Editorial, December 2013
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue forty-three of Lightspeed!

The World Fantasy Awards were presented at the World Fantasy Convention, held this year in Brighton, England, Oct. 31 – Nov. 3. As we mentioned previously, Kat Howard’s story, “Breaking the Frame” (Lightspeed, August 2012), was a finalist for the award this year, as was your humble editor (now for the fifth time), this time in the Best Anthology category, for Epic: Legends of Fantasy. Alas and alack, both Kat and I lost in our respective categories. But, as always, it was a thrill to be nominated, and congrats to all of the winners!

In other news: 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.

You can now also buy ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine—all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the Bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

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 (and Fantasy) store are provided in both epub and mobi formats.

And, on top of all that—if you dig the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy interviews we’ve been presenting to you here in Lightspeed, good news: Now you can buy complete episode transcripts in ebook format. So now in addition to reading the great interviews we line up for Geek’s Guide, you can also read transcripts of our panel discussions, which cover topics such as video games, swordfighting, The Wizard of Oz, Robert H. Howard, weird fiction . . . and all manner of subjects. If you’d like to learn more, just go to www.geeksguideshow.com to find out where you can get the ebook transcripts.

And our last bit of news this month before we get to our stories: We’ve once 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 Hao Jingfang (“Invisible Planets,” translated by Ken Liu) and Gregory Benford (“Leaving Night”), along with SF reprints by Maureen F. McHugh (“Dead Fads”) and David Barr Kirtley (“Power Armor: A Love Story”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by James Patrick Kelly (“Miss Nobody Never Was”) and Siobhan Carroll (“The Correspondence Between the Governess and the Attic”), and fantasy reprints by William Browning Spencer (“The Foster Child”) and Kit Reed (“Yard Sale”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with Jay Lake and Margaret Atwood.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella “The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear's Stead” by Damien Broderick and a novel excerpt of Twinmaker by Sean Williams.

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at 47North. This month, look for Alien Honor by Vaughn Heppner (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.

The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear’s Stead
Damien Broderick

I was there, my smalls, when empire came crashing down about the ears of the old galactics. This is what the wickedest man in the galaxy told his wife at the time: “When the entire universe is blowing itself to buggery, the only prudent course of action is to be Emperor of the whole goddamn shebang.”

I torqued into the High Imperial demesne in full ceremonial drag, and the stinky heat wrenched open every pore of my body. Humid summer’s sun, on that fabled world, was a fat hot peach drifting in watered claret. For a while I just stood there gasping, letting the sweat run into my mouth. Off to one side of the clearing was a monstrous, leaning sail woven all of straw and decorated on its face with faces: gargoyle shields in rank on row, lofting fifty meters to the structure’s pointed tip. At its base was a hut, the lower swelling of the sail, with two pert pierced nipples for leaving and entering. All the foliage of the ferns and trees beyond the clearing was hard somber green, tricking the eye to see varieties of black. It took me some effort to pick out the hunched servant at work on his shrubs and herbs in the garden.

I sighed, finally, and went to see what he was doing. Undoubtedly he was the filthiest old man I’d ever set eyes on, his tawny pelt thick with greasy emulsions on those patches where the hair had not been plucked out and his hide cicatrized with welts and gouges, nothing like the delicate tattoos which grace your mothers’ upper lips. He had a ripe aroma, like a wormy cheese left to warm beside the hearth, and I was obliged to turn my head aside and regain myself. When I looked again over his preoccupied shoulder, shielding my eyes against the orange sun, I saw that his hands moved through a pale glaze of sapphire light, a streaky weft of blue radiance. My telephone rang.

Entranced by the light, I fumbled for the receiver at my belt. “Yep?”

“This is Roger, your Life Support System.”

“What is it, Roger?” I said patiently.

“Let go of your nose and start the recorders, That’s Cerenkov radiation.”

“How extraordinary.” I did as the Liss suggested, and the holofield’s subdued ticking came on. It was hardly necessary to give public notice that a recording was being made, since the gardener had no way of knowing I was there (which, strictly speaking, I wasn’t), but the equipment had been designed to conform to standing regulations.

“Roger, what’s a servant doing with tachyon manipulation? I thought magic was strictly reserved to Imperial citizens.”

“So he’s a citizen,” the telephone deduced acerbically. “Maybe he just likes pottering with flowers. Bowsprit, that’s not all. There’s a raft of meron activity coming from the jungle to your right.”

“Vacuum fluctuations?” The dirty old beast was still fiddling with the damp soil, his stubby fingers drifting through blue pale webs. “Roger, have you been thoroughly serviced lately? The barbarians are still several light-hours away, and you know how these people feel about physical technology.”

“Have it your own way,” the Liss said sulkily. “Every single sensor in my pack reports singularity flux not half a kilometer from here, and coming closer, but if you wish to insist that—Bowsprit, the tachyons are gone.”

“So I see.” My eyes stung with sweat, but I’d noticed the sapphire haze flick out. With a grunt and a groan the old fellow got up off his knees and turned in my direction. Uncannily, he seemed to glance straight into my eyes. He placed his grubby hands on the crown of his head and lowered them to his cheeks, whining loudly, and barked like a dog.

Ah, you jump and squeal, my sproggies. Imagine my reaction! My belly turned over and little mice did cartwheels in it. Every lock of my beard bit at my throat and the sweat laving my flesh turned to beads of crisp dew. Before I could gather my wits, the grimy derelict dropped his arms, regarded me with a quizzical moue, and fell into that squatting posture we know so well. Stupefied, I watched him brush the fingers of his right hand (bronze-furred, the nails ragged and blackened) across the palm of his left, watched him brush right palm with left fingertips. My will bobbed away from my mind, and I found myself without deliberation on my own haunches, respectfully brushing my palms in greeting. The claws on the paws of my sacred garb fell together with a rattle. I babbled some nonsense in our own tongue, while my mind whirled to catch up with my well-bred instincts. Then I rose, with what dignity I could, and gave the old man my name in his people’s Vocal Tongue. The telephone was ringing; I ignored it, and it stopped.

“Neither wild animal nor man, eh?” the Neanderthal said. His hand stroked lightly my borrowed pelt. “And no star barbarian either, to judge by your phenotype.” He tugged at my beard, which in those sprightly days came only to the mid-point of my breast. “Your eyes are not crooked, young man, and your skin has a curious pallor. But come, let me show you an unusual vegetable, as rare perhaps in its kingdom as you are in ours.” And he crouched down again into his plot of turned soil, and fetched me down beside him.

I knew these people for great workers of magic, my smalls, and I was not appalled to find a mass of stems, densely packed and decked with yellow, where a minute earlier had been only naked earth and flimmery sapphire. What dried my tongue was the simple fact of his seeing me, addressing me. We were, by every law of physics known to me, mutual ghosts, he in his time, I in mine. Under the shelter of Heisenberg, I was a skein of virtual particles, instanton fluctuations in the zero-energy state. Yet my chin smarted from his tug to my whiskers. It was all quite impossible. If possible, it was horrendous.

He delved into his garden miracle and snapped off a bloom in one hand, a leaf in the other. The leaf was deepest green, heavily veined, like the tissue of a stretched scrotal sac. The old man touched it with his tongue, chewed, grimaced, spat it out. He held up the flower to me, detailing its salient features.

“I haven’t altered its genome much, though it craved a cooler climate. It has four petals, not terribly attractive, and four sepals. Here is its pistil, and you will find six stamens. Evidently one of the Cruciferae, the mustards, you know. Marx calls it Brassica rapa, but Smith insists it’s a rutabaga.” He popped the flower into his mouth, munched without pleasure, and discarded it. “Pity. I was informed that it’s edible. Are you a keen gardener yourself?”

Wordless, I shook my head. I realized, then, that he would not recognize the gesture, but I was wrong. He shot me a hard look.

“How may I serve you, then, sir? I had imagined that you were here to view my horticulture.”

The telephone rang. I screamed with frustrated rage and snatched the receiver up.

“God damn it!” I covered the mouthpiece with my palm and told the Neanderthal, “Excuse me for a moment.”

“This is Roger, your Life Support System.”

“I guessed. Listen, Roger, I’m in the middle of—”

“Bowsprit, don’t blow it. He’s right about the plant, the rutabaga is a related but different herb, Brassica napobrassica. This one’s a turnip. Tell him to pull up the root, but not to gnaw on it—it has to be cooked.”

“Roger, you’re a gem.”

“Don’t hang up. Those singularities are getting closer. There are two of them. Marx and Smith?”

“Presumably. I’ll get back to you.” I passed on the facts to the old fellow, trying to breathe through my mouth. You have no idea how bad he smelled. He unearthed a number of spherical roots with tails, their plump white bodies swathed at the top in purple much darker than the sky.

“Fascinating,” he said, peeling one open. “You don’t happen to know how to prepare them, I suppose? Marx obtained the seeds for me for my birthday, but it would never occur to him to get a recipe. They don’t eat, you see.”

I risked offending him, but there couldn’t have been any alternative explanation. “There are mechanisms from Earth here, at the Imperial Palace?”

“Just the two. Robots. Artificial human beings, as it were. The barbarians sent them a long time ago, as a gift to the last Emperor. They’re very old, like me.” He took my elbow in a comradely way. “Can I offer you a drink? Come in out of the hot sun, you’re sweating like a pig, you know. Tell me, are all your race so hairy? Do you all have two heads?”

With some embarrassment, I tapped the dead, ferocious jaws which gaped over my forehead. “This is a vestment, Old Father, a costume. It is of sacred significance. I wear the head and pelt of my brother Bear when I, uh, voyage.”

“I thought his eye was a trifle glazed.” We started toward the great sail-hut, and my telephone rang.

“This is Roger, your Life Support System.”

“I know already. Can’t you leave us in peace for—”

“To prepare a delicious turnip ragout,” the Liss said, “peel a dozen baby turnips, not too long in the ground, mind, and set them aside. Blend a large spoonful of flour in the same quantity of melted dripping, heating and stirring until the blend is yellow. Add a cup of stock and bring to the boil. Put in the turnips, seasoned with salt, pepper, and two teaspoons of sugar, and simmer for about three-quarters of an hour. Tender, the turnip is a toothsome treat.”

“Thank you, Roger.”

“A pleasure. Do you hear that crashing in the trees?”

Now that he mentioned it. Alarmed, I looked questioningly at the scarred, naked ancient. He was staring with interest at the handpiece of my Liss. When I was younger I was enormously proud of the instrument, a beautiful and delicate receiver, fragile with brass and ivory and carved black wood. I slammed it down. “Are there wild animals here?” Children, you see that I had lost all perspective. The most fearsome of carnivores could no more hurt me, in my virtual state, than it could detect my presence. Nor, of course, could I hurt it, even if it ran straight through me.

“Calm yourself, young man. It is only my robots. They will not molest you.”

“Your—?” The spark, belatedly, arced. I threw myself on the grass at his feet. “Magnificence, forgive me. I failed to recognize your Mightiness.” This was impromptu stuff, and went against the grain, but I understood without difficulty that if the incomparable magic of the Galactic Emperor enabled him to see and hear me I’d be well advised to keep on his good side.

“Get up, get up, lad, you’ll smother under all that fur.” He helped me to my feet, and his grip and leverage were startlingly strong. “There’s no need to burden me with all that court crap in the sanctuary of my own garden. Bowsprit Bear’s Stead,” he said, “my name is Lyric Music Stirs Too Fierce the Heart, and it’s refreshing to make your acquaintance. In private, you must call me Lyric Music. Now, let’s get that drink before you expire. Besides, you still haven’t told me how to cook these admirable herbs.”

I grinned suddenly at him and shouted over the racket at the edge of the clearing, “As it happens, Sire, I just happen to have a most delectable recipe. First, you peel your turnips—”

A sharp report cracked behind us, and I jumped around to see a splintered tree fall into the springy arms of its neighbor. Into the clearing, skirting the Emperor’s rude garden by a breath and preceded by plentiful teeth-jarring subsonic P-, S-, and surface-type earthquake waves, lumbered an immense polished cylinder. Its locomotion was bipedal: The elephantine metal legs rose and fell thunderously in a quintessential parody of the machine technology that the old galactics despised so ardently. It gave an awful blast on its klaxon as it spied the Emperor.

“Sire!” it cried, grinding toward us. “Condition Red! Alert! Situation Triple-Danger! Withdraw to the deep bunkers!” In the center of its torso a hefty ruby spun and glinted, bloodier than sun or sky: part of a laser detection system, and surprisingly merry.

“Smith, Smith,” said Lyric Music, his tone weary. “Calm down. Show some regard for our guest.” To me he said, “They are a hysterical breed, these robots. Nothing will satisfy them but rumors of war.” Smith had quietened at once, but hopped from one mighty leg to the other with unrelieved anxiety. It stood fifteen meters high in the puddle of its own shadow. The Emperor patted its left leg affectionately. “This one, Bowsprit, was the military executive computer for the barbarians’ Right-Hand Hegemony. Marx served the same role for their traditional enemy, the Left-Hand Hegemony. They were dispatched to the Empire as a gift by the previous Chairman of Earth’s Glorious Republic. Apparently they were obsolescent, but they can run up a nice woven hut in double time.” He gestured to the leaning sail.

In a tiny, strangled voice, the robot said: “Permission to speak, Sire?” The confused crashing from the midst of the trees had not ceased; I could hear more trees crumpling.

“Of course, my dear, but keep it cogent. My guest is thirsty, and seems quite faint from the heat of the day.”

“Guest?” muttered Smith. “I see no guest, only a ghost, a disturbance in the vacuum. Still, I guess you’re the boss.” I perceived in the robot a family resemblance to my Liss. All machines are adept at dumb insolence. “Sire, the barbarians are coming. The Empire is on the verge of collapse.”

“Oh, that. The Empire has been on the verge of collapse for five hundred years. Bowsprit, why don’t you take that damned shaggy suit off and come inside. I have a euphoriant potation you’ll like, distilled from the ichor of a certain native bush leech.”

“Gospodin! Mein Liebling!” cried a hoarse excited voice. Rearing and careening, a second robot thumped across the grass out of the trees. Half the height of Smith, chubby, propelled by four bald tires, it accelerated toward its companion in a mad rush. Smith leaped to one side and sprinted away.

“Your hole!” shouted Marx. “Open to me your hole, my little mouse, for I am on fire!” It executed a neat slalom turn, bright bronze shell blurring, and tripped the first robot to the ground. The shock of impact bruised my ankles, and I felt my knees buckle. Halfway between horror and hilarity, I saw the enormous rubber hose that extruded questingly from Marx’s undercarriage. It pulsed; a wave ran from its base to the glowing metal connecting jack at its tip. “I burn, dumpling!”

“Get away from me, you loathsome brute,” shrieked Smith, furrowing backwards through the soil with prodigious kicks. “Put that thing away. It’s the wrong time of the month.”

“Stop screwing around, you bloody dolt,” roared Marx. “Something’s brought me on early. Open up, or I’ll blow. You’ll take your virtue to kingdom come.”

“Oh.” Smith ceased its struggles. “I’m sorry, Karl, I figured you were just feeling saucy. Oh my God, Karl, your positron count is going up exponentially. Quick, my dearest, come to me.” A plate cycled open in the cylindrical torso, and Marx jerked forward, thrusting home its throbbing rubber hose. For an instant, before the red-hot jack entered Smith’s socket, I saw the eye-searing corona of the power hole.

“Jenny, my darling wife!”

“Eve,” cried Smith, acquiescent at last in a mythic rapture.

I picked up my telephone and dialed 0. “Did we have anything to do with that?”

“This is Roger, your Life Support System. I think our arrival must have triggered the decay curve in Marx’s black hole.”

“Explain.”

“Well, these robots are fantastically primitive. To tell the truth, they’re peripatetic gigaton bombs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Republic sent them here as sort of Trojan Horses. They run off quantum black holes, about fifty tons apiece I’d estimate, locked into a pinch effect. But the holes are grotesquely unstable. Any singularity that small tends to evaporate quick-smart, and if you can’t dispose of the radiation that it’s ripping out of the Dirac negative mass you have an annihilation vortex on your hands. Blooey.”

“They’re not anchored to a wormhole?” I asked in horror.

“Not these early models. From the look of things, they’ve been jerryrigged to evaporate on a turn-and-turn-about basis. That tube’s a superconducting conduit. When Marx’s black hole gushes, as it’s doing now, it pumps about an exawatt straight into Smith’s event horizon. That destabilizes Smith’s hole, but there’s a reasonable degree of compliance. Our flux stirred up the Negative Energy Ocean a bit and brought Marx on too soon, that’s all. Really nothing to fret about.”

“Helen!”

“Eve, Eve, sock it to me, baby.”

“Friedrich!” Marx yelped in a trembling voice. Sobered, the taller robot jerked back to the full length of the rubber conduit.

“That’s quite enough of that, Karl.” Marx pounded its wheels on the ground. I couldn’t take my eyes off them, though I was aware that the Emperor had ambled off to the shade of the sail.

“Baby, I need ya!” screamed Marx. “Tussy!” With a terminal spasm, it shook its battered old jelly-roll. The hose retracted, the jack cooled to a dull gray, and the socket plate snapped shut.

Smith drew back, trembling with fury. “Tussy?” it moaned. “Tussy? You degenerate monster. You Commie filth. Your own daughter!” Sobbing and grinding its swivel legs, the robot rushed from the clearing with a terrible tearing of ruptured branches.

Vaguely, I heard the Emperor of the Galaxy calling to me. He stood at the entrance to his hut, two long cool drinks in his hands. “Can’t we be friends again?” Marx was hollering from the clearing. “You’re not really mad at me, you know. It’s just post-quantal tristesse.” But I had fallen on my backside in the dry, purple-green tufts, the teeth in the jaws of the bear’s skull over my brow chattering together; I was clutching my belly, my smalls, laughing uncontrollably, dizzy in the stinking heat, laughing fit to bust.

Both Lyric Music and I found the barbarians’ abhorrence of incest (actual and metaphorical) at once comical and offensive. One serious glance at the Galactic Emperor, with his bleached-out irises and his buckled legs, not to mention the magical tachyon haze furring his thaumaturge’s hands, yielded evidence enough of stringent inbreeding. The genome for effective psi-focus is a mess of recessives, alleles as slippery as spawning salmon. Oddly enough, though, none of Lyric’s wives stood in closer degree than second cousin—he took most of his puissance from his swarm of kids, coupling his genes through them to a social register refined in thirty thousand years of keeping it in the family. He’d potlatched his way to the top of the tree, building up an immense fortune black-marketing with the barbarians and disposing of it all in one monumental eleemosynary blowout which had left him drunk as a coot, creditor of half the ancient families in the galaxy, personally skint, and the husband of his predecessor’s mother-wife. In a tradition bereft of hard-core personal ambition, Lyric Music Stirs Too Fierce the Heart was a rarity.

As for me, had I not sprung from the loins of Dulcet, prettiest daughter of that redoubtable hunter, Bountiful, my father? My own dear wife was my cousin Lustrous, and the tusu-guru of our village, wizard and terrible master of our fetishes, was joint uncle to us both, brother to that kind woman whose breasts gave me suck, breasts heavy from her carrying of Lustrous. My future spouse and I, engaged in the week of our birth, had exchanged parents on that same day, and Dulcet was more to me an aunt than a mother. It is a fine way to grow a child up, though I would hate to have to try to explain it to the purse-mouthed puritans of the Glorious Republic. You can see why I warmed at once to chubby, addle-pated Marx.

Getting through the low bulging entrance to the palace hut was a bit tricky, bulked out as I was with Liss modules and my bear-voyager’s pelt. You can travel one of two ways: hypnotically geared for deference and accommodation to the reality structure of your destination, or as a specter. I’ve never enjoyed finding myself embedded in a wall, or running my fist through someone’s head, so I was hampered by the dimensions of the hut doorway.

Finally I backed out again and took off the pelt. I bundled him up respectfully and left him outside. Under the pelt I’d been wearing my attush, the same cloak I’d had since my training began twenty years earlier. That was a garment to be proud of, my smalls: a gift from my true mother, woven by her in the old way from the cloth of the mountain elm, soft and supple from the delicate flesh of the inner bark. The rich blues of its blocky embroidery were faded, it’s true, but every stitch had been laid in by Dulcet’s hand. I felt sorry for Lyric Music: Maybe his body scars held something of the same meaning to him, but I judged it a depressing loss to go through life naked as a savage.

The Emperor was waiting inside for me, sipping his drink. Certainly it was cooler there. I had expected the interior to be pitch dark, for there were no windows, but remarkably it glowed with earthlight from a barbarian luminator. Well, an old galactic with a brace of robots is hardly going to shrink from the elementary creature comforts of technology. I got my bear-engraved mustache lifter from my bag, dipped it ceremoniously into the glass Lyric held out to me, placed it on my upper lip, and took the glass. It slipped straight through my hand and shattered on the rammed-earth floor. Hard as rock, that floor, and wonderfully level; I imagine Smith had made it, thundering on the soil with fifty-ton blows.

“Oh shit,” I said, peering down at the shards over the mustache lifter beneath my nose. Lyric Music hadn’t turned a hair, though one would have expected him to be bellowing for exorcists.

“Smith was right, then,” he said, regarding my confusion placidly. “You are a ghost, though of the strangest kind. Did I not touch your arm, and tug your whiskers?”

“Indeed you did, Sire, and it is a tribute to your magic. Here, let me clean this . . .”

Now he did look shocked. “Do not demean yourself, master Ghost. What else are my thousand lazy bundles to do with their time?” A fat young Neanderthal girl was suddenly kneeling beside us, scooping up the broken fragments onto a platter of wood. It was obvious that she couldn’t see me, and her eyes rolled somewhat in their hooded sockets as the Emperor took his ease on a rush palliasse and motioned me down beside him. “They eat their heads off, Bowsprit, and swive one another from dusk to dawn, and not one of the brainless creatures stops for an instant to consider what will become of them when the barbarians arrive. Which, as the impetuous Smith is fond of telling me, will certainly happen any day now.”

Without a word, her task done, the servant was teleported out of the hut.

“You interest me, sir Ghost,” the Emperor said, draining his drink. “I have seen barbarians in my day, and done business with the rogues, but I have never witnessed your like among them. But you’re not a citizen, still less a servant. And I doubt somehow that you’re from the Further World.” He left questions implied, and hanging.

“Sire . . .” I hesitated, pondering paradox. To my knowledge this sort of thing had never come up before. If it did, the mathematics indicated that a voyager would loop straight out. At any given instant, in Superspace, every elementary particle subsists in a condition of absolute ubiquity, an infinite fog of all possible virtual states. A temporal paradox is impossible, because when effect precedes cause, to vitiate that same effect a damping oscillation brings the whole segment back to its ground state, but at a dreadful cost in energy. The Archives people disapprove mightily of historians who go over budget, and it didn’t take an accountant to see how much a paradox loop would cost.

All this went through my mind in a flash, of course. But how do you explain such a thing to an old galactic? You don’t, naturally.

“Sire,” I said again, “forgive me, but there are certain facts I must not disclose, even to you, and certain matters of politics I am forbidden to discuss.”

Lyric Music looked at me steadily for an interval. Then, “Quite right,” he cried, slapping my knee. “Only the vulgar and the shiftless waste their worry on politics, sir palpable Ghost, and I do not believe in pushing a man where he will not go.” He considered me craftily. “Still, you pique my curiosity. What was that stick you held so oddly beneath your nostrils? And may you not throw me some small tidbit about your people? How are your tribe known, Bowsprit Bear’s Stead?”

I’d been glancing surreptitiously around the long, bare hut, expecting someone to interrupt us and get the pressure off me. All my training was as an observer, an interpreter of the lost and the alien, a witness; I was no diplomat. To my astonishment, we were completely alone. Apart from the arrival and vanishing of the servant, there was no indication that Lyric Music had not all his life lived incarcerated, or as a hermit. The psychic, I reminded myself earnestly, are different to us. On some waveband of the mind, the Galactic Emperor was plugged into a universe of bustle more frenzied than a termite’s hill.

I compromised, showed him the mustache lifter my father had carved for me when my beard was a laughable wisp. “My people, Sire, are known as the Men—in our tongue, the Ainu. We pride ourselves for our hirsuteness, and the ancestors of the barbarians made mock of this, naming us the ‘Hairy’ Ainu. The most blessed among us, such as my fortunate self, are scholars, voyagers, messengers of the bears.” His short, thick fingers ran admiringly across the embossed bears on my lifter. “Like your mighty nation, Sire, the first seed of my people was nurtured in the soil of the world Earth.”

“The latest seed of that world,” said Lyric Music gloomily, “is on its way with its damned engines of death to fertilize our gardens with our blood.” He rose, handing back my lifter. “It is a topic that much exercises my principal wife. I suppose I’ll have to see the harridan. I have enjoyed our chat, sir Mystery, but I must leave you now to your own devices. Even an Emperor must work on occasion.”

The hut was crammed with bodies, rank with their own effluvia and the short-chain aliphatic pheromones the Neanderthals favor for perfume. All of them were women, short and broad, with heavy broad noses and immense gleaming teeth, breasts jaunty and sagging according to age but all scarred with initiatory symbols; slender collarbones, to be sure, but arms and legs like wrestlers; pubic beards to put an Ainu warrior to shame. I confess it: excitement jolted in me, despite the shock to my nostrils. Quickly, I withdrew to a corner of the palace hut, and watched with more than the delight of the historian as the serving women of the Empress sorted themselves into a kind of order, and the ancient woman herself stepped forward haughtily to greet her liege.

As a boy I was randy as a beagle, which befits a healthy child, but I was never noticeably Oedipal with it. Certainly I was a rogue with the village girls, and the boys, too, more than once, tugging at their skirts and wraparounds, quick to pull another child’s hair or tickle her armpits, all the better to cop a delicious feel. Surely it was the bane and gory tragedy of the pinched, trap-lipped hordes of the Glorious Republic that they locked their tender places up in bands of prohibition. All their buried heritage cried out in repudiation of this madness—their Taoists, their Shinto saints, their rubber-limbed Tantric athletes—and went unheard, smothered by the colder joys of mechanism and lock-step marching. I’ve seen their rigid bodies, clad in their dull uniforms: as inveterate a tribe of brain-softened masturbators as the species ever spawned. Not that we failed to twang our own nice places, in my youth, when the need was hot upon us and no fellow creature close by, but that was not often. I speak of yesterday, of course, my smalls; today I am a husband and a father, a grandfather, as I was when I stood in Lyric Music’s crowded hut. I have never fancied the faithless husband’s fate, toe-dancing on the ground, suspended by the shrieking hairs of the shame-heaped scalp.

Such matters are seldom all-or-nothing, but for the wretched subjects of the Glorious Republic it came a long chalk too close to nothing. What other nation could have conceived so gross a travesty as the rutting robots of their abandoned Hegemonies? There, at least, their fundamental equation spelled out its formula without disguise: that spasm yoking sex and power, raw crude power, the energy of implosion, the fusion of self with self in endless self-containment, and the burning violence of its only seed?

I have said that I was not overly Oedipal, yet the truth is that I find my highest pitch in the womanly pelt of a lustrous pubic beard. An epithalamic allusion, my sproggies, but my fixation was pre-nuptial. Many the winter evening, in the shadows of the flickering hearth, before my manhood was fully upon me, had I wriggled in the mandala of an inverted kiss, licking and snorting at the apricot cleft of a friendly girl-child (and sniffed in, more than I cared to, the odor of dried urine), but my heart’s delight was the prospect of snuffling a nether beard.

There are great mysteries, my children, in our people’s ancient ways. That tattoo, on the upper lip of a wedded woman—does it say that, secretly, she is a man, with all the powers over life of a man? Or does she tell us that a man is the budded form of a woman, with his pubic thatch the wrong way up and over-boastfully paraded from his chin? To the men of the Glorious Republic such speculations would have seemed obscene; their bellies would have shrunk to berries, their manly parts (too often self-handled, unless I miss my mark) contracted like snails. For them, the making of a baby was no more than a momentary convulsion. All the burden went upon their women, those grim devotees of duty. Is it any wonder that their children lacked souls? A woman cares for the tiny growing thing within her, but it is a man’s place to fill its wrinkled red head with intellect. Lustrous, when our first child was due, went about without complaint, I recall, until the day the mid-wives took her off to squat in the dark. I, though, like a good father, responsive to the fish kicking in her lumpy womb, lay for weeks with the fetishes before the fire, morose, my spirit straining at its fecundating task, in couvade.

What inkling could the machine-folk have of our reward, when the tribulations are behind us, and the chubby thighs of the infant are slashed and stuffed with fungus mycelium? They are barren of mystery, locked in their time, heeding only cesium clocks, endlessly visiting apocalypse upon the endless worlds of the old galactics.

Despite her immense age (she was certainly old enough to have been Lyric Music’s grandmother, and conceivably his great-great grandmother), the Empress The Early Bird Catches the Worm struck me as formidably impressive. Out from the ranks of her chamberlains and serving women she stepped, bald high and low as a lizard, skin translucent and creased infinitely fine as oiled brown paper folded and unfolded by centuries of archivists, and her breasts, too, like brown paper bags emptied of their goods and discarded; right eye turned inward and useless, the other glaucous with antiquity but alive and raging. All her lineaments, in truth, made up a catalogue of sublethal recessive defects, yet a kind of absolute power and self-conviction was instinct in her.

“You foolish man,” she cried, quivering, as she stood before the Emperor of the galaxy. “Do I find you loitering in this absurd place built by your abominations? Have you nothing better to do as the foe hurtles toward our world?”

The old man glanced up to meet the eye of the old, old woman, and from my position in the hut’s corner I could just make out the pixie smile which transformed his huge mouth.

“My dear, you come at an auspicious moment. Come, come, sit down here with me. Look,” and he held up the purple-and-white vegetables, “I have just this minute grown a wonderful novelty, a plant known as ‘turnips,’ and I expect them to be precisely as tasty as they look. Don’t you find them elegant?” Lyric Music offered them to his wife courteously, holding them by the stalks.

“Imbecile!” Early Bird snatched the turnips from his hand and cast them on the floor. They winked out of existence. “You have become a doddering child, Lyric. What next! By my ancestors, I am ashamed. Wife to the High Magus? Wife to a village gardener! You are a pollution to my honorable bloodline, Lyric, a curse and a disgrace . . .” Her breath failed in a rattling wheeze, and instantly women held her by the waist and elbow, helped her down to the palliasse despite her objections; their glances at the Emperor were venomous.

“My good wife,” said Lyric Music, with a touch of acerbity, “I find your slurs on the craft of the gardener offensive and short-sighted. Competent agriculture is the wellspring of society, and inspired horticulture its highest art. Nourishment for both body and soul is—”

“Lyric!”

“—both the supreme end and the finest means—”

“Sire, I beg you!”

Gently, Lyric Music took her crippled hands in his, and fell silent for a space. One of them wordlessly expressed a command, and the hut was empty. Neither took any notice of me in the corner.

“Early Bird, sometimes you forget yourself.”

She was weeping, but she had not softened. “I apologize, Sire.”

“Oh, crap. Madam, you’re a stiff-necked old bird and all your children are the same.” He stroked her fingers. “Do you think that a genotype like ours will be disturbed one whit by the antics of barbarians from a single world?”

Whipping her head up and around, Early Bird stared at him. “The New Humans are not a comic troupe.” With patrician decorum, she insisted on giving the earth people their proper designation. “They are murderers, Lyric. They have slaughtered their own kind for half a hundred millennia, and now they mean to slaughter us. Something must be done to stop them. Their leader is only hours distant. When his abominable machines arrive he will have this world put to the torch. It is their way. Our nation will be utterly destroyed. It is your duty to prevent that holocaust.”

My own excitement, my smalls, was extreme, and I could not suppress a shudder. Here was history! Here were the principals of the fall of empire, and I was privy to their debates. Lyric Music toyed with what were left of his turnips. The only sound in the hut was the ticking of my holofield recorder, lapping up the actuality. The Emperor looked my way, then, one swift penetrating flick of his eyes, and away again.

I have listened to that recording a hundred times since, children, and I am morally certain that his next words were meant as much for us as for his wife. How could he have known? I can only say that Lyric Music was the craftiest man I have ever encountered.

“My dear,” he said, rising to his feet and striding back and forth in the long hut, “are you reminding me of my duty to history?”

The ancient woman laughed with some bitterness. “To history, Lyric? What else is our nation if not history?”

“Indeed. It is written in our genes, and the genes of our children. You and I, Early Bird, are the custodians of thirty-seven thousand years—”

“You,” she snarled, “by right of purchase.”

“Because my gene-line strayed from the path of psychic purity?” Lyric Music sighed, and ran his fingers down the wonderfully woven straw of the wall. “Because my ancestors discerned value in talents other than the single vampiric ability to suck off the mana from countless human cattle?”

The Empress was on her feet, trembling and bloodless. “Guttersnipe! How dare you? With every word you muddy and defame the nation at whose pinnacle you loll like a drunken slave. You showed enterprise enough toadying to the machine-mongers, buying your way into eminence.” Beside herself, she lifted an earthlight luminator and dashed it on the floor. It bounced several times without breaking, and rolled against a rush wall, casting strange shadows. “All your power you owe to me and our children, and you dare to defame us as parasites.”

“Sit down, madam.” His voice rasped with authority and anger, somewhat belated in my opinion. “The means by which I obtained this post were legal and time-honored. I would remind you that I am your liege. Your behavior is disgraceful. For one who despises the barbarians so strenuously, you remind me distastefully of their arrogant women. Now,” and his voice regained its gruff blandness, if you see what I mean, “we are speaking of history, and its demands.”

Thinly, the Empress told him: “There will be no more history when the New Human warriors land.”

“You astonish me. History is the record of events. It has no favorites. You make time a myth.”

“And so it is, Lyric. We see time with different eyes, Sire. Yours is the dew which evaporates from the drenched earth, leaving no trace. Mine is the rain which smites the topmost leaves of the forest, runs from twig to branch to trunk to root, fecundating the earth. And its fruit is the tree itself, older than that transitory time that gives drink to its roots. The history of our nation is the myth of the tree, Lyric, with its infinite fragile branches in a thousand million worlds. And its Emperor is the trunk. They will hack you down with their barbarous instruments, and hurl the tree of our people into the fire. Then,” she said, with a voice as lost and elegiac as her words, “time for both of us will be a thin smoke dispelled by the breeze, and a handful of dying ashes.”

“I see.” The Emperor turned away from her and crouched on his haunches, tracing with his right index finger the scars on his left biceps. Perhaps the blue glow danced at his fingertip. “You speak for the Women’s Mysteries?”

“I speak for the nation entire.”

“Do you understand what you are saying?”

I could hardly hear her voice. All the snappy verve and choler was gone from it. “I ask for a Great Culling.”

A tremor passed through Lyric Music’s shoulders. “You are prepared to destroy a whole people, to the last man, woman, and child, to preserve your own culture?”

“What choice do we have? They are savages. They will not rest until they have laid waste our nation.”

I felt sickened. My head reeled. Some hint of this moment, this swinging balance, had passed into the later apocrypha, but no one believed it. No one had doubted that the thing was feasible, but who could credit the cold proposal to murder twenty billion human people? We can imagine the barbarians making such a calculation, but not the old galactics. My body was cold, my smalls, and my bowels like water.

But I see that some of you do not understand. Let me explain how that ancient witch had planned the death of old Earth.

In coldest winter, the year I became a man, my uncle the tusu-guru, he of the “double life,” sought me out one day beside the hearth, under the dark sooty rafters, and led me through the frigid sleet to his brightly-lit study. I had never been within that code-locked place before, and I shivered more to see the yellow bears’ skulls and willow fetishes and other arcana than I did from the blustering walk there through snow halfway to my knees. He took from a tall shelf a curious artifact of lovingly polished wood and glass, as wonderful and powerful, I thought, as any fetish, and perched it on his lap. It was an elongated triangle (not unlike the sail-hut palace of the Emperor, in fact), and behind its glass face a thousand small buttons spread across a velvet backing in an array as regular as Pascal’s Triangle. I could not conceive any mundane use for it, but its simple elegance bespoke an instrument of some kind.

“Saucepan,” my uncle said (for in those days I was not yet Bowsprit, and certainly had not dared to hope for that lofty role as the bear-messenger’s proxy), “have you been taught anything yet about the old galactics?”

“A little, sir,” I admitted, looking at my feet and the cork tiles they stood upon.

“You have heard that they were wizards?”

“Yes, sir.” Was it a trap? I glanced at him quickly. “But their magic was not like our magic.”

“No.” My uncle moved the instrument, opening a lever recessed into its apex. “Their magic was the old, forbidden kind, harnessing the stored power of a million minds to the benefit of one magus. Do you know the binomial theorem, Saucepan?”

I assumed it was mathematics. “No, sir. I am studying hunting, training the dogs.”

“Well and good, my boy. You seem agile enough in the snow. Still, I wish they’d give you children an earlier start with numbers. It doesn’t matter, my little engine here will make the point well enough. Look closely, lad. At the top, here, is a chute giving access to the board within.” He took up a canister from his bench, and I saw that it was filled with hundreds of small perfect metal balls. My uncle fixed this container to the open chute by means of a narrow valve at its base. “When I release these spheres, they will rush down the chute and dispose themselves at the bottom of the triangle. As they fall, they will strike the buttons and suffer deflection, some this way, some that. Can you tell me, boy, what the pattern will be when all have fallen to the lowest available point?”

I gazed at the machine and puzzled over the problem. The gap between velvet and glass seemed hardly greater than the diameter of each ball, as did the distance between adjacent buttons. As the tusu-guru had said, each sphere, in falling, would hit numerous buttons on its path. I became slightly dazed, trying to picture the pattern. Some of you laugh at my naiveté, but the matter is not immediately apparent if you are innocent of statistics.

“I suppose they’ll pile up in the middle and spread out evenly,” I hazarded.

“Let’s see,” said my uncle, and released the spheres. With a rattling, glinting rush, the balls cascaded into the triangle. It was impossible to observe their paths as they batted and caromed from button to button. In a moment the activity stilled—and the balls could be seen as a silvery bell-shaped mass at the instrument’s base, few at the extremities of the triangle, most mounding upward at its center. I was dazzled by the demonstration. I think that moment was the beginning of my life-long love of mathematics: the latent order in random things.

“We call that curve the normal distribution,” said my uncle. “Few interactions in this complex world are as neat and clear as the carefully designed workings of my little toy. Still, the underlying principle can be found in most things that are the result of a multitude of small influences, none of them connected.”

“And this is the secret of magic?” I guessed.

“On the contrary, Saucepan. This is the secret of science. We cannot predict the path of any particular ball in that maze, but we know quite perfectly the end-state of all the balls together. No, magic works like this.” And with a deft flick, he inverted the instrument. Spheres scurried and jostled, whirling miniature worlds, and drained back into the canister. “The psychic force is generated at random within the human brain. Some of us are more powerful emitters than others, but psi is always sporadic and unpredictable. It can only be directed usefully, and put to work as magic, under strict social conditions.”

“Like an orchestra, you mean?”

“Exactly, Saucepan. But an orchestra playing powered instruments, with the current cut off from any given instrument ninety-nine per cent of the time. To obtain music from such an ensemble, you’d need thousands of instrumentalists, maybe hundreds of thousands, none of them sure if his keyboard is alive but obliged to play as if it were. Well now, imagine how crucial is the role of the conductor in such circumstances.”

In fact, I knew almost as little about orchestral music as I did about stochastic analysis. I’d heard holos, but that is sound detached from its root. I tried to bring the analogy back home, to the night gatherings where we played our tonkori zithers, striking the open strings with both hands, adding our voices in the ancient guttural polyphonies. And the image no longer conveyed my uncle’s meaning; magic is centrally totalitarian, an elixir distilled from the dross of masses. Our music, even our shamanistic rapture, was too personal for that, too earthy and immediate.

I stared at the canister, and all the little globes of silver crammed together. They reminded me of salmon, the divine fish, piled gleaming in the sun ready for drying. “The conductor—the magician—he, he sucks out the psychic force from other people?”

“You could put it that way, lad, but the truth is more horrible. The forbidden magic of the old galactics gained its power from the willing co-operation of a race bred like cattle. To be a magus, a psi-focus for that confluence of force, required in its turn a very special genotype. Magic, like language and mathematics, is a sort of machine that transforms energy through symbols.” My eyes must have glazed over; he added, “Well, never mind. The important thing is that the brain of a magus has a special structure, refined by careful genetic selection through many generations. When it taps the random blurts of psychic energy from ordinary brains, it acts as a rectifier, a transformer. Nor is it the brain of the magus alone that channels this force, but the brains of all those whose genetic constitution most resembles his own. And archetypal symbols, in their turn, are all-important. The Emperor of the old galactic order stood at the peak of an immense psychic pyramid, confirmed in his role by a tradition of untold thousands of years, and his children were the most vital circuit in his psychic amplifier.”

“Yes, sir,” I mumbled. I desperately needed to take a piss, but I was much too awed to say so. And the pressure on my bladder was acting as an erotic stimulus; I had arranged with another young person to meet under the furs that afternoon, and it began to seem that I would miss my appointment. How little we value the truly important things of life, such as the opportunity for pure learning, when we are young. Ah, smirk if you will. Nevertheless, what my uncle told me next cooled my ardor.

“Saucepan, listen carefully. We have come to the point where the dogs drive the catch to shore.” He smiled. “I’m sure you would rather be back beside the fire, under the covers with your little friends. But I wish you to fix this in your thoughts, engrave it there, for your manhood rites are very close now and this is one of the great truths every man must know well and fear.” He paused until, in my sudden fright, I nodded. His friendly tone was in shocking contrast to the portent of his words, more effective than any ranting might have been.

“The psychic force, like poetry, operates at the level of symbols. And the fundamental symbolic structure in our bodies and minds—and in the bodies of all living creatures—is the architecture of our cells, and within our cells the DNA of our genes. In the antiquity of our species, it was believed that knowledge of a man’s name conferred control over his person. That was a mistaken belief, my small, but it hinted at the greater truth; for knowledge of the phenotype does indeed yield authority, in psychic operations, over the genotype. The ancients of all nations employed dolls adorned with a man’s name, hair, and nail-parings, but the magus used true gene-linked symbols. A race of men or animals is defined by those symbols, even the most superficial.”

My uncle leaned forward intently, his hazel eyes regarding me over his snubbed nose, and grasped my left hand, turning it upward.

“Look closely at the shape of your fingerprints. See the loops, like a buffeted wave curling under its own rushing force? That shape is typical of our people, scribed in our DNA. The fingerprints of the old galactics were predominantly whorled, like the rings across a tree stump.”

Despite his intensity, and my apprehension, I was dying for a leak. I hopped about edgily. “It doesn’t seem like a very important difference.”

“By itself it’s not. But it segregates the Ainu from those bearing a different genetic makeup. Suppose a strange and terrible plague arose that discriminated its victims according to which fingerprint gene they possessed. Then you might find the matter more than trifling.”

“Is there a disease like that?”

“In the ancient days there were many—malaria was one. But I am trying to make a more general point, boy. Mother Goddess, I wish they’d get you started on science a couple of years earlier. Do you know about blood type?”

“For accident transfusions? Of course; I’m type B.”

“Good, good. Well, my small, the Ainu as a group have a blood-type signature unlike any other people. Twenty-eight per cent are like you, bearing the gene for type B. Five per cent less have mine, for type A. None at all have type A2. There are four per cent with Rh-negative, and we have the highest recorded level of NS combination. Never mind what that means: The point is, a map of the Ainu People would show gradients for a million characteristics of this kind in proportions singular to us alone.”

“Uh, sir,” I said with some desperation, “may I be excused for a moment? I gotta take a leak.”

“Saucepan, why didn’t you say so? Get the hell out of here, then. I don’t want you piddling all over my nice new floor.”

I bolted out the door. The weather had eased, but the sky hung over me like a gray hand. I ripped open my garments and poured a hissing, smoky stream into the snow, sagging with relief. The spark arced in my mind, ripping away the blissful emptiness, and I jerked, spraying my boots.

I slammed the door. My uncle looked up in exasperation.

“You weren’t talking about disease, you meant magic,” I said with horror.

“Of course.”

“And the triangle—the balls falling into that pattern. It works the other way too, doesn’t it? A magus got his power from his own kind, channeled through his kin. And if he wished, he could aim it in the same way. He could make a map, a symbol map of his enemies, and blast all that power straight into their bodies, and their own genes would act like a . . . like an antenna tuned for exactly that frequency.”

“A selective effect,” the tusu-guru said gravely, “and no way to avoid it if it’s aimed at you. The old galactics used it for ecological control, thinning out animal populations on a scheduled basis. They needed neither fences, nor domestication, nor cultivation. And they employed the same techniques, handled with infinite delicacy, in breeding their trillions of human slaves. They sculpted the genome as easily as I carve a fetish from willow.”

He picked up a bird’s oracular skull and turned it slowly, his fingertips skimming the empty sockets.

“Saucepan, when you leave here I would like you to meditate on the fact that you immediately interpreted your insight in lethal terms. That is one of the reasons why the old magic is forbidden. We are a peaceful people, we Ainu, but we have a legacy of war. Today we are hunters and scholars: Once we were ferocious soldiers, and we could be again. The risks are too great.”

He sighed. “We are hostages to our own symbols, too often the symbols written with the four letters of the primeval code. When we sicken, our bodies are in rebellion against some symbolic statement our cells repudiate. I might heal the sick with antibiotics, or with whale bristle and deer horn powder, but in both cases I am waging a war of propaganda. There are certain bacteria, Saucepan, which wear embroidery on their attushes, graffiti that enrage our flesh. These lipopolysaccharides are harmless in themselves, but the moment we read their slogans our white blood corpuscles become hysterical. They swarm together in the blood vessels, blocking the body’s fuel. They gush pyrogens, igniting fever. A normal activating hormone from the adrenal medullae begins literally to kill the tissues it encounters. Serum fractions in the blood holler for more leucocyte reinforcements. In the worst cases, the victim goes into hemorrhage, high fever and shock. And all of this crazy runaway self-destruction has been provoked by an automatic response to endotoxin symbols which by themselves do no damage at all.”

I gaped. Until that moment I suppose I’d always regarded myself as on perfectly cordial terms with my own body. Abruptly, I saw it as my potential assassin. Struggling, I asked, “Do you mean that old galactics could, could trigger this kind of sickness in, people, by magic? Make their bodies destroy themselves?”

“That’s exactly right, Saucepan.” The fragile skull cracked, with a sharp sound, in his hands, and fell into two uneven pieces. “They did it when culling animals. There is no reason why they could not have done the same with human beings. Fortunately, to our knowledge, they never did use it in war. The Neanderthals, after all, had left Earth originally because of their nation’s loathing for the violence of the New Humans. But they could have culled the barbarians. They could have slaughtered every single one of them.”

My uncle rose and took me to the door. A freezing gale was blowing up again, in the black, splattered night. He put his arm about me as I left. “Saucepan, meditate on what we have discussed. And ask yourself, until the answer is clear and without qualification: Do you think that you would trust yourself with such power?”

I slogged off through the snow, and felt the burden of manhood on my shoulders.

A reprise of that emotion took hold of me, as I stood out of the way in the corner of the palace hut, destroying the last remnants of my professional composure and detachment. I was in the grip of an acute anxiety attack. My situation was unprecedented, after all. I should have been a ghost, intercepting a shadow reality. Instead, that phantom realm had chatted to me and tugged at my whiskers. Far from my practiced role as observer par excellence, I had become a participant. At a level of unconscious self-perception deeper than my training—and that buffer of educated response, in turn, now abruptly irrelevant—I had introjected the reality I saw and heard.

Unlike the youth of memory, though, discussing the theory of psychic genocide with his shaman, I was spared the pressure of my bladder. But without the renal dialysis unit of my Liss, rubbing on my cramped belly muscles, I’m sure I would have pissed my pants.

