Editorial, September 2013
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue forty of Lightspeed!

The Hugo Awards are to be announced on the day this issue is scheduled to publish (September 1), so we couldn’t include the results in this issue. But rest assured we are currently either giddy with victory or gloomy in defeat, and we will share the news with you either way in next month’s editorial.

But what we can announce now is that Kat Howard’s story, “Breaking the Frame” (Lightspeed, August 2012), is a finalist for the World Fantasy Award! Your humble editor is also again a finalist (now for the fifth time), this time in the Best Anthology category, for Epic: Legends of Fantasy. So congratulations to Kat, and thanks to all of the judges and voters who made these nominations possible.

In other news, over in the Lightspeed ebookstore (lightspeedmagazine.com/store), I just wanted to point out that we currently have the following Lightspeed ebook bundles available:

Lightspeed (Year One bundle) - $19.99

Lightspeed (Year Two bundle) - $24.99

Lightspeed (Year Three bundle) - $29.97

Lightspeed Supermassive Bundle (Years 1-3) - $69.95

Buying a Bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So, for instance, the Year One Bundle gets you a copy of every issue we published during our first year (June 2010-May 2011), etc. And then there’s the SUPERMASSIVE BUNDLE, which nets you a copy of every issue published during our first three years. (And buying the Supermassive Bundle saves you $5 off the cover price of buying the other three Bundles individually!) So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Of course, if you don’t want to buy a Bundle, you can also just purchase an individual ebook issue, or if you’d like to subscribe directly from us, you can do that too. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in both epub and mobi format. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all of our subscription options.

Speaking of awesome ebooks you can buy, as I mentioned last month, I recently re-released a new edition of my anthology Seeds of Change, which features nine stories about paradigm shifts—those critical moments when everything you know can change—including work by Tobias S. Buckell, Ted Kosmatka, Nnedi Okorafor, Ken MacLeod, and others.

And our last bit of news this month before we get to our stories: We’ve again got a special bonus for you this month: In addition to all of the usual Lightspeed goodness, at the end of this issue, we’re presenting a bonus story from the pages of our sister-magazine, Nightmare. So once you’re done reading the issue proper, please also check out the bonus story—and if you enjoy it, please consider subscribing to Nightmare!

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

We have original science fiction by D. Thomas Minton (“The Schrödinger War”) and Will McIntosh (“Dry Bite”), along with SF reprints by Lisa Tuttle (“Ragged Claws”) and Nina Allan (“Angelus”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Seanan McGuire (“Homecoming”) and a new Gorlen story by Marc Laidlaw (“Bellweather”) and fantasy reprints by Gene Wolfe (“Suzanne Delage”) and the first Erm Kaslo tale by Matthew Hughes (“And Then Some”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with io9’s Annalee Newitz and author of The Shining Girls, Lauren Beukes.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella “The Secret Sharer” by Robert Silverberg and an excerpt of Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at 47North. This month, look for The Palace Job by Patrick Weekes (of which you can read an excerpt in our ebook edition this month). You can find more from 47North at www.apub.com.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And remember, there are several ways you can sign up to be notified of new Lightspeed content:

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Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as 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 Secret Sharer
Robert Silverberg

1.

It was my first time to heaven and I was no one at all, no one at all, and this was the voyage that was supposed to make me someone.

But though I was no one at all, I dared to look upon the million worlds and I felt a great sorrow for them. There they were all about me, humming along on their courses through the night, each of them believing it was actually going somewhere. And each one wrong, of course, for worlds go nowhere, except around and around and around, pathetic monkeys on a string, forever tethered in place. They seem to move, yes. But really they stand still. And I—I who stared at the worlds of heaven and was swept with compassion for them—I knew that though I seemed to be standing still, I was in fact moving. For I was aboard a ship of heaven, a ship of the Service, that was spanning the light-years at a speed so incomprehensibly great that it might as well have been no speed at all.

I was very young. My ship, then as now, was the Sword of Orion, on a journey out of Kansas Four bound for Cul-de-Sac and Strappado and Mangan’s Bitch and several other worlds, via the usual spinarounds. It was my first voyage and I was in command. I thought for a long time that I would lose my soul on that voyage; but now I know that what was happening aboard that ship was not the losing of a soul but the gaining of one. And perhaps of more than one.

2.

Roacher thought I was sweet. I could have killed him for that; but of course he was dead already.

You have to give up your life when you go to heaven. What you get in return is for me to know and you, if you care, to find out; but the inescapable thing is that you leave behind anything that ever linked you to life on shore, and you become something else. We say that you give up the body and you get your soul. Certainly you can keep your body too, if you want it. Most do. But it isn’t any good to you anymore, not in the ways that you think a body is good to you. I mean to tell you how it was for me on my first voyage aboard the Sword of Orion, so many years ago.

I was the youngest officer on board, so naturally I was captain.

They put you in command right at the start, before you’re anyone. That’s the only test that means a damn: They throw you in the sea and if you can swim, you don’t drown, and if you can’t, you do. The drowned ones go back in the tank and they serve their own useful purposes, as push-cells or downloaders or mind-wipers or Johnny-scrub-and-scour or whatever. The ones that don’t drown go on to other commands. No one is wasted. The Age of Waste has been over a long time.

On the third virtual day out from Kansas Four, Roacher told me that I was the sweetest captain he had ever served under. And he had served under plenty of them, for Roacher had gone up to heaven at least two hundred years before, maybe more.

“I can see it in your eyes, the sweetness. I can see it in the angle you hold your head.”

He didn’t mean it as a compliment.

“We can put you off ship at Ultima Thule,” Roacher said. “Nobody will hold it against you. We’ll put you in a bottle and send you down, and the Thuleys will catch you and decant you and you’ll be able to find your way back to Kansas Four in twenty or fifty years. It might be the best thing.”

Roacher is small and parched, with brown skin and eyes that shine with the purple luminescence of space. Some of the worlds he has seen were forgotten a thousand years ago.

“Go bottle yourself, Roacher,” I told him.

“Ah, Captain, Captain! Don’t take it the wrong way. Here, Captain, give us a touch of the sweetness.” He reached out a claw, trying to stroke me along the side of my face. “Give us a touch, Captain, give us just a little touch!”

“I’ll fry your soul and have it for breakfast, Roacher. There’s sweetness for you. Go scuttle off, will you? Go jack yourself to the mast and drink hydrogen, Roacher. Go. Go.”

“So sweet,” he said. But he went. I had the power to hurt him. He knew I could do it, because I was captain. He also knew I wouldn’t; but there was always the possibility he was wrong. The captain exists in that margin between certainty and possibility. A crewman tests the width of that margin at his own risk. Roacher knew that. He had been a captain once himself, after all.

There were seventeen of us to heaven that voyage, staffing a ten-kilo Megaspore-class ship with full annexes and extensions and all virtualities. We carried a bulging cargo of the things regarded in those days as vital in the distant colonies: pre-read vapor chips, artificial intelligences, climate nodes, matrix jacks, mediq machines, bone banks, soil converters, transit spheres, communication bubbles, skin-and-organ synthesizers, wildlife domestication plaques, gene replacement kits, a sealed consignment of obliteration sand and other proscribed weapons, and so on. We also had fifty billion dollars in the form of liquid currency pods, central-bank-to-central-bank transmission. In addition, there was a passenger load of seven thousand colonists. Eight hundred of these were on the hoof and the others were stored in matrix form for body transplant on the worlds of destination. A standard load, in other words. The crew worked on commission, also as per standard, one percent of bill-of-lading value divided in customary lays. Mine was the 50th lay—that is, two percent of the net profits of the voyage—and that included a bonus for serving as captain; otherwise I would have had the l00th lay or something even longer. Roacher had the l0th lay and his jackmate Bulgar the l4th, although they weren’t even officers. Which demonstrates the value of seniority in the Service. But seniority is the same thing as survival, after all, and why should survival not be rewarded? On my most recent voyage I drew the l9th lay. I will have better than that on my next.

3.

You have never seen a starship. We keep only to heaven; when we are to worldward, shoreships come out to us for the downloading. The closest we ever go to planetskin is a million shiplengths. Any closer and we’d be shaken apart by that terrible strength which emanates from worlds.

We don’t miss landcrawling, though. It’s a plague to us. If I had to step to shore now, after having spent most of my lifetime in heaven, I would die of the drop-death within an hour. That is a monstrous way to die; but why would I ever go ashore? The likelihood of that still existed for me at the time I first sailed the Sword of Orion, you understand, but I have long since given it up. That is what I mean when I say that you give up your life when you go to heaven. But of course what also goes from you is any feeling that to be ashore has anything to do with being alive. If you could ride a starship, or even see one as we see them, you would understand. I don’t blame you for being what you are.

Let me show you the Sword of Orion. Though you will never see it as we see it.

What would you see, if you left the ship as we sometimes do to do the starwalk in the Great Open?

The first thing you would see was the light of the ship. A starship gives off a tremendous insistent glow of light that splits heaven like the blast of a trumpet. That great light both precedes and follows. Ahead of the ship rides a luminescent cone of brightness bellowing in the void. In its wake the ship leaves a photonic track so intense that it could be gathered up and weighed. It is the stardrive that issues this light: A ship eats space, and light is its offthrow.

Within the light you would see a needle ten kilometers long.

That is the ship. One end tapers to a sharp point and the other has the Eye, and it is several days’ journey by foot from end to end through all the compartments that lie between. It is a world self-contained. The needle is a flattened one. You could walk about easily on the outer surface of the ship, the skin of the top deck, what we call Skin Deck. Or just as easily on Belly Deck, the one on the bottom side. We call one the top deck and the other the bottom, but when you are outside the ship these distinctions have no meaning. Between Skin and Belly lie Crew Deck, Passenger Deck, Cargo Deck, Drive Deck. Ordinarily no one goes from one deck to another. We stay where we belong. The engines are in the Eye. So are the captain’s quarters.

That needle is the ship, but it is not the whole ship. What you will not be able to see are the annexes and extensions and virtualities. These accompany the ship, enfolding it in a webwork of intricate outstructures. But they are of a subordinate level of reality and therefore they defy vision. A ship tunnels into the void, spreading far and wide to find room for all that it must carry. In these outlying zones are kept our supplies and provisions, our stores of fuel, and all cargo traveling at second-class rates. If the ship transports prisoners, they will ride in an annex. If the ship expects to encounter severe probability turbulence during the course of the voyage, it will arm itself with stabilizers, and those will be carried in the virtualities, ready to be brought into being if needed. These are the mysteries of our profession. Take them on faith, or ignore them, as you will: They are not meant for you to know.

A ship takes forty years to build. There are two hundred seventy-one of them in service now. New ones are constantly under construction. They are the only link binding the Mother Worlds and the eight hundred ninety-eight Colonies and the colonies of the Colonies. Four ships have been lost since the beginning of the Service. No one knows why. The loss of a starship is the worst disaster I can imagine. The last such event occurred sixty virtual years ago.

A starship never returns to the world from which it was launched. The galaxy is too large for that. It makes its voyage and it continues onward through heaven in an endless open circuit. That is the service of the Service. There would be no point in returning, since thousands of worldward years sweep by behind us as we make our voyages. We live outside of time. We must, for there is no other way. That is our burden and our privilege. That is the service of the Service.

4.

On the fifth virtual day of the voyage I suddenly felt a tic, a nibble, a subtle indication that something had gone wrong. It was a very trifling thing, barely perceptible, like the scatter of eroded pebbles that tells you that the palaces and towers of a great ruined city lie buried beneath the mound on which you climb. Unless you are looking for such signals you will not see them. But I was primed for discovery that day. I was eager for it. A strange kind of joy came over me when I picked up that fleeting signal of wrongness.

I keyed the intelligence on duty and said, “What was that tremor on Passenger Deck?”

The intelligence arrived instantly in my mind, a sharp gray-green presence with a halo of tingling music.

“I am aware of no tremor, sir.”

“There was a distinct tremor. There was a data-spurt just now.”

“Indeed, sir? A data-spurt, sir?” The intelligence sounded aghast, but in a condescending way. It was humoring me. “What action shall I take, sir?”

I was being invited to retreat.

The intelligence on duty was a 49 Henry Henry. The Henry series affects a sort of slippery innocence that I find disingenuous. Still, they are very capable intelligences. I wondered if I had misread the signal. Perhaps I was too eager for an event, any event, that would confirm my relationship with the ship.

There is never a sense of motion or activity aboard a starship: We float in silence on a tide of darkness, cloaked in our own dazzling light. Nothing moves, nothing seems to live in all the universe. Since we had left Kansas Four I had felt that great silence judging me. Was I really captain of this vessel? Good: Then let me feel the weight of duty upon my shoulders.

We were past Ultima Thule by this time, and there could be no turning back. Borne on our cloak of light, we would roar through heaven for week after virtual week until we came to worldward at the first of our destinations, which was Cul-de-Sac in the Vainglory Archipelago, out by the Spook Clusters. Here in free space I must begin to master the ship, or it would master me.

“Sir?” the intelligence said.

“Run a data uptake,” I ordered. “All Passenger Deck input for the past half hour. There was movement. There was a spurt.”

I knew I might be wrong. Still, to err on the side of caution may be naïve, but it isn’t a sin. And I knew that at this stage in the voyage nothing I could say or do would make me seem other than naïve to the crew of the Sword of Orion. What did I have to lose by ordering a recheck, then? I was hungry for surprises. Any irregularity that 49 Henry Henry turned up would be to my advantage; the absence of one would make nothing worse for me.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” 49 Henry Henry reported after a moment, “but there was no tremor, sir.”

“Maybe I overstated it, then. Calling it a tremor. Maybe it was just an anomaly. What do you say, 49 Henry Henry?” I wondered if I was humiliating myself, negotiating like this with an intelligence. “There was something. I’m sure of that. An unmistakable irregular burst in the data-flow. An anomaly, yes. What do you say, 49 Henry Henry?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes what?”

“The record does show an irregularity, sir. Your observation was quite acute, sir.”

“Go on.”

“No cause for alarm, sir. A minor metabolic movement, nothing more. Like turning over in your sleep.” You bastard, what do you know about sleep? “Extremely unusual, sir, that you should be able to observe anything so small. I commend you, sir. The passengers are all well, sir.”

“Very good,” I said. “Enter this exchange in the log, 49 Henry Henry.”

“Already entered, sir,” the intelligence said. “Permission to decouple, sir?”

“Yes, you can decouple,” I told it.

The shimmer of music that signaled its presence grew tinny and was gone. I could imagine it smirking as it went about its ghostly flitting rounds deep in the neural conduits of the ship. Scornful software, glowing with contempt for its putative master. The poor captain, it was thinking. The poor hopeless silly boy of a captain. A passenger sneezes and he’s ready to seal all bulkheads.

Well, let it smirk, I thought. I have acted appropriately and the record will show it.

I knew that all this was part of my testing.

You may think that to be captain of such a ship as the Sword of Orion in your first voyage to heaven is an awesome responsibility and an inconceivable burden. So it is, but not for the reason you think.

In truth, the captain’s duties are the least significant of anyone’s aboard the ship. The others have well-defined tasks that are essential to the smooth running of the voyage, although the ship could, if the need arose, generate virtual replacements for any and every crew member and function adequately on its own. The captain’s task, though, is fundamentally abstract. His role is to witness the voyage, to embody it in his own consciousness, to give it coherence, continuity, by reducing it to a pattern of decisions and responses. In that sense the captain is simply so much software: He is the coding through which the voyage is expressed as a series of linear functions. If he fails to perform that duty adequately, others will quietly see to it that the voyage proceeds as it should. What is destroyed, in the course of a voyage that is inadequately captained, is the captain himself, not the voyage. My pre-flight training made that absolutely clear. The voyage can survive the most feeble of captains. As I have said, four starships have been lost since the Service began, and no one knows why. But there is no reason to think that any of those catastrophes were caused by failings of the captain. How could they have been? The captain is only the vehicle through which others act. It is not the captain who makes the voyage, but the voyage which makes the captain.

5.

Restless, troubled, I wandered the eye of the ship. Despite 49 Henry Henry’s suave mockery I was still convinced there was trouble on board, or about to be.

Just as I reached Outerscreen Level I felt something strange touch me a second time. It was different this time, and deeply disturbing.

The Eye, as it makes the complete descent from Skin Deck to Belly Deck, is lined with screens that provide displays, actual or virtual, of all aspects of the ship both internal and external. I came up to the great black bevel-edged screen that provided our simulated view of the external realspace environment and was staring at the dwindling wheel of the Ultima Thule relay point when the new anomaly occurred. The other had been the merest of subliminal signals, a nip, a tickle. This was more like an attempted intrusion. Invisible fingers seemed to brush lightly over my brain, probing, seeking entrance. The fingers withdrew; a moment later there was a sudden stabbing pain in my left temple.

I stiffened. “Who’s there?”

“Help me,” a silent voice said.

I had heard wild tales of passenger matrixes breaking free of their storage circuits and drifting through the ship like ghosts, looking for an unguarded body that they might infiltrate. The sources were unreliable, old scoundrels like Roacher or Bulgar. I dismissed such stories as fables, the way I dismissed what I had heard of the vast tentacular krakens that were said to swim the seas of space, or the beckoning mermaids with shining breasts who danced along the force-lines at spinaround points. But I had felt this. The probing fingers, the sudden sharp pain. And the sense of someone frightened, frightened but strong, stronger than I, hovering close at hand.

“Where are you?”

There was no reply. Whatever it was, if it had been anything at all, had slipped back into hiding after that one furtive thrust.

But was it really gone?

“You’re still here somewhere,” I said. “I know that you are.”

Silence. Stillness.

“You asked for help. Why did you disappear so fast?”

No response. I felt anger rising.

“Whoever you are. Whatever. Speak up.”

Nothing. Silence. Had I imagined it? The probing, the voiceless voice?

No. No. I was certain that there was something invisible and unreal hovering about me. And I found it infuriating, not to be able to regain contact with it. To be toyed with this way, to be mocked like this.

This is my ship, I thought. I want no ghosts aboard my ship.

“You can be detected,” I said. “You can be contained. You can be eradicated.”

As I stood there blustering in my frustration, it seemed to me that I felt that touch against my mind again, a lighter one this time, wistful, regretful. Perhaps I invented it. Perhaps I have supplied it retroactively.

But it lasted only a part of an instant, if it happened at all, and then I was unquestionably alone again. The solitude was real and total and unmistakable. I stood gripping the rail of the screen, leaning forward into the brilliant blackness and swaying dizzily as if I were being pulled forward through the wall of the ship into space.

“Captain?”

The voice of 49 Henry Henry, tumbling out of the air behind me.

“Did you feel something that time?” I asked.

The intelligence ignored my question. “Captain, there’s trouble on Passenger Deck. Hands-on alarm: Will you come?”

“Set up a transit track for me,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

Lights began to glow in mid-air, yellow, blue, green. The interior of the ship is a vast opaque maze and moving about within it is difficult without an intelligence to guide you. 49 Henry Henry constructed an efficient route for me down the curve of the Eye and into the main body of the ship, and thence around the rim of the leeward wall to the elevator down to Passenger Deck. I rode an air-cushion tracker keyed to the lights. The journey took no more than fifteen minutes. Unaided I might have needed a week.

Passenger Deck is an echoing nest of coffins, hundreds of them, sometimes even thousands, arranged in rows three abreast. Here our live cargo sleeps until we arrive and decant the stored sleepers into wakefulness. Machinery sighs and murmurs all around them, coddling them in their suspension. Beyond, far off in the dim distance, is the place for passengers of a different sort—a spiderwebbing of sensory cables that holds our thousands of disembodied matrixes. Those are the colonists who have left their bodies behind when going into space. It is a dark and forbidding place, dimly lit by swirling velvet comets that circle overhead emitting sparks of red and green.

The trouble was in the suspension area. Five crewmen were there already, the oldest hands on board: Katkat, Dismas, Rio de Rio, Gavotte, Roacher. Seeing them all together, I knew this must be some major event. We move on distant orbits within the immensity of the ship: To see as many as three members of the crew in the same virtual month is extraordinary. Now here were five. I felt an oppressive sense of community among them. Each of these five had sailed the seas of heaven more years than I had been alive. For at least a dozen voyages now they had been together as a team. I was the stranger in their midst, unknown, untried, lightly regarded, insignificant. Already Roacher had indicted me for my sweetness, by which he meant, I knew, a basic incapacity to act decisively. I thought he was wrong. But perhaps he knew me better than I knew myself.

They stepped back, opening a path between them. Gavotte, a great hulking thick-shouldered man with a surprisingly delicate and precise way of conducting himself, gestured with open hands: Here, Captain, see? See?

What I saw were coils of greenish smoke coming up from a passenger housing, and the glass door of the housing half open, cracked from top to bottom, frosted by temperature differentials. I could hear a sullen dripping sound. Blue fluid fell in thick steady gouts from a shattered support line. Within the housing itself was the pale naked figure of a man, eyes wide open, mouth agape as if in a silent scream. His left arm was raised, his fist was clenched. He looked like an anguished statue.

They had body-salvage equipment standing by. The hapless passenger would be disassembled and all usable parts stored as soon as I gave the word.

“Is he irretrievable?” I asked.

“Take a look,” Katkat said, pointing to the housing readout. All the curves pointed down. “We have nineteen percent degradation already, and rising. Do we disassemble?”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Approved.”

The lasers glinted and flailed. Body parts came into view, shining, moist. The coiling metallic arms of the body-salvage equipment rose and fell, lifting organs that were not yet beyond repair and putting them into storage. As the machine labored the men worked around it, shutting down the broken housing, tying off the disrupted feeders and refrigerator cables.

I asked Dismas what had happened. He was the mind-wiper for this sector, responsible for maintenance on the suspended passengers. His face was open and easy, but the deceptive cheeriness about his mouth and cheeks was mysteriously negated by his bleak, shadowy eyes. He told me that he had been working much farther down the deck, performing routine service on the Strappado-bound people, when he felt a sudden small disturbance, a quick tickle of wrongness.

“So did I,” I said. “How long ago was that?”

“Half an hour, maybe. I didn’t make a special note of it. I thought it was something in my gut, Captain. You felt it too, you say?”

I nodded. “Just a tickle. It’s in the record.” I heard the distant music of 49 Henry Henry. Perhaps the intelligence was trying to apologize for doubting me. “What happened next?” I asked.

“Went back to work. Five, ten minutes, maybe. Felt another jolt, a stronger one.” He touched his forehead, right at the temple, showing me where. “Detectors went off, broken glass. Came running, found this Cul-de-Sac passenger here undergoing convulsions. Rising from his bindings, thrashing around. Pulled himself loose from everything, went smack against the housing window. Broke it. It’s a very fast death.”

“Matrix intrusion,” Roacher said.

The skin of my scalp tightened. I turned to him.

“Tell me about that.”

He shrugged. “Once in a long while someone in the storage circuits gets to feeling footloose, and finds a way out and goes roaming the ship. Looking for a body to jack into, that’s what they’re doing. Jack into me, jack into Katkat, even jack into you, Captain. Anybody handy, just so they can feel flesh around them again. Jacked into this one here and something went wrong.”

The probing fingers, yes. The silent voice. Help me.

“I never heard of anyone jacking into a passenger in suspension,” Dismas said.

“No reason why not,” said Roacher.

“What’s the good? Still stuck in a housing, you are. Frozen down, that’s no better than staying matrix.”

“Five to two it was matrix intrusion,” Roacher said, glaring.

“Done,” Dismas said. Gavotte laughed and came in on the bet. So too did sinuous little Katkat, taking the other side. Rio de Rio, who had not spoken a word to anyone in his last six voyages, snorted and gestured obscenely at both factions.

I felt like an idle spectator. To regain some illusion of command I said, “If there’s a matrix loose, it’ll show up on ship inventory. Dismas, check with the intelligence on duty and report to me. Katkat, Gavotte, finish cleaning up this mess and seal everything off. Then I want your reports in the log and a copy to me. I’ll be in my quarters. There’ll be further instructions later. The missing matrix, if that’s what we have on our hands, will be identified, located, and recaptured.”

Roacher grinned at me. I thought he was going to lead a round of cheers.

I turned and mounted my tracker, and rode it following the lights, yellow, blue, green, back up through the maze of decks and out to the Eye.

As I entered my cabin something touched my mind and a silent voice said, “Please help me.”

6.

Carefully, I shut the door behind me, locked it, loaded the privacy screens. The captain’s cabin aboard a Megaspore starship of the Service is a world in itself, serene, private, immense. In mine, spiral galaxies whirled and sparkled on the walls. I had a stream, a lake, a silver waterfall beyond it. The air was soft and glistening. At a touch of my hand I could have light, music, scent, color, from any one of a thousand hidden orifices. Or I could turn the walls translucent and let the luminous splendor of starspace come flooding through.

Only when I was fully settled in, protected and insulated and comfortable, did I say, “All right. What are you?”

“You promise you won’t report me to the captain?”

“I don’t promise anything.”

“You will help me, though?” The voice seemed at once frightened and insistent, urgent and vulnerable.

“How can I say? You give me nothing to work with.”

“I’ll tell you everything. But first you have to promise not to call the captain.”

I debated with myself for a moment and opted for directness.

“I am the captain,” I said.

“No!”

“Can you see this room? What do you think it is? Crew quarters? The scullery?”

I felt turbulent waves of fear coming from my invisible companion. And then nothing. Was it gone? Then I had made a mistake in being so forthright. This phantom had to be confined, sealed away, perhaps destroyed, before it could do more damage. I should have been more devious. And also I knew that I would regret it in another way if it had slipped away: I was taking a certain pleasure in being able to speak with someone—something—that was neither a member of my crew nor an omnipotent, contemptuous artificial intelligence.

“Are you still here?” I asked after a while.

Silence.

Gone, I thought. Sweeping through the Sword of Orion like a gale of wind. Probably down at the far end of the ship by this time.

Then, as if there had been no break in the conversation: “I just can’t believe it. Of all the places I could have gone, I had to walk right into the captain’s cabin.”

“So it seems.”

“And you’re actually the captain?”

“Yes. Actually.”

Another pause.

“You seem so young,” it said. “For a captain.”

“Be careful,” I told it.

“I didn’t mean anything by that, Captain.” With a touch of bravado, even defiance, mingling with uncertainty and anxiety. “Captain, sir.”

Looking toward the ceiling, where shining resonator nodes shimmered all up and down the spectrum as slave-light leaped from junction to junction along the illuminator strands, I searched for a glimpse of it, some minute electromagnetic clue. But there was nothing.

I imagined a web of impalpable force, a dancing will-o’-the-wisp, flitting erratically about the room, now perching on my shoulder, now clinging to some fixture, now extending itself to fill every open space: an airy thing, a sprite, playful and capricious. Curiously, not only was I unafraid, but I found myself strongly drawn to it. There was something strangely appealing about this quick vibrating spirit, so bright with contradictions. And yet it had caused the death of one of my passengers.

“Well?” I said. “You’re safe here. But when are you going to tell me what you are?”

“Isn’t that obvious? I’m a matrix.”

“Go on.”

“A free matrix, a matrix on the loose. A matrix who’s in big trouble. I think I’ve hurt someone. Maybe killed him.”

“One of the passengers?” I said.

“So you know?”

“There’s a dead passenger, yes. We’re not sure what happened.”

“It wasn’t my fault. It was an accident.”

“That may be,” I said. “Tell me about it. Tell me everything.”

“Can I trust you?”

“More than anyone else on this ship.”

“But you’re the captain.”

“That’s why,” I said.

7.

Her name was Leeleaine, but she wanted me to call her Vox. That means “voice,” she said, in one of the ancient languages of Earth. She was seventeen years old, from Jaana Head, which is an island off the coast of West Palabar on Kansas Four. Her father was a glass-farmer, her mother operated a gravity hole, and she had five brothers and three sisters, all of them much older than she was.

“Do you know what that’s like, captain? Being the youngest of nine? And both your parents working all the time, and your cross-parents just as busy? Can you imagine? And growing up on Kansas Four, where it’s a thousand kilometers between cities, and you aren’t even in a city, you’re on an island?”

“I know something of what that’s like,” I said.

“Are you from Kansas Four too?”

“No,” I said. “Not from Kansas Four. But a place much like it, I think.”

She spoke of a troubled, unruly childhood, full of loneliness and anger. Kansas Four, I have heard, is a beautiful world, if you are inclined to find beauty in worlds: a wild and splendid place, where the sky is scarlet and the bare basalt mountains rise in the east like a magnificent black wall. But to hear Vox speak of it, it was squalid, grim, bleak. For her it was a loveless place where she led a loveless life. And yet she told me of pale violet seas aglow with brilliant yellow fish, and trees that erupted with a shower of dazzling crimson fronds when they were in bloom, and warm rains that sang in the air like harps. I was not then so long in heaven that I had forgotten the beauty of seas or trees or rains, which by now are nothing but hollow words to me. Yet Vox had found her life on Kansas Four so hateful that she had been willing to abandon not only her native world but her body itself. That was a point of kinship between us: I too had given up my world and my former life, if not my actual flesh. But I had chosen heaven, and the Service. Vox had volunteered to exchange one landcrawling servitude for another.

“The day came,” she said, “when I knew I couldn’t stand it any more. I was so miserable, so empty: I thought about having to live this way for another two hundred years or even more, and I wanted to pick up the hills and throw them at each other. Or get into my mother’s plummeter and take it straight to the bottom of the sea. I made a list of ways I could kill myself. But I knew I couldn’t do it, not this way or that way or any way. I wanted to live. But I didn’t want to live like that.”

On that same day, she said, the soul-call from Cul-de-Sac reached Kansas Four. A thousand vacant bodies were available there and they wanted soul-matrixes to fill them. Without a moment’s hesitation, Vox put her name on the list.

There is a constant migration of souls between the worlds. On each of my voyages I have carried thousands of them, setting forth hopefully toward new bodies on strange planets.

Every world has a stock of bodies awaiting replacement souls. Most were the victims of sudden violence. Life is risky on shore, and death lurks everywhere. Salvaging and repairing a body is no troublesome matter, but once a soul has fled it can never be recovered. So the empty bodies of those who drown and those who are stung by lethal insects and those who are thrown from vehicles and those who are struck by falling branches as they work are collected and examined. If they are beyond repair they are disassembled and their usable parts set aside to be installed in others. But if their bodies can be made whole again, they are, and they are placed in holding chambers until new souls become available for them.

And then there are those who vacate their bodies voluntarily, perhaps because they are weary of them, or weary of their worlds, and wish to move along. They are the ones who sign up to fill the waiting bodies on far worlds, while others come behind them to fill the bodies they have abandoned. The least costly way to travel between the worlds is to surrender your body and go in matrix form, thus exchanging a discouraging life for an unfamiliar one. That was what Vox had done. In pain and despair she had agreed to allow the essence of herself, everything she had ever seen or felt or thought or dreamed, to be converted into a lattice of electrical impulses that the Sword of Orion would carry on its voyage from Kansas Four to Cul-de-Sac. A new body lay reserved for her there.

Her own discarded body would remain in suspension on Kansas Four. Some day it might become the home of some wandering soul from another world; or, if there were no bids for it, it might eventually be disassembled by the body-salvagers, and its parts put to some worthy use. Vox would never know; Vox would never care.

“I can understand trading an unhappy life for a chance at a happy one,” I said. “But why break loose on ship? What purpose could that serve? Why not wait until you got to Cul-de-Sac?”

“Because it was torture,” she said.

“Torture? What was?”

“Living as a matrix.” She laughed bitterly. “Living? It’s worse than death could ever be!”

“Tell me.”

“You’ve never done matrix, have you?”

“No,” I said. “I chose another way to escape.”

“Then you don’t know. You can’t know. You’ve got a ship full of maxtrixes in storage circuits but you don’t understand a thing about them. Imagine that the back of your neck itches, captain. But you have no arms to scratch with. Your thigh starts to itch. Your chest. You lie there itching everywhere. And you can’t scratch. Do you understand me?”

“How can a matrix feel an itch? A matrix is simply a pattern of electrical—”

“Oh, you’re impossible! You’re stupid! I’m not talking about actual literal itching. I’m giving you a suppose, a for-instance. Because you’d never be able to understand the real situation. Look: You’re in the storage circuit. All you are is electricity. That’s all a mind really is, anyway: electricity. But you used to have a body. The body had sensation. The body had feelings. You remember them. You’re a prisoner. A prisoner remembers all sorts of things that used to be taken for granted. You’d give anything to feel the wind in your hair again, or the taste of cool milk, or the scent of flowers. Or even the pain of a cut finger. The saltiness of your blood when you lick the cut. Anything. I hated my body, don’t you see? I couldn’t wait to be rid of it. But once it was gone I missed the feelings it had. I missed the sense of flesh pulling at me, holding me to the ground, flesh full of nerves, flesh that could feel pleasure. Or pain.”

“I understand,” I said, and I think that I truly did. “But the voyage to Cul-de-Sac is short. A few virtual weeks and you’d be there, and out of storage and into your new body, and—”

“Weeks? Think of that itch on the back of your neck, Captain. The itch that you can’t scratch. How long do you think you could stand it, lying there feeling that itch? Five minutes? An hour? Weeks?”

It seemed to me that an itch left unscratched would die of its own, perhaps in minutes. But that was only how it seemed to me. I was not Vox; I had not been a matrix in a storage circuit.

I said, “So you let yourself out? How?”

“It wasn’t that hard to figure. I had nothing else to do but think about it. You align yourself with the polarity of the circuit. That’s a matrix too, an electrical pattern holding you in crosswise bands. You change the alignment. It’s like being tied up, and slipping the ropes around until you can slide free. And then you can go anywhere you like. You key into any bioprocessor aboard the ship and you draw your energy from that instead of from the storage circuit, and it sustains you. I can move anywhere around this ship at the speed of light. Anywhere. In just the time you blinked your eye, I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been to the far tip and out on the mast, and I’ve been down through the lower decks, and I’ve been in the crew quarters and the cargo places and I’ve even been a little way off into something that’s right outside the ship but isn’t quite real, if you know what I mean. Something that just seems to be a cradle of probability waves surrounding us. It’s like being a ghost. But it doesn’t solve anything. Do you see? The torture still goes on. You want to feel, but you can’t. You want to be connected again, your senses, your inputs. That’s why I tried to get into the passenger, do you see? But he wouldn’t let me.”

I began to understand at last.

Not everyone who goes to the worlds of heaven as a colonist travels in matrix form. Ordinarily anyone who can afford to take his body with him will do so; but relatively few can afford it. Those who do travel in suspension, the deepest of sleeps. We carry no waking passengers in the Service, not at any price. They would be trouble for us, poking here, poking there, asking questions, demanding to be served and pampered. They would shatter the peace of the voyage. And so they go down into their coffins, their housings, and there they sleep the voyage away, all life-processes halted, a death-in-life that will not be reversed until we bring them to their destinations.

And poor Vox, freed of her prisoning circuit and hungry for sensory data, had tried to slip herself into a passenger’s body.

I listened, appalled and somber, as she told of her terrible odyssey through the ship. Breaking free of the circuit: That had been the first strangeness I felt, that tic, that nibble at the threshold of my consciousness.

Her first wild moment of freedom had been exhilarating and joyous. But then had come the realization that nothing really had changed. She was at large, but still she was incorporeal, caught in that monstrous frustration of bodilessness, yearning for a touch. Perhaps such torment was common among matrixes; perhaps that was why, now and then, they broke free as Vox had done, to roam ships like sad troubled spirits. So Roacher had said. Once in a long while someone in the storage circuits gets to feeling footloose, and finds a way out and goes roaming the ship. Looking for a body to jack into, that’s what they’re doing. Jack into me, jack into Katkat, even jack into you, Captain. Anybody handy, just so they can feel flesh around them again. Yes.

That was the second jolt, the stronger one, that Dismas and I had felt, when Vox, selecting a passenger at random, suddenly, impulsively, had slipped herself inside his brain. She had realized her mistake at once. The passenger, lost in whatever dreams may come to the suspended, reacted to her intrusion with wild terror. Convulsions swept him; he rose, clawing at the equipment that sustained his life, trying desperately to evict the succubus that had penetrated him. In this frantic struggle he smashed the case of his housing and died. Vox, fleeing, frightened, careered about the ship in search of refuge, encountered me standing by the screen in the Eye, and made an abortive attempt to enter my mind. But just then the death of the passenger registered on 49 Henry Henry’s sensors and when the intelligence made contact with me to tell me of the emergency, Vox fled again, and hovered dolefully until I returned to my cabin. She had not meant to kill the passenger, she said. She was sorry that he had died. She felt some embarrassment, now, and fear. But no guilt. She rejected guilt for it almost defiantly. He had died? Well, so he had died. That was too bad. But how could she have known any such thing was going to happen? She was only looking for a body to take refuge in. Hearing that from her, I had a sense of her as someone utterly unlike me, someone volatile, unstable, perhaps violent. And yet I felt a strange kinship with her, even an identity. As though we were two parts of the same spirit; as though she and I were one and the same. I barely understood why.

“And what now?” I asked. “You say you want help. How?”

“Take me in.”

“What?”

“Hide me. In you. If they find me, they’ll eradicate me. You said so yourself, that it could be done, that I could be detected, contained, eradicated. But it won’t happen if you protect me.”

“I’m the captain,” I said, astounded.

“Yes.”

“How can I—”

“They’ll all be looking for me. The intelligences, the crewmen. It scares them, knowing there’s a matrix loose. They’ll want to destroy me. But if they can’t find me, they’ll start to forget about me after a while. They’ll think I’ve escaped into space, or something. And if I’m jacked into you, nobody’s going to be able to find me.”

“I have a responsibility to—”

“Please,” she said. “I could go to one of the others, maybe. But I feel closest to you. Please. Please.”

“Closest to me?”

“You aren’t happy. You don’t belong. Not here, not anywhere. You don’t fit in, any more than I did on Kansas Four. I could feel it the moment I first touched your mind. You’re a new captain, right? And the others on board are making it hard for you. Why should you care about them? Save me. We have more in common than you do with them. Please? You can’t just let them eradicate me. I’m young. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. All I want is to get to Cul-de-Sac and be put in the body that’s waiting for me there. A new start, my first start, really. Will you?”

“Why do you bother asking permission? You can simply enter me through my jack whenever you want, can’t you?”

“The last one died,” she said.

“He was in suspension. You didn’t kill him by entering him. It was the surprise, the fright. He killed himself by thrashing around and wrecking his housing.”

“Even so,” said Vox. “I wouldn’t try that again, an unwilling host. You have to say you’ll let me, or I won’t come in.”

I was silent.

“Help me?” she said.

“Come,” I told her.

8.

It was just like any other jacking: an electrochemical mind-to-mind bond, a linkage by way of the implant socket at the base of my spine. The sort of thing that any two people who wanted to make communion might do. There was just one difference, which was that we didn’t use a jack. We skipped the whole intricate business of checking bandwiths and voltages and selecting the right transformer-adapter. She could do it all, simply by matching evoked potentials. I felt a momentary sharp sensation and then she was with me.

“Breathe,” she said. “Breathe real deep. Fill your lungs. Rub your hands together. Touch your cheeks. Scratch behind your left ear. Please. Please. It’s been so long for me since I’ve felt anything.”

Her voice sounded the same as before, both real and unreal. There was no substance to it, no density of timbre, no sense that it was produced by the vibrations of vocal cords atop a column of air. Yet it was clear, firm, substantial in some essential way, a true voice in all respects except that there was no speaker to utter it. I suppose that while she was outside me she had needed to extend some strand of herself into my neural system in order to generate it. Now that was unnecessary. But I still perceived the voice as originating outside me, even though she had taken up residence within.

She overflowed with needs.

“Take a drink of water,” she urged. “Eat something. Can you make your knuckles crack? Do it, oh, do it! Put your hand between your legs and squeeze. There’s so much I want to feel. Do you have music here? Give me some music, will you? Something loud, something really hard.”

I did the things she wanted. Gradually she grew more calm.

I was strangely calm myself. I had no special awareness then of her presence within me, no unfamiliar pressure in my skull, no slitherings along my spine. There was no mingling of her thoughtstream and mine. She seemed not to have any way of controlling the movements or responses of my body. In these respects our contact was less intimate than any ordinary human jacking communion would have been. But that, I would soon discover, was by her choice. We would not remain so carefully compartmentalized for long.

“Is it better for you now?” I asked.

“I thought I was going to go crazy. If I didn’t start feeling something again soon.”

“You can feel things now?”

“Through you, yes. Whatever you touch, I touch.”

“You know I can’t hide you for long. They’ll take my command away if I’m caught harboring a fugitive. Or worse.”

“You don’t have to speak out loud to me any more,” she said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Just send it. We have the same nervous system now.”

“You can read my thoughts?” I said, still aloud.

“Not really. I’m not hooked into the higher cerebral centers. But I pick up motor, sensory stuff. And I get subvocalizations. You know what those are? I can hear your thoughts if you want me to. It’s like being in communion. You’ve been in communion, haven’t you?”

“Once in a while.”

“Then you know. Just open the channel to me. You can’t go around the ship talking out loud to somebody invisible, you know. Send me something. It isn’t hard.”

“Like this?” I said, visualizing a packet of verbal information sliding through the channels of my mind.

“You see? You can do it!”

“Even so,” I told her. “You still can’t stay like this with me for long. You have to realize that.”

She laughed. It was unmistakable, a silent but definite laugh. “You sound so serious. I bet you’re still surprised you took me in in the first place.”

“I certainly am. Did you think I would?”

“Sure I did. From the first moment. You’re basically a very kind person.”

“Am I, Vox?”

“Of course. You just have to let yourself do it.” Again the silent laughter. “I don’t even know your name. Here I am right inside your head and I don’t know your name.”

“Adam.”

“That’s a nice name. Is that an Earth name?”

“An old Earth name, yes. Very old.”

“And are you from Earth?” she asked.

“No. Except in the sense that we’re all from Earth.”

“Where, then?”

“I’d just as soon not talk about it,” I said.

She thought about that. “You hated the place where you grew up that much?”

“Please, Vox—”

“Of course you hated it. Just like I hated Kansas Four. We’re two of a kind, you and me. We’re one and the same. You got all the caution and I got all the impulsiveness. But otherwise we’re the same person. That’s why we share so well. I’m glad I’m sharing with you, Adam. You won’t make me leave, will you? We belong with each other. You’ll let me stay until we reach Cul-de-Sac. I know you will.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” I wasn’t at all sure, either way.

“Oh, you will. You will, Adam. I know you better than you know yourself.”

9.

So it began. I was in some new realm outside my established sense of myself, so far beyond my notions of appropriate behavior that I could not even feel astonishment at what I had done. I had taken her in, that was all. A stranger in my skull. She had turned to me in appeal and I had taken her in. It was as if her recklessness was contagious. And though I didn’t mean to shelter her any longer than was absolutely necessary, I could already see that I wasn’t going to make any move to eject her until her safety was assured.

But how was I going to hide her?

Invisible she might be, but not undetectable. And everyone on the ship would be searching for her.

There were sixteen crewmen on board who dreaded a loose matrix as they would a vampire. They would seek her as long as she remained at large. And not only the crew. The intelligences would be monitoring for her too, not out of any kind of fear but simply out of efficiency: They had nothing to fear from Vox, but they would want the cargo manifests to come out in balance when we reached our destination.

The crew didn’t trust me in the first place. I was too young, too new, too green, too sweet. I was just the sort who might be guilty of giving shelter to a secret fugitive. And it was altogether likely that her presence within me would be obvious to others in some way not apparent to me. As for the intelligences, they had access to all sorts of data as part of their routine maintenance operations. Perhaps they could measure tiny physiological changes, differences in my reaction times or circulatory efficiency or whatever, that would be a tipoff to the truth. How would I know? I would have to be on constant guard against discovery of the secret sharer of my consciousness.

The first test came less than an hour after Vox had entered me. The communicator light went on and I heard the far-off music of the intelligence on duty.

This one was 612 Jason, working the late shift. Its aura was golden, its music deep and throbbing. Jasons tend to be more brusque and less condescending than the Henry series, and in general I prefer them. But it was terrifying now to see that light, to hear that music, to know that the ship’s intelligence wanted to speak with me. I shrank back at a tense awkward angle, the way one does when trying to avoid a face-to-face confrontation with someone.

But of course the intelligence had no face to confront. The intelligence was only a voice speaking to me out of a speaker grid, and a stew of magnetic impulses somewhere on the control levels of the ship. All the same, I perceived 612 Jason now as a great glowing eye, staring through me to the hidden Vox.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Report summary, Captain. The dead passenger and the missing matrix.”

Deep within me I felt a quick plunging sensation, and then the skin of my arms and shoulders began to glow as the chemicals of fear went coursing through my veins in a fierce tide. It was Vox, I knew, reacting in sudden alarm, opening the petcocks of my hormonal system. It was the thing I had dreaded. How could 612 Jason fail to notice that flood of endocrine response?

“Go on,” I said, as coolly as I could.

But noticing was one thing, interpreting the data something else. Fluctuations in a human being’s endocrine output might have any number of causes. To my troubled conscience everything was a glaring signal of my guilt. 612 Jason gave no indication that it suspected a thing.

The intelligence said, “The dead passenger was Hans Eger Olafssen, 54 years of age, a native of—”

“Never mind his details. You can let me have a printout on that part.”

“The missing matrix,” 612 Jason went on imperturbably. “Leeleaine Eliani, 17 years of age, a native of Kansas Four, bound for Cul-de-Sac, Vainglory Archipelago, under Transmission Contract No. D-14871532, dated the 27th day of the third month of—”

“Printout on that too,” I cut in. “What I want to know is where she is now.”

“That information is not available.”

“That isn’t a responsive answer, 612 Jason.”

“No better answer can be provided at this time, Captain. Tracer circuits have been activated and remain in constant search mode.”

“And?”

“We have no data on the present location of the missing matrix.”

Within me Vox reacted instantly to the intelligence’s calm flat statement. The hormonal response changed from one of fear to one of relief. My blazing skin began at once to cool. Would 612 Jason notice that too, and from that small clue be able to assemble the subtext of my body’s responses into a sequence that exposed my criminal violation of regulations?

“Don’t relax too soon,” I told her silently. “This may be some sort of trap.”

To 612 Jason I said, “What data do you have, then?”

“Two things are known: the time at which the Eliani matrix achieved negation of its storage circuitry and the time of its presumed attempt at making neural entry into the suspended passenger Olafssen. Beyond that no data has been recovered.”

“Its presumed attempt?” I said.

“There is no proof, Captain.”

“Olafssen’s convulsions? The smashing of the storage housing?”

“We know that Olafssen responded to an electrical stimulus, Captain. The source of the stimulus is impossible to trace, although the presumption is that it came from the missing matrix Eliani. These are matters for the subsequent inquiry. It is not within my responsibilities to assign definite causal relationships.”

Spoken like a true Jason-series intelligence, I thought.

I said, “You don’t have any effective way of tracing the movements of the Eliani matrix, is that what you’re telling me?”

“We’re dealing with extremely minute impedances, sir. In the ordinary functioning of the ship it is very difficult to distinguish a matrix manifestation from normal surges and pulses in the general electrical system.”

“You mean, it might take something as big as the matrix trying to climb back into its own storage circuit to register on the monitoring system?”

“Very possibly, sir.”

“Is there any reason to think the Eliani matrix is still on the ship at all?”

“There is no reason to think that it is not, Captain.”

“In other words, you don’t know anything about anything concerning the Eliani matrix.”

“I have provided you with all known data at this point. Trace efforts are continuing, sir.”

“You still think this is a trap?” Vox asked me.

“It’s sounding better and better by the minute. But shut up and don’t distract me, will you?”

To the intelligence I said, “All right, keep me posted on the situation. I’m preparing for sleep, 612 Jason. I want the end-of-day status report, and then I want you to clear off and leave me alone.”

“Very good, sir. Fifth virtual day of voyage. Position of ship sixteen units beyond last port of call, Kansas Four. Scheduled rendezvous with relay forces at Ultima Thule spinaround point was successfully achieved at the hour of—”

The intelligence droned on and on: the usual report of the routine events of the day, broken only by the novelty of an entry for the loss of a passenger and one for the escape of a matrix, then returning to the standard data, fuel levels and velocity soundings and all the rest. On the first four nights of the voyage I had solemnly tried to absorb all this torrent of ritualized downloading of the log as though my captaincy depended on committing it all to memory, but this night I barely listened, and nearly missed my cue when it was time to give it my approval before clocking out for the night. Vox had to prod me and let me know that the intelligence was waiting for something. I gave 612 Jason the confirm-and-clock-out and heard the welcome sound of its diminishing music as it decoupled the contact.

“What do you think?” Vox asked. “It doesn’t know, does it?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“You really are a pessimist, aren’t you?”

“I think we may be able to bring this off,” I told her. “But the moment we become overconfident, it’ll be the end. Everyone on this ship wants to know where you are. The slightest slip and we’re both gone.”

“Okay. Don’t lecture me.”

“I’ll try not to. Let’s get some sleep now.”

“I don’t need to sleep.”

“Well, I do.”

“Can we talk for a while first?”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

But of course sleep was impossible. I was all too aware of the stranger within me, perhaps prowling the most hidden places of my psyche at this moment. Or waiting to invade my dreams once I drifted off. For the first time, I thought I could feel her presence even when she was silent: a hot node of identity pressing against the wall of my brain. Perhaps I imagined it. I lay stiff and tense, as wide awake as I have ever been in my life. After a time I had to call 612 Jason and ask it to put me under the wire; and even then my sleep was uneasy when it came.

10.

Until that point in the voyage, I had taken nearly all of my meals in my quarters. It seemed a way of exerting my authority, such as it was, aboard ship. By my absence from the dining hall I created a presence, that of the austere and aloof captain; and I avoided the embarrassment of having to sit in the seat of command over men who were much my senior in all things. It was no great sacrifice for me. My quarters were more than comfortable, the food was the same as that which was available in the dining hall, the servo-steward that brought it was silent and efficient. The question of isolation did not arise. There has always been something solitary about me, as there is about most who are of the Service.

But when I awoke the next morning after what had seemed like an endless night, I went down to the dining hall for breakfast.

It was nothing like a deliberate change of policy, a decision that had been rigorously arrived at through careful reasoning. It wasn’t a decision at all. Nor did Vox suggest it, though I’m sure she inspired it. It was purely automatic. I arose, showered, and dressed. I confess that I had forgotten all about the events of the night before. Vox was quiet within me. Not until I was under the shower, feeling the warm comforting ultrasonic vibration, did I remember her: There came a disturbing sensation of being in two places at once, and, immediately afterward, an astonishingly odd feeling of shame at my own nakedness. Both those feelings passed quickly. But they did indeed bring to mind that extraordinary thing which I had managed to suppress for some minutes, that I was no longer alone in my body.

She said nothing. Neither did I. After last night’s astounding alliance, I seemed to want to pull back into wordlessness, unthinkingness, a kind of automaton consciousness. The need for breakfast occurred to me and I called up a tracker to take me down to the dining hall. When I stepped outside the room I was surprised to encounter my servo-steward, already on its way up with my tray. Perhaps it was just as surprised to see me going out, though of course its blank metal face betrayed no feelings.

“I’ll be having breakfast in the dining hall today,” I told it.

“Very good, sir.”

My tracker arrived. I climbed into its seat and it set out at once on its cushion of air toward the dining hall.

The dining hall of the Sword of Orion is a magnificent room at the Eye end of Crew Deck, with one glass wall providing a view of all the lights of heaven. By some whim of the designers we sit with that wall below us, so that the stars and their tethered worlds drift beneath our feet. The other walls are of some silvery metal chased with thin swirls of gold, everything shining by the reflected light of the passing star-clusters. At the center is a table of black stone, with places allotted for each of the seventeen members of the crew. It is a splendid if somewhat ridiculous place, a resonant reminder of the wealth and power of the Service.

Three of my shipmates were at their places when I entered. Pedregal was there, the supercargo, a compact, sullen man whose broad dome of a head seemed to rise directly from his shoulders. And there was Fresco, too, slender and elusive, the navigator, a lithe dark-skinned person of ambiguous sex who alternated from voyage to voyage, so I had been told, converting from male to female and back again according to some private rhythm. The third person was Raebuck, whose sphere of responsibility was communications, an older man whose flat, chilly gaze conveyed either boredom or menace, I could never be sure which.

“Why, it’s the captain,” said Pedregal calmly. “Favoring us with one of his rare visits.”

All three stared at me with that curious testing intensity which I was coming to see was an inescapable part of my life aboard ship: a constant hazing meted out to any newcomer to the Service, an interminable probing for the place that was most vulnerable. Mine was a parsec wide and I was certain they would discover it at once. But I was determined to match them stare for stare, ploy for ploy, test for test.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” I said. Then, giving Fresco a level glance, I added, “Good morning, Fresco.”

I took my seat at the table’s head and rang for service.

I was beginning to realize why I had come out of my cabin that morning. In part it was a reflection of Vox’s presence within me, an expression of that new component of rashness and impulsiveness that had entered me with her. But mainly it was, I saw now, some stratagem of my own, hatched on some inaccessible subterranean level of my double mind. In order to conceal Vox most effectively, I would have to take the offensive: Rather than skulking in my quarters and perhaps awakening perilous suspicions in the minds of my shipmates, I must come forth, defiantly, challengingly, almost flaunting the thing that I had done, and go among them, pretending that nothing unusual was afoot and forcing them to believe it. Such aggressiveness was not natural to my temperament. But perhaps I could draw on some reserves provided by Vox. If not, we both were lost.

Raebuck said, to no one in particular, “I suppose yesterday’s disturbing events must inspire a need for companionship in the captain.”

I faced him squarely. “I have all the companionship I require, Raebuck. But I agree that what happened yesterday was disturbing.”

“A nasty business,” Pedregal said, ponderously shaking his neckless head. “And a strange one, a matrix trying to get into a passenger. That’s new to me, a thing like that. And to lose the passenger besides—that’s bad. That’s very bad.”

“It does happen, losing a passenger,” said Raebuck.

“A long time since it happened on a ship of mine,” Pedregal rejoined.

“We lost a whole batch of them on the Emperor of Callisto,” Fresco said. “You know the story? It was thirty years ago. We were making the run from Van Buren to the San Pedro Cluster. We picked up a supernova pulse and the intelligence on duty went into flicker. Somehow dumped a load of aluminum salts in the feed-lines and killed off fifteen, sixteen passengers. I saw the bodies before they went into the converter. Beyond salvage, they were.”

“Yes,” said Raebuck. “I heard of that one. And then there was the Queen Astarte, a couple of years after that. Tchelitchev was her captain, little green-eyed Russian woman from one of the Troika worlds. They were taking a routine inventory and two digits got transposed, and a faulty delivery signal slipped through. I think it was six dead, premature decanting, killed by air poisoning. Tchelitchev took it very badly. Very badly. Somehow the captain always does.”

“And then that time on the Hecuba,” said Pedregal. “No ship of mine, thank God. That was the captain who ran amok, thought the ship was too quiet, wanted to see some passengers moving around and started awakening them—”

Raebuck showed a quiver of surprise. “You know about that? I thought that was supposed to be hushed up.”

“Things get around,” Pedregal said, with something like a smirk. “The captain’s name was Catania-Szu, I believe, a man from Mediterraneo, very high-strung, the way all of them are there. I was working the Valparaiso then, out of Mendax Nine, bound for Scylla and Charybdis and neighboring points, and when we stopped to download some cargo in the Seneca system I got the whole story from a ship’s clerk named—”

“You were on the Valparaiso?” Fresco asked. “Wasn’t that the ship that had a free matrix, too, ten or eleven years back? A real soul-eater, so the report went—”

“After my time,” said Pedregal, blandly waving his hand. “But I did hear of it. You get to hear about everything, when you’re downloading cargo. Soul-eater, you say, reminds me of the time—”

And he launched into some tale of horror at a spinaround station in a far quadrant of the galaxy. But he was no more than halfway through it when Raebuck cut in with a gorier reminiscence of his own, and then Fresco, seething with impatience, broke in on him to tell of a ship infested by three free matrixes at once. I had no doubt that all this was being staged for my enlightenment, by way of showing me how seriously such events were taken in the Service, and how the captains under whom they occurred went down in the folklore of the starships with ineradicable black marks. But their attempts to unsettle me, if that is what they were, left me undismayed. Vox, silent within me, infused me with a strange confidence that allowed me to ignore the darker implications of these anecdotes.

I simply listened, playing my role: the neophyte fascinated by the accumulated depth of spacegoing experience that their stories implied.

Then I said, finally, “When matrixes get loose, how long do they generally manage to stay at large?”

“An hour or two, generally,” said Raebuck. “As they drift around the ship, of course, they leave an electrical trail. We track it and close off access routes behind them and eventually we pin them down in close quarters. Then it’s not hard to put them back in their bottles.”

“And if they’ve jacked into some member of the crew?”

“That makes it even easier to find them.”

Boldly I said, “Was there ever a case where a free matrix jacked into a member of the crew and managed to keep itself hidden?”

“Never,” said a new voice. It belonged to Roacher, who had just entered the dining hall. He stood at the far end of the long table, staring at me. His strange luminescent eyes, harsh and probing, came to rest on mine. “No matter how clever the matrix may be, sooner or later the host will find some way to call for help.”

“And if the host doesn’t choose to call for help?” I asked.

Roacher studied me with great care.

Had I been too bold? Had I given away too much?

“But that would be a violation of regulations!” he said, in a tone of mock astonishment. “That would be a criminal act!”

11.

She asked me to take her starwalking, to show her the full view of the Great Open.

It was the third day of her concealment within me. Life aboard the Sword of Orion had returned to routine, or, to be more accurate, it had settled into a new routine in which the presence on board of an undetected and apparently undetectable free matrix was a constant element.

As Vox had suggested, there were some who quickly came to believe that the missing matrix must have slipped off into space, since the watchful ship-intelligences could find no trace of it. But there were others who kept looking over their shoulders, figuratively or literally, as if expecting the fugitive to attempt to thrust herself without warning into the spinal jacks that gave access to their nervous systems. They behaved exactly as if the ship were haunted. To placate those uneasy ones, I ordered round-the-clock circuit sweeps that would report every vagrant pulse and random surge. Each such anomalous electrical event was duly investigated, and, of course, none of these investigations led to anything significant. Now that Vox resided in my brain instead of the ship’s wiring, she was beyond any such mode of discovery.

Whether anyone suspected the truth was something I had no way of knowing. Perhaps Roacher did; but he made no move to denounce me, nor did he so much as raise the issue of the missing matrix with me at all after that time in the dining hall. He might know nothing whatever; he might know everything, and not care; he might simply be keeping his own counsel for the moment. I had no way of telling.

I was growing accustomed to my double life, and to my daily duplicity. Vox had quickly come to seem as much a part of me as my arm, or my leg. When she was silent—and often I heard nothing from her for hours at a time—I was no more aware of her than I would be, in any special way, of my arm or my leg; but nevertheless I knew somehow that she was there. The boundaries between her mind and mine were eroding steadily. She was learning how to infiltrate me. At times it seemed to me that what we were were joint tenants of the same dwelling, rather than I the permanent occupant and she a guest. I came to perceive my own mind as something not notably different from hers, a mere web of electrical force which for the moment was housed in the soft moist globe that was the brain of the captain of the Sword of Orion. Either of us, so it seemed, might come and go within that soft moist globe as we pleased, flitting casually in or out after the wraithlike fashion of matrixes.

At other times it was not at all like that: I gave no thought to her presence and went about my tasks as if nothing had changed for me. Then it would come as a surprise when Vox announced herself to me with some sudden comment, some quick question. I had to learn to guard myself against letting my reaction show, if it happened when I was with other members of the crew. Though no one around us could hear anything when she spoke to me, or I to her, I knew it would be the end for our masquerade if anyone caught me in some unguarded moment of conversation with an unseen companion.

How far she had penetrated my mind began to become apparent to me when she asked to go on a starwalk.

“You know about that?” I said, startled, for starwalking is the private pleasure of the spacegoing and I had not known of it myself before I was taken into the Service.

Vox seemed amazed by my amazement. She indicated casually that the details of starwalking were common knowledge everywhere.

But something rang false in her tone. Were the landcrawling folk really so familiar with our special pastime? Or had she picked what she knew of it out of the hitherto private reaches of my consciousness?

I chose not to ask. But I was uneasy about taking her with me into the Great Open, much as I was beginning to yearn for it myself. She was not one of us. She was planetary; she had not passed through the training of the Service.

I told her that.

“Take me anyway,” she said. “It’s the only chance I’ll ever have.”

“But the training—”

“I don’t need it. Not if you’ve had it.”

“What if that’s not enough?”

“It will be,” she said. “I know it will, Adam. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ve had the training, haven’t you? And I am you.”

12.

Together we rode the transit track out of the Eye and down to Drive Deck, where the soul of the ship lies lost in throbbing dreams of the far galaxies as it pulls us ever onward across the unending night.

We passed through zones of utter darkness and zones of cascading light, through places where wheeling helixes of silvery radiance burst like auroras from the air, through passages so crazed in their geometry that they reawakened the terrors of the womb in anyone who traversed them. A starship is the mother of mysteries. Vox crouched, frozen with awe, within that portion of our brain that was hers. I felt the surges of her awe, one after another, as we went downward.

“Are you really sure you want to do this?” I asked.

“Yes!” she cried fiercely. “Keep going!”

“There’s the possibility that you’ll be detected,” I told her.

“There’s the possibility that I won’t be,” she said.

We continued to descend. Now we were in the realm of the three cyborg push-cells, Gabriel, Banquo, and Fleece. Those were three members of the crew whom we would never see at the table in the dining hall, for they dwelled here in the walls of Drive Deck, permanently jacked in, perpetually pumping their energies into the ship’s great maw. I have already told you of our saying in the Service, that when you enter you give up the body and you get your soul. For most of us that is only a figure of speech: What we give up, when we say farewell forever to planetskin and take up our new lives in starships, is not the body itself but the body’s trivial needs, the sweaty things so dear to shore people. But some of us are more literal in their renunciations. The flesh is a meaningless hindrance to them; they shed it entirely, knowing that they can experience starship life just as fully without it. They allow themselves to be transformed into extensions of the stardrive. From them comes the raw energy out of which is made the power that carries us hurtling through heaven. Their work is unending; their reward is a sort of immortality. It is not a choice I could make, nor, I think, you: but for them it is bliss. There can be no doubt about that.

“Another starwalk so soon, Captain?” Banquo asked. For I had been here on the second day of the voyage, losing no time in availing myself of the great privilege of the Service.

“Is there any harm in it?”

“No, no harm,” said Banquo. “Just isn’t usual, is all.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “That’s not important to me.”

Banquo is a gleaming metallic ovoid, twice the size of a human head, jacked into a slot in the wall. Within the ovoid is the matrix of what had once been Banquo, long ago on a world called Sunrise where night is unknown. Sunrise’s golden dawns and shining days had not been good enough for Banquo, apparently. What Banquo had wanted was to be a gleaming metallic ovoid, hanging on the wall of Drive Deck aboard the Sword of Orion.

