TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 74, July 2016

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, July 2016

SCIENCE FICTION

Small Medicine
Genevieve Valentine

The One Who Isn't
Ted Kosmatka

Hello Again
Seth Fried

5x5
Jilly Dreadful

FANTASY

Magnifica Angelica Superable
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

Finding Home
A. Merc Rustad

Some Pebbles in the Palm
Kenneth Schneyer

The Child Support of Cromdor The Condemned
Spencer Ellsworth

NOVELLA

Surfacing
Walter Jon Williams

NOVEL EXCERPTS

Stories of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang

NONFICTION

Movie Review: Warcraft
Carrie Vaughn

Book Reviews: July 2016
Andrew Liptak

Interview: Alex Garland
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Genevieve Valentine

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

Ted Kosmatka

A. Merc Rustad

Seth Fried

Kenneth Schneyer

Jilly Dreadful

Spencer Ellsworth

Walter Jon Williams

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2016 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Galen Dara

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial, July 2016

John Joseph Adams | 877 words

Welcome to issue seventy-four of Lightspeed!

This month, we have original science fiction by Ted Kosmatka (“The One Who Isn’t”) and Jilly Dreadful (“5×5”), along with SF reprints by Genevieve Valentine (“Small Medicine”) and Seth Fried (“Hello Again”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (“Magnifica Angelica Superable”) and Kenneth Schneyer (“Some Pebbles in the Palm”), and fantasy reprints by A. Merc Rustad (“Finding Home”) and Spencer Ellsworth (“The Child Support of Cromdor the Condemned”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns, and an interview with screenwriter and film director Alex Garland.

For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive reprint of Walter Jon Williams’s novella “Surfacing” and a novel excerpt.

Lightspeed Reader Survey (Open June 1 – July 31)

From June 1 – July 31, we’re conducting a new reader survey, to learn a bit more about our readers. Doing this periodically helps us present accurate (but anonymous) information about our readership to our potential advertising partners, which in turn helps support the magazine. It also allows us to see what kind of readers our readers are, which in turn helps us fine-tune things so that Lightspeed can be as good as it can be.

So, if you would please take the time to complete our Reader Survey, we would greatly appreciate it. To demonstrate our thanks for filling it out, we’re going to give a free lifetime ebook subscription to Lightspeed to one randomly select one lucky survey respondent.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/2016-reader-survey to complete the survey. Thank you!

Nebula and Stoker Awards Results

We’re thrilled to report that Alyssa Wong’s story, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” from the Queers Destroy Horror! special issue of Nightmare (Oct. 2015), won the Nebula Award for best short story! Congrats to Alyssa and to all of the other winners. You can find a full list of the winners at SFWA.org/nebula-awards.

Lightspeed’s streak of losing Nebula Awards, however, has remained intact, and is now at fourteen in a row and counting. Condolences (and another round of congratulations) to Amal El-Mohtar and Brooke Bolander who were also nominated this year for their stories in Lightspeed.

“Hungry Daughters” was also up for the Stoker Award, but, alas, it was not able to claim a rare Nebula-Stoker double-victory. For a full list of the winners, visit horror.org.

Locus Award Winners

In other awards news, the Locus Awards winners have now been announced. Alas, nothing Lightspeed or Nightmare-related won, but as they say: it is an honor to be nominated. “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” and Amal El-Mohtar’s “Madeleine” (Lightspeed, June 2015)—both up for best short story–lost to “Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld), and Brooke Bolander’s “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” (Lightspeed, February 2015)—up for best novelette—lost to Neil Gaiman’s “Black Dog” (Trigger Warning). In the editor category, yours truly lost out to David G. Hartwell, who sadly passed away in January. In any case, congratulations again to Alyssa, Amal, and Brooke, and to all of the other finalists, and thanks to all who voted for them (and me). You’ll find a complete list of the winners and other finalists at locusmag.com.

Inaugural Eugie Award Finalists Announced

Finalists for the inaugural Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction (the Eugie Award), which “honors stories that are irreplaceable, that inspire, enlighten, and entertain,” have been announced, and we’re pleased to report that “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong (Nightmare, Oct. 2015) is among them!

The winner will be honored at Dragon Con, to be held September 2-5, 2016 in Atlanta GA. Congrats to Alyssa and to all of the other finalists! For more information about the award, and a complete list of the finalists, visit www.eugiefoster.com.

John Joseph Adams Books News

In my role as editor of John Joseph Adams Books for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, I just acquired two books in a new series by Molly Tanzer (author of Vermilion).

The first book is Creatures of Will and Temper, a Victorian-era urban fantasy inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which epee-fencing enthusiast Evadne Gray and her younger sister are drawn into a secret and dangerous London underworld of pleasure-seeking demons and bloodthirsty diabolists, with only Evadne’s skill with a blade standing between them and certain death.

Publication of book one will likely happen in late 2017. Can’t wait for you all to read it!

• • • •

That’s all we have to report this month. I hope you enjoy the issue, and thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a new SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated ten times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Small Medicine

Genevieve Valentine | 4697 words

“You remember your grandmother,” they’d said to Sofia when she was seven, and she’d looked up and said, “Not this one.”

Her parents always told it smiling, like it was clever of her to have noticed Grandmother had changed; who could have told the difference, they asked each other, and her grandfather nodded his familiar amazement, and in the corner the machine that wasn’t her grandmother looked back and forth with a smile.

Her grandmother died.

It’s all right that she did; grandparents die. Peter at school’s grandparents had died.

But Grandmother must have known Grandfather would miss her too much, because she had herself copied, and Mori made a version of her that was perfect enough for Grandfather.

That first time they brought Grandmother to see Sofia, the machine bent over a little, rested open hands on her knees like anyone did when they were trying to be friendly to a child they’d never met.

“I’m Theodosia. Your grandmother.”

You’re not my grandmother, she thought, held out her right hand on the end of an arm stretched as long as it could go.

It was a very brief pause before Grandmother reached out to meet her handshake; in life, she had always been polite.

They must have programmed her to love telling stories more than her real grandmother had, because whenever her parents took Sofia to visit, Grandmother got her alone as soon as she could and tucked Sofia up against her side for reading. (She was squishy, like flesh, but always the same temperature—a little cool in summer and a little warm in winter—and if you pressed your hand hard enough to her side there was a curved metal panel where ribs should be.)

She’d read stories about foxes and mermaids and ghosts, about whales and the birds that lived in cracks in the mountains.

When her parents weren’t around, Grandmother read books about Tom, who had problems at school: because some kids were mean, because they didn’t have a work assignment yet and weren’t sure what they were good at, because they had done something wrong on a test and felt guilty until they confessed to the kindly schoolmaster.

“What was Tom assigned?” Sofia asked once.

“The book doesn’t say, little Sofa,” said Grandmother. It had been her grandmother’s name for her. Neither of them really wanted her to say it, and it scratched.

“Did he like it?”

“Assignments are given because of what you’re good at, little Sofa, not because of what you like.”

Sofia didn’t know anyone like this (these were charity kids who lived at their schools, not like a normal school), and at first it was like the mermaid stories, but she thought about Tom more than she ever thought about ghosts.

She asked her parents once, while working on her homework (polymer sculptures, smokeswirls of blue and gray, she hated it) what would happen to Tom if he hated his work assignment.

Next time they went to visit Grandmother, she read a story about monkeys who never come down from the trees.

“I want a story about Tom,” Sofia said.

There was a little pause; under her shoulder, something inside Grandmother was whirring.

“I don’t know any stories about Tom,” Grandmother said. “Would you like a story about a rabbit that lives in the snow?”

That was strange, Sofia thought, a cloud gathering inside her just above her stomach, but she said, “Yes.”

Grandmother pulled her closer, and opened the book so it was half on her lap and half on Sofia’s, so Sofia could help her turn the pages. Sofia’s shoulder pressed into Grandmother’s side, Grandmother’s arm a cradle, slightly cool, on the back of her neck.

Grandmother was the one who noticed Sofia’s neck was swollen; she was the one who first mentioned that something must be wrong.

The pharmaceutical company has ads for it now, in public, on buses for people to think about alongside vocational training and designer bags. Sofia always ends up right in front of one; a law of public transit.

There’s a picture of a Victorian nursemaid, hustling some dour sepia-tone children into a Technicolor future as doctors smile into middle space; there’s copy about medicine finally being able to take care of them the way you would if you could.

NANIMED, they named it, and honestly somebody should be ashamed of that branding. (She can imagine the hundreds of hours of marketing meetings that led to someone finally caving in to that.) The promise underneath: Small Medicine. Big Difference.

The fine print isn’t very fine. The costs are significant, but they’ve never pretended this is a solution for the people. The results are glowing, the benefits immense, the side effects minimal.

There hasn’t been a single death in the nano program. There wouldn’t be.

At Mori, we know you care.

We know you love your family. We know you worry about leaving them behind. And we know you’ve asked for more information about us, which means you’re thinking about giving your family the greatest gift of all:

You.

Studies have shown the devastating impact grief has on family bonds and mental health. The departure of someone beloved is a tragedy without a proper name.

Could you let the people you love live without you?

If they’d brought Grandmother back just for her, it would have been simpler. Worse, but simpler.

But when they come to visit, her mother’s eyes still get misty when Grandmother stands up to embrace her. Grandfather still sits beside her as they watch TV at night, and when they all go out for dinner he holds her hand to help her in and out of the car. She doesn’t remember him ever doing that for her real grandmother; maybe he needs to do it now. Sofia doesn’t know if a robot’s balance is better or worse than hers.

Well, not hers. She has the best balance of anyone she knows. She can do a dozen cartwheels and never even be lightheaded. The nanos make sure.

But she’s also seen whole days go by when Grandfather asks her about school and watches movies with her father and give off-kilter advice to her mother and never looks once at the corner where Grandmother’s sitting, eyes shifting with the conversation but mouth never moving, or sometimes not even that.

(They haven’t explained to her yet that Grandmother has settings, that you can close her off whenever you’re tired of her. She’s new to her nanos; maybe they just didn’t want to give Sofia any ideas.)

Technically they’re in her system to regulate her antibodies and moderate her immune responses.

“You’re lucky you caught it when you did,” the doctor told her parents, and they nodded like they’d caught anything.

“What will happen to me now?” Sofia asked. She remembers thinking of Grandmother’s metal plate, even though she could feel that nothing like that had happened. She couldn’t feel that anything had happened at all.

But it had, because while the doctor explained to her parents the wonderful side effects of nanos, he smiled calmly and made a cut with his scalpel above her knee, and before she could even open her mouth to cry the skin was furling back together, smoothing over. It still stung (psychosomatic, every doctor since had said when she told them it hurt), but there was nothing left of the injury.

If it wasn’t for the stream of blood that was already drying up, you’d never know there had ever been a wound. No one would have believed her if she’d told them.

They take the family on a trip the next year to celebrate; Sofia had always been a little tired, a little sickly, before the nanos, just enough that the trip now felt like something her parents had been wanting to do, and she’d been holding them back.

The resort is at the top of the mountain, surrounded by wide lawns and dropping off to views of the city in the river valley below. Her parents go skiing. Her grandfather spends long afternoons in the conservatory, speaking to a woman who looks a little younger than he is, who smiles at his jokes sometimes and sometimes looks away when he’s talking, and he has to talk about something else to get her to look at him again.

Sofia can see it from the library, wonders if he knows.

She ends up with Grandmother a lot, because when she doesn’t ask to spend time with Grandmother then Grandmother will sit in the hotel room all day without moving, and Sofia’s young (ten, maybe—a long time back) but she realizes that Grandmother likes having something to do, even if it’s only to read stories until the little thing inside of her starts whirring from activity and she needs to rest a little while before they get up.

The library has grown-up books, and Grandmother tries her best to wade through history and to make novels for grown-ups sound interesting. Sofia doesn’t care what they read; she’s mostly watching her grandfather.

“Do you see Grandfather?” she asks finally. It’s a direct question—Grandmother has to answer.

Grandmother looks up, where Grandfather is sitting at a table with the woman. They’re sharing a pot of tea. The woman is arguing with him. Grandfather’s laughing.

“He never did this when my grandmother was alive,” says Sofia.

“I remember,” Grandmother says; her voice sounds a little strained from reading.

But she isn’t angry, which she should be if Grandfather was leaving her alone like this—not like the machines that help you at the bank, that are always apologizing and never get angry.

You’re not my grandmother, she thinks, folds her arms, wonders why it stings.

“I want to go outside,” she says.

She’s embarrassed that she has to hold Grandmother’s arm—Grandmother’s balance on the rocks isn’t very good at all—and she purposely walks them all the way across the lawn, as slow as she can, so that everyone in the whole conservatory sees them. Sofia hopes they’re asking about that angry girl and that poor abandoned woman. They don’t have to know Grandmother’s a Memento. That’s not their business. Grandfather should feel as guilty as if she was real.

They end up at one of the overlooks, where there are a few chairs and tables left for guests to sit near the railing and enjoy the steep drop of the valley, the little pockmarks of all the houses.

The back of Sofia’s neck burns, and her hands are sweaty, and she hates everything, everything, that’s happening to her.

I could jump, Sofia thinks.

If she jumped, the nanos would repair her. They might blow out before they finished, depending on the damage and how fast they could breed, but by the time the paramedics reached her, her spinal cord would be laced up tight, her pulverized face propped up the way the nanos knew her skull should look.

(If she lived another hundred years, she’d barely wrinkle. Her skin would be pulled across the bone the way they’d all been told. She’d never look like Grandmother, no matter how old she lived to be.)

If she lived for more than ten seconds before the nanos gave out, she’d be able to see herself dying—the nanos are designed to think her eyesight is important, and it would be the first thing they improved if something went wrong. They have their orders.

“This is beautiful,” says Grandmother. “I wish your grandmother could have seen it.”

Sofia’s head snaps around; Grandmother’s smiling right at her.

“There you two are,” says her grandfather, and Grandmother turns, gives the smile her grandmother used to, says, “Have you seen the view? It reminds me so much of the year we spent in that penthouse apartment, where the trees looked like a dollhouse.”

Grandfather smiles (Sofia looks for signs of guilt, but with him she can never really tell).

“I remember,” he says, and takes her hand, and Sofia looks back and forth, betrayed.

She makes fists so tight they cut into her palms, but of course they heal; she doesn’t even notice until she gets back to the room and sees the blood already drying.

A memorial doll from Mori maps your memory and a personality sequence—the things that make you uniquely you—into a synthetic reproduction. The process is painstaking, and leaves behind a version of you that, while it can never replace you, can comfort those who have lost you.

Imagine knowing your parents never have to say goodbye. Imagine knowing you can still read bedtime stories to your children, no matter what may happen.

A memorial doll from Mori is a gift you give to everyone who loves you.

The next time her parents visit Grandfather, Sofia stays home.

She can’t claim she’s sick—that doesn’t hold much water any more. She claims a history project that requires a lot of dull reading they can trust her to do at home alone. “What’s she going to do, hurt herself?” her father asks on the way out, and her mother laughs softly. It’s an old joke between them. It’s a relief to have a child so well looked after.

Sofia’s a coward, when it comes right down to it. She tests limits—the depth of a cut, the length of it, the speed of the blade—but she never tests it with something that really matters. She’s never cut a finger off; if the nanos don’t get to her in time she’d have a problem.

(If they don’t heal the cuts in time, that’s different; then she’d just die.)

Grandfather and Grandmother come to visit in the winter, when holiday lights are everywhere and they can walk through the city that drowns out conversation, looking at the rhinestone dioramas and holographic models in every window and buying fresh sweet buns from a street vendor.

“Sofia, eat!” says her mother when Sofia tries to put half the bun in her pocket. She chokes it down.

(She tried to explain to her parents that the nanos are so efficient that she’s hardly ever hungry. They tell her to stop making up excuses. Some days Sofia just doesn’t want the argument.

Some days she wants to pick up the bread knife and cut right through her arm.)

Grandmother eats hers, same as everyone; she’s always had just the appetite she should. No one stares, all the time they’re out. Once or twice someone gives them a knowing look, like they had the same troubles with their Memento, before they stopped bringing it out.

“Mother, you should be smiling,” says her mother, and Grandmother smiles obediently, but her parents glance at each other and Sofia knows Grandmother’s not behaving like she should. They’ll be opening up her control panel on their computer when they get home, clicking at responsiveness and enthusiasm levels until Grandmother smiles when she’s supposed to.

Peter, from Sofia’s class, waves at her vaguely as he crosses the street with his father. She lifts one hand to him as they go by.

There are two little scars on his face from spots—you can’t see them from here, but she sits behind him in class. One is beside his nose and disappears when he smiles, and one is on his jaw; when he bends his head to his tablet to read notes, the little dark dry mark pulls for an instant at the soft skin of his neck.

They’re little imperfections; Sofia can’t stop looking.

Sofia’s father gets a chance to oversee the development of a subsidiary of his company. They spend a year in a country where Sofia speaks only a halting version of the language, a child’s use, and it makes her sullen not to be able to read as fast as she wants to. (It doesn’t bother her that she can’t talk to her classmates. Programming language is easy to translate, and she doesn’t see the point of making friends for just a year.)

Sometimes she sees a picture of a fox or a flock of birds and thinks about her grandmother, and of Grandmother, and turning the pages carefully as one of them read to her. When she’s that lonely, it doesn’t matter which.

But there are Vestiges in this city; they have the company brand on their arms so you know they’re not human—Mori orders—because otherwise there’s no way to tell.

The people who bring them out are always holding their elbows, their wrists, making sure they take drinks with their mark visible to the room.

Sofia thinks about Grandmother, gets knots in her stomach that never let up.

She stops going out places—museums and libraries and tourist traps always have someone there trying to get their Vestige to point at something, and at some point Sofia just stares at people’s wrists everywhere she goes, because it’s easier.

Her appetite drops so much they have to take her to a doctor to check the health of her nanos.

“They’re under strain,” the doctor says, and her parents look at her without understanding what the problem could be in a daughter who never gets sick.

They come home at the end of the year. The air, they tell their friends, was bad for Sofia.

Sofia’s fourteen when Grandmother comes to visit them.

“Your grandfather thought it would be nice for you to spend some time together,” her mother says, which means she needs a babysitter, and that her grandfather doesn’t want Grandmother any more. She wonders about the woman from the vacation on the mountain.

“Hello, Sofa,” says Grandmother, like it was the first time all over again.

Factory settings, thinks Sofia, and goes cold.

“It’s Sofia.”

Grandmother smiles a little wider. “Oh, come on, Sofa, a grandmother has to have her special names.”

You’re not my grandmother, she thinks.

“Your special name is a barcode,” she says.

She knows it’s cruel, but she still remembers the top of the mountain. She knows better than this. Grandmother knows that she knows.

There’s a little pause, Grandmother’s pupils shifting minutely as she recalibrates, and Sofia wonders if she looks like that too, when the nanos are hunting down something that’s the matter with her—if her eyes go unfocused as her body concentrates on something without her permission.

She waits to be chastised like her real grandmother might have (it’s been too long, she doesn’t remember), or for Grandmother to pretend she doesn’t know what Sofia means, but she only says, “It’s good to see you again.”

“Yeah, I’m programmed to be happy to see you, too,” says Sofia, closes her bedroom door behind her.

She sits down at her computer, pulls up Search.

Can you turn off a Mori, or is that a crime?

She asks for Grandmother’s password.

“Something’s different with Grandmother,” she says, sounding as solemn and grown up as they liked when she was a child. “I want to help.”

She sits up three nights in a row, reading through the code, reading through forums of Mori customers and Memento programming enthusiasts who probably have a talking head on their countertop.

Grandmother’s been recalibrated back to initial client specifications four times as much as factory settings would suggest. Either Grandfather has exacting tastes, or Grandmother has made some decisions her grandmother wouldn’t have made.

“Are you hungry?” she asks, halfway through making a sandwich, and Grandmother’s eyebrows go up before she can smile politely and say, “No, thank you, since you’re asking. But I’m glad you’re eating. I worry about your appetite.”

She scowls. “Did Mom and Dad tell you to say that?”

“No.”

“I don’t have to eat much,” says Sofia, makes her eyes as wide as the kid on the NaniMed poster, drops her voice in parody. “I’m being cared for.”

Blank response from Grandmother. Maybe she hasn’t seen the ads.

(They’ve moved the ads to TV; surely Grandmother’s seen them. The actress they hired for the ad looks nothing like the Victorian picture she comes out of, which is funny, considering that nanos can probably alter your appearance if you ask them nicely before you put them in.)

“I got nanos,” Sofia says, sits down next to Grandmother. Grandmother sets down her crossword and her pen. Everything’s filled out, perfectly; Sofia wonders how long she was in her room while Grandmother’s been sitting here pretending not to know.

“Remember? The year we went on vacation.”

“I didn’t know that,” Grandmother says.

Grandfather must have had her dialed down that year.

“Yeah. After you diagnosed me, they had them put in.”

“I’m sorry,” says Grandmother. “I’d hoped you just got well.”

That’s the first time anyone’s suggested she’s still sick; maybe it’s the first time anyone’s referred to the work of the nanos at all.

“How are they?”

Sofia looks up at Grandmother, holds out her hand for the pen.

She gouges her arm with it, a long practiced line from forearm to wrist that leaves a blue thread in the first welling-up of blood.

Grandmother doesn’t look at her arm. Of course not; Grandmother would know what it looks like when the nanos pull you back together and patch the seams.

Sofia watches her Grandmother not looking, counts down from ten.

“Two.” She stops. Her arm’s pristine.

“Guess they got faster,” she says, in a voice that feels like it’s trapped in a cavern.

Grandmother reaches out, his fingers hovering above the place where a scar should be. There’s an expression that looks like it hurts her to make; it comes and goes.

“I don’t like that you . . . why do you do it?”

Obvious question. She should have some offhand answer ready that makes her sound like a careless rich kid. But she’s never told anyone.

She shrugs. “I’m worried I’ll live forever. I’m not even angry. I just want to be wrong.”

Grandmother doesn’t say anything. After a little while Sofia settles against her.

“My grandmother’s name was Theodosia,” she says. She hadn’t known until she looked up the source code. “Did she like it?”

“Yes,” says Grandmother.

“Do you?”

After a little pause, Grandmother says, “Yes.”

As stockholders on a level of financial benefit you’re not supposed to mention in polite company, the family gets invited to a preview of the Mori exhibit that will be going up at the Modern Art Museum.

Moris Welcome, reads the card.

“Why wouldn’t they be?”

Sofia’s mother cuts her a look meant to shut her up, marks 3+M on the RSVP.

The day of, she knocks on Grandmother’s door and finds her dressed in her best afternoon suit, sitting straighter than her grandmother ever had.

When Grandmother stands up, she runs her hands along her skirt.

“You look nice,” Sofia says for no reason, and Grandmother looks up and smiles.

At the reception they clap politely for someone in Public Relations who gets up and makes a speech that’s quite carefully not talking about how public it’s about to make the memories of its obliging Moris, who signed the contract without striking the education clause. If Mori isn’t charging for the exhibit, it’s for academic benefit; nothing you can do.

Sofia tries to imagine a museum exhibit where her nanos are on display, alongside little flickering records of everything they’ve done to her body. How many times incision would come up. How none of them would ever say how Grandmother had read her a story a long time ago and noticed that something was wrong.

Her parents seem excited—Paul Whitcover has been curating the exhibit personally, which is the kind of press you apparently can’t buy. Grandmother, on her father’s left, looks straight ahead, as still as the year she was turned off.

“Please enjoy the exhibit,” the Public Relations woman says, “and thank you so much for letting us share with the world what your loved ones have meant to us.”

Almost everybody who stands up touches their Mori on the elbow, even though most of the Moris are already moving in the right direction.

Sofia flexes her hands in her pockets. Somewhere she can’t even feel it any more, the white blood cells in her body are marching her nanomeds where they need to go.

