Editorial, June 2013
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue thirty-seven of Lightspeed!

This year’s Nebula Awards were presented at the Nebula Awards Weekend event, May 16-19, in San Jose, CA. Lightspeed had 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. Alas, neither story took home the prize, but of course it was a huge honor to be nominated. Congratulations to Aliette de Bodard, who won in the short story category for her story “Immersion” (from Clarkesworld), and congrats to all of the other winners as well.

In happier award news, the Locus Award finalists have been announced, and we’re pleased to report that your humble editor has been nominated in the best editor category. Finalists for this year’s Theodore Sturgeon Award have also been named, and our own Ken Liu is on that ballot as well—not once, but twice: for his Nebula-nominated Lightspeed story “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” and his Hugo Award-nominated story “Mono no aware,” which we’re featuring in this issue as one of our reprints.

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

We 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 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’s current Hugo Award finalist (“Mono no aware”).

And of course we have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling authors Nalo Hopkinson and Robert J. Sawyer.

For our ebook readers, our ebook-featured novella is “The Fool's Tale” by L. Timmel Duchamp, and the featured novel excerpt is from Abaddon’s Gate by James S. A. Corey.

Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh. 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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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 Fool’s Tale
L. Timmel Duchamp

In September, 1589, a storm of “baffling winds” blew a Danish fleet carrying the sixteen-year-old Anne of Denmark off course, to the coast of Norway. Anne, the daughter of Frederick II, King of Denmark, had just been married by proxy to James VI of Scotland (who fourteen years later would accede to the throne of England). The fleet was within sight of Scotland, the story goes, when the storm struck. James and other persons of importance decided that witchcraft had caused the storm, and several Danish women were burned at the stake. Malice toward the fleet’s admiral, Peter Munch, not against James or Anne, was given as the motive. Munch, according to contemporary sources, had “boxed the ear” of a merchant and thereby enraged the merchant’s wife: “Quhilk storm of wind was alleged to have been raist by the witches of Denmark, by the confession of sundrie of them when they were burnt for the cause. What moved them was ane cuff, or blow, quhilk the admiral of Denmark gave to ane of the bailies of Copenhagen, whose wife being ane notable witch, consulted her cummers, and raised the said storm to be revengit upon the said admiral.”

Though the women who paid for the storm with their lives were Danish, James himself had a great terror of witches and did his best to fan anti-witch hysteria in his own country. Claiming that judges who were “lenient” with witches were pawns of Satan, he participated in “examinations” of suspected witches personally and wrote Daemonologie (1597), a nasty piece of hate-literature framed as a learned treatise on the subject. Convinced that the Earl of Bothwell was employing a number of witches to murderous ends against him, he supervised the torture of the suspected witches and conducted their interrogations himself, resulting in the “discovery” that the “baffling winds” that blew his bride’s fleet off course had been caused by a group of women known as “the witches of Lothian.” The said witches had accomplished this feat by casting cats that had been bound to the severed joints of dead bodies into the sea.

The man’s take on his world was definitely paranoid (a condition not atypical in powerful men of the day). But to give credit where credit is due, we must acknowledge that such ideas about witchcraft, women, and the supernatural originated with the perverse ideas two women-hating German Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Institor Krämer and Jakob Sprenger, had conjured up more than a century earlier in their infamous Malleus Maleficarum, or “Witches’ Hammer.” With the authorization of the complementary papal bull by Innocent VIII, Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, this fabulous duo took their inquisition on the road through most of Western Europe, far beyond the Rhineland, their original sphere of operations. As is well known, the paranoia they whipped up had a devastating impact on European society, particularly on women.

The Malleus was indeed a blunt instrument, or “hammer.” Besides inspiring authority-sponsored terrorism, it had the additional effect of preventing men like James I from ever imagining creative forms of magic not cast in the ugly, constipated, Malleus mold, much less perceiving its practice right under their very noses. But though the ferocity and indiscriminate wildness with which the hammer was wielded did not crush the practice of enchantment by adepts, it did, eventually, drive such adepts underground—and, finally, to extinction.

Since the spectacle of hammer-wielding maniacs in positions of authority provokes a certain streak of perversity woven through the fabric of my personality, I take the greatest pleasure in disseminating a tale of magic told (if not enacted) right under that very king’s nose. The tale has been pieced together from five manuscript fragments written on quarto-sized pages that were found in a sheaf of folio-sized sheets of music that had been wrapped in silk and kept in a thick leather pouch recently discovered in the false bottom of a Jacobean chest stored in the attic of the house of a distant descendant of a cousin of two Jacobean courtiers, Lord Harington and his daughter, Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Lord Harington was the tutor of Princess Elizabeth, James’s daughter, who eventually became the “Winter” Queen of Bohemia (so-called because her husband’s election to that throne, contested by the Hapsburgs, set off the Thirty Years War).1The Countess of Bedford was one of the most influential courtiers of her day, holding the Number-One spot among Anne of Denmark’s Ladies of the Bedchamber; she collected art as well as patronized several artists and poets, including John Donne and Ben Jonson. Julia Guthke, the music historian, believes that the music manuscripts present a rare English example of musica secreta. She describes the music as being “for the most part elaborate motets and madrigals in that highly wrought, bizarre-to-the-modern-ear style which is most (in)famously associated nowadays with Gesdualdo.” Composed for Renaissance princes and kept private, musica secreta was never performed in open court. “Such music,” Guthke says, “went abruptly out of fashion in the first decade of the 17th century, with the arrival of (a) the stile nuova (the most famous early practitioner of which was Monteverdi) and (b) ever more visibly absolutist courts that used music and dance less to give an exclusive and intimate pleasure to princes and more for the ostentatious display of their power.”

The identity of the tale’s author has stimulated a degree of scholarly speculation. The initials XCM appear in the lower right-hand corner of every sheet of music; suggestively, the author of the tale identifies herself as Xaviera Cristiana Morley. (The PRO State Papers Domestic do not mention anyone of that name, but a James Morley, musician, was employed by Elizabeth I, as well as by both James I and Anne of Denmark.) The author claims to be Anne of Denmark’s “fool.”2My good friend, the historian Louise Ducange, informs me that although paleographers and literary experts find the manuscript a convincing example of early 17th-century English prose (and chemical analysis confirms that the ink and paper are appropriate to the era), she doubts that such a person ever existed, and believes that whoever wrote the music and the tale simply called herself that, in order to protect her privacy (and reputation) in case either the music or the manuscript ever became public. I, L. Timmel Duchamp, am not a historian and therefore don’t qualify to debate the matter. But I would urge readers to consider the author’s self-description:

“I may call myself a fool, but though the King in his very person grants me a rich source of foolery, he doth not love fools, and I am not his, but his wife’s, and know better than to play the fool with such as he. In a man so ordinarily superstitious and frighted of women, the very look of my person, stitched to the needling wit of my tongue, is like to make me appear to his rolling eyes a witch for hanging. My laugh I know he detests, ‘an ugly clangor of mismatched bells’ he once called it; wisely, I keep it muted whenever he is by. And what would he think to learn that when he is absent the ladies take that very clangor up among themselves, in unconscious mimicry, a contagion they do not in the slightest seek to resist? I listen to them falling about laughing at the mildest of witticisms, in mere mimicry of the laughter that is the true source of their mirth. ’Tis the Queen who laughs the loudest and the longest, holding a hand to her side, indelicately doubled up, nearly spilling her breasts from her gown in abandon. ‘Cristiana!’ she shrieks (like everyone in the court, unwilling to call me “Xaviera”). ‘Have mercy,’ she begs, ‘for already my sides ache from thy earlier excesses.’ And ’tis not my joking she means, but my laugh. My witch’s laugh, the King could well have it. A laugh with power to corrupt.

“‘Child,’ oftimes saith my father to me, ‘how dost thy make such a sound, being thyself so tiny, and thy speaking voice like the piping of a small bird? Thy mother never sounded thus, nor I either, as thou knowest. How can such a sound come from such little lungs?’

“That a musician would even ask such a question! ‘How can’st such a sharp throb come from your smallest tabor?’ I always reply. ‘Or such a far-carrying hoot from the smallest length of wood pipe, or such a penetrating sweetness from even the smallest of your viols?’ My mother was a singer, and do I not remember how her voice had the power to soar above all the drums and viols and pipes playing at once?

“Oh my mother, my mother, that luminous Spanish beauty—nothing at all to the likeness of my person! Only my father asketh whence comes my laugh. All else ask whence came my very person, that is nothing like to her, nothing like to him, a creature some call a sport. My person, as grown to its full height as ’twill ever be, stands as high as the Queen’s waist; my breasts like a boy’s, my chest as large and arched and flatly smooth as a bird’s; my hair sprouts from my scalp every shade of the rainbow, as though Nature could not decide Her will; great brown and strawberry patches paint my olive skin with Mysteries physicians and magicians are pleased to read; my hands, mismatching my body, are as strong and as great as those of the largest men. These features alone—besides those talents I keep close, safe from all discovery—mark me as one of those strange creatures so dear to the physicians and moralists who instruct men and women on how to get children. All who see me wonder first whether I am the devil’s spawn, or the issue of the most improper sodomy practiced by my parents, or mayhap of some strange thoughts or sights my mother looked upon during pregnancy. Oh how they tasked my mother, to learn her sin, after bringing forth such as I! Oh how my mother was grieved, worrying to remember what fault had been hers. And yet, giving me her milk, as fine ladies seldom do their noble infants, and teaching me to sing and dance, and even setting me to perform for the old Queen herself, she did bear to me all the love any mother hath to give.”3

If such a narrative self has been cut out of whole cloth, it is in the form of a morally equivocal being, the misconceived freak from “unnatural” sexual intercourse, a being in contrast to whom the normal categories of human being were strictly defined. Such an invention, as my friend Louise Ducange agrees, would be an extraordinary-for-those-times conceit of authorship. While it often amused early modern people to write about freaks, what person in his or her right mind would have consented to speak from the position and in the voice of a freak? Trained closely to Occam’s Razor, I prefer, over the conceptually extraordinary, a simple fact: viz., that Xaviera Cristiana Morley did exist and did produce the tale. So. As is always the case with any text, whether the tale is truth or fiction, readers will have to decide for themselves.

In a society in which service was the most important avenue to advancement at all levels, one of the most essential skills was the ability to make oneself acceptable to superiors . . . Marks of respect to be shown in conversation with superiors included baring the head, dropping the right knee, keeping silence till spoken to, listening carefully and answering sensibly and shortly. Compliance with commands was to be immediate, response to praise heartily grateful.

—Ralph Houlbrouke, The English Family

On a February evening in 1609, the Countess of Bedford arranged a special performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night for the Queen’s court. The Countess intended this performance to be a simple affair, a light amusement meant to whisk away the queen’s inevitable letdown following her grand triumph of February 2. On that day Anne had appeared, in a masque, as the queen of the twelve greatest queens in history, Amazon warriors all.4She and the Countess had devoted months to cooking it up with Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. According to the Venetian ambassador, Marc Antonio Correr, the Queen had personally supervised “daily rehearsals and trials of the machinery.” By all accounts, James’s court far exceeded contemporary notions of extravagance with the Masque of Queens.

The King, it had been thought, would be at Theobalds, an estate he kept for hunting.5The masque had kept him from hunting, and the three courts combined (James’s, Anne’s, and Prince Henry’s) had already staged a total of twenty-three plays that winter. And a Shakespearean comedy was not, after all, the sort of play James was likely to attend for fun. And yet that evening, just as the company was about to enter the Performance Hall, the King and a large party of his cronies showed up—“loud, and loutish, and lousy lords,” as the tale has it—staggering drunk. At their unexpected appearance, the Queen’s Fool thought, “’Tis clear intrigue or mischief is afoot, or I be no fool!”

As the King, Queen, Prince and crowd of courtiers stood about waiting while accommodation was made for the King’s party in the Performance Hall, the question “What doth the King here this evening?” was bruited about in low murmurs with lifted eyebrows. The Fool, at a distance from the royal persons, used the special power of her “amber orb” to scrutinize them and their favorites. The Queen showed not the least sign of irritation or curiosity as to the King’s change of plan. The King looked as he always did when drunk. But the Fool was suspicious. Not a soul at that Court failed to read political and ideological subtexts in even the most incidental piece of ritual, much less in the performance of an entire play. And knowing what she knew of the Queen’s and Countess’s preferences, she had no doubt that the Countess had arranged something the King had not been meant to see.

The clever, silvery laugh of the Countess slipped and slithered through the raucous, bawdy racket made by the King’s Gentlemen, its timbre too thin and fine to be mired in the coarse Scots’ brawl.6Though responsible for the evening’s entertainment, she betrayed not the slightest sign of dismay at the King’s presence. The Fool watched the royal fingers busy themselves clumsily at the Favorite’s codpiece and wondered whether the Countess assumed that the King would be too preoccupied with lust or befuddled by drink to notice whatever delicious thing she had planned. And the thought struck her that perhaps Master Jonson, lately at odds with certain of the Queen’s ladies, had somehow maneuvered the Favorite (perhaps through the latter’s handler, Sir Thomas Overbury), into insisting on attending, in order to stir up the King’s resentment against them. The Fool thought it unlikely, but not impossible. Master Jonson had not liked the subtext the Queen and Countess had required of the Masque of Queens; he had quite other ideas about women than to glorify their bold, martial prowess. Since the King, having easily recognized it as a score for his wife in their continual game of one-upmanship, had expressed only perfunctory praise of the masque, perhaps Master Jonson thought the time was ripe for exposing the Queen’s circle’s tendency to lèse-majesté.7

As the crowd of waiting courtiers milled and gossiped, everyone with a clear view of James watched his slightest gesture and twitch (a continual stream of twitches, frankly, since James habitually jerked his neck and rolled his eyes, behavior some of his courtiers variously attributed to his having been wet-nursed by a woman who was always drunk, or to his having been taught at a tender age to be fearful of assassination and witchcraft). Privileged with her far-seeing amber orb, the Fool watched a flea dive from the King’s beard onto a point of his high silver-threaded white lace ruff, dance briefly with the grand style of the Queen herself, then make a splendid gavotte, springing its body gracefully and elegantly high onto the jeweled royal earlobe. The Fool caught the Venetian ambassador staring at this royal ballet. Looking again at the King, she saw the royal tongue thrust into the Favorite’s ear. On seeing the King spit phlegm onto the marble palace floor only inches from Sir Robert Sidney’s jeweled and gold-thread embroidered velvet shoe, she thought, “’Tis our honor and place to behold all that Majesty is and does.” The king’s very vermin were royal, and the King’s stuttering Scots contortion of the English Tongue, too. Almost since childhood the King had proclaimed to anyone who would listen—in Latin, French, and Italian besides his own peculiar rendering of English—that he, by God’s grace, was a “Little God on Earth.” In his paternal masterpiece, Basilicon Doron, he bade his son Henry to be thankful to God “for that he made you a little God to sitte on the throne, and rule ouer other men.” James also said, “What God hath conioined then, let no man separate. I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the head, and it is my Body.” Kings, James went so far to claim, are “euen by GOD himselfe . . . called Gods.”8“My new rib,” the Fool recalled hearing that the King had designated Anne when they were first married. So how many ribs did the King now have? she wondered.

John Wheeler blasted out a trumpet fanfare, supported after the first five notes by an ensemble of two shawms (one of them played by James Morley) and three trombones. Under the direction of the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, the Court perfectly arranged itself according to rank and began its entrance into the Performance Hall. Though the musicians played a march-like processional, the King and Queen paced their steps as though to a basse-dance, which the Fool believed must be the Queen’s doing, for the King, shambling and lurching with the clumsiness and crookedness that afflicted him when he was drunk, plainly depended on the Queen’s guidance to walk straight. And the Queen’s fondness for dance in all its forms made her wont to transform every ceremonial movement into dance whenever the King and Lord Chamberlain would allow her. After the King and Queen followed Prince Henry, paired with the Countess of Bedford because Lady Arbella, next the prince in rank, was confined to bed with small pox. After them came the several ambassadors and their ladies, including the French Ambassador (who was able to attend solely because the Spanish Ambassador had departed for Spain), followed by “the bevy of Barons and Countessess highest in their majesties’ favor,” then the “Knights and Ladies and so on,” down through the Great Chain of Being, with no one for once arguing with Sir Robert over his placement, with no gentleman jostling, punching, collaring, or threatening another, only the raucous talk and laughter of the drunken Scots spoiling the celestial harmony of the general social order. The Fool, scampering on her short legs to keep up even at such a stately pace, was assigned a place almost at the end of the processional, not much behind John Donne and immediately following the interesting Aemelia Lanyer who, like the Fool, was both a foreigner’s and musician’s daughter.9“Who,” asks the Fool, “cannot take comfort at the neatness of our order? God is in his heaven, the King’s Majesty is on his throne, and we, so privileged to shelter beneath such a paternal roof, are safe indeed.”

And so the Queen was seated in the first row in a throne-like chair on the left, the King in his throne-like chair in the center, and Prince Henry in his throne-like chair on the right. To the left of the Queen were stools placed for each of the ambassadors present, and one also, between the King and the Prince for the Favorite. Velvet-covered chairs were placed to the right of the Prince for the Lord Chancellor and the ambassadors’ Ladies, and to the left of the ambassadors for the wife of the Lord Chancellor. Benches were placed in rows behind, where on the most prominent and comfortably upholstered of these sat the Barons and Countesses, and behind those everyone else in their order. The Fool’s place was on a plain oak bench. Sitting on the special cushion she had brought to augment her height, though, she had a clear view of the Queen and Countess, and with her special powers had no trouble eavesdropping when the Countess’s ash-blond head leaned forward to whisper in the Queen’s ear. Their exchange, of course, was safe from the King’s notice, for his own head was bent far forward, with his face up against the Favorite’s, nuzzling his neck, cheek, chin, and . . . nose.

When Shakespeare appeared on the stage, the Fool recognized his costume as having recently belonged to Sir William Cornwallis.10The playwright bowed low, first to the King, next to the Queen, then to the Prince, and finally to the entire audience. Seeing the relative bareness of the stage, the Fool was reminded of the fabulous machinery and flashing colored lights of the Masque of Queens. Imagination and wit, not material wealth and physical invention, would that night be paramount. Said Shakespeare, “grandly and proudly”: “Your Majesties, your Highness, your Lordships and Ladyships, gentlemen and gentlewomen.” The King giggled at something the Favorite said; Shakespeare, of course, pretended not to notice. “’Tis my company’s immensely great honor and pleasure to present to you my comedy, which I call Twelfth Night Or What You Will, for your amusement and entertainment. We bestow our exceeding gratitude and thanks upon the Countess of Bedford, who, having seen it performed time past in the Middle Temple, duly recommended it to the Queen’s Majesty’s attention, and do verily hope to meet the faith in our play evinced by her shining grace.” Then Shakespeare bowed again and backed quickly behind one of the screens set to the side of the stage.

Almost at once the Duke of Orsino entered, richly dressed and bejewelled, followed by a retinue of courtiers and musicians. His voice was bitter and melancholy. “If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it, that surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die.” Obediently, the musicians played—softly, though, softly, certainly not loudly enough to drown the King’s hiccup and giggle and grating growl of words too Scots-tainted for most of the English ears present to grasp. “Will you go hunt, my lord?” said one of the duke’s courtiers. “Tomorrow!” the King’s Favorite shouted, drowning out the actor’s response. At which the King collapsed into a fresh outburst of laughter as raucous as that of any drunkard in a tavern.

Since certain relationships in Twelfth Night are integral to the Fool’s tale, and since the Fool penned her tale for someone well-acquainted with the play (assumed by the scholars to be the Countess of Bedford), a plot summary at this point is in order. The play opens after a shipwreck in which a pair of teen twins, Viola and Sebastian of Messaline, are separated. These twins are supposedly identical in appearance, and each believes the other to have perished in the wreck, but Sebastian is rescued by a pirate named Antonio (to whom he is known as “Roderigo”), and the two became lovers. Eventually Sebastian announces he is leaving for Illyria. Antonio, desperately enamored, begs him not to go and says that the Duke of Orsino, who rules Illyria, bears him, Antonio, a grudge and will destroy him if he ever gets his hands on him. When Sebastian leaves anyway, Antonio follows, regardless of the danger.

In the meantime Viola, with the help of the captain of the ship that wrecked, disguises herself as a boy (“as a eunuch,” as she calls it) and places herself in the service of the Duke of Orsino, under the name “Cesario.” Orsino, she finds, is languishing in a sea of narcissistic self-pity, apparently in love with his neighbor, Lady Olivia, who is in mourning for her brother and refuses to have anything to do with Orsino’s suit for marriage (or anyone else’s, for that matter). Orsino, struck by “Cesario’s” style, sends Viola to woo Lady Olivia in his stead. Olivia of course falls madly in love with “Cesario”—while Viola falls in love with Orsino, who himself comes to have rather tender feelings for the “boy.”

Interlacing these love plots are scenes of disorder in Lady Olivia’s household (which is female-headed, after all). Her uncle, Sir Toby Belch (played by Shakespeare), throughout the play carouses with two buddies and makes trouble. He schemes to get one of the buddies, the foppish and foolish Sir Andrew Aguecheek, married to his niece and engineers an unwilling duel between the latter and “Cesario.” Lady Olivia’s fool, the merry, mischievous, but often wise Feste, and Maria, her waiting woman, join their revels and form a league against Olivia’s social-climbing, snobbish, and puritanical steward, Malvolio. It is Maria’s idea to expose Malvolio’s ambitions to Lady Olivia by writing an unsigned letter that obliquely encourages his pretensions to wed a lady above his status, a letter Maria allows him to find just lying about. Malvolio, believing the letter is for him, slyly presses his attentions on Olivia and is locked up as mad for his pains, thereby giving Feste, Maria, and Sir Toby real scope for tormenting him.

The main plot comes to a head when Sebastian and Antonio arrive (separately) on the scene. Sebastian, taken for “Cesario,” fights the duel and agrees—with a bewildered sense of having stumbled on a windfall—to Olivia’s proposal of marriage; the Duke’s men arrest Antonio, and Antonio, taking “Cesario” for Sebastian, begs the return of the purse he had given Sebastian, which Viola, of course, does not have. Inevitably, the Duke, with Viola, Lady Olivia, and Antonio all encounter one another, with Antonio reviling Viola for having betrayed his friendship, and Olivia claiming Viola as her husband. Viola, mystified, protests these claims, but the Duke condemns her perfidy. At which Sebastian comes on the scene, and Olivia (with everyone else) is duly astonished, and unable (!) to tell who is the real “Cesario.” All is revealed. The Duke offers to marry Viola once she has dressed in women’s clothing; Viola agrees to do so when her old clothes are found. Since she had left her old clothes with the captain, and it is revealed that Malvolio had had him arrested, Malvolio is released and receives Olivia’s apologies, and the play ends with plans for a double-wedding.

Eroticism, in the early modern period, is not gender-specific, is not grounded in the sex of the possibly ‘submissive’ partner, but is an expectation of that very submissiveness. As twentieth-century readers, we recognise the eroticism of gender confusion, and reintroduce that confusion as a feature of the dramatic narrative. Whereas, for the Elizabethan theatre audience, it may be the very clarity of the mistakenness—the very indifference to gendering—which is designed to elicit the pleasurable response from the audience.

—Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically

The fragments left by Queen Anne’s fool provide a blow-by-blow description not of the play per se, but of particular audience responses to the play—and of her own sudden insights into the performance’s subtexts. She writes, for instance, “soon it is the pretty little boy playing Viola’s turn to enter. ’Tis Robin, a known flirt at court, pert as a kitten, and when younger, a strong countertenor, though not so tuneful as would make him suitable for the trade. Now the King’s party quiets, pleased to hear his sweet piping voice—until, that is, they cannot help but snicker, as when Viola says: ‘I’ll serve this duke. Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him.’”

The Fool describes Sir Toby Belch’s and Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s bawdy foolery as “quite to the King’s taste.” She notes that in most of the scenes between Viola (as “Cesario”) and the Duke, the audience is closely (and mostly quietly) attentive—though even these scenes are distinguished by remarks from the audience, as when the Duke says, “For they shall yet belie thy happy years that say thou art a man. Diana’s lip is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound, and all is semblative a woman’s part.”

The Fool says that “a good English voice, from a bench closer to me than to the King,” called out, “And just what size is thy pipe, boy?” The Fool expresses annoyance—and the opinion that if the King had not been present, the man would not have been “so impertinent with his own pipe.” A short while later, when Malvolio describes Cesario, “as a squash is before a peascod, or as a codling when ’tis almost an apple. ’Tis with him in standing water, between boy and man,” the same male voice burst out, “Aye, and full ripe enough to be tasty!” The Fool notes that she was not alone in her annoyance. The Countess of Bedford’s kinswoman and maid of honor, a certain Mistress Goodyere, went so far as to get up from her seat and go to speak to one of the Queen’s ushers, presumably to have the man silenced if he persisted.

The Fool’s reactions to the play include professional interest whenever Feste plies his craft: “Next enters the Lady’s fool, and my interest quickens most proprietorial. I dearly love the clever fool who proves wise, giving a fillip to such humble work as mine, and yet find myself gnawed by jealousy to see one such of readier, nimbler wit on his feet than is ever possible in true life. These lines he speaks were written for him, of a quill’s invention. And does not clever ink flow more freely from a quill than twisted wit rolls off a nimble tongue? How can the Queen my mistress not wonder at the clumsiness of my own, after seeing this night’s work? How compare I to Feste? Not at all, alas, not at all!”

Significantly, the Fool explicitly distinguishes what interests her from what interests the vocal male audience. The male audience is clearly most entertained by the drunken hilarity engineered by Sir Toby Belch and the fool, and most emotionally engaged by the Duke’s relations with “Cesario.” The Fool, contrarily, expresses boredom with the drunken hilarity and intense interest in Lady Olivia’s relations with “Cesario” and Maria’s cleverness and loyalty to her lady. Perhaps the greatest anxiety the play raises for her lies in the extent to which Olivia and Maria flout gender restrictions, revealed by the Fool’s certainty that they will be punished. She quotes “Cesario” telling Olivia (after Olivia’s told “him” that she’d heard he’d been “saucy at my gates”) “I see what you are, you are too proud,” and notes that it’s clear that Olivia would rather have a lover she could pity from above, than one she must simply respect.

The Fool’s first clue to the Countess’s subtext is Sir Toby’s naming Maria “Penthesilea,” which the Fool at first takes as “a cheekiness for certain, when that queen’s true image only lately graced our Court.” A few sentences later, she reports: “Lo, at this very moment of the Duke’s speech, do I suddenly lay my thoughts on that niggling familiarity that has been teasing my brain since I first put my eyes to this character. Ho, and so it is, that the Duke’s silver-threaded ruff, his royal purple velvet doublet slashed with rose silk, his worsted and silk hosen seamed with evenly matched seed pearls, and even his high, cork-heeled shoes lined with gold and studded at the toes with great garnets, are all the very items I recall seeing the King’s Majesty himself wearing not five winters past! And it is now, too, that I see that as the Duke lifts his goblet to his lips, why he holds it in that peculiar, clumsy way only the King doth, with his crooked elbow thrust awkwardly out at its own unnatural angle! And I notice, now, the odd restlessness of eyes that never stay still—though not rolling wildly, as the King’s are like to do, yet in discreet emulation thereof . . . Yea, all becomes obvious of an instant, to she that hath eyes to see, making the nagging puzzle breathtakingly plain! How now, can it be that the King doth not see it himself? ’Tis he so far gone in his cups, or may it be that, never having beheld himself in a true mirror of disinterested fashioning, his Majesty would not recognize himself were he to meet his own image in bright light and open face-to-face, and not as in this mirror so darkly?

“And so ’tis, while Feste sings a sad love song, I casteth my eye about, certain for to find other likenesses from the King’s court. And straightaway my far-seeing orb discerns among the crowd of ducal courtiers one with the mannerisms and style of hair-dressing of Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk and another with those of Sir Robert Cecil himself—wearing clothing I could swear had once been Sir Robert’s. And so it becomes a game with me, to catch out the likenesses, and guess at those the recognition of which come not at once to my slow, feeble brain.

“Such cunning doings! Surely I cannot be the only one watching who has taken the joke. The players would not have put such a game forward, as they fear the King’s custom of clapping playwrights and players into gaol when annoyed by a report of public mockery. Methinks it can be only the Countess of Bedford’s doings. She hath the power to protect the lot of them, and the wherewithal to deflect the King’s anger (if anger there chances to be). And being the most clever person in all three royal courts, and the one who has arranged the play for the Queen’s amusement, my doubts are none at all.”

The Fool takes a moment to note the pleasure to the audience of watching “Cesario” speak his love to the Duke in cryptic language: “And how many seated in this hall do not know the pleasure of speaking unpolitic truths under cover of a mask? Or the like pleasure of telling one’s love, without surrendering oneself?” And then she swings back to her unpicking of all the threads of the subtext: “But this is rich! As the steward, Malvolio, enters, ever pompous and fussy and self-important, the scales fall from my amber, attentive eye, and I see that spot of grease on the sleeve, just above the lacy cuff, where Sir George Carew, omitting to see me standing so low beside him, jostled me as I held out to him a gold plate of sweetmeats and pastries for his delectation, at which he brushed against the pastries, making a fair mess of his sleeve, a general smearing of raspberry and cream and butter into the cloth, for that the gentleman cursed me as a devil’s spawn of a dwarf. And though the laundresses worked over it, ’twas never the same, and eventually was gi’en up for another. The Queen could not bear him as her Lord Chamberlain, and would not have him (though she must needs bow to the King’s command and allow him to stand her Vice Chamberlain). How this player doth take Sir George’s tapping of the foot and his exaggerated angle of the chin to the life! The Queen’s Majesty must know this Malvolio—even if Sir George himself doth not! How choice a delight, to hear this puffed up steward take up a letter neither signed nor addressed, well tangled in his own insolent assumption that in his vast astuteness ’tis in his power to grasp its portent as if ’twere a riddle put to him by the Sphinx herself. Vanity alone driveth him, that cutteth the text’s cloth to his own puny measure. How like a man, I say. A letter, found on the ground, must be meant for him! A letter left unsigned must be from his mistress! It cannot be else, but that she be in love with him, though anyone with eyes open must see that she is mad for Cesario! Hark! When a man knoweth not how to read a woman’s text, it behooveth him to acknowledge himself mistressed! And that that true mistress, in this case—as she be the true author of the text o’er which he labors so mightily—be Maria, glorious, clever, puissant, is naught that any gentlemen in this audience will think to notice.

“But what pleasure doth this clever mask render this insufferable character’s humiliation! Saith he, puffing out his chest: ‘Daylight and champaign discovers not more! This is open. I will be proud, I will read politic authors, I will baffle Sir Toby, I will wash off gross acquaintance, I will be point-devise the very man. I do not now fool myself, to let imagination jade me . . .’ ’Tis sweet, so sweet for a joke. ’Twill be e’en sweeter if neither Sir George nor the King discover it, so to consider how fleeting sweetness can be when swiftly followed by the bitter. Ah, and enters Maria now, to collect her ’gratulation from the gentlemen—and I see, at once, what I did not before. In faith, this Maria stands straight and slim, wearing an ash-blonde wig. Earlier, I cavilled that they named her Penthiselea. But ’tis all clear now, the cunning of that designation. For who is Maria but our very Countess herself! And after Feste, the fool, is not Maria the cleverest creature in the play?”

At this point the text breaks off. The next fragment begins with the revelation that Lady Olivia’s costume once belonged to the Queen, and that the actor portraying her is recognizably imitating the Queen’s gestures and demeanor. The Fool, certain that the men in the audience aren’t getting it, is triumphant at her own superior penetration: “The gentlemen admire the boys beneath the gowns and scorn the Lady who cannot attract the love of one already taken by the Duke. ’Tis a dangerous game, and yet safe enough. For unless the King’s Majesty catches out the joke this night, tomorrow ’twill be too late, since his pride and vainglory will have the head of anyone who dares suggest he’s been made a fool however royal without himself noticing ’t. The Countess has that right and knows her business, as fully as Maria, making sport of Malvolio, knows hers.”

For the rest of her account of the play, the Fool continually notes the real persons of the Court who she believes the Countess intends to be conflated with the play’s characters. The audience apparently ceases making vocal interruptions—with the exception of an incident involving the King. During one of Malvolio’s speeches, “the King’s Majesty’s voice raises a raucous howl for a chamberpot so thick on the royal tongue that e’en those of us well-practiced in grasping his speech are deprived of the exact, coarse words of his demand. Malvolio is halted in his nonsense, rooted to his place and struck dumb as a pebble lying passive in a field. I pray the King’s need be only to piss, which is all the use mine own eyes have ’til now seen put to the golden pot the boy called Matthew carries everywhere after the King. Short as I be, ’tis never been my privilege to hunt with their Majesties, but who has not heard of the King’s loosing his bowels off the back of his horse whilst the Queen and court wait on the royal pleasure?

“But ho, the audience becometh restless at this wait—and ’tis true, the King doth not always piss as freely as a royal body would claim its privilege to do—and ’round about do maketh whispers and rumblings, chuckles and titters. At such times methinks of the rumors whispered concerning the royal childhood in the wilds of Scotland, that his chamberlain carried him everywhere until he was five, though he be dressed in rags through the meanness of those Scots lords who called themselves his subjects. (Which whispers always bring another crop about the Queen’s Majesty, raised in the luxury of a wealthy court, to the effect that as a princess she was carried everywhere till she reached ten, a nonsense impossible for a sober soul to put credence in.)

“Of a sudden, shouting, the King bids the player to continue, testily saying he doth not know the reason the blockhead standeth there, not saying his lines, and can it be that he has forgot them, and if so, would not someone of the Company kindly prompt the dolt?

“The poor player looks plainly distressed and lost in the wave of titters that sweeps through the audience. But lo, my acutest ear picks up the soft-spoken cue, ‘I would not have him miscarry for the half of my dowry,’ and the player stands erect, thrusting a leg forward, puffing out his chest, the epitome of foolish vanity. Go to, methinks, all appreciation for the fellow’s fine aplomb. ‘O ho, do you come near me now? No worse a man than Sir Toby to look to me!’ he crows, all gleeful, vaunting pride.

“The sound of water trickling in the pot (albeit ’tis of metal, though fine, chased gold) carries clearly to every ear in the audience. ‘I discard you,’ saith Malvolio. ‘Let me enjoy my private.’ The whilst we all listen to the King’s business, a Tinkle, tinkle, as nurses say to their small charges. ‘Carry his water to the wisewoman,’ Fabian sayeth, just as the King’s golden pot be carried away. The scene is full riotous: who cannot but laugh? Even Mistress Lanyer, seated at my side, nigh as worldly and discreet as the Countess herself, shakes with laughter. The happy coincidence is more than anyone sober can bear!”11

As her account of the play advances, the Fool becomes more and more focused on what we (though not she) would call “gender differences.” She notes of the duel that puts “Cesario’s” “manhood” on the spot: “This tack the gentlemen all adore, for making so sharp the difference between a boy playing a woman masquerading as a man, and a true man (of the which, however, Sir Andrew might be less than a stellar exemplar).” And notes—“‘A very dishonest, paltry boy, and more a coward than a hare,’ saith Sir Toby. The gentlemen in the audience all roar and make jokes, that when a female goes in breeches, she’s always dishonest and paltry, and a poor imitation only.” When Sebastian comes along and plunges without question into fighting Sir Andrew, “The gentlemen all cheer, satisfied to see a man act as the one imitating him so failed to do.” The Fool’s dissatisfaction grows as the male audience’s satisfaction increases when Olivia wins Sebastian (“a full man” she mistakes for her beloved “Cesario”): “Sebastian is all delight at his strange fortune, as are the gentlemen in the audience, nudging one another and chuckling. The ladies, though, keep silent, seeing how ’tis that the Lady, heretofore so much her own mistress, is now to be made a pitiful, cheated fool of.”

Significantly, her description of the play’s ending indicates the trajectory of the next day’s adventure. “[A]ll [is] discovered and wrapped into a parcel for carrying away in the neatest, most seemly fashion. The Lady Olivia’s love is seen to be improper and foolish, Viola’s to be proper and wise. Like the late Queen, the Lady Olivia was surrounded by men of inferior standing, refusing all offers of marriage from suitors of her rank. Unlike her royal counterpart, tho’, this lady ends worsted (if not bested). Who with eyes cannot see how her gaze travels to and fro’ ’tween Sebastian and her whom the lady thought was called “Cesario,” and how her expression changes from one of puzzlement, astonishment, and doubt, to that of disappointment and disillusion, e’en as Sebastian taketh her arm and doth stand at her side, her revealed lord and master? The very sight puts a sadness in my belly, though the players do not mean us to pity the lady. Maria, most excellent and marvellous dea ex machina, too, is rendered silent and harmless, as a proper woman must be in the face of true authority and mastery—such as neither the upstart Malvolio nor the debauched Sir Toby could be said to possess. Aye, Sebastian and the Duke stand exalted, the which being men of rank soon to be wed they must be, while Antonio, standing on t’other side of Sebastian, seemeth securely assured of his beloved’s protection and affection—though now in the place of the subordinate rather than the master of the one he loves, as befits their respective ranks, which heretofore hath been concealed. Malvolio, that climbing, prating puritan, is banished, no more to threaten decent order with his moralizing self-importance. But joy of joys, the fool is given the last word, and that in jolly song, that the audience may be recalled to a full consciousness of how much it has its entertainers to thank for the evening’s pleasures: But that’s all one, our play is done, And we’ll strive to please you every day. With a hey-ho, aye, I say, and a tra-la-la, tra-la-la. For a good piper is worth his pay—and so every actor, musician, and wit!”

However differently the early and late discourses about women and the family manage femininity, both depend on the powers of representation, whether it be the spectacle of the punished female body or the demure depiction of a right marital relation.

—Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama

The audience’s applause woke the King. Except to make way for persons of royal rank, the members of the audience left the Hall without ceremony, nearly stampeding the Fool, who describes herself as vulnerable to being knocked in the head by (sheathed) swords and the skirts of ladies’ gowns “so starched and wired and farthingal’d that e’en as they knock into my face they conceal my small person from everyone around me.” Rushing to supper, people in the crowd gossip rather than talk about the play, trading rumors of expectations for how badly scarred the Princess Arbella will be from small pox, of the Privy Council’s latest plan to send an army of loyal administrators to put Ireland and the colonies into strict order, and—perhaps the most eagerly discussed tidbit, the goodheartedness of Prince Henry for having declared himself unwilling to use the saddle James had given him for a New Years’ gift until the woman who embroidered it was paid for her labor.

Much later, after the Queen had ceremoniously retired for the night, a group of courtiers congregated in Cecily Bulstrode’s room with the intention of playing a round of “Newes.”12The Fool says that while pens and ink and paper were set out, the company speculated on the King’s reasons for attending the play. Lady Mary Wroth’s theory was that the Favorite was infatuated with Robin, the actor who played Viola/Cesario. But Sir Thomas Overbury13scoffed at the suggestion: “’Twould be a folly, and though he himself would never claim to be the equal in wit to any in this chamber, ’tis not a folly like any he’d likely make himself liable to.” The Fool notes that since “the gentleman’s ordinary demeanor maketh his mouth and eyes to be a sneer, ’tis impossible to take his tone with any surety.”

Because of all those present only Overbury’s status allowed him to speak so frankly, “the titters his speech draws run wildly, as does the fox from spaniels, ragged with the haste and fervor of one that holds dear his life.”

Lady Anne Southwell, casting an arch look at the Countess of Bedford, said, “But it came to my ears after the play, whilst I was caught up in the crush to supper, that ’twas expected by many of the King’s gentlemen that something unseemly might tonight be acted. I heard one gentleman say to another, in his disappointment, did not everybody know the Queen’s taste for comedies not to the King’s Majesty’s liking, and what was planned was a dessert, as ’twere, to the late Masque, which as this gentleman would have it, so displeased the King’s Majesty that he’s determined never again to let the Queen and the Countess direct another’s making. The gentlemen both expressed themselves of the opinion that faced with the King’s presence, the Countess directed the players to act another play than the one originally intended for tonight.”

“Pish, posh, mere stuff and nonsense,” replied the Countess. “The King was all graciousness in applauding our efforts in making the Masque. The Queen, I’ll warrant, is well satisfied o’er that.”

The Fool notes that the Countess dared not speak of the Queen’s taste for seeing the King and his Scots mocked on the stage, and that the Queen’s preference, like Sir Thomas’s open disrespect for the Favorite, was her privilege.

“So there was no other play to be performed tonight?” said Overbury, his lips curling into a sly smile he couldn’t quite manage to conceal.

“Nay, sir, there was not,” said the Countess coldly, as though she couldn’t have cared less whether he believed her—adding, “And ’twas no disappointment for the Queen, for certain, except in its ending, which I’ll confess left her somewhat annoyed.”

“Somewhat annoyed!” said John Donne, whom the Fool describes as “all astonishment.” “A harmonious ending for all but the puritan, whose expulsion was necessary for the general happiness, and marriages all ’round? How could such an ending annoy any woman, when women, aye, even those of the highest rank, are always mad for love matches, the which generally bring the greatest fiasco when made amongst families of rank? For surely the Queen, who knoweth the difference between sober duty and fantasy, could not construe such fantasy to imply sanction to the disorder of lovematches in our own society?”

The Countess replied tartly: “Nay, the Queen, sir, is not of such weak discernment as it pleases thou to think.”

Donne flushed in face and neck. Of no great rank or standing, he was allowed to join the company to entertain them, not because he was “a true member of the circle.” “A misstep,” the Fool writes, “comes easily to the feet of such as we, and cannot help but bring mortification, as never happens with the others, who can laugh off any clumsiness in the sure confidence that they have the right.” Swiftly Donne rose to his feet and bowed gravely to the Countess. No one, the Fool says, was surprised at the formality of his gesture, since the poet relied on the Countess as his chief patron, who he hoped would either support his art or secure a commission for him as Secretary in the Virginia Company. “My pardon, My Lady,” said he, his tone a match to his manner, “I meant no slight to the Queen’s understanding. My question was more general than particular, for that it was my discernment that was too weak to imagine any other cause for annoyance.”

Said Overbury, seizing a liberty none of the others would dare: “So please to tell us, Lucy, lest we expire of curiosity, how the Queen could be annoyed at the ending?”

The Countess thrust back her head and stared haughtily down her nose at the company. “Did no one of you here feel a dissatisfaction, then?” she said, as though posing the obvious.

When no one else replied, the Fool herself spoke: “Most decidedly, My Lady. The gentlemen were all made happy, and the ladies in a way to becoming most unhappy. But do not comedies always end so? All the reason being, I believe, that men maketh them, and care naught for the woman’s part, or else assume that making men happy is all that women do care for.”

The Fool’s answer drew a furor of scorn and ridicule down on her head. “And so,” she writes, “foreseeing my sure defeat in their common opinion, I cry surrender without hesitation.” Said she: “I being but a fool, I cannot help but speak foolishness.”

The Countess, however, smiled and nodded her approbation for the Fool. “Cristiana speaks the Queen’s mind. As the Queen’s Majesty herself saith, ‘’Tis impossible to think the Lady Olivia could be happy with the poor substitute, a mere seeming in appearance, of the one she loves, who is nothing like the one the Author, at the end, resigns her to. She, who has lived without a master, which a husband must always be, suddenly to be subject to such a one after having chosen quite another—’tis a tragic ending indeed, and no comedy as far as I can see. And yet the play itself doth not so much as take note of the tragedy, but celebrates it as a happy conjunction! And so the Lady is rendered dumb, to allow the play’s supposed joyful ending.”

The company was “struck dumb”—but for a “few astonished moments only, it boasting some of the cleverest tongues in the Kingdom.” Overbury found his voice first. “Surely the Queen’s Majesty would not want all entertainments to be like her masques, with Amazon warrior Queens prevailing over men, which is the world turned upside-down?” He tittered, as though nothing could be more ridiculous, and Cecily Bulstrode smirked and cut her eyes at him, while Lady Anne Southwell looked more thoughtful than amused. Overbury waved his languid, beringed hand with more energy than he usually showed. “Olivia’s household was chaos throughout the play,” said he, “exactly for that it was masterless. Surely no person of sense could agree that such bedlam is to be taken as anything but an argument for why men must keep rule o’er women?”

The Countess’s kinswoman, Mistress Goodyere, said, “And yet, Sir, I myself doth take the Queen’s point. A certain melancholy steals over my heart now that I think on the Lady’s feelings. Sebastian showed himself to be nothing much like his sister, but in appearance only. When a woman loves, whilst she loveth the body, she also loveth the spirit and heart as well. I do not see how one who would love the youth as Cesario seemed to her to be would then love another very much unlike.” Mistress Goodyere smiled gently at Master Donne. “The which is to say, I do not see the lovematch in that union, Master Donne.”

Donne said, “somewhat (though kindly) mocking,” “I see that I mistook the matter entirely. The which must be laid to my ignorance of the true workings of ladies’ hearts. But you must grant that Viola’s union with the Duke was a lovematch? Or doth the ladies find fault with that match as well?”

The Countess said “with that clever dryness in her voice that draweth interest to its pronouncements just as honey draweth flies,” “The Queen’s Majesty regarded it skeptically. The Duke will be bored with Viola in a trice, is how the Queen judgeth the matter. As a boy, Viola was delightful to him. But transformed into a woman, swathed in skirts and restrained from frank speech as any lady must be, and never pert and always proper, she will soon lose the Duke’s interest. What charms in a boy is intolerable in a woman. And so ’twas, the boyish companion was all to his taste; his previous pursuit of Olivia, though trumpeted to the world, mere play-acting without true passion. In short, the Queen resteth no confidence in the happiness of that match, the which, like t’other, was based on a lie, albeit of appearance rather than spirit, and by reason for that ’tis true that the spirit of a woman must differ when she be in skirts than when she be in breeches, the difference doth in fact come to more than one of mere appearance.”

Then Overbury said: “But that is a hard judgment, indeed. By such perverse reasoning, only Sebastian and Antonio will end happily! When they be not properly matched at all, not being husband and wife but only intimate friends!”

A few people rolled their eyes, and the Fool said, “’Tis Maria I care most for. Her cleverness in exposing the puritan upstart was an act of service to her mistress. A woman of such intelligence is too good for such as Sir Toby, whose only use for her is dishonorable. The Author doeth her no honor in his ending, either!”

The Countess’s lustrous eyes beamed warmly on the Fool. “A Penthiselea indeed,” she said. “But in the world as it doth be nowadays, a Penthiselea would be taken for a madwoman, or a whore. Our world would know nothing of her. And so, Maria must be silent and downcast in the end, or else be taken for a scold or harlot.”

Bulstrode said then, “Aye, and ’tis not that always the way. When a woman speaketh her mind, or doeth what she desireth rather than what she is supposed to desire, she is condemned for ’t. Unless she be Elizabeth Tudor, or Catherine de Medici, that no one dare slander or judge disorderly.”

“You see, Donne, what their constant reading of Spanish Amazon fantasies hath achieved,” said Overbury. “Such romances maketh them to hunger for what no good Englishman would in truth abide!”

“Say rather most good Englishmen, sir, rather than none,” replied Donne. “For if you mean to invoke the Querelle des Femmes, I must declare myself to take the ladies’ side.”

