Editorial, October 2013
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue forty-one of Lightspeed!

In this issue, you’ll find a story written in the form of a fictional Kickstarter pitch by Keffy R.M. Kehrli called “HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!!” My first thought when I read the story was: This story is really funny. My second thought was: I should build an anthology around it. My third thought was: Obviously the anthology should be launched via Kickstarter.

So that’s what I’m doing. I’m running Keffy’s story here in Lightspeed as an original, and simultaneously launching a Kickstarter for HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! & Other Improbable Kickstarters, an anthology of futuristic, magical, alternate-world, and entirely fictional crowdfunding projects. To learn more about the project, please visit johnjosephadams.com/kickstarter.

In addition to the anthology itself, there are lots of great prizes available, like subscriptions to Lightspeed and Nightmare, Tuckerizations, and signed copies of my anthologies. So, if you enjoy Keffy’s story and would like to read more stories like it, please do check out the Kickstarter and consider backing it. In addition to Keffy’s story (which will be the lone reprint in the anthology), the book will include works by folks such as Seanan McGuire, Daniel H. Wilson, Tim Pratt, Tobias S. Buckell, and Mary Robinette Kowal—along with works by Kickstarter phenoms such as Monte Cook (Numenera), David Malki (Machine of Death: The Game of Creative Assassination), Michael J. Sullivan (Hollow World), and Matt Forbeck (12 for ’12)—and more! The Kickstarter ends October 31, so don’t delay!

As I write this, I’m just back from Worldcon and the Hugo Awards, where I lost not one but two Hugos (and for the third year in a row!). But what they say is true: It truly is an honor to be nominated. Congratulations to all of the winners and other nominees. Though I did lose both Hugos, the extended results revealed that, during the nomination period, I actually received the most nominations (35 more than the next highest finalist) for Best Editor (Short Form), so it was very gratifying to see that so many voters thought I was among the best editors of our field. Also, in the semiprozine category, Lightspeed placed second in the final voting, which is also nice to see.

We mentioned this in our editorial last month, but it bears repeating: 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.

On the subject of things that bear repeating: Just a reminder that over in the Lightspeed ebookstore (lightspeedmagazine.com/store), we now have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-36).

Buying a Bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. 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 to Lightspeed directly from us, you can do that, too. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in both epub and mobi formats.

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

We have original science fiction by the aforementioned 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 novel excerpts of Parasite by Mira Grant and Copperhead by Tina Connolly.

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at 47North. This month, look for Poe by J. Lincoln Fenn (of which you can also 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 five-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.

Human Readable
Cory Doctorow

1. Nice networks don’t go down

It was unthinkable that the invisible ants that governed all human endeavor should catastrophically fail, but fail they did, catastrophically, on the occasion of Trish’s eighth date with Rainer. It took nineteen seconds for the cascade of errors to slow every car on the Interstate to a halt, to light up the dashboard with a grim xmas tree of errors, to still the stereo and freeze the tickers of information and context that they had come to think of as the crawling embodiment of the colony that routed all the traffic that made up their universe.

“We are going to be: So. Late,” Rainer said, and Trish swiveled in her seat to look at him. He was Fretting again, his forehead wrinkled and his hands clenched on the steering wheel. When they traded massages (third date) and she’d rubbed at his hands, she’d found them tensed into claws that crackled with knuckle-fluid when she bent each finger back and rubbed sandalwood-scented oil into it. He was mighty cute for a neurotic—at least he knew it when he was being nuts. Not that he’d stop being nuts, but he’d cheerfully admit it.

“We are not going to be late,” she said. “We just need to manually route ourselves out of the dead spot and get back on the grid and we’ll be on our way. We’ve got plenty of time.”

“Dead spot?”

“Yes,” she said. His forehead wrinkles were looking more klingon by the second. “Dead spot.” She forced a chuckle. “You didn’t think that the whole world was down, did you?”

He relaxed his knuckles. “Course not,” he said. “Dead spot. Probably ends up at the turn-off.”

“Right,” she said. “We need a map. I’m navigatrix. You’re pilot. Tell me where your maps are, then get onto the shoulder and drive straight.”

“Where my maps are? Jesus, what century do you live in? My maps are with the sextant and sundial, between my leeches and my obsidian sacrifice-knife.”

She laughed. “Okay, pal, I’ll find a michelin, you drive. Every car has a couple maps. They self-assemble from happy meal boxes.” She opened the glove-compartment and started rooting through it while he pulled onto the shoulder and gunned the tiny two-seater along it.

“This is: So. Illegal,” he said.

“Naw,” she said. “I’m pretty sure you’re allowed on the shoulder when the routing goes down. It’s in the written-test manual. Learned it while I was helping my little cousin Leelee study. Aha!” she said, holding something up.

“You have a cousin named Leelee? That’s uniquely horrible.”

“Shut up,” she said. “Look at this.” It was an old-fashioned phone, of a certain handsome retro line that made it look like a dolphin fucking a silver dildo, the kind of thing marketed to old people who wanted a device with its affordances constrained to collapse the universe of all possible uses for things that fit into your hand into the much smaller universe of, say, a cellphone.

“Yeah, my mom left that behind a couple years ago. I looked everywhere for it but couldn’t find it. She must’ve been snooping in the glove-box. Serves her right. So what?”

“These things can unmesh and talk straight to a tower at a long distance, can’t they?”

“I dunno, can they?”

“Oh yes, they can. Which means that they work in dead spots. So we can call and get directions.”

“You think you’re pretty smart, huh, dumpling?”

She put her finger to her temple and made an adorable frowny thinky face, and held it until he looked at her and laughed. They’d discovered their ability to make one another laugh when he’d farted while taking off his kilt (second date) and had reflexively swung the hem back to make it appear that his mighty gust was ruffling the pleats.

“What’s your mom’s number?” she said.

He recited it and she tapped it in.

“Hi there! This is Trish, Rainer’s friend? We’re on the way, but the, well the, but the—I mean to say, the grid’s down or something. The car doesn’t have any nav system, the dolby’s out, the Interstate’s a parking-lot . . . Oh, you too? God. Wonder if it’s the whole country! So, we need directions from San Luis Obispo, to the cemetery, if possible.”

: . . . :

“Why yes, it’s venti nice to be meeting you,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you, too. Yes, I’m giving directions, he’s driving. Oh, that’s so sweet of you. Yes, he does look like he’s going to scrunch his forehead into his upper lip. I think it’s cute, too. Right. Got it. Left, then right, then left, then a slight left, then up the hill. Got it. Whups! That’s the duracell! Better go. Soon! Yes. Whoops.”

“So?” he said.

“So, your mom sounds nice.”

“You got the directions?”

“She gave me directions.”

“So you know where we’re going?”

“I don’t have a single, solitary clue. Your mother gives terrible directions, darling. Pull off at the next exit and we’ll buy a map.”

“We are going to be: So. Late.”

“But now they know we’re late. We have an excuse. You: stop Fretting.”

Once they were on the secondary roads, the creepiness of the highway full of stopped cars and crane-necked drivers gave way to a wind-washed soughing silence of waves and beach and palms. Trish rolled down the window and let the breeze kiss the sweat off her lip, watching the surfers wiping out in the curl as the car sped toward the boneyard.

“Are you sure this is the kind of thing you’re supposed to bring a date to?”

“Yes,” he said. “Don’t Fret. That’s my job.”

“And you don’t think it’s even a little weird to take a girl to a cemetery on a date?”

“We’re not burying anyone,” he said. “It’s just an unveiling.”

“I still don’t get that,” she said. “I keep picturing your mom cutting a ribbon with a giant pair of gold scissors.”

“Right, let’s take it from the top,” he said. “And you’d better not be getting me to talk to stop my Fretting, because appealing to my pedantic nature to distract me is a very cheap trick.”

“I’m fluttering my eyelashes innocently,” she said.

He laughed and stole a hand through the vent in her apron-trousers and over her thigh. “Achtung!” she said. “Eyes on road, hands on wheel, mind in gutter, this instant!” She put her hand over his and he put down the pedal. His hand felt nice there—too nice, for only eight dates and 20-some phone calls and about 100 emails. She patted it again.

“This is kind of fun,” he said, as they zipped past some surfer dudes staring glumly at their long-boards’ displays, their perfect tits buoyant and colored like anodized aluminum with electric-tinted sun-paste.

“Ahem,” Trish said, squeezing his hand tight enough to make his knuckles grind together. “You were about to explain tombstone-unveiling to me,” she said. “When you got distracted by the athletic twinkies on the roadside. But I am sweet-natured and good and forgiving and so I will pretend not to have seen it and thus save us both the embarrassment of tearing out your Islets of Langerhans, all right?” She fluttered her eyes innocently in a way that she happened to know made him melt.

“Explaining! Yes! Okay, remember, I’m not particularly Jewish. I mean, not that my parents are, either: They’re just Orthodox. They don’t believe in God or anything, they just like Biblical Law as a way of negotiating life. I renounced that when I dropped out of Yeshiva when I was 12, so I am not an authority on this subject.”

“Let the record show that the witness declared his utter ignorance,” she said. “But I don’t get this atheist-Orthodox thing either—”

“Just think of them as Mennonites or something. They find the old ways to be a useful set of rules for navigating the universe’s curves. God is irrelevant to the belief.”

“So they don’t believe in God, but they pray to him?”

“Yeah,” he said. The surfers were all coming in now, jiggling their boards and rebooting them and staring ruefully at the radical cutback off the lip, dude, gnarly, as they plodded up the beach. “The ritual is the important part. Thinking good thoughts. Having right mind.

“It’s good advice, most of it. It doesn’t matter where it comes from or how it got there. What matters is that if you follow the Law, you get to where you’re going, in good time, with little pain. You don’t know why or how, but you do.”

“It’s like following the ants,” she said, watching the stop-and-go traffic in the other direction. “Don’t know why they tell us to go where they do, but they do, and it works.”

“Well, I guess,” he said, using the tone of voice that told her that he was avoiding telling her how wrong she was. She smiled.

“Anyway. The thing about Jews—ethnic Jews, cultural Jews, forget the religion here—is that we’re pretty much on the melodramatic end of the grieving scale. We like to weep and tear at our hair and throw ourselves on top of the coffins, right? So there’s like 5,000 years of this, and during that time, a bunch of social scientists—Rabbinical scholars—have developed a highly evolved protocol for ensuring that you grieve your dead enough that you don’t feel haunted by guilt for having failed to honor them, but not grieving so much that you become a drag on the tribe.

“When someone dies, you bury him right away, usually within twenty-four hours. This means that you spend an entire day running around like your ass was on fire, calling everyone, getting the word out, booking last-minute travel, ordering in from the caterers, picking out a box, fielding consoling phone-calls, getting the rabbi on the phone, booking the limo, so much crap that you can’t spare even a second to fall to pieces. And then you bury him, and while you’re at it, your family extrudes a volunteer to go over to your house and take all the cushions off of one of the sofas, hang sheets over all the mirrors, and set out enough food to feed the entire state, along with an urn of starbucks the size of an oil-drum.

“Before the service starts, the rabbi gives you a razor-blade and you slash a hole in your lapel, so that you’ve got the rent in your heart hanging out there in plain sight, and once you get back home, you spend seven days grieving. You pray two times a day with a quorum of ten men, facing east and singing the Kaddish, this really, really depressing song-prayer-dirge that’s specially engineered to worm its way into the melancholy receptors of the Semitic hindbrain and make you feel really, really, really miserable. Other people come over and cook for you, all three meals. You don’t see yourself in the mirrors, you don’t sit on cushions, you don’t do anything except mourn for a whole week.

“Then it’s over. You take a walk, leaving by one door and coming back in by the other. You put the mourning behind you and start your new life without your dear departed. You’ve given over your whole life for a whole week, done nothing but mourn, and you’re completely sick of it by then, so you’re almost glad to be done.

“Then, six months or a year later, usually just before Jewish New Year’s, which is in the fall, you have a tombstone erected at the gravesite. The stone-cutters tie a white cloth around it, and everyone gathers there, and there’s a sermon, and that dirge again, and more prayer, and everyone has a good hard cry as the scabs you’ve accumulated are ripped away and all your pain comes back fresh and scalding, and you feel it all again in one hot second, and realize with a guilty start that you have been neglecting the memory of the loved one, which is to say that you’ve gotten on with your life even though his is over, which is to say that you’ve done perfectly healthy, normal stuff, but you feel totally, completely overwhelmed with guilt and love, which are kind of flipsides of the same emotion—”

“You don’t believe that, do you?” She held her breath.

“Well, kind of. Not that they should be, but hell, they are, most of the time, then.”

“Good thing we’re not in love, then, right?” she said, in reference to their sixth date, when they’d decided that they would hold off on any declarations of love for at least an entire year, since they were most often moved to utter the Three Words of Significance when they were besotted with e.g. post-orgasmic brain-juice or a couple of cocktails.

“Yes, counselor.”

She shook her head. He knew she was an academic, not a practicing lawyer, but he loved to tease her about it, ever since she’d revealed (after the third date, on the phone) that she’d spent about ten seconds in private practice after she’d worked for her congressman and before she’d joined the faculty at UCLA.

“You’re out of order,” she said.

“This whole damned car is out of order!” he said. “So that’s the ritual. You said you wanted to meet the parents and sisters and aunts and grandmothers and cousins and uncles and nephews and in-laws the next time we all got together. This is it.”

“Right,” she said. “I asked for this.” And she had, of course. Hadn’t asked for the graveside elements, but she’d been curious to meet this big sprawling enterprise of a family that he was always nattering on about. This seemed as good an occasion as any. “So,” she said. “Is this a traditional date among Your People?”

He chuckled. “Yes, this is Yom Shiksa, the ritual bringing of the gentile woman to the family so that she may become the subject of intense, relentless scrutiny and speculation.”

She started to laugh, then saw that the tractors were stilled in the fields they were passing, that a train was stopped in its tracks, that the surfers were unable to get their roll-cage dune-buggies to take to the road.

“You all right, babe?” he said, after a couple minutes of this.

“Just wondering about the dead spot,” she said. “I wish we knew what had happened.”

“Nothing too bad, I’m sure,” he said. “It’s all self-healing. I’m sure we’ll be back online soon enough.”

They rolled into the parking lot for his family’s shul’s section of the giant graveyard a few minutes after 1PM, just over an hour late, along with the majority of the other attendees, all of whom had had to navigate manually.

“Where are your sisters?” Rainer’s mother said, even before he’d kissed her cheek.

Rainer screwed his face up in a scowl and dug in his pocket for a yarmulke. “Do I know? Stuck in traffic, Ma. The grid’s down everywhere.”

Trish watched this bemusedly, in her cool, loose cotton apron-trousers and blouse. She scuffed her toe conspicuously and Rainer turned to her, and it was as though he’d forgotten she was there. She felt a second’s irritation, then a wave of sympathy as she saw the spasm of anxiety cross his face. He was nervous about her meeting his fam, and nervous about who would arrive when, and nervous about where his sisters were with their enormous families and meek husbands, trapped somewhere on southern California’s squillion-mile freeway network.

“Ma,” he said. “This is my friend, Trish.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Feinstein,” Trish said. The old woman was remarkably well-preserved, her soft skin glowing with heat-flush, her thick hair caught in a tight bun and covered with a little scarf that reminded Trish of Rainer’s yarmulke. She wondered if she should be wearing one, too. Mrs. Feinstein’s eyes flicked quickly to her shoes, up her legs and boobs, to her face and hair, and then back to her face. She opened her arms and drew Trish into a hug that smelled of good, subtle perfume, though Trish knew so little about scent that she couldn’t have said which. “Call me Reba, darling,” she said. “It’s so good of you to come.”

And then she was off, hustling to corral a wayward knot of horseplay-aged cousins, stopping to shake hands with the deceased great-uncle’s poker buddies in their old-man pants, golf shirts, and knit yarmulkes bobby-pinned to their thinning hair.

Trish took stock. Looked like every other graveyard she’d been in, which wasn’t that many. At 35, she’d been to half a dozen family funerals, a couple of college buddies who OD’ed or cracked up their cars, and one favorite poli-sci teacher’s service, so she was hardly an expert on boneyards, but something was amiss.

“What’s with the pebbles on the headstones?” she whispered to Rainer, who was scanning the road for signs of his sisters.

“Huh? Oh. You drop those on the monument when you visit the grave, as a sign that someone’s been there.”

“Oh,” she said, and began to cast about for a pebble she could put on his great-uncle’s headstone once it was unveiled. There were none to be found. The ground had been picked completely clean. Looking at the thousands and thousands of ranged marble headstones, each topped with a cairn of stones—and not just stones, either, toys and seashells and small sculptures, she saw now—and she understood why.

“What are you doing?” Rainer asked. He might have been irritated, or just nervous. It was hard to tell when he was Fretting, and he was clearly going coo-coo for coco-puffs.

“Looking for pebbles,” she said.

He said :fuck: very quietly. “I meant to bring some. Damnit. I’ve got twenty relatives buried here and we’re going to go past every single tombstone before we get to leave and I don’t have a single rock.”

“Can you leave toys or other stuff, like on those stones?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I suppose. If I had other stuff.”

She opened her purse and pulled out the dolphin-dildo cellphone. “You still need this?” she said.

He smiled and his forehead uncreased. “You’re a genius,” he said.

She set it down on the pavement and brought her heel down on it hard, breaking it into dozens of fragments. “All the pebbles we’ll ever need,” she said, picking them up and handing them to Rainer.

He put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “I’m awfully fond of you, Counselor,” he said, kissing her earlobe. His breath tickled her ear and made her think of the crazy animal new-relationship-energy sex they’d had the night before—she was still limping, and so was he—and she shivered.

“You too, steakypaste,” she said. “Now, introduce me to all of your relatives.”

“Introduce you?” He groaned. “You don’t think I remember all of their names, do you?”

Afterward, they formed a long convoy back to the nearest family member’s house—a great-aunt? a second cousin? Rainer was vague—navigating by keeping everyone in sight, snaking along the traffic jam that appeared to have engulfed the entire state, if not the whole coast.

“You made that law, yes? We’ve all heard about you.” This was the sixth time someone had said this to her since they’d arrived and Rainer had made her a plate of blintzes, smoked salmon, fresh bagels, boiled eggs, and baby greens salad with raspberry dressing, then had been spirited away into an endless round of cheek-pinching and intense questioning. She’d been left on her own, and after having a couple of grave conversations with small children about the merits of different toys, she’d been latched upon by one of the Relatives and passed from hand to hand.

“I was involved in it, but I didn’t write the law,” she said.

“Look at you, so modest, you’re blushing!” the Relative said. She reached out to steady a cut-glass vase as it wobbled in the wake of two small boys playing keep-away with a third’s yarmulke, and Trish realized that this was probably the hostess.

“This place is just supercalafragilistic,” she said, with an economical gesture at the tasteful Danish furnishings, the paper books in a handsome oak bookcase, the pretty garden out one side window and the ocean out the back window.

“Thank you,” the great-aunt said. “My Benny loved it here.” She misted up. Trish finally added two and two, remembered the BENJAMIN chiseled into the marble headstone, and the blank spot on the other half of the tombstone, realized that this wasn’t just the hostess, this was the widow, and felt about for a thing to say.

“It was a beautiful ceremony,” she said. She had a couple napkins tucked in the waistband of her pants, and without thinking, she extracted one and folded an angle into it, reaching for the corner of the great-aunt’s eye. “Look up,” she said, and blotted the tear before it could draw a line of mascara down the widow’s cheek.

The old woman smiled a well-preserved smile that reminded Trish of Rainer’s mom. “You’re a sweet girl,” she said. “Me, I’m not so good with names, and so I’ve forgotten yours.”

“I’m Trish,” Trish said, bemusedly. Rainer’s grammar got yiddishized when he wasn’t paying attention, and she adored the contrast between its shtetl credibility and his witty, smooth public banter-persona. It had attuned her to little phrases like, “Me, I’m not so good.”

The widow shook her hand. “I’m Dorothy. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Would you like to come out to the garden with me?”

Once they were seated, young male Relatives materialized and set up shade-umbrellas and brought out trays of iced juice.

“They’re not after the inheritance, you know,” the old woman said with a snort. “Their parents are very well-off. They don’t need from money. They just adore me because I’ve spoiled them rotten since they were babies and I’d take them swimming and to Disneyland.”

“You have a beautiful family,” Trish said.

“Do you have a big family, too?” The old woman put on a pair of enormous sunglasses and sipped at her pink grapefruit juice.

“Not like this one,” she said. There were a couple hundred people in the house, and Rainer had spent the whole car-ride back from the cemetery Fretting about all the relations who hadn’t made it.

“Oh, this one! Well, this is a special case. This family accumulates other families. My Benny had a small family, and when he married me, they just joined us. All the high holidays, we ate here, or at my parents’ place, God rest them. Your family is in DC?”

“All over.”

“But you’re from DC, no?”

“Not really. I grew up in Chicago and Seattle.”

“But you made that law—”

“I really didn’t, honestly! I was clerking for a Supreme Court judge when the case was heard, and I wrote his dissenting opinion, and when we lost, I quit and went to work for a PAC that was agitating for copyright reform to accommodate free expression, and then when Senator Sandollar got voted in and they started the Intellectual Property committee and made her chairman, I joined her staff as a policy wonk. So I worked on it, along with a couple thousand other people, not counting the millions who contributed to the campaign and the people who knocked on doors and so on.”

“How old are you, darling?”

“35,” she said.

“At 35, I was having babies. You—listen to you. Listen to what you’ve accomplished! I’m proud just to listen to you. Rainer is lucky to have you. You two will get married?”

Trish squirmed and felt her face grow hot. Neither of them really believed in marriage. Whenever anyone brought the subject up around Rainer, he’d grimace and say, “Are you kidding? It’d make my mother far too happy—she’d keel over from joy.”

There was some kind of disturbance down the beach, one that had been growing steadily over the past several minutes, and now the Relatives were all turning their attention that way, to a couple of small boys in miniature suits who were ruining the shine on their shoes running in the sand like lunatics.

Something in the way they were running, the distant expressions she couldn’t quite make out on their faces. It made her think back to high-school, to working as a beach lifeguard on Lake Michigan in the summers, and before she knew what she was doing, she’d kicked off her shoes and was running for the shore, her legs flashing immodestly through the vents in her apron-trousers.

She was still yards away from the hissing surf when she began to assess the situation. There was the small boy, bobbing in the ocean, where the undertow had spit him up after sucking him under. There was the swimmer, unconscious on the beach, face down. Couldn’t tell if his chest was moving, but the small boy was in a suit, not swim-trunks like the swimmer, and that meant that he was part of Rainer’s Family, which she had begun (on the eighth date, no less!) to think of as her own, and so she had him as her primary target before she reached the sea.

She didn’t bother finicking with the buttons on her top, just grabbed her collar and yanked, leaving her in a bra that revealed less than some bikinis she owned, but did so through a cunning arrangement of lace, mesh, and structural engineering that was probably illegal in Texas. She undid the bows on each hip holding up her pants and stepped out of them, leaving behind a very small pair of white panties whose primary design consideration had been to avoid showing lines through thin trousers, with modest coverage of all her nethers coming in a distant second.

She plunged into the water without hesitation, moving swiftly but surely, taking care to keep her feet dug in against the undertow as she waded out toward the young boy. She was a strong swimmer, but the water was shockingly cold after the heat of the garden and the buzzing afternoon and it sucked at her calves and legs like a jacuzzi intake. Her breath roared in her ears as she rode the swells, and then she was soaked by a succession of breakers, and then she had the boy’s little hand.

She hauled him to her, seeing that he was only five or six, and that his pouting lips were alarmingly blue and that his skin was as pale as cream. She scooped the water out of his mouth, hooked her arm around his neck and tilted his head back and began to slosh back toward shore. When she was waist-deep—immodestly revealed in a bra that she was quite certain had gone completely transparent—she pinched his nose and blew into his mouth, not quite getting her mouth out of the way before he vomited up a gush of salt-water, blintzes, diet coke, and bile. She spat and wished that she could duck her head and get a mouthful of ocean to rinse with, but she couldn’t without dunking the boy, too, so she hauled him up out of the water and handed him to the Relative who was standing with his arms out on the shore, his fine leather shoes soaked with cold seawater.

She looked for the swimmer, and saw that he was still face-down in the sand. “You, you, and you,” she said, pointing at three young cousins whose wide eyes were flicking from her boobs to her crotch—white underwear, Christ, why white underwear today?—to the boy on the sand, who was mobbed now with Relatives whose hubbub had reached deafening proportions, “Go to the house, find an old-fashioned phone, and call emergency services. Tell them where we are, and that we have two drowning victims, one a child, neither breathing. What are you going to do?”

The tallest of the three managed to make eye-contact long enough to say, “Find a cell-phone, call emergency, tell them where we are, two drownings, not breathing.”

“Right,” she said. “Come back when you’re done and tell me that it’s done.”

“You, you,” she said, picking out two tall uncles who looked like they’d worked out or played sports before they found whatever careers had paid for the nice suits they were wearing, “Carry him here and lay him down on his side.”

She looked for Rainer and found his ass sticking out of the scrum around the boy. She snagged him by the belt and dragged him back. “Rainer,” she shouted. His forehead was scrunched, but he was clear-eyed and grim and looked like he was listening to her, which she found very pleasing. “You need to get everyone back at least five steps from that kid, and make them quiet down,” she said.

“Right,” he said, and took off his jacket and handed it to her.

“Hold it yourself,” she snapped, “I’ve got things to do.”

“It’s to wear,” he said.

She surprised herself with a grin. “Thanks.”

The Relatives were murmuring, or crying, or bickering, but Rainer hollered. “LISTEN UP,” he said. “All of you get over there by that rock, NOW, or my girlfriend won’t be able to save Jory’s life. GO!”

And they went, amazingly, crushing back so quickly they looked like a receding tide. The tall uncles deposited the swimmer in the sand between them, and she checked his breathing and saw that it was good.

“Turn him on his side and tell me if he starts to choke,” she said, and turned to the little boy, struggling to remember her rescue breathing.

She got the boy breathing and ended up with more puke on her face, on Rainer’s jacket, in her hair. His pulse was thready but there. She turned to the swimmer and saw that he was a muscular surfer dude in board shorts with a couple of bitchun tatts and a decent body-paint job. He was breathing, too, but his heart was erratic as hell. She pressed two fingers to his throat.

“What happened?” she said. “Who saw it happen?”

One of the aunts stepped forward and said, “My son says they were playing—”

She held up her hand. “Where’s your son?” she said.

“He’s back at the house,” the aunt said, startling back.

“Send someone for him, then tell me what happened.”

The aunt looked like she’d been slapped, but the other Relatives were staring at her and so she had to talk, and then the boy arrived and he told it again and it was pretty much the same story, but she was able to get more details, as she began to examine both the boy and the surfer’s bodies for cuts, bruises, breaks, and punctures. She gave the boy’s clothes the same treatment she’d given her own, gently but forcefully tearing them off, using a seashell to start the tears at first, then a pocket-knife that someone put in her hand.

The story was that the kids had been playing when they’d seen the surfer floating in the breakers, and they’d dared each other to fish him out, and the undertow had sucked them out to sea. One had gotten away, the other had ended out beyond the waves, and meanwhile, the surfer had beached himself on his own.

“Right,” she said. “Blankets and pillows. Elevate their feet and wrap them up good.” She stood up and staggered a step or two before Rainer caught her, and the crowd made a noise that was at once approving and scandalized.

“Get me to the sea,” she said. “I need to soak my head.”

So he walked her into the water, he still in his suit-pants and dress shirt and tie, and held onto her while she dunked her head and swirled a mouthful of salt water in her mouth.

“Where are the fucking paramedics?” she said, as she sloshed back out with him.

“There,” he said, and pointed at the horizon, where a Coast Guard clipper was zooming for the shore. “The cell-phone was dead, so I fired up a couple flares. You didn’t hear them?”

“No,” she said. He could have set off a cannon and she wouldn’t have noticed it.

She got back to the shore just in time to see the surfer convulse. She was on him in a second, kneeling at his side, doing airway-breathing-circulation checks, finding no pulse, and slamming him onto his back and beginning CPR.

Some time later, she was lifted off him and two paramedics went to work on him. Someone put a robe over her shoulders and a cup of juice in her hands. She dropped the juice in the sand and sticky liquid and beach sand covered her legs, which she realized now that she hadn’t depilated in a week, and that made her realize that she’d spent a pretty crucial amount of time prancing around naked in front of her date’s family, and that that was probably not on the timetable until the fifteenth date at least.

She looked up at Rainer, who was still in his shoes and as she was in bare feet loomed over her. “God,” she said, “Rainer—”

He kissed her. “I love you, Patricia,” he said.

“Ooh,” she said, with a weak smile. “You’re breaking the rules!”

“Can you let it go this once?”

She made her scrunchy thinky face and then nodded. “Just don’t make a habit of it, you lunk.”

It would have been perfect if only the surfer hadn’t died.

They didn’t get home until well after midnight. Parts of LA appeared to be on fire as they inched their way along the freeway. It was weird to see LA at this speed. They were used to clipping along at 60 or 70—over 80 if the traffic was light—flying over the freeway so fast that the scenery was just a blur. Only the year before, the New Yorker had run a 40-page paean to LA, a public apology declaring it the most livable city in America, now that it had licked its traffic problems. It balanced lots of personal space with thorough urbanization and urbanity. It was why they both lived there.

Now they seemed to have traveled back fifty years in time, to the bad old traffic-jam-and-smog days. Looters danced below, torching stores, and the traffic moved so slowly that some people were apparently abandoning their cars to walk home—which made the traffic even worse. The smoke from the fires turned the sunset into a watercolor of reds and mustards and golds, tones that had blown away with the smog when the last gas-sucking Detroitmobile was retired for a plastic Nickel-Metal Hydride jellybean, and all the lanes were repainted to cut them in half.

It was nightmarish. When they got off the ramp at Studio City, they found homeless guys directing traffic with gas-tubes they’d torn out of the bus-shelters. The tubes glowed in the presence of microwave radio-frequency radiation, and as each of the trillions of invisible ants in the system attempted to connect with its neighbors and get the traffic set to rights again, the RF noise made the tubes glow like sodium lamps.

They coasted into Trish’s driveway and collapsed in her living room.

“You were wonderful, darling,” Rainer said, peeling off the tracksuit that one of his cousins had scrounged from the gym-bag in her trunk and donated to Trish. Her skin was gritted with sand and streaked with stripes of sunburn.

“God,” Trish said, lolling back on the sofa, just letting him gently brush away the sand and rub lotion into her skin. “You spoil me,” she said.

“You’re unspoilable,” he said. “Wonderful girl. You saved their lives,” he said.

“What a fucking day,” she said. “You think that my lifeguard training made up for my scandalous undergarments in your family’s minds?”

He snorted and she felt his breath tickle the fine hairs on her tummy. “You’re kidding. My mom told me that if I didn’t marry you, she’d have me killed and then fix you up with someone else from the family—told me it was my duty to see to it that you didn’t get away, just in case someone else fell in the ocean.”

He looked around at the blank walls. “Creepy not to have any news at all,” he said.

“There’s a TV in the garage,” she said. “Or maybe the attic. You could find it and plug it in and find out that no one else knows what’s going on, if you feel like it.”

“Or I could escort you to the bathtub and we could scrub each other clean and then I could give you a massage,” he said.

“Yes, or you could do that.”

“Where did you say the television was?” he said.

“You are going to be: In. So. Much. Trouble.” She twined her fingers in his hair and pulled him up to kiss her.

2. Progress pilgrims

It took three days for even the thinnest crawls to return to the walls. In the meantime, people dug out old one-to-many devices like radios and televisions and set them up on their lawns so they could keep track of the aftermath of The Downtime.

He slept over those three nights, because no one was going anywhere, anyway, and they had a running argument over how many dates this counted as, but truth be told, they had a wonderful time, making omelets for one-another, washing each other’s backs in the shower, stealing moments of sex in the living room at two in the afternoon without worrying about being interrupted by a chime, ringer, bell, or vibe.

When they weren’t enjoying each other, they took coolers of fizzy drinks onto the lawn and watched the neighbor’s TV set and saw the pundits describing The Downtime. The news-shows were having a drunken ball with this one: As the only game in town, they were free to bring a level of craft to their newsmongering that hadn’t been seen since Trish’s parents’ day, when news-networks turned catastrophes into light operas, complete with soundtracks, brand-identities, logo-marks, and intermissions where buffoons worked the audience for laughs.

“Oh, she’s your favorite, isn’t she?” Trish asked, goosing Rainer’s bicep and taking a sip of his peach ginger-ade. The pundit had been in heavy rotation since the TV went back on the air. She was a Norwegian academic mathematician who wrote books of popular philosophy. She was a collection of trademark affectations: a jacket with built-up shoulders, a monocle, a string tie, nipple tassels, and tattooed cross-hatching on her face that made her look like a woodcut of a Victorian counting-house clerk. Rainer loathed her—she’d been on the committee to which he’d defended his Philosophy of Networks thesis, and she’d busted his balls so hard that they still ached a decade later when he saw her on the tube.

The pundit explained the packet-switching, using trains versus automobiles as a metaphor: “In a circuit uniwerse, every communication gets its own dedicated line, like a train on a track. Ven I vant to talk to you, ve build a circuit—a train track—betveen our dewices. No one else can use those tracks, even if ve’re not talking. But packet-svitching is like a freevay. Ve break the information up into packets and ve give every packet its own little car, and it finds its own vay to the other end. If vun car doesn’t arrive, ve make a copy of its information and send it again. The cars have brakes and steering veels, and so they can all share the same road vithout too much trouble.”

Rainer grit his teeth and hissed at the set. “She’s faking the accent,” he said. “She thinks that Americans believe that anyone with a European accent is smarter than we are. She can pronounce vee and doubleyou perfectly well when she wants to—she speaks better English than I do! Besides, she stole that line from me,” he said, “from my thesis,” he said, his face scrunching up again.

“Shh, shh,” Trish said, laughing at him. He wasn’t really angry-angry, she knew. Just a little stir crazy. He was a networking guy—he should have been out there trying to make the network go again, but he was on sabbatical and no one at UCLA wanted to hear from him just then.

And then the pundit was off onto ants—networks modeled on ant-colonies that use virtual pheromones to explore all possible routes in realtime and emerge a solution to the problem of getting everything, everywhere, in shortest time. Rainer kept barking at the TV, and Trish knew he was doing it to entertain her as much as for any reason, so she laughed more and egged him on.

The TV cut back to the news-dude, who was a very cuddly ewok who’d made his name hosting a wheel-of-fortune, jumping up and down and squeaking excitedly and adorably whenever a contestant won the grand prize, his fur-plugs quivering. He cupped his paws to his cheeks and grinned.

“But ants aren’t perfect, are they?” the ewok said.

“He’s feeding her!” Rainer said. “She’s going to go off on her stupid walking-in-circles bit—”

“The thing about using wirtual ants to map out the vorld and make routing recommendations is that ve can’t really tell the difference betveen a good solution and a bad vun, without trying it. Sometimes, ants end up valking in circles, reinforcing their scent, until they starve to death. Ve might find that our cars tell us that the best vay from San Francisco to San Jose is via a 1500-mile detour to Las Wegas. It may be true—if all the traffic eweryvhere else is bad enough, that might be the fastest vay, but it may just be the ants going in circles.”

“God, talk about taking a metaphor too far,” he said. Trish thought that Rainer was perfectly happy to think about the ants as ants, except when someone raised a point like this, but she didn’t see any reason to raise that point just then.

The ewok turned to the camera: “One scientist says we should expect more Downtimes to come. When we come back from this break, we’ll talk to a University of Waterloo researcher who claims that this is just the first of many more Downtimes to come.”

The screen cut over to a beautiful, operatic advertisement for some Brazilian brand of coca-cola, wittily written, brilliantly shot, with an original score by a woman who’d won three grammies at the Independent Music Awards in Kamchatka the year before. They watched it with mild attention, and Trish absently fished another bottle out of the cooler and chewed the lid off with her side-molars.

She looked at Rainer. He was gripping the arm-rests of his inflatable chair tightly, dimpling the hard plastic. She held the bottle to his lips and he took it, then she rubbed at his shoulders while he took a swallow.

“Let’s go back inside and play,” she said. “They won’t have anything new to tell us for days.”

The crawls were alive the next morning, exuberantly tracking across the walls and over the mirror and down the stairs. They picked out the important ones and trailed them to convenient spots with a fingertip and devoured them, reading interesting bits aloud to one another.

Soon the crawls had been tamed and only a few personal messages remained. Trish dragged hers over to the tabletop, next to her cereal bowl, and opened them up while she ate. Outside, she could hear the whisper of cars speeding down the road, and she supposed with a mingling of regret and relief that she should probably go in to her office.

She opened her personal mail. It had been three days since she’d read it, but for all that, a surprisingly small amount had accumulated. Of course—everyone else had been without connectivity, too. This was mostly stuff from the east coast and Europe, people who’d been awake for a couple hours.

She read, filed, and forwarded, tapping out the occasional one-word answer to simple questions or bouncing back messages with a form letter.

Then she came to the note from the Coast Guard medic. He didn’t mince words. It was in the first sentence: The surfer dude she’d rescued had had a second cardiac arrest on the boat. They’d tried what they could, but he hadn’t recovered. He was a freak statistic of The Downtime, another person who’d lost his life when the ants spazzed out. They’d recovered his board and found its black-box. The accelerometer and GPS recorded the spill he’d taken after the loss of climate and wave-condition data from the other surfers strung out on the coast. He’d stayed up for about ten seconds before going under.

She stared numbly at the note, the spoon halfway to her mouth, and then she dropped the spoon into the bowl, not noticing that it splashed milk down her blouse.

She got up from the table and went into the kitchen. Rainer was there, in a change of clothes they’d bought from a mom-n-pop gap at the mall on the corner that had been taking IOUs from anyone who could show a driver’s license with a local address. She grabbed his wrist, making him slosh starbucks down his front, she took the cup out of his hand and set it down on the counter, then put her arms around his chest and hugged him. He didn’t protest or ask any questions, he just put his arms around her and hugged back.

Eventually, she cried. Then she told him what she was crying about. She let him tell her that she was a hero, that she’d saved Jory’s life and almost saved the surfer’s life, and she let him tell her that it wasn’t her fault for sloshing into the ocean to rinse off the barf, and she let him tell her that he loved her, and she cried until she thought she was cried out, and then she started again.

He took her upstairs and he laid her down on the bed. He undressed her, and she let him. He put her in fluffy jammies, and she let him. He wiped away her makeup and her hot tears with a cool face-cloth, and she let him. He took her hand and ran his fingers over her fingernails, squeezing each one a little, the way she liked, and she let him.

“You’re going to have a nice lie-down for a couple hours, and I’m going to be right beside you. I’ll call the department secretary and tell him you’re taking a personal day and will be in tomorrow. Then we’re going to go see Jory and his family, so that you can see the boy whose life you saved, and then we are going to go for a walk in the hills, and then I’m going to put you to bed. When you get up in the morning, you can make an appointment to see a grief counselor or not. Today, I’m in charge, all right?”

Her heart swelled with love and she felt a tear slip down her cheek. “Rainer,” she said, “you’re a wonder.”

“You inspire me, darling,” he said, and kissed her eyelids shut.

Their thirty-fifth date was their last.

“You’re going back to Washington,” he said, when he saw the boxes in her office.

“Yes,” she said.

He stood in the doorway of her office. Trish was painfully aware of the other faculty members in the corridor watching him. Their romance was no secret, of course. Everyone in the law department knew about him, all the network engineers knew about her, and they both took a substantial amount of ribbing about “mixed marriages” and “interfaith dating.”

Trish realized with a pang that it was likely that everyone in the law department knew that she’d decided to go back to the Hill but that he’d only suspected it until this instant.

“Well, good for you,” he said, putting on a brave face that was belied by the Fret wrinkles in his forehead.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have told you once I decided, but I didn’t want to do it over the phone—”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” he said, holding up his hand. “Do you want to come out for dinner with me anyway?”

She gestured at the half-packed office. “The movers are coming in the morning.”

“Well then, do you suppose you could use some help? I could get some burger king or taco bell.”

She looked at him for a long moment, swallowing the knob in her throat. “That would be lovely. Mexican. I mean, ‘taco bell,’” she said. “Thank you.”

He let her pay for it—“You’re making the big bucks now,” he said—and he was a surprisingly conscientious packer, padding her framed pictures carefully and wrapping her knick-knacks in individual sheets of spun fiber.

“Well then,” he said, once he’d finished writing out a description of his latest box’s contents on its outside, “you always told me that Hill Rats were Hill Rats for life, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” she said. She knew she should explain, but they’d had the argument about it three times since the new PAC had contacted her and offered her the executive director position. The explanation wouldn’t get any better now that she’d made up her mind.

The new PAC, The Association for a Human-Readable World, was the brainchild of some people she’d worked with while she was on the Hill. They’d asked her to hire a team, to scout an office, and then to camp out in the offices of various important committee chairmen until they passed a law limiting the scope of emergent networking meshes. The Europeans had enacted legislation requiring cops, hydroelectric agencies, banks, hospitals, and aviation authorities to use “interrogatable” networks within ten days of The Downtime. With fifteen thousand dead in Western Europe alone, with Florence in flames and Amsterdam under two meters of water, it was an easy call. The US had scoffed at them and pointed to the economic efficiencies of a self-governing network, but the people who were funding Human-Readable World wanted to know where old concepts like “transparency” and “accountability” and “consent of the governed” fit in when the world’s essential infrastructure was being managed by nonsentient ant-colony simulations.

“Be gentle with us, okay?” he said.

“Oh, I wish I had your confidence in my abilities,” she said, sucking on her big-gulp of coke.

He put down his food and looked hard at her. He stared longer than was polite, even for (ex-) lovers, and she began to squirm.

“What?” she said.

“You’re not putting me on. Amazing. Patricia Lourdes McCavity, you have felled an empire and you are setting yourself up to fell another—and it’s one that I’m pretty heavily invested in, both professionally and financially.”

“Come on,” she said. “I’m good, but I’m not superwoman. I was part of a team.”

“I’ve read your briefs. Position papers. Opinions. Speeches. Hell, your press-releases. They were the most cogent, convincing explanations for intellectual property reform I’d ever read. You weren’t the judge, but you were his clerk. You weren’t the committee chairman, but you were her head staffer. Taco Bell underestimated you. Coke underestimated you. Starbucks underestimated you. Disney underestimated you. Vivendi and Sony underestimated you. Now you’re running your own organization, and it’s pointed at me, and I’m scared shitless, you want to know the truth. I’m not underestimating you.” He’d drawn his dark eyebrows together while he spoke, and lowered his head, so that he was looking up at her from under his brow, looking intense as the day they’d met, when he was delivering a brilliant lecture on ant-colony optimization to a large lay audience at the law-school, fielding the Q&A with such convulsive humor and scalding lucidity that he’d melted her heart.

She felt herself blushing, then wondered if she was flushing. She still loved him and still craved the feeling of his skin on hers, wanted nothing more than another lost weekend with him, taking turns being the strong one and being the one who surrendered, soothing each other and spoiling each other. Thinking of that first meeting brought back all those feelings with keen intensity that made her breasts ache and her hands flutter on the box she was eating off of.

“Rainer,” she began, then stopped. She took a couple deep breaths. “I’m not gunning for you, you know. You and I want the same thing: a world that we can be proud to live in. Your family’s company has contributed more to the public good than any of us can really appreciate—”

He blushed now, too. She never talked about his father’s role in the earliest build-outs of ant-based emergent routing algorithms, about the family fortune that he’d amassed through the company that bore his name still, thirty years after he’d stepped down as Chairman of the Board. Rainer was a genius in his own right, she knew, and his own contributions to the field were as important as his father’s, but he was haunted by the idea that his esteem in the field was due more to his surname than his research. He waved his hands at her and she waved hers back.

“Shush. I’m trying to explain something to you. Between your father and you, the world has increased its capacity and improved its quality of life by an order of magnitude. You’ve beaten back Malthus for at least another century. That makes you heroes.

“But your field has been co-opted by corrupt interests. When you study the distributions, you can see it clearly: The rich and the powerful get to their destinations more quickly; the poor are routed through franchise ghettoes and onto toll-roads; the more important you are, the fewer number of connections you have to make when you fly, the better the chance that you’ll get a kidney when you need it. The evidence is there for anyone to see, if only you look. We need standards for this—we need to be able to interrogate the system and find out why it does what it does. That’s an achievable goal, and a modest one: We’re just asking for the same checks and balances that we rely on in the real world.”

He looked away and set down his taco. “Trish, I have a lot of respect for you. Please remember that when I tell you this. You are talking nonsense. The network is, by definition, above corruption. You simply can’t direct it to give your cronies a better deal than the rest of the world. The system is too complex to game. Its behavior can’t be predicted—how could it possibly be guided? Statistics can be manipulated to ‘prove’ anything, but everyone who has any clue about this understands that this is just paranoid raving—”

She narrowed her eyes and sucked in a breath, and he clamped his lips shut, breathed heavily through his nose, and went on.

“Sorry. It’s just wrong, is all. Science isn’t like law. You deal with shades of grey all the time, make compromises, seek out balance. I’m talking about mathematical truths here, not human-created political constructs. There’s no one to compromise with—a human-readable emergent network just doesn’t exist. Can’t exist. It doesn’t make sense to say it. It’s like asking for me to make Pi equal three. Pi means something, and what it means isn’t three. Emergent networks mean not-human-readable.”

She looked at him, and he looked at her, and they looked at each other. She felt a sad smile in the corners of her lips, and saw one tug at his, and then they both broke out in grins.

“We’re going to be seeing a lot of each other,” she said.

“Oh yes, we are,” he said.

“Across a committee room.”

“A podium.”

“On talk-shows.”

“Opposite sides.”

“Right.”

“No fighting dirty, okay?” he said, raising his eyebrows and showing her his big brown eyes. She snorted.

“Give me a hug and go home,” she said. “I’ll see you at the hearings when they introduce my bill.”

He hugged her, and she smelled him, thinking, this is the last time I’ll smell this smell.

“Rainer,” she said, holding him at arm’s length.

“Yes?” he said.

“I’m going to call you, when I have questions about ant-colony optimization, all right?”

He looked at her.

“I need the best expertise I can get. It’s in your interest to see to it that I’m well-informed.”

Slowly, he nodded. “Yes, you’re right. I’d like that. I’ll call you when I have questions about policy, all right?”

“You’re on,” she said, and they hugged again, fiercely.

Once he was gone, she permitted herself the briefest of tears. She knew that she was right and that she was going to make a fool out of him, but she didn’t want to think of that right then. She felt the place behind her ear where he’d kissed her before going home and looked around her office, five years of her life in thirty banker’s boxes ready to be shipped across the country tomorrow, according to a route that would be governed from moment to moment by invisible, notional, ridiculous insects.

She ate more taco bell. The logo was a pretty one, really, and now that it had been adopted by every mom-and-pop burrito joint in the world, they’d really leveled the playing field. She thought about the old Taco Bell mystery-meat and plastic cheese and took a bite of the ground beef and sharp Monterey Jack that had come from her favorite little place on the corner, and permitted herself to believe, for a second, anyway, that she’d made that possible.

She was going to kick ant ass on the Hill.

3. Conflict of Insect

Trish gathered her staff in the board room and wrote the following in glowing letters on the wall with her fingertip, leaving the text in her expressive schoolmarm’s handwriting rather than converting it to some sterile font: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”

Her staff, all five of them, chuckled softly. “Recognize it?” she asked, looking round at them.

“Pee-Wee Herman?” said the grassroots guy, who was so young it ached to look at him, but who could fire a cannonload of email into any congressional office on twelve hours’ notice. He never stopped joking.

The lawyer cocked an eyebrow at him and stroked her moustache, a distinctive gesture that you could see in any number of courtv archives of famous civil-rights battles, typically just before she unloaded both barrels at the jury-box and set one or another of her many precedents. “It’s Martin Luther King, right?”

“Close,” Trish said.

“Geronimo,” guessed the paralegal, who probably wasn’t going to work out after all, being something of a giant flake who spent more time on the phone to her girlfriend than filing papers and looking up precedents.

“Nope,” Trish said, looking at the other two staffers—the office manager and the media guy—who shrugged and shook their heads. “It’s Gandhi,” she said.

They all went, “Ohhhh,” except the grassroots guy, who crossed to the wall and used his fingertip to add, “And then they assassinate you.”

“I’m too tough to die,” the lawyer said. “And you’re all too young. So I think we’re safe.”

“Okay,” Trish said. “This is an official pep talk. They’re playing dirty now. Last night, my car tried to take me to Arlington via Detroit. My email is arriving on a 72-hour time-delay. My phone doesn’t ring, or it rings all night long. I’ve had to switch it off.

“But what all of this means is that I’ve got more uninterrupted work-time than ever and I’m getting reacquainted with my bicycle.”

“Every number I call rings at my ex-girlfriend’s place,” the grassroots guy said. “I think we’re going to get back together!”

“That’s the right attitude, boy-o,” the lawyer said. “When life gives you SARS, make sarsaparilla. I appear to be unable to access any of my personal files, and any case-law I query shows up one sentence at a time. I’ve discovered that the Georgetown University law-library makes a very nice latte and serves a terrific high tea, and I’ve set Giselle to work on refiling and cross-indexing twenty years’ worth of yellow pads that had previously sat mouldering in a storage locker that I was paying far too much for.”

“Which has given Giselle a rare opportunity to explore the rich civil rights history that you embody,” Trish said, looking pointedly at the paralegal. “But I suspect that she could use a hand, possibly from a grad student or two who could get some credit for this. Let’s ask around at Georgetown, okay?”

The lawyer nodded. The office manager pointed out that their bill-payments were going astray after they’d been dispatched to their suppliers but before they were debited from their—dwindling—account, which meant that they were getting a couple days’ worth of free cash-flow. Only the media guy was glum, since he couldn’t field, make, or review calls or press-releases, which made him pretty useless indeed.

“Right,” she said, and scribbled something on one of the steno pads she’d bought for everyone when their email started going down three times a day. “This guy owes me from back in the copyright wars—I fed him some good stories that he used to launch his career. He was the ABNBC Washington bureau chief until last year and now he’s teaching J-School at Columbia. Take the afternoon train to Manhattan and bring him back with you tonight. Don’t take no for an answer. Tell him to bring his three most promising protégés, and tell him that they’ll have all the access they need to produce an entire series on the campaign. Sleeping on our sofas. Following us to the toilet. Everything on the record. Do-able?”

“It’s do-able,” the media guy said. “I’m on it.”

Once they’d all cleared out, the lawyer knocked on her door. “You going to be all right?” she asked.

Trish waved her hands at the piles of briefing books, red-lined hardcopies, marked-up magazine articles, and memos from her Board of Directors. “Of course!” she said. She shook her head. “Probably. We never thought we’d get this far, remember? All this psy-ops shit they’re pulling, it’s just more proof that we’re on the right track. No one should be able to do this. It’s the opposite of democracy. It’s the opposite of civil discourse.”

The lawyer smoothed her moustache. “Right on,” she said. “You should be proud. This is a hell of a fight, and I’m glad to be part of it. You know we’d follow you into the sun, right?”

Trish fluttered her hands. “God, don’t give me that kind of responsibility.”

“All right then, into the ocean. We’re making this happen, is what’s important.”

“Thanks, babe,” Trish said. She put on a brave smile until the lawyer had backed out of the office, then stared down at her calendar and looked at her morning schedule. Three congressional staffers, a committee co-chair, an ACLU researcher, and the head of the newly formed Emergent Network Suppliers’ Industry Association—a man she had last seen in her office at UCLA, backing away from a long and melancholy hug.

When he rang off the phone and joined her, finally, she straightened out her smart cardigan and said, “Rainer, you’re certainly looking . . . well.”

“. . . funded,” he finished, with a small smile. The Emergent Network Suppliers’ Industry Association’s new offices were in a nice Federal Revival building off Dupont Circle, with lots of stained glass that nicely set off the sculptural and understated furniture. “It’s not as grand as appearances suggest, Trish. We got it for a song from the receivers in the Church of Scientology’s bankruptcy, furnishings included. It is nice though. Don’t you think?”

“It’s lovely,” she said. Around her, staffers bustled past in good suits and good shoes and smart haircuts. “Hard to believe you only set up shop a week ago,” she said.

“It came furnished, remember,” he said.

“Oh yes, so you said,” she said, watching a kid who looked like he’d gone tops in his class at the Naval Academy put his ankles up on the plasticized return beside his desk and tilt his chair, throwing his head back with wild laughter at whatever it was some other Hill Rat (in her mind, it was a key Congressman’s aide—some old frat buddy of Mr. Navy 2048) was saying at the phone’s other end.

She looked back at Rainer and saw that he was staring where she had.

“Well, it’s a far cry from academic research,” he said.

“I know you’ll be very good at it. You can explain things without making it seem like an explanation. The first lesson I ever learned on the Hill was, ‘If you’re explaining—’”

“‘—you’re losing,’“ he said. “Yeah, I’ve heard that. Well, you’re the old hand here, I’m just learning as I go. Trying not to make too many mistakes and to learn from the ones I do make.”

“Do you want some free advice, Rainer?”

He sat down in one of the chairs, which bulged and sloshed as it conformed itself to his back and butt. He patted the upholstered jelly beside him. “You may always assume that I would be immensely grateful for your advice, Trish,” he said.

She sat down and crossed her legs, letting her sensible shoe hang loose. “Right. DC is a busy place. In academic circles, in tech circles, you might get together to feel out your opponent, or to make someone’s acquaintance, or to see an old friend. You might get together to enjoy the company of another human being.

“We do that in DC, after working hours. Strictly evenings and weekends. When you schedule a meeting during office hours, it has to have a purpose. Even if it appears to have no purpose, it has a purpose. There’s a protocol to meetings, a secret language, that’s known to every Hill Rat and written nowhere. What time you have the meeting, who’s there, who’s invited, who knows it, how long you schedule, whether you cater: they all say little things about the purpose of the meeting. Even if you have no reason to call the meeting, one will be read into it.

“If this was any other city in the world, it would make perfect sense for you to look me up once you got to DC. We’re still friends, I still think about you from time to time, but here in DC, you calling me over for a meeting, this kind of meeting, at this time of day, it means you’re looking to parley. You want to strike a deal before my bill goes to the committee. I don’t know how well you know the Hill, so I don’t want to impute any motives to you. But if you took a meeting like this with anyone else, that’s what they’d assume.”

Rainer’s forehead crinkled.

“No Fretting,” she said. Then she smiled a sad smile. “Oh, Fret if you want. You’re a big boy.”

He twiddled his thumbs, caught himself at it, and folded his hands in his lap. “Huh,” he said. “Well. I did want to talk to you because it’s been a while and because we meant a lot to each other. I also wanted to talk to you about the bill, because that’s what I’m here to do, at a pretty decent salary. I also wanted to see you because I had an idea that you’d be different here in your native habitat, and well, that’s true.”

She refused to let that make her self-conscious. Of course she was different, but it wasn’t geographic. The last time they’d seen each other, they were lovers and friends. Now they were ex-lovers who were being paid to accomplish opposing, mutually exclusive objectives. She knew that there was a certain power in not saying anything, so she wrapped herself in silence and waited for him to say something. She didn’t have to wait long.

“Your bill is going to committee?”

“Well, I certainly hope so,” she said. “That’s what I’m here for, after all. The discussion draft has been circulating for a week, and we’re confident we’ll see it introduced and assigned to committee by the end of this week. That’s what we’re told, anyway. It’s got strong bipartisan support. Selling Congress on the importance of human-generated governance is pretty easy. Wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”

He grinned. “You’re trying to psych me out.”

“Maybe,” she said, grinning back. “But that’s nothing compared to the psych job that we’ve been getting down at my office.” She told him about the phone weirdness, the oddball traffic-management. “Someone on your side has a funny sense of humor.”

His smile faded. “You’re still trying to fake me out,” he said. “If you’re seeing corruption in the net, it’s because you’re looking so hard, you can’t help but find it. You’re reading malice into accident. Dead spots aren’t personal, you know. This is a law of nature—the networks emerge solutions, they’re the best they can come up with. If you don’t like the results, talk to nature, not me.”

She shrugged. “Whatever, Rainer. I know what’s happening. You’ll believe what you want to believe.” She pursed her lips and made an effort at controlling her irritation. “It’s really happening, and it’s not helping your side. If you know who’s responsible, you might let him know that the dirty tricks are what convinced Senator Beauchamp’s staff to green-light the bill. Conspiracy is supposed to be beneath the surface. It doesn’t look so good when it’s exposed to fresh air and sunshine.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “Doesn’t matter, I suppose. All right, message received. If I happen to run into someone whom I think should hear it, I’ll be sure to pass it on, okay?”

“That’s all I ask,” she said.

“You want to talk about the bill now?”

“Have you seen the discussion draft?”

He squirmed. “No,” he admitted. “I didn’t know it existed until just now.”

“I’d offer to send you a copy, but I expect it would take a week to arrive, if it ever did. Why don’t you ask that guy,” she gestured at the Navy man, “to get you a copy? He looks like he knows his way around. And then drop by my office if you want to chat about it.”

She stood up and tugged at her cardigan again. “It’s been very nice seeing you,” she said. She picked up her coat and her mitts. “Good luck settling in.”

He gave her a hug—which felt weird, hugging was strictly west-of-the-Mississippi, and she broke it off firmly—and showed her to the door. The first snows were coming in, and the steps were slightly icy, so she maneuvered them slowly, carefully. When she reached the road, he was no longer in the doorway. He was standing right behind her, breath coming out in foggy huffs.

“Trish,” he said, then stopped. His arms dropped to his sides and his shoulders slumped.

“Rainer,” she said, keeping her voice calm and neutral.

“God,” he said. “God. How’d this happen, Trish? Look, I’ve never been happy the way I was with you. I haven’t been that happy since. God, Trish—”

“Rainer,” she said again, taking one of his hands, firmly, motherly. “Rainer. Stop it. You’re here to do a job, and your job requires that you and I keep it on a professional level. It doesn’t matter how it happened—” But it did, didn’t it? She’d left him to come east and do something he thought of as wrong-headed and backwards and superstitious. But she’d left him, not the other way around. And he’d never recovered, though she’d built herself a new life here. It wasn’t a contest (but she was winning anyway). “It doesn’t matter. We respect each other. That’s enough.”

