Editorial, May 2013
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue thirty-six of Lightspeed!

In case you missed the news last month, 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. Additionally, our resident illustrator, Galen Dara, is up for the Hugo Award for best fan artist—largely, we assume, due to her work illustrating Lightspeed stories. If you’d like to check out all of Galen’s illustrations for Lightspeed, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/tag/illustrated-by-galen-dara.

Speaking of awards, this year’s Nebula Awards will be presented at the Nebula Awards Weekend event, May 16-19, in San Jose, CA. 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; assistant editor Christie Yant and I will be on hand to cheer them on—so if you’re also going to be there, be sure to find us and say hi!

In other news, the list of artists to appear in Spectrum 20, the latest edition of the prestigious art anthology series have been selected, and Hugo Award nominee (sounds good, doesn’t it?) Galen Dara is among them. So is Marc Simonetti, who provided our cover for the June 2012 issue. As we were going to e-press with this issue, which specific pieces of art they’d be reprinting was not yet revealed; all we know for sure is both Galen and Marc will have their artwork featured in the anthology. Congrats to them both!

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

We 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 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 is “The Garden” by Eleanor Arnason, and of course we have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with Gregory Maguire and Karen Russell.

Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty. 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 a reminder that our custom-built ebookstore I told you about last month is now 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 six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and four-time finalist for 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.

The Garden
Eleanor Arnason

There was a boy who belonged to the Atkwa lineage. Like most of his family, he had steel gray fur. In the case of his relatives, the color was solid. But the boy’s fur was faintly striped and spotted. In dim light this wasn’t visible. In sunlight his pelt looked like one of the old pattern-welded swords that hung in his grandmother’s greathouse and were taken outside rarely, usually to be polished, though sometimes for teaching purposes, when adult male relatives were home. Not that anyone used swords in this period, except actors in plays. But children ought to learn the history of their family.

The boy’s pelt was due to a recessive gene, emerging after generations, since the Atkwa had not gone to a spotted family for semen in more than two hundred years. This was not due to prejudice. Unlike humans, the hwarhath find differences in color more interesting than disturbing. Their prejudices lie in other directions.

It was circumstance and accident that kept the Atkwa solid gray. They lived in a part of the world where this was the dominant coloration; and—being a small and not especially powerful family—they did not look to distant places when arranging breeding contracts.

As a toddler, the boy was forward and active, but not to an extraordinary degree. At the age of eight or so, he lengthened into a coltish child, full of energy, but also prone to sudden moods of thoughtfulness. These worried his mother, who consulted with her mother, the family matriarch, a gaunt woman, her fur frosted by age, her big hands twisted by joint disease.

“Well,” the matriarch said after listening. “Some men are thoughtful. They have to be, if they’re going to survive in space, with no women around to do their thinking.”

“But so young?” the mother asked. “He spends hours watching fish in a stream or bugs in a patch of weeds.”

“Maybe he’ll become a scientist.” The matriarch gave her daughter a stern look. “He’s your only boy. He’s been strange and lovely looking from birth. This has led you to pay too much attention and to worry without reason. Straighten up! Be solid! The boy will probably turn out well. If he doesn’t, he’ll be a problem for our male relatives to handle.”

At ten, the boy discovered gardening—by accident, while following a tli that had come out of the nearby woods to steal vegetables. The sun was barely up. Dew gleamed on the vegetation around his grandmother’s house. The air he drew into his mouth was cool and fragrant.

The tli, a large specimen with strongly marked stripes, trundled over his grandmother’s lawn, its fat, furry belly gathering dew like a rag wiping moisture off something bright. A metal blade maybe, the boy thought. A dark trail appeared behind the animal, and it was this the boy followed at a safe distance. Not that a tli is ever dangerous, unless cornered, but he didn’t want to frighten it.

The animal skirted the house, entering the garden in back. There the tli began to pillage, a messy process with much (it seemed to the boy) unnecessary destruction. He ought to chase it away. But he was hit, suddenly and with great force, by the beauty of the scene in front of him. The perception was like a blade going into his chest. Don’t think of this as a figure of speech, exaggerated and difficult to believe. There are emotions so intense that they cause pain, either a dull ache or a sudden sharp twinge. Under the influence of such an emotion, one’s heart may seem to stop. One may feel wounded and changed as one is changed by a serious injury.

This happened to the boy when he didn’t, as yet, understand much of what he felt. If he’d been older, he might have realized that most emotions go away, if one ignores them. Instead, he was pierced through by beauty. For the rest of his life he remembered how the garden looked: a large rectangular plot, edged with ornamental plants, their leaves—red, purple, yellow, and blue—like the banners of a guard in a military ceremony.

Inside this gaudy border were the vegetables, arranged in rows. Some grew on poles or trellises. Others were bushes. Still others rose directly from the soil as shoots, fronds, clusters of leaves. The variety seemed endless. While the garden’s border was brightly colored, most of these plants were shades of green or blue. Yet they seemed if anything more lovely and succulent, beaded with dew and shining in the low slanting rays of the sun.

So it was, on a cool summer morning, the air barely stirring, that Atkwa Akuin fell in love—not with another boy, as might have been expected, if not this year, then soon—but with his grandmother’s garden.

He spent the rest of that summer in the plot, helping the two senior female cousins who did most of the house’s gardening. In the fall, he turned soil, covered beds with hay, trimmed what needed trimming and planted chopped-up bits of root. Black and twisted, they looked dead to him. But they’d send up shoots in the spring, his cousins promised.

Akuin’s mother watched doubtfully. The boy was settling down to a single activity. That had to be better than his former dreaminess. But she would have been happier if he’d taken up a more boyish hobby: riding tsina, fishing in the nearby river, practicing archery, playing at war.

“Give him more time,” said Akuin’s grandmother. “Boys are difficult, as I know.”

She’d raised three. One had died young in an accident. Another had died in space, killed in the war that had recently begun. The enemy—humans, though their name was not yet known—had come out of nowhere in well-armed ships. Almost everything about them remained hidden in darkness as complete as the darkness from which they’d emerged. But no one could doubt their intentions. The first meeting with them had ended in violence; so had every encounter since.

The matriarch’s third son was still alive and had reached the rank of advancer one-in-front. This should have given her satisfaction, but the two of them had never gotten along. Akuin’s uncle rarely came home for a visit. The matriarch lavished her attention on her one daughter, her nieces, and their children.

Now she said, folding her twisted hands, “Maybe Akuin will become a gardener in a space station. Such people are useful. An army needs more than one kind of soldier.”

When he was fifteen, Akuin went to boarding school, as do all boys of that age. In these places they learn to live without women and among males who belong to other lineages. This becomes important later. A boy who can’t detach himself from family and country is little use in space. In addition, the boys complete their education in the ordinary hwarhath arts and sciences, the ones learned by both females and males; and they begin their education in the specifically male art and science of war.

Akuin’s school was on the east coast of his continent, in an area of sandy dunes and scrub forest: poor land for gardening. Nonetheless, the school had a garden. Botany is a science, and horticulture is an art.

It was on the landward side of the school complex, sheltered by buildings from the prevailing wind. Akuin found it the day after he arrived. To the west was a row of dunes, with the afternoon sun standing just above them. Long shadows stretched toward the garden. The gardener—a man with a metal leg—moved slowly between the rows of plants, bending, examining, picking off bugs, which he pressed between the fingers of his good hand. His other arm hung at his side, clearly damaged and not recently. It had shrunk ’til little remained except black fur over bone.

Akuin thought he was unnoticed. But the gardener turned suddenly, straightened, and glared at him with yellow eyes. Akuin waited motionless and silent. He might be a little odd, but there was nothing wrong with his manners.

“You’re new,” said the man finally. “Where from?”

Akuin told him.

“Inland. Why aren’t you on the beach? Or exploring the school? We have a fine museum, full of things which former students have sent back.”

“I like gardens,” Akuin said.

The man glared at him a second time, then beckoned, using his good hand. The boy came forward into the garden.

The man’s name, it turned out, was Tol Chaib. He’d gone to this school years before, gone into space, then come back to teach. He said nothing more about himself in that first encounter. Instead he talked about the difficulty of growing healthy plants in sand. Partly, he said, he worked to change the soil. The school provided him with compost and manure, more than was needed. “If there’s anything certain about boys and tsina, it’s that they will produce plenty of fertilizer.” Some of the excess went into lawns and ornamental borders. The rest was sold to local farmers.

Mostly, he found plants that fit the local soil and weather. “No other strategy works well. This is why it’s so difficult to grow our plants on other planets. The light is different; so is the invisible radiation. The soil has the wrong minerals or minerals in the wrong proportions. A plant always grows best on its home planet, unless—as sometimes happens—it proliferates unnaturally in a strange place.”

Akuin had been feeling lonely and afraid. How could he survive five years in school? At the end of his school years stood a fate even worse. Few hwarhath men remain on the home planet. From 20 to 80, their lives are spent in space, exploring and preparing to meet the enemies who will inevitably appear. The universe is a dangerous place, and the hwarhath are a careful species. So the men go into space, looking for trouble, while their female relatives stay home, raising children and practicing the arts of peace.

Sixty years in metal corridors, with only brief visits home. Hah! The prospect was terrible.

Now, listening to Tol Chaib, he felt a little comfort. Maybe he’d be able to survive school. He could certainly learn much from the crippled man.

The school had a curriculum, of course. There were classes, labs, field trips, military exercises. Most of what Akuin did was required. But when he could decide for himself, he went to Tol Chaib’s garden or to the greenhouses where Chaib kept flowers growing all winter.

This was a comfort on days when snow lay over the campus and a knife-wind blew off the ocean. The glass walls were covered by condensed moisture, making the world outside invisible. Inside was damp, warm air; the smell of dirt and growing things; flowers that blossomed as brightly as a campfire; the gardener’s dry, harsh voice.

At first he told Akuin about the plants around them, then about the gardening he’d done in space. Gardens up there—Tol Chaib waved at the ceiling—are necessary for five reasons. Men are healthier if they eat fresh fruit and vegetables. The plants help keep air breathable by removing carbon dioxide and providing oxygen. “This can be done by inorganic chemical reactions or by microbes, but a garden is more pleasant and produces air with a better aroma.”

In addition, Tol Chaib said, every station and ship is supposed to be self-sufficient. “Ships become lost. A station might be cut off, if the war goes badly. If this happens, the men on board will need ways to provide themselves with air, food, and medicine.”

“You’ve given me three reasons for gardens in space,” Akuin said. “Health, clean air, and self-sufficiency. What are the other two?”

“Joy,” the gardener said, “which is not usually produced by vats of microbes or inorganic chemical reactions; and hope that we will finally come home.”

Toward the end of winter, Akuin learned how Tol Chaib had been injured.

He’d been the foremost gardener in a small station designed for research rather than war. A supply ship arrived, and the pilot made a mistake while docking—several mistakes, since he panicked when he realized the coupling of ship and station was going badly. The station’s outer skin had been punctured. “There was a sudden loss of pressure.” Tol Chaib grinned. “The air lock system in my section of the station was new and had improvements, which did not work as planned.”

When the rescue workers reached the garden, they found most of the plants gone, sucked out into space. The garden’s equipment was mostly in pieces. Tol Chaib lay under a heap of debris, next to a lock that had finally closed.

“They think—I don’t remember—that I was pulled from one end of the garden to the other, through several rooms. Most likely I hit things on the way. I certainly hit the airlock after it closed, and the debris hit me.”

What a story! Akuin shivered.

“The pilot of the ship killed himself. The engineer in front of the air lock design team asked to die. But his senior officers decided the problem with the system had not been caused by anything he did, and could not have been foreseen.”

“What was the problem?” Akuin asked. “Why did the system malfunction?”

“I never learned. At first, I was in no condition to pay attention. Later, I didn’t care.”

“Did the pilot have permission to kill himself?”

“That’s another thing I don’t know.” Tol Chaib said.

The pilot had panicked in an emergency. That was the one thing Akuin knew about him. Maybe, after he saw the damage he’d done, the pilot had panicked a second time and made the decision to die on his own. A terrible idea! “If he asked for permission and got it, then what he did was right,” Akuin said finally. “And it was right for the engineer to live, after permission had been refused to him, though—hah! He must have wanted to die.”

“Maybe,” said Tol Chaib.

There was another thought in Akuin’s mind, which he did not express.

“You’re wondering why I’m still alive,” Tol Chaib said. “I gave serious thought to taking the option.” He paused, his good hand gently touching the frilly edge of a tropical bloom. “I was a handsome man. Many approached me or watched from a distance, hoping for encouragement. Hah! It was fine to know that I could make another man happy by saying ‘yes.’

“Then I woke and discovered my leg was gone. What a surprise! Where was the rest of me?”

Akuin felt uncomfortable. No child wants to know that adults can be unhappy. Heroes in hero plays—yes. They can suffer, and a boy Akuin’s age will be inspired. But a man like Tol Chaib, a teacher and crippled, should never reveal pain.

“I had no desire to limp and crawl through life,” the teacher said, his dry voice inexorable. “I wanted to be quick and lovely and loved.

“One of my senior male relatives came to visit me while I was in sick bay. I asked him for permission to die. He said, ‘wait.’ So I did. My male relatives consulted with each other and with the officers in front of me. This is how such things are done,” the dry voice said. “Except in hero plays.”

“I know,” Akuin said. In a sense he hadn’t known. Before this moment, the rules for killing oneself had been unreal, something learned as one learns formulae one is never going to use. How fine that I can use sticks and triangles to determine the height of that tall tree! Do I want to know the tree’s height? No.

“In that kind of situation,” Tol Chaib added, “the kind that occurs in hero plays, when a man is entirely alone or the people around him are confused and wrong, it makes sense for the man to take his fate into his own hands. What choice does he have? But it’s a good idea to be sure that one is a hero and in a heroic situation, before acting in such a way.

“It was decided I ought to live—for various reasons. My skill as a gardener was remarkable; and I’m good at teaching. Also, I’m an only child, and my mother is well-loved in our family. It was thought she might grieve too much, if I killed myself.”

Akuin left the greenhouse soon after, trudging back to his dormitory through a new fall of snow. Overhead the sky was full of stars. For once the air was almost still, though stabbingly cold. The boy walked in a cloud of his own breath.

He reached the middle of a playing field and looked around, first at the snow, unmarked except by the trail he was in the process of making, then at the sky. How brilliant! How many-colored! How difficult to measure!

All at once, he lost his sense of position and direction. Up and down seemed no longer different. The ground beneath his feet was gone; so was his body’s weight; he was falling into the innumerable stars.

It was a terrible sensation. Akuin closed his eyes. For a moment, the sense of falling continued. Then it was gone, as quickly as it had come. When he opened his eyes, everything was ordinary again.

Later, he wondered if this had been a vision. Most likely not. He’d never shown any signs of having a diviner’s ability, nor did he want it. Seeing what other people can’t see is unsettling. Diviners tend to be odd ungraceful folk, who go through life out-of-step and off balance, never fitting into any group. No rational boy wants a fate like this.

More likely, Akuin thought, he’d been tired and disturbed by his mentor’s story. In any case, the experience was over and did not recur.

He completed school in the usual period of time. Education is not a race for the hwarhath. No one finishes before the others. How can they? Every hwarhath male goes into the army as soon as he graduates; and no one can enter the army until he has reached the age of adulthood.

At twenty, Akuin left school, going home for a long visit. As usual, on visits home, he worked in the family garden. His mother watched with her usual concern. He had turned into a lovely young man, slim and graceful; his pale, stippled pelt reminded her of sunlight moving over metal or water moving over stones. But he was too quiet for a youth his age, too thoughtful and too in love with the plants he tended.

With luck, she told herself, he’d be assigned to work as a gardener. The teachers at his school had recommended this. According to her male relatives, the officers in charge of making assignments often paid attention to such recommendations. Though not always, of course.

A little before harvest, Akuin’s assignment came. As expected, it was in space, though where in space the message did not say. He packed the one bag permitted him and said goodbye to his family. It wasn’t easy to bid his mother farewell. Unlike humans, the hwarhath do not express grief by excreting water from the corners of their eyes. Nor do they have the human love of making noise. Given any reason—grief, anger, happiness, a flash of irritation, a momentary surprise—humans will be noisy. An uncomfortable kind of behavior. Maybe it comes from their ancestors, who spent their time (we are told) screaming at the tops of trees. The hwarhath must be descended from animals who spent more time on the ground, where they could see one another, and where noise might attract unwelcome attention. In most situations, they are quiet, at least in comparison to humans.

But what man wants to see a look of grim endurance on his mother’s face?

It was a relief to get outside. The plants that bordered the garden were waist-high now. Their long sharp leaves seemed (to Akuin) like a fence of swords, inlaid with precious metals and encrusted with jewels, so they shone red, blue, yellow, green. The green especially was a shade so intense and pure that it seemed to pierce him. Hah! He could feel it in his throat and chest!

Bugs with the same rich late-summer colors floated in the hot air. Bending down and peering, Akuin could see ripe fruits and vegetables nestled among the leaves of the plants raised for food. He found a few last pests, pressed them to death between his fingers, then turned toward the waiting car.

One of his female cousins drove him to the nearest rail line. They parted quietly. He went by train to the regional airport, then by plane to one of the rocket islands. From the island he went to a keeping-pace-with-the-place-below station. At each stage of this journey, his environment became more closed-in and artificial, till at last in the station it was a maze of gray metal corridors. No windows opened out on space. If they had, what would he have seen?

His unreachable home planet.

Akuin felt his spirit shrink like a plant shriveling in a drought. How was he going to survive? His grandmother’s voice, speaking in his mind, gave the answer: through loyalty and discipline. In his imagination, he made the gesture of acknowledgment.

An FTL transport carried him (along with other men) to a station in the most remote region of hwarhath-explored space. This was not a place where the hwarhath would usually have built a station; it was too far out, and the route that led to it was not easy to follow.

But when the hwarhath came to this region, they found many stars in close proximity. By itself, this would have been interesting. The stars in hwarhath space are, for the most part, scattered as thinly as trees on Great Central Plain, and in general they are solitary rather than communal. It’s rare to find more than two or three together.

If ordinary stars are like a bottle tree, standing alone on the dusty plain, with at most a couple of offshoots or companions, then this group was like a grove or thicket, gathered around some hidden reason for their gathering: a spring or sunken pool.

Of course the hwarhath scientists wanted to study the grove, and they had enough influence to get the station built. But they did not get the resources they wanted. Remember that a war was on. This region was far distant from the hwarhath home planet and from the region where humans were a recurring problem. The work done here did not seem important to the men who made decisions. Akuin’s new home was inadequately funded.

Imagine a metal cylinder orbiting a dim and dusty, unimpressive star. The cylinder is small and plain, with none of the additions characteristic of the great stations, which unfold over time like flowering plants, producing metal stalks, blossoms, and pods. Around them move attendant bodies: maintenance craft, shuttles, satellites devoted to research or specialized manufacture, so the great station seems enveloped in a cloud of glittering bugs.

Akuin’s destination was nothing like this. There was only the cylinder, a simple geometric shape, orbiting its primary, which had no planets. In the distance were other stars, packed closely together, all of them dim and red.

“Like an army camped on a plain,” said one of the new arrivals. (Not Akuin.) “How long the night has been! The army’s fires have burnt down. Now they are almost out.”

“It may look like an army to you,” another soldier commented. “To me it looks like a group of stars.”

Scattered through the star-grove (or if you like the image, the army-camp of stars) were other bodies, which the new arrivals could not see. These came in several varieties. Most were burning-into-darkness stars, which had exhausted their fuel, turning into the stellar equivalent of cinders. Others, less numerous, were breaking-into-pieces stars, which had become so dense that gravity had crushed their matter, so it became a kind of puree or thick soup. The last group, least numerous of all, were called falling-into-strangeness; and these were the stars that interested the hwarhath scientists. 1

Akuin paid little attention to the grove (or camp) of stars. Instead he noticed the interior of the station: a cramped maze of corridors and rooms. There were no windows, of course; and most of the holograms (there were some, though not as large and splendid as the ones in a great station) showed more impressive parts of the galaxy.

At the end of one corridor a huge planet turned, surrounded by moons and braided rings. At the end of another corridor was a human ship, which exploded over and over, hit by hwarhath missiles. Hah! It was a thing to see! Dramatic and encouraging!

He was assigned to a room with four other young men, also new arrivals. Each got a bed, a storage locker, and a niche in the wall, where a hologram could be installed. Three of his companions put scenes of home, as did Akuin: his grandmother’s garden at midsummer. The last man, a thin lad with the most amazingly ugly markings on his pale gray fur, put nothing in his niche.

The ugly lad was named Gehazi Thev. He seemed remarkably calm and friendly, for a man who looked as if he’d been used to blot up ink. How could any family have kept a child like this one?

“Easy enough to explain,” Thev said on the second or third day that Akuin knew him. “My mother is a mathematician, the best in our lineage; and the semen used to produce me came from a family—the Thevar—who are famous scientists. They also have a tendency toward splotchiness that shows up rarely. It’s a defect they have tried to eliminate.

“In any case—” No question that Thev was a talker. “My mother had a terrible pregnancy. Not only did she feel sick, but her ability to think about math vanished almost entirely, either due to her queasiness or to some change in her hormones.

“When I was born, they thought of killing me. Just look!” He ran one hand over an arm disfigured by a great dark blotch. “How could I possibly have a normal life? But my mother had already announced that she would never allow her family to breed her again. These were her good years, when she could do original work. She wasn’t going to waste them on motherhood.” The calm, friendly voice sounded amused. “My relatives could kill me and lose my mother’s genetic material, or they could keep me. There was no reason to believe that I would be stupid.”

“It doesn’t bother you?” asked Akuin.

“My lack of stupidity? No. The Goddess has made sure that the universe is well provided with stupid people. As far as I can tell from their behavior, humans are as dim as most hwarhath. What is this war about, for example? How can we fight people when we can’t even talk with them? What has war been about, through our entire history? The taking of land! The acquisition of women and children! But what good are human females to us? If they even have females, as we understand that term. For all we know, humans may have five different sexes, none of them producing children in a way we understand. As for their land, how can we use it? It isn’t likely that our plants will grow on their planet. So, what are we fighting for? Women who cannot mother hwarhath children, and land that is—for us—infertile. The humans are just as stupid. Unless, of course, they have another reason for killing people.” Thev tilted his head, considering the idea of a new reason for war.

“I was talking about your looks,” said Akuin. He touched a patch of fur that wasn’t blotchy. Instead, it shone like silver. “If you had been like this all over—”

“Hah! I would have been something! There would have been men lined up at our door, and very inconvenient it would have been for the rest of you.” Thev paused. He was sprawled on his bed, resting on his elbows, regarding Akuin with resin-yellow eyes. “Yes, it has bothered me at times,” he said at last. “When I first realized how very ugly I was, and again when I was in school and the age when boys begin to fall in love. No one would ever love me, I thought. I would have to be content with my hands and the programs the Public Health Corps makes about how to have sex that’s both pleasant and healthy.”2

“Has that happened?” Akuin said.

Thev smiled. “I have seen a lot of public health programs. But I have discovered that some men like intelligence. Believe me, I am intelligent!”

They became friends, though the other roommates couldn’t understand why. Akuin was lovely and also sad, the kind of youth that older men—some older men—liked to comfort. No one would ever try to comfort Thev. He was too confident and happy. In addition, they were slightly different ages. Thev had stayed on the home world for two extra years, studying at the famous Helig Institute. Instead of being 20 or 21, he was 23, though he didn’t seem especially old. His time had been devoted to ideas rather than experience. It was stars he knew, not manners.

They stayed together through the period when new arrivals were oriented to life in space. “Like two burrs,” said the other roommates, who began to suspect it was Akuin’s beauty that drew the other man. But what drew Akuin to a man whose conversation was so often impossible to understand? All these kinds of stars that fell into themselves, changing (as they did so) the nature given them by the Goddess, and even in some cases (according to Thev) falling out of the universe the Goddess had created. This was unexpected! Who could make sense of it? Who could find it interesting or erotic?

When the orientation period was over, Thev began to spend his time with other physicists. Akuin started his new job, in the station’s garden.

A garden, you may think. The lad had been saved. He’d found his natural environment.

The garden occupied a series of rooms, gray metal like everything else in the station. The plants, all useful rather than ornamental, grew in raised beds like metal boxes. Light came from panels in the ceiling. Moisture was provided by a network of tubes, which dripped water directly on the roots. Nothing was wasted. Nothing was present unless it was needed.

Akuin discovered that gardening (for him) comprised many things besides the garden itself. He missed sunlight, clouds, rain, bugs, raiding tli, the sight of hills rising in the distance, the smell of a nearby forest or ocean. It was home he missed, the home world in its entirety. Most especially he missed his home country: the valleys full of stones and stony rivers, the indomitable granite mountains.

But he could not go home, except for an occasional brief visit, until he was eighty. To think of sixty years in stations like this one! The idea was horrible!

“Don’t be morose,” Thev said. “You have a gift for gardening. The senior gardener has said that often. In time you’ll be transferred to one of the big stations, where there are ornamental plants and bugs, maybe even a hologram of the home world sky. Think of that above you, while you pick suckers off stems! I, by then, will be a distinguished physicist. They’ll bring me in to lecture, and we’ll make jokes about the way our lives used to be.”

Akuin felt doubtful and said as much.

“And then, finally, when you are a success, I’ll confess to you that I’ve always loved you. And only the Goddess can know why, because you have an awful disposition.”

Akuin looked at his friend. “Do you mean that?”

“About your disposition? Absolutely!”

“About loving me?”

“From the first moment I laid eyes on your shining pelt. From the first time I heard you complain.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea. Remember that my area of competence is stars, not people.”

Akuin kept looking at Thev, who was (as usual) sprawled on his bed, under the empty wall niche. He’d just come from the communal shower. Naked, it was possible to see all the blotches on his front. One covered half his forehead. Another, even larger and just as badly shaped, covered half a thigh.

“Did you ever think of coloring your fur?” Akuin asked.

“My aunts tried dying me when I was young. I hated it, a horrible messy process that stank and had to be done over and over. When it was time, when I smelled the dye cooking, I’d run away and hide, and they would come hunting. They made my cousins join in, until they began to refuse. ‘If Thev wants to be ugly, let him be. We don’t want to hunt him down like an animal.’ My aunts gave up finally.”

“You never rethought that decision?”

“What are you telling me, Akuin? You are willing to become my lover if I turn myself black? But not otherwise? Can’t you be content to be the lovely one? I am certainly content to be the smart one.”

No question the spots were ugly. But the thin body was good enough, and so was the voice, even and friendly and amused. The mind was in front of any mind he’d ever encountered. What would it be like to make love with someone who could peer into the center of stars and see what lies beyond ordinary experience? Akuin kissed his friend. Thev responded with passion. Ugly he might be, and intellectual, but he was also passionate.

They became lovers. This is always a difficult situation when the couple is young, without much privacy. Either they waited till their roommates were gone, or they used the rooms-for-sex-and-other-intimate-behavior which are associated with gymnasia.

It would be better to do these things, Akuin thought, in the woods of Atkwa or in a secluded part of his grandmother’s garden. Even the dunes next to his boarding school would have been better. Love did not belong in the station. Though Thev didn’t seem to mind the gray rooms and the air that smelled of machinery.

Would life have been different, Akuin wondered later, if he’d chosen a more appropriate lover? One of the older men, who showed an interest in him? The senior gardener, for example?

The problem now, aside from the uncomfortable places they made love, was Thev’s other passion. He was onto something interesting about the star grove.

Maybe, if Akuin had loved his work as much, he would have been able to endure Thev’s periods of abstraction or his long discussions of the behavior of aging stars. He tried to be as boring, telling Thev about the garden’s problems. It is always difficult to keep an incomplete ecology in balance. This particular garden had recurrent infestations of a parasitic organism that was neither a plant nor an animal, but rather alive in its own way. It was native to the hwarhath home world, but had changed after the hwarhath had inadvertently carried it into space, a region it liked; or rather, it liked the conditions of gardens in space. It thrived under lights that did not have the exact spectrum of the hwarhath home star, and soil that wasn’t full of the home world’s microorganisms seemed like a gift from the Goddess.

Thev listened patiently, but what he heard—more than anything else—was complaining. Obviously, a garden in space was going to be different from a garden on the home planet. Obviously, there were going to be difficulties and problems. But to a man of his temperament, optimistic and determined, problems were something one overcame or suffered cheerfully, the way he suffered his spots.

If Akuin’s plants were covered with mold, well then, Akuin would have to find a cure. If a cure could not be found, the garden would have to grow other kinds of plants.

“Does nothing discourage you?” asked Akuin.

“You do, sometimes. Why not enjoy life? Is anything improved by moping? Think of how handsome you are! Think of my devotion! Do you think mold is any worse than my equations, which are not going where I want them to?”

In spite of his excellent heritage, Thev said, he was not a first rate mathematician. Rather, he had an instinct for how things are. “Where that came from, I don’t know. The same place as my spots, maybe. In any case, I don’t reason out what the Goddess has done with the universe. It comes to me almost as a vision, and if you think it’s easy to see things in more than the usual five dimensions, you are wrong.3 That’s what the grove is like: a place that requires far more than five dimensions, if I’m going to understand it. There are so many stars here, and they are packed so closely!”

Maybe the problem was a difference in magnitude. Mold seems like a trivial problem, compared to Thev’s struggles with his equations. More likely it was a difference in temperament. Thev’s energy made everything he did important. When he struggled, it was a real struggle. Akuin’s sadness, which was chronic now, diminished his concerns. Nothing he did seemed really worth doing to himself or to those around him.

His first year in space ended. The second began. According to messages from relatives, everyone at home was doing well, though his grandmother’s garden didn’t thrive as it had when he tended it. Beyond doubt, he had a gift. “How lucky that you can use it where you are,” his mother said.

The mold was under control now. He had convinced the senior gardener to introduce a few ornamental plants.

“Just in the corners, lad,” the senior gardener said. “The places we aren’t using. This isn’t a great station. If the officers here want flowers for their lovers, too bad. And no matter how you beg, I’m not going to send for bugs. They aren’t in the budget.”

At first he put in plants with colored leaves. They shone like jewels at the corners of beds full of green and blue-green vegetation.

“Like fire in the night,” said one of the station’s senior officers. “Are flowers possible?”

“Talk to the man in front of me. He says we don’t have the money.”

The officer, a physicist and a good one, according to Thev, ran his hand along a bright red leaf. “Maybe something can be worked out, though he’s right that research and beauty never get the funding they deserve.” The man glanced at Akuin. “You are Gehazi Thev’s friend.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve made a good choice. He’s going to have a future, in spite of being as ugly as a wall made of mud. Beauty isn’t everything.” The man touched the leaf a second time. “But it’s something.”

Money was found for flowers, though not for bugs. The senior officer picked the first bloom that opened. “To give to someone dear.”

“I know who that is,” Thev said. “A man who gets ahead on charm. He’ll go into administration. He hasn’t got the mind for research. But he isn’t a bad fellow, and he’ll make sure the men who can think get the chance to think. Do you think charm can take a person all the way to the front, Akuin?”

“I never got the impression that the Frontmen-in-a-Bundle were charming.”

“Research scientists don’t make it to the Bundle,” Thev said. “Accountants, yes, and administrators, though I’m not sure they are especially charming administrators. Also experts on warfare. But not experts on how the universe really works.”

“Are you ambitious?” Akuin asked.

“Yes, but not in that way. What I want, aside from you—” He rolled over and took hold of Akuin, pulling him close. “Is fame that goes on forever and a good teaching position.”

At the end of his second year in space, Akuin got leave and went home, like any other young man, to his native country and the house where he’d been raised. He was there for the usual length of time, working in his grandmother’s garden and taking hikes in the stony hills. For the most part, he spent his time alone.

Hah! He had grown, his female relatives told him. He was handsomer than ever! They didn’t mention his aloofness, which troubled them, or the expression of sadness that appeared too often on his face.

“It may be nothing,” his grandmother said in private. “There are men who have trouble adjusting to space, but almost everyone manages in the end. This other young man sounds encouraging. I’ve done research on the family. They are a small lineage, not rich, but they have made excellent alliances; and their traits seem fine. If this romance works out, and Akuin stays involved with the Gehazi boy, we ought to think of approaching them for semen.”

“It’s the other side of the planet!” Akuin’s mother exclaimed. “And the young man has spots!”

“He’d be a poor choice to father children,” the grandmother admitted. “Though he is apparently a genius. But I agree with you. It would be better to go to his male relatives. He has plenty who look normal, and most are bright. As for Gehazi’s location, these are modern times. We can’t be provincial. Who can say which alliances will prove useful?”

At the end of his leave, Akuin visited his former school. It was almost empty, the students on vacation, but Tol Chaib was there, getting his garden ready for winter. The air was cold already and smelled, when the wind came off the land, of drying vegetation.

He spent a day working with his mentor, digging into the sandy soil, cutting stalks and branches, gathering fallen leaves. In the evening they drank halin and talked, alone together in Tol Chaib’s quarters. The rest of the building was unoccupied.

After they were both drunk, Tol Chaib said, “I always wanted to have sex with you. It wasn’t possible, until you became a man. But the longing was there. It frightened me. I’m not usually attracted to boys.”

What was it, Akuin wondered, about him and ugly men? Maybe they could see the wrongness in him, though it was different from their ugliness. There was nothing wrong with Thev except his spots. In every other way, he was a model young man: loyal, determined, direct, pious. Though not violent. Thev lacked the fifth male virtue. Well, no one was perfect, and Thev’s other traits—his intelligence and cheerfulness—ought to count for something.

Tol Chaib was more disturbing. Looking at him, Akuin saw loneliness and grief for things lost: his old beauty, his life in space. The old man was like a mirror, reflecting Akuin’s future. He could end like this. Though he didn’t think he would ever be attracted to boys. That was a perversion, after all; and his wrongness—whatever it was exactly—seemed unconnected with perversity. He was a gardener, who wanted to garden at home. A shameful ambition! But not the same as wanting to molest children.

In the end, after another cup of halin, he went to bed with Tol Chaib, though he was never certain exactly why. The old man wanted this to happen, and he felt he owed his mentor something. That was as good an explanation as any. In the morning they parted, Tol Chaib giving him a tropical flower from the school greenhouse. It was huge and intricate and as blue as the sky, though almost scentless. Akuin carried it until it wilted, then threw it in the ocean. This was on one of the rocket islands. An ikun4 later he boarded a rocket, which carried him into space.

Gehazi Thev greeted him with affection when he got back to their station. “Though it was a good idea to have time away from you. I thought about stellar evolution instead of sex. There is much to be said for both, of course, but my job is stars.”

During his absence, Thev had moved into a new dormitory, this one occupied by four young physicists.

“There didn’t seem to be any reason to stay in my old room. I have nothing in common with the other men. It was only habit that kept me there. Habit and you, and you were gone.”

Their romance continued, though it might have ended. Who can say what ties men (or women) together? They returned to their old habits, exercising in the station’s gymnasia, going to its one theater to see recordings of plays put on in the great stations, places such as Tailin. Both enjoyed soaking in the pools-for-soaking. Both enjoyed sex in the rooms-for-privacy.

These last were small, like everything in the station. There was a low bed, fastened to the floor, and two stools that moved in grooves. The ceiling had a mirror, which could be turned off, though the lovers usually kept it on. The wall opposite the bed could be replaced with a hologram. Thev liked scenes of space: galaxies, nebulae, stars, and planets. Akuin (of course) preferred scenes of home.

During one of their stays in a private room, Thev spoke about the work he was doing. They’d had sex and were lying together on the bed’s thin mattress. A trio of stars—orange, red, and green—blazed at the room’s end. The mirror above them showed their bodies, quiet now, Thev resting on his belly, Akuin on his back.

Later, Akuin remembered the scene, as he remembered the day he first fell in love with grandmother’s garden.

Thev had been working with geometry. “Making models, so I can visualize what is happening in this region of space. Mind you, it isn’t easy. We evolved to see five dimensions, and that’s the number we insist on seeing, no matter how many there may be. But it is possible, especially if one uses a computer. How did our ancestors get anything done, before the existence of computers? Imagine trying to understand the universe by counting on fingers! Or making lines in the dirt! No wonder the universe was small in those days! No wonder it was simple!

“What one does—” Thev rolled over and began to go through his uniform’s pockets. 5 A moment later he was kneeling by the hologram projector. The triple star vanished. In its place was an irregular object made of glowing white lines. It floated in midair, turning slowly and changing shape as it turned.

“—is eliminate one of the ordinary visible dimensions and replace it with a dimension that can’t be seen. Obvious, you may say to me; and certainly it has been done many times before; and certainly it isn’t adequate to show what’s happening in this region of space.

“But if one makes a large number of these partial models, each one showing an aspect of reality—”

Now the room was full of floating objects, all made of glowing lines, but not all the same color. Some were red or orange, like the vanished stars. Others were green, blue, yellow. Hah! It was like a garden! Except these flowers were all deformed and deforming. Some expanded like leaves opening in spring. Others folded in and seemed to be swallowing themselves. As one diminished, the one beside it grew, either in size or complexity. Akuin began to feel queasy.

“The problem, of course, is fitting all these partial models together. This is where a computer is essential.”

“What is this about?” Akuin asked. “Does this array of ugly objects serve any purpose?”

“Ugly!” said Thev. “Dear one, they are the achievement of my life!” He was back on the bed now, sitting with his arms around his knees, admiring the things. “Of course, I’m young and likely to do better. But this isn’t bad, I assure you.”

“You have told me,” Akuin said, “that you are trying to see what can’t be seen, and comprehend what isn’t comprehensible. Maybe you can do this. Everyone agrees that you are brilliant. But I’m not going to understand these things swallowing themselves.”

“You want another kind of model. Something that has to do with plants and bugs.”

“That’s what I know,” Akuin said.

Thev was silent for a while, watching his things, which continued to grow, change shape, divide, diminish, and vanish. A garden out of a bad dream. A sorcerer’s garden.

Thev spoke finally. “Think of this region, this grove of stars, as a grove of trees growing in a dry place, so the trees are forced to seek water. We think the ground is dirt and stone, we think it’s solid. In reality, a multitude of roots go down and out, forcing their way through dirt and stone, twisting around each other. It’s possible the roots are connected.”

Akuin had grown up in a part of the home world where many species of trees were communal, their various trunks rising from a single root system. But he had trouble imagining stars connected in the same way. This suggests that he hadn’t paid attention to his physics class in school, which is true.

“We know that strange stars can be connected with other strange stars. Usually, the partners are not in close proximity. Here, I think they are. Imagine what this must do to reality. Strangeness loops back on itself. The fabric of space is pierced again and again by strangeness.

“What I’ve said so far is ordinary. Few scientists would disagree, except about the strangeness looping. That’s not a generally accepted idea, though I’m not the only person who’s come forward with it. But from this point on—” Thev glanced and smiled. “The ideas are mine.

“According to the usual theory, the ground under our grove of trees is stable. Yes, the roots have pushed through it, causing stress—most evident at the surface, where the ground may buckle, forced up from below. In areas settled by people, this pressure-from-below is easily perceived. Sidewalks are lifted. The walls of buildings crack and fall. All done by roots.” Thev wiggled his fingers, showing the action of roots.

“But let’s imagine that the ground is not stable. Maybe the land is limestone and full of caves. The roots, burrowing down, are cracking stone that forms the roof of one of these caves. In time the roof will break. The grove will fall into a sinkhole.”

This was understandable. There are places in the Great Central Plain where the ground is limestone, and water is usually found in pools at the bottom of sinkholes. Nowadays, windmills bring the water up. In the old days, people cut steps in the stone walls and carried buckets. Akuin knew all this, and knew that sinkholes could appear suddenly. But how could a sinkhole appear in space? After all, a sinkhole was an absence of stone. But space wasn’t there in the first place. How could one have an absence of something already absent?

“Let me give you another model,” Thev said. “Think of this region of space as a cheese.”

“What?” said Akuin.

“A large, round one.” Thev spread his arms to show the cheese’s size. “Bugs have infested it. It looks solid, but inside is a maze of tunnels. If one bends the cheese a little, or twists it, if any extra strain is put on it—hah! It breaks apart! There’s nothing left but crumbs. The bugs have destroyed their home.”

“These are disturbing images,” Akuin said. “What are you saying with them? That this region of space could break into crumbs? I find it hard to imagine such an occurrence. What is a space crumb like?”

“Maybe the grove is a better model than the cheese, though you wanted plants and bugs, and I have given you both. I think it’s possible this region will collapse. More than possible. In time, collapse is certain.”

“But what will it become? Not a sinkhole?”

“My guess would be a large area of strangeness. Spherical, of course. Such things always are.”

“What would happen to the station?” By this time Akuin was sitting up and looking at Thev with horror. This wasn’t a pleasant situation that Thev was describing. But Thev’s voice was full of interest and pleasure. What Thev was enjoying, of course, was his own cleverness. In addition, it’s possible that he saw the situation as one of the many fine jokes with which the Goddess has filled her universe. A pious man will always enjoy the Great Mother’s tricks.

“It depends on the size of the collapse,” Thev said. “If it takes the entire region out, the station will be destroyed. But if it’s the right size, and happens at the right distance, we’ll be able to observe the process.”

Akuin was getting a headache, either from the conversation or his lover’s ugly things, which still filled the room and continued to change in disturbing ways. He mentioned the headache. Thev stopped the recording. The garden remained, but everything in it was motionless.

Much better! Akuin lay back. The mirror above him reflected his own dark body. On one side of him was a funnel made of bright red lines. It appeared to be dissolving and pouring itself down itself, though nothing moved now; and the center of the funnel was empty.

On the other side of him was a blue sphere, which had apparently stopped in the middle of turning itself into something full of many sharp angles. Both the angles and the sphere’s smooth surface were visible. Akuin closed his eyes.

Thev kept talking. More research was needed. He’d written a proposal. “But you know the funding situation. If an idea can’t be turned into a weapon at once, the frontmen aren’t interested; and I can’t see any obvious way to do harm with my ideas. Maybe some day we’ll be able to use strangeness as a weapon, but not soon.”

Thev must be getting tired. His conversation was beginning to wander. So much was uncertain. So many things might happen. If the station wasn’t swallowed, it might still be destroyed by the event. “I don’t think this process of collapse will be entirely quiet and peaceful.” Or, if the station survived, and the men inside were alive, they might find that they’d lost their Heligian gate. 6

“We’d be trapped,” Akuin said. No one had ever warned him to beware of sex with physicists. Maybe they should have. It would be easier to have a lover who thought about more trivial problems.

“We could send information home,” Thev answered in an encouraging tone. “Though only at the speed of light. But that would be sufficient. It would take less than five years for a message to reach the nearest working gate. Surely the frontmen would post a ship there, after our gate vanished.”

“What is most likely to happen?” Akuin asked.

“The station will be destroyed.”

“Soon?”

“I don’t know,” Thev said. “Some of the work done here suggests the space in this region is badly strained already, and it’s possible that our presence is making things worse.”

“How?” Akuin asked.

“Through the coming and going of star ships. They do have an effect on the fabric of space, though not one that matters in ordinary situations; and there is at least one experiment being done here at the station which may be acting like roots pushing through a crack in limestone, or maybe like a slight twist of the cheese.” Thev smiled briefly. “The experiment is continuing, though I’ve mentioned that it may cause trouble. The men running it don’t believe the risk is significant.”

“Aren’t you worried?” Akuin asked.

“What can I do, except put my ideas out in front? Maybe I’m wrong. I have sent my theory, and recordings of my models, to the Helig Institute. If I die here, I will become famous. If I don’t die here, if this region does not collapse, then I’ll become famous later for something else. One cannot live in fear of thoughts, Akuin.”

That was the end of the conversation. Akuin found he couldn’t get Thev’s ideas out of his mind. They haunted him: the collapsing grove, the cheese eaten out by bugs, the garden of ugly things.

Bad enough to think of living for years in the station. But to think of dying here! How could he feel the same affection for Thev? A man who came up with such ideas and models!

Gradually the two lovers drew apart. Thev accepted this with his usual calm good sense. Nothing pushed him back for long. He always recovered and went forward. Soon he found a lover among the physicists: not a thinker, but a hands-on builder, who said that Thev’s models were likely to prove useful, though he didn’t believe the station was in danger.

“You theoreticians love terrifying ideas! The Goddess may be sloppy in her details. We know she is, from looking around. But the basic structure of her universe is solid. Space doesn’t fall to pieces like a bridge with bad mortar. It lasts! And will outlast everything!”

As for Akuin, he took a series of sexual partners. All were casual. This didn’t especially bother him. Some men must have a true love, a companion for life. He wasn’t such a man. Sex was fine. So was friendship. But his real love, the center of his life, was plants.

Another year passed. Once again he traveled home. His grandmother had died suddenly, shortly after his previous trip. Now it was time to put her ashes in the ground and carve her name on the monument for Atkwa women.

When he reached his home country, it was spring. In his grandmother’s garden, flowers bloomed, attracting early bugs. The house was full of female relatives, busy with details of the coming ceremony.

There was nothing for Akuin to do, so he went hiking. South and west of the house were hills, not high, but made impressive by huge outcroppings of igneous rock. No limestone here, eroding easily! His country had bones of granite! An ikun from home, he came to his favorite spot for looking into the distance. Up he climbed, until he was atop the great bald knob. Now he could see the folded hills, covered with pale green foliage. They stretched in every direction. Here and there were patches of color: yellow, pale orange, and lavender, flowering shrubs and trees.

All at once, he realized he had reached the limit of his endurance. He could not bear to leave this place again. He would not return to space.

Why did this happen? How can any man turn away from duty? His grandmother, the most formidable member of his family, was dead. He’d lost his lover. His mentor had turned out to be a pervert, attracted to children. The garden in the station was not an adequate substitute for the country here, extending around him in every direction under a cloudless sky.

Always, in the station, he was aware of the space outside: dark, cold, airless, hostile to life. If Thev was right, the emptiness outside the station was not even reliable. It might collapse at any moment, becoming something worse.

Here he stood on granite.

By the time he returned to his grandmother’s house, he was already making plans. His female relatives continued to be busy, his mother especially. She would be the new matriarch. Akuin gathered supplies, sneaking them out of storerooms and hiding them in a forest. Tools. Clothing. A rifle and ammunition. A hunting bow and arrows. Medical supplies. Plenty of seeds. A computer full of information.