Overbury made a loud noise of disgust, fairly spitting as he thrust the syllable “Pah!” from his mouth. “This Olivia,” he said, “plainly needs a generous helping of halek. A husband—with a real staff between his legs—would provide that, especially a husband like that young and lusty fellow Sebastian. The Author hath that right, I’ll warrant. Whether Cesario is a codling or a woman disguised as one, the lad lacks what it would take to satisfy such a woman. A shrew, if we better knew her, I make no doubt. Treating her lord as she did, gives the hint to ’t. The kind of woman who is never satisfied, and is always just about to fall to a fit of the Mother,14or halfway to a pact with the Devil, caught up in the belief that the Evil one will see her satisfied where mortal men aren’t up to the job.” Overbury stared satirically at the court ladies, and then suddenly at the Fool, where his gaze grew harsh and derisive. “As one imagines your own mother to have been, puny freak that you are. Either too impatient for ’t to wait until her monthly bleeding was past, or so dissatisfied with her husband’s potency to seek the Devil’s bed. Thou art a living lesson to us, thou child of filth or devil’s baggage, so to see plainly with our own eyes what such women do wreak out of their very bodies.”

The Fool writes that “This shame hath been put to me so often that I no longer blush with each fresh rebuke.” She replied, “Just so, Sir Thomas,” and bowed to him as deeply as Donne had bowed to the Countess for his offense. “’Tis my profession,” she writes, “to please and amuse. That I must grovel to all and sundry the way the likes of Sir Thomas must grovel to the Queen and King is the way of the world. Living at court, I am oft reminded that the King maketh little difference in his regard for the gradations of station of those beneath him. Did not the King’s Majesty write publicly to the Queen that it made no matter to him that she was a King’s daughter, for that being his wife, to his mind she would as well be the daughter of a fishmonger? And so all men do so regard most women, but those few like the Countess and the Queen with the power to bless or curse their lives, and more especially as with the late Queen, so like the Lady Olivia, whom Sir Thomas condemneth as a shrew or witch or hysteric.”

After bowing to Overbury, the Fool bowed a second time to the rest of the company and said, “But just as I am such a freak, sir, and with so little of the true woman about me that many are led to speculate on my sex altogether, so I, at least, am in no danger of sharing my own mother’s fate. The Mother will have aught of me, that I have too little of the Sex in me to suffer an affliction in that organ, and the Devil neither, for all my ugliness is beyond what even the Evil One will tolerate. Which leaves me by default, sir, chaste and the child of God, who alone will have such as me.”

Overbury turned haughtily away, as though the Fool hadn’t spoken, and leaned close to Cecily Bulstrode and whispered into her ear. The Fool claims that her special powers allowed her to hear what he whispered, but that she chose not to repeat it.

Lady Mary Wroth, smiling broadly at the Countess, said, “I see Sir Thomas’s strategem. ’Tis plain! He hath distracted us exceedingly, so that we no longer talk of the ladies’ discontent, but rather of how greatly e’en the mightiest of men do fear the power of e’en its least effects.”

Donne said, “And ’tis not so, that all men, howe’er wise or foolish they be, do well to fear the power of the fair Sex?”

Lady Mary Wroth rolled her eyes at Lady Anne Southwell and said, “Mayhap we should be playing Edictes rather than Newes, since the gentlemen are in the mood to attack us whate’er we might venture to say.”15

Bulstrode smirked at Overbury. “As usual, the man speaks from pique. He dies to die in love in a certain Countess’s arms. Who will none of him.”16

Annoyed, Overbury said, “And why all this bibble-babble, when there’s Newes to play?”

“Ah, that it would be possible to see the outcome, and make wagers on ’t,” said Lady Mary Wroth, smiling, “all radiance and mischief.” “That we could go to Illyria, there to spy on the supposed lovers, and see what they make of the Author’s ending.”

The Fool writes, “’Tis a common enough notion for that lady, putting forth such a wish, for that she spends much time imagining other places and societies, peopled with family, friends, and acquaintance, caught up in other methods of ordering relations. Doth she not oft entertain the Queen with such fancies, whilst most of us ply our needles, as we chat idly about whatever romance we have been reading among ourselves as we work?”17

The company laughed, “some in delight, and Sir Thomas in scorn.” Donne said, “But ’tis easily done, my Lady, by merely asking the Author how he imagines it.”

Overbury laughed loudly. “But would the ladies be satisfied then? There’s a matter I’d make a wager on.”

Mistress Goodyere shook her head. “Nay. But the Author’s opinion is no more authority to predict than that of a parent asked to give the tale of his child’s life at the moment of its birth.”

Donne looked surprised. Impatient, Bulstrode threatened to send the lot of them away and herself to bed if no one had any intention of playing Newes. The Countess was asked to suggest the game’s theme. “The stage,” she said “quickly, briskly, and in all originality. ’Tis not a theme anyone remembers having played before.”

Anything once it is made has its own existence and it is because of that anything holds somebody’s attention.

—Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America

The Fool writes that the next day she and a number of ladies were sitting with the Queen doing needlework while one of the Queen’s personal servants, Pierrette, was translating a story (aloud) from the French. “. . . and Pierrette’s bright, black button eyes flash with that sly air of knowledge only a Frenchman carries about his person,” the Fool says, then quotes him as reading: “The lady, being entirely French and therefore possessed of a full measure of feminine cunning so characteristic of that country, approached Madame Marguerite, the King’s daughter, and the Duchess of Montpensier, who was sitting with the Princess. ‘If it would please you, Mesdames,’ saith she to them, ‘I would show you the most amusing thing in the world.’ And the Princess and the Duchess, neither of whom were inclined to be melancholy, inquired eagerly as to what she had in mind to show them.”18

The Fool notes that while Pierrette’s translations are always amusing, his commentary, “more to the point, makes so bold as to exploit the Queen’s malice towards the French, e’en when enjoying a tale of French conception.”

Seated in the full flood of the light of midday, reasonably near the fire, the ladies comfortably pulled their silk-threaded needles in and out, in and out, embroidering here a white rose, there one blushing, here the sturdy trunk of an oak, there the deep twining green of ivy or the celestial blue of heaven.

Pierrette’s gaze returned to the lectern and the beautifully illustrated book. “And the lady saith, ‘There is a certain gentleman whom you and everyone else at court revere as one of the most honorable men who lives, and full of courage and bravery, too. Who does not know how much cruelty he has borne unto me, or how when I loved him most he abandoned me to avail himself of the love of other women? Though I concealed my unhappiness, it was almost beyond what I could bear. Now God has granted me the opportunity to revenge myself on him. Hark. When I go upstairs to my room, if you take the trouble to watch, you will observe the man follow me, like a hound hot on the scent of the fox. May I ask of you, Mesdames, that when he is through the galleries and about to ascend the stairs, that you both go to the window and shout “Help! Thief!” along with me? I warrant that that will make him so angry, that he’ll act such a performance for us as we seldom have the pleasure to watch.’ The lady’s words gave the Princess and Duchess considerable amusement, for that no other gentleman at court was known to be so relentless in besieging the ladies with his seductions. And yet he was also well regarded by all, and in great demand, and the sort of man no one ever dared risk being mocked by. The Princess and Duchess were doubly entertained, because they felt that the lady, by including them in her plans, would be allowing them to share in her triumph over him.”

The Fool says that like everyone else present, she was taking a great deal of pleasure from this narrative, but that she had to leave the room at that point so that she could execute her plan “for bringing the Queen even greater delight than Pierrette’s reading of such a tasty tale.” No one paid any attention to her departure. She writes: “I go not to the privy, though, but into a little chamber nearby, to be private as I shift my shape into that of my most frequent familiar, a large orange cat known to come and go as it pleases where’er it lists. Though such a form is not natural to me, yet ’tis comfortable to inhabit a body that moves gracefully and as swiftly as the fleetest swallow darting to its nest under an eave. The Queen’s dwarf greyhounds have never caught me, though are like to give chase whene’er they catch sight or scent of my fiery form insolently dashing past them.”

She says she padded softly back to the ladies, “to their senses a mere cat that either lurks silently about during the most secret converse, or dashes like a beast caught in brain-fever, to tempt the dwarf greyhounds into misbehavior.” She crouched for a moment on the threshold, to spy out the lay of the land. Pierrette’s voice had all the human ears in the room hanging on its every word: “But the gentleman was swift with ripostes and dogged in his own defence, making so bold as to claim that he had only accepted the lady’s invitation to meet her in her chamber simply to relieve the tedium of everyone at court.”

Suddenly the Fool leaped out of her crouch and streaked past the dwarf greyhounds lying asleep at the Queen’s feet, to the far wall of the room and the large tapestry that hung there. Before uttering even one yelp or bark, the dogs were up and away “in hot pursuit of a prey they have long wished to capture. But I am clever and far too fast. I dart behind the tapestry—which no longer covers a wall, but guards the entrance into a certain garden to which I know the Queen and all her ladies will desire admission. The dwarf greyhounds, yelping wildly, mad to catch me, race swiftly after me. But not only am I too quick for their capture, but as they enter the gardens, they at once lose my scent, and coming to a halt, sniff the lush deep grass for some hint as to where I have gone.”

Screened by a shrub, the Fool lolled about in the thick, silken grass at her leisure, basking “in the hot Illyrian sun, enjoying the warm breezes and spicy scents of rosemary, sage, cedar, and carnation, all of which thrive and abound in the garden! Nearby squat trees heavy with oranges, their leaves glossy and bright in the clear Illyrian air. With vigilance I watch the patch of ground from whence I and the dogs came and keep a wary eye on them, for all that their bodies—like mine—are so unfleshly as to be transparent. In this world we be spirits, without scent, without substance, without extension, just as visitors from the spirit world, angels and ghosts alike, lack flesh in our own.”

The dogs were leaping over and through the rosemary hedges in madcap play when Pierrette came through, whistling for them. “Mon Dieu!” said he, astonished at the new world spread around him. And he turned and stepped back into the old world, “so that to my eyes,” the Fool writes, “there appears only the ghost of a velvet shod foot and shapely calf in bronze-clocked silk stockings where I know him to be standing. When the dogs begin their rush towards that foot and calf, I dart past them, to tempt them by the very sight of my speed, to make them ignore Pierrette and renew their pursuit of the orange cat they have never yet caught.”

By the time the Fool had shaken the dogs’ scentless pursuit, she had strayed from the entry point. When she slyly slinked back to it, she found “the Queen and her ladies wandering about the garden, their faces turned to the sun in wonder, their heavy wool shawls scattered over the grass like great ghostly patches to be stitched into a quilt blown hither and thither by the wind.” Silently the Fool retired behind a thick hedge of cedar and changed her shape back to her own. She then rejoined the ladies.

When the Queen tried to speak, her voice was inaudible. Though her bright brown eyes glittered with wonder, the Fool says, “we are but thin wraiths even to one another, and have no other means to converse but our eyes and gestures. And so it is that I gesture to Pierrette and persuade him to follow me, and so I lead him to the palace that is Lady Olivia’s and draw him within its precincts, as grand and handsome as Denmark House or even Hampton Court, or any other of the palaces so familiar to us. Everywhere we go we pass servants at work who do not see us, do not hear us, do not feel us even when Pierrette puts out his hand to grasp a page’s arm and his fingers go right through it, as though it were an illusion made only of light and air.”

After wandering through many rooms, they at last came “to a long, handsome room looking out on the garden, where a gentleman paces before a lady that is seated on a cushioned bench with a younger gentleman, perhaps the other’s brother, beside her.”

The Fool looked at Pierrette, and Pierrette looked at her. His mouth moved, and the Fool says she almost heard the word “Rina!”19The Fool nodded “Indeed!” with great vigor. “For the lady seated on the bench might have been our Queen herself at about twenty years of age. Because that such a sight I did not expect to find, it doth bemuse me with the greatest of confusion.”

The Fool relates that the man who paced said, “Such a chance I cannot let slip by. Orsino’s assistance in this matter is more than I could e’er dare hope for, and will give me the closest of odds for recovering my father’s estate.”

And then the “younger brother” said, “Orsino, Orsino. ’Tis all thou canst talk of! Then go, then go, if thou thinkest there’s aught to be won by ’t. Thou hearest no objection from Olivia. And I stand not in thy way. So to what point, then, tend all these speeches thou must needs to burden us with?”

“Viola!” the lady said. “Will thou not hold thy tongue when speaking to thy brother? It aids naught, but only makes his temper the hotter.”

The Fool writes, “And indeed, the gentleman hath gone quite red in the face, rage blooming in ’t like unto that of the brightest of poppies, his shoulders grown suddenly wider, his stature taller, ’til his manly physique nearly fills every spare bit of the air in the whole chamber.” “Hoyden! Wanton! Shrew!” he said, “flinging the words from his mouth like the bitterest and foamiest of vile spittle.”

And then the Fool suddenly announces: “But lo, this be Sebastian! I look from him to the lad who is his sister, and back to him, and wonder. Indeed, though their features share a sameness, his are all hardness grim and stony, bristled by beard and ruddy from sun and drink, while hers though stubborn are soft and pliant and cream with a faint blush of rose, and he of greater girth and stature than she. She looks indifferent to his railing, but only throws back her head—in such wise discovering to us a smooth, shapely neck—and stares up at him, her gaze hard, blue—and unmoved.”

Viola spoke softly when Sebastian ceased “making his imprecations.” “I have said. You all agreed to ’t. I would put off my male attire when my own clothes were brought to me. Do you remember my very words? If nothing lets to make us happy both but this my masculine usurped attire, do not embrace me till each circumstance of place, time, fortune, do cohere and sump that I am Viola—which to confirm, I’ll bring you to a captain in this town, where lie my maiden weeds. That the captain lost them when the duke’s men put him in durance—it is the duke’s task to remedy. Let Orsino have my maiden weeds found, and then I shall be his bride. ’Tis the task I require of him, if he would take me as his lady. Or he may have me back as his boy—by thy leave, of course, my brother. Else, I’ll continue me as before.” She rose and bowed to Olivia. “As my lady’s sister and guest.”

“Sister!” Sebastian said “as though he would choke on the word.” “In faith, soon thou shalt be no sister to me, an thou denies all meet duty and loyalty to the one thou callest brother!”

Sebastian strode to the open windows. The Fool writes that she noticed then that the Queen and all her ladies were standing out in the garden, looking on. “The feeling sweeps o’er me, that I am dreaming, dreaming one of those day-time dreams that come when one is drowsing in church, poorly attending a sermon, when one’s thoughts enter another realm, with the preacher’s words droning like flies buzzing, whilst images of another place and time slip into that innermost eye, dreaming yet not asleep, awake but elsewhere  . . . ”

[On the English stage] ‘Woman’ is, precisely, a set of learned social codes and mannerisms, executed by a boy.

—Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically

The text breaks off midsentence, but resumes with Sebastian’s leaving the room. The Fool writes that Oliva then said, “I’ll not believe thou would give thyself to him as his boy, e’en if he would have thee. Thou art bold, thou art audacious, the which are the reasons I so love thee. But both Orsino and Sebastian, like all men, take the sight of a woman in man’s clothes to be a clear sign and warrant of her whoredom. The least word will tip their faith out of balance, so that they will see not thy virginity. E’en if Orsino would have thou as his whore, the which would thereby make grave offense to Sebastian, and thereto cause some great, mortal mischief, I’ll not believe thou would so put thyself in his power. For if thou wouldst be in his power, thou would straightaway take up women’s attire and make thyself his bride.”

Viola flung herself onto the floor, propped her head up with a cushion, crossed her knees in the air, “as though she hath come by her doublet and hose naturally,” and said, “The power of one o’er another is all that fixes thy mind, Olivia. ’Tis something I will not busy my thoughts with, else to see myself deep into my grave. Thou refused Orsino for ’t, and now cannot love Sebastian, either. Love rules me, and not the fist. ’Tis all I care for, and the reason I put Orsino to the test, and would indeed live with him again as his boy, howe’er far that would undo me. A strong heart is all that a woman wants. The rest is of no account.”

Olivia rose to her feet and paced as Sebastian had done when he was in the room. “Love! Love Sebastian!” The Fool writes that the lady was “vehement, passionate, afire. ’Tis said the Queen has oftimes been so, though I have ne’er seen it. I glance across the room to see her wraith staring raptly at the lady. Doth she see herself? Or ’tis interest in the scene she watches that so fixes her attention?” Pacing, Olivia said, “Never have I loved thy brother! I married him only because I lovest thee! Thou knows where my heart lies! In hands that treat it indifferently, a mere bauble they would rather be rid of!” Olivia halted near Viola and stared down at her for a long moment, and then sank to her knees “in a great pool of peach silk and creamy lace that flows o’er Viola’s arm and breast like the tide of foam up onto a beach.” The Fool continues, “The silence is so sudden and entire that methinks I hear the distant sound of surf, of waves beating against the pebbles and rocks of a harsh, stony shore. So sure I am of that sound that it seems I smell the salt and wrack of the sea subtly scenting the air, a perfume more real than the scarcely visible flesh of my own hand.”

Wanting to see the expressions on their faces, the Fool moved closer—“as ’twould ne’er be polite or possible to do if this were a stage on which actors played. It is the Lady Olivia’s face that most astonishes me. ’Tis wet with tears, yet glowing with a passion and tenderness the sight of which clutches at my heart. Her lips are quivering.” Olivia spoke softly, and “strangely slowly”—“My dear one”—and then took Viola’s hand and lifted it gently to her lips, “to there caress it, and then press it to her breast, as a lover presses his own hand to his breast when declaring his love.” “Dear one, now sister,” she said. “Thou see’st how I, as doth any sensible woman, accept what I must, when by doing so I may have at least some part of what I require. This has e’er been how women live. I accept sisterhood, and make the best of it, since I must live deprived of my true heart’s desire.”

Viola sighed and turned her head away. “A woman I am, aye, but not just any. I care naught that I be called whore, if only he would not mind it.”

Olivia shook her head and both laughed a little and cried. “I know Orsino, sister. Yea, I know him. The first breath of suggestion that cometh to his ear will fell you fore’er in his grace. A woman’s reputation is the most delicate thing, stained by anyone with an ill will to her. ’Tis all the cause she needs the protection of a man’s honor, and the only cause.”

Viola pulled her hand from Olivia’s and sat up. “My brother and I have shared honor and love since birth. The protection of his and my father’s name and honor is all that I need!”

“And I, too, shared honor and love with my brother,” said Olivia. “Mind that a brother’s protection doth not always suffice.”

“The which,” the Fool writes, “makes me think of the Queen, whose own brother had lately come to visit, to assuage her griefs and melancholy, the which had so swiftly returned after his departure. For which I glance now at that royal lady, and see her struck with an emotion too strong to be concealed.”

Another woman then entered—“who, when she speaks, seems so much like the Countess of Bedford that I look over to the Queen’s party to ascertain that she still stands there, beside the Queen.” “My lady,” the woman said. “I bring you good warning. From a pane in the tower, my eye took clear sight of the duke’s approach. ’Twill not be long before he nears the gate and asks admittance.”

Olivia said, “Devil take him!”

Viola sprang to her feet, “her face a shining glass of eagerness.” “Mayhap he cometh to see me, at last! With my maiden’s weeds—or else simply for love, that hath worn down his obstinance!”

At which, the Fool writes, “I, too, am filled with an eagerness to set my eyes on him, or rather a curiosity. For if Maria is the image of the Countess, and Olivia of the Queen, will the Duke be that of the King, and Malvolio that of Sir George Carew?”

“He’s come to see Sebastian,” Olivia said, “I make no doubt, before he departs with Antonio. Maria!”

The Fool writes, “I feast my eyes on her, assured manyfold times that the lady lately entered, being the redoubtable waiting woman who showed herself more clever than every bodie else in the play, might be taken for the Countess’s twin.” She notes that Maria then went to Olivia and offered her an arm as she rose to her feet.

“My very heart doth feel how seemly this display of affection,” the Fool writes, “as it echoes that true affection of the Countess for the Queen the which makes the Countess worthy of her Majesty’s answering trust and love.” Olivia, she writes, glanced briefly at Viola, then said, “Go to my husband and tell him Orsino is soon arrived.”

Maria exited. And then Viola was the one pacing. “I’m nothing short of patient, Olivia,” said she. “Indeed, ’tis my best—nay, my only—virtue. He wants me, I felt it all the time I played the boy in his menage. It cannot be true that he cares less for a gown than for the heart, body, and soul he would have wear it!”

Olivia seated herself on the bench in weary resignation, “her face of a sadness near to bringing tears to my own eyes.” She said, “As much as it cannot be true that thou doth value your doublet and breeches less than thou doth value his love.”

Viola whirled, all flashing temper, and jutted her chin at the lady. “Nay! ’Tis not about the doublet and breeches, but what he loves in me, for that I fear lest he’d miss it an I were wearing a gown!”

Olivia’s face grew even sadder. She said, “Any man hearing thou speak so would say thou art mad. I know thou art not, but I tell thee that if thou dost not accept a woman’s lot, thou wilt come only to grief, and thy love for the man who will not have thee mad or whorish will be but like a dream, that only thou canst know in the privy place of thine own mind and heart.”

The Fool writes, “Little Pierrette moves before me, startling me, and points. Behold, I see that the Queen and the others in her party have gone from the windows. Pierrette gestures, making me know his wish to follow. Without me, they will wander as shades in this foreign place, unable to find the way back to the world. Though Pierrette knoweth that not, he beseemeth full anxious to rejoin the ladies, lest he be lost in this strange world without them.

“Swiftly we fly out into the garden. Before long we find the party, the Queen’s Majesty in the lead, royal hand to throat, weeping sorely. Since we cannot hear one another speak, ’tis impossible to know the cause for the Queen’s great emotion. Worse, the Queen doth not know the way, though ’tis she who is leading the company. And so, from strict necessity, in the blink of an eye (whether amber or green) I conjure, not far in advance of the Queen, a gossamer ball as glittering as a diamond, as clear as the finest crystal, veined lightly with gold, to guide the Queen’s progress. For so ’tis, when she sees it, she stretches forth her hand, as if to catch it to her. But lo, it is my will that moves it, so that it always keeps just beyond her reach, and so by little and little guides her to the exit, where her faithful dwarf greyhounds await her, and all the heavy shawls all the ladies had put off under the gentle heat of Illyria’s sun.”

[E]xplanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear.

—Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography

And so soon they were back as they had been, seated at their needlework, “no door to be found any longer behind the tapestry,” with Pierrette sent off to fetch wine for the company.

“Such tales you do tell, Cristiana!” the Countess of Bedford said, taking the Fool “by the greatest of surprise.”

The others all looked dazed and amazed—until they realized, individually, “the Countess’s wise intent” in suggesting that the Fool had been telling them a tale, rather than that they had impossibly visited a world known as imaginary.

The Queen sighed and sighed. “Cristiana, Cristiana, ’tis almost as if I had been to Illyria myself, so wondrous vivid your narration,” she said. “And so she doth hold a frippery of lace to her eyes,” the Fool writes, “to dab gently there at a few tears yet lingering. Her mouth trembles with an endeavor of a smile.”

“Would that you had found a happy ending to the playwright’s tale,” the Queen said, “rather than such sadness.”

The Countess went to the Queen and knelt beside her. “Dearest Rina!” said she, showing a gentleness she reserved for the Queen alone. “The playwright’s stories must needs have unhappy endings for ladies, whate’er another teller might make of them. ’Tis in their very nature to do so, for unlike our brave Amazon masques, this Author’s tales follow life too closely. For the which, the Lady Olivia spoke truly.”

The Fool writes, “But we did not stay to see the end of ‘my’ tale, and so do not know ’twas so unhappy as the Queen bethinks. (Nor did we see whether Orsino looked to be the King’s twin.)”

And she ends the text: “You, my lady, did ask that I write this account so that memories of the beautiful marvellous might be refreshed in your imagination as oft as you so desire, by the mere reading of my words. ’Twas indeed that our very visit to Illyria was marvellous and beautiful, howe’er poignantly sad its unfolding. Pleasure and sorrow are no enemies, as people are wont to conceive them. Else we women would have only the latter, and ne’er the former, as sorrow doth always accompany a woman through life as a shadow doth any body. And so ’tis, we take our pleasure where’er we can find it, to rejoice when we can, and weep when we must.”

If the author of this tale did invent this magical adventure, one must wonder at its open ending. To please the lady for whom it was written—to “never say die”? Or to leave an opening for another “visit” to Illyria? Or was it, indeed, as the Fool (or whoever the narrator is) claims, that “the playwright’s stories must needs have unhappy endings for ladies, whate’er another teller might make of them,” because “this Author’s tales follow life too closely”? I’ll leave that kind of speculation to the literary historians. Personally, I prefer to believe that the adventure happened as she claimed, and that such magic was the Fool’s to command and her pleasure to offer. And that maybe, maybe, she returned to Illyria another time—leaving its traces on a second, as yet undiscovered, manuscript.

© 2002 by L. Timmel Duchamp.

Originally published in Leviathan Three, edited by Jeff VanderMeer & Forrest Aguirre.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

L. Timmel Duchamp is the author of the five-novel Marq’ssan Cycle, Love’s Body, Dancing in Time and Never at Home, as well as the short novel The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding) and dozens of short stories that have been published in magazines and anthologies like Asimov's SF and the Full Spectrum and Leviathan series. Her fiction has been a finalist for the Nebula and Sturgeon Awards and short-listed numerous times for the James Tiptree Jr. Award. Her essays and reviews have been published in numerous venues, including The American Book Review, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons. She is also the publisher of Aqueduct Press and the editor of Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles; Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries Lost, Suppressed, or Misplaced in Time; Talking Back: Epistolary Fantasies; and The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 1, and co-editor, with Eileen Gunn, of The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 2.

Footnote

1Elizabeth’s erudite daughter, Elizabeth of Bohemia, was an important correspondent of Descartes. One wonders what James’s reaction would have been had he realized that the intellect of a female descendant would someday be judged vastly superior to his own.

2Marie de’ Medici (queen of France from 1600, and Queen Regent 1610-1617) employed a “fool” who happened to be a woman. Known as “Mad Mathurine,” she apparently wielded a scathingly feminist pen against certain misogynist writers of her day. A sample of her prose style is the curse she deployed against the author of the scurrilous Le Caquet de l’accouchée, whom she characterized as a sex-starved, rapacious bird, rejected by every woman he pursued, except by a hideous old whore who gave him a veneral disease that turned him into an eviscerated falcon: “Would to Saint Fiacre [the patron saint of gardens and venereal diseases] that his arse be full of boiling water . . . Let every woman smear his face with cow dung! Let every girl soil his mustache with spit, and let all women together heap so many curses upon him he can only shit after a good thrashing, and prowl about like a werewolf all the rest of his days!” Xaveria Cristiana Morley’s style is not so flamboyant. But her perspective is indubitably as critical.

3I take this quote directly from the piece of text Julia Guthke labels Fragment A. I’m grateful to her, and to her graduate student Blaine Bowen, for their transcription (using modern spelling and orthography), and to the ms’s owner, Harold Sutton, for permission not only to paraphrase the text, but to quote it directly at liberty.

4Masques were highly politicized court spectacles, 17th-century versions of Busby Berkeley production numbers that served as vehicles for flaunting the crown’s wealth and for promoting a royal iconography.

5An estate, I might add, he forced one of his subjects to swap for another, simply because he liked it.

6The Fool’s manner of speaking about the Scots was not exactly what we’d call politically correct. Most English people of her time despised the Scots, and the favoritism James showed to those who followed him to England intensified that loathing. The numerous instances of rape by some of these same men, and of James forcing the daughters of his English subjects into disadventagous marriages with many of them, didn’t help.

7According to Julia Guthke, “James I had a habit of jailing the authors and producers of plays he considered disrespectful of his dignity. Ben Jonson, for instance, was jailed at least twice for writing such plays. (The Countess of Bedford’s influence secured his release in both cases.) The Queen apparently enjoyed such plays and supported their production, including a series of political satires performed publicly at Blackfriars by her own Children of the Queen’s Revels.”

8I doubt the Parliament that his son Charles (“the High and Mighty Prince” as he was known in 1609) tangled with would have agreed. They did, after all, cut off his head.

9Aemilia Lanyer is interesting because: (a) Tillyard and others have (probably erroneously) identified her as Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady”; (b) she was an accomplished poet who was one of the first Englishwomen to see her work in print; and (c) though she married the court musician Alfonso Lanyer in 1592 apparently “for collour” to cover a pregnancy, she was the stylishly-maintained mistress of Henry Cary, Elizabeth I’s Lord Chamberlain (forty-five years her senior and a notable patron of the arts, particularly of Shakespeare’s company).

10By this time theatrical companies had begun buying their costumes from nobles. (Previously the crown had had a monopoly on such sales.) Tudor and Stuart theatrical productions typically used very little scenery, but spent enormous amounts of money on acquiring authentic costumes. The crown made a bundle after the Reformation selling not only monastic property, but also the rich, centuries-old vestments of prelates—to theatrical companies.

11Though literary historians routinely speculate on performance practices and audience behavior, especially with respect to Shakespeare, their notions of distracting audience behavior usually don’t refer to such privileges of royalty. (Though who, knowing anything about James, would find the Fool’s account of it incredible? Even if this particular instance is invented, surely the author of the tale witnessed such doings on other occasions, if not with such serendipitous timing.)

12According to Julia Guthke, “Newes” was a game of wit played in Anne of Denmark’s court. A selected “round” of it was published as Sir Thomas Overbury, His Wife, including, in its second edition, a rebuttal to its misogyny by “A.S.” The game was played in Cecily Bulstrode’s rooms at court with varying collections of players, sometimes for half the night. The queen herself sometimes played, as well as the better known Ben Jonson and John Donne.

13According to Julia Guthke, “Overbury was Robert Carr’s ‘handler.’ Because the Favorite had the important political responsibility of distributing an enormous amount of patronage, which was apparently beyond Carr’s ability to manage, Overbury, a friend of Carr’s, had the close-to-official position of dictating most of his advice to the king.”

14According to Louise Ducange, “The ‘Mother’ was the uterus. A ‘fit of the Mother’ was an attack of hysteria, explained variously as the womb wandering the body in search of relief, or afflicted with humoral imbalance. A plentiful diet of orgasm or hard physical labor were supposed to prevent it.”

15According to Julia Guthke, “‘Edictes’ was another game played in Cecily Bulstrode’s rooms, a put-down game explicity pitting a group of men against a group of women.”

16Julia Guthke glosses this: “I believe this is a reference to Overbury’s attempt to seduce the Countess of Rutland by (after other methods failed) sending Ben Jonson, whom she favored, to read to her Sir Thomas Overbury His Wife, much as Orsino sent Cesario/Viola to read Orsino’s love letter to Olivia.”

17Julia Guthke: “Lady Mary Wroth was the author of, among other things, The Countesse of Montgomerie’s Urania, an obvious roman à clef, which when it was published in 1621, caused a scandal.”

18Julia Guthke: “I’m virtually certain this is from Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptamaron, though I haven’t gotten around to running it down yet.”

19Julia Guthke: “‘Rina’ was the name Anne of Denmark’s intimates used familiarly with her. It was a shortened form of ‘Regina,’ allowing the combination of affection and a Latinate honorific in a single form.”

Abaddon’s Gate
James S. A. Corey

Chapter Three: Melba

When she walked into the gambling house, Melba felt eyes on her. The room was lit by the displays on the game decks, pink and blue and gold. Most of them were themed around sex or violence, or both. Press a button, spend your money, and watch the girls put foreign and offensive objects inside themselves while you waited to see whether you’d won. Slot machines, poker, real-time lotteries. The men who played them exuded an atmosphere of stupidity, desperation, and an almost tangible hatred of women.

“Darling,” an immensely fat man said from behind the counter. “Don’t know where you think you come to, but you come in the wrong place. Maybe best you walk back out.”

“I have an appointment,” she said. “Travin.”

The fat man’s eyes widened under their thick lids. Someone in the gloom called out a vulgarity meant to unease her. It did, but she didn’t let it show.

“Travin in the back, you want him, darling,” the fat man said, nodding. At the far end of the room, through the gauntlet of leers and threat, a red metal door.

All of her instincts came from before, when she was Clarissa, and so they were all wrong now. From the time she’d been old enough to walk, she’d been trained in self-defense, but it had all been anti-kidnapping. How to attract the attention of the authorities, how to deescalate situations with her captors. There had been other work, of course. Physical training had been part of it, but the goal had always been to break away. To run. To find help.

Now that there was no one to help her, nothing quite applied. But it was what she had, so it was what she used. Melba—not Clarissa, Melba—nodded to the fat man and walked through the close-packed, dim room. The full gravity of Earth pulled on her like an illness. On one of the gambling decks, a cartoon woman was being sexually assaulted by three small gray aliens while a flying saucer floated above them. Someone had won a minor jackpot. Melba looked away. Behind her, an unseen man laughed, and she felt the skin at the back of her neck tighten.

Of all her siblings, she had most enjoyed the physical training. When it ended, she began studying tai chi with the self-defense instructor. Then, when she was fourteen, her father had made a joke about it at a family gathering. How learning to fight might make sense—he could respect that—but dancing while pretending to fight looked stupid and wasted time. She’d never trained again. That was ten years ago.

She opened the red door and walked through it. The office seemed almost bright. A small desk with a built-in display tuned to a cheap accounting system. White frosted glass that let in the sunlight but hid the streets of Baltimore. A formed plastic couch upholstered with the corporate logo of a cheap brand of beer that even people on basic could afford. Two hulking men sat on the couch. One had implanted sunglasses that made him look like an insect. The other wore a T-shirt that strained at his steroidal shoulders. She’d seen them before.

Travin was at the desk, leaning his thigh against it. His hair was cut close to the scalp, a dusting of white at the temples. His beard was hardly longer. He wore what passed for a good suit in his circles. Father wouldn’t have worn it as a costume.

“Ah, look, the inimitable Melba.”

“You knew I was here,” she said. There were no chairs. No place to sit that wasn’t already occupied. She stood.

“’Course I did,” Travin said. “Soon as you came off the street.”

“Are we doing business?” she asked. Her voice cut the air. Travin grinned. His teeth were uncorrected and gray at the gums. It was an affectation of wealth, a statement that he was so powerful mere cosmesis was beneath him. She felt a hot rush of scorn. He was like an old cargo cultist; imitating the empty displays of power and no idea what they really meant. She was reduced to dealing with him, but at least she had the grace to be embarrassed by it.

“It’s all done, miss,” Travin said. “Melba Alzbeta Koh. Born on Luna to Alscie, Becca, and Sergio Koh, all deceased. No siblings. No taxation indenture. Licensed electrochemical technician. Your new self awaits, ah?”

“And the contract?”

“The Cerisier ships out, civilian support for the grand mission to the Ring. Our Miss Koh, she’s on it. Senior class, even. Little staff to oversee, don’t have to get your hands dirty.”

Travin pulled a white plastic envelope from his pocket. The shadow of a cheap hand terminal showed through the tissue.

“All here, all ready,” he said. “You take it and walk through the door a new woman, ah?”

Melba took her own hand terminal out of her pocket. It was smaller than the one in Travin’s hand, and better made. She’d miss it. She thumbed in her code, authorized the transfer, and slid it back in her pocket.

“All right,” she said. “The money’s yours. I’ll take delivery.”

“Ah, there is still one problem,” Travin said.

“We have an agreement,” Melba said. “I did my part.”

“And it speaks well of you,” Travin said. “But doing business with you? I enjoy it, I think. Exciting discoveries to be made. Creating this new you, we have to put the DNA in the tables. We have to scrub out doubled records. I think you haven’t been entirely honest with me.”

She swallowed, trying to loosen the knot in her throat. The insect-eyed man on the couch shifted, his weight making the couch squeak.

“My money spends,” she said.

“As it should, as it should,” Travin said. “Clarissa Melpomene Mao, daughter to Jules-Pierre Mao of Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile. Very interesting name.”

“Mao-Kwikowski was nationalized when my father went to jail,” Melba said. “It doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Corporate death sentence,” Travin said as he put the envelope on the desk display. “Very sad. But not for you, ah? Rich men know money. They find ways to put it where little eyes can’t find. Get it to their wives, maybe. Their daughters.”

She crossed her arms, scowling. On the couch, the bodybuilder stifled a yawn. It might even have been genuine. She let the silence stretch not because she wanted to pressure Travin to speak next, but because she didn’t know what to say. He was right, of course. Daddy had taken care of all of them as best he could. He always had. Even the persecution of the United Nations couldn’t reach everything. Clarissa had had enough money to live a quiet, retiring life on Luna or Mars and die of old age before the capital ran out. But she wasn’t Clarissa anymore, and Melba’s situation was different.

“I can give you another ten thousand,” she said. “That’s all I’ve got.”

Travin smiled his gray smile.

“All that pretty money flown away, ah? And what takes you out into the darkness, eh? I wondered. So I looked. You are very, very good. Even knowing to squint, I didn’t see more than shadows. Didn’t hear more than echoes. But—” He put the envelope on the desk before him, keeping one finger on it the way her brother Petyr did when he was almost sure of a chess move but hadn’t brought himself to commit. It was a gesture of ownership. “I have something no one else does. I know to look at the Ring.”

“Ten thousand is all I have. Honestly. I’ve spent the rest.”

“Would you need more, then?” Travin asked. “Investment capital, call it? Our little Melba can have ten thousand, if you want it. Fifty thousand if you need it. But I will want more back. Much more.”

She felt her throat tighten. When she tilted her head, the movement felt too fast, too tight. Birdlike. Scared.

“What are you talking about?” she asked, willing her voice to sound solid. Formless threat hung in the air like bad cologne: masculine and cheap. When he spoke again, false friendliness curved all of his vowels.

“Partners. You are doing something big. Something with the Ring and the flotilla, ah? All these people heading out in the dark to face the monsters. And you are going with them. It seems to me that such a risk means you expect a very great return. The sort one expects from a Mao. You tell me what is your plan, I help you how I can help you, and what comes your way from this, we divide.”

“No deal.” The words were like a reflex. They came from her spine, the decision too obvious to require her brain.

Travin pulled back the envelope, the plastic hissing against the table. The soft tutting sound of tongue against teeth was as sympathetic as it was false.

“You have moved heaven and earth,” he said. “You have bribed. You have bought. You have arranged. And when you say that you have held nothing in reserve, I believe you. So now you come to my table and tell me no deal? No deal is no deal.”

“I paid you.”

“I don’t care. We are partners. Full partners. Whatever you are getting from this, I am getting too. Or else there are other people, I think, who would be very interested to hear about what the infamous Mao have been so quietly doing.”

The two men on the couch were paying attention to her now. Their gazes were on her. She turned to look over her shoulder. The door to the gamblers’ den was metal, and it was locked. The window was wide. The security wire in it was the sort that retracted if you wanted the glass to open and let the filthy breeze of the city in to soil the air. The insect-eyed one stood up.

Her implants were triggered by rubbing her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Two circles, counterclockwise. It was a private movement, invisible. Internal. Oddly sensual. It was almost as easy as just thinking. The suite of manufactured glands tucked in her throat and head and abdomen squeezed their little bladders empty, pouring complex chemistry into her blood. She shuddered. It felt like orgasm without the pleasure. She could feel conscience and inhibition sliding away like bad dreams. She was fully awake and alive.

All the sounds in the room—the roar of street traffic, the muffled cacophony of the gambling decks, Travin’s nasty voice—went quieter, as if the cocktail flowing into her had stuffed foam in her ears. Her muscles grew tense and tight. The taste of copper filled her mouth. Time slowed.

What to do? What to do?

The thugs by the couch were the first threat. She moved over to them, gravity’s oppressive grip forgotten. She kicked the bodybuilder in the kneecap as he rose, the little beer coaster of bone ripping free of its tendons and sliding up his thigh. His face was a cartoon of surprise and alarm. As he began to crumple, she lifted her other knee, driving it up into his descending larynx. She’d been aiming for his face. Throat just as good, she thought as the cartilage collapsed against her knee.

The insect-eyed one lunged for her. He moved quickly, his own body modified somehow. Fused muscular neurons, probably. Something to streamline the long, slow gap when the neurotransmitters floated across the synapses. Something to give him an edge when he was fighting some other thug. His hand fastened on her shoulder, wide, hard fingers grabbing at her. She turned in toward him, dropping to pull him down. Palm strike to the inside of the elbow to break his power, then both her hands around his wrist, bending it. None of her attacks were conscious or intentional. The movements came flowing out of a hindbrain that had been freed of restraint and given the time to plan its mayhem. It was no more a martial art than a crocodile taking down a water buffalo was; just speed, strength, and a couple billion years of survival instinct unleashed. Her tai chi instructor would have looked away in embarrassment.

The bodybuilder sloped down to the floor, blood pouring from his mouth. The insect-eyed man pulled away from her, which was the wrong thing to do. She hugged his locked joints close to her body and swung from her hips. He was bigger than she was, had lived in the gravity well all his life. He buffed up with steroids and his own cheap augmentations. She didn’t need to be stronger than him, though. Just stronger than the little bones in his wrist and elbow. He broke, dropping to his knee.

Melba—not Clarissa—swung around him, sliding her right arm around his neck, then locking it with the left, protecting her own head from the thrashing that was about to come. She didn’t need to be stronger than him, just stronger than the soft arteries that carried blood to his brain.

Travin’s gun fired, gouging a hole in the couch. The little puff of foam was like a sponge exploding. No time. She shrieked, pulling the power of the scream into her arms, her shoulders. She felt the insect-eyed man’s neck snap. Travin fired again. If he hit her, she’d die. She felt no fear, though. It had been locked away where she couldn’t experience it. That would come soon. Very soon. It had to be done quickly.

He should have tried for a third bullet. It was the smart thing. The wise one. He was neither smart nor wise. He did what his body told him to and tried to get away. He was a monkey, and millions of years of evolution told him to flee from the predator. He didn’t have time for another mistake. She felt another scream growing in her throat.

Time skipped. Her fingers were wrapped around Travin’s neck. She’d been driving his skull into the corner of his desk. There was blood and scalp adhering to it. She pushed again, but he was heavy. There was no force behind her blow. She dropped him, and he fell to the floor moaning.

Moaning.

Alive, she thought. The fear was back now, and the first presentiment of nausea. He was still alive. He couldn’t still be alive when the crash came. He’d had a gun. She had to find what had happened to it. With fingers quickly growing numb, she pulled the little pistol from under him.

“Partners,” she said, and fired two rounds into his head. Even over the gambling decks, they had to have heard it. She forced herself to the metal door and checked the lock. It was bolted. Unless someone had a key or cut through it, she was all right. She could rest. They wouldn’t call the police. She hoped they wouldn’t call the police.

She slid to the floor. Sweat poured down her face and she began shaking. It seemed unfair that she’d lose time during the glorious and redemptive violence and have to fight to stay conscious through the physiological crash that followed, but she couldn’t afford to sleep. Not here. She hugged her knees to her chest, sobbing not because she felt sorrow or fear, but because it was what her flesh did when she was coming down. Someone was knocking at the door, but the sound was uncertain. Tentative. Just a few minutes, and she’d be . . . not all right. Not that. But good enough. Just a few minutes.

This was why glandular modification had never taken root in the military culture. A squad of soldiers without hesitation or doubt, so full of adrenaline they could tear their own muscles and not care, might win battles. But the same fighters curled up and mewling for five minutes afterward would lose them again. It was a failed technology, but not an unavailable one. Enough money, enough favors to call in, and enough men of science who had been cured of conscience. It was easy. The easiest part of her plan, really.

Her sobs intensified, shifted. The vomiting started. She knew from experience that it wouldn’t last long. Between retching, she watched the bodybuilder’s chest heaving for air through his ruined throat, but he was already gone. The smell of blood and puke thickened the air. Melba caught her breath, wiping the back of her hand against her lips. Her sinuses ached, and she didn’t know if it was from the retching or the false glands that lay in that tender flesh. It didn’t matter.

The knocking at the door was more desperate now. She could make out the voice of the fat man by the door. No more time. She took the plastic envelope and shoved it in her pocket. Melba Alzbeta Koh crawled out the window and dropped to the street. She stank. There was blood on her hands. She was trembling with every step. The dim sunlight hurt, and she used the shadows of her hands to hide from it. In this part of Baltimore, a thousand people could see her and not have seen anything. The blanket of anonymity that the drug dealers and pimps and slavers arranged and enforced also protected her.

She’d be okay. She’d made it. The last tool was in place, and all she had to do was get to her hotel, drink something to put her electrolytes back in balance, and sleep a little. And then, in a few days, report for duty on the Cerisier and begin her long journey out to the edge of the solar system. Holding her spine straight, walking down the street, avoiding people’s eyes, the dozen blocks to her room seemed longer. But she would do it. She would do whatever had to be done.

She had been Clarissa Melpomene Mao. Her family had controlled the fates of cities, colonies, and planets. And now Father sat in an anonymous prison, barred from speaking with anyone besides his lawyer, living out his days in disgrace. Her mother lived in a private compound on Luna slowly medicating herself to death. The siblings—the ones that were still alive—had scattered to whatever shelter they could find from the hatred of two worlds. Once, her family’s name had been written in starlight and blood, and now they’d been made to seem like villains. They’d been destroyed.

She could make it right, though. It hadn’t been easy, and it wouldn’t be now. Some nights, the sacrifices felt almost unbearable, but she would do it. She could make them all see the injustice in what James Holden had done to her family. She would expose him. Humiliate him.

And then she would destroy him.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 James S. A. Corey.

From Abaddon’s Gate by James S. A. Corey.

Published by arrangement with Orbit.

All rights reserved.

James S. A. Corey is the author of four novels and four short stories, most of them set in The Expanse universe, including the critically acclaimed short story "Drive" in the anthology Edge of Infinity. He has been short-listed for the Hugo award for best novel for Leviathan Wakes and the Locus Award for both Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War. He lives in New Mexico with his family, and works closely with iconic fantasy author George RR Martin. He is also the pseudonym of the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.

Interview: Robert J. Sawyer
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Robert J. Sawyer—called "the dean of Canadian science fiction" by The Ottawa Citizen and "just about the best science-fiction writer out there these days" by The Denver Rocky Mountain News—is one of only eight writers in history (and the only Canadian) to win all three of the science-fiction field's top honors for best novel of the year: the Hugo Award (for Hominids), the Nebula Award (for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for Mindscan). He has written more than twenty books, including Flashforward, which was adapted into a television series on ABC. The show ended in 2010, but more Sawyer adaptations are in the works, and the author himself has been tapped to write the screenplay for a feature film version of his 2012 novel Triggers, a near-future conspiracy thriller.

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 new novel Red Planet Blues started life as a novella called “Identity Theft.” So how did that story first come about?

Yeah, very interesting. The meta-story is that amazon.com was kicking the crap out of book clubs in general. It used to be it was only through book clubs, mail order book clubs, that people in rural areas could get a decent selection, and so the Science Fiction Book Club was always a reprint publisher. When Amazon started really eating into their business, they got a brainstorm that they would try some original, only available through the Science Fiction Book Club publications. They commissioned the great Mike Resnick to edit an original anthology for them called Down These Dark Spaceways, science fiction and detective fiction combined together. And he commissioned me, Catherine Asaro, Jack McDevitt, David Gerrold, [Robert Reed], and himself to write novellas for this anthology. And it had not occurred to me to do anything in the noir vein, although I had always been a fan of that genre, but Mike is the guy who kind of orchestrated this shotgun wedding of the two genres for me. I was very lucky that my novella, which was called “Identity Theft,” was very well received. It was nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula. It also won Spain’s top science fiction award; it got me six thousand euro for that. So it did very well in its own right, and it came out in 2005. But I had gotten a lot of fan mail about it over the years, a lot of very positive feedback, and I really enjoyed the character and the setting. And I thought, “You know what? I’ve got 25,000 words of story here. All I have to do is add another 75,000 and I’ve got a full length novel.” Sounded easy. Turned out to be one of the hardest novels I’ve ever written.

