FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, May 2014
John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue forty-eight of Lightspeed!

Awards season continues, and we are pleased to announce that Lightspeed is again a Hugo Award finalist for best semiprozine, and your humble editor is again a nominee for best editor, short-form. We’re extremely honored to be nominated again (that’s four times in a row for both me and Lightspeed!), so please allow me to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who voted for us. You can see a full list of the other nominees at loncon3.org/2014hugos.php.

Speaking of awards, as you have probably heard, Lightspeed has four Nebula finalists this year: “Paranormal Romance” by Christopher Barzak, “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” by Ken Liu, “The Sounds of Old Earth” by Matthew Kressel, and “Alive, Alive Oh” by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley. For a complete list of the finalists, visit SFWA.org. The winners will be announced at the SFWA Nebula Awards Weekend, May 15-18, in San Jose, California.

• • •

In case you missed the news last month, I just wanted to mention that my new anthology—Robot Uprisings, which I co-edited with Robopocalypse author Daniel H. Wilson—is now available. It’s about just what you would suspect based on the title—namely: robots, uprising! It’s got a great lineup, featuring all-new, never-before-published stories by Robin Wasserman, Seanan McGuire, Scott Sigler, Charles Yu, Anna North, and Genevieve Valentine, among others, plus a new novella by my esteemed co-editor, Daniel. If you’d like a sneak peek at the anthology, the complete text of Scott Sigler’s story, “Complex God,” appears in our April issue as one of our reprints. Visit johnjosephadams.com/robot-uprisings for other free samples or if you just want to learn more.

You remember last month when I said I don’t rest on my laurels? Well, just to drive that point home, I have another new anthology out this month. On May 13, Titan Books will publish Dead Man’s Hand. It’s full of weird-western goodness, and it has a great lineup, featuring all-new, never-before-published stories by Kelley Armstrong, Seanan McGuire, Elizabeth Bear, Alastair Reynolds, Jonathan Maberry, Joe R. Lansdale, Tad Williams, Hugh Howey, and many more. If you’d like a sneak peek at this anthology, look no further: The complete text of Rajan Khanna’s story, “Second Hand,” appears in this issue as one of our reprints. Additionally, Fred Van Lente’s story in this issue (“Willful Weapon”) takes place in the same world as his Dead Man’s Hand story, “Neversleeps.” Visit johnjosephadams.com/dead-mans-hand or your favorite book retailer for more information.

• • •

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

We have original science fiction by Seth Dickinson (“A Tank Only Fears Four Things”) and Sandra McDonald (“Selfie”), along with SF reprints by Nisi Shawl (“Deep End”) and Sean Williams (“Zero Temptation”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Matthew Hughes (“The Ba of Phalloon,” a Kaslo Chronicles tale) and Fred Van Lente (“Willful Weapon”), and fantasy reprints by Rachel Pollack (“Burning Beard”) and Rajan Khanna (“Second Hand”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with a pair of feature interviews.

For our ebook readers, we also have the novella reprint “Shiva in Shadow” by Nancy Kress and novel excerpts from Defenders by Will McIntosh and The Silk Map by Chris Willrich.

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-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. He has been nominated for eight Hugo Awards and five World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine, and is a producer for Wired’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

SCIENCE FICTION

A Tank Only Fears Four Things
Seth Dickinson

The surgery makes Tereshkova into a tank.

In the war, she never showed any fear, not at Fulda, not even in the snows of Vogelsberg when the Americans dropped the first bomb. When Clinton and Yeltsin shook hands at Yalta, when the word came down to the 8th Guards Army to yield Frankfurt and withdraw to Soviet soil, Tereshkova spat into the dirt and said: “Too bad. We were turning things around.” And Yorkina, who sat beside her in the cab, laughed and shook her head. Between them the Geiger counter made soft cricket noises.

When they were discharged, they each promised to write, having failed in their goodbyes to say what Tereshkova, at least, felt in her heart: I needed you. I wouldn’t be okay without you.

But she isn’t okay. On her first day home in Vereya, Tereshkova hears the diesel engine of a truck passing on the road, and she begins to sweat.

• • •

A tank fears only four things. One of them is a fuel shortage. Another is a man with an anti-tank missile. But the T-80 main battle tank can fire missiles from its own gun barrel, like a tiger who has eaten her hunter and digested him into a new and dangerous tooth. American tanks in the war couldn’t do this.

Except in four ways, the tank is invincible.

• • •

Tereshkova never writes to Yorkina. What would she say? I hear they have opened a Walmart in Moscow; I still don’t drink; when I hear a diesel engine I remember that I’m going to die?

I miss you?

She hates the other veterans because they ask her what she did in the war. Even Yorkina counts as another veteran. Yorkina was her friend, too, but certainly a wartime friendship must have its own armistice, its own terms of disengagement.

She wants to tell Yorkina how afraid she is, but if she did, Yorkina would know she was only pretending to be brave.

• • •

The surgical team comes from Republican China. They are hoping to find volunteers for an experimental treatment: They will solder a new connection between the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a feedback loop that will help the brain learn to control its own fear. Although they never say fear: They prefer to call it a trauma, a disorder, like an army routing, like a broken tread.

They never mention making Tereshkova into a tank. Maybe it’s a side effect.

• • •

She only volunteers for the surgery because of Yorkina.

Ten years after the armistice, the sound of diesel engines still makes her go numb. She sweats uncontrollably and lies awake for hours, paralyzed, her heart a small unsteady pain. But no one has ever noticed, and she’s never told anyone. In the war, she never showed any fear.

One day, without warning or prelude, Yorkina calls, and she begins to weep, open and unashamed, when she hears Tereshkova’s voice. “I can’t stop being afraid,” she says. “I can’t even get into cars any more. The engines—I need your help.”

“Of course,” Tereshkova lies, even though she cannot help, even though her first thought when she heard Yorkina on the phone was: Thank God, you can help me. Yorkina had never been lost, even when they drove off the edge of the map.

Tereshkova takes the train from Dorokhovo into Moscow, but although the two women cry out and embrace and laugh when they see each other, Tereshkova cannot help Yorkina, and Yorkina cannot help her. She can see the plea in the way Yorkina avoids more than the lightest touch, unready to be disappointed: Weren’t you brave, then?

Or maybe the plea is: Weren’t we brave, together?

When Tereshkova crashes in Yorkina’s one-room Sokolniki rat nest, she hears Yorkina trembling in the night and sometimes she thinks that if she could only tremble, too, if she could only admit she is afraid, somehow this would help. But no, she must be stronger. She must find a way to help.

Tereshkova finds the operation advertised in the veterans’ newsletter: Are you still fighting? Experimental psychosurgery may help you win. She tears the page out and takes it with her when she leaves.

• • •

Tereshkova and Yorkina never drove a tank, although many women did. They never saw an American or shot a gun or came under attack. This is why Tereshkova hates it when people ask what she did in the war: She did nothing that feels important or brave. She would much rather have been in a tank. Sometimes she tries to remake the whole war that way, to remember a world where she led the spearhead down the E45 autobahn and spent ten years afterwards answering: I fought as tank crew.

Instead she drove an old Ural diesel truck, carrying supplies and ammunition from the depots to the front. This, the Chinese doctors say, is why Tereshkova is always afraid.

The Americans had stealth airplanes. They bombed the supply lines day and night, trying to starve the tanks and soldiers at the front. People were killed on the road, in the depot, asleep in their cabs or bunks—sudden, random, unavoidable.

A tank only fears four things. One of them is the airplane.

“There are different ways to be afraid,” the chief surgeon explains. He has warm brown eyes and speaks earnest, terrible Russian. “It’s easy to be very afraid for a little while, as long as you get a chance to rest and heal. But in that truck, with the bombers overhead, you were always a little afraid, every minute of every day. The poison never had a chance to drain.”

It was like feeling you’d forgotten something, a gnawing important something, and then remembering what it was: that you are about to die, just the very next instant, the next, the next. She wants to tell him about this feeling. She wants him to say: That’s right, you were never a coward. I’m certain of it.

“Maybe,” she says, shrugging. “Are there side effects?”

“Make no mistake,” he says, his warmth flickering. “The treatment is very experimental.”

“Will there be damage?”

“Your brain is resilient,” he says. “We’re only helping it recruit its own strengths.”

• • •

When Tereshkova wakes up from the surgery, she is a tank. She knows it in her hull.

Now she can be strong for Yorkina. She gets a job as a diesel mechanic and sends Yorkina all the money she can spare. She goes to veterans’ meetings and makes new contacts. She learns to drink with Yorkina, and to stop Yorkina from drinking when she goes too far. She helps Yorkina find a new apartment.

“What do you need?” Yorkina asks, as they carry her things up the steps. “You’ve been so kind . . . can I . . . ?”

“Nothing,” Tereshkova says, smiling a comrade’s smile. “I don’t need anything, now.”

For the first time in more than a decade, she might be happy. The tank, after all, should never operate alone. The tank must open the way.

• • •

“I want you to move in,” Yorkina says.

They’re drunk in a bar on Kudrinskaya. Yorkina looks up with reverent eyes. “I feel safe with you,” she says, her hand on Tereshkova’s elbow. “You’re invincible.” Her eyes flutter, with vodka or brief embarrassment. “And you must be tired of those long rides in from the country.”

“I can’t do everything for you,” Tereshkova says. She chuckles crudely to defuse the joke, but Yorkina doesn’t laugh. She blushes.

Tereshkova pretends to take a long drink.

The T-80 main battle tank is layered in Kontakt-5, a special kind of armor, like a chainmail of explosive bricks. When the tank senses something that’s come too close, moving too fast, it detonates one of the bricks. The blast knocks the missile or the bullet away, just an instant before it can strike. The tank doesn’t feel anything, but sometimes soldiers standing nearby are killed. This is acceptable. Russia invented Kontakt-5 and now the whole world has copied it.

In the army, tanks are called the armor. To be a tank is literally to be impenetrable.

“Come on,” Tereshkova says, clapping Yorkina on the back, pretending she’s forgotten about the question. “You’re drunk. Let’s get you home.”

Yorkina clings to her as they get into the cab, trying to hide from the sound of the engine. “You’re never afraid,” she says into Tereshkova’s shoulder. It’s started to sound like a plea. “You’re never afraid.”

“I’m here,” Tereshkova assures her. “I’m here.”

“I want to walk home,” Yorkina groans.

Tereshkova strokes her hair. “You’ll get lost,” she says.

• • •

The chief surgeon interviews her for her three-month follow-up. “Have your social relationships improved?” he asks. Certainly his Russian has improved.

“Oh, certainly.” Tereshkova nods. “I’ve been helping a friend.”

“A veteran?”

Tereshkova nods again.

“Does she help you work through your trauma?”

Tereshkova frowns, trying to make sense of the question. “No,” she says, her arms folded, like a glacis, across her chest. “I help her.”

“Do you think she’d be a good candidate for the surgery?”

Tereshkova pretends to think for a moment. “No,” she says. “She’s taken care of.”

The surgeon nods and makes a note. “Anything else you’d like to report?”

“No,” Tereshkova says. “Nothing else.”

• • •

Unexpectedly, Yorkina outflanks her.

Tereshkova climbs the stairs to Yorkina’s apartment with good news. She’s found a man hiring veterans for a data entry job right off the Metro. Yorkina can get there without hearing too many cars. The line of advance is safe.

But Yorkina doesn’t want to hear about a job. She sits in the kitchenette, smoking, grinding the ash on the tabletop, and loading another cigarette, sabot-like, between her thin lips. Finally, she says: “You were never going to tell me.”

“What?” Tereshkova hesitates, reverses, trying to buy time to orient herself towards this unexpected threat. She tries a smokescreen. “Do you mean—your question? I thought you were drunk.”

“And I thought I was a coward.” Yorkina’s eyes glisten. “The way you just got over—it. You convinced me. I just wasn’t strong enough.”

Yorkina opens a drawer, takes out the veterans’ newsletter from four months ago, and shows Tereshkova the torn page. “I found another copy,” she says. “Psychosurgery. What does that mean? Like a lobotomy?”

Tereshkova opens her mouth, still searching for a target. “I wanted to help you,” she says, her desperation cold, ballistic. “You said you needed my help.”

“Well.” Yorkina laughs harshly. Her eyes have fixed on a distant, receding point, past the back of Tereshkova’s skull, as if she’s tracking the flight of an overpenetrating shell. “You fucked up, didn’t you?”

Tereshkova doesn’t understand. How can her rapid advance, her decisive schwerpunkt, her unmatched resilience, not be the answer? Maybe she broadcasts that question somehow, a frantic, unwitting transmission in the clear. Yorkina averts her eyes from the wreckage. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I just—I thought, when I called you—I thought maybe you were afraid, too.” She shrugs and studies the lap of her jeans. “And I guess you were. But it’s gone now.”

She looks up, her jaw clenched, her teeth fixed in her lower lip, perhaps to hurt it enough that it will stop trembling. “I wish you could get it back. I—”

She swallows the thing she was trying to say.

Tereshkova’s heart hammers, a gas turbine overpressure. Yorkina wants her to go back, to unbuckle the treads, empty the magazines, shed the composite plate, the Kontakt-5 that turns all harm aside. To leave the tank.

She backs toward the door, desperate to withdraw, to escape the killzone.

• • •

The tank only fears four things.

In Afghanistan and Chechnya, the Soviet armed forces used their invincible tanks to lead the attack. Lords of the highway and open plain, the tanks found themselves at a loss to conquer cities. Attacked by untrained men with cheap RPGs, firing from rooftops and alleys in every direction, the T-80s and BMPs were decimated.

Without infantry to protect it, the tank was helpless in a city. Without the SAM battery and anti-aircraft gun to shield it, the tank could not even seize a highway, an open field.

Even the mightiest tank fears operating alone.

• • •

“We can reverse the procedure,” the surgeon says, brow furrowed. “But why? Has there been a complication?”

“Left in isolation, without supporting elements,” Tereshkova says, “the tank cannot survive.”

The surgeon blinks, as if he has forgotten all his hard-won Russian. “Do you understand the risk of relapse? Without surgical reinforcement to the vmPFC regulatory loop, your trauma may return. Are you sure this is what you want?”

“Yes,” Tereshkova says, decisive, committed. Hesitation is anathema to the tank. Hesitation kills. If she slows down for one instant, she will realize that she’s destroying herself. She will waver and withdraw.

But the tank exists to cross the killzone, the no-man’s-land. To open the way.

“This,” she says, holding the surgeon’s gaze, “is what I need now.”

And when they have finished, the amygdala-PFC loop undone, Tereshkova stands at the door to the apartment building, her hand on the buzzer, her scalp itching around the fresh sutures.

A diesel engine roars in the near distance.

Tereshkova remembers, with a physical start, what she has forgotten. She makes a small, desperate sound, terrified, joyful, and lifts her chin. Her hands prickle with sweat.

She thinks of the tank, grinding forward through the crash of artillery, deaf to the protest of passing jets, relentless, unmoved. Draws a slow, steady breath, and exhales her fear.

Presses the buzzer.

“Hello?” Yorkina says.

“Hi,” Tereshkova manages, and then, a little tremulously, but smiling as she says it: “I’m scared.”

© 2014 by Seth Dickinson.

Seth Dickinson is a lapsed doctoral student at NYU (where he studied social neuroscience) and both an alumnus of and instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. His fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Analog, and Strange Horizons, and he can be found at sethdickinson.com.

Go to Author Spotlight

Selfie
Sandra McDonald

If you ask me, I’m more like my mom than my dad. She and I love astronomy and the mysterious origins of the universe. Dad’s not only stuck on the past, he literally would move there if he could. Every summer he drags me along on his research trips to eras where sweaty-smelling people with wool bathing suits hole up in seaside deathtraps.

“The Belleview is a beautiful hotel,” Dad protests, studying the snaps displayed on our living room wall. “It’s not a death trap.”

“Dad, it’s a wooden structure filled with flammable furniture and gas lamps, populated by people smoking pipes and cigars,” I say, from where I’m doing homework. “You told me yourself the number one enemy of old wood buildings is one careless spark. Show me a place with sprinklers and fire extinguishers, and then we’ll talk.”

He waves his hand to make the images scroll sideways. Some are black-and-white grainy images, while others are color chronoshots, and scrolling along the screen is a real-time cost analysis of different routes to get there. The cheapest option right now would require passing down three separate time tunnels and crossing two multidimensional borders. I hate the borders. They’re always crowded and boring and the lines seem to take forever, because you’re actually crossing forever.

“You didn’t object last summer when we visited the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island,” Dad says.

“Last month I did a school report on famous fires. Do you want me to read it to you?”

The color and angle of light slanting on Dad’s face changes as he brings up the blueprints. One of his many jobs is designing interactive tours of nineteenth century Victorian resorts for chrono tourists. The hotels all either burned down, got razed for redevelopment, or were destroyed by the rising tides that took out the old coastal cities. The Belleview is a sprawling white structure on the Gulf of Mexico, a tempting beacon for both termites and hurricanes.

Dad says, “Susan, you can’t stay home for two weeks while I’m away. You’ll like Florida. The space program started there.”

He goes back to his plans. I think about the Gemini and Apollo missions and the first man on the moon, more than a hundred years ago.

Mom’s surprised when I call her a few days earlier than scheduled.

“I want to come visit while Dad goes to 1899,” I tell her.

She frowns on my palmscreen. “You want to come up here?”

“You said I could for my birthday.”

“Which is eight months away. What’s wrong with time trips? You used to like them.”

“Do you know how uncomfortable a corset is?” Especially now that I’ve gotten a lot bigger on top, but I don’t mention that. “And the shoes kill my feet.”

She glances away and taps on a tablet. “What does your father say?”

They were never married. In most timestreams they probably would never even dated, but in this one they met at a wedding while in grad school and drank too many glasses of champagne. Mom gestated my embryo and Dad took over after that. Everything’s mostly worked out fine, except they’re not quite friends and do most of their communicating through me.

“I haven’t told him,” I say, spinning the moon globe dangling over my desk. The settlement she lives in is built to scale and smaller than the crescent on my thumbnail. “He’ll be okay with it.”

She makes a distracted noise. “Well, he’s got to pay half. This time of year, the rates are very expensive.”

Lunar travel is never cheap. Luckily, every time Dad drags me to the past I take snaps of old jewelry, clothing, and furniture. I send them to a replication database for commercial and private users and earn a commission on anything they use. I’ve been doing it for four years now and there’s more money in my account than either Mom or Dad suspect.

“So I can come up?”

“Talk to him, sweetie. I’ll look at my schedule.”

The key to success with Dad is timing. No pun intended. A few days later, he logs off from one of his jobs with a big grin, thanks to an unexpected bonus, and over dinner I’m ready with my proposal.

“Dad, I want you to take a selfie of me when you visit the Belleview. That way we get to spend some quality time together, and I can do research with Mom on the moon for my senior project. Wouldn’t that be great for my college portfolio?”

He blinks in surprise. “Since when do you have a selfie?”

“I could get one. I’ve got some savings. And a coupon.”

Dad scratches the side of his head. He’s one of those very tall, very skinny guys who look like they’re stooping for low doorways even when they’re not. Sometimes when we travel to the past, the locals say he looks like Abe Lincoln.

“Did you say moon?”

“Mom okayed it.”

He hesitates. “Aside from the fact that’s something we need to discuss more in depth, I’m not thrilled with the idea of spending my time with a robot daughter.”

Immediately I pop up the brochure on our tabletop. “Selfies aren’t robots. They’re just temporary containers. You used one for that conference in Brazil last year because you couldn’t be in two places at the same time.”

“As I recall, it was my leg that was in pieces,” he says drily.

“And that’s why we don’t let you ride airbikes anymore.”

“I don’t know if I can afford to travel next summer. This could be our last big trip together.”

“We’re still taking it together. The selfie’s going to act just like I would. When I get back from the moon I’ll synch the memories in and it’ll be like we were never apart.”

He’s not convinced. Luckily, I’m persistent and persuasive and finally he agrees, reluctantly, as long as I pay for half the selfie out of my own savings. Mom gets my visa approved, my friend Jessy shrieks with jealousy, and Dad and I visit the selfie showroom. The model we pick out has my same body shape. A half hour later she comes out of the imprint mold with my face, hair, birthmarks, and the tattoo Dad doesn’t know about. A few days before my trip, we return for a visit to the lab. A technician loads Selfie Susan with my neuro profile and any memories I’ve elected for her to carry. I give her everything except my passwords, my poetry, my first kiss, and Carlos. Some things are private.

“I’m going to wake her up now,” the technician says. He has a coffee stain on his white lab coat. “They’re a little disoriented when first activated. Do you want to meet her?”

I stare down at the steel lab table. I don’t like my nose. I can’t see if her eye color is exactly the same. But underneath the blue paper gown she’s otherwise exactly me, and it’s kind of creepy. What if she’s smarter than I am, or funnier, or Dad likes her better? I decide to wait outside. Dad stays in the lab for fifteen minutes, talking to his temporary daughter, and when he comes out he’s wearing a frown.

“You don’t like her?” I ask. He shouldn’t. I’m the real deal and she’s going to be recycled at the end of his trip. But I panic a little at the thought he might not let me go visit Mom.

“She’s fine,” he says, pulling me in for a hug. “But you’ll always be my favorite.”

Dads are so sentimental. I pat his back. “I’ll miss you, too.”

The night before I leave, I’m too excited to sleep. I’ve memorized every step of the trip. Dad and I will take a bullet train to the nearest space elevator in New Mexico. I’ll ride that to an orbital transfer station. A shuttle will take me and three hundred other passengers from the station to the moon. I’m going to be traveling with scientists, researchers, grad students, and families. The higher and farther I go, the more I’ll see of our gorgeous spinning planet. Me, in space. Finally. I’m going to take a hundred thousand snaps.

Once I get to the moon, Mom and I will bond in a way we’ve never before. She’ll grow to appreciate what a great daughter she has, and I’ll learn how much she regrets putting her career ahead of everything. Or maybe not, because real life isn’t like movies. I’m not expecting bittersweet epiphanies that lead to heartfelt declarations or anything. I’m not expecting much, really, except two weeks of low gravity and cool science and looking down at Earth hoping Dad’s having a good time with my plastic twin.

And it all goes exactly to plan, really it does, until a micro-asteroid rips through the transfer shuttle’s engine, breaches the passenger cabin, and sends us screaming into oblivion.

• • •

Dad’s late picking me up from the selfie labs. He apologizes, but he doesn’t look me in the eyes while speaking. He pockets the remote that can reboot me if my programs crash, signs the final rental agreement, and walks me to the autocar.

“I already sent the bags ahead,” he says. “Susan packed your overnight bag.”

“I’m Susan, Dad,” I remind him. “Just riding around in a temporary package.”

We climb inside the dark, air-conditioned car. He immediately pulls out his tablet to read his notes about the Belleview Hotel. “I’m still getting used to the idea.”

I nudge his knee. “Keep that up and you’ll hurt my feelings. When we synch, you’ll hurt her feelings, too.”

A very slight smile flicks over his face. “I can see you remember how to take guilt trips.”

My other me has thoughtfully loaded a backpack with our spare tablet, some snacks, and some of our jewelry. The funny thing is that I know I’m a copy, and that she’s technically the “authentic” Susan Ann Miller, but I don’t feel fake. I poke my own arm. Plastic, but warm and soft. I flex a muscle. Okay, I’ve never been known for my upper arm strength, but it feels like a real muscle should. I zing Jessy.

She peers at me through the screen. “You don’t look like a robot.”

“I’m not a robot. I’m exactly Susan. The real deal in a plastic body.”

“She said you’d say that. What about Carlos and the butterfly?”

“Who’s Carlos?”

“See!” Jessy grins. “You’re not exactly like you because you didn’t tell yourself that Carlos is sort of your boyfriend.”

I’m instantly indignant. “I have a boyfriend and I didn’t tell myself?”

Dad raises an eyebrow. “You didn’t share it with me, either. Let me talk to Jessy.”

“Whooops,” I say, and “accidentally” disconnect the call.

Luckily, there’s no time, literally, to investigate the mystery of Carlos before we arrive at the timeport. It’s a giant building by a lake with strict queues and multiple stations for security screening, insurance waivers, orientation briefs, more security, more waiting. Thousands of people make a lot of noise, and the wallvids play the same boring election stories over and over. I wish we could just pick a president and be done with it.

Finally, Dad and I reach the ramp into a long black-green tunnel. I’ve been through before and should be used to it, but it’s creepy. It makes you feel like you’re going uphill and downhill at the same time, and it’s simultaneously cold and hot, and it seems like there’s an invisible wind pushing you forward but also holding you back. Usually Dad and I walk through hand-in-hand. This time he hesitates, so I grab his hand and squeeze it.

“The first time we went through, I was so nervous you promised me a pony ride when we reached Coney Island,” I say.

He nods. “Then you felt bad for the ponies, so we got ice cream soda instead. Our tradition.”

“Don’t think you can get out of that now. Selfies don’t need food, but we like it anyway. I want chocolate scoops and chocolate syrup and seltzer that gets up my nose.”

Dad smiles, and we go through the time tunnel together to visit the Belleview Hotel in 1899.

• • •

Dad’s not supposed to pick me up from the selfie labs until noon, but he’s early. He’s jittering with excitement or too much caffeine or maybe nervousness about me being a robot and all, but I’m not really a robot. I’m Temporary Susan, and some subconscious programming keeps me happy with that. Nobody wants a selfie moping around in existential gloom.

As it turns out, Dad’s unsettled for another entirely different reason. “I had a last-minute commission for a trip to the Hotel Del Coronado in California, 1918.”

“I don’t have clothes for 1918, Dad.”

“I was up all night printing some out,” he says. “You’ll like it there. We might meet Charlie Chaplin.”

I don’t know who that is, but if Dad’s excited about that, he’ll be less worried about the whole selfie thing. I rummage through the backpack that Original Susan packed for me. She must have been in a hurry, because there’s no tablet or comm device. I want to call my best friend Jessy and see if she can tell the difference between selfie and real thing.

“I grabbed the wrong bag,” Dad says, apologetic. “Tell me how you feel. What’s it like to be in an artificial body?”

We talk all the way to the timeport. Inside, the lines are as long as usual, but thankfully there’s no news of the upcoming election. Maybe all of the stations have gotten tired of talking about it. Dad keeps me chatting. He’s very interested in my experience, which is strange because he wasn’t very thrilled before. He keeps staring intently at my face in a way that might be creepy if he weren’t my Dad.

The time tunnel is long and dark, as eerie as I remember. Dad takes my hand and says, “I know your body just passes nutrients through, but when we arrive I think we should have ice cream sodas.”

I squeeze his fingers. “Sounds like a deal.”

1918 isn’t too boring, mostly because there’s a Hollywood movie crew filming around the hotel exterior and down on the beach. It’s for a silent film. How people were ever able to enjoy silent movies is beyond me. The bad guy is played by someone named Rudolph Valentino, who will be famous eventually. He gets to run around in a bathing suit with bare legs while all the women have to wear soggy leggings. Otherwise the clothes are more comfortable than 1899, though not as easy or convenient as hanging out in the temperature-controlled moon habitat in shorts.

“Is that what you’re going to remember most?” Dad asks on our way back to the labs, once we’re back in the future. He’s gazing out the window pensively. “The clothes?”

“No, the stars.”

“Valentino?”

“The real stars, Dad.” The best thing about our trips is when I can find the edge of land, stretch out flat with my arms over my head, and point my toes up into the glittering dome of the sky. All those stars, so bright and distant, their light traveling across time just for me. The universe is full of secrets waiting to be unraveled.

“Thank you for coming,” Dad says when the technicians take me back. I’m not nervous about my impending annihilation. Another subroutine to thank. In what seems like only a few minutes, I’ll be reintegrated into biological Susan.

“See you soon,” I say, and climb up on my lab table.

• • •

Dad’s very late picking me up. I’m afraid he’s backed out of the whole deal and would rather go into the past alone than with some facsimile of his daughter, even though I feel like the genuine Susan. The friendly technician in a wrinkled lab coat assures me that’s not true.

“He’s more committed than you think, kid. Here, hold your remote for a minute while I check the calibration.”

The remote is silver and rectangular, no heavier than a pebble. It’s kind of weird to think about how it can reboot my brain if it crashes. I wonder what it’s like to be rebooted—like dying and getting instantly reborn, or would I even notice? I ask the technician.

“There shouldn’t be any gaps in awareness,” he says. “Unless your owner double reboots, which puts you into safe mode. Able to walk and follow instructions, but not running your full profile.”

“Like a zombie,” I say.

“It’s very rare,” he says.

Finally Dad shows up breathless and harried. “Sorry, last-minute commission and change in plans. We’re going to New Hampshire.”

In the car he shows me pictures of our new destination. The Wentworth is the Grande Dame of the Sea, he says. I’m sure I’ll be just as bored there as I would be at the Belleview, but I don’t say so because I’m too busy being annoyed he forgot my tablet and comm.

“You don’t need to call Jessy,” he says. “How’s it feel to have an artificial body?”

“It feels the same as a normal one.”

“No differences at all?”

“I said it feels the same, Dad.” I wish he’d stop trying to prove how different I am from his “real” daughter. I’m the only one he’s got for the next two weeks, and I paid a lot to make this happen, so I don’t need quizzing.

The timeport is full of people and noise and some blabbering on the wallvids about the presidential election. Dad keeps talking to me, so I can’t be sure, but the candidates aren’t familiar. What happened to the ones I’ve been seeing for months?

“Your mother sent some pictures,” he says, showing me snaps of her and the “real” Susan up on the moon. They’re in a lab together, posing with their heads propped on their hands, smiling. You can see our mother-daughter resemblance. “There’s a couple dozen of them.”

I scroll through the snaps as we inch forward in line. Mom and me in the chow hall. Mom and me walking in a lunar arboretum. I wonder who took the pictures. Something else is odd, too, but it takes me a moment to figure it out.

“Dad, look at my earrings,” I say. “I’m wearing the same ones all the time.”

He looks blank. “So?”

“I change them every day. See?” I flick the silver hoops I’ll have to pull out at the final time border where we change into period clothes. We’ll leave our modern clothes and most tech in secure lockers, ready for pick-up upon return. “I packed twelve pairs for the moon.”

“Maybe you forgot them.”

“I’d buy or borrow new ones,” I tell him. “Why would Mom send fake pictures?”

Dad’s distracted by a security screener moving down the line with questions that need answering. I thumb Mom’s picture and put through a call.

She answers with, “Bob, you know how I feel—“ and then stops when she sees me. The screen resolution is so fine that I can see her go pale despite the hundreds of thousands of kilometers between us.

“He promised you’d never call me,” she says, her lips tight. “Get off the phone, selfie.”

The hostility knocks me backward into Dad. When he sees what I’ve done, he reaches for the remote in his pocket.

White noise floods my head, followed by nothingness.

• • •

Dad picks me up from the selfie lab with a change of plans. We’re headed for the east coast of Florida instead of the Gulf of Mexico. The resort is named Murray Hall and it’s in Ruby Beach, outside of Jacksonville. Dad brought a note from Jessy for me. Her parents have dragged her off to one of those “techno free” resorts in Nepal for a month. She’s going to go crazy without her comms, but no more crazy than I’ll be in 1888.

Dad has another surprise. He paid for VIP access through the timeport. Shorter lines, faster screening, and no wallvids screaming out election stories.

By the time we reach Ruby Beach, I’m too beat to pay much attention. Selfies get tired like everyone else, although our reaction is driven by power levels and not biochemistry or physiology. Dad and I take adjoining rooms on the third floor facing the sea. The lack of air conditioning means I wake up with sunlight broiling my room. I flop around in the hot bedclothes like a fish yanked out of the ocean. It’s cruel to take a modern teenager anywhere without air conditioning. I hope Moon Susan is happy with herself, up there having fun while I sweat my way through the nineteenth century.

Dad knocks on my door with, “Come on, get dressed and let’s eat breakfast.”

Food in 1888 isn’t very good. People eat meat and greasy eggs and biscuits that don’t even have chocolate on them. I watch Dad eat and pour extra sugar into my tea. The hotel manager stops by our table and thanks us for visiting. Murray Hall doesn’t get many time travelers, although of course he hopes Dad’s work will bring more.

“It’ll be my pleasure to write about your fine establishment,” Dad says.

It wouldn’t be so much of a pleasure if he was the one stuck wearing a high collar, long skirts, and a ridiculously lacey camisole. I absolutely refused to bind myself into anything resembling a corset. Dad’s probably not much more comfortable in the layers of his linen suit. Why couldn’t he specialize in twenty-first-century cruise ship travel, instead?

“You should come with us,” Dad says, after the manager offers a personal tour of the property.

I pick up my drawstring bag. “You do your thing, I’ll do mine.”

“Susan . . .” he says.

“Dad . . .” I mimic. “Go. Have fun.”

I spend the morning drifting around the resort, taking snaps of jewelry and furniture. The border police don’t let you bring communication devices into the past—too valuable, too prone to theft, the insurance claims are ridiculous—but simple flash tech is okay. After lunch I find myself a straw hat, a deck chair, and some shade. With me are the collected works of Mark Twain and a tall glass of genuine lemonade. The ocean’s at low tide, the blue waves dotted by gulls plucking their lunch from the sand. Horse-drawn carriages pull the tourists up and down the shore.

By the time I’m done reading, the tide is back in and the horses are being returned to their stables. I need to go find Dad and declare that it’s time for our traditional ice cream soda. Before I can leave, I realize I’m being watched by one of the locals, a boy my age. He has dark hair, dark eyes, and a big frown. He doesn’t look comfortable in his white suit and hat, and can’t seem to decide whether to come outside or keep lingering in the doorway.

“Do you need something?” I ask, figuring he’s just a gawker who wants to see the time traveler’s daughter.

He walks to my chair and stands over me. “Susan. It’s Carlos. I rented this selfie.”

I shade my eyes and blink up at him. “Carlos who?”

“She told me she didn’t give you those memories but I thought maybe a little . . .” He tugs on his tie, as if it’s too tight around his neck. “We go to school together. You, me, and Jessy share a science pod.”

Okay, no one here knows about Jessy, so I guess he’s legit. But I’ve never heard his name before. “Still nothing. Why would my original block you out?”

“Because we’re more than classmates. More than friends.”

My heart speeds up a little. “How do I know you’re not lying?”

He sits on the edge of the chair and touches one of my hands. His fingers are soft and smooth. “You have a birthmark on your right leg, right behind your knee. And matching tattoos that we got before you left. See?”

Carefully he pulls up the sleeve of his summer jacket. A tiny blue butterfly is marked inside his wrist. I have a duplicate on my right hip, where Dad’s never seen it.

Carlos says, “I can’t stay long. I could only afford to rent this until midnight. But I miss you. I wanted to see you.”

His voice has gone wistful. It’s strange to think he feels something for me that I can’t even remember. We must have a pretty strong relationship if he can’t be apart from me for even a few days. I glow a little inside, metaphorically.

“I don’t miss you,” I tell him truthfully, because you can’t miss someone you don’t remember. “But maybe we can take a walk on the beach.”

He smiles and offers me a hand up.

Strolling around dry sand isn’t easy in Victorian high heels. I peel my shoes off and Carlos strings them over his shoulder for me. He recalls stories about Jessy that I’ve shared with him, and some complaints I’ve made about my parents. Apparently I write poetry, though I don’t remember that, either. He says our first date was ice skating. Our first kiss was in the carport under my house, very quiet so that Dad couldn’t hear. Dad thinks I shouldn’t date until I’m thirty. Carlos wants to be a famous architect. He already knows that I plan on being an award-winning astrophysicist. On a blanket in the dunes, hidden from passers-by, we watch falling stars streak across the sky. His head rests easy on my plastic belly, and I run my plastic fingers through his curly plastic hair. Although we came from a factory, our bodies can feel warmth and softness and joy.

My other self can keep the moon. I’d rather have this.

“I can send you money for another rental,” I say when it’s time for him to go.

He belts his trousers and tucks in his shirt. In the starlight he looks lovely and tousled and very sad.

“Susan, how many trips have you gone on with your father?” he asks. “As a selfie, not as yourself.”

I prop myself up on one elbow. “This is the first time. Because I’m visiting my mom, too. You know that.”

He drops to his knees and cups my face with both hands. “You left for the moon four summers ago. I’m sorry. You didn’t—there was an accident.”

My ears fill with a buzzing noise that’s louder than the ocean surf. “I’m dead?”

Carlos kisses me, but I don’t kiss back. My lips feel numb.

“Ask your father,” he says, and disappears over the dunes.

Clumsily I button my blouse. Over my head, the ancient constellations silently whirl on their carefully delineated paths. No moon yet. I walk back to the hotel with my hair unpinned in the salty breeze, my shoes forgotten, and if the locals are aghast that I dare walk through the lobby that way, I don’t care. Nothing matters except for the truth.

Up in his room, scratching notes in a book by the light of a lamp, Dad looks up and says, “There you are—” before he realizes something’s wrong.

“Is it true?” I ask shakily. “There was an accident?”

He puts aside his fountain pen and we stare at each other. A long minute passes, filled only by the tick of a clock on the mantelpiece.

Dad asks, “Who told you?”

“Does it matter? I’m dead!”

He rubs his head. “You’re not dead. You suffered brain damage in the decompression and crash of your transfer shuttle. You’re in a coma in Texas. Your body is being kept alive while we wait for new treatment options.”

I don’t know what to feel. Angry that he’s been lying to me. Bewildered at why he couldn’t just tell me. Unable to imagine my biological body in a hospital bed, living on without any kind of consciousness to move or control it.

“So what is this selfie, a toy?” I ask bitterly. “A plastic doll you take out of a tube every summer to play with?”

I don’t remember sitting down, but I’m suddenly in a padded gold armchair. Dad comes to me and crouches down with sorrow written all over his face. He’s so close I could hit him in the nose if I wanted to.

“You’re not a toy,” he says. “You’re Susan. But your selfie brain has limited storage and the neural connections degrade after a few weeks of use. The technicians can’t synch you to a living brain, so they put each trip’s memories into long-term storage for later integration. Every summer I rent your unit and they reload the original neuro profile they have on file.”

I shake his shoulders. “You can buy a better model, put me into something more permanent—“

“Your hospital bills are too high. The insurance money, your savings, my income—it’s all tapped out. I sold the house. I work twenty hours a day to afford just this short trip every summer. “

My voice is wobbly. “Mom can afford it.”

“She can’t,” he says. “We’re not rich, Susan. She already pays all she can. I’m sorry.”

I stalk away from him to the balcony. Out over the ocean, the stars hang like strands of tiny white Christmas lights. But there will be no Christmas for me. No Thanksgiving or birthday or college, no career or Carlos or more butterfly tattoos.

“What happens to me the rest of the time?” I ask, my hands wrapped around the railing. “Don’t tell me they just let this unit sit in a tube, unused. Do I work in a factory? Maybe I clean bathrooms. Maybe they rent me out for parties.”

“It doesn’t matter what the unit does,” Dad replies. He sounds muffled and thick, and far away. “I get you and we get this. It’s all I can offer you.”

“It’s not enough,” I whisper. Saline tears drip down my face. They didn’t mention tears in the selfie catalog, but apparently we can cry for ourselves and our families and for futures that will never be.

He comes up behind me and wraps his arms around my chest. “We won’t stop looking for a cure. One day you’ll wake up and I’ll be right there beside you. You’ll leave the hospital and resume your life and none of this will bother you.”

On the horizon, far over the ocean, the thin crescent of the waning moon is rising. Silver and distant and empty. Somewhere nearby, Carlos has already passed through a time tunnel to a future where he and Jessy have graduated school and moved on with their lives.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Dad,” I tell him.

The silver remote flashes in his hand. “I’ll never let you suffer.”

• • •

I open my eyes. Everything is dim. Standing by my bed is Dad and a man in a white coat. This looks like a hospital. Or maybe a lab. I’m in a bed. Or maybe on a hard table. I’m wearing a paper gown and underneath it, on my hip, is a tiny itch like a rash or a scab or a recent tattoo. My body feels blazing hot and icy cold, my mouth full of sand, my head full of strange, disjointed thoughts.

“As I said,” the man in the lab coat says. He’s a doctor or a technician. “Disorientation is normal.”

Dad bends close. He looks older than I remember, with silver sprinkled in his hair. “Susan, do you know who I am?”

Sure I do.

The more important question is, who am I? Real or selfie?

© 2014 by Sandra McDonald.

Four of Sandra McDonald’s stories have been noted on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and her collection Diana Comet and Other Impossible Stories was a Booklist Editor’s Choice and ALA Over the Rainbow book. She is the author of The Outback Stars series of SF adventures, the Fisher Key mysteries for GLBTQ young adults, and stories that have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Beyond Binary and War and Space: Recent Combat as well other magazines and anthologies. Once upon a time, she was Hollywood assistant who worked at CBS Television and Disney Studios. Visit her at http://www.sandramcdonald.com.

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Zero Temptation
Sean Williams

Picture the most perfect place on Earth. If it’s a deserted desert island, you’d be close. Blue sky, white sand, green palm trees, crystal water, gently sighing surf . . . Paradise, right?

Now picture yourself trapped there, with no way of escape.

It doesn’t take long for heaven to turn to hell.

• • •

“What do you mean, the booth’s not working?”

“I mean it’s not working. Don’t ask me why. It just isn’t.”

That’s Ronnie. My best friend, the science nerd. She got me into this, and now she’d better get me out of it.

“Can you fix it?”

“Not on my own, but VIA will help. Why don’t you go talk to the others?”

There are three people trapped here besides us—I was exaggerating about the island’s deserted-ness—but everything else is true. Just check my life-log. Paradise contains one and only one d-mat booth, and it’s broken.

“Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“Only because I need to concentrate.”

I want to tell her how that makes me feel worse than useless, but I wouldn’t want to distract her or anything.

“You don’t have to log that, Tash. There’s no need to describe everything.”

“If I don’t, how will anyone know what I’m feeling?”

This, I think, is the flaw in the whole life-logging thing. You can record everything: sight, sound, location, pulse, respiration, whatever you want. But it’s nothing without emotions. It’s just data.

Live it. Love it. Log it. That’s the slogan. But if you’re not actually loving it, what’s the point? It’s just a way of filling time I have too much of.

• • •

By now, word has reached friends back home. (There’s nothing wrong with our connection to the Air.) Clair and Libby call to express sympathy and, if I’m not mistaken, a small amount of amusement.

Libby: “So tell me how you got there, again?”

I explain, as I explained to my parents five minutes ago. Ronnie took me on a zero-degree latitude-jump to take my mind off the whole Miles thing. It seemed like a good idea. I mean, everyone with a friend like Ronnie knows that the Equator is the longest physical way around the Earth. What they don’t tell you is that it’s paradoxically one of the quickest lat-jumps around, because in terms of interesting stuff there’s not much in that band. No offence to anyone who lives there; that’s just the way it goes. There’s a volcano in Ecuador, where it actually snows. There’s the mouth of the Amazon. There’s a forest in Borneo. There’s the wreck of the Serbia seastead. And there’s Banaba Island, population normally zero, now five: Ronnie, me, some old guy and his granddaughter, and a woman with a shaved head who hasn’t said anything to anyone. At present, she’s building a sand castle.

“The booth just stopped working. No one knows why. We’re stuck here, maybe forever.”

“It’s only been an hour.”

Clair is trying to reassure me, and I know I shouldn’t be such a drama queen. But it’s not as if I haven’t had enough drama in my life lately.

“At least it’s taking your mind off things.”

She’s right about that. Being dumped by Miles really sucked, and it does help to put the bad things behind me. That includes the booth, I tell myself. The Stoics my Dad’s always quoting would tell me to worry about things I can change, not things outside my control.

Ronnie: “Where are you going?”

“For a walk along the beach. Might as well enjoy it while I’m here. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No, go right ahead. Don’t get lost.”

That makes me smile. Get lost where? I’ll probably go right around the island in five minutes.

But the island throws up a surprise by being bigger than I thought, and half an hour later I’m still walking.

• • •

I log details for posterity.

The temperature and humidity of the air. Wind speed and direction. A shell that looks like a miniature human ear. Several different species of palm and beach grass. A young blond god rising up out of the surf dressed in the tightest shorts I have ever seen. . . .

There are pictures, I know. I don’t have to describe him. But I need to. He’s so beautiful. Tight, wet curls. Jewel-like droplets clinging to his chest and shoulders. Eyes as blue as the sky. The fingers of his right hand straightening to wave. I’m logging even as I’m tasting the words on my tongue, imagining tasting him at the same time. Salt, I think. Miles who?

Wait. He’s waving at me.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he says, and his voice is all tree bark and honey, with perhaps a little smoke thrown in for good measure.

“Huh?”

I want to write sonnets and paint them on his skin with a sable brush, but for the moment that’s the best I can manage.

“What are we waiting for? Let’s get out of here.”

I’m about to swoon. Ronnie ruins everything.

“VIA says the booth isn’t broken. It’s been physically hacked. Someone sabotaged it, someone on the island.”

I think of the old guy and his granddaughter, and the bald woman with her sand castle. Population: six. Part of me dies a little.

“Gotcha,” I tell her. “Someone like this guy?”

There’s a flurry of semantic activity as everyone’s attention shifts to me. Suddenly I’m much more than a grouchy beachcomber best left to sulk alone.

“Keep him occupied,” says a peacekeeper from the other side of the world. “We’ll be there as soon as the booth is working again.”

“Take your time,” I want to tell them, but I’m not immune to the possibility that he’s a murderer as well as a saboteur. I’m acutely aware that I’m wearing a bikini top, a wrap, and not much else. But neither is he. I know he’s not packing anything more serious in his outfit than, uh, the usual.

I have to physically force myself to look away. My life log registers a blush. That word is seriously inadequate to express what I’m feeling.

• • •

Me: “I’m not who you think I am.”

Him: “Oh, shit.”

“Sorry.”

What am I saying? I’m not sorry. He sabotaged the booth and got me stuck on this crappy island. Beauty is no defense, although it does go some way towards ameliorating the task I have been given, to keep him busy before the PKs come to take him away.

“Are you a terrorist?”

He pulls a face that on anyone else would’ve looked ugly.

“Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you.”

“Is that a yes?”

“WHOLE is not a terrorist organization. We believe d-mat’s dangerous, that’s all.”

“Have you ever used it?”

“No.”

“So how do you know?”

He shrugs and the smooth dance of his pecs momentarily flatlines my brain.

“If you don’t use d-mat, how did you get here?”

“I parachuted in from an airship.”

“Yeah, right.”

“No, really.”

“And how were you planning to get away? Catapult?”

He glances behind him, at the curling lip of the endless ocean.

“A skiff. Someone was supposed to meet me here. A woman. Are you sure it’s not you?”

“Positive.”

“Shame.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“You know. Smile.”

“What’s wrong with smiling? I like your hair.”

It’s green that week. Is he flirting with me? God, please, no. I feel like the entire world is aware of what’s going on. But I can’t stop logging now. This probably counts as evidence. It might even be keeping me safe. If there really is a skiff (whatever that is) and another terrorist waiting nearby, my lenses and life log could be all that’s stopping me from being kidnapped or worse.

Live, log, and prosper. That’s the other slogan of the life-logging movement. I plan to do all three, for the immediate future.

“Let’s, uh, walk, shall we?”

“I’m supposed to wait here.”

“No point to that now. Your friends aren’t coming.”

“You walk, then, and I’ll stay to see what happens.”

“Maybe they were never coming at all. Maybe you were set up.”

For the first time, he looks uncertain.

“They wouldn’t do that.”

I feel sorry for him, then. He’s my age. He’s stuck in the middle of nowhere. He’s waiting for rescue, just like I am. Where’s the harm in being nice to him? The PKs are watching his every move, and I bet he’s as acutely aware of that as I am.

“All right. We’ll both wait.”

“Can I call you Natasha?”

I’m momentarily surprised, but being a d-mat skeptic doesn’t mean you’re a complete Luddite, even if your name is Darryl. He picked up my name from my public profile just as I picked up his.

“Tash. Don’t get any funny ideas.”

• • •

The sand is warm, even in the shade. I can feel it through my wrap. By wriggling my toes, I burrow down to cooler layers. He stretches out next to me, improbably lean and gorgeous. That’s when I notice.

“Hey, you’ve got six toes.”

He flexes his feet and I’ll admit I’m a little weirded out.

“You don’t like them? I inherited them from my mother.”

“And her mother before her?”

“No. She got them from d-mat. I’m lucky we have any toes at all. Or legs.”

I pffft automatically and he puts the offending phalanges away.

“Seriously, Tash. Things go wrong all the time. You don’t hear about them because VIA keeps them quiet.”

“You do so hear about mistakes. There was one last year, in Australia. Two people died.”

“Perfect infallibility is the very definition of implausibility. They let enough through to make it seem as though they’re telling the truth. But there are more mistakes than you dare imagine. People like Mum, swept under the rug and forgotten, as though they never existed.”

This sounds like an argument he’s learned by rote. He’s probably heard it all his life, and if it helps him make sense of his weird feet, I can’t begrudge him that. But he does a lot more than just believe weird stuff.

“How does sabotaging d-mat booths help?”

“I haven’t really damaged anything. Just put in a code or two to slow things down.”

Ronnie: “Ask him about the code.”

“Will you tell me the code?”

“Maybe later. What’s the hurry?”

“I told you to stop smiling like that.”

“I mean it: What’s the hurry? You rush around the world like there’s no time for anything. Do you ever stop to look around? There’s no crime in making you do that for a little while.”

“I’ve looked around, thanks. Desert islands are all right, but I wouldn’t want to live on one.”

“No one’s asking you to, Tash. I just want you to think about what you’re doing to yourself. Think about what those machines are doing to you. Doesn’t it bother you? Aren’t you worried about what could go wrong?”

“Weren’t you worried when you jumped out of that airship?”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“The parachute would either bring me safely down to earth or it wouldn’t. There was zero chance of it tearing me apart and building a copy that only thinks it’s me.”

Ronnie again: “Ask him again about that code.”

But I’m stung by his comment.

“I don’t think I’m me. I know I’m me, just like you knew you were you when you woke up this morning.”

“Sleeping is different to d-matting.”

“You think a lot of things are different when they’re actually the same.”

“How is waking up the same as being rebuilt from scratch?”

“Because it’s not about the atoms. It’s about what the atoms do. That’s how you can tell when someone’s asleep or when they’re awake. They’re exactly the same material, only one moment the person’s there and the next they’re not. That’s how d-mat works.”

“Not really, Tash.”

“Yes, really, only in reverse. Someone’s in transit, and then they’re there. There’s no tearing apart of anything, except what’s left behind.”

“But that was you. You were left behind.”

I punch him on the shoulder. “Feel that? That was me. I’m right here, all of me, and thanks to you I’m getting sunburnt. If you really cared, you’d have bought some lotion to put on me.”

That shuts him up. Plus, he’s gone a little pink, so I count that as a double victory.

Ronnie: “Tash, if he tells you that code, I can fix the booth more quickly.”

Yeah, I get it. I’m just enjoying the argument.

“Let’s not sit here squabbling all day. Give me the code and we’ll go our separate ways.”

He brightens, which dents my ego a little until he says, “I’ve got a better idea.”

“You have got sunscreen after all?”

“No. You could come with me.”

“Are you real?”

“Of course I’m real. The skiff will be here soon. Don’t you want to know what it feels like to be out on the open ocean, with the wind in your hair and the spray on your face?”

“That sounds uncomfortable.”

“It might be. I’ve never done it myself. But I want to try, and I think that’s important, don’t you? Isn’t getting somewhere just as important as being somewhere?”

I open my mouth, and then I close it again. I don’t know what to say to that. I could tell him that he’s wrong, except part of me is willing to admit that he has part of a point. That was the problem with Miles, if I’m really honest with myself. We were together by habit in the end, never really going anywhere and destined to be unhappy until one of us did something about the rut we were in. Which he did, and here I am now, sitting on a beach with the most handsome boy I’ve ever met.

I could tell the handsome boy that the skiff isn’t coming, that he’s not going anywhere just for the moment and that he might as well get used the idea, but then I see a dot out on the horizon, and he sees it too, and we both stand up as it gets larger and closer, resolving slowly into the top of a small boat that’s skimming the top of the low waves, barely touching the water in its haste to reach the beach. A woman with black hair is waving one hand above her head.

“That’s my ride.”

“Thanks, Mister Obvious.”

“And this is your last chance.”

We’re ignoring the boat, staring only at each other. The world will never know how tempted I am at this moment. My throat is so tight I can barely manage a monosyllable.

“Pass.”

“Okay. Your loss.”

Then he’s running down the beach, and I could write whole essays on his glutes. Literally on them.

“Hey! Wait up!”

I’m chasing him, not really expecting him to stop, but he does. He turns in a shower of sand, and I just about run into him. What happens next is completely unexpected. He grabs me and kisses me in front of the whole world, and for a second I don’t think at all. This wasn’t what I wanted. This is totally what I wanted.

I push him away.

“The code, you ass.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. It’s: VIA blows.”

He grins at me as he runs for the boat, and looks back over his shoulder no less than four times, as though making sure I won’t change my mind. Is he disappointed? I can’t tell. I feel like a fool, but I wave anyway.

Ronnie: “All’s fixed, Tash. The PKs are on their way.”

Too late, too soon. How often are you stuck on a desert island with a hot boy who turns out to be a terrorist?

Damn damn damn.

• • •

Ronnie is waiting for me at the booth when I return with my escort. The PKs met me coming the other way and walked me back, one on either side, as though guarding me. But the skiff is safely gone. I watched it skip back out to the horizon like a skimming stone, and vanish over the edge of the world.

The old guy and his granddaughter are still on the island. They’ve joined the bald chick and are making a giant sand sculpture that looks like it wants to be a whale. Or a rocket. The kid is in charge, so who really knows?

“Nice work, getting that code. Totally committed.”

Ronnie’s grin is sly, and I can’t tell whether she thinks I was faking the kiss or not. Best to keep her wondering.

“Do you think I’d make a great spy? I think I’d make a great spy.”

I am so over Miles right now. That’s the point I want recorded for posterity.

We link arms and jump to the next stop on our journey.

© 2013 by Sean Williams.

Originally published as a bonus story in the novel Twinmaker: Jump,

published by Allen & Unwin.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Sean Williams is a #1 New York Times-bestselling author with forty novels and eighty short stories under his belt, not to mention the odd odd poem. He writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror for adults, young adults, and children, and enjoys the occasional franchise, too, such as Star Wars and Doctor Who. Born in the dry, flat lands of South Australia, where he still lives with his wife and family, he is currently working on the Troubletwisters series with Garth Nix and a PhD exploring the trope of the matter transmitter. He is also the Overseas Regional Director of SFWA. This story is set in the world of Twinmaker, his first original SF novel in four years, out from HarperCollins in November 2013.

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Deep End
Nisi Shawl

The pool was supposed to be like freespace. Enough like it, anyway, to help Wayna acclimate to her download. She went in first thing every “morning,” as soon as Dr. Ops, the ship’s mind, awakened her. Too bad it wasn’t scheduled for later; all the slow, meat-based activities afterwards were a literal drag.

The voices of the pool’s other occupants boomed back and forth in an odd, uncontrolled manner, steel-born echoes muffling and exposing what was said. The temperature varied irregularly, warm intake jets competing with cold currents and, Wayna suspected, illicitly released urine. Overhead lights speckled the wall, the ceiling, the water, with a shifting, uneven glare.

Psyche Moth was a prison ship. Like all those on board, Wayna was an upload of a criminal’s mind. The process of uploading her mind had destroyed her physical body. Punishment. Then the ship, with Wayna and 248,961 other prisoners, set off on a long voyage to another star. During that voyage the prisoners’ minds had been cycled through consciousness: one year on, four years off. Of the eighty-seven years en route, Wayna had only lived through seventeen. Now she spent most of her time as meat.

Wayna’s jaw ached. She’d been clenching it, trying to amp up her sensory inputs. She paddled toward the deep end, consciously relaxing her useless facial muscles. When Psyche Moth had reached its goal and verified that the world it called Amends was colonizable, her group was the second downloaded into empty clones, right after the trustees. One of those had told her it was typical to translocate missing freespace controls to their meat analogs.

She swirled her arms back and forth, creating waves, making them run into one another.

Then the pain hit.

White! Heat! There, then gone—the lash of a whip.

Wayna stopped moving. Her suit held her up. She floated, waiting. Nothing else happened. Tentatively, she kicked and stroked her way to the steps rising from the pool’s shallows, nodding to those she passed. At the door to the showers, it hit her again: a shock of electricity slicing from right shoulder to left hip. She caught her breath and continued in.

