; within a week, the front of my housedress began to tighten; and within a month, I gave birth: three in all. One by one, their children ripped away from me and grew to the size of the children I had walked to the gates of Eliza.

I did not need to feed them. They grew from the nourishment of my tears and rages. They knew how to walk and talk instinctively, and began to make bargains with one another, trading clothes and toys and whole tracts of land.

Soon their fathers returned to claim them. “Thank you very much,” said the captains, as they presented each child with a pocket watch, a pair of white gloves, a top hat. Then they looked at me. “In return for your troubles, we have built you a library.”

They swept their arms in wide arcs to the opposite side of the street. Where once a row of houses stood shoulder to shoulder, now a three-story library parked its bulk along the sidewalk. “Where are my neighbors?” I asked. “Where are my friends?”

“We have moved them to another part of the city,” said the captains. “Do not worry. We are in the midst of building them their own library at this very moment. We do not take, you see, without giving back.”

Then they clapped their hands and curled their index fingers over and over, motioning for their top-hatted, white-gloved children to follow, checking the time on their new pocket watches as they walked toward the financial district.

A dark rumor soon began to circulate throughout the back rooms in pubs and in the common rooms of the libraries of Smoke City. The captains’ children were growing faster than their fathers could manage, it was said. The captains themselves, it was said, were having difficulties with their wives, who remained in their stone mansions on top of the mountains ringing the city, above the strata of smoke. One wife had committed suicide and another had snuck out of her mansion in the middle of the night, grew wings, and flew across the ocean to her home country, where her captain had found her many years ago sitting by a river, strumming a stringed instrument and singing a ballad of lost love. Those of us who lived below their homes above the point where the wind blew smoke away from the captains’ houses had never seen these women, but we knew they were aching with beauty.

I could see it all now, what lay behind that terrible evening, and the plans the captains’ children had been making as they’d left with their fathers, opening the backs of their pocket watches to examine the gears clicking inside, taking them out to hold up to the non-existent light.

Indeed, the future spread out before me, a horizon appearing where the captains’ sons were building machines out of the gears of their pocket watches, and more men lumbered away from the mills every day to sit on porches and frustrate their wives who did not know how to take care of them while they were in their presence.

A future will always reveal itself, even in places like Smoke City.

But smoke nor soot nor the teeth of gears as they turned what arms once turned, as they ground time to chafe and splinters, could not provide the future I desired. I had seen something else—a long time ago, it seemed now, or a long time to come—and though it came with the price of unshakable memory, I began the journey that would return me to it.

Through the streets I trudged to the Incline platform, where I waited for my car wearing nothing but my worn-out housedress, my old shoes covered in mud and the stinking feces of horses. No one looked at me. I was not unnatural.

When the car arrived, I climbed in. And when the car began to lift, rickety-click, I breathed a small sigh. This time, though, as I turned to peer out the back window, my mother was not there, waving her hand in the air. Only the city. Only the city and its rooftops spread out behind me. This time, I was leaving without the cobwebs of the past clinging to me.

On the way up, a car went by in the opposite direction, carrying a woman with her man inside it. I stared at her for a moment, staring at me through her window, a frightened look on her face, before I broke our gaze to look up at the mouth of the Fourth River’s cavern, and the water spilling from it.

When the car reached the top, I exited to wander through the lantern-lit cavern, the river beside me, until the walls were bare and no lanterns lit the way any longer, and the roar of the river was in my ears and the dark of the cave filled my eyes.

At some point, I felt the chill of rising water surround me. It trickled over my toes at first, then lifted me off my feet. I began to swim upward, pulling my arms through the current, kicking my legs furiously. Up and up and up I swam, until I opened my eyes to sunlight, blue skies that hurt to look at, yellow bridges, vast hills of green, and somewhere on the other side of this city my husband in this place would be waking up to find I had left him in the middle of the night again. He would wake the children next, the children I would never give over, and together they would walk to the place where I found myself surfacing. They have come across me here before. My husband will take my hand, say, “Early riser,” and I would bring his hand to my lips to kiss it.

I gasped, taking the blue air into my lungs, the light into my eyes. The city, the city of my refuge, spread out before me, the rivers on either side of me spangled with light, a fountain spraying into the air, the towers of downtown gleaming. The smoke of that other city was gone now, the fires in that other sky were nowhere on this horizon. The smoke and the fires were in some other world, and I found that I could only weep now, selfishly grateful that it was no longer mine.

© 2011 Christopher Barzak.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award winning novel, One for Sorrow. His second book, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula and Tiptree Awards. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. He grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and has taught English in suburban and rural communities outside of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. His most recent book is Birds and Birthdays, a collection of surrealist fantasy stories. Forthcoming is Before and Afterlives, a collection of supernatural fantasies. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.

The Visited
Anaea Lay

“Manuel Black is dead. Long live Manuel Black.”

—Headline of the New York Times obituary

“Are you crazy? You may as well ask me to write a eulogy for God.”

—Me, when my editor assigned me this article

I was in love with Manuel Black from the moment I first heard “A Fragment, A Scar” at Penny Carson’s summer pool party my freshman year of high school and my devotion never wavered. Now that he’s gone everybody will say that, but they’re lying. By the end of sophomore year he’d disappeared, swallowed by a pit of depression and obscurity. That would have been the last we heard from him if not for the Visitation. Those were my private years with Black, the years of “Fragrant Like Stars” and “Eternity and I, We Miss You.” This is some of his best work, raw and broken, simple but fierce, and genuine. The seeds of what would emerge in the post-Visitation years are all there, but they’re missing the bleak optimism that suffuses his later work.

Black was born during the hour of the wolf on October 31st, 1987, to Maria Marquez and Robert Black. He was their first child after years of trying, a painful pregnancy, and two days of labor. Robert was so overjoyed when he heard about the birth of his son that he kissed the doctor. At 4:08AM, Robert held his son for the first time. He danced around the room, singing so loudly the entire maternity ward heard him. Reports of what he was singing conflict, but everybody agrees that he did. Then, at 4:17AM, baby Manuel still in his arms, Robert collapsed, dead. He’d always suffered from congenital heart problems, and the stress of the extended labor on top of a difficult pregnancy was too much for him.

So it was that Manuel carried a double-legacy from his first hour of life: a scar above his right eyebrow from hitting a table edge when Robert dropped him, and the conviction that by coming into the world, he’d slain his father.

—The Visited, Tanya Limth

The next time you’re wasting time at work, fire up one of the videos of Black from the Scarified tour. He was just twenty, a college drop-out who’d accidentally become famous when his video for “A Fragment, A Scar” went viral. He’s visibly uncomfortable on stage, his signature curls falling into his face, hiding him from the audience. It’s such a cliché of the stage-frightened musical genius, yet on Black it communicates a vulnerability that only grew with his confidence. Scarified Black was lost, overwhelmed, destined to seize our hearts and fade.

When you’re done with that, plug in “Manuel Black,” “The Ingress Lounge,” and “Loneliness of Forever” and start watching videos. They’re from his lost years, the pre-Visitation Black. It’s still him, but now he’s angry. He hasn’t found his Morrisonian black leather pants yet, but he’s not afraid of the audience anymore. Curls fly around his face as he stares them down, challenging them to answer the questions he raises with his lyrics, to justify the world in the face of his seething despair and melancholy. Critics of the time wrote the music off as angst-ridden wankery. Audiences found it unpalatably depressing and turned instead to catchy dance pop. Listen to it now and you’ll realize his melancholy was a foreshadowing of the post-Visitation malaise waiting for all of us, that his anger was founded in an optimistic belief that things could be different if we’d just bother to acknowledge they ought to be.

I took a break from college after my sophomore year. At the time I thought I was dropping out forever. This was just a few months after the first Visitation, and I had decided that I needed to do something different. I wasn’t the only one—people were dropping out, changing jobs and giving up at alarming rates. My parents were fairly understanding, even when I told them that my plan was to tramp across the country following a rock star. Lots of parents were understanding of lots of things in the months following the Visitation. The rest were too busy doing crazy things of their own.

What’s it like to meet somebody you’ve loved from a distance for years? Somebody you’d loved through obscurity only to have them break into popularity in the wake of the biggest communal trauma in the history of man? It’s nerves and sweating and making an ass of yourself in shoes you can’t walk in. It’s deciding to chuck out the shoes and stalk him back stage, then getting tongue-tied when he looks at you, until you blurt out, “I know exactly what you mean, in ‘Eternity and I.’” It’s proudly tweeting “Manuel Black stole my panties,” before remembering that your mother joined Twitter three months ago—her post-Visitation act-of-crazy.

We may never understand exactly what the Visitation was. Reports conflict, and there are as many reports as people who were alive at the time. What we do know is that at 10AM, GMT on October 31st, 2013, everybody on the planet had a vision. Some claim to have seen a man, others a woman. Most reports claim the figure they saw was unnaturally beautiful. They also claim to have sensed an intense longing. This report attempts to outline, categorize, and analyze the common themes across the corpus of available reports.

—The Visitation Commission Analysis

I saw them both. They were death, two-faced and beautiful. They wanted me. Oh god, they wanted me and I couldn’t bear it. I ran. I don’t even know how but I ran and they let me go.

I wish they hadn’t.

—The Unpublished Journals of Manuel Black

It was 3AM in L.A., where Black was crashing in a flophouse, when the Visitation happened. He immediately bent over his journals. By noon he’d barged into a friend’s home and commandeered his home studio. “The Faces, the Mark” was on the internet before the East Coast was heading home from work. It didn’t just go viral. Nearly every site hosting it went down under the traffic. In those few hours, Manuel Black had processed the trauma of being seized by something terribly, unfathomably beautiful, and being discarded. Our longing, our sense of disorientation, loss, our confusion around all of it, he had it there in a four-minute track. The technical elements of the song are massively complex, harmonies playing off each other and building, carrying the listener from whoever they were, through the revelation, and into what we were going to be after. Listening to that song made it feel like the world made sense, like we knew how to go forward from there. Just as long as we were listening to it. So we listened. On repeat. And we nearly brought down the internet.

We were all touched and disturbed by the Visitation, but none more so than Black. He’d found something of himself in the experience—and lost something. Never again would you hear his anger, his disappointed quest to change things. The world simply was, and he was powerless to change it. Instead, he explained it, became its prophet, its guide. The music he released in the weeks and months following the Visitation charted our course back to a sense of normalcy, a concept of our place in the universe. We couldn’t go back—there is no going back from facing your cosmic irrelevance—and we couldn’t have gone forward without him. In those weeks we were all in love with Manuel Black.

Did he love us back?

I stayed with the Visitation tour from its late May opening night at the Ingress Lounge in L.A. until their Boston stop in mid-October of the following year. I still can’t single out individual incidents from that time. I lived it as one long stretch, from the moment I confessed my adoration and he didn’t laugh until a shattering phone call from my dad brought me home. There are no pieces there. It doesn’t subdivide into anecdotes. That tour simply was, and it was marvelous and intense and ecstatic. I’ve talked to other people who traveled with Black, not just during the Visitation tour, but before as well. We all had the same experience. Spending time with Manual Black was living inside the Visitation, dwelling in 30 seconds that stretch on for eternity, skimming across months that pass in a moment. If we’d died on tour with him, the moment we joined would have been the last of our lives, one long, succulent, final moment. We all hate the people who were with him in New Orleans a little bit.

Kitman: You’re an international icon, your concerts sell out and overflow, people adore you. Is it enough?

Black: Enough what?

Kitman: Enough for you. Do you have everything you want?

Black: No.

Kitman: What’s left?