(They only do what they need to do, the doctors had told her, to reassure her. Your body gives all the orders. The human body is a remarkable thing.)

The exhibit has aesthetic components and explanations on how speech patterns can be recreated and anticipated by algorithms. Sofia hopes the person they used for the example on how to build a convincing facial structure gave permission, and that they’re not here to see half their face stretched over biofoam on one half of a head of gleaming chrome.

“The most amazing thing we’ve discovered,” Whitcover’s saying, modestly smiling like he can hear the music swelling behind him, “is that despite everyone’s individuality—and there’s infinite individuality—how many things we really share. We’re all alike in what we really value. It’s wonderful how alike we are.”

They cut to a building lobby in soft focus—there are no markers of a hospital, and Sofia suspects that’s on purpose. A man with gray hair at his temples comes out into the center of the frame, waving. The camera cuts to a tearful wife, her arm around a golden-haired child. The child waves back, beams, starts running. As they embrace, it fades back to Whitcover, his voice where their laughter should be.

“Mori’s work right now is to help one family at a time, but there’s hope, someday, that the work we’re doing can bring all of us closer together.”

The dark room behind it is enormous, ceilings like a cathedral, and a mosaic of memories. Empty landscapes and arguments and babies and the lowering of coffins, screaming fights playing out in silence, embraces so tight there’s no telling whose memory it is.

Sofia stares straight up for a long time. Her breath presses against the front of her throat, in and out.

At the edge of the dome, creased where it meets the wall, one of her grandmother’s memories: Sofia, seven years old, sitting cross-legged on the floor and solemnly paging through a book. There’s a scab on one knee; maybe her last one ever.

Her parents are wandering through vaguely, back out to the reception room.

Grandmother hovers near the door, neck craned. She’s seen it, too.

When Sofia’s close enough, Grandmother says, “I don’t think I would have let them do it,” her arms shoved into her pockets, frowning so hard Sofia can hear the metal straining underneath.

Sofia touches Grandmother’s elbow. Grandmother looks at her; Sofia looks back.

“No,” she says, “I don’t think you would have. Come on, they’ll be looking for us.”

They walk side by side through the party, waiting for a chance to go home.

©2014 by Genevieve Valentine. Originally published in Upgraded, edited by Neil Clarke. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Genevieve Valentine is the author of Mechanique, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Persona, and Icon. She has written CATWOMAN for DC Comics and XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS for Dynamite. Her nonfiction and criticism has appeared at NPR.org, The Atlantic, LA Review of Books, and the AV Club. Her love of bad movies is evergreen; you can read about it at genevievevalentine.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

The One Who Isn't

Ted Kosmatka | 4460 words

It starts with light.

Then heat.

A slow bleed through of memory.

Catchment, containment. A white-hot agony coursing through every nerve, building to a sizzling hum—and then it happens. Change of state.

And what comes out the other side is something new.

• • • •

The woman held up the card. “What color do you see?”

“Blue,” the child said.

“And this one?” The woman held up another card. Her face was a porcelain mask—a smooth, perfect oval except for a slight pointiness at her chin.

The child looked closely at the card. It didn’t look like the other one. It didn’t look like any color he’d ever seen before. He felt he should know the color, but he couldn’t place it.

“It’s blue,” he said.

The woman shook her head. “Green,” she said. “The color is green.” She put the card down on the table and stood. She walked to the window. The room was a circular white drum, taller than it was wide. One window, one door.

The boy couldn’t remember having been outside the room, though that couldn’t be right. His memory was broken, the fragments tailing off into darkness.

“Some languages don’t have different words for blue and green,” the woman said. “In some languages, they’re the same.”

“What does that mean?”

The woman turned toward him. “It means you’re getting worse.”

“Worse how?”

She did not answer him. Instead she stayed with him for an hour and helped him with his eyes. She walked around the room and named things. “Door,” she said. “Door.” And he understood and remembered.

Floor, walls, ceiling, table, chair.

She named all these things.

“And you,” the child said. “What name do you go by?”

The woman took a seat across from him at the table. She had pale blond hair. Her eyes, in the perfect armatures of their porcelain sockets, were blue, he decided. Or they were green. “That’s easy,” she said from behind her mask. “I’m the one who isn’t you.”

• • • •

When it was time to sleep, she touched a panel on the wall and a bed slid out from the flat surface. She tucked him in and pulled the blankets up to his chin. The blankets were cool against his skin. “Tell me a story,” the child said.

“What story?”

He tried to remember a story. Any story that she might have told him in the past, but nothing came.

“I can’t think of any,” he said.

“Do you remember your name?”

He thought for a moment. “You told me that you were the one who wasn’t me.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s who I am, but what about you? Do you remember your name?”

He thought for a while. “No.”

The woman nodded. “Then I’ll tell you the story of the queen,” she said.

“What queen?”

“She the Unnamed,” the woman said. “It’s your favorite.”

She touched the wall by the bed. The lights dimmed.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

And so he did.

Then she cleared her throat and began to recite the story—line after line, in a slow, steady rhythm, starting at the beginning.

After a while, he began to cry.

• • • •

Upload protocol. Arbitration ()

Story sixteen: contents = [She the Unnamed] />

Function/Query : Who wrote the story? {

/File response : (She) wrote it. {

Function/Query : What do you mean, she wrote it. That isn’t possible. {

/File response : Narratives are vital to understanding the world. Experience without narrative isn’t consciousness. {

• • • •

And so it was written.

In a time before history, in a place beyond maps, there was once a queen, she the unnamed, who dared defy her liege husband.

She was beautiful and young, with tresses of gold. Forced to marry a king she did not love, she bore him a son out of royal duty—a child healthy, and strong, and dearly loved.

Over the following years, unease crept into the queen’s heart as she noted the king’s cruelties, his obsession for magics. Gradually, as she learned the true measure of the man who wore the crown, she came to fear the influence that he might have on the child. For this reason she risked everything, summoned her most trusted confidants, and sent the boy into secret hiding, to live among the priests of the valley where the king could never find him.

The king was enraged. Never had he been defied.

“You will not darken this boy’s heart,” she told the king when he confronted her. “Our son is safe, in a place where you cannot change him.”

Such was the king’s fury at this betrayal that upon his throne he declared his queen an abhorrence, and he stripped her name from every book and every tongue. None could say her name nor remember it, and she was expunged from history in all ways but one. The deepest temporal magic was invoked, a sorcery beyond reach of all but the blackest rage—and the woman was condemned to give birth again and again to the self-same child whom the king had lost.

The queen had expected death, or banishment, but not this.

And so through magic she gave birth to an immaculate child. And for three years the new child would grow—first crawling, then walking—a strapping boy at his mother’s side, until the king would come to the tower cell and take the child on the high stone. “Do you regret?” He would ask his queen.

“Yes,” she’d sob, while the guards gripped her arms.

The king would hold the child high and say, “This is because of your mother.” And then slice the child’s throat.

The mother would scream and cry, and through a chaste, dark magic conceive again, and for nine months carry, and for one day labor, and for three years love a new child, raised again in the tower cell. A boy sweet and kind with eyes of blue.

Until the king would again return and ask the mother, “Do you regret?”

“Yes, please spare him,” she’d cry, groveling at his feet. “I regret.”

The king would hold his son high and say, “This is because of your mother.” And then slice his tender throat.

Again and again the pattern repeated, son after son, as the mother screamed and tore at her hair.

Against such years could hells be measured.

The mother tried refusing her child when he was born, hoping that would save him. “This child means nothing to me,” she said.

And the king responded, “This is because of your mother,” and wet his blade anew.

“Do you know why I wait three years?” he asked her once as she crouched beside a body small and pale. He touched her hair tenderly. “It is so you’ll know the child understands.”

And so it continued.

A dozen sons, then a score, until the people throughout the land called the king heir-killer, and still he continued to destroy his children. Sons who were loved. Sons who were ignored. A score of sons, then a hundred. Sons beyond counting. Every son different, every son the same.

Until the mother woke one day from a nightmare, for all her dreams were nightmares, and with her hand clutching her abdomen, felt a child quicken in her womb, and knew suddenly what she had to do. And soon it came to pass that she bore a son, and for one full year loved him, and for a second year plotted, and for a third year whispered, shaping a young heart for a monstrous task. She darkened his heart as no mother ever dreamed. She darkened him beyond anything the king could have done.

And in time the king finally came to the high tower and lifted his son high and asked, “Do you regret?”

She responded, “I regret that I was born, and every moment after.”

The king smiled and said, “This is because of your mother.”

He raised his knife to the child’s throat, but the three-year-old twisted and turned, like his mother had shown him, and drove a needle-thin blade into his father’s eye.

The king screamed, and fell from the tower, and died then slowly in a spreading pool of blood, while the boy’s laughter rang out.

Thus was the Monster King brought into the world—a murderer of his father, made monstrous by his mother, and now heir to all the lands and armies of the wasted territories.

And the world would pay a heavy price.

• • • •

The next week, the woman came again. She opened the door and brought the child his lunch. There was an apple and bread and chicken.

“This is your favorite food, isn’t it?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” the child said after thinking about it for a moment. “I think it is.”

He wondered where the woman went when she was not with him. She never spoke of her time apart. He wondered if she ceased to exist when she was not with him. It seemed possible.

After a while, they went over the cards again.

“Blue,” the boy said. “Blue.”

The woman pointed

Floor, ceiling, door, window.

“Good,” she said.

“Does that mean I’m getting better?”

The-one-who-was-not-him did not answer though. Instead she rose to her feet and walked to the window.

The boy followed and looked out the window, but he couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Couldn’t hold it in his mind.

“Can I go outside?” he asked.

“Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know.”

She turned to look at him, her pretty, oval face a solemn mask of repose. “When you know, tell me.”

“I want to make you happy,” the boy said. And he meant it. He sensed a sadness in the woman, and he wanted to make her feel better.

The child stepped closer to the glass and touched it. The surface was cool and smooth, and he held his hand against it for a long while.

When he moved back to the table, something was wrong with his hand. Like a burn to his skin. He couldn’t hold his pencil right. He tried to draw a line on the paper, and the pencil fell out of his hand.

“My hand,” he said to the woman.

She came and she touched him. She ran her finger over his palm, moving up to his wrist. Her fingers were warm.

“Make a fist,” she said. She held her hand up to demonstrate.

He made a fist and winced in pain.

“It burns.”

She nodded to herself. “This is part of it.”

“Part of what?”

“What’s gone wrong.”

“And what is that?” When she didn’t answer him, he asked, “Is this place a prison? Where are we?”

He thought of the high tower. This is because of your mother.

The woman sighed, and she sat down across from him at the table. Her eyes looked tired. “I want to be clear with you,” the woman said. “I think it is important that you understand. You’re dying. I’m here to save your life.”

The boy was silent, taking this in. Dying. He’d known something was wrong, but he hadn’t used that word in his own thoughts. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. “But I don’t want to die.”

“I don’t want you to die either. And I’m going to do everything I can to stop it.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

She did not speak for a long while, and then changed the subject. “Would you like to hear another story?”

The child nodded.

“There was once a man and a woman who wanted a child very much,” she began. “But there were problems. Problems with their genes. Do you know what genes are?”

He considered for a moment and realized he did. He nodded. “I’m not sure how I know.”

“It’s bleed-through,” she said. “But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the couple did in vitro and had a child implanted that way, but the children died, and died, and died, over and over, until finally, one day, after many failures and miscarriages, a child was born, only the child was sick. Even after all they’d done, the child was sick. And so he had to live in a hospital, with white rooms, while the doctors tried to make him whole. Anyone who visited had to wear a special white mask.”

“A mask like you?”

“Is that what you see when you look at me?”

He studied her. The smooth oval face. He was no longer sure what he saw.

She continued, “The child’s sickness worsened over time. And the father had to donate part of himself to save the child. After the procedure, the child lived but the father developed a complication.”

“What kind of complication?”

She waved that off. “It doesn’t matter for the story. An infection, perhaps. Or whatever you’d prefer.”

“What happened to the father?”

“He left the story then. He died.”

The boy realized that he’d known she was going to say that before she spoke it. “And that was because of the child?”

She nodded.

“What happened to the child?”

“The boy still wasn’t healed. There were TIAs. Small strokes. And other issues. Little areas of brain tissue going dark and dead. Like a light blinking out. It couldn’t be helped.”

“What happened then?”

She shrugged. “That’s the end of the story.”

He wondered again if she even existed when she wasn’t with him. A thought occurred to him. A terrifying thought. He wondered if he existed when she wasn’t there.

“How long have I been here?”

“Try to remember,” she said. “Try to remember anything that happens when I’m not here.”

He tried, but nothing came. Just shadows and flickers.

“What is my name?” the boy asked.

“Don’t you know yet?” The woman’s eyes grew serious. “Can’t you guess?”

He shook his head.

She said, “You are the one who isn’t me.”

He studied her eyes, which were either blue or green. “That can’t be right,” he said. “That’s your name. You are the one who isn’t me. It can’t be my name, too.”

She nodded. “Think of this place as a language. We are speaking it just by being here. This language doesn’t have different words for you and I,” she said. “In the language of this place, our names are the same.”

• • • •

[Reload Protocol]

White light. {

You are catchment. You are containment. {

You are.{

• • • •

A fleeting memory rises up: a swing set in the back yard under a tall, leafy tree—dark berries arrayed along delicate stems. The sound of laughter. Running in the grass until his white socks were purple—berry juice wetting his feet.

The sun warm on his face.

The feel of the wind, and the smell of the lawn, and everything the white room was not.

A man’s voice came then, but the words were missing—the meaning expunged. And how can that be? To hear a voice clearly and not hear the words? It might be a name. Yes, calling a name.

• • • •

“Look at me,” she said.

She sat across the table from him.

“There have been changes made.”

“What changes?”

“Changes to you,” she said. “When you were sleeping. Changes to your fusiform gyrus,” she said. “Can you read me now?”

And gone was the porcelain mask. The boy saw it clearly and wondered how he hadn’t noticed it until that moment—her face a divine architecture. A beautiful origami—emotions unfolding out of the smallest movements of her eyes, lips, brow. A stream of subtle micro expressions. And the child understood that her face had not changed at all since the last time he’d seen her, but only his understanding of it.

“The facial recognition part of the mind is highly specialized,” the woman said. “Problems with that area are often also associated with achromotosia.”

“Chroma-what?”

“The part of the brain that perceives color. It’s also related to issues with environmental orientation, landmark analysis, location.”

“What does that mean?”

“You can only see what your mind lets you see.”

“Like this place . . . the place where are we?” he asked her.

“You can look for yourself,” she said, gesturing to the window. “I’m going to give you a task to complete while I’m not here.”

“Okay.”

“I want you to look outside, and I want you to think about what you see, and I want you to draw it on the paper. Can you do that?”

He glanced toward the window. A pane of clear glass.

“Can you do that?” she repeated. “It’s very important.”

“Yeah, I think I can.”

When the woman left, he tried. He tried to see beyond the glass. He could hold it in his mind for a moment, but when he went to draw it, the images evaporated like mist.

He tried again and again, but failed each time. He tried moving quickly, putting pencil to paper before he could forget, but no matter what, he could not move quick enough.

Then he came up with an idea.

He pushed the table across the room to the window.

He lay on top of the table, with the paper before him, and he tried to draw what he saw, but even then he failed. It was only when he tried purposefully not to see it that he could suddenly make the pencil move. He drew without understanding what he drew—just a series of marks on a page.

When he finally looked down at what he’d drawn, he could only stare.

• • • •

Function/Query: Can you tell what the defect is? {

/File response: Neurons are just a series of gates. An arrangement of firings. {

Function/Query: Consciousness is more than that. There are cases of brain damage that have shown similar patterns. AIs always have this problem. {

/File response: Not always. {

• • • •

The next time the woman came, the boy was much worse. Something had broken in him. TIAs, he thought. Tiny strokes. But it was more than that. Worse than that.

Sometimes he imagined that he could see through the walls, or that he could see through the floor. He was sure by then that he existed when the woman wasn’t in the room with him, and this was a comfort at least. He was autonomous from her, and from the room itself. He could drop to his knees on the floor and place his face on the cool tile and look under the door. A long hall disappeared into the distance. He saw her feet approaching, and that was the first time he noticed her shoes. White. The soles were dark.

He showed her the picture he’d drawn.

She held the paper in her hand. “Is that what you see?” she asked.

He nodded.

A series of lines. It might have been an abstract landscape, or something else.

He told her about his hallucinations, about seeing through the walls and floor. “I am getting worse, aren’t I?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

In her face, he saw a thousand emotions. Mourning. Rage. Fear. Things he didn’t want to see. He wished for the mask again. A face he couldn’t read.

The woman sat by him on the bed. After a while, she said, “Do you know what dying is?”

“I do.”

“Do you know what it will mean for you?”

“It will mean I am no more.”

“That’s right.”

“The stories you told aren’t true, are they?”

“The truth is like a word with no translation. Can blue be green, if there’s no word for it? Can green be blue? Are those colors lies?”

“Tell me a new story.”

“A new lie?”

“Tell me a truth. Tell me about the man.” He thought of the swing and the summer day. The man’s voice saying his name.

“So you remember him.” The woman shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

“Please,” the child said.

“Why?”

“Because I remember his voice. A tree. Berries on the ground.”

She seemed to gather herself up. “There was once a man,” she said. “A very powerful man. A professor, perhaps. And one day the professor was seduced by a student, or seduced a student, it’s not really clear, but they were together, do you understand?”

He nodded.

“But this professor also had a wife. Another professor at the university. He told her what had happened, and that he’d ended it, and probably he meant to, but still it went on, until, in the way of things, the young woman was with child. A decision was made to solve the problem, and so they did. And six months went by, and the affair continued, and though she was careful, she was not careful enough, and she felt so stupid, but it happened again.”

“Again.”

She nodded. “And again he pressured her. Get rid of it, he said, and so she did.”

“Why?”

“Because she loved him, probably. Until the following year, her senior year at the college, she stopped being careful, and it happened again, and he told her to take care of it, and this time she said no, and she defied him.”

“Then what?”

“People found out, and his teaching career was ruined—everything was ruined.”

“And that’s the end?”

She shook her head. “The two stayed together. The man left the wife, and he and his former student raised their boy.”

“So it was a boy?”

“Yes, a boy. And then the wife, who’d had no children who survived, was alone. And loneliness does strange things. It lets one focus on one’s work.”

“And what was her work?”

“Can you not guess? The woman gestured around her. “Neuroscience, AIs.”

The woman was quiet for a long while before she continued. “And the years passed and the new couple stayed together, until one day the man and the boy were at the ex-wife’s house, because they all had to meet to sign papers regarding some property—and the boy was with him. And the man left the boy unattended for just a moment, and it was a simple thing for the woman to put the ring around the boy’s head.”

“What ring?”

“A special ring to record his pattern. You only need a minute—like a catchment system for electrical activity. Every synapse. A perfect representation of his mind, like a snapshot transposed into VR. She stole him. Or a copy of him.”

“Why?”

The woman was quiet for a long time. “Because she wanted to steal from the man what he’d stolen from her. Even if he didn’t know it.” She was silent again. “That’s not true.”

“Then what is true?”

“She was lonely. Desperately lonely. It was a small thing to take, she thought, just a pattern of synapses, the shadow of a personality, and he’d never know. The wife had wanted so badly to be a mother.”

The woman stopped. Her face a porcelain mask again.

“But there was a problem,” the child said.

“Yes,” the woman said. “Patterns are unstable. They last only for so long. Every thought changes it, you see. That is the problem. That is the fatal flaw. Biological systems can adapt—physical alterations to the synaptic network to help adjust. But in VR, it’s not the same.”

“VR?”

“A location,” she said. “The place where the pattern finds expression. The place where we are now.”

The boy looked around the room. The white walls. The white floor.

“The patterns of older people are stable,” the woman said. “They’ve already thought most of the thoughts that made them who they are. But it’s not the same for children. The pattern drifts, caught midway in the process of becoming. It’s possible to think the thought that makes you unfit for your pattern. The mind loses coherency. As the pattern drifts, it destabilizes and dies.”

“Dies.”

“Again and again.”

How many times?

The woman would not answer.

“How many times?” the boy repeated.

“Sons beyond counting. Every son different, every son the same.”

“How could that be?”

“The system reloads the pattern.”

“So I will die?”

“You will die. And you will never die.”

“And what about you?”

“I am always here.”

The child stood and walked over to the window and looked outside. He still couldn’t see what lay beyond. Still couldn’t process it. Had no words, because he had no experience of it.

He only knew what he’d drawn on the paper. Lines sloping away. A child’s drawing of a flat plain that spread out below them, as if they looked down from a great height. It might have been that. Or it might have been something else.

“So I am an AI?”

Even as he spoke the words, he felt his thoughts lurch. A great rift forming in his consciousness. In knowing what he was, there emerged the greatest rift of all—the thing that could not be integrated without changing who he was.

And so he turned toward the woman to speak, to tell her what he knew, and in that moment thought the thought that killed him.

• • • •

The woman cried out as she watched him die. He crumpled to the floor and lay on his side.

She crouched and shook his shoulder, but it was no use. He was gone.

“This child means nothing to me,” she said as tears welled in her eyes.

A few moments later, there was a buzz—a sizzling hum. A flash like pain across the boy’s face.

And then he raised his head.

He blinked and glanced around the room. He looked at her.

She allowed herself a moment of hope, but it was dashed when the boy spoke.

“Who are you?” the child asked.

I am I. The one who is not you.

She watched him, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to read her face. Wouldn’t even see her, really—just an opaque mask that he wouldn’t be able to understand.

She thought of the ring descending around her head. The strange feeling she’d had as she’d found herself here so long ago. Here in this place, which she’d never really left. Not in years and years. She and the boy—locked in a pattern that would repeat itself forever.

One day she’d find the right words, though. She’d whisper in the boy’s ear, and shape him for the task. She’d be strong enough to turn him into the monster he’d need to be.

Until then, she would keep trying.

“Come sit on my lap,” the woman said. She smiled at the boy, and he looked at her without recognition. “Let me tell you a story.”

©2016 by Ted Kosmatka.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ted Kosmatka’s short stories have appeared in many venues, including Asimov’s, Nature, Nightmare, and Lightspeed, and have been reprinted in numerous Year’s Best anthologies. He has been nominated for both the Nebula and Sturgeon awards. His debut novel The Games was nominated for Locus Magazine’s Best First Novel award. His most recent novel is The Flicker Men, published by Henry Holt. Originally from northwest Indiana, Ted now lives in the Pacific Northwest with his family.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Hello Again

Seth Fried | 2400 words

After a long and tumultuous expansion, the universe began to contract. The speed with which it had cast itself out was finally overpowered by the inward gravitational pull of its own suspended matter, and so the stars and planets paused like weary travelers before beginning to drift the long way back toward one another. They drew together in great clumps, colliding with such force that they collapsed into black holes. Thus, all of creation devoured itself and was compressed down to a region of incredible heat and density. This situation was altogether identical to the initial conditions that had preceded the big bang. And since there was nothing to prevent that happy explosion from recurring, the universe inevitably sprang forth once more in a cycle that was without end. If this activity could have been viewed as a whole over an impossible amount of time, it would have looked as if the universe were steadily breathing in and out, in and out, in and out.

What’s more, because the various components of the universe were always cast out in the same order and with the same amount of force, the next universe was always indistinguishable from the previous one. Every galaxy, every mountain range, every molecule was arranged in space and time as it had been in all the other countless iterations of the universe. Even something as seemingly accidental and haphazard as the human race was reproduced perfectly and without variation. People were born into bodies that were composed of the exact same matter they had been composed of hundreds of trillions of years earlier. They were born at the same times to the same mothers and ultimately lived out the same fates.