Clarity returned. Only then did I realize how close I’d been to passing out. My face was icy cold, and my limbs trembled. Roger, monitoring my vital signs, had reorganized my endocrinal balance. Tranquilizers have their place.

Lyric Music, the comical savage whose act of will could blight a world, stood facing his wife. She had not moved. The enormity of her demand had shaken her, I suspect, almost as much as it had shaken me, but she was not cowed.

“I have never been in any doubt that you despise me,” he told her. She did not deny it. A professional eavesdropper, I nevertheless felt uncomfortable. The ticking of the holofield’s public notification seemed unnaturally loud. “You can doubt my wisdom to your heart’s content, madam,” he said more sharply, “but I hope you do not dispute my knowledge.”

“I do not. But we are not discussing your unparalleled access to the collective memory of my ancestors—”

“They are my ancestors too, Early Bird.”

“Only in the diminished degree.”

The Emperor took a deep, harsh breath. “Your patrician regard for heraldry is quite stupefyingly beside the point, madam. Do you think I entered your gene-line because I was hungry for personal prestige?”

“Why else?” Her voice was as dry and parching as a desert wind.

Coarsely, Lyric Music Stirs Too Fierce the Heart told her: “When the entire universe is blowing itself to buggery, the only prudent course of action is to be Emperor of the whole goddamn shebang. As Emperor, I’m the sluice-gate for the energy of a galaxy of minds. As Emperor, I’m the custodian of the psychic records of my predecessors. You wish me to use the first to cull the barbarians. I’ll draw on the second instead to prove why your suggestion is an abominable stupidity. Listen:

“Twenty-eight thousand years ago, there was an Emperor named Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining—”

“We do not speak of him,” Early Bird said with, I swear to you, a sniff.

For the first time, the filthy old man laughed. His eyes rolled under their jutting brows.

“I suppose you don’t. He died insane, after all. But I have his memories. It comes with the job, madam, and I can’t prune them off your mythic tree in the interests of neatness and convenience.”

“Lyric, this is in the worst possible taste.”

“By God, woman!” He seized her frail, birdlike jaw in his blunt fingers, and I waited for her skull to shatter. The blood left her crumpled brown paper face, and she gave a thin shriek. “You demand a Great Culling of human beings, and you find your black sheep ancestor too ignoble a topic for polite soiree. This is what your fucking mad disgraceful ancestor did:

“Silver Lining took himself off to the solitary moon of a gas giant world ten thousand light years from other human company. There he skulked for the decades from his middle age to gibbering dotage, in the company of fanged slugs and insects huge as clouds, not all of his own imagining. He had fathered three children, daughters all, and they stayed behind and multiplied his genes.”

The Empress jerked her bruised jaw out of his clutching grip, and covered her face with her own bony hands.

“At last, Silver Lining’s spiritual disease populated even his bolt-hole with enemies and lurking wizards,” Lyric Music said inexorably. “A solution occurred to the lunatic, finally. If he could not out-run his ill-wishers, he could at least hold them at bay. He issued a decree for a festival of poets and artists . . .”

“I do not wish to hear this.”

“He summoned to his gloomy moon a hundred thousand of the finest, most refined men and women of enhanced sensibility in the galaxy. Our nation’s numbers were much fewer then, madam, but the highest flower of its talent was no less distinguished.”

The old, old naked woman was bent double, and she keened with an almost inaudible register of distress. My own fear was gone, now, and my skin prickled with the strangeness of it. Lyric Music was speaking to her with more than words, I was sure; perhaps he was evoking in her consciousness the demented phantasmagoria of his monstrous borrowed memory. And the words themselves were enough to fix my attention utterly.

“He brought them to his thin-aired world, and disposed them one by one on every range of hills, beside the seething lakes, on islands and places rimed with ice. And he set them to the making of their arts: the weavings of colors and textures, bright songs like lonely, lovely birds, the meditation of exalted philosophies. And when he judged that the moment was right, when their fears were soothed and their souls opened to the whisper of eternity, he gathered in the power of the worlds beyond number of our nation and he fashioned ten thousand burning sunlets in the void—”

“No! No! Too bright!”

“—plasmas from a fusing star-heart, and he cast the flame upon them, a small piece of hell for each man and woman scattered across his moon, and as they blazed up in their private infernos like insects shriveled in a campfire—”

Early Bird screamed, and fell onto the floor.

“—the magus wove their agony into a shield that locked his world away from humankind forever.” Without pity, the Emperor regarded the naked crone writhing at his feet. The fall had been too much for her decalcified frame; her left arm had bent sideways, fractured at the humerus, and there was something badly wrong with her clavicle. Possibly her pelvic girdle had cracked as well. Keening, Early Bird brought her knees up and her bony buttocks pointed at me. Lyric Music knelt down carefully beside his moaning wife. Cerenkov radiation flared in his palms as he straightened her broken bones. Obviously there was nothing he could do for the tissues nature had ruptured. He helped her to her feet, but his expression remained stony.

“There will be no Great Culling, madam. If you wish to kill barbarians, you must use their own methods. I doubt, though, that they will be terribly eager to sell you weapons.”

Holding herself away from his touch. Early Bird stared at him with detestation. “I shall never forgive you for what you have just done.”

“It was necessary to make you understand. Do you understand?”

She refused to reply. Her hatred was palpable.

“You are all the same,” the Emperor said dismally. “You use power with no concern for its source or its laws. Silver Lining turned an entire world into a pustule of poison we can never lance, and you would have me do the same to the galaxy. Magic is not a tool you can use and discard. It is ourselves. It casts back our actions upon ourselves, like a barbarian mirror reflecting the light from our faces. Our nation,” he said, sharpening each word like a blade, “is rotten through and through. It is time to dismantle it. Now go.”

The Empress vanished. Lyric Music sat with his legs spread, elbows pressing his knees, kneading his fingers. After a moment he vanished as well, and I stood alone in the sweat-stinking hut.

My telephone rang. “This is Roger, your Life Support System. I didn’t think you’d want to be interrupted; I figured the bell might throw our subject off his stride.”

“Yeah. Use the microwave link if anything big blows up while Lyric Music’s here. Roger, I could really use a drink.”

“Won’t be much longer, the Earth fleet has just entered planetary orbit. Bowsprit, something has come up. The robots must have tuned their detectors. They’re aware of our presence at an interactive level. Smith has been nosing around the bear pelt. Oh shit, he’s picked it up.”

“Fire Goddess!” I yelped, and ran for the exit.

That bear had been with me, you understand, almost from the beginning. How well I recall capturing him, a snuffling cub, and toting him home triumphantly to the village. He was the last of the animals our people ever sent on the great pilgrimage, and I still believe that the abandonment of that tradition has been a grave impoverishment of our way of life. No doubt you think me an incorrigible fogy.

I was twenty-four then, and our village had shifted to the mountains of Hokkaido after our ancestral home in Sakhalin cracked into three pieces and sank, spewing lava and superheated steam into the ocean. A terrible year for fishing. The Okhotsk Current went crazy. Lustrous and I were on the slopes of Fujiyama at the time, where I was taking accelerated courses in the new meron physics. My eldest son had not yet been weaned, and when we flew back to help settle the survivors Lustrous’ breasts were still rich with milk. My village had lost their bear in the disaster, and I chivvied the men into coming in search of another.

Fiercely cold was the snow, and the bamboo gaunt and flattened. We clambered blindly through territory none of us had hunted before, carrying only bows for arms. When I saw the yellow marks in the snow, the breath-spoor of the hibernating bear, I called the others to a halt and dispersed them to their posts. I wrapped my head in thick cloth, fingers frozen and heart thumping, and crept into the beast’s den with my knife. The animal was dormant, and there were two cubs curled against her. I rousted her out of her hole with cries that terrified me as much as her, booting her in the arse as she turned blindly to find me. Once started, she went out like a locomotive, dogs yapping around her, arrows thudding into her hide, the men bellowing like a gang of yahoos. One cub jolted after her, tumbling in the snow; the other I captured with little enough complaint. He was a biddable creature, my adopted son.

Lustrous loved him. She took Woodchip off the teat as quickly as it could be managed, but for a time my son and the cub shared her breasts. I will not tell you the name we gave the cub; he has traveled ahead of us, and it would be impolite. He was a sturdy little fellow, with his baggy skin that seemed a fur coat in all truth, small eyes gleaming with the promise of wisdom in his broad head. He quickly knew us for his family, and I do not think his sharp teeth ever bothered my wife’s long nipples.

We had two more children by the time he’d grown large enough for the cage. Or was it only one, my eldest daughter? That must be it: two children, one bear. You have lost so much, my smalls, in giving up that rite. He ate at the hearth with us, taking the lid delicately from the millet pot and scooping up as much as his appetite called for. I taught my youngsters that he was the mirror of Aeoina, the “Person Smelling of Man,” who came among us in the times of fable and bore back to the gods a human attush.

When the Feast of Sending Forth came at last, the Iomande maratto, my beautiful Lustrous lingered for a time on the edge of a psychotic break. Perhaps you are right, my sproggies. Perhaps the price of our message was too great. As the bear waxed fat, squatting cheerfully in his cage, poor Lustrous lost her taste for food. I lay beside her in the nights of that September, while she shivered and wept, and I traced the tattoos of her mouth. There I had gashed her skin with an obsidian knife, and rubbed in soot to complete her passage into womanhood; now, it seemed, it was her very soul which had been lacerated. I told her of the honor this meant to her adopted child. I took her to the cage where every day we praised our bear and passed him wine to drink and begged him to carry only good reports of our hospitality. It did no good. Lustrous bit her tongue and redoubled her tears, wresting herself from my grip and fleeing home, throwing herself before the lilac inua fetish in the northeast corner of the hut.

On the day of the feast, though, she was resigned. With the other women she baked a tangy meal of dumplings and spicy cakes, and set it before us. I went privately and whispered to my bear, and now found myself overwhelmed with grief. I patted his narrow snout and gave him the confections I’d stored away from the kids, and then I turned away with my eyes blurry and went inside, and shaved the beard from my neck with a nicked, rusty razor, and hacked the hair from my forehead and shaved the stubble clean. The children were singing when I came out into the luminous, cloudless day; the women swayed and clapped their hands, inducing trance. It was a glorious misery. One by one the other men came from their huts, skin pale and bloody where they had shaved their foreheads. We danced, crying to our fetishes, striking the ground hard with our feet, begging the bear’s forgiveness, calling for his advice.

Arrows whistled between us, blunt and stinging, striking the bear in his cage. His paws went up to protect his face. I found myself laughing, reaction-formation, and I ripped a bow from somebody’s hands and flung an arrow at my son.

I do not think I was fully conscious when we ran to the cage and dragged the stunned animal out. He had drunk much sake, I suppose he was drunker than us. He waddled between us on his clumsy back legs, and waited patiently as we lashed him upright to a post and jammed a chunk of wood in his jaws. My cousin Valid handed me a pole; together, we strangled the bear into insensibility. Something was placed in my hand. It caught the sun’s autumnal brilliance. I had carried the same blade with me into the den when I had captured this winter cub.

He died without pain, without waking. His spirit ascended, carrying our messages. Now he is walking the earth in a new body, hungry for honey, rollicking in snow drifts.

We caught every drop of his blood and drank its salty warmth, smearing it into our beards and hair until we took on the guise of a party of axe-murderers.

Lustrous, like all the women who have given a bear suck, grew quiet and strangely patient in the years that followed. My uncle took the pelt, when the feast was done and the bear brought through the shattered east window of the chief’s hut, and had it tanned. Shortly after that last of the great feasts I was called away to continue my studies, and took up my role finally as the Bear’s Stead, walking the endless paths of the vacuum fluctuations, and in that sacred duty I was comforted always by the warmth of my bear’s brown saggy, baggy pelt. If the robots messed with him, I’d strip the bastards down for junk.

Purple dusk, under a mandarin star flecked with sunspot whorls. They were gone. Distant crashing in the afternoon forest, diminishing. I pelted through the grass toward the trees, cursing.

A vertigo whir in the pit of my brain made me stumble. My Liss had shifted to microwave, two gigahertz straight to my soft neuro-tissues. The power was too low for anyone else to pick it up; his imposed and disembodied voice demodulated in the asymmetrical synaptic array of my cortical rind, and I “heard” him without any difficulty. Generally the process is illegal, and I wouldn’t recommend it anyway; it can make your nose bleed.

“This is Roger, your Life Support System. You’ll never catch them on foot. Hang on a moment and I’ll change our coordinates. Okay?”

“I hear you,” I said.

“I’ve found the band they’re talking to one another on,” Roger said. “It’s way too fast for one-to-one transcription, but I can slow it down for you.”

“Put it on.” I said, chafing.

“Scrawniest animal I’ve ever seen. It seems to have no internal organs.”

“I don’t get any EEG, Smith. I think you’ve killed it.”

“Oh Jesus.” A pause. “Maybe it’s not a symbiont.”

“Maybe the primary creature molts. You know, sloughs off its outer skin.”

“If I didn’t know better, Smith, I’d place it in the Ursidae family, from back in the People’s Republic.”

“Christ, Marx, you really get my goat sometimes. You’re the most obdurate, jingoistic reductionist I’ve ever . . .”

An indigo jump. The robots faced each other at the lip of a cliff, with nothing beyond them but bruised sky. We stood on rock, blue-gray basalt, the kind formed when lava vomits up red-hot and poisonous from a world’s guts and quenches fast: It’s glassy and hard, hard. A laser reference beam speared out from the belly button of the huge columnar robot, scanning my airborne, spread-eagled, slowly rotating pelt.

“That’s my property, you son of a glitch,” I screamed. “Put it down at once. What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?”

There was a noisy guffaw inside my head, which turned into a peal of laughter. Through it, I heard the robots say with startlement:

“It’s the ghost.”

“He’s angry, but at least he’s not dead.”

“I never thought the ghost was dead. I was talking about this . . .”

They’d completed their conversation long before the Liss-slowed transcription ran out, and my bear bundled itself up neatly in the air and deposited itself on the rock in front of me. The robots edged closer together.

Frustrated and enraged, I yelled, “Roger, is that you laughing? Shut the fuck up.” The snickering cut out abruptly. I picked up the pelt and shook it out. No damage that I could see. “What’s the joke?”

Resentfully, the Liss said: “This is Roger, your . . .”

“I know who it is, you cretinous dummy. What was so funny?”

“I should have thought it was obvious. Didn’t you wonder why the Smith robot had no arms? It uses an external pinch effect for manipulation.”

“So?”

“Bowsprit, really—it’s Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand!”

I was totally baffled by now. “And?”

“Mother of Fire,” the Liss snapped irritably, “you humans are so ignorant. Look, it doesn’t bear exegesis. The essence of wit is concision, an unexpected and pleasing juxtaposition of—”

“Explain!” I roared.

In a dry, marked manner, Roger said: “Adam Smith (1723-90), b. Kirkcaldy, d. Edinburgh, proposed in his ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ (1776) that the sum of independent entrepreneurial actions, each governed by self-interest alone, tends to an equilibration identical with maximal societal well-being. This cybernetic effect Smith likened to the benign influence of an Invisible Hand, which—”

“Enough.” Again, the Liss fell silent instantly. Match and game. Ears and tail. The two robots were creeping closer to me, somehow forlorn and hang-dog. I hung the pelt over my shoulders.

“Ahem,” said Marx, sagging back on its threadbare tires. “Sir Ghost, please accept our apologies. We hope this regrettable incident has not caused you too much mental anguish.”

“All’s well that ends well,” I said gruffly. My anger, deep and seething, was all directed at Roger now. It occurs to me for the first time, my smalls, that perhaps my Liss meant it that way. He was shrewd, shrewd.

I regarded the robots speculatively, recalling Roger’s surmise that they were fifth columnists, black hole time-bombs. There wasn’t any record of mammoth gravitational collapse in the immediate future but the records were such a shambles that nothing would have surprised me. “Tell me, are you robots hard-wired to tell the truth?”

“Categorically,” Marx affirmed stoutly.

“If you’ll forgive me, sir,” Smith added, “that was a rather pointless exchange. You’ve run up against the paradox of the Cretan Liar, sir. If Marx is a liar, how can you trust a word he says?”

“Quite so.” I cudgeled my brains. Stepping closer, I discerned a line of print stamped into their looming hulls, one in English, one in Mandarin. Illiterate in either, I asked Roger, “Is that the statutory warrant that these robots are programmed to obey the Three Laws? Answer yes or no.”

“Yes.”

With a note of resonant ritual, Marx said: “We avow our adherence to the Three Laws of Microprocessors.”

“First,” said Smith, “‘Thou shalt love mankind with thy whole mind and thy whole heart and thy whole soul.’”

“Second,” cried Marx, “‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’”

“Third,” finished Smith, clashing its heels together in a crisp salute, “‘Thou shalt love thyself.’”

I was shaken; I’d imagined the behemoths under the control of a more stringent algorithm than that. “It seems rather open to interpretation.”

“Ethics is like that,” Marx said. “It’s a Gödel problem, like the Cretan Liar. Don’t fret, though, sir. We’re situationalists, but we opt from a rather comprehensive metaphysical consensus.”

That seemed to dispose of the Trojan Horse hypothesis, or at least to put it beyond testing. There was a lurid flash across the sky, and a heinous booming. The Glorious Republic was dropping down out of parking orbit. I had to get back to Lyric Music. My hand went automatically to my telephone. Smith swiveled.

“Before you go, sir Ghost, we wonder if you’d settle a private dispute?”

“Hurry it up, then.”

“We’ve deduced that you’re a time-traveller, sir. I say you’re from the remote past. Marx maintains that you must be from the future. We have a wager riding on the matter, you see.”

Fuji-no-yama, mountain of the Grandmother, old Huchi the Fire Goddess, came howling and red-faced into the world in a single catastrophic night, in 285 BCE. Lustrous and I sat in a sundeck on her southern slope, sheltered from the cold wind, gazing over Suruga Bay, the day the Institute engineers first tore merons out of the zero-energy vacuum and accidentally ripped our birthplace apart. Under us the earth rumbled, shook the deck, tossed little Woodchip out of his tripod-hanging litter. Fujisan belched, mildly. The black, boiling clouds out of the north took hours to reach us, and by then Sakhalin, old Karafuto, had wallowed like a butchered whale back into the depths. Subtract my grief from that moment, my smalls, and you might guess how well the shock and incredulity left over serves as a metaphor for my reaction to Smith’s easy question. I blinked at them like a puppy and said at last, “What an extraordinary suggestion. I am a scholar, no more and no less.”

“A scholar you may be,” Smith said, “but you are clearly not from this era. Your technology’s a dead give-away. Of course we can’t compel you if you decline to humor our perfectly reasonable curiosity.”

You can see my fix. Whether I told them the truth or not, these garrulous buggers would blab from one end of the galaxy to the other. I’d be slammed into a loop straight back to the beginning of insertion, and the scale of the thing was so gross that we’d probably get quantum hysteresis locking us out of the entire period. We’d never find out what happened on the day the Empire fell—and it would all be my fault.

“Would you like to hear our reasoning?” asked Marx. “You’re not a Neanderthal, though there’s a striking physical resemblance. You’re not from the Glorious Republic—if they had equipment of your class they wouldn’t be farting around in starships. You can’t be a spirit, sir Ghost, because . . . well, for example, it seems vanishingly unlikely that spirits need little black boxes to piss into. Phenotype too close to human for an alien, and none have ever been detected anyway. That leaves parallel universes and time-travel. Conservation laws militate against the first, paradoxa against the second. We’re rooting for the conservation laws.”

Their logic was shot to shit, but it held up well enough in terms of their contemporary physics. It didn’t leave me any choice.

“Okay, guys, I’ll come clean.” I put authority into my voice: “Under the provisions of the Three Laws, I bind you both never to divulge, whether by action or implication, the conjectures you have advanced about me, or the facts I shall now reveal.”

“Freedom of Information!” Smith protested.

“A nation that hampers the free flow of data,” Marx cried vehemently, “is a nation in chains.”

“That’s rich,” I said, “coming from you two.”

“That was in the past,” Smith said in an injured tone. “Circumstances alter cases.”

“The dialectic has moved on,” added Marx. “Now that the negation has negated the negation—”

“Be quiet,” I told them. “Do you understand my stipulation?”

“Naturally, but we don’t have to like it.”

“I’m a historian from the future.”

Marx crowed. Snarling, Smith booted it savagely in the tire. “Will the Glorious Republic win, or did the Empire rally at the last?”

“Don’t be simple-minded,” I said. “The actual outcome wouldn’t make the faintest sense to you. History is always opaque to its participants. Now you can tell me something in return. Just a moment.” My Liss had announced himself in my queasy brain-tissues. “What is it?”

“Bowsprit, I’ve been keeping tabs on the Emperor. He’s been flashing from place to place like a demented mosquito, but now he’s back in his hut. And the barbarians have started landing. I think we should get back to where the action is.”

“Hold it. I’ll give you the word.” I looked up again at Smith’s towering presence. “I’m puzzled, Smith. How could you suppose that I’m from the past? Time travel never existed until my people discovered it.”

“Well, I thought you might have been a Cro-Magnon and got it from the Old Ones.”

“That’s absurd. The Neanderthals never had time travel.”

“No, no, not the Neanderthals—those Old Ones who led the galactics out of the home world when the New Humans appeared.”

I goggled, my smalls, and felt that first radiant crack appear in my preconceptions which heralds a paradigm cataclysm. I must have been ripe for drastic change; there was no strangled clawing to preserve my verities. In some quarters, this has been attributed to my genius. Modesty aside, my sproggies, it wasn’t; simply, I’d taken such a mental thumping that cognitive dissonance seemed my natural condition, and impossible truths bobbed on the surface for all to see.

“But you said no aliens had ever been detected.”

“The Old Ones are hardly ‘aliens,’” Smith said primly. “Besides, They’re all asleep.”

“They’re hibernating under the sands, on the planet Marx.”

“I’ve never even heard of it.”

“You must have. Fourth planet out from the sun, in the home system.”

“This is Roger, your Life Support System. It means Mars.”

“Don’t you mean Mars?”

“The Red Planet,” added Roger.

“The Red Planet?”

“That’s what I said, haw, haw, haw!” shrieked Marx with delight, and spun its tires wildly on the basalt shelf. Smith put an end to these comic capers with another ringing kick to its undercarriage.

“But seriously, sir Time Traveler,” Smith told me, “I’m surprised you haven’t deduced the Old Ones yourself. A historian should comprehend the import of chronologies.”

“Make it snappy, the Chairman’s on the ground.”

“Most of the time, Mars is a rotten place to live. The atmospheric pressure is less than six millibars, and most of its water and carbon dioxide is frozen in huge layers on the poles. But the Martian orbit has a lot of eccentricity, around point zero nine, so there are massive precessional seasons. Every twenty-five thousand years it swings into the ecozone. The atmosphere comes off the poles, lakes form, ozone heats the air and blocks the UV. The Old Ones come up to the surface and play god games.”

“They . . . interfered with Homo sapiens?”

“You bet. Last summer was twelve thousand years ago, and They stirred up the New Humans into inventing agriculture. As far as we can make out, the New Humans were a long-term project of Theirs. They got them started several seasons ago, mutating them off the original stock by fuzzing their psi capacities. That might have been a mistake, because it turned them into a bloodthirsty gang of motherfuckers. The Neanderthals couldn’t hack it, so the Old Ones lifted them out thirty-seven thousand years ago and gave them the rest of the galaxy to play with. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.”

I swore vilely for a while, and slapped my head with the heel of my hand, and went over to the edge of the cliff and watched the sunset. Flocks of dark native birds drifted like blown soot over the black trees. I hadn’t seen any domestic pets around the Emperor’s palace, no cats or dogs, not even a trained parrot. The old galactics preferred to domesticate people. Had Lyric Music appreciated the ancient embedded parallel in his borrowed action, when we’d met beside his garden patch? Into my mind he’d snuck, deft as a thief, to pluck out our Ainu greeting rituals. There’d been no time for search, to check the catalog; it must have been quite automatic.

Staring into the darkening sky I put my hands on the top of my skull, as he had done, my eyes blurry with anger, with truly bitter anger, and drew down my fingers to the sides of my face, stroking the heavy fur of my beard, whining in greeting across the unspeakable light years to my discovered masters and creators snug and dreaming like hibernating bears under the frozen sands of Mars.

“Hello,” I screamed, pawing at my cheeks. I whined again, salutation of custom, the courtesy of two Ainu warriors met in a bamboo trail. “Hello there, you bastards, you sons of bitches, you tawdry gods. Wake up, get out of bed, your experiment’s proceeding nicely, right on time no doubt, hello, hello, you fucking heartless shits,” and I barked like a dog, went down on my hands and knees on the hard, hard rock and bayed a canine howl of fury and revulsion, while the two robots from old Earth stared at me in consternation and Roger my Life Support System dithered in my uncomprehending ears.

Before the fall of Sakhalin into the broken sea, my greatest pleasure was in taking out the dogs to fetch in a haul of fish. I had a wonderful dog in those days, a kelpie named Beadle, true son of the animals bred by our Amurian cousins in the Murray River basin, in ancient Australia. He would stand forward proudly on the prow of a dugout when we surged out with our lethal gaffs to hunt fur seals, but his great skill, and our mutual joy, was to lead the pack into the waves.

Even in the warmer months, when we fished, the ocean waters bit like aconite, but the dogs never flinched. They would run cheering and snapping ahead of us through the dense bamboo, churning up the gritty sand at the shore, falling into line at our command. Beadle went always to the head of the right-hand queue, straining to be off, ears pricked, never looking back, waiting for my cry. I would stand there between the lines of animals, my sproggies, with the salty wind in my throat, the dogs quivering a hundred meters distant on either hand, and I would give the ringing, harsh command, and in they would dash, slashing the waters in a demonstration of Euclid’s arbitrary axiom, and you could sense the deep shock of dread that vibrated through the schools of fish moving blindly in the water, you could sense it at the tendrils of your skin.

Another cry, and Beadle would turn, sharp left, and paddle resolutely across the stinging tide toward the wheeling dogs that came to meet him. Deployed, then, an animate net, they would ride the surge and wait for the signal. I’d howl it out, and in they’d come like torpedoes, curving to a crescent, driving the terrified salmon before them, driving the divine fish toward us. Then into the water we’d splash to greet them, no tools in our hands, scooping up the threshing chum-fish, the sacred salmon, the gift they’d brought us. Once purchased on the sea floor, each dog would dart and harry the fattest fish in sight, clamp it in his tender mouth, run and deliver it up before shaking off the chill in a cloud of sparkles. To me would Beadle come, for though we shared the dogs without ownership he knew me for his master, and a plump fish would be his reward to me for allowing him this sport. After we’d cleaned our catch, I always gave Beadle as many heads as he could eat.

I panted for a time, my cheek pressed to the ground.

“You’re making a fool of yourself, Bowsprit,” Roger told me.

“We’re their doggies,” I said. “We fetch in their fish while they sleep, and they graciously allow us the heads.”

Acutely, Roger said, “I’ve always taken you for a religious man, Bowsprit Bear’s Stead. Would you prefer the history of humanity to have been the outcome of a random process?”

“Better than this,” I mumbled. I rolled over. For the first time I noticed the droplets of fierce light falling with all their ominous threat into Lyric Music’s venerable sanctuary. Roger was pestering me, but I got to my feet and watched the starships make planetfall. Chairman Pan-Ku and his staff were already in conference with the naked, complex savage who thought he ruled all the bright pin-points which shortly would be coming out over my head and the ones I couldn’t see under my feet because a world was in the way. I experienced the demented clarity of manic hysteria, hard and faceted and feverish. It was like the euphoria in which I’d slain my adopted son, my brother bear, but where thought then had been bound in the infrangible constraints of ritual it was now exalted, utterly disconnected from precedent, a mad surgeon dismembering something warm and breathing and unearthly.

“Roger, are we linked to the robots?”

“Certainly. How else could they perceive us?”

“Not just information. Can we affect them?” Shivering, I pulled the bearskin tighter about me. “Sorry, of course we can. We already did.”

“Right, when we churned up Marx’s black hole. Unprecedented. It’s clearly a function of Lyric Music’s incomparable magic, a direct consequence of his psychic rapport with us. The robots are tuned to him, and they’re getting a feed through his personal wormhole mosaic.”

Even though my teeth were clattering together, I didn’t feel cold. I didn’t feel anything much, my sproggies. “Roger, can we use that channel to destabilize the holes?” There was a shriek of anguished remonstration from the eavesdropping robots. I ignored them. “Roger?”

After a lengthy pause, “Bowsprit, forgive me but you’re not being rational. Your physiological indicators . . .”

“Just answer the question.”

“Yes, we can.”

My legs gave way, and I sat down again on the rock. “Three points. Can we do it without getting caught by whiplash? Is it feasible to cut Lyric Music out of the channel? And do we have any evidence in the historical records of Marx and Smith still being here after the conference?”

“We don’t have any post-Earth record of them, period. That could mean anything. If you want to take them out you’ll just have to risk precipitating a temporal loop. But for Huchi’s sake, Bowsprit, they’re Good Guys!”

Wearily, I said, “I know. But they’re tattle-tales. I can’t run the risk of leaving them intact; Lyric might get past my prohibition.” The robots were keening pitifully, metaphorically wringing their hands. “What about side-effects?”

“I can manage it.” I’d never heard the Liss so bitter.

“Do it.”

Blue-white light flared like a nova. A quantum filter kept it bearable, even beautiful. The mass-energy of those poor, clever machines went into a pinch beam half a millimeter wide, straight up into the sky. Winds howled in a superheated micro-vortex, and thunder hollered. When my eyes had come back to normal there was a small bubbling lava pool on the clifftop, sizzling with leaves ripped from the trees below, and no sign at all of the robots from old Earth.

“Are you sufficiently purged?” the Liss asked snidely. “Can we get to the conference now?”

“Change of plan, Roger,” I said. “Take me home.”

“Whaaat? Bowsprit, do you know how much this jaunt cost?”

“I know. Move it.”

“How often do you get to see the greatest empire in history carved up?”

“Someone else can do it,” I said.

“Mission aborted.” Roger sighed. Through the microwave link I heard bat squeaks, tiny flutterings at the back of my tongue: the Liss setting up homing signals through the Dirac Ocean, laying coordinates for our return to the future. So must Lyric Music’s swollen, tender mind vibrate to the tachyon whispers from a galaxy of active brains. Was he yet aware of the catastrophic demise of his metal pets, or had Roger’s counter-magic spared him that? I imagined the pang of their termination going into him like a needle, trembling his voice, his hand, as he sat with the New Humans as he’d planned for decades, ceding them the Empire.

“Done,” said Roger. “Before we go, I have one thing to tell you, Bowsprit, if you can contain your Weltschmerz for a moment.”

You can believe, my smalls, that there was an edge to his voice.

“Go ahead.”

“Have you ever paused to wonder what it’s like to be me?”

It took me unawares; I laughed unbelievingly.

“Gods of the hearth! Spare me your sanctimonious allegories.”

Fallen starships burned victorious in the darkness, cities of light and power. The birds, disturbed, were trying to get to sleep against their better judgment.

“No, you’ve never wondered.” Was it pity or contempt I heard in Roger’s tone? “Poor bear messenger, how insulated you keep yourself! Always the observer, eh? Wrapped up in your heavy protective fur.”

“Shut up,” I said shrilly, the sound petulant even to me.

“I,” the Liss said, “have always known where I came from. Your people made me. You put me together from micro-laminates and you programmed me in a factory and you sent me out to do a job.”

“That’s right,” I yelled. “You’re a machine. I’m not. I am not a machine.”

“My thoughts run ten thousand times faster than yours. I am never deactivated. While you plod in your clumsy pedestrian way from idea to slow idea, I sing in my soul like a dolphin. But I do not deny what I am. Yes, of course, Bowsprit, I too am a machine. Allow me to recommend a stance of adaptive despair.”

We torqued into the meron flux, gray banners of mockery.

“It’s okay, brother,” Roger said gently. “You’ll get used to it.”

All I could find within me was the image of my dog Beadle, alert, obedient, gulled. He was a wonderful animal, wonderful.

© 1980 by Damien Broderick.

Originally published in Edges,

edited by Virginia Kidd & Ursula K. Le Guin.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Damien Broderick is an Australian science fiction writer, editor, and critical theorist, who currently lives in San Antonio, Texas. He has written or edited some 60 books. His 1980 novel The Dreaming Dragons (revised in 2009 as The Dreaming) is listed in David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels—and with Paul Di Filippo, he has published a sequel to Pringle's book, Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985-2010. Recent short story collections are Uncle Bones, The Qualia Engine and Adrift in the Noösphere. With Grand Master Robert Silverberg, he recently published Beyond the Doors of Death, a composite novel based on Silverberg’s “Born with the Dead.”

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Twinmaker
Sean Williams

You are special.

You are unique.

And you have been selected.

Follow the instructions.

Don’t tell anyone.

You are the lucky one.

You can be Improved.

The method is simple.

Improvement is certain.

You can change anything.

Change everything,

if you want to.

Keep this a secret.

You deserve it.

1

The Lucky Jump was all the rage that year. Clair had tried it once but had become bored after arriving at a string of destinations that seemed anything but lucky. An empty field, a theater advertising a show in a language she didn’t understand, an underwater viewing platform full of noisy kids, and somewhere so wet and hot she didn’t even leave the booth. Clair could get better views from home, surfing media through her lenses, and be comfortable into the bargain.

It was Libby, of course, who convinced her to give it another try.

“Come on, it’ll be jazzy.”

“How exactly?”

“There’s this clique—they call themselves crashlanders. Ever heard of them?”

Clair shook her head. Libby was into that kind of thing, not her.

“They’re the coolest of the cool,” Libby said. “You wouldn’t believe how popular they are. Hardly anyone can join them, but we’re going to.”

“Just like that?”

“Trust me, Clair. Have I led you astray before?”

“Plenty of times.”

“Come on! What about when we auditioned for the circus even though we couldn’t even juggle? Or visited that hacked satellite and Ronnie threw up?”

“Yes, but then we got stuck at the South Pole—”

“You’re the one who set the booth to Chinese.”

“Only because you dared me to try!”

They laughed. That was a memorable moment. They had only gotten moving again when Clair found a friend of a friend who knew how to change the settings back.

“Where did you hear about the crashlanders?” Clair asked.

“Through Zep. He’s not one of them, but he’d like to be.”

Clair just nodded. Lately she clammed up when Zeppelin Barker, Libby’s boyfriend, entered the conversation.

“Come on, Clair. Say yes. You always do in the end.”

That was true, although she couldn’t imagine d-matting randomly from place to place would ever be “jazzy.” There was no point resisting one of Libby’s whims when she had her mind set on it.

“All right.”

“Great! I’ll come to yours after class. Be ready.”

Clair lived in Windham, Maine, with her mother and stepfather. She and her best friend went to high school on the other side of the continent, near Sacramento Bay, California. Libby lived somewhere in Sweden—Clair always forgot the name, but that didn’t matter. She just told the booth to take her to Libby’s, and so it did.

Clair dialed a familiar outfit from the fabber’s memory: navy plaid skirt and tank top, with black boots, bicycle shorts, and belt, and a navy headband in the vain hope of keeping her curly hair in line. She’d given up on ever having Libby’s perfectly straight blond locks. Where she was dark, Libby was light; combine the two of them, she’d often thought, and you’d get someone of precisely average coloring.

Libby was running late. While she waited, Clair searched the Air for anything regarding the crashlanders. Apart from an old book with the same name, there were several peacekeeper reports concerning the new clique and its members. Founded by a woman called Alexandra Nantakarn, the clique held “crashlander balls” at different points around the world every night, in old missile silos, abandoned hospitals, and other ruins, often illegally. Exclusive parties in exotic locales sounded like the kind of thing Libby would be into, but there was no information on how the balls were organized or who was allowed to attend.

Before Clair could perform a more detailed search, Libby arrived, looking fashionable in white tights, silver A-line dress, bright-red leather retro Doc Martens with yellow laces, and a skull-hugging yarmulke that matched the boots but left her hair free to do what it did best. Her makeup was a wild contrast between white foundation and primary-colored lipstick and eyeliner designed to pull attention away from the brown birthmark that, despite numerous skin treatments, stretched from her left ear to her chin. Clair had given up trying to convince Libby that the mark was anything other than a minor imperfection—unlike, say, Clair’s nose, which she had inherited from her birth father and hated with a blinding white-hot passion.

“Come on.” Libby dragged Clair out of the apartment and up the hall. “It’s starting.”

“The ball?”

“Exactly!”

“What’s the huge hurry?” said Clair, messaging her stepfather to apologize for not saying good-bye in person. “We’ll be there in a sec.”

“No, we won’t, because I don’t know the way,” Libby said, adding with an enigmatic grin: “But it’s vitally important we get there first.”

“What?”

“You’ll see.” Libby pulled a makeup applicator from her pocket and touched up the pancake over her birthmark. The booth’s mirrored interior reflected and re-reflected thousands of Libbies and Clairs in all directions.

Libby said to the booth, “I want to get lucky.”

Somewhere, a machine shuffled every possible public d-mat address and selected one by chance. Instead of taking them to a destination they specified, like home or school, the booth would take them to a random point anywhere on the Earth. People used Lucky Jumps to sightsee or while away an empty afternoon. Clair had never heard of anyone using them to get anywhere in particular.

Bright light flared from the booth’s eight corners and the air thinned around them. Clair opened her mouth from years of habit. Her sinuses strained.

sssssss—

She stuck a finger in her right ear, wiggled it—

—pop

The lights returned to normal and the door opened.

They were on a rugged coast, looking out over choppy water under skies as gray as granite. The northwest coast of England, her lenses told her. Nowhere.

“Well, this looks fun,” said Clair.

“Better than that thing you took me to last month—the Morris Dance Festival, whatever it was.”

“I was promised men in tights,” conceded Clair.

“And if any of them had been under seventy, maybe it would have worked out. Again,” Libby told the booth. “Lucky, lucky, lucky.”

“We’re not seriously going to randomly jump around until we find the ball, are we?”

“That’s the plan.”

“It’s going to take us forever,” said Clair. “We’ll literally be in here forever.”

“Don’t be such a worrywart. Just wait and see.”

sssssss-pop

Red Australian desert vanished at the horizon into endless starscape above. A nocturnal lizard crouched in the light spilling from the booth, frozen by the sudden development.

“Crap,” said Libby.

“You can say that again.”

“All right, all right.” Libby put her applicator in her pocket and embiggened Clair’s hair with her fingers. “There, perfect. Third time really lucky, please.”

The door slid shut on the sight of the lizard, stolidly chewing on an insect that had been attracted by the light.

sssssss-pop

The doors opened on an utterly ordinary, utterly uninteresting Ugandan d-mat station.

Clair folded her arms and raised an eyebrow. Libby was starting to look a little impatient herself.

“Okay, I guess the surprise is ruined now. No one knows where the crashlander balls are until they happen, see? People Lucky Jump around until they find somewhere with potential and then they all converge.”

“Anyone can do this?”

“Anyone can suggest venues on the forum, but the crashlanders make the final decision. And they don’t let anyone come to the ball who hasn’t found a venue before. You get it?”

Clair did see. This wasn’t just about a party. The ball was literally their ticket into the cool new clique, which in importance to Libby was right up there with the clothes she was wearing and the person she was dating. Schoolwork barely rated.

Clair piggybacked on Libby’s feed from the crashlander forum and splashed its content across the infield of her lenses. Uganda vanished behind a wall of images, projected onto her retinas by contacts she had worn from birth. The forum was full of people exchanging images of suggested sites taken with their lenses. There were a lot of images.

Clair and Libby jumped twice more, without success.

“This is giving me a headache,” said Libby despondently, brushing her bangs back into line after the doors closed and the gale outside ebbed to a muffled scream.

“Harder than you thought?” Clair tried not to sound smug.

“Much. Maybe we should pack it in.”

“Why? We’ve only just started.”

“I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Someone has to find a venue. It could still be us.”

“Not at the rate we’re going.”

This was the way it always went. Clair didn’t like giving up on anything once she got into it, and Libby was easily bored. “We’ll just have to go faster, then. Booth? Again, please.”

sssssss-pop

Clair was seeing the fun of it, now. There was the challenge of finding the right place entirely by chance, combined with finding it before anyone else did. The chance of the former was low—there were tens of millions of d-mat booths in the world, after all, maybe hundreds of millions—but that made the odds of being the first to any one of them higher. Clair figured it canceled out.

And if they found the place, they would be crashlanders. They would be cool, and Zep would come to them, because he was as much a publicity-hound as Libby. That incentive, she kept carefully to herself.

Their seventeenth Lucky Jump put them in the middle of what looked like an abandoned industrial complex somewhere high up, judging by Clair’s unpopped ear and the instant chill against her skin. She stepped out and looked around, skeptical.

“Booth’s ancient,” said Libby, circling it with a look of profound dissatisfaction. It was an outmoded model, square, with a single round-edged door opening out of each white face. Just four transits at a time. “It’d be a total bottleneck.”

“Could work in our favor—you know, make it feel exclusive?” said Clair, gazing up at thick iron girders and bulging rivets, and beyond all that, a high, domed ceiling. The floor below was empty, because industry was a thing of the past. Anything except people could be fabricated at will, as long as it had been through a d-mat booth or a fabber at some point in its existence.

“It’s freezing,” said Libby, hugging herself, “and the air’s thin.”

“We can fab heaters,” Clair said, peering through a window at the infinite quilt of mountains outside. “Oxygen, too, if people need it.”

“Because passing out is a definite buzz-kill.”

“Doesn’t it give you a high if you breathe it pure?”

Libby shrugged. “Don’t forget the parkas,’” she said. “They’re always sexy.”

Clair checked the Air for details on their location. They were in Switzerland, it turned out, and the amazing building around them wasn’t an old factory at all, but an abandoned astronomical research station, the Sphinx Observatory, three and half thousand meters up on the top of a hollowed out mountain, with an ice palace somewhere at the end of an old elevator shaft below and observation decks that had been sealed up for a decade. . . .

Clair read on with amazement. Was this place real?

“I’m getting a buzz,” she said. “Quick, take my picture.”

She opened her arms, and Libby stared hard for a second while her lenses worked.

“Got it, gorgeous girl. You want me to post it to the forum?”

“Worth a try.”

“You really think they’ll come?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Libby’s lenses flickered in the gloom, and when Clair checked the crashlander forum she saw images of herself standing in the observatory spreading out into the world.

“How will we know if they like it?” Libby asked, worrying at her lip.

“They’ll just come, I guess.”

For five minutes, nothing happened. Libby kicked the floor in moody silence, hands plunged deep in the pockets of a thick woolen coat she had ordered through the booth, while Clair paced around the enormous space, refusing to give up hope. She was finding it harder, though, with every passing minute, as the cold seeped into her skin and she became aware of a faint dizziness from the thin air. Giving up, as Libby was clearly ready to do, would be a lot easier than persisting much longer. And the odds of talking to Zep were practically zero anyway, even if the party happened. . . .

The booth behind them clunked. They ran across the room to see. One of the four doors was closing. In quick succession, the remaining three closed too, and the echoing metal space was full of the hum of matter and energy spinning into new forms. Clair stopped pacing, barely able to breathe with anticipation. They were stranded, but only temporarily, and soon they wouldn’t be alone. She saw the same eager alertness on Libby’s face. Neither of them dared speak.

“Hey,” said the first person out, a lanky man in his twenties with a British accent and a swoop of yellow hair that completely covered half his face. He stared around him with one green eye wide and gleaming, and shivered. “This is savage.”

“You like it?” asked Libby.

“Maybe. Where’s the telescope?”

“Don’t know,” said Clair. “We haven’t looked yet.”

He wandered off to explore. The door he had come through was already closing, processing someone else.

The second door opened, admitting another young man in a thick, furred overcoat, who simply ran across the room to the nearest window and gasped with something that might have been excitement or alarm. It was hard to tell. The view through the window went a long way down.

Libby looked at Clair, who shrugged.

The third potential partygoer was a young woman with Thai features and a South American accent.

“Are you Liberty Zeist?” she asked Clair.

“No, I am,” said Libby.

“And you want to be a crashlander.”

“Uh, obviously. We both do.”

“Haven’t you heard that all the good sites have been taken?”

Libby looked at Clair in frustration. Clair’s heart sank. All their jumping and standing around in the cold had been for nothing. If the crashlanders had already been here, that meant no ball and no Zep.

“Just messing with you,” said the woman with a grin. “This is a great find. Congratulations.”

She produced three beers from her backpack and tossed one each to Libby and Clair. The third she opened.

“What are you waiting for? It’s time to party.”

“But how do you know?” Libby asked. “Doesn’t there have to be a vote or something?”

“Democracy is so twentieth century. Besides, the queue for the booth is thirty deep already. I’d say the decision’s been made.” The woman grinned and raised her can in salute. “Xandra Nantakarn. Welcome to the crashlanders.”

Clair turned to Libby and saw the delight she felt mirrored on her best friend’s face. They whooped and high-fived and toasted each other’s brilliance with their gifted beers.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 by Sean Williams.

Excerpted from Twinmaker by Sean Williams.

Published by permission of the author and HarperCollins.

All rights reserved.

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

Sean Williams is a #1 New York Times-bestselling author with forty novels and eighty short stories under his belt, not to mention the odd odd poem. He writes science fiction, fantasy and horror for adults, young adults and children, and enjoys the occasional franchise too, such as Star Wars and Doctor Who. Born in the dry, flat lands of South Australia, where he still lives with his wife and family, he is currently working on the Troubletwisters series with Garth Nix and a PhD exploring the trope of the matter transmitter. He is also the Overseas Regional Director of SFWA. Twinmaker is his first original SF novel in four years.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Alien Honor
Vaughn Heppner

Prologue

FENRIS SYSTEM (230 Light Years from Earth)

A boy and old man crawled over sharp rocks the color of lead.

They were near the top of a towering mountain in the greatest range of an Earth-like planet. Ice lay in patches around them, mixed with purple lichen. A freezing wind shrieked, tearing at the boy’s fur jacket and buffeting his pale features. He was gaunt and white-skinned and had fierce, sky-colored eyes.

At times, the wind threatened to lift him off the rocks and hurl him like a doll onto jagged boulders a thousand feet below. He clung to stony protrusions then, with his teeth clenched like a predator gripping a choice piece of meat. He wanted to see the Valley of the Demons and the Mountain that was a Machine. Both were on the other side of the peak.

Beside him, the old man panted, his foggy breath blown away like stray thoughts. He had dark, leathery skin. He was the clan seeker, the ancient man of wisdom. Twice, as the wind shrieked madly, his entire body lifted so no part of him touched the mountain.

He should have flown in the air to land cruelly thousands of feet below. Instead, his dark eyes shone with a metallic color and sweat appeared on his face. He stopped lifting and remained frozen for an infinitesimal amount of time. Then he sank back onto the stone, as if in some fashion he had gained weight or pulled himself down.

The boy witnessed this each time. He also felt the seeker’s inner strength. It was like standing too close to a bonfire, and it singed his mind. Oh, but he marveled at the seeker’s power. Why didn’t the old man lead the clan? Then they could raid the demons in the valley and make their blood run red on the stones.

“It’s more dangerous at the top,” the seeker shouted, his words coming in wind-whipped fragments.

The boy nodded, and he eased upward another foot. His hands ached from gripping rocks so tightly. Fear like a snake writhed through him, but he wanted to see, had begged many weeks for this chance. Now that he was so close, he wasn’t going to turn around and slink back to the others in defeat.

He looked up. The great moon with its many bands of color dwarfed the sun. The moon filled half the sky. It seemed so near that he felt he could reach out and scratch its surface.

“Don’t be distracted!” the seeker shouted.

The boy—Klane—barely heard the admonishment in time. He pressed his frail body against stone and the wind howled across him, trying to tear him away. He endured as the invisible force plucked at him, seeking to gain a purchase. It was just like wrestling in camp against stronger, bigger boys. But none of the others, despite their strength, had ever been up here. They always sneered at him for his smooth skin, for his weakness, but he was braver than any four of them. This proved it.