He deflated and she said, “Oh, come here,” and gave him a long and soulful hug, right there on the street, knowing that she was giving the hug and he was taking it. Then she let him go, spun him round, and gave him a little push back toward his office.

By the time she reached the corner and looked back over her shoulder, he was nowhere to be seen.

That afternoon, her phone started ringing normally, with actual people on the other end. Her outbound calls were connected. Her email was delivered. Her car got her home in record time. She sighed as she eased it into her driveway and carried her briefcase inside and poured herself a very small glass of Irish whisky so rare that it had been known to make grown men weep. Normally, she saved it for celebrations, but if she was celebrating something, she was damned if she knew what it was.

Her phone rang as she was licking the last few drops of liquor from the little glass. It was the lawyer, with news.

“I just stopped by the office and found a messenger on the doorstep. He had hard-copy of a press-release from Senator Beauchamp’s office. They’re introducing the bill in the morning. Congrats, kid, you did it.”

Trish set the glass down and said :whoopee: very quietly and very emphatically.

“You’re durned tootin’,” the lawyer said. “And double for me.”

Of course, it wasn’t over by a long shot. Getting a bill introduced was not the same as getting it through committee. Getting it through committee was not the same as getting it passed in the Senate, and getting it passed in the Senate was not the same as getting it passed in the House, and then who the hell knew what the hereditary Chimp-in-Chief in the Oval Office would do when it was passed through the bars of his cage with his morning banana.

But she had ridden back into town less than a year before, and she had gone from nothing to this. The ACLU was supporting the bill, and EFF, EPIC, all the old civ-lib mafia had opened their arms to her. She poured herself one more very small whisky, gave herself a fragrant bath and put herself to bed, grinning like a fool.

“There are four news-crews, six print reporters, and a couple of others here to see you,” the office-manager said. The office phones were out again, but that hadn’t stopped a fair number of determined people from figuring out that they could actually move their physical being from one part of Washington to another and have a real, old-fashioned face-to-face. The lawyer and she had each taken a dozen press “calls” that morning, with their embedded reporters from Columbia J-School perched obtrusively in the corners of their offices, taking copious notes and filming constantly.

“Others?”

“A mixed bag. Some Hill people, some I’m not sure about.”

Trish stood and stretched out her back, listening to it pop. She usually worked in bursts, typing or talking for an hour, then taking a little walk to gather her thoughts and touch base with her co-workers. Today, she’d been glued to her seat from 7AM to after lunchtime, and her back and butt were shrieking at her.

She walked into the front area, trailed by her reporter. She recognized some of the journos and some of the Congressional staffers, and a local rep from a European Privacy think-tank in Brussels, and—Rainer.

He was turned out in a very natty suit and a homburg, a fashion that had recently come back to DC, and she knew that he’d been put together by a personal shopper. Her own Board had suggested to her, matter-of-factly, that she should get one of her own once the bill cleared committee, since she’d be doing tons of press and as sharp a dresser as she fancied herself, she was no pro. Her prodigious talents, they assured her, lay elsewhere.

He took her hand with both of his and gave her a long, intense hand-shake that drew stares from the journos and the think-tank man.

“Nice to see you again, Ms. McCavity,” he said, somberly.

“A pleasure as always, Mr. Feinstein,” she said.

“I’m sorry to drop in on you unannounced,” he said, “but I hoped that I could have just a moment of your time.” Belatedly, he remembered to take off his silly hat and then he fumbled with the right way to hold it, settling for dropping it to his waist and upending it. She thought he looked like a panhandler in a Charlie Chaplin movie and she suppressed a smile. His curly hair had been gelled into a careful configuration that reminded her of the glossy ringlets of a black poodle.

“I suppose we can do that,” she said. She turned to her other visitors. “Who’s got a 3PM deadline?” she said. Two of the print-reporters held up their hands. “You, then you,” she said. “Who’s got a 5PM filing deadline? 6PM? 10PM?” She triaged them all, promised to meet the think-tank man for dinner at an Ethiopian place in Adams-Morgan, and led Rainer into her office and closed the door.

He looked at her embedded reporter and cocked his head.

“Sorry, Rainer,” she said. “I have a shadow for the duration. Just pretend he isn’t here. You don’t mind, do you, dear?” she said to the reporter, who was very young and very bright and missed nothing. He shook his head and made some notes.

“The bill’s dead,” Rainer said, after he’d sat down.

“Oh really?” she said.

“Just heard from Senator Rittenhouse, personally. He takes the position that this should be in Commerce, not Judiciary, and is calling hearings to make that happen.”

Rittenhouse was another powerful committee chairman, and this wasn’t good news. What’s more, he was in the pocket of the network operators and had been for a decade, so much so that editorialists and talk-radio types called him “The Senator from The Internet.”

Still, it wasn’t catastrophic. “That’s interesting,” she said, “but it’s a far cry from killing the bill. It’s pretty standard, in fact. Just slows things down.” She smiled at him. He was just a kid sometimes, so out of his depth here. He reminded her of the Relatives she’d met that day, the little boys in their miniature suits running on the beach.

He shifted in his seat and fondled his hat-brim. “Well, I guess we’ll see. My press-liaison has set up a post-mortem debate on one of the news-networks tonight, and I thought you might want to represent the other side?”

She smiled again. He was twice the rhetorician that she was, but he had no idea how to play the game. She’d have to be careful to bruise, not break him.

“We, as a society, make trade-offs all the time,” Rainer said. He was wearing a different suit this evening, something that Trish had to admit looked damned good on the studio monitors (better than her frumpy blouse and wool winter-weight trousers). “We trade a little bit of privacy for a little bit of security when we show identification before going into a federal building—”

The ewok held up his paw. “But how much should we be willing to trade, Ms. McCavity?”

She looked into the camera, keeping her eyes still, the way she’d been told to if she didn’t want to appear tourettic. “Wickett, when Franklin said, ‘Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty,’ he wasn’t spouting empty rhetoric, he was laying the groundwork for this enduring democratic experiment that we all love. Look, we’re not opposed to the use of autonomous networks for some applications, even most applications, with appropriate safeguards and checks and balances. No nation on earth has the reliance that we do on these networks. Are they an appropriate way of advising you on the best way to get to the mall on a busy Saturday? Absolutely, provided that everyone gets the best advice the system can give, regardless of economic status or influence. But should they be used to figure out whom the FBI should open an investigation into? Absolutely not. We use judges and grand juries and evidence to establish the sufficiency of a request to investigate a private citizen who is considered innocent until proven guilty. We learned that lesson the hard way, during the War on Terrorism and the Ashcroft witch-hunts. Should we trade grand juries and judges for ant-colonies? Do you want the warrant for your wiretap issued by an accountable human being or by a simulated ant-hill?”

The ewok turned to the camera. “Both sides make a compelling case. What do you think? When we come back, we’ll take your calls and questions.” The lights dimmed and it adjusted its collar and cracked its hairy knuckles on the table before it. Ever since it had made the move to a pbs, it had been grooming its fur ever-more conservatively and trying out a series of waistcoats and short pants. It turned to her and stared at her with its saucer-sized black button eyes. “You know, I just wanted to say thanks—I had self-identified as an ewok since I was five years old, but Lucasfilm just wouldn’t license the surgery, so I went through every day feeling like a stranger in my body. It wasn’t until your law got enacted that I was able to find a doctor who’d do it without permission.”

She shook its paw. “It wasn’t my law, but I helped. I’m glad it helped you out.” She unconsciously wiped her palm on her thigh as the ewok turned to his make-up boy and let him comb out its cheeks. She stared at Rainer, who wasn’t looking good. She’d had him on the ropes since their opening remarks, and the ewok kept interrupting him to let her rebut—and now she knew why.

Rainer had his phone clamped to his head, and he was nodding vigorously and drumming his fingers. He was sweating, and it was making his hair come un-coiffed. Trish’s own phone buzzed and she looked down at in surprise. It was her voice-mail, coming back to life again. It had started when she got to the studio—when she got within a few yards of Rainer, she realized. Messages coming in. She’d transcribed a dozen in the green-room before they’d dragged her into makeup.

The studio lights blinked and Rainer popped the phone back into his pocket and the ewok turned to look back into the camera, examining the ticker scrolling past his prompter. He introduced them again, then turned to Trish.

“Ms. McCavity, Alberto in San Juan writes in wanting to know what changes we should institute in the networks.”

She said, “It’s not my place to say what technical changes the networks need to have. That’s where experts like Mr. Feinstein come in. We’d ask the administrative branch to solicit comments from people like him to figure out exactly what technical changes could be made to allow us to remain competitive without giving up our fundamental liberties in order to beat the occasional traffic jam.”

“Mr. Feinstein?”

He grinned and leaned forward. “It’s interesting that Ms. McCavity should disavow any technical expertise, since that’s what we’ve been saying all along. If she’s getting stuck in traffic, it’s because there’s a lot of traffic. The ant-nets route five thousand percent more traffic than our nation’s highways ever accommodated without them, and they’ve increased the miles-per-hour-per-capita-per-linear-mile by six thousand, four hundred percent. You’re stuck in traffic? Fine. I get stuck sometimes too. But for every hour you spend stuck today, you’re saving hundreds of hours relative to the time your parents spent in transit.

“The other side of this debate are asking for something impossible: They want us to modify the structure of the network, which is a technical construct, built out of bits and equations, to accommodate a philosophical objective. They assert that this is possible, but it’s like listening to someone assert that our democracy would be better served if we had less gravity, or if two plus two equaled five. Whether or not that’s true, it’s not reasonable to ask for it.”

The ewok turned to her.

She said, “Well, we’ve heard a great deal about the impossibility of building democratic fundamentals into the network, but nothing about the possibilities. This hard, no-compromise line is belied by the fact that we know that the rich and powerful manipulate the network to their own advantage, something that statistics have proven out—”

“See, this is exactly how these Human-Readable types do it, it’s how their media training goes. They are here to ask for changes to technical specifications, but they disavow any technical knowledge, and when they’re called on this, they spout dubious ‘statistics’ that ‘prove’ that up is down, black is white, and that millionaires can get to the movies in half the time that paupers can. The Emergent Network Suppliers’ Industry Association represents the foremost experts in this field, but you don’t need to be an expert to know that these networks work. The ants take us where we want to go, in the shortest time, with the highest reliability. Anyone who doubts that can dig out her map and compass and sextant and try to navigate the world without their assistance, the way they do in Europe.”

Her mouth was open. Media training? Where did he get this business about media training? “I’m not sure where Mr. Feinstein gets his information about my media training from, but personally, I’d rather talk about networks.” She paused. “Let’s talk about Europe, where they have found ways of creating transparency and accountability for these ‘unregulatable’ algorithms, where the sky hasn’t fallen and the final trump hasn’t sounded. What do they know that we don’t?”

“What indeed?” the ewok said, breaking in and giving her the last word again. “More of your questions after this break.”

They got in their cars together after they’d scrubbed off their makeup and shaken paws with the ewok, riding down in the elevator shoulder to shoulder, slumped and sweaty and exhausted. They didn’t speak, and the silence might have been mistaken for companionable by someone who didn’t know any better.

They got off at the same floor in the parking garage and turned in the same direction, and Trish spied his car, parked next to hers, the last two on the floor. Quickening her step, she opened her door and turned the car on, backing up so that she was right behind Rainer.

He backed out slowly, looking at her quizzically in his rearview, but she refused to meet his eye, and when he pulled out, she rode his bumper.

“Sweet fancy Moses,” she breathed, as the traffic parted before them, allowing them to scythe through the streets, onto the beltway. She hung grimly onto his bumper, cutting off cars that tried to shift into her lane. Moving this fast after so much time stuck on the roads—it felt like flying. She laughed and then got a devilish idea.

Spotting a gap in the passing lane, she zipped ahead of Rainer and swerved back into his lane so that she was in the lead. As though a door had slammed shut, the traffic congealed before them into a clot as thick as an aneurysm. She hissed out a note of satisfaction, then waited patiently while Rainer laboriously passed her again, and the traffic melted away once more.

It was tempting not to get off at her exit, but she had to get some sleep, and so she reluctantly changed lanes. There wasn’t much traffic on the road, but every traffic light glowed vindictive red all the way to her house.

The Chairman of her Board messengered over a hand-written note of congratulations that was on her doorstep. Beneath it was a note from Rainer’s great-aunt, with the best wishes of his mother in neat pen beneath it. She read its kind words as she boiled the kettle, and put it into her pile of correspondence to answer. Rainer’s great-aunt wanted to know if she had met a nice boy in DC yet, but she didn’t come right out and say it—too subtle for that. The women in Rainer’s family got all the subtlety, and they recognized their own kind. It was why she and the old lady kept writing to each other; that and so that the Relatives could reassure themselves that someone in full possession of lifeguardly skills and a level head was watching out for Rainer’s interests.

This business of hand-written, hand-delivered notes and letters was actually kind of charming, she thought as she put her feet up on her coffee table and opened up her flask of very special Irish whisky again.

She and Rainer went head to head in half a dozen more skirmishes that month—her phone popping back to life every time she got within shouting distance of him. The on-again/off-again hearings in both Judiciary and Commerce never quite materialized.

She was better at playing the game, but he was a fast learner, and he had much deeper pockets and working network infrastructure. Her Board approved her renting out an empty suite of offices below their office and converting them to bedrooms for her staff for days when their cars couldn’t get them home. They secretly borrowed elderly network appliances from relatives or bought them in the dollar-a-pound bin at the Salvation Army, but always, within a few hours of being in the possession of someone in the employ of the Association for a Human-Readable World, the devices would seize up and lose their routes to the network. Their offices started to fill up with dead soldiers, abandoned network boxes that no one could get online.

The embedded journalists went home after the second week. Their own gear was seizing up, too, as though the curse of the Association for a Human-Readable World was rubbing off on them. They vowed to return when things got interesting again, but they were of no use to anyone without working cameras, mics, and notepads.

Christmas came and went, and New Year’s, and then February arrived and the city turned to ice and slush and perpetual twilight. The paralegal quit—she needed a job where the phones worked so that she could call her girlfriend. The media guy took a series of “personal days” and she wasn’t sure if he’d show up again, but it didn’t matter, because the press had stopped calling them.

Then came the second Downtime.

It struck during morning rush-hour on Valentine’s Day, a Monday, and it juddered the whole country to a halt for eight long days. The hospitals overflowed and doctors used motorized scooters to go from one place to another, unable to spread their expertise around with telemedicine. Firemen perished in blazes. Cops arrived too late at crime-scenes. Grocery stores didn’t get their resupplies, and schools dug out old chalk-boards and taught the few students who lived close enough to walk. Fed cops of all description went berserk, and could be seen walking briskly from one federal building to another, their faces grim.

And suddenly, miraculously, every journalist, policy-wonk, staffer, advisor, clerk, and cop in DC wanted to have a chat with the Association for a Human-Readable World.

She hired three more people that week, and borrowed four more from fellow-traveler organizations. Paying their salaries for the next four weeks would bottom out the group’s finances, but she knew that this was now or never, and the Board backed her, after some nail-biting debate.

Rainer showed up on the fourth day of the Downtime, and she found him standing, bewildered, in the hustle of her office as her staffers penned notes on steno pads to their contacts on the Hill and handed them to waiting bicycle couriers in space-program warmgear that swathed them from fingertips to eyeballs. She plucked him out of the bustle and brought him back to her office.

“I’ve got a hell of a nerve,” he said, sitting in her guest-chair.

“Really?” she said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Well, I haven’t been showing it off. But I’m about to. I need advice. My office is falling apart. You’ve been living with no communications and no travel for a year now, you know how to make it work. We’re completely lost. I’ve come to throw myself on your mercy.” He looked up at her with his big brown eyes, and then they crumpled shut as he made his Fretting face.

“You’re playing me, Rainer,” she said. “And it won’t work. Whatever I feel for you, I’ve got a job to do, and if this Downtime tells us anything, it’s that I’m doing the right thing, and you’re doing the wrong thing.”

He hung his head. He wasn’t even the slightest bit natty that day. She supposed that his personal assistant was stuck in Falls Church or Baltimore or somewhere, unable to get into the city. Judging from the slush and road-salt on his shoes, he must have walked the two miles between their offices.

“What’s more, I don’t have any advice to give you, in particular. We’re not faring well here because we’re doing something differently—we’re faring well because we’re doing what we’ve been at all along, because of a network outage that you claim is impossible, is a figment of our imagination. Those bike messengers: We’ve been their best customers for months now. Everyone else is begging for service from them, but they’re always here when we need them. We’ve got beds and changes of clothes and toilet-kits in the offices downstairs. We’ve been living through a Downtime for a couple of quarters now—we’ve hardly noticed the change. If you want to cope as well as we are, well, you can go back in time, rent out spare offices to house your staff, establish a good working relationship with a bike-messenger company, learn to navigate the Metro and the freeways by map, and all the other things we’ve done here.”

He looked defeated. He began to stand, to turn, to leave.

“Rainer,” she said.

He paused.

“Close the door and sit down,” she said.

He did, looking at her with so much hope that it made her eyes water.

“Here’s my offer,” she said. “You and I will lock ourselves in this office with the last draft of my bill. My staff will run interference for me with the Judiciary committee, and we will draft a version of my bill that we can both live with. We will jointly take it to Senators Beauchamp and Rittenhouse, with our blessings, and ask them to expedite it through both committees. Every Congresscritter on the Hill is sitting around with his thumb up his ass until the lights come back on. We can get this voted in by Tuesday.”

He stared down at his hands. “I can’t do it,” he said. “My job is not to compromise. I just can’t do it.”

“Come on, Rainer, think outside the box for a minute here.” Her heart was pounding. This could really be it. This could be the solution she’d been waiting for. “Even if the bill passes, there’s going to be a long deliberation over the contours of the regulation, probably at the FCC. You’ll be able to work on the bureau staffers and at the expert agencies, take ex-parte meetings and lobby on behalf of your employers. It’s all we’ve ever asked for: an expert discussion where the public interest gets a hearing alongside of private enterprise and government.”

But he was shaking his head, standing up to go. “You’re probably right, Trish,” he said. “I don’t know. What I know is, I can’t do what you’re asking of me. They’d just fire me.”

“If the Downtime continues, they won’t be able to fire you—they won’t even know what you’re up to until it’s too late. And then they’ll make the best that they can out of it. No one is better qualified to represent your side in the administrative agencies.”

He put his ridiculous hat on and wrapped his scarf around his neck, and they looked each other in the eyes for a long moment. She waited for the involuntary smile that looking into his eyes inevitably evoked, but it didn’t come.

“I don’t understand you, Trish. You won this incredible victory for cooperation, for collective ownership of our intellectual infrastructure. Ant-networks demand the same cooperation from the nodes, that my phone pass your car’s messages to his desk. Let’s just set aside the professional politics for a second. Just you and me. Tell me: How can you not support this?” He looked at her out from under his brows, staring intensely. He swallowed and said, “It was the surfer, wasn’t it?”

“What?” she said.

“The one who died. That’s why you’re doing this. You want to make up for him—”

She couldn’t believe he’d said it. Taken such a cheap shot. “I’m surprised you didn’t save that one for television, Rainer. Jesus. No, I’m doing this because it’s right. In case you haven’t noticed, your self-healing, uncorruptible network is down. People are suffering. The economy is tanking. The death toll is mounting. You won’t even bend one inch, one tenth of an inch, because you’re worried about losing your job.”

“Trish,” he said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

Her office door opened and there stood her embedded journalist. “I just got in from Manhattan,” he said. “Can I set up in that corner there again?”

“Be my guest,” she said, grateful for the distraction. Rainer looked at her, forehead scrunched, and then he left.

“It’s a good thing you’re not over him,” the lawyer said, pouring her another victory whisky. The bill had passed the House with only one opposing and two abstentions, and had squeaked through the Senate by five seats, at five minutes to midnight on the eighth day of the Downtime. They were halfway to the bar (where the office manager had been feeding twenties to the bartender to stay open) when the grid came back up, crawls springing to life on every surface and cars suddenly zipping forward in the characteristic high-speed ballet of efficiently routed traffic. They’d laughed themselves stupid all the way to the bar and after a brief but intense negotiation between the lawyer and the barman, he’d produced a bottle of Irish that was nearly half as good as the stuff Trish kept at home.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” Trish said, sipping tenderly at the booze.

“Come on, girl,” the lawyer said, twirling her moustache. “Be serious. You two had so much sexual energy in that room, it’s a wonder you didn’t make the bulbs explode. It’s how you got inside each other’s heads. You weren’t selling the committee, you were selling him, and that’s what made you so effective. We’re going to need that again at the FCC, too—so no getting over him until after then.”

Trish drank her whisky. She didn’t know what to say to that. He’d looked ten years older tonight, in the corridors, whispering to his committee members, to his staffers, his face drooping and wilted. She supposed she didn’t look any better. It had been, what, three days? since she’d had more than an hour’s sleep.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “How could he be so dumb? I mean, it’s obvious that the system is being gamed. Obvious that we’re being targeted through it. Yet he sits there, insisting that white is black, that up is down, that the network is autonomous and immune to all corruption.”

“It’s like a religion for them,” the lawyer said. “It doesn’t need explaining. It’s just right-living. It’s the Law.”

Trish thought back to the ceremony in the graveyard, the dirge and the prayers to a god no one believed in. Had Rainer really renounced his faith when he dropped out of Yeshiva?

“Here’s to a human-readable world,” Trish said, raising her glass. Around her, the staffers and borrowed staffers and hangers-on and even the barman raised their glasses and cheered. It was warm and the feeling swelled in her tummy and up her chest and through her face and she burst out in what felt like the biggest smile of her life.

She’d learned a long time ago never to send email while drunk, but it had been too much last night.

“What if, Rainer, what if—what if the reason for the Downtimes is that someone is manipulating the network and that’s breaking it. Did you ever wonder about that? Maybe the network is as good as you say it is—until someone screws it up by trying to get preferential treatment for his pals.

“Wouldn’t that be a kick in the teeth? We get five squillion percent increases in across-the-board routing efficiency, but in the end, it’s never enough for people who can’t be happy unless they’re happier than someone else.

“The thing that saves the human race, but if we adopt it, it will destroy us. Irony sucks.”

She’d signed it “Love,” but even drunk, she’d had the sense to take that out before sending it. Saying “Love” would have been no more appropriate than saying, “You know, I did save your cousin’s life.” She’d called in no favors, she’d run no blackmail, and she’d won anyway.

He rang her doorbell at 5AM. She was barely able to drag herself out of bed.

“I figured you’d be getting up to deal with the press soon,” he said, and she groaned. He was right. She’d earned some time off, but it’d be a month before she could take it. Too much press to do. She appreciated anew how much work it must have taken to be any of her old bosses from the copyright wars: the judge, the senator, the executive director of the PAC.

She was in her robe, and he was in jeans and a UCLA sweatshirt. He didn’t have any gel in his hair, which was matted down by the knit cap he’d been wearing. He looked adorable.

“They fired me this morning,” he said.

“Oh, hon—” she said.

“I would have quit,” he said. “I’m outmatched.”

She felt herself blush. Or was she flushing? She was suddenly aware of his smell, the boy smell, the smell that she could smell in his chest, in his scalp, in his tummy, lower . . . She straightened up and led him into the living room and started the coffee-maker going.

“When do you fly back, then?” she said.

He looked at her, smiling. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t booked a ticket.”

She felt an answering smile at the corners of her mouth and turned into the fridge to fetch out some gourmet MREs. “Bacon and eggs or pancakes?” she said, then laughed. “I guess bacon is out,” she said.

“Oh, I’m willing to bet that that bacon hasn’t been anywhere near a pig,” he said, “but I’ll have the pancakes, if you don’t mind.”

She set everything to perking and went into the bedroom to pull on something smart and camera-friendly, but everything was in the hamper, so she settled for jeans and a decent shirt from last-year’s wardrobe.

When she opened the door, he was standing right there, taller than her. “I think you’re right,” he said. “About the network. It’s the best explanation I’ve heard so far.”

She wrapped herself in silence again, waited for him to say more.

“You see, the true, neutral network is immune to corrupting influences and favoritism. So the existence of corruption and favoritism means that what we’ve got isn’t a true network. Which means you’re right! We need to have a hearing to get to the bottom of this, so that we can build the true network.” He smiled bravely. “I thought maybe you could use an expert in your corner who’d say that in a hearing?”

“Thanks,” she said, and slipped under his arm and back into the kitchen. Suddenly, she wanted very much to be back at her office, back with her staff, talking to reporters and overseeing a million details. “I’ll think about it.”

“I’m giving up my apartment at the end of the month—next Monday. I won’t be able to afford it without the Association’s salary,” he said.

Her place was big. A bedroom, a home office, a living room, and a dining room. It was a serious deal for DC, even outside the beltway. It could easily accommodate a second person, even if they weren’t sleeping together.

Her office—her staff—the press—the bill—her Board.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve got to get going. I’ll shower at the office. Got to get there in time to catch the Euro press-calls. Let me put your breakfast in a bag, okay?”

He looked whipsawed. “Uh, okay. Can I give you a ride?”

“No, I’ll need my car this afternoon. Thanks, though.” She kept her voice light, didn’t meet his eyes. Kept thinking: her office—her staff—the bill.

“Well,” he said. He turned for the door. Stopped. She tensed. He turned back to her. “Trish,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay. We just have religious differences, is all.”

She slipped past him and into her car, and left him standing in her driveway. As she asked the car to plot a route for her back to the Hill, she dug through her purse for a pocket-knife. At the next red light, she took her lapel and slashed at it, opening a rent in her shirt that reflected a little of what her heart was feeling. It made her feel a little better to do it.

—For Alice

© 2005 by CorDoc-Co, Ltd (UK).

Originally published in Future Washington,

edited by Ernest Lilley.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

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

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Parasite
Mira Grant

INTERLUDE 0: GENESIS

August 17, 2015: Time stamp 15:06.

[The recording is crisp enough to look like a Hollywood film, too polished to be real. The lab is something out of a science fiction movie, all pristine white walls and gleaming glass and steel equipment. Only one thing in this scene is fully believable: the woman standing in front of the mass spectrometer, her wavy blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, a broad smile on her face. She is pretty, with a classic English bone structure and the sort of pale complexion that speaks less to genetics and more to being the type of person who virtually never goes outside. There is a petri dish in her blue-gloved hand.]

DR. CALE: Doctor Shanti Cale, Diphyllobothrium symbogenesis viability test thirty-seven. We have successfully matured eggs in a growth medium consisting of seventy percent human cells, thirty percent biological slurry. A full breakdown of the slurry can be found in the appendix to my latest progress report. The eggs appear to be viable, but we have not yet successfully induced hatching in any of the provided growth mediums. Upon consultation with Doctor Banks, I received permission to pursue other tissue sources.

[She walks to the back of the room, where a large, airlock-style door has been installed. The camera follows her through the airlock, and into what looks very much like an operating theater. Two men are waiting there, faces covered by surgical masks. Dr. Cale pauses long enough to put down her petri dish and put on a mask of her own.]

DR. CALE: The subject was donated to our lab by his wife, following the accident which left him legally brain dead. For confirmation that the subject was obtained legally, please see the medical power of attorney attached to my latest progress report.

[The movement of her mask indicates a smile.]

DR. CALE: Well. Quasi-legally.

[Dr. Cale crosses to the body. Its midsection has been surrounded by a sterile curtain; the face is obscured by life support equipment, and by the angle of the shot. She pulls back the curtain to reveal the gleaming interior of the man’s sliced-open abdomen. The skin has been peeled back, and the blood has been suctioned away, revealing a wide array of colors. Liver brown, intestinal green, and glistening white, and the smooth pink sac of the stomach. Calmly, she reaches into the man’s body, pushing organs aside until the surface of the small intestine is revealed.]

DR. CALE: Scalpel.

[One of the masked men passes her the requested tool. She takes it, pressing down against the man’s intestine. He does not move. Her hand does not tremble.]

DR. CALE: I am not following strict sterile protocol, in part because infection is not a risk. The subject’s immune system has been supplemented. D. symbogenesis eggs were introduced to the subject’s system six days ago, fed into his body along with the nutrient paste we have been using to preserve basic biological functions.

[The surface of the intestine splits, spilling a thin film of brownish liquid over the surrounding organs. Dr. Cale ignores it as she sets the scalpel aside and thrusts her hand into the man’s body. He still does not move as she digs through his small intestine. When she finally retracts her hand, she is clutching something. She pulls down her mask with her free hand and directs a beatific smile toward the camera.]

DR. CALE: I am pleased to report that we have multiple fully-formed proglottids present in the subject’s body, as well as some partial strobila.

[She holds out her hand. The camera zooms in on the white specks writhing against her gloved fingers.]

DR. CALE: D. symbogenesis is capable of maturing when cultured inside a living human host. Ladies and gentlemen . . . at long last, it’s alive.

[The film ends there. There are no notes in Dr. Cale’s progress reports relating to the eventual fate, or original identity, of the first human subject used to culture D. symbogenesis. The medical power of attorney referenced in the recording has never come to light.]

[End report.]

June 23, 2021: Time stamp, 13:17.

This is not the first thing I remember.

This is the first thing that I was told to remember; this is the memory that has been created for me by the hands and eyes and words of others. The first thing I remember has no need for hands, or eyes, or words. It has no need for others. It only needs the dark and the warm and the distant, constant sound of drums. The first thing I remember is paradise.

This is not the first thing I remember. But this is the first thing you will need to know.

Sally Mitchell was dying.

She was up against an army—an army that had begun with paramedics, moved on to doctors, and finally, to complicated life support machines that performed their function with passionless efficiency—but none of that seemed to make any difference. She had always been determined, and now, she was determined to die. Silently, and despite everyone’s best efforts, she was slipping farther and farther away.

It was not a swift process. Every cell in her body, damaged and undamaged alike, fought to retain cohesion. They struggled to pull in oxygen and force out the toxins that continued to build in her tissues and bloodstream. Her kidney function had been severely impaired in the accident, and waste chemicals had ceased to be automatically eliminated. She no longer responded in any meaningful way to external stimuli. Once she was removed from the machines that labored to keep her body functional, her life would come to an end in very short order.

Sally Mitchell existed in a state of living death, sustained by technology, but slipping away all the same.

Her hospital room was crowded—unusually so, for a woman standing in death’s doorway, but her doctor had hoped that by bringing her family to see her, he could better plead his case for taking her off life support. The damage from the accident had been too great. Tests had shown that Sally herself—the thinking, acting girl they remembered—was gone. “Clinical brain death” was the term he used, over and over again, trying to make them understand. Sally was gone. Sally was not coming back. And if they kept her on artificial life support for much longer, more of her organs would begin to shut down, until there was nothing left. If her family approved the procedures to harvest her organs now, her death could mean life for others. By pairing her organs with splices taken from her SymboGen implant, the risks of rejection could be reduced to virtually nothing. Dozens of lives could be saved, and all her family had to do was approve. All her family had to do was let her go.

All they had to do was admit that she was never waking up.

Sally Mitchell opened her eyes.

The ceiling was so white it burned, making her eyes begin to water in a parody of tears. She stared up at it for almost a minute, unable to process the message she was getting from her nerves. The message wanted her to close her eyes. Another part of her brain awakened, explaining what the burning sensation in her retinas meant.

Sally closed her eyes.

The doctor was still pleading with her family, cajoling and comforting them in turn as he explained what would happen next if they agreed to have Sally declared legally dead. His voice was no more or less compelling than the buzz of the machines around her. None of his words meant anything to her, and so she dismissed them as unimportant stimuli in a world that was suddenly full of unimportant stimuli. She focused instead on getting her eyes to open again. She wanted to see the white ceiling. It was . . . interesting.

The second time Sally opened her eyes, it was easier. Blinking came after that, and then the realization that she could breathe—her body reminded her of breathing, of the movement that it required, the pulling in of air through the nose, the expelling of air through the mouth. The respirator that was supposed to be handling the breathing process began beeping shrilly, confused in its mechanical way by her sudden involvement. The stimulus from the man in the ceiling-colored coat became more important as it grew louder, hurting her ears.

Sally sat up.

More machines started to beep. Sally winced, and then blinked, surprised by her own automatic reaction. She winced again, this time on purpose. The man in the ceiling-colored coat stared at her and said something she didn’t understand. She looked blankly back at him. Then the other people in the room started making noise, as shrill and confused as the machines around her, and one of them flung herself onto the bed, putting her arms around Sally and making a strange sound in her throat, like she was choking.

More people came into the room. The machines stopped making noise, but the people kept on doing it, making sounds she would learn were called “words,” asking questions she didn’t have answers for, and meanwhile, the body lived. The cells began to heal as the organs, one by one, resumed the jobs they had tried to abandon.

Sally Mitchell was going to live. Everything else was secondary.

STAGE 0: EXPOSURE

Your health is too important to trust to just anyone. Choose SymboGen. Choose freedom.

—EARLY SYMBOGEN ADVERTISING SLOGAN

Where am I?

—SALLY MITCHELL

When the hygiene hypothesis was proposed in the late 1980s, most people laughed it off as fringe science. It was based around the idea that more people were developing life-threatening allergies and autoimmune conditions because they weren’t getting enough early-life exposure to infectious agents. Not just viruses—everyone gets exposed to viruses, unless they live inside a bubble—but allergens, bacteria, even parasites. We weren’t living in literal bubbles, but we were sterilizing our environments more every year, and we were starting to see the effects. Children were getting sick because we refused to let them play in the dirt. It was a ludicrous idea. Pure scientific comedy.

Except that by the beginning of the 21st century, no one was laughing. More and more, the human race was being faced with a choice: find a way to keep our systems in the equilibrium they had evolved to maintain, or accept a future of chronic illness, increasing biological and neurological disorder, and potentially, eventually, extinction.

That’s where we came in.

—FROM “KING OF THE WORMS,” AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. STEVEN BANKS, CO-FOUNDER OF SYMBOGEN. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ROLLING STONE, FEBRUARY 2027.

… traffic cameras captured images of the driver’s hands beginning to shake uncontrollably in the middle of the intersection before she apparently experienced a massive seizure, losing control of her vehicle and causing a dramatic sheer to the right. Witnesses reported that Sally Mitchell, age 20, appeared unaware of her surroundings as she drove straight into the path of an oncoming crosstown bus.

In his deposition, the bus driver (David Alexander, 37) claimed he had been unable to either hit the brakes or swerve to avoid Mitchell’s car. The two vehicles collided without slowing, sending Mitchell slamming into the wall of a nearby bank. One pedestrian was hit, Anthony Thomas, 28. Mr. Thomas was hospitalized for a broken leg and several minor contusions, and was released two days later. At the time of this writing, Sally Mitchell remains under hospital care, and has not yet regained consciousness…

—FROM THE CONTRA COSTA TIMES, JUNE 13, 2021.

Chapter 1

Dark.

Always the dark, warm, hot warm, the hot warm dark, and the distant sound of drumming. Always the hot warm dark and the drums, the comforting drums, the drums that define the world. It is comfortable here. I am comfortable here. I do not want to leave again.

Dr. Morrison looked up from my journal and smiled. He always showed too many teeth when he was trying to be reassuring, stretching his lips so wide that he looked like he was getting ready to lean over and take a bite of my throat.

“I wish you wouldn’t smile at me like that,” I said. My skin was knotting itself into lumps of gooseflesh. I forced myself to sit still, refusing to give him the pleasure of seeing just how uncomfortable he made me.

For a professional therapist, Dr. Morrison seemed to take an unhealthy amount of joy in making me twitch. “Like what, Sally?”

“With the teeth,” I said, and shuddered. I don’t like teeth. I liked Dr. Morrison’s teeth less than most. If he smiled too much, I was going to wind up having another one of those nightmares, the ones where his smile spread all the way around his head and met at the back of his neck. Once that happened, his skull would spread open like a flower, and the mouth hidden behind his smile—his real mouth—would finally be revealed.

Crazy dreams, right? It was only appropriate, I guess. I was seeing him because I was a crazy, crazy girl. At least, that’s what the people who would know kept telling me, and it wasn’t like I could tell them any different. They were the ones who went to college and got degrees in are-you-crazy. I was just a girl who had to be reminded of her own name.

“We’ve discussed your odontophobia before, Sally. There’s no clinical reason for you to be afraid of teeth.”

“I’m not afraid of teeth,” I snapped. “I just don’t want to look at them.”

Dr. Morrison stopped smiling and shook his head, leaning over to jot something on his ever-present notepad. He didn’t bother hiding it from me anymore. He knew I couldn’t read it without taking a lot more time than I had. “You understand what this dream is telling us, don’t you?” His tone was as poisonously warm as his too-wide smile had been.

“I don’t know, Dr. Morrison,” I answered. “Why don’t you tell me, and we’ll see if we can come to a mutual conclusion?”

“Now, Sally, you know that dream interpretation doesn’t work that way,” he said, voice turning lightly chiding. I was being a smart-ass. Again. Dr. Morrison didn’t like that, which was fine by me, since I didn’t like Dr. Morrison. “Why don’t you tell me what the dream means to you?”

“It means I shouldn’t eat leftover spaghetti after midnight,” I said. “It means I feel guilty about forgetting to save yesterday’s bread for the ducks. It means I still don’t understand what irony is, even though I keep asking people to explain it. It means—”

He cut me off. “You’re dreaming about the coma,” he said. “Your mind is trying to cope with the blank places that remain part of your inner landscape. To some degree, you may even be longing to go back to that blankness, to a time when Sally Mitchell could be anything.”

The implication that the person Sally Mitchell became—namely, me—wasn’t good enough for my subconscious mind stung, but I wasn’t going to let him see that. “Wow. You really think that’s what the dream’s about?”

“Don’t you?”

I didn’t answer.

This was my last visit before my six-month check-in with the staff at SymboGen. Dr. Morrison would be turning in his recommendations before that, and the last thing I wanted to do was give him an excuse to recommend we go back to meeting twice a week, or even three times a week, like we had when I first started seeing him. I didn’t want to be adjusted to fit some model of the “psychiatric norm” drawn up by doctors who’d never met me and didn’t know my situation. I was tired of putting up with Dr. Morrison’s clumsy attempts to force me into that mold. We both knew he was only doing it because he hoped to write a book once SymboGen’s media blackout on my life was finally lifted. The Curing of Sally Mitchell. He’d make a mint.

Even more, I was tired of the way he always looked at me out of the corner of his eye, like I was going to flip out and start stabbing people. Then again, maybe he was right about that, on some level. There was no time when I felt more like stabbing people than immediately after one of our sessions.

“The imagery is crude, even childish. Clearly, you’re regressing in your sleep, returning to a time before you had so many things to worry about. I know it’s been hard on you, relearning everything about yourself. So much has changed in the last six years.” Dr. Morrison flipped to the next page in my journal, smiling again. It looked more artificial, and more dangerous, than ever. “How are your headaches, Sally? Are they getting any better?”

I bared my own teeth at him as I lied smoothly, saying, “I haven’t had a headache in weeks.” It helped if I reminded myself that I wasn’t totally lying. I wasn’t having the real banger migraines anymore, the ones that made me feel like it would have been a blessing if I’d died in the accident. All I got anymore were the little gnawing aches at my temples, the ones where it felt like my skull was shrinking. Those went away if I spent a few hours lying down in a dark room. They were nothing the doctor needed to be concerned about.

“You know, Sally, I can’t help you if you won’t let me.”

He kept using my name because it was supposed to help us build rapport. It was having the opposite effect. “It’s Sal now, Doctor,” I said, keeping my voice as neutral as I could. “I’ve been going by Sal for more than three years.”

“Ah, yes. Your continued efforts to distance yourself from your pre-coma identity.” He flipped to another page in my journal, quickly enough that I could tell he’d been waiting for the opportunity to drop this little bomb into the conversation. I braced myself, and he read:

Had another fight with parents last night. Want to move out, have own space, maybe find out if ready to move in with Nathan. They said wasn’t ready. Why not? Because Sally wasn’t ready? I am not her. I am me.

I will never be her again.

He lowered the book, looking at me expectantly. I looked back, and for almost a minute the two of us were locked in a battle of wills that had no possible winner, only a different order of losing. He wanted me to ask for his help. He wanted to heal me and turn me back into a woman I had no memory of being. I wanted him to let me be who I was, no matter how different I had become. Neither of us was getting what we wanted.

Finally, he broke. “This shows a worrisome trend toward disassociation, Sally. I’m concerned that—”

“Sal,” I said.

Dr. Morrison stopped, frowning at me. “What did you say?”

“I said, Sal, as in, ‘my name is.’ I’m not Sally anymore. It’s not disassociation if I say I’m not her, because I don’t remember her at all. I don’t even know who she is. No one will tell me the whole story. Everyone tries so hard not to say anything bad about her to me, even though I know better. It’s like they’re all afraid I’m pretending, like this is some big trick to catch them out.”

“Is it?” Dr. Morrison leaned forward. His smile was suddenly gone, replaced by an expression of predatory interest. “We’ve discussed your amnesia before, Sally. No one can deny that you sustained extensive trauma in the accident, but amnesia as extensive and prolonged as yours is extremely rare. I’m concerned there may be a mental block preventing your accessing your own memories. When this block inevitably degrades—if you’ve been feigning amnesia this whole time, it would be a great relief in some ways. It would indicate much better chances for your future mental stability.”

“Wouldn’t faking total memory loss for six years count as a sort of pathological lying, and prove I needed to stay in your care until I stopped doing it?” I asked.

Dr. Morrison frowned, leaning back again. “So you continue to insist that you have no memory prior to the accident.”

I shrugged. “We’ve been over this before. I have no memory of the accident itself. The first thing I remember is waking up in the hospital, surrounded by strangers.”

One of them had screamed and fainted when I sat up. I didn’t learn until later that she was my mother, or that she had been there—along with my father, my younger sister, and my boyfriend—to talk to my doctors about unplugging the life support systems keeping my body alive. My sister, Joyce, had just stared at me and started to cry. I didn’t understand what she was doing. I couldn’t remember ever having seen someone cry before. I couldn’t remember ever having seen a person before. I was a blank slate.

Then Joyce was throwing herself across me, and the feeling of pressure had been surprising enough that I hadn’t pushed her away. My father helped my mother off the floor, and they both joined my sister on the bed, all of them crying and talking at once.

It would be months before I understood English well enough to know what they were saying, much less to answer them. By the time I managed my first sentence—“Who I?”—the boyfriend was long gone, having chosen to run rather than spend the rest of his life with a potentially brain-damaged girlfriend. The fact that I still hadn’t recovered my memory six years later implied that he’d made the right decision. Even if he’d decided to stick around, there was no guarantee we’d have liked each other, much less loved each other. Leaving me was the best thing he could have done, for either one of us.

After all, I was a whole new person now.

“We were discussing your family. How are things going?”

“We’ve been working through some things,” I said. Things like their overprotectiveness, and the way they refused to treat me like a normal human being. “I think we’re doing pretty good. But thanks for asking.”

My mother thought I was a gift from God, since she hadn’t expected me to wake up. She also thought I would turn back into Sally any day, and was perpetually, politely confused when I didn’t. My father didn’t invoke God nearly as much, but he did like to say, frequently, that everything happens for a reason. Apparently, he and Sally hadn’t had a very good relationship. He and I were doing substantially better. It helped that we were both trying as hard as we could, because we both knew that things were tenuous.

Joyce was the only one who’d been willing to speak to me candidly, although she only did it when she was drunk. She didn’t drink often; I didn’t drink at all. “You were a real bitch, Sal,” she’d said. “I like you a lot better now. If you start turning into a bitch again, I’ll cut your brake lines.”

It was totally honest. It was totally sincere. The night she said that to me was the night I realized that I might not remember my sister, but I definitely loved her. On the balance of things, maybe I’d gotten off lightly. Maybe losing my memory was a blessing.

Dr. Morrison’s disappointment visibly deepened. Clearing his throat, he flipped to another point in my journal, and read:

Last night I dreamt I was swimming through the hot warm dark, just me and the sound of drums, and there was nothing in the world that could frighten me or hurt me or change the way things were.

Then there was a tearing, ripping sound, and the drums went quiet, and everything was pain, pain, PAIN. I never felt pain like that before, and I tried to scream, but I couldn’t scream—something stopped me from screaming. I fled from the pain, and the pain followed me, and the hot warm dark was turning cold and crushing, until it wasn’t comfort, it was death. I was going to die. I had to run as fast as I could, had to find a new way to run, and the sound of drums was fading out, fading into silence.

If I didn’t get to safety before the drums stopped, I was never going to get to safety at all. I had to save the drums. The drums were everything.

He looked up. “That’s an odd amount of importance to place on a sound, don’t you think? What do the drums represent to you, Sally?”

“I don’t know. It was just a dream I had.” It was a dream I had almost every night. I only wrote it down because Nathan said that maybe Dr. Morrison would stop pushing quite so hard if he felt like he had something to interpret. Well, he had something to interpret, and it wasn’t making him back off. If anything, it was doing the opposite. I made a mental note to smack my boyfriend next time I saw him.

“Dreams mean things. They’re our subconscious trying to communicate with us.”

The smug look on his face was too much. “You’re about to tell me I’m dreaming about being in the womb, aren’t you? That’s what you always say when you want to sound impressive.”

His smug expression didn’t waver.

“Look, I can’t be dreaming about being in the womb, since that would require remembering anything before the accident, and I don’t.” I struggled to keep my tone level. “I’m having nightmares based on the things people have told me about my accident, that’s all. Everything is great, and then suddenly everything goes to hell? It doesn’t take a genius to guess that the drums are my heart beating. I know they lost me twice in the ambulance, and that the head trauma was so bad they thought I was actually brain-dead. If I hadn’t woken up when I did, they would have pulled the plug. I mean, maybe I don’t like the girl they say I was, but at least she didn’t have to go through physical therapy, or relearn the English language, or relearn everything about living a normal life. Do I feel isolated from her? You bet I do. Lucky bitch died that day, at least as long as her memories stay gone. I’m just the one who has to deal with all the paperwork.”

Dr. Morrison raised an eyebrow, looking nonplussed. Then he reached for his notepad. “Interesting,” he said.

Somehow I managed not to groan.

The rest of the session was as smooth as any of them ever were. Dr. Morrison asked questions geared to make me blow up again; I dodged them as best as I could, and bit the inside of my lip every time I felt like I might lose my cool. At the end of the hour, we were both disappointed. He was disappointed because I hadn’t done more yelling, and I was disappointed because I’d yelled in the first place. I hate losing my temper. Even more, I hate losing it in front of people like Dr. Morrison. Being Sally Mitchell sucks sometimes. There’s always another doctor who wants a question answered and thinks the best way to do it is to poke a stick through the bars of my metaphorical cage. I didn’t volunteer to be the first person whose life was saved by a tapeworm. It just happened.

I have to remind myself of that whenever things get too ridiculous: I am alive because of a genetically engineered tapeworm. Not a miracle; God was not involved in my survival. They can call it an “implant” or an “Intestinal Bodyguard,” with or without that damn trademark, but the fact remains that we’re talking about a tapeworm. A big, ugly, blind, parasitic invertebrate that lives in my small intestine, where it naturally secretes a variety of useful chemicals, including—as it turns out—some that both stimulate brain activity and clean toxic byproducts out of blood.

The doctors were as surprised by that as I was. They’re still investigating whether the tapeworm’s miracle drugs are connected to my memory loss. Frankly, I neither care nor particularly want to know. I’m happy with who I’ve become since the accident.

Dr. Morrison’s receptionist smiled blandly as I signed out. SymboGen required physically-witnessed time stamps for my sessions. I smiled just as blandly back. It was the safest thing to do. I’d tried being friendly during my first six months of sessions, until I learned that I was basically under review from the time I stepped through the door. Anything I did while inside the office could be entered into my file. Since those first six months included more than a few crying jags in the lobby, they were enough to buy me even more therapy.

“Have a nice day, Miss Mitchell,” said the receptionist, taking back her clipboard. “See you next week.”

I smiled at her again, sincerely this time. “Only if my doctors agree with whatever assessment Dr. Morrison comes up with, instead of agreeing with me. If there is any justice in this world, you’ll never be seeing me again.”

Maybe the comment was ill-advised, but it still felt good to see her perfectly made-up eyes widen in shock. She was still gaping at me as I turned back to the door and made my way quickly out of the office, into the sweet freedom of the afternoon air.

One good thing about being the first—and thus far, only—person to be saved from certain death by the SymboGen Intestinal Bodyguard: I wasn’t paying for a penny of my medical care, and neither were my parents. Instead, the corporation paid for everything, and got running updates from my various doctors, all of whom had release forms on file making it legal for them to give my medical information to SymboGen. It sucked from a privacy standpoint, but it was better than dying.

SymboGen developed the Intestinal Bodyguard. My father works for the government, but even they don’t know enough about what the implants can do to manage my care. So everything went on SymboGen’s bill, and the corporation kept learning about what their tapeworms can do, while I kept getting the care I needed if I wanted to keep breathing. Breathing was nice. It was one of the first things I remembered discovering on my own, and I wanted to keep doing it for as long as possible.

Even with SymboGen looking out for me, we’d had our share of close calls. Since my accident I’d gone into full anaphylactic shock multiple times, for reasons I still didn’t fully understand. The first time had corresponded with a course of antiparasitics provided by SymboGen. They were intended to help me pass my old implant—a pretty way of saying “they were supposed to kill my tapeworm and force it out of my body”—and they’d nearly killed me, too. The second and third attacks had come out of nowhere, and the attack after that had corresponded with another course of antiparasitics, different ones.

What mattered to me was that I’d nearly died each time. Without SymboGen, I would have died. I needed to remember that. No matter how much I hated the therapists and the tests and everything else, I owed my life to SymboGen.

I looked back at Dr. Morrison’s office before walking down the street to the empty bus stop. I sat down on the bench and settled in to wait. I’m patient. I’m rarely in a hurry. And I don’t drive.

Patience may be something I have in abundance, but punctuality is not. My shift at the Cause for Paws animal center was supposed to start at four o’clock. Thanks to my missing the bus—again—and having to wait for the next one—again—it was already almost five when I came charging through the door.

“I’m sorry!” I called. I shrugged off my brown leather messenger bag and hung it next to the door, where it looked dull and out of place next to Tasha’s rainbow crochet purse and Will’s electric red backpack. In an organization made up of eccentrics and chronic do-gooders, the girl with the unique medical history is the boring one.

The door slammed behind me. I flinched.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated more quietly to Tasha, who was standing next to the coffee machine with an amused expression on her face.

“You’re sorry?” she asked. “Really? You’re late, and you’re sorry about it? Truly this is unprecedented in the annals of our humble shelter. I’ll mark the calendars.”

I stuck my tongue out at her.

“Did the bad psychologist try to tell you that you were crazy again?” asked Tasha, seemingly unperturbed. Perturbing Tasha was practically impossible. She was the kind of girl who would probably greet Godzilla while he was attacking downtown by asking whether he’d ever considered adopting a kitten to help him with his obvious stress disorder. “You can tell your Auntie Tasha about it. I swear I’m not a SymboGen plant reporting all your actions back to the corporation.”

“You’re a jerk,” I said mildly, and grabbed my apron. “Come on. Scale of one to murder, how mad is Will over the whole ‘late’ thing?”

“Will isn’t mad at all, because you just volunteered to clean all the cat boxes,” said Will. I turned to see the shelter’s owner standing in the doorway of the kitten room, a seemingly boneless cat draped across his forearm. “Thanks, Sal!”

I rolled my eyes. “Lateness is not a legally binding promise to scoop shit.”

“No, but keeping your job sometimes means doing things you don’t want to do. Now go forth and scoop.” Will stepped out of the doorway. “Look at it this way. You spent the afternoon feeding metaphorical shit to your therapist, and now you can clean up some literal shit. It’ll be symbolically cleansing.”

“You just don’t want to do the boxes.”

“That, too,” Will agreed.

I rolled my eyes again and walked past him to the supply cabinet. Will was making a bigger deal of punishing me than was strictly necessary—I had a disability clearance excusing me for all my mandatory medical appointments, and since SymboGen made healthy donations to the shelter in exchange for keeping me on the staff, it wasn’t like he was going to argue with them needing a little of my time. I was also making a bigger deal of disliking my punishment than I had to. He was right. I needed a little normal after the day I’d had. I didn’t like dwelling on the reality of my situation, or the fact that SymboGen essentially controlled my future, at least for now. They paid for everything. The medical care, the lab work, the classes . . . everything. Until I was perfectly healthy and finished relearning the world, they held the strings.

The cats chirped, meowed, and hissed their greetings as I came into the room and shut the door behind me. I smiled at them, ignoring the paws that reached for me between the bars of their cages. “Okay, guys,” I said. “Let’s get to work.”

There’s one more good thing about being the girl who lived because her genetically engineered tapeworm refused to let her die: I lived. That made everything else possible. Everything else in the world.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 by Mira Grant.

Excerpted from Parasite by Mira Grant.

Published by permission of Orbit.

All rights reserved.

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

Mira Grant was born and raised in Northern California, where she has made a lifelong study of horror movies, horrible viruses, and the inevitable threat of the living dead. In college, she was voted Most Likely to Summon Something Horrible in the Cornfield, and was a founding member of the Horror Movie Sleep-Away Survival Camp, where her record for time survived in the “Swamp Cannibals” scenario remains unchallenged. Currently, Mira lives in a crumbling farmhouse with an assortment of cats, horror movies, comics, and books about horrible diseases. When not writing, she splits her time between travel, auditing college virology courses, and watching more horror movies than is strictly good for you. Favorite vacation spots include Seattle, London, and a large haunted corn maze just outside of Huntsville, Alabama.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Copperhead
Tina Connolly

The door was grey, ash and soot and smog grey, the grey of a city choked on its own failure. The full iron mask, padded though it was, was ice-cold in the frigid November night. Helen slipped one lilac-gloved finger under the chin of the mask and angled it so she could better see out of the eyeholes. Yes. Even here at the Grimsbys’, the stoop and sidewalk and bushes were blanketed with misty shreds of blue.

The fey.

Bits of the fey.

With one hand Helen found her sister Jane, standing just behind her. With the other she reached for the copper doorknocker, then stopped as her fingers closed on the rapping bit—the coiled tail of a seven-headed copperhead hydra. The emblem of the Copperhead Society was spreading faster and faster these days, almost as fast as the blue bits of fey that lay quiescent throughout the city.

But Mr. Grimsby was the leader of Copperhead. It was his house, his meeting. And her husband Alistair would want to take the lead.

Helen’s fingers fell away and she stood there in the frosty air, ice crystals on her breath and Jane’s cold fingers squeezed in the grip of her gloved hand. Two patient women. Protected. Waiting. Helen turned to Jane and with frost in her breath mouthed, “Soon.”

Jane nodded. Unlike Helen, her face was bare—and yet not, for she had thin iron strips embedded in her skin that outlined her perfect, inhuman features. The strips ringed her eyes, followed the curve of her cheekbone, ran along her jawline—an eerie but not ugly effect, especially when contrasted with the perfection of her face. Those iron strips, Helen’s iron mask—all to protect the two women from the deadly fey. Jane’s green eyes glittered in the cold and Helen suddenly thought of all she could do, would do, to help the vulnerable women like herself, to help Jane. Helen would redeem herself yet.

“Hurry, hurry, girls,” said a refined voice behind them. Alistair Huntingdon squeezed between the two sisters to bang imperiously on the doorknocker. “This is the most dangerous part of the trip, Helen. You must hurry inside.” I have my iron mask on, Helen thought rebelliously, but all she said was, “Of course, darling.”

Alistair pointed one yellow-gloved finger at a patch of blue coiled on the front lawn, a handsbreadth from the iron railing that would be poison to it. “I say, is that one moving? I swear I saw it move.”

Helen’s nerves twitched as he pointed, but she willed herself to stay calm. The blue bits of fey coated the city these days, covered everything not iron. She had even seen a motorcar with blue mist clinging to its rubber tires. But the bits of fey were mostly silent, mostly still.

Mostly.

Luckily the door was opened then by a man who looked more brawn than butler, who muttered through the ritual “An’ ye be human, enter,” and then with a hefty white-gloved hand brought them forcefully over the iron threshold and inside.

The air was warm. It would be close before the night was out, Helen thought, stuck in that room full of hot tempers and single-minded men. Or was it that her nerves were busy jangling, now that they were here, now that she needed to convince Jane of what they were to do to night . . . and under whose noses?

A homely maid took their wraps. With relief, Helen reached to unbuckle her iron mask, but her husband stopped her. “Could be dangerous.”

“Security seems tight enough,” said Helen. “Besides, do you really think this house—of all houses—isn’t fully ironbarred at each door, every window? The fey can’t cross that without invitation. Jane and I will be safe.”

“I would trust Grimsby with my life,” said Alistair immediately.

“Good,” said Helen, reaching again for the buckles.

“But not yours. Consider, my pet. Remember that a fey almost took you over before. No, I’m not risking that again.”

“Seems like if you paid for this face you ought to let people see it,” said Helen, or rather, she didn’t say it as she knew it would be just one teensy remark too far. No point in letting her wretched tongue ruin all of her evening’s plans over the urge to get a dig in, especially when his face was already going white around the nostrils. She pulled back into delightful, chattering Helen, and said, “I understand you’re looking out for me, Alistair dear! Very sensible of you and of course I shall obey. It did occur to me though—one teensy little thought—if I were to go unmasked, then I would be the most beautiful woman in the room. All the other women with fey faces like mine will be too afraid to go unmasked. But I could be so charming that I win everyone over—to your cause, of course. For your goals.”

A covetous spark leapt to Alistair’s eye. “Perhaps there is merit in what you say. As you say, Grimsby’s house is surely the safest in town. He hates the blue scum even more than I do, if possible.”

“Excellent,” said Helen, and unbuckled her mask and handed it to the homely maid before her husband could rescind his permission. “Now, Jane, if you’re finished, let’s go to the powder room and smooth our hair after those mussing buckles, shall we?” She flashed her brilliant smile around the room.