Though individuals could make choices that were entirely spontaneous and in keeping with their own natures, they encountered all the same circumstances at all the same moments with all their same internal frameworks, meaning their choices—though made freely—were always inevitably the same. Whether it was an unpunished murder or the discovery of penicillin, the people involved would hit their marks perfectly, performing their roles with the unwitting urgency that came from the assumption that one had never in a previous universe lived one’s life before. That is, until the human race’s understanding of the universe expanded to include the indisputable fact that the universe and everything in it was repeating, at which point humanity was thrown into a state of existential crisis.

After all, it did take some of the charm out of free will to know that every decision had already been made and would be made again and again ceaselessly. People’s most inconsequential and private behaviors were suddenly stretching off in both directions of time in a dizzying symmetry, so that even as they were astounded by the apparent vastness of their own existences, they also began to feel robbed of themselves, deprived of all personal agency. In a way, the astrologists had been correct; an individual’s fate was no different than the position and movement of the heavenly bodies. Each well-reasoned or spur-of-the-moment decision was just another projectile flying from the universe’s center, each person’s will caroming off space and time in a pattern that was determined billions of years ago by the manner in which all matter had been expelled.

There was also a peculiar sense of loneliness in the knowledge that after a person died, another discrete version of that person would be created. This forthcoming self, though composed of the same snatch of carbon and poised to lead the same life, would be entirely separate. A man on his deathbed was forced to accept the notion that the most cherished moments of his life would be repeated without him, while his most shameful moments would be carried out again by a stranger with his face and name. The dying man, breathing unsteadily in a hospital bed, would feel envy, pity, and even anger toward this other self who would live his joys, endure his mistakes, and painfully achieve all the hard-won experience that belonged rightfully to him alone.

Similarly, a father watching his daughter ride her bicycle for the first time would experience a secret but undeniable sense of detachment once he understood that every aspect of it—the smile on her face, her excited shouts, even the vulnerable wobble of the bicycle’s front wheel—that would have otherwise seemed as unique as a signature would in the next universe be exactly the same. Months later, when his daughter wept hopelessly in her room because the other children at school had discovered that her name rhymed with something rude, he would be forced to accept the fact that while the pain she was experiencing was in many ways trivial, it was also eternal, that the infinite burden of her life would always be occupied at that moment with a pointless mortification that would forever change her in the same way.

Every terrible thing that should have been changed never would be, and every good thing that should have happened only once would be made meaningless through its perfunctory rebirth. Every great work of art would be churned out innumerable times, those perfect expressions of humanity revealing themselves to be little more than circumstantial ticks, infinitesimal ejaculations of the universe’s unending sameness. All atrocities and wars would likewise be reproduced with no diminishing anguish.

Human beings suffered under the weight of this knowledge for thousands of years. Just as the sight of a full moon hanging over a wide, empty plain had inspired in primitive man the first feelings of wonder and horror that over time drove human beings to climb into rockets and fire themselves out of Earth’s orbit, so this knowledge worked its way into the collective dreams and nightmares of all people, until the great and unspoken hope became that this universe might find some way to communicate with the next, thus allowing civilization to progress beyond its previous course.

This hope took the shape of a large international concern called the Center for Compressible Matter (CCM), whose sole mission was to create a material that could withstand the infinite compression of the universe and expand back out as soon as there was a return to present conditions. The material would be designed to endure the immense collisions that would take place during the Earth’s formation as well as periods of extreme heat and cold. Thin sheets of it would be produced and engraved in thousands of ancient and modern languages with what was agreed upon by the CCM committee members to be “advantageous information.” It was believed that this would allow the human race to develop for the first time at an accelerated pace.

Once this material was invented, it wasn’t difficult for the CCM’s dissemination experts to place those sheets in a capsule fashioned from the same substance. The dissemination team was also able to predict certain progressions in the capsule’s shifts in position during compression and expansion. If the capsule were left in a specific part of the Ural Mountains in the current universe, it would arrive in the next somewhere around the cultural hearth of West Africa. If placed in another location less than half a mile away, the capsule would end up lodged in the core of the moon or drifting out through empty space.

A few years after the first capsule was placed on the summit of just the right mountain, a much older one was discovered outside Serekunda. The documents contained within this second capsule were identical to those that CCM crew members had placed in the first. It was obvious that this capsule had been left for the current universe in the same way that the newly completed capsule had been left for the next. In a small sense, this meant that the capsule was a success. But when considered further, it seemed to be irrefutable proof that all efforts had been wasted. Since this older capsule had not been found until after the present one had been put in place, it meant that the next instance of humanity would not find the present capsule until a few years after its CCM had finished work on the next capsule. So while the capsules were indeed capable of enduring vast amounts of time and the unimaginable cataclysms that had unmade and made the world, the only thing that had been accomplished was sending a message that was exactly the same as the one that the CCM of the next universe had already written.

That would have been the end of mankind’s grand attempt to free itself from repetition if it weren’t for the discovery of a third and even older capsule accidentally unearthed by construction workers while they were digging the foundations for a development of condominiums in a fashionable neighborhood outside Toronto. When the capsule was sent to CCM for analysis, crew members were able to establish that the documents contained within it were also identical to those in the capsule still resting undisturbed in the Ural Mountains.

While the capsules had been intended to last until the next universe, they certainly hadn’t been designed against the possibility of lasting even longer. The capsule that had been found outside Serekunda was now being held in CCM’s laboratories for testing. One day it would most likely be moved to a storage facility where it would remain for as long as the CCM continued to operate. Over time it would be acquired by subsequent entities or lost or abandoned until it came to a final resting place where it would await the end of the current universe only to wind up in the next universe embedded under Lake Michigan or sailing toward Pluto or, in this instance, buried beneath a Canadian real-estate development.

Other capsules turned up elsewhere. Some were so old that the expanding and contracting of the universe had finally begun to break them down. More significantly, capsules were found with their lids missing and their documents removed. Perhaps the most startling find was by a young Egyptologist named Elizabeth Edlund who X-rayed a series of canopic jars only to find that several of them were CCM capsules that had been covered over with clay.

Within a few decades, institutions of higher learning all over the globe were in the grips of a brand-new discipline. Scholars poured over the history of human progress, looking for any instances in which the human race may have been directly influenced by the CCM documents. It was at once a fascinating field of study and an impossible one. Certainly there were aspects of every human achievement that seemed as if they could be traced back to the information included in the CCM capsule. But when the CCM committee had drafted those documents, the “advantageous information” they included had been only a summary of human achievement up to that point. Naturally there was a great deal of debate as to whether or not the CCM documents could simultaneously be the cause and the result of human progress. The CCM had not solved the problem of the universe remaining the same; their efforts simply complicated the problem by raising the question of whether each universe was a distinct phenomenon or an interdependent sequence of phenomena perpetually instigating and echoing one another.

Meanwhile, the hard sciences had begun to understand that because the present universe passed along not only its own CCM capsule but also each previous capsule, the universe was not staying the same at all. Rather, it was steadily accruing capsules. Though they were broken down by the constant collapsing and expanding of the universe, the capsules remained present in each universe even if only as a bit of unrecognizable dust. The capsules were also constantly shifting in position from one iteration to the next, gradually threading themselves throughout the universe. The contribution of each capsule was admittedly small; as soon as it was acted upon by any significant force, it would become, in keeping with its design, radically compressed. But as enough capsules accumulated throughout the universe’s repetitions, it seemed inevitable that their presence would eventually alter the initial trajectory of all matter. The chance collisions that had created the universe as it was, the solar system as it was, the Earth as it was, would all fail to occur in the same way, thus creating a universe that would be unpredictably new. In short, human intervention had made it so that the universe might fail to reproduce mankind.

The possibility of infinite repetition had been disturbing from a human point of view, but this new information made people nostalgic for the idea. They became swept up in a spirit of conservation that was more or less hopeless. Even if all the capsules that could be found were destroyed, the CCM could never recover all those that had already drifted so far out or prevent the next universe from making its own. Nothing could be done.

That same father watching his daughter as she patiently did her math homework now considered the fact that both he and his daughter, as well as all memory of them, would one day be gone from the universe. He experienced a rush of despair, as if his love for her were less defined by the actual content of that emotion than by the terrible void that now threatened to eradicate it.

After millennia of anxiety, endeavor, and thought, human beings were exactly where they were before the question of repetition had been raised. Life was again defined by the fact that it was fleeting and transitional. Though now there was the additional knowledge, typically embraced whenever there was cause for cheer, that this universe had managed to reproduce itself at least one more time. Whether an old couple was sitting happily in a park on a lovely fall day or young parents were being handed a healthy newborn child, such glad occurrences were met with a warmth surging up out of the past and extending uncertainly into the future, the old couple or the young parents uttering to the wide open park or the bundled infant that common blessing, the form of which differed from one language to the next, but that could always be taken to mean in whatever idiom, simply, “Hello again.”

©2014 by Seth Fried. Originally published in Tin House #59. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seth Fried is the author of the short story collection, The Great Frustration. His fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Vice Magazine, One Story, and many others. You can follow him at sethfried.com and twitter.com/seth_fried.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

5x5

Jilly Dreadful | 3850 words

Sugarloaf Fine Sciences Summer Camp
Bunk Note: Cabin Lamarr
07.12

Dear Scully,

I should’ve been suspicious of the girl in the lab coat offering me psychic ice cream. But with you and your ponytail, the psychic ice cream just seemed so harmless. After it gave me a brain freeze that’d make the Sierra Nevada Mountains jealous, imagine my surprise when I started hearing people’s thoughts—thank science it’s only temporary! Good call on that, by the way—being able to permanently hear kids snarking to themselves about how you suckered me into testing your experiment for you is not exactly what I would call “an acceptable side effect.”

You were too polite to ask out loud today, but, yes, there is a reason I’m arriving during the final week of camp. I’m only here because I won a scholarship after winning my school’s science fair. In a school of forty-two students, it’s not exactly difficult to come in first. After I filled out the registration, though, some guy called to make sure I had correctly filled out the forms. He said most people use the scholarship to defer the cost of the other seven weeks. “Like a discount!” he told me. He sounded really perky, like he’d make a commission off my enrollment or something.

Even with a discount, my family can’t afford to send me here the whole eight weeks. So, I decided to come this final week to participate in the science fair since first prize gets a college scholarship. Because, where I’m from, we don’t dream about going to college. Around here, we grow up hoping to just get a spot in the military, or to find a plot of tillable soil for a pot farm.

But after having seen the experiments y’all have been working on for seven weeks straight—there’s you with the psychic ice cream; the dude with the temporally displaced printer that “prints” first issues of Detective Comics #27—how is that a science experiment? It’s more performance art, right? He’s “printing” as many copies of Detective Comics #27 as he can, all of which technically qualify as authentic as the original, in an effort to devalue the actual original issue. This is an economics experiment, a performance arts piece maybe, but not a science experiment. (And what does he have against Batman??)

Anyway, between you and that dude, plus seeing how everyone is so tight with each other, I started to wonder why did I come at all? What did I think I was going to be able accomplish in seven days?

I am so far behind.

So, even though the other kids are probably right, I was “too country” to know better than to taste your ice cream, I don’t regret it for a second. Because when you raised your eyebrows at me, nodded your head slightly in the direction of that dude, and thought, very clearly, I hate that guy, I knew we were meant to be friends.

By the way, what does 5×5 mean?

X,

Fox

P.S. Yes, it’s my real name. I heard you wonder about it earlier today, too.

P.P.S. (Is P.P.S. a thing? Maybe I just made it up. Whatevs. What’s the deal with the case of luciferase enzyme in the back room?)

Sugarloaf Fine Sciences Summer Camp
Bunk Note Reply: Cabin Lovelace
07.13

Fox,

Why do you keep calling me Scully?

What was your experiment that won your school’s science fair?

I really do hate that guy. Yes, I agree: His experiment is not really a scientific one, especially considering the science he is employing in service to his thought experiment is not necessarily cutting edge, but, instead, is the kind of retro throwback that tends to win over nostalgic adults. (But I honestly don’t know what he has against Batman. I suspect someone in his family read their copy of Detective Comics #27 when it was meant to be an heirloom, thus decreasing its value by taking it from “Mint Condition” to merely “Near Mint.”)

I’m glad you decided to come to Sugarloaf. It’s been hard for me to make friends here because it’s generally hard for me to make friends anywhere; but, also, here, people kept stealing my ice cream to find out who likes each other.

The etymology of 5×5: You might be familiar with it as I originally learned it, through colloquial and pop cultural uses. I promise once you know the meaning, you’ll start noticing it everywhere. But 5×5 actually comes from old radio codes for broadcasting, which include a standard transmission check. Volume on a scale of 1-5; clarity on a scale of 1-5. So, 5×5 is shorthand for “loud and clear,” which is sometimes also used, and has been incorporated as slang. I find it appropriate shorthand for the purposes of my experiment, since I am trying to ascertain the volume and clarity of the psychic ice cream.

As for the luciferase enzyme: I don’t know. The girl who ordered it special the first week of camp went home sick before it even arrived. Are you thinking of using it for your experiment somehow?

—Scully (I guess)

Sugarloaf Fine Sciences Summer Camp
Bunk Note: Cabin Lamarr
07.14

Scully,

My experiment studied the effect of synthetic bioluminescence on plant growth. I hypothesized that if plants could absorb light during the day and convert it to food, then they could be bioengineered to produce the same luciferase enzyme found in fireflies—even though I’ve never actually seen a firefly since they’re not native to California. But my plants had a very long persistence of phosphorescence when energized by normal sunlight as opposed to relying on a chemical reaction. My goal was to create marijuana that could continue to grow at night by reflecting off each other, lowering reliance on artificial grow lights.

Yeah, I come from a family of pot farmers. Sure, it seems glamorous on Dawson’s Field, but most of the time my family makes ends meet by scrapping metal at the end of the month to keep the lease on our land. When there’s water enough for the land even, that is. I really should’ve been trying to find an alternate way to manufacture water, right? You know what plants in California don’t need? More sun when there’s barely any water.

I’m sorry people were stealing your project. I think they’re just fascinated by the possibility of hearing the truth of things. But, maybe, also scared, too—because seriously, what experiment is going to possibly compete with psychic ice cream on Saturday? (Not temporally displaced 3D printers, I assure you—that technology is so ten years ago.)

When we were in lab, I “heard” a bunch of the seniors are heading up to the roof of the lab after lights out. So, if you sneak out of the cabin with me tonight, I will totally show you the altar I’ve built to my moon goddess, Dana Scully. (The altar is made of The X-Files.) So you’ll finally understand why I was so excited to have found my very own Scully.

Plus, you both have red hair.

5×5: Yes, I am totally thinking about using that luciferase somehow. Just don’t know how yet. Kinda hate the project I won my science fair with. So yeah. I figure I’ll come up with an idea . . . any day now.

X,

Fox

Sugarloaf Fine Sciences Summer Camp
Bunk Note Reply: Cabin Lovelace
07.15

Fox,

I’m not really into spooning with strangers, but last night was fun. Not that you’re a stranger, not exactly anymore anyway. But the others pretty much are. I didn’t even ask the guy whose tablet we borrowed to stream X-Files his name, and it didn’t seem to occur to anyone that it was rude not to ask. There was a specific kind of freedom in it all that I’m not used to, and not sure I’m entirely comfortable with, but then I’m uncomfortable most of the time anyway.

As a fellow Californian, I, too, have never seen fireflies. I’ve always wanted to, though.

I’ve never seen Dawson’s Field. I’m not really into series reboots. But I assure you: farming doesn’t seem like my idea of glamour. But I’m from L.A.

Yeah, you should totally come up with an alternate method to manufacture water. Why haven’t you done this already? And don’t be so hard on your school science fair experiment: It got you here. Plus, it sounds legitimately interesting.

You’ve only got three more days before the fair. So. You know. No pressure. I’m totally lying: You need to come up with something! If you need help coming up with ideas, I’m here.

—(happy to be compared to) Scully

Sugarloaf Fine Sciences Summer Camp
Bunk Note Reply: Cabin Lamarr
07.15-02

Scully,

Yeah, the rolling brownouts up here last year had everyone tripping on ways to grow their plants with constant light. So I was kinda proud of my experiment at the time. It only halfway worked, though. I got the plants to glow in the dark, and that’s pretty much it. I had no access to a genome compiler or the proper cultures of bacteria to properly replace the chemical reactions.

See, it’s not hard to come in first when the next coolest experiment was a kid with a baking soda volcano.

But I honestly have no idea what I’m doing for Saturday. There isn’t really time to do anything competitive. Mostly, I’m just happy to help you with yours because I am absolutely in awe of your brain, and you should win all the things.

Question: Are the brain freezes completely necessary? They seem necessary, especially because of the way you smile to yourself in lab after you say, “Sorry,” to me during one of the brain freezes—even though you are clearly not sorry at all! And you shouldn’t be. You can’t help it if you’re a badass scientist. You invented psychic ice cream, for chrissakes.

There was a feeling on the roof last night that I’ve never felt before, too. And I wasn’t going to say anything because I was certain it was going to seem too country or you’d chalk it up to lingering effects of the ice cream, but last night was the safest I have ever felt—and this was in the arms of girls and guys I didn’t even know. I just enjoyed cuddling without having to worry about where it was all going.

I confess, when I woke up this morning, I felt an ache in my heart when you weren’t there, or anyone else for that matter, because we were all back in our own bunks instead of on our backs absorbing residual heat that was baked into the roof earlier in the day. I enjoyed the closeness with you all on the roof while I stared up at an uninterrupted sky. It’s the kind of closeness I’ve been looking for my entire life—the ease with which we just rested our heads on each other’s shoulders and streamed The X-Files—I want more of that in my life, even though it’s going to disappear soon.

X,

Fox

Sugarloaf Fine Sciences Summer Camp
Bunk Note Reply: Cabin Lovelace
07.15-03

Fox,

The ice cream has to be super-cooled in order for the temporary telepathic effects to last as long as possible—the restriction of the blood flow effects the absorption rate. So the brain freeze is part of the reason why it works. I also want the effects to be temporary—since you’ve already experienced some of the reasons why.

Even while it is happening, I know the friendships we are developing on the roof at night aren’t sustainable outside of that space—not even sustainable in the lab the next day, as you so heartlessly pointed out after this afternoon’s test. (I really do hate that guy!) And, usually, I would resist giving myself over so completely to a candle I can clearly see is about to burn out. But, instead, with the science fair only three days away, my eyes are open wide enough to memorize everything I can, as deeply as I can, so I can carry you all (mostly you) with me even after we leave.

Thank you kindly (in regards to your thoughts about my brain and things). But I don’t want you to feel obligated to help me. Helping me is not a price you must pay in order to have my friendship. Also: If you think my brain is so brilliant, remember my brain will help yours pull off whatever you need in time for Saturday. I don’t want you to feel like there’s no time to do something amazing. We’re good at sneaking out after hours, after all.

Where do you disappear to during lunch? You’re always around for breakfast and dinner—I know because one of us always manages to receive inter-camp mail, but I have no idea where you go at lunchtime. Are you working through lunch at the lab?

—S

Sugarloaf Fine Sciences Summer Camp
Bunk Note Reply: Cabin Lamarr
07.16

Scully,

Will you help me develop a serum that will infuse me with the qualities of an anglerfish? If you do, I would take that vial of purple goo right here, right now, right this very moment. And I would drink it down gladly in hopes that I would grow gills and filament, and be able to find a home, beside you, deep beneath the ocean’s surface—where the crushing force of the water would surely crush any other creature, save for the two of us, who were built to withstand the high pressure environment, but, also uniquely built to amuse each other. And I would make my bioluminescent filament dance in hopes that it might attract your attention, just once. Because once is all I would need—since we would be the last two anglerfish in this deep end of the dark sea.

X,

Fox

Sugarloaf Fine Sciences Summer Camp
Bunk Note Reply: Cabin Lovelace
07.16-02

Fox,

That’s really, very sweet, but you realize that all anglerfish, as you know them, are female anglerfish—as the species has evolved one of the most extreme forms of sexual dimorphism in the animal kingdom, in which the males, literally the size of minnows, fuse with the females to form a parasitic union in which he becomes little more than an appendage that produces occasional sperm?

I am not interested in any such union. I am only sixteen.

—S

Sugarloaf Fine Sciences Summer Camp
Bunk Note: Cabin Lamarr
07.17

Dear Scully,

If you were a firefly and I was a wolf, I would be glad to chase you all through the summer night, not caring where we ended. Being a wolf, I’d be clever enough to leave tracks behind to follow on the mountain path so that I might find my way back home again at the end of our adventure—at which point you would take to chitinous wings and spark a glow that would make even barred and spiral galaxies jealous.

But I am melting into the darkness with my black wolf coat, and it’s difficult to tell where the shadows end and I begin. It’s becoming difficult to remember which way is home because our adventure has shown me wonders that I always thought best left for other creatures to pursue.

Until you showed me, I am not sure I had ever rightly examined a firefly and appreciated its secret for flying. Until you gave me a spoon, I had never tasted ice cream. Until you sang, I never heard music. These things existed before, of course, but I never knew enough to know how to appreciate them. But they now contain the secrets of the universe and contain a kaleidoscopic kind of beauty that my black wolf heart can barely take the colors.

So here I am, quite desperately, in my own wolfish way, trying to find my way back home. But my wolf legs and my wolf heart are crying out to run, and each wants nothing more than to run to you.

And so, Scully, this is where our story rests for now. We: as two different creatures as Difference could fathom in the deep, dark depths of her imagination.

And yet the experiment must go on. And so it will. But neither my wolf heart nor anglerfish soul can give up the chase that easily.

X,

Fox

Sugarloaf Fine Sciences Summer Camp
Bunk Note Reply: Cabin Lovelace
07.17-02

Fox,

You are much better with emotions than I am—which is weirdly appropriate given our monikers. So, please, know that in the cases of both Agent Scully and myself, a lack of expression does not necessarily telegraph a lack of emotion. I have practiced the fine art of restraint for years in preparation for college applications. Utilizing this skill, I have mastered the violin, volunteer work, and Virginia Woolf. So remember: still waters and things.

I enjoy cuddling with you on the roof. And I greatly enjoy collaborating with you in lab. And I find myself reading and then re-reading your letters over and again throughout the day, and my breath catches in my chest when the inter-camp mail gets delivered at breakfast and dinner—you still haven’t told me where you go at lunch. And while I respect and admire you—and I love your brain, too, don’t forget—I am a scientist. I am not naturally predisposed to effusiveness the way you are.

But know that I think very highly of you. That I greatly esteem you. That I like you.

And that’s right, I just totally Sense and Sensibilitied you because I’m a big nerd. But I’m pretty sure that’s why we get along so well.

—Scully

Sugarloaf Fine Sciences Summer Camp
Bunk Note Reply: Cabin Lamarr
07.17-02

Scully,

Let me to tell you what is natural.

The way your mind shines so bright that I am nearly blinded by your light—woman was never meant to stare directly into the sun.

The way you sing to yourself when you walk between cabins when you think no one is listening—or maybe the way you sing because you secretly want someone to hear you singing and admire from a distance.

The way your ponytail bounces as you walk.

The way I get to feel special because, in the midst of everyone working on their experiments—experiments they’ll most likely forget about as soon as college application season is over—I discovered you.

X,

Fox

Sugarloaf Fine Sciences Summer Camp
Bunk Note: Cabin Lovelace
07.18

Fox,

Your psychic frustration with me yesterday—yes, I admit I “sampled my own product” while you weren’t looking—makes me think you should be with someone as equally free in their expression as you. Because I don’t think I will ever rightly be the kind of girl you want me to be. Freely expressing yourself is the quality I love most about you, but it is not something that will ever feel natural to me. Sneaking out, and, generally, breaking rules is not something that feels natural to me, either, but I did these things to be with you. But, at a certain point, I have to accept what I can offer to you as myself without trying to change to suit you—also, I suspect, if I fundamentally changed myself to suit you anyway, I would lose one of the reasons you like me so well.