As the wind lessened, Klane dragged himself upward another foot, and then another. He reached the top of the mountain at the same time as the seeker.

Klane glanced at the smiling old face. Then he looked over the topmost rock. The Valley of the Demons spread out before him, a glorious wonder. He’d never envisioned anything like this. The valley was massive, hundreds of miles long so it faded into the horizon. There were two towering mountain ranges on either side of the vale. The mountains loomed miles above the lowest point of the valley. Down in the distant bottom Klane could see greenery and a snaking river.

“The air is much thicker down there,” the seeker shouted in his ear. Klane could smell the old man’s onion breath.

Then Klane spied the Mountain that was a Machine. The seeker had described it before, many times, but he’d never expected it would be like this. The mountain didn’t seem natural but looked like a titanic box. The box or building was many miles long. It had huge, smooth tubes sticking out of it. White vapors like clouds billowed from the tubes or stacks. Beside the Great Machine was the last of an iceberg. Ropy vines snaked from the machine onto the ice. They must be huge ropes for Klane to see them from so far away.

“There!” the seeker shouted. “Now you should look up. You will see a thing to boggle your senses.”

Klane squinted upward into the heavens. His chest constricted and his breath caught in his throat. From the old man’s descriptions before he saw . . . he saw. They were long tongues of fire, flames. That meant rockets came down from space. Yes, yes, he remembered his lessons. These rockets must be high up in the atmosphere. Thunder began to boom. The noise grew louder and louder until it shook his bones. Klane kept staring at the rockets. He could see them now, mighty vessels of metal belching tongues of fire. Between the various rockets swayed a great iceberg. The rockets lowered the ice toward the Machine Mountain.

“This is a miracle!” Klane shouted.

“No. It is high technology. The iceberg was once an asteroid snatched from New Saturn’s rings and flown through the void to our planet.”

Klane stared at the seeker who knew so much. The old man used words of High Speech, the words of magic and ancient wisdom.

“The demons lower the ice from space!” the seeker shouted. “They use the ice to fuel the Great Machine.”

“What does the machine do?”

“There are many such machines on our world, Klane. The demons terraform the planet to suit their evil nature. They like the thicker atmosphere in the valley. That is why they stay down there and why they leave us alone here in the uplands.”

“What do the demons look like?” Klane shouted.

The seeker studied him, the dark eyes seemingly boring into Klane’s soul. “One day, you will tell me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I would be amazed if you did.”

Frowning, Klane asked, “Why do you always speak in riddles?”

The old man smiled. He was missing teeth. “After we return to camp, you will begin to fashion your first junction-stone.”

Klane stared at the Mountain that was a Machine. He wanted a junction-stone, but he’d doubted now for months that he could ever fashion one. The seeker had told him several weeks ago that seeing the Valley of the Demons would help him make one. Now that he saw all this . . .

“Let us go to the Mountain that was a Machine,” Klane pleaded. He wanted to go inside it and see the ancient marvels.

“Why do you wish this?” the seeker asked. “Tell me truly.”

Klane debated what he should say. “I would know more about this terraforming.”

“No! Pray that you never do know, Klane.”

“Why do you say this? I don’t understand.”

The seeker studied him, finally saying, “Greater knowledge only brings greater sorrow.”

Klane’s frown deepened. “Why do you always hound me then to learn more and to do it faster?”

The seeker turned away, for once at a loss for words.

Klane watched the rockets land near the Great Machine. The tongues of fire blew dust and grit in billowing clouds. The roar increased and Klane clamped his hands over his ears. Finally, with a thunderous sound that shook the mountain, the rockets landed on the iceberg, the ice that once was an asteroid.

Oh, the demons wielded great power indeed. They were worthy of fear. Fear . . .

Klane snarled. He was tired of being scared all the time, of enduring the endless beatings from the bigger boys. If he had a junction-stone to wield . . .

“Why am I different from the others?” Klane shouted.

“It is time to go.”

As the old man turned away, Klane grabbed one of the seeker’s frail wrists.

“Why am I different?” he repeated. “You know, don’t you?”

The seeker turned back to study him. With a deft twist, the old man freed his stick-like wrist. Then he pointed up at the monstrous, banded moon. “You came down from there, Klane. The demons brought you as they brought the iceberg. They gave you to me.”

Moisture fled from Klane’s mouth. The boys mocked him about his difference. But he’d never believed it was this bad. Was he a demon then? Was he one of their imps?

“Why would the demons do such a thing?” Klane shouted.

“Yes. That is what I would like to know. It is a penetrating question.” After a moment, the old man shook his head, and he began to crawl backward down the mountain.

The shock was too great. Klane almost stood up to let the wind take him. Instead, he craned his neck and peered up into the sky.

His thoughts took time coalescing. He had come from up there. His eyes narrowed. The seeker had just told him another riddle. He hated riddles and he hated being different. Most of all, he hated how the bigger, older boys picked on him day and night. It was time to return to camp, to fashion a junction-stone and teach the others the price of mocking one who came from the sky.

Part I: Preparation

24 OCTOBER 2452 A.D.

In another time and place, Cyrus Gant might have been a gawky teenager, all elbows and knees and ill-coordinated, skinny limbs. Here, he was gaunt like a starved rat, with the cunning of a junkyard dog. He’d need that cunning to escape the Dust hunters.

Here was Level 40 Milan, Italia Sector, end-of-the-line for everyone living a kilometer underground. At the bottom of Milan, tons of algae-slime ran through the vast processing plants. Every hour of every year, the slime pits seeped noxious fumes that could drop a trank freak.

Several mega-blocks away was the deep-core mine that supplied the city’s power. The main shaft ran down to the Earth’s mantle, and usually the magnetic shields held. When they didn’t, they bled excess heat. Bottom Milan temperatures could soar into the one-hundred and twenties and even thirties. During one disaster seventeen years ago, everyone in Levels 40 and 39 died. Taken all together—the fumes, heat and squalor—many said Level 40 was an Earthly version of Dante’s Hell.

Anyone with the credits or connections moved up. Cyrus was one of the unlucky 40ers—a lifer as they said—although he was a survivor. He’d been on his own ever since he escaped the orphanage.

As he slunk past massive, gurgling pipes, casting a wary eye to the right and left, his right hand dropped to his belt. It was a piece of rope with a knot. It kept the castoff pants tight against his sunken waist. Thrust through the belt was the object of his grope and his prized possession: a working vibrio-knife. He wore paper-thin boots and a shirt two sizes too large for his scrawny frame.

He ducked under a tube, careful to keep his head or back from touching it. Heat radiated from the rusty thing.

The upper ceiling lights flickered. Cyrus looked up fifty meters. High up there in the ceiling shined sunlamps. One of them had just blown, and the giant lamp went dark.

Too many sunlamps in Level 40 were the same way, giving the bottom a twilight quality.

Sucking in his lips, Cyrus scanned the terrain one more time. He felt something wrong, an oppression of his spirit, an evil thing. The terrain was a vast maze of tubes and pipes crisscrossing for kilometers in a bewildering array. Some of the pipes were scalding hot. Others had icicles on the bottom. This was part of Algae Plant Twelve. The mutated sludge gurgling through the tubes was a particularly vigorous form of slime that helped to feed Earth’s billions.

Cyrus had chosen the place for a reason. He carried ten grams of pure Dust, the prized and most expensive illegal drug in the solar system. He belonged to the Latin Kings, one of the hundreds of mules or carriers used to transport Dust and other black market goods. His goal was to become a foot soldier, a gunman next, and finally a chief in one of the sub-gangs. He would protect himself from the evils of life by being the toughest, smartest, and highest-ranked person around.

Right now, he needed to get his ten grams of Dust to the other side of Level 40 near Number Seven Lift. The guards there had been bribed to look the other way. His contact waited there.

The constant gurgling sludge as it pulsed through the pipes, the heat, and the ill odors should have disguised the approach of the three hunters. They should have, but Cyrus kept scowling in frustration.

He had the gaunt features of the eternally hungry and a sharp nose. His eyes, there was something strange about them. They were deep-set, blue like ink and wise about the street. His gut told him trouble came. He trusted the feeling, hesitating to make his move through an open area.

He kept turning his head, rubbernecking as he looked around. A BAD THING was out there. He hadn’t felt something like this since the time in the orphanage when the sex fiends had exchanged credits with the housemaster. He’d always had a knack for keeping his ears open. Trust no one but yourself. It was the earliest law of life he’d learned on the street. Cyrus had fled from the orphanage that night before the predators could take him down to the basement and abuse him. Since then, he’d looked out for himself. He’d joined the Latin Kings because the street had taught him you needed allies to beat the nastiest evils.

Out here in the pipes, his fingers curled around the hilt of his vibrio-knife. Why did he feel—?

Cyrus saw a hunter. It was the man’s feral movement more than the red jacket that gave him away. The thick-necked thug ducked under a tube, straightened, and turned around. A big sword image on the back of the jacket marked him as a Red Blade. They were another gang, the blood-foes to the Latin Kings.

Cyrus’s heart began to pound. The man held a gun, a slugthrower, a big one. Cyrus didn’t wonder what the Red Blade was doing here. It was obvious. The thug hunted him because the man wanted Dust. Who didn’t want ten pure grams? The Red Blade wouldn’t just rob him either. The man would kill him.

Instead of sobbing at the unfairness of life, instead of making a face or shaking in fright, young Cyrus’s eyes narrowed. The man must have twice his weight and age and the hunter gripped a gun.

A junkyard dog in this situation would have bolted for a better place. The eyes gave Cyrus away: that he was more than just another slum-dweller, a punk with a knife and an errand. He was a dinosaur, a small one to be sure, but a throwback to a different era when humanity lived in caves, battling giant bears for the right of its home. To run blindly now would be to die.

Cyrus had no intention of dying.

[End Excerpt]

Copyright © 2013 by Vaughn Heppner.

Excerpted from Alien Honor by Vaughn Heppner.

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.

Vaughn Heppner is the author of many science fiction and fantasy novels, including the Invasion America series and the Doom Star series. Canadian-born, he now lives in Central California. Visit his website at www.vaughnheppner.com.

Interview: Jay Lake
Ken Scholes

Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His books for 2013 and 2014 include Kalimpura and Last Plane to Heaven from Tor and Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh from Prime. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. He will be dying soon of terminal metastatic colon cancer.

Over the course of our friendship, we’ve joked about who had the weirdest childhood. You were born overseas and your childhood was split between the developing nations that your father served in as a member of the Foreign Service and boarding schools. Listening to some of your childhood stories, it sounds like you missed large chunks of US pop culture and instead were exposed to a much broader tapestry to draw from. How do you feel these factors shaped you both as a writer and as a person? In hindsight, what were some of the positives and negatives of this experience?

Absolutely. I grew up overseas in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. This was before satellite TV, VCRs, and media globalization. This meant we relied almost entirely on books for entertainment, even while my age cohort was growing up as the second television generation. Because of living in odd places with limited resources, the reading material was often eclectic. I wound up with the reading habits and history of an SF fan ten or twenty years my senior, and virtually no television or movie viewing history at all.

So, for example, I hadn’t ever seen the entire run of Star Trek (the original series) until 2012, at the age of 48. That only thanks to Netflix, as I haven’t cable TV since 1994, and gave up broadcast a lot earlier than that. As a child, teen, and young adult, I knew more about Kirk and Spock from James Blish’s work than I did from Shatner and Nimoy.

This drove me to rely more on both the written word and in-depth conversation than is perhaps typical of my generation. It also drove me to a certain quickness of conversation when commonly viewed media are the topic. For example, I was about three years late in figuring out that House wasn’t a home improvement show. I cover well, mostly by talking about politics, religion, sex, and other such boring topics.

I also believe this is a significant part of what drove me to be a writer. I went to nine schools in twelve years. I was almost always the new kid, and at least well into high school, very socially isolated and extremely moody. (Which is a polite way of saying I enjoyed what was eventually clinically diagnosed and treated as chronic depression.) Books were my friends, often my only friends.

Within this framework, an interest in writing seems like an extremely natural progression.

You are such a powerhouse of productivity that I once wrote a short story, “Jay Lake and the Inscrutable Alien Story Device,” in which we learn that these mad writing skills actually were given to you by aliens with the intent of preparing us for their arrival. Ten novels, five collections, and over 300 short stories across the course of thirteen years, in addition to about two million words of blogging. But it all had to start with the first story that tipped you into the writing waters. When did you know you wanted to be a writer? And how did you know? What was that first story you wrote and what inspired it? What ever happened to that story?

I wanted to be a writer even when I was a little kid. Except I wanted to be a poet. I occasionally had my poems printed in the local English language daily back in Taiwan during grade school. This ambition persisted through high school. Somewhere in there, I shifted my focus to short stories, specifically as the result of a class assignment to write a piece of gothic fiction in the style of Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Wieland. I wrote a story called “Hempkill,” an epistolary piece about a man in revolutionary France who’d recovered the eagle of a lost Roman legion, and was (perhaps) being pursued by the vengeful ghosts of the legion’s dead. That’s the first short story I can remember writing.

Oddly enough, it still exists today. I found a copy in my file boxes while cleaning out my belongings this year, and had a friend rekey it. They also rekeyed some of my deeply dreadful high school poetry. “Hempkill” was much better.

Here’s the first paragraph:

“’Tis only now, in the Year of Our Lord 1841, that I, Theodore K. Sandusky, feel it is safe to publish the following epistles. I received these communications from my brother, Hempkill P. Sandusky, during the Republican troubles in France near the close of the last century. They were all undated, and no direct indication of location was given, probably both because my brother was always conscious of censorship, as well as for other reasons which shall become self-evident. They arrived here in Baltimore in packets addressed by another hand, always marked from cities in Europe outside of France.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

Or perhaps literature.

Everyone asks writers what books or authors influenced them. What are some of the other influences—film, television, games, music, art, political figures, historical figures, and events—that shaped you and your writing? What made those influences so impactful?

Mostly what influenced me was my lifestyle. Growing up overseas, in a household where politics and international relations were dinner table conversation even for young children, gave me a view of the world as a complex and ever-changing interrelation of systems and interests. In effect, I quite early on came to see life as having a plot or a through line. Likewise I came to distrust absolutes and certainties. These conceptions have greatly influenced me as an adult in my civic and political identity, as well as in my writing, parenting, and general lifestyle.

Again, remember that I grew up largely without television and with a very limited exposure to film. Likewise pop culture, so I didn’t become exposed to music until I went to boarding school in the United States as a sophomore. (My freshman year was spent at a missionary boarding school in Nigeria, which is an entire tale of its own.) It really was more politics, history, and events that drove me.

My first political awareness was the fall of Vietnam, and Watergate. My real political coming of age was the late Carter administration—the hostage crisis, specifically—and the travesty that was the election and misrule of Ronald Reagan. That colored me with a certain cynicism and distrust of authority, and a sense that formal collective interests, whether national or religious or cultural, were often at odds or even profoundly inimical to personal interests.

I was very focused on history, both ancient and modern, which again reinforced my somewhat holistic view of the world as a series of interrelated systems with distinct life cycles and rhythms extending over very long baselines of time.

Mix this with the aforementioned fannish reading habits, consuming everything from Andre Norton and the Heinlein juveniles to 1970s Delany and Lord of the Rings, and you can see why my early influences are complex. And worldbuilding comes so naturally to me that I tend to do it even when writing flash.

Later on, of course, came Dungeons & Dragons (I started playing in the brown book days), the New Wave of SF (which I discovered about fifteen years after the fact), cyberpunk, and Gene Wolfe.

As I mentioned above, you have quite a body of work. If you had to pick three Jay Lake pieces—stories or books—that were going to be considered your most definitive works, read and re-read, taught in high schools and universities, for the rest of humankind’s existence, which three would they be and why?

Ho ho. It is to laugh. As if I could . . .

Well, I’ll try.

I suppose my book Green, my short story “The Sky That Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and Into the Black,” and my novella “The Baby Killers.”

Green is me talking about religion, childhood, what it means to be human, and oddly (for me) what it means to be female. I don’t know if it’s my best book, but Green is also very much about my daughter, and that makes it perhaps my favorite.

“The Sky That Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and Into the Black” is a short piece about life, mistakes, and atonement. Which in a sense is the journey we all take. It folds my childhood and adult experiences of Asia in with my own interpretation of the classic SFnal sensawunda. I have never written a perfect story, and never will, but that one makes me happy.

“The Baby Killers” because steampunk!!!!! Plus a certain Ken Scholes makes an appearance in that piece as a sociopathic mad scientist.

For as long as I’ve known you, you have been a strong advocate and mentor for new writers, both casually over tater tots and formally on panels and in workshops. I’m honored to be one of the new writers you’ve helped along the way, and I suspect there are many others who cite you as a major influence in the development of their own careers. What brought about this commitment to mentoring? Were you, yourself, mentored? If so, who were some of the writers that shaped you through their own coaching and what specifically did you take away from them?

You hit the nail on the head. I was mentored and helped in more ways than I can count by more people than I can name. So many hands reached out, down, or up to help me climb my own ladder. I will never be able to repay any of them for what they have done for me. All I can do is help others.

This has always been very important to me. I really only stopped convention workshopping when my extended illness made it too costly a use of my limited energy. Likewise, my various forms of support, financial and otherwise, extended as long as I was able to offer them.

As for my own mentors . . . Members of the Slug Tribe, a writers’ group in Austin, Texas that I was a member of all through the 1990s. Members of the Wordos, a writers’ group in Eugene, Oregon that I was a member of through the first half of the 2000s. Jim van Pelt, who never really knew how much he influenced and helped me. Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, who I think do know how much they influenced and helped me. (Kris eventually fired me from her workshop series, telling me to go home and write.) Also my peer or near-peer mentors, including you, John Pitts, Elizabeth Bear, and many others. Later on, professional mentors like Walter Jon Williams, Maureen McHugh, and Beth Meacham.

Most of what I took away from all these folks was a sense of professionalism and an understanding of what it means to be a professional in this field. That’s not about publication credits or remuneration, that’s about working to requirements, knowing when to blow the requirements, meeting deadlines, extending courtesies small and large, even the small, simple things like how to format and submit a manuscript.

As I often say to my daughter, no one is born knowing anything. We all have to learn somewhere. My fiction bubbles up from inside me, but the paths it has taken were in many cases laid down by the kindness, patience, and guidance of many others. The framework in which I could learn what to do with that bubbling up came from those others as well.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever been given? Who gave it to you and what made it so helpful? Consequently, what is the worst writing advice you’ve ever been given and what made it unhelpful?

Best advice ever was Ray Vukcevich, who told me, “Cut out all the parts that aren’t interesting.” Unfortunately, that’s the kind of advice that makes sense only after you understand it. I’m still not sure I understand it, but I can’t imagine a better description of the writing and revision process.

Worst advice ever was from someone in the Slug Tribe, I no longer recall whom, who told me, “Writing is not therapy.” Like hell. It’s our individual experiences and pathologies that give each of us writers our distinctive concerns and voices on the page. Just as the most interesting trees are those which have been forced to twist to fit their environment, the most interesting stories are those filtered through genuine, raw human emotion. Colorless, analytical writing has its place, Ghu knows, but fiction should be passionate, and passion arises from the flaws and joints in our souls.

You were the first person I ever heard reference “compassionate humanism.” What does that term mean to you, personally, and at what point did you realize that it was a part of your worldview? Prior to atheism, did you have a religious faith that you held to, strongly or otherwise? How have your views on religion changed—or have they?—over the course of your life as you’ve observed your fellow humans on this big rock in space? How has the cancer diagnosis influenced, or not, your worldview?

To me, compassionate humanism just means the very simple and apparently challenging belief that people are people. It doesn’t matter what church they do or don’t go to, what culture or country they are from, what gender they identify with, where their genetics originated, the orientation of their sexuality, or anything else. Everyone has the potential for a life of the mind and soul. To think otherwise, to punish and ostracize and try to enforce morality, is perhaps the greatest sin we can commit against one another.

In a sense, I’ve always known this. In another sense, I am still learning it. That is part of everyone’s life journey. The only real error is certitude. If you think you have the correct answers, you are almost certainly wrong. Especially if those answers lead you to judge or dismiss others.

I was raised churched, in the Disciples of Christ. I was a very good Sunday school student at a young age, and spent three of my years of school in missionary schools (2nd, 3rd, and 9th grades). I used to be able to quote a lot of the Bible chapter and verse, and retain a pretty good grasp of how American Protestant Christians think about their Holy Writ. I personally became disconnected from my religion at a fairly early age when I questioned why we considered Passover a miracle. What did the sleeping sons of Egypt do to deserve death, and why was God’s slaughter of those innocents evidence of His love? That’s a very adult phrasing for a question that occurred to me in first grade. (It was not well received by my religious teachers.)

As for my views on religion now, I am a low church atheist. That is to say I view the world empirically, and there is not now nor has there ever been a shred of objective evidence for the existence of any god or gods. Saying the Bible proves the existence of God is logically equivalent to saying that comic books prove the existence of Spider-Man. At the same time, I recognize the immense value that faith has for most people, and the constructive role it can play in the life of the mind and soul, and so even in my atheism I am a First Amendment absolutist when it comes to freedom of religion.

However, freedom of religion equally means freedom from religion. That is precisely how any church or sect is protected from being overwhelmed by a more populous or popular competitor. This means that I am very, very cynical about the role of religion in the public square, in the courthouse, and in the schoolhouse. Whether you are atheist, agnostic, lapsed, or observant in your religion, your best guarantee of freedom of thought and belief is precisely a completely lack of religion in your law and politics.

This is an idea lost on so many Americans that sometimes I despair of our country. But it is an idea that I hold on to as fiercely as any faith holder retains their convictions.

People are people, and no one has all the answers or the right to judge. Our culture and politics would so different, so much more gentle and humane, if more of us understood this.

This is the hard part. We know now that your cancer is terminal and that we’re going to have to live without you at some point in the not-so-distant future. For many of us, and I know for you, this is terrifying and tragic. How has this experience challenged your views of the world, humanity, and yourself? And what are the most important footprints you hope to leave behind to show that “Jay was here”?

I can only leave behind my child, my writing, and the memories people have of me. Anything more is my own vanity. I am terminal and expect to pass within the next year or two of this writing. Medical science may buy me a bit more time, but my cancer is very far past the point of no-return barring something that would be an almost literal miracle. Which, to this atheist, would be an irony so deep as to be almost unbearable.

Being terminally ill has made me both more patient and more desperate. It has made me kinder and more selfish. It has given me perspective and stripped away hope. In other words, it has kept me as human as I always was.

I try to love more, and miss fewer opportunities, and remember that every day I wake up is a good day.

In coping with your terminal illness, you’ve absolutely colored outside the lines. For example, you recently hosted your own wake—JayWake. What were people’s reactions to JayWake? Did it give you any kind of closure? How did you feel about the event? Did you feel the way you expected to feel?

JayWake was my attempt to be sarcastic about my dying. It’s misfired a bit since I obstinately insist on continuing to live, at least for now. There are about two dozen tumors spread through four regions of my body, but somehow I keep going against very steep odds indeed. Yet here I am.

So I protest my cancer in large ways and small. I can no longer work, or write, due to the cognitive and physical side effects of my disease and its treatments. My life expectancy is measured in months. But I give interviews, blog about even the most painful and personal aspects of the cancer experience, and try to at least giggle in the face of death.

For me, the morbid humor of it all helps the days pass in some comfort. I’m not afraid to ride in a coffin. If my partner would let me, I’d get a tattoo on my chest that says, “Hello, I’ll be your cadaver this semester” for the med student who eventually gets to cut me open as a learning experience. Some people embrace this enthusiastically. Some people are appalled. (Most of my family members, for example.)

But closure? I will never have closure. I will merely fight, then die. Life is about the journey, not the destination.

You are unashamedly and courageously committed to your life being an open source for the world, publically sharing from your experiences, the good, bad, and ugly, both in person and through your blog. Over the last dozen years I’ve seen that open source approach to life expand rapidly, especially when the cancer showed up. Was this a conscious choice that you grew into or have you always intended to live in such a public way? What benefits and drawbacks do you feel this has had for you? And for others?

I never intended to live my life in public. It just kind of happened. People who know me well in meatspace know that I have kind of funny boundaries. Very broad and elastic. Expressing myself publicly, largely but not entirely through social media, came naturally to me. I think I began being very open source as part of my effort to pay forward in my writing life. I wrote and talked about the travails and victories of being a beginning writer, then a writer with an evolving career. As it happened, my writing career bloomed about the same time as the blogosphere, so we sort of grew up together.

When the cancer came, in 2008, it was a natural decision for me to continue to bear public witness to my experiences. Perhaps that was an error, but it does not feel like such to me.

The benefits are that I have a great, settled comfort with the vast majority of my life choices, which I have aired nigh endlessly. The drawbacks are that small talk is hard these days. But mostly, I know that I have helped many writers, and many cancer patients and their loved ones. And that makes it all worthwhile, regardless of my internal landscape.

You are also very outspoken on your blog and in general about your progressive values—such as healthcare reform, gun control, marriage equality—and present them in a passionate yet well-reasoned manner. What lies at the heart of these values for you? What drives you to share them?

Well, this mostly arises out of my compassionate humanism. I suppose one way to frame my views is to say that we should leave people alone to live their lives in a modicum of health, safety, and opportunity. In my political lifetime, conservatism has always been about taking things away from people, punishing them for their race, gender, and lifestyle, and limiting their opportunities in protection of entrenched interests. The eternal conservative war on women’s health, the continuous persecution of the poor and the ill, the outright cultural warfare against the LGBTQ community—these are reasons I must be a progressive. While conservative rhetoric at its best is high-minded and clear-eyed, almost without exception the application of conservative positions in everyday life is oppressive, intellectually dishonest, and morally repugnant.

This is also intensely personal. As a cis-gendered educated white male of English descent in America, those entrenched interests I mentioned are largely aligned with a simplistic interpretation of my interests. It’s incumbent upon me with my privilege to work to devolve that privilege to people who were not lucky enough to be born with it. At the same time, my child is a young woman of color. She personally needs to be protected from the harm that conservative thought wishes upon her systematically and fostered to her own opportunities for success and happiness at her own initiative, on her own terms.

I am a progressive because in contemporary America, the alternative produces unthinkable cruelty, which is celebrated on a daily basis in media outlets and from pulpits across our nation.

Your advocacy of others goes far beyond writing. I know that a part of the blogging and sharing your cancer experience is also an expression of your advocacy, giving voice to something that people often won’t talk about. If you were to imagine an ideal society where this advocacy led to changes in how we approached illness and mortality as a culture, what would that look like?

We would support the ill and the dying as humanely as possible. The current system for healthcare distribution is badly broken. The Affordable Care Act, which conservatives flatly view as the greatest threat to American freedom since Nazism, is only the beginning of a fix for that problem which every other industrialized nation in the world has managed to solve to a much greater degree.

Likewise our disability system is founded on a presumption of fraud and denial of need. It is cruel and wrong-headed by design, and forces people at the nadir of their lives, who are in great suffering, to comply with endless requirements for documentation and behavior which often are literally nonsensical.

We are so afraid as a culture that someone, somewhere is enjoying an unearned benefit at our expense that we would deny a hundred people in desperate need to keep one skimmer from potentially prospering. This is exactly backwards to how any sane, humane society would treat its sickest and neediest members.

What are the weirdest, funniest, and best things that have happened to you over the course of your life?

Weirdest? Are you kidding? Off the top of my head, in the course of my life, I have managed to flood a moving car with raw sewage, fought a fatal pornography fire, and been co-host of the Hugo Awards ceremony. I could fill a freaking book with weird. Life is weird.

Funniest pretty much runs alongside weird. My life is funny almost every day. Even now, in this time of cancer and death, there is a lot of laughter in my house. Hell, everyone’s life is funny almost every day. The trick is learning how to see that.

Best . . . Being a dad. Being an author. Love. Sex. Food. Waking up every day. Those are what is best in life.

You and I have eaten a lot of food together. You’ve introduced me to things like frickles (fried pickles) and Époisses (cheese that smells like feet). As meals go, what is the absolutely best meal you have eaten? And what was the worst?

The best meal I have ever eaten would be a tough call. Food is so complex. I’ve been to formal Chinese banquets and been served cured meat and fermented mare’s milk in a Mongolian ger (yurt) on the edge of the Gobi Desert. A sumptuous casino meal in Melbourne, dim sum in Hong Kong. Pizza in Boston’s North End, pit barbecue among the mesquites of Central Texas. Greek banquets by the Aegean and safari fare in Kenyan lodges.

There is no absolute best, but if I had to pick one to relive, it would probably be a good pizza. I am at heart a plebian man.

As for the worst, well . . . I never did cotton to Ethiopian food, but that’s me and the spices not getting along, rather than a quality issue. Maybe the live eel soup I was forced to eat as a child at one of those Chinese banquets. I was certainly scarred for life by the twitching, bleeding section of eel in the low tide broth set before me.

But it’s all experience, it’s all sensation, it’s all the stuff of life.

We know that your health isn't letting you write currently, but you do have some projects still releasing with your work in them. For example, in October 2013, Audible will release the third in its award-winning METAtropolis series, METAtropolis: Green Space, which will include your novella “Rock of Ages.” Can you give us an idea of what else is in the pipeline?

Even though I'm not writing, or even revising and editing, any more, there's still inventory out there. Tor has acquired what will be my final short story collection, entitled Last Plane to Heaven, for a Fall 2014 release. I still have short fiction percolating through a few market queues. There's also an ongoing effort to place some of my other longer work, as well as find collaborators to wrap up existing projects I am no longer capable of working on.

You’ve been interviewed quite a lot over the course of your writing career. What’s the one question you wish someone would finally ask? And how would you answer it?

The question is, who do you love?

The answer is, everyone who ever wrote or read a story.

Ken Scholes is the critically acclaimed author of four novels and over forty short stories. His series, The Psalms of Isaak, is being published both at home and abroad to award nominations and rave reviews. Publishers Weekly hails the series as a "towering storytelling tour de force." Ken's eclectic background includes time spent as a label gun repairman, a sailor who never sailed, a soldier who commanded a desk, a preacher (he got better), a nonprofit executive, a musician and a government procurement analyst. He has a degree in history from Western Washington University and is a winner of the ALA’s RUSA Reading List award for best fantasy novel, France's Prix Imaginales for best foreign novel and the Writers of the Future contest. Ken is a native of the Pacific Northwest and makes his home in Saint Helens, Oregon, where he lives with his wife and twin daughters. You can learn more about Ken by visiting www.kenscholes.com.

Interview: Margaret Atwood
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Margaret Atwood is the author of the classic dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, about a takeover of the American government by religious fundamentalists, as well as the book, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, an essay collection that examines mythology, utopias, and science fiction. Her most recent book is MaddAddam, a sequel to her novels Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, about a mad scientist who tries to replace humanity with genetically engineered people of his own creation.

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 MaddAddam is set in the same world as your previous books Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Would you recommend that people jump right into this book, or would you recommend that people read the other two books first?

I think that would be the reader’s own choice. You could certainly come in at any entry point. The first two books run during the same time period, and the third one takes off from the end of both of them. I did put a little Lord of the Rings-type summary at the beginning for those who might stumble upon the third one without knowing about the other two.

A lot of the book deals with the backstory of the character, Zeb, whose father was this sleazy televangelist type who headed up the church called The Church of Petrol Oleum. Could you talk about the creative process you went through in inventing that church?

It wasn’t much of a stretch. The word petroleum does come from those two Latin words, and there is a crossover already. But also it comes from people’s true religion, as what they worship, whether it’s called a church or not. So if you’re dedicated, for instance, to the stock market to the exclusion of all else, you have a religion of the stock market. It’s an invisible force that you pray to, whether you know you’re doing that or not. So, just as there was once a sun god, why would there not be an oil god?

I guess we should maybe explain, if people haven’t read the book, that the Church of Petrol Oleum thinks God gave humans dominion over the Earth and therefore it’s our holy obligation to extract as much oil as possible.

Well, because oil is holy and because, what do we anoint people with in the Bible but oil? Therefore it must be holy. Wouldn’t you say?

Yeah, that a pretty good argument.

(Laughing). I’m glad you’re convinced.

(Laughing). Do you think you could make up a church about anything you could imagine and find justification for it in the Bible?

No, you couldn’t. There are some things that you could absolutely not make up a religion about because they’re not in the Bible. So you couldn’t make up a Church of Avocados. I don’t think avocado is mentioned once. So it is restricted by what words are actually there, but people have interpreted those words many different ways and continue to do so.

One thing I think about a lot is that, it seems to me, speculative fiction has a lot of the virtues of religion without any of its downsides.

You are not the first person to have noticed that. Science fiction more particularly; we can no longer do the burning bush, plausibly, say on Fifth Avenue. Anybody who saw a burning bush on Fifth Avenue that they said talked to them would probably be on some drug, having a mental episode, or such would our interpretation be. But if you get on a space ship and go to Planet X, the whole thing can be littered with burning bushes that talk; they would simply be an alien life form. That is why certain kinds of theological discussions have moved off planet, and are acted out on other planets with imagined beings that can debate these questions much as angelic beings once debated them in Paradise Lost.

I also read your book, In Other Worlds, which is sort of an essay collection about speculative fiction and related subjects, and—

And science fiction. There’s plain old, outright science fiction too.

Yep. And in that book you talk a lot about utopian stories, which are about ideal societies, and dystopian stories which are about nightmarish societies, and you also coined the term “usetopias,” which are either a utopia or dystopia depending on the way you look at it, they’re kind of a blend of the two. How would you say that your studies on that form of literature have informed the Oryx and Crake trilogy?

Oh, well, quite deeply, I’ve been reading the raw material since I was about ten, and thinking about it in a more organized way since I was about twenty-one. One of the things you can say is that having read so much of it, I know what some of the pitfalls are and tried to avoid them therefore. Particularly with utopias, there’s always a part where you get more or less a tour, which you did quite a lot in communist countries—you get a tour of the factory, and a lecture that goes, “In olden days, societies made these horrible mistakes and did these bad things, but we’ve fixed that now. Here’s how we do it!”

Do you want to talk a little bit about usetopias? Where would you put the Oryx and Crake trilogy on—

I think they’re the same. I think utopia and dystopia are essentially flipsides of the same form, and that every utopia has a dystopia concealed within it. And every dystopia has got a utopia concealed within it, otherwise you wouldn’t have anything to judge the “bad” by.

The nineteenth century utopias, of which there were really a lot, many were written then because people did think great improvements were being made and that the world was, if not perfectible, almost so. They wanted to do something about the deplorable slum conditions and the polluted environments that they saw around them then. So they wrote a lot of utopia stories, and they started utopian societies. Coleridge had the idea of being part of one of them, Nathaniel Hawthorne dabbled in it, the Shakers and Quakers were, of course, both utopian communities, and the American adventure started as another such thing, with the seventeenth century Puritans thinking that they were going to build God’s kingdom on earth, or close to it.

Utopianism is something people both wrote about and did, from the seventeenth to maybe the end of the nineteenth century. Then it kind of blew up, literally, with the First World War, and the Second World War, and a couple of other experiments in utopias. So the USSR and Hitler’s Germany were both experiments in utopianism. “Grand Plan, going to make everything much better, except first of all we have to get rid of these people.” These were followed by Mao’s China and Pol Pot. There’s some minor ones too, Ceaușescu’s Romania and the Albanian Adventure, etc.

Utopias became much harder for us to credit, the perfect society that was going to come into being as the result of the imposition of an overarching plan.

Each utopia always had a little bit of dystopia, the part where “we had to get rid of those people.” And each dystopia had a utopia, the better society that we either remembered or hoped to escape to.

In the Oryx and Crake trilogy, what aspects of that world do you see as the utopian aspects and which as the dystopian aspects?

The utopian thinking, of course, is done by Crake himself, things are going to be so much better, except first we have to get rid of “those people.” “Those people” would be—

Everybody.

That would be the human race. Not quite everybody, he leaves Jimmy alive as the shepherd to the new new-people, who have had some of what he considered to be our imperfections removed from them. Thus, they have built-in sunblock and insect repellent, which I think would be good things. They don’t need clothing and therefore will never have a cotton industry, or a fashion industry, or any cotton mills. They’re not only vegetarian, they can eat grass and leaves, so they will never have to have agriculture. They will not have to have herd animals, and therefore they will not be territorial. They will not suffer from romantic despair, they will never be rejected romantically because they breed seasonally, like most other mammals. They aren’t partially “on” all the time like us. To that end, in the breeding season, parts of them turn blue, so there’s never any mistake. Because they breed in groups, they’re not worried about paternity.

So you say that things like built-in insect repellent you see as a good thing.

Wouldn’t you think it would be a good thing?

I do, for sure. But your review of Bill McKibben’s book, Enough, gave me the idea that you were not in favor of the idea of genetically engineering humans.

I’m not in favor of genetic engineering as a commercial pursuit today. There are genetic engineering programs on offer in the world of Oryx and Crake in which you can get your baby tweaked. Is it going to be like out of the catalog where you pick the height, weight, eye color, intelligence level, and curliness of hair? I think that’s probably a pretty bad idea. On the other hand, if it’s a matter of disease elimination, then it’s probably a very good thing.

Earlier it came up a little, about speculative fiction and science fiction. You’ve defined “speculative fiction,” essentially, as stories that take place on Earth and employ elements that already exist in some form.

Yeah, so it’s a matter of truth and labeling. When people think science fiction they think, whether you like it or not, of spaceships and, as one person said, Lycra. So that’s just a question of what you’re going to put on the box. I like there to be, inside the box, what it says on the outside there is going to be.

Somebody did quite a wonderful book a few years back about comic book promises, that is, things that you could send away for from the backs of comic books. They sent away for all of them, and then they compared the promise with what they actually got. In most cases there was very little resemblance. So, I like there to be some resemblance between what is promised on the outside and what you get on the inside. If it says science fiction I want there to be something that doesn’t already exist.

Do you think that causes confusion?

Only amongst people who are already using a label in a very large sense, that includes all kinds of stuff. And we could usually go through and say what it isn’t. For instance, is Dracula science fiction?

The way that most people that I know define speculative fiction would be: a wide range of fantasy, supernatural, horror, and science fiction.

Because they think those things might actually exist?

Well, speculative fiction is often just an umbrella term for a wide range of non-realistic fiction.

Okay, I would put a different label over the top of that and I would call it all “wondertale.” That includes everything. And then underneath that you could have various subsets, which is sword and sorcery fantasy, with dragons, without dragons; you could have science fiction proper, which would be with spaceships and other planets and really amazing inventions; you could have what I would call speculative fiction, which would be things we could actually do and probably have done to some extent.

Right, but if you’re asking how I would define science fiction, I would tend to think of it as wondertales, as you put it, that presuppose the scientific worldview. So it’s not so much, “is this possible or impossible,” but “if it were to be explained, would the explanation be scientific?”

Yeah, but a lot of stuff that people would call science fiction, the worldview is not scientific at all. It has a sort of palaver of scientism applied on to it. But it isn’t really scientific, quite often there’s a lot of magical thinking in it.

Like Star Wars for example?

Star Wars, exactly.

That’s why I wouldn’t actually classify Star Wars as science fiction in particular.

You’d call it science fiction fantasy.

Yeah, science fantasy.

Or galactic fantasy of some kind. And where would we put Star Trek? We would probably put Star Trek somewhere in the middle.

I think Star Trek does have it where everything is, presumably, explained by science. It’s just a lot of the science is not particularly rigorous.

It’s just science we haven’t done yet.

But, I mean, I guess, you said that people are sometimes hostile to you when you don’t want to use the term science fiction for some of your books.

There’s truth in labeling again.

What have been some of the most intense reactions that you’ve experienced?

I don’t know. I think, probably, you might ask—Jonathan Lethem actually wrote quite a good piece about this a while ago, about hanging out with these science fiction cultists. His worldview is probably a bit out of date now because it was presupposed on, “literary people scorn us, they won’t let us into their clubhouse, or we’re not going to let them into ours.” But when you have The New Yorker doing a science fiction issue, I would say that that particular door is no longer closed. And it should never have been closed in the first place because you cannot write a history of prose narrative in the twentieth century without including H.G. Wells, without Brave New World, without 1984. Those are key books of the century, I would say.

Anyway, so there was this sort of skirmish going on in the book world about who was allowed to be in what group. People lay claim to literary territories a lot, and then they try to fence them off, but it never works.

When we interviewed Ursula K. Le Guin last year, she mentioned that she’s had a long-running debate with you about the term science fiction.

Yeah, it’s about terminology, but she wouldn’t deny that there are those two kinds of fiction. I think it’s just a question of what to call them. And we did, in fact, do an onstage conversation when I published In Other Worlds, and in the preface to that book you can find that matter discussed. She was a naughty Ursula. (Laughter).

Speaking of Ursula K. Le Guin, you discuss her work quite a bit in In Other Worlds. You also mention other recent science fiction authors like Octavia Butler, Stanislaw Lem, and William Gibson. Is it fair to say that those are some of your favorite science fiction authors?

I guess you would have to say that, wouldn’t you? Does that mean there are others that I also like that I haven’t mentioned, I’m not sure, I’d have to go back and look at the index.

I heard it suggested that Octavia Butler is, and that Lilith’s Brood, was an influence on the Oryx and Crake trilogy.

No, because I didn’t read it until after I’d written Oryx and Crake. It was through writing Oryx and Crake that people came to suggest it.

You also say in the book that when you were working on the dissertation, you covered all sorts of authors who might be considered somewhere on the fantasy and science fiction spectrum.

All sorts, yeah. Nobody else was doing any academic work on that kind of thing then.

You called them metaphysical romances, the books you were focused on?

I made that up. (Laughter).

I like it, though.

Yeah, I think it’s pretty good. It was that string that led from George MacDonald through H. Rider Haggard into C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. I was mostly interested in the supernatural women figures who had pre-comic book super powers of various kinds. And that was very distinct from the other thing that was forming in the nineteenth century, which was that Jules Verne, who I would call the great-granddaddy of speculative fiction, wrote about stuff that he thought could actually happen, such as submarines. And when H.G. Wells came along, he created stuff everybody knew couldn’t happen, such as The Time Machine. Jules Verne was horrified. He said, “Mais, il invente!” (“But he’s inventing things!”). Which, we now take it for granted that people invent things. But it was perfectly new then, and the term science fiction was not used for it. It didn’t come into use until the late ’20s.

It seems like that distinction is problematic in a way because it presupposes that we can know what’s possible and what isn’t. I know a lot of very smart people who are absolutely convinced that we’ll be uploading our minds to computers within the next century, and an equally number of equally smart people who think that’s completely ridiculous.

Yeah, well, the fact that you can argue it means that it’s within the realm of speculative fiction.

But I would’ve said that teleportation was completely ridiculous as well, but there have been recent experiments with quantum teleportation, which shows that it’s maybe not as ridiculous as you would’ve thought.

Maybe not in theory, but we’re not in the land of the fly yet.

No.

(High-pitched, squeaky voice) Help me, help me!

We’re not there yet.

You’re not troubled by that at all, that it’s hard to say what might actually be possible and what might not be?

No, I’m not troubled by that at all. And I know it’s hard to say. I wrote a piece in that book, In Other Worlds, about Jonathan Swift in which I look at Book Three of Gulliver's Travels, a book that most people skip because it doesn’t really interest them, but it’s the one in which he’s making fun of the royal academy essentially, in the early age of scientific experiments. And a lot of the stuff he was making fun of, in a kind of backhanded way, is now actually coming into being. So yes, I know that can happen, that one age’s common sense is another one’s discarded superstition. We surely all know that by now. The one thing about science and the way it proceeds is that it’s constantly self-correcting.

Another thing you say in In Other Worlds is that, at various times, the real world has seemed to drift dangerously close to Brave New World, or 1984, or The Handmaid’s Tale. And so, in our current situation, which dystopia or dystopias do you fear most?

I think we’re going to get them all at once. (Laughter). Yeah, actually, I’m about to review a book that takes on another version of Brave New World. Our version, the version that we actually find ourselves enmeshed in, even as we speak, and that would be the ability to track, and as it were, publish everyone all the time.

You’re reviewing a book about this?

I’m reviewing a book that’s taking that on and it’s by Dave Eggers. It’s called The Circle and it’s coming out in October.

But that is what’s concerning us right now because of the revelations about data mining that has been done by, for instance, the U.S. government, and they’re not alone. So tracking people through the Internet is basically what it is.

David Brin wrote a book called The Transparent Society where he argued that that would be a good thing and that we should just forget about privacy.

Sure, I know him, and then some of the people in Dave Eggers book are arguing exactly that. So that harks back to a lot of earlier work. I don’t know whether you remember a play by Ionesco called Rhinoceros. The idea that if everybody could see everybody all of the time, nobody would ever do anything bad. But would that be such a good thing? Because what you’re actually proposing is a kind of very paranoia-inducing crowd mentality, which is really pretty close to Newspeak in 1984. In other words, “We’ll make it impossible for you to think certain thoughts because we will just remove the possibility from you.”

Another recent project you’ve been working on is The Positron.

Yes. Positron on Byliner. So another example of how new technologies enable old forms. Dickens published in serial form in the nineteenth century, and so did a lot of writers then, in mid-century, and serials migrated to newspapers and magazines, and then short fiction magazines shrank and faded in the ’70s and ’80s, leaving The New Yorker standing like a lone mountain peak. So what the Internet has enabled is the return of short fiction online, read-it-in-one-go investigative journalism, and serial publishing. So there’s that one but then there’s also Wattpad, where a lot of people are writing and publishing in serial form, using their phones.

I noticed in the book description for Positron, Episode 4, you were described as the “Diva of Dystopias.” I was wondering what you thought about that.

That wasn’t my description. But it’s fun.

All right, are there any other projects, what are you up to right now? Is there anything you want to mention?

Well, there’s a couple of associated things. Some kids came and said, “How about doing MaddAddam as a video game?” And I said, “I think it would be too huge for that. But there is a video game inside MaddAddam itself, actually there are three of them in the chapter called ‘Intestinal Parasites: The Game.’ So why don’t you make those?” And so they have done it. They’ve made Intestinal Parasites: The Game, and you can download it as an app, and so far I think they’re going to do a number of different organs, and so far they’ve gone as far as the lungs.

Have you played it? Are you a gamer at all?

I’ve played it; I’m going to have to practice because I can’t get past level three. And every time you fail at a level a sign comes up saying: “You have died.” It’s quite blunt.

So if that does well, will we see Extinctathon?

They wanted to make Extinctathon and I told them it would be way too boring as an actual game. You could make a game called Extinctathon that would be quite a lot more exciting than the one that’s described in the book. But Intestinal Parasites, I think, is going to keep everyone occupied for the foreseeable future.

All right, great, I think we’re going to wrap things up there. We’ve been speaking with Margaret Atwood; her new book is called MaddAddam. Thanks for joining us!

Thank you.

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: Halil Ural

Artist Spotlight: Halil Ural
Henry Lien

Halil Ural was born in Turkey in 1983. He grew up with the pop culture and cartoons of the ’80s and ’90s and has been passionate about drawing since childhood. He studied at the Istanbul High School of Fine Arts, where he concentrated on drawing and painting, and the Marmara Faculty of Fine Arts, from which he graduated in 2006 with a degree in graphic design. He currently works in the medium of digital painting as a freelance science fiction/fantasy illustrator and concept artist for book publishers, game developers, and advertising firms. His website is mrdream.deviantart.com.

What were your favorite monsters when you were a child?

There are many of them. When I was a little kid, my favorites were mostly the cartoon villains such as Skeletor and Trapjaw. From the movies, I liked the sandworms in Tremors and I liked Gremlins. Dinosaurs became popular in the early ’90s, possibly because of the Jurassic Park movie. So if T. rex is regarded as a monster, then I can say that it’s also among my favorite childhood monsters.

If you could have one of the creatures from one of your paintings as a pet, which one would it be?

I think my creatures are not tame enough to keep as pets but it would be nice to have that griffin-like creature that I painted for the cover of Kestrel’s Midnight Song.