By the time his grandmother was underground, he was ready. There was a final ceremony: cutting his grandmother’s name in the stone that memorialized the family’s dead women. When that was over, his mother bid him farewell. A cousin took him to the train station. He climbed on board, climbing out the far side and ducking behind a bush. The train pulled away. His cousin returned to her car. Akuin took off for the forest and his hidden supplies.

He reached them without trouble. With luck, it would be several days before his family realized that he had vanished: time enough to get into the high mountains, the wilderness. He was strong, determined, and not afraid of anything in his homeland. Pack on back, he set off.

There’s no reason to tell his life in detail from this point on. The important thing had happened. Akuin had decided to turn away from loyalty and obligation. Now, he lived for himself rather than his family or his species. This is something humans do, if the stories we hear are true. This is why their home planet is full of violence and has far too many inhabitants, produced not by careful breeding contracts, but random acts of heterosexuality.

He found a valley high in the mountains, away from all trails, with a hard-to-find entrance. There he built a hut and established his garden. The first year was difficult. So was the second. But he persisted. At times he was lonely. Not often. He’d always been comfortable with solitude. The things around him—sunlight, rain, wind, his garden, the mountains—were a constant source of joy.

In the third year he built a solid cabin. Having done this, he began to wonder what was happening in the house where he’d grown up. He waited till harvest was over, and his cabin full of food. Then he went home.

He couldn’t arrive openly, of course. He was a criminal now, and the women of his family had always been law-abiding and respectful of tradition. Instead, he lurked in the forest shadow and crept close after dark, peering in windows. There his family was, the same as always. Only he had changed. For a while he felt regret. Then he remembered the station, and Gehazi Thev’s terrifying ideas. He’d made the right choice.

The next fall he came down again. This time he did a little stealing. There were tools he needed, and he could always use more seeds.

The fifth year of his exile, he decided to visit the library in his grandmother’s house, which was held by his mother now. He crept in after midnight, when the house was entirely dark, and made his way without trouble to the room. Some of the houses in Atkwa were old. Their libraries were full of actual books, ancient cherished objects. This house had been built a century before. There were a few books, brought from other places, but most of the glass-fronted cabinets held modern recordings. When his electric torch played over them, they glittered like so many jewels: garnet-red novels, poetry like peridots, topaz-yellow plays. The music was shades of blue. What a fool he’d been to take only nonfiction before! Quickly, he picked the recordings he wanted and copied them into his computer, then replaced the shining bits of silicon and metal in their proper resting places.

When he was almost done, he heard a noise. Akuin turned and saw his mother, standing in the doorway.

She reached out a hand. The ceiling light went on. Akuin stood ashamed, his hands full of music, like a jewel thief holding sapphires.

His mother stepped into the room, closing the door behind her. “It was you who stole from us last fall.”

He tilted his head in agreement.

“I thought so, and I thought, ‘he’s alive.’ That idea brought me joy, Akuin, though it shouldn’t have. What’s wrong with you? Why was it so difficult for you to live like other men? When you came home the first time, your grandmother and I made plans. If your romance worked out, she wanted to asked the Gehazi for semen. A young man of so much promise! A family worth forming an alliance with! We thought—we hoped—you had overcome your oddness at last.”

No words of explanation came to him. Instead, he said, “what?” and stopped. His voice sounded harsh. The tone was wrong. He was no longer used to speaking.

“What am I going to do? Nothing. By now the neighboring families have forgotten about you. If I give you to the male police, it will bring our shame into daylight. People will know for certain that you ran from duty. Before, there was a possibility that something happened—an accident, a murder.”

“You could tell me to die,” Akuin said in his new strange voice.

“Would you kill yourself, if I asked you to?”

He didn’t answer.

“No,” his mother said. “I think not. Go back to your mountains. Every family has embarrassing secrets. You will be ours.”

He set the music on a table. How it glittered!

“Don’t come into the house again,” his mother added. “I’ll see that things are left in the far barn for you.”

He opened his mouth to thank her.

“Go.”

Akuin left, carrying his computer.

The next year he came home twice, though not to the greathouse. Instead he found his mother’s gifts in the far barn: tools, small boxes containing seeds, recordings of music, favorite pieces from when he was young, a letter full of family news.

After this, there were no changes in his life for many years. Bit by bit, he expanded his garden and made his cabin more comfortable. Slowly he read his way through most of the great male plays, which are—as everyone knows—about honor and the making of difficult choices. The heroes, the men who must choose, usually die, as he should have. Or they sacrifice their happiness to obligation. Another thing he had failed to do.

In addition, he read many of the plays written about women and their lives. These deal with endurance and compromise, which are not male virtues.

Maybe he would have made a better woman, though it didn’t seem likely. Nothing about him seemed especially feminine. He certainly didn’t have his grandmother’s solidity. His mother was the same. Women like the mountains of Atkwa! Nothing ordinary could wear them down!

Akuin’s mother died prematurely, when he was only forty. Coming down from the mountains through an early snow, he found the usual kind of supplies in the far barn, also a letter. It was from one of his female cousins, telling him the news: a sudden illness that should not have killed a woman so healthy, not yet old. But it did! “Life is full of these kinds of surprises,” his cousin wrote in an elegant, flowing script, though Akuin was not thinking about calligraphy at the moment.

He fell to his knees, chest heaving. The groans inside him would not come out. Beyond the barn’s open door, snow fell in thick soft flakes.

The gifts would continue, his cousin wrote. She had promised his mother while the woman lay dying. “This is not the kind of promise one breaks. Though I have to say, Akuin, that I do not approve of your behavior.”

“So, so,” Akuin said. He got up finally, walking into the snow. No chance the people in the house would see him through this whiteness. He lifted his head and hands, as if to catch something, though he didn’t know what. The life he should have had? The snowflakes melted when they touched his palms.

More time passed. This is what the real world is like. Instead of the sudden important decisions that heroes must make in plays, everything solved in less than an ikun, real life is gradual.

His cousin kept her promise. He continued to find gifts in the barn. For many years he saw no people, except at a distance. He always managed to avoid them.

One summer morning when he was almost fifty, Akuin stepped out his cabin door and saw a monster in his garden. That was his first impression. The thing stood in brilliant sunlight. Akuin, coming out of his cabin’s dimness, could make out nothing except the creature’s shape: upright on two legs like a person, but far too thin and tall. A stick-person. A person made of bones. Like bones, the monster was pale.

He stepped back into his cabin, picked up his rifle, and waited, hoping the monster had not seen him. Maybe it would go away. He’d never had a problem with monsters before.

The thing remained in the middle of Akuin’s vegetables. He saw it more clearly now. It had on clothing, pants and a red checked shirt. A head rose above the shirt. The face was hairless, the features like no hwarhath features he had ever seen: everything narrow and pushed together, as if someone had put hands on either side of the creature’s head and pressed, forcing the cheeks in, the nose out, the forehead up, the chin into a jutting bulge.

“It’s a magnificent garden,” the creature said in Akuin’s own language.

He’d been spotted. Akuin raised his rifle.

A second voice said, “You are looking at a human. This one is friendly. Put the gun down.”

Akuin glanced around, until he made out the second person, standing at the forest edge. He was short with steel gray fur, dressed in hiking shorts and boots. A hwarhath male, beyond any question. But not a relative. Like the monster, he spoke with an accent that wasn’t local. In the case of this man, the accent was southern.

“Believe me,” added the hwarhath in a quiet voice. “Neither one of us will do you any harm. We are here with the permission of the Atkwa, for recreational purposes.”

“Hiking in the mountains,” said the monster in agreement.

“Enemy,” Akuin said in the voice he almost never used. Hah! The word came out like a branch creaking in the wind!

“The war has ended,” the hwarhath said. “We have peace with the humans.”

This didn’t seem possible, but the news Akuin got from his cousin was all family news.

“Put the gun down,” the hwarhath male repeated. “You really must not kill this human. He works for us. His rank is advancer one-in-back.” 7

Akuin had been a carrier. The monster far outranked him. It was definitely wrong to point a gun at a senior officer. He lowered the rifle.

The hwarhath man said, “Good. Now, come out.”

Slowly, Akuin moved into the sunlight. The monster remained motionless. So did the man at the edge of the forest.

What next? Akuin stood with his rifle pointing down. He was making out more details now. There was a patch of hair, or possibly feathers, on top of the monster’s head. The patch was bone-white, like the hairless face. Even the monster’s eyes were white, though a dark spot floated in the middle of each eye. Was this a sign of disease? Could the monster be blind? No. Akuin had a clear sense that the thing was watching. The dark spots moved, flicking from him to the hwarhath male, then back again.

“I think it would be easier to talk if you put the gun down entirely,” the hwarhath said.

A calm voice, low and even, but Akuin recognized the tone. This was authority speaking. He laid the rifle on the ground and straightened up, trying to remember the way he used to hold himself, back when he was a soldier.

“Much better,” said the hwarhath. He walked forward and picked up the rifle, handing it to the monster.

For a moment, Akuin was afraid. But the monster held the rifle properly, barrel pointed down. The oddly shaped hands did not reach for the trigger. The backs of the hands were pale and hairless. Was the creature the same all over? White and as hairless as a fish?

The hwarhath man looked at Akuin, who glanced down at once. This was a very senior officer. It showed in his tone of voice, the way he moved, the way he treated the monster, expecting obedience, which the monster gave him. Not a man you looked at directly.

If the man had questions, he did not ask them. Instead, he explained their arrival. It had been an accident. They’d gotten off their trail and lost. “Though not by much, I suspect. If your relatives become worried, they will be able to find us.”

The night before had been spent at the entrance to Akuin’s valley. This morning, curious, they had hiked in. “I don’t think we could find this place again. In fact, we’ll need your help to get back to our trail.”

“I’ll give it in return for news,” Akuin said, then felt surprise at what he’d said.

The hwarhath man tilted his head in agreement. “That can be done.”

Akuin remembered he was the host and got busy making tea. The two visitors wandered through his garden. The human still carried Akuin’s rifle. There was another rifle in the cabin. If necessary, Akuin could kill both of them.

But if they vanished, Akuin’s relatives would look for them and keep looking till the men were found. Hospitality required as much. So did respect for rank and the connections far-in-front officers always had. The hwarhath picked a flower—a yellow midsummer bloom—and handed it to his companion, who took it with a flash of teeth. A smile. Then the two of them strolled back toward the cabin, the hwarhath first, the monster following, rifle in one hand, flower in the other.

This was a peculiar situation! And likely to turn out badly. If the men became curious about him, they’d discover that he was AWOL. His family would be shamed in public. He would have to kill himself.

His mother should have turned him in twenty-five years before. The result would have been the same for him: death by suicide or execution. But the Atkwa would have escaped embarrassment. At least his mother wasn’t alive to see the result of her affection.

Maybe it would be better to ask no questions, send the men off as quickly as possible and hope they did not become curious. But his longing for information was intense. In any case, they must suspect that he was a runaway. How could they not? He was alone in the mountains and so ignorant that he didn’t know the war with the humans was over.

There was a flat rock near his cabin door. He used it as a table, setting out teapot and cups. His two guests settled down, the monster leaning Akuin’s rifle against the cabin where Akuin could not reach it, though the monster could. He kept the flower, twirling its stem between oddly proportioned fingers. “It really is a very fine garden.”

“What kind of news do you want to hear?” asked the hwarhath.

“The war,” Akuin said.

“It turned out to be a mistake. Humans can be reasoned with, though I can’t say the process is easy, and we live at such great distances from one another that there isn’t much to fight over.”

“Some fool, apparently a human fool, fired at the first strange ship he encountered,” the monster added. “That’s how the war began.” He showed his teeth to Akuin, another smile. It wasn’t quick and friendly like a hwarhath smile, but wide and slow, disturbing. “It continued because the two sides lacked a way to communicate, unless one calls the firing of weapons a form of communication. In the end, we learned each other’s languages.”

“That helped,” the hwarhath said. “Though once a war has gotten going, it’s hard to stop. This proved no exception.”

Akuin asked about the station where he’d been assigned. The hwarhath man was silent.

“It’s not an important place,” Akuin said. “Maybe you haven’t heard of it.”

“Why do you want to know about it?” the man asked.

“I had a friend who was assigned there, a man named Gehazi Thev.”

“The physicist.”

“You know about him,” said Akuin. “Is he still alive?”

“He wasn’t at the station when it disappeared.”

Hah! Akuin thought and refilled the cups. The monster had barely touched his tea, but the hwarhath male was obviously a drinker. “Did the region collapse, as he said it would? Was the station swallowed by strangeness?”

“We couldn’t get back in the usual way,” the hwarhath said. “The local gate had vanished, along with everything else. But we were able to survey the area from a distance, and we sent a robot probe. The stars that had been in the region were gone. No question about that. But they hadn’t—as far as we could tell from a distance—been replaced by strangeness, and there wasn’t the kind of release of energy we expected. When the probe reached the region, it found nothing special. There was nothing there except empty space.”

“How is that possible?” Akuin asked.

“Gehazi Thev revised his theory.” The hwarhath gave a proper smile, small and quick, which did not threaten at all. “If you know him, you know that nothing pushes him back. His first ideas did not explain what happened, so he brought new ideas to the fore. He now thinks the collapse served to separate the region from our universe.”

“What do you mean?” Akuin asked. “What happened to the station? Does it still exist?”

“How can we know?” the man said in answer. “If it has survived, then it’s in another universe, along with the stars that vanished. A very small universe, according to Gehazi Thev, who has described the place. There is no way to check his ideas, but it’s a fine description.

“At first, according to Gehazi Thev, the new universe would be dark, except for the stars around the station. Imagine how that would look!” The man exhaled. Akuin couldn’t tell if the exhalation meant horror or interest. Horror seemed more reasonable. “In time, the light produced by the stars will be bent back. Then it will seem that new stars are appearing in the distance, all dim and red, like the stars around the station. If the men in the station had good enough instruments, they’d be able to see themselves. They will certainly be able to see and hear the messages they send.”

“The men in the station must be dead,” Akuin said.

“Most likely, though Gehazi Thev thinks—or did, the last time I heard him speak—there’s a slight possibility they are alive. It depends on what happened to all the strangeness in the region, when it collapsed, not to mention the energy that should have been generated by the collapse. If these went into this new universe, then the universe is almost certainly uninhabitable. But if the strangeness and energy were in some way dissipated or used up in the creation of the universe—”

It was, Akuin realized, another one of Thev’s terrible ideas. “When did this happen?”

“Twenty-one years ago,” the hwarhath said.

Akuin could have been there, when the station vanished. He almost certainly knew men who had died or gone into their own universe. Had Thev’s lover, the hands-on physicist, been among them? He could no longer remember the fellow’s name. Akuin looked toward his garden, but did not see its midsummer brightness. Instead, for a moment, he imagined darkness and isolation, relieved—finally—by dim red stars that were an illusion, light bent back toward its origin. What a fate!

“Most likely the station was destroyed,” the hwarhath said in a comfortable tone, then excused himself and went off to eliminate tea.

The monster stayed where he was, his cup still full. “I have bad reactions to a number of hwarhath foods,” he said. “It’s better not to experiment.”

“How did you end up working for us?” Akuin asked.

“I was offered a job. I took it.”

“Was this after the war ended?”

The monster smiled his slow, disturbing smile. “No.”

“Is this acceptable behavior among humans?” Akuin asked.

“To change sides in the middle of a war? No.”

Obviously Akuin found the monster interesting. This was a person who’d done something worse than running away. “What would happen if your people got hold of you?”

“Nothing now. There is a treaty. I’m a hwarhath officer. That should protect me. But the usual penalty for disloyalty is death.”

Akuin wanted to ask the monster why he’d changed sides, but there wasn’t time. 8 The hwarhath male was returning, moving through Akuin’s garden, pausing to pick another flower, this one red. He laid the flower down on Akuin’s rock table, then resettled himself on the ground. “Is there anything else you want to know?”

“What are you going to do about me?” Akuin asked, and was surprised by the question. Surely it would have been wiser to keep quiet.

The hwarhath tilted his head, considering. “We’re both on leave at the moment. Our work, when we are at work, is not for the Corps that keeps track of hwarhath men; and we are guests in this country. I assume the Atkwa know about you. Let them deal with you. I don’t see that your behavior is our business.”

He was not going to die. His relatives were not going to suffer embarrassment. In his relief, he offered them vegetables from his garden.

“We can’t carry much,” the hwarhath said. “And my friend can’t eat most of our edible plants. Either they don’t nurture him, or they make him ill. So he lives on specially prepared rations. It’s a hard fate for a human. Eating is an amusement for them. They expect their food to be as entertaining as a good play. Our human rations are—I have been told—dull.”

“This is true,” the monster said.

“But I’ll accept your offer,” his hwarhath companion concluded. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen handsomer looking vegetables. This is something worthy of respect, though I don’t have the human interest in food.”

That afternoon, Akuin led them back to their trail. After he left them, heading back toward home, he realized that he hadn’t learned their names. Nor had they learned his, but he was obviously Atkwa. If they wanted to find his records, they’d be able to do it without difficulty. He reached his cabin late in the afternoon. Shadows covered the valley’s floor and lower slopes, but light still filled the sky and touched the eastern hilltops. A copperleaf tree stood high on one of these, shining as if it were actually made of uncorroded copper. Lovely!

He gathered the teapot and cups, carrying them inside, then came out and picked up the yellow flower, which had been left. The red one had gone with his visitors, tucked under a flap on the hwarhath man’s pack. He’d seen it go bobbing down the trail, as the hwarhath followed his long-legged companion. Easy to see who the athlete in the pair was.

Holding the withered flower, Akuin realized the two were lovers. It was as clear as something seen in a vision, though he was not a diviner and did not have visions. Nonetheless, he knew.

Impossible! was his first reaction. But how could he tell what was possible these days? He’d heard a monster speak his native language and been told the monster was a hwarhath officer. If this could happen, and a station vanish out of the universe, who could say what other unexpected events occur?

He laid the flower down, unwilling to discard it yet, and watched as sunlight faded off the copperleaf tree. A disturbing day, though he was glad to hear that Thev was still alive and apparently famous. It was what Thev wanted. The news brought by the two men made him feel isolated and ignorant, for a moment doubtful about the choice he’d made.

Overhead the sky seemed limitless, not a roof, but an ocean into which he could fall and sink—if not forever, then far enough to drown.

Hah! That was an unpleasant idea! And also untrue. He stood with his feet in the dirt of Atkwa. Below the dirt was granite and the great round planet, which held him as a mother holds a child. There was no way for him to fall into the sky.

As for the choice he’d made—this was what he’d always wanted, as intensely as Thev had wanted fame: the garden in front of him, the copperleaf tree shining on its cliff, evening bugs beginning to call in the shadows. Only a fool mourns for the impossible or asks for everything, as if the Goddess had made the universe for his comfort.

If he had lost through his choice, he had also gained. Surely this valley—the bugs, the scent of his garden carried on a slight cool wind—was better than a lifetime spent in gray metal corridors. It was certainly better than vanishing into a very small universe of dim red stars. Thev and his ideas!

He stayed at the cabin doorway, watching day end. The sky was a roof again. The ground beneath his feet was solid. Gradually his uncertainty—his sense of loss—faded, like sunlight fading off the copperleaf tree. He regretted nothing. This was the right place for him to be.

That evening Ettin Gwarha and Sanders Nicholas made their camp next to the trail. A stream ran in a gully below them, producing a pleasant quiet noise. Ettin Gwarha ate fresh vegetables, while his companion made do with human rations. Then the son of Ettin turned on a map and studied it. “We’ll take a different route out than the one we originally planned,” he said.

“Why?” asked Sanders Nicholas.

“The original plan had us ending at one of the Atkwa greathouses. I’d just as soon avoid the family.”

“Is there a reason?”

“If they realize how close we came to that man’s territory, they’ll worry, and that will force me to reassure them. As much as possible, I want nothing to do with this situation.”

“But you told the man you wouldn’t turn him in.”

“Every family has its secrets, and we are guests in the country of the Atkwa. But never think that I approve of behavior such as his. There is no acceptable reason to run away from duty.” The frontman turned off his map and closed it, then added, “I’m not going to comment on the behavior of the Atkwa women in letting their male relative go wild. Only women can judge women.”

Sanders Nicholas considered this for a while. Maybe Ettin Gwarha could read the expression on his pale hairless face. No ordinary hwarhath can. “I have another question,” he said finally.

The frontman looked at him.

“Why do you know so much about Gehazi Thev and the station which vanished? Physics has never been one of your areas of competence.”

“Negotiation is my great skill, as you know. When the station disappeared, the Bundle had two questions it wanted answered, and they wanted one question at least to be asked diplomatically, since it was a disturbing question, and they had to go—I had to go—to the Helig Institute for an answer.”9

Sanders Nicholas waited.

“The first question was, had some kind of weapon caused our station to disappear? Was it possible that humans—or another alien species—had so much power? Remember that an entire grove of stars vanished with the station. This was a serious event! If intelligent beings caused it to happen, then we were in trouble.

“The next question was, could such an event be caused? Was there a way to make a weapon out of whatever had happened?”

Sanders Nicholas gave his lover the wide, slow, unfriendly-seeming smile of humans. “You were hoping you could force the human home system into another universe.”

“It was a thought that occurred to several men,” Ettin Gwarha admitted. “Surely you can imagine the appeal of the idea, Nicky! The human threat could be eliminated without doing harm to humanity. We wouldn’t have to go to our female relatives and say, ‘We have destroyed women and children.’”

Sanders Nicholas sat quietly, looking at the small fire they had made. It was dying to embers already. Overhead the sky was dark. The Banner of the Goddess stretched across it, a wide swathe of dimly shining light. “I have two objections,” he said finally. “How could the Bundle be certain that people would not be harmed? It would be an untested procedure, after all; and I find it hard to believe that any universe, even a small one, comes into existence quietly.”

Ettin Gwarha inclined his head, perhaps in agreement. “What is your other objection?”

“Even if it could be done without immediate physical harm, think of the consequences. You would be depriving humanity of this—” He looked up, gesturing toward the starry sky. “Would you like to live in a very small universe, Ettin Gwarha?”

“No.”

“I may be showing a bias, but I think this universe would be diminished if it lost humanity, though there’s no question we are a difficult species.”

“We could have found better neighbors,” Ettin Gwarha said in agreement. “But it doesn’t seem likely we’ll be able to get rid of you. The scientists at the Helig Institute say there’s no way to reproduce whatever happened at Kushaiin. Gehazi Thev does not agree. He believes we could cause such an event, but only in a region on the verge of collapse. Such a region would be full of old stars and strangeness. It’s not the kind of place one would expect to find intelligent life. At most, in such a place, we might find a research station.” Ettin Gwarha smiled briefly, his teeth flashing in the red light of the fire. “Hardly worth destroying in such an elaborate fashion. ‘Avoid force in excess of the force needed,’ as the old proverb says.”

“Well, then,” Sanders Nicholas said. “We are stuck with each other and with a very large universe.”

“A disturbing situation,” his lover said in agreement. “Though I think we can endure it. There is a final aspect, which I pointed out to the Bundle. The situation at hand—the idea that worried us—was not likely. Destroying an entire system, or moving it out of our universe, is beyond any science we know, and I don’t believe humanity will develop a weapon able to do this. Human technology, at least in the relevant areas, is not impressive, and their economic and political problems are so severe I don’t think they can afford the necessary R & D. But if there are two star-faring species in the galaxy, there ought to be three and four and five. Suppose one of these other species is as hostile as humanity and better organized. Could they create a weapon able to destroy an entire area of space? How can we know?

“That’s one thing to consider. The other is, it’s comparatively easy to make a single planet uninhabitable. Even the humans could do it. Our home world was safe during the war, because humanity didn’t know where it was. At some point they are going to learn. It’s possible the human government knows already.”

“Maybe,” said Sanders Nicholas. “I certainly think you ought to assume they know. But they’d have to fight their way here, and I think the hwarhath can stop them. In addition, as you ought to remember, there’s a peace treaty.”

“Some treaties last. Others don’t. This one has no breeding clause. 10 How can we trust an agreement that hasn’t been made solid—knotted—through the exchange of genetic material?”

Sanders Nicholas did not answer this question, though the answer is obvious. No treaty can be entirely trusted, if it lacks a breeding clause.

“Humans send their women to the stars. Destroying the Solar System would not destroy their species. But our women prefer to stay at home. If something happened to our home planet, we would not be able to reproduce.”

“You could borrow human biotechnology,” Sanders Nicholas said.

“And produce cloned children who are raised by men?” asked Ettin Gwarha. His voice combined disgust and horror, as it should, of course.

“They wouldn’t have to be clones.”

“Well, suppose we decided to combine genetic material from men belonging to different lineages. Who would arrange the breeding contract, if our women were all gone? And how could men possibly raise children?”

“That leaves one obvious alternative,” Sanders Nicholas said. “The hwarhath could do what humans have done: move women out of the home system. You must have thought of this.”

“The Bundle has discussed the idea,” Ettin Gwarha admitted. “And we have suggested it to the female government. Unfolding such a plan required far-in-front diplomatic ability. I was sent.” He smiled briefly. “The idea was to establish colonies of young women in distant systems—in stations initially, since they are safer than the surface of any inhabitable planet.

“‘To live without the advice of their mothers and senior female relatives?’ the Weaving said. ‘Absolutely not! It’s the job of men to keep the home system safe. If you can’t do it, then we need to talk about your failings and limitations. But we won’t send our daughters to the stars.’”

“Did you suggest sending older women as well?”

“The Weaving didn’t like the idea, nor was the Bundle entirely happy with it. There are frontmen whose mothers are still living, not to mention other female relatives. Space might become considerably less comfortable, if senior women began to travel.”

“This is true,” said Sanders Nicholas. “But comfort is not the only important aspect of life. I think the Weaving and the Bundle are making a mistake.” He glanced at Ettin Gwarha. “There’s a human proverb which warns against putting all one’s ova in one container. If anything happens to the container—”

Ettin Gwarha tilted his head in agreement. “None the less, the Bundle isn’t going to argue with the Weaving over an issue that concerns women. Most likely, the home system is safe. Anyone seeking to destroy this world would have to get past many armed and armored ships. But I’d like to see women among the stars. Some of them would enjoy the experience.”

Sanders Nicholas made no answer, possibly because he was tired.

Soon after the two of them went to sleep. In the morning they continued their journey, going down out of the mountains to a railroad junction. There, at day’s end, they caught a local train. All night they rattled through the Atkwa foothills, riding in a freight car, since there wasn’t a passenger car for men. He’d had worse accommodations, Sanders Nicholas said. At least there were windows, though not much to see: the hills as areas of darkness against a starry sky, now and then the lights of a station, flashing by quickly, showing nothing except an empty platform. By sunrise they had reached the plain.11

© 2004 by Eleanor Arnason.

Originally published in Synergy SF.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Eleanor Arnason has published six novels and thirty plus works of short fiction. Her novel A Woman of the Iron People won the Tiptree and Mythopoeic Awards. Her story “Dapple” won the Spectrum Award. She has been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her most recent books are Tomb of the Fathers, a short novel from Aqueduct Press, and Mammoths of the Great Plains, a chapbook from PM Press. Both came out in 2010. Eleanor spent most of her adult life working in offices, ending finally as a nonprofit accountant, because she could not find work as a space cadet. She is now retired and writing full time. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Footnotes:

1 Black dwarves, EDSOs, and clothed singularities. There is no reason to believe the hwarhath have discovered a stellar cluster as odd as this one turns out to be.

2 Hwarhath Public Health Corps programs about sex are deliberately erotic and often made with the assistance of the Arts Corp, the theory being that the audience will pay more attention to something that is beautiful and sexy than to something that is ugly and dull.

3 Pre-modern hwarhath math and physics recognized five aspects of objects in space. These were: location, extension, expansion-to-the-side, expansion-up-and-down, and relation or change. The human equivalents to these are: point, line, plane, volume, and time.

4 A hwarhath measure of time: one tenth of a standard hwarhath day, 2.31 human hours.

5 The hwarhath male uniform is a pair of shorts: knee-length, loose and abundantly provided with pockets. This, plus sandals, is adequate for life in a space station or ship.

6 The hwarhath name for an FTL transfer point.

7 The equivalent human rank is major. There is no easy (or politically neutral) way to discuss the two characters just introduced. Therefore they will not be discussed, except to note that any ordinary hwarhath reader would recognize the pair at once. Much of the humor in the rest of the story lies with Akuin’s attempts to figure out things all other hwarhath know.

8 Most hwarhath believe that Nicholas Sanders changed sides because of love.

9 The Helig Institute is on the home planet and thus under the control of the hwarhath female government rather than the Bundle. As far as can be determined from a distance, the two halves of hwarhath society treat each other as genuine sovereign governments, whose interests are not always identical.

10 As every reader ought to know, humans and hwarhath can’t interbreed.

11 There is no reason to believe that the Bundle, or any hwarhath senior officer, has advocated an idea as radical as putting women into space. It belongs to the author, who is almost certainly female, though the story (like most hwarhath fiction) was published anonymously. Apparently, there are hwarhath women who want to travel outside the home system; and the real point of the story, what the hwarhath would call its center or hearth, seems to be this final argument in favor of travel for women. Why didn’t the author argue her point directly, by writing a story about women actually going to the stars? Maybe because she felt that would be fantasy, at least at present, and she wanted to write science fiction.

The 5th Wave
Rick Yancey

“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.” —Stephen Hawking

INTRUSION: 1995

There will be no awakening.

The sleeping woman will feel nothing the next morning, only a vague sense of unease and the unshakable feeling that someone is watching her. Her anxiety will fade in less than a day and will soon be forgotten.

The memory of the dream will linger a little longer.

In her dream, a large owl perches outside the window, staring at her through the glass with huge, white-rimmed eyes.

She will not awaken. Neither will her husband beside her. The shadow falling over them will not disturb their sleep. And what the shadow has come for—the baby within the sleeping woman—will feel nothing. The intrusion breaks no skin, violates not a single cell of her or the baby’s body.

It is over in less than a minute. The shadow withdraws.

Now it is only the man, the woman, the baby inside her, and the intruder inside the baby, sleeping.

The woman and man will awaken in the morning, the baby a few months later when he is born.

The intruder inside him will sleep on and not wake for several years, when the unease of the child’s mother and the memory of that dream have long since faded.

Five years later, at a visit to the zoo with her child, the woman will see an owl identical to the one in the dream. Seeing the owl is unsettling for reasons she cannot understand.

She is not the first to dream of owls in the dark. She will not be the last.

I: THE LAST HISTORIAN

1

Aliens are stupid.

I’m not talking about real aliens. The Others aren’t stupid. The Others are so far ahead of us, it’s like comparing the dumbest human to the smartest dog. No contest.

No, I’m talking about the aliens inside our own heads.

The ones we made up, the ones we’ve been making up since we realized those glittering lights in the sky were suns like ours and probably had planets like ours spinning around them. You know, the aliens we imagine, the kind of aliens we’d like to attack us, human aliens. You’ve seen them a million times. They swoop down from the sky in their flying saucers to level New York and Tokyo and London, or they march across the countryside in huge machines that look like mechanical spiders, ray guns blasting away, and always, always, humanity sets aside its differences and bands together to defeat the alien horde. David slays Goliath, and everybody (except Goliath) goes home happy.

What crap.

It’s like a cockroach working up a plan to defeat the shoe on its way down to crush it.

There’s no way to know for sure, but I bet the Others knew about the human aliens we’d imagined. And I bet they thought it was funny as hell. They must have laughed their asses off. If they have a sense of humor . . . or asses. They must have laughed the way we laugh when a dog does something totally cute and dorky. Oh, those cute, dorky humans! They think we think like they do! Isn’t that adorable?

Forget about flying saucers and little green men and giant mechanical spiders spitting out death rays. Forget about epic battles with tanks and fighter jets and the final victory of us scrappy, unbroken, intrepid humans over the bug-eyed swarm. That’s about as far from the truth as their dying planet was from our living one.

The truth is, once they found us, we were toast.

2

Sometimes I think I might be the last human on Earth.

Which means I’m the last human in the universe. I know that’s dumb. They can’t have killed everyone . . . yet. I see how it could happen, though, eventually. And then I think that’s exactly what the Others want me to see.

Remember the dinosaurs? Well.

So I’m probably not the last human on Earth, but I’m one of the last. Totally alone—and likely to stay that way—until the 4th Wave rolls over me and carries me down.

That’s one of my night thoughts. You know, the three-in-the-morning, oh-my-God-I’m-screwed thoughts. When I curl into a little ball, so scared I can’t close my eyes, drowning in fear so intense I have to remind myself to breathe, will my heart to keep beating. When my brain checks out and begins to skip like a scratched CD. Alone, alone, alone, Cassie, you’re alone.

That’s my name. Cassie.

Not Cassie for Cassandra. Or Cassie for Cassidy. Cassie for Cassiopeia, the constellation, the queen tied to her chair in the northern sky, who was beautiful but vain, placed in the heavens by the sea god Poseidon as a punishment for her boasting. In Greek, her name means “she whose words excel.”

My parents didn’t know the first thing about that myth. They just thought the name was pretty.

Even when there were people around to call me anything, no one ever called me Cassiopeia. Just my father, and only when he was teasing me, and always in a very bad Italian accent: Cass-ee-oh-PEE-a. It drove me crazy. I didn’t think he was funny or cute, and it made me hate my own name. “I’m Cassie!” I’d holler at him. “Just Cassie!” Now I’d give anything to hear him say it just one more time.

When I was turning twelve—four years before the Arrival—my father gave me a telescope for my birthday. On a crisp, clear fall evening, he set it up in the backyard and showed me the constellation.

“See how it looks like a W?” he asked.

“Why did they name it Cassiopeia if it’s shaped like a W?” I replied. “W for what?”

“Well . . . I don’t know that it’s for anything,” he answered with a smile. Mom always told him it was his best feature, so he trotted it out a lot, especially after he started going bald. You know, to drag the other person’s eyes downward. “So, it’s for anything you like! How about wonderful? Or winsome? Or wise?” He dropped his hand on my shoulder as I squinted through the lens at the five stars burning over fifty light-years from the spot on which we stood. I could feel my father’s breath against my cheek, warm and moist in the cool, dry autumn air. His breath so close, the stars of Cassiopeia so very far away.

The stars seem a lot closer now. Closer than the three hundred trillion miles that separate us. Close enough to touch, for me to touch them, for them to touch me. They’re as close to me as his breath had been.

That sounds crazy. Am I crazy? Have I lost my mind? You can only call someone crazy if there’s someone else who’s normal. Like good and evil. If everything was good, then nothing would be good.

Whoa. That sounds, well . . . crazy.

Crazy: the new normal.

I guess I could call myself crazy, since there is one other person I can compare myself to: me. Not the me I am now, shivering in a tent deep in the woods, too afraid to even poke her head from the sleeping bag. Not this Cassie. No, I’m talking about the Cassie I was before the Arrival, before the Others parked their alien butts in high orbit. The twelve-year-old me, whose biggest problems were the spray of tiny freckles on her nose and the curly hair she couldn’t do anything with and the cute boy who saw her every day and had no clue she existed. The Cassie who was coming to terms with the painful fact that she was just okay. Okay in looks. Okay in school. Okay at sports like karate and soccer. Basically the only unique things about her were the weird name—Cassie for Cassiopeia, which nobody knew about, anyway—and her ability to touch her nose with the tip of her tongue, a skill that quickly lost its impressiveness by the time she hit middle school.

I’m probably crazy by that Cassie’s standards.

And she sure is crazy by mine. I scream at her sometimes, that twelve-year-old Cassie, moping over her hair or her weird name or at being just okay. “What are you doing?” I yell. “Don’t you know what’s coming?”

But that isn’t fair. The fact is she didn’t know, had no way of knowing, and that was her blessing and why I miss her so much, more than anyone, if I’m being honest. When I cry—when I let myself cry—that’s who I cry for. I don’t cry for myself. I cry for the Cassie that’s gone.

And I wonder what that Cassie would think of me.

The Cassie who kills.

3

He couldn’t have been much older than me. Eighteen. Maybe nineteen. But hell, he could have been seven hundred and nineteen for all I know. Five months into it and I’m still not sure if the 4th Wave is human or some kind of hybrid or even the Others themselves, though I don’t like to think that the Others look just like us and talk just like us and bleed just like us. I like to think of the Others as being . . . well, other.

I was on my weekly foray for water. There’s a stream not far from my campsite, but I’m worried it might be contaminated, either from chemicals or sewage or maybe a body or two upstream. Or poisoned. Depriving us of clean water would be an excellent way to wipe us out quickly.

So once a week I shoulder my trusty M16 and hike out of the forest to the interstate. Two miles south, just off Exit 175, there’re a couple of gas stations with convenience stores attached. I load up as much bottled water as I can carry, which isn’t a lot because water is heavy, and get back to the highway and the relative safety of the trees as quickly as I can, before night falls completely. Dusk is the best time to travel. I’ve never seen a drone at dusk. Three or four during the day and a lot more at night, but never at dusk.

From the moment I slipped through the gas station’s shattered front door, I knew something was different. I didn’t see anything different—the store looked exactly like it had a week earlier, the same graffiti-scrawled walls, overturned shelves, floor strewn with empty boxes and caked-in rat feces, the busted-open cash registers and looted beer coolers. It was the same disgusting, stinking mess I’d waded through every week for the past month to get to the storage area behind the refrigerated display cases. Why people grabbed the beer and soda, the cash from the registers and safe, the rolls of lottery tickets, but left the two pallets of drinking water was beyond me. What were they thinking? It’s an alien apocalypse! Quick, grab the beer!

The same disaster of spoilage, the same stench of rats and rotted food, the same fitful swirl of dust in the murky light pushing through the smudged windows, every out-of-place thing in its place, undisturbed.

Still.

Something was different.

I was standing in the little pool of broken glass just inside the doorway. I didn’t see it. I didn’t hear it. I didn’t smell or feel it. But I knew it.

Something was different.

It’s been a long time since humans were prey animals. A hundred thousand years or so. But buried deep in our genes the memory remains: the awareness of the gazelle, the instinct of the antelope. The wind whispers through the grass. A shadow flits between the trees. And up speaks the little voice that goes, Shhhh, it’s close now. Close.

I don’t remember swinging the M16 from my shoulder. One minute it was hanging behind my back, the next it was in my hands, muzzle down, safety off.

Close.

I’d never fired it at anything bigger than a rabbit, and that was a kind of experiment, to see if I could actually use the thing without blowing off one of my own body parts. Once I shot over the heads of a pack of feral dogs that had gotten a little too interested in my campsite. Another time nearly straight up, sighting the tiny, glowering speck of greenish light that was their mothership sliding silently across the backdrop of the Milky Way. Okay, I admit that was stupid. I might as well have erected a billboard with a big arrow pointing at my head and the words YOO-HOO, HERE I AM!

After the rabbit experiment—it blew that poor damn bunny apart, turning Peter into this unrecognizable mass of shredded guts and bone—I gave up the idea of using the rifle to hunt. I didn’t even do target practice. In the silence that had slammed down after the 4th Wave struck, the report of the rounds sounded louder than an atomic blast.

Still, I considered the M16 my bestest of besties. Always by my side, even at night, burrowed into my sleeping bag with me, faithful and true. In the 4th Wave, you can’t trust that people are still people. But you can trust that your gun is still your gun.

Shhh, Cassie. It’s close.

Close.

I should have bailed. That little voice had my back. That little voice is older than I am. It’s older than the oldest person who ever lived.

I should have listened to that voice.

Instead, I listened to the silence of the abandoned store, listened hard. Something was close. I took a tiny step away from the door, and the broken glass crunched ever so softly under my foot.

And then the Something made a noise, somewhere between a cough and a moan. It came from the back room, behind the coolers, where my water was.

That’s the moment when I didn’t need a little old voice to tell me what to do. It was obvious, a no-brainer. Run.

But I didn’t run.

The first rule of surviving the 4th Wave is don’t trust anyone. It doesn’t matter what they look like. The Others are very smart about that—okay, they’re smart about everything. It doesn’t matter if they look the right way and say the right things and act exactly like you expect them to act. Didn’t my father’s death prove that? Even if the stranger is a little old lady sweeter than your great-aunt Tilly, hugging a helpless kitten, you can’t know for certain—you can never know—that she isn’t one of them, and that there isn’t a loaded .45 behind that kitten.

It isn’t unthinkable. And the more you think about it, the more thinkable it becomes. Little old lady has to go.

That’s the hard part, the part that, if I thought about it too much, would make me crawl into my sleeping bag, zip myself up, and die of slow starvation. If you can’t trust anyone, then you can trust no one. Better to take the chance that Aunty Tilly is one of them than play the odds that you’ve stumbled across a fellow survivor.

That’s friggin’ diabolical.

It tears us apart. It makes us that much easier to hunt down and eradicate. The 4th Wave forces us into solitude, where there’s no strength in numbers, where we slowly go crazy from the isolation and fear and terrible anticipation of the inevitable.

So I didn’t run. I couldn’t. Whether it was one of them or an Aunt Tilly, I had to defend my turf. The only way to stay alive is to stay alone. That’s rule number two.

I followed the sobbing coughs or coughing sobs or whatever you want to call them till I reached the door that opened to the back room. Hardly breathing, on the balls of my feet.

The door was ajar, the space just wide enough for me to slip through sideways. A metal rack on the wall directly in front of me and, to the right, the long narrow hallway that ran the length of the coolers. There were no windows back here. The only light was the sickly orange of the dying day behind me, still bright enough to hurl my shadow onto the sticky floor. I crouched down; my shadow crouched with me.

I couldn’t see around the edge of the cooler into the hall. But I could hear whoever—or whatever—it was at the far end, coughing, moaning, and that gurgling sob.

Either hurt badly or acting hurt badly, I thought. Either needs help or it’s a trap.

This is what life on Earth has become since the Arrival. It’s an either/or world.

Either it’s one of them and it knows you’re here or it’s not one of them and he needs your help.

Either way, I had to get up and turn that corner.

So I got up.

And I turned the corner.

4

He lay sprawled against the back wall twenty feet away, long legs spread out in front of him, clutching his stomach with one hand. He was wearing fatigues and black boots and he was covered in grime and shimmering with blood. There was blood everywhere. On the wall behind him. Pooling on the cold concrete beneath him. Coating his uniform. Matted in his hair. The blood glittered darkly, black as tar in the semidarkness.

In his other hand was a gun, and that gun was pointed at my head.

I mirrored him. His handgun to my rifle. Fingers flexing on the triggers: his, mine.

It didn’t prove anything, his pointing a gun at me. Maybe he really was a wounded soldier and thought I was one of them.

Or maybe not.

“Drop your weapon,” he sputtered at me.

Like hell.

“Drop your weapon!” he shouted, or tried to shout. The words came out all cracked and crumbly, beaten up by the blood rising from his gut. Blood dribbled over his bottom lip and hung quivering from his stubbly chin. His teeth shone with blood.

I shook my head. My back was to the light, and I prayed he couldn’t see how badly I was shaking or the fear in my eyes. This wasn’t some damn rabbit that was stupid enough to hop into my camp one sunny morning. This was a person. Or, if it wasn’t, it looked just like one.

The thing about killing is you don’t know if you can actually do it until you actually do it.

He said it a third time, not as loud as the second. It came out like a plea.

“Drop your weapon.”

The hand holding his gun twitched. The muzzle dipped toward the floor. Not much, but my eyes had adjusted to the light by this point, and I saw a speck of blood run down the barrel.

And then he dropped the gun.

It fell between his legs with a sharp cling. He brought up his empty hand and held it, palm outward, over his shoulder. “Okay,” he said with a bloody half smile. “Your turn.”

I shook my head. “Other hand,” I said. I hoped my voice sounded stronger than I felt. My knees had begun to shake and my arms ached and my head was spinning. I was also fighting the urge to hurl. You don’t know if you can do it until you do it.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Other hand.”

“If I move this hand, I’m afraid my stomach will fall out.” I adjusted the butt of the rifle against my shoulder. I was sweating, shaking, trying to think. Either/or, Cassie. What are you going to do, either/or?

“I’m dying,” he said matter-of-factly. From this distance, his eyes were just pinpricks of reflected light. “So you can either finish me off or help me. I know you’re human—”

“How do you know?” I asked quickly, before he could die on me. If he was a real soldier, he might know how to tell the difference. It would be an extremely useful bit of information.

“Because if you weren’t, you would have shot me already.” He smiled again, his cheeks dimpled, and that’s when it hit me how young he was. Only a couple years older than me.

“See?” he said softly. “That’s how you know, too.”

“How I know what?” My eyes were tearing up. His crumpled-up body wiggled in my vision like an image in a fun-house mirror. But I didn’t dare release my grip on the rifle to rub my eyes.

“That I’m human. If I wasn’t, I would have shot you.”

That made sense. Or did it make sense because I wanted it to make sense? Maybe he dropped the gun to get me to drop mine, and once I did, the second gun he was hiding under his fatigues would come out and the bullet would say hello to my brain.

This is what the Others have done to us. You can’t band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope.

How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.

“I have to see your other hand,” I said.

“I told you—”

“I have to see your other hand!” My voice cracked then. Couldn’t help it.

He lost it. “Then you’re just going to have to shoot me, bitch! Just shoot me and get it over with!”

His head fell back against the wall, his mouth came open, and a terrible howl of anguish tumbled out and bounced from wall to wall and floor to ceiling and pounded against my ears. I didn’t know if he was screaming from the pain or the realization that I wasn’t going to save him. He had given in to hope, and that will kill you. It kills you before you die. Long before you die.

“If I show you,” he gasped, rocking back and forth against the bloody concrete, “if I show you, will you help me?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t answer because I didn’t have an answer. I was playing this one nanosecond at a time.

So he decided for me. He wasn’t going to let them win, that’s what I think now. He wasn’t going to stop hoping. If it killed him, at least he would die with a sliver of his humanity intact.

Grimacing, he slowly pulled out his left hand. Not much day left now, hardly any light at all, and what light there was seemed to be flowing away from its source, from him, past me and out the half-open door.

His hand was caked in half-dried blood. It looked like he was wearing a crimson glove.