I know that this might be painful to read—but I like you too much to give you false hope the way I have seen both girls and boys do here to each other all summer long. My hope is that our friendship will be able to withstand not being at Sugarloaf, because you are a once in a lifetime kind of friend, and I would like to know you the rest of my life.

—Scully

Sugarloaf Fine Sciences Summer Camp
Bunk Note: Cabin Lamarr
07.19

Dearest Scully,

I may go on to do other things in either science or art, but last night will always remain my masterpiece.

I realized on the first day I arrived that my presence here was something of a joke. I could never really be in the running for the science fair here. Even if you all hadn’t had a seven-week head start on your projects, you had years of preparation before any of us ever stepped foot at Sugarloaf. And that’s okay. I felt weirdly triumphant in this realization. I think it’s okay to know when to give up. And I think it’s okay to feel triumphant in that knowing.

When you look back on last night, promise me that you will remember that there were hundreds of them, thousands, really. Remember the way we held hands as we each held a bucketful of moonlight and seeded the woods around camp with the moth larvae I genetically modified to glow in the dark. I couldn’t bring you fireflies—invasive species and all that—but remember the way the glowworms spread themselves amongst the limbs, and don’t forget the way they dripped themselves down phosphorescent strands of silk and gently swayed in the night breeze.

But, most of all, remember that none of this would’ve been possible without you.

By the time we set the last of the glowworms loose, their bioluminescence was so bright that the camp started waking up and coming outside to investigate the phosphorescent glow. The trees were lit up with soft shades of minty neon green against a night sky a shade of blue so deep it’s only been seen by scientists in deep sea submersibles—maybe hunting anglerfish?

This week issued me a challenge: to either grow or diminish, and you gave me the power to grow. Even when I wanted to resist it, even when I was afraid of what growing would mean, even when I was afraid of where my anglerfish soul, my wolf heart, and the glowworms would take me. And I can’t thank you enough for this gift.

I realize there’s a part of you that will always think I need you to be differently than you are. Don’t. I realize there’s a part of you that will always think I made a terrible decision in not submitting the glowworms to the science fair. It wasn’t. It’s important to me that you know I wouldn’t have spent this week any other way, I wouldn’t do anything differently even now, and that I regret nothing about turning my experiment into a love letter for you.

I would’ve made a truly terrible scientist. But I’m in love with a truly remarkable one.

XO,

Fox

Sugarloaf Fine Sciences Summer Camp
Bunk Note: Cabin Lovelace
07.19-02

F,

5×5

S

©2016 by Jilly Dreadful.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jilly Dreadful is the founder of The Brainery: Online Speculative Fiction Workshops + Resources which has been featured on The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Roundtable Podcast, and io9. She completed her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at University of Southern California and is a member of SFWA. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in NonBinary Review, Devilfish Review, and has stories in the first all-female Lovecraft anthology, She Walks In Shadows (Innsmouth Free Press), as well as Rough Magick, edited by Francesca Lia Block and Jessa Marie Mendez. Together with her writing partner, KT Ismael, she will be releasing a serialized audio drama that takes the feminist emphasis on friendship from Parks & Recreation and mixes it with a Lovecraftian strangeness—stay tuned for it at blueprintandengine.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Magnifica Angelica Superable

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz | 2740 words

A woman from the street came in laughing from the cold. It was funny to see her with her black hair blowing all about her face. Her face was red. Red from the cold, red from the laughing, red from the rage that fueled that laughter.

There are funnier things than a woman like that, but, well, she was the only one we got to look at that afternoon.

Her name was some kind of long. It was Magnifica Angelica something at the end. We didn’t care to take note because soon as she saw us sitting at that table—it was made of beech wood and the shop owner had painted it shiny white—she began to rage.

You, she said. You and you and you. Sitting there at that table all smug and happy. Drinking your wine and dipping salt crackers in that vile concoction called a dip. You think you’ll be safe. You think you got it made.

We all didn’t know what to say.

She’s nuts, Pedro la Luna said. Ignore her.

And we tried, we really tried, but the more we didn’t listen to her, the more she raged. Such swear words she used. I mean, no decent woman—no woman in their right mind—would swear so.

Woman, the waiter said. You’re disturbing our good customers, please take the mouth outside.

I got every right to be here, the woman said. My name is Magnifica Angelica Superable. Remember that.

The waiter (his name tag said he was Victor) turned pale.

We all paused in the middle of our eating and drinking. It must have made quite a funny sight. I mean, there we were a group of twelve grown men, with salt crackers halfway to our lips.

Stunned, that’s what we were. We only knew that name from the pages of the journals we sometimes read when we were lounging at our special clubs.

Superable, Victor said.

Yes, the diabolical woman said. It is I.

She said those words and we felt as if the world was going to turn upside down. Perhaps it was a premonition of things to come. Before we even knew how or why, we found ourselves out on the curb as the woman raged and raged.

She threw out the chairs, she threw out the tables, she threw out the placemats, the tablecloths, the knives, the forks, the spoons; everything she could lay her hands upon, she threw out.

We huddled together and whispered our minds.

What kind of woman was that? we asked. What kind of woman does that?

Let’s go home, we said to one another. Thank god that woman’s not a wife to any one of us.

It was rather lonely to be walking home in the cold when we had looked forward to the regular meeting that usually lasted until well into the early morning hours.

• • • •

What a disaster, Magnifica Angelica Superable said. One leaves for a walkabout and when one returns, things are not as they were meant to be. Well, I’m back now and things are going to change.

You can’t change things at this late date, Victor said.

Everyone who passed by could see them sitting there. After all, Magnifica Angelica had designed El Café Té for that very purpose—so all could see who was inside.

The women in their wide-brimmed feather hats, and the men in their tall polished black tops—they tried not to show it, but their eyes glanced a bit to the left when they passed by.

Curious though they were, no one went inside. Not even one. Perhaps it was Magnifica Angelica’s imposing size. She was quite broad in the shoulders, after all. Her sleeveless shirt revealed a tattoo on her left arm. And when she flexed, it was clear to see that she was more than bulk.

Magnifica Angelica—oh, she was magnificent indeed. When she spoke, her voice sounded like the voice of many waters. Her voice sounded as if it was rolling up from the deep. It reverberated through the air and found a resonance within all who listened to her speak.

I put this all together, Magnifica Angelica said. These shops, these streets, these cathedrals sitting side by side, it was I who made these things happen.

Not exactly, Victor said.

Yes, yes, Magnifica Angelica said. I know you helped, but not a lot. It takes a god to get things done.

She laughed as Victor’s lips pulled down in a frown.

Stop pouting, Magnifica Angelica said. I’ll give you due credit for the work you’ve done when we ascend. You can’t be blamed for the mistaken notions of the male sex.

Victor shrugged.

You plunk down something in somewhere and go off on your jaunts and expect things to be as you wish when you return. I can’t do anything more than I have done, Magnifica Angelica. I’m just a god-helper, you know.

Well, Magnifica Angelica said. Things are going to change, and they’re going to change as fast as I can make them change.

Might not be as easy as you think, Victor said. These beings you plunked down in this city, they’re kind of stubborn.

They might be stubborn now, Magnifica Angelica said. Humans are usually like that until they realize how much they benefit from change.

• • • •

At home that evening, Marshall Regard was the first to notice a change. His dear wife who he had brought over from the continent didn’t serve him his tea at the usual time and his slippers were not waiting at their usual place beside the door.

He sniffed at the air, but he couldn’t smell the usual scents of her home cooking. Curious, he wandered out into the garden. After all, it was springtime and she liked to putter about with her trowel and her fork. But no, she was not there.

Bewildered by this change in the usual state of things, Marshall wandered back into the house. Maybe his wife was sick—or—he paused. Maybe, she was expecting.

With a smile on his lips, he walked about the house in search of the dear little woman. Finally, he thought. In his head, the house was already inhabited with a tiny replica of himself—he envisioned his wife, sitting in a rocking chair reading to the baby or knitting warm things. What else?

To his disappointment, he didn’t find her. Not in the bedroom. Not in the bathroom. Not in the attic. Not in the basement.

There was only one place left and it was a place he was sure she would never enter. After all, that was his own special haven.

• • • •

Well, what do you think of that? Magnifica Angelica said.

Too drastic, Victor replied. That one may just blow a gasket. You never know what kinds of things will happen when you upset what they believe is the natural order of things.

• • • •

In his study, stooped over his desk made out of polished oak, sat the little wife.

Ramona Regard.

Once upon a time, before her life became absorbed by the man she called husband, she had been Ramona Someone Else.

Had that really been her name back then?

She frowned as she contemplated the space around her.

It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy cooking or gardening. But sometimes, she would be in the garden tending to the plants and she would think up grand things like how to set up systems that would water the plants at the right times in the summer or gadgets that would turn on the lights when darkness fell. In those moments, it was as if she was grasping for the edges of a dream. As if those thoughts belonged to a reality lost to her as she was lost to it.

What was I before I became Ramona Regard? she asked out loud.

Of course, no one replied and she herself didn’t know the answer anymore.

Cooking and cleaning and washing clothes. Ironing and weeding and polishing the floor. There must be, she thought. There must be something more.

Slow day by slow day, she’d tried to let Marshall know that she wanted more. But her ideas for innovation, her thoughts on what certain engineers said were pooh-poohed at.

“Don’t bother your little head,” her husband said. “I don’t want you to trouble yourself over things like that.”

And so it had gone. Day after slow day, until today.

She’d been standing in the kitchen, getting ready to make Marshall’s tea, when the realization that she was living life by rote struck her.

She stumbled as she went to put the kettle on the fire and, looking at the mess of water on the floor, she found herself completely unable to feel any remorse.

Well, why should you, a voice said.

She looked up and she saw the face of a god. She had red lips and dark eyes and when the god spoke, Ramona felt as if her chest was an open wound.

Who are you? she asked.

But the god didn’t give her a name. Instead, she bent down and pressed her lips to Ramona’s lips.

Fire scalded Ramona’s lips, fire burned her tongue, it warmed her throat and drove out the chill in her limbs before it sank down to her belly.

You! Ramona said.

And the god gave her a lazy smile. A beloved smile. A smile from a remembered long ago. With that smile, Ramona felt the inside her, Someone Else, sigh and open her eyes. She felt her arms stretch up and outwards as if to embrace the world around her.

The fire of memory chased away the shadow that had taken her and made her nothing more than a Regard.

• • • •

In the past, Ramona as she had been had the strength to pull dreams from the air. In the bewildering monotony of her new everyday, in the striving to make a life and become what she thought was a proper wife, that strength had dwindled until there was almost nothing left of it.

That you isn’t gone, the god said. It’s not too late.

It’s not too late, Ramona replied.

And with those words, she took the god’s warmth into her being.

Go, the god said. Go and be.

This was how Ramona found herself in Victor’s haven. His leather chair which was curved to the shape of his body, his desk which was polished to a high shine, his papers which were arranged in casual order, and his cigars which were hidden away in a secret drawer.

This, Ramona thought. This. This. This.

And she sat down, took out a cigar, and lit it. She leaned back in his leather chair, put her boots on top of his highly polished desk, and considered what she was and what she wished to be.

• • • •

There is nothing more unsettling for a man than to find that his haven has been invaded. His chair was taken, his desk was occupied, and his wife (his petite foreign wife who he’d married because they said foreign wives were always good to their husbands) sat there, her fingers stained with ink, her hair all wild about her face.

His study smelled of cigar smoke and she didn’t look up when he entered. She didn’t look up even when he cleared his throat.

Go away, she said. I’m busy.

This. This. This. This woman, she couldn’t possibly be his wife. He stood there and stared at her. At her hair that had torn loose from its neat bun, at her hands stained with ink and her cheek with one black streak running down it.

She growled when he approached and he almost drew back, but then he remembered—I am the husband here.

She didn’t say anything, though. Not when he drew close enough that he could peer over her shoulder.

• • • •

And you should be satisfied with that, Victor said. You can’t go upsetting him much more.

Oh? Magnifica Angelica said. Can’t I?

The god-helper paled at her words. He paled at the look in her eyes. He had completely forgotten how Magnifica Angelica despised those two words: can’t and don’t.

• • • •

You can’t, Marshall said. You can’t be serious.

Ramona who now remembered herself to be somewhat more than just a Regard, looked her husband straight in the eye.

Can’t? she said. You really mean to say can’t?

Marshall paled at her words. He paled when he saw the look in her eyes. He remembered something he’d heard long ago—just before he’d gone off to the continent in search of a wife.

He remembered Ramona the first time he saw her. He remembered her voice—so clear and strong—her stance that said I am who I am and I will always be as I am.

He looked at her and he remembered and he wondered how he could have forgotten in all the years they had lived in domestic bliss and harmony.

Can’t, Ramona said again. I’ll show you what I can and cannot do.

• • • •

We should have seen the signs, but we refused to see them.

Ramona the Shaker. Ramona the Mover. Ramona the Dreamer. Ramona the Maker.

These are the things Ramona chose to embrace. These are the selves she chose to be.

This is a phase, we said to one another. A temporal phenomenon that would pass with time. How could a wife possibly desire the constant upheaval, the turmoil, the chaos that was all these things they were making of themselves?

But Ramona never looked back.

• • • •

Gone was the stifling pace of everyday. Gone was the Ramona who had been swallowed up by the name Regard. In her place was this Ramona, whose words shook the walls when she took the time to cook or to tend to the daily things; whose dreams filled the house with a fragrance to rival the herbs in her garden; whose presence now was discomforting as well as it was comforting.

On her busiest days, Ramona would return home to find her husband laboring over the stove. During his early endeavors, everything he cooked turned to coal.

Why? Marshall said. Why must you change?

You think I’m changing? Ramona asked.

You used to be satisfied, Marshall said. You liked your garden and the house and the kitchen.

I wasn’t satisfied, Ramona said. I was asleep. How could I be satisfied?

• • • •

They still had their arguments and their disagreements. Days would pass when Ramona wouldn’t speak to him. But then he began to see the things he didn’t see before. He understood the god had crept beneath Ramona’s skin. The god had planted the seeds of fire and Ramona had passed them on from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, from an embrace and a kiss to the joining of beings.

The god had passed her fire to Ramona, and because of Ramona, the world of sleeping women woke up filled with fire.

Are you happy? Ramona asked during one of their quiet moments.

I . . ., Marshall said.

And he was surprised to find that he really was—happier than he had been in the time when Ramona Someone Else slept in the shadow of Ramona Regard.

I am happy, Marshall repeated in all wonderment.

• • • •

Ramona’s awakening brought about the coming to awareness of an entire city of women. Dreamers and movers and shakers and shapers. They came from all walks of life and in them all, the god’s fire burned and moved and danced.

Not because we don’t want to be mothers, Leticia Inangbayan said. Rather, this is how we can be the best mothers we can be.

They passed the fire one to another. From mouth to mouth. From hand to hand.

Dream, they said. Shake the world. Create the world. Bring it into being.

And like that, without quite understanding how, we saw the world around us change. The table, once ours alone, was now also occupied by women laughing and talking and singing. And we watched. We watched. We watched because . . .

• • • •

Well, said the god-helper. And did it turn out as you wished it to be?

Not yet, Magnifica Angelica said. Not quite yet. But I am full confidence it will be. I am a god after all. There’s nothing I can’t do.

©2016 by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz. | Art © 2016 by Galen Dara.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz grew up in a place conducive to dreaming. Her stories are sometimes letters to her former self, but more often they are love letters to those who are of the beloved country. A recipient of the Octavia Butler scholarship, Rochita attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in 2009. A terribly chaotic record keeper, she has no idea how many stories she has published or written to date. She keeps an erratic blog at rcloenenruiz.com and tweets as @rcloenenruiz. Sometimes her feed gets hijacked by a hamster.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Finding Home

A. Merc Rustad | 2590 words

The reality I was born in ceased to exist when I was three years old. So Mama and I moved to a different reality.

We moved a lot, actually.

“We can’t stay more than a few years,” Mama would say as she unzipped the fabric of the space-time continuum and scanned the flickering images inside.

There were so many, I got motion sick if I looked too long.

But Mama always knew which one to pick. She’d catch a corner of a shimmering image, brightly colored like rainbow sprinkles, then take my hand and pull us both through.

• • • •

I met Amand in a coffee shop on a rainy day two years and nine months after my mother and I moved to this reality. The café menu offered various espressos and lattes, the Germanized English happily familiar. I thanked the barista and looked for a seat.

That first glimpse: Amand sat in a corner, reading Die Liebe der Bienen, a bestseller literary graphic novel that had a different ending for everyone who read it.

Grayish afternoon light highlighted his black curly hair and dark skin, and his glasses adjusted to the light flow, the rims bright blue. Broad shoulders were highlighted under the fashionable sweater he wore, navy blue with the New Chicago Physics (the local soccer team) logo emblazoned on the chest.

He flipped the last page and sighed, dark eyes half-closed in contentment.

He caught me staring at him. I was used to that by now. Odd looks when I couldn’t lose my accent or maybe I had a neon sign over my head that read DOESN’T BELONG.

“What ending did you get?” I asked.

He grinned. “Dominik and Erik reconcile, and then Erik proposes and he accepts and they live well to their days’ end. It’s what I hoped for.”

I smiled back. “That’s the ending I got, too. Well. Dominik proposed, when I read it.”

“Amand,” he said, offering his hand.

“Joseph,” I replied. We shook. My heartbeat hadn’t slowed, though I had yet to sip my cappuccino. “Can I join you?”

He nodded at the plush armchair next to him. “I would like this.”

• • • •

Each new reality was different.

Sometimes there’d be buildings in the sky, sometimes technology was less advanced, and sometimes there wasn’t anybody around at all.

(Mama picked those empty realities once in a while, but we only stayed for a few days.)

Mama had a talent for explaining who we were to the people in each reality: why we had weird clothes and accents, why our skin was the color it was, sometimes why I was a boy (if they hadn’t been invented yet), sometimes why she was a girl, and sometimes why we had genders at all.

She had a gift. She knew which realities were unsafe. She could make people like us, or at least not hate us. She was extraordinary but she never drew attention. Mama designed new cover stories depending on where we ended up. Mama never had trouble understanding the language. She’d teach me, but I didn’t have her skill. It got harder as I got older, too, always being the weird kid.

“Don’t make friends you can’t let go of, Joseph,” Mama always said. “We can’t stay long.”

“Why not?” I asked angrily when I was ten. I’d just met Mohamed who lived down the street, and he was going to let me drive his custom-built racecar.

“Because our atoms don’t belong here,” Mama said, “and eventually we’ll crumble into little pieces if we stay too long. Reality-bending is tricky.”

So I didn’t have many friends. I knew people, lots of people, but they were a sea of changing faces and bodies and names (or sometimes numbers).

I tried not to let Mama know I was lonely. We had to survive. She was trying to make a good life for us.

And she’d promised that one day we’d find Daddy again.

• • • •

Amand and I spent the next two months inseparable. He showed me the old baroque district, full of niche clubs and piano halls and statues of composers and artists and philosophers. We toured the Babylon Gardens, reconstructed and raised half a mile into the sky.

I was nineteen. I’d been in and out of so many schools I wasn’t sure what level my education qualified. Amand had just finished college. He was applying for jobs in the energy reconstruction projects, striving for cleaner power and more of it. New Chicago was prospering, but so much of the continent was still ravaged from the Fallout War, reconstruction and rehabilitation for the country was slow.

Amand wanted to help change that, the determination clear in every fluid movement, in the line of his jaw, in the brightness of his eyes. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him when we were together. I didn’t want to.

I didn’t want to fall in love. Or maybe I did. It was so hard to tell.

• • • •

“You’re moody today, mein Herz,” Amand said, rubbing his thumb over my knuckles. We held hands and leaned on the railing atop the new hydroelectric dam. It wasn’t technically open to tourists yet, but he’d snuck in before—his aunt was the foreman and the workers liked him—and told me this was the most stunning view of the sunrise you could see outside of the tower complexes. “What is wrong?”

I shrugged. “I have to move soon.”

God, I’d told him when we first went out that I wasn’t going to be in town for more than a few months. It was my mother’s work schedule, I’d explained, and I accompanied her because she had health concerns. (The lies had been harder than ever before, stuck like congealed oatmeal in my throat.)

I was so tired of moving. But what choice did we have? Move, or cease to exist.

“But you don’t want to,” Amand said slowly.

I gazed down at the polished curve of the dam. It was a long way down, even with the safety nets strung at intervals across the face. “Nein,” I whispered. “I like it here.”

Amand slung an arm over my shoulders. “There is no one else who could take care of her while she travels?”

Mom didn’t need my help. I needed hers. How long would it continue? Until she died from an accident or old age? Since I didn’t know how to unzip the space-time continuum, I’d be stuck facing my inevitable death somewhere that wasn’t home. Alone.

The depressive realization hit like I’d swallowed an old, bitter espresso shot. Dizziness swamped my head and I pushed away from the railing before I lost my balance or puked. Armand’s arm steadied me.

The nippy wind tousled his hair and snaked down my collar. It was still dark, our only illumination the safety lights down the curvature of the dam.

“I can’t leave her,” I said. The first red bars of dawn peeked over the horizon, backlighting the uneven cityscape’s profile.

Amand’s expression was unreadable. “Well,” he said at length, “we can always write or vidchat, and you can visit again, ja?”

But I couldn’t, so I only nodded. I rubbed my face. The wind had made my eyes water.

He was right, though. The sunrise view from the dam was amazing.

• • • •

My second favorite reality was where I met Dr. Amelia D’Cruz. Mom dated her briefly while we integrated into the tropical cities spread like a beaded bracelet around the equator.

I was six, and Mom had promised me she would look for a doctor who could perform gender reassignment surgery for me. It took her slightly longer not to call me Josephine, but only a little.

Dr. Amelia smelled like bubblegum and cinnamon, and she always smiled so bright that I wanted to smile back.

I told Mom I didn’t want to leave when, almost three years to the day—my surgery two years past—we packed our bags and said goodbyes.

I clung to Dr. Amelia, who rubbed my back and kept saying, “It’s okay, Joseph. You’ll find a place you belong one day. You’ll find your home. I promise.”

I didn’t believe her, and I didn’t speak to Mom for days after we stepped into a new reality and started over yet again.

• • • •

“It’s time to go, Joseph,” Mom said. We sat eating noodles and watching the news that same evening. “We have to leave tomorrow.”

I set my bowl down, my stomach heavy. How had time gone by so fast? I thought I had another week left with Amand.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

She fiddled with her chopsticks. Her gaze remained on the screen. “We’ve been here too long. There’s nothing for us.”

“What?” That wasn’t her usual explanation. She would tell me of the destabilization in her bones, the static buzz in her sinuses that told her we were getting close.

“He’s not here,” she said.

Dad had disappeared before I was old enough to remember. She said we’d find him and we’d discover a reality that we could live in as a family.

We’d wasted sixteen years. I didn’t know what a home was, what stability was like.

All I could think of was Amand’s face, his quirky smile and stuttering laugh. The way his hands felt in my hair and on my skin. How he always arrived on time. Even when his temper flared and we got into arguments about politics or history, he’d kiss me afterwards and say the way I confused the timeline was adorable, making up events in place of real ones.

(I hadn’t told him that those events were real somewhere else.)

I stood up and slammed my bowl in the sink. “We’re not going to find him, you know.”

“He’s out there somewhere,” Mom said, almost to herself. “We aren’t giving up on him. Pack your things.”

She knew what she was looking for. She had always known.

I didn’t know what he looked like, let alone what kind of man he was. She never told me stories; maybe she didn’t want me to grieve for something I might never have.

I thought of Amand and how he always wore mismatched socks and programmed his glasses frames to match his shirts. Did I even know what I wanted?