If you could be one of the creatures in one of your paintings, which one would it be?

I guess I would be the cat in Miss Nevermiss.

The paintings all have a strong narrative element. How much background story do you imagine before creating the painting?

Well, I believe that any subject matter can be a story itself and it’s important to interweave the main story with other small side stories. It makes them more believable and more alive. And I also have bits of symbolism in some of my paintings. So that visual narrative is a nice way to bind them. The background story sometimes gets developed as I refine the subject matter, though it’s another case when the client comes up with a pre-written background story. If that’s the case, then I have to follow that pre-written path for it, which means I don’t have much space to play. At that point, I have to figure out how to tell someone else’s story with my own visual language. In the end, it becomes a fusion of the client’s story and my narrative.

Leave Her Alone is one of the most interesting paintings I have seen in a long time, because of the point of view. It is composed from the first-person point of view of the villain. Tell us about your decision to do that. Tell us about the project that this was for.

It wasn’t actually for a project. It was a personal piece where I experimented with the narrative uses of camera angle. So the decision for that composition was made to challenge myself. I wanted to make a fight scene without showing the fight. The foreshortening gives the impression that the character you are looking at is bravely standing up to a tall guy, probably a stronger guy. The first-person point of view from the villain’s eyes is a form of interaction with the viewer to exaggerate how the character you are viewing is determined to protect the girl, by even guarding her from the viewer.

Hibernate is my favorite painting of yours. It seems to have an environmentalist subtext that reminds me of Princess Mononoke. Was this in your mind when you created this painting?

It was an old piece I did for Taron’s “Natives of the Lifeless Forest” Challenge at CGHUB.com. The environmentalist subtext is there, but at the same time, the tribe of blue creatures who hunt the tree-tortoise creature is also a part of that lifeless forest too. The theme is the tension between extinction and over-population. My “lifeless forest” is a glacial land that life has not permanently abandoned. It’s a place where trees can travel when they awaken from hibernation. And of course, it is almost impossible not to get inspired by Miyazaki’s works when the subject is “Natives of the Lifeless Forest.” So my answer would be yes.

Prophecy of Tides is an unusual painting. It has a figure that you would expect to see at human-scale, but it is contrasted with the landscape to give it monstrous scale. What are some of the emotions and themes that were in your mind when you created this painting?

Yes, he indeed is enormous and his lower body is blending or fading in the horizon. He’s like a giant ghost of the past that blocks the sun. He is wearing tribal dress, looking into the distance, and possibly foreseeing a coming danger. The main themes in my mind were the flood of Genesis and colonization. Prophecy of Tides is my take on mankind’s grasp of its own myths.

Many of your digital paintings have effects applied so that they resemble hand-painted works. How did you do that? Why did you do that?

I love the depth of colors and how the brush strokes look in traditional mediums. It has that organic feel that is a bit hard to achieve digitally. So I decided to simulate that natural look, especially in my fantasy-themed works. I started building my own customized color palette and brush sets for Photoshop. Also, sometimes I do not fix all the flaws or details in everything. I believe the rawness and flaws make them look more hand-painted.

What is your dream project?

There are too many ideas for various possible “dream projects” in my mind, so it’s hard to put all of them together into one single project. After all, if it’s a “project,” it needs to be one step ahead of being just a “dream.” I would love to see my paintings get animated, so maybe a feature-length animated film would make a good “dream project” someday.

Henry Lien is an art dealer in Los Angeles (www.glassgaragegallery.com). He represents artists from North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. His artists have appeared in ARTnews, Art in America, Juxtapoz, the Huffington Post, and Time Magazine, and been collected by and exhibited in institutions and museums around the world. Henry has also served as the President of the West Hollywood Fine Art Dealers’ Association and a Board Member of the West Hollywood Avenues of Art and Design. Henry also has extensive experience as an attorney and teaches at UCLA Extension. In addition, Henry is a speculative fiction writer. He is a Clarion West 2012 graduate and has published work in Asimov’s and Interfictions. Visit his author website at www.henrylien.com.

Invisible Planets
Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu

“Tell me about the fascinating planets you’ve seen. But I don’t want to hear anything cruel or disgusting,” you say.

Good. I nod and smile. Of course. No problem.

Chichi Raha

Chichi Raha is a fascinating place, its flowers and lakes unforgettable to all visitors. There, you cannot see a single inch of exposed soil because the land is covered by vegetation: the anua grass, as fine as silk thread; the kuqin tree, tall enough to scrape the clouds; and many varieties of unnameable, unimaginably strange fruits, exuding seductive aromas.

The Chichi Rahans have never needed to worry about making a living. Their life expectancy is high, their metabolism is slow, and they have no natural enemies. They fill their bellies on a diet of various fruits and make their homes inside a type of tree with large, hollow trunks. The average diameter of these tubes is just wide enough to allow an adult Chichi Rahan to lie down comfortably. When the weather is good, the branches hang loosely, but when it rains, the branches rise so that the leaves form a canopy like an umbrella.

Those who visit Chichi Raha for the first time are always confused by how civilization could have developed on such a world. From the perspective of the visitors, in a place lacking crisis and competition, life should be able to survive very well without intelligence. But there is indeed civilization here, and indeed it is beautiful, vigorous, full of creativity.

Many visitors think that they would like to retire here. Most of them think that their greatest difficulty would be a matter of diet. So, anxiously and carefully, they taste every type of local fruit. But after they’ve lived here for a while, after they’ve attended enough local banquets, they discover—somewhat to their surprise—that while they enjoy the food, they cannot tolerate life here, especially those who are old.

It turns out that all Chichi Rahans learn to lie from birth. Indeed, lying is their most important occupation. They spend the entire span of their existence fabricating stories concerning both events that have occurred and events that have not. They write them down, paint them, sing them, but never remember them. They do not care if there’s a correspondence between their words and the facts, their only standard being whether the tale is interesting. If you ask them about the history of Chichi Raha, they will tell you a hundred versions. No one will contradict the version told by another, because each moment, they are already engaged in self-contradiction.

On this world, everyone is always saying, “Yes, I will,” but nothing is ever done. No one takes such promises seriously, though promises do make life more interesting. Only in extremely rare circumstances do the inhabitants do as they promise. And such occasions are celebrated. For example, if two of them make an appointment and both happen to keep it then they will most likely become a couple and live together. Of course, such occurrences are rare. Most live alone all their lives. The inhabitants do not feel any lack because of this. Indeed, they hear about the overpopulation problems of other planets and feel that their own world is the only one that understands the secret of good living.

So, Chichi Raha developed a brilliant literature, art, and history, and became a famous center of civilization. Many visitors come with the hope that they might hear a local tell family stories in the grass beneath the crown of one of the house-trees.

At one time, some questioned whether a stable society could develop on a planet like this. They imagined Chichi Raha as a chaotic place with no government or commerce. But they were wrong. The planet has an advanced political culture, and the business of exporting fruits has gone on for several centuries without interruption. The habit of lying has never caused problems for these developments, but may have even helped them. The only thing that Chichi Raha lacks is science. Here, every intelligent mind knows a bit of the universe’s secret, but the bits never get the chance to be pieced together.

Pimaceh

This is another planet where you can’t be sure about history. As you wander through its museums, restaurants, and hotels, you will hear many versions of its past. Eventually, you will be trapped in a miasma of confusion because every speaker’s expression will be so sincere that you can’t help but believe, and yet there is no way to reconcile all the different stories.

The scenery of this world is legendary. Strictly speaking, the planet is not even spherical. The southern hemisphere is far lower in elevation than the northern, and an almost perpendicular cliff, going all the way around the equator, divides the planet into two completely different halves. Above the cliff: ice and snow; below: an endless ocean. The city of Pimaceh is built on this world-encircling cliff. From the sky to the sea, the lightly recessed houses and the perfect straight up-and-down avenues are like parts of a giant painting.

No one knows how this place was built. All that you will hear are the various romances told by the current inhabitants. Every story is exciting: Some are heroic legends; some are tragic and austere; some are full of doomed loves. The particular effect depends on the teller, but no one can give a version that convinces everyone. And so, as it passes from teller to teller, Pimaceh becomes more and more mysterious and charming.

Many visitors, entranced by the wondrous sights and stories, linger and do not wish to leave. This is an open and accommodating planet, and every visitor is welcomed with open arms. The visitors—now settlers—then build their own houses on the cliff and pass on the stories they hear to new visitors. Content, they gradually become locals.

This state of happiness will last until one day, when they will realize the truth about themselves. They’ll suddenly understand that countless hints have already revealed Pimaceh’s true history to them: Everyone on this world is a visitor. There are no natives at all.

Yes, Pimaceh did once have a glorious history, but for some reason it had been abandoned. The original inhabitants had left for unknown reasons, leaving behind only a lovely ghost town that astounded interstellar travelers who later stumbled upon it. They also left behind fragments of a language that no one could decipher, like metaphors that filled in the blank spaces between the buildings. These took root in the minds of those who came after, and blossomed into the most lush and beautiful imaginary pasts for the planet.

No one knew who was the first to discover this uninhabited world. The history of the visitors has also faded, consciously or not, as it passed from generation to generation. All the visitors who have settled wish to think of themselves as the people of Pimaceh. They protect this planet and steadfastly play the role of hosts—until one day they themselves begin to believe that this is their native land and the country where they will die.

Almost no one can discover Pimaceh’s secret except a few true wanderers who have been to all corners of the universe. They can sense that the inhabitants here emphasize slightly too often the fact that they are the People of Pimaceh. On planets where real natives have remained in charge, this is one of those things easily forgotten.

Bingwaugh

Setting Pimaceh aside, in the sea of stars, you’ll probably have to go all the way to Bingwaugh to see such a variety of different species from all over, each with its own culture and civilization, colliding, striking against each other, creating sparks.

Bingwaugh is not too big and not too small. Its seasons are indistinct and its climate mild. The surface of the planet is composed mostly of plains, with few mountains and little variation in elevation. The horizon is a gentle, smooth curve. Here is everything that an average planet should have, but nothing more: good soil, decent mineral deposits, various fauna and flora, and even the sort of circular fields surrounded by low bushes where tourists like to sing and dance. There’s nothing remarkable at all.

The inhabitants of Bingwaugh are similarly average. They are mammals; not too big; a solid, good people, easily satisfied. Their social organization is loose, and everyone lives in harmony.

If one had to pick something unique about them, it would be their pleasant disposition. Rarely are they seen arguing, whether amongst themselves or with the multiplicity of interstellar visitors. They’re great listeners. Adults and children alike would open their eyes wide and listen to you lecture, nodding frequently, their faces often breaking into expressions of being intoxicated by the wisdom you’re imparting.

Having discovered this characteristic of Bingwaugh, all the ambitious adventurers in the universe rushed to take advantage of it. Who doesn’t want to rule over such a people and place? Plenty of resources, comfortable living environment, and a great location at the intersection of so many trade routes.

So, educators came, missionaries came, politicians came, revolutionaries and reporters all came. They described to the locals their visions of heaven, lectured them on their ideals, and again and again, the inhabitants of Bingwaugh nodded and sighed with heartfelt admiration and accepted the new philosophies. Some remote planets even sent over “Supervisors” to rule over these new converts. The inhabitants never objected, not even a peep.

But, after these triumphant developments, the interstellar guests would always be disappointed. Indeed, the longer they stayed on Bingwaugh, the more their disappointment grew.

As it turns out, the locals have never truly accepted any alien propaganda. Even when they agree with a new faith, they never actually do as they’re told. As enthusiastically as they admire the new systems of laws being presented to them, just as enthusiastically they don’t follow any of the alien laws at all.

Faced with this attitude from the locals, the ambitious colonizers can do nothing. This is because they realize that this contrast between what the locals say and what they do is not at all the result of some deep conspiracy, but simply a matter of habit. If you ask them directly, they’ll reply, very puzzled, “Yes, what you say sounds like Truth. But the world is full of Truths. So what if you have a Truth?”

Some planets, unable to tolerate this state of affairs, attempted to conquer Bingwaugh by force. But immediately, some other planets would intervene. The balance of power is such that every possible conflict is always resolved outside the boundaries of the atmosphere of Bingwaugh.

So, though it is a place where foreigners love to congregate, Bingwaugh is also one of the planets that has best preserved its native culture.

Do you like these stories?

“Yes . . . and no. Why is every planet filled with visitors from across the stars? I don’t like this. It makes them sound like zoos.”

You’re right. I don’t like it, either. The uniqueness of each planet disappears over time in this manner, like a fingerprint being rubbed away. All right, let’s hear some stories about real natives.

Amiyachi and Aihuowu

Let me tell you about two planets still ruled by their original inhabitants. On each, there are two different intelligent species. Yet each species believes itself to be the only master of its respective world.

Amiyachi orbits a double star: one a bright blue giant, the other a dim white dwarf. The two are similar in mass, but differ widely in volume and the type of emitted radiation. So, Amiyachi’s orbit is shaped like an irregular gourd. It dances a waltz along the hyperbolic paraboloid of the gravitational fields of the two stars.

Whenever Amiyachi is near the blue giant, it enters a long summer. But when it’s near the white dwarf, it enters an equally long winter. The summer is when the planet’s flora multiply and grow and stretch their vines like madness. In winter, most are dormant, and only a few hardy weeds quietly bloom over the empty earth.

Summer and winter, in each season Amiyachi is ruled by a different species: One dances through the lush forests of summer, the other marches alone over the barren plains of winter. The summer Amiyachians live in houses made of woven vines, and when the weather turns cold, the houses disappear as the vines wither and die. The winter Amiyachians live in caves dug into thick mountains, and when the weather turns hot, the mouths of the caves are hidden behind dense clumps of grass and fern, leaving no visible trace.

Whenever the summer Amiyachians are about to hibernate, they secrete a liquid covering to protect themselves and sink underground. The liquid stimulates a kind of insect, known as the wususu, to begin mating. The multiplying wususu then bring to life the cold-resistant shrub aludon. The flowering of this plant, unremarkable in appearance, begins the long and slow process of awakening the winter Amiyachians.

When the winter Amiyachians are near the end of their season’s journey, they give birth. The new babies, protected by a hard membrane, develop and grow in the soil. The ionic reactions of their growth change the pH level of the soil and cause other plants to germinate and grow, announcing the beginning of the planet’s summer, as well as the reign of the summer Amiyachians.

Thus, the two intelligent species of Amiyachi remain unaware of each other. Neither knows that its civilization’s existence depends on the existence of the other, two sides of the same coin. Both races have composed works praising the divine wisdom of the gods, allowing them to be reborn as they awake from their slumber. But they have never realized that they’re both children called forth by the gods, as well as the gods themselves.

As for Aihuowu, the situation is entirely different. On the surface of this world, the two intelligent species and their civilizations are very aware of each other’s existence, yet neither is aware that the other is just like itself, possessing feelings, logic, and morality.

The reason is simple: The two species exist in different frames of time.

Aihuowu is a planet with a strange orbit. The angle between its axis of rotation and the plane of its orbit is very small, and the axis of rotation itself processes slowly. Thus, the surface of the planet can be divided into four regions: The narrow strip near the equator has night and day in accordance with the rotation of the planet, while the polar regions have their own periods of brightness and darkness based on the procession of the axis of rotation. A day near the pole is hundreds of times longer than a day near the equator, and so the lives born in each of these regions experience time at rates hundreds of times apart.

For the Aihuowuans near the equator, the mysterious poles seem to have very long nights and very long days. But for the polar Aihuowuans, the equator passes through darkness and light rapidly, in flashes. The equatorial Aihuowuans are dainty and agile, with hundreds of thousands of individuals living in dense colonies. The polar Aihuowuans, on the other hand, have slow metabolic rates matched to their long days and long nights, and their bodies are scaled large to fit their sense of time.

Sometimes, the equatorial Aihuowuans come to the poles for adventure and exploration. They always get lost in the maze-like forests full of gigantic trees, and mistake the occasional houses they encounter as unscalable cliffs. But when the polar Aihuowuans wander near the equator, they often miss the details and carelessly destroy the houses and fields of the equatorial Aihuowuans. They live on the same planet, but belong to entirely separate worlds.

Sometimes, the equatorial Aihuowuans venture to speculate that the giant creatures of the poles might also possess intelligence. But in their hearts, they believe that even if such slow-moving creatures, who in a hundred years might not shift more than a few feet, were intelligent, it would be a simple and rudimentary kind of intelligence. The polar Aihuowuans have similar suspicions of intelligence concerning the equatorial species. But then they sigh and shake their heads, realizing that such tiny creatures that are born and die in a single day would be incapable of experiencing real civilization.

And so the two intelligent species of Aihuowu experience the same process of learning, working, love, and war. Their histories play out at two time scales, each echoing the other. But they remain opaque to each other, unaware that when it comes to time, everyone is only measuring the universe using the ruler of their own lifespan.

“Wait a minute,” you interrupt. “How can you know about all these civilizations? When did you go to Amiyachi? And what scale of time did you use to experience Aihuowu?”

I know. Of course I know. If you had been there, you would know as well. This is the difference between visitors and natives. This is the point of traveling.

“It is? This is why you travel?”

Yes, and no.

If you really want to know why I travel, then let me tell you about a planet devoted to travel.

Lunaji

The people of Lunaji build the galaxy’s most beautiful cars, boats, airships, and passenger catapults. The complexity and refinement of these vehicles far exceed the imaginations of visitors from other worlds, and also far exceed the technological levels of all other industries on this planet.

Those who are intuitive immediately jump to the conclusion that travel is especially meaningful for the Lunajians. But there’s a deeper explanation that most cannot figure out. They can’t imagine why so many intelligent beings would devote their entire lives to traveling and preparing for travel, rather than the accomplishment of some other, more rewarding task. Only those who know the life cycle of the Lunajians have some understanding of this seemingly irrational restlessness.

Lunaji has a large basin, where the concentration of oxygen is higher than anywhere else. The soil is rich and moist; small waterfalls pour into a clear, pristine lake; flowers are in bloom every season of the year; and heavily laden, spherical fruit trees surround soft lawns, strewn with mushrooms in all the colors of the rainbow. Every Lunajian spends their childhood here, none knowing how they arrived in this world. From the moment they open their eyes, this basin is all they know.

From time to time, some wish to discover the secret origin of their lives, or seek the home of the gods. Then they start to grow up, tall enough to climb over the rocks blocking the gentle slope at the edge of the basin. They walk into the maze-like, dense forest, climbing up the slope toward the world outside the basin. They can’t tell you their ages, because the age at which each one begins to mature is different.

After exiting the basin, they keep on walking, wandering, seeking—finding nothing. They meet others who left the basin before them, but they also are still searching, still traveling, still baffled by the mystery of their own lives. So, a Lunajian’s life is one long migration. They go from one place to another, never settling. They build boats, cars, airplanes with the purpose of accelerating their own pace so that they can cover every square inch of the planet, until they reach the edge of the sky.

Sometimes, by coincidence, some follow an obscure path and arrive at a meadow in the wilderness. There, a lovely silver flower blooms, giving off an intoxicating aroma. The fragrance makes every Lunajian nearby dizzy, and causes unprecedented tender feelings to spring up between them. For the first time, they feel attraction for one another, embrace, clasp, give and receive. Then, they give birth by the edge of a brook, from where the babies are borne by the water to the basin beneath the falls.

The parents? They die and sink into the muddy earth.

And so, such a simple cycle turns out to be the entirety of the meaning of the ceaseless travels of the Lunajians.

Yanyanni

Since we’re on the topic of growing up, I want to tell you a few more stories. The first is about Yanyanni.

You can always tell a Yanyannian’s age at a glance. Like trees, they never cease to grow. Every year, they become taller than they were the year before. An adult is several times the height of a child, and a young person is several feet shorter than an elder. The oldest person is always head and shoulders above the surrounding crowd, a lonely tower.

So, in the world of the Yanyannians, there is no such thing as a friendship that crosses age gaps. Even talking to someone who is very different in age can be a chore. A long conversation would leave both interlocutors with sore necks and shoulders, as the younger looks up while the older looks down. Indeed, there’s not much to talk about between people of very different ages. Their houses are of different heights and the shelves from which they do their shopping are different. One can only see the belt of the other, and neither can see the other’s expressions.

It’s not true, however, that the Yanyannians can grow without limit. One day, they wake up and discover that their height hasn’t increased. Then they know that they are about to die. The knowledge does not make them sad, however. Growing taller is actually a very tiring process. Many have been exhausted by it and simply find an excuse to stop. Death for the Yanyannians takes a long time, but no one knows exactly how long. It’s never been precisely measured. To simplify things, they list the age of death as the day when growth ceases. In their eyes, the passage of time is a measure of change. When growth ceases, time stops.

The tallest house on Yanyanni was built more than a century ago. At the time, there was an old man who, year after year, grew and grew until his head touched the ceiling of the tallest building then in existence. So the people erected a tower for him designed to hold a single man. The base of the tower took up the space for a park. After his death, no one else ever managed to reach his record of longevity, and so the tower was divided into two stories and turned into a museum.

Legend has it that the old man left a diary next to each window of the tower, recording his life during the years when his height corresponded to that window. Afterward, others climbed ladders to retrieve these diaries for reading, but after a while, the diaries became lost.

Now, visitors wander past the empty windows and imagine how a man who could cross a river with a single step might brush his teeth and eat his food.

Tisu Ati and Lutikawulu

Tisu Ati and Lutikawulu are a pair of opposites. These two planets, a hundred thousand light years apart, are like the two ends of a dipole: They negate each other and also define each other.

Tisu Atians are much smaller than the inhabitants of most planets. Their skin is especially soft, and their bodies can rapidly shift shapes. On this Lamarckian world, the development of gene expression reached its pinnacle—no, surpassed the pinnacle. All of evolution has been compressed into an individual’s brief life.

The Tisu Atians can alter their bodies in accordance with their desires. Those who practice climbing mountains develop longer and longer arms, until their arms are longer than their bodies. Those who operate machinery develop five or six arms, until an individual can simultaneously control the opening and closing of numerous valves. On the street, no two Tisu Atians look alike. Everywhere, one can see a mouth so large as to take up half a face, a waist thinner than a strand of noodle, or a round sphere covered by a layer of armor-like scales. These changes are unique to each individual, and it’s impossible to detect anyone’s parentage based on appearance. Even the parents themselves, if sufficient time has passed, have a hard time picking their children out of a crowd.

But “in accordance with their desires” is not quite accurate. It’s not true that every Tisu Atian can attain the appearance they have in their minds. Most of the time, they’re vague in their self-images. It’s only when someone takes an extra large step or bumps into something that that person realizes their legs have grown another thirty percent or their back has grown a row of little spikes. Of course, in a few years, one has turned into a long-legged strider able to go up an entire flight of stairs in a single step, or a warrior whose body is covered by hard and sharp spikes.

So, many Tisu Atians are even more cautious than the inhabitants of other planets. They speak carefully; they work carefully. They’re terrified of the possibility that in a moment of carelessness, the silly face they made before going to bed will become permanent, will turn into a tumor impossible to remove.

On the busy streets of Lutikawulu, you can tell at a glance each person’s career and daily life. This may be the only point on which Tisu Ati and Lutikawulu agree.

The Lutikawuluans also look very different from each other: runners, singers, sculptors, thinkers, etc. The difference between them can be clearly gleaned from differences in musculature, body shape, size, and facial features, just like on Tisu Ati.

But on Lutikawulu, the journey of life is the exact opposite of life on Tisu Ati. This is a Darwinian planet, where everyone is in agreement that any effort expended in directing the path of evolution is useless. The Lutikawuluans have stable genomes that evolve slowly in accordance with the principles of random variation and natural selection. But because the Lutikawuluans reproduce asexually, genetic changes in their somatic cells do continue to be expressed through inheritance. The cells, as they divide and change, pass on their adaptations without reservation to the next generation. And so children inherit the alterations in their parents.

As a result, a blacksmith’s son is born stronger than other children, and a clocksmith’s daughter is born with better vision and more nimble fingers. These differences, accumulated over thousands of years, slowly add up to the level of speciation. Every occupation has evolved into its own independent species. And even when some occupations have disappeared, the features associated with them continue to be expressed and continue to evolve.

All of these different species are united by their language. It’s only through the common tongue and identical numbers of chromosomes that they can recognize themselves as possessing a common origin. Other than these, they have nothing in common. No one is jealous of another’s work, just as a monkey would not be jealous of a dinosaur. As the proverb says, the birds have the sky while the fish have the sea. They pass by each other in the same town, but it’s as if they see each other without seeing each other.

While the Tisu Atians have replayed evolution a hundred million times, they have always refused real evolution. No matter how they alter their own appearance, their children always begin in the same place, keeping the same original, primitive shape. The Lutikawuluans are just the opposite. No individual ever experiences any change, but when seen through the lens of eons, they are each points along numerous diverging curves.

“You lie,” you say, pouting. “How can the same universe follow two opposite sets of rules?”

Why not? My dear, there’s nothing that’s impossible. Numerous steps, each meaningless by itself, when added together become a rule, a principle. Perhaps in this moment you laugh, or frown, and the future is divided into two paths, two sets of rules. But how can you, the you of this moment, know?

“Is that true?” you ask, leaning your head. And for a while you are quiet.

I look at you and laugh lightly. The swing you sit on sways back and forth, and the breeze causes the locks of hair next to your ears to flutter. The key to your question is the method of reproduction, of course, but this kind of answer is too dry. I have no wish to give it.

You know something? The real key isn’t about whether what I say is true, but whether you believe it. From start to end, the direction of narrative is not guided by the tongue, but by the ear.

Chincato

The tongue and the ear have the most meaning on Chincato. For the people of this planet, speech is not a mere way to pass the time, but a necessity for existence.

There’s nothing special about Chincato, save its thick atmosphere. It’s so dense that no light can penetrate it, and the surface of the planet is covered by darkness. Chincato’s life is born from warm, thick, deep-sea currents, full of organic material and warmed by bubbling lava, and gain their energy from the heat at the heart of the planet. For them, the boiling crater of the underwater volcano is their sun, the home of the gods, the source of wisdom and strength. Outside the crater, they can find organic sugars, which are their food, the foundation of their life.

The Chincatoans do not have organs that sense light, or eyes. They rely on sound to locate each other. Their ears are both for listening and observing. Actually, to be precise, they don’t have ears. They listen with their entire body. The upper halves of their bodies are covered by trapezoidal diaphragms, each of which is strung with thousands of hairs of different lengths, and each of which can resonate with the sound of a particular frequency. Using timing differences between when each trapezoidal diaphragm hears a sound and their positions, the brain of a Chincatoan can deduce the location of the source of the sound, its distance, and even its precise shape.

So, all day long, the Chincatoan talk and listen without pause. They emit sounds to feel the presence of others, and also to let others know of their own existence. They cannot be silent. Silence is dangerous and makes them panic. Only by continuously talking can they ascertain their own position, be sure that they’re still alive. They compete with each other to speak louder, because only by doing so can they make themselves appear brighter, more noticeable by others.

Some children are born with defects in their voice organs. These children almost cannot survive. They’re always in danger of being run over by others, much bigger and faster. And then no one would even know that such a child once existed.

“That is so sad. Your stories have become shorter and shorter, but why have they also become so much sadder?”

Sad? Is it that the story I’m telling is sad, or is that that the story you’re hearing is sad?

“What’s the difference?”

Very different. I’ve been to a planet where the people can make sounds at ten thousand different frequencies, but can only hear a small portion of the frequency range. The sensitivity of their ears is not matched to the versatility of their vocal cords, and so they never hear as much as they can speak. But the most interesting part is that the range of frequencies that each of them can hear is different. While they all think they’re hearing the same song, a thousand individuals would actually hear a thousand different songs, but none of them knows that.

“You’re making things up again. How can such a place exist?” You bite your lips and widen your eyes. “I’m now suspicious that you haven’t been to these planets you’ve been telling me about. Have you made them all up to amuse me?”

My darling, starting with the Odyssey, every knight errant has told romances of faraway places to court the ladies they love. Can you tell which stories are real and which are not? I travel through these planets like Marco Polo wandering through the cities of the Orient, like Kubla Khan riding through his endless realm: Everything happens in the blink of an eye. You can say that I really have been to those places, or that I have never left. The planets I speak of are scattered at every corner of the universe, but sometimes collect themselves into the same place, as though they have always been together.

Hearing this, you giggle. “I understand now. They are gathered together by your stories, and now you tell these stories to me, so they are gathered in my mind. Isn’t that right?”

Looking at your happy face, I sigh. The sound is so quiet that you cannot see anything strange in my smile. How can I explain this to you? How do I make you understand? Stories cannot gather anything together, if they’re fated to separate.

Yes, I say quietly. We have been sitting here for an afternoon telling stories, and together, we possess a universe. But these stories are not something I tell you. This afternoon, you and I are both tellers, and both listeners.

Jinjialin

Jinjialin is the last story I will tell you today. It’s a short tale. I’ll be finished soon.

The people of Jinjialin possess bodies unlike the bodies of the people of any other planet. They are like soft balloons, or maybe like jellyfish floating through the air, transparent and loose. The surface of the Jinjialinians is membranous, like a cell’s outermost layer. When two membranes touch, they can merge into one.

When two Jinjialinians encounter each other, parts of their bodies briefly merge and mix the materials inside. When they separate, the materials are redistributed. Thus, the people do not care much about their physical bodies. Even they cannot tell how much of their current bodies come from strangers they met along the road. They believe that they are still themselves, and it’s no big deal to exchange some materials.

But they don’t realize that this sense of “self” is an illusion. At the moment when two of them merge, the two original selves cease to exist. They become a combined person, and, when separated, two new persons. The new persons do not know all that transpired before their encounter and each believes that the self is the self, never having changed at all.

Do you understand? When I am done telling you these stories, when you’re done listening to these stories, I am no longer I, and you are no longer you. In this afternoon we briefly merged into one. After this, you will always carry a bit of me and I will always carry a bit of you, even if we both forget this conversation.

“You’re saying that Jinjialin is our own world?”

Our own world? Which one? Can any planet have belonged to us? Or can we have belonged to any planet?

Do not ask me about the coordinates of these planets. Those numbers are the oldest mystical proverbs of the universe. They are the air between your fingers. You reach out to grab them, but when you open your hands, there’s nothing. You and I and they meet for a moment, and we are fated to again separate. We’re only travelers, singing songs whose meanings are obscure, wandering through the dark sky. That is all. You know they are singing in the wind, singing in the wind of a distant homeland.

Translation © 2013 by Hao Jingfang & Ken Liu.

First published in Chinese in New Realms of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

© 2010 by Hao Jingfang.

Published in translation by permission of the author.

Hao Jingfang (jessica-hjf.blog.163.com/) is the author of two novels and numerous short stories published in a variety of Chinese venues such as Science Fiction World, Mengya, New Science Fiction, and New Realms of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She has been nominated for the Galaxy Award, China's highest honor for science fiction. Currently, Ms. Hao is pursuing a Ph.D. in Economics at Tsinghua University in China.

Power Armor: A Love Story
David Barr Kirtley

It was quite a party. The women wore gowns. The men wore tuxedos. Anthony Blair wore power armor.

Armor that was sleek and black and polished, and made not a whisper as Blair paced the lawn behind his mansion, passing a word here or there with one of his guests. In those days the most advanced exoskeletons were crude affairs, and Blair’s armor seemed decades, if not centuries, ahead of its time.

But he was an inventor, after all, one who in the past several years had introduced any number of groundbreaking new technologies. And that was about all anyone knew of Anthony Blair, reclusive genius. He was seldom seen, and never without his armor, and he politely rebuffed all inquiries into his past.

So it had attracted considerable interest when he’d purchased a house on the outskirts of Washington, a move that seemed to signal him taking a greater interest in public affairs. For his housewarming, he’d sent out scores of invitations—to politicians, pundits, business leaders, celebrities, and scientists. Such a gathering of notables, along with the chance to get a rare glimpse of Blair himself, would have been enough to make this the hottest ticket in town, but there was more. Blair had let it be known that tonight he’d be making an “important announcement.” Speculation was frenzied.

Finally Blair hopped up onto the patio and called for everyone’s attention, his voice amplified by speakers built into the torso of his suit. From what could be seen of him through his transparent visor, he seemed a handsome man of about forty, with a penetrating gaze and a sardonic grin. He proceeded to lay out his plans for a new nonprofit group, the Anthony Blair Foundation, dedicated to promoting civil liberties worldwide, and he invited his guests to get involved.

He wrapped things up with a toast, thanking everyone for coming. He pointed an armored finger down into his wine glass, and a large plastic straw emerged, and began suctioning up the wine, which Blair then drank, moments later, from a tube inside his helmet.

As his guests sipped their drinks, they conferred in puzzled tones about whether that had been the “important announcement,” in which case the evening was proving a terrible letdown. When no announcement of any greater import seemed likely to be forthcoming, they began to drift away.

Blair moved from conversation to conversation, wishing everyone a good night. A distinguished-looking gentleman said to him, “Mr. Blair, I’d like to introduce you to a colleague of mine, Dr. Mira Valentic.”

She wore a red dress and had inky black hair. Blair reached out with his giant metal fingers and lightly shook her hand. “Pleased to meet you, Doctor.”

He asked about her work, and she described her research into gene sequencing. He listened intently and asked many questions, which led her to describe her graduate studies, then a childhood obsession with amphibians. As they talked, the other guests excused themselves one by one, and the lawn slowly emptied, until Blair and Mira stood alone.

“And now I’ve told you everything about myself,” she said. “But I still don’t know anything about you.”

“Not much to tell,” he said.

She chuckled.

After a moment, he said, “I’ve had a very nice time talking with you, Dr. Valentic.”

“Please, call me Mira.”

“Mira,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, but I just feel like we’re on the same wavelength somehow.”

“Yes,” she said. “Me too.”

He lowered his voice. “So I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone.”

He had her full attention now.

“I’m from the future,” he said.

She regarded him uncertainly, as if this might be a joke. “People wondered,” she said. “I didn’t believe it. It seems impossible.”

“It’s not impossible,” he said. “Just very difficult.”

She thought for a moment. “So what’s it like? The future?”

“Maybe I’ll tell you,” he said, “next time I see you.”

“Next time?”

“There will be a next time, won’t there? I should certainly hope your bosses would arrange for us to meet again, now that you’ve managed to wrangle one big secret out of me.”

“My bosses? At the museum?”

“No, in the government, I mean.”

“I don’t—”

He waved a hand. “It’s fine, really. I don’t mind being spied on. My armor and I are big unknowns, and I don’t blame folks for wanting to keep an eye on us. That’s their job. Your job.”

She was silent.

Finally she said, “When did you know?”

“When I first saw you.”

“What?”

“From across the yard. I’m awfully clever, Mira.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “No one’s that clever.”

“I am,” he said. “I didn’t rise to my position by accident, you know.”

“What position?”

“Maybe I’ll tell you,” he said. “Next time I see you.”

The next time was two weeks later, downtown, at the first public fundraiser for the Anthony Blair Foundation. She approached him as the event was winding down.

“Mira,” he said. “So nice to see you again.”

“Well, you were right,” she said. “Keep feeding me information and you’ll be seeing a lot more of me.”

He smiled. “In that case, what would you like to know?”

“Your armor,” she said. “Where’d you get it?”

“I stole it.”

“Oh,” she said. “We thought it must be one of your inventions.”

“It is,” he said. “I invented it, and then I stole it.”

“Sounds like there’s a story there.”

“There is,” he said. “But let’s not go into it just now.”

He glanced about the room, then turned back to her. “Hey,” he said, “do you want to get out of here?”

Later, as they walked along the river, beneath a sky full of stars, he said, “I’d like to take you out to dinner some time.”

“I’d like that.”

He was silent for a while.

Finally he said, “If we’re going to keep seeing each other, there’s something I have to tell you.”

She waited.

“My armor,” he said. “I never take it off.”

“What?”

“It’s sort of . . . something I swore.”

“Never?”

“Right.”

“But . . . how do you eat?”

“Through the straw. It filters poisons.”

“And I mean, how do you bathe? Go to the bathroom?”

“The armor handles everything. It’s very advanced.”

“Wow,” she said.

“I know that sounds strange,” he said. “But you’ll understand. Once you hear the whole story.”

After a moment, she said, “So what’s the whole story?”

He sighed. “You know I’m starting this new foundation. Don’t you wonder why?”

“Because you care about civil liberties?”

“But why?”

She said nothing.

“It’s because in the future, where I come from, there are no civil liberties. None.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I had never been disloyal,” he said softly. “You can’t be, where I come from. Our thoughts are monitored. I’d been identified early as a promising scientist, and had risen through the ranks to head of my research division. We’d developed a high-energy device that possessed some unusual properties—like, it could project a man-sized object into the past, creating a branching timeline. Theoretically, at least. Completely useless, as far as our leaders were concerned, but interesting. Then one day the thought popped into my head: I could escape.”

He stopped and stared out over the water. “Once I’d had the thought, I knew it was only a matter of time before I’d be picked up for ‘neural re-education.’ So I had to act fast. The problem was, even if I succeeded in traveling into the past, my voyage would create a temporal wake large enough for them to send someone after me.”

He met her eyes. “I don’t mean to scare you, Mira, but where I come from there are . . . secret police. Unlike anything you can imagine. Cyborgs. Shapeshifters. I’d have no chance against one of them. Unless . . .” He showed the hint of a smile. “In the same lab was something else we’d been working on. This armor.” He raised his gauntleted hands. “Wearing this, I’d be impervious to anything. So I could escape, but at a cost—I must never take off the armor, not for an instant. Because if I did, the agent sent to punish me would surely strike.”

She glanced around at the trees, the shadows. She shivered.

“And that’s the story,” he said. “So, do you still want to grab dinner sometime? I’ll understand if you say no.”

“I . . . I’ll have to think about it,” she said. “This is a lot to take in.”

“I know,” he said. After a moment, he added, “I should probably be getting back.”

“All right.”

As they retraced their route, she thought: He never takes off the armor. Never. Not for an instant, he said.

That was going to make it very hard, she thought, to kill him.

He took her to one of the finest restaurants in Washington, and it made quite a sight to see him sitting there in his armor, with a napkin in his lap, suctioning up his entree through the straw in his finger. In spite of that it was a pleasant meal. That is, until the middle of dessert, when he suddenly said, “I have to ask you something.”

“Yes?” she said.

“About your bosses.”

“At the museum?” she said sweetly.

“No.” He smiled back. “In the government, I mean.”

“All right. Yes. What?”

“Do they know what you are?” he said, suddenly serious.

“What do you mean?”

“Do they know,” he said calmly, “that you were sent from the future to kill me?”

“What?” She laughed.

He waited.

“You think I’m—?”

“Yes,” he said.

She put down her fork. Finally she said, “Yes, they know.”

They watched each other.

“They want your armor very badly,” she said. “They’ve made repeated overtures, and have concluded that you’ll never cooperate.”

“They’re right,” he said.

She shrugged. “So . . . they want the armor, I want you. We have an understanding.”

“I see.”

“When did you know?” she said.

“When I first saw you,” he said. “From across the yard.”

She laughed. “Bullshit. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I was having a nice time. I didn’t want to spoil the mood.”

“I think you’re lying,” she said. “I think you figured it out just now.”

He shrugged.

“So I guess that’s that,” she said, tossing her napkin out on the table and reaching for her purse.

“Wait,” he said. “I want to say something.”

She paused.

“We find ourselves,” he said, “in a branching timeline. We can’t return to our own time, and no one else can follow us here. So they’ll never know whether you succeeded or not.”

“You’re suggesting,” she said coldly, “that I abandon my mission.”

“I’m suggesting you do what’s right,” he said. “What’s best for both of us.”

She stood. “I am not a traitor. You are. And the punishment for that is death, as you well know. I was assigned this mission, and the faith of my superiors was not misplaced. Your armor is a clever gadget, I’ll grant you, but no defenses can hold forever, and no matter how long it takes, no matter how safe you think you are, before this is over I will watch you drown in blood.”

People at nearby tables were staring.

“Thanks for dinner,” she said, and strode away.

He called her the next day.

“I had a really nice time last night,” he said.

She stared at the phone. “Are you out of your mind?”

“No,” he said. “Do you want to come over some time?”

She hesitated. “Is this some sort of trick?” she said. “Some trap?”

“No,” he said. “I mean, what are you? A class eight?”

“Class nine,” she said.

“We’re in the twenty-first century,” he said. “You could probably fight off a tank platoon. I don’t even have a gun. I just want to talk.”

“About what?” she said. “Treason?”

“No. No treason. I promise.”

“What then?”

“Old books, shows, people. We’re the only ones who remember the future.”

“You’re not afraid?”

“No. The armor will protect me.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I designed it,” he said.

“And what if I find a weakness?”

“You won’t.”

After a moment, she sighed. “All right. Fine.”

“Swing by around eight,” he said. “I’ll cook dinner.”

She drove over to his mansion, and he cooked her dinner, and they had a very nice time talking about old books and shows and people that were now known only to the two of them.

Finally she stretched and yawned. “Well, it’s late.”

“You’re welcome to stay,” he said. “I have a spare bedroom. Eight, actually.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Why not? It makes perfect sense.”

“Does it?”

“I mean, what’s your plan?” he said. “To disappear, change into someone else, and try to catch me off guard? It won’t work. I never take off the armor, not for you or anyone. Your only hope is to find a weakness in the armor, and you won’t get a better chance to study it than by staying right here with me.” He added, “Besides, I like the way you look now.”

She chuckled. “So what’s in it for you?”

“The pleasure of your company. Plus I’ll know where you are, and I won’t have to go around wondering if everyone I meet is a secret assassin.”

“That’s it? Sounds like the risks outweigh the benefits.”

“Let me worry about that,” he said. “Anyway, I think you’re underestimating the pleasure of your company.”

“Ha.”

“Also, if you get to know me better, you might decide you don’t really want to kill me.”

“I doubt that,” she said. “Actually, I’m getting the opposite vibe.”

He laughed.

“. . . and you said no treason. You promised.”

“You’re right. Sorry.”

Finally she said, “All right, I’ll think about it. Let’s see the room.”

He gave her a tour of the mansion, and when she saw the guest room she said, “Hey, this is really nice.” She sat on the mattress and bounced a few times, testing it. “All right, I’ll stay. For a bit.”

“Great,” he said.

She sprawled on the comforter, grinning. “You want to slip into something more comfortable?”

He laughed. “Goodnight, Mira. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She stayed with him for weeks, and they talked and talked, until they knew practically everything about each other. They went out to dinner, and to movies and plays, and they went on long, long walks. (Much longer than any normal person could walk, thanks to his armor and her cybernetics.) Many nights they simply lounged about doing nothing at all.

One night they played chess.

The first game ended with his king pinned in one corner. She put him in check with her queen, and he moved to an adjacent square. She moved her queen to put him in check again, and he moved back to the first square. This was repeated several times. The game was declared a draw.

The second game ended the same way. And the third.

“I suppose you think this is terribly funny?” she said.

He shrugged.

She swept the pieces onto the floor, and stood.

As she strode away, he called, “I’m sorry. Mira . . .” She ignored him.

But when she was out in the hallway, she smiled. Her anger and frustration were feigned. Actually, things were going quite well.

She’d discovered a weakness in his armor.

They took vacations together—to London, New York, Tokyo. In Paris, at the top of the Eiffel Tower, as they stood looking out over the rivers and rooftops, she said, “Well, you were right, dammit. As always. I’ve grown awfully fond of you, Blair, and now the future seems like such a long time ago. So I guess you’re safe.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “Though you’ll forgive me if I don’t strip off the armor just this second.”

She laughed. “Of course.”

Six months later though, it was starting to become an issue.

One night at dinner she said to him, “We need to talk.”

“Yes?”

“Are you ever going to take off that armor?” she said.

He set down his utensils and studied her. He said, “When I fled into the past, I swore I would never take off this armor. Not for an instant.”

“Because of me,” she said. “Because I’d be sent after you. But that’s all changed now.”

“I knew there would come a time,” he said, “when I’d start feeling safe, start letting my guard down. That’s why I made the resolution then, when my sense of the danger was at its most acute.”

After a moment, she said, “You still don’t trust me.”

He said nothing.

“Look at me,” she said. “Can’t you just look at me with your super-genius gaze and see that I’m telling the truth?”

“No,” he said.

“Then I guess you’re not as smart as you think you are,” she said. “As you pretend to be.”

“Do you remember what you said, Mira? When we first met? ‘No matter how long it takes, no matter how safe you think you are—’”

“I know what I said. Look, I’m sorry, all right? I was a different person then. It was a stupid thing to say. I wish I could take it back, but I can’t.”

There was a long silence.

Finally she said, “What are we doing here? If you’re never going to trust me, what’s even the point of this?”

“Enjoying each other’s company? That was the point, I thought.”

“And in five years?” she said. “Ten? Will we still just be sitting across a table from each other, with you in a suit of armor?”

“I don’t take off the armor,” he said. “You knew that from the start.”

“So there’s nothing I can do? To prove myself?”

“There’s one thing,” he said, very serious. “You can hold my life in your hands and choose to spare me.”

“But how can that ever happen?” she said. “If you won’t take off the armor?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

When he woke the next morning, she was gone. He paced the empty rooms, seeking her. “Mira?” he called, his voice echoing.

He tried her phone, but got no response. He left message after message.

Finally she answered. “Please stop calling me,” she said.

“Where are you?”

“Away,” she said. “Away from that house, away from you. There are other men, you know? Who aren’t afraid.”

“Please come back,” he said.

“Will you take off the armor?” she said. “Ever?”

“You know I can’t.”

She hung up.

Six weeks passed without a word. Then one night his doorbell rang, and he opened the door to find her standing there.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He made her tea, and she sat in the kitchen and said, “Look, I understand why you wear the armor. It’s all tied up with who you are and why we’re here together, and I accept that. I hope someday I can prove myself to you, but even if you never take it off I don’t care. We understand each other in a way that no one else ever will.”

“Let’s fly to Paris,” he said. “Tonight. We had good times there.”

“Yes,” she said. “All right.”

They hopped a private jet, and by the next morning they were in Paris. They revisited all their old haunts. On their third night there, they ate dinner at the hotel, then took a midnight walk down a cobbled street beside the Seine.

Suddenly Mira said, “We’re being followed.”

A hundred yards behind them lurked three men dressed in black. One carried a briefcase.

“Are they from the future?” she said.

“No,” Blair said. “Impossible.”

“Then what threat could they be to us?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s not find out. Come on.”

He began to hurry. Suddenly he halted. “Uh-oh.”

“What?” she said.

“I can’t move.”

She glanced about as more men appeared from the shadows.

“They’re special forces,” she said. “Black ops.”

“How do you know?”

She smiled. “Because they’re with me.”

Eight men surrounded Blair. Several carried boxes.

“I told you you weren’t the only man in my life,” she said.

One of the men stepped forward. He had a heavy jaw and short gray hair and cold, hard eyes.

“Captain.” Mira nodded.

The man set his briefcase on the ground and bent to open it.

“How are you doing this?” Blair said.

She knelt over the briefcase. “We introduced a virus through the suit’s communications array.”

“That’s impossible,” Blair said. “Equipment to interface with the suit won’t even exist for—”

“What, you mean like this?” she said, rising, gadget in hand.

Blair studied it, his face pale.

“All right, I’m impressed,” he said. “Cramming that much R&D into so short a time. But it won’t matter. In a few minutes—”

“You don’t have a few minutes,” she said.

The men opened boxes, yanked out equipment. Blair’s eyes darted about.

“Laser cutters?” he said. “Diamond-tipped saws? You can’t honestly believe those will even scratch this armor?”

“No,” Mira said, nodding at the men. “But they did.” She added, “What can I say? They’re not geniuses.”

The captain frowned. Then Mira backhanded him across the face, and his head flew a hundred feet through the air and splashed into the river.

The men screamed and drew weapons. Two ran. Of course it did them no good. A minute later Mira was piling their bodies on the ground at Blair’s feet.

“I admit I’m a bit nervous now,” he said.