The showers were empty. Wayna was the first one from her hour out of the pool, and it was too soon for the next hour to wake up. She turned on the water and stood in its welcome warmth. What was going on? She’d never felt anything like this, not that she could remember—and surely she wouldn’t have forgotten something so intense . . . She stripped off her suit and hung it to dry. Instead of dressing in her overall and reporting to the laundry, her next assignment, she retreated into her locker and linked with Dr. Ops.

In the sphere of freespace, his office always hovered in the northwest quadrant, about halfway up from the horizon. Doe, Wayna’s honeywoman, disliked this placement. Why pretend he was anything other than central to the whole setup, she asked. Why not put himself smack dab in the middle where he belonged? Doe distrusted Dr. Ops and everything about Psyche Moth. Wayna understood why. But there was nothing else. Not for eight light-years in any direction. According to Dr. Ops.

She swam into his pink-walled waiting room and eased her icon into a chair. That registered as a request for the AI’s attention. A couple of other prisoners were there ahead of her; one disappeared soon after she sat. A few more minutes by objective measure, and the other was gone as well. Then it was Wayna’s turn.

Dr. Ops presented as a lean-faced Caucasian man with a shock of mixed brown and blond hair. He wore an anachronistic headlamp and stethoscope and a gentle, kindly persona. “I have your readouts, of course, but why don’t you tell me what’s going on in your own words?”

He looked like he was listening. When she finished, he sat silent for a few seconds—much more time than he needed to consider what she’d said. Making an ostentatious display of his concern.

“There’s no sign of nerve damage,” he told her. “Nothing wrong with your spine or any of your articulation or musculature.”

“So then how come—”

“It’s probably nothing,” the AI said, interrupting her. “But just in case, let’s give you the rest of the day off. Take it easy—outside your locker, of course. I’ll clear your bunkroom for the next twenty-five hours. Lie down. Put in some face time with your friends.”

“‘Probably?’”

“I’ll let you know for sure tomorrow morning. Right now, relax. Doctor’s orders.” He smiled and logged her out. He could do that. It was his system.

Wayna tongued open her locker; no use staying in there without access to freespace. She put on her overall and walked up the corridor to her bunkroom. Fellow prisoners passed her heading the other way to the pool: no one she’d known back on Earth, no one she had gotten to know that well in freespace or since the download. Plenty of time for that onplanet. The woman with the curly red hair was called Robeson, she was pretty sure. They smiled at each other. Robeson walked hand in hand with a slender man whose mischievous smile reminded Wayna of Thad. It wasn’t him. Thad was scheduled for later download. Wayna was lucky to have Doe with her.

Another pain. Not so strong, this time. Strong enough, though. Sweat dampened her skin. She kept going, almost there.

There. Through the doorless opening she saw the mirror she hated, ordered up by one of the two women she timeshared with. It was only partly obscured by the genetics charts the other woman taped everywhere. Immersion learning. Even Wayna was absorbing something from it.

But not now. She lay on the bunk without looking at anything, eyes open. What was wrong with her?

Probably nothing.

Relax.

She did her body awareness exercises, tensing and loosening different muscle groups. She’d gotten as far as her knees when Doe walked in. Stood over her till Wayna focused on her honeywoman’s new face. “Sweetheart,” Doe said. Her pale fingers stroked Wayna’s face. “Dr. Ops told a trustee you wanted me.”

“No—I mean yes, but I didn’t ask—” Doe’s expression froze, flickered, froze again. “Don’t be—it’s so hard, can’t you just—” Wayna reached for and found both of Doe’s hands and held them. They felt cool and small and dry. She pressed them against her overall’s open V-neck and slid them beneath the fabric, forcing them to stroke her shoulders.

Making love to Doe in her download seemed like cheating. Wayna wondered what Thad’s clone would look like, and if they’d be able to travel to his group’s settlement to see him.

Anticipating agony, Wayna found herself hung up, nowhere near ecstasy. Doe pulled back and looked down at her, expecting an explanation. So Wayna had to tell her what little she knew.

“You! You weren’t going to say anything! Just let me hurt you—” Doe had zero tolerance for accidentally inflicting pain, the legacy of her marriage to a closeted masochist.

“It wouldn’t be anything you did! And I don’t know if—”

Doe tore aside the paper they had taped across the doorway for privacy. From her bunk, Wayna heard her raging along the corridor, slapping the walls.

Face time was over.

• • •

Taken off of her normal schedule, Wayna had no idea how to spend the rest of her day. Not lying down alone. Not after that. She tried, but she couldn’t.

Relax.

Ordinarily when her laundry shift was over, she was supposed to show up in the cafeteria and eat. Never one of her favorite activities, even back on Earth. She went there early, though, surveying the occupied tables. The same glaring lights hung from the ceiling here as in the pool, glinting off plastic plates and water glasses. The same confused noise, the sound of overlapping conversations. No sign of Doe.

She stood in line. The trustee in charge started to give her a hard time about not waiting for her usual lunch hour. He shut up suddenly; Dr. Ops must have tipped him a clue. Trustees were in constant contact with the ship’s mind—part of why Wayna hadn’t volunteered to be one.

Mashed potatoes. Honey mustard nuggets. Slaw. All freshly factured, filled with nutrients and the proper amount of fiber for this stage of her digestive tract’s maturation.

She sat at a table near the disposal dump. The redhead, Robeson, was there too, and a man—a different one than Wayna had seen her with before. Wayna introduced herself. She didn’t feel like talking, but listening was fine. The topic was the latest virch from the settlement site. She hadn’t done it yet.

This installment had been recorded by a botanist; lots of information on grass analogs and pollinating insects. “We know more about Jubilee than Psyche Moth,” Robeson said.

“Well, sure,” said the man. His name was Jawann. “Jubilee is where we’re going to live.”

“Psyche Moth is where we live now, where we’ve lived for the last eighty-seven years. We don’t know jack about this ship. Because Dr. Ops doesn’t want us to.”

“We know enough to realize we’d look stupid trying to attack him,” Wayna said. Even Doe admitted that. Dr. Ops’ hardware lay in Psyche Moth’s central section, along with the drive engine. A tether almost two kilometers long separated their living quarters from the AI’s physical components and any other mission-critical equipment they might damage. At the end of the tether, Wayna and the rest of the downloads swung faster and faster. They were like sand in a bucket, centrifugal force mimicking gravity and gradually building up to the level they’d experience on Amend’s surface, in Jubilee.

That was all they knew. All Dr. Ops thought they needed to know.

“Who said anything about an attack?” Robeson frowned.

“No one.” Wayna was suddenly sorry she’d spoken. “All I mean is, his only motive in telling us anything was to prevent that from happening.” She spooned some nuggets onto her mashed potatoes and shoved them into her mouth so she wouldn’t say any more.

“You think he’s lying?” Jawann asked. Wayna shook her head no.

“He could if he wanted. How would we find out?”

The slaw was too sweet; not enough contrast with the nuggets. Not peppery, like what Aunt Nono used to make.

“Why would we want to find out? We’ll be on our own ground, in Jubilee, soon enough.” Four weeks; twenty days by Psyche Moth’s rationalized calendar.

“With trustees to watch us all the time, everywhere we go, and this ship hanging in orbit right over our heads.” Robeson sounded as suspicious as Doe; Jawann as placatory as Wayna tried to be in their identical arguments. Thad usually came across as neutral, controlled, the way you could be out of your meat.

“So? They’re not going to hurt us after they brought us all this way. At least, they won’t want to hurt our bodies.”

Because their bodies came from, were copies of, the people they’d rebelled against. The rich. The politically powerful.

But Wayna’s body was hers. No one else owned it, no matter who her clone’s cells started off with. Hers, no matter how different it looked from the one she was born with. How white.

Hers to take care of. Early on in her training she’d decided that. How else could she be serious about her exercises? Why else would she bother?

This was her body. She’d earned it.

Jawann and Robeson were done; they’d started eating before her and now they were leaving. She swallowed quickly. “Wait—I wanted to ask—” They stopped and she stood up to follow them, taking her half-full plate. “Either of you have any medical training?”

They knew someone, a man called Unique, a nurse when he’d lived on Earth. Here he worked in the factury, quality control. Wayna would have to go back to her bunkroom until he got off and could come see her. She left Doe a message on the board by the cafeteria’s entrance, an apology. Faceup on her bed, Wayna concentrated fiercely on the muscle groups she’d skipped earlier. A trustee came by to check on her and seemed satisfied to find her lying down, everything in line with her remote readings. He acted as if she should be flattered by the extra attention. “Dr. Ops will be in touch first thing tomorrow,” he promised as he left.

“Ooo baby,” she said softly to herself, and went on with what she’d been doing.

A little later, for no reason she knew of, she looked up at her doorway. The man that had held Robeson’s hand that morning stood there as if this was where he’d always been. “Hi. Do I have the right place? You’re Wayna?”

“Unique?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on in.” She swung her feet to the floor and patted a place beside her on the bed. He sat closer than she’d expected, closer than she was used to. Maybe that meant he’d been born Hispanic or Middle Eastern. Or maybe not.

“Robeson said you had some sort of problem to ask me about. So—of course I don’t have any equipment, but if I can help in any way, I will.”

She told him what had happened, feeling foolish all of a sudden. There’d only been those three times, nothing more since seeing Dr. Ops.

“Lie on your stomach,” he said. Through the fabric, firm fingers pressed on either side of her spine, from midback to her skull, then down again to her tailbone. “Turn over, please. Bend your knees. All right if I take off your shoes?” He stroked the soles of her feet, had her push them against his hands in different directions. His touch, his resistance to her pressure, reassured her. What she was going through was real. It mattered.

He asked her how she slept, what she massed, if she was always thirsty, other things. He finished his questions and walked back and forth in her room, glancing often in her direction. She sat again, hugging herself. If Doe came in now, she’d know Wayna wanted him.

Unique quit his pacing and faced her, his eyes steady. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” he said. “You’re not the only one, though. There’s a hundred and fifty others that I’ve seen or heard of experiencing major problems—circulatory, muscular, digestive. Some even have the same symptoms you do.”

“What is it?” Wayna asked stupidly.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” he repeated. “If I had a lab—I’ll set one up in Jubilee—call it neuropathy, but I don’t know for sure what’s causing it.”

“Neuropathy?”

“Means nerve problems.”

“But Dr. Ops told me my nerves were fine . . .” No response to that.

“If we were on Earth, what would you think?”

He compressed his already thin lips. “Most likely possibility, some kind of thyroid problem. Or—but what it would be elsewhere, that’s irrelevant. You’re here, and it’s the numbers involved that concern me, though superficially the cases seem unrelated.

“One hundred and fifty of you out of the Jubilee group with what might be germ plasm disorders; one hundred fifty out of 20,000. At least one hundred fifty; take under-reporting into account and there’s probably more. Too many. They would have screened foetuses for irregularities before shipping them out.”

“Well, what should I do then?”

“Get Dr. Ops to give you a new clone.”

“But—”

“This one’s damaged. If you train intensely, you’ll make up the lost time and go down to Jubilee with the rest of us.”

Or she might be able to delay and wind up part of Thad’s settlement instead.

As if he’d heard her thought, Unique added “I wouldn’t wait, if I were you. I’d ask for—no, demand another body—now. Soon as you can.”

“Because?”

“Because your chances of a decent one will just get worse, if this is a radiation-induced mutation. Which I have absolutely no proof of. But if it is.”

• • •

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and there we wept . . .” The pool reflected music, voices vaulting upward off the water, outward to the walls of white-painted steel. Unlike yesterday, the words were clear, because everyone was saying the same thing. Singing the same thing. “For the wicked carried us away . . .” Wayna wondered why the trustee in charge had chosen this song. Of course he was a prisoner, too.

The impromptu choir sounded more soulful than it looked. If the personalities of these clones’ originals had been in charge, what would they be singing now? The “Doxology”? “Bringing in the Sheaves”? Did Episcopalians even have hymns?

Focusing on the physical, Wayna scanned her body for symptoms. So far this morning, she’d felt nothing unusual. Carefully, slowly, she swept the satiny surface with her arms, raising a tapering wave. She worked her legs, shooting backwards like a squid, away from the shallows and most of the other swimmers. Would sex underwater be as good as it was in freespace? No; you’d be constantly coming up for breath. Instead of constantly coming . . . Last night, Doe had forgiven her, and they’d gone to Thad together. And everything was fine until they started fighting again. It hadn’t been her fault. Or Doe’s, either.

They told Thad about Wayna’s pains, and how Unique thought she should ask for another clone. “Why do you want to download at all?” he asked. “Stay in here with me.”

“Until you do? But if—”

“Until I don’t. I wasn’t sure I wanted to anyway. Now it sounds so much more inviting. ‘Defective body?’ ‘Don’t mind if I do.’” Thad’s icon got up from their bed to mimic unctuous host and vivacious guest. “‘And, oh, you’re serving that on a totally unexplored and no doubt dangerous new planet? I just adore totally—’”

“Stop it!” Wayna hated it when he acted that way, faking that he was a flamer. She hooked him by one knee and pulled him down, putting her hand over his mouth. She meant it as a joke; they ought to have ended up wrestling, rolling around, having fun, having more sex. Thad didn’t respond, though. Not even when Wayna tickled him under his arms. He had amped down his input.

“Look,” he said. “I went through our ‘voluntary agreement.’ We did our part by letting them bring us here.”

Doe propped herself up on both elbows. She had huge nipples, not like the ones on her clone’s breasts. “You’re really serious.”

“Yes. I really am.”

“Why?” asked Wayna. She answered herself: “Dr. Ops won’t let you download into a woman. Will he.”

“Probably not. I haven’t even asked.”

Doe said “Then what is it? We were going to be together, at least on the same world. All we went through and you’re just throwing it away—”

“Together to do what? To bear our enemies’ children, that’s what, we nothing but a bunch of glorified mammies, girl, don’t you get it? Remote-control units for their immortality investments, protection for their precious genetic material. Cheaper than your average AI, no benefits, no union, no personnel manager. Mammies.”

“Not mammies,” Doe said slowly. “I see what you’re saying, but we’re more like incubators, if you think about it. Or petri dishes—inoculated with their DNA. Except they’re back on Earth; they won’t be around to see the results of their experiment.”

“Don’t need to be. They got Dr. Ops to report back.”

“Once we’re on Amends,” Wayna said, “no one can make us have kids or do anything we don’t want.”

“You think. Besides, they won’t have to make people reproduce. It’s a basic drive.”

“Of the meat.” Doe nodded. “Okay. Point granted, Wayna?” She sank down again, resting her head on her crossed arms.

No one said anything for awhile. The jazz Thad liked to listen to filled the silence: smooth horns, rough drums, discreet bass.

“Well, what’ll you do if you stay in here?” Doe asked. “What’ll Dr. Ops do? Turn you off? Log you out permanently? Put your processors on half power?”

“Don’t think so. He’s an AI. He’ll stick to the rules.”

“Whatever those are,” said Wayna.

“I’ll find out.”

She had logged off then, withdrawn to sleep in her bunkroom, expecting Doe to join her. She’d wakened alone, a note from Dr. Ops on the mirror, which normally she would have missed. Normally she avoided the mirror, but not this morning. She’d studied her face, noting the narrow nose, the light, stubby lashes around eyes an indeterminate color she guessed could be called grey. Whose face had this been? A senator’s? A favorite secretary’s?

Hers, now. For how long?

Floating upright in the deep end, she glanced at her arms. They were covered with blond hairs that the water washed into rippled patterns. Her small breasts mounded high here in the pool, buoyant with fat.

Would the replacement be better-looking, or worse?

Wayna turned to see the clock on the wall behind her. Ten. Time to get out and get ready for her appointment.

• • •

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Wayna.” Dr. Ops looked harassed and faintly ashamed. He hadn’t been able to tell her anything about the pains. He acted like they weren’t important; he’d even hinted she might be making them up just to get a different body. “You’re not the first to ask, you know. One per person, that’s all. That’s it.”

Thad’s right, Wayna thought to herself. AIs stick to the rules. He could improvise, but he won’t.

“Why?” Always a good question.

“We didn’t bring a bunch of extra bodies, Wayna,” Dr. Ops said.

“Well, why not?” Another excellent question. “You should have,” she went on. “What if there was an emergency, an epidemic?”

“There’s enough for that—”

“I know someone who’s not going to use theirs. Give it to me.”

“You must mean Thad.” Dr. Ops frowned. “That would be a man’s body. Our charter doesn’t allow transgender downloads.”

Wayna counted in twelves under her breath, closing her eyes so long she almost logged off.

“Who’s to know?” Her voice was too loud, and her jaw hurt. She’d been clenching it tight, forgetting it would amp up her inputs. Download settings had apparently become her default overnight.

“Never mind. You’re not going to give me a second body. I can’t make you.”

“I thought you’d understand.” He smiled and hunched his shoulders. “I am sorry.”

Swimming through freespace to her locker, she was sure Dr. Ops didn’t know what sorry was. She wondered if he ever would.

Meanwhile.

• • •

She never saw Doe again outside freespace. There’d still be two of them together—just not the two they’d assumed.

She had other attacks, some mild, some much stronger than the first. Massage helped, and keeping still, and moving. She met prisoners who had similar symptoms, and they traded tips and theories about what was wrong with them.

Doe kept telling her that if she wanted to be without pain, she should simply stay in freespace. After awhile, Wayna did more and more virches and spent less and less time with her lovers.

Jubilee lay in Amends’ Northern latitudes, high on a curving peninsula, in the rain shadow of old, gentle mountains. Bright-skinned, tree-dwelling amphibians inhabited the mountain passes, their trilling cries rising and falling like loud orgasms whenever Wayna took her favorite tour.

And then there were the instructional virches, building on what they’d learned in their freespace classes. Her specialty, fiber tech, became suddenly fascinating: baskets, nets, ropes, cloth, paper—so much to learn, so little time.

The day before planetfall, she went for one last swim in the pool. It was deserted, awaiting the next settlement group. It would never be as full of prisoners again; Thad and Doe weren’t the only ones opting out of their downloads.

There was plenty of open freshwater on Amends: a large lake not far from Jubilee, and rivers even closer. She peered down past her dangling feet at the pool’s white bottom. Nothing to see there. Never had been; never would be.

She had lunch with Robeson, Unique, and Jawann. As Dr. Ops recommended, they skipped dinner.

She didn’t try to say goodbye. She didn’t sleep alone.

And then it was morning and they were walking into one of Psyche Moth’s landing units, underbuckets held to the pool’s bottom, to its outside, by retractable bolts, and Dr. Ops unlocked them and they were free, flying, falling, down, down, down, out of the black and into the blue, the green, the thousand colors of their new home.

© 2004 by Nisi Shawl.

Originally published in So Long Been Dreaming,

edited by Uppinder Mehan and Nalo Hopkinson.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Nisi Shawl’s story collection Filter House, lauded by Ursula K. Le Guin as “superb,” and by Samuel R. Delany as “simply amazing,” won the 2008 James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Shawl is the coauthor of Writing the Other, a guide to developing characters of varying racial, religious, and sexual backgrounds, and one of the founding members of the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the representation of people of color in the fantastic genres. She is Reviews Editor for new literary quarterly The Cascadia Subduction Zone, editor of Aqueduct Press’s WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity, and a coeditor of Strange Matings: Octavia E. Butler, Feminism, Science Fiction, and African American Voices, forthcoming from Seven Stories. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. In May 2011 she was the Guest of Honor of the feminist science fiction convention WisCon. Shawl blogs at http://nisi-la.livejournal.com.

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FANTASY

Willful Weapon
Fred Van Lente

The torch of the Statue of Liberty blazed with an unearthly light. The steamship lumbered through the retina-stinging nimbus which draped the colossal lady and her fortress pedestal in a luminescent haze. Cellach mac Rath crowded with the rest of the bedraggled masses on the deck and watched his destiny loom ever closer: the towers of Manhattan, garlanded with gargoyles and lit with the fires of a million lanterns. Turgid clouds of dragon-towed airships docked at skyscrapers’ spires. It was like being slowly ejected from a golden womb of dreams, comforting but vague, into a stark, unknown reality.

He wondered if Ma and Da’s generation had experienced the same feeling, when the Awakening blew the tops off the Hollow Hills, expelling the Tuatha de Danaan from the gleaming paragon cities of the Otherworld into damp, drab Eiru. And now, as a result of an injustice so unspeakable his mind recoiled from the thought of it, he had escaped from Eiru for freedom on an even farther shore.

The steamship docked at Ellis Island and the newcomers surged into a spired sandstone castle and its cavernous Registry Room. From the ceiling hung a pair of enormous American flags that could have been used as topsails. A healer with a white robe and impossibly cold hands made him open his mouth so she could send her familiars inside. The luminescent insect-sprites flitted into his insides and danced around his eyeballs, then flew to their mistress’s ear and proclaimed him in good health in their whispery cant, or at least they must have, because the healer’s thumb jerked him toward the line for the immigration clerks. A hulking ogre from Brest behind him was not so lucky, and struggled with the guards as they hauled him toward Quarantine, accused of some sort of fungal infection.

“Next! C’mon, Irish, voyage not long enough for you? Let’s go.” A clerk with grey muttonchops urged him forward with a hand.

His golden eyes flashed. “Not Irish. Sidhe.”

“Oh? Take the hat off, let me see the ears.” The clerk groaned when he saw the tips sticking out from Cellach’s long flaxen hair. “Great, another one.”

“What does that mean?” The familiar fire ignited in him, the one that he was old enough to recognize but too young to control.

“Nothing.” The clerk turned his bifocals to the processing card on the lectern before him. “Name?”

“Cellach mac Rath.”

“Kellogg?”

“Cell. Lack.”

“Age?”

“I have counted one hundred and thirty-seven summers.”

“A spring chicken. Good for you. Destination?”

“The Glass Castle, it is in—”

“Five Points.” The clerk peered meaningfully at Cellach over his glasses in a way the Sidhe did not understand. “I have heard of it. I won’t bother asking ‘Occupation,’ then.”

He stamped the card and handed it back to Cellach. “Okey-doke, welcome to America, Kellogg. Santa’s Workshop is three thousand miles that way. Better start walking now, or you’ll never make it.”

“What? Who is this Santa?”

“Next?” The clerk waved forward the Peloponnesian kobold in line behind him. “Let’s go, scaly.”

The surge of newcomers dismissed from other lines and moving toward the wide, inviting doors beyond caught up Cellach in their mass and carried him toward the exit. But he looked down at the transit card and saw the name registered at top: “Kellogg McRoss.” He turned and pushed his way through the horde back to the clerk, his broad shoulders and sinewy arms knocking down an arriving Russian grandmother by accident. He grabbed the clerk by the shoulder of his uniform and shook.

“This is not my name,” he said.

“So?” the clerk said, eyes flashing in anger the way landlord Sliney’s had when he caught Cellach in his daughter’s room, between his daughter’s legs.

“Clan mac Rath of shining Gorias has nobly served the High King Bres against the Fomor since the Second Battle of Moytura. It is an honorable name and by the oldest tree in oldest wood, you will not take it from me.”

Cellach’s voice became a growl and his eyes turned the color of molten steel and the clerk’s face now looked like Sliney’s after the landlord struck him with an iron shovel from the hearth and the familiar fire burned away every tether on his self control and he walked across the room bare-ass naked and tore Sliney’s windpipe out through the front of his throat.

“Kinsman!” A Sidhe he had never seen before suddenly interposed himself between Cellach and the clerk, pulling him away just as his hand reached for the man’s neck. Turning to the pale, saucer-eyed human he said, “Forgive me, I know visitors are supposed to wait outside, but I could not resist, as soon as I saw him—it’s been almost a century since he laid eyes on me last! Cousin!”

He embraced Cellach with both arms, then stuffed a wad of folded-up bills into the front pocket of the petrified clerk’s uniform. “Thank you so much for your assistance in arranging this happy reunion, my friend.”

The Sidhe took Cellach by the arm and steered him to the exit. “I do not know you,” Cellach said.

“My name is Annwn, nice to meet you, now shut the fuck up.” His thin, stringy hair barely covered his pate, which barely reached to Cellach’s shoulder. He had a potbelly. It occurred to Cellach that he had never seen a fat Sidhe before. “Per arrangement with your kin in Eiru, I am taking you to the chieftain of the Glass Castle.”

“Is that Santa?”

Annwn stopped and looked at him.

“No,” he said. “It’s not Santa.”

• • •

Glass castles were common enough in the Otherworld, but the one on the Lower East Side was the only of its kind in North America. Its smoky green bulk could be seen oppressing the skyline anywhere in the city, rising out of the vortex of Five Points, the central orifice into which all human refuse and refuse humanity of New York poured.

Much to Cellach’s surprise, its chieftain was a twelve-foot tall Fomor, red-eyed and wattle-skinned, wearing pin-striped pants and a lanyard. At a table at the far end of the Glass Castle’s uppermost common room he sat devouring what appeared to have been a calf, back when it had skin. Instead of a left hand, a thick bone jutted from the stump at his wrist; this he used to spear the calf squishily in the ribs and hold it in place while his right hand sawed off strips of moist flesh with a cleaver. Cellach could not tell if the bone spear was an old injury made practicable or the singular deformity unique to each member of the Fomor race.

When Annwn presented the new arrival to his boss, the half-dozen Sidhe and Fomor youths lounging around with whores in their laps roused from lethargy into something not quite resembling interest. Dalbor og Fomor swiveled one eye up at him for half a second before returning it to his butchery.

“That doe-like look of surprise on your face?” he said, circling the air with the cleaver. “In New York it will be lethal to you. Learn to hide it if you cannot banish it entirely, which is better. In the Otherworld, you were Sidhe and I was Fomor, and we were always at war.

“Here? You are an elf. And I am a troll. These American cunts cannot be bothered to learn the right name for anything. They still call their own natives ‘Indians,’ for Mab’s sake.”

He upended a fifth of whiskey into his razor-lined maw and slammed the empty bottle down on the table. “And most importantly, you only war with who I tell you to. Because I own you now.”

Dalbor og Fomor nodded at Annwn, who underhanded Cellach’s rucksack at the gang. He had thought the fat elf had taken it from him in a show of hospitality; now his face burned with shame at his naïveté as the greasy youths pulled it apart like wolves on a rabbit, parceling away his fine clothes and the wooden flute he had amused himself with on the long voyage. They fell to fighting over the golden torc his mother had given him, with five fine small emeralds set in each rosebud point.

Annwn managed to hold him back from the redistribution of his possessions until the torc appeared, but at the sight of it, Cellach broke free and knocked the others down in a whirlwind of fury until he held the neck ring in his hands. “This is a clan heirloom and none but I have the right to—”

“Right?” Dalbor closed his pincers around the ring and yanked him off the ground so violently his grip loosened and he dropped to his knees on the floor. “I give rights. I take them away. You killed a human. All County Cork was mad for your blood. We wanted nothing to do with you. You were too hot. But your mother begged. She begged. The things she said she would do . . .” He clucked his purple tongue. “We almost took her up on a few of them, but no. Instead, we took pity. Got you false papers. Booked you passage. These things cost money. Money you now owe. One hundred dollars.”

“This?” He admired the torc and its green stones. “This has maybe . . . five dollars’ worth of gold-plating. But see? It has five points. I am the chieftain of Five Points.”

He shoved the ring down the front of his trousers. “And it fits so nice and snug around my cock.” His underlings bayed with laughter.

No sooner had Cellach staggered to his feet than Dalbor began pushing him back with the tip of his bone-spear hand. “How shall you pay me back, that is the question.” His footsteps made the tankards tremble on the tabletops. “Trials will determine this, as is the ancient custom of our people.”

Cellach bumped up against a waist-high railing. He looked down into a pit of blood-streaked mud.

“Killers, them I can use. They get paid the best and take the least shit. But killing an old man because you can’t keep your dick out of the local humans? You’re going to have to do better than that, me boyo.”

“He wasn’t old,” Cellach said.

“What?”

“Landlord Sliney was in the—the prime of his life.”

“My fucking hero,” Dalbor sneered. “Then you shouldn’t have a thing to worry about.”

Cellach glanced down into the pit, then at the Fomor. “Am I to be unarmed?”

Dalbor grunted, strode back to his table, picked up the empty whiskey bottle by its neck and underhanded it into Cellach’s arms.

“Congratulations,” he said, “you’re armed.”

He then slammed the flat of his great-nailed rhinoceros foot into the middle of Cellach’s chest, shattering the bottle against it and sending the Sidhe spinning head over heels into the pit.

He landed with a crash and a splash of mud, knocking the wind out of him. On the far end of the pit, a wooden gate rattled open and out rushed a naked creature with a spiked mace raised high over his helmet. Cellach just managed to roll to the side before the blow landed. A shard of the bottle glass that had fallen with him jammed deep in his hip, and his blood spilled freely.

Agony seared through the wound as he tried to stand up. The wild man screamed his awful piercing scream and swung the mace up right below Cellach’s ribs, the spikes digging into his ribs and lifting him off his feet. He crashed into the wooden bars of the cage that encircled them and the assembled whores and killers bellowed out a single cry on impact, drowning out his own.

On his back, he could see his assailant was a human, near-purple with old scars and an elaborate eagle tattoo with a wingspan touching his nipples. It marked him as a member of the White League, a nativist, anti-immigrant society that specialized in terrorizing nonhumans. Dalbor’s gang must have captured him and impressed him into gladiatorial service as his one slim chance for survival. A bullet-shaped helmet had been screwed around his head and through its faceplate all Cellach could see was hair and madness.

The White Leaguer swung the mace over his head with two hands and brought it down with another piercing war cry, but the Triple Goddesses took pity on Cellach: The wild man had misjudged his swing and slammed the spikes into the wood of the cage directly above.

The Sidhe kicked forward with his one good leg and knocked the White Leaguer back. Then he launched to his feet and removed the mace with a single hand and swung it at the human’s head. The blow glanced off the dented helmet and rang through the Glass Castle like a church bell that for a moment drowned out the bloodlust of the crowd. The White Leaguer simply spun around and showed Cellach his smile, and then he was under Cellach’s next swing, driving the elf to the ground.

The mace flew out of Cellach’s hand and the man’s hands closed around the Sidhe’s throat and he was stronger, much stronger than he looked and Cellach couldn’t get any purchase to thrust back in the sucking mud and just as the darkness began to creep in at the edge of his vision, he remembered the glass shard in his hip and he yanked it out and jammed it upward and into the man’s armpit.

He would never know if he struck the vital artery there by luck or subconscious design, but the hot spray of the White Leaguer’s blood jetting in his face let him know it was there. The Leaguer himself instantly knew the wound was mortal. He fumbled off Cellach and staggered from one side of the cage to the other, begging and moaning for help without words—for his tongue had long since been cut out—but the mob just heaped their final curses of contempt on him as he fell to his knees, then to his side, then expired before their eyes.

The gate rattled open again, this time admitting Dalbor, who strode over and hauled Cellach, muddy and bloody, to his feet.

“Ladies and scum,” he crowed, thrusting Cellach’s hand skyward, “I give you the next member of our noble brotherhood! I give you—the next Willful Weapon!”

The crowd nearly knocked him down again with its roar.

• • •

And so Cellach had a roof over his head, an ample supply of food and spirits, and a reason to wake every day, which was more than he could have said for the better part of the past year. It rankled his pride, if not his conscience, to earn his keep as a low-level thug, marauding the alleys and grog shops and oyster cellars, putting the fear of Dalbor in the various pimps, opium pushers, and cut-purses: Goblins who worked as Panel Boys, hiding below the floorboards of brothels and scurrying in unseen to relieve men’s pockets of their valuables with their pants hung around their ankles. The cantrippers who put tourists to sleep with minor magery and literally stole the shirt off their backs. The wisps who slipped through the cracks of locked second story windows and walked out the front door with whatever valuables they could carry. They all paid a tax on their take to the Willful Weapons for the freedom of operating freely in Five Points, and every penny squeezed beyond his required collections dripped into the easing of his own debt. Desperate for his parents to be free of Dalbor’s agents back home, Cellach performed his duties with aplomb.

He also had comrades, if not friends, with which to drink grog in the shade of the enormous ash tree that twisted out of the ground in the center of the Glass Castle’s public room and reached its gnarled branches towards the dingy sunlight that glommed through the translucent walls.

“Will you look at that?” Annwn said one day, head cocked at a table beneath one branch. An old human in tattered robes gripped a half-full stein with both hands and rested his forehead in a puddle of beer on the tabletop. “He thinks we’re a flophouse.”

Cellach felt all eyes fall on him, the newcomer. Everything was still a test for him. Maybe this was the final time he had to prove himself. He sauntered over with a sigh.

“Hey. You. Human.” Cellach kicked the legs of the drunk’s chair, jarring his face off the tabletop. “This place became an elf and troll bar while you were asleep. Maybe it’s time to be moving on to a place where your kind are more welcome, eh?”

He looked back at Annwn and the others. The Willful Weapons raised their steins and laughed, but not, he realized, to his benefit, but more in his general direction. His suspicions aroused, he turned back to the old man, but not soon enough to escape when the drunk suddenly lashed out and grabbed the Sidhe’s wrist. Despite his superior strength, Cellach could not pull away from the man’s “eyes”—really, the sockets where his eyes would be—and saw the twisting tendrils of an infant tree growing out each of them.

“Cellach mac Rath,” the human said, somehow, even though his lips did not move in the correct shapes to form his name, his true name, which he had not heard since the Ellis Island clerk had robbed him of it.

“Let—let go of me,” he said, struggling to free himself, his mouth so dry he could barely get the words out. His pulse throbbed in terror, almost drowning out the laughter of Annwn and his dogs behind him.

“Cellach mac Rath will only be killed by the woman who loves him, and whom he loves in return.” Again, he heard the words, the old man’s mouth moved, but the one did not match the other.

The rummy let go of his wrist, and he stumbled back flat on his ass. The Willful Weapons laughingly hauled Cellach to his feet, but their japes and insults were lost on him. All he could think about were the drunk’s words: “Cellach mac Rath will only be killed by the woman who loves him, and whom he loves in return.” He knew exactly what they meant: This was his geis, a prophecy and an omen and a taboo all wrapped into one, a commandment of his fate woven into the fabric of the universe. The great warrior Cúchulainn, whom some whispered was half-Sidhe, was told never to eat food offered by a woman; the Scottish usurper Mac Beth was told he would never be killed by a man born of woman. But the rules of hospitality forced Cúchulainn to accept dog meat offered by a hag, and Mac Beth was besieged by a man prematurely cut from his mother’s womb: Both met their untimely ends, high princes though they were. Cellach mac Rath shivered with the chill of looking into his own grave.

“Sorry about that, Kellogg, that was a nasty trick,” Annwn said with what appeared to be genuine remorse when he saw how ashen Cellach’s face was. He watched the old man grab the stein and dump it down his hairy maw before dropping his nose into his crossed arms once more.

“Who—what is that creature?”

Annwn shrugged. “Not so sure. He just showed up one day. And I mean, ‘just showed up.’ Dalbor threw him out, and he’d reappear every time. Funny thing is, no one’s seen him enter. We walk in and he’s slumped at that table. Even after Dalbor had his head cut off and smashed to little pieces and fed to Rhys’s hogs down on Baxter. When he came back after that, Dalbor decided to leave well enough alone. He’s connected to the tree in the middle of the castle, I’ll wager you that.”

“What’s his name?”

“Never asked.” Annwn downed his own stein. “We call him the Drunk Druid.”

• • •

The Drunk Druid’s words cast a shadow over Cellach’s heart. Whenever other thoughts did not command his immediate attention, the despair of never truly loving without fear of death fell over his mind and stubbornly refused to be moved.

He first staved off fatality by giving up on any genuine emotion and throwing himself whole-heartedly into sex. Prostitutes were everywhere in Five Points, and the uppermost levels of the Glass Castle offered Sidhe, human, and, for the outré taste, Fomor wenches in various states of undress, bosoms heaving out of their corsets, laced-stocking legs easily stretched languidly over their heads.

“Humans prefer Sidhe and Sidhe prefer mirrors,” so the cynical American saying went—it did not take Cellach long to understand that that was where much of the immigration clerk’s hostility came from, human men’s inability to compete with elves for their own women—and many of the human whores welcomed Cellach into their beds in off-hours for free, entranced by his long blond hair, his perfect tush, his corded chest, his ample cock, like he had been crafted by an artist just for their specific pleasure. He loved them for hours, and never tired, and never refused them a thing, and never left them anything but gasping and satisfied.

Once, emerging from a pleasantly shagged-out doxy’s crib buttoning his trousers, he came upon a lovely vision in a peach-colored gown struggling with a man he had seen malingering around the Glass Castle before. He was a drunk and a villain, half Sidhe, who whored out his own mongrel daughter from time to time, a girl no older than ten who now cowered behind the woman’s skirt. The woman he knew as a reformer from the House of Charitable Healing overlooking Paradise Square, a rich uptown lass with high cheekbones and almond eyes and skin the color of coffee to which a spoonful of milk had been added.

The pimp father was about to lay hands on her when Cellach spun him around and slapped him hard across the face.

“If you were a man, I’d punch you like man,” he said. “But you’re a cunt. Cunts get slapped.”

The half-breed wasn’t sufficiently impressed. He lunged for Cellach with a growl, so the purebred Sidhe grabbed him by the neck and swung him over the nearby railing, dangling him over the table and chairs below, kicking and gasping.

“You like to fight women, do you?” the pureblooded Sidhe snarled. “That was just practice for me.”

“That—that meddling bitch is trying to take me own flesh and blood!” he sputtered.

Cellach looked to the reformer, chest still out and chin still up, who said, “This man just broke a glass on this child’s head because he thought she was holding out on him. I have been seeing him treat her like this for months and I have had enough of it, sir! I’ve had enough of it, I don’t care what you or anyone else in this filthy place has to say about it! I am taking her where she can get a hot meal and a warm bed and regain at least some small part of her innocence.”

The Willing Weapon looked to the struggling man. “She was holding out on me!” the pimp roared. “She’s taken to bed six times, and there’s only five rolls’ worth in her pocket!”

“You fight little girls, too? I was wrong—you’re not quite ready for me.” Cellach let the man drop. He splintered the wood of a table and the bones in his legs with a crash that even made the Drunk Druid look up from his stupor to see what was going on. “Once you’ve beat a few of your fellow cripples come back to me!”

“Thank you for your help, sir.” There was a glow in her eyes that warmed him in a way he had not known for some time. Maybe in forever.

“It was nothing. That one—got on my nerves anyway. I am Cellach.” He doffed his hat. “At your service.”

“My name is Dominique. There is a nobility in you not often found in the Glass Castle, Cellach.” His name. She said his name correctly. “Please—call on me at the House of Charity some time.”

“I may at that. Thank you, miss.”

She smiled and led the child away by a hand, the crowd of tarts and ruffians parting for her like an angelic visitation. As he watched her go, Cellach felt the sting of the Drunk Druid’s geis ease, and thought here, at last, was one he could love from afar, deep in his heart, and if he never spoke the feeling aloud, perhaps he could keep it a secret, even from Fate.

Annwn broke the spell with a hard stare. “What do you think you’re doing, me boyo? Huh? That there was Sean. Sean and his girl were good earners. For me.”

“You saw how he was acting, that piece of shit—”

“Look around you!” Annwn hissed. “If we ran off every piece of shit in this place, there’d be no one left but the fucking tree. The do-gooder? Her I have to tolerate because of who her father is. You? Oh, me boyo, you are a different story. You’re gonna be paying the missing cut of what Sean owes me, to me, every week on top of the debt to Dalbor you already got.” He jabbed Annwn repeatedly in the chest. “You hear me?”

Cellach shrugged defiantly. “Sure. What do I care? I’ll pay whatever pennies the girl brings in.”

“Idiot.” Annwn slapped him upside the head. “The uptown reformers, they’re living off fortunes stolen before they were born. If you wanna play the hero, you’re gonna have to pay for the privilege.”

“All right! I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just use your fucking head once in a while. Goddesses!”

“Kellogg? Annwn? Put your dicks away. I need a word.” It was Dalbor, who had just arrived and Cellach realized with relief, had missed the incident with Dominique and Sean’s daughter. Every month or so the Fomor chieftain made himself look ridiculous by brushing his few strands of hair across his callused scalp and squeezing himself into a three-piece suit and beaver top hat and heading uptown to meet with swells and high-talkers. Cellach gathered that the Willful Weapons kept agents of The Book and the municipal coppers at bay by delivering a solid Five Points block of Know-Nothing votes every election and cudgeling anyone who dared speak up for the Progressive Party. He didn’t ask for too many details because he had so little interest in politics he could barely finish saying the word without falling into a coma.

Dalbor didn’t bother to change out of his monkey suit before guiding Annwn and Cellach to a secluded booth in the corner of the bar’s second floor.

He pushed a scrying locket at Cellach. When he opened it, the image of a gray-haired Nibelung—dwarves, as the Americans called them—floated out and implanted itself on his mind.

“Name’s Gundobad,” Dalbor said, “foremen of the sandhogs on the new subway line they’re sinking in Second Avenue. Word is, he’s trying to unionize the dig.”

Annwn sucked air through his front teeth. “Not good, not good. That’s a city dig. The ward bosses, they don’t like unions so much.”

“Meeting’s tonight and you’re going, Kellogg. You’re the only one of our guys the bolshies can’t make, you’re too green. They use mostly dwarves and gnomes and kobolds on the dig, you know, the Underfolk, but there’s an elf or five on the job so nobody’ll question it. We got a pile of work cards over there, you’ll go as a steel-smith—”

“I don’t know the first thing about smithing.”

“Shut up. You don’t need to. It’s just to get you in the door. The day shift boys will think you’re on the night shift, the night shift will think you’re day. Look, listen, take the scryer, note the faces. Talk up the bolshies. Find if any of them like dice or whores, and even better, where they like to get them.”

“Don’t the bosses usually use Pinkertons for this?” Annwn asked.

“Yeah, but the bolshies have gotten wise to the Neversleeps’ guising. Wherever the meeting’s held will be wall-to-wall detection spells. Best to do it clean. You got that, Kellogg? Bring whatever you get on ’em to me, I’ll run it up the flagpole, then we’ll see when and where we need to bust heads.”

Dalbor patted Cellach on the shoulder and kicked his seat back. “Now I’ve got to get out of this monkey suit before I kill somebody for the sport of it.”

Once he was gone Cellach turned to Annwn. “Dwarves . . . I don’t know from them.”

“Well, whatever you do, don’t pick one up.” Annwn shook his head gravely when Cellach started to smile. “No, I’m serious, troll, human, elf, ogre, I don’t give a fuck. You pick up a dwarf like he’s a teatime doll, and he will make it his life’s sacred mission to show you your own heart. Their sense of humor is absolutely fucking lacking in that regard.”

• • •

The union meeting took place in a vaulted underground beer hall in Kleindeutschland, and as Dalbor predicted, no one questioned Cellach’s presence. Gundobad was the most stirring speaker. Some whispered he had a ring from an enchanted hoard that bent wills toward his own, but from what Cellach saw his powers resided wholly in his oratory, which he delivered first in German, then in English. He proclaimed that all workers were one, but especially the nonhumans, the bosses encouraging differences between elf and dwarf and goblin and troll when really they were all fingers from the same hand. Once they closed in a single fist, none could stand in their way. “If we follow the simple rule, ‘an injury to one is an injury to all,’ this city will be ours, brothers!” the Nibelung concluded to cheers.

Cellach stayed long after the meeting ended and bought drinks with money Annwn had given him for that purpose. Once the gnome matron who ran the beer hall was putting chairs up on tables and shooed them out, only he and Gundobad were left.

The Sidhe helped the weaving Nibelung out of the cellar and across Avenue B, or “German Broadway,” as it was known. Snow fell in a silent shroud across the city and they cut through Tompkins Square Park, the bare elms lonely and beautiful in the lamplight.

“How do you think they do it, elf? Hanh?” Cellach did not know how Gundobad’s watery, swollen eyes could see anything in the darkness.

“Who?”

“The humans. You Sidhe are prettier, the Fomor stronger, we Nibelung are more industrious, our cousins der Heinzelmännchen faster still. Still they rule us. Does that make any sense to you? They are all the lesser parts of us put together, the average, the mean, yet we toil and bow and scrape to them. How is that possible?”

The Sidhe shrugged. “Perhaps it is because they are the average. The medium is also the most moderate—”

“Nein. Nein, nein, nein.” The dwarf wagged a drunken finger at him. “I have another theory. I know down to the very marrow of my bones that it is truth. Everyone thinks I am mad when I say these things, but you, I can see you are a lad of exceptional insight, Kellogg. Come here, come here, schnell, so I can tell you.”

Six-foot-five Cellach had to put his hands on his knees so he could crane one pointed ear down close enough to Gundobad’s sour ale-breath to hear:

“They aren’t lesser parts of us, we are exaggerated parts of them. How they see different aspects of themselves, labor and looks, speed and power. You and me? We’re not real, Kellogg. We are fairy tales. Dreams. Someone, out there, has conjured us up in his mind. And when that sleeper wakes?” He mimed a puff of smoke with his fingers and spittle. “We’ll be gone—just like that.”

Cellach scowled. “I know I’m real.”

“No. You don’t. You go to sleep, and the world goes away. You wake up, and there it is—back again! You have no way of knowing whether you created it or it created you.”

The Sidhe shook his head. The mobs in Cork, searching every haystack and trough for him; the grim passage to America; the humiliation at Immigration; the death-struggle in the Glass Castle; he could not believe all that blood and fury was for nothing, no, he could not believe it. At the very thought, the black raging fire inside him stirred like a watchdog awakened by a snapping twig in the distance.

“It’s all a joke. Our lives are a punchline to a jest we can never understand—”

“Speak for yourself,” Cellach all-but growled, hoisting Gundobad up almost six feet off the ground by the front of his jacket, then sending him sprawling backward beneath a small marble canopy in the middle of the park.

Gundobad picked himself up off the pavement by steadying himself on the small fountain between the columns. Very slowly. Not because he was injured.

“You know why Ymir made Sidhe and Nibelung exactly the size that He did?”

Lamplight flashed on the dirk in his hand.

“So you’re just tall enough for me to harvest your balls.”

Cellach remembered, too late, what Annwn said about picking up dwarves.

Gundobad lunged forward with a Teutonic cry, but he was drunk and sloppy, and Cellach had only had a few beers all night. He grabbed the dwarf’s forehead and slammed him back into the rim of the fountain. The first impact sounded like a wet slap on pavement, and so did the second, and so did the third, but by the fourth it became a deep, fleshy crunching sound, and Cellach didn’t stop slamming Gundobad into the marble until the Nibelung’s skull had all but come apart in his hand.

The black fire fled, as it always did, that coward, leaving Cellach alone, panting and baffled, like he had walked in late to the middle of a play. He looked around and saw nothing moving but the falling snow. With handfuls of sleet he wiped the gory smear off the fountain and the floor of the pavilion, then gathered up the corpse and largest bits of skull and managed to wrap it convincingly up in his own coat. He looked up and saw atop the canopy the small marble statue of a cup-bearing goddess peering down on him. Etched into the stone at her feet was the word “TEMPERANCE.”

At the five-story-deep Second Avenue Subway excavation site was a wide, muddy pit where the water sprayed to cool the grinding parts of machinery ran off and collected. No one bothered to guard the area and so no one saw Cellach tie the broken half of a cinder block to Gundobad’s ankles and pitch him into the slurry. The surface of the brown water bubbled and rippled after the dwarf sank, but soon reverted to unbroken flatness like an amnesiac mind.

• • •

He did not sleep that night.

The following morning he was at the Glass Castle’s doors when they opened, and stood shifting his feet at Dalbor’s usual corner booth until the Fomor at last made an appearance near noon. After spending the whole night debating its wisdom back and forth, in the end he told his chieftain everything, from the beginning of the dwarf’s speech to where Gundobad’s body lay.

For some reason, he found it even more terrifying that the head of the Willful Weapons did not yell or scowl or say a thing, neither during the tale nor after its completion.

All he did say was, “Go on to your collections” and Cellach went to the day’s work wondering if swimming across the river to New Jersey and running until he reached the Pacific might have been the wiser strategy.

Later that night, he returned to the Glass Castle to drown himself in whiskey and batted away Annwn’s inquiries about how the night before went. Dalbor appeared, in his top hat and suit again, called Cellach over, and put a slip of paper in his hand.

“He’s expecting you in an hour,” the Fomor said, and walked away with the air of one who just spent the last bedside visit to a dying friend.

The address on the paper was for The Dakota, a grim tri-gabled fortress overlooking the Sheep Meadow in Central Park; so named, it was said, for being so far from the heart of Manhattan it might as well be in Dakota Territory. The maid who answered the door was a Sidhe, six and a half feet tall if she was an inch, mostly legs in fishnets that he followed up a side stair into a library as big as the Glass Castle’s common room.

The maid said something to him when they entered that he didn’t hear. When he frowned at her, she jabbed a finger at the golden bun on her head.

“Hat.”

He quickly removed his hat and moved to sit on the nearest armchair.

“Stand,” the maid barked, and upon making sure he saw the contempt in her eyes, left the room.

He stood halfway between the wall and the furniture for what seemed like a long time, never more acutely aware of his dirty hair and soot-stained suit, wrists and ankles jutting awkwardly from too-short cuffs. A child in a corner, awaiting punishment.

He looked around. Any wall space not taken up by tome-laden bookcases was dominated by four massive paintings showing the rise, then fall of civilization: The first painting was all forested pastoral; the second a pillared and porticoed center of commerce and learning; the third a besieged metropolis lit with the flames and brimstone of war; the fourth a crumbling ruin already beginning to be reclaimed by vines and weeds.

At last the door opened and the man of the house entered, a bald African in a three-piece suit and an easy grin, broad shoulders unencumbered by conscience. “Why are you standing? Please, Mr. McRoss, sit down.”

Cellach did not move an inch. “No thank you, sir.” Later, he would recognize his resistance as good instinct: This one makes you feel bad for sitting, this other makes you feel bad for standing. It was a tactic to keep him off-balance, and he would have none of it. He would take his lumps like a Mac Rath, even if these American cunts refused to address him as one.

The human did not break stride across the room to the wet bar. “Wherever you’re comfortable. Drink?”

“I’ll take whiskey, if you have it.”

“I would be a poor host if I didn’t.” He poured a glass far too shallow for Cellach’s taste, but he accepted it with a smile. “Do you know who I am?”

“You are Mister Morgan Ash,” Cellach said. He had seen his face in the Illustrated Police News. “You are Boss of the First Ward.”

Ash winced. “I really don’t like that word—‘boss.’ Makes me sound like I’m the foreman of a chain gang. Technically, my elected post is city councilman. Each of my colleagues and I have specific spheres of responsibility. Do you mind if I sit? No?

“The Third Ward is The Book—the inscribers of Enchantment. Its agents enforce the laws adjudicated by the Second Ward, The Flesh—the practitioners of ceremonial magics. We are the First Ward. The sorcerers. We are The Will. It is through us that laws are made.”

“And you sit above the law,” Cellach said.

Ash just smiled. “In cultures past, of course, that phrase, ‘above the law,’ was considered a condemnation of tyranny and corruption. In our system, it is just . . . practical. In order to make a thing, one must be able to comprehend it from all sides. I would submit to you that the best vantage point for that is height.”

Cellach had no response for that.

“As the force that gives life and animation to society’s codes, the First Ward obliges itself from time to time to employ agents of its own. To work in the shadows, nameless even in the light, to be The Will’s will . . . if you will. You have not been in this country long. Have you heard of the Neversleeps?”

“Neversleeps?”

“Detectives. For what used to be called the Pinkerton Agency.”

“You mean like what The Book does?”

“No. I do not.” For the first time in his presence, Morgan Ash had stopped smiling. “The Book stops crimes. The Neversleeps prevent chaos.” He got up and walked towards the Sidhe. “Out in the Sierra Madre the other night, well . . . I don’t have time to relate the whole sordid tale, but suffice it to say, the Pinkertons have suffered massive casualties. Our ongoing war with the atomists in the White City requires me to replenish their numbers immediately, particularly here in the city. Your resolution of the Gundobad labor problem—well above and beyond the call of duty, I might add—recommends you highly.”

Cellach blinked. He assumed he had been summoned here to be reprimanded, or worse. It finally began to dawn on him that he was being offered a promotion. Pride swelled in him. He would have to write his parents. He would have to tell Annwn he did not have to pay for the privilege of helping the city, they were going to pay him.

But reality crashed down on him again. He shifted his feet. “I’d love to, sir. Truly I would. But my family and I still owe a debt to the Glass Castle—”

Ash’s smile instantly returned. He laughed. “Please, that is no obstacle. The First Ward will make sure Dalbor og Fomor will be amply rewarded for letting you go. As you will be for going, Kellogg McRoss.”

“This fine young man’s name is Cellach, Father.”

A beautiful young woman passing in the hallway entered the room and he was surprised to find himself looking at the lovely reformer. “Dominique?”

“Cellach has already done me a fine service, in the Glass Castle. Is he coming to work for us here?”

Morgan Ash could not entirely hide his surprise, or his displeasure. “You have met my daughter?”

He knew the look in the First Ward Boss’s eye. It was the same look in landlord Sliney’s when he saw the Sidhe with his daughter. And the Drunk Druid’s words rang in his ears and he knew then that he had not escaped anything by fleeing Eiru. Whether he was a criminal thug or a respectable one, it did not matter. His geis was written in stone, and it was tied around his neck, and he could not remove it. He saw the black fire rise up inside him again, and it said, you are not a projection of the humans. You are a projection of me. I will never leave you, I will follow you like a shadow, except it is you that is cast by my light. And it was at that moment he saw, for the first time, that the fire had his very own face.

© 2014 by Fred Van Lente.

Fred Van Lente is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Marvel Zombies, Incredible Hercules (with Greg Pak), Odd Is On Our Side (with Dean R. Koontz), as well as the American Library Association award-winning Action Philosophers. His original graphic novel Cowboys & Aliens (co-written with Andrew Foley) is the basis for the major motion picture starring Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. Van Lente’s other comics include The Comic Book History of Comics, Taskmaster, Archer & Armstrong, Amazing Spider-Man, and Hulk: Season One. Fred loves hearing from readers at fred.vanlente@gmail.com.

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The Ba of Phalloon
Matthew Hughes

Previously on The Kaslo Chronicles: 

Magic has abruptly superseded rationalism and the technological civilization on the ancient world of Novo Bantry has collapsed. Hardboiled confidential operative Erm Kaslo, now chief henchman to the proto-wizard Diomedo Obron, works to secure the castle they seized from Obron’s rival, Phalloon the Illimitable, and to deal with the survivors of the catastrophe. [To read the other stories in the series, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/kaslo.]

• • •

“I’d say there are at least three hundred of them,” Kaslo said. “Mostly men, but quite a few women. I don’t see any children. I see clubs, knives, some homemade spears.”

He turned from the narrow slit of unglazed window that pierced the castle wall. His employer, Diomedo Obron, was seated on a high stool, immersed in studying a diagram in an ancient tome spread open on the workbench, the pages tall and wide, stiff and yellowed with age. He waved a hand in a gesture that said, Not now, without averting his gaze from the book, the index finger of his other hand tracing one of the curved lines of the figure. At intervals along its course, the tip of the finger disappeared for a while.

“I’m thinking they might try to come in here,” Kaslo said. “Not right away, but after they’ve looted Phalloon’s manse.”

Obron’s free hand showed him its palm. His finger continued along the rest of the line, came to where it ended at a cartouche that enclosed three symbols. When he touched each of them in a particular sequence, the characters glowed as if they were inked in fire.

“Hmm,” he said, and his gaze became distant. Then the light faded and he closed the book, a puff of dust rising from the scratched black cover.

“Master,” said Kaslo—he was getting used to using the term—“we need to stabilize our situation here.”

Obron came back from wherever he had been. He glanced toward the window and gave another variant of the dismissive gesture. “They are of no concern,” he said. “The castle is still protected by Plackatt’s Discriminating Delimiter. The harder they throw themselves against it, the farther it will throw them back.”

Kaslo looked again. The mob was now filling the forecourt of the sprawling stone manse, those at the leading edge prying open the doors and venturing within. They would find furnishings and artworks whose only value now was as firewood. The great house was also full of sophisticated mechanisms that were now of no value at all: Their self-awareness was gone; the world-spanning connectivity in which they had once taken part was vanished; the functions they had performed, whether complex or simple, were already fading from the minds of the new primitives, as if the devices were no more than elements of a dream from which they had been rudely woken.