The stunted light kissed his bloody hand and flicked along the length of something long and thin and metallic, and my finger yanked back on the trigger, and the rifle kicked against my shoulder hard, and the barrel bucked in my hand as I emptied the clip, and from a great distance I heard someone screaming, but it wasn’t him screaming, it was me screaming, me and everybody else who was left, if there was anybody left, all of us helpless, hopeless, stupid humans screaming, because we got it wrong, we got it all wrong, there was no alien swarm descending from the sky in their flying saucers or big metal walkers like something out of Star Wars or cute little wrinkly E.T.s who just wanted to pluck a couple of leaves, eat some Reese’s Pieces, and go home. That’s not how it ends.

That’s not how it ends at all.

It ends with us killing each other behind rows of empty beer coolers in the dying light of a late-summer day.

I went up to him before the last of the light was gone. Not to see if he was dead. I knew he was dead. I wanted to see what he was still holding in his bloody hand.

It was a crucifix.

[End Excerpt]

© 2013 by Rick Yancey.

From The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey.

Published by arrangement with G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

All rights reserved.

Rick Yancey is the author of several adult novels and the memoir Confessions of a Tax Collector. His first young-adult novel, The Extradorindary Adventures of Alfred Kropp, was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. In 2010, his novel The Monstrumologist received a Michael L. Printz Honor, and the sequel, The Curse of the Wendigo, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Learn more at rickyancey.com.

Interview: Karen Russell
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Karen Russell is the author of the story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swamplandia!, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and one of the New York Times' Top 5 Fiction Books of 2011. Her new story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, was released by Knopf in February 2013.

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.

First of all, your first novel, Swamplandia!, was optioned by HBO, so what’s the current status of that project?

In development, still in development. And I’m not even sure if that’s the industry lingo. I think they have a writer who’s working on it. The writer’s not me. I’m a consultant. And what those duties are are kind of fuzzy to me. So I think we’ll just have to see. I’m trying to be guardedly optimistic. I think a lot has to go right for something that gets optioned to actually make it on-screen, so I’m not promising my out-of-work friends jobs on the set holding the boom, or whatever, just yet.

So what sort of changes do you expect them to make to the story?

One of the big ones, I think, is just the idea of having a world vast enough to sustain seasons of TV, you know? Right now I think it’s the microcosm of this family in the novel they really focus on. And I think the novel turns pretty tragic. There’s sort of a funnier storyline with the brother, but the heart of the story for me was this little girl Ava who gets really lost in a very literal kind of a hell, the swamps. Somehow I think that will be, maybe, less of a focus of a TV series, and I think the show will shift, I think it will be weighted more toward comedy than tragedy.

So what sort of consulting have you done? Have you seen any scripts?

I have not even seen any scripts yet. I was in Berlin for ten months last year, so I was completely out of the loop. We had a couple of conversations about the palette of the show and the format and the degree to which South Florida would be, kind of, would it be more fictionalized? Would there be some kind of way to retain a couple different kinds of worlds, you know? Osceola sort of has this very dreamy surreal quality of those sections of the novel, so is there a way to juxtapose that with the grittier, tackier, goofier parts of South Florida? So that was the sort of consulting I did, sort of about tone and about how we might broaden some of the story lines and character arcs so that you could really sustain drama over time.

What were you doing in Berlin?

I was at the American Academy in Berlin, which is this sort of fabulous place. I was their lone fiction writer. It tends to be, they have fellows come—you apply for these fellowships to do your project. They consider your projects and they sort of wine and dine you and you get to live in this kind of academic hostel, I guess. It’s this beautiful house on the Wannsee. It almost felt too good. It felt a little Hansel and Gretel, they were taking such good care of us. There’s a composer, we had a visual artist, a social scientist, historians of science, you know, political scientists. It was good, it was a little like being in college again, or something, you know, a multi-generational college.

What was the literary scene there like, particularly as regards sort of surreal kind of fiction?

I think they were into it! I felt, I don’t know what it is in the water. I think there are a couple of precedents. You know, the Grimm Brothers come from that country. So they’re steeped in some pretty . . . they seemed receptive to some fairy tale-infused surreal tales. I felt pretty surprisingly, happily understood. And you know, that’s not a given. I feel like the stuff I write is pretty whacked out. I felt like, for whatever historical and cultural reason, that there was a good reception for that kind of thing there.

What do you guys say about that? When people ask about spec fiction and bring up fairy tales, how do you guys class that? I never know.

I would certainly consider fairy tales to be fantasy stories. A lot of fantasy is actually just appropriating the elements of fairy tales, but treating them in a more modern context.

Right. Right. I completely agree. And I’ve been reading Dune, which, I love that book so much, and I had forgotten that they had, as epigraphs scattered throughout the book, there are these kind of like a child’s history, you know, these fairy tales for kids about the contemporary history of this imaginary planet. Which, to route a fictional history of an imaginary place into a future, it’s sort of like he’s imagining a fairy tale of the future that is contending with something that has already passed from history into myth, but it’s all in this imaginary world. It’s just so exciting to see that kind of mirror of the function that fairy tales play here.

What inspired you to go back and re-read Dune?

You know you go on the road with books and then everyone wants to know about your influences and I was just thinking about how much I love that book. Something, too, it’s such an ecological novel and I feel like I’ve been reading so much about climate change and oil, energy crisis and this and that. And all of that is in Dune. It’s a really prescient book in that way.

Do you ever think you might write a big, sprawling futuristic epic like Dune?

Man, I just think that’s the dream. It’s sort of like, you have to be extra brilliant to write a book about that. To set up an entire, you know, sociopolitical, to do the work of reinventing all of these human systems in the future on a different planet. I would love to be able to, I mean, you see the scale I’m working at would be short stories, and that takes me forever. And so, I’m not sure the way my imagination works is quite matched by the scope of something like Dune. But it would be exciting to try.

You know, John and I, the first time we met you was at the New York Review science fiction reading series.

Right.

At that time you said that you were working on this novel about a family of alligator wrestlers and that it was a total mess, you didn’t know if you would ever finish it. So I thought it was funny to see what a massive success that book has gone on to be, given how despondent you were.

How despondent I was at that moment! Oh my god, I’m so glad, so glad that you guys remember that, because I would say that was probably—when was that, 2007 or something?—that would have been my valley of the shadow with Swamplandia!. I was like, whatever, the subway ads were looking really tempting where you can be a masseuse in six months. I was like, six months is soon and then I’ll have a career! I was having a hard time making the story-to-novel transition. Novels are scary, I think, because there’s just no guarantee that you’ll ever get to the end, and they’re just so demanding. I’m trying to work on a second one now and I’m horrified that it seems even harder. That doesn’t seem just.

I understand the new novel is called The Land: It’s Just Not That Into You.

[Laughter] Did I say that? That’s funny. I—

You definitely said that.

I shouldn’t laugh at my own jokes. [Laughter.] That’s the worst characteristic of a person. I’m sorry to be such an asshole. The other joke I made too many times, which wasn’t really that funny, was that I was gonna call it Drylandia, and my sister said it was like my rebound book where I was going to go deep into the dustiest part of the past to escape the limbo space of Swamplandia!. Yeah, and I think that in a weird way, I mean it’s not, I guess it wouldn’t really be classified as science fiction but it definitely feels like writing science fiction of the past to me, or kind of having these magical interventions in America’s actual past. But I mean, what Dune does, I think is by order of magnitude is more exciting than what I’m trying to do, because I still have a lot of bedrock that’s in place to work with and I’m really working with diaries and kind of the actual literal history of the dustbowl. So I’m not sort of moving from the ground up to set up a whole cosmos that functions with its own government and its own customs and its own literature that I’m citing throughout. It’s not quite at that level. But I really do think that there’s this way that writing historical fiction, writing science fiction is not so different.

A lot of your stories seem to involve pioneers and farmers and . . .

I know. I have this total farm fetish; I think it’s because I grew up in the mall culture of south Florida. I think the first husband I imagined for myself was, I wanted to marry Charlie Brown and live on a farm. That was the saddest fantasy.

Were you really into Little House on the Prairie or something?

I fricking love that stuff. I love that stuff! Anything about Laura Ingalls Wilder. You know, part of it too, I think is the way kids love orphan tales, generally. There’s something about being on a frontier. There’s a kind of, you crave autonomy so much when you’re that age. You know how kids just naturally love animal stories and geek out over different creatures, and somehow I think for me the farm represented both self-sufficiency and autonomy. Kids are always pretty big protagonists in those books, because that’s why they had kids then. They were like, “Thank god, as soon you can suit up we need you to do some labor on this farm.”

You mentioned that you kind of write whacked-out stuff, and I guess, for people who haven’t read your short stories, do you want to just talk about those frontier stories and how you put this weird spin on them?

Oh sure. I guess, the first time I tried to do this I picked up [a book] at some discard table [called] Women’s History of the Westward Migration. [The stories] would be hilarious if they weren’t so depressing, like Wile E. Coyote or something. Because they were just really stoic accounts of suffering that shocked me, you know? These women lost everything. They lost all their children. They lost their sisters to snake bites. They say goodbye to their families in the east for the rest of their lives, and went on to Oklahoma, went out in the covered wagons. I’m reading these diaries and was thinking about, I had also been re-reading that Borges story about the minotaur, and so I had this idea to write about a minotaur father. He’s sort of a legend gone to seed. In my mind he was just this mythical figure. He’s sort of, he’s got a belly, he’s robust now. He’s retired from his rodeo days as this kind of American myth and he wants to pull his family west. So I just thought that would be one way to kind of combine two myths, to have this mythic figure that everyone relates to, the minotaur, and then really think about the myth of the west. Why that remains so seductive, you know? And also what’s dangerous to have this uncritical faith in your own abilities without any respect for your own limits or nature’s limits. And it has a kid having to contend with that. So it’s told from this kid’s point of view. I think, originally, it was told from the minotaur’s point of view. The minotaur was named Jack in some drafts. It could have gone way wrong, I think. Even wronger than it arguably did.

I really love that story and I think that it would appeal a lot to fantasy and science fiction fans. Do you have any sense to what extent fantasy and science fiction fans have found your work?

A little bit. io9 has been really supportive. I was so excited to get to do that reading series that you guys had me out, where we saw each other. [Laughter] I’ll start thanking you guys for more and more things you didn’t do as the show goes on. Like, that birthday party you all threw for me, I loved it. I really, sort of, love folks who are, like Kelly Link who is kind of claimed by both camps, you know, literary camps, if there’s such a thing, if those distinctions aren’t totally just a phase, at this moment anyway. I was such a sci-fi/fantasy kid. I was so excited to be asked to do this with you guys. I think those dreams really feed my work as much or more than Virginia Woolf or people who are more, who tend to be associated with the canon or whatever.

I saw you say in an interview that you had a public/private reading split as a kid, where you would read Austin and the Brontes in public, and R.L. Stine and Frank Herbert in private.

Yeah, yeah. Isn’t that a shame? I mean, I was the kind of nerd that wasn’t even courageous. I couldn’t even courageously claim my identity as a nerd. That’s probably even a little bit of a stretch. I’m sure that I was super private about everything I read, but especially, I remember I loved this Stephen R. Donaldson book. What was this book called? The Mirror of Her Dream? It was like a two book series. It’s this woman, I forgot the verb. He had some amazing verbs for it, but she uses mirrors to see other worlds, and then she can enter those other worlds, which is basically, you know, a lot like writing. Sort of this really concrete way to think about creation and just art as creation. And she was this mild-mannered brunette woman who could then travel to these worlds that she saw. And so for whatever reason that struck a chord with me at the time. But I remember having to hide it from, just being so embarrassed, just hot in the face embarrassed when somebody saw that I was reading that. There is some stigma. I don’t know if you guys experienced that. In Miami, there’s a stigma if you’re reading generally. That was suspicious enough. But certain of those covers, they’re not doing you any favors, you know, there’s a buxom woman in front of a dragon on the cover of your book. I think that had certain connotations, at least in my Miami high school, that I was eager to avoid.

David: John grew up in Florida. John, what do you think about that? Is there more of that in Florida than elsewhere?

John: I can’t speak to whether there was more anywhere else because all I knew was growing up in Florida. And I mean, I never really felt like I had to hide the sort of genre literature that I was reading, but on the other hand, I had also, sort of, I had no choice but to embrace my nerdiness right from the get-go, because I was hopeless. There was no way of getting around it.

Well, yeah, see. If I had capitulated with that kind of wholeheartedness, then it kind of rebounds and you become cool, you know? Because you own your aesthetic and your taste, but I wasn’t there yet, just wasn’t there yet.

Were you always writing the sort of surreal, weird stuff, and did people try to force you to write more realistic fiction?

Yes and yes. I wrote, sort of, really terrible, earnest . . . it’s high school. I wrote like the song lyric writing we were all writing then, where it’s just like this spill of shapeless emotion, where it’s not even clear if there are characters or a setting. It’s just an undiluted emotion that just goes spilling onto the page, so I did a lot of that. And then I went to Northwestern. I remember my first fiction class. I wrote this story about these two boys and some albino parrot named Rufus, I don’t even remember. I remember that I kept misspelling “canon” and also that the professor encouraged me to try writing a story about fully-fledged adults, and that was the comment. It was funny, because actually that story was probably realism for South Florida. Nothing wild happened. It was just like two kids went to a parrot theme park, which you could easily do today in Miami.

I’m sorry, did you say albino parrot?

Yeah, well, this— Yeah.

I though you said albino carrot at first, and then you said that was realism. I was like, “Whoa, Florida’s weirder than I thought.”

That’s kind of a beautiful image. Let’s never eat one if we see it.

Aren’t those called parsnips?

Did you guys read Bunnicula? Do you remember that great Bunnicula joke about the minion and the little kid was like, “What’s a minion?” And they thought it was a miniature onion. I think I like, I think I tried to use that. I tried to deploy that in some fiction of my own, embarrassingly recently, until I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s that joke from Bunnicula. I’m so glad I’m plagiarizing Bunnicula at age 31.”

So you were encouraged to write more realistic fiction. I mean, a fair amount of your output is fairly realistic.

I think all of it is. I mean, arguably, it’s a really weird distinction for me to try and talk about because I think often, it’s not even, I don’t know what to call it. It doesn’t feel, when I’m writing it, like magical realism. Certainly, I always associate that with a real particular moment in Latin American literature anyhow. I also don’t think it’s magical thinking literature, you know. Like, magical thinking or wishful thinking, or often, if it’s fantasy, it’s some fantasy come to life. I have this one story, another farm frontier story set in Nebraska in this new collection, and the monster, or whatever, I just imagine there’s this zombie homesteader who’s been trying to prove up his land for, we don’t even know how long, in various forms for centuries possibly, and I was thinking that this is kind of like an animated hope that has, sort of, outlived or outlasted any possibility of its fulfillment, right? So I guess that’s spec fiction, because it’s not often you see an undead homesteader in some spooky woods or whatever. I guess the one thing I’ve started saying—you guys tell me how this sounds, because I never know how to talk about it in a way that feels true to how I think about it myself as I’m writing these stories. So one kind of realism you sacrifice, not that because you’re going to write something that’s so extraordinarily untrue or different than life as we experience it on this planet, it’s that you’re going to sacrifice a memetic representational realism to tell another kind of truth that’s normally obscured, or we’re inured to it on a regular Tuesday that we can’t see it. And that’s how I feel about people that I really love, like Kelly Link’s stories: impossible things happen in them, but it’s always a way, it’s like it’s an optical trick to let you see something that was invisible before you read the story. You know, something about our nature that you might not be aware of if you were reading about the same plot set in a mall in New Jersey or whatever.

You mentioned that you have this collection out; it’s called Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Do you see it as different? Do you see your stories changing in any way between your first collection and this one?

Yeah, I think so. I don’t know that I’m even the best person to really weigh in on that, in some ways, right? Because I’m stuck in my own dumb perspective, and I never feel—that’s kind of the sad thing about writing, right? As my friend was saying, it’s sort of like you build a house and then lock yourself out of it. So then you’re like, “Hey, how was it in the house?” You can’t experience it as a reader, exactly. I left Florida, so that felt like a conscious kind of striking out. And I think that was important in a way, because if left to my own devices, my imagination lists back to South Florida. For better or for worse, the voice that I always feel comfortable channeling is some completely bewildered adolescent.

You mention that you sort of left Florida for this. For example, you went to Meiji-era Japan. There’s so much detail in a lot of these settings. What sort of research process do you use when you’re writing about some faraway real place and time?

I guess that’s another, that was a big difference from the first collection called, Saint Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. I can’t say that I really hit the stacks to research that collection. A lot of them really deal with adolescence and with [that] particular threshold. And a lot of them are set in some kind of whacked-out Florida, and I know that’s a landscape that I know pretty well. A lot of those stories are contemporary, so it wasn’t as big of a time traveling leap. I think that’s why it felt like writing science fiction, because it is sort of, you’re doing this weird time travel to get back there. So with that book I just read about the Meiji era in Japan. There’s a book called Factory Girls [by Leslie T. Chang]. It was about this really strange moment when, after two hundred years of isolation, Matthew Perry shows up and they sign unequal treaties with Japan, basically force them to trade, and they’re sort of shunted into the world of Western-style capitalism. Blue-eyed foreigners flood their ports and suddenly there’s this really violent seismic period of industrialization where Japan is trying to catch up with the rest of the world, basically, and compete with them. David Graper had this book about debt, and there’s sort of a horrifying section about female debt slavery. And there was some reference, a short reference, to these silkworm workers in Meiji era Japan.

What were the real silkworm workers? I assume they’re not like in your story.

So in my story there are these girls that drink a toxic tea, and they’re converted into these hybrid silkworm/women creatures. That’s sort of, that sounds so insane, but that’s basically the trajectory for these actual girls. They were often recruited from rural areas—rural areas where they were the daughters of these tenant farmers who are in terrible debt—and they were called female dekasegi workers. You left your home and you went to these factories that were touted as these incredible places where the daughters of samurai and aristocrats also worked. And you would learn a trade and you would be working on these Western-style machines, you would be trained in these new technologies. And the conditions were miserable in these factories. There’s an argument that the birth of feminist consciousness in Japan begins at this moment, because these women bind together to revolt against these conditions. They sort of do factory protests, completely female factory protests. These places were riddled with tuberculosis. They basically held the women hostage. They were essentially slaves in many cases, and they worked 10-hour days, 11. And the scary thing is that this isn’t some human rights horror story from the distant past that isn’t ongoing, that’s the situation still today for a lot of textile workers. So it’s a real horror story, and I think to do that conversion and make it about some kind of monster metamorphosis where the women become these hybridized animal-machines, I think that in a way, was a way for me to think through what that must have felt like, when production gets mechanized and suddenly time ceases to function the way it did before. The factory workday is in place and these women’s bodies became cogs in this larger machine.

This kind of feels like a horror story, and you mentioned your story “Proving Up,” about the zombie homesteader, kind of has a horror feel to it. Also, your story “The Graveless Dolls of Eric Mutis” almost reminds me of Stephen King’s “The Body.”

Oh, thank you, what a compliment!

Do you see these stories as horror stories? Was that something you were trying to experiment with?

Yeah, I think in some ways . . . with “Reeling for the Empire,” one of the things that felt like a big risk or just a change for me was that story is not funny at all. Maybe there’s one half of a joke in that story. And I think a lot of the St. Lucy stories and also Swamplandia!, you know, sometimes I think it’s so great to have comedy in there because it’s a kind of humility or it’s a relief or whatever. So, tonally, that was interesting, to really commit to horror as a tone, and to try to work a story where there’s suspense, but the suspense that drives it is psychological, but also maybe there’s genre elements, too. That was a goal. I wonder if I could find a way to make something that’s genuinely scary on one level, and also engages with these real life historical horror stories. To me, one of the reasons I’m writing about the Dust Bowl drought now and one of the reasons that I love, well, love is the wrong verb, but that it’s interesting to me is the horror story of how could you lose so much? How could they bear it? What was it that made them stay in this place? What made them commit to this particular future? When did their optimism turn into delusion, you know? So for “The Graveless Dolls of Eric Mutis,” for me, I was just thinking about the way a haunting works. That’s a pretty shallow burial. There’s a group of bullies, and one day they find a scarecrow tied to a tree in a park, like an urban scarecrow. And there’s something familiar about it, but they can’t quite put their finger on it and someone remembers, “Oh, that’s Eric Mutis. He’s this kid that we bullied and we had forgotten him so completely.” And I just think, that’s when the ghost comes back, right? When there needs to be a reckoning with the past, or when there’s something to be done, or there’s a really shallow burial that didn’t function.

You mentioned “Reeling for the Empire.” Are you making any kind of political statement in that or any of your other stories?

I don’t think I ever sit down to write a story with a clear agenda in mind. I think if you have a statement you can excise from your story, then maybe it should have been an op-ed. Or maybe a story is not the form for it if it’s just didactic, or if there’s one statement. But I guess, with that one, I was thinking a little bit about, you could argue that those girls, they have kind of their class-consciousness moment. There’s this real resolve there where they alter the machine so they can, I don’t want to give it away, but there’s a sort of revolutionary energy, I hope, to the end. And I guess, if there’s a political statement, I think it’s also connected to a statement about the character in that particular story, it’s that she kind of finds a way to become an agent. She’s been sort of a passive victim and she’s part of a machine for most of the story, and then she kind of recovers a sense of herself as a creator and an agent and revolts. But I don’t know that that’s my Occupy Wall Street story, or whatever.

Well, the story that you read when John and I went to the New York Review of Science Fiction reading series was “The Barn at the End of Our Term,” which is about US presidents being resurrected as horses. I mean, it’s about the US presidents; is there any politics in that at all?

No, and that one especially not, I think. It’s funny. I wish that I could say that I had written it during this election cycle and that it’s a great allegory about Romney and Barack or something. I think I was really just thinking about how everyone sort of assumes that when we die, we’re going to get an answer one way or the other? Well, there will be something or there will be nothing. That’s when many people have just kind of like really sweet naive faith that then things will make sense. Or that, one way or the other, that we’ll get some kind of answer. And I read Kevin Brockmeir, do you guys know him? I love his stuff. And he wrote that gorgeous spec fiction book, A Brief History of the Dead, and what I liked about it was that everybody dies and goes to this kind of antechamber world where they’re just scratching their heads and they’re even more confused what the nature of reality is, what they’re doing there, how their histories are going to affect the future in this weird place, so I think that was sort of the impulse. I was thinking about what a demotion it would feel like to someone who was a president to find themselves in this weird stable in some Kentucky afterlife, and the really human impulse, I think, to take your past, whatever it is, and try to use that to make sense of your present, and just the failure of that project in this particular afterlife.

When you read that story, I thought it was really funny. You said that when it was published, you felt like you had shown up to a party and you were the only one wearing a costume.

Yeah, I really did. I still do a little bit. But that appeared in the Granta anthology for the Best of Young American Novelists. And I will say that’s a pretty scary ante, isn’t it? They were like, this is what we’re going to call the collection, so give us a story. That’s the scariest ante in the world.

You weren’t even technically a novelist at that point.

No, I wasn’t even a novelist. You guys met me at—that was when I felt the most like the Bernie Madoff of fiction, was at that moment when we met. I was like, well, I’ve defrauded everyone, I’m not even a novelist, the story that’s going forward that’s going to represent me to the world is this one about a bunch of presidents reincarnated as horses. That was a shameful time.

Most of the time when people meet us, that’s basically the lowest point in their lives.

[Laughter] Is that your True Hollywood story, everything in black and white? David and John are always in black and white. There’s always a really sad minor key chord being played when they’re around.

So are there any interesting behind-the-scenes stories about how you came up with any of the pieces in the book?

So there’s one, “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979.” I don’t even know if this is so interesting, but I had read this essay by André Aciman called “Arbitrage” and I was just thinking about that feeling that I think is, I hope, pretty universal, that your life has been knocked off the rails, or that there’s sort of an incremental but widening gap between where you are and where you think you ought to be. That terrible kind of inertia where you’re like, I got knocked a little off course and I can’t correct for it, and I’m not going to be able to realign with the path that I thought was my life, kind of a feeling. For whatever reason, the way my brain chose to . . . the image that it found for this was this boy who’s haunted by the notion that there’s this flock of seagulls—I was probably listening to that terrible band; well, they’re not that terrible, the Flock of Seagulls—they’re these cosmic scavengers and they fly into the future and they’re just willy-nilly stealing little bits of people’s futures and brining them back to feather this nest in the present. I was thinking, just the way he would pull a vertebrae out of a spine or something and then one kind of your future changes shape, or it’s deformed. Sort of that butterfly in Africa, where it’s deformed in a way that’s irrecoverable. So I thought that was kind of a scary idea. I was talking to my brother and telling him the idea for this story and I was like, what could the seagulls bring back from the future that would really—or what would the boy imagine they’re bringing back from the future that would alter a life permanently in a really catastrophic way? He was like, “Hmm, ladies’ birth control pills.” And I was like, “I don’t think that’s gonna go.” The one that I think I like the best, remember when Three 6 Mafia won the Grammy? He was like, “What if they bring Three 6 Mafia’s Grammy?” Sometimes I wish you could write the parody of whatever you’re writing. It’d probably be better in some ways, you know?

So it sounds like maybe other people are a big part of your creative process, that you bounce ideas off your friends and siblings and stuff like that?

I just like to tell people what I’m up to so I can watch their faces change and then hear them be like, “I’ll buy you a beer.” I think my siblings are, because they veto stuff all the time. I had a good friend who helped me with a lot of the stories in this collection on this go-around. But I sort of try to keep it tight for awhile, because I think, do you guys find that?, that there’s usually a vulnerable stage where it can be harmful to, you know, sometimes I think if you let people read stuff too early, that can deform the thing that you’re making in some ways.

Speaking of vetoing ideas, I swear, were you the one who told this story where you had this great idea for a story and you described it to friends and they said, “Karen. That’s the plot of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective”?

That happens all the time. That’s like when I plagiarized Bunnicula in my own book. That happens all the time. It’s really scary. That was my mom. I was like, “What if there was a kidnapper but they’re holding a dog hostage?” She was like, “that is definitely, definitely a Jim Carrey movie.” My brother also made me really mad once. I was telling him about Swamplandia! and these two story lines and how they were going to intersect. And without looking up from his sandwich, he’s like, “Yeah, that’s like Big Bird Goes Home. Remember it’s like half on Sesame Street and half in the real world?” And I was like, “Fuck you, dude.” It hit really close to home. Did I just borrow the narrative model of Big Bird Goes Home? And arguably, I did.

What do you think about endings? Some of the Amazon reviews, they feel like your endings aren’t resolved to their satisfaction. Is that something that you think about?

Can I tell you a funny story about endings really fast? I had this story in The New Yorker about these boys who land on a glacier and my grandfather read this story of mine and then he called me and he was like, “Pretty good story. Pretty crazy. And those sneaky bastards, you gotta buy the magazine to find out how it ends.” And I was like, “No, Poppa, that is the end.” There was this long silence and he was like, “What kind of ending is that?” So I can sympathize with those reviewers. I can understand the frustration where sometimes you want a different kind of answer. I try to find an image that gathers up some of the questions in the story. I think that’s always more interesting than to pretend: Is he gonna kiss the girl? Did they find the gold? Whatever the animating questions were, if you hit on a turn of phrase or an image where you can strike those resonances, that’s when I feel most comfortable about exiting a story, kind of on a plateau. For whatever reason, I really do love ambivalent endings. I was just talking about this with a friend. She does these paintings and she always has “Untitled” and then she’ll put a title in parentheses, which I was telling her was kind of passive aggressive. And she’s like “Yeah, it is.” But in her argument, it’s similar to why I think that feels often like the right place to exit a story. Because she doesn’t like it when a viewer sees her painting and reads the title and decides that they got it, that they got it and they can just move on. That they’re like, “OK, so that was the message.” Or like you were saying, “That was the political statement, so check!”, check on the box. She was like, “I really want them to be haunted, or I want it to have a life in their body that continues even when they’ve moved on, when they’re not standing in front of it anymore.” And I would sort of agree. I think some of my favorite endings, nothing is resolved, but there’s a feeling that things are opening out. Or that something has been gonged inside of you. You are now going to be haunted by those same questions or that character’s state or whatever.

I took a creative writing class at USC with T.C. Boyle, and he has this story I love called “Tooth and Claw” where in the very last scene, a character steps into a room that may or may not contain a dangerous feline. So you don’t know if he dies and he said he went to an elementary school and they had read the story and they all complained about the ending. And he said, “If you don’t like that ending, you can just add one sentence: ‘And then I died.’”

I sort of love that. I teach too, and I’ll get student manuscripts that are Hunter S. Thompson style, where the scale is weird. We’ve got three pages of a dinner and then on the last page the house catches ablaze in one paragraph, or it’s like triple homicide. I’m like, “My goodness!” I think that’s not the real ending, right? That isn’t actually the resolution.

I can think of one story of yours that has a very definite conclusion. You have a story that goes, “Once there were a bunch of unicorns, and a flood came.”

I must have said that at some point, that those were the first stories I wrote. It would always be some stable, peaceful context, some, like, valley of magical bears or something, and then a comet would hit them. I really don’t think it’s gotten so much more sophisticated. It’s sad. It’s so funny that you bring that up because I was just having lunch with a friend. She has a nine-year-old niece and we were talking about this nine-year-old’s idea of a plot. I was like, “Gosh, I should borrow a page from her playbook,” because it sounded so clear. She was like, “Let’s play ‘writer.’ Do you wanna do ‘princess marries prince?’ Do you wanna do ‘rich person falls in love with poor person?’ Do you wanna do ‘war?’” I do want to do all of those plots. It sounds so liberating. One of the nice things about literary writers doing genre sometimes. If there are genre conventions, it’s so fun, like what you were asking about horror. Like the scarecrow story, it was so fun for me to write that particular story because you know how the rules work. In a horror story, there’s going to be something gone awry, it’s mysterious, someone is complicit. In this case, it’s one bully who has been scapegoated by his friends and he sort of becomes the scarecrow and the strange substitution. But also there’s a trajectory of escalating dread. You can follow that. You can hold on to that. You have an exoskeleton. Genre can give you, well, a skeleton, it doesn’t even have to be an exoskeleton.

Since we’re science fiction fans, we like exoskeletons.

That was such a good cartoon. Did you guys ever see that? Exosquad?

Uh, yeah.

It’s fine if you didn’t! It’s fine if you didn’t. I went even further and you guys didn’t follow me there. It’s sad. That’s why I had to keep it quiet in high school.

This is an important question: You said in an interview that you had done so much research on alligator wrestling that you felt like you could take on an actual alligator; so, if an alligator were to attack right now, how would you fight it?

Oh, what would I do? Oh my god. Well, I think I lied when I said that. I would scream. I would scream like a woman and stand on the table. The trick is that if you can get their jaws closed, the musculature of their jaw, by some weird evolutionary fluke, can come down with the force of a guillotine but they can’t open it again. So you can hold it shut with a scrunchie. What if we get all these lawsuits by people who say, “That’s not true”?

“Karen Russell fan mauled in freak alligator-wrestling accident.”

They just have a Goody elastic [hair-tie] and they’re like, “It didn’t work, though.” Their horror as the gator easily opens its jaw and bites their hand. Yeah, I wonder what I would do if it came in right now. See? Remember when you would study so hard for your European AP exam and then, who knows what any of those battles were? I think that’s how I feel about alligator wrestling.

A while back you mentioned humor in your stories. A lot of your stories, they do have really funny lines in them. And I guess I was just wondering, are you sort of laughing to yourself as you’re writing the stories?

Wouldn’t that be terrifying? No, of course not. How scary would that be if I was just sitting alone laughing in a room? [Laughing] That’s the path of madness. Nobody wants that. I heard that Flannery O’Connor cracked herself up, which I like to picture too. It’s funny, you know, I don’t think—somehow I think the new collection is a little more sedate in some ways, humor-wise, I think just because some of the stories commit to darkness in a different way. There’s a lot more earnest darkness here maybe.

You do also have “Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgating.”

I was glad to have that one in there. Even though I think it’s a story about underdogs, and I’m sure it’s the underdog of the collection. It’s truly such a ridiculous story. You know when I did laugh? The end line is something like, “We munch and munch and da da da da da.” I was just laughing with my friend. He was like, “that’s the end line of the story, we munch and munch? The most extraneous kind of thought.” I used to love those kinds of epics, too, like Antarctic epics. Ken Sharp is a writer who I love a lot and he’ll do a very straight kind of a version of this tale. Where some explorers motivated by ego, and whatever hubristic forces motivated those explorers, in addition to a kind of hope to discover new territories etc., etc. That kind of willful blindness that led them to be drinking tea on the ice floes. And I was just thinking about the men in my family and their love of these underdog sports teams. Like if they love a team, my brother is a hockey fan in Miami and he loves the Panthers. The perversity of that, I just think that says a lot about my brother, this perverse and really undying loyalty. There’s so many kinds of dark looks at that in this collection, that kind of optimism. Like this is going to be our team’s season. Or this is going to be the year that we have a bumper crop of wheat on our Nebraska farm. Or I’m going to be a hero in these ways. I just thought it would be nice to have a lighter—the density of that story is a little lighter than some of the other ones.

The premise, I guess, we should say just for people who haven’t read it, is that they are fans who go down to the South Pole to root for different kinds of marine life and the main character roots for the krill. And the krill never win this contest against the baleen whales.

No, they never will. Yeah, it’s the Food Chain Games. But you know, there are franchises that are just not going to win for you. I just liked that idea of putting yourself at incredible personal risk, just casting your lot with this microscopic loser creature, that’s just like the world’s oldest loser.

I really think I’m not that funny of a person. I go for a 70/30 ratio. I just keep throwing stuff out there. 70/30, that’s pretty good. And in writing, I think, even less so. It’s really hard. Have you guys had that experience? Sometimes if you read someone who’s really trying to be funny, it feels like being tickled. It feels violent and kind of aggressive.

Ok, well, I wasn’t going to bring this up, but we asked for questions online, questions we should ask you. And somebody on twitter wanted us to ask you if you’re ticklish.

I am really ticklish. Are you guys going to attack me outside of the building? Is there gonna . . . I swear to god, if some masked tickler tickles me now I’ll be so upset. If some man in a dirty Elmo costume comes up in the atrium and tries to tickle me, I’ll be like, “Fuck you, John. God damn it.”

That was the one question.

That was the only question anybody asked?

Yeah. Is that a reference to anything or is that just totally random?

No, I’m telling you, that’s what’s going to happen. Someone’s plotting a cruel attack. No, I’m super ticklish. It’s really embarrassing at those airport checkpoints. Everyone is just, “Go ahead. Just fricking go ahead. You’re scaring us.” I can’t believe that’s the only question. I’m sad. Nobody wanted to know about the ratio of fantastic to naturalistic detail, or . . . ?

To be fair, we don’t actually get all that many responses when we say, “Hey we’re going to interview so and so. What questions do you want us to ask?” We don’t get a whole lot of people offering up questions. Or certainly not good ones. It’s very infrequently that they actually make it on to the show. One thing I wanted to ask you about was, just trying to research you, I couldn’t find any website or blog or twitter or anything like that. Do you have any online presence?

Nope. Isn’t that wonderful? I’m sort of so socially anxious generally that the idea of maintaining a twitter anything, I can’t. I’m also like 90 years old secretly, so I can’t even use that language. Did anyone tweet or retweet about me? I just don’t even really know what’s going on over there.

Is there a way for people to send you fan mail? Do you get fan mail?

If you send it to Random House, then you can. But don’t; people don’t have to do that. They’ve got better things going. They should write their real moms or something.

So, Karen, thanks for giving us so much time for the interview.

Thank you, it was so fun. I can’t wait to see you at another critically low moment in my confidence in life. Really, thank you. This was super fun.

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 six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

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

Interview: Gregory Maguire
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Gregory Maguire is the author of The Wicked Years, a four-book cycle including Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz—all New York Times bestsellers. Wicked: The Musical is soon to celebrate its tenth anniversary on Broadway, and is one of the top dozen longest-running shows in Broadway history. Maguire has written five other novels for adults and two dozen books for children, and has written and performed pieces for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Selected Shorts. His novel Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister was an ABC film starring Stockard Channing.

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.

The first thing that I wanted to talk about is that I live in New York, and I saw you at an event years ago at a Barnes & Noble in Union Square where you read sections from the novel Wicked and then members of Broadway cast performed the songs that had been adapted from those sections. I thought it was one of the best book events I’d ever seen, and I was just curious whose idea that was and how that came about.

Well, I have to say my publisher, HarperCollins, and the people who make the play, the Broadway theater people, have worked hand-in-glove all the way along in order to make sure that there’s as much generosity of spirit about this shared material as they possibly can. It never hurts the play for me to go out and talk about my work, and it certainly never hurts me, as a writer, to have a fourteen-million-dollar advertising budget behind my book. While I can’t remember whose idea it was exactly, I do know that there was no coercion needed. There were no greased palms, everybody was happy to help out together.

You said something I thought was really funny, if I’m remembering right. You said that when you first went out on tour, one of your friends said something along the lines of, “You’re not so cute that groupies are going to be a huge problem, but you’re cute enough that they might be a slight problem.”

[Laughs] That was the writer Alice Hoffman, who said, “Never leave a bookstore with somebody you’ve just met.” I didn’t want to ask her, “Why, Alice? Do you have any interesting stories you want to tell me about? I’m all ears.” I just said, “Thank you for your advice. I’m a babe in the woods; I’m a novice. I’m not stupid, but I’m a novice.” She gave me, for protection, a kind of hand puppet of the Wicked Witch of the West. She said, “What you must do, if you are going out and you happen to go to a café across from the bookstore, take this Wicked Witch of the West puppet out, order yourself a bottle of wine, do not drink it, just put the puppet on the bottle of wine, and put the Wicked Witch of the West across from you at the table, and that will scare off all pretenders.” That was good advice, except, of course, the Wicked Witch of the West invites lunatics out of the woodwork, and so it didn’t quite work in quite the fashion she had imagined it would. But I did carry that puppet around with me for years and told that story often.

So obviously the Broadway play has been a big success, and I understand there’s a feature film in development. What’s the status of that?

There is a feature film in very slow development. I have not heard any updates recently. I think I did see over the past summer that there was a director who was considering being attached to the project. But Universal Studios is the main bankroller for the play, and they are still making money on Broadway and on four continents on every night the curtains go up, and so they’re not in any big hurry to turn this into a feature film just yet. Why kill the goose that’s laying the golden eggs? The eggs are still good-sized, and eventually the movie will come to be, but only I think when the play has finally gotten to be completely passé and either needs a little boost or is done, and therefore can be reinvented once again.

The reason Oz is in the news right now is that there is this new movie coming out called Oz The Great and Powerful. Have you been following that at all?

I have seen the trailers for it. I saw the truncated one last fall that I liked quite a bit. I saw the expanded one that goes out to a minute, and I wasn’t quite as impressed with that one. It began to look as if it were verging on Tim Burton territory. Nothing wrong with that, except that that’s not my personal picture of what Oz is like.

How would you say your take is different from a Tim Burton take on it?

Tim Burton’s worlds are fascinating, and I love them, but they crawl toward the baroque and the macabre, let’s say—even his Alice in Wonderland. My take on Oz is sinister in some ways, but it is no less capable of salvation at the same time. In other words, my world is just as corrupt and just as redeemable as the real world in which we live. At least that’s my artist’s attempt.

I’ve heard you say that one of the things that makes Wicked strike a chord with people is it is concerned with doing the right thing and being good versus being bad and that that’s kind of become almost passé in literature. How do you think we got to this place where questions of doing the right thing are not fashionable?

One can certainly understand that when the bad becomes so immense, the last hundred [or so] years has not been a very noble period for the human race, and so we have some choices just for self-protection. We can choose to ignore the problems, which is the most common way human beings have of severing themselves from the pain of fecklessness, or we can say we’re going to fight as hard as we can, and we’re going to lose. Or we can say it’s all beyond us, no one person can change the history of the Holocaust, no one person can turn back global warming, no one person can impound all the guns that threaten all the schoolchildren in every school in the nation, and so to say that I have the capacity for good is to indulge in a kind of hubris that is outsized to my real capacities. So I think we have stepped back from the belief that we could change the milieu in which we live.

You said that one of your goals with writing Wicked was to encourage people to not be so hasty in demonizing other people and the book has sold millions of copies—I think seven million copies—the play has been this big Broadway hit: Have you gotten any feedback that suggests that message is sinking in to people who are enjoying the story?

Yes, I have. Mostly from young people who are not scared of saying what they think about something. We should all be that young. I am very pleased that Elphaba particularly as a character, but also the story of Wicked in general has been such as to make people want to write to me and say, “I identify with this character of Elphaba because she is going up against it; she knows she has so little chance of success, but she won’t give up.” And, personally, between you and me and anybody else [listening to] this podcast, I identify with her too. I take my own set of courage from the story of Elphaba. I admit it’s a bit onanistic to think I can admire as a hero somebody I made up from some part of my own brain. It’s a little bit of a closed system there, isn’t it? But nonetheless, I do. I don’t quite say to myself, “What would Elphaba do?” But in a way, knowing that there’s a character like Elphaba out in the world—it doesn’t matter that I helped shape her—what matters is that I can take an impression from her strength and her vivacity, and it can make me decide how I’m going to approach my teenage kids when they come home today.

Do you ever get letters from kids who say, “There was this green-skinned girl in our class, and we used to be mean to her, but having read the book, now we realize we should be nicer to her.”

No, because every letter that I get from every kid says, “I am the green-skinned girl. They should be nicer to me.” Boys and girls alike.

Let’s talk about the world of Oz. Since this is a show for fantasy and science fiction fans, I think one that one thing that was really interesting about the way that you approached creating this world of Oz is you said that you actually consulted with a cultural anthropologist to create the societies. Do you have lessons that are generalizable for fantasy writers in terms of creating those kinds of worlds?

I think about this a lot in almost every work that I do, regardless of the audience. If it’s an audience of kids who are eight or if it’s an audience of adult readers, I try to think, “What are the minimum details that I need to supply in order to make this world seem coherent?” Now, in a short story, you may only need one or two crispy phrases or surprising iterations of the layout of the world in order to make the whole thing snap into being and leap up before the eyes of the reader like a pop-up book. But, in a large world, especially a world like Oz, which already existed, I felt I needed to be on the money for every single aspect of the life and culture and history that’s provided. But, of course, L. Frank Baum did not provide a whole lot of that. The history of Oz is very sketchy, and I wanted to deepen it and to enrich it, and I wanted to be able to have some sense of how the entire society had worked and was working and might work in the future, depending on how people behaved. To that end, I made a list of the things that any cultural anthropologist going out in the field might actually consider upon finding a new population. What are the inheritance structures? What are the class divides? How do the people in any particular part of the clan relate to clans outside and to differences within the clan? What is the attitude toward gender? And then what are some of the processes? The marriage processes? The birth processes? What is the relationship of fable and faith in that particular society? The more I delved in, the more I got my hands dirty, the more I felt I could find answers either in myself or in some turning over of the ground that L. Frank Baum and MGM had left us.

You did have to make some changes to L. Frank Baum’s world—what have been the most impassioned reactions from L. Frank Baum purists that you’ve gotten to changes that you made?

The initial response to Wicked from the world at large, the world of literary critics, was generally very good. There was one particularly nasty response from the New York Times, but almost all the other reviews were quite flattering. They were better reviews than I ever expected to get in my life, and I was really pleased. The Oz purists were slower to come on board. I think I was considered something of a heretic at first, for the following reasons: I allowed a certain kind of joyful inanity to seep out of Oz, that is to say, while there’s cause and effect in the story of Dorothy in Oz, there really is very little cause and effect in Oz without Dorothy there. The populations all throughout Oz that Baum began to embroider and then continue to embroider were all self-contained and hardly knew or cared about each other even if their territories were contiguous. There was very little sense of how they’d come to be there or what made them be unique, one from another. When Dorothy lands in Munchkinland, nobody in Munchkinland has ever been to the Emerald City, it’s just hearsay. They’re farmers out in the sticks, so I felt that I needed to explain a little bit about that, about why the populations were so different, and that suggested to me that there was a lot more antagonism among the populations than Dorothy was aware of when she got there. So most of my inventions were based on apprehensions from clues that had been left on the ground by Baum—and by MGM, I consider them co-parents, as it were, of the Oz that we all feel that we know. The diehard Oz enthusiasts, the L. Frank Baum clubs, etc. were not all that happy, but I’ll tell you this: I was out in Wichita or in Kansas City or Omaha or someplace on tour for Wicked, and at the end of my reading when I had talked about the Wicked Witch of the West, and I had made it clear that I had no intention to have written a Saturday Night Live parody of The Wizard of Oz, I intended to take it all very seriously as if it were a nineteenth-century moral tale. At the very end, when I was signing books, a woman came up to me. She was very tall, she had a trench coat, a brim-snapped hat on, and she came to me, and she peered down into my face, and she said, “I have a confession to make.” I said, “Yes?” She looked this way, she looked that, she said, “I’m from the official International Wizard of Oz Club, and I’ve come to spy on you and report back to our minions, but I’ve become a convert!” And then she threw off her hat and bought three books and had them all signed for her mother and her husband and her children. I think that’s sort of what happened. It took the Oz people a little bit longer to realize, yes, I was playing around with sacred material, but not in any way to disgrace the original material, just actually to make it seem richer and to make its richness make more sense.

There’s this whole thing about in the Wizard of Oz that the Scarecrow is the symbol for the farmers, and the Yellow Brick Road is a symbol for the gold standard, and the whole thing is a political allegory. What do you think about that and did you do anything similar with your Oz books?

I stayed away from using any of those characters as allegorical elements, I mean, the most famous characters. And I have come around to thinking that, what I’ve heard a few other people write, is that it’s quite possible that the images of the Yellow Brick Road and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, particularly, occurred to L. Frank Baum as a result of political cartooning. He was, after all, a newspaper journalist in the years before he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and so he was familiar with how political cartoons were beginning to use symbols like that and characters in order to demonstrate certain segments of the population and their attitudes toward cultural, social, political, and historical changes. On the other hand, it’s been suggested that the images themselves are so strong, that they actually didn’t have to mean anything. The cow jumping over the moon doesn’t have to mean anything, but, boy, there’s a cow jumping over the moon, that in itself. Blake famously said about the “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright” in his poem, when asked, “What does the tiger stand for?” he said, “The tiger stands for the tiger.” And so, in a sense, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man stand for who they are in the story; their origins may have been political, but once Baum started to use them as characters, they shucked off their origins, I do believe. And so I don’t believe anybody would waste his time writing an allegory about the foundations of fiscal policy in a book intended for eight year olds.