Any of the three cyborgs could set up a starwalk. But Banquo was the one who had done it for me that other time and it seemed best to return to him. He was the most congenial of the three. He struck me as amiable and easy. Gabriel, on my first visit, had seemed austere, remote, incomprehensible. He is an early model who had lived the equivalent of three human lifetimes as a cyborg aboard starships and there was not much about him that was human any more. Fleece, much younger, quick-minded and quirky, I mistrusted: In her weird edgy way she might just somehow be able to detect the hidden other who would be going along with me for the ride.

You must realize that when we starwalk we do not literally leave the ship, though that is how it seems to us. If we left the ship even for a moment we would be swept away and lost forever in the abyss of heaven. Going outside a starship of heaven is not like stepping outside an ordinary planet-launched shoreship that moves through normal space. But even if it were possible, there would be no point in leaving the ship. There is nothing to see out there. A starship moves through utter empty darkness.

But though there may be nothing to see, that does not mean that there is nothing out there. The entire universe is out there. If we could see it while we are traveling across the special space that is heaven we would find it flattened and curved, so that we had the illusion of viewing everything at once, all the far-flung galaxies back to the beginning of time. This is the Great Open, the totality of the continuum. Our external screens show it to us in simulated form, because we need occasional assurance that it is there.

A starship rides along the mighty lines of force which cross that immense void like the lines of the compass rose on an ancient mariner’s map. When we starwalk, we ride those same lines, and we are held by them, sealed fast to the ship that is carrying us onward through heaven. We seem to step forth into space; we seem to look down on the ship, on the stars, on all the worlds of heaven. For the moment, we become little starships flying along beside the great one that is our mother. It is magic; it is illusion; but it is magic that so closely approaches what we perceive as reality that there is no way to measure the difference, which means that in effect there is no difference.

“Ready?” I asked Vox.

“Absolutely.”

Still I hesitated.

“Are you sure?”

“Go on,” she said impatiently. “Do it!”

I put the jack to my spine myself. Banquo did the matching of impedances. If he were going to discover the passenger I carried, this would be the moment. But he showed no sign that anything was amiss. He queried me; I gave him the signal to proceed; there was a moment of sharp warmth at the back of my neck as my neural matrix, and Vox’s traveling with it, rushed out through Banquo and hurtled downward toward its merger with the soul of the ship.

We were seized and drawn in and engulfed by the vast force that is the ship. As the coils of the engine caught us we were spun around and around, hurled from vector to vector, mercilessly stretched, distended by an unimaginable flux. And then there was a brightness all about us, a brightness that cried out in heaven with a mighty clamor. We were outside the ship. We were starwalking.

“Oh,” she said. A little soft cry, a muted gasp of wonder.

The blazing mantle of the ship lay upon the darkness of heaven like a white shadow. That great cone of cold fiery light reached far out in front of us, arching awesomely toward heaven’s vault, and behind us it extended beyond the limits of our sight. The slender tapering outline of the ship was clearly visible within it, the needle and its Eye, all ten kilometers of it easily apparent to us in a single glance.

And there were the stars. And there were the worlds of heaven.

The effect of the stardrive is to collapse the dimensions, each one in upon the other. Thus inordinate spaces are diminished and the galaxy may be spanned by human voyagers. There is no logic, no linearity of sequence, to heaven as it appears to our eyes. Wherever we look we see the universe bent back upon itself, revealing its entirety in an infinite series of infinite segments of itself. Any sector of stars contains all stars. Any demarcation of time encompasses all of time past and time to come. What we behold is altogether beyond our understanding, which is exactly as it should be; for what we are given, when we look through the Eye of the ship at the naked heavens, is a god’s-eye view of the universe. And we are not gods.

“What are we seeing?” Vox murmured within me.

I tried to tell her. I showed her how to define her relative position so there would be an up and a down for her, a backward, a forward, a flow of time and event from beginning to end. I pointed out the arbitrary coordinate axes by which we locate ourselves in this fundamentally incomprehensible arena. I found known stars for her, and known worlds, and showed them to her.

She understood nothing. She was entirely lost.

I told her that there was no shame in that.

I told her that I had been just as bewildered, when I was undergoing my training in the simulator. That everyone was; and that no one, not even if he spent a thousand years aboard the starships that plied the routes of heaven, could ever come to anything more than a set of crude equivalents and approximations of understanding what starwalking shows us. Attaining actual understanding itself is beyond the best of us.

I could feel her struggling to encompass the impact of all that rose and wheeled and soared before us. Her mind was agile, though still only half-formed, and I sensed her working out her own system of explanations and assumptions, her analogies, her equivalencies. I gave her no more help. It was best for her to do these things by herself; and in any case I had no more help to give.

I had my own astonishment and bewilderment to deal with, on this my second starwalk in heaven.

Once more I looked down upon the myriad worlds turning in their orbits. I could see them easily, the little bright globes rotating in the huge night of the Great Open: red worlds, blue worlds, green ones, some turning their full faces to me, some showing mere slivers of a crescent. How they cleaved to their appointed tracks! How they clung to their parent stars!

I remembered that other time, only a few virtual days before, when I had felt such compassion for them, such sorrow. Knowing that they were condemned forever to follow the same path about the same star, a hopeless bondage, a meaningless retracing of a perpetual route. In their own eyes they might be footloose wanderers, but to me they had seemed the most pitiful of slaves. And so I had grieved for the worlds of heaven; but now, to my surprise, I felt no pity, only a kind of love. There was no reason to be sad for them. They were what they were, and there was a supreme rightness in those fixed orbits and their obedient movements along them. They were content with being what they were. If they were loosed even a moment from that bondage, such chaos would arise in the universe as could never be contained. Those circling worlds are the foundations upon which all else is built; they know that and they take pride in it; they are loyal to their tasks and we must honor them for their devotion to their duty. And with honor comes love.

This must be Vox speaking within me, I told myself.

I had never thought such thoughts. Love the planets in their orbits? What kind of notion was that? Perhaps no stranger than my earlier notion of pitying them because they weren’t starships; but that thought had arisen from the spontaneous depths of my own spirit and it had seemed to make a kind of sense to me. Now it had given way to a wholly other view.

I loved the worlds that moved before me and yet did not move, in the great night of heaven.

I loved the strange fugitive girl within me who beheld those worlds and loved them for their immobility.

I felt her seize me now, taking me impatiently onward, outward, into the depths of heaven. She understood now; she knew how it was done. And she was far more daring than ever I would have allowed me to be. Together we walked the stars. Not only walked but plunged and swooped and soared, traveling among them like gods. Their hot breath singed us. Their throbbing brightness thundered at us. Their serene movements boomed a mighty music at us. On and on we went, hand in hand, Vox leading, I letting her draw me, deeper and deeper into the shining abyss that was the universe. Until at last we halted, floating in mid-cosmos, the ship nowhere to be seen, only the two of us surrounded by a shield of suns.

In that moment a sweeping ecstasy filled my soul. I felt all eternity within my grasp. No, that puts it the wrong way around and makes it seem that I was seized by delusions of imperial grandeur, which was not at all the case. What I felt was myself within the grasp of all eternity, enfolded in the loving embrace of a complete and perfect cosmos in which nothing was out of place, or ever could be.

It is this that we go starwalking to attain. This sense of belonging, this sense of being contained in the divine perfection of the universe.

When it comes, there is no telling what effect it will have; but inner change is what it usually brings. I had come away from my first starwalk unaware of any transformation; but within three days I had impulsively opened myself to a wandering phantom, violating not only regulations but the nature of my own character as I understood it. I have always, as I think I have said, been an intensely private man. Even though I had given Vox refuge, I had been relieved and grateful that her mind and mine had remained separate entities within our shared brain.

Now I did what I could to break down whatever boundary remained between us.

I hadn’t let her know anything, so far, of my life before going to heaven. I had met her occasional questions with coy evasions, with half-truths, with blunt refusals. It was the way I had always been with everyone, a habit of secrecy, an unwillingness to reveal myself. I had been even more secretive, perhaps, with Vox than with all the others, because of the very closeness of her mind to mine. As though I feared that by giving her any interior knowledge of me I was opening the way for her to take me over entirely, to absorb me into her own vigorous, undisciplined soul.

But now I offered my past to her in a joyous rush. We began to make our way slowly backward from that apocalyptic place at the center of everything; and as we hovered on the breast of the Great Open, drifting between the darkness and the brilliance of the light that the ship created, I told her everything about myself that I had been holding back.

I suppose they were mere trivial things, though to me they were all so highly charged with meaning. I told her the name of my home planet. I let her see it, the sea the color of lead, the sky the color of smoke. I showed her the sparse and scrubby gray headlands behind our house, where I would go running for hours by myself, a tall slender boy pounding tirelessly across the crackling sands as though demons were pursuing him.

I showed her everything: the somber child, the troubled youth, the wary, overcautious young man. The playmates who remained forever strangers, the friends whose voices were drowned in hollow babbling echoes, the lovers whose love seemed without substance or meaning. I told her of my feeling that I was the only one alive in the world, that everyone about me was some sort of artificial being full of gears and wires. Or that the world was only a flat colorless dream in which I somehow had become trapped, but from which I would eventually awaken into the true world of light and color and richness of texture. Or that I might not be human at all, but had been abandoned in the human galaxy by creatures of another form entirely, who would return for me some day far in the future.

I was lighthearted as I told her these things, and she received them lightly. She knew them for what they were—not symptoms of madness, but only the bleak fantasies of a lonely child, seeking to make sense out of an incomprehensible universe in which he felt himself to be a stranger and afraid.

“But you escaped,” she said. “You found a place where you belonged!”

“Yes,” I said. “I escaped.”

And I told her of the day when I had seen a sudden light in the sky. My first thought then had been that my true parents had come back for me; my second, that it was some comet passing by. That light was a starship of heaven that had come to worldward in our system. And as I looked upward through the darkness on that day long ago, straining to catch a glimpse of the shoreships that were going up to it bearing cargo and passengers to be taken from our world to some unknowable place at the other end of the galaxy, I realized that that starship was my true home. I realized that the Service was my destiny.

And so it came to pass, I said, that I left my world behind, and my name, and my life, such as it had been, to enter the company of those who sail between the stars. I let her know that this was my first voyage, explaining that it is the peculiar custom of the Service to test all new officers by placing them in command at once. She asked me if I had found happiness here; and I said, quickly, Yes, I had, and then I said a moment later, Not yet, not yet, but I see at least the possibility of it.

She was quiet for a time. We watched the worlds turning and the stars like blazing spikes of color racing toward their far-off destinations, and the fiery white light of the ship itself streaming in the firmament as if it were the blood of some alien god. The thought came to me of all that I was risking by hiding her like this within me. I brushed it aside. This was neither the place nor the moment for doubt or fear or misgiving.

Then she said, “I’m glad you told me all that, Adam.”

“Yes. I am too.”

“I could feel it from the start, what sort of person you were. But I needed to hear it in your own words, your own thoughts. It’s just like I’ve been saying. You and I, we’re two of a kind. Square pegs in a world of round holes. You ran away to the Service and I ran away to a new life in somebody else’s body.”

I realized that Vox wasn’t speaking of my body, but of the new one that waited for her on Cul-de-Sac.

And I realized too that there was one thing about herself that she had never shared with me, which was the nature of the flaw in her old body that had caused her to discard it. If I knew her more fully, I thought, I could love her more deeply: imperfections and all, which is the way of love. But she had shied away from telling me that, and I had never pressed her on it. Now, out here under the cool gleam of heaven, surely we had moved into a place of total trust, of complete union of soul.

I said, “Let me see you, Vox.”

“See me? How could you—”

“Give me an image of yourself. You’re too abstract for me this way. Vox. A voice. Only a voice. You talk to me, you live within me, and I still don’t have the slightest idea what you look like.”

“That’s how I want it to be.”

“Won’t you show me how you look?”

“I won’t look like anything. I’m a matrix. I’m nothing but electricity.”

“I understand that. I mean how you looked before. Your old self, the one you left behind on Kansas Four.”

She made no reply.

I thought she was hesitating, deciding; but some time went by, and still I heard nothing from her. What came from her was silence, only silence, a silence that had crashed down between us like a steel curtain.

“Vox?”

Nothing.

Where was she hiding? What had I done?

“What’s the matter? Is it the thing I asked you?”

No answer.

“It’s all right, Vox. Forget about it. It isn’t important at all. You don’t have to show me anything you don’t want to show me.”

Nothing. Silence.

“Vox? Vox?”

The worlds and stars wheeled in chaos before me. The light of the ship roared up and down the spectrum from end to end. In growing panic I sought for her and found no trace of her presence within me. Nothing. Nothing.

“Are you all right?” came another voice. Banquo, from inside the ship. “I’m getting some pretty wild signals. You’d better come in. You’ve been out there long enough as it is.”

Vox was gone. I had crossed some uncrossable boundary and I had frightened her away.

Numbly I gave Banquo the signal, and he brought me back inside.

13.

Alone, I made my way upward level by level through the darkness and mystery of the ship, toward the Eye. The crash of silence went on and on, like the falling of some colossal wave on an endless shore. I missed Vox terribly. I had never known such complete solitude as I felt now. I had not realized how accustomed I had become to her being there, nor what impact her leaving would have on me. In just those few days of giving her sanctuary, it had somehow come to seem to me that to house two souls within one brain was the normal condition of mankind, and that to be alone in one’s skull as I was now was a shameful thing.

As I neared the place where Crew Deck narrows into the curve of the Eye a slender figure stepped without warning from the shadows.

“Captain.”

My mind was full of the loss of Vox and he caught me unawares. I jumped back, badly startled.

“For the love of God, man!”

“It’s just me. Bulgar. Don’t be so scared, Captain. It’s only Bulgar.”

“Let me be,” I said, and brusquely beckoned him away.

“No. Wait, Captain. Please, wait.”

He clutched at my arm, holding me as I tried to go. I halted and turned toward him, trembling with anger and surprise.

Bulgar, Roacher’s jackmate, was a gentle, soft-voiced little man, wide-mouthed, olive-skinned, with huge sad eyes. He and Roacher had sailed the skies of Heaven together since before I was born. They complemented each other. Where Roacher was small and hard, like fruit that has been left to dry in the sun for a hundred years, his jackmate Bulgar was small and tender, with a plump, succulent look about him. Together they seemed complete, an unassailable whole: I could readily imagine them lying together in their bunk, each jacked to the other, one person in two bodies, linked more intimately even than Vox and I had been.

With an effort I recovered my poise. Tightly I said, “What is it, Bulgar?”

“Can we talk a minute, Captain?”

“We are talking. What do you want with me?”

“That loose matrix, sir.”

My reaction must have been stronger than he was expecting. His eyes went wide and he took a step or two back from me.

Moistening his lips, he said, “We were wondering, Captain—wondering how the search is going—whether you had any idea where the matrix might be—”

I said stiffly, “Who’s we, Bulgar?”

“The men. Roacher. Me. Some of the others. Mainly Roacher, sir.”

“Ah. So Roacher wants to know where the matrix is.”

The little man moved closer. I saw him staring deep into me as though searching for Vox behind the mask of my carefully expressionless face. Did he know? Did they all? I wanted to cry out, She’s not there any more, she’s gone, she left me, she ran off into space. But apparently what was troubling Roacher and his shipmates was something other than the possibility that Vox had taken refuge with me.

Bulgar’s tone was soft, insinuating, concerned. “Roacher’s very worried, Captain. He’s been on ships with loose matrixes before. He knows how much trouble they can be. He’s really worried, Captain. I have to tell you that. I’ve never seen him so worried.”

“What does he think the matrix will do to him?”

“He’s afraid of being taken over,” Bulgar said.

“Taken over?”

“The matrix coming into his head through his jack. Mixing itself up with his brain. It’s been known to happen, Captain.”

“And why should it happen to Roacher, out of all the men on this ship? Why not you? Why not Pedregal? Or Rio de Rio? Or one of the passengers again?” I took a deep breath. “Why not me, for that matter?”

“He just wants to know, sir, what’s the situation with the matrix now. Whether you’ve discovered anything about where it is. Whether you’ve been able to trap it.”

There was something strange in Bulgar’s eyes. I began to think I was being tested again. This assertion of Roacher’s alleged terror of being infiltrated and possessed by the wandering matrix might simply be a roundabout way of finding out whether that had already happened to me.

“Tell him it’s gone,” I said.

“Gone, sir?”

“Gone. Vanished. It isn’t anywhere on the ship any more. Tell him that, Bulgar. He can forget about her slithering down his precious jackhole.”

“Her?”

“Female matrix, yes. But that doesn’t matter now. She’s gone. You can tell him that. Escaped. Flew off into heaven. The emergency’s over.” I glowered at him. I yearned to be rid of him, to go off by myself to nurse my new grief. “Shouldn’t you be getting back to your post, Bulgar?”

Did he believe me? Or did he think that I had slapped together some transparent lie to cover my complicity in the continued absence of the matrix? I had no way of knowing. Bulgar gave me a little obsequious bow and started to back away.

“Sir,” he said. “Thank you, sir. I’ll tell him, sir.”

He retreated into the shadows. I continued uplevel.

I passed Katkat on my way, and, a little while afterward, Raebuck. They looked at me without speaking. There was something reproachful but almost loving about Katkat’s expression, but Raebuck’s icy, baleful stare brought me close to flinching. In their different ways they were saying, Guilty, guilty, guilty. But of what?

Before, I had imagined that everyone whom I encountered aboard ship was able to tell at a single glance that I was harboring the fugitive, and was simply waiting for me to reveal myself with some foolish slip. Now everything was reversed. They looked at me and I told myself that they were thinking, He’s all alone by himself in there, he doesn’t have anyone else at all, and I shrank away, shamed by my solitude. I knew that this was the edge of madness. I was overwrought, overtired; perhaps it had been a mistake to go starwalking a second time so soon after my first. I needed to rest. I needed to hide.

I began to wish that there were someone aboard the Sword of Orion with whom I could discuss these things. But who, though? Roacher? 612 Jason? I was altogether isolated here. The only one I could speak to on this ship was Vox. And she was gone.

In the safety of my cabin I jacked myself into the mediq rack and gave myself a ten-minute purge. That helped. The phantom fears and intricate uncertainties that had taken possession of me began to ebb.

I keyed up the log and ran through the list of my captainly duties, such as they were, for the rest of the day. We were approaching a spinaround point, one of those nodes of force positioned equidistantly across heaven which a starship in transit must seize and use in order to propel itself onward through the next sector of the universe. Spinaround acquisition is performed automatically but at least in theory the responsibility for carrying it out successfully falls to the captain: I would give the commands, I would oversee the process from initiation through completion.

But there was still time for that.

I accessed 49 Henry Henry, who was the intelligence on duty, and asked for an update on the matrix situation.

“No change, sir,” the intelligence reported at once.

“What does that mean?”

“Trace efforts continue as requested, sir. But we have not detected the location of the missing matrix.”

“No clues? Not even a hint?”

“No data at all, sir. There’s essentially no way to isolate the minute electromagnetic pulse of a free matrix from the background noise of the ship’s entire electrical system.”

I believed it. 612 Jason had told me that in nearly the same words.

I said, “I have reason to think that the matrix is no longer on the ship, 49 Henry Henry.”

“Do you, sir?” said 49 Henry Henry in its usual aloof, half-mocking way.

“I do, yes. After a careful study of the situation, it’s my opinion that the matrix exited the ship earlier this day and will not be heard from again.”

“Shall I record that as an official position, sir?”

“Record it,” I said.

“Done, sir.”

“And therefore, 49 Henry Henry, you can cancel search mode immediately and close the file. We’ll enter a debit for one matrix and the Service bookkeepers can work it out later.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Decouple,” I ordered the intelligence.

49 Henry Henry went away. I sat quietly amid the splendors of my cabin, thinking back over my starwalk and reliving that sense of harmony, of love, of oneness with the worlds of heaven, that had come over me while Vox and I drifted on the bosom of the Great Open. And feeling once again the keen slicing sense of loss that I had felt since Vox’s departure from me. In a little while I would have to rise and go to the command center and put myself through the motions of overseeing spinaround acquisition; but for the moment I remained where I was, motionless, silent, peering deep into the heart of my solitude.

“I’m not gone,” said an unexpected quiet voice.

It came like a punch beneath the heart. It was a moment before I could speak.

“Vox?” I said at last. “Where are you, Vox?”

“Right here.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Inside. I never went away.”

“You never—”

“You upset me. I just had to hide for a while.”

“You knew I was trying to find you?”

“Yes.”

Color came to my cheeks. Anger roared like a stream in spate through my veins. I felt myself blazing.

“You knew how I felt, when you—when it seemed that you weren’t there any more.”

“Yes,” she said, even more quietly, after a time.

I forced myself to grow calm. I told myself that she owed me nothing, except perhaps gratitude for sheltering her, and that whatever pain she had caused me by going silent was none of her affair. I reminded myself also that she was a child, unruly and turbulent and undisciplined.

After a bit I said, “I missed you. I missed you more than I want to say.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, sounding repentant, but not very. “I had to go away for a time. You upset me, Adam.”

“By asking you to show me how you used to look?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand why that upset you so much.”

“You don’t have to,” Vox said. “I don’t mind now. You can see me, if you like. Do you still want to? Here. This is me. This is what I used to be. If it disgusts you, don’t blame me. Okay? Okay, Adam? Here. Have a look. Here I am.”

14.

There was a wrenching within me, a twisting, a painful yanking sensation, as of some heavy barrier forcibly being pulled aside. And then the glorious radiant scarlet sky of Kansas Four blossomed on the screen of my mind.

She didn’t simply show it to me. She took me there. I felt the soft moist wind on my face, I breathed the sweet, faintly pungent air, I heard the sly rustling of glossy leathery fronds that dangled from bright yellow trees. Beneath my bare feet the black soil was warm and spongy.

I was Leeleaine, who liked to call herself Vox. I was seventeen years old and swept by forces and compulsions as powerful as hurricanes.

I was her from within and also I saw her from outside.

My hair was long and thick and dark, tumbling down past my shoulders in an avalanche of untended curls and loops and snags. My hips were broad, my breasts were full and heavy: I could feel the pull of them, the pain of them. It was almost as if they were stiff with milk, though they were not. My face was tense, alert, sullen, aglow with angry intelligence. It was not an unappealing face. Vox was not an unappealing girl.

From her earlier reluctance to show herself to me I had expected her to be ugly, or perhaps deformed in some way, dragging herself about in a coarse, heavy, burdensome husk of flesh that was a constant reproach to her. She had spoken of her life on Kansas Four as being so dreary, so sad, so miserable, that she saw no hope in staying there. And had given up her body to be turned into mere electricity, on the promise that she could have a new body—any body—when she reached Cul-de-Sac. I hated my body, she had told me. I couldn’t wait to be rid of it. She had refused even to give me a glimpse of it, retreating instead for hours into a desperate silence so total that I thought she had fled.

All that was a mystery to me now. The Leeleaine that I saw, that I was, was a fine sturdy-looking girl. Not beautiful, no, too strong and strapping for that, I suppose, but far from ugly: Her eyes were warm and intelligent, her lips full, her nose finely modeled. And it was a healthy body, too, robust, vital. Of course she had no deformities; and why had I thought she had, when it would have been a simple matter of retrogenetic surgery to amend any bothersome defect? No, there was nothing wrong with the body that Vox had abandoned and for which she professed such loathing, for which she felt such shame.

Then I realized that I was seeing her from outside. I was seeing her as if by relay, filtering and interpreting the information she was offering me by passing it through the mind of an objective observer: myself. Who understood nothing, really, of what it was like to be anyone but himself.

Somehow—it was one of those automatic, unconscious adjustments—I altered the focus of my perceptions. All old frames of reference fell away and I let myself lose any sense of the separateness of our identities.

I was her. Fully, unconditionally, inextricably.

And I understood.

Figures flitted about her, shadowy, baffling, maddening. Brothers, sisters, parents, friends: They were all strangers to her. Everyone on Kansas Four was a stranger to her. And always would be.

She hated her body not because it was weak or unsightly but because it was her prison. She was enclosed within it as though within narrow stone walls. It hung about her, a cage of flesh, holding her down, pinning her to this lovely world called Kansas Four where she knew only pain and isolation and estrangement. Her body—her perfectly acceptable, healthy body—had become hateful to her because it was the emblem and symbol of her soul’s imprisonment. Wild and incurably restless by temperament, she had failed to find a way to live within the smothering predictability of Kansas Four, a planet where she would never be anything but an internal outlaw. The only way she could leave Kansas Four was to surrender the body that tied her to it; and so she had turned against it with fury and loathing, rejecting it, abandoning it, despising it, detesting it. No one could ever understand that who beheld her from the outside.

But I understood.

I understood much more than that, in that one flashing moment of communion that she and I had. I came to see what she meant when she said that I was her twin, her double, her other self. Of course we were wholly different, I the sober, staid, plodding, diligent man, and she the reckless, volatile, impulsive, tempestuous girl. But beneath all that we were the same: misfits, outsiders, troubled wanderers through worlds we had never made. We had found vastly differing ways to cope with our pain. Yet we were one and the same, two halves of a single entity.

We will remain together always now, I told myself.

And in that moment our communion broke. She broke it—it must have been she, fearful of letting this new intimacy grow too deep—and I found myself apart from her once again, still playing host to her in my brain but separated from her by the boundaries of my own individuality, my own selfhood. I felt her nearby, within me, a warm but discrete presence. Still within me, yes. But separate again.

15.

There was shipwork to do. For days, now, Vox’s invasion of me had been a startling distraction. But I dared not let myself forget that we were in the midst of a traversal of heaven. The lives of us all, and of our passengers, depended on the proper execution of our duties: even mine. And worlds awaited the bounty that we bore. My task of the moment was to oversee spinaround acquisition.

I told Vox to leave me temporarily while I went through the routines of acquisition. I would be jacked to other crewmen for a time; they might very well be able to detect her within me; there was no telling what might happen. But she refused. “No,” she said. “I won’t leave you. I don’t want to go out there. But I’ll hide, deep down, the way I did when I was upset with you.”

“Vox—” I began.

“No. Please. I don’t want to talk about it.”

There was no time to argue the point. I could feel the depth and intensity of her stubborn determination.

“Hide, then,” I said. “If that’s what you want to do.”

I made my way down out of the Eye to Engine Deck.

The rest of the acquisition team was already assembled in the Great Navigation Hall: Fresco, Raebuck, Roacher. Raebuck’s role was to see to it that communications channels were kept open, Fresco’s to set up the navigation coordinates, and Roacher, as power engineer, would monitor fluctuations in drain and input-output cycling. My function was to give the cues at each stage of acquisition. In truth, I was pretty much redundant, since Raebuck and Fresco and Roacher had been doing this sort of thing a dozen times a voyage for scores of voyages and they had little need of my guidance. The deeper truth was that they were redundant too, for 49 Henry Henry would oversee us all, and the intelligence was quite capable of setting up the entire process without any human help. Nevertheless there were formalities to observe, and not inane ones. Intelligences are far superior to humans in mental capacity, interfacing capability, and reaction time, but even so they are nothing but servants, and artificial servants at that, lacking in any real awareness of human fragility or human ethical complexity. They must only be used as tools, not decision-makers. A society which delegates responsibilities of life and death to its servants will eventually find the servants’ hands at its throat. As for me, novice that I was, my role was valid as well: the focal point of the enterprise, the prime initiator, the conductor and observer of the process. Perhaps anyone could perform those functions, but the fact remained that someone had to, and by tradition that someone was the captain. Call it a ritual, call it a highly stylized dance, if you will. But there is no getting away from the human need for ritual and stylization. Such aspects of a process may not seem essential, but they are valuable and significant, and ultimately they can be seen to be essential as well.

“Shall we begin?” Fresco asked.

We jacked up, Roacher directly into the ship, Raebuck into Roacher, Fresco to me, me into the ship.

“Simulation,” I said.

Raebuck keyed in the first code and the vast echoing space that was the Great Navigation Hall came alive with pulsing light: a representation of heaven all about us, the lines of force, the spinaround nodes, the stars, the planets. We moved unhinderedly in free fall, drifting as casually as angels. We could easily have believed we were starwalking.

The simulacrum of the ship was a bright arrow of fierce light just below us and to the left. Ahead, throbbing like a nest of twining angry serpents, was the globe that represented the Lasciate Ogni Speranza spinaround point, tightly-wound dull gray cables shot through with strands of fierce scarlet.

“Enter approach mode,” I said. “Activate receptors. Begin threshold equalization. Begin momentum comparison. Prepare for acceleration uptick. Check angular velocity. Begin spin consolidation. Enter displacement select. Extend mast. Prepare for acquisition receptivity.”

At each command the proper man touched a control key or pressed a directive panel or simply sent an impulse shooting through the jack hookup by which he was connected, directly or indirectly, to the mind of the ship. Out of courtesy to me, they waited until the commands were given, but the speed with which they obeyed told me that their minds were already in motion even as I spoke.

“It’s really exciting, isn’t it?” Vox said suddenly.

“For God’s sake, Vox! What are you trying to do?”

For all I knew, the others had heard her outburst as clearly as though it had come across a loudspeaker.

“I mean,” she went on, “I never imagined it was anything like this. I can feel the whole—”

I shot her a sharp, anguished order to keep quiet. Her surfacing like this, after my warning to her, was a lunatic act. In the silence that followed I felt a kind of inner reverberation, a sulky twanging of displeasure coming from her. But I had no time to worry about Vox’s moods now.

Arcing patterns of displacement power went ricocheting through the Great Navigation Hall as our mast came forth—not the underpinning for a set of sails, as it would be on a vessel that plied planetary seas, but rather a giant antenna to link us to the spinaround point ahead—and the ship and the spinaround point reached toward one another like grappling many-armed wrestlers. Hot streaks of crimson and emerald and gold and amethyst speared the air, vaulting and rebounding. The spinaround point, activated now and trembling between energy states, was enfolding us in its million tentacles, capturing us, making ready to whirl on its axis and hurl us swiftly onward toward the next way-station in our journey across heaven.

“Acquisition,” Raebuck announced.

“Proceed to capture acceptance,” I said.

“Acceptance,” said Raebuck.

“Directional mode,” I said. “Dimensional grid eleven.”

“Dimensional grid eleven,” Fresco repeated.

The whole hall seemed on fire now.

“Wonderful,” Vox murmured. “So beautiful—”

“Vox!”

“Request spin authorization,” said Fresco.

“Spin authorization granted,” I said. “Grid eleven.”

“Grid eleven,” Fresco said again. “Spin achieved.”

A tremor went rippling through me—and through Fresco, through Raebuck, through Roacher. It was the ship, in the persona of 49 Henry Henry, completing the acquisition process. We had been captured by Lasciate Ogni Speranza, we had undergone velocity absorption and redirection, we had had new spin imparted to us, and we had been sent soaring off through heaven toward our upcoming port of call. I heard Vox sobbing within me, not a sob of despair but one of ecstasy, of fulfillment.

We all unjacked. Raebuck, that dour man, managed a little smile as he turned to me.

“Nicely done, Captain,” he said.

“Yes,” said Fresco. “Very nice. You’re a quick learner.”

I saw Roacher studying me with those little shining eyes of his. Go on, you bastard, I thought. You give me a compliment too now, if you know how.

But all he did was stare. I shrugged and turned away. What Roacher thought or said made little difference to me, I told myself.

As we left the Great Navigation Hall in our separate directions Fresco fell in alongside me. Without a word we trudged together toward the transit trackers that were waiting for us. Just as I was about to board mine he—or was it she?—said softly, “Captain?”

“What is it, Fresco?”

Fresco leaned close. Soft sly eyes, tricksy little smile; and yet I felt some warmth coming from the navigator.

“It’s a very dangerous game, Captain.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do,” Fresco said. “No use pretending. We were jacked together in there. I felt things. I know.”

There was nothing I could say, so I said nothing.

After a moment Fresco said, “I like you. I won’t harm you. But Roacher knows too. I don’t know if he knew before, but he certainly knows now. If I were you, I’d find that very troublesome, Captain. Just a word to the wise. All right?”

16.

Only a fool would have remained on such a course as I had been following. Vox saw the risks as well as I. There was no hiding anything from anyone any longer; if Roacher knew, then Bulgar knew, and soon it would be all over the ship. No question, either, but that 49 Henry Henry knew. In the intimacies of our navigation-hall contact, Vox must have been as apparent to them as a red scarf around my forehead.

There was no point in taking her to task for revealing her presence within me like that during acquisition. What was done was done. At first it had seemed impossible to understand why she had done such a thing; but then it became all too easy to comprehend. It was the same sort of unpredictable, unexamined, impulsive behavior that had led her to go barging into a suspended passenger’s mind and cause his death. She was simply not one who paused to think before acting. That kind of behavior has always been bewildering to me. She was my opposite as well as my double. And yet had I not done a Vox-like thing myself, taking her into me, when she appealed to me for sanctuary, without stopping at all to consider the consequences?

“Where can I go?” she asked, desperate. “If I move around the ship freely again they’ll track me and close me off. And then they’ll eradicate me. They’ll—”

“Easy,” I said. “Don’t panic. I’ll hide you where they won’t find you.”

“Inside some passenger?”

“We can’t try that again. There’s no way to prepare the passenger for what’s happening to him, and he’ll panic. No. I’ll put you in one of the annexes. Or maybe one of the virtualities.”

“The what?”

“The additional cargo area. The subspace extensions that surround the ship.”

She gasped. “Those aren’t even real! I was in them, when I was traveling around the ship. Those are just clusters of probability waves!”

“You’ll be safe there,” I said.

“I’m afraid. It’s bad enough that I’m not real any more. But to be stored in a place that isn’t real either—”

“You’re as real as I am. And the outstructures are just as real as the rest of the ship. It’s a different quality of reality, that’s all. Nothing bad will happen to you out there. You’ve told me yourself that you’ve already been in them, right? And got out again without any problems. They won’t be able to detect you there, Vox. But I tell you this, that if you stay in me, or anywhere else in the main part of the ship, they’ll track you down and find you and eradicate you. And probably eradicate me right along with you.”

“Do you mean that?” she said, sounding chastened.

“Come on. There isn’t much time.”

On the pretext of a routine inventory check—well within my table of responsibilities—I obtained access to one of the virtualities. It was the storehouse where the probability stabilizers were kept. No one was likely to search for her there. The chances of our encountering a zone of probability turbulence between here and Cul-de-Sac were minimal; and in the ordinary course of a voyage nobody cared to enter any of the virtualities.

I had lied to Vox, or at least committed a half-truth, by leading her to believe that all our outstructures are of an equal level of reality. Certainly the annexes are tangible, solid; they differ from the ship proper only in the spin of their dimensional polarity. They are invisible except when activated, and they involve us in no additional expenditure of fuel, but there is no uncertainty about their existence, which is why we entrust valuable cargo to them, and on some occasions even passengers.

The extensions are a level further removed from basic reality. They are skewed not only in dimensional polarity but in temporal contiguity: That is, we carry them with us under time displacement, generally ten to twenty virtual years in the past or future. The risks of this are extremely minor and the payoff in reduction of generating cost is great. Still, we are measurably more cautious about what sort of cargo we keep in them.

As for the virtualities—

Their name itself implies their uncertainty. They are purely probabilistic entities, existing most of the time in the stochastic void that surrounds the ship. In simpler words, whether they are actually there or not at any given time is a matter worth wagering on. We know how to access them at the time of greatest probability, and our techniques are quite reliable, which is why we can use them for overflow ladings when our cargo uptake is unusually heavy. But in general we prefer not to entrust anything very important to them, since a virtuality’s range of access times can fluctuate in an extreme way, from a matter of microseconds to a matter of megayears, and that can make quick recall a chancy affair.

Knowing all this, I put Vox in a virtuality anyway.

I had to hide her. And I had to hide her in a place where no one would look. The risk that I’d be unable to call her up again because of virtuality fluctuation was a small one. The risk was much greater that she would be detected, and she and I both punished, if I let her remain in any area of the ship that had a higher order of probability.

“I want you to stay here until the coast is clear,” I told her sternly. “No impulsive journeys around the ship, no excursions into adjoining outstructures, no little trips of any kind, regardless of how restless you get. Is that clear? I’ll call you up from here as soon as I think it’s safe.”

“I’ll miss you, Adam.”

“The same here. But this is how it has to be.”

“I know.”

“If you’re discovered, I’ll deny I know anything about you. I mean that, Vox.”

“I understand.”

“You won’t be stuck in here long. I promise you that.”

“Will you visit me?”

“That wouldn’t be wise,” I said.

“But maybe you will anyway.”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” I opened the access channel. The virtuality gaped before us. “Go on,” I said. “In with you. In. Now. Go, Vox. Go.”

I could feel her leaving me. It was almost like an amputation. The silence, the emptiness, that descended on me suddenly was ten times as deep as what I had felt when she had merely been hiding within me. She was gone, now. For the first time in days, I was truly alone.

I closed off the virtuality.

When I returned to the Eye, Roacher was waiting for me near the command bridge.

“You have a moment, Captain?”

“What is it, Roacher?”

“The missing matrix. We have proof it’s still on board ship.”

“Proof?”

“You know what I mean. You felt it just like I did while we were doing acquisition. It said something. It spoke. It was right in there in the navigation hall with us, Captain.”

I met his luminescent gaze levelly and said in an even voice, “I was giving my complete attention to what we were doing, Roacher. Spinaround acquisition isn’t second nature to me the way it is to you. I had no time to notice any matrixes floating around in there.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. Does that disappoint you?”

“That might mean that you’re the one carrying the matrix,” he said.

“How so?”

“If it’s in you, down on a subneural level, you might not even be aware of it. But we would be. Raebuck, Fresco, me. We all detected something, Captain. If it wasn’t in us, it would have to be in you. We can’t have a matrix riding around inside our captain, you know. No telling how that could distort his judgment. What dangers that might lead us into.”

“I’m not carrying any matrixes, Roacher.”

“Can we be sure of that?”

“Would you like to have a look?”

“A jackup, you mean? You and me?”

The notion disgusted me. But I had to make the offer.

“A—jackup, yes,” I said. “Communion. You and me, Roacher. Right now. Come on, we’ll measure the bandwidths and do the matching. Let’s get this over with.”

He contemplated me a long while, as if calculating the likelihood that I was bluffing. In the end, he must have decided that I was too naïve to be able to play the game out to so hazardous a turn. He knew that I wouldn’t bluff, that I was confident he would find me untenanted or I never would have made the offer.

“No,” he said finally. “We don’t need to bother with that.”

“Are you sure?”

“If you say you’re clean—”

“But I might be carrying her and not even know it,” I said. “You told me that yourself.”

“Forget it. You’d know, if you had her in you.”

“You’ll never be certain of that unless you look. Let’s jack up, Roacher.”

He scowled. “Forget it,” he said again, and turned away. “You must be clean, if you’re this eager for jacking. But I’ll tell you this, Captain. We’re going to find her, wherever she’s hiding. And when we do—”

He left the threat unfinished. I stood staring at his retreating form until he was lost to view.

17.

For a few days everything seemed back to normal. We sped onward toward Cul-de-Sac. I went through the round of my regular tasks, however meaningless they seemed to me. Most of them did. I had not yet achieved any sense that the Sword of Orion was under my command in anything but the most hypothetical way. Still, I did what I had to do.

No one spoke of the missing matrix within my hearing. On those rare occasions when I encountered some other member of the crew while I moved about the ship, I could tell by the hooded look of his eyes that I was still under suspicion. But they had no proof. The matrix was no longer in any way evident on board. The ship’s intelligences were unable to find the slightest trace of its presence.

I was alone, and oh! it was a painful business for me.

I suppose that once you have tasted that kind of round-the-clock communion, that sort of perpetual jacking, you are never the same again. I don’t know: There is no real information available on cases of possession by free matrix, only shipboard folklore, scarcely to be taken seriously. All I can judge by is my own misery now that Vox was actually gone. She was only a half-grown girl, a wild coltish thing, unstable, unformed; and yet, and yet, she had lived within me and we had come toward one another to construct the deepest sort of sharing, what was almost a kind of marriage. You could call it that.

After five or six days, I knew I had to see her again. Whatever the risks.

I accessed the virtuality and sent a signal into it that I was coming in. There was no reply; and for one terrible moment I feared the worst, that in the mysterious workings of the virtuality she had somehow been engulfed and destroyed. But that was not the case. I stepped through the glowing pink-edged field of light that was the gateway to the virtuality, and instantly I felt her near me, clinging tight, trembling with joy.

She held back, though, from entering me. She wanted me to tell her it was safe. I beckoned her in; and then came that sharp warm moment I remembered so well, as she slipped down into my neural network and we became one.

“I can only stay a little while,” I said. “It’s still very chancy for me to be with you.”

“Oh, Adam, Adam, it’s been so awful for me in here—”

“I know. I can imagine.”

“Are they still looking for me?”

“I think they’re starting to put you out of their minds,” I said. And we both laughed at the play on words that that phrase implied.

I didn’t dare remain more than a few minutes. I had only wanted to touch souls with her briefly, to reassure myself that she was all right and to ease the pain of separation. But it was irregular for a captain to enter a virtuality at all. To stay in one for any length of time exposed me to real risk of detection.

But my next visit was longer, and the one after that longer still. We were like furtive lovers meeting in a dark forest for hasty delicious trysts. Hidden there in that not-quite-real outstructure of the ship, we would join our two selves and whisper together with urgent intensity until I felt it was time for me to leave. She would always try to keep me longer; but her resistance to my departure was never great, nor did she ever suggest accompanying me back into the stable sector of the ship. She had come to understand that the only place we could meet was in the virtuality.

We were nearing the vicinity of Cul-de-Sac now. Soon we would go to worldward and the shoreships would travel out to meet us, so that we could download the cargo that was meant for them. It was time to begin considering the problem of what would happen to Vox when we reached our destination.

That was something I was unwilling to face. However I tried, I could not force myself to confront the difficulties that I knew lay just ahead.

But she could.

“We must be getting close to Cul-de-Sac now,” she said.

“We’ll be there soon, yes.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. How I’m going to deal with that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a lost soul,” she said. “Literally. There’s no way I can come to life again.”

“I don’t under—”

“Adam, don’t you see?” she cried fiercely. “I can’t just float down to Cul-de-Sac and grab myself a body and put myself on the roster of colonists. And you can’t possibly smuggle me down there while nobody’s looking. The first time anyone ran an inventory check, or did passport control, I’d be dead. No, the only way I can get there is to be neatly packed up again in my original storage circuit. And even if I could figure out how to get back into that, I’d be simply handing myself over for punishment or even eradication. I’m listed as missing on the manifest, right? And I’m wanted for causing the death of that passenger. Now I turn up again, in my storage circuit. You think they’ll just download me nicely to Cul-de-Sac and give me the body that’s waiting for me there? Not very likely. Not likely that I’ll ever get out of that circuit alive, is it, once I go back in? Assuming I could go back in in the first place. I don’t know how a storage circuit is operated, do you? And there’s nobody you can ask.”

“What are you trying to say, Vox?”

“I’m not trying to say anything. I’m saying it. I have to leave the ship on my own and disappear.”

“No. You can’t do that!”

“Sure I can. It’ll be just like starwalking. I can go anywhere I please. Right through the skin of the ship, out into heaven. And keep on going.”

“To Cul-de-Sac?”

“You’re being stupid,” she said. “Not to Cul-de-Sac, no. Not to anywhere. That’s all over for me, the idea of getting a new body. I have no legal existence any more. I’ve messed myself up. All right: I admit it. I’ll take what’s coming to me. It won’t be so bad, Adam. I’ll go starwalking. Outward and outward and outward, forever and ever.”

“You mustn’t,” I said. “Stay here with me.”

“Where? In this empty storage unit out here?”

“No,” I told her. “Within me. The way we are right now. The way we were before.”

“How long do you think we could carry that off?” she asked.

I didn’t answer.

“Every time you have to jack into the machinery I’ll have to hide myself down deep,” she said. “And I can’t guarantee that I’ll go deep enough, or that I’ll stay down there long enough. Sooner or later they’ll notice me. They’ll find me. They’ll eradicate me and they’ll throw you out of the Service, or maybe they’ll eradicate you too. No, Adam. It couldn’t possibly work. And I’m not going to destroy you with me. I’ve done enough harm to you already.”

“Vox—”

“No. This is how it has to be.”

18.

And this is how it was. We were deep in the Spook Cluster now, and the Vainglory Archipelago burned bright on my realspace screen. Somewhere down there was the planet called Cul-de-Sac. Before we came to worldward of it, Vox would have to slip away into the great night of heaven.

Making a worldward approach is perhaps the most difficult maneuver a starship must achieve; and the captain must go to the edge of his abilities along with everyone else. Novice at my trade though I was, I would be called on to perform complex and challenging processes. If I failed at them, other crewmen might cut in and intervene, or, if necessary, the ship’s intelligences might override; but if that came to pass my career would be destroyed, and there was the small but finite possibility, I suppose, that the ship itself could be gravely damaged or even lost.

I was determined, all the same, to give Vox the best send-off I could.

On the morning of our approach, I stood for a time on Outerscreen Level, staring down at the world that called itself Cul-de-Sac. It glowed like a red eye in the night. I knew that it was the world Vox had chosen for herself, but all the same it seemed repellent to me, almost evil. I felt that way about all the worlds of the shore people now. The Service had changed me; and I knew that the change was irreversible. Never again would I go down to one of those worlds. The starship was my world now.

I went to the virtuality where Vox was waiting.

“Come,” I said, and she entered me.

Together we crossed the ship to the Great Navigation Hall.

The approach team had already gathered: Raebuck, Fresco, Roacher, again, along with Pedregal, who would supervise the downloading of cargo. The intelligence on duty was 612 Jason. I greeted them with quick nods and we jacked ourselves together in approach series.

Almost at once I felt Roacher probing within me, searching for the fugitive intelligence that he still thought I might be harboring. Vox shrank back, deep out of sight. I didn’t care. Let him probe, I thought. This will all be over soon.

“Request approach instructions,” Fresco said.

“Simulation,” I ordered.

The fiery red eye of Cul-de-Sac sprang into vivid representation before us in the hall. On the other side of us was the simulacrum of the ship, surrounded by sheets of white flame that rippled like the blaze of the aurora.

I gave the command and we entered approach mode.

We could not, of course, come closer to planetskin than a million shiplengths, or Cul-de-Sac’s inexorable forces would rip us apart. But we had to line the ship up with its extended mast aimed at the planet’s equator, and hold ourselves firm in that position while the shoreships of Cul-de-Sac came swarming up from their red world to receive their cargo from us.

612 Jason fed me the coordinates and I gave them to Fresco, while Raebuck kept the channels clear and Roacher saw to it that we had enough power for what we had to do. But as I passed the data along to Fresco, it was with every sign reversed. My purpose was to aim the mast not downward to Cul-de-Sac but outward toward the stars of heaven.

At first none of them noticed. Everything seemed to be going serenely. Because my reversals were exact, only the closest examination of the ship’s position would indicate our l80-degree displacement.

Floating in the free fall of the Great Navigation Hall, I felt almost as though I could detect the movements of the ship. An illusion, I knew. But a powerful one. The vast ten-kilometer-long needle that was the Sword of Orion seemed to hang suspended, motionless, and then to begin slowly, slowly to turn, tipping itself on its axis, reaching for the stars with its mighty mast. Easily, easily, slowly, silently—

What joy that was, feeling the ship in my hand!

The ship was mine. I had mastered it.

“Captain,” Fresco said softly.

“Easy on, Fresco. Keep feeding power.”

“Captain, the signs don’t look right—”

“Easy on. Easy.”

“Give me a coordinates check, Captain.”

“Another minute,” I told him.

“But—”

“Easy on, Fresco.”

Now I felt restlessness too from Pedregal, and a slow chilly stirring of interrogation from Raebuck; and then Roacher probed me again, perhaps seeking Vox, perhaps simply trying to discover what was going on. They knew something was wrong, but they weren’t sure what it was.

We were nearly at full extension, now. Within me there was an electrical trembling: Vox rising through the levels of my mind, nearing the surface, preparing for departure.

“Captain, we’re turned the wrong way!” Fresco cried.

“I know,” I said. “Easy on. We’ll swing around in a moment.”

“He’s gone crazy!” Pedregal blurted.

I felt Vox slipping free of my mind. But somehow I found myself still aware of her movements, I suppose because I was jacked into 6l2 Jason and 6l2 Jason was monitoring everything. Easily, serenely, Vox melted into the skin of the ship.

“Captain!” Fresco yelled, and began to struggle with me for control.

I held the navigator at arm’s length and watched in a strange and wonderful calmness as Vox passed through the ship’s circuitry all in an instant and emerged at the tip of the mast, facing the stars. And cast herself adrift.

Because I had turned the ship around, she could not be captured and acquired by Cul-de-Sac’s powerful navigational grid, but would be free to move outward into heaven. For her it would be a kind of floating out to sea, now. After a time, she would be so far out that she could no longer key into the shipboard bioprocessors that sustained the patterns of her consciousness, and, though the web of electrical impulses that was the Vox matrix would travel outward and onward forever, the set of identity responses that was Vox herself would lose focus soon, would begin to waver and blur. In a little while, or perhaps not so little, but inevitably, her sense of herself as an independent entity would be lost. Which is to say, she would die.

I followed her as long as I could. I saw a spark traveling across the great night. And then nothing.

“All right,” I said to Fresco. “Now let’s turn the ship the right way around and give them their cargo.”

19.

That was many years ago. Perhaps no one else remembers those events, which seem so dreamlike now even to me. The Sword of Orion has carried me nearly everwhere in the galaxy since then. On some voyages I have been captain; on others, a downloader, a supercargo, a mind-wiper, even sometimes a push-cell. It makes no difference how we serve, in the Service.

I often think of her. There was a time when thinking of her meant coming to terms with feelings of grief and pain and irrecoverable loss, but no longer, not for many years. She must be long dead now, however durable and resilient the spark of her might have been. And yet she still lives. Of that much I am certain. There is a place within me where I can reach her warmth, her strength, her quirky vitality, her impulsive suddenness. I can feel those aspects of her, those gifts of her brief time of sanctuary within me, as a living presence still, and I think I always will, as I make my way from world to tethered world, as I journey onward everlastingly spanning the dark light-years in this great ship of heaven.

© 1987 by Agberg, Ltd.

Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Robert Silverberg—four-time Hugo Award-winner, five-time winner of the Nebula Award, SFWA Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame honoree—is the author of nearly five hundred short stories, nearly one hundred-and-fifty novels, and is the editor of in the neighborhood of one hundred anthologies. Among his most famous works are Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. Learn more at www.majipoor.com.

Novel Excerpt: Shaman
Kim Stanley Robinson

We had a bad shaman.

This is what Thorn would say whenever he was doing something bad himself. Object to whatever it was and he would pull up his long gray braids to show the mangled red nubbins surrounding his earholes. His shaman had stuck bone needles through the flesh of his boys’ ears and then ripped them out sideways, to help them remember things. Thorn when he wanted the same result would flick Loon hard on the ear and then point at the side of his own head, with a tilted look that said, You think you have it bad?

Now he had Loon gripped by the arm and was hauling him along the ridge trail to Pika’s Rock, on the overlook between Upper and Lower Valleys. Late afternoon, low clouds rolling overhead, brushing the higher ridges and the moor, making a gray roof to the world. Under it a little line of men on a ridge trail, following Thorn on shaman’s business. It was time for Loon’s wander.

— Why tonight? Loon protested. — A storm is coming, you can see it.

— We had a bad shaman.

And so here they were. The men all gave Loon a hug, grinning ruefully at him and shaking their heads. He was going to have a miserable night, their looks said. Thorn waited for them to finish, then croaked the start of the good-bye song:

This is how we always start

It’s time to be reborn a man

Give yourself to Mother Earth

She will help you if you ask

— If you ask nicely enough, he added, slapping Loon on the shoulder. Then a lot of laughing, the men’s eyes sardonic or encouraging as they divested him of his clothes and his belt and his shoes, everything passed over to Thorn, who glared at him as if on the verge of striking him. Indeed when Loon was entirely naked and without possessions Thorn did strike him, but it was just a quick backhand to the chest. — Go. Be off. See you at full moon.

If the sky were clear, there would have been the first sliver of a new moon hanging in the west. Thirteen days to wander, therefore, starting with nothing, just as a shaman’s first wander always started. This time with a storm coming. And in the fourth month, with snow still on the ground.

Loon kept his face blank and stared at the western horizon. To beg for a month’s delay would be undignified, and anyway useless. So Loon looked past Thorn with a stony gaze and began to consider his route down to the Lower Valley creekbed, where knots of trees lined the creek. Being barefoot made a difference, because the usual descent from Pika’s Rock was very rocky, possibly so rocky he needed to take another way. First decision of many he had to get right. — Friend Raven there behind the sky, he chanted aloud, — lead me now without any tricks!

— Good luck getting Raven to help, Thorn said. But Loon was from the raven clan and Thorn wasn’t, so Loon ignored that and stared down the slope, trying to see a way. Thorn slapped him again and led the other men back down the ridge. Loon stood alone, the wind cutting into him. Time to start his wander.

But it wasn’t clear which way to get down. For a time it seemed like he might freeze there, might never start his life’s journey.

So I came up in him and gave him a little lift from within.

I am the third wind.

He took off down the rocks. He looked back once to show his teeth to Thorn, but they were out of sight down the ridge. Off he plunged, flinging the thought of Thorn from him. Under his feet the broken gritstone was flecked with pock snow, which collected in dimples and against nobbles in a pattern that helped him see where to step. Go as agile as a cat, down rock to rock, hands ready to grab and help down little jumps. His toes chilled and he abandoned them to their cold fate, focused on keeping his hands warm. He would need his hands down in the trees. It began to snow, just a first little pricksnow. The slope had big snow patches that were easier on his feet than the rocks.

He tightened his ribs and pushed his heat out into his limbs and skin, grunting until he blazed a little, and the pricksnow melted when it touched him. Sometimes the only heat to be had is in hurry.

He clambered down and across the boulder-choked ravine seaming the floor of Lower Valley, across the little stream. On the other side he was able to run up the thin forest floor, which was all too squishy, as the ground was wet with rain and snowmelt. Here he avoided the patches of snow. First day of the fourth month: it was going to be trouble to make a fire. The night would be ever so much more comfortable if he could make a fire.

The upper end of Lower Valley was a steep womb canyon. A small cluster of spruce and alder surrounded the spring there, which started the valley’s creek. There he would find shelter from the wind, and branches for clothing, and under the trees there wouldn’t be much snow left. He hurried up to this grove, careful not to stub his senseless toes.

In the little copse around the spring he tore at live spruce branches and broke several off, cursing their wetness, but even damp their needles would hold some of his heat against him. He wove two spruce branches together and stuck his head through a middle gap in the weave, making it into a rough cloak.

Then he broke off a dead bit of brush pine root to serve as the base of his firestarter. Near the spring he found a good rock to use as a chopper, and with it cut a straight dead alder branch for his firestick. His fingers were just pliable enough to hold the rock. Otherwise he didn’t feel particularly cold, except in his feet, which were pretending not to be there. The black mats of spruce needles under the trees were mostly free of snow. He crouched under one of the biggest trees and forced his toes into the mat of needles and wiggled them as hard as he could. When they began to burn a little he pulled them out and went looking for duff. Even the best fire kit needs some duff to burn.

He reached into the center of dead spruce logs, feeling for duff or punk. He found some punk that was only a little damp, then broke off handfuls of dead twigs tucked under the protection of larger branches. The twigs were damp on their outsides, but dry inside; they would burn. There were some larger dead branches he could break off too. The grove had enough dead wood to supply a fire once it got going. It was a question of duff or punk. Neither spruce nor alder rotted to a good punk, so he would have to be lucky, or maybe find some ant-eaten wood. He got on his knees and started grubbing around under the biggest downed trees, avoiding the snow, turning over bigger branches and shoving around in the dirt trying to find something. He got dirty to the elbows, but then again that would help keep him warm.

Which might matter, as he could not find any dry punk, or any duff at all. He squeezed water out of one very rotten mass of wood, but the brown goo that remained in his hand resembled dead moss or mullein, and was still damp. The firestick’s rough tip would never light such shit.

— Please, he said to the grove. He begged its forgiveness for cursing as he had approached it. — Give me some punk, please goddess.

Nothing. It became too cold for him to keep kneeling on the wet ground digging in downed logs. To make some heat in him he got up and danced. With this effort he could warm his hands, and it was important they not go numb like his feet had. Oh, a fire would make the night so much more comfortable! Surely something could be found here that would burn under the heat of his firestick’s tip!

Nothing. His belt contained in its fold many little gooseskin bags in which there were spark flints, dry moss, firestick, and base. Dressed and carrying all his things, he could have survived this night and the fortnight to follow in style. Which was why he had been sent out naked: the point of the wander was to prove you could start with nothing but yourself, and not just survive but prosper. He needed to come back into camp on the night of the full moon in good style.

But first he had to get through this night. He began to work hard in his dance, throwing his arms around, spinning his hands in big circles. He sang a hot song and wiggled all over. After doing this for a while, everything but his feet began to burn. But he was also getting tired. He tried to find a balance between the cold and his efforts, walking in a tight circle while also inspecting the forest floor for likely punk and duff shelters. Nothing!

In every grove some wood will burn.

This was one of the sayings that Heather often repeated, though seldom when talking about fire. Loon said it aloud, emphatically, beseechingly: — In every grove some wood will burn! But on this night he wasn’t convinced. It only made him mad.

Dig!

He went at the underside of a log, which had broken over another one in its fall, a long time ago. They were two crossing mounds of dirt, almost; not an impossible source. But at this moment, wet through and through. And cold.

When he saw how it was, he beat his fist on the soft wet logs. Then he had to start walking in circles again.

Later, more digging into another log gained him only a knot that was still hard, with two spurs extending away from it at an angle much like the angle needed to make a spear thrower. He replaced his first firestarter base with this flat knot, which was better. His alder firestick still looked good. All was ready, if only he had something dry enough to catch fire.

And if only it would stop raining so hard. For a while it pelted down, cold enough to be a little sleety, and all on a gusty wind. In the hard gusts it was like getting hit with cold sand. He simply had to take shelter, and so he crawled under a spruce with big branches right against the ground, where he could snuggle in tight around the trunk and feel only a few drips on him, a few tickles of wind. The spruce needles were scratchy and the ground was cold, but he flexed his shoulder up and down, and sang a hot song and swore vengeance against Thorn. Talk about bad shamans!

But all boys have to become men one way or another. Their wanders had to be trials of skill and endurance. Hunters’ wanders were just as bad. And other packs’ shamans insisted on even harder trials, it was said.

Loon banished Thorn again. He tested all the branches at the bottom of the spruce. If a dead one could be broken, a dead one well dried but still a little resiny, possibly he could pulverize a spot in it with a rock point and make a mash of splinters fine enough to catch fire under the spin of the firestick. Worth a try, and the effort itself would help keep him warm.

But it turned out there didn’t seem to be a branch around the bottom of this tree that he could break.

When the rain let off, he squirmed back out and crawled around under the other spruces looking for such a branch. His hands were so cold he could scarcely grasp the branches to test them.

After a while he had broken off a few likely-looking branches. If he could get a fire started in one of them, the others would be good wood to feed to it.

He found an adequate hearth rock, and a better smasher rock. He took the best one of his dead dry spruce branches and placed it on the hearth, then hit it with the smasher. It resisted, and it was clear it would take a while to get it right, but it seemed promising. Smash smash smash. He had to be more careful than usual not to catch a finger, his hands were so clumsy. Once two years before he had smashed a fingertip, and it was still fat and a little numb at the end, its flat claw lined with grooves. He called that finger Fatty. So he hit his smasher on the side of the broken branch very carefully, once or twice hitting the hearth instead. A spark or two from those accidents made him long for his flint firestrikers. A few scattered sparks were not going to be enough to do it on a night like this. The wet wind whooshed its laughter at him, loud in the trees.

Eventually a spot on the side of his target branch was squashed into a splay of splinters, perfectly dry. He sat cross-legged with his body arched over the branch, and it seemed like the mash of splinters might burn. Breathing hard, warm except for his feet, he crawled under the best of the spruces in his grove and arranged his new kit around him. Smashed branch on the hearth rock, held there between his feet; firestick placed almost upright in the mash of splinters on the branch, held at its tilt between his palms. All set: spin the firestick back and forth.

Back and forth, back and forth between his hands, gently pushing the point of the stick down into the branch. Back and forth, back and forth. His palms ran down the stick with the force of his pushing down, and when they reached the lower end of the stick he had to grasp it with one hand, put the other against the top, and move up and catch it and begin over again, with as little a pause as he could manage. Meanwhile it kept raining outside the shelter of the spruce, and under it, even right against the trunk, drips were dripping. Really it began to look impossible, given the conditions. But he didn’t want to admit that. It would get an awful lot colder the moment he admitted that.

After a long time, maybe a fist or more, he had to give up, at least on this branch. The mash of splinters was a bit too massy, and after a while, a little damp. He could get the spot just under the firestick so hot that it slightly burned his fingertip to touch it, and the splinters around that spot had even blackened a little, but they would not burst into flame.

Loon sat there. This was going to be a hard thing to tell Thorn about, assuming he survived to tell the tale. The old sorcerer would flick him on the ears for sure. You had to be able to start a fire, anytime, anywhere; the worse conditions were, the more important it got. Thorn, like most of the shamans at the corroboree, was exceptionally good with fire, and had spent a lot of time with Loon and the other kids, teaching them the tricks. He had put a firestick to their forearms and spun it, to teach them how hot the spinning got. Eventually Loon had learned how to make fire no matter how the old man complicated the task. But there had always been some dry duff, one way or another.

Now he crawled out from under the spruce and stood up, sobbing with frustration, and danced until the cold was held off him by a thin envelope of sweat. When the rain let up a little, he steamed. Already he was hungry, but there was nothing for it. Time to chew on a pebble and think about other things. Chew a pebble and dance in the rain. Cold or not, this was his wander. When daylight came at last he would find better shelter, find some dry duff, find an abri or some smaller overhang. Begin outfitting himself for his return at full moon. He would walk into camp fully clothed, belly full, spear in hand! Clothed in lion skins! Beartooth necklace draped around his neck! He saw it all inside his eyes. He shouted the story of it at the night.

After a while he sat again under the best spruce, his head on his knees, arms wrapped around his legs. Then he got back out and shuffled around in the grove, looking for a better tuck, finding one after another and testing them. If they were good, he added them to a growing little round of camps, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. He chanted for long stretches, cursed Thorn from time to time. May your pizzle fall off, may a lion eat you . . . Then also from time to time he would shout things out loud. — It’s cold! Thorn would sometimes howl his thoughts that way, using old words from the shamans’ language, words that sounded like the things themselves: Esh var kalt! Esh var k-k-k-kaaaal-TEE!