The mob from the city would be looking for food and drink. They would find neither. After Obron had caused this castle to appear, he and Kaslo, accompanied by Follace, the majordomo to the estate’s former owner, had emptied the manse’s cellars and pantry of all its provender. It was enough to last those inside the castle for years; the mob, for a week or so.

Obron had selected another old book from the shelf above the bench and was leafing through its pages, once more completely absorbed. Kaslo picked up a speculon that lay on a stool beneath the window. It appeared to be only a hollow tube of some hard, black rock, yet when he put one eye to it and said, “Closer,” it presented him with an amplified view of whatever he aimed it at. It was as if the distant scene was right before him, a full-size image hanging in the air, just as his old integrator would have supplied, before the great change ended the intelligent device’s existence.

He studied the mob, though now he was seeing individuals instead of an undifferentiated mass of humanity. He could focus on one person at a time, even call for the image to freeze then resume motion. Just like before the change, he thought, and realized that that word—before—kept coming up. So did after.

The members of the mob were mostly young adults, and none older than middle age. Nobody was in rags—not yet, he thought—but some of them had rips and tears, a few had improvised bandages, and there were some bloodstains here and there.

Ordinary people, he thought, though maybe quicker than most to react to sudden disaster, or maybe just luckier than most. Wouldn’t matter how savvy you were if you were in an omnibus that forgot how to fly, or in a building held together by abstruse forces that abruptly ceased to apply.

The refugees had been flooding into the manse; now they were trickling out. Some of them carried treasures or knick-knacks they’d picked up, but increasingly the emotions Kaslo saw on their faces were frustration, disappointment. And when they looked toward where he stood, he saw another common cast: hunger.

“Pull back, slowly,” he said to the speculon; the image receded until he told it to stop. The throng had come out onto the forecourt, and were now filtering through the screen of topiary that separated the stone paving from the sweeping lawn that eventually climbed to where the former owner, the ill-fated Phalloon the (self-styled) Illimitable had sited his redoubt.

Now a big man pushed his way through to the front of the mob. Heavy-shouldered, wide in the waist without being fat, a scar on one cheek, he was dressed in the remains of a singlesuit that had not been cheap to buy, though there was nothing about it to name its wearer as a member of the social class that wore the best. In Kaslo’s many years as a confidential operative, he had often met the type: more cunning than intelligent; intensely focused on his own needs and desires; not only always the first to know when violence would serve, but always the first to strike.

Precisely the kind to rise to the top of a mob, Kaslo thought. Two other men now came to join the bruiser, and the op’s eyebrows rose when he realized he recognized them. They were the two bravos Phalloon had hired to be his henchmen; Kaslo had last seen them running for the horizon after Obron had blasted their employer in the opening round of the duel that ended in the death of Phalloon. Kaslo was surprised the two had come back. Things must be as bad in the city as Obron had said they would be.

The leader of the mob was scanning the castle, taking in the towers, the closed gates, the sheer walls crenellated on top and dropping down to the steep glacis, the tall, narrow windows. His focus arrived at the slit through which Kaslo watched.

The op saw the man studying him, and said, “Closer.” He stopped when he had the thick-jawed face presented larger than life-size. He noted the broken nose, the scars around the lips, the eyes as flat and affectless as a marine predator’s.

“Pull back,” he said, and saw the thug’s gaze go to the unmanned battlements then back to the gates. Kaslo knew what was coming, and his expectations were confirmed when the leader of the mob turned and singled out, one at a time, six men from the crowd. He called them, gathered them around him, pointing at where Kaslo stood. He also gestured with his chin to the two who had been Phalloon’s henchmen.

One of them tried to shrink back into the crowd. The other expostulated in words that Kaslo didn’t need to hear to understand. The man pointed to the burnt patches on the back of his head, the other hand gesturing toward the castle.

The thug in charge cut them off with a short word and a brandishing of a thick cudgel that had been dangling by a cord from one thick wrist. The op could see dark stains on the weapon’s studded head.

The man who had tried to hide in the multitude was shoved forward. The one with the singed scalp was seized by the neck and thrust toward the chosen six. The meaning of the ringleader’s gestures was clear: They could try their luck at the castle or take their chances with him.

The eight men, all of them armed with simple weapons—spears, a couple of clubs that had once been table legs, a ceremonial knife—advanced on the castle. Their shoulders were hunched, their heads down, as if they were walking into a storm. But on they came.

Kaslo turned to Obron. “They’re going to try it,” he said.

The wizard made a small, dry sound, a puff of air escaping over his lower lip, his attention now on the contents of a small libram bound in faded green leather.

Kaslo knew his master was right. Plackatt’s Discriminating Delimiter had defeated not only Phalloon, but the raging storm-spirit the thaumaturge had hurled against the invisible barrier—though not without some crucial assistance from Kaslo at the moment of truth. But that was not what bothered him about the situation.

“It’s the waste,” he told Obron.

“Hmm?” the other looked up, a bemused expression on his sharp-chinned and even sharper-eyed face. “What waste?”

“Those people out there. They’re not monsters or barbarians. They’re mostly decent people who’ve had their lives yanked out from under them.”

Obron shrugged and went back to his book.

“No, listen,” said Kaslo. “It can’t be just a few wizards like you and a few more helpers like me and Follace. Somebody’s got to do the things that make life go on. Grow fresh food or, I don’t know, make the pots and furniture.”

The wizard quirked his mouth, then spoke a few syllables and performed a precise movement of one hand. A small table appeared between them, on it a long loaf of fresh bread.

“Fine,” said Kaslo, “but do you want to have to do that three times a day, every day?”

The other man conceded the point. He spoke and gestured and the food disappeared. “Do what you think best,” he said. “I have things to . . .” As he spoke, his attention went back to the book and he became absorbed once more.

“Wait,” said the op, and when the wizard dragged his gaze back to him, said, “Bring back the bread.” A moment later it was in his hand, warm and smelling like the backyard of a bakery. Obron really was getting better at thaumaturgery.

“That’ll do,” he said. Carrying the loaf, he went out the door and down the stone staircase that led to the castle’s bailey and the main gates. He opened a smaller portal set within the larger one and stood for a moment on the wide, flagstoned path that interrupted the glacis and led up to the gates.

He saw the advancing party take note of him. He closed the sally port and stepped easily down the paved slope, the loaf of bread held up where it couldn’t fail to be seen. A few paces took him to where he knew the barrier spell surrounded the castle. He passed through it as if it wasn’t there; for him, it posed no barrier to passage in either direction. That’s why it’s called a “discriminating delimiter,” he thought.

He went down the sloping lawn to a point where the incline became steeper, and by the time he had descended that part, the eight that the mob leader had sent were right in front of him. He held out the loaf.

“Here is the arrangement,” he said. “Work for food. And for safety.”

The man with burned patches on his head swore, but Kaslo read relief behind the belligerence. The others mainly looked uncertain—one had the expression of a man who expects others to try to fool him, without success—and the op knew it was time to seize the initiative.

“The big guy,” he said, gesturing with the bread, “he’s the boss?” He was already moving through them toward where the thug with the cudgel waited.

The singed man spoke quietly as Kaslo passed him. “He’s a hard one.”

The op didn’t look his way. “Who isn’t?” he said. The eight turned and followed him. It’s just that easy, Kaslo told himself. Then he took another look at the mob’s leader and thought, Until it isn’t.

He approached at a steady pace. He saw the big man step forward and set himself, the cudgel ready at his side, but Kaslo kept on coming as if he saw nothing to deter him. When he was close enough to be heard in a conversational tone, he tossed the loaf of bread so that it flipped end-to-end, caught it without taking his eyes off the other man, and said, “Listen . . .”

He took one more easy pace, then tossed the loaf toward the thug with the club. Nineteen out of twenty brawlers would have looked at the spinning loaf, but Kaslo realized immediately he was up against the twentieth. The man moved forward fast. He didn’t bother to haul back the studded length of wood to strike a downwards or side-arm blow. Instead he brought it straight up in a vertical swing intended to connect with Kaslo’s chin, while the empty hand sprang forward to grasp his throat if he stopped and tried to back-pedal clear.

But Kaslo hadn’t won fights by avoiding them. He turned sideways and leaned a little backwards to let the cudgel brush past his chest, just close enough to snag a thread from his upper garment. His leading hand met the outspread fingers of his opponent’s as it reached for him. He grasped the middle two fingers and bent them sharply back. He heard the small bones snap and saw the shock register in the man’s eyes.

But, an instant later, those eyes could no longer register anything; Kaslo pivoted to bring his free hand around in a shoulder-high strike, his middle and index digits driving straight into the other man’s sockets. He felt the moment’s resistance as the edges of his fingernails pierced the thinness of the corneas, then the obscene warmth as his fingers sank to their knuckles in the man’s most vulnerable flesh. The eyes’ clear ichor squirted past onto his hands as he thrust right through the retinas and dug into the soft, gray tissue behind.

The op yanked his fingers out of his opponent’s ruined sockets. The big man fell forward, already convulsing, what had started to be a scream turning into the moan of a wounded animal. He landed facedown on the manicured turf, twitching, the cudgel’s cord still looped about his wrist.

Kaslo bent, seized the weapon, and with three swift blows crushed the back of the skull.

He stood, wiped the gore from his hand on the leg of his breeches. The scene was silent except for the soft suffle of a breeze through the topiary. The nearer members of the mob were staring at him. He saw wide eyes and open mouths. One of the women looked as if she was going to gag.

He turned and picked up the loaf of bread. It had landed near the feet of the man with the burned head, who now took an involuntary step back as the op approached. Kaslo ignored him and turned to the crowd. With the hand that still held the dripping cudgel he indicated the corpse on the ground.

“That,” he said, “is over.” He let fall the weapon and held up the loaf, and as their eyes went to it, he said, “This has just begun.”

• • •

The next few days were busy. Kaslo divided the crowd into platoons, then the platoons into squads, and put those who had had some experience with managing groups into positions of leadership. The skills that most of the three hundred had brought with them from the world gone by—that became the usual way to refer to their pre-change existence—had little application to their new requirements. An essence distiller or a designer of eyelid adornments did not easily transpose to the life of a peasant.

But there were others who had abilities that could be adapted to their new existence. Those who had tended plants in their conservatories, cooked meals without integrators, built scale models with their own hands, fashioned decorative ceramics, now found that their former quirky pastimes had laid at least the rough foundations of usefulness.

“We need shelter, sanitation, a water supply, and the beginnings of crop lands,” Kaslo told his squad and platoon leaders. “The change is not temporary. The mechanisms that underlay our lives will never work again. Instead, we must work for ourselves.”

A man of late middle age who had been a managing partner in a firm of intercessors said, “What about the fellow in the castle? What will he do for us?”

“His thoughts increasingly lead him down ever more abstruse avenues,” said the op. “He is not to be relied upon.”

“He made the castle,” the man said. “Why can he not make all that we need?”

“Because, sooner or later, he would stop. And then where would we be?” They were seated in a circle on the lawn. Kaslo looked up at the narrow window behind which Obron read his books and conducted his experiments in the green school of magic. “He is not your integrator,” he said. “There are no more integrators. We are on our own.”

They had some supplies: those taken from Phalloon’s stores, as well as some basic foodstuffs that Obron had stockpiled in a hiding place at his own, now abandoned, estate. Kaslo led a group of a hundred there—what had formerly been a short trip in an aircar was now a two-day march—and found the house and grounds deserted. Obron’s vehicles could not be awakened, so they tore apart a wooden outbuilding and used its materials to make sledges. Heaped with packages and containers, each was hauled by ten men back to the castle. The return trip took three days.

He had left the man with the singed-off hair—Bodwon was his name—in charge. Kaslo had induced Obron to make them tools—axes, saws, hammers, nails—and Bodwon was overseeing the leveling of Phalloon’s woods and the construction of the first plank houses. When the op returned, he saw that the work had proceeded well: Piles of lumber were stacked neatly on the level ground downslope from the castle. The people were tired from unaccustomed labor, but the wizard had provided salves that swiftly turned blisters into calluses and put strength into muscles while easing their aches.

Bodwon reported a problem with the construction plans: “Yao-sen, our carpenter,”—in the world gone by, the man had liked to make intricate toys and puzzles out of wood—“says that if we build with fresh-cut wood, it will warp and twist. The winds will whistle through gaps. Walls may not stand.”

Kaslo went to Obron, and found that the wizard had revived an Eighteenth-Aeon spell called Fofferah’s Temporal Cabinet, good for aging wines, spirits, and cheeses. He was able to apply it to the lumber, seasoning whole stacks overnight.

“Build communal latrines first,” Kaslo said. The bushes at the side of Phalloon’s manse were becoming impassable.

The days were long, but never long enough to accomplish all that Kaslo foresaw would be necessary. He wanted a village, ringed by a palisade, with vegetable gardens and grain fields surrounding it. The alternative was to have let the people fall back to what they had been when they had come to the estate, led by the brute he had killed: a feral wolf-pack, picking the bones of a dead civilization. And when the bones were all picked, they would have eaten each other.

There were always ten more things for the op to do, each one crying out that it should have priority over the rest. So it was that weeks had gone by before he could concentrate on anything other than their immediate needs. But in those weeks, with calculated assistance from Obron, they had accomplished much: built communal houses within an enclosing wall of timbers, pointed at the top; planted and harvested their first crops, using seeds from Phalloon’s stores and with the plants’ growing time amplified by Fofferah’s Temporal Cabinet; organized themselves into a polity that, if it was not quite a village, was at least no longer the mob that had come up the road from the chaos in Indoberia.

Bodwon had become a useful lieutenant. The fellow with whom he had served as Phalloon’s henchmen—Polpera was his name—lacked intellect and insight, and had slid down the emerging hierarchy to simple laborer. But by the time Bodwon’s hair had grown back and his scalp burns had become dry scar tissue, he was already directing much of the settlement’s day-to-day work.

Kaslo finally had time to think. One morning, his thoughts took him back to the days just before the change, then they leaped him forward into the might-be’s of the still-evolving future. He went to where Bodwon was supervising the construction of a grain storage hut, raised well above the ground on timber legs that were fitted with hammered-metal skirts to deter rodents.

“I want to ask you about your time with Phalloon,” the op said.

Bodwon rubbed his hard hand over his skull’s scars and bristles, a motion that had become a habit. “It all seems a long time ago now,” he said. “Like a dream from when I was young.”

“Concentrate your mind,” Kaslo said. “Do you recall any dealings with a Captain Maduc of the Constabulary on Cheddle? There would have been another Cheddlite, big, in temperament not unlike Polpera.”

“No Cheddlites I ever saw,” Bodwon said. “There was Pol and me and the household servants.”

“Might he have met with them out of your sight?”

The erstwhile wizard’s henchman’s signaled a negative. “He kept Pol and me with him at all times. One of us had to sleep in his chamber, on a pallet just inside the threshold, with the door triple bolted.”

“He made no mention of wanting to take Obron’s goods? To scotch his plans for after the change?”

Bodwon’s shoulders lifted then dropped. He told Kaslo that Phalloon had scarcely mentioned him, and what little he had said was of a disparaging nature. “‘Feckless’ was the word he used,” the lieutenant said. “A ‘talentless dabbler.’”

“But he was preparing to dominate Obron, once he was settled here in his castle?”

Bodwon blinked in surprise. “Is that what you thought?” His gaze turned inward for a moment, then he went on, “That makes it clearer.”

“How so?” Kaslo said.

The man told him that the castle was not intended to be a base for aggressive operations. It was to provide safety for Phalloon, a redoubt guarded by spirits of air and fire.

“But not from Obron,” the op said.

“No, he was very surprised to see him in the place when the day came.”

Kaslo’s thumb and forefinger tugged on his lower lip as he contemplated the new pattern that was emerging. After a moment, he said, “Then against what threat was he building a fortified stronghold?”

Bodwon’s hands spread in a gesture of helplessness. “He did not confide in Pol and me. I suspect that in his eyes we were not much more than talking beasts.”

“Arrogant, yet afraid,” Kaslo said, mostly to himself.

“It began to worry us,” the other man said, “toward the end. We wondered if we had signed on to a ship that would sink before it left harbor.”

Kaslo was familiar with the sensation.

• • •

The op found Obron in his workroom, humming to himself as he assembled a complex apparatus of flasks and beakers, mounted on metal struts and connected by glass tubes, some of them curled like springs. Stoppered bottles containing multicolored liquids and powders crowded a side table and yet another old tome lay spread-eagled on a free-standing lectern.

He looked around as Kaslo entered, and said, “The big lead cauldron over in the corner. Bring it and put it here.” He pointed to a clear space on the bench at one end of the alchemical arrangement of metal and glass.

Kaslo obliged, finding the task a back-strainer. When he had the cauldron in place and Obron had begun making minute adjustments to its setting, the op said, “It was not Phalloon who hired Maduc to steal your goods.”

Obron tugged the heavy gray vessel a minim to one side so that whatever came out of a glass tube would drop into its exact middle. “Really?” he said.

“He was afraid,” Kaslo said. “Very afraid.”

“There is plenty to be afraid of,” the wizard said, still focused on the apparatus. “Was his fear specific or general?”

“Bodwon doesn’t know for sure.”

“Bodwon?”

“Phalloon’s henchman, the one who fled with his hair on fire. He works for us now.”

“Really?”

“Really. Listen, can you stop fizzicking with that for a moment? We need to discuss this.”

Obron sighed. Still, he turned to his security chief, though not without waving an arm to take in the workbench, table, and lectern, and saying, “This is important, too, you know.”

“Bear with me,” said Kaslo. “Phalloon had a high opinion of his abilities—and, incidentally, a low one of yours—but something had him deeply worried.”

The thaumaturge’s face clouded. “He said something about me? What was it?”

“Does it matter? You are here and he is scattered meat and bones.”

But Obron insisted on knowing, and absorbed “feckless” and “talentless dabbler” with a solemn frown. “If he were here,” he said, “I could show him a thing or two.”

“If he were here, you wouldn’t be,” Kaslo reminded him. “But turn your mind to this. He had identified a threat that worried him greatly, so much so that he built a strongpoint over the intersection of two ley lines and was gearing up to enslave some elementals to defend it.”

He saw Obron’s long face grow solemn as he focused his thoughts on the matter. Then the wrinkles and furrows relaxed as the wizard reached no conclusion. His gaze stole back to the book open on the lectern.

After weeks of constantly having to be the prime decision-maker for three hundred people—not to mention a few dozen more who had found their way to the emerging village and been accepted as probationers—the op found his temper fraying. “Listen to me,” he said. “When you hired me to be your security chief, I was entirely suitable for the position. I knew how to evaluate threats and weaknesses, and knew what to do when I found them.

“Now I am half-blind. Yet I know this much: Before the change, even though there was a Constabulary in Indoberia, you had an enemy who sent armed thugs to steal from you. We thought it was Phalloon and acted against him. Now it turns out that he was not the one.”

“He was nonetheless my enemy,” Obron said, “or at least a competitor.”

“Be that as it may,” Kaslo said, “the situation now looks like this: Someone attacked you; someone frightened Phalloon; chances are, they are the same someone. We need to know who he is, what he can do, and how he means to do it.”

Again he saw the thaumaturge come to grips with the facts, even over the lure of whatever was in the book. “Very well,” Obron said, after a moment, “what do you want from me?”

“Now that the change has come, do you have any way to find out what we need to know?”

Obron did not answer. Kaslo watched him stand and think, the long face serious now. It occurred to the op that Phalloon’s estimation of his master had been wrong. The wizard might have started out as a dabbler, an amateur easily gulled by the likes of Binnie Varshun, the confidence trickster and budding thaumaturge Obron had originally hired Kaslo to track down after the man had absconded with the funds Obron had invested in their partnership. But events since then had required the op’s master to step up to the necessities of this new and dangerous age. Obron might still like to dabble, but by his studies he was turning himself into a full-weight wizard.

The question was: Would he have time to complete the transformation? Or would some greater power, until now operating from the shadows, step into Obron’s path and do to him the thaumaturgical equivalent of what Kaslo had done to the man with the cudgel?

And the most pointed question of all: What could Kaslo do to keep his master safe? He waited now as Obron sifted through the contents of his mind, contents that grew daily more complex, and more interconnected. He saw a possibility occur to the man, watched him go to a shelf of ancient and tattered books, leaf through it, finally find and read a page, then close the book with a head-shake of irritation.

Obron stood again in cogitation, one long finger tapping the bridge of his nose. He pulled out another book, scanned its table of contents, then put it back. Now his head cocked to one side, like a bird’s, as he considered a newly arrived thought. He opened a draw beneath the workbench, rummaged through its contents, and came out with a piece of dark wood as thick as Kaslo’s finger and as long as his forearm.

“Phalloon’s,” he said, as if that was all the explanation required. With a purposeful stride, he carried the wand to another part of the chamber, where a waist-high tripod supported a wide, shallow bowl. Kaslo followed him and watched as the wizard dipped a finger into the bowl’s contents, which appeared to be a clear oil, and spoke a word. The oil instantly became opaque and tiny ripples raced across its surface, as if it were being ruffled by a breeze that kept changing direction.

Obron spoke again, a string of syllables. The surface stilled. He lightly touched the wand to the oil, then drew it back and spoke again, this time at length. Kaslo did not recognize the language, but he heard the name of Phalloon in the midst of the final passage.

Images appeared on the surface, fleeting and difficult for Kaslo to make out from his vantage point. Obron studied them, as if waiting for something. And then it must have arrived, because he spoke a short word and the image stayed. He turned to Kaslo and said, “Come, see.”

The op approached until he could look down into the vessel. He saw, as if from on high, a vast, featureless plane where constant winds blew clouds of dust. Through the obscuring billows he saw a small figure, clad in dark rags, huddled against the blast.

Obron said something and the point of view seemed to swoop down toward the sharp-pebbled ground and close in on the target. It was a man, one arm over his eyes to shield them from the flying grit.

“There,” said Obron, “is the one who can tell us whom Phalloon feared.”

“Who is he?” Kaslo said.

“Better to ask who was he.”

“Very well, who was he?”

Obron turned a mildly condescending gaze upon him. “You really have no talent for this, do you?” he said. “It is, of course, Phalloon—or what’s left of him.”

“But I saw him ripped to pieces by the air elemental!”

“Yes,” said the wizard, “and now you’re seeing his shade, down in the Underworld.”

“How is he all alone? I always thought the place was overcrowded.”

“It is. He is surrounded by a multitude, each enduring an endless solitude.”

Both men paused a moment to contemplate the paradox. Then Kaslo said, “Can you conjure him up here, so we can ask him questions?”

Obron shrugged. “The wizards of old did it,” he said, “though I have no idea how.” He looked speculatively at the shelves of books.

“Then what good is this?” Kaslo said, the back of his hand flicking over the bowl and its contents.

“I don’t know how to bring him up,” said the wizard, “but I do know how to send someone down.” Now he gave Kaslo a meaningful look.

“No,” said the op. “Not a chance.”

• • •

“Phalloon!” Kaslo said. He had to shout to overcome the constant wail of wind—a wind that not only scoured the skin with a constant spray of grit but stank like a battlefield a week after the slaughter.

The huddled figure looked up at the sound of his voice, but the seamed and coarse-skinned face was scarcely recognizable as the full-fleshed visage that the thaumaturge had worn in life. Kaslo reminded himself that this was only a part of the entity that had been torn apart by his own whirlwind.

As Obron had explained it, each evolved being had three essences: the ka, the ba, and the kra. The ka accumulated all that was virtuous during its owner’s lifetime and at death went up to the delights of the Fourth Plane, called the Overworld. The ba accumulated all that was evil, and went down to the foulness of the Second Plane. The kra was no more than a hinge that held the other two together; it remained on the Third Plane where, at least usually, it soon dissipated.

The op called Phalloon’s name again and saw the ba’s grim features condense as it struggled to chase a memory it could not catch. But Obron had provided Kaslo with a means to restore the shade’s power of recall, at least temporarily.

“It has to be something he felt deeply about in life,” the wizard had said. “The stronger the affiliation, the stronger the effect.”

Now Kaslo showed the shade the object he had brought with him into the Underworld and saw light return to the dull and faded eyes. The claw-like hands reached for the dust-covered bottle of Grand Empyreal, but the op held it out of reach.

“Only a little,” he said, “and then only if you answer my questions.”

The eyes shone with a hunger then burst into a flood of tears that caused shame to well up in Kaslo. But he steeled himself to do what had to be done and did not reflect on the part he had played in consigning Phalloon to death. He opened the bottle and produced a tiny cup, into which he poured a few drops of the red liquid, which seemed to glow like fire here in the Underworld. The shade’s fingers took the offered vessel and carried its contents quickly to the dried, cracked lips. The wine disappeared and in a moment a flush of life reanimated the emaciated face.

“More.” The voice creaked like a worn-out chair. The cup was held out in a silent plea.

“First, tell me your name,” said the op.

The eyes went inward, then Kaslo saw the knowledge dawn.

“Phalloon. I am—I was—Phalloon the Illimitable.”

Kaslo poured another tiny measure and saw it disappear. “Do you remember the castle you were creating?”

Again the pause, then again the recollection. “Strong. I was making it strong.”

Kaslo gave it more to drink. The shade was somehow more substantial now, its worn-out non-flesh filling with vitality from Third-Plane wine.

“Why did it need to be strong? Whom did you fear?”

The mouth opened to speak. Kaslo saw gray teeth and a gray tongue against which the few drops of Grand Empyreal glowed like rubies. Then the sere lips closed.

“Take more,” he said. “Answer me.”

The shade’s hands trembled now. It spilled a droplet onto its thumb and licked it clean after it had downed what remained in the cup. It looked at Kaslo, and its eyes showed anger, but beneath the animosity, the op saw another emotion.

“What are you afraid of?” he said. “Nothing can hurt you here.”

“Give me more,” said the ba of Phalloon, holding out the cup.

Kaslo saw some of the strength that had made Phalloon a powerful thaumaturge. He had not expected a struggle. “Not until you answer. Whom did you fear?”

“Did?” said the shade, and followed it with a hard, dry sound that Kaslo realized was an Underworld laugh. “Not did! Do!”

“What can hurt a shade?” he said. “Only your own regrets.”

The dried hand beckoned. “Give me the bottle, and I will tell.”

But Kaslo now saw a sly intent. He poured another few drops and saw them pass between the now-stained lips. Then he said, “Answer me fully, and the wine is yours. Play games, and it goes back to the Third Plane. You will never see its like again.”

Rage exploded in the shade’s face. And misery. And a fear that almost harrowed Kaslo’s heart. But he stood firm against the flood of hard words alternating with pitiful pleas that now ensued. Finally, he said, “Enough, I am leaving.”

Phalloon’s ba burst into tears again. “You do not know!” it cried after him, its voice a thin shriek against the wind. “He hears! He knows!”

Kaslo turned back, the bottle offered as a silent inducement. “Who hears? Who knows?”

He saw only misery now in the shade’s ruined visage.

“If I speak his name, he will hear. He will come. He will . . .”

“He will what?” said the op.

“Torment me. He has powers—such powers.”

“Who?” said Kaslo. “If you fear to speak the name, give me a clue that I can follow.”

He saw the shade trying to gather its weakened faculties. “Here,” he said, and poured it three successive doses of the elixir.

Phalloon’s remnant drank them down. The flush in its face spread to its neck. It shook its head as if to clear its mind. Kaslo saw an idea form.

“Have you,” the shade said, “my books?”

“Yes. What can they tell us?”

The hand beckoned for more wine. The op complied. The shade drank.

“It was where I found him, the traces of him. He is not fully . . .”—it sought for a word—“immanent. Not fully realized.”

The words did not make sense to Kaslo. “He is a thaumaturge? Like you, like Obron?”

Again the bark of a laugh. “Not like. And not ‘is’ but was.”

“Was?” said the op. “You mean he’s given up wizardry?”

Another bark and another summons of the wine. Kaslo poured and this time the shade tossed it off, as more of the old Phalloon reconstituted itself.

“Given up? That’s droll.” A grim smile occupied the shade’s mouth. “He never gives up.”

The wind threw grit in Kaslo’s face. He had had about enough. “If you mock me,” he said, “the wine goes. There is still much of it left, and I will drink it in your castle, sitting in your chair.”

The ba had acquired enough energy to growl, but Kaslo was not impressed. “Give me clues I can work with,” he said, “or this ends now. I’ve had enough of this stinking place.”

“You’ll have more than enough of it, when you’re here forever,” said the shade. But when Kaslo turned to go, it said, “I will tell you what I can. Three things: the Twentieth Aeon; a face of black iron; the blood of a dragon.”

“More,” said Kaslo.

“No more,” said the shade. “I have already given you more than I had when I discovered him and his plan. Search the books. Even a nibblewit like Obron should be able to find what I found.”

It beckoned for more wine and Kaslo obliged. When the drink had gone down, he saw a cruel smile appear as the shade followed its thoughts. Then it said, “Of course, finding the truth is just the beginning. Then the question becomes: What, if anything, can you do about it?”

“What did you do?”

Another short laugh. “Built a castle, prepared for a siege. Or, at least, I started to.” It looked up at Kaslo and the mockery was unconcealed. “Whether it would have worked or not, I didn’t know. I was hoping to make a redoubt so strong I would not be worth the trouble of winkling out.”

A chill went through Kaslo that had nothing to do with the cold wind. “That was the best you could hope for?”

“Against him ? It is the best anyone could hope for.”

“Twentieth Aeon, a face of black iron, and the blood of a dragon,” Kaslo said. “That’s all you have?”

“No,” said Phalloon’s ba, “it’s all you have.”

The time was almost up. Kaslo left the bottle and walked downwind. He had to keep changing direction as the gale constantly shifted to throw grit into his face. Occasionally, he saw the faint shapes, like shadows, of other tattered figures sitting on the ground, each alone and forlorn. Finally, he huddled down and just waited, his collar pulled up and his arms raised to shield his eyes.

• • •

Phalloon had caused a small, circular chamber to be dug into the rock beneath the castle, its center marking the exact place where the ley lines crossed. It was from here that Obron sent Kaslo into the Second Plane and it was to here that the op returned when the period of the spell ended.

He found the room empty, but there was a whiff of smoke in the air, the odor of burning wood—and of other things. As he climbed the spiral staircase that led up from the chamber, the smell grew stronger and he heard the sound of a woman sobbing.

The staircase led to a door that opened into the castle’s walled courtyard. A woman was sitting on the stone paving, her back against the rim of the well that supplied the castle, her hands and hair covering her face. Kaslo recognized her: Irilene, one of the latecomers. In the world gone by, she had liked to prepare gourmet meals with her own hands. Now she was one of the cooks who fed the castle’s staff.

Kaslo went to her, squatted down. “What is it?” he said. “What’s happened?”

She made a wordless sound and gestured toward the gate.

It stood open. He crossed the courtyard and went out to where he could look down on the village—and saw instead a mass of charred and smoldering wreckage. The crops in the fields beyond were rows of ashes.

Obron was standing outside the gate, gazing down on the scene with the air of one who was sizing up a puzzle. Follace, Bodwon, and other members of the castle staff were huddled nearby, staring at the destruction and talking softly among themselves. All of them were within the boundary of Plackatt’s Discriminating Delimiter.

“Who did this?” Kaslo said.

Obron turned, a worried frown further lengthening his already long face. “I don’t know. Whoever it was sent a fire elemental against the castle. I called up a water spirit to counter it, and the fire-sprite turned and ravaged the village instead.” He gestured to the smoking ruins. “All that was the work of moments.”

“How many did we lose?” the op said.

“How many what?”

Kaslo contained his temper in a hot, bright part of his being, where it could do no immediate harm. “How many people?”

Obron’s face made the equivalent of a shrug. “All of them,” he said, “except for those you see here.”

“All of them?” Kaslo said, horror replacing anger as he imagined the scenes he had missed. “All burned?”

“Not burned,” the wizard said. “Taken. The village was emptied before the fire elemental reached it.”

“Emptied how? Why did you not stop it?”

Obron spread his hands. “It, too, was the work of moments. They came like a flood, sweeping over the wall and through the fields and houses, and carried them all off.”

“Who came?”

Now the op’s master looked like a man who finds he can’t remember a small fact. “Not ‘who,’ I think. Better to say ‘what.’” He used his thumb and two fingers to draw his cheeks toward his mouth, thinking. “I need to look in some of the oldest books,” he said, then turned and strode toward the gate.

Kaslo went to where the others stood. They watched him approach and he saw varied emotions: Some were glad to see him, some were angry that he had not been there, some were just afraid.

He spoke to Bodwon. “What did you see?”

The man rubbed his stubbly head. “They weren’t men,” he said, “but they couldn’t have been machines—there are no machines anymore. They were gray and they ran on more than two legs, so fast you couldn’t . . .”

His account trailed off as his mind replayed something horrific, then he shook his head as he came back to now. “They made a clicking sound. I don’t know if it was their legs or how they spoke to each other.” He shuddered. “Every time I try not to think of it, I hear that clicking, clicking.”

Follace the major-domo had been at the gate, about to take a basket of eggs Bodwon had brought up from the chicken pens. He had had a good view. The gray tide had come from the west, where lay the ruins of the Commune of Indoberia. He had seen it pour over and into the settlement, then the fire-sprite had arrived at the castle and made the barrier a wall of flame. When it was driven off, it passed through the village and set it ablaze.

“It all happened in the time it takes to eat a boiled egg,” he finished.

Kaslo said, “Did you see which way they went?”

Follace blinked. “Yes,” he said, “back the way they’d come.”

Kaslo looked to the west, where the late afternoon sun glinted on the shattered crystal of the truncated towers. “Then that’s the way we’ll have to go.”

© 2014 by Matthew Hughes.

Matthew Hughes writes science-fantasy. His SF novels are: Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion, Majestrum, The Commons, The Spiral Labyrinth, Template, Hespira, The Damned Busters, The Other, Costume Not Included, and Hell to Pay. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Postscripts, Storyteller, Interzone and a number of “Year’s Best” anthologies. Night Shade Books published his short story collection, The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, in 2005. Formerly a journalist, he spent more than twenty-five years as a freelance speechwriter for Canadian corporate executives and political leaders. His works have been short-listed for the Aurora, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards. His web page is at matthewhughes.org.

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Burning Beard: The Dreams and Visions of Joseph ben Jacob, Lord Viceroy of Egypt
Rachel Pollack

“There was a young Hebrew in the prison, a slave of the captain of the guard. We told him our dreams and he interpreted them.”

—Genesis, 41,12

“Why did you repay good with evil? This is the cup from which my lord drinks, and which he uses for divination.”

—Genesis, 44, 5

If A Man Sees Himself In A Dream

Killing an ox: Good. It means the removal of the dreamer’s enemies.

Writing on a palette: Good. It means the establishment of the dreamer’s office.

Uncovering his backside: Bad. It means the dreamer will become an orphan.

—Excerpts from Egyptian Dream Book, found on recto, or back side, of a papyrus from the 19th dynasty.

In the last month of his life, when his runaway liver has all but eaten his body, Lord Joseph orders his slave to set his flimsy frame upright, like the sacred pillar of the God Osiris in the annual festival of rebirth. Joseph has other things on his mind, however, than his journey to the next world. He has his servant dress him as a Phoenician trader, and then two bearers carry him alone to the dream house behind the temple of Thoth, God of magic, science, writing, celestial navigation, swindlers, gamblers, and dreams. Joseph braces himself against the red column on the outside of the building, then enters with as firm a step as he can. The two interpreters who come to him strike him as hacks, their beards unkempt, their hair dirty, their makeup cracked and sloppy, and their long coats—

It hardly matters that the coats are torn in places, bare in others. Just the sight of those swirls of color floods Joseph’s heart with memory. He sees his childhood dream as if he has just woken up from it. The court magicians in their magnificent coats lined up before Pharaoh. The Burning Beard and his brother shouting their demands. The sticks that changed into snakes. And he remembers the coat his mother made for him, the start of all his troubles. And the way he screamed when Judah and Gad tore it off him and drenched it in the blood of some poor ibex they’d caught in one of their traps.

Startled, Joseph realizes the interpreters are speaking to him. “Sir,” they say, “how may we serve you?”

“As you see,” Joseph says, “I am an old man, on the edge of death. Lately my dreams have troubled me. And where better to seek answers than in Luxor, so renowned for dreamers?” The two smile. Joseph says, “Of course, I would have preferred the interpretations of your famous Joseph—” He watches them wince. “—but I am only a merchant, and I am sure Lord Joseph speaks only to princes.”

The younger of the two, a man about thirty with slicked down hair says, “Well, he’s sick, you know. And there are those who say the Pharaoh’s publicity people exaggerate his powers.” He adds, with a wave of his hand, “One lucky guess, years ago . . .”

“Tell me,” Joseph says, his voice lower, “is he really a Hebrew? I’ve heard that, but I find it hard to believe.”

In a voice even lower, the young one says “Not only a Hebrew, but a slave. It’s true. They plucked him out of prison.”

Joseph feigns shock and a slight disgust. “Egypt is certainly more sophisticated than Phoenicia,” he says. “In Tyre, our slaves sweat for us, not the other way around.”

The other stares at the stone cut floor. “Yes,” he says. “Well, the Viceroy is old, and things change.”

Quickly, the older one says, “Why don’t you tell us your dreams?”

“Lately, they’ve been very—I guess vivid is the best word. Just last night I dreamed I was sailing all alone down a river.”

“Ah, good,” the older one says. “A sign of wealth to come.”

“It had better come soon, or I won’t have much use for it. But to continue—I climbed the mast—”

“Wonderful. Your God will bear you aloft with renewed health and good fortune.”

Joseph notices their eyes on the purse he carries on his belt. He goes on, “When I came down, I became very hungry and ate the first thing I saw, which only afterwards I realized was the offal of animals. I haven’t dared to tell anyone of this. Surely this is some omen of destruction.”

“Oh, no,” the younger one jumps in. “In fact, it ensures prosperity.”

“Really?” Joseph says. “Then what a lucky dream. Every turn a good omen.” He smiles, remembering the fun he had making up the silly dream out of their lists. But the smile fades. He says, “Maybe you can do another one. Actually, this dream has come to me several times in my life.” They nod. Joseph knows that the dream books place great emphasis on recurrence. After all, he thinks, if a dream is important enough to come back, maybe the interpreters can charge double.

He closes his eyes for a moment, sighs. When he looks at them again he sees them through a yellow haze of sickness. He begins, “I dream of a man. Very large and frightening. Strangely, his beard appears all on fire.”

He can see them race through their catalogues in their minds. Finally the old one says, “Umm, good. It means you will achieve authority in your home.”

Joseph says, “But the man is not me.”

The young one says, “That doesn’t matter.”

“I see. Then I’ll continue. This man, who dresses as a shepherd but was once a prince, appears before Pharaoh. He demands that Pharaoh surrender to him a vast horde of Pharaoh’s subjects.” He pauses, but now there is no answer. They look confused. Joseph continues “When the mob follows the man, he promises them paradise, but instead leads them into the desert.”

“A bad sign?” the old one says tentatively.

Joseph says, “They clamor for food, of course, but instead he leaves them to climb a mountain. And there, in the clouds, he writes a book. He writes it on stone and sheepskin. The history of the world, he calls it. The history and all its laws.”

Now there is silence. “Can you help me?” Joseph says. “Should I fear or hope?” The two just stand there. Finally, so tired he can hardly move, Joseph drops the purse on a painted stone table and leaves the temple.

• • •

Ten-year-old Joseph wants to open a school for diviners. “Prophecy, dreams interpreted, plan for the future,” his announcements will say. And under a portrait of him, “Lord Joseph, Reader and Advisor.” Reuben, his oldest brother, shakes his head in disgust. Small flecks of mud fly out of his beard and into Poppa Jacob’s lentils. Reuben says “What does that mean, reader and advisor? Since when do you know how to read?”

Joseph blushes. “I’m going to learn,” he says. Over Reuben’s laugh he adds quickly, “Anyway, when I see the future, that’s a kind of reading. The dreams and the pictures I see in the wine. That’s just like reading.”

Reuben snorts his disgust. To their father, he says, “If you’d make him do some decent work, he wouldn’t act this way.”

Rachel is about to say something, but Joseph looks at her with his please-mother-I-can-handle-this-myself look. He says, “Divining is work. Didn’t that Phoenician woman give me a basket of pomegranates for finding her cat?”

Under his breath, Reuben mutters, “Rotten pomegranates. And why would anyone want a cat, for Yah’s sake?”

But Joseph ignores him. He can see he’s got the old man’s attention. “And we can sell things,” he adds. “Open a shop.”

“A shop?” Jacob says. His nostrils flare slightly in alarm.

“Sure,” Joseph says, not noticing his mother’s signal to stop. “When people study with me, they’ll need equipment. Colored coats, cups to pour the wine, even books. I can write instruction books. ‘The Interpretation of Dreams.’ That’s when I learn to read, of course.”

Jacob spits on the rug, an act that makes Rachel turn her face. “We are not merchants,” he says. “Damnit, maybe your brothers are right.” He ignores his wife’s stagy whisper, “Half brothers,” and goes on, “Maybe you need to get your fingers in some sheep, slap some mud on that pretty face of yours.”

Before Joseph can make it worse, Rachel covers his mouth and pulls him outside.

Over the laughter of the brothers, Judah yells, “Goodbye, Lord Joseph. See you in the sheep dung!”

Rachel makes sure Joseph wraps his coat around him against the desert’s bite. Even under the thin light of the stars, the waves of color flicker as if alive. What wonderful dreams this boy has, she thinks. She remembers the morning he demanded the coat. Needed it for his work, he said. Leah’s brats tried to stop it being made, of course, but Rachel won. Just like always. She says, “Those loudmouths. How dare they laugh at you? You are a lord. A true prince compared to them.”

But Joseph pays her no attention. Instead, he stares at the planets, Venus and Jupiter, as bright as fire, hanging from the skin of a half-dead Moon. Images fall from them, as if from holes in the storage house of night.

He sees a lion, a great beast, except it changes, becomes a cub, its fur a wave of light. Seraphs come down, those fake men with the leathery wings that Joseph’s father saw in his dream climbing up and down that ladder to heaven and never thought to shout at them, “Why don’t you just fly?” The seraphs place a crown like a baby sun on the lion’s head. And then they just fly away, as if they have done their job. No, Joseph wants to scream at them, don’t leave me. For already he can see them. The wild dogs. They climb up from holes in the Earth, they cover the lion, tear holes in his skin, spit into his eyes.

Joseph slams his own eyes with the heels of his hands. The trick works, for suddenly he becomes aware of his mother beside him, her worry a bright mark on her face as she wipes a drop of spit from his open mouth. Vaguely, he pushes her hand away. Now the tail comes, he thinks. The bit of clean information after the torrent of pictures. Just as his brothers begin to leave their father’s grand tent, it hits Joseph, so hard he staggers backward. They want to kill him. If they could, they would tie him to a rock and slit him open, the way his great-grandfather Abraham tried to kill Grandpa Isaac, and even struggled against the—seraph?—that held his hand and shouted in his ear to stop, stop, it was over, Yah had changed His mind. And yet, in all the terror, Joseph can’t help but smirk, for he realizes something further. Reuben, Reuben, will stop them.

“What are you laughing at?” Reuben says as he marches past, and it’s all Joseph can do not to really laugh, for it almost doesn’t matter, scary as it is. He knows something about them that they don’t even know themselves. And doesn’t that make him their lord?

• • •

Mostly Joseph divines from dreams, but sometimes the cup shows him what he needs to know. His mother gave him the cup when he was five. She’d ordered it made two years before, when their travels took them past the old woman who kept the kiln outside Luz. Rachel had had her own dream of how it should look, with rainbow swirls in the glaze, and four knobs of different colors. It took a long time but she made Jacob wait, despite the older boys’ complaints, until the potter finished it. And then Rachel put it aside until the ceremony by the fire, when Joseph’s first haircut would turn him from a wild animal (one who secretly still sucked at his mother) into a human. Rachel couldn’t attend—yet another boys’ only event—but they came and told her what happened—how he whooped it up, jumping and waving his arms like a cross between a monkey and a bat, how his hair made the fire flare so that Jacob had to yank the child back to keep him from getting scorched. And then how Joseph quieted when his father gave him the cup, how he purred over it like a girl, how his father poured the wine. But instead of drinking Joseph just stared at it, stared and made a noise like a nightmare, and might have flung it away if Jacob hadn’t grabbed hold of him (a salvation Jacob later regretted) and forced him to drink the wine so they could end the ceremony.

It took Rachel a long time to get Joseph to tell her what he’d seen. Darkness, he said finally. Darkness over all the world, thicker than smoke. And a hand in the dark sky, a finger outstretched, reaching, reaching, stroking invisible foreheads. He heard cries, he said, shrieks and wails in the blackness. Then light came—and everywhere, in every home, from palace to shack, women held their dead children against their bodies. “I’m not going to die, am I?” Joseph asked her.

“No, no, darling, it’s not for you, it’s for someone else. The bad people. Don’t worry, sweetie, it’s not for you.” Joseph cried and cried while his mother held him and kissed the torn remnants of his hair.

• • •

As much as they make fun of him, as much as they complain to Jacob about his airs and his lack of work, the brothers will sometimes sneak into his tent, after they think everyone has fallen asleep. “Can you find my staff?” they’ll say, or “Who’s this Ugarit girl Pop’s got lined up for me? Is she good-looking? Can she keep her mouth shut?” The wives come even more often, scurrying along the path as if anyone who saw them would mistake them for rabbits. “Tell me it’s going to be a boy,” they say, “Please, he’ll kill me if it’s another girl,” as if the diviner can control something like that, as if events are at the mercy of the diviner, and not the other way around.

At first, Joseph soaks in their secret devotions. When Zebulon ridicules him, Joseph looks him in the eye, as if to say, “Put on a good show, big brother, because you know and I know what you think about after dark, under your sheepskin.” Or maybe he’ll just finger the colored stone Zeb gave him as a bribe not to say anything. But after a while he wishes they’d leave him alone. He even pretends to sleep, but they just grab him by the shoulder. Worst of all are the ones who offer themselves to him, not just the wives, but sometimes the brothers, too, pretending it’s something Joseph is longing for. Do they do it just to reward him, or because they really desire him, or because they think of it as some kind of magic that will change a bad prediction? Joseph tries to find the answer in his cup, or a dream, but the wine and the night remain as blank as his brothers’ faces. He can see the fate of entire tribes but not the motives of his own brothers. Maybe there are no motives. Maybe people do things for no reason at all.

• • •

And Joseph himself? Why does he do it? Just to know things other people don’t? To make himself better than his brothers? Because he can? Because he can’t stop himself? As a child, he loves the excitement, that lick of fire that sometimes becomes a whip. Later, especially the last days in Egypt, he wishes it would end. His body can’t take the shock, his mind can’t take the knowledge. He prays, he sacrifices goats stolen from the palace herd and smuggled into the desert. No use. The visions keep coming, wanted or not.

Only near the very end of his life does he get an answer. The half-burnt goat sends up a shimmer of light that Joseph stares at, hypnotized, so that he doesn’t hear the desert roar, or see the swirl of sand that marks a storm until it literally slaps him in the face. He cowers down and covers himself as best he can, and wonders if he will die here so that no one will ever find his body. Maybe his family will think Yah just sucked him up into heaven, too impatient to wait for Joseph to die. In the midst of it all, he hears it. The Voice. An actual voice! High pitched, somewhere between a man and a woman, it shouts at him out of the whirlwind. “Do you think I do this for you? I opened secrets for you because I needed you. I will close them when I close them!”

• • •

The fact is, Joseph is no fool. By his final years, he’s known for a long time that Yah has used him. He doesn’t like that this bothers him, but it does. A messenger, he tells himself. A filler. A bridge between his father and the other one, the Burning Beard. He knows exactly what people will think over the millennia. Jacob will get ranked as the last patriarch (the only real patriarch, Joseph thinks, the only one to pump out enough boys to found a nation), the other one the Great Leader. And Joseph? A clever bureaucrat. A nice guy who lured his family to Egypt and left them there to get into trouble.

He considers writing his own story. “The Life of Joseph ben Jacob, Lord Viceroy of Egypt.” But what good would it do? A fire would incinerate the papyrus, or a desert lion would claw it to shreds, or maybe a freak flood would wash away the hieroglyphs. By whatever means, Yah would make sure no one would ever see it. The Beard is the writer, after all. God’s scribe.

• • •

Some things Joseph knows from the ripples and colors of the wine. Others require a dream. He first sees the man he calls “the Beard” in a dream. Joseph is eight, a spindly brat with a squeaky voice. He’s had a bad evening, swatted by Simeon for a trick he’d played on Levi. In despair that no one loves him, he drinks down a whole cup of wine from the flask his mother has given him. The cup falls with a thud on the dirt floor of his tent as he instantly falls down asleep.

At first, he sees only the flame. It fills his dream like floodwaters hitting a dry riverbed. Finally, Joseph and the fire separate so that he can see it as a blaze on a man’s face. No, not the face, the beard. The man has thick eyebrows and thin hair, and sad eyes, and a beard bushier than Reuben’s, except the beard is on fire! The flames roar all about the face and neck, yet somehow never seem to hurt him. They don’t even seem to consume anything, his beard always stays the same. Later in life, in countless dreams, Joseph will study this man and the inferno on his face. He will wonder if maybe the fire is an illusion—the man’s a master magician, after all—or a trick of the desert light (except it looks the same inside Pharaoh’s palace). And he will wonder why no one ever seems to notice it, not the Pharaoh, not the Beard’s self-serving brother, not the whiny mob that follows him through the desert. In that first time, however, the fiery beard scares him so much he can only hide in the corner of his dream, hardly even aware that the man stands on a dark mountain scorched by lightning, and talks to the clouds.

• • •

Joseph doesn’t like this man. He doesn’t like his haughty pretension of modesty, the I’m-just-a-poor-shepherd routine. He detests the man’s willingness to slaughter hordes of his own people just for the sake of discipline. He dislikes his speeches that go on for hours and hours, in that thick slurry voice, always with the same message, obey, obey, obey. Joseph distrusts the man’s total lack of humor, his equal lack of respect for women. Can’t he see that his sister controls the waters, so that without her to make the rocks sweat they would all die of thirst? As far as Joseph can tell, the mob would have done a lot better if they had followed the sister and not the Beard. Joseph thinks of her as his proper heir as leader of the Hebrews. But then, he has to admit, he always did like women better.

Most of all, Joseph detests the Beard’s penchant for self-punishment. The way he lies down in the dirt, cutting his face on the pebbles, the way he’ll swear off sex but won’t give his wife permission to take anyone else. And what about his hunger strikes that go on for days and days, as if Yah can’t stand the smell of food on a man’s breath? It might not bother Joseph so much if the man wasn’t such a role model for his people. Joseph’s people. Doesn’t the man know that Joseph saved his family—the mob’s ancestors, after all—and all of Egypt from starvation just a few generations before? It was Joseph who explained Pharaoh’s dream of the seven fat cows and the seven lean ones, Joseph who took over Egypt’s food storage systems during the seven good years, building up the stocks for the seven years of famine. It was Joseph who took in his family and fed them so the tribes could survive. Doesn’t the Beard know all this? He claims to know everything, doesn’t he? The man who talks to Yah. How dare he denounce food? How dare he?

• • •

Some dreams come so quickly they seem to pounce on him the moment he closes his eyes. Others lie in wait all night until they seize him just before he plans to wake up. The dream of the coat comes that way. Joseph has fidgeted in his sleep for hours, flinging out his arm as if trying to push something away. And then at dawn, just as Reuben and Judah and Issachar and Zebulon are gulping down stony bread on their way to the sheep, their little brother dreams once more of the Burning Beard. He sees the Beard stride into the biggest room Joseph has ever seen. Stone columns thicker than Jacob’s ancient ram hold up a roof higher than the Moon. The Beard comes with his brother, who has slicked down his hair and oiled his beard, and wears a silver plate around his neck, obviously more aware than the Beard of how you dress when you appear before a king. Or maybe the Beard has deliberately crafted his appearance, his torn muddy robe, his matted hair, as either contempt for the Pharaoh or a declaration of his own humility. “Look at me, I’m just a country bumpkin, a simple shepherd on an errand for God.” Later, in other dreams, Joseph will learn just how staged this act is from the man who grew up as Pharaoh’s adopted son. Now, however, the dreaming boy knows only the gleam of the throne room and the scowl of the invader.

The brothers speak together. Though Joseph cannot follow any of it (he will not learn Egyptian for another twenty years) he understands that the Beard has something wrong with his speech so that silver-plate needs to interpret for him. Whatever they say, it certainly bothers the king, who shouts at them and holds up some gold bauble like a protection against the evil eye. The Beard says something to his brother, who strangely throws his shepherd’s staff on the floor. Have they surrendered? But no, it’s a trick, and a pretty good one, because the stick surrenders its rigidity and becomes a snake!

Asleep, Joseph still shivers under his sheepskin. The king, however, shouts something at one of his toadies who then rushes away, to return a moment later with a whole squad of magicians in the most amazing coats Joseph has ever seen. For Joseph, the rest of the dream slides by in a blur—the king’s magicians turn their sticks into snakes, too, only to have silver-plate’s snake gobble them up like a basket of honeycakes—because he cannot take his dream eyes off those coats. Panels of linen overlaid with braids of wool, every piece a different color, and hung with charms and talismans of stone and metal. I want that, the dream Joseph thinks to himself, and “I’ve got to have that,” he says out loud the moment he wakes up.

He begins his campaign that very day, whining and posturing and even refusing to eat (later, he will blame the Beard for this fasting, as if his dreams infected him) until he wins over first his mother and then at last his father. With Jacob on his side, Joseph can ignore the complaints of his brothers, who claim it makes Joseph look like “a Hittite whore.”

Joseph doesn’t try for the talismans. Jacob probably could afford it, but Joseph knows his limits. Besides, it’s the coat he cares about, all the colors, even more swirls than his cup of dreams. The day he gets it he struts all about the camp, the sides of it held open like the fan of a peacock—or maybe like a foolish baboon who does not know enough to protect his chest from his enemies.

That same night, Joseph dreams of the coat soaked in blood.

• • •

Joseph’s dream power comes from his mother. “All power comes from mothers,” Rachel tells him, and thereby sets aside the story Jacob likes, that Yah taught dream interpretation to Adam, who taught it to Seth, who taught it to Noah, whose animals dreamed every night on the boat, only to lose the knack when they walked down the ramp back onto the sodden earth. “Listen to me,” Rachel whispers, “you think great men like Adam spent their time with dreams? It was Eve. And she didn’t learn it from God, she learned it from the serpent. She bit into the apple and snipped off the head of a worm. And that’s when people started to dream.”

• • •

Joseph’s worst moment comes in prison. He sits on his tailbone with his legs drawn up and his arms around his knees, trying to let as little of his body as possible touch the mud and slime of the floor. He’s tried so hard, it’s so unfair. No matter what terrible tricks Yah played on him—his brothers’ hatred, his coat taken from him and streaked with blood—he’s done his best, he’s accepted it, really he has. And now this! And all because he tried to do something right. When your master’s wife wants to screw you, you’re supposed to say no, right? Isn’t that what Yah teaches (not that it’s ever stopped Jacob, but that’s not the point)? And instead of a reward, he has to sit in garbage and eat worse.

Something touches Joseph’s sleeve. He screams and jerks back, certain it’s a rat. But when he opens his eyes he sees two men not much older than himself. They wear linen and their hair is curled, signs they’ve fallen from a high place. “Please,” one says, “You’re the Hebrew who interprets dreams, aren’t you? Will you help us? Please?”

“No,” Joseph says. “Go away, leave me alone.” And yet, he feels a certain tug of pleasure that his reputation as Potiphar’s dream speaker has followed him into hell. He tries to ignore them, but they just stand there, looking so desperate, that finally he says “Oh, all right. Tell me your dreams.”

The one who goes first announces that he was Pharaoh’s chief wine steward before the court gossips slid him into jail. He tells Joseph, “In my dream I saw—I was in a garden. It was nighttime, I think. I looked up high and saw three branches. They began to bud. Blossoms shot forth. There were three ripe grapes. Suddenly, Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand. Or maybe it was there before, I’m not sure. I squeezed the grapes in my hand. I poured the juice into the cup. I gave it to Pharaoh. He was just there and I gave it to him and he drank it.”

Joseph rolls his eyes. This is not exactly a great mystery, he thinks. He says, “All right, here’s the meaning. In three days, Pharaoh will lift up your head. He will examine your case and restore you to your office. You’ll be safe from this filth and back in the palace. Congratulations.”

The man claps his hands. “Blessed Mother Isis!” he cries. “Thank you!” He bends down to kiss Joseph’s knees, but Joseph pulls his legs even closer to his chest.