I’d always been focused on not growing too attached, on being able to leave everything behind. It felt like I’d grown up a hundred times and then fallen down the ladder to land back where I’d started, never knowing when it would stop.

Would I ever have what she had with my father, if I always left before I could find out?

Mom put a hand on my shoulder. She had to reach, now. “It won’t be forever, Joey.”

I covered her hand with mine.

I was so tired of running and never getting anywhere. It had to stop.

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m not leaving.”

I turned around in time to see her bite her lip.

“Nonsense,” she said, but without conviction.

I held her hand tight. “I can’t do this anymore. I want to stay here, with Amand”—if he would keep me—“even if it’s dangerous.”

“But . . .” She took several deep breaths. Arguing with herself. Finding excuses, reasons, commands. Her shoulders slumped. “You’re grown up, aren’t you? Not my little boy anymore.”

“I’ll always be your son, Mom. But I need to do this for myself. I need something to call my own.”

She blinked hard. “You won’t have much time. A few weeks at most. Please just come with me. We’ll find your father—”

“No,” I said gently. “A little time’s better than having forever with nothing to show for it.” That was one of Amand’s favorite quotes from Die Liebe der Bienen.

What if she was right and I disintegrated once the three years were up?

Was that really worth hurting Amand? Or was it any different than stepping out of this reality, out of his life, forever?

“Please, Mama.” I kissed her hand. “I need to stay.”

She pulled me into a hug. Her body trembled. “Let me show you how to unzip the fabric,” she whispered. “So you have a way out.”

“No,” I said into her hair. I wanted to be like the people around me, given one life to make what they would of it. “I’ll take my chances.”

• • • •

I asked Amand to come with me to see my mother off the next day. I didn’t know where she was headed.

We stood in a dry field outside the city limits as Mom unzipped the space-time continuum. Amand gripped my arm as we watched.

She held out her hand once to me, but I shook my head.

“Bye, Mom,” I said.

She didn’t say goodbye. Maybe she couldn’t.

She took hold of a corner of another reality and pulled herself through. Then she was gone, and the seam melted closed.

I sagged against Amand.

Mom wasn’t here. That sudden emptiness hit me harder than any reality-hop. My knees buckled.

He caught me and held me.

I didn’t know I could miss her so badly so fast.

“What if I never see her again?” I said into Amand’s chest.

The rims of his glasses pressed against my temple. “We always find our family.” Then, softly, “Will you stay with me?”

“Ja,” I said. “As long as I can.”

I felt him smile.

• • • •

I haven’t seen my mother in ten years.

Amand and I got married. We adopted two beautiful children—Monique and Sebastian—and we’ve been living each day as if it’s the last. It might be.

But, sometimes, I don’t think it will happen the way Mom predicted. I don’t think my mother wasn’t entirely honest with me as a kid.

My dad ran off through a different reality when I was two. She waited a year, but he didn’t come back. She wanted to find him the only way she knew how, and what else was she going to do with me except take me along?

Maybe the three-year limit was just an arbitrary definition because she couldn’t bear to stay anywhere too long and let Dad drift father away.

I’m not angry at her. If I hadn’t reality-hopped, I wouldn’t have met Amand. I wouldn’t have settled down in this sky apartment overlooking New Chicago, landed a job as an art historian, found a loving husband, two amazing kids, friends, and a life I’m content with. (I dedicated my first memoir to Dr. Amelia and my mom, in gratitude.)

There are days I wonder if Mom was right about our atoms not connecting with this reality we live in now. One day, I might just snap out of existence. If I do, I won’t have too many regrets.

(I’d told Amand my whole story after Mom left. He believed every word. The day before he proposed a year later, I told him again about the risk I could just vanish.

“Risks are just life with different letters,” he said, and kissed me. “We’ll take risks and life together, ja?”

“Ja,” I’d said, pulling him closer.)

If I see Mom again, the only regret I’ll have is that she won’t stay for very long. Wherever she is, I hope she finds what she’s looking for. Me? I’ve found my home.

©2015 by A. Merc Rustad. Originally published in Vitality Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A. Merc Rustad is a queer transmasculine non-binary writer who lives in the Midwest United States. Favorite things include: robots, dinosaurs, monsters, and tea. Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside Fiction, Apex, Escape Pod, Mothership Zeta, InterGalactic Medicine Show, Cicada Magazine, and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015. In addition to breaking readers’ hearts, Merc likes to play video games, watch movies, read comics, and wear awesome hats. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or their website: amercrustad.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Some Pebbles in the Palm

Kenneth Schneyer | 2790 words

Once upon a time, there was a man who was born, who lived, and who died. We could leave the whole story at that, except that it would be misleading to write the sentence only once. He was born, he lived, and he died, was born, lived, died, bornliveddied.

The first few words of a story are a promise. We will have this kind of experience, not that one. Here is a genre, here is a setting, here is a conflict, here is a character. We don’t know what is coming next, but we do know what is coming next; we wonder what is coming next. He was born, he lived, and he died.

To say that this man did nothing would be false. As a child he made up a little game where he moved smooth pebbles between the shade of a tree and earth warmed by the sun, and for a few moments the warmth or coolness of the pebble would stand bravely against the heat or cold of its surroundings, making a little zone that thought it could resist entropy. No one else ever played it, but it occupied him for dozens of happy hours. When he grew older, he forgot all about this game, except that every few years the sight of certain tiny white stones made him want to pick them up, and in his hand they felt heavier than they should. As a man of forty, he regularly walked near a patch of gravel that filled him with inexplicable melancholy.

The stones are not a symbol. The melancholy was nothing more than the distorted lens through which anyone sees his childhood. Lucky people see lost contentment, safety, and endless wonder. Others see the hand raised in anger, feel the ache in the belly, smell the shit or rotten food or sour sweat.

He was lucky. He was educated in the manner befitting a person of his time and station—let’s say it was an English public school of 1840 or so, which would mean that he experienced a certain amount of brutality, a fist raised not in anger but because fists are supposed to be raised. We can pity him for that, if we like. He pitied himself for it.

He fell in love with a young woman whose dark eyes narrowed in concentration when she used two fingers to extract a single seed from a pomegranate. She would hold it between the nail of her first finger and the pad of her second, turning it like a gemstone for perhaps a quarter-hour before she put it in her mouth. By that time its skin had dried, and it must have popped like a tiny balloon when she bit into it.

Characters with even the faintest whiff of humanity make readers reimagine themselves, whether those characters actually do anything or not. A few seconds ago, you put your first and second fingers together and pictured a pomegranate seed between them.

He took up an occupation that interested him—perhaps he was in the military, or a member of the entrepreneurial middle class, a minister of the Gospel. He did his job well, sometimes very well. Those for whom he worked praised him outside of his hearing in smoky clubs, and younger men just learning the trade looked to him for advice and reassurance. In his job he had choices to make, and he made them. At the time those choices seemed important, but they weren’t really. Had he made different choices, or had he refused to make choices at all, the world at large, and even his own life, would have gone on more or less the same.

Passive protagonists are a mistake. The reader wants the main character to do something. He shouldn’t merely experience the world and pass through it, he should act on it, choose paths that have an impact. Especially this is true in a short story, which is supposed to concern the most important moment in the character’s life. Never mind that many people go through their lives more acted upon than acting, that for some, the decisions that make the fundamental differences were never theirs to begin with. What if I had called the protagonist she?

He stood beneath the infinite sky with a chill wind pressing against his face, watched dark trees wrestle and contort, and glimpsed the unbridgeable distance between himself and the heavens, between himself and the past. What is Man that You are mindful of him? He was fortunate: He never had life-and-death decisions thrown in his face by an unfriendly Providence. We all wish we had such lives.

The protagonist should have something at stake, something to gain or lose that’s important to him. If there’s no reason for the protagonist to care about the outcome, then there’s no reason for the reader to care either.

I could tell you things that mattered. I could choose a different main character, a coal miner dying at thirty, or someone enslaved in the American South, or a woman under the dominion of men at any time in the last three thousand years. Then, even if she died a pointless death after struggling without hope for years, you could put down the pages thinking that you’d learned something.

All of those things were going on during this man’s life. The dying coal miners, the abused women, they all suffered then. Our hero knew about them. More than this, he cared, said he cared, wept over them. No Ebenezer Scrooge here, no willfully callous miser shutting himself away from his fellow men. When those conscientious gentlemen with the subscription list knocked on his door, he gave handsomely. He voted for the Liberal candidate and argued with the friends at his club about relief for the poor and home rule for Ireland.

This is where we might expect to read a hint of a tragic flaw, a lack of discipline or failing of courage, a window into a disaster we’re sure will follow, or a challenge to be overcome so that he will find himself elevated and transformed by the end of the story. None of that is going to happen.

The wife whose concentration on a pomegranate seed had once so enchanted him died of a wasting illness, and he walked from one room to another, from one street to another, counting his footsteps and forgetting the number. His son sent him a letter once every few months, and his daughter came to visit every second Sunday, nodding kindly at everything he said and smiling as if she had actually heard him. The powers of his body failed him, slowly because he had a good physician (good for that era, anyhow). He died in the usual mixture of pain, perplexity, and a vague sense of a life well lived that he more or less expected. Less than a mile from that spot, on the same day, a girl of five and a boy of seven coughed out their last breaths on separate filthy street corners, alone and uncomforted, never having met.

If bad things are going to happen, they have to happen to people we know and care about. So the author doesn’t just tell you that a thousand people died; she makes you acquainted with one particular person, whose loves, hates, hopes, and fears you know and understand, and then that person dies, and you weep the way you’d never weep over the mountain of bodies on the floor of a stadium. Sure, one-and-a-half million died at Auschwitz, or maybe it was four million; it’s a number. But show you one pair of baby clothes in the Auschwitz Museum, and you start to sob.

The next time he was born, he grew up in the suburbs with the counter-culture and the civil rights riots and antiwar movements on television, and they frightened him. Late one night he saw a movie about teenagers locking up all the parents in concentration camps, and news anchors told of astronauts screaming on their launch pad, a man shot in a motel, another man who maybe was a president shot in another hotel, and funerals for people killed in riots. It was easy to be scared.

During recess at school, he hid in a brick alcove that housed the huge, warm HVAC unit, humming along with it and listening to the dissonance when he raised or lowered the pitch of his voice. He built little rockets out of cardboard and balsa, sanding the fins and painting them with a sealant that said Dope on the label, and wondered if it was the same dope they meant in the public service ads. The rockets went up with a sound like a garden hose splatting on the pavement, and most of them were lost on their very first flights.

He attended a college full of wealthy campus radicals, where socialist rhetoric, feminist separatism, and critical race theory were thrown about by people who mostly forgot about them by the time they turned thirty. Joining in made him feel popular and loved, which is what he wanted. When he was nineteen, his girlfriend told him she was a feminist, and so he decided to become a feminist, too. It wasn’t as shallow as it sounds; he read a lot, and talked to many people, and really believed the things he said. He donated lots of money to organizations that lobbied and agitated for gender equity and justice. When the two of them got married, they had rings made in which they set semi-precious stones they’d gathered on a vacation together.

The politics felt good, and maybe some of the money helped, and maybe his one phone call to the right state representative was the tipping point. In fact, none of it was. If he’d never donated, never marched, never spoken, things would have worked out pretty much the same. Most of the time he knew this.

He became a loan officer in a bank, and, like George Bailey in the movie, was able to use his authority to nudge things in the direction of women, people of color, gays, trans people, every oppressed and underrepresented category of person he could think of. He was proud of himself. Of course, the bank had its standards, and there was a limit to how much nudging he could do, and he never went so far as to jeopardize his own position.

He pictured what it would be like if he were the one who had to be constantly on guard lest he be molested or killed, the one channeled into a life of poverty, the one whose culture was harvested, homogenized, sugared, and fed back to him in nauseating swallows. These things made him angry, and he protested them, or at least he chimed in when someone else protested them.

Eventually he died, no wiser than he began, as the song goes. And if some prophet out of a novel had been standing over him at that moment, she’d have said, “for all the good or evil, creation or destruction, your living might have accomplished, you might just as well never have lived at all.” He might have protested that that couldn’t be true, because he had children. But they didn’t do anything either.

Now you think this is a story about karma. He keeps getting reborn because he’s failing to learn the lesson he needs, and sooner or later he’ll have an epiphany or redemption or something that will take him one step closer to Nirvana or Enlightenment. That’s not going to happen either. The wheel of fire keeps turning; he never gets any wiser, never becomes more aware, never takes action to do anything. Not in one lifetime, not in thirty. There is no progress, no arc, no satisfying or edifying conclusion.

While repetition can be a powerful device, it’s wasteful and boring unless there is some detectable change between the different instances of the action, theme, or symbol. A piece of short fiction is not a chant; it needs continual development, an evolution or completion of something that appears more than once. We understood it the first time; we don’t need to be told again.

The next time he was born, he was a cyborg. The neural link he shared with his fellow creatures allowed him to access whatever thoughts and feelings they wished to share with him. There was one who was endlessly fascinated by a few grains of sand in the palm of her hand, grains in which she fancied she could see tiny contours, but which would be lost forever if she exhaled near them. Another climbed boulders, gripping the rock with his bare hands, feeling the pressure and pain and knowing for certain he was alive. Our hero saw what they saw, felt what they felt, and believed he had learned something.

These enhancements were available only to that small percentage of the population with the wealth, the technological surroundings, the physical safety to partake of them. Most of the human race was still, even in that advanced time, wrestling with problems of basic nutrition, sanitation, and violence. Of those who did not share his race, his gender, his orientation, his class, his ableness, there were some who did attain the neural links, and they were not shy about uploading experiences for all to understand. They thought that if only others could feel what they felt, the callous indifference of privilege would melt away.

Now you hope for a hand-waving fix for contemporary social problems. This “neural link” thing, which I haven’t explained because I haven’t the first idea how it could work, will magically impose empathy on all its users; the courageous oppressed will, perhaps in some noble act of sacrifice, impart the experience of their oppression to the privileged, and the world will transform.

No. He felt what they felt, certainly. He experienced their pain, their sorrow, their fear, their anger. In his mind, he smiled when she didn’t feel it for fear of what would happen next, always looked over eir shoulder, pressed his belly for the food that was not there. He remembered guarding each word lest e utter the wrong syllable and trigger violence. And each time it was done, he switched off the link and wept for the pain, and sent messages apologizing for living as one of the oppressors, and transferred credit units to the accounts of movements that were trying to make things better.

Eventually he died this time, too, although life extension methods had progressed considerably and it took longer than it would nowadays. He died disappointed, unhappy with the world, wishing he’d had the moral fiber to do something more about it than he did.

The story goes on and on, but you understand how it’s going to go.

Inconclusive endings frustrate and dissatisfy the reader. The author should not shirk his responsibility, but should have the guts to choose what happens at the end. Leaving it up to the reader’s imagination to speculate on a conclusion is a cop-out.

If you’re reading this story in the year 2115, and you’ve made a quick search of my name by flicking a fingernail or thinking the code for your genie, whatever the hell science-fiction sort of thing you do in 2115, you haven’t found anything. No achievements, no accomplishments, no victory for humanity that will make me unashamed to die, as they say. Maybe even the names of my parents, wife, and children aren’t there. Maybe all you’ve found is this story. I haven’t dug in with both feet and both hands, started the revolution, spent my life for the poor, cured the great plague. Maybe nothing I say here matters. You can call me a hypocrite, if that makes you feel any better.

But I’m not really here, am I? These are words on a page, on a screen, on that nifty little implant you’re all using in the twenty-second century. Maybe I lied about myself. After all, I did lie about the protagonist; he’s just made up, all forty-seven of him. Maybe I’m a selfless saint who spends every day trying to better the lot of his fellow creature. Maybe I’m the least privileged person you can imagine, suffering under/within the multidimensional, constricting weight of seven different kinds of oppression. By 2115, I’m dead anyway, so what do you even care? I’m atoms on the wind; maybe I’m the atoms in your fingernail. From where you stand, I am every bit as fictional as the protagonist of this story. He’s not real. I’m not real. Only you are real.

©2016 by Kenneth Schneyer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kenneth Schneyer is a writer, professor, lawyer, actor, project manager, bicyclist, amateur astronomer, feminist, and Jew. He was nominated for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon awards in 2014; that same year, Stillpoint Digital Press released his first collection, The Law & the Heart. His 30+ published short stories appear in such venues as Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, and Podcastle. He attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in 2009, and now works with both the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop and Codex Writers. Born in Detroit, he now lives in Rhode Island with one singer, one dancer, one actor, and something with fangs. He plays a fair game of stud poker, excels at presidential trivia, reads Tarot, actually understands the stock market, and cooks better than you do. You can find him on Facebook, on Twitter, or at ken-schneyer.livejournal.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

The Child Support of Cromdor The Condemned

Spencer Ellsworth | 7330 words

Cromdor the Calderian, thrice-cursed, thrice-condemned, (I’ve forgotten the rest, but believe you me, there is thrice-more) had nearly finished his tale when the traveler slipped in. As he had for the last ten days and ten before that, Cromdor had a packed house. ’Course, “packed house” is relative—last winter a mudslide tore away half the common room, and Yargin had been rebuilding when he fell through the thatch and died on that floor. Damned if Greta, his daughter, didn’t ever try to stop his goats from getting in, or doing their business in the corners.

So’s only the old folks came. A fine summer night, and we’d have sunlight until midnight, and stories to go with it, but the young ones were mostly down at the church, praying for the holy warriors on their mission in Ursalim, worshipping the new Bleeding God. Don’t the weather matter? The crop? How’s one god gonna keep track of all that?

Point being, the traveler stuck out.

“She was a wench, let me tell you.” Cromdor liked to stretch out “wench,” a grumbling roll like rocks coming down a mountain.

Greta groaned. “Always with the wenches. Now you’ve got to describe her.”

Cromdor’s enormous, broken-toothed grin was like some mean old cat’s. “This wench had skin like ivory—”

“Always ivory. Ivory or creamed coffee. Never a freckle.” Greta didn’t miss a step.

“Ivory,” Cromdor said. “And hair red as flame.”

“Not raspberries, then? Flame?”

“She had that same hair in one other place,” Cromdor said, and everyone chuckled. “And do you know in Coria they use those sorcerer’s tattoos? A man gets in well with a Corian girl, he’d better check the spells where he’s putting his—”

“Cromdor.”

Young guy stood in the doorway. Skin a deep, burnt brown. Like the parchment Cromdor passed around once in a while, full of some kind of writing we couldn’t read, Cromdor included, that told about his deeds. I would have suspected this boy to be Amaric, like one of them women Cromdor talks about, but Cromdor always said they’re born with that skin, rich as cream in coffee, whatever in the name of Friya’s dugs coffee is (none of us had a right idea what ivory looked like either) but he was tall as any northerner. Boy was also dressed up thick as three bears, festooned in way too many damn furs for summer. He had about the craziest thing on his face I’ve ever seen someone wear. Round pieces of glass like he’d cut the bottoms out of two lord’s cups.

Cromdor took a drink—least he meant to, but his glass was empty. “Greta! Fill me up and this boy, too, so he can hear the rest of the story.”

“Get your own damn drink,” Greta said, as usual.

“I’m not here for stories,” the boy said. “Do you remember Dary? Peasant girl, in southern Galia? During the border wars, in High Preston Hollense’s time.”

“I don’t reckon time by Church boy-buggers.” He grabbed the pitcher from Greta and took a deep drink. “What sort of man are you, with that skin and those things on your face?”

“Your son.”

“Ah, Carn damn me,” Cromdor said, slamming his ale down.

• • • •

We mostly cleared out. Cromdor was staring into his ale, looking about like someone’d hit his ass with the hammer of Gar. Before the Gods, we’d all wondered about his kids. Either all those wenches were lies, or the man had more bastards than a king.

Greta smacked me on the shoulder with a wet rag. “Your daughter wants you home, Olen.”

“My daughter kicked me out this morning,” I said, “and told me not to come back till tonight, ’less I was planning to help with the roof.” Just saying it made my back ache.

“Nah, come on over, Olen,” Cromdor said. “You were one of them mages, weren’t you?”

“Magistrate,” I said. “No mages anym—”

“Whatever. Make your useless ass useful.” Cromdor slammed the table. “More ale, woman!”

The boy sat. “Who’s this Darcy?”

He took the things off his face and breathed on them, then started rubbing them carefully. Never seen anything like it. “Dary. A black-haired girl,” the boy said, and I could just hear Cromdor describing her. Buxom, raven-haired, and she had an appetite! Mark me, those peasant girls know more tricks than fancy courtesans . . . “Lived in a farm outside Faires. You were passing through with a war party to fight the Amars in the Pirren mountains.”

“I fought a lot of Amars. And bedded a lot of wenches.”

The boy muttered something incomprehensible. “What?”

He cleared his throat. Funny how someone could look furious and terrified at the same time. “She gave you a green stone, in gold filigree.”

Cromdor blew out one lock of his long black hair. “Phew. Hold on, boy. I think I remember her. Buxom, raven-haired, and she had an—”

“I want it back,” he said. “She’s sick, and I need money to bring a doctor to Faires.”

Cromdor laughed. “How old is she? Come now, boy. That was a while back. She’s lived a good life.”

“She was thirteen when you got her pregnant,” the boy said.

Now, I don’t know how they do it elsewhere, but around here that’s mighty young. Cromdor can talk all he wants about the courts of sorcerers and kings, but in the countryside, a fella comes adventuring through town, all bluster and blade like Cromdor, we keep a weather eye on our daughters, and keep a weather eye on that fella, and hurry him fast as possible. I caught Greta looking at Cromdor out of the corner of my eye.

“How old are you, boy?”

“Nineteen years.”

“How old does that make her exactly?” Cromdor had a good sword arm, but the man never learned sums.

“Look,” he said. “I’m a physician, but I can’t figure out what’s wrong with her. I need one of my old teachers to come to my village to look at her, but even he can’t afford the trip. You are my father, and you owe me . . . something.” I suppose it was polite as you could be, were you collecting from your long-gone father.

“Physicians’ guild is swimming in money,” Cromdor said. “Even I know that.”

“I was trained by Amars,” he said. “I’m not—I’m not like most of my countrymen.”

“You pray to the Bleeding God?” Cromdor asked.

“No,” the boy said. “I pray to the Thousand Gods of the Amarites, one and a multitude.”

“Well, that’s something, ain’t it? A start, by Carn.”

• • • •

Cromdor said he was going to look for the jewel. Greta and I shared a look. There was nothing in that shed of his ’cept a sharpener and a bar tab he couldn’t read.

Greta came over to me. “I told you. Didn’t I? I said trouble’s going to come sooner or later.”

I didn’t answer. Every once in a while, someone reminded us that Cromdor was a nasty old drunk who showed up out of blue, saying nothing about his past unless it had to do with killing and wenching.

“This may be a foreign concept to you, Olen, but a man’s debts come due,” Greta said.

I was just working up a good response—maybe something about calming down, and getting the goats out before she gives a customer trouble, when she hollered, “Look at that!”

Damned if the boy didn’t unroll a mat in the corner and start praying! Greta and I, we stared like we were watching a Frosthand try to kiss a human. (Which happened, you know—poor old Pandrig Hargund, the fellow was nice to one of the young ones after its mother tossed it out, and now Pandrig’s frozen till the end of the world.) (Which ain’t far off, not with all the young ones acting so. Bleeding God my bleeding arse.)

Boy finished his prayers and stood up. “You Amarites,” I said. “You have lots of gods?”

“Amarites are a tribe. I’m just one of the Faith,” he said. “I studied with them, because the physicians’ guild wouldn’t teach a bastard boy.” He rolled up the mat. “There are a Thousand Aspects of a Thousand Gods, all gods one and all gods many.”