Black: You should never get everything you want. Not until your very last moment. Then, right as you’re leaving, then it’s okay. But if you have it before then, why would you ever go on? You’re just going to lose it.

Kitman: What is it that you still want?

Black: Something I ran from.

—Interview with Beth Kitman, Interior Examiner

From Boston, the Visitation tour veered South, landing in New Orleans. Black insisted on playing venues small enough to feel intimate, which meant that there were never enough tickets for his performances. That was why he started the live streams of his concerts, and the New Orleans gig was the biggest stream of the tour. We all waited while the opening bands fell behind schedule, delaying Black’s entrance more and more as the evening wore on. By the time the lights went up on Black at midnight, nearly a third of the adult populations of the U.S. was watching the stream. In the two days since his death, the video of the concert has been viewed over 100 million times. “Black’s New Orleans gig” is the Star Wars of our generation: Everybody saw it; some people watched it on repeat, letting it imprint itself on their bones.

Where were you when the stream cut out?

The second Visitation came at 8AM GMT, October 31st, 2015, two hours shy of the two-year anniversary of the first Visitation. There’s been lots of analysis to figure out why the people who saw it the second time did, what they had in common. Scientists and analysts and government cranks have spent millions combing through the data, and their explanation isn’t any better than the one we all knew instinctively right when it happened: It was after Manuel Black.

I was watching the stream on my cell phone while sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a soul-crushing hospital room, waiting for my mother to die of pancreatic cancer and an unwillingness to do anything about it. It was so different to see the show but not be there, to hear the music over a small, tinny speaker instead of feeling it in my sternum and the bottoms of my feet. I was crying before the stream cut out, lonely and alone, desperate to let Manuel Black carry me through this transition and into anything else.

The photos from when the authorities first arrived on the scene weren’t released for two years, so the staged photos of the event have become our canon. We know that Manuel Black stood on the stage, shirtless in his leather pants, his curls blowing in an ethereal breeze while his hands were turned up in supplication and he stared down the Visitation with mournful, hungry eyes. We know he was bathed in hard shadows and that his scar stood out more than it ever had before, that a black pendant glowed on his bare chest. We know he was gorgeous and impervious and innocent.

The sole survivor was a Hispanic male of approximately thirty years, 5’10”, black medium length hair. We found the subject prone on the stage in a state of extreme distress. He was naked except for a black pendant on a silver chain worn around his neck. Subject clutched the pendant and muttered unintelligibly. When officers attempted to engage subject, he withdrew. “You don’t understand,” he screamed. “I love them. I should have gone the first time.” Then he collapsed. At that point, paramedics on the scene took charge of the subject. At no point did he indicate awareness of the bodies in the room.

—Police Report from Investigation of the “New Orleans Gig”

We waited for Black to release a new track, to carry us through this new iteration of the crisis. But nothing came. Nobody heard from him for two months. “The Faces, The Mark” surged back to popularity, but it wasn’t the same. The second Visitation didn’t hurt us the way the first had. Or it hurt us differently.

I didn’t see anything. Had I been rejected? I couldn’t be sure and the doubt niggled at me. Did the people who had seen something feel like they’d failed somehow, too? I never asked anybody. None of us ever asked. We muddled our way through our post-Visitation lives without Black’s guidance.

That was as it should be.

Black never toured again, and only made one more public appearance, but he released tracks, and photos, and videos. He kept interpreting the world for us, kept telling us how to cope, kept paving our way through each day.

My favorite track from this period is “The Sacred Knight.” It’s a ballad—the instrumentation much simpler than in his more popular work—and a sublime interpretation of Lancelot as a hero torn between his devotion to a world shaped by chivalry, and his love, not just for Guinevere, but Arthur as well. The royal couple are the center around which Lancelot’s world rotates, so his devotion to one feeds his dedication to the other. He’s reflecting on that while debating whether he should go into the bedchamber and declare his affection, or continue to—honorably—stand guard outside. He tries to draw strength and guidance from a token Guinevere gave him the last time he struggled, but it tortures him with silence. The song ends before he makes a decision, leaving us with a bitter ambiguity. We know how the story ends, yet the song is so compelling we genuinely wonder. What does one do, torn between love of a thing and worship of the world it enables?

After four years of living alone in his Colorado ranch, Black made his last appearance two weeks ago by showing up in New York and giving an impromptu concert in Central Park. He hadn’t filed for permits or hired security—it was a public safety disaster waiting to happen. Given that everybody who attended his last public concert died during it, you’d think people would have stayed away. But they didn’t. The internet is full of videos showing police joining the crowd, hanging out and enjoying the music with everybody else when they should have shut it down.

And videos of Black? Maybe this is nostalgia, or wishful thinking, but he looks happy. He’s almost the twenty-year-old Black again, youthful and stunned to be popular, except that the confidence he learned over time is still there—and the leather pants. He’s having fun, the audience is having fun, and for two weeks we thought that maybe we’d turned a page, that we’d get to see Black again.

Manuel Black was found dead in his home early in the morning of October 31st, 2019. He was slumped over his journal, presumably because he’d been writing in it when he died. His estate released what he wrote. “It’s time to sit still, time to surrender, time to accept. This is the moment, and I refuse to lose anything. My loves, they’re coming again, and I am ready.”

I stretched out to forever

Hoping to find a trickle

A trace

A fragment of you

You tore a rent in the world

A scar, a mar, a wound

Waiting

Maybe you’ll hear me

Return to us, lover

We miss you

—Excerpted with Permission from “Eternity and I, We Miss You.”

Lyrics by Manuel Black.

© 2013 Anaea Lay.

Anaea Lay lives in Madison, Wisconsin where she sells real estate under a different name, writes, cooks, plays board games, spoils her cat, and plots to take over the world. The rumors that she never sleeps are not true. She has no comment on the rumors about the disconcerting noises emanating from her basement. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nightmare, Apex, Strange Horizons, Penumbra,and Shock Totem. Find her online at anaealay.com.

A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain
Karin Tidbeck

On a beach by the sea stands a gutted stone tower. A man is climbing up the remains of a staircase that spirals up the tower’s interior. Vivi sits on the roof, oblivious, counting coins that have spilled from her breast pocket: one fiver, three ones, one golden ten. She’s only wearing a worn pair of pajamas, and the damp breeze from the sea is making her shiver. She has no memory of how she arrived, but is vaguely aware of the sound of footsteps.

Eventually the footsteps arrive at the top, and stop. The man who has appeared on the roof is dressed in khakis and worn boots. Dark locks tumble down the left side of his face, which is beautiful in that ruddy way that belongs to adolescence.

Vivi looks up, startled. “Who are you?”

“I should ask you the same.” The man’s barely winded. “You’re trespassing. We’ve claimed this place.”

“I don’t understand,” says Vivi. “Who are you? And who are ‘we’?”

“Exploratory actors, of course.” He makes a mock bow. “We’re the Documentary Theatre Troupe. And you, as I said, are trespassing on our territory. I must ask you to come with me.”

Vivi follows him down the stairs, down the beach, and into a lush forest where the Documentary Theatre Troupe have made camp and eagerly greet their new audience.

The play is called The Tragedy of King Vallonius.Contrary to the title’s promise, the story is about a girl named Rosella, famed for her beauty and especially her lovely head of hair, so striking that she must wear a headscarf outside lest she attract unwanted attention. One day Rosella forgets to put her scarf on and goes for a walk with her head uncovered. A pedestrian passing by on the other side of the street sees her bright red hair and runs into a lamppost. The shopping bag he was carrying spills its contents in the street: vegetables, a bottle of milk, and a packet of soft butter. A man riding by on his bicycle slips in the patch of butter and falls over, cracking his head open on the stones. And this is where the Tragedy of King Vallonius comes in. The man on the bicycle was in fact the beloved monarch who liked to disguise himself as a commoner to see how his subjects were faring. Now that the king is dead, the country is plunged into a war with its neighboring nation. Rosella, in terror, shaves her head and never leaves her home again.

When the play is done, the troupe lines up and bows for applause. They look bewildered when Vivi doesn’t clap her hands.

“What did we do wrong?” says the Pedestrian.

“Nothing,” says Vivi. “I just don’t like it. Maybe the setting is wrong.”

“How about winter?” says Rosella, pulling off her skin-coloured rubber cap, letting her luxurious hair spill out.

Vivi wrinkles her nose. “I don’t like winter. And I don’t like Rosella. Also this would never happen in real life.”

“It would,” says the dead king from the floor, twirling his thick grey moustache. “This is based on real events. King Vallonius I died just this way, and that is how the kingdom of Pavalona fell to the Fedrans. We only enact stories that are true.”

“Absolutely, one hundred percent true,” Rosella agrees.

“There was never a king named Vallonius,” says Vivi.

“Of course there was,” replies the Pedestrian. “But not in your world.”

Apprentice hates playing Vivi, the sniveling girl from a boring dayworld that “encounters” strangeness and through that strangeness tells the story of a “documentary theatre troupe.” There are too many meta levels, too much self-referencing. Why would you set up a play about setting up a play? And the casting is always the same. Apprentice never gets to play the actor who does Rosella, or King Vallonius, or the Pedestrian; she has to be boring old Vivi, and Vivi’s grey tedium is sinking into her bones.

“You have to feel her to play her,” says Director, the third time she interrupts the play to correct Vivi. “Let her emotions bleed into yours.”

“She doesn’t have any,” Apprentice replies. “She’s a protagonist. She’s an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the audience.”

“That,” Director replies, “is what you read in some book. Now go back to your seat, be Vivi, watch the play. Do whatever Vivi would do.”

“She’d do exactly what I’m doing,” says Apprentice. “She’d be yawning and not liking it.”

“But only in the beginning,” says Director, “and you know it. She’ll become dazzled and intrigued by the strangeness of it all.”

“All right, all right. But I want to play someone else after this.”

“We’ll see,” says Director, and steps onto the stage, slipping back into the actor who plays Rosella.

Apprentice returns to her seat and to Vivi. It’s such a tedious, washed-out mind.

Vivi claps, mesmerized. The actors take her up onto the stage and put a red wig on her, almost as red as the one the other actress wears.

“You are now Rosella,” the old Rosella intones, “and this is what happened inside the Pedestrian’s head.”

The Pedestrian steps forward and touches Vivi’s—no, Rosella’s—breast. Rosella is less experienced than Vivi; Vivi frowns at her terror of this other man grasping at her body, but she must play along. Rosella’s fear and disgust bleeds into her, mingling with the unbearable excitement that comes from weeks of no sex, no touching. Vivi wants it. Rosella does not. Rosella screams, a short, high-pitched yelp as the Pedestrian starts tearing at her clothes. It is what he must do, as the Pedestrian, and Rosella must squeal and weep and eventually succumb to the desire his rough hands awaken in her, because deep down every woman hides a dream of being ravished by strange men.

King Vallonius, still dead in a pool of his own blood and brains, leers from the cobblestones. They chant in unison as Rosella passes through the stages of fear, terror, despair, surrender, and ecstasy. She rises up, naked and bleeding, a complete woman. The others clap their hands and cheer.

Vivi takes her wig off and thanks the Pedestrian, who is now just the actor shyly hunched over his own naked form.

“Now that was a good play,” says Vivi. “Well done! I feel refreshed.” She puts her pajamas back on.

“Excellent,” says the King, and sits up. “Let us have lunch and then push our stage out of Pavalona and to another place.”

“The Arctic?” asks the Pedestrian hopefully.

“I was rather hoping the Cyclades,” says Rosella.

“You think too small.” The King rips off his moustache. “But do let’s have lunch first.”