“Just promise me something,” Joseph says. “When you’re back pouring wine for Pharaoh, remember me? Tell him I don’t deserve this.”

“Oh yes,” the man says, and claps his hands again.

“Now me,” the other one says. He kneels down before Joseph and says, “In my dream I’m walking in the street behind the palace. There are three baskets on top of my head. Two of them are filled with white bread, but the one on top holds all the lovely things I bake for Pharaoh. Cakes shaped like Horus, a spelt bun like the belly of Hathor. Just as I’m thinking about how much the king will like them, birds come and pluck them away.” He laughs, as if he’s told a joke. “Right out of the basket. Now,” he says, “Tell me the meaning.”

Joseph stares at him. He stares and stares at the man’s eager face. Why has Yah done this to me? he thinks, but even that last shred of self-pity drains out of him, washed away in horror at such pathetic innocence.

“Go on, go on,” the man insists.

Can he fake it? Joseph wonders. He tries to think of some story but his mind jams. He can’t escape. Yah has set the truth on him like a pack of dogs. In a cracked whisper he says, “In three days, Pharaoh shall lift your head from your shoulders. He will hang you from a tree and the birds will eat your body.”

The baker doesn’t scream, only makes a noise deep in his chest. “Oh Gods,” he says, “help me. Help me, please.”

Joseph is stunned. No anger, no hate. No demands to change it or make it go away or even to think again. Just that trust. Without thought, Joseph wraps his arms around the man like a mother. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m so sorry.”

Joseph will stay two years in the prison before Pharaoh will dream a dream not found anywhere in the catalogues, and his wine steward, hearing of lean cows and fat cows, will remember the man he had promised not to forget. In all those months, Joseph will think of that empty promise only three or four times. But he will see the face of the baker every morning, before he opens his eyes.

• • •

People at court sometimes joke about the Viceroy’s clay cup. Childish, they call it. Primitive. Hebrew. Visitors from Kush or Mesopotamia look shocked when they see him raise it in honor of Pharaoh’s health. Their advance men, whose job it is to know all the gossip, whisper to them that Lord Joseph uses this cup to divine the future. Perhaps he sees visions in the wine, they say. Or perhaps—these are the views of the more scientifically minded—some impurity in the clay flakes off into the liquid and induces heightened states of awareness. The visitors shake their heads. That’s all well and good, they say. He saved Egypt from famine, after all. But why does he drink from it in public?

During long dinners the Viceroy, like other men, will sometimes pause to swirl his barley wine, or else just stare blankly into his cup. At such times, all conversation, all breathing, stops, until Lord Joseph once more lifts up his eyes and makes some bland comment.

• • •

The princes, the courtiers, and the slaves all agree. The God Thoth visits Joseph at night, when together they discuss the secrets of the universe. A bright light leaks under the door of the Viceroy’s bedchamber, and sometimes an alert slave will hear the flutter of Thoth’s wings. And sometimes, they say, Thoth himself becomes the student, silent with wonder as Joseph teaches him secrets beyond the knowledge of Gods.

• • •

The boy Joseph curls himself up in the pit where his brothers have thrown him. Frozen in the desert night without his coat, he clutches the one treasure they didn’t take from him, the cup his mother gave him, which he keeps always in a pouch on a cord around his waist. What will it be? A lion, a scorpion, a snake? Instead, before Judah and Simeon come back to sell him as a slave, a deep sleep takes him. He does not know it, but Yah has covered him with a foul smell that will drive away the beasts, for now is the time to dream. Joseph sees himself standing before a dark sky, with his arms out and his face lifted. A crown appears on his head. The crown becomes light, pure light that spreads through his body—his forehead, his mouth, his shoulders, all the way to his fingertips, light that streams out of him, through his heart and his lungs, even his entrails, if he shits, he shits light, his penis ejaculates light, the muscles and bones of his legs pure light, his toes on fire with light. Joseph tries to cry out, but light rivers from his mouth.

And then it shatters. Broken light, broken Joseph splashes through the world, becomes darkness, becomes dust, becomes bodies and rock, light encased in darkness and bodies. And letters. Letters that fall from the sky, like drops of black flame.

Joseph wakes to the hands of the slave traders dragging him up from the dirt.

• • •

Does the Beard dream? Does the fire on his face allow him even to sleep? Or does he spend so much time chatting with Yah, punishing slackers, and writing, writing, writing, that he looks at dreams, and even the future, as a hobby for children and weak minds? After all, what does the Beard care about the future? He has his book. For him, time ends with the final letter.

• • •

When his brothers bully him, when they throw mud on his coat or trip him so he falls on pebbles sharp enough to splash his coat with blood, Joseph just wants to get back at them. In Jacob’s tent one night he decides to make up a prophecy. “Listen, everybody,” he announces, “I had a dream. Last night. A really good one.” They roll their eyes or make faces but no one stops him. They don’t want to believe in him, but they do. “Here it is,” he says gleefully. “All of us were out in the fields binding sheaves. We stepped back from them, but my sheaf stood upright and all yours bowed down to it.” He smiles. “What do you think?”

Silence. No one wants to look at anyone. At last, Reuben says, “Since when do you ever go out and bind sheaves?” Inside their laughter, Joseph hears the whisper of fear.

That night, a dream comes to him. The Sun, the Moon, and eleven stars all bow down to him. He wakes up more scared than elated. He should keep it to himself, he knows. He’s already got them mad, who knows what they’ll do if he pushes this one at them. He pours some water into his cup from the gourd his mother’s handmaids fill for him. Before he can drink, however, he sees in the bubbles everything that will follow—how the dream will provoke his brothers, how he will become a slave in Egypt, how he will rise to viceroy so that his family and in fact all Egypt will bow to him. It will not last, he sees. Their descendants will all become slaves, only to get free once more and stumble through the desert for forty years, forty years, before they can get back to their homeland. The vision doesn’t last. Startled, he spills the water, and the details spill from his brain. And yet he knows now that everything leads to something else, that all his actions serve some secret purpose known only to Yah. Is it all just tricks, then? Do Yah’s schemes ever come to an end?

He can stop it, he knows. All he has to do is never tell anyone the dream. Doesn’t Grandpa Isaac claim God gives all of us free will? (He remembers his father’s whisper, “All except my brother Esau. He’s too stupid.”) If Joseph just keeps silent, the whole routine can never get started.

That afternoon, Zebulon kicks him and he blurts out, “You think you’re so strong? I dreamed that the Sun and Moon and eleven stars all bowed down to me. That’s right, eleven. What do you think of that?”

• • •

Joseph is old now, facing the blank door of death. He has blessed his children and his grandchildren and their children. Soon, he knows, the embalmers will suck out his brains, squirt the “blood of Thoth” into his body, wrap him in bandages, and encase him in stone. He wonders—if his descendants really do leave Egypt, will they find him and drag him along with them?

At the foot of his bed lies a wool and linen coat painted in swirls of color. Joseph has no idea how it got there. By the size of it, it looks made for a boy, or maybe a shrunken old man. Next to the bed, on a little stand, sits his cup, as bright as the coat. He has told his slave to fill it with wine, though Joseph knows he lacks the strength to lift it, let alone pour it down his throat.

When he dies, will he see Rachel and Jacob? Or has he waited so long they’ve grown impatient and wandered off somewhere where he will never find them? He is alone now. The doctors and the magicians, his family, his servants, he’s ordered them all away, and to his surprise they have listened. He wants more than anything to stay awake, so he can feel his soul, his ka, as the Egyptians call it, rattle around inside his body until it finds the way out. He tells himself that he’s read all the papyruses, the “books of the dead,” and wants to find out for himself. But he knows the real reason to stay awake. He doesn’t want any more dreams. As always, however, Yah makes His own plans.

In his dream, Joseph sees the Burning Beard one more time. With his face even more of a blaze than usual, he and his brother accost Pharaoh in the early morning, when Pharaoh goes down to wash in the Nile. Joseph watches them argue, but all he can hear is a roar. Now the brother raises his staff, he strikes the water—and the Nile turns to blood! Joseph shouts but does not wake up. All over Egypt, he sees, water has turned to blood, not just the river but the streams and the reservoirs and even the wells. For days it goes on, with the old, the young, and the weak dying of thirst. Finally the water returns.

Only—frogs return with it. The entire Nile swarms with them. Soon they cover people’s tables, their food, their bodies. And still more horrors follow. The brother strikes the dust and lice spring forth. Wild beasts roar in from the desert.

Joseph twists in agony, but Yah will not release him. He sees both brothers take fistfuls of furnace ash and throw them into the sky. A wind blows the ash over all the people of Egypt, and where it touches the skin, boils erupt. Now the Beard lifts his arms to the sky and hail kills every creature unfortunate enough to be standing outside. As if he has not done enough, he spreads his hands at night and calls up an east wind to bring swarms of locusts. They eat whatever crops the hail has left standing. No, Joseph cries. I saved these people from famine. Don’t do this. He can only watch as the Beard lifts his hand and pulls down three days of darkness.

And then—and then—when the darkness lifts, the first born of every woman and animal, from Pharaoh’s wives and handmaids to the simplest farm slave who could never affect political decisions in any way, even the cows and the sheep and the chickens, the first born of every one of them falls down dead.

Just at the moment of waking up, Joseph sees that the finger of death has spared certain houses, those marked with a smear of lamb’s blood. The Hebrews. Yah and the Beard have saved the Hebrews. Joseph’s people. But aren’t the Egyptians Joseph’s people as well? And didn’t he bring the Hebrews to Egypt? If all this carnage comes because the Hebrews have lived in Egypt, is it all Joseph’s fault?

He wakes up choking. For the first time in days, his eyes find the strength to weep. He wishes he could get up and kneel by the bed, but since he cannot, he prays on his back. “Please,” he whispers. “I have never asked You for anything. Not really. Now I am begging You. Make me wrong. Make this one dream false. Make all my powers a lie. Take my gift and wipe it from the world. Do anything, anything, but please, please, make me wrong.”

But he knows it will not happen. He is Joseph ben Jacob, Lord Viceroy of dreams. And he has never made a wrong prediction in his life.

© 2007 by Rachel Pollack.

Originally published in Interfictions,

edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Rachel Pollack is the author of thirty-six books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, art, and translation, along with short stories and comics. Her novel Unquenchable Fire won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, while her novel Godmother Night won the World Fantasy Award. Her books on Tarot cards include The Shining Tribe Tarot, designed and drawn by Rachel herself, and 78 Degrees of Wisdom, described around the world as “the Bible of Tarot readers.” Rachel’s books have been translated into fourteen languages, and she has taught and lectured in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and China. She is a senior faculty member in Goddard College’s MFA program. Rachel lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

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Second Hand
Rajan Khanna

Wyoming Territory

Circa 1874

Quentin Ketterly stood in the Gold Star Saloon and lit his cheroot with one hand, the other resting lightly on his hip, very close to his waistcoat pocket. He stared across the room at the five men playing poker at a nearby table. His eyes tracked the movement of the cards that they held and played, though his mind was on another set of Cards entirely.

The lion’s share of his attention was focused on one Hiram Tetch—an itinerant and idiot, who happened to be Quentin’s charge. Not for the first time, Quentin cursed the promise that had led him to become . . . what? Hiram’s teacher? His chaperone?

Whatever the title, he had promised the old man that he would look after the lad, and without the old man, Quentin wouldn’t have become a Card Sharp and wouldn’t have discovered the Cards. Taking care of Hiram was payment for that debt. That the old man had a halfwit for a son was just part of the price.

The dealer dealt out a fresh hand and Hiram looked surreptitiously at the cards, then tugged at the brim of his bowler hat. Quentin recognized it as one of Hiram’s tells. It meant he had a good hand. Unfortunately, the money in front of him was meager. He could have gone all in, but that likely would have scared off the skittish players at the table. Hiram liked to draw out the play, reel in the others, then clean up.

Hiram reached into the inside pocket of his dusty black coat and removed a gold cigarette case. He held it down in his lap and fitted a cigarette to his lips. As he struck the match on the underside of the table, Quentin saw two lights flare—one from the match, the other from inside the case. Quentin stifled a curse and his hand moved closer to his waistcoat pocket.

Quentin couldn’t see the Card Hiram had just Played, the one that had come from inside the cigarette case, but he would bet it all that it had been a Diamond. Diamonds were associated not only with wealth, but with trickery. Illusion. What in the damned Hell was the boy playing at?

A moment later, Hiram reached into his coat pocket (an outside one this time) and removed a small pouch of clinking coins. Quentin knew with certainty that the pouch had been empty just moments before. “My emergency supply,” Hiram said and spilled shining coins onto the table. The other men grunted, but seemed pacified. They had no reason to know of Hiram’s notorious lack of foresight, his inability to look even an hour into the future.

The hand continued.

Hiram reeled them in.

When all was said and done, Hiram had more than tripled the money he’d started with. He sat back, a wide grin etched on his face. He looked at Quentin and winked. Quentin frowned back. It was an expression all too familiar to him these days.

A cry went up from one of the other men at the table. While Hiram had won back most of his “emergency supply,” some of the coins had made their way into the others’ piles, and the man who had cried out held one of these between two grimy fingers, his face puckered into a grimace. The coin flexed between his fingers, to the astonishment of everyone except Quentin and Hiram.

Then the room erupted into chaos.

Hiram swiped at the paper money in front of him, scooping up as much as he could, then ran for the front door of the saloon as his fellow players reached for their guns.

Quentin cursed and tossed the cheroot, his hand reaching to his waistcoat pocket and his Deck. It was a reflex action in times of stress, but he would be damned if he would waste one of his Cards on that fool of a boy.

Still, his hand stayed near his pocket.

The men ran after Hiram, and Quentin chased after them. Hiram bolted across the street and around the side of the tailor’s shop, running for the fringe of scrub that rimmed the town of Stillwell like thinning hair. Quentin winced as a shot rang out. It would serve the kid right to get a bullet in the ass as a result of his play. And for generally being a burr in the seat of everyone’s pants.

Quentin pulled out the Five of Spades, held it tightly between his fingers. Ahead, Hiram dove for a small bush, and Quentin saw a flash between the sparsely filled branches.

The two pursuers held their guns out, but as they prepared to shoot, the gun barrels twisted, curving until they were black and silver snakes in the men’s hands. Both men screamed and dropped the snakes to the ground. Then, with a look at each other, they bolted.

Quentin waited a moment, then strode to where Hiram was hiding. “I don’t know where to begin,” he said. “With your damn fool decision to cheat or with your poor job in doing so.” He pulled the young man up by his collar.

Hiram’s expression turned serious. “I don’t cheat,” he said. “Conjurin’ up more coins don’t mean I cheat at cards.”

Quentin rolled his eyes. “You couldn’t hold the Play.”

Hiram flushed. “Just a moment longer and it would have been fine.” He shrugged off Quentin’s touch and brushed the bramble from his coat. “Only, well, I used a Four.”

“How many coins did you conjure?”

“Forty-nine. I mean, I know that the numbers should match, but, well, it was still in the range of four . . .”

Quentin slapped the back of Hiram’s head. “Idiot,” he said. “I taught you better than that. Never mind. We need to get off this street in case those men come back.”

Quentin grabbed Hiram’s arm and pulled him down the street. “When are you going to learn some sense?” Quentin said. “Wasting Cards on a card game?”

“What do you care?” Hiram asked. “They’re my Cards. You can’t use ’em.”

“You should care,” Quentin said. “Once they’re gone, there are no more.”

“But I did good with those pistols, right?” Hiram asked.

Quentin spit. He would have liked to say the Play was no good. Instead, he admitted, “Yeah, kid. That was good.”

Hiram pulled away from Quentin and went back to where the altercation had taken place. When he returned, he was tucking one of the six-shooters, now reverted to its original form, into his belt.

“What you going to do with that?” Quentin asked.

Hiram shrugged. “Maybe next time I won’t need to use my Cards.”

Quentin shook his head. “We’re not here to start useless fights. And we’re not here to win money at cards.”

“I know,” Hiram said. “We’re here for the list, but we need money to keep us going, right?”

Quentin gritted his teeth. The boy was right. They’d been chasing down a list of names that the old man had kept inside his battered traveling case. So far, it had yielded little but had eaten through a lot of their resources—Cards and cash both. The last name had brought them to Stillwell, but they’d only had enough money to pay for one night in the hotel.

“You head back to the room,” Quentin said. “I want you lying low in case those card players are still about.”

“What are you going to do?”

Quentin narrowed his eyes. “I’m going to see if we can’t turn this hand around.”

• • •

The last name on their list was just “Gunsmith.” Quentin asked about, as discretely as he could. The boy at the stables turned his luck. “Don’t know no Gunsmith, but there is a gun shop in town.”

It sounded right to Quentin. If this were a card game, it would be enough for him to bluff. He returned to the hotel, grabbed Hiram, and dragged him to the gun shop. They stood outside looking for a moment at the plain, wooden building.

“Guess we should go inside,” Hiram said. Before Quentin could stop him, he bounded up the steps leading to the shop door and burst inside.

Mumbling curses, Quentin followed.

The store wasn’t very different from other gun stores that Quentin had been to, though he had only seen a few. Sleek, oiled pistols and rifles lined glass cases, with a few models mounted on the walls.

Standing behind the counter, wearing a leather apron, was a woman. Her sandy hair was streaked with gray and pulled back into a ponytail. Her eyes were a startling blue, but tired. She raised an eyebrow at Quentin. “You looking for a gun?” she said.

“No,” Quentin said. “I’m actually looking for someone who might go by the name of Gunsmith. You know anyone like that?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “And what might you be wanting with this Gunsmith?”

“Just to talk,” Quentin said. “We think he might have known a friend of ours.”

“My father,” Hiram said. “Though he was never no friend to me.”

One of the woman’s hands came up with a black revolver. “Well, there’s no Gunsmith here. And unless you’re looking to buy a gun, I think you’d better just leave now.” She eased the hammer back with her thumb.

Quentin’s hand jumped to his waistcoat pocket. “Now hold on,” he said. “No need to get jumpy.”

Hiram reached for his Cards, too, in their cigarette case, and the woman swiveled the pistol toward him.

Quentin pulled the Five of Spades.

The woman’s eyes flashed between the two of them, then she thumbed the hammer back into place and lowered the revolver. “Wasn’t expecting you to be slinging Cards,” she said.

Quentin’s eyes widened. “You know about the Cards?”

The woman nodded. “I’m Gunsmith.”

Quentin nodded and slid the Five of Spades back into his pocket. He moved forward, excited. “I’m Quentin Ketterly. And this is Hiram Tetch.”

“Real names, huh? You must be greenhorns. Most seasoned Cardslingers use nicknames.”

“Oh,” Quentin said.

Hiram elbowed Quentin lightly in the ribs. “I’m going to call myself the King of Aces.”

“No,” Quentin said. “You’re definitely not.” He turned to Gunsmith. “We’ve been looking for you.”

Her eyes narrowed again. “I get that. Why?”

“To learn more about the Cards,” Quentin said.

“And you expect me to learn you? Why would I do that?”

Quentin paused, taken aback. “I just thought . . .”

“That we’re all one happy family? You do have a lot to learn. There are some that would kill you just for showing your hand. Hell, I almost killed you myself.”

“Why?” Quentin said.

“I made a lot of enemies in my time with the Cards,” Gunsmith said.

“You’re using a six-shooter, though,” Hiram said. “Reckon that’s so you can save your Cards?”

“In a way,” Gunsmith said. She held up the pistol and, without it being pointed at him, Quentin saw that it was one of the finest revolvers he’d ever set eyes on. “This here’s a Colt Peacemaker,” Gunsmith said. “In the right hands, a Peacemaker’ll kill a man dead. But this here Colt will kill anyone dead with just one shot. Anywhere. Graze a man on the ear, and he’ll die. Guaranteed.”

“How?”

Gunsmith smiled. “The Six of Spades. I infused the power into the revolver. Good for six shots. And, well, you know Spades . . .”

She held up another six-shooter made from a darker metal. “This one was the Six of Clubs. Each shot is a small explosion. First pistol won’t hurt anything other than a person. But this one can blow in doors.”

“You have them for the Six of Diamonds and Six of Hearts, too?” Hiram said.

“I used to,” Gunsmith said.

“So you harness the power of the Card,” Quentin said, “but defer the effect until later.”

“Exactly,” Gunsmith said.

“Can I do that?” Quentin asked.

“Well, not without practice,” Gunsmith said. “It took me years to master it.”

Quentin shook his head. There was so much he didn’t know about the Cards. So much he hadn’t even considered. He certainly had never imagined being able to infuse their power into other objects.

“I don’t usually go heeled,” Quentin said, “but a gun like that . . .”

Gunsmith raised an eyebrow. “You in need of killing someone?”

Quentin looked at his boots. “Not anymore.”

She let this pass. She looked at Hiram. “So I guess your father was Jeb Tetch?”

Hiram nodded.

“When I met him, he was going by the name ‘Hoyle,’” Quentin said.

“Hoyle?” Gunsmith said. “The nerve of that man. He used to go by Cannonball. As in ‘all the subtlety of.’ The man was a brute, but—” Her eyes squinted in recollection. “—boy, could he dance.”

Quentin looked at Hiram, who shrugged.

“So, I take it you’re now teaching this one.” She indicated Hiram.

“As much as I know,” Quentin said.

“And how is that going?” she asked Hiram.

“Well, ma’am,” Hiram said, “he’s about as fun as a bucket of mud, but I think he’s learning me just fine.”

Gunsmith eyed them both, shaking her head. “I should send you both packing.”

“But you’re not,” Quentin said, picking up on her reticence.

Gunsmith sighed. “No. Against my better judgment, I’m not.” She looked at Hiram. “As a favor to your father. He wasn’t all bad.”

Hiram shrugged. “If you say so.”

“Besides,” she continued. “You remind me of better times, of my own apprentice.” Her face darkened for a moment. Then she smiled. “Why don’t you boys come by tomorrow. We can have lunch. Will that suit?”

“Yes,” Quentin said. “Thank you. We’ll see you then.”

• • •

Quentin couldn’t deny something like a thrill as he dressed the next morning. He couldn’t wait to meet with Gunsmith, couldn’t wait to hear more about the Cards. He had twenty-six left, but he hoped to learn a way to use them more wisely. Or even just learn more about where they came from. How they worked. He had promised the old man that he would teach Hiram. This would help. And then, when he was done, he could start using the Cards to help people. To do good instead of violence. Hell, maybe they both could.

He went outside for a quick smoke, then went to fetch Hiram, who was already two drinks deep at the bar. “Isn’t it a bit early?” Quentin said.

“Just needed a little fortification,” Hiram said. “I’m good now.”

“Good. Because we have an appointment today.”

“I know,” Hiram said. “The old lady.”

“You be respectful,” Quentin said. “We could learn a lot from her. You’d do well to pay attention.”

“I’d love to get my hands on one of those Colts,” Hiram said. “D’ya think she’d give us some kind of discount?”

“No. And no asking her neither. Be polite.”

They stopped by the fancy store up the street, the one that carried imported goods, and walked out with some tea from back east and some biscuits. Then they went over to Gunsmith’s.

There was no answer when Quentin knocked, so he knocked again. Then again.

“Do you smell smoke?” Hiram said.

Quentin sniffed the air, then kicked in the door.

The interior of Gunsmith’s shop was in disarray, glass cases broken into shards, pistols and rifles and instruments strewn across the place, curtains torn down, tables overturned.

“What do you think—?” Hiram said.

Quentin shushed him, his Deck already out in his hands. Hiram followed suit. They crouched down and stalked through the store. The place was silent save for the sound of their own steps, and whatever had been burning had been doused already, so there was no immediate danger.

At the back of the shop, they found Gunsmith. She lay on the ground, stiff, her arms and legs contorted, her face twisted in a permanent expression of complete pain.

“Good god,” Hiram said, and turned away.

Quentin crouched by the body. Touched one claw of a hand. It wouldn’t budge. Then he searched the woman’s pockets, her apron.

“God, man, be decent,” Hiram said.

“I’m checking for her Cards,” Quentin said.

“Why?”

“Because I can’t imagine she would let this happen. And—” He didn’t finish the sentence. He needed to be sure.

His search turned up nothing. No Cards. None even littered the ground. As an afterthought, he checked her boots. Hiram’s father had taught Quentin to keep his Jokers there, since their uses were unpredictable. Quentin had taught Hiram to do the same.

Gunsmith’s boots were empty.

“Maybe she didn’t carry them with her,” Hiram said.

“You know what the Cards are. How special they are. Would you keep yours anywhere but on your person?”

“No,” Hiram said. “But . . . maybe she was empty. Dry. No more.”

The thought chilled Quentin. “She did use the power in her guns. Maybe she had run out.”

“Shit,” Hiram said. “What do we do now?”

Quentin clenched his jaw. He knew that they should just move on. Someone good enough to take out Gunsmith, to make this kind of Play, might be more than they could handle. But this was the end of their trail. If they walked away now, they might never find another person who knew the Cards.

“I don’t want to spend too much time here, but I say we do some quick exploring. Might be something here that could help us out.”

Hiram nodded. Quentin gritted his teeth. He hated going through the woman’s things—it felt too much like looting—but anything that would help them, any more information on the cards, would be a boon.

This wasn’t what I bargained for, he thought. Skulking around like a criminal. Yet, the Cards are too important.

He closed Gunsmith’s eyelids and rose to search her shop.

• • •

They found the Spades revolver in one corner of the room, and the cylinder had only two bullets left in it. “She used this,” Quentin said.

“But it didn’t help her,” Hiram said.

“No. And since there’s no other body here, we’ll have to assume she didn’t hit anyone.”

Hiram took the pistol and tucked it into his belt. “No use leaving this behind,” he said. “Not with the magic in it.”

Quentin winced at the word. He hated thinking of it like that. But Hiram always named it so.

Quentin ran his fingers along the edge of his Deck. He could rustle up something to help track the killer, but it would use up a Card. He’d dealt out half of them while pursuing revenge against his uncle—payback for the death of his father. He’d hoped to honor his father by doing something better with the Cards afterward. And he would, once he’d finished schooling Hiram.

He could ask Hiram to make a Play. The boy would put up a fuss, but in the end he’d probably do it. But that idea left a bad taste behind it.

That was the thing about the Cards. As wondrous as they were, they made one a miser. Like an old man clinging to a dwindling fortune.

“I don’t like this,” Quentin said. “Whoever killed her didn’t seem to take much. Most of the weapons are still where they belong. Save for those that got knocked over.”

“And it weren’t no gunfight,” Hiram said. “Not with that smell in the air. If it weren’t her Cards, then maybe someone else made the Play?”

Could that be it? Quentin thought. She had said she’d made enemies. Did one come back to kill her? “Let’s go upstairs and see if we can find anything.”

They moved through Gunsmith’s rooms, pulling open drawers and pawing through chests and bureaus.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” Hiram said.

“I don’t know,” Quentin replied. “Something to give us direction.”

In the end, they found nothing beyond what a woman of Gunsmith’s age might have in her house—clothing, some toiletries, and linens—plus an assortment of tools in an old chest. But nothing about the Cards. No notebooks or diaries, either.

“Let’s get out of here,” Quentin said.

“Okay,” Hiram said. “Just give me a minute. I want to check on something.”

Quentin descended the stairs . . . and froze when he saw a woman standing in the room beside Gunsmith’s body. She was young, blonde, with piercing blue eyes; she wore traveling clothes and held a deck of cards (he had to assume they were Cards) in her hand.

Suddenly, she noticed him. “Who the hell are you?” she said. She stepped back.

Quentin’s eyes flicked to her Deck. “Now hold on,” he said.

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “D’you kill her?”

“What? Me?” Quentin said. “No, I—”

She pulled a Card from the top of her deck, though Quentin could only see the red back of it. He raised his own Card. But something held him back.

“Let’s not be hasty,” he said, moving slowly forward. “This could all be a misunderstanding.”

“What isn’t a misunderstanding,” she said, “is that my mother’s dead. Murdered. And I find you robbing her house. No, there ain’t no misunderstanding.”

“Wait, your mother?” Quentin said. “She never said she had a kid.”

“Oh, and you knew her so well, did you?” She still held the Card out in her shaking hand. All it would take was some concentration and she could rain fire down on him. Or something else. He could try to counter, but there was no knowing what card she held. Quentin would either have to Play one of his highest or risk going down.

Hiram’s arrival broke the moment down into pieces. The woman’s eyes jumped to him. Quentin moved. He pumped his legs, closing the gap, and tackled the woman to the ground. He placed one hand across the woman’s eyes, hoping it would momentarily break her concentration. Then he hissed in her ear, “We didn’t kill your ma.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth? Why should I believe you?”

“We came here to meet with her. She was going to talk to us. About the Cards.”

“What about them?”

“We’re . . . we’re new to this. We thought she could teach us something.”

The woman looked from Quentin to Hiram. She narrowed her eyes. “That does sound like her.”

Quentin let go of the woman and got to his feet, offering his hand to her. “I’m awful sorry about your mother. If there’s anything we can do to help, we’ll try.”

Her face softened, then she took his hand and he helped her to her feet. She turned back to where her mother still lay and took a moment to compose herself. “When did you get your Deck?” she asked, brushing off her skirt.

“His father gave it to me.” Quentin indicated Hiram. “As a favor.”

“That’s some favor.”

“Well, it wasn’t all kindness. He asked me to train this one.”

“Hey!” Hiram said.

“My ma gave me mine,” the woman said. She extended her hand. “I’m Clarice.”

“Quentin.” He shook her hand. She had a good grip. “This here is Hiram.”

Hiram tipped his bowler hat. “Ma’am.”

“Do you know who might have wanted to hurt your ma?” Quentin asked.

“I know she’d made enemies,” Clarice said. “I’d heard tell that someone was gunning for her. One of her friends down in Abilene got word to me. I just . . . got here too late.”

All of them turned when they heard the loud voices outside the front door. Quentin peeked through the curtained windows. “The Law,” he said and grabbed Hiram’s arm. “We have to go. Looks like someone heard something. Clarice, if you need us, you can find us at the Sovereign Hotel.”

“No,” Clarice said. “I’m going with you.”

“Why?”

“The sheriff’s not going to believe my ma was killed by a deck of playing cards. And I can’t waste time here with those dullwits while her killer is still out there. I’ll go with you now and deal with the law later.”

Quentin nodded. “Okay. If that’s how you want to play it. Let’s go.”

They slipped out the back and made their way to the hotel. Quentin had to stop himself from barraging Clarice with questions. He’d thought his hopes for more knowledge about the Cards had died with Gunsmith. But now he’d found someone else. Only there were more important things to focus on now. But once they were done . . .

He pushed the thoughts away. They entered the hotel, and Quentin turned to Clarice. “Why don’t you stay down here, maybe get a drink, and we’ll head up to our room for a minute, then we’ll come back down and join you.”

“I’ll come with you,” she said.

“But—” Quentin said, exchanging a glance with Hiram. Surely she would be concerned about propriety.

“My ma just died,” she said. “I need to do something.”

He shrugged and the three of them walked up the stairs to the room the two men shared.

Clarice sat on the bed, and Hiram, without being asked, poured her some whisky from the bottle they kept in the room. Clarice took a long draught. Quentin took off his hat, poured some water into the basin, and threw it over his face and neck. Dust and grit colored the water.

“How many do you have left?” Hiram said behind him.

“Not enough,” Clarice said, and left it at that. Curiosity burned brightly in Quentin’s mind. Was that part of the etiquette? Don’t let others know what you have? It certainly would be safer.

“Did your mother have any Cards left?” Quentin said, toweling off his face.

“I . . . I don’t know,” she said. “She did last time I saw her, but . . .” She shrugged. “I guess she either’d run out or she used what she had left trying to fight off her killer. If we’re lucky, that means he will have used a few Cards of his own.”

“There could have been more than one of them,” Hiram said. “If I wanted to take down a veteran Card Sharp, I’d have sent a few men after her.”

“We don’t know enough,” Quentin said. “If the killer just came here to kill Gunsmith, he might already be on his way out of town.”

“Then we should be checking and maybe asking around to see who might be new in town,” Hiram said.

“I’ll do that,” Quentin said. “I don’t want to chance you running into your friends from the Gold Star Saloon.”

“What should I do, then?” Hiram said.

“You and Clarice see what you can turn up. Maybe ask around here? It might even make sense to talk to the sheriff.”

Hiram grimaced, but Clarice nodded.

Quentin gave Hiram a pat on the back, a pat that the younger man seemed to find uncomfortable, then he left.

The bright light of Stillwell’s main road brought second thoughts. What are you doing, Quentin? Risking your life and maybe your Cards for something that doesn’t concern you?

But he had wanted to do good with the Cards. Wasn’t stopping a killer doing good? Wasn’t righting injustice worth the risk?

He stopped first at the other side of Stillwell, at the Alder Hotel where the stagecoach departed from. The next stage wasn’t for at least an hour, and no one was there waiting.

Next, he stopped by the town stables and asked around if anyone had left in a hurry. No one seemed to have done so. Quentin hung around the stables for a spell nevertheless, until he felt stupid watching for someone who might never come.

On his way back to the Sovereign, he detoured past Gunsmith’s place. Outside of it, he pulled his Deck from his waistcoat pocket and flipped through it. Hiram had wanted a special case for his—the cigarette case—but Quentin liked to have his pressing up against him, easily accessible.

Of all the Cards in his deck, he had more Diamonds than anything else. Cards from the other three suits had been burned up in his vendetta against his uncle.

He found he suddenly wished for a pistol like the one Hiram had picked up. Perhaps the boy had it right. Maybe it was a way to hold on to the Cards a little longer. No wonder Gunsmith survived for as long as she did. Finding a way to make the Cards last was a miracle. Once they were gone, they were gone. It was the one absolute truth he knew about them.

The lawmen had left Gunsmith’s house some time ago by the looks of it, probably to cart off the body to the undertaker. He wondered what they would think of her death; there were no real wounds on the body—whatever had killed her had been from the Card Sharp’s Play.

Quentin reached for his Diamonds. He hadn’t been intending to use a Card for this—it wasn’t even his business, any of this. But finding out what happened to Gunsmith felt right. And Clarice might be more willing to exchange information if he helped find her mother’s killer.

Making a Play was tricky and never a guaranteed thing. If you tried for something beyond the value of the Card, it wouldn’t work. And you would waste the Card nonetheless. So he thought carefully.

He needed to sharpen his senses. He flipped to the Five of Diamonds. It seemed right—five senses, after all. But before he drew it, he flipped ahead to the Six and pulled that out. Five normal senses, sure, but there was that elusive sixth. And Diamonds was the suit of vision and also of earth, of buried secrets.

He entered the house through the open back door and sat down where they’d found Gunsmith’s body. Then he focused on the Six of Diamonds, shaping his desire, feeling the power gather as it always did, and he willed the Card to life. It flared in his hand, burning away to nothing.

He gasped as his vision swam and the room around him seemed to thicken, as if he were underwater. A shape, like dark smoke, coalesced before him. As he stepped back, it sharpened into Gunsmith. Or at least an approximation of her. Her features were muddied, unclear. But he knew it was her.

The vision went beyond sight, though. He could feel her boots upon the wooden floor. Could smell the scent of her—oil and leather and something herbaceous.

She was bending down, lining up some pistols in a glass case. The door opened. She rose and reached for the Spades pistol. The figure in the doorway was black smoke.

Quentin caught the momentary image of a Card in the figure’s hand. Then a charge ran through the room and the glass case in front of Gunsmith shattered, throwing glass around like sparks from a fire. Gunsmith rose, firing—once, twice, then the pistol went flying from her grasp.

She reached down to a holster beneath her apron, coming up with a Card.

The vision blurred as intense energies filled the room. Though he was removed by the veil of time, Quentin thought he could feel Gunsmith’s attack raise the hairs on his arms.

Gunsmith reached for another Card, but maybe she was injured, or just too slow. Whatever the reason, she never used it. An unseen force gripped her, arching her back and contorting her face, and then she toppled to the ground, still in the same awkward position.

The attacker moved into the room. And as she neared, as the room saw her, felt her, her features resolved so that Quentin could see who it was. His skin went cold.

Clarice.

As he watched, she bent down over the dead form of Gunsmith and removed the Card from the still-clutching hand, then retrieved the rest from the holster at the dead woman’s side. It was a thin stack, but she took them, and put them in her own coat pocket.

I’ve been a damned fool, Quentin thought.

He ran upstairs, back into the bedroom. He remembered a photograph from before, in a tarnished silver frame. He picked it up. There was a younger Gunsmith and Clarice, no more than a girl. Why would she kill her own mother?

He was just leaving the bedroom when a gunshot rang out downstairs.

Quentin ran down the stairs and barreled into the shop. Clarice stood over a limp, dark figure on the ground, holding a still-smoking pistol. Gunsmith’s Spades pistol. Quentin recognized Hiram’s bowler hat rolling away on the floor. Clarice held Hiram’s Deck of Cards in her free hand.

Clarice turned and leveled the pistol at him. Quentin’s Cards were still in his pocket.

“Why?” Quentin gasped, reeling as he spoke the words. I’m sorry, old man—I failed you. I let your son die.

“For these,” she said, holding up the Deck.

Quentin shook his head. “But you can’t use another man’s Cards!”

Clarice grinned with one side of her mouth. “Are you certain of that fact?” she said. Quentin began to move, but she cocked back the hammer of the pistol. “Uh-uh.”

“Do you really think you can make them work?”

“Oh, I know it to be true,” she said. “It’s clear you’re milling about on the ignorant side of the fence—and to be fair, most of us are—but there are ways out there, secret ways, that only a few know. One trick lets you take another’s Cards and make them your own.”

Quentin gasped. The old man had taught him that there was only ever the one Deck. Once you used that up, the power was gone. Never to return. To be able to get more . . .

“Why kill him?” he said through clenched teeth.

“Don’t you understand how it works? The Cards are linked to us when we take them. When we use them. I can’t take these if the owner is still breathing. The ritual that tethers them wouldn’t work otherwise.”

“Ritual?”

“Yes,” she said, her smile widening. “Once I find it, I’ll—”

“You don’t even have it yet?” Quentin said, incredulous. Without even meaning to, he moved forward, and then stopped when Clarice took a step toward him, gun arm fully outstretched, violence sparking in her eyes.

“No,” she said, the smile now gone. “Not yet, but I will. Ma got it from one of her old pals. Only I had to kill him when I made my escape. Believe me, every day I spent chained up in her cellar . . . I don’t regret it one bit. Though it did make this part more difficult. The sad thing is that the cost, in Cards, is high. But with your two Decks, and Ma’s, I should have plenty leftover after.”

Quentin shook his head. “She tried to take your Cards?”

“I was so happy when she told me about them, when she made me my Deck. I was adopted, you see. I felt like this was her passing on her legacy to me. Only I don’t know if she did it because she wanted to share them, or if she knew this is how it would end. I think she gave them to me just so she could take them back again.”

“My God,” Quentin said. “Why?”

“Why?” she repeated, a wild gleam in her eyes. “You know why. So much power, but always fleeting. She spent most of her life trying to make them last longer. Putting their strength into objects. But, as you know, they dwindle. They go. She started getting weird in the head. Paranoid. She kept saying that old enemies were coming for her. She needed more. I guess . . . I guess I made things easier, unsuspecting as I was.”

Quentin thought back to the old man training him. If he knew barely anything now, he’d known literally nothing then. The old man could have easily killed him and taken the Cards back. “How did you manage to survive?”

The smile returned. “She had to learn me something,” she said. “I think that’s how the magic works. She couldn’t just take them from me right away. Even so, it wasn’t easy. I used one of my Jokers and that gave me an opportunity. I ran away and never came back. ’Til now.”

It made sense. Jokers, as Wild Cards, had unpredictable results. He’d in fact used one to similar advantage.

“Thing was,” Clarice said, “I was really gunning for you and your friend. I picked up on the two of you going around to some of the old-timers, asking questions. I figured you’d be easy marks. I never expected you’d lead me back here. I ought to thank you. Lucky I got to you before she did.”

Realization dawned in Quentin’s mind. If she was right, Gunsmith wouldn’t have taught them about the Cards. She would have taken them. Still, it didn’t matter much. Clarice was going to do the same.

She smiled. “Now, toss your Cards to me.”

“No,” Quentin said. “You’re going to kill me anyway. I’m not gonna make this easy for you.”

“Fair enough,” she said. The gunshot rang out even as Quentin felt the slug strike his left shoulder. He fell backward, his chest erupting into pain.

This was it, then, he thought. Death at last. Still with some Cards remaining. The Cards she would take from him. From his corpse.

He fell to the ground, the impact hard against his body. He’d been expecting a quick death, thought that’s how the gun would work, but it was taking its sweet time. He hurt too much—it was sadistic.

Clarice moved toward him.

Quentin found himself wishing that the bullet would take effect, would kill him before she took his Deck away. To have to watch . . .

She stood above him now, her eyes greedy.

Then the room exploded into a flurry of butterflies—fluttering, delicate wings of every possible color flitting and flying through the space.

Clarice turned in surprise and started swatting at them as they flew at her.

Quentin pushed aside his astonishment and moved. Whatever the reason, the bullet had yet to take him, and he still had his Cards. Ignoring the pain in his shoulder, he rose to his feet and took out the next Card from his deck, the Seven of Diamonds. His perceptions from the previous card were still lingering, and he reached out through them, feeling roots tangling beneath the wooden floor, coiling through the earth there. The Card flared in his hand and with a creaking, then a cracking, the roots shot up through the wooden floor, suddenly animated, wrapping around Clarice’s legs.

The pistol went tumbling from her hands, and she reached for her own Deck, drawing a Card, which quickly burned away in her hands. The roots that gripped her suddenly took fire, sizzling away into blackish smoke that blew across the flying butterflies.

Quentin flipped out another Card, the Eight of Spades this time, and focused his thoughts, throwing a thunderbolt across the store’s space. It flared bright blue-white, incinerating a wide swath of butterflies in its path as it arced toward Clarice.

But the light from a Card in Clarice’s hand was already fading, throwing up a reddish, transparent shield, and Quentin’s thunderbolt danced across its surface without reaching her. It crackled, trying to penetrate it, but she held it back, her Play at least as powerful as his own.

They stood like that for a moment, him pushing his power, Clarice holding it back.

Quentin fumbled for another Card even as Clarice reached for her own, but his wound made his arm tremble and blood had run down onto his hand. He grabbed for one, any one, staring at it so that he could focus on a meaning. Something, anything to take Clarice down.

He drew the Seven of Hearts, and his mind reached out desperately for the first meaning that appeared. The heart. Life energy. He grabbed it and seized it and in his mind pictured Clarice’s heart, willing his fear and anger at it.

She had already drawn her Card, but then the hand holding it dropped and her other hand went to her chest, her eyes wide in fear and shock.

He pushed with all of his willpower, carrying the Play through to its end.

Clarice fell to the ground, terrible gasping sounds coming from her throat.

He ran to her, crouched down over her. She looked up at him, tears spilling from her eyes. Then she was still.

Quentin went to Hiram, who stirred on the ground. “How are you not dead?” Quentin asked. “How am I not dead? Did Gunsmith’s pistol fail?”

Hiram, clutching at a wound in his thigh, shook his head. He pointed across the room to what looked like Gunsmith’s Colt lying in a corner.

“But—” Quentin said.

“I laid a glamour on it,” Hiram said. “Made the plain one look like the special one and vice versa.”

“Didn’t trust her?”

Hiram smiled. “I just wanted to keep it for myself.” He crawled his way over to Clarice’s body, wincing in pain, and roughly retrieved his Deck. “Bitch,” he said. “Luckily, I remembered the Jokers in my boots.”

“Butterflies.” Quentin shook his head. “Unpredictable.”

With his Cards returned, Hiram pulled out one of his own Hearts and fixed up the wound in his leg. Then, in a rare moment of generosity, he used one on Quentin’s wound as well.

They left the body where it lay, though Quentin removed Clarice’s Cards. It would be up to the sheriff to figure out what had happened, if he could. Quentin knew that they would have to gather their things and move on. Both of them with their Decks lighter than they’d been when they arrived in Stillwell.

Using a key they found on her body, they visited Clarice’s room at the Avery Hotel. Quentin wanted to open her suitcase, but in a rare moment of insight, Hiram thought it might be trapped. “Gunsmith could put a Play inside a pistol, why not one inside a bag?”

So it was one more Play each (a Diamond to detect and identify the protection and one of Hiram’s Spades to counteract it) before they could safely open it. Inside, they found six Decks of varying sizes. These they carefully placed into their own bags.

Quentin also found a journal filled with names and locations in a feminine scrawl. “Another list?” Hiram said.

Quentin shrugged. “Got to play the hand that we’ve been dealt.”

• • •

Quentin fingered Clarice’s journal as they sat on the train heading west. Dusty brown land dotted with scrub passed by outside the window.

“Did you believe what she said?” Hiram asked. “That you could get more Cards by taking them away from a person?”

Quentin looked at his hands. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seems an awful horrific thing to do.” And yet, he thought, the Cards flee so quickly.

“In any case,” he said, “none of us know the secret. And I think that’s for the best.”

“Oh, most certainly,” Hiram said, an odd note in his voice.

They looked at each other uneasily. The rest of the ride passed in silence.

© 2014 by Rajan Khanna.

Originally published in Dead Man’s Hand,

edited by John Joseph Adams.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Rajan Khanna is a writer, musician, and sometime bon vivant. A graduate of the 2008 Clarion West Writers Workshop and a member of the NY-based writing group, Altered Fluid, his fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Shimmer Magazine, Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages, Diverse Energies, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Escape Pod, and The Way of the Wizard (among others) and has received Honorable Mention in the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror and the Year’s Best Science Fiction. He sometimes writes articles for Tor.com and occasionally narrates podcasts for sites like Podcastle, Lightspeed, and Pseudopod. Rajan also writes about wine, beer, and spirits at FermentedAdventures.com.

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NOVELLA

Shiva in Shadow
Nancy Kress

1. SHIP

I watched the probe launch from the Kepler’s top-deck observatory, where the entire Schaad hull is clear to the stars. I stood between Ajit and Kane. The observatory, which is also the ship’s garden, bloomed wildly with my exotics, bursting into flower in such exuberant profusion that even to see the probe go, we had to squeeze between a seven-foot-high bed of comoralias and the hull.

“God, Tirzah, can’t you prune these things?” Kane said. He pressed his nose to the nearly invisible hull, like a small child. Something streaked briefly across the sky. “There it goes. Not that there’s much to see.”

I turned to stare at him. Not much to see! Beyond the Kepler lay the most violent and dramatic part of the galaxy, in all its murderous glory. True, the Kepler had stopped a hundred light years from the core, for human safety, and dust-and-gas clouds muffled the view somewhat. But, on the other hand, we were far enough away for a panoramic view.

The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, the lethal heart of the galaxy, shone gauzily with the heated gases it was sucking downward into oblivion. Around Sag A* circled Sagittarius West, a three-armed spiral of hot plasma ten light years across, radiating furiously as it cooled. Around that, Sagittarius East, a huge shell left over from some catastrophic explosion within the last 100,000 years, expanded outward. I saw thousands of stars, including the blazing blue-hot stars of IRS16, hovering dangerously close to the hole, and giving off a stellar wind fierce enough to blow a long fiery tail off the nearby red giant star. Everything was racing, radiating, colliding, ripping apart, screaming across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. All set against the sweet, light scent of my brief-lived flowers.

Nothing going on. But Kane had never been interested in spectacle.

Ajit said in his musical accent, “No, not much to see. But much to pray for. There go we.”

Kane snapped, “I don’t pray.”

“I did not mean ‘pray’ in the religious sense,” Ajit said calmly. He is always calm. “I mean hope. It is a miraculous thing, yes? There go we.”

He was right, of course. The probe contained the Ajit-analogue, the Kane-analogue, the Tirzah-analogue, all uploaded into a crystal computer no bigger than a comoralia bloom. “We” would go into that stellar violence at the core, where our fragile human bodies could not go. “We” would observe, and measure, and try to find answers to scientific questions in that roiling heart of galactic spacetime. Ninety percent of the probe’s mass was shielding for the computer. Ninety percent of the rest was shielding for the three mini-capsules that the probe would fire back to us with recorded and analyzed data. There was no way besides the mini-caps to get information out of that bath of frenzied radiation.

Just as there was no way to know exactly what questions Ajit and Kane would need to ask until they were close to Sag A*. The analogues would know. They knew everything Ajit and Kane and I knew, right up until the moment we were uploaded.

“Shiva, dancing,” Ajit said.

“What?” Kane said.

“Nothing. You would not appreciate the reference. Come with me, Tirzah. I want to show you something.”

I stopped straining to see the probe, unzoomed my eyes, and smiled at Ajit. “Of course.”

This is why I am here.

• • •

Ajit’s skin is softer than Kane’s, less muscled. Kane works out every day in ship’s gym, scowling like a demon. Ajit rolled off me and laid his hand on my glowing, satisfied crotch.

“You are so beautiful, Tirzah.”

I laughed. “We are all beautiful. Why would anyone effect a genetic alteration that wasn’t?”

“People will do strange things sometimes.”

“So I just noticed,” I teased him.

“Sometimes I think so much of what Kane and I do is strange to you. I see you sitting at the table, listening to us, and I know you cannot follow our physics. It makes me sad for you.”

I laid my hand on top of his, pushing down my irritation with the skill of long practice. It does irritate me, this calm sensitivity of Ajit’s. It’s lovely in bed—he is gentler and more considerate, always, than Kane—but then there comes the other side, this faint condescension. “I feel sad for you.” Sad for me! Because I’m not also a scientist! I am the captain of this expedition, with master status in ship control and a first-class license as a Nurturer. On the Kepler, my word is law, with virtually no limits. I have over fifty standard-years’ experience, specializing in the nurture of scientists. I have never lost an expedition, and I need no one’s pity.

Naturally, I showed none of this to Ajit. I massaged his hand with mine, which meant that his hand massaged my crotch, and purred softly. “I’m glad you decided to show me this.”

“Actually, that is not what I wanted to show you.”

“No?”

“No. Wait here, Tirzah.”

He got up and padded, naked, to his personal locker. Beautiful, beautiful body, brown and smooth, like a slim polished tree. I could see him clearly; Ajit always makes love with the bunk lights on full, as if in sunlight. We lay in his bunk, not mine. I never take either him or Kane to my bunk. My bunk contained various concealed items that they don’t, and won’t, know about, from duplicate surveillance equipment to rarely-used subdermal trackers. Precautions, only. I am a captain.

From his small storage locker, Ajit pulled a statue and turned shyly, even proudly, to show it to me. I sat up, surprised.

The statue was big, big enough so that it must have taken up practically his entire allotment of personal space. Heavy, too, from the way Ajit balanced it before his naked body. It was some sort of god with four arms, enclosed in a circle of flames, made of what looked like very old bronze.

“This is Nataraja,” Ajit said. “Shiva dancing.”

“Ajit—”

“No, I am not a god worshipper,” he smiled. “You know me better than that, Tirzah. Hinduism has many gods—thousands—but they are, except to the ignorant, no more than embodiments of different aspects of reality. Shiva is the dance of creation and destruction, the constant flow of energy in the cosmos. Birth and death and rebirth. It seemed fitting to bring him to the galactic core, where so much goes on of all three.”

This explanation sounded weak to me—a holo of Shiva would have accomplished the same thing, without using up nearly all of Ajit’s weight allotment. Before I could say this, Ajit said, “This statue has been in my family for four hundred years. I must bring it home, along with the answers to my scientific questions.”

I don’t understand Ajit’s scientific concerns very well—or Kane’s—but I know down to my bones how much they matter to him. It is my job to know. Ajit carries within his beautiful body a terrible coursing ambition, a river fed by the longings of a poor family who have sacrificed what little they had gained on New Bombay for this favored son. Ajit is the receptacle into which they have poured so much hope, so much sacrifice, so much selfishness. The strain on that vessel is what makes Ajit’s love-making so gentle. He cannot afford to crack.

“You’ll bring the Shiva statue back to New Bombay,” I said softly, “and your answers, too.”

In his hands, with the bright lighting, the bronze statue cast a dancing shadow on his naked body.

• • •

I found Kane at his terminal, so deep in thought that he didn’t know I was there until I squeezed his shoulder. Then he jumped, cursed, and dragged his eyes from his displays.

“How does it progress, Kane?”

“It doesn’t. How could it? I need more data!”

“It will come. Be patient,” I said.

He rubbed his left ear, a constant habit when he’s irritated, which is much of the time. When he’s happily excited, Kane runs his left hand through his coarse red hair until it stands up like flames. Now he smiled ruefully. “I’m not much known for patience.”

“No, you’re not.”

“But you’re right, Tirzah. The data will come. It’s just hard waiting for the first mini-cap. I wish to hell we could have more than three. Goddamn cheap bureaucrats! At an acceleration of—”

“Don’t give me the figures again,” I said. I wound my fingers in his hair and pulled playfully. “Kane, I came to ask you a favor.”

“All right,” he said instantly. Kane never counts costs ahead of time. Ajit would have turned gently cautious. “What is it?”

“I want you to learn to play go with Ajit.”

He scowled. “Why?”

With Kane, you must have your logic ready. He would do any favor I asked, but unless he can see why, compliance would be grudging at best. “First, because go will help you pass the time until the first mini-cap arrives, in doing something other than chewing the same data over and over again until you’ve masticated it into tastelessness. Second, because the game is complex enough that I think you’ll enjoy it. Third, because I’m not too bad at it myself but Ajit is better, and I think you will be, too, so I can learn from both of you.”

And fourth, I didn’t say aloud, because Ajit is a master, he will beat you most of the time, and he needs the boost in confidence.

Ajit is not the scientist that Kane is. Practically no one in the settled worlds is the scientist that Kane is. All three of us know this, but none of us have ever mentioned it, not even once. There are geniuses who are easy for the inferior to work with, who are generous enough to slow down their mental strides to the smaller steps of the merely gifted. Kane is not one of them.

“Go,” Kane says thoughtfully. “I have friends who play that.”

This was a misstatement. Kane does not have friends, in the usual sense. He has colleagues, he has science, and he has me.

He smiled at me, a rare touch of sweet gratitude on his handsome face. “Thanks, Tirzah. I’ll play with Ajit. You’re right, it will pass the time until the probe sends back the prelim data. And if I’m occupied, maybe I’ll be less of a monster to you.”

“You’re fine to me,” I say, giving his hair another tug, grinning with the casual flippancy he prefers. “Or if you’re not, I don’t care.”

Kane laughs. In moments like this, I am especially careful that my own feelings don’t show. To either of them.

2. PROBE

We automatically woke after the hyperjump. For reasons I don’t understand, a hyperjump isn’t instantaneous. Perhaps because it’s not really a “jump” but a Calabi-Yau dimension tunnel. Several days’ ship-time had passed, and the probe now drifted less than five light years from the galactic core. The probe, power off, checked out perfectly; the shielding had held even better than expected. And so had we. My eyes widened as I studied the wardroom displays.

On the Kepler, dust clouds had softened and obscured the view. Here, nothing did. We drifted just outside a star that had begun its deadly spiral inward toward Sag A*. Visuals showed the full deadly glory around the hole: the hot blue cluster of IRS16. The giant red star IRS7 with its long tail distended by stellar winds. The stars already past the point of no return, pulled by the gravity of Sag A* inexorably toward its event horizon. The radio, gamma-ray, and infrared displays revealed even more, brilliant with the radiation pouring from every single gorgeous, lethal object in the bright sky.

And there, too, shone one of the mysteries Kane and Ajit had come to study: the massive young stars that were not being yanked toward Sag A*, and which in this place should have been neither massive nor relatively stable. Such stars should not exist this close to the hole. One star, Kane had told me, was as close to the hole as twice Pluto’s orbit from Sol. How had it gotten there?

“It’s beautiful, in a hellish way,” I said to Ajit and Kane. “I want to go up to the observatory and see it direct.”

“The observatory!” Kane said scornfully. “I need to get to work!” He sat down at his terminal.

None of this is true, of course. There is no observatory on the probe, and I can’t climb the ladder “up” to it. Nor is there a wardroom with terminals, chairs, table, displays, a computer. We are the computer, or rather we are inside it. But the programs running along with us make it all seem as real as the fleshy versions of ourselves on the Kepler. This, it was determined by previous disastrous experience in space exploration, is necessary to keep us sane and stable. Human uploads need this illusion, this shadow reality, and we accept it easily. Why not? It’s the default setting for our minds.

So Kane “sat” “at” his “terminal” to look at the preliminary data from the sensors. So did Ajit, and I “went” “upstairs” to the observatory, where I gazed outward for a long time.