Helen took Jane’s arm and whisked them away into a small powder room. Helen had been to the Grimsbys’ once before, in the short halcyon time between marrying Alistair Huntingdon seven months ago but before the blue fey appeared in the city, and Copperhead rose up along with it. Well, those days hadn’t been entirely perfect, but they seemed so now. This house had been hung with tiny yellow lights—the new electricity coming into vogue. Before the Great War, relations had been amicable, if distant, with the rarely seen fey, and a steady trade of fey technology had kept humans supplied with clean energy—“bluepacks” that ran all the lights and cars and trolleys. But eight years ago the fey attacked. The Great War started between the two races, and trade stopped, leaving humans bereft of all their borrowed technology. Humans had struggled to pull society back from collapse, while fighting the forest-dwelling fey—an enemy of blue mist that could emulate humans—or worse, animate their dead bodies. The war dragged on for nearly four years, then abruptly the fey disappeared. Slowly people dared hope they were gone for good—slowly hope and laughter and silk stockings returned to the city. That dance seven months ago had been lovely and perfect, one of those few evenings when Helen had felt as though she fit in with her new, rarefied society. She had worn a slinky green velvet dress and coppery T-strap shoes, her red-gold hair all over curls. And she had been pretty. Plain pretty, not inhumanly perfect . . .

Helen came back to reality with a sigh and turned away from the mirror. “Now, Jane,” she said. “Tell me who you need to meet tonight. The most important candidate is Millicent Grimsby, but so many women of The Hundred will be here with their husbands. You should be able to meet a fair number of them.” Her tongue beat with the urge to say what Jane needed to do with Millicent, but she held it. Millicent’s safety was riding on her. She could not tip their hand too soon, even to Jane. The less Jane knew till the last second, the less she could give away in a glance, a look, a misplaced word at the end of a sentence. Oh, when she thought of that horrible Mr. Grimsby . . . Helen told her racing heartbeat to still, but her heart never obeyed her.

Jane looked at her sister from under level black brows. “Does he always order you around like that?”

Helen blinked and with an effort brought her worries and plans back to the present, ran through the past few moments since disembarking from the motorcar and entering the Grimsbys’. She smiled, ordering it to reach her eyes. “Now Jane, don’t you concern yourself with darling Alistair.” She turned back to the mirror for something to do, smoothed copper-blond curls around her inhumanly perfect face. “All of The Hundred of us are in danger. Isn’t it good that he’s concerned?”

“Well,” said Jane.

“Besides, you saw how well I handled him. Everything is tout à fait.”

“You did, and I’m impressed,” said Jane. “You always were good at smoothing ruffled feathers. But about Alistair—” Helen whirled back. “Tell me whom you need to meet,” she cut in, because she could see Jane was gearing up for another of her dreary arguments about feminine inequality, and when stubborn Jane met stubborn Helen, the battle could last all night. Jane did not understand about necessary compromises. “Do you have a list of The Hundred or something?”

“I do,” said Jane. “But I don’t think that will be necessary.” She pointed over Helen’s shoulder, and Helen turned and looked into the large room. Heartache throbbed, remembering it as she had last seen it, the ballroom, the music, dancing so light on her toes in time, in time, in time . . .

Focus, Helen. It is a bare sober room now, with dark dresses and long hard benches. No rumbas, no foxtrots, and if the occasional sharp laugh escapes into the close air it is because these women will not be completely contained by fear. Focus, Helen—until she saw what Jane meant.

At least half of the seated women were wearing iron masks.

“All right then,” said Helen.

“That’s a third of them right there,” breathed Jane. The two sisters stood, looking at the cold iron masks dotting the room.

Over the last several years, a hundred of the richest women—and a few men—had secretly had their faces worked on by one Edward Rochart, an enigmatic artist who was now Jane’s fiancé. Every woman had come back a dazzling version of herself—and in most cases the changes were even deniable, put down to a “restorative holiday” in the countryside.

But the idyll had turned sour—Jane had discovered six months ago that the “fey beauty” of The Hundred was exactly that. They had each had their old face replaced by a mask—a mask made of the dangerous fey themselves.

And anyone who had fey attached to their bodies was at risk of being taken over by the fey. That was the secret to how the fey had animated dead bodies during the war—they had killed humans with bombs that coated the victim with their own fey substance—little bits of themselves. Then they could move in. But dead bodies only lasted so long. The Fey Queen had figured out how to use Rochart to get these women to coat themselves in fey voluntarily—an unwitting accomplice to a plan to take over the city from the inside, fey slipping into highly placed women and erasing their personalities completely.

It had even happened to Helen. Only Jane’s quick application of an iron spike into her arm had killed the fey and saved her. Helen shuddered, remembering the moment. The whole fey slipping into Helen through the bit of fey on her face, crackling through her thoughts, erasing. Telling Helen things would be so much better if she simply didn’t exist, and Helen, feeling that that might be true . . .

“I just don’t understand why I’m getting so much resistance,” said Jane. Jane was on a mission to make each of The Hundred safer by returning their original human faces to them. But she was not making as much headway as she had hoped.

“Because once you have been the most beautiful woman in the room, it’s impossible to give up,” Helen said.

“It’s pathetic to be so focused on appearance,” said Jane sharply. Jane’s face had been scarred for so long due to fey shrapnel from the Great War that she came at this from a different angle, Helen thought. Jane had just wanted to be normal. But everyone else had always been normal. And now they had a chance to be extraordinary.

“It’s not pathetic at all,” Helen said softly. “Just think about the power you hold. You have always been just another face. And now everyone turns to you, asks your opinion. Those men who run your lives—suddenly they will do anything for you, if you favor them with a look. There is a touch of fey glamour at your command, yes, but more, there is just the fact that suddenly everyone thinks you are somebody. You are worth something.”

“And that’s enough to set against cold hard facts?” said Jane. “The cold hard fact that if you go outside without your iron mask, a fey could take you over and you’d be gone like that?” She snapped her fingers.

“What cold hard facts?” returned Helen. “How many people were in that ballroom when it happened to me? Only a handful of people saw it actually happen—and look, here I am, right as rain and twice as sparkling. It’s much easier to pretend that the danger isn’t as real as you say it is. Especially when their option is their old face back.” She took a breath before the slightly pointed jab, but she needed Jane to see how much she was in need of Helen’s help. “Besides, you probably wave their old face around in front of them when you try to convince them. Hard to be thrilled by the idea when you’re looking at your nasty old face, stretched and hideous from drying on the wall.”

“Give me some credit,” said Jane.

Helen raised her eyebrows.

“Well. Maybe once,” said Jane. “But I’ve learned since then. And I’ve learned how to reverse the sags and stretch marks during the facelift procedure.”

“But they’ll never be beautiful again,” said Helen.

“No,” Jane admitted. “There is that.”

“So, this Millicent,” said Jane, as Helen pointed her out. “What did you want to tell me about her? You seem bursting with some news. I brought her face as you asked, but you just told me not to ‘wave it around in front of her as I try to convince her.’” She eyed her younger sister. “I don’t suppose you’re finally going to let me do you, are you?”

“Not yet,” said Helen, and she lit up inside, for now was the moment. “Because I need every ounce of fey charisma I can get. I have a plan, a great grand plan.” A breath. “I’m going to help you.”

Jane looked dubious. “Even with the bit of fey in your face, you wouldn’t be able to do the facelifts right away. I barely have the ability to wield the fey power to do it, and that’s after months of practice.”

“No no no,” said Helen. “I’m going to help you talk The Hundred into it.”

Jane looked nonplussed. “Thank you for your offer, but I don’t see how your presence will help. I’m the one with the experience with the facelifts and the history with the fey. Surely if I tell them the facts, they’ll understand that it has to be done.”

Helen raised her eyebrows at Jane. “Really?” she said. “How long have you been working at this task? Half a year?”

“Off and on,” said Jane. “But I’ve been studying to do the facelifts, too. It hasn’t been all talking to the women.”

“And you’ve managed to convince how many of The Hundred?”

“Well. Six,” said Jane.

Helen squeezed her sister’s arm. “So don’t be a goose, silly. This is exactly where I come in. Look, I might not be perfectly tactful always—”

Jane raised her eyebrows at this.

“—but your idea of tact is to force out the words ‘in my opinion’ as you tell someone exactly what you think of them.”

“So what’s part two of this grand plan?” Jane said dryly to this tactless comment.

“I’ve already talked to Millicent,” Helen said, and the words she had told herself to keep in tumbled all out. Her face lit up, glowing with the joy of the surprise of it, with the good she was going to accomplish for Millicent, for Jane. “She’s all ready for you. She wants you to replace her face. Tonight.”

Jane turned a shocked face on Helen and shoved her younger sister into the nearest alcove to whisper furiously at her. “Tonight? It’s not a haircut, Helen. It’s a serious operation. It’s not something I can just do, just like that.”

“You can,” insisted Helen, heart rat-a-tat. “But you have to do it secretly, upstairs, while everyone is downstairs. It’s her only chance.” Jane couldn’t say that she was wrong, that she was foolish. This was new Helen, determined to make things come out right. “You have all your supplies, don’t you?” Helen pointed at the carpetbag that Jane carried everywhere.

“I suppose,” said Jane. “But—”

“But nothing; you’re just nervous, now that I’ve done it so quickly and gotten everything ready to go.” The words tumbled headlong from her lips. The mad rush, the intrigue, the heady thrill of brink-of-success: it all made her feel so alive.

Helen showed Jane how to slip around to the back stairs and wind her way to the garret. After a suitable interval, she caught Millicent’s eye and gave her the nod. The small woman in the iron mask did not nod, did not move. But Helen knew she knew.

It was quite dark outside now. The room pressed together, quieting and erupting by turns as people found seats or decided to stand. The room was packed, for which Helen was immensely grateful. She found a spot that seemed perfect for sneaking away.

Men—leaders—came into the room in a clump. They had been off somewhere with Grimsby. Her husband Alistair was among the gang of men. They spilled into the room like a pack of hunting dogs, jostling each other as they moved to the front. Before Grimsby stirred them into a passion over Copperhead, they had spent all their time drinking and gaming.

When they moved, when they tumbled and rolled, she saw the puppy dog in them still. Helen was glad she did not have her mask on, obscuring her vision. The electricity was at half the brightness it had been for that dance in the spring. It was dim yellow, unlike the familiar blue light of her childhood. Before the Great War.

The men straightened as they drew closer to the front and the strange sheet-covered lump in the middle of the room. They no longer reminded her of anything tame, but something fiercer, colder, and they stood straight around each other as if they were one pack surveying their quarry. Everything drew still as their presence filled the room, all eyes turned to the front. Helen searched around, checking for her escape route, and in doing so caught a tiny flicker of movement by the window—a lithe man in closely fitted black leaned on the windowsill as if he had always been standing there. But what then would have drawn her attention?

Boarham and Morse—Grimsby’s two particular right-hand men—moved to flank the machine. Morse was stoop shouldered and pinch-faced, the meanest of them all. Boarham was heavy, lumpy, toadying. “We will begin,” said Boarham, “by updating you on the preparations that have been made as we remain under siege by the fey. Later in the evening will be the event you are most anxious for: Grimsby will reveal his new weapon that—we hope—will eventually annihilate the fey for good.”

Breath caught at the word, at the hope. Annihilate.

“We move ever closer to our goal,” Boarham said. “One People. One Race.” All around her, fingers flicked out to touch their hydra lapel pins in solidarity. “But first a moment to remember James Morrow, who since our last meeting was a casualty of the fey blight, when the blue carpeting his front garden turned out not to be powerless bits of many different fey, but one whole fey, lurking in wait with a concealed fey bomb. . . .”

Now.

It was not Helen’s style to move quietly. She moved by chatter and misdirection. But for this moment she needed to slink, and she did, moving like a bit of sunlight falling noiselessly through canopy leaves. Her blood pounded as she climbed the garret stairs, slipped through the door.

The garret was irregular and pocked with gables. A cluster of candelabra lit the area with the most headroom; the rest of the garret fell away into dark piles of unwanted things as it sloped to the black wooden floor. It smelled of mildewing wood; of the sour poison of mothballs; of beeswax. Millicent lay in the center of the light, a small dark figure on a daybed draped with a white sheet. Jane worked efficiently around her, setting out her tools on a heavy scarred chest. No matter what nerves Jane had professed, as always, her sister seemed as cold as ice.

It was going to be done. Her plan would work. Helen wanted to clap her hands and burst into speech, tell the two women a million things, but she restrained herself, moving noiselessly over to the white daybed, still like falling sun.

Helen remembered the day Mr. Rochart had worked on her—the small white room, the deep sleep as he etched around the skin of her face to replace it. She had had such peculiar dreams. Strange to think that her sister had learned to carry out the same fey-powered operation.

Millicent Grimsby lay down, closing her eyes. Her thin hands clenched the sheets, the knuckles white.

Jane carefully took some of the precious fey-infused clay from the water bag inside the carpetbag and smeared a thin layer on her hands, adding to the power she could control. Jane placed one hand on Millicent’s forehead and one hand on her heart, till the woman’s eyes fluttered, and finally stopped. Her breathing and heartbeat slowed.

Then she was as still as marble.

“One hundred of them,” Helen said softly.

“And you’re key to this,” said Jane. “You have one purpose for the next week. Convince every last one of them. Be single-minded. I’ll do the rest.”

Helen swallowed. “But what if—?”

“No buts,” said Jane. “I’ve got my own plans that have to happen. Scalpel, please, and then you’d better go. You’ll need an alibi—isn’t that what the detectives call it?”

Helen wiped the scalpel with carbolic disinfectant and passed the handle to Jane. In her fey trance, the woman seemed like a lifeless doll, as if there had never been a mind activating that beautiful, silent face.

The crowd downstairs was on recess as Grimsby and stoop-shouldered Morse fiddled with the machine under the sheet. It might be a meeting, but it was still society. The earthy smell of liver pâté trickled by as more of the homely maids passed canapés and drinks. What was this fashion for unpleasant-faced girls? thought Helen. But she supposed it was Grimsby’s grim fanaticism again. Fey had always been drawn to beauty in humans—the faces that The Hundred wore were feybeautiful. The ugliness of the serving girls was proof. No fey here. Grimsby himself was perhaps the perfect Copperhead leader in that regard. He had a hard, unfriendly look, and his features were too sharp and jutting to be at all pleasant.

No fey here.

Nervous energy coursed through her as she wended her way through the crowd, smiling and nodding. As she had told Alistair, going without the mask made her the prettiest woman there, and it was obvious in the way heads turned to track her passage. Normally she would have basked in the attention—the pleasure of it hadn’t completely worn off, when among these people who hadn’t been quick to welcome her after her marriage. But tonight she did not want attention. Tonight her heart beat a steady thrum at what her sister was doing upstairs.

Helen was determined to help Jane. She remembered full well the moment of fey takeover. Only Jane’s quick action plunging an iron spike into Helen’s arm had killed the fey inside her, saved her life. Helen had roused from her fey trance a day later to find a team of the best doctors in the city hovering over her bed, waiting for any movement.

But were things really as dire as Jane had said just now? Why the sudden haste? The earliest of The Hundred had received their fey faces several years ago. They were all being very careful these days, going out with their iron masks. But all the blue bits of fey did was sit there—well, mostly. Still, surely they weren’t gearing up for some takeover of The Hundred like Jane said, like Alistair and Copperhead thought. Frankly, it would be ridiculous. What no one seemed to remember was that the Fey Queen’s plan had been to have fey secretly infiltrate those women and men and land themselves in influential positions, ready to take over from the inside.

You couldn’t secretly infiltrate if everyone knew you were coming, could you?

And Helen was determined to help Jane, to convince the women Jane couldn’t. But quickly? She thought through some of the women she knew off the top of her head—the self-absorbed wife of the prime minister, there in grey (she had not sacrificed her apricot-hued shoes, though). Stubborn Alice Pennyfeather. Close-minded Lady Dalrymple. All transformed from their workaday selves into ethereally beautiful women, and their social status similarly elevated. Even with the iron masks, The Hundred ran the social scene. No, as much as Helen liked a good intrigue, even she was sensible enough to know that she would need more time than a few days.

The men straightened up, the crowd herded back to their seats. They squashed onto the long benches, stood in the makeshift aisles, ranged long legs along the windowsill. There was silence, and in it Grimsby said quietly, “This is what you have come to see.”

The cloth was whisked away to reveal a strange device. The center was a large copper ball, full of ridges and rivets. It looked like claws clasping each other, or perhaps snakes that writhed over the copper ball. It was held firmly in an open cube of iron, crisscrossed with wrought iron that curlicued in a curious pattern. In the front of the box was a child-sized door.

“In this box,” said Grimsby, “I have trapped a fey.” Murmurs, tremors. Men who would shout if it weren’t improper. With a great creaking and grinding, the copper ball slowly opened its interlocking layers. Inside hovered a blue ball of light. When the copper was completely opened, the light burst out of the ball and flung itself at the open door of the iron box.

The guests shrieked and ducked. But the blue light did not seem to be able to pass beyond the threshold. It thudded to a stop right at the boundary of the open door. Then it launched itself at the side wall, coming to a stop a hairsbreadth from the wrought iron. Back, forth, up and down, till it was spinning around and around the cage with savage ferocity.

“There, you see?” said Alistair. “Completely trapped.”

“And well-deserved,” shouted someone from a bench, someone who had had too much wine.

“It’s beautiful,” whispered Helen, so quietly that no one could hear her. No one must, or could have, and yet next to her was a slight man in black, and he gave one short sharp nod, not looking at her. But that could be about anything.

Her fingers twisted her handkerchief as if to tear it. How far along were Jane and Millicent? So long to carefully take off the current face, so long to press down the old face and bind it in place, so long to return Millicent from that still-as-death sleep. Helen’s fingers wanted to burst out of her hands, fly like birds to check on the women, flutter at Mr. Grimsby, claw his eyes out for being so hateful to poor Millicent. . . .

“I captured this fey by using one piece of a fey as a seed,” said Grimsby. “The machine finds all the other pieces of that particular fey and draws them in, restoring the whole fey to itself.” He grinned cruelly. “Ironically enough, it runs on fey power.”

“And then that fey you captured can be destroyed forever,” put in Alistair, his face sharp and blue in the glow. “Show them, Grimsby.”

A hint of malice crept across Grimsby’s face at Alistair’s words. Now he bent his tall bony frame to the machine. If he had made it, why didn’t he make it to measure, thought Helen, for Grimsby seemed like some kind of strange praying mantis folded around too-small prey.

A switch—a thrum as the machine turned on. The blue light keened with pain. It mutated wildly, turning itself into all manner of things—a frog, a tree, a sparrow. A face, shining out of the light—low gasps as it formed the face of a small child, tears running down its face. “Help me,” it said, and the words thrummed inside Helen’s skull. She felt a tremendous compulsion to run over and let that child free—and by the looks of it, many of the others felt that, too.

The thrumming grew louder. The face splintered and reformed, struggling to keep its shape. “He’s caught me, he’s caught me. Help—”

A small boom like an implosion, and it was gone.

Grimsby turned off the machine and straightened up with a smile. “No mess, no fuss,” he said. “We have never been able to destroy a fey before, unless it was trapped in a human. But this? Very tidy. One People. One Race.”

Silence in the room as men and women grappled with what they had just seen. Helen felt as if she would be violently ill. She twisted her fingers together, focused on that sliver of pain to distract her.

Finally a female voice said, “Forgive the impertinence, but how do you get the piece of fey into the machine to begin with? Who bells the cat?”

Helen looked, but she could not see who had spoken. Grimsby smiled, as if this question was on cue, as if he had waited for just this opportunity. Helen did not like that smile. She put a hand to her seat, starting to turn, wondering if she could slip away. But one of the homely maids was standing there, Helen’s iron mask in her hands.

“When I turn on the general setting it pulls in the first piece of fey it can find,” Grimsby said. “A dangerous setting, you can see, to have fey come rushing at you.” A calm, meaningful voice. “More dangerous still for those who have fey lurking in their skin. I need every endangered woman to be thoroughly shielded, please.” Heads swiveled as he nodded at Helen.

With shaky fingers Helen buckled her mask in place. She needed to get upstairs to warn Jane. But the maid was there and all eyes upon her.

“Windows open,” Grimsby said, and Helen saw that Millicent was right, that there was no iron bolted into the wooden frames. The cold November air rushed in. Grimsby folded himself around his device again, long fingers sliding over the copper curves till they found the heavy lever. He pulled it down.

The masked women gasped and Helen knew they felt it, too.

A strange, almost hypnotic pull, tickling around the edges of the iron mask. Eerie, but faint, a fingernail-on-chalkboard sensation that she did not like but could withstand. She wondered how strong the compulsion would be without the iron mask. Would it suck the bit of fey right out of her face, or would it make Helen herself get up and throw herself inside that machine?

“Nothing’s happening,” grumbled one of the men, and several iron-masked faces turned his way, staring.

“Increasing power,” said Grimsby.

He cranked the copper wheel, and suddenly there was blue in the small room, blue out in the middle of the benches. In the middle of the guests—right through the guests, who screamed. A masked woman fainted, and several men stood, angry and red-faced.

“The piece of fey is resisting,” said Grimsby, eyes gleaming. “It must be a bigger piece than I expected. More massed intelligence. It’s attempting to form a shape.” His eyes narrowed.

“Except . . .”

Except this figure had a familiar face.

This figure held a scalpel.

“Jane,” said Helen, and it did not seem to matter how loud the room was, she was heard. The name carried around the room in waves as Helen pushed her way to the space that had formed in the center of the room.

It was a wavy blue picture of Jane, Jane who had been bending over a still form on a white bed. But Jane wore iron, Helen thought—and then she saw that the blue light was most sharply focused on her hands, the hands that she had smeared with the fey-infused clay.

Jane looked up and through Helen. Her eyes were glassy with concentration, filmed over with white fatigue. Her mouth seemed to be shouting something Helen could not hear. Millicent’s fey mask was off, the face underneath red and horrifying. Helen could not look away, even though it felt as though she was being sucked back a great distance. The blue air whirled around her, and her ears popped as the pressure in her head grew tighter and tighter, and Jane seemed to be farther and farther away.

“Jane!” Helen shouted. “Jane!”

Jane looked directly at her then. Her dark hair was wild and blowing about her head. The attic furniture loomed behind her like a crouching beast. Jane held Millicent’s old face in her hands, clutching it in front of her.

<<Impressive>> Helen heard, and it seemed to be a voice in her head alone, or not even a voice, but the memory of a voice, a thought of one. <<Not what we expected, is it?>>

Now Jane was straight, the scalpel was gone. She was arching, shrieking. The strips of iron on her face glowed, brighter than the rest of the blue that made up the strange picture of her. Voices screamed. Jane turned and Helen thought Jane was facing her, thought Jane saw her. Jane’s lips faintly moved and Helen read, “Stop it . . . stop it . . . stop it. . . .” Jane seemed to bend in the direction of the copper machine. Stooping, still shouting, “Stop it, stop it.”

Behind the copper ball Grimsby’s face was backlit from the blue glow, and she could not tell if it was cruelty or fear she read there.

“Turn it off, turn it off,” Helen yelled at Alistair, but he shouted back, “Do you want the fey to be freed? I’m not going near it!”

Helen was not conscious of thought in that moment, but if she had stopped to examine the impulse that made her feet pick up and run forward, not away, it would have been something like: If it destroys me, it destroys me—but it will not hurt Jane.

There were those whose lives were worth something. Those who were trying to do good. Those who were determined as all hell to set things right in the world, and didn’t waste their days spouting off nonsense about “one race” or the cut of their hemline.

Those people needed to be around to save the rest of them from themselves.

Helen threw herself onto the lever and shoved it down with all her might.

And then everything went dark.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 by Tina Connolly.

Excerpted from Copperhead by Tina Connolly.

Published by permission of the author and Tor Books.

All rights reserved.

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

Tina Connolly lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and young son. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Fantasy, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the anthology Unplugged: Year’s Best Online SF 2008. Her debut fantasy novel Ironskin came out from Tor in 2012 and was nominated for the Nebula Award. She is a frequent reader for Escape Pod and Podcastle, and is narrating a 2012 flash podcasting venture called Toasted Cake. In the summer she works as a face painter, which means a glitter-filled house is an occupational hazard. Her website is tinaconnolly.com.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Poe
J. Lincoln Fenn

Prologue

Clink. It sounds like someone just put a penny in a jar. Unfamiliar voices in the distance, fuzzy and hard to pinpoint. My ears are ringing. Damn, why is it so cold? There’s something else too, a putrid stench, like shit and rotten pizza mixed together.

Focus.

I was breathing water—it was cool and felt good in my lungs. I was drowning, dying, and strangely I didn’t seem to mind. And there was a woman in the water—ice-blue skin, blond hair floating like tendrils of seaweed. She wanted to tell me something, and I could see a solitary word bubbling from her frigid lips—my name, Dimitri. Then something else, something important, but I can’t pull the memory to the surface, and it is so cold, so very, very cold.

Gradually the ringing in my ears stops. My hearing starts to clear. There’s a whoosh of something like a fan, and a refrigerator hum. I try to open my eyes, but they refuse.

Clink, clank, clunk. Someone is humming. Humming?

Then a low voice. “So my wife is, like, you need to take a shower before you come home from work, you smell like cadavers, and I said, you don’t seem to mind cashing the checks.”

A lighter voice, feminine. “Um-hum.” Obviously not listening.

“She can’t say anything then, ’cause she’s got a new Gucci purse she doesn’t want to tell me about. Like I don’t read the credit card statements—hey, do you mind turning that thing off while we’re working?”

A sigh, then a click. “It keeps me focused.”

“Can’t believe your iPod still works after it fell in that guy’s stomach. You’d think the acid would have shorted the battery.”

“Waterproof case. I did have to get new earbuds though.”

Deep-voice guy snorts with laughter. Then a sudden intake of breath. “Damn, have you ever seen a stab wound this deep before? The knife splintered her rib.”

Thumpity thump thump. My heart starts to beat. It’s cautious, like it’s not sure whether there’s much point, but methodically plods along anyways. Each throb pushes more of the fizzy darkness aside with a familiar staccato rhythm that’s reassuring. Suddenly, every nerve in my body kicks in, tingling with a fiery determination—it’s a rush. I realize I’m naked. I’m lying on something cold, metallic, and decidedly uncomfortable. I try a breath and the air burns my lungs, but they seem functional.

“What kind of knife would do that?”

“A very sharp one.”

“Ha-ha, very funny.”

Pause.

“Check out the spleen. It looks like something was eating it.”

“Maybe she had cats. Cats are heartless.”

“Cats are not heartless,” replies the feminine voice.

“When’s the last time you heard about a dog eating its dead owner? Never.”

Snap, crack, clink.

My eyelids finally flutter—a fuzzy light glows behind something white and cottony. I gather my jangling neurons, point them at my right arm—Move, arm, move—and manage to jerk at the sheet that’s covering me. A new chemical stink wafts by—formaldehyde—and above me a bright, round fluorescent light nearly blinds me. I slowly turn my head; it feels like my brain is sloshing inside my skull, and it takes a moment for the dizziness to clear enough for me to see.

A man and a woman in surgical scrubs stand in front of a gray naked body. Bright red blood spatters their sleeves and gloves. The man holds a large pair of shears, also covered in blood, and the woman has a white dangling earbud that trails from beneath her surgical cap to a bulge in her right front pocket. They both stare, perplexed, into the abdomen of what appears to be the corpse of a fiftyish woman; her frizzy gray hair is badly permed, and she stares at me with the glossy eyes of a dead fish. A flap of thick, yellowed, and fatty flesh hangs from her waist, and I can see blue veins crisscrossing the tissue, while some kind of white, viscous liquid oozes onto the linoleum floor. A bloody heap that looks like raw hamburger rests on a hanging metal scale. Ten pounds.

I’m in a morgue. My stomach heaves, but there’s nothing to throw up. My body is completely drained. Empty.

“Hey, did you do that?”

“What?” Something squishes.

“Drowning dude’s sheet is off.”

“Well, why don’t you go fix that? My hands are a little tied, if you know what I mean.”

The woman mutters, “I’m not some kind of first-year resident . . .”

A scream builds in the back of my throat and dies there.

Footsteps softly pad across the linoleum floor. I can feel the rough sheet being pulled back up and over my feet, my legs, my chest. I need to move—I need to move now. Somehow I turn my head, look at the woman in scrubs directly in her eyes. Blink. I open my mouth, and a small rush of water pours out.

“Holy shit!” She jumps back, knocking the scale. It swings like a pendulum, and the hand on the dial swerves wildly as the bloody heap slides to the floor with a wet plop.

My eyes roll toward the back of my head and I reach one hand out, grasping nothing. Suddenly I remember what the woman with the ice-blue skin said in her strange, watery voice.

“Dimitri. He’s coming. He’s coming for you.”

Then the darkness wells up, envelops me, and I’m gone again.

Halloween

Twenty-four hours earlier

Chapter One: New Goshen

There’s not a lot of opportunity to get creative with obituaries. Take Mrs. Porrier, aged eighty-five, an elementary school teacher who committed suicide by locking herself in the garage of her four-bedroom colonial house with the car running.

She had terminal pancreatic cancer, but that’s not the point. The point is that the most interesting part of her life—the moments leading up to her death—I can’t write about. I can’t write that she got the car keys out of the brown leather bowling ball bag cherished by her husband—Mr. Porrier, otherwise known as “Doc” to his league—and opened the familiar latch of the screen door. That she pressed the yellowed plastic button of the electric garage door opener, got into the car, and pulled the heavy door of the ancient but still functional Cadillac behind her—the scent of cigarette smoke still in the carpeting, although her husband had quit smoking ten years before. I can’t write that she rolled up the windows by hand—nothing automatic in that car—and started the engine. And the moment before her eyes got heavy, when she still could have gotten out of the car but didn’t, the moment she decided enough, I can’t include in her obituary.

Instead, I have to write the mundane, perfected-life details. She taught school for forty years. She is remembered by her grandchild Harris in Colorado, her daughter Stella, also a teacher, in California, and her beloved husband, who served two years in the Korean War. She enjoyed knitting, horticulture, and baking. She died of pancreatic cancer. I reduce her to a palatable bit of print, ready to be absorbed, digested, and quickly forgotten.

Christ, I wish I didn’t take this shit so seriously.

I try to avoid the newspaper office in the flatiron building on New Goshen’s Main Street as much as possible—probably because I’m supposed to work there. So over the past year I’ve suffered periodic intestinal episodes from bad sushi. My car has a habit of being borrowed by my (nonexistent) roommate, or the tires are flat, or the battery needs a jump. I’m susceptible to migraines, increasingly bad episodes of asthma, and my back needs regular appointments with a chiropractor, who keeps changing my appointment times. As long as the deadlines are met, Mac, the editor (who really lets themselves be called Mac anyway?), doesn’t threaten me too much with firing, which is bullshit anyway because there aren’t many people in this town who could string together one sentence, let alone two.

After my parents died and I flunked out of college, it was either this or the crab boats in Alaska, those being the best employment opportunities presented by my frazzled college counselor. She was obviously trying to rush me out the door—completely understandable given she had a long line of actual students waiting. And to be honest I was ready to grab onto anything. But whenever I push open the brass office doors and gaze upon the dusty metal file cabinets resting on the equally dusty olive carpet, with Myrna in the corner pretending to type when she’s really checking the clock for her smoke break, I imagine myself in one of those orange deckhand suits on the Bering Sea, my eyebrows singed with frost, and realize I’ve made the biggest mistake of my young life.

But sometimes, like this morning, I have to face reality. For the third time this year I’ve been given my two weeks’ notice.

“Morning, Myrna,” I say, wondering if her optometrist has ever heard of those newfangled thin plastic glasses, as opposed to the glacier-thick glass ones she wears. Tinted a delightful gradient pink.

Myrna pulls a sheet of paper from her printer with a snap. “You’re gracing us with your presence today? Fired again so soon?”

“Is that a new sweater?” I say. “It really brings out the color of your eyes.”

Her sweater is red.

Myrna gives me a look. “Smart ass,” she mutters.

I head toward my ostensible desk, which doubles as a paper stand when I’m not in. I stack the reams on the floor and then look for my chair. Nowhere to be found. Myrna must know something, but she’s studiously applying whiteout to a sheet of paper, dabbing at it with a corner of tissue and pointedly ignoring me.

Which leaves Bob.

Bob has a gut that hangs over his leather belt, and his standard attire is tight Oxford shirt and penny loafers. He prides himself on dated practical jokes. I’ve found all my paper clips hooked together, an actual pink Whoopee cushion on my chair, and, on my very first day, I got an electric shock from the buzzer he had hidden in his palm. When Myrna’s on her smoke break, sometimes I’ll find a miniature plastic television on my desk with two large breasts poking out from the screen and the words “Boob Tube” at the base, which I think is Bob’s way of testing my heterosexuality, since my hair is on the shaggy side and there are questions. The local barber has one standard style, military buzz, so I pay my “bachelor” neighbor Doug twenty bucks every now and then to cut it. Doug’s an actual hairstylist and a refugee from a long-term relationship in San Francisco that ended badly. He says that if it weren’t for the dark circles under my eyes, I would have potential, what with my high Russian cheekbones and thick brows. Which gender he’s talking about my having potential with is unclear. All I know is that I’m the tall, thin, unnaturally pale and dark-haired sensitive-looking type instead of the rock-bodied, square-jawed testosterone type—a tragic genetic disadvantage that usually results in stilted conversations with girls, who smile politely while obviously clocking the muscular guys chugging beer through funnels.

My mind clicks through various places in the building where my chair could be—emergency stairwell, bathroom stall, the alley that smells of dead cat where the newspaper trucks pull up. Basically, a pain-in-the-ass way to start my day. I decide screw it and loudly pull my desk over to the Victorian metal radiator that hasn’t worked in, say, a century, balling up my jacket to serve as a cushion. Problem solved.

I pull out my laptop, a device that always causes a certain furrow in Myrna’s brow, she who swears by her antiquated IBM, because the Internet is causing the rapid degeneration of society’s youth, and wireless frequencies cause cancer. Unlike smoking, of course—her pack-a-day habit is perfectly healthy; Reagan said so.

Bob waltzes in. The cat-that-ate-the-canary metaphor applies rather well here.

“Nice chair,” says Bob, barely able to repress a chuckle.

“Yeah,” I say, “it’s so SAC.”

I enjoy making up nonsense acronyms that I know Bob will attempt to use with his ten-year-old niece in an attempt to be “down with the kids.”

“You know,” I add casually, “sustainable and cool.”

“Right,” says Bob, and I can tell he’s now feeling off his game, having been reminded poignantly that he is pushing his late fifties. I almost feel sorry for him, but then again I’m the one who writes the obituary notices, and I’m sitting on a radiator.

Bob, on the other hand, practically is the newspaper, especially since Mac likes to keep the writing staff lean (our value is slightly above janitor and way below the sales and accounting departments). Bob writes the local news, features, and sports; he even writes the occasional “investigative” piece that profiles our highest-paying advertiser in glowing terms, neatly avoiding actual journalism while painting a portrait so rosy it would make Norman Rockwell vomit. A pale accountant fills in to cover the rare event of business news, usually a bankruptcy or store closing, which we call internally YABBTD (Yet Another Business Bites the Dust). Film reviews are written by Sandeep Banerjee, who charges five dollars an article and e-mails his copy from somewhere in the heart of Mumbai. Mac would probably love for Sandeep to write the obits, too—his new favorite acronym is ROI (Return on Investment)—but he knows that in a small, some would say close-minded (I would say borderline racist) town, nobody would want their beloved relative’s life-and-death story written by anyone other than a full-blooded American. Which is why my byline is D. Peters instead of Dimitri Petrov. Go figure.

And in New Goshen, where 75 percent of the local population is over sixty-five, there are so many obituaries they fill up two full pages of the newspaper—sometimes three, if we really stretch the prime advertising space. Death here is the proverbial cash cow. It wasn’t always that way—when industrialization hit New Goshen in the early twentieth century, it must have been a rocking place to be. Thousands of immigrants and children of rural farmers poured into the city to work in the mills. Fourteen was a great age to start, and if you lost a finger or two in the process, you’d have considered yourself lucky that you still had part of a hand. Of course, now all that manufacturing is done in China, which has an even greater and cheaper supply of fourteen-year-olds, so the mills here are boarded-up shells with broken windows. Anyone under thirty wisely got out while the getting was good, and the aging population has caused a boom in hospice care, funeral, and other “death industries,” including my own meager position writing obits.

Lucky me.

“Well,” says Bob, trying to salvage his dominant spot as chief jokester, “I’ll give you a hint.” He leans in close and his breath smells of fried-egg sandwich. “Next time you want to take a dump”—he whispers the word “dump” so he won’t offend the delicate sensibilities of Myrna—“you might want to use the stall by the window.”

He cheerfully gives my shoulder a punch, like he’s the coach and I’m the high school rookie, and then thuds over to his desk, where he has a grinding first-generation laser printer that makes more noise than an artillery range.

I look out the window and wonder if, assuming I survived a jump from the second story, I’d be entitled to disability payments.

This much we know about Muriel Sheridan. She died in her sleep at Crosslands Nursing Center at 1:05 a.m. on a rainy Monday morning. At least we hope that she died in her sleep and didn’t wake up alone, unable to call the nurse because of her advancing Alzheimer’s, gasping for a last, rattling breath as pneumonia filled her lungs with fluid.

When I say we, I mean Lisa and me.

Lisa is the receptionist at Crosslands, one of four nursing homes that make up the Quadrant of Death. All four are located within the same city block, just a stone’s throw from the hospital, mortuary, and cemetery. Lisa is my main point of contact and supplier of scoops when it comes to the dead or nearly dead. She hears all the good gossip about the inmates (excuse me, residents)—things that of course can’t, but should, go in the obits.

“Relatives?” I ask.

“Bitchy niece who’s got her eye on Muriel’s Victorian,” says Lisa.

Lisa’s voice is smoky, and I know she’s about my age, but I haven’t yet gotten the nerve to ask her to coffee and meet her in person. I like to tell myself that I’m working up to it.

I tap my pencil on my desk. “So what’s the story?”

“Well,” says Lisa, and I can hear her pause as she checks to see if there’s anyone within earshot, “apparently Muriel was loaded. She was a burlesque dancer in Vegas.”

I drop my pencil on the floor with a clatter, causing Myrna to glare in my direction.

“No shit,” I whisper.

“But she really made her money playing poker. Word is she was a card counter, and when the Mafia found out, they got her a one-way ticket to New York and told her if they saw her again, no one would ever find the body.”

I whistle through my teeth. Go Muriel.

“So she just settled down and got married, never had kids, and played Suzie Homemaker until after her husband Harold died. Then she went back to Vegas one last time.”

“No one would recognize her,” I say.

“Exactly,” says Lisa. “Who’d suspect a nice little old lady with permed gray hair? I wouldn’t. Bitchy niece said she made over two hundred grand her first week, but the thick-necked guys started following her with walkie-talkies, so she decided it was time to clear out. A year later the Alzheimer’s started.”

I jot notes as we talk. Not that any of this will make the paper. But still.

“Anyone else close?” I ask. As in close to dying. I like to keep track so that if there’s a flurry of deaths in a short period of time, I can have some prep work done and easily make my deadline. I’m that sick.

“Umm . . .” says Lisa. “Mrs. Jameson has been dying forever . . . She seems close, but then I think I said that last month.”

“Two months ago,” I say. I already have a file on Mrs. Jameson with some preliminary research, so I could wrap her up fairly quickly. “Nothing new?”

“No,” says Lisa with a sigh. “I found out she did some charity work at the hospital, nothing else.”

I make a note to do some digging. There’s always “the thing” that separates a person out, makes them unique, different. It’s not always stories about Vegas gambling, although you might be surprised at the number of adulterous relationships, incarcerations, and illegitimate children of the Greatest Generation currently stationed at Crosslands. Sometimes the thing is as simple as a mastery of French cuisine, a collection of rare butterflies pinned on a piece of velvet in the living room, or a stay in the White House during the Nixon years. Finding the thing gives me a strange kind of thrill. It’s finding the story behind the façade, even if I have to spin it so that the raging alcoholic was “the life of the party” and the drug addict dies “suddenly of heart failure.” I know the truth. Someone knows the truth before they’re buried. I think everyone deserves that.

“Dimitri, you there?” says Lisa.

I have once again completely spaced out. This happens often in my line of work.

“Hey Lisa, I wanted to ask you—”

Suddenly the line is dead, and I see a large, familiar, thuggish index finger pressing the receiver’s button. Fuck. Nate.

“Talking to your girlfriend on company time?”

I look up to find Nate, Mac’s son and the senior editor, aka Senior Asshole, or Senior Douche Bag, or Senior Beneficiary of Nepotism, standing in front of me. There is a characteristic dumb smirk on his squarely jawed face, and a gleam of unexpressed sadism in his eye. If there was a nuclear war and people resorted to a Lord of the Flies barbarism complete with cannibalism and rampant destruction of whatever civilization remained, it would not surprise me in the least to find Nate at the head of the ruling clan with a scavenged thigh bone in hand and automatic rifles strapped to his back, screeching through the ravaged streets in some kind of assemblage of truck, a la Mad Max. As it is, Nate’s proclivities toward violence are limited to editing my writing with bloody indecipherable marks made with a red Sharpie.

“She’s a source,” I say.

Nate hugs himself and makes obnoxious kissing noises. “Just kidding, slugger,” he says, giving my other shoulder a punch so now I’ll have a bruise to match the one Bob gave me.

I try to hunch over my laptop, like I’m right on the verge of something truly incredibly important or at least more absorbing than starting a discussion. Nate, as usual, misses (or ignores) the cues. He settles on the corner of my desk, his balls frighteningly close to my stapler.

His eyes furrow in some kind of bad caveman impression. “I don’t get it, Shakespeare. Why do you spend so much time on this crap?”

“Crap? What crap?” I say.

Nate pulls out a handful of crumpled and sweaty-looking obits from his back pocket. Nate likes to edit while he’s on the treadmill at the gym. He’s often said he does his best thinking while pumping iron. Seriously.

I hate to admit it, but I’m a little jealous of his ability to work the phrase “pumping iron” into everyday conversation. I wish I could randomly drop lines like, “Yeah, I was in the middle of a triathlon,” but I have a long-standing aversion to any activity that involves pain and an increased heart rate.

“This crap,” says Nate, pushing a pile of my writing at me. “Do you know how long it takes me to edit this shit?” Nate pulls a sheet out and squints at it. “He died of an unidentified prosodemic illness. Who talks like this? Every other sentence I have to use a dictionary.”

I take one of the pages and try to flatten it back out.

“It’s like a fucking never-ending game of Scrabble. And I hate Scrabble.” Nate picks up my pencil and starts scratching the back of his ear with it.

“Maybe you should rethink your vocation,” I mutter.

“There!” says Nate, pointing my pencil back at me. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. What the hell is a vocation?”

“It’s a kind of candle,” I say without hesitation. I have no mercy.

“Oh yeah,” says Nate. “Those little ones . . . Anyway, we can’t print all this shit. No one cares. It’s just dead old people.”

I swallow everything I’d like to say. Hard. “So what would you like me to change?”

“Just take out some words. The big ones.”

I look at the pile in front of me. “So you want me to just take out some words.”

Nate’s face brightens measurably. “Now you get it.” He does an excited drum roll on my desk. “Just get it down to the designer before deadline. We cool?”

I have no intention of editing a word. “We cool,” I say.

My parent’s obituary was sparse—they got one paragraph combined, as if their dying together had somehow melded their lives into a single conglomeration, punctuated by my father’s country of origin (Russia) and a vague allusion to my mother’s interest in baking. An ad for Dalton Discount Motors pushed hard into their column: “0% Down, No Payments for Six Months, Drive Away Happy.” I don’t know who gave the details to the writer at their local paper—I was a little blown out at the time—and the whole experience had the feel of a bad hallucinogenic trip. Not that I have a lot of experience with that kind of thing, but before I failed college last year I did a little experimenting.

In fact, the night my parents died I’d been to a disastrous Halloween party at a frat house. There was this hot girl from my English Lit class with long, wavy hair who’d decided the best costume was none at all. She gave me a hallucinogenic pill called a disco biscuit, along with a shot of warm vodka to chase it down with. I was completely disguised as a Wookie, and she’d obviously mistaken me for one of the frat brothers—a mistake I was more than happy to play along with—so I downed it all in one gulp. What happened next is a blur. There were blobby colors that seemed to wish me ill, threatening blues and purples, and if I stared at anything long enough, the edges started to bleed, as if the pulsating boundaries of reality had become loose, unstrung. My tongue got thick and everything I said came out garbled. I thought I said “I think I’m going to puke” and instead I actually said “Russia has a nuke”—truly unfortunate, because the girl laughed instead of running to get me a bowl to be sick in, and when I removed my mask to clumsily kiss her neck, I lost my lunch instead. I still don’t know how I got home.

And then when I got the call at four in the morning from Aunt Lucy—not literally my aunt; more like my mother’s best friend—and she said my parents had died in a car accident, time took on this quality that’s hard to explain. It was as if time became thick, like water—not that it slowed down, but everything got all liquid, including my knees before I dropped to the floor. I could hear Lucy’s concerned voice through the end of the receiver, all tinny sounding and distant: “Dimitri, are you okay? Dimitri? Dimitri?” And I guess I’d have been worried too, because it wasn’t like I lived in a dorm surrounded by actual people; by then I called an isolated trailer on the outskirts of town home. I wanted to have a first draft of my novel done by the time I graduated, which was not going to happen in a dorm where every Friday night reggae, punk, and metal competed to see which overblown bass line could shatter the windows first. That, and the fact that every time I hit the head there were pails of vomit (the pails provided by janitors who were tired of unplugging the sinks from undigested chunks of Chickwiches).

After the call I didn’t really eat or sleep for a couple of weeks. Lucy and some relatives I’d never heard of—ancient cousins with papery, white skin—made all the arrangements, and a funeral, I found out, is like a wedding in reverse, with less time to plan. Once the bodies were identified—eternal thanks to Lucy for taking that on; the car wreck, I understand, beheaded my mother—there were flowers to be ordered, coffins to be chosen, the mortuary and catering company to be coordinated with. I remember soggy meatballs, bread that tasted like paper, all with the strange ticking of the bodies’ inevitable decay pressing over the proceedings. There is a rush to see it done, over. I wore a black rayon suit—itchy and thin—at my parents’ gravesite. I held a bit of dirt, which in retrospect must have been some kind of gardening mulch, because the ground was rock-solid frozen. Words were said, coffins were lowered, and I tossed the dirt into the neat rectangular plots, wiping my hands on my pants after.

The next day, with a bad, pressing feeling in my intestines from the aforementioned meatballs, I had a meeting with the executor, a reedy, thin man with very thin hair. In his cramped, dim office, he explained that there was a will, but also X amount of debt, which meant that the estate would still be in the hole after everything was liquidated—that word again, “liquidated.” He said I should go and pick out a few things that I wanted to keep. It was hard to understand—the words themselves seemed to move so slowly that I could almost see them hang in the air, and I found myself inordinately distracted by a patch of tape holding together a tear in the leather seat. There were papers to sign—scratch of pen on paper—and my hand was gripped in a meaningful way.

I spent the next few days sorting through the house and putting things in five oversized cardboard boxes.

My mother, I discovered, was surprisingly sentimental. The attic rafters were crammed with every Mother’s Day card I had ever made with crayon, Christmas ornaments, my red tricycle, battered from several ill-planned trips into the gulch behind our house, along with the odd antique, like a moth-eaten bowler hat and a croquet set that looked well used, although we’d never played. Eventually I started to rush through the debris like I was on one of those crazy shopping game shows, pulling out photos by the handful and tossing them in the boxes without looking, making split decisions. Baby teeth? No. Kindergarten macaroni necklace Mother’s Day present? What the hell, sure.

My father, on the other hand, kept surprisingly little.

Contents of my father’s closet: ten identical short-sleeved polo shirts in muted colors, and six pairs of wool slacks (black and gray). Contents of drawer (he had one, and only one, in the mahogany dresser): six pairs of boxers, and six white T-shirts, folded with military precision. In a shoebox under the dresser I found a tarnished silver ring and a broken pocket watch. The ring was engraved with some kind of Celtic knot, and there was a dull red stone in its center. He’d always worn the ring on his right hand, a mirror of the plain gold wedding ring he wore on his left. It was oddly missing from the baggy the funeral director gave me after the wake, jewelry taken from their cold bodies and presented like some kind of corporeal parting gift. I thought he’d nipped it and even sent a few heated texts that were never replied to. So, on rediscovering the ring, I decided to do the smart thing and slip it into the zipped pocket of my messenger bag, which I keep on me at almost all times. I put the shoebox in one of my large cardboard boxes, leaving the rest for the executor to donate. Of course when I went to look for the ring later, it wasn’t there, and I never did find it again—something that haunts me in a recurring dream where I look down and see it on my finger, only to watch it slowly disappear.

The boxes are currently sitting in my apartment closet, taped shut. I haven’t opened them in a year, and in fact I don’t even use that closet. I find that the floor works perfectly well for coat storage and umbrellas.

Two weeks. Everything you love, own, and cherish, can be gone, liquidated, and lost forever in two weeks. Give or take a day.

By the time four o’clock hits I’m wondering if it’d be worth it to pull the fire alarm and get an extra hour of my life back when suddenly Bob, uncharacteristically ashen-faced and sweaty, roughly pulls on his jacket and bolts out the door.

Myrna inadvertently catches my eye.

“What’s up with him?”

She icily swivels her chair out of my sight line.

My phone buzzes. I hope whoever died is someone I have a file on, because there’s no way I’m staying past five.

But it’s just Mac. “Kid, you still here?”

Mac likes to call me “kid,” which makes me wonder if I could sue him for age discrimination. For a moment I consider gently placing the phone back on the receiver and ducking out the back through the fire exit, but then I remember my rent is due.

“Sure I’m here,” I say in a busy, curt voice, tapping loudly on my laptop. “Got a lot on my plate. What’s up?”

“Bob’s gotta go to the hospital for a colonoscopy, for Christ’s sake. Afraid he’s got polyps in his ass.”

This brings up the single most disturbing visual image of my life. I rub my forehead. “That really sucks.”

“You bet it sucks, ’cause it’s Halloween and I already paid Maddy sixty bucks to do her psychic voodoo thing at the Aspinwall place. Huge fuckin’ feature in the Saturday paper, and Bob’s freaking out, ’cause he’s got blood in his shit.”

Second most disturbing visual image of my life.

“So, guess what? Today is your lucky fuckin’ day. I’m gonna put your two-week notice on ice and let you write the feature. How do you like that shit? I mean, no offense to Bob and his polyps, but I gotta have something to print or all the fuckin’ advertisers will pull out, and it’s not like we can fill up those pages with obits unless there’s, like, some kind of fuckin’ bus accident or something. We should be so lucky, right?”

“So this feature—”

“Yeah, you need to get your ass down to the Aspinwall mansion by seven, otherwise Maddy will pitch a fit. She’s my fuckin’ wife’s hairdresser, and damn, she’s got a mouth on her. I’m sending Nate, too, ’cause he’s driving me up the fuckin’ wall. He wants to start a gym-and-donut franchise. Can you believe that shit?”

I have nothing to say about that.

“I swear to God my wife fucked around behind my back, ’cause that idiot doesn’t even look like me. But what the hell can I do, right?”

I try to get the conversation back on track. “So what’s the angle?”

“Angle? It’s a fuckin’ Halloween story in a fuckin’ haunted house. You sure you went to college, ’cause you’re starting to sound a lot like Nate.”

“Right,” I say, trying to think if I’ve ever heard of Aspinwall mansion. I haven’t. “So—”

“Just don’t fuck it up, because I swear to fuckin’ God this is your last shot.”

Click.

Great. Me, Nate, and a psychic hairdresser spending the first anniversary of my parents’ death in some kind of decrepit mansion that’s probably a deathtrap and will certainly set off my mold allergies.

My life could not possibly get worse.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 by J. Lincoln Fenn.

Excerpted from Poe by J. Lincoln Fenn.

Published by permission of the author and 47North.

All rights reserved.

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

J. Lincoln Fenn began her horror career in the 7th grade when she entertained her friends at a sleepover by telling them the mysterious clanking noise (created by the baseboard heater) was in fact the ghost of a woman who had once lived in the farmhouse, forced to cannibalize her ten children during a particularly bad winter. Strangely, it was the last slumber party she was allowed to have. The author graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in English, and lives on an island (not deserted) with her family.

Interview: Melissa Marr
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Melissa Marr is the author of the best-selling Wicked Lovely series, which has been optioned for film by Vince Vaughn. Her latest novel, The Arrivals, is about a group of strangers from throughout American history who find themselves transported to an alternate world that resembles the Wild West with monsters and magic.

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 Arrivals; what’s that about?

The Arrivals is a story of killers from different time periods who are pulled into an alternate world where they have to deal with demons and political intrigue. Theirs is a world in which death is not necessarily a permanent state of being. I’m kind of fixated on death, so what I wondered was, “How do we deal with the idea of never knowing whether or not death is permanent?” In these characters’ lives, after six days they either wake up or they don’t, and there’s no predictable way to determine which it will be. The main characters are: a brother and sister from the late 1800s American Wild West, Jack and Kitty, who have been there the longest; Edgar, who is a trigger man from the Prohibition era; Melody, who’s a 1950s housewife who likes to kill people; and Chloe, who’s a modern day girl who is our most recent arrival. They believe that they are working for the governor and trying to be a force for justice, but at the same time, they’re also dealing with the fact of death being impermanent and having a nemesis who is basically destroying the community, the land, and the mines. The antagonist is an embodiment of cultural imperialism focusing on both the political and the personal in this world.

You describe the book as a big departure from your previous ones; what would you say makes it so different?

I’ve obviously enjoyed my other books, but this was the book I wrote just for me. It’s possibly the weirdest thing I’ve ever done. I’m dealing with coffin texts from the Victorian era. I’m pulling in Prohibition, the 50s, and all of these eras that are just fun. It’s an alternate world, and it’s time-space travel, and it’s lots of monsters and viscera hanging off the walls. It was a combination of cowboy and action movies, and science fiction love that said, “I’m going to do this, and either my editor will hate it or I’ll get away with it.” It appears that I got away with it.

For people who haven’t read your other books, do you want to say what those are like by way of comparison?

I’m best known for the Wicked Lovely series, which is faeries in the modern world. It’s traditional faeries, and it’s coming out of my Scottish and Irish heritage. It’s a little bit more romantic, but also a little dark. It’s not an action series. It’s dealing a lot more with relationships, traditional folklore. I also have a new children’s series that I just started with Kelley Armstrong called The Blackwell Pages, and that’s dealing with the descendants of Norse gods in modern day America. I had Graveminder, which was a small town where the dead don’t stay dead. The other books are a lot more dealing with myth and folklore, whereas The Arrivals is gunslinging, monsters, and action, and not so much with the mythology.

You mentioned the Victorian coffin texts; could you explain what those are?

Victorian was one of my eras in graduate school, and in the Victorian era they were very fascinated with Egyptology. They’d have these parties in which there’d be a sarcophagus that you’d unwrap, and there’s different things that come with it. There are these things called coffin texts, which were little pieces of text that would be included, and there’s one in particular that talks about not fearing death and facing death. This particular text (used in The Arrivals) reads like it’s a recipe or spell for opening a portal. When I was reading it, it made a connection with physics for me, with the idea of time-space travel and wormholes. I consulted with a physicist friend on the idea of time-space and wormholes, and then I put fantasy and science together, and suddenly there’s a passage that, instead of being a reference to what death is like, is actually instructions for opening a hole that takes you to another place and time.

You say that you didn’t use a ton of folklore and stuff in this series, but in the back of the book you do have a list of real world antecedents for some of the elements in the book, like Garuda, bloedzuiger, and the Lindwurm. Where do those things come from?

I guess when I say I don’t use folklore, I mean that I don’t use a whole body of lore. For instance, Wicked Lovely is specifically pulled out of a certain culture and a certain type of lore. With The Arrivals, it’s very piecemeal. Lindwurm is a type of dragon. For bloedzuiger, literally the word means “blood sucker.” Cynanthropes are dog shapeshifters. They’re parallel to different types of creatures in lore, but I wanted to be clear that they weren’t those things. I find it very frustrating when someone calls something, for instance, a vampire and it doesn’t behave as a vampire should. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t having people come in with the baggage associated with those words, so I pulled comparative words and concepts in order to rebuild them the way I wanted them to work in my world, instead of relying on the existing lore and baggage that ties to specific words.

In the dedication of the book, you also thank your dad for the years of Westerns, action movies, and guns. Which Westerns, action movies, and guns have the most influence on you?

My parents are card-carrying NRA members, and I grew up with guns. My father actually collects guns. I’m a very good shot, I’m very proud of that. Being a girl growing up in rural Pennsylvania, there are gender issues, and I was determined that I was going to be as good as the boys. I’m partial to a .357, and generally I prefer a revolver. I don’t like a 9mm (usually). I’m a scrawny-armed girl, so I can’t deal with a .45, and I’m not really good with rifles. Dad has a collection of guns, and he would get them all out, and we’d set up targets in the field, and you just shoot, and it’s fun. My husband is a retired Marine, so he was an expert at the highest level you can get in all of the options: small arms, large arms, he even did anti-tank artillery. It was a bonding thing for us, too. So, I’m a big fan of guns. I don’t agree with the idea that we should not have any rules on them, but when you grow up country, and there’s so much distance between you and the police, and it takes a very long time for that one officer to get to you, there’s something comforting about having a nice little artillery in your house. It was the way I was raised. As to Westerns, they were all Daddy liked to watch. We watched Westerns. Give me some Clint Eastwood, some Charles Bronson, and I was a happy girl. That was our father-daughter bonding. Then my husband is a huge comic geek, and to be honest, we’ve been subscribers to Wired from the beginning, and anything tech, anything comic, anything action is his deal. His degree was actually in film, so when we started dating, we went to every action and superhero movie that came out.

You mentioned that the setting was very Western, but the heroes in the book all come from different time periods. How did you decide which time periods to draw the characters from?

I started with Jack and Kitty, again with the Western, and I love the Prohibition era, so Edgar was an obvious choice. I don’t know what it is about the 50s, I don’t know if it’s a result of being a Marine wife, but the concept of femininity, with the 50s woman who’s put-together and very polished but has a rotten core and a twistedness in there, is something I’ve always been really interested in. When I became a Marine wife, they had etiquette manuals, and they read straight out of the 50s. It would be very confusing to me because people would call the house to speak to my husband, and they had a certain number of statements or comments that they would make to me. They’d inquire after the children. It was all very throwback. Again, Melody was a logical choice for me. I needed a modern one, so Chloe was obvious. Hector, my 80s guy, was because when I was bartending, we used to have the carnies come into the bar all the time, and I loved the carnies. If I was building a carnie as a character, I wanted it to be someone who would be based on the people that I had known, and so Hector became a logical choice. My in-laws actually live in a self-sustaining house in the mountains of Colorado, off the grid where there are no utilities. They have a self-composting toilet. So the hippy character, Frances, was pretty easy to build, too. I can look at my in-laws for that. It was very much types of characters that I find intriguing as a person.