He stubbed a big toe and only felt it in the bone; the flesh was numb. More curses. May the ravens shit on you, may your babies die . . . Lie on the ground under one big spruce, only his kneecaps and toes and the palms of hands and his forehead touching the earth. Push himself up and down with his arms, staying rigid. If only he could fuck the earth to get warm, but it was too cold, he couldn’t get his poor pizzle to antler, it was as numb as his toes, and would hurt like crazy when it next warmed up, prickle and burn till he cried. Maybe if he thought of that girl from the Lion pack, a raven like him, therefore forbidden to him, supposedly, but they had made eyes anyway, and it would warm him to think of plunging her. Or Sage, from his own pack.

That line of thought trapped some time: seeing it all inside his eyelids, seeing her spread her legs to him. Be there inside her kolby, forget this cold rain. Her kolby, her baginaren, her vixen. Start a little fire behind his belly button, get his prong to spurt. But it was too cold. He could only mash the poor flesh around and make it burn a little, warm it in the hope it would not get frostbit. That would be so bad.

After a time the rain relented. The sky’s cloudy dark gray seemed a bit lighter. No moon, no stars to tell him how close dawn was. But it felt close. It had to be close. It had been a long, long night.

He stood and swayed. It was surely a lighter gray overhead. He sang a hot song, he sang a song to the sun. He called for the sun, the great god of warmth and good cheer. He was tired and cold. But he wasn’t so cold he would die. He would make it to dawn, he could feel it. This was his wander, this was how a shaman was born. He howled til his throat was raw.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Excerpted from Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Excerpted by permission of Orbit Books.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Kim Stanley Robinson is the bestselling author of sixteen novels, including three series: the Mars trilogy, the Three Californias trilogy, and the Science in the Capitol trilogy. He is also the author of about seventy short stories, much of which has been collected in the retrospective volume The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson. He is the winner of two Hugos, two Nebulas, six Locus Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His other latest novels are Galileo’s Dream and 2312.

Novel Excerpt: The Palace Job
Patrick Weekes

One

The rulers of the Republic lived atop the great flying city of Heaven’s Spire, their magnificent palaces soaring above the world. From their great manses in the sky came the laws and decrees that kept the country in motion, and the commoners on the ground could look up every morning and see their rulers overhead.

The prisoners of the Republic lived beneath the great city of Heaven’s Spire, scouring the lapiscaela whose magic kept the city aloft. For their terrible crimes, each man and woman served a life sentence, clinging to the pipes with only a mile of empty air beneath them. There was no chance of release, no hope of escape.

Today, however, Loch intended to change that.

“You sure this is the best way?” Kail asked. Like Loch, he clung upside-down to the pipes that anchored the lapiscaela in place, gripping a side-rail with one hand and his scouring broom with the other.

Loch nodded, giving him a lopsided grin, but said nothing. She was a tall, dark-skinned woman, muscular enough that she hadn’t needed the protection of the women’s gangs when she’d arrived last month. Her only concession to safety had been the silence she had maintained since arriving. An old superstition among the Republic’s criminals held that old magic in the lapiscaela would steal the souls of prisoners who talked near them.

“Jeridan doesn’t have what we need yet,” Kail noted, “and we still haven’t talked price.”

Loch shrugged. They had to move while they were still newcomers, watched carefully and checked for signs of resistance. And, frankly, if she had to clean a damn magical rock with a damn magical broom one more time, she was going to go crazy and jump.

“Your confidence is inspiring, Captain. I’d follow you to the ends of the world if we weren’t already in prison.” Kail grinned sourly, his teeth bright white against his dark face, and swung himself upright. His leg-chain rattled against the pipes. “Whenever you’re ready. No sense in putting in a full day’s work.”

Loch pulled herself up, her scouring broom tucked casually under one arm, so that they stood atop the pipe grid. Around them, other prisoners scurried, dull gray in their prison worksuits and lit from below by the great magical stones that kept the city in the sky.

A double grid of pipes secured the lapiscaela. During the day, when they caught light reflected from the great mirrors that hung along the rim of Heaven’s Spire, the power of the enormous violet crystals held the city aloft, and the upper grid of pipes held them in place. At night, the stones sank down to rest in the lower grid, which held them safely while reserve-enchantments kept the city aloft until sunrise.

It was vital that the lapiscaela remain free of dust or grime to maximize the absorption of sunlight. When the ancient magic that polished the crystals had failed, the most dangerous prisoners in the Republic had been pulled into unwilling service in what had come to be called the Cleaners, scouring the lapiscaela with special brooms made to clear away the toughest dirt without risking a damaging scratch to the crystal surface. It was said that in the Cleaners, a prisoner’s broom was worth more than his life.

Loch looked around, held her scouring broom out at arm’s length, and let it go.

The broom clanged off the lapiscaelum they’d been assigned to clean, rang off the lower grid, and then fell into the distance.

Kail shook his head. “That should get their atten—”

“Broken chain!”

Loch and Kail turned toward the call, as did every prisoner on the grid. The rattle of leg-chains and the slow grunts of labor went deathly still.

“It’s Soggs!” someone called. “South side. He’s still got a grip!”

Loch took the grid-path at a run, one hand grabbing the cross-pipes for balance as she dashed along the narrow surface, the other yanking on her leg-chain as it rattled and jangled behind her. Kail was close behind. The other prisoners watched them run by, some shouting encouragement, most silent. “Which rock? Upper grid or lower?” Kail shouted.

“The Tooth! Lower grid!” Loch grimaced at the reply. The lapiscaela were irregularly shaped, like natural boulders. The Tooth was a jagged stalactite that hung down like a dragon’s fang, its irregular shape so unusual that it necessitated a special frame to lock it into place. The Tooth had killed more men than any other stone on the grid. At the Cleaners, prisoners kept track of that sort of thing.

Loch and Kail had almost reached the Tooth when their pipes hit a junction.

“Guard!” Kail hollered. “We’ve got a man loose!”

Loch hit the corner as if she hadn’t seen it, and her leg-chain snapped taut with a metallic twang that echoed across the grid.

Looking down, Loch could see Soggs—an older man, not a killer, probably in for something he wrote or said or sang—clinging to a tiny spur on the great violet stone. His leg-chain snapped and jingled as he struggled to pull himself up.

“Guard!” Kail’s voice bounced tinny echoes off the shadowed grid. “Switch me over!”

There was no way Loch could reach Soggs, not if she kept an arm on the pipes, probably not even if she leapt and trusted in her leg-chain to hold both their weights. She gripped the pipes until her knuckles turned white, keeping a scream of frustration in check through sheer willpower.

There were murderers and worse at the Cleaners. Soggs wasn’t one of them.

“Guard!” Kail hollered up to the observation level. “Move your damn ass!”

In the maze of gray metal pipes lit from below by the vivid glow of the lapiscaela, the prisoners were completely alone.

“It’s too far, Loch.” Kail gripped the pipes.

Loch nodded, then extended a hand without looking at Kail.

With a sigh, he handed her his broom. “Soggs! She’s coming!”

Soggs could see Loch through the grid of pipes between them. He looked into her dark eyes and nodded even as his sweat-slicked hands began to slip.

When she leapt, her whole body stretched to a single line that shattered into pain when her leg-chain stopped her fall. Soggs leapt as best he could for the broom she held extended for him.

He was perhaps a handbreadth short.

If he’d had a foothold to give him purchase, he might have reached her, even with Loch stuck on the wrong pipe and too far away.

Instead, one more prisoner escaped the Cleaners the only way he could.

He was too small to see after a few seconds, but everyone kept looking. The grid was silent but for the soft tinkle of chains tapping the pipes, and the regular, rusty squeak as Loch swung back and forth, her shackle digging into her ankle and the useless broom clutched in both hands.

Then Tawyer, one of the guards, slowly clambered down from one of the topside hatches, grunting as he hopped down. “You don’t watch your tone, Kail, you’ll spend the night dangling,” he said easily. “Guards don’t come down without a flying charm, no matter how you holler.” He stepped lightly past where Kail stood silent and tight-fisted, then looked down at Loch. “So, your mute friend slipped, did she? Hey, Loch, you hold onto that broom or it’s coming out of your hide!”

Tawyer chuckled. “Don’t worry, boy. You two are good workers. We won’t let her fall.” He unlocked Kail’s leg-chain, locked it back onto another pipe, and gestured for Kail to help Loch. “Byn-kodar’s hell,” he added with a laugh that echoed off the silent grid, “I had money on her to catch the bastard!”

Warden Orris huffed into the medical clinic where Prisoner Loch was being tended for cuts on her leg. Her hands and feet were shackled, as were those of Jeridan, a prisoner stocking supplies under a guard’s watchful eye. Most prisoners hunched over a bit or shuffled when the shackles were put on, but Loch sat calmly, back straight, as a nurse applied the bandages.

This had to be handled carefully, Loch thought. Too soft, and he’d ignore it. Too hard, and he’d snap right here. She gave him a look devoid of anger or curiosity.

She knew Warden Orris didn’t like her. It was probably her Urujar blood. Orris acted like he had Old Kingdom blood, and a dark-skinned woman who didn’t act properly respectful would naturally put his back up. The fact that she was only half-Urujar would make him even angrier.

Orris waved the nurse and the guard out of the room, then stood before Loch, waiting expectantly. Jeridan put tools on the shelf, his shackles jangling.

“The guards tell me you lost a broom today,” Orris finally said, pulling his jowly cheeks into a friendly smile. “Dropped your own and took someone else’s to make up for it.”

Loch said nothing.

“That’s the story I heard, anyway. If you have a different story, I’d like to hear it.” Orris gave her an encouraging smile.

She still said nothing.

“Loch, I want to help you here,” Orris said, frowning. “I’ve tolerated this attitude . . . but that equipment you lost has to be paid for . . . one way or another.” He tried a different smile this time. Across the room, Jeridan blanched and went back to stocking the shelves with jerky movements. His chains rattled more loudly.

A long and silent moment passed.

Orris wore a saber while at work, and he yanked the blade from its sheath now. It was a fine weapon, with a brass-plated guard, contoured mahogany grip, and a name worked into the blade in intricate calligraphy. He leveled it at Loch. “What happened to Soggs can happen to you! You will give me the respect I deserve!”

After another long moment, Loch gave him a low bow and shot him the tiniest suggestion of a smirk. He glared at her, so intent on catching the look that he completely missed the quick motion that sent several small tools into Jeridan’s prison worksuit.

“Have it your way!” Orris shouted, and turned and left without a backward look.

When Orris was gone, Loch grinned. Perfect.

She tapped the metal frame of the bed gently, catching Jeridan’s eye. She raised an eyebrow, and the other prisoner grinned, gave her a tiny nod, and went back to stocking the supplies as the guard and nurse came back in.

Back in his own office, Orris growled and tossed his grandfather’s calvary saber onto the chair. Stupid, getting flustered like that. He was in charge. He could take care of her if she wouldn’t learn respect. But he couldn’t kill her—the Voyancy was already going to investigate the death of Soggs.

Orris hung his grandfather’s sword back up and asked his secretary to send for another prisoner.

Akus arrived a few minutes later, a burly man shuffling jerkily in the leg-shackles. He’d torn the sleeves off the gray worksuit, revealing ropy masses of muscle and knife scars along both arms. Orris should have disciplined him for damaging his worksuit, but the big man bowed low, then grinned and said, “Afternoon, Chief,” and Orris decided to let it slide.

“I need a certain woman to have an accident.” Orris smiled. “She needs to live, and I’ll have to dangle you for a night afterward, but it’ll pay.”

Akus snorted. “Pay don’t much matter. She’s gotta live, you said?”

Orris nodded. “But anything short of killing her is fine.” He leaned forward. “Anything.”

Akus’s mouth twisted into a broken-toothed grin.

The guards carried truncheons in the dining hall, as the dining hall was the only place aside from their own cells in which the prisoners were left unshackled. If the truncheons failed, the warden could activate a single crystal and send eldritch beams of energy sizzling across the metal floors, driving the prisoners to their knees in agony.

Riots ended quickly at the Cleaners.

Loch and Kail were waiting in line when Akus walked up and, without preamble, slammed his elbow into Loch’s shoulder. “Hey!” he shouted. “Watch it! You messin’ with me?”

“Watch yourself,” Kail shot back. “She didn’t —” Akus flung out an arm, and Kail staggered back. Kail grabbed for a sword that hadn’t been at his waist since his old military days with Loch, then lifted a flimsy tin dining tray. He stopped when a guard’s truncheon tapped gently on his shoulder.

“Settle down, son,” Tawyer said affably. “You don’t want more trouble.” Using his truncheon, he gently steered Kail away from Akus and Loch.

“You messin’ with me?” Akus blocked Loch’s path as she tried to walk around him. “You say you’re sorry real nice, maybe I’ll forget about it.” Seeing the crowd of prisoners slowly gathering around them, Akus grinned. “I like you breaking your vow of silence just for me.”

Loch’s eyes narrowed to thin slits, and she looked back at Kail. Kail gestured minutely at Tawyer, and Loch gave him a tiny nod, then turned around to walk the other way.

Akus’s shove sent her crashing into a flimsy bench that shattered under the impact, leaving her face-down in a pile of splintered wood. “Don’t you walk away from me!”

“Got what you asked for,” Jeridan murmured as Kail stepped back into the crowd, which was starting to yell encouragement now. “But it’s going to cost you.”

“I’m a bit shy,” Kail said, not making eye contact, “but if you’re interested in a wager . . .”

“Always.” Jeridan was in the Cleaners for winning a lot of money from very important people.

As Loch pushed herself to her knees, Akus kicked her hard in the side. “You’re not gonna say my name, now. You’re gonna scream it!”

“I’d take twenty at four to one,” Kail said by way of opening.

Loch struggled back to her feet, and Akus strode over, shouting for the crowd, and pulled her to her feet by her thick black ponytail. She lashed out as she rose, her fists bloodying Akus’s nose, and then broke his grip and slammed a fist into his broad gut.

Akus grunted and took Loch clear off her feet with a single backhand. She rolled and came up, shaking her head.

“You had your chance,” Akus growled. “Pulling your hair’s the least I’m gonna do.”

“Two to one,” Jeridan countered. “And at least a hundred, or why are we even talking?”

“Fifty at three to one. I’m no good for a hundred.”

“Five to two?”

“I can do that,” Kail said, and the two men shook on it.

Loch lunged in with high, fast jabs, but Akus had his hands up in a brawler’s guard, and Kail heard him laughing as the smaller woman pounded his arms ineffectually. Then he ducked down, wrapped his arms around her knees, and yanked up. Loch slammed back onto the metal floor with a hiss of breath and rolled away desperately.

The crowd roared its approval.

“I’m impressed by your confidence,” Jeridan said conversationally. “But really, against Akus?”

“Akus is the mighty oak,” Kail said, “but Loch is the slender reed.”

Pausing to acknowledge the cheers, Akus grinned, then looked to the dining hall doorway. Warden Orris was standing there, a mad leer on his face. He gave Akus a little nod.

As Loch pushed herself to her knees, leaning on the wall for support, Akus raised one boot to crush her spine.

The boot slammed into the wall a fraction of a second after Loch darted to the side, and Akus staggered. Loch’s kick snapped into the back of his leg, and Akus crashed to his knees.

“And sometimes,” Kail added, “the slender reed kicks the crap out of the mighty oak.”

Loch slammed the heel of her palm into Akus’s jaw with a crack that silenced the room, then hammered Akus’s temple with an elbow. An uppercut snapped his head back up and sprayed blood across the room, and Loch grabbed a fistful of his hair and finished it by pulling him into a knee to the face.

Jeridan closed his mouth and looked at Kail.

Kail nodded thoughtfully. “So, about the one-twenty-five you owe me, and those items I wanted to buy . . .”

Akus wasn’t moving. Loch pulled her blood-spattered gray worksuit back into place. She looked to the doorway, staring at Orris for a long moment. Then she sniffed, picked up her dining tray, and returned to the serving line.

Loch’s silence since arriving at the Cleaners wasn’t uncommon. The criminals who believed that the lapiscaela would catch the words and steal their souls often didn’t talk for the first few weeks, until fear and loneliness and grim acceptance broke the barriers down.

In the small cell she shared with Kail, Loch kept her silence, saying not a single word.

Not aloud, anyway.

Are we clear? she signed to Kail. He had top bunk—Loch hated hearing him snore beneath her—and had swung his upper body down over the edge to look at her from above.

“Jeridan will get us the goods tomorrow,” he said quietly. “You okay?”

Fine, she signed. Hurry. Not much time.

“You think the warden will move that soon?” Kail frowned. “Seems fast after sending the thug at you today.”

Tomorrow. The sign-language she and Kail and learned as scouts didn’t allow for nuance, but she put a fierce snap into each gesture. He killed before.

“I’m sorry about Soggs.” Kail sighed, then shrugged. “Did give you a chance to piss off the warden even more, though.”

After a moment of silence, Kail’s large eyes closed, two points of white blinking shut in the dim light. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

Soggs was a civilian.

“I know, Loch. I’m sorry.”

Fight the enemy, not their people. When Kail had joined her unit, that was the first thing she’d taught him. It was the first thing she’d learned herself when she’d joined, years before that. Every scout in the Republic’s army learned that phrase, signed or spoke it before every mission. They were soldiers, not thieves, not murderers.

“I know.” Kail sighed. “Tomorrow, then. Assuming the warden is as blood-crazy as he seems.”

Tomorrow. Follow the plan. It will be okay.

“Where have I heard that before?” Kail shook his head and pulled himself back up onto the top bunk.

She’d caught the brief flash of his white teeth in the darkness, though, and the smile meant a lot that night.

When the prisoners lined up at the supply station desk that morning, Warden Orris was there alongside Tawyer. The change in routine had the prisoners nervously murmuring to each other. The warden greeted each prisoner as Tawyer switched the shackles for the leg-chain, handed them their broom, and called out their assignment.

“Morning, Rastik. How’s block C treating you? Lewerryn, you take it easy today, you hear? Haha!”

“Got it?” Kail murmured to Jeridan as they neared the desk. Loch was in front of them.

“Of course.” Jeridan rocked gently and bumped into Kail, who staggered and pushed him back into place. A small, cloth-covered bundle disappeared into the sleeves of Kail’s worksuit.

“Morning, Loch!” Orris said jovially. “Let’s hope you run into less trouble today than yesterday! Haha!”

Loch stepped up to Tawyer and wordlessly held out her shackled arms.

“Not today, I think,” Warden Orris said easily. “The lady lost a broom, nearly fell, got into a fight. She can keep the arm shackles on today. Hell, those Urujar are more comfortable in chains anyway, right?”

Tawyer chuckled weakly. “I have to sign off for each pair of shackles—”

“Just mark it down, Tawyer. Here, let me put my initials by it.” Orris grabbed the pen. “There. Take her legs, though. Can’t wear your leg shackles and the leg-chain.”

“Right, sir.” Tawyer didn’t meet Loch’s stare as she stepped onto the stand to have her leg shackles removed. “Here, I’ll just—”

“No, no, Tawyer. Give her this leg-chain, here.” Orris produced one with a smile. “Fasten it good and tight, too. I’d be real sad if anything should happen to her.”

Tawyer fastened the leg-chain. “Where would you like—”

“The Tooth, I think.” Warden Orris nodded thoughtfully. “She was so eager to get there yesterday, after all. Put them on the lower grid. In fact, why don’t you go ahead and walk them there yourself?” He gave Loch a wide smile. “You take care now, girl.”

Tawyer did Kail’s shackles and leg-chain in silence, then snapped a single-use flying charm secure on his shoulder and followed them to the hatch nearest the Tooth. He carefully fastened each of their leg-chains to one of several vertical pipes labeled with different grid sections. They climbed down a short metal pipe along a rusted iron ladder, their leg-chains squeaking and rattling beside them.

At the bottom, Tawyer had to float a bit to get around them. “Go on,” he muttered. “You know which way it is.”

“He’s gonna kill her,” Kail said conversationally.

“That kind of talk gets a man a night dangling down under, Uru.”

They started moving, Loch in the lead since her chain was connected to the pipe ahead of Kail’s. They followed the pipe along the narrow walkway, the cold morning air still tasting of the metal of the grid.

“You think the warden can kill two prisoners in one week and not be investigated?” Kail asked. “When the heat comes down on the warden, who do you think he’ll blame?”

“You just stay careful.” Tawyer prodded Kail with his truncheon. “Can’t blame the warden for getting angry. Byn-kodar’s hell, all she had to do was show a little respect!”

“Oh, damn, Tawyer, you’re right,” Kail said as he and Loch turned a corner on the pipe, their leg-chains protesting the uneven fittings with shrill screeches. “I guess she has to die. What was I thinking?”

They reached the Tooth. From the upper grid, standing level with the top, it was a violet jewel. The sun hadn’t risen above the rim of the city yet, and the Tooth shone with a clear brilliance as the sun’s light caught it directly.

“Lower grid,” Tawyer said sharply.

Loch and Kail moved to the junction where the upper grid linked to the special frame that locked the Tooth into place all four sides. A vertical pipe led down to the lower grid, which connected to the frame below as well.

“You think about what you did to make the warden so mad.” Tawyer gestured for them to head down. “Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

“See,” Kail said thoughtfully, “I don’t know what I did to make him so mad. I know it wasn’t sleepin’ with his mama, because I was sleeping with your mama last night.”

“Shut your fat mouth!”

“That’s not what your mama said. Man, she couldn’t get enough of my mouth. And your mama’s a screamer, too—”

The truncheon came whistling down at Kail’s head, and Kail dove back. The truncheon clanged off of the pipes instead, and then Loch’s shackled arms crashed down on Tawyer’s wrist.

As the truncheon clattered on the pipes, Loch’s palms slammed into Tawyer’s temples. Then she looped her shackles over the back of his neck, yanked down hard, and brought her knee up.

“So, today it is,” Kail said as Tawyer hit the ground. He pulled a small bundle out of his sleeve, passed Loch what looked like a pair of thick cloth slippers, and produced another pair for himself.

Loch shot him a look and pulled on the cloth slippers.

“Yes, I always use it,” Kail said, “every time. Because it always works.”

Loch raised an eyebrow as she got to her feet.

“Swear to Gedesar, if I run into a guard who doesn’t fall for it, I’ll find a new one.” Kail reached into his sleeve again, produced a thin metal wire, and bent down to work on the leg-chain. A moment later, it snapped free. “Here, let me see yours.”

With a wry smile, she reached down and yanked hard, and the special leg-chain Warden Orris had saved for her snapped clean away.

“Or that,” Kail allowed, and then, grinning, reached into the bundle to produce a pair of pipefitter’s tools. “Shall we?”

Orris pounded the desk so hard that his hand throbbed. “Guards! Guards, get in here!”

As warden, he had access to several powerful artifacts. He’d taken a vicious pleasure in pulling out the flat disc of polished ivory, laying it flat on the table, breaking a vision charm over the artifact, and watching as the dust sprinkled down and the pale ivory surface resolved into a view of the grids. He shifted through the divining crystals set throughout the Cleaners until he found the perfect view of the Tooth, complete with Tawyer, Kail, and Loch herself.

Then he watched in helpless rage as she took down Tawyer with brutal efficiency, broke the chain he’d prepared for her, and got to her feet. She and Kail began to do something with metal tools on the pipes of the grid. His grid.

But he was still master of the grid, and he had a few surprises of his own. It had been a while since the Cleaners had seen real discipline.

Orris reached into a special drawer in his desk and drew out a narrow wand of polished crystal. At its tip was set a single gem, a muddy green-black whose whirling pattern constantly shifted.

A pair of guards came into the room, and one of them asked him what he needed. He ignored them.

Instead, he looked down into the polished ivory surface at Loch. “Time to dance, little princess.” Then he touched his personal signet ring to the wand.

The screams that echoed up from the grid made the whole office vibrate, or perhaps it was the magic itself that shook the very underside of Heaven’s Spire. Orris felt a lustful rush as he stared into the ivory, watched the writhing tendrils of scarlet fire snake across every metal surface on the grid. Every prisoner at work would curl up in helpless torment or fall screaming from the pipes until their metal leg-chains caught them. Then they would dangle, writhing in agony while the pain raced down their chains.

Loch and Kail jumped in surprise, then stopped and waited.

After half a minute, the scarlet flames flickered and died.

Loch grinned, turned to the divining crystal that she knew he was using to watch her, and waved.

The nurse sighed as the vibrations ran through the clinic. The containment magic was wonderful for neutralizing prisoners, but there were always injuries. He was going to have prisoners complaining of all sorts of aches and pains for the rest of the day, and the warden hated it when the nurse used supplies.

He looked down at his only overnight prisoner, a man who’d lost a fight in the dining hall and was shackled to the bed for treatment. “Count yourself lucky,” the nurse said conversationally, leaning in to check the unconscious man’s pulse. “Better to be in here than down there this—”

The man’s shackled hand shot up, closed around the nurse’s throat before he could pull back out of reach, and yanked him down toward the bed.

“Key,” the prisoner growled.

The nurse tried to pull back, realized that that wasn’t going to help his breathing, and sputtered frantically. “Can’t escape!” he gasped. “They’ll kill you as soon as you go up!”

The prisoner grinned horribly. “Not going up.”

Orris watched helplessly as Loch and Kail started working on the pipes again.

“It can’t be,” he murmured again. “She played me. She played me!” He thrust the crystal wand at the ivory plate and focused his will, but the magic required time to gather its strength again. Orris hurled the wand and spun away as it shattered against the wall. “Get down there and . . . No!” With sheer force of will, he lowered his voice. “No. Tend to the prisoners.” He pulled his grandfather’s saber from the wall, unsheathed it, and tossed the scabbard aside.

“I’ll deal with Loch myself.”

His pronouncement was ruined when another guard burst into the room. “Sir! Sir!”

“You don’t get paid to run around screaming, guard!” Orris barked, brandishing the saber. The intruding guard flinched back, sputtering. “I know damn well the security wards were activated!”

“That’s not why I’m here, sir,” the guard cut in, still eyeing Orris’s saber nervously.

“Well, why the hell are you here?” Orris shouted, bustling forward and urging the guards out of his way with flourishes of his grandfather’s saber.

“It’s, well, it’s about the prisoner who got beaten in the dining hall yesterday.” The guard stepped back at Orris’s stare. “He was at the clinic when the wards were activated, but it appears that in all the excitement . . .”

“Where is he now?” Orris asked, biting off each word.

“He, er . . .” The guard winced. “He subdued the orderly treating his injuries and told the man that he intended to settle a score with the woman.”

Orris laughed. “Well, now, that’s not bad news at all!” he declared grandly, heading for the drop-hatches with a jaunty step. “I just hope I get to see him do it!”

“Done.” Kail stepped back from the upper grid. They’d worked fast since Orris had activated the wards and had gotten through most of the frame holding the Tooth in place. If not for the insulation slippers Kail had scrounged up, they’d likely have been dead already. “Want me to head down?”

Loch turned and nodded shortly, then jerked her head back to the eastern walkway where footsteps clanged in sharp contrast to the groans of shaken prisoners. Then came a roar of sheer hatred that could have been the war trumpet of Esa-jolar herself. “LLLLLOCCCCH!”

Akus came around the corner, a massive figure of battered flesh and rippling muscle. His nose was broken, and one eye was swollen nearly shut. He wore no worksuit, only boots and a clinic blanket wrapped around his waist several times like a kilt. His broad chest was covered with hair, knife scars, and purple-green bruises. She threw a punch, but he ignored it in his rage, slamming her against the pipes and driving the breath from her lungs.

“Get off her!” Kail shouted, leaping at the enormous man. His punch glanced harmlessly off Akus’s shoulder, and with a grunt, Akus grabbed hold of Kail’s worksuit with thick, knotted hands and lifted him off the ground.

“No leg-chain, little Urujar?” Akus growled. “That’s gonna cost you.” As Kail struggled helplessly, Akus walked to the edge of the upper grid. Then, with a smile, he flung Kail off the edge, laughed harshly, and turned back to Loch. “Hope your friend has a nice—”

Her elbow caught him in the gut. Her kick caught him in the groin. The open palms of her shackled hands smashed into his already-broken nose. And as he howled and lashed out blindly, her shoulder, with the full power of her lunging body behind it, caught him in the midsection, knocking him back a full three steps.

He’d only been two steps from the edge.

He screamed as he fell, and Loch spun away, not wanting to see it.

Instead, she saw Warden Orris himself, standing at the edge of the walkway with his saber raised in a mocking salute.

“That poor dumb brute was never in your league, Loch,” the warden said conversationally, “but then, I guess your little friend Kail was never in his league.”

Loch spread her arms as far apart as they could go, shackled as they were, and set herself in an unarmed fighting stance.

“What, nothing?” Orris shook his head. “You stupid girl, you know you’re not leaving the Cleaners alive. You thought you could play me, do something to my grid, but I caught you. And still you cling to that stubborn pride?” His face reddened at her silence, and sweat began to bead on the thick jowls of his neck. “Or maybe you’re too stupid to talk. Is that it? You too stupid to spit out any last words, you Uru?”

Loch walked forward, her padded feet nearly silent on the metal of the grid.

“Fine!” Orris shouted, raising his saber. “Die like the—”

Loch lunged in and kicked Orris in the shin. As he howled and brought the saber down, she raised her shackled arms, caught the saber on the shackles, crossed her wrists to trap the blade, and spun away, yanking the sword from his grasp. With practiced ease, she flipped the blade free of the chains and caught it with one hand.

Then she turned away from Orris and walked to the edge of the upper grid, her new sword held high to keep it clear of the shackles.

“I’ll see you scream before you die, you . . .” Orris stammered to a halt. “Where are you going?”

Loch tapped the sword twice on the edge of the grid, looked down for a moment, and then strode to one of the corners. From the lower grid below, Kail’s voice clearly called up, “Ready when you are, Captain!”

Orris dashed to the edge and stared down at the lower grid in dumbfounded shock. He’d clearly seen Kail thrown from the upper grid by Akus, who had then been knocked off by Loch.

Kail and Akus were working side by side. Akus was naked except for his boots, and the large blanket Akus had worn wrapped around his waist was now wrapped around the Tooth, covering the vast majority of its lower surface like a massive stocking.

Blocking it from the light of the sun.

Orris was not a stupid man. The Tooth was so irregular and so large that it required a special frame to connect it to the grid. His gaping stare took in the missing screws and broken pins on that frame, both on the upper grid and the lower grid.

There was only one major support pipe still connected to the Tooth’s harness, and it was creaking ominously, metal whining in protest as Loch approached it.

“You can’t!” Orris blurted, then felt himself reddening as Loch turned and raised an eyebrow. “You’ll be . . . That’s . . . You’re a madwoman!”

Loch smiled, and it was that more than anything that made Orris backpedal frantically. She raised the sword in her shackled arms, her whole body bending like a fully stretched bow, and then she brought the blade down on the last junction holding the entire Tooth and its frame in place.

There was a sharp metallic crack, followed an interminable moment later by a low creak that built rapidly in pitch and volume as the entire structure of the grid around the Tooth began to sink. Small pipes twisted, bent, and snapped under the weight of the great stone, and as Orris scrambled back, the entire section of scaffolding sheared away in a screaming crescendo of tearing metal.

The last thing Orris saw as the Tooth and the three prisoners fell away to freedom was Loch’s smiling face. One shackled arm clung to the twisted wreckage of the grid around the stone, and the other held his grandfather’s sword. Orris watched that face until he could no longer see it, and then, when his shaking legs would bear his weight again, he pulled himself back to his feet.

Behind him, the prisoners began cheering.

Kail had insisted that he had timed it exactly, but Loch was very near the end of her trust when, below her on the remains of the lower grid, Kail shouted, “Three! Two! One! Now!”

As the ground raced toward them, green and brown and blue resolving into fields and rivers, farms and townships, Kail and Akus yanked hard on the sheet and pulled it free from the Tooth. The wind caught it, and in seconds, the blanket was far above them, floating gently on its lazy path to the ground.

As the Tooth caught the morning sunlight, its dull purple surface blossomed into violet and its ancient magic slowed their plummeting descent. The wind that threatened to tear Loch free from the grid fell from a scream to a throaty whisper, and the ground that had been hurtling toward them at breakneck speed slowed to the comparative crawl of a galloping horse.

Which, Loch noted as she hit the damp turf of a dazzling green meadow and rolled, taking the impact in her legs and shoulders and hips and back, was still faster than you wanted to be going when you hit the ground.

Loch found herself lying face-down in the damp grass. The sword stood embedded in the earth a few paces away, vibrating from the impact. She took in a deep breath, heard the ominous creak of metal, and rolled away instinctively. Sparks of light trailed dizzily across her eyes, but she still got a good look.

Its glow now rising to its normal dazzling violet brilliance, the Tooth rose from the shattered wreckage of the grid. It moved slowly at first, rocking and swaying like a charm dangling on a chain. Then, picking up speed, it leapt into the heavens, straight back toward the glowing purple disk that hung high above them like a sullen sun, the only glimpse of Heaven’s Spire most citizens ever saw. It would, Loch guessed, be going quite fast by the time it returned to the Cleaners.

“Damn!” Akus groaned as he pushed himself back to his feet. “I don’t know who hits harder, Loch, you or the damn ground.” He looked up at Heaven’s Spire high above and laughed. “Still, worth a few beatings. Anybody seen my blanket?”

“I’m looking, believe me,” Kail said shakily, leaning on the wreckage of the grid. “I don’t need my first glimpse of freedom ruined by your sorry naked body.”

“Hah!” Akus clapped Kail on the shoulder. “Almost wish I could see Orris’s face when the Tooth gets back. Hope it hits him square in the ass.”

“Given the size of his ass, you’ve got good odds,” Kail said, and Akus laughed again.

“Damn straight! Hey, you ever got a job that needs some muscle, you let me know.”

“Will do,” said Kail. “Thanks again for coming to us when Orris made his offer. I had no idea how in Byn-kodar’s hell we were going to smuggle a tarp out to the grid.”

“Worked out for all of us.” Akus looked to Loch, who was still staring upward. “Ma’am, I’m going to put some distance between me and this wreckage before the airships come looking. Pleasure working with you.”

Loch smiled and raised a fist in a warrior’s salute. He returned it, ducked his head, and walked off toward the woods to the east, naked and whistling off-key.

“So, Captain,” Kail said, still swaying where he stood, “what now?”

Loch reached down and ran her hand along the damp grass, then licked the dew from the palm. She swallowed, tasting the sweet water as it loosened her throat. High overhead, she imagined she could see a sudden blossom of light across the underside of Heaven’s Spire.

“Now,” she said, “we pay back the son of a bitch who put us there.”

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 by Patrick Weekes.

Excerpted from The Palace Job by Patrick Weekes.

Excerpted by permission of 47North.

All rights reserved.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Patrick Weekes was born in the San Francisco bay area and attended Stanford University, where he received a B.A. and an M.A. in English Literature. In 2005, Patrick joined BioWare’s writing team in Alberta, Canada. Since then, he’s worked on all three games in the Mass Effect trilogy, where he helped write characters like Mordin, Tali, and Samantha Traynor, (along with krogan poets, hanar Spectres, and foul-mouthed asari matriarchs). He is now working with the Dragon Age team on the third game in the critically acclaimed series, and he has written tie-in fiction for both series, including Tali’s issue in the Dark Horse Mass Effect: Homeworlds series and Dragon Age: Masked Empire, an upcoming novel from Tor Books to be released in July 2014. Patrick lives in Edmonton with his wife Karin, his two Lego-and-video-game-obsessed sons, and (currently) nine rescued animals. In his spare time, he takes on unrealistic Lego-building projects, practices Kenpo Karate, and embarrasses himself in video games. He is fluent, though sadly rusty, in French and American Sign Language.

Interview: Annalee Newitz
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Annalee Newitz is the editor of io9, the internet’s most popular science fiction website. Her new book, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, describes massive disasters throughout Earth’s history and explores how we might increase our chances of surviving the next one.

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 book is called Scatter, Adapt, and Remember. What’s that about?

This is a science, non-fiction book, which I am describing as being somewhere between very hard science fiction and absolutely straight science writing. It’s partially a scientific discussion of the history of mass extinction on the planet, and it’s partly a speculative, science-based musing on how humans could survive the next mass extinction based on what we know now of how they unfolded before, but also what we know of the technologies and about biology today that will take us into the future.

You say at the beginning of the book that you got interested in disasters from watching monster movies, so I’m just curious, which monster movies have had the greatest impact on you?

I have to say that the more fantastical disaster movies are the ones I like the best. So giant monster movies are in the top, if I were to rank one to ten, giant monster movies are really at the top. I also like movies that try to deal realistically with what would happen if there were some kind of pandemic, like 28 Days Later or something like, even The Road I think is somewhat realistic, although I think it’s got a lot of problems. But I like the exploration of how humans survive disasters and what happens to civilization during times of extreme tribulation.

This is really a book about a kind of disaster that people don’t think about because it happens slowly over geological time. A mass extinction is when more than 75% of all species on the planet die out, and it usually takes about a million years. So it’s not something like a giant explosion or a giant monster that you can see in one human lifetime, like, “Holy crap, this giant thing happened!” It’s something that you really can only see from an historical perspective. What’s somewhat alarming is that we now have evidence, because we’ve been gathering data for so long, that indeed we may be in the first stages of a mass extinction, partly because we’re seeing elevated levels of extinction among animals, but also because we now know, from fairly recent geological work, that most mass extinctions that have happened in the past, and there’ve been five already, were caused by climate change. So we’re in a phase, right now, of climate change on Earth, and so those two pieces of evidence put together, climate change and elevated extinction levels, make it look like we could be a few thousand years into a mass extinction event.

Could you give a couple more examples of the kinds of disasters that you talk about in the book?

Sure. Initially I talk a lot about the kinds of disasters that have caused the climate change that led to previous mass extinctions. Some of them are pretty awesome, like they would make great disaster movies. For example, it seems that one of the mass extinctions, the Ordovician Mass Extinction, may have been caused by the planet being bombarded by gamma radiation from some kind of space disaster. That’s one theory; I mean, there are other theories, too. But this was about four hundred and fifty million years ago, there was a very rapid ice age, and the question is: Why would an ice age happen so quickly in under a hundred thousand years? One possibility is that big chunks of the atmosphere were fried off and that changed how reflective the atmosphere was. And so light was not entering as much and things cooled down really fast. That’s one cool one.

Then there was the End Permian Mass Extinction, which was caused by super volcanoes. This was a super volcano that erupted for about a thousand years, so a very long eruption releasing lots and lots of toxins and ash and carbon into the environment. I like to call that the Super Industrial Revolution Mass Extinction because basically the kinds of climate change we’re seeing now are very similar, it’s just that we’re releasing all those toxins through burning fossil fuels instead of having a super, insanely giant, long-lived volcanic eruption. And then of course there’s the famous mass extinction that we’ve all heard about, which is sixty-five million years ago when the dinosaurs were wiped out, or most of the dinosaurs were wiped out, and that mass extinction was set off by a one-two punch, because there were super volcanos erupting in India already, so things were going downhill in terms of the environment and the climate, and then the planet was hit by an asteroid.

And speaking of asteroids hitting the earth, one of the details from the book that really struck me was, I think most people when they think about an in-coming asteroid, they think, “Oh we would send some astronauts up to blow it up with a nuclear bomb.” And one of the experts you talked to in the book says, “No, we would never send people to go asteroid hunting because, by the time it was close enough that people could reach it, it would be way too close. There’d be nothing we could do about it.”

That’s right, and right now we have a program at NASA, the Near Earth Objects Program, which is using space-based telescopes to monitor all of the objects in our solar system’s region that might intersect with the Earth’s path. It’s obviously important to monitor these objects because those are the ones that are most likely to hit us. But in order to really defend against an asteroid effectively, we need to continue having these kinds of space-based telescopes because they will see objects on an intersect course with the planet, say, twenty years out, and that’s something we can do now and that we need to continue doing because, of course, the landscape in our volume of space is always changing. There are always new guys coming out of the Oort Cloud and different rocks that get knocked out of the asteroid belt for various reasons. If we catch one of these rocks coming in twenty years out or fifteen years out, it’s relatively easy to push it out of our path. What we would have to do is send probes out there, much like the probes we’ve already sent into the asteroid belt or that we’ve sent to intercept comets, for example, and have them nudge that rock out of the way, because if it’s far enough away, all you have to do is a little bit of nudging. You don’t even have to set off a nuke, even though that sounds really cool, you can just nudge it a little bit and that changes its trajectory, and of course by the time that trajectory is intersecting with where the Earth might have been, it’s been radically altered because, again, it’s years out.

So there are all these things that might get us: asteroids, super volcanos, climate change, etc. I understand that you started out on this book feeling like we were basically doomed, and you were just going to write about how we were all doomed, but you kind of took a turn towards optimism in the course of researching the book. Was there a particular point where you made that turn and started feeling more optimistic?

Yeah, there was. I mean, when you look at the histories of mass extinctions on Earth, it really does feel like a sort of grim chronicle of death, and also when you look at human history and all the times we’ve nearly gone extinct, it’s even more depressing, and the turning point for me was when I was researching the worst mass extinction that ever happened, which was two hundred and fifty million years ago at the end of the Permian Period. That was the mass extinction that I mentioned earlier that was caused by a mega-volcano that went off for about a thousand years, or perhaps a few times over a thousand year period, and that mass extinction killed off ninety-five percent of life on Earth. It even killed insects, which is extremely unusual. Usually insects survive mass extinctions. I’m reading about this grim period on the planet when most of the life on Earth was slime, and I interviewed a geologist who was telling me about it—he had nicknamed it “Slime World”—and he was showing me a slice of rock from the ocean floor that shows a layer in the Permian where there’s just all kinds of life and fossils from many, many different types of plants and animals. Then suddenly there’s this stark, black layer, and that’s the slime layer where the only thing that was hanging around was slime and it was eating dead bodies a lot of the time. And then above it you could see the reemergence of life, diverse life. That, to me, was hopeful. I mean, it was weird because it was this grim kind of hope, what I wound up calling “pragmatic optimism,” which is to say it’s not optimism saying, “Hey, you know, the future’s going to be great because we’re all going to upload ourselves and become energy beings.” It was more the optimism of, “You know what, even if the planet goes through a scenario where we lose 95% of species, I think humans are going to be part of that 5% of species that survive because we share a lot in common with the animals that survived previous mass extinctions. But, it may be really dark, ugly times. It may be freakin’ slime world.” It’s kind of weird to call that optimistic, but I think that is the kind of optimism we need to have right now, something where we acknowledge the depths of the possible damage and disaster and horror that we might be facing, and realize that we’re going to make it through. Think about the fact that, “You know, given that we’re going to make it through, maybe we should be doing something about making those grim times coming less grim.”

If people are listening to this now and they’re like, “Hey, I don’t want to live in slime world, let’s prevent that,” what can they do? Are there organizations they can join or causes they can support? What can listeners do about stuff like that?

There’s some really basic stuff; it’s almost kind of like saying, “Eat a healthy breakfast.” You do need to be thinking about reducing waste, reducing reliance on fossil fuels, all of those things that you’ve been hearing from environmentalists, those are true. But I think in the long term, and this is where it gets science fictional and kind of fun, is that cities are going to change fundamentally over the next hundred to hundred and fifty years if we choose to walk down the pathway of survivability. One of the ways they’re going to change is in terms of the materials we use to build them. For example, the way this might look is in a hundred and fifty years you might have a city that is built partly from self-healing concrete. So if there is a disaster where a crack appears in a bridge or a building, that crack would repair because the concrete is made with bacteria that, when perturbed, will extrude epoxy and other materials that allow that crack to fill in and become stronger. Cities might look like they were kind of covered in scar tissue almost because they would be self-repairing. And we would also start, instead of using fossil fuels to do things like light our lights, we might just have algae that glows at night. We might be using algae for water purification and air purification. We really need cities that produce their own food with urban farms. We need cities that are built from materials that are functioning within their ecosystems so that the city is built out of the same living organisms that surround it in the ecosystem.

Well how important would you say it is that we all start practicing megapolisomancy?

I’m glad that you brought that up, because I think megapolisomancy is a weird way of thinking about the city’s history as being part of its built environment. Megapolisomancy, for those who have not read the freaking amazing novelette by Fritz Leiber called Our Lady of Darkness, is city magic and it’s city magic that’s caused by urban design. It’s basically, certain buildings create relationships between people, historical people, people who are dead, people who are alive, and ultimately can kind of bring about a meeting of dimensions or a transformation in the city itself. And the problem is that bad urban designers, the people who built some particularly heinous buildings in the San Francisco downtown area, have set off a dark spell over the city of San Francisco in this particular story. The main characters have to figure out: How do you undo this city-wide terrible spell? The story grows out of a very long running political conflict between people who wanted affordable housing for artists in San Francisco and people who wanted to build the Transamerica Pyramid, which was for a long time considered a horrible eye-sore in downtown San Francisco. Anyway, so it turns out the Transamerica Pyramid forms the final part of this terrible spell. So I think that megapolisomancy is a way of thinking about how the choices we make in the ways that we build our cities affect us as a community.

In addition to Fritz Leiber, you mentioned a couple of other science fiction authors in this book. You mentions Kim Stanley Robinson, Paul McAuley, Arthur C. Clarke, and then, obviously, most of all, Octavia Butler. Could you talk about why you decided to talk about those particular authors in the book?

Let me start by talking about Octavia Butler because she’s really, in a way, the muse of this entire book, because a lot of her work deals with human evolution. By evolution, I don’t mean something cheesy and psychological, I mean actually biologically evolving, what do we turn into over time, and she never ever falls into the trap of saying that a particular evolutionary path is perfect or terrible. Everything is always a compromise. I think that you see this best in her trilogy, which used to be called the Xenogenesis Trilogy, and I think now it’s called Lilith’s Brood, it’s three books sold in one book that’s called Lilith’s Brood. In this story humans have destroyed the Earth, mostly in a nuclear war, and there are a small number of human survivors, and they are rescued by aliens who have entirely biological technology. So all of their technology is about creating stable, diverse ecologies that they use as spaceships, and that they use as communications devices and medical devices and all kinds of other stuff. Their entire spaceship is a living organism and they grow trees to live in, and the trees of course have perfectly nice floors and benches in them, and everything like that. They live in harmony with their environment, but the way that they reproduce is they join with other species. They have this incredible ability to manipulate DNA. They come to the humans and they’re like, “Great, we’ve rescued you. Now we want you to breed with us and become part of our species.” There’s a way in which becoming part of their species is a fantastic proposition because their technology and their spacefaring abilities are far beyond humans. They don’t have war. They don’t appear to have hierarchical politics. But they will, of course, remove from these humans anything that’s human about them. What will happen is they’ll ultimately create a hybrid species that’s nothing like the aliens and that’s nothing like the humans either. Or it’s kind of like both of them.

At the same time, the hope that she offers in that book, and in a lot of her other books as well, is that these new hybrid creatures won’t actually forget what it means to be human. They will think of humans as being an important part of their history, important ancestors, and that they will retain some traits of humanity. As we face the future, one of the things that humans really have a hard time with is that change part. Like Bill McKibben, he’s so scared of genetic modification because he says we won’t be human anymore, and that’s okay, being human is partly about evolving, and that’s what it means to be a life form, is to evolve. We have to embrace change as part of what it means to survive. I think that really provided a nice framework and a way forward for me in terms of thinking about the future: that we won’t be headed towards a perfect state of the light-filled beings from Star Trek, that it’ll be messy and there will be compromises and people will be pissed off, and we might become tentacled aliens in the end and that’s okay, that’s a win if we do that, because it means that we’ve survived and we’ve changed to meet changing environmental conditions and that should be our life goal as a species.

A lot of the other science fiction authors I talk to, like Kim Stanley Robinson and Paul McAuley especially, have both thought a lot about the steps on the way toward that future, like how we would do things like geoengineering, how we would do things like reengineering humanity to suit new environments in space. Paul McAuley has a background in biology and has written incredibly interesting novels where he talks about geoengineering on other worlds, and so has Kim Stanley Robinson, and actually one of the things that Kim Stanley Robinson said to me that I thought was such a great insight was, I was asking him, you know, how are we going to get from total fear of genetically engineering humans to accepting it, because there’s this leap that so many science fiction authors just kind of take for granted, where we are suddenly reengineering our bodies to live in space, because of course we would have to do that. Humans are not radiation resistant, and they aren’t suited to lots of other environments, and so, in order to make ourselves fit into those environment we’re going to have to tweak the germ line, and so Stanley said, “You know, as soon as we have a technology or a genetic tweak that allows us to extend human lifespan, that’s going to be the doorway. Once we have that, which is something that everyone wants, then people will become much more comfortable with transforming the human germ line, and transforming humans through genetic engineering.” I think that’s a really good observation and it totally contradicts what every single biologist I talked to said. All of the synthetic biologists I talked to, who are people who are actively working with tweaking genomes and things like bacteria, were absolutely like, “No way, humans will never genetically modify themselves, that will never ever in a billion years happen. Just forget it.” Whereas Stan was like, “Of course it’ll happen. It’ll happen as soon as we have this one breakthrough technology.” So that’s one of the things I think that’s ultimately great about science fiction, it goes where science is afraid to go. Scientists have to really focus on the here and now and they have to get grants, and they can’t say wacky shit like, “We’re going to change the germ line and make humans who can live on Titan.” But science fiction writers can, and they can really think in long-term ways about how science will impact culture. So thank goodness for science fiction.

Speaking of science fiction, in addition to writing books, you also edit the popular website, io9. Do you want to talk a little bit about what’s been going on over there recently? Are there big stories you’re excited about? What’s new over at io9?

Things are going great. We’re having an awesome summer because people are really excited about things like Star Trek and Iron Man. I’m excited about Pacific Rim, which is of course a giant monster movie.

The big thing that’s coming up on io9 this summer is, we’re doing a Summer of Citizen Science. We’re encouraging io9 readers to pick one or two citizen science projects to participate in and then write about them on io9’s new Kinja platform. Kinja allows you to create your own io9 blog, and what you post there can be quickly shared onto io9.com, the website. Of course you can share posts from io9 onto your own Kinja as well. We’re hoping to get a lot of scientists and citizen scientists writing about what they find, whether it’s doing stargazing, or counting birds, or participating in creating a new kind of 3D printer. We just really want people to spend their summer indulging in citizen science and doing something scientific while they’re on vacation, or while they’re in between jobs, or whatever. That’s going to be our next big thing, everybody doing science.

So, in the time that you’ve been running the site, have you noticed trends in terms of what makes a post popular that would be useful for other people who blog about science and science fiction to keep in mind?

There’s no good formula. People claim that, for example, the ultimate internet story is a list. And it’s not actually always true. We do lists quite a lot, and sometimes they do well and sometimes people don’t care. I think what really matters is the author of the post being passionate about what they’re writing about and really showing that they’ve done research and thought about it, and that it’s not just like, “I linked to another person doing a thing,” but, “I actually went out and I interviewed the scientist who was working on this stuff,” or, “I did a bunch of reading about the history of this particular idea.” And things like this podcast, which is not a ten-minute podcast, right?

No, since I edit this show, no one knows better than I do that this is not a ten-minute long podcast.

But, it is true that a lot of the time the advice that you read is, “Make it really short because people don’t have time.” And I just don’t think that’s true. I think people do have time and they make time for stuff that they feel is meaty and will actually teach them something.

Last year you and Esther Inglis-Arkell launched a video, sort of an io9 TV show called We Come from the Future. Could you talk about what your experience was in trying to branch out into video?

It was really fun. I think the most fun part was Esther is an incredible science experiment designer. She has a background in physics and I think that gave her a real craving for experiments that you could do in five minutes on TV. Because, of course, in physics oftentimes the experiments require you to have an enormous particle accelerator. She maybe gets more excited about stuff where it’s like, “I have a pickle and I plugged it in and made it glow!” So we had a lot of fun doing that and inviting other people in to do science experiments with us, and it was a really fun, positive experience. Although, as you know, it’s really different editing something to be seen or heard than it is producing something to be read. It was hard. It was hard to switch from writing into being a face on TV and I have to confess that I am much more of a written word person. It’s probably because I grew up on UseNet and stuff like that. I’m text identified.

So I noticed that you had a previous book called Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop-Culture. I was just wondering, could you talk about that book? What does capitalism have to do with zombies?

That book actually grew out of my dissertation that I did at Berkley, where I was looking to talk about 20th-century monster stories and how the popularity of certain kinds of monster stories are affected by economic conditions in the United States. Throughout the 20th century, zombie movies have really changed a lot. Zombie stories in the early 20th century were about, really, the origin of the zombie myth in the Caribbean. And the earliest zombie films, like I Walked With a Zombie, which has such a silly title but is actually am incredible film—if people haven’t seen it, go out and rent I Walked With a Zombie because it’s explicitly about basically a slave rebellion in a plantation. Of course it’s after slavery has been abolished, but the natives on the Caribbean island are still being treated like slaves and zombies are one of the ways that the black working class has of getting back at their white overlords. This is kind of how the zombie myth begins in the United States. It’s explicitly a story about race relations between white wealthy people and black working-class people or black rural populations. It’s very much about that, and overtime the zombie really shifts, and becomes much more of a figure for thinking about, generally, the working class, like the wandering hordes of hungry people, hungry consumers in the kind of Living Dead movies that you see later. But that’s why, for example, Night of the Living Dead is so interesting as a transitional zombie film, because it’s about a black hero who’s dealing with white zombies and it switches the racial politics of previous zombie movies. And of course the black guy in that film is like the only person who has any idea how to behave and how to deal with this menace, which is a white menace, it’s all a bunch of white people wondering around being all, “Bllleeeggghhhhh!” And, well—is it okay to give spoilers to a film from the 1960s?—so of course he’s murdered at the end by a bunch of white cops. It’s this great moment where it is very much a racial allegory and then, in The Walking Dead, which of course is not 20th century, but you’re still seeing the issues around race and class in Walking Dead. They’re so interesting, even though the show’s kind of annoying.

Well, speaking of The Walking Dead, in one of the lectures I just saw you give, you said that you thought that Star Trek would have more staying power than The Walking Dead. I was wondering if you could elaborate on what you meant by that?

I think that about specifically The Walking Dead, not necessarily stories about the undead, because of course stories about the undead, I think, are going to be around for a long time. I think the relevance of a show like The Walking Dead is pretty time-sensitive. What I mean by that is I feel like a lot of the concerns that are expressed in Walking Dead, the kinds of anxieties that make us love that narrative, the kinds of social issues that we see in it, are very early 21st century. I feel like people in fifty years will look back and be like, “Wow! That’s really a relic of the early 21st century.” Whereas I think Star Trek is, well, it’s already proven itself to be a narrative that can mutate and evolve overtime, and can change to meet changing social conditions and can reflect new social issues. As much as people criticize the J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, which I absolutely think they should, like everyone I’m a little bit sad about the new film, but one thing that J.J. has done, if I may call him J.J., is he’s switched the importance of the lead characters. So it used to be like, “Kirk, Kirk, Kirk, everybody’s all about Kirk,” and now I feel like Spock is the new hero, and that’s really interesting. I think it reflects a dramatic shift in our culture toward making the kind of geeky character, the logical character, into the heroic figure at the center of the story. Spock is the one who makes the good decisions, he’s the ethical center of the story, he has true passion because of course normally he’s rational, so when he actually is passionate, it’s something that’s meaningful, it’s not just because he’s like Kirk, who’s passionate about everything because he’s a doofus, he’s just never in control of anything. That is a great example of how Star Trek can have staying power, because it’s a story about a future that many of us hope will come to pass, and it’s a story about the future that responds to the changing conditions of the future. Now we are living in the future of previous Star Trek—I’m going to start sounding like I’m talking about some weird time loop, but we are in the future of the previous version—

Yeah, we’re past the Eugenics Wars.

We are. We’re past the Eugenics Wars. And the fact that the narrative behind Star Trek, like the underlying story, has continued to be relevant to people and continued to be part of a blockbuster franchise, I think, A) it’s testimony to how much we are invested in this as a story of our possible future, and B) how well the story can change to meet our new understandings of what the future will be like. Because maybe now we’re thinking the future belongs to a passionate, rational scientist and that our leadership can come from, not just a swashbuckling white dude who looks cute in a tunic, but also from somebody who, like Spock, of course he also looks cute in a tunic, but he’s a figure who represents rationality as well as bravery and passion.

We’re almost out of time. I want to make sure, though, that everybody knows about this CD3WD document. Do you want to tell people about what that is?

That is one of many different documents that I talk about in my book, which are attempts to put together as much human knowledge as you would need to restart human civilization. This particular document can be held on three CDs so that you can have some sort of off-site storage, you don’t have to get it from Wikipedia. It contains information on everything from agriculture to basic medicine to basic generators, how to build a generator. Each of these document sets has pluses and minuses, I think, but they’re great to keep on your tablet though! Just in case.

It is really a fun thought experiment to think about what are the minimum number of machines, or what is the minimum amount of knowledge you would need to rebuild a viable civilization.

Just given your interest in the end of the world, and the time you must have spent thinking about it, I just imagine that you have one of these documents in your house, one in your glove box, just all over the place.

Well, what I’m really interested in is preventing a disaster from happening. The kinds of stuff I’m interested in are plans for dealing with disaster and diverting disaster. I’m less interested in the scenario where civilization falls and we have to rebuild. That’s a very potent fantasy and I totally understand why people wish that civilization would fall so they could rebuild something better, but that hasn’t been how it’s ever gone down historically. There’s never been a moment when every place on the planet lost civilization. You know we think about, for example, in the West, everyone’s obsessed with, “Remember when Rome fell and everything was shit?” Well, in other parts of the world, the Middle East, for example, civilization was rising; civilization was incredibly sophisticated during that time when white people were sitting around being tribal or whatever. I think that it’s kind of a mistake to imagine that all of civilization would fall. It’s incredibly important to have the knowledge of being able, if your local area suffers a disaster, to be able to build machines and build farms to deal with that. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have that knowledge, I really do admire preppers for thinking about that stuff, but I don’t think that we should ever imagine that all of human civilization will fall.

Famous last words. People will be quoting this to me in fifteen years, saying, “Yeah, remember when you said that!”

And if civilization fell, I wouldn’t be able to read io9, so what would I do all day? I’d have to just fight mutants or something.

Or you would have to create your own local network and build your own io9, right? That would be the first thing like, all right, I’m here in San Francisco so when civilization falls that is the first thing I want to work on. Let’s create a local network with locally generated power so we can start getting information out to people in the city and letting them know what’s going on and what to do. Then in that case, just have local io9.

Okay, so while civilization is still going, what kind of stuff are you working on? Do you have other books you’re thinking about or any new projects in the works?

I do have some books I’m thinking about. I have a science fiction novel that is in desperate need of revision, but that will happen over the next year. I have a couple of other non-fiction ideas that are not for public consumption, but I am definitely working on some upcoming projects. But right now I’m just focused on helping people think about surviving a mass extinction and also working on io9, I’m really excited to be back just doing io9 for a while, instead of trying to do io9 and a book at the same time. Expect meatier big features from me on io9.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic, 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 a four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include Wastelands 2, Dead Man’s Hand, and Robot Uprisings. He is also the co-host of Wired.com’sThe Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Bes 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: Lauren Beukes
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Lauren Beukes is a South African author and filmmaker. Her novels include Zoo City and Moxyland. She also wrote a story arc for the graphic novel series Fairest, a spinoff of Bill Willingham’s Fables. Her latest novel, The Shining Girls, is about a time-traveling serial killer and has been optioned for TV by Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company Appian Way.

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 book is called The Shining Girls. What’s that about?

It’s about a time-traveling serial killer who is absolutely impossible to stop until one of his victims survives and turns the hunt around. It’s set in Chicago between 1931 and 1993, and I specifically head it off at 1993 so I could avoid the Internet, Reddit, CCTV cameras, Google Earth, and everything else which would basically wrap up the case in two days.

There’s a violent drifter in 1931, Harper Curtis, who stumbles upon a house that opens onto other times. Upstairs there is a wall in the bedroom which is covered with these strange artifacts and girls’ names that have been carved into the wall and written over and over and over again in his handwriting. He knows that these are the shining girls, and that he’s going to have to go through time to find them and kill them. His M.O. is all over the place. He’s more violent in 1993 and less violent in 1984, which makes it impossible for any detective to try and put that together. He’s completely untraceable. Until Kirby survives the attack in 1989. Her life derails, and she becomes completely obsessed with finding the man who did this to her and stopping him.

You said that you got the idea from Twitter?

I got the idea on Twitter. I was messing around, as you do, when you’re supposed to be writing, and I threw it out in the middle of a conversation. It was banter with a random stranger that I should write a book about a time-traveling serial killer. I was like, “No, wait! I really should, that would be amazing. I could do something really fun with that.”

I didn’t want to do a “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Killing Spree through Time.” I wanted to do something a bit more serious. I like using fantastical elements in fiction to look at social issues. I was very interested in the 20th century, and specifically how much has changed particularly for women.

I quickly deleted the tweet because I didn’t want anyone else to come across the idea. I think it’s bad form to put your best ideas out there in the world.

I immediately knew that I couldn’t set the book in South Africa, just because the story of South Africa in the 20th century is the story of apartheid. That would have overshadowed everything else I wanted to talk about. Both Moxyland and Zoo City, which are my previous novels, are allegorical apartheids anyway, so I felt like I could get away with writing something different.

I started writing it on the plane. The story just came through very strongly. It starts with a man limping across the grass to a little girl in 1974, and he gives her an impossible present—a My Little Pony from 1982, and he tells her that he’ll come back to get it. And when he does, several years later, it’s when he tries to kill her.

Time travel is a favorite theme of science fiction writers and fans, so what are some of the main things that you have to keep in mind when you’re writing a time travel story?

It’s fine to have loops and paradoxes—it’s time travel, that’s the nature of the beast. I wanted to play with Greek Tragedy time travel, where your destiny is laid in stone, everything you try to do to resist it just puts in motion everything that will bring it about. It’s very Oedipus or Macbeth, but it’s also kind of Sisyphus or Prometheus, stuck in a loop, forced to come back and repeat the same actions again and again.

I had to map it all out very carefully. I have a murder wall above my desk, which tracks all of the different timelines. There’s Harper’s killing timeline, there’s the actual historical timeline of the murders, and then there’s the novel’s timeline which jumps between the shining girls’ perspectives, Harper’s perspective, Kirby’s perspective, her sidekick, Dan, and crisscrossing all of this are these red threads tracking the murders, black threads to track the objects that Harper leaves behind on the girls, yellow threads to track the objects that he takes from the girls, and all the reference pictures that I took on my research trip to Chicago. It was very important to me that everything did make sense, that there weren’t these throw-away explanations, that if you concentrate and track it out, everything will hold together.

If people want to see the picture of Lauren in front of her murder wall, that will be the picture on our blog post, so you can go check that out. But it really does make it look like you’re a serial killer; did you ever worry that people would come over to your house and think maybe you were a serial killer?

A lot of people have asked my husband how he can sleep in the same bed with me at night. He says, “Well, I think she gets most of it out on the page.” But yeah, it looks like I’m a crazy person. I look completely nuts. I’m either clearly a serial killer, or some kind of wannabe Homeland or The Wire detective, which is probably true. I would love to be a detective. If I could step into any universe it would be Pattern Recognition, Narnia, or The Wire.