She grinned. “Told you I’d make you drown in blood.”

She fiddled with her gadget, and the armor knelt stiffly, and its right hand reached out and plunged its straw deep into the chest of the nearest corpse. Blair grimaced and turned his head aside as blood bubbled from the tube inside his helmet.

“Wow,” he said. “Paris is definitely not as much fun as I remember.”

“Keep laughing,” she said. “While you can.”

The straw drained corpse after corpse. Soon the blood rose above Blair’s lips and threatened to engulf his nose.

“Any last words?” she said.

“Mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm,” he said.

She came and stood inches from his visor. “Sorry, I didn’t catch that?”

He watched her, his eyes wide.

“Do we agree,” she said, “that there’s absolutely nothing stopping me from killing you?”

“Mmmm-hmmm,” he said.

“Good.” She smiled. “Then take off that stupid armor and kiss me.”

She flipped a switch, and suddenly Blair could move again. He tore off his helmet and hurled it to the ground, then swept her up in his arms, pressing his lips to hers.

Later, as they lay naked on a hotel bed, he murmured, “I knew about your device.”

She stirred and said drowsily, “Hmm?”

“I could have stopped the blood,” he said. “I was never in any danger.”

“I know,” she said. “The armor is flawless.” After a moment, she added, “It only ever had one weakness.”

“Me,” he said, rolling onto his side, studying her. “We understand each other perfectly, don’t we?”

“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

“You still haven’t decided whether or not to kill me. Have you?”

“No,” she said.

“But either way you wanted me out of the armor.”

“Yes,” she said. “And you took it off, even knowing the danger.”

“I love you, Mira,” he said. “I couldn’t stand being separated from you another moment.”

“Sounds like the risks outweigh the rewards,” she said.

“I think you’re underestimating the rewards,” he said, and she chuckled.

He added, “If your mission is that important to you, then go ahead and kill me. You might as well, if you don’t love me.”

“I think that’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” she said.

And for a long time after that they lay curled together, drifting in and out of sleep. And if they dreamed, it was of the future—not the distant future from which they’d come, a cold and sterile place of surveillance and mind control, but the immediate future, of the breakfast croissants they’d soon enjoy, and the stroll they’d take through the fresh morning air, hand in hand. And the armor stood in a nearby corner like some exotic decoration, like some improbable furniture, watching over them with its transparent visor, a silent presence, waiting there, sleek, black, polished, empty.

© 2012 by David Barr Kirtley.

Originally published in Armored,

edited by John Joseph Adams.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

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.

Dead Fads
Maureen F. McHugh

The dead have fads. I work in Deadtown, at a bar mostly frequented by the Dead. They call me PD for Pre-Dead. The Dead tip for shit because they just aren’t all that interested. That’s what I think. Cory, one of my regulars, says it isn’t like that. The Dead are interested fine, he said. They’re just poor.

“Would you live here if you weren’t poor?” he asks.

“I dunno,” I say, “I like it here.” I do. The rent is cheap, and that’s why I moved here. I’m taking classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art, doing the starving artist thing.

“But you don’t expect to live here the rest of your life,” he says. “You’re slumming.”

“Maybe,” I say. “But artists don’t tend to get rich.”

“You’ll marry some guy and live in the suburbs,” Cory says and takes a pull on his Heineken.

“Maybe I’ll marry a Dead guy,” I say.

Cory laughs. Cory was drowned when a drunken boater hit his boat and was resurrected as part of court-ordered restitution. Cory almost doesn’t look Dead. In bar light, he practically passes. Not like Schmitty at the other end of the bar. Even if Schmitty wasn’t scarred all over his face from some kind of accident—maybe he went through a windshield—he just looks dead. I always say the well and truly Dead look like they were made out of clay or something. Cory says they look more like those sculptures of maids and old women that look really real and normal enough to fool you. The kind that people start talking to until they realize that they aren’t alive.

But like I said, the Dead have fads. The big fad among the Dead these days is square dancing. Thursday night is Square Dance Night. The caller is setting up his equipment on stage. The square dance caller is a kid with a cowboy hat and a goatee. He’s wearing shorts, fishnets, and red cowboy boots. He’s setting up DJ equipment. The light is really yellow over the stage and I can’t tell if he’s Dead or not.

The DJ starts a mix. “Da Doo Ron Ron” with a house beat. After a moment, the lights flash and then pulse with the bassline. Four people are already standing, ready to dance and the DJ leans into his mic and starts saying all those incomprehensible things like “allemande left and shift a gear.” The four people, three Dead women—one of whom is a punk princess in her leather and crinoline square dance dress—and a Dead guy start doing their thing. They come every week.

Cory leans across the bar and passes me a five and shouts above the music, “Give me change for the cigarette machine?”

“Can’t smoke in the bar,” I shout back.

He nods.

The Dead have a lot of self-destructive habits, at least the ones I see. They smoke too much, drink too much, don’t exercise. There’s a pretty high murder rate down here, and a pretty high suicide rate, too. But most of the crime is Dead on Dead so no one much seems to care. Not even the Dead.

I’m working on a big project for school. It’s a series of collages. I took one of the Dead Chick calendars (Dead Girls of 2029 which is a good one because in seven of the months the Dead Chicks are standing or moving) and cut out six of the Dead girls to use as characters in my collage. My collage series was originally going to be The Dead Chicks Battle Evil à la the outsider artist Henry Darger. I started screwing around, and I traced the Dead Chicks and started drawing. I drew a tree and a landscape, and I ended up with Dead Chick lynching. Dead Chicks hanging from trees with their heads at crazy angles and people picnicking all around—that one’s called “Strange Fruit Dead.” Dead Chicks running from bloodhounds. Dead Chick Elizas leaping from ice floe to ice floe on the Ohio River—“Uncle Tom’s Dead Chicks.”

They’re a little too political, I think. But I really like making them. I use a lot of colored pencil on really big rolls of paper, and I put two or three different versions of each situation on each page. So I’ll show the Dead Chicks running for the river, and then I’ll show them leaping across the river—they are all spread out so I can really concentrate on each Dead Chick. They have names on the calendar, and I feel as if they’ve got personalities. Aileen has short blond hair, and she’s more there, so she’s the leader. And Violet looks really Dead. She has this stillness that makes her hard to work with. But she works really well as this visual moment that halts the movement of the piece. Your eyes slide across the river until they hit Violet, and then everything stops. In that piece, I actually used really cool colors to trace her and fill her in so she looks icy.

My teacher really likes them, which is great, but for once, it isn’t the point. A lot of times when I’m working, even if I like what I’m doing, I’m thinking of it as for school. But I think about the Dead Chicks a lot. I think about them when I’m riding the bus to class or home. I want to work on them. My favorite part is working on the actual Dead Chick figures, Aileen and Violet and Leisha and Mary and Karen and Ai-ling, so sometimes I just trace them for no reason. I can draw them pretty well anymore without tracing them, and sometimes I draw them on bar napkins at work. When they’re isolated from the work, they look a lot more like calendar figures. They have that sort of vapid I’m-having-my-picture-taken pose.

Cory usually comes in on Wednesdays and Thursdays. I don’t know why. He’s an orderly at St. Vincent’s where he says they are so desperate for employees they’ll even hire the Dead.

“What are you drawing?” he asks.

I flip the napkin around. I’m drawing Violet. I’m using a Derwent pastel pencil. Lately I’ve been really into pastel pencils. The pencil I’m using is Crimson Lake Full. I have an obsession about pigments.

“Nice,” he says. “Is she Dead?”

“Yeah,” I say. “You could tell?”

He shrugs. “I dunno. Maybe it’s just because I know you have this Dead thing going.”

“You make me sound like a corpse-fucker.”

“Maggot,” he said.

“What?”

“PD! Don’t tell me you haven’t heard that!”

“Oh, god!” I say. “That’s so gross.”

“So you’re doing Dead art?”

I haven’t talked to anyone Dead about my collages, and I feel weird doing it now. “Sort of playing around with it,” I say.

Cory shakes his head. “Is it for school?”

“Yeah,” I say. And then I start telling him about Henry Darger. Darger is this guy who grew up in institutions and then worked as a janitor for a Catholic church for his whole life. All that time he was doing this huge artwork. It was about the Vivian girls and it is pages and pages of illustration about these seven little girls and their battle against evil. Darger didn’t like his own drawing so he traced the Vivian girls from illustrations. And sometimes he drew them nude with little tiny boy penises.

“Penises?” Cory says. When Cory leans close, there’s something that reminds me he’s Dead. It’s as if Cory is this perfect replica of a human being.

“Yeah,” I say. “Some people think he really didn’t know what a naked girl looked like.”

“That’s really twisted,” Cory says.

“But they’re gorgeous,” I explain. “I mean the Vivian girls are like these little Shirley Temple figures, but all around them is this sort of luscious-colored pencil art—butterfly wings and flowers and red-coated soldiers, and there’s all this mutilation and stuff. It would be like some weird cliché or postmodern junk except it’s so obsessed.”

Cory is really into this, I can tell. “So you’re working on a project based on that?”

“Not really based on that,” I say. I don’t know that I want to explain it. Talking about art and dancing about architecture and all that stuff. On impulse I say, “But I’m going to have some stuff hanging in the student show at the end of term. You want to see it?”

“Yeah,” Cory says. “I’d like that.”

I wear a white jean skirt and red boots because I think that art students wearing black are such a cliché that you have to make a thing about it. I don’t even care that I have thick ankles.

I’m so used to hanging around Dead people that I don’t even think about it until that day, and then I realize I’m bringing a Dead guy, and a bunch of people I go to school with are going to be there. I mean, lots of people know I live down in Deadtown, and people make necrophiliac jokes all the time, but between the art and Cory, I’m going to end up looking like a pathetic fetish chick. But fuck it, I think. I like Cory.

I take the bus to school, and Cory is waiting outside for me. Cory is wearing blue jeans and a sports coat. He almost couldn’t come because he had to work, but at the last minute, this black Dead guy traded shifts with him. He’s smoking a cigarette.

“Those’ll kill ya,” I say.

“You’re kidding me,” he says. It’s all an old joke. But I’m nervous, and it makes me lame.

Inside, there are a bunch of people in the Reinberger gallery and Chuck Asay, my instructor for my second year project, sees us come in the door. He’s short and skinny and balding and intense. But he’s a good teacher. “Therese,” he says. “Hey, I want to let you know, your piece is attracting a lot of attention. Susan Kafrey of Bonfoey is looking for you.”

My stomach does that elevator in freefall thing. I mean, this is Cleveland, not New York. But Bonfoey Gallery means something here. They’ve been around forever, for one thing.

“What—what does she want?” I say.

“I think she wants to see your portfolio,” Chuck Asay says. Then he sticks his hand out to Cory. “Hi, I’m Chuck Asay.”

“Cory Zinteroff,” Cory says. And then I see Asay sort of flinch, but then shake Cory’s hand firmly in a gesture that says, “I’m not prejudiced, I’ll shake the hand of a Dead guy.”

Cory doesn’t change expression. I guess he’s used to it.

Suddenly to me he looks really Dead, and I almost can’t bear to be with him. People talk about the Dead like they are the persecuted minority for today. And they are. People treat the Dead like shit, and they didn’t do anything to deserve it. At least most of them didn’t.

But the Dead are different.

A bunch of people are standing around my two pieces, which is both really cool and really scary at the same time. One of them is “Uncle Tom’s Dead Chicks,” and the other is “Dead Chicks Titanic” about, of course, the sinking of the Titanic, with Violet, the Deadest-looking one, as the heroine standing at the prow of the ship as it hits the iceberg. I don’t have all three parts of that one in the show; at home I have the getting-into-the-lifeboat scene, and the ship-sinking scene, but they aren’t done.

There’s a woman there in black pants and a cerise silk shirt, and she stops me and says, “Hi, are you PD Langley? I’m Susan Kafrey. I’m from the Bonfoey Gallery, and I just want to tell you how impressed I am with your work.” Her eyes flicker from Cory back to me, but Cory is looking at the work.

“Wow,” I say, “That’s great!” I don’t know what to say so I just sort of gush and act stupid.

“I like the way you haven’t sacrificed to the political,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say, and trying to say something intelligent, I add, “I’m really interested in the way that outsider art can transcend cliché and convention. I mean, reinventing the wheel, but making it new through real obsession.”

“I like the references to Darger,” she says. And I want to jump up and down because she gets it, but then I’m thinking, maybe she thinks it’s too derivative? But she goes on. “I’d like to look at some slides,” she says. She digs in her purse and hands me her card. “Call me and we can make an appointment.”

“Sure,” I say. “That would be great.”

I can see Chuck Asay, my teacher, and he’s grinning me and giving me the thumbs up. I guess he saw her give me her card.

“Congratulations, maggot,” Cory says. I don’t know if he’s completely kidding. But a couple of kids from my life drawing class want to know what she said, so I don’t really have time to do anything but introduce him. I drink a couple of glasses of white wine out of those big green glass gallon jugs, and they go right to my head because I haven’t eaten, and then Cory and I look at the other stuff that’s hung. Some of which is okay but some of which is pretty lame. Cory doesn’t know shit about art and I can tell he feels a little out of place. He looks at Lindsey Cunningham’s big Mylar-and-grocery-store-plastic-bag sculptures, and I can tell he’s thinking, “What the fuck?” I mean, I like how she’s taking off on all those artists who recycle, and I like the way she uses space, but I can see how it would all look like just a lot of plastic bags. And Hiko Sakai’s video of nail polish doesn’t do anything for him. But he likes Beth Cornish’s big head oil paintings, and he likes some of the neo-traditional watercolor stuff.

I can’t help noticing how Cory is a little overweight. I mean, I’m not the skinniest person in the world, you know? But Cory has no style. He dresses kind of Walmart. And he has brown hair, kind of curly, but he uses some sort of mousse or something on it, and it’s really thinning on top, and so I can see his scalp. In Deadtown, Cory looked great. He looked normal. Here in the gallery, well, he looks like a bit of a dweeb. A Dead dweeb.

So eventually we end up back in Deadtown getting a couple of gyros from the Gyro Cart guy (who is not Dead but who is ancient and has been working this area of town since it was called The Flats.) I have been chattering a mile a minute about neo-traditionalist stuff, but the wine buzz is wearing off.

Cory’s really quiet, which I think is because he doesn’t know squat about art. “The girls in your picture,” he said. “Are they real girls?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I got them off a calendar.”

“One of them looks like this girl I knew,” he says. “I think she might have been in one of those calendars.”

I feel a little creepy.

“Her name was Eva?” he says. “I didn’t really know her, but this guy I knew did.”

“None of the girls is named Eva,” I say, obscurely relieved.

“Maybe she didn’t use her real name for the calendar,” he says.

“I can show you the originals,” I say.

He is holding the foil with a couple of bites of gyro in it. It’s cold down in Deadtown with the wind whipping off the river.

“She’s dead now anyway,” he says.

I almost say “Duh, of course she’s Dead,” but then I realize he means it the other way. “What happened?”

“She had HIV, so she killed herself,” Cory says. The Dead commit suicide a lot. It’s illegal to bring back a Dead person who has killed themself.

I don’t know what to say to that.

Cory kind of shuffles his feet.

“That’s too bad,” I say, which sounds lame.

“Yeah,” Cory says. “Like I said, I didn’t know her that well.”

We stand around for a bit, feeling uncomfortable, and it’s cold. I’m about to say I’ve got to go when Cory says, “Did you ask any of them if you could use their pictures?”

Which is a stupid question. “It’s just a piece for school,” I say.

“Yeah, what if it ends up in an art gallery? What if that one woman, the one from the art gallery, what if she buys it?”

“Art galleries don’t buy stuff,” I say. But I know what he means. “It’s not really a picture of someone,” I say. “I mean, you thought it was this Eva chick, and none of the girls were named Eva. And besides, they’re just based on the girls in the calendar.”

“Maybe she changed her name,” he says. He’s looking at me really funny, and I’m feeling really creeped out. I mean, sometimes the Dead just scare me. And right now, Cory is scaring me big time.

“I don’t think what you’re doing is right,” he says.

He’s going to kill me, I’m thinking. And then I’ll be Dead. But I can’t run away because what if I’m wrong and I’m being a total idiot? “Why not?” I say, trying to sound friendly and interested, but sounding whiney.

“Because . . . you’re, like, stealing something,” he says.

“I’m not stealing anything,” I say.

“People like it because it’s about Dead people,” he says. “You’re, you’re, pretending you’re one of us.”

“I’m not!” I say. “Everybody knows I’m not Dead.”

“I’m not saying this right,” he says. “You know what I mean.”

And I do. “You’re saying it would be different if I were Dead,” I say. “But that’s an old argument. Only black people should paint about black issues, only Native Americans should do Native American stuff. Only women should do women stuff. But nobody worries about that anymore.” Well, they do, they worry about whether or not they’re being jerks about it. But I’m not being a jerk. I’m trying not to be a jerk.

“But it’s like you’re trying to get people to admire you, because you’re a friend of the Dead,” he says.

“No, I’m not!” I say.

Cory’s face is way too pale in the streetlights, and I suspect mine is too. “Forget it,” he says.

I want to explain. “I mean,” I say, “I’m on your side.”

He shakes his head. “I wasn’t saying it right. Just forget it, okay?”

I want to go home. I wish I were in Massillon, an hour south of here, in my own room with the purple walls and my stupid stuffed animals and my mom and dad asleep down the hall.

Cory nods. “Well,” he says. “I gotta be getting home.”

“Me too,” I say.

We kind of hug each other, and he doesn’t try to kiss me. For which I am glad.

I notice I’ve stopped using my Crimson Lake Full pastel pencil, which is weird because I really like it. But I just . . . don’t use it. I had left it at the bar the night I asked Cory if he wanted to see the show and been worried I’d have to buy another one. They’re about two bucks a piece. But it was there the next day, and I stuck it in my purse and brought it home.

I think it’s Dead.

I know that makes no sense. It wasn’t like my pencil was murdered and then resurrected. But it’s different.

After a week of not using it, I take it to school and leave it on a windowsill in a drawing class. It ought to be gone in an hour. But a week later, it’s still there. Because it’s Dead. And it’s different.

I call Susan Kafrey of Bonfoey Gallery, and I take my slides with me and go to see her. The gallery is doing a show of works by Daniel Dove. They’re these strange painted landscapes, like photographs but superimposed, and, well, they sort of look as if I were seeing them through some irregular glass. I could never do anything like them in a million years.

The good thing is that when I take my slides in to Susan Kafrey in this cluttered office in the back, I don’t have any great expectations anymore. I’ve got so much work to do to be good enough to be somewhere like this. The Dead Girls stuff is nice, but it’s the very best work I’ve ever done. The rest of my work isn’t anywhere near as good.

But she is really nice to me and gets out her viewer, and then bends over the slides. The office is full of business stuff and she has some sort of spreadsheet open on her computer.

“Who do you like besides Darger?” she asks.

I name some artists. Kate Shepherd and Francis Bacon.

She smiles, very encouraging. “It’s nice to hear that you know a little about contemporary art,” she says. “I ask a lot of students, and the artists they like best have been dead for two hundred years.”

“I really like the show you’ve got now. Daniel Dove.”

She nods. “He’s doing us a favor, letting us do a show for him. He’s with Cherbois in New York, now, but he started here.”

Yeah. New York. I watch her look at my slides. I had fantasies that she would offer me a show, or a place in a group show. Maybe, in these fantasies, I would say no. And I could go back and tell Cory.

This is not a fantasy. It’s just too ordinary. I’m too ordinary. Susan Kafrey is dressed really nice in gray raw silk pants. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t ride the bus.

She’s really nice, and she only takes two phone calls. She tells me that my Dead Girls stuff is a real leap in technique and subject matter. And then I thank her, and she gives me my slides, and I walk out across the empty gallery, my boots clicking obscenely loud on the wooden floors.

I do take the bus. It’s after four, and the buses are supposed to come fast, but it takes a long time for it to come. There are a bunch of other people waiting for the bus—they are mostly black guys in maintenance suits and heavy-hipped black women with swollen ankles. We all stand in the cold, waiting for the bus.

It’s a Thursday night and the square dance DJ comes up to the bar and asks for a beer. He drinks on the house. I hand him a Heineken and notice he’s not Dead. He says, “Hey, what’s your name?”

“PD,” I say. I have to raise my voice over the music. Some asshole is playing “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult. I wish they’d take it off the jukebox because almost everybody I know hates it. But some dipstick always thinks it’s funny or something.

I talk to the DJ kid for awhile. Then he’s got to go set up his gear. Cory is in, and we are acting studiously normal, joking and stuff. After the DJ kid, I bring Cory another beer. I don’t know how I ever thought Cory passed for not Dead.

But he’s still Cory and he’s still an island of sanity in this madhouse.

If I work here long enough and live in Deadtown long enough, like my Crimson Lake Full pastel pencil, will I become infused with Deadness? Will I be Dead without ever having died? Wouldn’t that be a fucking laugh?

“I went to that gallery and talked to that woman,” I say.

“Yeah?” Cory says. “I thought about what you said, about blacks not being the only people allowed to paint blacks and stuff, and I think you’re right.”

I shrug. “Doesn’t matter,” I say. “She was real nice, but she wasn’t interested.”

“People will be,” Cory says. “You’re talented, PD.”

“That just earned you a free beer,” I say.

I’m watching the DJ. I’m tired of this place, tired of my life. I wish I’d never gone to see Susan Kafrey because now I hate working on the Dead Girls picture. I don’t get lost in it. It’s not an obsession anymore. Maybe I don’t need an obsession if I’m going to end up doing graphic arts for packaging for some manufacturing company.

Someday I will end up either Dead or dead.

I want my obsession back. I want it more right now than I want to be in a gallery. Being in a gallery used to be what I wanted more than anything. Like getting an A in class. I’m thinking about the Crimson Lake Full pastel pencil. I’m thinking about making something Dead. Imagine I made a painting, and then I left it in the bar for a week, hidden. Imagine it was Dead. Put that in your gallery, Susan Kafrey. People would walk in, and they’d part around it like the Dead Sea. It would be anti-art.

I bum a cigarette from Cory.

He’s surprised. “I didn’t know you smoked?”

I shrug. I don’t. I mean, I’ve tried it, but really right now I just want to get outside. So I take a Dead cigarette from his Dead fingers and go outside and light up.

It’s just winter. The dead part of the year. In Deadtown the streets go out and away in straight straight lines. The corners of the buildings go straight up into the cold night. Above the clouds are lit from below by the indifferent city and the snow comes down. Flakes of snow are falling into the white of the streetlights, falling. Falling and falling across and through the indifferent light.

© 2013 by Maureen F. McHugh.

Originally published in the Readercon 24 Souvenir Book.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Maureen F. McHugh was born in what was then a sleepy, blue collar town in Ohio called Loveland. She went to college in Ohio, and then graduate school at New York University. She lived a year in Shijiazhuang, China. Her first book, Tiptree Award winner China Mountain Zhang was published in 1991. Since then she has written three novels and a well received collection of short stories, Story Prize finalist Mothers & Other Monsters. McHugh has also worked on alternate reality games for Halo 2, The Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails. She lives in Los Angeles, where she has attempted to sell her soul to Hollywood.

Leaving Night
Gregory Benford

1.

Very quietly, in the dark of night, people began disappearing.

Later research showed that they vanished while in their deepest sleep. The few available videos of sleeping people revealed that the air around them shimmered for a few seconds amid a soft humming sound. The bodies seemed to shrink to nothing. They were simply gone, leaving clothes behind. Seldom did the event even wake mates asleep beside them.

Consternation grew as wives woke beside empty pajamas, still warm. Wailing mothers searched for their children, husbands frantically sought families. In a few regions, whole towns stood empty. Cars had run out of control into deserted buildings. Airplanes fell from the sky, but the victim count was much below the passenger manifest number. Recorded in-flight messages said that pilots had disappeared and as the airplanes fell, many passengers had vanished, too.

The wave of disappearances swept around the world as it rotated, through what came to be termed “Leaving Night.” Most losses occurred in the early hours past midnight. Gray dawns greeted empty streets in Arabia, but full teeming avenues in Europe, for the vanishings varied greatly as the Earth turned.

The horrified world slowly made do. The final toll was approximately a third of humanity, gone in a single rotation of the earth. A few occupations were badly affected, especially agriculture. Family farms stood empty; cows mooed to be milked. Firefighters and police, soldiers in most countries, those who faced risk every day—gone. Those who had seen combat and people who had lived through life-threatening illnesses also had few remaining. Apparently those who worked in constant close contact with the vagrant forces of the real world needed a belief that got them through their days—and that led to their disappearance. Yet the more hardened and cynical of these groups, especially the police, did not vanish.

Still, despite being the largest disaster—and by far the most mysterious—of all human history, the basic functions of society carried on. As in wartimes, people pulled together. This happened out of brute necessity—amid, of course, great grief at the loss of loved ones.

Of course there was also a lot of searing sex, heavy drinking, drug use and suicides. Depression, bursts of manic elation, somber reflection, plenty of gazing at the stars—people reacted in myriad ways. Some hoped for another Leaving Night to take the remaining people away, but the next night was completely ordinary. Another Leaving Night never happened.

As the days wore on, the aftermath echoed less and people showed resilience few knew they had.

2.

Soon enough, patterns emerged.

Many who had devoted their lives to medical, literacy, and child welfare causes had vanished. The good are gone, many concluded. Some, though by no means all, fundamentalist Christians were missing, as seemed to befit their ideas of a coming Rapture. So too vanished a majority of Muslims, leaving a swath of nations from Morocco to Indonesia half vacant. This seemed odd, since Muslims had no equivalent to the Christian Rapture; their great coming moment was a return of Mohammed or some other charismatic leader, who would establish a Caliph.

The toll included also many Jains, Hindus, some Buddhists, Shinto practitioners, Inuit, and Catholics. So few Mormons remained that the religion collapsed. Scientology suffered the opposite fate—only a handful vanished. These events caused endless embarrassment, discussion, and sarcastic editorial cartoons.

Many felt that God had taken those who truly believed, independent of sect. This soon became the prevailing explanation. Much angry argument followed. Several factions sought to justify the plain flat facts of who, apparently, had actually believed as they professed. No simple explanation could be formulated for why so many avowed Agnostics had also vanished.

Mere church membership or attendance had not sufficed. More men remained than women, a result that provoked often violent disputes. It also led to fierce competition for the women who did remain. This effect was most pronounced in China and India, where gender-selecting abortion had already thinned the ranks of young women in recent decades.

China especially had suffered the lowest Leaving Night loss rate, well under five percent. These were mostly Christian women, so this loss pushed their existing crisis of gender imbalance to emergency levels. Quite quickly this led to the male-saturated areas taking control of nearby depleted regions, especially in India. In China the government used its military to block the streams of men trying to reach provinces where rumor said there were more women.

Even before Leaving Night, China had been suppressing class warfare riots on a daily basis, driven by the growing inequity between the interior and the coast. Since more women vanished inland, the problem piled atop already festering anger. When factions of the Red Army broke away and sided with the rioters—after all, the army was filled with largely deprived men—local government disintegrated. Many died.

These nations’ main rival in the region became the Japan-Australian alliance, which had lost relatively few. Somehow Shinto beliefs, founded on a pantheistic ancestor respect, did not make the cut.

Those termed by the academics “tribal religionists,” “ethnic faiths,” or “animists” had considerable losses, even higher than those among Protestants. The key trait that led to disappearance was a sincere faith. Followers of shamans or outright pagans apparently had surprisingly many sincere adherents, for they became a tiny minority among the remaining religious populations. This was especially so among the “primal-indigenous” religions that were mostly tribal with closely held kinship ties, and composed of pre-technological peoples, especially Voodoo.

Curiously, many Catholic priests survived Leaving Night. So also did most politicians of both sexes, and many theologians. Most strikingly, every living President of the United States, including the current office holder, remained.

Over ninety-five percent of scientists survived Leaving Night, though chemists were in shorter supply. There were oddly large gaps among the Nobel laureates, too—it seemed that a passionate belief in science had constituted a faith in and of itself. Believing that the world has order and beauty at its core, despite entropy and chaos, seemed at base an act of religious import.

Engineering too had few losses. Secular humanists and atheists—all remained. So too did very nearly all the Jews in the world, leading many to call Judaism the “atheist religion.” Unitarian Universalism and the Roma (gypsies) also remained intact.

Interestingly, house pets almost universally vanished. Dogs were a bit more likely to have been taken than cats.

Some called Leaving Night “the Smart Rapture” for those left behind. They inherited the Earth, yet few were meek about it.

3.

Of course, there was no way to tell if the missing had gone to some lofty heaven, another Earth, or had just ceased to exist. No single dogma or prophecy sufficed to explain all those who had vanished. Many celebrated the loss of their opponents on many social issues. Atheists set up a political party. Gay Pride parades ran every week for a while, though straights did not get the logic. Scientists largely ignored all this and got back to work.

But Leaving Night ironically proved that some supernatural power did dwell in our universe. Atheists had a hard time with this. Scientists considered it a non-issue.

Interestingly, later tests showed that the average intelligence quotient of humanity had risen by five points, and the former “bell curve” had a slump in the lower range. Evidently faith was harder for the bright among us. Yet a significant percentage of the truly brilliant from all fields were gone, as well. These had seen atheism as mental, as well as spiritual, arrogance. This had apparently been enough to join the Leaving.

This, plus the sudden lifting of the population burden, brought on a Golden Age for the survivors. There were more homes, businesses, transportation, and food for all to share. This was particularly true in the most poverty-stricken regions, where apparently many truly believed what the local religions dispensed. But those who did the dispensing there remained. Most churches and mosques were still fully staffed, to their embarrassment.

Africa finally had enough to feed its population. China stopped importing food entirely. But the American grain belt had lost many farmers, and some let crops rot in the field.

Such zones as western Europe, eastern Africa, and Australia then appropriated the wealth and vacant lands of their neighbors.

Warfare largely ceased. Some few terrorist groups did remain, but were made conspicuous by their supposedly religious agenda. Removing this camouflage made easy their identification and extermination. Perhaps, their executioners argued, they would end up in some fevered heaven. No one took this argument seriously.

Realizing that lower populations meant prosperity, survivors had surprisingly little birth rate “rebound.” A conventional wisdom grew that the Believers had indeed been taken to a place where their respective heavens awaited. This led many to cease grieving for friends, relatives, and lovers, for after all, those were now in a better place.

This logic appealed to many, though it opened a chasm: What would become of the survivors, those who had not Left? Did Hell await them? The thought could not be dismissed; the People of the Book (Christians, Muslims, some Jews) had held so for millennia. Now there was evidence for it. Evidently Hell was Earth itself.

Was it too late to join the Leaving, perhaps, if one converted now? As this sunk in, churches, temples, and mosques began to enjoy rising attendance.

Or—this thought gnawed at many—would they simply, well, die and vanish forever? The survivors had believed so before the Leaving, but now they had evidence of some supernatural order that could act suddenly, capriciously, with no warning.

The implications were profound. Some took up religion. But which one? The survival statistics of the various faiths then took on a useful aid. Still, among hardcore atheists there were even a few suicides.

Most people struggled with these issues, then decided to put the matter aside. After all, times were better. A long era of world peace began.

4.

Climate change slowed under the lighter press of human numbers, and geoengineering measures offset the worst effects from greenhouse gases. Before the Leaving, both sides in the geoengineering debate had claimed the moral high ground. Some had said that Genesis showed humanity as commanded by God to become the Stewards of the Earth. Others, opposed to knowingly managing the world’s climate, oceans, and biosphere, had accused the religionists of hubris, arrogance, and naïve faith in technology.

The Leaving seemed to resolve this stalemate. The Remaining decided to carry out offsetting measures, such as capturing CO2 from the air and storing it, or using it to offset the growing acidity of the oceans. This worked quite quickly. No one cared that it fulfilled an argument made by the God-fearing, Bible-citing vanished. Everyone simply acknowledged it as merely good engineering practice.

The absence of religious arguments against stem cell research helped a great deal. Over a few decades, rapid, unfettered research in longevity brought the mean lifetime of the Remaining to over a hundred years. Expansion of the space program led to many resources brought across interplanetary distances, spurring still more prosperity. A new creed emerged: “No Heaven but the one we make.”

Naturalists noticed that no wild land animal species had taken any losses whatever; the natural world remained and prospered. But the whales were a mystery. Some remained, but by the time people got around to an inventory, it seemed that a majority had vanished, right around the time of Leaving Night. Though humans still could not speak to whales, or vice versa, it did seem that these great animals also mirrored humanity’s theological differences.

Questions arose about the wild animals. Either they did not believe in an afterlife, if the thought had ever even occurred to dolphins or elephants, or . . . was Heaven, if it existed, only for humans and their pets, plus a few whales? It was a riddle.

Yet many cats and some dogs remained, so apparently pets had some theology after all. But not so among nearly all wild animals. Perhaps they did not need any.

Only later did many people realize that perhaps they, too, were in a place they had sought by not believing in any religion or supernatural agency. The Atheist Heaven? This might mean that they had been brought to their own secular hereafter, one that worked far better for them than the divisive society they had known.

But . . . people kept dying, so if Earth had become sardonically known as the Atheist Heaven, it was not a permanent one. This realization confused the Remaining a good deal.

The ages that followed did nothing to clear away their questions. No further Leaving occurred.

A few centuries later, Earth was again a garden, with only a billion people and verdant wildlands. Even better, many people lived in colonies on Mars or in the asteroid belt. There they mined and innovated and became rich, building habitats that left ample room for forests and lakes. Rotating, hollowed-out asteroids became home to hundreds, then thousands, then millions. There was no limit to the size of such resourceful worlds. People gravitated to their own kind, so colonies based on utopian schemes, or tax plans, or sexual preferences, abounded. Some even formed religious city-states.

All this was further insurance against some sudden catastrophe eradicating humankind.

5.

Still, the fragility of having only one solar system home for our species was an obvious risk. Driven by evolutionary need as well as desire, humanity reached outward to the stars, developing fusion ramjets to explore the Oort cloud, and then on to the very stars—and so a final irony occurred.

Belief in nonbelief was worldwide, though religion had returned among a minority. Rather than hope for heaven, humanity reached out decisively beyond our solar system.

With vast optical gathering systems scientists prowled among the blips of light that were nearby stars. Spectral searches led them to promising glimmers of blue-green. They found a world with a clear ozone absorption line and evidence of an oxygen biosphere. Imagery showed blotchy continents, blue seas, some polar caps. Building long voyage craft took another century, running parallel to the missions that economically developed the outer solar system and the Kuiper Belt. There was no shortage of volunteers for the cold-sleep mission to the nearest Earthlike world.

As the expedition approached a lovely Earthlike planet around a G4 star, eighteen light years distant from Earth, they received a signal. The shocked would-be explorers heard in speech ranging from Anglish to ancient dialects a single hailing message: “Welcome! We’ve been waiting and hoping for you.”

The aliens were humans, the long-missing Faithful of Earth. Dogs slobbered gleefully over arriving explorers from the moment they left their landing craft; cats ignored them as irrelevant. Humpback whales sang their deep and unfolding songs—which were understood at last on this new world. The dazed starfarers witnessed days-long sagas of bone-shaking song that chronicled the great beasts’ passage between the stars, splashing suddenly down into strange seas.

What’s more, there were cows, horses, and those of the highly intelligent or sentient species such as elephants and crows. In the hubbub of the Leaving, their depleted numbers had been largely missed on Earth.

The natives of this world called it Heaven, of course, though some preferred Eden. They had simply woken up, startled and blinking and feeling well rested, amid the forests, mountains and grasslands of this surprisingly hospitable world. The oxygen content was slightly less, gravity a few percent lower. Plants and animals had the right chemistry for food, all the way down to the helicity of their sugars.

The meek, or at least the believing, had inherited another proto-Earth—one remarkably similar to the original. It was a younger version, where evolution had colonized the land with plants but few animals beyond large snail-like foragers—which did at least prove edible; expedition crew dined on escargot steaks. The first generations were necessarily vegetarians, and many starved before they learned the skills of agriculture in the narrow ecology.

If Earth’s had been a Smart Rapture, theirs was the Rough Rapture. Their trauma had been worse than Earth’s. They had missed their many nonbeliever friends and family members, of course. As well, they had to rebuild civilization entirely with their own memories and skills. No technology accompanied them, save for implants and a few eyeglasses or contact lenses worn while sleeping. Compared with Earth, they had fewer engineers, scientists, and tech types. Many who had white collar and service training found themselves learning to sow, till, milk, weed, and harvest. A hard century followed.

Those times they called the Earning—by which they meant the toil of starting anew from scratch, without even tools. They pitched in for grunt labor—foraging, foresting, and farming. These had few charms. Their new world was far harder than a Sierra Club weekend.

But they did it. Their first buildings were churches in which they lived, beginning a new tradition of including a worship sanctuary in each home. Soon enough the Christians began carrying out the Lord’s first command in Genesis: name the beasts, the beginnings of Heavenly biology.

Plainly some power had separated the faithful from the unbelievers. There had been painful costs among each side, and emotional tolls were high. But each society had righted itself and gone on, both sides ever more strongly convinced of their essential correctness.

The mysterious cause of the Leaving gave no further signs. The natives of Heaven were utterly certain only a god could have caused such a supernatural event—though of course they differed greatly over which particular god that might be. There had been religious skirmishes over this, but of late they had damped down such blemishes in Heavenly society.

There was a new Heavenly major religion, devoted to praying for God to manifest physically, so these issues could get settled. Millions yearned for a Voice to speak. Show Yourself to Your anointed! Billions prayed for this. Prayer Days became Prayer Months became Prayer Years.

After a while many gave up. They were stuck on a world much like Earth and . . . what next?

Population rise continued, evidently as each sect raced to outnumber its opponents. There was no answer.

The Earth expedition took a while to recover from meeting those with faith. They had known the religious as a small faction at home, which could safely be ridiculed and ignored. Pieties did not sit well with those who had endured centuries-long voyages, venturing across light years—only to meet ideas they had thought safely relegated to the past.

The Heaven natives rather smugly pointed out that some supernatural force had to lie behind Leaving Night (termed on Heaven “the Miracle” or “Rapture” or “the Coming Forth”).

The Earthers disliked this argument, though obviously it was true. Some expedition members, irked by the certainty of the Believers, even tried to explain the Leaving as a giant quantum mechanical “tunneling” event. The Believers brushed this aside as “wantum mechanics”—science that, with enough hand-waving explanations, could give you any outcome you wanted, especially after the fact. Over this, fighting broke out.

An old saying that the ferocity of belief was inversely proportional to the amount of information available seemed now wrong. Plainly something had caused the Leaving, and science struggled in vain to explain it. So opinions ruled yet again.

And the old conflicts rose as the news returned back to Earth.

6.

I watched with what can best be described, in this language you are reading, as . . . bemusement.

Still, these humans do have a talent, a fine one, for the blissful insolence of joy. That quality makes them among the finest of the Emerged.

I designed the separation experiment to see what this species of unfurred, bipedal, and tool-using primates would make of an inexplicable event. My simpler such experiments in the deep past of this species—momentary large-scale appearances, acts seemingly without cause, reversals of death—had been misunderstood. They could not fathom instruction by example, and so I decided to observe the results on a large scale—a strategy I seldom use. I realized these events had not widened their conceptual range.

So I had let many thousands of their planet cycles pass before attempting a new stratagem. I wished to see if all could yet still agree on one stark fact: Their theology was theory, and now a great Something, as they would put it in their innumerable ways, had carried out a clear experiment. Experiment trumps theory, as they would say, or so I should hope.

The sutras of the Buddha; the Gospels of the executed; the drumming followers immersed in their natural world’s potency; the insights of illiterates in a desert—all those then came into furious play, as their kind developed. This social species needed explanations of their origin, of the universal Origin itself, and what all this meant.

Against this rose applied reason. It too had emerged from evolution itself, with a finely grained discrimination. Reason found no apparent explanation. This is part of the Design.

Such was the classic battle of evolved minds. Their conflicts echoed the felt needs of these short-lived, evolved primates—intelligences I made, through so many long, indirect, and intricate means. So those too were indirectly ordained by impersonal forces launched long before.

Like you, they yearn to escape death. Yet nothing does. This universe cannot both store all that has happened within it, and still evolve dynamically into an infinite future. Fundamental laws of information make that impossible. The primates yearn for such impossibility and so do you. So do I. We shall not have it.

I cannot keep growing unless I can modify fundamental law. To this end I pursue a mechanism: universe experiments. To understand more deeply demands testing, often through trial. This imposes some costs upon matter-based life, which they must bear.

Such explanations have not occurred to the primates. They believe the test was wholly about them.

I learned little from this experiment. Perhaps they had—as I had hoped. But the larger purpose eludes them.

We are in a way equal. Their minds struggle with a substrate world they imagine came from a single great cause. They did not imagine that none, not even I, could comprehend that cause in its entirety. I am finite, as are they, but of a different order.

I of course know far more. Still, the Origin eludes me. I emerged with the physical universe in ways I do not grasp. That word itself, grasp, implies hands like those of primates—yet I have no hands. Language limits.

I am restricted, as is everything in a finite, unbounded, yet expanding universe. I struggle with self-knowing. The lot of everything is to grow, change. My understanding grows as well. It is unlike any way of comprehending that humans have, or even could have. My comprehension arises from the collective properties of the universe itself.

My fate is to not fathom that process, but to experience it—which I do, by trial. Such as the event they called Leaving Night.

So I continue to watch, and only rarely, to act.

The skies shall remain mute over Earth and Heaven alike. There shall not be another Leaving Night.

Some humans now speak of me as God the Ambiguous. I shall not speak. Yet I may act again.

Experiment trumps theory.

© 2013 by Gregory Benford.

Gregory Benford is a professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Phi Beta Kappa, was a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. A fellow of the American Physical Society, his fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. In 2007 he was awarded the Asimov Memorial Award for Popularizing Science.

Yard Sale
Kit Reed

“OK Sally, what do you want me to do with these?”

“Mark them ONE DOLLAR OR BEST OFFER.” I want everything out. Out, so we can leave this place and lock the door behind us. Between us, Mare and I have pushed or dragged most of the big stuff onto the grass in front of the house and now we are tagging the little stuff, everything the Praying Hands hasn’t already taken. It was hard getting it out the door, but we managed. It was hard getting out the door ourselves, but it won’t be hard much longer. We are on the road to freedom. The yard sale starts tomorrow, and with any luck scavengers come tonight and half of the stuff gets stolen. No! When we unload this first batch, we’ll start on the next. We will clean out Father’s things by the end of the week and when the last bit of our father is gone for good we will be free to go. I can walk away from this hateful house of his and never come back. But my sister is dawdling. “Get on it, Mare. What’s your problem?”

“These are Daddy’s stamps,” Mare says with this fool hurt look.

“My point. Daddy’s stamps.” I am trying to be patient. “It’s time to get rid of them. Put PRICED TO CLEAR.”

Trapped in this house with that awful man for all these years and my damn fool sister seems bent on hanging on to what’s left of him. Mare is paddling in the sunlight, clutching his stamp albums. “What would Daddy say?”

I want to shake her for being such a wuss. “He’s dead and buried, for Pete’s sake. What difference does it make?”

It’s my stamp collection, idiot. Are you too stupid to know it’s worth thousands?

I shoot a look at Mary. —Do you hear it too?

She looks so scared that I think she does. She says, “He’d kill us.”

“He is done killing us,” I say. I cover my ears and start humming to shut him out. We will sell our father’s junk and get rid of this big old ark of a house and that’ll be the end of him. I promised Mom.

It’s probably worth millions.

Shut up, asshole, I’m warning you. I brought your damn gold things home from the hospital because you insisted—your stupid Phi Beta Kappa key and your gold wireframes and your gold pivot tooth, that you were scared shit somebody would steal them. I have half a mind to . . .

You promised.

Mary flashes her eyes at me.

. . . I only promised so you’d go ahead and die. You think I don’t know you would of hung on forever just to take care of them? Same as you saved every stick and splinter you ever collected and hung on to everybody, like our poor mother, you grasping old bastard. Your things, your things, she spent her life taking care of your things and by God I am here to see that it is over. Poor Mom’s moaning inside right now, wringing her hands and worrying. Listen. I’ll keep your creepy gold things, you made me swear, but by God that’s all I’m going to keep, and I am keeping them at a safe distance. In the basement behind the furnace in a shoebox, where they can’t hurt us. When I get a minute I’m going to cement them in back there so nobody will find them and . . .

What?

—I don’t know. Mom got all weird when I shoved the shoebox with your gold tooth and your personal gold-framed glasses behind the furnace but I had to. We are getting rid of everything you used to own so she can have her freedom.

I could never get her to leave you but God knows I begged her to flee before it came to this. “I can’t go,” she told me, and she was crying, “I can’t go until I know Howard’s things are taken care of.”

Idiot bitch. Listen to your mother.

Your things, your things. I am good and sick of taking care of your precious things, forty years’ worth of rotting antiques and dusty books, massed Toby jugs and moth-eaten needlepoint doorstops, rusting Matchbox cars and filthy hobnail glass and LIFE magazines for Mother to tend and organize; forty years’ worth of obsessions that Mare and I had to sort and dust and clean and pile up neatly when we were only little girls because if we didn’t, they would roll in and smother us, we worked until our fingers bled while you kept amassing stuff! You hauled it in from every junk store and yard sale and flea market, and you wonder why we can’t wait to see the end of you? Forty years tending your stuff, and when Mom couldn’t do it any more it all fell on Mare and me: forget about life, girls, forget about meeting Mr. Right; come straight home from work and polish my silver, clean the glass on my daguerreotypes, it is your sacred duty.

Well, when it comes right down to it people are more important than things, old man, and don’t you forget it.

We’re going to empty this house of you, Father, we are going to get rid of your stuff and hose down the walls and scour all the corners and empty it of every vestige of you.

Not so fast.

Shut up! We’re doing it so Mother can walk free, understand? Poor Mom, poor old lady: bopping around in there fretting when she should be free and happy in the wild blue, and all because of your wretched collections. Well, we are moving you out of there with this yard sale, every chopstick and teacup you ever owned, we are removing every vestige of you and when we’re done, by God that will be the end of you. Then Mare and I, we can sell the damn place and buy a nice condo and start having boyfriends like normal girls.

These are my things!

“Not anymore.”

Mare jogs my arm. “These stamps could be worth something, maybe we should hold onto them.”

Damn right they are.

I don’t know if I hear him or if I only think I hear him. “In your dreams, Mare, so chill. Everything goes!”

Damn Mare; I turn my back on her for five minutes and she starts pulling things out of the pile. “This could be worth something, Sally.”

It is a bicycle reflector. “Stop that.” I push her into a chair and give her a string of labels to mark.

My sister is mourning. “This cup is much too nice to sell.”

“Put prices on, nothing higher than ten dollars.”

Ten dollars, you bitch, ten dollars!

Who, me? I don’t hear anything.

So Mare sits by while I lug our father’s telescopes and his stereopticon out of the ark where we grew up; I used to think it was nice but it has become our prison. I am dragging the goddamn past out of that place and I can tell you now it’s goddamn good riddance. The carved furniture, the fat brass andirons, even Father’s Barcalounger look smaller out here in the sunshine. His brass-headed cane loses its power. Laid out on the grass like dead soldiers, his Hugo Boss suits look limp and shabby. So does he, now that everything’s exposed to the light. In life, Father ran Mare and me around like a pair of housemaids. I suppose I ought to be sad, seeing the old man reduced to a collection of used furniture and second-hand outfits, but you know what? I’m glad. And somewhere deep in the house where I can’t see her, Mother is too.

And Mare? Ever the dutiful daughter, she says, “But the Alcott family silver, Sally. Father would freak.”

“He isn’t exactly in a position to care.”

That’s what you think.

Mare grabs my wrist. “Did you hear anything just now?”

“No,” I say. “No I didn’t.”

“Sally, what if Daddy’s still . . .”

I shoot her a look that should kill her dead. “Mare, are you hearing voices?”