I thought it was interesting that there’s a part where Chloe is from 2010, and she’s starting to be interested in Jack who’s from the Old West, and she’s startled to realize that he has a very blasé attitude toward brothels. I was curious, what do you think about those two attitudes toward brothels? Do you fall more on the Chloe side or more on the Jack side?

I actually fall more on the Jack side. I understand that there are people that have an issue with it, but it’s a service like any other service. I think that sometimes in our country people are a little more uptight about sexuality than makes sense to me. I had a lot of friends that were dancers. I used to spend a lot of good time in strip clubs. There are people that appreciate being able to have relations without having to worry about emotions, and if it’s a service, and people are responsible, and not taking advantage of each other, I don’t see an issue with it.

Just from hearing you talk it sounds like you’ve had a very colorful, interesting life, and that even goes back to your childhood where you said that you were raised believing that faeries were real.

I was. I think colorful is a very polite way to put it. We’d hear those stories and that was the same as facts as you hear in church, and the same facts as you hear anywhere else, in school. There was proof. We would leave out whiskey for the good neighbors, and in the morning, it was gone. The cat wasn’t drunk, the dog wasn’t drunk, so clearly there were faeries. It was later that I realized that perhaps my grandfather might have been drinking it, but at the time, I thought this was evidence. There was never any reason not to believe. There was a section of the woods you didn’t go into because there was a banshee that hung out there. We had an old record player thing that would periodically start on its own, and my mother said that’s because someone from the dead was trying to communicate with us. That was just how I grew up. I think I was a teenager when I realized that some of it was, perhaps I’ll say, useful. I had gone out on a date, and I had come home missing curfew, and my mother was waiting up, and I explained to her that I would have come home sooner, but there was a vampire between me and the door. I had proof. There was a mark on my throat where the vampire tried to get me. My mother looked at me very seriously and said, “Did you have your cross?” I did, I had a crucifix, and so I showed it to her, and she said, “Okay,” and I didn’t get grounded. It was this realization that there was a power in story. In retrospect, I realize that my mom was just being cool, but at the time it was also this moment of, there’s a choice to believe in these things, and a choice to embrace it, so it was fun.

It’s interesting, I think you know Holly Black, and we interviewed her a few years ago, and she also was raised to believe that faeries were real, and I asked her, “When did you realize that they weren’t?” And she says, “I don’t think I’ve ever realized that. I think that when you’re raised with a particular worldview, that sticks with you throughout your life at some level. No matter what happens later.”

I’d agree with that completely. There are moments where you say, “Logically this cannot be the case,” but if I’m walking late at night and I see a dark shape, there is absolutely nothing logical that’s happening in my head. What’s happening is I’m thinking, “Is this the Wild Hunt? Is this a threat?” That fight or flight mechanism kicks in. You can try and logic it away as much as you want, and I think you have to believe in that to some degree in order to do the immersive fantasy that I want to write. My children were raised with that same belief. I think that’s very important, to have that sense of wonder. I don’t have an issue believing in myth and believing in the logic of science. I feel like I can make them co-exist in my head.

You’ve said that you also have had severe nightmares, even going back to childhood. You had a teacher who said, “Well, don’t be alarmed, maybe it’s just Satan trying to get you.”

No, they were very alarmed by that. There was much conversation with the Sisters. The parish priest came and talked to my parents. When I first started writing, I was in fifth or sixth grade, and Sister Elaine gave me a journal, and one of the very first things I wrote was a story about my nightmare that I had all the time, in which this wolf creature would come in and put his hands fingernail-to-fingernail, they would go tap, tap, tap, as they all touched together in the center of my chest, and then dig them in, rip me open, and lift out my heart. At the same time I was also sitting on the chair next to the bed watching this. He would look at me and hold my heart out to me. It was this very horrible, bloody nightmare that my parents say I had for as long as they can remember. I would wake up screaming, and I still have nightmares where I wake up screaming in cold sweats, and so now I use them, turn them into books, and people give me money for it. I’m not complaining about them, but I think there’s a kind of a believing in the supernatural and having those kinds of nightmares. If I don’t write, I have violent nightmares, so I constantly write.

Can you think of any specific elements of your books that were actually pulled straight out of a dream?

There’s a scene in The Arrivals where they walk into an office and someone has been possessed by a demon that has sort of slashed and killed, and so there’s blood and pieces hanging off the walls and decorating everything. There’s a scene in my first book in Wicked Lovely where someone is crawling across ice shards that are coming up out of the floor as the person is crawling, they keep coming up and embedding in the body. Both of those are from nightmares.

Getting back to faeries for a minute, as someone who grew up believing faeries were real, I’m curious when you may have discovered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories, just because he famously also believed in faeries.

I can’t give you a year for that. My uncle is a Victorians professor, and when I was a kid, we didn’t have a bookstore where I lived. He would bring home cardboard boxes and grocery bags of teaching copies that they send to professors to adopt a book. There were always stacks of classics around the house. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit this as an author, but I never paid attention to titles or author names. I just got in the box, got a book, and read. It would be years later when I’d look at something that I’d be choosing to read and say, “This is familiar; I’ve read it before.” I can’t tell you the year or the experience for most authors, except for Stephen King—he was my one exception. When I got a hold of Salem’s Lot, I was in middle school, and I thought it was the most brilliant thing I’d read in my life.

Then Neil Gaiman came along and stole you away.

[Laughter] I worship Neil. Aside from being a brilliant author, he’s just such a good person. He was actually one of only three author events that I had been to prior to being published. When I saw him, it was me and like ten other people sitting on the floor in a bookstore in Cary, North Carolina. It was quite different from the way his events are now. He was the most charming person. He was the best reader. For someone that is totally intimidated by reading in public, I thought that was brilliant. All these sorts of things that I’d been raised believing in, he was turning into stories, so I was just like, “He’s a god.”

Shifting gears a bit: You’re probably one of the only writers we’ve talked to who uses a snorkel as part of your writing process.

Wow, you’ve done some research. I was really tired the first time I admitted that in public. It’s one of those things where the world has a long memory. I have a big bathtub, and I go under the water, close my eyes, and it’s a sensory deprivation situation, but I have to have the snorkel because there’s the need for oxygen. I have a salt-water pool for in the summer—it doesn’t work so well in the winter—but I think that blocking everything out where you don’t have input from any of your senses is a meditative state that I think helps to reach past “plot bunnies.” You don’t get stuck if you can just block everything out. I think the tub works, or something physical (I like to exercise), or something where you have to concentrate on the details. I weave, I bake, something that enables me to knock out that part of me that has doubts and questions, and once I get away from that and all this noise, I fall into the story again, and then I can get back to writing.

Is there a particular brand of snorkel that you would recommend for writers?

It’s actually one of my children’s. My son did a class in Southern California called “Snorkeling with Sharks” through either the Scripps aquarium or the Natural History Museum [of Los Angeles], and I stole his.

They have kids go snorkeling with sharks?

It sounds like the kind of thing that’s more dangerous than it really is. I don’t remember what kind of shark it is, but they can’t bite you. They’re little sharks. It sounds dangerous, which is very appealing to young boys, but really, they’re not dangerous sharks.

Speaking of blocking everything out, I’ve heard that when you have a book optioned for a movie, that’s what you should do. You should just try to forget about it and forget that it ever happened, but I’ve never really heard of authors who do that. With that in mind, what’s the current status of the Wicked Lovely movie?

They give me sentences I’m allowed to say and sentences that I’m not allowed to say.

What’s one of the sentences you’re not allowed to say?

See, there’s the problem. I tend to say those, and I know they’re going to listen to this, and I’ll get yelled at, so we’re going to not say those. I’m allowed to say that IM Global is on-board, and I don’t know if I’m allowed to say, but they’re the people with the money. Generally what keeps a movie from being made is lack of money, so that’s no longer an issue. I like that. We were to the point of being very on-track. I even have a full color copy table book of the characters and some of the CGI stuff. It’s gorgeous. Then it went into turnaround. So, IM Global came on board sometime around the turn of the new year, and now it appears that we are actually going to have a movie. I believe I’m allowed saying they are close to a new director, but I think that’s all I’m allowed to say. We have a new producer, we are going to have a movie, we are close to a director, things are actually happening, and I think that covers my approved list. I’d been begging them for more approved data before I talked to you because there’s other things, but they kept saying no, so I emailed them again yesterday with a sort of, “So, well . . .” and they’re like, “No.”

Speaking of money, I heard that the book was originally optioned by Vince Vaughn. I was wondering if he called you on the phone and said, “You’re money, Melissa! You’re so money!”

[Laughter] The Vince Vaughn story is kind of embarrassing. He is still my producer. I watch comic book movies. Give me The Avengers. Give me Thor. Those are my area. I don’t watch comedies, and so my agent called and said, “Vince Vaughn wants to buy your book.” I’m not sure if I’m allowed cussing on here, so I’ll just say my answer was, “Who the hell is Vince Vaughn?” My agent said, “Type it in the computer.” I looked him up, and I was like, “Okay, so he’s an actor. Why can’t he go to a bookstore? Do you have author copies?” She said, “No, honey, he wants to buy the book for the purposes of making a movie.” I was like, “Okay, sure, I guess?” The embarrassing part was that they’ve been really interactive, and I’ve gone over all the drafts of the script. I’ve met with both the prior directors, Vince, and people about the effects. I keep going out there, and the first time I went out there, Vince comes in the room, and all the other people knew what I said when they called me. They waited until he was in the room and said, “So tell Vince what you said.” I was like, “Uh . . . no.” Then they tell him, he laughs, and he said, “You really didn’t?” I said, “No, I’ve never seen any of your movies, but I can.” It was terribly embarrassing because he was so sweet. Then I said I would go out and see one of his movies.

Have you seen Swingers? Do you have any idea what I’m talking about when I say, “You’re so money”?

No, but I’ve read it in articles about him. I did go out, and I saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith, he’s in that one, and things blow up, so that fit my criteria.

The Arrivals is your new book, but you also have another new book out called Loki’s Wolves, which you mentioned before. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Loki’s Wolves is the book I wrote for my now fourteen-year-old son back when he was twelve. I had written Wicked Lovely for my now nineteen-year-old daughter. When my son got to that age he said he wanted a book for him that didn’t involve any kissing. Loki’s Wolves is a book about thirteen-year-olds in South Dakota who discover that Ragnarök is coming. In Norse mythology, that’s the end of the world. One of the interesting things about Norse mythology is that the gods can die. I went with the concept of the gods have gone and done stupid things, as gods often do, so Ragnarök is coming, but the gods are already dead. They need people to be their stand-ins for this final battle, and these kids who are descended from Norwegians who ended up laying down with gods at some point or another become the god stand-ins, the representatives, the champions for the gods, and the end of the world. It’s set in South Dakota, where my husband’s family is from. (They are Norwegian, complete with the extra A in the last name.) It’s the mythology, and my children’s heritage, in the state that the family is from.

On the cover, it lists the authors as K.L Armstrong and M.A. Marr. Why did you guys go with the initials?

Because our names are so long. We didn’t want one name on top of the other. We wanted them in a row because we didn’t want a sense of, like a lot of times when they do that on anthologies there’s the “lead author” and then there’s the other people, and we didn’t want to have that. Between the two of us, they didn’t fit properly. The other issue is that Kelley is a video game addict, and I’m an action movie addict. We are technically girls, and we were concerned about our sons because she did the same thing, this was for her son as it was for my son. Our sons are less inclined to pick up books by chicks, and so we decided that we would prefer to use our initials, in part because of our gender, in part because of the size of our names. The third reason is that my YA and her adult books are darker. We didn’t want young readers to then read our other stuff, because there are things in there that I wouldn’t feel comfortable with children that age coming across by accident. So we thought the responsible thing to do on several different levels was to use the initials.

Your publisher was nice enough to send us a copy of these books. I didn’t get a chance to read Loki’s Wolves, but I’m just looking at the cover, and it shows a boy and a girl facing off against ten or more gigantic killer wolves. The boy has a shield, but the girl seems to be holding a stick? Is it a magic stick or something? How do you fight wolves with a stick? Is she going to toss it and have them go fetch it?

[Laughter] I don’t know about the stick. At that point in the series she is, in fact, weaponless. Obviously that’s going to change, but initially it’s a case of we wanted to be sure that it was obvious that the book is both for boys and girls. We do multiple points of view. I write one of the boys and the girl. Kelly writes the boy with the shield; that’s Matt. The idea is to represent that it is not just about a boy and his sidekicks, which is something that we’ve had a lot of positive feedback on from moms, teachers, and young readers, saying that it was exciting to read a book that was middle-grade, but it wasn’t just that the girl was there, and it wasn’t told in her voice. I love Harry Potter, but Hermione doesn’t tell the story, Harry tells the story. I think there’s something to be said about making sure that all the voices are heard.

You wrote this book with Kelley Armstrong, and you guys had done these Smart Chicks book tours; are you still doing those?

We are not. The Smart Chicks book tour was supposed to be a single year. It was to be a one-shot because we had been told we couldn’t do it, and I never respond well to that particular sentence. We had been told that group tours had to be from a single publisher, and Kelley and I had done one of those tours, and it was very frustrating because I don’t think readers say, “Oh, well, I’m only going to buy books by this publisher.” So, it was supposed to be a single-year event. It was author-funded and -organized, mostly well organized, except that there was a little pushback because I forgot to include things like meals, which apparently should be on the itinerary. There were so many people that were interested, and our turnout was unbelievable. We decided to do it a second year, and then there were still so many cities and booksellers that were like, “Hey, you forgot us.” So we ended up doing a third year, and then we agreed not to do it again. We did three years. We did Canada and the US, and I think we ended up doing something like thirty cities between the three years. It was wonderful.

I’ve really found doing events with multiple authors is better because then more people show up. I did one event for my writers’ group in New York, so of course three people came to see me, but then one member of the group was really popular, and like sixty people came to see her. But then they all had to sit there and watch me before they got to see her.

I think it’s great in several ways. I think it’s great because, yes, everyone’s bringing in their readers. That part is fun, and readers are discovering new authors in that way. For us, the big motivation was that when you’re doing these things, like you guys asked me earlier to describe one of my books, and I fail at that so often, I’m just like, “I don’t know. It’s a book about some stuff that I like, and I wrote it on some papers.” But I can tell you about Kelley’s book, or I can tell you about Rick Yancey’s book. I can tell you about books that I dig. For us, it was very much about it [being] more fun and there’s less feeling self-conscious. I go on these tours, and I sit in a hotel room and do room service, or I’m on a plane by myself, and it’s boring, so a group tour is just more fun.

What are some new, geeky books that you dig?

I absolutely loved Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave. I read it in one fell swoop. I was supposed to be revising and ended up not able to because I just wanted to read Rick’s book. It’s more engaging than a lot of the YA that has been out previously, which I personally love. It’s an end-of-the-world alien invasion, dealing with that in very poignant, personal ways, as well as some guns and some violence, which I like. Richelle Mead has an adult book that I think is out now called Gameboard of the Gods, which is a future world in which religion is banned. It’s science fiction, but it’s also pulling in religion and some mythology, and some of the religions are being kept down because they are actually valid, and one particular mythological religion that I’m fond of is a factor, so that one was a lot of fun. Kelley has a new book, which may or may not [be out]—I have no sense of when things come out—she’s got one called Omens, which is [about] the daughter of two infamous serial killers who doesn’t know that she was adopted, and then finds out that she is, and the family that’s adopted her is very wealthy, and she’s very popular and public, and has to deal with this new notoriety. That one was interesting. Those are the ones off the top of my head. I’ve mostly been reading things like making baby food books because I have a six-month-old now, but those are my most recent not-baby-related books.

Do you want to tell us if you’re working on anything right now, other than baby food? Do you have projects off on the horizon?

I do, actually. I am finishing a book that is very unlike everything that I have written. It is a book told in multiple points of view from a girl who is a survivor of a killer and the killer himself, and that should be out next year. I’ve been wanting to write a contemporary killer book for a number of years, and my YA publisher finally agreed, so it has a little bit of a paranormal element, but it is primarily a contemporary with a murderer. Kelley and I just finished the second book in The Blackwell Pages trilogy, which is called Odin’s Ravens, and that’s out in May. I’m leaving with Kelley to go somewhere in Canada on the edge of the water and write the third book [soon.] I’m trying to finish my killer book, or at least put it in a place that I can take a break in order to go play with gods and monsters.

Does the killer book have a title?

Not that I’m allowed to say. They have one. Technically, as I was telling you, I’m not even really sure I’m supposed to be saying that, because they told me I’m not supposed to be talking about it online, but I’m not really typing this, I’m just talking to you, so we’ll assume that they aren’t listening.

You also have an anthology coming out this fall, right?

I am so excited about my anthology. It’s call Rags and Bones, and it’s a result of a friend, Tim Pratt, and I talking because he did something to do with Heart of Darkness and Dora the Explorer, which I thought was fun and interesting. We ended up taking a flip conversation into what if we took classic stories and made them science fiction and modern. It is a collection of stories by Neil Gaiman; Rick Yancey’s first ever short story, which has been optioned for film; the amazing Gene Wolfe; Kelley is in it; Kami Garcia; Carrie Ryan; and Saladin Ahmed. Really, really interesting science fiction and fantasy takes on traditional short stories, like Hawthorne, and Neil does a fairy tale, and Kelley does The Monkey’s Paw, so it’s these classic stories with a science fiction, modern twist, and it was an absolute joy to work on.

Do you have plans to update your website at any point in the future?

[Laughter] Yes, I do have those plans. I really do. I think about it regularly because my new book isn’t even on there, but Harper made a website for my new YA, and then we made a website for Blackwell, so it hasn’t been as pressing until The Arrivals, and I was determined that I would get updated before The Arrivals. But my infant son was born in December, and his birthmother was a drug addict, so we spent forty days in the hospital going through withdrawal, and he still doesn’t sleep more than two hours. Pretty much when I’m not writing, I’m holding the baby because he’s still suffering the effects of the drugs that were in his system, so that has been my general priority and focus in life these days—getting him okay.

We certainly wish you guys all the best. Do you have anything else you want to mention before I wrap things up here?

I want to thank you guys so much for having me. My teen son and husband were so thrilled. I tell them about my work stuff and they’re like, “That’s nice.” But I tell them that it’s you guys and there were the nods of approval, which I really appreciate. So thank you very much for that.

No, thank you. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you very much for having me!

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 five-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’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

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

Interview: Felicia Day
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Felicia Day is the creator and star of the hit web-series The Guild. She’s also appeared as an actress in the Joss Whedon short film Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, as well as on TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural. Her latest project is Geek and Sundry, a YouTube channel offering a wide range of geek-themed videos.

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.

You have a new book out, The Guild: The Official Companion, that you wrote the introduction for. Do you want to tell us a bit about that book and how it came about?

I worked quite a bit on the book. It came about because Titan, the publisher, came to me after doing the Dr. Horrible Companion, and they said, “It seems like a natural fit for us to do a companion for your series.” I have so much on my plate that I was almost ready to say no, but then I thought, “Hey, how awesome would it be to have a book?” As I saw on the horizon that the show would be wrapping up after season six, I thought it would be an amazing way to wrap up our whole journey of these amazing six years that we had on a show that started in my garage and has become very well known amongst a certain type of internet-using geek. I was so pleased to work with them for the last several months on the book. We had a great interviewer who interviewed everyone firsthand, and then I worked really hands-on with the publisher to get all the photos right and add a lot of things that fans have never seen before, like behind-the-scenes pictures, original writing, and all sorts of extra, fun stuff.

Did anything that came out in those interviews surprise you, that your fellow cast members said?

It was really nice to have their perspective on everything, to be honest with you. We’d been running so fast on the treadmill, there was nothing that we’ve done in this show that was ever easy. We never had too much help. We were always doing it pretty much ourselves, me and my partner Kim Evey. She is an amazing person. She and I never had a full-time employee really to help us with this thing that became so incredibly huge. So, I never actually had the time to sit down and ask even the cast what they thought about the show. It was really heart-warming, a lot of the things that they said to the interviewer, especially since we all knew at the time of the interview that the show was going to come to an end in the format that we’d been doing it. Everyone has a really nice reflective quality on the show, without being too far away from it. A lot of the interviews took place right after we’d finished filming season six. Everything is fresh on their minds, and it made me realize what an amazing journey we’d taken together, and how, I guess, if there is any regret in my life, it’s that I didn’t enjoy the journey a little bit more while we were doing it. Honestly, the odds were so against us for so many years that there was no time to really pause and look at all the things we’d done that nobody else had done because it was too hard.

It really struck me, the way the book describes how you only had a couple hundred dollars at the beginning as your budget, and you would actually leave The Guild bookmarks in public restrooms just to try to promote the show. I was wondering, does that work? Did you ever have someone say, “Oh, I was in a restroom, and I came across a bookmark, and now it’s my favorite show.”

I don’t know if I ever got specifically the bathroom [mentioned by a fan], but I honestly did. I would carry a stack of about a hundred bookmarks with me every single place I went. I would leave a lot of bookmarks in bathrooms because, hey, you have nothing else to do in there, really. I would leave them at coffee shops, at auditions, and to me there was nothing too small. There was no venue or effort that was not worth my time, because when you’re starting from zero every single person involved in your project, that’s a person that wouldn’t have been involved otherwise.

You mention the challenges, and that was another thing that struck me in this book. From the outside, your career seems like one success after another. There’s Buffy, Dr. Horrible, The Guild, and Geek and Sundry, but this book really paints this picture of all these challenges that you’ve encountered working in Hollywood. Did you want to talk a little bit about what some of those challenges have been?

To me, it’s so funny, because in my world, I’m always struggling. I’m always the underdog. I’m always the person that’s going to be passed over. I don’t know if that’s something that I hold on to from my past as the actor who was rejected a lot, but at the same time, as somebody who lives in Hollywood and works in Hollywood as an actor still and works on the web, and still to this day, people in mainstream Hollywood don’t really understand or acknowledge the web as anywhere near equal or on par with what traditional Hollywood makes. There is, not a snobbery, but a lack of understanding and credence given to people who work on the web, even to this day. That mentality accompanies me with everything I do because I still have my foot in a world that doesn’t see what I do on the web as something legitimate. From the creator’s side, a lot of the creators do love the idea of working on the web—working without the gatekeepers and all the business and cookie-cutter parameters that people are forced to work in to make things in Hollywood. On the creator end, what we’ve done with the show has been recognized by a lot of writers, actors, and creators, but from the business side, the gatekeepers, they don’t see the stakes as being high enough for them to acknowledge them and give them as much credence, although that’s changing, but very slowly. That’s where the underdog mentality comes from.

You’ve talked about how, when you first got to Hollywood, people told you that you should have plastic surgery, and you were cast four times in a row as quirky secretaries and stuff like that?

Yes, early on, I was told to get a nose job. I needed to fix my teeth. I needed to get bigger boobs. I was told this by people who were agents and managers and people who manage talent, casting directors, and all this stuff. That certainly can get to you, but I did have enough of a strong sense of self to know that I didn’t want to change myself, but I did change myself to bring out the quirkiness and oddballness, and that became more saleable, but ultimately less fulfilling, because I was becoming a caricature of something that I was. It’s like me only being the “geek girl.” That’s what people know me for, but hopefully they know me as a three-dimensional person versus just a superficial cliché of somebody who likes geek things. That’s what I think Hollywood tends to do to artists, because it’s such a quick-paced environment to be in. There’s so many people trying to get in that you can only look at the surface of everything most of the time. It made me very unhappy to feel like a large part of myself was not being represented in what I was doing with my career. So that’s why I sat down and wrote The Guild one day. It was really about trying to find myself again and have ownership over myself.

You just had a piece on your blog about how in the new Star Trek movie there are few roles for women, and even hundreds of years in the future all of the most powerful officers in Star Fleet are all white men.

I enjoyed the movie quite a bit, and I admire J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. I had a great time, but it was something that surprised me, in that I always felt Star Trek was more egalitarian. I’m a Next Generation girl, so there are a lot of amazing female characters on that show, and that was always what I approached Star Trek as. Maybe I’m hyper-sensitive about it, but I think maybe it’s just the people in charge on that movie didn’t notice. I don’t think they deliberately didn’t include women extras around that table, but someone did, and someone didn’t think consciously, “This is what we’re showing the world. This is what we’re showing that this world is.” And it’s mostly white guys, so I think it’s perfectly valid to put a spotlight on that and ask ourselves, “Is this really what we want to show people and convey that this is where our culture in the future would go, or what we want to convey today?” Because really, it’s all the unspoken, unconscious things and media that we look at that formulate how we think about the world.

What is the climate like right now for independent web-series like The Guild? Is that something that you would recommend that people get into?

It’s very interesting, because The Guild saw many ebbs and flows in the web-series business environment. There were a lot of media companies trying to get into the business and then they went under, and then they got into the business and they went under. Dr. Horrible also gave a big boost to web series around 2008, and that didn’t come to fruition in the way that the business part was realized. It’s very interesting because now it feels like finally the web is going to stick. The growth of web-series, digital content, and watching video online is going to be long-lasting. The peculiar part of it is that independent web content has actually taken a step back in order to facilitate the people watching regular TV shows online and all this other stuff as far as budgets go. The Guild was never very high budget, but it seems like nowadays, because there’s such a glut of entertainment, inventory, and video vying for people’s attention, that the audience is now diluted, and therefore people are less willing to risk money to invest in web series. I think it’s just a temporary thing, and I think it’s definitely going to go upward as people start being able to watch Game of Thrones on the same browser that they’re watching something on YouTube, but right now, I don’t know if something like The Guild could have launched and been able to get the show’s voice through all the other things that are vying for people’s attention. What I would give people advice about is just don’t wait, make what you want, something that really translates your voice into video, and do it because you’re never going to do it perfectly the first time, so you might as well start practicing now. Finding an audience is going to be very difficult, and just make sure that you’re safe and that it’s really true to yourself, and expressing yourself uniquely. That’s really all you can ask yourself to do. You can’t create something thinking, “Oh, I heard baking is really popular this month.” You have to genuinely be a baker and do something that’s unique with baking that the audience hasn’t seen before. That goes for scripted, non-scripted, or just a vlog, really. We’ve been doing a really cool thing on my network, Geek and Sundry: We’re doing a vlogging project, and we’ve been adding a lot of new talent to it. It’s amazing, we’ve gotten so many submissions over the summer to join the vlogging channel. Every single person, you can really tell the minute you watch a video whether they’re talking about something they love, or they’re talking about something because somebody told them to. People’s personalities just shine when you’re talking about something you have passion for. I would say, first and foremost, make sure that passion is there, because it’s a lot of work, and you have to make sure that you don’t consider it work because you care about it so much. That will get you through all the tough times, just like it got us through all the tough times in The Guild.

Do you want to say a bit more about Geek and Sundry for people who don’t know? What is it and why should they go check it out?

Geek and Sundry is the company that I started in 2011. The last season of The Guild is on the channel; it’s on YouTube. YouTube invested in a hundred channels to make all sorts of web series of all different backgrounds, and I was very lucky to be picked, and we were even luckier to get reinvested in for a second year. For about a year and several months we’ve been releasing really cool content, all the shows, about a dozen of them, have centered on things that you’d see at Comic-Con or a fan convention, or just feature geeky things and subjects. We have scripted shows, like The Guild season six; Space Janitors; Written by a Kid, which is a storytelling show where a kid tells a story in a science fiction or fantasy universe, and we re-enact it with a different director each time. We have a full-length thirty-minute show with Wil Wheaton, who created a show called TableTop; it’s where he invites three celebrities to come join him to play a different board or hobby game every week. It’s really amazing. It definitely has drawn a lot of people to the hobby that never would have thought of playing board games before. Like I said, we have a vlogger network of twenty vloggers that talk about everything from cosplay to thumb wrestling to comics. Really, Geek and Sundry is my translation of The Guild community transferred over to something that will be evergreen. It will be beyond just one show. It’s a network, a website destination, a forum, and a community that people can belong to, and they know the sensibility will be my sensibility, and hopefully they’ll really enjoy the shows, and be a part of what we consider a family.

On your blog, you had a video called “State of the Sundry,” where you’re just talking about the state of the union for Geek and Sundry and in that video you talk about how you would like to see geeks more as rebels and fighters. In what way do you see geeks as rebels and what sorts of things should we be fighting for?

I was going to do a silly music video instead to launch the second season, and I didn’t feel like it was very true, and I actually had gone through a lot of ups and downs after The Guild ended. It was an emotionally tough time for me, and I didn’t want to do something frivolous. Being involved in business and creating a startup company has been very challenging because I was a creator. I’m a creative person. I wrote, produced, and acted in a show. I did all the front-facing activity like the marketing and tweeting and all this stuff, but really it wasn’t so much the business stuff I was drawn to. In creating this company, we’ve gotten over a huge hump. The first year was extremely challenging to set up how this company would work, managing personnel, and at the time I needed to do a video, I didn’t want to do something silly or fun, necessarily. I wanted to say something about geek culture, because interacting with sponsors and the business side made me feel very superficial in the way that I was dealing with geek culture. I didn’t want to get caught in the trap of being clichéd or just dealing with things and subjects geeks like versus the substance of what it means to be a geek, which is essentially someone who’s brave enough to love something against judgment. The heart of being a geek is a little bit of rejection, but love in the face of rejection.

In that “State of the Sundry” video, you also talked about how the term “geek” has become something to monetize and market to and exploit. Could you talk about some of the ways in which you see that happening?

Dealing with the business side of a “geek business” certainly led me to interact with people on a much more surface way by necessity. When you’re building a business, you really need to hone in on what you need, and when you see the word “geek” in it, everybody thinks the cliché of the word “geek,” which is a person who likes comics, books, and games. Commercialization of “geek” is very popular now, obviously because if you look at the biggest movies and TV shows that we enjoy, they’re all fantasy and science fiction right now, so obviously anybody who is looking to make money is going to look to that as something to tap. I wanted to make sure in the speech that I did to remind people that to have this last longer than just a fad, to get people to really understand geekdom, we have to mean something to ourselves and not get trapped into, “Hey, everything’s just a mashup t-shirt,” because it means more than that underneath. If some kid who might not have been a geek otherwise gets attracted to geek things because of popular culture, encouraging that. We want to offer something underneath just the superficial to make sure that that person in ten years doesn’t abandon playing video games, or the idea of playing a board game with their friends, or rejects geeky things entirely because the societal tide has shifted to something else being popular. To me, being a geek is very organic. I’ve always been an outsider, but I’ve never been ashamed of being who I am. I think that that has served me in good stead, because at no point am I ever threatened by people who question who I am, or why I like the things I do, or my legitimacy, because I know who I am very strongly, and that’s what geek culture can reinforce as we struggle with this whole popularity situation.

As geekiness becomes more popular and acquires a cachet and a marketing angle, it has led to wrangling over authenticity and who’s a real geek and who’s a fake geek girl and a fake gamer girl.

I don’t understand. People should not be concerned. It’s like gay marriage to me, it’s like, is it really harming you? I think that it’s a horrible argument when you’re pinpointing people and asking them to prove themselves. Shouldn’t you be worried about something else? I don’t ever approach anyone saying, “You have to prove yourself to me.” You have to prove the negative here. That’s not even a valid argument. “Prove that you aren’t fake.” In rhetoric and mathematics, proving a negative is impossible, so I like to encourage people to be who they are, regardless of having to prove anything to anyone else. If you’re one of those people, and that person is judging you, and questioning who you are, I don’t know if there’s any point at which you’re going to intersect anyway. It’s not as if you’re going to be able to show enough street cred in order to say, “Oh, yeah, we’re going to be friends.” You don’t want to be friends with that person anyway.

I did want to talk about how in Geek and Sundry you had three channels devoted primarily to books and writing, Sword & Laser, The Story Board, and Vaginal Fantasy. Could you tell us a little about those?

The first season we did have three shows, now we only have Vaginal Fantasy, which is my romance genre book club. Sword & Laser is still an amazing podcast with Veronica and Tom. The Story Board is on hiatus because Pat Rothfuss, the host, is very busy working on his other projects. Books and literature are something that are very important to me, and I felt were underrepresented in video form. I don’t know if book readers are necessarily the biggest video watchers. The numbers kind of prove that it isn’t as strong as video games, comics, or anything like that as far as people who read books watching videos, but I think podcasts are much more popular as far as book readers translating. At the same time, it’s very interesting to me that if you sell 30,000 books, you’re on the bestseller list, and that much audience is certainly going to watch a video, so I think there is the potential, even in the future, to provide that for book readers as a social experience. That was really what we were trying to encourage. Sword & Laser and Vaginal Fantasy both have very active forums on Goodreads, which is a great service if you’re a reader. That socialization around books encourages people to step out from being an isolated reader and to connect the dots in ways that they wouldn’t have in the things that they read, and that’s why I think book clubs are great, and why I wanted to include them on Geek and Sundry in the first place. As we move forward, I certainly will look for more opportunities to represent literature on the channel.

Vaginal Fantasy, we should say, is for romance, science fiction, and fantasy cross-over type novels.

We do some historical [fiction] occasionally. We’re doing Tipping the Velvet this month and Swordspoint to celebrate gay and lesbian DOMA dropping. We’re going to do space assassins next month, so it’s very much a tongue-in-cheek, mixed bag, but it’s basically like popcorn.

Could you talk about the process of selecting the name Vaginal Fantasy for the show and what sort of reactions you’ve gotten to that name?

My mother thought it was porn, but I actually discovered romance novels when I got a Kindle. I’d never been brave enough to buy them in a store with a cover before. I got a Kindle and I was like, “Oh, I’m going to try those books I was always ashamed of reading.” Then it just got to be an obsession with me, because it’s my reality TV. I like to read them before I go to bed at night. It definitely turns my brain off. I was into Goodreads several years ago, and I wanted to shelve the books, and I felt embarrassed just shelving a romance, so I did them tongue-in-cheek as “vaginal fantasy,” and I made the phrase up. It made me laugh, and it also shocked people, but it also made them laugh, too. I love making people laugh, so I got the url years ago, and didn’t think anything more of it. I was just shelving books that I read and people tended to find them because of my Goodreads account and had a lot of fun. Google approached me with this new “hangout on air” thing about a year and a half ago, and they said, “Would you like to use this service?” I said, “I can’t possibly add something more to my plate that I wasn’t already doing already. What do I do that I don’t do a video about that could be fun and no work for me? Oh, these romance books!” So I approached three of my friends: Veronica Belmont who does Sword & Laser, who approaches everything from a very intellectual point of view. Bonnie Burton who is a wild card, she has a really awesome personality online, and she does crafts, and is just hilarious. She comes from a more feminist point of view. My friend Kiala Kazebee who is also very funny on Twitter and just a really good friend of mine. We used to trade these books back and forth before we started the Hangout. I reached out to my three friends, and I said, “Hey, do you want to do a monthly book club where we drink and discuss a book every month, have a forum, and just make it really informal?” They were in, and now a year and a half later we’re having a great time doing it. We have a lot of men in the club as well. We don’t just stay talking about the book. The book definitely spurs off-topic conversations about feminism or women in media, movies, books, or games. We talk about pretty much everything because we are drinking wine the whole time, and we tend to get a little bit more unfocused. It’s certainly the most social you can get around a book club. We have almost ten thousand members. We have women meeting up every month and discussing the books on their own and getting together to play games. It’s really gratifying to create this small, intimate group that enjoys each other’s company, and we’re rallying around something that you wouldn’t normally rally around.

You mentioned Swordspoint, which is by Ellen Kushner, right?

It is, yes.

I saw that you teamed up with Neil Gaiman to narrate one of her other novels, The Privilege of the Sword. Do you want to say what that process was like?

That’s actually the sequel to Swordspoint. I had read the books already because I’m a big fan of hers, and they approached me to do a small part in the audio book for the sequel. It was an interesting process. I’d never done audio books before, and I’m definitely more of a visual learner, so audio books aren’t something that I’m particularly familiar with, but that experience, just being a part of that, was super fun. It made me want to do it again, actually.

One thing I really wanted to ask you about is that you say in The Guild book that you’re a big fan of the Ultima role-playing computer game series, which is one of my favorite series of all time.

Oh, well, thank you, high five.

Obviously Codex, your character in The Guild, must be a reference to The Codex of Ultimate Wisdom.

Of course! Thank you for identifying that. That’s very obscure, but definitely. I was a member of the Ultima Dragons, which was on Prodigy actually in [the] very early online [days], in like ’95 or something. I was so young, and I joined that service because I loved the game so much as a teenager, like a twelve-year-old. I would post fan poetry to the game on the forums and on the bulletin board. It was a formative part of my life to be able to reach out and meet people in this online world that loved what I loved.

What was your dragon name?

Codex Dragon.

I was Genetically Altered Dragon.

Oh, how funny. I remember Crimson Dragon, Black Dragon, and there were many others that I interacted with, but I don’t know if I saw yours.

I didn’t post a whole lot, but I’ve always been more of a lurker-type personality online. Those games were a huge influence on me. I actually majored in college in political philosophy with an emphasis on moral philosophy, and I really trace that back to my interest in the Eight Virtues of Britannia.

It’s very formative. As a kid, you experience your personality being set by that fortuneteller, and for some reason that really struck a chord with me, that you could follow these virtues. I still feel like I have way too much honor to be in business, that’s what I always say.

What’s new with you? Did you have some announcements at this most recent Comic Con you want to talk about?

Absolutely. We announced several new shows for Geek and Sundry. We have a new show called Outlands. It’s an 8-bit animated show that’s going to be premiering in a couple of weeks on Geek and Sundry, by Adam de la Peña, who created Code Monkeys. He’s super funny. I’ll be doing a voice on that as well. It’s about a group of misfits travelling space and terraforming planets to support more consumerism, but really it’s just about the misfit personalities on the show. We also announced two other scripted shows. One is called Gamer E.R., with the sketch group Lost Nomads, and that’s Josh Gad, from Book of Mormon’s sketch group, so we’ll be doing a project together early next year. We have another superhero scripted show mixed with motion comics, called Caper. It was created by Amy Berg, who I worked with on Eureka, who’s one of my favorite writers, so I’m super excited about that. Lastly we announced a scripted show called Spooked, with Bryan Singer’s company Bad Hat Harry. It’s a half-hour paranormal comedy about a group of paranormal investigators, and that will all be on YouTube and our website geekandsundry.com this fall and early next year. We definitely have amazing shows that are non-scripted, like Table Top and all the vloggers. Now we’re looking to refocus around what The Guild provided, which is really small budget but character-driven comedy for the web. I’m super excited because that’s the stuff I love to work with most.

Speaking of Table Top, it was mentioned in the book, and just reported on Gawker yesterday, that the set for Table Top had previously been used for porn shoots, and I was wondering what reactions people have said to that revelation?

Strangely enough, we had already known about that. I think it was on Reddit a couple of months before as well. All we can say is that I think any location in Los Angeles, you can find porn being shot there. It’s just Los Angeles; this is where it’s all shot, there’s not one location, I’m sure, that’s inviolate like that. Wil likes to say that we always flip the covers, and that’s all I can say about it. I’m just shocked that there’s Table Top porn crossover, that’s all I’m shocked about.

As an actor, do you have any acting roles recently that people should check out, or coming up, or anything?

You can always find me on the channel doing my retro gaming show Co-Optitude with my brother. We have some really funny episodes. I just announced that I’ll be back on Supernatural, so I’ll be going to Vancouver later in August. I’m looking to develop new shows, so really I’m cutting back on everything to dig in and create new worlds like The Guild. We’ll see how long that takes.

We’re really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I think we’ll wrap things up there. The book The Guild: The Official Companion is out now, and you should all go check out geekandsundry.com. Felicia, thanks for joining us.

It was fun!

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, 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 five-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’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: Don Maitz

Artist Spotlight: Don Maitz
Tara Larsen Chang

Don Maitz has been producing imaginative and iconic paintings for over thirty years. He has illustrated book covers for science fiction greats such as Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, and has twice been awarded the Hugo for best professional artist, but is most famous for his paintings of pirates, particularly the character he created for Captain Morgan Spiced Rum. You can find out much more about him at paravia.com/DonMaitz.

Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer a few questions, Don. I’m an admirer. Your art has graced the covers of so many of the books I’ve read and loved over the years. However, your cover for Hellburner is not one I’ve seen before. In fact, I wouldn’t have guessed you painted it, given that I am mostly familiar with your fantasy work, and, of course, the pirates! What background can you give me about this cover?

Thank you for following my artwork! Hellburner is a novel written by C.J. Cherryh for Warner Books and is the sequel to her book, Heavy Time, which I also illustrated. I am what might be called an adaptive artist, because my images are inspired by and are responsive to the source material. When I read a book, or create any painting, I project myself into the work and extract what is meaningful. This immersion makes for diverse results, unlike artists who approach subjects with the same flavor again and again.

In the case of Hellburner, a very experimental, fast, and deadly space gunship has been released from production, but pilots capable of flying these vessels are difficult to find. One such exceptional pilot hallucinates at the wrong moments. By showing him in a pilot’s chair, but with his hands lifted in surprise from the controls, I am suggesting that there is something wrong, a mental lapse is impeding his performance at a crucial moment. What intrigued me about these two novels is the conflict [the author] introduces between corporate greed and human compassion. These books were written well before the Enron scandal. It was like the author saw present-day situations and such conditions becoming part of our lives. She has imagined and projected a future society where profits are more important than ethics. This is a road I hope we abandon soon.

Did/do you enjoy painting science fiction subjects?

Did and do enjoy science fiction subjects. I can say these are not my first choice, at least in the traditional sense. I am exploring human potential and expansion instead of the current imaging of technology gone bad and ruling our universe, usually for ill. The premise for a lot of science fiction in recent years is dystopian subjects, world disaster scenarios, most with rubble-eating cyborg zombies and other such dehumanizing constructs. This trend has not enamored me to the current flavor of science fiction. Visualizing possibilities of our future in a more human-fulfilling environment attracts me. Accepting a cover assignment, for me, involves a connection with the underlying meaning of a book. The world going to hell in a handbasket, with no hope or promise of anything better, is too pessimistic for my visual entertainment.

An example of a positive future image is a recent personal painting, titled Golden Moment, where a woman symbolizing Mother Nature is at one with the earth and its wildlife. Her magic wand is a live oak twig, which has acorns leaping from the branch and germinating to sprout new forests, much like the legend of Johnny Appleseed.

I do enjoy a well-written science fiction story that offers interesting possibilities for me to produce futuristic imagery. Most recently, I am working on covers for Baen Books involving time travel by Steve White, which are appealing to me, the first being Pirates of the Timestream, which has spaceships in the days of Henry Morgan in the Caribbean.

What is your favorite subject to paint? (Current evidence would suggest maritime themes?)

I have a tendency to shift my interests. If I do too many related subjects, I feel restricted. I explore, then return to favorite subjects for personal works. Illustrations and commissions that I accept allow me to expand my focus towards other related areas. I enjoy painting colorful figures with character and personality. If I paint too many scurvy, parasite-infected louts, I yearn for a pretty girl; then I may get the urge for a dragon. Mostly, I go with my gut when I am on my own hook. A personal, sea-roving scoundrel I have painted, titled Quicksilver, was inspired by the 17th-century oil painter Frans Hals, who painted cavaliers at drinking establishments and portraits of dashing figures. The background was painted on location at Higgs Beach in Key West. I painted the figure from a photograph that contained glancing, “rakish” lighting. I first exhibited the painting at DragonCon a few years ago and when I arrived, discovered the frame had chipped in travel. I was not happy. However, [my wife] Janny gave me an excellent solution to the damage by suggesting I drill a hole and glue in a musket ball. It was brilliant!

You originally painted Captain Morgan back in 1982. What is the ongoing appeal of pirate-related subject matter for you?

When I moved to Florida from Connecticut, I had in mind that I was entering a part of the globe where explorers and sea rovers ventured. I felt a bit like Fredric Remington traveling out west to experience the cowboy and Indian culture and bring it back to NYC publishing and fine art venues. For me, the era of our pre-colonial period is interesting because at that time, sailing to the New World was almost like visiting another planet. The unknown was around every corner. I would like to offer such jolly companions as may have been found on ships without countries up for visual inspection. If I observe a palm or sea grape tree near the shore, I start imagining what sort of person may have seen a similar sight arriving from the Old World. The lighting, fauna, and other aspects of this environment are so different from Europe, and for me, New England.

In your pirate work especially, I love how you combine elements of both fine art and fantasy: from your character portraits, to the details of ships and costumes, the gorgeous sunset skyscapes and in particular, your seeming penchant for combining Plein Air landscapes with your swashbuckling characters. What else would you like to do or explore in this arena?

You hit things pretty accurately. My surroundings are pretty influential, and I am trying to get out of the studio and record what I see with brushes more. I feel the outdoor experience has been lacking in my work and adding the imaginative bits brings a level of authenticity to the whole. Placing an imaginary narrative image into a directly observed environment is a challenging kind of presentation, but a rewarding one, because the Plein Air elements tend to bolster the veracity of the unreal bits.

I also admire the work (both written and painted) of your wife, Janny Wurts. How does being married to another artist impact how you work?

It is a joy and a challenge. We both cringe a bit when the other is looking at a work in progress, as if there is an art critic loaded for bear standing behind you. But in fact, it is a blessing to have an experienced set of eyes that can offer a helpful comment to expand an idea, or see a shortcoming before an artwork is presented for public consumption.

What would you say is your primary focus at this stage in your career?

My primary focus is to keep on working, as I enjoy having an art tool in my hand. I have some paintings I want to do, but personal works do not necessarily get extensive exposure. Published works, particularly in mass market situations, allow for a wider audience to see and respond, though the subject matter and direction can stray afield of the personal art. Opportunities are exciting challenges, and they come from many directions. For example, nearly thirty years ago, I took on two semesters of teaching as a guest instructor at the Ringling College of Art and Design, and I sometimes lecture there still. Several years back, I responded to create concept art for a pair of animated films, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius and The Ant Bully. Last year I had eighty-seven original paintings in four museums at the same time. One of the museums, the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania, hosted an exhibit, At the Edge: Art of the Fantastic, featuring over 160 imaginative original artworks spanning the last 200 years. More than 200,000 visitors came to the exhibition. IlluxCon, a gathering of the most prominent of today’s imaginative artists, is being held at this museum in mid-September (illuxcon.com) and a forthcoming documentary film, Art of the Fantastic, is in production that contains interviews with selected artists and their works, many filmed on site during the At the Edge: Art of the Fantastic exhibition opening. It is exciting for me to participate in this documentary, the IlluxCon event, and to have been represented in the At the Edge: Art of the Fantastic exhibition, because imaginative art is important and it has been largely ignored by the art world and the general public, even though this art form has influenced generations of people that have become scientists, engineers, authors, computer developers, filmmakers, and other respected professionals.

Today, if a commission, exhibition, or other interesting proposal comes my way that excites me, another door opens. If there is a pause in the workflow, I get to do the projects I have been wanting to produce. I feel, at this stage, my horizons keep expanding.

Is there anything you’d like to take on that you haven’t had a chance to do yet?

I would like to do a public mural at some point.

And also, work somewhat larger. Storage for original art can be an issue, and the subsequent packing materials and so forth involved with larger works create demanding logistics. With two of us creating original art inventories, producing prints, and licensing works, time and space are issues we confront as best we can. As you can probably tell, I am into using actual pigments and not rendering digitally. I have spent my life with hands-on access to what I create, and much prefer the “hairy sticks” approach.

I really enjoyed your “Future of the Cover” interview in Watch the Skies. Such spot-on observations on the current state of the industry (I love the idea of ebook “special features” that would give more information on the creative teams that produce these things). Given how much the industry is changing, especially in the last decade, what advice would you give aspiring illustrators entering the field?

Wow, I cannot conceive what is in store for aspiring illustrators entering the field today. My advice is to be prepared for change, but do not become like the flag on a pole moving with every breeze. When I started my art career, acrylics and alkyds had taken over and gave my instructors pause from their normal long-standing traditional media. Today, with all the software programs mimicking all aspects of creativity and with 3D printing coming into easy access, creating visual material is in for another big change. My best advice is to get to know yourself—what you are attracted to—as honestly as you can, and be aware of what you love. Be passionate about your interests. That will see you through, because a tough day doing what you like is much more satisfying than an easy day doing something you hate.

Really study your raw materials—these are not pigments, pixels, or apps. The raw materials I mean are visual aesthetics. Values (degrees of tone from white to black), shapes, quality of line, color relationships, design dynamics, texture awareness, and edges. These are universal elements that manipulate what and how people see. From abstract art, sculpture, computer graphics, logos, comics, photography, fine art, illustration, and yes, fantastic art, these are the ingredients of visual imaging. Your passion in controlling them is what provides an exciting visual experience.

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.

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!!
Keffy R.M. Kehrli

Project Goals

As late as ten years ago, a mad scientist with a dream could expect to turn a decent profit with his lesser inventions and build enough capital to put his (or her!) real plans into play.

Those days are sadly over, although my father, fool that he was, claimed that they never existed. You knew him as Doctor Cetaceaux, at least up until last year, when his orca henchmen, fed-up with being paid in inferior tuna, turned on him. Oh, how he screamed as they tossed him around like a stringy, bony seal . . . but that’s neither here nor there. He claimed that he and my mother were quite poor back in the day, and that it has always been difficult for new talent to get a start. NONSENSE! Absolute nonsense—why, when he was young, a handcrafted reverse-aging ray might make an enterprising scientist enough money to live comfortably in an abandoned Alpine castle for several years. Now, such items are mass-produced by Beauticience Incorporated for a pittance.

I have been obsessed (moderately!) with robots from a very young age. According to my mother—who you would know as Doctor Electronautía—I was “accidentally” left in an android servicing center overnight at the tender age of four, and ever since that day I have been utterly uninterested in having any friends with disgusting, oozing, fleshy bodies. And why should I? Human children are squalling animals with no sense of style and no appreciation for genius. Their parents, of course, are worse.

The field of robotics is full of hacks, engineers with no creative impulse. Scientists who wouldn’t know ambition if it hit them in the face with a laser cannon. Well! I have spent the past twenty years designing my robot army—no machine out of place—to take over the world for my own nefarious purposes.

With this in mind, I am asking for $40,000,000,000 to pay for equipment, raw materials, rent for my secret lair, and a Playstation.

I have no doubt that you are wondering what I will do if—ah, though it is not “if” so much as “when”!—I surpass my initial funding goals. My stretch goals include a squad of “Steam Punk” robots, including gears, parasols, and gold inlay; a domed city to house survivors, surrounded by a moat complete with robot sharks to keep them safe; and a collection of plush versions of my most popular robot models.

You may be wondering why you should fund my creation of a robot army! This is a very good question. I think that if you have this question it shows that you are thinking about everything all wrong! Consider this: What if I am unsuccessful and the next supergenius decides to make a robot army and is not so cheerful, friendly, and gracious as I am?

Reward Tiers

$5—My heartfelt thanks.

After I have taken over the world and repopulated most of it with my robotic creations, I will have your name written down somewhere.

$50—You will be spared. 

(Probably.)

$125—You and your three closest friends will be spared. 

(Probably.)

$200—Radioactive cookies!

I will bake them, test them on several lab rats for suitable potency, and then ship at least a dozen right to your door. NOTE: To save on costs, they will be shipped as media mail and may take some time to reach you.

$1,000—Become a robot for a day!

I will use the funds from this project to find a way to upload human intelligences. You can spend your last happy day on Earth inside the robot of your choice before I return you to your inferior body and what remains of your miserable life.

$10,000—Permanent neural upload.

The future looks grim for humanity’s survivors! Even if enough people are willing to pledge $50 apiece that the species will survive, it will be a hard life of gardening, fending off wild animals, robot attacks, and terrible hygiene. With this reward, you will thrive in a new body. For an additional $5,000 pledge, I will even allow you to choose your design.

$100,000—Co-conspirator! LIMITED: 1 of 1 available

Together we will rule the world with iron fists, at least until I tire of you, at which point I suppose we’ll end up as arch enemies and do battle across the scarred surface of the planet. It should be fun while it lasts. In order to make our harmonious co-habitation more feasible, I have built bunk beds.

Risks and Challenges

Clearly, the only major risks associated with this project involve what will happen if you choose not to fund it. However, I do appreciate your concern for my well-being. In general, I have experienced very little personal damage while building robots. Occasionally errors by my human staff have caused them to suffer from burns, radiation sickness, missing fingers, missing eyes, missing limbs, and paper cuts.

I do not anticipate any aspect of this project will prove truly challenging, as I have never failed to achieve my goals.

Comments

THE REAL Dupliticus Jones about 5 minutes ago:

This is going to fail the same way (and for the same reasons) as the clone army project that imploded a few months back.

Lizbet Flashbang about 20 minutes ago:

Don’t you think you should start with something smaller? Like, maybe just ONE killer robot, instead of an entire army of them?

Hagfish McCarthy about 1 day ago:

I don’t understand why we had to sit through a memoir just to find out what he wants money for.

Dupliticus Jones about 1 day ago:

This is completely subverting the purpose of this website, asshole. The point of crowdfunding isn’t so that the super rich can enslave the masses, it’s so that people who aren’t independently wealthy can fund their projects! NOBODY FUND THIS. IT IS A SCAM.

Seamus Gearsworth about 2 days ago:

Don’t forget clocks for the steampunk robots!

Updates

How will I spend the money?

Update #1

I thought that this would be obvious, but apparently you people need me to spell it out for you. R.O.B.O.T. A.R.M.Y.

New reward tiers!

Update #2

I am not opposed to criticism, no matter what you brain-dead malcontents might think. As a result, I have added some new reward tiers for those of you who think that being spared is NOT worth $50. (Oh, and won’t you be SORRY in a few months). The new tiers are as follows:

$20—An 8x10 glossy photograph of the robot of your choice crushing the skull of your worst enemy. 

UNLESS your enemy has already pledged $50, in which case you have the option of choosing your second worst enemy. NOTE: If you have not also pledged $50 to be spared, I will instruct my Death Bots to allow at least 10 minutes for appreciation of your backer reward prior to your inevitable death. Please add $15 for international shipping.

$1500—Choose a landmark to be destroyed.

Is there a building or monument that you find to be in particularly bad taste? With this reward, you will be allowed to direct one demolition. Restrictions: None of my current or future holdings are included in the list of eligible landmarks, nor is the World’s Largest Rubber Stamp for reasons that should need no explanation.

$2,000—First Choice of New Living Quarters (LIMITED: 1000 of 1000 available).

While you can potentially survive the destruction of all you hold dear for far less money, mere survival is unlikely to be any fun! At this reward tier, you will be first in line for a choice of premium living cubes within my domed city. Make your friends jealous!

$5,000—Become a robot technician.

While the rest of your friends and family are sitting around unemployed and bemoaning their fates, you will have a full time job maintaining my robot army.

IN ADDITION: 

All tiers above the $50 mark will now include the $50 reward and I will spare your life.

This is not a scam!

Update #3

Apparently, the owner of this website has been receiving complaints from the populace. The complaints, as far as I can tell based on several open letters, are simply that I am tricking innocent people into giving me money.

I assure you! This is no scam! It is the best way to ensure that you will survive the next ten years. Or months, depending on how quickly I’m able to move beyond the prototype stage. Simply because you do not wish to purchase additional months or years of life does not mean that you should prevent others from doing so!

It is absolutely ridiculous to claim that this is a scam! People are funding me of their own free will, and I assure you they will be satisfied with the results!

I am tired of being held back by petulant whiners with no drive to achieve their own goals. I will succeed! None of you can stop me now!

Please retweet!

Update #4

Dear lovely backers! As you may have noticed, we are currently four days away from my deadline and have so far only raised a paltry $6,655. This is less than 0.000017% of my funding goal! I currently have access to your email addresses, which I can use to triangulate your location due to nefarious sciency techniques that I will not divulge in this missive. It is absolutely essential to your continued existence that you fund this project.

I have released several short documents on Twitter. I urge you to retweet them, especially if you happen to know someone famous.

SCREW YOU ALL!

Update #5

I knew that it would be difficult to be recognized as the genius I am, but I did not think that my work would be SO disregarded!

Clearly not one of you understands my works of staggering genius! You would rather fund an entire run of tiny kitten Jacuzzis, but robots? The future? THE TRUE FUTURE, THE ONLY FUTURE OF HUMANITY? NO! NOTHING!

But I shall have the last laugh! I will build this army regardless, and when I return oh, how you will RUE the day you failed to contribute!

You have not heard the last of Doctor Crushamous!

© 2013 by Keffy R.M. Kehrli

[Editor’s Note: If you enjoyed this story, you might want to check out the Kickstarter (johnjosephadams.com/kickstarter) we’re currently running to fund an entire book of similar stories—HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!!, an anthology of improbable, futuristic, magical, & alternate-world crowdfunding projects. See this month’s editorial for more details. —eds.]

Keffy R.M. Kehrli is a science fiction and fantasy writer currently living in Seattle. Although his degrees are in physics and linguistics, he spends most of his time in a basement performing molecular biology experiments for fun and profit. In 2008, he attended Clarion UCSD where he learned that, unfortunately, rattlesnakes don’t always rattle. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as Apex Magazine, Fantasy, and Escape Pod, among others. He is also an editor and slush reader for Shimmer magazine.

Enyo-Enyo
Kameron Hurley

Enyo meditated at mealtimes within the internod, huffing liquor vapors from a dead comrade’s shattered skull. This deep within the satellite, ostensibly safe beneath the puckered skein of the peridium, she went over the lists of the dead.

She recited her own name first.

Enyo’s memory was a severed ocular scelera; leaking aqueous humor, slowing losing shape as the satellite she commanded spun back to the beginning. The cargo she carried was unknown to her, a vital piece of knowledge that had escaped the punctured flesh of her memory.

She had named the ship after herself—Enyo-Enyo—without any hint of irony. The idea that Enyo had any irony left was a riotous laugh even without knowing the satellite’s moniker, and her Second, Reeb, amused himself often at her shattering attempt at humor.

After the purging of every crew, Reeb came into Enyo’s pulpy green quarters, his long face set in a black, graven expression she had come to call winter, for it came as often as she remembered that season in her childhood.