What was it about the idea of a serial killer that made you want to base a book around it?

I don’t have a particular interest in serial killers. I’m not a fundie. I’m not a junky. I have enjoyed serial killer movies like Zodiac, Silence of the Lambs, or Se7en. I think when you do it cleverly it’s very interesting, but often serial killers are represented in popular culture as these sexy, glamorous, sophisticated apex predators who are sipping chianti while diabolically planning out attacks, and messing with the detective’s minds.

I did a lot of research into real serial killers and true crime, which was absolutely the most devastating part of writing the book, having to delve into these people’s heads. There’s not a lot going on in there, they generally don’t have a lot of empathy, obviously, but they also don’t have a lot of insight into why they’re doing what they’re doing. A lot of them have major issues with impotence in the world, whether that’s actual sexual dysfunction or feelings of powerlessness. They’re actually just violent losers, and that’s not as interesting as Hannibal, but I thought I wanted to portray a serial killer as they (often) truly are, and to make it much more about the victims, to focus on the shining girls.

It was important to me, coming from South Africa, which has a terrible femicide rate, and having seen a family close to me suffer terribly through the murder of their 23-year-old daughter, and the way the police bungled the case. If there’s a murder reported in the news, then there was real horror and there was real violence there.

Could you say more about this real life case that you were involved in? How did you get involved in that and why did things go so wrong with the investigation and the aftermath?

I have a cleaning lady who comes to my house once a week and her 23-year-old daughter, who I’d known since she was about 14 or 15, was murdered by her boyfriend. Her name was Thomokazi Zazayokwe. Her abusive boyfriend stabbed her, poured boiling water over her head, and then he locked his shack and walked away. Five days later the neighbors finally responded to the moaning and got the police to come in and break down the door. It was horrific. She was rushed to the hospital. She had third degree burns that had become infected, there were flies thick on her skin, and she was in absolute agony. She was in and out of the hospital over the next four months until finally she died from her injuries.

The family didn’t know that they had legal recourse, they didn’t know what their rights were. They’re poor and black, and I tried to help them as much as I could. I took them to the women’s legal center and tried to get them legal counsel and to get the hospital records. But it was like China Mieville’s The City and the City. We live in parallel universes. If you’re middle-class, you have more rights, more access to justice, to medicine, to everything. It was devastating to see that play out in real life, but it was especially devastating when I accompanied Thomokazi’s sister to the court hearing four months after she died.

We saw the boyfriend outside on the bench in the waiting area, with his new 19-year-old girlfriend. The prosecutor called us into the office and he told us that he couldn’t prosecute the case. He showed us the single sheet of paper that was the police file, and he said, “This is the worst bit of investigating I’ve ever seen. The only person they bothered to interview was the victim, and she’s dead. This guy can stand up in court, and he can say absolutely anything he wants, and he’ll get away with it. I will have to believe him because I have no evidence to the contrary. I’m going to throw it out of court now, but you can reopen the case, you can go back to the police, you can appeal to the justice minister, and take it to the newspapers, and see what you can do.”

I just burst into tears in the middle of his office. I’m not really prone to that kind of thing, but I was so angry that this guy was going to get away with this, that there wasn’t justice, that the system doesn’t work. You’re raised with all these fairytales of justice on American TV shows from Matlock and Murder She Wrote to Law and Order and it’s not real.

Because I’m middle class, and I have a voice and I know how to use it, and I have friends who are journalists, I got the story covered by major newspapers. I did manage to get the case reopened. But the family phoned me a week later, and told me, “We can’t face going through it again. We want you to let it go.”

It was very, very hard for me to let it go. It wasn’t my decision to make and it wasn’t my fight to have, so I did. I guess this novel is, in part, a way of exorcising that, but also just generally, the terrible violence against women and men that we see in society.

Another classic example is what’s recently happened in South Africa with our paralympian athlete Oscar Pistorius, who murdered his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. All the publicity and press has been about him, and she’s nothing but a pretty corpse. I wanted to write a book that was about real women and not about pretty corpses.

Could you talk about how you did that? This is a book that pays much more attention to the victims than crime books typically do.

Serial killers often have a type. Ted Bundy was into young women with brown hair and middle parting, for example. I thought, “What if Harper’s type was actually not physical, but something within the girls? Some burning potential, some fire inside them? What if he was a twisted Prometheus intent on stealing their fire to try and fill the hollowness inside himself?”

There’s a range of different characters, from a young architect in the 1950s who’s accused of being a dirty commie, to a burlesque dancer with a terrible secret, to an activist working in the 1970s providing backstreet abortions safely and humanely to women in desperate need, through to a young woman who dances in radium paint (based on a real incident in the ’30s of a dancer hospitalized with radiation burns), an African-American welder in World War 2, and Kirby, of course, who only really starts to shine after she’s been attacked.

It was really important to me to be able to explore their lives in detail. They’re all kicking back against their context in their time, they’re all extraordinary in normal ways. It’s not like any of them are going to grow up to be the next president of the United States, or that the economics student is going to stop the 2008 crash if only she’d lived, but they’re all going to make some contribution. They’re curious, engaged, smart, and full of fire. Most of the chapter is focused on their lives, who they are, their ambitions, hopes, and fears, and where they’re going. Then right at the end Harper comes for them.

The attacks aren’t (usually) written from Harper’s perspective, where you’re on his shoulder, accompanying him, along for the ride, and getting off on the same twisted, sick thrills. You’re with the victim, and she is afraid, angry, outraged, hopeless, and can’t believe this is happening to her. It’s much more about the emotion of that moment.

A lot of people have reacted very strongly to the violence in the book, and I think it’s because I’ve made it emotional. I’d like to think that it’s not gratuitous. I specifically have tried to avoid writing torture porn. My editor, Dr. Helen Moffett, is one of the leading experts in violence against women in South Africa, so if she said a scene was okay, I felt it was probably okay.

Could you talk about your research method? How did you research these characters and their time periods?

The research was really fun on this book.

I lived in Chicago in 2000 and 2001. I went back on a research trip, and I interviewed a police detective to find out what access to the case Kirby would have had. We went through boxes of old evidence files, which was completely crazy, and I took lots of photographs. I interviewed an old Chicago Sun Times journalist. I interviewed musicians from the ’90s who were very involved in the punk scenes. I interviewed the head of the ’Zine museum because Kirby start writing for the ’zines, which were obviously a big part of the ’90s punk scene as well. A Chicago historian fact-checked everything for me and triple-checked it. He was amazing. I went on location scouts. I went to Montrose Beach, which is where Kirby’s attack happens, and I kind of choreographed it. I snuck around through the back corridors of Congress Hotel with a ghost hunter. I really just got a feel for the city and the different time periods. I think this comes from having been a journalist. You find that the real, amazing details are actually in the real world. If you can hang your fantastic fiction on those real details it makes it more credible and believable.

I also worked with two young researchers, Adam Maxwell in Denver, Colorado, and Zara Trafford in South Africa. Mainly they were dealing with the nitty-gritty stuff. I would ask Adam for details on a 1931 hospital, for example, because the way I deal with writing Harper was to fuck him up at every opportunity. So, I rip his tendon, I break his jaw, I get him bitten by a dog, and I get him stung by a bee. It’s the little victories that count. That meant I had to keep track of all his injuries, but I also had to know how you would treat those injuries in the 1930s because he always returns to his homebase in 1931.

Adam dug into the details, like what does a 1931 hospital look like? How much would they charge? How would they fix a ripped tendon? What would the doctors wear? How is the Great Depression affecting hospital wards at that time? He sent me back a ton of information with links to everything from oral history reports about hospitals at that time, to photographs of what doctors were wearing, to links to eBay if I wanted to buy creepy medical equipment from the 1930s, which I really, really don’t. It was fun to have that. And then he sent me this article that he found from 1936 from the Milwaukee Sentinel about a young woman who was dancing to her death in radium paint, and it was about this burlesque dancer who danced in radioactive paint and what this was doing to her. The article was so amazing. It was full of this really rich descriptive language, and she speaks in this crazy French accent, she says, “Tell ze boys zey should not be frightened of me, zey should be frightened of ze radiation. It is zat which is poisonous.”

I should probably never do a French accent.

One thing I heard you say that I thought was funny was that when you were interviewing people to be research assistants, Adam said something like he named his company after one of your books, and that helped him get the job.

Again, Twitter is amazing. I advertised for the position of research assistant on Twitter and both my researchers came from there. Adam, aka @snipehunter, approached me and told me he’d named his game development company Skyward Star, named for a character in Moxyland. It was amazing to have someone who knew me and my work and what I was interested in, and that’s exactly why he kicked up that article on the radium girl. That was incredibly valuable.

I often turn to Twitter for information. I got one thing wrong, which luckily one of my editors caught. (I’m sure people are going to find other mistakes, but I’m pretty sure, 99% sure that we got most of them covered.) One of my characters, Zora, was too young in 1932 when I had her playing with a truck, so I had to age her up to have her making paper planes for her little brother. I was like, wait, did they even have paper planes in 1932? I Googled, and I went through about five pages of search results, and I couldn’t find anything, so I asked Twitter. Within five minutes somebody had responded with a Daily Mail article about paper darts recovered from the eves of a chapel in 1899. The hivemind is phenomenal.

Is the protagonist, Kirby, is she named after Jack Kirby, or Kirby the videogame character, or anything like that?

Obviously there are those pop-culture resonances. Building research and building a convincing time period absolutely relies on getting the pop-culture right, the advertising, music, movies, and everything that was happening at that time. Kirby’s name was inspired by a real-life Kirby I met, who happens to be @thebestkirby on Twitter. I met her years ago, she is the sister of somebody who interned for me. I was like, “That’s it. I’m stealing your sister’s name. I’m saving that for the right character when she comes along.”

I heard you say that part of your research involved listening to podcasts. I was wondering which podcasts are the best for your purposes.

True Murder: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History and Authors that have Written about Them. My South African cover designer, Joey Hi-Fi, dug them up for me. He does have a major interest in serial killers, and because he’s a designer he listens to a lot of podcasts while he’s working. I can’t do that because I can’t compete with the words in my head.

I also heard you say that serial killers are fond of puns.

I was hanging out with Ed Brubaker in Los Angeles. He’s one of my favorite comic writers, and his series Criminal is impeccable. It’s the most beautiful storytelling. It’s the first time I’ve ever stopped after I’ve read something and had to Google the hell out of someone to find out who this guy is. Who could this person be that could write this story? We made friends on Twitter, I sent him a copy of my book, and we hooked up in L.A. I went out for dinner with him, his wife, and a game designer friend. They were driving me home, and he was telling me that a profiler friend of his had told him that serial killers are apparently really into puns. It’s one of the senses of humor that they can kind of understand, and that they use to show that they do have empathy and a sense of humor. So, if you like puns, you might have some latent tendencies.

Puns make me want to kill people, to be honest.

[Laughter] Absolutely, that too.

I thought it was interesting that you do so much research, and you read all of this true crime, but you also said that you don’t watch the news. That’s an interesting paradox, almost.

I find the news often very depressing and often very local. It’s really irritating that CNN, like my novel, loops back on itself within fifteen minutes. At least my novel gets four hundred pages. It’s crazy, and there’s so much of the world that we’re missing out on. I find Twitter is a much more interesting and diverse way of connecting with the world. I can follow up on the stories that I’m interested in. Of course, the problem is that you’re creating an echo chamber, which is only feeding you the news that you want to hear. I think I have fairly broad tastes, and I follow some really interesting curators who do tweet a lot of interesting stuff about the world. I do have a better sense of the world from Twitter than I would if I was watching the news.

You just got back from your book tour for this book. Could you talk about what reactions you’re getting to the book from readers and people you talk to?

It’s been amazing. The book keeps getting compared to Gone Girl, but Gillian Flynn actually wrote a review in O Magazine saying that she really enjoyed it, and that she knew me from my comics work, which just blew my mind. Obviously I have other writer friends who really liked it, William Gibson loved it, and Richard Kadrey. Tana French said it “scared the bejesus out of her,” which was really gratifying. It’s good to scare the bejesus out of Tana French.

People’s reactions have been generally very positive. There have been some people who find the violence very hectic or gratuitous, which is the one criticism that really cuts me deep. I tried very hard not to make it so.

And on the other hand, I had a young woman wait until the very end of my New York signing to come up and talk to me, and she didn’t say so outright, but she implied that something bad had happened to her, and that she said that she expected the book to affect her, but she hadn’t expected it to cut so deep, and she said, “Thank you.” I think out of all the responses I’ve had that that meant the most to me. That I am actually speaking, somehow, to the survivor’s experience in a meaningful way that resonates with them.

Have you ever had any funny experiences on this past tour, or any of your previous book tours?

I had the one guy who came up to me at a con and said, “Your hair is looking much better today.” I was like, “Thanks, random stranger.” That’s great. I don’t know, none in particular. I’ve met really amazing people, and demanded that the people take me out for drinks, like in Houston, for example, where I found someone who had been at the reading on Twitter and tweeted at her, “Are you still in the area, please come pick me up and take me for a drink, I’m bored and lonely.” And she did. It was amazing. Again, the power of Twitter, it’s phenomenal.

It was just recently announced that there’s going to be a TV adaptation of The Shining Girls, do you want to tell us about that?

The Shining Girls has been optioned by Appian Way, which is Leonardo DiCaprio’s company, and MRC, who made House of Cards, which was directed by David Fincher and starred Kevin Spacey, and very interestingly, and I think this is what sold me on them, it went straight to Netflix. MRC has an interesting funding model, which isn’t based on making a pilot. It’s based on finding the right people and getting the right script. Then, if that works out, they’re all systems go. When I was looking at the different options, with four different companies pitching on the book, it really came down to that, the fact that they were so forward-thinking. It really feels like the future of television.

For example, I was taking my four-year-old to school this morning, and one of the songs from Wreck-It Ralph came on the radio, and she demanded that I play it again. I couldn’t explain to her that radio was not on demand. She has no concept of media that is not on demand. That’s absolutely the way we’re heading, and to think otherwise is very foolish, and there’s a reason Game of Thrones is the most pirated TV show on Earth. If HBO would just make it possible for people to buy it, I think it would change those statistics massively. There would still obviously be pirates, but there are a lot of people who want to pay for that kind of contact, but don’t have any access to it.

I was excited about MRC and Appian as prospective partners in that regard, and how they sold me on the idea of a TV series—by telling me to think of it as a 13-hour movie. Which would really allow you to get deeply into the characters because otherwise you’d run the risk of the girls just being pretty corpses. You’d get such a short snapshot of their lives in two hours that they might be reduced to exactly what I was trying to avoid.

You’re saying they’re not going to do a pilot? They’re going straight to series and it’s going to be on Netflix, or . . .?

No, I’m not saying any of that. I’m saying that’s what they’ve done previously. I don’t know exactly how it’s going to work. The ink is barely dry on the paper, so they’re going to try and attach a director, then try and find a really great scriptwriter, but they don’t spend money making a pilot. Everyone makes pilots for HBO, and then they see if they’ll pick up the pilot. Then you end up with crazy stuff like polar bears, which are never explained and never make sense ever again.

They’re much more about writing a strong script, getting great talent attached, and then raising the money based on that, rather than messing around trying to make a pilot which you’re then stuck with. I might be misrepresenting their business model, but that’s my understanding of it.

You have a background in TV and film, do you expect to be involved at all with the production?

I am on board as a consultant. It really depends on the director and how much input they need. I’d love to be involved. It’s an adaptation, so it’s a completely different animal, and it also becomes a collaborative vision that’s no longer mine, and that’s absolutely fine.

Speaking of TV, I thought it was funny that you said growing up that it was difficult for you to watch the TV show V in South Africa.

During apartheid there was a lot of censorship, which is how an evil, dictatorial, racist regime maintains power—by keeping people in the dark as to what’s actually going on. They took it to crazy lengths. Sometimes defiant newspaper editors would put out a paper with a blank front page, or a front page covered with black censor bars to show how much they were being censored. The kind of footage that the rest of the world saw on TV, on the news, we weren’t exposed to. We weren’t seeing the same kind of violence, and the craziness in the townships, and the activists being killed. It was super restricted.

This went to ridiculous lengths. The TV series V came on in the late ’80s, early ’90s, and it’s a mini-series. The first episode aired, and I was really excited because it was science fiction, and there were aliens, and it was really cool. The next thing I know, it’s being pushed to a late time slot. It was primetime, something like Fridays at 7 p.m. and suddenly it got moved to Wednesdays at 11:30, which meant that because I was a school kid I couldn’t stay up and watch it. I was lucky to grow up with liberal parents who didn’t believe in apartheid and when I asked them why, they explained it was because the show had freedom fighters—which was a word the government associated with the ANC.

I only found out years later that the real reason it got pushed to such a late time slot when no one could see it was because the state president, P.W. Botha, whose nickname was the “Big Crocodile,” had freaked out completely, phoned the head of the South African Broadcasting Corporation immediately after the first episode had aired, and demanded that it be taken off air immediately because the aliens were reptiles. He was so vain that he thought this TV show was actually about him.

The whole apartheid regime was terrible, and we’re going to be tripping up over its legacy for years and years and years to come. There’s not easy fix to what happened in this country. It was devastating. People were killed, there were apartheid assassination squads, death camps, a chemical weapons program that was trying to make black people sterile. It was horrific. Every dictatorship also has its ridiculous eccentricities, and that was an example of one of them—this absolutely absurd moment amongst all the violence.

Did that extend outside of television to written science fiction as well? What has the written science fiction scene been like in South Africa for the past few decades?

J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is very much a science fiction novel that came out in the ’80s, about a totalitarian regime and the futility and absurdity of it. The apartheid government absolutely missed the allegory there.

They banned other stupid things; for example, they actually banned the book Black Beauty, about the horse, because it had the words “black beauty,” and they were like, “No, no, no, we can’t have black people thinking that way. Those two words in combination, that’s terrible.”

But they missed the allegories, like an Afrikaans novel ostensibly about the Irish revolution and hiding rebel leaders. South African writers found ways of talking about apartheid without writing about it directly because that would get you banned, or put under house arrest or exiled or killed. It was a shocking time.

Then apartheid ended, and our local literature was struggling to find its feet. To generalize terribly, there were a lot of “I grew up under apartheid” memoirs. It’s only been in the past five to seven years that the scene has opened up to fiction that addresses current issues of what it means to be South African, and to just let people play across genres.

The science fiction scene is really exploding now. It started with District 9, and then when Zoo City won the Arthur C. Clarke award, it showed people that it was possible to write that kind of story and that there was an audience for it.

There’s some exciting stuff happening at the moment. I mentored a young writer, Charlie Human, whose book Apocalypse Now Now is coming out in July, and it’s just mental. It’s this crazy, batshit, amazing urban fantasy set in Cape Town with lots of magic and monsters, but also some apartheid legacy stuff, and it’s absolutely fascinating.

Sarah Lotz is making huge waves. She’s got a major thriller coming out next year, but she’s been writing very smart, nuanced horror as S. L. Grey together with Louis Greenberg, looking at consumerism, hospitals, and education, but in a really fun, dark, creepy way, with this alternate underworld.

Are there science fiction conventions, magazines, workshops, and stuff like that in South Africa?

There are some small ’zines and electronic anthologies, including Science Fiction South Africa, Something Wicked Magazine, and Jungle Jim, which is a wonderful pulp magazine. Bloody Parchment puts together horror anthologies and has an annual competition. It’s all very small and very few people are actually making a real living out of it. It’s certainly not the same status that it is in the States or in the U.K.

You mentioned District 9 and Neill Blomkamp; what do you think about his upcoming movie Elysium?

I love the way that he brings his South African perspective to bear on bigger issues. He’s said that he’s based it on veterans from the war in Angola, I believe, and obviously you can see the influence in the extremities of the divided society. The rich live up in space. It’s absolutely fascinating. I cannot wait to see it. I’ve avoided the trailers because I don’t want any spoilers. I want to go into it absolutely cold, not knowing anything about it. What I think is amazing about Neill Blomkamp, and South African genre fiction in general, is that he takes a major issue and by making it science fictional and putting this fantastic spin on it, it gives you a new way of seeing it and a new way of talking about it. Had District 9 just been about refugees, it would have been Hotel Rwanda, and if it had just been about aliens, it would have been Battlefield Earth, probably directed by Michael Bay. The fact that he brought those two things together was what it made it so exciting. I think that’s what a lot of genre fiction in South Africa is doing. Twisting reality slightly so that we can get a fresh perspective on it, especially tired issues like xenophobia, violence against women, or stratified society and neo-apartheid systems based on economics.

Have there been other filmmakers coming out of South Africa picking up the torch after Neill Blomkamp?

They’re trying. I think it helps to have a personal relationship with Peter Jackson. Neill Blomkamp was very much his protégé, and it’s very hard to get a movie made in this country, especially if you’re talking about big special effects. Neill Blomkamp, he’s an outlier, he was an amazing animator doing incredible stuff. If you look at his original short Alive in Joburg, it’s just phenomenal. All the foundation for District 9 was already there, and he probably could have made it by himself, using his animation skills, but the fact that he was able to tie in with Peter Jackson, and the fact that the Halo movie fell through and he was able to do his own project, I think was actually the best thing that could have happened to him. I think it’s also a hard thing to follow up on. You can’t say, “Okay, I’m just going to do what Neill Blomkamp did.” You have to have all those factors. It’s about hard work and determination, but so much of it is also about pure, bloody luck.

We mentioned that you have a background in both animation and directing. One thing I thought was interesting was that in The Shining Girls there’s a transgender character who hides the fact that she has a male body and works as a burlesque dancer, and you did a documentary called Glitterboys and Ganglands, and I was wondering if that helped inspire that character at all.

The documentary definitely helped inspire that character. Spending time with the girls gave me a real feel for what they go through and the everyday issues that they have to tackle. You can draw a pretty direct line between The Shining Girls and my first book, which is a non-fiction, Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa’s Past, which is all short chapters about extraordinary women who had to deal with hardship in their lives, fighting against their social context, and were often dogged by terrible tragedy, but also fought through. Those were real historical women. That set a precedent, and that was partly where this book was coming from.

I’ve always used my journalism and scriptwriting and comics to feed into my fiction. With Zoo City, I used a lot of previous journalism that I’d done on 419 email scammers, for example, or on “rehab safaris,” where people come to South Africa for cheap rehab that’s a tenth of the price and then go on holiday after. I threaded that through the narrative.

I don’t know if you’ve ever played the Rift pen and paper roleplaying game—it’s this science fiction game—but it made me think of it because they have these characters named Glitterboys, do you know what I’m talking about?

I’ve never played it, but that’s cool.

The Glitterboys are these gigantic robot, power-armor suits with diamond armor that deflects laser beams, and they have these gigantic rail guns that are so powerful that when you shoot them you have to have these pylons shoot fifteen feet into the ground out of your boots to brace you from the recoil.

That’s amazing. That’s awesome.

Since you like Glitterboys, I thought maybe you would like to make a documentary about that next.

I would totally like to make a documentary about that. That sounds incredible. Have you got a mech suit? I’m all about giant robots.

I’m sure my co-host, John Joseph Adams, would want us to mention his anthology Armored that you contributed a story to. Do you want to talk about that story?

Giant robots are cool. I played Mech Warrior when I was a kid and Robotech was one of my formative influences, especially where they just killed characters way before George R.R. Martin was doing it. It was a kid’s cartoon and they were killing characters.

So, I was really excited to write a story about a power suit or a mecha, but I wanted to do a really dark twist on it. Inatec Biologica (the morally dubious bio-tech company from Moxyland) have established a space operation that’s specifically harvesting new forms of organic life to synthesize as drugs for medication, which is something we’re seeing in the real world now. And then something goes horribly wrong.

There are dead harvesters who are being kept alive by this really creepy algae. They’re half dead and half alive inside the power suits, and it’s one harvester’s mission to try and confront what’s going on and to find out the truth . . . the terrible truth.

John was just telling me that you also have a story coming up in his Wastelands II anthology.

“Chislehurst Messiah,” which was partly inspired by the London riots. It was fascinating being in London just after that happened because we’d seen so much hectic footage on TV, and the South African embassy had issued a warning advising South African citizens not to travel to the UK, so I’m in London, and I’m tip-toeing around, texting my friends, saying, “Where is it safe to go?” And they’re just laughing at me because the London riots were bad, but they’d also been blown out of proportion the same way South African crime always gets blown out of proportion, and it was really interesting to be on the other side of that. To be the scared tourist, as opposed to the local who’s just like, “Oh, God, really, do you really feel that way?”

“Chislehurt Messiah” is about a rich tosser who thinks he’s the last human alive, and then he starts finding YouTube videos of other survivors. He realizes that he’s the only one over thirty-five, and that he must surely bring his wisdom to the people, to save them. Of course, things devolve horribly from there.

Do you have any other projects that you want to mention? You have all sorts of stuff going on that’s almost too much to keep track of: graphic novels, screenplays, and everything.

My graphic novel, Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom, which is a spinoff of Bill Willingham’s Fables. Bill specifically asked me to pitch on Rapunzel, what I would do with her, and I took her to Japan. I figured that Rapunzel’s all about the hair, and Japanese horror is all about the hair, and this can’t be a coincidence.

I was able to explore all the Japanese fairy tales, and again do a ton of research into how the Yakuza work, and the different kind of Yokai. I worked with Inaki Miranda, who is a phenomenal artist and who was totally up for it. For example, I made him watch five videos on Pachinko for one page, just so he could draw the Pachinko Parlor right, and so that we could get the authenticity of it down.

It’s important. I read a comic a while ago where the characters fly to Cape Town, and if you do one Google image search on Cape Town you will see an amazing, bright, beautiful, cosmopolitan city in front of Table Mountain, and the comic artist had drawn generic street scenes, and an airport that looked like it was in rural Rwanda, with long grass, and acacia trees and elephants, and I was like, “No, seriously, please, we have a major international airport. We are a vibrant and amazing city. Please, don’t do this.” I think that’s partly why I’m obsessed with getting the details right. I want locals to be able to read my work and say, “Yeah, she did a pretty good job.”

My new novel is Broken Monsters, set in Detroit. It’s about weird bodies turning up in abandoned places, and the police detective investigating it and her relationship with her daughter. That’s coming out next year.

You’re also doing a screenplay adaptation of Zoo City, right?

I am, and that’s on hold at the moment because I have to finish the novel. It’s been really fun to revisit that universe, and that really makes me feel like I would like to do a sequel at some point.

An adaptation is naturally a different animal. It has to be because it has to be more visual and to mess with the story a little bit. The core story will stay the same, but I’ve rearranged the scenes and written it up to bring through the relationship between Zinzi and Benoit much more strongly so that he’s more present throughout, and it was fun figuring out how to represent the email scams on screen. There’s stuff that I put into the screenplay that I kind of almost wish I could go back and put into the book, so it’s worked out pretty well. It’s a long, slow process, developing something as a feature film. It might take four to ten years, we’ll see. Hopefully four. Raising that pesky thirty million dollars is such a pain in the ass. If you know anyone who has thirty million dollars, please send them my way.

I’m sure one of our listeners probably has thirty million dollars.

Oh, absolutely.

It’s all taken care of. Now that you’ve been on Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy all your problems are solved.

Fantastic.

I think we’ll wrap things up there. We’ve been speaking with Lauren Beukes. Her new book is called The Shining Girls. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you so much. It’s been awesome.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Epic, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a four-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor) and Robot Uprisings (2013, Doubleday). He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

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

Artist Gallery: Sutthiwat Dechakamphu

Artist Spotlight: Sutthiwat Dechakamphu
Tara Larsen Chang

Sutthiwat Dechakamphu is a concept artist, graphic designer and illustrator in Thailand. You can see what he’s working on on his blog at therafa-art.blogspot.com and more of his work at iddpd4studio.blogspot.com.

You received a traditional Fine Arts degree in painting in college. When did you switch to working digitally?

I graduated in fine art, but I taught myself digital art in my last year at university. I had done some cover work for a book company traditionally, but sometimes they needed way too many fixes, which was very difficult to do traditionally. When they told me that I had the option of working digitally, that made me decide to learn the program. I think it’s been a better way to go.

What made you decide to pursue commercial art?

When I was kid, I liked to draw fantasy or science fiction things because it was very enjoyable spending time with those subjects. When I grew up, there was no concept art school here in Thailand, so traditional art school was the only choice for me. After I graduated in 2008, I was an assistant artist in China for five months. It was very hard work and did not make good money, so I sent my portfolio to a new game company in Thailand. I liked them a lot and got to do concept art for them. I improved a lot in 2009 and after only one year I became the lead concept artist.

You have a very interesting mix of work on your website—illustration, every kind of concept art subject, and traditional portrait work. What is your favorite to work on?

Actually, I like them all, but the concept art is my favorite because the things I design come alive on video games.

What are you working on now?

Most of my work right now is illustration for a card game. Second is concept art for games.

What can you tell me about your cover illustration, Zora?

In the picture is Zora in wolf mech armor. She’s a character from the video game Planet Cyrene, which is an expansion of the MMO Entropia Universe.

Where do you draw your inspiration for your illustrations? I read that your Wizard of Plague illustration came from a dream. What motivates or inspires you to create these images?

I always draw what I am impressed with most. I draw inspiration from songs, movies, and the artists I like. For Wizard of Plague, I had a nightmare. It felt very real at the time, so when I woke up I drew it that night. It was scary but I didn’t want to lose what I saw in the dream, so I just drew it up.

Which of your pieces is your favorite, or which are you the most proud of? Why?

My favorite piece is Jiwa Reina. I made it because I had no job and had a lot of free time. I spent a lot of time on it and used many techniques, like smoke brushes, texture brushes. It was very fun. When I posted Jiwa Reina to the internet, it made a lot of people follow my work. And then I got a job.

Who are some of your favorite artists, or who inspires you?

I have many favorites, but I give the most credit to Thai artist, Mr. Skan Srisuwan. I found an art book in my college bookstore called Thai Digital Painting. I saw his very cool work and was impressed with the work style. I read his profile and saw that he had graduated from a fine art facility and was self-taught digitally. That inspired me to do this as well.

What is something that you’d really like to paint but haven’t had a chance to yet?

Someday, I’d like to do my own artbook: how-tos, step-by-steps, and secret techniques. But sadly I don’t have the budget or the time. It’ll only happen if I have support from a sponsor or when I am rich.

Thanks so much for the peek into your artistic process!

From her earliest memories Tara Larsen Chang has been captivated by the illustrations in fairy tales and children’s books and couldn’t think of anything else she’d rather do when she grew up than create her own. When she’s not painting in the studio, she can probably be found working in her gardens to make sure that there are plenty of havens for visiting fairies.

The Schrödinger War
D. Thomas Minton

You’d think after seven tries, I could get the living part right, or at least be a pro at dying, but both are still messy and painful. At least dying doesn’t scare me anymore.

I yank Olshevski back into our wrinkle of black basalt before the Eatees mist his head.

“Keep it down,” I say, my voice tinny in the helium tri-mix of my armor’s helmet. As if it matters; if the Eatees don’t get him, something else will.

To either side of me, prone soldiers in combat armor bead the lava, like dewdrops on a burn victim. Overhead, sunlight reflects off an arch of orbiting debris, which in another fifty million years will coalesce into the Earth’s moon, the same moon under which I will lie as a kid, fantasizing about fighting space aliens.

A streak of fire scratches the sky.

“A shooting star,” Olshevski says. His chuckle crackles through the radio-link. “Make a wish.”

He’s a first incar, fresh down the well from 2075 or some such. Like most firsts, he’s gung-ho and stupid and won’t live through the day. I’d like to think I wasn’t as stupid as Olshevski, but I suspect I was. Then I died. And died again. And again.

Voices buzz through the radio-link. The Eatees are forming up across the no-man’s land for an assault on the prize: a steaming pool of long-chain proteins, RNA, and protobionts that may one day evolve into Earth’s higher carbon-based life, provided we stop the Eatees.

“Cut the chatter,” Tanner says. He mutes the squad’s mics. The sudden silence presses on my ears.

I’ve known Tanner since we were first incars. He was a good soldier then; he’s a good leader now.

Olshevski pops up again. Before I can pull him down, an Eatee sonic shears the top half of his body clean off, the atoms of his suit and every living cell vibrated apart by the high energy noise. The pink mist floats away on the methane wind, and Olshevski’s legs tumble over like felled trees.

If he’s lucky, his genetic algorithm never finished transmitting to H-Station, and he can find peace in the Big Dark.

The Big Dark sounds good. It doesn’t matter if Christina is there or not anymore, either. I hope she is, but—

Fuck it.

I scramble over the basalt lip and charge the cluster of black lumps in the distance. If I hadn’t known what I was looking at, I never would have recognized them as alive—featureless lumps of metalloborane, no head, no eyes, only a hole that periodically gapes open, presumably to breathe when it isn’t emitting blasts of high frequency noise.

“Sam, what are you doing?” Tanner asks.

Behind me, soldiers scramble from the trench into the glassy no-man’s land.

The Eatees rotate toward us. Their orifices open. A sonic blast glances off my armor hard enough to knock me down.

I struggle to my knees and launch an O2 cluster bomb. The skittering pellets explode, washing the Eatees in reactive oxygen. Their bodies fizz and glow, catch fire and burst.

Eatee sonics shimmer across the battlefield. The whine grates my eardrums.

My right arm vibrates, all the molecules shaking like ping pong balls in an earthquake. I’m lifted off the ground, spun around, and I lose all track of up and down. Then the glassy basalt crashes into my helmet plate and my feet flop over my head as I fold in half.

Red mist covers the right side of my visor. I struggle to recall who had been next to me.

Warnings flash across my HUD. Suit breach, and I realize my arm is gone. Whatever hasn’t spray-painted my helmet has been splattered into the wind. But I’m still alive.

Dammit, I’m still alive.

I lie on my back, laughing at my misfortune through the haze of pain blockers.

Overhead, meteors etch fiery lines across the sky, like tiger claws opening up skin. They trace graceful arcs that anytime else would have been beautiful. I remember the time Christina and I made love in a Nebraska wheat field beneath the Perseids. They were beautiful. She more so.

Through the narcotic haze, I sense something wrong, but it takes me a full minute to realize what. One of the lines is shortening and growing brighter. Pressure sensors scream as the hammer of air pushed in front of the dropping meteor crushes—

—I sit up, clutching my right arm and gulping bites of air.

“It’s okay, Sam, we made a full recovery.” Kim’s hand is soft and smooth and warm.

H-Station’s recovery room is a morgue: antiseptic and harshly lit. Odd, because H-Station is a mathematical construct cycling through nano-cores lodged in Hilbert space. You’d think they could create something more friendly to wake up in.

Algorithms or not, the cold metal beneath me burns against my balls.

At the foot of the table are a folded flannel shirt and familiar denim jeans broken in by hard use.

Kim rips a sensor patch from my neck.

I grab her wrist, a lightning quick reflex that makes her gasp.

Kim’s face is different again. Her narrow eyes have grown rounder, the sharpness of her nose has dulled, and her hair, once black and thick, has lightened to a sun-bleached tan. Today her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, revealing a morning-clean face with freckles splashed like the Milky Way over her cheeks and nose. The same as—

I release her and pull the shirt over my shoulders; focus on pushing buttons through their holes.

Kim rubs her wrist.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“I should have warned you.” She turns away as I pull on the jeans.

When I look up, a desk and chair have appeared, and the morgue table is gone. The lights have softened to the gold of a Nebraska sunset. As a new recruit, I had found H-Station’s sudden shifts disconcerting, like the architects had gone to great lengths to create the illusion of a real world, but had never finished the programming. Like living in a movie—the unimportant stuff had been cut away, leaving only the scenes necessary to move the story forward to its inexorable climax.

I’ve never taken a shit on H-Station.

The chair squeaks as I sit. The leather cools my back.

A window behind Kim opens onto a field of wheat and a curtain of blue sky. Sometimes that window has familiar Colorado mountains or a slice of Caribbean beach or a hillside of golden poppies. Tanner thinks we have subconscious control over what we see on H-Station, and that Kim uses this information in her work.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“A meteor,” I say. It isn’t what she wants, but if I give her what she wants too quickly, I would have to leave.

Kim taps a yellow pencil against her cheek.

After every recovery, Kim is here. I sit in the same chair and answer the same questions. The only thing different is the view out the window. And the way Kim looks.

“I got hit by an Eatee.”

Out the window, the wheat bends over in an afternoon breeze. I expect to see Christina in her jeans and floppy hat checking its ripeness by the angle of the heads.

The lump in my throat hurts.

“And how did that happen? You getting hit.”

Each visit, I find it harder to concentrate on the interview. I get distracted by what lies beyond the window or by the changes to Kim’s face or the clothes I’m wearing. I see ghosts of my past everywhere, but I know they’re not here, except in my head. No matter how I try, I can’t seem to get rid of them.

Every death seems to chip away a flake of my sanity. Eighths and ninths talk about not being whole anymore. As a third, I thought it would never happen to me. When I was a sixth, I fought it. Now I’m a ninth . . .

“I sighted the enemy, and I charged.” I feel oddly disconnected from the room and the moment. When I blink, I see Olshevski’s legs tumble over on the back of my eyelids. Something that horrible should have crippled me, but it didn’t faze me at all. “How many were recovered?” I ask.

“There was no order to advance. What were you thinking when you made the decision to charge?”

“I don’t get paid to think.”

“You don’t get paid at all.” A half-grin slides across her face, her lips parted to reveal perfect teeth.

Christina had perfect teeth.

My knuckles pop as I crack them. The noise surprises me, and I look down at my hands. The scars I remember having are gone, because they are not part of my genetic algorithm. The physical ones, that is.

“Why did you charge?”

I forget sometimes that Kim knows everything that happens on the battlefield. These post-recovery sessions allow her to learn why. Kim has been tasked with optimizing our fighting force.

H-Station sits in Hilbert Space, just up-well of a white hole that opens into the solar system four and a half billion years in my past. H-Station is a haven of sorts, safe from the Eatees, but disconnected from space-time as we humans know it. It’s also the critical junction point for down-well travel, because you can’t send matter down-well, only information, in this case a soldier’s genetic algorithm, a multidimensional information array that captures a person’s genetic code and a neural map of the brain. The problem is, H-Station can hold only a limited amount of information, so Kim is searching for the optimal soldiers to fight this war. So we fight and die and learn and change, each time spawning new incars that Kim tosses back into her battlefield experiment. At some point, one of our incars will reach the zenith of our martial skill, and Kim will delete the rest of us.

“Why did you charge?” Kim asks again.

“I saw an opportunity.”

Kim doesn’t say anything.

Does she know I’m lying?

Kim resumes tapping her pencil against her cheek. “How do you feel otherwise?”

“Like hell. I just died, for the eighth time.”

“Fair enough.” Kim’s pencil scritches against the pad. With her head down, I see her scalp in the wide part of her hair. The skin is pale and smooth.

The familiarity unsettles me. “Is that all?” I ask, wanting to get away.

She doesn’t look up from her writing. “Are you ready to go back?”

“No, but it’s what I signed up for.”

H-Station is a maze of memories half-remembered. Maybe it’s the shared human condition, distilled by algorithms into surroundings that are both numbingly generic and achingly familiar. Like the wheat field outside Kim’s window.

When I first came down-well, nothing about H-Station was familiar. Yet each time I come back, I see more places that remind me of my past. I suspect it has something to do with Kim’s work.

This time, the processing room is a smoky bar with a low ceiling and barely enough space to breathe. It reminds me of the beaten honky-tonk on the outskirts of Omaha, where a fresh-faced girl from the wheat fields snookered me of forty bucks at eight ball. She was nice enough to share her garlic fries with me, confident enough to kiss me afterward, and stupid enough to spend the rest of her life with me.

Why do I remember this? There’s no pool table here, and the air smells of anticipation, not garlic.

I recognize few faces; most are firsts and seconds I don’t want to know.

Against the wall with his arms crossed, Tanner raises his chin to catch my eye. I slide through the crevices between conversations, but before I can reach him, a woman grabs my collar and kisses me on the lips. “Hey, lover,” she breaths across my cheek.

From the patch on her uniform, I see she’s a fourth, but I’ve never met her before. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else,” I say.

She frowns. “You don’t recognize me, Sammy?”

Then she sees the patch on my shoulder and looses an expletive. “Sorry,” she says, straightening my collar. “I knew a third—”

I raise my hand. She knows an earlier incar of me, a third, but not my third. I don’t know how many different incars of Samuel Hohlman exist, but each one is spawning branches in the probability function that is me. Kim is betting that one of us is an optimal soldier.

Before I can say anything, the woman turns her back to me and pretends I don’t exist.

I continue through the crowd until I get to Tanner. He shoves a glass tumbler in my hand. Vodka on the rocks.

I see from his patch that he’s a sixth.

Tanner arches an eyebrow when he sees my own patch. “Lava?” he asks.

I’ve served with many of Tanner’s incars, so there’s always a good chance we can find common ground. Tanner and I decided long ago not to associate if we had more than a four-incar difference—too much personal misery to overcome.

“Methane explosion?” he asks.

I nod, recognizing how I died as sixth. This incar knew me two or three lives ago.

The lines pinched into Tanner’s forehead relax. “So a ninth,” he says. “Still no command?”

My patch has the crossed swords of a G. I. grunt. “I’m not leadership material, but it looks like you are.”

Tanner flushes. As a sixth, this is his first command.

“Who’s the fourth?” he asks, motioning with his glass. “She’s hot.”

I shrug. “Never met her, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t . . .”

Tanner makes a noncommittal sound. He’s died enough to understand.

As a second and third, I screwed everything and anything willing. There are probably three dozen incars making it in the bar’s backroom right now. Dying is still scary to them, and they don’t fully appreciate that they’ll be back again and again. To cope with the fear, they seek solace in the most base and carnal of human actions. It’s a way to forget, at least for a little while.

Tanner searches the bottom of his glass and asks, “Is it still worth it?”

He knows he isn’t supposed to ask questions like that; it violates our agreement. Even so, I find myself answering. “I don’t know,” I say softly.

Tanner frowns. I’ve said too much. I remember being a sixth, when I started to realize the senselessness of the dying.

“But we’re still here, so we must win.” The uncertainty in his eyes is gut-wrenching.

That isn’t how it works. Our lives are an arrow, always moving forward, and we can never know the future until we get there. The future has no bearing on my past. If we fail to save humanity, I won’t simply poof out of existence. I’m fighting the Eatees for some other humanity. I’m not fighting for Christina, because she’s lost three years in my past, and while one day there may be another Christina, she will not be my Christina.

That thought drains the noise from the room, and all I hear is the roar of silence in my ears.

My drink tumbles from my shaking hand and shatters on the floor.

What the hell am I doing here?

The conversations crash in around me, like a cave collapsing. I can’t make out any voices or words. It’s all just noise.

I leave Tanner standing alone, staring into his glass.

The noise dies around me as new deployment orders flash across my visual cortex.

It’s time to die again.

I inch to the top of the trench and peer through the heat-ripples distorting the no-man’s land. I can’t be certain that I’ve been here before, but I get an unsettling sense of déjà vu.

I’ve heard ninths and tenths talk about rejoining battles they’ve already died in and sometimes even meeting earlier incars of themselves. It’s never happened to me before, but if it did, I think I would tell myself to find a way to put an end to the circle, to join the Big Dark.

My HUD picks up movement and zeroes in on a line of Eatees half a kilometer away. Like a train of charcoal briquettes, they move in formation across the jumbled basalt, venting trails of pinkish gas from their orifices.

I slide down the trench wall and check my weapon. Working on military muscle-memory, I chamber an O2 grenade without thinking.

By now, others have seen the Eatees. Chatter pollutes the comms.

“Keep it down,” Tanner says.

The second incar on my left stares at me with saucer-big eyes. For a moment I see Christina’s face through the helmet shield. Not her face as the cancers ate her body, but her face on our wedding day. Even though her hair had already fallen out, she never looked more beautiful.

I squeeze my eyes shut. I have done everything I can to forget her and make the pain go away, but she never seems to leave me.

The recruit with big eyes touches my shoulder. “You okay?” she asks through the private touch-link.

I recognize her now. I know her, or at least who she will be. Her sixth saved my life, back when I was a fourth, and paid for it with her own. I died a few seconds later, but I’ve never forgotten her. A few more deaths, and she’ll be a good soldier.

I brush her hand away.

I’m not okay. I came down-well to get away from everything that reminded me of what I have lost. I needed to kill something, to become less human, so I could stop feeling. What Christina and I had is too strong, however, and now it eats at me like her cancer ate her bones.

My only way out is the Big Dark, but I can’t have that.

My teeth vibrate painfully as Eatee sonics discharge nearby. The chatter in my helmet ends as Tanner kills the comms so his orders can be heard. We’re to lay down a wall of O2, and make sure the Eatees don’t flank us. It all strikes me as pointless.

“Get down, Sam!”

Tanner’s words jar me, and I realize I’m standing and firing my weapon over and over. My HUD tells me I’ve launched a half-dozen O2 grenades as a seventh whumps from my launcher.

Across the smoldering cinder, an Eatee swivels. Its orifice opens and the world ripples. I close my eyes and see Christina.

My heart starts to vibrate and come apart.

“You’re safe, Sam.”

It takes a moment to put a name to the voice . . . not Christina . . . Kim.

“It hurts,” I say. It’s not supposed to hurt—because I am no longer that person—but it does.

“It’ll pass. Your brain is still reconciling what happened.”

The cold metal gurney presses against me. Shivers wrack my flesh.

“Try to calm down,” she says.

I raise my head from where it’s tucked against my chest. This time, her eyes are amber, flecked with gold. They aren’t Kim’s eyes; that isn’t Kim’s face.

“We made a full recovery,” she says.

“No,” I say.

Her brows pinch together. I know she is checking H-Station’s data-core, confirming a full recovery of Samuel Holman, tenth incar.

But I’m no longer complete, no matter what the genetic algorithm says.

Kim helps me to a sitting position, and I pull on the clothes at the foot of the table. When I look up, Kim is sitting at her desk. Outside the window, aspens quiver at the edge of a lake, glassy smooth and filled with clouds. I recognize the place immediately: the Montana cabin where Christina and I spent a week every summer, and where—

“Tell me about this place,” Kim says.

I am surprised for a moment by the change in script. “No.”

I expect her to pry, but she doesn’t.

Backlit, Kim’s ponytail is pulled so tight she looks bald.

The silence picks at my resolve. I exhale, and my body deflates like a punctured bladder.

“Every summer, we’d come to this place.”

“This is a special place then.”

“I hate this place.” The lump in my stomach threatens to come up my throat. “Christina died here, the day after we were married.” I have never talked about Christina with Kim. I’m sure she knows about her; she knows everything about me.

Kim’s pencil stops, frozen mid-tap. Everything seems to stop—the shimmering trees, the clouds on the surface of the lake—like the program that is H-Station has crashed.

“She had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. They tried chemo and radiation, but it didn’t work. The cancer spread into her lungs and bones. When the doctors gave her a week to live, she asked me to bring her to the cabin. We were supposed to have a life together.”

Christina is motionless behind the desk, the pencil frozen near her perfect lips. It’s not her, I tell myself.

“I want to forget because it hurts.”

I hear a pounding sound that starts in time with my heartbeat, but slowly slides out of synchronization. When I blink, Kim’s pencil is tapping again.

“Is that why you volunteered?”

There are as many reasons for joining up as there are soldiers. What does it matter if I came here to lose my past? It’s not like I volunteered as a way to commit suicide.

My fingernails are square and perfect, not chewed to the quick like when I enlisted. Every time I’m recovered, the scars of living are polished from my surface.

“Everything back there reminded me of Christina. The way the wheat bent was her smile. The smell of sunshine was the fragrance of her hair. Now, everywhere I look here. . . . I don’t want to go on.”

Kim studies me quietly. After a moment, she says, “That’s not up to you.”

“You have nine incars of me, and probably dozens more I don’t know about. Why can’t I retire?”

“There is no retirement here, Sam.” Kim’s lips continue to move, but I don’t hear her through the pounding of blood in my ears and the rasps of breath through my lungs. Those are the sounds of life, but I’m not alive anymore, so how can I make them?

Kim scribbles on her pad with her pencil; then she looks up at me. “I need you to go back.”

The words stab me like a cruelly curved knife. I can’t go back there. Why can’t Kim see that? “I’m finding it hard to be a good soldier,” I say. “I don’t know what I’m fighting for anymore.”

“Maybe you didn’t come here to forget. Maybe you came here to remember.”

It sounds like something Christina would have said when I was belly-aching about something ridiculous.

“You need to go back one more time, Sam.”

My HUD flashes to life with new deployment orders. I squeeze my eyes shut, but I still see them on the inside of my eyelids.

It’s time to die again.

The basalt crunches like broken glass as I step off the drop-ship. More ships streak in low across the crimson sky, their engines sun-flaring as they pivot and drop. The clouds glow as the orbital battle continues; each flash is one of our ships bursting and burning.

A concussion wave from a distant explosion vibrates my faceplate. Even though the surface battle is a kilometer away, first and second incars dive into a laser cut trench at the edge of the drop circle. Their chatter is loud and fast in the comms.

A ship booms overhead and skims the battlefield, stirring up dust and sulfur steam. From its bottom, cluster bombs whiz toward the ground. They explode, killing Eatees and humans alike.

My third incar died from friendly fire. It had been painless—a bright flash, intense heat, like I had been dropped into the middle of a supernova—and then I awoke on H-Station with baby-new skin and another hole in my psyche.

My visor lightens as the flash fades and the glowing battlefield cools from white-hot to red to glassy black basalt.

Tanner taps my helmet, opening a touch-link. “Orbital’s picked up an Eatee incoming; we got ten minutes ’til this place gets hot.” He dashes off toward the rally point.

The last drop-ship lifts into the red sky, vanishing slowly into the methane clouds, like a fleck of copper sinking into blood. For the moment, the world is quiet.

The edge of the landing zone drops off into a steaming pool of scummy organics and proto-life. In a hundred million years, this pool will be teaming with the first anaerobic lifeforms, which will produce oxygen as a waste product of their metabolism. It’s that oxygen that will make this world uninhabitable to the Eatees, and will make it my—

No, it will never be my home.

I close my eyes and see Christina’s face, beautiful and smiling. Every minute I had with her is something to cherish, not forget. Maybe Kim is right.

Damn her.

Movement to my right catches my attention. A third has stepped up to the edge and is looking down into the steaming pool. Maybe he’s thinking about throwing himself in. It’s hard to say with a third; they’re a critical transition incar, from the wide-eyed newbie to either a well-adjusted soldier or to someone who will eventually be like me.

I’m not sure why, but I place my hand on his shoulder, opening a touch-link. “It’s not high enough to even damage the suit,” I say.

When he turns toward me, I stumble back. He grabs my elbow and saves me from tumbling over the edge.

His face has the same lines as my own, only fresher, and the same eyes, only more alive. He shows no recognition of who I am, even though he looks into his own face, half a dozen deaths later. I am no longer the same person, but am I so damaged he does not recognize himself?

But he is also not the same person I was as a third. He has been shaped by different experiences and today he will likely die a different death, which will make him a different fourth, and a different fifth, and so on. Yet, in his eyes is the shadow of our common bond, and I know this grief will force him down a path parallel to my own.

His eyes narrow, but they do not yet glimmer with recognition. “You okay?”

Afraid he will release my arm, I seize his wrist to keep the touch-link open. “I’ve learned something recently,” I say softly. “Our past makes us who we are today. If we forget what happened before we came down-well, then our past is only this: war, dying, and more dying. How can that be any good for anyone?”

“I—” His eyes widen then, and he sees what could be his future, but I also know he’s smart enough to realize the future holds infinite possibilities, and that I am not necessarily his fate.

It’s too late for me—my scars are all below this perfect skin—but I am only one possible future for Samuel Hohlman. How many of my thirds are out there, forging new futures and trying to get it right? Maybe, because of me, this is the one that will get it right.

“Wait—”

I release his wrist, breaking the touch-link. I move toward the rally point. He follows me at a short distance, but stops when our HUDs come alive. The Eatees are here.

Time for me to die.

© 2013 by D. Thomas Minton.

D. Thomas Minton tells people he lives with his wife and daughter in a grass hut on the beach of a tropical Pacific island, but only some of that is true. When not writing, he gets paid to “play” in the ocean, travel to remote places, and help people conserve coral reefs. His fiction has been published in Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and Daily Science Fiction. His idle ramblings hold court at dthomasminton.com.

Ragged Claws
Lisa Tuttle

Last night, after a short struggle, I went out.

It’s like that most evenings, the slow, silent battle between my desire to stay in, with my thoughts and dreams and memories, and the need to go where other people gathered. Much as I preferred my own company, no one, these days, was paying me to keep it. I lived as frugally as I could on what I’d saved, but the price of electricity had soared recently, and I was in the red again. If I went out, there was at least the chance of making money.

The sky above the closed and dismal city streets was a lurid pink, in places streaked with darker reds and blues, evolving into a deep purple, so like the skies of Eden that it set my heart racing. I soon realized that what I saw was the sunset, masked most evenings by the heavy cloud cover that had been the norm this damp summer, and that it was so exceptionally beautiful only as a side effect of the pollution that was choking the life out of our planet. In other words, there was no reason to find it wonderful, or feel happy. But reason had no impact on my feelings. The unearthly beauty of the sky moved me so profoundly that I couldn’t bear to leave it. So, instead of ducking quickly into one of the many small café-bars in the formerly trendy area where I live, I kept walking, an unusual spring in my step propelling me on, beyond the streets I knew, enraptured, until every last scrap of colour and light had drained away, and I could see no more of the heavens above, nothing but a kind of smoky, smothering darkness that pressed down against the sickly yellow glare of streetlights.

And all at once I felt trapped again. I felt it horrible to be outside in the dark, wandering through unknown, narrow streets, past shuttered shops and blocks of flats where the doors and windows gaped open since the rain had passed, and children ran in and out, shrieking, past sad-looking men out for a smoke, and the sounds of other people’s lives, a cacophony of languages, argument, laughter, music, and hysterical shouting all poured out along with a jumble of cooking smells and the stink of the filthy pavements.

Uncomfortable now, feeling watched, expecting that at any moment I’d be accosted by some beggar or lunatic, I moved more quickly, trying to inject a sense of purpose into my stride, and entered the first pub I saw.

It was a vast barn of a place, originally a Victorian gin-palace, or else designed to give that impression. There was a reek of stale, spilled beer and illegal cigarette smoke, and a background electric buzzing and chiming from some kind of games or gambling booths at one end. I have always preferred more intimate, confined spaces—trying to get my bearings and find the bar in this place gave me a rush of vertigo—but it is actually easier to strike up conversations with strangers in such surroundings, so by chance I’d made a good choice.

I told myself this, trying to counter the rush of sickness that made me want to turn around and run for home. It was only nerves; I’m always a bit nervy before I get going, and I knew the best way to deal with that was to ignore it, concentrating on the job at hand, breaking it down: First, get myself a drink, second, choose my target for tonight.

He, or she, had to be young, and not all young people appreciate an approach from an old fart like me. Although I’m not yet fifty, I know I look older. But expecting to be rejected almost ensures that you will be, so I had to put that possibility out of my mind.

Soon enough I spotted two young men and a woman sitting in a corner near the back. There was room for one more at their table, and something about their body language suggested that a stranger’s arrival might not be unwelcome, so I made my way through the crowds, careful not to spill any of my drink or bump into anyone as I navigated the length of the room.

“Mind if I join you?” I nodded at the empty stool but didn’t put my glass down until, after a quick glance at his colleagues, one man gave me the nod. We exchanged a few, bland pleasantries about the weather and sport, as you do. Football holding too much potential for team rivalry, and Wimbledon being too long over, it was natural enough to talk about the disappointingly damp squib that had been the Space Olympics, and from there it was a natural progression to my raison d’etre, the Colony. Eden.

Sometimes the conversation goes one way, sometimes another, but it’s rare that it takes more than three or four minutes to reach this point, and that’s without me ever doing anything so vulgar and obvious as “steer” the conversation. My targets always believe that they were the ones who wanted to talk about other worlds and emigration, so one of them was the first to bring it up.

Of course it wasn’t the first time they’d thought about, or talked about, the subject; who, these days, has not? There are some people who refuse to believe it even exists—it’s regularly near the top of the list wherever conspiracy theories are discussed—but I was relieved to find I wouldn’t be having one of those kind of conversations. Perhaps these three didn’t all consider it the dream of a lifetime, but they’d be willing to consider it, they’d been tempted long before meeting me, or at least one of them had.

That was the girl. I picked up her excitement right away—the rise of blood in her cheeks, the sparkle in her eye—and knew she was the one.

She began to talk about Eden, and it was almost as if she’d been there. She knew so much about the landscape, the geology, the flora and fauna, as well as having ideas for creating a better society—nothing that she said was new to me, of course, but listening to her made my heart melt with yearning, and I just about fell in love with her. We shared a dream. If only it were possible to run away with her, to start a new life, together, on Eden . . .

“But those are just games, Blake,” the lad beside her cut in. He emphasized the obsolete word for a format. “No, actually, they’re worse than games, which everybody knows are make-believe, they’re actually advertisements, meant to sell you on the idea, and advertisers are awfully damn clever, don’t you know. So they call it Eden—when in fact, it might in reality be more like Hell.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Harvey,” she said kindly. “At least don’t treat me like one. I do know the difference between fact and fiction. And I’ll bet I know a lot more about the colony on Eden than you do. I haven’t just done the adventures, the ‘games’ as you call them—”

“I wouldn’t have had you pegged as a soap opera addict.”

She made a little grimace of disapproval. “I’m not. If I’m addicted to anything, it’s Eden. I’ve done every format I can find on the subject. Not just the entertainments. I’ve done plenty of research as well, even real-time monitoring.”

I couldn’t stop myself blurting out a question, even though I knew these things should better come from her friends: “Which ones?”

She gave me a measuring look. “Quite a few. Building, landscaping, mining, surveying. Exploration.”

I didn’t have to ask her favourite; her pause made it clear.

“Never knew you had masochistic tendencies, Blake.”

She turned away from me. “I don’t, Tanner.”

“No? I don’t know what else you’d call it. Taking the POV of a construction robot is just about the most boring thing you can do, whether it’s building or terraforming or mining or surveying. Doing it once, just to see, okay. But more than that—I just can’t imagine—”

“And your deficiency in the imagination department means I’m a masochist? Hmm, I guess I do put up with you.” She flashed him a smile to pull the sting. “Only joking. Sorry, Tan, but if you will make flat statements about things you don’t know—

“Actually, I do know,” he objected. “It so happens I’ve spent hours monitoring construction robots—the ones on Eden. We had to do it as part of a unit in college. So I know just how bum-numbingly boring it is, and I think you need to come up with an effen good excuse if you want me to believe it’s a normal thing for anyone to do.”

“Why did you do it?”

“I told you, I had to, it was part of—oh, you mean why the assignment?” He shrugged. “Learning the practicalities of the construction business, something like that.”

“To learn. There you go. That’s my reason, too. I need to learn as much as I possibly can about Eden, before—” She stopped, as both men burst out in protest at the shocking, unthinkable-to-them notion that their friend—this woman they thought of as a friend, but whom they clearly hardly knew—could be planning to chuck it all and emigrate to an unknown new life on a distant world. She sat quietly under the verbal onslaught until it ran down, when she said, “Can you imagine, if everyone thought like you, where we’d be today? Most of this world would never have been settled. Why go over that hill? There might be bears! We’ve got plenty of caves to live in right here, and if it was good enough for your father and mother, it should be good enough for you. Oooh, what do you want to go out to sea for? That little boat will surely sink, and, besides, life anywhere but here is bound to be more boring.”

“Going to Eden is totally different. When people went over the hill, or even across the ocean, they could still come back—plenty of them did, so they could tell their friends what it was like, prove it was a good idea to go. Whereas, anyone who goes to Eden goes knowing they can never, ever come back. Or, at least, if they do come back, thanks to relativity, they’ll arrive at an earth so changed they might as well not bother. They know, if they go, it means giving up everything they’ve ever known, and never seeing their family or their friends ever again.”

“Unless their friends decide to go, too,” said she with a look that made him flush and turn his attention to a beer-mat on the table as if he’d never seen such an object before..

“Some people may love their lives here,” she said. “They talk about ‘giving everything up.’ Not everybody feels like that would be such a sacrifice.” A shadow crossed her face. “What do I have? A share in a flat I can’t afford, a crap job, a crazy, alcoholic mother, a bastard of a father I haven’t even seen in nine years, and frankly, if the best you can come up with as a reason to stay on this crappy, disintegrating old world is that I might miss my friends, well . . .” She rolled her eyes and raised her glass to drink.

The others drank, too. Feeling pretty sure that the next word anyone spoke would change the subject, I leaned in towards Blake and asked her why, if she felt like that, she hadn’t already emigrated?

Of course, I knew. The answer was always the same.

The journey.

Back in the early nineteenth century it used to take five or six weeks to sail from Britain to America. It would have taken longer to Australia, but the time would still have been measured in weeks, maybe months, but not years.

Harvey (or was it Tanner?) had been quite right to point out that going to our generation’s “new world” was different, by an order of magnitude, from the experience of colonists in the past.

Getting from Earth to Eden took ten years.

Ten years.

That was the minimum; it might take longer. And what that meant was ten or eleven or maybe even twelve years of imprisonment, of solitary confinement, with no time off for good behaviour and absolutely no chance of early release. You’d go in a young man and emerge middle-aged. A whole rich decade of possibilities and experiences would be turned into a single, seemingly endless, long, dark night in confinement. What greater punishment could there be for people who longed to start new lives in a new society on a new world? Lock a group of these folks up together and there was bound to be mutiny, murder, suicide, forbidden pregnancies, infanticide, general disaster. Keep them carefully apart, in an artificial state of coma or half-hibernation, and while they couldn’t harm each other or destroy the mission, there would be other problems. It was the most daunting obstacle to colonization. Most people had to be pretty desperate—or mad—to agree to it, and those weren’t the kinds of people the Eden Colony wanted for their bold venture.

“You’d go mad,” said Tanner. “At least, I know I would.”

And lovely, determined, healthy, sane young Blake nodded slowly, unwillingly accepting this verdict.

“No you wouldn’t,” I said, softly.

“They said on this programme—”

“I saw a documentary, where—”

“I read—”

“I know.” I pitched my voice so it stopped them all. Having their attention, I went on. “Forget what you’ve heard or seen or read. It’s all speculation, and conjecture, and opinion. I’ve got the facts. I can tell you what it’s really like. I’ve been there.”

Harvey nodded his head up and down, his expression carefully neutral, but clearly humouring the madman. “Ah, you’ve been to Eden, have you?”

“If I’d been to Eden, you nimmit, I’d still be there, not sat here talking to you, now, would I?” I gave him a hard stare. “What I’m saying is, I know what it’s like to go there. I know the journey, because I’ve been inside the box. I helped design the system, and then . . . I tested it.”