I—the other “I”, the one on the Kepler—grew up on a station in the Oort Cloud, Sol System. Space is my natural home. I don’t really understand how mud-dwellers live on planets, or why they would want to, at the bottom of a murky and dirty shroud of uncontrollable air. I have learned to simulate understanding planetary love, because it is my job. Both Kane and Ajit come from rocks, Ajit from New Bombay and Kane from Terra herself. They are space scientists, but not real spacers.

No mud-dweller ever really sees the stars. And no human being had ever seen what I saw now, the frantic heart of the human universe.

Eventually I went back downstairs, rechecked ship’s data, and then sat at the wardroom table and took up my embroidery. The ancient, irrelevant cloth-ornamenting is very soothing, almost as much so as gardening, although of course that’s not why I do it. All first-class Nurturers practice some humble handicraft. It allows you to closely observe people while appearing absorbed and harmless.

Kane, of course, was oblivious to me. I could have glared at him through a magnifying glass and he wouldn’t have noticed, not if he was working. Back on the Kepler, he had explained in simple terms—or at least as simple as Kane’s explanations ever get—why there should not be any young stars this close to the core, as well as three possible explanations for why there are. He told me all this, in typical Kane fashion, in bed. Post-coital intimacy.

“The stars’ spectra show they’re young, Tirzah. And close—SO-2 comes to within eighty AU’s of Sag A*! It’s wrong—the core is incredibly inhospitable to star formation! Also, these close-in stars have very peculiar orbits.”

“You’re taking it personally,” I observed, smiling.

“Of course I am!” This was said totally without irony. “Those young stars have no business there. The tidal forces of the hole should rip any hot dust clouds to shreds long before any stars could form. And if they formed farther out, say one hundred light years out, they should have died before they get this close in. These supermassive stars only last a few million years.”

“But there they are.”

“Yes. Why do you still have this lacy thing on? It’s irritating.”

“Because you were so eager that I didn’t have time to get it off.”

“Well, take it off now.”

I did, and he wrapped my body close to his, and went on fretting over star formation in the core.

“There are three theories. One is that a dust cloud ringing the core, about six light years out, keeps forming stars, which are then blown outwards again by galactic winds, and then drawn in, and repeat. Another theory is that there’s a second, intermediate medium-sized black hole orbiting Sag A* and exerting a counterpull on the stars. But if so, why aren’t we detecting its radio waves? Another idea is that the stars aren’t really young at all, they’re composites of remnants of elderly stars that merged to form a body that only looks bright and young.”

I said, “Which theory do you like?”

“None of them.” And then, in one of those lightening changes he was capable of, he focused all his attention on me. “Are you all right, Tirzah? I know this has got to be a boring voyage for you. Running ship can’t take much of your time, and neither can babysitting me.”

I laughed aloud and Kane, having no idea why, frowned slightly. It was such a typically Kane speech. A sudden burst of intense concern, which would prove equally transitory. No mention of Ajit at all, as if only Kane existed for me. And his total ignorance of how often I interceded between him and Ajit, smoothed over tensions between them, spent time calming and centering separately each of these men who were more like the stars outside the ship than either of them were capable of recognizing. Brilliant, heated, intense, inherently unstable.

“I’m fine, Kane. I’m enjoying myself.”

“Well, good,” he said, and I saw that he then forgot me, back to brooding about his theories.

Neither Kane nor Ajit knows that I love Kane. I don’t love Ajit. Whatever calls up love in our hidden hearts, it is unfathomable. Kane arouses in me a happiness, a desire, a completeness that puts a glow on the world because he—difficult, questing, vital—is in it. Ajit, through no fault of his own, does not.

Neither of them will ever know this. I would berate myself if they did. My personal feelings don’t matter here. I am a captain.

• • •

“Damn and double damn!” Kane said, admiringly. “Look at that!”

Ajit reacted as if Kane had spoken to him, but of course Kane had not. He was just thinking aloud. I put down my embroidery and went to stand behind them at their terminals.

Ajit said, “Those readings must be wrong. The sensors were damaged after all, either in hypertransit or by radiation.”

Kane didn’t reply; I doubt he’d heard. I said, “What is it?”

It was Ajit who answered. “The mass readings are wrong. They’re showing high mass density for several areas of empty space.”

I said, “Maybe that’s where the new young stars are forming?”

Not even Ajit answered this, which told me it was a stupid statement. It doesn’t matter; I don’t pretend to be a scientist. I merely wanted to keep them talking, to gauge their states of mind.

Ajit said, “It would be remarkable if all equipment had emerged undamaged from the jump into this radiation.”

“Kane?” I said.

“It’s not the equipment,” he muttered. So he had been listening, at least peripherally. “Supersymmetry.”

Ajit immediately objected to this, in terms I didn’t understand. They were off into a discussion I had no chance of following. I let it go on for a while, then even longer, since it sounded the way scientific discussions are supposed to sound: intense but not acrimonious, not personal.

When they wound down a bit, I said, “Did the mini-capsule go off to the Kepler? They’re waiting for the prelim data, and the minicap takes days to jump. Did either of you remember to record and send?”

They both looked at me, as if trying to remember who I was and what I was doing there. In that moment, for the first time, they looked alike.

“I remembered,” Ajit said. “The prelim data went off to the Kepler. Kane—”

They were off again.

3. SHIP

The go games were not a success.

The problem, I could see, was with Ajit. He was a far better player than Kane, both intuitively and through experience. This didn’t bother Kane at all; he thrived on challenge. But his own clear superiority subtly affected Ajit.

“Game won,” he said for the third time in the evening, and at the slight smirk in his voice I looked up from my embroidery.

“Damn and double damn,” Kane said, without rancor. “Set them up again.”

“No, I think I will go celebrate my victories with Tirzah.”

This was Kane’s night, but the two of them had never insisted on precedence. This was because I had never let it come to that; it’s part of my job to give the illusion that I am always available to both, on whatever occasion they wish. Of course, I control, through a hundred subtle signals and without either realizing it, which occasions they happen to wish. Where I make love depends on whom I need to observe. This direct claim by Ajit, connecting me to his go victories, was new.

Kane, of course, didn’t notice. “All right. God, I wish the mini-cap would come. I want that data!”

Now that the game had released his attention, he was restless again. He rose and paced around the wardroom, which doesn’t admit too much pacing. “I think I’ll go up to the observatory. Anybody coming?”

He had already forgotten that I was leaving with Ajit. I saw Ajit go still. Such a small thing—Ajit was affronted that Kane was not affected by Ajit’s game victory, or by his bearing me off like some earned prize. Another man would have felt a moment of pique and then forgotten it. Ajit was not another man. Neither was Kane. Stable men don’t volunteer for missions like this.

It’s different for me; I was bred to space. The scientists were not.

I put down my embroidery, took Ajit’s hand, and snuggled close to him. Kane, for the moment, was fine. His restless desire for his data wouldn’t do him any harm. It was Ajit I needed to work with.

I was the one who had suggested the go games. Good captains are not supposed to make mistakes like that. It was up to me to set things right.

• • •

By the time the minicap arrived, everything was worse.

They would not, either of them, stop the go games. They played obsessively, six or seven times a day, then nine or ten, and finally every waking minute. Ajit continued to win the large majority of the games, but not all of them. Kane focused his formidable intelligence on devising strategies, and he had the advantage of caring but not too much. Yes, he was obsessed, but I could see that once he had something more significant to do, he would leave the go games without a backward glance.

Ajit grew more focused, too. Even more intent on winning, even as he began to lose a few games. More slyly gleeful when he did win. He flicked his winning piece onto the board with a turn of the wrist in which I read both contempt and fear.

I tried everything I could to intervene, every trick from a century of experience. Nothing worked. Sex only made it worse. Ajit regarded sex as an earned prize, Kane as a temporary refreshment so he could return to the games.

One night Ajit brought out the statue of Shiva and put it defiantly on the wardroom table. It took up two-thirds of the space, a wide metal circle enclosing the four-armed dancer.

“What’s that?” Kane said, looking up from the game board. “Oh, God, it’s a god.”

I said quickly, “It’s an intellectual concept. The flow of cosmic energy in the universe.”

Kane laughed, not maliciously, but I saw Ajit’s eyes light up. Ajit said, “I want it here.”

Kane shrugged. “Fine by me. Your turn, Ajit.”

Wrong, wrong. Ajit had hoped to disturb Kane, to push him into some open objection to the statue. Ajit wanted a small confrontation, some outlet to emphasize his gloating. Some outlet for his growing unease as Kane’s game improved. And some outlet for his underlying rage, always just under the surface, at Kane, the better scientist. The statue was supposed to be an assertion, even a slap in the face: I am here and I take up a lot of your space. Notice that!

Instead, Kane had shrugged and dismissed it.

I said, “Tell me again, Ajit, about Nataraja. What’s the significance of the flames on the great circle?”

Ajit said quietly, “They represent the fire that destroys the world.”

Kane said, “Your turn, Ajit.”

Such a small incident. But deep in my mind, where I was aware of it but not yet overtly affected, fear stirred.

I was losing control here.

Then the first minicap of data arrived.

4. PROBE

Mind uploads are still minds. They are not computer programs in the sense that other programs are. Although freed of biological constraints such as enzymes that create sleep, hunger, and lust, uploads are not free of habit. In fact, it is habit that creates enough structure to keep all of us from frenzied feedback loops. On the probe, my job was to keep habit strong. It was the best safeguard for those brilliant minds.

“Time to sleep, gentlemen,” I said lightly. We had been gathered in the wardroom for sixteen hours straight, Kane and Ajit at their terminals, me sitting quietly, watching them. I have powers of concentration equal in degree, though not in kind, to their own. They do not suspect this. It has been hours since I put down my embroidery, but neither noticed.

“Tirzah, not sleep now!” Kane snapped.

“Now.”

He looked up at me like a sulky child. But Kane is not a child; I don’t make that mistake. He knows an upload has to shut down for the cleansing program to run, a necessity to catch operating errors before they grow large enough to impair function. With all the radiation bathing the probe, the program is more necessary than ever. It takes a few hours to run through. I control the run cues.

Ajit looked at me expectantly. It was his night. This, too, was part of habit, as well as being an actual aid to their work. More than one scientist in my care has had that critical flash of intuition on some scientific problem while in my arms. Upload sex, like its fleshy analogue, both stimulates and relaxes.

“All right, all right,” Kane muttered. “Good night.”

I shut him down and turned to Ajit.

We went to his bunk. Ajit was tense, stretched taut with data and with sixteen hours with Kane. But I was pleased to see how completely he responded to me. Afterward, I asked him to explain the prelim data to me.

“And keep it simple, please. Remember who you’re talking to!”

“To an intelligent and sweet lady,” he said, and I gave him the obligatory smile. But he saw that I really did want to know about the data.

“The massive young stars are there when they should not be . . . Kane has explained all this to you, I know.”

I nodded.

“They are indeed young, not mashed-together old stars. We have verified that. We are trying now to gather and run data to examine the other two best theories: a fluctuating ring of matter spawning stars, or other black holes.”

“How are you examining the theories?”

He hesitated, and I knew he was trying to find explanations I could understand. “We are running various programs, equations, and sims. We are also trying to determine where to jump the probe next—you know about that.”

Of course I did. No one moves this ship without my consent. It has two more jumps left in its power pack, and I must approve them both.

“We need to choose a spot from which we can fire beams of various radiation to assess the results. The heavier beams won’t last long here, you know—the gravity of the superhole distorts them.” He frowned.

“What is it, Ajit? What about gravity?”

“Kane was right,” he said, “the mass detectors aren’t damaged. They’re showing mass nearby, not large but detectable, that isn’t manifesting anything but gravity. No radiation of any kind.”

“A black hole,” I suggested.

“Too small. Small black holes radiate away, Hawking showed that long ago. The internal temperature is too high. There are no black holes smaller than three solar masses. The mass detectors are showing something much smaller than that.”

“What?”

“We don’t know.”

“Were all the weird mass-detector readings in the prelim data you sent back to the Kepler?”

“Of course,” he said, a slight edge in his voice.

I pulled him closer. “I can always rely on you,” I said, and I felt his body relax.

I shut us down, as we lay in each other’s arms.

• • •

It was Ajit who, the next day, noticed the second anomaly. And I who noticed the third.

“These gas orbits aren’t right,” Ajit said to Kane. “And they’re getting less right all the time.”

Kane moved to Ajit’s terminal. “Tell me.”

“The infalling gases from the circumnuclear disk . . . see . . . they curve here, by the western arm of Sag A West . . .”

“It’s wind from the IRS16 cluster,” Kane said instantly. “I got updated readings for those yesterday.”

“No, I already corrected for that,” Ajit said.

“Then maybe magnetization from IRS7, or—”

They were off again. I followed enough to grasp the general problem. Gases streamed at enormous speeds from clouds beyond the circumnuclear disk which surrounded the entire core like a huge doughnut. These streaming gases were funneled by various forces into fairly narrow, cone-like paths. The gases would eventually end up circling the black hole, spiraling inward and compressing to temperatures of billions of degrees before they were absorbed by the maw of the hole. The processes were understood.

But the paths weren’t as predicted. Gases were streaming down wrong, approaching the hole wrong for predictions made from all the forces acting on them.

Ajit finally said to Kane, “I want to move the probe earlier than we planned.”

“Wait a moment,” I said instantly. Ship’s movements were my decision. “It’s not yet the scheduled time.”

“Of course I’m including you in my request, Tirzah,” Ajit said, with all his usual courtesy. There was something beneath the courtesy, however, a kind of glow. I recognized it. Scientists look like that when they have the germ of an important idea.

I thought Kane would object or ridicule, but something in their technical discussion must have moved him, too. His red hair stood up all over his head. He glanced briefly at his own displays, back at Ajit’s, then at the younger man. He said, “You want to put the probe on the other side of Sagittarius A West.”

“Yes.”

I said, “Show me.”

Ajit brought up the simplified graphic he had created weeks ago for me to gain an overview of this mission. It showed the black hole at the center of the galaxy, and the major structures around it: the cluster of hot blue stars, the massive young stars that should not have existed so close to the hole, the red giant star IRS16, with its long fiery tail. All this, plus our probe, lay on one side of the huge, three-armed spiraling plasma remnant, Sagittarius A West. Ajit touched the computer and a new dot appeared on the other side of Sag A West, farther away from the hole than we were now.

“We want to go there, Tirzah,” he said. Kane nodded.

I said, deliberately sounding naïve, “I thought there wasn’t as much going on over there. And besides, you said that Sag A West would greatly obscure our vision in all wavelengths, with its own radiation.”

“It will.”

“Then—”

“There’s something going on over there now,” Kane said. “Ajit’s right. That region is the source of whatever pull is distorting the gas infall. We need to go there.”

We.

Ajit’s right.

The younger man didn’t change expression. But the glow was still there, ignited by Ajit’s idea and fanned, I now realized, by Kane’s approval. I heated it up a bit more. “But, Kane, your work on the massive young stars? I can only move the probe so many times, you know. Our fuel supply—”

“I have a lot of data on the stars now,” Kane said, “and this matters more.”

I hid my own pleasure. “All right. I’ll move the probe.”

But when I interfaced with ship’s program, I found the probe had already been moved.

5. SHIP

Kane and Ajit fell on the minicap of prelim data like starving wolves. There were no more games of go. There was no more anything but work, unless I insisted.

At first I thought that was good. I thought that without the senseless, mounting competition over go, the two scientists would cooperate on the intense issues that mattered so much to both of them.

“Damn and double damn!” Kane said, admiringly. “Look at that!”

Ajit reacted as if Kane had spoken to him, but of course Kane had not. He was just thinking aloud. I put down my embroidery and went to stand behind them at their terminals.

Ajit said, with the new arrogance of the go wins in his voice, “Those readings must be wrong. The sensors were damaged after all, either in hypertransit or by radiation.”

Kane, for a change, caught Ajit’s tone. He met it with a sneer he must have used regularly on presumptuous post-grads. “‘Must be wrong’? That’s just the kind of puerile leaping to conclusions that gets people nowhere.”

I said quickly, “What readings?”

It was Ajit who answered me, and although the words were innocuous, even polite, I heard the anger underlying them. “The mass readings are wrong. They’re showing high mass density for several areas of empty space.”

I said, “Maybe that’s where the new young stars are forming?”

Not even Ajit answered this, which told me it was a stupid statement. It doesn’t matter; I don’t pretend to be a scientist. I merely wanted to keep them talking, to gauge their states of mind.

Ajit said, too evenly, “It would be remarkable if all probe equipment had emerged undamaged from the jump into core radiation.”

“Kane?” I said.

“It’s not the equipment.” And then, “Supersymmetry.”

Ajit immediately objected to this, in terms I didn’t understand. They were off into a discussion I had no chance of following. What I could follow was the increasing pressure of Ajit’s anger as Kane dismissed and belittled his ideas. I could almost see that anger, a hot plasma. As Kane ridiculed and belittled, the plasma collapsed into greater and greater density.

Abruptly they broke off their argument, went to their separate terminals, and worked like machines for twenty hours straight. I had to make them each eat something. They were obsessed, as only those seized by science or art can obsess. Neither of them would come to bed with me that night. I could have issued an executive order, but I chose not to exert that much trust-destroying force until I had to, although I did eventually announce that I was shutting down terminal access.

“For God’s sake, Tirzah!” Kane snarled. “This is a once-in-a-species opportunity! I’ve got work to do!”

I said evenly, “You’re going to rest. The terminals are down for seven hours.”

“Five.”

“All right.” After five hours, Kane would still be snoring away.

He stood, stiff from the long hours of sitting. Kane is well over a hundred; rejuves can only do so much, so long. His cramped muscles, used to much more exercise, misfired briefly. He staggered, laughed, caught himself easily.

But not before he’d bumped the wardroom table. Ajit’s statue of Shiva slid off and fell to the floor. The statue was old—four hundred years old, Ajit had said. Metal shows fatigue, too, although later than men. The statue hit the deck at just the right angle and broke.

“Oh . . . sorry, Ajit.”

Kane’s apology was a beat too late. I knew—with every nerve in my body, I knew this—that the delay happened because Kane’s mind was still racing along his data, and it took an effort for him to refocus. It didn’t matter. Ajit stiffened, and something in the nature of his anger changed, ionized by Kane’s careless, preoccupied tone.

I said quickly, “Ship can weld the statue.”

“No, thank you,” Ajit said. “I will leave it as it is. Good night.”

“Ajit—” I reached for his hand. He pulled it away.

“Good night, Tirzah.”

Kane said, “The gamma-ray variations within Sag A West aren’t quite what was predicted.” He blinked twice. “You’re right, I am exhausted.”

Kane stumbled off to his bunk. Ajit had already gone. After a long while I picked up the pieces of Ajit’s statue and held them, staring at the broken figure of the dancing god.

• • •

The preliminary data, Kane had declared when it arrived, contained enough information to keep them both busy until the second minicap arrived. But by the next day, Kane was impatiently demanding more.

“These gas orbits aren’t right,” he said aloud, although not to either me or Ajit. Kane did that, worked in silence for long stretches until words exploded out of him to no particular audience except his own whirling thoughts. His ear was raw with rubbing.

I said, “What’s not right about them?” When he didn’t answer, or probably even hear me, I repeated the question, much louder.

Kane came out of his private world and scowled at me. “The infalling gases from beyond the circumnuclear disk aren’t showing the right paths to Sag A*.”

I said, repeating something he’d taught me, “Could it be wind from the IRS16 cluster?”

“No. I checked those updated readings yesterday and corrected for them.”

I had reached the end of what I knew to ask. Kane burst out, “I need more data!”

“Well, it’ll get here eventually.”

“I want it now,” he said, and laughed sourly at himself, and went back to work.

Ajit said nothing, acting as if neither of us had spoken.

I waited until Ajit stood, stretched, and looked around vaguely. Then I said, “Lunch in a minute. But first come look at something with me.” Immediately I started up the ladder to the observatory, so that he either had to follow or go through the trouble of arguing. He followed.

I had put the welded statue of Shiva on the bench near clear hull. It was the wrong side of the hull for the spectacular view of the core, but the exotics didn’t press so close to the hull here, and thousands of stars shone in a sky more illuminated than Sol had seen since its birth. Shiva danced in his mended circle of flames against a background of cosmic glory.

Ajit said flatly, “I told you I wanted to leave it broken.”

With Kane, frank opposition is fine; he’s strong enough to take it and, in fact, doesn’t respect much else. But Ajit is different. I lowered my eyes and reached for his hand. “I know. I took the liberty of fixing it anyway because, well, I thought you might want to see it whole again and because I like the statue so much. It has so much meaning beyond the obvious, especially here. In this place and this time. Please forgive me.”

Ajit was silent for a moment, then he raised my hand to his lips. “You do see that.”

“Yes,” I said, and it was the truth. Shiva, the endless dance, the endless flow of energy changing form and state—how could anyone not see it in the gas clouds forming stars, the black hole destroying them, the violence and creation outside this very hull? Yet, at the same time, it was a profound insight into the very obvious, and I kept my eyes lowered so no glimpse of my faint contempt reached Ajit.

He kissed me. “You are so spiritual, Tirzah. And so sweet-natured.”

I was neither. The only deceptions Ajit could see were the paranoid ones he assumed of others.

But his body had relaxed in my arms, and I knew that some part of his mind had been reassured. He and I could see spiritual beauties that Kane could not. Therefore he was in some sense superior to Kane. He followed me back down the ladder to lunch, and I heard him hum a snatch of some jaunty tune. Pleased with myself, I made for the galley.

Kane stood up so abruptly from his terminal that his eyes glowed. “Oh, my shitting stars. Oh, yes. Tirzah, I’ve got it.”

I stopped cold. I had never seen anyone, even Kane, look quite like that. “Got what?”

“All of it.” Suddenly he seized me and swung me into exuberant, clumsy dance. “All of it! I’ve got all of it! The young stars, the gas orbits, the missing mass in the universe! All shitting fucking all of it!”

“Wwwhhhaaatttt . . .” He was whirling me around so fast that my teeth rattled. “Kane, stop!”

He did, and enveloped me in a rib-cracking hug, then abruptly released me and dragged my bruised body to his terminal. “Look, sweetheart, I’ve got it. Now sit right there and I’m going to explain it in terms even you can understand. You’ll love it. It’ll love you. Now look here, at this region of space—”

I turned briefly to look at Ajit. For Kane, he didn’t even exist.

6. PROBE

“The probe has moved,” I said to Ajit and Kane. “It’s way beyond the calculated drift. By a factor of ten.”

Kane’s eyes, red with work, nonetheless sharpened. “Let me see the trajectory.”

“I transferred it to both your terminals.” Ordinarily ship’s data is kept separate, for my eyes only.

Kane brought up the display and whistled.

The probe is under the stresses, gravitational and radiational, that will eventually destroy it. We all know that. Our fleshy counterparts weren’t even sure the probe would survive to send one minicap of data, and I’m sure they were jubilant when we did. Probably they treated the minicap like a holy gift, and I can easily imagine how eager they are for more. Back on the ship, I—the other “I”—had been counting on data, like oil, to grease the frictions and tensions between Ajit and Kane. I hoped it had.

We uploads had fuel enough to move the probe twice. After that, and since our last move will be no more than one-fiftieth of a light year from the black hole at the galactic core, the probe will eventually spiral down into Sag A*. Before that, however, it will have been ripped apart by the immense tidal forces of the hole. However, long before that final death plunge, we analogues will be gone.

The probe’s current drift, however, considerably farther away from the hole, was nonetheless much faster than projected. It was also slightly off course. We were being pulled in the general direction of Sag A*, but not on the gravitational trajectory that would bring us into its orbit at the time and place the computer had calculated. In fact, at our current rate of acceleration, there was a chance we’d miss the event horizon completely.

What was going on?

Kane said, “Maybe we better hold off moving the probe to the other side of Sag A West until we find out what’s pulling us.”

Ajit was studying the data over Kane’s shoulder. He said hesitantly, “No . . . wait . . . I think we should move.”

“Why?” Kane challenged.

“I don’t know. I just have . . . call it an intuition. We should move now.”

I held my breath. The only intuition Kane usually acknowledged was his own. But earlier things had subtly shifted. Kane had said, “Ajit’s right. That region is the source of whatever pull is distorting the gas infall.” Ajit had not changed expression, but I’d felt his pleasure, real as heat. That had given him the courage to now offer this unformed—“half-baked” was Kane’s usual term—intuition.

Kane said thoughtfully, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe the—” Suddenly his eyes widened. “Oh my god.”

“What?” I said, despite myself. “What?”

Kane ignored me. “Ajit—run the sims for the gas orbits in correlation with the probe drift. I’ll do the young stars!”

“Why do—” Ajit began, and then he saw whatever had seized Kane’s mind. Ajit said something in Hindi; it might have been a curse, or a prayer. I didn’t know. Nor did I know anything about their idea, or about what was happening with the gas orbits and young stars outside the probe. However, I could see clearly what was happening within.

Ajit and Kane fell into frenzied work. They threw comments and orders to each other, transferred data, backed up sims and equation runs. They tilted their chairs toward each other and spouted incomprehensible jargon. Once Kane cried, “We need more data!” and Ajit laughed, freely and easily, then immediately plunged back into whatever he was doing. I watched them for a long time, then stole quietly up to the observation deck for a minute alone.

The show outside was more spectacular than ever, perhaps because we’d been pulled closer to it than planned. Clouds of whirling gases wrapped and oddly softened that heart of darkness, Sag A*. The fiery tail of the giant red star lit up that part of the sky. Stars glowed in a profusion unimaginable on my native Station J, stuck off in a remote arm of the galaxy. Directly in front of me glowed the glorious blue stars of the cluster IRS16.

I must have stayed on the observation deck longer than I’d planned, because Kane came looking for me. “Tirzah! Come on down! We want to show you where we’re moving and why!”

We.

I said severely, gladness bursting in my heart, “You don’t show me where we’re going, Kane, you ask me. I captain this ship.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, you’re a dragon lady. Come on!” He grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the ladder.

• • •

They both explained it, interrupting each other, fiercely correcting each other, having a wonderful time. I concentrated as hard as I could, trying to cut through the technicalities they couldn’t do without, any more than they could do without air. Eventually I thought I glimpsed the core of their excitement.

“Shadow matter,” I said, tasting the words on my tongue. It sounded too bizarre to take seriously, but Kane was insistent.

“The theory’s been around for centuries, but deGroot pretty much discredited it in 2086,” Kane said. “He—”

“If it’s been discredited, then why—” I began.

“I said ‘pretty much,’” Kane said. “There were always some mathematical anomalies with deGroot’s work. And we can see now where he was wrong. He—”

Kane and Ajit started to explain why deGroot was wrong, but I interrupted. “No, don’t digress so much! Let me just tell you what I think I understood from what you said.”

I was silent a moment, gathering words. Both men waited impatiently, Kane running his hand through his hair, Ajit smiling widely. I said, “You said there’s a theory that just after the Big Bang, gravity somehow decoupled from the other forces in the universe, just as matter decoupled from radiation. At the same time, you scientists have known for two centuries that there doesn’t seem to be enough matter in the universe to make all your equations work. So scientists posited a lot of ‘dark matter’ and a lot of black holes, but none of the figures added up right anyway.

“And right now, neither do the orbits of the infalling gas, or the probe’s drift, or the fact that massive young stars were forming that close to the black hole without being ripped apart by tidal forces. The forces acting on the huge clouds that have to condense to form stars that big.”

I took a breath, quick enough so that neither had time to break in and distract me with technicalities.

“But now you think that if gravity did decouple right after the Big Bang—”

“About 10-43 seconds after,” Ajit said helpfully. I ignored him.

“—then two types of matter were created, normal matter and ‘shadow matter.’ It’s sort of like matter and antimatter, only normal matter and shadow matter can’t interact except by gravity. No interaction through any other force, not radiation or strong or weak forces. Only gravity. That’s the only effect shadow matter has on our universe. Gravity.

“And a big chunk of this stuff is there on the other side of Sag A West. It’s exerting enough gravity to affect the path of the infalling gas. And to affect the probe’s drift. And even to affect the young stars because the shadow matter-thing’s exerting a counterpull on the massive star clouds, and that’s keeping them from being ripped apart by the hole as soon as they otherwise would be. So they have time to collapse into young stars.”

“Well, that’s sort of it, but you’ve left out some things that alter and validate the whole,” Kane said impatiently, scowling.

“Yes, Tirzah, dear heart, you don’t see the—you can’t just say that ‘counterpull’—let me try once more.”

They were off again, but this time I didn’t listen. So maybe I hadn’t seen the theory whole, but only glimpsed its shadow. It was enough.

They had a viable theory. I had a viable expedition, with a goal, and cooperatively productive scientists, and a probability of success.

It was enough.

• • •

Kane and Ajit prepared the second minicap for the big ship, and I prepared to move the probe. Our mood was jubilant. There was much laughing and joking, interrupted by intense bursts of incomprehensible jabbering between Ajit and Kane.

But before I finished my programming, Ajit’s head disappeared.

7. SHIP

Kane worked all day on his shadow-matter theory. He worked ferociously, hunched over his terminal like a hungry dog with a particularly meaty bone, barely glancing up and saying little. Ajit worked, too, but the quality of his working was different. The terminals both connect to the same computer, of course; whatever Kane had, Ajit had, too. Ajit could follow whatever Kane did.

But that’s what Ajit was doing: following. I could tell it from the timing of his accesses, from the whole set of his body. He was a decent scientist, but he was not Kane. Given the data and enough time, Ajit might have been able to go where Kane raced ahead now. Maybe. Or, he might have been able to make valuable additions to Kane’s thinking. But Kane gave him no time; Kane was always there first, and he asked no help. He had shut Ajit out completely. For Kane, nothing existed right now but his work.

Toward evening he looked up abruptly and said to me, “They’ll move the probe. The uploads—they’ll move it.”

I said, “How do you know? It’s not time yet, according to the schedule.”

“No. But they’ll move it. If I figured out the shadow matter here, I will there, too. I’ll decide that more data is needed from the other side of Sag A West, where the main shadow mass is.”

I looked at him. He looked demented, like some sort of Roman warrior who has just wrestled with a lion. All that was missing was the blood. Wild, filthy hair—when had he last showered? Clothes spotted with the food I’d made him gulp down at noon. Age lines beginning, under strain and fatigue and despite the rejuve, to drag down the muscles of his face. And his eyes shining like Sag A West itself.

God, I loved him.

I said, with careful emphasis, “You’re right. The Tirzah upload will move the ship for better measurements.”

“Then we’ll get more data in a few days,” Ajit said. “But the radiation on the other side of Sag A West is still intense. We must hope nothing gets damaged in the probe programs, or in the uploads themselves, before we get the new data.”

“We better hope nothing gets damaged long before that in my upload,” Kane said, “or they won’t even know what data to collect.” He turned back to his screen.

The brutal words hung in the air.

I saw Ajit turn his face away from me. Then he rose and walked into the galley.

If I followed him too soon, he would see it as pity. His shame would mount even more.

“Kane,” I said in a low, furious voice, “you are despicable.”

He turned to me in genuine surprise. “What?”

“You know what.” But he didn’t. Kane wasn’t even conscious of what he’d said. To him, it was a simple, evident truth. Without the Kane upload, no one on the probe would know how to do first-class science.

“I want to see you upstairs on the observation deck,” I said to him. “Not now, but in ten minutes. And you announce that you want me to see something up there.” The time lag, plus Kane’s suggesting the trip, would keep Ajit from knowing I was protecting him.

But now I had put up Kane’s back. He was tired, he was stressed, he was inevitably coming down from the unsustainable high of his discovery. Neither body nor mind can keep at that near-hysterical pitch for too long. I had misjudged, out of my own anger at him.

He snapped, “I’ll see you on the observation deck when I want to see you there, and not otherwise. Don’t push me around, Tirzah. Not even as captain.” He turned back to his display.

Ajit emerged from the galley with three glasses on a tray. “A celebratory drink. A major discovery deserves that. At a minimum.”

Relief was so intense I nearly showed it on my face. It was all right. I had misread Ajit, underestimated him. He ranked the magnitude of Kane’s discovery higher than his own lack of participation in it, after all. Ajit was, first, a scientist.

He handed a glass to me, one to Kane, one for himself. Kane took a hasty, perfunctory gulp and returned to his display. But I cradled mine, smiling at Ajit, trying with warmth to convey the admiration I felt for his rising above the personal.

“Where did you get the wine? It wasn’t on the ship manifest!”

“It was in my personal allotment,” Ajit said, smiling.

Personal allotments are not listed nor examined. A bottle of wine, the statue of Shiva . . . Ajit had brought some interesting choices for a galactic core. I sipped the red liquid. It tasted different from the Terran or Martian wines I had grown up with: rougher, more full-bodied, not as sweet.

“Wonderful, Ajit.”

“I thought you would like it. It is made in my native New Bombay, from genemod grapes brought from Terra.”

He didn’t go back to his terminal. For the next half-hour, he entertained me with stories of New Bombay. He was a good storyteller, sharp and funny. Kane worked steadily, ignoring us. The ten-minute deadline I had set for him to call me up to the observation deck came and went.

After half an hour, Kane stood and staggered. Once before, when he’d broken Ajit’s statue, stiffness after long sitting had made Kane unsteady. That time he’d caught himself after simply bumping the wardroom table. This time he crashed heavily to the floor.

“Kane!”

“Nothing, nothing . . . don’t make a fuss, Tirzah! You just won’t leave me alone!”

This was so unfair that I wanted to slap him. I didn’t. Kane rose by himself, shook his head like some great beast, and said, “I’m just exhausted. I’m going to bed.”

I didn’t try to stop him from going to his bunk. I had planned on sleeping with Ajit, anyway. It seemed that some slight false note had crept into his storytelling in the last five minutes, some forced exaggeration.

But he smiled at me, and I decided I’d been wrong. I was very tired, too. All at once I wished I could sleep alone this night.

But I couldn’t. Ajit, no matter how well he’d recovered from Kane’s unconscious brutality, nonetheless had to feel bruised at some level. It was my job to find out where, and how much, and to set it to rights. It was my job to keep the expedition as productive as possible, to counteract Kane’s dismissing and belittling behavior toward Ajit. It was my job.

I smiled back at him.

8. PROBE

When Ajit’s head disappeared, no one panicked. We’d expected this, of course; in fact, we’d expected it sooner. The probe drifted in a sea of the most intense radiation in the galaxy, much of it at lethal wavelengths: gamma rays from Sagittarius East, X-rays, powerful winds of ionized particles, things I couldn’t name. That the probe’s shielding had held this long was a minor miracle. It couldn’t hold forever. Some particle or particles had penetrated all the shielding and reached the computer, contaminating a piece of the upload-maintenance program.

It was a minor glitch. The back-up kicked in a moment later and Ajit’s head reappeared. But we all knew this was only the beginning. It would happen again, and again, and eventually programming would be hit that couldn’t be restored by automatic back-up, because the back-up would go, too, in a large enough hit—or because uploads are not like other computer programs. We are more than that, and less. An upload has back-ups to maintain the shadows we see of each other and the ship, the shadows that keep our captured minds sane. But an upload cannot house back-ups of itself. Even one copy smudges too much, and the copy contaminates the original. It has been tried, with painful results.

Moreover, we uploads run only partly on the main computer. An upload is neither a biological entity nor a long stream of code, but something more than both. Some of the substratum, the hardware, is wired like actual neurons, although constructed of sturdier stuff: thousands of miles of nano-constructed organic polymers. This is why analogues think at the rate of the human brain, not the much faster rate of computers. It’s also why we feel as our originals do.

After Ajit’s maintenance glitch our mood, which had been exuberant, sobered. But it didn’t sour. We worked steadily, with focus and hope, deciding where exactly to position the probe and then entering the coordinates for the jump.

“See you soon,” we said to each other. I kissed both Kane and Ajit lightly on the lips. Then we all shut down and the probe jumped.

Days later, we emerged on the other side of Sag A West, all three of us still intact. If it were in my nature, I would have said a prayer of thanksgiving. Instead I said to Ajit, “Still have a head, I see.”

“And a good thing he does,” Kane said absently, already plunging for the chair in front of his terminal. “We’ll need it. And—Ajit, the mass detectors . . . great shitting gods!”

It seems we were to have thanksgiving after all, if only perversely. I said, “What is it? What’s there?” The displays showed nothing at all.

“Nothing at all,” Ajit said. “And everything.”

“Speak English!”

Ajit—I doubt Kane had even heard me, in his absorption—said, “The mass detectors are showing a huge mass less than a quarter light year away. The radiation detectors—all of them—are showing nothing at all. We’re—”

“We’re accelerating fast.” I studied ship’s data; the rate of acceleration made me blink. “We’re going to hit whatever it is. Not soon, but the tidal forces—”

The probe was small, but the tidal forces of something this big would still rip it apart when it got close enough.

Something this big. But there was, to all other sensors, nothing there.

Nothing but shadows.

A strange sensation ran over me. Not fear, but something more complicated, much more eerie.

My voice sounded strange in my ears. “What if we hit it? I know you said radiation of all types will go right through shadow matter just as if it isn’t there—” because it isn’t, not in our universe “—but what about the probe? What if we hit it before we take the final event-horizon measurements on Sag A*?”

“We won’t hit it,” Ajit said. “We’ll move before then, Tirzah, back to the hole. Kane—”

They forget me again. I went up to the observation deck. Looking out through the clear hull, I stared at the myriad of stars on the side of the night sky away from Sag A West. Then I turned to look toward that vast three-armed cloud of turning plasma, radiating as it cools. Nothing blocked my view of Sag A West. Yet between us lay a huge, massive body of shadow matter, unseen, pulling on everything else my dazed senses could actually see.

To my left, all the exotic plants in the observatory disappeared.

• • •

Ajit and Kane worked feverishly, until once more I made them shut down for “sleep.” The radiation here was nearly as great as it had been in our first location. We were right inside Sagittarius A East, the huge expanding shell of an unimaginable explosion sometime during the last 100,000 years. Most of Sag A East wasn’t visible at the wavelengths I could see, but the gamma-ray detectors were going crazy.

“We can’t stop for five hours!” Kane cried. “Don’t you realize how much damage the radiation could do in that time? We need to get all the data we can, work on it, and send off the second minicap!”

“We’re going to send off the second minicap right now,” I said. “And we’ll only shut down for three hours. But, Kane, we are going to do that. I mean it. Uploads run even more damage from not running maintenance than we do from external radiation. You know that.”

He did. He scowled at me, and cursed, and fussed with the minicap, but then he fired the minicap off and shut down.

Ajit said, “Just one more minute, Tirzah. I want to show you something.”

“Ajit—”

“No, it’s not mathematical. I promise. It’s something I brought onto the Kepler. The object was not included in the probe program, but I can show you a holo.”

Somewhere in the recesses of the computer, Ajit’s upload created a program and a two-dimensional holo appeared on an empty display screen. I blinked at it, surprised.

It was a statue of some sort of god with four arms, enclosed in a circle of flames, made of what looked like very old bronze.

“This is Nataraja,” Ajit said. “Shiva dancing.”

“Ajit—”

“No, I am not a god worshipper,” he smiled. “You know me better than that, Tirzah. Hinduism has many gods—thousands—but they are, except to the ignorant, no more than embodiments of different aspects of reality. Shiva is the dance of creation and destruction, the constant flow of energy in the cosmos. Birth and death and rebirth. It seemed fitting to bring him to the galactic core, where so much goes on of all three. This statue has been in my family for four hundred years. I must bring it home, along with the answers to our experiments.”

“You will bring Shiva back to New Bombay,” I said softly, “and your answers, too.”

“Yes, I have begun to think so.” He smiled at me, a smile with all the need of his quicksilver personality in it, but also all the courtesy and hope. “Now I will sleep.”

9. SHIP

The next morning, after a deep sleep one part sheer exhaustion and one part sex, I woke to find Ajit already out of bed and seated in front of his terminal. He rose the moment I entered the wardroom and turned to me with a grave face. “Tirzah. The minicap arrived. I already put the data into the system.”

“What’s wrong? Where’s Kane?”

“Still asleep, I imagine.”

I went to Kane’s bunk. He lay on his back, still in the clothes he’d worn for three days, smelling sour and snoring softly. I thought of waking him, then decided to wait a bit. Kane could certainly use the sleep, and I could use the time with Ajit. I went back to the wardroom, tightening the belt on my robe.

“What’s wrong?” I repeated.

“I put the data from the minicap into the system. It’s all corrections to the last minicap’s data. Kane says the first set was wrong.”

“Kane?” I said stupidly.

“The Kane-analogue,” Ajit explained patiently. “He says radiation hit the probe’s sensors for the first batch, before any of them realized it. They fired off the preliminary data right after the jump, you know, because they had no idea how long the probe could last. Now they’ve had time to discover where the radiation hit, to restore the sensor programs, and to retake the measurements. The Kane analogue says these new ones are accurate, the others weren’t.”

I tried to take it all in. “So Kane’s shadow matter theory—none of that is true?”

“I don’t know,” Ajit said. “How can anybody know until we see if the data supports it? The minicap only just arrived.”

“Then I might not have moved the probe,” I said, meaning “the other I.” My analogue. I didn’t know what I was saying. The shock was too great. All that theorizing, all Kane’s sharp triumph, all that tension . . .

I looked more closely at Ajit. He looked very pale, and as fatigued as a genemod man of his youth can look. I said, “You didn’t sleep much.”

“No. Yesterday was . . . difficult.”

“Yes,” I agreed, noting the characteristically polite understatement. “Yes.”

“Should I wake Kane?” Ajit said, almost diffidently.

“I’ll do it.”

Kane was hard to wake. I had to shake him several times before he struggled up to consciousness.

“Tirzah?”

“Who else? Kane, you must get up. Something’s happened.”

“Wh-what?” He yawned hugely and slumped against the bulkhead. His whole body reeked.

I braced myself. “The second minicap arrived. Your analogue sent a recording. He says the prelim data was compromised, due to radiation-caused sensor malfunction.”

That woke him. He stared at me as if I were an executioner. “The data’s compromised? All of it?”

“I don’t know.”

Kane pushed out of his bunk and ran into the wardroom. Ajit said, “I put the minicap data into the system already, but I—” Kane wasn’t listening. He tore into the data, and after a few minutes he actually bellowed.

“No!”

I flattened myself against the bulkhead, not from fear but from surprise. I had never heard a grown man make a noise like that.

But there were no other noises. Kane worked silently, ferociously. Ajit sat at his own terminal and worked, too, not yesterday’s tentative copying but the real thing. I put hot coffee beside them both. Kane gulped his steaming, Ajit ignored his.

After half an hour, Kane turned to me. Defeat pulled like gravity at everything on his face, eyes and lips and jaw muscles. Only his filthy hair sprang upward. He said simply, with the naked straightforwardness of despair, “The new data invalidates the idea of shadow matter.”

I heard myself say, “Kane, go take a shower.”

To my surprise, he went, shambling from the room. Ajit worked a few minutes longer, then climbed the ladder to the observation deck. Over his shoulder he said, “Tirzah, I want to be alone, please. Don’t come.”

I didn’t. I sat at the tiny wardroom table, looked at my own undrunk coffee, and thought of nothing.

10. PROBE

The data from the probe’s new position looked good, Kane said. That was his word: “good.” Then he returned to his terminal.

“Ajit?” I was coming to rely on him more and more for translation. He was just as busy as Kane, but kinder. This made sense. If, to Kane, Ajit was a secondary but still necessary party to the intellectual action, that’s what I was to both of them. Ajit had settled into this position, secure that he was valued. I could feel myself doing the same. The cessation of struggle turned us both kinder.

Kane, never insecure, worked away.

Ajit said, “The new readings confirm a large gravitational mass affecting the paths of both the infalling gas and the probe. The young stars so close to Sag A* are a much knottier problem. We’ve got to modify the whole theory of star formation to account for the curvatures of spacetime caused by the hole and by the shadow mass. It’s very complex. Kane’s got the computer working on that, and I’m going to take readings on Sag A West, in its different parts, and on stars on the other side of the mass and look at those.”

“What about the mass detectors? What do they say?”

“They say we’re being pulled toward a mass of about a half million suns.”

A half million suns. And we couldn’t see it: not with our eyes, nor radio sensors, nor X-rays detectors, nor anything.

“I have a question. Does it have an event horizon? Is it swallowing light, like a black hole does? Isn’t it the gravity of a black hole that swallows light?”

“Yes. But radiation, including light, goes right through this shadow matter, Tirzah. Don’t you understand? It doesn’t interact with normal radiation at all.”

“But it has gravity. Why doesn’t its gravity trap the light?”

“I don’t know.” He hesitated. “Kane thinks maybe it doesn’t interact with radiation as particles, which respond to gravity. Only as waves.”

“How can it do that?”

Ajit took my shoulders and shook them playfully. “I told you—we don’t know. This is brand-new, dear heart. We know as much about what it will and will not do as primitive hominids knew about fire.”

“Well, don’t make a god of it,” I said, and it was a test. Ajit passed. He didn’t stiffen as if I’d made some inappropriate reference to the drawing of Shiva he’d shown me last night. Instead, he laughed and went back to work.

• • •

“Tirzah! Tirzah!”

The automatic wake-up brought me out of shut-down. Ajit must have been brought back on-line a few moments before me, because he was already calling my name. Alarm bells clanged.

“It’s Kane! He’s been hit!”

I raced into Kane’s bunk. He lay still amid the bedclothes. It wasn’t the maintenance program that had taken the hit, because every part of his body was intact; so were the bedclothes. But Kane lay stiff and unresponsive.

“Run the full diagnostics,” I said to Ajit.

“I already started them.”

“Kane,” I said, shaking him gently, then harder. He moved a little, groaned. So his upload wasn’t dead.

I sat on the edge of the bunk, fighting fear, and took his hand. “Kane, love, can you hear me?”

He squeezed my fingers. The expression on his face didn’t change. After a silence in which time itself seemed to stop, Ajit said, “The diagnostics are complete. About a third of brain function is gone.”

I got into the bunk beside Kane and put my arms around him.

• • •

Ajit and I did what we could. Our uploads patched and copied, using material from both of us. Yes, the copying would lead to corruption, but we were beyond that.

Because an upload runs on such a complex combination of computer and nano-constructed polymer networks, we cannot simply be replaced by a back-up program cube. The unique software/hardware retes are also why a corrupted analogue is not exactly the same as a stroke- or tumor-impaired human brain.

The analogue brain does not have to pump blood or control breathing. It does not have to move muscles or secrete hormones. Although closely tied to the “purer” programs that maintain our illusion of moving and living as three-dimensional beings in a three-dimensional ship, the analogue brain is tied to the computer in much more complex ways than any fleshy human using a terminal. The resources of the computer were at our disposal, but they could only accomplish limited aims.

When Ajit and I had finished putting together as much of Kane, or a pseudo-Kane, as we could, he walked into the wardroom and sat down. He looked, moved, smiled the same. That part is easy to repair, as easy as had been replacing Ajit’s head or the exotics on the observation deck. But the man staring blankly at the terminal was not really Kane.

“What was I working on?” he said.

I got out, “Shadow matter.”

“Shadow matter? What’s that?”

Ajit said softly, “I have all your work, Kane. Our work. I think I can finish it, now that you’ve started us in the right direction.”

He nodded, looking confused. “Thank you, Ajit.” Then, with a flash of his old magnificent combativeness, “But you better get it right!”

“With your help,” Ajit said gaily, and in that moment I came close to truly loving him.

• • •

They worked out a new division of labor. Kane was able to take the sensor readings and run them through the pre-set algorithms. Actually, Ajit probably could have trained me to do that. But Kane seemed content, frowning earnestly at his displays.

Ajit took over the actual science. I said to him, when we had a moment alone, “Can you do it?”

“I think so,” he said, without either anger or arrogance. “I have the foundation that Kane laid. And we worked out some of the preliminaries together.”

“We have only one more jump left.”

“I know, Tirzah.”

“With the risk of radiation killing us all—”

“Not yet. Give me a little more time.”

I rested a moment against his shoulder. “All right. A little more time.”

He put his arm around me, not in passion but in comradeship. None of us, we both knew, had all that much time left.

11. SHIP

Kane was only temporarily defeated by the contamination of the probe data. Within half a day, he had aborted his shadow-matter theory, archived his work on it, and gone back to his original theories about the mysteriously massive young stars near the hole. He used the probe’s new data, which were all logical amplifications of the prelim readings. “I’ve got some ideas,” he told me. “We’ll see.”

He wasn’t as cheerful as usual, let alone as manically exuberant as during the shadow-matter “discovery,” but he was working steadily. A mountain, Kane. It would take a lot to actually erode him, certainly more than a failed theory. That rocky insensitivity had its strengths.

Ajit, on the other hand, was not really working. I couldn’t follow the displays on his terminal, but I could read the body language. He was restless, inattentive. But what worried me was something else, his attitude toward Kane.

All Ajit’s anger was gone.

I watched carefully, while seemingly bent over ship’s log or embroidery. Anger is the least subtle of the body’s signals. Even when a person is successfully concealing most of it, the signs are there if you know where to look: the tight neck muscles, the turned-away posture, the tinge in the voice. Ajit displayed none of this. Instead, when he faced Kane, as he did in the lunch I insisted we all eat together at the wardroom table, I saw something else. A sly superiority, a secret triumph.

I could be wrong, I thought. I have been wrong before. By now I disliked Ajit so much that I didn’t trust my own intuitions.

“Ajit,” I said as we finished the simple meal I’d put together, “will you please—”

Ship’s alarms went off with a deafening clang. Breach, breach, breach.

I whirled toward ship’s display, which automatically illuminated. The breach was in the starboard hold, and it was full penetration by a mass of about a hundred grams. Within a minute, the nanos had put on a temporary patch. The alarm stopped and the computer began hectoring me.

“Breach sealed with temporary nano patch. Seal must be reinforced within two hours with permanent hull patch, type 6-A. For location of breach and patch supply, consult ship’s log. If unavailability of—” I shut it off.

“Could be worse,” Kane said.

“Well, of course it could be worse,” I snapped, and immediately regretted it. I was not allowed to snap. That I had done so was an indication of how much the whole situation on the Kepler was affecting me. That wasn’t allowed, either; it was unprofessional.

Kane wasn’t offended. “Could have hit the engines or the living pod instead of just a hold. Actually, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before. There’s a lot of drifting debris in this area.”

Ajit said, “Are you going into the hold, Tirzah?”

Of course I was going into the hold. But this time I didn’t snap; I smiled at him and said, “Yes, I’m going to suit up now.”

“I’m coming, too,” Kane said.

I blinked. I’d been about to ask if Ajit wanted to go with me. It would be a good way to observe him away from Kane, maybe ask some discreet questions. I said to Kane, “Don’t you have to work?”

“The work isn’t going anywhere. And I want to retrieve the particle. It didn’t exit the ship, and at a hundred grams, there’s going to be some of it left after the breach.”

Ajit had stiffened at being pre-empted, yet again, by Kane. Ajit would have wanted to retrieve the particle, too; there is nothing more interesting to space scientists than dead rocks. Essentially, I’d often thought, Sag A* was no more than a very hot, very large dead rock. I knew better than to say this aloud.

I could have ordered Ajit to accompany me, and ordered Kane to stay behind. But that, I sensed, would only make things worse. Ajit, in his present mood of deadly sensitivity, would not take well to orders from anyone, even me. I wasn’t going to give him the chance to retreat more into whatever nasty state of mind he currently inhabited.

“Well, then, let’s go,” I said ungraciously to Kane, who only grinned at me and went to get our suits.

The holds, three of them for redundancy safety, are full of supplies of all types. Every few days I combine a thorough ship inspection with lugging enough food forward to sustain us. We aren’t uploads; we need bodily nurturing as well as the kind I was supposed to be providing.

All three holds can be pressurized if necessary, but usually they aren’t. Air generation and refreshment doesn’t cost much power, but it costs some. Kane and I went into the starboard hold in heated s-suits and helmets.

“I’m going to look around,” Kane said. He’d brought a handheld, and I saw him calculating the probable trajectory of the particle from the ship’s data and the angle of the breach, as far as he could deduce it. Then he disappeared behind a pallet of crates marked SOYSYNTH.

The breach was larger than I’d expected; that hundred-gram particle had hit at a bad angle. But the nanos had done their usual fine job, and the permanent patch went on without trouble. I began the careful inspection of the rest of the hull, using my hand-held instruments.

Kane cursed volubly.

“Kane? What is it?”

“Nothing. Bumped into boxes.”

“Well, don’t. The last thing I want is you messing up my hold.” For a physically fit man, Kane is clumsy in motion. I would bet my ship that he can’t dance, and bet my life that he never tries.

“I can’t see anything. Can’t you brighten the light?”

I did, and he bumped around some more. Whenever he brushed something, he cursed. I did an inspection even more carefully than usual, but found nothing alarming. We met each other back by the hold door.

“It’s not here,” Kane said. “The particle. It’s not here.”

“You mean you didn’t find it.”

“No, I mean it’s not here. Don’t you think I could find a still hot particle in a hold otherwise filled only with large immobile crates?”

I keyed in the door code. “So it evaporated on impact. Ice and ions and dust.”

“To penetrate a Schaad hull? No.” He reconsidered. “Well, maybe. What did you find?”

“Not much. Pitting and scarring on the outside, nothing unexpected. But no structural stress to worry about.”

“The debris here is undoubtedly orbiting the core, but we’re so far out it’s not moving all that fast. Still, we should have had some warning. But I’m more worried about the probe—when is the third minicap due?”

Kane knew as well as I did when the third minicap was due. His asking was the first sign he was as tense as the rest of us.

“Three more days,” I said. “Be patient.”

“I’m not patient.”

“As if that’s new data.”

“I’m also afraid the probe will be hit by rapidly orbiting debris, and that will be that. Did you know that the stars close in to Sag A* orbit at several thousand clicks per second?”

I knew. He’d told me often enough. The probe was always a speculative proposition, and before now, Kane had been jubilant that we’d gotten any data at all from it.

I’d never heard Kane admit to being “afraid” of anything. Even allowing for the casualness of the phrase.

I wanted to distract him, and, if Kane was really in a resigned and reflective mood, it also seemed a good time to do my job. “Kane, about Ajit—”

“I don’t want to talk about that sniveling slacker,” Kane said, with neither interest not rancor. “I picked badly for an assistant, that’s all.”

It hadn’t actually been his “pick”; his input had been one of many. I didn’t say this. Kane looked around the hold one more time. “I guess you’re right. The particle sublimed. Ah, well.”

I put the glove of my hand on the arm of his suit—not exactly an intimate caress, but the best I could do in this circumstance. “Kane, how is the young-star mystery going?”

“Not very well. But that’s science.” The hold door stood open and he lumbered out.

I gave one last look around the hold before turning off the light, but there was nothing more to see.

• • •

The mended statue of Shiva was back on the wardroom table, smack in the center, when Kane and I returned from the hold. I don’t think Kane, heading straight for his terminal, even noticed. I smiled at Ajit, although I wasn’t sure why he had brought the statue back. He’d told me he never wanted to see it again.

“Tirzah, would you perhaps like to play go?”

I couldn’t conceal my surprise. “Go?”

“Yes. Will you play with me?” Accompanied by his most winning smile.

“All right.”

He brought out the board and, bizarrely, set it up balanced on his knees. When he saw my face, he said, “We’ll play here. I don’t want to disturb the Cosmic Dancer.”

“All right.” I wasn’t sure what to think. I drew my chair close to his, facing him, and bent over the board.

We both knew that Ajit was a better player than I. That’s why both of us played: he to win, me to lose. I would learn more from the losing position. Very competitive people—and I thought now that I had never known one as competitive as Ajit—relax only when not threatened.

So I made myself non-threatening in every way I knew, and Ajit and I talked and laughed, and Kane worked doggedly on his theories that weren’t going anywhere. The statue of the dancing god leered at me from the table, and I knew with every passing moment how completely I was failing this already failing mission.

12. PROBE

Kane was gentler since the radiation corruption. Who can say how these things happen? Personality, too, is encoded in the human brain, whether flesh or analogue. He was still Kane, but we saw only his gentler, sweeter side. Previously that part of him had been dominated by his combative intellect, which had been a force of nature all its own, like a high wind. Now the intellect had failed, the wind calmed. The landscape beneath lay serene.

“Here, Ajit,” Kane said. “These are the equations you wanted run.” He sent them to Ajit’s terminal, stood, and stretched. The stretch put him slightly off balance, something damaged in the upload that Ajit and I hadn’t been able to fix, or find. A brain is such a complex thing. Kane tottered, and Ajit rose swiftly to catch him.

“Careful, Kane. Here, sit down.”