You have said that Wicked was inspired by the US involvement in Iraq. Were the later books in the series similarly intertwined with contemporary politics or did it kind of go off on its own after a while?

Well, they were. Son of a Witch, the second in the series, was the most directly inspired by contemporary events, and here’s where I break with what I said as an answer to the previous question, the book Son of a Witch was intended as a response of mine to the Second Gulf War, and to the pictures of people coming out of Abu Ghraib, especially the one of the man with the hood and he’s on a box wired up supposedly to electrodes. Those pictures came out and were all over the front of the Boston Globe and they were so horrendous that I felt physically sick, and I thought if I don’t write something about somebody making an attempt to break someone out of prison, then I’m just going to go bonkers. I’m going to have to sign myself into McLean’s [psychiatric hospital] and spend the rest of my life there because I find this so offensive, so horrible to consider. Now when I came to read the book Son of a Witch for an audio book, books on tape, I found to my surprise that the character playing the new ruler of Oz, the new Emperor of Oz, had a distinctly Texan twang, which I don’t believe he had any right to have. So I suppose I was betraying my own political attitude in my performance of some of the characters once I came to do the book on tape.

You’ve described yourself as a pacifist. How hard is it to be a pacifist given contemporary politics when there doesn’t seem to be much support for that kind of idea?

I’m a pacifist by inclination; it’s not a religion. I would prefer in almost all instances for people not to be put in danger, but I was also raised a Christian, and I have read the essay by Thomas Aquinas on the moral justifications for a just war, and I know that there are times when one must pick up guns and try to right a wrong or to defend yourself. I know that. But I just always hope that’s always used as defense and as a last resort rather than an immediate kneejerk reaction. It is hard. It’s a hard position to hold, and like any position that any thinking being holds, I wobble on it back and forth all day long as well as in any given conversation.

Can you talk about how you went down to Nicaragua on sort of a peace mission?

Yes. It was in the late eighties, right before the Iran-Contra revelations, but there was certainly money coming in, flooding in from the United States, to arm one side of the struggle, to arm the right side of the struggle. By “right” I mean not the progressive side, not the leftist side, but the other direction. And I knew that there was, because I knew people who lived there, that there was a really commendable effort by American citizens who didn’t believe in the arming of rebels in another country to want to go to Nicaragua, and to stand, to want to link arms with the peasantry [ . . . ] as a way of saying even if the American government is funding these guns, not everybody in America, in the United States, feels the same way. So we’re going to come down and just be another voice, another presence, and stand [ . . . ] in solidarity with the movement. I was very happy to do that, I was very scared to do that, and I’ve never done it again. But it was a real education, and it was an attempt for me to stand up for what I believed.

You talked about using storytelling to comfort children there.

Yes. Boy, you’ve done your research well. The fact is that I didn’t speak much Spanish, but I found that I have a little bit of a Pied Piper sort of presence sometimes among children, and I was able just with the tiniest bit of toys or sticks or stones and making animal noises, I was almost always able to bring the children together and to engage with them. I was staying one night in a house that only had one door. It was in the farthest highland place that we were going on this trip, and about nine o’clock at night the lights in the town went off, the entire lights of the whole little mountainside village went off, and one of the Americans said, “Oh, they may be cutting the power in order to attack the town at night. We all better go inside our homes.” I was staying with a minister whose wife had been killed and had left him with three children, and when the guns went off, the children came and nestled under my arms, like little chickadees coming for safety, to a person who didn’t have any Spanish and certainly didn’t know what to do if somebody burst through the door with a gun, and I just started singing and rocking and making funny noises, and indeed it was some sort of gun episode, outside in the street outside our house. Nobody was hurt, eventually everything was silenced. I never did find out what it was, but I felt that I was able, at least in that moment, to give comfort in the way that I could, by singing and being a lunatic.

I think it’s really interesting that you said that your parents didn’t really let you watch TV and that The Wizard of Oz was basically the only TV that you were allowed to watch, that it was like Christmas that it was on TV once a year and you were allowed to watch it.

Well, the story as you put it out is a little extreme. We actually were allowed to watch TV, but not much. We had to vote as a family of seven children which half hour the TV was going to be on every week. We could watch it every week, we just couldn’t watch it all that regularly. But, yes, you’re right, once a year my parents relented, they gave up their harshness and their restrictions and they said, “Oh, The Wizard of Oz is a great family film, every child should see it.” It was part of our annual festival, it was in the liturgical calendar, really: There was Christmas, there was Easter, there was The Wizard of Oz. [ . . . ] Because of that, I think the story of Oz got into me, I don’t say more deeply than it did to other people of my generation, who didn’t live in the video mesmorama in which children and adults live now, but it certainly did get in deep to me as the first instance of a filmic impression. This was one of the few stories that I got through the movies first, and then went back and started trying to find the books afterwards.

I saw that your father wrote a humor column. What kind of effect did that have on you?

Yes, you might say he was a kind of early and localized Garrison Keillor, not with the kind of extended metaphor with which Garrison Keillor has been working for forty years or so, but he collected funny stories from around town and told them in a column that ran four days a week in our local newspaper. He was also a stringer attached to Time and Newsweek and the New York Times to report on any news that was happening out of upstate New York—the Albany area where I was born and where I was raised. So I grew up thinking, “Oh! I don’t think too much of my father, I don’t like him, he’s a bore, I’m going to do anything other than what he does in my life, I’m going to be a different person than he is,” but my whole life I’ve been a writer, exactly the way he has, and incidentally so too are three of my brothers writers, so despite the fact that we thought what he did was not terribly interesting, we must have been raised in that hothouse atmosphere of love for words, love of story, and love of sharing whatever it was that was good by writing about it.

What do you think about that, being raised with such limited access to television? What kind of effect did that have on you? I know you have kids now. I can’t even imagine trying to limit kids’ access to the Internet and so on today. What do you think of that sort of approach of limiting children’s access to media?

I think it’s a lost cause, and I think it’s important to lose it. That is to say, I think it’s important to try, and I think you’re going to lose. Our children are now fifteen, thirteen, and eleven, and we won the battle for ten years in a row. From the time they came to us, they’re all adopted, until they were about eleven, and then, in the last couple of years, as they’ve come up into high school and middle school, we’ve pretty much lost a good part of the battle, they are on screens an awful lot of the time, but not all the time. I still collect the iPad, the iPod, the phone, and the computers every night around eight thirty, quarter to nine, and that’s it ’til the next morning. They are supposed to read, and most of them do, the older one does homework, and the younger two read every night. They are not being raised in the world in which I was raised, and I couldn’t raise them there even if I wanted because it doesn’t exist anymore. I’ve had to relax a little bit and remind myself they need to be able to be functional in the world in which they find themselves. Just as I’ve found a way to be functional in my own [ . . . ] universe.

I saw on your Facebook page that you went to a symposium on dystopias last May. What was that and what things were discussed there?

It was run by a group called Children’s Literature New England, which is a group I actually helped to start about twenty-seven years ago. That group had as its aim to enliven the mission of telling people about the significance of literature in the lives of the children. To do that, it used to hold weeklong conferences once a year at which a stellar band of writers and illustrators, teachers and librarians, would come together. We had people like Ursula Le Guin and Maurice Sendak, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, just pretty much anybody who was alive and could move across the floor accepted our invitations to come and speak. But as I have gotten older and have pulled back from doing that kind of organizing work in order to raise my own family, the group too has gone through a transition, and last fall we’d been meeting in smaller groups, and we did have a three-day symposium on dystopian fiction. We read some older material, we talked about Tobin Anderson’s work. We talked about The Hunger Games work. Some of the names of the books escape me at the moment. There’s a wonderful new anthology by Datlow and Windling called After. I don’t know if you’ve seen that. I have a story in that. And that’s a whole set of new and original dystopian fiction written for children.

Do you want to tell us about your story from the anthology?

Yes, it’s called “Hw th’Irth Wint Rong by Hapless Joey @ homeskool.guv.” And it is a six- or seven-page story that pays a tip of the hat/homage to Russell Hoban in his famous and wonderful dystopian novel called Riddley Walker. What most characterized that novel is that, in addition to the world being broken, even language was broken. The laws of grammar had all been forgotten. In order to read Riddley Walker, pretty much you have to read it out loud the way you find if you read Shakespeare out loud or Chaucer, who actually realized that your ears are hearing things and understanding it, doing just as much of the work as your eyes are doing. You read Riddley Walker and you read it out loud phonetically like a child learning to read and you remember how every child learning to read is trying to unriddle the universe. I took that plan and I wrote about a boy who was trying to write an essay about what happened to the world. He sees photographs of what the world used to be like when planes flew through the air, and everybody was clean and lawns were cut and everything seemed to be bright-colored, but in the time since he was born, half the world plunged into shadow, my suggestion as to why that happened is that something has gone wrong with that high speed particle collider halfway underneath France and Switzerland and that it generated a particle that began to change the nature of molecules. This is actually built out of a fear of mine of the Large Hadron Collider. People talked about the fact that nobody really knew what was going to happen if two particles collided and made a third particle that had never existed. Well, I always have to have something to worry about when I go to bed. First, it’s whether or not I’ve flossed correctly, and then it’s whether or not the universe is going to change its nature before I get up and brush my teeth. So that’s really where that story began, it was built out of that anxiety.

You’re best known for writing fantasy but I saw you wrote at least one young adult science fiction novel; I don’t know if there are others. Just what is your relationship with science fiction?

I read science fiction when I was fourteen or fifteen in the way that I read everything. So I read my Robert Heinlein, I read my Isaac Asimov, and I read my Ray Bradbury. There are some science fiction writers I really do admire a huge amount. There’s somebody who writes for teenagers, H. M. Hoover; she wrote with particular literary style that was very appealing to me. I’ve liked some of the work that Doris Lessing . . . and at the moment names escape me. I admire almost everything of Ursula Le Guin’s.

I hear you’re working on a new novel called Egg and Spoon. You want to tell us about that?

Yes, it’s on a table in the back of my study here. It is, in a little bit of a sense, a dystopian novel. It is set in the past, in roughly 1905 in czarist Russia. And despite the fact that it’s set back then, it’s really a meditation on some things that we are facing right now in our dystopian 2013, which is the threat of climate change, floods, and droughts, and weather that won’t sit in the month in which it belongs, and its implications for human suffering and the human need to begin to find new ways to share resources. I purposely set it in the past so that it won’t be too extreme and too science fiction, and it allows me to dabble in the kinds of things that I like to, but it nonetheless is intended to respond to readers, to young readers, right in the world in which they live. In which we see these storms, and we can worry about things like colony collapse of bees and about drought and about what it’s going to mean if our chain of food supply really is as drastically interrupted and revised as seems to be quite possible even within our lifetimes.

Do you have any idea when it will be released into the wild?

I would like to think that there is still a wild for it to be released into by the time I’m finished, and I would like to say probably fall of 2014.

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 six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

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

Artist Gallery: Giuliano Brocani

Artist Spotlight: Giuliano Brocani
Galen Dara

Giuliano Brocani is a designer and illustrator living in Italy. His portfolio and blog are at www.giulianobrocani.com. You can follow him on Twitter @notpill.

Our cover image this month is your fabulous illustration, Leviathan. Such a visually stunning piece, harrowing and visceral. I noticed it was based on a Concept Art Character of the Week contest (and the winner too, congratulations!). How did you come up with the idea for this piece?

Let me start by saying that I’m really proud to be featured in Lightspeed. I’m an avid sci-fi reader and many authors featured in your magazine have been part of my literary and artistic growth.

This is a hobby to me, which means I don’t have an awful lot of time for my passion, or at least not as much as I’d like, but there are always so many things I want to paint, be it for study or just because I feel like it. I keep some kind of a mental list of things I want to draw sooner or later, and when I look up the current activities on the forum, I always find something to do that’s on my list. An astronaut left to his own devices in space was definitely on that list, so I sketched it down very quickly and I have done nothing else but refining it, following here and there the advice of the forum users. [Link: http://www.giulianobrocani.com/wp/character-of-the-week-278-wip/]

In your biography, you state that you work in advertising and paint for fun. Can you tell us a little about your background, such as how you came into the creative field and what sort of crossover there is between your advertising/design work and your illustration/painting work? Do you ever consider making painting and/or illustrating your career?

I grew up in a family that breathed art. My father and his six brothers all made paintings, sculptures, drawings, even if they were kept busy with their jobs that had nothing to do with art. Art was not particularly encouraged, there were no pressures, it was just . . . normality. I started working for an advertising company when I was looking for a summer job, as a porter, something for a month or so. I got out of there nineteen years later as art director. I’ve opened a design shop with some friends and here I am. It’s the job I love, but, despite what many young people think, it has nothing to do with art. It is method, technique, problem solving. It’s not art. That’s why I need an art-release-valve, that’s why I spend all my spare time on forums and Photoshop. To be honest, I never thought illustration could be my main profession, but you never know . . .

You paint mostly in Photoshop, is that correct? I noted you did a few experiments with ArtRage and Painter; do you experiment with other software as well? Do you ever work with traditional mediums? Sketch things out pen on paper, etc.?

First of all, I want to specify that I love traditional painting. I’m crazy about oil painting. My approach to illustrations is nothing else but an attempt at simulating that method, with the advantage that I don’t have to wait for the colour to dry off, clean the brushes, set up the easel . . .

I’ve used Photoshop since its version 2.5 (!!) so you can imagine how comfortable I feel in that environment. I tried everything out there. I used Painter when it first came out (it was made by Metacreations and it only came for Mac and it was . . . dunno, a long time ago!) and it was stellar, with its palette to mix colours . . . wow, it was great! . . . but it didn’t feel like home to me. Now and then I try to do something with other software, but Photoshop is still my first choice. I am one of the lucky Wacom Inkling early adopters—I bought it specifically to improve my analogue approach. If you ever jot down a sketch on your moleskin, hey presto, with Inkling you already have it in digital format.

Since I started my full-digital adventure, I got rid of all analogue tools. I rarely sketch my drawings in pencil, and when I do, I sketch them in digital. Mine is a process similar to sculpture: I start from undefined shapes that step by step become characters or landscapes. I use PS like a canvas, only a few layers (two or three generally) with just a few settings—I then merge them as soon as possible.

Who are some of the artists that have inspired you? Where do you go to get ideas for your next painting? (And if you ever find yourself stuck on an artistic problem what do you do to get past that?)

This is probably an answer you get a lot of times, but there are too many artists that inspire me. I try to buy all the art books I can lay my hands on. Spectrum albums are a yearly appointment I can’t miss and then all the “The Art of…” [insert_a_movie_title_here]. Many of them are also artists that are not well known to the public, like Wesley Burt, Marko Djurdjević, and all staff at Massive Black, Inc. If I really had to name one, I’d say the one who really shocked me is Jon Foster. If you look at what he does, you can never be sure whether it’s traditional or digital painting.

More than by individuals, though, I have been influenced by the community. Everything I know today about digital painting comes from forums like CGSociety, ConceptArt.org, CGhub.com. Names like Philip Straub, Jason Manley, Nicholas “Sparth” Bouvier, Marko Djurdjević, and many many more that, with great humility, offer their expertise and advice to everybody. That’s why I actively and constantly participate in the forum: to give back, to reciprocate the favor. There’s no doubt this is a wonderful era for sharing knowledge.

I generally draw to relax. I don’t work on commission, so I rarely face complex artistic problems. My professional experience has taught me, though, how to work with very specific briefs, so I’m quite comfortable in solving issues that seem quite intricate. That’s also why I’m interested in online challenges. If there’s a brief, there’s a solution.

If I can choose, I usually try to push myself out of my comfort zone. For instance I know I need to work hard on anatomy (among other things), so if there’s a challenge that requires the study of a character, I’m quite happy because it’s an opportunity to develop my skills.

I’m intrigued by the Francis Goya quote you have across the banner of your website: “Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.” This feels like a very apt pairing with your art, which is gritty and fantastical. What were your reasons for selecting that quote and what are your thoughts about the place of fantasy in our arts and entertainment?

I was intrigued by this quote as much as you are. I realize more and more that the art of illustration is one of the foundational elements of entertaining, but it is bound by the readers’ reason. Their awareness and rationality are our chain. The more we are able to break that chain, the more we’ll be able to take them to wonderful worlds.

Thank you very much for talking to me, Giuliano!

Galen Dara likes to sit in the dark with her sketchbook, but sometimes she emerges to illustrate for books and magazines, dabble in comics, and hatch wild collaborations with friends and associates. Galen has done art for Edge Publishing, Dagan Books, Apex, Scapezine, Tales to Terrify, Peculiar Pages, Sunstone, and the LovecraftZine. She is on the staff of BookLifeNow, blogs for the Inkpunks, and writes the Art Nerd column at the Functional Nerds. When Galen is not online you can find her on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, climbing mountains or hanging out with a loving assortment of human and animal companions. Follow her on Twitter @galendara.

The Man Who Carved Skulls
Richard Parks

“I married your mother for her skull. It’s no secret.”

Jarak put aside his rasps and gouges for the moment, resting his eyes and mind from the precise, exacting work his trade demanded. He didn’t mind his son’s persistent questions at such times. Akan was at an age when he should be curious and, if curiosity was a duty, Akan was a dedicated boy. It wasn’t as though Purlo the Baker, whose skull rested patiently on Jarak’s workbench, was in a hurry.

Akan nodded. “Mother is pretty,” he said. “Often men of the village speak about what a fortunate man Jarak the Skullcarver is.”

“Letis is indeed the most beautiful woman in Trepa and for seven leagues around. But that’s not the same thing. The ugliest man alive during your grandfather’s time turned out to have a skull of exquisite beauty, as your grandfather knew all along. With time and practice and the aesthetic sense that might come with them, perhaps you’ll understand and be able to see the difference for yourself. I hope so, if you’re to take over for me some day.”

“I hope so too, Father,” Akan said very seriously.

The trumpet call echoed faintly from the south side of the village, opposite the temple of Somna the Dreamer. As a chance to satisfy his son’s curiosity, it seemed a perfect opportunity. “They’ve started,” Jarak said. “Let’s go see, and maybe I’ll tell you how I won your mother.”

They walked out of the workshop, around Letis’ herb garden, and out through the gate onto Trepa’s main street. Other folk were stirring now as the trumpet sounded again, gathering in small groups that slowly grew and spread out until the entire cobbled street was lined with smiling people.

“Here they come!”

Three young girls led the procession, dropping daisy petals from willow baskets as they came. They all looked very solemn in their white muslin gowns and red ribbons. Jarak pointed to the dark-haired little girl in the middle. “That’s Melyt, Theran’s granddaughter. Your mother thinks she’d be a good wife for you. Isn’t she pretty?”

Akan stuck out his tongue. “I’m not getting married, ever.”

“You’ll change your mind. And when you do, best not to leave the choosing of your bride to chance. That gives the Forces of Gahon too much room to play.”

“You weren’t betrothed to Mother,” Akan pointed out. “She told me.”

Jarak smiled. “Nonetheless . . . oh, there’s Theran now.”

At least, what was left of him. Four priests of Somna carried the skull on a raised dais. Jarak had decided to go with an historical motif for that skull; considering Theran’s full and rich life, it had seemed more than fitting. The scenes of the old man’s life were played out in bas-reliefs carved in a spiral that started at the top of his skull and ended just where the spine had once joined its base. They were too far away to see properly, but Jarak named them to Akan one by one.

Here was Theran traveling with the Wind People on the Great Grass Sea, smuggling weapons to Ly Ossia under the noses of the Watchers; here was Theran visiting the ruins of the Temple of the Dreamer in Darsa and bringing back the piece of the original altar that now resided in the local Temple. Here was Theran as all had known him, surrounded by his wife and children and grandchildren. Whether any of his stories were really true didn’t matter; they were true now and would remain so as long as the House of Skulls stood.

Theran’s widow Karta and his family came last. They did not grieve; grief was over and done long before. Now it was time for Theran to take his place in the House of Skulls. Now it was time for celebration. Karta beat a small drum and her steps were close to a dance; her daughters followed wearing small bells on straps about their wrists. Between the trumpets of the flanking priests and the din from Theran’s family, Jarak was sure every Ancestor in that sacred place knew of Theran’s coming. He said as much.

“They can’t hear anything,” Akan said solemnly.

Jarak raised an eyebrow. “Oh? And why not? Because they’re dead?”

Akan shook his head and then hugged himself, nearly doubled over giggling. “No ears!”

Jarak put his arm around his son’s shoulders. “Come on, you rogue. Let’s follow.”

Jarak and Akan fell into step behind the procession with the rest of the villagers, sharing the joy of Theran’s family and adding to it as well. They came to the entrance to the Temple of the Dreamer, passing by the wooden statue and shrine that Jarak’s father had carved years before. They did not stop at the shrine or the temple. Soon after Theran’s death, his proper funeral had been held at the temple and offerings made at the shrine, and that had been the time for tears. Now it was Theran’s Homecoming, and the procession did not pause until they reached the House of Skulls.

The procession broke apart; Theran’s family went first into the stone building. Next season the masons would be summoned and another large room would be added to the House, and then again when that one filled. For now, there was still room in the main hall. Jarak and Akan followed the others into the echoing chamber, with rows and rows of intricately carved skulls staring down at them from niches evenly spaced in the walls.

“Theran Molka’s Son, Beloved of Somna, has come home,” said the senior priest. He carefully lifted the skull and handed it to Karta, who placed it in the niche on the far wall that had been prepared for it, beside the small skull of his sister who died in childhood, beneath the skulls of their parents Molka and Derasee. Farther along the wall, the masons had already begun work on the niche for Purlo the Baker, for when his time came.

“Our father has come home,” said each of Theran’s children as they approached the skull in turn and paid their respects.

“Our grandfather has come home.” Each of the grandchildren repeated the ritual, each looking very grave and serious, though Melyt was clearly trying not to giggle. The ritual was repeated by all who had known Theran best or felt the desire to honor him; even Jarak took his turn.

“My friend has come home.”

Then, finally, all was done. People broke apart into small groups and chatted; others drew apart to pay respects to the older residents of the House of Skulls. Jarak took Akan’s hand and led him to a central column that was also full of niches like little doorways. Jarak pointed to one particular skull residing there.

“Do you know who that is?” Jarak asked.

Akan nodded somberly. “It’s Great-Grandmother Laersa.”

Jarak smiled. “You asked about how your mother and I got married—it’s because of Laersa.”

Akan’s eyes got very big. “Did she tell you to get married?” he asked. “Weren’t you frightened?”

“It wasn’t like that. Your mother was the only daughter of the High Priest of Somna, and I no more than a skull-carver’s apprentice. She had suitors from all over the village and far away, all well-favored young men of good family and prospects.”

“Mother loves you,” Akan said proudly.

Jaran grunted. “Not then, she didn’t. I think she does now, but it was some time coming. I always loved her, of course. How could I not? But I had no chance, at least not until the Homecoming of her Aunt Telesa.”

“What did you do?”

“I watched her. After most of the others had gone, she stayed. She came and stood about where you’re standing now, looking at her Grandmother Laersa.”

“Great-Grandmother Laersa,” corrected Akan, looking as prim as Bol the Schoolmaster.

“Her Grandmother Laersa,” said Jarak. “Your great-grandmother. So. She was alone, which almost never happened in those days. I could speak to her, but what would I say? So I watched her, and I noticed something. Something important.”

“What was it?”

“It was the way she looked at Laersa. Not in grief, or even fond memory. The look on your mother’s face was pure envy. You see, Laersa’s skull was carved by a master, and he outdid himself. It is simply marvelous work.”

Akan nodded. “Marvelous,” he said, trying on the new word for size. “It’s a very nice skull. But wasn’t it wrong of Mother to envy someone?”

“Perhaps, but just then I thought it was a very endearing quality, because it gave me an idea. I went up to your mother, and I said that her grandmother’s skull was the most beautiful in Trepa, and she agreed that this was so. Then I said ‘I love you, Letis. Marry me and when the time comes I will make of your skull a work to eclipse even that of Laersa. Folk will look at you as you look at her now, and none will surpass you. Your name and your memory will live forever.’ You see, I offered your mother immortality, and that’s the one thing I had to give her that no other could.”

“And she said ‘yes’!” Akan clapped his hands in delight.

Jarak laughed. “Actually, she called me a presumptuous fool and stormed out. But, deep down, she believed I meant what I said. She held her suitors at bay, delaying her choice until she had time to see my apprentice work and even to speak, once, to my old master Boreth concerning me.” Jarak winked. “She thinks I didn’t know about that. Then, when the choice could be delayed no longer, she chose me.”

“I’ll offer to carve Melyt’s skull,” Akan said, grinning. “Will she like me then?”

Jarak snorted. “She’ll more than likely box your ears. Every woman and every man has their own tale to unravel. If the Dreamer means for you and Melyt to share one, you’ll have to untangle it yourselves.”

“It’s not such a bad thing,” Letis said. “Beyond our island, I hear people actually bury their dead.”

Akan looked at his mother. He knew she had aged, in the fifteen years since Theran’s Homecoming, but the change had been so gradual that, to him, it was no change at all. Her hair was still the same rich shade of red-gold; the streaks of white were barely noticeable. Her eyes were still clear and bright, her face unlined and lovely.

The change that had come about in his father was quite different. Jarak was older than his years; the weakness in his heart had not been quite so gradual or so gently building. Jarak and Akan and Letis had long known the truth—Jarak would die first, and his promise to Letis would be unfulfilled. Letis was the first to speak of it. It was like a wall coming down.

Akan shook his head. “Why build a tomb when you can grow a garden? It makes no sense to me. The bone meal is good for the fields, the House of Skulls takes up far less room than a necropolis.”

“At least the buried dead would never be seen . . . Akan, your mother is a vain woman. Jarak won me by that vanity, for all that I love him. But sometimes I think this is harder on him than me. He wants to fulfill his promise at least as much as I want him to.” Letis sighed. “It is perhaps the Will of the Dreamer that both of us shall be . . . disappointed.”

Akan looked grim. “Perhaps,” he said, “the fulfillment of my father’s promise will fall to me.”

Letis looked up from her sewing, then reached up and patted his cheek. “You’re a good son, and an excellent carver. But you are not your father. Where is he, by the way?”

Akan shrugged. “In his workshop, of course. And I know your meaning—I have not his skill.”

Letis put the needle aside. “My ‘meaning’ is that your father’s promise dies with your father. If my skull does come to you in time, I know I’ll not disgrace my place in the House. It’s wrong to want more than that.”

“But you do want more.”

“Yes, son. I do.” Letis looked thoughtful. “I guess I just don’t want it enough.”

Akan stared at her, now afraid that he didn’t understand her meaning, but more afraid that he did. “You would not—”

Letis smiled sadly. “I would.” She showed her wrists and the faint red lines that marked them. “But I could not. Barely a scratch is all I managed. I’m a coward. I don’t deserve immortality.”

Jarak was a sick man, but his grip on the gouge was still strong, his skill with the chisel still fine. The new skull was almost ready.

“I could finish that for you,” Akan said.

His father shook his head. “It’s not as if I’ll have many more chances. This is what I love, Akan. This is what I’ve always wanted to do. You know that.”

“I think you should speak to Mother,” Akan said.

Jarak put his tools away for a moment. “Why? The sight of me adds to her suffering more than my words could assuage. Leave it be, Akan. There’s nothing for it.”

“She tried to kill herself.”

Jarak nodded. “She failed. We failed. She wants to die in order to live forever, but she wants to live to be with me for as long as I have. She begged me to hold the knife myself, did she tell you that?” Akan shook his head, feeling numb. Jarak continued, “It’s true. I could not. I’d sooner kill myself. And yet I always thought she would die first. We planned our lives around it, but we can’t do the one thing necessary to make it happen. It’s almost funny. I’m sure the Prince of Nightmares would appreciate the joke.”

“It would be wrong,” Akan said.

“I suppose so,” Jarak said. “As excuses go, that one will have to do.”

“Father—”

Jarak shook his head, and Akan fell silent. “Go find Melyt,” Jarak said. “She’ll be waiting for you.”

Melyt had grown into a lovely young woman, also so gradually that it was a long time before Akan noticed. By then he didn’t need his parents wishes to push him in her direction. Melyt, sensible girl that she was, hadn’t quite made up her mind about the matter yet, but she was perfectly willing to discuss it. Akan found her underneath a trailing willow on a bluff overlooking the river.

“You’re late,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I was delayed at home.”

He sat down on the blanket Melyt had spread out there. She’d brought a willow basket for a picnic, and she began to unpack the food. “I’m sorry about your father’s illness, Akan. He’s a good man.”

Akan sighed. “I just wish there was something I could do. There are . . . other problems between my mother and father now. I hate to see them like this.”

Melyt handed him a meat pie and a bit of bread. “Have you consulted the Temple?”

Akan frowned. “What could they do? The only Temple Dreamers I know of are in Ly Ossia, and I’d need them for a proper oracle. Assuming I could make the journey and raise the gold I’d need for their fee, my father would be dead before I returned. I don’t think he has very long.”

“Then what about an improper oracle?” she asked. Akan just stared at her, and she went on, “Whenever I have a problem, I fast and then pray at the Temple. It soothes me. Sometimes I sleep on the Temple grounds, and the dreams are always useful, or at least strengthening. Your mother is related to the High Priest; I’m surprised she hasn’t done that herself.”

Akan thought of the times her mother had disappeared for long periods in the evening, and his father had said nothing of it. Akan’s imagination had played with this knowledge with rather unsettling results, but once Melyt had spoken he knew that this is precisely what his mother had done. “Perhaps she has. Nothing has changed.”

“It’s not about ‘changing,’ Akan. It’s about understanding. Try it; at least there’s no harm in that.”

Somna’s presence in the world—since the world was, in fact, Somna’s Dream—was something everyone just took for granted. Maybe it was time to see what meaning there was in that one fact. Akan considered.

“I think I will,” he said, then added, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now try not to think about it for a bit. Your attention is required elsewhere.”

Akan smiled and reached for her hand.

The next evening Akan fasted, and then made a bed under the stars near the shrine of Somna the Dreamer. He dreamed, but it was not Somna who answered his dream. The creature was like a man and was not. It was part shadow, part pain, and all hunger, and the visage was the one carved in the base of the statue of Somna and painted on the temple walls.

Gahon the Destroyer. Gahon, Prince of Nightmares.

Akan tried to run, but there was nowhere to go, no part of the dream he could run to that did not also contain Gahon’s shadow. Akan wanted to wake up, but he could not. Gahon waited, not threatening, not smiling, expressionless. He waited until Akan gave up and sat, trembling on the featureless floor of the nightstage.

“Mercy,” Akan said.

“Too rare a thing,” the demon said. “I’d like some for my own; can I get it? No. What else do you want of me, Akan Jarak’s Son?”

“Want . . . ?”

“Certainly. You must want something. But will I give it? Ah, there’s the question lying in ambush. Are you ready?”

“I don’t know. I sought an oracle dream from Somna.”

“Which you are now having, though you may be too thick to realize it. Don’t you know who I am?”

“Gahon,” Akan said. “Demon, Destroyer, the one who crouches on Somna’s breast in the form of nightmare and disturbs her dream. You shouldn’t be here . . .”

“Nonsense. You dreamed me. It’s the only way I can walk Somna’s dream in my true form. Now . . . what is there about you that seeks the image of Somna and instead finds me?” Gahon poked Akan’s ribs. His fingers were long and his fingernails like needles. “Eh? Think about it. You’ll understand.”

Akan did understand. In his heart, he had already decided what he was going to do. And Gahon clearly knew his heart. “Dreamer Forgive Me . . .”

Gahon shrugged. “She will. She’s like that. Will you forgive yourself? Another pesky question. But if you ask my advice—and you did by virtue of being here—I’d say do it.”

Akan shook his head. “It is sinful. Such evil would disturb the Dream—”

“How do you know that?” Gahon asked.

“You’re trying to trick me; it won’t work. I would cause much unhappiness to do as you suggest. And is not unhappiness poison to Somna’s Dream? Does not the burden of sorrow carried in the Dream disturb her sleep?”

Gahon grinned, showing teeth like a shark’s. “It is. It does. So tell me—how much poison is coursing through the veins of your mother and father even as we speak? How much unhappiness is there between them, and how long will it last with your mother and then you to carry it on? How much damage to the Dream you prize so much? Oh, yes. It’s spreading to you even now. Will you deny that?”

Akan shook his head. “No.”

“Just so. Lancing a boil hurts, boy. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.”

“Why would you help me? Why would the Sculptor of Lies speak truth? You seek to end the Dream!”

“I do. And why? Because Somna has spent too long in this one little world; her affection for her creation clouds her judgment. She could create much grander places than this. She could even forgo the Divine Sleep for a bit and spare a moment and a smile for one who loves her.”

Akan just stared. “You?”

Gahon smiled again. “I am what I am, and you simple manifestations of Somna’s will don’t know the smallest part of it. I want Somna to wake, yes. But I want the shock to be brief, the hurt fleeting. I would not chisel away at the dream piece by wretched piece, given a choice. We all serve Somna in our own way, Akan. We all sacrifice for what we want. You speak of poisons and unhappiness, but do you really know what it is to be happy?”

Akan shook his head, slowly. “No.”

“Then I’ll tell you.” Gahon leaned close. “Sometimes,” he said, “it’s merely knowing what you can bear and what you cannot bear and living your life tailored to that understanding. You have to decide what you will do. The Dream continues or it does not. So do I, and as I plot and scheme I weigh Somna’s pain in the balance with my own, always.”

Akan sobbed. “What must I do?”

“What you already know to do. The only thing left is that you decide to act. Or not. Time is running out, either way.”

Gahon the Destroyer held up a nearly-empty hourglass in his hands, and just when the last grains fell Akan awoke, cold and alone, by the statue of Somna the Dreamer.

The following afternoon, Akan found Letis his mother, knife in hand, standing under the willow tree by the river. She stared at the knife she held in disgust. She did not hear Akan approach until he spoke.

“Mother, if it is your will, I will hold the knife.”

She looked at him. Akan was prepared for anything he saw there: rage, pain, contempt. He was not prepared for the love, the pure mad joy he saw in her eyes. “You love me as much as that?”

Akan took the knife from her. “Even more.”

Two months later, Letis came home to the House of Skulls. She was a masterpiece, as Jarak had promised, easily outshining all who had gone before. Even Laersa. Jarak took to his bed soon after; his own Homecoming followed quickly.

No one called what Akan had done murder, once Jarak had spoken for him, but understanding only went so far. Akan did not marry Melyt; that was impossible now. In time she married a fine young man from Tolbas and everyone thought that best, and Akan agreed. It was just one regret that he had to bear. Another was that he was not allowed to take his father’s place as carver for Trepa, with only one exception—when Jarak died, Akan was the one who prepared the skull for Homecoming. It was Jarak’s last request. The skull Akan did was fine work, his best up to that point. Not so fine as Jarak’s, but still showing promise for what might have been.

Afterwards Akan’s freedom was given over to the Temple, and he was shackled with silver chains. Every morning till the day he died, Akan was led to the House of Skulls, there to watch the Homecomings in silence and then to tell his tale of vanity and selfish pride to any visitor who cared to listen.

Akan did not think of it as punishment; rather, he saw it as just another step in helping to secure his father’s promise. He told the story with great feeling, and, with the skill of long practice, the tale became a wonder in itself and spread far and wide like some ancient legend that everyone knew. Akan never wearied of the telling, and every day he looked up at the remembered faces of his parents with great pride and love.

There were dark hours, of course. There always are. Yet even when such times forced Akan to place all his regrets in the scale against his one great joy, for him the balance remained true.

© 2007 by Richard Parks.

Originally published in Weird Tales.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Richard Parks’ work has appeared in Asimov’s SF, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and several Year’s Best anthologies, and has been nominated for both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature. His fourth story collection, Yamada Monogatari: Demon Hunter, was published in February. He blogs at “Den of Ego and Iniquity Annex #3,” also known as: richard-parks.com.

Always, They Whisper
Damien Walters Grintalis

She was not a monster, nor did Perseus cut off her head. The whole Athena and shield bit? Bullshit. Perseus was a self-absorbed fool who barely had the strength to lift a sword over his shoulder, let alone swing it hard enough to sever sinew and bone.

As far as the rest of her story, the snakes and stone might be true, but not in the way you think. It’s always easy to paint a villain; harder to scrape below the gilt to find the real.

Medi pushes away from her desk, rubbing her eyes. Translating ancient Greek is usually a piece of cake, but, for this project, she’s working off photographs, not the actual documents themselves, and the faded text is nearly illegible.

She knows she should keep working, but she’d rather drink wine and watch a movie. She’ll deal with the rest of the translation later.

In the kitchen, her mouth twists. Her last bottle of wine is almost empty. It’s not necessary, but wants never are. She checks the mirror. There aren’t quite enough wrinkles for her liking, but they should be enough.

When she unwraps the heavy towel from her head, the serpents whisper. She does her best to ignore them and puts on an ugly floral scarf and her sunglasses. Never mind that the sky is a shade of dusky purple.

Outside, she steps into the sound of bass-heavy music pumping from a car speaker and the stink of exhaust. She hates it all—the noise, the desperation—but the thought of living in a place where she can’t be just another anonymous body is terrifying.

Especially for her.

Although the sidewalks are nearly deserted, she keeps her gaze down and her steps brisk. The autumn air is cool against her cheeks. Despite the wrinkles and sunglasses, her heart races the entire way.

The man at the liquor store takes her money without a word. He gave up trying to engage her in conversation a long time ago.

On her way back to her apartment, the screech of tires fills the air. A door opens and closes behind her. Then she hears the steady thump of shoes on pavement. She glances over her shoulder, and when she turns back, a man is standing close. Too close. She tries to dodge out of the way, hits his arm instead, and stumbles. He grabs for her, her sunglasses tilt, and she doesn’t look away fast enough. Keeping her guard up is hard, even after all her years of practice.

But he isn’t looking at her face, her eyes. Relief flows through her body. She nudges her glasses back into their proper position and says, “Thank you.”

“No problem. Be careful, okay?” he says in a solicitous manner.

Her heart is still pounding heavy in her chest when she slams and locks her front door. Half a glass of wine downed in two gulps eases it somewhat. She feels the weight of the serpents hidden inside the spiral curls of her hair. She muffles their words with a towel again.

No mortal can understand what they say. Athena granted that mercy at least.

How many times do you have to hear something before you believe it to be true?

Not nearly as many as you think.

Every Sunday morning, Medi wakes early, regardless of how late she stayed up the night before. She wraps a towel around her head and prays, but not to the gods and goddesses of her youth. They were never friends. Never a comfort.

She prays for forgiveness, for compassion, for safety. She suspects she would’ve had an answer by now if anyone was listening.

Then she takes a glass vial from atop her chest of drawers. The liquid inside shimmers a pale pink. When she removes the stopper, the room fills with the smell of gardenias, but it’s a lie. The elixir tastes like rotten fruit and spoiled meat.

Fitting, she thinks.

There are only a few drops left in this bottle, but she only needs one and the results last for a week, give or take a few days.

The elixir is cool on her tongue. For a long moment, there is nothing but the sound of her breathing and the muted whispers from beneath the towel. Then a slow pain burns beneath her skin, rippling out like a sheet shaken over a bed. The first time, she writhed on the floor until it was finished, but she’s used to it now. Pain is part of being a woman.

When the hurt subsides and her fists unclench, she checks the mirror in the bathroom and nods at her reflection. An ugly woman stares back. A woman not worth anyone’s time.

Or anyone’s attention.

They have names for women like her, or maybe she’s the reason for the names. Everyone needs a scapegoat.

In the old days, there was a ritual called the pharmakos. In times of drought or other hardship, a slave or an animal was driven from the city in the hope that casting out the scapegoat would also cast out the hardship.

They never formally pushed her out. They didn’t have to. The words and whispers did it for them. And even though the serpents were hissing their poison, even though she fought tears the entire way, she held her head up high as she left.

There was no such shame for Poseidon.

The edge of the sky is just beginning to lighten when she finishes up the last line of translation. She sends it via email, and sits back in her chair with her hands clasped behind her head. The serpents coil around her fingers. She shakes them free and puts on her scarf and sunglasses. Her clothing is already shapeless, but she grabs a cane to complete the look.

One walk around the block to clear her head and get her blood flowing is all she needs before breakfast and bed. She doesn’t normally pull all-nighters, but this was a rush job. Nothing ancient this time, just a bit of modern Greek in a legal document for a writer and her literary agent. A fairly easy, well-paying assignment.

The streets are still awash in shadow. Her cane thumps against the pavement. She doesn’t hunch over or force her feet into a slow and halting rhythm; there’s no one around to see. She drops a few dollars into a homeless man’s cup. He’s snoring loudly, oblivious to her presence, and she hopes he wakes before someone else steals the money.

As she withdraws her hand, she sees smooth skin and frowns. She pats her cheek. Her frown turns into a gaping hole of shock. No, it isn’t possible. It’s only been two days.

At her feet, the man shifts. Mumbles. She turns and runs the rest of the way home. Inside, she drops the cane, rips the sunglasses and scarf free, tosses them onto the floor, and races into her bathroom. The bright lights reveal an absence of wrinkles. In their place, smooth skin, a firm jawline. A young woman’s face, although she’s anything but. The part in the old stories about her mortality?

Wrong.

They also like to portray her as a hag or a monster. She’s never been either one naturally, and if she were, would so many have tried to claim and conquer her?

She grips the edge of the porcelain. Stares down at the white as she fights the tears. The serpents twitch awake, then settle back to sleep without a sound. She’s grateful; she doesn’t need their input right now. Her breath comes fast and her fingers tremble.

Maybe the last few drops spoiled somehow. A logical, legitimate reason. She’ll toss out the remaining elixir and make a new batch.

From the tiny herb garden in her kitchen, she snips two amaratho leaves, for courage and longevity, tugs a few anithos seeds free, for protection, and slices off a bit of daphni, for purification. She grinds them together with a mortar and pestle until her wrist aches, switches hands, and keeps working until the mixture is fine.

Using a small funnel, she pours the powder into the vial, and adds purified water infused with lygos. A poetic bit of irony; in days of old, it was used to calm sexual appetites. Finally, she adds three drops of an oil nicknamed Tears of the Lonely.

She pours the elixir into a vial and shakes it until everything blends. It took her years to get the mixture just right, but now she could make it in her sleep.

It needs to sit for twenty-four hours before she can take it. Luckily, she doesn’t have anywhere to go and her apartment walls are safe. Inside, she doesn’t need her disguise.

She doesn’t bother with a towel on her head. She doesn’t pray. Just drops the elixir on her tongue. She welcomes the pain that rushes in, just as she welcomes the hag in the mirror when it’s done.

She breathes heavily, relieved enough to ignore the serpents and the words they whisper.

But the next morning, the hag is gone. The woman in the bathroom is young. Beautiful. A face she knows. A face she hates.

She stands in front of the bathroom mirror, one hand on her cheek, unable to move, unable to think. It’s not possible.

A serpent slips free from the towel. Breathes on her cheeks. Whispers.

Your fault.

The spell breaks and she backs away from the mirror with her hands covering her ears.

“Stop it, stop it, stop it.”

Of course it was her fault. She must not have used enough. She shoves the serpent back beneath the towel and races into her bedroom. Another drop of elixir. Another welcome bite of pain. Another mask of age spots and wrinkles.

Beneath the towel, the serpents stir.

Once again, the hag is gone come morning.

Perseus came to her the week before she left. He reached for her cheek and said nothing when she pulled away. Then he offered marriage. She laughed, thinking it a joke.

It wasn’t.

Never mind that he had a half-dozen other women fawning all over him, including Athena. Any one of them would’ve jumped at the chance to be his wife. He was good looking—Medi had to give him that—but he knew it and never let anyone forget it.

The hesitant smile on his face vanished. His jaw clenched. She tried to explain the why, but he wasn’t interested and with each word from her lips, his anger grew. No, it was more than anger. It was rage. And his parting words?

“As if anyone else would ever want you now.”

Medi’s hand shakes as she removes the stopper from the vial, but after the drop touches her tongue, there is no pain. No change. She bites back a sob.

In the kitchen, she checks all the plants. No signs of rot or infestation of any kind. The water infusion smells fine, as does the oil. Tears slip from her eyes as she makes another batch. She knows she didn’t make any mistakes before. She knows it as sure as she knows her own name.

Still, she grinds the herbs until her fingers are numb from the effort.

Twenty-four hours later, Medi perches on the edge of her sofa, the vial on the coffee table. The museum sent an email, requesting that she come in to look at some recently discovered documents. She asked for photographs, but they were beyond illegible.

She picks up the vial. If she wants this assignment, she’ll have to go, and she needs the money. She pulls the stopper free.

“Please work. Please, please work.”

One drop on her tongue.

Nothing happens.

Another drop.

Still nothing.

She drains the contents. Pain rips through her belly, but she doesn’t feel her skin change and when she holds out one hand, the flesh is still smooth.

“No, no, no!”

She hurls the vial across the room. Shards of glass rain down on the floor when it shatters against the wall. She shrieks into her palms.

She can’t go to the museum. She can’t go anywhere at all.

She gets up, wipes the tears from her cheeks with angry swipes of the back of her hand, and stalks into the kitchen. Pulls out the herbs, the water, the oil. Grinds and pours and mixes and waits.

It doesn’t work.

She buries her face in a pillow so the neighbors won’t hear her cries.

As she crawled away from Poseidon, with tears on her face, blood on her thighs, and bruises on her arms, she saw Athena standing near the temple entrance, her arms crossed over her chest. Medi whispered and to this day she cannot remember what she said. “Help,” or perhaps she simply said Athena’s name.

But she will never forget the words that spilled from Athena’s mouth. Never. The serpents remind her every single day.

She ignores the museum’s emails. Their phone calls. She paces; the serpents slip and slither through her curls. She feels their breath on her cheeks; knows the whispers aren’t far behind.