What was so challenging about it?

What was challenging about going from the novella to the novel? You know, I thought, “Very easy. Start off with 25,000 words and you’re kind of a quarter of the way there. Boom.” But it isn’t easy. Part of it isn’t easy because I’m going back and trying to write in a voice that I hadn’t written in for six or seven years at this point. I’ve changed as a person. My writing style changes, only incrementally from book to book, but cumulatively in the half dozen books I’d done in the interim, quite substantially. My advice to anybody who thinks there is a shortcut to writing a novel by taking an existing piece of work, you know what? That isn’t really true. It’s going to end up being more work, not less, to try and do justice to what you started with, but also to really give value for money. And I wanted to be absolutely sure that anybody who had already read “Identity Theft”would not feel they were getting anything less than a full new book’s worth of material when they went to buy Red Planet Blues.

How about combining the science fiction aspects and the detective aspects, did that come naturally to you or was that a challenge?

Yes, that did come naturally. You know, I often said that science fiction and fantasy never should have been paired because they’re antithetical genres. Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen. Fantasy is about things that never could happen. They’re completely opposite from each other. But science fiction and mystery both prize the rational thought process, and both require the reader to go along picking up clues as he or she reads. In the mystery, of course, to solve the ostensible mystery or crime at the heart of the novel. And in science fiction, we writers artfully salt little clues as to what the whole world of the story is like. We don’t stop for a lecture on the politics or the ecological situation at the time, but we drop little hints here and there. It’s the same reading process to read science fiction that goes into reading detective fiction. My very first novel that came out in 1990, called Golden Fleece, was a science fiction/detective novel, and I’ve repeatedly done science fiction mystery crossovers. My Hugo winner from 2003, Hominids, is a science fiction mystery crossover features a lot of courtroom drama that’s playing out as one of the major subplots of that novel.

One of my favorite books growing up was Larry Niven’s The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton, which is a set of science fiction detective stories, and in that book he talks a little about the history of the science fiction detective story. And he says that, actually, John W. Campbell said it was impossible to write a science fiction detective story.

Yeah, and Campbell was wrong! And he wasn’t often wrong. Let us not run a steamroller over John Campbell here in our haste to mention this. Of course, as the editor of the great Astounding Stories, which went on to become Analog, he was the mentor to Asimov, to Clarke, to Heinlein, to a whole generation of writers. But yes, he felt that it would be too easy for the detective to say at the end of the story, “Well, as you know (in fact we don’t know at all) that gravity on the planet Zetox works in reverse, so of course the corpse floated to the ceiling, and that’s why nobody noticed it when they came into the room and they thought it was simply a missing persons case.” Or whatever ludicrous thing they could lay on the unsuspecting reader as almost a deus ex machina, something they pulled out of the air to solve the crime. Niven very adroitly dealt with that issue in, as you say, The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton—very good story—part of his known space universe. I actually prefer, and I hope Larry will forgive me, what Isaac Asimov did to refute, while Campbell was still alive, directly to Campbell, this notion. And of course the great Asimov novel is The Caves of Steel,which works absolutely perfectly as a mystery story. It works absolutely perfectly as a buddy cop drama. And it works absolutely perfectly as a science fiction novel. It is, to my way of thinking, the best novel that Asimov ever wrote. And it certainly puts to rest this notion, which, you know, Campbell said it. Campbell’s a brilliant writer. Campbell wrote Who Goes There? which became John Carpenter’s The Thing. This is a guy that did lots of really important writing and editing, but he had this notion that he tossed off, and may we all be forgiven for these little things that we toss off at some point and say, “Well of course this is impossible.”

So you say in the introduction that, “My working title for this book was The Great Martian Fossil Rush, but my American publisher wanted something that played up the noir angle. I asked for suggestions online and hundreds of possibilities were put forth.” I was just wondering, do any of these suggestions stand out as being particularly odd or memorable?

It’s funny. At this point I’ve forgotten almost all of them, I have to say Blood Red was one, which is not bad, you know? Red for Mars and the blood. But the one that definitely resonated for me immediately was Red Planet Blues, and it was suggested by multiple people in multiple online venues. It’s also the only one my US editor, Ginjer Buchanan, liked. And we were all set to go and then, boom, flag on the play, my friend Michael Walsh points out that Allen Steele had used that title for a novella he had written in the late ’80s. Well, I don’t want to use Allen’s title without permission. Allen incorporated that novella into a book that he called Labyrinth of Night. Labyrinth of Night was about the face on Mars. It’s out of print now. Allen considers it justly, reasonably out of print, in that what it wrote about is no longer considered scientifically valid: that there might have been an archaeological artifact that looked like a giant face on the surface of Mars in the Cydonia region. That’s just gone from science now. So the book is fallow, out of print, and he never used the novella or reprinted it subsequently, so he said, “I’d be flattered. Go ahead, use my title.”

Since it was supposed to be called The Great Martian Fossil Rush,obviously the premise is that people are going to Mars looking for fossils. What do you think about that as a scientific possibility?

I think that if I was a betting man, I would bet a substantial amount of money that we will eventually find fossils of life on Mars. I would bet a reasonable amount of money that we will find extant active biology on Mars. Sub-surface, microbial, but still living. But I think it will defy most of our understandings of biogenesis, of the basic principles of how life came into being. That Mars was a warm, wet planet billions of years ago. That if life did not emerge then, we really do have another thing coming about how common life is in the universe. I think we will find fossils on Mars. And that we’ll find them as soon as we get actual people on the surface. Finding fossils requires covering an awful lot of territory with trained eyes. That’s how we do it on Earth. Little Pathfinder and Curiosity and Sojourner and so forth aren’t quite yet up to that. We’ll get paleontologists to Mars and then we’ll find the fossils.

And it comes up in the book that fossils on Mars would be different than the fossils that we find on Earth. Could you talk about that?

Sure. There are two possible answers to the question of life on Mars, if you accept that there is life on Mars. One is that that life and our life share a common ancestry, that is, biological material was transferred from Mars to Earth, or from Earth to Mars, which is a little bit of a harder one to do, on ejecta, material that was kicked out by asteroid or cometary impacts drifted through the solar system and landed on the other planet, which means that we’re all cousins. Martians, humans, we’re all cousins. The other option is that there were two separate biogenesis events: one here and one there. And the one there, if it’s different, would have given rise to different kinds of lifeforms. My Martian fossils are all more or less invertebrate. They’re all fairly primitive. They’re equivalent to the things that would have existed on Earth about 550,000,000 years ago, at the beginning of the Cambrian explosion. But on Mars, I have it happening much, much earlier in their history. So over three billion years ago, when Mars still had an awful lot of surface water.

Well, it wouldn’t be mineralized, right?

That’s an interesting question about how fossilization occurs. On Earth, it mostly is mineralized. That is, you take a natural bone and it gets buried in sediment and minerals percolate through the sediment from rain water and ground water and fill in the little gaps in the original material, all the little cellular spaces in your bone, for instance. And it gets filled up with minerals and it gets, as you say, mineralized or petrified, turned to stone. What happens with my Martian fossils is very different. Mars underwent a great desiccation. It dried out almost completely. It’s a very, very arid planet, and very rapidly did it dry out, too. So what I have is things that actually are frozen in permafrost for billions years and have not been mineralized. When you pick up a Martian fossil and thaw it out, the permafrost melts away. The shell or the exoskeleton that you get is the actual shell or exoskeleton that was part of a living creature billions of years ago. It’s a very different kind of paleontology that’s being done on Mars, though I think a plausible one, given the very different geological histories of Mars and Earth.

The Mars colony in this book is covered by a dome that’s described as being made out of aloquartz. What is aloquartz?

Right. “Alo” is a prefix that’s used in chemistry to mean “altered,” so it’s simply quartz that’s been altered. In this particular case, it’s been altered so that it has a sharper fractive index for ultraviolet radiation and helps a little bit with the radiation shielding as well. Quartz is silicon dioxide. It’s easy to come by. It has the property already of being clear, as you well know; it’s what glass is made of. I allow for a little bit of material science modification of source material, because it is the future. One of the things John W. Campbell said, and he was right about, is that the future doesn’t happen one at a time. You don’t get uploaded consciousness, as I have in this novel; you don’t get routine interplanetary travel, as I have in this novel; you don’t get human hibernation, as I have in this novel, without also getting a whole bunch of other technological advances as well.

What are the basic facts of life on Mars you have to keep in mind when writing a story set there that you wouldn’t have to think about in a normal detective novel?

Well, the single best thing about Mars is the reduced gravity. It’s thirty-eight percent of Earth’s gravity, about one-third. Almost never have you seen that portrayed in film or television. Mars is just portrayed as a place that’s got reddish sand, but otherwise is pretty much identical to the Mojave Desert. And that’s not the case. Fundamentally, it is very, very different. How that impacts it being a detective story, when you get to it being a noir detective story, where your characters end up roughing people up and there’s some fisticuffs and there’s face-to-face personal combat, you get very, very wild and exciting fight scenes. I like to think that I went to town in writing them in this novel, taking full advantage of the fact that you can really pick up somebody and throw them across the room in a way that would be fantastic to watch. The other thing, of course, is that Mars is deadly everywhere except under the dome. Death is very close at hand. And for a mystery story, especially a noir story, it’s hard to write a story about how dangerous it is to be in the dark streets of, let’s say London, England, that’s the classic example right now, because there are no dark streets anymore, in the sense of not being observed by security cameras. On Mars, you open it up to an area where you’ve got dark spaceways, dark alleyways, places that aren’t covered by cameras, and a whole wide planet whose surface area is equal to the surface area of Earth’s. Dry land surface area is equal between the two planets. That is an enormous place to run around on, where death literally lies around every corner.

So this book describes how the first visitors to Mars were, “too crazy, adventurous, thumbing their noses at all the moribund space agencies.” How likely do you think that is as a scenario?

Look at the front-page headlines these days. Is private sector going to be the way that space exploration is going to happen, especially manned space exploration? The obvious answer is that the only initiatives toward manned space exploration that are going on right now are private sector ones. We understand the profit motive for going to mine the asteroids, for going to mine things on the moon, for going to mine things on Mars, the enormous tourism opportunities. And I embrace that with all the gung-ho-ness that has gone with the private sector opening up the American West, and where I live, in Canada, our whole north was opened up by the Hudson’s Bay Company, which was a company of adventurers and explorers, very much in pursuit of the wealth of the fur trade. Believe me, it wasn’t the geological survey of Canada, nor was it the geological survey of America, that spread out and tamed the land. It was people that thought there was a buck to be made, and endured enormous hardships to go and get that buck.

You mention in the introduction that this book was partially inspired by a trip you took, I think to the Yukon, and you stayed at Jack London’s house, something like that?

I stayed across the street from Jack London’s house. I stayed at Pierre Berton’s house. The name won’t mean anything to most Americans, but to Canadians, he’s the great Canadian writer of popular history. He’s our Shelby Foote and our Alex Haley rolled into one. And he has bought back his childhood home in Dawson City, heart of the Klondike Gold Rush, and it’s a very competitive writer’s retreat. You apply for it; lots of people want to get the opportunity. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to spend three months living there, across the street from Jack London’s cabin, just down the street from Robert Service’s cabin, right where all of the madness of the great Klondike Gold Rush took place, and that was the template for my Great Martian Fossil Rush.

And there’s actually a writer’s retreat on Mars in this book, too.

There is. That’s right, there absolutely is. On a similar basis that well-to-do, in this case, adventure novelist, actually patterned a bit on Jack London, has left a stipend in his will to make it possible for writers to go and spend some time on the red planet and hopefully capture it in a way that perhaps the scientists are not able to, and a way that greedy throngs who are rushing there to make money aren’t bothering to take the time to.

Okay, speaking of writers, obviously there’s a long tradition of science fiction stories set on Mars. So which of those had the most impact on you?

You know, that’s a great question. I love Mars in science fiction because it’s got so many different faces. It can be Ray Bradbury’s Mars. It can be Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars, Stanley G. Weinbaum’s Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars, Ben Bova’s Mars. Everybody who comes to look at it, it’s a Rorschach test. H.G. Wells, of course, War of the Worlds. Every writer whose come to look at Mars sees it in a different way. And that’s the beauty of the planet over history. (A), we have learned more about it and so we keep reimagining it, and (B) even in the present day, I said quite forcefully that I think there probably was life on Mars and probably still is life on Mars. Other people look at that same rock hanging there in space and say, “It’s sterile now and it always has been sterile.” It’s wonderful that we can respond in all these different ways to it. That said, the Mars stories that I enjoyed the most were not actually novels about Mars. I read all the Burroughs books and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, but I actually liked short story treatments of Mars, and my favorite one is one that Campbell turned down, I think: “A Martian Odyssey”—actually written, I guess, a little bit before Campbell took over Astounding—“A Martian Odyssey,” by a guy named Stanley G. Weinbaum. And it was the kind of story that you can’t sell anymore. It’s just a travelogue. It’s a guy who goes to Mars. His little ship crashes away from the base camp and while his co-astronauts are trying to find him, he tries to trek across Mars to make it back to safety, and along the way he has an endless series of adventures meeting all kinds of interesting Martian lifeforms, including one Martian lifeform based on silicone instead of carbon chemistry. And I loved that story when I first encountered it in the book The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg. It’s the first story in the book. And I still love that story to this day. Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey.” Sadly, Weinbaum died a year and a half after his first story was published and never really made the popular impact on the field that he should have. His name should be as well-known when we talk about Mars as Burroughs or Bradbury.

Speaking of Burroughs, isn’t there a bar named Barsoom in the book?

Yes. You know, as far as my research showed, nobody had yet used the name Barsoom for a bar on Mars, and it just seemed like such a natural joke to me. I’m sure somebody listening to this podcast will now comment and say, “No, no, no, it was used in this story or that story.” Barsoom is, of course, the name from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter stories. The natives don’t call Mars “Mars,” they call it “Barsoom.” And it just seemed like a cute and fun name to use. I mentioned a little bit about this “walking in the footsteps of.” Isaac Newton said, “If I’ve seen farther than those who’ve gone in front of me, it’s because I stand on the shoulders of giants.” You can’t be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the popular imagination that Mars was an exciting place. And I like to sprinkle those throughout Red Planet Blues.

I listened to an interview you did about the TV show based on your novel Flashforward, and you talked about meeting with the producers. I was really struck about how many rules they had about what a television show had to conform to. It couldn’t look like the future. It had to be set in a major American city. The main characters couldn’t be scientists. They had to be cops, doctors, and lawyers. Everyone has to be young and gorgeous, stuff like that.

Yes. Now all that said, for American network prime time television, that’s what they were aiming for. Obviously there are television shows around the world that aren’t set in the United States, but for the American prime time television market, those were the things that they felt would be the keys to success, none of which were in my novel Flashforward. It was set in Europe. Flashforward the novel has people flashing forward twenty-one years, not six months, so that would mean the beautiful young people who might have been in the cast would spend a large part of their screen time with the old and haggard—that was a non-starter. And at the time—this is now 2007 when we had this meeting, to show it on the air in 2009—at the time, it was a fair statement to say that the only shows that Americans watched in big numbers were shows about lawyers, doctors, or cops. Now, I had the great pleasure one day, working in the writer’s room at Flashforward’s offices on the Disney lot in Los Angeles, to say to the staff writers, “Sorry guys, I gotta leave early today. I’m heading off to a taping of that show that kicks our butt every week in the ratings that is about three physicists and an engineer,” which of course was Big Bang Theory. In 2007 Big Bang Theory was not the breakout hit that it became in 2009, so yes, absolutely, those rules made sense at the time they were articulated, which is now six years ago.

You think those were true at the time, though? I heard you say that, when you first started out, everyone told you not to write books set in Canada because it wouldn’t sell, and that just turned out to be superstition or something.

Yes, it turned out that nobody had empirically tested that, that people writing popular fiction in Canada, mystery and science fiction, fantasy, were shying away from any Canadian content or reference, because they had assumed that it would not work. Now, there had been TV shows about scientists. I can name a bunch from the 1970s that lasted a single season or less. Gemini Man is one. That starred Ben Murphy. It was actually a riff on The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. It lasted, I think, one season. It was about scientists. Didn’t last. Man from Atlantis was a TV series about scientists at the foundation for oceanic research and their discovery of a living, breathing, Aquaman kind of thing. It did not last. The ones that did last, The Six Million Dollar Man, when they went from being pilot film and the first two subsequent 90-minute movies, when they went to an hour-long format, I did not like this move, but what did they do? They took the three characters they had, the superhero, the government bureaucrat, and the scientist, Dr. Rudy Wells, who had made Steve Austin into a cyborg, and dropped the scientist. So he was gone as a regular from the first three seasons of The Six Million Dollar Man, because people don’t tune in to watch scientists unless they are forensic scientists. Dexter is a scientist. He’s a forensic scientist, which is close enough to being either a cop or a lawyer or a doctor to be palatable. But yeah, it was advice that actually made sense. I wish it wasn’t true. I wish that, more than just as comedic figures, people would rally around the interesting lives of scientists in television drama. But it’s been a very, very hard sell to the public to make that happen.

So I saw on your Facebook page that you recently appeared on Naked News?

I did, for the third time!

So what’s that like?

Well, Naked News is the longest running pay-per-view show on the internet. And I think it was the New York Times that said it has the best international coverage this side of the BBC. It’s a legitimate news program that happens to be presented by beautiful women who strip naked while they’re presenting news stories. And they also do lighter, magazine-style pieces, including interviews, occasionally with authors or actors or musicians and so forth. And it happens that a lot of people at Naked News are fans of my books, which I’m very, very grateful for. And they love having me on and I love talking to beautiful naked women so it strikes me as a win-win scenario. Victoria Sinclair was the name of the woman who interviewed me this time. She’s the senior anchor. She’s also the longest-serving anchor, the original anchor, at Naked News. She’s absolutely brilliant, and I will tell you this, and let’s say present company excepted, no reflection on the current interview that we just did, it was the best interview that I’ve done in the last year. And last year when they interviewed me about Triggers, I can confidently say now—that was my previous book. We’re no longer talking about Triggers,rather my new book Red Planet Blues—they did the best interview of all of the dozens and dozens of interviews I did about Triggers. Why? One simple expedient: The interviewer actually reads the book from cover to cover. Most interviewers don’t. They rely on secondary material, press releases, jacket copy, what have you, Amazon write-ups. She read the whole book, thought deeply about the issues in the book, asked probing questions, and was willing to let me answer at length, which a lot of television interviews won’t let you do.

I saw that you just donated your papers to McMaster University?

They’re actually sending the truck on Monday, so the paperwork for the donation has been done. The actual physical donation is happening, as you and I speak now, five days from now. Yeah, absolutely. McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario approached me. They’re not my alma mater. I’ve never taught there. I have no connection to them, but they have very large holdings in the field of Canadian literature. Now, I’ve been approached by a lot of institutions, including the University of California Riverside, the University of South Florida, and various other places who wanted my papers for their holdings in science fiction. And at the end of the day I thought, “You know what, my legacy in science fiction is secure. I’ve won the Hugo for best novel. I’ve won the Nebula for best novel. I’ve had a TV series adapting one of my books.” My legacy in Canadian literature—it’s always been an uphill climb for anybody who writes genre fiction to be taken as part of the literary establishment. I was very flattered and moved that McMaster wanted to put me along the side the papers of great Canadian writers and editors, including Pierre Berton, whose retreat I started Red Planet Blues at. I’m thrilled at this opportunity and very much looking forward, not just to the donation of the papers, getting all the stuff out of my home will free up a large amount of space, but McMaster is actually hosting a three-day academic conference this fall, the fall of 2013, called “Science Fiction: The Interdisciplinary Genre,” because so much of my science fiction crosses genres. Red Planet Blues is exobiology, paleontology combined together. That kind of juxtaposition is the hallmark of my work. They’re doing a conference about the juxtaposing of interesting things within science fiction in honor of this. I’m really thrilled about that. “Science Fiction: The Interdisciplinary Genre,” September at McMaster University in Hamilton. Free and open to the public.

And how about the Lifeboat to the Stars award?

Yeah, gee, I’m the coordinating judge, which means that I am the chief cat herder of all the other judges who are looking for a work published in 2012 or 2011 that deals realistically and significantly with interstellar travel, not interplanetary, but interstellar travel. And surprisingly, as we’ve gone hunting for these, there have been very few in the last couple of years. It used to be such a mainstay of science fiction and it just isn’t really that much anymore. But we’ve been looking at—I’m not giving away our shortlist because that hasn’t been decided yet, but amongst the books the I’ve been looking at, of course, are Larry Niven and Gregory Benford, who have their first collaboration out, The Bowl of Heaven,which is a wonderful book. I say that because my cover blurb appears on the front cover of that book. Kevin Anderson and Steven Savile have a great book out called Tau Ceti, about the first generation ship voyage to the star Tau Ceti, one of our near neighbors. There’s wonderful stuff out there that we’re sorting through and looking for the best of the best, to give an award, and to bring it all full circle at the end of our interview, at the John W. Campbell conference, which is held each year at the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, Kansas. The Lifeboat to the Stars awards $1,000 to be given at the Campbell conference in June.

That about does it for our questions. Are there any other new or upcoming projects that you would like to mention before we go?

Well, I am very excited about the fact that I’m just embarking on an adaptation of my novel Triggers as a screenplay. I’ve been commissioned by a production company, a very credible one. I won’t say the name right now because we’re still dotting Is and crossing Ts on some of the paperwork. But they want to adapt and make a very big-budget feature film out of my novel Triggers. In most cases somebody else does the screenplay [but] I’m a trained broadcaster, my degree is in radio/television arts, I’m a member of the Writer’s Guild of America and the Writer’s Guild of Canada. I’ve been doing scriptwriting professionally for twenty years and those credentials were sufficient to convince them that I had the chops to tackle this and I’m really, really enjoying that project and very, very excited about the prospect of it moving ahead and actually getting made.

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: Nalo Hopkinson
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Jamaican-born author Nalo Hopkinson burst onto the publishing scene in 1997, when her novel Brown Girl in the Ring, set in present-day Toronto and featuring supernatural events drawn from Caribbean folklore, won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. She followed that up with a string of other successes, including 2001′s short story collection Skin Folk, which was acclaimed by The New York Times. Her two latest novels are Sister Mine and The Chaos.

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

Your new novel is called Sister Mine, and it’s about a pair of sisters, Abby and Makeda. Could you just tell us a little bit about those characters and how you came up with them?

I’ve been trying to remember that, and I’m really not sure. Part of it is because I’ve always been intrigued by “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti. It’s from the nineteenth century, and it’s about two sisters, one of whom saves the other from goblins. I wanted to write about two sisters who were very, very close, as these two were, so I came up with Abby and Makeda, who were born conjoined. They got separated at birth, and when they got separated—you know, when you separate conjoined twins, often they’ve been sharing some part of their body, so one gets it and the other one doesn’t—so when Abby and Makeda get separated, Abby gets the magic and Makeda doesn’t.

They belong to this family of demigods called the Celestials. Are those characters drawn from folklore or did you just make them up? Where did those characters come from?

The characters are kind of a kind of a riff on the deities from the Afro-Caribbean belief system, which is rooted in West Africa, and you see various versions of it throughout the African diaspora, wherever African people landed up, West African people specifically. So they are sort of based on them. Beyond that, I departed a bit and had a bit of fun and used a bit of imagination, but they are very clearly—People will be able to identify who’s who.

Could you talk a little about a couple of them and what sort of spins you put on those characters?

Well, I have Grandmother Ocean, who is loosely based on Oshun, who is a riverine deity; she’s associated with bodies of waters, such as rivers. I made her into the grandmother of the lot, and put a pun on her name so that “Oshun” became “Ocean.” I have General Gun, who is very loosely based on Ogoun (again, a pun on the name), and Ogoun is a blacksmith, but can also be found on the battlefield, where he has a tendency to go into berserker mode. So I did a bunch of playing around with Ogoun and who Ogoun is as General Gun, that kind of thing.

Makeda and Abby’s father had fallen in love with a mortal woman, and so they’re half mortal, and so they’re kind of on the outs with their family. Does that have a history in folklore, that that sort of thing might happen?

Sure, there’s a history in science fiction and fantasy, the idea of the biracial savior of two races, or what a sweetheart of mine calls, “not so subtle race allegory science fiction theater,” so I did some of my own. And the idea that they’re on the outs with one half their birth family is just the kind of thing you can see in life everywhere, where the circumstances of somebody’s birth, their family doesn’t approve of it, and so decides that they aren’t really one of them and finds subtle and not so subtle ways to keep them feeling ostracized, so I sort of drew on human foible.

The magic system in this book is called hoodoo. Is that just a variant spelling of voodoo? Is it different in any way from what people think of when they hear the word voodoo?

It is, and it isn’t. They are related. Getting into the specifics of how they are and are not related could take up most of this podcast and needs somebody with more training in it than I have, but they are definitely related, and I think I called it mojo.

I think both terms appear in the book.

Yeah, I do use them. I throw in a bunch of terms, but I call magic specifically mojo.

Is there a difference between hoodoo and mojo, or is that also too complicated to get into?

Yeah. [laughing] Mojo feels to me like a broader word, and most of us know the blues line, “I got my mojo working.” That sense of “got game” is one of the ways you’ll hear people use “mojo,” and hoodoo is something specific that’s a specific set of practices.

One example of the magic in this book that I really liked was one of the characters was once one of Jimi Hendrix’s guitars, and he was turned into a human being. How did you come up with that idea?

Totally written randomly. I was writing, and I don’t do well with outlines. I have to outline in order to be able to have a project I can sell to an editor, but the outline’s always very vague, and once I’ve done that, I just start writing. So I was writing that scene and got to a moment where Makeda asks something about Jimi Hendrix, and the guy leans forward and says, “I used to be his guitar,” and that just came out of my fingers. I was just typing and there it was, and then I thought, “Okay, that’s cool . . . what? How did that happen? Did Jimi Hendrix even have a British guitar at any point? (Because this guy is British.) What did I just do?” So then I had to do some research and figure out a bit more about Hendrix and his music and his guitars, and it also went into and informed the story. That one was completely random.

It’s funny, there’s a part in the book where Makeda sort of zones out and creates this powerful magical artifact, and I saw a clip with you where you said you have this tendency to sort of zone out and don’t ask you how the toothpaste ended up in the refrigerator and stuff like that. I was just wondering, is that part of your creative process? To sort of zone out and then come to and kinda look at what you’ve written and you’re like, “Where did this come from?”

It can happen. It hasn’t happened reliably for about five or six years now, partly because I spent five or six years quite ill, and couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, so zoning out in a creative way did not happen much. But I have ADD and part of that means that sometimes you just kind of lose track, either because you’re hyperfocused on one thing, or because you’re not focused at all and struggling to focus and sort of taking in all the information all at once, and getting too confused to make any good sense of it, and so I know the sense of—I have had lovely moments that feel like moments where I’m writing and writing and writing, and I’m quite aware of what I’m doing, then I look up, and it’s four hours later when it feels subjectively like only a few minutes. They don’t happen often enough. Because they’re fairly easy, or—they’re not easy, writing’s never easy—but they’re exciting when they happen. But I’ve heard other writers describe going into that kind of creative vortex where you sort of get lost in the work, and everything else kind of fades away for a while, and then you look up, and you’re surprised, almost, that you’re back in the world.

A lot of the characters in this are artists and musicians and things. There’s this wonderful, I think, bohemian atmosphere to the apartment complex that Makeda moves into. Did you have a background in arts grants or something? I was just wondering if you had experienced that sort of environment or is that a sort of dream life or . . . ?

A little bit of everything. I grew up in—my dad was a poet, a playwright, an actor. A lot of his friends were writers or actors, some of them artists, so it’s a world I kind of grew up in, but not like Makeda experiences it. I have been in a warehouse, I’ve lived in a warehouse, but it was awful and filthy, and it didn’t feel bohemian so much as just really not any fun at all. But this is fiction, so I can have fun, and because I worked in the arts in Toronto, because I still tend to work in the arts, I’m very much used to that surround, so I was very much able to draw on it, and also had people I could ask for advice, like when I didn’t know anything about how an electric guitar works, for instance. So it’s a little bit of experience, a little bit of drawing on the experience of others, and, you know, I would love to move into a building that was never intended to be a house and make a home into it. I want to live in a fire station, I want to live in a silo, I want to live in an old church or an old mosque and make it my own. It’s a dream. I don’t think it will ever happen, but it’s been a dream for a very, very long time.

You mentioned that this was sort of inspired in a way by the Christina Rossetti poem “Goblin Market,” and there are actually excerpts from the poem scattered throughout the book. I was just wondering, why did you decide to include those excerpts in here?

The poem itself is gorgeous, and it manages to simultaneously be very innocent and very sexual. It’s these two sisters have such a strong love for each other that they’re physically affectionate as well as just loving, and some of the lines in the poem read like sex scenes—they aren’t, but they read like sex scenes, and I just couldn’t help but include some of that gorgeous, gorgeous writing of Christina Rossetti’s, and some of the lines that it is possible to twist, and read as perverse if you have a mind like mine.

Well, no, I mean, I think that the sexual subtext of the scene, particularly where the two sisters smush fruit all over, and the fruit is running down—

Sucked juice off the other’s body! I mean that’s, really?

And there’s a scene very reminiscent of that in here where the two sisters are kind of smushing oranges on each other—

Oh, yes.

That was the one I noticed. Were there other scenes like that, pulled out of the poem or . . . ?

There is a—I don’t want to give away too much—but there’s stuff that I refer to that refers back to the poem, between the two sisters, between my two sisters that I created for the novel, and I tried to sort of evoke their closeness with the line about “like two birds in one nest,” where they’re sleeping in the same bed, so there are a few bits where I sort of refer backhandedly to things.

The title of this book, I saw, was originally Donkey. How did that change to Sister Mine?

That was my editor. [laughing] Editors get to change your titles. I mean, you have to agree, but they’ll work really hard to get you to agree. I called the novel Donkey because when the sisters were younger, one of them, Makeda, was a little more physically healthy and developed quicker than the other, and she would occasionally carry Abby on her back, and because Makeda is the one without the magic, she’s grown up with this notion that the family thinks that the only thing she is good for is for carrying her talented sister around. And so she thinks of herself as the donkey, and, in fact, some of the other relatives think of her that way too. So that’s what that came from. My editor thought that the title Donkey, though apt, was sort of ugly in what it referred to, and they didn’t want to turn people off the book before they had started reading it, and I figure the marketing department knows their job better than I do, so I was okay with it. The neat thing is, when I was most of the way through the first draft, I discovered a pair of sisters, black girls who were born into slavery, Millie Christine, who were born conjoined, kind of back-to-back and side-to-side, and who became singers, where one was physically stronger than the other, and actually the weaker one would sometimes sort of kite her legs up into the air, and the stronger one would walk around with her. So I went and found singing black sisters where one was stronger than the other and they were conjoined. I had not known about them before then; my friend Ellen Klages, who is also a writer, told me about them.

Makeda collects photos of conjoined twins. Did you do a lot of research on conjoined twins?

Yes, I did. Not so much on the modern day aspects of them, although there’s a little bit of that there, but the way they have been treated in history is interesting to me because of how they have often ended up being put on display and having to be treated as one person. When you read references to Millie and Christine, they’re called “Millie Christine” and referred to in the singular, as though they were one person. So I did a lot of research into various types of ways that human beings can be born attached to each other, and some of them were fascinating. The whole idea of the parasitic twin, where it’s not even a whole person, it’s a body part that’s sort of attached to the child when it is born—just some amazing stuff our bodies can do.

You also have a YA book out called The Chaos, and they made you change the title for that one too, right?

You’ve been doing your research! Yes, that one I was calling Taint, and I was getting pushback on the title from the very beginning because of, you know, some of the street names, what “taint” means on the street, and I kind of liked that meaning, so I wanted to keep it, and had tried to sort of modulate it by putting an apostrophe after the T, so that it could also be kind of a thing like “t’aint no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones.” But when I handed in my manuscript, the editor wrote me back and said, “Look, my sales managers are giggling every time, can we please change it?” So I did. That whole thing of changing titles, I’ve learned now to have second title in reserve, [laughing] because frequently I seem to come up with titles that make editors’ hair fall out.

Sister Mine is very sexual, and I would imagine a book called Taint might be as well, although it is a YA book, so I think maybe I wonder . . . is there sexuality in The Chaos and what sort of—

There is. The protagonist is sixteen; she is sexually active. That’s barely there in the story. I mean, it’s obvious that it is, but I don’t make a whole lot of it. For me, part of what was going on in The Chaos is that when she was younger, before she was sexually active, she was in a different school where she was being slut-shamed by the other girls in the school, you know, that kind of phenomenon where girls will spread rumors about each other, or they’ll find one of their own to pick on and spread rumors about awful things they’re doing with the football team, or sometimes will physically attack them as well. I wanted to talk about that, because it will happen regardless of whether the girl they pick on is actually sexually active, so I have a moment where my protagonist in The Chaos remembers the other girls sort of passing around notes or something that said that she had been giving blowjobs to the whole football team, and she’s at this point maybe thirteen, she doesn’t even know what one is, she just knows it’s not good. So I wanted to talk about that phenomenon and what happens to her, what happens to girls who have this visited upon them, because often they’re the ones who are for some reason cast as an outsider. They might be different in some way, or they might be newly come to the school when all the others know each other already. There’s usually something like that going on, and I did a lot of looking into the lives of girls who had been slut-shamed.

Well, actually, one of the Amazon reviews complained specifically about that line about blowing the football team, that it was too graphic or something. Have you gotten—

Yes, but that review . . . I sympathize with the reviewer, she’s a woman who has two girls, two daughters of her own, and she’s sort of alarmed at the notion they might be reading stuff, not even about blowjobs, I don’t describe a blowjob, I don’t . . . there’s no sex onscreen in the book at all, but the notion that they might be reading words like that, and she was also alarmed that my protagonist often disobeys her parents—that one made me smile. I mean, I have sympathy for the woman, but the fact is her girls might be dealing with this stuff as we speak and they’ll need to be able to come to her and tell her. They need their parents to be allies, not so afraid of the world that they won’t deal with it. So I’m of two minds, and it was how I was going to write it anyway.

Back in episode seventy, we interviewed Junot Diaz, and I asked him if he was familiar with your work, and he said, “Of course, I mean, Nalo’s my girl. I saw Nalo just a couple of days ago,” so I was just kind of curious how you guys know each other and how often you hang out and stuff like that?

Well, I knew his work because he was making such a splash for himself with his very first short story collection, Drown, and I did not know him, but turned on my email one day to an email from him, basically saying hi, how much he loves science fiction, and how much he wanted to write it, and we kept in touch. We finally met, oh, I can’t remember the year, but he and Joe Haldeman, who both teach at MIT, engineered having me go to visit MIT, and that’s when I met Junot. I’d known Joe before because Joe was a teacher at the Clarion I attended, so that’s when I met Junot in the flesh. We’ve kept in touch. We tend to see each other across crowded rooms where two thousand people have gathered to hear Junot speak and we wave. He’s a wonderful, wonderful man. I teach his work in my creative writing classes now, to give students a sense of voice and language and just fierce honesty in your writing.

Yeah, could you talk about that? You started teaching fairly recently, right, at UC Riverside?

I’ve been teaching all my entire writing career, off and on, but usually one-off things like a Clarion or that kind of thing, and I mentored at Humber College in Toronto, where it was an online mentorship, but a few years ago in 2009 I was offered a position teaching creative writing, specializing in science fiction and fantasy, at the University of California, Riverside. I don’t think there’s another job like this in the world. I mean a lot of people teach science fiction and fantasy, but they’re usually not in a creative writing department, or there isn’t a position created specifically for it. This university has the Eaton Collection, which, I’m told, is the largest science fiction archive that is open to the public. It’s a glorious, glorious collection, and there are three profs here who are part of a research cluster, a science fiction research cluster, and a lot of our work is sort of centered around the Eaton Collection. I’ve been to the Collection and sort of touched some second editions of Thomas More’s Utopia and first editions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. For science fiction writers, it’s like going to church.

You mentioned that you’ve had health problems. I saw you said that you hope this job will provide you a bit of economic security, and I think some of our listeners were just sort of wondering just how you were doing.

Oh, bless them. I love science fiction. There are ways in which this community kept me and my partner alive through some very, very bad years, and I will always acknowledge that, so thank people for asking. I’m doing a whole lot better. A regular paycheck is magic. It’s a pretty decent paycheck, though I’m still struggling with a lot of stuff. Climbing back of out of a hole of not just poverty but homelessness takes a whole lot, but I am starting to believe it’s going to hang around, that the good stuff that’s happening is going to hang around, my health is coming back, my creative focus is growing again, I’m making a home for myself here. I’m not forgetting Toronto and keep making a home for myself there, but basically I am now eating regularly and back on medication I need to be on, and doing better and better every day.

Ah, that’s great.

Yes!

Another book you had just come out recently was that you were one of the featured authors in Terry Bisson’s Outspoken Authors Series. Can you just talk about that series and how you got involved with it?

Report from Planet Midnight. Terry approached me while—see, partly my memory’s bad because of the ADD and the learning disability and the fibromyalgia, but put it through then five years of destitution, and it gets even worse. So I remember Terry approaching me, I don’t remember when or how, whether it was in the flesh or whether he sent me an email, but he told me about the Outspoken Authors Series that he edits, that are chapbooks where one author is sort of featured. They will have a story or two in there, an interview with Terry, and an essay. And I said, yes, I thought I could do that, and we worked on it. Terry was very, very patient as I went through homelessness and clambered my way back out to sort of having a home to really having a home to being able to think about writing at all, and, bless his heart, he kept waiting, and he remained patient, but, you know, kept on at me until we had Report from Planet Midnight.

It’s got two of my short stories; I didn’t have the brain to write new ones at the time, but I picked two that most people would not have seen because they got published in such obscure places. One of them wasn’t even published as a short story, and it wasn’t published under my name. Then he did the interview, and I took an address I had given to the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA). I was the guest author in a year where the theme of the conference was race in the literature of the fantastic. It was about a year and a half after RaceFail, so I knew it was going to be touchy, and I did part of the address as a performance piece that talked about translation, about what we mean when we say “I’m not racist.” So all of those are in the chapbook, which I really liked. I really loved the work that Terry did, the editing he did, the way he put everything in context, I loved the way the book looked, I loved working with the editor and the publishing house, but since it was a chapbook—and I know, particularly in this genre, we’re size queens; a book’s not a book unless it’s at least four hundred pages, preferably twice that—so I figured it would mostly be of academic interest. To my surprise, people have been buying it and reading it and talking about it and it’s got legs, it’s doing quite well. I’m very pleased. I’m proud of having done it, proud of the fact that Terry asked me. Terry’s been an outspoken writer for a very long time, and that he thought what I had to say was important enough to be heard is a lovely thing.

In this performance piece you mentioned, you actually enacted it as if you were sort of channeling an alien intelligence. Could you talk about why you decided to present your remarks that way?

I had been trying to write—I knew almost two years ahead of that particular ICFA, that particular year of the conference, that I was going to be a guest author, and I had been trying to write my speech for most of that time, and you know how touchy things got around RaceFail, and the kinds of stuff that was happening, and I’d start trying to write it, and I’d get a combination of scared and furious, and I’d go take a walk around the block, and plus I was, you know, still homeless and hungry. No, by then I actually had an apartment, a room in somebody’s apartment, but the words weren’t coming in a way that felt strong to me or felt like people would find them “listenable to.” Until it was the day before the conference, I was actually already at ICFA, and I took my notes down and started going over them again, and it may have been something my partner said that made me start writing in that mode of a translator from another planet, and I was mixing all kinds of modes because I have the translator sort of inhabit me, so we have the very science fiction/fantasy notion of possession, but the notion of possession is also one that you find in the Afro-Caribbean spiritual systems that I talk about in my writing. Only it’s not a scary possession, it’s not a ghost taking you over so that they can vomit out every fluid you’ve ever had in your body; it’s in the course of a religious service, you open yourself to the deity, you invite the deity, one of the deities, to come down and inhabit your body for a while so they can talk to their parishioners, so I was evoking both simultaneously, because I can’t . . . my world is a hybrid one, my references are hybrid references, so I just really worked that. And I had this translator from another planet inhabit me as a horse, which is what you’d call the person in the spiritual service who has a god riding on their head, and he and his team of translators have been listening to transmissions from Earth and having to translate them, and they’re not sure they’re really getting them because the translations they’re getting aren’t really making sense to them. So he’s asking for clarification, and when they tried to translate “I’m not racist,” they got something like “I can swim in shit without getting any of it on me.” And he looked at their own translation and thought, “That doesn’t make any sense. What sensible race would say this?” So they’ve come down to ask for clarification, always with a confession every so often that, you know, “sure you guys do some crazy things, we do some crazy things too,” because I didn’t want to give people the notion that I was standing there with some notion of purity, of being unaffected by racism. And it was a fascinating performance to give. I was shaking; I was shaking because I knew who attended ICFA, and I knew that some of the people who were there would not be fond of what I was saying. But I could also hear the supportive people in the audience who did get it and who encouraged me and I actually cut it short as a speech, because I just couldn’t bring myself to keep standing up there feeling as vulnerable as I did, but to my surprise, when I stopped, I got a standing ovation from the audience. So Terry had me take that speech and put it in context for people who don’t know the science fiction community and for whom RaceFail would not make any sense just as a phrase, and then I put the speech in with some additions.

Um, I have forgotten your question.

The question was just, I guess, why did you choose to present as an alien being, and maybe is there some synchronicity between feelings of alienation and extraterrestrials and race relations and stuff like that?

Mm-hm. Well, you look at science fiction, and look how often it talks about being alien, being alienated by the Other. Look at the numbers of blue people!

Yeah, that was funny, you mentioned all that—

Avatar, looking at you. And it is now easier to find people of color in science fiction literature and media, but the issues of representation are still really, really troubling. The way they took, for instance, Avatar: The Last Airbender, that was in a pan-Asian world, and made the protagonist white. Neil Gaiman talking about—I believe it’s Anansi Boys or American Gods—getting an offer for a film production of it, then having the producers say, “Well, of course, we’re going to make everyone white, because black people aren’t interested in fantasies,” the kind of thing you’ll hear white writers say about not wanting to write any people of color, for one reason or another, but it all boils all down to “because I don’t want people to be mad at me.” So the issues are still very, very much there. Even though we talk about race a lot in the literature, there’s still this idea of “Well, if we make this person blue and give them pointy ears, then we don’t have to actually talk about what’s happening in the real world.” And those of us who live in racialized bodies feel that lack, we feel that erasure, so yes, there was something quite deliberate in my doing half the speech as an alien.

I think actually a lot of our listeners don’t know what RaceFail was, so do you want to maybe just explain that for them?

Yes, I believe in 2009, discussions on race and racism in science fiction and fantasy in literature and community blew the hell up on the Internet. There are some ten thousand posts that have been archived, with people of color in the community talking about what our experience has been, with white people in the community talking about what their experience has been, with lots of people who are very proud to say that they’re colorblind opining very loudly on why the people of color were talking nonsense. It just got very productive, and I use that word deliberately because a lot of good came out of it. For one thing, people of our color began to see that there were [others out there], we made contact with each other. Often, you go to a con, and it can still happen that you’re the only, or one of the handful of people of color there. When Octavia Butler was alive, it was the experience of all the other, maybe four, black women science fiction writers in the community that we would go to a con, and someone would assume that that’s who we were, to the point that Toby Buckell suggested that we call ourselves “The Butlerian Jihad.” [laughing] I want t-shirts!

So a lot of the buried and not-so-buried systemic racism in the science fiction community became laid bare. Lots of people denied it was there, but how could it not be? We’re part of the rest of the world. Like I said, you can’t swim in shit and not get any of it on you. This idea that the worst thing that could happen to you is for somebody to say “That was racist,” and that you should react virulently against the very notion that you can be affected by your own society. People began to talk about that, and people began to make space to talk about it. One of the lovely, lovely things that come out of it was a publishing venture that’s going quite well and got supported by the community beautifully. And out of it came this sort of Fifty Books Challenge where a lot of the readers realized that they weren’t reading writers of color and started challenging each other to read fifty books by writers of color in a year. And they’re doing it. It’s a lovely thing. There’s still this notion that you are somehow morally superior if you don’t know anything about the background of the writers you read, and I maintain that writers have every right to not talk their backgrounds, that’s fine, but when people do and it’s important to their work, to not know doesn’t mean you’re morally superior, it means you are indifferent. And so there’s just all of that going on, still going on, still getting challenged, still arguments going back and forth. It’s a very rich time, I think, in the science fiction community, and a lot of nastiness has come out of it, but a lot of change, I think, is beginning to come out of it, and it’s, at base, a hopeful time for me.

If people want to embark on that Fifty Book Challenge you mentioned, what would be five or six they should start with that you would really recommend?

Oh my god. [laughing] You want me to get hate mail. Five or six? Okay, let’s start with one on my desk: The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord. It’s her new one. I am reading it now and really enjoying it. Something I’m teaching my students: Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water. He’s a Canadian First Nations author. Uhm, that’s two. Samuel R. Delany: pretty much anything. That’s three. Hmmmmm . . . The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by Nora (N.K.) Jemisin. Charles Saunders: pretty much anything. And Love and Rockets [by the Hernandez Brothers], which is a graphic novel/comic, as well as Bayou [by Jeremy Love], which is another set of graphic novels. There! Off the top of my head.

Actually, speaking of graphic novels, I saw you said that you were very slowly working on a graphic novel. Is there any—

Progress? No, but I’m still collecting research. It’s something that my life partner and I were working on together, and he’s gone back to school, so it’s on hiatus. But I’m still collecting research and notes for it. I don’t know when it’ll happen; it’s nowhere near imminent.

Can you say what you’re researching or what the overall topic is or . . . ?

Part of what we’re looking at it is discussions of what constitutes a human being at a time between sort of the Second World War and a few years afterwards, where we had the suffragist movement where women were fighting to be recognized as people, we had corporations being designated people under the law, that kind of thing. But I’m also looking at a particular African supernatural creature and the history of black men on the railroad in North America. You know, it can’t be just one thing. It all comes together, I promise you, but I just don’t know when.

Okay, so that pretty much does it for the questions. Are there any other projects that you’re working or have coming up that we haven’t touched on yet?

Yes, I am back to working on Black Heart Man, which is a novel that I’ve mostly finished and had to put aside, so I will be working on that over the summer. I am shopping around a new short story collection, and just generally getting about the business of learning to become a full-time professor and getting back into my creative brain. So that’s where I’m at.

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: Pavel Elagin

Artist Showcase: Pavel Elagin
Galen Dara

Pavel Elagin is a concept artist living in Australia, working for the entertainment industry. www.artbypavel.com

Our cover image this month is your fantastical painting, Flautist Woods. As I understand, this was a personal piece of yours and you took it through several revisions and a complete start-over before you had it where you wanted it. [http://www.artbypavel.com/illust/2010/11/17/process-journal-flautist-woods] Where did the idea for this piece come from and how did you know when you were on the right track?