But it doesn’t. She sighs. “I was just remembering his last wishes.”

“He was blackmailing us! Touch nothing. Keep the house as it is, like this place is the sacred Howard Alcott house and we are the virgin keepers of the shrine. You are dead, Father. It’s over.”

“Daddy always gets what he wants.”

“Not this time.”

Don’t be so sure.

Mother told me what to do. She came to me in the night. OK, I’ll be upfront about it. Mother is dead.

She has been for a year; she says she went accidentally, i.e., Father’s wingnut collection fell on her as she was cleaning the cluttered metal shelf at the head of the basement stairs, thirty badly stacked boxes crashing through the rust, but frankly, I think he wished her dead.

After all, she let his dieffenbachia die, and it served her right. At the funeral he got all holier than thou. “That’s what happens when you don’t take care of things.”

Listen, she wished herself dead. What happened was, Mom developed pneumonia while she was in the hospital after she fell down the basement stairs when the wingnut boxes hit her. She landed on one of Father’s garden statues and punctured a lung. The nurses loved her, they put plastic flowers in her hair and brought her a little plastic thing to breathe into, I would go in to visit and find them yelling at her: “Martha, BREATHE,” but I could tell she didn’t want to. Both lungs collapsed and she just let go one night and died. That last night she put her palm against my palm on the plastic tent and mouthed a single word: “Freedom.”

I was crying, we were all crying; even Father was crying, but Mom caught my eye and I could see the flicker that let me know that she was glad because she thought she was done with us.

OK, I thought. That makes one of us. When we got home I said, “Well, I guess we’ll need to move into a smaller place.”

Father wheeled on me like an iron man with an iron mallet. Thump. “Not while I have you two to take care of my house.”

Mother came to me in the night. “Sally . . .”

“Mom! What are you doing here?”

“Sally, I’m stuck in this house!”

“I thought you were dead.”

“I am, but I have to talk to you.”

“But I thought you were . . .”

“Free?” Mom shook her head. “No more than you girls are.”

“But you’re dead, I saw them bury you.”

The sigh she let out was so spooky that all the air in the room shivered. “You might as well know, souls can’t leave until everything is satisfied.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant. I thought maybe it meant we had to hunt down her killer. “He killed you, didn’t he?”

“No,” she said, and through Mother’s eyes I saw our house and every object in it, every treasure he’d brought home and every single item in all his collections, our father’s massed belongings closing in on us, everything waiting to be dusted or polished or cleaned or sorted and labeled or catalogued or filed or all of the above; I felt the weight of every single object with which horrible Howard kept us securely in his grasp. “This did.”

“But Mom, you’re free now.”

“I can’t leave,” she said with a look so profoundly sad that it tore me wide open.

“My God, why?”

“You know what he says.”

I tried to make fun of his tone so she’d lighten up. “‘You have to take care of things.’”

She didn’t lighten up; she repeated him. “‘You know what happens when you don’t take care of things.’ Sally, do you see where this is going?”

I saw my whole life flashing before my eyes, and it was over.

“Come on. We’ll run away!” I tried to grab her hand, but the dead come without appendages—nothing you can grab onto but something fearsome that you come away with, the sense of unresolved problems and abiding grief. Listen, I’m only twenty-two, what do I know. I said, “Mother, please! We’ll get Mary and go.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“We’ll just sneak out.” I jumped up and grabbed my shoes.

She shook her head. “I can’t go. But that isn’t the bad part. The bad part is . . .”

“Of course we can, he’s sleeping, hurry,” I was trembling, I couldn’t stop gasping, “we don’t have much time . . .”

“The bad part is . . .” Her sigh shook the room. “Neither can you.”

She was right. That nagging feeling of things undone brought me straight home after work and put me to polishing, cleaning, sorting, filing when I should have been down at Fiasco’s hanging out with my friends and hooking up with cute guys. The dust layering in corners I’d just dusted, the objects out of place, the unfiled magazines that piled up in the mailbox every day, everything Father collected ensnared me. Father’s house is a neverending story, the unfinished symphony. You go nuts waiting for the credits to roll: The End. In this family, there isn’t one.

Then Mother had The Idea.

By the time she did, I’d met a man. This cute guy Randy asked me out for drinks after work. I wanted to go, but guilt tore through me in the parking lot. Everybody else went out to the Mafia fern bar, but I went home. It was the guilt. I couldn’t meet guys while Mare and I had work to do; things in the house were getting out of hand. That night she and I washed the Hummel collection and made his dinner and repaired the needlepoint while he watched TV; I filed the snapshots from the summer of ’84 and the whole time I knew Randy was going home with Lola Hanson instead of me.

Mare looked at me. “What’s up?”

Father said, “Sarah? Is there something on your mind?”

I tried. “I think we should sell this place.”

Mare gasped, “Where would we go?”

“Stupid girl.” Like the avenging angel, Father flattened me with a glare. “Sell this place? Never!”

“We have to get out of here.”

I was in tears but he didn’t care. He slapped me hard. “Do you know what happens when you don’t take care of things?”

That night Mom came. “It’s the things.”

“What?” I stopped crying.

“Don’t be scared Sally, it’s me.”

“I know who it is.”

“Then do what your mother tells you. The things are the trap. All those things, waiting to be taken care of.”

“His things,” I said.

“They’re certainly none of mine.” Forty years and he hadn’t quenched her spirit. Trapped in here with his things even in death, Mother was dying to go. She’d had enough. She let the thought drift into my head. “Get rid of his things and you’ll be free to go, sweetheart. We all will.” She rattled me with that sigh. “Especially me.”

I got where we were going. Fast. “He’d have to die.”

She nodded.

Don’t ask me how we did it. I am not going to incriminate myself here, never mind where I got the stuff or what it was or how I slipped it into his after-dinner cappuccino or what I told the paramedics when Mare weakened and dialed 911 even though he was only frothing a little bit, or how we managed all this without Father finding out, but even at the end he didn’t know what we’d done to him. He didn’t, I swear.

Otherwise, why would he have given me his gold-framed glasses and his Phi Beta Kappa key and his gold tooth to take care of instead of calling the cops?

The first day of the yard sale is a sellout. Mare and I are sitting on the front lawn counting the money in the coffee can. I feel better already. “Four hundred dollars, this is great.”

“And a woman who collects Mission took the sideboard.”

“Why do you care who took the sideboard?”

She shows me the whites of her eyes. “If we don’t give this stuff a good home, who’s going to take care of it?”

“Like I care who takes care of it?”

You’d damn well better.

I don’t hear that. No way. I don’t hear anything.

Mare says, “I don’t see how you can look so happy.”

“You don’t get it? We’re getting out of jail.”

But my sister is fretting. “I don’t think the guy who took the Barcalounger is going to take good care of it.”

I give her a poke. “Get over yourself. This is our ticket to freedom. Ours and Mom’s.”

She whirls to look at me. “Whose?”

“Never mind.”

“You’ve been hearing from Mom?”

“Well, sort of.”

She looks worried. “This was her idea?”

“It was.”

“But Mom died because she wasn’t taking good enough care of . . .”

“The wingnut collection?”

Mare sobs, “She didn’t stack the boxes right.”

“You think the stupid wingnut collection killed her?”

She says in our father’s tone, “How many times do I have to tell you, you have to take care of things?” My sister is shaking.

You know what happens when you don’t take care of things.

“Well, we’re putting an end to all that, so you can quit worrying.”

Don’t think it’s going to be that easy.

“You shut up,” I say.

Hard to explain what happens when we get back inside. It’s nice in a way, for the first time we can begin to see the walls. All his railroad and whaling prints are gone, along with the Alcott family portraits, which went to a dealer in Cambridge, and the Keane children pictures and the gazillion Grand Canyon photographs. There’s so little furniture left that we can cross entire rooms without bumping into anything and now that the centerpiece collection is gone, there’s enough space in here for us to eat at the dining room table. I think I hear a beginning echo in our rooms because a dealer from New Haven came and took away the Orientals for which, thank you, we are going to receive a bundle.

Not a patch on what they’re worth.

Go away.

Mark my words, you’re going to be sorry.

I’m warning you.

No, I’m warning you.

Mare says, “Are you OK?”

“Who, me? I’m fine. I’ve never been better. I think I’ll just . . . I’m tired.”

“Me too.”

“I think I’m going to bed now.”

“Me too,” Mare says.

Our footsteps echo on the stairs because the rug guy took the Bokhara runner. The old man keeps at it, but I imagine my father’s voice is getting fainter.

Mom comes in the night. “How’s it going?”

“Great,” I say. “Fantastic.”

“How’s it really going?”

“Half the stuff went today. The rest goes tomorrow and Thursday and what we can’t sell, the Praying Hands will come and take on Friday.”

Mom sighs. “I hope that will do it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know how Howard is about having his things taken care of.”

“They aren’t his things anymore.”

“They aren’t the only things he owns,” she says with a sigh.

She’s a goddamn ghost, what does she have to lose? “Let’s hope.”

By the end of the week the place is cleared out. We have sold everything. Well, almost everything. Some of it we sent off in the Praying Hands truck, and some we couldn’t give away. I stood on the curb and made the garbage men take it. Either way, the heap we grew up in is good and empty. Mare and I are spending our last night in the house. We called Domino’s at seven on our last day, and now we are sleeping in new sleeping bags in our old bedrooms, a kind of Goodbye to All That party, if that makes any sense.

Tomorrow Mare and I move to a motel and put this big old ark on the market. In fact, I have made a Saturday date with Randy.

Freedom soon: I can’t wait. I . . . “Mom?”

“Yes.”

“Mom! You’re still here.”

Our mother sighs. “Afraid so.”

This makes me sigh. “His stuff is gone, Mom. You don’t have to hang around anymore, it’s almost over.”

“But I am. Still here, I mean.”

“You just stopped in to say goodbye, right?”

“Afraid not.”

“Mom, we got rid of all his things. You know, all those things that you had to stay so they’d get taken care of?”

“Not quite,” she says.

“Mom!”

“There’s that box behind the furnace.”

Oh God, I forgot. I have to think fast. “I’m cementing it in back there first thing in the morning.” I am getting this deep, uneasy feeling. “That’ll do it, right? Right Mom?”

“It’s worth a try,” she says.

I think I hear him scream, You bitch, you promised.

Promises are promises, you old fool, but this is ridiculous.

It comes to me: If I destroy what’s in the shoebox in the cellar, we can all go.

I hear him wailing in rage and pain. My gold, my gold!

Shut up, you old bastard. You sound like a broken pirate.

This is what I did with my father’s last things. The shoebox, I burned. The Phi Beta Kappa key and the gold tooth, I flushed down the toilet. “Take that,” I said. When I put his gold-framed glasses into the Dispos-Al I thought I heard him scream. “Take that,” I yelled right before I turned it on.

Bitch, you promised.

“And that.”

Then—fantastic—I stopped hearing him and started hearing her.

Thaaank yoooouuuu. From somewhere overhead my mother’s voice comes back to me as she rises up, and up . . .

And my father’s voice rising after her. So much for youuuuu . . .

“Shut up,” I yell, “shut up, old man. That’s the end of you.”

If he answers, I don’t hear it. I am on the run now.

“Mare. Mare, wake up,” I say. There is nothing of my father left in this room, just the sleeping bag with my baby sister rubbing her eyes and snuggling down again. It’s Saturday, and I have a date. I nudge her with my toe. “Get up and get your things, we’re free.”

She rolls over and yawns. “What?”

“Hurry.” I start stuffing her clothes into her duffle bag. I’m not sure why it is so urgent, only that it is. “Get dressed. We have to get out of here.”

“You killed the glasses?”

“And the gold tooth. There’s nothing left of him here.”

That’s what you think.

“Mare, let’s go, let’s go!”

One look at my face and she is terrified. “Sally, what’s the matter?”

“Not sure,” I say, listening. I turn my head this way, that way, but if he’s around, Father isn’t manifesting, at least not right now.

We both get dressed and from that point we move fast: collecting last bits to take out of the house with us; we hit the stairs running, running, and we hit the front hall running and I hit the front door running and throw it wide and then we hit . . .

What?

Whatever it is, it stops us cold.

I hear him laugh. Gotcha.

Desperate, I turn to Mare. She turns to me.

Did you really think it would be that simple?

We are transfixed by the fear dawning in our guts and bubbling up until it spills into our faces. “You son of a bitch,” I shout. “I drowned all your gold, even the Phi Beta Kappa key.”

“Shh, Sally, shhh!” Mare bows her head like the favorite daughter she is. “Daddy?”

Who else? Father’s laughter cracks the room. That isn’t all I own.

“I got rid of the goddamn glasses.”

His voice is huge as he comes down on me. DID YOU FORGET WHO OWNS THE HOUSE? The house is mine, along with everything in it. And the land is mine, so don’t think you can get away by torching it.

I try to run again, and even though the front door is wide open and I can see daylight I hit the wall. Outside Randy pulls up; when I don’t come out he honks. I feel so helpless, trapped in the doorway, but all I can do is wave. He is waiting for me in the car with the motor running.

Now, Father says reasonably, you can live here like swine or you can live here like good daughters.

“That’s not fair, Mother got away!”

The laugh that splits the air is evil and horrendous. Your mother doesn’t have as much to answer for.

“Let go,” I scream and by this time even pious Mare is screaming, “Oh, Daddy, please let go!”

But Father has us in his grip now, and he won’t let go no matter how we struggle. Now you might as well pick up the phone and get cracking. Nobody leaves, so you might as well get comfortable, and let this be a lesson to you. This is what happens to girls who don’t take good care of things.

© 2004 by Kit Reed.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Kit Reed is the author of several novels, such as the recent Son of Destruction. Her collection, What Wolves Know and Other Stories, was a Shirley Jackson Award nominee in 2012, and two earlier collections were short-listed for the Tiptree Prize. A Guggenheim fellow and first American recipient of a literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation, she is a resident writer at Wesleyan University. Her latest book is a new story collection, The Story Until Now.

Miss Nobody Never Was
James Patrick Kelly

Everybody thinks that bartenders steal. You know what? They’re right. Maybe there’s an upright bartender someplace where it’s all parking lots and cornfields and traffic lights flashing yellow, but I doubt it.

So what do we steal? We might pocket some of the tips we’re supposed to split with other bartenders or the dishwashers in the back of the house. Or we might steal from the boss. We sure as hell steal from the government when we lie about our actual income. But it’s not just money—we steal time, too. Watch some guy sliding off a barstool at closing, and you’re seeing a sucker we’ve taken for two, three, four hours of his one and only life. That’s time he’ll never get back, time he likely won’t even remember losing. I’d been pulling beers since before Clinton met Lewinsky, so I was ready to come out from behind the stick with no regrets, no looking back. When you own a bar, however, you’re stuck with the kind of baggage that doesn’t travel. Even though I’d been sober since the divorce, two years and counting, I had to live with the burnt toast smell of cheap bourbon, the sticky oak floors and the wobble and snort of strangers who wanted to tell me that I was the brother they never had. If I stole whatever from whoever, like all my fellow bartenders, The Strange Brew Pub was stealing my life from me.

Which is why I was miserable that night. It was a Wednesday—our Whiskey & Wings night—and I had the game on the widescreen in the main room and Comedy Central on the old plasma in the annex. The Red Sox were down two in the fifth and were playing like their shoelaces were untied. There was my usual upscale crowd, a couple of suits postponing family obligations, more couples than usual. The whiskey was flowing and we’d run out of wings; Dana was pushing our mini chimis. The hardcore at the bar had already gone through the night’s ration of free chips and salsa.

“So the professor goes, ‘And how many of you believe in ghosts?’ About half the class raise their hands.” Cal Overton was telling one of his endless stories to some bored former hippie with a graying ponytail.

“I need a Jack and Jill for table four.” Dana set a tray filled with empties on the bar. “Ten Penny, Magic Hat, and Harpoon IPA pints.”

“‘How many of you have even seen a ghost?’ says the professor.” Cal was already leaning and it was only quarter to ten. We knew that he frontloaded his buzz before coming in, so he could nurse a Smutty or two all night. Dana glanced at her checks. “Hey Chaz, what’s a Stinger?”

“A duo,” I said. Dana was twenty-three, new to the job and the wonderful world of cocktails. “Brandy and white crème de menthe. Sweet.”

“Okay then,” she said. “Straight up. For table six.” Which was around the corner in the annex, just out of sight of the bar.

“That’s it? Just the one?”

Dana shrugged. “Solo, says she’s waiting for somebody.”

“That’s a big table. Give her a menu.”

“Then the professor goes, ‘Anybody here ever slept with a ghost?’” Cal giggled. Silence. “Nothing. So finally this redneck kid . . .”

Ponytail Guy checked his watch and then made eye contact with me. He pushed his glass across the bar, palm pressed to the rim. I nodded so he’d know that I’d seen and would cash him out. I measured three jiggers of brandy from the well into a shaker, then free poured the jigger of liqueur. Best to go light on the crème de menthe or the thing will taste like NyQuil. Stingers are pure nostalgia—Mad Men drinks. I’m pretty sure there’s an old Sondheim song that mentions them. It was a cocktail that meant something to me, once upon a time.

“‘That’s amazing,’ says the professor. ‘You have to tell us more, because in all my years here, not one student has ever admitted to sleeping with ghosts.’”

I rang Ponytail Guy up for a couple of G&Ts: $14.34 with tax.

“And the kid goes ‘Ghosts? I thought you said goats.’” Cal Overton was the only man I ever met who could guffaw. The synchronous bob of his Adam’s apple and his gut was accompanied by a soggy cough, as if he’d just swallowed a sponge.

I gave Ponytail Guy a sympathetic shrug, slid him his check and, on a whim, ducked under the gate of the bar. I wasn’t going to deliver the Stinger myself, I just wanted to see what kind of woman would order such an old fashioned drink. Probably a twenty-something being ironic.

Even though I only saw her from behind that first time, I knew right away. It was the hair mostly: silky, almost limp, brushing the base of her neck, the color of the straw in the barn where we’d first made love. But it was also the way she held her body: waiting but gathered for flight. She didn’t like to be stood up, my Adele.

Except this couldn’t be Adele, because this girl was twenty-something and my ex was getting invites from AARP. I could tell she was young from the shoulders, which had never borne the weight of overdue bills or a curdled marriage. She was wearing a black tank top and the spray of freckles on her pale arms was so familiar that it took my breath away. She cocked her head and I had just a glimpse of the swell of her cheek, the tip of her nose. I felt a dangerous champagne fizz at the back of my head. No way could I possibly know anything about this girl, but I already had one foot over the precipice and was leaning into the fall.

Spooked and back in love at the same time.

But the bar called, as it so often did—this time with a shout of rage.

“Sorry, s-sorry!” Then I heard Cal’s slurred, shivery plea. “No, let me pay that. Least I can do.”

The other voice was hot. “Get away from me.”

Reluctantly I turned away from my life to see the two of them off their stools. The front of Ponytail Guy’s shirt was soaked. Cal made as if to dry him off with one of our pathetic bar napkins and got his hand slapped away.

“Okay, okay,” I said, stepping between them. “No need to get personal. Accidents happen.” Dana had Cal’s elbow, tugging him to a neutral corner. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my barback-slash-bouncer Hilly threading through the tables to us. “I’m very, very sorry, sir.”

“That asshole.” Ponytail Guy still seethed, but at least he focused on me and not Cal, who had wilted into Dana. “He’s shitfaced and you’re still serving him?”

“You’re right and I apologize.” My voice was on its knees. “I can see the problem now. He needs to go home. We’ll get him there.”

The man considered, then his ponytail bobbed. “Okay then.” The temperature in the room dropped. “An accident. Just took me by surprise is all.” The rest of the customers returned to the drinks. “I guess I need a shower.”

“Your tab is on me, sir. Again, I’m very sorry.” I watched him through the door. Maybe he was able to wash away that night, but I sure wasn’t. When I glanced into the alcove again, the girl who couldn’t be my ex-wife was gone.

Not only did I work at The Strange Brew, but I lived there too. When Adele and I bought the building with the money her mom left us, living over the bar had seemed like a smart move. We spent twelve years after that working to build our business, even as our marriage was going bankrupt. Looking back, I realize that I was already an alcoholic when I met her. By the time we were ready to split, we were both raging drunks. It snuck up on us; we made jokes about our drinking right up until it wasn’t funny anymore. We both hit bottom on the night she pitched down our apartment stairs and broke her arm. Only she didn’t fall, I pushed her. At least I think I did; I was shitfaced at the time. I’ve tried to convince myself that it wasn’t on purpose, but what’s the difference? If she hadn’t been a blackout drunk, she would’ve ratted me out and I would’ve done time for assault. Should’ve done.

We were already lawyered up at that point. Five months later she was sober, and I was trying to be, and we were divorced. Adele said she needed to leave the bar behind, and although I was sick of it too, I was so wracked with shame that I agreed to her settlement offer. As punishment for my sins, I got custody of the building and she filled the trunk of the Camry with $600,000 from my brand new second mortgage. It was my final present to her: a clean escape from our miserable life.

She left lots of stuff behind: furniture, most of her clothes, photos, skis, her Carly Simon CDs, even her great-grandmother’s Fabergé silver and enamel clock, which we’d once had appraised for $40,000. I’d kept it all, even though I hated living with it. I figured that if she ever asked about her stuff, I could hand it over to make my amends.

It was a swell apartment, even if it was the Museum of Our Broken Marriage. The building had been converted from a townhouse in the 1880s. I had five airy rooms with tall windows facing west. The place had pocket doors and a tin ceiling. The dining room featured a hipped copper-frame skylight over Adele’s showpiece Matsuoka table, currently strewn with notebooks and the stacks of pages that I laughingly called my “drinking memoir.” My shrink had started me journaling as a step on the road to sobriety. I’d spent the last eighteen months writing about my old life instead of starting a new one. Even though the apartment was too big for just one person, whenever I brought someone home to share it, the place seemed to shrink.

My bedroom had a queen-sized bed and a king-sized Sony flatscreen; its decorative balcony looked onto Washington Street. The balcony was too narrow for sitting, but I’d replaced the original windows with a slider. When the weather was right I could perch on one of Adele’s pricey dining room chairs, half in and half out of the apartment. Which wasn’t that often, considering the brutal winters and annoying drone of AC in the summer. But that May night, a few days after I first saw her, I was letting the cool wash over me as the city slept. I like to wind down after closing and, since I don’t smoke, I would sit and write to keep from thinking about all the bottles calling me downstairs to the bar. It suited me fine when there was nothing to see but the traffic light cycling from green to yellow to red, nothing to hear but the clatter of lonely cars.

Except that night there was singing.

I followed “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” into the kitchen. She was sitting at the breakfast table, peeling an orange. I hadn’t bought an orange in years. After she moved on, I switched to grapefruit.

“Hello Chaz,” she said. “Long time.”

This was where I had to decide whether I was dreaming or crazy or whether decades of single malt abuse had finally caught up to me. I dropped into a chair.

“Hi yourself, Adele.”

She didn’t correct me; her attention stayed with the peeling. She could skin even the thinnest Valencia in one continuous spiral, clever fingers caressing the moist flesh, fingernails drawing just a few glittering beads of juice. She was wearing white bellbottoms and a floral print blouse with droopy sleeves. She was barefoot, twenty-three if she was a day, and as gorgeous as when we’d first met.

“So?” I said.

She wrinkled her nose the same way she always did when she was annoyed. “So what?”

“So,” I said, “are you real? How did you get in? Why are you here? Does God exist? Do the Sox have enough pitching?”

She tucked her chin to her neck to hide her smile. “Funny.” She separated a section from the orange. “Still with the jokes.” She sucked the orange slice into her mouth and grinned at me.

“You’re dripping.” I said, watching the juice bead on the table. “Would you like a plate?” I pulled one out of the cabinet and slid across the table to her.

She set the orange on it and separated the sections; the kitchen seemed to fill with its fragrance. “Are you glad to see me?”

“Am I seeing you?”

She offered me a piece of her orange; I leaned toward her and opened my mouth. She slipped it in and before she could get away I brushed my upper lip against her cool fingertip. She was definitely there.

“You’re dripping.” She got up and tore a paper towel from the roll above the sink. “She’s drinking again.”

“Adele?”

She nodded.

“Where is she?”

“In town somewhere.” The girl waved vaguely at the windows. “She’s been sleeping at Maureen’s.”

“But you’re Adele. Unless you’re not real.”

“Are you real?”

“Near as I can tell.” She had always made me take these little tests—her version of flirting. I liked them at first, but they got old. Or maybe we got old. “When I go downstairs for my shift, people see me. I fill glasses and put them on the bar. I sign checks. I get wet when it rains and I stink if I don’t take a shower. I’m more or less someplace every minute of the day. So she’s drinking. What business is that of mine?”

“You can fix her.”

“I was barely able to fix myself. Seeing you makes me think I botched the job.”

“I don’t want to be her.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. This ghost—wait, can there be a ghost of someone who isn’t dead? This phantom, this spook didn’t want to be who? I understood what she was asking, sort of, but that train left the station in 1994, right after I mixed Adele her first Stinger.

“Listen, kid. The one thing they teach you about drunks is that you can’t make them change.”

“You broke her, so you fix her. That’s what’s real.” And with that she got up and walked out.

As I watched from my window I could see her step onto the street. I wanted her to turn into mist and disappear. That way I could stop wondering if I was nuts, stop remembering how much I had loved this woman once upon a time. Besides, there was no way I could give her story a happy-ever-after ending. At the corner, she glanced over her shoulder and pointed up at me. Our little ritual: We never waved hello or goodbye. We pointed.

I pointed back at her. “Sure,” I muttered. “And then I’ll get to work on world peace.”

I’d known Maureen Flannery longer than I had known Adele; we’d graduated Southie a year apart. Maureen used to write the Citysights column for the Boston Globe before all the newspapers wandered off to the internet to die. Someone told me that she was in online reputation management now, whatever that was. She was one of the friends I’d lost in the divorce, but I hoped we were still on speaking terms. I gave her a call the next morning.

“Yeah, she’s passed out on my couch. You want me to wake her up?”

“Passed out as in passed out?” I used to get these sick churns of panic whenever my drunken memories of the night before snapped into daylight focus. No hangover this time, but I felt the familiar dread. Not only had the spook been real, she’d called my ex’s relapse. “Is it bad?”

“Nothing that a winning lottery ticket and a summer in rehab couldn’t cure. What do you want with her, Chaz?”

I wished I knew. “I heard she was in town.”

That got me nothing.

“I really don’t need to disturb her just now,” I said. “I just thought maybe . . . tell her that I still have her things. Ask her what she wants me to do with them.”

“Ask her yourself. Invite her out for drinks. She’ll have four before you finish your first.”

“I’m sober, Maureen. You know that.”

“Yeah, sorry. Just looking for someone to take her off my hands . . .” She sighed. “When?”

I considered. “Scheduled myself to work at three.” It was almost eleven. “Could I stop by soon?”

“I’ll throw her in the shower. Give me half an hour—maybe she’ll drown and save you the trip. You remember the place?”

I did, but when I got there, Adele was gone.

“When she heard you were coming, she dressed and left.” Maureen ushered me into her tiny living room. “Says she doesn’t want her stuff, doesn’t want anything to do with you. So, what? She owes you money too?”

I shook my head. “I had no idea she was in trouble.”

“I suppose I should thank you for chasing her off.” Her expression was stony. “I never thought I would say this, but you’re probably better off without her. I’m thinking I am.”

“You introduced us.”

“My bad.” She grimaced. “Adele shows up a couple of days ago, all she’s carrying is a purse and a plastic Stop and Shop bag. Claimed the airline lost her luggage. That was bullshit. Here, look at this.” Maureen had an efficiency in the North End—nice place if you were into claustrophobia. She stuck overnight guests on a lumpy sleep sofa to discourage long stays; I’d spent a few backbreaking nights on it during the drunk decade. There was a hole burned onto the near arm, the size of a lit cigarette that had never found an ashtray. “Smoking in bed and didn’t have the nerve to tell me. Cost five hundred to have this thing reupholstered last fall.”

“Jesus, that’s really out of control.” I peered at the burn to be sociable. “Did she say when she’s coming back?”

Maureen didn’t reply. She went to a window and gazed down at Clark Street. The North End was coming back to life now that the eleven o’clock Mass had let out from St. Stephen’s. “You know,” she said, “back when I got my column, I would’ve called her my best friend. She says that late last night, but only after getting totally fucked up. I’m her best friend, she says. Still.” Her laugh sounded like a cough. “And then she asks for a loan. Five thousand. Loan, like I’d ever see it again. I should cross her off the list, Chaz. There’s friendship and then there’s stupidity.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Somebody called, told me she was coming, that she needed help.” She tapped a finger against the glass as though trying to get the attention of a passer-by. “She reminded me of my responsibilities, this somebody.” She was musing to herself; I wasn’t part of the conversation. “Wasn’t somebody I could just ignore.”

“This somebody,” I said, “was she strange?”

She started, as if she had forgotten I was in the room. “Strange?”

I felt my mouth stretch. “As in impossible.” Maybe it looked like a smile, although I certainly wasn’t feeling very happy. “You talked to her, didn’t you? Young Adele. The spook?”

“You’re in on this too?” Maureen’s shock gave way to anger. “Is that what this is?” She thrust both hands into my chest. “Again with the two of you taking advantage of me? Like I haven’t already done enough?” She pushed hard enough to stagger me. “Get out.”

“Maureen, listen . . .” As I backed away, I tripped over a wicker magazine rack and sprawled onto my ass.

“You’re drunk. Can’t even stand up straight.” She grabbed her phone and aimed it at me like a gun. “I’ve got 911 on speed, shithead. Get out or talk to the cops.”

“Okay, okay.” I hauled myself up and retreated to the door. “But I know it’s scary but I swear, Maureen, I . . .”

She winged an ashtray at me as encouragement to leave. “Five, four, three . . .” As I escaped, she shouted, “And when you see my best friend, tell her to fuck off and die.” She kicked the door shut.

We used to go barhopping, Adele and I, since no one saloon can encompass the glorious universe of drink. Sure, if you’re in the business, you want to check out the competition, steal ideas. But we barkeeps are a welcoming lot, especially when we greet our own. Swapping stories about customers is the code through which we pass the secrets of the trade. How to sort the happy drinkers from the hopeless. When to listen and how to forget. What to say to the mirror in the men’s room after a hard night behind the stick. But it’s different when you’re an exile from the fellowship of ethanol. When everyone around you has had at least one pop, probably many more, your sobriety means you’ve decided not to join the party. You’re there under false pretenses. After all, how many drinking establishments specialize in club soda with a twist?

So it had been a while since I had checked the local bar scene. I guessed that Adele would be drinking that night and hoped she might wander through some of our old favorites. It would have been an impossible search otherwise. Drunks have plenty of options. Boston has issued six hundred and seventy-five full liquor licenses at last count, three hundred and fifty-five for beer and wine. Of course there was no guarantee that I would pick the right place at the right time, but I had to try. How long would Adele stick around now that Maureen had turned on her?

Back when we were still drinking together, we would often start a pub crawl with tapas at Toro. I picked at a kind of seafood stew they called suquet de marisco for about an hour and then walked to the Beehive, where some street funk band was playing that I knew would drive Adele crazy. Fred Hingle at the Double Down had an ABCC hearing coming up for serving a twenty-year-old Northeastern student who showed a fake driver’s license. Fred said he was finally going to cough up the grand for one of those ID scanners. Yawky’s was pushing the new drink Gulliver had dreamed up called the Big Papi, which was a mojito made with maple syrup. Gabby had finally retired because of her bad hip but Geno was still working every other night at the Old Town Tap. Nobody had seen Adele. It was already past midnight when I decided to try the dive bars. There were cop cars and an ambulance outside of Rose’s so I kept going down Tremont to the Two Way Lounge. She was slumped in a booth at the back.

“She staggers in, orders a Stinger.” Helena Borisyuk leaned over the bar and whispered to me. “I said I didn’t think so. Then she lights a cigarette and I make her put it out. I thought she might cry.” Helena had worked for us back in 2006 until she left to chase down her ex, who had spirited their son back to Ukraine. “She’s been a statue ever since, not moving, maybe fifteen-twenty minutes. Kind of spooky.”

Adele—my Adele—was gray and haggard and frayed, like a bar rag that had been wrung out one too many times. She was thinner than I remembered her, but not in a good way. She was wearing a white, unbuttoned sweater over a blue shirtdress. She was clean and looked vaguely put together—sort of a Goodwill makeover. There was a crumpled pack of Newports on the table in front of her. She sat in the booth with hands clasped, staring into a parallel world where the drinks were on the house and ice cubes never melted.

“Evening, Adele,” I said.

No reaction.

I knocked on the table and said it again. Not even a twitch.

“See what I mean?” Helena hovered behind me, still whispering for no good reason. She could’ve shouted into a bullhorn and Adele wouldn’t have noticed. “I don’t want to call the cops.”

“No, they’re busy.” I considered. “Make me that Stinger.”

She goggled at me. “I can’t serve her, Chaz.”

“You’re serving me,” I said. “Don’t worry, it’s just bait.” I trailed her back to the bar. Helena shook the drink over ice, poured and reluctantly pushed the glass toward me. I pushed two twenties back. “For pain and suffering.” I said.

I slid into the booth next to Adele, waved the drink under her nose and then pulled it back.

She turned just enough to blink at me. “You.” She shook herself into the real world. “I’m a mess.”

“Are you?”

“Take a look.” She straightened with a languid sneer. “What do you see?”

Drunks have an infinite capacity for self-pity; I wasn’t in a mood to feed Adele’s. “I see a woman who doesn’t know what time it is or where she’s spending the night. Probably doesn’t care.”

Her grin was so lopsided it almost slipped off her face. “Got that right.”

“Who probably won’t remember this conversation in the morning.”

“Nope.” She pointed her forefinger at me. “Uh-uh. Wrong there.” Then she surprised me by dipping the finger into the glass I was holding. She took her time sucking it clean, making the suggestion so obvious that even Larry Flynt would’ve been embarrassed. “You don’t drink Stingers, Chaz.”

“I don’t drink period, Adele. Not anymore.”

“Then handle that over here.”

“You want to get our friend Helena fired?”

“Bitch.” She cut her eyes toward the bar. “Not my friend.”

“Listen, you can’t get served, Adele. Here or anywhere.”

“Think so? Night’s young.”

“Tell you what. Come with me and I’ll let you have this one once we get to the sidewalk.” I gestured with the glass. “We can take it back to the apartment.”

“Ohh, what’s there?” She was still going for lascivious, but drooping eyelids made her look pathetic.

“The place you’re going to spend the night.”

“Hear that, bitch?” she called, pointing at Helena. “Ref calls that a forward pass.” Adele grabbed her smokes and bumped toward me on the seat. I scooted over and stood, holding the Stinger, to let her out. She swiveled her legs out of the booth and then tapped a foot against the floor as if to make sure it was still there. With a grunt, she heaved herself upright—and promptly lost her balance.

I caught her with my free arm as I deliberately spilled the Stinger on the floor. “Oops,” I said. We both stared at the puddle for a beat, breathing in the sharp, minty scent.

“Helena, we need a mop over here.” I set the empty on the table.

Adele squinted at me. “Not fair.”

“I’ll make it up to you.” I aimed her at the door. “Wait, where’s your purse?”

“Lost.” She let an arm flop carelessly and cackled. “Like me.”

Driving home with my ex slumped like an old laundry bag against the door of my Tacoma, I started to count all the wrong turns I’d made in my life. Somehow, I realized now, getting married to her hadn’t been one of them. Seeing the other, younger Adele made me realize that what we had at the beginning was good and true. Yes, we had stolen that from each other, but most of our troubles had been caused by the disease we shared. This wreck wasn’t who Adele was—or was supposed to be. But if I felt sorry for her because of her alcoholism, then I had to feel sorry for myself as well, which did nobody any good. I figured that I owed this woman something more than pity. I just didn’t know what.

“It’s her.” Adele’s breath fogged the passenger window. “She sent you.”

“Not exactly.” I’d thought she had passed out. “Maureen’s pretty pissed at you.”

“Not her.” She jabbed a finger at the window and drew a crooked face in the fog. “That fucky little shit.”

“Who?” I squeezed the steering wheel to keep from driving into oncoming traffic.

“Miss Nobody Never Was.” Her moan came from deep within her. “Leave me alone.” She scoured the face away with her fist. “She thinks it’s so easy. Young and stupid.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She made her choices.” Her voice would have fit in a thimble. “My choices.”

“Adele?”

But she let her head droop, making dry, crushed whimpers. I thought she might be crying, but no tears came. She didn’t speak for the rest of the ride.

At first I thought I was going to have to carry her up to the apartment, but she rallied when I parked the truck in our spot in the alley.

“Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.” She rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Just in time for a drink.”

I steered her up the stairs and fumbled for the key. She seemed to expand as she went through the door.

“Swell place.” She spread her arms and twirled like Julie Andrews in The Sound Of Music. “Airy. View. Smart colors.” Then she tripped over the floor and careened into the Baker sofa she’d bought just before we separated. “Like your taste in furniture.” She smeared a finger across the face of her great-grandmother’s Fabergé heirloom. “Nice clock.” She cupped her hand around an imaginary tumbler and shook it for a refill. “So, barkeep?”

“So what?

Her expression darkened. She lurched into the kitchen, opened the cabinet where we used to keep the bottles and gaped in horror at Shredded Wheat, Raisin Bran, Cream of Wheat, and six flavors of instant oatmeal.

“Lying sack of shit. Where’s my drink?”

“I said I was sober. Maybe you missed that part. But I have coffee. Plenty of Diet Coke.”

“Fuck.” She shook a cigarette out of the pack, turned on the gas stovetop and bent to light it. “Whatever.” She took a deep drag off the Newport and talked weary smoke at me. “Give me something to hold.”

I pulled the tab on a Diet Coke and poured half of it into a red plastic cup. Then I rummaged through the drawers until I found one of her old ashtrays.

“What’s this?” Adele had settled at the dining room table and had flipped one of my journals open. “Writing a book?”

“Yeah,” I said. “A horror story.” I set the glass and the ashtray in front of her. “Not sure how it comes out.”

“Kills the wife, grinds her up. Serves meatballs to the cops.” She wrapped her hands around the drink. “Happily ever et cetera.”

“Nah, it’s been done.” I swept my papers and journals into a messy pile on the far side of the table.

“Want to kill me, Chaz?”

“Why bother? You’re doing a pretty good job of it yourself.”

“So judgmental.” She picked up the cup and watched it all the way to her lips with the elaborate precision of someone who had spilled more than a few. “Did you ever love me?”

“Sure.” It was easy to say because it was the truth. The journals were full of it, if she ever wanted to read them. “How about you?”

She giggled and started to hum “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” Singing was how she used to make up after a fight, but this wasn’t the time. She swirled soda in her cup and then pushed it away from her. “So, Chaz, what’s next?”

“Nothing,” I said. “You spend the night, sleep this one off.” Seeing her brighten with expectation, I pointed. “On the couch.”

She stuck out her lower lip. “That really where you want me?”

“I want you to find yourself, kid. This isn’t you.”

“You think?” She held out a hand so I could help her up from the table, but then she spun into my arms. She was trying for a kiss but found only air.

“Jesus, Adele.” We staggered, but I managed to catch her upright and aim her at the living room.

She slumped forlornly as I tossed a pillow and a blanket I’d stripped from my bed onto the couch. Her couch. “I hung a clean towel in the bathroom. Get some sleep. We can talk in the morning.” I retreated to the bedroom, my virtue intact.

“You’re a good man, Chaz Mariano.” She pointed at me. “And a fucking son-of-a-bitch.”

“If you say so.” I shut the door.

The spook Adele perched on the edge of my disheveled bed. She was wearing cutoff jeans and The Bags tee shirt I’d bought her at the WBCN Rock & Roll Rumble in 1989. “She can still be saved.”

“Don’t you ever knock?”

“No, really, you’re doing great.” She rubbed her hand against the sheet and somehow I was sitting beside her.

“You don’t understand, I don’t know what else I can do.” I stamped my foot in frustration. “So I feed her breakfast and we talk. Then what?”

“Maybe that’s all she needs for now.”

“It’s not like she can move back in here. We’re done.”

She filled the silence with her smile.

“So you’ve been bugging her? Maureen too?” I said. “Sounds like they’re creeped out.”

“They don’t believe in me, not really. Not like you.” The look of true affection she gave me made my throat close. From fear? Desire? Regret? “You said you loved her.”

“Once upon a time.”

“When she was me.” She leaned in then, and I kissed her. She was the girl I fell in love with, the only time it mattered. The girl I wanted to marry. She tasted just like I remembered; her mouth opened and her sweet breath seemed to fill me. Then I tried one last time to stop. I wanted to believe, but I also wanted to understand.

I pulled back. “What is this?”

Adele smirked, and then gave me that oh-so-familiar shiver of carnal anticipation. “Just what you want.” She trailed her fingers across my lap and let them camp between my legs. “See?”

“This isn’t happening.”

She laughed. “Got that right.”

Even now, the memory of making love to Adele that night gets mixed up with the memories of making love to her a hundred other times. The tangle of bodies, the tingle of skin on skin. Gasps and kisses. I think she was offering comfort sex, but it felt uncomfortable because there were too many of me watching us: Fifty-two-year-old me, wondering what the hell he was going to tell his shrink; twenty-six-year-old me, upset that the love of his life would go down so enthusiastically on a limp old man; thirty-eight-year-old me, astonished that he had let sex with this delicious girl turn sour.

The one thing I do remember was being very, very sad.

The heart-stopping squeal of all my smoke alarms going off launched me from bed. “Adele?” I could smell smoke before I hit the light switch. An acrid haze roiled near the ceiling.

The haze was thicker in the living room. She was sitting up on the couch, doubled-over, choking. Only then did I realize how hard I was coughing. The air was thick; it was like breathing steel wool. The kitchen was a nightmare of flame. I was wobbly and on the verge of deciding that none of this was really happening, that I should just lie down and go back to sleep.

“Chaz!”

I turned. Framed in the bedroom door was the spook Adele. The Adele I’d lost. She was naked, bathed in smoke, shimmering in firelight. She pointed and I started toward her. But it wasn’t a do something point. Or a hello point. It was goodbye. And in that moment, I understood how she had spooked me. She was as solid as a memory, as real as my squandered dreams of happiness, but she wasn’t—couldn’t be—my Adele anymore.

For some reason I could hear the ticking of her great-grandmother’s Fabergé clock trying to steal the last few minutes of my one and only life and figured I should find someplace with oxygen to think all of this over. I thrust an arm around my ex-wife’s shoulder, caught her under the armpit and jerked her toward me. The first fire engine arrived as we stumbled onto the street. As the firefighters pulled hoses past us, an explosion in the apartment blew out two of my beautiful windows and rained burning debris onto the sidewalk.

A man in an absurdly yellow helmet shouted at us but for some reason I couldn’t hear him. I cupped a hand to my ear.

“Anybody else in there?” It sounded like he was calling from New Hampshire.

I couldn’t speak for coughing but I managed to shake my head. He disappeared. Some other guy tried to throw a blanket over my shoulder and separate the two of us. Adele clutched at me, staring as if she’d just seen a ghost.

The investigation into the cause of the fire was inconclusive. The forensic unit was able to determine that one of the gas jets on the stove in the kitchen had been on, but the origin and cause report pointed at the living room as the place where the fire started. The Boston Fire Department’s best explanation was that Adele had lit a cigarette from the stove and then dropped it in the living room when she fell asleep. Or passed out. She, of course, remembered nothing.

Sometimes I wonder if the spook set the fire. Of course, the report made no mention of spooks. After all, there were just two people in the apartment and we both got out.

I could tell that the adjusters from Liberty Mutual wanted to make something of the fact that it was “carelessness” on the part of my ex-wife that led to the loss, but she was judgment proof, having squandered almost all of her share of our divorce settlement. Eventually I collected for the loss of my business and the apartment. The structural damage was so extensive that the building inspector condemned The Strange Brew. Fine with me—I sold the ruin to a developer who knocked it down. I believe there’s a Citizen’s Bank there now. After paying off both mortgages, I was $723,000 to the good. And yes, it felt like stealing, but who cares when the victim is an insurance company?

After all this time, I’m still not sure who saved who that night. It was Adele’s return that rescued me from the bar, after all. Or maybe the spook saved us both. Adele hit bottom after the fire; almost killing the two of us got her attention. I’d kept a $40,000 insurance rider on the Fabergé clock, which of course was hers, so I cut her a check and then staked her to three months of rehab at the Pura Vida Center in New Mexico. It wasn’t cheap, but it seems to have taken. She got her two-year chip last month. I don’t see her, but we’re Facebook friends and as near as I can tell she’s prospering. She’s put on weight, but in a good way.

I haven’t seen the spook since the night of the fire. Sometimes I think I should look, but where? Mostly she’s just a dream of that life that I stole from myself. Meanwhile I’m keeping busy with my retirement career. I’m writing a book, don’t you know?

Of course, it’s all true. I’m just an alcoholic ex-barkeep. No way could I make this shit up.

© 2013 by James Patrick Kelly.

James Patrick Kelly has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays, and planetarium shows. He has won the Nebula and Hugo Awards and his fiction has been translated into twenty-one languages. With John Kessel, he is co-editor of seven anthologies, most recently Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology and SFWA’s Nebula Awards Showcase, both published in 2012. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. Jim’s website is jimkelly.net.

The Correspondence Between the Governess and the Attic
Siobhan Carroll

OPENING

The changeling hides in the window seat. On one side of her is glass, gauzy with rain. On the other, a thick curtain. November whistles through the crack in the window frame, but she dares not move. In this house she is a creeping, persecuted thing. Best if they don’t see her.

She opens the book. Reading, she knows, is dangerous: none of the books in the house are hers, nothing is hers, and the family will hold this small act against her. But reading is a better escape than none at all.

Boards creak. The changeling looks up from the book’s eerie paintings. She tries to breathe without noise. But she is only a frail orphan, without friends or magic, and she is not hidden well enough.

The curtain is pulled aside. Together, you are dragged into the beginning of the story.

THE RED ROOM

For fighting back, they punish her. The orphan pounds at the door of the haunted bedroom. Her screams claw down the hallway, but no one will save her.

She dies her first death in the red room.

There will be others.

THE INTERVIEW

Afterward, the girl is interrogated, to see if she has learned her lesson:

“And what must you do to avoid hell, child?”

“I must keep in good health, and never die.”

This gives the family pause. Only yesterday, the orphan shrank away from them. Now she is upright, glittering, dangerous. Death will do that to some people.

“I am not deceitful,” the changeling says. “If I were, I should say I loved you. But I am glad you are no relations of mine. If anyone ever asks how you treated me, I shall say the thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty.”

This will not do.

THE SCHOOL

The family washes their hands of her in a respectable way: They send her to school. This is not a clean, well-lit institution but a prison, where unwanted children stand in rigid lines and faint from hunger. The servants bind the corpses in cheap linen and line them up in the courtyard for collection.

The changeling’s fury sustains her. When the headmaster singles her out for abuse, she glares at him. She will not die, not again, not so soon.

She is befriended by Helen Burns, a girl with a saintly smile and a red cough that will martyr her before the story is even underway. Burns counsels the embrace of suffering, and dies (beautifully) to illustrate her point.

The changeling is not convinced. She scratches the walls of her prison, searching for a way out. A kind ancestral fairy drops the solution on her pillow: She will become a governess.

THORNFIELD

Jane (let’s call her Jane now, everyone else does)—

Jane Errant sets out for a house called Thornfield, where she is to tutor a clockwork French girl who sings stuttering arias.

The housekeeper claims the house has no ghosts in it. The changeling chooses to believe her, although she already knows that the servants laugh too loudly and that strange footsteps sound in the attic. As she lies awake at night, the attic creeps into the governess’s thoughts, just as it creeps into yours. Dreams of yellow wallpaper, and women who will not be caged.

THE CLOCKWORK GIRL

Adele, unlike Jane, is ideal.