Everyone laughs. The Pedestrian claps his hands, and they all fall silent. As one, they turn outward, take each others’ hands, and make a slow bow. The trees respond with a compact silence.

“You have been watching Vivi and the Documentary Theatre Troupe!” Rosella bellows at the trees. “I present to you, in order of appearance: Apprentice, as Vivi!”

Apprentice takes a step forward and curtseys, pinching her pajama legs as if they were a skirt.

“Journeyman, as The Mysterious Guide and the Pedestrian!”

Journeyman—who, unlike the actor in the play, is unbothered by his nudity—makes an elegant court bow.

“The Eccentric Owner and the King, played by our beloved Nestor!”

Nestor hops forward, grace belying his aged face.

“And finally,” Rosella steps forward, “Nameless Actress and Rosella, played by myself. I am Director, and I hope you have enjoyed our show this evening, whoever you are and wherever you may be.”

They bow again. The trees whisper.

Apprentice goes to bed with a stomachache. Vivi’s character clings to her like grime. All Vivi wants is another rough fuck from that Pedestrian. She’s such a nasty cluster of control fantasies and boredom.

“Is anyone even watching?” Apprentice asks as they lie in their sleeping bags.

“Of course,” says Nestor. He scratches his upper lip with a dry noise. The King’s moustache gives him a rash.

“How do you know that?”

“Oh, I hear them sometimes, rustling their confectionery bags.”

Apprentice peers out into the darkness, the trees, the pinprick stars between their branches.

The next day, they are at the bottom of the sea. Director has decided on a straightforward play: The Prince and the Abyssal Queen. Journeyman is the Prince of Yr, and Director the Queen of the Abyssal Plain; Apprentice is The Sly Fish and Nestor the God of the Abyss.

The play begins as the fish has lured the fair Prince into an enchanted boat, which dives down into the ocean depths, the Sly Fish gleefully pulling it along on a string. The Prince is distraught, of course: He’s been abducted, he’s afraid of water and the dark. Three little anglerfish keep pace with the boat, lighting it with their lanterns. One of the smaller anglerfish tries to attach itself to the biggest one. It must be mating season.

The Prince reaches the bottom, treads onto the Abyssal Plain, and becomes the Queen’s consort. He’s snared by her spells and stays there for a year before the spell is broken. He begs the Sly Fish to help him flee to the surface; the fish agrees, in exchange for the Prince’s promise of the first living thing he loves. In a very striking scene, the Queen appeals to the God of the Abyss for aid, and he grants her the Harp of the Deep. The Queen sits on her throne, playing her harp to lure the Prince back.

Of course, there are twists. Quickly rising to the surface, the Prince’s ears are so damaged by the pressure changes that he is rendered deaf. He returns to the kingdom of Yr, where he enters into an arranged and unhappy marriage, but has a son he loves dearly. Over the years, he forgets about his promise to the Sly Fish, and one day brings his family to the beach. When the boy takes his first steps into the ocean, the Sly Fish pulls him under. But as soon as the boy’s head comes under the surface, the Harp of the Deep claims him; it’s in his blood to return to the Abyssal Plain. Thus the Sly Fish loses as it always must, and the Queen receives something but not what she asked for, and the Prince of Yr pays for his idiocy in blood.

They make camp under the boat, which is much more roomy when turned upside down. Two of the anglerfish have disappeared off to somewhere, leaving the third one to float alone under the ceiling. Director and Journeyman embrace in the fore, both moved to tears by the story’s unbearably sad conclusion. Nestor is sound asleep at the aft, chin reduced to a rashy mess from the ocean god’s beard. Apprentice lies in the middle, still in her fish costume, listlessly flopping her ventral fins. The Sly Fish’s dreams of love, just a little love, insist on crowding her thoughts. It’s the loneliest creature in the ocean. She eventually falls asleep, lulled by the sound of blood rushing in her ears and the rhythmic rasp of the anglerfish’s lantern scraping the hull.

Apprentice wakes with flailing arms. Her hand hits something soft, and Nestor mutters irritably in his sleep. Disturbed by the motion, silt tickles her arms. It’s crept up on her while she slept. In the pale light of the anglerfish’s lantern, everyone else seems to be asleep. Apprentice is wide awake. She gently catches the anglerfish in her hand and crawls out from under the upended boat.

The water outside is crushingly cold, pressing down with the weight of the world. Outside of the tiny sphere of light the weakly struggling anglerfish gives off, darkness is absolute. Apprentice slowly steps out onto the abyssal plain, back bent under kilometers of sea. She can just about see her own feet shuffling through the silt, sometimes disturbing the odd object: a Roman coin, a blackened silver fork. Blind and transparent fish appear in the gloom. Some of them follow, the wanderers between the depths, those who still have eyes; they flash arcane patterns at her in fluorescent blue and green. In the utter silence, Apprentice thinks she hears the sound of flutes far away, a discordant piping.

Eventually something winks in the distance, like a star, or another swinging lantern. Apprentice strides toward it.

It’s a bathyscaphe, round like a fruit, with a porthole out of which spills a warm yellow light. The winking light comes from a small headlight at the top. There’s a face in the porthole that doesn’t belong to anyone in the company. It’s a stranger. A woman. She motions for Apprentice to walk around to the other side of the bathyscaphe, to where a little airlock protrudes from the sphere. Apprentice turns the wheel, stops inside, closes the door and watches the water drain out. The inner door opens, releasing a puff of warm air.

The woman is in her fifties. She’s dressed in dungarees and a knitted sweater, one of those sweaters with a pattern that stops at the waist, because the rest is for tucking inside the dungarees. She’s barefoot. Apprentice wonders if the pattern belongs to a particular family.

“Hello,” says the woman and peers at Apprentice. Her eyes are a little glassy and unfocused.

“Hello,” says Apprentice.

They look at each other in silence.

“You’re dressed like a fish,” the woman remarks.

“I play the Sly Fish.” Apprentice flaps a ventral fin.

The woman nods slowly. “All right. I’m Ada.” She extends a hand.

Apprentice shakes it. “Apprentice. Are you the audience?”

“Apprentice what?”

“Just Apprentice.”

“I see. And what are you doing here? It’s the bottom of the ocean.” Ada tilts her head. “I expect you’re a hallucination. I must be suffocating already.”

“You’re very pink,” says Apprentice. “People who suffocate are blue. Anyway I’m here with the troupe. Are you the audience?”

“Troupe?”

“Yes, the troupe! We’re here!”

Ada shakes her head. “What do you do exactly?”

“We . . .” Apprentice falters. “It’s we who play the stories.”

“Never heard of you.”

“So you’re not here to watch?”

“I wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place.” She extends a hand to caress a cluster of tubes running down the inside of the wall. “This is the Laika. I thought it was a fitting name. Small, round, and lonely, you know?” Ada chuckles to herself. “Anyway, I was taking her for a test drive. Checking the systems and such. We were going into the Mariana Trench, eventually. Not the Challenger Deep, mind. Not yet. Anyway, I knew there was a risk. Should have known better than to christen her Laika. I’m Laika, really.”

“Uh,” says Apprentice. “Who’s Laika?”

“She was a dog that . . . oh never mind. The point is, the cable snapped and so did the oxygen line.” Ada pauses. “Actually I’m not sure. I think maybe something chewed on it. It’s gone, anyway. I’m done for.”

“Oh,” says Apprentice absently. She swallows at the knot that’s suddenly formed in her throat.

“I’m just waiting for the oxygen to run out.” Ada sighs. “Didn’t expect to meet anyone down here, though. Nothing like you. So I’m probably hallucinating already. I should be grateful, I suppose.”

Wet warmth spills down Apprentice’s face.

“Oh, come on,” says Ada. “You don’t have to feel sorry for me.”

Apprentice wipes her face with her fin, her stupid fish fin. “I . . .” The word drowns in a sob. She tries again. “I thought you were here to watch.” She pulls snot back into her nose. “I keep telling Nestor, what if there’s no one who’s watching, and he says of course they are, but I was always unsure, and now that you were here I thought . . . but you’re not. You’re just here to die.”

Ada’s expression goes from surprise to faint disgust to a sad smile. She pats Apprentice on the shoulder.

“You know, I’d love to watch a play.”

Apprentice returns to the boat, waking the rest of the troupe up with her shouts: “We have an audience! We have an audience! A real one!”

“We always have an audience,” mumbles Nestor.

“Not like this. I promise.”

They walk the boat over to Ada’s bathyscaphe, and there’s Ada in the window, smiling and waving. Under the cover of the boat, Director slips into the Queen’s regalia, Nestor fastens his beard and Journeyman combs his long hair.

In variation number two of The Prince and the Abyssal Queen, the Prince regrets his return to the surface. Deafened from his journey upward, he can hear nothing but the whisper of the ocean, which fills him with longing. The daylight is too bright, the air too dry, the servants too clumsy. One moonlit night, he wades out into the sea where the Sly Fish comes to fetch him.

“Where is my present?” says the Sly Fish in the silent language spoken on the ocean floor. “You must keep your part of our agreement.”

“You will have it soon,” says the Prince.

Of course he has no present for the Fish; he has not yet fallen in love, but he is trying to buy time, so that the Fish will at least deliver him to the Abyssal Plain.

The moment his feet touch the silt, the Queen appears.

“I miss the sea,” says the Prince, “but I will not be your slave. I will stay here as your courtier.”

“Very well,” says the Queen. “I have treated you unfairly. As compensation, you may stay in my court for a year.”

As the Prince takes the Queen’s pale hand and looks into her transparent eyes, he finally realizes the truth. “I love you,” he says. “You need no spell but your own self.”

The Sly Fish collapses in horror. Of all the living things the Prince loved first, it had to be the Queen. And as the Queen created the Sly Fish out of her own flesh, it would be like promising the Fish to itself, which is impossible. The bargain is null and void, and the Fish once again thwarted. Apprentice lives out the Sly Fish’s misery in an exquisite dance.

Ada watches through her porthole the whole time. As the ensemble take their bows, she claps her hands soundlessly. She is beginning to look a little tired, but nods with a smile when Director mimes her an offer of another variation.

When the God of the Abyss has deus ex machinaed, and the Sly Fish’s devilish attempt at toppling the Queen has been averted, and the Queen and the Prince live happily ever after, Ada has slumped forward with her forehead against the glass. Her broken eyes stare blindly into the ocean gloom. The Company takes one last bow.

“We had a spectator,” says Apprentice.

“We always have spectators,” says Nestor. “But this time we had a spectator up close.”

“Can we do it again?” says Journeyman.

Director nods.

They perform all the varieties of the Abyssal Plain stories, including some where the Sly Fish also gets to live happily ever after, until they have no more and Journeyman is so suffused with the Prince’s feelings he cannot speak his lines and Director must hold him while he cries. By then most of the anglerfish have left.

“I think it’s time to move on,” states Director.

They bring the bathyscaphe, Apprentice tugging it along on a string. Ada is such a good and appreciative audience, and they have many more plays for her to enjoy. Transporting the bathyscape on land will be a problem for later.

© 2013 Karin Tidbeck.

Karin Tidbeck lives in Malmö, Sweden, and writes in Swedish and English. Her stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Shimmer, Unstuck Annual, and the anthologies Odd? and Steampunk Revolution. She has published a story collection and a novel in Swedish; a collection in English, Jagannath, came out in November 2012. She blogs at karintidbeck.com.

Dinner in Audoghast
Bruce Sterling

“Then one arrives at Audoghast, a large and very populous city built in a sandy plain. . . . The inhabitants live in ease and possess great riches. The market is always crowded; the mob is so huge and the chattering so loud that you can scarcely hear your own words. . . . The city contains beautiful buildings and very elegant homes.” Description of Northern Africa, Abu Ubayd al-Bakri (1040-1094 A.D.)