Ajit eased Kane into a chair at the wardroom table. I put down my work. Kane said, “Tirzah, I feel funny.”

“Funny how?” Alarm ran through me.

“I don’t know. Can we play go?”

I had taught him the ancient strategy game, and he enjoyed it. He wasn’t very good, not nearly as good as I was, but he liked it and didn’t seem to mind losing. I got out the board. Ajit, who was a master at go, went back to Kane’s shadow-matter theory. He was making good progress, I knew, although he said frankly that all the basic ideas were Kane’s.

Halfway through our second game of go, the entire wardroom disappeared.

A moment of blind panic seized me. I was adrift in the void, nothing to see or feel or hold onto, a vertigo so terrible it blocked any rational thought. It was the equivalent of a long anguished scream, originating in the most primitive part of my now blind brain: lost, lost, lost and alone . . .

The automatic maintenance program kicked in and the wardroom reappeared. Kane gripped the table edge and stared at me, white-faced. I went to him, wrapped my arms around him reassuringly, and gazed at Ajit. Kane clung to me. A part of my mind noted that some aspects of the wardroom were wrong: the galley door was too low to walk through upright, and one chair had disappeared, along with the go board. Maintenance code too damaged to restore.

Ajit said softly, “We have to decide, Tirzah. We could take a final radiation hit at any time.”

“I know.”

I took my arms away from Kane. “Are you all right?”

He smiled. “Yes. Just for a minute I was . . .” He seemed to lose his thought.

Ajit brought his terminal chair to the table, to replace the vanished one. He sat leaning forward, looking from me to Kane and back. “This is a decision all three of us have to make. We have one minicap left to send back to the Kepler, and one more jump for ourselves. At any time we could lose . . . everything. You all know that. What do you think we should do? Kane? Tirzah?”

All my life I’d heard that even very flawed people can rise to leadership under the right circumstances. I’d never believed it, not of someone with Ajit’s basic personality structure: competitive, paranoid, angry at such a deep level he didn’t even know it. I’d been wrong. I believed now.

Kane said, “I feel funny, and that probably means I’ve taken another minor hit and the program isn’t there to repair it. I think . . . I think . . .”

“Kane?” I took his hand.

He had trouble getting words out. “I think we better send the minicap now.”

“I agree,” Ajit said. “But that means we send it without the data from our next jump, to just outside the event horizon of Sag A*. So the Kepler won’t get those readings. They’ll get the work on shadow matter, but most of the best things on that already went in the second minicap. Still, it’s better than nothing, and I’m afraid if we wait to send until after the jump, nothing is what the Kepler will get. It will be too late.”

Both men looked at me. As captain, the jump decision was mine. I nodded. “I agree, too. Send off the minicap with whatever you’ve got, and then we’ll jump. But not to the event horizon.”

“Why not?” Kane burst out, sounding more like himself than at any time since the accident.

“Because there’s no point. We can’t send any more data back, so the event horizon readings die with us. And we can survive longer if I jump us completely away from the core. Several hundred light years out, where the radiation is minimal.”

Together, as if rehearsed, they both said, “No.”

“No?”

“No,” Ajit said, with utter calm, utter persuasiveness. “We’re not going to go out like that, Tirzah.”

“But we don’t have to go out at all! Not for decades! Maybe centuries! Not until the probe’s life-maintenance power is used up—” Or until the probe is hit by space debris. Or until radiation takes us out. Nowhere in space is really safe.

Kane said, “And what would we do for centuries? I’d go mad. I want to work.”

“Me, too,” Ajit said. “I want to take the readings by the event horizon and make of them what I can, while I can. Even though the Kepler will never see them.”

They were scientists.

And I? Could even I, station bred, have lived for centuries in this tiny ship, without a goal beyond survival, trapped with these two men? An Ajit compassionate and calm, now that he was on top. A damaged Kane, gentle and intellectually gutted. And a Tirzah, captaining a pointless expedition with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

I would have ended up hating all three of us.

Ajit took my left hand. My right one still held Kane’s, so we made a broken circle in the radiation-damaged wardroom.

“All right,” I said. “We’ll send off the minicap and then jump to the event horizon.”

“Yes,” Kane said.

Ajit said, “I’m going to go back to work. Tirzah, if you and Kane want to go up to the observation deck, or anywhere, I’ll prepare and launch the minicap.” Carefully he turned his back and sat at his terminal.

I led Kane to my bunk. This was a first; I always went to the scientists’ bunks. My own, as captain, had features for my eyes only. But now it didn’t matter.

We made love, and afterward, holding his superb, aging body in my arms, I whispered against his cheek, “I love you, Kane.”

“I love you, too,” he said simply, and I had no way of knowing if he meant it, or if it was an automatic response dredged up from some half-remembered ritual from another time. It didn’t matter. There are a lot more types of love in the universe than I once suspected.

We were silent a long time, and then Kane said, “I’m trying to remember pi. I know three point one, but I can’t remember after that.”

I said, through the tightness in my throat, “Three point one four one. That’s all I remember.”

“Three point one four one,” Kane said dutifully. I left him repeating it over and over, when I went to jump the probe to the event horizon of Sag A*.

13. SHIP

The second breach of the hull was more serious than the first.

The third minicap had not arrived from the probe. “The analogues are probably all dead,” Kane said dully. “They were supposed to jump to one-twenty-fifth of a light year from the event horizon. Our calculations were always problematic for where exactly that is. It’s possible they landed inside, and the probe will just spiral around Sag A* forever. Or they got hit with major radiation and fried.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “How is the massive-young-star problem coming?”

“It’s not. Mathematical dead end.”

He looked terrible, drawn and, again, unwashed. I was more impatient with the latter than I should be. But how hard is it, as a courtesy to your shipmates if nothing else, to get your body into the shower? How long does it take? Kane had stopped exercising, as well.

“Kane,” I began, as quietly but firmly as I could manage, “will you—”

The alarms went off, clanging again at 115 decibels. Breach, breach, breach . . .

I scanned the displays. “Oh, God—”

“Breach sealed with temporary nano patch,” the computer said. “Seal must be reinforced within one-half hour with permanent hull patch, type 1-B, supplemented with equipment repair, if possible. For location of breach and patch supply, consult—” I turned it off.

The intruder had hit the back-up engine. It was a much larger particle than the first one, although since it had hit us and then gone on its merry way, rather than penetrating the ship, there was no way to recover it for examination. But the outside mass detectors registered a particle of at least two kilos, and it had probably been moving much faster than the first one. If it had hit us directly, we would all be dead. Instead it had given the ship a glancing blow, damaging the back-up engine.

“I’ll come with you again,” Kane said.

“There won’t be any particle to collect this time.” Or not collect.

“I know. But I’m not getting anywhere here.”

Kane and I, s-suited, went into the back-up engine compartment. As soon as I saw it, I knew there was nothing I could do. There is damage you can repair, and there is damage you cannot. The back end of the compartment had been sheared off, and part of the engine with it. No wonder the computer had recommended a 1-B patch, which is essentially the equivalent of “Throw a tarp over it and forget it.”

While I patched, Kane poked around the edges of the breach, then at the useless engine. He left before I did, and I found him studying ship’s display of the hit on my wardroom screen. He wasn’t trying to do anything with ship’s log, which was not his place and he knew it, but he stood in front of the data, moving his hand when he wanted another screen, frowning horribly.

“What is it, Kane?” I said. I didn’t really want to know; the patch had taken hours and I was exhausted. I didn’t see Ajit. Sleeping, or up on the observation deck, or, less likely, in the gym.

“Nothing. Whatever that hit was made of, it wasn’t radiating. So it wasn’t going very fast, or the external sensors would have picked up at least ionization. Either the mass was cold, or the sensors aren’t functioning properly.”

“I’ll run the diagnostics,” I said wearily. “Anything else?”

“Yes. I want to move the ship.”

I stared at him, my suit half peeled from my body, my helmet defiantly set on the table, pushing the statue of Shiva to one side. “Move the ship?”

Ajit appeared in the doorway from his bunk.

“Yes,” Kane said. “Move the ship.”

“But these are the coordinates the minicap will return to!”

“It’s not coming,” Kane said. “Don’t you listen to anything I say, Tirzah? The uploads didn’t make it. The third minicap is days late; if it were coming, it would be here. The probe is gone, the uploads are gone, and we’ve got all the data we’re going to get from them. If we want more, we’re going to have to go after it ourselves.”

“Go after it?” I repeated, stupidly. “How?”

“I already told you! Move the ship closer into the core so we can take the readings the probe should have taken. Some of them, anyway.”

Ajit said, “Moving the ship is completely Tirzah’s decision.”

His championship of me when I needed no champion, and especially not in that pointlessly assertive voice, angered me more than Kane’s suggestion. “Thank you, Ajit, I can handle this!”

Mistake, mistake.

Kane, undeterred, plowed on. “I don’t mean we’d go near the event horizon, of course, or even to the probe’s first position near the star cluster. But we could move much closer in. Maybe ten light years from the core, positioned between the northern and western arms of Sag A West.”

Ajit said, “Which would put us right in the circumnuclear disk! Where the radiation is much worse than here!”

Kane turned on him, acknowledging Ajit’s presence for the first time in days, with an outpouring of all Kane’s accumulated frustration and disappointment. “We’ve been hit twice with particles that damaged the ship. Clearly we’re in the path of some equivalent of an asteroid belt orbiting the core at this immense distance. It can’t be any less safe in the circumnuclear disk, which, I might remind you, is only shocked molecular gases, with its major radiation profile unknown. Any first-year astronomy student should know that. Or is it just that you’re a coward?”

Ajit’s skin mottled, then paled. His features did not change expression at all. But I felt the heat coming from him, the primal rage, greater for being contained. He went into his bunk and closed the door.

“Kane!” I said furiously, too exhausted and frustrated and disappointed myself to watch my tone. “You can’t—”

“I can’t stand any more of this,” Kane said. He slammed down the corridor to the gym, and I heard the exercise bike whirr in rage.

I went to my own bunk, locked the door, and squeezed my eyes shut, fighting for control. But even behind my closed eyelids I saw our furious shadows.

• • •

After a few hours I called them both together in the wardroom. When Kane refused, I ordered him. I lifted Ajit’s statue of Shiva off the table and handed it to him, making its location his problem, as long as it wasn’t on the table. Wordlessly he carried it into his bunk and then returned.

“This can’t go on,” I said calmly. “We all know that. We’re in this small space together to accomplish something important, and our mission overrides all our personal feelings. You are both rational men, scientists, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Don’t patronize us with flattery,” Ajit said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to do that. It’s true you’re both scientists, and it’s true you’ve both been certified rational enough for space travel.”

They couldn’t argue with that. I didn’t mention how often certification boards had misjudged, or been bribed, or just been too dazzled by well-earned reputations to look below the work to the worker. If Kane or Ajit knew all that, they kept it to themselves.

“I blame myself for any difficulties we’ve had here,” I said, in the best Nurturer fashion. Although it was also true. “It’s my job to keep a ship running in productive harmony, and this one, I think we can all agree, is not.”

No dissension. I saw that both of them dreaded some long, drawn-out discussion of group dynamics, never a topic that goes down well with astrophysicists. Kane said abruptly, “I still want to move the ship.”

I had prepared myself for this. “No, Kane. We’re not jumping closer in.”

He caught at my loophole. “Then can we jump to another location at the same distance from the core? Maybe measurements from another base point would help.”

“We’re not jumping anywhere until I’m sure the third minicap isn’t coming.”

“How long will that be?” I could see the formidable intelligence under the childish tantrums already racing ahead, planning measurements, weighing options.

“We’ll give it another three days.”

“All right.” Suddenly he smiled, his first in days. “Thanks, Tirzah.”

I turned to Ajit. “Ajit, what can we do for your work? What do you need?”

“I ask for nothing,” he said, with such a strange, intense, unreadable expression that for a moment I felt irrational fear. Then he stood and went into his bunk. I heard the door lock.

I had failed again.

• • •

No alarm went off in the middle of the night. There was nothing overt to wake me. But I woke anyway, and I heard someone moving quietly around the wardroom. The muscles of my right arm tensed to open my bunk, and I forced them to still.

Something wasn’t right. Intuition, that mysterious shadow of rational thought, told me to lie motionless. To not open my bunk, to not even reach out and access the ship’s data on my bunk screen. To not move at all.

Why?

I didn’t know.

The smell of coffee wafted from the wardroom. So one of the men couldn’t sleep, made some coffee, turned on his terminal. So what?

Don’t move, said that pre-reasoning part of my mind, from the shadows.

The coffee smell grew stronger. A chair scraped. Ordinary, mundane sounds.

Don’t move.

I didn’t have to move. This afternoon I had omitted to mention to Kane and Ajit those times that certification boards had misjudged, or been bribed, or just been too dazzled by well-earned reputations to look below the work to the worker. Those times in which the cramped conditions of space, coupled with swollen egos and frenzied work, had led to disaster for a mission Nurturer. But we had learned. My bunk had equipment the scientists did not know about.

Carefully I slid my gaze to a spot directly above me on the bunk ceiling. Only my eyes moved. I pattern-blinked: two quick, three beats closed, two quick, a long steady stare. The screen brightened.

This was duplicate ship data. Not a back-up; it was entirely separate, made simultaneously from the same sensors as the main log but routed into separate, free-standing storage that could not be reached from the main computer. Scientists are all sophisticated users. There is no way to keep data from any who wish to alter it except by discreet, unknown, untraceable storage. I pattern-blinked, not moving so much as a finger or a toe in the bed, to activate various screens of ship data.

It was easy to find.

Yesterday, at 1850 hours, the minicap bay had opened and received a minicap. Signal had failed to transmit to the main computer. Today at 300 hours, which was fifteen minutes ago, the minicap bay had been opened manually and the payload removed. Again signal had failed to the main computer.

The infrared signature in the wardroom, seated at his terminal, was Ajit.

It was possible the signal failures were coincidental, and Ajit was even now transferring data from the third minicap into the computer, enjoying a cup of hot coffee while he did so, gloating in getting a perfectly legitimate jump on Kane. But I didn’t think so.

What did I think?

I didn’t have to think; I just knew. I could see it unfolding, clear as a holovid. All of it. Ajit had stolen the second minicap, too. That had been the morning after Kane and I had slept so soundly, the morning after Ajit had given us wine to celebrate Kane’s shadow-matter theory. What had been in that wine? We’d slept soundly, and Ajit told us that the minicap had come before we were awake. Ajit said he’d already put it into the computer. It carried Kane’s upload’s apology that the prelim data, the data from which Kane had constructed his shadow-matter thesis, was wrong, contaminated by a radiation strike.

Ajit had fabricated that apology and that replacement data. The actual second minicap would justify Kane’s work, not undo it. Ajit was saving all three minicaps to use for himself, to claim the shadow matter discovery for his own. He’d used the second minicap to discredit the first; he would claim the third had never arrived, had never been sent from the dying probe.

The real Kane, my Kane, hadn’t found the particle from the first ship’s breach because it had, indeed, been made of shadow matter. That, and not slow speed, had been why the particle showed no radiation. The particle had exerted gravity on our world, but nothing else. The second breach, too, had been shadow matter. I knew that as surely as if Kane had shown me the pages of equations to prove it.

I knew something else, too. If I went into the shower and searched my body very carefully, every inch of it, I would find in some inconspicuous place the small, regular hole into which a subdermal tracker had gone the night of the drugged wine. So would Kane. Trackers would apprise Ajit of every move we made, not only large-muscle moves like a step or a hug, but small ones like accessing my bunk display of ship’s data. That was what my intuition had been warning me of. Ajit did not want to be discovered during his minicap thefts.

I had the same trackers in my own repertoire. Only I had not thought this mission deteriorated enough to need them. I had not wanted to think that. I’d been wrong.

But how would Ajit make use of Kane’s stolen work with Kane there to claim it for himself?

I already knew the answer, of course. I had known it from the moment I pattern-blinked at the ceiling, which was the moment I finally admitted to myself how monstrous this mission had turned.

I pushed open the bunk door and called cheerfully, “Hello? Do I smell coffee? Who’s out there?”

“I am,” Ajit said genially. “I cannot sleep. Come have some coffee.”

“Coming, Ajit.”

I put on my robe, tied it at my waist, and slipped the gun from its secret mattress compartment into my palm.

14. PROBE

The probe jumped successfully. We survived.

This close to the core, the view wasn’t as spectacular as it was farther out. Sag A*, which captured us in orbit immediately, now appeared as a fuzzy region dominating starboard. The fuzziness, Ajit said, was a combination of Hawking radiation and superheated gases being swallowed by the black hole. To port, the intense blue cluster of IRS16 was muffled by the clouds of ionized plasma around the probe. We experienced some tidal forces, but the probe was so small that the gravitational tides didn’t yet cause much damage.

Ajit has found a way to successfully apply Kane’s shadow-matter theory to the paths of the infalling gases, as well as to the orbits of the young stars near Sag A*. He says there may well be a lot of shadow matter near the core, and maybe even farther out. It may even provide enough mass to “balance” the universe, keeping it from either flying apart forever or collapsing in on itself. Shadow matter, left over from the very beginning of creation, may preserve creation.

Kane nods happily as Ajit explains. Kane holds my hand. I stroke his palm gently with my thumb, making circles like tiny orbits.

15. SHIP

Ajit sat, fully dressed and with steaming coffee at his side, in front of his terminal. I didn’t give him time to get the best of me. I walked into the wardroom and fired.

The sedative dart dropped him almost instantly. It was effective, for his body weight, for an hour. Kane didn’t hear the thud as Ajit fell off his chair and onto the deck; Kane’s bunk door stayed closed. I went into Ajit’s bunk and searched every cubic meter of it, overriding the lock on his personal storage space. Most of that was taken up with the bronze statue of Shiva. The minicaps were not there, nor anywhere else in his bunk.

I tried the galley next, and came up empty.

Same for the shower, the gym, the supply closets.

Ajit could have hidden the cubes in the engine compartments or the fuel bays or any of a dozen other ship’s compartments, but they weren’t pressurized and he would have had to either suit up or pressurize them. Either one would have shown up in my private ship data, and they hadn’t. Ajit probably hadn’t wanted to take the risk of too much covert motion around the ship. He’d only had enough drugs to put Kane and me out once. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have risked subdermal trackers.

I guessed he’d hidden the cubes in the observatory.

Looking there involved digging. By the time I’d finished, the exotics lay yanked up in dying heaps around the room. The stones of the fountain had been flung about. I was filthy and sweating, my robe smeared with soil. But I’d found them, the two crystal cubes from the second and third minicaps, removed from their heavy shielding. Their smooth surfaces shed the dirt easily.

Forty-five minutes had passed.

I went downstairs to wake Kane. The expedition would have to jump immediately; there is no room on a three-man ship to confine a prisoner for long. Even if I could protect Kane and me from Ajit, I didn’t think I could protect Ajit from Kane. These minicaps held the validation of Kane’s shadow-matter work, and in another man, joy over that would have eclipsed the theft. I didn’t think it would be that way with Kane.

Ajit still lay where I’d dropped him. The tranquilizer is reliable. I shot Ajit with a second dose and went into Kane’s bunk. He wasn’t there.

I stood too still for too long, then frantically scrambled into my s-suit.

I had already searched everywhere in the pressurized sections of the ship. Oh, let him be taking a second, fruitless look at the starboard hold, hoping to find some trace of the first particle that had hit us! Let him be in the damaged back-up engine compartment, afire with some stupid, brilliant idea to save the engine! Let him be—

“Kane! Kane!”

He lay in the starboard hold, on his side, his suit breached. He lay below a jagged piece of plastic from a half-open supply box. Ajit had made it look as if Kane had tried to open a box marked SENSOR REPLACEMENTS, had torn his suit, and the suit sealer nanos had failed. It was an altogether clumsy attempt, but one that, in the absence of any other evidence and a heretofore spotless reputation, would probably have worked.

The thing inside the suit was not Kane. Not anymore.

I knelt beside him. I put my arms around him and begged, cried, pleaded with him to come back. I pounded my gloves on the deck until I, too, risked suit breach. I think, in that abandoned and monstrous moment, I would not have cared.

Then I went into the wardroom, exchanged my tranquilizer gun for a knife, and slit Ajit’s throat. I only regretted that he wasn’t awake when I did it, and I only regretted that much, much later.

• • •

I prepared the ship for the long jump back to the Orion Arm. After the jump would come the acceleration-deceleration to Skillian, the closest settled world, which will take about a month standard. Space physics which I don’t understand make this necessary; a ship cannot jump too close to a large body of matter like a planet. Shadow matter, apparently, does not count.

Both Ajit’s and Kane’s bodies rest in the cold of the non-pressurized port hold. Kane’s initial work on shadow matter rests in my bunk. Every night I fondle the two cubes which will make him famous—more famous—on the settled Worlds. Every day I look at the data, the equations, the rest of his work on his terminal. I don’t understand it, but sometimes I think I can see Kane, his essential self, in these intelligent symbols, these unlockings of the secrets of cosmic energy.

It was our shadow selves, not our essential ones, that destroyed my mission, the shadows in the core of each human being. Ajit’s ambition and rivalry. Kane’s stunted vision of other people and their limits. My pride, which led me to think I was in control of murderous rage long after it had reached a point of no return. In all of us.

I left one thing behind at the center of the galaxy. Just before the Kepler jumped, I jettisoned Ajit’s statue of a Shiva dancing, in the direction of Sag A*. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine it will travel toward the black hole at the galaxy’s core, be caught eventually by its gravity, and spiral in, to someday disappear over the event horizon into some unimaginable singularity. That’s what I want to happen to the statue. I hate it.

As to what will happen to me, I don’t have the energy to hate it. I’ll tell the authorities everything. My license as a Nurturer will surely be revoked, but I won’t stand trial for the murder of Ajit. A captain is supreme law on her ship. I had the legal authority to kill Ajit. However, it’s unlikely that any scientific expedition will hire me as captain ever again. My useful life is over, and any piece of it left is no more than one of the ashy, burned-out stars Kane says orbit Sag A*, uselessly circling the core until its final death, giving no light.

A shadow.

16. PROBE

We remain near the galactic core, Kane and Ajit and I. The event horizon of Sag A* is about one-fiftieth of a light year below us. As we spiral closer, our speed is increasing dramatically. The point of no return is one-twentieth of a light year. The lethal radiation, oddly enough, is less here than when we were drifting near the shadow matter on the other side of Sag A West, but it is enough.

I think at least part of my brain has been affected, along with the repair program to fix it. It’s hard to be sure, but I can’t seem to remember much before we came aboard the probe, or details of why we’re here. Sometimes I almost remember, but then it slips away. I know that Kane and Ajit and I are shadows of something, but I don’t remember what.

Ajit and Kane work on their science. I have forgotten what it’s about, but I like to sit and watch them together. Ajit works on ideas and Kane assists in minor ways, as once Kane worked on ideas and Ajit assisted in minor ways. We all know the science will go down into Sag A* with us. The scientists do it anyway, for no other gain than pure love of the work. This is, in fact, the purest science in the universe.

Our mission is a success. Ajit and Kane have answers. I have kept them working harmoniously, have satisfied all their needs while they did it, and have captained my ship safely into the very heart of the galaxy. I am content.

Not that there aren’t difficulties, of course. It’s disconcerting to go up on the observation deck. Most of the exotics remain, blooming in wild profusion, but a good chunk of the hull has disappeared. The effect is that anything up there—flowers, bench, people—is drifting through naked space, held together only by the gravity we exert on each other. I don’t understand how we can breathe up there; surely the air is gone. There are a lot of things I don’t understand now, but I accept them.

The wardroom is mostly intact, except that you have to stoop to go through the door to the galley, which is only about two feet tall, and Ajit’s bunk has disappeared. We manage fine with two bunks, since I sleep every night with Ajit or Kane. The terminals are intact. One of them won’t display any more, though. Ajit has used it to hold a holo he programmed on a functioning part of the computer and superimposed over where the defunct display stood. The holo is a rendition of an image he showed me once before, of an Indian god, Shiva.

Shiva is dancing. He dances, four-armed and graceful, in a circle decorated with flames. Everything about him is dynamic, waving arms and kicking uplifted leg and mobile expression. Even the flames in the circle dance. Only Shiva’s face is calm, detached, serene. Kane, especially, will watch the holo for hours.

The god, Ajit tells us, represents the flow of cosmic energy in the universe. Shiva creates, destroys, creates again. All matter and all energy participate in this rhythmic dance, patterns made and unmade throughout all of time.

Shadow matter—that’s what Kane and Ajit are working on. I remember now. Something decoupled from the rest of the universe right after its creation. But shadow matter, too, is part of the dance. It exerted gravitational pull on our ship. We cannot see it, but it is there, changing the orbits of stars, the trajectories of lives, in the great shadow play of Shiva’s dancing.

I don’t think Kane, Ajit, and I have very much longer. But it doesn’t matter, not really. We have each attained what we came for, and since we, too, are part of the cosmic pattern, we cannot really be lost. When the probe goes down into the black hole at the core, if we last that long, it will be as a part of the inevitable, endless, glorious flow of cosmic energy, the divine dance.

I am ready.

© 2004 by Nancy Kress.

Originally published in Between Worlds,

edited by Robert Silverberg.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-six books: three fantasy novels, twelve SF novels, three thrillers, four collections of short stories, one YA novel, and three books on writing fiction. She is perhaps best known for the Sleepless trilogy that began with Beggars in Spain, which was based on the Nebula- and Hugo-winning novella of the same name. She won her second Hugo in 2009 in Montreal, for the novella “The Erdmann Nexus.” Kress has also won three additional Nebulas, a Sturgeon, and the 2003 John W. Campbell Award (for her novel Probability Space). Her most recent books are a collection of short stories, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories; a bio-thriller, Dogs; and an SF novel, Steal Across the Sky. Kress’s fiction, much of which concerns genetic engineering, has been translated into twenty languages. She often teaches writing at various venues around the country and blogs at nancykress.blogspot.com.

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NOVEL EXCERPTS

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Defenders
Will McIntosh

Prologue

Lieutenant Enrique Quinto

June 26, 2029. Morris Run, Pennsylvania.

It was a quaint Pennsylvania town, many of the buildings well over fifty years old, with green canopies shading narrow doorways. Even the town’s name was quaint: Morris Run. If not for the abandoned vehicles, filthy and faded by two years of exposure to the elements, and the trash stacked along the sidewalk, Quinto might have expected someone to step out of the Bullfrog Brewhouse and wave hello.

“Lieutenant Lucky?” Quinto turned to see Macalena, his platoon sergeant, making his way to the front of the carrier. Quinto wished he’d said something the first time someone called him Lucky, but it was far too late now. Most of the troops he was leading today probably didn’t know his real name.

“One of the new guys shit his pants,” Macalena said when he drew close, his voice low, giving Quinto a whiff of his sour breath.

Quinto sighed heavily. “Oh, hell.”

“The kid’s scared to death. He hasn’t been out of Philadelphia since this started.”

“No, I don’t blame him.” Quinto looked over Macalena’s shoulder, saw the kid perched on the side of the carrier, head down. He was about fourteen. The poor kid didn’t belong out here. Not that Quinto couldn’t use him; they called raw recruits “fish food,” but sometimes they were surprisingly effective in a firefight, because they were too scared to think. The starfish could get less of a read on what they were going to do, which way they were going to point their rifles. Usually the newbies didn’t shit their pants until the shooting started, though. “Does he have a spare pair?”

Macalena shook his head. “That’s the only pair he owns.”

Quinto reached into his pack, pulled out a pair of fatigue pants, and handed them to Macalena. “I hope he’s got a belt.”

Macalena laughed, stuck the pants under his armpit, and headed toward the kid.

What an awful thing, to be out here at fourteen, fifteen. When Quinto was fourteen, he’d spent his days playing video games, shooting bad guys in his room while Mom fetched fruit juice and chocolate chip cookies and told him when to go to bed.

They reached the end of the little downtown, which was composed of that single road, and the landscape opened up, revealing pine forest, the occasional house, mountains rising up on all horizons. There was little reason for any Luyten to be within eight miles of this abandoned backwater town, but they were all out there somewhere, so there was always a chance they’d be detected.

Quinto tried to access his helmet’s topographical maps, but the signal still wasn’t coming through. He pulled the old hard copy from his pack, unfolded it.

The carrier slowed; Quinto looked up from the map to see what was going on. There was a visual-recognition drone stuck in a drainage ditch along the side of the road. As they approached, the VRA drone—little more than a machine gun on treads—spun and trained its gun on each of the soldiers in turn. When it got to Quinto, it paused.

“Human. Human!” Quinto shouted, engaging the thing’s vocal-recognition failsafe. It went on to the next soldier. It was always an uncomfortable moment, having a VRA drone point a weapon at you. You’d think it would be hard to mistake a human for a Luyten.

Failing to identify anything that resembled a starfish, the gun spun away.

“Get a few guys to pull it out of the ditch,” Quinto said. Four troops hopped out of the transport and wrestled the thing back onto the road. It headed off down the road, continuing on its randomly determined route.

Pleasant Street dead-ended close to the mouth of the mine, about half a mile past an old hotel that should be coming up on their left. When they got to the mine they’d have to unseal it using the critical blast points indicated on the topo map, then a 2.5-mile ride on the maglev flats into the mine, to the storage facility.

If someone had told Quinto two years ago that he’d be going into an abandoned mine to retrieve seventy-year-old weapons and ammo, he would have laughed out loud.

It wasn’t funny now.

• • •

The locomotive and five boxcars were parked right where they were supposed to be—as close to the mouth of the mine as the track would allow. They were late-twentieth-century vintage, the locomotive orange and shaped like a stretched Mack truck. Quinto called Macalena and his squad leaders, instructed them to set the big recognition-targeting gun they’d brought along in the weeds on the far side of the road, and place two gunners near the entrance with interlocking fire. When that was done, they got the rest of the squads moving down the tunnel. The quicker they moved, the sooner they’d be out of hostile territory and back in Philly.

Quinto took up the rear of the last carrier for the ride down into the mine. He was not a fan of deep holes with black walls, and when his CO had first laid out the mission Quinto had nearly crapped his own pants.

Macalena climbed in and took the seat beside him. “So what are we looking for? I cannot for the life of me guess what we’re doing in here.”

Quinto smiled. It must seem an odd destination to the rest of the men, but they were used to being kept in the dark about missions. The fewer people who knew, the less likely the starfish were to get the information. Or so the logic went.

“The feds have been sealing huge caches of weapons in old mines for the past two centuries, waiting for the day when Argentina or India or whoever took out our more visible weapons depots. They coat them in Cosmoline and pretty much forget about them.”

Macalena frowned, sticking out his big lower lip. “You mean, old hand grenades and machine guns and shit?”

“More or less. Flamethrowers with a pathetically limited effectiveness range, eighty-one-millimeter mortars, LAW rockets, fifty-cal MGs.” Most were outdated weapons, but simple, easy to operate.

Macalena shook his head. “So we’re that desperate.”

In the seat in front of them a private who was at least seventy was clinging to the bar in front of her seat. She was tall—at least six feet. The slight jostling of the carrier was clearly causing her old body discomfort. It was true what they said: There were no civilians anymore, only soldiers and children.

“Yup. We’re that desperate,” Quinto said. “They’ve destroyed or seized so much of our hardware that we have more soldiers than guns.”

“What’s Cosmoline?” Macalena asked.

“I didn’t know, either; I had to look it up. It’s a grease they used back in the day to preserve weapons. Once you chip away the hardened Cosmoline, the weapons are supposed to be like new.”

Macalena grunted, spit off the side. “Dusty as hell in here. And cold.”

“Let’s be glad we’re not staying.”

Macalena’s comm erupted, a panicked voice calling his name.

“What have we got?” Macalena asked.

“Vance is dead. Lightning shot, from the trees to the left of the mine.”

“All stop!” Macalena shouted. The carrier slowed as Quinto dropped his head, covered his mouth as the implications sunk in.

Lucky no more.

“Where are you now?” Macalena asked the private.

“Inside the mine, about a hundred yards.”

“Stay there.”

Quinto looked up at Macalena, who raised his eyebrows. “What do you want to do?”

He wanted to get as deep in the mine as he could, and stay there, their backs against the wall, weapons raised until the starfish came to get them. Of course the Luyten would never come down, because they were reading his thoughts right now. Plus it was far easier to blow the mouth of the mine and leave them to suffocate.

Quinto ordered the small caravan to turn around and head toward the mouth.

They barely got moving before they heard the flash-boom of a Luyten explosive. The cave shook; bits of dirt and debris spewed at them, then everything settled into silence, the cave now truly pitch-black, save for the carriers’ headlights.

They climbed out of the carriers. Some of the troops cried, and there was no shame in that. One woman went off to the side of the tunnel and knelt in the rubble to pray. Quinto didn’t know their names, because he hadn’t served with them long. Troops came, and died, and new troops came. Only Lieutenant Lucky went on, mission after mission. Quinto realized he’d begun to believe he really was lucky, or special. Destined to see the war to its end.

It killed him, to think he wouldn’t get to see how things turned out, whether the bad guys won, or the good guys pulled something out of their asses at the eleventh hour.

Quinto used the walkie to apprise HQ of their situation, so HQ wouldn’t wonder when Quinto’s platoon never returned.

“Lieutenant?” Macalena said. He was studying the topo map he’d borrowed from Quinto. “Did you see these?” A few of the enlisted came over to look at the map over Macalena’s shoulder as he ran his finger along black lines set perpendicular to the mine. “There are five vertical shafts sunk along the length of the mine. I’m guessing they were escape routes in case of collapse, or ventilation, or both.”

Quinto looked up from the map, impotent rage rising in him. “Jesus, Mac, couldn’t you have waited a half hour to notice this?”

It took Macalena a second to understand. When he did, he grimaced, curled his hand into a fist, crumpling a section of the map. He turned and walked a dozen paces down the shaft, cursing quietly, viciously.

Even Macalena was too green for this war. He’d been in the infantry for only four months; before that he’d been writing military technical manuals. The army needed fighters more than writers these days.

If Macalena had waited even fifteen, twenty minutes before examining the old map, chances were the Luyten would have been out of range, and they could have climbed out of this hole and gone home.

“We need to move,” Quinto said. “The fish are going to find those exits and seal them up. Spread out, find the exits. When I get to the surface I’m going to set off a Tasmanian devil, give us some breathing room. As soon as it’s spent, get out there. Understood? Let’s move.”

“Couldn’t we just stay down here? Dig our way out when they’re gone?” It was the kid who’d crapped himself, looking absurd in Quinto’s big pants. “If we go up there now, they’ll kill us. I mean, maybe they’ll get distracted by something and leave . . .” He trailed off.

Everyone stared at the ground, except for the soldier who was praying.

“Let’s go,” Quinto said.

Quinto grasped the cold rung of the ladder that had dropped down when they unsealed the iron hatch.

“Good luck to you, Lieutenant,” one of the troops waiting to follow him called. It was Benneton, the old woman. The kid who’d crapped his pants was there as well, along with four others.

Quinto looked up into darkness. “Here we go.” He headed up the ladder. A lot of people who’d been as lucky as Quinto might have been tempted to believe the streak would hold, but Quinto knew his past held no hint of his future. More to the point, he knew he had no future.

It was a forty-foot climb according to the map, but adrenaline made it effortless. When he reached the top, he twisted the seal on the hatch, then pushed with his back and shoulders to force the hatch open. Daylight flooded into the dusty shaft as dirt and moldy leaves rained down on him.

The kid, who was just below him, passed up the Tasmanian devil. Reaching among the big spines jutting from the central carbon-fiber sphere, Quinto activated it, tossed it outside, and pulled the hatch closed.

The buzzing of razor-sharp shrapnel hitting, and then burrowing around inside everything within five hundred yards, would have been reassuring if Quinto weren’t absolutely certain the starfish had retreated outside the Tasmanian devil’s range as soon as Quinto thought about using it. At least it would back the fish up so they wouldn’t be able to pick off Quinto and his troops as they climbed out of their holes.

“Here we go,” Quinto said to the boy. “Have your weapon out. Run as fast as you can. Try to take one with you.” His guess was that Benneton would stay behind, shoot from the cover of the shaft until the Luyten cooked her. That’s what Quinto would do in her situation; it would probably afford her a few more minutes of life. He took a deep breath, trying to grasp that this was the end, this was the moment of his death, but he couldn’t.

As soon as the Tasmanian devil went silent, Quinto threw open the hatch, his heart thudding wildly, and ran.

Their carriers were trapped in the mine, so his best chance would be to make it to the locomotive. Of course the Luyten would have fried the locomotive, so really there was nothing to do but run, and when the fish closed in, turn and fight.

Two hundred yards ahead, he spotted four of his troops running north, into the woods, toward the nearest cover. That probably made more sense than what Quinto was doing, but all of the moves open to them were losers. It was always the same: The fish knew their exact location, but they had no idea where the fish were. If you could catch a fish out in the open, it couldn’t dodge automatic weapons fire, but you almost never caught them out in the open.

Quinto glanced back, saw the kid was two steps behind, his dirty cheeks tracked with tearstains.

The locomotive had been melted to a lump. He kept running. Everyone but he and the kid had headed north. Since Quinto wasn’t dead yet, it was safe to assume the fish had gone after the larger group first. If he could get outside their range, which meant seven or eight miles, he and the kid might have a chance. Quinto pushed himself to pick up the pace, but when he did the kid started to fall behind, looking panicked. Quinto slowed.

In the distance, Quinto heard the worst sound in the world: the sizzle-crackle of a Luyten lightning stick, a sound as much felt in your body as heard by your ears. Then another. He was spared the pungent, unearthly sweat smell of the weapon. He was too far away.

When he’d made it through the town, Quinto took another glance back. The kid was a hundred yards behind, one hand clutching his side. No way this kid was going to run another four or five miles. Panting, his throat coated in phlegm, Quinto considered leaving him behind. No. No matter how fast he ran, we wasn’t going to outrun Luyten on foot. He could try calling HQ and beg for a carrier to come get him, but they’d only tell him what he already knew: They weren’t going to feed the fish any more than they had to.

So he stopped, pulled out his comm, and waited for the kid to catch up. The kid stopped beside him, put his hands on his knees.

“You want to call anyone? Your mom or dad alive?”

The kid eyed the comm. “Just my little sister.” He swallowed, looked at Quinto. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

“Yeah. We are.”

“Maybe they got distracted by something. Maybe the others killed them.”

“Maybe,” Quinto said. He thought he heard the snapcrackle of something moving through the woods to the north. “Come on.” He tugged the kid’s jacket and headed into the woods on the opposite side of the road.

Should he call his own mother to say goodbye? He would like that, but he didn’t want to risk having her on the line when he died. He didn’t want that to be her last memory of him.

Branches whipped his face as he tore through the brush. It was pointless, but he couldn’t relinquish that last millimeter of hope that he might get lucky, just one last time. He barreled down a slope as the landscape opened, then splashed through a stream and raced up the bank.

He spotted a flash of crimson ahead, behind a thick cover of green leaves, and stopped short. The kid stopped short beside him, looked at him, questioning, just as a bolt of lightning burst through the foliage.

Copyright © 2014 by Will McIntosh.

Excerpted from Defenders by Will McIntosh.

Published by permission of the author and Orbit Books.

All rights reserved.

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

Will McIntosh’s first story for Lightspeed, “Defenders,” became the basis for his novel of the same name, out from Orbit Books in May 2014. Will’s third novel, Love Minus Eighty, based on the Hugo Award-winning short story “Bridesicle,” was published by Orbit books in June 2013. His debut novel, Soft Apocalypse, was a finalist for both a Locus award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Will lives in Williamsburg, Virginia with his wife, Alison, and twins, Hannah and Miles. He teaches psychology as an adjunct professor at the College of William and Mary, after leaving his career as a psychology professor in southeast Georgia to write full time.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
The Silk Map
Chris Willrich

Chapter 1: Fools of Five-Toe Peak

In hindsight, it was perhaps foolish to awaken the sleeping demigod.

Gaunt, Bone, and Snow Pine might have turned back after the third warning, but there was something about the trio of skull-adorned markers, embellished with old bloodstains and croaking unkindnesses of ravens that had aroused their professional ire. The road to Five-Toe Peak had been a route to inspire either despair or stubbornness. The three rogues were constitutionally inclined toward the latter. Of the former they had a sufficiency.

Thus they’d taken in stride the forest of the poisonous Zheng-bird, and the crags of the one-footed booming Kui-monsters, and the wasteland of elephant bones sliced with the tracks of giant Bashe-snakes who consumed elephant flesh.

Now, although Snow Pine was a child of the East, she’d long since stepped beyond the realms of her personal knowledge, and likewise passed the perimeters of scholarship and hearsay and drunken ranting. For they now skirted those mountains that defined the southern boundary of the Braid of Spice, which led to the dubious Western lands. Gaunt and Bone themselves hailed from the exotic empires of the sunset, where pale-skinned folk like themselves were the norm. But they’d taken the sea-route to the East, and knew even less than Snow Pine of this frontier.

Thus none of them knew what to make of the first marker, rising from its skulls.

It was a large boulder chiseled with the characters of the Tongue of the Tortoise Shell, the language of Qiangguo. The inscriptions were darkened with a suspicious-looking substance. By now, after a long sojourn in the Country of Walls, Gaunt and Bone could read them along with Snow Pine. This didn’t put any of them at ease.

THE GREAT SAGE IS BUSY. COME BACK IN TEN THOUSAND GENERATIONS.

Around the stone, arranged rather like bulbs in a flower garden, lay the craniums of monkeys.

“At any rate I assume they’re monkeys,” said Persimmon Gaunt, considering the one in her palm. Her sun-bronzed skin and tattooed face (portraying a web-shrouded rose upon her right cheek) might lead a quick observer to judge her some barbaric marauder. In fact she was a poet and a scholar and—as circumstances warranted—wily tomb-plunderer and thief.

Her husband Imago Bone scrambled onto a neighboring boulder and perched there, scanning the land. “Do you think, as we are not monkeys, the message doesn’t apply?” He was a lean fellow, veteran of many a mansion-theft and crypt-crawl, with scars upon either cheek, one from blade, one from flame. There was something jovial about even his fiercest scowl, something sinister about even his warmest smile.

Gaunt snorted. “You look rather like a monkey to me, up there.” Her tone was not entirely warm.

Ravens squawked at them. Snow Pine shook her head at her friends. She was a wiry bean-pole of a woman, with short, straight black hair, wearing a gray tunic that seemed to defy any attempt to scrutinize her, as a nondescript boulder might shelter a glittering chameleon. Her eyes regarded all the wild nature about her coolly, trying to peer beyond surfaces into the interplay of contrasts that gave birth to the physical world. Such meditations helped soothe her in the midst of trouble.

But of late Gaunt and Bone seemed to exemplify that clash of contrasts, and their arguments did not inspire calm.

“You two can always head back to civilization,” Snow Pine ventured. “I won’t be offended. Whatever the Great Sage is, he—or she, or it—belongs to these lands. Like me. This might be something I should try alone.”

Gaunt shook her head, though her expression softened. “Our child is just as imprisoned as yours. Together we’ve braved the Ghast Emperor’s tomb, and the Goldfish Kingdom, and the Geomancer Gangsters, seeking an answer. We must dare the demigod. You said it’s our last hope.”

As she spoke Bone looked west toward the rising mountains, and toward the tangle of alpine forest blazing green like a jade necklace entwined with pearls of clouds, and toward the sun plunging behind those clouds toward the fabled cities of Madzeu and Qushkent and Anoka—and toward many other sights in that moment that weren’t the eyes of his wife.

“I said,” Snow Pine replied, “the Great Sage, Equal of Heaven, is the last chance I know of. There could be others in the wide world. I can only offer the knowledge I’ve got, such as it is. And my knowledge is fading as fast as that path ahead.”

“We might as well continue, Snow Pine,” Bone said mildly, scrutinizing the five-peaked range blazing like an icy weapon ahead. “We can help you dodge a few more monsters, if nothing else.”

“All right,” Snow Pine said.

“All right, all right!” mocked a raven, before Gaunt threw a monkey skull.

• • •

After they had frightened away the nine-headed Jiufeng-bird by mimicking barking dogs, and fled from the gibbering Fei Lian that seemed a mix of serpent, stag, leopard, bull, and sparrow, Snow Pine led them gasping to a second marker, appointed much as the first.

GO BACK. THE GREAT SAGE DECLINES ALL VISITORS.

“Hell,” Bone said.

“Hell!” a raven agreed.

“These surroundings lie,” Gaunt said.

“Oh?” Bone asked.

“They indicate great antiquity and neglect, Bone. Yet these markers have a perfect grisliness to them. Too perfect. I don’t trust the sudden appearance of ravens.”

“Hell!” said another bird.

“You feel we’re being mocked,” Bone said.

“I do,” said Gaunt. Snow Pine thought Gaunt was studying Bone for signs of mockery of his own. Gaunt continued, “This Great Sage must maintain the warning through some magic. The demigod may even be aware of our approach. I find this annoys me.”

Snow Pine said, “You’ll keep going, then?”

“Of course,” said Gaunt, and “Indeed,” said Bone.

In truth, Snow Pine felt better for their companionship. Still, she hoped they could rise above their own troubles when they ascended the mountains.

The third marker did not manifest until they had reached the very slopes. By then the proliferation of bizarre wasteland creatures had acquired a certain charm. Not all were harmful. The trio marveled at strange, one-horned, goat-like creatures climbing the foothills, their shaggy coats rippling golden in the wind; and at a pair of one-eyed, one-winged birds with clawed feet intertwined, such that they formed one unit.

“Now there’s matrimony for you,” Bone said, whistling. “If either withdraws, both tumble.”

“Pecking each other’s still possible,” Gaunt said.

“As well you would know,” he muttered.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Well, you have been throwing me looks like daggers the entire journey.”

“Well, what do you expect? We’re on a quest to rescue our son. And yet you act as if we’re on a picnic.”

He waved a hand airily. “A picnic among monsters and monkey skulls, Gaunt?”

“That’s it, that’s just it! You mock everything. Nothing’s sufficiently serious for the untouchable thief Imago Bone.”

“Says the poet Persimmon Gaunt. Who would rather wallow in despair than take action. Who thinks words matter more than deeds.”

“Uh—” Snow Pine began. “Friends—”

She’d known them before they’d lost their son, and it hurt her to see them argue thus. She, who’d likewise lost a daughter, understood their grief.

But unlike Gaunt and Bone, Snow Pine had no spouse in which to seek solace or blame. She was a widow at nineteen. She sometimes wished her friends, in the midst of their bickering, would remember that.

She blinked at something salty she’d no time for. As her vision refocused on the foothills, she sucked in her breath.

“You’ve had decades to grow up,” Gaunt was saying. “Don’t you think it’s time you got started?”

“Do you know where all injustice begins? It begins with someone declaring themselves a grownup.”

“You speak of injustice, O thief?”

“Have you managed to overlook just how we’ve been maintained, O poet?”

“Friends!” Snow Pine repeated more urgently. “I think I know those horned goats. Unless I’m crazy, they’re xiezhi. Empathic beasts. And they hate arguments . . .”

The xiezhi, their golden coats flowing, their hooves echoing like mad machinery through the foothills, were charging down in their dozens from the heights.

“Oh,” Bone said.

“Will they attack?” Gaunt asked.

“It’s said,” Snow Pine said quickly, “they’ll gore the person in the wrong, in any dispute. Unless either of you wants to live like a one-winged bird . . . run!”

They ran.

The three of them bore weapons, of course—Bone his many daggers, Gaunt similarly armed and with a short bow besides, and Snow Pine a curved dao-sword of Qiangguo. But they were none of them warriors. Snow Pine was perhaps the closest to a true combatant, with her hardscrabble upbringing and a little training from fighting monks and a warrior-woman of the wulin.

Now, if that wulin were here, perhaps they’d have a chance. But Snow Pine couldn’t leap halfway to the clouds, nor shatter bones with her hands, nor disrupt the life-force of her foes. And Lightning Bug was as dead as Snow Pine’s husband.

The ground ahead pitched and twisted with lurches and curves of granite, covered here and there with pebbles and fine silt. The treeline loomed on the right with its deceptive promise of sheltering woods but also gangs of tripping roots, trapping shrubs, swatting branches. The steep leftward slope looked ready to crumble into a minor avalanche at the first footfall.

A narrow path of firm untangled ground lay between. It led into a defile between vast rocks leaning like giants’ abandoned playthings.

As they entered the passage, it bent left, and there they met a third marker, rising up from its own batch of skulls.

GO BACK AND HONE YOUR READING SKILLS. THE GREAT SAGE DOES NOT WANT YOU!

Ten crows flitted and squawked around the plinth. Each bird possessed three legs, and even with angry xiezhi on their tail, something about the birds made Snow Pine silent and wary.

But Gaunt and Bone gasped outrage at the marker.

“If there was any chance,” Bone said, “that I would not . . . bother the Great Sage . . . that chance is done.”

“Indeed,” Gaunt said, “he has earned my spite . . .”

“If you want to hide on a mountain . . .” Bone said.

“Then hide on a mountain!” Gaunt finished for him. “Don’t put up signs saying, ‘Ha, ha, behold, I am hiding on a mountain.’”

“‘Look at me, look at me, how reclusive I am!’”

They chuckled bitterly, leaning against one another. “We’d best prepare to be gored,” said Bone, drawing a pair of daggers.

“Ha, yes,” said Gaunt, with something near giddiness, as she prepared to fire an arrow.

As the spouses and their bewildered companion peered back along the path, they saw the horde of xiezhi sweeping toward them, horns aimed toward the defile like cavalry spears, less than a minute away.

Snow Pine drew her sword, and Bone’s daggers were already out. For whatever good they would do. At least first blood would go to Gaunt, who raised her bow.

Looking at Gaunt’s face, Snow Pine recalled the saying that dangerous as a tigress was, she never harmed her own cubs.

The xiezhi were in a sense between Gaunt and her cub. Snow Pine would not want to be them.

• • •

Persimmon Gaunt was sighting along the arrow, thinking, I don’t want to kill them. I don’t want to kill anything, ever again. The xiezhi were beautiful things; while they’d initially resembled goats, their gait was reminiscent of cats, and their eyes had the mournfully intelligent gaze of hunting dogs.

A ruthless part of her mind offered answers. Lovely pretty killers. At most you’ll slay one. They’re herd creatures; one death may disperse them.

When did I become such a cold thing? she wondered.

She fired, aiming for the ground ahead of the lead xiezhi.

The arrow raised gray dust, and the lead xiezhi snorted and blinked and growled.

Such is the last act of the adventuress Persimmon Gaunt, said the cold voice.

“Climb!” she told the others, and took her own advice.

Somehow she managed to keep hold of the bow as she hauled herself onto the huge, roughly shaped boulders defining the defile.

She slipped once, before Bone caught her arm. Of course he was already up here.

“Thanks. Where is Snow Pine—no!”

Their companion had not climbed. She was instead walking into the gap, sword raised.

The xiezhi rushed her. They were elegant but stank. Like moralists. Gaunt readied another shot, knowing there’d be no time.

Bone leapt.

Her idiotic glorious thief leapt.

Once again he survived something he truly didn’t deserve to and landed on the lead xiezhi’s back.

He yanked on its woolly neck, and it lurched about toward the heights. Bone was nearly knocked off. Yet miraculously he kept his hold around the neck, flopping to the xiezhi’s left side as it hurled itself upslope.

He was well on his way to climbing Five-Toe Peak without her. About half the herd followed him.

The rest crowded before Snow Pine, snorting, stamping, looking confused. Snow Pine yelled obscenities and swung her sword in the air. They would not attack nor back off.

Somehow neither Bone nor Snow Pine were yet dead. Goddess of Swanisle, Gaunt thought, I am not a lunatic, but I collect them.

Light flared.

For a moment Gaunt assumed the sun had emerged from behind the clouds. Her crisp shadow fell upon the herd of xiezhi as if Krummara the Dead Huntress, a goddess of the West, had manifested here in the remote East. The xiezhi pounding the ground beside Snow Pine reacted as much, charging after their fellows toward the heights. Then Gaunt recalled that save for the clouds attending the mountaintops, the sky was clear.

The blazing light shifted and split, and Gaunt’s shadow divided and whirled.

Gaunt whirled as well, arrow at the ready.

The three-legged crows from the marker had taken to the air. Along with this new liveliness their eyes had seemingly caught fire. Dazzling energies twisted in complex knots as the crows whirled and squawked. Gaunt’s vision was soon a weave of searing threads, the rest of the world but a shadowy suggestion beyond.

“Sun-crows!” Snow Pine was yelling. “That’s impossible! Sun-crows!”

“Back off!” Gaunt shouted at the birds, hoping anything so supernatural would have the gifts of language and reason.

Crows squawked and swirled around her, and lashes of light burned her way.

She dodged in a way that might have impressed Bone—had he not been busy playing with xiezhi—and kept her perch and her grip on the bow. Her skin felt as though she’d napped uncovered in a desert. She ignored her pain and fired at a dark shape concealed in a skein of light.

The sun-crow screeched its pain, and dark feathers fluttered toward the defile.

“Crows!” Snow Pine called.

Your mastery of the obvious, Gaunt thought, drawing a fresh arrow, rivals my husband’s.

But Snow Pine was not addressing Gaunt. “Crows, behold the lineal descendent of Yi the Archer, he who shot your ancestors out of the sky! See how her line has been hidden in a benighted sunless land, for behold her pale skin, nearly the color of death! Now the legacy of Yi comes again. Where once there were ten suns, only one remains. How will you fare? Flee! Flee!”

Gaunt, who’d trained as a bard, felt a twinge of jealousy: cheering on a combatant was surely her job, and Snow Pine showed a knack for it.

Nevertheless Gaunt was the one with the bow.

She fired again, and this time luck was with her, if not sight.

A crow cried its outrage and flapped away on a damaged wing. Gaunt barely noticed the whips of crackling energy that descended upon her boulder—she tumbled off in a low roar of pebbles and dust, landing inauspiciously on her face.

Snow Pine helped her up, and Gaunt reclaimed the bow. Yet there was no need. With much invective in the manner of crows, the flock relocated to a cliff a quarter-mile away.

“Their eyes are still burning,” Snow Pine said.

“So are mine,” Gaunt said.

“You probably can’t see Bone on his way to us.”

“No, but I think I hear him.”

“Run!” Bone was shouting from somewhere upslope. “Run!”

“What is he fleeing from?” Gaunt said, squinting. “I can barely see him, running down the slope.”

“He seems to have found more xiezhi,” Snow Pine said.

“He has a talent for finding things,” Gaunt said.

“Maybe we should take his advice.”

It might have been the light still blazing within her eyes. It might have been the return of violence, yet again, to her life.

Something dark and stony rose within her mind, and she stepped forward, as Snow Pine had done.

“Gaunt!” Bone was shouting desperately. “Run!”

“Persimmon?” Snow Pine was saying.

“You do not need to run, my friend,” Gaunt heard herself answer, setting down her bow. “I realize now you were in no danger.” The shadowy form of Bone came toward her, on foot now.

“I know! That’s why I blocked the gap. They were attracted by you and Bone.”

“I know.”

“Gaunt!” Bone yelled, nearly in her face. She could barely see his beloved, vexing face. Golden forms rose behind him like a dark wave. She whispered a prayer that she was right and grabbed Bone, forcing him into a kiss.

“Mmmph?” he said.

“Shut up,” she said, though it came out as “Shmp.”

It was a good kiss. Standing at the edge of disaster was like that, sometimes.

Nothing gored them.

When she opened her eyes, she saw more, and perceived Bone’s astonished face and a herd of golden beasts nuzzling the ground for feed.

One by one the animals began snuffling away. Meanwhile the sun-crows’ distant mockery blended with the wind.

“How did you know?” he asked when they pulled apart.

“I didn’t, really,” she said. “Well, perhaps I guessed when half the herd followed you and half stayed with me—until the sun-crows dispersed them. Since we were both at fault, I thought together we could mend things.”

“Sun-crows?” He stared across the defile at the distant birds. She was beginning to make out his face. She liked it. Wilderness travel became him.

“You’re burned,” he said, touching her face.

“This comes of getting close to fires,” she said.

Snow Pine said, “I’m glad you two put aside your troubles for now. No! Don’t start! I’m sorry I said anything. So, how about we leave and come back in ten thousand generations?”

Bone smirked. “The Great Sage. I’d almost forgotten.”

Gaunt shook her head. “I’ve advice to him on how to reword his markers. It begins with a hammer.”

As they passed the third marker, Gaunt pocketed a fallen feather the color of obsidian. One never knew what might come in handy.

• • •

Bone led the way. We altitude aficionados, he mused, have our uses.