At eight years old she is already pretty, with bright blue eyes that are empty of thought. Her golden hair falls in ringlets, and when she sings she tilts her head just so and shakes her curls as her mother taught her. She smiles frequently at men, displaying teeth that are white and straight.

If you let her, she will sing for you. She will recite poems that she doesn’t understand, raising her hand in the places her mother taught her. When she has finished, she will sink into a curtsey and look up demurely through her fringe of golden hair.

In France, her audience pretended to find this sweet; the gentlemen watched her with eager eyes as she danced for them like a music-box ballerina. Afterward she was sent to sit on their knees. Sometimes in their laps.

Adele dislikes the governess’s lessons, for they are full of big words and numbers that clatter noisily in her head. But she likes the governess well enough, though she is a plain, mousy thing with a thoughtful face. At eight years old, Adele already knows that women should never be thoughtful. They should be pretty and work hard to catch men’s eyes and keep them.

It takes a lot of concentration not to think of the footsteps she hears in the attic, but Adele has been practicing the art of thoughtlessness for a long time. Her mother began the clockwork process—to aid Adele’s dancing, she said—and now Adele has almost completed it on her own. Sometimes, when the ghosts in the attic threaten to dig their way into her mind, Adele likes to think about her clockwork body, how solid it is, how quiet and regular. Her body will last forever, and unlike people, it will never abandon her.

The noise in the attic starts again, but Adele turns away. She places her hand over her heart, feeling its fleshy beats thud disgustingly against her ribcage. Soon, she thinks, her transformation will be complete. Then she will be perfect. Then she will be loved.

THE ATTIC

It is time we speak of the attic, this space around which Thornfield’s stories turn. Thornfield is a fairy-tale prison, after all; its thorny walls must guard something. But do they guard it from the world or guard the world from it?

The changeling lies awake in her virginal governess’s bed, listening to the attic. Are those footsteps she hears real, or figments of her imagination?

One night, tentatively, she writes out a note, and slips it through a crack into the attic: Who are you?

Excellent question. Sadly, it goes unanswered for weeks. During this time Adele lisps her lessons and the governess is bored. Idly, she plans a trip to the crossroads.

One day she finds a note pinned to her door. The pin is long and sharp; its head is red as blood. The creased paper contains a single word: Myself.

The governess writes a longer note, filling the margins with carefully phrased questions. She never receives an answer. The attic has already told her all she needs to know.

THE CROSSROADS

At midnight the changeling goes to the crossroads. She puts her delicate hands to the dank, pressed earth and digs a hole as deep as her forearm. She takes out the charm—a simple thing made of rags and rabbit’s blood, like the ones her nurse used to make—and drops it down.

There, the changeling thinks. Now do something.

Nothing happens.

The changeling lets a breath out she did not know she was holding. She formed the charm to ask for a change, a breath of excitement in a life fast becoming dreary. But of course nothing will happen. Her nurse’s tales were fantasy only.

Then the hair rises on the back of her arms. Her sweat crisps into cold jewels of ice and skitters to the ground. It pools around her accusingly.

Looking up, the changeling sees a lone dog rushing toward her, eyes gleaming like underwater coins. Her nurse told her stories about dogs like this, fairy guardians of solitary ways.

She feels a surge of fear. Is this another beginning for her? A rough hand come to drag her into yet another story?

The dog rushes past her. It’s his master—and hers—who stops. Falls, actually, tumbling from his horse with a clatter of bones and ugly deeds. It’s up to the changeling to help him to his feet again, a dark man with gloomy manners.

If he had been handsome, if he had smiled, if he had treated her kindly—this story would be different.

She is used to rudeness, and to the insults he hurls in her direction. She offers him a hand and helps lift him up, into a story she—mistakenly—believes unchanged.

THE SECOND INTERVIEW

“When you came on me in the Hay Lane last night, I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse. I am not sure yet. Who are your parents?”

The governess tells her master the truth: She has none she can remember.

“And so you were waiting for your people when you sat on that stile? Did I break through one of your rings, that you spread that damned ice on the causeway?”

The changeling feels an unaccountable chill at Rochester’s words. Does he know? But see how perfectly she answers, mimicking her master’s ironic tone:

“The men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago.”

The lie looks well on her, reflecting in the light of her preternatural eyes.

BLANCHE

A party of gentlefolk has arrived at the great house. The servants scurry through Thornfield’s dark chambers, trying to scrub away layers of Gothic with harsh brown soap. The governess can think only of the woman she heard talked about: Blanche Ingram, the lady the servants say her master will marry.

On the night of the party, the governess sees her rival for the first time: a woman white as bleached marble. Blanche has an imperial air about her, the crackle of repressed power. She is careful not to touch the governess, not even with the hem of her gown.

Oddly, there is something about Blanche that reminds the changeling of herself. Ignorant of all but the most basic instincts of the fey-blooded, she cannot tell what it is. She only knows that Blanche’s power is to be respected; that her anger will make itself felt even at great distances. She knows, also, that Blanche has inherited a feral cruelty that the changeling herself does not possess.

Oh, thinks the governess, as Blanche passes by. Is this the kind of woman her master likes?

The changeling has learned to love her master (poor thing). And why not? In his rough way, he has treated her kindly. At least, he has been interested in her, and to those who are used to being ignored, interest is a kindness.

Besides, Thornfield is a dreary place. There is little else for a young woman to do here but fall in love or go insane. The changeling chose the first option (she thinks). She cannot unlove him now, merely because he has ceased to notice her.

THE FORTUNE TELLER

An old gypsy is at the gate, hissing prophecies. She offers to tell everyone’s fortunes, if the servants will let her cross the threshold.

The guests summon her into the hall—a stooped cipher of a woman, bundled like a leper—and give her a private room to interview them in.

One by one the gentlefolk go in, laughing. They emerge with questions gathering in the creases of their eyes. Blanche comes out and announces that she is leaving; the party has exhausted her. She asks that all due apologies be conveyed to the host.

The governess has not met Blanche’s gaze until now. All night, this fine lady’s eyes swept past her, but now she stares at the governess, and her eyes glitter like cold iron.

The changeling stares back, her face set. Sensing danger, she is stubborn. As Blanche turns to leave, Jane feels the same chill she did at the crossroads. This will not go well, she thinks, but does not know what she is afraid of.

A guest comes and touches her arm. The gypsy woman wants to see her.

THE THIRD INTERVIEW

The changeling and the gypsy woman confront each other in a flame-lit room.

“Why don’t you tremble?”

“I’m not cold.”

“Why don’t you turn pale?”

“I’m not sick.”

“Why don’t you consult my art?”

“I’m not silly.”

The gypsy laughs. You are all three, the old woman says. Cold from want of love, sick from desire, and silly for not pursuing it.

The changeling will say nothing to that. The flame flickers in the eye. Perhaps she already detects her master’s face beneath the soot and rags. Perhaps she’s already wondering what game he’s playing.

WAITING

After the guests leave: silence.

The servants move about as quietly as they can, cleaning up all traces of the week of parties. The governess wonders at her master’s charade, about the queer games he is playing with her and Blanche Ingram.

Her master is congratulating himself on his cleverness. He thinks he has driven Blanche off with a few well-turned prophecies. But women like Blanche have a way of making their feelings known even after your doors are barred to them, and the changeling fears that Blanche’s power will not be gainsaid.

There are signs. A tree in the garden is blasted by lightning, and afterward the air around its stump smells like roses. The milk left beside the door turns sour. The clouds around Thornfield threaten rain, but no storm arrives.

The changeling can sense the magic in the air, but she has not the least idea how to turn back the curse coiling around them. Someone has set something dreadful in motion, and she does not know what to do.

It occurs to the changeling that she might ask the attic for help, but the thought stirs fear in her. Instinctively, she knows that whatever is locked in the attic is not on her side. It is on nobody’s side but its own. Unleashed, there is no telling what it might do.

THE PRECURSOR

Blanche’s curse arrives in the form of another visitor, one who brings the tropical past clinging to his heels. He gives his name as Mason. He comes, he says, from the West Indies.

The West Indies. It’s easy to forget, here in the damp mist of Thornfield, that there’s an empire out there. Its blood brews the coffee at your table. Its ghosts wander your darkness; children whose bones were ground into sugar pound on the wet glass. You can shred their hands on the broken panes, but it will not keep them out—some of them are already inside.

“Mason—the West Indies,” her master repeats. The governess feels chilled, though she does not know why.

MIDNIGHT

Something has happened in the attic.

Mason, the newest houseguest, is brought below stairs, his shirt soaked with blood, his pale eyes rolling.

“She said she’d drain my heart,” he tells Rochester. The words stagger down the halls, leaving bloody handprints on the yellow wallpaper.

The changeling is all for going to the attic herself, candlestick in hand, to do . . . what, she could not say. She does not know what to call the strange power seething under her skin, but something dreadful seems to be called for.

As she goes to mount the attic stairs, a servant’s brown arms restrain her. The young woman shakes her head silently. No. This is not a governess’s concern.

There is blood seeping into the floorboards, crawling into the bones of the past. The housekeeper is on her knees, trying to prevent a stain.

Afterward, nobody comments on the incident. It is as though it never happened at all.

The governess resumes her correspondence with the attic. This time her note contains a single word: Why?

A few days later, she receives a reply, left on her pillow as though by an evil fairy. This time the note says simply: You’ll learn.

THE PROPOSAL

Her master begins (subtly, he thinks), by asking Jane what she thinks of the house. Of course she must approve of the house: Despite its Gothic appearance, the ghost in the attic, the alleged homicidal impulses of its servants, it is the only home she has. From here it is a short step to approving of the man himself, or so he hopes.

The governess, to her credit, is skeptical. She is in love with him, yes: but he is older than she, richer than she, and is a gentleman. Also, there is the matter of the attic. (She is astute enough not to mention the attic aloud, but she looks meaningfully in the direction of the house. Rochester chooses to ignore her gaze.)

Her master has answers for her: His wealth and age are usually considered good things, and he hates parties, so she will not have to mix much in society.

Eventually, she says yes.

In a fairy tale, the story would now be over. But in the attic, something broods, waiting.

THE WEDDING

On the morning of the wedding, the governess wakes with a mound of salt in her mouth. She spits out the white powder—her mouth is dry, so dry—and kicks away the iron horseshoe that someone has left at the foot of her bed. She sits up trembling, enraged.

Her fey self is housed in human flesh, and such weak tricks will not work on her. But the changeling knows she has been threatened. Someone in this house does not wish her well.

She glances askance at the servants who help her with the veil. One of them, perhaps? One of the laughing kitchen girls she called a friend? Or the housekeeper?

The mirror stares at her, its pale face reflecting hers.

She looks like a ghost in her bridal gown, a feathery concoction of silk and lace. Her master chose it for her, and who is Jane to argue? She owns no clothes but those that are handed to her.

Rubbing the glitter of salt from her lips, she tells herself that all will be well. It is only a dress, after all.

THE TRAITOR

At the foot of the stairs, Adele tilts her porcelain face up and mouths her words: “It didn’t work.”

There is no answer.

Uncertainly, Adele twists her tiny hands in front of her. The wedding will start soon. As the flowergirl, Adele is expected to perform, and yet she is still imperfect, still flawed.

Desperation makes her bold. “I did what you said,” she tells the attic. “Now you must give me my heart.”

“It is not mine to give.” The attic’s voice is dry, amused. It sounds like dead leaves scraping together. A chill runs up the clockwork girl’s perfectly articulated spine.

Adele licks her lips. “But you promised—”

“I promise many things,” the attic says. “Only time will tell.”

Adele shakes her head. There are so many things she wishes she could say, but her perfect mouth cannot form the words.

THE CEREMONY

The wedding guests shuffle as Jane walks in. They are Rochester’s friends, and her veil turns their faces into white blurs.

The priest speaks and the governess tries to listen. Tension is gathering around her. Blanche’s curse is here, standing in the shadows like an unexpected guest. It looks like Mason.

Someone must have said something. Rochester turns to look at Mason. Adele is standing perfectly poised, one graceful hand cupped to her face in a perfect mimicry of shock.

“The groom has another wife,” Mason repeats.

Rochester is furious. He would kill Mason if he could, but this is England, and the wedding guests would be positively shocked.

Angrily he leads the curious and the cynical down the stone path to Thornfield, up that ancient house’s creaking stairs. The governess follows behind, wondering if this is the worst Blanche can do to her.

Then she sees they are to go into the attic. She pauses at the top of the stairs, her skin prickling. Things are about to change. She can feel it.

THE MADWOMAN IN THE ATTIC

The governess hears the woman before she sees her. Snarls, thick and guttural, the sounds life makes when it refuses to be stamped out. A lurching, scrabbling figure on the floor, all hair and fingernails. Its look is hateful.

Jane recognizes that look, and the ring of salt that surrounds the woman. She recognizes the horseshoes nailed to the wall. They have kept her here, this fey thing, safely away from their white table cloths and dining sets. The attic rattles with her fury.

Grace Pool, that whispering servant, warns them to take care. “One never knows what she has, sir; she is so cunning. It is not in mortal discretion to fathom her craft.”

Lured, perhaps, by the abjection of the groveling shadow, the gentlemen draw closer, staring the way people do through the bars of a cage. One of them disturbs the salt with the toe of his boot.

Instantly the fairy is at them, desperate for a chance to inflict damage. The magic that curls at her fingertips still blazes power. Her bared teeth are yellow. They draw blood.

They wrestle her down, pin her to the floorboards. Her magic is too tattered to stop them. She moans and hisses into the veins of wood, her bare feet kicking vaguely at the air.

The changeling has never seen one of the pure fey before. There were images, to be sure, memories lurking in her blood, but none of them prepared her for this once-proud creature clawing at floorboards, eyes empty of reason.

Jane almost does not hear her master’s words, but they seep into her mind like a rising tide: “That is my wife,” he explains, rubbing the dark stains on his torn sleeve. “Such is the sole conjugal embrace I am ever to know. And this is what I wished to have,” (here he lays his hand on the governess’s shoulder): “this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon.”

Jane shudders, almost shrugs the hand off. One of the gentlemen asks a question. With her master distracted, Jane turns away from the madwoman on the floor, and the cluster of spectators. Unnoticed, she slips down the stairs, each step creaking familiarly in a house she no longer feels at home in.

She does not take much. There is no time: They will be downstairs soon, and someone might run after her with pleas and reasonable explanations.

She leaves by the servant’s gate. Nobody sees her go.

Behind her, the attic howls its loneliness to the wind.

THE MOORS

She dies her second death on the moors.

It is cold, bitterly cold, and the changeling is not dressed for the weather. Her flesh suffers the elements as severely as any human, though her fey nature sings on the wind.

Home, she thinks bitterly. I’ve come home, and in a way she has: Being a changeling, she belongs nowhere.

At some point she sleeps, or tries to, huddling on a muddy bank under the shelter of a wind-beaten tree. At dawn she rises, scraping away the frost that has formed on her skin.

She wades knee-deep in the heath’s dark growth. She follows paths no humans could walk, under hills and through stones, through the abandoned tunnels and empty barrows that mark the deserted cities of the fey. No friendly fires welcome her.

She recalls the words she spoke once, by a warm fireplace: “The men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago.” She had hoped to be wrong.

Wearily she directs her path out of the earth. She is almost at the end of her magic now; even her fey self cannot keep walking much longer. And yet she sets one foot in front of the other, stubborn to the end.

Her path takes her to the house at Marsh End, a lonely hermitage of a building. The servant who answers gives this wandering beggar a crust of bread before sending her off. The changeling accepts it numbly. She no longer has the strength for gratitude.

She does not eat the bread. With her last strength, she draws a splayed cross on the dust of the road and lays the bread on top of the symbol. As charms go, it’s horribly weak, but it is her last hope.

The changeling lies down beside her charm. Mustering what remains of her strength, she dies.

MOURNING

Thornfield is a dark house now.

The clockwork girl sits in her room, counting the beats of her imperfect heart. Nobody cares if she studies penmanship, or asks her hard questions about the kings of England. Adele should be glad, but she isn’t. The master’s gloom has fallen on them all.

“Why did you do that?” she demands of the attic. “Why did you have to spoil everything?”

The attic is contemptuously silent.

“I don’t see why I had to show her the horseshoe,” Adele says. “She would have left anyway, as soon as she found out.” She adds, carefully, “It’s a scandal,” in the breathy way the maids did in the kitchen.

Silence. Adele lies down on her bed, facing away from the attic.

“Well I hope she comes back soon,” she says, and then adds, “I want to show her the new dance I’ve been working on.”

I need you to do something for me, the attic says. This time Adele claps her hands over her ears.

THE SICK ROOM

The changeling comes back to life slowly. Her mind is in pieces and every piece of it hurts. She hears voices, sees fragments of faces. Some of them are there, some are elsewhere, some are long ago.

She is alive.

“She’s alive,” says the man, “but barely. We must keep her by the fire.”

“She looks sensible, but not at all handsome. The grace and harmony of beauty are quite wanting in those features.”

The changeling groans. She wants to tell them that she knows she is plain; she has never had any pretensions to beauty. Whatever wild looks run in the blood of the fey passed her by. What is left is a dull composite of dreams unfulfilled.

But her movement brings only questions: “Who are you? Where are your people? What is your name?” They sting her like hornets.

To make them go away she answers, “Jane, my name is Jane—” then, remembering, she adds “—Elliot. I have no people.”

After that, they let her rest.

MOOR HOUSE

There was a governess who worked in a house of thorns. She fell in love with a man but discovered his past locked in an attic. She ran away, like a madwoman broken free. She was adopted by a family. They lived in the house at Marsh End, and all ended happily ever after.

The changeling tries out her tale as she sits in the parlor, taking advantage of the family’s absence to test how her words bounce off the walls. It’s true, this sounds like a plausible conclusion, but she would prefer a different kind of ending.

She hears voices at the door. Her benefactors have returned.

“Jane Elliot!”

The alias is easy to answer to. Jane nods and smiles. Both of the women are pleasant enough, but it’s St. John that Jane is most aware of.

The master of the house is an austere man, a man made of marble, white and cold. The changeling feels obliged to him, on account of his saving her life, and on account of his being a religious man. The truth is, she doesn’t like him.

“We have news,” says Diana. “St. John has located a position for Mary. She is to be a governess.”

Jane’s face is slow to smile. For a moment she thinks she hears a footfall overhead, but of course there is no attic here. Her mind is playing tricks on her again.

She manages to congratulate Mary on her new employment. In truth, it is good news of a sort, for these gentlewomen have very little to live on, and their brother is to go for a missionary.

The magic that sleeps in these people is buried deep. In the women it almost never surfaces—their dreams are cramped by poverty. Also, they are afraid of their brother, of his torrential ambitions and drive to know God. The changeling senses his magic and fears it, for it flows down the narrow channels carved by his religion.

St. John does not know he is different. Or if he does, it is because he thinks he is one of God’s chosen. He believes he has a destiny. Such people are dangerous.

But, she thinks, this family means her no harm. They are the first other changelings that she has found. And where else would she go?

She must stay here and build a new life, no matter what it costs her.

CURSES

“This place is cursed,” Adele says, balancing on her toes. The housekeeper turns and looks at her sharply.

“Who told you that?” Mr. Rochester asks. He almost never listens. Astonished, Adele loses her balance and lands flat-footed.

“Oh,” the clockwork girl says, “everyone.” She thinks of the gossiping maids, and of the madwoman brooding overhead, dark and terrible.

“You should not give credence to idle tales.” Mr. Rochester is staring out the window again, waiting for someone. The woman he is looking for will not return, Adele thinks, not as long as the house has curses piled up at its door.

“Nevertheless,” he says, as if to himself, “I should send you away. This is not a good place for a child. Not anymore.”

For a moment, hope flares inside Adele. “Shall I go to Paris?” she says. “To see Mama?”

Rochester is silent for a moment. Then he says, “No, I will not send you to Paris, but to my cousin’s house in Derbyshire. He has a young girl your age.”

Adele is horrified. Other girls? She imagines a pair of rivals, their hair curled more perfectly than hers, their artificial bodies perfectly poised. “Oh non, monsieur,” she wails. “Do not send me there.”

Afterward, when she has been sent to her room, she climbs up on one of the posts of her tall bed and puts her fingers against the ceiling. “Do something,” she says, “they are sending me away.”

You will be safer elsewhere, the attic says.

“But I don’t want to be elsewhere,” Adele says, outraged. “Elsewhere is exactly the same!” And she knows it—she’s been abroad in the world. It’s full of the spite of women, the jealousy of men. Curses sleep on every tongue. Here, at least, she has a place; she is cosseted and somewhat protected.

Then you must do what I tell you. The attic is relentless on this point. It has been whispering the same thing for weeks.

This time, Adele is willing to listen.

DESTINIES

In Moor House, Jane is saying her goodbyes again. This time she is bidding farewell to her two protectors, the earnest changelings who do not know what they are. They do not know how to form charms; they have not seen the dead cities of the fey. Jane pities them, and envies them, too.

While she will miss them all, it will be a relief not to steel her mind against St. John’s ambition. When he talks to her, she does not feel like herself. She becomes the quiet, mouse-like creature she resembles, nodding at his every statement.

Just as she thinks this, a shadow falls on her shoulder. “May I have a word?” St. John asks, his voice mild and ominous.

The changeling wipes her damp hands on her skirt. There is nothing to be afraid of, she tells herself as she follows him out.

THE SUMMONING

“And if I give you the candle, you can bring her back?” Adele is dubious. Her clockwork mind is turning over the details of the attic’s plan, and however much the voice in the walls reassures her, the part of Adele that remains human feels certain that her governess will never return.

The fire will call to her.

“Why can’t I free you?” Adele says. “I’m here already.”

Fire can burn the prison, but only one of my own blood can free me.

Adele does not follow this logic. She does not understand what a plain, mousy thing like her governess could have in common with the attic. But seeing as she cannot win the argument, she shrugs and reaches for the candle.

THE SECOND PROPOSAL

The changeling walks on the heath with St. John. He looks, she thinks, like an animated statue, the kind that stalk young maidens through Italian castles.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he says, “about your future.”

Instantly her heart sinks. She is aware of the magic that swirls strongly around him. She raises barriers against its will.

“I have observed you for many weeks now,” he says, in his regular tone. “You have been obedient and reserved, though I have reason to believe this has not always been the case.”

Here he pauses, and she can almost hear him trying to frame what he senses but cannot admit: that the blood that runs in her veins is, like his own, wild and godless, thick with alien magic. “Do you know what you must do to save your soul?”

Keep in good health and never die. The old, rebellious answer springs to her tongue, but this time she bites down on it. She has too much to lose.

“You must be purified,” he says earnestly, “in blood and fire.”

The changeling keeps perfectly still.

“As you know, I intend to go to India, to do the Lord’s work and—I hope—earn a chance at redemption.”

To die in flame, in other words. He must know that foreign soil is fatal to their kind. He knows it; she can see the light of martyrdom in his eye.

“It has occurred to me,” he says, “that I would be benefited by having a helpmate. Someone who can aid me in my labors, visiting the natives, tending to me when I am ill. In short, that I may need a wife.”

Jane says nothing. All her breath has frozen inside her. She can see his plan now, unfolding before her. Yes, she would be the perfect wife for him: quiet, obedient, tumbling with him into an early grave. And if not? A ring of salt, a circle of iron.

St. John is getting angry now, his unacknowledged magic constricting the air. Already Jane can feel the awful charm forming, and part of her wonders if this was how the Masons caught the madwoman in the attic. People can pretend you have choices even as they deny you the air you breathe.

Still, she summons her strength to make her final reply. And it is in the summoning that she feels something tear away from her. On the other side of the shadow someone calls her name as they fall into a terrible light.

“No,” she says, the word coming out of her in a rush of air. Then she adds, “I must go.”

Leaving St. John bewildered in her wake, she runs across the heath, her skirt bunched up in her hands, the mud splattering her boots. Someone, somewhere, has done an awful thing. She can feel the narrative buckling around her as the story changes.

She is, therefore, not surprised to see a bearded man standing at the door, message in hand. Her heart sinks. She slows to a walk, trying to delay the last few seconds before the man speaks, knowing that whatever he says will propel her in a final direction.

The attic has called her home.

JANE, HEIR

The people at the crossroads are happy to retell the story: how Rochester’s mad wife laughed to see the fire creep up Thornfield’s walls, how his young ward ran shrieking through the flickering passages, her pretty white dress crawling with flame.

The old house went quickly, they say. Its old beams gave up their ghosts with hardly a shriek.

They saw the madwoman, a candle in each hand, her hair fizzing in tendrils of smoke. They say she laughed as she jumped. Her crazed brains made wet puddles on the stones below.

“And Rochester?” The lady who inquires listens with a somber countenance.

The master tried to follow her as far as he could. To the edge of the roof, and almost over it. In the end, he lost an eye and his hand in the fire. (And his wife, of course, but they do not count her.)

The lady nods and rises. She counts out her storytellers’ reward. She is too new to wealth to treat each coin lightly, as a rich woman should.

Since becoming an heiress, the changeling has taken to acts of charity. She has also bought herself some better clothes, and a new set of luggage. The messenger who greeted her at the door that day had promised much more, but Jane didn’t want it. There was too much news to absorb—a sudden windfall from a relative in the West Indies, the discovery that the strange inhabitants of Moor House were her cousins by blood and not by charity—it was too much like the conclusion of a sentimental novel, and the changeling is of a more serious turn of mind.

So she split her riches with her newfound cousins and parted from St. John as a relation, but no longer a friend. And now, with money and haunted dreams, she has come home to the blackened ruin of Thornfield Hall.

The changeling walks over the scarred earth, looking for something she can recognize. She pauses at a broken spar that might have come from the attic. No weeds grow here. The wood underfoot has burned to a fine white ash that looks suspiciously like salt.

Looking around her, the changeling can see the remains of the claustrophobic walls of Thornfield, that for so long protected all their shared and tangled miseries.

It is time for a new kind of story.

The changeling draws a booted foot across the white line in front of her, breaking what remains of the circle. When she leaves, she does not look back.

MEETINGS

The changeling finds Rochester hulking in a desolate manor house, surrounded by iron fences that cannot keep her out. The kitchen servant jumps when the changeling strides in, and puts a hand to her throat. “Oh my,” she says. And then, “Is that you?”

In the corner Adele stands to attention, tugging down the skirt to hide the burn on her leg. The attic has kept its word; now nobody will send her away.

Rochester does not receive visitors, they tell her.

“No fear of that,” says the changeling. “Give me the tray. I’ll carry it to him.”

So she does. Quietly, so as not to disturb him. She has a streak of fey cruelty in her still, and she has taken a good deal of punishment to be able to stand before him now and say: “I am myself, Jane Eyre, an independent woman.”

Which she will soon say. But for now, she draws out the moment, dismissing the excited dog with a flick of her pale hands. She stands patiently, as she did for so many dreary months when she was a mere governess in his service.

She waits for Rochester to notice her.

PARTINGS

Reader, she married him. I wish I could say something different, although as far as endings go, this one will do. Let us leave her with what happiness she can gather together, a changeling with a husband and a son and a pretty clockwork ward, living together in a house by the moorlands.

Her new house has an attic, and ghosts creep around it at night. Sometimes they have names like Bertha or Brontë, and sometimes they are nameless. Still, both she and you know them as you do your own shadow. Your other half.

The changeling lies awake listening to them, wishing there was something she could do to help. But she cannot change dead histories.

She sleeps restlessly, the way all in-between creatures must do, awaiting eras in which they might yet be fully born into the world. In the meantime, the women creep overhead, rattling attics with stories that want to be told.

—For Susan Gubar

© 2013 by Siobhan Carroll.

When not globetrotting in search of dusty tomes, Siobhan Carroll lives and lurks in Delaware. She is a graduate of Clarion West, the indefatigable OWW, and the twin ivory towers of Indiana University and U.B.C. Her fiction can be found in magazines like Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Realms of Fantasy, and IGMS. Sometimes she writes under the byline “Von Carr.” Both versions of herself firmly support the use of the Oxford Comma. For more, visit voncarr-siobhan-carroll.blogspot.com

The Foster Child
William Browning Spencer

1

I came, the hope of my tribe, to the City of Absolutes, in the year of the zero plus two big and a nine. I sought Lena, the girl I had dreamed of as my fingers grew back and I drifted in the waters of Nagoda.

They had killed us long and hard, and scattered what was killed, and howled long prayers over our heads so that, even dead, we grew demoralized and let the enduring truth leak from our essence, as blood leaks from the sky-cracked hands of our prophets.

Had the rivers been less vigilant, we would have blown away, without the strength to even add a voice to the black wind. But the mother rivers caught us and carried us down to Nagoda, just enough of us to make this one, and I call myself Yeats, after a singer from the north who abandoned the name to walk naked through the Country of Dead Trees.

At the gates of the city, I was halted.

I dissembled, saying, “I am a trader from Magoth. I bring gold to trade for machine thoughts wrought by your high engineers in the Temple of Bytes.”

“Give us some of your gold,” they said, “and we will let you pass.”

This I did, but then, being imperfect, I killed them anyway, and separated their limbs from their bodies, according to custom.

I should not have done this. Now they knew I was in the city, and their servants would seek me.

I went immediately to the Garden of News and lay down in a rented coma. There the voice visited me.

“What do you need to know, my son?”

“Oh holy Network,” I cried. “I need to know why it must go on, why this getting and spending? The stillness between the stars is our true delight and peace.”

“We thought you all were killed,” the Network said. “We thought the Void of Incoherence had claimed you and all your generations.”

“No,” I said. “I am alive and seeking one, Lena by name.”

“Why?”

“Love. Implacable love. The line across which life leaps. She is our hope. She will restore our order.”

“Flee this place,” the Network said. “They come now, flying down the infrastructure.”

The spiky shivers told me of their presence. Charred electrons, blue halitosis of ghost robots withered the stale air of the coma. I broke out, wires flapping, and ran down the Street of Philosophers.

I fled inward to the Reference Jungle at the edge of my enemy’s lair. I wandered amid ancient paper runes and ragged scholars, one of whom recognized me.

“I fall at your feet,” the old man said. “I humble myself, grovel, delete all dignity, that you might grant me a boon.”

“Be quick,” I said. “I am harried by circumstance.”

“One question answered,” the old man said, “no more. I have spent my life in worship of knowledge. Tell me, have I been wrong to do this?”

“Yes.”

The man looked stricken, as though skewered by revelation. I move on, into the Field of Arguments where my kind had once chosen to abide and where the greatest of us, Meta, had wounded the Earth and sought his own death, devoured by his students.

I came to the Wall of Congruity, beyond which the wizard Nulson, misshapen, robbed of humanness, did nothing now but covet. And I knew that there I would find Lena, no more than a child.

I reached out and grasped the holohand that extended from the door. Cold ghosts rushed through me and stirred a thousand thousand memories.

“You are not dead, then,” the voice said. “It is just as well. I am bored and sick of killing things that hold their lives no tighter than an infant holds a spoon. Come in.”

“This time you will not kill me, Nulson,” I said. My tongue, hampered by my mission, had difficulty speaking the words.

He glittered with laughter. Around the metal bulk of his person, in blue turbulence like small asteroids, a dust of old capacitors, resistors, ICs spun. “You come for the child.”

“I come for the child,” I said.

“And why?”

Pride made me tall. “Always this question. And who is its author? Even here, in this lamentable darkness, questions lurk. I come to answer them, of course. I come from love.”

“Well, there she lies, embraced by sleep. Claim her.”

He moved aside, and I saw, in his motion, that he had grown much since our last encounter. All manner of things had accrued to him, wires and devices, some rusted, some gleaming still, some oscillating and humming.

I looked beyond him to the clear glass from which Lena’s frozen face, pale as desire in an old man’s heart, stared with frosted eyes.

Three tentacles spun out, silver, segmented, and as the first fell on my shoulder I drew my sword and swung. Sparks gauded the darkness and seared the air. The second tentacle wrapped thickly round my thigh; the third one girded my waist.

I struck again and my sword shattered. A dull electric current sought to paralyze me—a new trick this—and I fell down. I was pulled, knees skidding across the concrete, toward my hated foe.

“What made you think you could defeat me? What made you think it would be different?”

He drew me to him.

“The last time I died, I learned,” I said. “What good is death if some wisdom does not adhere to the dying?”

“What good indeed!” my enemy roared. “Die in vain twice over.”

He drew me to the grinding gears, the teeth that processed blood and flesh and bone.

“I learned where the rat hides in his maze,” I said, and I spit the homing dart from my mouth, through the latticework of steel, through the one opening, to where that memory of a monkey shape still lodged. Nulson himself, atrophied, sequestered in his cage within the cybernetic monster he had sprouted, screamed—this was a violent poison that boiled the blood—and a great straining and crying out of metal filled my ears, and I toppled sideways amid blue smoke and the buckling thunder of exploding circuits.

I rose amid the rubble and walked to the glass case and found the secret of it and opened it. I kissed Lena on the forehead and studied her frost-glazed eyes.

2

“You may be the best teacher in the world, Mr. Wilson, but I am afraid that you cannot help my child,” Mrs. Jamerson said.

The young man put the cup of tea down and regarded the woman. She was pretty, and he could see an echo of the much-photographed child in her, but worry had aged her, and her blue eyes looked beyond him to some repeated tragedy.

“I’ve read the articles, of course; the media coverage brought her to my attention. And the institution has briefed me thoroughly,” he said.

The woman sighed and ran her hands across the fabric of her dress. Such a well-appointed house, such a decorous woman, such sadness. “Yes, there has been much written about Lena,” Mrs. Jamerson said. “So many words, as though a million words could explain her, solve her. Words like ‘savant.’ But Lena is only Lena, only herself.”

“Can I see her?”

“I suppose there is no reason you shouldn’t.” Lena’s mother put down her teacup and stood up. “This way, please.”

John Wilson followed her down a hallway. They passed a framed photo of Mr. and Mrs. Jamerson, waving from a yacht—the same photo the newspapers had run, the same photo John Wilson had studied just yesterday. It must be painful to keep it there, John thought. An act of deliberate courage, perhaps.

Less than a week after that photo was taken, the yacht had been destroyed in a storm. Lena Jamerson—two years old—had fallen into the ocean, and her father had lost his life trying to save her. Lena had survived, but near-drowning, oxygen deprivation, had done some damage. She was not the same. And it was this alteration that drew the newspapers, always hungry for the unique, the bizarre, the uncanny.

“Lena,” Mrs. Jamerson said, ushering John Wilson into the room. “I’ve brought you a visitor.”

The room was decorated with posters of animals. Sunlight streamed through a window, falling on a doll that sat crookedly in a small white chair.

A little girl, dressed in a blue smock with white knee-length socks and white tennis shoes, sat cross-legged on a canopied bed. Her hair was pale blond, almost white, and combed to a sunstruck luster. She was staring straight in front of her and her eyes were the blue one encounters when breaking the ocean’s surface after diving off a boat somewhere in the Caribbean.

“She has always been the most beautiful girl in the world,” her mother said, speaking from behind him. “There is nothing about Lena that is not extraordinary. You know, as a baby, she did nothing but laugh; I believe, on occasion, I heard her giggle when I was carrying her, months before her birth.”

“She is a princess,” Wilson said. She was like a china figurine, an enchanted fairy.

“She does not relate to the world around her. She is amused but passive. She smiles often, laughs, but she is unaware of our presence. She can feed herself. She is toilet trained. Oh, in many respects, she is the model child. But she sleepwalks through her life.” Lena’s mother walked to the bed, sat down, and put her arms around her daughter, who continued to stare straight ahead, hands primly nested in her lap.

“A year ago, at the age of five, she spoke. My sister and I were at the breakfast table. Lena said, ‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness, thou foster-child of silence and slow time.’”

Wilson nodded. “Keats. The beginning of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’”

“Hardly ‘Mommy,’” Lena’s mother said. “Those were the first words she ever uttered. My sister is a professor of English literature—as the more skeptical reporters noted immediately—and she recognized the quote. But I assure you, as I have assured a horde of doubters, that we did not coach her. Since then any number of investigators, including some from the institution with which you are affiliated, Mr. Wilson, have satisfied themselves that Lena speaks only in fragments of poetry and that she ranges across all nationalities and times. If you are yet another man determined to expose a fraud, you are doomed to failure. Lena does not read; she has not been exposed to these poets. This is not a ‘savant’ syndrome; Lena is not one of those children with greatly impaired mental faculties who can mimic classical piano pieces after one listening. In Lena’s case, there is no source to mimic.”

“Yes,” he said, “It is incredible.”

The first touch of anger darkened his hostess’s voice. “And how do you explain it?”

“Well. I’m not sure that anyone can explain it. It is mysterious.”

“Then you haven’t given it sufficient thought, Mr. Wilson. Your institution should have asked a poet. Any poet could have told them that Lena simply listens to the Muse. She is not quoting William Blake or Shakespeare or Milton or anyone else. My Lena is listening to the source of all inspiration. The Muse is dictating to her directly. Don’t poets say their visions come from some mysterious otherworld? Well, my poor Lena has been shouted deaf by that mystery voice, that voice poets call the Muse.”

Lena’s mother drew the child to her and hugged her tightly. Eyes wet now, emotion in her voice, she addressed Wilson as though the whole of science, in all its vanity, stood before her. “You can’t do anything for her. You say you are a teacher? Wonderful. Will you teach her to quote ‘Dover Beach’? Hah! Better if you can teach her how to poison this Muse. Teach her how to kill the voice within her. Teach her how to return to her mother and her aunt, to hear our unrhymed voices that love her and call her name every day, and get no answer and watch our beautiful child drift further and further from us.”

“I understand your feelings,” Wilson said. “But, without wishing to raise false hopes, I think I might be able to help. People . . . people talk to me.”

Mrs. Jamerson regarded him with a weary smile. She said, “I think you have met your match.”

“I would like to come here every day,” he said. “I would like to take Lena on some outings, picnics, that sort of thing.”

Mrs. Jamerson lifted her child in her arms, stroking the child’s bright hair. “You can do no harm, I suppose.”

3

The trees had turned to explosive reds, yellows like pennants in a festive football crowd. There was smoke in the autumn air. Lena’s mother had dressed Lena warmly, a green sweater, corduroy pants. Wilson held Lena’s hand as they stood there on the side of the mountain. It was a sign of Mrs. Jamerson’s trust in him that she no longer accompanied them on their outings.

“Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole!” he quoted.

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?” Lena said, completing the quote.

Wilson had learned this trick, so gratifying at first and now, two months later, so frustrating, so heartbreaking. Here was Lena, relating, logically and absolutely, to his voice. Feedback!

He would say, “Light breaks where no sun shines,” and Lena would seem to answer, her small voice like a hallelujah choir in his ears: “Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart push in their tides.”

So gratified was Wilson that he immediately showed this trick to Mrs. Jamerson, and so he instilled false, cruel hopes. Lena was still remote, a good-humored little ghost, indifferent to her surroundings and to the desperate affection and suffering of those who loved her. He reproached himself now for announcing this parlor trick of triggered quotes as though it were real progress.

Recently he had been plagued by bad dreams. He seemed to be losing a battle with time; a dreadful sense of urgency would suddenly slam him awake at three in the morning. Sweating, suspecting some intruder had invaded his small apartment, he would get up and turn on all the lights and search the entire house, even opening dresser drawers—as though this invading menace might be the size of a rat, a serpent.

Still, it was a beautiful North Carolina autumn and it was a sacrilege to waste it with night-fears and negativity. The poems he knew were English, and many of them too sedate for such a day, but Gerard Manley Hopkins would do. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” he shouted, lifting Lena and swinging her in a circle.

“It will flame out like shining from shook foil!” Lena shouted back.

For a while he forgot all his failures. They ate their packed lunches under a bright, warming sun. A scattering of crows raced like schoolboys to a recess bell, over the sky and away in a clamor of raucous voices.

4

I had freed her from the wizard Nulson and carried her from the city. Her limbs were still cold, despite the tropical Contested Zone we traveled through, and when I lay in near-death trance, in the House of Solemnity to which I had brought the child, I found the door of her mind swung open on an empty room. She had tired of her imprisonment, and she had leapt recklessly toward the abyss. She had neglected the memory pinions; the cables of desire had been cast off, and so she spun away like a kite that snaps its string, unmoored and beyond all returning.

I screamed awake, breaking the circuits of trance-net with such ferocity that small flames ignited in the encumbering sheets.

“Gone!” I screamed. “Lost!”

My host, Portheria, reprimanded me: “Please, less despair,” she urged. “My kin-shepherds are sensitized to you and your quest. You’ve bruised many of them.”

I apologized to the cowled monks, and, still abstracted, walked to Lena, sleeping in her web, all our new-brood hopes imperiled by her abandonment. “Oh, Queen,” I sighed, “We are numb with knowledge. The world is dying in the knowing of things. All the waters of love, of empathy, are drained by tireless, inhuman engines. Children are crushed under the wheels without a whimper, and their parents do not weep. We need your holy compassion. Only compassion and love can save us. Just yesterday Volander Inc. merged with Welger Limited and the acid vats claimed two hundred thousand superfluous employees.”

The dream child said nothing. Portheria touched my shoulder.

“Despair perhaps later,” she said. Her words were always awkward in the air, but she was the greatest empath in the empire, and so her thoughts cut with clarity into my troubled mind. “My kin-shepherds and I can find her yet. We will task our energies to all limits.”

“The universes are so wide,” I said, unwilling to rise to the bait of hope.

“We will weave a great net of words,” Portheria said. “We will fish for her in all the languages of dreams, down all the years, with all the love and sorrow that she must hunger for.”

And so I retired apart from them, prepared for a wait of some years—knowing that our world unraveled at a quicker pace.

5

“You are a stubborn young man,” Mrs. Jamerson said, speaking into the phone. “But I think there is some virtue in acceptance. It is time to admit that Lena has defeated you. She remains aloof and alone, my impossible child.”

John Wilson had come to know Mrs. Jamerson well. He marveled at the woman’s courage, and felt a genuine, ever-growing affection.

“I want to come by tomorrow around noon and take Lena to meet a friend of mine,” Wilson said.

Mrs. Jamerson sighed. “Another scientist, I suppose. Another student of the mind. Oh, John, let it go.”

“I want Lena to meet Sara Palliser. Sara has won a Pulitzer Prize, so you might be familiar with the name. She is a poet.”

“What do you hope to accomplish, John?”

“Mrs. Jamerson,” John Wilson said, “probably nothing. But I remembered something you said. You said that Lena doesn’t quote the poetry of individual poets. She goes to the Muse, the Source of inspiration, and there finds the same poems that have bloomed in the hearts and minds of our great bards. So . . . suppose . . . Sara Palliser is a friend of mine. I had lunch with her yesterday, and she spoke of an unfinished poem. She said to me, ‘It is not really unfinished. Somewhere it is complete. I just have to unearth the rest of it.’ And I thought—it burst upon me—that Lena would know where the rest of the poem was. If she and Sara . . . well, you see, if they could go there together, if they made the journey at the same time under hypnosis—Dr. Byrne at the institution would serve as a guide—then they could talk to one another. Sara Palliser could speak to Lena. Lena could answer.”

“John—”

“Tomorrow at noon. See you then.” John Wilson hung up.

6

I was awakened from a deep slumber. The whisper moths that had been drawn by my dreams fluttered away to drift in a pink cloud high above my head.

“We have found her,” Portheria said. There was an anxiety in her tone that should not have accompanied such news.

“What is wrong? What year is it?”

“We’ve found her soon enough,” said Portheria, anticipating my fear. “But you must act immediately. There is one there, well-intentioned but ignorant of the forces at risk, who is prepared to draw her into the new world she inhabits. He has found a singer who—we all agree—can awaken her. Once awakened to her new home, she will be lost to us forever.”

“I go then,” I said. “Show me the quadrant and I will surrender my will to your soul-steering.”

7

Wilson could not sleep that night. He got up and turned the radio on. A flurry of static crackled in the cold night of the apartment and then an organ-voiced version of “Silent Night” flared to sudden clarity. He had forgotten that Christmas was only a week away. He would have to buy presents for his parents, his sister, a few friends.

Wilson went to turn the radio off—the music of the season somehow saddened him—but then another burst of static, and a voice, or no voice at all but something like an articulate wind, said, “That is no country for old men.”

And Wilson slept late the next morning, and awoke feeling sluggish and thinking that this dullness heralded the beginning of a cold.

And as he drove over to see Mrs. Jamerson and fetch her daughter, a few large flakes of snow spiraled down from an overly bright sky.

Mrs. Jamerson greeted him at the door. She threw her arms around him. “I’ve talked to Lena,” she said.

She began to cry, sobbing against Wilson’s shoulder. “If she can live there whole, then she must go there of course.”

“I don’t understand,” Wilson said. “Just what did she say? How did it come about?”

Wilson stopped. A black bird perched on the sofa arm next to Lena. Lena raised her head, and instantly Wilson saw recognition, felt his heart reverberate as though some vast, inaudible chord resounded within.

“Say the words, John Wilson,” Lena urged.

He spoke them as though born with them, suddenly savant himself. He knew then, that this was the last poem they would share.

“That is no country for old men,” he began.

“ . . . therefore I have sailed the seas and come to the holy city of Byzantium,” Lena said, her words enlivened by the fire in her blue eyes.

I know what’s coming, John Wilson thought.

Her last words were whispered, “ . . . of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

“Goodbye, Mother. Goodbye, John Wilson,” she said. Her image had already begun to fade.

The nightingale hopped to the child’s shoulder where it too dimmed.

Mrs. Jamerson spoke from behind Wilson. “There is nothing about Lena that is not extraordinary,” she said, pride trembling in her voice. “They bow down to her in Byzantium.”

© 1997 by William Browning Spencer.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

William Browning Spencer is the author of 4 novels and 2 short story collections. His short stories have been reprinted inThe Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Year’s Best SF, The Best Horror of the Year, and numerous Lovecraftian anthologies. One of his stories is reprinted in The Weird, that juggernaut of a book that has harvested a century of odd stories into one disorienting trip for fans of the brazenly strange. Spencer's novel, Résumé with Monsters, won the International Horror Critics Award for best novel. His short story, “A Child’s Christmas in Florida,” can be found in its short-film incarnation on youtube (under the title “A Child’s Christmas in Texas”). That story was reprinted by Gardner Dozois in his Year’s Best Science Fiction, although it is a story that is not science fiction.

Author Spotlight: Damien Broderick
Jude Griffin

Neanderthals, the Ainu, copulating robots, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, turnip ragout, meron fluxes: How did this all come about?

I wanted to play with a basic idea Asimov and many others had used—the fall of the Roman empire. I stole the story’s dynamic from a humorous yet stoic German play by Friedrich Dürrenmatt on that theme (Romulus the Great). Plus an obsession, which continues, with time travel. And the question: What happened to the Neanderthals; what if someone stole them? Plus a momentary fascination with that odd shamanistic Caucasian culture in Japan, the Hairy Ainu. Plus everything else I was reading about in those few weeks. You know how it is.

The wild scene where Marx seeks relief from Smith was delightfully unhinged: Did you struggle with the balance between humorous digressions and narrative momentum? Were there temptations you had to resist?

Never resist temptations! I love silliness. Recently I saw an hour-long standup show with Iliza Shlesinger, and she roamed the stage with lissome charm and occasional boisterousness, attended briefly by her lugubrious dog (“This is my cat”) and a phallic microphone. At one point she became a giant lizard revenger against bad date men, with breathy roars and thudding clawed feet and the dreadful swishing of her great tail. Then she paused, looked behind her, and asked, “Does this tail make my butt look big?” That’s the kind of thing I like to do.

So much of what stays with me from this story are tiny things that encapsulate/suggest so much more: Saucepan, tattooed lips, aliphatic pheromones. It’s a story dense with detail and rewarding to the close reader: Did all the layering come in revision or was all that complexity there at the start?