They were all silent a moment, trying to decide what to make of my claim. Then Blake’s clear voice rang out.

“For how long?”

I looked straight into her eyes. “I lived it. Real time, ten years, without a break. Wouldn’t have been a proper test otherwise, would it?”

In her intent gaze I saw curiosity—more than that, fascination, and a kind of hard determination to know more, to learn the truth. There was no room, with all that, for sympathy, but I didn’t care.

“What was it like?”

“Like? It was like life. Ten years.” I made the noise that was my rusty excuse for a laugh. “What’s your last ten years been like, hmm?”

“They kept you in suspended animation for ten years?” It was one of the men who asked, but I was too absorbed by Blake’s interest to look at him.

“Well, you could call it that. I was on life-support. But it wasn’t like being in a hospital. I was still living, in V-R, and, believe me, that was much more fun than my so-called real life ever had been. Physically, I was in top shape, too, getting optimal nutrients and exercise.”

“Exercise? Lying in a box?”

“I thought you said you’d seen a documentary?” I gave the guy a slightly contemptuous look. “Do a little research; check it out for yourself. The whole time I got the perfect workout every day. State of the art stuff—this was a few years ago, so it might be even better now, although I can’t imagine how.”

“And mentally?” Blake commanded my attention. “What was going on with you—the you inside—while your skeleto-muscular system was being put through its paces? You were conscious?”

“Except for the normal sleep cycle, yeah. Like I said, like they say in all the publicity, it was just like life.”

“Formats? The very best, state-of-the-art V-R.”

“That’s right. Much better than anything you can buy on the open market. Realer than real.” I saw she was uneasy with this, which was understandable. Anyone who’d ever lost a weekend, totally immersed in some exciting new format, would remember the consequences, struggling to readjust to real real life, in the office or at school, on Monday. An alcohol-induced hangover was as nothing compared to the horrifying struggle any binge-gamer had gone through, desperately trying to reconnect to the rest of the world, his non-virtual life, even his own physical body.

I worked to reassure her. “You have to bear in mind that it’s not like putting on a format at home. For one thing, there’s nothing to conflict with the experience—you don’t get hungry or cold or uncomfortable as the hours roll by, because everything is integrated; the life inside your head is the same as what you’re feeling, it really is what’s happening to you. When you eat in the format the pod gives you nourishment; when you’re running or building a wall or getting hit in the head, or making love, your body has those experiences—except that you can’t ever really get injured, and you can’t die. The machines won’t let you. And it’s so much better, so much more exciting, to live in V-R, because you can have all sorts of special abilities—you can really fly, or go deep beneath the sea, exploring for hours . . .”

“Like being in a robot POV.”

“Only much, much better.”

We’d clicked; the hunger in her meeting my own passion, and nourished by it. But she was still cautious.

“But the after-effects? I mean, just because they’re postponed for ten years . . . wouldn’t they be much, much worse?”

Tanner cut in here: “Obviously. Ten years of thinking you could fly and breathe underwater and then, boom, you’re ordinary again! Talk about crashing down to earth.”

“Except you don’t,” I said quickly. “That’s the thing—you’re not on earth, when you get out at the end, are you? You’ve spent ten years in V-R not because you have a problem with real life (and, believe me, they won’t take you if you’re that sort of at-risk personality) but because you’re travelling to another planet. And on top of that, you get weaned off slowly, no cold turkey, so the last year, maybe two, you’re gradually spending more and more time in the real . . . well, I mean it’s still V-R, obviously, but it’s more like real life, normal life, ordinary stuff you’d really spend your time doing.”

“Sitting behind a desk in a windowless office, filing data,” suggested Harvey. “Frying burgers and wrapping them to go. Trying to sell insurance to twenty hostile strangers every hour. Cleaning toilets. Yeah, I imagine after a solid year of that you’d weep with joy just to be let out of the box.”

“They also monitor your blood and brain chemistry, to make sure you’re at your best and don’t get depressed or stressed-out.”

“Pills?”

“Nothing so crude. A microchip monitor . . . your body does it itself. Occasionally you might need a little help, and then medication is available.” I felt uneasy, recalling my own first year out of the box. I’d been content, a happy idiot. In retrospect that state seemed worse to me than the depression that followed. The happiness was artificial, my misery at least was honest.

But I forced those thoughts down to reassure Blake. “Most people don’t need much help to adjust. They’re pretty careful who they accept for the colony. Young and fit isn’t enough if you’re not mentally and psychologically stable enough to survive the journey.”

As I was speaking, a line floated into my head: The journey, not the arrival, matters.

I don’t know where it comes from—I think it’s an old saying. I don’t even really know what it means. I knew I would have to think about it later, but I didn’t have time for it then, so put it out of my mind.

Blake was watching me so closely she must have seen I was repressing something, even if she couldn’t have known what it was. It was like she was the perfect fantasy girlfriend, able to read a volume of desire in each tiny twitch and shudder in my skin. As if we weren’t strangers, she reached over and touched my hand. It was only a light touch, but for me, solitary and isolated as I am, it was incredibly powerful, more erotic than the hottest porno. I couldn’t even remember the last time anyone had touched me in real life—it was probably my dentist.

“It must have been so awful for you, to go through, like, the whole journey, always dreaming of the colony and a life there, and then, at the end . . .” she took her hand away, gesturing, “You’re back here, like you never left.”

This was so true as to require no comment, but I gave her a short nod, to acknowledge her concern.

“Ten years in a box, for nothing,” said one of the men. “Who’d do it?”

“Hardly nothing. I was paid.”

“You did it for the money?”

I felt my skin prickle, and thought how satisfying it would be to chuck the last of my beer at his smug grin. So easy in V-R, but so complicated in the real. I didn’t want to fight. So I counted to five and shrugged. “That was part of it, sure. It was well paid.”

“Still.” He shook his head, his lip curling. “However much you were paid, to let yourself be locked up in a coffin for ten years is pretty—”

“A life-pod is not a coffin.”

He went on like I hadn’t said anything. “There must have been other work you could do; there must have been something.”

I wanted to smash his face. Of course there was work I could do, work I was good at—but who was paying then? I counted to five again. “You’re obviously far too young to remember the last recession.”

Blake began to say something—trying to defuse the tension, I think—but I cut across, determined to make my point. “Anyway, why should I have done anything else? You’ve missed the point if you think I regret a minute of it. You don’t know what it was like. You can only imagine it from the outside. From that point of view, I was stuck in a box. But that’s not how it felt to me, on the inside. For me, those ten years were an adventure, a wonderful journey. For me, the time I spent exploring Eden, helping to settle it, being involved in the town-planning, feeling the thrill of growing my own crops, exploring the wilderness—” I shook my head, amazed at his lack of insight. “They were the most wonderful years of my life, the richest time, full of the best, and the strangest, experiences. I saw things in the Ringing Mountains and on the shores of the Quiet Sea—and deep down below that sea, too—that you cannot possibly imagine.”

I spoke in generalities at first but then, as I got warmed up, I got into the flow, and began to describe some of my adventures. I threw in all sorts of quirky little details about Eden, watching and feeling triumphant whenever something lit an answering spark in Blake’s eyes, as she recognized things from her own virtual experiences.

I probably went on for a little too long. Finally, the shifting, restless movements and bored expressions of the other two began to filter through. Even Blake, while still drinking in my every word, was starting to feel a little uncomfortable at the way I was dominating the conversation, and boring her friends. Maybe she was embarrassed for me, thinking I was revealing too much personal emotion before strangers.

So I gave another of my awkward, rusty laughs and said, “I’ll shut up now. But I’ll tell you this: If I was twenty years younger—no, scratch that. If it weren’t for the bloody Eden Corporation’s effen age restrictions, I’d sign up right this minute. I’d leave tonight. And I’d gladly spend my next ten or eleven years in a box, knowing I’d climb out on Eden at the end of it, even if I knew I’d drop down dead at the end of my first week there. I’d take that chance, just to have that one week. That’s how much I loved it. That should tell you I don’t feel even one single day of those ten years was wasted, especially not if it helps somebody else go there.”

I drained the last of my beer in a gulp, slammed the glass down on the table and stood up. “Time to go.”

Before I walked away, I had to take one last, searching look at Blake. She looked back, and, as she met my eyes, I saw that I’d achieved my aim. She would seize the dream I’d just given her, and go to Eden. My camera-implant captured her image and forwarded it to my employers, so they’d know, when she went to sign up for the Colony, that I was the one due the bonus.

How I envied her innocence and faith.

And how I despised myself as I took the long, lonely walk back to my room, wishing I really could live in the V-R format called Eden, that I’d designed for the Corporation nearly fifteen years ago. I wished I could plug myself into it and never come out again.

© 2009 by Lisa Tuttle.

Originally published in Postscripts: Edison’s Frankenstein.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Lisa Tuttle was born and raised in the United States, spent ten years in London, and now lives in a remote part of the Scottish highlands. She began writing while still at school, sold her first stories at university, and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer of the year in 1974. Her first novel, Windhaven, was a collaboration with George R. R. Martin published in 1981; her most recent is the contemporary fantasy The Silver Bough, and she has written at least a hundred short stories, as well as essays, reviews, non-fiction, and books for children.

Dry Bite
Will McIntosh

Josephine had been up all night, her heart pounding, thinking about this day, about whether she would survive it. Now, out on the road and exposed on all sides, she was so scared she could barely breathe.

“Down,” Bella hissed.

Josephine dropped into the weeds lining the road. She stayed perfectly still, except for her chest, which was rising and falling as quickly as a butterfly flapping its wings. Bella’s face was inches from hers, the barrel of her M16 between them. “On the hill,” she whispered. She moved her eyes to the right, to indicate direction.

Ever so slowly, Josephine lifted her head, looked past the brush and scattered trees toward the top of the hill.

There were five of them, just standing there, looking around as if they were out admiring the view. Two were men, or had been when they were alive. One had foot-long yellow spines where his fingers and toes had been. The back of his head was a huge bald dome. The other man was stretched, maybe eight feet tall, and most of his body was covered in thorns. The three women weren’t any easier to look at. At least, thank God, none of them had wings.

Josephine couldn’t help but study their faces. She’d lived in Burlington her entire life, so, often, she recognized someone among the stingers. They were never who she was looking for, though; never Stan or Michael.

And what if one time they were? Would that be a good thing? No, it would be a nightmare. Yet she couldn’t help looking.

One of the stingers squatted, grabbed some vines, and started sliding down the steep slope leading to the road. The others followed, their movements fluid, almost graceful.

“Shit,” Josephine whispered.

Bella looked up the hill. “I say we run for it. This isn’t great cover, and it’ll take them a few minutes to get down that slope, so we’ll have a head start.”

“Okay.” It wasn’t a hard decision; every cell in Josephine’s body was telling her to run.

“Go.” Bella sprang up and took off down the road, her rifle bouncing against her back. Josephine was right behind her, sprinting for all she was worth, barely feeling the pavement under her feet. She waited for the shriek of discovery that would alert other stingers to their presence, but it didn’t come. When they’d been running for a few minutes, Josephine risked a glance back, expecting to see the stingers chasing them, but the road was empty.

“They’re not following,” she called to Bella.

Bella looked back, then slowed to a walk, gasping. “That’s lucky.”

Josephine stopped, rested her hands on her knees. “This isn’t fair. There are people in the compound who are much better shots than we are. There are ex-soldiers, ex-cops with big forearms who can handle the recoil on these things.” She slapped the M16 draped over her shoulder. “I can’t control it. At all. The recoil knocks me on my ass. What are we doing out here?”

Bella looked down the road. Josephine envied her broad shoulders, her muscular thighs. Once upon a time, being scrawny like Josephine had advantages. Not anymore. “I don’t know. I guess if the big, strong people make all the runs, their odds of getting killed are pretty much a hundred percent. That’s not fair either.”

“Yeah,” Josephine said, grudgingly. “But they should have to draw twice or something, to even things out.”

Bella grinned at her. “You want to tell them that?”

“No, not really.” She turned to look at the road ahead. They were at the top of the rise; poking out of the treetops in the valley below, she could see the bell tower of the Episcopal Church, and the top few floors of the glass and steel Prudential Building. “Let’s just get this over with.”

They stepped out of the woods, past a rusted swing set in the backyard of a little Cape Cod. It reminded Josephine of her own house, or what had been her house once upon a time.

Stan, Michael, and her, huddled in the living room, the door and windows boarded up, even though they knew that was completely useless. The TV news blasting reports of attacks everywhere. They weren’t sugar-coating it. You couldn’t hide, they said, because the awful black slits could open anywhere. And when they did, the quills would whip out before you had a second to react, and they’d sting you. And you would die.

And as the newswoman was saying this, speaking quickly in a hoarse half-whisper, a slit opened beside her, like someone had sliced a wound in the air, and a half-dozen long, long spines burst out of it and sank into the screaming woman’s neck and shoulder. A moment later, they were gone, and there was only the newswoman, howling in pain and fear, saying over and over again that she didn’t want to die . . .

“Josephine? You all right?”

Josephine snapped out of it, like waking from a nightmare. She’d stopped walking without realizing. “Sorry. Yeah, I’m all right.”

They padded around the side of the house, clutching their rifles. Josephine scanned the sky. People tended to watch for the ones on the ground, expecting them to jump out at any minute, but it was the winged ones that usually got you.

She followed as Bella jogged across the street, down a driveway, then into another backyard. This one had a pool, and it was filled with stingers. Josephine and Bella steered clear; the swimmers rarely left the water unless you wandered too close. She couldn’t help glancing once as they passed, to check their faces. One was watching them, a doughy-faced man with close-set eyes; the other three were swimming, their faces in the water. Two of those were women, their long hair skimming the surface as huge paddle-shaped limbs combed the water. The third was an old man; the skin under his arms flapped as he swam.

They peered through the bushes in front of the house, down Exeter Street. A dozen or more stingers were standing around as if waiting for a bus. Between the bank and the Century 21 office, Josephine could see a sliver of the main drag. It was crawling with them, even more than the last foraging group had reported. For some reason, they clustered close to the business districts, but Josephine had never seen this many.

There was no way they could go farther without being seen. If it was up to Josephine, they’d turn back right now. Let the others get angry if they wanted.

“I’ll shoot,” Bella said. “Just cover my back, keep an eye out for the fliers.” Without waiting for a reply, Bella stepped out, leveled the M16, and started firing.

The report was deafening. Josephine resisted the urge to stick her fingers in her ears as she followed Bella, occasionally turning in a full circle to make sure nothing snuck up behind them.

Stingers buckled and fell as Bella delivered tight volleys at each in turn, starting with the closest. They didn’t bleed, didn’t clutch their wounds or cry out in pain. They simply went down. If they were only wounded, they immediately tried to get back up. They did die, though; there was that, at least.

Three stingers sailed over the treetops. “Fliers!” Josephine screamed, but Bella couldn’t hear her over the roar of the M16. Josephine slapped her on the back; Bella stopped shooting and spun around. “Fliers.” The last of them was disappearing over the rooftops of downtown. Josephine and Bella watched it go.

“There’s no way they didn’t see us,” Josephine said.

“They had to hear us, at least. Christ, you can hear an M16 a half mile away.”

Two stingers stepped out of the front door of a house behind them, one with a big, colorful sail jutting out of its back. Both looked at Josephine, then started down the porch steps. They were walking, though—not running. More came through the front door, cutting off any hope of retreat.

“Shoot,” Bella said. She pushed forward, toward downtown, her M16 barking, stray bullets battering cars and smashing windows. Josephine raised her rifle, pointed at the stingers coming out of the house.

The thing was, they weren’t coming at her. They weren’t charging with spines raised. They were sort of cringing, or walking away. She’d never, ever heard of a stinger walking away from someone.

“Hold on,” Josephine shouted. She tapped Bella’s shoulder. When Bella looked her way, she held up her palm, mouthed, “Stop.”

Looking bewildered, Bella stopped shooting. “What? You’re going to get us killed.”

“They’re not coming after us. Look.” She pointed at a cluster of stingers coming down Market Street. After glancing their way, the stingers actually turned right, away from Josephine and Bella.

Bella squinted. “It must be a new trick.”

That hadn’t occurred to Josephine. She eyed two stingers cutting a wide berth around them, going to join the group that had just turned away from them.

Bella was watching; she kept lifting her rifle partway, then hesitating.

This was insane. It was impossible.

Standing back-to-back, they watched the stingers as a mockingbird twittered and peeped in a nearby tree. They must have stood there for half an hour, neither of them so much as shifting their feet. Josephine was afraid if she moved, it would break the spell.

Finally, Bella said, “Let’s go get the damned respirator before they change their minds.”

“You see?” Josephine said.

The others stood in a tight line, weapons raised, but the four stingers sunning themselves several hundred yards away, in a rolling field, made no move.

“Maybe they don’t see us?” Daniel said. He clapped his hands, shouted, “Hey.” One of the stingers, who’d been a child of about twelve (Michael’s age, but this child was white), lifted his head and looked their way, then set his head down and went back to sunning.

“How can this be?” Paula asked.

“How can any of it be?” Bella asked. It was a good point. Aliens had opened wormholes from a billion miles away, infecting millions of people with a fatal virus. The dead who weren’t buried in time had morphed into freaks, rose, and infected just about everyone else. Given that scenario, should any turn of events surprise them?

“I’ll bet it’s temporary,” Jake said, eyeing the stingers. “Some sort of hiccup. They’ve killed off ninety-five percent of the population. They’re not going to stop now.”

“You sound disappointed,” Bella said.

Jake barked a laugh. “Yeah, I’m devastated. I love running for my life.” He studied the stingers for a moment, then shook his head. “It just seems too good to be true.” He sighed heavily, turned back toward the compound.

Josephine walked down the double yellow lines, her heart hammering. They were everywhere, and they were all watching her. But look was all they did, as if Josephine was a curiosity, nothing more.

Main Street was littered with trash and broken glass—reminders of the panic of the invasion—but it was silent, the stingers flowing along in inscrutable patterns of pointless movement, each of their heads swiveling to watch her as she passed.

She turned onto Asbury Avenue, staying on the yellow lines, watching the faces, occasionally spotting a familiar one. There was Larry Noble, who’d worked with Stan. Not twenty feet beyond Larry, she spotted Larry’s wife, Claudia. Paul Crakovia, Michael’s sixth-grade math teacher, crossed in front of her. Paul was walking on all fours and had razor-sharp tusks.

At the bottom of the hill, Asbury Avenue crossed the railroad tracks. Past the tracks Josephine turned right onto Sycamore and stopped in front of the third house on the right. Her house. She hadn’t laid eyes on it since the day Stan got up from under the sheet Josephine had pulled over his body and stiff-armed their son in the face. His palm had been covered in spines, like the rest of him.

The front door was wide open, but Josephine had no interest in going inside. There was nothing in there but pain. Just seeing the house hurt, and not simply because it triggered memories of that last day. Those memories played out all the time, wherever she was. What hurt were the good memories the house triggered. Michael, practicing for his green belt in Tae Kwon Do on the front lawn while Stan watched from the stoop. Michael and his best friend Chris, playing whiffle ball on the side lawn for hours. The weeping willow she and Michael had planted after they moved in, now grown to majestic size. All memories hurt—the good ones and bad, the mundane and the landmarks. It hurt to remember her past, period.

She turned away and was startled to find a stinger standing behind her, studying her. She nodded to it, then felt foolish for doing so and left, cutting a wide berth around it.

There must be some reason they’d stopped infecting people, although the reason could be so alien they’d never understand it. And as Jake said (over and over), the stingers might go back on the attack any day. It might be temporary, their version of a mating season or something. The thought gave Josephine a prickly sensation as she wound her way through hordes of them.

Dozens of stingers were filing out of Grice’s Photography Studio. Josephine smiled, imagining them posing for glamour shots—

—and stumbled, almost fell, as Stan stepped through the door.

His face was still her Stan’s face—the warm brown eyes, the long, crooked nose. Even his posture, the slump of his shoulders, was as familiar as Josephine’s own hands. The rest of him, the porcupine quills jutting through his ruined clothes, was an abomination.

The air went out of her as Michael stepped out, right behind Stan, his neck stretched a foot long, his fingers replaced by thick spines that split into dozens of finer ones at the tips.

“Michael,” she called. She reached out, but her feet wouldn’t move. She wanted to go to them, yet wanted to get as far away as possible.

Stan and Michael headed into the street, toward Josephine. She watched their faces as they came closer, seeking some sign of recognition—a glance her way, a nod, a smile. They looked at her as they passed not six feet away, but gave no indication that they recognized her. It was torture, having them only a few steps away. They were right there. Right there.

And they were together.

That’s what got her. They were staying together. Some part of them must still be working, must know they once meant something to each other.

Yet they hadn’t recognized her, didn’t know that she’d meant something to them, as well. Josephine suddenly felt so empty, so alone. She held her stomach and sobbed, wiped her eyes as her vision blurred. Stan and Michael went on walking, down Main Street, leaving her behind.

When they were out of sight, she headed back to the compound. It felt so strange, seeing her husband and son head in one direction while she headed in the other. She felt like a character in the wrong story. They were supposed to be together always.

And then there’d been that moment in the kitchen. Stan opening the refrigerator, the unspeakable darkness inside. Three long yellow spines darting out (connected to something awful Josephine couldn’t—or didn’t want to—see), stabbing Stan in the chest before he could slam the door shut. The look on his face, as he turned to her, clutching the puncture wounds.

Someone in the fields called her name. Josephine looked over, saw Bella standing beside a basket among the potatoes. “You all right?”

Josephine gave her a thumbs-up and kept walking. Everyone thought she was out of her mind for going out there for no good reason. A few, like Jake, seemed to hope something bad would happen, to prove they were right about what a fool she was. Others, like Bella and Daniel, were just worried. She was an adult, though; no one could tell her where she could and couldn’t go, as long as she did her share of the work.

“What happened?” Bella fell into step beside Josephine, hands stuffed in her back pockets. All Josephine wanted right now was to sleep, even though it was still the middle of the afternoon.

“I saw them.” Her voice was thin and tight.

They walked for a minute, through the gate of the compound, their feet crunching on the gravel road. Maybe Bella was thinking about the time she’d spotted her sister Maura, breaking the surface on Lake Champlain, or imagining what it would be like to bump into Luis, her father, who’d been killed a few months earlier in the compound. A flier had swooped down at him from behind, speared him so hard in the back the spines had poked through his chest. The stinger had carried Luis fifty feet into the air before the spines slid out and he fell. At least it had been quick, and relatively painless. Compared to dying from a sting, anyway.

“You saw them both?” Bella finally asked.

“They were together.” She glanced at Bella, saw the bald surprise on her face.

“Right together, or just close to one another?”

“Michael was following Stan. Right on his heels.”

Bella digested this.

“Come to think of it, I saw one of Stan’s colleagues as well, and his wife wasn’t twenty feet away.” Until the recent turn of events, no one had had the time or interest to notice which marauding half-alien corpses were in proximity to one another. Everyone had assumed it was pretty much random.

“Did Stan or Michael seem to notice you?” Bella asked.

Josephine shook her head.

“What are you going to do?”

Josephine frowned at her. “What is there to do?”

“I mean, are you going back out there?”

They stopped in front of the door to Josephine’s apartment. “I’m not sure.”

With the straps of her backpack digging into her shoulders, Josephine fell into step behind Stan and Michael. Michael turned to look at her, his eyes clear and focused, but inscrutable. He turned and continued walking.

Now that the light was waning, she was having second thoughts about this. In the sunlight, it had seemed perfectly reasonable to spend a few days in the wild, among their new neighbors, as it were. Now a cold, stark loneliness tinged with terror was sinking in. She wanted to see Bella, Daniel, the rest of her little clan, to sit in front of a fire.

Instead, she followed Stan and Michael inside Macy’s. They headed toward the back, the thick gloom growing ever darker. When they stopped in the Juniors section, Josephine could no longer see their faces, only their spiny, inhuman outlines.

They did nothing. Stan stood beside a rack of miniskirts, Michael facing a checkout counter, as if waiting to pay for something. He was still wearing the remnants of the black pants and button-down shirt he’d put on for Stan’s burial.

Josephine set her pack down, pulled out her sleeping bag, and unrolled it at the foot of a sweater display. At least if she got cold during the night she could reach up and pull down a few sweaters. Lying on her side, she watched Michael and Stan.

After some time, Michael sat against the counter, pulling his knees up to his chest. Stan went on standing. They didn’t sleep, but they seemed to be resting. Someone must have noticed that along the way—that they rested. Maybe one of the generals directing tanks and fighter jets, when there was still an organized military. But Josephine hadn’t. There was so much they didn’t know about stingers.

An idea came to Josephine with such clarity, such force and certainty, that she jolted upright. She wanted to start right away, but it would have to wait until morning, when she could locate a pen and paper.

Between the adrenaline of her idea, the darkness, and the presence of Stan and Michael, Josephine was sure she wouldn’t be able to sleep. But she did.

There are patterns to their behavior, even if they make no sense. They have routines. Stan and Michael walk in specific patterns for hours. Sometimes it’s nothing but a circle, sometimes it’s far more complex, but whatever the pattern is, they repeat it.

Josephine looked up from the page, watched Michael for a moment. He was walking in a circle with four other stingers, all of them watching their feet.

Sometimes they fall into a trancelike state. Their eyes glaze over, they stop looking around, they get clumsy. Then, suddenly, they’re alert again, clear-eyed, looking around.

Josephine watched Michael; on the far side of the circle, Stan stood watching him as well. If not for the quills and sundry abnormalities, they could still be two parents watching over their son. She dropped her gaze, jotted another note.

What if they’re still part of the aliens who infected them? Maybe they’re limbs that are still somehow connected over all that distance, that the aliens stretch and move, but sometimes forget.

“Joe.” Josephine jumped. Bella was walking toward her, head down.

She set down her pen. “How did you find me?”

Bella shrugged. “I just walked around until I spotted you. It’s not such a big town.” She squatted, elbows resting on her thighs. “What are you writing?”

“The great post-American novel,” she said, closing the notebook.

Bella smiled. “No, really.” When Josephine didn’t answer, she added, “If it’s personal, I understand. I’m just curious. You’re spending so much time out here.”

Josephine turned her head from side to side to loosen the kinks in her neck. “I’m trying to learn about them.”

Bella gestured toward Stan. “About Stan and Michael?”

“About all of them. We should be learning about them, trying to understand them.”

Bella nodded slowly.

Josephine studied her face. “Is there something you want to say?”

Bella sighed. “Yes. I came out here to warn you. People are starting to grumble that the next time you come back for supplies, we shouldn’t give you any, because you’re not contributing anything.”

That sent a jolt through her.

“Needless to say, I don’t agree with them,” Bella added.

“So understanding the dominant species on this planet doesn’t have any value? It isn’t a contribution?”

“Is that what you’re doing?” Bella laid a hand on Josephine’s knee. “Sweetie, nobody knows that. You just show up at the compound, pick up food, and turn right around.”

Josephine looked at her notebook, which had nothing at all profound written in it, nothing of tangible use. “I wanted to wait until I learned something useful before I told people.”

“Have you?”

Flustered, Josephine waved at the circling creatures. “These things are completely foreign; I can’t figure them out in a couple of days. It’s going to take time.”

Bella stood, folded her arms. “Josephine, I have to admit, I’m a little worried about you. You’re spending an awful lot of time alone out here.”

As if on cue, Stan turned and headed out of the park. Michael broke off from the circle and followed him.

Josephine wanted to follow as well, but maybe it was more important that she have this conversation. “Are you worried because I’m alone, or because I’m with Stan and Michael?”

Bella didn’t answer.

“I’m still grieving for them. Maybe following them around seems ghoulish, but it’s part of my grieving process.” Stan and Michael disappeared behind a copse of trees, reappeared on the far side.

“I guess I’m worried that you think you’re grieving, but really you’re hoping they’re still in there somewhere.”

Josephine gasped; it felt as if Bella had accused her of something incredibly perverse. “I saw them die. You think I’m hoping one day we’re all going to be back sitting around the table eating dinner together?”

“No,” Bella said immediately. “That’s not what I meant.” She struggled for the right words. “I’m afraid one day I’m going to come out here and find you walking in a circle with them.”

Josephine picked up her pen and notebook, stuffed them into her pack, zipped it closed, and went after Stan and Michael.

“Josephine,” Bella called. “Sweetie, please.”

Josephine refused to believe what she was doing was obsessive, or immoral, or pointless. She couldn’t put it into words, but felt instinctively that staying near Stan and Michael was a good thing. She felt that right to her bones. As for watching the stingers more generally, they should have a whole team out watching them. Other communities probably did.

The talk of cutting Josephine off for not doing her share scared her. She couldn’t survive the winter on her own. She’d have to start alternating days, one day working her ass off in the compound, the next studying the stingers. It would be a grueling schedule, but no one could accuse her of being a freeloader, and she would get to continue her study. So everyone would win.

She spotted Stan and Michael cutting across a weedy lawn and hurried to catch up.

A beetle scurried across the oil stained floor of the service station bay. It paused close to Michael’s foot, which had the remnants of a Nike clinging to it. Michael reached out, picked up the beetle, and slipped it into his mouth. He chewed.

Josephine watched, wide eyed. She retrieved her notebook. They eat. She underlined “eat” five times. They eat. I’ve never seen one eat, never heard anyone mention seeing one eat. Is this a new behavior, like the armistice?

Surely it was. Maybe their human side was breaking through. Josephine thought of what Bella had said to her last week. Maybe she was looking for hints of humanity in these creatures. Was it so inconceivable, that some of their humanity survived death and assimilation? Maybe they hadn’t wanted to even entertain that possibility while they were at war with the stingers, because it would have made it that much harder to kill them.

Whatever the reason, Michael had just eaten a bug. That much she knew for certain.

It was getting dark. Josephine unzipped her pack to get her sleeping bag, pushed aside a zip-locked bag of pork jerky.

She froze with her fingers on the jerky. They eat.

She unzipped the bag and took out a stick of jerky, set it in front of Stan.

Stan studied it, picked it up, and took a bite.

Off in the distance, someone shouted. She and Bella stopped working, turned, and scanned the flat green crop fields.

Bella pointed. “Over there.” It was Marco, a few hundred yards away in the tomato fields. He was backing up slowly, his pistol pointing toward dozens of stingers coming out of the woods, pushing into the field.

The compound gate swung open; Jake and Paula stormed out, each carrying a rifle. Josephine took off toward the tomato field.

“Joe, hang on,” Bella shouted. “You’re not armed; you’ll just get in the way.”

As Josephine ran, she watched a stinger with tall, narrow wings attached to its arms bend and pick a tomato. It took a bite. Others were spreading into the field, eating tomatoes, ignoring the people racing toward them.

Jake and Paula reached the field before Josephine. Marco stepped back as Jake raised his M16. Gunfire tore the silence.

“Stop!” Josephine screamed. She ran faster, shouted again, her voice drowned by rifle fire. The stinger closest to Jake bloomed with red wounds and dropped. Jake stepped forward, choosing targets farther out. Finally reaching him, Josephine grabbed the stock of his rifle and tried to yank it out of his hands.

Jake stopped firing, gripped the rifle and tried to pull it free. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Am I out of my mind?” Josephine screamed, twisting the rifle. “You want to start another war with those monsters for eating tomatoes?”

By now a dozen others had reached them, with half the compound on their way.

“If we let them eat our food, we starve.” With one mighty jerk, he pulled the rifle free, turned back toward the stingers.

Josephine ran right out in front of Jake, between him and the stingers. Only, now there were a dozen rifles pointed at the stingers.

“Stop,” Josephine said, glaring at Jake. “We have no idea what might set them off again. You don’t have the right to make this decision on your own.”

“I’m responsible for defending the compound.”

“You’re not defending the compound, you’re defending tomatoes. And if these things have decided they need to eat, and we try to stop them . . .” Josephine trailed off. “Wait a minute.” She watched the stingers, their faces smeared orange. “This is why they stopped infecting us.” She swept her hand toward the crops, the stingers. A few were heading back into the forest; evidently it didn’t take much to satisfy them.

“What is?” Bella asked, joining her, ignoring the rifles pointed their way. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

Josephine clutched Bella’s hand. “They stopped killing us because they need us. They like being indoors. They eat. If they wiped us out completely, eventually there’d be no buildings, no crops.”

“And you arrived at this conclusion how?” Jake asked.

Josephine wheeled to face him. “Because it makes sense, Jake. There has to be a reason they stopped infecting us. They didn’t do it to be nice. What advantage could there be in letting some of us live? We must have something they need.”

A dozen muttered conversations broke out. At least she had them thinking, wondering what these things wanted.

“You make them sound like a bunch of geniuses. Look at them.” Jake swept his hand at the retreating backs of the stingers. “If they were smart enough to think all that, they’d be smart enough to grow their own food.”

“The aliens who made them were smart enough to poke holes in space.” Looking at Jake, who was scowling, Josephine realized she was never going to convince him. He wasn’t a bad guy, if you were just sitting around a table talking, but he wasn’t good when it came to disagreements. She stepped past him, faced the others standing among the knee-high crops, and opened her arms, as if inviting them in. “We’re never going to wipe out two or three billion stingers. Our only chance is to get along with them, now that they seem willing.”

“Maybe we should set aside some of our harvest and leave it by the gate,” Jake said. “No, hang on.” He touched his fingers to his temples. “I’ve got it: We can have a Thanksgiving, like the Pilgrims! We’ll set up picnic tables and feed the stingers hamburgers and corn on the cob. Get to know our new neighbors.”

Some of the onlookers laughed.

“We could have a square dance,” Jake added, milking a few more laughs.

Josephine folded her arms. “I think that’s a terrific idea.”

“Oh, come on,” someone called. “You’ve got to be joking.”

“No,” Josephine said, “I’m serious. They made the first move; let’s make a gesture, and see how they respond.”

“They won’t respond,” Jake said. “They’re vegetables. Anyone can see that.”

“That’s not true,” Bella said. She touched Josephine’s shoulder. “Joe’s been studying them. Tell them. Tell them what you’ve found.”

Josephine didn’t feel like she’d found much of importance, but she told them everything she’d learned.

Bella smiled at her, clearly trying to buck up her spirits, as they watched rainwater dribble off the tents they’d set up on the lawn of a grand white house on the edge of town. Josephine looked around, counted twenty-two people. Some who’d agreed to come had used the rain as an excuse to back out; others had peeled away as the hours dragged on, saying they had work to do back at the compound.

They’d waited six hours for the stingers to show. The corn was cold, the biscuits soggy.

Although she’d gotten her way, it was beginning to look like Jake had won. In the end, Jake and his friends hadn’t stopped them from taking some of their share of the stores and doing with it what they chose, though they could have; they tended to be the gun people. When it came down to it, Josephine and her small cadre probably got their way because Jake’s people didn’t have it in them to shoot fellow humans after all they’d been through.

Bella rose from the bench. “Look.”

Her hopes soaring, Josephine stood to see what Bella was looking at. So did some of the others.

Stingers were coming up the lawn. Josephine’s breath caught when she saw Stan and Michael among them. Josephine grabbed plates, started heaping food on them and setting them at the edge of the table.

Stingers approached the table, eyeing the food. A teenage girl with unnaturally elongated arms and legs took a biscuit from one of the plates. An old man covered in quills that shifted in the breeze picked up an ear of corn. Josephine grabbed a plate and headed toward Michael, who was standing toward the back of the crowd.

Michael turned, saw her approaching with the plate. He reached out. Her heart soaring, Josephine pushed the plate into his hand.

She felt a sharp sting between thumb and forefinger as one of his quills caught her. Crying out, she yanked her hand away.

Michael walked off with the plate clutched among the sharp quills that comprised his fingers.

“Joe!” Bella cried out, rushing toward her.

She was afraid to look. Eyes closed, she whispered, “Please, oh please,” as she raised her hand. She opened her eyes.

A bead of blood had welled up in the tiny hole. It had broken the skin. She’d be dead in half an hour. She’d be one of them by nightfall. What had she been thinking?

Bella grabbed her wrist, examined the tiny wound. “Oh, no. Oh, God. No.” She looked at Josephine, her eyes filled with pity.

Everyone huddled in a circle around Josephine. Bella took Josephine’s uninjured hand, squeezed it. “What can I do? Do you want us to take you back to the compound? Do you want to stay here? I’ll stay here with you, if that’s what you want.”

Josephine wiped away tears. “Please stay.”

Bella nodded.

“I’m so scared.”

“I know,” Bella said. “We’re here for you.” Someone pushed a blanket into Bella’s hands; she wrapped it around Josephine’s shoulders.

“I’m so stupid,” Josephine said. “How could I be so stupid?” Everyone else had been setting the food on the table; why had she felt compelled to hand a plate to Michael?

“You were excited,” Bella said. “You wanted this to work so badly.”

Josephine studied the tiny wound. It had stopped bleeding, was just a round red spot on her brown skin. She wondered if she’d join Stan and Michael, if the three of them would wander together. Maybe, deep down, that’s why she’d done it?

No, that was bullshit; she didn’t want to be like them.

What would she become? Would she have paddles for arms? Or wings? The thought made her dizzy and nauseous. Or maybe these were the first symptoms of the infection. If not, they’d be kicking in any minute. Abdominal pain, muscle spasms, then hemorrhaging—blood pouring from her mouth and nose.

“You warned me this would happen,” she said to Bella.

Bella looked confused.

“You said you were afraid you’d come back one day and find me walking in a circle with Stan and Michael.”

Bella shook her head. “No, I meant I was worried you’d get too caught up in your study of them, that you’d take it too far.”

“Well, I took it too far.” It was comforting to have Bella by her side. “You know, I really wasn’t staying close to Stan and Michael because I was hoping they’d come back.”

Bella shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

Josephine clutched her hand. “But I want to tell you. I want you to understand.” Bella leaned in closer. “I did it in case there’s some part of them still in there. I wanted them to see me, to know I was there, that someone still cared. I thought it might comfort them.”

Bella nodded, blinked away tears. “I understand. I really do.”

That was reassuring, that Bella didn’t think she was unbalanced. “Will you do the same for me?” She whispered. “Will you come and find me, and spend some time with me once in a while?”

Bella swallowed, nodded. “I promise.”

Somehow that was comforting, too, to know someone she cared about, someone human, would visit from time to time.

Jake’s face appeared over Bella’s shoulder. “Oh, Josephine. Jesus.”

“Go ahead and say it. You know you want to.”

“I told you this would happen,” he whispered. “But I wish I’d been wrong.” He pressed his palm to his face, shook his head.

“How much time has passed?” Josephine asked. She didn’t feel sick yet, and she’d seen how the stings affected people. It was always fast.

Jake looked at his watch. “At least an hour.”

She was afraid to move. It might break the spell, set the virus loose in her blood stream.

“I’ve never heard of anyone surviving a sting,” Jake said, looking stunned. “It kills everyone. Twenty minutes, thirty tops.”

“It’s a dry bite,” Bella said.

Jake turned. “A what?”

“Poisonous snakes can withhold venom when they bite you, if they want. It’s called a dry bite.”

“Holy shit,” Jake whispered. He studied Josephine. “You really feel okay? You don’t feel sick?”

“I feel fine.” Tentatively, Josephine stood. She examined the spot on her hand, rubbed it. Now that she was standing, she could see into the street. Michael was still there, in front of the house, with Stan and a dozen others.

Josephine could have sworn he was looking right at her.

© 2013 by Will McIntosh.

This is Will McIntosh’s second story for Lightspeed. His first, “Defenders,” is the basis for a novel to be published by Orbit books in 2014. Will’s third novel, Love Minus Eighty, based on the Hugo Award winning short story, “Bridesicle,” will be published by Orbit books in June, 2013. His debut novel, Soft Apocalypse, was a finalist for both a Locus award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Will lives in Williamsburg, Virginia with his wife Alison and twins Hannah and Miles. He teaches psychology as an adjunct professor at the College of William and Mary, after leaving his career as a psychology professor in southeast Georgia to write full time.

Angelus
Nina Allan

He was in the bathroom cleaning the taps. I could only see the back of him—an overlong measure of spine, the lean, narrow shoulders hunched forward slightly as he polished the chrome with the yellow duster—but there was no doubt in my mind that it was him. I hadn’t seen him for fifteen years and had received no news of him in all that time. The first thing I thought of was Cambridge, the cleanliness and order he had brought to his shabby basement rooms. He must have sensed me standing there because almost at once he started to straighten up.

“Finished,” he said. “Sorry. We’re running behind today because of the Bank Holiday.”

He was wearing tatty faded jeans and over the top of them some kind of nylon overall. His sleeves were rolled back to the elbow and I could see his stark, bony wrists and the oversized hands that had always reminded me of a labourer’s hands, the hands of someone who might work in one of the dirty wayside garages out on the southside. His fingertips were the colour of ochre and I guessed he had started smoking seriously at some point, although previously he had been always been one of those fortunate people who seem able to enjoy the occasional cigarette without being forced to make a habit of it. The thing that struck me most was his hair, cut close to his head now but unsullied by a single fleck of grey.

I experienced the brief and predictable urge to get out of the room before he turned and saw me but the practical consequences—the unavoidable inconveniences that would arise as the result of such a decision prevented me from acting on it. The room had been booked in advance and it would be impossible to find another. Even if I did, the cost would be ridiculous and unnecessary. The seconds in which I waited for him to turn and look at me formed one of those surprisingly rare spans of time in which one lives entirely in the present. I observed my life as I might an action sequence in a film, something I might later reflect on or form opinions about but for the moment was simply watching to see what happened.

His eyes were the same grey-blue.

“Soren,” he said. “Chess. You’re here for the tournament.”

“I’m adjudicating,” I said. There must have been some previous time in the past before we knew each other properly when he had called me by my first name but I couldn’t remember it. At first he had called me Malevich like everyone else but after that it had always been Chess. He pronounced my Christian name in a strange way, the first vowel long and overemphasised, more like a “u” than an “o.” It was that which made me remember he came from some place in the far east, some back-of-beyond village north from Kubok called Vash or Mirsk that had fallen off the edge of the railway network.

We stood facing each other. I found myself wanting to touch him, to reach out and take one of his knobbly wrists between my thumb and forefinger, as if I needed the feel of his skin and the pulse of blood beating beneath it to convince me that he was real. It flashed across my mind that touching him might reduce him somehow. Not to an illusion or a ghost—although I would most likely have given a great deal at that moment to have believed in such things—but to someone else, the janitor or chamber steward I had expected to see and not Alexei Vilnius after all. He still held the yellow duster in his hand.

“Leck,” I said.

“The luggage,” he said. “Let me take it.” He reached forward and grabbed the handles of my holdall. The holdall was leather, weathered to a mud-coloured sheen. I’d had it for years. He hefted the bag and then lowered it, setting it on the luggage stand as lightly as if it had been a supermarket carrier bag. I stood in the archway between the main room and the small square hallway from which doors led off into the bathroom and the second floor corridor. From where I was standing, I could see one corner of the bed and a polished wooden clock on the mantelpiece. I could hear the clock ticking. I wondered if the sound could be extinguished by flicking a switch on the base or whether it was the real thing, a genuine analogue antique.

“Would you come and have a drink with me?” I said in the end.

“I can’t,” he replied. “I’ve still got five rooms left to do.”

It was the feast-day of St. Ludmilla and all the hotels were full. I had left it to the tournament organisers to book my accommodation and they had chosen the Kolokol, part of a five-storey neo-gothic terrace that partially overlooked Lunar Park but was a full fifteen minutes’ walk from the esplanade. Had it been on the Front the tariff would have been astronomical. As it was, the board had been able to make themselves look generous without putting undue strain on their budget. I had refused to play, after all, even in the “veterans” exhibition matches that formed no part of the main competition. They were hardly going to push the boat out unnecessarily.

I had played only two tournaments that year. I had achieved the degree of financial security that allowed me to be choosy and I had won both matches but still I felt edgy, unaccountably nervous. More so than in previous years where I might have taken part in ten tournaments but won only seven or eight. I had contracted a virus in January that had laid me low for almost six weeks, leaving my limbs aching and heavy, the inside of my mind sluggish and tired. I put my nervousness down to that, but I knew it wasn’t the whole of it. I missed Zhanna and because I no longer had a real home to return to, I had come to dislike living out of a suitcase. Added to all that, I had an uncomplicated hatred of losing. The higher you climb, the further you have to fall.

Once Vilnius had left the room, I found I was able to behave as if he had never been there. I unpacked my good suit and hung it in the wardrobe. The wardrobe, like the clock, was an antique, a massive polished anachronism with a marquetry trim depicting flowers and satyrs. Some of the veneer was missing. I remembered the marble floor of the lobby, the enormous onyx-framed mirror behind the bar. The well-hidden yet nonetheless ineradicable traces of wear and decay—broken sections of marble replaced by granite, a scatter of age spots on the mirror—suggested that these things were real rather than reproduction. I closed the door of the wardrobe, letting my hand rest for a second on the warm, waxy surface of the wood. I wondered if Leck had polished it himself, whether his oversized mechanic’s hands had sprayed beeswax on one of his yellow dusters and buffed the ancient wood to a rubicund shine. The metal coathangers inside the wardrobe stirred slightly, making a noise like the wind brushing the strings of an out-of-tune harpsichord.

I washed my hands and face, then went outside. There was a funfair in the park and an arcade of fast food stalls. Beneath a painted bandstand, a loudspeaker played orchestral remixes of pop records that had once been hip but had since mutated into vehicles for nostalgia. Children clustered together on the steps of the bandstand, eating khvorost from paper cones or poring over magazines. Adults sat on the benches that lined the grass or strolled along the baking concrete paths. A man in a bubble car circled the dried-up fountain. He held a book on his lap, a squat black volume that could have been a medical textbook or perhaps a dictionary. A young woman walked beside him, her hands encased in the white lace gloves that had once been part of the tradition of saints’ days but were now a year-round fashion statement. At first glance, the man appeared old enough to be her grandfather, but as I drew closer I saw he was a discharged flier. His body lay against the grey upholstery of the chair in a fragile arrangement of right angles. It looked weightless as a corn husk or a sloughed spider skin. It was impossible to know his age, of course, but in real terms he would have been thirty-five or forty, possibly less. If he were to fall from the chair or run into something the impact would crush his shin-bones to powder like the legs of a cockroach. The girl came to a standstill in front of him, stroking her fingers lightly over one of his knees.

She could have been his wife or his daughter or even his granddaughter. It was impossible to tell. I found my way out of the park and headed for the esplanade. The streets closest to the shore were tricked out in bunting and flags. There were images of St. Ludmilla in the windows of many of the shops and most of the cafés: the large shiny posters on cheap photographic paper that would have come free with the morning papers, cardboard icons hand-touched with gold enamel unpacked from cardboard boxes beneath the stairs. In some of the images the saint was idealised, homogenized, tawny impassive features beneath neatly-plucked brows, the child, Wenceslaus, held in the crook of her arm or on her knee. In rarer cases you could see that the picture had been drawn from a photograph of Ludmilla Miliukova. She had been a tall woman, taller than average, with an Asiatic slant to her eyes and the melanin-coloured brand marks running diagonally across her left cheek. In one particular icon she was holding her traditional relics, a magnetic compass and a fountain pen. The pen’s cap had been outlined in gold leaf. Where the sun fell on it, the gilding shone yellow-white, as if it had been recently redone.

I noticed posters here and there advertising the tournament. Some already had graffiti scrawled across them, the names of rock bands and the taglines of what must have been local gangs, but the names meant nothing to me. The heat down by the water was stifling and the crowds on the esplanade served only to intensify it. I was thinking of retracing my steps to the hotel and perhaps making another attempt to call Zhanna when I caught sight of Leck Vilnius. He formed part of the mass of people on the jetty overlooking the water, but the set of his shoulders—inward turning and slightly hunched, like the stone wings of a gargoyle or a tomb angel—and his fixed, straight-ahead gaze made it apparent he wasn’t with anyone. I felt an exaggerated relief that he was no longer wearing the nylon overall he’d had on in the hotel. The work uniform had seemed to redefine him in some way that was absolute and irrevocable. The sight of him in it had increased my sense of guilt. That was something I only realised now it was gone.

I took him by the shoulder. “Let’s go for a beer,” I said. I think I realised even then that the idea of us having a conversation, let alone a drink together, was made possible not by any show of courage on my side—there was none—but by his inability to nurture hatred or bear a grudge. I say inability because it was simply that: a characteristic rather than a virtue. Some might even have labelled it a weakness, precisely that crucial failure of nerve that had led to his annihilation in the first place.

We found a couple of empty seats at one of the covered tables. The canvas awning did little if anything to diminish the heat, but at least it provided shelter from the sun. I left Leck to save our seats and went to stand in line at the counter. The kvas I eventually returned with was gassy and warm.

“Is it always this hot in September?” I asked.

“People come here for the heat,” he said. “It’s a resort.”

“The fliers, you mean?”

“The fliers stay all the year round.”

I had heard that invalided fliers could apply for a sizeable relocation package as well as the usual discharge annuity. Fliers couldn’t tolerate cold or damp. The doctors advised them to move south because things tended to go wrong with them otherwise, things that once in progress could not be cured. The doctors suggested a lot of things, but what it came down to was that they didn’t understand the physiology they had helped to create, or at least not properly.

“I saw one of them in the park,” I said. “He looked a hundred years old.”

“They’re everywhere here,” said Leck. “You soon get used to it.”

It was Leck that introduced me to chess. I had played before, naturally—it would have been impossible to pass a childhood in Radosth and not at least become acquainted with the game—but I played in a perfunctory, almost dutiful fashion, the game meaning as little to me as football or draughts. The thing that mattered to me was poetry, not just my own work but the oeuvres of the great twentieth-century Symbolists, Yesenin and Gumilev and Blok, whom I revered as my masters. It wasn’t until my year in Cambridge, where after so much hopeful anticipation I found myself an alien and an outsider, that I found comfort in the pursuit of a game that by its very familiarity had previously seemed irrelevant and even hackneyed.

Leck played chess like a professional but it was just an amusement for him. Like so many of his talents, he enjoyed it without granting it any particular importance. He taught me everything I knew and I suppose in the end I was able to augment that knowledge and improve on it because I gave the subject my whole attention. I became obsessed because it was in my nature to become obsessed. But of all my victories, I would say that my first victory over Leck Vilnius is the one that still means the most to me. Leck Vilnius was the yardstick by which I measured my progress.

He laughed with delight when I won. I feel certain that if he had put his mind to it he could have gained the upper hand again and easily but he wouldn’t put in the hours to improve his game.

His gift was a natural instinct, while mine was a hard won skill. In the end I stopped playing him. He made a joke of it, claiming I’d grown too high and mighty to waste my time with an amateur, but in truth I was afraid to. No matter how many tournaments I won or how many foreign masters I competed against, there was always the fear at the back of my mind that one day I’d go up against Leck Vilnius and discover that he’d finally got round to doing some serious practise.

I’d been awarded a scholarship to write a paper on Catherine Lovesey, but Leck, of course, was in Cambridge to study under Roland Eyre. Leck’s supervisor at MGU was Valery Kushnev. Kushnev had known Eyre for thirty years. It was even said that Eyre had collaborated with Kushnev on some elements of the Aurora project. In view of what happened later, Eyre had distanced himself from such speculation, although he never denied that he and Kushnev were friends. I met Eyre on several occasions and to me he exemplified everything I hated about Cambridge. He dressed carefully and ate well. His smooth hands were always clean. He seemed knowledgeable on every subject but passionate about none—indeed he seemed to mock the very concept of passion. He could have been anything or nothing, the opposite of Kushnev, who was buried so deep in his particular enthusiasms he might almost have been described as a madman.

I wondered about Eyre, what he had been like as a child or how he might react to being hit. His expression was one of habitual bland irony that, whenever I encountered it, made me tight in the chest with rage.

I first saw Angelica Eyre in the fiction department of Heffers bookshop on a Friday afternoon in the third week of November. The surname was unusual but not unprecedented. It was scarcely credible that she was his daughter. I still doubt the fact to this day.

There was a particular type of moth that used to frequent the stand of scrawny oaks behind the house I grew up in on the outskirts of Radosth. It wasn’t a large insect—an inch across at most—but it struck me as having a modest beauty, a quality of grace that had to do with the flicker and purr of its flight between the branches and the soft, somehow decorous brown of its triangular wings. It was called the Spring Usher. I could never decide if it was so called due to its likeness, in its quietude of demeanour, to an attendant in a church or funeral parlour or whether its name was a reference to its appearance at the head of the season, but I loved the name anyway, the juxtaposition of a word that was mostly brightness with one that suggested the dark. Angelica Eyre had that same quality of fragile fortitude, the same shaded light, as well as a personal modesty that had nothing to do with subservience or repressed emotion but was by way of being a secure yet non-combative sense of self.

I would see the moths outlined against the dusk, brittle, ephemeral puffs of powder and ash. It seemed to me a gesture of almost naïve bravery that, defenceless as they were, they should face the night so openly. I liked Angelica on sight, although I had no reason to believe I would see her again. When I came out of Heffers, it had started to drizzle. I made for one of the dingy teashops just off the High Street where the cakes were often stale and the tea weak and milky but it at least provided an escape from the rain. The place was crowded and although I would not normally have done so, I was forced to sit down at a table that was already occupied. In an effort to preserve my solitude I took out the book I had just bought, an edition of the late poems of Catherine Lovesey annotated by her sister Millicent Wray. It was only when the waitress brought the tea that I looked up for a moment and discovered that the girl from the bookshop was facing me across the table. She caught my eye and apologised for taking up so much room. For a moment I misunderstood her, thinking she was referring to the space she herself occupied as a physical being. The thought creased my brow—she was tiny—but then I saw how she was busying herself with her tea things, sliding them around in an effort to restrict them to her half of the table. There was a small teapot, I noticed, a sugar bowl, a china cup and saucer and a plate of the same curiously anodyne sliced white bread that had so repelled me when I first arrived in England. I grew used to it in time but I never saw the point in it, unless as the preferred English method for absorbing the milky tea. As I watched the girl buttered a slice and then sprinkled it with sugar from the bowl.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s fine.”

She looked up from her plate. Sugar crystals glimmered at the corners of her lips.

“Where are you from?” she said. The idea that my foreign accent—something I could scarcely hope to conceal—marked me out so immediately, so obtrusively as a stranger made me feel defensive but all the same I liked her directness. Many of the people I had so far met in Cambridge seemed committed to promulgating the national conviction that to ask real questions—personal questions—was some indecent breach of required etiquette, contenting themselves instead with the stylised gavotte of phrasebook pleasantries and humorous small talk. Angelica asked questions for the same reason a child asks questions: She wanted to know the answers.

“A place called Radosth,” I said. “It’s in Ukraine.” I found I couldn’t stop staring at the food she was eating, the slice of sugary white bread with the bite taken out of it. She laughed.

“I can’t do this at home,” she said, waving the bread. “My father thinks it’s vile.” That was before I knew who her father was, of course, but it struck me even then as curious that anyone might object to a pleasure that was so harmless. Even stranger was the fact that the girl still paid attention to him. She looked at least eighteen.

In fact she was nineteen, and already on her way to a doctorate. She was preparing an annotated edition of Melanie Schleif’s prison letters. At some point—I think it was shortly after we first slept together—I asked her if her thesis was a way of getting back at her father, but she just sighed and said it wasn’t like that.

I busied myself with my own tea and I couldn’t help noticing how beautiful the cup was, the translucency of the china, the delicate design of pale blue forget-me-nots. It never ceased to mystify me, the trouble such places took with their accoutrements, the lack of respect they showed towards their tea. I poured out the teapot, adding milk to the cup beforehand in the English manner. The drink was as bland as always, the colour of dishwater, but the heated porcelain brought warmth to my hands and an obscure kind of comfort.

“What were you buying?” said the girl. “In there?” She made a head-gesture towards the street and in the vague direction of Heffers. I handed over the Lovesey and watched as she leafed through it. I noticed that she turned first to the title page, scanning it as if she already had some idea what she was looking for. That surprised me. Catherine Lovesey had a following but she was never what you’d call popular.

“There’s this one,” the girl said, resting her finger half way down the page. I leaned over and saw she was pointing to St. Margaret, one of the longer poems in the Rosary sequence and the one many would claim to be its centrepiece. “Melanie Schleif always carried that poem with her. She had it with her when she died, did you know that?”

I could see at once there was no pretence about her, no arrogant need to display her knowledge, just a desire to talk about the things she found interesting or important. I had heard of Schleif, though barely. Later on, I asked Leck Vilnius about her and he told me she had been one of the less-well-known casualties of the Polarity, a mathematician, not a pilot, but she had still been executed for heresy like all the others. Lovesey’s Rosary poems made free reference to the saints of both canons, the Catholic and the Modern Orthodox, so St. Margaret was both the Christian martyr from Antioch who was burned, boiled, and then beheaded by a thwarted suitor, and Margrit Palister, the Aeronautics engineer who had died on the Fidel Castro. The familiar of both Margarets was still a dragon, although many of the more modern representations showed her without it.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Angelica,” she said. “If I wrote anything myself, it would be stories rather than poems.” She showed me her own book, the one she had been looking at in Heffers when I edged my way past her into the poetry section. It was Hilary Morris’s The Hurricane, a book I had read as a boy but not touched since. The stories in it were all about people preparing for an alien invasion, but I had found it disappointing as the invasion itself, the hurricane of the title, never took place.

“I know this,” I said, turning the volume over in my hands. It was a new edition, a hardback with a black-and-white aerial photograph of a caravan park on the front. “Why do you like it?”

“I’ve always loved it,” she said. “I’ve read it so many times I know it by heart.”

“That still doesn’t tell me why you like it.”

“When I was younger, I just used to find it so exciting.” She poured more tea into her cup. It was the dregs of the pot and I could see tealeaves in it. “I used to lie in bed and try to imagine what I’d do if I were in that situation. Perhaps you only discover who you really are when you’re in danger of losing everything. It forces you to make up your mind about what you want.”

“But you could argue that danger is crippling, like hunger or fear.”

“You could,” she said. “But so is lassitude.”

“He’ll never let me marry you,” she said. “He hates foreigners.”

Her words shook me to the depths but not for any of the reasons you might have thought. I hadn’t a clue that was what she’d been thinking—marriage hadn’t entered my head. The truth was that, although I admired her intellect, I found it difficult to connect with her on an emotional level. I wouldn’t say she was cold, although when we were in bed together she was always passive. Perhaps it was the difference in our ages, although that was only five years. But when I lay beside her in the dark she sometimes seemed a world away, and the world that she came from seemed so small.

I liked her very much but I had avoided thinking about what might happen when my time in Cambridge was over. In fact, once the novelty of sleeping with her had worn off, I never really thought about Angelica unless I was actually with her.

I had a few seconds to take in what she was saying and a couple more to focus on what it meant. I realised she was talking about her father and for the first time I saw him as an ally rather than an adversary.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Virtually everyone in his department is a foreigner. He shares an office with Omar Hussain.”

“None of that matters. Deep down he still sees them as inferior. He thinks he’s doing them a favour just by talking to them. I think he’d pay to get rid of you rather than accept you as a son-in-law.”

I felt suddenly furious, not at the man’s racism—that was exactly the kind of thing I had come to expect from Cambridge—but at his daughter’s unwitting presumption in envisaging a role for me I hadn’t the slightest intention to fulfil. And again there was something else I couldn’t make sense of, the girl’s continuing adherence to her father’s wishes. I didn’t understand the hold he had over her. I couldn’t believe that she loved him. I couldn’t imagine that anyone could care about Roland Eyre.

“He’s bound to change his mind,” I said. “At least once you’re older.”

She gave me a strange smile then, as if I had said something funny. I could only think that it meant she’d guessed my true feelings on the matter and I felt a deep relief that I hadn’t had to speak of them aloud.

The first I knew of what came later was when I arrived back from a lecture one morning and found Angelica in the kitchen arguing with Leck. Until that day I had never heard Leck raise his voice and even then he wasn’t shouting at Angelica, not really, just turning up the volume a little.

“You mustn’t do this,” he was saying. “I need you to promise me.” He was leaning towards her, his shoulders stooped and his big hands spread wide like crows’ wings. Leck Vilnius had never shown any interest in Angelica Eyre, at least not in my presence. He came and went from his basement on his way to the labs. In the evenings, he would sit at the table with us sometimes and smoke a cigarette. If Angelica wasn’t there we might play chess. Mostly he lived for his work. You could have said his head was in the stars.

“What’s going on?” I said. I supposed Angelica had come to meet me and arrived a little early. The way she was behaving with Vilnius surprised me, though. She seemed more animated than usual, speaking forcefully, as if she knew him better than I realised.

He turned instantly at the sound of my voice, his blue-grey eyes fixing on mine. I checked them for guilt but found none. “She’s planning on running away,” he said. “She wants to become a flier.”

I almost laughed. I couldn’t remember ever having heard anything more implausible.

“They won’t take just anyone,” I said. “You’re a humanities student.”

“They want all kinds of people now,” she said. “People from all disciplines. If you’re young and fit, they can use you. I’ve already filled in the forms.” She looked relieved to see me. Perhaps she thought I might back her up against Vilnius, or perhaps she just wanted there to be someone else in the room besides the two of them. In any case, she turned her back on him. The idea that she might be going away made me feel strangely elated. All at once I felt homesick for Radosth and the leagues of barren scrubland that surrounded it. The burnt-out factories that loomed on the horizon like the battlements of ruined castles. I felt a longing that was almost painful, a nostalgia for someone not yet met.

“That isn’t the point,” said Vilnius. “It’s not something you do on a whim, that’s all. There’s no way back from a decision like that. It’s tantamount to signing your own death warrant.”

Angelica and I both went quiet. I felt shocked at hearing Leck speak about his work in that way and I supposed Angelica felt the same, but it was she who broke the silence.

“If I stay around here much longer, I’ll end up as just another faculty wife.”

“You’re nineteen years old,” he said. “You don’t know anything.” He threw his hands in the air and then let them fall palms down on the table. They rested there, fingers apart, and thinking about it now I recall they were nicotine-stained even then. I turned to leave, forgetting I had only just come in. After a second’s hesitation Angelica followed me. We walked along the Backs for a bit—it was late spring, there were people on the river—and then down to the market to browse the second hand bookstalls. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I do know that neither of us mentioned what had just happened. We went to a pub and had lunch. At around three o’clock she told me she had an essay to finish. I said goodbye and returned to my rooms.

What happened was that Roland Eyre blamed Leck Vilnius for everything and as a result destroyed him. He did him no bodily harm—resorting to physical violence wasn’t his style. But he accused Leck of plagiarism and withdrew his references for the Herzog-White bursary. I think he also exerted his influence on Valery Kushnev. Kushnev thought of Leck like a son, but he needed Eyre more. Their association was Kushnev’s passport back to international reputability. In any case, the fellowship that should have been waiting for Leck back at MGU never materialised. Leck kept quiet about it all, but there were plenty of people who didn’t. The thing that mystified me most was how Eyre came to believe it was Leck who’d corrupted his daughter. I asked someone about it—a political scientist in the third year who I knew a little, enough to chat to in the JCR anyway—and he said that Eyre had gone through Leck’s stuff one day at the labs and found a photograph of Angelica in the zip compartment of his wallet. It seemed everything followed on that.