“Why don’t we finish out this turn alone?” he would say. “We can manage the internod ourselves. Besides, they don’t make engineers the way they did eight turns ago.”

“There’s the matter of the prisoner,” she would say.

And he would throw up his dark, scarred hands and sigh and say, “Yes, there’s the prisoner.”

It was Enyo’s duty, her vocation, her obsession, to tread down the tongue of the spiraling umbilicus from the internod to the holding pod rotation of the satellite, to tend to the prisoner.

Each time, she greeted the semblance of a body suspended in viscous green fluid with the same incurious moue she had seen Justice wear in propaganda posters during the war. Some part of her wondered if the body would recognize it. If they could talk of those times. But who knew how many turns old it was? Who knew how many other wars it had seen? On a large enough scale, her war was nothing. A few million dead. A system destroyed.

The body’s eyes were always closed, its sex indeterminate, its face a morass of dark, thread-like tentacles and fleshy growths. Most sessions, she merely came down and unlocked the feed cabinet, filled a clean syringe with dark fluid, and inserted it into the black fungal sucker fused to the transparent cell. Sometimes, when the body absorbed the fluid, it would writhe and twist, lost in the ecstasy of fulfillment.

Enyo usually went straight back to the internod to recite her lists of dead, after. But she had been known to linger, to sit at the flat, gurgling drive that kept her charge in permanent stasis.

She had stopped wondering where the body had come from, or who it had been. Her interest was in pondering what it would become when they reached its destination. She lost track of time in these intimate reveries, often. After half a rotation of contemplation, Reeb would do a sweep of the satellite. He would find her alive and intact, and perhaps he would go back to playing screes or fucking one of the engineers or concocting a vile hallucinogen the gelatinous consistency of aloe. They were a pair of two, a crew of three, picking up rim trash and mutilated memories in the seams between the stars during the long night of their orbit around the galactic core.

When they neared the scrap belt called Stile, Enyo was mildly surprised to see the collection of spinning habited asteroids virtually unchanged from the turn before.

“It’s time,” she told Reeb. “Without more fuel, we won’t make it the full turn.” And she would not be able to drop off the prisoner.

He gave her his winter look. She had left the last of his engineers on a paltry rock the color of foam some time before. He did not know why they needed the crew now; he did not have her sense of things, of the way time moved here. But he would be lonely. It’s why he always agreed to take on another crew, even knowing their fate.

“How many more?” he said.

“This is the last turn,” she said. “Then we are finished.”

She let Reeb pick the new crew. He launched a self-propelled spore from the outernod well ahead of their arrival on the outskirts of Stile. The dusty ring of settlements within the asteroid belt circled a bloated, dying star. Had it been dying the last time they passed? Enyo could not remember.

Reeb’s sister worked among the debris, digging through old spores and satellites, piecing together their innards, selling them as pirated vessels imbued with the spirit of cheap colonial grit.

Enyo had not seen Reeb’s sister in many turns, when speaking of the war, of genocide—in terms outside the propagandic—was still new and unsettling and got them thrown out of establishments. Broodbreeders and creep cleaners called them void people, diseased, marked for a dry asphyxiation aboard a viral satellite, drifting ever aimless across limitless space. They were not far wrong. Sometimes Enyo wondered if they really knew who she was.

She heard Reeb’s sister slide up the umbilicus into the internod. Heard her hesitate on the threshold, the lubrication of the umbilicus slick on her skin.

“This your satellite?” Reeb’s sister asked.

Enyo had expected to feel nothing at her voice, but like the body in the tank, she was sometimes surprised at what was fed to her. Something in her flared, and darkened, and died. It was this snapshot of Reeb’s sister that she always hoped was the true one. The real one. But she knew better.

She swiveled. Reeb’s sister did not take up the tubal port as Reeb did, but inhabited it in the loose way the woman inhabited all spaces, wrapping it around herself like a shroud, blurring the edges of her surrounds—or perhaps Enyo’s eyes were simply going bad again. The satellite changed them out every quarter turn. The woman had once had the body of a dancer, but like all of them, she had atrophied, and though she was naturally thin, it was a thinness borne of hunger and muscle loss. Her eyes were black as Reeb’s, but their color was the only feature they shared. She was violet black to Reeb’s tawny brown, slight in the hips and shoulders, delicate in the wrists and ankles, light enough, perhaps, to fly.

“Reeb says you need a sentient spore specialist,” the woman said.

“Yes, we have one last pickup. I need you to aid in monitoring our spore for the drop. I’m afraid if you do not, the prisoner may escape.”

“The prisoner?”

Enyo had forgotten. This woman had not met them yet. She did not know. Something inside of Enyo stirred, something dark and willfully forgotten, like a bad sexual encounter.

“Where are the others?” Enyo asked.

“Aren’t you going to ask my name?”

“I already know it,” Enyo said.

The day Reeb’s sister was born, Enyo had named her “Dysnomia.” She had cursed all three of them that day, and perhaps the universe, too. One could never be quite certain.

Nothing had ever been the same after that.

Because she could not go back. Only around.

The sound of the machines was deafening. Enyo stood ankle-deep in peridium salve and organic sludge. Ahead of her, Reeb was screaming. High pitched, squealing, like some broodmeat. But she could not see him.

Then the siren started. A deep-seated, body-thumping wail that cut deep into her belly. Now we turn, she thought. This is a very old snapshot.

Ahead of her, a few paces down the dripping corridor, Dax battered her small body against the ancient orbital entryway. Her tears mixed with sweat and grease and something far more dangerous, deceptive. Grew florets spiraled up the bare skin of her arms from wrist to elbow.

Enyo raised the fist of her weapon and called the girl back, “Don’t go down there! Not there! The colonists are this way.”

“I’m not leaving them!” Dax sobbed. Her white teeth looked brilliant in the darkness. What animal had she harvested them from? “I know what you did! I know you started this. You set this all in motion.”

Enyo admitted that she had not expected it would be Dax who went back. Her memories were not always trustworthy.

The satellite took a snapshot.

Reeb’s tastes were predictable in their disparity. He brought up his new crew to meet with Enyo in the internod. The first: a pale, freckled girl of a pilot whose yellow hair was startling in the ambient green glow of the dermal tissue of the room. Enyo could not remember the last time she’d seen yellow hair. The war, maybe. The girl carried no weapons, but her hands were lean and supple, and reminded Enyo of Reeb’s hands when he was in his sixties: strong, deft, capable. Not what he was now, no, but what he would become.

The other crewmember was a mercenary: a tall, long-limbed woman as dark as the girl was light. Her head was shaved bald. She wore a silver circlet above her ears, and half of her left ear was missing. She carried a charged weapon at either hip, and a converted organic slaying stick across her back. She smelled of blood and metal.

“Do they have names?” Enyo asked Reeb.

“Dax Alhamin,” the little pilot said, holding out her hand. It was a rude affectation picked up by many of the young, to touch when first meeting. They did not remember how the war had started, with a nit-infected warmonger who murdered superpod after superpod of colonists with a single kiss. Or perhaps they had simply forgotten. Enyo was never sure what side of the curtain she was on. The satellite distorted the universe at its leisure, often at her expense.

The other one, the mercenary, laughed at the open hand the girl proffered and said, “I’m Arso Tohl. I heard you have cargo that needs . . . liberating.”

Dax pulled her hand back in. She was smiling broadly. Her teeth were too white to be real. Even if she was the twenty years she looked, no real person had teeth like that—not even a rim world god. Not even a warmonger.

“It’s necessary,” Enyo said. “We need to get back to the beginning.”

“The beginning?” Dax said. “Where did you come from?”

“It doesn’t matter where we came from,” Reeb said. “Nor where we’re going. That’s not how a satellite like this works.”

“I think I’ve heard of this satellite,” Arso said. “Some prototype from the Sol system, isn’t it? You’re a long way from home. You were already old news when I was growing up.”

Enyo closed her eyes. She ran through her litany of dead. At the end, she added two new names:

Arso Tohl and Dax Alhamin.

She opened her eyes. “Let’s tell them how it works, Reeb,” she said.

“Enyo-Enyo makes her own fate,” Reeb said. “Her fate is ours, too. We can alter that fate, but only if we act quickly. Enyo guides that fate. Now you’re part of it.”

Arso snorted. “If that’s so, you better hope this woman makes good decisions, then, huh?”

Reeb shrugged. “I gave up on hoping that many cycles ago.”

“All that we are is sacrifice,” Enyo’s first squad captain told her. “Sacrifice to our countries. To our children. To ourselves. Our futures. We cannot hope to aspire to be more than that.”

“But what if I am more than that?” Enyo said. Even then, she was arrogant. Too arrogant to let a slight go uncommented upon.

Her squad captain smiled; a bitter rictus, shiny metal teeth embedded in a slick green jaw grown just for her. The skin grafting hadn’t taken. Enyo suspected it was because the captain forgot the daily applications of salve. People would take her more seriously, with a jaw like that.

“I know what you did, Enyo,” her squad captain said. “I know who you are. This is how we met out justice on the Venta Vera arm, to war criminals.”

The captain shot her. It was the first time Enyo died.

As Enyo gazed up from the cold, slimy floor of the carrier, her blood steaming in the alien air, her captain leaned over her. The metal teeth clicked. Close enough to kiss.

The squad commander said, “That is how much a body is worth. One makes no more difference than any other. Even the body of the woman who started the war.”

As her life bled out, Enyo’s heart stopped. But not before Enyo reached up and ate half her captain’s spongy artificial jaw.

Enyo secured her comrade’s skull in the jellied dampener beside her. All around her, the spore trembled and surged against its restraints. Reeb had created it just an hour before and clocked in the elliptical path it must take to get them to the rocky little exoplanet where the cargo waited. The spore was ravenous and anxious. Dysmonia already lay immersed at the far end of the spore. She looked terribly peaceful.

Dax eased herself back into her own jellied dampener. Torso submerged, she remained sitting up a moment longer, cool eyes wide and finally, for the first time, fearful.

“Whose skull is that?” Dax asked.

Enyo patted the dampener. “Yours,” she said.

Dax snorted. “You’re so mad.”

“Yes,” Enyo said.

Arso pushed through the still-slimy exterior of the spore and into the core where they sat. She spit a glob of the exterior mush onto the floor, which absorbed it hungrily.

“You sure there’s no one on that rock?” Arso said.

“Just the abandoned colonists,” Reeb murmured from the internod. The vibrations tickled Enyo’s ears. The tiny, threadlike strands tucked in their ear canals were linked for as long as the living tissue could survive on their blood.

“It was simply bad timing on their part,” Reeb said. “The forming project that would have made Tuatara habitable was suspended when they were just a few rotations away. They were abandoned. No one to welcome them.”

“No one but us,” Enyo said, and patted the skull beside her. For a long moment, she thought to eat it. But there would be time for that later.

“Filthy business,” Arso said.

Enyo unloaded the green fist of her weapon from the gilled compartment above her. It molded itself neatly to her arm, a glittering green sheath of death.

“You have no idea,” Enyo said.

Enyo screamed and screamed, but the baby would not come. The rimwarder “midwife” she’d hired was young, prone to madness. The girl burst from the closet Enyo called home three hours into the birthing. Now Enyo lay in a bed soaked with her own perspiration and filth. The air was hot, humid. Above her screams, she heard the distant sound of people working in the ventilation tube.

So it was Enyo who took her own hand. Who calmed her own nerves, who coached her own belabored breath. Enyo. Just Enyo. Why was it always the same, every turn? Why was she always alone, in this moment, but never the others?

She pushed. She screamed herself hoarse. Her body seemed to tear in two. Somewhere far away, in some other life, in some other snapshot, she was dimly aware of this moment, as if it were happening to some character in an opera.

The death dealers banged on the door and then melted it open. They saw she was simply birthing a child alone . . . so they left her. Sealed the room behind her. Like most rim filth, they hoped she would die there in childbed and spare them the trouble. They could come back and collect her dead flesh for resale later.

Enyo grit her teeth and pushed.

The baby came. One moment, just Enyo. The next . . . a squalling, writhing mass no more sentient in that moment than a programmable replicator, but hers nonetheless. A tawny brown child with her own black eyes.

“Reeb,” she said.

She reached toward him. Her whole body trembled.

The second child was smaller, too thin. This was the one she would give away. The one who would pay her way to the stars.

This one she called Dysmonia.

Enyo voided the body for delivery. Capped all the tubes. A full turn about the galaxy in transit for a single delivery. A single body. Back to the beginning. How many times she had done this, she wasn’t certain. The satellite, Enyo-Enyo, revealed nothing. Only told her when it was hungry. And when it was time to station itself, once again, on its place of origin.

She pushed the body’s pod over and it floated beside her, light as a moth’s wing. She placed her fingers on top of the pod and guided it down into the cargo bay. The body stirred gently.

The interior of Enyo-Enyo was mostly dark. Motionless. Not a sound. They were the last of the living on Enyo-Enyo, this turn. They usually were. The satellite was hungry. Always so hungry. Like the war.

At the airlock, she stopped to bundle up. Stiff boots, gloves, parka, respirator. The air here was breathable, Enyo-Enyo told her, but thin and toxic if exposed for long periods. She queued up the first phase of the release and waited for pressurization.

The vibrating door became transparent; blistering white light pushed away the darkness of the interior.

Ahead of her: a snow swept platform. In the distance, a cavernous ruin of a mountain pockmarked with old munitions scars. A sea of frozen fog stretched from the platform to the mountain. As she watched, a thin, webbed bridge materialized between the mountain and the platform.

She waited. She had waited a full turn around the galaxy to come back here, to Eris. She could wait a couple terrestrial turns more.

The moisture of her breath began to freeze on the outer edges of her respirator. It reminded her of the first time she had come here to Eris.

Bodies littered the field, and Enyo moved among them, cloaked in clouds of blood-rain. The nits she had infected herself with collected the blood spilled around her and created a shimmering vortex of effluvia that, in turn, devoured all it touched.

“You must not fight her,” the field commander shrieked, and Enyo knew some of the fear came from the waves of methane melting all around them as the frozen surface of Eris convulsed. “You must not stop her. She is small now. You must leave her alone, and she will stay small. If you fight her she will swell in size and grow large. She will be unstoppable.”

But they fought her. They always fought her.

When she took the field, she flayed them of their fleshy spray-on suits and left them to freeze solid before they could asphyxiate, flailing in sublime methane.

There had to be sacrifices.

As she stood over the field commander, making long rents in her suit, the commander said, “If it’s a war your people want, it’s a war they’ll get.”

When it was over, Enyo gazed up at the thorny silhouette of the colonial superpod that the squad had tried to protect. Most of the Sol colonists started from here, on Eris. She would need the superpod, later, or she could never be here, now. Sometimes one had to start a war just to survive to the next turn.

Enyo crawled up into the sickening tissue of the superpod. She found the cortex without much trouble. The complicated bits of genetic code that went into programming the superpod should have been beyond her, but she had ingested coordinates from her squad commander’s jaw, during some long-distant snapshot of her life that the satellite had created. Now the coordinates were a part of her, like her fingernails or eyelashes.

She kissed the cortex, and programmed the ship’s destination.

Tuatara.

Reeb worked on one of the harvester ships that circled the Rim every four cycles. Enyo was twenty, and he was eighty-two, he said. He said he had met her before. She said she didn’t remember, but that was a lie. What she wanted to say was, “I remember giving birth to you,” but that, too, was a lie. The difference between memory and premonition depended largely on where one was standing. At twenty, on the Mushta Mura arm, her “memories” were merely ghosts, visions, brain effluvia.

When she fucked Reeb in her twenty-year-old skin, it was with the urgency of a woman who understood time. Understood that there was never enough of it. Understood that this moment, now, was all of it. The end and the beginning. Distorted.

She said his name when she came. Said his name and wept for some nameless reason; some premonition, some memory. Wept for what it all had been and would become.

“The satellite is a prototype,” the recruiter said. The emblem on her uniform looked familiar. A double red circle shot through with a blue dart.

They walked along a broad, transparent corridor that gave them a sweeping view of the marbled surface of Eris. Centuries of sculpting had done little to improve its features, though the burning brand in the sky that had once been its moon, Dysmonia, made the surface a bearable -20 degrees Celsius during what passed for summer, and unaided breathing was often possible, if not always recommended. The methane seas had long since been tapped, leaving behind a stark, mottled surface of rocky protuberances shot through with the heads of methane wells. Beyond the domed spokes of the research hub’s many arms, the only living thing out there was the hulking mop of the satellite. Enyo thought it looked like a spiky, pulsing crustacean.

“A prototype of what, exactly?” she asked. Her debriefing on Io had been remarkably . . . brief.

“There’s much to know about it,” the recruiter said. “We won’t send you out until you’ve bonded with it, of course. That’s our worry. That it won’t take. But . . . there is an indication that you and the satellite are genetically and temperamentally matched. It’s quite fortunate.”

Enyo wasn’t sure she believed in fortune or coincidence, but the job paid well, and it was only a matter of time before people found out who she was. The satellite offered escape. Redemption. “Sure, but what is it?”

“A self-repairing—and self-replicating, if need be—vehicle for exploring the galactic rim. It will take snapshots—exact replicas—of specified quadrants as you pass, and store them aboard for future generations to act out. Most of that is automated, but it will need a . . . companion. We have had some unfortunate incidents of madness, when constructs like these are cast off alone. It’s been grown from . . . well, from some of the most interesting organic specimens we’ve found in our exploration of the near-systems.”

“It’s alien, then?”

“Partially. Some of it’s terrestrial. Just enough of it.”

“It’s illegal to go mixing alien stuff with ours, isn’t it?”

The recruiter smiled. “Not on Eris.”

“Why Eris? Why not Sedna, or a neighboring system?”

“The concentrated methane that will give you much of your initial inertia comes from Eris. The edge of the Sol system is close enough for us to gain access to local system resources at a low cost, but far enough away to . . . well, it’s far enough away to keep the rest of the system safe.”

“Safe from what?”

“There’s a danger, Enyo. A danger of what you could . . . bring back. Or perhaps . . . what you could become.”

Enyo regarded the spiky satellite. “You should have hired some techhead, then.” She was not afraid of the alien thing, not then, but the recruiter made her anxious. There was something very familiar about her teeth.

“You came highly recommended,” the recruiter said.

“You mean I’m highly expendable.”

They came to the end of the long spoke, and stepped into the transparent bubble of the airlock that sat outside the pulsing satellite.

“The war is over,” the recruiter said, “but there were many casualties. We make do with what we have.”

“It’s breathing, isn’t it?” Enyo said.

“Methane, mostly,” the recruiter said.

“And out there?”

“It goes into hibernation. It will need less. But our initial probes along the galactic rim have indicated that methane is as abundant there as here. We’ll go into more detail on the mechanics of its care and feeding.”

“Feeding?” Enyo said.

“Oh yes,” the recruiter said. She pressed her dark hand to the transparent screen. Her eyes were big, the pupils too large, like all the techs who had grown up on Eris. “You’ll need to feed it. At least a few hundred kilos of organic matter a turn.”

Enyo gazed up at the hulk of the thing. “And where exactly am I going to get organic matter as we orbit the far arms of the galaxy?”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” the recruiter said. She withdrew her hand, and flashed her teeth again. “We chose you because we knew you could make those kinds of decisions without regret. The way you did during the war. And long before it.”

Enyo sliced open the slick surface of the superpod with her weapon. There was no rush of Tuataran atmosphere, no crumpling or wrinkling about the wound. No, the peridium had already been breached somewhere else. Arso and Dax hung back, bickering over some slight. Enyo wondered if they had known one another before Reeb picked them up. They had, hadn’t they? The way she had known Arso. The snapshot of Arso. Some other life. Some other decision.

Inside, the superpod’s bioluminescent tubal corridors still glowed a faint blue-green, just enough light for Enyo to avoid stepping on the wizened body of some unfortunate maintenance officer.

“Don’t you need direction?” Reeb tickled her ear. But she already knew where the colonists were. She knew because she had placed them there herself, turns and turns ago.

Enyo crawled up through the sticky corridors, cutting through pressurized areas of the superpod, going around others. Finally, she reached the coded spiral of the safe room that held the colonists. She gestured to Arso.

“Open it,” she said.

Arso snorted. “It’s a coded door.”

“Yes. It’s coded for you. Open it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s why you’re here. Open it.”

“I—”

Enyo lifted her weapon. “Should Enyo make you?”

Arso held up her hands. “Fine. No harm. Fucking dizzy core you’ve got, woman.”

Arso placed her hand against the slimy doorway. The coating on the door fused with her spray-on suit. Pressurized. Enyo heard the soft intake of Arso’s breath as the outer seal of the safe room tasted her blood.

The door went transparent.

Arso yanked away her hand.

Enyo walked through the transparent film and into the pressurized safe room. Ring after ring of personal pods lined the room, suffused in a blue glow. Hundreds? Thousands.

She glanced back at Dax. Both she and Arso were surveying the cargo. Dax’s little mouth was open. Enyo realized who she reminded her of, then. The recruiter. The one with the teeth.

Enyo shot them both. They died quickly, without comment.

Then she walked to the first pod she saw. She tore away the head of her own suit and tossed it to the floor. She peered into the colonist’s puckered face, and she thought of the prisoner.

Enyo bit the umbilicus that linked the pod to the main life system, the same core system responsible for renewing and replenishing the fluids that sustained these hibernating bodies.

The virus in her saliva infected the umbilicus. In a few hours, everything in here would be liquid jelly. Easily digestible for a satellite seeking to make its last turn.

As Reeb cursed in her ear, she walked the long line of pods, back and back and back, until she found two familiar names. Arso Tohl. Dax Alhamin. Their pods were side by side. Their faces perfectly pinched. Dax looked younger, and perhaps she was, in this snapshot. Arso was still formidable. Enyo pressed her fingers to the transparent face of the pod. She wanted to kiss them. But they would be dead of her kiss soon enough.

Dead for a second time. Or perhaps a fifth, a fiftieth, a five hundredth. She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know.

It’s why she piloted Enyo-Enyo.

The woman waiting on the other side of the icy bridge was not one Enyo recognized, which did not happen often. As she guided the prisoner’s pod to the woman’s feet, she wondered how long it had been, this turn. How long since the last?

“What do you have for us?” the woman asked.

“Eris is very different,” Enyo said.

The woman turned her soft brown face to the sky and frowned. “I suppose it must seem that way to you. It’s been like this for centuries.”

“No more methane?”

“Those wells went dry five hundred years ago.” The woman knit her brows. “You were around this way long before that happened. You must remember Eris like this.”

“Was I? I must have forgotten.”

“So what is it this time?” the woman said. “We’re siphoning off the satellite’s snapshots now.”

“I brought you the prisoner,” Enyo said.

“What prisoner?”

“The prisoner,” Enyo said, because as she patted the prisoner’s pod something in her memory ruptured. There was something important she knew. “The prisoner who started the war.”

“What war?” the woman said.

“The war,” Enyo said.

The woman wiped away the snow on the face of the pod, and frowned. “Is this some kind of joke?” she said.

“I brought her back,” Enyo said.

The woman jabbed Enyo in the chest. “Get back in the fucking satellite,” she said. “And do your fucking job.”

Back to the beginning. Around and around.

Enyo wasn’t sure how it happened, the first time. She was standing outside the escape pod, a bulbous, nasty little thing that made up the core of the internode. It seemed an odd place for it. Why put the escape pod at the center of the satellite? But that’s where the thing decided to grow it. And so that’s where it was.

She stood there as the satellite took its first snapshot of the quadrant they moved through. And something . . . shifted. Some core part of her. That’s when the memories started. The memories of the other pieces. The snapshots.

That’s when she realized what Enyo-Enyo really was.

Enyo stepped up into the escape pod. She sealed it shut. Her breathing was heavy. She closed her eyes. She had to go home, now, before it broke her into more pieces. Before it reminded her of what she was. War criminal. Flesh dealer. Monster.

As she sealed the escape pod and began drowning in life-sustaining fluid, she realized it was not meant for her escape. Enyo-Enyo had placed it there for another purpose.

The satellite took a snapshot.

And there, on the other side of the fluid-filled pod, she saw her own face.

The squalling children were imperfect, like Enyo. She had already sold Reeb to some infertile young diplomatic aid’s broker in the flesh pits for a paltry sum. It was not enough to get her off the shit asteroid at the ass end of the Mushta Mura arm. She would die out here of some green plague, some white dust contagion. The death dealers would string her up and sell her parts. She’d be nothing. All this pain and anguish, for nothing.

Later, she could not recall how she found the place. Whispered rumors. A mangled transmission. She found herself walking into a chemically scrubbed medical office, like some place you’d go to have an industrial part grafted on for growing. The logo on the spiral of the door, and the coats of the staff, was a double circle shot through with a blue dart.

“I heard you’re not looking for eggs or embryos,” she said, and set Dysmonia’s swaddled little body on the counter.

The receptionist smiled. White, white teeth. He blinked, and a woman came up from the back. She was a tall brown-skinned woman with large hands and a grim face.

“I’m Arso Tohl,” the woman said. “Let’s have a look.”

They paid Enyo enough to leave not just the asteroid, but the Mushta Mura arm entirely. She fled with a hot bundle of currency instead of a squalling, temperamental child. When she entered the armed forces outside the Sol system, she did so because it was the furthest arm of the galaxy from her own. When a neighboring system paid her to start a war, she did so gladly.

She did not expect to see or hear from the butchers again.

Not until she saw the logo on the satellite recruiter’s uniform.

Enyo ate her fill of the jellified colonists and slogged back to the satellite to feed it, to feed Enyo-Enyo. Reeb’s annoying voice had grown silent. He always stopped protesting after the first dozen.

She found him sitting in the internode with the prisoner, his hands pressed against the base of the pod. His head was lowered.

“It was enough to make the next turn,” Enyo said.

“It always is,” he said.

“There will be other crews,” she said.

“I know.”

“Then why are you melancholy?” If she could see his face, it would be winter.

He raised his head. Stared at the semblance of a body floating in the viscous fluid. “I’m not really here, am I?”

“This turn? I don’t know. Sometimes you are. Sometimes you aren’t. It depends on how many snapshots Enyo-Enyo has taken this turn. And how she wants it all to turn out this time.”

“When did you put yourself in here?” He patted the prisoner’s pod.

“When things got too complicated to bear,” she said. “When I realized who Enyo-Enyo was.” She went to the slick feeding console. She vomited the condensed protein stew of the colonists into the receptacle. When it was over, she fell back, exhausted.

“Let’s play screes,” she said. “Before the next snapshot. We might be different people, then.”

“We can only hope,” Reeb said, and pulled his hands away from the prisoner.

© 2013 by Kameron Hurley.

Originally published in The Lowest Heaven,

edited by Anne C. Perry & Jared Shurin.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Kameron Hurley is an award-winning, Nebula-nominated writer currently living in the Midwest. She is the author of the Bel Dame Apocrypha, comprising the books God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture. Her short fiction has appeared in venues such as Strange Horizons and EscapePod. Find out about her latest work at kameronhurley.com

Trouble Leaves a Scent Trail
Constance Cooper

Peacekeeper Gimel 300254 CitrusPeel was doing routine crowd control down at the shellfish market when a Tav Messenger scuttled up to her. “Urgent, urgent!” the Messenger blasted, enveloping Peel in the scent. “Your boss wants you back at the station right away. Hope you’re not in trouble!”

Peel struggled not to exude annoyance as she pushed the Messenger’s raised tail back down to the ground. “Thanks, cousin. Tell FreshPrawn I’ll be right there, as soon as I inform my team.” These new, high-initiative Messengers were far too cocky, Peel grumped to herself as she watched the sleek, quick-stepping form scurry away. Give her the old-fashioned, completely literal Messenger genotype any time.

Of course, she was biased, being an antiquated type herself. There weren’t many Gimel Peacekeepers being hatched anymore. The Governors had decided many generations ago that smaller ammets with thinner, more streamlined carapaces were generally more appropriate for modern city life.

They might be right, Peel admitted as she lumbered through the pungent bustle of the market, sensewhiskers waving as she tried to find her less bulky colleagues. Most Peacekeepers nowadays were flexible, narrow-shouldered Zayins, slipping easily through the crowds, standing out far less than Peel among most other types of ammet.

Just this morning, though, Peel had quelled a dispute between a mussel dealer and a refectory purchasing agent by merely approaching them and looming nearby, forearms flexed. No, the Adapters wouldn’t discontinue Gimel Peacekeepers any time soon, Peel reassured herself.

The shellfish market was dense with the odors of crab and shrimp, mussel and lobster, mingling with the sweetness of sales pitches and the sharpness of dickering ammets. Vendors and Buyers were known for being contentious, since they considered harsh haggling to be part of their jobs. Peel couldn’t even imagine what the atmosphere would be like if the market weren’t held in the open air.

“I don’t think that mussel vendor will give any more trouble, but keep a whisker pointed in her direction,” Peel instructed the other two Peacekeepers on duty. “Remember, this is a market. Don’t break up an argument unless it gets so strong that folks nearby can’t communicate.”

Peel left the daylit marketplace and ducked into Broad Burrow, placing her feet carefully in the jostling stream of busy ammets. Stolid Transports, bent down onto all six feet under their loads, nudged skillfully around her, carrying baskets of farm produce and seafood, bundles of Recorders, or crates of tools. Messengers bumped heedlessly off Peel’s frontplates, scrabbled across her armored back, or crouched and zipped between the columns of her legs. The occasional Cleaner trundled by, eating detritus that had fallen from the Transports as well as the usual ammet waste.

Peel stopped abruptly. Where was that scent coming from? It was prominent even above the babble of the surrounding traffic. Peel edged over to the side of the burrow and read the graffiti scrawled acridly onto the smoothed earth wall. “No to the Long Bridge! Keep Foreigners out!” The message was so fresh that the writer might be only a few steps away.

Rubbing her thick foredigits together uneasily, Peel swung her length back into the center stream of ammets and continued toward the station.

Peacekeeper Zayin 746 FreshPrawn was an experienced ammet some seasons older than CitrusPeel. She had lost several digits off one midfoot as a junior while climbing Cloud Mountain one winter, and walked with a slight limp. Her shelves were crammed with Recorders of every age and type. Peel could not even imagine her scent without the faint tang from the copper badge that hung against her skin.

Prawn ushered Peel into her office and sealed the door so none of their conversation could escape, even halting the Fan in the airshaft above.

“Thanks for coming so promptly, Peel. I’ve got a new assignment for you—an investigation. Think you can handle it?”

Peel fought to keep her scents neutral, but she was sure Prawn could detect her excitement. “May I know the details, cousin?”

“I thought you’d be interested.” Prawn’s sensewhiskers waved in amusement. “Ever heard of Architect Tsadi 27? Her usename was SweetGum.”

“Was?”

“Yes. She died this morning. Seems like an accident.”

“The name does seem familiar—”

“You should read the newsboards more carefully, Peel. Gum’s been in the news twice lately. The first time was ten days ago, when the Governors chose her design for the Oceanic Bridge. You must remember that.”

“Of course I do. We had to patrol in the Plaza of News all day. The No-Bridgers were running around and spewing out their slogans so strongly I could hardly breathe. I thought for sure there was going to be a riot. But I didn’t remember the Architect’s name.”

“Well, that was her. Kind of a surprising choice. She was still young, and her type is relatively untried—they’ve only hatched three dozen so far. But the Governors liked her plans, said they were the most innovative they’d received. That’s why we need to investigate her death so carefully—in case it’s really suicide.”

“Suicide?”

“I’m afraid it might be. It’s a sad business, Peel. Most ammets are so well suited for their jobs, there’s no reason for them to be unhappy with themselves. We only get one or two suicides per season, Continent-wide. But when it does happen, it’s taken very seriously. Sometimes the entire type comes under scrutiny.”

Peel shifted her feet. “Oh. And since Gum’s type is so new—”

“Right. All 36 clones—well, 35 now—might be recalled.”

To lose not only your own life, but all your clone sisters and all the clone juniors who might come after you—a recall was the ultimate ammet nightmare. Not that all ammets got to raise a junior, anyway . . .

Peel pushed away the old resentment. She had three sisters in the Salt City district alone. There were still plenty of Gimels left.

“So you understand why this needs careful handling, Peel.”

“Yes, cousin. But—”

“Is there a problem?”

“I was just wondering—why me? I’ve only handled a few investigations so far, and they were just small stuff—overeating, rowdy juniors. And since you say this case is so sensitive—”

“Ah. Well, Peel, you must appreciate that it’s politically sensitive as well. Here we have the chosen Architect for the Oceanic Bridge—the biggest engineering project ever attempted. If Gum’s proved unstable, it casts a cloud over the entire bridge decision. So there’s going to be a lot of public attention focused on this case.”

“I know how to be discreet, cousin.”

“I know you do, and it’s part of the reason I chose you. The other part is that you’re a Soldier.”

Peel pulled her whiskers back in dismay, and it was a moment before she could reply. “I don’t really like that term, cousin.”

“I’m sorry, Peel, I shouldn’t have used it. You’re a Peacekeeper, just like me. But you know what I mean. If you do find suicide, no one will say that the finding was politically motivated.”

Peel emitted reluctant agreement. She had tried to stay nonpolitical about the Long Bridge, as it was popularly known. She wasn’t like some Gimel Peacekeepers, vocal members of the Go-Bridge faction who called themselves by the archaic name of Soldiers, and talked eagerly about the need for more of their type to protect the settlements once the New Continent was opened up. But it was true—no one would think of a Gimel as anti-Bridge.

“Cousin—you said it seemed like an accident? Why is there a suicide investigation at all?”

“Because of this.” FreshPrawn reached back and plucked a Recorder off the shelf. She issued a brusque command and a news story started to waft from the stubby ammet’s tail. It concerned a bridge collapse in the Canyon District that had killed over sixty ammets—mostly agricultural workers such as Plows, Planters, and Transports, but also a few Cleaners and Recorders. They had tumbled to their deaths in a deep gorge when a crucial truss in the Cold Canyon Bridge suddenly buckled and gave way. Commerce in the area would be disrupted for many seasons until the missing spans could be replaced.

“This happened just yesterday,” Prawn explained. “And yes—I’m afraid SweetGum was the Architect for that bridge.”

SweetGum’s body had not been disturbed, and in fact would take considerable effort to move. The fellow Architect who had found the corpse had thoughtfully restrained the studio’s Cleaner in a corner behind a stack of stone blocks, so that the small ammet would not continue to exhaust herself. Judging by the Cleaner’s fatigue, she had been trying to remove the new refuse for many hours—probably ever since SweetGum’s death, though of course utility ammets were too single-minded to notice anything beyond their work.

The top two plates of Gum’s body lay crushed under a mound of cut stone. Even Peel’s armor could not have withstood that much weight. Peel ran her short foredigits over the pile of blocks, which seemed to have toppled down from a shelf full of sample materials.

“It does seem like an accident, doesn’t it, cousin?” said WetSand, the junior Peacekeeper that FreshPrawn had assigned to help Peel. Sand had only recently started going out in the field, and she shifted nervously, back-plates sliding loosely against each other.

“Well, let’s hope it is, but we’re here to find the truth.” Peel turned to the young Architect who was hunched desolately before the body. “I’m sorry, cousin, but I need to ask you some questions. WetSand, handle the Recorder, would you? Right. Now, you’re Architect Tsadi 15, known as CedarWood, is that correct?”

It was obvious that CedarWood was SweetGum’s clone sister. The resemblance was unmistakable, even though Gum’s body already whiffed of decay, and Wood’s scent was harsh with shock and grief.

“It wasn’t suicide, cousin.” Wood curled her tail upward in emphasis. In the dim light from the airshaft, Peel could see that her scenters were worn at the tip from seasons of making drawings and notes on a woodtable before committing them to the memory of a Recorder. “Gum would never do that, never!”

“Even after she read about the Cold Canyon Bridge?” Peel couldn’t blame Wood for not mentioning the bridge collapse. After all, if Gum really had killed herself, Wood might be recalled.

“I should’ve known you’d find out about the bridge.” Wood failed to suppress a bitter overtone. “Yes, she was upset. She sent me a Messenger right after she read the newsboard. That’s why I came by this morning.”

“So you were close, then?”

“I’m her only sister in Salt City. Of course we were close. She couldn’t wait to get out there and study the wreckage and figure out what went wrong. Flawed materials, maybe, or some mistake during the construction. Maybe some Builder misinterpreted the plans.”

“Could she have believed her design was faulty? Even if she didn’t say so?”

“Maybe,” Wood admitted. “But even if it was her fault, why would she kill herself before finding out for sure?”

“Good point.” Peel pondered a moment. “Where can I find you, if I need to talk to you again?”

“I work in the West Burrows by Airshaft 3. What are you going to do now, cousin?”

Peel swung her body around. “I’m going to visit a bridge. Or what’s left of it.”

“Wow, we’re going almost as fast as a Messenger!” WetSand exclaimed, clinging to the handholds as their Scooter darted along the causeway. CitrusPeel tried to enjoy the young Zayin’s enthusiasm, but she was too preoccupied. What if Gum’s death was neither accident nor suicide?

Most ammets thought of death by violence as a vanished horror of the ancient wars, when the cities of the Foreigners still dotted the Continent and hordes of ammets died defending their territory. But Peacekeeper training taught otherwise. Now that all ammets were cousins, murder was rarer even than suicide. But it was not extinct.

The Long Bridge controversy had stirred up the populace more than any issue in generations. On their way to check out the Scooter, Peel and Sand had passed two more fervent wall-scribbles. The first said: “We developed irrigation. We invented meat ranching. We discovered the ocean. Now we’re going to the New Continent! Go-Bridge!” The other was more astringent and simply said: “Don’t invite war into our home!”

Could a No-Bridger have hurt Architect SweetGum, if she sincerely thought she was saving her fellow ammets from danger?

However, the only unusual scent Peel had detected in the Architect’s studio was that of CedarWood, who had arrived that morning. The other odors were the usual background of Recorders, Fans, and other everyday ammets. CedarWood had less motive than anyone for killing Gum, and it was hard to believe she could have faked her chemical reactions to her sister’s death.

CitrusPeel and WetSand arrived at the ruins of the Cold Canyon Bridge well before dewfall. There was no wind, and a miasma of horror tinged with avid curiosity hung over the site from the thick groups of milling ammets.

Unable to stop themselves, Peel and WetSand went and leaned over the edge of the gorge. The rain-smoothed sandstone draped away in folds beneath them, blurring with distance into an indistinct jumble of water and boulders at the bottom. “Oh—I think I can smell the corpses!” WetSand blurted, scampering back from the cliff and curling almost into a ball.

Peel felt her own backplates slide against each other as she unconsciously hunched for defense. “It’s just your imagination, Sand. No scent could drift up from that far down. Come on, let’s find someone to talk to.”

Only a few Peacekeepers remained at the scene. “We’re here mostly to keep the juniors from falling over the edge,” Peacekeeper Zayin 688 AniseSeed explained. “There are also a few Builders who keep trying to climb out on the remains of the bridge, but we’re not letting anyone up there till we’re sure it’s safe. The district’s sending a couple of Climbers for each side.”

“Any strange scents or debris around the top of the bridge?”

“No, just the usual—Transports, Messengers, Cleaners, and a lot of farm types. Totally normal for this area.” AniseSeed’s body drooped tiredly. “Just one of those things, I guess. Sometimes technology lets us down.”

“Thanks for your time, cousin.” Peel turned away.

“Are we going home now? I’m getting hungry.” Sand dropped down to all sixes beside the roadway.

“A little longer, okay? You can help me out. Just circulate through the crowd, and come back and tell me what they’re saying. They’ll talk more freely in front of a junior than they would in front of me.”

Peel picked up her Recorder and approached a blocky, rugged ammet who was pacing by the stub of the broken bridge. AniseSeed had pointed her out as Builder Vav 12093 PineBark, leader of the bridge’s construction crew.

“I’ve got to at least check out the damage,” she told Peel truculently. “My team’s reputation is at stake. They’re saying we chose defective materials! I tell you, Peacekeeper, every beam of that bridge was prime hardwood, approved by at least three top Builders. And the fittings were from Fog Mountain Smiths. Real quality.” She stumped up to the intact portion of the bridge and clonked a muscly midfoot against the flooring.

“Let’s step back a bit, cousin,” said Peel nervously. “Thank you. Now, I don’t know much about wood, but this wasn’t a brand new bridge, was it? Could there have been weather damage, woodborer holes, something like that?”

“Not a chance. The district inspects all major structures every season, and the Climbers gave this one a clean report less than forty-two days ago.”

“A design flaw, maybe?”

“Nothing wrong with the design.” PineBark flared her whiskers. “In fact, it had a lot of safety improvements in it. Sturdiest bridge in the district, I would’ve said. Planned by SweetGum herself.”

Peel decided not to tell the Builder about Gum’s death if she wasn’t aware of it yet. “So, cousin, in your professional opinion, why did this bridge fail?”

“I don’t know!” The Builder’s scent was caustic with frustration. “I’ve never dealt with anything like it, even in earthquake areas, which this is not. That’s why I have to get out there on the structure and examine it myself.”

On the way back to the station, WetSand told Peel what she’d found out. “They’re scared, cousin! They’re saying, if a bridge this good can just fall down, what could happen to the Oceanic Bridge? It’s going to be millions of paces long, and if it gave way, think how many ammets could die! They’re saying, no way will you get me out on the Long Bridge, emigration grants or not.”

The junior Peacekeeper curled her tail close under her body and spoke in tiny whiffs—not that any of the other road traffic could catch more than a word, with the speed their Scooter was going. “They’re even saying maybe the Governors made a mistake deciding to build the Oceanic Bridge. Some of them were telling old stories about pred—, about predators, which are animals that eat ammets! And there was a Scout who’d been out surveying in the North Snowies, and she said there might be more use for her type once Foreigners started coming in over the Long Bridge. She said it like she was joking, but I don’t know if she was.”

Sand’s head curled down further. “Also, there was one Farmer who said that Salt City Governors don’t know what’s right for inland ammets. She said living by the ocean wasn’t natural and it would drive anyone crazy.” WetSand clutched the Scooter’s handholds tight. “I was glad they didn’t know my name.”

Back at the station, FreshPrawn pulled Peel immediately into her office. “I’m sorry, Peel, I seem to have wasted your day. SweetGum’s death was definitely suicide.”

“What? But—”

“New evidence came up. One of the top city Governors got a Messenger from SweetGum late last night. Well, you know how busy Governors are—she didn’t get around to that message until a few hours ago. It said, ah—” Prawn activated a Recorder. “SweetGum’s letter, please.”

As the scents issued from the Recorder’s angled tail, Peel’s frontplates contracted as she realized she was experiencing the words of a dead ammet. Of course, it wasn’t the first time—all historical Recorders held nothing but the stored knowledge of the ancients, passed down through the generations. But having examined Gum’s body just that morning made the message unbearably poignant. “Dear Governor RoseHip, I’m sorry to let you down this way. I know the Oceanic Bridge was a cherished dream of yours, but I can’t go on any longer, knowing my plans might be unsafe. I hope you can forgive me for abandoning my duty. Your cousin, Architect Tsadi 27 SweetGum.”

FreshPrawn returned the Recorder to her shelf. “I’m sorry, Peel. You have to smell some ugly scents in this profession sometimes. I thought you’d want to know right away. It’ll be up on the newsboards by first moonrise.”

“Thanks, cousin.” Peel shifted her weight indecisively between her midlegs. “Would you mind if I went back to Gum’s studio one more time?”

“Why?”

Peel recounted her findings at Cold Canyon Bridge. “There’s some doubt about why the bridge collapsed, and it’s only a matter of time before someone wants to examine Gum’s original plans and notes. What with the public feeling about all this—I’d rather have those Recorders safe in custody here at the station.”

“Good thinking, Peel. Go ahead. You don’t have to take WetSand if you don’t want. I know juniors can be trying sometimes.”

“Thanks, cousin. But I think I will take her along, if she wants to come.”

WetSand, fed and happy now, bounded into the studio as soon as Peel unsealed the door. “Hey, cousin! This poor Cleaner has been shut up all day. Can I let her out?”

“Might as well,” Peel agreed. “Put her up off the floor for now, okay?” A team from the station had collected Gum’s body earlier that day, but Peel had no desire to watch the Cleaner tackling the sticky spot that remained on the floor.

Peel stirred the air with her sensewhiskers. “Huh. I would have expected someone like Gum to have shelves and shelves of Recorders, with all the projects she’s worked on. But there’s only a faint scent.”

“Maybe that’s because the Fan is working so hard.” Sand tried to curl her tail up to speak toward the ceiling airshaft, but her junior height was not enough to reach. Meanwhile Peel searched the room, feeling each wall and shelf with her stubby foredigits and extending her whiskers in all directions. “No, there aren’t any Recorders here at all. Does that seem strange to you, Sand?”

“Maybe she kept them somewhere else. Cousin, could you tell the Fan she can stop?”

“Oh, of course.” Peel walked under the shaft and felt a wash of fresh air. “Fan, you can take a rest now.”

“Thank you, cousin. Tired.” The Fan, sitting on her platform in the airvent, exuded gratitude as she stopped pedaling her wide flipper-digits.

“Now, who set you working so hard?” Peel mused. “Surely an Architect doesn’t need that much fresh air.” The Fan, uncomprehending, did not reply. She stank of exhaustion, as if she’d been working at double speed all day long. Peel wished fleetingly that utility ammets were not so oblivious to everything outside their jobs. “Is the Cleaner all right, at least?”

The Cleaner was bumbling along a bare shelf, releasing a happy aroma as she licked up the dust. “Are you all right, cousin?” said Sand, putting her tail close up to the diminutive ammet and enunciating in clear, simple words.

“Happy,” replied the Cleaner after a moment. “Job easier now.”

Peel’s whiskers quirked in interest. “Why is it easier?”

“Easier to clean shelf with ammets gone,” the Cleaner explained after a moment’s thought. “Easier to reach dust.”

“What kind of ammets? Recorders?”

“Yes. Recorder ammets gone,” the Cleaner said obligingly.

Refectory 33 was only a few turnings from SweetGum’s studio, and still teeming with hungry ammets. The air held savory hints of the fish stew and chopped greens which Chefs were serving from the hatches around the perimeter of the chamber. A glow of moon- and starlight dappled down through the six-Fan airshaft in the center of the room.

“What’s wrong, Sand? I thought you’d be happy to eat again so soon.”

“I feel weird,” the junior confessed. “We’re the only Peacekeepers here. I feel like everyone’s whiskers are pointed at me.”

It was far more likely, Peel thought wryly, that she was the center of attention. Sand at least was no taller than the rest of the crowd, while Peel’s head nearly touched the roof. “That’s something you’ll have to get used to, being a Peacekeeper,” she told Sand gently. “And besides, that means we found the right place. Look how many Architects are here.”

Sure enough, this seemed to be the place where ammets in the building trades gathered for their meals. It stood to reason, since it was close to the masonry and lumber market, and also near the Governors’ wing of the city where most building commissions originated. Peel could detect Builders, Architects, a group of Vendors and Buyers who probably specialized in construction materials, and even a few Governors. Here and there around the room were single ammets of different types, most of whom seemed to be catching a quick meal before heading somewhere else.

Peel began sifting through the conversations around her, taking a bite at this hatch and at that, trying to find Architects who had known Gum. It became clear that the suicide letter had gone public already, and many were reluctant to admit that they had ever worked with someone so unstable. “She didn’t talk to us other Architects a whole lot,” one languid young ammet claimed. “She was a new type, you know. Into the cross-disciplinary thing. Yeah, you’d find Gum with Builders, Scouts, Adapters—even Governors sometimes, though that did work out for her.” The ammet ground her jaws derisively. “Lead planner for the Oceanic Bridge project, would you believe it?”

“Is there anyone here she did talk to?”

“Well, she spent a lot of time with her sister, but I think CedarWood is working late tonight. But hey, that Adapter over there? SpearMint, I think she’s called. They met a lot. Talk to her if you want to know about SweetGum. Ta now.”

Adapter Mem 92833 SpearMint was glad to talk. “Flooding shame what happened to SweetGum,” she said gruffly. “And now everyone’s acting like they never knew her. Well, she was my friend, and I don’t think for a moment that she was to blame for that accident over in Cold Canyon.”

“Were you surprised when you learned about her suicide?”

“I still don’t really believe it.” Mint’s scenters wafted puzzlement along with her sorrow. “She was a genius. Lots of new ideas, some of them crazy, some of them brilliant. But unstable? I would never have guessed it, and I worked with her more closely than most.”

Peel gathered her thoughts. “Then, cousin,” she said carefully, “would you happen to know anything about her design for the Oceanic Bridge?”

SpearMint’s whiskers wavered, and she drew her forearms closer in to her belly plates. Then she relaxed them. “I suppose I can tell you, since I doubt it’ll ever happen now. It was supposed to be a secret. She kept all the Recorders at her studio, didn’t share them with anyone. Except me.”

“Why you? I mean, I know you were friends, but you’re an Adapter.”

“That was exactly it, though. I was helping her with the project. She wanted to build the Oceanic Bridge out of ammets.”

Peel’s mind reeled at the sheer extravagance, the presumption of the idea. Ammets could plow immense fields and drain vast tracts of swampland. They could ventilate huge cities. They could control meat animals twice their size. But ammets were ammets, with jobs to do, and building materials were things like wood and iron and stone that stayed where they were put.

“I know,” Mint said. “That was my reaction, too. But after Gum talked to me awhile, it made more and more sense. One of the biggest problems in designing the Oceanic Bridge is that wood rots. For most bridges, the wood is high up, out of the water, but of course the bottom of the ocean is way too deep to sink pilings the way we’d normally do. So right away we’re looking at a pontoon bridge, basically a floating road. But how long until the floats rot away? Also, where on the Continent are we going to get that much wood?”

The Adapter’s earlier distress had been drowned out now by enthusiasm. “Ammets are the perfect solution. Since they’ll be literally on the water, they can feed themselves by just sifting out algae and other nutrients. They won’t need to move much, so their energy needs will be low. They’ll be self-repairing—even if a storm comes up and breaks the bridge, the Bridgers, as we call them, will eventually be able to locate each other, paddle back together, and seal the gap.” Mint paused a moment. “It’s great to actually talk about this,” she confided.

“How hard would it be to design this, this Bridger?”

“Not hard at all,” Mint said proudly. “Adaptation is our most advanced science, you know. In fact, the design Gum submitted to the Governors even mentions my prototype. We’ll need a long, slender body, of course, with highly developed gripping ability and great strength. Flotation chambers, probably in the lower abdomen. The upper carapace, which will form the roadway, should be rough for traction in wet weather—”

“Wait a minute, cousin.” Peel rubbed her chestplates absentmindedly. “This is all fascinating, but what are these Bridgers going to do all day, when there’s no storm damage to repair? They’d wither away and die, if all they did was sit and eat. Every ammet needs a job.”

“Oh, they wouldn’t be idle. That’s one of the best parts. They’d be transmitting information, back and forth along the length of the bridge! Imagine it: One ammet speaks directly to the one behind, tailscenters to sensewhiskers. That ammet passes on the sequence to the next, and so on. Of course, the bridge would be many ammets wide, so we’d have room for multiple transmissions. Midlegs linked for additional stability—and naturally we’d alternate the directions of the strings of Bridgers, so information could flow both ways. Just the traffic reduction alone makes it worthwhile!”

“And this is the design the Governors chose?”

“Yes, cousin. It was the best.”

Peel reared up to her full height. “WetSand!” she blasted. “Have you stuffed yourself too full to run?”

“No, cousin!” The junior came bounding up.

“Good! I need you to get down to the station as fast as you can. Gather up every Peacekeeper you can find—tell FreshPrawn I take full responsibility. Then bring them all to the West Burrows, Airshaft 3.”

“Yes, cousin. Uh, where exactly around Airshaft 3? What chamber?”

“You’ll know when you get there,” said Peel. “Tell them to just follow my scent.”

Peel whipped her tail around to point toward the astonished SpearMint. “Mint, you just stay here. Stay in the refectory, with lots of ammets around you. Don’t go anywhere alone, do you understand? I’ll explain later. Sand, why are you still here?”

“Uh, I was just thinking, cousin—if this is so urgent, wouldn’t it be better to send a Messenger? There are probably lots in the corridor outside, and they can run a lot quicker than me.”

“No, Sand.” Peel clamped her jaws grimly. “I’d much rather send you.”

CedarWood’s scent had been laid down in a lasting trail over many seasons. It led from the main burrow by the airshaft up to a modest door in a row of Architect’s workspaces. The door was closed and sealed, but Peel could feel the vibration of a Fan turning inside when she put her whiskers up against the roughness of the wood.

She hesitated. If she was wrong, it would mean disciplinary action against her in the department. Worse, FreshPrawn might never think of her the same way again. But there was really no choice. She had to warn CedarWood, immediately. Gripping the edge of the door in her foredigits and powerful midleg claws, Peel bunched her muscles and wrenched the plug of wood out of the frame, scattering clumps of earth where the swivel-pins tore out of their sockets. The air clouded with the taste of dust. She sprang inside, shoulders filling the doorway, and confronted a scene she would never forget.

Four gangly Messengers, heavy blocks clutched in their elongated foredigits, flailed their arms wildly in a cacophony of aggression, landing heavy blows on the bruised frontplates of CedarWood, who had wedged herself into a storage nook in the side of her studio. Wood defended herself valiantly with a short length of shelf planking, but the Messengers with their longer limbs found it easy to stay out of reach of her increasingly feeble swings. Although violence was clearly new to them, they seemed to be learning fast. The room was a maelstrom of stenches, brute anger and vicious excitement blended with fear and desperation.

CitrusPeel felt as if the room wasn’t big enough for her. She raised herself up taller than she’d ever been before, splayed her forearms out to either side, and advanced on the Messengers, clashing her jaws. Her tail lashed from side to side, frothing with combat scents so primal they made the Messengers’ necks arch reflexively toward the ground. One Messenger cowered back against the wall, dropping her weapon stones.

“As a duly authorized Peacekeeper of Salt City,” Peel blared menacingly, “I order you to stand back and desist. My colleagues are only a few paces away.”

“Don’t you understand her?” called out the Messenger by the wall, curling her length downward. Peel turned her attention to the other three. They seemed confused, arms hanging limp at their sides.

Then a gust of rage came from behind Peel as the first ammet continued, “She’s the only Peacekeeper here! We’ve still got time!” A stone block, flung with surprising force, crashed into the back of Peel’s head.

It might have killed a Zayin Peacekeeper. But for CitrusPeel, the blow thudded off head-armor as thick as a cast-iron bridge fitting. She whipped around, forearm shooting out, and pinned the Messengers’ leader against the wall. “Any attempts to escape custody,” she told the other three, “will be prevented.”

They didn’t try to escape. They all attacked CitrusPeel.

As a junior Peacekeeper, Peel had learned several methods for immobilizing an unruly ammet. They mostly involved pinioning both the forearms and midlegs in a complex tangle, and assumed one Peacekeeper per troublemaker. When FreshPrawn arrived at the studio leading a team of six Peacekeepers, she was astounded at what she found.

“Unconventional, but effective,” she told Peel approvingly, as her workers trussed the Messengers for carrying. “Ha! Not everyone could do that, you know. Holding each of them by the throat—and two of them with midfeet! I’ve always known that you’re more coordinated than you let on.”

“Thanks, cousin.” Peel swept her foredigits searchingly across her frontplates.

“I saw they were using chunks of stone against you. With their long limbs, I’m surprised you managed to keep out of their reach.”

“Actually,” said Peel, “I didn’t.” She brushed stone dust proudly off her chestplates and her armored skull.

Back at the station WetSand stood awkwardly, all agog, next to Peel in FreshPrawn’s office. Peel had insisted that she be present. The young ammet’s sensewhiskers stretched admiringly toward Peel as she gave her report.

“Well, cousin, I felt uneasy when you showed me that suicide message from SweetGum,” Peel explained. “I’d talked to Gum’s sister, I’d been out to the wreck at Cold Canyon Bridge, and something smelled rotten. But of course I didn’t imagine that a Messenger would actually fabricate a letter.”

“Quite understandable, Peel. First time it’s ever happened, as far as I know. It’s only recently that Messenger types have had enough initiative to even think of it.”

“I suppose. So anyway, I thought of a reason for going back to Gum’s studio one more time, just so I could try to put my mind at ease. WetSand here—” the junior’s body stiffened with pride, “noticed that the Fan was working at high speed. It made me a little suspicious. I realize now that the Messengers who killed SweetGum last night must have commanded her Fan to clear their scents from the room. She’s a good Fan all right, because she nearly succeeded. There were only background traces of Messengers, as you’d expect in any Architect’s studio.

“The other thing was the Cleaner. CedarWood had restrained her earlier, and when we released her she was delighted that all the Recorders in the studio had been recently removed.” Peel weighted the statement with an ominous tang. “That made me wonder. Some of those Recorders must have held SweetGum’s plans for the Oceanic Bridge. Someone wanted those plans to be lost.”

“I hope we find them,” FreshPrawn said grimly. “And that’s when you went looking for other Architects to question?”

“Yes, cousin. I went to the refectory I guessed Gum had used, and asked around until I found a friend of hers. A friend and colleague, as it turned out.”

WetSand couldn’t restrain herself any longer. “And that’s when she figured it all out! Right, cousin?” The junior bounced eagerly on her hindlegs.

“Well, it took me a little while, Sand. The Adapter—SpearMint—described Gum’s bridge design to me. It was revolutionary, using specially modified ammets as building materials. These Bridgers wouldn’t just be structural elements, they’d transmit messages along the length of the bridge.”

“Aha.”

“Yes. But I didn’t make the connection until Mint mentioned that this feature would reduce traffic on the bridge. She meant Messenger traffic, of course. You know how, nowadays, almost half the ammets on any road will probably be Messengers.”

“Oh, yes. That’s why that new type was given more independence of mind, I think—so they could be more creative in choosing alternate routes.”

“That would make sense. Anyway, thinking about a bridge without Messengers made me remember that in the Cold Canyon tragedy, no Messengers were listed as being killed. Not what you’d expect, given the high volume of traffic on that bridge. But perfectly understandable, if it was the Messengers themselves who engineered the disaster.”

FreshPrawn radiated discomfort. “It’s still hard to imagine, Peel. Even the most reeking No-Bridger wouldn’t go that far just to discredit one Architect.”