It started out as a simple exercise in character drawing—a flute player—but the image kept evolving as I worked on it. At first I wanted to keep the location more suggestive and abstract, but in the process of painting, the original intent started to become more complicated. The character felt disjointed from the location I had painted. I had to find a way to solve that problem, so I set it aside. The revision happened when I was working on the moody forest location as a separate image. It was a matter of having the separate ideas click into place and from there I had the final image in mind that I worked towards.

I think, in the end, it’s hard to pinpoint where exactly the idea came from; it was more a matter of many ideas forming something new.

I love your environmental paintings! Beautiful atmospheric effects and such a wide range of mysterious and intriguing locations—they make me want to travel some place exotic. I was intrigued to look through your flickr feed [http://www.flickr.com/photos/rayk/] and see that you are quite the explorer yourself with trips to Katmandu, the Himalayas, and Japan (and did you climb Mt. Everest?). Does your traveling feed into your inspiration for these fantastical and other-worldy locations? Where else do you get your inspiration from?

I didn’t climb Mt. Everest, it was only a simple trek to the base camp, and a climb to Kala Pata for the breathtaking view of Mt. Everest and the surrounding peaks.

I love traveling and exploring new locations. I think for me the biggest source of inspiration is simply the energy and excitement you get while traveling and not necessarily what you see. Of course, for some things like mountains, you don’t really get to appreciate their scale and enormity unless you experience them for yourself. It’s experiences like these that you can incorporate into your own work, which might not necessarily be of the same location or subject matter.

My other source of inspiration is definitely books, video games, and animation. I’m an avid reader of science fiction, especially if it takes you on an epic journey through many worlds and locations. Recently I’ve been reading Peter F. Hamilton’s work; I really love the epic setting in many of his books.

You currently work in the gaming and film industry doing environmental design and visual development. What sort of work does that entail? Can you give us some background into how you became the artist you are and how your gaming and film work relates to your personal work?

I’ve been very fortunate that much of the work I do professionally is very similar to what I enjoy doing for my personal work. Early on in a project, it’s usually establishing mood paintings for the various locations and environments. Once the initial stage is done, it’s more concrete designs for those locations, color and lighting keys for script, and anything else that needs to be visualized.

I had wanted to become an artist since I was young, but my journey didn’t start until I graduated from high school. I was lucky to learn about concept design for video games on an internet site. From there I knew exactly what I wanted to pursue as my career. I love creating imaginary locations and I’ve always loved that about video games; I think that common ground has brought me to where I am today as an artist.

Any exciting projects and trips on the horizon?

I am very excited about the current project I’ve been a part of, and I can’t wait to see it released. Absolutely looking to travel again: Europe and South East Asia are the two places that are on top of my list to visit, and I hope I’ll get the chance to do that soon!

Thank you Pavel, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.

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

The Ballad of Marisol Brook
Sarah Grey

Her name, this time, is Marisol Lysium Brook. The media, long bored with the minutiae of her death, occupies itself by speculating which stars will grace the guest list at her reconstruction gala.

Marisol is the name she etched into the Hollywood concrete, beside her thin palm prints. Both lie beneath the tread of tourists, under a golden star, not far from the sea where the ashes of her first body sailed away on Pacific winds. The name, as she has insisted in countless interviews, praises the sea and sun, the golden sunshine and silver waves. She is a sun-kissed daughter of the California coast.

Brook is the name of her husband, Oliver, the esteemed director and father of her only child, a solitary young man named Peter with a bent mouth and sad eyes. Upon Marisol’s death, alone, in the dark sea beneath a sailboat a half-mile off Catalina, Peter checked himself into the linen embrace of Blackwood Recovery Center, burrowed amongst Vermont evergreens, intent on trading his cocaine addiction for yoga and raw produce.

Lysium is the primary subsidiary of Conti Cosmetics Milan. For twenty years, it has specialized in cream eye shadows and high-gloss lipsticks in a spectrum to boggle the eyes, a stunning array of light-bending metallics designed to glitter like shattered glass beneath throbbing dance club lights.

Lysium, through a quiet sea of shell corporations, has sponsored Marisol’s reconstruction. In return, she carries its name, along with a contractual obligation to serve as its otherwise uncompensated spokeswoman for ten years. Marisol, reborn from cells and brine, belongs to Lysium.

The vault itself is tightly monitored. Seven doctors wait in attendance, all of them phantoms behind white coats and masks. Their shoe covers rasp across the bleached tile floor like wind through parched leaves. They monitor synaptic impulses, recalibrate drips, and watch the barest rhythm of a pulse rise from silence.

Two bodyguards line the door, each in a suit of stygian black.

The room is a snug seventy-two degrees. Marisol’s eyes open; at the base of her skull, bundled memory clusters leap to life, and she is swarmed by her own archived thoughts. A doctor draws the ventilation tube out of her windpipe. She gasps, coughs up stagnant mucus, and, for the first time in eighteen months, inhales.

The sterilized laboratory air sears her throat. She squeals, a involuntary exclamation of shock that calls to mind the climax of her fourth romantic comedy, the wildly lauded Saddleburn, in which two-time Best Actor winner Barry Levain leaps out of a empty whiskey barrel and kisses her, boldly and unexpectedly, causing them both to plunge headlong into a horse trough.

One of the doctors, charmed by the memory of this beloved scene, laughs out loud. The others smile, triumphant.

Seven days later, painted with Lysium’s pale rose Copernica shade of lipstick and masked in its deep violet Nova eye shadow, Marisol steps out of an unmarked sedan and into the celebration of the century. In the grand ballroom of the ocean view Palacio Rojo Hotel, she dances on gilt stilettos with Mr. Levain and a battalion of other film demigods, with every West Coast producer and many from the stages of the East. She waltzes with ambassadors and sips champagne poured by senators.

Her husband, regrettably, has declined to attend, citing obligations in Europe. Peter is absent as well, having abruptly departed the Blackwood Center three days before to face felony drug charges.

Late in the evening, Marisol receives a letter, hand-delivered in a white glove, from Mr. Oliver Stuyvesant Brook, through his counsel, Ashwild & Craycroft, notifying her that the unfortunate drowning of the true Ms. Marisol Brook operates to terminate their marriage and nullify any support obligations delineated in their prenuptial agreement.

Beside the ballroom’s central fountain stands Mr. Barry Levain, lately engaged to Laurentia di Conti, the very young and disappointingly plain heiress to the Conti Milan fortune. He carries a half-drunk flute of champagne and watches as Marisol receives the news. As soon as the frown crosses her glossed lips, he seizes his opportunity. He throws his champagne aside, drawing a hundred heads toward the tinkle of shattering glass, just in time to see him snatch Marisol into his arms and kiss her, boldly and unexpectedly. The move throws her off balance and plunges them both headlong into the fountain. Marisol squeals in shock.

The guests laugh, charmed by the memory of that beloved scene. Not one sees the frown cross Ms. di Conti’s thin face.

Near dawn, after the final guests have departed, Marisol, high on the finest champagne, leaves via the basement tunnel that opens onto the Palacio’s private beach. Her black-suited bodyguards blend with the soaked stones and darkened cliffs. Only the most tenacious paparazzi witness her departure, and few of them observe that the man enveloping her like a fox fur cloak is, in fact, the inimitable Mr. Levain.

Only one manages to snap a recognizable photograph.

Two days later, at her family’s Malibu estate, Laurentia di Conti awakens to a headline and accompanying photograph that shatter her manicured life. It is hours before she regains sufficient composure to dress herself and leave the house. By the time she swerves into the driveway of Marisol’s flat, she has already bested a bottle of vodka and carries a loaded pistol.

Her name, this time, is Marisol Festavi Brook. Her reconstruction will be celebrated in private.

Marisol means Maria of the Sun, the goddess of the gilded light that forever warms the stark Arizona desert.

Brook is a name she took of her own accord. It is understood that Marisol, in her present manifestation, bears no relation to the famed producer Oliver Stuyvesant Brook; nor does her deviant son, Charles Brook, presently serving a prison term for sale of methamphetamines and resisting arrest. Suggestions to the contrary are met with an invitation to federal court from the hands of Ashwild & Craycroft, Attorneys at Law.

Festavi is a promising line of American-made electric muscle cars: all the green, twice the mean. Upon its initial public offering, Festavi Automotive exploded in value, upstaging blue-chip paragons for the adoration of the wealthiest investors. The company’s startup capital derives, in large part, from subsidies that flew through the legislature on a bill sponsored by Senator Tad Benson of Arizona. The bill received unprecedented bipartisan support despite fervent opposition from the President, Benson’s longtime political foe. Festavi’s offices are nestled near a palatial suburb east of Phoenix, between a faux-Tuscan martini bar and Benson’s campaign headquarters.

Festavi, through an independent investors’ group, has underwritten Marisol’s immediate reconstruction. She is obligated to address any resulting tax liabilities herself, however, and is shadowed by fifty million in-breach-of-contract penalties should she violate any of the one hundred and forty-seven personal services provisions, including a maximum bodyweight of one hundred twelve pounds and an obligation to only drive the latest Festavi models. Marisol, reborn, belongs to Festavi.

The vault is dim and chilled to sixty degrees, as recent research has suggested exposure to undue heat or intense light may induce chemical imbalances in a reconstructed specimen, which in turn may lead to a circus of aberrant behavior ranging from rebellion and disloyalty through vicious sexual promiscuity.

There are two doctors and a nurse in attendance. One doctor fumbles with a dial; the other reads a financial journal and chews his thumbnail.

Two bodyguards line the door, their suits so black they swallow what little light dares to wander into the room.

Marisol’s eyes open. Her pupils narrow and scan the vault, taking in the recovery table, the tubes, the wires, the suited men with pistols at their hips. Memory clusters flare and tingle. Her first white-hot thoughts are of falling headlong into frigid water. She fights the ventilator’s forced breath and chokes.

Seven minutes pass before the nurse takes note of Marisol’s rapidly escalating pulse. The doctor tosses his journal aside. A scowl coagulates on his face, and remains even as he twists the ventilator tube out of her windpipe.

The bitter air rips through her chest, and she squeals. No one hears. The nurse fills a syringe with narcotics and plunges it into Marisol’s thigh.

Seven days later, Marisol takes part in a photo shoot, where she is brushed and oiled and then draped, tastefully nude, across the monstrous grille of a cherry-red Bengali X8 convertible. Senator Benson, a notorious bachelor, attends the shoot. Afterward, he insists that she accompany him on a long drive in the Bengali, through a bone-stark desert night. They stop on a county road far south of the city, where towering cacti claw at the stars.

He draws a pistol from the glove compartment, and leaves no uncertainty as to Marisol’s role in his political career.

A year later, Marisol testifies before a Congressional panel regarding her alleged affair with the President. She has memorized a script of details too depraved and insidious for even the most tawdry of her films, a circus of lips and sweat and flushed bodies spread wide across vintage White House furnishings. Her gray suit draws every camera to her cleavage, but cinches too tight around a waistline padded thick with Festavi-sponsored banquets and cocktails.

When the hearing ends, she cries in the bathroom, alone.

The panel finds her testimony unworthy of credibility and dismisses the investigation. The media christen her a liar and a whore; in particular, they take note of her creeping obesity.

Festavi, in its breach of contract suit, cites her body weight.

On a January night colder than the dark sea, Marisol pays for a month’s supply of painkillers, two brands of diet pills, and a bottle of vodka, and drives her scuffed red Bengali home.

Her name, this time, is Marisol Brook MacPherson. The press, though notified of her reconstruction, is indifferent.

Marisol is a Hebrew name that translates, roughly, to “bitter.” It is not, in fact, Spanish. Marisol herself is a proud American citizen, descended from generations bred and fed on rich Midwestern wheat, as pure as the star-struck Texas skies.

Brook is the name of Marisol’s first husband, noted producer Oliver Brook. While posterity has largely forgotten him, cinema historians will recall the cloud of suspicion that devoured Mr. Brook’s career following Marisol’s drowning off Catalina Island. The more studious among them will refer to the fierce litigation between the estate of Oliver Stuyvesant Brook and the bankrupt Festavi Automotive Corporation, which ended with the Supreme Court’s pronouncement that a reconstructed individual retains neither the assets nor the obligations of her former incarnations. They will describe how, in the six decades since, reconstruction has devolved into an escape hatch for the wealthy. They may refer, in passing, to the abrupt disappearance of former Senator Benson of Arizona following his conviction for securities fraud.

MacPherson is the name of Marisol’s second husband, aging songwriting supernova Serge MacPherson. Marisol has haunted his heart since he was eleven, when he first saw clips of the neo-western romance Saddleburn on a midnight viral feed. He has laid more flowers on Marisol’s grave than his own mother’s. Her reconstruction so many years after her third death puts a sizeable dent in his dwindling fortune. Serge is indifferent. Marisol, reborn, will belong to him.

Marisol’s revival takes place in a vault in a Houston warehouse, in the midst of a January storm.

The vault itself is a drafty fifty-four degrees, the product of wind gouging its tendrils through the brittle ceiling. The one doctor in attendance trips repeatedly on a deep chink in the concrete floor. Serge stands near the vault, wearing his best pair of ostrich boots and coddling a half-empty flask of late twenty-first century Oregon whiskey.

Two bodyguards line the door, suits and shoes and ties all black as pooled oil.

Marisol’s eyes open. As Serge has anticipated, they are the same flawless brown as her close-up in the fifty-fourth minute of Saddleburn, when Barry Levain fishes her out of the trough and her blinking lashes cling together and her mouth hangs open in a surprised pout. For forty years, Serge has imagined himself in the shoes of the pathetic Mr. Levain, whose own reconstruction following the tragic di Conti murder-suicide was, thankfully, sidelined by the claims of his half-dozen illegitimate children.

Memory clusters send fireworks through Marisol’s brain. She is swimming upward, through water colder than death. She can see a light above her, beyond a shield of glass, too far to touch. A column of water throbs in her lungs; she cannot breathe against it.

The doctor pulls the tube from Marisol’s throat. She has no chance to inhale before Serge kisses her, boldly and unexpectedly.

The doctor, who has never seen Saddleburn, shakes his head.

Seven days later, in the wake of a jet-speed evangelical wedding ceremony, Serge has crafted a new song, a drawling, tragic melody about a vulnerable starlet whose heart and body are shattered time and again by greed and sin. The song ends only when she is stitched back together and held tight to the chest of a loyal man. He calls it The Ballad of Marisol Brook.

Seven million viewers log on for the live netvid release. Serge rests in a suede chair on the deck of his low-orbit shuttle, and Marisol cradles herself near his feet, smiling upward as if he is the dawn. He sings to her in a wavering croon, twisting his fingers tight around the neck of his acoustic guitar. If his voice falls a half-step flat in the fourteenth bar, no one on Earth notices, and certainly no one connects it to the whiskey that stains the hem of his button-down shirt.

The audience is privileged to miss the fight that erupts hours later, when Serge finds Marisol scanning archived headlines about a Charles Stuyvesant Brook, a/k/a Charlie Ruiz, an elderly felon executed a decade before for the unflinching murder of two police officers in the midst of a botched methamphetamine raid. The audience does not see the swell of Marisol’s bloodied lip, nor do they see Serge refill his flask before sputtering a tearful apology.

Within days, The Ballad has topped charts in the United States, Australia, and parts of Western Europe. Serge buys her a fox fur cloak to celebrate.

Ten months later, halfway through a fourteen-city tour, Marisol waits until Serge is sober to tell him she is leaving.

Serge remains stone-faced, even as he swears off drinking and promises to quit his tour, to quit all tours forever. He seizes her by the arm and she pulls away; his fingernails break the surface of her forearm, and her blood leaks onto the upholstery of his restored Bengali X8. Marisol squeals in pain. It is only then that he weeps.

On a rain-flooded street outside Minneapolis, Marisol opens the passenger door and walks away. Serge does not follow her.

Country music fans will recall Serge’s tragic suicide the night before his sold-out Minneapolis concert, despite his recent marriage and the explosive success of his fifteenth album, titled Beloved. They will note that a businesswoman jogging with her terrier uncovered his river-wracked body a week later. They may discuss the handwriting on the note found on the dashboard of his cherry-red convertible—a drunken, desperate scrawl, a fumbling apology to a cinema goddess.

They may add that, though her body was never located, the presence of Marisol’s blood on the upholstery, along with the text of Serge’s note, has generally been regarded as conclusive evidence of her fourth and final death.

Her name is, and always has been, Marisol Amada Ruiz. She was reborn at a bus stop off a suburban Minnesota street, in a downpour of icy rain. No one noticed.

Marisol evokes Santa María Soledad, saint to the lonely and sick, whose miraculous corpse remained intact so many years after fluid filled her lungs and swept her from the earth. This blessed name belonged to Marisol’s mother and to her grandmother, and to a half-dozen other Ruiz women who trudged up thirsty trails in search of borderland dreams.

Amada, of course, means beloved.

She carries no other name, not even that of her lover, David, a man who speaks little and smiles often, who drives a bruised hatchback and holds his grandchildren as if they were jeweled eggs. David wears a deep scar across his chin, the relic of some battle lost in his youth, which time refuses to soften. They met a decade ago in a rainy cemetery, where his wife rested several plots from the grave of a long-dead criminal named Charles Brook. He shared his umbrella and his conversation, and pretended not to notice her tears through the storm.

He has never asked her why she was there. She has never asked how he got his scar.

The beach, on this windy afternoon, is cool, and is attended by a handful of giggling families and by lovers whose hair and limbs and lips tangle in the wind. A single dog prances in the surf, its fur thick with sand.

Marisol closes her eyes against the high summer sun and follows the path of the shore, finding her way by the chill of wet sand and the pulse of seawater over her toes. The wind hurls salt at her, across a body weighed down by time and labor, over suntanned cheeks and kiss-worn lips, through hair grown brittle and gray. She can hear David, far down the shore, shouting to the children, over the gleeful bark of a dog and the scream of seagulls.

A pair of crows guards the dunes, feathers black as lost memories, claws latched tight around a bleached shard of driftwood. As she steps closer, they shriek a warning. She does not stop. They surrender at last and fly away, eastward, toward the silver city.

On an empty beach, Marisol lets the crisp sea wind fill her lungs, and settles into solitude.

© 2013 by Sarah Grey.

Sarah Grey is an attorney, a mother, an art historian, a medievalist, an aggressive advocate for the disabled, and a militant vegetarian with an unquenchable lust for cheese. She was born on Bloomsday, but prefers her fiction short. Her work has appeared in Flash Fiction Online. She lives with her family near Sacramento, California.

Mono no aware
Ken Liu

The world is shaped like the kanji for umbrella, only written so poorly, like my handwriting, that all the parts are out of proportion.

My father would be greatly ashamed at the childish way I still form my characters. Indeed, I can barely write many of them anymore. My formal schooling back in Japan ceased when I was only eight.

Yet for present purposes, this badly drawn character will do.

The canopy up there is the solar sail. Even that distorted kanji can only give you a hint of its vast size. A hundred times thinner than rice paper, the spinning disc fans out a thousand kilometers into space like a giant kite intent on catching every passing photon. It literally blocks out the sky.

Beneath it dangles a long cable of carbon nanotubes a hundred kilometers long: strong, light, and flexible. At the end of the cable hangs the heart of the Hopeful, the habitat module, a five-hundred-meter-tall cylinder into which all the 1,021 inhabitants of the world are packed.

The light from the sun pushes against the sail, propelling us on an ever widening, ever accelerating, spiraling orbit away from it. The acceleration pins all of us against the decks, gives everything weight.

Our trajectory takes us toward a star called 61 Virginis. You can’t see it now because it is behind the canopy of the solar sail. The Hopeful will get there in about three hundred years, more or less. With luck, my great-great-great—I calculated how many “greats” I needed once, but I don’t remember now—grandchildren will see it.

There are no windows in the habitat module, no casual view of the stars streaming past. Most people don’t care, having grown bored of seeing the stars long ago. But I like looking through the cameras mounted on the bottom of the ship so that I can gaze at this view of the receding, reddish glow of our sun, our past.

“Hiroto,” Dad said as he shook me awake. “Pack up your things. It’s time.”

My small suitcase was ready. I just had to put my Go set into it. Dad gave this to me when I was five, and the times we played were my favorite hours of the day.

The sun had not yet risen when Mom and Dad and I made our way outside. All the neighbors were standing outside their houses with their bags as well, and we greeted each other politely under the summer stars. As usual, I looked for the Hammer. It was easy. Ever since I could remember, the asteroid had been the brightest thing in the sky except for the moon, and every year it grew brighter.

A truck with loudspeakers mounted on top drove slowly down the middle of the street.

“Attention, citizens of Kurume! Please make your way in an orderly fashion to the bus stop. There will be plenty of buses to take you to the train station, where you can board the train for Kagoshima. Do not drive. You must leave the roads open for the evacuation buses and official vehicles!”

Every family walked slowly down the sidewalk.

“Mrs. Maeda,” Dad said to our neighbor. “Why don’t I carry your luggage for you?”

“I’m very grateful,” the old woman said.

After ten minutes of walking, Mrs. Maeda stopped and leaned against a lamppost.

“It’s just a little longer, Granny,” I said. She nodded but was too out of breath to speak. I tried to cheer her. “Are you looking forward to seeing your grandson in Kagoshima? I miss Michi too. You will be able to sit with him and rest on the spaceships. They say there will be enough seats for everyone.”

Mom smiled at me approvingly.

“How fortunate we are to be here,” Dad said. He gestured at the orderly rows of people moving toward the bus stop, at the young men in clean shirts and shoes looking solemn, the middle-aged women helping their elderly parents, the clean, empty streets, and the quietness—despite the crowd, no one spoke above a whisper. The very air seemed to shimmer with the dense connections between all the people—families, neighbors, friends, colleagues—as invisible and strong as threads of silk.

I had seen on TV what was happening in other places around the world: looters screaming, dancing through the streets, soldiers and policemen shooting into the air and sometimes into crowds, burning buildings, teetering piles of dead bodies, generals shouting before frenzied crowds, vowing vengeance for ancient grievances even as the world was ending.

“Hiroto, I want you to remember this,” Dad said. He looked around, overcome by emotion. “It is in the face of disasters that we show our strength as a people. Understand that we are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we’re enmeshed. A person must rise above his selfish needs so that all of us can live in harmony. The individual is small and powerless, but bound tightly together, as a whole, the Japanese nation is invincible.”

“Mr. Shimizu,” eight-year-old Bobby says, “I don’t like this game.”

The school is located in the very center of the cylindrical habitat module, where it can have the benefit of the most shielding from radiation. In front of the classroom hangs a large American flag to which the children say their pledge every morning. To the sides of the American flag are two rows of smaller flags belonging to other nations with survivors on the Hopeful. At the very end of the left side is a child’s rendition of the Hinomaru, the corners of the white paper now curled and the once bright red rising sun faded to the orange of sunset. I drew it the day I came aboard the Hopeful.

I pull up a chair next to the table where Bobby and his friend Eric are sitting. “Why don’t you like it?”

Between the two boys is a nineteen-by-nineteen grid of straight lines. A handful of black and white stones have been placed on the intersections.

Once every two weeks, I have the day off from my regular duties monitoring the status of the solar sail and come here to teach the children a little bit about Japan. I feel silly doing it sometimes. How can I be their teacher when I have only a boy’s hazy memories of Japan?

But there is no other choice. All the non-American technicians like me feel it is our duty to participate in the cultural-enrichment program at the school and pass on what we can.

“All the stones look the same,” Bobby says, “and they don’t move. They’re boring.”

“What game do you like?” I ask.

“Asteroid Defender!” Eric says. “Now that is a good game. You get to save the world.”

“I mean a game you do not play on the computer.”

Bobby shrugs. “Chess, I guess. I like the queen. She’s powerful and different from everyone else. She’s a hero.”

“Chess is a game of skirmishes,” I say. “The perspective of Go is bigger. It encompasses entire battles.”

“There are no heroes in Go,” Bobby says, stubbornly.

I don’t know how to answer him.

There was no place to stay in Kagoshima, so everyone slept outside along the road to the spaceport. On the horizon we could see the great silver escape ships gleaming in the sun.

Dad had explained to me that fragments that had broken off of the Hammer were headed for Mars and the Moon, so the ships would have to take us further, into deep space, to be safe.

“I would like a window seat,” I said, imagining the stars streaming by.

“You should yield the window seat to those younger than you,” Dad said. “Remember, we must all make sacrifices to live together.”

We piled our suitcases into walls and draped sheets over them to form shelters from the wind and the sun. Every day inspectors from the government came by to distribute supplies and to make sure everything was all right.

“Be patient!” the government inspectors said. “We know things are moving slowly, but we’re doing everything we can. There will be seats for everyone.”

We were patient. Some of the mothers organized lessons for the children during the day, and the fathers set up a priority system so that families with aged parents and babies could board first when the ships were finally ready.

After four days of waiting, the reassurances from the government inspectors did not sound quite as reassuring. Rumors spread through the crowd.

“It’s the ships. Something’s wrong with them.”

“The builders lied to the government and said they were ready when they weren’t, and now the Prime Minister is too embarrassed to admit the truth.”

“I hear that there’s only one ship, and only a few hundred of the most important people will have seats. The other ships are only hollow shells, for show.”

“They’re hoping that the Americans will change their mind and build more ships for allies like us.”

Mom came to Dad and whispered in his ear.

Dad shook his head and stopped her. “Do not repeat such things.”

“But for Hiroto’s sake—”

“No!” I’d never heard Dad sound so angry. He paused, swallowed. “We must trust each other, trust the Prime Minister and the Self-Defense Forces.”

Mom looked unhappy. I reached out and held her hand. “I’m not afraid,” I said.

“That’s right,” Dad said, relief in his voice. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

He picked me up in his arms—I was slightly embarrassed for he had not done such a thing since I was very little—and pointed at the densely packed crowd of thousands and thousands spread around us as far as the eye could see.

“Look at how many of us there are: grandmothers, young fathers, big sisters, little brothers. For anyone to panic and begin to spread rumors in such a crowd would be selfish and wrong, and many people could be hurt. We must keep to our places and always remember the bigger picture.”

Mindy and I make love slowly. I like to breathe in the smell of her dark curly hair, lush, warm, tickling the nose like the sea, like fresh salt.

Afterwards we lie next to each other, gazing up at my ceiling monitor.

I keep looping on it a view of the receding star field. Mindy works in navigation, and she records the high-resolution cockpit video feed for me.

I like to pretend that it’s a big skylight, and we’re lying under the stars. I know some others like to keep their monitors showing photographs and videos of old Earth, but that makes me too sad.

“How do you say ‘star’ in Japanese?” Mindy asks.

“Hoshi,” I tell her.

“And how do you say ‘guest’?”

“Okyakusan.”

“So we are hoshi okyakusan? Star guests?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” I say. Mindy is a singer, and she likes the sound of languages other than English. “It’s hard to hear the music behind the words when their meanings get in the way,” she told me once.

Spanish is Mindy’s first language, but she remembers even less of it than I do of Japanese. Often, she asks me for Japanese words and weaves them into her songs.

I try to phrase it poetically for her, but I’m not sure if I’m successful. “Wareware ha, hoshi no aida ni kyaku ni kite.” We have come to be guests among the stars.

“There are a thousand ways of phrasing everything,” Dad used to say, “each appropriate to an occasion.” He taught me that our language is full of nuances and supple grace, each sentence a poem. The language folds in on itself, the unspoken words as meaningful as the spoken, context within context, layer upon layer, like the steel in samurai swords.

I wish Dad were around so that I could ask him: How do you say “I miss you” in a way that is appropriate to the occasion of your twenty-fifth birthday, as the last survivor of your race?

“My sister was really into Japanese picture books. Manga.”

Like me, Mindy is an orphan. It’s part of what draws us together.

“Do you remember much about her?”

“Not really. I was only five or so when I came on board the ship. Before that, I only remember a lot of guns firing and all of us hiding in the dark and running and crying and stealing food. She was always there to keep me quiet by reading from the manga books. And then  . . . ”

I had watched the video only once. From our high orbit, the blue-and-white marble that was Earth seemed to wobble for a moment as the asteroid struck, and then, the silent, roiling waves of spreading destruction that slowly engulfed the globe.

I pull her to me and kiss her forehead, lightly, a kiss of comfort. “Let us not speak of sad things.”

She wraps her arms around me tightly, as though she will never let go.

“The manga, do you remember anything about them?” I ask.

“I remember they were full of giant robots. I thought: Japan is so powerful.”

I try to imagine it: heroic giant robots all over Japan, working desperately to save the people.

The Prime Minister’s apology was broadcast through the loudspeakers. Some also watched it on their phones.

I remember very little of it except that his voice was thin and he looked very frail and old. He looked genuinely sorry. “I’ve let the people down.”

The rumors turned out to be true. The shipbuilders had taken the money from the government but did not build ships that were strong enough or capable of what they promised. They kept up the charade until the very end. We found out the truth only when it was too late.

Japan was not the only nation that failed her people. The other nations of the world had squabbled over who should contribute how much to a joint evacuation effort when the Hammer was first discovered on its collision course with Earth. And then, when that plan had collapsed, most decided that it was better to gamble that the Hammer would miss and spend the money and lives on fighting with each other instead.

After the Prime Minister finished speaking, the crowd remained silent. A few angry voices shouted but soon quieted down as well. Gradually, in an orderly fashion, people began to pack up and leave the temporary campsites.

“The people just went home?” Mindy asks, incredulous.

“Yes.”

“There was no looting, no panicked runs, no soldiers mutinying in the streets?”

“This was Japan,” I tell her. And I can hear the pride in my voice, an echo of my father’s.

“I guess the people were resigned,” Mindy says. “They had given up. Maybe it’s a culture thing.”

“No!” I fight to keep the heat out of my voice. Her words irk me, like Bobby’s remark about Go being boring. “That is not how it was.”

“Who is Dad speaking to?” I asked.

“That is Dr. Hamilton,” Mom said. “We—he and your father and I—went to college together, in America.”

I watched Dad speak English on the phone. He seemed like a completely different person: It wasn’t just the cadences and pitch of his voice; his face was more animated, his hand gestured more wildly. He looked like a foreigner.

He shouted into the phone.

“What is Dad saying?”

Mom shushed me. She watched Dad intently, hanging on every word.

“No,” Dad said into the phone. “No!” I did not need that translated.

Afterwards Mom said, “He is trying to do the right thing, in his own way.”

“He is as selfish as ever,” Dad snapped.

“That’s not fair,” Mom said. “He did not call me in secret. He called you instead because he believed that if your positions were reversed, he would gladly give the woman he loved a chance to survive, even if it’s with another man.”

Dad looked at her. I had never heard my parents say “I love you” to each other, but some words did not need to be said to be true.

“I would never have said yes to him,” Mom said, smiling. Then she went to the kitchen to make our lunch. Dad’s gaze followed her.

“It’s a fine day,” Dad said to me. “Let us go on a walk.”

We passed other neighbors walking along the sidewalks. We greeted each other, inquired after each other’s health. Everything seemed normal. The Hammer glowed even brighter in the dusk overhead.

“You must be very frightened, Hiroto,” he said.

“They won’t try to build more escape ships?”

Dad did not answer. The late summer wind carried the sound of cicadas to us: chirr, chirr, chirrrrrr.

“Nothing in the cry

Of cicadas suggest they

Are about to die.”

“Dad?”

“That is a poem by Basho. Do you understand it?”

I shook my head. I did not like poems much.

Dad sighed and smiled at me. He looked at the setting sun and spoke again:

“The fading sunlight holds infinite beauty

Though it is so close to the day’s end.”

I recited the lines to myself. Something in them moved me. I tried to put the feeling into words: “It is like a gentle kitten is licking the inside of my heart.”

Instead of laughing at me, Dad nodded solemnly.

“That is a poem by the classical Tang poet Li Shangyin. Though he was Chinese, the sentiment is very much Japanese.”

We walked on, and I stopped by the yellow flower of a dandelion. The angle at which the flower was tilted struck me as very beautiful. I got the kitten-tongue-tickling sensation in my heart again.

“The flower  . . . ” I hesitated. I could not find the right words.

Dad spoke,

“The drooping flower

As yellow as the moon beam

So slender tonight.”

I nodded. The image seemed to me at once so fleeting and so permanent, like the way I had experienced time as a young child. It made me a little sad and glad at the same time.

“Everything passes, Hiroto,” Dad said. “That feeling in your heart: It’s called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: We are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell and we are all ephemeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon.”

I looked around at the clean streets, the slow-moving people, the grass, and the evening light, and I knew that everything had its place; everything was all right. Dad and I went on walking, our shadows touching.

Even though the Hammer hung right overhead, I was not afraid.

My job involves staring at the grid of indicator lights in front of me. It is a bit like a giant Go board.

It is very boring most of the time. The lights, indicating tension on various spots of the solar sail, course through the same pattern every few minutes as the sail gently flexes in the fading light of the distant sun. The cycling pattern of the lights is as familiar to me as Mindy’s breathing when she’s asleep.

We’re already moving at a good fraction of the speed of light. Some years hence, when we’re moving fast enough, we’ll change our course for 61 Virginis and its pristine planets, and we’ll leave the sun that gave birth to us behind like a forgotten memory.

But today, the pattern of the lights feels off. One of the lights in the southwest corner seems to be blinking a fraction of a second too fast.

“Navigation,” I say into the microphone, “this is Sail Monitor Station Alpha, can you confirm that we’re on course?”

A minute later Mindy’s voice comes through my earpiece, tinged slightly with surprise. “I hadn’t noticed, but there was a slight drift off course. What happened?”

“I’m not sure yet.” I stare at the grid before me, at the one stubborn light that is out of sync, out of harmony.

Mom took me to Fukuoka, without Dad. “We’ll be shopping for Christmas,” she said. “We want to surprise you.” Dad smiled and shook his head.

We made our way through the busy streets. Since this might be the last Christmas on Earth, there was an extra sense of gaiety in the air.

On the subway I glanced at the newspaper held up by the man sitting next to us. “USA Strikes Back!” was the headline. The big photograph showed the American president smiling triumphantly. Below that was a series of other pictures, some I had seen before: the first experimental American evacuation ship from years ago exploding on its test flight; the leader of some rogue nation claiming responsibility on TV; American soldiers marching into a foreign capital.

Below the fold was a smaller article: “American Scientists Skeptical of Doomsday Scenario.” Dad had said that some people preferred to believe that a disaster was unreal rather than accept that nothing could be done.

I looked forward to picking out a present for Dad. But instead of going to the electronics district, where I had expected Mom to take me to buy him a gift, we went to a section of the city I had never been to before. Mom took out her phone and made a brief call, speaking in English. I looked up at her, surprised.

Then we were standing in front of a building with a great American flag flying over it. We went inside and sat down in an office. An American man came in. His face was sad, but he was working hard not to look sad.

“Rin.” The man called my mother’s name and stopped. In that one syllable I heard regret and longing and a complicated story.

“This is Dr. Hamilton,” Mom said to me. I nodded and offered to shake his hand, as I had seen Americans do on TV.

Dr. Hamilton and Mom spoke for a while. She began to cry, and Dr. Hamilton stood awkwardly, as though he wanted to hug her but dared not.

“You’ll be staying with Dr. Hamilton,” Mom said to me.

“What?”

She held my shoulders, bent down, and looked into my eyes. “The Americans have a secret ship in orbit. It is the only ship they managed to launch into space before they got into this war. Dr. Hamilton designed the ship. He’s my . . . old friend, and he can bring one person aboard with him. It’s your only chance.”

“No, I’m not leaving.”

Eventually, Mom opened the door to leave. Dr. Hamilton held me tightly as I kicked and screamed.

We were all surprised to see Dad standing there.

Mom burst into tears.

Dad hugged her, which I’d never seen him do. It seemed a very American gesture.

“I’m sorry,” Mom said. She kept saying “I’m sorry” as she cried.

“It’s okay,” Dad said. “I understand.”

Dr. Hamilton let me go, and I ran up to my parents, holding on to both of them tightly.

Mom looked at Dad, and in that look she said nothing and everything.

Dad’s face softened like a wax figure coming to life. He sighed and looked at me.

“You’re not afraid, are you?” Dad asked.

I shook my head.

“Then it is okay for you to go,” he said. He looked into Dr. Hamilton’s eyes. “Thank you for taking care of my son.”

Mom and I both looked at him, surprised.

“A dandelion

In late autumn’s cooling breeze

Spreads seeds far and wide.”

I nodded, pretending to understand.

Dad hugged me, fiercely, quickly.

“Remember that you’re Japanese.”

And they were gone.

“Something has punctured the sail,” Dr. Hamilton says.

The tiny room holds only the most senior command staff—plus Mindy and me because we already know. There is no reason to cause a panic among the people.

“The hole is causing the ship to list to the side, veering off course. If the hole is not patched, the tear will grow bigger, the sail will soon collapse, and the Hopeful will be adrift in space.”

“Is there anyway to fix it?” the Captain asks.

Dr. Hamilton, who has been like a father to me, shakes his headful of white hair. I have never seen him so despondent.

“The tear is several hundred kilometers from the hub of the sail. It will take many days to get someone out there because you can’t move too fast along the surface of the sail—the risk of another tear is too great. And by the time we do get anyone out there, the tear will have grown too large to patch.”

And so it goes. Everything passes.

I close my eyes and picture the sail. The film is so thin that if it is touched carelessly it will be punctured. But the membrane is supported by a complex system of folds and struts that give the sail rigidity and tension. As a child, I had watched them unfold in space like one of my mother’s origami creations.

I imagine hooking and unhooking a tether cable to the scaffolding of struts as I skim along the surface of the sail, like a dragonfly dipping across the surface of a pond.

“I can make it out there in seventy-two hours,” I say. Everyone turns to look at me. I explain my idea. “I know the patterns of the struts well because I have monitored them from afar for most of my life. I can find the quickest path.”

Dr. Hamilton is dubious. “Those struts were never designed for a maneuver like that. I never planned for this scenario.”

“Then we’ll improvise,” Mindy says. “We’re Americans, damn it. We never just give up.”

Dr. Hamilton looks up. “Thank you, Mindy.”

We plan, we debate, we shout at each other, we work throughout the night.

The climb up the cable from the habitat module to the solar sail is long and arduous. It takes me almost twelve hours.

Let me illustrate for you what I look like with the second character in my name:

It means “to soar.” See that radical on the left? That’s me, tethered to the cable with a pair of antennae coming out of my helmet. On my back are the wings—or, in this case, booster rockets and extra fuel tanks that push me up and up toward the great reflective dome that blocks out the whole sky, the gossamer mirror of the solar sail.

Mindy chats with me on the radio link. We tell each other jokes, share secrets, speak of things we want to do in the future. When we run out of things to say, she sings to me. The goal is to keep me awake.

“Wareware ha, hoshi no aida ni kyaku ni kite.”

But the climb up is really the easy part. The journey across the sail along the network of struts to the point of puncture is far more difficult.

It has been thirty-six hours since I left the ship. Mindy’s voice is now tired, flagging. She yawns.

“Sleep, baby,” I whisper into the microphone. I’m so tired that I want to close my eyes just for a moment.

I’m walking along the road on a summer evening, my father next to me.

“We live in a land of volcanoes and earthquakes, typhoons and tsunamis, Hiroto. We have always faced a precarious existence, suspended in a thin strip on the surface of this planet between the fire underneath and the icy vacuum above.”

And I’m back in my suit again, alone. My momentary loss of concentration causes me to bang my backpack against one of the beams of the sail, almost knocking one of the fuel tanks loose. I grab it just in time. The mass of my equipment has been lightened down to the last gram so that I can move fast, and there is no margin for error. I can’t afford to lose anything.

I try to shake the dream and keep on moving.

“Yet it is this awareness of the closeness of death, of the beauty inherent in each moment, that allows us to endure. Mono no aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe. It is the soul of our nation. It has allowed us to endure Hiroshima, to endure the occupation, to endure deprivation and the prospect of annihilation without despair.”

“Hiroto, wake up!” Mindy’s voice is desperate, pleading. I jerk awake. I have not been able to sleep for how long now? Two days, three, four?

For the final fifty or so kilometers of the journey, I must let go of the sail struts and rely on my rockets alone to travel untethered, skimming over the surface of the sail while everything is moving at a fraction of the speed of light. The very idea is enough to make me dizzy.

And suddenly my father is next to me again, suspended in space below the sail. We’re playing a game of Go.

“Look in the southwest corner. Do you see how your army has been divided in half? My white stones will soon surround and capture this entire group.”

I look where he’s pointing and I see the crisis. There is a gap that I missed. What I thought was my one army is in reality two separate groups with a hole in the middle. I have to plug the gap with my next stone.

I shake away the hallucination. I have to finish this, and then I can sleep.

There is a hole in the torn sail before me. At the speed we’re traveling, even a tiny speck of dust that escaped the ion shields can cause havoc. The jagged edge of the hole flaps gently in space, propelled by solar wind and radiation pressure. While an individual photon is tiny, insignificant, without even mass, all of them together can propel a sail as big as the sky and push a thousand people along.

The universe is wondrous.

I lift a black stone and prepare to fill in the gap, to connect my armies into one.

The stone turns back into the patching kit from my backpack. I maneuver my thrusters until I’m hovering right over the gash in the sail. Through the hole I can see the stars beyond, the stars that no one on the ship has seen for many years. I look at them and imagine that around one of them, one day, the human race, fused into a new nation, will recover from near extinction, will start afresh and flourish again.

Carefully, I apply the bandage over the gash, and I turn on the heat torch. I run the torch over the gash, and I can feel the bandage melting to spread out and fuse with the hydrocarbon chains in the sail film. When that’s done I’ll vaporize and deposit silver atoms over it to form a shiny, reflective layer.

“It’s working,” I say into the microphone. And I hear the muffled sounds of celebration in the background.

“You’re a hero,” Mindy says.

I think of myself as a giant Japanese robot in a manga and smile.

The torch sputters and goes out.

“Look carefully,” Dad says. “You want to play your next stone there to plug that hole. But is that what you really want?”

I shake the fuel tank attached to the torch. Nothing. This was the tank that I banged against one of the sail beams. The collision must have caused a leak and there isn’t enough fuel left to finish the patch. The bandage flaps gently, only half attached to the gash.

“Come back now,” Dr. Hamilton says. “We’ll replenish your supplies and try again.”

I’m exhausted. No matter how hard I push, I will not be able to make it back out here as fast. And by then who knows how big the gash will have grown? Dr. Hamilton knows this as well as I do. He just wants to get me back to the warm safety of the ship.

I still have fuel in my tank, the fuel that is meant for my return trip.

My father’s face is expectant.

“I see,” I speak slowly. “If I play my next stone in this hole, I will not have a chance to get back to the small group up in the northeast. You’ll capture them.”

“One stone cannot be in both places. You have to choose, son.”

“Tell me what to do.”

I look into my father’s face for an answer.

“Look around you,” Dad says. And I see Mom, Mrs. Maeda, the Prime Minister, all our neighbors from Kurume, and all the people who waited with us in Kagoshima, in Kyushu, in all the Four Islands, all over Earth and on the Hopeful. They look expectantly at me, for me to do something.

Dad’s voice is quiet:

“The stars shine and blink.

We are all guests passing through,

A smile and a name.”

“I have a solution,” I tell Dr. Hamilton over the radio.

“I knew you’d come up with something,” Mindy says, her voice proud and happy.

Dr. Hamilton is silent for a while. He knows what I’m thinking. And then: “Hiroto, thank you.”

I unhook the torch from its useless fuel tank and connect it to the tank on my back. I turn it on. The flame is bright, sharp, a blade of light. I marshal photons and atoms before me, transforming them into a web of strength and light.

The stars on the other side have been sealed away again. The mirrored surface of the sail is perfect.

“Correct your course,” I speak into the microphone. “It’s done.”

“Acknowledged,” Dr. Hamilton says. His voice is that of a sad man trying not to sound sad.

“You have to come back first,” Mindy says. “If we correct course now, you’ll have nowhere to tether yourself.”

“It’s okay, baby,” I whisper into the microphone. “I’m not coming back. There’s not enough fuel left.”

“We’ll come for you!”

“You can’t navigate the struts as quickly as I did,” I tell her, gently. “No one knows their pattern as well as I do. By the time you get here, I will have run out of air.”

I wait until she’s quiet again. “Let us not speak of sad things. I love you.”

Then I turn off the radio and push off into space so that they aren’t tempted to mount a useless rescue mission. And I fall down, far, far below the canopy of the sail.

I watch as the sail turns away, unveiling the stars in their full glory. The sun, so faint now, is only one star among many, neither rising nor setting. I am cast adrift among them, alone and also at one with them.

A kitten’s tongue tickles the inside of my heart.

I play the next stone in the gap.

Dad plays as I thought he would, and my stones in the northeast corner are gone, cast adrift.

But my main group is safe. They may even flourish in the future.

“Maybe there are heroes in Go,” Bobby’s voice says.

Mindy called me a hero. But I was simply a man in the right place at the right time. Dr. Hamilton is also a hero because he designed the Hopeful. Mindy is also a hero because she kept me awake. My mother is also a hero because she was willing to give me up so that I could survive. My father is also a hero because he showed me the right thing to do.

We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.

I pull my gaze back from the Go board until the stones fuse into larger patterns of shifting life and pulsing breath. “Individual stones are not heroes, but all the stones together are heroic.”

“It is a beautiful day for a walk, isn’t it?” Dad says.

And we walk together down the street, so that we can remember every passing blade of grass, every dewdrop, every fading ray of the dying sun, infinitely beautiful.

© 2012 by Ken Liu.

Originally published in The Future is Japanese, edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nature, Apex, Daily SF, Fireside, TRSF,and Strange Horizons, and has been reprinted in the prestigious Year’s Best SF and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year anthology series. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Get a Grip
Paul Park

Here’s how I found out: I was in a bar called Dave’s on East 14th Street. It wasn’t my usual place. I had been dating a woman in Stuyvesant Town. One night after I left, I still wasn’t eager to go home. So on my way I stopped in.

I used to spend a lot of time in bars, though I don’t smoke or drink. But I like the secondhand stuff. And the conversations you could have with strangers—you could tell them anything. “Ottawa is a fine city,” you could say. “My brother lives in Ottawa,” I could say, though in fact I’m an only child. But people nod their heads.

This kind of storytelling used to drive my ex-wife crazy. “It’s so pointless. It’s not like you’re pretending you’re an astronaut or a circus clown. That I could see. But a Canadian?”

“It’s a subtle thrill,” I conceded.

“Why not tell the truth?” Barbara would say. “That you’re a successful lawyer with a beautiful wife you don’t deserve. Is that so terrible?”

Not terrible so much as difficult to believe. It sounded pretty thin, even before I found out. And of course none of it turned out to be true at all.

Anyway, that night I was listening to someone else. Someone was claiming he had seen Reggie Jackson’s last game on TV. I nodded, but all the time I was looking past him toward a corner of the bar, where a man was sitting at a table by himself. He was smoking cigarettes and drinking, and I recognized him.

But I didn’t know from where. I stared at him for a few minutes. What was different—had he shaved his beard? Then suddenly I realized he was in the wrong country. It was Boris Bezugly. It truly was.