Up and up. Between the third marker and the shining ice of the five summits he saw a region of swift-moving clouds. Here and there the veil of white ripped to expose gray-tan contours of misty rock, perforated here and there by gangly trees. Bone should have been terrified. He was exhilarated. To have something to scale was a great mercy compared with the terror of stumbling through an ordinary day.

Stone steps rose into a whiteness that was almost an absence of form. Bone plunged in.

Now all the world was a pocket of ghostly shapes with three inhabitants upon a shifting landscape about three yards across. The steps narrowed and switchbacked.

Up and up.

A sudden shift of wind, and the world expanded, sun blazing upon a cliff inches to Bone’s right, treetops far below like a green army’s spears.

One misstep and I’ll be even more gone than my son.

The thought drove Bone on. For the boy it was a magical form of Gone . . . and as such there was no giving up for Bone and Gaunt, they who, though husband and wife, still found it more comfortable to use old surnames than to abandon one of them or form a new or, outside of intimacy, to call each other Persimmon or Imago.

And the intimacy was a bit rare of late.

“I have the notion,” Bone said to escape his own thoughts, “that when we reach the end of the path there will be only a marker. It will say, THE GREAT SAGE HAS GONE FISHING.”

“COME BACK IN THE NEXT CYCLE OF THE EARTHE!” Gaunt added.

It was good they could laugh at something. Or grimace anyway. In normal times (to the extent that Bone had normal times) it was the glue between them. That and lust for new vistas . . . and lust for the bedroom—well, tent, inn floor, riverbank, graveyard, and on one memorable occasion—

“I wonder,” Snow Pine said, “if he, she, or it can hear us.”

“Or read our minds,” Gaunt said.

The thought dampened his musings like mountain mist.

Now the steps strained for the vertical—practically a ladder carved into the mountain. Mist made it impossible to determine how far up it went.

They roped themselves together and ascended. Bone wished he had ironsilk; hemp would have to do.

A chilly half-hour blew past.

Breaking the cloud layer, they saw a wall of granite to one hand, a seeming infinity of blue on the other, and a floor to the world composed of golden, churning fluff.

He whistled.

This was why he had to succeed. To bring the boy back, to make his mother fully live again, so they could enjoy all these moments. The truest treasures any mortal could pinch from life’s treasury.

“Bone,” Gaunt said, voice all business. “Do you see it?”

Up there was a glinting of a more mundane treasure. Gold, or he was a guardsman.

“I see it. I think we’re on the doorstep.”

The alcove turned out to be big as a country teahouse, and Bone could not imagine how so much gold had gotten up here. There were gold plaques, and gold benches, and a golden doorframe with embossed characters in the Tongue of the Tortoise Shell.

The door itself was of iron, with a peculiar wooden knob, and a stone seal was set in its midst. There was also a window in the door, filled with translucent ice; through it, a dark passage was dimly visible.

“‘Om Mani Padme Hum,’” Gaunt said, squinting at the inscription on the doorframe. “This is gibberish.”

“It’s not from my language,” Snow Pine said, “but I’ve heard it. I’m not sure what it is, but the priests of the Undetermined use that phrase.”

“The Undetermined?” Bone asked.

“You in the West may have heard of him as the ‘Dust on the Mirror?’ A legendary being of enlightenment who broke through the illusions of this world.”

Bone remembered now. “He ended his own suffering and showed the way for others to end their own?”

Snow Pine nodded. “It’s said about him:

The Undetermined

Who won by losing

Who is free of the chain of causes

And has had great effect.”

“Paradoxical,” Gaunt said.

“Yes,” Snow Pine said. “I don’t really understand the Undetermined. And I say that as someone who’s bashed her head against the Way of the Forest! But legends say he still appears now and then, with unmatched power and compassion.” She pointed at the door. “Now, speaking of compassion, this phrase supposedly comes to us by way of a goddess of kindness and empathy. A holy man once told me it calls upon her name, but in our province we called the same goddess ‘Guanyin.’ So I don’t know. A holy woman told me it means . . . aiya, can’t remember. Something like ‘generosity, patience, wisdom.’ You know. Enlightened stuff.”

“This door is most peculiar . . .” Bone reached out, and the stone seal blazed with a red inscription. Pain lashed his fingertips. “Ah!”

“‘Monkey,’” Snow Pine murmured, looking at spindly red lines resembling a bamboo forest twisting in a fiery wind. They were already fading. “It means ‘Monkey . . .’”

Gaunt studied the door. “There’s a reason for the peculiarity, I think. Qiangguo’s sages speak of five elements: metal, wood, earth, fire, and water. The door’s of metal, wood, and earth. Bone has just discovered the ‘fire’ aspect.”

“Thank you for the sympathy,” Bone said, sucking his fingers.

“Poor thing. Now, if we interpret the ice as ‘water,’ we have the full set. There’s some magical aspect to this door.”

“Hm,” Snow Pine said. “Is it to keep us out? Or keep the Great Sage in?”

“What do you know about him, again?” Bone said. “It may be important soon.”

“I know only what Lightning Bug told me when she was teaching me this and that. There were so many things I only got pieces of, like shards of porcelain after an earthquake.” She shut her eyes, remembering. “Once there was a great disturbance in the celestial court. An outsider came claiming to have power equal to anyone, including the August Personage in Jade. He, she, or it declared the title ‘Great Sage, Equal of Heaven.’ There was great commotion until the Jade Emperor gave the Sage the job of stablekeeper for the cloud-steeds. For a little while all was well. But at last the Sage understood the position was a lowly one and returned to mischief. Storms crackled in the sky. Meteors streaked and crashed. Heaven’s angry generals at last won the day. Yet the Sage proved indestructible. Luckily the Undetermined himself was on hand. I don’t know how the deed was done, but the Sage was kicked down to the mortal realm to dwell within this mountain.”

“Hm,” Gaunt said. “Kicked down to the ground. Five-Toe Peak.”

“It’s suggestive, sure,” Snow Pine said. “There are always stories of wise folk on mountains, but maybe this folk is trapped in one.”

Having already burned his hand, Bone saw no harm in trying the knob. It would not turn.

“Do you ever think before acting?” Gaunt said.

“I think while acting,” Bone said. “And I think the door is locked. Moreover I think the lock is of the metaphysical, not the pickable, kind.” He scratched his head. “Five elements. Perhaps we must match each element to its opposite. No, no, that only works in the Western system, where there are four . . .”

“Maybe,” Snow Pine said, “we can use the hot stone to melt the ice somehow, and then . . .”

“The stone’s already faded.”

“Well, you could set it off again.”

“Thanks so much for your encouragement.”

“‘Om Mani Padme Hum,’” Gaunt said while touching the knob. It turned smoothly, and the door groaned open. Although Gaunt needed give only a gentle shove, the noise suggested tremendous weight.

When the echoes had subsided, Bone cleared his throat. “Think before acting?”

“Well, you’d already tested the waters.” Gaunt patted him on the shoulder. “The fires, rather.”

They stepped into the Sage’s realm.

Bone pulled out a torch, ignited it with one of Qiangguo’s ingenious fire-starting devices, and led them into the passage.

The tunnel corkscrewed deep into the mountain, changing character as it went. At first it appeared hewn, a tomb-like passage. Later it seemed the result of natural processes, with a rugged floor and irregular walls, but with an improbable downward curve.

“I do not trust the geology,” Gaunt said.

“I’m mistrustful of many things,” Snow Pine said. “Governments, sorcery, criminal organizations larger than three, people who smile too much, men—”

“Ah, you wound me,” Bone said.

“Should I trust you, master thief?” Snow Pine said. “As a general principle?”

“Point taken.”

“But it’s never occurred to me to mistrust rocks.”

“You should,” Gaunt said. “This mountain has the outward aspect of granite. But this tunnel has the look of limestone. Worst of all, we walk among stalactites and stalagmites, which in a limestone cave are the work of dripping groundwater. I doubt the ice of the summit could be responsible.”

“It’s wise to heed my wife,” Bone said. “Geology is something of a hobby of hers. Along with trailblazing, tavern songs, polemics, practical mythology, wizard-taunting, and morbid poetry.”

“Not true,” Gaunt said. “Morbid poetry is a passion, not a hobby.”

Bone smiled, yet Snow Pine tugged at her hair in a way that worried him.

She said, “You think the tunnel is some sort of sham?”

Bone wondered, with a fresh wince of guilt, how Snow Pine managed. We’re stronger than you Westerners, Snow Pine had said once, when he’d tried to broach the subject. You’re tough, you know how to fight. But we’re tougher, we know how to suffer.

“The whole mountain, perhaps,” Gaunt was saying. “There is a degree of unreality about the proceedings, a mutability. I think some mind guides this environment, even if it doesn’t dictate everything.”

“The Great Sage perhaps?” Bone said.

“Or the thing that locked up the Sage,” Snow Pine said.

“Wait,” Bone said, halting. There came a distant, rhythmic noise in low tones, and in time to the rhythm a wind that fanned the torchflame. “It seems to me,” he observed, “wandering about through underground passages was quite frightening enough when I knew the local folklore . . .”

“Well,” said Snow Pine, “I may know the local folklore, but I have no idea what this is. But I can tell you one thing. It’s snoring.”

Copyright © 2014 by Chris Willrich.

Excerpted from The Silk Map by Chris Willrich.

Published by permission of the author and Pyr.

All rights reserved.

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

Chris Willrich is the author of The Scroll of Years, the first Gaunt and Bone novel, and the sword-and-sorcery tales of Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone. Until recently he was a children’s librarian for the Santa Clara County Library System, in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has appeared in Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Black Gate, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Flashing Swords, The Mythic Circle, and Strange Horizons. Visit him online at chriswillrich.blogspot.com, on Facebook and on Twitter @WillrichChris.

NOVEL EXCERPT:
Babel-17
Samuel R. Delany

Editor’s Note: Though we usually present excerpts of new and forthcoming works, this month we’re presenting this excerpt of the classic novel Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany, to help celebrate the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America naming him a Grand Master for his contributions to the field. Babel-17 is newly available in ebook format from one of our sponsors this month, Open Road Media.

• • •

It’s a port city.

Here fumes rust the sky, the General thought.

Industrial gases flushed the evening with oranges, salmons, purples with too much red. West, ascending and descending transports, shuttling cargoes to stellarcenters and satellites, lacerated the clouds. It’s a rotten poor city too, thought the General, turning the corner by the garbage-strewn curb.

Since the Invasion six ruinous embargoes for months apiece had strangled this city whose lifeline must pulse with interstellar commerce to survive. Sequestered, how could this city exist? Six times in twenty years he’d asked himself that. Answer? It couldn’t.

Panics, riots, burnings, twice cannibalism—

The General looked from the silhouetted loading-towers that jutted behind the rickety monorail to the grimy buildings. The streets were smaller here, cluttered with Transport workers, loaders, a few stellarmen in green uniforms, and the horde of pale, proper men and women who managed the intricate sprawl of customs operations. They are quiet now, intent on home or work, the General thought. Yet all these people have lived for two decades under the Invasion. They’ve starved during the embargoes, broken windows, looted, run screaming before firehoses, torn flesh from a corpse’s arm with decalcified teeth.

Who is this animal man? He asked himself the abstract question to blur the lines of memory. It was easier, being a general, to ask about the “animal man” than about the woman who had sat in the middle of the sidewalk during the last embargo holding her skeletal baby by one leg, or the three scrawny teenage girls who had attacked him on the street with razors (—she had hissed through brown teeth, the bar of metal glistening toward his chest, “Come here, Beefsteak! Come get me, Lunchmeat . . . ” He had used karate—) or the blind man who had walked up the avenue, screaming.

Pale and proper men and women now, who spoke softly, who always hesitated before they let an expression fix their faces, with pale, proper, patriotic ideas: work for victory over the Invaders; Alona Star and Kip Rhyak were great in “Stellar Holliday” but Ronald Quar was the best serious actor around. They listened to Hi Lite’s music (or did they listen, wondered the General, during those slow dances where no one touched). A position in Customs was a good secure job.

Working directly in Transport was probably more exciting and fun to watch in the movies; but really, such strange people—

Those with more intelligence and sophistication discussed Rydra Wong’s poetry.

They spoke of the Invasion often, with some hundred phrases consecrated by twenty years’ repetition on newscasts and in the papers. They referred to the embargoes seldom, and only by the one word.

Take any of them, take any million. Who are they? What do they want? What would they say if given a chance to say anything?

Rydra Wong has become this age’s voice. The General recalled the glib line from a hyperbolic review. Paradoxical: a military leader with a military goal, he was going to meet Rydra Wong now.

The streetlights came on and his image glazed on the plate glass window of the bar. That’s right, I’m not wearing my uniform this evening. He saw a tall, muscular man with the authority of half a century in his craggy face. He was uncomfortable in the gray civilian suit. Till age thirty, the physical impression he had left with people was “big and bumbling.” Afterwards—the change had coincided with the Invasion—it was “massive and authoritarian.”

Had Rydra Wong come to see him at Administrative Alliance Headquarters, he would have felt secure. But he was in civvies, not in stellarman-green. The bar was new to him. And she was the most famous poet in five explored galaxies. For the first time in a long while he felt bumbling again.

He went inside.

And whispered, “My God, she’s beautiful,” without even having to pick her from among the other women. “I didn’t know she was so beautiful, not from the pictures . . . ”

She turned to him (as the figure in the mirror behind the counter caught sight of him and turned away), stood up from the stool, smiled.

He walked forward, took her hand, the words Good evening, Miss Wong, tumbling on his tongue till he swallowed them unspoken. And now she was about to speak.

She wore copper lipstick, and the pupils of her eyes were beaten disks of copper—

“Babel-17,” she said. “I haven’t solved it yet, General Forester.”

A knitted indigo dress, and her hair like fast water at night spilling over one shoulder; he said, “That doesn’t really surprise us, Miss Wong.”

Surprise, he thought. She puts her hand on the bar, she leans back on the stool, hip moving in knitted blue, and with each movement, I am amazed, surprised, bewildered. Can I be this off guard, or can she really be that—

“But I’ve gotten further than you people at Military have been able to.” The gentle line of her mouth bowed with gentler laughter.

“From what I’ve been led to expect of you, Miss Wong, that doesn’t surprise me either.” Who is she? he thought. He had asked the question of the abstract population. He had asked it of his own reflected image. He asked it of her now, thinking, No one else matters, but I must know about her. That’s important. I have to know.

“First of all, General,” she was saying, “Babel-17 isn’t a code.”

His mind skidded back to the subject and arrived teetering. “Not a code? But I thought Cryptography had at least established—” He stopped, because he wasn’t sure what Cryptography had established, and because he needed another moment to haul himself down from the ledges of her high cheekbones, to retreat from the caves of her eyes. Tightening the muscles of his face, he marshaled his thoughts to Babel-17. The Invasion: Babel-17 might be one key to ending this twenty-year scourge. “You mean we’ve just been trying to decipher a lot of nonsense?”

“It’s not a code,” she repeated. “It’s a language.”

The General frowned. “Well, whatever you call it, code or language, we still have to figure out what it says. As long as we don’t understand it, we’re a hell of a way from where we should be.” The exhaustion and pressure of the last months homed in his belly, a secret beast to strike the back of his tongue, harshening his words.

Her smile had left, and both hands were on the counter. He wanted to retract the harshness. She said, “You’re not directly connected with the Cryptography Department.” The voice was even, calming.

He shook his head.

“Then let me tell you this. Basically, General Forester, there are two types of codes: ciphers, and true codes. In the first, letters, or symbols that stand for letters, are shuffled and juggled according to a pattern. In the second, letters, words, or groups of words are replaced by other letters, symbols, or words. A code can be one type or the other, or a combination. But both have this in common: once you find the key, you just plug it in and out come logical sentences. A language, however, has its own internal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with words that span various spectra of meaning. There is no key you can plug in to unlock the exact meaning. At best you can get a close approximation.”

“Do you mean that Babel-17 decodes into some other language?”

“Not at all. That’s the first thing I checked. We can take a probability scan on various elements and see if they are congruent with other language patterns, even if these elements are in the wrong order. No. Babel-17 is a language itself which we do not understand.”

“I think—” General Forester tried to smile—“what you’re trying to tell me is that because it isn’t a code, but rather an alien language, we might as well give up.” If this were defeat, receiving it from her was almost relief.

But she shook her head. “I’m afraid that’s not what I’m saying at all. Unknown languages have been deciphered without translations, Linear B and Hittite for example. But if I’m to get further with Babel-17, I’ll have to know a great deal more.”

The General raised his eyebrows. “What more do you need to know? We’ve given you all our samples. When we get more, we’ll certainly—”

“General, I have to know everything you know about Babel-17; where you got it, when, under what circumstances, anything that might give me a clue to the subject matter.”

“We’ve released all the information that we—”

“You gave me ten pages of double-spaced typewritten garble with the code name Babel-17 and asked me what it meant. With just that I can’t tell you. With more, I might. It’s that simple.”

He thought: If it were that simple, if it were only that simple, we would never have called you in about it, Rydra Wong.

She said: “If it were that simple, if it were only that simple, you would never have called me in about it, General Forester.”

He started, for one absurd moment convinced she had read his mind. But of course, she would know that. Wouldn’t she?

“General Forester, has your Cryptography Department even discovered it’s a language?”

“If they have, they haven’t told me.”

Copyright © 1966 by Samuel R. Delany.

Excerpted from Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany.

Published by permission of the author and Open Road Media.

All rights reserved.

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

Samuel R. Delany is the author of numerous books of science fiction, including Nova, Dhalgren, Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand, and most recently Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. Two of his classic works of science fiction criticism, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine, have just been brought back into print by Wesleyan University Press, who will reissue a third, The American Shore, in the summer of 2014.

After winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards over the course of his career, Delany was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002. In 2013, SFWA named him the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for his contributions to the literature of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Since 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, where for three years he was Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program. In 2010 he won the third J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction from the academic Eaton Science Fiction Conference at UCR Libraries. He is also a recipient of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime’s contribution to lesbian and gay literature.

NONFICTION

Interview: Jeff VanderMeer
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Jeff VanderMeer is a three-time winner, thirteen-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. His most recent books are Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction and Annihilation, which is the first in his new Southern Reach trilogy. With his wife Ann, he has also co-edited several iconic anthologies, most recently The Time Traveler's Almanac and The Weird.

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

Your new book is called Annihilation, and you’ve said that it was inspired by a dream. So tell us about that dream.

It was quite an experience, because it was one of those dreams where you don’t actually know that you’re sleeping, everything seems ultra-real. Basically, I was walking down this spiraling staircase in a tunnel, and noticed that there were these words on the wall that were kind of glowing. As I looked at them close, I realized they were made of living material, and eventually that they were getting fresher, like whatever was writing them was very close by. And then I saw a kind of shimmering light below, around the corner, and realized that if I turned the corner, I was going to see whatever it was. At that point, some part of my subconscious writer brain was like, “Okay, that’s enough. We do not need to see this thing because if we see this thing we’re not going to write the story.” So I literally felt like my subconscious was coming over and saying, “Hey, Jeff, you’re in a dream. Let’s get you out of here.”

I woke up, and I immediately wrote the dream down, then fell back asleep, and in the morning I woke up again and immediately went to the typewriter, I mean . . . [laughter] the computer, and wrote the first few pages. I was in this kind of altered state anyway, because I had had rather severe bronchitis, so all I could do was get up in the morning, write for a few hours, and go to sleep, and then repeat that process.

If I ever found myself typing on a manual typewriter, that’s how I would know I was having a horrible, horrible nightmare.

I do sometimes actually type on a typewriter, but . . .

I also read your book on writing, Wonderbook, and in that book you write, “Dream logic usually isn’t story logic. Dreams can be inspirational, but you can’t usually transcribe them and come up with a story that makes sense to anyone but yourself.” Could you just talk about that process of taking a dream and turning it into a workable story?

I have plenty of dreams that don’t become stories. I had a dream once about Los Angeles being ravaged by giant, fire-breathing dinosaurs—which I guess makes them dragons—that I never turned into anything. But basically it’s that there’s something there that then expands outward, and the mind begins to fill in the logic of it. There would be no story without the character of the biologist in Annihilation, and that little bit of dream is really just the kind of catalyst for all the rest of it. The other catalyst for it was really the fact that I have become so enamored of the wildlife and the wilderness of north Florida where I hike a lot, and so I’ve been wanting to write something with a setting that was like that for a while. That kind of combined in my imagination with the dream bits, and then the character came to me, and the situations that the character was in, and then I knew that I had a story.

You refer to the protagonist as “the biologist,” and that’s because none of that characters in Annihilation have names or physical descriptions. Could you say why you decided to take that approach?

Well, it’s just purely a precaution on the part of the expedition. They’ve discovered over time that modern tech and using names are clear pathways for whatever the thing is that’s in Area X to basically corrupt and eventually destroy the expeditions. So that really isn’t a Kafka-esque kind of thing that I’m doing there; that is something that is actually a practical application, but then that allows me, especially in also the second and third books, to kind of have some ruminations in there about what names mean and what functions names have—and the way that we draw a lot of information about characters and whatnot from their names, even though the name doesn’t really convey anything about a person’s character.

The other thing that you mentioned, the physical descriptions, that was because I felt that it kind of was in line with the lack of names. It also created this interesting effect whereby they were totally defined by their actions and their dialogue and their interactions, first of all, which I think kind of had a clarity to it, at least while I was writing it; then secondly, it put them at a different remove from the landscape around them, and considering that nature is so important to the novels, I thought that was useful. So, in a way, not giving them physical descriptions, but having physical descriptions of the things around them creates a different effect.

You mentioned Area X. Could you just say a little bit more about what Area X is?

Basically some unexplained event—unexplained at least in Book One—has caused an area of very remote coastline to suddenly become kind of set apart from the rest of the world, and there’s more about it in the second book, but there’s actually kind of an invisible border with an access point in it that kind of comes up around Area X, and over the last thirty years, the Southern Reach, this secret government agency, has been sending in expeditions with varying degrees of success, trying to figure out what’s going on. As you find out in Book Two, this has had really interesting effects on the secret agency itself, because if you can imagine something that even with turnover personnel and whatnot has tried for thirty years, unsuccessfully, to solve a problem, you’re going to have some devolution of command and control going on in that situation.

You’ve said that Area X was roughly based on the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge in Florida. For people who haven’t been there, could you just give an idea of what it’s like and how that informed the setting?

Basically, it’s a series of transitional wildlife, or biospheres, in a way. You walk out there, and at first it’s kind of like normal pine forest, and then that transitions to kind of cypress-y pine, swamp forest, which is my least favorite part because it’s actually very creepy. It’s very much a kind of black water situation with just still water, and kind of a stillness and a watchfulness, and then that eventually becomes the salt marshes and the reeds and the canals and lake area, and then eventually that becomes the beach and the seashore, and there is an old lighthouse out there as well. It just seemed like a natural setting.

One thing about the novel that was so great was that I could relax into this setting. My prior novels, I’m creating the setting from scratch because they’re all set in imaginary worlds, and here I could kind of relax into it. It’s never said that it’s north Florida in the books, and I think that that kind of specificity would be wrong for these books, but that was the inspiration in all of those details. A lot of things that are in the book happened to me, like being charged by a wild boar. I’ve had to jump over an alligator out there. I’ve seen a Florida panther once out there, which was amazing. So it’s just an amazing habitat and a very rich, fertile setting for something.

I’m just curious, what is it like being charged by a wild boar? Like, what happens?

In our case, it charged us from a very long way away, and it could have smelled us, but we really have no idea. We had no idea as we were watching it charge toward us whether it had recognized us or not, and I was out there with a guy who had told me he was ex-military, so we’re standing there with a god-awfully long time to think about what we were going to do about this boar charging, which is not something I would have expected if you told me I was going to be charged by a boar. So I took out my little gutting knife, which is very useful if you want to stab something that’s already gored you, and my friend had his walking stick, which he was twirling around like nunchucks, which was not inspiring any confidence in me whatsoever.

And we just had this very casual conversation—because we couldn’t really run because there was water to both sides—about this thing that was like the size of a very large German Shepherd charging towards us. We finally got to a point where I said, “Have you ever had this situation before?” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, what did you do about it?” He said, “Well, I was in a tank at the time.” I said, “That helps not at all.”

Eventually, about fifteen feet away from us, it veered off into the water, which was kind of funny because it hadn’t occurred to us that boars could swim, so we never had this thought that it had an option other than to gore us. So that’s actually in the book. Although the strange thing that happens at the end of that scene obviously did not happen to us.

Annihilation is just an incredibly creepy book. Do you have a specific approach you use to make a book feel creepy? Or do you just sort of play it by ear?

I think there’s stuff in the book that’s creepy to the biologist, and then there’s stuff that’s normal to the biologist that is creepy to the reader, so there’s those two different kind of levels. I think I thought a lot about pacing. There’s a lot of things I learned from the last book, Finch, and from reading for the various anthologies, and there was a time where I didn’t want to write novels for a while, so I was working on a lot of dead edits and editing other people’s novels, and I learned a lot about pacing. So some of the unease comes from the way the reveals are dropped in there, and the way it keeps curling back to the past, and the fact that the biologist is kind of an unreliable narrator, so there are kind of these layers of unease, and different types of unease working through it.

Then I think there is also the fact that I love the natural world, but there are moments when you’re out there alone when obviously you have these . . . there have been moments out there when I’ve actually been lost, like in a thunderstorm, and not known where the heck I was, and so I think some of that comes through, too. Just the nature of the book, of being in an expedition, isolated, that also doesn’t know at a certain point if it can trust the information it’s gotten from the very people who have sent them in there, and not knowing if that’s for their protection or because something else more ominous is happening.

So it’s kind of a layering of different kinds of dread that I think kind of converge, but the pacing of the book came very naturally to me, I think because of studying all these other books before it.

This is a very short novel by contemporary publishing standards. I wish most novels were a lot shorter—I really appreciate that.

Thanks. I think for this—I mean the second novel is 95,000 words and so is the third, but they don’t have kind of the . . . I think for an account like this, which is purportedly the journal entries of this biologist, I think longer would be a huge mistake.

You mentioned that you were sick with bronchitis while you were writing this. Were you in a feverish state of mind at all? Did that affect the story at all?

It gave me a weird clarity, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because it was impossible to become fragmented. I was so tired that I hardly . . . I didn’t get on the internet. I couldn’t do anything else. All I could do was work on this thing and sleep, so none of those usual things I have to guard against and would still seep in sometimes anyway, were an issue.

I actually heard you say that there are scenes in this that you don’t remember writing.

[Laughter] There are a couple of scenes.

What’s an example of a scene you just read now, and you’re just like, I don’t even know where that came from?

Probably parts of their initial expedition into the tunnel, and it may have been because I was taking parts of that from the dream as well, but there were parts of that that I just didn’t really remember. I would go back to the computer the next day and be like, “Okay, I wrote that. That’s interesting.” Then every once in a while I’d be like, “I wrote that, and that definitely doesn’t belong. That is going. That was bad, whoever that other person was who came to my computer and wrote that.”

You mentioned in the dream that some being was writing this text on the wall. In your dream could you read the text, or did any of that come out of your dream? Or did you have to invent that after the fact?

That was actually the creepiest thing for me—that those words were actually in my head after the dream, and I wrote them down along with the other stuff when I woke up that night, and they have not changed since that point. I have been very superstitious about editing them. It’s kind of bizarre to me that they make a strange kind of sense.

In Authority [the second novel of the series], there’s a fairly long section of this kind of writing. How much of that was from the dream?

I think everything except like the last sentence or so.

Oh, wow.

I needed a little extra, and I felt really weird about adding the extra, but hopefully it sounds the same as the rest, but pretty much all of that. That’s why it was so strange.

Just to give the listeners a sense of how it goes, I have a section of it here I could read. Or if you have it at hand, could you read like the first sentence or so of this . . . ?

Actually, I have Authority here in fact, so I could probably . . .

I have it. It’s page ninety-six.

Ninety-six. One second. Here we go, “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner? I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives, while from the dim lit halls of other places, forms that never could be, rise for the impatience of the few who have never seen or been seen.”

When you look at that now, do you have any idea where that came from? Does it echo anything you’ve read or anything?

It really hasn’t. Then I thought, “Well, you know, it probably is from the mulch in the back of my reptile brain from reading, like, old Galaxy Magazines and Weird Tales and whatnot.” That part is probably from that mulch, and I couldn’t be absolutely sure if I went back to those if I wouldn’t find some little echo of that either. I think that’s probably where it came from. I have no other guess.

Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the sequel, Authority? I saw you say that you wanted to write a “supernatural novel without a supernatural element.” Could you talk about that?

You have the Southern Reach agency, which has become kind of degraded, like I said, over thirty years, and my thought was that, in a way, it’s haunted. They’re all haunted by this place that they’re trying to explore, and so that was kind of like my guideline for what the mood and atmosphere of the novel was going to be. They were going to be haunted by something that wasn’t supernatural or they were going to be haunted by their memories and haunted by what they hadn’t been able to accomplish. That really was part of what I set out to do.

So I was thinking, “What are the tropes of supernatural fiction?” I went to, and this is going to be blasphemy, I know, but I really love Kubrick’s The Shining and the specific effects he creates in that movie. There’s some great stuff he does. Like, there’s a TV in the center of a room with no cord coming out, and of course that’s possible now, but it wasn’t then. And there’s all these little details he put in there that really enhance the sense of unease because you can’t quite identify at first look why something is wrong. So I was like, “Well, that’s an interesting technique.” Like, for example, in The Shining, and this may be a continuity error, the carpet, the pattern of the carpet is going one way in one scene, and then in a later scene it’s facing the other direction in the same hallway. That’s an incredibly effective kind of almost subliminal thing to do to somebody, to a viewer, in terms of making them feel like something is wrong, but not quite knowing what it is. So I thought, “How can I translate some of those effects?” And so that’s what I did with Authority.

It’s also in part based on when I had a day job, I had a fair amount of interaction with government agencies. I was always fascinated by the fact that even in modern times, you would have agencies that would have DOS-based programs, and databases, and all kinds of mixes of technology, almost like when you go into a modern city and you see a sixteenth-century cathedral next to a skyscraper. So I really also was interested in exploring that. I also have worked for some fairly dysfunctional companies, so I have had some experiences that I thought would be of interest. Authority has kind of a streak of dark humor running through it, especially, I think, if you’ve ever been in any of those kinds of situations in organizations.

Yeah, working for this place just seems like an absolute nightmare. I don’t know if that was intentional or not, but it does seem like the work environment is scarier than the supernatural threat.

I think that’s actually true. Having had co-workers and myself commiserating in various situations, it does take that kind of a toll. These toxic work environments are incredibly stressful, and I think the more we learned about how stressing out affects the body and everything else, the more that those psychological things, and even kind of slightly dysfunctional workplaces, are really affecting people’s health and are much more kind of dangerous than we think about, so that’s kind of just amplified, in a way, in Authority.

Are you a fan of horror writers who do workplace horror stuff? Does Thomas Ligotti do stuff like that?

Yes. I adore Ligotti’s workplace stories, which I believe are also based on personal experience. I think there’s one called “My Work is Not Yet Done,” and although I didn’t really draw on that directly or anything, I’m sure that was in the back of my mind a little bit. Those are great stories and well worth checking out. I think that’s one of his great triumphs, actually, is that going from being someone who was supposedly so influenced by Lovecraft, he eventually moved out of that influence, moved on to other more interesting, I think, influences. But also then managed to take some personal experiences or whatever and create some very modern horror of unease using that setting.

Some people have suggested that these books are influenced by Lovecraft. To what extent do you think that that’s true?

I understand, in that Lovecraft is shorthand for talking about weird fiction to some degree. Where it bothers me is just that the approach to style is completely different, and the approach to nature is completely different. I’m fairly convinced that Lovecraft could see the long shadow of a mouse on a wall and run screaming from the room, let alone be out in a wilderness area and enjoy. So his approach to nature, to me, is that it’s not separate from the Old Ones and stuff, that that’s all manifestations of it, in a sense, in his indifferent universe. And in Annihilation you have nature which is just going along merrily in Area X, and doing whatever it will, and then whatever is also in effect there and subverting parts of nature and affecting the expeditions.

I don’t know if this is a spoiler, but it’s mentioned in Authority that some members of the Southern Reach feel that maybe Area X is less polluted, or that it’s not polluted at all compared to the outside world, and maybe they have some sympathy for Area X?

Yes, that’s kind of the dilemma amongst the scientists. At the same time that this is happening, the world is ecologically collapsing on the outside, so the issue is to what extent is it important . . . “Is it more important for human beings to survive, or is it more important for the planet to survive” is the issue as framed by some of the people in these books. I tend to not want to definitively answer that question as the author; I prefer to just kind of put characters in conversation about it. It comes up again in Acceptance in various other ways, but it is an issue, and one thing that I think is really important. The question that science fiction and fantasy can ask in some ways better by getting some distance is “what is it to see the world without the human gaze, or to try to get beyond it.” You can’t really get beyond seeing things through human eyes, but in the attempt to try to do that, you may get somewhere kind of interesting and some new perspective about the natural world.

I read Annihilation, and then Authority, and then Wonderbook, back to back, so I noticed that in Wonderbook you mention an author named Hsyu, and there’s a character with that last name in Authority. I was just wondering if it was that old tuckerization or something?

Oh yeah, Hsyu, Jennifer Hsyu. The one thing about Authority is, every once in a while I just like to . . . basically you’re right, it is. It’s a combination in Authority of a couple of people that I know, and not so much to try to kind of conjure up their attributes. I just every once in a while will do that. Not with names that people will necessarily know, because I think then it becomes kind of like fan fiction or something. Like, Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness is full of references to Clarke Ashton Smith and whatnot, things like that, which I don’t think really helps the atmosphere. But it does help me sometimes as an anchor, and I can’t tell you exactly why, but it does help me with the characterization every once in a while.

Could you just say who Jenifer Hsyu is and what she does?

She’s a writer out of San Francisco who was in our Clarion class of 2010. She has published some short stories in the fantasy field and is working on a novel right now.

It was announced that the Southern Reach trilogy film rights were bought by Paramount. What’s the current status of that?

I think basically they’re figuring out the form of what the movies might be, because there’s a lot of different ways you could go, especially considering that, in Authority especially, you learn that you have thirty years of secret agency history here. So you could go with the structure of the three books, or you could go with something that uses the three books as the base material for something else that explores all those nooks and crannies that aren’t explored in Authority—how the Southern Reach has been dealing with Area X. So that’s really where it is right now. They need to read Acceptance and then we’ll go from there.

Cool. So you’ve also been involved with the Shared Worlds Writer’s Workshop. Could you tell us about that?

Seven years ago, the director of Shared Worlds, Jeremy L. C. Jones, contacted me and brought me in on this amazing project. I’m now co-director of Shared Worlds, which is a teen science fiction/fantasy writing camp out of Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Basically, every year we get sixty-plus kids from all over the world who come to Shared Worlds, and for the first week of Shared Worlds, they get in groups of ten, and they create their own fantasy or science fiction world. They have help from Wofford faculty in various aspects of biology, and politics, and everything else, so they can have those resources to draw on.

Then, in the second week, they write stories set in those worlds. We find it’s very effective for a couple of reasons. Kids who are thirteen to seventeen don’t always know exactly what they want, and so by the end of the first week they have a good idea of whether they really want to go into writing, or if they like gaming more, or they like illustration, and so we have some resources for those things, or if they want to stick with the worldbuilding. But they do get to do that in a story the second week.

It’s really effective because they have a personal stake in it because they built the world, but it’s not so personal, like their own personal writing, that they feel uncomfortable sharing it or get blocked writing. Then, at the end of the second week, they get a critique from a professional writer in a one-on-one session. By critique, I mean something fairly general, because a thirteen-year-old with their first story, you don’t want to have to do a Clarion critique of. That doesn’t make any sense at all.

For about ten years, I’ve been involved with the Alpha Young Writer’s Workshop, which is a similar teen writing workshop, and I face that same issue of how tough to be on the students. The critiques are one thing that I worry about a lot, but even just telling them what their economic prospects are for writers, like, how blunt do I want to be about that? I want them to be forewarned, but I don’t want them to just come to summer camp and have their dreams crushed.

It’s kind of funny, because I find most of the students that we get seem pretty savvy about it from the Internet. I remember one one-on-one session with a thirteen-year-old girl where I said—we keep most of the emphasis on the craft of writing, and then at the very end we talk a little bit about career, because we don’t want a thirteen-year-old focusing on having to submit stories and stuff, but I remember that she said, “Well, I know writing is a tough career to choose, so probably I’ll go into English or history as a major in college, and I’ll either go into some technical writing thing or I’ll be a history professor, and I’ll do that for maybe twenty years, and then maybe eventually I’ll be a full-time writer.” I think pre-Internet, you wouldn’t have necessarily found that. Or we might just be getting particularly savvy kids, because I know forty-year-olds who don’t have that much insight into what a writing career is. But, yes, words carry a lot more weight to teenagers, and so we’re very careful.

One thing we’ve found with Alpha is that the students who apply are overwhelmingly female. We have about twenty stories, and usually there are one or two boys—I think we had four one year. Have you had that same experience with Shared Worlds?

I think it’s more like usually 70/30 or 65/35, but it’s definitely a lot more girls. I don’t know why that is necessarily, but that’s usually how it skews.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that most of the years that I’ve taught there, I knew most of the books that the students had read. I would ask someone “Who’s your favorite author,” and they would say, “You’ve probably never heard of this person, but Lloyd Alexander,” or something, and I’d say, “Dude, I’ve heard of Lloyd Alexander, come on.” But now I actually haven’t heard of most of the authors they’ve read, because they’re all these YA authors, and the YA stuff is really segregated in a way from the adult fantasy and science fiction. I just wonder what sort of impact that will have on the sense of science fiction and fantasy as a community.

My experience with Shared Worlds is that they raid every single section of the bookstore, and most of the kids we get are actually not going to the YA section. They’re going to the adult fiction section. So I don’t necessarily see that trend. The other trend I hear people talk about a lot is the next generation is so invested in ebooks and whatnot, but most of our kids don’t even use laptops to write. Some of them do, but they do a lot of drafting still in longhand, and they read physical books. I don’t know, really, that we can extrapolate, especially because we’re also dealing with, as you are, the ones who are the really heavy-duty readers and the not necessarily typical. I don’t necessarily see a YA trend. I tend to recognize most of what they’re telling me they’ve read.

Let’s talk about some of your author projects coming up. I saw you have an anthology that you’re working on called The Time Traveler’s Almanac.

That’s coming out in March. It’s co-edited by my wife, Ann. It’s a hundred years of time travel fiction collected in one massive volume, and it has everyone from, of course, Asimov to people you might not expect. One thing we found when looking at past time travel anthologies, compilations of reprints, we found that they were fairly conservative, and so there was a lot of room to put stuff in one volume that hadn’t been in conversation in quite this way.

Could you give some examples of some sort of out-there time travel stories?

I don’t have that book in front of me, but there’s a guy who has a story called “Loob,” of all things, a writer from the ’80s who wasn’t very well known at the time, but it’s a very interesting story involving witchcraft and time travel. I think the main thing is that we have a lot of stories that we were able to fit in because we also have a fantasy and horror sensibility, not just SF, and so we’re not that interested in the logic of how you build a time machine or having the details behind it, but just more in is the emotional resonance right, or had the implication been set out correctly. Karen Heuler has a story in there that I think is a great story, and it’s a great story because it’s about someone who time travels to get a better deal on an apartment in San Francisco, so she’s renting the apartment in the past, and then she travels to the future to her day job. So things like that.

It doesn’t always have to be the fate of the world is in the balance. There are some very interesting things you can do. We have Geoffrey Landis and people like that who are known for having written classic stories. We have Dean Francis Alfar, a great Filipino writer, who has a story in there about a kind of time travel magic shops that’s really cool. It’s a great mix of stuff from all over the place.

One thing I noticed reading Wonderbook is that there were quite a few references to Finnish authors. I was just wondering, do you have some special connection to Finnish literature? How’d you come across all these Finnish authors in particular?

They actually have a really vibrant science fiction and fantasy community that they’ve worked on very hard, and as a result they have a really, really strong support system, and as a result they have a higher than normal percentage of really great writers per capita, in a sense. But also back in the day, in the ’90s, when I was starting out and writing fairly surreal stories, I was having some difficulty placing a lot of them in U.S. markets, so I turned overseas, and had a lot of stuff out in the Czech Republic and elsewhere, and one of the places I did have stories out was in Finland, and then we just kind of gradually grew a relationship, and then that relationship extended because of the fact that the Finnish government is great about giving out translation grants, so we got some translation grants for the publishing company that we run, Cheeky Frog, and so it’s just kind of a synergy that’s grown up over time.

What are, say, one or two Finnish authors that people should go check out?

I’m terrible on the pronunciations as they themselves will point out whenever I’m there, but of course Tove Jansson, who did the Moomin comics, but also The Summer Book is an amazing book for adults that is on the fringe of fantasy. It’s set on an island and is about the relationship between a granddaughter and her grandmother. The creative play that they engage in is kind of reminiscent of some of the things set out in Wonderbook. Leena Krohn, whose Tainaron is just one of the most amazing works of twentieth-century fantasy, about this woman sending back letters from a city of intelligent talking insects, and it’s both kind of a parable and it works on the surface level as well. There’s The Quantum Thief author (Hannu Rajaniemi) whose last name I would completely annihilate if I tried to say it, from Tor. There’s a writer, Leena Likitalo, who had a story in Weird Tales, and was just a finalist for the Writers of the Future contest, who is an up and coming talent. And, gosh, there’s a few others, too, and they’re all in this Finnish anthology that we put out, called It Came from the North, last year in ebook format.

Do you have any other projects that you’re working on that you’d like mention? Anthologies or things like that?

I’m finishing up the last stages of the last edits on Acceptance, the last novel, which is pretty funny because—as you know from having read Authority—there’s kind of a manuscript in there, that’s kind of a weird manuscript written by one of the people at the agency, and I’m actually going to be in a bed and breakfast right next to a lighthouse on the coast of California with my own marked-up manuscript doing the final edits. It’s just a little meta.

Beyond that, I’m working on a novel called The Book Murderer, and then another one called Thorn, which is a little bit like if you had Godzilla and Mothra fighting in the background while a Chekhov play was going on in the foreground, so we’ll see how that works out.

And The Book Murderer, could you give a little capsule description of that?

It’s literally about a guy who has this obviously deranged plan to try to destroy all the books in the world, which he knows is futile, but he’s into quixotic quests. He does all kinds of things, including trying to interrupt writers’ thought processes and stuff so they won’t write as much, and in some cases, trying to steal manuscripts that have masters of edits on them that haven’t yet been photocopied so he can totally mess with writers. There’s a scene in there where there’s a fight between him and this community college teacher who had not yet photocopied her manuscript, and they’re fighting it out in the parking lot because he’s trying to get away with it. At one point, he goes on a book tour to shadow an author as the assistant to learn more about the enemy. It’s kind of satirical, although it gets a little more darkly psychological by the end, and it does allow me to tell, in disguised forms, a lot of stories about book culture.

In Wonderbook, you mentioned an upcoming project called The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. What’s the status of that?

I’ve got about 55,000 words of that, and that’s another novel. Between finishing Finch and finishing Annihilation, I worked on these three different novels, and for various reasons got pulled off of them, but The Journals of Doctor Mormeck is kind of an alternate universe/parallel universe kind of thing involving the journals of a sentient mountain out on a remote planet who is being used by the angels, who are real but they’re actually like an alien species, to spy on various versions of alternate Earth where something terrible is going to happen. He spies on them through things like luna moths, and through flies that are actually transmitters, and whatnot. It’s a very kind of out there science fiction epic.

Is that a challenge having a mountain as a protagonist?

So long as he’s just writing a journal—well, he has avatars, so one of his avatars is actually send back to Stalingrad, an alternate Stalingrad during World War II, and so that gives me some latitude, too. He’s able to kind of bud off parts of himself as little expeditions.

Do you have any short stories or anything coming out?

No, I’ve been so focused on the novels that I really haven’t been doing much short fiction. We will have a feminist sci-fi anthology coming out next year from PM Press. There are some stories I want to write, but mostly I want to finish up Acceptance because I want to spend most of my time thinking about the book tour and kind of relaxing from writing for a while.

Best of luck with the rest of the book tour, and thanks so much, Jeff VanderMeer, for joining us on the show today.

Thank you.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by:

David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

Interview: Michio Kaku
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Dr. Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist, bestselling author, acclaimed public speaker, renowned futurist, and popularizer of science. As co-founder of String Field Theory, Dr. Kaku carries on Einstein’s quest to unite the four fundamental forces of nature into a single grand unified theory of everything. His latest book, The Future of the Mind, was released in February 2014.

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

Your new book is called The Future of the Mind, and it deals with all these amazing technologies that are in development or will be developed in terms of things we can do with our minds. For me, one of the most fascinating things about this book was just learning about how weird our minds were to start with, and how weird our minds have been this whole time. For example, you talk about how a person can be an atheist in one half of their brain and a religious person in the other half.

Isn’t that amazing? That with MRI scans we can actually see that the left brain and the right brain actually operate slightly differently. The left brain is the dominant brain, so what you consider yourself is basically your left brain. But your right brain can be separated surgically with epileptics, and by cutting the link between the left brain and the right brain then the right brain can begin to reveal its personality, and we begin to realize that the right brain is actually quite different from the left brain in terms of intentions, in terms of what it wants to be. We can actually communicate separately with the left brain and the right brain of these epileptics who have this connection surgically cut, and we realize that you can be perhaps Republican on your left brain and Democrat on your right brain—but of course your arm has only one lever to pull when you’re in the voting booth. So you can imagine the conflict this person would have trying to vote, with the left brain and the right brain competing over who controls their right arm.

You say that maybe one reason we evolved this way is because people often make better decisions when they have multiple points of view offering suggestions, and in effect, our brains do that on our behalf.

That’s right. Our brain, in some sense, is not like a digital computer, which is what we thought; it’s more like a bureaucracy. The leadership of a corporation does not have to know everything that’s happening in the bureaucracy, and that’s why we have an unconscious mind, as Sigmund Freud correctly pointed out. And that’s also why we have emotion. A corporation has to have a quick, rapid response to different kinds of emergencies, independent of the leadership. Emotions are good for our survival; they allow us to react instantly to different kinds of emergencies, and that’s why we have emotions.

You mention that we can see these different parts of the brain come out sometimes with epileptics or if people have brain injuries or things like that, but you also say in the book that there is this technology now, called “trans-cranial ultra-magnetic scanners,” with which you can actually turn off parts of people’s brains at will.

It turns out that this actually has religious implications as well. It turns out that injuries to the left temporal lobe make you hyper-religious, and that is every time you see somebody fall or [witness] misfortune, you think there are evil spirits and it was meant to be, and so these people are hyper-religious. We think that many individuals like Joan of Arc, and throughout history, many prophets, probably suffered from some kind of injury to the left temporal lobe which induced this behavior.

Now, with magnetism, we can actually induce this behavior without having to hit somebody over the head. It’s called “The God Helmet” and by putting on the God Helmet you can actually induce the feeling of being in the presence of spirits, of being in the presence of a higher being, and so nuns were put into the God Helmet and they were asked, “Doesn’t this disprove the existence of God?” And these nuns said, “No, because this simply is a telephone system to God. God wanted us to have a telephone system by which we can communicate with him, and that’s why God created our brain with this hookup to God.” And so I think this does not disprove the existence of God, but it basically shows that physics can create disturbances in the brain to allow us to understand how the brain is wired.

Speaking of hooking things up to the brain, that’s sort of the latest thing: being able to have people use their minds to control keyboards, arms, or things like that. I guess even Stephen Hawking is using this now?

That’s right, my colleague Stephen Hawking has lost control over his fingertips now. He can no longer operate a laptop computer because he has no voice, he has no motion of his fingertips under his control, so the next time you see him on TV, look at his glasses. Look at the right frame of his glasses, and you’ll see an EEV sensor basically picking up radio emissions from his brain. It’s not very sophisticated, but with it he’s able to mentally control a laptop by which he can painfully begin to type.

In Japan, there’s even a toy that you can buy—it’s basically a headband with two plastic ears on it—and when you are excited when you meet someone at a party these ears go straight up, and when you lose interest in that person then the sensors pick that up, and the two ears begin to sag. So in other words, in the future you’ll know exactly who you’re impressing at a party by looking at the ears, whether they are straight up or whether they sag.

One thing that really struck me in the book is that it’s sort of common wisdom among conspiracy people that if you wear a tinfoil hat, it’ll protect your mind from being spied on by the CIA or something. You actually say in this book that a telepathy shield would consist of metal foil placed around the brain. So is there any truth to this whole classic tinfoil hat idea?

Let’s talk about the CIA for a moment. The CIA, we now realize, had a project called MKUltra whereby they literally dumped millions and millions of dollars at universities and different military bases to study ESP, to study hypnosis, to study drugs like LSD. Out of this multi-million dollar project, almost nothing came out. They were not able to control people’s minds. They could not read minds at all. However, now we have the sophisticated MRI machines, the magnetic sensors coming in, and they do give a limited ability to peer into your thoughts, but privacy is still protected. You have to have direct access to the person’s brain, like in an epileptic operation, or to put a helmet directly on the skull.

But you could shield your brain somehow using a metal foil?

It’s called a Faraday Cage. Michael Faraday was the great physicist back in the 1800s who showed that if you are in a metal cage and you are struck with a big electric spark, like a lightning bolt, the electricity is evenly distributed around the cage so that you are perfectly fine inside. In the same way, if you really are paranoid about this, putting on tinfoil and grounding it is a way to shield the inside from the outside because then lots of little disturbances are distributed around a metal foil.

So you think, in the future, spies and world leaders might have some sort of metal around their brains to keep people from spying on them?

I saw the movie Salt with Angelina Jolie, and in that movie they actually capture a Russian operative and put him in an MRI machine to read his mind, to use it as a lie detector. It turns out that when you tell the truth, your brain doesn’t do much on an MRI scan, but when you tell a lie, first you have to know the truth, and then you have to create the lie, and then you have to create the cover-up, the consistency of the lie with all the other lies you’ve been telling all these years. That’s a lot of brain power. Your brain lights up like a Christmas tree. So in the movie they actually use an MRI scan to see whether or not this Russian was lying or not. I think this is possible, but again there are ways you can foil it, because this machine basically looks at tension and nervousness of the brain. There are psychopaths who can control a lot of their brain functions and bodily functions so they don’t respond as if they’re nervous when they tell a lie.

Do you think that, as MRI technology advances, it will be possible to read people’s minds? Say, to build a reliable lie detector that doesn’t measure whether the person is nervous or not, but just actually does tell you whether they believe they’re telling the truth or not.

At the present time, you can get this commercially. There are commercial outfits who say with “90% accuracy” they can tell whether or not a person is lying, but I think we’re still in our infancy in terms of being able to do this.

However, let me tell you what we can do with an MRI machine. At Berkeley, where I interviewed the scientists there, they can convert the electrical activity of the brain into 30,000 dots, each dot representing electrical activity of the brain. Then you put these 30,000 dots into a computer, the computer program will then digest this information, and spits out a picture of what you are thinking about. This actually can be done using today’s technology, and in the future we may be able to actually photograph a dream. This was once considered straight out of science fiction—look at the movie Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio. But actually, the back of the brain is the visual cortex, and using this MRI scan you can actually scan the visual cortex and roughly get an approximation of what you are dreaming of.

You say that in the future, maybe instead of watching movies, we’ll just experience people’s thoughts, so you could record what it’s like to win an Olympic gold medal and then download that experience into your brain and experience that sensation.

This is straight out of the movie The Matrix. Recording a thought and recording emotion was once considered science fiction, but we did it. Scientists, just a few months ago, recorded the first memory of a mouse, reinserted that memory, and the mouse remembered what it had forgotten, so now it is actually possible to record a memory. It’s been done in a laboratory. Now, the memory is not very complicated. The memory is a mouse sipping through a straw, but the very fact that we could do this at all last year is absolutely amazing, because it means that in the future we might be able to push the play button and learn calculus.

One of the things they do to the mice is they’re able to inject them with drugs and make them forget specific things. You say it might be possible to do that with people as well. There was some pretty promising research on that along those lines.

The forgetful pill has been looked at very carefully by the military because, of course, we have all the GIs with traumatic experiences, and it turns out that there are several kinds of drugs that are being tested that seem to have this capability of erasing traumatic memories. However, there is a dark side to this. What happens if someone puts a memory into your brain that is incorrect? That is a false memory? That was explored in the movie Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger, where Arnold Schwarzenegger thinks he’s a good guy because all of his memories are the memories of an honest, law-abiding citizen, but in reality those memories are fake. In reality, he was a cutthroat criminal. These memories were simply injected into his mind so he could carry out the crime of the century, so this leaves open the possibility that one day you could tinker with people’s memories.

It seems like there’s so much potential to this idea, say, to be able to treat soldiers with PTSD and relieve them of these unpleasant memories, but you mention in the book that these kinds of drugs actually got a thumbs-down from the president’s council on bioethics. What did you think about that decision?

This is controversial. What the president’s commission on ethics said is that bad memories are part of our lives. We live with bad memories, traumatic memories, and they make us better people. That was the conclusion they made. But I tend to disagree. What happens if a memory is so traumatic that it debilitates you? You’re constantly depressed. You can’t get a job. You can’t function in society because you’re haunted by memories of what happened in wartime. That’s not learning from the past. That’s not making you a better person. We’re talking about basically an injury to the brain in the form of a memory that is so traumatic it paralyzes you. So I think the president’s commission went too far.

In that section, the bioethicists you quote really seem to me to be committing the naturalistic fallacy of “this is the natural thing, this is the way it’s always been, so it must be for the best.”

Diseases have been with us for thousands of years, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t cure them. That doesn’t mean we have to live with certain kinds of diseases, and I think this whole philosophy that we should be natural—that we should live with disease or live with traumatic memories—I think is taking things too far.

There’s one sort of random bit in the book I wanted to ask you about. You say that the court doctor to the emperor Claudius used electrically charged torpedo fish which were applied to the head of a patient suffering from severe headaches. Does that work?

It turns out that modern day technology that is so amazing has predecessors in the past that were overlooked, or people didn’t understand what they were doing. Now, of course, back in the days of the Roman empire, they did not know that the brain was basically electrical; however, by trial and error they realized that, yes, there are certain properties, like for example electric fish, and different kinds of living organisms which do harness electricity, and they could be used, in some sense, to treat things like headaches and stuff like that. And so we realize that the ancients were not quite as stupid as we think they were. They were on to something.

But, of course, there was no way to exploit it. There was no systematic understanding of electricity. That didn’t come for 2,000 more years. Now we can take the fact that the brain is basically electrical and use magnetic and electric probes to be able to stimulate parts of the brain that can then influence different kinds of behaviors. Now we have something called “Deep Brain Stimulation.” We can actually put a hair-thin probe into the brain in order to shut off or turn on certain parts of the brain.

For example, Parkinson’s. Michael J. Fox suffers from Parkinson’s Disease, where you tremble, and with brain scans you can actually see there’s a tiny part of the brain that’s overactive. That’s why people shake when they have Parkinson’s, like in the case of Michael J. Fox. We now know that you can insert electrical, hair-thin probes into the brain in order to quiet that area of the brain, and these people no longer shake.

Also, there’s a part of the brain that lights up when you are clinically depressed. Not just ordinary depression, but there’s a very, very virulent form of depression that seems to be impervious to drugs, psychotherapy, counseling. It turns out that if you again insert this probe into the specific part of the brain, these people who are chronically depressed suddenly become normal. It’s amazing. You see videotapes of these people, chronically depressed for decades, suddenly saying that, “Hey, this has cured me of depression.”

In the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, he imagines a device called “the Penfield mood organ,” which is sort of like a radio, but you can tune it to whatever emotion you want to experience. Do you think this deep brain stimulation has the potential to develop into something like that?

Maybe. It turns out that emotions are pretty much locked into what is called the amygdala, which is located at the very center of the brain. That’s a very old part of the brain, sometimes called “the monkey brain,” because monkeys also have emotions, and you can stimulate different parts of it. Not only do you have the emotion of fear, which is excited when you dream, for example. When you dream they make these little fires, and so that’s why many dreams are nightmares and are very fearsome. However there’s another part in the hypothalamus which is the pleasure center, and so then the question becomes ethical. Is it ethical to stimulate the pleasure center and experience pure emotion, the emotions of joy and ecstasy?