“Yes, but these Messengers weren’t exactly No-Bridgers. They faced a much more specific threat.” Peel gestured toward her boss. “You taught me yourself, cousin: The only drive stronger than the will to do one’s job, is the need to protect one’s genes. That operates at the species level, but also at the level of a type. Once the Oceanic Bridge was in place, how much longer before the Governors ordered chains of land-adapted Bridgers to be laid along each road? Think of walking down Broad Burrow without Messengers crawling over you at every step.”

“Spring floods, I’d love that!” Prawn exclaimed. “It would make our job so much easier.”

“Exactly. Before the season was out, lines of these new Transmitter ammets would be everywhere, and Messengers would be almost obsolete. As soon as one of the new Messenger types—probably in the Governors’ complex—caught wind of the plans for the new bridge, she must have figured that out. As Messengers, it was easy for them to spread the word about the danger, and devise a plan to disgrace the bridge’s main Architect and all her sisters. The sabotage at Cold Canyon also helped stir up public feeling against the Oceanic Bridge project, and our Governors pay attention to that sort of thing.”

“So that must have been when you realized CedarWood could be in danger?”

“Wood, and her sisters, and SpearMint too,” Peel agreed. “But especially Wood. She was closest to Gum, and the most likely to protest a suicide verdict. She was probably also familiar with Gum’s plans for the bridge.”

“But they’re all safe now, aren’t they, cousin?” WetSand’s whiskers twitched anxiously.

“Yes, Sand, we’ve sent Peacekeepers out to guard every Tsadi Architect on the Continent, and it won’t be long before all the Tav-type Messengers are recalled.” FreshPrawn exuded sadness. “It’s a real pity to lose so many workers, but they just can’t be trusted any more. We’ll have to make do with the older Messenger types for awhile.”

“Older types aren’t always so bad,” Peel agreed, flexing her forearms.

“Indeed. Indeed. You certainly proved that tonight.” Prawn flavored the air with pleasure and pride. “In fact, Peel, I’m going to request another Gimel for the department. What with recent events, I don’t think the Governors can really refuse. And I’d like you to be in charge of training this new junior—that is, if you’re willing.”

“If I’m willing—cousin, I don’t even know what to say.” Peel had almost given up hope of ever raising a junior of her own. “You know I’ve never trained anyone before—but I’ll do my best.”

“Be sure that you do, then. Our department has a high standard to maintain.” Prawn looked over at WetSand, who squirmed shyly. “I’d have assigned you a junior before this if I could, Peel, but Gimels aren’t in high demand, I’m sorry to say.”

“I understand, cousin.”

But as Peel settled down to sleep in her neighborhood dormitory later that night, she wondered.

The Governors had decided to build the Oceanic Bridge based on reports from the intrepid Scouts who had floated across and explored the New Continent. They had brought back descriptions of a fertile, peaceful land, free of predators or hostile ammets. But if Messengers could lie, so could they.

Few Scouts were needed here on the tame Home Continent, but it would be different in the lands across the ocean. There’d be an immediate need for thousands of new Scouts to fan out over the unfamiliar landscape, doing mapping and reconnaissance. It was in the Scout type’s best interest for the Oceanic Bridge to be built, wasn’t it? Even if the New Continent was roiling with horrors. Even if Foreigners were waiting on the far shore, ready to surge across the bridge into the heart of home civilization. Especially then. The ancients had first created Scouts for war.

Peel’s heavy plating did not allow her to curl into a ball, but she tensed and hunched forward into the floor pad, armor creaking. Should she tell FreshPrawn her fears?

No, there was no evidence. And besides, even if she was right—well. Peel folded her burly forearms and gradually relaxed. She was a Soldier, after all. If war came over the bridge, the Governors would need her type. They’d need every Soldier on the Continent—yes, and millions more.

© 2005 by Constance Cooper.

Originally published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Constance Cooper’s short fiction has appeared in publications such as Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Black Gate, and Brian Youmans’ Best of the Rest. Her SF poetry has twice been nominated for the Rhysling Award. Constance has worked as a linguistic researcher, balloon twister, and software engineer. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, but spent several years in Philadelphia, PA and Edinburgh, Scotland before returning to the Bay Area, where she lives with her husband and two children. Find her online at www.constancecooper.com.

Ghost Days
Ken Liu

3.

Nova Pacifica, 2313

Ms. Coron pointed to the screen-board, on which she had typed out a bit of code.

(define (fib n)

  (if (< n 2)

        1

        (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))

“Let’s diagram the call-graph for this classic LISP function, which computes the n-th Fibonacci number recursively.”

Ona watched her Teacher turn around. The helmetless Ms. Coron wore a dress that exposed the skin of her arms and legs in a way that she had taught the children was beautiful and natural. Intellectually, Ona understood that the frigid air in the classroom, cold enough to give her and the other children hypothermia even with brief exposure, was perfectly suited to the Teachers. But she couldn’t help shivering at the sight. The airtight heat-suit scraped over Ona’s scales, and the rustling noise reverberated loudly in her helmet.

Ms. Coron went on, “A recursive function works like nesting dolls. To solve a bigger problem, a recursive function calls on itself to solve a smaller version of the same problem.”

Ona wished she could call on a smaller version of herself to solve her problems. She imagined that nested inside her was Obedient Ona, who enjoyed diagramming Classical Computer Languages and studying prosody in Archaic English. That would free her up to focus on the mysterious alien civilization of Nova Pacifica, the long-dead original inhabitants of this planet.

“What’s the point of studying dead computer languages, anyway?” Ona said.

The heads of the other children in the classroom turned as one to look at her, the golden glint from the scales on their faces dazzling even through the two layers of glass in their and Ona’s helmets.

Ona cursed herself silently. Apparently, instead of Obedient Ona, she had somehow called on Loudmouth Ona, who was always getting her in trouble.

Ona noticed that Ms. Coron’s naked face was particularly made up today, but her lips, painted bright red, almost disappeared into a thin line as she tried to maintain her smile.

“We study classical languages to acquire the habits of mind of the ancients,” Ms. Coron said. “You must know where you came from.”

The way she said “you” let Ona know that she didn’t mean just her in particular, but all the children of the colony, Nova Pacifica. With their scaled skin, their heat-tolerant organs and vessels, their six-lobed lungs—all engineered based on models from the local fauna—the children’s bodies incorporated an alien biochemistry so that they could breathe the air outside the Dome and survive on this hot, poisonous planet.

Ona knew she should shut up, but—just like the recursive calls in Ms. Coron’s diagram had to return up the call stack—she couldn’t keep down Loudmouth Ona. “I know where I came from: I was designed on a computer, grown in a vat, and raised in the glass nursery with the air from outside pumped in.”

Ms. Coron softened her voice. “Oh, Ona, that’s not . . . not what I meant. Nova Pacifica is too far from the home worlds, and they won’t be sending a rescue ship, because they don’t know that we survived the wormhole and we’re stranded here on the other side of the galaxy. You’ll never see the beautiful floating islands of Tai-Winn or the glorious skyways of Pele, the elegant city-trees of Pollen, or the busy data warrens of Tiron—you’ve been cut off from your heritage, from the rest of humanity.”

Hearing—for the millionth time—these vague legends of the wonders that she’d been deprived of made the scales on Ona’s back stand up. She hated the condescension.

But Ms. Coron went on. “However, when you’ve learned enough to read the LISP source code that powered the first auto-constructors on Earth; when you’ve learned enough Archaic English to understand the Declaration of New Manifest Destiny; when you’ve learned enough Customs and Culture to appreciate all the recorded holos and sims in the Library—then you will understand the brilliance and elegance of the ancients, of our race.”

“But we’re not human! You made us in the image of the plants and animals living here. The dead aliens are more like us than you!”

Ms. Coron stared at Ona, and Ona saw that she had hit upon a truth Ms. Coron didn’t want to admit, even to herself. In the Teacher’s eyes, the children would never be good enough, never be fully human, though they were the future of humanity on this inhospitable planet.

Ms. Coron took a deep breath and went on as if nothing had happened. “Today is the Day of Remembrance, and I’m sure you’ll impress all the Teachers with your presentations later. But let’s finish our lesson first.

“To compute the n-th term, the recursive function calls itself to compute the (n–1)th term and the (n–2)th term, so that they could be added together, each time going back earlier in the sequence, solving earlier versions of the same problem . . .

“The past,” Ms. Coron continued, “thus accumulating bit by bit through recursion, becomes the future.”

The bell rang, and class was finally over.

Even though it meant they had less time to eat, Ona and her friends always made the long walk to have lunch outside the Dome. Eating inside meant squeezing tubes of paste through a flap in her helmet or going back to the claustrophobia-inducing tanks of the dormitory.

“What are you going to do?” Jason asked, biting into a honeycomb fruit—poisonous to the Teachers, but all the children loved it. He had glued white ceramic tiles all over his suit to make it look like an ancient spacesuit from the old pictures. Next to him was a flag—the old Stars-and-Stripes of the American Empire (or was it the American Republic?)—his artifact, so that he could tell the legend of Neil Armstrong, Moonwalker, at the Remembrance Assembly later that evening. “You don’t have a costume.”

“I don’t know,” Ona said, twisting off her helmet and stripping off her suit. She took deep gulps of warm, fresh air, free of the suffocating chemical odor of the recycling filters. “And I don’t care.”

Everyone presenting at the Remembrance Assembly was supposed to be in costume. Two weeks ago, Ona had received her assigned artifact: a little, flat metal piece with a rough surface about the size of her palm and shaped like a toy spade. It was dark green in color, with a stubby, fat handle and a double-tined blade, heavier than its size would suggest. It was a family heirloom that belonged to Ms. Coron.

“But these artifacts and stories are so important to them,” Talia said. “They’ll be so angry that you didn’t do any research.” She had glued her artifact, a white veil, over her helmet and put on a lacy white dress over her suit so that she could enact a classical wedding with Dahl, who had painted his suit black to imitate the grooms he had seen in old holos.

“Who knows if the stories they tell us are true, anyway? We can never go there.”

Ona placed the little spade in the middle of the table, where it absorbed the heat from the sun. She imagined Ms. Coron reaching out to touch it—a precious keepsake from a world she will never see again—and then screaming because the spade was hot.

You must know where you came from.

Ona would rather use the spade to dig up the past of Nova Pacifica, her planet, where she was at home. She wanted to learn about the history of the “aliens” far more than she wanted to know about the past of the Teachers.

“They cling to their past like rotten glue-lichen”—as she spoke she could feel fury boiling up inside her— “and make us feel bad, incomplete, like we’ll never be as good as them. But they can’t even survive out here for an hour!”

She grabbed the spade and threw it as hard as she could into the whitewood forest.

Jason and Talia stayed silent. After a few awkward minutes, they got up.

“We have to get ready for the Assembly,” Jason murmured. And they went back inside.

Ona sat alone for a while, listlessly counting the darting shuttlewings overhead. She sighed and got up to walk into the whitewood forest to retrieve the spade.

Truth be told, on bright, warm autumn days like this, Ona wanted nothing more than to be outside, suitless and helmetless, wandering through the whitewood groves, their six-sided trunks rising into the sky, the vibrating silver-white hexagonal leaves a canopy of mirrors, their susurration whispers and giggles.

She watched the flutter-bys dance through the air, their six translucent, bright blue wings beating wildly as they traced out patterns in the air she was sure was a kind of language. The Dome had been built on the site of an ancient alien city, and here and there, the woods were broken by hillocks—piles of angular rubble left behind by the mysterious original inhabitants of this planet who had all died millennia before the arrival of the colony ship, alien ruins exuding nothing but a ghostly silence.

Not that they’ve tried very hard, Ona thought. The Teachers had never shown much interest in the aliens, too busy trying to cram everything about old Earth into the children’s heads.

She felt the full warmth of the sun against her face and body, her white scales coruscating with the colors of the rainbow. The afternoon sun was hot enough to boil water where the whitewood trees didn’t shade the soil, and white plumes of steam filled the forest. Though she hadn’t thrown the spade far, it was hard to find it among the dense trees. Ona picked her way slowly, examining every exposed root and overturned rock, every pile of ancient rubble. She hoped that the spade hadn’t been broken.

There.

Ona hurried over. The spade was on the side of a pile of rubble, nestled among some tinselgrass that cushioned its fall. A small spume of steam was trapped under it, so that it seemed to be floating over the escaping water vapor. Ona leaned closer.

The steam held a fragrance that she had never smelled before. The spume had blasted away some of the green patina encrusting the spade, revealing the gleaming golden metal underneath. She suddenly had a sense of just how ancient the object was, and she wondered if it was some kind of ritual implement, vaguely remembering the religion excerpts from Customs and Culture class—ghost stories.

She was curious, for the first time, whether the previous owners ever imagined that the spade would one day end up a billion billion miles from home, on top of an alien tomb, in the hands of a barely-human girl who looked like Ona.

Mesmerized by the smell, she reached for the cauldron, took a deep breath, and fainted.

2.

East Norbury, Connecticut, 1989

For the Halloween dance, Fred Ho decided to go as Ronald Reagan.

Mainly it was because the mask was on sale at the Dollar Store. Also, he could wear his father’s suit, worn only once on the day the restaurant opened. He didn’t want to argue with his father about money. Going to the dance was shock enough for his parents.

Also, the pants had deep pockets, good for holding his present. Heavy and angular, the little antique bronze spade-shaped coin had been warmed by his thigh through the thin fabric. He thought Carrie might like to use it as a paperweight, hang it as a window decoration, or even take advantage of the hole at the handle end to turn it into an incense holder. She often smelled of sandalwood and patchouli.

Picking him up at his house, she waved at his parents, who stood in the door, confused and wary, and did not wave back.

“You look dapper,” Carrie said, her mask on the dashboard.

He was relieved that Carrie had approved of his costume. Indeed, she did more than approve. She had dressed up as Nancy Reagan.

He laughed and tried to think of something appropriate to say. By the time he settled on “You look beautiful,” they were already a block away, and it seemed too late. So he said, “Thank you for asking me to the dance,” instead.

The field house was festooned with orange streamers, plastic bats, and paper pumpkins. They put on their masks and went in. They danced to Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up” and then Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” Well, Carrie danced; Fred mostly tried to keep up.

Though he still moved as awkwardly as ever, the masks somehow made it easier for him not to worry about his lack of the most essential skill for surviving an American high school—blending in.

The rubber masks soon made them sweaty. Carrie drank cup after cup of the sickly-sweet punch, but Fred, who opted to keep his mask on, shook his head. By the time Jordan Knight began to sing “I’ll Be Loving You (Forever),” they were ready to get out of the dark gym.

Outside, the parking lot was filled with ghosts, Supermans, aliens, witches, and princesses. They waved at the presidential couple, and the couple waved back. Fred kept his mask on and deliberately set a slow pace, enjoying the evening breeze.

“Wish it could be Halloween every day,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

No one knows who I am, he wanted to say. No one stares at me. But instead all he said was, “It’s nice to wear a suit.” He spoke carefully and slowly, and he almost could not hear his accent.

She nodded, as if she understood. They got into the car.

Until Fred’s arrival, East Norbury High School had never had a student whose first language wasn’t English and who might be illegal. People were mostly friendly, of course, but a thousand smiles, whispers, little gestures that each individually seemed so innocuous added up to you don’t belong.

“You nervous about meeting my parents?” she asked.

“No,” he lied.

“My mom is really excited about meeting you.”

They arrived at a white raised ranch behind an immaculate lawn. The mailbox at the mouth of the driveway said “Wynne.”

“This is your house,” he said.

“You can read!” she teased, and parked.

Walking up the driveway, Fred could smell the sea in the air and hear the waves crashing against the shore nearby. There was an elegant, simple jack-o-lantern on the steps before the front door.

A fairy tale house, Fred thought. An American castle.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Fred asked from the kitchen door.

Mrs. Wynne (“Call me Cammy”) was shuttling between the kitchen table, which was being used as a cutting/mixing/staging station, and the stove. She smiled at him quickly before turning back to her work. “Don’t worry about it. Go chat with my husband and Carrie.”

“I really can help,” he said. “I know my way around a kitchen. My family runs a restaurant.”

“Oh, I know. Carrie tells me your Moo Shu Pork is excellent.” She stopped and looked at him, her smile even wider. “You speak such good English!”

He never understood why people felt it important to point that out. They always sounded so surprised, and he never knew what to say. “Thank you.”

“It really is very good. Go on now. I have this all under control.”

He retreated back to the living room, wishing he could stay in the warm, almost-familiar heat of the kitchen.

“A terrible thing,” Mr. Wynne said. “Those brave students in Tiananmen Square. Heroes.”

Fred nodded.

“Your parents,” Mr. Wynne continued, “they were dissidents?”

Fred hesitated. He remembered his father reading the Chinese newspaper they got for free from Chinatown up in Boston, showing the photographs of the protesting crowds in Beijing.

“Stupid kids,” he had said, contempt making his face red. “Wasting their parents’ money to riot outside like the Red Guards just so they can pose for the foreigners and their cameras instead of studying. What do they hope to accomplish? They’re all spoiled, read too many American books.”

Then he turned to Fred and shook his fist threateningly. “If you ever dare to do something like that, I’ll beat you until you can tell your ass apart from your head again.”

“Yes,” Fred said. “That’s why we came here.”

Mr. Wynne nodded, satisfied. “This is a great country, isn’t it?”

Truth be told, he had never really understood why, one day, his parents had woken him up in the middle of the night; why they had gotten on a boat, then a truck, then a bus, then a big ship; why, for so many days, they had ridden in the dark, the tossing and tumbling of the sea making him sick; why, after they landed, they had hidden in the back of a van until they emerged in the dirty streets of Chinatown in New York, where some men spoke with his father in menacing tones while he nodded and nodded; why his father had told him that now they all had different names and were different people and they must never talk to foreigners or the police; why they had all lived in the basement of a restaurant and worked there for years and talked endlessly of how to save money to pay off the debt to those menacing men and then make more of it; why they had then moved again, to East Norbury, this small town on the coast of New England, where his father said there were no Chinese restaurants and the Americans were too stupid to know that he wasn’t much of a cook.

“A great country, sir,” he said.

“And that’s the face of a great man you’re holding,” Mr. Wynne said, indicating his mask. “A real fighter for freedom.”

After that week in June, his father had gotten on the phone every evening, whispering deep into the night. And suddenly his father told him and his mother that they had to memorize a new story about themselves, about how they were connected to the students who had died in Tiananmen Square, believed the same things, and were hopelessly in love with “democracy.” “Asylum” was mentioned often, and they had to be prepared for an interview with some American official in New York next month, so that they could make themselves legal.

“Then we can stay here and make lots of money,” his father had said, satisfied.

The doorbell rang. Carrie got up with the bowl of candies.

“Carrie is always adventurous,” Mr. Wynne said. He lowered his voice. “She likes to try new things. It’s natural, being rebellious at her age.”

Fred nodded, not sure what he was really being told.

Mr. Wynne’s face lost its friendly expression, like a mask falling off. “She’s just going through a phase, you understand. You’re a part”—he waved his hands vaguely— “of . . . of how she wants to get a rise out of me.

“It’s not serious,” he added. But his expression was very serious.

Fred said nothing.

“I just want there to be no misunderstandings,” Mr. Wynne continued. “People tend to belong with their own kind, as I’m sure you’ll agree.”

Over by the door, Carrie gasped and pretended to be scared by the trick-or-treaters and expressed admiration at the costumes.

“Don’t get the wrong idea about what she’s doing with you.”

Carrie returned from the door.

“Why so quiet?” she asked. “What were you two talking about?”

“Just learning about Fred’s family,” Mr. Wynne said, his face again friendly and smiling. “They were dissidents, did you know? Very brave people.”

Fred stood up, his hand in his pocket, fingers wrapped around the little bronze spade. He fantasized throwing it at the face of Mr. Wynne, which strangely bore some resemblance to his father’s.

But instead, he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it’s so late. I should go.”

1.

Hong Kong, 1905

“Jyu-zung—” William’s father called again. He was as loud as their neighbor futilely attempting to quiet her colicky child.

Why does everyone in Hong Kong have to shout? It’s the first decade of the twentieth century, and everyone still acts like they live in villages.

“It’s William,” William muttered. Even though his father had paid for his expensive education in England, the old man still refused to use his English name, the name he had gone by for more than a decade.

William tried to focus on the book in front of him, the words of the 14th-century Christian mystic:

For thou hast brought me with thi question into that same derknes, and into that same cloude of unknowyng that I wolde thou were in thiself.

“Jyu-zung!”

He plugged up his ears with his fingers.

For of alle other creatures and theire werkes—ye, and of the werkes of God self—may a man thorou grace have fulheed of knowing, and wel to kon thinke on hem; bot of God Himself can no man thinke.

The book, The Cloude of Unknowyng, had been a parting gift from Virginia, who was surely the most radiant of His works and one William longed to have “fulheed of knowing.”

“Now that you’re going back to the mysterious Orient,” she had said as she handed him the book, “may you be guided by the mystics of the Occident.”

“Hong Kong is not like that,” he had said, unhappy that she seemed to think of him as a mere Chinaman, though . . . he kind of was. “It’s part of the Empire. It’s civilized.” He took the book from her, almost, but not quite, touching her fingers. “I’ll be back in a year.”

She had rewarded him with a bold and radiant smile, which, more than all his high marks and the praise from his tutors, made him feel like a proper Englishman.

And therfore I wole leve al that thing that I can think, and chese to my love that thing that I cannot think. For whi He may wel be loved, bot not thought. By love may He be getyn and holden; bot bi thought neither.

“Jyu-zung! What is the matter with you?”

His father stood in the door, his face red with the exertion of having climbed up the ladder to William’s attic room.

William pulled his fingers from his ears.

“You’re supposed to help me with the preparations for Yu Lan.”

After the mellifluous music of Middle English in his head, his father’s Cantonese grated on his ears like the clanging of cymbals and gongs in Jyut kek, the native “folk opera” that was undeserving of the name, a barbarous shadow of the real operas he had attended in London.

“I’m busy,” William said.

His father looked from his face to his book and then back again.

“It’s an important book,” he said, avoiding his father’s gaze.

“The ghosts will be parading tonight.” His father shuffled his feet. “Let’s make sure the spirits of our ancestors aren’t ashamed, and we can try to comfort the homeless ghosts.”

To go from reading Darwin, Newton, and Smith to this, to appeasing ghosts. In England, men were contemplating the possibility of knowing all the laws of nature, the end of science, but here, under his father’s roof, it was still the Middle Ages. He could easily imagine the look on Virginia’s face.

He had nothing in common with his father, who might as well be an alien.

“I’m not asking,” his father said. His voice grew hard, like the way the Cantonese opera actors ended a scene.

Rationality suffocates in the air of superstition in the colonies. His determination to go back to England had never been stronger.

“Why would grandfather need this?” William asked, staring critically at the paper model of an Arrol-Johnston three-cylinder horseless carriage.

“Everyone appreciates things that make life more comfortable,” his father said.

William shook his head but continued the task of gluing headlights made of yellow paper—intended to simulate brass—to the model.

Next to him, the surface of the table was covered with other offerings to be burnt later that night: a paper model of a Western-style cottage, paper suits, paper dress shoes, stacks of “underworld money” and piles of “gold bullion.”

He could not resist commenting, “Grandfather and great-grandfather must have poor eyesight to confuse these with the real thing.”

His father refused to take the bait, and they continued to work in silence.

To make the tedious ritual tolerable, William fantasized that he was polishing the car in preparation for a ride through the countryside with Virginia . . .

“Jyu-zung, could you take out the sandalwood table from the basement? Let’s lay out the feast for the ghosts with some style. We shouldn’t argue any more on this day.”

The pleading note in his father’s voice surprised William. He noticed, suddenly, how bent his father’s back had become.

An image came unbidden to him of himself as a young boy sitting on top of his father’s shoulders, which had seemed as broad and steady as a mountain.

“Higher, higher!” he shouted.

And his father lifted him over his head so that he could be above the milling crowd, so that he could see the exciting costumes and beautiful makeup of the folk opera troupe performing for Yu Lan.

His father’s arms were so strong, and kept him lifted high in the air for a long time.

“Of course, Aa-baa,” William said, and stood up to go to the warehouse in the back.

The warehouse was dark, dry, and cool. This was where his father temporarily stored the antiques he was restoring for customers, as well as the pieces he collected. The heavy wooden shelves and cubbyholes were filled with Zhou bronze ritual vessels, Han jade carvings, Tang tomb figurines, Ming porcelain, and all manner of other wares that William did not recognize.

He made his way carefully through the narrow hallways, looking impatiently for his prize.

Maybe in that corner?

In this corner of the warehouse, a ray of slanting light from a papered-over window illuminated a small workbench. Behind it, leaning against the wall, was the sandalwood dining table.

As he bent down to pick up the table, what he saw on the workbench stopped him.

There were two identical-looking bubi, ancient bronze coins, on the table. They looked like palm-sized spades. Though he didn’t know much about antiques, he had seen enough bubi as a child to know that this style was from the Zhou Dynasty or earlier. The ancient Chinese kings had cast coins in this shape to show a reverence for the earth, from which came life-sustaining crops and to which all life must return. Digging in the earth was a promise to the future as well as an acknowledgement of the past.

Given how large these bubi were, William knew they must be very valuable. To have an identical pair was very rare.

Curious, he looked closer at the coins, which were covered in dark green patina. Something didn’t seem right. He flipped over the one on the left: it gleamed bright yellow, almost like gold.

Next to the coins was a small dish with some dark blue powder inside, and a paintbrush. William sniffed the powder: coppery.

He knew that bronze only looked bright yellow if it was freshly cast.

He tried to push away the thought. His father had always been an honorable man who made an honest living. It was unfilial for a son to think such thoughts.

But he picked up the pair of bubi and put them in his pocket. His English teachers had taught him to ask questions, to dig for the truth, no matter what the consequences.

He half-dragged and half-carried the table up to the front hall.

“Now this looks like a proper festival,” his father said as he placed the last plate of vegetarian duck on the table. The table was filled with plates of fruit and mock-versions of every kind of meat. Eight place settings had been arranged around the table, ready to receive the ghosts of the ancestors of the Ho family.

Mock chicken, vegetarian duck, papier-mâché houses, false money . . .

“Maybe we can go to see some opera performances in the streets later,” his father said, oblivious to William’s mood. “Just like when you were little.”

Forged bronzes . . .

He took out the two bubi from his pocket and placed them on the table, the gleaming side of the unfinished one facing up.

His father looked at them, paused for a moment, and then acted as if nothing was wrong. “You want to light the joss sticks?”

William said nothing, trying to find a way to phrase his question.

His father arranged the two bubi side by side and flipped them over. Carved into the patina on the reverse side of each was a character.

“The character forms from the Zhou Dynasty were a bit different from later forms,” his father said, as though William was still only a child being taught how to read and write. “So collectors from later ages would sometimes carve their interpretations of the script on the vessels. Like the patina, these interpretations also accumulate on the vessels in layers, build up over time.”

“Have you ever noticed how similar the character ‘jyu’—for the universe, which is also the first character in your name—is to the character ‘zi’—for writing?”

William shook his head, not really listening.

This entire culture is based on hypocrisy, on fakery, on mocking up the appearance for that which cannot be obtained.

“See how the universe is straight forward, but to understand it with the intellect, to turn it into language, requires a twist, a sharp turn? Between the World and the Word, there lies an extra curve. When you look at these characters, you’re convening with the history of these artifacts, with the minds of our ancestors from thousands of years ago. That is the deep wisdom of our people, and no Latin letters will ever get at our truth as deeply as our characters.”

William could no longer stand it. “You hypocrite! You are a forger!”

He waited, silently urging his father to deny the charge, to explain.

After a while, his father began to speak, not looking at him. “The first ghosts came to me a few years ago.”

He used the term gwailou for “foreigners,” but which also meant “ghosts.”

“They handed me antiques I had never seen before to restore. I asked them, ‘How did you get these?’ ‘Oh, we bought them from some French soldiers who conquered Peking and burned down the Palace and took these as loot.’

“For the ghosts, a robbery could give good title. This was their law. These bronzes and ceramics, handed down from our ancestors for a hundred generations, would now be taken from us and used to decorate the homes of robbers who did not even understand what they were. I could not allow it.

“So I made copies of the works I was supposed to restore, and I gave the copies back to the ghosts. The real artifacts I saved for this land, for you, and for your children. I mark the real ones and the copies with different characters, so that I can tell them apart. I know what I do is wrong in your eyes, and I am ashamed. But love makes us do strange things.”

Which is authentic? he thought. The World or the Word? The truth or understanding?

The sound of a cane rapping against the front door interrupted them.

“Probably customers,” said his father.

“Open up!” whoever was at the door shouted.

William went to the front door and opened it, revealing a well-dressed Englishman in his forties, followed by two burly, scruffy men who looked like they were more at home in the docks of the colony.

“How do you do?” the Englishman said. Without waiting to be invited, he confidently stepped inside. The other two shoved William aside as they followed.

“Mr. Dixon,” his father said. “What a pleasant surprise.” His father’s heavily accented English made William cringe.

“Not as pleasant a surprise as the one you gave me, I assure you,” Dixon said. He reached inside his coat and pulled out a small porcelain figurine and set it on the table. “I gave you this to repair.”

“And I did.”

A smirk appeared on Dixon’s face. “My daughter is very fond of this piece. Indeed, it amuses me to see her treating the antique tomb figurine like a doll, and that was how it came to be broken. But after you returned the mended figurine, she refused to play with it, saying that it was not her dolly. Now, children are very good at detecting lies. And Professor Osmer was good enough to confirm my guess.”

His father straightened his back but said nothing.

Dixon gestured, and his two lackeys immediately shoved everything off the table: plates, dishes, bowls, the bubi, the food, the chopsticks—all crashed into a cacophonous heap.

“Do you want us to keep looking around? Or are you ready to confess to the police?”

His father kept his face expressionless. Inscrutable, the English would have called it. At the school, William had looked into a mirror until he had learned to not make that face, until he had stopped looking like his father.

“Wait a minute.” William stepped forward. “You can’t just go into someone’s house and act like a bunch of lawless thugs.”

“Your English is very good,” Dixon said as he looked William up and down. “Almost no accent.”

“Thank you,” William said. He tried to maintain a calm, reasonable tone and demeanor. Surely the man would realize now that he was not dealing with a common native family, but a young Englishman of breeding and good character. “I studied for ten years at Mr. George Dodsworth’s School in Ramsgate. Do you know it?”

Dixon smiled and said nothing, as though he was staring at a dancing monkey. But William pressed on.

“I’m certain my father would be happy to compensate you for what you feel you deserve. There’s no need to resort to violence. We can behave like gentlemen.”

Dixon began to laugh, at first a little, then uproariously. His men, confused at first, joined in after a while.

“You think that because you’ve learned to speak English, you are other than what you are. There seems to be something in the Oriental mind that cannot grasp the essential difference between the West and the East. I am not here to negotiate with you, but to assert my rights, a notion that seems foreign to your habits of mind. If you do not restore to me what is mine, we will smash everything in this place to smithereens.”

William felt the blood rush to his face, and he willed himself to let the muscles of his face go slack, to not betray his feelings. He looked across the room at his father, and suddenly he realized that his father’s expression must also be his expression, the placid mask over a helpless rage.

While they talked, his father had been slowly moving behind Dixon. Now he looked over at William, and the two nodded at each other almost imperceptibly.

And therfore I wole leve al that thing that I can think, and chese to my love that thing that I cannot think .

William jumped at Dixon as his father lunged at Dixon’s legs. The three men fell to the ground in a heap. In the struggle that followed, William seemed to observe himself from a distance. There was no thought, but a mixture of love and rage that clouded his mind until William found himself sitting astride Dixon’s prone body, clutching one of the bubi, poised to smash its blade into Dixon’s head.

The two men Dixon had brought with him looked on helplessly, frozen in place.

“We don’t have what you’re looking for here,” William said, breathing deeply. “Now get out of our house.”

William and his father surveyed the mess Dixon and his men left behind.

“Thank you,” his father said.

“I suppose the ghosts got a good show tonight,” William said.

“I’m sure grandfather is proud of you,” his father said. And then, for the first time that he could remember, his father added, “Jyu-zung, I’m proud of you.”

William did not know if what he felt was love or rage, and as he looked at the two characters on the upturned bubi on the ground, they seemed to waver and merge into one as his eyes grew blurry.

2.

East Norbury, Connecticut, 1989

“Thank you for having me to your house,” Fred said. “I had a great time tonight.” He spoke stiffly and carefully kept his distance from her.

The waves of Long Island Sound lapped gently at the beach at their feet.

“You’re very sweet,” she said, and held his hand. She leaned against him, and the wind lifted her hair against his face, the floral scent of her shampoo mixing with the smell of the sea, like promise mixed with longing. His heart thumped. He felt a tenderness in the middle of his chest that he was frightened of.

Across the bay, they could see the bright red lights of the Edley Mansion, which was being run as a haunted house for the week. He imagined the delighted screams of the children, willingly thrilled by the lies told by their parents.

“Don’t worry too much about what my dad says,” she said.

He froze.

“You’re angry,” she said.

“What do you know about it?” he said. She is a princess. She belongs.

“You can’t control what others think,” she said. “But you can always decide for yourself if you belong.”

He said nothing, trying to comprehend the rage in himself.

“I am not my father,” she said. “And you’re not your parents. Family is a story that is told to you, but the story that matters the most you must tell yourself.”

He realized that this was the thing about America that he loved the most: the utter faith that family did not matter, that the past was but a story. Even a story that started as a lie—a fib—could become authentic, could become a life that was real.

He reached into the pocket of his pants and took out his gift.

“What is it?” She held the little bronze spade uncertainly in her hand.

“It’s an antique,” he said. “It used to belong to my grandfather, and he gave it to me before we left China, for luck. I thought you might like it.”

“It’s beautiful.”

He felt compelled to be honest. “My grandfather said that his father had saved it from foreigners trying to steal it from the country, and the Red Guards almost destroyed it during the Cultural Revolution. But my dad says it’s a fake, like many things from China, and not worth anything. See this mark on the bottom? He says it’s too modern, not really old. But it’s the only thing I have from my grandfather. He died last year and we couldn’t go back for the funeral, because of . . . immigration problems.”

“Shouldn’t you keep it?”

“I want you to have it. I’ll always remember giving it to you, and that’s a better memory, a better story.”

He bent down and picked up a small, sharp rock from the beach. As he held her hand with the spade coin in it, slowly, he etched the letters of their initials into the patina, next to the older character. “Now it has our mark, our story.”

She nodded and solemnly put the coin into her jacket pocket. “Thank you. It’s lovely.”

He thought about going home, about the questions from his father and the worried silence from his mother, about the long hours ahead of him in the restaurant tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, about college, now a possibility if he could show his citizenship papers, about one day making his own way across this vast continent, now still hidden under a cloud of unknowing darkness.

But not yet. He looked around and wanted to do something big, to commemorate this night. He took off his jacket, his shirt, kicked off his shoes. He was naked, maskless, costumeless. “Let’s go for a swim.”

She laughed, not believing him.

The water was cold, so cold that diving in made him gasp and think his skin was on fire. He dove under and then popped back up, and shook the water from his face.

She called for him, and he waved back, once, and then swam toward the bright lights on the other side of the bay.

The reflection of the red-lit Edley Mansion in the water was streaked, mixed with the bright white from the moon. As his arms moved through the dark blue sea, jellies glowed against his skin, like hundreds of little stars.

Her voice faded behind him as he swam through the stars and stripes, fractal, ambiguous, tasting of salty hope and the deliberate sting of leaving behind the past.

3.

Nova Pacifica, 2313

Ona woke up in the middle of a busy street. The light was dim, and it was cold, as though it were dusk or dawn.

Six-wheeled vehicles shaped like sleek finned sea-darts rushed by both sides of her, seeming to miss her by inches. A glance inside one of the vehicles almost made her scream.

The head of the creature inside had twelve tentacles radiating from it.

She looked around: thick, six-sided towers around her rose into the sky, as dense as the trunks of the whitewood grove. She dodged around the speeding vehicles and made her way to the side of the street, where more of the twelve-tentacled creatures ambled by, paying no attention to her. They had six feet and a low-slung torso, with a shimmering skin that she wasn’t sure was made of fur or scales.

Overhead, cloth signs etched with alien markings fluttered in the wind like leaves, the individual symbols made up of line segments intersecting at sharp and obtuse angles. The noise of the crowd, consisting of incomprehensible clicks, moans, and chirps, coalesced into a susurration that she was sure was a kind of language.

The creatures paid no attention to her, sometimes barreling right into her, through her as though she were made of air. She felt like a ghost in the stories that some of the Teachers used to tell when she was younger, an invisible being. She squinted to find the sun in the middle of the sky: It was dimmer and smaller than she was used to.

Then, suddenly, everything began to change. The pedestrians on the sidewalks stopped, swung their heads skyward, and lifted their tentacles toward the sun—at the tip of each appendage was the black orb of an eye. The traffic in the street slowed and then ceased, the occupants of the vehicles stepping out to join the sun-gazing crowd. Silence fell across the scene like a veil.

Ona looked around the crowd, picking out individual groupings frozen in tableaus like photographs. A large creature wrapped its forearms protectively around two smaller ones, its tentacles trembling noiselessly. Two aliens leaned against each other, their tentacles and arms entwined. Another one, its legs unsteady, supported itself against the side of a building, its tentacles lightly tapping against the wall like a man sending a message.

The sun seemed to glow brighter, and then brighter still. The creatures turned their faces away from the sun, their tentacles wilting in the new heat and light.

They turned to gaze at her. Thousands, millions of dozens of eyes focused on Ona, as though suddenly she had become visible. Their tentacles reached toward her, pleading, signaling.

The crowd separated, and a small creature, about her size, walked toward her. Ona held out her hands, palms uplifted, uncertain what to do.

The small alien reached her, deposited something in her hand, and stepped back. Ona looked down and felt the ancient, rough metal against her scaled skin, absorbed its heft. She flipped the spade around and saw a mark that she did not recognize: sharp angles, hooks, reminding her of the markings on the fluttering signs.

A thought came into her mind like a whisper: Remember us, you who treasure the old.

The sun glowed even brighter, and as Ona felt warm again, the creatures around her melted into the blinding, bright light.

Ona sat under the whitewood tree, fingers wrapped around the small bronze spade. White plumes of steam continued to erupt from the hillocks around her, each perhaps another window into a lost world.

The images she had seen went through her mind again and again. Sometimes understanding comes to you not through thought, but through this throbbing of the heart, this tenderness in the chest that hurts.

As their world was about to die, the ancient people of Nova Pacifica, in their last days, focused all their energy on leaving behind tributes, memorials of their civilization. Knowing that they themselves would not survive the sun that burnt hotter and hotter, they embedded their six-fold symmetry into every species around them, hoping that some would survive and become living echoes of their cities, their civilization, their selves. In their ruins, they hid a record that would be played when triggered by the detection of something made, aged, layered, still preserved because it was valued, so that they had some reasonable expectation that the owner would have a sense of history, of respect for the past.

Ona thought of the children, frightened and uncomprehending as their world burnt up. She thought of the lovers, poised between regret and acceptance, as the world outside collapsed against the world between them. She thought of a people trying their hardest to leave behind a trace of their existence in this universe, a few signs to mark their passage.

The past, ever recurring, made up the future like layers of patina.

She thought of Ms. Coron and the naked faces of the Teachers, and for the first time, she came to see their expressions in a new light. It was not arrogance that made them look at the children the way they did, but fear. They had been stranded on this new world, where they could not survive, and they clung to their past as fiercely as they did because they knew that they would be yielding their places to a new race, the People of Nova Pacifica, and live on only in their memories.

Parents fear to be forgotten, to not be understood by their children.

Ona lifted the small bronze spade and licked the surface with the tip of her tongue. It tasted bitter and sweet, the fragrance of long-dead incense, of sacrificial offerings, of traces left behind by countless lifetimes. The spot where the steam had blasted away the patina, next to some ancient etched marks, was shaped like a little person, gleamed fresh and new, the future as well as the past.

She got up and pulled off a few pliant branches from nearby whitewood trees. Weaving carefully, she made them into a crown with twelve radiating branches, like tentacles, like hair, like olive branches. She had her costume.

It was but a brief scene glimpsed through the cloud of unknowing, a few images that she could barely comprehend. Perhaps they were idealized, sentimental, constructed; yet was there not a trace of authenticity, an indelible seed of the love of a people whose past meant something? She would show them how she now understood that digging into the past was an act of comprehension, an act of making sense of the universe.

Her body was an amalgam of the biological and technological heritages of two species, and her very existence the culmination of the striving of two peoples. Nested inside her was Earth Ona and Nova Pacifica Ona and Rebellious Ona and Obedient Ona and all the generations that came before her, stretching back into infinity.

Steeped in memories and the beginning of understanding, a child of two worlds picked her way through the woods and among the hillocks toward the Dome, the surprisingly heavy little spade cradled in her palm.

© 2013 by Ken Liu.

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

Augusta Prima
Karin Tidbeck

Augusta stood in the middle of the lawn with the croquet club in a two-handed grasp. She had been offered the honor of opening the game. Mnemosyne’s prized croquet balls were carved from bone, with inlaid enamel and gold. The ball at Augusta’s feet stared up at her with eyes of bright blue porcelain. An invitation to a croquet game in Mnemosyne’s court was a wonderful thing. It was something to brag about. Those who went to Mnemosyne’s games saw and were seen by the right people. Of course, they also risked utter humiliation and ridicule.

Augusta was sweating profusely. It trickled down between her breasts, eventually forming damp spots on the front of her shirt. She could feel a similar dampness spreading in the seat of her too-tight kneepants. More moisture ran down her temples, making tracks in the thick layers of powder. Her artful corkscrew curls were already wilting.

The other guests spread out across the lawn, waiting for her move. Everyone who meant something was here. Our Lady Mnemosyne sat under a lace umbrella on her usual podium. Her chamberlain Walpurgis lounged in the grass in his white surtout, watching Augusta with heavy-lidded eyes. At his side, the twin lovers Vergilia and Hermine shared a divan, embracing as usual. Today one of them was dressed in a crinoline adorned with leaves; the other wore a dress made of gray feathers. Their page, a changeling boy in garish makeup, stood behind them holding a tray of drinks. Further away, Augusta’s sister Azalea had grown tired of waiting. She had stripped naked next to a shrubbery, methodically plucking leaves off its branches. Everyone except Azalea was watching Augusta. The only sound was that of tearing leaves.

Augusta took a deep breath, raised her club and swung it with a grunt. The ball flew in a high arc, landing with a crunch in the face of the twins’ page, who dropped his tray and doubled over. The garden burst into cheers and applause. Mnemosyne smiled and nodded from her podium. Augusta had passed the test.

The game thus opened, the other guests threw themselves into play. In a series of magnificent hits, Walpurgis knocked out two pages who were carried off with crushed eyebrows, broken teeth, and bleeding noses. The twins were in unusually bad shape, mostly hitting balls instead of pages. Augusta played very carefully, focusing on not getting hit. There were a few breaks for cake, games, and flogging a servant. Finally Hermine and Vergilia, one hand each on the club, hit Augusta’s ball and it rolled well into the woods beyond the gardens. The hit was considered so stylish that Augusta was sent out of the game. She wandered in among the trees to find her ball.

Under one of the dog-rose bushes lay a human corpse: a man in a grey woolen suit. They sometimes wandered into the woods by mistake. This one had come unusually far. It was difficult to tell what had killed him. He had begun to putrefy; the swollen belly had burst his waistcoat open. A gold chain trailed from one of the pockets. Augusta bent forward, gingerly grasped the chain, and pulled it. A shiny locket emerged on the end of the chain, engraved with flowers. Augusta swung the locket up in the air and let it land in her palm. The touch sent a little chill along her arm, and for a moment she felt faint. She wrapped the locket in a handkerchief, put it in a pocket, and returned to the croquet green to announce that there was a new and interesting corpse.

Augusta returned to her rooms, a little medal pinned to her chest as thanks for her find. No one had noticed her taking the metal thing for herself. She shooed out her page and sat down on the bed to examine the thing further.

It seemed to be made of gold, engraved on both sides with flowery strands. It was heavy and cold in her palm. The vertigo gradually subsided, but the chills remained like an icy stream going from her hand to her neck. The chain attached to the locket by a little knob on the side. Another, almost invisible button sat across from it. She pressed it, and the locket sprung open to reveal a white disc painted with small lines. Three thin rods were attached to the centre. One of them moved around the disc in twitching movements, making a ticking noise like a mouse’s heart.

It was a machine. Augusta had seen things like it a few times, among the belongings of houses or humans who had been claimed by the gardens. They had always been broken, though. Mechanical things usually fell apart as soon as they came into the gardens’ domain. It was a mystery how this thing could still be in one piece and working.

The chills had become an almost pleasant sensation. Augusta watched the rod chasing around the disc until she fell asleep.

She woke up in the same position as she’d fallen asleep in, on her side with the little machine in her hand. It was still now. Augusta frowned and called on her page. There were a handful of pages in the family, most of them nameless changelings raised in servitude. For various reasons, only two of them could carry a conversation, should one be so inclined. Augusta’s page wasn’t one of them.

“Fetch Azalea’s page,” she told him when he arrived.

Augusta watched the machine until there was a scratch at her door and Azalea’s page stepped inside. He was a half-grown boy, with dark hair in oiled locks and eyes rimmed with kohl; a beautiful specimen that Azalea had insisted on taking into service despite his being too old to train properly. The boy stood in the middle of the room, having the audacity to stare directly at Augusta. She slapped him with the back of her hand. He shrunk back, turning his gaze to the floor. He walked over to the bed and started to remove his clothes.

“No, not now,” Augusta said.

The boy froze halfway out of his surtout. Augusta tossed him the little locket.

“You will tell me what this is,” she said.

“You don’t know?” he said. Augusta slapped him again.

“You will tell me what this is,” she repeated.

He sniffled. “It’s a watch.”

“And what does a watch do?”

“It measures time.”

He pointed at the different parts of the watch, explaining their functions. The rods were called hands, and chased around the clock face in step with time. The clock face indicated where in time one was located. It made Augusta shudder violently. Time was an abhorrent thing, a human thing. It didn’t belong here. It was that power which made flesh rot and dreams wither. The gardens were supposed to lie beyond the grasp of time, in constant twilight; the sun just under the horizon, the moon shining full over the trees. Augusta told the boy as much:

“Time doesn’t pass here. Not like that, not for us.”

The boy twisted the little bud on the side of the locket, and the longest hand started to move again.

“But look,” he said. “The hands are moving now. Time is passing now.”

“But does it know how time flows? Does it measure time, or does it just move forward and call that time?”

The changeling stared at her.

“Time is time,” he said.

Augusta cut his tongue out before she let him go. Azalea would be furious, but it was necessary.

She lay down on her bed again, but couldn’t seem to fall asleep. How could the hands on the watch keep moving here? The sun didn’t go up or down. Didn’t that mean time stood still here? It was common knowledge. Whenever one woke up, it was the same day as the day before. She sat at her writing desk, jotting down a few things on paper. It made her head calm down a little. Then she opened a flask of poppy wine and drank herself back to sleep.

When Augusta woke up, her page was scratching at the door with a set of clothes in his arms and an invitation card between his teeth. It was an invitation to croquet. With a vague feeling that there was something she ought to remember, Augusta let the page dress and powder her.

She returned with a bump in the back of her head and a terrific headache. It had been a fantastic game. There had been gorging, Walpurgis had demonstrated a new dance, and the twins had—sensationally—struck each other senseless. Augusta had been behind everyone else in the game, eventually having her ball sent into the woods again, needing to go fetch it just like that time she’d found something under the dog-rose bush . . . under the dog-rose bush. She looked at her writing desk, where a little silk bundle sat on a piece of paper. She moved the bundle out of the way and read:

A minute is sixty seconds. An hour is sixty minutes. A day is twelve hours. A day and a night is twenty-four hours.

Augusta opened the bundle and looked at the little locket. Some images appeared in her mind: Her first croquet game. The corpse in the grey suit. The watch. The page who told her about time. A thirst to know how it worked. What is time? she wrote under the first note. Is it here?

Augusta took the watch and left her room. She wandered down to the orangery, which was lit from inside. Tendrils of steam rose from the roof. Inside, three enormous mounds lay on couches. The Aunts were as always immersed in their holy task to fatten. Three girls hovered around them, tiny in comparison. The girls were servants and successors, keeping the Aunts fed until they eventually perished, and then taking their places to begin the process anew. Augusta opened the watch, peeking at the clock face. The longest hand moved slowly, almost imperceptibly.

She walked from the orangery to the outskirts of the apple orchard, and from there to Porla’s fen; then to the dog-rose shrubs in the woods outside Mnemosyne’s court. Everywhere, the hands on the clock face moved; sometimes forward, sometimes backward. Sometimes they lifted from the clock face, hitting the glass protecting it, as if trying to escape.

Augusta woke up in Azalea’s arms, under a canopy in Our Lady’s arbour. The orgy they were visiting was still going on; there were low cries and the sound of breaking glass. Augusta couldn’t remember what they had been doing, but she felt sore and bloated, and her sister was snoring very loudly. She was still wearing her shirt. Something rustled in her left breast pocket; she dug it out. It was a note. A little map, seemingly drawn in her own hand. Below the map was written a single sentence: The places float just like time. She had been wandering around, drawing maps and measuring distances. At some point. Mnemosyne’s garden had first been on the right-hand side from Augusta’s rooms. The next time she had found herself walking straight ahead to get there. The places floated. Augusta turned the note over. On the other side were the words: Why is there time here? Why does it flow differently in different places? And if the places float, what is the nature of the woods?

She returned to her rooms in a state of hangover. Papers were strewn everywhere it seemed: on and under the bed, on the dresser, in droves on the writing desk. Some of the notes were covered in dust. She couldn’t remember writing some of them. But every word was in her own handwriting.

There was a stranger in Mnemosyne’s court, towering over the other guests. She was dressed in simple robes, hooded and veiled, golden yellow eyes showing through a thin slit. They shone down on Walpurgis, who made a feeble attempt to offer her a croquet club. Everyone else gave the stranger a wide berth.

“It is a djinneya. She is visiting Mnemosyne to trade information,” the twins mumbled to Augusta.

“We wonder what information that is,” Vergilia added. “Those creatures know everything,” Hermine said. The djinneya sat by Mnemosyne’s side during the whole game, seemingly deep in conversation with her hostess. Neither the twin’s spectacular knock-out of Walpurgis nor Azalea’s attempt to throttle one of the pages caught her attention. Having been knocked out with a ball over her left knee, Augusta retreated to a couch where she wrote an invitation.

Augusta was woken at her writing desk by a knock at her door. A cloaked shape entered without asking permission. The djinneya seemed even taller indoors.

“Come in,” said Augusta.

The djinneya nodded, unfastening the veil. Her skin was the colour of fresh bruises. She grinned with a wide mouth, showing deep blue gums and long teeth filed into points.

“I thank you for your invitation, Augusta Prima.” She bent over Augusta’s bed, fluffing the pillows, and sat down. A scent of sweat and spice spread in the room. “You wanted to converse.”

Augusta straightened, looking at the papers and notes on her desk. She remembered what it was she wanted to ask.

“You and your sort, you travel everywhere. Even beyond the woods. You know things.”

The djinneya flashed her toothy smile. “That we do.”

“I would like to know the nature of time,” Augusta said. “I want to know why time can’t be measured properly here, and why everything moves around.”

The djinneya laughed. “Your kind doesn’t want to know about those things. You can’t bear it.”

“But I do. I want to know.”

The djinneya raised her thin eyebrows. “Normally, you are tedious creatures,” she said. “You only want trivial things. Is that person dead yet? Does this person still love that person? What did they wear at yesterday’s party? I know things that could destroy worlds, and all you wish to know is if Karhu from Jumala is still unmarried.”

She scratched her chin.

“I believe this is the first time one of your sort has asked me a good question. It’s an expensive one, but I shall give you the answer. If you really are sure.”

“I have to know,” said Augusta. “What is the nature of the world?”

The djinneya smiled with both rows of teeth. “Which one?”

Augusta woke up by the writing desk. The hangover throbbed behind her temples. She had fallen asleep with her head on an enormous stack of papers. She peered at it, leafing through the ones at the top. There are eight worlds, the first one said. They lie side by side, in degrees of perfection. This world is the most perfect one. Below these lines, written in a different ink, was: There is one single world, divided into three levels which are partitioned off from each other by greased membranes. Then in red ink: There are two worlds and they overlap. The first is the land of Day, which belongs to the humans. The second is the land of Twilight, which belongs to the free folk, and of which the woods is a little backwater part. Both lands must obey Time, but the Twilight is ruled by the Heart, whereas the Day is ruled by Thought. At the bottom of the page, large block letters proclaimed: ALL OF THIS IS TRUE.

It dawned on Augusta that she remembered very clearly. The endless parties, in detail. The finding of the corpse, the short periods of clarity, the notes. The djinneya bending down to whisper in her ear.

A sharp yellow light stung Augusta’s eyes. She was sitting at her writing desk in a very small room with wooden walls. A narrow bed with tattered sheets filled the rest of the space. The writing desk stood beneath a window. On the other side of the glass, the woods bathed in light.

There was a door next to the bed. Augusta opened it, finding herself in a narrow hallway with another door at the end. A full-length mirror hung on the opposite wall. It showed a woman dressed in what had once been a blue surtout and knee pants. The fabrics were heavily stained with dirt and greenish mold and in some places worn through. Concentric rings of sweat radiated from the armpits. The shirt front was stiff with red and brown stains. Augusta touched her face. White powder lay in cracked layers along her nose and cheeks. Deep lines ran between her nose and mouth; more lines spread from the corners of her eyes. A golden chain hung from her breast pocket. She pulled on it, swinging the locket into her hand. It was ticking in a steady rhythm.

Augusta opened the other door and stepped out onto a landing. An unbearably bright light flooded over her. She backed into the hallway again, slamming the door.

“I told you. Your kind can’t bear that question.”

The djinneya stood behind her in the hallway, shoulders and head hunched under the low ceiling.

“What did you do?” Augusta said.

“What did I do? No. What did you do, Augusta Prima?” She patted Augusta’s shoulder. “It started even before you invited me, Augusta Prima. You tried to measure time in a land that doesn’t want time. You tried to map a floating country.”

The djinneya smiled.

“The woods spit you out, Augusta. Now you’re in the land that measures time and draws maps.”

Augusta gripped the hand on her shoulder. “I want to go home. You have to take me home again.”

“So soon? Well. All you have to do is forget what you have learned.” The djinneya squeezed past Augusta and stepped out onto the porch, where she stretched to her full height with a sigh. “Goodbye, Augusta,” she said over her shoulder. “And do try to hurry if you want to make it back. You’re not getting any younger.”

© 2011 by Karin Tidbeck.

Originally published in Weird Tales.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Karin Tidbeck lives in Malmö, Sweden, and writes in Swedish and English. Her stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Shimmer, Unstuck Annual, and the anthologies Odd? and Steampunk Revolution. She has published a story collection and a novel in Swedish; a collection in English, Jagannath, came out in November 2012. She blogs at karintidbeck.com.

The Five Deaths of Marvin Dimitri
Dylan Otto Krider

I first met Marvin several years ago, but you don’t have to know Marvin to know his story. That’s the sort of thing that’s just understood, that comes from living in Beaumont, Texas, where Marvin lived most all of his lives.

Marvin looked like anybody you’d know, a jolly man with a belly and a beard, which he grew to hide the fact that he was missing his bottom jaw—the only truly remarkable thing about Marvin, aside from his extra lives—which had been blown off by a land mine during the Vietnam War the first time he died.

He met his wife, Nora, at art school. He was studying to be a technical artist at the time, because he liked to draw warplanes. Marvin was a good-looking guy then: tall, muscular, chiseled features—block jaw—and when he walked into life drawing class that first day, Nora knew he was the man she would marry. Nora had a gift, a certain sense that some people have that you just can’t explain. She had that same feeling the week Kennedy was killed, and the day she knew her sister gave birth to her nephew without being told. And so when she foresaw Marvin would be the man whom she would marry, that, too, would come to pass.

Nora had yet another premonition of Marvin’s coming death shortly after the wedding vows, when Marvin got his notice. She tried to make him burn his draft card or flee to Canada, but Marvin always had a sense of duty, regretting he had but one life to give and all that, though in Marvin’s case it was actually two—the other three were civilian. When Marvin says he’s going to do something, he does it, and if there is anything powerful enough to counteract one of Nora’s premonitions, it’s the strength of Marvin’s word. So when Marvin clasped Nora’s arms right before he left and said, “Honey, I promise you, I’m coming back,” she knew that no war or premonition, not even death itself could keep Marvin away.

But just as he was about to head to the bush, two officers came out and said, “Listen up, because two of you aren’t getting on that plane.” Everyone was looking around in disbelief. Two of them wouldn’t have to go to war. You could hear the men mumbling as they waited for the second name: Please, God, let it be me, let it be me . . . The officer called the first name: “. . . Ben Eiselman!” the officer said. A boy stepped forward, and the officer gave him a dime and told him to go call his mother because he was going to Germany.

Then the men started praying again. All, that is, except for Marvin, who was hoping with all his might that he’d get to go on that plane. That’s because Marvin had but two goals in life. One was to have enough money to buy a sailboat so he could go out on the ocean and fish the Atlantic dry, and the other was to go to Vietnam and shoot a Viet Cong. Not that Marvin had anything against them, per se, but in the realm of public opinion, those were the only people acceptable for shooting at the moment.

“And Marvin Dimitri!” the Sergeant called.

They sent him to a base overlooking a small German village that still had buildings left toppled from the bombing during WWII. So Marvin spent the war drawing illustrations for propaganda pamphlets that were dropped over Russia. The transfer wasn’t so bad. Marvin got over it. They only made him work until five, and he spent his evenings walking through the countryside until he found a rock or a tree he could lean against as he wrote letters home to Nora. As you can imagine, Nora was giddy about Marvin’s new assignment. It didn’t even bother her that this was the first time one of her premonitions hadn’t come true.

Then one day, Marvin was walking through the woods composing a letter in his head about his tour being over, and as he took a step, he heard a strange clink and: Boom! Marvin had stepped on a land mine, resting undiscovered beneath the ground since the Second World War.

Nora got the notice two weeks later, commending her husband’s bravery and service in the line of duty. But Marvin wasn’t really dead. Not really. Marvin came back months later with the remaining bones of his jaw wired shut. He had to use a pad and pencil to tell her about the military hospital and Germany. The last thing Marvin scribbled on the pad of paper that day was: “I keep my promises.” And it was true.