Delightful Audoghast! Renowned through the civilized world, from Cordova to Baghdad, the city spread in splendor beneath a twilit Saharan sky. The setting sun threw pink and amber across adobe domes, masonry mansions, tall, mud-brick mosques, and open plazas thick with bristling date-palms. The melodious calls of market vendors mixed with the remote and amiable chuckling of Saharan hyenas.

Four gentlemen sat on carpets in a tiled and whitewashed portico, sipping coffee in the evening breeze. The host was the genial and accomplished slave-dealer, Manimenesh. His three guests were Ibn Watunan, the caravan master; Khayali, the poet and musician; and Bagayoko, a physician and court assassin.

The home of Manimenesh stood upon the hillside in the aristocratic quarter, where it gazed down on an open marketplace and the mud-brick homes of the lowly. The prevailing breeze swept away the city reek, and brought from within the mansion the palate-sharpening aromas of lamb in tarragon and roast partridge in lemons and eggplant. The four men lounged comfortably around a low inlaid table, sipping spiced coffee from Chinese cups, and watching the ebb and flow of market life.

The scene below them encouraged a lofty philosophical detachment. Manimenesh, who owned no less than fifteen books, was a well-known patron of learning. Jewels gleamed on his dark, plump hands, which lay cozily folded over his paunch. He wore a long tunic of crushed red velvet, and a gold-threaded skullcap.

Khayali, the young poet, had studied architecture and verse in the schools of Timbuktu. He lived in the household of Manimenesh as his poet and praisemaker, and his sonnets, ghazals, and odes were recited throughout the city. He propped one elbow against the full belly of his two-string guimbri guitar of inlaid ebony, strung with leopard gut.

Ibn Watunan had an eagle’s hooded gaze and hands calloused by camel reins. He wore an indigo turban and a long striped djellaba. In thirty years as a sailor and caravaneer, he had bought and sold Zanzibar ivory, Sumatran pepper, Ferghana silk, and Cordovan leather. Now a taste for refined gold had brought him to Audoghast, for Audoghast’s African bullion was known throughout Islam as the standard of quality.

Doctor Bagayoko’s ebony skin was ridged with an initiate’s scars, and his long, clay-smeared hair was festooned with knobs of chiselled bone. He wore a tunic of white Egyptian cotton, hung with gris-gris necklaces, and his baggy sleeves bulged with herbs and charms. He was a native Audoghastian of the animist persuasion, the personal physician of the city’s Prince.

Bagayoko’s skill with powders, potions, and unguents made him an intimate of Death. He often undertook diplomatic missions to the neighboring Empire of Ghana. During his last visit there, the anti-Audoghast faction had conveniently suffered a lethal outbreak of pox.

Between the four men was the air of camaraderie common to gentlemen and scholars.

They finished the coffee and a slave took the empty pot away. A second slave, a girl from the kitchen staff, arrived with a wicker tray loaded with olives, goat-cheese, and hard-boiled eggs sprinkled with vermilion. At that moment, a muezzin yodeled the evening call to prayer.

“Ah,” said Ibn Watunan, hesitating. “Just as we were getting started.”

“Never mind,” said Manimenesh, helping himself to a handful of olives. “We’ll pray twice next time.”

“Why was there no noon prayer today?” said Watunan.

“Our muezzin forgot,” the poet said.

Watunan lifted his shaggy brows. “That seems rather lax.”

Doctor Bagayoko said, “This is a new muezzin. The last was more punctual, but, well, he fell ill.” Bagayoko smiled urbanely and nibbled his cheese.

“We Audoghastians like our new muezzin better,” said the poet, Khayali. “He’s one of our own, not like that other fellow, who was from Fez. Our muezzin is sleeping with a Christian’s wife. It’s very entertaining.”

“You have Christians here?” Watunan said.

“A clan of Ethiopian Copts,” said Manimenesh. “And a couple of Nestorians.”

“Oh,” said Watunan, relaxing. “For a moment I thought you meant real feringhee Christians, from Europe.”

“From where?” Manimenesh was puzzled.

“Very far away,” said Ibn Watunan, smiling. “Ugly little countries, with no profit.”

“There were empires in Europe once,” said Khayali knowledgeably. “The Empire of Rome was almost as big as the modern civilized world.”

Watunan nodded. “I have seen the New Rome, called Byzantium. They have armored horsemen, like your neighbors in Ghana. Savage fighters.”

Bagayoko nodded, salting an egg. “Christians eat children.”

Watunan smiled. “I can assure you that the Byzantines do no such thing.”

“Really?” said Bagayoko. “Well, our Christians do.”

“That’s just the doctor’s little joke,” said Manimenesh. “Sometimes strange rumors spread about us, because we raid our slaves from the Nyam-Nyam cannibal tribes on the coast. But we watch their diet closely, I assure you.”

Watunan smiled uncomfortably. “There is always something new out of Africa. One hears the oddest stories. Hairy men, for instance.”

“Ah,” said Manimenesh. “You mean gorillas, from the jungles to the south. I’m sorry to spoil the story for you, but they are nothing better than beasts.”

“I see,” said Watunan. “That’s a pity.”

“My grandfather owned a gorilla once,” Manimenesh said. “Even after ten years, it could barely speak Arabic.”

They finished the appetizers. Slaves cleared the table and brought in a platter of fattened partridges, stuffed with lemons and eggplants, on a bed of mint and lettuce. The four diners leaned in closer and dexterously ripped off legs and wings.

Watunan sucked meat from a drumstick and belched politely. “Audoghast is famous for its cooks,” he said. “I’m pleased to see that this legend, at least, is confirmed.”

“We Audoghastians pride ourselves on the pleasures of table and bed,” said Manimenesh, pleased. “I have asked Elfelilet, one of our premiere courtesans, to honor us with a visit tonight. She will bring her troupe of dancers.”

Watunan smiled. “That would be splendid. One tires of boys on the trail. Your women are remarkable. I’ve noticed that they go without the veil.”

Khayali lifted his voice in song. “When a woman of Audoghast appears/The girls of Fez bite their lips,/The dames of Tripoli hide in closets,/And Ghana’s women hang themselves.”

“We take pride in the exalted status of our women,” said Manimenesh. “It’s not for nothing that they command a premium market price!”

In the marketplace, downhill, vendors lit tiny oil lamps, which cast a flickering glow across the walls of tents and the watering troughs. A troop of the Prince’s men, with iron spears, shields, and chainmail, marched across the plaza to take the night watch at the Eastern Gate. Slaves with heavy water-jars gossiped beside the well.

“There’s quite a crowd around one of the stalls,” said Bagayoko.

“So I see,” said Watunan. “What is it? Some news that might affect the market?”

Bagayoko sopped up gravy with a wad of mint and lettuce. “Rumor says there’s a new fortune-teller in town. New prophets always go through a vogue.”

“Ah yes,” said Khayali, sitting up. “They call him ‘the Sufferer.’ He is said to tell the most outlandish and entertaining fortunes.”

“I wouldn’t trust any fortune-teller’s market tips,” said Manimenesh. “If you want to know the market, you have to know the hearts of the people, and for that you need a good poet.”

Khayali bowed his head. “Sir,” he said, “live forever.”

It was growing dark. Household slaves arrived with pottery lamps of sesame oil, which they hung from the rafters of the portico. Others took the bones of the partridges and brought in a haunch and head of lamb with a side-dish of cinnamon tripes.

As a gesture of esteem, the host offered Watunan the eyeballs, and after three ritual refusals the caravan-master dug in with relish. “I put great stock in fortune-tellers, myself,” he said, munching. “They are often privy to strange secrets. Not the occult kind, but the blabbing of the superstitious. Slave-girls anxious about some household scandal, or minor officials worried over premonitions—inside news from those who consult them. It can be useful.”

“If that’s the case,” said Manimenesh, “perhaps we should call him up here.”

“They say he is grotesquely ugly,” said Khayali. “He is called ‘the Sufferer’ because he is outlandishly afflicted by disease.”

Bagayoko wiped his chin elegantly on his sleeve. “Now you begin to interest me!”

“It’s settled, then.” Manimenesh clapped his hands. “Bring young Sidi, my errand runner!”

Sidi arrived at once, dusting flour from his hands. He was the cook’s teenage son, a tall young black in a dyed woollen djellaba. His cheeks were stylishly scarred and he had bits of brass wire interwoven with his dense black locks. Manimenesh gave him his orders; Sidi leaped from the portico, ran downhill through the garden, and vanished through the gates.

The slave-dealer sighed. “This is one of the problems of my business. When I bought my cook she was a slim and lithesome wench, and I enjoyed her freely. Now years of dedication to her craft have increased her market value by twenty times, and also made her as fat as a hippopotamus, though that is beside the point. She has always claimed that Sidi is my child, and since I don’t wish to sell her, I must make allowance. I have made him a freeman; I have spoiled him, I’m afraid. On my death, my legitimate sons will deal with him cruelly.”

The caravan-master, having caught the implications of this speech, smiled politely. “Can he ride? Can he bargain? Can he do sums?”

“Oh,” said Manimenesh with false nonchalance, “he can manage that newfangled stuff with the zeroes well enough.”

“You know I am bound for China,” said Watunan. “It is a hard road that brings either riches or death.”

“He runs the risk in any case,” the slave-dealer said philosophically. “The riches are Allah’s decision.”

“This is truth,” said the caravan-master. He made a secret gesture, beneath the table, where the others could not see. His host returned it, and Sidi was proposed, and accepted, for the Brotherhood.

With the night’s business over, Manimenesh relaxed, and broke open the lamb’s steamed skull with a silver mallet. They spooned out the brains, then attacked the tripes, which were stuffed with onion, cabbage, cinnamon, rue, coriander, cloves, ginger, pepper, and lightly dusted with ambergris. They ran out of mustard dip and called for more, eating a bit more slowly now, for they were approaching the limits of human capacity.

They then sat back, pushing away platters of congealing grease, and enjoying a profound satisfaction with the state of the world. Down in the marketplace, bats from an abandoned mosque chased moths around the vendors’ lanterns.

The poet belched suavely and picked up his two-stringed guitar. “Dear God,” he said, “this is a splendid place. See, caravan-master, how the stars smile down on our beloved Southwest.” He drew a singing note from the leopard-gut strings. “I feel at one with Eternity.”

Watunan smiled. “When I find a man like that, I have to bury him.”

“There speaks the man of business,” the doctor said. He unobtrusively dusted a tiny pinch of venom on the last chunk of tripe, and ate it. He accustomed himself to poison. It was a professional precaution.

From the street beyond the wall, they heard the approaching jingle of brass rings. The guard at the gate called out. “The Lady Elfelilet and her escorts, lord!”

“Make them welcome,” said Manimenesh. Slaves took the platters away, and brought a velvet couch onto the spacious portico. The diners extended their hands; slaves scrubbed and towelled them clean.

Elfelilet’s party came forward through the fig-clustered garden: two escorts with gold-tipped staffs heavy with jingling brass rings; three dancing-girls, apprentice courtesans in blue woolen cloaks over gauzy cotton trousers and embroidered blouses; and four palanquin bearers, beefy male slaves with oiled torsos and calloused shoulders. The bearers set the palanquin down with stifled grunts of relief and opened the cloth-of-gold hangings.