(Would that Athena had cursed her with the true face of a hag instead of this, but that would have been a kindness. And that wasn’t Athena’s style.)

She takes a deep breath. And another. Everything will be fine. It will. She won’t panic. She grabs her sunglasses and stands at the door for a long time. How long has it been since she went out into the world with her real face exposed on purpose? Years—many, many years.

I can do this, she thinks.

She has to. A quick trip to the shop for fresh herbs and oil. Maybe she can experiment with the mixture a bit. After so many years, perhaps she's built up a tolerance and now she needs to add something else.

She puts her hand on the doorknob. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Takes her hand away. Maybe she shouldn’t go out. Does she really have to go? But if not, then what?

Maybe she should order what she needs online and pay for overnight shipping; then she won’t—

Stop it!

“I can do this,” she whispers, tugging her scarf tighter.

Between the scarf, the sunglasses, the shapeless clothes, it has to be safe. The shop is only a few blocks away. Her heart races as she steps outside.

At the end of the street, she passes a group of men. They’re speaking loudly. Laughing. She doesn’t like the edge of their laughter. It’s hard. Like a fist, like the words bitch and cunt. Her back goes straight, her mouth dry.

The serpents stir. She takes a deep breath. Walks past with eyes down. Don’t look at me, don’t look at me, she thinks, but she feels their gazes crawling all over her back as if she were wearing nothing more than stiletto heels and a smile.

But they don’t follow. They don’t say a word. She turns the corner. Passes a woman in a business suit who gives her a quick nod. Another woman, younger, this one busy with her cell phone. Then a man emerges from a doorway, but he passes by without looking as well. She allows herself a small smile. Not much farther now.

She turns the last corner and runs into someone. A man. Hard enough to send her sunglasses flying to the ground. She drops her eyes, but it’s too late. His eyes are wide. Dark. Fixed on hers for only a second, but it’s a second too long and he’s smitten. Yes, the first part of the curse happens that fast. Her heart races madness. He reaches for her arm; she pulls away.

“Hi,” he says with a smile.

She says nothing. Takes a step back, pulling her arm away, and bends down, her fingers scrabbling on the pavement for her glasses. He bends down, too. His hands reach the glasses first.

“Here, let me help,” he says.

She shakes her head. Steps to the side. He does the same.

“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

She steps again. As does he. Can’t he see the frumpy dress? The heavy-soled shoes, for the gods’ sake? (But of course, it’s too late for the camouflage. He saw her face. He looked into her eyes.)

“Please, let me pass,” she says.

“Why don’t you stay and we can talk for a while?”

She shakes her head again.

“So what, you won’t talk to me?”

She takes a step back, away from the edge in his voice.

He steps forward. Grabs her arm, his fingers digging in hard.

“Why do you have to act that way?” he says. “I just want to talk to you.”

She looks up. It doesn’t matter now anyway. She sees the stone set of his eyes—the second part of the curse. All the breath rushes from her lungs. The serpents shiver.

“Please leave me alone.”

“Please leave me alone,” he repeats in a sing-song voice.

She turns. Breaks into a run. Hears a name (one of those names) carried on the breeze, and quickens her step before it can echo in her ears.

The serpents wake. See what happens? they say. See what you make happen?

“Stop it,” she whispers. “Please.”

Your fault.

She locks her apartment door behind her and covers her ears, but still, the serpents whisper sharp-barbed reminders she doesn’t need; she knows all too well where the blame falls. Where it’s always fallen.

All your fault. You shouldn’t have smiled at Poseidon. You shouldn’t have been there.

She curls up in a ball on the floor, praying the serpents will fall to silence, but of course they don’t.

Poseidon said he wanted to talk. He lied.

“It’s not my fault you’re so beautiful,” he said.

But what about when she begged him to stop? When he pressed his hand over her mouth to hold in her screams? When he ripped open her tunic?

After, she went into seclusion. It was for the best. A few months later, when she braved the world again, her eyes, her face, safely hidden behind a veil, she heard the first whispers.

Serpentine and human both.

The intercom buzzes. A moment later, a gruff voice says, “Delivery.”

“Leave it at the door,” Medi calls out.

When the footsteps retreat, she brings the box inside and slices open the tape. The serpents press against her scalp as she crushes and grinds and blends, holding tight to hope.

She sits on the floor in the corner of her kitchen, amid a scatter of leaves and berries and drops of oil. Nothing has worked. Nothing. She rests her face in her hands, her shoulders slumped.

The curse has won. They have won.

Silent tears slip between her fingers. Doesn’t she deserve peace after all this time? Hasn’t she paid enough for Poseidon’s lust?

One serpent curls around her ear. Your fault, it whispers softly.

But why? What has she ever done but exist?

She rocks back and forth while the serpents whisper again and again. The towel can only muffle so much.

Once upon a time, she was a young girl, a priestess in Athena’s temple who wanted nothing more than to wake each morning with the sun, to assist with the rituals, to drink from the sacred spring.

Medi tosses and turns beneath the sheets. In the darkness, she remembers the weight of an unwanted body against hers, a mouth pressed hard against lips fighting to scream, wrists straining beneath the iron grip of a hand as the ugliness, the guilt, spilled out of him and into her, marking her as sure as a brand.

Pariah. Anathema.

She chokes back a moan, pushing hard on the scarf wrapped tightly around her head, but even so, she can hear the serpents’ reminder of the how and the why. She sits up, gasping for air, drowning in waves so high, so violent, she’s sure they’ll pull her under.

On trembling legs, she staggers into the bathroom and stares at her reflection, her eyes filled with hate. She opens the medicine cabinet and there on the shelf, a straight razor waits.

Will this make them happy?

She grips the handle tight, the blade glimmering in the overhead light, and touches it to the delicate skin of her wrist. The blue veins beneath her flesh point the way like tiny lines on a map leading to an exit ramp.

A serpent slips from beneath the scarf. Coils. Uncoils. Its tongue flickers cool against her temple.

Your fault, it whispers.

She presses the blade. A tiny wound opens. A single pearl of red runs free.

Your fault.

This is the only way to make them stop, isn’t it? She watches the red run across the pale of her skin, drop to the sink, and slide down the porcelain into the waiting mouth of the drain.

Her lip curls. Hasn’t she bled enough? Hasn’t she given up enough? She rips the scarf from her head, grabs a serpent, and forces its maw open. It hisses and writhes in her fist.

Your fault.

“Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

She cuts out the serpent’s tongue. The pain is like a fire raging unchecked beneath her scalp, a thousand brutal words slamming against her skin. The blade slips from her hands, and she covers her mouth to hold in the scream.

The tongue sits in the basin, dark against the white. Like an exclamation point. Like an accusation.

She takes her hands away. Shrieks. Grabs another serpent. Grabs the blade.

“Not my fault.”

Another tongue falls. She reaches for another serpent.

“Not my fault.”

Again, the blade. Again, the pain.

“It was never my fault.”

One by one, the tongues fall, and when the last is gone, she drops the razor on the floor. The serpents are writhing, their hateful words now the sibilance of rage, of warning, of something else she cannot define, though it feels right and sure.

The pain slowly fades to a dull ache. Perhaps it will remain, perhaps time will turn it to memory, but it doesn’t matter. She stands tall. Smiles. Brushes her hair away from her face. Her eyes are full of tears—a sign of the pain or of triumph or perhaps a little of both. Her skin is still smooth; her face still a maiden’s. If the visage captures a man’s fancy, if it turns his heart to stone, so be it. She will not apologize for who, for what, she is anymore. It’s time to reveal the truth and rewrite the story, her story, the way it was meant to be written all along.

Once upon a time, she wasn’t the villain.

© 2013 by Damien Walters Grintalis.

Damien Walters Grintalis' short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Shimmer, and others. Her debut novel, Ink, was released in December 2012. She is also an Associate Editor of the Hugo Award-winning magazine Electric Velocipede and a staff writer with BooklifeNow. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two rescued pit bulls, but you can find her online at damienwaltersgrintalis.com or follow her on Twitter @dwgrintalis.

The Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue
Holly Black

There is a werewolf girl in the city. She sits by the phone on a Saturday night, waiting for it to ring. She paints her nails purple.

She goes to bed early. Body curled around a pillow, fingers clawing at the bedspread, she dreams that she’s on a dating show, a reality television one. She’s supposed to pick one boyfriend out of a dozen strangers by eliminating one candidate each week. After eliminations, she eats the guys she’s asked to leave. In her dream, the boys get more and more afraid as they overhear screams, but they can’t quite believe the show is letting them be murdered one by one, so they convince each other to stay until the end. In the reunion episode, the werewolf girl eats the boy who she’s picked to be her boyfriend.

That’s the only way to get to do a second season, after all.

When she wakes up, she’s sorry about the dream. It makes her feel guilty and a little bit hungry, which makes her feel worse. Her real-life boyfriend is a good guy, the son of a dentist from an ancestral line of dentists. Sometimes, he takes her to his dad’s office and they sit in the chairs and suck on nitrous while watching the overhead televisions that are supposed to distract patients. When they do that, the werewolf girl feels calmer than she’s felt her whole life.

She’s calling herself Nadia in this city. She’s called herself Laura and Liana and Dana in other places.

Despite going to bed early, she’s woken up tired.

Nadia takes her temperature and jots it down in a little notebook by the side of the bed. Temperature is more accurate than phases of the moon in telling her when she’s going to change.

She gets dressed, makes coffee, and drinks it. Then goes to work. She is a waitress on a street where there are shirt shops and shops that sell used records and bandanas and studded belts. She brings out tuna salads to aged punks and cappuccinos in massive bowls to tourists who ask her why she doesn’t have any tattoos.

Nadia still looks young enough that her lack of references doesn’t seem strange to her employers, although she worries about the future. For now, though, she appears to be one of a certain type of girl—a girl that wants to be an actress, who’s come in from the suburbs and never really worked before, a girl restaurants in the city employ a lot of. She always asks about flexibility in her interviews, citing auditions and rehearsals. Nadia is glad of the easy excuses, since she does actually need a flexible schedule.

The only problem with her lie is that the other girls ask her to go to auditions.

Sometimes Nadia goes, especially when she’s lonely. Her boyfriend is busy learning about teeth and gets annoyed when she calls him. He has a lot of classes. The auditions are often dull, but she likes the part where all the girls stand in line and drink coffee while they wait. She likes the way their skin shimmers with nervous sweat and their eyes shine with the possibility of transformation. The right part will let them leave their dirty little lives behind and turn them into celebrities.

Nadia sits next to another waitress, Rhonda, as they wait to be called back for the second phase of the audition for a musical. Rhonda is fingering a cigarette that she doesn’t light—because smoking is not allowed in the building and also because she’s trying to quit.

Grace, a willowy girl who can never remember anyone’s order at work, has already been cut.

“I hate it when people stop doing things and then they don’t want to be around other people doing them,” Rhonda says, flipping the cigarette over and over in her fingers. “Like people who stop drinking and then can’t hang out in bars. I mean, how can you really know you’re over something if you can’t deal with being tempted by it?”

Nadia nods automatically, since it makes her feel better to think that letting herself be tempted is a virtue. Sometimes she thinks of the way a ribcage cracks or the way fat and sinew and offal taste when they’re gulped down together hot and raw. It doesn’t bother her that she has these thoughts, except when they come at inappropriate moments, like being alone with the driver in a taxi or helping a friend clean up after a party.

A large woman with many necklaces calls Rhonda’s name and she goes out onto the stage. Nadia takes another sip of her coffee and looks over at the sea of other girls on the call-back list. The girls look back at her through narrowed eyes.

Rhonda comes back quickly. “You’re next,” she says to Nadia. “I saw the clipboard.”

“How was it?”

Rhonda shakes her head and lights her cigarette. “Stupid. They wanted me to jump around. They didn’t even care if I could sing.”

“You can’t smoke in here,” one of the other girls says.

“Oh, shove it,” says Rhonda.

When Nadia goes out onto the stage, she expects her audition to go fast. She reads monologues in a way that can only be called stilted. She’s never had a voice coach. The only actual acting she ever does is when she pretends to be disappointed when the casting people don’t want her. Usually she just holds the duffel bags of the other girls as they are winnowed down, cut by cut.

The stage is lit so that she can’t see the three people sitting in the audience too well. It’s one of those converted warehouse theaters where everyone sits at tables with tea lights and gets up a lot to go to the bar in the back. No tea lights are flickering now.

“We want to teach you a routine,” one of them says. A man’s voice, with an accent she can’t place. “But first—a little about our musical. It’s called the Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue. Have you heard of it?”

Nadia shakes her head. On the audition call, it was abbreviated ATSCR. “Are you Mr. Aarne?”

He makes a small sound of disappointment. “We like to think of it as a kitchen sink of delights. Animal Tales. Tales of Magic. Jokes. Everything you could imagine. Perhaps the title is a bit dry, but our poster more than makes up for that. You ready to learn a dance?”

“Yes,” says Nadia.

The woman with the necklaces comes out on the stage. She shows Nadia some simple steps and then points to crossed strips of black masking tape on the floor.

“You jump from here to here at the end,” the woman says.

“Ready?” calls the man. One of the other people sitting with him says something under his breath.

Nadia nods, going over the steps in her head. When he gives her the signal, she twists and steps and leaps. She mostly remembers the moves. At the end, she leaps though the air for the final jump. Her muscles sing.

In that moment, she wishes she wasn’t a fake. She wishes that she was a dancer. Or an actress. Or even a waitress. But she’s a werewolf and that means she can’t really be any of those other things.

“Thank you,” another man says. He sounds a little odd, as though he’s just woken up. Maybe they have to watch so many auditions that they take turns napping through them. “We’ll let you know.”

Nadia walks back to Rhonda, feeling flushed. “I didn’t think this was a call for dancers.”

Rhonda rolls her eyes. “It’s for a musical. You have to dance in a musical.”

“I know,” says Nadia, because she does know. But there’s supposed to be singing in musicals too. She thought Rhonda would be annoyed at only being asked to dance; Rhonda usually likes to complain about auditions. Nadia looks down at her purple nail polish. It’s starting to chip at the edges.

She puts the nail in her mouth and bites it until she bleeds.

Being a werewolf is like being Clark Kent, except that when you go into the phone booth, you can’t control what comes out.

Being a werewolf is like being a detective who has to investigate his own crimes.

Being a werewolf means that when you take off your clothes, you’re still not really naked. You have to take off your skin too.

Once, when Nadia had a different name and lived in a small town outside of Toronto, she’d been a different girl. She took ballet and jazz dancing. She had a little brother who was always reading her diary. Then one day on her way home from school, a man asked her to help him find his dog. He had a leash and a van and everything.

He ate part of her leg and stomach before anyone found them.

When she woke up in the hospital, she remembered the way he’d caught her with his snout pinning her neck, the weight of his paws. She looked down at her unscarred skin and stretched her arms, ripping the IV needle out without meaning to.

She left home after she tried to turn her three best friends into werewolves too. It didn’t work. They screamed and bled. One of them died.

“Nadia,” Rhonda is saying.

Nadia shakes off all her thoughts like a wet dog shaking itself dry.

The casting director is motioning to her. “We’d like to see you again,” the woman with the necklaces says.

“Her?” Rhonda asks.

When Nadia goes back on stage, they tell her she has the part.

“Oh,” says Nadia. She’s too stunned to do more than take the packet of information on rehearsal times and tax forms. She forgets to ask them which part she got.

That night Rhonda and Grace insist on celebrating. They get a bottle of cheap champagne and drink it in the back of the restaurant with the cook and two of the dishwashers. Everyone congratulates Nadia and Rhonda keeps telling stories about clueless things that Nadia did on other auditions and how it’s a good thing that the casting people only wanted Nadia to dance because she can’t act her way out of a paper bag.

Nadia says that no one can act their way out of a paper bag. You can only rip your way out of one. That makes everyone laugh and—Rhonda says—is a perfect example of how clueless Nadia can be.

“You must have done really well in that final jump,” Rhonda says. “Were you a gymnast or something? How close did you get?”

“Close to what?” Nadia asks.

Rhonda laughs and takes another swig out of the champagne bottle. “Well, you couldn’t have made it. No human being could jump that far without a pole vault.”

Nadia’s skin itches.

Later, her boyfriend comes over. She’s still tipsy when she lets him in and they lie in bed together. For hours he tells her about teeth. Molars. Bicuspids. Dentures. Prosthodontics. She falls asleep to the sound of him grinding his jaw, like he’s chewing through the night.

Rehearsals for the Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue happen every other afternoon. The director’s name is Yves. He wears dapper suits in brown tweed and tells her, “You choose what you reveal of what you are when you’re on stage.”

Nadia doesn’t know what that means. She does know that when she soars through the air, she wants to go higher and further and faster. She wants her muscles to burn. She knows she could, for a moment, do something spectacular. Something that makes her shake with terror. She thinks of her boyfriend and Rhonda and the feel of the nitrous filling her with drowsy nothingness; she does the jump they tell her and no more than that.

The other actors aren’t what she expects. There is a woman who plays a mermaid whose voice is like spun gold. There is a horned boy who puts on long goat legs and prances around the stage, towering above them. And there is a magician who is supposed to keep them all as part of his menagerie in cages with glittering numbers.

“Where are you from?” the mermaid asks. “You look familiar.”

“People say that a lot,” Nadia says, although no one has ever said it to her. “I guess I have that kind of face.”

The mermaid smiles and smoothes back gleaming black braids. “If you want, you can use my comb. It works on even the most matted fur—”

“Wow,” says the goat boy, lurching past. “You must be special. She never lets anyone use her comb.”

“Because you groom your ass with it,” she calls after him.

The choreographer is named Marie. She is the woman with the necklaces from the first audition. When Nadia dances and especially when she jumps, Marie watches her with eyes like chips of gravel. “Good,” she says slowly, as though the word is a grave insult.

Nadia is supposed to play a princess who has been trapped in a forest of ice by four skillful brothers and a jaybird. The magician rescues her and brings her to his menagerie. And, because the princess is not on stage much during the first act, Nadia also plays a bear dancing on two legs. The magician falls in love with the bear and the princess falls in love with the magician. Later in the play, the princess tricks the magician into killing the bear by making it look like the bear ate the jaybird. Then Nadia has to play the bear as she dies.

At first, all Nadia’s mistakes are foolish. She lets her face go slack when she’s not the one speaking or dancing and the director has to remind her over and over again that the audience can always see her when she’s on stage. She misses cues. She sings too softly when she’s singing about fish and streams and heavy fur. She sings louder when she’s singing of kingdoms and crowns and dresses, but she can’t seem to remember the words.

“I’m not really an actress,” she tells him, after a particularly disastrous scene.

“I’m not really a director,” Yves says with a shrug. “Who really is what they seem?”

“No,” she says. “You don’t understand. I just came to the audition because my friends were going. And they really aren’t my friends. They’re just people I work with. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Okay, if you’re not an actress,” he asks her, “then what are you?”

She doesn’t answer. Yves signals for one of the golden glitter-covered cages to be moved slightly to the left.

“I probably won’t even stay with the show,” Nadia says. “I’ll probably have to leave after opening night. I can’t be trusted.”

Yves throws up his hands. “Actors! Which of you can be trusted? But don’t worry. We’ll all be leaving. This show tours.”

Nadia expects him to cut her from the cast after every rehearsal, but he never does. She nearly cries with relief.

The goat boy smiles down at her from atop his goat legs. “I have a handkerchief. I’ll throw it to you if you want.”

“I’m fine,” Nadia says, rubbing her wet eyes.

“Lots of people weep after rehearsals.”

“Weird people,” she says, trying to make it a joke.

“If you don’t cry, how can you make anyone else cry? Theater is the last place where fools and the mad do better than regular folks . . . well, I guess music’s a little like that too.” He shrugs. “But still.”

Posters go up all over town. They show the magician in front of gleaming cages with bears and mermaids and foxes and a cat in a dress.

Nadia’s boyfriend doesn’t like all the time she spends away from home. Now, on Saturday nights, she doesn’t wait by the phone. She pushes her milk crate coffee table and salvaged sofa against the wall and practices her steps over and over until her downstairs neighbor bangs on his ceiling.

One night her boyfriend calls and she doesn’t pick up. She just lets it ring.

She has just realized that the date the musical premieres is the next time she is going to change. All she can do is stare at the little black book and her carefully noted temperatures. The ringing phone is like the ringing in her head.

I am so tired I want to die, Nadia thinks. Sometimes the thought repeats over and over and she can’t stop thinking it, even though she knows she has no reason to be so tired. She gets enough sleep. She gets more than enough sleep. Some days, she can barely drag herself from her bed.

Fighting the change only makes it more painful; she knows from experience.

The change cannot be stopped or reasoned with. It’s inevitable. Inexorable. It is coming for her. But it can be delayed. Once, she held on two hours past dusk, her whole body knotted with cramps. Once, she held out until the moon was high in the sky and her teeth were clenched so tight she thought they would shatter. She might be able to make it to the end of the show.

It shouldn’t matter to her. Disappointing people is inevitable. She will eventually get tired and angry and hungry. Someone will get hurt. Her boyfriend will run the pad of his fingers over her canines and she will bite down. She will wake up covered in blood and mud by the side of some road and not be sure what she’s done. Then she’ll be on the run again.

Being a werewolf means devouring your past.

Being a werewolf means swallowing your future.

Methodically, Nadia tears her notebook to tiny pieces. She throws the pieces in the toilet and flushes, but the chunks of paper clog the pipes. Water spills over the side and floods her bathroom with the soggy reminder of inevitability.

The opening night of the Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue, the cast huddle together and wish each other luck. They paint their faces. Nadia’s hand shakes as she draws a new, red mouth over her own. Her skin itches. She can feel the fur inside of her, can smell her sharp, feral musk.

“Are you okay?” the mermaid asks.

Nadia growls softly. She is holding on, but only barely.

Yves is yelling at everyone. The costumers are pinning and duct-taping dresses that have split. Straps tear. Beads bounce along the floor. One of the chorus is scolding a girl who plays a talking goat. A violinist is pleading with his instrument.

“Tonight you are not going to be good,” Marie, the choreographer, says.

Nadia grinds her teeth together. “I’m not good.”

“Good is forgettable.” Marie spits. “Good is common. You are not good. You are not common. You will show everyone what you are made of.”

Under her bear suit, Nadia can feel her arms beginning to ripple with the change. She swallows hard and concentrates on shrinking down into herself. She cannot explain to Marie that she’s afraid of what’s inside of her.

Finally, Nadia’s cue comes and she dances out into a forest of wooden trees on dollies and lets the magician trap her in a gold glitter-covered cage. Her bear costume hangs heavily on her, stinking of synthetic fur.

Performing is different with an audience. They gasp when there is a surprise. They laugh on cue. They watch her with gleaming, wet eyes. Waiting.

Her boyfriend is there, holding a bouquet of white roses. She’s so surprised to see him that her hand lifts involuntarily—as though to wave. Her fingers look too long, her nails too dark, and she hides them behind her back.

Nadia dances like a bear, like a deceitful princess, and then like a bear again. This time as the magician sings about how the jaybird will be revenged, Nadia really feels like he’s talking to her. When he lifts his gleaming wand, she shrinks back with real fear.

She loves this. She doesn’t want to give it up. She wants to travel with the show. She wants to stop going to bed early. She won’t wait by phone. She’s not a fake.

When the jump comes, she leaps as high as she can. Higher than she has at any rehearsal. Higher than in her dreams. She jumps so high that she seems to hang in the air for a moment as her skin cracks and her jaw snaps into a snout.

It happens before she can stop it and then, she doesn’t want it to stop. The change used to be the worst thing she could imagine. No more.

The bear costume sloughs off like her skin. Nadia falls into a crouch, four claws digging into the stage. She throws back her head and howls.

The goat boy nearly topples over. The magician drops his wand. On cue, the mermaid girl begins to sing. The musical goes on.

Roses slip from Nadia’s dentist-boyfriend’s fingers.

In the wings, she can see Marie clapping Yves on the back. Marie looks delighted.

There is a werewolf girl on the stage. It’s Saturday night. The crowd is on their feet. Nadia braces herself for their applause.

© 2010 by Holly Black.

Originally published in Full Moon City, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Darrell Schweitzer.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Holly Black is the author of bestselling contemporary fantasy books for kids and teens. Some of her titles include The Spiderwick Chronicles (with Tony DiTerlizzi), The Modern Faerie Tale series, The Good Neighbors graphic novel trilogy (with Ted Naifeh), and her new Curse Workers series, which includes White Cat and Red Glove. She has been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award, a finalist for an Eisner Award, and the recipient of the Andre Norton Award. She currently lives in New England with her husband, Theo, in a house with a secret door.

Leaving the Dead
Dennis Danvers

Darwin thought he might be more alive than other people. Not a whole lot, but ever increasingly, until finally, in a checkout line at Target, he was the last person left alive but his checker. Gabriella, her nametag said, and she was drifting off.

Good for her he was the sort of person who reads nametags. Good for them both.

“Gabriella!” he shouted, and she opened her eyes, blinking.

“Nobody calls me that except my mother,” she said.

He couldn’t decide whether that was good or bad. “It says on your nametag,” he said, pointing.

She took it off.

You forget you have it on, that you’re labeled like everything else in the store, as if the red outfit’s not enough. Team Member. That’s what they called you, expected you to call yourself. She used to like wearing red. She liked that her nametag said something nobody ever really called her anymore, like some other person was on the job. “My supervisor made the nametag. She can call me whatever she wants.” She said it like she might call the supervisor a thing or two, but she never would. Sweet child, her mother used to say. She scanned his items: Peppermint Patty. White socks. A Kindle, the cheapest. Seeds (flowers). He was a frail, pale little flower himself. Like a pot of grandma’s pansies.

“Is that your supervisor over there?” Darwin detected some vague sense of rank in the woman’s red garb, though the point was moot. Her hair swept up; everything else drooped. “She’s dead,” Darwin said, swiping his card, signing the screen with a plastic nub. Dotting the i felt particularly foolish, plastic kissing plastic, leaving a deep blue craggy dot. His illegible signature was approved and vanished, and he was thanked. Who did that? he wondered. It must be automatic. His credit was perfect. He paid everything off. Except for the student loan payments. They would never end.

Gaby (as everyone but Mom called her) squinted at Karin, her supervisor. The man was right. Still standing somehow on her tree-trunk legs, but dead as a mackerel. Gaby had never seen a mackerel to know one, but Mom had used the expression whenever something dead came up. Mom was her authority on death. She looked around. “Everybody’s dead.”

“That’s why I shouted at you. You were dropping off.”

She didn’t remember any shout. Barely audible in her family. One reason she never did. Shout. Whisper quiet was her motto. Her nickname was ironic. Her third grade teacher told her that. Like most of us, Gaby hadn’t changed much since third grade. “Off. You mean dead. Dropping dead.”

“Yeah, I guess. Everyone else did.”

“What’s going on?”

He was thoughtful. Darwin fell into thoughtful like some cats purr, just waiting for your touch. His favorite verb was mull. “I don’t know. It just seemed to happen gradually. You know? Everyone dying a little bit every day. It kind of crept up on me. Then I looked around . . .” He gestured at all the dead. Some had fallen facedown into their carts. Others were still reaching out for the bottom shelf. Most had dropped where they stood. Dropped phones were dropping calls everywhere. They were dead too. Personal devices without a person.

The store kept going. The AC roared. The music played. The ads, too. It was all automatic. The dead were told to expect more and pay less, then another song played. Gaby didn’t mind the songs, but the happy yappy woman who did the ads totally got on her nerves. Maybe it was mass hypnosis. The wrong chirp fracked all these people’s brains.

“Have you checked outside?” Gaby asked. She shut off the light showing she was open, stepped out of the stall. Normally, she could get in big trouble for that. Things obviously weren’t normal.

“I’m sure it’s the same out there. I was just over at Barnes & Noble, and the people weren’t much more alive than the dead writers on the wall. But we should have a look-see here first, don’t you think?”

Gaby figured the store was somehow her responsibility, now that everyone else was dead. That’s just how she was brought up. “I’ll do it,” she said, thinking maybe if she left this weird little dude and walked around the store, things might be different. He could be controlling her mind. She could be insane. This could be like the Rapture, and nobody was really dead. She could be a spy and not know it. Maybe she just killed all these people and not the chirpy PA bitch after all. She’d seen all those movies and more with her brothers. She didn’t know what movie this was, but anything was better than everybody dies. Just like that. For no reason.

Look-see. Who says look-see? That’s what she was doing up and down the aisles. Look. See: Dead. Dead. Dead. Housewares. Sporting Goods. Electronics. Women’s Apparel. Didn’t matter. Mick Jagger was singing “Wild Horses.” Still. You couldn’t stop him. Somewhere, was Mick dead now? Keith? She couldn’t remember whether they were still alive. There was a stroller parked in Family Shoes. Kid sitting in it seemed to be looking right at her. No. He was dead as a mackerel too. “Yeah. Let’s have a look-see the fuck out of this place.” She strode to the doors—not running—her mother’s voice hollering down the long hallway to the child inside, Gabriella! Don’t you dare run in this house! She burst out of that memory into daylight and stopped in her tracks.

The automatic doors whooshed closed behind her, then parted again. Darwin stood beside her. She had this weird urge to take his hand. Not a car was moving. It’s not like you had to look inside each one to make sure after seeing that. Anybody stuck in this traffic jam would be screaming if they could, laying on the horn. Something. Six lanes of traffic up and down Broad Street for as far as you could see. Stopped dead. Dead inside. You could see them. The engines had all died too. No point going on, the drivers slumped, their hands slipped from the wheel—destination nowhere. It was quiet.

Darwin didn’t own a car. Couldn’t afford it. He’d come on the bus. He could see his return bus from here, dead at the top of the hill. There was a lovely woman’s voice that told you where you were. You could hear her still singing but not quite make out the words. It was automatic. GPS, digital recordings. That sort of thing used to interest Darwin. Not so much anymore now that everyone was dead.

The traffic lights kept going through their automatic cycles. Safety first. Sure as they stopped, some of these cars would start up again, and the city would be on the hook for a major lawsuit. Darwin found the clunk of their relays reassuring. Darwin had temped in the city’s Risk Management Department for a time, known among the workers as Trip and Fall. They were nice people.

“What did you mean, this crept up on you?” Gaby demanded.

She expressed the intensity of her feelings as quietly as ever—more quietly—whispering the last, most intense part. He found himself leaning closer to listen. She fixed him with her dark eyes. However close to death she may have been, she was fiercely alive now. In her quiet way. “It wasn’t that way for you?” he asked.

She looked around. A pair of 180s. “No. This shit just happened.”

“Then we have differing perspectives,” Darwin said, like that was definitely a good thing, like it cheered him up somehow, like between the two of them they had this dead thing totally surrounded.

“Did you do this?” she asked.

“Me? Are you kidding? No. Do you think someone did it?”

“How should I know? What about the dead people? What should we do?”

Darwin was surprisingly quick with his answer. “Leave them. It won’t be very pleasant around here in a few days. We can’t possibly bury them all. My name’s Darwin. What should I call you?” He stuck out his hand.

She knew his name. It came up on her screen when he swiped his card. Darwin Berang. What kind of name was Berang? Who names their kid Darwin? “Gabriella,” Gaby said. She took his hand.

“I thought only your mother called you that.”

“My mother’s dead.” As a mackerel. She let go of his hand.

“It’s a pretty name,” he said.

She wished she could say the same about his. Grandma took her to church. They pronounced it evil-lution. Even her biology teacher in high school got nervous when Darwin’s name came up, like maybe he was a registered sex offender. Once you tell people they’re nothing but animals, especially a sweaty class of 10th graders, anything might happen, right?

Even though everybody else was dead, they still had their needs, and it wasn’t like anyone was going to stop them, and they’d both missed lunch. They walked across the street to the Olive Garden, trying not to look through the windshields at the dead. The glare hurt their eyes. Having needs was what set them apart from the dead behind the windshields, piled up at the bus stop, scattered around the parking lots. At least there weren’t any in the street. You’d have to be crazy to walk across this street.

They cooked themselves a nice meal in the Olive Garden kitchen after they dragged all the dead into the walk-in. There weren’t that many—more employees than customers. It had been slow, mid-afternoon. The Specials didn’t look very interesting. All the breadsticks were burned, the pasta gummy. There was a nice fire in the grill. They cooked steaks even though neither one of them usually ate red meat. They didn’t see the harm in an occasional indulgence. They opened a bottle of Chianti. Neither one of them usually drank. Alcohol was contraindicated for someone taking Darwin’s prescribed medications. Fortunately, he hadn’t taken them in years, and not just because he couldn’t afford them. Gaby had no prescriptions but lived with Grandma, for whom anything fun was contraindicated. They clinked their glasses together, chewing and swallowing, and felt like they were in a TV ad.

“What if they turn into zombies?” Gaby asked.

“Why would they do that?” Darwin asked, like maybe she had a theory about the life cycle of the dead. Darwin always liked to learn new things. He knew nothing of zombies, and his vampires were out of date.

She shrugged like she was just making conversation. She didn’t like zombies. It was her brothers who were into zombies, who made her watch them on TV, then hid under her bed and reached up and grabbed her, making zombie noises in the middle of the night when Mom was at work, making her scream and giggle and wet her bed, and they had to change the sheets and wash and dry them before Mom got home. She never told.

She and Darwin were watching the TV in the restaurant, making the rounds of the channels to see what they could find out about the dead. Darwin had found the remote beside the hostess. It must all be automatic, the shows and the commercials: Two and a Half Men, Jeopardy, Rick Steve’s Europe. Alex Trebek wasn’t dead, but he was making Christmas jokes in April. Finally, they found a live broadcast. Dead guy sat on a sofa, his new book on a table in front of him, while a dead woman was supposed to interview him. They were slumped together like they were in a huddle over the next question. Darwin thought he’d seen the book in a stack at B&N. The weather was next. It was blue. Everybody LIVE! was dead at CNN too. Darwin handed the remote over to Gaby and turned on his Kindle. It welcomed him. He was registered automatically. He shopped for the dead guy’s book.

Gaby found a soccer stadium full of dead people and turned off the TV. There was music playing in the dining room, some classical music you’ve heard a million times she didn’t know the name of. Darwin probably knew. He looked like the type who knew things. They hadn’t found where to turn the music off, though they hadn’t looked too hard. She thought about looking again. She wished she knew the name of this piece. She’d never know now. The first time she remembered hearing it, she was watching old cartoons. Daffy Duck. She liked Daffy because he was black. He was in Italy. He had a boat. Venice. She always wanted to go there. Was it underwater yet? Was everybody dead in Venice? Or had they already left and were dead somewhere else? That would suck. “Too bad about the breadsticks,” she said. “I really like those. Do you have anyone?”

He hesitated. He knew what she meant. He just didn’t like to admit it. It was remarkable, really. No siblings, both parents dead for some years. Largely friendless since grad school, a serial temp worker who didn’t like to drink and couldn’t afford to eat out, he didn’t have to think long on the answer, or why it was so. He secretly never took any of the medications ever prescribed for him. He developed an interest in side effects early in life. He wondered if that’s why he hadn’t died—never properly socialized, he missed the moment when we were all supposed to let go. He glanced up from the Kindle. He’d just found New Releases in Literature. He supposed literature lived on no matter what—that’s what made it Literature. Something had to, besides Amazon saying it was. He pictured the New Releases like little fishes the trout hatchery dumped into the streams every year. They didn’t live on. They said catch and release, but sooner or later, somebody ate them. Darwin would. He loved trout. Cooked any way. Except raw. He didn’t like sushi. Another reason he didn’t have any friends. “No. No one,” he said.

Her eyes were bright. Was that her returning life or her approaching tears or both? He didn’t know. He looked away. Every time Darwin had ever encountered a crying woman, from his mother onward, it hadn’t turned out well. She didn’t want him getting involved. He wouldn’t know what to say, what to do. He would only make it worse. Sometimes, he used to look up from whatever he was doing as a kid into the glistening eyes of his parents and not know what to do. They didn’t either. They found help. Lots of it.

He found the dead man’s book, and though it didn’t look like his sort of thing—kind of weird and offbeat and twisted—he bought it anyway. Local author. Saw him on TV. Dead. He’d never seen a living author dead before. While he was in the Kindle Store, he downloaded all of Mrs. Gaskell for free, delivered automatically to his Kindle. That’s how he justified the expenditure, all the free content. It was cheaper than a new TV. “What about you?” he asked. “Do you have anyone?”

“Me neither.” Both brothers dead, Mom gone, father unknown. That left Grandma, and it was her time to go anyway, after all she’d been through. Gaby couldn’t feel too bad. The woman talked about Heaven her whole life long. Business must be booming there. Everybody seemed to be dead but her and Darwin. How weird was that?

Weirder? Nothing else was. Darwin was the first to notice. She thought he was just reading his Kindle, short stories he said. “Surreal,” he said. She wasn’t sure she remembered exactly what that meant, didn’t want to look stupid asking. Then he asked her, “Have you noticed the birds?” He shut off the Kindle, pointed out the window.

She hadn’t noticed, but once he mentioned it, she saw they were everywhere, not like thousands or anything, like in Hitchcock, but plenty, like usual she guessed. There weren’t that many trees around here, and that made it look like more. Plenty of poles, lights, wires, and signs though. Birds looked fine. So did the squirrels. Something was making a noise in the trashcan where they’d thrown out the burnt breadsticks. She bet if she went outside and looked, there would be ants crawling around on the soda cups, or maybe with all the bodies around, they’d be crawling around on them.

She saw this movie once. Ants all over everything. Everybody. Except some beautiful redhead and a big sweaty guy who was into her, somewhere in South America. After seeing that movie, Gaby and her brothers smeared her Barbie—the one with the twisted leg from the flamethrower incident—with pancake syrup and buried it in an anthill. She screamed stuff, and they laughed and laughed. That was a good time. She missed her brothers. They were twins. They had a different father than she did, but that didn’t matter. They were angels to her.

A dog walked into the dining room—where Gaby and Darwin had the nice big booth in the corner—and looked at them peculiarly. He was a big beautiful Golden. Then they noticed his harness. He was a guide dog. So somewhere out there in the parking lot was a dead blind person who’d been headed for the Olive Garden when everybody died. Somebody must’ve driven them. No way they could’ve walked here safely from the bus. Darwin wouldn’t dream of crossing Broad Street, dog or no dog. Some guy texting on his phone, steering with his knees in three lanes of traffic with a burger hanging out of his mouth doesn’t care if you’re blind. He’s got his own navigational problems.

“Here boy,” Gaby said and offered the dog a hunk of her steak. Gaby liked dogs a lot, had never lived anywhere you could have one. Especially one like this. Big as a pony. Big as a pony was like dead as a mackerel, almost. Something Mom said. Gaby had seen ponies, though, even sat on one at a school fair when she was little. Her brothers were still alive then. Ty on one side of the pony, Jay on the other. This dog wasn’t that big, but he was big enough, and he looked like he’d just had his hair done at the beauty shop like Grandma used to. A real pretty boy. She adored him.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Darwin asked when she fed the dog, but it obviously was. The dog, whose name was Elvis, according to his collar, camped out beside them, having decided they were his next blind responsibility. The last humans. Gaby petted and hugged his big head and told Darwin she had always wanted a dog. Elvis wagged his big tail and smiled.

He enjoys the petting, but pays close attention to everything going on around them. You think it’s easy leading the blind? Harder still, people who think they can see. Elvis lets them finish their meal. He’s a good boy. But they should really think about leaving. To them, there’re just dead people everywhere. To others, they’re food. Carrion. Not to Elvis. He’s horrified at the idea. But he’s a good boy. Nobody knows better than a good boy that not everybody is. You can’t screw up leading a blind guy around. Eye-level with the meat counter or a dead squirrel in the road—not your concern. There’s no room for error. He misses the blind man, but he can’t worry about that now. He wonders if the woman will give him the bone. No begging. Elvis doesn’t beg. You know why. Good boy. Yes! The bone. Good boys get the bone.

More wine. Coffee. Cheesecake. A little bit of lemon liqueur. Brandy. Darwin and Gabriella didn’t get out much. They knew they should be moving on, but who knew when they might have the chance to go to a nice restaurant again? This one wasn’t so nice when you thought about what was in the walk-in. On the other hand, they didn’t want to face what was outside either. They returned to the bar, away from the windows, so they wouldn’t have to look at all the dead people in the parking lot, and Elvis followed them. What was that liqueur in the tall skinny bottle? Darwin remembered his mother used to like that. He didn’t usually talk about his family, meaning never, but Gabriella was a good listener. Lovely name. They’d talked so much about the dead, he hadn’t found out that much about her.

Finally, Elvis stands up and barks at them. A little yip. A gentle reminder. Can’t they hear what’s going on outside? Smell it? Even a good boy has his limits, and the bone’s already gone. Puppy bones lasted days.

They decided Elvis was right, skipped the Galliano, and went out in the parking lot. This time she did take his hand. Somehow, Darwin managed to end up with his arms wrapped around her, and her face buried in his chest, which kind of forced him to take in the scene, since the top of her head was under his chin. He tried not to throw up on her head. He liked the feel of her head under his chin, though. It steadied him. He didn’t have much experience in the comforting department, so he rubbed his chin on the top of her head sort of like she’d done when she hugged Elvis’s head. It seemed to work. Darwin felt proud.

Elvis never knew there were so many bad dogs in the world. The buzzards started it, of course, but now the dogs—you know the sort—are showing up and getting into it with the buzzards and each other. Fighting over . . . You don’t need to know what they’re fighting over. Disgusting. What’s next? Coyotes? Elvis and the blind man used to live in Tucson. He was afraid to go out of the house after dark. He sits beside the man and woman and waits. This is their call.

Darwin’s nice, Gaby decided in his arms, which helped her get it together. Gaby was not one to freak out for long. She grew up with zombies under her bed. They had to figure out how they were going to leave the dead and soon, since more and more dogs and buzzards kept showing up. They needed to find some wide, open spaces without dead people—besides the parking lots that stretched for miles in either direction—but how to get there? Even if they could start a car, they couldn’t navigate around all the rest of them. They could walk, but it would be awfully far. They were still holding on to each other as they raced through all the possibilities.

Darwin suggested bikes, and Gaby liked the idea and gave him a big hug.

They went back into the Target to pick out some bikes. Turns out they’d both had their bikes stolen just when they were getting past their sore knees and butt troubles and had started to enjoy them. They wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore. The stolen part. Dead people don’t steal. They were trying to look on the bright side. Listing advantages. They were both pretty drunk.

Gaby pointed out the security cameras, all automatic, and they posed and waved and decided they were looters now—something else they had in common, besides being drunk and totally surrounded by dead people. They thought that was pretty funny, and they were both laughing by the time they picked out some extremely nice bikes from Target.

They also got some of those padded pants and gloves and baskets and panniers and food and sleeping bags and a tent and it went on and on. It was fun. They hadn’t shopped much with another person, never thought of it as recreation. Gaby saw that all the time at Target. Couples showing up and just wandering up and down seeing if they felt like buying something, like they were strolling around the park. Sometimes, they brought the thing back still in the box, but they’d still had the afternoon shopping together, like a date, and sometimes another when they made the return. That’s basically what she and Darwin were doing. She shed the red outfit and got something nice. It was easier than you might think to ignore the dead.

Gaby laughed out loud in Tents when Mick Jagger started singing “Wild Horses” again, and she had to explain why to Darwin so he wouldn’t think she was laughing at him working up a sweat trying to put the tent on the front of his bike with bungies, and he laughed too.

Then he gave her this look like she was Barbie, and he wanted to haul her out of an anthill. Not to lick the syrup off her body—that’s where her mind went—but to straighten out her twisted leg and make her forget about the ants. Gaby had soaked the Barbie’s hair in Red Hots and vodka, and the ants ate it down to the plastic. Gaby’s hair sort of looked like that, short red frizz, latest fashion mistake. Darwin didn’t even seem to mind that.

They had both seen this movie.

Gaby used to sit between her twin brothers on the sofa and watch any movie that was on, and when she didn’t understand it, they would both explain it to her, but they always told her two totally different things. They thought that was funny, and if she was them, older and two of them, she would’ve done the same thing. When she got older, they explained things they knew she understood fine just for fun, trying to outdo each other’s craziness. Ty told her Helen Keller could really see and was faking it. Jay told her Captain Kirk was insane, and the Starship Enterprise never went anywhere. She missed her brothers, though Gaby felt like there was only one way to tell this story: last man, last woman.

Darwin watched movies all day when he worked at the video store between his second degree and his third. He had a terrible crush on one of the women who worked the same shift, and she always picked out what they watched. Mostly foreign. He wasn’t sure what a lot of them meant. He would forget to read the subtitles, stealing glances at her, or he’d have to wait on a customer, but there was lots of sex in all of them. He was about to ask her to do something sometime when they weren’t working, when someone figured out he lied on his application and fired him. There was this one movie. Last man, last woman. A second guy showed up who hadn’t lied on his application.

Darwin kissed Gabriella before the other guy had a chance to show up.

Gaby was surprised how good a kisser he was. So was Darwin.

Elvis watches the automatic doors. Anything can set them off. A rabid coyote. Snakes. Bats. Squirrels. Smells. Dreams.

He waits.

Elvis followed them inside, of course. Gaby decided to take his harness off, let him decide what he wanted to do. She thought his harness was another version of her red shirt and nametag, an understandable mistake. He sat still while she took it off, but it made absolutely no difference in his behavior. Good dog goes deep.

Elvis only wears the harness when they go out somewhere. He doesn’t wear it at home with the blind man. It’s too heavy, and it rubs on his shoulder, but he doesn’t complain, because he knows it’s necessary. He can see. The man can’t. The man’s dead, and these people see, so he doesn’t need the harness anymore. He gets that. He’s not stupid. That doesn’t mean these people don’t need guidance. Elvis wonders how he ended up with the last people. Must be because he’s a good boy.

When he was a puppy, there were lots of other dogs who weren’t good enough. Some didn’t even care about being good. Even when a blind man was hanging on to them.

You had to be even better if he let go, because he might need to find you.

Had to be best of all if he wasn’t there and was counting on you to be good anyway. To wait. No matter what.

Like now.

Dead means gone, never coming back.