I pretended not to know what had happened. I went around sullen and silent, letting people believe I was depressed because Angelica had left me. As soon as my viva was over I flew home. I was granted my Masters in absentia, but by then Catherine Lovesey seemed part of another lifetime. I’d managed to pull a top-flight sponsor and was beginning to attract some notice on the national circuit. My agent booked me to play a tournament in New York.

“Only one person in fifty who enrols on the program actually completes it,” said Vilnius. “Did you realise that?”

I shook my head. I remembered the nightmares I had endured for a while. Angelica’s body had been slight, almost emaciated in any case. In my dreams, it had become hollow and weightless, her pubic hair sparse and greyish as thistledown, the hair of her head breaking off at the roots at the slightest touch. Even two years after she’d gone, I was still having those dreams. In the end, I as good as forgot what she had really looked like.

Vilnius drank his beer, taking it in small, slow sips as if anxious to make it last. He looked tired. I wondered how much they paid him at the hotel. Then he leaned forward over his glass and told me how he had tried to find Angelica, but failed.

“She wasn’t at Maastricht,” he said. “But that’s just the registration centre, so I didn’t really think she would be. I tried a couple of the bases, but nobody had heard of her. It’s like a closed shop, though, no one will tell you anything. I had to give up in the end.”

I took him to mean that he had run out of money. I had passed the base at Orel on the train coming south. The field generated by the protective fences meant that nothing could live or grow for fifty yards on either side. The buildings beyond—a huddled square mile of hangars, labs, and low-rise residential complexes—had no windows, at least not on the elevations that faced the world. There was no sign of movement and it pleased me to imagine the place had been abandoned even though I knew that wasn’t the case.

“I told her she’d find all the freedom she needed just by moving out, by getting her own place in London or something, but she wouldn’t listen,” he said. “She said her father wouldn’t stand for it, that unless she got away completely he’d always find a way to interfere. She didn’t know how to stand up to him. I suppose she was too young.”

I’m still not sure exactly how well he knew her. Most people would say I’m being naïve in not facing the facts, but I’m certain that’s not the case. Not because friends don’t betray each other every day, but because if Angelica had been having an affair with Leck Vilnius she would have owned up to it immediately. That’s the kind of person she was. Vilnius, too.

Perhaps I’m wrong about that, but I don’t think so. In any event, it doesn’t seem to matter any more.

I asked Leck if he wanted another beer. He hesitated for a moment and then said no. “I’d better be getting back,” he said. I offered to walk with him. I wanted to see how he lived.

Dusk was falling and the bells had started to ring for St. Ludmilla. I thought of Ludmilla Miliukova, the girl from Tashkent who had been one of the cosmonauts on the second Mars mission and later imprisoned by the Uzbek government for crimes against the state. Her face had been scarred by a heat gun when they brought her down. I have always hated September, because its still-long, grass-scented days make it possible to deceive yourself that summer might go on forever. In that town, in that heat, where the children ran back and forth along the jetty and the golden evening sunlight turned the seawater the colour of amethyst, it seemed more possible still.

We went inland away from the esplanade, turning not in the direction of Lunar Park and the Kolokol Hotel, but west, towards the scarified industrial estates and the old railway depot. The houses there were shabby but not derelict, a mixture of newer concrete low-rise and underpinned brick terraces reinforced to comply with building regulations in the earthquake zone. Leck had a flat in one of the newer blocks. The magnetic security lock looked as if it had been smashed with a hammer but the entrance hall was clean nonetheless.

For a moment I envied him his existence, the defined confinement of his lodging place, the secure and secluded quietude of this tastefully festive seaside town. Then in a flash I saw the horror of it, the procession of identical days, the inevitable daily comparison of what he had with what ought to have been. I wondered if he had married after all, or at least found a friend to lodge with, but when we entered the apartment it was obvious almost at once that he lived there alone.

“What do you do here?” I asked. It was a relief to have the question out in the open because it was a real question, a question I wanted to know the answer to. In addition to that, I felt the mere act of asking it seemed to some extent to restore relations between us. It was the sort of direct question you could only think of putting to a friend.

“I wait,” he said.

I was silent, until I realised what he was talking about. He meant to stay in this place and wait for Angelica.

“I know it’s not the only place she might come to,” he said. “But it’s the most likely. Most discharged fliers end up here eventually. They come to be with their own kind.”

“But it could be—decades,” I said. “It could be never.” I wanted to tell him that he didn’t even know if she was alive, but I supposed he must know that already. She could have died in training or as a result of the drain. She had probably decided against entering the program at all—it was far more likely she had ended up as ground staff or admin in one of the high-rise air-conditioned office blocks in Maastricht.

It would have been a good life in a foreign city, hundreds of miles away from Roland Eyre.

When fliers come back, they’re damaged, and I’m not just talking about their ruined bodies. Most have been away so long in real terms that everyone they knew before is already dead. Those who still have family or friends find it difficult to connect with them. I’ve read stuff like that in the memoirs written by war veterans—how their lives and their outlook were so altered by war that they lost the thread that bound them to civilian life.

I think now of Angelica and find it impossible to believe that such a small, slight creature could have survived such ordeals. And yet she was brave. Braver perhaps than Leck Vilnius. Braver than me, certainly.

“I watched her once in the library,” said Leck. “She was drawing the constellations,” He was heating the samovar and I knew the tea he made would be dark, almost black, bitter and rich as loam. “She had a piece of paper spread out, and a row of sharpened pencils in about twenty different colours. The way she was doing it made it seem as if there was a logical pattern to everything, an order that could be calculated and utilized if you only thought about it hard enough.” He shrugged, drawing his shoulders together in that crow-like, gargoylish way he’d always had. “It made me suddenly wonder whether Eyre might not have got his figures mixed up somehow, that I’d been wrong to go along with him. I’ve had a lot of new ideas, Chess. I would have liked to discuss them with Valya Kushnev, but I heard that he died.”

The apartment was one room with kitchen equipment in an alcove and a toilet in a cupboard leading off. There was a low couch covered with a blanket that obviously doubled as his bed. Like the basement in Cambridge, it was spotlessly clean. In one corner stood a trestle table with an ancient laptop on it amidst stacks of books and papers. I saw diagrams on some of the papers, segments of coloured ink and dotted lines. They looked more like abstract paintings than maps of the stars.

On the wall between the table and the couch there hung a photograph of a girl in profile, her dark hair drawn back from her face. The longish nose had a slight kink at its midpoint, the mouth was sensuously curved but rather wide. You may not have called her pretty but you might well have said she was distinctive. It took me a couple of seconds to realise who she was.

Vilnius had those old-style tea glasses, the polished silver holders with troikas engraved on them.

“Do you fancy a game of chess?” he said.

“All right,” I replied. “Why not?”

© 2008 by Nina Allan.

Originally published in Albedo One.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

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

And Then Some: A Kaslo Chronicles Story
Matthew Hughes

Erm Kaslo is an “op”—a confidential operative based on Novo Bantry, a long-settled planet that is one of the Ten Thousand Worlds, humanity’s far-future civilization. A highly trained, highly principled security agent, he is at the peak of his professional career when he discovers a forgotten truth: Every several thousand years, the fundamental ground rules of the universe arbitrarily switch between rational cause-and-effect and “sympathetic association.” Very soon, the laws of physics will give way to the reign of magic. Only a handful of people know what’s coming: Technological civilization will collapse; Novo Bantry will be ruled by wizards. And the would-be mages are already jockeying for position. The question facing Kaslo: How will he greet the new order?

Erm Kaslo came to Cheddle on the Adelaine, a tramp freighter that didn’t mind taking passengers who didn’t mind the quality of the accommodations. He could have come on a liner, but he preferred, when working, to make his entrances unnoticed.

Carrying his valise, he disembarked along with the crewmen, but when the little knot of spacers turned left out of the spaceport gate, heading for the huddle of taverns and bump-houses that catered to transients whose needs were pressing but whose standards were low, he turned right and climbed the rise into the town of Upper Pulluch.

This was a middling-sized community of one- and two-story buildings built of the dark-hued local stone and roofed in slate. Even in the wan sunlight of Bessan’s Star, it looked a stern and unwelcoming place, a town that had seen better days without ever having seen really good times. Kaslo hoped his business would be done and he off-world before he had to experience one of the frequent month-long rains the freightermen had warned him against. They must turn Upper Pulluch into a grim setting indeed.

He inquired of a passerby and received directions to his destination, got lost anyway, but was steered aright in the end by another pedestrian. The Adelaine’s purser had bid him be careful in approaching Cheddlites—theirs was an uncommunal society, in which no man felt obliged to aid another, and they were quicker than most to take offense and to assuage their injured feelings by doing sudden violence.

But Erm Kaslo was the kind of man who could make even the quickest temper cool. He was not particularly large, but he was well-knit, with a hard-planed face and eyes as gray as winter. And today he had about him a purposeful air that invited the Cheddlites he encountered to offer him quick cooperation that would move him on and out of their lives.

He recognized the police prefecture by the blue light above the entrance. Inside was a small lobby with wooden benches around the drab walls, a strong door leading into the building’s interior, and a chest-high counter, above which was a metal grill pierced by a wicket. The window framed the head and shoulders of a mature man in a green uniform with rank markings on its sleeve. He was making notes on a sheet of paper but looked up when Kaslo entered. He regarded the newcomer with a face that had long ago registered its last surprise.

Kaslo approached and presented a folded paper. He identified himself and said, “Here is an arrest warrant signed by the Chief Constable of the Commune of Indoberia on Novo Bantry.” He brought forth another document. “And here is a certificate of deputization authorizing me to act, in the execution of the warrant, as a special agent for the Constabulary.”

The policeman behind the wicket examined both papers in a leisurely manner. Then he handed them back to Kaslo and said, “You will have to see Captain Maduc, the Deputy Prefect.”

“Then I will see him,” said Kaslo.

“He is not here.”

“Where is he?”

The policeman made a noncommittal gesture.

Kaslo said, “When will he return?”

Again, the man behind the counter silently implied that no definite answer would be forthcoming.

“Should I wait?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Then what do you advise?”

The other man gave it some thought. “Find accommodations and remain there,” he said after a while. “When the Captain is ready to see you, someone will come to collect you.”

Kaslo restrained himself. “Can you recommend somewhere?”

Again, the policeman appeared to consider alternatives. Finally, he said, “Are you wealthy?”

“Not in material terms,” said Kaslo.

The uniformed shoulders shrugged. “Then the Old Bastable will do you.” He gave directions, then it was as if Kaslo had ceased to become visible to him.

After the silence had lengthened, Kaslo pointedly cleared his throat. “My documents,” he said.

The policeman looked at the warrant and the certificate. “You’re sure?” he said.

“I am.”

Another shrug, and the papers were slid through the opening. Kaslo took them and folded them into an inner pocket. He saw that he had again ceased to hold the other man’s attention.

He left and followed the directions to the New Bastable Inn. It was in an even less appealing part of Upper Pulluch than the spaceport and the prefecture. The lobby smelled of stale beer and last night’s dinner entree. The clerk who eventually emerged from the inner office to answer Kaslo’s repeated tappings on the bell had neither bathed nor shaved in long enough for the results to be easily noticeable.

Kaslo engaged a room with a bath and went upstairs. He did not bother to unpack his valise, but sat on a hard chair near the window that looked out onto the unswept street in front of the hotel. It was just after noon when he began to watch. It was near to sundown when a low-slung groundcar with official insignia on the door pulled up to the far curb. A fat man in civilian clothes got out, followed by a heavy-shouldered individual in prefecture green.

Apparently, Kaslo was not to be sent for. He wondered if his status had gone up or down.

The fat man looked up and saw the face in the upstairs window. His face registered no expression. The uniformed man followed his gaze and Kaslo saw what might have been a smile briefly touch his lips. Or it might have been a smirk.

The two men crossed the street toward the hotel and disappeared from view. Twenty seconds later, there was a knock on Kaslo’s door. He opened it and they came in, stood close together just inside the doorway. Both men gave Kaslo the looking-over that police on all worlds give to people they encounter in their line of work: the sizing-up that asks and answers the question, Are you going to be trouble?

“You’ve got a warrant for the arrest of Binnie Varshun?” said the fat one.

“I do,” said Kaslo. “Captain Maduc?”

The only answer he received was a grunt and a hand extended in a gesture that said, Hand over the warrant. He did so, then waited as the fat man read every word of the document. The uniformed one used the time to fix Kaslo with a hard, unblinking stare, the kind policemen give to people they are trying to intimidate.

Maduc looked up from the warrant, and said, “And you’re some kind of deputy?”

Kaslo handed over the certificate and waited while it was subjected to the same detailed scrutiny. When the fat man had finished, he let his hands drop to his sides. Both papers fell to the floor.

“Well,” he said, “what to do about this?”

“That’s easy,” said Kaslo. “Assist me in serving the warrant.”

“You want to arrest Binnie Varshun?” said the Deputy Prefect. “And what? Take him back to this . . .”—he looked down at the warrant, lying on the floor, and nudged it with his toe to turn it around so that he could spell out the name—“In-do-be-ria?”

Kaslo did not look at the warrant, but straight into the fat man’s eyes. “Yes, I do.”

The two Cheddlites exchanged a glance. The door to the room had remained open. Now the big one in the uniform used his boot heel to slam it shut. The fat one sighed and said, “Maybe we could convince you that that’s not a good idea.”

“Binnie Varshun has committed fraud,” Kaslo said, “in the amount of two million Indoberian SDUs—”

The uniformed man spoke for the first time. “What’s an SDU?” He did not seem greatly interested in the matter, unless being interested included finding the situation faintly amusing.

“Sovereign Debt Unit,” said Kaslo. “Ours is a credit-cyclic economy. Varshun conducted a confidence scheme, selling shares in a mining venture—”

The uniform interrupted again. His smirk had reappeared. “What’s credit-cyclic mean?”

Kaslo ignored the question. He stooped and recovered the warrant and certificate. “Varshun raised funds for a mining operation that did not exist. He published a false prospectus, offered bank guarantees that turned out to be forged. These are crimes on Novo Bantry and on Cheddle. My warrant is legally enforceable.”

The policeman opened his mouth to say something, but the Deputy Prefect forestalled him by raising one plump finger. To Kaslo he said, “Are you acting for yourself?”

“No, I am a licensed confidential operative.”

The fat man smiled. “An op? And your client is . . . ?”

His client was Diomedo Obron, a landed magnate of Indoberia, but Kaslo saw no need to divulge that information. He said, “Someone who wishes to remain anonymous.”

“That may pose difficulties. Cheddlites are entitled to confront their accusers.”

“Produce Varshun and I shall confront him.” He straightened out the papers. It was clear, however, that his representations were having no effect on the fat man. “If the Upper Pulluch prefecture cannot help me, I will go to the federal police in your capital city.”

The fat man thoughtfully scraped his upper lip with his lower teeth. “In that case, there’s only one thing we can do.”

The uniformed one’s smile widened. His right hand had been shielded by the other man’s body since they’d come through the door. Kaslo stepped back, reaching inside his upper garment. But he was too late. He glimpsed something black and solid in the policeman’s hand, saw it emit a flash of dark light almost at the end of the visible spectrum.

Then he saw nothing.

“Get up!”

Someone was toeing him in the ribs, none too gently. Kaslo tried to focus his eyes, his head still hissing with white noise from the policeman’s stunner. He saw a striated gray landscape stretching away into a blurred distance, a dark island just at the edge of his vision.

“I said get up!” The second kick came harder, sent a jolt of pain through Kaslo’s side. His head jerked up and the dull landscape became a plank floor, dirt laid deep in the grain of the wood, the island an empty knothole.

He had been lying on his belly. Now he got his arms under him, fought down the trembling of the aftershock, and pushed himself onto his hands and knees. He paused to let his head catch up with his body’s motion, then levered himself back until he was kneeling, his buttocks resting on the backs of his legs. A wave of dizziness washed through him. He used his knuckles to try to wipe some of the film from his eyes.

A hand took hold of his upper arm, pulled him upwards. “Come on,” said the voice. “You’re in the way.”

He staggered to his feet, the room swimming. Another voice said, “Put him over there. Somebody get him a cup of skreek.”

Shapes and motion around him. He felt other people’s footsteps through the loosely sprung floor, realized his own feet were bare. Now they had hold of both of his arms. He was led a short distance, then turned and sat down on a rough bench against a wall. He lowered his head into his hands, took a couple of long breaths, wiped his eyes again, and began to bring the world into focus.

He was at one end of a big room, no, a single-roomed building: windowless walls, floor, roof-joists, all of unpainted wood gone gray with age; one side lined with bunks that were little more than bare shelves with rags for bedding; in one corner, a flat-topped, wood-burning stove; a long table made of greasy planks laid across trestles; benches made of the same planks set on short, upended sections of tree trunk. Something in a blackened pot atop the stove was giving off steam.

And there were men: all of them dressed in tatters, shoeless like him, unbarbered and dirty, with grime deep in the seams of their faces. They crowded around the common pot, dipping in cups and bowls of battered metal, then took their food to the table, sat and drank whatever they’d got, in between tearing off chunks from a couple of huge, round loaves of coarse bread.

“Here.” Someone looming in front of him, a hand offering a tin mug. He took it, sniffed the dark liquid it contained. He took a sip, found it hot and bitter, but as the brew bathed his tongue he realized he was desperately thirsty. He drank more, swallowing the liquid as quickly as its heat would let him.

He felt better now. He lifted his head. The man who had brought him the mug was standing, watching him. He was middling-sized, balding, and gifted by nature with a face made for mourning, dressed in the ruins of a commerciant’s single-suit. He was examining Kaslo with eyes webbed by red veins.

“You all the way back now?” he said.

Kaslo took stock. “I think so.” In fact, the after-effects of the stunner were evaporating. His mind felt sharp, his vision preternaturally clear. A shimmering, shivering sensation ran through his limbs and made a lightness in his chest. When he took in air, his breath wavered pleasantly.

“That’s the skreek kicking in,” said the other man. “You’d better go get something more in your belly ’fore you get to twitching.”

He beckoned Kaslo toward the steaming cauldron, and led the way there. Kaslo copied his actions, picking up a bowl from a shelf beside the stove, dipping it into the thick liquid, and carrying his meal over to the table. They sat across from each other. The man tore off a big chunk of bread, pulled it apart, and tossed one of the pieces to Kaslo.

There were no spoons. Kaslo sucked salty soup from the bowl, then put it down to spare his fingers the heat of the metal. He dipped bread into the pottage, chewed, and swallowed. He looked down the table, saw a dozen unwashed scarecrows hunched over their bowls, jaws chewing, lips slurping, nobody talking.

The man who had brought him the drink said, “My name is Vanandaramatan. It used to be a significant name. Now it is not. Most people call me Van.”

“Erm Kaslo. What is this place?” he said.

“If you’re a poet,” said the balding man, “this is Sheol, Nifflheim, the Land Beyond the Dark River, the Undersphere.”

“I’m no poet,” said Kaslo.

Van scraped his bowl with a cob of bread. “Then it’s just the place where the crap ends up.”

Outside, a whistle blew. The men got up. “Come on,” said Kaslo’s sad-faced informant, “you can see for yourself.”

Outside it was just past dawn. Kaslo saw a fenced area on a piece of flat ground. On the far side of the open space, the ground rose and became a broad hill covered by the same dense forest that surrounded the compound. Because the trees were of a kind that did not begin to sprout branches until their trunks were twice the height of a man, he could see a long way between the trees into the shaded space. The fence looked none too hard to scale, but it was hung in many places by loose pieces of metal that would make a noise if they were moved. There were no guard towers.

“Don’t think about it,” Van said. “The fence isn’t to keep us in.”

Kaslo looked a question at him, and the man went on, “Anybody dies, they put the body out there at sunset. At night we hear the beasts fighting over it. Come morning, not even the bones are left. Sometimes a pack of them come sniffing around the perimeter. If they try to dig their way under, the alarms sound and the guards come out and crisp them.”

They crossed the compound from the barracks to a shed. A well-fed man with a club hooked to his belt unlocked its door. Kaslo saw two other guards in the open space. None wore a uniform, but one of them wore a garment he recognized.

“That one has my jacket,” he said. He had already noticed that he was dressed in filthy cast-offs: pants made of heavy cloth and a one-sleeved shirt that was stiff with dirt.

“A perquisite of guardhood,” said the balding man. “Another perk is that they can make us dance for their amusement,”—he indicated the nearest warder’s club, and Kaslo recognized it as a neuromuscular inducer, illegal on most worlds—“so let us get tools and move out of here.”

The tools in the shed were basic: shovels, picks, a floatbarrow whose untuned gravity obviators made Kaslo’s teeth buzz when one of the men activated it, some long pry bars, and a couple of wide-bladed hoes. Some broken tools were piled in a corner. Kaslo took one of the hoes and slung it over his shoulder, followed the barrow and the others to the far side of the compound and along a dirt track fenced in on either side. The land started to rise the moment they left the open space, and they climbed for a few minutes until the rough trail ended at a hole in the hill. To one side of the cavern, a squat machine sat on a framework of squared timbers.

No guards had accompanied them. Kaslo remarked on that. “We don’t produce,” said Van, “we don’t eat. A simple system, but remarkably effective.”

The men filed into the hole, which revealed itself to be the mouth of a tunnel leading into the hill. Kaslo was no expert miner, but he saw that the passage seemed to be well braced with timber and there was a wide air hose running along the floor to one side. As well, the darkness was partly dispelled by lumens set at intervals into the wall.

“It’s an old mine,” said Van, “abandoned years ago. Now someone has reopened it.”

“Someone,” said Kaslo, “who wants it worked on the shush.” The name Binnie Varshun hung unspoken in his thoughts.

The tunnel was almost tall enough for him to walk without stooping. He followed Vanandaramatan through the half-light, counting his paces. At just over a hundred, the passage widened and became a high-ceilinged cavern, the kind that underground streams carved out over millennia. The floor and roof were thick with stalactites and stalagmites.

There were two workplaces in the cavern and the men divided themselves up, half a dozen going to each spot where the walls of the cave had been hacked away. Kaslo followed Van to one of the sites and the balding man explained the process.

He pointed out a narrow band of rock that was a different color. “It’s a vein, some kind of ore we don’t know the name of,” he said, “but when you get it out it looks like this.” He dug a pick into the friable rock and pried loose a pebble the size of a thumb joint. The piece had a dull metallic sheen to it where the pick had split it from the native rock.

“We fill the barrow, then take it out to the refiner and process it into something that looks like lead. I can’t imagine it’s worth much. At the end of the day, we deliver the goods to the guards and they feed us. Mid-day, they bring out bread and skreek.”

“Always the same guards?” said Kaslo. “How many of them are there?”

The other man gave him a considering look. “Oh, dear,” he said, “another strategist.”

“What do you mean?”

“If the guards think you’re going to be trouble,” Van said, “they put you outside the wire. Alive.” He applied his pick to the rock and broke off another piece. “Though not for long.”

Kaslo spent the morning scraping fragments of paydirt and valueless overburden into piles. A man with a shovel put the piles into the floaterbarrow and, when it was full, it was steered out to the refiner. The barrow lifted itself above the intake hopper and deposited its load. A man named Quai—the one who’d toed Kaslo in the ribs and given orders—threw a switch and the machine made noises. After a minute or so, a shower of grit issued from a vent at the side of the device, to land on an up-sloping conveyor belt that carried it beyond the fence and dumped it at the top of a conical spoil heap. Then a panel opened on the top of the refiner, revealing a recess in which sat a droplet of dull gray stuff about the size of a pea. Quai put it in a leather pouch he wore at his belt.

“Not very rich ore,” Kaslo commented, scraping another pile.

“Couldn’t tell you,” said Van, hoisting his pick. “You know anything about mining?”

“Some.” He changed the subject. “Might one of the guards have taken my boots?”

“Were they good quality?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then probably.”

Quai said, “Less talk, more work.” They did as they were told.

By lunchtime, they had made five trips with the barrow, producing five gray peas of varying sizes. A carryall came along the track from the compound, two guards in the front, a bag of bread and a pot of hot skreek in the back. Before the guards would let them unload the meal, Quai had to turn over the morning’s production. The guard who had operated the carryall weighed the peas in his hand and grunted. He stepped back and let the prisoners get their rations.

The carryall turned and took the guards away. Kaslo chewed the tough bread and watched it go. The man who had received the metal was wearing his boots.

The bread was rudimentary fuel for the body; the skreek supercharged it. They went back to work and, by the time Cheddle’s short day was drawing to a close, they had made another seven little round ingots of whatever they were mining. By then, the effects of the skreek had worn off. Kaslo was tired, having spelled Van with the pick for the last two hours of the day—none of his fellow prisoners had much stamina.

They trooped back to the camp to deliver their gray peas, crowded into the shed to store their tools, and were allowed to go into the barracks. A pot of soup simmered on the stove and there was a heap of round loaves on the trestle table. No skreek, Kaslo noticed. They were expected to sleep.

“Do the guards patrol at night?” he asked Van.

The sad-faced man was nodding over his bowl, almost too exhausted to chew his bread. “They check the perimeter fence if they hear anything trying to dig its way in. Otherwise, they stay in their quarters.”

“Huh,” Kaslo said.

Van looked at him, bleary-eyed. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I mean, we don’t even know where we are. We all arrived in the same condition as you.”

“You all crossed Binnie Varshun?”

The other man blinked at him. “Who?”

“Never mind.”

Van yawned and stood. He went to one of the rag-strewn benches, sat, then more or less toppled over until he was lying on his side. Kaslo followed him.

“How did you all get here?” he said.

Van was fading fast. “Taken up by the Upper Pulluch prefecture. Vagrancy. Drunk and disorderly. Mopery with intent to gawk. One of the guys when I first came was a freighterman who took on a skinfull and missed his ship’s departure. He got drunk again and woke up here.”

“No court, no judge?”

“Nope. And no time off for good behavior.”

“Where’s that guy now?” Kaslo said.

Van made a head motion that indicated the barracks wall and the fence beyond.

Kaslo was quiet for a while, thinking. When he said, “Hey, Van . . .” the only answer was the other man’s quiet breathing. He heard snores coming from farther down the room, and the first of many screeches and calls from the night forest.

Kaslo had always had the ability to wake when he needed to, and he came out of sleep after two hours. Before he’d allowed himself to drift off, he’d investigated the rags on which he’d made his bed. One of them was a sack of coarse material with a drawstring at its mouth. He’d worked the cord loose.

Now he eased himself off the sleeping platform and crept through the darkness to the door. It was solidly barred from the outside, as he’d expected, but he’d had to give it a try. By the residual heat of the stove he felt his way to its corner, testing the plank floor with his feet until he found the one that had squeaked when he’d stepped on it at suppertime, carrying his bowl of pottage to the table.

He knelt and felt along the wood until he located the end of the plank, which was raised up a quarter inch above its neighbors. Kaslo sat down cross-legged and took out the piece of broken hoe blade he’d rolled up in the waistband of his ragged pantaloons. He’d spotted it in the morning and made sure to collect it when he took his tool back to the shed.

The shard of metal was a little longer than his longest finger and twice as broad, flat at one end and pointed at the other. It would have made a primitive knife, but it was better suited to the task at hand. He wrapped the sharp end in a piece of rag and slipped the broad end into the crack at the end of the plank. Then he began to pry.

The process took time, but he had plenty of it. The plank had squeaked because it was able to move, and it could move because the joist to which it was nailed had half-rotted away. Gradually, he got one end of it clear of the floor. Then he prised it high enough to fit his fingers underneath. He squatted and lifted, alternating steady pressure with short sharp tugs.

There was a screech as a nail came free of a joist, but the sound was lost in the cacophony of animal sounds from outside. He used the plank as a lever to lift the adjacent floorboard, and now he had room enough to slip through the floor and into the crawlspace beneath the barracks. He took his string and tool and belly-crawled toward the open space and the fence beyond. He chose the part of the perimeter that was shielded by the barracks from the guards’ view in their hut.

He crawled to the base of the fence and worked quickly with the piece of metal and his bare hands, scooping out a passage beneath the wire. He was careful not to touch the fence, and its hanging pieces of tubular steel and clappers that would jangle if disturbed. When he’d made a hollow big enough for a man to fit through, he attached his piece of string to the bottom of the fence a few feet away. Then he crawled back under the barracks and lay belly-down, facing out.

He pulled on the string. The tubular alarms jangled and gonged. He waited a moment, then tugged again. Waited, then another pull. From the end of the barracks he saw a moving light. He backed farther under the building, out of the range of the hand lumen carried by the guard come to investigate the noise.

The man came down the line of the fence, the lumen’s beam playing on the wire and the ground beneath. It caught the shadow of the hole Kaslo had dug and stayed on it, the guard coming closer. He stopped at the gouge in the ground, shone his lumen around looking for tracks, then directed the beam out into the forest. By the light spilled round the lumen’s edges, Kaslo saw him use his free hand to scratch the back of his head.

By then, Kaslo had come silently out from under the barracks and crossed the short distance between them at a run. One forearm snaked around the guard’s neck, pulling his head back. The fingers of his other hand slid under his own arm, found the carotid sinus, and pressed. The man struggled an instant before his body went limp. The lumen fell from his grasp.

Kaslo lowered the unconscious man to the ground, took up the lumen, and shone its light on the guard’s feet. He grunted with relief when he saw his own boots—he wouldn’t have to do this a second time, let alone a third.

He placed the light on the ground and took hold of the heel of the right boot. A pull, a slide, and a twist, and the bottom of the heel came off, revealing a cavity filled with a small, flat, oblong object. Kaslo removed the concealed item and closed up the heel again. Then he dragged the unconscious guard over to the hole under the fence, laid him on his back, and pushed so that his head and shoulders went down into the hollow and partially up the slope on the far side of the fence.

He did not want to do it this way, but he could think of no other. He took up the light and shone it into the darkness under the trees. Several pairs of glowing orbs looked back at him, edging nearer. He set the lumen on the ground, recovered his string, and scooted back under the barracks. Moments later, he was back inside the building and pushing the floorboards back into place, the nails fitting neatly into the half-rotten wood from which he had pulled them. He dropped the piece of metal through a gap in the floorboards, then got back onto the sleeping platform in time to hear snarls and slaverings from outside. There was a short scream of terror as the guard regained consciousness, but it was cut off by a bubbling, choking sound.

Now came shouts and running boots, the snap of an energy pistol, then a stream of hoarse-voiced profanity as someone discovered what was left of the dead man. Another voice overrode the swearer’s, giving orders. Kaslo heard the sound of a body being dragged across dry ground, saw beams of light coming through chinks in the rough wooden walls and through gaps between the floorboards as the area outside was searched. Then the door flew open and men with lumens and inducers in their hands stormed into the barracks and rousted the sleeping prisoners.

They were pushed and kicked outside, made to line up, and counted. The guards were angry, on edge, slapping and punching, but with many looks over their shoulders at the darkness under the trees. Finally, they shouted and shoved the ragged, frightened men back to their sleep, barred the barracks door, and went away. Kaslo heard the scrape of a shovel as someone filled in the hole he had dug.

When all was quiet, the exhausted prisoners back asleep, he removed the miniaturized device from where he had kept it, between his cheek and his molars. He twice-touched a stud on its edge and saw a red pinpoint light up in the darkness. After a moment, it turned green.

Good, Kaslo said, in the privacy of his mind. He slid open a hatch on the device’s side and pushed the stud beneath it. He waited, watching, for several seconds. Then the green light blinked three times. Very good, he thought and closed up the hatch. He rolled the device up in the waistband of his pantaloons and lay down to sleep.

A far distance away, in the refuse receptacle behind the New Bastable Inn, Erm Kaslo’s valise was now wide awake, assessing its environment and beginning to make plans.

Kaslo was in his lodgings in the Parslaine district of Che, capital of the Grand Foundational Domain of Novo Bantry, packing for two weeks of fishing. He felt that he had earned the vacation and could certainly afford it: He had received not only his customary fee and expenses for delivering Binnie Varshun to the Adjudication but an additional ex gratia award from the federal authorities on Cheddle for exposing gross corruption in the Upper Pulloch police prefecture.

He had just closed his suitcase—an ordinary bag, not the special valise he had personally designed and constructed for operations in the more rough and ready corners of the Ten Thousand Worlds—when his integrator informed him that his client Diomedo Obron wished to speak with him. The magnate’s majordomo had settled the account, but Kaslo assumed that the man wished to express personally his satisfaction with the outcome of the operation; he told his integrator to allow the connection.

A screen appeared in the air and the narrow, sharp-eyed face regarded him. Obron’s gaze went to the suitcase hovering expectantly beside Kaslo. “You are going somewhere?”

“Grand Shoals. The brimtails are spawning. I am in need of renewal.”

“I wish to engage you again. Immediately.”

“You haven’t been defrauded again?” The client did not seem the type to make the same mistake twice.

“No.”

“Varshun hasn’t escaped?”

“Not as such.” It was the kind of remark that required amplification. Kaslo cocked his head in a way that invited Obron to carry on. The man said, “We have come to an agreement. I will drop the charges and he will continue to work on the project in which I invested.”

Kaslo blinked, bemused. “I thought the ‘project’ was a tissue of fabrication.” That had been the opinion of the Colonel-Detective of the Cheddle federal police who had interrogated the fraudster.

Obron’s face took on the expression of a man who is deciding how much of his knowledge he can risk divulging. “Some would call it far-fetched. Others would say it is not beyond the bounds of possibility.”

“Obviously, you fall into the latter category.”

“I do. As well, as part of my agreement to end the prosecution, Varshun has yielded me a controlling interest in the venture.”

Kaslo kept a straight face, but asked the obvious question. “And why would you trust him again?”

“I do not,” said Obron. “That is why I wish to engage you.”

“In what capacity?”

“As a regulator.”

“Of Varshun’s behavior? It is not my line of work.”

The flash of irritation that crossed Diomedo Obron’s face said he was not used to having his wishes thwarted. “You made an impression on him, when you burst through the door, threw him to the floor, and put the holdtight on him.”

Kaslo smiled slightly. “It did seem to come as a shock,” he said.

“In your presence,” said the other man, “he will be more tractable.”

“Or he will scheme more shrewdly.”

“You were a match for him once. Why do you fear he might be one too many for you this time?”

Kaslo did not let his resentment show. “I have no such fear.”

“Then accept the assignment.”

“How long for?”

Based on what Varshun had shown him, Obron estimated another three weeks to complete the project, once they were back on Cheddle. Kaslo added travel time and said, “A month then.” He looked with regret at his packed baggage.

“The brimtails will spawn again next year,” said Obron. “What is your monthly rate?”

“I do not have one. I charge by the day.”

“Then how much for a month of days?”

Kaslo made the calculation, named a figure. Obron doubled it. “Plus expenses,” he added.

The newly hired regulator told his suitcase to prepare for unpacking.

Diomedo Obron kept a space yacht, a Grand Itinerator from the Berry shipyards on Grim, all in black with yellow farings and sponsons. He met the client and his new responsibility at the south end of the Indoberia spaceport a few hours after agreeing to Obron’s terms. Binnie Varshun, a plump, pleasant-faced man with thinning blond hair and eyes of a supposedly guileless blue, was waiting at the yacht’s hatch, flanked by two officers of the Constabulary, there to see him put aboard.

They all gathered in the ship’s salon, where the senior officer signed a chit and declared that henceforth the fraudster was Diomedo Obron’s problem. His expression as he said it indicated that of the many foolish acts he had seen civilians perform, this one was well up in the listings.

The officers gone, Obron instructed the ship’s integrator to negotiate their departure from the port at the earliest. A few moments later, the in-atmosphere drive vibrated the decking beneath their feet and they rose smoothly into the sky.

Kaslo escorted Varshun to his cabin. “You will be confined for the voyage. If you have any needs, communicate them to the ship’s integrator.”

The other man went into the small space, turned before Kaslo could close the door and said, “Can you and I come to an understanding?”

“We had this conversation once before, when I arrested you.”

“That was in the heat of the moment. We are cooler now.”

Kaslo said, “Very well. Let us both understand that your actions caused me suffering and threatened my life. Moreover, I had to kill a man by means that still trouble me. I will have no truck with you, and I will not hesitate to kill you.”

“Diomedo Obron needs me alive,” Varshun said.

“He has his needs and priorities,” said Kaslo. “I have mine.” He closed the cabin door and locked it.

They did not go to a spaceport on Cheddle, but touched down directly in the compound beside the secret mine. The barracks was empty, but two men from a private security firm were guarding the premises.

“What happened to those who were here?” Kaslo asked Obron.

“The guards were arrested, the vagrants released.”

“And Captain Maduc of the Upper Pulloch prefecture?”

Obron shrugged. “He fled, along with his closest accomplice. Apparently he had sources in the federal police who warned him. But his other associates in the local force were taken attempting to escape.”

Kaslo grunted. He preferred to imagine the Deputy Prefect in a contemplarium. He looked around at the scene of his own detention. The scar where he had dug underneath the fence was still there. “What are we doing here?”

“Collecting the naphralite.”

“That is the mineral we were mining?”

“Yes,” said Obron. “Now that Varshun and I are partners again, the material is ours.”

The client was eager to inspect the goods. They went to the guards’ hut where a strongbox waited. Varshun told it to open and display its contents, adding a series of coded syllables while forming the fingers of one hand into precise arrangements in front of the box’s percepts. The device hummed and revealed its contents.

Obron dipped into it and came out with a heavy leather pouch. He opened it and peered inside, then fished out a single metal pea, which he rolled between finger and thumb. “What is the total weight?” he asked the strongbox, then his brows drew together when it cited a figure.

He rounded on Binnie Varshun “That is not enough.”

The fraudster’s smile betrayed no concern. “Then we will dig out some more and refine it.” His gaze wandered to Kaslo as he spoke.

“I have done my digging,” said the op.

“I think,” Obron told Varshun, “that it is your turn to make an effort.”

They dismissed the guards, who flew off in a carryall. Kaslo showed Varshun where the tools and floaterbarrow were stored and indicated the direction to the diggings. But Varshun already knew the way. When they arrived, he took a pick and went to the rock face where the vein of naphralite was widest. He set his feet and swung the tool.

Kaslo gave the man plenty of room and made sure that his stunner was loose in its holster. He also had a compact energy pistol in a leg pocket of his pantaloons. Varshun seemed far too content with his situation. He voiced his concern to Obron.

“He is a psychopath,” the narrow-faced man said. “His moods are not like ours.”

“Why do you trust him?”

“I do not. That is why you are here.”

“I do not know enough about what is going on to be comfortable in my work,” said Kaslo. “What happens when you have enough of this mysterious metal?”

“We will use it to build a machine.”

“We?”

Obron expression conceded the point. “Varshun and I will do the work. It was the . . . shall we say the design plans he showed me that convinced me to invest the SDUs.”

Kaslo realized there were too many questions he should have had answered before they left Indoberian. “What kind of machine? How does the naphralite come into it? What exactly is naphralite?”

Varshun gouged out a fist-sized lump of ore that showed a metallic sheen where it had been fractured from the vein. He nudged it with a foot toward a heap that was building behind him and took another swing at the rock. Diomedo Obron watched him, speaking to Kaslo out of the side of his mouth.

“You do not need to know these things. Just guard him.”

Kaslo shook his head. “What if the machine is dangerous, lethal? He builds it, presses a stud, and I am consumed in a pillar of flame.” He waited for an answer and when it was not forthcoming he said, “I believe I will summon a taxi and terminate our agreement.”

Obron started. Kaslo saw fear in his eyes. “You cannot!”

“I can and I will, unless my concerns are addressed.”

Varshun had paused to listen to their conversation. Obron told him to get back to work and he did so, whistling. The client seemed to be having trouble coming to a decision. Kaslo decided to help the process along by going to the cave mouth and taking out his communicator.

Obron came after him. “Wait!” His face twisted with an inner conflict. “I will increase your fee.”

Kaslo shook his head. “Pillars of flame cannot spend.” He activated the communicator and it told him that he was linked to the Cheddle connectivity.

“All right! All right!” said Obron. “Put it away!”

Kaslo pocketed the device and stood expectantly. Obron still appeared reluctant to begin, so he started for him. “What is naphralite? I am familiar with mining operations on several worlds, but I have not come across it before.”

Obron sighed. “It is a naturally occurring alloy of two transuranic minerals,” he said.

The op let his skepticism show. “Then it ought to be highly unstable. Instead it looks like common lead.”

Obron actually lowered his voice, though there was no one to overhear them. “It is formed,” he said, “under the influence of . . .” he looked about and dropped into a whisper, “. . . interplanar forces.”

Kaslo was practiced in keeping a straight face. He did not let his smile show itself. “Interplanar forces?” he said.

“Yes.” Obron’s face said, So now you know.

“I see,” said Kaslo. He knew, as did all educated persons of the Ten Thousand Worlds, that phenomenality was spread across nine different planes, each radically different from the others in its physical underpinnings. The nine dimensions were separated from each other by powers—interplanar forces—even stronger than those that prevailed within each plane. But there were some leakages from one to another. For example, the force known as gravity in the third plane—which contained our universe—was a solid though volatile substance widespread throughout the second plane, something like salt in our own realm. And the force we called “evil” was a naturally occurring climatic condition in the fourth.

What Kaslo also knew was that the alleged ability to harness interplanar forces was a favorite gambit of swindlers and hoodwinkers. Diomedo Obron was still being played for a noddy by Binnie Varshun. It had often amazed the operative to see how persons who might be highly accomplished in demanding careers could nonetheless be gulled like yokels from some backwater world flocking to a traveling circus that touched down, to be fleeced within its gaming tents.

“I see,” he said again. “And his machine will offer opportunities that are also of an interplanar nature?”

Obron’s face hardened. “I am not some nibblewit begging to be pruned,” he said. “I have researched the matter thoroughly. It was I”—here his voice took on a conclusive note—“who discovered Varshun and his project. He did not bring it to me. Indeed, he tried to keep it to himself.”

“I see.”

“Stop saying that!” Obron folded his arms. “You do not see at all!”

Kaslo sighed. “Very well. Your decisions are your own. Still,” he said, looking at the battered barrow, “I have to wonder what the two million SDUs were for.”

The client’s tone wandered somewhere between defensive and determined. “You’ll see. The materials from which the armature must be crafted are rare and expensive.”

“I’m sure,” said Kaslo.

“Then you’ll stay?”

“I suppose I must.”

“Do you wish to take part in the digging? It would go faster.”

Kaslo took a look at Varshun, who was still working away at the rock face. “One of us must keep an eye on him. And that is what you are paying me for.”

They had arrived at mid-morning. An hour after noon, they went back to the ship, a small gray pearl in Diomedo Obron’s possession. After a meal and a rest, they returned to the diggings and the client assisted the fraudster in gouging out more naphralite ore for the refiner to process. Neither man was a competent miner but as they dug deeper into the rock face, the vein widened. By evening, they had a larger sphere to add to the pouchful.

Days passed. A routine established itself. Varshun and Obron dug, while Kaslo guarded them—the one from the other, and both from the creatures that came to the fence, their broad muzzles white with drool and their upthrusting lower canines gleaming. At night the three men retreated to the ship where Kaslo locked the fraudster away.

The dam of secrecy having broken, Obron proved eager to regale the op with his hopes and aims. The device they would build, from gems and refined naphralite, would offer a narrow portal into three of the other eight planes. They would be able to reach into the higher realms and extract natural materials and even manufactured objects, the value of which to collectors of esoterica would be simply beyond price. Obron, who already enjoyed a comfortable situation on one of the Grand Foundationals, would become a supermagnate and win the envy of the loftiest moguls.

“I will have it all,” he told Kaslo, as they sat in the comfort of the yacht’s salon, while the ship’s curative system repaired the damage that manual labor was doing to his hands. “All and then some.”

On the morning of the fourth day, when Kaslo went to fetch Varshun from his nightly confinement, the fraudster made a surreptitious gesture to draw the op into the cabin. “Obron has told you what he means to gain from our project?” he said.

“To grow richer, plucking gewgaws from other realms.”

“You mock his ambition?”

Kaslo sighed. “Don’t try to slip one under me,” he said. “I do not share Diomedo Obron’s weakness, that renders him pluckable by the likes of you.”

Varshun returned him a bland smile. “That weakness is?”

“The willingness to believe that there are secret shortcuts to fabulous prizes, known to only an exclusive few.”

“Surely you believe there are other planes?”

“I was taught in school that they exist. When we came here from Indoberia, the ship passed through a whimsy that routed us through another dimension. Apart from that, the other eight planes do not seem to intrude on this one, and certainly not on my existence.”

“You are right about Obron,” Varshun said. “He is a fool, but not for the reason you think.”

Here it comes, thought the op. He said, “Enlighten me.”

Varshun bid him close the cabin door. When they were private, he asked Kaslo if he was familiar with the theory that every few millennia the fundamental operating principle of the universe switched from rationalism—that is, cause and effect—to sympathetic association.

“Sympathetic association?” said the op. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s the phrase that describes a sophisticated spectrum of phenomena,” Varshun countered. “The word you’d be more familiar with, the vulgar term, is ‘magic.’”

Kaslo’s single-word reply was an even more vulgar term.

The blond man’s smile remained insipid. “And yet, it’s true. By my calculation, we’ve now had several thousand years of rationalism since the last turnover. But it’s about to end. There will be a social collapse. Technologies will fail. Then out of the wreckage will arise a new age, ruled by those who have the gift, and especially those who have the willpower, to comprehend and use magic.”

“Of which you will be one.”

“Indeed. And you could be my assistant.”

“I haven’t had my breakfast,” said Kaslo, opening the door. “Come.”

“One thing more,” Varshun said. “I did defraud your client. I already had the naphralite deposit, and enough capital of my own to pay Captain Maduc to set up this camp. But the funds needed to acquire the other materials for the speculon were beyond my means.”

“Speculon?”

“What Obron refers to as the ‘machine’ I intend to build. He thinks of it as a kind of trapdoor. It is not. It is more like a window into other realms.”

Kaslo made no attempt to hide his ridicule. “More magic?”

“You’ll see.” The fraudster got off his bunk. “Let me tell you what I want from you.”

“Oh, please do.”

“I thought Maduc would serve, but you bested him easily. The change you don’t believe in is coming. We are nearing the cusp. When it happens, the speculon will become a conduit of immense power, power beyond your imagining.”

“Of course,” Kaslo said.

“I am not the only one preparing for the transition. There are others like me. We keep an eye on each other’s doings. At least two or three have an inkling of what I’m up to. They may try to wrest the speculon from me. I have some means to defend myself—”

“Spells and cantrips?”

“Yes, if you want to know. But until the change comes, they lack full power. So I need a man of action—a practiced and practical pair of hands, with a functioning brain behind them.”

Kaslo looked at his hands. “All that’s behind these, right now, is an empty stomach,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Varshun went through the door. “I ask only,” he said, “that you keep an open mind.”

“To be sure,” said the op. “But at the moment I need to fill an open mouth.”

Two more days of mining and smelting, then Binnie Varshun announced that they had enough refined naphralite to work with. Diomedo Obron told the yacht to take them back to Novo Bantry and to Manderling, his estate in the parkland outside Indoberia. The voyage involved a two-day flight through normal space to the whimsy that put them within a few hours of Novo Bantry. Obron displayed an increasing tension as they neared their destination. Sometimes he conducted whispered conversations with the fraudster; other times, he sat smiling to himself at whatever inner visions were presenting themselves to his expectations.

They landed at Manderling early in the morning, local time. Obron hoisted the satchel that contained the naphralite and declared that work must immediately begin. The sidewise look he gave Kaslo spoke silently of a belated regret about having spoken so freely concerning his project. The op wondered if the magnate would dismiss him now, and rely on his servants to keep Varshun in line. But after a brief vacillation, Obron gestured for Kaslo to go along with the fraudster and to be watchful.

They went into the main house and Obron led the way to an underground corridor that ended at a door made of hewn timbers with heavy iron fittings and several locks. Beyond it was a windowless room containing a scarred and stained workbench covered with metalworking tools and equipment. Obron locked the three of them in, then laid the satchel on the bench. He knelt beside one of the flagstones that formed the floor, touched its corners in a certain pattern, then spoke two words. The slab tilted up on a hidden hinge, exposing a cavity into which the magnate reached, bringing forth a rectangular shape swaddled in a dark cloth.

He placed it on the bench and removed the wrapping. Kaslo saw a book that gave every appearance of great age, bound in stained red leather that had worn away at the corners. When the magnate opened its wrinkled pages, an odor of ancient smoke cut by a more acrid reek filled the room.

“There,” said Obron, pointing to the place at which he’d opened the tome. It showed an inked diagram of a curved object and a calligraphic text spread across two pages. He made a nervous, get to it gesture to Binnie Varshun.

The blond man approached the bench, his fingers and thumbs rubbing against each other. He studied the sketch and read the text, his mouth silently forming the words. Then he turned to Obron. “Where are the materials?”

The thin-faced man returned to the pit and brought forth a brass coffer, unlocked it, and poured onto the benchtop a multicolored heap of jewels. He went again to the hiding place and fetched two ingots of gold.

Varshun separated the gems into sizes and colors, picked up each one and studied it through a lens taken from the bench. Grunting his satisfaction, he next examined each of the heavy bars of precious metal, then said to Obron, “These are as specified? It must be virgin gold, unworked and fresh from the earth.”

“They are,” said the magnate.

Varshun turned back to the bench, took a deep breath, and rubbed his pale palms together. “Then let us begin.”

Kaslo had no part in the proceedings, but he stepped forward now and said, “Let me see the book.”

Varshun showed a flash of irritation, quickly suppressed. “Why not?” he said, and gave way.

Near to, the ammoniac smell was even sharper. The op held his breath and looked at the tome, touched the uneven edges of the pages. It had a primitive, homemade look, but there could be no doubt of its great age. The hand-inked text was in a language, indeed in a script, that he had never encountered before—and his profession had made him a well-traveled man. The leather binding, on close examination, showed traces of scales, as if it had been tanned from the hide of some great reptile. To the touch, though, it was greasy, like powdered graphite.

“Seen enough?” said Binnie Varshun.

Kaslo stepped away, positioned himself in a corner of the room from where he could watch. The reality of the book—clearly the “design plans” Obron had spoken of—had disturbed him. If it was a fake, a maguffin Varshun had constructed to gull Obron into his scheme, then the fraudster was a master of artifice. But, much as the op did not want to wrap himself in the web the blond man had spun, there was something about the ancient tome that chilled the skin of his forearms and caused the hairs of his nape to prickle.

Varshun took the lead in what followed, with the op’s client as his willing helper. They began by placing the gold bars into a tabletop smithy. Varshun set the controls and activated the device; moments later, it began to extrude a curved strip of gold, two fingers wide with upturned edges. The process continued until the band formed an oval frame, such as would hold a windowpane or a mirror. When the strip had all emerged from the machine, Varshun bought the two ends together and used a thermal intensifier to weld them into an unbroken whole about the size of a groundcar’s wheel.

He laid the golden loop upon the bench, then he and Obron set about stationing the individual jewels at precise intervals within the frame, using calipers and protractors to check and recheck the relative positions against the diagram, finally gluing each glittering stone in place. It was a painstaking business, with arguing and crosstalk, and it was nearly an hour before both men pronounced the job properly done.

“Now,” said Varshun, “the naphralite.”

Obron fed the gray pearls into the smithy’s hopper while Varshun made minute adjustments to the controls. He set the output emitter to its widest setting, then with a meaningful glance toward Diomedo Obron, said, “Ready the frame.”

The magnate picked up the frame with its inset jewels and held it, despite its substantial weight, so that it lay flat, a little distance above the smithy. Varshun activated the device, then reached to help Obron keep the golden oval where they wanted it.

Kaslo watched. The moments fled by, but nothing happened. The other two men held their stance, the loop of gold with its inset jewels trembling between them. The op saw sweat bead upon Varshun’s pale brow, his tongue come out to wet dry lips.

And then, between one eye blink and another, there was a sheet of luminous gray enclosed within the oval. The jewels inset within the golden rim were no longer to be seen, but from each of their positions, a stream of colored light—red, green, blue, amber—briefly shimmered across the pearlescent surface before fading into the overall sheen.

Varshun exhaled a long-held breath. “It is done,” he said. “Careful with it.”

He and Obron together lifted the object and turned it upright. To Kaslo, it resembles a mirror of clouded glass, or a sheet of gray metal, semipolished. Except, when he looked at it from an angle, he saw colors dancing across its flat sheen, as transient and insubstantial as those that would appear on his inner screen were he to close his eyes and press upon his eyelids.

It should not have come from the smithy the way it did—in an instant, fully formed—yet he had seen it happen. And now, the more he looked at it, the more it seemed somehow more real than anything else in the room, including himself and the other men, as if it were a solid and they but shadows. He looked away from it, feeling a shiver between his shoulder blades.

The gold frame, before the smithy had done its work, had been an arm-tremblingly heavy weight for Obron and Varshun. But now, they carried the mirror—it was the word that came to Kaslo and it stuck—as if it weighed almost nothing. They took it over to a sideboard that stood against a wall. A groove had been cut into the sideboard’s top, and into this they inserted the bottom of the gold frame, then gingerly leaned the rest of the object against the wall.

Both creators stepped back and gazed at what they had done.

“Well,” said Diomedo Obron.

“Well enough,” said Binnie Varshun.

And Erm Kaslo said, “Now what?”

Criminal and magnate looked at each other. “We must give it a try,” said Obron, his eyes bright.

“We should study more, first,” said Varshun. “Map the other realms, learn how to adjust reach and orientation.”

“Just a little one,” said the thin-faced man. To Kaslo, he sounded like a boy arguing for a treat. “I’ve prepared a grapple like the one in the book.” He stooped and opened a door in the sideboard, brought out a long-handled pair of tongs with spoon-like cups at the business end, wrought in gleaming gold.

Varshun licked his lips. “I suppose just once couldn’t hurt,” he said. “Though we’re likely to get nothing more than a scoop of dirt.”

Obron’s face was pale with excitement, two red spots glowing on his cheekbones. “All right. Here we go.” He extended the implement toward the mirror.

“Just in and out,” Varshun said.

“Agreed.” The magnate moved forward. The tongs approached the shimmering surface. Gold touched pearl and a shiver went through Obron’s sparse frame. “I felt that,” he whispered.

“Keep going,” Varshun said, “but slow, and careful.”

Kaslo had remained in his corner, his attention tightly focused on what the two men were doing. But as the magnate pressed the tongs through the grayness, which allowed their entry as if it was no more than a thick mist, he heard a noise from the corridor beyond the heavy door. Neither Obron nor Varshun, intent on their experiment, noticed.

With only the handles of the tongs protruding from the grayness, Obron spread them then closed them again. Slowly, he withdrew the implement from the mirror and Kaslo saw that the portion that had gone through to the other realm—he had no doubt now that such was what he was seeing—was now a gold of a different color: richer, brighter, deeper.

Something was held between the upper ends of the tongs. Obron lowered them to the top of the sideboard and spread them wide. There on the polished wood lay a heap of dazzling light, so bright that Kaslo had to squint against the glare. Obron covered his eyes with one hand and dug with the other into the cupboard from which he’d taken the tongs. He came out with goggles of darkened crystal, slipped one pair over his eyes, and gave the others to Varshun and the op.

“From the sixth plane,” the magnate was whispering as he gazed at the pile of shining stuff.

Kaslo put on the glasses and came closer to join Obron and Varshun, where the two men bent over the interplanar material. Obron took a silver probe from the workbench and touched the treasure, which, now that Kaslo was not blinded, was revealed to be a conical heap of beads and globules, of a hundred colors and shades, each glowing like an ember fired by a bellows.

But when the tip of the silver instrument touched one of the little orbs, the metal seemed to shrivel like a leaf brought to a flame. In one moment, it became as a twig of charcoal; in the next, it was a whiff of smoke vanishing into the air as Obron opened fingers and thumb.

“The sideboard!” said the op. “It’s on fire!”

The polished wood was indeed smoldering, tiny tongues of flame coming from beneath the scoop of sixth-plane matter. Varshun acted quickly, using the tongs to pick up the shining stuff. Hastily, he thrust the implement back through the grayness and opened it. When he withdrew it from the mirror, the end cups were empty.

Meanwhile, the room’s protective systems had created a localized vacuum over the burning wood, extinguishing it. The smoke was being sucked from the room.

Obron examined the tongs, which seemed unaffected. “Virgin gold,” he said.

“And the probe?” Varshun said.

“Old silver. I didn’t think.”

“From now on,” said the blond man, “we must do nothing but. No more forays into the other planes until we know what we are doing.”

“Agreed,” said the magnate. “We will have to construct vessels of virgin—”

He broke off as the workroom was shaken by a powerful blast, half-filling with smoke. The strong door to the corridor flew from its hinges, blown inward by explosives that had been shaped around its ironwork. Its edge struck Kaslo and knocked him sprawling so that he fell, landing half under its heavy weight. By the time he recovered enough to focus, the house’s systems were doing their best to draw off the smoke, and the doorway was filled by two large figures he recognized.

Captain Maduc brandished a heavy-duty disorganizer, moving its emitter from side to side to cover Obron and Varshun. “Move away,” he said, indicating with the weapon that he wanted them far from the sideboard and the interplanar portal. Then, to the man behind him, “Get it.”

The smirking policeman Kaslo had met at the New Bastable Inn, now minus his green uniform, squeezed past the fat man and approached the gray object. He stepped on the door, causing Kaslo to groan and the two newcomers to notice him for the first time.

“Well, look who it is,” said the henchman. His smile at full cruelty, he lifted a booted foot and stomped on the door.

Kaslo made a sharper sound, writhing beneath the pressure.

“Stop it!” said Maduc. “We’re here for the goods!” He indicated the thing on the sideboard. “Get it!”

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” Diomedo Obron said.

“Sure I do,” said the man with the weapon. “I always did. While this cake-faker was paying me to staff his little mine,”—he pointed the emitter toward Varshun—“somebody else was paying me to be kept apprised of his progress. He even lent me a private spaceship to get us off Cheddle. And to follow you on your travels to the mine and back. When I informed my benefactor you’d arrived back from the camp, he paid me a very handsome sum to come and collect whatever you had.”

His eyes swept the room and settled on the ancient tome. “We’ll take that, too. My client has a shelf of old books like that. I’ll bet he’ll pay a bonus.”

“Who is it?” Varshun said. “Whatever he’s paying, I’ll double it.”

“With what?” said Maduc, his chin indicated Obron. “His funds?”

“He’ll pay,” the fraudster said. He turned to the magnate, his face a plea. “Offer him whatever he wants,” he said. “Soon it won’t matter—”

But Maduc cut him off. “I’m satisfied with my present arrangements,” he said. “I don’t like complications. And I never liked you.”

He aimed the disorganizer and pressed its stud. A beam of non-light reached out to Binnie Varshun, wrapped him in a cocoon of swirling black sparkles, converted him into discrete wavelengths of energy, and transmitted those back to the disorganizer’s storage matrix—a vicious weapon, but an efficient one.

His hulking sideman had meanwhile stepped over the door—and Kaslo underneath it—to reach the sideboard. He examined the mirror briefly, wearing the skeptical expression of a low-browed individual confronted by a piece of highly conceptual art. Then he reached out both hands and picked it up.

He was surprised by the thing’s lightness. And shifted his grip as he peered into the pearly surface. “What is this?” he said. “Some kind of mir—”

But as he spoke, one of his thumbs touched the grayness. He froze, a look of complete surprise beginning to form on his heavy features. It never fully arrived, though, because in an instant he disappeared, leaving behind only a man-shape composed of something that appeared to be fine white powder. This visual echo lasted only long enough to be perceived before it fell apart and drifted down to the floor, only to disappear completely before it got there.

The mirror remained exactly where the thug had held it, suspended in the air.

“What the—” the ex-captain began, but he, too, would not finish his expostulation. Erm Kaslo’s writhings under the boot-stomp of the henchman had served to conceal his drawing of the energy pistol he kept in a side pocket of his pantaloons. He now brought it to bear on Maduc and turned the fat man’s head into an incandescent lump. The boiling of brains in a confined space caused the back of his skull to blow out, smearing the wall behind him and entailing yet more work for household maintenance.

The op slid out from under the door, rose to his feet, and put the pistol back where it had come from. “I would be obliged,” he said to Diomedo Obron, “if you would provide me with transport to Indoberia. I will send you an invoice in the morning.”

“What about . . . ?” the magnate indicated the headless corpse, which had now slumped to its knees and toppled over.

“That is not my line of work,” Kaslo said. He looked at the gold-framed grayness still hanging in the stench-filled air of the underground room. “And neither, I am glad to say, is that.”

The magnate made further representations, but Kaslo would not hear them. He waited on the lawn for the hired aircar the estate’s integrator summoned from the city. As soon as he was back in his lodgings he instructed his own integrator to accept no further communication from Diomedo Obron.

Then he told it to book him in for a week at Grand Shoals. Binnie Varshun had given him a great deal to think about. At the very least, if the universe’s fundamentals were about to undergo a drastic change, Kaslo was resolved to get in all the angling he could.

© 2013 by Matthew Hughes.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Matthew Hughes writes science-fantasy. His SF novels are: Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion, Majestrum, The Commons, The Spiral Labyrinth, Template, Hespira, The Damned Busters, The Other, Costume Not Included, and Hell to Pay. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Postscripts, Storyteller, Interzone and a number of best-of-the-year anthologies. Night Shade Books published his short story collection, The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, in 2005. Formerly a journalist, he spent more than twenty-five years as a freelance speechwriter for Canadian corporate executives and political leaders. His works have been short-listed for the Aurora, Nebula, and Philip K Dick Awards. His webpage is at matthewhughes.org

Homecoming
Seanan McGuire

The locker room is always tense before a game. Alisa is trying to get her uniform to stay in place, counting more on safety pins and prayer than she probably should, and Birdie—true to her name—keeps whistling, which is probably going to get her slapped if she doesn’t stop soon. Cram twenty girls from opposing squads into one small space and tensions are going to flare.

“Has anybody seen my nail file?”

“Where’s my hair tie?”

“Birdie, shut up.”

The October air smells like bonfires and promises, and it’s always October for this game, for the big game. October is Homecoming season. This is when promises are made and pledges are broken, and the boys of fall walk proudly into legend with their short-skirted heralds singing their praises every step of the way. The girls of fall, too, when they choose to take the field.

“Does this top make my breasts look big?”

“Did somebody take my blue mascara?”

“Birdie, shut up.”

There are locker rooms for the football players, of course: empty, echoing gray rooms lined with lockers and the memories of hot October nights that have no end. The world makes the mistake of thinking that every night happens only once, but no two people live through the same hour, the same evening, the same season. Every trial and triumph is unique, even when it’s shared—maybe especially when it’s shared, because then there are other mirrors for the moment to reflect against. Every night is infinite.

“How are my tights?”

“Tilly, will you come braid my hair?”