I took my club soda over to join him. We had parted on such good terms. “Friends, friends!” he had shouted drunkenly on the platform of Petersburg Station, saliva dripping from his lips. Now he was drunk again. He sat picking at the wax of the red candle. When he looked up at me, I saw nothing in his face, just bleared eyes and a provisionary smile.

We had met two years before, when a partner in the firm was scouting the possibility of a branch office in Moscow. Even in Russia he was the drunkest man I ever met. When we were introduced, he had passed out and fallen on his back as we were still shaking hands. Maybe it was his drunkenness that kept him from recognizing me now, I thought. After all, it had taken me a moment.

But we were in New York. Surely running into me was not as strange as running into him. And why hadn’t he told me he was coming?

“Sdravsvuytse,” I said, grinning. “Can I buy you a drink?”

What passed over his face was an expression of such horror and rage, it made me put up my hand. But then his face went blank and he turned away from me, huddling around his candle and his drink.

He had lost weight, and his black beard was gone. In Russia he had worn a hilarious mismatch of plaid clothes, surmounted by an old fur cap. Now he wore a tweed suit, a denim shirt open at the neck. The cap was gone.

“Boris,” I said.

In Russia his English had been absurd. I used to tell him he sounded like a hit man in a Cold War novel, and he had laughed aloud. Now he spoke quickly and softly in a mid-Atlantic accent: “I think you’re making a mistake.”

And I would have thought so too, except for the strange expression I had seen. So I persevered. I pulled out one of the chairs and sat down—“What are you doing?” he cried. “My God, if they find us here. If they see us here.”

These words gave me what I thought was a glimmer of understanding. In Moscow, in the kitchen of his tiny apartment, Boris once had put away enough vodka to let him pass through drunkenness into another stage, a kind of clarity and grim sobriety. Then he had told me what his life was like under the Communists—the lies which no one had believed. The interrogations. When he was a student in the sixties after Brezhnev first came in, he had spent two years in protective custody.

Now maybe he was remembering those times. “My friend,” I said, “it’s all right. You’re in America.”

These words seemed to fill him with another gust of fury. He tried to get up, and I could see he was very drunk. “I don’t know you, I’ve never met you,” he muttered, grinding out his cigarette butt. But then the cocktail waitress was there.

“I’ll take a club soda,” I said. “And my friend will have a Smirnoff’s.”

“No,” he snarled, “that was the problem with that job. Get me a bourbon,” he told the waitress. Then to me: “I hate vodka.”

Which surprised me more than anything he’d said so far. In Moscow he had recited poetry about vodka. “Yeah,” he told me now, smiling in spite of himself. “Tastes change.”

Apparently he had reassured himself that no one was watching us. But he waited until the waitress had come and gone before he spoke again. “Boris,” I said, and he interrupted me.

“Don’t call me that. It was just a job, a two-week job. I barely remember it.”

“What are you talking about?

He smiled. “You don’t know, do you? You really don’t know. Get a grip,” he said. “It’s like candy from a baby.”

I saw such a mix of passions in his face. Envy, frustration, anger, fear. And then a kind of malignant grin that was so far from my perception of his character that I stared at him, fascinated.

“You never went to Russia,” he said. “You’ve never met a single Russian. You were in a theme park they built outside Helsinki, surrounded by people like me. They were paying us to guzzle vodka and wear false beards and act like clowns. ‘Sdravsvuytse,’ my ass!”

He was crazy. “My poor friend,” I said. “Who was paying you? The KGB?”

He knocked his heavy-bottomed glass against the table, spilling bourbon on the polyurethaned wood. “Not the KGB,” he hissed. “The KGB never existed. None of it existed. None of this.” He waved his hand around the room.

He was in the middle of a paranoid breakdown of some sort. I could see that. And yet the moment I heard him, I felt instinctively that what he said was true.

“They never would have taken you to Russia,” he went on. “Not to the real Russia.” As he spoke I brought back my own memories—the grime, the cold, the sullen old babushkas with rags around their heads. The concrete apartment blocks. The horrible food.

He put down his empty glass. “Thanks for the drink. And now I’m definitely getting out of here before somebody sees us. Because this is definitely against the rules.”

Then he was gone, and I walked home. And maybe I wouldn’t have thought much about it, only the next day I was walking up Fifth Avenue on my lunch hour, and I passed the offices for Aeroflot. I went in and sat down with the people who were waiting to be helped. We were in a row of armchairs next to the window.

This is ridiculous, I thought. And I was about to get up and go, when I found myself staring at a travel poster. One of the agents was talking on the phone, and there was a framed poster of Red Square above her desk. And was that Boris Bezugly in the middle of a group of smiling Russians in front of St. Basil’s? The beard, the hat, the absurd plaid?

The Aeroflot agent was a dark-haired, heavy-chested woman, dressed in black pumps, beige tights, and a black mini-skirt. A parody of a Russian vamp. And what was that language she was speaking on the phone? The more I listened, the more improbable it sounded.

I asked the woman sitting next to me. She frowned. “Russian, of course,” she said. How could she be so sure? Made-up gobbledygook, but of course once you let yourself start thinking like that, the whole world starts to fall apart. Not immediately, but gradually. I took the woman from Stuyvesant Town to a musical on Broadway. Critics had pretended to like it, though it was obviously bad. Audience members had applauded, laughed—who were they trying to fool?

At work sometimes I found it hard to concentrate. I was representing the plaintiff in a civil suit. Yet no actual client could have been so petty, so vindictive. In my office I sat staring at the man, watching his lips move, waiting for him to give himself away.

And of course I spent more of my time at Dave’s. I would go there every evening after work, and in time I was drinking more than just club sodas. But it was weeks before I saw Boris again. He came in out of a freezing rain and made his way directly toward me, where I was sitting at a table by myself.

He sat down without asking and leaned forward, rubbing his hands over the tiny candle flame. “Listen,” he said, “I’m in trouble,” and he looked it. He needed a shave. His eyes were bloodshot. He wasn’t wearing a coat.

“Listen, I can’t do it any more. All that lying and pretending. I’ve screwed up two more jobs and now they’re on to me. I can’t go home. Please, can you give me some money? I’ve got to get away.”

“I’ll pay you fifty dollars for some information,” I said. I took the bills from my pocket, but he interrupted me.

“No, I mean your watch or something. I can’t use that bogus currency.” He pulled some coins out of the pocket of his pants, big, shiny, aluminum coins like Mardi Gras doubloons. In fact as I looked closely, I saw that’s what they were. The purple one in his palm was stamped with the head of Pete Fountain playing the clarinet.

“I don’t even have enough here for a drink,” he said.

“I’ll get you one.” I raised my hand for the waitress. But then I saw her at the corner of the bar, talking with the bartender. As I watched, she pointed over at us.

“Oh my God,” said my Russian friend. His voice was grim and strange. “Give me the watch.”

I stripped it off, though it was an expensive Seiko. “Thanks,” he said, looking at the face, the sweep of the second hand. “And in return I’ll answer one minute’s worth of questions. Go.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

But he shrugged irritably. “No, it’s not important. My name is Nathan—so what? What about you?”

“I know about myself,” I said uncertainly.

“Do you? Paul Park, Esq. Yale, 1981. But what makes you think you were smart enough to go to the real Yale? Do you think they let just anybody in?”

Actually, I had always kind of wondered about that. So his words gave me a painful kind of pleasure. Then he went on: “Twenty seconds. What about your marriage? What was that all about?”

“I’m divorced.”

“Of course you are. The woman who was playing your wife landed another job. It was never supposed to be more than a two-year contract with an option, which she chose not to renew. Last I heard, she was doing Medea, Blanche Dubois, and Lady Macbeth for some repertory company up in Canada.”

Again, this sounded so hideously plausible that I said nothing.

“Forty seconds.”

“Fifty seconds.”

“Wait,” I said, but he was gone out the door. He left only his Pete Fountain doubloon, which I slid into my pocket.

Then, in a little while, the police were there. A man in a white raincoat sat opposite me, asking me questions. “Did he say where he was going? Did he give you anything?”

“No,” I said. “No. Nothing.”

But then when I was watching TV later that night, I saw that Nathan Rose, a performance artist wanted in connection with several outstanding warrants, had been arrested. There was a photograph, and a brief description of his accomplishments. Nathan Rose had been a promising young man, recipient of several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. The newscaster’s voice was sad and apologetic, and she seemed to look out of the television directly at me. She made no mention of the crime he’d been accused of. What was it—impersonating a Russian?

That night was the beginning of a quick decline for me, because success in life depends on not asking too many questions. The patterns of illusion that made up the modern world require a kind of faith, a suspension of disbelief. The revenge on skeptics is quick and sure, and I soon found myself hustled out of what I’d thought was my real world as rudely as I might have been thrown out of a magic show, if I had stood up in the audience and explained the tricks while the performance was in progress.

But of course at that time I could only guess at the real truth. I conceived the idea that the government had hired an enormous troupe of actors, administered and paid for by the NEA, to create and sustain an illusion of reality for certain people. At first I played with the idea that I might be the only one, but no. That was too grandiose, too desperate a fantasy. So much money, so much effort, just to make a fool out of a single citizen. The Republicans never would have stood for it. Providing jobs for actors just wasn’t that important, even in New York.

I lost my job, my friends, and my apartment. I refused to work long hours for play money. And no one could tolerate me. People I knew, I kept trying to catch them in small lies and inconsistencies. I would ask them questions. “If this is just a job for you, why aren’t you nicer to me? Surely we’d enjoy it more. How can we turn this into a comedy? A farce? A musical?”

By the middle of December I was living by the train tracks, inside the tunnel under Riverside Park. Maybe it wasn’t necessary for me to have gone that far down all at once. But at a certain moment, I thought I’d try to penetrate down below the level of deception. Because I imagined that the illusions were falser and more elaborate the higher up you went, which is why so many rich people are crazy. Wherever they go, part of their brain is mumbling to the other part, “Surely the actual Plaza Hotel isn’t such a dump. Surely an authentic Mercedes corners better than this. Surely a genuine production of Hamlet isn’t quite so dull. Surely the real Alps are higher and more picturesque.”

But that night in my tarpaulin tent next to the train tracks, wrapped in my blankets, it was hard for me to think that the real Riverside Park was even darker, even colder, even more miserable. I was dressed in a dinner jacket I had kept from my apartment. I was glutted with hors-d’oeuvres, drunk on chablis, because New York provides many opportunities to a man in black tie, especially around Christmas time. I had attended office parties and openings all the way from midtown, pretending all the way. I had been an architect, an actor, a designer, a literary agent. In each place as I grew drunker, the lies I told grew more outrageous, yet people still smiled and nodded. Why not? They were being paid good Mardi Gras doubloons to pretend to believe me.

In my tent, I slid my hand down into my pocket and clasped my hand around my own Pete Fountain coin, perhaps, I thought, the only genuine thing I’d ever owned. I lay back against a pile of cinders. The temperature was below freezing. Drunk and despairing, I let the cold come into me, let it calm me until I wasn’t sure if I could move even if I’d wanted to. My hands and legs were stiff. I looked up the tunnel into the dark and imagined how the world was changing outside, how in the morning I would climb out through the grate into a new world of heat and light and honesty.

As the hours passed, the walls of the tunnel seemed to close around me. But yes, there was some light down toward the tunnel’s mouth, too bright, too soft for dawn. Yes, it seemed to fill the hole, to chase away the darkness, and it was as if I had left my body and was drifting toward it, suspended over the tracks. There was heat too, beyond my fingertips, and as I drifted down the tunnel I felt it penetrate my body and my soul. I imagined faces in the tunnel with me, people standing along the rails, smiling and murmuring. As I passed them I reached out, especially to the ones I recognized: my mother, my grandparents, my childhood friends, and even Barbara, my ex-wife. Yes, I thought, this is the truth.

It couldn’t last forever. I was sprawled over the tracks, and the light was coming toward me. I listened to the muffled voices and the creak of the wheels, and the light was all around me. It was so bright, I had to close my eyes. As I did so, I heard somebody say, “That’s it, I guess. That’s a wrap.”

When I sat up, I was in a crowd of people and machines. The big lamp had gone out, replaced by a yellow fluorescent line along the middle of the vault.

By its light I could see much that had been hidden from me. For one thing, the entire tunnel was only about twenty-five yards long. I could see the brick ends of it now, cunningly painted to look like train tracks disappearing in both directions.

In front of me there was a lamp rigged to a platform, which ran on wheels along the rails. Now that the lamp was out, I could see the movie camera beneath it, the cameraman stripping off his gloves and his coat; they had turned off the refrigeration machines. There was a whole line of them along the wall, and I guess they had been making quite a racket, because now I could hear all kinds of talking from the crew as they finished up.

I threw aside my blanket and sat rubbing my hands. Nobody was paying any attention to me. But then I saw my mother coming toward me through a crowd of technicians, and she squatted down. “Congratulations,” she said. “That was great.”

“Mother,” I stammered, “is it really you?” I admit I was surprised to see her, because she had passed away in the spring of 1978.

She was wearing a silk shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots. She was smiling. “Yeah, that’s great. I tell you, these last few weeks you’ve made me proud I ever got to work with you. Proud you’re my son, so to speak. The paranoia, the anger, the disgust. It was all so real.”

“Mother,” I said, “I can’t believe it. You look so young.”

She winked. “Yeah, sure. You’ve probably never seen me without makeup. But let’s not get carried away. Somewhere along the line you must have guessed. That was the whole point of this game.”

She stood up. And now others were helping me to my feet. I recognized a few old faces, and then Barbara was there. “Your suit’s a mess,” she said.

I was stunned, overwhelmed to see her. Her freckled nose. Her crooked smile. She reached up to touch my damp bow-tie. When I’d known her, her breath had always been a little sour, a symptom of chronic gastric distress. Now she was standing close to me, and I caught a whiff of the mints she used—the same old brand. At least that was for real, I thought.

Her little head was close to my lapel. Packed with brains. I’d always said that was the reason she so easily outwitted me. The space inside her skull was so small that her thoughts never had more than an inch or so to travel, to make connections. Her ideas moved faster, like molecules in a gas when it’s condensed.

And at the moment when I smelt her breath, I felt a little surge of hope. Even if there was no place for me in her old life, maybe now there might be some new way for us to be together in this new world. Cleverer than me, maybe she had already had the same idea, because I felt her arms around me, her head against my cheek as I bent down. “I’m sorry I was so mean,” she whispered. “But I had to. It was the script. Sometimes it broke my heart, the things I had to do to you. I’m not normally so promiscuous.”

Mother and the rest had disappeared, and we were surrounded by technicians packing up equipment. “I just wanted to tell you right away,” she said. “Before anybody else talks to you. Sex and betrayal are the only things that keep the yuppie games alive. The only reason anybody wants to play. So I had to. That thing where you caught me with your boss’s wife—I actually protested to the writers. I cried for days when we were finished.”

Then she took my hand and led me outside. It was early morning. We walked through a park that seemed all of a sudden only twenty-five yards wide, and it was rapidly disappearing as people rolled up the astroturf and wheeled away the papier-mâché balustrades.

The night before, I had come down to the park the way I always did, along West 98th Street. Now as we approached Riverside Drive, I could see as if from a slightly different angle the painted plywood facades of the buildings, all just a few inches thick. On 98th street itself there was a huge crew striking the set, so instead of going back that way, Barbara led me north, uptown, and soon we were lost among streets I didn’t recognize, although I’d lived on the Upper West Side my whole life.

“Where are we?” I asked faintly.

“Toronto. They always use it for the New York shoots. The real New York is so expensive. It’s like American actors—no one can afford them any more. We use Canadians for everything.”

“So what was this?” I asked. “A movie or a game?”

“Both. It’s interactive TV. A few hired professionals like me and your mom, and then tons of paying customers. They do most of the minor characters, the extras and what not. Then the whole thing is broadcast live, with your thoughts picked up on an internal mike as a kind of voice-over. That’s what made the show—you were so innocent, so clueless. The show started when you were fifteen, which meant it took you twenty-two years to figure out what was going on. It’s a new record. And in the end we had to give you massive hints.”

“When I was fifteen?”

“Sure. All the rest was just recovered memory syndrome. Who wants to make a show about a kid? I mean except for all the shows within the show. Beaver Cleaver and so forth.”

“Beaver Cleaver?”

“No expense was spared,” said Barbara. “It’s the information superhighway. But you have to understand—this was a huge deal.”

She was right. By the time we hit Yonge Street a crowd had gathered. Old ladies, teenagers, men, women, all wanting to shake my hand and get my autograph. I was a celebrity, like O. J. Simpson or Woody Allen, except of course I really existed. I was a real person, and not just a collection of computer-generated film clips.

“Mr. Park,” somebody shouted. “When did you know for sure?”

“Show us the doubloon!” demanded another, and when I took it from my pocket, everyone laughed and clapped.

An old man grasped my hand. I recognized him as the super of the building next to mine. “I just wanted to say you’ve given my wife and me such pleasure over the years. Most of the shows should be banned from the airwaves, if it was up to me. But you never even raised your voice. No violence at all. Not that you weren’t tempted,” he said, giving Barbara a severe look.

Then the limo arrived, small and sleek. Inside I could hear a small hum, as if from a computer. No one was driving. We pulled out slowly into the wide street, and then we were heading downtown. “So what was the show’s name?” I asked.

“It was called Get a Grip,” said Barbara. And when she saw my face, she grinned. “Oh come on, don’t take it like that. Sure, you were kind of a wimp, but the guy was right. It was a wholesome show. Every day we found new ways to humiliate you, but you just soldiered on. Most of the time you didn’t even notice. I mean sure, you were a total moron, but that was all right. It was your dignity that people loved.”

We drove on through the unfamiliar streets. “I guess it didn’t keep me from being canceled,” I said.

“Well, to tell the truth, it was all a little dated. And you needed a good female lead. That fat tart in Stuyvesant Town just wasn’t doing it. People seemed to find your life less interesting as soon as I bailed out.”

“I guess I felt the same way.”

Barbara patted my hand. “But you were still popular among retirees. You have no idea how bad most of the competition is. Like the guy said, they gave over most of the twentieth century to war games. Vietnam, KKK, Holocaust, Cold War, Hiroshima. Those are all the American shows. Kids love them, even the minorities. But I can’t stand them.”

“Hiroshima?” I asked.

She smiled. “Meanwhile, we thought it was a stroke of genius to work all that into the background of Get a Grip. To show what life in America might have been like if it had all really happened. Of course we had to change the footage and the point of view—reshoot a lot of it. Most of those shows are ridiculously patriotic.”

“Ingenious,” I murmured.

“But that’s how we got into trouble. ABC claimed it was copyright infringement, and the American ambassador protested. But Get a Grip was a satire, for God’s sake. Even the US courts ruled in our favour.”

After a little while I said, “So what did really happen?”

“Well, that’s what I’m telling you. The Americans were furious for years. So ABC finally made a hostile bid for Ottawa Communication, which produced your show. The deal went through last week, and Get a Grip was canceled. But there had been rumors for months, which was why the writers brought back all that Russian stuff last fall. They wanted to take the show to its own end.”

“No. I mean, what really happened? In the world.”

She squeezed my arm. “Don’t worry. You’ll soon catch up. Besides, we’re here.”

We pulled up in front of a hotel. “You’ll love it,” she said. “Czar Nicholas III stayed here last time he was in town.”

So I got out and followed her up the steps. In through the revolving doors. The lobby was all ormolu and velvet and gilt mantelpieces. The elevator ran in a cage up through the middle of the spiral staircase. “What am I doing now?” I asked as we got in.

“God damn it, Pogo, don’t be such a dope.” I hated when she called me “Pogo.” It was a nickname left over from my earliest childhood, and she only used it to annoy me. But as I rode up in the elevator, it occurred to me that maybe no one had ever really called me that. Maybe all those painful memories had been induced when I was fifteen. Maybe they had all been covered in a flashback, when Get a Grip first went on the air.

My eyes filled with tears. “What’s the matter now?” said Barbara. “Honest to God, you’d think you were being boiled over a slow fire. It’s the best hotel in town. I thought you might want to rest for a few hours, take a shower, change your clothes before the reception at the President’s house tonight. The Russian ambassador will be there—I tell you, you’re a star. A symbol of Canadian pride. Come on, is that so terrible?”

Then, when we were alone together in the jewel-box room, she said, “Besides, I’ve missed you.”

But I wasn’t listening. I was looking at my face in the mirror above the dresser. The same curly hair and gullible eyes, as if nothing had happened. “My whole life has been a parody,” I said, watching my lips move. But then I had to smile, because it was exactly what I might have said back in America, back during the salad days of Get a Grip.

Barbara was behind me. In the mirror I saw her undo the first few buttons of her blouse, and then slip it off her shoulders. “Let me make it okay for you,” she said. Then it was like a dream come true, because she was leading me to the bed and pulling off my clothes. I had thought about this moment so many times since we split up, directing us as if we were the actors in a scene. In my mind, sometimes she was harsh and fast, sometimes passive and accommodating. Sometimes it took hours, and sometimes it was over right away. But none of my fantasizing prepared me for this moment, which was not sublime so much as strange. During two years of marriage, I thought I had got to know her well. But I had never done anything of the things she required of me in that hotel room; I had never heard of anybody doing them. But, “Things are different here,” she whispered. “Let me teach you how to make it in the real world,” she said, before I lost consciousness.

Then I came to, and I was lying on the bed. Barbara was in the shower. I could hear the water running. I sat naked on the side of the bed, staring at the television. It was in a lacquer cabinet on top of a marble table, and the remote was on the floor near my foot. There were hundreds of buttons on it.

Then suddenly I was seized with a new suspicion, and I flicked it on. I flicked through several channels, seeing nothing but football games. But there I was on channel 599xtc, butt-naked, staring at myself. Behind me: the hotel room, the ripped sheets and soggy pillows. And on the bottom corner of the screen, a blinking panel which said:

PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE.

Then Barbara was there, toweling her neck, looking over my shoulder. “Okay, so it’s not quite over yet,” she said. “There are still some things you ought to know.”

© 1997 by Paul Park.

Originally published in Omni Online.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Paul Park has published a dozen novels and two dozen short stories in a variety of genres. He lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children, and teaches in the English and Art History departments at Williams College.

Alive, Alive Oh
Sylvia Spruck Wrigley

The waves crash onto the blood-red shore, sounding just like the surf on Earth: a dark rumbling full of power. It’s been seventeen years since we left.

Owen and I got married at the register office in Cardiff. We took a flat near the University, a tiny bedsit. I felt very cosmopolitan, living in the capital city, and only a little bit homesick for Swansea. Then Owen came home one night and asked me what I thought about going into space. I laughed because I thought he must be joking, but he wasn’t: They’d offered him a position in a new terraforming colony on G851.5.32 and of course he wanted to go. I was frightened, but it’s not the kind of opportunity you can say no to, is it? And it was only for ten years; afterward we could come back to a full pension. Fame and fortune, he said. I did like the thought of telling my friends. Oooh, hello Emma, how have you been? Yes, it has been quite some time, hasn’t it? You’ve moved to Mumbles Road, have you? That’s nice. We moved to an exoplanet eighteen light-years away. Oh well, we’re back now, of course . . .

That was back when I thought we’d return to Wales one day.

The water here is nothing like the salty sea of home. It’s acidic and eats into the flesh. I shouldn’t even be this close to the shore, in case the spray splashes across and burns me. Everything about G851.5.32 is toxic; I’ve been here so long, even I am.

Megan was born after we’d been here five years. My best friend Jeanine (my only friend) was present for the birth. Owen started off holding my hand, but he couldn’t stand to see me in such pain. In the end, he paced outside until Jeanine went out to tell him that it was all over, that he was the father of a baby girl.

“She looks so fragile,” he said. “I’m afraid to touch her in case she breaks.” It’s true: Megan was a tiny little thing, ice-blue eyes peering at everything, curious.

I worried about her growing up in the colony dome; it was such a sterile environment. “Children need to get muddy,” I said. “They need to be able to explore and get out from under everyone’s feet and just burn up energy.”

“She’ll be running down the sandbars of Swansea Bay before long,” he promised, tickling under her chin. She stared back at him with a serious face.

When she was a baby, I sang Suo Gân to her, the Welsh lullaby. As she got older, I made her laugh with songs about a world she’d never seen: “Oranges and Lemons,” “The Bishop of Bangor’s Jig,” “Sweet Molly Malone.” I told her stories about day-to-day life in Swansea: the covered market, the sandy beach of the bay, Blackpill Lido, the rain. These were as fantastical to her as gold spun from straw.

Once Megan could walk, Owen had protective goggles made for her small face and we took to taking long strolls outside, around the edges of the dome. We went as far as the craggy coastline, where the dark waves crashed against red silt. She sang “Molly Malone” while I told her about making sandcastles and the mewling cries of the seagulls. She gazed at everything with curious eyes.

“Didn’t you get dirty, Mummy?” The colony has very strict rules about sterile conditions. The idea of playing in the sand was as alien to Megan as life in space would be to my school friends. She grew up with constant warnings, having to wear three layers of protective clothing just to open a window. That afternoon, she clutched her favourite toy—a stuffed octopus I made from scraps of synthetic fabric—in one hand and held my hand tightly with the other. She was four years old and she had never been free. I did what I could, kept telling her the stories she loved, tried to explain what a child’s life should be like. It wasn’t the same. She knew it wasn’t.

“Yes,” I told her, “we got very dirty. And then we’d go home and our mummies would make us wash and we’d be clean again.” Megan looked dubious. “It was a different type of dirty, child,” I admitted eventually. “Dirt on Earth doesn’t hurt. In fact, sometimes pregnant women even eat soil.” She laughed at me, the idea so ludicrous, she couldn’t imagine it. When we returned to the dome, we left all our outerwear in the entry bay, where it would be collected and sterilised. The commanders weren’t very pleased with me taking Megan out of the base for walks, but once I found out they weren’t letting us return to Earth, I didn’t much care what they thought.

Owen and I were in the third wave of researchers to come to the colony; there were a few thousand of us at the peak. It was a long trip: five months’ travel and then ten years on the base and another five months home. Still, it seemed reasonable until a few years after Megan was born. The first return mission to California was a disaster. The initial researchers—including my friend Jeanine Davies—were so excited about going home. Jeanine stayed up all night in anticipation. She told me she was going to gorge herself on fresh fruit and vegetables and then go outside and enjoy the feel of the wind against her face. We made plans to meet in Cardiff once Owen’s time was finished. Her only regret was that she wouldn’t see Megan for a few years. She was full of energy, the picture of health. She was going home.

When the capsule delivered them to the space centre in the California desert, the occupants became violently ill. It took a while to get the news. Jeanine was dead. All of them, dead. They carried some unknown bacteria in their gut, which went malignant once they arrived in Earth’s atmosphere. Not just the homecomers, everyone: The bacteria spread with a virulence that hadn’t been seen since the plague. So G851.5.32 was put under quarantine and all further trips to Mother Earth cancelled with no clue as to when we could return.

“It’s autumn on the Gower right now,” I told Megan. “We’d be picking blackberries if we were home. The skies are grey and rain falls from the sky. The wind is crisp and the roads full of puddles.”

“Did you really go outside without goggles or anything?” Megan had never felt the air against her bare skin. We walked along the high end of the beach, safely away from the acid water. She begged me to tell her more about “the past,” as she called it: Wales was an unobtainable world that only existed in stories. I stopped correcting her after a few years went by. There seemed no point.

“Just an umbrella and sturdy shoes. Mind, we got flu and colds that lasted all winter long as well. You’re lucky in that respect.”

Illness is not common here on our sterilised colony and the medical centre is quick to treat any symptoms. They’ve spent thousands of hours trying to find the bacterium that killed our homecomers, but it appears to be inactive here, mutating to a malicious killer only in the Earth’s atmosphere. And they can’t just send people to Earth to die, even if the scientists on the ground were willing to risk themselves trying to do the research. They isolated the plague in California by cordoning off the entire desert, leaving the carriers to die alone.

“The sea was always cold, but by October it would be freezing. We would walk along the beach on the way home from school. We dared each other to run in and brave it. The water was so cold it felt as if it burned.” Sometimes it took a couple of sips of vodka to get the nerve. The cold would make your heart stop.

I wish I had a bottle of vodka now. The sun’s low in the sky. If I squint, I can almost pretend it’s a brilliant Swansea sunset, rays reflecting off the low clouds to turn the landscape red. I can almost pretend I’m at Oystermouth Road, standing at the long stretch of beach, Jacquelyn daring me to take my togs off and run into the waves.

Megan had the same enthusiastic curiosity about the world as her father the scientist. The dome was stifling to a young girl’s spirit. We explored the local area, but I didn’t dare go very far. Megan complained bitterly when it was time to return. It came to a head when she was caught sneaking out in the middle of the night, without authorisation, without the proper gear. Owen was furious, but I couldn’t blame her for rebelling against the rules and regulations.

“How can we learn more if we lock ourselves away?” she complained. “When I grow up, I’m going to live outdoors and I’m going to see the entire planet. I’m going to study the Homecoming Plague until I find a solution and we can travel again.”

“If you do, I’ll be on the first ship home. I’ll take you to the pier for ice cream.”

Ice cream was one of the few traditional treats that Megan recognized. She never had food except from a container: synthesised vitamins and American processed meat. “You could really just go someplace and get food? You didn’t have a canteen?”

“No. Well, we had restaurants, where we could meet up and have a meal together. It was a social thing. It was a choice.” She was bemused by the concept of choice. Our food is doled out in scoops. If you don’t go to the canteen, you don’t eat.

By her twelfth birthday, food was tightly restricted. We lived on carbohydrate dishes that tasted of cotton, with the tinned goods tightly rationed. Two unmanned ships had successfully reached us with supplies since the quarantine began. Many others failed. We had no idea when the next might come. I fought off the hunger pangs by telling Megan about my favourite dinners when I was her age.

“The beaches of the Gower are full of treasure,” I told her. “We’d go to the beach after school and fish for our supper. Mum would peel a couple of potatoes and fry our catch in butter and that would be dinner.” Mostly Mum heated up frozen dinners from Tesco, but I didn’t like to tell Megan that. Besides, when Mum was sober, she was a pretty good cook. She would always have a go at preparing anything we brought home. “I didn’t have the patience for fishing. My line was always getting tangled up and I hated touching the lugworms. But you could collect all kinds of shellfish at the changing of the tides. Nan used to take us out in the middle of the night with a thermos of whisky and coffee. We’d collect what we could find: oysters, mussels, even crabs.”

Megan’s mouth fell open and she stared at the distant beach disbelievingly. “So they were just there waiting for you to take them? Did you eat them?”

“We steamed them and then we ate them with just a squeeze of lemon juice. Lemons grow on trees, but we bought our fruit from the market.”

“How does steaming work?” It was hard for her to imagine the world I took for granted. Megan never had raw food so she didn’t understand about cooking. The closest she came to seafood was the tinned salmon they served on New Year’s Day.

“You have to steam them to force the shells open so you can get to the meat inside.” Megan looked disappointed. She relished the idea of a movable feast, food simply there for the taking. Our dependence within the colony was so constant; the concept of fending for yourself was a favourite source of wonder for her.

I liked to indulge her. “Sometimes you could catch them with the shells open. I caught buckets of razor clams at the estuary. Find a hole in the sand, that’s where they’ve dug themselves into. You just drop a bit of salt into the hole and then reach in and drag the clams straight out of their shells. They’re plump and meaty. If you were hungry enough, I guess you could simply eat them on the spot. In the old days, they had special knives to pry the shells open and eat them alive.”

“How would you know they weren’t poisonous?”

“There’s not much from the sea that will kill you, not if it’s fresh.”

Not in the Celtic Sea, anyway. I stare out at the poisonous waves of G851.5.32, a mystery to me. Who knows what beasts lurk within its softly glowing swells. The scent is sharp and chemical rather than the briny breeze of Swansea Bay. Everything here is toxic.

“What does it taste like? Food you find on your own, I mean.” By the time Megan was thirteen, I’d given up all hope of returning home. We were “self-sufficient” and a perfect test bed for the colonies of the future, with sterilised capsules transferring data back to Earth. All wonderful research, except that I’d never signed up for this, never wanted to spend a lifetime in space, never would have started a family if I’d known the antiseptic life in the colony was all she’d ever see. Megan’s curiosity became insatiable as she begged for details of a “normal” life, of what she’d missed. I told her about wine and thunderstorms and aeroplanes and guitars. I taught her church hymns and Bonnie Tyler songs and rugby chants. Megan continued to sneak out of the dome, “taking liberties with her safety” it said on the reports. Colony security wasn’t designed to hold in rebellious teenagers; she didn’t find it difficult. I never said anything. How could she grow up in this barren collection of plastic buildings? She needed to explore.

Owen grew distressed. “You are making her homesick for a world she’s never known,” he told me. I didn’t care. I wanted her to know, to understand where she had come from. So I kept telling her the stories, answering her questions. I never noticed how often we returned to the subject of food.

“Shellfish tastes better than anything else in the universe,” I told her. “Especially if you caught it yourself. The fresh air seasons it, we say. But it’s because you put the effort in, you made the food happen.”

“But specifically, what is it like? What do cockles and mussels taste of?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. She had never eaten anything that wasn’t full of preservatives and salt. “They taste like the sea. They taste slick and primordial. They taste of brine and dark blue depths. It’s an Earth flavour. I can’t explain.” She glared at me and stomped out of the room. She wanted facts, not metaphors. She wanted to know and I wasn’t helping. She wanted to go home and taste them for herself.

The silt of the shore is soft and powdery, nothing like the golden sand of Swansea Bay. When I press my fingers into it, the edges of my gloves begin to singe against the damp soil underneath. Everything about this planet is poison. It was never meant for families.

The day Megan told me she had a stomachache, I didn’t think too much about it. “Have you finished your school work?” I asked her. She had daily one-on-one tutorials, taught by some the best scientists of our time, not that an education was any use up here. Still, we stuck to the routines, pretended there was a future.

“I don’t feel well at all,” she said. Those were her last coherent words. She collapsed before I made it across the room to feel her forehead. I carried her to the med station myself, her long legs dragging along the polished hallways. Megan’s eyes opened as I screamed for the nurse to help me. She twisted and began to vomit blood as they pulled her onto the bed and wheeled her into the back rooms. Within a few hours, she was dead.

Owen found refuge in process. He told me they thought she might have the same bacteria that stopped us returning to Earth, that she might be the key to finding the cure. I turned away as he stuttered platitudes, that maybe they would solve the quarantine, that maybe her death wouldn’t be in vain. I couldn’t stand to hear him try to make sense of the tragedy. He stayed at the medical station, signing consent forms, overseeing the process as they cut her open and examined her insides.

I went home and sat in her room, touching her things. I bunched her favourite dress in my fists, hoping to banish the last sight of her, flesh pale as marble, splattered with blood, blue eyes colder than any ice. I collapsed onto her bunk. Once the tears slowed, I ran my fingers over her stuffed octopus like a blind woman, touching the ragged cloth and glassy eyes as if it might hold some of her essence.

The sharp edges of something under her pillow stopped me. I opened my eyes and moved the pillow to see a pair of stolen protective gloves, singed away at the tips, and half a dozen blood-red shells. Two of them were cracked and pried open; the insides sparkled like mother of pearl, wiped clean. Licked clean.

Owen told me that Megan’s death was not preventable. It was an unknown illness, he said, there was nothing that we could have done. He cried as he told me that she’d ingested some sort of parasites. They had rampaged through her flesh, feasting on her organs. He promised me that it was quick, as if I didn’t already know that, as if that was a consolation. I took the shells she’d hidden under her pillow and said nothing.

I press my bare toes into the powdery silt of the barren shore of G851.5.32. It stings, a million pins and needles pricking my flesh. When I was a girl, we would dare each other to dash into the frigid waves of the sea, the water so cold that it burned.

I wonder if it will feel the same, in this alien sea so far from home. I clench the broken shells in my fists and run forward into the breaking waves.

I think it will feel just the same.

© 2013 by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley.

Sylvia Spruck Wrigley was born in Germany and spent her childhood in Los Angeles. She now splits her time between southeast Wales and Andalucia, two coastal regions with almost nothing in common. Her short stories have been published in the UK, the US, France, and Argentina. You can find out more about her at www.intrigue.co.uk.

Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon
Theodora Goss

When the Queen learned that she could not have a child, she cried for three days. She cried in the clinic in Switzerland, on the shoulder of the doctor, an expert on women’s complaints, leaving tear stains on his white coat. She cried on the train through Austria, while the Alps slipped past the window of her compartment, their white peaks covered with snow. She cried when the children from the Primary School met her at the station, bringing her bouquets of snowdrops, the first of the season. And after the French teacher presented her with the bouquets, and the children sang the Sylvanian national anthem, their breaths forming a mist on the cold air—she cried especially then.

“It doesn’t matter, Margarethe,” said King Karel. “My nephew Radomir will make a fine king. Look at how well he’s doing at the Primary School. Look at how much he likes building bridges, and if any country needs bridges, it’s Sylvania.” For the Danube and its tributaries ran through the country, so that wherever you went in Sylvania was over a river, or perhaps two.

And then Queen Margarethe stopped crying, because it was time to greet the French ambassador, and she was after all the youngest daughter of the King of Greece. She had been trained to restrain her emotions, at least at state functions. And the blue satin of her dress would stain.

But that night, when the French ambassador was discussing business with the bankers of Sylvania, and her other guests were discussing French innovations in art (for although Sylvania was a small country, it had a fashionable court) or losing at cards in a cloud of cigarette smoke, the Queen walked out to the terrace.

It was a cold night, and she pulled the blue satin wrap more closely about her shoulders. The full moon above her was wearing a wrap of gray clouds. In its light, she walked down the steps of the terrace, between the topiaries designed by Radomir IV, boxwood swans swimming in a pool of grass, a boxwood stag running from overgrown boxwood hounds. She shivered because her wrap was not particularly warm, but walked on through the rose garden, which was a tangle of canes. She did not want to go back to the castle, or face her guests.

She reached the croquet lawn, beyond which began the forest that surrounded Karelstad, where croquet balls were routinely lost during tournaments between the ministers and the ladies-in-waiting. Suddenly, she heard laughter. She looked around, frightened, and said, “Is anyone there?”

No one answered. But under a chestnut tree that would be covered with white flowers in spring, she saw a basket. She knelt beside it, although the frost on the grass would stain her dress more certainly than tears, and saw a child. It was so young that the laugh she had heard might have been its first, and it waved its fist, either at the moon above or at the Queen, whose face looked like a second moon in the darkness.

She lifted the child from its basket. Surely it must be cold, left out on a night like this, when winter still covered Sylvania. Surely whoever had left it here did not deserve a child. She picked it up, with the blanket it was wrapped in, and carried it over the croquet lawn, through the rose garden, between the boxwood swans and the boxwood stag, up the terrace steps, to the castle.

“Surely she has a mother,” said the King. “I know this has been difficult for you, Margarethe, but we can’t just keep her.”

“If you could send the Chamberlain out for diapers,” said the Queen. “And tell Countess Agata to warm a bottle.”

“We’ll have to advertise in the Karelstad Gazette. And when her mother replies, we’ll have to return her.”

“Look,” said the Queen, holding the child up to the window, for the cook had scattered cake crumbs on the terrace, and pigeons were battling over them. “Look, embroidered on the corner of her blanket. It must be her name: Lucinda.”

No one answered the advertisement, although it ran for four weeks, with a description of the child and where she had been found. And when the King himself went to look beneath the chestnut tree, even the basket was gone.

Princess Lucinda was an ordinary child. She liked to read books, not the sort that princesses were supposed to like, but books about airplanes, and mountain climbing, and birds. She liked to play with her dolls, so long as she could make parachutes for them and toss them down from the branches of the chestnut tree. The Queen was afraid that someday Lucinda would fall, but she could not stop her from climbing trees, or putting breadcrumbs on her windowsill for the pigeons, or dropping various objects, including the King’s scepter, out of the palace window, to see if they would fly.

Lucinda also liked the gardener’s daughter, Bertila, who could climb trees, although not so well as the Princess. She did not like receptions, or formal dresses, or narrow shoes, and she particularly disliked Jaromila, her lady-in-waiting and Countess Agata’s daughter.

But there were two unusual things about Princess Lucinda. Although her hair was brown, it had a silver sheen, and in summer it became so pale that it seemed purely silver. And the Princess walked in her sleep. When the doctor noticed that it happened only on moonlit nights, the Queen ordered shutters to be placed on Lucinda’s windows, and moonlight was never allowed into her room.

For the Princess’ sixteenth birthday, the Queen planned a party. Of course she did not know when the Princess had been born, so she chose a day in summer, when the roses would be at their best and her guests could smoke on the terrace.

Everyone of importance in Sylvania was invited, from the Prime Minister to the French teacher at the Primary School. (Education was considered important in Sylvania, and King Karel had said on several occasions that education would determine Sylvania’s success in the new century.) The Queen hired an orchestra that had been the fashion that winter in Prague, although she confessed to the Chamberlain that she could not understand modern music. And Prince Radomir came home from Oxford.

“They ought to be engaged,” said the Queen at breakfast. “Look at what an attractive couple they make, and what good friends they are already.” Princess Lucinda and Prince Radomir were walking below the morning room windows, along the terrace. The Queen might have been less optimistic if she had known that they were discussing airplane engines. “And then she would be Queen.”

She looked steadily at the King, and raised her eyebrows.

“But I can’t help it, Margarethe,” said King Karel, moving his scrambled eggs nervously around on his plate with a fork. “When the first King Karel was crowned by the Pope himself, he decreed that the throne must always pass to a male heir.”

“Then it’s about time that women got the vote,” said the Queen, and drank her coffee. Which was usually how she left it. King Karel imagined suffragettes crashing through the castle windows and writing “Votes for Women” on the portraits of Radomir IV and his queen, Olga.

“How can you not like him?” asked Bertila later, as she and Lucinda sat on the grass, beneath the chestnut tree.

“Oh, I like him well enough,” said Lucinda. “But I don’t want to marry him. And I’d make a terrible queen. You should have seen me yesterday, during all those speeches. My shoes were hurting so badly that I kept shifting from foot to foot, and Mother kept raising her eyebrows at me. You don’t know how frightening it is, when she raises her eyebrows. It makes me feel like going to live in the dungeon. But I don’t want to stand for hours shaking hands with ambassadors, or listen to speeches, even if they are in my honor. I want—”

What did she want? That was the problem, really. She did not know.

“But he’s so handsome, with those long eyelashes, and you know he’s smart.” Bertila lay back on the grass and stared at the chestnut leaves.

“Then you should marry him yourself. Honestly, I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately. You used to be so sensible, and now you’re worse than Jaromila.”

“Beast. As though a prince could marry a gardener’s daughter.” Bertila threw a chestnut, rejected by a squirrel the previous autumn because a worm had eaten through its center, at the Princess.

“Ouch. Stop it, or I’ll start throwing them back at you. And not only do I have more chestnuts, I have much better aim. But seriously, Bertie, you’d make a better queen than I would. You’re so beautifully patient and polite. And since you’re already in love with his eyelashes  . . . ”

“There you are,” said Jaromila. “Lying in the dirt as usual, and talking with servants.” She tapped one shoe, as pointed and uncomfortable as fashion demanded, on the grass.

“You’re not wanted here,” said Lucinda.

“But you’re wanted at the reception, half an hour ago.”

“You see?” said Lucinda to Bertila, in dismay. “You’d make a much better queen than I would!”

“And she’d be just as entitled to it,” said Jaromila. She had also seen Lucinda walking with Radomir on the terrace, but she had reacted quite differently than the Queen. She could not tell you the length of Radomir’s eyelashes, but she knew that one day he would be king.

“What do you mean?” asked Lucinda.

“Yes, what do you mean?” asked Bertila. She was usually patient, just as Lucinda had said, but today she would have liked to pull Jaromila’s hair.

“Well, it’s time someone told you,” said Jaromila, shifting her feet, because it was difficult to stand on the grass, and because she was nervous. “But you can’t tell anyone it was me.” From the day the Princess had been found, Queen Margarethe had implied that Lucinda was her own child, born in Switzerland. No one at court had dared to question the Queen, and the Chamberlain and Countess Agata liked their positions too well to contradict her. But Jaromila had heard them discussing it one night, over glasses of sherry. If anyone found out that Jaromila had told the Princess, she would be sent to her grandmother’s house in Dobromir, which had no electric lights or telephone, not even a phonograph.

“Told what?” asked Lucinda. “You’d better tell me quickly. I have a whole pile of chestnuts, and you can’t run in those shoes.”

“That you’re not a princess at all. You were found in a basket under this chestnut tree, like a peasant’s child.”

That afternoon, the Queen had to tell Lucinda three times not to fidget in front of the French ambassador.

As soon as the reception was over, Lucinda ran up to her room and lay on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Who was she, if she was not the Princess Lucinda? After a while, she got up and took off the dress she had worn to the reception, which had been itching all afternoon. She put on her pajamas. But she could not sleep. For the first time in her life, she opened the shutters on her bedroom windows and looked out. There was the moon, as full as a silver Kroner, casting the shadows of boxwood swans and hounds on the lawn.

In her slippers, she crept down the stairs and out the French doors to the terrace. She walked between the topiaries and the rose bushes, over the croquet lawn, to edge of the forest. There, she lay on the grass and stared up at the moon, through the branches of the chestnut tree. “Who am I?” she asked. It seemed to smile at her, but gave no answer.

Lucinda woke shivering, with dew on her pajamas. She had to sneak back into the castle without being seen by the footmen, who were already preparing for the party.

Jaromila had forgotten to set out the dress she was supposed to wear, a white dress the Queen had chosen, with a train she would probably trip over on the stairs. With a sigh, Lucinda opened the door of her dressing room and started looking through the dresses that hung there, all the dresses she had worn since her christening, for although Lucinda did not care about dresses, Queen Margarethe cared a great deal.

That was why she missed the excitement.

Jaromila had been afraid to go to the Princess’ room that morning. Lucinda would certainly tell the Queen what she had said, and when the Queen found out—Jaromila remembered Dobromir. So she stayed in the ballroom, where Queen Margarethe was preparing for the party by changing her mind several times about who should sit where. Countess Agata was writing place cards, and the footmen were setting out the glasses for champagne.

King Karel, still in his slippers, wandered into the ballroom and said, “Margarethe, have you seen my crown? I thought I left it next to my bureau—”

That was when the shaking started. The ballroom shook as though the earth were opening beneath it. Jaromila, who was standing by the French doors, clutched at the curtains to stay upright. The Queen fell on Countess Agata’s lap, which made a relatively comfortable cushion. The King, less fortunate, stumbled into the footmen, who toppled like dominoes. Most of the champagne glasses crashed to the floor.

A voice resounded through the ballroom. “Bring me the Princess Lucinda!”

The King, recovering his breath, said, “Whatever was that?”

Prince Radomir ran into the room and said, “Was it an earthquake?”

One of the footmen, who had fallen by the French doors, said, “By Saint Benedek, that’s the biggest dog I’ve ever seen.”

The King went to the French doors, leaving Prince Radomir to pick up the Queen and the Countess. There, on the terrace, stood a hound, as white as milk and as large as a pony.

“Bring me the Princess Lucinda!” he said again, in a voice like thunder. Then he shook himself, and the ballroom shook with him, so the King had to hold on to a curtain, like Jaromila, to stay upright. The remaining champagne glasses crashed to the floor, and the footmen fell down again in a heap.