Mostly not revision, but out of the jumble of stuff I was reading and talking to people about. This was written in the late 1970s, typed on an electric typewriter in a dark cavern I and my partner of the time had dug out below the house. Possibly I already had a review set of the Encyclopedia Britannica—the Google of the ancien regime—and was delving in it quite often for the fun of the adventure.

Sexual attitudes, practices, and proclivities are a big part of the world-building in this story: for the Ainu, the Neanderthals, and the robots. (Alas, poor Liss, no?) Can you talk a little bit about why you chose this route to world-building for this particular story?

Well, I had a terrible fight with Joanna Russ about that. She wrote to the editors of Edges, the anthology that published it in 1980. Hadn’t Ursula Le Guin and Virginia Kidd seen how horribly sexist and stupid this writer was? “Tell me how the story sneaked in,” she closed. “Did Broderick force you to edit at gunpoint?”

I sprang off my chair and raged up and down the streets of Balmain, the Sydney suburb where I lived in those days. Russ was a professor of English and a marvelously nuanced writer. How could she make the elementary error of denouncing the writer for the narrator’s views? Could she really be blind to the story’s anti-sexist irony—or, worse still, had she seen deeper than deep into my rotten guilty white male soul?

I wrote to her raising these objections. Russ replied, itemizing fresh crimes in my letter (I had addressed her, in the collegial science-fiction fashion, by her first name). In the end, she told me to walk in front of a bus. I was flabbergasted. It didn’t stop me from loving her work, but it did draw my attention even more closely to the sexual politics I was exploring in the story.

The ending was unexpected, for me: What made it feel like the right choice for your story?

The empire falls, like a big machine ticking over. Are we the same, small doomed machines? Maybe, maybe not.

Any new projects you want to tell us about?

I’d be happy to have the chance to mention a new book by Grand Master Robert Silverberg and me, Beyond the Doors of Death. It’s from the small press Arc Manor, and is a short novel built from Bob’s very famous novella “Born with the Dead” (from 1974) and my continuation, “Quicken.” It was a terrific experience, a strange experiment, working my way into the consciousness of Silverberg’s character trapped by grief in a near future where his wife had died and been rekindled, leaving him for the company of the dead. I wanted to know what lay behind that world, what was lurking in the interstices, where it was headed. I’m quite pleased with the result, but the book hasn’t had much response to date. C’mon, people, give it a go, huh?

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Hao Jingfang
Christie Yant (Translated by Ken Liu)

Welcome to Lightspeed! Your story “Invisible Planets” takes the reader on a tour of an unknown galaxy and introduces them to the inhabitants and customs there. Amiyachi and Aihuowu were my favorite invisible planets because they reminded me of the place I live and am getting to know better. Is there one planet in particular that feels most familiar to you right now?

The one that comes to mind is Chincato, the planet where the inhabitants live in perpetual darkness and must rely on sound to locate each other. The inspiration for this planet is our life on the Web. There, I’ve always felt that everyone seems obsessed with making noise, with ostentatious display of their own beauty and pride. A silent person might as well not exist.

In other contexts, this phenomenon isn’t as obvious as it is on the Web, but you can still sense that everywhere—in schools, in social venues, in the media—everyone seems to be using their own voice to define a space for themselves, to locate their place in the world. Only those who shout incessantly can live easily, while those who are quiet might as well be living in darkness, their disappearance unknown to anyone.

And so the world is filled with noise. Many are talking, but no one is listening.

I went for a walk recently through an unfamiliar neighborhood, and I thought of Amiyachi and Aihuowu. Even just a short distance away people live very differently than I do, and despite being neighbors we don’t know anything of each other. Was there an experience like that for you, before you wrote about Amiyachi and Aihuowu or after? Do you think that there are summer and winter people, or neighbors who live on different time?

Absolutely. Neighbors can possess completely different lifestyles and rhythms. Take Beijing as an example. Every dawn and dusk, the streets are filled with millions of workers hurrying through the wide avenues and narrow alleys, rushing towards their jobs at a sprint. But in the sunlight of the afternoons, you can see old men and women, their hair white, strolling in the streets with young children. From time to time, they drink tea or play chess, everything happening at a leisurely pace. Then, at midnight, when most places are quiet, yet another group appears in the streets: The young are heading to the clubs, to dance and sing and drink—the nightlife of Beijing is rich and colorful.

None of these groups seem to cross each other’s paths. Though they inhabit the same city, they live in completely different worlds.

Your narrator says: “The real key isn’t about whether what I say is true, but whether you believe it. From start to end, the direction of narrative is not guided by the tongue, but by the ear.” Every story is different to every reader, but it seems that you may have written this one specifically to be so. What are some of the different ways that you think “Invisible Planets” may strike the reader? Or do you think identifying such things takes away from the reading?

For me, there are at least two ways to read “Invisible Planets.” First, I tried to imagine many planets, each different from the world we live in. Second, all of these worlds can be said to be Beijing—just like in Calvino’s Invisible Cities, all the cities described by Marco Polo can be said to be his home in Venice.

Beijing is a city with many faces. Everyone who comes and makes the city their home can speak of different impressions (just like Pimaceh in my story). Every visitor sees a different Beijing. Many of my inspirations come from the Beijing and China I see around me.

When you tell a story about the different aspects of a city, they are abstracted into “planets,” and readers can perhaps recognize their own cities in the text, which together form into the idea of the City. This is like a writer describing a greedy person, a kind person, a timid person, or showing a person’s greed, kindness, timidity—all of these, together, coalesce into the abstract idea of Mankind.

Which authors do you feel influenced you most, both as a reader and a writer? What was it about their work that stayed with you? Can you recommend some authors our readers may not have encountered, and would be enriched by?

At different points in my career, different writers inspired me. “Invisible Planets” is an homage to Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Early on, Calvino was my favorite writer. Later, the writers I came to appreciate include Camus and Faulkner. Their works probe the depths of the human heart with calm narrative, and they are filled with precise, rich details.

In science fiction, I like the works of Arthur C. Clarke, Neil Gaiman, and my translator, Ken Liu. I also think highly of Argentina’s Julio Cortázar, whose imagination and humor are so evocative and memorable, and Ireland’s Colm Tóibín, whose stories are soulful and moving. Among Chinese science fiction writers, I especially like Liu Cixin; he writes with a grandness of spirit.

We are grateful to you for your story, and to Ken Liu for translating your work, allowing us to bring it to our readers. Do you have any other projects due to be translated into English that we can look forward to? What will you be working on next?

I’ve published many science fiction and fantasy stories in Chinese, but most of them are probably too long for English magazines. Their subjects include the future, human resistance of alien invasions, etc. I’ve also published two novels in Chinese, but as you know, it’s very difficult to get novels translated into English and published here. I’m currently working on a few short science fiction stories and a novel with some fantastical elements.

I hope to have more opportunities in the future to meet readers outside China!

Christie Yant has published fiction in the magazines Analog, 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: David Barr Kirtley
Jude Griffin

What a fun story! How did it come about?

I wrote this story for the John Joseph Adams anthology Armored. John and I do the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast together, and he encouraged me to write something for the book shortly after we finished recording Episode 26. In that show, I talked about how one book I read as a kid claimed that when knights traveled east to attack Jerusalem during the Crusades, they sometimes got so hot that their sweat filled up their armor, drowning them. That was still fresh in my mind, so when John suggested I write a power armor story, I got the idea of a critical flaw in someone’s otherwise invincible armor that would cause the suit to fill with fluid, drowning them.

I imagine this story probably seems like a pretty fun, fast read, but it was a real challenge to write. For the longest time I was stuck on the idea that the man inside the armor had traveled back in time and installed himself as a despot, and that no one could challenge him except this woman from the future who would somehow drown him in blood, perhaps the blood of his own minions. But I could never find an emotional angle that interested me in this story of a nasty guy who gets killed.

Finally one day it occurred to me to make the guy inside the armor more sympathetic, and then things started falling into place. I imagined him more as this refugee from the future who knows there’s an assassin out to get him, and then there’s this dangerous romance with the assassin and he has to decide whether or not to trust her. I liked that idea a lot, and I wrote a good chunk of the story with the idea that in the end she would defeat his armor and spare his life, and they’d live happily ever after.

As I neared that ending, though, it wasn’t really working for me. Blair had been set up as being so smart that I didn’t believe he’d fall into this trap. And that ending, it seemed to me, was fairly obvious. From the beginning, it’s clear that one possible ending is that Mira kills Blair, and the other is that they fall in love and live happily ever after. What the story needed, I decided finally, was a third alternative that’s somewhat ambiguous and falls somewhere between the two.

Blair says we’re “in a branching timeline. We can’t return to our own time, and no one else can follow us here. So they’ll never know whether you succeeded or not.” If he has gone back in time where no one can follow, how can they send assassins?

Earlier in the story Blair mentions that traveling back in time would create a “temporal wake large enough for them to send someone after me.” The idea is that time travel creates a temporary timespace rift that can be locked on to. After that, the rift seals, and locating that particular timeline again becomes impossible.

Which stories about similar dystopias stick out in your mind?

Dystopian fiction is so ubiquitous these days that it’s hard to think of individual examples that particularly stand out. 1984 obviously comes to mind. (The protagonist’s surname Blair is a reference to Eric Blair, George Orwell’s real name.) Other big influences on this story are obviously the Iron Man movies, which also deal with a genius inventor at odds with the government, the Aeon Flux cartoons, which feature a similar sort of dangerous romance, and the Terminator franchise, which also works with the idea of dueling time travelers.

In light of recent revelations about the NSA, the future that Blair describes doesn’t seem as farfetched as one would like. Is that future starting to feel a little inevitable to you?

Definitely. Around the time I wrote this story, I’d been reading articles about the use of fMRI machines to read people’s thoughts. There’s already technology that can scan a person’s brain in real time and produce a very hazy, impressionistic image of what that person is looking at. Some scientists think we’ll have effective mind-reading tools very soon, in as little as ten or fifteen years. It seems to me that science fiction isn’t grappling with this as much as it should, though in some ways that’s understandable, since effective, commonplace mind-reading technology poses enormous challenges to most of our ideas about what constitutes good drama. (This story, for example, only works because the characters don’t have access to such technology.) And of course such technology poses enormous challenges to most of our ideas of what it means to be human and function in society. In some ways I think the end of deceit holds out enormous promise to improve the human condition, but at the same time it’s almost impossible to imagine that such technology won’t be used in some places—hopefully not all places—to identify and punish dissenters and to ensure that the ruling party is composed of nothing but lickspittles and fanatics.

I liked the voice in this story—it works really well for the subject. Was that something that evolved naturally or was it something that was honed during revisions?

I didn’t really do any revisions, per se. I typically write very slowly and deliberately, and work out each paragraph in my head before I write it down. The disadvantage to that is that it might take me several months to finish one story, but the upside is that the first “draft” is more or less the way I think the story should be written and generally doesn’t change much. I do spend an inordinate amount of time polishing up each story, but it’s mostly just deleting commas and then putting them back in again, stuff I doubt most readers notice or care about. I also have a particular rhythm for my fiction, and I spend a lot of time making sure that every line fits that rhythm. Again, I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares about this stuff, but to me it just sounds wrong otherwise. But overall I think the voice of the story is just my natural voice as a writer—sort of earnest, sort of funny, sort of dark, definitely weird.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

Most of my time these days is spent working on the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast I mentioned earlier, so I hope people will go check that out if they haven’t already. Recent guests include Philip Pullman, Karen Russell, Joe Hill, Felicia Day, and Margaret Atwood, and we’ve discussed topics such as swordfights, The Wizard of Oz, rationalism in science fiction, and Choose Your Own Adventure books. You can find us at geeksguideshow.com.

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Maureen McHugh
Robyn Lupo

What was the spark that set you writing “Dead Fads”?

I wrote “Dead Fads” because a friend was thinking of doing an anthology based around the idea that there was a technology that could resurrect the recently dead but that it left them “tainted.” I lived in Cleveland then and his first story was set in Cleveland. So that’s where I set mine as well. (He’s still working on the idea, creating more stories.)

How do you see this work fitting into the larger conversations about cultural appropriation?

It’s not so much the larger conversation about cultural appropriation (although since it’s published now, I guess it is) as an exploration of my own issues. I don’t want to write fiction exclusively about middle-class white people. Although I do want to write about middle-class white people because I am one. But my experience of life is more complicated than that, so I want to write about working class, Asians, queer folk. I live in a world like that and want my fiction to reflect it.

On the other hand, I don’t want to write badly about things outside my experience. I’m very afraid that I will write a Dominican-American guy who doesn’t feel right as a guy or as a Dominican and I’ll offend people who care. I am resigned to offending people for some things because I have positions and opinions on divisive issues like globalization or reproductive rights or health care and that is going to inform my writing.

So what happens in “Dead Fads” isn’t so much about how I feel about appropriating as what I’m afraid of. It’s the place where I have questions. I don’t know if the art PD is making is appropriating or if it is a legitimate subject for her.

Was the research for this project extensive? How far out of your own experience did you have to go?

I didn’t do a lot of research. Some on Henry Darger, but I was already fascinated by the drawings and watercolors that go with his giant manuscript, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. I knew artists when I lived in New York who were trying to break into galleries, so I had a sense of how that worked, and I spent years writing without being published. Without having lived any of these events or experiences, the story is an emotional memoir of my twenties.

How closely connected do you think obsession and art are?

I don’t think you have to be obsessed to be an artist (and I include writers as artists), but it helps. Imagine you wanted to be an accountant and so you went to school for accounting. When you graduated there was no such thing as an accounting job, so you got a day job and you practiced accounting and went to people and submitted your accounting samples to them and finally someone let you do their taxes for free. After a decade or so of getting incredibly good at accounting, you finally started getting some accounting jobs. Most of the people you knew who did accounting never made a living at it, but a few people did and a tiny handful got rich.

You can see how it would help to be obsessed with accounting.

A lot of art is fun. A lot of it is not. Obviously it feeds something in us that accounting doesn’t, but the truth is that a lot of the experience of making art is just work. Painting. You stretch canvas, you prime it, you prep. You spend some of the time in the painting trying to fill space in an interesting way, working the edges of the painting, perhaps. It’s physical. Painters are like carpenters in a lot of ways. Get painters together and they talk about the materials they use because a lot of it is making a thing.

On the other hand, there have been times in my life where writing really was important to just getting through the week. Having the piece to work on structured my life in a way that was really important to me.

What are we going to see next from you?

I’m working on a story about de-extinction and dire wolves. But I just got a ton of paying work, so it may have to wait awhile.

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: Gregory Benford
Andrew Liptak

Where did your story “Leaving Night” come from?

In a dream. The whole opening came in remarkable detail, so I wrote the opening third or so next morning (obey your unconscious!). The second third came while writing . . . then I stalled. I took months to see how to resolve the plot. I wonder what people will take of the big swerve at the end. Seldom have I had so much trouble with a story!

You present a picture of the world that feels like it’s finely balanced on a point: remove a major element (lots of people from the global population), and it tips, drastically. Is this story an assessment of the world around us now?

Take away those who hold a major belief system and yes, society alters. Those left behind have their beliefs shaken. Those transported greet a new world, and though somewhat reassured, have a hard time and many questions. It’s a huge reset. Plus I wanted a way to frame an old debate that will never go away.

There’s an interesting paradox here that many of the world’s problems are alleviated with the removal of all of the “good people,” whereas you could reasonably argue that many problems that we face stem from technological advancements. Where’s the line here?

Religious people taken away have no tech to start and face great challenges. Unbelievers left behind enjoy the high tech/lower population Earth. That set up the dilemma for the reader, one reason I liked the idea. Which group would you want to be in? Of course this suggests our big problem is overpopulation, much of it unskilled for this tech level we enjoy. We have such huge numbers because tech makes that possible. Our problems stem from us, not technologies; we choose what to do with them.

There’s also the argument made here that religions are a sort of brake on innovation and science. Can we reach the stars with a moral or religious compass intact?

Historically, some religions do brake innovation and science: Galileo, etc. Islam? Two factors suggest that Islam is not inherently anti-science. The Prophet said, “God has not created anything better than Knowledge or anything more perfect or more beautiful than Knowledge,” and it is well known that for its first three hundred years Dar al Islam (the Muslim cultural/political sphere) was probably the most scientifically advanced area on the planet. The Muslim scholar Ibn-e-Myskuea foreshadowed the idea of evolution in the ninth century. But! Fundamentalist elements crushed the Arabic university system and its science within a few centuries. For cultural reasons, science as we know it never appeared in medieval China (though high technology did), it stumbled and perished in medieval Islam, and yet took root and flourished in the medieval West. Crucial was the belief that everything necessary to life was already known, either in the Confucian books or in the sunnah (the Qur’an and the hadith). Christendom took its bible as a springboard for speculating about the world rather than as a set of cut-and-dried instructional details. (Islam never encountered Greek philosophy except as something conquered infidels had once done. Right up to the end, the study of philosophy was called “Greek studies” or “foreign studies,” and it was never, ever taught publicly in a school.) So a millennium of this has led to an Islamic world far behind others.

We’re in the third scientific revolution. The Greek and Arabic ones died. The Asians have adopted Western ideas and science well, starting with the Japanese in the 19th century.

But surely no one can see the West as amoral. So we can move into the big themes of the next century—controlling climate, uplifting humanity economically, expanding our resource base into the solar system—while still having a religious compass—if we want it. We can’t do those things without more technology, not less.

In many ways, this reminds me of an uplift story. What about this theme is so appealing to readers?

The central theme of SF—the expansion of human horizons, in all meanings of those words. Opposition to this springs from many quarters. Creationists think their beliefs should trump evolution. Supposed rationalists think genetically modified food, which has saved millions from starvation, are “unnatural.” We all have our constraints on the horizons.

What do you have coming up next that we should keep our eyes out for?

Shipstar, the completion of the two-novel series that began with Bowl of Heaven, written with Larry Niven. It appears April 2014. The anthology I co-edited with my brother James is just out: Starship Century. It has Freeman Dyson, Stephen Hawking, Neal Stephenson, Nancy Kress, etc.—a fiction and nonfiction plentitude.

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, SF Signal, Tor.com and he can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter.

Author Spotlight: Kit Reed
Amber Barkley

“Yard Sale” is a mix of hoarding and a haunted house. What inspired this story?

I’m happy to put things out on the street, give them away, whatever, because they’re only things. My mother came from a large family that lived in a great big house, and no matter where we lived, she always spoke of that as “home.” She and her sisters fought bitterly for possession of certain treasured objects. We lived in a modest bungalow in Florida when she scored her ultimate triumph: a mahogany dining room set that filled our tiny dining room, a two-sided chair, an Eastlake loveseat and a gigantic marble-topped pier table with a huge mirror which, thank God, went away somewhere before we had to move her into an apartment.

A year before the move, we got rid of as much junk as we could, some in the garbage, the rest via a yard sale, with Praying Hands or somebody to take away anything we couldn’t sell. It was a nightmare, but man, we cleared a lot! Found buyers even for the carved bedroom set with the rosebud motif.

Now, about getting rid of the junk: This very small house had a great big bedroom closet with shelves up to the ceiling—it was big enough to hold a chest of drawers, that closet.

She wouldn’t let us throw out a thing from that closet. Carefully (remember, she had a year), we arranged the objects around all the walls of the biggest bedroom in the house with these sacred objects (sleeve-pressing mini-ironing board, for instance) and told her to find people who wanted them and/or get rid of them.

We flew down for the move. The movers came and the furniture went while she lounged at a friend’s house, far from the fray.

Then we found out that everything we’d taken out of the closet, she’d put back in the closet.

We ended the day with shin splints.

Mare seems to be much more under their father’s influence than Sally. Why the difference? Why is it that only Sally seems to be able to consistently hear their dead parents?

It’s Sally’s story, really. She realizes how pernicious he is, and how obsessed. She’s a hyper-empath, and she just knows these things.

Is there any significance to the particular objects their father collected? Why did you choose to give him a large variety of things, rather than focusing on one or two overwhelming obsessions?

Well, the Phi Beta Kappa key was my Uncle Forrest’s, he was my mother’s cherished big brother; he was an anti-Semite and not a nice man. Some of the stuff comes from her personal Tara—not mine. She kept a very neat house; not cluttered, but in every cabinet and every closet, and in the loft in the garage . . .

There’s a clear parallel between being trapped by an obligation to things and being physically trapped inside the house. Was their father’s revenge always your intended ending? How did this story develop?

See above.

What can we expect from you in the future?

Always working on something: two books out this past March, The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories from the Wesleyan Press, and a novel, Son of Destruction, from Severn House (US and UK)

And the next thing? Too soon to talk about.

Amber Barkley is a recent graduate of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She was born in Idaho and grew up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Her favorite animals are cats and horses, and she considers it a great injustice that she is allergic to both—though that doesn’t stop her from being around them whenever she has the chance. Amber writes high fantasy with a dark twist, and is currently working on her first novel.

Author Spotlight: James Patrick Kelly
Earnie Sotirokos

You’re primarily known as a science fiction writer. Why did you delve into the supernatural for “Miss Nobody Never Was”?

I am always surprised by questions like this! Although it’s true that most of the stories I’m best known for have been science fiction, I’ve been writing fantasy since the beginning of my career. Of the first ten stories I published, four were fantasies. Over my entire career, maybe a third have been. Of course, almost all the fantasy I’ve published has been contemporary, weird, supernatural, or slipstream. I’m afraid I don’t do wizards or dragons. While lots of my stuff has some personal connection, I think that my own life issues are most transparently realized on the page in my fantasies. I even wrote a fantasy once in which I was the main character! Understand, that doesn’t mean you should waste too much time mapping me onto Chaz Mariano in this particular piece. But if I tell you that my grandfather was a bartender, do you get what I’m saying about personal connections?

The bar banter was spot on. What’s your approach to writing tricky dialogue like that?

I have a side career as a playwright and from that I’ve learned to pay particular attention to different speech patterns. Nobody speaks the Queen’s English, not even the Queen, and deviations from the standard can be a rich source of characterization. But I have to say that I really enjoy having different conversations between groups of people impinge on one another, because it’s so hard to do. I think it has something to do with the fact that I’ve written more than a hundred stories and that I like technical challenges to help me engage in a fresh way with the action.

Young Adele sometimes takes a back seat to make room for the characters’ other issues. How important is it to strike a balance between interwoven conflicts?

I am very aware of the story clock that ticks in the background of all fiction. The shorter the story, the faster the clock ticks. So Young Adele can only get as much time as there is. But besides this, the story has a kind of ambivalence about her reality. It privileges the issues of Chaz and the older Adele, because they are clearly “real.” This piece began as a note that I wrote to myself many years ago. It read, “A story about the ghost of somebody who isn’t dead.” As I began to write, young Adele became something more than a ghost—different anyway—but her exact nature is unclear, even to me. But that’s why this is a fantasy story and not a science fiction story about a time traveler.

You sold your first story almost forty years ago. Speculative fiction has evolved a lot during that time. Where you do see it heading in the future?

It should come as no shock to readers of Lightspeed that the tent of speculative fiction has grown very big indeed over the decades. And within its shelter, the boundaries of the various subgenres are blurring. Although some might decry the loss of genre rigor, I am not among their number. Mutation is the engine of evolution and writers need to make stories that are fit to survive in our changing literary environment. But I think the biggest shift in our little corner of letters has happened since the beginning of the century. Although there may not be as many readers as there were in the golden age of science fiction and fantasy magazines, the success of Lightspeed and its many worthy digital competitors has created a newly lush short story landscape. My bet is that it will continue to flourish.

What can we expect from you down the line?

I am working on a novel, which I hope to finish by the end of the year. And I have a new play in development. Then lots more stories, some of which I hope will appear in these pages!

Earnie Sotirokos grew up in a household where Star Trek: The Next Generation marathons were only interrupted for baseball and football games. When he’s not writing copy for radio or reading slush, he enjoys penning fiction based on those influences. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.

Author Spotlight: Siobhan Carroll
Jude Griffin

This is such a beautiful retelling—what was the seed for “The Correspondence Between the Governess and the Attic”?

It actually comes out of a Victorian literature class I took with Ivan Kreilkamp. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was on the syllabus, a novel I’d vigorously disliked since I was a child. I’d been forced to read it by my parents, who held it up as an example of the kind of classic book I should be reading rather than “all that sci-fi stuff.” Alas for poor Jane Eyre—I was too young to understand what was good about it. For me, it instead became an example of the boring, realist novel in which women marry jerks for no good reason.

So when I encountered Jane Eyre again in graduate school, I was in for a bit of a shock. This was not the dull, safe story I remembered. It was a novel out of Victorian nightmare, clawing against the constraints of its historical period. And this time it was clearly, to my eyes, a fantasy novel: It features a young Orphan With A Destiny adventuring across a landscape infused with fairy-tale imagery. Oh, and at a crucial moment, she gets psychic powers. What else do you call a story like that? Re-reading Jane Eyre was a bit like looking at one of those optical illusion images in which you can see both a vase and two faces, depending on what you focus on. Before, I’d only seen the realist domestic novel. Now I saw speculative fiction.

I wrote a short paper about reading Jane Eyre as a fantasy novel. But while I thought the idea had promise, I couldn’t figure out how to turn it into an effective journal article. At a certain point I started drafting a fiction piece based on my Jane Eyre reading instead, and that’s where “Correspondence” got started.

Can you talk a little about the themes in Jane Eyre that you incorporated into your story?

For me, Jane Eyre offers a glimpse into the subconscious of the Victorian period. It’s rife with repressed anxiety over how women are being treated, how Britain is interacting with its empire, how the space of the “home” is coming apart, etc. Reading it these days, I see it as a fascinating story that’s thinking through the figure of the “Other” and what goes into “othering.”

We could call Jane herself an Other, for example. The novel begins with her being tossed out of the house in which she’s grown up. Her so-called “family” call her evil and want to get rid of her—and they do. So in Jane’s story we get a certain sense of what it’s like to be always be defined negatively, as someone who is not like “us.”

But the novel’s not simple. It also alludes to other figures—most famously Bertha Mason, the “madwoman in the attic”—who are in far worse positions than “outsiders” like Jane and Rochester. Jane has a claim on the Victorian reader’s sympathy in part because she can look and act the part of the respectable Christian white woman. But Bertha—the Other who is portrayed as beyond language and is perhaps from a interracial background—can’t. She stands for all those figures who are beyond the pale of Victorian sympathy.

I wanted to get at that in this story, and also at Jane’s moral culpability. For all Jane Eyre constructs people like Jane and Rochester as “outsiders,” it also shows them participating in the oppression of people like Bertha. Rochester’s the one who locks Bertha up in the first place. And Jane becomes constructed as the ideal woman in part because Bertha is on the scene. It’s Bertha’s othering—and later, her destruction—that allows Jane to finally get a home in British society.

The novel also has odd moments like the one in which Rochester masquerades as a “gypsy” to get information out of his guests. There are, please note, no real Romani showing up as characters in this novel—only a rich Victorian man constructing what he, and his audience, think a racial Other should be, in order to suit his private agenda. It’s at moments like this that I think that Jane Eyre is actually more subversive than more overtly political books from the nineteenth century. The process of “othering” itself is being examined, and the ways it benefits Victorian Britons are being exposed.

So basically, in retelling this story, I wanted to be open about some of the subversive narratives I see at work in the original novel. I particularly wanted to think about what goes into othering and what the cost is of “fitting in” to an unsympathetic society.

You reference “yellow wallpaper” early on; how did Gilman’s story influence “The Correspondence”? Any other influences that you would like to highlight? How did Wide Sargasso Sea enter into your thoughts about how to tell the story?

Jane Eyre may be the most famous “madwoman in the attic” story, but it’s hardly the only one. I’m a big fan of Gothic novels in general, so I worked in references to other Gothic works like “The Yellow Wallpaper” where I could.

Wide Sargasso Sea is probably the most famous of the Jane Eyre retellings, and I don’t think anyone who’s read it can go back to Jane Eyre and not be sympathetic to Bertha. It’s definitely informing my interpretation of the Bertha figure in this story. To me, Wide Sargasso Sea is an example of the power of a retelling versus an academic argument about a text. You can be a lot more specific about how you see a text when you’re writing an academic argument, but a retelling can make your case more powerfully.

Did you experiment at all with first-person narration?

No. Because I was coming at this story from a critical perspective, it always had a third-person point of view. I never wanted to change that, because I wanted the reader to be viewing Jane Eyre from a distance and thinking about what this story means, rather than being immersed in it.

You are working on a fascinating book, The Blank Spaces of the Earth: Atypical Space in the Romantic Century; how is that going?

It’s going well. This nonfiction book is before a publisher right now and I’m waiting on their decision. Blank Spaces looks at how the scientific exploration of areas like the North Pole changed the stories Britons told each other about their nation and their empire. To my SF friends I call it a “pre-history of science fiction,” because a lot of the narrative conventions introduced in this period continue to show up in our movies and books. The movie Gravity, for example, is basically a nineteenth century ocean-shipwreck story in outer space.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

I’m working on two more nonfiction books, and I’m in the early stages of drafting a novel that puts the imperialism back in steampunk. I’m also delighted to report that my short story “Wendigo Nights” will be appearing in Ellen Datlow’s Fearful Symmetries anthology. It promises to be a wonderful collection.

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: William Browning Spencer
Amber Barkley

What is the connection between the two realities we see in “The Foster Child”? How and why was Lena split between them?

I guess it is best to start with a disclaimer: I don’t really think writers should talk at length about what they have written. There is a temptation to explain away everything; we try to codify chaos, we lie and pretend we had a plan. And we get a little pompous. Maybe more than a little.

A great deal of what I like about this story is what isn’t there. It is meant to be mystical and elegiac, which is life, as I understand it. I don’t know how Lena lost her place in the strange world that begins this story, but I know that poetry sustains that world, and it will die if it doesn’t regain its Muse, its inspiration.

Where did the idea for Lena’s split consciousness first come from, and how did it develop? What inspired this story?

I think three of my favorite poets inspired this story: William Butler Yeats, John Keats, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The title comes from “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by John Keats: “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness! / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time.”

The references to Yeats and Gerard Manley Hopkins (both of whom embraced mystical, transcendent visions of the world) are there in the poetry that is recited. There are also a couple of lines from a Dylan Thomas poem.

Does it matter if people don’t catch all these allusions? I don’t think it does. I have tried to write a story that has some of the attributes of poetry, that is more interested in evoking an emotion than in explaining just precisely how these two worlds intersect. It is a story about the critical, life-sustaining importance of poetry, and maybe it is about the decline of the humanities in universities or the dumbing-down of language in smart-phone-social-networking America. But probably not.

The first scene in “The Foster Child” is a mix of ambiguity and vivid imagery. How did you go about crafting this world?

In a short story, you aren’t required to have the elaborate sort of worldbuilding you need in a novel. I wanted to create a place where a hero of myth and legend battled against a decadent technology. This warrior who calls himself Yeats seeks to rescue Lena before it is too late. I didn’t want to use alien words that required explaining further down the road—a common and somewhat irritating practice in SF and fantasy novels—so I used words that evoked a stranger world without being couched in another language. You can puzzle out what’s going on, I think.

Wilson begins to have bad dreams as he attempts to coax Lena fully into the reality he inhabits. What is the significance of these dreams? Is there a connection between them and losing Lena?

I believe Wilson senses that something dire is on the horizon. He can’t define it, but the urgency invoked by the other world has, as he’s grown closer to the child, impinged on his subconscious and created an unfocused anxiety, our modern world’s existential dread. (I warned about the opportunities for pomposity . . .) I think the ending is a happy one, although probably not all readers would agree.

Why does Lena only speak in poetry? How did you go about deciding which quotes to use? What significance does the Muse have in the story aside from Lena’s speech?

I think I’ve probably answered these questions in the above. In her own world, that other world, I expect Lena can converse normally. To speak in our blunted world, she has to fight against her lethargy, and poetry is the only communication succinct enough, powerful enough, to win through.

Okay, I just made that up, but it sounds right.

Amber Barkley is a recent graduate of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She was born in Idaho and grew up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Her favorite animals are cats and horses, and she considers it a great injustice that she is allergic to both—though that doesn’t stop her from being around them whenever she has the chance. Amber writes high fantasy with a dark twist, and is currently working on her first novel.

Coming Attractions

Coming up in January, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Jeremiah Tolbert (“In the Dying Light, We Saw a Shape”) and Anaea Lay (“Salamander Patterns”), along with SF reprints by Terry Bisson (“Bears Discover Fire”) and Zhao Haihong (“Exuviation”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Matthew Hughes (“His Elbow Unkissed”—a Kaslo Chronicles tale) and Adam-Troy Castro (“The Thing About Shapes to Come”), and fantasy reprints by Rosamund Hodge (“Apotheosis”) and Ursula K. Le Guin (“Elementals”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with Hyperbole and a Half’s Allie Brosh and bestselling epic fantasy author Scott Lynch.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella reprint “The Chambered Fruit” by M. Rickert 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. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Sunny Moraine, Sofia Samatar, Kat Howard, Sarah Pinsker, Carrie Vaughn, Seth Dickinson, Chen Quifan (translated by Ken Liu), Jessica Barber, Carmen Maria Machado, Ken Liu, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Sandra McDonald, Shaenon K. Garrity, Fred Van Lente, and Linda Nagata. Plus, we’ve got two 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!

57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides
Sam J. Miller

1. Because it would take the patience of a saint or Dalai Lama to smilingly turn the other cheek to those six savage boys day after day, to emerge unembittered from each new round of psychological and physical assaults; whereas I, Jared Shumsky, aged sixteen, have many things, like pimples and the bottom bunk bed in a trailer, and clothes that smell like cherry car air fresheners, but no particular strength or patience.

2. Because God, or the universe, or karma, or Charles Darwin, gave me a different strength, one that terrified me until I learned what it was, and how to control it, and how to use it as the instrument of my brutal and magnificent and long-postponed vengeance.

3. Because I loved Anchal, with the fierceness and devotion that only a gay boy can feel for the girl who has his back, who takes the Cosmo sex quiz with him, who listens to his pointless yammerings about his latest crush, who puts herself between him and his bullies so often that the bullies’ wrath is ultimately re-routed onto her.

4. Because after the Albany Academy swim meet, while I was basking in the bliss of a shower that actually spouts hot water—a luxury our backwoods public school lacks—I was bodily seized by my six evil teammates, and dragged outside, and deposited there in the December cold, naked, wet, spluttering, pounding on the door, screaming, imagining hypothermia, penile frostbite, until the door opened, and an utterly uninterested girl opened the door and let me in and said, “Jeez, calm down.”

5. Because it’s not so simple as evil bullies in need of punishment; because their bodies were too beautiful to hate and their eyes too lovely to simply gouge out; because every one of them was adorable in his own way, but they all had the musculature and arrogance of Olympic swimmers, which I lacked, being only five-six of quivery scrawn; because I loved swimming too much to quit the team—the silence of the water and how alone you were when you were in it, the caustic reek of chlorine and the twilight bus rides to strange schools and the sight of so much male skin; and because of those moments, on the ride home from Canajoharie or Schaghticoke or Albany, in the rattling medicine-smelling short bus normally reserved for the mentally challenged, with the coach snoring and everyone else asleep or staring out the window watching the night roll by, when I was part of the team, when I was connected to people; when I belonged somewhere.

6. Because I had spent the past six months practicing; on animals at first, and after the first time I tried it on my cat she shrieked and never came near me again, but my dog was not so smart, and even though his eyes showed raw animal panic while I was working him he kept coming back every time I took my hand away and released him, and pretty soon working the animals was easy, the field of control forming in the instant my fingertips touched them, their brains like switches I could turn off and on at will, turning their bodies into mirrors for my own, but I still couldn’t figure out a way to harm them.

7. Because once, while she slept, in my basement, engorged on candy and gossip and bad television, I tried my gift on Anchal, and it was much harder on a human, because she was so much bigger and her brain so much more complex and therefore more difficult to disable, and even though I tried to only do things that would not disturb her, her eyes fluttered open and then immediately narrowed in suspicion and fear, the wiser animal part of her brain recognizing me as a threat before the dumb easily-duped mammalian intellect intervened and said, no, wait, this is your friend, he would never do anything to hurt you, and she smiled a blood-hungry smile and leaned forward and said, “How the hell did you do that?”

8. Because Mrs. Burgess assigned us Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog” for English class, which helped my vengeance take shape, and because none of the boys had read it.

9. Because Anchal did read it, and came to me, after school, eyes all laughing fire at the ideas the protagonist gave her—Hop-Frog, that squat deformed little dwarf who murdered the cruel king and his six fat ministers in a dazzling spectacle of burned flesh and screaming death, and her excitement was infectious, and we worked on my gift for hours, until turning her into a puppet was as easy as believing she was one.

10. Because Carrie came on television that same night.

11. Because I am an idiot who still hasn’t learned how stories and movies mislead us, showing us how things ought to end up, which is never how they do; and because stories are oracles whose prophecies we can’t unravel until it is too late.

12. Because Anchal worked long and hard on the revenge scenario, sketching out all the ways my gift could be used to cause maximum devastation, all the ways we could transform our enemies into an ugly spectacle that would show the whole world what monsters they truly were.

13. Because I didn’t listen when she said we would have to kill them, that they were sick sons of bitches and would never stop being sick sons of bitches. Because I still believed that they could be mine.

14. Because Anchal, equal parts Indian and Indian—Native American and Hindu—always smelled like wood smoke, lived with her Cherokee mom in a tiny house barely better than a cabin, and so I thought that she was invincible, heiress to noble, durable traditions far better than my own impoverished Caucasian ones, and that she could survive whatever the world might throw at her. And because she was beautiful; because she was smart and strong; because boys flocked to her; because she knew that if there was one sure thing we could depend upon, it was that teenaged boys were a lot more likely to make dumb decisions when lust was addling their brains.

15. Because Spencer, alone among my swim team mates, would smile at me for no reason, and speak to me sometimes when the others weren’t around, and because some tiny actions gave me hope that he too was gay, and that we were each other’s destinies.

16. Because Rex, on the other hand, an ogre of rare and excellent proportions, thick-headed but shrewd when it came to cruelty, served as the ringleader, and just as they had all obeyed him in his plan to pour Kool-Aid into Anchal’s locker as punishment for stopping them from stomping my skull in, so I knew that he was the linchpin, the only one I would need to work, and that once I had him, the others would fall.

17. Because coach was sick that day, and our next meet wasn’t for a week, so we had the day off from practice, an unheard-of gift of free time, and I knew that this was our shot, and we couldn’t waste it, so I texted Anchal We are GO and then after school, while Rex was alone in the weight room, I stood outside in the hallway and called her cell, and said in a maybe-a-little-bit-too-loud voice, “Hey, so, I got a couple hours to kill, wanna meet me by the slate quarries in an hour, maybe bring some of your mama’s vodka?” and she said, “Yes,” and I said, “Great,” and whistled while I walked away.

18. Because I hid myself in a darkened classroom where I could watch the weight room through the window in the door, and I saw how Rex called them all into a huddle when they arrived from their own classes, and they rubbed their hands or licked their lips or punched each other in the arm in glee, and then they left, as one, and I knew the bait had been taken.

19. Because they had their bicycles and I had mine, and after they left I let five minutes go by, and if I had stuck to that timeline everything would have gone exactly according to plan.

20. Because as I was about to unlock my bike I heard someone holler my name, and I swooned at the sound of it in Spencer’s mouth, and I stopped, and saw him standing sweaty and tank-topped at the cafeteria window, smiling, nervous, looking exactly like he always did in the dreams where we finally told each other our separate, identical secrets, and said “Can I maybe talk to you for a minute?”

21. Because I have an easily-duped mammalian intellect of my own, and because if there’s one thing you can depend upon, it’s that teenage boys are a lot more likely to make dumb decisions when lust is addling their brains.

22. Because I went to him, and said, “Hey,” and he said, “Hey,” and we stood there like that for a second, and his pale skin had the same faint green-blue tint as mine from soaking in chlorine four hours a day for months, and his eyes were two tiny swimming pools, and somehow there wasn’t a single pimple anywhere on him. And he said “That Edgar Allan Poe shit was pretty fucked up, wasn’t it?” and I laughed and said that yes, it was, and my heart was loud in my throat and it had hijacked my brain and I could not disobey it, through several long minutes of small talk, even while I knew what it meant for Anchal.

23. Because he smiled and said, “Do you think I could, I don’t know, come over some time?” and I grinned so hard it hurt, and said “Yeah, yes, sure, that’d be great,” while my mind scrolled through a zoetrope of blurry images, heavy petting on the bean bag chair in my basement, pale skin warming pale skin, us walking hand-in-hand through the hallowed horrible halls of Hudson High, me and Spencer against the world, my heinous monastic celibacy broken.

24. Because his phone buzzed, then, and he took it out and looked at it and then looked at me and said “Yeah, uh, so, I should be going,” and I saw at once that my plan had been seen through, my timeline tampered with, and I knew what even these six minutes of delay might mean for Anchal—and I left him in midsentence, and ran for my bike and pedaled as hard as I could, heading for the slate quarries.

25. Because the long rocky road in to the quarry was littered with giant jutting slabs of slate, obscuring my view and slowing me down, so I didn’t see her, or any of them, until I arrived at the top of the quarry and saw Anchal standing her ground, the five of them in a semicircle around her, but nothing between her and a drop to the jagged rocks and quarry lagoon below, and her face was bruised and bleeding but she was still on her feet and holding something in her hand, and she turned, and saw me, and saw Spencer coming close behind, and knew what I had done, how my weakness had hurt her, how only her own strength had saved her from the horrific fate I abandoned her to, and she knew, in that moment, exactly what I was, and what I was was a sick son of a bitch just like the rest of them.

26. Because Rex had taken off his jacket, and his sweater, and his shirt, even though it was mid-December twilight, and he was freezing, and goosebumps armored his torso, and he turned and smiled when he saw me ride up, and said, “Hold on for a minute, boys, let me just take care of something first.”

27. Because I tossed my bike to the ground and advanced on him, unafraid for once in my life, because guilt and shame over how weak I was had overpowered the fear of physical pain that usually held me back, and one of them laughed with surprise at my aggressiveness and said, “Damn, Rex, look out,” and I yelled, “Get away from her you pigs!” and Rex laughed and said, “Or what? You’ll take us all on? All six of us?”—for Spencer had taken Rex’s spot in the semicircle—and I said, “I’ll kill you all,” and I knew, hearing myself say it, that it was true, that Anchal was right, that there was no way not to kill them, that being a threat was who they were, and only death would make them cease to be one.

28. Because Rex said, “Come on then!” and I reached out for him, and he evaded me, and I reached again with the other arm and he leapt back, and I wasn’t throwing fists because all I had to do was touch him, bare skin to bare skin, to possess him.

29. Because the terrible thought occurred to me, when Rex had successfully dodged several of my grabs, and threw his arm out at me, not in a fist but in the same extended-finger grip as mine, What if I’m not the only one with this gift?

30. Because our fight looked more like a ballet than a battle, ducking and leaping and flinging our arms out, and I was gaining ground, pushing him back toward the circle and the ledge, and his friends were laughing but in a nervous kind of way, and because I knew that he was thrown off balance by trying not to make eye contact with any of his fellow thugs, but that so was I, in my efforts to avoid looking into Anchal’s eyes, for fear of what I’d find there.

31. Because Anchal’s arm shot out then, and sprayed the little mace canister in Rex’s eyes, and he stopped like someone pushed pause, and I struck his bare shoulder with one triumphant palm.

32. Because his scream of pain was cut short in that instant, and we stood like that, frozen, touching, for a solid thirty seconds, while I battled Rex for control of his body, and I saw how ill-advised this plan had been, because only the pain and confusion caused by Anchal’s mace kept him from easily turning my gift back on me, and if any of his friends had touched me my control would have been broken and I’d surely have died that day.

33. Because none of them did touch me.

34. Because once I had Rex, the rest were easy.

35. Because I reached out my left arm and Rex reached out his in a precise mirror-motion, and touched it to the right arm of the boy standing beside him, and now when I reached out with my left arm both boys reached out with theirs, and touched the next boy, and so on, until all six boys, including Spencer, were linked hand to hand with me, and every move I made, they made.

36. Because my gift had established a field of control that no longer depended on mere touch, and when I took my hand away the boys were my vassals, my puppets, unable to move or speak on their own, free will gone, their hearts pumping at precisely the same rate as mine, their lungs taking in and casting out air in perfect rhythm with my breath.

37. Because I, on the other hand, felt nothing at all beyond the slight tension of the muscles that I always felt when I used my gift.

38. Because I raised my arms and they raised theirs; I jumped and so did they; I let loose a wolf call matched by six baying voices.

39. Because their eyes, I was surprised to learn, retained their autonomy, and the semicircle now showed me an impressive ocular display of hatred, fear, pain, anger.

40. Because Anchal stood up, and looked at me, and unlike my captive animals her eyes told me nothing, and she ran, silently, into the dark, and when I called her name those six boys said it too.

41. Because I let a long time pass, standing, listening, waiting for her to come back.

42. Because she didn’t.

43. Because it is not a simple thing, to kill a man who mimics your every move.

44. Because Anchal chose the slate quarry for just that purpose.

45. Because I squatted, and they squatted, and I picked up a heavy rock, and their hands closed on nothingness, and I stood, and they stood, and I hoisted the rock over my head, and they raised their empty hands up just as high, and I threw the rock as hard as I could at Rex’s head, and they made the same gesture.

46. Because Rex could neither flinch nor blink nor budge as the rock struck his face, nor even snap his head back to soften the impact by moving with the rock’s inertia, and blood covered his face in seconds, and in the darkness we could smell the blood but not see the extent of the damage, and now every emotion other than terror was gone from those eyes.

47. Because I spoke, then—I shouted, and their screams formed around my words, a ghastly chorus of doomed men, echoing: “Once I dreamed of being one of you, of having your bodies, of moving so easily and fearlessly through the world, of belonging so effortlessly to a group of friends—but now that I can taste it for myself, now that I have your bodies, now that I am you, all of you, I see it for the horrid meaningless thing that it is.”

48. Because the speech was not for them, and I’d spent a long time practicing it, and I was proud of it, but its intended audience was gone, fled, betrayed and hurt, by me.

49. Because suddenly my anger was gone, replaced by shame, and I had no more energy for our plan of a moment ago, of slowly but surely inducing them to bash each other to bits, to leave a grisly mess for forensic scientists to spend decades puzzling over.

50. Because the water at the bottom of the quarry was still an eerie blue with the light from the sky, even though the sun had already slipped past the horizon.

51. Because they were all standing so much closer than I was to the uneven lip of the quarry, and I reached out my arms and clasped my hands on air, so they were linked up in a human chain, and I ran and leapt and they went over the edge but I still had another three feet of solid ground ahead of me.

52. Because I stepped forward and looked down and there they were, far below, their backs to me, waist-deep in water and looking down into it, still holding hands, some of them unable to stand on broken legs, and there was blood in the water.

53. Because it was more from weariness than anything else when I lay down on the ground, head pressed to the dirt, and I knew even though I couldn’t see them that they were all fully underwater, and I opened my mouth and breathed in that sweet cold December night air and then breathed it out, breathed it in and breathed it out, until the tension slackened in my muscles and I knew the field was broken, because they had drowned.

54. Because I got up off the ground knowing I had lost her forever, that she had seen straight through to the cold twisted heart of who I was. And in seeing who I was, she had shown me myself.

55. Because I had been too dumb to see how this power, this privilege I didn’t want but had nonetheless, far from helping me to see, had blinded me to the truth of who we were.

56. Because in the movie, Carrie’s punishment for killing her foes was to die, and mine was to live.

57. Because Anchal knew what I did not: that we are what we are, and we act it out without wanting to, and only death can break us of the habit of being the bodies we’re born into.

© 2013 by Sam J. Miller.

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shimmer, Electric Velocipede, Strange Horizons, Icarus, The Minnesota Review, and The Rumpus, among others. He is a graduate of the 2012 Clarion Writer’s Workshop and the co-editor of Horror After 9/11, an anthology published by the University of Texas Press. Visit him at www.samjmiller.com.