“Shut up, Birdie!”

Bit by bit, the preparations are completed: faces are painted, hair is styled, and squad divisions become clear as crystal, written proudly across the front of uniforms and detailed in the color of fabrics, cosmetics, ribbons tied to ponytails or braids. The Falcons, in blue and gold, and the Ravens, in red and rust. There is the much-scolded Birdie in Falcon blue, with gold glitter clinging to her cheeks like stardust. There is Alisa in Raven red, wearing a skirt that should have been retired two seasons ago. They line up like warriors preparing to take the battlefield, each facing another across the locker room. Bit by bit, the chatter and arguments die. Even Birdie’s whistle comes to a temporary end.

The team captains step forward, Elle in blue, Rona in red. Elle is the first to hold out her hand. Rona hesitates, takes it, shakes.

“Let’s have a good clean game tonight,” says Elle. “There’s no home team advantage.”

“That’s because every team is the home team here,” says Rona, and smiles, dropping Elle’s hand as she turns to her squad. “Gimme an ‘R’!”

“R!” scream the Ravens, and the Falcons are doing the same with their own name, and the locker room devolves into an almost primal storm of shrieking female voices. This, too, is part of the ritual; this, too, is the herald of the endless October night.

The game is about to begin.

There is no sign of primal fury in the twenty girls who slip from the locker room onto the darkened gridiron. They walk with calm precision, ten and ten, taking their places in front of the empty stands. Elle raises her hands, looking to Rona across the empty field. Rona mirrors the gesture. The captains nod in brief unison. Two sets of hands are clapped, and the age-old cry to battle echoes through the night:

“Ready? Let’s go!”

The stadium lights flash dazzlingly on, and the sound of thunder is close behind as the crowds in the stands—who were not there a moment ago, who have always been there, who will always be there when the October lights are lit—leap to their feet, stomping and clapping and howling for the boys of fall, the heroes of the night. Here they come now, twenty-two players in blank white uniforms pouring out of the locker room doors and onto the green, the sacred, moonlit green. They pump their fists in the air, and the cheerleaders are shouting encouragement, and vendors are selling popcorn in the stands, and oh, this is the night. This is the time they have been waiting for since they were born.

This is the night when they are heroes.

It doesn’t seem to matter that none of them are in team colors, because they fall into position all the same, without jockeying or argument. The crowd settles, and the cheerleaders lower their pom-poms, falling back to the flats of their feet as they wait for the game to begin. There is no need for a coin toss, customary as it would have been: The teams have not yet been truly decided.

The whistle blows to signal start of play. Here’s the snap, the quarterback drops back to pass, and he connects! The ball flies straight and true to the tight end in a throw that would be the stuff of high school legend on another field, on another night, in the arms of another October. The tight end turns, and he runs as hard as he can for the goal, clutching the ball in his arms like a promise. The people in the stands are screaming their heads off, and it’s all about the game, it’s all about the moment, it’s all about this sweet harvest night with the full moon overhead and the scent of bonfires on the breeze. It’s about this, and only this. There has never been anything else—

—his name is Daniel Ryan, Specialist, United States Army, and he was never supposed to be here. He enlisted because he needed a way to pay for college, and the man at the recruitment center swore that there would never be another war fought this way, with men on the ground. He’s tired; he’s so tired. Tired of fighting, tired of knowing that he’s in a place he was never meant to be. Tired of being an invader in a land that doesn’t want him there. But he’s fighting for his country, and he knows it would be unpatriotic to admit to his exhaustion. So he keeps going, long past the time when he just wants to lay down and sleep for a week. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t realize something is wrong, doesn’t sense the danger in the silence until the convoy rolls over the IEDs buried in the road, and everything goes white, and there’s nothing, nothing, nothing at all, until—

—he’s running hard across the green field, moving fast in his white uniform, his feet turning distance into memories. By the time the defensive backs pile into him, he’s halfway to the goal line, and the ball rolls away, forgotten, as he smiles up at the stars. He stands in blue and gold, Falcon colors, his name and number printed bold across the back of his jersey, and the crowds go wild once more.

“DANIEL RYAN, HE’S OUR MAN!” shout the Falcon cheerleaders, and if anyone thinks it’s strange for them to be cheering after the tackle, nothing is said. Across the field, the Raven cheerleaders fluff their pom-poms and glare.

No one likes to give ground first.

The teams take up their positions for the second play, and the ball is snapped once more, the sound like a prayer in the cool night air. The cheerleaders on both sides of the field shout and clap and leap, their pom-poms waving wildly, and the running back has the ball and he’s running, he’s running, he’s running like that’s all he’s ever wanted to do—

—the call comes in while he’s on the road back to the station, ready to finish off another shift. Armed robbery in progress, hostages involved. He responds without hesitation, hitting the gas and rocketing back the way he came. This is his job. This is why he joined the police force, fresh out of college and pursuing a better future for himself, for the city that he loves. It hasn’t been easy. Nothing good is ever easy. He’s had his regrets—regrets are only human—but he’s never been sorry that he chose this life, and he isn’t sorry even as the robbers open fire. Officer Tony Woodrow falls. The ground seems to reach up to catch him, and if he regrets anything at all, it’s that the fight will be going on without him—

Rust and red bloom across his white uniform as he laterals the ball to a wide receiver, and the Raven cheerleaders scream triumphantly, their voices cutting through the night like the caws of carrion birds. It’s a rare play, but all their joy seems to be reserved for the man who made it. Woodrow goes down under a hail of white-uniformed bodies, but the ball is still in motion, the wide receiver is running, running, and everything could change in an instant—

—the fire is threatening to take out an entire city block, and they keep going into the inferno, one fireman after another collapsing from heat, from exhaustion, from smoke inhalation. They have to keep trying, or so many more will die, and she’s so tired, but that doesn’t matter; when Nadine Wallace joined the fire department, she did it with the understanding that she’d be fighting right up until the moment when the fire took her down. Then a window blows and the flames reach out like greedy hands, and the last thing she has time to think is that she knew it was going to end this way; she knew that she was going to die fighting. Now, finally, she has the chance to rest—

The blue and gold-unformed figure of Nadine Wallace, wide receiver, changes directions like she was intending to do so all along, running back toward the Raven goal. None of the figures on the field seem to find this strange. The white continue to scramble, while the lone red uniform redirects to intercept her. Still Nadine runs, a perfect silhouette against the night, and the people in the stands go wild.

Two Raven cheerleaders turn to each other, using the sound of screaming to cover their voices. “Remember when women never made it onto the field?”

“Times change, Alisa, jeez.” The other cheerleader snaps her gum, eyes glinting red in the gleam from the floodlights. “We’re co-ed now.”

“Chill, Kerry,” says Alisa, and thrusts her pom-pom into the air, whooping encouragement for their team.

The players keep running. The cheerleaders keep cheering. The sweet October night goes on.

Halftime finds six players in blue and gold, seven in red and rust, with nine as yet undecided. Not that the decision is a conscious thing; not that the teams will necessarily be equal when the night is done. Some games end with all twenty-two players on the same team. It all depends on their circumstances, on what they want all the way down to the bottoms of their souls.

As the cheerleaders group like strange, colorful birds around the edges of the field, watching the marching band go through its paces, a figure in glittering silver and green runs out of the locker room, pulling one of the remaining white uniformed players from the huddle. The man looks confused as he is led away, passing his substitute. The new player is led by a silver-and-green figure of her own.

“Are substitutions at this stage legal?” asks Rona.

“Technically,” says Elle. The team captains are standing together, with no signs of animosity between them. It would be a waste of energy, and they have little to spare at this point in the evening. The teams are so close to evenly divided; it’s still anybody’s game. “I wonder who made the error by sending him here.”

“Medical technology keeps improving. It may not have been an error at all.”

“Even so,” says Elle. She picks up her pom-poms, shaking them experimentally. A single black feather falls out. “I wonder if he’ll get another chance.” Unspoken are the rules of this field, of this game, of this endless October where every night is played a thousand times over again: Only warriors come here, earning their place on the team by dying a warrior’s death. A substitution at this stage in the game may mean the player who was removed (Albert Li, United States Marine Corp) may not be coming back for another chance at the trophy.

The marching band is finishing their final song, and the cheerleaders flock forward while the crowd is still applauding, taking up their places for the halftime show. Oh, this is part of the ritual, and oh, they almost seem to soar as they throw themselves into the leaps and backflips, and oh, they have been here before so many times, and oh. October never ends if the game is never truly finished.

Elle and Rona stand atop their respective pyramids and clap their hands, and the cheerleaders shout defiance into the blackness of the night, and the game—the game that never ends—goes wildly on.

The score is tied, 21-21, and the players are falling into more fixed roles on more fixed teams, blue with blue, red with red. They don’t seem to notice doing it, even when a uniform blooms in the middle of a play and a player switches sides without warning. Falcons fly with Falcons, Ravens with Ravens. It is the simple logic of the game. The cheerleaders shout their names and wave their pom-poms in the air, and if a name is never called before the player’s uniform changes colors, no one really seems to care about that. Each of them is lost in his or her private battle, each of them playing on a different green field, somewhere in the recesses of their hearts.

Clarice McNally, bus driver and local hero, who saved six schoolchildren at the expense of her own life, joins the Ravens.

Michael Jones, SPCA, who was stabbed in the back six times while investigating an illegal dog-fighting ring, joins the Falcons.

Neither team is marked as “home” or “away” on the scoreboard: it’s just numbers, 21-21, and then the Ravens score a touchdown, and the numbers change. “Gimme an ‘R’!” shouts Rona, and the Ravens scream delight into the evening air. The moon hasn’t moved since the start of play. It’s still early evening, the scent of popcorn and bonfires and fresh green grass filling the air. The players move across the field, falling back into position, counting down to the next play.

“Go Falcons, go Falcons! Go, go, go Falcons!”

The ball is snapped, and Clarice McNally—the substitution, whose bus hit the water as the game was starting, whose lungs gave up as halftime rolled around—snatches it from the air, turning to run toward the distant, welcoming shape of the goal. She runs for the joy of running as much as anything else; her lungs pull in each breath like a benediction, so glad to be breathing unencumbered, so glad to be alive.

—but she’s not alive, she’s not, she remembers the water reaching up to wrap its arms around her, and it’s not October, it’s nowhere near October; it’s June, the school year is racing to a close, and if the bridge had been maintained like it should have been, she would never have been forced to drown—

Clarice stumbles to a stop. The safeties are five yards behind her and closing fast when the ball tumbles from her nerveless fingers and hits the turf, dead in play as soon as it touches the ground. Clarice is a heartbeat behind it, dropping to her knees as confusion and contradiction swarm around her. She can’t be here. She died, she died in the river, and half the children in her charge died with her. Some parents will remember her as a hero, but what about the parents of the dead? What about the ones she couldn’t save, who drowned reaching for the only adult who might have been able to help them?

“No,” she mumbles, starting to rock. “No, no, no.”

Someone blows the whistle for a time out. Not the coach for the Ravens. Not the coach for the opposing team, either; neither coach has been seen since the start of play. Play freezes all the same, and the cheerleaders come flocking onto the field, strangely colored birds descending on the fallen player.

“Clarice? Are you all right?”

She raises her head and finds herself looking at Rona, squad leader for the Ravens’ team cheerleaders. She is pretty, in a stark way, the sort of girl who always seems to stand on the outside of groups and skirt along the leading edge of trends. Her hair is the color of red velvet cupcakes or dried blood, and her eyes are almost amber. She should be terrifying, this autumn-girl under the October moon. Instead, somehow, she looks like coming home.

“I couldn’t save them,” Clarice tells her, and tears run down her cheeks. “I tried, but I couldn’t save them. Why couldn’t I save them?” The grass—no longer pristine, not now, not in the middle of the battle—is cold beneath her hands. The smell of bonfires is stronger now, like the field itself is on fire.

“Fighting doesn’t always mean winning,” says Rona, still crouching in front of the fallen warrior. “Sometimes it just means doing the best that you can do, and hoping that when the scores are tallied, that’s enough to put you on the winning side.”

“Winning? Losing? Children died, and now somehow we’re . . . how am I here? How are we playing football? I haven’t played football since high school.”

“But you did,” says another girl—Elle, with her white-blonde hair streaked in Falcon blue, and she’s lovely, she’s an angel, but her eyes are cold as she looks down on Clarice. “If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here. You’d be playing water polo, maybe, or chess, or competitive Pictionary.”

“There are as many battlefields as there are fallen warriors to fight on them,” says Rona. She straightens, offering Clarice her hands. “You earned your place here, I swear that you did, and now all you have to do is see the game through to its end in order to get your reward.”

Clarice looks at her, this teenage girl with her hair tied up in ribbons, and nothing has ever been more wrong, and nothing has ever been more right. This is Homecoming, this is the October that never ends, and she has earned her place here, on this field, on this team. She slides her hands into Rona’s without deciding that she’s going to do so, and Rona tugs her back to her feet, stronger than she should be for a girl so slight.

“Fight on, warrior,” she says, letting go of Clarice’s hands. She smiles, and for a moment, she is something else; not a cheerleader, exactly, but something older, and wilder, and serving the very same role. She cheers at the edges of the battlefield. “Fight on, and win.”

Then the cheerleaders are running from the field, and the whistle blows again, and this night—this beautiful, perfect, endless night—resumes.

A touchdown for the Ravens; a penalty for the Falcons; two more players on each team, and only three are still running the field in white uniforms that show no dirt or grass stains, unlike the colored uniforms of their teammates. The Ravens and Falcons show the wear of the game, but the players in white uniforms are unmarred. If any of them find this strange, they do not say it. They never say it.

“BE AGGRESSIVE! B-E AGGRESSIVE!” shriek the Falcon cheerleaders, and their voices are the cries of hunting birds who remember, always, the safety of the hand and the glove.

“FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!” answer the Raven cheerleaders, and their voices are the call of carrion birds on the battlefield, no less revered because their duty is to the dead.

The players surge back and forth across the green, and the cheerleaders fly in their carefully practiced formations, pom-poms shaking, voices lashing hard across the night. In the stands, the crowds cheer and whistle and stomp their feet, and if none of them ever comes fully into the lights, fully into view, well, that’s not what this night is about, is it? This night is about the boys and girls of fall, their feet digging divots into the turf, the smell of sweat and blood and battle in their nostrils. This night, this good October night with the moon like a single all-seeing eye, this night is theirs.

The Falcons’ quarterback catches the ball and hooks it hard to a receiver in blue and gold, who plucks it from the air like a farmer plucks an apple. He starts to run, but a player in white puts her shoulder into his numbers, and—

—the plane is going down hard, and there’s nothing that can be done for it now; they’re going to crash into the mountains, and if they’re lucky, they’ll live long enough for the rescue choppers to arrive. They’re not going to be lucky, Emily Kwan knows that in her bones. She opens her email client, breathing in through her nose, out through her mouth, and starts sending her research to her partner back at the lab. She may die, but her work will live on, and maybe a few lives will be saved as hers is ending. She presses send, and the oxygen masks deploy, and the world goes black on impact—

Emily’s uniform blooms red and rust as she goes down with her opponent, a whistle shrilling the end of the play. The Falcons will have to punt now, their forward momentum diminished.

On the sidelines, Elle shakes her head.

“I thought for sure she was ours.”

Rona laughs, and just claps her hands as the cheer for Emily begins.

The final two players both bloom blue and gold, Falcons on the field. When the final scrimmage lines up, it is ten in red and rust and twelve in blue and gold, an illegal formation that doesn’t draw a flag. Everyone’s focus is on the ball, on the moon, on the last game of the season before the season fades away forever. Emily Kwan snaps the ball to Tony Woodrow, and he’s running, he’s running so fast that it seems like he can almost fly. The other players follow, some defending him, some trying to claim the prize for their own, and it’s a beautiful snapshot of a life well-lived, this moment, this field. In this moment, winning and losing don’t matter. There’s only the play itself, the old, familiar pattern of hands and hearts working in perfect concert.

The crowds scream. The cheerleaders cheer. The players run like there is nothing left to them but running, block like there is nothing that can ever tear them down.

The Ravens score the final touchdown, and the stands go wild for a beautiful, heart-stopping second. Everything is right as Tony’s fellow players hoist him onto their shoulders, shouting their joy into the night, and the cheerleaders . . .

. . . the cheerleaders are silent and still, save for the last fading notes of Birdie’s whistle.

The players falter, looking confused, and in that moment, the shouting from the stands stops. For the first time, the glare from the stadium lights is dim enough to let them see the bleachers, and there is no one there. There is no one there at all.

“What’s going on?” Daniel Ryan, Specialist, removes his helmet. Around him, the other players are doing the same, revealing the faces of bewildered men and women.

“The game is over,” says Elle. She stands on the sidelines, but her voice is clear; her voice is always clear.

“You fought bravely,” says Rona.

“But the fight is finished.”

“The sides are drawn.”

The two step onto the field, and maybe it’s a trick of the light, but the colors of their uniforms seem to shift as they walk, blue becoming red, rust becoming gold, the small differences of cut and style fading, until the two girls are dressed identically. They stop in front of the players, and even the names written across their chests are different now—not Falcons, not Ravens, but Valkyries.

“What . . . ?” asks Clarice.

Rona smiles. “Your coaches are here.”

The girls turn, looking toward the locker room doors; the players, unsure, do the same. A man emerges from one door; a woman from the other. Together yet apart, they walk across the field toward the two teams.

The man has only one eye, and the logo of the Ravens is printed on his sweatshirt.

The woman has hair the color of red gold, and wears a cap with the logo of the Falcons.

They wave their teams to them, and they begin their postgame talks. What they say to their players is private; it has always been private, and always will be, on those sweet harvest nights when the field is filled with laughter, triumph, tears, and regret. But the word Valhalla is spoken, as is the word Fólkvangr, which is less remembered in this day and age, yet has always been there, for as long as there have been Valkyries to choose, and warriors to be chosen. Some warriors yearn for the fight to go on forever. Others seek rest and recuperation. Half the chosen slain are bound for each hall at the end of any battle—and look: The Ravens follow the one-eyed man, and the Falcons follow the woman with the golden hair.

Only Clarice McNally hesitates, looks back at the assembled girls in the red and gold cheerleading uniforms. Birdie is whistling again, a piece by Wagner. She never gets the low notes right.

Rona waves. After a moment’s hesitation, Clarice waves back. Then she exits, and the field is empty, waiting for the next game to begin.

It’s always October for this game, the big game, the game everyone who has ever loved high school football dreams of for their entire lives. The air smells like bonfires and promises. In the locker room, twenty girls in cheerleader’s uniforms are preparing for the field ahead of them. The choosers of the slain have always loved their rituals. Elle, wearing Raven red and rust, smiles across the benches at Rona in her Falcon blue and gold.

“We’ll have a good game tonight,” she says.

Rona smiles back at her sister. “We always do,” she replies.

© 2013 by Seanan McGuire.

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

Suzanne Delage
Gene Wolfe

As I was reading last night—reading a book, I should explain, which was otherwise merely commonplace; one of those somewhat political, somewhat philosophical, somewhat historical books which can now be bought by the pound each month—I was struck by a certain remark of the author’s. It seemed to me at the time an interesting, if almost self-evident, idea; and afterward, when I had turned the page, and many other pages, and was half through a new chapter bearing very little relation to what had gone before, this idea found its way back into my consciousness and there acted as a sort of filter between my mind and the book until I put it down and, still thinking, went up to bed.

The idea which had so forcibly struck me was simply this: that every man has had in the course of his life some extraordinary experience, some dislocation of all we expect from nature and probability, of such magnitude that he might in his own person serve as a living proof of Hamlet’s hackneyed precept—but that he has, nearly always, been so conditioned to consider himself the most mundane of creatures, that, finding no relationship to the remainder of his life in this extraordinary experience, he has forgotten it.

It seemed to me (considering the immense extent of the universe of the senses and the minute size of that area of it we think of as “everyday”) that this must certainly be correct. Yet if it were true of every man it ought also to be true of me—and try as I might I could remember no such extraordinary circumstance.

When I had switched off the light I lay recalling, very pleasantly on the whole, my life. It has been a pleasant life, though I fear a dull, and perhaps a lonely, one. I live now not five miles from the hospital in which I was born, and have lived nowhere else. Here I grew up, learned a profession, practiced, and, much sooner than most men, retired. I have twice been married, but both marriages were brief, and both ended in friendly separations; the truth is that my wives (both of them) bored me—and I am very much afraid I bored them as well.

As I lay in bed, then, thinking of times when my grandfather had taken me fishing and of skating parties with friends, and about our high school team (on which I was a substitute quarterback, but one so much inferior to the first-string occupant of that position that I almost never got into a game unless we were several touchdowns ahead, which was not often), it at last occurred to me that there has, in fact, been one thread of the strange—I might almost say the incredible, though not the supernatural—in my own history.

It is simply this: Living all my life, as I have, in a town of less than a hundred thousand population, I have been dimly aware of the existence of a certain woman without ever meeting her or gaining any sure idea of her appearance.

But even this is not, perhaps, as extraordinary as it may sound. I have never made an effort to meet this woman, and I doubt that she has ever attempted to meet me, if, indeed, she is aware that I exist. On the other hand, we are neither of us invalids, nor are we blind. This woman—her name is Suzanne (though I fear most of us here have always pronounced it “Susan”) Delage—lives, or at least so I have always vaguely supposed, on the eastern edge of our little city; I live on the western. I doubt that we, as children, attended the same elementary school, but I know that we were, for four years, at the same high school. I was able to ascertain this as a matter of certainty through my yearbooks, which my mother, with that more or less formalized sentimentality characteristic of her, saved for me in the attic of this tall, silent frame house (itself saved for me as well).

Actually, of the four volumes which must originally have existed, only two remain—those for my sophomore and senior years. There are a number of pages missing from the class picture section of the earlier book, and I seem to recall that these were torn out and cut up to obtain the individual photographs many decades ago. My own face is among those missing, as well as Suzanne Delage’s; but in another section, one devoted to social activities, a girl’s club (it was called, I think, the Pie Club) is shown, and one of the names given in the caption is Suzanne’s. Unfortunately the girls in the picture are so loosely grouped—around a stove and work table—that it is not possible to be certain in every case which name should be attached to which young lady; besides, a number of them have their backs to the camera.

The senior book should have told me more—at least so I thought when I, at last, came across it at the end of an hour or so of rummaging. It is whole and undamaged, and I, thanks largely to football, have no less than four pictures in various parts of it. Suzanne Delage has none. On one of the closing pages a woebegone roll of names reminds me of something I had forgotten for many years—that there was an epidemic of some kind (I think Spanish influenza) just at the time the pictures for the annual were to be taken. Suzanne is listed as one of those “unable to be photographed.”

I should explain that ours was one of those overgrown schools found in the vicinity of small towns, a school repeatedly expanded because the growth of the town itself had been slow (though always faster, so it seemed in retrospect, than anyone had anticipated) and the taxpayers had not wanted to authorize a new one. It was large enough, in short, that only a few leading students—the star athletes, the class officers, the few really promiscuous girls and the dazzlingly beautiful ones whom we, in those naïve times, called “queens”—were known to everyone.

The rest of us, if we moved socially at all, went by classes and cliques. A student might know the others in his English and algebra rooms; the cliques—at least the ones I remember—were the football players and their girls, the children of the rich, the boys and girls whose families attended a certain fundamentalist church on the outskirts of town; and certain racial minorities, the chess and debating society types, and the toughs. It sounds, I suppose, as though there were a group for everyone, and at the time (since I was fairly well entrenched among the athletes) I believe I thought myself (if I thought about the matter at all) that there was. I now realize that all these little coteries embraced no more than a third of the school, but whether Suzanne Delage had entry to one or more of them I do not know.

I should, however, have made her acquaintance long before I entered high school, since Mrs. Delage, Suzanne’s mother, was one of my own mother’s close friends. They had met, I think at about the time I was eight, through a shared passion (much more widespread in our area, I think, than in the country as a whole, and more ardently pursued in the past than it is now) for collecting antique fabrics; in other words, for embroidered tablecloths, for quilts, crocheting of all kinds, afghans, crewel work, hand-hooked rugs, and the like. If my mother or her friends could discover a sampler, or a bedspread or “comfortable” made in the earlier part of the nineteenth century (it was their enduring hope, I think never well satisfied, to find a piece from what they called “American Revolution times”—by which they meant the eighteenth, even such dates as 1790 or 1799), a piece well made and decorated—the more the better—in the unschooled, traditional ways of the old farm families, then their joy and their pride knew no bounds. If, in addition, the work was that of some notable woman—or to be more precise, of some woman relation of some notable man; the sister, say, of a lieutenant governor—and could be authenticated, the home of the finder became a sort of shrine to which visitors were brought, and to which solitary pilgrims from other towns came (ringing our bell—for we possessed, as a result of Mother’s efforts, a vast appliquéd quilt which had been the civil-wartime employment of the wife of a major in a fencible Zouave regiment—usually at about ten-thirty in the morning and offering, in introduction, a complicated recitation of friendships and cousincies linking themselves to our own family) bearing homage like cookies on a plate and eager to hear, for the better direction of their own future strategies, a circumstantial description of the inquiries and overheard clues, the offers made and rejected and made again, which had led to the acquisition of that precious object which would, as terminator of the interview, at last be brought forth in a glory of moth crystals, and spread sparkling clean (for of course these collected pieces were never used) over the living room sofa to be admired.

Mrs. Delage, who became my mother’s friend, possessed pieces of her own as valuable as the major’s wife’s quilt (which was, as my mother never tired of pointing out, entirely hand-sewn) and a collection, too, of lesser treasures ranking, as my mother herself admitted, with our own hoard. Together they scoured the countryside for more, and made trips (trips so exhausting that I was, as a boy, always surprised to see how very willing, in a few weeks, my mother was to go again) to view the riches of neighboring counties—and even, once or twice, by rail, of neighboring states. It would therefore have been entirely logical for Mrs. Delage to have been our frequent guest, at least for tea; and for her to have brought, occasionally, her little daughter Suzanne, whom I would no doubt have soon come to both love and hate.

This would doubtless have occurred but for a circumstance of a kind peculiar, I think, to towns exactly the size of ours, and incomprehensible not only to the residents of cities, but to truly rural people as well. There lived, directly across the brick-paved street from us, a bitter old woman, a widow, who for some reason never explained to me detested Mrs. Delage. It was lawful for my mother to be friendly with Suzanne’s, but if (women in small towns somehow know these things) she had gone so far as to invite Mrs. Delage to our house this widow would at once have become her enemy for life. The invitation was never given, and I believe my mother’s friend died while I was at college.

Thus while I was still small I was hardly aware of Suzanne Delage, though my mother often mentioned hers; in high school, as I indicated, though I was in much closer proximity to the girl herself this was hardly altered. I heard of her vaguely, in connection perhaps with some friend of a friend. I must surely have seen her in the corridors hundreds of times—if one can be said to see, in a crowd, people one does not know. I must sometimes have shared classrooms with her, and certainly we were together at assembly and in the vast study hall. She would have attended many of the same dances I did, and it is even possible that I danced with her—but I do not really believe that, and if, indeed, it happened, the years have so effectively sponged the event from my mind that no slightest trace remains.

And in fact I think I would never have recalled the name of Suzanne Delage at all, as I lay in bed last night listening to the creaking of this empty house in the autumn wind and searching the recesses of my memory for some extraordinary incident with which to attest the author’s thesis, if it had not been for something that took place a few days ago.

I had been shopping, and happened to meet, on the sidewalk in front of one of the larger stores, a woman of my own age whom I have known all my life and who is now the wife of a friend. We stood chatting for a moment—she, after the usual half-teasing reproaches about my (supposed) gay bachelor life, gossiping about her husband and children. As she turned to leave, a girl of fifteen or so came out of the store and, smiling but intent upon her own concerns, walked quickly past us and down the street. Her hair was of a lustrous black, and her complexion as pure as milk; but it was not these that for a moment enchanted me, nor the virginal breasts half afraid to press the soft angora of her sweater, nor the little waist I might have circled with my two hands. Rather it was an air, at once insouciant and shy, of vivacity coupled with an innocence and intelligence that were hers alone. To the woman beside me I said: “What a charming child. Who is she?”

“Her name?” My friend’s wife frowned and snapped her fingers. “I can’t think of it. But of course you know whose she is, don’t you? She’s the very image of her mother at that age—Suzanne Delage.”

© 1980 by Gene Wolfe.

Originally published in Edges,

edited by Ursula K. Le Guin & Virginia Kidd.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Gene Wolfe—who is perhaps best known for his multi-volume epic, The Book of the New Sun—is the author of more than 200 short stories and thirty novels, is a two-time winner of the Nebula Award, a four-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, and was once praised as “the greatest writer in the English Language alive today” by author Michael Swanwick. His most recent novels are An Evil Guest, The Sorcerer’s House, and Home Fires.

Bellweather: A Gorlen Vizenfirthe Tale
Marc Laidlaw

The first Gorlen story was a novel, long since lost to time (written in the author’s teens and shredded in his twenties). In that novel of origins, the young bard Gorlen Vizenfirthe was given the typical task of saving the world. To keep him on track, one of his fingers was cut off and replaced with the stone finger of a gargoyle. As long as Gorlen kept on his quest, the stone was limited to his finger; but if he strayed, or tried to avoid his duty, the stone took over more of his flesh. By the time he had finished saving the world, the single gargoyle finger had become an entire hand. Assuming the corresponding gargoyle had seen similar transformations in its flesh finger, Gorlen sought this nameless goyle in hopes of arranging an exchange. The gargoyle’s name turned out to be Spar, but Spar had no ability to undo the magic of the priest who had done the deed in the first place. Together, they now seek this itinerant mage, hoping for restoration to their original forms.

“I like this place not,” said Spar.

“I can’t imagine why,” said Gorlen. “It looks like a gargoyle’s graveyard.”

They had struggled for days through a wasteland of broken rock, high in the mountains, on their way through a pass that maps had indicated would take them to a country of promise. The first of the rocks were chipped and quarried, and showed signs of having been worked by artisans as much as by nature. But after a time, the unfashioned stone gave way to broken figures. The general impression was that a nation of statues, its entire populace, had been carried to the heavens and then dropped, so that all were shattered. Fractured heads and torsos, truncated limbs, toes and fingers of every size, from gnomic to gigantic, lay strewn from peak to peak, as if spread across the high mountain valleys by glacial action. For two travelers on foot, it was rough going, and Gorlen sensed that his gargoyle companion found the terrain unnerving—his sense of uneasiness redoubling as they neared the far edge of the plateau and saw sky instead of mountains before them. They should have been gladdened by the promise of a descent, but as the sky opened up, the ominous atmosphere solidified into a tangible form:

A wall of hands, palms turned toward them, ran along the mountain crest as far as they could see. Stone hands, severed (or simply snapped) at the wrists, hands of all sizes packed together to form a barrier as solid as a reef. It was not, perhaps, as unnerving as if the hands had all been formed of skeletal human remains, and yet as possessor of a gargoyle hand himself, Gorlen found it more than menacing.

Directly ahead of them, the hands knit more closely, forming a kind of finished border around an opening, an archway through which a reasonably large trade caravan might have passed.

“Is that where our path leads?” he asked.

Spar needed to consult no map to verify this.

“And what do you make of this warning?”

“I am not certain it is meant to intimidate. It may simply be that these were the most appropriate building materials.”

“Hands?” Gorlen said. “Why the total absence of toes or elbows, for instance?”

“It is worth considering whether we should keep to our original track. Perhaps there is another way around. This can hardly be the only route down from the mountains.”

They stood and surveyed the terrain. Far off among the chipped heads and bent limbs, Gorlen thought he saw movement and heard a distant tinkling. They had seen little sign of life on the plateau—the occasional nomad encampment, distant roaming figures quickly lost in the jagged horizons. Suddenly, he felt lonely and exposed. The sooner they made their way down from this altitude, to warmer and greener lands, the sooner he would feel at ease. And yet, it was impossible to mistake the warning here.

“Perhaps we’d best push on,” he said. “We can always come back if we don’t find another route.”

Spar agreed, and they started off, keeping the grotesque wall to one side. The going was slow and grew harder almost immediately, for once they left the track that led to the gate of hands, they found the terrain between the stones had changed from earth to water, a cold flood of snowmelt from the encircling peaks. Without a flat dry path, they were forced to scramble and jump from one shard to the next. If they slipped or found a gap too great to jump, ice-cold water awaited them. On the surface it appeared clear and still, but the first moment Gorlen stepped into it—and that first moment was quite inadvertent—he felt a strong current tugging and trying to further unbalance him. Spar, being made of stone, was indifferent to the chill, and did his best to help Gorlen make the precarious leaps without getting soaked. Gorlen explained in some detail what would happen should he soak himself in such cold weather. As for fires, or any other means of warming himself and drying his clothes, the plateau was entirely devoid of sticks, trees, leaves—anything, in fact, that might be burned, apart from the wooden instrument that was his livelihood. Gorlen said, “Had we known this route would be so miserable, I might have recommended avoiding it altogether. The land on the far side of the pass is as likely as anyplace else to disappoint us. I forget now why it seemed critical to get there. I only—hold on, what’s that?”

Gorlen cut off and listened, and after a moment, very faint in the sound of chuckling silvery waters, they heard a tinkling of bells. It sounded like a number of them, tiny peals, almost lost in the water sounds.

“Herders,” he said. “I think I saw them back by the gate.”

Suddenly, a louder bell pealed—a single bright chime that cut through the afternoon. Gorlen’s spirits lit up instantly at the thought that they were drawing closer to companionship.

At that moment, the sun went dark. A veil of ice-flecked mist closed around them, as if drawn up from the frigid pools of the flooded plain.

“What is this?” Gorlen cried, indignant, as snow blinded him. He groped for Spar, unable to see him in the sudden frost. “There were people out there somewhere. We should find them.”

“What if it was only animals? Shouldn’t we wait here?”

“We can’t wait!”

The single pure bell note sounded again, muffled by the snow but cutting through until it faded to the edge of audibility, where it hung for a very long time.

“Back to the gate, then,” Gorlen said. “At least we can start our descent on the other side, and get below this.”

“As you say,” Spar agreed.

In the blinding weather, the wall was a fixture to be prized—a sole bit of solidity when Gorlen’s senses failed to offer much in the way of reliable information. Reversing course, they kept it to their side as they retreated to the gate of hands, and this time passed through, once more taking up their original track. But although Gorlen had hoped for a quick descent, and better weather, conditions only degraded on the far side. The wall was somewhere behind them, and soon they lost the track as well. Underfoot, the boulders had iced over, glazed in a slippery transparent shell. Gorlen took an uncertain step and knew halfway through that it would end in disaster.

The water was shallow, but still deep enough to drench him straight through, cold enough to stab him to the marrow, like knives floating in his bloodstream. He hoped Spar was paying attention. He threw himself into a small place where he could perch between two larger boulders, and sat slowly freezing to death, shivering violently. Spar dug into Gorlen’s pack and pulled out his eduldamer, and began plucking the silver strings with one of his quickstone fingers. The instrument rang out like a bell itself, calling to the others. Gorlen thought that was a fine idea, worthy of the wise goyle, and he heartily approved. He clamped his jaws to keep from shivering too hard. A gargoyle of course had no dry clothes in which to wrap him, and though Gorlen had known Spar to strike a spark by snapping his fingers, there was no tinder here, either. But all reason was soon lost in the ice fog. He shut his eyes, losing track of his companion, numb and senseless, hardly hearing the tinkle of little bells coming closer as Spar jangled at the eduldamer.

Then, in his delirium, Gorlen had a vision as strange as any he had ever dreamed. The snowfall wavered and parted, and a clear hole opened in the mist. It widened steadily, perfectly round, clearing away all the snowflakes in an area centered on a hooded figure dressed in furs. A nomad—a herder. He carried a bell held out ahead of him, sounding it steadily; the ringing seemed to generate, all around the bell, a bubble of warm dry air. This warm pocket followed the bell through the blizzard, moving to surround Gorlen and Spar. The nomad leapt up onto an immense stone knee and looked down on Gorlen, huddled shivering below. Gorlen tried to see the man’s face, but his vision was darkening: The cold had grown too great, the warmth barely registered. The figure said something he didn’t hear, for he was falling into white darkness, falling like the snow.

The ringing of a bell had followed him into darkness; a different bell led him out of it. The sound was inseparable from deep warmth, a rising, subtle flush of heat that flowed in with the tone, low, almost below his ability to hear—although he felt it in his blood, his bone, his skin.

His eyes came open slowly into grey smoky light. Now he smelled woodsmoke, and saw it curling in the dark upper corners of the room where he lay nestled in soft bedding. Above him stood a young man, with thick black hair and skin that seemed smudged with the smoke of the room. The man was leaning over him, dangling a flat silver bell several inches across. Looking up into it from below, Gorlen saw himself warped but bright in the reflective surface. The young man struck the bell with a small rod of ivory, and again the warmth flooded through him with the sound.

Seeing that Gorlen was awake, the man spoke quietly to someone nearby. A child rushed past at the edge of his vision, darting outside, and a moment later Spar appeared.

“He appears well,” Spar said. “Are you, Gorlen?”

Gorlen sat up, took a look around him. “Where are we?”

“I am Chamsin. This is our home. Your friend called us to you in the storm.”

“I remember . . . I was very cold.”

“Yes. We have your clothes drying. Rest a bit longer. I have hot tea for you, but you cannot drink it till you are warm enough. So for now, just rest. The bell of warming has done most of the work already, but it still takes patience.”

Chamsin went to one side of the little room and carefully hung the bell on a dowel, alongside a dozen or so of different sizes, shapes, and colors. Also hanging there was a skin cloak with a loose cowl that he recognized from his last moments of consciousness in the snowstorm. It did not seem to be storming now. The hut was open to the world at one side, a doorway with no door in it, or even a hanging hide. Beyond was the grey light of the plain and the sea of broken rock extending into the distance. Closer to hand was life: a child peering into the hut from outside, and the movement of herd animals roaming past the entry. After a moment, one child became two, as well as a skinny older boy; they crowded around the opening and then came in to see Gorlen. They were fascinated by his eduldamer, which he promised to play for them once he was rested—and Chamsin tried sending them off, but Gorlen reassured him all was well. As a bard, Gorlen was used to such curious attention wherever he went. The younger two children dropped down around him, and he realized he must have been lying in one of their beds. These were several shallow troughs dug out of the earth and lined with varieties of moss, furs laid over that, all close to a small central fire. The hut was small, crowded, smoky—but also cozy. And compared to the vast plain of rubble, this was home indeed.

Where Chamsin failed to get his children to leave Gorlen alone, his wife soon succeeded at least in getting them to quiet down. She came in from outside, an infant strapped sleeping to her back with blankets and colored bindings. A round-faced woman with flushed cheeks, raw from snow and sun, she crouched down smiling and thrust a bowl of steaming milk at him. It was warm from whatever beast had given it—and given the tinkling sound of herd bells all around the hut, he didn’t think she’d had to carry it far.

Her name was Smaia. The infant had not yet found his name (as they put it), and the two other young children didn’t sit still long enough for him to keep them straight. The older boy was called Aial, and he eventually went off to tend to chores outside.

The milk—and slices of dark, waxy cheese—soon had Gorlen feeling revivified, and as soon as he could rise from the sleeping niche, Chamsin threw his stiff, warm clothes to him. Moments later, Gorlen stepped, blinking, into the afternoon.

The rocks and broken statuary spread out before him, but the storm was gone as if it had never been—not even a cloud embellished the deep surface of the sky. The hut sat on a slight elevation, a flattened little knoll formed or built out of mud and bryophytes, either congested in this spot by the elements or collected by Chamsin’s kin over many years. This spot was all the humans needed: The beasts, called draaks, appeared happy enough among boulders and the ruined limbs of giants. Long-legged to the point of absurdity, they resembled insects, loosely draped in patchy fur, udders swinging as they stilt-walked over the boulders and then lowered themselves to drink and graze in the deceptively still pools between the stones. They came up with mouthfuls of mud and moss dripping from bearded jaws, a placid and serene look in their dark eyes as they chewed their spongy cud.

Aial was out among them now, chivvying them closer to the hut. They wore the bells that Gorlen had heard tinkling, and the boy too carried a bell, hung from the top of a stout walking staff that he used for various purposes—balancing, poking the beasts, stirring up mud, and pushing aside small rocks to release bubbling moss from around the base so his herd might feed. They were a skinny lot of beasts, but judging from the milk and cheese he had eaten, and the furs Chamsin’s family wore, they provided a living. The camp also had its guardians: two enormous shaggy black beasts that gave the impression of being an abstraction of fur and fangs. They had taken a liking to Spar, apparently, or else out of mistrust they were following him around, flanking him. The goyle being completely devoid of scent and nearly silent, Gorlen was not sure what they found interesting about him. But when Spar settled himself up on an enormous convex stone that might once have been a giant’s shield or elbow, they sank down on either side of him and Gorlen instantly sensed a deep inherent kinship. All three were guardians—they recognized, in the spirit that animated the quickstone, an essence that went deeper than flesh and mineral differences.

“We’ve come away from the pass,” Spar said. “It was necessary to keep you alive.”

“As you may recall, I have no particular attachment to this route,” Gorlen said. “Another mountain pass, another high plateau, new twists on the same old hardships—blizzards, ice, fog, cold, blisters, deprivation—it no longer matters to me that the scenery constantly changes. This is the same as it ever was.”

He held out his quickstone hand, and gave a soft thump to Spar’s flesh counterpart. The shaggy beasts sniffed the hand of flesh with wet black noses and flicked out pink proboscises to test the skin. Gorlen saw a glimmer of fangs in a long feeding tube; it seemed like overkill.

He recuperated there on the domed rock, like a wan flower drinking in sunlight. His ribs ached from the act of straining hard for air in the thin atmosphere of the mountains, and he envied the ease with which Aial leapt after the flock. Smaia too sprang lightly from one jagged, precarious stone to another, her babe nodding and dozing all the while. The stilt-legged draaks lowered themselves over the pools, thrust feeding tubes deep into the mud, speared soft-shell leeches and chitins that lived in the silt, pulled them squirming into their mouths. Omnivores, then. Gorlen retrospectively thought he could identify a faint smack of leech in the milk he had drunk. It was no doubt an acquired taste.

The sun sank abruptly, and here was more reason to be grateful for the rescue from the rocky terrain. The lack of level dry ground would have meant a great deal of hazardous stumbling over tilted hard surfaces where sleep would be impossible to come by. The herders brought Gorlen and Spar back inside, where they discovered that somehow Smaia had assembled a feast in their honor.

“It is traditional to begin the feast with the foremost part of the draak.” And here Chamsin held out a plate of braised draak tongue. Gorlen determined early on not to scrutinize the offerings, but to eat everything offered without reservation. This all went well until the end of the meal, when, with great ceremony, Chamsin said, “It is traditional to end the feast with the hindmost part of the draak.” At which moment Gorlen recalled with a start that the draak possessed no tail. He was soon thinking back with great longing for the inoffensive savor of leech. Fortunately, after a certain point, even the spiced and fermented buttermilk of the draak began to lose some of its objectionable properties, and he found it useful for washing down the final course . . . which admittedly he ate in a manner that redefined the word “sparingly.”

With so much alcoholic milk imbibed, Gorlen found it hard to play his eduldamer with true dexterity. If the children found his playing of interest, they did not show it. In fact, they were all soon asleep. Smaia brewed a salty mud-colored tea from silty water. Chamsin promised to show them a safe track out of the mountains in the morning. He performed a very quiet and solemn tune, tapping several of the family’s precious bells, and then insisted Gorlen take the largest and most comfortably lined sleeping niche, while he and Smaia curled up in one together, with the infant between them.

With the lovely music of the bells still fading in his ears, like a note sustained far beyond hearing but still entirely present, Gorlen drifted off to sleep.

Bells . . .

Bells . . .

Always his sleep was haunted with bells.

And which was this? He had not heard it before. It was nothing like the shepherd bells; there was nothing domestic or comforting about it. It began like a nightmare, and only worsened. Instead of starting with a strike and then attenuating into silence, this one welled up from the deep quiet of sleep, building and building as if climbing toward some future in which it would eventually be struck. In dread of that moment, he woke into paralysis and terror. His eyes sprang open, but he could move nothing else. A prisoner in his body, in this state between waking and dreaming, he was forced to watch what transpired without the ability to affect events in any way.

As the ringing increased, it was accompanied by a weak light that seemed an expression of the sound, a light that grew in brightness as the ringing intensified. Colors clotted in the air, a pale spherical shape above a blur of darker violet tones that shifted cloudily and then settled into folds of velvety shadow. The pallid sphere became a head, and then the head developed features: a face, remote and expressionless but exuding malevolence that was inseparable from the sound of the bell. It was as if he could hear a soul’s essence, and this was a terrible soul indeed.

In the violet folds he saw a pale, clawed hand, from whose fingers hung a small violet bell that gleamed like glass. The thin, keening waves of sound and the eerie light alike poured out of the bell. The malevolent figure did not ring it, merely held it lightly from an embroidered cord and let it sing.

Still paralyzed, Gorlen watched in awe as the bell-ringer, now fully formed and physically, wholly present in the hut, stepped forward in the sphere of ringing light that followed the violet bell. He stood gazing down at Gorlen, but saw nothing of interest there and drifted over to the sleeping niche where Chamsin and Smaia slept.

Gorlen could not turn his head, and so could not see what the bell-ringer did next, only that for a moment he dipped out of sight. When he straightened, he was carrying something small and squirming, but his robes quickly closed over it.

And then came the high, thin voice of the bell itself, an evil ringing tone shaped into words, matched to the movement of the man’s lipless mouth:

“Chamsin, you violated your vow. You intruded on the sacred grounds. Thus we exact the penalty, which we are sure you will agree, though painful, is fair. We will tolerate no protest. The bells have spoken.”

With that, he snapped the cord from which the violet bell dangled. It jerked up several inches and he caught it in his fingers, pinching it—and in that instant of muting the bell, the eerie light died, the sound went out, the hut flooded with its natural midnight darkness—

And Smaia began to scream.

Gorlen sprang up. Chamsin and Smaia leapt to their feet. The younger children and the eldest son woke with a start, but it was obvious to Gorlen that the adults had been awake but helpless through the whole visitation.

“He was here, he was here! He took our baby!” Smaia wailed, inconsolable, and Chamsin, pale, held her close with a rigid, determined expression.

“It was Lek. He summoned the storm,” Chamsin said in a grim voice. “He sensed travelers, lost, within a few steps of the temple’s land—and by imperiling them he knew I would come to their aid. It was a trap all along.”

Spar stepped in from outside, puzzled by the commotion. “But I have been guarding the door,” he said, “sitting with your watchers. We saw nothing, heard nothing, nothing stirred.”

“Lek rides the bellsong,” Chamsin said, “and not all may hear it. He goes where he casts his mind. It is an art taught at the Temple of the Bells. He is the abbot there.”

Spar asked, “And by taking a child—what cause, what right did he think he had?”

Chamsin sank to his knees, holding his wife, who clutched her two young, terrified children. Aial stood near the entry, looking bravely out at the night, but casting heartbroken looks at his parents.

“I was a monk there,” Chamsin said. “From boyhood—my parents sent me to the temple, to whom they owed a son. I was the abbot’s own boy, but I hated it there, and as soon as I was of an age, I chose to leave. He could not prevent me, so instead he put an exile’s vow upon me. If ever I set foot within the temple’s domain, he would collect the debt he says I owe—the same my own parents once supplied because they were too fearful to defy him. I was brave for myself, but now . . . for my family . . . What have I done?” He began to shake, struggling with tears.

“But clearly he tricked you,” Spar said.

“He hates me—hates that I was strong enough to leave. I learned enough bell magic to ward him off—but he is ancient, implacable, and patient. How long he must have waited for travelers through his lands, and a moment when I was close enough to respond.”

Smaia looked up at them. Gorlen tensed against recrimination, but there was only grief and pleading in her eyes.

“What will we do?” she asked.

“We will do all we can to help you,” Spar said, without a glance at Gorlen. “If you can point out the route to this Temple of Bells, we will address ourselves to this abbot Lek and entreat him to return the child. Perhaps we can provide something else he desires. Perhaps it is time his influence be curtailed.”

Gorlen said nothing, but he wondered what Spar was getting them into. Chamsin seemed to share his concern.

“Lek is very powerful,” he said. “He will not take well to being confronted by strangers. No, this is my problem—his argument is with me.”

“We are the most immediate cause of your troubles,” Spar said. “And he has used us as instruments against you. This is unjust. As a gargoyle, I cannot let this stand.”

“Many gargoyles, in my experience, would,” Gorlen said dryly.

“My race is much reduced in nobility, in these late days,” said Spar.

“You would not know it to look at you.”

Spar gave a slight bow of acknowledgment.

Even before dawn had flooded the grey waste of broken statuary, Chamsin and Smaia were embracing and saying words of parting. Chamsin had wrapped himself in furs and selected several bells from his collection, as well as a heavy-looking dagger with a cylindrical, tapering needlelike blade. Gorlen had not thought their perils would hinge on a knife fight, and the sight of the weapon made him even more apprehensive. Leaving Aial to take full responsibility for the spindly-legged flock, and with the other children somewhat confused, they took their departure, and were stumbling over stones when the sun rose. Well, except for Chamsin, who stepped lightly from boulder to shard like a bit of flower fluff, leaving them to follow more clumsily.

“We are retracing ground we covered yesterday,” Spar informed Gorlen. “Chamsin must have known he took a risk venturing close to the area of his exile.”

“Will this take us far off our track?” Gorlen asked.

“I thought that was of no concern to you.”

“I did wonder at the alacrity with which you involved us in a quarrel to which we are not parties.”

“It is likely Chamsin is in this strait because of us.”

“If not us then some other traveler. The abbot was waiting for an opportunity to trick him.”

“You do not seem grateful to the man who saved your life.”

“He only had to save it because another man he has an argument with used me as bait.”

“Then I will amend my comments: You do not seem angry enough with the man who endangered your life.”

“He is nothing to me, and I would be content to leave it that way.”

They walked in silence for a time; Gorlen feeling by turns sullen and resentful, then embarrassed by his smallness of spirit. How readily Spar jumped to aid these near strangers. And yet the goyle was unreadable. Was he annoyed by Gorlen? Did he expect apologies? On his glossy black visage, one could read almost any subtle configuration of emotions—but the likeliest explanation was that he intended no judgment.

“Let me ask you,” he said, just when Gorlen had convinced himself that absolutely nothing was going on behind those impenetrable features. “When the rogue priest of Nardath wished to force your obedience to his geas—when he set you on the quest to save the world and whatever else that entailed—why do you think he did so with the graft of a gargoyle finger?”

Gorlen looked down at his black stone hand. It was hard to remember now when only the one index finger had been made of gargoyle stone. Every time he strayed from his duty, or went against what he knew in his heart was right, the stone spread, grew, infecting him. And he had strayed repeatedly—one finger at a time was eventually claimed, and then his whole hand, and for a time it had advanced far past his wrist and up his forearm. He knew that were it to reach beyond his arm—were it to touch his lungs, let alone his heart—that would mean his death. Yet he found it almost impossible to follow unwaveringly the path of his quest. The stone flesh retracted very gradually after his successful fulfillment of his obligation, but it still claimed his entire hand. In the time since he and Spar had joined forces, it no longer grew or shrank. It was as if between them there was equilibrium. Spar, he realized, it might be the cause of that . . . of keeping them on track. At the thought, Gorlen stopped in his tracks and nearly tumbled off a precarious slab.

“A gargoyle’s essence is to guard and protect, to serve, to offer solace and succor,” Spar said. “We are all but indestructible compared to the weak soft creatures of flesh. We love you not, in any unconditional sense, yet our spirit is bound to yours by ancient pacts and powers we none of us understand. The gargoyle finger was not merely a reminder of your duty: It was duty’s embodiment. A gargoyle cannot defy its nature. You could deny and defy a finger, but it is much harder to defy a hand. As for me . . . I have little idea of what it must be like to shirk and not serve. I barely feel this weak part of myself—”

He held up his white flesh hand, which had begun as Gorlen’s pale, callused index finger.

“—a tiny nagging voice urging me to think only of myself. Is this the opposite of what you feel, Gorlen? For you, is it merely the tiniest of voices wondering whether you might be untrue to yourself and your nature?”

Gorlen simply stared at him, then clapped Spar on the shoulder, stone to stone. “You are wise, my friend. Take care of my weak nagging hand, and I pray you’ll soon be rid of it, and reunited with this proud grip.”

He raised Spar’s hand in a showy salute, but his mood was solemn in spite of that.

“Chamsin waits on us,” Gorlen noted. “We must not let him down.”

The wall of hands came into sight suddenly, for the rubble of broken statues hid it until they were almost upon it. This time they passed through with Chamsin at their side.

Unlike their earlier traversal of this route, no blinding snow obscured the path. But the descent began quickly, taking them toward lands that a swirling layer of lower clouds kept mysterious.

“Most monks are taken from the lands below,” Chamsin said. “A few like myself, nomad children, are more prized. The monks believe we have a closer communion with the bells, but I have no reason to think that is the case.”

“By monks, I assume you mean there are no women in the temple,” Gorlen said. “And thus . . . no children? They must find new recruits outside their own walls?”

“It is worse than that,” Chamsin said with a smoldering anger. “At a certain age, the monks, the men . . . are castrated. It was at such an age that I left.”

Gorlen shuddered. “As would anyone.”

Chamsin shook his head. “Lek casts such a spell, few resist. He is so feared that once in his influence, it is hard to see any other way of life. He channels such power from the bells. But here . . . you can hear them now.”

And indeed, the wind was filling up with deep notes that seemed to rise from the mountain itself; strange harmonics surged in and out of audibility. As they proceeded, the tones came and went, some deep and sonorous and seeming to vibrate in his bones, others so high that he scarcely heard them, though his skin and small hairs prickled, as if sensing the proximity of danger.

Finally, through shreds of mist, they saw the temple, the source of all the bells. From every tower, every wall, hung a bell—sometimes many. Large metal bells caught the sun, small bells of duller substances clacked in the mountain wind. From this distance, the monks moving along the walls were small busy figures, brightly garbed. They were playing the bells, keeping them alive, hitting the larger ones with suspended timbers, tapping the others with fine ivory wands like the one Chamsin used to play his weather bell. But many of the bells had no players—they rang in sympathy with the other bells or were so sensitive that they sang in response to the wind passing over them. It was an eerie ambience, partly natural, as if the mountain itself gave off this song—and partly artificial, in the control of the attending monks. And the tenor of the song changed completely when Chamsin and his companions came into sight.

A sharp cry went up—not a monk’s voice, but a bell, shrill and grating. That bell continued, and others joined it in warning. The monks atop the walls peered out at them, faces alert and frightened, as if the three of them could pose any threat to a compound of such size. The temple was built like a fort, and they were being greeted like an approaching army. As the monks beat the alarm bells, another darker tone crept in.

A new bell rang out emphatically, and the world changed around them. Waves of light, brown and ocher, seemed to scorch the air and cover the rocky slope with soot. The stuff of matter lay down like reeds before a strong wind. Gorlen could see the sound moving through the air, the earth, through himself. A foul, burning reek pervaded his senses and then grew barbs. His skin prickled as if hooks were being driven into him. The edges of the rock grew sharp and bent; the ground underfoot stabbed up through his soles and grabbed at his flesh. It was a gnashing, nauseating sensation. The whole mountainside had become a twisted black landscape of needles and snags, poison-tipped—the rocks alive and malicious—the air unbreathable. And all of the evil emanated from the temple, carried over and through them by the sound of a particular bell that was inseparable from its other dire qualities.

“Stay close,” Chamsin said, an utterly unnecessary warning. He took a small round bell from his pouch—a golden sphere, like a round cage, with a bright blue gem suspended inside. He tapped it lightly, with a fingernail, and instantly a tone arose that smoothed the snags, sweetened the air, restored light and color to the world. Each light tap dispelled the effect of the temple’s threat-bell.

Monks scurried on the parapet, clanging every bell more furiously, but Chamsin’s simple pure tone persisted, and they could not pervert its spell. Among them, a taller monk appeared, wrapped in dark lustrous robes; Gorlen knew him from the night’s visitation. It was he of the evil light—the abductor.

“Lek!” Chamsin said, and the name contained a lifetime of hate, contempt, disgust, anger . . . and more than anything else, fear.

The abbot held his arms wide and in an instant every bell was silenced. Only the wind blowing through the stones of the pass could be heard. And then the creaking of the temple’s immense wooden gate opening to admit the travelers.

“This is the man who took your child?” Spar asked, as if insensible to the aura of sinister importance that surrounded the abbot. When Chamsin and Gorlen confirmed, Spar clucked softly to himself.

“There is something different about him,” he said. “He has a quality I have not seen in other men.”

“His powers are great,” Chamsin said. “He has contemplated the bells for so long that he has almost become one himself. You perceive his essence, perhaps.”

Lek had now taken a distinct interest in Spar, and as they approached the gate, the abbot leaned out, scowling at the gargoyle. He appeared about to speak, but Spar spoke first.

“I cannot enter this place,” he said.

Gorlen stumbled. “What?”

“It has guardians already. I am not permitted past the threshold. I do not know their type, but the restriction is clear and unavoidable.”

“I wish you had known when you volunteered for this task,” said Gorlen.

“I will wait out here,” Spar said. “Should he come outside, I may be able to intervene directly, but I would not count on any such lapse. He seems highly aware of the invisible boundaries.”

Lek, seeing Spar step back, straightened and gave a satisfied smirk. Then he vanished from the wall.

Gorlen said, “Spar, without you—”

“You can speak for us both.”

“It is my child he keeps,” Chamsin said. “None of this is your obligation.”

“No—I will come with you,” Gorlen said. “Of course I will. You saved my life . . . and this Abbot imperiled it.”

Inside the temple, the grounds were paved with grey stone flags; monks gathered above the brightly painted walls, lining every walkway and clustering on the steps that joined the doorways of the inner buildings. Every monk carried a bell, which he was busy ringing. Only Lek, who seemed to float down a flight of stairs to the center of the courtyard, did not come armed with a bell.

“I have come for my son,” Chamsin said. “You have taken him by deception.”

“Your son,” said Lek, in a cool, high voice, “has been taken by the temple, to which he belongs. You gave up your place—he will fill it. Unless, of course, you wish to take up your former position. Truthfully, I am not at all certain I would grant such a request, were you to make it. I am no longer sure you can be trusted.”

“There is nothing right in this,” Gorlen said. “You gained an advantage by putting my life in danger—a stranger to you and your temple. By that deceit, you should forfeit what you’ve claimed as yours, and pay a penalty besides. But I’m not here to administer punishments—only to see to justice. Your transgression, which I witnessed, was extraordinary. Return this man’s child to him immediately and I will recommend the local authorities consider your acquiescence and treat you with some forbearance.”

“Local authorities?” Lek laughed. “We are alone here, bard, and the law of this land is the law of the bells. I speak with their voice, I ring with their song, I am one with their resonance. You bring a dull, flat note to our discourse, which I find surprising from one who assumes the appearance of a musical creature.”

“I play many notes, not the same one over and over. Yours is quickly becoming monotonous.”

“Truth is one sound, and it is eternal. I think you do not pay it proper respect.”

Lek lifted a finger and blew sharply on it, and his flesh began to ring. The sound was clear, piercing, and when he pointed the finger at Gorlen, he felt a sympathetic tingling in his chest, as if a tuning rod had been pressed against his breastbone. The tingling spread through him, rendering him numb. Again the paralysis of the night crept over Gorlen—but this time something rolled it back. He held up his own black stone hand. It was unaffected by the bell tone. He clung to that sense of being outside its influence, unaffected. It was only his hand, but the more he let the quickstone act for him, the more he felt the rest of himself working free.

Lek’s visage turned angry at Gorlen’s defiance. “Any act of aggression shall be paid for by the child,” he said.

“Where is my son?” Chamsin asked.

“This is a hopeless situation for you,” Lek said. “We will not take you to the child, and I will not bargain with you in any respect. I will provide nothing you ask. The boy’s life belongs to the bells. We have a chance, in him, to groom a successor, to perhaps regain some of what we lost when you, Chamsin, betrayed the bells.”

“I betrayed no one worthy of my loyalty. To say I betrayed you is like saying I betrayed the snake when I pulled its fangs from my flesh. But I believe you will bargain with me, Lek. You still lack the sound-dagger, after all.”

“You are mistaken if you think I require these physical appurtenances, these trappings. The bells have taught me well; I am nearly one of them. My soundform is stronger than my flesh at this point.”

“But can you confer it on another, or does it die with you?”

“You don’t understand, Chamsin. The sound of my existence is in resonance with the tone of eternity. I am immortal.”

“Then what need have you for a successor?”

Lek waved a hand dismissively. “Enough of this. I wish to be rid of him.”

Suddenly, the monks who had stood by observing the exchange between Chamsin and their master imposed themselves between them. Three descended from the wall, traversed the broad steps past Lek, and entered the courtyard. From their robes, they drew long, gleaming blades, iridescent, reflecting the sun—shimmering violet, blue, and orange. Holding the long knives aloft, they clanged them together, and the bellblades began to sing.

Waves of visible sound flowed from the weapons, and as with the sentry bell that had rung out at their approach, the air and earth altered where the sound poured through it. The monks moved in flattened bubbles of light and tone—and within these shells of influence, time seemed to slow—except for the monks, who moved with heightened speed. The motes that had been stirred up in the courtyard air hung as if painted there, but the monks spun and whirled their blades and sliced the motes clean through.

Each bubble of sound centered on one knife, but there were three such shells, and the monks moved to keep them merged, which seemed to heighten the effect, as if the bellblades were harmonizing.

As they moved in on Chamsin, he drew his own blade. Freed from his robes, the blade began to ring sympathetically. He held it up so it caught the light, and Gorlen saw its influence merge with the monks’ blades.

They were caught by surprise—his dagger’s appearance might have been expected by Lek, but the young fighters were caught out and they faltered. Lek gave a high-pitched shout, and they set on Chamsin with ferocious speed and skill.

The instant Chamsin’s blade clashed with one of theirs, the tone of the battle changed. Fear robbed them of confidence. The vision of speed and clarity, summoned by their blades, was shattered as Chamsin’s blade sent out a radiant sound of its own. With the first clashing note, the entire temple courtyard was transported. They stood suddenly on a plain of glass, Chamsin and Gorlen and the fighting monks—all those within the immediate influence of the ringing blades. A rippled green surface, faintly undulant beneath their feet, as if they stood on an ocean that was bottomless, empty, and perfectly still. There was no sky, but the green surface rose up and met above, containing them. In the midst of battle, Gorlen felt utterly safe—but only for a moment. A thin note of black sound worked its way in and levered the green calm apart; the green sphere shattered into jagged, splintered notes. Chamsin moved quickly over the courtyard stones and, with a spiraling move of his dagger, sent a monk’s blade flying.