Nothing in King Karel’s training had prepared him for an enormous hound on his terrace, a hound who evidently had the ability to shake his castle to its foundations (his training having focused on international diplomacy and the Viennese waltz). But he was a practical man. So he said, from behind the curtain, “Who are you, and what do you want with the Princess?”

“I am the Hound of the Moon. If you don’t bring me the Princess Lucinda, I will bite the head off the statue of King Karel in front of the cathedral, and the steeple off the cathedral itself, and the turrets off the castle. And if I’m still hungry, I’ll bite the roofs off all the houses in Karelstad—”

“Here she is, here is the Princess Lucinda!” said the Queen, pushing Jaromila out the French doors. Jaromila, surprised and frightened, screamed. The Countess, who has leaning on Radomir, also screamed and fainted.

But the hound grabbed Jaromila by the sash around her waist, leaped from the terrace and landed among the topiaries, then leaped through the rose garden and over the forest, into the clouds.

Lucinda never noticed. When the castle had shaken, all the dresses on the shelves of the dressing room had fallen on top of her, along with most of the shoes, and when she had crawled out from beneath them, she imagined that she had somehow shaken them down herself. And still the dress for the ball was nowhere to be found.

The hound dropped Jaromila on the floor of a cave whose walls were covered with crystals.

The first thing she said when she had regained her breath was, “I’m not the Princess Lucinda.”

“We shall see,” said the hound. “Get up, whoever you are, and take a seat.”

At the center of the cave, arranged around a table, Jaromila saw three chairs. The first was an obvious example of Opulentism, which had been introduced at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Its arms were carved to resemble griffins, with garnets for eyes, and it was elaborately gilded. The second was a chair any Sylvanian farmer could have carved on a winter night as he sat by his fireside. The third was simply a stool of white wood.

Surely he didn’t expect her to sit on that. And as for the second chair, she wasn’t a peasant. Jaromila sat in the first chair, on its cushion of crimson velvet, and put her arms on the griffins.

“Can I offer you something to drink?” asked the hound.

On the table, she saw three cups. The first was certainly gold, and probably Lalique. The others were unimportant, a silver cup like those common in Dobromir, which had a silver mine, and a cup of horn that a shepherd might have drunk from. Of course she would drink from the first. She took a careful sip. The wine it contained, as red as the griffins’ eyes, gave her courage.

“I’m not the Princess Lucinda. You will take me home at once!”

“As you wish,” said the hound. “But the journey might be cold. Can I offer you a coat?”

In his mouth he held three coats. The first was a crimson brocade embroidered with gold thread, which she had seen just that week in a catalog from Worth’s. That was the coat she would wear, not the plain green wool, or the dingy white thing that the hound must have drooled on.

But as soon as she reached to take it, the hound opened his mouth, dropped the coats, and once again grabbed her sash. And then they were off, over the forests of Sylvania, over Karelstad and the croquet lawn, to the castle terrace.

The King was still trying to soothe the Queen, who was crying, “What have I done?” Prince Radomir was waving smelling salts under the Countess’ nose. The footmen were trying to sweep up the shattered glasses.

Upstairs, Lucinda had finally found her dress. It was in the Queen’s own dressing room, behind an ermine cape. She sighed with relief. Now at last she could go to the party.

Just as the hound landed, Jaromila’s sash ripped, and she dropped to the terrace.

“Bring me the Princess Lucinda!” said the hound. “If you don’t bring me the Princess, I will drink up the fountain in front of King Karel’s statue, and the pond by the Secondary School that the children skate on, and the river Morek, whose waters run through all the faucets of Karelstad. And if I’m still thirsty, I’ll drink up the Danube itself—”

“I am the Princess Lucinda,” said a voice from the garden. Bertila walked up the terrace steps. She had woken early to see the preparations for the party, and had been watching all this time from behind the topiary stag.

“Isn’t that the gardener’s daughter?” asked Prince Radomir. But at that moment the Queen screamed (it seemed her turn), and nobody heard him.

Under ordinary circumstances, no one would have mistaken Bertila for a princess. Her dresses were often patched, and because her mother had died when she was born, she sewed on the patches herself, so they were usually crooked. But today all the servants not needed for the party had been given a holiday, and she was wearing an old dress of Lucinda’s. Lucinda had been allowed to give it away because it had torn on a tree branch. Bertila had mended it (with the wrong color thread), but the rip was toward the back, so she hoped it would not be noticed.

“Climb on my back then,” said the hound, and climb she did. She twisted her fingers into the hair at his neck, and held on as well as she could when he leaped from the terrace over the forests of Sylvania.

“Mama!” cried Jaromila, at which the Countess revived. But the Queen went into hysterics. And that was when Lucinda finally came down the stairs, holding her train, and stared about her, at the footmen sweeping the floor and the sobbing Queen.

“What in the world is going on?” she asked. King Karel tried to tell her, as did the Queen in broken sobs, and even the Countess, who clutched Prince Radomir’s arm so hard that he could not answer. Jaromila tried to powder her nose in the mirror, because after all Prince Radomir was present.

“Radomir?” said Lucinda. And then Radomir explained about the hound and Bertila’s deception.

“Well,” said Lucinda, when the explanation was over. She turned to the King and Queen. “I think it’s time you told me everything.”

Bertila looked about the cave.

“Will you take a seat?” asked the hound.

“Thank you,” said Bertila. Which chair should she choose? Or rather, which chair would Lucinda choose, since she must convince the hound? She had read Lucinda’s copy of the Brothers Grimm, which Lucinda had left on the croquet lawn. This was surely a test. Her hands were shaking, and she could scarcely believe that she had spoken in the garden. But here she was, and the deception must continue. Whatever danger Lucinda was in, she must try to save her friend.

Surely Lucinda would never choose a chair so gaudy as the gold one. And a stool did not seem appropriate for a princess. But the wooden chair looked like the one her father had carved for her mother. Lucinda had sat in it often, when she came to the gardener’s cottage. The wood had been sanded smooth by a careful hand, and ivy leaves had been painted over the arms and back. That was a chair fit for a princess of Sylvania. She sat down.

“Would you care for something to drink?” asked the hound.

“Thank you,” said Bertila. “I really am thirsty.”

Lucinda would make fun of the gold cup, and the cup of white horn was like the stool, too plain. But the silver cup, with the snowdrops in enamel, might have been made by the silversmiths of Dobromir, who were the finest in Sylvania. It was a cup fit for the Pope himself. She paused before taking a sip, but surely the hound would not hurt her. He had treated her well so far. The cup was filled with a delicate cider, which smelled like peaches.

“Thank you,” she said. “And now I think I’m ready.” Although she did not know what she was ready for.

“Very well,” said the hound. “You must choose a coat for the journey.”

Lucinda would never wear the crimson brocade. But the coat of green wool, with its silver buttons and tasseled hood, looked warm and regal enough for a princess. There was another coat beneath, but it looked tattered and worn.

“I’ll wear this one,” said Bertila.

“You’re not the Princess Lucinda,” said the hound.

Bertila stood silently, twisting the coat in her hands. “No” she said finally. “I’m sorry. I hope you don’t blame me.”

“It was brave of you,” said the hound. “But you must return to the castle.”

When he landed on the terrace with Bertila, Lucinda was waiting.

“You don’t have to threaten anyone this time, or break any glasses,” she said. “I’m Princess Lucinda, and I’m ready to go with you.”

The Queen was sent to bed with a dose of laudanum. The King cancelled the invitations for the party. Countess Agata had a lunch of poached eggs with the Chamberlain and asked what the monarchy was coming to. Jaromila tried to find Prince Radomir. But he was sitting under the chestnut tree with Bertila, asking if she was all right, and if she was sure. Bertila was blushing and admiring his eyelashes.

“Will you take a seat?” asked the hound.

“What a strange stool,” said Lucinda. She had never read the Brothers Grimm, although Bertila had handed her the book with a reproachful glance. “The wood seems to glow. I wonder where it comes from?”

“From the mountains of the moon,” said the hound. “Down the slopes of those mountains flow rivers, and on the banks of those rivers grow willow trees, with leaves as white as paper. When the wind blows, they whisper secrets about what is past and what is to come. This stool is made from the wood of those willow trees.”

“This is where I’ll sit,” said Lucinda.

“Can I offer you something to drink?” asked the hound.

“What a curious cup,” said Lucinda, picking up the cup of horn. “It’s so delicate that the light shines right through it.”

“On the slopes of the mountains of the moon,” said the hound, “wander herds of sheep, whose wool is as soft and white as thistledown. This cup is carved from the horn of a ram who roamed those mountains for a hundred years.”

Lucinda drank from the cup. The water in it was cold, and tasted of snow.

“And now,” said the hound, “you must choose a coat for our journey.”

“Where are we going?” asked Lucinda. “Oh, how lovely!” She held up a coat that had been lying beneath the coats of crimson brocade and green wool. “Why, it’s covered with feathers!”

“The rivers of the moon flow into lakes,” said the hound, “and on those lakes live flocks of herons. They build their nests beneath the willow branches, and line them with feathers. There, they lay their eggs and raise their children through the summer. When winter comes, they return to Africa, leaving their nests behind. This coat is made from the feathers of those herons. As for your question, Princess—to meet your mother.”

“My mother?” said Lucinda, sitting abruptly back down on the stool. “Oh, I don’t know. I mean, until yesterday I thought Queen Margarethe—What is my mother like? Do you think she’ll like me?”

The hound seemed to smile, or at least showed his teeth. “She’s my mother also. I’m your brother, Lucinda, although we have different fathers. Mine was Sirius, the Dog Star. Yours was a science teacher at the Secondary School.”

“And my mother—our mother?” asked Lucinda.

“Our mother is the Moon, and she’s the one who sent me for you. Put on your coat, Lucinda. Its feathers will warm you in the darkness we must pass through. Now climb on my back. Mother is eager to see you, and we have waited long enough.”

As though in a dream, for nothing in her life, not even the books on airplanes and mountain climbing, had prepared her for such an event, Lucinda put on the coat of white feathers and climbed on the back of the hound. He leaped to the edge of the cave, and then into the sky itself. She was surrounded at first by clouds, and then by stars. All the stars were visible to her, and the Pleiades waved to her as she flew past, calling out, “She’s been waiting for you, Lucinda!” Sirius barked and wagged his tail, and the hound barked back. Then they were landing in a valley covered with grass as white as a handkerchief, by a lake whose waters shone like silver.

“Lucinda! Is that really you?”

The woman standing by the side of the lake had silver hair so long that it swept the grasses at her feet, but her face looked not much older than Lucinda’s. She seemed at once very young and very old, and at the moment very anxious.

“It is,” said the hound. “Go on,” he said to Lucinda, nudging her with his nose. “Don’t you want to meet her?”

Lucinda walked forward, awkwardly. “It’s nice to meet you  . . . ”

“Oh, my dear,” said the Moon, laughing and taking Lucinda in her arms, “I’m so happy to have found you at last!”

The Moon lived in a stone house surrounded by a garden of white roses. A white cat sat on the windowsill, watching Lucinda with eyes like silver Kroners.

“The soup will be ready in a moment,” said the Moon. “I find that the journey between the earth and my home always makes me hungry.”

“Do you travel to the earth?” asked Lucinda.

The Moon laughed again. Her laughter sounded like a silver bell, clear and sweet. “You would not have been born, otherwise! In a shed at the back of the house live my bats. Whenever I want to travel to the earth, I harness them and they pull me through the darkness. Perhaps later you’ll help me feed them. They like the nectar of my roses. Here, blow on this if you think it’s too hot.”

She put a bowl of soup in front of Lucinda. It was the color of milk but smelled like chicken, and Lucinda suddenly realized that she had forgotten to eat breakfast.

“Tell me about that,” said Lucinda. “I mean, how I was born. If you don’t mind,” she added. There was so much she wanted to know. How did one ask a mother one had just met?

“Well,” said the Moon, sitting down at the table and clasping her hands. “Your father’s name was Havel Kronborg. When he was a child, he would lie at night in his father’s fields, in Dobromir, and look at the stars. But even then, I think, he loved me better than any of them. How glad I was when he received a scholarship to study astronomy in Berlin! And how proud when his first paper was published in a scientific journal. It was about me, of course, about my mountains and lakes. But when his father died, the farm had to be sold to pay the mortgage, so he worked as a science teacher at the Secondary School. Each night he wandered on the slopes of the mountains about Karelstad, observing the stars. And one night, I met him in the forest.

“How well I remember those months. I could only visit him when the moon was dark—even for love, I could not neglect my work. But each month that we met, our child—that was you, Lucinda—was closer to being born, and his book, Observations on the Topography of the Moon, closer to being completed.

“When you were born, I wrapped you in a blanket I had woven from the wool of my sheep, and laid you in a basket of willow branches. Your brother slept beside you and guarded you, and all the stars sang you lullabies.”

“Was it this blanket?” asked Lucinda. Out of her pocket she pulled a blanket as fine as silk, which the King had given her in the course of his explanation. Her name was embroidered on one corner. She had been carrying it with her since, but had almost forgotten it. How far away Karelstad seemed, and the Queen, and her life as a princess.

The Moon reached out to touch it, and her eyes filled with silver tears. “Your father asked me to leave you with him for a month. How could I refuse? But I told him to set you in the moonlight every night, so I could see you. One night, while he was gathering mushrooms in the forest for a botany lesson, he placed your basket beneath a tree. I watched you lying there, laughing up at me. But suddenly a cloud came between us, and when it had passed, you were gone.

“You can’t imagine his grief. He searched all that night through the forest around the castle. When the gardener found him in the morning, he was coughing, and could not speak. The doctor told him he had caught pneumonia. He died a week later. I found the basket by his bedside. It’s the only thing I’ve had of yours, all these years.”

Silver tears trickled down her cheeks. She wiped them away with the blanket.

Lucinda reached out her hand, not knowing what to say. The Moon took it in her own, and smiled through her tears. “But now we’ve found each other. How like him you look, so practical and solemn. I searched the world for years, but never saw you until last night, lying beneath the tree where he had left you. I knew who you were at once, although you’ve grown so tall. Will you walk with me, Lucinda? I want to show you the country where you were born.”

The strangest thing about being on the moon was how familiar it seemed. Lucinda learned to feed the bats, gathering white roses from the garden, tying them together in bundles, and hanging them upside down from the rafters where the bats slept through the night, while the moon was shining. She learned to call the sheep that roamed the mountains, and to comb their fleece. The Moon spun the long hairs caught in the comb on a spinning wheel that sang as it whirled. She learned to gather branches from the willow trees and weave them into baskets, like the one the Moon had shown her, saying, “This is where you slept, as a child.”

Sometimes, after the night’s work was done, she would sit with the Moon beside the lake, watching the herons teach their children to fly. They would talk about Lucinda’s childhood in Karelstad, or the Moon’s childhood, long ago, and the things she had seen, when elephants roamed through Sylvania, and the Romans built their roads through its forests, and Morek drove out the Romans, claiming its fertile valleys for his tribe, and Karel I raised an army of farmers and merchants, and drove out the Turks. Then they would lie on the grass and look at the stars dancing above them.

“Their dances were ancient before I was born,” said the Moon. “Look at Alcyone! She always wears diamonds in her hair. And Sirius capering among them. We were in love, when I was young. But we each had our work to do, and it could not last. Ah, here is your brother.”

The white hound lay next to Lucinda. She put her arm around him, and the three of them watched the stars in their ancient dances.

One day, the Moon showed Lucinda her observatory, on a slope above the lake. “This is where I watch what happens on the earth,” she said.

Lucinda put her eye to the telescope. “I can see the castle at Karelstad.”

“That was where I last looked,” said the Moon. “Since you’ve been here, I’ve had no wish to look at the earth. It reminds me of the years before I found you.”

“There’s Bertila, walking in the garden with Radomir. I can see Jaromila. She’s looking in her mirror. And King Karel is talking to the French ambassador. Why do they look so sad? Well, except Jaromila. And there’s the Queen. Why, she seems to be crying. And I’ve never seen her wearing a black dress. Oh!” said Lucinda. “Is it me? Do they think I’m dead?”

The Moon looked at her sadly.

“I’m so sorry,” said Lucinda. “It’s just—I grew up with them all. And Queen Margarethe was my mother. I mean, I thought she was.”

“She was, my dear,” said the Moon. “She was the best mother she could be, and so I forgive her, although she has caused me much grief. I knew that eventually you’d want to return to the earth. It’s where your father belonged, and you belong there also. But you will come to visit me, won’t you?”

“Of course I will, Mother,” said Lucinda.

That night, while the moon was shining, they harnessed the bats. Lucinda put on her coat of heron feathers, and took the reigns.

“Before you go,” said the Moon, “I have something to give you. This is the book your father wrote. I’ve kept it for many years, but I would like you to have it. After all, I have my memories of him.” For a moment, she held Lucinda, then said to the bats, “Fly swiftly!”

The bats lifted Lucinda above the white roses in the garden, and above the stone house. The Moon called, “Goodbye, my dear,” and then she was flying over the mountains of the moon and toward the earth, which lay wrapped in darkness.

She landed on the castle terrace, just as the sun was rising over the forest around Karelstad. Lucinda released the reigns, then ran into the castle and up the stairs, to the Queen’s bedroom.

Queen Margarethe was sitting by the window. She had not slept all night, and her eyes were red with weeping. She thought she must be dreaming when she saw Lucinda enter the room and say, “Good morning, Mother.”

Lucinda’s sixteenth birthday party took place a month late, but was perhaps all the merrier. The orchestra from Prague played, the champagne flowed freely, and the footmen danced with each other in the hall. Under a glittering chandelier, the French ambassador asked Jaromila to marry him, and on the terrace, beneath a full moon, Radomir asked Bertila the same question.

When Lucinda went to her room that night, her head spinning from champagne and her feet aching from the narrow shoes, she found a white stool on which sat a white cup. In the cup was a silver necklace. From it hung a moonstone, which glowed like the moon itself, and next to the cup was a card on which was written, in silver ink, “Happy Birthday, my dear.”

The next morning, Lucinda went to the graveyard behind the cathedral. There, by the grave of a forgotten science teacher, she laid a bouquet of white roses.

Observations on the Topography of the Moon received an enthusiastic reception among astronomers in London, Paris, and New York, and was widely quoted in the scientific journals. It was eventually included in the Secondary School curriculum, and the author’s portrait appeared on the two Zlata stamp.

After her husband’s death, Jaromila opened a couture house in Paris and became famous as the inventor of the stiletto heel. When Radomir finished his degree in engineering, King Karel retired. He and Queen Margarethe lived to a contented old age in the country. King Radomir and Queen Bertila guided Sylvania through two world wars. Karelstad eventually became a center of international banking, where even the streets were said to be paved with Kroners. They sat together, listening to the radio, on the night Lucinda won the Nobel prize for her theories on astrophysics.

But no one, except the white hound that was occasionally seen wandering around the garden of her house in Dobromir, ever found out that she had been the first person on the moon.

© 2007 by Theodora Goss.

Originally published in Realms of Fantasy.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; and Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards.

The Huntsman
Megan Arkenberg

Had I but known, Tamlin, Tamlin,

Before we came from home,

I'd hae ta’en out thy heart o' flesh,

Put in a heart of stone.

1.

“It’s the best bargain you’ll get in this town,” the faery woman says. She’s standing by a cracked kitchen sink with mold between the tiles, rinsing diced tomatoes and crooked green jalapeño rings. “A heart for a heart. And my heart’s more than what she’s used to, I’ll tell you that. You couldn’t find better if you went door-to-door from every house in the tithe-projects.”

She tips the plastic mixing bowl onto the counter. Dark wet tomatoes and thin peppers and pungent wisps of cilantro spill across the gray-green Formica. A little flower has sprouted among them spontaneously: a tiny white chrysanthemum, browned by the acid. She plucks it out with annoyance and shoves it under her tongue.

“So?” she asks, chewing. “What do you say?”

2.

It’s a hot night, dry as bone, and the stink of a garbage fire drifts like smoke over the deserted street: coffee grounds and greasy sausage wrappers, damp rags and melting plastic, spoiled lettuce and something bitterly metallic. The huntsman moistens his lips, tasting the cheap paper and tobacco of a discarded cigarette. He doesn’t smoke anymore, not really, not for the taste or the nicotine. He just wishes he had something to steady his hands.

A rhythmic, tuneless chanting plays somewhere in the projects. He hears a door slam on a fire escape two streets over and a boy or young woman shouting rapidly in two foreign languages. But there’s only one lighted window on Hawthorne Street, a tiny yellow flickering in a second story kitchen. He rounds the back of the house and tries the door. The lock is faulty. A dank, loamy smell fills the stairwell. He closes the door silently behind him and makes his way up the uncarpeted linoleum stairs.

A tithe-government vehicle whooshes in the distance, sirens barking, carrying the men and women who have disappeared in the night. The city is a forest full of wolves. They used to say that when he lived in the projects, and they were right. They hunt in packs, consume every trace of their prey. Even skin and bone.

3.

He leans against the bathroom wall, listening to the sirens and wishing for a cigarette.

“Hey,” Queenie murmurs. She rolls onto her side, sloshing dark purple over the bone-like sides of the tub. It sizzles when it hits the snow-dusted floor. The whole room stinks of chemical snow, and of fairy blood—a warm, spicy odor, part saffron, part mace. “What happened to you?”

“Nothing. Couldn’t sleep.” He scratches the backs of his forearms, where the skin prickles with gooseflesh. “Bad dreams again.”

“Dreams don’t mean nothing, my sweet. They’re just dreams.”

“I know.” He nods his head. But his have never been just dreams.

4.

The narrow kitchen is the first door on the left. Pale green wallpaper, stained brown over the gas range. A dingy ivory refrigerator. The floor rustles with a thick blanket of leaves, three inches deep, all autumn-red and russet. He almost misses the woman sitting at the table. Her back is to him, her dark tangled hair falling to the floor, nested with twigs and the feathers of black, black birds.

It’s no good trying to muffle the crunch of his footsteps on the dry leaves. The woman must hear him approaching, but she does not turn her head. She’s bigger than he expected—so many are like Queenie, skinny as the ubiquitous drought-lizards that cling to bathroom walls, all curved ribs and fragile vertebrae. So dry they bleed rust. But the woman at the table comes up to his shoulder while seated, her broad, thick-fingered hands spread flat on the vinyl tablecloth. She wears a green floral-printed wrap with nothing underneath. Her skin’s a uniform terra-cotta brown, even the wide nipples, and the hair on her body grows curly and black.

“Stop,” she says. “I have an offer for you.” Her eyes are closed, the broad lids sparkling with lime-colored shadow.

“I’m not interested,” he says, drawing the knife.

5.

“I’m hungry. You know what I need?” Queenie’s looking at herself in the mirror behind his head, looking through him like he’s invisible, or like he isn’t even there. He used to find her pretty, with her smooth black skin and weird electric-violet eyes, the mauve-streaked weave that flows halfway down her back—pretty, before he knew what she was.

“What?” he asks dutifully.

Her eyes shift. Now she’s looking at him.

Something cold licks at his feet; the faery blood is running across the grimy linoleum tile. It stains the clothing she’s discarded—her violet lace bra and panties, his white undershirt.

“A heart,” she says, her breath catching around the final consonant. A brittle sound, like cracking bone.

6.

He takes up a cube of tomato. It tastes moldy, like cilantro. Like chrysanthemum.

“A heart for a heart,” he says. “It’s a deal.”

7.

The faery woman smiles, her hands still flat on the table. She smells like the stairwell, musky and organic, with an undercurrent of cheap gin and stale tobacco. “I know who you are,” she says. “You’re that changeling boy our sister is fucking. She dreams about you, you know. She says she has to shove a pillow in your mouth so the neighbors don’t hear.”

He stands behind her. The long steel knife is in his hand, the edge close enough to caress the warm skin of her throat. The smell of her, the salty line of sweat between her heavy breasts, the smoothness of her bare feet against the dead leaves tangle in his thoughts like rough grasping fingers. The knife’s point nips at an artery, drawing a trickle of dark purple blood.

A door slams somewhere in the apartment, a heavy body thuds and curses and knocks something off a bedside table. The huntsman hesitates, only a second, and suddenly he is on his back in the moldering leaves, his knife spinning across the floor, the faery woman standing over him, nursing a clenched hand. She threw the punch wrong—for a moment, he thinks she’s broken her thumb—but then she moans and spreads her fingers, the small bones shifting, and everything looks as it should.

“He’ll join us in a moment,” she says, nodding toward the bedroom door, as though nothing has happened, as though the only interruption to their conversation was the fumbling sound of the man in the next room. “But listen, my sweet. I have an offer for you.”

8.

He pins her to the leaf-strewn floor with a knee between her breasts. Normally, this is the point where the ribcage cracks, but she’s smiling up at him, as though she barely registers his weight. He stabs quickly, deeply, an inch or two above the navel, and rips her open from below. She grunts. The heart is a smooth muscled globe, like a fleshy apple, pumping, pumping dark blood over his hands.

A blade slides against his own throat. He tips his head back, as if for a kiss, and sees his own face staring down at him. The man from the next room is completely naked, his scar-crossed chest mottled with purple bruises, his broad shoulders scoured with the white tracks of fingernails. The body is the huntsman’s own body, only this body is dead and beginning to rot.

Always, this is the moment when the huntsman wakes up.

9.

Except this time, he doesn’t.

10.

“Do you remember when I found you?” Queenie purrs.

They’re in his bed. The springs creek slightly, the thin sheets beneath him crackle with static. The electricity’s been turned off—even in the better neighborhoods, utilities are unreliable so close to the border. She’s on top of him, rocking gently, her violet eyes glowing in the jaundice-colored moonlight.

“They sent you out with the tithe,” she says. “You were sitting on the big white bus with all the other little boys and girls, in your little starched shirts and your little black ties that some tithe-officer must have tied for you. And all your eyes, your little black eyes, were so sad and deep and beautiful.”

He cups his hands around her tiny waist, caresses her soft belly with his thumbs.

“The bus was parked on the side of the road, waiting for some sign from the officers. You had your tiny faces pressed against the windows. It was the first time you’d ever left the tithe-projects, I’ll bet. And as I walked past, you looked up at me and smiled. Do you remember why you smiled?”

“I liked your eyes,” he pants.

“And when you smiled, a tiny chrysanthemum sprouted in my box of cigarettes.”

He remembers the delighted surprise on her face, the sparkle in her pretty eyes as she plucked the pale flower from the crushed box and stuck its stem between her teeth.

She leans forward, nibbling a line of kisses up his neck, and her words spill into his ear. “So I asked for you myself. I went to the tithe-officer and I said, ‘Give me that little boy, the one with the coal-black eyes and lips as red as blood.’ And he was so shocked, he hardly knew what to do. Do you remember what he asked me?”

“He asked if you were one of them,” he says.

“He asked,” she says, “if I could still dream their dreams. And I couldn’t, my sweet, my changeling. I couldn’t dream with them anymore, not until you came to me. Not until you learned to bring me what I needed.”

From the window of his apartment, they can see it—once their home, now his hunting ground. The square small-windowed faces and dark lampless streets of tithe-government housing projects, the flimsy walls, the doors with faulty locks. They can hear the polyglot cursing, the tuneless chanting, the slam of rubber balls against crumbling cement all hours of the day and night. They can smell the garbage fires and the astringent licorice smell of disinfectant, the spicy blood, the warm loamy stink of Faery.

But only she can dream its dreams.

It’s the best bargain you’ll get in this town: a heart for a heart. Her heart for his.

11.

“Not all of you left with the tithe,” the faery woman says. She pushes him off of her, and he falls back against his own rotting body. The smell of faery blood—hers, his—mixes with the leaves and the loam and the cilantro, makes him want to vomit.

“All these years, we’ve kept you safe. The part of you that still dreams our dreams. The part of you that’s still faery.”

“That part of me is dead.”

That part of him pins his wrists as the faery woman takes up his knife. She carves him open, slowly, tenderly, each touch a caress, while his own hand covers his mouth, muffling his screams. He bleeds and bleeds. Warm and spicy, saffron and mace.

She lifts his heart out and sets it in the plastic bowl on the counter. Blood makes her fingers sticky, and she licks up a clinging fleck of tomato and jalapeño. Then she kneels beside him, holding out her hands. “Eat,” she says.

When he has licked the last of the blood and fruit away, she turns, reaches up into her ribcage, and puts the muscled apple of her own heart into the empty space inside him.

“Come back to us,” she says. She pounds her fist against his chest.

Her heart beats inside him. Once. Twice.

12.

On the third beat, he wakes up.

13.

Queenie is shaking him, one hand over his mouth, the other pounding against his chest. Her eyes look wild in the moonlight, her hair tangled and crackling with static.

“Don’t be frightened, my sweet, don’t be frightened,” she’s murmuring, clutching him to her like a drowning woman, holding on for dear life. “It’s just bad dreams. Just dreams, my changeling. They don’t mean nothing, they’re just dreams.”

But the blood from his bitten lip tastes of saffron, and where a drop of it has fallen on the pillowcase, a tiny chrysanthemum is sprouting.

His have never been just dreams.

© 2013 by Megan Arkenberg.

Megan Arkenberg is a student in Wisconsin. In the name of story research, she racks up late fees at the college library, gets dizzyingly lost along the shores of Lake Michigan, consumes a steady diet of M.R. James, and lusts quietly after the architecture and costume of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her work has appeared in Asimov's, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and dozens of other places. She procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Danceand the historical fiction e-zine Lacuna.

Paranormal Romance
Christopher Barzak

This is a story about a witch. Not the kind you’re thinking of either. She didn’t have a long nose with a wart on it. She didn’t have green skin or long black hair. She didn’t wear a pointed hat or a cape, and she didn’t have a cat, a spider, a rat, or any of those animals that are usually hanging around witches. She didn’t live in a ramshackle house, a gingerbread house, a Victorian house, or a cave. And she didn’t have any sisters. This witch wasn’t the kind you read about in fairytales and in plays by Shakespeare. This witch lived in a red brick bungalow that had been turned into an upstairs/downstairs apartment house on an old industrial street that had lost all of its industry in Cleveland, Ohio. The apartment house had two other people living in it: a young gay couple who were terribly in love with one another. The couple had a dog, an incredibly happy-faced Eskimo they’d named Snowman, but the witch never spoke to it, even though she could. She didn’t like dogs, but she did like the gay couple. She tried not to hold their pet against them.

The witch—her name was Sheila—specialized in love magic. She didn’t like curses. Curses were all about hate and—occasionally—vengeance, and Sheila had long ago decided that she’d spend her time productively, rather than wasting energy on dealing with perceived injustices located in her—or someone else’s—past. Years ago, when she was in college, she had dabbled in curses, but they were mainly favors the girls in her dorm asked of her, usually after a boyfriend dumped them, cheated on them, used them as a means for money and mobility, or some other power or shame thing. A curse always sounded nice to them. Fast and dirty justice. Sheila sometimes helped them, but soon she grew tired of the knocks on her door in the middle of the night, grew annoyed after opening the door to find a teary-eyed girl just back from a frat party with blood boiling so hard that the skin on her face seemed to roil. Eventually Sheila started closing the door on their tear-stained faces, and after a while the girls stopped bothering her for curses. Instead, they started coming to her for love charms.

The gay couple who lived in the downstairs rooms of the apartment house were named Trent and Gary. They’d been together for nearly two years, but had only lived together for the past ten months. Their love was still fresh. Sheila could smell it whenever she stopped in to visit them on weekends, when Trent and Gary could be found on the back deck, barbequing and drinking glasses of red wine. They could make ordinary things like cooking out feel magical because of the sheer completeness they exuded, like a fine sparking mist, when they were near each other. That was pure early love, in Sheila’s assessment, and she sipped at it from the edges.

Trent was the manager of a small software company and Gary worked at an environmental nonprofit. They’d met in college ten years ago, but had circled around each other at the time. They’d shared a Venn diagram of friends, but naturally some of them didn’t like each other. Their mutual friends spent a lot of time telling Trent about how much they hated Gary’s friends, or telling Gary about how much they hated Trent’s. Because of this, for years Trent and Gary had kept a safe distance from each other, assuming that they would also hate each other. Which was probably a good thing, they said now, nodding in accord on the back deck of the red brick bungalow, where Trent turned shish kabobs on the grill and Gary poured Sheila another glass of wine.

“Why was it probably a good thing you assumed you’d hate each other?” Sheila asked.

“Because,” Gary said as he spilled wine into Sheila’s glass, “we were so young and stupid back then.”

“Also kind of bitchy,” Trent added over his shoulder.

“We would have hurt each other,” said Gary, “before we knew what we had to lose.”

Sheila blushed at this open display of emotion and Gary laughed. “Look at you!” he said, pointing a finger and turning to look over his shoulder at Trent. “Trent,” he said, “Look. We’ve embarrassed Sheila.”

Trent laughed, too, and Sheila rolled her eyes. “I’m not embarrassed, you jerks,” she said. “I know what love is. People pay me to help them find it or make it. It’s just that, with you two—I don’t know—there’s something special about your love.”

Trent turned a kabob with his tongs and said, “Maybe it’s because we didn’t need you to make it happen.”

It was quite possible that Trent’s theory had some kind of truth to it, but whatever the reason, Sheila didn’t care. She just wanted to sit with them and drink wine and watch the lightning bugs blink in the backyard on a midsummer evening in Cleveland.

It was a good night. The shish kabobs were spiced with dill and lemon. The wine was a middlebrow Syrah. Trent and Gary always provided good thirty-somethings conversation. Listening to the two of them, Sheila felt like she understood much of what she would have gleaned from reading a newspaper or an intelligent magazine. For the past three months, she’d simply begun to rely on them to relay the goings-on of the world to her, and to supply her with these evenings where, for a small moment in time, she could feel normal.

In the center of the deck several scraps of wood burned in a fire pit, throwing shadows and orange light over their faces as smoke climbed into the darkening sky. Trent swirled his glass of wine before taking the last sip, then stood and slid the back door open so he could go inside to retrieve a fresh bottle.

“That sounds terrible,” Sheila was saying as Trent left. Gary had been complaining about natural gas companies coming into Ohio to frack for gas deposits beneath the shale, and how his nonprofit was about to hold a forum on the dangers of the process. But before Sheila could say another word, her cell phone rang. “One second,” she said, holding up a finger as she looked at the screen. “It’s my mom. I’ve got to take this.”

Sheila pressed the answer button. “Hey, Mom,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Where are you?” her mother asked, blunt as a bludgeoning weapon as usual.

“I’m having a glass of wine with the boys,” Sheila said. Right then, Trent returned, twisting the cork out of the new bottle as he attempted to slide the back door shut with his foot. Sheila furrowed her brows and shook her head at him. “Is there something you need, Mom?” she asked.

Before her mother could answer, though, and before Trent could slide the door shut, the dog Sheila disliked in the way that she disliked all dogs—without any particular hatred for the individual, just the species—darted out the open door and raced past Sheila’s legs, down the deck steps, into the bushes at the bottom of the backyard.

“Hey!” Gary said, rising from his chair, nearly spilling his wine. He looked out at the dog, a white furry thing with an impossibly red tongue hanging out of its permanently smiling face, and then placed his glass on the deck railing before heading down the stairs. “Snowman!” he called. “Get back here!”

“Oh, Christ,” Trent said, one foot still held against the sliding door he hadn’t shut in time. “That dog is going to be the death of me.”

“What’s going on over there?” Sheila’s mother asked. Her voice was loud and drawn out, as if she were speaking to someone hard of hearing.

“Dog escaped,” said Sheila. “Hold on a second, Mom.”

Sheila held the phone against her chest and said, “Guys, I’ve got to go. Gary, I hope your forum goes well. Snowman, stop being so bad!” Then she edged through the door Trent still held open, crossed through their kitchen and living room to the front foyer they shared, and took the steps up to her second floor apartment.

“Sorry about that,” she said when she sat down at her kitchen table.

“Why do you continue living there, Sheila?” her mother said. Sheila could hear steam hissing off her mother’s voice, flat as an iron. “Why,” her mother said, “do you continue to live with this illusion of having a full life, my daughter?”

“Ma,” Sheila said. “What are you talking about now?”

“The boys,” said her mother. “You’re always with the boys. But those boys like each other, Sheila, not you. You should find other boys. Boys who like girls. When are you going to grow up, make your own life? Don’t you want children?”

“I have a life,” said Sheila, evenly, as she might speak to a demanding child. “And I don’t want children.” She could have also told her mother that she was open to girls who liked girls, and had even had a fling or two that had never developed into anything substantial; looking around the kitchen, however, Sheila realized she’d unfortunately forgotten to bring her wine with her, which she would have needed to have that conversation.

“Well, you should want something,” her mother said. “I’m worried about you. You don’t know how much I worry about you.”

Sheila knew how much her mother worried about her. Her mother had been telling her how much she worried about her for years now. Probably from before Sheila was even conceived, her mother was worrying about her. But it was when Sheila turned fifteen that she’d started to make sure Sheila knew just how much. Sheila was now thirty-seven, and the verbal reminders of worry that had started when she’d begun dating had never stopped, even after she took a break from it. So far, it had been a six-year break.

Sheila didn’t miss dating, really. Besides, being alone—being a single woman—was the one witchlike quality she possessed, and it was probably the best of the stereotypical witch features to have if she had to have one.

“Ma,” Sheila said.

But before she could tell her mother that she didn’t have time to play games, her mother said, “I’ve met someone.”

Sheila blinked. “You’ve met someone?” she said. Was her mother now, at the age of fifty-eight, going to surprise Sheila and find love with someone after being divorced for the past eighteen years?

“Yes,” her mother said. “A man. I’d like you to meet him.”

“Ma,” Sheila said. “I’m speechless. Of course I’ll meet him. If he’s someone important to you, I’d love to meet him.”

“Thank you, lovey,” her mother said, and Sheila knew that she’d made her mother happy. “I think you’ll like him.”

“I’m sure I’ll like him, Mom, but I’m just happy if you like him.” What Sheila didn’t say was how, at that moment, it felt like a huge weight was being lifted from her.

“Well, no,” her mother said. “You have to like him, too. As much as I’m glad you trust my judgment in men, it’s you who will be going on the date with him.”

“Ma,” Sheila said, and the weight resumed its old position across her shoulders.

Her mother made a guttural noise, though, a sound that meant she was not going to listen to anything Sheila said after the guttural noise reached completion.

“He’ll pick you up at seven o’clock tomorrow. Be ready to go to dinner. Don’t bring up witch stuff. No talking shop on a date. His name is Lyle.”

“Lyle?” Sheila said, as if the name seemed completely made-up—a fantasy novel sort of name, one of those books with a cover that features castle spires and portentous red moons covered in strands of cloud. One of those novels where people are called things like Roland, Aristial, Leandor, Jandari, or . . . Lyle.

“Lyle,” said her mother. Then the phone went dead. Sheila looked down at it for a while as if it were a gun that had accidentally gone off, leaving a bullet lodged in her stomach.

The bullet sat in Sheila’s stomach and festered for the rest of that night, and the feeling was not unfamiliar. Sheila’s mother had a habit of mugging her with unwanted surprises. Furniture that didn’t go with Sheila’s décor. Clothes that didn’t fit her. Blind dates with men named Lyle.

Her mother was a mugger. Always had been. So why was she still surprised whenever it happened, as if this were a sudden, unexpected event? By the next morning, Sheila had come up with several jokes about her mother the mugger that she would tell to the two clients who had appointments with her that afternoon.

“Mugger fucker,” Sheila mumbled as she brushed her hair in the bathroom mirror. “Mugger Goose. Holy Mugger of God. Mugger may I?”

Her first client was a regular named Mary, who was forty-three, had three children, and was married to a husband she’d fallen out of love with four years ago. Mary came every other month for a reboot of the spell that helped her love her husband a little longer. She’d tried counseling, she’d tried herbal remedies, she’d even tried Zumba (both individually and with several girlfriends as a group), but nothing seemed to work, and in desperation she’d found Sheila through a friend of a friend of a former client who Sheila had helped rekindle a relationship gone sour years ago, back when Sheila had first started to make her living by witching instead of working at the drugstore that had hired her while she was in college.

The knock came at exactly ten in the morning. Mary was never late and never early. Her sessions always lasted for exactly thirty minutes. Sheila was willing to go beyond that, but Mary said she felt that Sheila’s power faded a little more with every second past the thirty-minute mark. She still paid Sheila three hundred dollars for each session, and walked away a happy—or at least a happier—woman. She’d go home and, for five to six weeks, she’d love her husband. Sheila couldn’t work a permanent fix for Mary, because Mary had fallen so out of love with her husband that no spell could sustain it forever. Their relationship was an old, used-up car in constant need of repairs. Sheila was the mechanic.

When Sheila opened the door, Mary pushed in, already complaining loudly about her husband, Ted. Sheila had never met him, though she did have a lock of his hair in an envelope that stayed in her living room curio cabinet. Except on appointment days with Mary; on those days, Sheila would bring the hair out for the renewal ritual.

“I don’t know if I want the spell again,” Mary said. She hadn’t even looked at Sheila yet. She just sat down heavily on the living room couch and sighed. “I don’t know if I want to fix things any longer.”

“What else would you do?” Sheila asked, closing the door before coming over to sit in the chair across from Mary. “Divorce? Start over? You know you could do that, right?”

Mary clutched a small black beaded purse in her lap. She was a beautiful woman, long limbed, peach-skinned, with dark hair that fell to the small of her back like a curtain. She exercised, ate healthy, and didn’t drink too much alcohol—even when alcohol sounded like a good idea. She wore upper middle class clothes that weren’t particularly major designer labels but weren’t from a mall store, either.

“I don’t know,” Mary said, pushing a piece of her layered black hair away from her face. Sheila noticed that Mary had gotten a nose piercing in the time between their last appointment and this one. A tiny diamond stud glinted in the sunlight coming through the living room windows. “The children  . . . ” said Mary. Sheila nodded, and stood, then went to her curio cabinet and took out the envelope with the hank of Ted’s hair in it.

Sheila opened the envelope and placed the lock of hair on the coffee table between them. It was a thick brown curl that Mary had cut from Ted’s mop one night while he was asleep. When Mary had come to Sheila for help four years ago, Sheila had said, “I’ll need you to bring me something of his. Something you love about him. Otherwise, I’ll have nothing to work with.” Mary had said she didn’t love him anymore, so how could she bring Sheila anything? “Surely you must love something about him,” Sheila said, and Mary had nodded, her mouth a firm line, and said that, yes, she did love Ted’s hair. It was beautiful. Thick and curly. She loved to run her fingers through it, even after she’d stopped loving Ted.

Now Mary looked down at the lock of curled hair as if it were a dead mouse Sheila had set out in front of her. “You know the drill,” Sheila said, and together the two pinched an end of the hair and lifted it into the air above the coffee table.

Sheila closed her eyes and tried to feel Mary’s love come through the coil of hair. Like an electrical current, a slight hum flowed through it, but it was weaker than ever and Sheila worried that she wouldn’t be able to help Mary once this slight affection for Ted’s hair eventually disappeared. She took the lingering love in through her fingers anyway, whipped it like cream, semi-consciously chanting an incantation—or more like noises that helped her focus on the energy in the feeling than anything of significance—and after she’d turned Mary’s weak affection into a fluffy meringue-like substance, Sheila pushed it back through the hair, slowly but surely, until Mary was filled with a large, aerated love.

When Sheila opened her eyes, she noticed Mary’s face had lifted a little. The firm line of her mouth had softened and curled up at the edges, as if she wanted to smile but was perhaps just a little shy. “Thank you, Sheila,” said Mary, blinking sweetly on the couch. This was when Sheila went soft, too. Whenever a client like Mary, hardened by a deficiency of love, took on a shade of her former self—a youthful self who loved and was loved, who trusted in love to see her through—Sheila had to fight to hold back tears. Not because seeing the return of love made her happy—no, the pressure behind her eyes was more a force of sadness, because the person in front of her was under an illusion, and no illusion, thought Sheila, was pleasant. They were more like the narcotics those with chronic pain took to ease their days. This returned love would only be brief and temporary.

At the door, Mary took out three hundred-dollar bills. “Worth every penny,” she said, folding them into Sheila’s palm, meeting Sheila’s eyes and holding her stare.

When Sheila closed the door behind her, she turned and looked at the face of her cell phone. Thirty minutes had passed. On the dot.

Her next client was new: a good-looking young man who was a bit too earnest for only being a twenty-three-year-old recent college graduate. His name was Ben, and he had just acquired a decent job with an advertising company. He’d gotten a mortgage, purchased a house, and was ready to fill it with someone else and him together, the kids, the dogs, the cats: the works. Sheila could see all of this as he sat in front of her and told her that he wanted to find love. That was simple, really. No need to drum up love where love already fizzed and popped. He just needed someone to really see him. Someone who wanted the same things. He wasn’t the completely bland sort of guy that no one would notice, but he wasn’t emitting a strong signal either. Sheila did a quick invocation that would enhance Ben’s desire so that it would beam like a lighthouse toward ships looking for harbor.

She charged him a hundred dollars and told him that if he didn’t get engaged within a year, she’d give him his money back. Ben thanked her, and after she saw him out of the house, it was time for Sheila to sit in her living room and stare at the television, where the vague outline of her body was reflected in the blank screen.

Lyle would be coming to pick her up in several hours. Lyle, Lyle. She said his name a few times, but it was no good. She still couldn’t believe a man named Lyle was coming for her.

Sheila had tried to make the thing that made her different the most normal aspect of her life. Hence her business: Paranormal Romance. She had business cards and left them on the bulletin boards of grocery store entryways, in the fishbowls full of cards that sat on the register counters of some restaurants, and on the bars of every lowdown drink-your-blues-away kind of joint in the city of Cleveland, where people sometimes, while crying into a beer, would notice the card propped against the napkin holder in front of them and think about Sheila possibly being the solution to their loneliness, as the cards declared.

She had made herself as non-paranormal as possible, while at the same time living completely out in the open about being a witch, probably because of what her father had once told her, years ago, when she was just a little girl and even Sheila hadn’t known she had magic in her fingertips. “If I had to be some creepy weirdo like the vampires and werewolves or whatever the hell else is out there these days,” her father had said while watching a news report about the increasing appearance of paranormal creatures, “then I suppose a witch would be the way to go.”

The way to go. That’s what he’d said. As though there was a choice about being cursed or born with magic flowing through you. Vampire, werewolf. Whatever the hell else. The memory stuck with Sheila because of the way her father had talked as if it were one of those “If you had to” games.

If you had to lose a sense, which one?

If you had to live on a deserted island with only one book, which one?

It was only later, after Sheila felt magic welling up in her as a teenager, that she realized how upset he was when she accidentally revealed her abilities—a tactless spell she’d cast to bring him and her mother closer. Unfortunately, her father had noticed Sheila’s fingers weaving through the air as she attempted to surreptitiously cast the spell while her parents were watching television one evening. Her mother stuck by Sheila, but he filed for divorce and disappeared from their lives altogether.

Thus her business, Paranormal Romance, was born. She would make it work for her, Sheila decided in her late twenties. She would use this magic in a way that someone with good legs, flexibility, and balance might become a dancer or a yoga instructor.

This desire for normality also explained why Sheila wanted to kill her mother after she opened the door that evening to find a man dressed in a black leather jacket, tight blue jeans, a black v-neck shirt, and work boots, sporting a scraggly goatee, whose first words were, “Wow, you don’t look like a witch. That’s interesting.”