Elfelilet emerged, a tawny-skinned woman, her eyes dusted in kohl and collyrium, her hennaed hair threaded with gold wire. Her palms and nails were stained pink; she wore an embroidered blue cloak over an intricate, sleeveless vest and ankle-tied silk trousers starched and polished with myrobolan lacquer. A light freckling of smallpox scars along one cheek delightfully accented her broad, moonlike face.

“Elfelilet, my dear,” said Manimenesh, “you are just in time for dessert.”

Elfelilet stepped gracefully across the tiled floor and reclined face-first along the velvet couch, where the well-known loveliness of her posterior could be displayed to its best advantage. “I thank my friend and patron, the noble Manimenesh. Live forever! Learned doctor Bagayoko, I am your servant. Hello, poet.”

“Hello, darling,” said Khayali, smiling with the natural camaraderie of poets and courtesans. “You are the moon and your troupe of lovelies are comets across our vision.”

The host said, “This is our esteemed guest, the caravan master, Abou Bekr Ahmed Ibn Watunan.”

Watunan, who had been gaping in enraptured amazement, came to himself with a start. “I am a simple desert man,” he said. “I haven’t a poet’s gift of words. But I am your ladyship’s servant.”

Elfelilet smiled and tossed her head; her distended earlobes clattered with heavy chunks of gold filigree. “Welcome to Audoghast.”

Dessert arrived. “Well,” said Manimenesh. “Our earlier dishes were rough and simple fare, but this is where we shine. Let me tempt you with these djouzinkat nutcakes. And do sample our honey macaroons—I believe there’s enough for everyone.”

Everyone, except of course for the slaves, enjoyed the light and flaky cataif macaroons, liberally dusted with Kairwan sugar. The nutcakes were simply beyond compare: painstakingly milled from hand-watered wheat, lovingly buttered and sugared, and artistically studded with raisins, dates, and almonds.

“We eat djouzinkat nutcakes during droughts,” the poet said, “because the angels weep with envy when we taste them.”

Manimenesh belched heroically and readjusted his skullcap. “Now,” he said, “we will enjoy a little bit of grape wine. Just a small tot, mind you, so that the sin of drinking is a minor one, and we can do penance with the minimum of alms. After that, our friend the poet will recite an ode he has composed for the occasion.”

Khayali began to tune his two-string guitar. “I will also, on demand, extemporize twelve-line ghazals in the lyric mode, upon suggested topics.”

“And after our digestion has been soothed with epigrams,” said their host, “we will enjoy the justly famed dancing of her ladyship’s troupe. After that we will retire within the mansion and enjoy their other, equally lauded skills.”

The gate-guard shouted, “Your errand-runner, Lord! He awaits your pleasure, with the fortune-teller!”

“Ah,” said Manimenesh. “I had forgotten.”

“No matter, sir,” said Watunan, whose imagination had been fired by the night’s agenda.

Bagayoko spoke up. “Let’s have a look at him. His ugliness, by contrast, will heighten the beauty of these women.”

“Which would otherwise be impossible,” said the poet.

“Very well,” said Manimenesh. “Bring him forward.”

Sidi, the errand boy, came through the garden, followed with ghastly slowness by the crutch-wielding fortune-teller.

The man inched into the lamplight like a crippled insect. His voluminous, dust-gray cloak was stained with sweat and nameless exudations. His pink eyes were shrouded with cataracts, and he had lost a foot, and several fingers, to leprosy. One shoulder was much lower than the other, suggesting a hunchback, and the stub of his shin was scarred by the gnawing of canal-worms.

“Prophet’s beard!” said the poet. “He is truly of surpassing ghastliness!”

Elfelilet wrinkled her nose. “He reeks of pestilence!”

Sidi spoke up. “We came as fast as we could, Lord!”

“Go inside, boy,” said Manimenesh, “soak ten sticks of cinnamon in a bucket of water, then come back and throw it over him.”

Sidi left at once.

Watunan stared at the hideous man, who stood, quivering on one leg, at the edge of the light. “How is it, man, that you still live?”

“I have turned my sight from this world,” said the Sufferer. “I turned my sight to God, and He poured knowledge copiously upon me. I have inherited a knowledge which no mortal body can support.”

“But God is merciful,” said Watunan. “How can you claim this to be His doing?”

“If you do not fear God,” said the fortune-teller, “fear Him after seeing me.” The hideous albino lowered himself, with arthritic, aching slowness, to the dirt outside the portico. He spoke again. “You are right, caravan-master, to think that death would be a mercy to me. But death comes in its own time, as it will to all of you.”

Manimenesh cleared his throat. “Can you see our destinies, then?”

“I see the world,” said the Sufferer. “To see the fate of one man is to follow a single ant in a hill.”

Sidi reemerged and poured the scented water over the cripple. The fortune-teller cupped his maimed hands and drank. “Thank you, boy,” he said. He turned his clouded eyes on the youth. “Your children will be yellow.”

Sidi laughed, startled. “Yellow? Why?”

“Your wives will be yellow.”

The dancing-girls, who had moved to the far side of the table, giggled in unison. Bagayoko pulled a gold coin from within his sleeve. “I will give you this gold dirham if you will show me your body.”

Elfelilet frowned prettily and blinked her kohl-smeared lashes. “Oh, learned doctor, please spare us.”

“You will see my body, sir, if you have patience,” said the Sufferer. “As yet, the people of Audoghast laugh at my prophecies. I am doomed to tell the truth, which is harsh and cruel, and therefore absurd. As my fame grows, however, it will reach the ears of your Prince, who will then order you to remove me as a threat to public order. You will then sprinkle your favorite poison, powdered asp venom, into a bowl of chickpea soup I will receive from a customer. I bear you no grudge for this, as it will be your civic duty, and will relieve me of pain.”

“What an odd notion,” said Bagayoko, frowning. “I see no need for the Prince to call on my services. One of his spearmen could puncture you like a water-skin.”

“By then,” the prophet said, “my occult powers will have roused so much uneasiness that it will seem best to take extreme measures.”

“Well,” said Bagayoko, “that’s convenient, if exceedingly grotesque.”

“Unlike other prophets,” said the Sufferer, “I see the future not as one might wish it to be, but in all it’s cataclysmic and blind futility. That is why I have come here, to your delightful city. My numerous and totally accurate prophecies will vanish when this city does. This will spare the world of troublesome conflicts of predestination and free will.”

“He is a theologian!” the poet said. “A leper theologian—it’s a shame my professors in Timbuktu aren’t here to debate him!”

“You prophesy doom for our city?” said Manimenesh.

“Yes. I will be specific. This is the year 406 of the Prophet’s Hejira, and one thousand and fourteen years since the birth of Christ. In forty years, a puritan and fanatical cult of Moslems will arise, known as the Almoravids. At that time, Audoghast will be an ally of the Ghana Empire, who are idol-worshippers. Ibn Yasin, the warrior saint of the Almoravids, will condemn Audoghast as a nest of pagans. He will set his horde of desert marauders against the city; they will be enflamed by righteousness and greed. They will slaughter the men, and rape and enslave the women. Audoghast will be sacked, the wells will be poisoned, and cropland will wither and blow away. In a hundred years, sand dunes will bury the ruins. In five hundred years, Audoghast will survive only as a few dozen lines of narrative in the travel books of Arab scholars.”

Khayali shifted his guitar. “But the libraries of Timbuktu are full of books on Audoghast, including, if I may say so, our immortal tradition of poetry.”

“I have not yet mentioned Timbuktu,” said the prophet, “which will be sacked by Moorish invaders led by a blond Spanish eunuch. They will feed the books to goats.”

The company burst into incredulous laughter.

Unperturbed, the prophet said, “The ruin will be so general, so thorough, and so all-encompassing, that in future centuries it will be stated, and believed, that West Africa was always a land of savages.”

“Who in the world could make such a slander?” said the poet.

“They will be Europeans, who will emerge from their current squalid decline, and arm themselves with mighty sciences.”

“What happens then?” said Bagayoko, smiling.

“I can look at those future ages,” said the prophet, “but I prefer not to do so, as it makes my head hurt.”

“You prophesy, then,” said Manimenesh, “that our far-famed metropolis, with its towering mosques and armed militia, will be reduced to utter desolation.”

“Such is the truth, regrettable as it may be. You, and all you love, will leave no trace in this world, except a few lines in the writing of strangers.”

“And our city will fall to savage tribesmen?”

The Sufferer said, “No one here will witness the disaster to come. You will live out your lives, year after year, enjoying ease and luxury, not because you deserve it, but simply because of blind fate. In time you will forget this night; you will forget all I have said, just as the world will forget you and your city. When Audoghast falls, this boy Sidi, this son of a slave, will be the only survivor of this night’s gathering. By then he too will have forgotten Audoghast, which he has no cause to love. He will be a rich old merchant in Ch’ang-an, which is a Chinese city of such fantastic wealth that it could buy ten Audoghasts, and which will not be sacked and annihilated until a considerably later date.”

“This is madness,” said Watunan.

Bagayoko twirled a crusted lock of mud-smeared hair in his supple fingers. “Your gate guard is a husky lad, friend Manimenesh. What say we have him bash this storm-crow’s head in, and haul him out to be hyena food?”

“For that, doctor,” said the Sufferer, “I will tell you the manner of your death. You will be killed by the Ghanian royal guard, while attempting to kill the crown prince by blowing a subtle poison into his anus with a hollow reed.”

Bagayoko started. “You idiot, there is no crown prince.”

“He was conceived yesterday.”

Bagayoko turned impatiently to the host. “Let us rid ourselves of this prodigy!”

Manimenesh nodded sternly. “Sufferer, you have insulted my guests and my city. You are lucky to leave my home alive.”

The Sufferer hauled himself with agonizing slowness to his single foot. “Your boy spoke to me of your generosity.”

“What! Not one copper for your driveling.”

“Give me one of the gold dirhams from your purse. Otherwise I shall be forced to continue prophesying, and in a more intimate vein.”

Manimenesh considered this. “Perhaps it’s best.” He threw Sidi a coin. “Give this to the madman and escort him back to his raving-booth.”

They waited in tormented patience as the fortune-teller creaked and crutched, with painful slowness, into the darkness.

Manimenesh, brusquely, threw out his red velvet sleeves and clapped for wine. “Give us a song, Khayali.”

The poet pulled the cowl of his cloak over his head. “My head rings with an awful silence,” he said. “I see all waymarks effaced, the joyous pleasances converted into barren wilderness. Jackals resort here, ghosts frolic, and demons sport; the gracious halls, and rich boudoirs, that once shone like the sun, now, overwhelmed by desolation, seem like the gaping moths of savage beasts!” He looked at the dancing-girls, his eyes brimming with tears. “I picture these maidens, lying beneath the dust, or dispersed to distant parts and far regions, scattered by the hand of exile, torn to pieces by the fingers of expatriation.”

Manimenesh smiled on him kindly. “My boy,” he said, “if others cannot hear your songs, or embrace these women, or drink this wine, the loss is not ours, but theirs. Let us, then, enjoy all three, and let those unborn do the regretting.”

“Your patron is wise,” said Ibn Watunan, patting the poet on the shoulder. “You see him here, favored by Allah with every luxury; and you saw that filthy madman, bedeviled by plague. That lunatic, who pretends to great wisdom, only croaks of ruin; while our industrious friend makes the world a better place, by fostering nobility and learning. Could God forsake a city like this, with all its charms, to bring about that fool’s disgusting prophecies?” He lifted his cup to Elfelilet, and drank deeply.

“But delightful Audoghast,” said the poet, weeping. “All our loveliness, lost to the sands.”