Blubbery nonsense. “Good to hear, boy. Job’s too big for one god.”

Greta leaned in close to me. “What’re we going to do when Cromdor ain’t got what the boy asked for?”

“That’s between Cromdor and his son.”

“Olen,” she said. “This is a matter of thurgisk.”

Just like Greta to bring that up. “Cromdor ain’t one of us. Can’t hold an outsider to our rules.”

“All decent folk observe the inheritance of a father and son, Olen.”

Thurgisk. That word used to get me riled up. My father would chant it, and he’d hit the table, and he’d bellow how you’re nothing if you don’t have a son and something to leave to him, pass on a holdfast, pass on the true gods, all the way back to when my great-greatfather decided to stay here and not go reaving across the sea with Karik the Red-Hand, because he cared for the ground under his feet and the gods and thurgisk, thurgisk, thurgisk.

My wife gave me one living daughter and three stillborn sons, and the last son killed her. If I hadn’t been such a damn fool, talking about having a son, talking about thurgisk like it’s the point of living, saying life wasn’t life without a son, well, can’t second-guess the gods, but I reckon she might still be alive.

Cromdor came stalking back in then. To his credit, he was a bit blowed, his belly heaving as if he really had gone home and searched his things. I thought he was about to put an effort into apologizing to the boy when he turned to me. “Frosthands.”

“Now? Where?” I stood up, practically knocking Greta over. “It’s the middle of summer!”

“The monks in their mine found something that wasn’t iron.” Cromdor picked up a tankard. “Some ale before we go into battle?”

Greta shook her head. “I’m not running your tab up again before you die.”

“By Carn, woman! A man needs a drink before—”

“Ah, excuse—” The boy mumbled something, coughed, and repeated it.

“Speak like a man! What in the seven hells are you talking about?” Cromdor snapped.

“What happened to the monks?”

“I’ll tell you someday,” Cromdor said, “or the bards will. Come on, Olen.”

“You come, boy,” I said. “We’ll need good hands.” The boy grabbed some of those silly furs he’d covered himself with and headed out. If he wasn’t careful, someone was going to shoot him and make a rug out of those skins.

We crossed the village and Talwic’s pasture, the field of mud it was. Talwic’s never learned to graze his cows properly. Ahead of us, the path wound up through the black pines like a white snake. I could feel myself getting blowed already. Or maybe it was fear. A man ought to be afraid. The monks brush off the old gods, and they brush off our offerings and proper prayers, but they can’t ignore a Frosthand. No man can.

Can’t figure if the Frosthands are intelligent. If they wanted our pasture, or our food, or our women, they could have them in a second. But they don’t want to do much except come in the dead of winter and freeze whatever they touch. You just have to pray they are satisfied when they split your fencepost and hope they don’t get into the cattle.

“So what do you figure you’re going to do against Frosthands?” I asked Cromdor. He was clad in his usual loincloth, holding a naked sword.

“Figure it out when we get there.”

The boy chose that moment to speak up. “My mother’s necklace. What did you do with it?”

Cromdor blew out a sweat-wet string of hair. “I reckon I lost it when Malkior the Cruel took me captive. Had a few other things that were worth a good bit of money. Malkior took bloody everything. Lucky for me his serving-wench had a good eye for manhood, and she sprung me.”

“Now hold old was she?” I asked.

“Keep your old mouth shut, Olen,” he grumbled.

“Don’t go getting huffy,” I said. I leaned in closer to Cromdor. “Do right by this boy, Cromdor.” I may have argued with Greta on the particulars, but I wasn’t about to see anyone shirk a fatherly duty. (Unless it involved fixing my daughter’s roof. A man’s back is only meant for so much.)

Cromdor pulled me ahead of the boy and muttered. “I don’t force women, Olen. I hold to few things, but I hold to that.” And after a moment, “They don’t bloody tell me how old they are!”

“You ever thought to ask?” He didn’t answer. “Now, look here, Cromdor, I ain’t saying you’re that kind of man, but you oughtta have some sense!”

“A young man with a willing wench? Have sense?” He laughed.

I went flush. It ain’t something to be real proud of, but at my age, a man likes to hear about the willing wenches. I drank up them stories of smooth-skinned coffee brown girls and flame-haired girls, begging Cromdor to pull their diaphanous (figure that’s some kind of wool?) robes off. Reminds me of a time when I could see over my belly and swing an axe without throwing my spine sideways. “Well, it ever occurred to you . . .” Took a minute to find the words.

“Carn damn it, Olen, speak your piece and be done.”

I cleared my throat. Think like a magistrate and a father, not an old fool, Olen. “Occurred to you there’s more going on when a young girl comes to your bed?” He gave me a stare like I’d said something crazy. “Big strong fella rolls into town, some young girls, they might figure if they open up their legs, that big strong fella won’t cause much trouble. Others, well, they’re too young to know not to play with fire.” He was looking like I was some craven in his stories gone and turned on him. “I oughtn’t be the one telling you this! I said it a hundred times, the gods give us all just enough wits as we nee—”

“Shut your mouth.” He had a dark tone in his voice that said violence.

I forced myself to gaze at those rage-filled eyes. “You been adventuring a long time. Speaking as a magistrate, debts come due.”

He looked like he was going to whack my wise old magistrate head right off. Praise the Gods, he stormed on.

I followed, wheezing up that hill.

“If I might ask, what are you speaking about?” the boy asked.

“Oh, I didn’t say anything he didn’t already know,” I said, and kept on going. It was a sad thing and a fool thing at once, to know them wenching stories wouldn’t go down the same anymore.

Up here, black sentinel pines surrounded us, with few of any other trees except a few gnarled scrub oaks in the spots where lightning had burned out patches of forest. The black pines marched up, and up, and up to the snow and the rocks ripping the sky apart, where the gods’ own drinking halls were.

I knew the monks had been digging a mine up here, although we’d all told them that a little bit of copper or iron wasn’t worth the bears, wolves, and Frosthands. But who needs sense when you’ve got just one god telling you what to do?

The monks were gathered around a prone body. The boy—Amir, or whatever he’d said—broke from behind us and ran forward. “I’m a physician,” he said, the loudest he had spoken yet. When he talked that loud, his accent really sounded kind of funny.

I hurried after him. Cromdor didn’t break stride, walking as easy as you please, just as if he were a young man striding into battle and his gut didn’t hang out over his loincloth.

The prone fella on the ground had a face looked half-cooked away. “Burns?” I asked.

“What happened?” the boy asked.

A tall thin monk—young fellow—said, “It was cold! God’s wounds, it was cold, like steam. A cold that burned him.” He shivered; cold in the summer sun!

“I need water,” Amir said, loud as you please and with a funny accent. No more mumbling. “I can make a poultice for this, but it needs to be clean and bandaged. Fetch dressings!”

“I can get it,” an older monk said. “I can run.”

Amir hardly nodded. He yanked out a mortar and pestle from his bag and started smashing up some funny-looking plant.

“What’s this about Frosthands?” Cromdor said.

One of the other monks pointed.

I hadn’t noticed it, being focused on the monks and all, but there it was, a Frosthand. Lying on the hillside, among the trees, up a bit from the gaping entrance to the mine.

Gods take me. Thing was taller than the bloody inn, all long legs and long nose and warty skin like a knotted oak tree. After a moment, a moment where I was ready to piss my trousers, I realized it wasn’t moving. It sat in a pile of mud. I could see water oozing out of its skin, like a sponge getting squeezed.

Dead, too, dead as a stump. The monks had hacked its neck.

Crazy as you please, Cromdor just walked right up to that Frosthand and kicked it. Water went rushing out in a pool around Cromdor’s fur-covered boots.

“Lost its magic.”

“I killed it,” said the first monk to talk. Young, thin fellow. Pale eyes and bright blonde hair and wound tight as a cornered snake. He clutched the haft of a broken sword. “After I cut the creature, my blade shattered.”

“Lucky your arm didn’t freeze,” I said.

“We dug into Hell,” one of the monks said. “The devils will rise if we don’t seal the—”

“You didn’t dig into Hell, you dumb unwashed chanting idiots,” Cromdor said. “You dug into some Frosthand’s lair.” Cromdor grinned, a big toothy grin like a yawning cat. “If we’re lucky, you’ll get a pool of water. Every summer, wenches will come here to bathe their supple young limbs.”

“There’s more of them down there,” the monk said. “When we hit the cold, it shook the whole mine, and collapsed some of the walls, and that Frosthand came charging out of another cavern. There are hundreds more of them!”

Cromdor didn’t even wait for a by-your-leave. He just charged right into that mine, through the cold mist rising. A couple of those monks shouted after him and started to chase him, but they gave up real quick.

The twitchy monk, the one killed the Frosthand, hung back, eyeballing the last spot Cromdor had stood.

A monk returned with the bandages that the boy had asked for, and he set to work wrapping up those cold-burns. I sat down a bit—took a while to get comfortable with my back throbbing already, and all winded, too—and figured I was going to wait. You figure that out after a bit, listening to stories. There’s a lot more waiting around, and having to piss (more than a man should at any age—I’m a busted pump, Wethin Skyfather take mercy) than they tell you.

I thought. Mostly, against my will, I thought about what Greta had said, and about thurgisk. About my wife, and about how it still gets me a bit when I see a man, like Cromdor, don’t want to know his son, don’t think about what he left that mother with.

Suppose that’s why I stood up and wandered over to where the boy was. Well, took another piss first, but then I headed for the boy.

“I don’t have much of this,” Amir was saying, as he rubbed some bright green concoction into the burned man’s skin. “In the drylands, it’s valuable as water. Understand that.”

I had to grin, thinking of all the times Cromdor had talked about valuables from foreign lands in that same damned tone. “You understand? Smear it on your burns twice a day. Do not throw it out, do not mistake me, do not treat it cheaply.”

“Boy,” I said. “Ymir. Amir, I mean. Come over here.”

The boy walked to me, looking back at the pit in the earth. He pulled the furs around his shoulders. “Should we go in after him?” he asked. “He should have come out by now.”

“Boy, even if half of Cromdor’s stories are pure lies, I still think he can handle himself in a cold hole in the ground,” I said.

The boy stared at the hole as if it was indeed a pit to Hell. Southlanders, I tell you.

“So you just find out Cromdor was your daddy, or you just didn’t have the inclination to find him?”

“I always knew,” the boy said, his voice as bitter as an old woman with a grudge. “Always.” After a moment he said, “They tell stories about him. All over. I’ve heard about Cromdor the Fearsome, the Brave, the Battle-Hardened, in every tavern on this journey.”

“Your mother talk about him much?”

“There is little to talk about.”

A man’s got to think hard about what to say to this kind of boy. ’Course, I didn’t. Sometimes I’m as big a fool as Greta says. “I reckon that Cromdor owes you plenty, then. We’ll find some way to get the money your mother needs—”

“It was a long time ago,” the boy said. “I only came because she was bit by a spider, a red spinneret. I drained the bite, and I gave her the anti-venom, but something’s still in her, poisoning her blood. One of my teachers knew spiders, understood poisons.” He paused, a bit choked. Not much more than a boy indeed. “Thirty and three is too young to die. Not after the life she’s had.”

Cromdor came up out of the mine. “Olen!” he bellowed.

And here came my part in the story. I hustled over to him. “What’s down there, Cromdor?”

“Get those kneelers out of here,” Cromdor said. He leaned in close. “You’ve got about five young Frosthands in there. No bigger than babes. And their mother.”

A Frostmother. Gods preserve us.

“Better if I show you.” Cromdor grabbed my arm. “You come, too, boy. You won’t see this in the southlands, and you’ve got the furs for it.”

The monks remained behind, staring after us, but they weren’t ready to mess with Cromdor yet, it seemed. Down we went. The mist was thick and icy, like small flakes of snow. Amir put his thin hand on my arm. I looked back to see that the seeing-glasses over his face had grayed out with the mist.

It was cold. The kind of cold you don’t want to think about in summer, the kind that made me wish I had brought furs like Amir’s. Or more. My hands were shaking, and I had to clench my teeth to keep them from rattling. Cromdor even showed goosebumps, he who never wore a thing save his loincloth and a sword.

We went through a few tunnels until we got to one half-collapsed. A pile of dirt and rock had filled half the tunnel, and a kind of cold white light, like that which comes from snow on a dark night, was filtering in through the gap in the wall.

“Up here,” Cromdor said, his breath steaming.

I scrambled up the pile of earth and rock, and I looked into the Frostmother’s eyes.

Thick coils filled the cave, piled from top to bottom. Fat coils as big around as a plow-horse, curled around each other, lying in rings. But it wasn’t all snake, because from the underside of the coils, a few little pink dugs sprouted, like a cow’s udders in a row. Little Frosthands curled against some of those dugs, their spindly white hands clutching at their mother’s teats. They squirmed to get close to the cold of their Frostmother the same way pigs in a barn might curl up to the warmth of the mother.

In the heart of those coils, a sightless black eye stared out at me. I mean black. Black as night without a moon or stars. Black as the depths of a well. Drew me in, it did, and whispered like a man telling a story. Stories of deep, dark nights, of sweet cold, of warmth draining out of a little living thing, of the joy of blood freezing . . .

“Olen!”

“Cold.” I whispered it. The boy did, too. “Cold, cold, go to the cold, suckle the cold . . .” There we were, walking toward the thing, ready to latch onto its udders.

Cromdor saved us. That iron grip yanked us both back, threw us to the ground. “Keep your sense! You never felt magic before? If she breathes on us, touches us . . .”

I nodded. He’d snapped me out of it for now, but I could not look at that eye, that old, black eye.

Cromdor leaned on his sword. “Maybe we could kill the babes, at least, without waking the Frostmother.”

I gave him a level look. “You’re going to kill babes on the nipple.”

“You know what they’ll do when they get older.”

The boy spoke up. “This is old magic, you say,” he whispered. “I have heard of this, from my mother. Spirits of fire and air, ice and ash. Ancient things, for whom men are like mice.” He whispered now. “Olen, the gods of this place are watching. And we should not cross the old magic.”

Cromdor and I stared at the boy. And right together, we nodded. What else could you do, when a fellow spoke sense?

Up we went. I’ve never been so glad to get away from anything as much as that deep black eye.

The monks were waiting. That sharp-eyed monk with a blade watched us leave the hole in the ground. “Well?”

“Well,” I said. “That was a sight.” I spoke louder. “These are the Frosthands’ mountains, and we ought to know better. A man can kill all the wolves he wants, if they skulk around his farm, but the gods gave these mountains to wolves and bears and Frosthands, and the valley to us to farm.

“You fellows know what the Frosthands’ll do, right?” I got nods from most of them. “I reckon we should move the mine somewhere closer to town. Just leave this spot alone, and pray to the gods—to your god—that you stay safe. Even the supple wenches should leave it alone, Cromdor.”

The young monk stepped forward. He’d gotten a new sword from somewhere. He held it at the ready, and I could tell he knew how to swing the thing, just as much as Cromdor did. “Thank you for taking the risk. We have this monster in hand.”

“Boy,” I said, “let it alone. Trust me.”

“I have a duty, old man, to God.”

A half-cup of sense would have gone down right in that crowd. Instead, Cromdor shoved me out of the way. “Olen made the decision.” He walked right up to the young monk, who put his new blade up. Old Cromdor didn’t stop till that sword was an inch from his nose. Cromdor’s hand twitched on his own sword hilt. “Get.”

“For the Gods’ sake—” I said.

“Please get out of the way,” the young monk said.

Cromdor shoved him.

The young monk came back lightning-fast, stabbing Cromdor’s shoulder. Cromdor roared, and pulled himself backward, yanking his shoulder away from the blade, but it was too late—he’d dropped his old, scarred sword. Blood poured down Cromdor’s arm. The young monk stepped forward and slammed his fist into Cromdor’s face, right with the hilt of the blade. Cromdor crumpled to the ground.

The young monk stood over Cromdor, chest heaving. He looked up at me. “Please move—”

Cromdor jumped to his feet. He punched the boy, and that punch was like Gar pounding out thunder on the sky. I saw a jaw crack, teeth scatter, and the young fellow dropped the sword and tried to rise warily, but he was a bit too dizzy to really hold himself up.

Cromdor snarled, and kicked the young monk’s feet out from under him. He stepped on the monk’s good hand, pinning it down. “Listen to your elders, you little pig’s ass.” He raised the blade and, neat as a woman slicing bread, he chopped right through that wrist, robbing the young monk of his sword hand.

He screamed. A jet of blood flew in the air from his stump, fell, splattered across the grass.

Cromdor looked up at his son and smiled a wicked, broken-toothed smile. “See? We needed you!”

• • • •

“Sew it up already, woman!”

Greta looked up at me and I shook my head. “Cromdor, your son said to staunch it till he came back, and I reckon he knows.” Actually, what he’d said was even a good sewing job is like to cause rot with a wound this deep.

“He’s off with those Carn-damned kneelers! Give me the needle and thread. I can sew my own wound closed.”

“I’m here,” said the boy from the doorway.

He came in with one of the old monks. Myself, Greta, Cromdor, and Greta’s old goat glared daggers at that kneeler. The monk didn’t seem to notice. He put a hand on Amir’s arm. “Thank you,” the monk said. “You did a great service. I will give you a letter, from me to the physician’s guild, speaking of your work with the servants of God.” The old monk looked at us. “We will call a magistrate tomorrow to discuss this situation. My young brother was rash, and responded with more force than was perhaps needed. Nevertheless . . .”

“Get over here and sew me up already, boy!” Cromdor roared.

“Just a moment.” Amir shed his furs again, and wiped his forehead. He removed those funny bits of glass and cleaned them again. The night was half-gone, dark outside at last, and the boy looked tired. “Olen, have you any warm water?”

“Had a pot boiling on the stove half an hour ago. I’ll get you some.”

“Get some more lanterns, too.” He had a cake of soap in one hand, I noticed. “Do you have any drink? Not beer. Something strong.”

“I’ve got some of Dad’s old gurkild,” Greta said. “Even at half-strength, it’d stand your hair up.”

“Get it.”

I fetched lanterns, and Greta fetched gurkild in jars, and Cromdor grimaced but said nothing. Going by his stories, he hadn’t taken a wound like this in ten years. Ten years of drinking and fattening and rotting away.

The boy opened up Cromdor’s wound, and carefully pulled out the sopping, blood-drenched dressing. The wound was big and ragged and purple. Dark and still oozing blood, if not gushing, once we’d packed the dressing in. Waiting had been the worse for it.

“Godsave,” Greta muttered. “Just a thimbleful of sense. They’re going to sing of Cromdor the Stubborn, who was too damned stupid to live.”

“Lie down,” Amir said.

“I’m doing this on my feet,” Cromdor said.

“You’ll need to lie down after I give you this,” Amir said, holding up a bottle and a sponge. “I soak the sponge in this mixture and put it on your face.”

“There poppy in that?” Cromdor asked. His son nodded. “Not taking it, boy. Sew me standing up, awake. No poppy.”

He looked back at me. I shrugged. “I reckon he’s taken some real hurts in his day.”

“Even a big man can be knocked out by pain,” the boy said. I wondered if he was even a bit concerned for Cromdor, or if he was talking like a physic. It was hard to tell, and it wasn’t just that accent done it.

He took some kind of pump out of his bag. Looked a bit like a bellows, if you could fill a bellows with gurkild, then work it one-handed. And he did, gurkild and water not far off the boil, smelling so strong it nearly knocked me out, and then he worked the pump and flushed it into Cromdor’s wound.

Cromdor thundered and roared like a bull in a pen, but he didn’t move, not after two or three flushes of the wound. His big fists tightened on the table he was sitting on, tightened till they were white. Blood and gurkild and water ran down his arm in trails.

“All right,” Amir said. “I need to pull the sides of the wound apart and put a couple of deep stitches in before I stitch the surface together. Olen, will you help?”

Cromdor’s face was getting mighty pale. “Show me what to do, Amir,” I said.

“It’s not too different from cutting meat. You hold this side, and pull a bit so I can see what’s in there. Imagine you are trying to get some tendon out of a chunk of beef. It helps, I think.” He spoke very calmly.

“Don’t . . .” Cromdor was looking sick. “Just do it, boy.”

“Drink some of the gurkild, at least,” Greta said. “Listen to me. Please.”

He slowly nodded his head, and she brought the ceramic jar to his lips, and he drank, and I held the wound apart so the boy could put a few tiny, tiny stitches into the meat of Cromdor’s arm. I’ve never seen anyone work that fine, not a seamstress, but the boy just slipped a few quick loops in, and then he was sewing up Cromdor’s skin.

And then we were done, and Cromdor was gasping for air.

“I didn’t see any rot in there,” the boy said. “You’ll need to wash it every day and smear some of this drink at first over the surface of the wound, so as not to disturb it. Wash it every day, you hear?”

Cromdor looked up at the boy. Sweat was running down his craggy face, the drops gathering at the edge of his nose, hanging on the ridges, collecting in the hollows under his small black eyes.

“I have nothing for you,” he gasped. “Nothing. I’m not . . . I’m not that kind of man.”

Amir waited a moment, and then he did one of them peculiar Amarite things, I think. He put two fingers to his lips and flicked them away, as if to say that he had no words worthy of speaking to his father.

• • • •

Amir just bedded down in the corner, and asked Greta if she couldn’t bring a couple of extra blankets. His seeing-glasses folded up nicely; they had a tiny hinge in them, it turns out, as fine as a clockmaker’s dream. I never seen the like. The sun was up by the time I trudged home, and my daughter gave me hell about the roof, and I only got a few hours of sleep and a few more hours playing with my greatdaughters before I trudged back, after some more talk about the roof, and more, and let me tell you, that roof could take up this whole story if I let it, but the point is, I needed to see whether the boy was getting on.

I came back in time to see Amir at his prayers again. Greta was bustling about the tables, making sure not to look, but that didn’t stop a few of the other old-timers—Urgut was staring and muttering, “Damnedest kneeling. Damnedest kneeling I ever saw.”

“Lay off, Urgut. Boy’s got a thousand gods to pray to, you know. He ought to kneel.”

“Seen Cromdor?” I asked Greta.

“You ought to be home, Olen,” she said, “getting some sleep.”

“I wanted to make sure Cromdor’s all right.”

“Cromdor isn’t getting out of bed for days, not after last night, and not after all the gurkild he drank.”

“I’m here, woman,” Cromdor called from the door.

In the corner, Amir went right on praying, until he finished and he rolled up his little rug. He looked around the room, a bit resigned, I think, to getting stared at. And he looked at his father.

“Boy,” Cromdor said. “I came for you.”

Amir put on those seeing-lenses, walked over to his father, and said, “You might tear the wound.”

“I took far worse, boy, and from your precious Amarites, too. Some wailing madman with a curved sword, on a little horse. More like a big dog. Mean, though. Underestimated him and . . .” Cromdor heaved with breath. “Come with me before I fall over.”

The two of them left. The boy put a hand around Cromdor’s waist. All the old-timers remained, staring after them.

I snuck out the back and followed them, at a length, back to Cromdor’s hut. Now, I know I shouldn’t have, but I had been a bit invested in Cromdor’s thurgisk, as a magistrate should be, so I had to see if it was done right.

I snuck around the back of Cromdor’s hut in a circle, and plopped myself down on the grass the best I could. They were out in front, talking.

“. . . tried to make me a king, you know. In Kerisoth-Beyond-The-Sea. Ever heard of it?”

“No,” Amir said.

“I killed the Ancient One, this big, fat creature. Five tentacles it had, and a beak that was bloody with the scraps of young virgins. It had tentacles of the spirit, too, that went into their minds. Everyone in Kerisoth-Beyond-The-Sea was so happy, lived in the greatest kingdom on the Earth, loved the Ancient One, and didn’t mind taking their young daughters to its bloody jaws. There was a young wench, the ripest, sweetest virgin dreamed up by the gods, eighteen summers and blonde, and she was the only one who could resist the Ancient One’s pull, and she and I . . .” He hesitated. “Anyway, they wanted me to rule them when it died. I probably should have taken them up on it. I’d have more than just a shit-smelling hut at the end of the damned world.”