“Probably the least interesting thing about me,” said Sheila. She tried to restrain herself, but couldn’t refrain from arching her eyebrows as a cat might raise its back.

“I’m Lyle. Nice to meet you,” the somewhat ruggedly good-looking Lyle said.

“Charmed,” Sheila said, trying to sound like she meant it.

“No,” said Lyle, “that’s what you’re supposed to do to me, right?” He winked. Sheila’s smile felt frail, as if it might begin to splinter.

“How do you know I’m a witch,” Sheila asked, “when my mother specifically told me not to bring it up?”

“Don’t know why she told you that,” said Lyle. “First thing she mentioned to me was that’s what you are.”

“Great,” said Sheila. “And I know nothing about you to make it even, and here we are, standing in my doorway like we’re new neighbors instead of going somewhere.”

Lyle nodded his head in the direction of the staircase and said, “I got us a reservation at a great steakhouse downtown.”

Sheila smiled. It was a lip-only smile—no teeth—but she followed Lyle down the steps of her apartment to the front porch, where she found Gary dragging Snowman up the steps by his collar. The dog had its ridiculous grin plastered on as usual, but started to yap in the direction of Lyle as soon as he noticed him. Gary himself was grimacing with frustration. “What’s the matter?” Sheila asked.

“This guy,” said Gary. “When he ran off last night, he really ran off. Someone on the neighborhood Facebook group messaged me to say she had him penned in her backyard. Three blocks from here. You’re a bad dog, Snowman. A bad dog, you hear?”

Snowman was barking like crazy now, twisting around Gary’s legs. He looked up at Lyle and for the first time in Sheila’s experience, the dog did not look like it was smiling, but was baring its teeth.

“Woof!” said Lyle, and Snowman began to whimper.

“Well, it’s a good thing she was able to corral him,” Sheila said, even as she attempted to telepathically communicate with Gary: Did this guy just woof? “I’ve never gotten along with dogs, so he’d have probably run away from me if I were the one to find him.”

“Oh, really?” Lyle raised his brows, as if Sheila had suddenly taken off a mask and revealed herself to be an alien with tentacles wriggling, Medusa-like, out of her head. “You don’t like dogs?”

“And dogs,” Sheila said, “don’t like me.”

“I can’t believe that,” said Lyle, shaking his head and wincing.

Sheila shrugged and said, “That’s just the way things are, I guess.”

“Who are you again?” Gary asked, looking at Lyle with narrowed eyes, as if he’d put Lyle under a microscope.

Sheila apologized for not introducing them. “This is my date,” she said, trying to signal to Gary that it was also the last date by rolling her eyes as she turned away from Lyle.

“A date?” Gary said, clapping one hand over his mouth as he said it. “Sheila is going on a date?”

“That’s right,” said Lyle. He nodded curtly. “And we should probably get started. Come on,” he said, pointing toward his car parked against the curb. Sheila inwardly groaned when she saw that it was one of those muscle cars macho guys collect, like they’re still little boys with Matchbox vehicles. “Let’s go get some grub,” Lyle said, patting his stomach.

“Grub?” Gary whispered as Lyle and Sheila went past him, and Sheila could only look over her shoulder with a Help Me! look painfully stretched across her face.

The steakhouse Lyle took her to was one of those places where people crack peanuts open, dislodge the nut, and discard the shells on the floor. The lighting was dim, but the room was permeated with the glow from a variety of neon beer signs that hung on every wall like a collection in an art gallery. Lyle said it was his favorite place to dine.

He said it like that too, Sheila could already hear herself saying later as she recounted the evening to Trent and Gary. He said, “It’s my favorite place to dine.” Can you believe it? What was my mother thinking?

“Oh, really,” Sheila said. The server had just brought her a vodka martini with a slice of lemon dangling over the rim. Sheila looked up at her briefly to say thank you, and noticed immediately that the server—a young woman with long mahogany hair and caramel-colored skin—was a witch. The employee tag on the server’s shirt said her name was Corrine; she winked as Sheila grasped after her words. “Thank you,” Sheila managed to say without making the moment of recognition awkward. She took a sip, licked her lips, then turned back to Lyle as the server walked away, and said, “What were you saying?”

“‘This is my favorite place to dine,’ I said. I come here a couple of times a week,” said Lyle. “Best steaks in town.”

Sheila said, “I don’t eat meat.”

To which Lyle’s face dropped like a hot air balloon that had lost all of its hot air. “Your mother didn’t tell me that,” said Lyle.

“No,” said Sheila, “but for some reason she did tell you that I’m a witch, even after she forbade me from speaking of it. Clearly the woman can’t be trusted.”

“Clearly,” Lyle agreed, which actually scored him a tiny little point for the first time that evening. There it was in Sheila’s mind’s eye, a little scoreboard. Lyle: 1. Sheila: Anxious.

He apologized profusely, in a rough-around-the-edges way that seemed to be who he was down to his core. He wasn’t really Sheila’s type, not that Sheila had a specific type, but he wasn’t the sort of guy she’d ever gone out on a date with before, either. Her mother would have known that too. Sheila’s mother had always wanted to know what was going on, back when Sheila actually dated. When Myspace and Facebook came around, and her mother began commenting on photos Sheila had posted from some of her date nights with statements like, “He’s a hottie!” and “Now that’s a keeper!” Sheila had had to block her mother. And only weeks later she discovered that on her mother’s own social networking walls, her mother was publicly bemoaning the fact that her daughter had blocked her.

But really, her mother would have known that Lyle wasn’t her sort of guy. “So what gives?” she finally asked, after Lyle had finished a tall beer and she’d gotten close to the bottom of her martini. “How do you know my mother? Why would she think we’d make a good pair?”

“I’m her butcher.”

Sheila almost spat out the vodka swirling in her mouth, but managed to swallow before saying, “Her butcher? Really? I didn’t know my mother had a butcher.”

“She comes to the West Side Market every Saturday,” said Lyle. “I work at Doreen’s Meats. Your mother always buys her meat for the week there. As for why would she think we’d make a good pair? I don’t know.” Lyle shrugged and held his palms up in the air. “I guess maybe she thought we’d get along because of what we have in common.”

Sheila snorted, then raised her hand to signal Corrine back over. “I’d like another martini,” she said, and smiled in the way some people do when they need to smother an uncivil reaction: lips firmly held together. She turned back to Lyle, who was cracking another peanut shell between his thick, hairy fingers, and said, “So what do we have in common, besides my mother?”

“I’m a werewolf,” said Lyle. Then he flicked the peanut off his thumb and snatched it out of the air, midflight, in his mouth.

Sheila watched as Lyle crunched the peanut, and noticed only after he’d swallowed and smiled across the table at her that he had a particularly large set of canines. “You’re kidding,” said Sheila. “Ha ha, very funny. You might as well start telling witch jokes at this point.”

“Not kidding,” said Lyle. Corrine stopped at their table, halting the conversation as she placed another tall beer in front of Lyle, another martini in front of Sheila, and asked what they’d like to order.

“I think we’re just here to drink tonight,” said Lyle, not taking his eyes off Sheila.

Sheila nodded vigorously at Corrine, though, agreeing. And after she left, Sheila said, “Well, this is a new achievement for my mother. Set her daughter up with a werewolf.”

“What? You don’t like werewolves?” Lyle asked. One corner of his mouth lifted into a 1970s drug dealer grin.

Sheila blinked a lot for a while, took another sip of her martini, then shrugged. “It’s not something I’ve ever thought about, you know,” she said. “I mean, werewolves aren’t generally on my radar. I get a lot of people who come around with minor psychic powers, and they’re attracted to me because they can sense I’m something out of the ordinary but can’t quite place what exactly, and of course I know a decent amount of witches—we can spot each other on the street without knowing one another, really—but werewolves are generally outside of my experience. Especially my dating experience.”

“From what I understand, your dating experience has been pretty non-existent in general.”

Sheila decided it was time to take yet another drink. After swallowing a large gulp of vodka, she said, “My mother has a big mouth for someone who hasn’t gotten back in the saddle since my father left her nearly two decades ago. And you can tell her I said that next time she comes in to stock up on meat.”

Lyle laughed. It was a full, throaty laugh that made heads turn in the steakhouse. When he realized this, he reined himself in, but Sheila could see that the laugh—the sheer volume of it when he’d let himself go—was beyond ordinary. It bordered on the wild. She could imagine him as a wolf in that moment, howling at a blood red moon.

“So what is it? Once a month you get hairy and run around the city killing people?” Sheila asked.

Lyle leaned back on his side of the booth and said, “Are you serious?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Sheila. “I hear it’s quite difficult to control bloodlust in times like that.”

“I make arrangements for those times,” said Lyle.

“Arrangements, huh,” said Sheila. “What sort of arrangements?”

“I rent an underground garage, have it filled with plenty of raw steaks, and get locked in for the night.”

“That’s responsible of you,” said Sheila.

“What about you?” Lyle asked. “Any inclinations to doing evil? Casting hexes?”

“No bloodlust for witches,” said Sheila, “and I gave up the vicious cycle of curse drama in college. Not worth it. That shit comes back on you sevenfold.”

Lyle snickered. He ran his thumb and forefinger over his scraggly goatee, then took another drink of beer. “Looks like we’re a pair,” he said, “just like your mother imagined.”

“Why?” Sheila asked. “Because you put yourself in a werewolf kennel on full moon nights and I don’t dabble in wreaking havoc in other people’s lives?”

Lyle nodded, his lips rising into a grin that revealed his pointy, slightly yellowed canines.

“I hardly think that constitutes being a pair,” said Sheila. “We certainly have that in common, but it’s a bit like saying we should start dating because we’re both single and living in Cleveland.”

“Why are you so single?” Lyle asked. His nostrils flared several times.

Oh my God, he is totally sniffing me! “I need to use the ladies’ room,” she said.

In the restroom, Sheila leaned against the counter and stared at herself in the mirror. She was wearing a short black dress and had hung her favorite opal earrings on her earlobes. They glowed in the strange orange neon beer-sign light of the restroom. She shouldn’t have answered when he knocked. She should have kept things in order. Weekend BBQs with Trent and Gary, even with the obnoxious Snowman running between their legs and wanting to jump on her and lick her. Working a few hours a day with clients, helping them to love or be loved, to find love. Evening runs in the park. Grocery shopping on Wednesdays. That’s what she wanted, not a werewolf butcher/lover her mother had found in the West Side Market.

The last time Sheila dated someone had been slightly less than underwhelming. He’d been an utterly normal man named Paul who worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland downtown, and he talked endlessly of bank capitalization and exchange-traded funds. Sheila had tried to love him, but it was as if all the bank talk was more powerful than any spell she might cast on herself, and so she’d had to add Paul to her long list of previous candidates for love.

There had been Jim, a guy who owned a car dealership in Lakewood, but he always came off as a salesman, and Sheila wasn’t the consumer type. There had been Alexis, a law student at Case Western, but despite her girlish good looks and intelligence, Alexis had worried about Sheila’s under-the-table Paranormal Romance business—concerned that she was possibly defrauding the government of taxable income. There had been Mark, the CPA (say no more). There had been Lola, the karaoke DJ (say no more). And there had been a string of potentials before that, too, once Sheila began sorting through the memories of her twenties, a long line of cute young men and women whose faces faded a little more each day. She had tried—she had tried so hard—hoping one of them would take the weight of her existence and toss it into the air like a beach ball. The love line went back and back and back, so far back, but none of those boys or girls had been able to do this. None of them.

Except Trent and Gary, of course. Not that they were romance for Sheila. But they did love her. They cared about her. They didn’t make her feel like she had to be anyone but who she wanted to be, even if who Sheila wanted to be wasn’t entirely who Sheila was.

Sheila washed her hands under the faucet and dried them with the air dryer, appreciating the whir of the fan drowning out the voice in her head. She would walk out on Lyle, she decided. She’d go home and call her mother and tell her, “Never again,” then hang up on her. She would sit in front of the blank television screen, watching her shadowy reflection held within it, and maybe she would let herself cry, just a little bit, for being a love witch who couldn’t make love happen for herself.

“Are you okay?” a voice said over the whir of the hand dryer. Sheila blinked and turned. Behind her, Corrine the server was coming out of a stall. She came to stand beside Sheila at the sinks and quickly washed her hands.

“You’re a witch,” Sheila said stupidly, and realized at that moment that two martinis were too many for her.

Corrine laughed, but nodded and said, “Yes. I am. So are you.” Corrine reached for the paper towel to dry her hands, since Sheila was spellbound in front of the electric dryer. “What kind?” she asked Sheila as she wiped her hands.

“Love,” said Sheila.

“Love?” said Corrine, raising her thin eyebrows. “That’s pretty fancy.”

“It’s okay,” said Sheila.

“Just okay?” said Corrine. “I don’t know. Sounds nice to be able to do something like that with it. Me? I can’t do much but weird things.”

“What do you mean?” Sheila asked.

“You know,” said Corrine. “Odds and ends. Nothing so defined as love. Bad end of the magic stick, maybe. I can smell fear on people, or danger. And I can open doors. But that’s about it.”

“Open doors?” said Sheila.

“Yeah,” said Corrine. “Doors. I guess it does make a kind of sense when I think about it long enough. I smell danger coming, I can get out of just about anywhere if I want to. Open a door. Any old door. It might look like it leads into a broom closet or an office, but I can make it open onto other places I’ve been, or have at least seen in a picture.”

“Wow,” said Sheila. “You should totally be a cat burglar.”

Corrine laughed. Sheila laughed with her. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“It’s okay,” Corrine said. “It was funny. I think you said it because it was funny.”

“I guess I better get back out there,” said Sheila.

“Date?” said Corrine.

“Blind date,” Sheila answered. “Bad date. Last date.”

Corrine frowned in sympathy. “I knew it wasn’t going well.”

“How?” Sheila asked.

“I could smell it on you. Not quite fear, but anxiety and frustration. I figured that’s why you asked for the second martini. That guy comes in a lot. He seems okay, but yeah, I couldn’t imagine why you were here with him.”

Sheila looked down at her hands, which were twitching a little, as if her fingers had minds of their own. They were twitching in Corrine’s direction, like they wanted to go to her. Sheila laughed. Her poor fingers. All of that love magic stored up inside them and nowhere to go.

“You need help?” Corrine asked suddenly. She had just taken off her name badge and was now fluffing her hair in the mirror.

“Help?” said Sheila.

Corrine looked over and said, “If you want out, we can just go. You don’t even have to say goodbye to him. My shift’s over. A friend of mine will be closing out your table. We can leave by the bathroom door.”

Sheila laughed. Her fingers twitched again. She took one hand and clamped it over the other.

“What are you afraid of?” Corrine asked. Her eyes had started to narrow. “I’m getting a sense that you’re afraid of me now.”

“You?” Sheila said. “No, no, not you.”

“Well, you’re giving off the vibe,” said Corrine. She dropped her name badge into her purse and took out a tube of lipstick, applied some to her lips so that they were a shade of dark ruby. When she was done, she slipped the tube into her purse and turned to Sheila. “What’s wrong with your hands?” she asked.

Sheila was still fidgeting. “I think,” she said. “I think they like you.”

Corrine threw her head back and laughed. “Like?” she said, grinning. “That’s sweet of them. You can tell your hands I like them too.”

Sheila said, “I’m so sorry. This is embarrassing. I’m usually not such a weirdo.” For a moment, Sheila heard her father’s voice come through—Creepy weirdoes. Whatever the hell else is out there—and she shivered.

“You’re not weird,” said Corrine. “Just flustered. It happens.”

It happens. Sheila blinked and blinked again. Actually, it didn’t happen. Not for her. Her fingers only twitched like this when she was working magic for other people. Anytime she had tried to work magic for herself, they were still and cold, as if she had bad circulation. “No,” Sheila said. “It doesn’t usually happen. Not for me. This is strange.”

“Listen,” said Corrine. “You seem interesting. I’m off shift and you have a bad blind date happening. I’m about to leave by that door and go somewhere I know that has good music and way better food than this place. And it’s friendly to people like you and me. What do you say?”

Sheila thought of her plans for the rest of the evening in a blinding flash.

Awkward moment before she ditched Lyle.

Awkward and angry moment on the phone while she told her mother off.

The vague reflection of her body held in the screen of the television as she allowed herself to cry a little.

Then she looked up at Corrine, who was pulling on a zippered hoody, and said, “I say yes.”

“Yes?” Corrine said, smiling.

“Yes,” said Sheila. “Yes, let’s go there, wherever it is you’re going.”

Corrine held her hand out, and Sheila looked down at her own hands again, clamped together as if in prayer, holding each other back from the world. “You can let one of them go,” Corrine said, grinning. “Otherwise, I can’t take you with me.”

Sheila laughed nervously and nodded. She released her hands from one another and cautiously put one into the palm of Corrine’s hand, where it settled in smoothly and turned warm in an instant. “This way,” Corrine said, and put her other hand on the bathroom doorknob, twisted, then opened it.

For a moment, Sheila could see nothing but a bright light fill the space of the doorway—no Lyle or the sounds of rock and roll music spilled in from the dining area—and she worried that she’d made a mistake, not being able to see where she was going with this woman who was a complete stranger. Then Corrine looked back at her and said, “Don’t be afraid,” and Sheila heard the sound of jazz music suddenly float toward her, a soft saxophone, a piano melody, though the doorway was still filled with white light she couldn’t see through.

“I’m not,” said Sheila suddenly, and was surprised to realize that she truly wasn’t.

Corrine winked at her the way she had done at the table, as if they shared a secret, which, of course, they did. Then she tugged on Sheila’s hand and they stepped through the white light into somewhere different.

© 2013 Christopher Barzak.

Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award winning novel, One for Sorrow. His second book, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula and Tiptree Awards. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. He grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and has taught English in suburban and rural communities outside of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. His most recent book is Birds and Birthdays, a collection of surrealist fantasy stories. Forthcoming is Before and Afterlives, a collection of supernatural fantasies. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.

Game of Chance
Carrie Vaughn

Once, they’d tried using sex to bring down a target. It had seemed a likely plan: Throw an affair in the man’s path, guide events to a compromising situation, and momentum did the rest. That was the theory—a simple thing, not acting against the person directly, but slantwise. But it turned out it was too direct, almost an attack, touching on such vulnerable sensibilities. They’d lost Benton, who had nudged a certain woman into the path of a certain Republic Loyalist Party councilman and died because of it. He’d been so sure it would work.

Gerald had proposed trying this strategy again to discredit the RLP candidate in the next executive election. The man couldn’t be allowed to take power if Gerald’s own favored allies hoped to maintain any influence. But there was the problem of directness. His cohort considered ideas of how to subtly convince a man to ruin his life with sex. The problem remained: There were no truly subtle ways to accomplish this. They risked Benton’s fate with no guaranteed outcome. Gathering before the chalkboard in their warehouse lair, mismatched chairs drawn together, they plotted.

Clare, sitting in back with Major, turned her head to whisper, “I like it better when we stop assassinations rather than instigate them.”

“It’s like chess,” Major said. “Sometimes you protect a piece, sometimes you sacrifice one.”

“It’s a bit arrogant, isn’t it, treating the world like our personal chess board?”

Major gave a lopsided smile. “Maybe, a bit.”

“I think I have an idea,” Clare said.

Gerald glanced their way and frowned.

Much more of this and he’d start accusing them of insubordination. She nudged Major and made a gesture with her hand: Wait. We’ll tell him later. They sat back and waited, while Gerald held court and entertained opinions, from planting illegal pornography to obtaining compromising photographs. All of it too crass, too mundane. Not credible. Gerald sent them away with orders to “come up with something.” Determined to brood, he turned his back as the others trailed to the corner of the warehouse that served as a parlor to scratch on blank pages and study books.

Clare and Major remained, seated, watching, until Gerald looked back at them and scowled.

“Clare has a different proposal,” Major said, nodding for her to tell.

Clare ducked her gaze, shy, but knew she was right. “You can’t use sex without acting on him, and that won’t work. So don’t act on him. Act on everything around him. A dozen tiny decisions a day can make a man fall.”

Gerald was their leader because he could see the future. Well, almost. He could see paths, likely directions of events that fell one way instead of another. He used this knowledge and the talents of those he recruited to steer the course of history. Major liked the chess metaphor, but Gerald worked on the canvas of epic battles, of history itself. He scowled at Clare like she was speaking nonsense.

“Tiny decisions. Like whether he wears a red or blue tie? Like whether he forgets to brush his teeth? You mean to change the world by this?”

Major, who knew her so well, who knew her thoughts before she did, smiled his hunting smile. “How is the man’s heart?”

“Yes. Exactly,” she said.

“It’ll take time,” Major explained to a still frowning Gerald. “The actions will have to be lined up just so.”

“All right,” he said, because Major had proven himself. His voice held a weight that Clare’s didn’t. “But I want contingencies.”

“Let the others make contingencies,” Major said, and that made them all scowl.

Gerald left Clare and Major to work together, which was how she liked it best.

She’d never worked so hard on a plan. She searched for opportunities, studied all the ways they might encourage the target to harm himself. She found many ways, as it happened. The task left Clare drained, but happy, because it was working. Gerald would see. He’d be pleased. He’d start to listen to her, and she wouldn’t need Major to speak for her.

“I don’t mind speaking for you,” Major said when she confided in him. “It’s habit that makes him look right through you like he does. It’s hard to get around that. He has to be the leader, the protector. He needs someone to be the weakest, and so doesn’t see you. And the others only see what he sees.”

“Why don’t you?”

He shrugged. “I like to see things differently.”

“Maybe there’s a spell we could work to change him.”

He smiled at that. The spells didn’t work on them, because they were outside the whole system. Their spells put them outside. Gerald said they could change the world by living outside it like this. Clare kept thinking of it as gambling, and she never had liked games.

They worked: The target chose the greasiest, unhealthiest meals, always ate dessert, and took a coach everywhere—there always seemed to be one conveniently at hand. Some days, he forgot his medication, the little pills that kept his heart steady—the bottle was not in its place and he couldn’t be bothered to look for it. Nothing to notice from day to day. But one night, in bed with his wife—no lurid affair necessary—their RLP candidate’s weak heart gave out. A physician was summoned quickly enough, but to no avail. And that, Clare observed, was how one brought down a man with sex.

Gerald called it true. The man’s death threw the election into chaos, and his beloved Populist Tradition Party was able to hold its seats in the Council.

Clare glowed with pride because her theory had worked. A dozen little changes, so indirect as to be unnoticeable. The perfect expression of their abilities.

But Gerald scowled. “It’s not very impressive, in the main,” he said and walked away.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Clare whispered.

“He’s angry he didn’t think of it himself,” Major said.

“So it wasn’t fireworks. I thought that was the point.”

“I think you damaged his sensibilities,” he said, and dropped a kind kiss on her forehead.

She had been a normal, everyday girl, though prone to daydreaming, according to her governess. She was brought up in proper drawing rooms, learning how to embroider, supervise servants, and orchestrate dinner parties. Often, though, she had to be reminded of her duties, of the fact that she would one day marry a fine gentleman, perhaps in the army or in government, and be the envy of society ladies everywhere. Otherwise she might sit in the large wingback armchair all day long, staring at the light coming in through the window, or at sparks in the fireplace, or at the tongue of flame dancing on the wick of the nearest lamp. “What can you possibly be thinking about?” her governess would ask. She’d learned to say, “Nothing.” When she was young, she’d said things like, “I’m wondering, what if fire were alive? What if it traveled, and is all flame part of the same flame? Is a flame like a river, traveling and changing every moment?” This had alarmed the adults around her.

By the time she was eighteen, she’d learned to make herself presentable in fine gowns, and to arrange the curls of her hair to excite men’s interest, and she’d already had three offers. She hadn’t given any of them answer, but thought to accept the one her father most liked so at least somebody would be happy.

Then one day she’d stepped out of the house, parasol over her shoulder, intending a short walk to remind herself of her duty before that evening’s dinner party, and there Gerald and Major had stood, at the foot of the stairs, two dashing figures from an adventure tale.

“What do you think about, when you look at the flame of a candle?” Gerald had asked.

She stared, parasol clutched in gloved hands, mind tumbling into an honest answer despite her learned poise. “I think of birds playing in sunlight. I wonder if the sun and the fire are the same. I think of how time slows down when you watch the hands of a clock move.”

Major, the younger and handsomer of the pair, gave her a sly grin and offered his hand. “You’re wasted here. Come with us.”

At that moment she knew she’d never been in love before, because she lost her heart to Major. She set her parasol against the railing on the stairs, stepped forward, and took his hand. Gerald pulled the theatrical black cape he’d been wearing off his shoulders, turned it with a twist of his wrists, and swept it around himself, Major, and Clare. A second of cold followed, along with a feeling of drowning. Clare shut her eyes and covered her face. When Major murmured a word of comfort, she finally looked around her and saw the warehouse. Gerald introduced himself and the rest of his cohort, and explained that they were masters of the world, which they could manipulate however they liked. It seemed a very fine thing.

Thus she vanished from her old life as cleanly as if she had never existed. Part of her would always see Gerald and Major as her saviors.

Gerald’s company, his band of unseen activists, waited in their warehouse headquarters until their next project, which would only happen when Gerald traced lines of influence to the next target. The next chess piece. Clare looked forward to the leisure time until she was in the middle of it, when she just wanted to go out and do something.

Maybe it was just that she’d realized a long time ago that she wasn’t any good at the wild version of poker the others played to pass time. She sat the games out, tried to read a book, or daydreamed. Watched dust motes and candle flames.

The other four were the fighters. The competitive ones. She’d joined this company by accident.

Cards snicked as Major dealt them out. Clean-shaven, with short-cropped hair, he was dashing, military. He wore a dark blue uniform jacket without insignia; a white shirt, unbuttoned at the collar; boots that needed polishing, but that only showed how active he was. Always in the thick of it. Clare could watch him deal cards all day.

“Wait a minute. Are we on Tuesday rules or Wednesday?” Ildie asked.

Fred looked up from his hand, blinking in a moment of confusion. “Today’s Thursday, isn’t it?”

“Tuesday rules on Thursday. That’s the fun of it,” Marco said, voice flat, attention on the cards.

“I hate you all,” Ildie said, scowling. They chuckled, because she always said that.

Ildie dressed like a man, in an oxford shirt, leather pants, and high boots. This sometimes still shocked Clare, who hadn’t given up long skirts and braided hair when she’d left a proper parlor for this. Ildie had already been a rebel when she joined. At least Clare had learned not to tell Ildie how much nicer she’d look if she grew her hair out. Fred had sideburns, wore a loosened cravat, and out of all of them might be presentable in society with a little polish. Marco never would be. Stubble shadowed his face, and he always wore his duster to hide the pistols on his belt.

A pair of hurricane lamps on tables lit the scene. The warehouse was lived-in, the walls lined with shelves, which were piled with books, rolled up charts, atlases, sextants, hourglasses, a couple of dusty globes. They’d pushed together chairs and coffee tables for a parlor, and the far corner was curtained off into rooms with cots and washbasins. In the parlor, a freestanding chalkboard was covered with writing and charts, and more sheets of paper lay strewn on the floor, abandoned when the equations scrawled on them went wrong. When they went right, the sheets were pinned to the walls and shelves and became the next plan. At the moment, nothing was pinned up.

Clare considered: Was it a matter of tracing lines of influence to objects rather than personalities? Difficult, when influence was a matter of motivation, which was not possible with inanimate objects. So many times their tasks would have been easier if they could change someone’s mind. But that was like bringing a sledgehammer down on delicate glasswork. So you changed the thing that would change someone’s mind. How small a change could generate the greatest outcome? That was her challenge: Could removing a bottle of ink from a room change the world? She believed it could. If it was the right bottle of ink, the right room. Then perhaps a letter wouldn’t be written, an order of execution wouldn’t be signed.

But the risk—that was Gerald’s argument. The risk of failure was too great. You might take a bolt from the wheel of a cannon, but if it was the wrong bolt, the wrong cannon . . . The variables became massive. Better to exert the most influence you could without being noticed. That didn’t stop Clare from weaving her thought experiments. For want of a nail . . .

“I raise,” Major said, and Clare looked up at the change in his voice. He had a plan; he was about to spring a trap. After the hundreds of games those four had played, couldn’t they see it?

“You don’t have anything.” Marco looked at his hand, at the cards lying face up on the table, back again. Major gave him a “try me” look.

“He’s bluffing.” Ildie wore a thin smile, confident because Major had bluffed before. Just enough to keep them guessing. He did it on purpose, they very well knew, and he challenged them to outwit him. They thought they could—that was why they kept falling into his traps. But even Major had a tell, and Clare could see it if no one else could. Easy for her to say, though, sitting outside the game.

“Fine. Bet’s raised. I see it,” Fred countered.

Then they saw it coming, because that was part of Major’s plan. Draw them in, spring the trap. He tapped a finger; the air popped, a tiny sound like an insect hitting a window, that was how small the spell was, but they all recognized the working of it, the way the world shifted just a bit, as one of them outside of it nudged a little. Major laid out his cards, which were all exactly the cards he needed, a perfect hand, against unlikely—but not impossible—odds.

Marco groaned, Ildie threw her cards, Fred laughed. “I should have known.”

“Tuesday rules,” Major said, spreading his hands in mock apology.

Major glanced at Clare, smiled. She smiled back. No, she didn’t ever want to play this game against Major.

Marco gathered up the cards. “Again.”

“Persistent,” Major said.

“Have to be. Thursday rules this time. The way it’s meant to be.” They dealt the next hand.

Gerald came in from the curtained area that was his study, his wild eyes red and sleepless, a driven set to his jaw. They all knew what it meant.

“I have the next plot,” he said.

Helping the cause sometimes meant working at cross-purposes with the real world. A PTP splinter group, frustrated and militant, had a plan, too, and Gerald wanted to stop it because it would do more harm than good.

Easier said than done, on such a scale. Clare preferred the games where they put a man’s pills out of the way.

She and Major hunched in a doorway as the Council office building fell, brought down by cheap explosives. A wall of dust scoured the streets. People coated in the gray stuff wandered like ghosts. Clare and Major hardly noticed.

“We couldn’t stop it,” Clare murmured, speaking through a handkerchief.

Major stared at a playing card, a jack of diamonds. “We’ve done all we can.”

“What? What did we do? We didn’t stop it!” They were supposed to stop the explosion, stop the destruction. She had wanted so much to stop it, not for Gerald’s sake, but for the sake of doing good.

Major looked hard at her. “Twenty-nine bureaucrats meant to be in that building overslept this morning. Eighteen stayed home sick. Another ten stayed home with hangovers from overindulging last night. Twenty-four more ran late because either their pets or children were sick. The horses of five coaches came up lame, preventing another fifteen from arriving. That’s ninety-six people who weren’t in that building. We did what we could.” His glare held amazing conviction.

She said, “We’re losing, aren’t we? Gerald will never get what he wants.”

So many of Gerald’s plans had gone just like this. They counted victories in lives, like picking up spilled grains of rice. They were changing lives, but not the world.

“Come on,” he ordered. “We’ve got a door.”

He threw the card at the wall of the alley where they’d hidden. It stuck, glowed blue, and grew. Through the blue glare a gaping hole showed. Holding hands, they dove into it, and it collapsed behind them.

“Lame coach horses? Hangovers?” Gerald said, pacing back and forth along one of the bookshelves. “We’re trying to save civilization.”

“What is civilization but the people who live within it?” Clare said softly. It was how she said anything around Gerald.

“Ninety-six lives saved,” Major said. “What did anyone else accomplish?” Silent gazes, filled with visions of destruction, looked back at him. The rest of them: Fred, Ildie, and Marco. Their jackets were ruffled, their faces weary, but they weren’t covered with dust and ragged like Clare and Major were. They hadn’t gotten that close.

Gerald paced. “In the end, what does it mean? For us?” The question was rhetorical because no answer would satisfy him. Though Clare thought, it means whatever we want it to mean.

Clare and Major never bothered hiding their attachment from the others. What could the company say to disapprove? Not even Gerald could stop them, though Ildie often looked at her askance, with a scowl, as if Clare had betrayed her. Major assured her that the other woman had never held a claim on him. Clare wondered if she might have fallen in love with any of the men—Fred, Benton, or even Marco—if any of them had stood by Gerald to recruit her instead of Major. But no, she felt her fate was to be with Major. She didn’t feel small with him.

Hand in hand, careless, they’d leave the others and retreat to the closet in an unused corner of the warehouse’s second floor, where they’d built a pallet just for them. A nest, Clare thought of it. Here, she had Major all to herself, and he seemed happy enough to be hers. She’d lay across his naked chest and he’d play with her hair. Bliss.

“Why did you follow Gerald when he came for you?” she asked after the disaster with the exploded building.

“He offered adventure.”

“Not for the politics, then? Not because you believe in his party?”

“I imagine it’s all one and the same in the long run.”

The deep philosophy of this would have impressed her a few years ago. Now, it seemed like dodging the question. She propped herself on an elbow to study him. She was thinking out loud.

“Then why do you still follow him? You could find adventure without him, now that he’s shown you the way.”

He grinned sleepily and gathered her closer. “I’d wander aimlessly. His adventures are more interesting. It’s a game.”

“Oh.”

“And why do you still follow him? Why did you take my hand the day we met?”

“You were more interesting than what I left behind.”

“But I ask you the same question, now. I know you don’t believe in his politics. So why do you still follow him?”

“I don’t follow him. I follow you.”

His expression turned serious, frowning almost. His hand moved from her hair to her cheek, tracing the line of her jaw as if she were fragile glass. “We’re a silly pair, aren’t we? No belief, no faith.”

“Nothing wrong with that. Major—if neither of us is here for Gerald, we should leave. Let’s go away from this, be our own cohort.” Saying it felt like rebellion, even greater than the rebellion of leaving home in the first place.

His voice went soft, almost a whisper. “Could we really? How far would we get before we started missing this and came back?”

“I wouldn’t miss the others,” she said, jaw clenched.

“No, not them,” he said. “But the game.”

Gerald could fervently agitate for the opposite party, and Major would play the game with as much glee. She could understand and still not agree.

“You think we need Gerald, to do what we do?”

He shook his head, a questioning gesture rather than a denial. “I’m happy here. Aren’t you?”

She could nod and not lie because here, at this small moment with him, she was happy.

One could change the world by nudging chances, Clare believed. Sometimes, she went off by herself to study chances the others wouldn’t care about.

At a table in the corner of a café—the simple, homelike kind that students frequented, with worn armchairs, and chess boards and pieces stored in boxes under end tables with old lamps on them—Clare drew a pattern in a bit of tea that dripped from her saucer. Swirled the shape into two circles, forever linked. In front of the counter, a boy dropped a napkin. The girl behind him picked it up. Their hands brushed. He saw that she had a book of sonnets, which he never would have noticed if he hadn’t dropped the napkin. She saw that he had a book of philosophy. They were students, maybe, or odd enthusiasts. One asked the other, are you a student? The answer didn’t matter because the deed was done. In this world, in this moment, despite all the unhappiness, this small thing went right.

This whole thing started because Gerald saw patterns. She wondered later: Did he see the pattern, identify them because of it, and bring them together? Was that his talent? Or did he cause the pattern to happen? If not for Gerald, would she have gone on, free and ignorant, happily living her life with no knowledge of what she could do? Or was she always destined to follow this path, use this talent with or without the others? Might she have spent her time keeping kittens from running into busy streets or children from falling into rivers? And perhaps one of those children would grow up to be the leader Gerald sought, the one who would change the world.

All that had happened, all their work, and she still could not decide if she believed in destiny.

She wouldn’t change how any of it had happened because of Major. The others marveled over Gerald’s stern, Cossack determination. But she fell in love with Major, with his shining eyes.

“We have to do better, think harder, more creatively. Look how much we’ve done already, never forget how much we’ve done.”

After almost a decade of this, only six of the original ten were left. The die-hards, as mad as Gerald. Even Major looked on him with that calculating light in his eyes. Did Gerald even realize that Major’s passion was for tactics rather than outcome?

“Opportunities abound, if we have the courage to see them. The potential for good, great good, manifests everywhere. We must have the courage to see it.”

Rallying the troops. Clare sighed. How many times had Gerald given variations of this speech in this dingy warehouse, hidden by spells and out of the world? They all sounded the same. She’d stopped being able to see the large patterns a long time ago and could only see the little things now. A dropped napkin in a café. She could only change the course of a few small lives.

“There’s an assassination,” said Gerald. “It will tip the balance into a hundred years of chaos. Do you see it?”

Fred smiled. “We can stop it. Maybe jam a rifle.”

“A distraction, to throw off the assassin’s aim.”

“Or give him a hangover,” Major said. “We’ve had great success with hangovers and oversleeping.” He glanced at Clare with his starry smile. She beamed back. Fred rolled his eyes.

“Quaint,” Gerald said, frowning.

The game was afoot. So many ways to change a pattern. Maybe Clare’s problem was she saw them as people, not patterns. And maybe she was the one holding the rest back. Thinking too small. She wasn’t part of their pattern anymore.

This rally was the largest Clare had ever seen. Her generation had grown up hearing grandparents’ stories of protest and clashes (civil war, everyone knew, but the official history said clashes, which sounded temporary and isolated). While their parents grew up in a country that was tired and sedate, where they were content to consolidate their little lives and barricade themselves against the world, the children wondered what it must have been like to believe in idealism.

Gerald’s target this time was the strongest candidate the PTP had ever put forward for Premiere. The younger generation flocked to Jonathan Smith. People adored him—unless they supported the RLP. Rallies like this were the result. Great crowds of hope and belief, unafraid. And the crowds who opposed them.

Gerald said that Jonathan Smith was going to be assassinated. Here, today, at the rally, in front of thousands. All the portents pointed to this. But it would not result in martyrdom and change, because the assassin would be one of his own and people would think, our parents were right, and go home.

Clare and Major stood in the crowd like islands, unmoving, unfeeling, not able to be caught up in the exhilarating speech, the roaring response. She felt alien. These were her people, they were all human, but never had she felt so far removed. She might have felt god-like, if she believed in a god who took such close interest in creation as to move around it like this. God didn’t have to, because there were people like Gerald and Major.

“It’s nice to be saving someone,” Clare said. “I’ve always liked that better.”

“It only has to be a little thing,” Major said. “Someone in the front row falls and breaks a bone. The commotion stalls the attack when Smith goes to help the victim. Because he’s like that.”

“We want to avoid having a victim at all, don’t we?”

“Maybe it’ll rain.”

“We change coach horses, not the weather.” But not so well that they couldn’t keep an anarchist bomb from arriving at its destination. They weren’t omnipotent. They weren’t gods. If they were, they could control the weather.

She had tried sending a message about the government building behind Gerald’s back. He would have called the action too direct, but she’d taken the risk. She’d called the police, the newspapers, everyone, with all the details they’d conjured. Her information went into official records, was filed for the appropriate authorities, all of which moved too slowly to be of any good. It wasn’t too direct after all.

Inexorable. This path of history had the same feeling of being inexorable. Official channels here would welcome an assassination. The police would not believe her. They only had to save one life.

She wished for rain. The sky above was clear.

They walked among the crowd, and it was grand. She rested her hand in the crook of Major’s elbow; he held it there. He wore a happy, silly smile on his face. They might have been in a park, strolling along a gentle river in a painting.

“There’s change here,” he said, gazing over the angry young crowd and their vitriolic signs.

She squeezed his arm and smiled back.

The ground they walked on was ancient cobblestone. This historic square had witnessed rallies like this for a thousand years. In such times of change, gallows had stood here, or hooded men with axes. How much blood had soaked between these cobbles?

That was where she nudged. From the edges of the crowd, they were able to move with the flow of people surging. They could linger at the edges with relative freedom of movement, so she spotted a bit of pavement before the steps climbing to the platform where the demagogue would speak. A toe caught on a broken cobblestone would delay him. Just for a second. Sometimes that was enough to change the pattern.

“Here,” she said, squeezing Major’s arm to anchor him. He nodded, pulled her to the wall of a townhouse, and waited.

While she focused on the platform, on the path that Jonathan Smith would take—on the victim—Major turned his attention to the crowd, looking for the barrel of a gun, the glint of sunlight off a spyglass, counter-stream movement in the enthusiastic surge. The assassin.

Someone else looking for suspicious movement in a crowd like this would find them, Clare thought. Though somehow no one ever did find them.

Sometimes, all they could do was wait. Sometimes, they waited and nothing happened. Sometimes they were too late or early, or one of the others had already nudged one thing or another.

“There,” Major said, the same time that Clare gripped his arm and whispered, “There.”

She was looking to the front where the iconic man, so different than the bodyguards around him, emerged and waved at the crowd. There, the cobblestone—she drew from her pocket a cube of sugar that had been soaked in amaretto, crumbled it, let the grains fall, then licked her fingers. The sweet, heady flavor stung her tongue.

Major lunged away from her. “No!”

The stone lifted, and the great Jonathan Smith tripped. A universal gasp went up.

Major wasn’t looking to the front with everyone else. He was looking at a man in the crowd, twenty feet away, dissolute. A troublemaker. Hair ragged, shirt soiled, faded trousers, and a canvas jacket a size too large. Boots made for kicking. He held something in his right fist, in a white-knuckled grip.

This was it, the source, the gun—the locus, everything. This was where they learned if they nudged enough, and correctly. But the assassin didn’t raise a straight arm to aim. He cocked back to throw. He didn’t carry a gun, he held a grenade.

Gerald and the others had planned for a bullet. They hadn’t planned for this.

Major put his shoulder to the man’s chest and shoved. The would-be assassin stumbled, surprised, clutched the grenade to his chest—it wasn’t active, he hadn’t lit the fuse. Major stopped him. Stopped the explosive, stopped the assassin, and that was good. Except it wasn’t, and he didn’t.

Smith recovered from his near-fall. He mounted the platform. The bodyguard behind him drew his handgun, pointed at the back of Smith’s head, and fired. The shot echoed and everyone saw it and spent a moment in frozen astonishment. Even the man with the grenade. Everyone but Major, who was on the ground, doubled over, shivering as if every nerve burned.

Clare fell on top of him, crying, clutching at him. His eyes rolled back, enough to look at her, enough for her to see the fear in them. If she could have held onto him, carried him with her, saved him, she would have. But he’d put himself back into the world. He’d acted, plunged back into a time and place he wasn’t part of anymore, and now it tore him to pieces. The skin of his face cracked under her hands, and the blood and flesh underneath was black and crumbling to dust.

She couldn’t sob hard enough to save him.

Clare was lost in chaos. Then Gerald was there with his cloak. So theatrical, Major always said. Gerald used the cloak like Major used the jack of diamonds. He swept it around the three of them, shoving them through a doorway.

But only Clare and Gerald emerged on the other side.

The first lesson they learned, that Major forgot for only a second, the wrong second: They could only build steps, not leap. They couldn’t act directly, they couldn’t be part of the history they made.

So Jonathan Smith died, and the military coup that followed ruined everything.

Five of them remained.

The problem was she could not imagine a world different from the burned-out husk that resulted from the war fought over the course of the next year. Gerald’s plan might have worked, bringing forth a lush Eden where everyone drank nectar and played hopscotch with angelic children, and she still would have felt empty.

Gerald’s goal had always been utopia. Clare no longer believed it was possible.

The others were very kind to her, in the way anyone was kind to a child they pitied. Poor dear, but she should have known better. Clare accepted the blanket Ildie put over her shoulders and the cup of hot tea Fred pressed into her hands.

“Be strong, Clare,” Ildie said, and Clare thought, easy for her to say.

“What next, what next,” Gerard paced the warehouse, head bent, snarling almost, his frown was so energetic.

“Corruption scandal?” Marco offered.

“Too direct.”

“A single line of accounting, the wrong number in the right place, to discredit the regime,” Ildie said.

Gerald stopped pacing. “Maybe.”

Another meeting. As if nothing had happened. As if they could still go on.

“Major was the best of us,” Clare murmured.

“We’ll just have to be more careful,” Ildie murmured back.

“He made a mistake. An elementary mistake,” Gerald said, and never spoke of Major again.

The village a mile outside the city had once been greater, a way station and market town. Now, it was a skeleton. The war had crushed it, burned it, until only hovels remained, the scorched frames of buildings standing like trees in a forest. Brick walls had fallen and lay strewn, crumbling, decaying. Rough canvas stretched over alcoves provided shelter. Cooking fires burned under tripods and pots beaten out of other objects. What had been the cobbled town square still had the atmosphere of an open-air market, people shouting and milling, bartering fiercely, trading. The noise made a language all its own, and a dozen different scents mingled.

Despite the war and bombing, some of the people hadn’t fled, but they hadn’t tried to rebuild. Instead, they seemed to have crawled underground when the bombardment began, and when it ended they reemerged, continued their lives where they left off as best they could, with the materials they had at hand. Cockroaches, Clare thought, and shook the thought away.

At the end of the main street, where the twisted, naked foundations gave way and only shattered cobblestones remained, a group of men were digging a well into an old aquifer, part of the water system of the dying village. They were looking for water. Really, though, at this point they weren’t digging, but observing the amount of dirt they’d already removed and arguing. They were about to give up and try again somewhere else. A whole day’s work wasted, a day they could little afford when they had children to feed and material to scavenge.

Clare helped. Spit on her hands, put them on the dusty earth, then rubbed them together and drew patterns in the dust. Pressed her hands to the ground again. The aquifer that they had missed by just a few feet seeped into the ditch they’d dug. The well filled. The men cheered.

Wiping her hands on her skirt, Clare walked away. She was late for another meeting.

“What is the pattern?” Gerald asked. And no one answered. They were down to four.

Ildie had tried to cause a scandal by prompting a divorce between the RLP Premiere and his popular wife. No matter how similar attempts had failed before. “This is different, it’s not causing an affair, it’s destroying one. I can do this,” she had insisted, desperate to prove herself. But the targets couldn’t be forced. She might as well have tried to cause an affair after all. Once again, too direct. Clare could have told her it wouldn’t work. Clare recognized when people were in love. Even Republic Loyalists fell in love.

“What will change this path? We must make this better!”

She stared. “I just built a well.”

Marco smirked. “What’s the use of that?”

Fred tried to summon enthusiasm. They all missed Major even if she was the only one who admitted it. “It’s on the army now, not the government. We remove the high command, destroy their headquarters perhaps—”

Marco said, “What, you think we can make earthquakes?”

“No, we create cracks in the foundation, then simply shift them—”

Clare shook her head. “I was never able to think so big. I wish—”

Fred sighed. “Clare, it’s been two years, can you please—”

“It feels like yesterday,” she said, and couldn’t be sure that it hadn’t been just yesterday, according to the clock her body kept. But she couldn’t trust that instinct. She’d lost hours that felt like minutes, studying dust motes.

“Clare—” Gerald said, admonishing, a guru unhappy with a disciple. The thought made her smile, which he took badly, because she wasn’t looking at him but at something the middle distance, unseen.

He shook his head, disappointment plain. The others stared at her with something like fascination or horror.

“You’ve been tired. Not up to this pressure,” he explained kindly. “It’s all right if you want to rest.”

She didn’t hear the rest of the planning. That was all right; she wasn’t asked to take part.

She took a piece of charcoal from an abandoned campfire. This settlement was smaller than it had been. Twenty fires had once burned here, with iron pots and bubbling stews over them all.

Eight remained. Families ranged farther and farther to find food. Often young boys never came back. They were taken by the army. The well had gone bad. They collected rainwater in dirty tubs now.