The second time Marvin died was a bit like the first. Marvin and Nora had gone to a party, and the General wanted someone to follow his wife to make sure she got home all right. She’d had a bit to drink and wanted to leave early. Marvin offered, despite being dead drunk. “Don’t go,” Nora told him. This was during the big blizzard. “You can hardly walk straight.”

“Fiddlesticks,” Marvin said. His speech was already slurred on account of the dentures and what they salvaged of his jaw. With alcohol, he was indecipherable, but Nora managed to make out his final words: “I’ll be coming back.”

Marvin followed close behind the General’s wife as she went down Main Street, past Third, and into the snowbank. Marvin kept right on going, over the top of the General’s car and down the hill, coming to rest against the trunk of a large fern tree. Anyone who knew anything knew a man couldn’t survive two hours in that cold. Any man, that is, except Marvin, who got out and wandered through the woods until he sobered up, finding his way back to the base around morning, when it was time to report for duty. He saw the ambulances and the MPs on the side of the road, but didn’t give it much thought, until he saw the look on his commanding officer’s face. “What on Earth are you doing here?” he said. “I was told you were dead.”

Marvin thought about that a moment, then said, “In that case, can I have the day off?”

The third time takes some explaining. Marvin had two fundamental habits at this point that were destined to be fatal: a growing sense of invincibility, and an insatiable desire for raw, red meat. It wasn’t just Nora who warned him this time, but the doctors, too. “Ah, shush,” Marvin said. “I’ve died two times in my life, and it’s going to take more than a little undercooked veal to be the end of me.”

There were lamb chops, mutton chops, rib-eye, and black angus. Not to mention beef: grilled, barbecued, and chicken fried. It was a particularly hearty serving of Spam hash and rack of lamb that finally did Marvin in. His heart stopped—the doctor was his witness, and pronounced him dead on the spot, and that was the third time Marvin died. But again Marvin came back. He always did. But by then his death had already been recorded in the official paperwork, and that was his fourth, and that’s pretty much how Marvin died.

I guess I misspoke before. I suppose there eventually has to be a fifth, even Marvin would admit that. We’re still waiting to see exactly how he’ll come back, if he ever does. But Marvin’s not the type to sit around and wait for something to happen. He figured there was one thing he wanted to do before he broke his promise to Nora, and that was to buy that boat with his savings and take off to fish the Atlantic dry. And that’s what he did. The day he left, Nora started to say something, but Marvin put a finger to her lips. “I know what you’re going to say, so don’t bother.” Nora just smiled and said, “I know you’ll be coming back.” So it counted. Marvin made his promise, if not in words.

Marvin packed up his rod and reel and climbed onto his boat, and that’s where Marvin is to this very day. He’s out there fishing until the Atlantic’s dry, like he promised he’d do, though it’s taken a bit longer than expected. If you see Nora in a grocery store, and ask how Marvin’s doing, she’s never worried. Everyone knows death can’t keep Marvin away, no matter how many months roll by. The banks haven’t bothered to freeze his accounts, and the life insurance company wouldn’t pay, though of course Nora never tried to collect. You’ve got to have absolute proof before you make a claim like that. Even if someone turned up with a body, pictures, something, you’d have to wonder. With Marvin, death never takes the first time. Or the third. So until someone does bring incontrovertible proof to the contrary, as far as we’re concerned, Marvin’s still alive.

© 2013 by Dylan Otto Krider.

Dylan Otto Krider has worked as a journalist for 15 years. His work has appeared in Asimov’s, Daily SF, Lightspeed, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Kenyon Review, Confrontations, and numerous local and national newspapers and magazines. He is the winner of the Asimov Award and grand prize winner of Writers of the Future. dylanottokrider.com

The Master Conjurer
Charlie Jane Anders

Peter did a magic spell, and it worked fine. With no unintended consequences, and no weird side effects.

Two days later, he was on the front page of the local newspaper: “The Miracle Conjurer.” Some blogs picked it up, and soon enough he was getting visits from CNN and MSNBC, and his local NPR station kept wanting to put him on. News crews were standing and talking in front of his house.

By the third day, Peter saw reporters looking through the dumpster in the back of his L-shaped apartment building, which looked like a cheap motel but was actually kind of expensive. He couldn’t walk his Schnauzer-Pit Bull mix, Dobbs, without people—either reporters or just random strangers—coming up and asking him what his secret was. When he went to the office, where he oversaw pilot projects for water desalination, his coworkers kept snooping over the top of his cubicle wall and trying to see his computer screen as he was typing, like they were going to catch him logging in to some secret bulletin board for superwizards.

Peter had a hard time concentrating on work when the TV set in the break room was tuned to CNN, and they were showing his bedroom window, and a million people were staring at the pile of unfolded laundry on his bed and the curtains that Dobbs had recently half-destroyed. Could the Clean Spell revolutionize spellcasting? a voice asked. Was there a secret, and could everyone else learn it? CNN brought on an Enchantress named Monica, who wore a red power blazer. She frequently appeared on talk shows whenever there was a magical murder trial or something.

By day four, Peter’s building was surrounded, and his phone at work pretty much never stopped ringing. People followed him wherever he went. It was only then that it occurred to Peter: Maybe this was the unintended consequence of his spell.

Peter had never liked looking at pictures of himself, because photos always made him look like a deformed clone of Ben Affleck. His chin was just a little too jutting and bifurcated, his brow a little too much like the bumper of a late-model Toyota Camry. His mousy hair was unevenly receding, his nose a little too knifey. Seeing the least attractive pictures of himself on every newspaper, website, and TV show was starting to make Peter break out in hives.

“I’m not talking to you,” Peter said to his former best friend Derek, the tenth time Derek called him. “You are completely dead to me.”

“Hey, don’t say that, you’re scaring me,” Derek said. “If the Master Conjurer says I’m dead, then I’m worried I’m just not going to wake up tomorrow or something.”

“You were the only one I told about doing the spell,” Peter said. “And now, this.”

Peter was sitting in his car talking on his phone, parked two blocks away from his apartment building because he was scared to go home. Dobbs was probably starting to bounce off the walls. At least the dog seemed a lot happier lately.

“I only told like a couple of people,” Derek said. “And it turned out one of them was best friends with a newspaper reporter. It was an amusing anecdote. Anyway, you know it’ll blow over in a week or two. You’re just like this week’s meme or something.”

“I hope you’re right,” Peter said.

“And you should milk it, while you got it,” Derek said. “Like, you know, you’re famous for doing something perfectly. Something that requires immense concentration and sensory awareness and a lot of heart. Basically, they’re as good as announcing to the entire world that you’re an excellent lover. This is probably the closest you will ever come in your entire life to being a chick magnet.”

“Please stop talking now.” Peter was practically banging his head against the steering wheel of his Dodge Neon. “Just, please, stop.”

The interior of his car always smelled like dog; not like Dobbs—just, like: generic dog. Like a big rangy golden retriever smell. Even if Dobbs hadn’t been in his car for days.

“Okay, okay. Just an idea, man. So are we good?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Peter hung up and steeled himself to go home and walk the dog, while people asked him his secret over and over. Nobody would ever believe Peter when he said there was no secret—he’d just lucked out, or something. Why couldn’t Peter have gotten an intimidating dog that he could sic on people, like a Doberman or a purebred Pit Bull? If he unleashed Dobbs, someone might end up with a tiny drool stain on one shoe.

But Peter couldn’t stop thinking about what Derek had said. He hadn’t been on a date, a proper date, for years. His last first date had been Marga, five years ago. Peter wasn’t just out of practice dating, or asking people out—he was out of practice at wanting to. He hadn’t even let himself have a crush on anybody in forever.

He started looking at the women around him as if he could actually be something to them. He didn’t perv anybody, or stare at anyone—after all, everybody was still staring at him, all the time, and his instinct in that situation was to look away, or just hide. But it was hard to go from never noticing women—except in a super-business-like way—to checking them out, and he might have overcompensated. Or maybe he overcompensated for his overcompensation. It was tricky.

Nobody at work was Peter’s type, and anyway they wouldn’t stop asking him over and over if he would do a spell for them. He had already made up his mind that he would never do a spell ever again.

He couldn’t be attracted to any of the women who kept coming up to him when he was trying to eat dinner at the Shabu Palace, either the reporters or the professional witches or the random looky-loos. They were all a little too sharky for him, the way they circled and then homed in, and they mostly looked as though they used insane amounts of product in their hair, so if they ever actually rested their heads on his shoulder, there would be a “crunch” sound.

The weirdest part wasn’t the stalkers or the peepers or the people asking him to do spells for them. The weirdest part was: After about a week, Peter started noticing that everybody had their own “this one time” story they wanted to tell him. Things had slacked off just enough that Peter wasn’t quite under siege any more, and strangers were having conversations with him on the street instead of just rushing up and blurting questions. And every conversation included a “this one time” story. They were usually really sad, like confessions that people had never told anyone, that—for some reason—they felt safe telling Peter.

Like, one woman with curly red hair and a round white face and a marigold sweater was telling Peter at the supermarket, by the breakfast cereals: “I never tried to do any magic myself. Too risky, you don’t really know. Right? Except this one time, I got wasted and tried to do a spell to make my dad give back the money he stole from my mom. It wasn’t even my problem, but I was worried about Mom, she had a lot of medical expenses with the emphysema. And Dad was just going to waste it on his new girlfriend (she had expensive tastes). So I just wanted him to give back the money he took from my mom’s secret hiding place.”

Peter knew this was the part where he was supposed to ask what terrible fallout the woman’s spell had had.

“Oh,” she said. “My dad went blind. He gave Mom her money back, and as soon as it changed hands, there went his eyesight. I’ve never told anybody this before.” She smiled, nervously, like Peter was going to tell on her. Even though he didn’t even know her name.

“You couldn’t know,” Peter said, like he always said to people after he heard their stories. “You had no way of knowing that would happen. You were trying to do the right thing.”

Peter had done a few spells before he cast the world-famous Clean Casting, which by now had been verified by every professional sorcerer who had a regular television gig. (There had been a lot of incense burning around Peter’s apartment building for a while there, which had helped banish the stench of his neighbor Dorothy’s homebrew experiments.) Peter had taken a spell-casting class at the local community college a few years before, with Marga, and they had done a few really tiny spells, lighting candles from a distance or turning a pinch of sugar into salt. They got used to weird smells or small dead creatures popping up an hour or a day later.

If the spell was small enough, the unintended downside was part of the fun—an amusing little surprise. Oh, look. A goldfish in the mailbox, still flapping about. Get a bowl of water, quick!

By now, the actual doing of the spell—the Clean Casting—felt like a weird dream that Peter had concocted after too many drinks. The more people made a fuss about it, the more he felt like he’d made the whole thing up. But he could still picture it. He’d gotten one of the stone spellcasting bowls they sold on late-night cable TV, and little baggies of all the ingredients, with rejected prog rock band names like Prudenceroot or Womanheart, and sprinkled pinches of them in, while chanting the nonsense syllables and thinking of his desired aim. The spellbook, with its overly broad categories of enchantments that you could slot your specifics into like Mad Libs, was propped open with a package of spaghetti. All of it, he’d done correctly more or less. Not perfect, but right. He’d done it in his oversized pantry, surrounded by mostly empty jars of stale oats and revolting cans of peaches, with Dobbs goggle-eyed and drooling, the only witness.

The time came when Peter could leave the house again without people shoving things in his face. He still had people coming up to him in the bookstore to ask him if he was that guy, and his coworkers would never stop making weird remarks about it. And he made a point of not googling himself. Or checking his personal email, or going on Facebook.

But just when Peter thought maybe his life was returning to semi-normal, some guy would see him and come running across the street—through traffic—to belt out something about his baby, his baby, Peter had to help, the man needed a spell and the consequences would probably be unbearable if anybody but Peter attempted it. Peter would have to shrug off the crying, red-faced man, and keep going to the pet food store or supermarket.

There was a girl working at the pet food store who apparently knew who Peter was, and didn’t seem to care. She had curly brown hair and really strong lines from the bridge of her nose down around her eyes, which made her look sort of intense and focused. She had a really pointy chin and a pretty nose, and seemed like the kind of person who laughed a lot. Even when she looked serious, which she mostly did. She always smiled at Peter when she rang up the special food that Dobbs needed for his pancreas, but not in a starey way.

Finally, one day, a few weeks after all this started, Peter asked her why she hadn’t ever said anything about his claim to fame. She rolled her eyes. “I dunno, I figured you were sick of hearing about it. Plus, who cares. It’s not like you won the lottery or anything, right?”

Peter immediately asked her if she wanted to grab some dinner sometime. She was like, “Sure. As long as it’s not medicinal dog food.” Her name turned out to be Rebecca.

Actually, they went to the shabu place that was Peter’s favorite restaurant in town. He always felt guilty for eating there alone, which he did often, because it was kind of an interactive experience, where you grilled your own meat and/or made your fancy stew, and you really needed someone else there to join in. The staff wore crisp white uniforms to underscore that they did no actual food preparation themselves. There were tables, but almost everybody sat around a big U-shaped bar in the center, which had little grills embedded in it. The sound system blasted a mixture of Foreigner, 38 Special, Yes, and some J-Pop from a CD-changer.

Peter was nervous about being seen out on a date, and having people act weird about it during or afterward. (Did you cast a “babe magnet” spell? Ha-ha-ha.) But the Shabu Palace was pretty empty, and a few people stared a little bit but it was no big deal. Peter found the meat vapors comforting, like carnal incense.

“I hate this town,” Rebecca said. “It’s just big enough to have restaurants like this, but no actual culture. We don’t even have a roller derby team any more. No offense, but that’s one reason why you’re such a big deal. We finally have a local celebrity again, to replace that sitcom actor who was from here who died." Peter wasn't offended by that at all; it explained a lot.

Rebecca was saving up money from her pet store gig to go to L.A., where she wanted to go to barista school. Peter didn’t know that was a thing you went to school for, but apparently it was a big deal, like knowing the science of grinding the beans just right and making just the right amount of ristretto and steaming the milk to the edge of burning. And of course latte art and stuff. Rebecca had tried to be a psychologist and a social worker and a vet, but none of those career paths had worked out. But she was excited about the barista thing because it was hip and artistic, and you could write your own ticket. Even start your own fancy café somewhere.

“It’s cool that you’re so ambitious,” Peter said. “I think L.A. would drive me insane.”

“I am guessing L.A. would be okay as long as you don’t want to be a movie star or whatever,” Rebecca said. “I mean, the barista school is probably hella cutthroat. But I can handle that.”

Peter hadn’t really thought of this as a small town—it seemed pretty big to him. There was a freeway, and the downtown with the opera house, and the art museum, and the world headquarters of a major insurance company. And there was a small zoo during the spring and summer, with animals that wintered in Florida somewhere.

“People hate you, you know,” Rebecca told Peter halfway through dinner. “You’re super threatening, because you’re the proof that there’s something wrong with them. If they’d only been good people, they would have gotten away clean, too. Plus, it offends our sense of order. Power should have terrible consequences, or life would be too easy. We want people to suffer for anything good they ever have. People are governed by envy, and a sense of karmic brutality.”

“That’s a very bleak view of human nature,” Peter said. But he found it kind of a turn-on. Misanthropy was just undeniably sexy, the way smoking used to be before you had to do it out in the cold.

It turned out Rebecca had never even tried to do magic herself. “I never wanted to risk it,” Rebecca said. “I’m the least lucky person, of anyone I know. I can only imagine how badly I would be screwed if I tried to bribe the universe to give me a shortcut.”

By now, Peter was really hoping that Rebecca would go home with him. He could almost imagine how cool it would be to have her naked and snarky in his big four-poster bed. Her body heaving to and fro. The way her hair would smell as he buried his face in it. He almost started getting hard under the counter of the Shabu Palace just thinking about it. Bryan Adams was singing about Heaven on the stereo. Everything was perfect.

“So,” Rebecca said, leaning forward in a way that could have been flirtatious or conspiratorial. “I gotta ask. What was the spell that you did? The famous one?”

“Oh man.” Peter almost dropped his meat piece. “You don’t want to know. It’s really dumb. Like really, really dumb.”

“No, come on,” Rebecca said. “I want to know. I’m curious. I won’t judge. I promise.”

“I . . . I’d rather not say.” Peter realized he’d been about to lift this piece of meat off the grill for a while, and now it was basically a big carcinogenic cinder. He put it in his mouth anyway. “It’s really kind of embarrassing. I don’t even know if it was ethical.”

“Now I really want to know,” Rebecca said.

Peter imagined telling Rebecca what he’d done, and tried to picture the look on her face. Would she laugh, or throw sake at him and tell him he was a bad person? Immature? He couldn’t even go there. Even Bryan Adams suddenly sounded kind of sad, and maybe a little disappointed in Peter.

“I’m sorry,” Peter said. “I think this was maybe a mistake.” He paid for both of them and got the hell out of there.

By the time Peter got home, Dobbs was freaking out because he really needed to go out and do his business. Dobbs ran around a tree three times before peeing on it, like he was worried the tree was going to move out of the way just as Dobbs was letting go. Dobbs looked up at Peter with big round eyes, permanently alarmed.

Of course, Derek called Peter the next morning and wanted to know how the date went. They ended up going for breakfast at the retro-1970s pancake place downtown, and Peter grudgingly told Derek the whole deal.

“So what you’re saying,” said Derek, “is that you plied her with meat and soft rock, and you had her basically all ready to shabu your shabu. And then she asked a perfectly reasonable question, and you got all weird and bailed on her. Is that a fair summary?”

“Um,” Peter said. “It’s not an unfair summary.”

“Okay,” Derek said. “I think there’s a way this can still work out. Now she thinks you’re complicated and damaged. And that’s perfect. Ladies love men with a few psychic dents and scrapes. It makes you mysterious, and a little intense.”

“You’re the only one I’ve told about that spell,” Peter said. “You didn’t tell anyone what the spell actually was, right?”

“That part, I haven’t told anyone,” Derek said. “I only mentioned the part about how you had no complications.”

“Okay, cool,” said Peter. “I don’t want people to go nuts on me. Even more than they already have.”

“Listen,” Derek said. “I’m kind of worried about you. I think this spell you did is just a symptom. I feel like you’ve been kind of messed up ever since Marga . . .” Derek trailed off, because Peter was scowling at him. “I just think you shouldn’t be alone so much. I feel like a new relationship, or a fling—either way—would be good for you.”

Derek and Peter had been friends since college, where they’d bonded over hating their History 101 professor, who had a cult following among almost all the other students. Literally a cult—there was a human sacrifice at one of the professor’s after-exam parties, and it’d turned ugly, as human sacrifice so often does. Peter and Derek weren’t so close lately, because Derek had gone into real estate and never had time for Peter; plus until pretty recently Peter had just been hanging out with Marga’s friends all the time. Like Marga herself, her friends were all erudite and artsy, with clever tattoos.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Peter said. “I’ve got Dobbs. And all I really wanted was to be left alone.”

“We’re not back to that again, are we?” Derek threw his arms up in a pose of martyrdom.

“It’s okay,” Peter said. “The media frenzy seems to have died down, and some other asshole is getting his fifteen minutes now.”

Peter almost called Rebecca a couple times. He imagined telling her the truth about his spell, and it made him cringe from the balls of his feet to the back of his neck. He always put the phone away, because he didn’t think he could work the “damaged and complicated” angle without telling the whole story. He went to sleep and dreamed of sitting naked with Rebecca in bed, explaining everything. He woke up with Dobbs sitting on his chest, legs tucked under his fat little body, saucer eyes staring at him. Dobbs licked Peter’s chin in slow flicks of his brash tongue. Lick. Lick. Lick.

When Peter went to work, his face was on the television in the break room again. Some expert had concocted a theory: Maybe Peter was the reincarnation of an ancient wizard, or maybe he was some kind of spiritually pure mystic or something. Obviously, if Peter really did know the secret of doing magic without any strings attached, he would be the world’s richest and most powerful man. So he either really didn’t have a secret method, or he was some kind of saint.

This day, in particular, Peter had a progress meeting with some of the other team leaders, and he was trying to explain why the desalination pilot projects he was funding were slow going. It’s easy to add salt to water, but taking it away again is a huge challenge—you have to strip the sodium and chloride ions out of the water somehow, which involves a huge unfeasible energy cost. Peter got halfway through his presentation, when Amanda, who was involved in microfinance in Africa, asked, “So why don’t you just use magic?”

“Um, sorry?” Peter said. He had clicked through to his next slide and had to click back, or risk losing his thread.

“Why not just use magic to remove the salt from the water?” Amanda said. “That gets around the high energy cost, and in fact there might be zero energy cost. Potable water for everybody. Water wars averted. Everybody happy.”

“I don’t really think that’s an option,” Peter said.

“Why not?” Amanda said. Everybody else was nodding. Peter remembered seeing Amanda on television, talking about him a few days earlier. She was the one who’d explained carefully that Peter had a twelve-year-old Dodge Neon and rented a one-bedroom apartment in a crumbling development near the freeway. If he was a master sorcerer, Amanda had told the ladies on The View, Peter was doing a pretty good job of hiding it.

Now Amanda was saying, in the same patient, no-nonsense tone: “Isn’t it irresponsible not to explore all of the options? I mean, let’s say that you really can do magic without some backlash, and you’re the one person on Earth who can. What’s the point spending millions to fund research into industrial desalination when you could just snap your fingers and turn a tanker of salt water into spring water?” This particular day, Amanda was wearing a blue paisley scarf and a gray jacket, along with really high-end blue jeans.

Peter stared at Amanda—whom he’d always admired for helping the poor women in Africa get microloans, and who he never thought would stab him in the back like this—and tried to think of a response. At last, he stammered: “Magic is not a scalable solution.”

Peter fled the meeting soon afterward. He decided to take the rest of the day off work, since he was either fatally irresponsible or secretly the reincarnation of Merlin. He passed Amanda in the hallway on his way to the elevator, and she tried to apologize for putting him on the spot like that, but he just mumbled something and kept walking.

Dobbs wagged his tail as the leash went on, and then tried to play with the leash with one of his front paws, like it was a dangling toy. At last, Dobbs understood that the leash meant going outside and relieving himself, and he trotted.

Peter went to bed early, with Dobbs curled up on top of his head like a really leaky hat. He dreamed about Rebecca again, and then his phone woke him up, and it was Rebecca calling him. “Whu,” he said.

“Did I wake you?” she said.

“Yes,” Peter scraped Dobbs off his forehead and got his wits together. His bed smelled foggy. “But it’s okay. I was just waking up anyway. And listen, I’ve been meaning to call you. Because I need to explain, and I’m sorry I was such an idiot when we . . .”

“No time,” Rebecca said. “I called to warn you. There’s been an incident, and they’re probably coming to your house again soon.” She promised to explain everything soon, but meanwhile Peter should get the heck out of there before the TV news crews came back. Because this time, they would be out for blood. Rebecca said she would meet Peter at the big old greasy spoon by the railroad tracks, the one that looked like just another railroad silo unless you noticed the neon sign in the window.

Peter put on jeans and a T-shirt, grabbed Dobbs and got in his Neon just as the first people were getting out of their TV vans. He backed down the driveway so fast he nearly hit one of them and then sped off before they could follow. Just to make sure, he got on and off the freeway three times at different exits.

Rebecca was sitting at the booth in the back of the Traxx Diner, eating silver dollar pancakes and chicken fried steak. The formica table had exactly the same amount of stickiness as Rebecca’s plate. Peter wound up ordering the chicken-fried steak too, because he was suddenly really hungry and it occurred to him he might have skipped dinner.

As soon as Peter had coffee, Rebecca shoved a tablet computer at him, with a newspaper article: “TWELVE DEAD, FIVE CHILDREN UNACCOUNTED FOR IN SCHOOL DISASTER.” One of the headlines further down the page was for a sidebar: “Peter Salmon: Made People Think They Could Get Off Scot Free?” And there was a picture of Peter, giving a thumbs up to a group of people—taken from his site visit to a water purification project in Tulsa two years earlier.

Peter spilled coffee on his pants. The waitress came and poured some more in his cup almost immediately.

“Don’t worry,” Rebecca said. “Ulsa won’t tell anybody you’re here. She’s a friend. Plus she’s really nearsighted so she probably hasn’t gotten a good look at your face.”

“Okay,” Peter said. He was still trying to make sense of this article. Basically, there was a middle school in New Jersey that was coming in at the bottom of the rankings in the standardized tests, and state law would have called for the school to be closed by the end of the year, which, in turn, would wreck property values. So the teachers and some of the parents got together to do a spell to try and raise the children’s test results by twenty percent, across the board. And it had gone very wrong. Like “everyone’s heads had turned to giant crayfish heads” wrong. There were some very gruesome pictures of adults lying around the playground, their beady eyes staring upward. Meanwhile, some of the children had gone missing.

“There’s no way anybody could say this is my fault,” Peter stammered, trying not to look at the corpses with stuff leaking out of their necks, just as Ulsa brought a plate of very crispy chicken-fried steak with some very runny eggs. “I told everybody that I didn’t have any secret. They just wouldn’t listen.”

“Yeah, I know,” Rebecca said. “Like I said, people hate you. This is why I quit my last five jobs, including that pet store gig, which I just bagged on the other day. Everybody feels entitled. I’ve never had a boss who didn’t feel like they ought to own me. People hate realizing that the world won’t just shower them with candy.”

Peter looked at the crayfish heads, then at his chicken-fried steak. In the car outside, through the one window, he could see Dobbs bouncing up and down. Like Dobbs already knew he was getting that steak. Then what Rebecca had said sunk in.

“You quit the pet store job?” Peter said, looking up at her.

“Yeah. They basically wanted me to do unpaid overtime, and they were trying to start a grooming business in the back, and wanted me to help with that as well. I do not groom.”

Peter couldn’t imagine just quitting a job, just like that. He felt his crush on Rebecca splintering a little bit. Like he’d put her on a pedestal too fast. “So what are you going to do now?” he said. “Are you going to go to L.A. and go to barista school?”

“Maybe. The next enrollment isn’t for a few months. I guess I’ll see how it goes.”

Peter made himself eat a little because he was starting to have a full-scale panic attack. He gestured at the tablet without looking at it. “This is going to keep happening. And they’re going to keep trying to make it about me.”

The radio in the diner quit playing some country song about a cheating man, and a news report about the New Jersey tragedy came on. Congress was talking about regulating magic, and there were questions about whether the makers of the spellbook the teachers had used could have some liability, even though it had five pages of disclaimers in tiny print. And there was a mention in passing of the notion that the teachers might have been influenced by the famous Clean Casting.

“What if there really was some secret and you had it?” Rebecca said. “If I were you, I’d be doing more spells and seeing if I could figure out what I did right. You could have anything you wanted. You could raise the dead and feed the hungry.”

“I would never get away with it. I was really selfish and stupid that one time, and I came away with a super-strong feeling that I’d better never try my luck again.”

And then Peter decided to go ahead and tell her about the spell:

“Here’s what happened. I was engaged to this girl named Marga. She was amazing and artistic and creative, and she was always doing things like repainting her apartment with murals, or throwing parties where everybody pretended to be a famous assassin. And she had this cat that was always sickly. Constant vet visits and late-night emergencies. She and I moved in together. And then a few months before the wedding, she met this guy named Breck who was a therapeutic flautist, and she fell in love with him. She wound up going with him to Guatemala to provide music therapy to the victims of the big mudslide there. Leaving me heartbroken, with a sick cat. The cat just got more and more miserable and ill, pining for Marga. We were both inconsolable.”

“I think maybe I can see where this is going,” Rebecca said, picking at her last pancake.

“Dobbs is way happier as a dog, he gets to go out and run around,” Peter said. “His pancreas seems way better, too.”

“So you turned your ex-girlfriend’s cat into a dog. As, like, revenge?”

“It wasn’t revenge, I swear. She doesn’t even know, anyway. I just . . . Dobbs was really unhappy, and so was I. And this seemed like it was a fresh start for both of us. But part of me felt like maybe I was doing it to get back at Marga, or like I was transforming Dobbs without his consent. And I welcomed the idea of being punished for it. So when the punishment didn’t come, it just made me feel more guilty. I started to hate myself. And maybe that’s why. The more I didn’t get punished, the worse I felt.”

“Huh.” She seemed to be chewing it over for a moment. “I guess that’s not the weirdest thing I’ve heard of people doing to their pets. I mean, at the store, there were people who shaved their pets’ asses. Who does that? And your ex is the one who left her cat behind when she bailed, right? You could have taken him to the ASPCA, and they’d have put him to sleep.”

And just like that, Peter had a crush on her again. Maybe even something stronger than a crush, like his kidneys were pinwheeling and the blood was leaving his head and extremities. He wanted to jump up and hug her and make a loud train-whistle sound. He hadn’t realized how guilty he’d been feeling about Dobbs, until he told someone and they didn’t instantly hate him.

“Do you want to go to L.A.?” Peter said.

“What, now?”

“Yeah. Now. I mean, as soon as we finish breakfast. You can try and go to that barista school, and I can get a job there. I know a guy who works in solar power financing. I’d barely even be famous by L.A. standards.”

For a second, Peter felt like he was totally free. He could leave town, with the girl and the dog and whatever else he had in his car, and never look back. He could be like Marga, except that he wouldn’t abandon Dobbs.

But Rebecca shook her head. Curls splashing. “Sorry. I don’t think I could ever be with someone who thinks it’s a good idea to run away from his problems.”

“What?” And then Peter said the exact wrong thing, before he could stop himself: “But you just told me that you quit your last five jobs.”

“Yes, and that’s called having a spine. Quitting a job isn’t the same thing as running away.”

She got up, and Peter got up too. He was getting a doggie bag for the steak, and he felt as though she was cutting him loose with a pack of wolves on his tail. And then she reached out and unsmudged the corner of his mouth with her thumb, and said: “Listen. I’m going to tell you the secret to getting what you want out of life. Are you ready? Never take any shit from anyone.”

“That’s the secret? Of happiness?”

“I don’t know about happiness. I told you, I’m unlucky.”

She walked back toward her car, then stopped to look at Dobbs, who was bouncing up and down inside Peter’s car, especially now that he could tell Peter was coming back. Dobbs’ eyes were almost perfect spheres, like a Pekingese, and his tongue was sticking out of the side of his mouth, spraying bits of drool. Rebecca leaned over and stuck her hand through the window Peter had left rolled down a bit, and Dobbs licked her. She nodded at Peter, like confirming that yes, the dog was really okay, then went and got in her own car, which was even older and junkier than his.

He watched her drive away. Her radio was playing classic rock. He wasn’t sure how you gave chicken-fried steak to a dog, but he figured he should fork it over while it was hot. Wouldn’t you know it, as soon as he tipped it out of the bag onto the passenger seat and Dobbs started chewing on it, the steak suddenly smelled incredibly good and Peter felt a fierce hunger deep in his core. For a second, part of Peter wanted to snatch the food out of his dog’s mouth.

He thought about what Rebecca had said: Don’t take any shit from anyone. He’d heard people say stuff like that before, but it still felt like a major life philosophy. Like words to live by. He found his phone, which had like twenty messages on it, which he ignored and called Derek.

“Hey, can you do me a favor? Yeah, this is a chance to make up for telling your friend about me in the first place,” he said. “Whatever, I’m over it. But can you go by my house and tell all the people camped out there that I’ll do a press conference or something? At noon. I’ll tell them the whole story about the spell, and answer their questions, and then they will leave me the fuck alone forever after that. Okay? Great.”

After Peter hung up, he watched Dobbs eat the last bits of food. He got back in his car and drove around, trying to think of how to explain himself to everybody so they would leave him alone afterwards.

“Hey guy.” Peter stroked Dobbs behind the ears when they were at a stoplight. “Are you ready for your moment in the spotlight?” In response, Dobbs extended his head, blinked, and sprayed vomit all over the inside of Peter's car. Then Dobbs sprawled in the seat, as if he'd just accomplished something awesome, and started to purr loudly. Like a jackhammer.

© 2013 by Charlie Jane Anders.

Charlie Jane Anders is managing editor of io9.com and the organizer of the long-running reading series Writers With Drinks. Her novelette “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award and was a finalist for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards.

An Invocation of Incuriosity
Neil Gaiman

There are flea markets all across Florida, and this was not the worst of them. It had once been an aircraft hangar, but the local airport had closed. There were a hundred traders there, behind their metal tables, most of them selling counterfeit merchandise: sunglasses or watches or bags or belts. There was an African family selling carved wooden animals, and behind them a loud, blowsy woman named (I cannot forget the name) Charity Parrot sold coverless paperback books, and old pulp magazines, the paper browned and crumbling, and beside her, in the corner, a Mexican woman whose name I never knew sold film posters and curling film stills.

I bought books from Charity Parrot, sometimes.

Soon enough the woman with the film posters went away and was replaced by a small man in sunglasses, his grey tablecloth spread over the metal table and covered with small carvings. I stopped and examined them—a strange set of creatures, made of grey bone and stone and dark wood—and then I examined him. I wondered if he had been in a ghastly accident, the kind it takes plastic surgery to repair: his face was wrong, the way it sloped, the shape of it. His skin was too pale. His dark hair looked like it had to be a wig, made, perhaps, of dog-fur. His glasses were so dark as to hide his eyes completely. He did not look in any way out of place in a Florida flea market: The tables were all manned by strange people, and strange people shopped there.

I bought nothing from him.

The next time I was there Charity Parrot had, in her turn, moved on, her place taken by an Indian family who sold hookahs and smoking paraphernalia, but the little man in the dark glasses was still in his corner at the back of the flea market, with his grey cloth. On it were more carvings of creatures.

“I do not recognise any of these animals,” I told him.

“No.”

“Do you make them yourself?”

He shook his head. You cannot ask anyone in a flea market where they get their stuff from. There are few things that are taboo in a flea market, but that is: Sources are inviolate.

“Do you sell a lot?”

“Enough to feed myself,” he said. “Keep a roof over my head.” Then, “They are worth more than I ask for them.”

I picked up something that reminded me a little of what a deer might look like if deer were carnivorous, and said, “What is this?”

He glanced down. “I think it is a primitive thawn. It’s hard to tell.” And then, “It was my father’s.”

There was a chiming noise, then, to signal that soon enough the flea market would close.

“Would you like food?” I asked.

He looked at me, warily.

“My treat,” I said. “No obligations. There’s a Denny’s over the road. Or there’s the bar.”

He thought for a moment. “Denny’s will be fine,” he said. “I will meet you over there.”

I waited at Denny’s. After half an hour I no longer expected him to come, but he surprised me, and he arrived fifty minutes after I got there, carrying a brown leather bag tied to his wrist with a long piece of twine. I imagined it had to contain money, for it hung as if empty, and could not have held his stock. Soon enough he was eating his way through a plate piled with pancakes, and, over coffee, he began to talk.

The sun began to go out a little after midday. A flicker, first, and then a rapid darkening that began on one side of the sun and then crept across its crimson face until the sun went black, like a coal knocked from a fire, and night returned to the world.

Balthasar the Tardy hurried down from the hill, leaving his nets in the trees, uninspected and unemptied. He uttered no words, conserving his breath, moving as fast as befitted his remarkable bulk, until he reached the bottom of the hill and the front door of his one-room cottage.

“Oaf! It is time!” he called. Then he knelt and lit a fish-oil lamp, which sputtered and stank and burned with a fitful orange flame.

The door of the cottage opened and Balthasar’s son emerged. The son was a little taller than his father, and much thinner, and was beardless. The youth had been named after his grandfather, and while his grandfather had lived the boy had been known as Farfal the Younger; now he was referred to, even to his face, as Farfal the Unfortunate. If he brought home a laying-fowl it would cease to give eggs, if he took an axe to a tree it would fall in a place that would cause the greatest inconvenience and the least possible good; if he found a trove of ancient treasure, half-buried in a locked box at the edge of a field, the key to the box would break off as he turned it, leaving only a faint echo of song on the air, as if of a distant choir, and the box would dissolve to sand. Young women upon whom he fastened his affections would fall in love with other men, or be transformed into grues or carried off by deodands. It was the way of things.

“Sun’s gone out,” said Balthasar the Tardy to his son.

Farfal said, “So this is it, then. This is the end.”

It was chillier, now the sun had gone out.

Balthasar said only, “It soon will be. We have only a handful of minutes left. It is well that I have made provision for this day.” He held the fish-oil lamp up high, and walked back into the cottage.

Farfal followed his father into the tiny dwelling, which consisted of one large room and, at the far end of the dwelling, a locked door. It was to this door that Balthasar walked. He put down the lamp in front of it, took a key from around his neck and unlocked the door.

Farfal’s mouth fell open.

He said only, “The colours.” Then, “I dare not go through.”

“Idiot boy,” said his father. “Go through, and tread carefully as you do.” And then, when Farfal made no move to walk, his father pushed him through the door, and closed it behind them.

Farfal stood there, blinking at the unaccustomed light.

“As you apprehend,” said his father, resting his hands on his capacious stomach and surveying the room they found themselves in, “this room does not exist temporally in the world you know. It exists, instead, over a million years before our time, in the days of the last Remoran Empire, a period marked by the excellence of its lute music, its fine cuisine, and also the beauty and compliance of its slave class.”

Farfal rubbed his eyes, and then looked at the wooden casement standing in the middle of the room, a casement through which they had just walked, as if it were a door. “I begin to perceive,” he said, “why it is that you were so often unavailable. For it seems to me that I have seen you walk through that door into this room many times and never wondered about it, merely resigned myself to the time that would pass until you returned.”

Balthasar the Tardy began then to remove his clothes of dark sacking until he was naked, a fat man with a long white beard and cropped white hair, and then to cover himself with brightly-coloured silken robes.

“The sun!” exclaimed Farfal, peering out of the room’s small window. “Look at it! It is the orange-red of a fresh-stirred fire! Feel the heat it gives!” And then he said, “Father. Why has it never occurred to me to ask you why you spent so much time in the second room of our one-room cottage? Nor to remark upon the existence of such a room, even to myself?”

Balthasar twisted the last of the fastenings, covering his capacious stomach with a silken covering that crawled with embroideries of elegant monsters. “That might,” he admitted, “have been due in part to Empusa’s Invocation of Incuriosity.” He produced a small black box from around his neck, barely large enough to hold a beetle. “This, when properly primed and invoked, keeps us from being remarked upon. Just as you were not able to wonder at my comings and goings, so neither do the folk in this time and place marvel at me, nor at anything I do that is in any wise contrary to the mores and customs of the Eighteenth and Last Greater Ramoran Empire.”

“Astonishing,” said Farfal.

“It matters not that the Sun has gone out, that in a matter of hours, or at most weeks, all life on Earth will be dead, for here and at this time I am Balthasar the Canny, merchant to the sky-ships, dealer in antiquities, magical objects, and marvels—and here you, my son, will stay. You will be, to all who wonder about your provenance, simply and purely my servant.”

“Your servant?” said Farfal the Unfortunate. “Why can I not be your son?”

“For various reasons,” stated his father, “too trivial and minor even to warrant discussion at this this time.” He hung the black box from a nail in the corner of the room. Farfal thought he saw a leg or head, as if of some beetle-like creature, waving from inside the little box, but he did not pause to inspect it. “Also because I have a number of sons in this time, that I have fathered upon my concubines, and they might not be pleased to learn of another. Although, given the disparity in the dates of your birth, it would be over a million years before you could inherit any wealth.”

“There is wealth?” asked Farfal, looking at the room he was in with fresh eyes. He had spent his life in a one-roomed cottage at the end of time, at the bottom of a small hill, surviving on the food his father could net in the air—usually only seabirds or flying lizards, although on occasion other things had been caught in them: creatures who claimed to be angels, or great self-important cockroach-like creatures with high metal crowns, or huge bronze-coloured jellies. They would be taken from the netting, and then either thrown back into the air, or eaten, or traded with the few folk that passed that way.

His father smirked and stroked his impressive white beard like a man petting an animal. “Wealth indeed,” he said. “There is much call in these times for pebbles and small rocks from the End of the Earth: There are spells, cantrips and magical instruments for which they are almost irreplaceable. And I deal in such things.”

Farfal the Unfortunate nodded. “And if I do not wish to be a servant,” he said, “but simply request to be returned to where we came from, through that casement, why, what then?”

Balthasar the Tardy said only, “I have little patience for such questions. The sun has gone out. In hours, perhaps minutes, the world will have ended. Perhaps the universe also has ended. Think no more on these matters. Instead, I shall procure a locking-spell-creature for the casement, down at the ship-market. And while I go to do that, you can order and polish all the objects you can see in this cabinet, taking care not to put your fingers directly upon the green flute (for it will give you music, but replace contentment in your soul with an insatiable longing) nor get the onyx bogadil wet.” He patted his son’s hand affectionately, a glorious, resplendent creature in his many-coloured silks. “I have spared you from death, my boy,” he said. “I have brought you back in time to a new life. What should it matter that in this life you are not son but servant? Life is life, and it is infinitely better than the alternative, or so we presume, for nobody returns to dispute it. Such is my motto.”

So saying he fumbled beneath the casement, and produced a grey rag, which he handed to Farfal. “Here. To work! Do a good job and I shall show you by how much the sumptuous feasts of antiquity are an improvement over smoked sea-bird and pickled ossaker-root. Do not, under any circumstances or provocation, move the casement. Its position is precisely calibrated. Move it, and it could open to anywhere.”

He covered the casement with a piece of woven cloth, which made it less remarkable that a large wooden casement was standing, unsupported, in the centre of a room.

Balthasar the Tardy left that room through a door that Farfal had not previously observed. Bolts were slammed closed. Farfal picked up his rag, and began, wanly, to dust and to polish.

After several hours he observed a light coming through the casement, so brightly as to penetrate the cloth covering, but it soon faded once more.

Farfal was introduced to the household of Balthasar the Canny as a new servant. He observed Balthasar’s five sons and his seven concubines (although he was not permitted to speak to them), was introduced to the House-Carl, who held the keys, and the maidmen who hurried and scurried thence and hither at the House-Carl’s command, and than whom there was nothing lower in that place, save for Farfal himself.

The maidmen resented Farfal, with his pale skin, for he was the only one apart from their master permitted in the Sanctum Sanctorum, Master Balthasar’s room of wonders, a place to which Master Balthasar had hitherto only repaired alone.

And so the days went by, and the weeks, and Farfal ceased to marvel at the bright orange-red sun, so huge and remarkable, or at the colours of the daytime sky (predominantly salmon and mauve), or at the ships that would arrive in the ship-market from distant worlds bearing their cargo of wonders.

Farfal was miserable, even when surrounded by marvels, even in a forgotten age, even in a world filled with miracles. He said as much to Balthasar the next time the merchant came in the door to the sanctum. “This is unfair.”

“Unfair?”

“That I clean and polish the wonders and precious things, while you and your other sons attend feasts and parties and banquets and meet people and otherwise and altogether enjoy living here at the dawn of time.”

Balthasar said, “The youngest son may not always enjoy the privileges of his elder brothers, and they are all older than you.”

“The red-haired one is but fifteen, the dark-skinned one is fourteen, the twins are no more than twelve, while I am a man of seventeen years . . .”

“They are older than you by more than a million years,” said his father. “I will hear no more of this nonsense.”

Farfal the Unfortunate bit his lower lip to keep from replying.

It was at that moment that there was a commotion in the courtyard, as if a great door had been broken open, and the cries of animals and house-birds arose. Farfal ran to the tiny window and looked out. “There are men,” he said. “I can see the light glinting on their weapons.”

His father seemed unsurprised. “Of course,” he said. “Now, I have a task for you Farfal. Due to some erroneous optimism on my part, we are almost out of the stones upon which my wealth is founded, and I have the indignity of discovering myself to be overcommitted at present. Thus it is necessary for you and I to return to our old home and gather what we can. It will be safer if there are two of us. And time is of the essence.”

“I will help you,” said Farfal, “if you will agree to treat me better in the future.”

From the courtyard there came a cry. “Balthasar? Wretch! Cheat! Liar! Where are my thirty stones?” The voice was deep and penetrating.

“I shall treat you much better in the future,” said his father. “I swear it.” He walked to the casement, pulled off the cloth. There was no light to be seen through it, nothing inside the wooden casing but a deep and formless blackness.

“Perhaps the world has entirely ended,” said Farfal, “and now there is nothing but nothing.”

“Only a handful of seconds have passed there since we came through it,” his father told him. “That is the nature of time. It flows faster when it is younger and the course is narrower: At the end of all things time has spread and slowed, like oil spilled on a still pond.”

Then he removed the sluggish spell-creature he had placed on the casement as a lock, and he pushed against the inner casing, which opened slowly. A chill wind came through it, which made Farfal shiver. “You send us to our deaths, father,” he said.

“We all go to our deaths,” said his father. “And yet, here you are, a million years before your birth, still alive. Truly we are all composed of miracles. Now, son, here is a bag, which, as you will soon discover, has been imbued with Swann’s Imbuement of Remarkable Capacity, and will hold all that you place inside it, regardless of weight or mass or volume. When we get there, you must take as many stones as you can and place them in the bag. I myself will run up the hill to the nets and check them for treasures—or for things that would be regarded as treasures if I were to bring them back to the now and the here.”

“Do I go first?” asked Farfal, clutching the bag.

“Of course.”

“It’s so cold.”

In reply his father prodded him in the back with a hard finger. Farfal clambered, grumbling, through the casement, and his father followed.

“This is too bad,” said Farfal. They walked out of the cottage at the end of time and Farfal bent to pick up pebbles. He placed the first in the bag, where it glinted greenly. He picked up another. The sky was dark but it seemed as if something filled the sky, something without shape.

There was a flash of something not unlike lightning, and in it he could see his father hauling in nets from the trees at the top of the hill.

A crackling. The nets flamed and were gone. Balthasar ran down the hill gracelessly and breathlessly. He pointed at the sky. “It is Nothing!” he said. “Nothing has swallowed the hilltop. Nothing has taken over.”

There was a powerful wind then, and Farfal watched his father crackle, and then raise into the air, and then vanish. He backed away from the Nothing, a darkness within the darkness with tiny lightnings playing at its edges, and then he turned and ran, into the house, and through the door into the second room. But he did not go through into the second room. He stood there in the doorway, and then turned back to the Dying Earth. Farfal the Unfortunate watched as the Nothing took the outer walls and the distant hills and the skies, and then he watched, unblinking as Nothing swallowed the cold sun, watched until there was nothing left but a dark formlessness that pulled at him, as if restless to be done with it all.

Only then did Farfal walk into the inner room in the cottage, into his father’s inner sanctum a million years before.

A bang on the outer door.

“Balthasar?” It was the voice from the courtyard. “I gave you the day you begged for, wretch. Now give me my thirty stones. Give me my stones or I shall be as good as my word—your sons will be taken off-world, to labour in the Bdellium Mines of Telb, and the women shall be set to work as musicians in the pleasure palace of Luthius Limn, where they will have the honour of making sweet music while I, Luthius Limn, dance and sing and make passionate and athletic love to my catamites. I shall not waste breath in describing the fate I would have in store for your servants. Your spell of hiding is futile, for see, I have found this room with relative ease. Now, give me my thirty stones before I open the door and render down your obese frame for fat and throw your bones to the dogs and the deodands.”

Farfal trembled with fear. Time, he thought. I need Time. He made his voice as deep as he could, and he called out, “One moment, Luthius Limn. I am engaged in a complex magical operation to purge your stones of their negative energies. If I am disturbed in this, the consequences will be catastrophic.”

Farfal glanced around the room. The only window was too small to permit him to climb out, while the room’s only door had Luthius Limn on the other side of it. “Unfortunate indeed,” he sighed. Then he took the bag his father had given to him and swept into it all the trinkets, oddments and gewgaws he could reach, still taking care not to touch the green flute with his bare flesh. They vanished into the bag, which weighed no more and seemed no more full than it had ever done.

He stared at the casement in the centre of the room. The only way out, and it led to Nothing, to the end of everything.

“Enough!” came the voice from beyond the door. “My patience is at an end, Balthasar. My cooks shall fry your internal organs tonight.” There came a loud crunching against the door, as if of something hard and heavy being slammed against it.

Then there was a scream, and then silence.

Luthius Limn’s voice: “Is he dead?”

Another voice—Farfal thought it sounded like one of his half-brothers—said, “I suspect that the door is magically protected and warded.”

“Then,” boomed Luthius Limn, decisively, “we shall go through the wall.”

Farfal was unfortunate, but not stupid. He lifted down the black lacquer box from the nail upon which his father had hung it. He heard something scuttle and move inside it.

“My father told me not to move the casement,” he said to himself. Then he put his shoulder against it and heaved violently, pushing the heavy thing almost half an inch. The darkness that filled the casement began to change, and it filled with a pearl-grey light.

He hung the box about his neck. “It is good enough,” said Farfal the Unfortunate, and, as something slammed against the wall of the room he took a strip of cloth and tied the bag that contained all the remaining treasures of Balthasar the Canny about his left wrist, and he pushed himself through.

And there was light, so bright that he closed his eyes, and walked through the casement.

Farfal began to fall.

He flailed in the air, eyes tightly closed against the blinding light, felt the wind whip past him.

Something smacked and engulfed him: water, brackish, warm, and Farfal floundered, too surprised to breathe. Then he surfaced, his head breaking water, and he gulped air. And then he pushed himself through the water, until his hands grasped some kind of plant, and he pulled himself, on hands and feet, out of the green water, and up onto a spongy dry land, trailing and trickling water as he went.

“The light,” said the man at Denny’s. “The light was blinding. And the sun was not yet up. But I obtained these,” he tapped the frame of his sunglasses, “and I stay out of the sunlight, so my skin does not burn too badly.”

“And now?” I asked.

“I sell the carvings,” he said. “And I seek another casement.”

“You want to go back to your own time?”

He shook his head. “It’s dead,” he said. “And all I knew, and everything like me. It’s dead. I will not return to the darkness at the end of time.”

“What then?”

He scratched at his neck. Through the opening is his shirt I could see a small, black box, hanging about his neck, no bigger than a locket, and inside the box something moved: a beetle, I thought. But there are big beetles in Florida. They are not uncommon.

“I want to go back to the beginning,” he said. “When it started. I want to stand there in the light of the universe waking to itself, the dawn of everything. If I am going to blinded, let it be by that. I want to be there when the suns are a-borning. This ancient light is not bright enough for me.”

He took the napkin in his hand then, and reached into the leather bag with it. Taking care to touch it only through the cloth, he pulled out a flute-like instrument, about a foot long, made of green jade or something similar, and placed it on the table in front of me. “For the food,” he said. “A thank you.”

He got up, then, and walked away, and I sat and stared at the green flute for so long a time; eventually I reached out and felt the coldness of it with my fingertips, and then gently, without daring to blow, or to try to make music from the end of time, I touched the mouthpiece to my lips.

© 2009 by Neil Gaiman.

Originally published in Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance,

Edited by George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Neil Gaiman’s most recent novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, was published in June 2013. His previous novel, the international bestseller The Graveyard Book, won the prestigious Newbery and Carnegie medals, the first author to win both for the same book. Other novels include American Gods, Coraline, Stardust, Neverwhere, and Anansi Boys, among many others. In addition to his novel-writing, Gaiman also created and scripted the popular comic book series Sandman. Most of Gaiman’s short work has been collected in the volumes Smoke and Mirrors, Fragile Things, and M is for Magic. He is the winner of four Hugos, two Nebulas, four Stokers, the Carnegie Medal, the World Fantasy Award, and seventeen Locus Awards, among many other honors.

Author Spotlight: Cory Doctorow
Moshe Siegel

Your novella, “Human Readable,” (which first appeared in the anthology Future Washington back in 2005) depicts an automated American future wherein ant-colony-efficient algorithms take the place of messy, human control on the streets of Los Angeles—rendering traffic a thing of the past. Of course, when the tech fails, chaos descends. In the eight years since this novella’s publication, have you picked up on any trends towards such automation of typically human tasks, like driving? Google’s driverless cars come to mind; several states in the US have already approved the use of automated vehicles. The question seems to be not “if,” but really, “when” do you think this automation will become as normative as it is in your story?

This is not about whether automation in driving or a particular domain is likely to become normal. The point of the story is not a story about automation, it’s a story about legibility in automation; that is to say, a story about whether the algorithms that make decisions for us will be ones that are on display and can be publicly debated, and have their characteristics known and understood, or whether they will be considered a matter of national security or business advantage and therefore not visible to us. I think the answer to that is a ringing “No,” there is no transparency in these algorithms. A much better question to ask than, “Are we going to be driving self-driving cars?” is, “Is the no-fly list, or the means by which your mortgage is approved, or the decision by which your phone or email is subjected to additional retention and surveillance through a shadowy NSA program, is that going to be subject to oversight, public debate? Will there be any accountability or illegibility?” The answer is a ringing “No.”

We inhabit a world today where we inhabit systems of guilt and innocence, or of privilege and deprivation, and those systems are completely inscrutable by design. And as a consequence they fail very badly, as is suggested in the story.

Even in the technology-saturated future, secular Jews like Rainer and his family cling to their traditions with tenacity. What do you think it is about cultural tradition that speaks so strongly to us, even when technology has taken us so far from our origins?

Well, you know I talk about the funeral rite particularly as being a framework for navigating an emotionally fraught and difficult time. You know, one of the things that struck me when I’ve gone to funerals and memorials from other cultures is that I’m never quite sure what I’m meant to do. It lacks bounding, and it lacks a formal protocol, or I lack knowledge of that formal protocol in a way that is not the case with Shiva and Jewish funerals. I think that there’s enough to worry about when someone has died, and knowing that you’ve done what you are meant to have done, and that you haven’t either imposed on or shirked your duty to the survivors of that person or their memory, is a comfort to the living.

As to the other parts of it, keeping kosher, taking a day off, I understand the Sabbath as a kind of intellectual principle, and I understand it as a labor law, and I think that having a requirement or consensus that we all take the day off on the same day makes it a lot easier to do that, otherwise you’re the only guy who’s not answering his email and you screw everybody else up. But other bits of it I actually think are nonsense, and I don’t know why people do them. Keeping kosher, the rest of it, I think it’s dumb Bronze Age superstition. I think people probably stick to it because they’ve stuck to it for generations, and if it was good enough for Dad, it’s good enough for me. It’s the same reason people put cow patties on their burns for generations, until we had germ theory. So I think it’s a mixed bag.

Rainer describes his family’s beliefs as “a way of negotiating life.” Do you think he sees the 5,000+-year-old system of Jewish tradition as an example of early networks? The first “evolved protocols” of streamlining human actions for maximum group benefit?

No, I think Jewish tradition is an example of an early social set of norms and rules. Is it the first evolved protocols? Absolutely not, the Babylonians predated the Jews.

This novella is a marketer’s nightmare. Brand dilution—a symptom of Trish’s work in intellectual property reform—is rife throughout, with references to “taco bell” as a synonym for Mexican food and “big gulp” meaning any large beverage. Modern readers, myself included, can feel the stress of genericizing these Big Brand Names by way of the inevitably pending lawsuits. Even Trish, free-expression crusader, corrects herself: “Mexican. I mean, ‘taco bell.’” Do you foresee a time when free speech concerns could really override commercial interests to such a degree that one could order a ‘big mac’ at the mom-and-pop McDonald’s on the corner?

Yeah, I sure hope that we arrive at a time when we restore the balance to trademark that has historically been there. It’s a truism of mine that anytime anyone uses the word “brand,” there’s a 98% chance that the sentence that it appears in is bullshit. And yet we reified brands to the point where they often end up trumping speech. Trademark wasn’t supposed to work that way. It’s meant to be consumer protection. It’s meant to help you be sure that if you think you’re buying a Big Mac you’re getting a Big Mac. Unfortunately, it’s turned into something like pseudo-property, where McDonald’s gets to assert something like a property interest in common words. Most notably we have Warhammer claiming to own “space marines.” I just think that’s bullshit. It would be great to see that balance returned in the same way that it would be great to see balance returned in lots of things that are public property, and that have been privatized, and that’s not just speech but public places. Our public parks are, increasingly, privately owned; our public services, our public schools, which have been invaded by the private sector, prisons, and police, and so on. This story is not a prediction; it’s an analogy, and one of the analogies in the story is the increased privatization of things that are properly owned by the public, and the joy that would follow if we could take those back.

The more Trish fought for network reform, the more trouble she and her team had navigating within it, to the point that they adapt to function autonomously. Even without the politics, Trish found evidence that the civilian population receives less benefit from the system than do the “rich and powerful.” Do you think there was indeed some malicious human hand at the throttle, making life easier for the wealthy and well-connected, or rather, did the system itself acknowledge the greater influence of certain individuals and determine on its own who needed to reach their destinations most expeditiously, for the good of the “colony” as a whole? Do you think an insect/computational intelligence formed within the system, capable of making such determinations about the humans in its care?

I think the question can be summed up as, “Is corruption an emergent property of law or is corruption deliberate in law?” I think it’s, of course, a little of both. I think that we have, for example, the changes in [the] Glass-Steagall [Act] and the trend towards self-regulation by big industries create, as an emergent property, elements of corruption. You don’t need to actively prove fixing when the competition bureaus fall down on the job and you end up with only two, or three, of five firms in a sector, as we have in much of the entertainment industry and energy sector and so on. When that happens, the industry players converge on a set of prices for reasons that can be explained using market dynamics, but that nevertheless conspire to screw the consumer and the average individual to the benefit of the corporation. I think the fact that lawmakers need to fundraise all the time in order to get reelected, and that primarily they fundraise from the rich, means that as a natural consequence of that that they see their allies as being the wealthy and not their constituents.

There’s this famous talk: “Twenty-Four Standard Causes of Human Misjudgment,” a talk given by Charlie Munger, who is Warren Buffet’s business partner, and it’s really a recapitulation of stuff from Robert Cialdini’s Influence. One of the points that he makes in that is that it’s very easy to create reciprocal social contracts with people. If I give you something, even if we both insist that it’s freely given without the expectation of a return, the return is nevertheless implicit between the two of us, and is likely to emerge. And in the speech, Munger says, “Sam Walton refused to allow any Walmart sales agents to take even so much as a ballpoint pen or a handkerchief from their counterparts from whom they were buying things, because he understood that, as soon as there’s the smallest exchange of value, or the smallest delivery of value, that there’s an expectation of a return on value.” This is a recurring problem at Burning Man, which runs on a gift economy, which is to say things are given freely without the expectation of a return, but that nevertheless often dissolves into a barter economy where things are given with the expectation of return.