“The world is wide,” said Bagayoko, “and the years are long. It is not for us to claim immortality, not even if we are poets. But take comfort, my friend. Even if these walls and buildings crumble, there will always be a place like Audoghast, as long as men love profit! The mines are inexhaustible, and elephants thick as fleas. Mother Africa will always give us gold and ivory.”

“Always?” said the poet hopefully, dabbing at his eyes.

“Well, surely there are always slaves,” said Manimenesh, and smiled, and winked. The others laughed with him, and there was joy again.

© 1985 by Bruce Sterling.

Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Bruce Sterling is the author of many novels, including Islands in the Net, Heavy Weather, Distraction, Holy Fire, The Zenith Angle, The Caryatids, and, with William Gibson, The Difference Engine. He is the winner of three Locus Awards, two Hugos, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He is also the editor of the seminal cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades. Much of his short fiction, which has appeared in magazines such as F&SF and Omni, was recently collected in Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling.

Author Spotlight: Nina Allan
Moshe Siegel

In your novella, “Bellony,” freelance journalist Terri Goodall greets the resort town of Deal, noting at once the complacency permeating the residents and the inevitable “claustrophobia of stasis” that would eventually drive them elsewhere. Terri is herself familiar with this concept, having just quit her job and boyfriend, both. The reader is given a few details—displeasure with the scope of her position, in each case—yet not much more about the “why” of her abrupt and complete relocation. What do you think was the ultimate deciding factor behind Terri reshaping her life in such a bold (and risky) way?

That insidious knowledge that “this”—whatever “this” is—was not what she wanted, not what she set out for. Terri has the sense that she has allowed others to shape her life for her, rather than the other way around. She feels trapped between two rather dominating people—her boyfriend and her boss—who both think they know what’s best for her and are willing to see her forthright intelligence and creative talent only insofar as they can use it to enhance their own standing, or as it impacts directly upon themselves.

It’s a risk and a brave thing to take a leap from the known into the unknown—but Terri knows it has to be, and it has to be now, and that the only solution to her personal problems lies in herself, in her ability to act according to her own desires, not out of her perceived idea of what others want, need, or expect from her.

Allis Bennett’s (former) home plays a central role in this story, to the point of anthropomorphization: It shares secrets with Terri (feeling “subtly enchanted” once she becomes less a visitor, more a tenant) and is moved to restlessness along with Terri as the journalist uncovers revelations about the missing Allis Bennett. Is this sense unique to the particulars of “Bellony,” or do you, as one may suspect from reading this novella, have an abiding interest in mysterious old houses?

Abiding interest certainly—in fact I think it would be better described as a lifelong obsession! I love houses, both individually and as a concept. I have a particular passion for the architecture of the English terraced house, perhaps because it’s the ultimate micro-unit of British history. The landscape of this country is a patchwork of forward progress and temporal endurance. I always see my birth city of London as the supreme example of this, where a fourteenth century coaching inn can stand directly in the shadow of Europe’s tallest building, the Shard—and it can be okay. Somehow it all fits together; London is the most accommodating of cities and it can take anything. In the face of whatever befalls it, it retains its character.

But on a micro-level, the domestic residence, the house, is also a living, breathing example of this layering of history. Many millions of British homes—and I’m talking about ordinary homes lived in by ordinary families, not grand mansions—will have been consecutively lived in by tens of generations. There are bound to be ghosts! I honestly don’t know what I think about ghosts—I’m an agnostic on the subject—but I definitely have many times seemed to sense that mysterious residue of organic life a house carries within itself, the idea that houses tend to harbour the “vibrations,” if you like, of their past occupancies. I’ve “felt” both good houses and bad houses in my time, and I think such experiences are common to most people. Almost anyone you talk to will have a story to tell about a house they felt was watching them, or otherwise “haunted.” Every house has its mysteries; every house literally is a story in its own right.

There is a feeling of ambiguity in this story, blurring the lines between past/present, dreams/reality, truth/deception, and even in a physical context, the ’tween place of the coastline, neither entirely solid nor wholly unstable. Did this theme naturally arise from Terri’s mental state, unanchored from her normal life and adrift in Allis’s, or did you intentionally play with the concept of being caught between two states?

Definitely both! Terri’s changing personal circumstances naturally affect the way her story plays out—she’s just broken up with a partner and quit her job, so she’s able and willing to take advantage of these disruptions and head out into the unknown. Rather than be daunted by change, she’s determined to use it. But this brings with it the twin effect of becoming unanchored, as you put it, and when one is unanchored, one can sometimes drift a long way further out to sea than one intended.

Just as importantly, though, I am drawn naturally to narratives of this kind, and to characters who don’t use “normal life” or societal convention as an excuse for not doing what they want to do, for not pursuing their desires. Both Terri and Allis are ruthless in their own way—they both go for what they want, and I admire that.

Terri comes to think that the emotional burden of having made it out of WWII alive while her sister (blood relative, or no) did not is the underlying reason behind Allis Bennett’s solitary yet many-layered life. What drew you to explore the theme of survivor’s guilt?

I think anyone with any degree of empathy can suffer from survivor’s guilt at some time in their lives, and I don’t think you need to have been involved in a traumatic or world-defining event, either—you can feel survivor’s guilt simply by seeing a report of a car crash or a house fire on the news, and it doesn’t matter if the people who died or were harmed are related or even known to you or not. It’s simply a heightened awareness of another’s suffering, that instinctive human ability to ask “what if?” Sometimes empathy can be so strong though it’s a destructive force, ruining and warping the life of the person who feels too much of it, and who ends up blaming themselves, almost, for the whole weight of sorrow on the world. It’s a kind of opposite force to the crippling lack of empathy that results in the amorality that we see in serial killers, for example, or other sociopaths. Either of these extreme qualities can make an interesting subject for a story.

I chose the World War Two theme for “Bellony” because it gives a shape and texture to the events that is immediately recognisable, immediately important—it gets people thinking and asking questions. What if? WW2 is still an immensely powerful collective memory within the European consciousness, it’s still talked about, has films made about it, it’s still emotionally very resonant. I suppose it’s inevitable that if you’re a writer, you’re going to write about it, in some form, at some time. I’ve touched on WW2 several times before—in a story called “Feet of Clay,” which is directly about a Holocaust survivor and the effect her experiences have on her modern day family. There’s also a long novella called “The Gateway,” forthcoming in my new book Stardust, which is partly about the experiences of ordinary civilians in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power.

These subjects are very serious and sensitive, and I always feel a measure of caution when approaching them. Any writer has a duty, when writing about a subject she does not “own,” to listen to the voices of other people and writers who experienced these things at first hand.

Presumably the side door was papered-over after Allis Bennett’s disappearance. Do you have any speculation as to whether subsequent tenants had realized that, when using that door, the facts of their reality . . . shifted . . . and that the door had to be barred because of its enchantment? Or was it just the annoyingly-stuck outer lock that led to the door’s disuse? Were Allis and Terri special, in some way—or in need, even—for the door to give them a fresh start in a new reality?

I think the word “need” is crucial here, actually. In my own mind the door would only work for the right person—someone already alive to the necessity of change and the possibility of enchantment. Terri and Allis are spiritual twins in this way. For anyone without this kind of active imagination, I think the door might just be a door. I think there are some people who are naturally willing—naturally eager—to look into the spaces between what is commonly recognised as “reality” and that other, rather more slippery commodity, possibility. It is this eagerness, this yearning for possibility that characterises many, if not all, of my stories.

Do you have any other projects upcoming or in the works that you would like to share with us?

At this moment I’m working on the final draft of my first novel, What Happened to Maree. It has a science fictional feel to it, but like “Bellony,” it’s very much caught up in the idea of overlapping realities.

I have a collection out later this year with PS Publishing called Stardust, which explores the life and identity of a fictional horror movie actor named Ruby Castle. The book is in the form of six “episodes,” which take place at different times in Ruby’s past or future and across the whole spectrum of science fiction, fantasy and horror. Each of the episodes works individually as its own self-contained story, but I wrote each very much in the knowledge or foreknowledge of the others, and I think they gain a great deal from being read as a continuing narrative. They’re like the stories in my collection The Silver Wind in this way, although Stardust is very different in tone, its colours are darker.

I’m very much in love with this idea of using different stories to tell a story, and one of the most inspiring things about speculative fiction is the way it invites a writer to play games with narrative form as well as overturning quotidian reality.

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: Desirina Boskovich
Kevin McNeil

Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process and what inspired “Deus Ex Arca?”

The idea for “Deus Ex Arca” popped into my head one afternoon when I was reading space opera. I started thinking . . . it’s a common narrative assumption that humans will one day obtain alien technology, either by discovering it in space, or capturing it in a war. Then, we’ll find a way to deploy that technology to our advantage, possibly with unforeseen consequences.

But such an idea seems awfully presumptuous. It assumes that aliens are so nearly like us, and so close to us in their arc of technological development, that their tools would represent only a small intuitive leap.

In reality, if alien civilizations do exist, their conceptual framework would most likely be utterly inscrutable to us; and if they have the technological prowess to reach earth in one piece, their technology is exponentially more advanced than ours. They would be working with different goals, different metaphors, different ergonomics. Their technology would seem like magic, and understanding it would require a total rewiring of the way we view the world. Their technology would most likely not even look like technology to us.

Just imagine a twelfth century farmer, who through some quirk in the space-time continuum, stumbles upon a working iPhone. How long might it take him to crack the password, fire up Safari, and start researching soil fertility? And just remember, the farmer actually has an edge in this situation, because he’s got a lot more in common with the iPhone’s creator: basic brain hardware, spatial reasoning skills, and number of fingers. A human who stumbles upon alien technology would not be assured these advantages.

So, I wanted to write a story that reflects the essential absurdity of humans interacting with alien technology, and illustrates the immense gap of consciousness between ourselves and an alien Other. With that idea came the image of the box: an artifact completely lacking in any kind of distinguishing physical characteristics. I wanted the box to defy rational or logical expectations; I wanted the box to be immune to the scientific method. Our impulse, naturally, would be to experiment with the box, trying to determine cause and effect. But the box breaks that concept. It resists and refuses any attempt at understanding.

(I should add the caveat here: none of this is meant as a criticism of stories where humans do successfully deploy alien technology. I love a good story, especially a good story set in space, and I don’t think realism should ever get in the way of telling one. I just wanted to try something different.)

I enjoyed the tone of this story, which ranged from the absurd (a soldier turning into a tuna sandwich) to the horrific (Jackson eating the tuna sandwich). Was this story particularly challenging to write? If so, how?

Actually, it was extremely easy. This was one of those stories that just happened. The first scene and the last scene were embedded in my initial idea for the story, unfolding in my mind in a very cinematic way. With the beginning and the ending in mind, I sketched out how to get from point A to point B, noting all the major events of the story, which at the time just seemed obvious. Then I sat at my desk and wrote the entire first draft in one sitting, probably six or seven hours, with a few breaks for snacks or tea. I wish writing could always be like that.

But regarding the range from the absurd to the horrific, I suppose one challenging aspect was continually resisting my own impulse to make the box act according to certain rules. Unconsciously, my writer brain kept attempting to create a pattern, to decipher the meaning behind certain destructive incidents, and to fit the effects of the box into a coherent logical narrative. And I kept consciously pushing back against that instinct.

Likewise, as the coherent structure of the world is eroded by disintegration and decay, I wanted that effect to be mirrored in the text. Jackson experiences a gradual unraveling of meaning, and I wanted the reader to experience that, too. So as the story progresses, the characters become disoriented, the narration becomes fragmented, and the narrative becomes more illogical. But I did run into the limits of this technique in the final scene; perhaps language is not the best medium for representing beings that are beyond language.