And yet. Even here. She drew a pattern on a slab of broken wood. Watched a young man drop a brick of peat for the fire. Watched a young woman pick it up for him and look into his eyes. He smiled.

Now if only she knew the pattern that would ensure that they survived.

When they launched the next plan—collapse the army high command’s headquarters, crippling the RLP and allowing the PTP to fill the vacuum, or so Gerald insisted—she had no part to play. She was not talented enough, Gerald didn’t say, but she understood it. She could only play with detritus from a kitchen table. She could never think big enough for them. Major hadn’t cared.

She did a little thing, though: scattered birdseed on a pool of soapy water, to send a tremor through the air and warn the pigeons, rats, and such that they ought to flee. And maybe that ruined the plan for the others. She’d nudged the pattern too far out of alignment for their pattern to work. The building didn’t collapse, but the clock tower across the square from which Fred and Marco were watching did. As if they had planted explosives and been caught in the blast.

Too direct, of course.

She left. Escaped, rather, as she thought. She didn’t want Gerald to find her. Didn’t want to look him in the eye. She would either laugh at him or accuse him of killing Major and everyone else. Then she would strangle him, and since they were both equally out of history she just might be able to do it. It couldn’t possibly be too direct, and the rest of the world couldn’t possibly notice.

Very tempting, in those terms.

But she found her place, her niche, her purpose. Her little village on the edge of everything was starting to build itself into something bigger. She’d worried about it, but just last year the number of babies born exceeded the number of people who died of disease, age, and accident. A few more cook fires had been added. She watched, pleased.

But Gerald found her, eventually, because that was one of his talents: finding people who had the ability to move outside the world. She might as well have set out a lantern.

She didn’t look up when he arrived. She was gathering mint leaves that she’d set out to dry, putting them in the tin box where she stored them. A spoonful of an earlier harvest was brewing in a cup of water over her little fire. Her small realm was tucked under the overhang formed by three walls that had fallen together. The witch’s cave, she called it. It looked over the village so she could always watch her people.

Gerald stood at the edge of her cave for a long time, watching. He seemed deflated, his cloak worn, his skin pale. But his eyes still burned. With desperation this time, maybe, instead of ambition.

When he spoke, he sounded appalled. “Clare. What are you doing here? Why are you living in this . . . this pit?”

“Because it’s my pit. Leave me alone, I’m working.”

“Clare. Come away. Get out of there. Come with me.”

She raised a brow at him. “No.”

“You’re not doing any good here.”

She still did not give him more than a passing glance. The village below was full of the evening’s activities: farmers returning from fields, groups bustling around cook fires. Someone was singing, another laughing, a third crying.

She pointed. “Maybe that little girl right there is the one who will grow up and turn this all around. Maybe I can keep her safe until she does.”

He shook his head. “Not likely. You can’t point to a random child and make such a claim. She’ll be dead of influenza before she reaches maturity.”

“It’s the little things, you’re always saying. But you don’t think small enough,” she said.

“Now what are you talking about?”

“Nails,” she murmured.

“You have a talent,” he said, desperately. “You see what other people overlook. Things other people take for granted. There are revolutions in little things. I understand that now. I didn’t—”

“Why can’t you let the revolutions take care of themselves?”

He stared at her, astonished. Might as well tell him to stop breathing. He didn’t know how to do anything else. And no one had ever spoken to him like this.

“You can’t go back,” he said as if it was a threat. “You can’t go back to being alive in the world.”

“Does it look like I’m trying?” He couldn’t answer, of course, because she only looked like she was making tea. “You’re only here because there’s no one left to help you. And you’re blind.”

Some days when she was in a very low mood she imagined Major here with her, and imagined that he’d be happy, even without the games.

“Clare. You shouldn’t be alone. You can’t leave me. Not after everything.”

“I never did this for you. I never did this for history. There’s no great sweep to any of this. Major saw a man with a weapon and acted on instinct. The grenade might have gone off and he’d have died just the same. It could have happened to anyone. I just wanted to help people. To try to make the world a little better. I like to think that if I weren’t doing this I’d be working in a soup kitchen somewhere. In fact, maybe I’d have done more good if I’d worked in a soup kitchen.”

“You can’t do any good alone, Clare.”

“I think you’re the one who can’t do any good alone,” she said. She looked at him. “I have saved four hundred and thirty-two people who would have died because they did not have clean water. Because of me, forty-three people walked a different way home and didn’t get mugged or pressed into the army. Thirty-eight kitchen fires didn’t reach the cooking oil. Thirty-one fishermen did not drown when they fell overboard. I have helped two dozen people fall in love.”

His chuckle was bitter. “You were never very ambitious.”

“Ambitious enough,” she said.

“I won’t come for you again. I won’t try to save you again.”

“Thank you,” she said.

She did not watch Gerald walk away and vanish in the swoop of his cloak.

Later, looking over the village, she reached for her tin box and drew out a sugar cube that had been soaked in brandy. Crumbling it and licking her fingers, she lifted a bit of earth, which made a small girl trip harmlessly four steps before she would have stumbled and fallen into a cook fire. Years later, after the girl had grown up to be the kind of revolutionary leader who saves the world, she would say she had a guardian angel.

© 2013 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC.

Originally published in Unfettered, edited by Shawn Speakman.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series. The eleventh novel, Kitty Rocks the House, came out in March 2013. She has also written young adult novels, Voices of Dragons and Steel, and the fantasy novels, Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age. Her short fiction has appeared many times in Realms of Fantasy magazine, and in a number of anthologies, such as Fast Ships, Black Sails and Warriors. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.

Author Spotlight: L. Timmel Duchamp
Moshe Siegel

Your novella, “The Fool’s Tale,” conveys a recurring message that reality (and literature) is in the eye of the beholder, that once created, all things take on a life of their own, unbounded by preconception, and that what one believes as truth, others may see as fantasy. In the writing of this story, was it challenging to weave the fantastic with the factual, the certain with the ambiguous?

I don’t see my fiction as conveying “messages,” though I’m aware that my work, like any reasonable complex fiction must often contains subtexts, usually without my conscious knowledge. Since perception management has been an obsessive interest of several US Republican administrations, beginning with the Reagan Administration (cf Oliver North’s emails, quoted in the Tower Commission report documenting the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s), the subject is not exactly an innocent one. Bush II’s neocon administration openly declared they could dispense with facts and rewrite reality. This presumption did a lot of damage along the way, but ultimately failed. Because writers are not imposing their fantastic visions on reality—for they expect readers to understand the difference between truth and fantasy—they enjoy a certain latitude for inviting readers to participate in a collective fantasy, which is exactly what the Fool does: invite the Queen and the Countess and their ladies into a magical moment of rewriting the ending of Twelfth Night. This isn’t that different from their experience of having watched the play and joined Shakespeare in his dramatic fantasy the evening before. Was it challenging for me to weave the fantastic with the factual, the certain with the ambiguous? No. I love ambiguity. And anyone who writes fiction necessarily weaves the factual with the fantastic (even when they are writing a roman à clef). What was challenging was getting the language right. Before writing the version of the story that was eventually published, I wrote the manuscript the story quotes from—all of it, of course, in Jacobean English, and it took me more than four months to do. (Such a concentrated dose of Jacobean prose was too difficult for my first readers to enjoy reading. And so I wrote a second version that discussed, paraphrased, and quoted from it.)

The reader is given a window into the intrigues and complexity of King James’s court, from the perspective of your fictional Fool. How much of said court life was drawn from research, and how much detail, if any, did you fabricate for the purposes of this tale?

I invented the Fool and her personal history and a few minor characters, for instance Robin, who plays Viola. Most of the characters, though, were drawn from life, including Pierette, the Queen’s personal servant. Similarly, most of the details were lifted from historical sources, though occasionally I took some license. The Fool recognizes Lady Olivia’s costume as having once been Queen Anne’s gown, but in fact I have no idea whose gown was used in that production. Designated members of the royal households were granted the right to sell garments when the royals were done with them, and costumes were the chief properties owned by acting companies. Given James’s obsession with passing (and then struggling to enforce) sumptuary laws, not many people would have legally been entitled to wear second-hand royal clothing. Interestingly, I knew a lot about the Court (consisting, actually, of three overlapping courts: King James’s, Queen Anne’s, and Prince Henry’s) before I became mildly obsessed with Twelfth Night, an obsession that led me to read the history of its performance and accompanying critical scholarship debating its interpretation. The moment I knew I’d have to write a story about it came when I began thinking about the performance of the play at court. I knew that Queen Anne and her ladies took a rather subversive attitude toward James’s misogynistic attitudes and preferences and that the Countess of Bedford was a patron of the arts in general and women poets in particular, and that the Countess and the Queen were acutely aware of gender politics in the masques they put on at court. So when I thought about Twelfth Night being performed at court, I began to see the play from the point of view of someone immersed in the Court’s gender politics.

What do you think are the benefits of revisiting history through literature? Do you think the injection of fiction into historical events contemporizes any lessons to be found in humanity’s past?

I’m less interested in lessons than in resonances. History exists as narrative and so, like narrative, always has a point of view. Some of history’s narratives will be invisible to whole generations of scholars—many of the narratives of history that so fascinate us in the twenty-first century could not have been detected by nineteenth-century scholars and many historical details seemed so implausible to them that they simply assumed the notaries and chanceries, etc., who recorded them meant something else. To me, it makes sense for fiction to revisit those narratives when they speak to our own experiences and understanding of the world.

Twelfth Night seems a perfect historical lens through which to view modern, persistent gender-role expectations. Do you have an abiding interest in Shakespeare, or were you drawn to this play through explorations of gender differences in literature?

I’ve always been drawn to Twelfth Night because of its play with gender roles. But I’ve long been a fan of Shakespeare, not only because of the vividness of his language and imagery, but also because most of his plays offer the viewer/reader cracks in the surface of reality, inviting imaginative, thoughtful exploration. Call it a kind of visionary spatial liberation. It’s the reason that performances can vary so radically from director to director and generation to generation. The crack running through Twelfth Night is what allowed me to conceive of an alternate ending the Fool then leads the Countess and Queen to glimpse.

Was the Countess correct in saying that Shakespeare’s plays end with such unfair disparity between the sexes simply because his works mirror true life and are too honest to be “happy”? Is that a fair reason for a lack of forward-thinking on behalf of the Author, or a too-easy, benefit-of-the-doubt excuse for a talented but socially-blinded artist?

Every artist is a product of their culture, and in that sense is “socially-blinded,” as you put it. In my view, the disparity at the end of the play (and at the end of many popular stories) is there to please the audience’s—and author’s—notions of a harmonious resolution. Such notions often fly in the face of real-life experience even as they seem to speak for “common sense.” I rather doubt, given what we know of his life, that Shakespeare thought of marriage as a happy outcome in real life. And as far as disparity of the sexes goes, it’s worth noting that gender politics (or sex war, depending on your generation) was as hot-button an issue in Shakespeare’s day as it is in ours. Although the law and distribution of property overwhelmingly favored men, women owned businesses, ran households (which in many cases were indistinguishable from businesses), owned property, and in a few cases even voted for members of Parliament, just as they had been doing for centuries; and at a time of great economic and social upheaval, the lack of total, absolute patriarchy came in for a good share of the focus of the resulting anxiety. Hence the sermons, legislation, and witch trials desperately resorted to by men determined to impose absolute patriarchy on English society. The anxieties raised by the long reign of Elizabeth, James’s predecessor, can be glimpsed in the narrative anxiety created by Lady Olivia’s lack of a spouse to rule her and manage her property. That Malvolio could even dream of aspiring to be her husband would have underscored the point for Shakespeare’s contemporaries. And so, though Sebastian may seem to modern audiences an unlikely substitute for a woman performing masculinity, he is at least of an appropriate rank for Lady Olivia. The epigraph quoting scholar Lisa Jardine on the erotic indifference to gendering for Elizabethan/Jacobean audiences reminds us of how different a twenty-first-century reaction to the substitution of Sebastian for Cesario typically is. I’d like to think that apart from the issue of erotic plausibility, at least a few women watching the play might have regretted the substitution—knowing full well what a different sort of life Lady Olivia might have had with Viola playing Cesario from the one she would have had with Sebastian (who has always struck me as thoroughly obnoxious).

How far, do you think, has the literary world moved from ingrained notions of gender? Can you list any modern authors or works that break traditional gender-roles? Or any that reinforce them?

The literary world hasn’t moved far at all from ingrained notions of gender, if by “ingrained notions of gender” you mean the assumption that some or many gender differences are biologically ingrained (and therefore essential). What particular ingrained notions are, of course, are constantly shifting (even within the same individual) over time—mostly without our noticing it. As for “traditional gender roles”: That phrase doesn’t make much sense to me, except as a sort of mantra resorted to by people desperate for authority over a social reality that makes them anxious. Ideas about gender change so often and so quickly that it’s impossible to point at one particular idea and claim it as “traditional,” since one can always go further back in time and discover an idea or role contradicting it. As I discovered doing graduate work in early modern European history, gender roles have always been fluid, changing not only from generation to generation and culture to culture, but from one town or city to another (especially before the technological revolution that engendered mass communications). Again, as with Shakespeare, the issue for writers isn’t holding up a mirror to the world, but confirming notions about reality that writers assume they share with their audiences.

Do you have any projects upcoming or in the works you would like to share with us?

Yes! I’ll mention two things. I’ll be launching an anthology I edited titled Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries from across the Known Multiverse at WisCon, which contains a story of mine that recontextualizes an 1889 feminist utopia by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett called New Amazonia. And I’m close to finishing a new science fiction novel with a working title of Deep Story that engages with historical material from mid-16th-century Rome.

Moshe Siegel proofreads and interviews at Lightspeed, interns at the pleasure of a Random House-published author, and freelance edits hither and yon. His overladen bookshelf and smug e-reader glare at each other across his home office in upstate New York, and he isn’t quite sure what to think about it all. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.

Author Spotlight: James S. A. Corey
Andrew Liptak

James S. A. Corey—a pseudonym for the collaboration between authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck—is the author of the Hugo Award-nominated The Expanse space opera series, which includes Leviathan Wakes, Caliban’s War, and Abaddon’s Gate (an excerpt of which is featured earlier in this issue).

When we started with The Expanse series in Leviathan Wakes, you almost destroy all life with an alien protomolecule, and in Caliban’s War, you bring everyone to the brink of war and the extinction of the human race. How do you top that?

DA: By doing something bigger. Seriously, though, we’ve talked a lot about how to have the books build on each other so that it never feels like we’ve taken our foot off the gas.

TF: The universe is much larger and far scarier than our poor characters realize. There’s a lot of room to escalate the threat. Poor monkeys.

The world of The Expanse is immersively large: What influenced your creation of the background when you were putting it all together?

DA: Ty was actually responsible for all the worldbuilding and background. That he had done such an amazing job with it was what got me into the project to begin with.

TF: My big influence for the setting was Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. I loved the solar system in which Gully Foyle has his adventure. A populated Mars and Luna, colonies on the moons of the outer planets, people living in the asteroid belt. I wanted to live there, too. Maybe work on a long haul freighter. Because of that, when I first saw the movie Alien, it plugged straight into my brain. I could see myself as Parker or Brett, wandering the corridors of a freight-hauling spaceship with a tool belt on. So when I created the background for the Expanse, I wanted that blue-collar feel. Space conquered, not by PhD supermen, but by regular Janes and Joes working regular jobs.

When we last left everyone in Caliban’s War, you ended with a hell of a bombshell. Where does Abaddon’s Gate pick up for your heroes?

DA: I think about a year later. There are a lot of things that needed to happen between the end of Caliban and the beginning of Abaddon that are cool in their way, but wouldn’t have made for an interesting story. So we took a page from Elmore Leonard and didn’t write the part that people would skip. If you’re taking your cues from Elmore Leonard you can’t go too far wrong.

TF: The character responsible for that bombshell is back. Sort of. But very, very strange.

The cultures that have spread out from Earth include societies from all over the Earth, a stark contrast to the historical racial makeup of space opera. Have we moved beyond a post-Cold War/US driven vision of the future?

DA: We’ve moved past a US vs. USSR zeitgeist, which makes sense since it’s almost a quarter century since the USSR broke up. Science fiction in particular reflects the age in which it’s written, and the kind of cultural and ethnic diversity we’re aiming for in the Expanse books is what you already see in an American hospital staff or post-graduate science program.

TF: We actually had a conversation when first plotting the series about how we didn’t want the series to be another “white men in space.” My mother is Hispanic. Her people settled portions of California long before the white settlers started pouring in from back east, but we only hear about the brave wagon trains full of white guys conquering the land. There’s this sort of cultural myopia that built up in this country that it was white Europeans that explored the world. But it’s incorrect. Also, a lot of exciting space stuff is happening now in countries that aren’t the US or Russia. I don’t think that will stop.

We have a rotating cast of characters in Leviathan Wakes—Principally Holden and his crew—and in Caliban’s War, we meet Bobbie, a Martian Marine; Avasarala, a UN official; and Prax, a Botanist. In Abaddon’s Gate, we’re introduced to a new cohort: Bull, Anna, and Melba. Do you worry about cluttering the system with too many characters, or is the focus firmly on Holden & Co.?

DA: The idea is to have the crew of the Roci be pretty consistently in the story and broaden the people in the universe book by book. You might catch a glimpse of Prax or Avasarala in later books. Bobbie may rotate back in later on. But I like the flexibility to put characters in place who would be where the interesting stuff is happening rather than finding reasons to bring the same seven people to every event.

TF: I think that would be a valid concern if we felt it necessary to keep all of the characters in every book. But because we can have a character appear in a book, and completely resolve that character’s story in the same book, we don’t need to keep checking in on them. Prax’s story is done. He’s farming on Ganymede with Mei. There are characters in Abaddon’s Gate that will only show up in that one book. In addition to giving us peeks into places in the Expanse universe that we wouldn’t otherwise see, it also allows us to tell a complete story in each book, at least for a few characters. Holden’s arc is the long one that will cover the entire series, so we only see a small piece of it in each book. It’s nice to have some stories we can tell and finish in each book.

Abaddon’s Gate was originally the last book of a trilogy; with three additional books coming, was there any worry about padding out the overarching story that you’ve set up?

DA: Oh my, no. Quite the opposite. I was worried we’d have to hack things way short.

TF: Yeah, we never plotted it as a trilogy. We sold a trilogy, because that was what Orbit was willing to buy at the time. But even just telling the minimum number of stories we want to tell would take, at last count, four trilogies. So twelve books in all. But that’s just the minimum. We could do a lot more than that easily. It all depends on what the audience, and by extension our publisher, wants.

What can you tell us about what comes after Abaddon’s Gate?

DA: We’re under contract for three more novels (Expanse books 4, 5, and 6) and four more novellas set in the same universe. My guess (and it’s still just a guess) is that there will be a few more past that before we get to the Last Book. But there is a Last Book. And Last Line. And it’s gorgeous.

TF: We’ve always known what the last book looks like. And I think it pays off all the promises the series will make to the reader. At least I hope so. The only question is how many stories we get to tell before that final one.

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as Armchair General,io9, Kirkus Reviews,SF Signal,and Tor.com, and he can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.

Author Spotlight: Sarah Grey
Jude Griffin

What was the spark for “The Ballad of Marisol Brook”?

The first inspiration was early Hollywood studio contracts. In short, during Hollywood’s Golden Age in the first half of the 20th century, studios contracted with actors. The actor was all but owned by her studio—she took the parts assigned her, whether she liked them or not. I found myself wondering how cinema history might have played out if studios had contracted the right to clone their actors. Jean Harlow, always alive, always twenty-six, the leading lady in every film?

The second inspiration was the death of Natalie Wood, who drowned off Catalina in 1981. It was a deeply tragic event in Hollywood. When they buried her, all the red-carpet elite showed up at the cemetery. If it hadn’t been a funeral, it could easily have been the party of the century. I wondered if they would all have greeted her with champagne and kisses if she’d been miraculously reborn in a new body.

The structure of “TBOMB” seems like a rough sort of poetic ballad itself, with the repetition of her names and their meanings serving as a refrain. Was this intentional?

It was, more accurately, a happy accident borne out of a dead end. I originally conceived the story as a kind of déjà vu experience—similar circumstances evoking the same emotions, and the same tragic outcome every time. But really, déjà vu is a fleeting, insignificant feeling. It just couldn’t hold the weight this story deserved.

For several days, I kept repeating the first few lines over and over in my head, trying to carve out the story, figure out where it needed to go. It became an obsessive sort of chant, a prayer for inspiration. And that’s when the repetitive structure fell into place—it wasn’t déjà vu at all; it was a song, a new verse for every lifetime, until it all can end on a satisfying note.

What role does the subplot involving her son play?

Peter’s life and death were doubly important.

First, he is the only character related to Marisol by blood—he is her only true family, and he mourns her first death with an act of penance. At the end of his life, he even takes her family name, showing that he identifies more closely with her than with his father. Still, for a very long time, Marisol doesn’t think about him at all; she is still focused on fame, on pleasing people whose motives are self-serving, even insidious. When she begins to miss Peter enough to act on it, it’s already too late. But the realization that she’s lost something so profoundly important gives her the strength to rescue the only things she has left—her sense of self, her own freedom.

Secondly, Peter’s fate represents a more tragic path Marisol could have taken—an irrevocable descent into addiction and crime.

There are no contractions in the story, adding to its formality and distance: What were the language choices you made for “TBOMB”?

I wanted the story to read like a biography, like a documentary. The kind you might catch on late night public television—the tragic tale of some starlet who flared and died young, lots of montages, possibly narrated by an actor with an Oxford accent. Always evoking the right emotions, but never melodramatic.

That style, of course, is native to film, not to written fiction. Mimicking it requires abandoning contractions, dialogue, and any close point of view—devices that ordinarily serve to draw the reader into the story. I approached it as a challenge: I needed to make the character and her story as sympathetic as possible within those stylistic constraints.

Those crows at the end, can you talk about them and the two bodyguards that appear throughout her lives?

Metaphorically, I intended the bodyguards to represent Marisol’s fears, her desire for respect and admiration, all the emotions that kept her obedient for so long. They’re waiting for her at the beginning of each new lifetime, armed and dark as ever. Not the sort of men you’d want to cross.

In the end, the bodyguards are still there: a pair of crows doing their best to be threatening. But they are only birds. Marisol has already moved on.

Stories about starlets rarely end well—what made you choose to end “TBOMB” the way you did?

The key part of every starlet tragedy is her all-consuming desire to please others—directors, lovers, audiences. Along the way, she loses her identity so completely that it becomes all but impossible for her to step back and address her own needs. There’s a risk of that happening to anyone of any gender whose life is geared toward the limelight, of course, but actors in particular specialize in filling a role controlled and designed by someone else.

Broadly speaking, we’ve come to see this as tragic entertainment. “Starlet” itself is a diminutive and it evokes rather sad images: the poor broken country girl lost in the city, struggling to make it big, always misunderstood, always exploited.

I wanted this quintessential starlet to walk away from the culture that locks her into that role, to break free of that cliché and find a path back to herself—even if it meant making lethal mistakes, and even if it took several lifetimes to accomplish.

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, photographer, and an expert in learning and knowledge management. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo, was a volunteer EMT and firefighter, accompanied journalists into combat in Central America, lived in a haunted village in Thailand, ran an international amphibian monitoring network, volunteers with the National Park Service habitat restoration program on the Boston Harbor Islands, reads slush for Nightmare and Lightspeed magazines, and is working on a novel that might be science fiction, might be fantasy. She cannot parallel park, lies about how far she runs in the morning, and still has her Gloria Vanderbilt jeans from high school. Folded. In a box.

Author Spotlight: Ken Liu
Christie Yant

Ken, welcome back to Lightspeed! Your story “Mono no aware” first appeared in The Future Is Japanese, edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington, and has been widely celebrated. Can you tell us how this story came to be?

Thank you! It’s great to be back in Lightspeed.

This story began with my interest in narratives that don’t follow the supposed “rules” of storytelling. There’s a lot of advice out there for genre writers, often phrased as universal laws. For example: The hero of the story must actively work at solving a problem.

I’m very skeptical of these kinds of absolutist pronouncements because I think often they just reflect the narrative conventions of particular times and particular places. A lot of folktales and fairytales, for instance, don’t follow this “rule.”

And that led me to consider the meaning of “hero” and whether the concept is also fluid and context-dependent.

How were you first introduced to the phrase and concept embodied in “Mono no aware?”

Many of the Chinese and Japanese stories I read don’t follow the “rule” I describe above. Instead, they aim to create in the reader an appreciation for the wonders of experiencing life in the moment, fully aware of the impermanence of all things.

To pick one example, the manga Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō contains many episodes that are simply descriptions of daily life in a post-apocalyptic landscape, with little in the way of what we in the West would recognize as “heroes” overcoming obstacles. Nonetheless, the reader learns to empathize with the characters and their calm acceptance of life in a world slowly falling into ruin.

I can’t remember exactly when I first encountered the Japanese phrase “mono no aware,” but as soon as I learned about this sentiment—an empathy for the inevitable passing of all things—I had a phrase to describe the aesthetic of those Chinese and Japanese stories that I liked.

I wanted to write a story that embodied this aesthetic and also redefined the concept of the Western hero.

I should emphasize that it is inevitable that my interpretation of the concept and the portrayal of Japanese ideas in the story contain gaps and errors. No matter how much research is done, an outsider’s perspective can never substitute for an insider’s.

To be respectful to the source culture, I used a narrative trick. I wrote the story from the perspective of a man who is not a true insider. Hiroto’s experience of life in Japan came to an end at the age of eight, and his knowledge of Japanese culture is thus largely second-hand and mediated. A lone survivor among a dominant culture very different from the culture of his childhood, he is fiercely protective of the legacy and memories of those he loved. Thus, he constructs a Japan in his mind that is necessarily distorted, idealized, incomplete, and yet, in an important sense, real to him.

In this way, “Mono no aware” is also an immigration story: It is about the inevitable passing of the immigrant’s homeland from his memories as he integrates into his new home.

Comparing the kanji character to the vessel with the solar sail seemed particularly inspired. Was that something that came to you after you already had the story fleshed out, or was it your starting point?

That was my starting point, actually.

The kanji for “umbrella,” , can be decomposed into a cover spread over a frame with multiple embedded copies of the kanji for “person,” . It thus seemed a perfect metaphor for the story’s generation ship, the shelter for the last remnants of the human race after unimaginable disaster. I had that image in mind before writing down the first word.

The preservation of culture is a theme that comes up often in your work. How do art and life intersect for you in that respect? Are there specific things about your family’s heritage that you are making a point of passing on to your children?

After having children, a lot of things I used to take for granted—my Chinese literary heritage, my knowledge of East Asian history, my comfort with Chinese culture’s diversity and internal conflicts—suddenly took on a new light. For my children, these things will not come to them effortlessly, to be imbibed from the surrounding culture like air and sunlight. Instead, if I want them to benefit from any of it, I will have to make a conscious effort to teach them. How to do so effectively is a challenge with which every parent is no doubt familiar.

What are you working on now, and what can your fans expect to see next from you?

I have a few exciting things going on: I’m revising my novel (set in a fantasy world that my wife and I created together), working on a (still secret) translation project, and looking forward to having a couple more stories come out in Lightspeed later this year. I hope readers like them as much as I do.

Christie Yant has published fiction in the magazines Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, Fireside, Shimmer, has been featured on io9 and Wired.com, and has been included in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Armored, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2011 Edition. In the past, she has served as a book reviewer for Audible.com, and she occasionally narrates for StarShipSofa and blogs at Inkpunks.com, a website for aspiring and newly-pro writers. 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. Learn more at inkhaven.net.

Author Spotlight: Paul Park
Andrew Liptak

Hi Paul! What can you tell us about how your story “Get A Grip” came about?

Years ago I was visiting a friend of mine, an actor on the set of a movie called Batteries Not Included, which was being shot on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, before gentrification, so there were a lot of vacant lots. In one of them, the movie crew had assembled the fake facade of a townhouse, three stories high, build of plywood and painted gesso, and only a couple of feet thick. It was for exterior shots, and it had a very realistic stone stoop. Dennis and I were sitting out there one day, and this old lady came wandering down the sidewalk, and stopped in front of us and said, “I was born in this house. That was my father’s room, there on the second floor.”

While reading this story, I get the very real sense of “the world is not what it appears,” and I was reminded very much of Philip K. Dick and his stories. Was he an influence on your work?

Yes—I love his stories where the whole nature of perceived reality turns out to be untrue. I’m also interested in meta-fiction, where there’s usually a rupture in the text, a place where the story is no longer what you thought you were reading. It’s a version of the same device, only one is inside the story, and the other is outside.

Our protagonist essentially finds that the world that he knows and loves is constructed around him: Do you think that the modern world is constructed, at least in part, with our willingness to talk/post/tweet about our lives?

When I was a kid, I had a hard time believing that other places, places I didn’t happen to be, were actually real—I guess I imagined that everyone in Paris, say, was standing around in suspended animation, waiting for me to show up. I mean, what would be the point of something I personally was unable to witness or be part of? Why would anybody bother? That’s an exaggeration of a fairly normal solipsism, especially among the young, and of course there’s a whole school of philosophy that justifies it. In our proudest moments, certainly we imagine the world is at least partially constructed by our perception of it, but at the same time, we imagine that gives us a kind of control. Of course the protagonist in the story doesn’t have any control; the world is constructed for the purpose of humiliating him.

Do you think that “Pogo” ever gets a grip on his life?

Never. He’s a total loser.

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal, Tor.com and he can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.

Author Spotlight: Sylvia Spruck Wrigley
Patrick J Stephens

The opening of “Alive, Alive Oh” is very visceral. The possibility of tangible pain—blood red shores and acidic waters—leads to the internal pain of leaving one’s home, and intrinsic fears resulting from the birth of Megan—what inspired this type of opening?

I wrote the first paragraph last. It was important to get the reader grounded quickly: This is genre, this is about women, this is not going to have a happy ending. I wanted to instil the reader with a sense of foreboding, because the narrator already knows what she’s about to tell you. She’s not withholding, she’s just telling it in order, but for that to work, she has to tell you what kind of story she’s telling. So that’s key in those first two sentences: This is off-world and dangerous and there’s no going home.

As a German-American being raised between Los Angeles and Mannheim, what (if any) images served as the foundation for that which would be missed on the colony?

Growing up in two places means that there’s always something missing. Homesickness was a confusing concept to me; I think because there was no place that was 100% home, there were always people and things that were in the other place. I first was able to explain this through food: California had corn dogs and burritos and popcorn. Germany had bratwurst and semmelknödel and Gummibears. I live in Spain but my partner and I have a flat in Swansea while he is doing business here. These days, I can get Gummibears and popcorn everywhere but I have a whole new list of interesting foods and shops and people that I can’t have all at once. Wherever I am, I’m giving something up.

The colony is the worst of this, where all the things that make a home are gone. And food remains a useful shorthand for trying to explain those tangible effects of being someplace else. It’s an immediately recogniseable symptom of longing, which I understand better than homesickness. So it was an obvious focus for the story, in terms of illustrating what is left behind and what we miss.

How long was it in writing “Alive, Alive Oh” before you came to the conclusion that the alien sea and that of Wales would feel the same? Was it the natural character progression, or was there something more intrinsic within the narrative about the dichotomy between “you can never go home again” and the idiom “home is where you make it”?

It was a sudden spark. Originally, I was thinking about teenage rebellion on a colony and how that would manifest itself, when everything was so shut down and closed. You can’t go out drinking with your mates, you can’t buy rock-star posters to cover your bedroom wall, you can’t run away from home.

Then I was walking along Swansea bay, which has one of the largest tidal ranges in the world. It was low tide and there was just this endless mud and seaweed, as far as the eye could see. It was cold out and there was no one on the beach but me. It felt otherworldly and I thought, this could be another planet, this could be what it is like. And when I tried to apply that to the story that I was creating, I found I could only do it from the adult viewpoint. I started recasting the story from the mother’s point of view and it became an altogether darker and more compelling story. I wrote the first notes of the story on the spot in my notebook and then rushed home to start drafting.

So the link between the two beaches was in my head very early on but it didn’t become explicit until much later in the writing process.

If you were in the situation, would you rather be like Megan, who had to hear about Wales from descriptions and would never experience Earth, or like her mother, who knew first-hand what her daughter was missing?

Megan. When I started writing the concept of a colony from her point of view it was much more light-hearted and full of teenaged frustration and angst. Even though everything about the story changed, I’m not sure Megan’s story is that different. Her death is tragic but her life had value to her and she was a product of her environment. Megan’s mother tried to do her best for her husband and then her daughter and in the end she lost everything.

You’ve written a wonderful article for the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) titled “Raising the Curtain,” which gives solid advice for writers and the need to market their books. Could you offer some guidance on marketing short fiction?

Don’t sell yourself short. The best marketing for short fiction is to get the story published in prestigious magazines. I know a lot of short story writers who try to second-guess whether a magazine will take a story and whether it’s good enough. They end up self-rejecting rather than allowing the editor to decide. When I submitted “Alive, Alive Oh,” I had had eight form rejections from Lightspeed without a glimmer of interest in my writing. I enjoyed reading the magazine, but I was starting to convince myself that my stories were simply not a good match for Lightspeed. But that’s not my decision to make, that’s the editor’s decision—and I’m thrilled that in this case, JJA proved me wrong.

Give readers a chance to find more of your work. Your author’s bio should not be the same as your query letter—it’s a different audience and serves a different purpose. Even if you have only a very basic website, invest in a single publications page with links to your stories—and then be sure to link to the website in your author’s bio. If I’ve enjoyed a story, I often like to find out more about the writer and with online magazines, it should be only a click away.

Most of all, keep writing.

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: Theodora Goss
Earnie Sotirokos

“Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon” balances real life and fantastical elements. How did you know where to draw the line and still keep the story grounded?

The truth is that I don’t think about that much when writing! I just know that I don’t want my fantasy to be ungrounded, so it’s a sort of balancing act, like in baking. You don’t want a recipe to be too sweet, or at least I don’t. So I add sour cherries to my brownies, which is something I learned to do in Budapest. I suppose it’s the Eastern European in me: I want my fantasy in contact with the real world. But I don’t think much about how I do it, just as I didn’t think much about how to create a recipe for sour cherry brownies. I did it by instinct and taste. (It’s actually a terrific recipe . . .) So Sylvania borders on real countries, and you can get there by train.

Did you invent Sylvania and the moon world at the same time or were they independent ideas that happened to fuse together nicely?

I think the basic idea of the story, with the hound asking for the princess, came to me first. I often think first in plot. Then the characters seemed to follow naturally, then the settings. Sylvania was a lot of fun to create. But it’s actually larger than this story: I’ve set several other stories there, and I’d like to write more about that country. It’s my way of exploring the history of Eastern Europe, a kind of fantastical thought experiment.

I pictured Sirius as a massive, albino St. Bernard. What did he look like in your head?

Well, he’s certainly large enough for Princess Lucinda to ride on! The funny thing is, when I started writing this story, I thought there was a fairy tale out there with a large white hound, and that I was writing a modern version of it, the way writers so often write modern versions of fairy tales. But I started looking for it, and couldn’t find it! If anyone out there knows of a fairy tale with a large white hound, let me know! In my mind, he looks rather like a wolfhound, but that’s because I used to have two large wolfhounds.

Do you have a favorite “protip” you’d like to share with aspiring writers?

Learn to use the past perfect tense? No, seriously, I’ve taught even MFA students who weren’t familiar with the past perfect. But the larger lesson is, grammar and punctuation are your tools. You need to learn to use them correctly and incorrectly-on-purpose. And the second use may be even more important than the first!

What can we expect from you in the future?

I’m currently working on a novel, so hopefully you can expect a novel from me! And hopefully another one after that . . .

Earnie Sotirokos grew up in a household where Star Trek: The Next Generation marathons were only interrupted for baseball and football games. When he’s not writing copy for radio or reading slush, he enjoys penning fiction based on those influences. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.

Author Spotlight: Megan Arkenberg
Amber Barkley

“The Huntsman” includes a quote from Tam Lin. How did that tale affect your writing? Did any other fairytales influence the story? Where else did you find inspiration?

The Tam Lin epigraph was actually a late addition to the story! I reread the ballad after finishing the final draft, and those particular lines leapt out at me.

As the title suggests, “The Huntsman” began as a retelling of Snow White; I was playing with the idea that the huntsman had a more permanent role in the Queen’s life than the original tale suggests. I kept returning to the image that now forms the opening of the story, the huntsman tracking a woman in a rather gritty, unromanticized urban setting. What was this man’s job—and why was he so good at it?

At one point, I described this story as “Snow White meets Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”—a reference of course, to the beheading game (de-hearting game?) that the faery woman proposes to the huntsman. Then came the idea of the tithe, which is lifted from Tam Lin. For me, one of the most fascinating features of that ballad is the hierarchy of supernatural powers that Janet must confront; behind the powerful and awful fairy queen is the even more fearsome power of Hell. My version of the tithe is a more ambiguous, shadowy power, but I tried to maintain a sense of the multiplicity of forces that keep the huntsman—this story’s Tam Lin—from returning home.

The faery woman mixes tomatoes and peppers in the story, and chrysanthemums also make repeated appearances. Can you tell us about the significance of those three elements?

When it comes to retellings of Snow White, I, personally, am so over poisoned apples. Twilight’s iconic cover was the final straw. The faery woman’s pico de gallo is my more contemporary and domestic riff on the red fruit theme.

Inside the story, the chrysanthemum represents the huntsman’s faery nature, the enchanted, spontaneously magical part of him that did not quite get left behind when he was taken from Faery. Chrysanthemums are also associated with death and autumn, making them an appropriate counterpart to the faery woman’s train of autumn leaves.

“The Huntsman” takes place in a world that seems to be a mix of the magical and the modern. Why did you choose this setting?

This is one of the exceedingly rare cases where I’d argue that the setting choose me. The tithe-projects were part of the mental image that jump-started this story. I decided that I wanted to write an urban fairy tale that addressed the less glamorous aspects of its setting—the low-income housing, shady hotel rooms, and public transportation, rather than the nightclubs and museums and high-class apartments that seem more prevalent in the genre. Hawthorne Street is based on a specific neighborhood that I used to drive through on my way to work. It was a run-down but strangely enchanting place; I particularly remember one apartment complex that had a massive, antique dollhouse sitting on the doorstep.

The huntsman knows that “his have never been just dreams.” Can you tell us more about the reality behind those dreams?

Faery in this story is not only a location, but also a subconscious space that Faery’s denizens can access in shared dreams. Being sent out with the tithe means being cut off from these dreams. However, the huntsman’s willingness to sacrifice himself for Queenie—who uses the blood and hearts of other faeries to maintain her connection to the dreams—has in fact allowed him to maintain his own connection to Faery. Thus, the dreams both teach the huntsman how to return to Faery and confirm that in some essential way, he had never been banished to begin with.

How did this story come into being? Was anything about writing “The Huntsman” different from your other stories?

Like many of my recent stories, this one suffered a number of false starts—different combinations of premises and characters, though the setting remained consistent. Part of what made this story so challenging was my attempt to juggle so many folkloric references at once; I think I became overly concerned with incorporating fairytale narratives intact. Once I recognized the value in taking only what I needed, the story became much easier to write.

What makes “The Huntsman” so unique is that, despite these false starts, I was actually able to complete it! Indecisiveness tends to be the kiss of death for my short fiction. Sometimes I think that the likelihood of a story ever being completed is inversely proportional to the amount of time I spend thinking about it!

Amber Barkley is a recent graduate of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She was born in Idaho and grew up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Her favorite animals are cats and horses, and she considers it a great injustice that she is allergic to both—though that doesn’t stop her from being around them whenever she has the chance. Amber writes high fantasy with a dark twist, and is currently working on her first novel.

Author Spotlight: Christopher Barzak
Earnie Sotirokos

“Paranormal Romance” takes a refreshing look at what a supernatural dating landscape might look like. Was this written in response to the current state of the subgenre?

I wrote it for a couple of reasons, but yes, it’s my own tongue-in-cheek response to the current state of the paranormal romance subgenre. I want to love paranormal romances, but I feel like that subgenre takes itself overly seriously, and by doing so has limited the types of paranormal romances that it could explore. So many paranormal romance stories are utterly serious, very Twilight-esque, and the romance at the heart of them needs to be saved and preserved as if it were the heartbeat of life itself. I, on the other, am reading those books and thinking, I want my Sex in the City paranormal romances. I want a nice romantic comedy, preferably one where the protagonist does not have to engage in saving the world while attempting to negotiate the waters of a turbulent love at the same time. Despite some of the humorous moments in my “Paranormal Romance,” I wanted to read a story where people can be badly mismatched, and love (or something like it) comes in off of the side of the stage, so to speak, unexpectedly.

Sheila changed her stance on how she feels about witchcraft and ultimately only uses it as a source of income. If magic was real, do you think those with the gift would treat it the same way?

I think even if magic isn’t real the way it is in this story, people are already using it for income. This is if you include those who give psychic readings, lay out spreads of tarot and interpret, conduct gemstone healings, concoct herbal remedies, create prayer or spell candles, etc. There’s already a market for witches and paranormals out there. So if magic became as real as the sort I depict in the story, I think all of that would become even more marketable than the type of hedge wizardry we already see in yellow pages and in certain corners of the internet.

You literally left the door open at the end of the story. Do you have any plans to revisit this world?

I would very much like to revisit this world. I already know, for instance, the story about the gay neighbors downstairs from Sheila. One of them has a dead ex-boyfriend whose ghost shows up once a year for dinner with them. This causes frustration between the boys, mainly because the one can’t get over his ex completely, and feels somewhat guilty for his ex’s death. I haven’t written this story, but it would be similar in tone to “Paranormal Romance”—somewhat ironic humor with some sad, authentic moments amid the winking. I’d like to do a whole book of stories linked by character and place like this. But right now I’m waist-deep in two other projects I have to bring to completion first. Then, I really do want to go back to writing more stories about Sheila and the people she interacts with and encounters in “Paranormal Romance.”

What can we expect from you in the future?

I’m working to complete my next novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, about a young man who is piecing together the mystery of his family’s secret history. And I’m also engaged right now with writing retellings of what I think of as classic genre literature. Some of these retellings have already appeared in magazines or anthologies. The first one was “Invisible Men” (after Wells) which came out in 2012 from Eclipse Online and was reprinted in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction. A new one will appear this summer in the Lethe Press anthology called Where Thy Dark Eye Glances: Queering Poe, which is a retelling of the Poe story “William Wilson.” I’ve got another one releasing this October in the Paula Guran edited anthology, Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales, called “Eat me, Drink Me, Love Me,” which is a retelling of the Christina Rossetti poem “Goblin Market.” I’ve written about six of these types of stories so far and have another four or five planned, and would like to create a collection entirely of retellings as well. Then maybe I can return to the world of “Paranormal Romance” (if I haven’t been sidetracked by some other shiny new idea).

And lastly, in 2014, a movie based on my first novel, One for Sorrow, will be released. The title is different, though. It’s being called “Jamie Marks is Dead” and stars Liv Tyler, Judy Greer, Cameron Monaghan, Noah Silver, and Morgan Saylor. Needless to say, I’m terribly excited to see it!

Earnie Sotirokos grew up in a household where Star Trek: The Next Generation marathons were only interrupted for baseball and football games. When he’s not writing copy for radio or reading slush, he enjoys penning fiction based on those influences. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.

Author Spotlight: Carrie Vaughn
Robyn Lupo

What was the spark for “Game of Chance”? How did you build this world?

This is one of those stories that went through a couple of permutations, several drafts, and evolved slowly rather than coming from a single spark. I’ve always had a fondness for writing about people on the fringes of a system, and for “secret histories,” the idea of an unseen hand guiding events. Fate, maybe, and how that might look from the ground. And time travel. So yes, it’s one of those stories where I kept putting things into the bucket and seeing how it turned out. The story grew out of having these quirky characters in a kind of pulp-era adventuring group—and then having them be not particularly good at accomplishing anything. They really think they’re saving the world, but they’re just kind of muddling along with all the people who don’t know what’s going on.

It seems like a lot of Clare’s life is about flying under the radar, about hiding who she is. Why did you decide to tell her story?

I love the most unlikely characters in any giving adventuring group. The one who isn’t the strongest or most powerful, who doesn’t have any particular talents and skills. (In college, I once drove my gaming group bonkers by insisting on playing a pregnant teenager.) In a fantastical adventure-oriented setting, those characters often have the best perspective on what’s going on, and they’re able to make things happen by being good people, by being focused on what they’re doing rather than on the “meta” story. She’s really the whole point of the story—the apparently weaker member of the team, easiest to dismiss, is the one who has the best idea of how to make a difference, how to do the most good. I really like writing about the kind of characters who tend to get overlooked, but who have a lot of depth behind them.

There’s a theme of free will versus destiny in this work. What’s your position in the debate? Do we choose, or are we destined?

Oh, I’m for free will, definitely. However, our choices are constantly defined and constrained in ways we’re not even aware of most of the time. Neurobiology, culture, societal pressure—it might seem like destiny sometimes, but I don’t think those structures are anything that grand. More like, this is the mess we’re born into and we spend our whole lives picking it apart. Another idea feeding into the story is of the self-correcting time stream—the idea that the sweep of history really is too big to change, even though tiny, individual quirks and choices are changing it all the time.

The main difference between Gerald and Clare seems to be the scale of the changes they make. What accounts for the difference they have in worldview?

A couple of threads feed into their differing worldviews. One is ambition—Gerald wants to change the world, and that’s the scale he’s thinking on—history, politics, the upper echelons of influence and power. Clare isn’t all that interested in changing the world—she’s focused on herself, her relationship with Major, the day-to-day details that make up a good life. Second, there’s a gendered aspect to their worldviews that I definitely wanted to get across. Clare is a woman who comes from a time and place where women are considered domestic, sheltered, passive, and that has impacted her. She’s never considered whether she has the ability to change anything beyond her own private domestic sphere. However, and this is another big point I wanted to make in the story, her so-called “limited” view, the little changes she’s able to make, have just as much potential to change the world. Gerald’s big mistake is ignoring the tiny details that Clare is focused on.

What’s next for you?

I always seem to be working on about a million things, so I hardly know where to start! I have a bunch of short stories coming out this year, in place like Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com, and Nightmare, as well as several anthologies. The next Kitty book, Kitty in the Underworld, will be out in July. Dreams of the Golden Age, the sequel to my superhero novel, will be out in January. I’m working on the next Kitty novel and lining up the projects that I’ll work on after that. Keeping busy! Find more info at www.carrievaughn.com.

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 July, in Lightspeed . . .

We’ll have original science fiction by Benjamin R. Lambert (“Division of Labor”) and Carlie St. George (“This Villain You Must Create”) and SF reprints by Margo Lanagan (“Mulberry Boys”) and Ryan North (“Cancer”).

Plus, we’ll have original fantasy by Adam-Troy Castro (“The Boy and the Box”) and Laura Friis (“Ushakiran”), along with fantasy reprints by Sophia McDougall (“Golden Apple”) and Ursula K. Le Guin (“The Stars Below”).

All that, and of course we’ll also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling authors Hugh Howey and Austin Grossman.

For our ebook readers, we’ll also have the novella “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky” by John Langan and an excerpt of the new Shannara novel Witch Wraith by Terry Brooks.

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!