I think that where you have a system where lawmakers have to fundraise continuously to get into office, then the people from whom they fundraise, they will naturally end up passing laws that serve to put the advantage to those people. And of course it’s a vicious cycle. When you have laws that make you richer, you have more money to spare to give to lawmakers, who pass you laws that make you richer still. Yes, it’s an emergent property, but it’s an emergent property of a system whose rules are understood and whose outcomes can be faithfully predicted. Which is to say, it’s still corruption.

It has been a busy year for those interested in privacy and freedom of information: anyone who follows your multifarious social media outlets is aware of your dedication to these and other related topics. That said, do you have any projects upcoming or in the works you would like to share with us?

I’m finishing a novella called The Man Who Sold the Moon that I’m writing for Neal Stephenson’s project with Arizona State University called “Hieroglyph.” It’s a story about people from the Burning Man subculture who modify designs for printing out yurts using solar centering, printing out the parts from which to build yurts in the desert using solar centering, and they land one on the moon that uses solar centering to turn lunar regolith into bricks that can be turned into yurts and igloos for future generations that take up residence on the moon. I also have recently finished a nonfiction book about copyright called Information Doesn’t Want to be Free, that both Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer were kind enough to write introductions for. That should be coming out soon, my agent is just finalizing, I believe, the publication details. I can’t say who until the signatures are inked, but it looks like a publisher I very much like is going to do that book. And I’m developing some software that will greatly assist people in making voluntary payments for things that they don’t need on the internet, called Shut Up and Take My Money.

I hope that was useful to you, thank you very much!

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: Keffy R.M. Kehrli
Robyn Lupo

What can you tell us about how “HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!!” began?

I am a terrible person who enjoys schadenfreude pie more than almost anyone else I know. People say that the internet runs on cats or porn, but I feel this is inaccurate. Beneath the layers of pornography, cats, and pornographic cats, the internet really runs on schadenfreude. This story came from reading the now-defunct Regretsy site and browsing spectacular crowdfunding failures for far too many hours. I also felt like crowdfunding has been ubiquitous for the past three years and wanted to poke at it a little bit.

At what point did the story gain momentum—like, at what point, did it turn into a story?

I had a “finished” draft of the story about a year ago, but I don’t think that it actually turned into a story until thirty minutes before my reading at Norwescon this year. I had been planning to read from my novel, but realized that I wasn’t happy with the excerpt I’d chosen. I decided that it’d be easier to fill twenty to twenty-five minutes with a few stories in the 500-1500 word range than cut a coherent 4000 words out of the novel draft. When I was giving the story a quick re-read, I realized that the ending sucked, so I added a couple more updates. Prior to that, it wasn’t really a story because it had no narrative arc. I kind of shoved the readers off a cliff at the end. One of the nice things about reading to an audience before sending this out for publication was that I had a good idea of which punch lines actually played well, and which ones needed tweaking.

What sort of evil geniuses inspired your Evil Genius Narrator?

I’m not sure. The only mad scientist that comes to mind when I think about “things that might have actually inspired me” is Dr. Frederick Frankenstein from Young Frankenstein. I don’t remember watching it much as a kid, but my parents used to hum the violin theme at me when I was a baby because it would make me cry, which was hilarious. That’s probably over-analyzing it, though. I suspect I just decided it was my turn to dip into that particular mossy, slug-lined well of tropes.

Why use this format?

It made me laugh!

What’s next for you?

I have a short story due to come out in Apex later this year, and I will have a story in the Alliteration Ink collection, What Fates Impose, sometime soon. Other than that, who knows?

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: Kameron Hurley
Jude Griffin

You talked about the genesis of “Enyo-Enyo” on jforjetpack.com. Was there anything in that early vision that didn’t survive the reframing around Eris?

To be dead honest, before Eris entered the picture, the story had no plot. It was just these two people floating around in space with some unnamed prisoner. It was an excuse for me to write a lot of what I thought were clever descriptions about space detritus and planets the color of foam. In the original, I had more male characters, which I gender-swapped after I figured out the frame. My timeline already jumped around a lot—I just had no idea why. Maybe because transitions tend to be so boring . . .

It was initially a story about loneliness, I think. Some of that bled through to the final, but loneliness wasn’t the main thrust of the story after the rewrite. It was altogether something more creepy and perhaps intangible. Something about loss, and how we double down on our bad choices.

Some writers are gardeners, just throwing interesting seeds of things together and seeing what comes out, and some are careful, exacting architects who know precisely where they’re going and what they want to accomplish. I’m definitely the gardener variety. Writing is as much a process of exploration for me as it is for the reader.

How did you approach the worldbuilding, the language, used to describe the satellite, the characters, and the worlds in your story?

I’m big on worldbuilding, which most anybody who’s read my novels or other short fiction already knows. I like to go to places that are really different, and then see what happens to people when they grow up there. Do we recognize them as human? Which parts of them? What parts become alien? That’s what really interests me in science fiction—not the bells and whistles of the technology and all the intricate schematics, but how it transforms people and what we think it means to be human.

I’m a fan of organic tech in science fiction, because I think it has the ability to far outlast big tin cans in the sky. If a spaceship sheds its skin like a snake, or spawns other ships like fishes, how does that change the way we interact with it? Or how we think of it (and, by extension, ourselves)? I want to see different sorts of technology, so every time I found myself pulling up a familiar trope as I wrote this—whether it was what a space transport looked like (shuttle cruisers for everyone!) or a spacesuit or drinking liquor—I excised it, and spent some time trying to come up with something I hadn’t seen before. I wanted it to feel alien, different. And it should feel alien. Even if your societies are building and crumbling every few centuries, no two are going to look exactly alike, especially when environments change.

I get tired of reading the same old stories where people look the same, talk the same, have the same moral values, and the same tired conversations ten thousand years from now. I want to go somewhere different. I want to meet different people. So that’s what I put in my fiction.

But it’s not for everyone. A lot of people take comfort in homogeny, which is great, because there’s plenty of work out there for them. But for those who want to go someplace weird sometimes, well, the weirder it is, the harder it is to find.

The story leaves a lot unanswered, leaves the reader to fill in their own answers: How did you hone the balance between engaging and dis-engaging ambiguity, balance the slow, incomplete reveal?

I had the great pleasure of writing this story knowing that it was for Jared Shurin and Anne C. Perry’s anthology, The Lowest Heaven, and they tend to prefer their fiction a little on the weird and dark and fantastic side. I suspected they would let me get away with more ambiguity than a more traditional SF venue would. When I sent it off to Jared, I trusted he would tell me if it was totally incomprehensible. He told me it was all right, so hurrah. I wasn’t sure there would be another venue for it, though. Like a lot of writers, I had a large collection of form and mostly-form rejections from John Joseph Adams from back in his days as assistant editor at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Not only was I sending him yet another Kameron story, but it was a very weird, ambiguous one, and I honestly expected he’d ask for rewrites, at best. I was shocked that he accepted it—weirdness, lack of exposition, and all. Sometimes life surprises you.

I’ve never been a fan of exposition. I like to learn by doing. You don’t need to tell me how a light bulb works. Just show me how to turn it on. I tend to lead readers through my worlds like this too. I’m not going to tell you how to start a bug-powered vehicle, I’m just going to put you inside one with somebody who knows how, and send you off on a ride.

Some readers really hate this. It can be confusing and incredibly challenging, especially when you first start. But I like to think that for those few who stick with it, it’s also incredibly satisfying when all the pieces come together. We get spoon-fed a lot of information in movies and TV, complete with flashbacks to stuff that happened just twenty minutes before, and long “as you know” dialogue that recaps all the events we’ve been watching for the last ninety minutes.

This is fine sometimes, when I need some brain candy, but on the whole I don’t like stories that insult me. I like to figure things out. I’ve heard people say that when writers don’t tell you everything, it’s mean, or some kind of elitist “trick,” or an author being arrogant. But to me, it’s about having total trust in my readers. I invite readers to immerse themselves in a place and with people who are very, very different from them in a way that doesn’t talk down to them. It’s not preachy, and it doesn’t invite easy answers. That’s not arrogant. That’s saying, “I trust that my readers are smart enough to come to their own conclusions.” For my part in all this, I need to be smart enough to give them enough information to do that. And if I’m not doing that, well, my editor needs to tell me so!

I was particularly worried about this story because it had absolutely no “this is what it all means” or “this is what happened” dialogue anywhere in the story. And then it just kind of has this Maureen McHugh-like “and that’s the end!” type of ending. Even in my novels, the protagonist generally has an “aha” moment where she lays out exactly how the puzzle of the plot fits together—so both the readers and the antagonists realize that she’s got it. But “Enyo-Enyo” was a much quieter, more hunt-and-pick sort of story that invites a second read (or maybe three).

To me, the reading experience isn’t just an author telling people things. It’s a conversation with a reader. That’s why two different readers can have such vastly different opinions on the meaning or events of a story. One of the things I also gun for is creating a story that people actually think about after they finish it. If everything’s explained in nice neat bullets with a fine little executive summary at the top, there’s really nothing to think about.

This need for completeness, for put-down-ability, is actually a very U.S. thing, and I suspect it has to do with the way we were trained to write fiction for magazines back in the day. It’s content that’s meant to be discarded. When you’d read a story in a magazine at the doctor’s office, they wouldn’t want you to take the magazine with you. They’d want you to read it for entertainment, say, “Well, that was nice,” and put it down again. If you kept the magazine, then the next person wouldn’t use it.

Writing stories today is a little different. What you want to do is encourage people to share your stories—and to do that they should be thinking about them. If I read a story online and I’m like, “Well, that was nice,” I’m probably not going to share it with my friends. I’m not going to talk about it. The stuff I share is the stuff I want to talk about with my friends. What did you think of this? What really happened? How did you interpret this? What do you think of this character? If you’re not creating stories that anyone gets excited about, then it’s just disposable content, something somebody picks up, enjoys, but then puts back down again.

In your drop-dead, spectacular essay, “We Have Always Fought,” you talk about being the “biggest self-aware misogynist” you know. I empathized with the ongoing struggle to identify and reject all the prejudices we ingest from the society we live in. How do you work to not let that inform your writing?

I was telling somebody the other day that if all I’m ever known for is writing that blog post, I can die happy. It’s already the work of mine that’s been read by the most people, and it’s circulated among a lot of writing and gaming communities—folks who can really make a difference.

The answer is, your internal biases always inform your writing. All you can do is be aware of them and fight to counteract them. We’ve internalized the narratives we’ve been fed from the time that we’re children. What I think a lot of people needed to hear in that post was that to some extent, internalizing those biased narratives isn’t your fault. But once you become aware of those biases, it’s up to you to stop perpetuating them. It can be something as simple as no longer laughing politely at a friend’s incredibly unfunny racist joke. Or correcting someone who says women can’t be programmers (not only are there plenty of women programmers, but programming was initially considered an occupation only fit for women, back in the ’50s. Oh how the narrative changes!).

But you can’t fight your internal biases and messed up narratives unless you’re aware of them. If there was only one story where the single female character was a damsel in distress, or the single gay character died tragically, or the single black character existed merely to magically assist the white dude hero—then it would be annoying, but not part of perpetuating a broader toxic narrative. Anyone who reads a lot of stories or watches a lot of media can tag these narratives pretty quickly. But there are subtler ones that sometimes have to be pointed out to you. The simplest way to become aware of them is to listen to readers react to your stories and others. Not argue with them. Or attack them. Or publicly disagree with them. Or shove yourself into their discussion. But to actively go out and find readers picking apart stories—yours or someone else’s—online and addressing problems with internal biases and the perpetuation of problematic narratives.

It’s funny how many writers flip out when somebody says, “Hey, isn’t it weird your Chicago doesn’t have any black people in it who aren’t homeless?” And hey, don’t you think it’s icky that you called your mixed-race protagonist a mongrel? And wow, do you realize you killed your gay male character—just like all these other novels do?

Just listen to people and their actual lived experience—not the experiences mass media feeds you. Because as somebody in advertising, I can tell you right now that marketers have good reason to feed you particular narratives about the way the world is and the way it should be. It’s not their job to tell you what the world actually is. It’s their job to sell you things.

Those of us who are actually in the writing, gaming, movie, television, and marketing industries have an opportunity to rewrite those narratives. Or perpetuate them. I take this responsibility pretty seriously. I remember how important books and stories were to me growing up. I remember how discomfited I felt by the is-that-a-rape scene in Blade Runner when I was twelve, and I remember throwing Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Mirror of Her Dreams across the room a few years later because of its milquetoast do-nothing heroine.

By day I work in marketing and advertising, so I know why we perpetuate these narratives. They keep the people in power in power and ensure that those we don’t want to be in power are constantly anxious and lacking in self-esteem. People who are anxious and lack confidence buy a lot more than happy, confident people. I recently finished a great book, Can’t Buy Me Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, that lays out how traditional marketing tactics and narratives define and often breakdown our relationships and sense of self.

You might ask, hey, if marketing is so bad, why are you in it? To which I’d respond, well, it pays a hell of a lot better than fiction. But seriously, if the narratives we write in fiction are so bad, why write fiction? Because we can fix them.

Marketing taught us to smoke. But it also dismantled that same industry even more quickly. Marketing is why we wear seat belts and bike helmets and why drunk driving in the U.S. is much, much lower than it used to be. We can rewrite narratives. We can change behavior. The same tools that create toxic narratives can be used to create positive, powerful ones, too. It’s all what you choose to do with it.

Great power, great responsibility, all that.

I loved this line: “Something inside of Enyo stirred, something dark and willfully forgotten, like a bad sexual encounter.” I actually stopped reading to spend a moment admiring the vividness of it. Are there any writers that throw you out of a story like that? Where you have to pause to live in the moment of a line just a little longer?

I’m a sucker for vivid writing. I read a lot of Jeff VanderMeer books for the vividness of the writing, for the jaw-dropping imagery, and for those starkly human lines that just cut you to pieces. Angela Carter and Elizabeth Hand, Gene Wolfe and Geoff Ryman do this, too. A newer writer whose debut recently wowed me was Zachary Jernigan, who has some incredibly creepy worldbuilding and really lovely imagery in his book No Return.

Michael Cunningham, Isabel Allende, Martha Wells, KJ Bishop—and even Joanna Russ in a gut-punch way—can all really turn a phrase, something that cuts at your heart, and reminds you of what it is to be human.

What’s up next for you?

I’m working on the first book in a fantasy epic, a Game-of-Thrones-meets-Fringe type of saga with flesh-eating plants and satellite-reliant magic. It’s called Forging the Mirror Darkly and my agent has been very patient with my perpetual rewriting of the damn thing, which I’ve been about two weeks away from finishing for the last, oh, three months. It’s about twice as long as my last book, which is some of why it seems to be taking so long, I suspect.

It’s also a lot heavier on exposition than I’m used to, which is my nod to greater marketability and to the epic form, which tends to lend itself to more telling than showing. Still, that’s a big change for me, and it’s been painful. I am assured this will help move more books, but . . . so, so painful. I look forward to writing the SF noir romp of expositionless madness that’s up next once this is out of my hands.

Hopefully we’ll find a home for it this year or early next year. Fingers crossed.

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: Constance Cooper
Patrick J Stephens

The language of “Trouble Leaves a Scent Trail” is very precise, especially in terms of the tone of the story. With your history in linguistics, what was your approach in considering the possibility of an unintended lighter nature? Was there a happy medium with names and terms, or did you nail them down from the start?

The names evolved out of imagining a hive society. Each character has what amounts to a model and serial number, like Peacekeeper Gimel 300254. The Hebrew letter shows you how old the model is—Gimel Peacekeepers were designed way before Zayin Peacekeepers, for instance. The serial number shows how many of that model have been produced so far. I almost used Greek letters, but I decided Hebrew letters would be more interesting, and I also didn’t want readers to think it was a reference to Brave New World, with its Alpha, Betas, and so on.

It would be boring to tell a story using only job titles, so I imagined that each character would also have what I called a usename. Since these aliens communicate by scent, I chose strong-smelling things like AniseSeed, PineBark, etc. FreshPrawn and WetSand’s names also indicate that they’re from a coastal community. SweetGum and CedarWood have similar names because they’re clonesisters. I chose CitrusPeel for the main character’s name because I got a kick out of naming a hulking, armored cop after something you’d find in a bowl of potpourri. Also, “peeler” is an old British word for a police officer.

Lead us through the world creation. Where did you begin? What troubled you the most about “Trouble Leaves a Scent Trail”? Most importantly, when did you realize the animalistic element?

The starting point for this story came when I wondered if crime could ever occur in a hive society. If you imagine aliens that are less inherently individual than humans, could there still be enough motive to commit, for instance, a murder? When I began writing, I had no idea how the story would end, but as I went on, it came to me that even under conditions of low individual selfishness, there might be selfishness on the group level. Everything grew out of that. The different genotypes of ammet, which could be redesigned or discontinued or even recalled if they turned out to be defective. The communal living, with refectories and dormitories. The basic drive of every ammet to do its predetermined job.

The tricky part was figuring out how much individuality and personal motivation to give the characters. It’s tough to root for a character who doesn’t have any problems or yearn for anything, so I gave CitrusPeel some angst and pride about her antiquated genotype, and I gave her the desire to train a junior—the closest thing her species has to raising a child. And, of course, it was fun to make young ammets bouncy and enthusiastic, like human children.

When you think about hive living, ants come to mind, and the aliens in this story are heavily ant-inspired. The name I chose for them, “ammet,” is a variant of an archaic word for ant. The characters are all “she,” because they’re workers. They have six legs. They communicate by scent and leave scent messages for each other (they never had to invent writing!)

The biography on your website lists you as having been a linguistic researcher, balloon twister, and software engineer, while living in unique locations such as the San Francisco Bay Area and Edinburgh, Scotland. What—if anything—did these parts of your life bring to such a unique and innovative world?

Living in California made me aware of the problem here with invasive Argentine ants. Their colonies are so similar genetically that they don’t compete with each other, and this gives them a huge advantage over the native ants, which they’re displacing. This concept was a key part of my story. The ammets all call each other “cousin,” and there are no wars across the entire Continent because they wiped out the Foreigners long ago. The main character struggles with her identity as a Soldier in a society where she’s almost obsolete, except for certain roles in police work.

“Trouble Leaves a Scent Trail” is a reprint of yours from 2005. You’ve also been published in many magazines and anthologies, including “Best Of” collections. What inspired you to bring this story out and re-sell it? Could you explain the difference behind an original first sale and the thought process behind re-selling?

“Trouble” originally appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, which is published in Australia, and at that time it wasn’t available electronically the way it is now. “Trouble” got some recognition when it came out, but I always wished it could get a little more exposure. Later, when Lightspeed came on the scene, I was impressed and wanted to submit to it, but I was busy with other projects. Finally I realized, hey, Lightspeed does reprints!

What upcoming projects or publications do you have in queue?

I’m very excited to be finishing up Wily Things, a fantasy novel set in a land of humid bayous where the water can play strange tricks.

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 Amazon.

Author Spotlight: Ken Liu
Christie Yant

Welcome back once again, Ken! In your latest Lightspeed story, “Ghost Days,” you explore parent/child dynamics in the context of racism. How the parents dealt with it and how the children did were informed by their own time and culture. Can you tell us something about what shaped these critical moments for your characters, and perhaps what shaped them for their author?

Thank you! As always, I’m honored and excited to be back in Lightspeed.

A common part of the experience of cultures facing the threat of loss (via emigration and assimilation, colonial domination, or something else) is the conflict between the older and younger generations as to the value and meaning of that cultural legacy. This story explores three possible resolutions—out of countless other possibilities—of this conflict.

In the end, William chooses to accept that legacy as an act of rebellion against the racist colonizers, and Fred rejects it, also as an act of rebellion, but against the weight of history—an especially American ideal. And they each find their own ambivalent freedom with those choices. Ona, on the other hand, tries something different: Through empathy, she tries to forge her own path through the cloud of unknowing that is our identity.

As you noted, each of these choices is justified by the historical context and by the individual circumstances of the characters. My hope was to have written all three of the characters empathetically, so that whether readers agree or disagree with their choices, they can understand those choices.

You open the story with a recursive statement, which plays out through the structure of the story itself, generationally and even geographically. Did you set out to write the story that way, or did the nature of the narrative lead you to it?

Unlike most of my stories, which grow and take form organically, this one’s structure was planned in advance.

What structure might be interesting? I thought. Well, my favorite programming language is Lisp, which places recursion at the center of how to think about a problem. And so I decided that I wanted to write this piece like a Lisp program: The story would be divided into smaller versions of the same story, each delving deeper into the past, and the resolution would build up as we returned up the call stack.

“Ghost Days” is an impressively complex narrative on a number of levels. Were there any other particular challenges in writing it?

This story was also written as an entry in a Halloween fiction contest, and so it had to fulfill a number of constraints. For instance, it needed to have something to do with Halloween, which necessitated working the concept of a day dedicated to ghosts into all the sub-stories. It also had to make use of two “story seeds”: the Middle English Christian mystical work, “The Cloude of Unknowyng,” and nesting dolls. Nesting dolls were easy—they provided the structure of the story—but “The Cloude of Unknowyng” was hard. It took me many readings of the key passages in that work before I finally understood that it was a perfect metaphor for the fierce love that sometimes bound children and parents, passing understanding.

As originally drafted, the story had numerous problems. The complexity of the narrative(s) rather overwhelmed me. (It’s just like programming in Lisp!) And it took some careful discussion with you during the rewriting/editing process for me to figure out what was for me the throughline of the story.

Another difficulty involved the story’s central artifact. I needed something to anchor the whole narrative, something that would be a constant through all the recursive substories. My initial choice was a bronze ding, a small ritual cauldron. But this turned out to be a faulty choice for many reasons, and it wasn’t until the editing stage with John and you that I finally switched to the right artifact, an ancient spade-shaped bronze coin, a bubi. As a medium of exchange, a sign of value in the past, and an implement that digs up the past, it was perfect thematically.

All in all, this may have been one of the most difficult stories I’ve ever written, but I think the result was worth it.

The parent/child relationship seems to come up in your work more than any other. You’ve explored it from many different angles. What brings you back to the complexities of that relationship again and again?

I think too much of our fiction focuses on romance as the primary relationship for our characters, giving short shrift to friendship and kinship. I try to consciously resist that tendency in my own work. We are defined by many other relationships in our lives.

As a new father, the bulk of my waking time that hasn’t been bought by my employer is devoted to thinking about my daughters—I’m sure many parents can identify. Also, the parent-child relationship is central to Confucian thought, and thus it has always occupied an important place in my own intellectual history.

Ultimately, we tell stories that reflect our own anxieties. I worry about being a good father, and that worry inevitably seeps onto the page.

In addition to writing your own fiction, you’re also an award-nominated translator, bringing Chinese fiction to English-speaking readers—in fact, one of your translations will be running here at Lightspeed later this year. I hear you got some very good news about one of your translation projects recently. Can you tell our readers about it, and what’s coming up next for you?

Oh, yes! I’m really excited to say that Tor Books will be bringing my translation of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, a best-selling hard SF novel, to America next year. It’s the first book in a trilogy about first contact and the future history of the human race.

This book has sold some 400,000 copies in Chinese and inspired legions of devoted fans in China. (Incidentally, they take fan art really seriously in China: I’ve seen many videos and paintings, heard dozens of songs, and read countless poems and stories—many of them of professional quality—all inspired by the trilogy.) It’s a wonderful work of grand imagination and striking imagery, and I can’t wait to share it with my fellow American readers.

Meanwhile, I’m still working on my first novel while also writing short stories here and there. I do feel a bit overwhelmed at times, but I’m not complaining. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have had some readers enjoy my work, and what more can a writer ask?

Thank you so much for doing this interview with me, and I hope readers like “Ghost Days.”

Christie Yant has published fiction in the magazines Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, Fireside, Shimmer, has been featured on io9 and Wired.com, and has been included in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Armored, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2011 Edition. In the past, she has served as a book reviewer for Audible.com, and she occasionally narrates for StarShipSofa and blogs at Inkpunks.com, a website for aspiring and newly-pro writers. She lives in a former Temperance colony on the central coast of California, where she sometimes gets to watch rocket launches with her husband and her two amazing daughters. Learn more at inkhaven.net.

Author Spotlight: Karin Tidbeck
Andrew Liptak

“Augusta Prima” opens in a sort of portal fantasy: What goes into the creation of such a world for you and who do you count as your influences?

What would become Augusta Prima’s world was originally born in 2005, when I co-wrote a Nordic LARP called Moira. It was a contemporary story set in the borderland between the human and the supernatural realms. The faerie folk, for lack of a better word, abducted a group of humans to examine them, and would, based on their findings, decide whether humanity should be exterminated or left alone. The background material is still floating around out there, I think—it’s copylefted so that anyone who wants to can create a LARP within that world, as long as they credit the original authors. I’ve re-built and altered the world for my own purposes, of course; it’s now quite far removed from its origin. “Augusta Prima” was written when the project was fairly fresh. This is not how I normally approach writing a story. Usually the world emerges around the narrative and not the other way around. But writing in a co-created, or pre-created, world is a great exercise.

The influences for the Moira project were Norse mythology, the Icelandic sagas, and folklore and fairy tales from Scandinavia, Germany, and other parts of the world. Also writers like Clive Barker, Selma Lagerlöf, Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, Astrid Lindgren, Lord Dunsany, Elizabeth Hand, and Mervyn Peake. So those are the influences for that project. My own influences are spread far and wide, and it kind of depends on the project.

Time has two entirely different connotations between the two worlds: Is it dangerous in one world because of how it’s understood in the other, or because of how it’s used?

Understanding is using. The moment Augusta understands other concepts of time and space, she begins to affect the world around her. Because time in her own world isn’t a firmly agreed-upon consensus reality, it’s susceptible to “infection.” Human time, at least in this story, is much more ordered and has the force of consensual agreement behind it. It becomes a sort of virus.

Augusta finds that with the discovery of the watch, she’s yearning for knowledge: Is there an Eden/Eve parallel here?

I don’t write parallels, but I suppose you could call it a Fall, or read it as a story of lost innocence—or of selling your soul to the Devil for knowledge. It’s up to the reader. I wanted to explore the psychology of Augusta, and what would happen if she began to understand the actual nature of the world she lived in.

Time is a construct of the industrial revolution, and here, time is rejected. Do you see fantasy literature (or this world, specifically) as a means to push against the conventions of an industrialized Europe?

I’ve been wrestling with this question, and I don’t think I can answer it. I just don’t agree with the premise. I don’t see time as a construct of the industrial revolution, and certainly not in this story. I’m also not sure what the conventions of an industrialized Europe are. Time? Space? Ontology?

As the world works in “Augusta Prima,” the outside world—the time-linear world, if you will—isn’t only about time. It’s about a monoreality, a consensually agreed upon time-and-space that works differently than Augusta’s. So it’s not only about time, it’s about the entire fabric of that world. Time is only one of the aspects, not necessarily the central theme.

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal, Tor.com and he can be found over atwww.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.

Author Spotlight: Dylan Otto Krider
Jude Griffin

What was the genesis for “The Five Deaths of Marvin Dimitri”?

Marvin Dimitri is inspired by a family friend who has been declared dead about four times. Most of the deaths in the story are his: He went missing in Vietnam, died on the operating table, wandered back to work after they found his wrecked car. And you wouldn’t believe the paperwork involved! Banks just aren’t equipped to reopen a “dead” person’s account. It just doesn’t happen. Except to this guy. I packaged it as fantasy so people would find it believable.

What were some of the challenges in writing a two-page short story?

Because this story was drawn from real life, it was practically already written. Once I had the voice, the rest flowed.

I’ve spent a good part of my career writing 100-word capsules to 500-word articles, so the length comes naturally. Even my novels have short chapters.

In flash fiction, you only have time to write about one thing, so the hard part is boiling your story down to that one thing it’s ultimately about.

Have you considered using the same approach to a short story as you did for your Google poem?

How did you know about my Google poem? By way of explanation, I took a poem I wrote that is somewhat abstract and open to interpretation. I then took the top Google image result I got from searching on each word and phrase in the poem, and flash them on the screen over my narration.

I am currently working on an app to do this “live,” so the results are always current. The images let us interpret the poem in a different way.

I don’t think it would work with fiction, because you can’t keep the images up long enough to draw anything from them.

Longer explanation: I’ve also run a video series and am collaborating on a Digital Dada Festival that focuses on art that wouldn’t be possible without new technology.

We have all these new mediums, much like when the first moving pictures popped up in turn of the previous century, and we’re looking for the Cecil B. DeMilles at the turn of this century who find the potential for art.

It goes beyond Google poetry to new ways to tell stories, as well—so I guess I could do something with Dimitri!

Any other projects coming up that you want to tell us about?

I did some editing on These Are The Voyages that’s just been released. I am not joking when I say it is the definitive nonfiction work on the original Star Trek series, based on interviews and all the internal studio memos and various drafts of each episode.

I also have two stories in the dystopian anthology Tuned To A Dead Channel by Dagda Publishing, which raises money for charity.

I always have stuff in the works—I’m working on a script to be produced as a short film, I’m shopping some novels, and I am currently in negotiations with a publisher to put out a collection of short stories, we’re just not sure what form it will take. So it’s always something.

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: Charlie Jane Anders
Kevin McNeil

Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired “The Master Conjurer”?

Usually when I start writing a short story, I start out with a particular “hook” or idea, and that ends up being jettisoned during the writing process, because I’ve wound up following some other thread that I got hooked onto. Or I’ll think of something about the world or backstory, and then I’ll wind up building a story that only incidentally uses that world as a setting, without delving into the aspects I originally obsessed about. This was kind of an unusual one in that the first thing that came to me was the notion of, “What if you did a magic spell with no ‘downside,’ and everybody got obsessed with that?” Even then, it only started to click for me when I started thinking of it as a story about dating.

Since 2001, you’ve hosted a monthly spoken word variety show, Writers With Drinks. Tell us a little about this.

Sure! Basically, Writers With Drinks started as a response to a few different issues: (1) I found some literary/spoken word events maybe a little too solemn. (2) There were events focusing on different sorts of writing, like poetry, “literary” fiction, science fiction, or science writing—but no event that combined them into one sort of variety show. (3) Because the readings I went to often featured just one type of writing, they tended to have a pretty homogenous audience, and I always prefer events that mix together different crowds or types of people. (4) I was involved with some struggling non-profits that needed money really badly. So I put together an event that featured as many different kinds of writing as possible, in a way that didn’t suggest one kind was any better than any other kind, and cultivated an emcee style that made the whole project as silly and tongue-in-cheek as possible. It’s pretty amazing to realize how long the event has gone on, and yet I’m still just making it up as I go along!

You are the co-editor of She’s Such a Geek and the managing editor at the popular science fiction blog io9. I’m curious about what a day in your writing life is like. How do you manage a routine that includes blogging, editing, and writing fiction?

I basically think having a good routine is the #1 secret to being successful at anything, but I’m kind of a creature of habit, so I would think that. In any case, my “usual” day, when I don’t have extra commitments, involves working on io9 stuff all morning and most of the afternoon. And then in the late afternoon/early evening, I take a really long walk, which clears my head and gets the blood flowing to my extremities, and I sit in a café and work on my fiction until dinnertime. On a good day, I can squeeze in two or three hours of writing before I grab dinner. And then maybe some more io9 stuff until late at night.

The tone of this story was very different from some other stories of yours I’ve read, like “Six Months, Three Days” (Tor.com, 2011) and “Love Might Be Too Strong A Word” (Lightspeed, August 2012). Did the style and humor come naturally, or was it something you had to work through on revision?

I feel like I come from a background of writing humor, and I’ve worked hard to delve more into emotion and character development and stuff. I always say that humor is texture. It adds some ridges or bumps to the surface of the text. I still really love writing humorous stuff—some of my stories at Strange Horizons, Monkeybicycle, McSweeney’s, or Flurb are more funny. Plus, when I read “Six Months” at an event in NYC last year, I was kind of startled by how much people laughed at it, when I had thought of it as more of a serious piece. These days, mostly I try to let the humor arise out of the characters and situations rather than leaning on the comedy too much, I guess.

This story had me thinking about the influence of the media, instant celebrity, and personal responsibility. Does your work tend to explore particular themes? What would you like an ideal reader to take away from this story?

I used to call myself an absurdist writer, back in the early 2000s—in keeping with the fact that I was doing more straight-up comic fiction. And I think that a lot of the goal of writing fiction, for me and maybe for other people too, is to point out how ridiculous and nonsensical a lot of stuff is. In this story, the media frenzy pretty quickly turns into a look at people’s unfulfilled yearning for the kind of power that they think Peter has. People fantasize about having the ability to change the world, without having to pay any price. Fantasy stories often revolve around the idea of paying a price for magic, and I wanted to approach that from a different direction.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about “The Master Conjurer”? What’s next for you?

I’m desperately trying to finish revising this novel. Fingers crossed!

Kevin McNeil reads slush for Lightspeed Magazine and is an editorial assistant for Nightmare Magazine. He is a physical therapist, sports fanatic, and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2012 and The Center for the Study of Science Fiction’s Intensive Novel Workshop, led by Kij Johnson, in 2011. Kevin is a New Englander currently living in California. Find him on Twitter @kevinmcneil.

Afterword to “An Invocation of Incuriosity”
Neil Gaiman

In lieu of a typical author spotlight—for which Neil Gaiman was not available—instead we present this afterword to “An Invocation of Incuriosity” that Mr. Gaiman wrote and published alongside the story’s original appearance in the anthology Songs of the Dying Earth.

I would have been thirteen. The anthology was called Flashing Swords, the story was called “Morreion,” and it started me dreaming. I found a British paperback copy of The Dying Earth, filled with strange misprints, but the stories were there and they were as magical as “Morreion” had been. In a dark second-hand bookshop where men in overcoats bought used pornography, I found a copy of The Eyes of the Overworld and then tiny dusty books of short stories—“The Moon Moth” is, I felt then and feel now, the most perfectly built SF short story that anyone has ever written—and around that point Jack Vance books began to be published in the UK and suddenly all I had to do to read Jack Vance books was buy them. And I did: The Demon Princes, the Alastor trilogy, and the rest. I loved the way he would digress, I loved the way he would imagine, and most of all I loved the way he wrote it all down: wryly, gently, amused, like a god would be amused, but never in a way that made less of what he wrote, like James Branch Cabell but with a heart as well as a brain.

Every now and again I’ve noticed myself crafting a Vance sentence, and it always makes me happy when I do—but he’s not a writer I’d ever dare to imitate. I don’t think he’s imitable.

There are few enough of the writers I loved when I was thirteen I can see myself going back to in twenty years from now. Jack Vance I will reread forever.

© 2009 by Neil Gaiman.

Originally published in Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance,

Edited by George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Neil Gaiman’s most recent novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, was published in June 2013. His previous novel, the international bestseller The Graveyard Book, won the prestigious Newbery and Carnegie medals, the first author to win both for the same book. Other novels include American Gods, Coraline, Stardust, Neverwhere, and Anansi Boys, among many others. In addition to his novel writing, Gaiman also created and scripted the popular comic book series Sandman. Most of Gaiman’s short work has been collected in the volumes Smoke and Mirrors, Fragile Things, and M is for Magic. He is the winner of four Hugos, two Nebulas, four Stokers, the Carnegie Medal, the World Fantasy Award, and seventeen Locus Awards, among many other honors.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in November, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Sean Williams (“Death and the Hobbyist”—a Twinmaker Story) and Beth Revis (“The Turing Test”), along with SF reprints by James Tiptree, Jr. (“And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side”) and James Stoddard (“The Battle of York”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kelly Barnhill (“The Insect and the Astronomer”) and Matthew Hughes (“Sleeper”—a Kaslo Chronicles tale), and fantasy reprints by Ian McDonald (“Tonight We Fly”) and Maria Dahvana Headley (“Bit-u-men”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with Chris Kluwe and Ryan North.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella “Holy Places” by Martha Wells 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: Siobhan Carroll (“The Correspondence Between the Governess and the Attic”), Hao Jingfang (“Invisible Planets”), 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”), James Patrick Kelly (“Stinger, Straight Up”), Kat Howard (“A Different Fate”), Sarah Pinsker (“No Lonely Seafarer”), Carrie Vaughn (“Harry and Marlowe and the Intrigues at the Aetherian Exhibition”), Seth Dickinson (“A Tank Only Fears Four Things”), Chen Quifan (“The Mao Ghost”), Jessica Barber (“Coma Kings”), Carmen Maria Machado (“Observations About Eggs . . .”), and Linda Nagata (“Codename: Delphi”). Plus, we’ve got three more all-new Erm Kaslo tales by Matthew Hughes in the queue, which take place in the author’s popular 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!

The Crowgirl
Megan Arkenberg

I.

The crowgirl decided they would set up camp on a low hill at the eastern edge of a cornfield. There was a dark copse of trees to the south and a slow muddy stream, its shore sharp and crunching with crayfish corpses. To the north was the roofless barn, pale brown beneath the red and purple clouds; the stench of rotting horses was so strong that even the crows avoided the place as they darted between the dry cornstalks, looking for mice. From the camp on the hill they could see everything, the river and the barn with its silos of molding grain, the hunting crows, and far to the west, in the square white farmhouse with its padlocked cellar door, the congregation of the Dead.

(One for sorrow, two for joy.)

“It’s a big nest,” said Josh, a big dark boy who rode shotgun in the crowgirl’s station wagon, watching out the windshield through his grandfather’s army-issue binoculars. “Thirty of them, maybe. They’re just sitting in the front room, no space to move.”

“Wonder how that feels,” muttered the crowgirl’s sister, who shared the back seat with a couple dozen gallons of gasoline and a trio of ancient, milky-eyed crows.

(Three for a woman, four for a boy.)

“Why aren’t they hunting?” the crowgirl asked.

Josh shrugged. “Nothing to hunt for.”

“There’s us,” Crystal said. She sat in the middle seat, in front of the crowgirl’s sister, and kept craning her neck to stare out the back window.

“Yeah, well.” Josh looked pointedly up at the black wings circling ahead of them, fragmenting the sun. “We’re not too easy to get.”

II.

“Someday,” the crowgirl told her sister, “you’re going to realize that you like me.”

They were walking across the rustling cornfield, the no-man’s land between their camp and the house of the Dead. Each footfall kicked up little clouds of white dust, glittering in the sunlight like powdered bone. The tiny shadows of high-flying birds made a patchwork of blue-black on the dead earth around them.

(Five for silver, six for gold.)

“Not that you love me,” the crowgirl continued in her low, beautiful voice. She was fifteen and skinny, deceptively fragile, but her voice flowed like honey. “You probably know that already. But someday—in a year or two, when I’m dead—you’ll be walking across a field and you’ll pause suddenly because you’ll remember a joke I used to make, or the way I used to braid your hair for you.”

The crowgirl’s sister kept her eyes on the pinwheeling earth-bound shadows and said nothing.

(Seven for a secret never to be told.)

“So now I’m telling you that I know. I know that you like me, deep down, so you don’t need to feel bad when I’m dead that you never told me yourself.”

“None of that’s ever going to happen,” said the crowgirl’s sister between gritted teeth. She steadfastly refused to look at the horizon.

III.

On the day they set up camp, the crowgirl’s sister was four months, two weeks, and five days pregnant.

(One for death, two for birth.)

This is how it happened:

They were almost out of gasoline. Gael and the crowgirl’s sister wanted to ditch the station wagon, load up on food and head farther west on foot, where fewer towns meant fewer congregations of Dead. After all, the crowgirl’s sister reasoned, ninety percent of their scuffles and close encounters could be avoided if they didn’t enter populated areas for gas. But everyone else, including the crowgirl, thought the occasional attack at the gas station was worth the added speed and storage capacity of the vehicle.

So it was agreed that the five of them, the crowgirl and Kenasia and Josh and Crystal and Ryan, would take the station wagon into Courville to fill the tank and gas cans and to grab as many soup packets, lighters, and bags of potato chips as they could carry. The crowgirl’s sister also wanted cigarettes, but Kenasia, who had perforce quit cold turkey, refused to let them in the car. “You want that shit so bad, you come into town with us and get it,” she said, parodying the crowgirl’s sister’s slurred, truncated sentences. “I’m not even looking at it. Unless you can find a pharmacy that’s still got nicotine patches?”

“Jesus Christ, don’t be such a bitch,” said the crowgirl’s sister. “It’s not like you quit for your health.”

(Three for mourning, four for mirth.)

“You know what’s good for my health? Not running unprepared into every goddamn gas station we pass because I need a smoke.”

“How’s that any different from needing gasoline?”

“You can blow up zombies with gasoline and a match,” Gael interjected smugly. “Only thing you can do with a match and Newport Kings is give yourself lung cancer.” Tall, skinny, and near-sighted, Gael was a total ass.

So while the others drove into town and Gael poked around the side of the road, stirring up anthills and bursting mushrooms with a stick, the crowgirl’s sister found a gravel path that led off into the woods, which were so thick and dark that even the high noon sun left the mossy trail unlit. Nothing stirred in the treetops. The swallows and robins and blue-jays were gone, dead or flown south, and all the crows and ravens were following the crowgirl, hungering after the Dead. A chipmunk darted unafraid along the path in front of the crowgirl’s sister, its white tail rusty with blood.

The trail wound past an old battlefield, where someone in the early days of the plague had stuck the severed heads of the Dead onto old fence posts. Even that didn’t silence them; a woman’s eyeless skull snapped its flesh-clotted teeth at the crowgirl’s sister as she walked past. Eat the flesh, scatter the bones; that was the only sure way to stop them. But at least it couldn’t follow her.

The gory fence ran parallel to the gravel path for a little over a mile, before the trail turned sharply east and began to crawl up a hill. The crowgirl’s sister had to crouch down beneath the low clutching branches of pine and yew, pulling herself up the sharp scree on hands and knees.

A low steel-sided house stood at the top of the hill, plywood over its windows. On the deep front porch, there was a floral-cushioned swing with a boy sitting on it.

(Five for heaven, six for hell.)

He looked about Josh’s age, twenty or twenty-one, with a ginger shadow along his firm jaw and a head of thick red hair. His skin was pale, except where a trail of freckles ran over his cheekbones and across the bridge of his nose. A hunting bow lay across his blue-jeaned knees, and a coffee can held a sheaf of arrows like a scrawny porcupine at his feet. He was sipping a Diet Coke and reading a three-year-old issue of Forbes.

“Hey,” said the crowgirl’s sister, dusting pine needles from her knees. “You got any regular Coke, or just diet?”

She half-expected him to grab an arrow from the can and fit it to his bow before he looked up and saw that it was just her, a big seventeen-year-old with sap in her hair and a hunting knife in her belt, baby fat still softening her cheeks. She half-wanted to see him startle. But he looked first, bending down the corner of his page before closing his magazine. He had been reading an article about online investing.

“No,” he said, “just diet. It’s pretty warm, but it’s still got fizz. Try it.”

He held the pale silver can out to her. She took a sip, sucking the thin liquid from the rim of the can. The bubbles stung the roof of her mouth.

“Why are you reading that?” she asked, nodding to the Forbes.

“I like the advertisements,” he said. “Last week I finished the back issues of National Geographic. Next week I’m starting Vanity Fair. It keeps me busy.”

“Do you live here?”

He nodded, smiling.

“Were you the one who piked all those Dead along the fence?”

He nodded again. Her admiration seemed to affect him somehow, to give him a sudden burst of energy. He kicked the rotting boards of the porch floor, carrying his swing back and forth.

(Seven for a secret none can tell.)

“You want to come inside?” he asked.

She did.

He fell asleep afterward, on the floral-sheeted mattress he’d dragged into what used to be the living room. A dead television set still stood against one wall, and the tiny fake-marble fireplace had a blanket of ash on the floor. The crowgirl’s sister looked around as she tugged on her khakis and buttoned her sweater, committing everything to memory: the dust on the television screen, the grape-vine pattern on the wallpaper, the way a bar of sunlight snuck through the plywood and gilded one side of her lover’s sleeping face. Her right bicep throbbed a little from when he had dragged her up on top; she had been hesitant to straddle him, her wide soft thighs seemed so much stronger than his boney hips. In an hour or two she would have a truly impressive bruise. For now, she crouched clumsily beside his head and kissed the tip of his freckled nose. She knew she wouldn’t see him again.

(One for sunshine, two for rain.)

Outside, the sun had begun to set, and a chill breeze was blowing out of the north. She drew her hunting knife and ran all the way back to the road, where Gael was practically hyperventilating in the back seat of the full-tanked station wagon, where Kenasia wasn’t even trying to hide the cigarette stubs in the wet grass at her feet, where Josh was peering worriedly into the blackening woods—where the crowgirl was sitting calmly on the roof, a raven on each shoulder, a knowing smile on her face.

IV.

The crowgirl became the crowgirl when she was seven years old. Her sister was nine. They were playing outside the chicken house on their aunt’s farm, tossing handfuls of sand at the big white hen and then darting away, giggling, as it lunged at their ankles with its vicious red beak. The crowgirl was leaning against the coop wall, panting to catch her breath, when a huge green-black bird dropped out of the sky, clamping its talons over something in the dust at her sandaled feet. The hens screamed, puffing their feathers, and the crowgirl’s sister took up a stick, thinking the massive crow was after the chickens. But the crowgirl had started screaming too, pointing to the thing in the crow’s claws.

It was a thick yellow snake, its head still stretched toward the damp hole it had burrowed beneath the floor of the chicken house.

From that day on, the crows followed her everywhere. They flocked on the sidewalk in front of the housing unit, pecking at worms and unsettling passers-by. They perched on the window ledge outside the crowgirl’s second-grade classroom, interrupting the math lessons with their hard, metallic voices. When the bigger girls cornered her on top of the jungle gym, the crows would swoop down and grab wispy clawfuls of hair.

(Three for pleasure, four for pain.)

One day, when the crowgirl was eleven and her sister was thirteen, they went into the woods between the middle school and high school to meet a boy the crowgirl’s sister liked. He was fifteen years old, a sophomore, and he smoked cigarettes and other things that made his sweatshirts smell strange. That day, he was using a pocket knife to pick apart the corpse of a gray squirrel. The crowgirl’s sister wasn’t sure if he had killed it or found it dead.

He looked angry when he saw that the crowgirl had come along.

“What’d you bring the freak for?” he asked, tossing ultramarine hair out of his eyes. He had gorgeous eyes, bright blue with long golden lashes, and had dyed his hair to match. “I wanted to see you alone, fat girl, just you and me.”

(Five for flowers, six for snow.)

“You make her scared,” the crowgirl said.

Her sister punched her in the arm and the boy laughed. He closed his knife and tucked it into the pocket of his tight black jeans.

“That true, fat girl? Do I make you scared?”

He scuttled toward her, still low to the ground, like a spider. The crowgirl’s sister yelped. A raven darted out of the treetops, shouting like an angry mother, and scratched three deep, bloody trenches in the hand that was reaching for his knife. The boy swore, licking blood from his fingers. He stood up, spat bloody saliva at the girls’ shoes, and stamped back toward the high school.

The raven cawed in self-satisfaction and began eating the dead squirrel.

V.

The crowgirl’s sister’s name is Gabrielle. The crowgirl has a name, too, but no one uses it anymore, not even her crows.

At night, in the tent she shares with Kenasia on top of the hill, the crowgirl’s sister whispers a name into her pillow.

(Seven for a secret none can know.)

Sometimes, the crowgirl’s sister thinks of herself in the third person.

VI.

When the crowgirl’s sister was four months, two weeks, and six days pregnant, she went down to the muddy river in the copse of trees to wash the morning sickness out of her t-shirt. She went alone. This was against the rule that they’d all agreed on after Gael wandered off to pee and got jumped by a pair of Dead. The crows came down, but too late; Gael’s spine had been snapped.

The crowgirl’s sister knelt on the riverbank and pulled her shirt over her head. Her belly, always soft and round, had begun to feel firmer over the last month, sturdier, as if a secret team of engineers had fortified her insides. Three or four times, she’d thought she felt the baby kick, but then she thought it might have been too early. Her brown skin had taken on a deep purple tinge in places, like another bruise left by her lover’s urgency.

(One for the wicked, two for the just.)

As she scrubbed her shirt in the river, a hot tickle of sweat ran down from the base of her neck, pooling at the ridge that her bra strap dug into her back. Pausing only a moment, as she thought of Josh and his binoculars, the crowgirl’s sister unhooked her bra and set it on the sandy bank. She took off her sandals, sweatpants, and panties with the word “sexy” printed across the seat, and slid into the water. It was not particularly deep, and it was warmer than she’d expected. She took a handful of dry leaves from the shore and scrubbed the sweat and dust from her limbs. Closing her eyes, she ducked her head beneath the surface and let the slow current loosen her tangled braid.

When her head broke the surface, she heard the raven’s warning caw.

The crowgirl’s sister grabbed her knife from the pile of clothes on the bank. The raven was darting low overhead, from one dead black branch to another, a hunter in pursuit of—something. Something moving toward her. She strained her ears in the windless silence. All around her, the fallen leaves lay undisturbed, broken branches dangled still as church columns.

“Who’s there?” she called, raising the knife.

(Three for water, four for dust.)

The raven dove suddenly behind the tangled roots of an oak. There was a thrashing, the sound of something tearing, and a woman’s voice shouted: “Don’t let it hurt me! I just want to talk.”

The crowgirl’s sister hesitated.

The raven screamed again, briefly, its voice cut off by a heavy thump. The Dead woman had thrown a rock. She emerged from behind the tree roots, shuffling broken legs, her black, thick-nailed hands thrown up to shield her face from the departing bird.

“It will come back,” she said as the oily wings dwindled in the distance. “I have to talk quickly, and you must listen. I have an offer to make.”

VII.

The crowgirl’s sister was prettier than the crowgirl. Part of this was because she was two years older; her breasts and hips were fuller, her eyes heavy-lidded and just a little sunken, so that she looked permanently ready to come to bed. Before the plague, back when she could do her make-up every morning, she lined her sleepy eyes in bright blue and painted her lips with icy pink gloss that smelled like strawberry or watermelon. It had been over a year since she wore lip gloss, but she remembered its taste, thick and sweet, like kissing, like sex.

The crowgirl’s sister had slept with Josh and Ryan, and once with Kenasia. Josh was sweet and Ryan liked it when she pushed him down and whispered in his ear, but Kenasia was by far the best, those soft kissable lips, the way she knew exactly what to do with her tobacco-sour tongue.

(Five for mountains, six for the deep.)

The crowgirl had huge pores, a flat chest, and chewed-down fingernails. Her eyes were tiny and her hair looked constantly in need of shampoo. As far as the crowgirl’s sister knew, the crowgirl hadn’t slept with anyone, ever. But she was skinny. She had a low, musical voice. She had the crows. And everyone loved her.

VIII.

When the crowgirl’s sister was dressed again, her wet hair knotted back in a sloppy braid, the Dead woman sat in the hollow of an oak’s roots and spoke. “Is it true that carrion birds obey your sister?”

There was a strange reverence in the way she said carrion birds. The crowgirl’s sister wondered if that phrase meant something different, something more, among the Dead.

“Crows and ravens, yeah. Sometimes vultures, but only if they’re weak or starving.”

“How does she do it?”

The crowgirl’s sister shrugged, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “Dunno. Never asked.”

“Never?”

“Never. Maybe I just don’t want to know.” She opened her knife, pushed the blade back into the handle with the pad of her thumb. Click-clack. She was keeping an eye to the east, toward the farmhouse and the rest of the congregation. Dead always hunted in packs. “This conversation got a point?”

The Dead woman’s chipped brown teeth closed over the place where her lower lip had been months of decomposition before. The crowgirl’s sister wondered if all the Dead kept their mannerisms like that, or if this woman was just new. She suspected the latter. She’d never known the Dead to talk before. “We want a truce,” the Dead woman said. “An exchange.”

“Okay.”

“Your sister for your lives.”

The crowgirl’s sister said nothing.

(Seven for a secret the dead will keep.)

“Look,” said the Dead woman, bending close. She smelled of stagnant water. The black strips of flesh that still clung above her nose and eyes were wrinkled, like furrows in mud. “We’re afraid of your sister. We admit it. Our only predators obey her, follow in her wake. But how safe can she really keep you—forever? How safe did she keep Gael?”

“How do you know his name?”

“We feasted.” The crowgirl’s sister didn’t know if that was the answer to her question or if the Dead woman was following some thoughtful track of her own. “Someday you will also be consumed. You’ll wander too far, or in a place too low and close for the crows to reach.”

“I won’t—”

“Even now.” The Dead woman raised her voice, a painful-sounding process, like strumming on a wire stretched to its limit. “What’s protecting you now? Where are the birds?”

“I have a knife.” She was thinking of her baby’s father, of the line of Dead skulls impaled on the fence posts. “I can fight you.”

“Will your child be able to fight us when it’s born?”

(One for weakness, two for might.)

“Give us your sister,” the Dead woman said, dropping her voice again. “Give us your sister and we will place a mark on you, you and your companions and anyone else you choose. Forever. None of us will harm you again.”

“But what would you do to my sister?”

A raven cawed nearby, invisible among the leaves.

The Dead woman looked away.

“They wouldn’t let me,” the crowgirl’s sister said. “Josh and Kenasia and the rest. They like her too much. I just couldn’t.” But she could hear her own uncertainty. The Dead woman was animated, almost smiling; she seemed to be listening for some approaching thing.

“Perhaps your sister thinks differently,” she said.

The crowgirl’s sister followed the Dead woman’s gaze. There was the crowgirl, the injured raven on her shoulder, walking slowly back toward the camp. “Damn,” the crowgirl’s sister said. She leapt up and took off running after her.

The Dead woman’s eyes followed her up the hill.

IX.

It was a brief meeting back at the camp, the crowgirl speaking calmly from the top of the station wagon, the crowgirl’s sister pacing until her sandals chaffed. Josh stood up as soon as the crowgirl finished telling the terms of the Dead woman’s offer. He pulled up a sprig of woody grass with colorless, spidery roots and began to chew on it, looking west toward the farmhouse. “No,” he said. “It’s out of the question.”

Crystal mumbled something that sounded like agreement, tracing patterns in the mud with a dirty fingernail. Kenasia was gone, huffing on a cigarette at the base of the hill.

Ryan, perched on an overturned coffee can, looked profoundly uncomfortable. “They’ve got a point about Gael.”

(Three for day, four for night.)

“So what?” Josh’s deep voice cracked around the second word. “Gael made a mistake and he paid for it. The rest of us have lived this long, and it’s only because of her.”

“What about when she’s gone?” the crowgirl’s sister said.

Josh and Ryan stared at her. Crystal was still tracing patterns in the mud, chewing the inside of her cheek. The crowgirl, stroking the feathers of the raven on her knee, looked as impassive as stone.

“She isn’t going to live forever,” the crowgirl’s sister said. “Zombies or heart attack or a fucking brain tumor, something’s going to happen. The birds’ll be gone. And we might not be around, but our children will.”

Josh spat out a gob of grass. Ryan glanced at the crowgirl, but she wasn’t looking at anyone, just the oily rainbow of her raven’s feathers.

(Five for heaven, six for hell.)

“I’m going to do it,” the crowgirl said. “I’m sorry, Josh, but Gabrielle is right. If you let them have me, you can demand protection for everyone. All of you, all of your children and grandchildren until the end of the world. That’s worth my life.”

“Let’s vote on it,” Josh said desperately. He was trying not to cry.

“No,” said the crowgirl. She looked up from her raven. Her eyes were wet and pink. “I’m going to do it.”

X.

She asked her sister to walk with her across the field. It was late afternoon, still warm and sunny, and crows and ravens looped through the dusty air. Their cries echoed in the distant hills, sharp sounds of mourning.

“It’s okay,” the crowgirl said, reaching for her sister’s hand. “I wouldn’t want to live like this forever. And I don’t want your daughter to grow up like this.”

(Seven for a secret none can tell.)

“She won’t,” the crowgirl’s sister said tightly. “I’ll make sure.” She watched the shadows of the birds, her hand resting on her belly.

XI.

The Dead streamed out of the farmhouse to meet them. Brown and blue, yellow and black, their dirty hair hanging in tangled mats and their eyes filmy and weeping. The crows swooped down to tear at them, but the crowgirl muttered something and waved her hands, and the birds dispersed.

She stopped a hundred feet from the sagging farmhouse porch and drew her sister up beside her. “Mark her first,” she said.

A Dead woman came forward, the one who had made the offer by the river. Her eyes were bloody but startlingly blue. She went to the crowgirl’s sister and pressed three bony fingertips to her forehead. She was humming a low, mournful melody that seemed to come from a deeper place than her decaying lungs. When the Dead woman lifted her hand again, the crowgirl’s sister felt a sharp bone-deep pain running down from her forehead.

(One for sickness, two for health.)

“Remember this,” the Dead woman said. The crowgirl’s sister nodded; she didn’t think she would ever forget the melody, the touch of those dead fingertips. “You can pass the mark to whomever you wish. We will treat you like one of our own.” She turned to the crowgirl. “Are you ready?”

(Three for famine, four for wealth.)

“Yes,” the crowgirl said. “Look away, Gabrielle.”

But I did not look away.

XII.

When it was over, the crows descended. Hundreds of them, thousands, beaks shining red and golden in the sunset. They scattered their sharp feathers like shadows over the field. They fell upon the Dead, feasting as the Dead had feasted on the crowgirl.

(Five for a coward, six for the brave.)

When they finished eating, they dispersed. And the crowgirl’s sister stood alone in the field of bones and shadows and death.

XIII.

Every day, I walk through fields.

I smell the rotting corn or the rain or the wild-blooming flowers. I feel the grass whipping soundlessly against my legs or the mud sucking at my heels. Sometimes my daughter walks with me, stopping at every round pebble or curious shining feather she comes across. The wind runs its fingers through her red-tinged hair, and I see the mark like three burned fingerprints on her little forehead.

Some days, the crows are flying. I watch their shadows on the earth and wonder if this will be the day I like my sister.

(Seven for a secret I’ll take to the grave.)

© 2013 by Megan Arkenberg.

Megan Arkenberg is a student in Wisconsin. In the name of story research, she racks up late fees at the college library, gets dizzyingly lost along the shores of Lake Michigan, consumes a steady diet of M.R. James, and lusts quietly after the architecture and costume of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her work has appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and dozens of other places. She procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance and the historical fiction e-zine Lacuna.