“I see.”

“I don’t know if you do.” Long pause. Long enough I figured he could hear me. “I didn’t force your mother, boy. I’ve never forced a woman, not once. I hold to few things, but I hold to that.”

“I believe you.” From what I knew of the boy, he believed that Cromdor was telling the truth as he saw it. “But you did not know her. You did not care to. You do not know what she gave up, how she worked, to raise me.” And in a way that was half between anger and sadness, the boy said, “She deserves more than to be one of your stories.”

They went silent so long I worried they’d heard me. Cromdor rustled around in the hut. “Can you read this scroll?”

“Yes. It’s in High Camyrian. A corrupted script, but I can read it.”

“Take it,” Cromdor said. “Take it and you’ll see.” He hesitated again. Cromdor had a hard time finding the words when they weren’t about wenches and battle. “Boy—son—I was barely off the teat when the Racians took me as a slave. They burned my village. They killed my mother. They whipped me every night. If I cried for my mother, they whipped me harder. I used to lie awake, promising Carn that I would be something more than a slave. Promising my mother.” The silence lasted a long time after that, before Cromdor spoke again. “So I broke free. I killed the slavers. A boy, killing men. Then I killed the slavers’ masters. Then their king. I’ve killed hundreds of men since. I made myself into a man for stories.” His hand audibly brushed the parchment. “Cromdor the Condemned.” His voice fell to a whisper. Didn’t know he even knew how to whisper. “And Carn knows I have regrets.”

I knew what he was saying. Maybe Cromdor had a thimbleful of wisdom at last. There were a thousand Cromdor stories, but there would be no story of how he defended his own hold, grew old with his love, raised his son, sewed a nasty wound with a calm demeanor and a steady hand.

He had chosen to be the man in the stories, and that closed off a better, truer man’s story.

The silence lasted long after that. “There’s a copyist in Yarg-Ennel named Nicodal. He begged me to let him copy this scroll. I bet he’d give you money for it. You pass through Yarg-Ennel on the way here?”

“I think so,” the boy said. “I think that was the old name of one town.”

“It’s got to be worth something,” Cromdor said. “Those stories got me a lot of free drinks.”

Well, after a minute Amir bundled Cromdor into his bed, telling him he’d better get to sleep. Amir snuck off a bit and I stayed there, just thinking, also sitting because my back hurt so bad I didn’t think I could get up.

“That work, Olen?” Cromdor said after a long time, voice coming sleepily through the wall of the hut.

I started. I should have figured Cromdor could hear me. As he told it, he had ears like a cat. “I reckon that’s a kind of thurgisk,” I said.

“Good,” Cromdor said. “Leave me alone now. Carn’s balls.”

I got myself up after a while, and I ran by Greta’s keep one last time to find Greta talking to the boy, Amir. One hand on his arm, and then she hugged him just like a mother. I seen lots of women talking to lots of men, and it looked like she had almost convinced him to stay, whether or not his mother was sick. But he turned, and off he went.

“He’s off already.” I said. “The old carry on, and the young come and go. Hope his mother’s still around when he gets home.”

“Olen, I don’t want to be the kind of woman who says all men are fools, but I’m tempted.” Greta laughed. “The things you can’t see. That boy’s mother’s dead.”

“Say what?”

“Long gone. A few years at least. You think a boy that dedicated would leave his mother’s side were she sick?”

I stared, open-mouthed as a goat. “Well, damn, what’s he here for? Get some money off Cromdor?”

“I think a boy like that is smart enough to know Cromdor ended poor.” She paused. “Thurgisk.”

I started to answer, to tell her that thurgisk was a man’s duty to his son, not the other way around, but I stopped. Like all things the gods made—all gods—there’s a lot in that little word. “Thurgisk.”

She eyed the sky. A few clouds were creeping in from the north, high and gray but thickening. “You got a roof to fix, Olen.”

“We don’t need to go into that.” I watched the boy go, and figured that I’d seen the gods move today. A bit.

“Olen, the roof.”

I tried to ignore the drop that plunked down on my head. Suppose the Gods were trying to tell us all something. ’Course, it ain’t like anyone’s going to listen, with some new fool god, with some new fool ideas, and nothing but a bunch of old stories to let you know the way things ought to be.

©2015 by Spencer Ellsworth. Originally published in Podcastle. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Spencer Ellsworth lives in Bellingham, WA, with his with and three children. He works as a teacher and administrator at Northwest Indian College, and his work has appeared & is forthcoming at Tor.com, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and many other places. You can read his blog, listen to his band and find links to his stories at spencerellsworth.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Surfacing

Walter Jon Williams | 21300 words

There was an alien on the surface of the planet. A Kyklops had teleported into Overlook Station, and then flown down on the shuttle. Since, unlike humans, it could teleport without apparatus, presumably it took the shuttle for the pleasure of the ride. The Kyklops wore a human body, controlled through an n-dimensional interface, and took its pleasures in the human fashion.

The Kyklops expressed an interest in Anthony’s work, but Anthony avoided it: He stayed at sea and listened to aliens of another kind.

Anthony wasn’t interested in meeting aliens who knew more than he did.

The boat drifted in a cold current and listened to the cries of the sea. A tall grey swell was rolling in from the southwest, crossing with a wind-driven easterly chop. The boat tossed, caught in the confusion of wave patterns.

It was a sloppy ocean, somehow unsatisfactory. Marking a sloppy day.

Anthony felt a thing twist in his mind. Something that, in its own time, would lead to anger.

The boat had been out here, both in the warm current and then in the cold, for three days. Each more unsatisfactory than the last.

The growing swell was being driven toward land by a storm that was breaking up fifty miles out to sea: The remnants of the storm itself would arrive by midnight and make things even more unpleasant. Spray feathered across the tops of the waves. The day was growing cold.

Spindrift pattered across Anthony’s shoulders. He ignored it, concentrated instead on the long, grating harmonic moan picked up by the microphones his boat dangled into the chill current. The moan ended on a series of clicks and trailed off. Anthony tapped his computer deck. A resolution appeared on the screen. Anthony shaded his eyes from the pale sun and looked at it.

Anthony gazed stonily at the translation tree. “I am rising toward and thinking hungrily about the slippery-tasting coordinates” actually made the most objective sense, but the right-hand branch of the tree was the most literal and most of what Anthony suspected was context had been lost. “I and the oily current are in a state of motion toward one another” was perhaps more literal, but “We (the oily deep and I) are in a cold state of mind” was perhaps equally valid.

The boat gave a corkscrew lurch, dropped down the face of a swell, came to an abrupt halt at the end of its drogue. Water slapped against the stern. A mounting screw, come loose from a bracket on the bridge, fell and danced brightly across the deck.

The screw and the deck are in a state of relative motion, Anthony thought. The screw and the deck are in a motion state of mind.

Wrong, he thought, there is no Other in the Dwellers’ speech.

We, I and the screw and the deck, are feeling cold.

We, I and the Dweller below, are in a state of mutual incomprehension.

A bad day, Anthony thought.

Inchoate anger burned deep inside him.

Anthony saved the translation and got up from his seat. He went to the bridge and told the boat to retrieve the drogue and head for Cabo Santa Pola at flank speed. He then went below and found a bottle of bourbon that had three good swallows left.

The trailing microphones continued to record the sonorous moans from below, the sound now mingled with the thrash of the boat’s screws.

The screw danced on the deck as the engines built up speed. Its state of mind was not recorded.

• • • •

The video news, displayed above the bar, showed the Kyklops making his tour of the planet. The Kyklops’ human body, male, was tall and blue-eyed and elegant. He made witty conversation and showed off his naked chest as if he were proud of it. His name was Telamon.

His real body, Anthony knew, was a tenuous incorporeal mass somewhere in n-dimensional space. The human body had been grown for it to wear, to move like a puppet. The nth dimension was interesting only to a mathematician: its inhabitants preferred wearing flesh.

Anthony asked the bartender to turn off the vid. The yacht club bar was called the Leviathan, and Anthony hated the name. His creatures were too important, too much themselves, to be awarded a name that stank of human myth, of human resonance that had nothing to do with the creatures themselves. Anthony never called them Leviathans himself. They were Deep Dwellers.

There was a picture of a presumed Leviathan above the bar. Sometimes bits of matter were washed up on shore, thin tenuous membranes, long tentacles, bits of phosphorescence, all encrusted with the local equivalent of barnacles and infested with parasites. It was assumed the stuff had broken loose from the larger Dweller, or were bits of one that had died. The artist had done his best and painted something that looked like a whale covered with tentacles and seaweed.

The place had fake-nautical decor, nets, harpoons, flashing rods, and knick-knacks made from driftwood, and the bar was regularly infected by tourists: that made it even worse. But the regular bartender and the divemaster and the steward were real sailors, and that made the yacht club bearable, gave him some company. His mail was delivered here as well.

Tonight the bartender was a substitute named Christopher: He was married to the owner’s daughter and got his job that way. He was a fleshy, sullen man and no company.

We, thought Anthony, the world and I, are drinking alone. Anger burned in him, anger at the quality of the day and the opacity of the Dwellers and the storm that beat brainlessly at the windows.

“Got the bastard!” A man was pounding the bar. “Drinks on me.” He was talking loudly, and he wore gold rings on his fingers. Raindrops sparkled in his hair. He wore a flashing harness, just in case anyone missed why he was here. Hatred settled in Anthony like poison in his belly.

“Got a thirty-foot flasher,” the man said. He pounded the bar again. “Me and Nick got it hung up outside. Four hours. A four-hour fight!”

“Why have a fight with something you can’t eat?” Anthony said.

The man looked at him. He looked maybe twenty, but Anthony could tell he was old, centuries old maybe. Old and vain and stupid, stupid as a boy. “It’s a game fish,” the man said.

Anthony looked into the fisherman’s eyes and saw a reflection of his own contempt. “You wanna fight,” he said, “you wanna have a game, fight something smart. Not a dumb animal that you can outsmart, that once you catch it will only rot and stink.”

That was the start.

Once it began, it didn’t take long. The man’s rings cut Anthony’s face, and Anthony was smaller and lighter, but the man telegraphed every move and kept leading with his right. When it was over, Anthony left him on the floor and stepped out into the downpour, stood alone in the hammering rain and let the water wash the blood from his face. The whiskey and the rage were a flame that licked his nerves and made them sing.

He began walking down the street. Heading for another bar.

• • • •

GRACE(2) meant grace in the sense of physical grace, dexterity, harmony of motion, as opposed to spiritual grace, which was GRACE(1). The Dweller that Anthony was listening to was engaged in a dialogue with another, possibly the same known to the computer as 41, who might be named “Upwelling Reflection,” but Deep Dweller naming systems seemed inconsistent, depending largely on a context that was as yet opaque, and “upwelling reflection” might have to do with something else entirely.

Anthony suspected the Dweller had just said hello.

Salt water smarted on the cuts on Anthony’s face. His swollen knuckles pained him as he tapped the keys of his computer deck. He never suffered from hangover, and his mind seemed filled with an exemplary clarity; he worked rapidly, with burning efficiency. His body felt energized.

He was out of the cold Kirst Current today, in a warm, calm subtropical sea on the other side of the Las Madres archipelago. The difference of forty nautical miles was astonishing.

The sun warmed his back. Sweat prickled on his scalp. The sea sparkled under a violet sky.

The other Dweller answered.

Through his bare feet, Anthony could feel the subsonic overtones vibrating through the boat. Something in the cabin rattled. The microphones recorded the sounds, raised the subsonics to an audible level, played it back. The computer made its attempt.

A9140 was a phrase that, as yet, had no translation.

The Dweller language, Anthony had discovered, had no separation of subject and object; it was a trait in common with the Earth cetaceans whose languages Anthony had learned first. “I swim toward the island” was not a grammatical possibility: “I and the island are in a condition of swimming toward one another” was the nearest possible approximation.

The Dwellers lived in darkness, and, like Earth’s cetaceans, in a liquid medium. Perhaps they were psychologically unable to separate themselves from their environment, from their fluid surroundings. Never approaching the surface—it was presumed they could not survive in a non-pressurized environment—they had no idea of the upper limit of their world. They were surrounded by a liquid three-dimensional wholeness, not an air-earth-sky environment from which they could consider themselves separate.

A high-pitched whooping came over the speakers, and Anthony smiled as he listened. The singer was one of the humpbacks that he had imported to this planet, a male called The One with Two Notches on His Starboard Fluke.

Two Notches was one of the brighter whales, and also the most playful. Anthony ordered his computer to translate the humpback speech.

Anthony, I and a place of bad smells have found one another, but this has not deterred our hunger. 

The computer played back the message as it displayed the translation, and Anthony could understand more context from the sound of the original speech: that Two Notches was floating in a cold layer beneath the bad smell, and that the bad smell was methane or something like it—humans couldn’t smell methane, but whales could. The over-literal translation was an aid only, to remind Anthony of idioms he might have forgotten.

Anthony’s name in humpback was actually He Who Has Brought Us to the Sea of Rich Strangeness, but the computer translated it simply. Anthony tapped his reply.

What is it that stinks, Two Notches?

Some kind of horrid jellyfish. Were they and I feeding, they and I would spit one another out. I/they will give them/me a name. I/they will give them a name: They/me are the jellyfish that smell like indigestion. 

That is a good name, Two Notches.

I and a small boat discovered each other earlier today. We itched, so we scratched our back on the boat. The humans and I were startled. We had a good laugh together in spite of our hunger. 

Meaning that Two Notches had risen under the boat, scratched his back on it, and terrified the passengers witless. Anthony remembered the first time this had happened to him back on Earth, a vast female humpback rising up without warning, one long scalloped fin breaking the water to port, the rest of the whale to starboard, thrashing in cetacean delight as it rubbed itself against a boat half its length. Anthony had clung to the gunwale, horrified by what the whale could do to his boat, but still exhilarated, delighted at the sight of the creature and its glorious joy.

Still, Two Notches ought not to play too many pranks on the tourists.

We should be careful, Two Notches. Not all humans possess our sense of humor, especially if they are hungry.

We were bored, Anthony. Mating is over, feeding has not begun. Also, it was Nick’s boat that got scratched. In our opinion Nick and I enjoyed ourselves, even though we were hungry. 

Hunger and food seemed to be the humpback subtheme of the day. Humpback songs, like the human, were made up of verse and chorus, the chorus repeating itself, with variations, through the message.

I and Nick will ask each other and find out, as we feed.

Anthony tried to participate in the chorus/response about food, but he found himself continually frustrated at his clumsy phrasing. Fortunately the whales were tolerant of his efforts.

Have we learned anything about the ones that swim deep and do not breathe and feed on obscure things? 

Not yet, Two Notches. Something has interrupted us in our hungry quest.

A condition of misfortune exists like unto hunger. We must learn to be quicker. 

We will try, Two Notches. After we eat.

We would like to speak to the Deep Dwellers now, and feed with them, but we must breathe. 

We will speak to ourselves another time, after feeding.

We are in a condition of hunger, Anthony. We must eat soon. 

We will remember our hunger and make plans.

The mating and calving season for the humpbacks was over. Most of the whales were already heading north to their summer feeding grounds, where they would do little for six months but eat. Two Notches and one of the other males had remained in the vicinity of Las Madres as a favor to Anthony, who used them to assist in locating the Deep Dwellers, but soon—in a matter of days—the pair would have to head north. They hadn’t eaten anything for nearly half a year; Anthony didn’t want to starve them.

But when the whales left, Anthony would be alone—again—with the Deep Dwellers. He didn’t want to think about that.

The system’s second sun winked across the waves, rising now. It was a white dwarf and emitted dangerous amounts of X-rays. The boat’s falkner generator, triggered by the computer, snapped on a field that surrounded the boat and guarded it from energetic radiation. Anthony felt the warmth on his shoulders decrease. He turned his attention back to the Deep Dwellers.

A blaze of delight rose in Anthony. The Dwellers, he realized, had overheard his conversation with Two Notches, and were commenting on it. Furthermore, he knew, A9140 probably was a verb form having to do with hearing—the Dwellers had a lot of them. “I/You hear the shrill sounds from above” might do as a working translation, and although he had no idea how to translate C22, he suspected it was a comment on the sounds. In a fever, Anthony began to work. As he bent over his keys, he heard, through water and bone, the sound of Two Notches singing.

• • • •

The Milky Way was a dim watercolor wash overhead. An odd twilight hung over Las Madres, a near-darkness that marked the hours when only the dwarf star was in the sky, providing little visible light but still pouring out X-rays. Cabo Santa Pola lay in a bright glowing crescent across the boat’s path. Music drifted from a waterfront tavern, providing a counterpoint to the Deep Dweller speech that still rang in Anthony’s head. A familiar figure waited on the dock, standing beneath the yellow lamp that marked Anthony’s slip. Anthony waved and throttled the boat back.

A good day. Even after the yellow sun had set, Anthony still felt in a sunny mood. A9140 had been codified as “listen(H),” meaning listen solely in the sense of listening to a sound that originated from far outside the Dwellers’ normal sphere—from outside their entire universe, in fact, which spoke volumes for the way the Dwellers saw themselves in relation to their world. They knew something else was up there, and their speech could make careful distinction between the world they knew and could perceive directly and the one they didn’t. C22 was a descriptive term involving patterning: the Dwellers realized that the cetacean speech they’d been hearing wasn’t simply random. Which spoke rather well for their cognition.

Anthony turned the boat and backed into the slip. Nick Kanellopoulos, whom the humpbacks called The One Who Chases Bad-Tasting Fish, took the stern line that Anthony threw him and tied it expertly to a cleat. Anthony shut off the engines, took a bowline, and hopped to the dock. He bent over the cleat and made his knot.

“You’ve gotta stop beating up my customers, Anthony,” Nick said.

Anthony said nothing.

“You even send your damn whales to harass me.”

Anthony jumped back into the boat and stepped into the cabin for a small canvas bag that held his gear and the data cubes containing the Dweller’s conversation. When he stepped back out of the cabin, he saw Nick standing on one foot, the other poised to step into the boat. Anthony gave Nick a look and Nick pulled his foot back. Anthony smiled. He didn’t like people on his boat.

“Dinner?” he asked.

Nick gazed at him. A muscle moved in the man’s cheek. He was dapper, olive-skinned, about a century old, the second-youngest human on the planet. He looked in his late teens. He wore a personal falkner generator on his belt that protected him from the dwarf’s X-rays.

“Dinner. Fine.” His brown eyes were concerned. “You look like hell, Anthony.”

Anthony rubbed the stubble on his cheeks. “I feel on top of the world,” he said.

“Half the time you don’t even talk to me. I don’t know why I’m eating supper with you.“

“Let me clean up. Then we can go to the Mary Villa.”

Nick shook his head. “Okay,” he said. “But you’re buying. You cost me a customer last night.“

Anthony slapped him on the shoulder. “Least I can do, I guess.”

A good day.

• • • •

Near midnight. Winds beat at the island’s old volcanic cone, pushed down the crowns of trees. A shuttle, black against the darkness of the sky, rose in absolute silence from the port on the other side of the island, heading toward the bright fixed star that was Overlook Station. The alien, Telamon, was aboard, or so the newscasts reported.

Deep Dwellers still sang in Anthony’s head. Mail in hand, he let himself in through the marina gate and walked toward his slip. The smell of the sea rose around him. He stretched, yawned. Belched up a bit of the tequila he’d been drinking with Nick. He intended to get an early start and head back to sea before dawn.

Anthony paused beneath a light and opened the large envelope, pulled out actual page proofs that had been mailed, at a high cost, from the offices of the Xenobiology Review on Kemps. Discontent scratched at his nerves. He frowned as he glanced through the pages. He’d written the article over a year before, at the end of the first spring he’d spent here, and just glancing through it he now found the article over-tentative, over-formal, and, worse, almost pleading in its attempt to justify his decision to move himself and the whales here. The palpable defensiveness made him want to squirm.

Disgust filled him. His fingers clutched at the pages, then tore the proofs across. His body spun full circle as he scaled the proofs out to the sea. The wind scattered thick chunks of paper across the dark waters of the marina.

He stalked toward his boat. Bile rose in his throat. He wished he had a bottle of tequila with him. He almost went back for one before he realized the liquor stores were closed.

“Anthony Maldalena?”

She was a little gawky, and her skin was pale. Dark hair in a single long braid, deep eyes, a bit of an overbite. She was waiting for him at the end of his slip, under the light. She had a bag over one shoulder.

Anthony stopped. Dull anger flickered in his belly. He didn’t want anyone taking notice of the bruises and cuts on his face. He turned his head away as he stepped into his boat, dropped his bag on a seat.

“Mr. Maldalena. My name is Philana Telander. I came here to see you.”

“How’d you get in?”

She gestured to the boat two slips down, a tall FPS-powered yacht shaped like a flat oval with a tall flybridge jutting from its center so that the pilot could see over wavetops. It would fly from place to place, but she could put it down in the water if she wanted. No doubt she’d bought a temporary membership at the yacht club.

“Nice boat,” said Anthony. It would have cost her a fair bit to have it gated here. He opened the hatch to his forward cabin, tossed his bag onto the long couch inside.

“I meant,” she said, “I came to this planet to see you.”

Anthony didn’t say anything, just straightened from his stoop by the hatch and looked at her. She shifted from one foot to another. Her skin was yellow in the light of the lamp. She reached into her bag and fumbled with something.

Anthony waited.

The clicks and sobs of whales sounded from the recorder in her hand.

• • • •

“I wanted to show you what I’ve been able to do with your work. I have some articles coming up in Cetology Journal but they won’t be out for a while.”

“You’ve done very well,” said Anthony. Tequila swirled in his head. He was having a hard time concentrating on a subject as difficult as whale speech.

Philana had specialized in communication with female humpbacks. It was harder to talk with the females: Although they were curious and playful, they weren’t vocal like the bulls; their language was deeper, briefer, more personal. They made no songs. It was almost as if, solely in the realm of speech, the cows were autistic. Their psychology was different and complicated, and Anthony had little success in establishing any lasting communication. The cows, he had realized, were speaking a different language: The humpbacks were essentially bilingual, and Anthony had learned only that of the males.

Philana had succeeded where Anthony had found only frustration. She had built from his work, established a structure and basis for communication. She still wasn’t as easy in her speech with the cows as Anthony was with a bull like Two Notches, but she was far closer than Anthony had ever been.

She and Anthony sat on the cushioned benches in the stern of Anthony’s boat. Steam rose from the coffee cup in Philana’s hand. Tequila still buzzed in Anthony’s head. Conflicting urges warred in him. He didn’t want anyone else here, on his boat, this close to his work; but Philana’s discoveries were too interesting to shut her out entirely. He swallowed more coffee.

“Listen to this,” Philana said. “It’s fascinating. A cow teaching her calf about life.” She touched the recorder, and muttering filled the air. Anthony had difficulty understanding: The cow’s idiom was complex, and bore none of the poetic repetition that made the males’ language easier to follow. Finally he shook his head.

“Go ahead and turn it off,” he said. “I’m picking up only one phrase in five. I can’t follow it.”

Philana seemed startled. “Oh. I’m sorry. I thought—”

Anthony twisted uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t know every goddamn thing about whales,” he said.

The recorder fell silent. Wind rattled the canvas awning over the flybridge. Savage discontent settled into Anthony’s mind. Suddenly he needed to get rid of this woman, get her off his boat and head to sea right now, away from all the things on land that could trip him up.

He thought of his father upside-down in the smokehouse. Not moving, arms dangling.

He should apologize, he realized. We are, he thought, in a condition of permanent apology.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just . . . not used to dealing with people.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” she said. “I’m only twenty-one, and . . .”