Good is forever, now that the blind man is gone.

Darwin and Gaby decided to spend the night in the display tent where they’d made love. They’d never done anything like that before—screw a total stranger in a display tent in the Target. It was one of the big ones, two rooms. It was fun, and they weren’t total strangers. They had just shared a profound traumatic experience together. There was a syndrome or something wasn’t there? Neither one of them could remember the name. Didn’t matter now. They were both pretty happy about it.

They were too tired and drunk, and it was getting too late anyway, to leave the dead today, but they planned to get a fresh start in the morning. Their bikes were loaded up with stuff. Darwin even had a trailer hitched up to his. They both were all serious and solemn about it out of respect for the dead, but secretly, they both thought it sounded fun to ride into the country and camp. Being in scouts had been like the bikes for both of them—cut short before they got to do the fun stuff. Darwin’s parents took him out on a matter of principle. He wasn’t sure which one. They had lots. Gaby’s mom quit taking her anywhere. After Ty and Jay died. Both understood their folks’ reasons at the time, but they weren’t their reasons.

Gaby took Elvis out front, and he crapped in the bushes. He looked at her like she should pick it up, but she thought she could let it slide under the circumstances. There was howling out there. Gaby noticed Elvis didn’t waste any time getting back inside.

She removed Karin the manager’s keys from around her neck and locked the front doors. She shut off most of the lights, but Karin didn’t have the key to turn off the PA . Maybe it was always going. Maybe even janitorial had to listen to it. They needed stuff that fit their lifestyle too. Gaby always thought she would like being a janitor, buffing the big empty store.

She told Elvis he could come sleep with them in the tent. There were two rooms. He followed her back to Sporting Goods but preferred to sleep outside at the crossroads of the aisles. She gave him a big bowl of dog food, the best they had, and a big dish of bottled water. What a day, she thought.

Inside the tent, Darwin had set up a camp table with a battery lantern, and he’d found pillows and pillowcases and chocolate bars and air freshener. She was touched. They made love some more. This time it was way better, and they fell asleep.

Darwin couldn’t sleep. Busy brains. Too much going on since everyone died. Everything’s changed. Too much to process. He decided to read. He turned on the light and started reading his Kindle. He wanted to finish the first story in the dead guy’s book, then he figured he’d switch over to Mrs. Gaskell.

Gabriella, as he lovingly called her, slumbered peacefully beside him, purring like a kitten. He could’ve gone to another cashier, and he never would’ve known her. He would be alone now. He couldn’t imagine he could’ve awakened just anybody, felt compelled to shout out her name. Gabriella was special. How could he be so lucky? What had he done to deserve this? He couldn’t think about it too much. He had a tendency to do that. One of his degrees is in philosophy.

He read.

He began to worry. The first story went on and on. He paged ahead. It never seemed to stop. He skipped to the next story, and there it was, so the first one had to end sometime. He tried to page back from the second story to where he’d been in the first, so he could see how much was left, but he finally gave up and went back to where he was and kept reading.

Maybe it would get better.

Anything to take his mind off the dead people. He wondered if you could smell them yet. The tent smelled like a new car. He thought of all the cars on Broad Street. Maybe he should’ve chosen a different air freshener. His student loan payments were automatic. He didn’t want to think about it.

In the story, someone named Norwood wants to die because everyone lives forever, and he’s tired of it, so he joins a Suicide Club where everyone wants to die, and they talk about it a lot in a way Darwin doesn’t find particularly interesting, but even when they try to kill themselves, they come back to life like everyone else, so Norwood decides to go back to school to study paleontology because that’s old dead things, and he talks a lot about that, what it all means, and about dinosaurs; then he meets a woman named Lucinda studying paleontology for pretty much the same reasons, and they talk a lot and make out a little, but all the dinosaurs are coming back to life too, so the creature they dig up devours them, and there they are, alive inside this big dinosaur headed for London to kill all the people who can’t die. To be alive inside a dinosaur forges a special bond between Norwood and Lucinda . . .

Darwin couldn’t take it anymore. He wasn’t sure whether it was Norwood or Lucinda or the dinosaur, but he was getting seriously annoyed by the story. He wanted to give it a chance, but this really wasn’t his kind of thing. He switched to Mrs. Gaskell. Wives and Daughters. He’d watched an adaptation on Masterpiece Theatre back when his television worked and rather liked it. It opened charmingly:

To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl, who had been swallowed by a dinosaur on its way to London to kill . . .

That’s not right, Darwin thought. Scanned by volunteers, it said at the beginning. He paid nothing, so he had no right to complain, but still. If you were going to do something, you should do it right, not tamper with a classic. There was a comfort in a story like that. You knew who it was about—this girl—who she was going to fall in love with and marry and her friends and so forth. One young man would be more interesting than the others if you bothered to look closely enough at him. This could take a while. She was still a kid, and she’ll have friends and so on, some not entirely trustworthy. Parents, all of that. There were no dinosaurs. Not living, anyway. London hadn’t even been bombed yet. All the dinosaurs were still dead. Another one of Darwin’s degrees is in literature.

Darwin switched back to the dead author’s story. Or, rather, the other dead author’s. Norwood is lying in the arms of his fellow paleontologist inside the dinosaur. They’re discussing the future of their relationship. The dinosaur ate London while Darwin was with Mrs. Gaskell—then shit out the whole lot except for Lucinda and Norwood—and now they’re on their way to Tokyo, telling each other why they want to die and sorting out what sort of impact this might have on their burgeoning romance. They can’t decide which is more important—death or each other—without a thought of Tokyo.

The Kindle slipped from Darwin’s hands, and he fell fast asleep.

After a time, the Kindle shut itself off. It’s automatic. Don’t worry. It saved his place.

Gaby is dreaming about her brothers. They both have holes in their heads, from temple to temple, neat little cylindrical passageways. They show her. You can line up their heads and see through to the other side. They aren’t anything like the real holes, through their real heads, Ty on one side, Jay on the other in the backseat of the car. Their skulls shattered and rained down on her. Jay’s. The shot came from his side. No glass. The windows were rolled down. The AC wasn’t working. Mom hadn’t had a chance to take it in to the mechanic.

“What are you doing in Target?” Jay asks her.

They’re in Electronics. All the televisions are showing the same thing, as usual. This time it’s real actors playing characters from an old cartoon show Gaby never watched. Mom probably did—she would watch anything when she got home from work—but Mom never went to movies. She never had time. But here she is in Electronics in her white doctor jacket she used to let Gaby play with and the stethoscope she didn’t. Not after the Barbie incidents.

Mom asks her, “What are you doing in Target, Gabriella?”

Gaby’s not sure what she means by that, what she’s asking exactly. “Are you dead?” she asks her mother. After Ty and Jay died, Mom went into a mental hospital. Maybe crazy people didn’t die. Mom blamed herself. You couldn’t get her not to blame herself. She’d always done everything. If it wasn’t her fault, then whose fault was it? This dream Mom seems to have gotten over it. She must be dead.

“Everyone’s dead, Darlin’, which is why you and your new boyfriend need to leave.”

“He’s not my boyfriend, Mom. We just met.”

“It’s okay either way, but it’s time to go. There’s nothing for you here.”

Gaby wakes up. The chirpy PA woman hasn’t given it up. She wants to make your life better, not just today, but every day. For a moment, Gaby thinks maybe everyone’s come back to life, and she’s not sure how she feels about that, but then she’s sure. She doesn’t want to go back to when everyone was alive, but dying like Darwin said. Mom would say let sleeping dogs lie, even though they never had a dog, and sleeping isn’t dead.

Elvis is panting at the entrance to the tent. It’s a new day. Her new boyfriend’s lying beside her. “Wake up, Darlin’,” she says, sounding just like her mother.

Darwin opens his eyes. “Gabriella,” he whispers.

They unzip the tent fly. Mick’s singing “Wild Horses” again.

As it turns out, it’s a lot easier to leave the dead than you might suppose. Elvis running alongside discourages the occasional dog inclined to give chase. They stop and have a meal at the last Applebee’s on Broad Street near the mostly empty office park out past the car dealers. It isn’t far beyond that before they find their pick of a dozen huge houses, each sitting on its own 10-acre lot. Most with only a couple of dead people inside. They can pitch a tent in the yard if they want or just live in one of these big houses.

They pick one of the smaller ones with a beautiful enameled wood stove in the family room and bury the owners near the gazebo in a spot with a nice view.

There are even horses at a lot of these places. Tame ones. They set them free when they go biking around the neighborhood in the afternoon, picking up a bottle of wine or bag of coffee beans, a jar of marinated artichoke hearts, chocolate bars. The trailer on Darwin’s bike comes in handy. There’s also a little lake with a dock and boats, and they like to drift around under the stars that are burning a lot brighter these days now that the power’s gone out. Not to worry. All these big places have big generators and big vehicles to siphon gas out of for as long as Darwin and Gaby are likely to live.

Unless they live forever, which doesn’t sound like such a bad idea to either one of them at the moment. They tell each other their life stories. There’s never been much demand before, so they’re fresh to the task and hold nothing back. Why should they?

“Mom was working in the Emergency Room and forgot to sign something and stopped off with us kids in the back and ran inside. That’s when some totally random guy, who had nothing to do with us or Mom, tried to shoot someone going into the hospital, and the bullet killed my brothers, and Mom was never the same. Me neither.”

Darwin holds her, kisses her wet cheeks, and they’re glad to be alive. He’s learned a lot, now that everyone’s dead, about relating to others. He tells her the names of all the drugs he’s been given and about all the different Darwins they could make him be, but what his problem was went by several names, depending on which specialist you were listening to, none of them you would want to name your kid. He was a great disappointment to his parents. He liked to learn things, though. He was good at it. Still is. He’s never found much use for the things he’s learned before, except their own enjoyment. Now he narrates them to Gabriella, who likes to hear about them while the cicadas sing and the frogs croak.

Darwin tells Gabriella about the Suicide Club story he still can’t get to the end of while they’re sitting on their new porch watching the horses they set free wander around in the woods, looking like they’re not quite sure what to do with themselves. Moscow, Los Angeles, Rio have all fallen before the dinosaur’s murderous rampage. All the content on the Kindle has been infected with dinosaurs. He’s afraid it’s a virus.

“Suicide Club?” Gaby says. “Definitely not interested. Dinosaurs are okay. Maybe we can find a copy of Jurassic Park?”

“I’ll keep an eye out.”

“I was just noticing our wild horses aren’t very wild.”

“Give them time,” Darwin says. “They’ll get there someday. Pinot Grigio or Sauvignon Blanc?”

“You choose,” she says. “Why don’t you just skip to the next story?”

“It’s about zombies.”

Gaby laughs. “You definitely don’t want to go there.”

It’s not really about zombies. He just wanted to hear her laugh. Darwin loves the sound of Gabriella’s laughter. It makes him laugh too. “I certainly don’t.” They go with the Pinot. “I think we may already have a copy of Jurassic Park somewhere. Elvis and I found quite a haul at the big Georgian.”

“They’re all big.”

“The really big one. Elvis loved that place, racing around the tile foyer.”

“I can imagine—you and that dog.”

Elvis sweeps his big tail back and forth across the porch at the sound of their laughter, the mention of his name. He lies at their feet. Life is good. He hears the howling out there, way off in the distance. He just doesn’t let it bother him. It took him a while, he’ll admit, to loosen up, to just have a little fun. But then, it was like a miracle. He was with the man when he found the thing. He wasn’t even sure the man liked him all that much up till then, not like the woman. But it was just the two of them in a big wide field where horses used to graze. They had the whole world to themselves, and he threw it. Elvis had never had so much fun in his whole life. Frisbee. Who knew? Now they have fun every day.

There’s a quiet contentment that pervades the evening, a slight chill in the air, as the moon rises in the sky, and the horses nicker in the moonlight, thinking about things horses think about.

Darwin thinks soon it will be time for a fire in the wood stove. There’s a lovely enamel scene on the side. It’s a snow-covered village on the other side of the world with reindeer instead of horses, and there’s a dog who looks a little like Elvis, but all the people are inside, safe and warm.

© 2013 by Dennis Danvers.

Dennis Danvers has published seven novels, including Circuit of Heaven (New York Times Notable, 1998), The Watch (New York Times Notable, 2002; Booklist 10 Best SF novels, 2002), and The Bright Spot (under pseudonym Robert Sydney). His first novel Wilderness has recently been re-issued with a sexy new cover. Recent short fiction has appeared in F & SF, Realms of Fantasy, Electric Velocipede, and in the anthologies Tails of Wonder and Richmond Noir. He teaches fiction writing and science fiction and fantasy literature at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, and blogs at dennisdanvers.com.

The Traditional
Maria Dahvana Headley

I.

By your first anniversary, the world’s stopped making paper, and so you can’t give your boyfriend the traditional gift. You never would have anyway, regardless of circumstances. You’re not that kind of girl. You pride yourself on your original sin. It’s the hot you trade in.

So you give him the piece of your skin just beneath your ribcage on the right side, where the floating ribs bend in. It’s a good part. Not the best. You’re like a food hoarder who pretends her larder’s empty, all the while running her finger along the dusty ledge that leads to the trick shelves that hold the jars of Caspian caviar. You’ve always been the kind of liar who leans back and lets boys fall into you while you see if you can make them fall all the way out the other side. You want them to feel like they’ve hit Narnia. You traffic in interdimensional fucking, during which they transcend space and time, and you go nowhere. When they fall in love, you Shun & Break™ them. Their poor plastic hearts are Pez dispensers topped with copyright violation Mickey Mice.

Your boy’s not falling for this shit. He simply refuses. He sees through your methods. You met him in a bar on the night of the first apocalypse, just prior, and both of you somehow lived through the night.

He clocked you from moment one, when you bought him a drink and brought it to him, fresh lipstick on your mouth, altering your walk to cause him pain. He drank it. He then took the cherry out of yours and drank your drink too, looking at you the whole time like he was a prime transgressor who was going to rock your world until it broke.

“You gonna try to make me love you now?” he asked. “That your thing?”

“Brother,” you said, taken aback by the way he’d just needlessly whacked the rules of flirtation, “I don’t even know you exist.”

This would have been the end of it, except that five minutes later there was a rending, and everyone was screaming and trying to get away, and buildings were falling down, and the streets were full of unimaginable.

You were out of your element. You loved the Woolworthing of the world before the apocalypse, the shopping mall fluorescence of flirtation, the IKEA particleboard pushing together of things that would shortly fall apart. You loved paper parasols and plastic monkeys. Everything was your toy. You killed men, but they never got anywhere near killing you.

But he grabbed your hand, and you grabbed his, and you took off running together, dodging crazy, jumping holes in the streets, not stopping to look at the people who were down on the ground already, vomiting up important parts of anatomy.

You didn’t actually see the worms that night, though other people did. That was the first anyone heard of them.

When you finally got indoors and safe as you were likely to get given the stakes, given the world situation—sex, you informed him, was necessary, because minus sex? This shit was just monsters and the end of the world.

He wasn’t so sure. He’d sobered up, considered lighting out on his own, but you insisted you were better off together. Then you tore off his clothes and climbed him like a firefighter reversing up a pole.

Maybe you love him now, maybe you don’t. You don’t trust him, but there’s nothing new about that.

The apartment you share has big windows, and no curtains. You don’t look out. The floor beneath the window has an old bloodstain, but whatever happened there happened a long time ago. In bed, you’re rubber and he’s glue, and it’s hot enough to keep you going.

“This is so you can write on me instead of paper,” you say, thrilling at your own fin de monde generosity. The rest of the world’s in mourning, but you’re celebrating your survival.

You roll over to face him. You’ve outlined the page with a razor blade. The rest of you is unmarked. There’s the promise of a quarto. Back before all this, you were both, weirdly, the kind of people who footnoted fucks. You prided yourselves on your grasp of gory details of the philosophical arguments of the 1300s. Now you don’t know what you are. Your dissertation is stalled. You used to be the cool girl. Now you’re just a live girl.

Your boy presses his cheek to your hipbone.

“You feel like a fossil,” he says. “Like a pterodactyl wrapped in fabric.”

“As long as I don’t feel like a worm,” you say.

You know very well that you don’t. The people out there who’ve died, the ones eaten by the worms? First everything liquefies. Then the worm emerges. While it’s happening, you feel it like an earthquake inside your soul. There’s a reason you’re in here. A year of that, and the worms are getting bigger all the time. They start out the size of pencils.

He cuts a word into your skin, and then another, and you gasp when the knife touches you, because here’s something you’ve never done before, and you’re a girl who does everything. You have a flash of worry about yourself. There is a distinct possibility that you’re flipping backward, your head upturned, everything sweet you’ve kept hidden sliding out into his hands.

Outside you can hear one of the worms moving through the streets, a big one, about the size of a motorcycle. You blow out the candle. It’s not like you’re scared.

“Do you remember mimeograph machines?” you ask him. You do. Your grade school had one. Once, because you couldn’t stop talking, you were exorcised in the mimeograph room by a substitute teacher using Diet Sprite as holy water. Back then, you couldn’t stop anything once you started. You revolved like a bent top, twitched, and bit boys. You cast spells. None of them worked. Now, if you were out there, it would be worse than mimeograph ink. People believe in things they didn’t.

“Yeah, I remember mimeographs,” he says, and smiles. “The purple ink. It smelled like a hot skillet.”

You flip over so you don’t have to look at him, and then you roll across the sheet to print the words he’s written, grabbing the fuck out of random religion, but isn’t everyone?

Hallelujah, Holy, Glory, Be, God, Gone, Gotten, Begat, Bore, Bear, Beginning: in the. End of days.

Out in the street there is a scream, high and wavering, which you both totally ignore.

II.

For your second anniversary, he gives you two teeth, wisdom. The traditional gift is cotton, but you’ve sold most of your clothes. He gives you ivory instead. The teeth aren’t quite white, because of the drinking of tea, back before it all. They’ve been out of his mouth for a while. The world’s shifted away from dentistry, or rather, the world’s shifted from cosmetic dentistry into tooth-retention, but his were removed before all that. He’s lost other things, too. He has no appendix. He has no tonsils. He still owns both his kidneys, though. You only have one.

The thought that he purposefully had organs removed, and didn’t even sell them, makes you pissed off with the waste (wastrel, you compulsively think, over and over, wastrel wastrel) and so you carefully don’t imagine his tonsils twitching on a tonsil heap. His appendix like a tiny harp, strumming inside a bath of alcohol.

There is, by now, a black market trade in vestigials, and the wisdom teeth are worth their weight in something. Some people have their mouths studded with other people’s teeth. It’s become a status symbol. The worms, however, don’t care. People are entirely in hiding by now, and still, sometimes, a worm gets in. No one sleeps with an open mouth anymore. There are masks and door seals. If you see a worm, even a tiny one, you’re supposed to shine a light on it and stomp on its head. This is not always possible. It takes time, but eventually, the worms get their way.

“Do you love me?” you ask him. It’s bullshit to hear yourself. Your voice sounds wobbly. You sound like what you never were.

“I gave you my teeth,” he says, but he doesn’t say he loves you. You are now plastic in a world where no one needs anything but metal.

You don’t say you love him, either. You met during an apocalypse. What kind of fool are you?

“What are your teeth for?” you ask.

“To pay tolls,” he says and then he closes your fingers around them. You hide the teeth beneath your pillow. One morning there are coins in their place. Some old traditions, apparently, linger in the world. Or maybe you did that, to try to make him love you. You place the coins on his eyes as he sleeps, and he wakes up laughing.

“Not that kind of toll,” he says.

You aren’t laughing. You hide his teeth, in case they’re ever all that is left of him, and you have to find something to bury. You curse yourself. Even at the end of the world, you’re still trying to rig the system. You don’t want to talk about love, and so you talk about worms. You casually relate anecdotes of people who died, listing their agonies like ingredients in a complicated recipe, waiting for him to tell you he loves you, waiting for him to tell you he hopes the worms don’t get you.

III.

Your skin, by the third year, for which the traditional gift is leather, is covered with words no one uses any longer. He’s careful. You’re careful. The blood isn’t much.

Sometimes he quotes you. “Brother, I don’t even know you exist.” Then sometimes he laughs. Sometimes he doesn’t.

Sometimes you tell him everything you know about him, which is everything except one thing.

Other things have gone wrong outside. You’re living in a drifting cloud of ash from some far off worm-battling explosion, and the lights are out, and the sun’s dimmed. You eat from cans opened with stabbing, and you aren’t sure what you’re eating, but no one says anything nasty. You’re still together, in a new little room, this one with only three walls. Your old apartment sank into a hole in the Earth and was gone for good. He traces words on your skin, and then erases them, and then traces new ones over the scars. You comfort each other with childhood.

“Blackboard,” he says, grinning in the dim. “Do you remember?”

“Eraser monitor,” you reply. “More times than I should have been.”

“Chalk dust,” he says. “Inhaled.”

“Snow,” you say. “Back when there was snow.”

“There’s still snow somewhere,” he says.

“I don’t think so,” you say. “No ice. Remember ice?”

“Of course I remember ice,” he says, annoyed, because he’s started to forget it. “Your drink had ice the night we met.”

“There isn’t any ice left,” you say, your voice taut against his cheek, and what you mean is, I’m a new world, fall into me. You’re scared of being by yourself at the end of the world, even though you pretend you’re chill. Chill, you repeat to yourself, chill chill chill. It starts to sound like a word you don’t know.

“How would you know?” he asks.

In the dark, you hand him the scar from your inner thigh. In the space where it was, there’s now another scar. You’ve stitched the leather into a purse, on which you’ve scarred an unsayable word.

“Tetragrammaton,” he says, and you feel him tasting the sound of it, not unimpressed with your syllables.

The end of the world has not made you a believer. The end of the word has.

IV.

By the fourth anniversary, you’ve forgotten the traditional gifts. Sex has begun to involve your skeletons. Your boy gives you his scalp. There’s a girl one apartment over who was a surgeon, and she comes in with a flat cloth-wrapped packet of knives and little saws like chefs used to carry. She cuts a circle out of his scalp, then out of his skull. You touch his brain, just once, with your fingertip, watching his eyes roll beneath closed lids. Then the doctor replaces the circles and closes his head back up with black stitches so no worms get in.

You give him your heart. Once your chest cavity is open, he looks at it beating for thirteen seconds, and then the doctor closes you back up again. It takes months to heal from that anniversary, but when you finally do, though you no longer have a bed, you lie on the floor and hold hands, and he tells you what your heart looks like at close range. You tell him about the gray whorls of his brain.

“I pretty much love you,” you say at last.

“I pretty much loved you the whole time,” he says. “Since I saw you standing on top of the bar as the roof fell in. Since I saw you kill that worm with a bottle of bourbon.”

This is a new kind of love for both of you, but not a new kind of love for the world. In the pre-catastrophe world, things that loved one another sometimes ate their mates. You both consider this. The thought of lapping at blood and chewing flesh becomes tempting. You’re both getting mad scared of the dark.

V.

For your fifth anniversary, after the sun is apparently gone for good, you’re fully baroque. You cut off your hair and sell it to buy a ring for him. There’s still a trade in hair. It’s used to weave blankets. It’s also used in spells. Magic has started to exist again, in the desperate early mornings.

He’s had the bones of his fingers made into a comb for your hair, which is, of course, gone. There’s a man who does that, filing the bones down into something spined and wired. The story that inspired these gifts is a cheesy classic, one you both partially remember from childhood, and it’s become hot, too, though in its original version it was only about love and pocketwatches. Sex at the end of the world is a pornographic, ecstatic recitation of everything that has ever and has never existed, a naming of genus and species, taxonomies of winged creatures and those that slither.

“Lunchmeat,” he says.

“Tempeh,” you say.

“Hummingbirds,” he says.

“Doves,” you say.

“Suspender buttons.”

“Oak galls.”

“Condoms.”

“Leotards.”

“Illuminations.”

“Daguerréotypes.”

“Sugarcane.”

“Bees.”

“The story where the baby gets cut in half.”

“It doesn’t. It’s a threat.”

“The story where there are a thousand babies who keep having more babies.”

“That story isn’t a real story.”

You pause in your movements, considering extinctions.

“Carol,” you say. “The secretary from the English lit department.”

“My grandfather,” he replies.

“Blake.”

“Rima.”

“Geraldine.”

“Henry.”

“I didn’t know Henry died,” you say.

“Of course he did,” he tells you, but you still don’t remember.

“The woman who used to stand at the end of the street, selling meat on skewers.”

“That wasn’t meat.”

“It was, sort of.”

“It was shoe soles.”

“It was the color of meat.”

You lie together in the dark, listening to the world ending. Five years is more than you would ever have expected, given the beginning of this. In the dark, something shines briefly.

“Glowworms.”

“Lite-Brite.”

“Dungeons and Dragons.”

“Breast implants.”

“Flaming arrows.”

“Greek fire.”

“Radioactive waste.”

“Fish at the bottom of the world.”

He puts his remaining hand up to touch your shaven head.

“There was a gorilla,” he says. “Do you remember it?”

“There was a gorilla who climbed the Empire State Building,” you finish. You aren’t who you were. You’ve given him all the things you were saving for yourself.

In the world outside your room, the question now is whether to go out and fight the newest version of the worm. This one rears up and bares its teeth. It’s got seven rows of sharp: old school multiplex shit. Now it emerges, in the shadowy days at the end of everything. No one has yet seen its tail. It seems to go on forever.

Outside your windows, buildings begin to crumble, and the sidewalks ripple. You are still that loser thinking about love.

“I have to go out,” you say.

“I have to go out, too,” he replies, and you touch him with your tongue. He tastes like you. Both of you are hungry. You feel like you might explode from out of his chest, or him from yours, writhing and opening jaws, eyeless.

Outside, the worm is rising where the sunrise was. Its flesh is smooth and gray. Your building shakes as the worm moves around it, wrapping it in coils.

“Nylon support stockings,” he says.

“Slinkies,” you counter.

“William Blake.”

“Loch Ness.”

A window breaks. He stands up. You stand up, too, and walk out without looking at him again. There’s nowhere to look, in any case. It’s dark. You start climbing.

The worm makes its way through the streets, turning left and turning right, making a low sound, a slurring rasp. It’s a successful worm. The more people a worm gets, the bigger it grows. You walk out under the sky, hunting the worm as the worm hunts you. You’re just a normal person who lived through things she shouldn’t have. Your fires have gone out. You’re not especially special.

Heaven is a cloud of ash, a starless place full of low nests.

You hold your present in your hand, the pronged, sharpened fingers of your man, and below you, you see the worm, shining in the no light.

Fall into me, you think, using your old self, willing the worm to woo. It shouldn’t come to you, but it does. Hunger and love work the same way. The spells you knew as a little girl are still part of you. Once you start spelling you’re never stopping. It’s like you have an audience and a word with a million letters, and you’re going to spell it to death. It’s like you’re a champion.

The worm stretches itself and you stand on top of a building, watching it approach. It’s curious. No one comes out in the street anymore. It smells you, or tastes you in the air.

Then, movement. Now you know why the worm is coming. Your man is in the street, the purse made of your skin held out before him, and on your skin, the unsayable word.

The worm writhes toward him, following your scent, and you’re shaking, feeling a this-is-it-shithead situation, but you’re here anyway and so is he. You can see your ring, flashing on your man’s finger, his remaining hand outstretched. He throws the purse into the worm’s mouth, and it laps at it, tasting it, rasping. Its teeth are shining and white, whiter than anything you’ve seen before. They close on the purse like it’s a washrag being wrung. Now the worm’s eaten the name of god. In some places, that would be poison.

Its head turns toward you.

You teeter, teeter, and leap, an old movie move showing up in your game plan unexpectedly. You dive for its face, its open mouth, its seven rows of teeth, and they cut you as you go in. No mouth, only throat. The thing is all throat. You hold out the comb and claw your way down.

You’re going into the center of the Earth. You fall, and you fall, and all around you the stars are falling, too. The inside of the worm is the inside of the world. You claw words into its throat, and you’re covered in blood and wet, in cold dark. You’re being digested and pulsed, inside a long channel of charnel. You think about all the people this worm has eaten from the inside, and now you’re inside it, too. You’ll do the same. You’re Woolworthing the monster, cataloging it into a bin of like unnecessaries.

You’re fucking terrified.

You think about your mother, whom you haven’t seen in years. You think about your umbilical cord and the way it wormtangled around your throat. You think about how you lived through that. You hold your man’s hand, the sharpened points of the fingers, and around you, the worm convulses and quivers. You stab yourself in, using the bonecomb, finger by finger, and you tear at the worm’s simplicity, bisecting it like a bad deed on a summer afternoon.

Eventually there is a larger shudder, a scream, a rasp, and you feel the worm give way.

VI.

For your sixth anniversary, you are the woman who emerged unscathed from the worm that ate the city. He’s the man who did it with you. You hold his hand in yours, and his other hand, the one made of bone, holds your hair, grown back now, into a twist on top of your head. The sky changes. The ash drifts down. You’ve given way, just as the worm did, and now, your skin, covered in words, and his body, covered in scars, are what the remaining people know to be the way that leaders look.

Beneath the streets, the worms are asunder, rotting corpses, bewildered by bones.

You met him drinking. He met you drinking your drink. Now you’re both in charge of things.

You give him a look for your sixth anniversary. He gives you the same look back.

© 2013 by Maria Dahvana Headley.

Maria Dahvana Headley's first novel, Queen of Kings, a dark fantasy/alt-history involving monsters, gods, witches, Cleopatra and the Roman Army, was recently published by Dutton in the US, and Transworld in the UK, among other countries. She's also the author of the internationally bestselling and somewhat notorious memoir The Year of Yes. Her short fiction has appeared in Subterranean, as well as in various anthologies and magazines, including, due to a constantly genre-hybridizing career, Best American Erotica. Mainly, she lives on Twitter, at @MARIADAHVANA, but you can also find her at www.mariadahvanaheadley.com.

The Missing Metatarsals
Sean Williams

The moment I stepped from the booth and saw Inspector Forest waiting for me, I knew something was up.

“You’re wearing your inscrutable face,” I told him.

“This is my usual face.”

His head swiveled to track me as we walked in lockstep through security. A birth defect called Möbius syndrome inherited from distant Nepalese ancestors left him with underdeveloped VI and VII cranial nerves, so he can’t blink, bite, or form expressions without the help of a series of tiny implants. My girlfriend Billie is a muscle artist, and she’s tweaked the inspector’s presets a couple of times, giving him conscious control of his face, but that’s not the same as the real thing. Not the same at all.

“I would like your perspective on a rather interesting situation, if you have time.”

“Sure.” I was a peacekeeper not for the status, but for a chance to crack cases with the legendary PK Forest. “What’s up?”

“A theft.”

“I didn’t think data crime was your bag.”

“This has nothing to do with data.”

“Someone actually stole something?”

“So it seems.” One eyelid drooped, very precisely. “Let me get my coat and we will be on our way.”

It was like the inspector to wear a coat when there was no need to go outside. Peacekeeper HQ was in the New York Archipelago that week, and the crime had occurred in Washington D.C., so we took an internal booth and stepped into a mahogany foyer that left me feeling as though I’d moved in time as well as space.

My augmented reality lenses synced with the Air on arrival, giving me a brief rundown of our new location. It was the home of a private collection belonging to a Mister Antoine Bayazati, but what the collection consisted of, exactly, the Air didn’t say. Antiques, I guessed, judging by the foyer. I was close.

“PK Forest.” A smartly-dressed Caucasian woman stepped out of a doorway to greet us, her hand outstretched to take the inspector’s in a firm grip.

“This is my assistant, PK Sargent.”

I took the woman’s hand in turn, noting green eyes that danced away too quickly, several strands of hair that had sprung free of a tight, auburn bun, and a not unpleasant smell of dust. The fingernail of her thumb was bitten short, her palm faintly damp.

“Diana Scullen, curator of Mister Bayazati’s collection,” she told me. “Please, this way.”

She led us through a series of dimly lit corridors, heels inaudible on thick, burgundy carpet. I examined a series of framed pictures as they swept past, expecting the usual portraits or landscapes, but they were in fact old paintings of dinosaurs. Their proportions were off, and everyone knows that T. Rex ran with its body parallel to the ground rather than upright like a kangaroo.

“Mister Bayazati is an eminent dinophiliac,” the inspector said, noting my interest.

“Is that a word?”

“Most would say preeminent,” said Scullen, waving us ahead of her through a double door. The office beyond left no doubt of the owner’s opinion regarding the prefix.

Mister Bayazati had a crown of curly gray hair that contrasted magisterially with his black skin. The tallest person in the room by almost a full head, followed by me, Scullen, and Inspector Forest, he loomed in a blue three-piece suit over an enormous, leather-topped desk.

“Good of you to come,” he said in a voice that was high-pitched with anxiety. He didn’t offer us a seat, but he didn’t sit himself so I supposed that wasn’t impolite. “I’m desperate.”

“So I was led to understand,” said the inspector. “Something about a stolen fossil . . . ?”

“Not just any fossil, man. The find of the century!”

“Perhaps you could explain the significance of the theft in more detail.”

“Yes, of course.” Bayazati walked as he talked, circumnavigating around the room as though looking for a way out. “There are three official species of Stegosaurus: armatus, homheni, and mjosi. Two years ago, I discovered a perfectly articulated skeleton of a fourth species, S. ungulatus, in the Lourinhã Formation in Portugal. The specimen has been in my collection ever since—or so I believed until yesterday, when I discovered that part of it was missing.”

“How?” I asked.

“I wished to view the metatarsals of the rear feet, one of the features that distinguish this species from its predecessors. When I opened the case, I found it to be empty. A preliminary search in neighboring boxes turned up no sign of them, so I called in Diana—Doctor Scullen, here. We conducted an emergency audit and discovered only more absences from the catalogue, all from the same skeleton. Fully fifteen percent of my S. ungulatus is missing. It must be recovered at once!”

“Surely you can recover its pattern from the Air and—”

“Never!” He rounded on me with a feverish gleam in his eye. “My specimens are completely authentic, right down to the last molecule.”

“Mister Bayazati is an Abstainer,” Diana Scullen elaborated. “All of his archeological samples are freighted by rail to avoid using any form of matter transmission.”

“I have no use for shabby counterfeits,” he blustered.

“But you have a d-mat booth in your foyer,” noted the inspector.

“People can do what they like as long as they leave me and my collection alone.”

“So none of the missing exhibits were scanned?” I asked, still not quite able to believe it. “Not even for insurance against damage or, well, loss?”

Mister Bayazati raised his chin and both thumbs went into his waistcoat. I took that as a no, since scanning inevitably requires the deconstruction of the object being scanned.

“Tell me about your fellow dinophiliacs.” Now it was the inspector’s turn to pace while Bayazati stood still. It was like watching Ganymede orbit Jupiter. “Could one of them could be responsible for the theft—perhaps one jealous of your extensive collection?”

Bayazati nodded. “The thought had occurred to me, PK Forest, but I accompany them at all times. They couldn’t take so much as a fingernail scraping without me noticing.”

I believed him. “What about other visitors? Family, friends . . . ?”

“We’ve compiled the names of everyone who came through the collection in the relevant period,” said Scullen. “There was some repair work performed by artisans on one of the display wings—a carpenter and an electrician. They might be worth looking into.”

“PK Sargent and I will study that information in a moment.” The inspector was still pacing, which meant he was still thinking. “You have a booth, Mister Bayazati, that you do not ever use. That means there is at least one other exit from the building.”

“There are three,” Diana Scullen answered for her boss again. “All are watched around the clock, as are the display wings. I have the security files for you, and somewhere private for you to work.”

“One last question, then,” said the inspector. “Stegosaurus was a large beast, yes? It would be difficult to smuggle it from the collection without breaking it into pieces.”

“Yes.” A pained expression crossed Bayazati’s face. “Let’s pray they didn’t do that.”

“Indeed. It would be a terrible loss to humanity were this precious fossil to disappear forever.”

“I completely agree, PK Forest,” said Diana Scullen. “Now, if you’ll come this way . . . ?”

We were escorted from the room to leave the collector agonizing over his losses. Diana Scullen took us to an office nearby, offered us coffee or tea, which we both declined, and then left us to our ruminations.

The inspector took off his coat, draped it over the back of a chair, and rotated to take in the room. It was considerably less grand than Mister Bayazati’s.

“I hoped for one of the display wings,” he said. “I loved dinosaurs as a child.”

“Is that why we’re here? It’s not for the case, surely. We could’ve interviewed Bayazati and studied the files from HQ. Yes, the theft part is a novelty, but I bet we catch a dinophiliac red-handed on the security feed.”

The inspector tapped the side of his nose.

“The case is more than the case.” He often said stuff like that. “What else do you see here? What is evident apart from the evidence?”

“That these people are completely out of touch,” I said. “Dinosaur bones and Abstainers—really?”

The inspector smiled winningly, and it caught me off-guard for an instant. One of Billie’s finest.

The data we had been promised was location-fixed, so would leave the infields of our lenses the moment we left the building. We set to it with a will, dividing the caches and pursuing our own particular paths.

I quickly determined that no one had left the building carrying a heavy rucksack with a giant femur sticking out of it. There went the easy break I’d hoped for. The next thing to ascertain was when the S. ungulatus cases had last been accessed. Diana Scullen had conducted a routine census three months ago, opening the boxes and noting the precise catalogue of their contents. All present and correct, so the crime must have taken place subsequently. That left a lot of coming and going, and a lot of idle staring at footage for me.

Apart from Bayazati, Scullen, and the occasional dinophiliac, the only people to come near the cases were the artisans Scullen had mentioned. I closely examined those particular moments, noting every opportunity they’d had to interfere with the precious bones. It was tedious work, and I wasn’t used to tracking physical objects like old-time police. Theft today means patterns, not property, since everything that goes through d-mat can in theory be infinitely reproduced. Of course, that won’t fly where people are concerned, so laws exist to limit copying, and also to protect ownership over proprietary designs. These laws are very complicated. Does a copy of the Mona Lisa have the same cultural value as the original? Is a copy of a fertilized human egg considered an entirely new human being? How does an inventor earn status from a prototype that can be copied in seconds by a million people at once?

And what does it mean to be the original Mona Lisa, anyway? To most people the answer is nothing at all, not when its copies are perfect right down to the tiniest particle. But clearly it matters to Abstainers like Mister Bayazati, who never use d-mat for fear of becoming something other if they are broken down and rebuilt elsewhere. I’ll admit that used to worry me too, when I was old enough to worry, but the process is so demonstrably safe that being frightened of it now just seems absurd. (I’d be more worried about driving in a car with a tank of explosive petroleum behind my seat, like people used to.)

“I’m getting nowhere,” I said after an hour of scouring. “Plenty of opportunities to get at the cases, but no opportunities to get out. You?”

The inspector nodded. “I think it is time to summon Doctor Scullen.”

I found her in a workshop up the hall that was full of hands-on preserving paraphernalia. She’d slipped a lab coat over her smart suit, and I liked her more on seeing it—evidence of a practical nature, not just an egghead like her boss. Sadly, she took it off to be grilled by the inspector.

“We have ruled out Mister Bayazati’s rivals as suspects for the crime itself,” he told her, which was news to me. “By no possible means could those bones have been physically removed from this institution in their original state, and without them being in their original state, collectors such as Mister Bayazati would not be interested in possessing them. Once d-matted, the bones would be considered facsimiles and therefore valueless.”

Ah. I had got partway to that conclusion, at least.

Scullen didn’t seem surprised. “So they left through the booth. Can you access the transit records?”

“I already have,” said the inspector. “The bones were not transmitted individually or en masse, alone or on anyone’s person.”

“That can’t be possible.”

“Oh, but it is. Doctor Scullen, do you have a fabricator here?”

“A fabber? Yes. There’s one in the rec room.”

“And this rec room is not monitored, I presume?”

“No. There’s nothing in there worth stealing.”

“Not any more. I am certain the fabricator was used in the perpetration of this crime. Mister Bayazati will not eat patterned food or drink, so the device is provided mainly for the comfort of visitors—the artisans effecting the repairs on the display cases, for instance. No one would suspect them for being there, using a machine that was provided for their own convenience.”

“But why would they put the bones into the fabber?” I asked.

“Not to be recycled,” asked Scullen with an aghast expression. “Don’t tell me that’s where you’re going with this.”

“It is not inconceivable,” said the inspector, “that what one collector does not possess, he might go to extreme lengths to deny to another. But in this case I do not think so. Fabbers are d-mat booths in miniature. They can assemble and disassemble—and they can scan.”

“That doesn’t change anything,” I said, wondering where he was going with this. “Even if the artisans did scan the bones, what would they do with the patterns? It’d be huge cache. Any attempt to upload it into the Air could be traced. Same if they fed it into the booth. You saw the data: The bones didn’t leave that way.”

Another smile. It sent a shiver down my spine. Sometimes I wondered if it wasn’t Billie I saw in him, but the other way around.

“It would be helpful to speak to Mister Bayazati now,” he said. “I am a man of few words, and I dislike explaining myself twice.”

Now, that simply wasn’t true. The inspector loves nothing better than revealing how clever he is. That he wasn’t talking now meant he had something big to reveal, and I too would have to wait.

Mister Bayazati burst through the door in a gargantuan rush.

“Tell me you’ve found S. ungulatus. Tell me the criminals who did this to me will soon be brought to justice!”

“That I can promise you,” the inspector said. “Their fate will be hideous and . . . poetic unless they return your specimens to you immediately.”

“You are certain of this? How?”

“Because you, Mister Bayazati, are the victim of something very close to a pun. ‘Stegosaurus’ means ‘covered lizard,’ as I am sure you already know. It comes from the Greek ‘stegos,’ roof, referring to the distinctive plates protruding from its spine. Now, there is another word derived from the same root that means ‘hidden writing’—”

“Steganography,” I eagerly contributed. People have been hiding data invisibly in other files for more than a century—pilfered blueprints in word processor documents, government secrets in accounting spreadsheets, child pornography in family photographs. It was an art almost as old as the dinosaurs themselves. “The artisans fed the data from the fabber into the booth in the foyer, then they merged it with themselves when they left, so they could get the bones out of the building without anyone noticing. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“An elegantly simple plan,” said the inspector. “But what happened next? Our criminals will not find a taker for this data among the dinophiliacs—yet they are intelligent enough to appreciate the value of S. ungulatus, otherwise they would never have stolen it. I cannot imagine them erasing the patterns. Not even in the utter desperation they must presently be feeling.”

“Desperation—how so?” asked Bayazati.

“Consider their situation. They must keep the data secret, which means continuing to hide it steganographically. They have been walking around with the bones of a long-extinct creature inside their body. Imagine what that data must be doing to them!”

“You think it’s affecting them?” asked Diana Scullen with surprise and possibly alarm.

“We’ll find out if it is,” I said, picturing a half-man, half-Stegosaurus rampaging through suburbia. A Steganosaurus, even. “We’ll bulletin all the hospitals and emergency centers, and check d-mat transit data for odd DNA signatures, too. Whatever symptoms they’ve got, they’ll stick out like a . . .”

“Like Brontosaurus in a briar patch,” said the inspector.

“Monstrous,” said Mister Bayazati. But behind his eyes I glimpsed something that might have been jealousy.

“Of course,” said the inspector, “if we could draw them out before then . . .”

“By offering a reward, perhaps?” asked Scullen.

“For stealing my property?” said Mister Bayazati. “Nonsense! The skeleton will forever be only eighty-five percent original, whether they return the patterns or not.”

“But who could tell the difference?” I asked.

“I could.”

“I agree with Doctor Scullen,” said the inspector in ameliorating tones, “but would suggest immunity from prosecution rather than a material reward. That will encourage the thieves to come forward more quickly, so S. ungulatus will be as complete as it can be as soon as can be, and you, Mister Bayazati, will have the honor of owning it once more—along with the knowledge that no one else does.”

“Well, I suppose . . .”

He seemed unsure whether to feel victorious or beaten and we were happy to leave him like that. Me, I didn’t care one way or the other, as long as the mystery was solved.

Diana Scullen walked us back to the foyer. There she thanked us both with genuine feeling, and with genuine reason, I thought. We had been there barely an hour—not quite a record for the inspector, but still pretty impressive. Who knew what fits she might have endured from her employer had we not solved the case so quickly?

“I expect the matter will be resolved forthwith,” said the inspector.

“Yes . . .” she said. “Yes, I expect you’re right.”

The booth opened for us and we stepped inside.

Arrival back at HQ came with a sinking feeling in my chest. D-mat always did that to me. Plus, the case was almost over. I would have nothing but mundane duties until next the inspector called.

“So, will you notify the hospitals or I?”

“No need, PK Sargent.”

“Don’t tell me you’re not interested in seeing a human-dinosaur hybrid.”

“I would indeed be, if there were such thing.”

“But you said—”

“I know what I said. You were not listening properly. Ah!” He stopped and clapped his hands together. “My coat—I appear to have left it behind. Would you mind fetching it for me, PK Sargent, while I start compiling the report . . . ?”

“Just this once, inspector,” I said, half-annoyed and half-amused at the same time.

“My thanks—but you know you really must not call me that . . .”

I headed back to the booth and requested a return journey. Our entrance permissions were still valid, but this time there was no one waiting for me when I arrived. Maybe, I thought, I could be in and out before anyone noticed I was there.

The coat was in the office we had briefly occupied, just along the hall from Diana Scullen’s workshop. As I picked up the coat, I heard a soft sound that caught me in mid-step. It was a soft cry or a sob—a sound of distress that the peacekeeper in me could not ignore.

I found Scullen with her lab coat bunched up and pressed to her face. Her shoulders were shaking.

“Are you all right?”

She gasped and jumped backwards.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came back for this.” I raised the inspector’s coat but had eyes only for her. “What’s going on? Is there something you need to tell me?”

She maintained her poise for barely a second. Then she crumpled like a statue that had been hollowed out from within, starting with the muscles of her face and cascading down the length of her body. Billie would’ve loved it. It was like watching someone dissolve.

“I don’t need to tell you,” she said, sagging into a chair. “You know it was me who took those damned bones, and you’ve been toying with me all this time. PK Forest’s little hints and jabs—I told myself I was imagining it, because he said it all with such a straight face, but here you are now, and . . . What is it you want—a confession? Well, you’ve got it, so take me in and be done with it. I won’t resist.”