This is the second story I’ve read of yours with a child as the main character (“Celadon,” Clarkesworld, January 2009). You’ve got a talent for creating innocent and believable adolescent characters. I found myself rooting for Jackson throughout the story, but one question I kept asking myself as I read your story was: Why did the box choose Jackson?

I have several answers to this question. On one level, the box chooses Jackson because he is the first to touch it; perhaps there is some kind of immediate pair bonding that becomes impossible to undo. On another level, the box chooses Jackson because the box is Jackson, and it is only returning to him, as it has done so many times before. On an entirely different level, the box only chooses Jackson in this iteration, or version, or worldline; perhaps there is a box for every human on earth.

I think I chose Jackson because he represents for me a kind of primal innocence. When the story begins, he is in that raw early stage of identity formation, where likes and dislikes are simple and unquestioned, actions are impulsive, and the ego is immaterial. Perhaps because of this he’s better equipped to deal with something so irrational. But he’s also completely vulnerable.

The ending to this story comes full circle, which left me satisfied, but with questions about the next “test.” Do you think humanity will ever figure out how to reverse engineer the box?

No. It’s impossible. The box is absolutely antithetical to the current human conception of the universe; it will always be an inappropriate technology.

We might have gotten there on our own—but the massive disruption caused by a clash in metaphors precludes that possibility.

Does your work tend to explore particular themes?

Yes, I think so. At its heart, “Deus Ex Arca” is a story about alienation. Jackson’s alienation from his family and everyone else; even when he’s in daily contact with psychologists who hang on his every thought, he is overwhelmingly lonely. And the alienation we experience as humans on earth, being so very alone in the universe; we long for any kind of connection with the stars, with “something out there,” but that connection will most likely never be found.

For me, that incredible, unbearable isolation is the story’s emotional anchor. It’s part of why I chose to set the story in a place where I spent two years feeling extremely lonely and alienated myself. But isolation is a theme I return to in my work a lot.

I also write a lot about the relationships between siblings. I’m fascinated by that bond; it’s incredibly deep and unique, but not without unease, as our brothers and sisters are typically aware of our deepest vulnerabilities and darkest memories, and can trigger those moments without even trying. I write about siblings because for me that relationship is an access point to the most intense and authentic emotions I know.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece? What’s next for you?

I’ve got a few exciting projects underway at the moment—but nothing I can talk about just yet.

But since you mentioned my story “Celadon,” let me point your attention to two upcoming anthologies. Clarkesworld: Year Three is available now, and Aliens: Recent Encounters will be available in June. Both include “Celadon.” The second volume in particular might be especially interesting to anyone who enjoyed “Deus Ex Arca,” as it deals exclusively with innovative takes on the alien contact story. I’m quite excited to read it myself.

Kevin McNeil reads slush at Lightspeed Magazine and is an editorial assistant at Nightmare Magazine. He is a physical therapist, sports fanatic, and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2012 and The Center for the Study of Science Fiction’s Intensive Novel Workshop, led by Kij Johnson, in 2011. Kevin is a New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter @kevinmcneil.

Author Spotlight: Anaea Lay
Earnie Sotirokos

What inspired you to write “The Visited”?

I was participating in the Halloween contest for a writer’s forum I participate in and planned to write a creepy story about a creature that interfered with people’s dreams by sticking fingers in their ears and doing something . . . creepy. It was vague. When I sat down to write the story, my brain informed me that I was instead going to impersonate Cat Valente and prove to the world that good things come of watching too much VH1 when you’re in high school. My brain is very opinionated and very hostile, so I don’t usually argue with it.

Where would you be when the stream cut out?

On the couch in my den. I’d be conducting stealth warfare to lure the cat onto my lap and losing to my roommates, who cheat by cuddling on the cat’s favorite chair with her favorite blanket. Further details are hard to determine, but I will definitely be teasing the indie music snob roomie for deigning to watch the live stream of somebody who is not only mainstream and famous, but not even endearingly foreign. And I’ll probably bore everybody by repeating stories from the time I went to New Orleans by train with little more than a guidebook and two days’ notice. Hopefully the stories will be new to somebody in the room.

Do you think global mega-hits like the ones Manuel Black put out are possible today, considering how fragmented current music tastes have become?

Not quite like Manuel Black, since he had a supernatural assist that made him universally popular, but global mega hits are a thing that still happens. I was in Argentina last November and there were posters for a Lady Gaga “Born this Way” ball all over Buenos Aires. And I was in Iceland when I finally connected the name “Katy Perry” with an actual song, because the cab driver mentioned how much he liked her when she came on the radio. I don’t think the mega-super-star is going anywhere, and that means mega-hits.

Portraying music in fiction can be tricky. Can you share any tips that may help aspiring writers hear the tune between their ears?

Not really—I’m tone deaf and arrhythmic, so I don’t hear the tune between my ears. For this story, I stuck to song titles as much as I could, which are much, much easier than lyrics but make it feel like there’s an actual body of music being referenced. For the lyrics I did include, I put them at the end of the story so that I would, hopefully, already have the reader rolling with the atmosphere and ready to give me some credit. For extra cover, the lyrics are from the years most people thought he wasn’t any good. I have no idea whether those lyrics even can be set to a tune. So I guess my tip is this: Don’t let lack of talent thwart you—lie and trick the reader into thinking you did something you didn’t.

What can we expect from you in the future?

A benevolent dictatorship and fudge. Failing that, I’ve got some other short stories coming up from Strange Horizons, Apex, and Nightmare in the next few months. They reflect on the virtues of cannibalism as a problem solving technique, the likelihood that we’re delusional about our own sentience, and the capacity for teenagers to think repeating their parents’ mistakes will solve problems. Not all in the same story. And you can reliably expect that on future Mondays I’ll be posting the Strange Horizons podcast, which is full of fantastic stories and poems.

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: Karin Tidbeck
Andrew Liptak

Hi Karin, thanks for speaking with us! First off, how did your story, “A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain” come into existence?

How did it come into existence? It’s one of those rare stories that knows what it wants to be right from the start. I was visiting a friend who’s also a writer. She had to take an hour to work on her current novel. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I wrote some random stuff in longhand without really thinking about it. When my friend came back out of her office, I had the first draft almost ready.

Your story follows a rather strange troupe, which begs the question: Much like a tree falling in the woods, if a play is held without an audience, is there anyone to appreciate it?

Apprentice is afraid they might be performing for empty seats, while Nestor is convinced that they’re out there, just invisible to the troupe. The question I would ask is, if the troupe has no audience, are they actually performing? I suppose it depends on whether you have an audience in mind or not. The troupe seems to be formed with the express purpose of performing for an audience, but opinions are divided on what or who that audience is. On the other hand, the troupe also believe they have the function of upholding the order of the universe. That kind of ritual needs no audience except creation itself. The actors may also be their own audience—a sort of ever-ongoing roleplay. Honestly? I don’t want to supply any ready answers. That’s up to the reader to decide.

There’s a real meta feel to this story, as Apprentice finds an audience caught in a situation very similar to the play that they’re playing. How much of real life is informed by stories, and vice versa?

I believe reality is a continuous narrative that we tell each other and ourselves; what we recognize as stories are just one of the shapes that narrative takes. I don’t think you can separate real life, or the human mind, from story. It’s a basic bodily function, like breathing.

You don’t always write in English; a number of your stories are in Swedish. What challenges do you face when writing a story in another language, and how are they different from a story in your native language?

Storywise, not so different. Language-wise, the two allow for different styles—the sounds and cultural baggage differ. When writing in a language not my own, it’s a question of being careful about over- and undertones, keeping track of what’s current usage and what’s outdated (because the Oxford English Dictionary won’t tell you), what’s British English and what’s American English. In short, it keeps you on your toes. I try not to worry too much, though. I can’t do the same job of it as someone who’s a native English speaker, and I don’t think I want to. Coming in from another language gives some leeway to play around with it, in a different way than natives get.

What do you have coming up that we should look forward to?

I have some stories coming up in Strange Horizons, Shadows & Tall Trees, and at Tor.com during the first half of 2013. I’ve written an entry for the upcoming anthology The Starry Wisdom Library, which should be out sometime in late fall. Also, “Reindeer Mountain,” one of the stories from Jagannath, is in Jonathan Strahan’s next Year’s Best antho.

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 www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.

Author Spotlight: Hugh Howey
Robyn Lupo

The issues that arise in “Deep Blood Kettle” remind me of Stephen Hawking saying in 2010 that humans should fear aliens, “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” Can you tell us more about what got you writing this story? Are the aliens in the story how you see our first contact working out?

I find myself in agreement with Stephen Hawking, which I suppose is a sign that I got lucky in my thinking. In the story, the war between an alien race and humans is likened to the war worms might put up against a farmer. Farmers don’t even see the life in the dirt, it’s so far beneath them. They just plow it under. But what I really had in mind while writing the story was the fiscal cliff in the news at the time. I created a scenario of perfect doom, and told the story of bickering politicians unable to reach the compromise that might save us all.

The father in the story is quite well-defined; believing in what he can see, learning things a hard way first, and so on. If it were up to him, what do you think Pa would choose with regard to the invaders?

He and his son’s teacher are the two polar opposites in the story, with the main character torn between the two. The father wouldn’t give an inch to the aliens, I don’t think. Let the rock land; we’ll make do. Come try to take my farm; I’m cleaning my gun. There is staunch obstinance on the one side and naiveté on the other. I think another of his traits is that he believes what he wants to believe, rather than what he can see.

Can you tell us why you chose this boy to be the focal character? How do you think his realization about the invaders will change him later on? (Assuming, of course, he survives.)

I wanted the point of view to come from someone young enough not to have made up their mind about the world. The boy is the decision, bouncing back and forth between two positions. Also, there are observations young people make—ways of seeing events from an unusual angle—that allow them to have insights others might not. There’s also the fact that I grew up the son of a farmer. :)

What’s next for you?

I’m just wrapping up the launch of Wool here in the States, and the sequel, Shift, should be hitting bookstores in the UK. I’m currently pouring my energies into Dust, which will wrap up the trilogy. After that, I have to choose between one of a half dozen stories begging to get out!

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: Christopher Barzak
Robyn Lupo

How did you come up with Smoke City?

I was reading a book called The Point of Pittsburgh, which chronicles the life of that city from its geological formation, through its years as a vied-for settlement among colonial powers, until the present day. I read the book, about 450 pages, in two evenings, fascinated by the years when Pittsburgh became an industrial power, and then an industrial wasteland when the steel industry moved its work to developing nations. I was struck by the absolutely miserable conditions of life for the working class that made men like Carnegie wealthy, and how he attempted to assuage his guilt from taking advantage of the labor of others by providing public institutions like libraries and social clubs for the underprivileged. I was also trying to compare this aspect of the city’s past with its present day position as a city that has devoted itself to education, medicine, and green industries—the exact opposite of what it used to be. I knew I wanted to write a story that explored those differences, and wanted to write a story, too, that would have a character bound up with both the wreckage of the city’s past and the more privileged life of the present day.

Loss and sacrifice for the community runs rampant in this story—can you tell us more about this theme and how you see it working in this story?