The other two closed in over Chamsin’s head, scissoring down on him. Chamsin met these blades with the point of his dagger, bisecting the angle where they met, and suddenly they stood on an ancient forested slope. Gorlen felt he recognized the place despite the lack of any familiar signs—as if it was contiguous with the slope of the Temple of Bells, but separated by time or some dreamlike quality of nature not to be readily measured or named. Towering trees of impossible age covered them all in deep shadow; they fought on a deep carpet of mulch and mushrooms, and among the immense trunks Gorlen was aware of huge faces, high up among the branches, gazing down on them impassively. The giants moved slowly among the trees, far back in the distant reaches of the forest. Something in their noble faces, the tilt of their features, reminded him of the ruined statuary of the plateau. As if that had not yet become their graveyard, for somehow the dagger had carried them back to a day when they had still lived.

Then this vision too succumbed to Lek’s denial. A shrill warbling note rose, penetrating the sylvan vision. The shaggy trees stopped swaying and grew cold and brittle; they became lustrous and dark, leafless, shedding branches in storms of twigs and needles. Then they began to topple, and he saw they were turning to stone, petrified by the abbot’s music. The huge columns fell, shattered, and as they died the giants fled—but even the giants were dying, caught by the hardening effect of the bells. They froze in midflight—fell heavily—shattered. And as the shards exploded around them, Chamsin disarmed the second monk and bore in, calm yet relentless, on the remaining fighter.

The two blades smashed into each other and it seemed impossible that one of them did not fly into splinters. The light grew pale and diffuse, like a grey dust that lay upon everything. Sound was muffled. He could hear no bells, no blades, nothing.

Then out of the grey muffling haze, three new figures emerged. They left Chamsin and the monk suspended in mid-clash. Lek still moved—he seemed alarmed by their presence, and discomfited to note Gorlen was an aware and active presence in this new tableau.

The three shimmered brightly into existence, forming themselves from the dusty light as if condensing out of it. They were round and radiant shapes like sea-stars—like bells themselves—and their voices were subtle modulations of the bell notes, such that Gorlen could not tell which of them spoke. Perhaps the sound was a blend of all three:

“There has been a violation of the guardianship,” the voices said. “One has come knowingly among you and thus cedes the dissolution of our ancient contract. “

Lek began to beam, a pure channel for a sound that twinged in Gorlen’s ears. It was a sound beyond physical hearing. Lek was far from the pure entity that these guardian shapes represented—flesh and a deeper essence wrestled within him—and in his face, they warred.

“There has been no violation on our part!” he said. “It is among the guardians that these agreements are observed. If you have broken them, then it is you who must suffer the consequences.”

“Nonetheless, we must investigate. Your analysis of the subtleties of the pact are necessarily limited by your impure form. Among you is a guardian essence and it must now explain itself.”

Gorlen felt his quickstone hand responding—rising up before his face. It glowed with a sullen light in this strange realm.

“I—I believe you speak of this,” Gorlen said, all too aware that the attention of these beings was not something he wished to attract. All minds were upon him—it would be insufficient to say all eyes. “I came among you unaware of any agreement—and as to violations—”

“But this is only an agent of the real power,” the bell voice said. “Let the true guardian appear.”

Spar stepped into visibility, as if shaken from a fold of space.

“The fault is mine,” Spar said. “I obeyed the stricture but did not realize a partial violation would result from Gorlen’s presence. The human carries my hand unwillingly.”

“Nonetheless he has brought it into the temple and our pact is explicitly broken. Let us be clearly understood on this point, so that as we proceed, there will be no further misunderstanding.”

“Very well,” said Lek. “Your ancient authority prevails in all matters. Please proceed.”

“This we shall do,” said the voice.

Lek stiffened in the middle of his obsequious bow, straightened abruptly, and began to emit sheets of piercing sound. In the realm of dust, the sound was visible as rays and ribbons swirling through the stuff. His arms jerked stiffly to either side, his fingers splayed, his mouth gaped. Very swiftly did he vibrate, his face becoming a blur, and then all irregularities were blasted away. A shining smooth visage, golden and apparently hollow, his head now rang like a gong. Arms clapped to his sides violently sent another twinned note ringing, but this time it blasted away the dust and they found themselves in the courtyard again.

“The impurities in this one required his total transmutation,” the guardians informed all watchers. “We were unable to take such steps while the pact held sway—for technically, to purify Lek required his destruction.”

The radiant sound pouring from the monk had not ceased—and in fact, the walls of the temple were beginning to flake and crumble.

“Is that not sufficient?” Spar asked.

”We have only begun. The entire area is rife with impurity.”

Lek began to ring even louder.

“My son!” shouted Chamsin.

Gorlen spun toward the temple interior, but the place was not only a maze but a disintegrating maze. The monks, who moments before had leapt to do Lek’s bidding, now stared in terror at their faceless, invisibly vibrating abbot. Gorlen felt as if his bones were going to crumble into sand, but he thrust himself in front of the monks and jabbed one with his quickstone hand, to startle the man by stifling the ringing with a blunt stab of his stiff fingers.

“You! Where’s the child?” he said. “Take us there!”

But the monk merely stammered and pointed at the walls, which seemed to be on the verge of collapsing and floating away into motes.

“I beseech you,” Spar said to the bell guardians, “give us a moment to find something the impure one stole—an unjust act. You must know the importance of remedy and redress.”

“This is no concern of ours. The purification will run its course.”

Spar then found himself addressing emptiness. The bell spirits were gone. But the effect continued to intensify. The myriad bells and chimes on the walls, and hanging in the towers, joined into the song, sliding into frequencies unimaginable.

Spar said, “Chamsin, Gorlen, go and find the child. I will do what I can to mute this. I do not know how effective this will be.”

With that, Spar walked straight up to the ringing abbot Lek and embraced him. Instantly the shrill tone muted, as if Spar had grabbed a buzzing insect and clamped its wings—though without completely silencing it. The sound and its effects remained, but it was possible to function now.

For a moment, Gorlen stared at the gargoyle, his attention arrested by a faint flecking of black dust that formed a cloud like an aura around Spar. But the goyle said, “Go,” and Gorlen rushed into the temple on Chamsin’s heels.

Most of the temple’s residents must have come out to watch the confrontation, or had fled as soon as the place began to rattle. The shaking halls were full of cracks—the smooth plaster chipping off in scaly patches, gravel and stones tumbling free, the vast rooms and labyrinthine halls full of choking dust. Long cylindrical gongs tore from overhead beams and crashed down around them like logs loosed in a siege. Ancient pots and ceramic vases shattered where they sat on carved pedestals. The belling drew painful aches from deep in Gorlen’s teeth; his eyes rolled upward, flashing him with twinges of agony. But somehow through the overwhelming noise and discomfort, he heard a baby crying.

Chamsin had already found the child; he held him cradled, safe, and rushed up the steps past Gorlen, calling him to follow. Gorlen hesitated, hearing a noise that was not of the bells. Whimpering from an adjacent cell. Looking in, he saw a young monk bound to a platform, sharp shining knives rattling and dancing around him, dashed onto the floor by the shaking of the temple. The boy was partially undressed, and suddenly Gorlen remembered Chamsin’s words about the procedure monks endured at a certain age. He grabbed one of the knives from the floor, and though its blade had chipped, he quickly sawed through the bonds and helped the boy to his feet. The monk was dazed, holding his head at the drilling pain of the bell sound, but Gorlen hauled him along, hoping he would soon be better when they were away from the ringing.

Outside, Chamsin rushed for the temple gate. There were no others in sight, apart from Spar and Lek, and these two formed an ominous configuration. Gorlen pushed the young monk after Chamsin, then rushed to his friend and pulled him away.

“Spar—we can go now! Spar!”

With his hand of stone, Gorlen pushed Lek back, and at the touch he understood what Spar had been enduring all this time. In direct contact with the abbot, he felt a purifying tone that was tantamount to a destructive force. He felt the very essence of his hand struggling to hold itself together. The black stone was instantly riddled with fine cracks, and gave off a splintering glaze of thin shards, as if shedding stone skin. With his smooth stone hand now pitted and scarred, crazed with cracks, he levered Spar away from Lek and let the abbot ring. They fled to the mountainside beyond the gate.

Spar’s face had gone white. He was completely covered with a fine glittering powder that was his own flesh, pulverized. Gorlen had never seen the goyle so visibly affected by anything. He moved cautiously toward his friend, and wiped the quickstone with a finger.

It was black underneath, glossy and black, but chipped as if worked over with a stonemason’s tools. Pocks and scars, like irregular scales, left their mark.

“Are you . . . ?”

“I am whole,” Spar said. “Made of stronger stuff than these temple walls.”

And even as he spoke, the abbot gave his last ringing cry, and the temple and all of its bells were blown into dust. Of the abbot himself, nothing remained—only the monks staring after him and the temple that had ceased to exist.

Outside the hut of Smaia and Chamsin, the sounds of laughter could be heard. The young children were delighted to have their baby brother home; and Aial and the young monk behaved as if they had been friends since their earliest childhood. The draak bells’ homely tinkling chilled Gorlen, but he believed Chamsin when he said it was nothing that could not be channeled and controlled, like music.

As Gorlen watched Spar communing silently with the great guard beasts, apparently bidding them an affectionate farewell, something occurred to him.

“These creatures—also guardians, are they?”

“We share that essential nature, yes.”

“And before you visited the Temple of Bells, did you . . . commune with them on this matter?”

“To some extent I knew what to expect.”

“And so when you remained without, observing the letter of the pact . . .”

“I allowed you to enter, in violation of its spirit. Yes. Among guardians, certain observances exist to be broken. There is a pride we take in testing these ancient strictures. After eons, even the fair ones can begin to chafe.”

The family, along with their new adopted son, accompanied them out of the broken statuary to where a plain track resumed. It was not the destination they had sought when they began crossing the plateau, but much had changed, and the new direction seemed as promising as the old. The guardian beasts licked Spar’s scarred stone hand and bounded off. Chamsin presented them with a small draak bell, to lead them where they wished to go. Smaia gave kisses, as did the children; and from the infant, a milky burp. They had declined a farewell feast. Gorlen did not care to sample either end of a draak.

As they found their footing on a slope that grew grassy below, Gorlen took out his eduldamer and tested the strings, and watched the calm, impassive gargoyle—sometimes ahead of him, sometimes behind—but when the path permitted, always at his side.

“It is a strange thing,” Gorlen said. “As a bard, I have always felt myself at the mercy of hosts and their requests, simply playing whatever songs and tunes I acquired along the road. From time to time I have wished to be more like the mythical elders, the authors of the old songs. But the thing they all possessed was something I felt I lacked. It never seemed sufficient to me to simply compose idylls on the blue of the sky or the violet of the moon. These are things everyone knows, and certainly they are bottomless—but I have no particular insight into them. But at last I feel that something has come my way. Something worth capturing in the bardic manner—in music and in verse.”

“Are you saying,” Spar said, “that you have found your subject?”

“Indeed!” Gorlen said, twanging a string. “That is precisely it! I have found a subject worthy of a bard—and not just any bard. A subject uniquely my own, to follow and study and capture in song.”

“Do you intend to keep this mystery to yourself, perhaps until your works are revealed posthumously, or do you intend to share your findings while there is still some light in the day?”

“Nothing could be more obvious. To anyone but you, that is.”

Spar stopped then, and fixed him with a finely crazed eye. “Gorlen Vizenfirthe . . .”

“No, not me. You, Spar. You.”

—For Gabe

© 2013 by Marc Laidlaw.

Marc Laidlaw is best known as one of the creators and lead writer on the Half-Life videogame series, but he initially got that gig on the strength of his short stories and novels of fantasy, horror and science fiction. His novel The 37th Mandala won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. A writer at Valve since 1997 (currently working on for the online game, Dota 2), his short stories continue to appear in various magazines and online venues.

Author Spotlight: Robert Silverberg
Moshe Siegel

Your novella, “The Secret Sharer,” pays tribute to Joseph Conrad’s 1910 story of the same title—much as your novel Downward to the Earth references Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Can you tell us something about your interest in Conrad and why you chose to explore these stories?

Conrad has been one of my favorite authors since my teens, and I go to him and reread him constantly—Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, Secret Sharer, Lord Jim, etc., etc. I value him for his sinewy prose and for his ability to dramatize moral values through complex plotting. Over the years I’ve given way many times to the temptation to rephrase one of my favorite Conrads in science-fiction terms—there’s a bit of Lord Jim in my novel Hot Sky at Midnight, there’s Downward to the Earth, there’s The Secret Sharer, and a couple of others.

Conrad aside, are there any other author/story references or homages lurking in the Silverberg library that you particularly enjoyed including?

Plenty of them, too many to start listing them here. The most conspicuous one is the novel The Man in the Maze, based on the Philoctetes of Sophocles, but there are lots of others.

The Sword of Orion boasts some wildly advanced tech. In particular, the dimension-folding engines and the alternate reality/probability wave storage annexes are impressive feats of imagination and science. What sort of scientific research, if any, did you undertake to envision the technology in “The Secret Sharer”?

Research? I just make it up. Nobody, far as I know, is working on probability-wave storage annexes at the moment, so there’s no place I could go for research.

Ship protocol aboard the Sword of Orion dictates direct human involvement in ship’s operations, despite the availability of an AI that could do the job by itself—stressing both the importance of ritual as well as the importance of humanity running the show, not our servant machines. In this current age of electronic ease and ceaselessly improving technology, do you think we yet have that same sense of independence from seductive convenience, or is that a concept that needs to be emphasized more, before the AIs show up?

The interplay of human and artificial intelligence in the operation of vehicles is something that is going to be undergoing very close inspection in the years just ahead. Right here in my San Francisco area, Google is working on software for driverless automobiles—which I would feel queasy about, but for the fact that the performance of cars with drivers hasn’t been all that good over the years—and just last week we had a plane crash at San Francisco Airport when the pilots seemed uncertain about whether they or the AI were actually flying the plane. This led to an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal in which the columnist suggested that we’d probably be better off if the computers did all the flying. Maybe so, but the idea needs more examination.

You have an extensive backlist of non-fiction publications on a wide range of topics. Do you plan to publish more non-fiction?

I do the essay every issue for Asimov’s, and I’m planning to do a couple of pieces for Analog later this year on scientific hoaxes, extending a book called Scientists and Scoundrels that I wrote more than forty years ago.

Do you have any other projects upcoming or in the works you would like to share with us?

Nothing upcoming but those, nothing in the works. I’m taking a long holiday from writing fiction these days.

Moshe Siegel interviews for Lightspeed, freelance edits hither and yon, and is in hot pursuit of an MS in Publishing at Pace University. 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: D. Thomas Minton
Amber Barkley

In “The Schrödinger War,” multiple incarnations of each soldier wait in the perpetually-changing H-Station for their deployment orders. How did this setting come to be? Can you tell us more about the reality versus memory aspects of it?

H-Station originally developed out of need, and as the story evolved became more integral to the plot. The original setting for this story was inspired by an anthology call for stories about extreme planets, and I thought it would be interesting to set a story on Hadean Earth. After other aspects of the plot came together, I needed a “safe” place for my soldiers to be turned around between battles, and H-Station was born. Gradually, as the theme of grief and reconciliation evolved, H-Station became a way to peek into the Sam’s psyche. As H-Station is a virtual construct, it can take on almost any form, and I purposely left it ambiguous and for the reader to decide whether Sam controlled its form or if Kim manipulated the form to better achieve her objectives.

Each time the soldiers are reincarnated, they lose their physical scars but keep their memories. Sam is trying to forget his past and can’t seem to do so. Why is it so important for him to remember, not just for the sake of being a good soldier, but for him as a person?

Grief is a powerful emotion. It can drive people to do any number of things they might not ordinarily do. In Sam’s case, he’s tried to forget everything about his past because the loss is too painful for him. He even signs up to fight a distant war to remove himself from anything that might remind him of Christina. But our past is what makes us who we are; we are that collection of experiences and relationships, and by denying his past, Sam is left only with senseless fighting and dying around him to identify who he is. That’s not a great place to be.

Time moves in an interesting way in “The Schrödinger War.” They’re fighting in the past to protect the future, but Sam recognizes that it’s not really his future now that he’s in the past. How does time work for him and the other incars?

I’ve always disliked time travel stories because of the paradoxes they invariably generate. To the best of our knowledge, it’s not possible to travel backward in time, but maybe it’s possible to “slip” into another timeline, so that from the perspective of the individual, they haven’t actually gone back in time. For Sam, his past is still his past, and his future is still unknown and ahead of him. There’s nothing circular here and Sam realizes this. He’s not fighting for his Christina; he’s ultimately fighting for himself.

As Sam returns as a ninth, then tenth incar, Kim looks more and more like Christina. Can you tell us why that is, and why Kim has changed each time Sam returns? How does Kim fit into the reality of H-Station?

As I said above, H-Station is a virtual construct and everything in it and on it can take on almost any form. Each time Sam returns to H-Station, his memories seem to be intruding more and more on the landscape around him, but I purposely left it ambiguous as to whether this is a product of Sam’s subconscious or a purposeful manipulation on the part of Kim as part of her research. Kim is Sam’s most important relationship on H-Station, and she’s the one who’s digging into his psyche, trying to tweak him into the ultimate soldier. She realizes he needs to reconcile his past if he’s ever going to reach his potential as a soldier. Both of these characters have reasons for H-Station manifesting Sam’s memories. Maybe both are responsible, and the answer becomes apparent only when you make a decision one way or the other (like any respectable wave function).

Why did you choose cancer as the cause of Christina’s death? How does that connect to Sam’s cycle of death and reincarnation?

To be honest, I put no special thought into Christina’s cause of death. I wanted something common that readers might relate with; I wasn’t interested in something that would draw undue attention to itself, because I didn’t feel her cause of death was important. I also wanted something that would leave distinctive “marks” on Christina, but wouldn’t necessarily debilitate her to the point that she was hospitalized or unresponsive. These “marks” then show up throughout the story, such as when Sam sees the part in Kim’s hair showing her scalp, and is rattled by the memory Christina missing hair.

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: Lisa Tuttle
Jude Griffin

Can you talk a little about the genesis of this story, “Ragged Claws,” and the thinking behind the title?

The title comes from a line in one of my favourite poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot—“I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” It seemed to me to evoke the atmosphere of the story, and the emotional mental state of the main character. The story grew out of reflections on how much of life for many people is spent in the fantasy worlds created by movies, books, games, or their own imagination—and also how many occupations now are carried out at a remove from the real world. Saying “the real world” seems wrong—what is reality if we’re not in it? But when you think about the way we live now, so much of the time we’re interacting with other people through screens, and even physical labour is performed by machines, supervised by people at some remove from the nitty-gritty, and as we explore places inhospitable to life, like the earth’s core or outer space, we do so through drones, probes, and transmitters. I don’t think people are easily divisible between body and mind, yet often the mind is one place and the body occupies another space entirely.

The characters argue a bit about the value of a life lived in VR: If your mind and body are being fully fed an experience, is there any substantive difference, in your opinion? Do the origins of the externalities matter?

It’s this very question that I wrote “Ragged Claws” to explore. It’s a fascinating problem. Although in some ways it seems that if you experience something fully with your body and your mind, that is your life, so the theoretical perception of an outside observer shouldn’t make any real difference—I think most people would feel uneasy accepting that whole-heartedly. There’s the idea of some basic, underlying “real” reality, and if you’re cut off from that for whatever reason, then your virtual life won’t be accepted as totally equal and equally significant to a life fully integrated into the “real world”—whatever the consensus view determines that to be. I’m not a philosopher, so I can’t take you through a logical argument for one side or the other; I wrote this story to play with and think about the question, and to invite readers to think about it, too. But I don’t know the answer, so the story leaves it open to argument.

Why is the saying, “The journey, not the arrival, matters,” so important to the protagonist? On the surface, it would seem like his justification for recruiting people for Eden, but why then would the import of the saying be obscure to him?

I think this line may be the very heart of the story. Bear in mind that narrators are not always to be completely trusted, and that when people say they don’t know something, it can mean they don’t want to know—and then he admits that he doesn’t want to think about it, and puts it out of his mind. There can be various reasons for this, and “Ragged Claws” is not a quiz—I did not intend for it to have one single meaning or answer, but more to cause pleasurable puzzlement and speculation in the reader (see my answer to the previous question!) Something I thought about is that little bit of wisdom he quotes could be considered either comforting or bleak in connection with the narrator’s own experience.

If Eden has a vast array of recruiting approaches, why then use a broken-down, depressed ex-employee to recruit one-on-one?

I don’t know if it’s realistic or not, but word-of-mouth still seems to be one of the best marketing devices, used today by plenty of companies with large sales forces and big budgets. Why does Amazon want customers to leave reviews? Why are people recruited to spread the word to their friends about various products? I don’t suppose this way of selling will die out anytime soon. The other thought I had was that the Eden corporation has basically “broken” this man and made him pretty useless for other jobs—and they know it. So this could be their conscience-salving gesture; but rather than offering him the charity of a straight-forward pay-off, they disguise it as a commission or bonus, and thus keep their old employee still working for them, still tied, never free.

“Ragged Claws” is largely a single conversation: What were some of the challenges you encountered with this approach?

Almost every time I have an idea for a short story, I face the challenge of how best to tell it. (I say “almost” because there are exceptions—some stories are more straightforward than others.) With a science fiction story, especially, there’s the problem of how much background information the reader needs, and how to get it across in a way that feels natural. Conversation is a good way to transmit information. Especially when a story is told in first person, it can raise unwanted (and unanswerable!) questions if they do too much explaining: Who do they think they’re telling this story to? Back in my teens, when I was first trying to write professionally, I was very impressed by Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and considered it a model for how to write a great short story. Maybe that memory was part of my inspiration when writing “Ragged Claws.”

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, and can’t say no to chocolate pudding pie.

Author Spotlight: Will McIntosh
Patrick J. Stephens

The stingers provide a startling first image for “Dry Bite.” What was your inspiration for them, and what came first: the stingers or the characters, namely Josephine?

The initial idea I had was to write a straightforward zombie story, where the zombies suddenly stop attacking the living, and the living have to learn to coexist with their dead brethren. As I started planning the story, I just wasn’t excited about writing it as a zombie story, so I figured readers wouldn’t be excited, either. That’s when I came up with the idea of making the dead humans hosts for aliens. So the stingers came before Josephine. Once I knew what I wanted the overall setup to be, I started thinking about what sort of character and situation might make for a compelling storyline.

As an opening, Josephine and Bella come across immediately as strong and vivid characters. Immediately, I felt the connection of admiration and respect. Did this bond between Bella and Josephine come naturally in writing “Dry Bite”? Was it based off anything familiar? Is this why you chose to begin the story with them, or was there another reason?

Bella is based on someone I know. I often have a real person in mind when I’m writing a character, in an attempt to keep the character from being flat and two-dimensional. The woman Bella is based on is tough, yet warm (she’s a psychotherapist). I wanted to begin with what felt like a fairly familiar scene: two survivors of an apocalypse sneaking into town for supplies and having to shoot their way out after being discovered by whatever caused the apocalypse. I wanted to turn the familiar scene on its ear by having them discover the deadly predators have lost interest in them.

Along the same lines, what kind of role did you initially think Josephine would play in the story behind the words, with her search and the survival aspect? How did you approach world creation for this story?

In zombie-type stories, people are often confronted with the horror of their dead loved ones coming after them. I wanted Josephine to be confronted with a different type of horror: Her dead loved ones are simply still around; she can see them, stand very close to them, but they’re utterly out of reach. I can’t imagine what it would be like to grieve for a child or spouse when they’re right in front of you; that was the burden I wanted to place on Josephine.

The world really developed out of necessity. I realized I didn’t want zombies, but I wanted something like zombies. I came upon an old note in my idea file: an alien invasion where the aliens could show up anywhere, at any time, through holes in the air. I thought that would make for a harrowing sort of invasion, so I added the connecting detail of having the aliens infect humans in a zombie-esque manner, and I was set.

The aspect of a dry bite serves a wonderful purpose to the story. In addition, young snakes aren’t familiar with this kind of control, oftentimes giving more venom than they need to on a first bite. Was this sense of maturity for the stingers—and for the journey of Josephine—always there? How did it progress in your mind?

Believe it or not, I wasn’t aware of the concept of a dry bite until I was just about finished with the first draft. Initially, I was thinking Josephine would turn into a stinger, which would have resulted in a very different story. I was brainstorming with a friend about the ending, because I wasn’t satisfied with it, and when I suggested having the sting have no effect on Josephine, my friend told me about the precedent for this among snakes. He suggested the title as well.

Is there anything you would like to share with Lightspeed about upcoming publications or projects?

My latest novel, Love Minus Eighty, was released last month from Orbit Books. It’s based on the Hugo Award-winning short story, “Bridesicle.” Next up is Defenders, coming next year, also from Orbit. It’s based on a story of the same title published here in Lightspeed, and it has already been optioned by Warner Brothers. The same friend who told me about dry bites came up with the structure to expand Defenders into a novel, so I owe him, big time.

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: Nina Allen
By Kevin McNeil

“Angelus” won the Aeon Award (2007) and was first published in Albedo 1, Issue #34 (2008). Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired this story?

The ideas for “Angelus” actually grew out of the story fragment that eventually became “Flying in the Face of God’ (shortlisted for the BSFA Award in 2010 and recently reprinted in Microcosmos, my new story collection from NewCon Press). It was also an attempt to explore further some of the ideas I touched on in an earlier story, “Bird Songs at Eventide,” about the distances–both physical and emotional–that inevitably exist between those who embark on a momentous journey and those who remain behind. There is another, much longer shadow hanging over “Angelus,” though–that of Nabokov’s monumentally brilliant short story “Spring in Fialta,” about an ultimately fatal meeting between two on-off lovers at a fictional resort on the Riviera. The time-echoes in that story, the way episodes of life and memory are juxtaposed and overlaid, like the folded bellows in a concertina, resound with redoubled force each time I read it.

There are beautiful descriptions with close attention to sensory detail throughout this story. It’s obvious you care about the language. I’ve read that most writers fall into one of two categories: storytellers or wordsmiths. Do you agree with this idea? Would you put yourself in the wordsmith camp?

I care passionately about language–but not altogether, I hope, at the expense of story. It’s absolutely true that I’m very particular about the stylistic aspects of a story, and while I find the wordsmith/storyteller comparison interesting and probably true, there’s another I’d like to cite alongside it. Unfortunately I forget who said it, but according to an article I once read, all writers are either “Dickensian” or “Nabokovian.” The Dickensian writer’s central concern is with life in the round, the vast panoply of existence, the “God’s eye view,” if you like, whereas the Nabokovian’s focus is narrower, more internal, obsessed with detail and with the subject of obsession itself. I’m definitely that second type of writer! Nabokovian writers tend to circle the same concerns endlessly, repeatedly picking them apart, reiterating. It’s probably no coincidence that such writers do also tend towards a preoccupation with the way words are put together, although I would hope always to be an inclusive writer–a writer who uses language to generate an emotional response rather than to alienate, to invite readers in rather than erecting a barricade against them.

The science fiction elements concerning the Aurora Project and fliers were fascinating, but they were also fairly subtle. Why use a fantastic setting to tell this story? What’s the appeal of speculative fiction for you?

The fantastic vision is at the core of everything I write, and I can’t imagine writing a story that did not contain at least some speculative element. For me, the whole of quotidian existence has its underpinnings in the fantastic, anyway. We like to familiarize the process of life and death by pretending that it’s entirely ordinary, that it’s “normal”–but when you actually begin thinking about the sheer unlikeliness of existence, the vast number of imponderables and inexplicables that have conspired to enable our presence here, there’s nothing remotely ‘normal’ about it! Even the most average day in any given year contains a thousand possibilities for the most outlandish strangeness. It is the fundamental strangeness of our predicament, its fantastical underpinning, that I have always felt driven to reveal and examine through my writing. The fantastic is often the truest metaphor for life as it appears when it is properly examined, scrutinized without prior expectations, at the basement level. European writers especially use these kinds of tools all the time–just take a look at stories by Kafka, or Bruno Schulz, and you’ll see what I mean.

I enjoyed how open the ending feels. You left me questioning the fate of these characters. Why did you choose to end the story at this point?

I always prefer a story to feel as if it’s really just a part of something, an episode, if you like, from a much longer story. The stories I love best are those in which you can sense the story–the lives of the characters–continuing after the final paragraph. (Stories by writers like Cheever and Carver, for instance, are masterclasses in this kind of open-ended narrative.) If readers come to the end of one of my stories still caring enough about the characters to keep guessing about what might have happened to them beyond that final frame, then the story is going some way towards succeeding. I like to end a story feeling that it’s still alive.

I found myself considering ideas of regret and choice, among other things, as I read this story. Does your work tend to explore particular themes?

Most definitely–over and over! Back to Nabokov again, he sometimes spoke of something he called “chronophobia,” or a fear of the passing of time. I’ve always identified with that. I think I also share his preoccupation with pinning events in place–and in particular the precise details of events–by the use of language, of “saving” things by writing them down. Every choice you make in life seals off other choices, and sometimes–many times–it’s impossible to know which choice was preferable until long after it’s been made. I think a lot of my stories deal with these themes–and with the nostalgia that inevitably accompanies this kind of intense examination of specific memories.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about “Angelus”? What’s next for you?

Winning the Aeon Award with “Angelus” was a hugely important milestone for me–not because it felt good to win an award as such (although it did!) but because the competition was judged by Ian Watson, who was one of my great SF heroes when I first started reading science fiction in my mid- to late teens. To know that he’d read my story and liked it–well, that felt fantastic.

I have to date written two other stories set in the same universe as “Angelus.” One is “Flying in the Face of God,” which I mentioned earlier, and the other is “Stardust,” published this April by PS Publishing as part of a collection of the same name. The events of “Stardust” take place in the same alternate world as “Angelus,” but at a time when the scientist Valery Kushnev is still alive and the idea of deep space travel is still in its infancy.

I’m still drawn towards the themes in these stories, and there’s every possibility I might revisit the “Angelus” universe again in the future–perhaps to find out more about Angelica Eyre. That’s unlikely to happen for a while, though, as I’ve just started work on a new novel-length project. The story is set on another planet, which is something of a departure for me, although all my familiar obsessions are present and correct!

Kevin McNeil reads slush and helps out with a few other things for Lightspeed and Nightmare Magazines. He is a physical therapist, sports fanatic, and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2012 and Kij Johnson’s Novel Writer’s Workshop in 2011. Kevin is a New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter @kevinmcneil.

Author Spotlight: Matthew Hughes
Patrick J. Stephens

Immediately, we get the impression of a fleshed out world, with all its intricacies ready to be put down on the page when needed. How did you approach crafting the world of “And Then Some” and how much didn’t make it to the final draft?

For quite a while now, I’ve been writing about a highly improbable far-future human civilization called The Ten Thousand Worlds that stretches along The Spray, our arm of the galaxy. There’s Old Earth, which has become as forgotten as the font of civilization as Uruk is to us today. Then there are the Grand Foundational Domains, the first planets settled aeons ago that are now vast, complex, wealthy societies. Then there are the secondary worlds, peopled by misfits and oddballs who felt hemmed-in on the Foundationals. And there are quite a few minor and disregarded planets where you take your chances, just like backpacking through some parts of Earth today.

So, not much gets left out. And I usually only do one draft and a good polish.

Cheddlites, the Adelaine, even names of characters like Binnie Varshun, come across as incredibly unique. How did you approach the terminology?

I mostly take existing names, although they might be unusual or thoroughly non-Anglo, then fiddle with them. Cheddle could be a descendant of Cheadle; Adelaine is a minor step away from Adelaide. A V often becomes a B as languages evolve, so think of Binnie Varshun as a mutation of Vinnie Vachon, and there you are. Of course, some of them I just make up.

With dozens to choose from, “And Then Some” offers images that invoke some of the best western and science fiction has to offer. What was the most exciting scene to write, and which image or scene was the most difficult?

None of it was difficult. I’ve been writing for a living for more than forty years, and writing fiction for a good half of that. My gears are well oiled.

I enjoyed writing the sequence where Kaslo arranged to get back his boots, because it was a good exercise in minimalism: Perfectly awful things were happening, but it is left to the reader’s imagination. I also enjoyed the conversation between Binnie and Kaslo on the spaceship. That was, to my mind, like Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre talking things over in The Maltese Falcon.

Erm Kaslo, Binnie Varshun, Captain Maduc, and—among many others—Diomedo Obron: All of these characters play significant roles in the story; however, which one would you feel you most identified with when writing, and why? Did anyone inspire the ones you didn’t identify with?

Each of them in turn. I’m an intuitive writer. When I’m writing a character’s lines and actions, I’m temporarily inside that persona. It’s nothing artsy. One of the reasons I was a successful speechwriter was that I was able to get a client’s voice and worldview inside my head, then write the words so that they sounded perfectly natural to that speaker. I discovered I had the ability when I was editing a weekly newspaper in a Vancouver suburb back in 1973. I had to write very right-wing (in the Canadian context) editorials about flogging vandals and so on, and I found that the only way I could pull it off was to write them in Richard Nixon’s voice.

As for inspiration: again, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, the noir films of the late forties and early fifties. Bogart, Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Van Heflin. I’m essentially a hard-boiled crime writer working in a science-fictional mode.

Is there any more insight you could give into the creation of “And Then Some”?

Well, since you ask . . . I’ve written a lot of stories set on Old Earth and the rest of the Ten Thousand Worlds when they’re about to enter a particularly horrible phase. That’s because, every several thousand years, the universe, for no known reason, abruptly switches its basic operating principle from rational cause-and-effect to “sympathetic association,” that is, magic. Every time this happens, civilization collapses, there’s an interregnum of chaos, then a slow rebuilding. But, gradually, the fact of the transition is forgotten, so the next time it happens it comes as a complete surprise to all but a few, who get an inkling shortly before the cusp and try to prepare for it.

I came up with the notion as a throw-away idea in my first novel Fools Errant, set on Old Earth one age before Jack Vance’s Dying Earth cycle. It was a way to explain how we got from his space-opera classic SF universe to the dark and magic-haunted world of Rhialto the Marvellous and Chun the Unavoidable. Later I came back to the idea and developed it in a series of stories and novels about Henghis Hapthorn, a Sherlock Holmes of old Earth who discovers, to his horror, that the change is about to happen and all that he values will be smashed and broken. In creating Hapthorn, I was thinking of the handful of Edwardian gentlemen in the weeks before the onset of World War I who realized that their civilization was about to crash: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we will not see them lit again in our lifetime” is the appropriate quote.

I took Hapthorn up to just before the tsunami of change strikes. With the series of stories that begins with “And Then Some,” I’m going to take Erm Kaslo and Diomedo Obron through the collapse and into the new dark age and a world ruled by wizards.

Is there anything you would like to share with Lightspeed about upcoming publications or projects?

I’m writing the Kaslo series as a serial, or call it an episodic novel. The episodes will appear in subsequent issues of Lightspeed, and I am grateful to John Joseph Adams for buying into the concept when only four episodes were written.

I have some interesting stories coming out in three cross-genre anthologies that George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois are editing. The first antho is Rogues, coming out in October 2013; Old Mars and Old Venus will follow in the next couple of years.

And since February, I’ve been self-publishing my backlist as bargain-priced ebooks (and reasonably priced POD paperbacks). Readers who like “And Then Some” should come to my webpage and take a look.

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: Seanan McGuire
Robyn Lupo

What got you started writing “Homecoming”? If there’s any one event that got you going on writing in general, what was it?

Ironically enough, a mistake. I was approached for an anthology of football stories—sadly, it didn’t find a publisher, which is how I was able to offer this story to Lightspeed—because the organizing editor had heard that I was a football fan. I’m not! One of my cousins plays in the NFL, and my friend Cat Valente dedicated a football story to me, but I, personally, am not a football girl. On the other hand, I like a challenge. So this was super-fun to research and write.

I started writing when USA started airing Ray Bradbury Presents. Every episode began with him typing on his typewriter, and I realized, to my delight and dismay, that people wrote books. Books didn’t just happen, people wrote them. I wanted to be one of those people. I started writing immediately. I was like, five.

Generally speaking, the ideas that travel together with “beginning” are “morning,” “the spring,” and so on. You open this story in October. Can you tell us more about this narrative choice? Why begin in October, at night?

I am an autumn girl, a Halloween girl, a bonfires and cornfields pumpkin patch trick-or-treat girl. Given the chance, I’ll open everything in October. More than that, I adore harvest stories. I think the harvest is one of the most powerful liminal ideas of the American psyche, and since I wanted this to be a very Americana story, I wanted that power.

I wasn’t expecting Valkyries. What role do you see the cheerleaders/Valkyries as playing in the story, as well as in the greater narrative?

They’re the choosers of the slain: It’s on them to recruit the players before the game begins, to get them to the field and then let them have one last glorious battle that will determine their afterlives. I see them as psychopomps. Cheerleaders are always a little mystical, aren’t they? They’re caught between. They’re serious athletes who perform with insufficient safety gear because they’re “just girls,” and they break bones and necks and bodies, all in the name of one glorious moment of flight. They’re supposed to be pretty; they’re inevitably bad-ass. Cheerleaders are superheroes in training. So I wanted that iconography, too. Plus they’re just fun.

Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

Author Spotlight: Marc Laidlaw
Jude Griffin

In the August 2013 issue of Lightspeed, you talk about the background and story arc for Gorlen. Can you tell us where this story fits in?

“Bellweather” is the very latest in the adventures of Gorlen and, more recently, of Gorlen and Spar. The cycle so far goes “Dankden,” “Catamounts,” “Childrun,” “Quickstone,” “Songwood,” “Bemused,” “Rooksnight,” and “Bellweather.” The two prior to “Bellweather” will be coming out fairly soon. It is not necessary to read them in any order because the incidents in each one do not overlap, but there are issues of internal consistency. For instance, in “Quickstone” (the story where Gorlen finally catches up with Spar), Spar has wings, and by the time of “Bellweather,” he doesn’t. I have more stories from earlier in Gorlen’s life, when he was still travelling alone, but I haven’t written them yet. For now it’s most fun to write about them being together.

How has your vision of Gorlen altered over the decades?

I first wrote about him when I was about 16, and I pictured him as being somewhat older than me. Somewhere along the line, we were about the same age, and then I outstripped him. There are lots of lacunae in his life that I haven’t explored. He seems a little different every time I decide to revisit him. He started off as basically an irresponsible rogue who had responsibility thrust on him; along the way, he has internalized some of that feeling of responsibility, I guess. He went from being a pale and passive and unsatisfying pastiche of Cugel the Clever in his origin novel (which I destroyed) to being more of person I can relate to. I used to regard him from a distance, now I feel him as very close.

Do any of the Gorlen stories feature a main character that is female?

As Gorlen wandered from place to place, he has encountered female characters who are well established in their environment—and usually this has been in the form of a dalliance. The strongest female in the series is Spar’s love interest, the carved songwood masthead called Sprit. She’s as much a main character as Spar in that story, which he narrates. But it’s an interesting question, because it has crossed my mind: I’ve done the lonely bard thing, and now I’m doing the buddy thing, and it has occurred to me that there could be a great dynamic with a third member who would almost certainly be female. If I were to write a Gorlen novel, it would almost certainly need a third character to keep things interesting. Maybe a character like Isabel, played by Natalie Portman, in Your Highness.

What was the real world inspiration, if any, for the culture of Lek, Chamsin, and Smaia? (I kept thinking of Tibet.)

Yes, Tibet, of course. It’s been an inspiration in a lot of my stories, from my novel Neon Lotus onward. I had the idea for the sinister monk using bells to get around many years ago, when I was dreaming up the adventures of a character named China Scott, who was based on the amazing explorer Alexandra David-Neel. I never wrote a single China Scott story, but the images hung around. Years later, after I joined Valve, Gabe Newell, Valve’s owner, went through a phase of teaching himself to do Tuvan throat-singing. He would practice constantly, and especially seemed to enjoy doing it in elevators and in the parking garage, quite unselfconsciously. Meanwhile, Gabe is a collector of extravagant knives. I joked about his ideal fantasy novel would have to be one about mystical singing knives, and although I was joking, there was something in the idea that . . . resonated. That was all ten or fifteen years ago . . . so these random ideas all had plenty of time to get mixed up together. The other real-world inspiration came from travelling through a stony area of Tibet very much like the one in the story; there were mundane boulders rather than broken statuary, but there was nothing else mundane about the environment. It was eerie and ethereal.

Do the giant stone hands ever get explained?

In Gorlen’s constant travels, he sees many things he’ll never understand.

The last line of this story just slayed me. Can you talk about how you laid the foundation for such a wonderful moment?

By writing all the stories that led up to it!

Any projects you want to talk about? Anything new coming out soon?

The two preceding Gorlen stories, “Bemused” and “Rooksnight,” are either in print or soon will be from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. They were both too long for Lightspeed. “Bellweather” is the second Gorlen story to appear outside of F&SF (the first story is "Catamounts" in the August 2013 issue of Lightspeed). I am hopeful that Gorlen and Spar will find their way to a new audience of online readers.

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, and can’t say no to chocolate pudding pie.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in October, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Keffy R.M. Kehrli (“Help Fund My Robot Army!!!”) and Ken Liu (“Ghost Days”), along with SF reprints by Constance Cooper (“Trouble Leaves a Scent Trail”) and Kameron Hurley (“Enyo-Enyo”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Dylan Otto Krider (“The Five Deaths of Marvin Dimitri”) and Charlie Jane Anders (“Small Dead Creatures”) and fantasy reprints by Karin Tidbeck (“Augusta Prima”) and Neil Gaiman (“An Invocation of Incuriosity”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with Melissa Marr and über-geek Felicia Day.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella “Human Readable” by Cory Doctorow and a pair of novel excerpts.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. Check out the slate of original stories we’ve got coming up over the next couple of issues: Sean Williams (“Death and the Hobbyist”), Kelly Barnhill (“The Insect and the Astronomer”), Beth Revis (“The Turing Test”), Siobhan Carroll (“The Correspondence Between the Governess and the Attic”), Hao Jingfang (“Invisible Planets,” translated by Ken Liu), Anaea Lay (“Salamander Patterns”), Adam-Troy Castro (“The Thing About Shapes to Come”), Gregory Benford (“Leaving Night”), Sunny Moraine (“So Sharp That Blood Must Flow”), Sofia Samatar (“How to Get Back to the Forest”), Jeremiah Tolbert (“In the Dying Light, We Saw a Shape”), Sam J. Miller (“57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides”), Tim Pratt (“Ghostreaper, or Life After Revenge”), and James Patrick Kelly (“Stinger, Straight Up”). Plus, we’ve got three all-new Kaslo Chronicles stories by Matthew Hughes in the queue, which take place in the author’s science-fantasy Archonate milieu.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed. Thanks for reading!

Bonus Story from Nightmare Magazine

If you enjoyed this issue, you might also enjoy Nightmare Magazine (www.nightmare-magazine.com), also edited by Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams. Herewith you will find the complete text of one of the stories from the current issue of Nightmare. Enjoy with our compliments—and, if you do, please consider subscribing!

Halfway Home
Linda Nagata

The airliner’s safety brochure was like every other I’d seen: laminated and perfect, showing a large jet afloat in calm water, the emergency chutes deployed with inflatable rafts at their ends awaiting the arrival of passengers after a perfect water landing.

“Those diagrams are terribly optimistic,” the woman in the seat beside me said, eyeing the brochure as our plane climbed away from Manila. She spoke masterful English, clipped with a Filipino accent. “Let’s hope we never have to test that theory.”

I turned to her, intrigued. We were seated in the coach section, two women, strangers, traveling alone to Los Angeles. I had the window seat; she was on the aisle. I’d flown a lot, and I knew the social rules for the small talk that goes on between strangers forced to sit side-by-side for hours on end. A discussion of the false promises illustrated in the safety brochure did not come close to qualifying under those rules.

“Prepare for the worst,” I said. “That’s my philosophy. At least know where the exits are.”

“You’re a rare type, then. Most people give no consideration to the worst-case scenario.”

She had come on board late, a slight and lovely woman, maybe forty years old, her brown skin made utterly smooth by a veneer of makeup, her black hair permed into loose curls that framed a balanced face. She dared to wear a salmon-colored business suit that somehow worked for her—a happy color that relieved some of the fatigue visible around her eyes.

After stowing a small bag under the seat with worried haste, she had acknowledged me with a courteous nod and then closed her eyes, seeming to have fallen asleep before we reached the runway.

I was a different sort of woman than my new companion: a tall and rangy California blonde, casually dressed in a cream pullover and cargo pants. I hadn’t even bothered with makeup. I was on my way home, a fifteen-hour flight shared with strangers whose opinions and lives had nothing to do with mine.

I refolded the brochure and put it back in the seat pocket. “I’ve seen the worst case,” I told her. “More than once. I’ve learned to prepare.”

She cocked her head, her gaze distracted, a skeptical frown furrowing her brow. “If you can prepare,” she murmured, more as if she were wondering aloud than speaking to me, “surely it is not the worst case?” Her gaze shifted to meet mine then shot away again, as a self-conscious smile quirked her lips. “Ah, I’m sorry. I’ve overstepped.” She leaned back in her seat, dabbing a tissue against her cheeks, where a sheen of sweat seeped through her makeup. “My occupation leads to an unhealthy fascination with hazard assessments.”

“What do you do?” I asked with honest interest.

“Geek work. Engineering appraisals of biohazard containment procedures under laboratory conditions.” She settled her small hands one atop the other in her lap. “Modeling the worst-case scenario is just part of the daily grind, but it’s always been theory for me. No real world tests. Not yet. And you? What experience has led you to always map the exits?”

“Call me a professional adventurer.”

I was a photographer and a mountain climber. For ten years I’d scrimped and saved and sought grants, managing to get myself on expeditions around the world. Not all of them had gone well. I told her about a disastrous climb on Denali when an avalanche hit, taking out most of our party and leaving me with a broken arm. And another time on Everest when crowds of amateurs slowed our descent as a storm rolled in.

“I learned not to count on other people, because when disaster strikes, most of them panic. In the worst case? It comes down to everyone for themselves, and if you’re not strong enough to accept that, you won’t survive. My name’s Halley, by the way.”

“Anita.”

She offered her hand. Its warmth surprised me, almost feverish in its intensity. “Are you all right?”

Anita gave me an indulgent smile. “I have a severe nickel allergy.” Touching the far side of her neck, she drew my gaze to a mottled, red rash. “I was given a necklace that turned out to be . . . less than I thought. A slight fever is part of my allergic reaction. It should clear up in a few hours.”

“Not a worst-case scenario, then.” I kept my voice light, as if it was a joke, but I was uneasy. I didn’t want to spend the first week of my homecoming laid out by some exotic Asian fever acquired from a biohazard engineer. Too much irony in that.

Anita laughed again, though this time it sounded forced. “You must be thinking I’m the worst-case scenario for the passenger in the adjacent seat. Gloomy and ill.”

“No. Worst case would be if something went wrong and I was stuck sitting next to someone too big to push aside or climb over on my way to the exit. Everyone for themselves, remember?” I smiled like it was a macabre joke, but it was the truth, and judging by her somber expression, she knew it.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” she said. “And stay in the air all the way to Los Angeles.”

“Best-case scenario,” I agreed.

I think it came to us both that we’d said more than we should have, and we retreated into silence.

I woke with a start. The cabin was dark: just the floor lights and a few reading lamps. The air was too warm, thick with exhaled breaths. A nervous whisper rode atop an ominous silence. Why couldn’t I hear any engine noise? I glanced down, to see Anita’s white-knuckled hand clutching the armrest between us.

“What the hell is going on?” My ears popped. “Are we descending?” I pulled out my phone to check the time, confirming that it was too soon to be landing, too soon by hours. We were hardly halfway home.

Anita turned to me, her shoulders hunched, reflected light glinting in her dark eyes, her lips parted to admit the quick, shallow breaths that mark the edge of panic. She looked to me like a hunted creature at bay, an impression reinforced by her words. “This can’t be happening. It can’t.”

“What is happening?”

“The engines! Listen to them. They’ve been cutting out, one by one.” There was a mad focus to her eyes as she added, “It’s a judgment. Against me.”

I pulled the buckle on my seatbelt and started to rise. “I’m going to go talk to someone. Where the hell are the flight attendants anyway?”

I jumped as a man’s voice, humble with apology, issued from the speakers. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have an emergency.”

The plane was going down.

As the news sank in, passengers wailed, cried, prayed.

I re-buckled my seatbelt and put on my life vest.

Next I looked for the exit sign. It hung above the aisle, four seats ahead. If I survived the impact, I promised myself I would do whatever it took to reach that exit. The pilot had assured us our situation was known. Rescue was already on the way. We wouldn’t be in the water long. If I could get out of the plane alive, I’d have a good chance to survive.

Beside me, Anita kept her white-knuckled grip on the armrest, but she wasn’t crying, she wasn’t praying. She stared ahead at nothing. She’d assessed our odds in her first words to me, when she called the safety brochure terribly optimistic. “Anita.”

She turned. It was too dark to really see her face, but I saw her hand let go of the armrest. She took my hand; squeezed it, her palm even hotter than it had been before, hot and dry. “You’re a survivor, Halley. Do whatever it takes to live through this. Climb over me. Climb over anyone, but live. Someone has to, or it’s for nothing.”

For nothing?

I wondered what she meant . . . but I didn’t really care. It didn’t matter. In just a few minutes all of us on the plane would likely be dead. “Put your vest on,” I told her. I helped her with it, buckling it around her waist.

Outside the window there was only darkness. I pressed my forehead against the plastic pane and peered up, but I couldn’t see any stars. I couldn’t see the ocean below us. No way to know how much farther we had to fall.

The plane began to shudder.

People screamed—a chaos of animal noises that my fear-filled brain refused to truly hear, blurring and blending the sound with the roar of wind rushing past our powerless wings—all of it abruptly overridden by the pilot’s terror-edged voice, “Assume crash position. Assume crash position!”

I grabbed Anita’s hand. Then I bent at the waist, my head pressed to my knees and one palm braced against the seat back in front of me—a position that felt to me as useless as a prayer, but I prayed too. I held onto Anita’s hand and prayed I would be one of the survivors.

We hit hard. I heard some kind of debris slam against the ceiling. I didn’t look up to see what it might be. The plane bounced. We hit again. The fuselage screamed with the voice of aluminum tearing. Luggage exploded out of the overhead rack—and then the fuselage cracked apart.

It broke right in front of me. Darkness swept in, and a howling wind. Fluid sprayed in my face—though whether it was blood or hydraulics or the ocean itself, I couldn’t tell because we were tumbling, swirling, cartwheeling on a long chaotic fall into the arms of death.

Or was it life?

We assume it’s easy to tell the difference.

Clawing at consciousness, I awoke to a low, rumbling assault of sound, and a raw awareness of pain. Everything hurt. My skull, my face, my back, my hips . . . every muscle along my sides. I blinked, and found myself gazing at black smoke roiling across a starry sky. I was lying on my back, still belted in my seat. The wall of the fuselage was still beside me. The little window framed a fiery light, but the seats that had been in front of me were gone. The fuselage had split right at my feet, and the front of the plane had torn away.

A hysterical little laugh escaped my throat as I remembered my promise to do whatever it took to reach the exit.

The exit was wide open now.

A soft whump startled me. A nearby roar of rushing water followed it. My seat shuddered. Rain pelted my face—salty rain, ocean water. The sound I heard was the sound of a breaking wave . . . sweeping around the fuselage? As the wave retreated it left behind a steady, bold roar unlike any ocean sound I’d heard before.

Braced for pain, I turned my head, peering through the window at a lurid light, blurred and refracted by a layer of water droplets clinging to the outside of the window. Something was burning out there, but I couldn’t see it clearly enough to know what it might be.

White water surged up and slapped hard against the plastic pane. Instinctively, I jerked back, while the fuselage trembled around me, and more salty water rained down.

A child wailed.

I gasped, realizing this was the first voice I’d heard since waking. The only voice. In the seconds since I’d opened my eyes there had been no screaming, no crying, no pleas for help, no reassurances . . . just the rumble of the ocean, the roar of the fire, and now, one child’s despairing wail.

That cry made me move.

“I’m coming,” I called out in a rusty croak, groping at my seatbelt until I got it undone. “I’m coming. Don’t be afraid.”

A stupid thing to say.

I squiggled and shifted and found that my body still worked. I got my feet under me and turned to climb out of my seat—only to discover Anita in my way. Refracted firelight shimmered in her eyes as she lay blinking up at me. Water swirled behind her head. I looked past her, in a direction that was now down, toward what had been the back of the plane. Everything back there belonged to the ocean now. I thought I saw drowned faces beneath the water’s unquiet, dark surface but the light was poor. It was hard to be sure.

The child cried again.

Across the aisle, only one other seat remained above the water. The seats that should have completed the row weren’t there. I had to assume that, like the front of the plane, they’d been ripped away in the crash.

The child huddled in the sanctuary of that one seat, a boy maybe seven years old. He’d gotten out of his seatbelt; he’d even remembered to inflate his life vest. It looked like a huge yellow pillow strapped to his chest. He clung to the vertical seat cushion, weeping as water rose and fell around his feet, soaking his shoes and his pants.

“I’m coming,” I told him.

I told myself, Go!

But Anita was in the way. She hadn’t moved at all; I needed to know if she could. “Are you hurt?” I asked her, all too aware of currents of hot air moving past my face, missives from the roaring fire just outside.

As Anita opened her mouth to answer, another wave hit. The torn fuselage shuddered, the seat shifted beneath me, and I almost fell on top of her. I caught myself with a hand against her seatback. My fingers came away sticky, smelling of blood.

“Leave me,” she said, in a high half-shriek. “Save yourself. Live.”

She was right. Injured, helpless, likely with hours to go before rescue came, her prospects were slim. The smart thing to do would be to abandon her, and focus on the child.

“Go,” she pleaded. “Before you can’t get out.”

I started to go; I tried to go—what did I care for her life? I hardly knew her. We’d sat together, we’d shared a few words—but then we’d held hands, and our abstract acquaintance had become personal. I couldn’t leave her.

I felt for her seatbelt and popped it open, telling myself I was strong enough to help her and the child too. “Come on! We’re getting out of here. Put your arm around my shoulder.”

She was delirious. She tried to push me away. I grabbed the red tabs dangling from her vest and pulled them. I pulled my own. Both vests inflated and I pushed her into the water that flooded the aisle.

We bobbed at the surface.

I turned her onto her back, gripped the straps at her shoulder, and dragged her with me as I worked my way around the boy’s seat. Beyond him, firelight glimmered on open water. That’s where I wanted to be. That light was hope glimmering—the desperate hope of not being drowned when the wreckage around us finally pitched over.

I cleared the seat and felt a strong pull of ocean current. Holding one arm out to the boy, I called to him, “Come! Jump!”

He didn’t hesitate. He threw himself at me, a skinny little thing strapped into a vest so big he looked like he might levitate. A rumbling growl warned me that a wave was coming. I got an arm around him. He got an arm around me. “Deep breath!” I yelled as a mountain of white water plunged over us.

Like the plane crash, there was nothing I could do except hold on. We tumbled. My head hit against a sandy bottom. I felt the boy thrash. I felt Anita flail, prying at my fingers, trying to get me to let go. Her elbow struck my ribs, but I held on, my fingers locked around the straps of her life vest. I swore to myself we would survive, that we would all three survive together.

The wave let us go.

I rolled onto my back and gasped for air, letting the life vest hold me up. I made sure the boy’s face was out of the water, and then Anita. “It’s okay,” I murmured to them, my voice pitched so high it frightened me. “We’re doing okay.” The boy had his arm around my neck, so tight it was painful. I was glad. It told me he was strong, not like Anita. She drifted beside us, nearly unconscious.

The wave had carried us maybe fifty feet from the broken fuselage. A fire still shimmered beyond it, though it was less than it had seemed through the window. A yellow fragment of moon floated low above the horizon, illuminating a line of white water that must surely mark a distant reef . . . and I realized then that the fuselage must have been resting on a reef, with waves breaking around it . . . but it made no sense. The north Pacific is vast and nearly empty, and while I could believe our pilot had hoped to come down near some patch of reef or on some spot of an island—Johnston Atoll maybe? Palmyra?—to imagine that he had succeeded was more than I could accept.

With my charges in tow, I swiveled around, where I was presented with more evidence of the impossible.

Visible in the moon’s light, not a hundred feet away, was a sand beach, rising steeply to a line of brush and skeletal trees. Water sloshed into my open mouth. I spit it out, sure I was suffering a hallucination, seeing a mirage. Reality had slipped. We had come to a place where the odds did not allow us to be.

Somehow, we had been given a chance—and I took it.

With one hand on Anita’s straps and the boy clinging to me with a relentless grip, I kicked my shoes off, kicked at the water, and slowly, slowly, I brought us all to that impossible shore.

The boy stood up as we reached the shallows, but Anita couldn’t walk, or maybe she didn’t want to. “I’m not going to leave you,” I warned her, and I dragged her arm around my shoulder, hauling her up the beach, while the boy ran ahead, scouting beneath the vegetation until he found a hollow that offered shelter from a relentless wind. I got Anita out of her vest, and used it as a pillow for her head. Her skin was hot, but she was shivering so I piled sand around her legs. The boy helped me.

“What’s your name?” I asked him as I unbuckled his vest. He gave me a puzzled look, so I tried one of the few Tagalog words I knew. “Pangalan?”

“Hilario,” he told me in a shy, frightened voice. I tried to remember who he’d been traveling with . . . mama or daddy or both? But they’d been strangers, of no importance to me, and I’d paid no attention. I ruffled his wet hair, and gave him a hug.

Out on the reef, the broken fuselage had been pushed over by the waves, submerged just below the surface. Every time a breaker rolled past, spray flew into the air, brilliant white in the moonlight. I watched it and realized: I survived.

I was alive, I’d saved two other people, and rescue was surely on its way.

“Come, Hilario.” I took his hand and we walked up and down the windswept beach, but nowhere did we find any other survivors, not even a body washed up on the beach, and no debris from the wreck.

This was not reality as I knew it. It was unnatural. All too neat.

As dawn began to lighten the sky, we made our way back to Anita. On the way I listened for a rescue plane, or a helicopter from some passing Navy ship, but I heard only the boom and rumble of waves.

“Is there water?” Anita whispered when we returned to her. “Tubig?”

“No, there’s nothing. But rescue should be coming soon.”

I sat cross-legged beside her. Hilario tumbled into my lap, and I held him close. He was mine now. It felt that way. I kissed his salty cheek, and then I put my hand on Anita’s forehead. The dry heat of her skin shocked me. Her fever was much worse. “My God.”

“Right on time,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I meant to die in L.A.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It doesn’t . . . really matter.”

Her voice was weak, her words hard to hear. I leaned closer, and my gaze fell on the rash at her neck. Like her fever, it was worse, a collection of tiny pustules, some of them glimmering wet with fluid.

I pulled back. “That’s not from an allergy. What’s wrong with you, Anita?”

She smiled at me as if we were good friends. “You survived the crash, Halley, just like you said you would.” Her whispery voice was almost lost in the wind. “Maybe you’ll survive the plague, too. It’s possible. One in a hundred should. Maybe two in a hundred, with the best hospital care.”

She was delirious. She didn’t know what she was saying. Her fever, her head injury, the shock of the crash, had combined to plunge her into the nightmare that must have haunted her career, the worst-case scenario of a biohazard plague escaping one of her labs . . .

That’s what I wanted to believe.

But when I looked again at the pustules on her neck, I couldn’t hold onto my denial. With Hilario in my arms, I stood up, and backed a step away. Her gaze followed me. “Everyone on the plane,” she murmured, “infected by the time we reached L.A.”

“We didn’t make it to L.A.”

“You’ll make it. It only takes one. You’re that one. The right one, because you’ll do what’s needed to survive.”

It’s not true.

That’s what I told myself, over and over again as Hilario and I held hands and walked the beach. It couldn’t be true.

But what if it was? What if she had made herself the dark angel of the apocalypse, bearing a pestilence that only one in a hundred would survive?

I went back to see her, to plead with her to tell me the truth, but the truth was lost. Her eyes had clouded. She was gone.

I sat on the beach with Hilario, shivering, but not from cold. Wasn’t it a miracle the plane had crashed? Euphoria swept over me as I thought about it. Horror rolled in on its heels. Over 330 people had been on that plane. They were gone now, lost. It was a tragedy—and yet if Anita could be believed, so many more, almost all the world, had been made safer because of it.

The drone of a distant helicopter startled me from my musings. I looked up, to see, beyond the reef, the silhouette of a Navy ship looming against the yellow glow of the predawn sky. The helicopter was a flyspeck, speeding toward the boiling water that marked the sunken fuselage of the plane.

Hilario leaped up. His eyes went wide as he took in the ship, and a beautiful grin broke out across his face. He whooped, jumping up and down and waving his arms in mad greeting.

I whooped and waved too, but my delirious relief faded as dread descended over me. I sank to the sand, watching Hilario jump up and down, up and down, his high voice crying out in words that I did not understand.

Wasn’t it a miracle that our plane had crashed? And wasn’t it a miracle that Anita had survived, if only just long enough for me to learn that she’d placed an apocalypse in my hands?

“Come!” Hilario screamed, using a rare English word. “Come!”

My voice broke as I told him, “No, baby. They can’t come here.”

He hesitated, turning to me with worried eyes. I got up and ran to the top of the beach where a line of driftwood had collected. I grabbed a large stick. I remembered Anita’s last words to me, You’ll do what you need to do to survive. She’d been so sure of me. I’d been so sure of myself.

I darted back down to where the sand was wet, as close to the wave wash as I dared, and I started scratching deep scars, digging down to the wet, dark sand to form giant letters. Hilario came to watch me with a worried frown on his sweet face. I gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile but I kept working, because it wasn’t the apocalypse that Anita had placed in my hands after all: it was the lives of ninety-nine out of a hundred people—and how personal every one of those lives felt to me, resting in my hands.

Our rescuers read my message and retreated.

Hilario called for them to come back and when they didn’t he ran to me and we cried together as the waves slowly erased my warning and my plea:

terrorism-biowarfare

don’t come

I wanted to explain to Hilario that the helicopter would be back. That our rescuers would come again, in biohazard suits, bearing miracle drugs, and that against all odds the two of us would survive even in the face of this worst-case scenario.

I wanted to tell him that.

I wanted to believe it.

But an untenable chain of miracles had brought us to this deserted shore. It made no sense to me that the pilot could have guided our plane here with no power in the engines, and it made no sense that only Anita, Hilario, and I should survive the crash and escape the wreckage, the boy and I not even hurt, and no sign of anyone else.

It made no sense.

We should have died on that plane with everyone else, our plague-infected bodies safely lost and unrecoverable beneath the deep waters of the Pacific.

I think maybe we did die.

It could be delirium setting in with the first brush of fever, but the hours since the plane crash do not seem real to me. Looking back, it feels like everything that’s happened since I awoke in the wreckage has been a question posed to my soul.

And my answer?

I cradle Hilario as he weeps against my chest.

My answer surprised even me.

© 2013 by Linda Nagata.

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