It was all I could do not to gape while I processed this revelation. What did she mean by the inspector’s hints and jabs? I hadn’t noticed anything steganographic going on; I was used to his straight face. But he himself had just chastened me for not listening properly. What had I missed?

Well, for starters, Scullen had pointed us at the artisans, and she had been alarmed when the inspector homed in on the fabber. Then she had gone for a reward, and displayed relief at the end, when it looked like she had eluded all blame.

All this didn’t necessarily make her a bad person. I remembered her bitten nails and damp palm: Her nerves must have been shot to pieces. And she hadn’t lied when the inspector had raised the terrible loss to humanity the theft represented.

Given a kick in the right direction, I could see now where the genesis of her crime lay.

“How much,” I asked, “of the skeleton have you leaked to the scientific community?”

She looked up at me, and all I saw in her eyes was stubborn pride. She was a curator, not a thief. She didn’t care about anything as stupid as molecular authenticity.

“Those bits were the last,” she said. “It doesn’t belong here, PK Sargent, locked up in a box where no one else can see it.”

“So you scanned the whole thing in the fabber, and then you put copies of the bones back where they came from?”

“Yes. In my lunch hours, over several weeks.”

“And it was just bad luck he chose that day to look at the metatarsals?”

She nodded. “Until then, Mister Bayazati never suspected a thing.”

I found the thought hilarious, except it wouldn’t have done just then to laugh.

“Kinder that way, I think, Doctor Scullen.”

She hesitated, then nodded again.

“I’ll show myself out.”

When I returned the coat to the inspector, he was wearing that innocent look I knew far too well.

“So,” he said brightly, “the hospitals . . . ?”

“No need,” I echoed him. “The bones will come back as you promised, and even if Mister Bayazati finds out what really happened, Scullen has his promise of immunity to fall back on. You sewed him up good and tight.”

He inclined his head. “Thank you for tying the bow.”

“What did I do? Apart from the usual, I mean.” People tended to notice me, the big girl in uniform, and that gives the inspector a smokescreen for whatever he’s up to.

“Solving the case without leaving HQ was as easy as you said,” he said. “But I believed the perpetrator was more likely to talk to you, rather than an old dinosaur like me.”

“Oh. That makes sense.” It was good that Diana Scullen didn’t think she’d gotten off scot-free. “As long as you’re not keeping me around to be your audience.”

“Never, my dear friend. Never.”

But his eyes twinkled in a way that not even Billie could program, and I knew that his version of the truth was, as always, somewhat less or more than he was willing to admit to.

© 2012 by Sean Williams.

Originally published in Cosmos Magazine.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Sean Williams is a #1 New York Times-bestselling author with forty novels and eighty short stories under his belt, not to mention the odd odd poem. He writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror for adults, young adults, and children, and enjoys the occasional franchise too, such as Star Wars and Doctor Who. Born in the dry, flat lands of South Australia, where he still lives with his wife and family, he is currently working on the Troubletwisters series with Garth Nix and a PhD exploring the trope of the matter transmitter. He is also the Overseas Regional Director of SFWA. This story is set in the world of Twinmaker, his first original SF novel in four years. Twinmaker will be available from HarperCollins November 2013.

Water Finds Its Level
M. Bennardo

“Would you still love me if I were exactly the same,” he’d ask, “but was a Civil War re-enactor?”

“Shut up,” I’d say.

“What if I were exactly the same,” he’d say, “but refused to eat anywhere except McDonald’s?”

“Shut. Up.”

“Or what if I greased my hair with pomade and went tanning every week?”

That’s when I would give him the death-ray glare. “If you want me to stop loving you right now,” I’d say, “you can keep asking those stupid questions.”

“You know why, Jennifer.”

“But it doesn’t work like that,” I’d say. “You can’t do those things and still be exactly the same in every other way. If you did those things, you’d be somebody else. So just shut up because I don’t want to think about it.”

When people asked where I met Roger, I always told the truth. “We met in the Collision,” I’d say. Then they’d give me that look that people used to give you when you told them you met somebody online. The look that said you must be reckless or naive or desperate, and that no good would come of it.

It got better over time, of course, once more people understood. Once they had to understand. By the time it was all over, I was the weird one—still living a single life, still just one of a kind.

And Roger—I guess they understood him better.

It started in the kitchen of my apartment, like a thin spot in the wall or an echo coming through the ventilation ducts. I didn’t think anything of it at first, since it was the kind of thing you hear in apartments all the time—someone else’s private life bleeding through into your living space.

Usually, it’s a murmur at most, a background drone. Sometimes, it’s suddenly and uncomfortably clear—a laugh or an angry shout that’s hardly muffled at all. I just ignored it. It was just somebody who had moved in next door—somebody on the other side of my walls, somebody who had brought their own new sounds that would become partly my sounds, too.

I knew how it worked. If ever we passed in the hall, we would pretend we didn’t hear each other. I wasn’t the sort to complain. The walls were thin. My kitchen had an echo. That was all.

That was all, at least, until the day I was pulling a casserole out of the oven, singing some Cher to myself. Too loud, I guess, because suddenly and without warning a man’s voice was at my ear. Not through the wall, not above the ceiling, but in the kitchen, at my ear.

“All right,” it said, in tones of exasperation. “Is somebody there?”

I dropped the dish, and the casserole exploded into shards of glass and soggy macaroni. I bolted for the living room, heart pounding, as the voice shouted behind me. The mess sat on my kitchen floor for three whole days before I worked up the nerve to go back in there and clean it up.

It was the news that saved me. That’s how I found out that I wasn’t the only one. They had a whole segment about these strange disembodied voices coming out of the air—in people’s houses, in offices, at the shopping mall, everywhere and anywhere. They started as indistinct mutters, but were growing clearer. Some people said they could make out whole sentences.

Nobody could explain it, but it sounded a lot like what had happened to me. “Despite some frightening encounters,” said the newscaster, “no one has reported any physical contact. The voices appear to be just that—voices.”

That evening I lay alone in my bed, the covers pulled up to my face even though it was a warm night. I could hear footsteps in my apartment, as if somebody were walking from room to room. I could hear doors opening and even the toilet flushing.

At last, the footsteps came into my bedroom. I waited until they came close, and then I took a deep breath. Pulling up all the courage in my body, I called out softly.

“Hey,” I said. “There is somebody here.” Then I paused, feeling stupid. “I’m Jennifer.”

A long minute passed in total silence. Then somebody—a man—said, “Okay.” Then he paused. “I’m Roger.”

He claimed he wasn’t really a disembodied voice. He said he was just a normal guy with a body, and that he’d been hearing the same kinds of sounds in his apartment. But my voice, my footsteps, my shattering casserole dish. Somehow, we could hear each other.

We found out pretty quickly that we lived in the same city. Then on the same street. I didn’t want to tell him my address, but he told me his. It was the same—down to the apartment number. According to Roger, we lived in the same apartment.

At that, I asked the only sensible question. “What year is it for you? What date?”

It was the same date.

That was where we left it that first night. It was getting too spooky. I had been almost willing to believe in a hole in space or time—a ventilation duct through the universe where two people in different places or times could accidentally hear each other. But this didn’t make any sense, and I realized suddenly I was exhausted.

“Well, good night,” I said weakly.

“I’ll try not to snore,” he said.

And then, after hours of talking, that one joke suddenly unnerved me. I realized that this wasn’t like hanging up the phone or signing off instant messaging. When we stopped talking, he’d still be there, or here, or wherever.

A few minutes later, I picked up my pillow and crept as quietly as I could to the living room couch.

Here’s what the scientists said on the news—finally—a few days later.

Every instant, they said, an infinite number of parallel universes are created as an infinite number of decisions are made. Usually, those universes just split apart and go off on their own separate courses, never to touch again.

But sometimes, two universes that had split in the past drift back toward each other. Sometimes, they even get close enough to merge back together again. They said it probably happens all the time, but typically things in the two universes are so similar that we don’t even notice. Maybe, they said, the few anomalies and differences are what have always been reported as ghosts or UFOs.

This time, however, the two universes split some time ago—no one really knew exactly, but maybe five years, maybe fifty years. Because of that, things were different. As the two universes bumped into each other, they wouldn’t just mostly overlap like usual. We would notice all the little and big differences—probably millions of them.

And when they merged—if they merged—well, who knew what would happen?

After hearing the scientists explain it all, I decided to talk to Roger again. I’d been tip-toeing around my apartment, trying to ignore the sounds that Roger made—which were becoming clearer and clearer all the time. The sneaking and daily panic attacks had started to seem almost normal, but then I realized I was being an idiot.

“Hey,” I said again, that night when I was sure Roger was in bed. “There’s still somebody here.”

That same silence followed, and then another single word answer.

“Good,” he said.

We talked almost every night from then on. I got to like it. I got to like Roger’s voice—calm and musical, with something that sounded like a hint of an accent. He said he’d been born in Ireland but moved to the States when he was five years old. Maybe I was just wishing he had an accent.

Eventually, I stopped slipping off to the living room to sleep. Once I got to know Roger better, I realized he was funny and kind. And, to me, he still was just a disembodied voice. There wasn’t really anything to be afraid of. Sometimes, it was even nice, in the still dark hours of the morning, when I woke suddenly from a dream to hear him breathing calmly in the room not far away.

The more people talked between the worlds, the more it seemed like things were mostly the same in both universes—not exactly, but pretty close. According to the news, scientists were working on figuring out when our two worlds had diverged and whether they would likely “bounce off” each other or end up merging.

By this time, Roger and I were talking long into the nights. Not just comparing the differences and similarities of our universes anymore, but just about ourselves. What we did that day, what we hoped to do tomorrow. It seemed natural to us, but we were the exception. Lots of people were still pretending that nothing was happening, still keeping as quiet as possible so the “new neighbors” wouldn’t hear.

Some people had discovered other versions of themselves coming through from the other universe. I was glad that wasn’t the case for me, and I never asked Roger to find out if there was another version of me living in his universe. Whether better or worse, I didn’t want to know what might have been different about my life. I didn’t even want to think about it.

But sometimes I was tempted to see if there was a version of Roger in my universe. I liked him—I wanted to meet him, to see him. I even put his name into Google once and pulled up a Facebook profile.

But I knew right away that this other version was different. Even if I did meet him in the flesh, he wasn’t this Roger—my Roger. So I closed the browser and just kept what I had instead, the calm musical voice in the night as I lay in my bed under the moonlight.

Eventually, the universes got close enough that things started to bleed through, too. I’d trip over something as I came back home to my dark apartment. “Did you leave your boots by the door again?” I’d ask.

Or he’d call to me invisibly from the kitchen. “I think I got your milk in my refrigerator,” he’d say. “Gross. It’s expired.”

As the universes drew closer, it started happening all the time. Sometimes, there’d be two similar objects sitting next to each other—two lamps (mine and his) crowding an end table. Other times, it was like new space had been created for the new objects—my dresser grew extra drawers that were full of men’s clothes. I laughed when I realized he folded his socks.

Then one day I arrived home to find a vase of flowers on my kitchen counter. I didn’t tell him that it had come through—just kept it secret like a stupid grinning schoolgirl while I baked him a tray of cookies. Just as I was pulling them out of the oven, Roger called over and said, “I can smell those!”

“They’re for you,” I said, suddenly shy. “For being sweet.”

Somehow, I was still unprepared for the morning when I woke to find my bedroom twice as large as usual. On one side of my bed, where there should have only been a wall, there stretched another room that was a mirror image of mine—or a mirror image of what mine could have been, had it been furnished and decorated by somebody else.

There was a dresser, a desk, a computer, a bookcase. There was a bed. In the bed was a man.

I shouldn’t have been shocked. I should have been used to weirdness by then. But everything else had felt like a kids’ game—like talking through a tin-can-and-string telephone, or leaving messages and gifts for each other in a hollow tree. But now, everything was suddenly very real.

I sank back down into my own bed, my heart fluttering and my throat tightening. I didn’t dare get up or make any noise. It was Roger, of course—it had to be. It was the man I had been talking to every day, now unexpectedly deposited in my bedroom. Or had I been deposited in his?

I closed my eyes and turned away.

Some time later, I heard stirring from his side of the room. I screwed my eyes tighter shut. Then I heard his voice. “Wow,” he said. It was clear and natural—like a voice sounds when it really is right next to you, not screened through the borders of two different universes.

“Hey, Jennifer,” said the voice again—said Roger again. He sounded like he was in total wonderment. He didn’t sound frightened, only amazed and excited.

“Hey, Jennifer,” he said again. “Is that you? Are you there?”

At last, I took a deep breath, vainly trying to quiet my heart. “Yes,” I said weakly, still clutching my blankets, still facing away from him with my eyes screwed shut. “Yes, I’m here.”

Ages seemed to pass while I waited for Roger to speak again. I could hear him on the edge of his bed, the box springs squeaking under him. I wondered how many others around the world were having the same experience that we were right now. I wondered how they were taking it.

“Jennifer,” Roger said at last, “let me see you.”

And slowly, somehow, I felt myself unfurling, turning toward him, responding instinctively to his voice like a plant responds to the sun or moisture or gravity. I sat up on my own bed, facing him, and then at last I opened my eyes.

For a long time, we just sat there, separated by a short gulf, and looked at each other. But after a while, looking didn’t seem like enough.

Roger crossed over from his world to mine the first time that morning. Later, I crossed over to see what his side looked and felt like. We learned later that most people didn’t do that—at least, not right away, not until they knew it was safe.

The geometry of the Collision was something I never really understood. Almost every space suddenly had a double. It was still possible to travel in all the usual directions—north, south, east, west, up, down—but it was as if a new direction and a new dimension had been added.

At every moment, each of us could step from any physical location in one world to the corresponding physical location in the other. You could go “out” and others could come “in.”

A lot of people were worried about what this would mean. Whether it meant that one world would obliterate the other, or people might get trapped on the “wrong” side if the worlds suddenly separated. Or if this meant we’d end up with one world with two versions of almost everything, all squished together.

But Roger and I didn’t really care about any of those questions. We were too busy finding out that we were in love.

A couple months later, I took Roger to visit my parents. We drove three hours to Pennsylvania, carrying a bottle of wine with us. My parents insisted on ignoring the fact that Roger had come from the next world over—my mother simply hovered nervously, fetching cheese trays and lemonade, while my father made bland small talk about whatever he thought would be a safe topic.

All around my parents’ house, they had pinned up long rows of bedsheets. Anywhere that the other world might peek through, they had hung sheets and blankets as privacy curtains. Whether they were hung from this side or that side—I couldn’t tell. For some reason, it made me furious.

I was alone in the kitchen with my mother when I demanded, “Don’t you even know who’s over there?” I could hear my father talking calmly about the blizzard of ’61 in the next room, which he must have figured was long enough ago to be “safe.”

“Jennifer!” said my mother, white and shaking. She was suddenly angrier than I was. “We don’t talk about that here.”

Later, as I was putting on my shoes to leave, I heard a laugh come from the other side of one of the sheets. Lifting a corner, I peeked under. In a room that looked remarkably like my parents’ living room, I saw my father—or a version of my father—sitting on the sofa with his arm around a woman.

But the woman—something was wrong with her. No matter how I scanned her features, I couldn’t make that woman fit into the form of my mother.

Both of the people on the other side glared at me. Even as I let the sheet fall with a mumbled apology, my blood turned icy in my veins.

I suddenly understood my mother’s fury. I was furious, too—as irrational as that was. Obviously, something had happened—in that other world, something was different with my parents. They had divorced, or my mother had died, or they had never met. And there, on the other side of all those sheets and blankets was that other life—probably neither happier nor sadder than this one, just different—and it was getting closer. Every hour, every day, as the Collision progressed, those other people were pushing into my parents’ rooms and their lives. Soon there might be no way to keep them out.

That night, at the motel, there was nobody renting the room on the other side. I told Roger I wanted to be alone, and I went to sleep on the bed in the other universe.

It was cold and empty, but at least it didn’t crowd me.

As space grew tighter, objects from each world started to meld together. It started with the biggest ones first. Where there had been twice as many skyscrapers on the skyline, there were once again the usual number. The duplicates had vanished, pushed together into single buildings occupying more or less the same space they had originally.

The same happened for houses and stores and restaurants. Where there were differences, the result was a combination of the two—a little from this world, and a little from that. It was unnerving, and often the slightness of the changes made them more so. Many times I stood looking at a building or holding an object in my hand, trying to figure out if it really had changed, or if I had just imagined it.

Even the furniture in our fast-shrinking apartment had become a hodgepodge. The dresser was mine, but it had the knobs from Roger’s. The desk was his, but my initials were carved in the bottom of one of the drawers. The books on our bookcase became weird entanglements of two stories told at once. I tried to read a few, but nothing made sense and I was left with unpleasant headaches.

“Water finds its level,” said the scientists. I don’t know exactly what that meant. I don’t know if anybody did. But it became a soothing motto nonetheless. Whenever we saw something changed—something old that had been carelessly mashed together with something new and different, we would nod and say, “Water finds its level.”

I guess it was supposed to make it seem natural. It was meant to suggest that this was somehow a return to order, or the result of some natural process. A flood might be violent while it happened, but once the water found its level, the torrent was replaced with a peaceful lake.

It was also meant, I suspect, to keep us from thinking too much about what would happen to the people.

There was no other version of me in Roger’s universe. Eventually I asked him, and he told me that he had looked but never found one. It seemed clear enough—whatever had changed about my parents had also erased me. I didn’t ask for details, didn’t want to know. Whether I had died somehow or had just never existed, I didn’t want to know.

Roger never asked about himself. Maybe he did his own research on his visits here—before all the phone books and Internet databases got entangled. Maybe he just knew. Either way, I didn’t tell him about the other version of him that I had found. I even knew where he worked: in a restaurant across town.

I had tried to forget about his whole existence, and mostly I succeeded. Another Roger, only twenty miles away. It made me sick somehow. I was sorry that I had ever looked.

But eventually, I went. Once everything started to meld together, I had to.

Once there, I couldn’t bring myself to get out of my car and just sat in the parking lot, staring at the restaurant.

Hours passed. I lost track of how many times I swore to myself that I would leave. Then, at last, the other Roger came out in a cook’s smock, chatting and sharing cigarettes with a waitress.

I went numb as I watched him. He was the same, but not. I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to get to know him. I didn’t want to find out if I liked kissing him.

He had long hair. He smoked. He worked as a cook. It sounds superficial, but that wasn’t the Roger I knew. I might not have cared about any of those things if I had met this Roger first. But that wasn’t how things had worked out. Somewhere, back in his life, he had made different choices from the Roger I knew. He had different priorities.

But more importantly, my Roger was the one who had talked to me all those nights. This person, no matter how good the copy, hadn’t done any of that. That shared history had shaped some small part of my Roger—we had laughed together, cried together, discovered things together. None of that could be replaced, not even by this identical twin.

There were countless programs on TV about people who had melded, or who were about to meld, or who wanted to meld. They all talked about feeling a strong pull, a desire, a need. And after their melding, they said it was the best thing that ever happened to them. How some imaginary hole in their being seemed to be filled. I just kept thinking that’s what people used to say about falling in love, but they made it sound like melding was even better than that.

Whenever the subject came up, Roger and I would just argue. So we stopped talking about it, but it would come up anyway, in secret and infuriating ways.

“Would you still love me . . .” Roger would say.

“Shut up,” I would say.

Eventually, I had to ask him. I blew up and asked him if he had ever wanted to be a cook, if he had ever had long hair, if he had ever tried a cigarette, if he had a thing for scuzzy waitresses with dyed hair and too much eye makeup. I didn’t tell him why I was asking, but he knew.

“Yeah,” he said, “I used to want to be a chef. I thought about going to culinary school.”

After that, I had to wonder. Which Roger had made the good decisions and which one had made the bad decisions? Which of the Rogers, if they compared lives, would be the happier one?

There were videos of people melding all over the Internet if you knew where to look for them. If you wanted to look for them. I didn’t like them—the insides and outsides, the flesh and skin, merging and oozing together. Things wriggling and writhing, skin splitting and sealing. They made me lightheaded. I hated them.

The time when Roger was away for three days without calling, they were all that I watched.

I recognized Roger immediately when he came back. I recognized both of them. He stood there in the hallway outside the apartment, a kind of hangdog expression on his face as he looked out from under his new long stringy hair through his old watery blue eyes.

He didn’t say he was sorry. He didn’t say anything. He knew how I felt, but I guess he wondered the same things I did, about which Roger had made the right choices. This was just another thing that never should have surprised me. Water finds its level.

As he stood there, his whole body was a question. Through my pain and fury and sorrow, I could see what he was asking. Could I find enough of the Roger I loved to let him stay with me? Could I find enough of him in there to try again? New and different were frightening, he seemed to say, but they can be exciting, too. Would I try this next experience with him? Could we discover this together too?

With tears trembling in my lashes and my heart slowly tearing apart, I let him in.

Later, when people asked what happened to Roger and me, I always told them the truth. “He melded in the Collision,” I’d say. “But I didn’t.”

And then they’d give me that knowing, sympathetic look. They had all been there, from one side or another—with spouses or parents or children or friends. We don’t say that water finds its level anymore. I haven’t heard anybody say that in years.

Now we just shrug and say, “Everybody changes.”

Everybody changes, and all we can do is accept it and move on. Everybody finds their other self, and they have that better-than-love melding experience, and suddenly they see everything twice as clearly and they know twice as many answers and priorities change overnight.

And suddenly you’re on the other end of that double-clear stare, and you realize it’s quiet, patient pity in those pale blue eyes. You realize they’re thinking that you can’t ever understand life like they do. You realize that they’re sorry there’s just no vocabulary to tell you what it means to have walked in two different pairs of shoes.

Yeah, everybody changes. Except those of us who don’t.

© 2013 by M. Bennardo.

M. Bennardo’s short stories appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Stupefying Stories, and others. He is also co-editor of This Is How You Die, a science-fiction anthology coming from Grand Central Publishing in July 2013. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio, but people everywhere can find him online at mbennardo.com.

Interview: On Any Given Day
Maureen F. McHugh

(Pullout quote at top of site.)

EMMA: I had this virus, and it was inside me, and it could have been causing all these weird kinds of cancers—

INTERVIEWER: What kind of cancers?

EMMA: All sorts of weird stuff I’d never heard of, like hairy cell leukemia, and cancerous lesions in parts of your bones, and cancer in your pancreas. But I wasn’t sick. I mean, I didn’t feel sick. And now, even after all the antivirals, now I worry about it all the time. Now I’m always thinking I’m sick. It’s like something was stolen from me that I never knew I had.

(The following is a transcript from an interview for the On Any Given Day presentation of 4.12.2021. This transcript does not represent the full presentation, and more interviews and information are present on the site. On Any Given Day is made possible by the National Public Internet, by NPIBoston.org affiliate, and by a grant from the Carrol-Johnson Charitable Family Trust. For information on how to purchase this or any other full site presentation on CDM, please check NPIBoston.org.)

Pop-up quotes and site notes in the interview are included with this transcript.

The following interview was conducted with Emma Chicheck. In the summer of 2018, a fifteen-year-old student came into a health clinic in the suburban town of Charlotte, outside Cleveland, Ohio, with a sexually transmitted version of a proto-virus called pv414, which had recently been identified as a result of contaminated batches of genetic material associated with the telemerase therapy used in rejuvenation. The virus had only been seen previously in rejuvenated elders, and the presence of the virus in teenagers was at first seen as possible evidence that the virus had changed vectors. The medical detective work done to trace the virus, and the picture of teenage behavior that emerged was the basis of the site documentary, called “The Abandoned Children.” Emma was one of the students identified with the virus.

The site map provides links to a description of the proto-virus, a map of the transmission of the virus from Terry Sydnowski through three girls to a total of eleven other people, and interviews with state health officials.

EMMA: I was fourteen when I lost my virginity. I was drunk, and there was this guy named Luis, he was giving me these drinks that tasted like melon, this green stuff that everybody was drinking when they could get it. He said he really liked all my Egyptian stuff and he kept playing with my slave bracelet. The bracelet has chains that go to rings you wear on your thumb, your middle finger, and your ring finger. “Can you be my slave?” he kept asking and at first I thought that was funny because he was the one bringing me drinks, you know? But we kept kissing and then we went into the bedroom and he felt my breasts and then he wanted to have sex. I felt as if I’d led him on, you know? So I didn’t say no.

I saw him again a couple of times after that, but he didn’t pay much attention to me. He was older and he didn’t go to my school. I regret it. I wish it had been a little more special and I was really too young.

Sometimes I thought that if I were a boy I’d be one of those boys who goes into school one day and starts shooting people.

(Music—“Poor Little Rich Girl” by Tony Bennett.)

INTERVIEWER: What’s a culture freak?

EMMA: You’re kidding, right? This is for the interview? Okay, in my own words: A culture freak is a person who really likes other cultures, and listens to culture freak bands and doesn’t conform to the usual sort of jumpsuit or Louis Vuitton wardrobe thing. So I’m into Egyptian a lot, in a spiritual way, too. I tell Tarot Cards. They’re really Egyptian, people think they’re Gypsy but I read about how they’re actually way older than that and I have an Egyptian deck. My friend Lindsey is like me, but my other friend, Denise, is more into Indian stuff. Lindsey and I like Indian, too, and sometimes we’ll all henna our hands.

INTERVIEWER: Do you listen to culture freak music?

EMMA: I like a lot of music, not just culture music. I like Black Helicopters, I really like their New World Order CDM, because it’s really retro and paranoid. I like some of the stuff my mom and dad like, too; Tupac and Lauryn Hill. I like the band Shondonay Shaka Zulu. It’s got a lot of drone. I like that.

(Music—“My Favorite Things” by John Coltrane.)

I’m seventeen. I’ll be eighteen in April. I went to kindergarten when I was only four. I’ve already been accepted at Northeastern. I wanted to go to Barnard but my parents said they didn’t want me going to school in New York City.

My dad’s in telecommunications. He’s in Hong Kong for six weeks. He’s trying to get funding for a sweep satellite. They’re really cool. The satellites are really small, but they have this huge, like, net in front of them, like miles in front and miles across. The net, like, spins itself. See, if space debris hits something hard it will drill right through it, but when it hits this big net, the net gives and just lets the chunk of metal or whatever slide away so it doesn’t hit the satellite. That way it won’t be like that satellite in ’07 that caused the chain reaction so half the United States couldn’t use their phones.

My mom is a teacher. She’s taking a night class two nights a week to recertify. She’s always having to take classes, and she’s always gone one night a week for that. Then there’s after school stuff. She never gets home before six. When I was little, she took summers off, but now she does bookkeeping and office work in the summer for a landscaper, because my older brother and sister are in college already.

The landscaper is one of those baby boomers on rejuvenation. He’s a pain in the ass. Like my dad says, they’re all so selfish. Why won’t they let anyone else have a life? I mean, the sixties are over, and they’re trying to have them all over again. I hate when we’re out and we see a bunch of baby boomers all hopped up on hormones acting like teenagers. But then they go back and go to work and won’t let people like my dad get promoted because they won’t retire.

They want to have it both ways. My mom says when we’re all through school, she’s going to retire and start a whole different life. A less materialistic life. She says she’s going to get out of the way and let us have our lives. People have to learn how to go on to the next part of their lives. Like the Chinese. They had five stages of life, and after you were successful, you were supposed to retire and write poetry and be an artist. Of course, how successful can you consider a high school teacher?

(Music—“When I’m Sixty-Four” by the Beatles.)

Okay, we were out this one Saturday, hanging outside the bowling alley because the cops had thrown us out. The cops here are the worst. They discriminate against teenagers. Everybody discriminates against teenagers. Like, the pizza place has this sign that says only six people under eighteen are allowed in at a time—which means teenagers. If they had a sign that only six people over eighteen or six black people were allowed in at a time everybody would be screaming their heads off, right? We rented shoes and everything, but we weren’t bowling yet, we were just hanging out, because we hadn’t decided if we were going to bowl and they threw us out.

We went over to the grocery store and the CVS to hang out on the steps and there was this boomer there. He was trying to dress like a regular kid. See, most boomers dress in flared jeans and black and stuff and they all have long hair, especially the men, I guess because so many of them were, like, bald before the treatments. This guy had long hair, too, pulled back in a dorky ponytail, but he was wearing a camo jumpsuit. He’d have looked stupid in county orange, like he was trying too hard, but the camo jumpsuit was okay.

In 2018, Terry Sydnowski was seventy-one years old. Click here for information on telemerase repair, endocrinological therapy, and cosmetic surgery techniques of rejuvenation.

We were ignoring him. It was me and Denise and Lindsey, and this older black guy named Kamar and these two guys from school, DC and Matt. Kamar had bought a bunch of forty-fives. You know, malt liquor. I was kind of nervous around Kamar. Kamar seemed so grown up, in a lot of ways. He’d been arrested twice as a juvenile. Once for shoplifting and once, I think, for possession. He always called me “little girl.” Like, when he saw me, he said, “What you doing, little girl?” and smiled at me.

Interview with Kamar Wilson, conducted in the Summit County jail where Wilson is serving eighteen months for possession of narcotics.

I was feeling pretty drunk and I started feeling sorry for this dorky boomer who was just standing over by the wall watching us. I told Denise he looked really sad.

Denise didn’t really care. I remember she had a blue caste mark right in the middle of her forehead and it was the kind that glowed under streetlights. When she moved her head it kind of bobbed around. She thought boomers were creeps.

I said he probably had money and ID. But she didn’t really care because DC always had money and this other guy, Kamar, he had ID.

I know that boomers already had childhoods and all that, but this guy looked really sad. And maybe he didn’t have a childhood. Maybe his mom was an alcoholic and he had to watch his brothers and sisters. Just looking at him, I felt like there was this real sadness to him. I don’t know why. Maybe because he wasn’t being pushy. He sure wasn’t like the guy my mom worked for, who was kind of a jerk. He wasn’t getting in our faces or anything. Boomers usually hang out with each other, you know?

Then DC sort of noticed him. DC is really kind of crazy, and I was afraid he and Kamar would decide to mess him up or something.

I said something about how I felt sorry for him.

And DC said something like, you want him to be really sorry? Kamar laughed.

I told them to leave him alone. DC is crazy. He’ll do anything. Anything anybody does, DC has to be badder.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about DC.

EMMA: DC always had a lot of money. He lived with this guy who was his godfather, because his parents were divorced and his mom was really depressed or something and just lay around all the time. His godfather was always giving him anything. Kamar was nineteen and he had a fake phone ID, so he’d order stuff and they’d do a check against his phone ID and then he’d just pick it up and pay for it.

DC did all kinds of crazy things. DC and Matt decided they were going to kill a bunch of kids. Just because they were mad. They were going to do a Columbine. So they drank like one of those fifths of Popov vodka, you know the kind I mean? They were going to get guns from some guy Kamar knew, but instead DC just took a baseball bat and started beating on this kid, Kevin, who he really hated.

INTERVIEWER: Why did he hate Kevin?

EMMA: I don’t know, Kevin was just annoying, you know? He was this dweeby kid who was always bad-mouthing people. He used to get in a fight with this black kid, Stan, at the beginning of every school year. Stan wasn’t even that good at fighting, but he’d punch Kevin a couple of times and that would be it until Kevin started bad-mouthing him the next year. It’s like everything Kevin said got on DC’s nerves. So DC is totally wasted, driving around with a bunch of kids, and he sees Kevin hanging out in front of Wendy’s and he screams, “Stop the car!” and he jumps out with this baseball bat and goes running up to Kevin and swings at him and Kevin raises his arm and gets his arm broken and then some other people haul DC off.

No, I wasn’t there. I heard all about it the next day, though. And Kevin’s arm was in a cast. Kevin was real proud of it, actually. He’s that kind of a dork.

No, Kevin’s parents were going to go to court, but they never did. I don’t know why.

No charges were ever filed. Kevin and his parents declined to be interviewed.

Anyway, that’s why I was really worried about DC and this boomer. Luckily, Lindsey had a real thing about DC that night and they went off to walk back down to the bowling alley to look for this other girl whose parents were gone for the weekend. We were all going to that girl’s house for a party.

INTERVIEWER: Where were your parents?

EMMA: My parents? They were home. I had to be in by midnight, but if it was a really good party I’d just go home at midnight and my parents would already be in bed, so I’d tell them I was home and then sneak back out through the side door in the basement and go back to the party.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think your parents should have kept closer watch on you?

EMMA: No. I mean, they couldn’t. I mean, like, Denise has a PDA with a minder. They caught her this one time she went to Rick’s in the Flats using Lindsey’s sister’s ID—

An industry has developed around the arsenal of monitoring devices used to track teenagers: pagers, minders, snitch packs, and chips, as well as the variety of tricks teenagers use to subvert them.

INTERVIEWER: Can you describe a minder?

EMMA: It’s like a chip or something, and it’s supposed to tell your parents where you are. Denise walked into the club and now all the clubs have these things, like, in the door or something that sets off the minder, and then this company calls your home and tells your parents where you are. But Kamar downloaded this program for Denise and put it on her PDA, and when she runs it, it tells her minder that she’s somewhere else. Like, she puts my phone number in, and then it tells her minder that she’s at my house.

So it was me and Denise and Kamar and this guy, Matt, and Kamar went somewhere . . . I don’t remember where. Denise starts kidding me about talking to the boomer.

I was kind of drunk by then, and when I got drunk I used to think everything was funny. Oh, yeah, Kamar had gone to look for some other kids we knew, but anyway. We were kind of goofin’. You know? And Denise kept saying that she didn’t think I would talk to the guy. So finally I did. I just went up to him and said hi.

And he said hi.

Up close he had that kind of funny look that geezers—I mean, boomers do. You know, like their noses and their chins and their ears are too big for their faces or something. I was pretty drunk and I didn’t know what to say, so I just started laughing, because I was kind of nervous and when I’m nervous, sometimes I laugh.

He asked me what I was doing, but nice. Smiling. And I told him, “Talking to you.” I thought it was funny.

He said I seemed a little drunk. He said “tipsy” which was funny because it sounded so old-fashioned.

For a minute I thought he might be a cop or something. But then I decided he wasn’t, because he could have busted us a long time ago, and besides, we weren’t doing anything but drinking. So I introduced him to Denise and Matt. He said his name was Terry, which seemed like a real geezer name, you know? He was really nice, though. Quiet.

INTERVIEWER: Do you know any rejuvenated people?

EMMA: No, I didn’t know any boomers, I mean, not any rejuvenated ones, except the guy my mom works for, and I don’t really know him. My grandmother is going to do it next year, but she has to wait until some kind of stock retirement thing happens.

I think I asked him if he was a cop, but I didn’t really mean it. I was laughing because I knew he really wasn’t.

He said he was just looking for someone to hang out with.

I asked him why he didn’t hang out with other people like him? I mean, now it sounds kind of rude, but really, it was weird, you know?

He said that they were all old, and he wanted to be young. He didn’t want to hang around with a bunch of old people who thought they were young. He said that he hadn’t really enjoyed being a kid so he was going to try it again.

That made me think I was right about what I’d thought before about his not having a childhood or something. I liked the idea of his having one now, so I asked if he wanted to go to the party.

Denise thought it was stupid, I could see from her face, but I knew once I explained about the childhood thing she’d feel bad for him, too.

He asked where the party was and we told him it was at this girl’s house but we needed to wait for DC and Lindsey and Kamar to come back. Then I started worrying about DC.

Then he said he’d go get beer, which was the coolest thing, because that would convince a lot of people he was okay. He asked us what kind of beer we wanted.

Denise really liked that lemon beer, what’s it called, squash, so we told him to get that. He got in this all-gasoline car—really nice. No batteries, a real muscle car, like a Mercury or something. I told Denise my theory about him not having a childhood.

She was worried DC might be crazy, but I thought that if Terry had beer, DC wouldn’t care. Denise kept saying that DC was going to be really cranked.

Matt kept saying DC wouldn’t care if Terry had beer, but I was getting really nervous about DC, because if he decided he wanted to be a pain in the ass—I’m sorry, I shouldn’t swear, but that’s the way we talk when it’s just us. Is that okay?

Well, I was afraid DC would be a pain in the ass, just because you never know with DC. I was kind of hoping maybe Kamar and DC and Lindsey would get back before the geezer did so we could just go on to the party and forget about it. Kamar got back. But then Terry got back before DC and Lindsey.

But when DC and Lindsey got back, DC didn’t even pay any attention to Terry. They told us that Brenda had already gone to her house so we all went to the party.

(Music—“Downtown” by Petula Clark.)

So the next time I saw Terry was with Kamar at another party. I was really surprised. Just because of the way Kamar was. But he and Terry were like good friends, which I figured really pissed DC off. Kamar liked DC, but part of the reason was because DC always had money, and Terry always had money. Terry was always buying beer and stuff. I thought Terry would ignore me because that’s what guys do, they’re nice to you one night and ignore you the next. But Terry was really nice and brought me a squash because he thought it was what I liked.

It’s Denise that really likes it but I thought it was neat that he remembered.

He hung around with me for a while. He was cute, for a geezer. I bet when he was a kid he was really cute. I just forgot that he was different. He just seemed like a regular kid, only really nice. Then all the sudden I’d look at him and I’d think about how odd he looked, you know, just the way his face was different, and his knuckles were thick. I mean his hands and face were smooth. He told me once that he was self-conscious about it, and that some people, people in movies and stuff, have the cartilage on their nose and chin shaved. After a while though, I got so used to it I didn’t even notice anymore.

So I hung out with him and after a while we started kissing and stuff. He got really turned on, really fast. It was already maybe 10:30 and I was drunk, so we went upstairs and Matt and Lindsey were in the bedroom, so we kind of snuck in. They were on the bed, but we spread out some coats. It’s really embarrassing to talk about.

(Music—“Days of Wine and Roses” by Frank Sinatra.)

EMMA: Oh my God! I just thought of something. I shouldn’t say it.

INTERVIEWER: You don’t have to unless you want to.

EMMA: You won’t put it on tape if I don’t want you to, will you? (Laughing.) Oh my God, my face is so red. He was a mushroom.

INTERVIEWER: What?

EMMA: You know, a mushroom. I can’t believe I’m saying this. He was cut. I don’t remember the word for it.

INTERVIEWER: Circumcised?

More than ninety percent of all men born between 1945 and 1963 were circumcised.

EMMA: Yeah. I’d never seen a boy like that before. Denise had sex with a guy who was, but I never had before. It was weird. I know my face is so red. I guess you can leave it in. A lot of boomers are circumcised, right?

Oh my God. (Covers face with hands, laughing.) It’s such a stupid thing to remember.

(Music—More of “Days of Wine and Roses” by Frank Sinatra, which has been playing underneath this portion of the interview.)

INTERVIEWER: How many people have you had sex with?

EMMA: Four. I’ve had sex with four guys. Yeah, including Terry and Luis.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any regrets?

EMMA: Sure, I wish I hadn’t. The antivirals made me sick. I missed almost a month of school that year, because every time I had a treatment I’d be sick for three days. And everybody knew why I was missing school, which was so embarrassing. There were seventeen of us who had it.

They think that the antivirals took care of it, and we won’t get cancer, but they don’t know because it’s so new. So I’ve got to have blood tests and check-ups every year. I hate it because I never thought about being sick before, not really, and now, every time I feel weird, I’m thinking, is it a tumor? Every headache, I’m thinking, is this a brain tumor?

Sometimes I’m so mad, because Terry got to be rejuvenated, he gets like forty extra years, and I may not even get to be old because of him. Most of the time I think the antivirals took care of it, and like my mom says, all the check-ups mean if I ever do get sick, it will get caught a lot faster than it would in another person, so in a way, I might be lucky.

I usually believe that the antivirals did it, but sometimes, like when I’m getting blood drawn, I’m really aware of how I feel and I’m afraid I’ve got cancer, and right then I don’t believe it. I was unlucky enough to have this happen, so why would I be lucky about it working? I know that doesn’t make any sense.

Terry and DC were arguing one time. DC was saying that when he was old he wouldn’t get rejuvenated. He’d let someone else have a chance. But Terry said he’d change his mind once he got old. And Terry was right. I always thought I wouldn’t want to be rejuvenated, but every time I think I’m sick, I really want to live and I don’t think I’ll feel different when I’m old.

Terry didn’t know he had the virus. It wasn’t really his fault or anything. But sometimes I still get really mad at him.

That’s kind of why I’m doing this. So that maybe someone else won’t have to go through what I did.

INTERVIEWER: Have you kept in touch with Terry?

EMMA: No. I haven’t seen him for three years.

INTERVIEWER: Your parents wanted to file statutory rape charges, didn’t they?

EMMA: Yeah, but I thought it would be stupid. It wasn’t like that.

INTERVIEWER: Why not?

EMMA: Statutory rape is stupid. He didn’t rape me. He was nice, nicer than a lot of other guys.

INTERVIEWER: But Terry is an adult. Terry is in his seventies.

EMMA: I know. But it’s not like a guy who looks seventy years old . . . it’s different. I mean, in a way it’s not, I know, but it is, because Terry was sort of being one of us, you know? I mean, he wasn’t all that different from Kamar. It would have been statutory rape with Kamar, too, but nobody says anything about that. I didn’t sleep with Kamar, but I know a lot of girls who did, and nobody is trying to pin that on Kamar.

They’re trying to pin everything else on Kamar. They said he was dealing drugs to us and he was the ringleader, but you can get drugs anywhere. You can get them at school. And he wasn’t the ringleader. There wasn’t any ringleader. We didn’t need to be led to do all those things.

INTERVIEWER: Was Terry one of you?

EMMA: Yeah . . . no. No. Not really. He wanted to be. I mean, I wish I had known stuff before, I wish I had known not to get involved with Terry and all this stuff—but I wish I could have been a kid longer.

(Music—“The Kids Are All Right” by The Who.)

The last time I saw Terry? It was before I got tested, before anyone knew about the virus. Before all these people said to me, “You’re lucky it’s not AIDS, then you’d have to take medicine your whole life.”

We went together for four months, I think. From November to March, because we broke up right after Denise’s birthday. We didn’t break up really, so much as decide that maybe we should see other people, that we shouldn’t get serious. Terry was weird to talk to. I never knew what he was thinking. I knew a little bit about him. He was retired and he’d had some kind of office job. I found out that he hadn’t had a rotten childhood, he just hadn’t liked it. He said he didn’t have many friends and he was too serious before.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you break it off?

EMMA: We weren’t in sync. He liked all that boomer music, rock and roll and Frank Sinatra and stuff. And we couldn’t exactly fall in love, because he was so different.

He was always nice to me afterwards. He wasn’t one of those guys who just ignores you.

We were all hanging out at the park next to the library after school. It was the end of the year, school was almost over. Kamar was hanging out with Brenda. He wasn’t exactly her boyfriend because she was also hanging out with this other guy named Anthony and one weekend she’d be with Kamar and the next weekend she’d be with Anthony.

Everybody was talking and something Terry said made DC really mad. I don’t know what it was. It really surprised me, because DC always acted like Terry didn’t even exist. When Terry was around, he’d ignore him. When he wasn’t around, DC would hang with Kamar. But DC started screaming, stuff like, why don’t you have any friends! You loser! You fucking loser! You have to hang around with us because you don’t have any friends! Well, we don’t want you, either! So why don’t you just go die!

Terry had this funny look on his face.

A couple of guys pulled DC away and calmed him down. But everyone was looking at Terry, like it was his fault. I don’t know why, I mean, he didn’t do anything.

That evening I was supposed to stay at Denise’s house, for real, not like when I told my mom I would be at Denise’s and then went out. So I took my stuff over to her house, and then my brother, who was home from Duke, took us and dropped us off at Pizza Hut so we could get something to eat and then we wandered over to the steps outside the CVS because we saw people hanging out there.

Lindsey was there and she told me that DC was looking for Terry. That DC said he was going to kill Terry. Kamar got arrested, she said. Which meant there was nobody to calm down DC.

Kamar had gotten arrested before, for shoplifting, but he got probation. But this time he got arrested for possession. Partly it was because Kamar is black.

Everybody was talking about Kamar getting busted and DC going off the deep end.

Lindsey kept saying, “Oh my God.” It really got on my nerves. I mean, I knew DC hated Terry. DC just hated Terry. He said Terry was a poser and was just using people.

INTERVIEWER: Were you friends with DC?

EMMA: I knew DC, but we never really talked, but Lindsey had been seeing him for a couple of months, so she knew him better than Denise and me.

Lindsey thought DC and Kamar were really friends. I thought Kamar just hung around with DC because he had money. Kamar was something like three years older than DC. But Lindsey said Kamar was just using Terry, but he and DC were really close.

I don’t know what was true.

After a while Terry showed up. I didn’t know what we should do, if we should tell him or not, but finally I thought I should. Terry was sitting with his car door open, talking to some people.

I told him Kamar got arrested for possession.

He wanted to know what happened, and I didn’t know anything but what Lindsey had told me.

Terry wanted to know if he had a lawyer?

I never thought about a lawyer. Like I said before, mostly it was easy to forget that Terry wasn’t just a kid like everyone else.

Terry called the police station on his cellphone. Just punched up the information and called. He said he was a friend of Kamar Wilson’s. They wouldn’t tell him anything on the phone, so he hung up and said he was going to go down.

I felt really weird suddenly, talking to him, because he sounded so much like an adult. But I told him DC was looking for him.

“Fuck DC,” Terry said.

I thought Terry would take off right then and there to go to the police station. But he kept talking to people about Kamar and about what might have happened, so I gave up and I went back to sit on the steps with Denise and Lindsey. We were working on our tans because it would make us look more Egyptian and Indian. Not that I would even think of doing that now, even though skin cancer isn’t one of the types of cancer.

So finally DC came walking from over towards the hardware store and Denise saw him and said, “Oh shit.”

I just sat there because Terry was an adult and he could just deal with it, I figured. I’d tried to tell him. And I was kind of pissed at him, too, I don’t know why.

DC started shouting that Terry was a loser.

I don’t remember if anybody said anything, but Terry didn’t get out of the car. So DC came up and kicked the car, really hard. That didn’t do anything, so he jumped up on the hood.

Terry told him to get off the car, but DC wanted him to get out of the car and talk to him. After a while, Terry got out of the car and DC said something like, “I’m going to kill you, man.”

DC had a knife.