It turns out, if you take a mouse, you can also put a probe right through the pleasure center, which is called the nucleus accumbens, of the mouse, and hook the mouse to a telegraph key, so that by pushing the telegraph key it self-stimulates the pleasure center. These mice will then hit the telegraph key twice a second until they die of starvation. Then you go up the evolutionary scale, you put rabbits, dogs, cats, whatever, on the device and see whether they’re smart enough to realize this is lethal, this is killing them. They have to stop and go out and eat or else they will starve to death. So a porpoise was put on this device—you can locate the pleasure center of the porpoise brain, hook it up to a sensor, and the porpoise, by going forward, backward, forward, backward, can stimulate the sensor. What happened was, these porpoise would stimulate the pleasure center continually until it realized it was dying, it will starve to death—so it stopped, went out and grabbed some fish, and then went back to stimulate itself.

This has also been done on humans. Humans, of course, are smart enough to realize that this is death, that they will eventually die unless they go out and eat. But we have to realize that a certain fraction of the human race would prefer to live in a drug-induced euphoria, so if this were to become widespread, we might find a certain fraction of the human race permanently hooked up to this, constantly stimulating themselves.

Another thing I wanted to ask you about is this idea of intelligence boosting, like we see in the novel Flowers for Algernon. How plausible is that looking?

It turns out that there are several recorded cases of people with brain injuries to the left temporal side of the brain—one person had a bullet that went through that side of the brain when he was a child; another person dived into a swimming pool, hitting that left side of the brain very hard at the bottom of the swimming pool—and these people came out to be mathematical geniuses. These are called savants. They have an incredible ability to do calculations. They can tell you a thousand years into the future if a certain day is going to be Wednesday or Thursday. Some of them have artistic memories: They can have a flight over Manhattan, and in one helicopter flight they’ve memorized the entire landscape of the New York harbor, and they could paint the entire harbor after this. In fact, when you go to JFK airport, and you land at the international terminal, look up and you will see the mural painted by one of these savants after one helicopter ride over New York City harbor.

Now, autistic savants also exist, and we think that autism is not inherently linked to becoming what is called a “savant,” we think that autism probably damages the left temporal lobe in a way, just like with a bullet, just like with hitting your head on the swimming pool, which induces this kind of savant behavior. We’ve brain scanned these individuals, and through MRI scans we see that their brains are not quite normal. They are slightly deformed. Especially in the case of autistics, we see damage to the brain, but we also see that these people have memories that would put them in the genius level, mathematical abilities that are absolutely astounding.

There’s a mild form of autism called Asperger’s. These people can function in society. We think, in fact, that a certain fraction of the people in Silicon Valley are actually Asperger’s. We think that Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist who ever lived, was a sufferer from Asperger’s. His personality comes right out of a book of Asperger’s. Isaac Newton, by the way, was selected to the British Parliament, and there’s only one instance where he actually said something as a member of the Parliament, when he asked for the window to be closed because it was too drafty. That is the only known thing that Isaac Newton spoke in the British Parliament. Anyway, Asperger’s can be studied, but we are not yet at the ability to brain scan these people and duplicate this. We simply don’t know. There’s several theories I mention in my book as to why damage to the left temporal lobe leads to this kind of behavior, but at the present time it’s still a mystery.

Can you explain why, if these abilities are sort of within the capacity of typical brains, and they can be brought out by something as simple as a brain injury, why that trait didn’t, by natural selection, become more common in the population?

There must be some reason why this ability—which is inherent in all of us, by the way—is not manifest. We think the reason is clear. Some of these people that scientists have examined in the past who have these fantastic powers are also deficient in their personality. Some of them are very low IQ, some of them could barely tie their shoelaces, and they cannot function in society. They’re haunted by all these memories continually coming at them.

One woman who has this fantastic photographic memory says it’s like split vision. One vision is what she sees in front of her, and the other vision is the videotape of what happened thirty-five years ago on a Monday, constantly rolling in front of her. So it’s not functional. I think what evolution has done is made us forget. In other words, the brain probably records everything. It’s a runaway tape recorder. But there’s a certain algorithm of forgetfulness, and in these individuals, apparently that algorithm of forgetfulness is turned off, and they simply do not erase extraneous memories. These people have forgotten how to forget.

You really make the point in the book that we think of people with super intelligence as just ruling the world, but actually the world is sort of ruled, sadly, by people with kind of average to low intelligence, and that people with high intelligence very often go into science or journalism or academia, which are not the most lucrative professions or power-amassing professions.

In so many comic books and movies, we have the super genius becoming the villain, like Lex Luthor, or all the movies where you see super brains take over the world. But actually we do have super brains, they actually do exist: Some of them are my friends, they have Nobel prizes in theoretical physics, and their incomes are very low, a fraction of what Zuckerberg makes as a founder of Facebook. And so, having a super brain does not make you suddenly become a dictator of the world. We don’t have to fear the scenarios of science fiction where the Lex Luthors of the world take over, because people with exceptional ability, they don’t become politicians, they don’t become multi-millionaires, and some of them become professors like me, making a measly income.

In addition to boosting human intelligence, in the book you also talk about boosting animal intelligence, like the recent movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, where an Alzheimer’s treatment ends up creating this super-brilliant ape.

Believe it or not, scientists are seriously looking at the Planet of the Apes type scenario. First of all, we are 98.5% genetically equivalent to a chimpanzee. Believe it or not, only a handful of genes separate us from a chimpanzee, yet we live twice as long as a chimpanzee; we have a vocabulary many, many times that of a chimpanzee, and we have the ability to see the future, to run simulations of the future. Chimpanzees have no concept of tomorrow. Tomorrow for them doesn’t really exist as a definite kind of thing, so a handful of genes made the difference. Now, the question is, how many of these genes are there? There are perhaps maybe a hundred of them, and is it possible to manipulate them with gene therapy? The answer is possibly yes.

My point of view is, if you were to take a chimpanzee and slowly mutate it so it has bigger cranial capacity, better articulation of the voice box so it can say things, better manipulation of the index finger so it can pick up tools, what you wind up with is something that looks like a human, and so, why bother, right? Because the manipulation of the genes of an ape, yes, it’s definitely possible, we know what these beings are now. We’ve located them. We’ve catalogued them. I mentioned it in my book, in fact. So it may be possible to do something like Planet of the Apes, but what you will wind up with is something that looks like a human.

When you were talking about this idea of maybe making animals more intelligent, you say that, not surprisingly, this area of bioethics is so new that it is totally unexplored, and it seems to me that science fiction has been presenting this idea of uplifting animals, going back to The Island of Dr. Moreau and earlier. I just wonder, do you think that bioethicists should be reading more science fiction so that they’re grappling with the ethical implications of these ideas before they happen, rather than once they’re upon us?

I think so, definitely. Because I think science fiction is way past bioethicists who are simply responding to what’s happening in laboratories today, not responding to what will happen in the laboratory a few decades from now.

It’s a very contentious issue in science fiction and futurism: Will it be possible for people to upload their minds to computers or transfer their brains to robots or things like that? Where do you come down on that debate?

President Barack Obama initiated a bombshell last January in the State of the Union Address when he said that hundreds of millions of dollars will be allocated to what is called “The Brain Project.” The European Union has already allocated one billion dollars toward The Brain Project. This is the next big thing in science. If I have this connectome project, this brain project which delineates all the pathways of the brain, then we could on a CD-ROM create “brain 2.0.” That is a Xerox copy of the brain with all of the memories, all the personalities intact. In which case, if you die, your wetware dies, but the software that codes all the memories and personality quirks survives after you die, so in some sense you become immortal. If you become immortal, you also have mind outside body, and this is a theme explored in many science fiction novels, even in Star Trek where Captain Kirk encounters beings that are pure consciousness. They exist in glowing globes of light, but they are consciousness without a body, and then, of course, these conscious beings want to take over the body of Spock, and that’s the plot line of that episode.

But is that possible? The answer is yes. If the connectome and Brain Project comes to fruition after throwing a billion dollars at it, we may have a backup copy of the brain that survives even after you die.

Then in the book, I mention perhaps one of the greatest science fiction short stories written by Isaac Asimov. His favorite science fiction story was way in the future when pure consciousness zips across the universe, and this is a possibility. If I have a CD-ROM with all of the neural connections on a disk, I can put that on a laser beam, and I can shoot that in outer space at the speed of light, and then I could explore the universe at the speed of light. Forget the booster rockets, forget asteroid collisions, forget weightlessness, forget radiation dangers, all of that is bunk when I put intelligence on a laser beam and shoot the laser beam to the stars, and then at the other end there is a relay station which absorbs the laser beam and puts all this memory into a robot, and so you can then begin to feel and live on another star system. So this idea was inspired by Isaac Asimov and other science fiction writers, but now we think it could be possible.

The author Neil Gaiman recently wrote that he had visited China, and that they had told him there that they thought that the Chinese scientists were very good at iterating on existing technologies but weren’t as good at coming up with completely new ideas on their own, and they had looked at American scientists and saw that they read a lot of science fiction, and they were trying to encourage their young students to read more science fiction to develop that kind of creative outlook. I was wondering what your thoughts were on that.

I have different thoughts on this. In Asia, we have the expression, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” That is the Asian philosophy of life. You stick out, you’re going to get creamed. However, in the West, we have the exact opposite expression, and that is “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” and that, in a nutshell, typifies one of the major defects of that Asian educational system. If you are a budding Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, you are hammered down, and when I see the top physicists of China, there’s a program called CUSPEA which selects the top, top, top university students in physics and sends them to the United States to learn physics—I know this because I’m on the CUSPEA committee, one of my students in fact was a CUSPEA student—and I can see these Chinese physicists close up, and I realize that they’re very good at taking orders. You tell them to do something, they’re not going to bad mouth you, they’re not going to snicker, they’re not going to say, “Oh, why do I have to do that?” No, they do it, and they do it very well.

But when you ask them to come up with a new idea, that’s where they get paralyzed, and of course, that’s what Silicon Valley is all about. We have tons of squeaky wheels in Silicon Valley all asking for the grease, all asking for startup funds to make their dreams come true, and so I think that the Asian system has to learn this, and science fiction has a definite role to play. Some of the greatest scientist of all time were inspired by science fiction. Take a look at Edwin Hubble, the greatest astronomer of the 20th century, who discovered the expanding universe. When he was a kid, his father wanted him to be a country lawyer, so he learned law, went to Oxford, and was destined to become a country lawyer, but he remembered reading Jules Verne as a child, and he was fascinated by the stars. So he gave up his law career, went to Chicago, got a PhD in astronomy, and went on to discover the expanding universe and eventually what is called the Big Bang theory. I think science fiction had a very definite role to play in his upbringing.

Also, Carl Sagan, the noted astronomer, when he was young, he wrote that he used to read John Carter of Mars, and he dreamt about chasing Dejah Thoris on the sands of Mars, just like what John Carter did in that series. He became an astronomer, and was fascinated by Mars as a consequence.

So yeah, I think science fiction definitely expands your imagination, and allows you to dream about worlds that don’t exist but could exist in the future.

We had a listener, Zach Chapman, who wanted me to ask you: “A few years ago, Michio Kaku was on a show The Science of Games. Does he play any video games? If so, which ones are his favorites?”

I don’t have enough time to play video games now, but I used to play a lot of video games, and the ones that I liked the best are the ones that really challenge you and play with space and time. For example, we think space and time is flat. We have this mental picture of rocket ships shooting things at other rocket ships. That is a very common-sense point of view that even animals understand. But we physicists work in curved space. We work in a space with holes in it, called worm holes. We work in spaces where things can disappear, reappear, if you go off the right hand sign of the video screen you wind up on the left hand side of the video screen, so space is curved, and so these are the games that I think are the most challenging because they force you to question your common-sense notion of what is space and what is time.

Another listener, Joe Montia says, “Ask about the dark matter research going on in a lab under a mountain in Italy.” Do you know what he’s talking about?

Yes, we think that most of the matter in the universe is actually dark matter, so all of the high school textbooks are actually wrong. All of the high school textbooks say that the world is mainly made out of atoms, end of story, that’s what the world is made of. Atoms. We now know that’s wrong. Only four percent of the universe is made out of atoms. 23% actually is made out of dark matter, an invisible matter that surrounds the Milky Way Galaxy, and 73% of the universe is dark energy which is blowing the universe apart. It’s the energy of the Big Bang itself. People ask the question, “What’s propelling the galaxies apart?” And it’s dark energy, and we are clueless as to understanding what is dark matter and dark energy.

However, in Rome, in different laboratories around the world, we have gigantic detectors hoping to pick up the collision of a proton with dark matter. It should create a tiny spark that should be visible, and that’s why many laboratories around the world are looking for that spark indicating that matter has collided with dark matter. So if anyone in your audience understands what dark matter is, have them call me first.

[Laughter] All right, you can contact us at geeksgalaxy@gmail.com and let us know what dark matter really is. Unfortunately, we’re almost all out of time here. Do you want to tell us about any other projects? Do you have any new books or TV shows or anything that you’d like people to know about?

Again, the book is called The Future of the Mind, which is coming out very soon, the end of February. I’m on a twelve-city book tour, in fact. I just finished a series for the Science Channel called Futurescape, a six-part series with the actor James Woods, talking about what the future is going to look like: the future of robots, the future of brain science, and things like that. But right now I’m open. I’m open to new projects. What I do professionally is try to complete Einstein’s dream of a theory of everything. What I’m looking for professionally is an equation, perhaps no more than one inch long, that will summarize all physical phenomena into a single theory, and that is the theory of everything.

Michio Kaku, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure.

The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by:

David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

Artist Gallery: Peter Mohrbacher

Peter Mohrbacher works as a concept artist, illustrator, and Art Lead for projects such as Magic: The Gathering and Dragons of Atlantis. His art has been featured in Spectrum annuals 18, 19, and 20. He lives in San Francisco. His website is www.vandalhigh.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Peter Mohrbacher
Henry Lien

One of the most striking things about your work is that, although it almost always features a humanoid figure, the figure’s face is almost always hidden. Even with some figures where the face is visible, the eyes are covered or simply absent, like in many of H.R. Giger’s creations. It is clear from several of your works that you are able to render beautiful faces. So why are faces and eyes so often hidden or deleted? Is it because they contain the most emotional information and you wish to convey a sense of dread by withholding that information?

This missing face gag started with my Angelarium series. The fiction behind it is based loosely on Christian mythology, but most of it comes from my own interpretation.

When I was thinking about drawing angels, I wanted to think about the way that they were different from people. My understanding is that the foremost sin in Christianity is “pride,” so for the most pious creatures in heaven, I imagined that they would have literally no ego. They would exist totally without a sense of self. Hence the distinct lack of a face.

The fallen angels in the series have suffered the sin of pride and formed faces for themselves, but have also grown ashamed of that fact, so they hide them whenever possible. That’s the primary way to distinguish between a divine angel and a fallen one in my world.

What is the relationship between your work and your dreams while sleeping? Do you ever get ideas for images directly from dreams?

I’ve heard stories of some famous artists that draw from their dreams for inspiration. There was a story about how Salvador Dalí would sit in front of a canvas while holding a spoon over a tin plate, so that when he fell asleep, the clatter of it falling would wake him up with his canvas at the ready. Personally, I don’t buy it.

Dreams are interesting to the dreamer. But anyone who has listened to another person recite an involved dream knows that the images and experiences we have in our sleep are only exciting to ourselves. Dreams are boring to other people, and what’s worse, mine are typically boring to me as well. The most interesting dreams of mine follow the common structure of exploring a familiar building that has expanded with additional rooms. Supposedly, this dream is linked to thoughts of ambition. Which seems accurate enough to me, but it’s simply not interesting.

Dreaming is the most familiar way that people are exposed to the mix of imagery and emotions outside their conscious mind. But since dreams are rarely predictable or interesting, I doubt many artists use them successfully as inspiration.

On the other hand, I find that drawing has the capacity to delve into the subconscious rather effectively. Drawing can often be a more surprising and revealing activity than dreams. Plus, the results of drawing can follow a coherent enough structure to share the experience with other people in a meaningful way. Creating something dreamlike but tangible is far more exciting to me than simply creating a mimeograph of an unstructured dream.

For many people, faces are obscure or constantly changing in dreams, yet people often still have a strong sense of who a person is in a dream, without being able to see the person’s face. Is this part of why you obscure faces so often?

There may be some shared DNA there. But it’s not where that idea came into my work.

When we see that there is something missing (a known unknown), we uncontrollably imagine what it is. That process of imagination creates powerful feelings and imagery that are deeply personal, and the experience leaves a strong impression. That’s part of why the intangibility of dream faces is compelling, and it’s why the no-face gag so consistently works for me. But to be honest, I may be overusing it a little. It’s become a go-to solution to add interest to a piece of mine without having to work too hard. Finding a way to add mystery to a piece without blanking out the face is my new challenge.

A lot has been written comparing the description of an otherworldly “wheel” and beings from the sky in the Book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament to actually describing UFOs and their passengers. It seems like a lot of your work, especially the Angelarium series, is reverse engineering those images. Many of the images look like your attempt to read between the lines of descriptions of otherworldly beings from various world mythologies and religions and to convey what those texts might be trying to describe, if they had had the sufficient words. Was that your conscious intention?

My intention was to deconstruct the imagery that’s commonly used in Christian mythology because I find it compelling. The hope is that there is something elemental within those ideas that people will respond to. The fact that similar images and ideas surface in different parts of history simply tells me that people’s unconscious minds have not changed much over time. Hopefully, the closer I can get to understanding the root of these ideas, the more compelling I’ll be able to make the imagery in my art.

You’ve talked about your desire to work in surrealism. I represent a lot of neo-surrealist artists as a fine art dealer. How do you define surrealism and what draws you to it?

When I think of surrealism, I think of realistic portrayals of symbolic imagery. Bringing visual metaphors into a believable context has the potential to create really participatory artwork. It has this prismatic effect, where the mental standpoint and life experience of the viewer causes different moods and interpretations to appear. Much like the shared dreaming experience in Inception, the artist creates a world and then viewers fill it with their thoughts and feelings. I think that’s an idea that’s exciting to everyone.

Science fiction/fantasy illustration has a complex and controversial relationship with sexuality, especially the representation of women’s sexuality. Representations of female sexuality are almost entirely absent from your work. Was this a conscious reaction to the traditional handling of female sexuality in SFF illustration?

My appreciation for pretty girls is not something I feel a strong need to communicate. Sexuality and gender are just not subjects that carry a lot of baggage for me.

Digging into my subconscious mind for material to share with other people has come up with many different fantasies, but the sexual ones have mostly gotten edged out by other obsessions. It wasn’t really a conscious choice, but it has led to some interesting reactions. On multiple occasions, people have commented on how my work is particularly appealing to gay men. Which, if it’s true, may be a side effect of simply avoiding sexual exploitation and grisly masculine power fantasies.

Talking with some fantasy artists who worked throughout the ’80s, they’ve told me that much of the hypersexuality that was on display in their work was a byproduct of market demand. I’m wondering if the reputation of SFF art wouldn’t be quite as pronounced if it weren’t for a consistent demand from employers to use sex appeal to market products that feature SFF art. These days, many artists I know groan and roll their eyes at the sexual exploitation that is still fairly common in art for games. In a society that’s obsessed with sex, it feels sort of unnecessary to include it in everything.

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. He is also the Arts Editor at Interfictions. 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. His work has been published in Asimov’s, Analog, and Interfictions, and been nominated for the Nebula. Visit his author website at www.henrylien.com.

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Author Spotlight: Seth Dickinson
Amber Barkley

What inspired “A Tank Only Fears Four Things”?

This is going to get a little roundabout!

My brother and I grew up as game-players, and although we’re now in separate cities leading very different lives, we like to hang out on Skype and play games together. In the last couple years, we’ve become devoted to a Cold War strategy game by Eugen Systems, a French studio. We play two-versus-two matches against other people on the Internet.

The game positions you as the commander of a battalion of soldiers during some terrible, smoldering, alt-history conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. You’re a commander with a god’s-eye-view of the battlefield, and you have to maneuver your troops to victory.

It’s a really grim premise—you know that right after you finish your 40-minute match against “TRIPLE X MANSTEIN” and “pro_weed_macnamara,” everything would probably collapse into an exchange of nuclear weapons and the end of human life on Earth. But at the same time, the game is a gleeful, unapologetic toy box: a chance to grab all the weird tanks and frighteningly slick killing machines of the Cold War and actually pit them against each other. So there’s an interesting tension there between ‘war is awful’ and ‘wow, war!’

As my brother and I played, we gathered stories about the hilarious things that happened—a tank that couldn’t be killed, a supply truck that took a wrong turn and drove into the enemy base, an opponent with charmingly weird tactics. People are storytellers and games give them amazing material.

My brother became an expert at micromanaging a single, powerful tank to victory. In particular, everyone in the game became terrified of the T80U, a Soviet tank that seemed nigh invincible. My brother could use a single tank to crumble enemy lines. But he’d spend any available resource to do it: for example, driving empty supply trucks ahead to bait enemy anti-tank missiles.

Of course, we started to think about those supply truck drivers, and what they’d think about their orders. Whether they’d wish they could be in the monster tank.

The characters are named after personal heroes of mine from the Soviet space program. I chose to write about women because—why not?, because I’m tired of the role of women in warfare being elided from the genre conversation, and because if I was going to write about the Soviet military, I wanted to remind Western readers that some of the bravest fighters in history were women in the Soviet armed forces.

The first line, “The surgery makes Tereshkova into a tank,” evokes the idea of a physical strengthening, though we later find out that it’s Tereshkova’s mind that becomes the tank. Can you tell us more about this contrast? How did this opening line come into being?

We live in a society that fetishizes military hardware. It’s on movie posters, in our games, our bestselling books. There are discussion forums full of people arguing whether this plane could outfight that one. And I totally understand this: I think it’s the same psychological engine that brings people into Pokémon, or bird watching, or sports. We love to catalog things, understand how they work, and try to figure out whether they could compete.

But war isn’t about empty machines colliding. War has enormous human cost. And it’s not just the camera-friendly pain of a soldier losing a friend or struggling with the decision to pull the trigger: It’s the mingled terror and boredom of patrolling with the chance of constant, random death, or the emotional isolation of being deployed away from friends and family.

Tereshkova wants to be strong like a tank: a complicated, deadly, invincible machine. She wants to be effective and empty. She wants her experience of war to play out like a video game or a blockbuster movie, a spectacular collision of mechanisms without human cost.

I wanted to connect our fiction of war as a physical contest—the sleek warplane, the invincible tank—with the truth of war as psychological damage.

The story is structured around the four weaknesses of a tank. How did this structure develop? Why did you choose the tank?

I knew it was a story about the weakness of strength. Tereshkova wants to be invincible, and that invincibility destroys her. By grasping for self-sufficient invulnerability, she loses the ability to connect with Yorkina.

(I feel like everyone’s struggled with this in their friendships and relationships—Am I allowed to be in pain? Wouldn’t I be a better friend if I were invincible, always happy, always able to help?)

If Tereshkova tried to claim tankhood as a way to become invincible, I had to show how that invincibility would destroy her. Even the tank needs help. Nobody wants to love a person who never needs love.

Tereshkova was a supply runner, never fighting on the front lines, but she is still greatly affected by the events of the war. Why did you choose to place her in this role?

Part of it was neuroscience. People associate PTSD with single traumatic events—rightly so! But I wanted to point out that constant, low-level fear and anxiety can also do immense harm. It’s one thing to face your fear, and another one to know that it could come for you at any moment, any place, without warning or chance for counteraction.

If the story worked right—and that’s not my call to make—I hope the American stealth fighters overhead are the constant dread faced by the disempowered: women confronting perpetual street harassment, queer people afraid they will be targeted if they come out, people of color treated unjustly by law enforcement. Constant, environmental anxieties.

I also wanted to recognize that even those who don’t fight still fight. War sweeps civilizations. Front-line soldiers aren’t the only ones who pay a price. So much of the American cultural narrative is about World War II, our brave soldiers going overseas to fight and coming home heroes. We think of war as a distant arena, rather than an all-consuming disaster.

Tereshkova chooses to undergo experimental surgery, and then, perhaps more surprisingly, chooses to have it undone. Was there ever a draft of this story in which she did not have the surgery reversed? What went into the decision for her to go back to feeling her fear?

The first draft of the story ended with Tereshkova’s follow-up visit to the doctor, and the line: ‘“No,” Tereshkova says. “Nothing else.”’ It was a grim, eerie, cynical place to end: Tereshkova would be a tank forever, and Yorkina would either leave in frustration or accept a distant, unilateral relationship. (The story’s title at this point was Kontakt-5, after the armor that explodes when something comes too close, moving too fast.)

I’m glad that decision changed. I think this type of story tends to end sadly, and I’m much happier with a note of hope. And I think the metaphor of the tank feels more complete now. The armies of the world spent the twentieth century learning that the tank can’t operate alone. I can only hope that most people spend their lives learning that it’s okay to be vulnerable, to reach out with need.

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: Sandra McDonald
Jude Griffin

Why hotels?

A favorite movie when I was younger: Somewhere in Time, with Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve. Hopelessly romantic time-travel love story. A favorite place to visit, even if I can’t afford a room: the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. They filmed Some Like it Hot there, with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon. Bucket list hotel: the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. I used that as an inspiration in a story about military veterans a few years ago. I grew up near Revere Beach in Massachusetts, which was the first public beach in America and had its share of rambling old structures on the ocean. I live now in Jacksonville, Florida, and put one of its historic old hotels (now long since vanished) in this story. The gables and porches, the ocean and sun, the promise of doing nothing: all personal squees. As a writer, if you don’t include your interests and delights in even some small way, where’s the fun?

Why selfie?

I love how new words or meanings pop into our language, although I always feel about a year behind the curve. For instance, bling. I had no idea what bling was until I heard it in a night class at Harvard Extension some years ago. Sometimes it’s an old word, but new to me: Recently, I learned what a case quarter is, and at my last job someone taught me the meaning of top-shelf guy (or gal). When I want to gross out students, I tell them to look up meth mouth. (What a great name for a horror story!) The word selfie is pretty well known now, thanks to Ellen DeGeneres and the Oscars, but it was relatively new to me until six months ago. I tried to push that word to its logical extension: another self, walking around on a temporary lease for a specified purpose. If I had a selfie, I’d send her off to grade college essays all day while I wrote the great American novel in coffee shops. Alas, I can’t afford one. And I don’t really like coffee.

Why time travel?

Time travel is so much fun! It’s ridiculously fun to work with in fiction. You can bend time, flex it, stretch it, condense it, twist it up like a knotted necklace and then spread it apart again like warm bread dough. The time travel mechanics in this story are very firmly fixed in the 1960s Irwin Allen show The Time Tunnel, although I was thinking of the Stargate episode “2010” and Vancouver’s Plaza of Nations for the main time terminal. The Plaza of Nations was a beautiful glass structure on the water that I was lucky enough to visit when my friend Janine Shahinian and I did a fangirl tour of the city. She was our sleuth, hunting down Highlander, The Sentinel, and Stargate film sites. She even got us onto the set of Stargate and we met Richard Dean Anderson, who was great. In any case, the Plaza of Nations is gone now, but if I had a time machine, I’d take people back to visit it. Just gorgeous. But since we don’t have time machines, I use stories instead.

Why the moon?

Here’s another personal squee. As part of its publicity and public relations programs, NASA periodically hosts social media events at its various facilities. I had just rejoined Twitter after being inactive for a long time when I saw a call for an event at the Johnson Space Center from @NASASocial. I signed up, thinking I surely wouldn’t have luck of the draw first time out, but got picked. Off to Houston I flew, not sure of what to expect, and crashed on the sofa of author Amy Sisson and Dr. Paul Abell, who himself works at NASA. Our group had a great time, including a visit to the historic Mission Control for the Apollo programs. I sat right where Gene Kranz would have sat during the nearly disastrous Apollo 13 flight. My long love for the space program was reignited, and that’s why the mom in this story lives on the moon.

What’s next?

Everything. Short fiction is my first love, because each story is a prism, however flawed, held up to the sun to reflect and refract the world around us. I’m hoping to make many more prisms this year. In the last few years, I’ve been writing YA novels for LGBTQ teens, which has been very rewarding, and I’m taking that into new directions as well. I’m also working on a big fat SF novel about the folly of intergalactic war, and another novel about magic and Newfoundland, and a romantic comedy about a home renovator and a veteran of Iraq. And sooner or later I’d like to write a transgender Sherlock Holmes. Wouldn’t that be marvelous? There’s a long parade of colorful characters in my head demanding stories, and the only constraint is time. Maybe duplicating myself really is the way to go.

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: Sean Williams
Bradley Englert

“Zero Temptation” is set in your Twinmaker universe, so how important was it to tie the Twinmaker lore in with a story that may be read by people who have never read any of the other Twinmaker stories? How difficult was it to strike that balance between new readers and readers who are looking for more stories set within Twinmaker?

Luckily both the Twinmaker stories and the Twinmaker novels (and, to a lesser extent, the urban myth series— http://twinmakerbooks.com/tag/urban-myths/—as well) rely on a trope that’s pretty familiar to everyone, that of the matter transmitter, so I can usually assume that a large percentage of what these stories are about will connect with readers. Some of the other elements—VIA, the Air, WHOLE, etc.—are trickier. I try to convey the meaning of these terms by their function in the sentence or in the context rather than stopping to explain. A first-person narrative like this one just doesn’t allow space for infodumps. It’s my hope that readers will get what’s important and not be troubled by anything else they miss. And perhaps the exact opposite of being troubled, they will be intrigued enough to try the book in order to learn more.

There’s a theme of social media and “logging” your activity throughout the story. Do you see the “Live it. Love it. Log it.” slogan becoming real in a few years, or do you think we’re already at that point?

I think the technology is at the point where people can readily log everything they do, if they want to, but it’s not really mainstream yet. There’s no killer app, if I still can use that term without sounding facile. I like the idea of memory aids—and, going even deeper back in time, full-blown nostalgia engines—but I’m not going to do it myself if it takes any effort at all. I stopped exercise logging after a week because it annoyed me, and that’s barely any inconvenience at all. Until we’re living in a full-on surveillance state where everything is monitored for me, and I have full access to that data, I doubt it’s going to entirely work for me.

Others, though . . . ? Sure. Some people do log everything. Some even make the data public (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129514.500-stroll-down-a-virtual-memory-lane-to-revisit-your-past.html). Information is neither inherently valuable nor valueless; it’s all about how it’s used. Even if this data only finds an application in the thesis of some future anthropology post-grad, that’s fine. She’ll be glad it exists. And if we do all of us end up logging everything we do and experience, even better for her.

No one seems to have any privacy, as Tash’s own thoughts about Darryl are logged and viewed by others constantly. Do you see technology ever getting to that point and people agreeing to let themselves be observed every moment of every day?

My Twinmaker characters do live in a transparent, post-privacy world, where anyone can pretty much see anyone, from top to bottom. It’s regulated in a way very different to our world, obviously, but I can see this world turning into that one by increments. Facebook may not be the game-changer some people say it is, but I do think it’s symptomatic of a fundamental shift in how today’s young people choose to engage with these notions. The sticking point is the lack of transparency at the governmental end—i.e., they can see us but we can’t see them. Breaking down that barrier will be much harder. In Twinmaker’s past, there’s been a massive crisis that changed by necessity many of our familiar social mores, including the very idea of what a government is. As a result, the world of Twinmaker is quite different to ours in lots of ways, ways we haven’t seen yet, and may not see at all. I’m not making predictions, just exploring the possible.

What do you have coming up in the future?

Crashland, the second Twinmaker book, is out in November. Readers will learn a great deal more about the world in that novel, and meet a whole bunch of new characters. This year also sees my fourth and fifth collaborations with Garth Nix in print: Troubletwisters 4: The Missing and Spirit Animals 3: Blood Ties, the last an installment in the massive, multi-format, multi-author middle grade series from Scholastic, currently taking the world by storm.

Bradley Englert is currently an undergrad at Western Kentucky University where he studies English, creative writing, and film. He enjoys writing fiction and directing short films. One day he hopes to have something written in italics in this section.

Author Spotlight: Nisi Shawl
Robyn Lupo

How did “Deep End” begin as a story for you? What was the most difficult aspect to writing it?

It started as an invitation to the anthology from Nalo Hopkinson. I forget her exact words, but whatever she said made me conceive the whole set-up. I was a bit surprised to see that everyone else hadn’t written the same story I did.

The hardest part was getting the ship designed. I had help with that from the husband of my dear friend, Sarah Zettel. Tim is a genuine rocket scientist.

Why did you write these colonists as prisoners? Why did you choose not to reveal their crimes or their guilt/innocence?

Empires often use their outcasts to do the dangerous work of colonizing. Many European whites were condemned to settle North America and Australia. I simply extrapolated.

I was honestly surprised the first time someone asked me what crimes the prisoners in “Deep End” had committed and then wondered why I hadn’t named these offences. Where I come from, imprisonment is largely a given for huge percentages of the population. Whatever one has done doesn’t matter much—punishment is based more on who one is. I haven’t memorized the horrific statistics, but African American men—my cousins, nephews, neighbors, so on—are all highly likely to have been imprisoned, or to be imprisoned in the future. Or now. What my characters had done to wind up where they did just didn’t register for me as a point I needed to cover. Of course, Wayna’s, Doe’s, and Thad’s sexual and romantic relationship with each other was nonstandard enough to make them criminals in some people’s estimation.

I found Wayna’s attitude toward her new body and its integrity inspiring in its self-love and mental toughness. How do you think she grew this attitude, since her circumstances might support even the opposite sort of view, i.e. self-destructive and self-loathing?

Wayna’s a survivor. I see her acceptance of her new body as a conscious choice made with the knowledge that rejecting it would lead to serious, perhaps even fatal, problems.

I had a similar experience the first time I took LSD. As the trip began, I looked for a long time at my feet. I had always been teased and shamed for my large feet. I realized that I could hate them, and I would have a really bad experience, or I could love them and have a good one. I chose the second option. So I know it’s possible to decide things like that.

What’s next for you?

Later today I’ve got to write a blog post for Sarah Hans, the editor of Steampunk World; that’s an anthology featuring a story excerpted from my Belgian Congo steampunk novel, Everfair. And I’m a few days overdue with a collaboration for Lethe Press’s A Scandal in Gomorrah—Cindy Ward and I are working on a cross-dressing mixed-race Sherlock Holmes pastiche. Then I’ve got an urban fantasy short story to write and send to Streets of Shadows, another anthology. Due in about three weeks. Finally, I hope to get an editorial letter from Liz Gorinsky telling me how to improve my Everfair manuscript soon and very soon. I hope.

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: Fred Van Lente
Bradley Englert

The worldbuilding is incredibly strong in “Willful Weapon.” There are a lot of races, terms, and places mentioned throughout the story, but it never feels overwhelming. What was your plan for developing the world, and how did you manage to create this in-depth world while maintaining clarity?

Thanks! Worldbuilding is something I’ve always emphasized in my work, particularly in comics. The trick is to come up with a very basic concept—here, the idea that, through a mechanism that is (purposefully, so as to avoid future spoilers) left vague, all the magic on Earth and the accompanying races returned about when the electric-powered age began—then take that concept to its logical conclusion in a number of variations: So once you get elven immigrants, you get the Ellis Island scene; in high concentrations of immigrants, one tends to find representatives of that group’s organized crime, etc.

But so the whole thing doesn’t get out of your control, it’s smart to keep that initial idea of the world very simple.

All of the descriptions and scenes of action are quite vivid, especially when Cellach is in Dalbor’s arena or when Cellach attacks Gundobad. Do you think writing comics has helped you become a better visual writer? Do you have a specific approach for writing action sequences?

It’s a matter of emphasis of focus, whether it’s prose or comics. As long as you have a strong POV character, either the threatened or one of the attackers, the reader is going to feel drawn in and part of the action. You run into trouble, particularly in prose, when you try to show many angles of a single conflict. Pick a POV and stick with it, and you’re going to do well.

The fantasy elements of the story are all heavily mixed in with contemporary reality, like Dalbor wearing a three-piece suit or the references to the Pinkertons. Do you think the blending of these two elements helps to ground readers in the world? Did you ever have to reel back on some of the fantasy to keep it consistent with the world as we know it?

Any story based in something fantastical, whether it’s superheroes or sword-and-sorcery, needs a human element the reader can latch on to emotionally. I am a huge history buff and read on that subject widely, and I especially love New York City history, where I’ve lived for two decades, so you manage to just pick up details that you can then deploy in a natural way in fiction that seems organic. The ideal is to give the reader the sense that the world extends beyond the confines of the story without loading her up with too much extraneous information.

Would you ever return to this world that you’ve created? It seems intricately detailed and fleshed out, so are there any plans for more stories set in this world?

This is actually the second story set in the Awakening I wrote, though it might be the first published. The other is called “Neversleeps” and will appear in the all-new anthology Dead Man’s Hand from Titan later in the year. There is at least one character common to both stories, so I hope people who enjoyed “Willful Weapon” check that one out.

To answer your question, yes, I plan on returning to this world, and soon, to pick up with a third set of characters from The Book (referenced in “Willful Weapon”) and these three intertwined tales form the basis for a whole novel set during The Awakening. Publishers, call me!

What’s up next for you?

I’ll be taking over the reins of the Conan monthly from Dark Horse Comics in April, rebooted as Conan the Avenger #1. Folks who enjoyed my worldbuilding in “Willful Weapon” should enjoy exploring Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age with me.

Bradley Englert is currently an undergrad at Western Kentucky University where he studies English, creative writing, and film. He enjoys writing fiction and directing short films. One day he hopes to have something written in italics in this section.

Author Spotlight: Matthew Hughes
Jude Griffin

You’ve said that the Kaslo Chronicles are space opera combined with the influence of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth fantasies, and you’ve been described as his heir apparent. What are the most powerful elements of his DE series for you? Were there any elements that you had to consciously set aside and not use in the Chronicles?

The most powerful element, for me, is the mood of decadence and world-weariness that pervades the stories. It’s an age when everything has been done, time after time, and there can be nothing new under the old sun—except for the fact that it will soon go out and plunge Old Earth into permanent darkness. But I’m not using that mood much in the Kaslo story because it’s set at the moment when the age of the Dying Earth begins and the would-be wizards—who were not much to reckon with in the age of rationalism—are all eager to strut their stuff.

The Vancean invention that I most rely on is the concept—all-pervasive now, but his original invention—that magic has rules and procedures that must be mastered by study, practice, and will power—plus innate talent. Kaslo, for all his determination and skills as an op, will never be a thaumaturge.

How has your vision for the Chronicles changed over the time you’ve been writing them? Any major unanticipated turns in the road?

When I start a story, I have a character, a situation, and an event that changes the situation and plunges the character into a developing conflict. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the middle, let alone at the end. So this one has evolved liked all the others. I now know who the villain is, which I didn’t last week, and I can get to the journey, the confrontation, and the climax.

“Fofferah’s Temporal Cabinet,” “Plackatt’s Discriminating Delimiter,” “talentless dabbler”: It seems like it would be tempting to go full tilt into wizard satire. Did you find yourself having to rein in the humor sometimes?

Yes. I try to write about serious things with a slightly comic bent. I have to keep reminding myself that there’s a thin line between ironic twists and the descent into buffoonery. Then I have to remind myself to watch for that line and stay on the right side of it. But snazzy spell names are also a Vancean trope that I like to follow.

Any chance we’ll see a female wizard or three in the upcoming stories?

Could be. I tend to write male characters because I am one. But I like strong female characters.

You’ve estimated the Chronicles as comprising at least twelve stories—what are the rewards and challenges of writing in the serial format?

The challenge: I can’t go back and change something to make the story glitch-free. If I change my mind about a plot development, I’ll have to do back-flips to preserve continuity or change my mind back again.

The rewards: same as any other story-making—I get to write and be paid for it.

How is the historical novel coming along? Any new projects you want to tell us about?

I’ve started scoping out the research. Before I start the historical, I’m going to revise a crime novel I wrote a couple of years ago. I want it to be more character-based and less plot-y.

In 2007, you combined writing with housesitting. How has the itinerant life been treating you? What’s been the best and worst of it?

All in all, it’s been an interesting and rewarding six and a half years. The worst of it was breaking an ankle in Cyprus without medical insurance. The best of it was seeing the North Island of New Zealand, which is my idea of a perfect place to live.

Whose work are you loving lately and why?

I’ve started reading Joe R. Lansdale. We had a brief correspondence when we were in one of George R.R. Martin’s and Gardner Dozois’s cross-genre anthologies. Turns out he has the same approach to plotting as I do (see the answer to the second question above). And I’ve been catching up on Carl Hiassen’s crime novels. He also writes about serious events in a comical manner and does very fine work.

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: Rachel Pollack
Jude Griffin

You’ve described “Burning Beard” as “midrash punk”—can you talk about this a little?

A midrash is a story created about characters or events of the Bible, sort of filling in gaps in the text with creative imagination. The original rabbis considered these divinely revealed, and the stories were usually pious. I prefer a modern sensibility and ideas that challenge traditional pieties. Presenting Moses and the God he speaks for as violent bastards is kind of in-your-face to most traditional Jews.

Why does Joseph tell false dreams to the interpreters?

He’s hoping they might not be hacks and needs to test them.

You’ve layered a lot of references in this story, including some Freud—is there anything you think readers tend to miss?

There is a direct line, I would say, between Joseph the great dream interpreter and Freud, with stop-offs at Daniel (the other great dream revealer in Ancient Israel) and the rabbi who wrote that a dream uninterpreted is like a letter unopened. But dream interpretation is very old and widespread, and usually very detailed. Freud’s The Interpretation Of Dreams is a literal translation of Oneirocritica, the great dream manual of Artemidoros, the ancient Greek who cataloged hundreds of dream omens. Moses’s beard on fire is, of course, the burning bush, about which I wrote elsewhere: “And honey, if you can’t understand a bush that burns without being consumed, there’s probably no hope for you.”

What’s the oddest dream interpretation you’ve come across?

There’s something about someone defecating on you being a sign of good fortune!

Do you have any news or upcoming work you want to share with us?

I have two things. In July, my novel The Child Eater comes out in England from Jo Fletcher Books, with its American publication a bit later in the year. Among various other sources, the book is inspired by certain Jewish myths, including a gruesome one about magical heads created out of children stolen by sorcery. There’s been great responses from people who’ve read the manuscript. Also, I and a great Tarot artist named Robert Place are about to publish The Burning Serpent Oracle, a deck and book based on a nineteenth-century card-reading tradition. We decided to raise money for it on Indiegogo and reached our minimum in under twenty-four hours.

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: Rajan Khanna
Benjamin Blattberg

What is the appeal of “weird west” fiction? Why do writers—or you yourself—write about it? What do you think readers like about it?

I’ve always been drawn to genre mash-ups, I think, because they’re a way to honor traditional tropes and yet cast them in a new light, to essentially play tropes off against one another. For me, the western has always been one of the most adaptable—it works well with fantasy, horror, or even science fiction. For me personally, there’s just something about many of those western tropes that appeals to me and evokes an instant sensory reaction.

What are some of your favorite examples of weird westerns (in any media), and what makes them your favorites?

This is a tough one, if only that I could rattle off a long list. Firefly is probably my favorite blend of science fiction and westerns (and one of my favorite television shows). In fiction, I love Joe Lansdale’s work in weird westerns, including his Jonah Hex comics with Tim Truman. Also in comics there’s The Sixth Gun by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurrtt. A few novels to round out the list would be The Six-Gun Tarot by R. S. Belcher, The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman, and, of course, Territory by Emma Bull. All of these do a great job of capturing the western feel while injecting something new into the equation, usually something supernatural or fantastical.

This is your second Quentin Ketterly story after The Way of the Wizard’s “Card Sharp.” What brought you back to Quentin and the “Card Sharp” universe?

I felt like I had only scratched the surface of what could be done with the Cards in the first story and I wanted to explore that a bit more. Early on, I decided that Quentin’s story would be ultimately told over three separate short stories. In the first story, he basically makes his peace with his past. I wanted to also consider what he would do with the Cards moving forward and also consider the cost as well.

Have you worked out the magic system of this universe or are you filling it in story-by-story? For “Second Hand,” did you first come up with the additions to the magic system (magical objects, potential to steal others’ Cards)? Or did you start from the characters (the ad hoc family of Quentin and Hiram) and the story you wanted to tell?

I started with the story and the characters. I had a good sense of the basic fundamentals of the magic system when I wrote the first story, but there seemed to be a lot of room for exploration and adding new elements. Gunsmith’s application of the Cards, for example, was something that just came with this story. And I always felt that there was a much darker side to the magic of the Cards, which cropped up here as well. But really what propelled me through this was the relationship between Quentin and Hiram. And ultimately what having this power does to people.

In “Second Hand,” danger is pretty synonymous with other people: Hiram vs. the gamblers, Quentin and Hiram vs. other Card Sharps, mothers vs. adopted daughters—and a possibility of Quentin vs. Hiram at the end. It seems like the further west Quentin goes, the less community and trust there is. Is that an effect you were going for? Do you see this “everyone for himself” conflict as particularly fitting with the western setting?

I don’t know if I see it as part of the western, necessarily. I think there’s something to losing community the further west you go, into the frontier where it often is every man (or woman) for themselves. But I think I ultimately see it as more a result of using the Cards. It separates you from the average person and also can set you up for conflict with other Card Sharps.

Did you do a lot of research—historical or genre—before writing this piece? Why move the action from the Mississippi River of “Card Sharp” to the Wyoming Territory and points west?

I did some research, but I don’t know that I would call it a lot. I tried to keep things accurate, basically. As for moving, I felt that Quentin would be roaming, trying to find out as much as he could about the Cards, and that would take him farther afield, and I wanted to get them closer to the frontier. I am currently toying with a novel set in this universe and that requires a lot more research and would involve a few more locations as well. But it’s the frontier that always draws me, out on the edge of civilization where there’s no law and plenty of danger. It is a great place to draw on the “weird” of the weird west.

Lastly, did you ever consider telling the story from a first-person point-of-view? Or from Hiram’s POV? Did you ever consider including flashbacks (as in “Card Sharp”) or did you always know this sort of mystery story required a more linear structure?

I don’t remember if I ever considered first person. I think for this one, because it’s focused on Quentin and Hiram, that if I had based it in one or the other’s POV then it would feel too weighted in one direction. I do write a lot of first-person stories, but this one just felt more like a third-person story. I don’t think I considered flashbacks for this one either, though I did return to that (in a fashion) for the third story.

Ben Blattberg is a freelance writer interested in speculative fiction, the nineteenth century, and the overlap between them. (Fun trivia: Everyone in the nineteenth century wrote an automaton story.) Among his credits, he has presented on Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ursula K. Le Guin at the Science Fiction Research Association conference; written about 1950s SF for the New York Review of Science Fiction; and gone on and on about 1990s pen-and-paper roleplaying games at Pornokitsch.com. He currently lives in Texas, blogs at incremental-catastrophe.blogspot.com, and tweets at @inCatastrophe.

Author Spotlight: Nancy Kress
John Joseph Adams

Nancy Kress’s story, “Shiva in Shadow,” is about sending two expeditions to survey the center of the galaxy. “One of [the expeditions is of] humans that cannot get very close due to furious radiation, and one [is] of uploaded AI avatars on a small probe who can do so, at least until radiation begins to affect them too much to function,” Kress said in an interview. “In a larger sense, it’s about chaos theory applied to people: how small events in human relationships can create enormous differences over time.”

The story originated when Robert Silverberg asked Kress to contribute a story to his anthology Between Worlds, which was to feature stories set at the center of the galaxy. “It was enormously challenging [to write], since I had no idea what existed at the center of the galaxy,” Kress said. “I got a book, Fulvio Melia’s The Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy (Ah-ha! a clue!) and began researching. It turns out that a lot is happening around the black hole, and happening with incredible violence. Whenever I write a hard SF story, this much research is necessary, because I am not trained as a scientist.”

The story was personal for Kress because of the characters. “The main male characters are physicists. My late husband, Charles Sheffield, was a physicist, so I suppose some of what I learned from him made it into the story,” she said. “On the other hand, Charles was nothing like either Ajit or Kane. Little of my fiction is directly biographical. Instead, I try to create characters unlike myself or my life—to deliberately explore what people not-me might feel and think and do.”

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed (and its sister magazine, Nightmare), is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars, 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 has been nominated for four Hugo Awards and four World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble.com. John is also the co-host of Wired.com's The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

BONUS CONTENT

The Myth of Everyman
Sofia Samatar

Editor’s Note: In our April 2014 issue, we ran an interview with Noah director Darren Aronofsky. Between the time the interview was conducted and its appearance in the online edition of Lightspeed, Noah’s screenwriter, Ari Handel, did an interview with Christian website The High Calling in which he offered up some problematic rationales for why the entire cast of the film was white. We found his response troubling, and felt as if we could not in good conscience publish the interview without addressing Handel’s comments in some way. As such, we recruited Sofia Samatar to write us a brief essay in response to Handel’s comments and published that alongside the interview when it ran in Lightspeed online. We now present that essay for our ebook readers here in our May issue . —John Joseph Adams

• • •

A recent interview with Noah co-writer Ari Handel recently drew attention for the way Handel answered a question about race. Asked why the entire cast of the film is white, the co-writer replied:

From the beginning, we were concerned about casting, the issue of race. What we realized is that this story is functioning at the level of myth, and as a mythical story, the race of the individuals doesn’t matter. They’re supposed to be stand-ins for all people. Either you end up with a Benetton ad or the crew of the Starship Enterprise. You either try to put everything in there, which just calls attention to it, or you just say, “Let’s make that not a factor, because we’re trying to deal with everyman.”

Handel’s response is offensive, yes. It’s also useful, because it illustrates how privilege works. Privilege works by remaining invisible. It “doesn’t matter.” It doesn’t “call attention” to itself. It’s “not a factor.”

What we’re looking at here is the power of the neutral position: the right to stand in for all people, to be “everyman.” From the neutral position, you can experience the whole range of human emotion and possibility, and you can communicate your experience to others. You’re the myth-maker; you create the story of the world. In implying that only white actors can do this, Handel’s saying the opposite of what he thinks he’s saying. He’s saying that the race of the individuals does matter. It matters enormously. It matters so much that Noah wound up with an all-white cast.

What happens if you make space for actors of color? Handel’s comparisons—a Benetton ad or the crew of the Starship Enterprise—are instructive. They suggest that putting white people and people of color in the same space is sort of ridiculous, and motivated by vulgar material concerns. Benetton, after all, is just trying to sell clothes. The diverse crew of the Enterprise—depending on whom you ask—represents either a deliberate expression of progressive politics, or part of a marketing strategy by NBC. Money, politics, the messiness of contemporary life—this isn’t the high plane of the story of Noah, the level of myth. Myth is neutral, spiritual, transcendent, and, for Handel, white; people of color are stuck in their time and place, stuck to the material world.

But Everyman is a myth—a myth both in the sense of “traditional story” and in the sense of “lie.” All people are mired in the material, stuck to their time and place, and all people have the power to create and embody stories that extend beyond their particular circumstances. In this sense, Ari Handel is right. The race of a given individual doesn’t matter; nobody has a neutral body. But it matters when we pretend that some of us do, and when we allow only those people to stand in for all of us. Exclusion, not inclusion, makes race a factor.

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria, winner of the 2014 Crawford Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, Rhysling, and British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in a number of places, including Strange Horizons, Tor.com, and Stone Telling. She is a co-editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, and teaches literature and writing at California State University Channel Islands. Find her at sofiasamatar.com.

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Coming up in June, in Lightspeed . . .

It's our special anniversary issue, Women Destroy Science Fiction!, an all-SF extravaganza entirely written—and edited!—by women.

In this special issue, which is guest-edited by long-time Lightspeed assistant editor Christie Yant, we’ll have ELEVEN all-new, original science fiction stories, plus four short story reprints, a novella reprint, and for the first time ever, an array of fifteen flash fiction stories. But wait—there’s more! In addition to all that goodness, we’ll also have more than two dozen personal essays by women talking about their experiences reading and writing science fiction, not to mention seven nonfiction articles and our editorial.

Because this issue is so super-sized, we can’t fit all of the contents on our website without drastically reorganizing everything, so we’ll be publishing about half of the issue in the web version of Lightspeed, while the rest of the issue will be exclusive to the ebook edition. If you’re a subscriber, don’t worry—you get all this extra special goodness as part of your regular subscription.

Here’s what we’ve got in store for you in this special issue:

Original science fiction (edited by Christie Yant) by Seanan McGuire (“Each to Each”), N.K. Jemisin (“Walking Awake”), Charlie Jane Anders (“The Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick”), Maria Dahvana Headley (“Dim Sun”), Amal El-Mohtar (“The Lonely Sea in the Sky”), Kris Millering (“A Word Shaped Like Bones”), Heather Clitheroe (“Cuts Both Ways”), Rhonda Eikamp (“The Case of the Passionless Bees”), Gabriella Stalker (“In the Image of Man”), Elizabeth Porter Birdsall (“A Burglary, Addressed by a Young Lady”), and K.C. Norton (“Canth”).

Original flash fiction (edited by Robyn Lupo) by Carrie Vaughn (“Salvage”), Ellen Denham (“The Mouths”), Samantha Murray (“Everything That Has Already Been Said”), Holly Schofield (“Standard Deviant”), Cathy Humble (“Getting on in Years”), Emily Fox (“A Guide to Grief”), Tina Connolly (“See DANGEROUS EARTH-POSSIBLES!”), Effie Seiberg (“Ro-Sham-Bot”), Marina J. Lostetter (“A Debt Repaid”), Rhiannon Rasmussen (“The Hymn of Ordeal, No. 23”), Sarah Pinsker (“The Sewell Home for the Temporally Displaced”), Kim Winternheimer (“M1A”), Anaid Perez (“Emoticon”), Katherine Crighton (“The Lies We Tell Our Children”), and Vanessa Torline (“#TrainFightTuesday”).

Reprints (edited by Rachel Swirsky) by Alice Sheldon a/k/a James Tiptree, Jr. (“Love is the Plan the Plan is Death”), Eleanor Arnason (“Knapsack Poems”), Maria Romasco Moore (“The Great Loneliness”), and Tananarive Due (“Like Daughter”). And our novella reprint for this issue will be “The Cost to Be Wise” by Maureen F. McHugh.

Nonfiction (edited by Wendy N. Wagner) by Tiptree Award founder Pat Murphy (“Illusion, Expectation, and World Domination through Bake Sales”), Stina Leicht (“How to Engineer a Self-Rescuing Princess”), Nisi Shawl (“Screaming Together: Making Women’s Voices Heard”), Tracie Welser (“The Status Quo Cannot Hold: A Few Words from the Women Who Wrote/Are Writing the Goddamn Book on Destroying Science Fiction”), plus a roundtable interview with Ursula K. LeGuin, Pat Cadigan, Ellen Datlow, and Nancy Kress by Mary Robinette Kowal and a feature interview by Jennifer Willis with comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick. Our cover for this issue is brand-new art from Galen Dara, who also conducted our artist showcase interview this month—a spotlight on the (female) illustrators who provided the artwork for selected stories in this issue.

Plus, we’ll also be showcasing a series of personal essays from staff members Jude Griffin, Gail Marsella, DeAnna Knippling, Georgina Kamsika, Sandra Wickham, Kristi Charish, and Rachel Swirsky and from the following other excellent people: Seanan McGuire, E. Catherine Tobler, Brooke Bolander, Marissa Lingen, Sylvia Spruck Wrigley, O. J. Cade, Anne Charnock, Cheryl Morgan, Pat Murphy, Sheila Finch, Kat Howard, Amy Sterling Castil, Nancy Jane Moore, Liz Argall, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Anaea Lay, Helena Bell, Stina Leicht, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Juliette Wade, and Kameron Hurley.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed. Thanks for reading!

Subscriptions & Ebooks

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes 96 stories (about 480,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! For more information, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently 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. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), will cost you just $25 (about $11 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have 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!).

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Ebooks: As you probably know, the majority of our interviews are provided by The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, a podcast our esteemed editor produces for Wired.com. You’ve been able to read transcripts of most of the Geek’s Guide interviews here in Lightspeed for quite a while now, but now you can also read transcripts of the panel discussions. If you hop over to geeksguideshow.com and click on Transcripts, you can see which episodes are available. We’ve got the episodes bundled in threes, so if you buy one of the ebooks (for just $2.99), you get three full episode transcripts, which all contain a variety of panel discussions on all things geeky. You’ll also find one of our panel transcripts as bonus content at the end of this month’s ebook edition. Enjoy!

About the Editor

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. He has been nominated for six Hugo Awards and five World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine, and is a producer for Wired’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.