I think for cities with a working class history like Pittsburgh—where the majority of its citizens were manual laborers for a great duration of the city’s existence—community and sacrifice for one’s community plays a big role. I grew up in a town in Ohio that grew out of Pittsburgh’s and Cleveland’s manufacturing industries, which has suffered a lot of economic losses (as those two cities have) as the manufacturing industry has left the U.S. Sacrifice is something people do when times are rough and the table of plenty has gone empty. Sharing, taking on more responsibility than usual. It’s also this self-sacrifice that leads many people from working class backgrounds to be easily taken advantage of in their dealings with others. They often take less pay than their employers can afford; they provide more labor than they’re compensated for; and they tend to be taken advantage of even in dealings with institutions like banks because they aren’t always as financially literate as people from white collar backgrounds. You can see an example of this in the recent past, with the predatory lending schemes many banks participated in. The majority of people who lost their homes were what politicians like to call “ordinary Americans,” which really translates into the lower middle class, the working class, and the working poor. Many of those working class families have had to arrange for very old-fashioned living arrangements in the wake of that debacle, multiple families living together, or people in their thirties having to live with their parents for longer periods of time, etc. Loss and sacrifice seem to be the essence of working people in America in general.

What’s a standard day of writing like for you?

I don’t have a standard writing day any longer, since I’ve started teaching full-time at Youngstown State University. My job makes it difficult to keep a regular schedule, so the best I can do is try to make use of my free time as much as possible. I tend to try to squeeze in a couple of hours each night, after classes have finished. Sometimes this consists of doing revision to works in progress, sometimes it’s generating new material to work on. If I can write a page or two a day, I’m happy. On days when I’ve not got an enormous amount of work to do for the day job, I like to write for four or five hours and really sink into that zone where everything else drops away from you except the page in front of you.

Can you tell us more about the Emily Dickinson quote and its connection to Smoke City?

The Dickinson quote worked its way into the story because of its theme, and because my grandmother, who was at varying times a factory worker or a farmer, liked Dickinson’s poetry, that poem in particular (“Because I could not stop for Death”). It’s a line that sort of functions as a reminder to the narrator of “Smoke City” that her obligations to the past—her past, as an inhabitant of Smoke City who has escaped into the future through a timeslip hidden in the Fourth River (a mythological river in Pittsburgh, which in the literal world is really an aquifer, or underground river, that flows beneath the city). I treated that river as a literal one for the purposes of the story and the mythic qualities I was developing within the world of the story. The Dickinson quote speaks to inevitability and obligation, too, I thought. Though we would not like to stop for Death, he will kindly stop for us when the time comes. The narrator, when she is returned periodically to Smoke City, is to some extent being returned to hell, Persephone-style, to live in the underworld and serve her time, as that myth functions.

How does the narrator leave Smoke City? Is it a natural ability of hers alone, or do others have it?

I think I alluded to this a bit in my previous answer. In the story, there’s a kind of timeslip hidden in the mythic Fourth River of Pittsburgh, which some of the inhabitants of Smoke City have found and use to escape, if they can find the strength to leave behind family and friends, their obligations and responsibilities. It’s not only my narrator who has done this, but some others. In the story, there’s mention of others coming and going from the mouth of the river’s cave entrance like she does. In this way, I’m sure the story feels a bit dystopic, which it should.

What’s next for you?

My first full-length collection of short fiction is being released in late March, 2013. It’s called Before and Afterlives,and a lot of the stories in it have won awards or been finalists for awards like the Nebula Award, the Spectrum Award, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. It’s a mixed-genre collection—ghost stories, contemporary fantasy, and some science fiction—but it’s predominantly concerned with the supernatural more than any other mode.

I’m also working on my next novel, (tentatively titled Wonders of the Invisible World), which will be finished any year now! Also, my first novel, One for Sorrow, is being made into a movie under the title Jamie Marks is Dead by director Carter Smith (The Ruins) and producer Alex Orlovosky (Blue Valentine), with plans to release in 2014.

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: Kathleen Ann Goonan
Robyn Lupo

Can you tell us how “A Love Supreme” happened for you? How did the inclusion of a major disability fit in with what you want to say in this work?

Ellen Datlow, a well-known editor in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, contacted me and asked if I was interested in writing a story related to overpopulation for Discover Magazine. I responded with three short proposals, and this is the idea that worked.

Ellie’s father chose not to have Ellie’s traumatic memories erased, and it appears Ellie appreciated this choice. What’s your position on memory erasure as a treatment for conditions like PTSD, since it is looking like procedures like this will be live options for us in a few years?

Because PTSD following combat, a violent crime, an automobile accident, or other life-shattering events can powerfully and negatively impact relationships and reactions to daily life, the ability to mitigate the intensity of certain memories will become an increasingly-used and very helpful option. I think that the key to responsible use of such medications or procedures will be individual choice.

Can you tell us more about the Coltrane connection in this story? Jazz appears to inform much of your work—can you tell us a bit more about that?

When I write, I usually proceed with a general plan and let the scenes play out in rough draft as I become involved with the process. “A Love Supreme,” one of Coltrane’s most famous pieces, surfaced in the first draft when I wrote the scene in which Ellie’s mother died, and as the story unfolded it assumed more power. In the end, it seems an apt description of how Ellie finds the grace and courage to deal with her father’s choice.

Jazz was my soundtrack since birth. In the late thirties, forties, and early fifties, my father saw most of the well-known Jazz luminaries, in person, and passed on to me his passion for Jazz. Like everyone else in the sixties, I became involved with the music of the day, but eventually my musical compass returned to Jazz. Music is become the deep ground of most of my novels. Queen City Jazz, a New York Times Notable Book, is infused with the music, the rhythms, of Scott Joplin. Mississippi Blues, which examines the bizarre history of our country (institutionalized slavery in the country that celebrates “Liberty and Justice for All”) has twelve sections to echo a 12-bar blues. Crescent City Rhapsody, a Nebula Award finalist, references Duke Ellington’s Rhapsodies in structure and in theme. In the afterword of my Campbell Award-winning In War Times I write: “I have likened the evolution of Modern Jazz, later dubbed Bebop, to the creative ferment in science which has led to our ever-growing understanding of the world, nature, and ourselves. Like the development of the atomic bomb, it remained a well-kept secret until after the war. Unlike the development of the bomb, which can now be known, we can never revisit the original luminous thoughts of Charlie Parker as he and Dizzy Gillespie birthed a new art form. In reality, the physicists, chemists, and biologists of the 19th and 20th Centuries birthed Modernity and its reflection and interpretation in literature, art, and music. Our art and our science are inextricably linked.”

What do you think allowed Ellie to see her father appropriately [during] their last meeting?

That’s a very good question. She attributes it to her infusion, but I think that although the infusion perhaps laid the groundwork for her acceptance of his choice, this acceptance could only have come about from the deepest and most vital part of her being, a part that has been clouded by fear and the memory of her trauma.

What’s next for you?

I’m finishing up “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”, a novelette or novella, depending on how long it gets, for Tor.com. “Bootstrap” will appear in Tech Review Science Fiction, MIT Technology Review’s annual science fiction issue, and “Sport” will be published in the forthcoming issue of Arc Magazine. I’m beginning work on two new novels. I am a Professor of the Practice at Georgia Institute of Technology, where I teach Creative Writing and other classes every fall, so I am happily engaged in all the things I love to do.

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: Robert Silverberg
Kevin McNeil

It’s been almost forty years since this story’s publication. With the rise of social sites like Facebook and Twitter, the world has never felt closer. Your story poses the question: Will globalization result in a homogenization of human culture? I know how Schwartz would feel about it, but do you think this is a negative thing? Are the gains we make worth the cultural diversity we give up?

I don’t think having a Starbucks on every corner would be a big step forward for humanity. On the other hand, modern sanitation in what are now third-world countries would be a boon. Call it a draw.

Ultimately, Schwartz chooses to remain in his fantasy world and exits the starship. Is mortality a theme you explore often in your work? Are there certain themes you find you return to?

There certainly are, and mortality is one of them. Didn’t someone say that love and death are the only important themes for fiction?

You’ve published more than eighty novels and hundreds of shorts stories. Do you have a preference for working with novels or short fiction? Outside of the fact that novels require more time, do you take a different approach to writing novels as opposed to short stories?

Short stories don’t give you any room for making errors. A novel can go off the tracks for three or four chapters in a row and a lot of people won’t notice. When I’m writing a short story, I feel uneasy about the need to make every word count. Writing novels makes big demands on the stamina. And so throughout my career I’ve switched from one to the other for a change of pace.

Your career has been so impressive and your writing has been incredibly prolific. What’s a typical writing day like for you? How have you maintained the discipline to remain so consistent for so long?

I don’t know any other way to do things. I go to the office, boot up, start writing, keep going until I’m too tired to continue, and stop. Been that way for almost sixty years.

You’ve written in a variety of genres, are an SFWA Grand Master, and a multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner. What’s the best advice you have for aspiring speculative fiction writers?

Read a lot. Think about what you’ve read. And write a lot. Also travel to far-off places, try new things.

What’s next for you? Any upcoming projects?

Not at the moment. I’m giving myself an extended sabbatical after what has been a very long and busy career.

Kevin McNeil reads slush at Lightspeed Magazine and is an editorial assistant at Nightmare Magazine. He is a physical therapist, sports fanatic, and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2012 and The Center for the Study of Science Fiction’s Intensive Novel Workshop, led by Kij Johnson, in 2011. Kevin is a New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter @kevinmcneil.

Author Spotlight: Bruce Sterling
Earnie Sotirokos

“Dinner in Audoghast” takes a look at an almost forgotten oasis city in Africa. Why did you choose to explore this speck of history?

I found Audoghast while reading a book about Moslem travellers and explorers. By the way, Audoghast really is “forgotten”—Audoghast was a wealthy, good-sized metropolis once, but nobody’s ever yet found any trace of its ruins. In these days of GPS and aerial photography, that’s pretty odd.

What effect did the few sentences of source material have on shaping your narrative?

I threw that quote in there so that the reader would realize that the city was historically existent—it’s not an Edgar Rice Burroughs fantastic lost city of Africa; Audoghast was a real place with real inhabitants. I also decided early on that the story wouldn’t have any Tarzan figures in it—no Europeans, no Christians, no lost English noblemen raised by apes. These remote strangers never had any role in the urban life of Audoghast.

Do you think fiction can serve a role in preserving cultures that are nearly lost to time?

Well, yeah, certainly, if that fiction was actually written by people from the lost culture, as with the Iliad or the Epic of Gilgamesh. In those cases, fiction truly is a precious relic, it’s of huge cultural value. If somebody from the actual Audoghast read this modern story of mine, they’d consider it a distorted fairy-tale, more like weird satire than an act of “preservation.”

On the other hand, they might like the story better than I think. Literate people in early Islam were rather keen on melancholy stories of fatalistic ruin. When you grow up in the ruins of the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Nile, there are plenty of dead civilizations underfoot.

Is there a piece of advice you would like to share with new writers who are thinking about tackling a secret history story?

Yeah. Try not to be a self-important hick. Above all, don’t write any secret histories where the subtext is all about how smart you are, and how dumb they were.

What can we expect from you in the future?

How much future do you want? In a thousand years we will all be creatures of fantastic obscurity.

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.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in May, in Lightspeed . . .

We’ll have original science fiction by Maria Dahvana Headley (“The Traditional”) and M. Bennardo (“Water Finds Its Level”), along with SF reprints by Maureen F. McHugh (“Interview: On Any Given Day”) and Sean Williams (“The Missing Metatarsals”).

Plus, we’ll have original fantasy by Damien Walters Grintalis (“Always, They Whisper”) and Dennis Danvers (“Leaving the Dead”), and fantasy reprints by Holly Black (“The Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue”) and Richard Parks (“The Man Who Carved Skulls”).

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella will be “The Garden” by Eleanor Arnason, and of course we’ll have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with Gregory Maguire and Karen Russell.

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!