Denise wanted us to go inside the CVS. But we were pretty far away. And the people inside the CVS are creeps anyway. They were calling the police, right then. Terry stood right by the door of his car, kind of half in and half out.

Lindsey was going, “Oh my God. Oh my God.” She was really getting on my nerves. I didn’t think anything was really going to happen. Terry kept saying stuff like, “Calm down man.”

DC was ranting and raving that Terry thought that just because he was older he could do anything he wanted.

Terry finally got in his car and closed the door. But DC didn’t get off the hood. He jumped up and down on it and the hood made this funny kind of splintery noise. Terry must have gotten mad, he drove the car forward, like, gunned it, and DC fell off, really hard.

Terry stopped to see if DC was okay. He got out of his car and DC was lying there on his side, kind of curled up. Terry bent over DC and DC said something . . . I couldn’t see because Terry was between me and DC. Matt was one of the kids up there and he said that Terry pulled open his jacket and he had a gun. He took the gun out in his hand, and showed it to DC and said to fuck off. A bunch of kids saw it. Matt said that Terry called DC a fucking rich kid.

INTERVIEWER: Have you ever seen a gun?

EMMA: I saw one at a party once. This kid I didn’t know had it. He was showing it to everyone. I thought he was a creep.

INTERVIEWER: When did you see Terry next?

EMMA: I never saw Terry after that, although I told the clinic about him, so I’m sure they contacted him. He was where the disease came from.

I wasn’t the only one to have sex with him. Brenda had sex with him, and this girl I don’t know very well, JaneAnne. JaneAnne had sex with some other people, and I had sex with my boyfriend after that. I don’t know about Brenda.

JaneAnne and Brenda’s interviews. JaneAnne was interviewed from her home in Georgetown, MD, where her family moved six months ago. Brenda is still living in Charlotte, with her mother.

It taught me something. Adults are different. I don’t know if I want to be one.

INTERVIEWER: Why not?

EMMA: Because DC was acting stupid, you know? But DC was a kid. And Terry really wasn’t, no matter how bad he wanted to be. So why would he do that to a kid?

INTERVIEWER: So it was Terry’s fault?

EMMA: Not his fault, not exactly. But he was putting himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

INTERVIEWER: Should he have known better?

EMMA: Yeah. No, I mean, he couldn’t know better. It was my fault, in a way. Because most of the time if, like, we’re at the bowling alley and a couple of geezers come in trying to be young, we just ignore them and they just ignore us. It’s just instinct or something. If I hadn’t talked to Terry, none of this would have happened.

Terry has different rules than us. I’m not saying kids don’t hurt each other. But Terry was always thinking, you know?

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean?

EMMA: I don’t know. Just that he was always thinking. Even when he wasn’t supposed to be, even when he was mad, he was always thinking.

(Music—“Solitude” by Duke Ellington.)

EMMA: When my parents found out, they were really shocked. It’s like they were in complete denial. My dad cried. It was scary.

We’re closer now. We still don’t talk about a lot of things, though. We’re just not that kind of family.

INTERVIEWER: Do you still go to parties? Still drink?

EMMA: No, I don’t party like I used to. When I was getting the antivirals, I was so sick I just stopped hanging out. My parents got me a PDA with a minder, like Denise’s. But I wasn’t doing anything anymore. Lindsey still sees everyone. She tells me what’s going on. But it feels different now. I don’t want to be an adult. That must have been what Terry felt like. Funny, to think I’m like him.

(Music—“My Old School” by Steely Dan.)

© 2001 by Maureen F. McHugh

Originally published in Starlight 3, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Maureen F. McHugh was born in what was then a sleepy, blue-collar town in Ohio called Loveland. She went to college in Ohio, and then graduate school at New York University. She lived a year in Shijiazhuang, China. Her first book, Tiptree Award winner China Mountain Zhang, was published in 1991. Since then, she has written three novels and a well-received collection of short stories, Story Prize finalist Mothers & Other Monsters. McHugh has also worked on alternate reality games for Halo 2, The Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails. She lives in Los Angeles, where she has attempted to sell her soul to Hollywood.

Author Spotlight: Eleanor Arnason
Moshe Siegel

In an interview given prior to the publication of your novella “The Garden,” you mentioned that hwarhath culture grew, in part, from your desire to infuriate outspoken social conservatives with a culture that embraced homosexuality as a function of stable society. Do you feel some vindication in the recent progress of the equality movement? Do you think you would have been driven to make such an extended literary statement as your hwarhath series, had the concept occurred to you in today’s social climate?

I have been writing hwarhath stories for twenty years now, which is scary. I don’t feel vindicated by the changes in society during this period, but I’m glad to see them. There is still plenty to change: human treatment of women and children and the poor is horrifying, and human ideas of the sanctity of life are insane. Why on Earth would anyone insist that foetuses be born because life is sacred, and then have no interest in caring for children and women and the poor? Look at what the English government is currently doing, cutting back support for severely disabled people and demanding that people who are sick, barely holding onto life, look for jobs they cannot possibly find. This is evil, and it’s being done by “respectable” Tories, not by religious wingnuts. Don’t tell me that life is sacred among humans.

The hwarhath have no problem with euthanasia and abortion, they are not invested in keeping badly damaged people alive, but they believe absolutely that healthy women and children must be cared for. And their families—which are huge—care for all members, which means there aren’t poor as we understand the term, except for those tossed out of their kinship group. Hwarhath society does outcasts and criminals. There is an underworld, though I haven’t written much about it.

At some point I have to write more about the hwarhath and disability/different ability. In many ways, they are not kind and they may not be entirely wise.

Hwarhath society draws from many different human cultures, while also possessing unmistakably alien characteristics (distinct physiology, philosophy, etc.). “The Garden” features one human character (the famous Nicholas Sanders), yet by the time he shows up, he is as alien to the reader in appearance and behavior as the hwarhath appeared at the start of the tale. Would you say it’s vital to lend a taste of humanity or human culture (such as the concept of honorable suicide, the bonds of familial relationships, or the simple pleasure of gardening) to an alien society, to coax the reader into a sense of connection?

The hwarhath stories are a way to talk about our society. If I made them too alien they wouldn’t serve this purpose. So I’ve borrowed from human cultures to create their society. Some of this was deliberate and planned. Hwarhath drama is based on Japanese Noh plays, and I read all the Noh plays I could find in translation while working on Ring of Swords. Hwarhath drinking cups and jars are based on Japanese pottery, which I know from working in art museums and from collecting 20th century American pottery. (Japan had a huge influence on American potters.) The sexual division in hwarhath society reminds me of human countries such as Saudi Arabia, except the hwarhath women control their own lives and reproduction and child care; and hwarhath families resemble the clans that exist in many parts of Earth, though not in Europe and America. This just happened. I did not study human clans or human cultures that separate the sexes.

I do have some strange aliens in the two hwarhath novels: the giant jellyfish in Ring of Swords and the Burrowers in Ring’s sequel. They are there to give some richness and complexity to my future biology.

Akuin’s passion for gardening, for nurturing growth while warding off predators, parallels the larger male hwarhath mission: to protect the female population and scour the stars for enemies. As well, you describe the galaxy in botanical terms many times over the course of this novella—did you set out writing “The Garden” with such a micro/macrocosm in mind, or did it evolve in the process?

It evolved. I could say it grew.

In the end, there is no place for Akuin among his people, Thev’s splotchy coloration—if not for the prestige of his family’s intellect—might have resulted in his death as an infant, and the final footnote reveals this story was likely written by a hwarhath woman circuitously advocating for female liberation from the home world (complete with a tongue-in-cheek reference that this is science fiction, after all, not fantasy). Do you think the implication is that any society, no matter the comparatively progressive attitudes it may boast, will inevitably develop prejudice and biased gender roles?

I’m not sure about biased gender roles, but I suspect prejudice is likely to be common. It’s a way—not a nice way—of enforcing social norms. Much of my writing is about people who refuse to conform and the price they pay. Akuin pays a huge price for his garden. But in the end, it’s a price he is willing to pay.

What of yourself can be found among your character’s strong personalities? Thev, like many hwarhath, seems to have an appreciation for irony: As noted, “A pious man will always enjoy the Great Mother’s tricks.” Do you share Thev’s wry amusement, or, perhaps, tend towards Akuin’s introspection?

My bet is, I am more like Akuin than anyone else here. I certainly love gardens, though I don’t have one right now, except for potted plants. My beloved hoya is currently blooming.

Gardens can be a metaphor for life or art. At the end of Candide, Voltaire tells us that it is necessary to cultivate our garden, and the American poet Marianne Moore tells us that it’s necessary to put real toads in our poetic gardens.

Akuin follows Voltaire’s advice and devotes his life to his garden. While he does not have real toads, he does manage to find a real alien.

Do you have any other projects upcoming or in the works that you would like to share with us?

Big Mama Stories, a collection of science fiction tall tales, is due out from Aqueduct Press in May of 2013. Hidden Folk, a collection of fantasies based on Icelandic sagas and folk tales, ought to come out late in 2013 from a new press that doesn’t have a name yet. I continue to work on the sequel to Ring of Swords, which will be published by Aqueduct Press when I finally finish revising it. And I have a novelette—“Kormak the Lucky”—coming out from Fantasy and Science Fiction in the fall.

Moshe Siegel proofreads and interviews for Lightspeed, interns at the pleasure of a Random House author, and works as a freelance editor, hither and yon. His overladen bookshelf and smug e-reader glare at each other across his home office in upstate New York, with a cat somewhere between. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.

Author Spotlight: Richard Parks
Jude Griffin & Kevin McNeil

“The Man Who Carved Skulls” was first published in Weird Tales (2007). Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process and what inspired this story?

Most cultures want to memorialize, if not actually venerate, those who have died, and we do it mostly with cemeteries. But in an agrarian society with a limited amount of arable land like the one in my story, wasting so much valuable farmland on a graveyard makes no sense. I considered all the cultures that preserve their dead in such a way as to keep them visible and, in a way, part of the living community, and combined that with a society with an almost instinctive need to make the best use of space and resources. In that context, the role of the skull-carver made perfect sense.

All that sounds coldly calculated, but in truth the rationale came mostly after the fact. I had an image in my head of an elaborately carved human skull, and worked backward until I had the context that would have produced it, and thus the story. A lot of my stories come from a seed image, rather than an “idea” as such.

You noted elsewhere that “in his introduction to The Ogre’s Wife, my first collection of stories, Parke Godwin says my themes are ‘. . . the nature of our humanity and the inescapability of what we are, the choices we make and the price we pay for each, right or wrong.’” “The Man Who Carved Skulls” seems like an excellent example: Why do you think this theme is still so compelling for you?

If you don’t believe in either fate or predestination—and I don’t—then we’re left with the inescapable fact that what we do matters. That is, actions almost by definition have consequences. Choosing A excludes B. Maybe A was the right choice, made for the right reasons and the best will and information to hand. That doesn’t mean that all the effects of that choice are going to be good. Sometimes the best you can do is to take the least destructive course of several bad options, but you’re still not excused from making that decision, nor from the consequences of it. That’s at once empowering and scary as hell. Akan can choose not to help fulfill his father’s promise or his mother’s greatest wish, and who would have blamed him? Maybe he would have been happier that way. Maybe it would have destroyed him. Akan drew his own conclusions, and acted accordingly.

This story’s setting is rich in culture and theology, with an unusual funeral custom. What can you tell us about the creation of this world?

When it came time to write this story I had a bit of a head start, because the world Akan inhabits already existed. I first wrote about it in a novel called A Warrior of Dreams. The culture is based on a premise you’ll find in Hindu mythology, among other places, that what we call the universe is simply a god’s dream. In this case, it’s the dream of a goddess named Somna, with a lover/antagonist called Gahon who is forever trying to wake her up so she can pay attention to him. The catch is that he has to do this from within the dream itself without letting Somna know that he’s the one who did it—she’s rather fond of this dream. All magic in this universe requires the manipulation of the fabric of the dream itself, which makes it an extremely dangerous thing to do, much to Gahon’s delight. In this story, we meet Gahon in the temple scene.

You explore the themes of love, loyalty, and promises. Akan makes a difficult choice and pays a high price for it. Are choice and consequence ideas you tend to explore in your fiction?

Constantly, and no doubt because they are issues I’m still trying to get a handle on myself, touching as they do on both the notion of free will versus destiny and how we at once fear and hope for a rational universe. People say the only certainties of life are death and taxes, but I’d add choices and consequences. All choices have consequences. Whether they are good or bad depends entirely on our perspective, but regardless of the outcome, we are not excused from making those choices. The problem is that we are very seldom aware of the actual consequences beforehand. We like to think we make informed decisions about our lives and careers and our relationships with others, but in truth most of the time we’re flying blind.

“. . . best not to leave the choosing of your bride to chance. That gives the Forces of Gahon too much room to play.” Does this line foreshadow the outcome of Akan’s night at the temple?

It’s a tenet of this society that “chance” is the thread from which Gahon weaves his traps. So they tend to be a little regimented in their outlook, or at least try to be, to avoid doing anything that gives Somna’s Adversary room to work. The irony of Akan’s night in the temple is that he meets Gahon instead of Somna, but at the same time Gahon doesn’t “trick” or mislead him. He simply tells Akan what he already knows, but doesn’t want to acknowledge.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece? What’s next for you?

Only that I hope the readers enjoy it. As for what happens next, I’ve got a few things in the pipeline. Prime Books just brought out the first Lord Yamada Collection, Yamada Monogatari: Demon Hunter,in January,and PS Publishing is scheduled to release the first Yamada novel, To Break the Demon Gate, in November. I’m currently at work on the second Yamada novel, which I hope to have finished by early next year.

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, photographer, and an expert in learning and knowledge management. She cannot parallel park, lies about how far she runs in the morning, and has a tin ear—transforming her goal to learn bird calls more subtle than a blue jay’s into a Sisyphean struggle. But hope chirps eternal.

Kevin McNeil reads slush for Lightspeed Magazine and is an editorial assistant for 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: Damien Walters Grintalis
Christie Yant

“Always, They Whisper” was tough to read. I think there are an awful lot of readers out there who are going to identify with what is a very common experience for women in particular. How did the ideas of contemporary street harassment, sexual assault, and the plight of Medusa collide for you to produce this story?

I was reading yet another article about sexual assault and the comments were dreadful. (No, I usually don’t read the comments; I’m honestly not even sure why I did that day.) There is so much stigma, so much blame, and it all gets shifted onto the victim’s shoulders. They become scapegoats and villains, bearing all the culpability so the real villain can retain an air of false respectability. She shouldn’t have teased him, she shouldn’t have done this or worn that. Ugh. It’s an ugly truth that’s everywhere. Always. In turn, that external blame becomes internal. Why did we go out? Why did we wear that? My fault, my fault, my fault—an ever-present litany of wrongly-placed blame.

Later that same day, I saw a picture of Medusa that someone posted on Facebook, something clicked in the word machine in my head, and the first paragraph came out in a rush. I wrote the rest of the italicized portions, but since I knew I wanted to set the story in modern times, it took a few drafts to get the rest of it to fall into place.

I was fascinated by the elixir; the idea of disguising herself, of deliberately becoming invisible, was one that really resonated with me from my teens and early adulthood. What left me thinking hard after I finished reading was that for Medusa, it stopped working. Can you tell us more about that metaphor and how it went in that direction?

Women learn at an early age that whenever we go out, we open ourselves up to the possible risk of harassment. A lot of men think that catcalls and such are flattering, but, in truth, they can be alarming and often escalate into frightening, e.g., when it becomes a demand of sorts—Hey, I’m talking to you. Why won’t you talk to me?

For me, Medusa’s elixir was the metaphorical equivalent of no makeup, sweats, and a disheveled ponytail. Walking with your head down and shoulders hunched so as not to capture anyone’s attention.

The elixir provided her with the peace of being able to walk freely without harassment; when it stopped working, I was alluding to the fact that, unfortunately, no matter what you wear, no matter how old you are, you can’t hide. And to some, your very existence is an open invitation for their attention, regardless of whether or not that attention is wanted.

Medi’s snakes were part of her curse, but their whispered voices could also be considered the enforcers of it—in that sense, I wonder if it’s even fair to consider them “her” snakes. When she tried to free herself of them, it caused her physical pain. Where is the line between the snakes’ voices and her own, or between the snakes and herself?

To me, the snakes represented the internal voice we all have. In Medi’s case, that voice was turned against her, and the snakes became separate entities of their own, feeding her a steady stream of what they demanded she believe.

She had to reach a point where she was strong enough to recognize that the snakes were filling her with bullshit and lies, strong enough to shed the blame and reclaim her sense of security, of self. I loved the concept of taking the emotional pain of healing and turning it corporeal.

Your novel Ink was recently launched by Samhain Publishing—the book is about a tattoo that has a sinister life independent of its host. Tattoos are such personal things that permanently alter our appearance, and in Jason’s case that part of his appearance betrays him. In that sense, Jason has something in common with Medi. Is this a theme that you explore often in your work?

I don’t consciously write with any themes in mind, yet as a woman, the concept of appearances, being judged by or the betrayal of, is inescapable. I think mostly, though, I’m drawn to emotionally fragile people. Everyone has ghosts and I like to explore what happens when those ghosts finally come knocking at the door, demanding attention.

In Jason’s case, it’s the result of a bad decision made when he’s caught beneath the dark cloud of a dysfunctional relationship’s abrupt ending. He’s developed internal blinders to avoid seeing how broken he really is, which makes him ripe for the tattoo artist’s taking.

In addition to your novel, you’ve had an impressive number of short stories published in the past year or two. What else can we look forward to seeing from you, and what are you working on next?

I have more short fiction forthcoming in Apex Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Shimmer, and Shock Totem, dark explorations about relationships, the fragility of memory, congenital analgesia, and the ghosts of grief, respectively.

My agent has my next novel in her capable hands, I have two others that need editing, and I’m in the early stages of another that, thus far, is about six families coping with loss that they’re unaware is connected in a dark, supernatural way. It’s the first novel I’ve written that has a very large cast of POV characters, which is both exciting and daunting.

Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer and habitual volunteer. She has been a “podtern” for Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, an Assistant Editor for Lightspeed Magazine, audio book reviewer for Audible.com, occasional narrator for StarShipSofa, and co-blogger at Inkpunks.com, a website for aspiring and newly-pro writers. Her fiction has appeared in magazines such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, and Fireside Magazine, and in anthologies including The Way of the Wizard, Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, and Armored. She lives in a former Temperance colony on the central coast of California, where she sometimes gets to watch rocket launches with her husband and her two amazing daughters.

Author Spotlight: Holly Black
Jude Griffin

I loved this work from the moment I read the title. Given the richness of the Aarne-Thompson classification system, was it difficult not to put more in the story?

First of all, thank you so much! But, actually, I came to the title much later in the story than you did—long about the time that I realized that the performers had to be performing something and also that I needed to eventually title the story—so it had already evolved a really defined shape. It was a story I lucked into, one where I had an idea for the beginning and I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going until I got there.

Is the mermaid’s line about her comb working on “even the most matted fur” a signal that she recognizes Nadia as a supernatural creature?

Yes. I wanted them to be trying to signal to her that they knew, but she’s been alone too long to hear it.

Nadia is the only clearly supernatural creature in the story. Why did you choose to make the truth of the nature of the other characters more difficult to discern?

I wanted Nadia not to quite be able to see the opportunity for community around her, so I wanted to show it in subtle—but not too subtle—ways. She’s so locked within herself that she can’t see when she is among her tribe.

The use of the present tense to tell the story feels so right. Was this always the choice for the story or did it happen in revisions?

I started telling the story in present tense almost from the beginning because present tense can be really distancing in interesting ways for me. It allows a character to exist in a perpetual now, looking neither backwards nor forwards. And for a character like Nadia, who is trying incredibly hard to not think backwards or forwards, it really fits.

At the end when Nadia transforms on stage, why must she brace herself for the audience’s applause?

I must have tweaked that line a dozen times at least, but finally I decided that Nadia has done a brave thing, by showing her true self and being her true self, but she’s still vulnerable and raw and even acceptance is going to feel scary at first. Does that make sense? I also think that the audience rising up is scary, even if it is just to clap their hands. There is something about it that feels threatening—all that noise, all that attention—and, of course, since the story stops where it does, we’re never entirely sure that all they do is applaud. I mean, I don’t think they get their pitchforks out and storm the stage, but we’re not sure. And that lack of surety is also part of what makes her brace herself.

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, photographer, and an expert in learning and knowledge management. She cannot parallel park, lies about how far she runs in the morning, and has a tin ear—transforming her goal to learn bird calls more subtle than a blue jay’s into a Sisyphean struggle. But hope chirps eternal.

Author Spotlight: Dennis Danvers
Robyn Lupo

This is a fresh look at the end of the world; how did you get there? What problems did “Leaving the Dead” present for you that other stories didn’t?

I guess the story arose out of the knowledge that we’re all dying all the time, though we like to remain scrupulously unaware of it. To know it, like Darwin, ironically is to be more alive, not less. That idea met up with zombies, a trope I’ve never liked. In my experience, the dead remain dead. It’s the single most distinctive feature of death—its permanence. I think of “Leaving the Dead” as an anti-zombie story. One thing you can count on in this tale is that no one is the living dead. Dead is dead.

You change inner views from Darwin, to Gabriella, to even Elvis. What prompted this choice?

Gabriella demanded to be heard immediately. Elvis too. I’ve never had such delightfully assertive characters before. I suppose in a world in which they’re the only life not on autopilot, their views define the world. They’re all three creatures whose thoughts go largely ignored and usually don’t have a voice. The story gives them one.

At the story’s open, Darwin says regarding the end of the world “It seemed to happen gradually. You know? Everyone dying a bit every day.” How did this notion inform the story, as it doesn’t seem to be a huge stretch to suggest that even in our world we are dying a bit, every day?

Not a huge stretch at all. The speech echoes one by the doctor in the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, one of my favorite SF films. Even though he knows that the takeover is the result of an invasion, he still laments how we’ve invited this somehow by living, especially loving, less and less. Darwin experiences the invasion of mindlessness gradually.

There’s a lot of optimism in this work. Was that hard to maintain, given the subject matter? Can you tell us why you chose the optimism, as opposed to, say, a cautionary tale?

Last man, last woman (and dog) is also first man, first woman, so there’s more optimism in the premise than was first apparent to me even as I set out with them. They were all so delighted to find one another, that once they resolved to leave the dead it was easy. Cautionary tales, focused as they are on the horrible future and how we fucked up in the past, distract from the most effective remedy to lifelessness: Be here now.

What can we expect from you next?

I’ve been working a lot on short stories, enjoying the form a great deal, and am working toward a short story collection. I have a story coming out in April, “Christmas in Hollywood Cemetery” in Remapping Hallowed Ground, an anthology of fiction, poetry, and art responding to the Civil War Sesquicentennial in Richmond.

Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

Author Spotlight: Maria Dahvana Headley
Patrick J Stephens

The second person point of view presents many challenges to writers, especially those working with an apocalypse. How did you approach the narrative voice in creating “The Traditional”? And, as a writer who found success with a memoir (The Year of Yes), and has a strong connection to that community, how much of your own voice influenced “The Traditional”?

The voice in this story is tonally different from the apocalyptic content, which pleases me. I have a theory about the second person POV. I think it’s a myth that it’s more challenging to write in it—it’s actually a kind of vaudevillian intimacy shortcut. For example: When you’re performatively telling a story, you might speak the whole thing in second person. “So, you walk into a bar . . .” It has a kind of jokey colloquial comfort—you’re saying, essentially, “we’re the same, imagine yourself in this situation.” If you can make a reader feel comfortable, you can wriggle under their skin more easily.

A second person POV is inherently fake when you see it written—as in you know it’s not a spoken voice, but it feels acceptable, because you feel addressed by the speaker as someone who is part of the story. So you can (hopefully) also get away with some styling, like I did here, while retaining the juice of it seeming like something that could be spoken, a riff. It’s a happy little cheat. Second person feels deceptively real—hence, I suspect, your question about autobiographical voice. It’s fun to write in it, because you can add uncomfortable things, things like “You touch his brain with your fingertip.” And the reader feels it as a sympathetic action before they can judge the character for the creepy. More daredevil is the first person plural, which I’ve never yet tried. That’s saying here we are, we ALL did this. It could be exquisitely used in a dithyrambic scary story. Maybe that’s next. (Oh no, this is dangerous. I shouldn’t think about new stories.)

So, as for the genesis of this particular second person POV, I happened, at the time I was writing this, to be reading Junot Diaz’s great new collection, This Is How You Lose Her, which is mostly written in badass second. Junot’s work is bawdy, brainy, extremely precise and blisteringly funny. It also always manages to break my heart. Dude just kills it. I first tried to steal Junot’s voice from Drown, back in my playwright days, 1996 or so. His stories are very much like monologues, and so I copied the fuck out of Drown, and failed. Years passed. Now Junot’s a friend of mine, and here I am, stalking his voice again. With “The Traditional,” I thought, let’s see what happens if I use a second person bullshitter voice like his—but a girl bullshitter. I really can never get enough of female bullshit artists as characters.

Is this my own voice, this story? Or, more simply, am I a girl bullshitter? Yeah. Writer = liar, but in this case, my narrator isn’t me. She has a lot of me in her—the mimeograph exorcism in particular, is something that actually happened to me. But her voice, the truth of this story? Is sideways. The joy of writing speculative fiction rather than memoir is that you can throw some enormous worms into the story right alongside anniversaries and drinks and love. They can all coexist.

Whether it’s the giant worms or opening the main character’s chest cavity in a show of affection—is there an image from “The Traditional” that remains just as haunting as when you wrote the first draft?

I wrote this—you can laugh—as a present for my boyfriend who’d had his wisdom teeth out, and given me one as a present. He’s a writer too, and we got to riffing on traditional anniversary gifts, what else a person might give of their body. Their bones, skin, brain, et cetera. In my mind, and his too, this was a sweet story, like, total romance. (I didn’t think of it as scary at all, until my friend Kat Howard told me she’d had a nightmare in which she was trapped in it, trying to kill worms with a weapon made of fingers.)

Our riff slithered, as our riffs do, over to what would happen if you wrote a filthy mash-up of O. Henry & J.G. Ballard. As in, the super-romance of Gift of the Magi + the kinky questionable of Crash. Gift of the Magi has always creeped me out, which is probably a flaw in me and my understanding of what you’re supposed to be willing to do for love. I remember reading it as a little kid, and feeling infuriated. So, I think it’s always been in me to write some kind of rebel version. Ballard, well, he creeps me out less than O. Henry does. Maybe I shouldn’t admit that. I’m interested in wide-ranging notions of eros and despairos. (Maybe I apologize for that word, maybe I don’t.) The sexiness of universal disaster. It ended up being a grind I could dance to, so I wrote it.

As for haunts: It’s the worms. Giant tunnelling worms are not my terror. Tiny parasitic worms are my terror. I grew up in Idaho, surrounded by sled dogs. Worms, man. Worms. Tiny worms that get bigger as they eat you from the inside? Oh, holy. There’s something about how worms are, the way they can subdivide. Chop them up, and back they come. That’s some classic nasty. I have a small wrong theory that the notion of the Hydra is based on an ancient balladeer’s childhood bad deeds with worm dissection. How many times can I chop it in half? How many times will it grow back? Ahhh! It’s a monster! It doesn’t die! Fucking scary. Also, anything that’s got extra hearts freaks me out. You have an extra heart, it doesn’t matter to you what happens in the moment. The most dangerous sort of heartbreakers are people who act like they’ve got a spare.

If you were a character in “The Traditional,” who would you find yourself socializing with—those like our main character and her love interest, or in a land far away, battling the worms?

I’ve always said that I’d suck it in an apocalypse, because I’m a Type 1 diabetic and I have to take insulin or drop over dead. I’m essentially science fiction made flesh. I travel around looking like a normal person, but my insulin pulp is cyber life-support. So, you know, if the worms were nearby and I could bash one in the head with my high heel, okay, I’d love to, but heading out to the desert to put dynamite in wormholes would probably be beyond me. However, I’ve always had an airplane/subway/bus defender fantasy of stabbing a syringe of insulin into a hijacker. I grew up in a family that was very apocalypse-centric, and we made contingency plans. Every time I get on public transportation, I consider my battle options. How do you battle? With the tools you’ve got on you. Your bone-comb. Your insulin syringe.

You’ve just been nominated for a Nebula with “Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream,” so congratulations are in order. You’ve also experienced great success with The Year of Yes, and Queen of Kings. How (if at all) has this affected the way you approach new stories?

Thank you! It was so flattering to be nominated for the Nebula, because it’s a peer award. It’s pretty great to have other writers thinking you’re good.

As for being successful, I’m not sure it changes anything for me, really, in terms of story approach. A friend of mine once described it as, well, you get a story in the New Yorker, or you get a rave in the NY Times, or you hit a bestseller list (all of which would be amazing, don’t get me wrong)—and even as those social markers happen and your mom is proud, you’re looking to the next project, and moaning, because you still don’t know how the hell to be a writer. That would be the way of the screwed up vocation. I’d be suspicious if I ever felt comfortable, because a big part of my urge to write comes from discomfort. So many nice things have happened with the things I’ve written, and that’s always lovely, but all I want to do is write things I haven’t written yet. Some people in my life find this approach maddening, but it’s working for me.

In the previous Author’s Spotlight in July 2012, you mentioned a sequel to Queen of Kings and a YA work in progress—how are these coming along?

The YA book just got turned in to my agents. Hopefully by the time this interview comes out, it will be sold, and then I can talk about it at long last. I’m in crazy love with it. It’s a contemporary pirate-y kind of riff, and it was beyond fun to write. In truth, anyone who likes this story probably will also like that book. The narrator is sixteen, but there are very few restrictions these days on what you can do in YA, so it’s quite dark, and full of scary strange. It’s also full of funny. Girl bullshitter. Yes.

The Queen of Kings sequel—utter opposite of the YA book, in that it’s alt-history and Elizabethan England—should also be turned in by the time this interview comes out. I had a personal apocalypse year and things got a bit slowed down, but with every apocalypse comes the hope of fantastic reinvention. I’m excited about all the things I’m writing/finishing/starting right now. Just answering these questions gave me two new story ideas! In two different genres.

Patrick J Stephens recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh and, after spending the entire year writing speculative fiction, came back with a Master’s in Social Science. His first collection (Aurichrome and Other Stories) can be found on Kindle and Nook.

Author Spotlight: Sean Williams
Kevin McNeil

“The Missing Metatarsals” was first published in Cosmos (2012). Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process and what inspired this story?

One of the things I love most about science fiction is its fascination with language. I’m sure I’m not the only writer inspired by a dodgy neologism or pun. The original title of this story was “Steganosaurus,” a word that barely appears in the final draft of the story, but that was really where it all started. The idea of hiding a dinosaur inside a human by means of a matter transmitter seemed both absurd and too wonderful to ignore—offering another echo of The Fly, if nothing else. I decided to explore the idea by means of a detective story rather than a horror story for several reasons: one, because that seemed both to fit the idea and to offer a means of unpacking the larger story in a surprising way; two, because I’ve never written one of those in the short form before, and I do like a challenge (see below); and three, the notion of a recurring duo investigating crimes involving matter transmitters was very appealing. Peacekeepers Forest and Sargent operate in a very long tradition, but I hope they’ll feel as fresh and new to the readers as they do to me.

This is the latest in the series of your d-mat stories. What draws you back to this world and these characters?

Speaking of long traditions . . . I’ve been fascinated by matter transmitters since I was a child, more than a century after the first one appeared in print. It’s a fascination that just won’t let go. Maybe it’s because of the tyranny of distance Australians have endured throughout our history; maybe it’s because the idea is cool, and only gets cooler the more you pick at it. I don’t know, but my first attempt to write a “serious” short story revolved around the trope, and so does my next science fiction novel, Twinmaker, the first in a series exploring the effects of this technology on a near-future world.

You might think that we’ve done everything there is to be done with matter transmitters in one hundred and thirty-odd years. George Langelaan had his human/insect hybrid, Larry Niven had his “flash crowds,” and James Patrick Kelly reminded us of the moral consequences of the technology (there’s another link to dinosaurs). Less famously, but no less interestingly, John Brunner, Algis Budrys, Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas M. Disch, Clifford Simak, Robert Silverberg, and many others all had a crack at it. What scraps could possibly be left around this well-picked platter? Plenty, I say. The superficial use of the trope on television as a means of getting people from A to B has left us with the impression that the trope itself is superficial, but the truth is that, in a world that has an operating matter transmitter, everything changes. Our relationships with space and time, our sense of self and identity, our societies, our humanity—all comes under examination when the trope is used well. I’m trying to remind people of this, through my fiction and also through the research I’m conducting as part of my PhD.

I have come to think of myself rather grandiosely as a bit of a champion for this overlooked trope. It’s not just about the trope, though. It’s about science fiction neglecting an idea that is gaining real currency in physics today. Look up “teleportation” on Google and you overwhelmingly find links to real science, real experiments, real people striving to make this technology work. Science fiction has a duty to the future to prepare the way—as well as to readers to tell interesting stories, of course!

You write in a variety of genres, from science fiction to fantasy to media novels, as well as in a variety of styles and forms, from short stories to middle grade and young adult novels. What are some of the challenges and pleasures to changing styles and forms?

The challenge and the pleasure are inextricably linked. I’m easily bored, so I’m always looking for the next thing to play with. It doesn’t have to be something completely new; I quite like bouncing back and forth between familiar series, familiar styles. It’s the difference between finding a groove and getting stuck in a rut. But there’s a fine line between productive experimentation and over-commitment, and that’s something I do have to deal with periodically. At the moment I’m working solo on one series, and collaboratively on three different series, one graphic novel, one picture book, one film adaptation, and one TV series. It keeps life . . . interesting.

You’ve written several successful novels with co-authors (Shane Dix and Garth Nix). How does this process usually work for you?

It used to be that, after writing a detailed outline in close collaboration with Garth or Shane, I would write a first draft solo in one big rush, then hand that draft over for them to make into something readable. These days, thanks in part to RSI, I’ve learned to be a bit more flexible. I’ve relinquished the first-drafting role on a couple of projects, and found that to be both stimulating and challenging. In general, I love the energy different people bring to projects. I love the surprises that come when you relinquish control. People often ask me about what happens when conflict occurs over some detail or other, but that rarely happens. There’s disagreement, but there’s never conflict. I choose my collaborators carefully, and they do the same with me. It’s like a business partnership or a marriage. If you don’t go into these things with your eyes open, then of course you’ll have trouble, but I hope I’m not that naïve.

How did you get involved with writing media novels, like The Force Unleashed and The Old Republic in the Star Wars universe? What are the challenges you’ve encountered when writing for an established franchise as opposed to your original work?

Tie-in work is at heart no different to other forms of collaboration. You’re playing with other people’s ideas, and you have to do so respectfully and productively. You have to accept the limitations, while at the same time giving something of yourself. Having grown up enjoying tie-in novels by writers like Terrance Dicks and Alan Dean Foster alongside those authors we would usually name as the greats (see my earlier list), this was work I actively sought out, and still do, when I can. It’s part of my creative practice. Some of my proudest creative achievements are listed on Wookieepedia rather than Wikipedia.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece? What’s next for you?

Next up is the latest installment in the middle grade fantasy series Garth and I have been working on. Troubletwisters: The Mystery comes out from Scholastic US (and other publishers around the world) in May. Twinmaker will be released by HarperCollins in November. Various editions of Twinmaker will feature bonus material and stories expanding the world even further. Forest and Sargent will appear in the sequel.

Kevin McNeil reads slush for Lightspeed Magazine and is an editorial assistant for 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: M. Bennardo
Patrick J Stephens

In the beginning, with the aspect of disembodied voices, what was the incentive to write from Jennifer’s perspective and not Roger’s?

If I can pinpoint any “beginning” for this story, it would be the disembodied voices. It was an idea that came to me years ago, when I was first living alone in an apartment and would sometimes hear my neighbors through the walls. I think at one point I actually heard something that sounded like a dropped casserole dish. But at the time, I figured it would be a ghost story, so clearly there was a dramatic mutation that took place that turned it into a romance instead.

But at every stage, I imagined a protagonist much like myself at the time when I started living alone—a young, single professional in a temporary living space with not many close attachments. I lived alone because I could afford it and because I wasn’t bothered by being alone. But when that happens, “home” becomes a place you go to after work to eat and sleep and watch TV. For the most part, all the interesting things in your life happen elsewhere for the simple fact that there’s rarely anybody else at home with you. Which I suppose is why Jennifer could so easily get over the initial shock of having somebody else in her apartment—she just never had much of a life there to disrupt.

Roger, on the other hand, has a dual nature. There’s one half of him that is like Jennifer. But the other half is living a slightly different life as a restaurant employee who hopes to become a chef. That part of him is probably living on a smaller income, probably sharing housing, working odd hours and living out of sync with the rest of society. He’s just generally forfeiting some comfort today in the hopes of being able to do what he loves tomorrow. So Roger’s story, I suppose, would be about those two halves confronting each other, and making some sense out of each other. Meanwhile, Jennifer’s story is simpler and more like my own.

In the creation of “Water Finds Its Level,” what came first: the relationship, the voices, or the Collision? Without the Collision, and the ability to see what Roger could have been, do you think that Jennifer would have met and fallen for her world’s version of Roger?

The voices came first, and then the explanation for the voices. As I said, I first thought they’d be ghosts of some sort. Then I realized they might just be from another world—then I figured I might as well collapse that world onto ours and see what happened. The relationship was a result of that.

Personally, I think the relationship was one of convenience, and I’m not sure it was ever built to last. As young people, we get thrown together with all kinds of people and make a lot of connections that may or may not be meaningful in the long-term—college roommates and classmates, co-workers, neighbors. But we’re also transient at that point in our lives, and all it takes is a move to a new apartment or a new job to sever a lot of the connections we thought were important.

Ultimately, Jennifer and Roger don’t do much to actively make their relationship work. It’s kind of thrust upon them by physics—they need to find a way to deal with the fact that they both occupy the same space. They can either be friends, or hang up sheets to hide each other from view. They obviously like each other and get along, but would they ever have gotten together if they hadn’t been put in that position? I doubt it—and I think that’s why it doesn’t last in the end.

The scientists explain the Collision with “water finds its level,” and then—even though she admits she doesn’t quite understand the phrase—Jennifer uses it. As the creator of this story, what do you think “water finds its level” means?

It means that humans eventually accept things the way they are and learn to live with them. There may be temporary interruptions where everything seems unsettled and confusing, but we always find some settled state in the end.

It doesn’t mean that the new state will necessarily be better or worse—the new level of the water could be so low that it leaves your well dry, or so high that [it] covers the roof of your house. It just means that after the uncertainty and flood is over, there will be a new reality and a new level, and we as humans will find a way to adapt to it.

I never used that phrase before this story, but it’s an idea that I’ve repeated to myself many times in moments of stress. It’s just a reminder to myself that I will inevitably find a way to cope, even if I don’t know exactly how I’ll do that at the moment.

How would you react if the merging in “Water Finds Its Level” came into fruition—would you prefer to share reality with a complete stranger, a duplicate, or a counterpoint to yourself?

This is another way that Jennifer is like me—I’d rather not meet another version of myself. I’m not even sure I can explain why. I think it’s because we only have one chance to go through life, and I’m very happy with where my life has led me. But seeing another version of my own life would just be a reminder that nobody can ever do it all—that we all have to leave big parts of our potential untouched. That would be a hard lesson to be faced with.

Machine of Death was a huge hit on Amazon. Its sequel, This Is How You Die, will be published soon. Is there anything you would like your readers to know regarding your upcoming projects?

This Is How You Die is being published by Grand Central Publishing, and will be launched at San Diego Comic-Con in July, and then will be available in all the usual places you buy books. I won’t be there, but my co-editor David Malki will be doing some fun stuff at Comic-Con. He goes overboard with everything. I’m not sure at this time whether Ryan North will be there too.

We were happy to partner with Grand Central Publishing, since it means the sequel will be able to be sold in bookstores. We tried to go that route ourselves with the first book, and barely made it out alive. (There’s still a warehouse full of thousands of copies of the book, so if anybody is interested please get in touch!) We decided not to repeat that experiment without the help of a publisher.

Meanwhile, Grand Central Publishing was obviously interested in how the first book got to be a success. We were able to convince them to let us release about 25% of the book for free—anybody can read those stories without paying a dime. Back in March, David did a Kickstarter for a Machine of Death storytelling card game that he created, and most of the free stories were released as part of that. They’ll be collected and posted in some convenient format, but for now you can find them at http://kck.st/X84Ryq.

And, of course, look for the other 75% of This Is How You Die (which is just as good!) in July.

[Editor’s Note: In July, Lightspeed will be publishing Ryan North’s story from This Is How You Die, “Cancer.”]

Patrick J Stephens recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh and, after spending the entire year writing speculative fiction, came back with a Master’s in Social Science. His first collection (Aurichrome and Other Stories) can be found on Kindle and Nook.

Author Spotlight: Maureen McHugh
Robyn Lupo

Baby Boomers and their culture informs much of “Interview: On Any Given Day.” What sort of challenges did writing about boomers present for you?

I was born in 1959, so writing about Baby Boomers isn’t really that difficult. The culture depicted is white straight male Baby Boomer culture. Pretty much right down the middle. I never felt like a Baby Boomer, although technically I fall within the demographic. My husband, who is six years older than I am, has a collection of nostalgias and emotional touchstones that are, for lack of a better way to put it, “historical” for me. But I do remember where I was when JFK was shot. I was sitting on the floor in the living room watching television.

How did this story start for you?

I have no idea. I can only say that I often start stories with a couple of ideas that I smash together. In this case it was the business of a therapy for extending life expectancy. I was working on a novel that explored that idea and I had worked out a lot of my bio-technology. Telomeres, which are involved in cell death and are also involved in protecting against the kind of errors that result in cancer. I had thought about what would happen if you could make your cells young but you still looked 70. It occurred to me that there would be a certain number of men who would prey on young girls. There was a news story about a medical treatment that had been contaminated by a virus in the lab, and I had a story. You know, every parent’s worst nightmare.

Was it easier or more difficult writing this story in interview format?

It was fun writing a story in interview format. I love NPR and I love This American Life and Radio Lab and Off-Ramp. I would very much love to produce a story for This American Life except a) I’m not a journalist and don’t really like the work of going out and getting a story because it involves aggressively talking to people I don’t know and b) have absolutely no producing skills and don’t really want to learn them. So being a writer I could do the next best thing, which is fake one. I wouldn’t do it twice, because it’s a kind of gimmick. It has an energy when done once that it doesn’t have when repeated.

You’ve written over 20 short stories—what do you think most people get wrong regarding writing short stories?

If you are asking me why most people don’t get published, that’s a different question; the answer to that is that most people don’t read short stories. Last time I actually checked the figures, which was in the ’90s, a magazine like Asimov’s got 800-1000 manuscripts a month, and published 8 to 10 stories a month. (The New Yorker gets 10,000 a month). It’s easier than being a professional baseball player, but the pay sucks.

First, you’ve got to get really good at the sheer level of technique. Malcolm Gladwell has a piece of the myth of prodigies that says that musical prodigies appear to have practiced about the same number of hours as adults who are really skilled, they just did it earlier. That number is about 10,000 hours. I don’t know if the number is actually accurate, but I use it as a short hand. First you have to put in your 10,000 hours. In the course of the 10,000 hours, you have to discover what it is you are inclined to do, either by temperament, accident of culture/geography/circumstance, or dumb luck that makes people want to read you. It’s not enough to just be really, really competent. When I finished grad school, I was really, really competent. I could do the thing. I was way more competent at the craft of writing short fiction than most of the people who got published in Asimov’s. But I couldn’t get published.

It took me several more years to find something that people wanted to actually read. I went to China, by the way. It was drastic, but it gave me some really interesting cultural/geographical thing that people found interesting. I didn’t just write about China. In fact, I didn’t write about China in my short fiction much at all. I wrote about “otherness” a lot. Science fiction is a fiction by people who often feel like they don’t really fit in, about “otherness.” It really would have been easier, though, if, for example, I had just been funny, like Terry Pratchet. The good thing was that because I found the combination of things that made me interesting, gender/third world/otherness, after I became really technically competent, I hit the SF world pretty solidly. I was a bit of an overnight sensation. I had my first novel and a novella on the 1993 Hugo ballot.

I didn’t feel like an overnight sensation. I’d been writing and writing and writing. I had enough rejection slips to wallpaper a bathroom. Anyone with any sense would have stopped. So remember there are two parts. Technique and what people want to read.

You’re award-winning, with many, many words behind you. Do you have any advice for those just starting out?

People say write what you know. I would say, write about the questions that you most want answered. The things that matter most to you. Write about the emotional issues that frighten you. These things tend to start in things you already know, but they very rarely stay there. One of the nice things about writing SF is I can hide the scary stuff from myself a bit. I can pretend I’m writing about the future when I’m really writing about my own fears. When I say that “Interview: On Any Given Day” is a parent’s worst nightmare, that’s true, but what it’s also about is my own unwillingness to think about people like Terry, the man in the story. I don’t believe in villains and I don’t write them in my fiction because everybody believes they’re the hero of their own story. Also, STDs are scary. I don’t want to give myself one, even in fiction. Inhabiting the experience of a teenager who has one is creepy. (Making the story an interview story, by the way, is a good distancing device . . . I can “interview” the character and give myself a little distance.)

What’s next for you?

Right now, I’m going through the whole process again, learning to write for television and film. It’s just as hard the second time as it was the first.

Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in June, in Lightspeed . . .

We’ll have original fantasy by Megan Arkenberg (“The Huntsman”) and Christopher Barzak (“Paranormal Romance”), along with fantasy reprints by Theodora Goss (“Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon”) and Gene Wolfe (“Suzanne Delage”).

Plus, we’ll have original SF by Sarah Grey (“The Ballad of Marisol Brook”) and Sylvia Spruck Wrigley (“Alive, Alive Oh”), and SF reprints by Paul Park (“Get a Grip”) and Ken Liu (his current Hugo Award-nominee, “Mono no aware”).

For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella will be “The Fool's Tale” by L. Timmel Duchamp, and of course we’ll have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling authors Nalo Hopkinson and Robert J. Sawyer.

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!