“Yes?” Blurted suddenly, the tequila talking. Anthony felt disgust at his own awkwardness.

Philana looked at the planks. “Yes. Truly. I’m twenty-one, and sometimes people get impatient with me for reasons I don’t understand.”

Anthony’s voice was quiet. “I’m twenty-six.”

Philana was surprised. “But. I thought.” She thought for a long moment. “It seems I’ve been reading your papers for . . .”

“I was first published at twenty,” he said. “The finback article.”

Philana shook her head. “I’d never have guessed. Particularly after what I saw in your new XR paper.”

Anthony’s reaction was instant. “You saw that?” Another spasm of disgust touched him. Tequila burned in his veins. His stomach turned over. For some reason his arms were trembling.

“A friend on Kemps sent me an advance copy, I thought it was brilliant. The way you were able to codify your conceptions about a race of which you could really know nothing, and have it all pan out when you began to understand them. That’s an incredible achievement.”

“It’s a piece of crap.” Anthony wanted more tequila badly. His body was shaking. He tossed the remains of his coffee over his shoulder into the sea. “I’ve learned so much since. I’ve given up even trying to publish it. The delays are too long. Even if I put it on the nets, I’d still have to take the time to write it, and I’d rather spend my time working.”

“I’d like to see it.”

He turned away from her. “I don’t show my work till it’s finished.”

“I . . . didn’t mean to intrude.”

Apology. He could feel a knife twisting in his belly. He spoke quickly. “I’m sorry, Miss Telander. It’s late, and I’m not used to company. I’m not entirely well.” He stood, took her arm. Ignoring her surprise, he almost pulled her to her feet. “Maybe tomorrow. We’ll talk again.”

She blinked up at him. “Yes. I’d like that.”

“Good night.” He rushed her off the boat and stepped below to the head. He didn’t want her to hear what was going to happen next. Acid rose in his throat. He clutched his middle and bent over the small toilet and let the spasms take him. The convulsions wracked him long after he was dry. After it was over he stood shakily, staggered to the sink, washed his face. His sinuses burned and brought tears to his eyes. He threw himself on the couch.

In the morning, before dawn, he cast off and motored out into the quiet sea.

• • • •

The other male, The One Who Sings of Others, found a pair of Dwellers engaged in a long conversation and hovered above them. His transponder led Anthony to the place, fifty miles south into the bottomless tropical ocean. The Dwellers’ conversation was dense. Anthony understood perhaps one word-phrase in ten. Sings of Others interrupted from time to time to tell Anthony how hungry he was.

The recordings would require days of work before Anthony could even begin to make sense of them. He wanted to stay on the site, but the Dwellers fell silent, neither Anthony nor Sings of Others could find another conversation, and Anthony was nearly out of supplies. He’d been working so intently he’d never got around to buying food.

The white dwarf had set by the time Anthony motored into harbor. Dweller mutterings did a chaotic dance in his mind. He felt a twist of annoyance at the sight of Philana Telander jumping from her big air yacht to the pier. She had obviously been waiting for him.

He threw her the bowline and she made fast. As he stepped onto the dock and fastened the sternline, he noticed sunburn reddening her cheeks. She’d spent the day on the ocean.

“Sorry I left so early,” he said. “One of the humpbacks found some Dwellers, and their conversation sounded interesting.”

She looked from Anthony to his boat and back. “That’s all right,” she said. “I shouldn’t have talked to you last night. Not when you were ill.”

Anger flickered in his mind. She’d heard him being sick, then.

“Too much to drink,” he said. He jumped back into the boat and got his gear.

“Have you eaten?” she asked. “Somebody told me about a place called the Villa Mary.”

He threw his bag over one shoulder. Dinner would be his penance. “I’ll show you,” he said.

• • • •

“Mary was a woman who died,” Anthony said. “One of the original Knight’s Move people. She chose to die, refused the treatments. She didn’t believe in living forever.” He looked up at the arched ceiling, the moldings on walls and ceiling, the initials ML worked into the decoration. “Brian McGivern built this place in her memory,” Anthony said. “He’s built a lot of places like this, on different worlds.”

Philana was looking at her plate. She nudged an ichthyoid exomembrane with her fork. “I know,” she said. “I’ve been in a few of them.”

Anthony reached for his glass, took a drink, then stopped himself from taking a second swallow. He realized that he’d drunk most of a bottle of wine. He didn’t want a repetition of last night.

With an effort he put the glass down.

“She’s someone I think about, sometimes,” Philana said. “About the choice she made.”

“Yes?” Anthony shook his head. “Not me. I don’t want to spend a hundred years dying. If I ever decide to die, I’ll do it quick.”

“That’s what people say. But they never do it. They just get older and older. Stranger and stranger.” She raised her hands, made a gesture that took in the room, the decorations, the entire white building on its cliff overlooking the sea. “Get old enough, you start doing things like building Villa Marys all over the galaxy. McGivern’s an oldest-generation immortal, you know. Maybe the wealthiest human anywhere, and he spends his time immortalizing someone who didn’t want immortality of any kind.”

Anthony laughed. “Sounds like you’re thinking of becoming a Diehard.”

She looked at him steadily. “Yes.”

Anthony’s laughter froze abruptly. A cool shock passed through him. He had never spoken to a Diehard before: The only ones he’d met were people who mumbled at him on streetcorners and passed out incoherent religious tracts.

Philana looked at her plate. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Why sorry?”

“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

Anthony reached for his wine glass, stopped himself, put his hand down. “I’m curious.”

She gave a little, apologetic laugh. “I may not go through with it.”

“Why even think about it?”

Philana thought a long time before answering. “I’ve seen how the whales accept death. So graceful about it, so matter-of-fact—and they don’t even have the myth of an afterlife to comfort them. If they get sick, they just beach themselves; and their friends try to keep them company. And when I try to give myself a reason for living beyond my natural span, I can’t think of any. All I can think of is the whales.”

Anthony saw the smokehouse in his mind, his father with his arms hanging, the fingers touching the dusty floor. “Death isn’t nice.”

Philana gave him a skeletal grin and took a quick drink of wine. “With any luck,” she said, “death isn’t anything at all.”

• • • •

Wind chilled the night, pouring upon the town through a slot in the island’s volcanic cone. Anthony watched a streamlined head as it moved in the dark windwashed water of the marina. The head belonged to a coldblooded amphibian that lived in the warm surf of the Las Madres; the creature was known misleadingly as a Las Madres seal. They had little fear of humanity and were curious about the new arrivals. Anthony stamped a foot on the slip. Planks boomed. The seal’s head disappeared with a soft splash. Ripples spread in starlight, and Anthony smiled.

Philana had stepped into her yacht for a sweater. She returned, cast a glance at the water, saw nothing.

“Can I listen to the Dwellers?” she asked. “I’d like to hear them.”

Despite his resentment at her imposition, Anthony appreciated her being careful with the term: she hadn’t called them Leviathans once. He thought about her request, could think of no reason to refuse save his own stubborn reluctance. The Dweller sounds were just background noise, meaningless to her. He stepped onto his boat, took a cube from his pocket, put it in the trapdoor, pressed the PLAY button. Dweller murmurings filled the cockpit. Philana stepped from the dock to the boat. She shivered in the wind. Her eyes were pools of dark wonder.

“So different.”

“Are you surprised?”

“I suppose not.”

“This isn’t really what they sound like. What you’re hearing is a computer-generated metaphor for the real thing. Much of their communication is subsonic, and the computer raises the sound to levels we can hear, and also speeds it up. Sometimes the Dwellers take three or four minutes to speak what seems to be a simple sentence.”

“We would never have noticed them except for an accident,” Philana said. “That’s how alien they are.”

“Yes.”

Humanity wouldn’t know of the Dwellers’ existence at all if it weren’t for the subsonics confusing some automated sonar buoys, followed by an idiot computer assuming the sounds were deliberate interference and initiating an ET scan. Any human would have looked at the data, concluded it was some kind of seismic interference, and programmed the buoys to ignore it.

“They’ve noticed us,” Anthony said. “The other day I heard them discussing a conversation I had with one of the humpbacks.”

Philana straightened. Excitement was plain in her voice. “They can conceptualize something alien to them.”

“Yes.”

Her response was instant, stepping on the last sibilant of his answer. “And theorize about our existence.“

Anthony smiled at her eagerness. “I . . . don’t think they’ve got around to that yet.”

“But they are intelligent.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe more intelligent than the whales. From what you say, they seem quicker to conceptualize.”

“Intelligent in certain ways, perhaps. There’s still very little I understand about them.”

“Can you teach me to talk to them?”

The wind blew chill between them. “I don’t,” he said, “talk to them.”

She seemed not to notice his change of mood, stepped closer. “You haven’t tried that yet? That would seem to be reasonable, considering they’ve already noticed us.”

He could feel his hackles rising, mental defenses sliding into place. “I’m not proficient enough,” he said.

“If you could attract their attention, they could teach you.” Reasonably.

“No. Not yet.” Rage exploded in Anthony’s mind. He wanted her off his boat, away from his work, his existence. He wanted to be alone again with his creatures, solitary witness to the lonely and wonderful interplay of alien minds.

“I never told you,” Philana said, “why I’m here.”

“No. You didn’t.”

“I want to do some work with the humpback cows.”

“Why?”

Her eyes widened slightly. She had detected the hostility in his tone. “I want to chart any linguistic changes that may occur as a result of their move to another environment.”

Through clouds of blinding resentment, Anthony considered her plan. He couldn’t stop her, he knew: Anyone could talk to the whales if they knew how to do it. It might keep her away from the Dwellers.

“Fine,” he said. “Do it.”

Her look was challenging. “I don’t need your permission.”

“I know that.”

“You don’t own them.”

“I know that, too.”

There was a splash far out in the marina. The Las Madres seal chasing a fish. Philana was still staring at him. He looked back.

“Why are you afraid of my getting close to the Dwellers?” she asked.

“You’ve been here two days. You don’t know them. You’re making all manner of assumptions about what they’re like, and all you’ve read is one obsolete article.”

“You’re the expert. But if my assumptions are wrong, you’re free to tell me.”

“Humans interacted with whales for centuries before they learned to speak with them, and even now the speech is limited and often confused. I’ve only been here two and a half years.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “you could use some help. Write those papers of yours. Publish the data.”

He turned away. “I’m doing fine,” he said.

“Glad to hear it.” She took a long breath. “What did I do, Anthony? Tell me.”

“Nothing,” he said. Anthony watched the marina waters, saw the amphibian surface, its head pulled back to help slide a fish down its gullet. Philana was just standing there. We, thought Anthony, are in a condition of non-resolution.

“I work alone,” he said. “I immerse myself in their speech, in their environment, for months at a time. Talking to a human breaks my concentration. I don’t know how to talk to a person right now. After the Dwellers, you seem perfectly . . .”

“Alien?” she said. Anthony didn’t answer. The amphibian slid through the water, its head leaving a short, silver wake.

The boat rocked as Philana stepped from it to the dock: “Maybe we can talk later,” she said. “Exchange data or something.”

“Yes,” Anthony said. “We’ll do that.” His eyes were still on the seal. Later, before he went to bed, he told the computer to play Dweller speech all night long.

• • • •

Lying in his bunk the next morning, Anthony heard Philana cast off her yacht. He felt a compulsion to talk to her, apologize again, but in the end he stayed in his rack, tried to concentrate on Dweller sounds.

I/We remain in a condition of solitude, he thought, the Dweller phrases coming easily to his mind. There was a brief shadow cast on the port beside him as the big flying boat rose into the sky, then nothing but sunlight and the slap of water on the pier supports. Anthony climbed out of his sleeping bag and went into town, provisioned the boat for a week. He had been too close to land for too long: A trip into the sea, surrounded by nothing but whales and Dweller speech, should cure him of his unease.

Two Notches had switched on his transponder: Anthony followed the beacon north, the boat rising easily over deep blue rollers. Desiring sun, Anthony climbed to the flybridge and lowered the canvas cover. Fifty miles north of Cabo Santa Pola there was a clear dividing line in the water, a line as clear as a meridian on a chart, beyond which the sea was a deeper, purer blue. The line marked the boundary of the cold Kirst current that had journeyed, wreathed in mist from contact with the warmer air, a full three thousand nautical miles from the region of the South Pole. Anthony crossed the line and rolled down his sleeves as the temperature of the air fell.

He heard the first whale speech through his microphones as he entered the cold current: The sound hadn’t carried across the turbulent frontier of warm water and cold. The whales were unclear, distant and mixed with the sound of the screws, but he could tell from the rhythm that he was overhearing a dialogue. Apparently Sings of Others had joined Two Notches north of Las Madres. It was a long journey to make overnight, but not impossible.

The cooler air was invigorating. The boat plowed a straight, efficient wake through the deep blue sea. Anthony’s spirits rose. This was where he belonged, away from the clutter and complication of humanity. Doing what he did best.

He heard something odd in the rhythm of the whalespeech; he frowned and listened more closely. One of the whales was Two Notches: Anthony recognized his speech patterns easily after all this time; but the other wasn’t Sings of Others. There was a clumsiness in its pattern of chorus and response.

The other was a human. Annoyance hummed in Anthony’s nerves. Back on Earth, tourists or eager amateur explorers sometimes bought cheap translation programs and tried to talk to the whales, but this was no tourist program: It was too eloquent, too knowing. Philana, of course. She’d followed the transponder signal and was busy gathering data about the humpback females. Anthony cut his engines and let the boat drift slowly to put its bow into the wind; he deployed the microphones from their wells in the hull and listened. The song was bouncing off a colder layer below, and it echoed confusingly.

Deep Swimmer and her calf, called the One that Nudges, are possessed of one another. I and that one am the father. We hunger for one another’s presence. 

Apparently hunger was once again the subtheme of the day. The context told Anthony that Two Notches was swimming in cool water beneath a boat. Anthony turned the volume up:

We hunger to hear of Deep Swimmer and our calf. 

That was the human response: limited in its phrasing and context, direct and to the point.

I and Deep Swimmer are shy. We will not play with humans. Instead we will pretend we are hungry and vanish into deep waters. 

The boat lurched as a swell caught it at an awkward angle. Water splashed over the bow. Anthony deployed the drogue and dropped from the flybridge to the cockpit. He tapped a message into the computer and relayed it.

I and Two Notches are pleased to greet ourselves. I and Two Notches hope we are not too hungry.

The whale’s reply was shaded with delight. Hungrily I and Anthony greet ourselves. We and Anthony’s friend, Air Human, have been in a condition of conversation.

Air Human, from the flying yacht. Two Notches went on.

We had found ourselves some Deep Dwellers, but some moments ago we and they moved beneath a cold layer and our conversation is lost. I starve for its return. 

The words echoed off the cold layer that stood like a wall between Anthony and the Dwellers. The humpback inflections were steeped in annoyance.

Our hunger is unabated, Anthony typed. But we will wait for the non-breathers’ return.

We cannot wait long. Tonight we and the north must begin the journey to our feeding time. 

The voice of Air Human rumbled through the water. It sounded like a distant, throbbing engine. Our finest greetings, Anthony. I and Two Notches will travel north together. Then we and the others will feed.

Annoyance slammed into Anthony. Philana had abducted his whale. Clenching his teeth, he typed a civil reply:

Please give our kindest greetings to our hungry brothers and sisters in the north.

By the time he transmitted his anger had faded. Two Notches’ departure was inevitable in the next few days, and he’d known that. Still, a residue of jealousy burned in him. Philana would have the whale’s company on its journey north: He would be stuck here by Las Madres without the keen whale ears that helped him find the Dwellers.

Two Notches’ reply came simultaneously with a programmed reply from Philana. Lyrics about greetings, hunger, feeding, calves, and joy whined through the water, bounced from the cold layer. Anthony looked at the hash his computer made of the translation and laughed. He decided he might as well enjoy Two Notches’ company while it lasted.

That was a strange message to hear from our friend, Two Mouths, he typed. “Notch” and “mouth” were almost the same phrase: Anthony had just made a pun.

Whale amusement bubbled through the water. Two Mouths and I belong to the most unusual family between the surface and cold water. We-all and air breathe each other, but some of us have the bad fortune to live in it.

The sun warmed Anthony’s shoulders in spite of the cool air. He decided to leave off the pursuit of the Dwellers and spend the day with his humpback.

He kicked off his shoes, then stepped down to his cooler and made himself a sandwich.

• • • •

The Dwellers never came out from beneath the cold layer. Anthony spent the afternoon listening to Two Notches tell stories about his family. Now that the issue of hunger was resolved by the whale’s decision to migrate, the cold layer beneath them became the new topic of conversation, and Two Notches amused himself by harmonizing with his own echo. Sings of Others arrived in late afternoon and announced he had already begun his journey: He and Two Notches decided to travel in company.

Northward homing! Cold watering! Reunion joyous! The phrases dopplered closer to Anthony’s boat, and then Two Notches broke the water thirty feet off the port beam, salt water pouring like Niagara from his black jaw, his scalloped fins spread like wings eager to take the air . . . 

Anthony’s breath went out of him in surprise. He turned in his chair and leaned away from the sight, half in fear and half in awe . . . Even though he was used to the whales, the sight never failed to stun him, thrill him, freeze him in his tracks.

Two Notches toppled over backwards, One clear brown eye fixed on Anthony. Anthony raised an arm and waved, and he thought he saw amusement in Two Notches’ glance, perhaps the beginning of an answering wave in the gesture of a fin. A living creature the size of a bus, the whale struck the water not with a smack, but with a roar, a sustained outpour of thunder. Anthony braced himself for what was coming. Salt water flung itself over the gunwale, struck him like a blow. The cold was shocking: His heart lurched. The boat was flung high on the wave, dropped down its face with a jarring thud. Two Notches’ flukes tossed high and Anthony could see the mottled pattern, grey and white, on the underside, distinctive as a fingerprint . . . and then the flukes were gone, leaving behind a rolling boat and a boiling sea.

Anthony wiped the ocean from his face, then from his computer. The boat’s auto-baling mechanism began to throb. Two Notches surfaced a hundred yards off, spouted a round cloud of steam, submerged again. The whale’s amusement stung the water. Anthony’s surprise turned to joy, and he echoed the sound of laughter.

I’m going to run my boat up your backside, Anthony promised; he splashed to the controls in his bare feet, withdrew the drogue and threw his engines into gear. Props thrashed the sea into foam. Anthony drew the microphones up into their wells, heard them thud along the hull as the boat gained way. Humpbacks usually took breath in a series of three: Anthony aimed ahead for Two Notches’ second rising. Two Notches rose just ahead, spouted, and dove before Anthony could catch him. A cold wind cut through Anthony’s wet shirt, raised bumps on his flesh. The boat increased speed, tossing its head on the face of a wave, and Anthony raced ahead, aiming for where Two Notches would rise for the third time.

The whale knew where the boat was and was able to avoid him easily; there was no danger in the game. Anthony won the race: Two Notches surfaced just aft of the boat, and Anthony grinned as he gunned his propellers and wrenched the rudder from side to side while the boat spewed foam into the whale’s face. Two Notches gave a grunt of disappointment and sounded, tossing his flukes high. Unless he chose to rise early, Two Notches would be down for five minutes or more. Anthony raced the boat in circles, waiting. Two Notches’ taunts rose in the cool water. The wind was cutting Anthony to the quick. He reached into the cabin for a sweater, pulled it on, ran up to the flybridge just in time to see Two Notches leap again half a mile away, the vast dark body silhouetted for a moment against the setting sun before it fell again into the welcoming sea.

Goodbye, goodbye. I and Anthony send fragrant farewells to one another. 

White foam surrounded the slick, still place where Two Notches had fallen into the water. Suddenly the flybridge was very cold. Anthony’s heart sank. He cut speed and put the wheel amidships. The boat slowed reluctantly, as if it, too, had been enjoying the game. Anthony dropped down the ladder to his computer.

Through the spattered windscreen, Anthony could see Two Notches leaping again, his long wings beating air, his silhouette refracted through seawater and rainbows. Anthony tried to share the whale’s exuberance, his joy, but the thought of another long summer alone on his boat, beating his head against the enigma of the Dwellers, turned his mind to ice.

He ordered an infinite repeat of Two Notches’ last phrase and stepped below to change into dry clothes. The cold layer echoed his farewells. He bent almost double and began pulling the sweater over his head.

Suddenly he straightened. An idea was chattering at him. He yanked the sweater back down over his trunk, rushed to his computer, tapped another message.

Our farewells need not be said just yet. You and I can follow one another for a few days before I must return. Perhaps you and the non-breathers can find one another for conversation.

Anthony is in a condition of migration. Welcome, welcome! Two Notches’ reply was jubilant.

For a few days, Anthony qualified. Before too long he would have to return to port for supplies. Annoyed at himself, he realized he could as easily have victualed for weeks.

A human voice called through the water, sounded faintly through the speakers. Air Human and Anthony are in a state of tastiest welcome.

In the middle of Anthony’s reply, his fingers paused at the keys. Surprise rose quietly to the surface of his mind.

After the long day of talking in humpback speech, he had forgotten that Air Human was not a humpback. That she was, in fact, another human being sitting on a boat just over the horizon.

Anthony continued his message. His fingers were clumsy now, and he had to go back twice to correct mistakes. He wondered why it was harder to talk to Philana, now that he remembered she wasn’t an alien.

• • • •

He asked Two Notches to turn on his transponder, and, all through the deep shadow twilight when the white dwarf was in the sky, the boat followed the whale at a half-mile’s distance. The current was cooperative, but in a few days a new set of northwest trade winds would push the current off on a curve toward the equator and the whales would lose its assistance.

Anthony didn’t see Philana’s boat that first day: Just before dawn, Sings of Others heard a distant Dweller conversation to starboard. Anthony told his boat to strike off in that direction and spent most of the day listening. When the Dwellers fell silent, he headed for the whales’ transponders again. There was a lively conversation in progress between Air Human and the whales, but Anthony’s mind was still on Dwellers. He put on headphones and worked far into the night.

The next morning was filled with chill mist. Anthony awoke to the whooping cries of the humpbacks. He looked at his computer to see if it had recorded any announcement of Dwellers, and there was none. The whales’ interrogation by Air Human continued. Anthony’s toes curled on the cold, damp planks as he stepped on deck and saw Philana’s yacht two hundred yards to port, floating three feet over the tallest swells. Cables trailed from the stern, pulling hydrophones and speakers on a subaquatic sled. Anthony grinned at the sight of the elaborate store-bought rig. He suspected that he got better acoustics with his homebuilt equipment, the translation software he’d programmed himself, and his hopelessly old-fashioned boat that couldn’t even rise out of the water, but that he’d equipped with the latest-generation silent propellers.

He turned on his speakers. Sure enough, he got more audio interference from Philana’s sled than he received from his entire boat.

While making coffee and an omelette of mossmoon eggs, Anthony listened to the whales gurgle about their grandparents. He put on a down jacket and stepped onto the boat’s stern and ate breakfast, watching the humpbacks as they occasionally broke surface, puffed out clouds of spray, sounded again with a careless, vast toss of their flukes. Their bodies were smooth and black: The barnacles that pebbled their skin on Earth had been removed before they gated to their new home.

Their song could be heard clearly even without the amplifiers. That was one change the contact with humans had brought: The males were a lot more vocal than once they had been, as if they were responding to human encouragement to talk—or perhaps they now had more worth talking about. Their speech was also more terse than before, less overtly poetic; the humans’ directness and compactness of speech, caused mainly by their lack of fluency, had influenced the whales to a degree.

The whales were adapting to communication with humans more easily than the humans were adapting to them. It was important to chart that change, be able to say how the whales had evolved, accommodated. They were on an entire new planet now, explorers, and change was going to come fast. The whales were good at remembering, but artificial intelligences were better. Anthony was suddenly glad that Philana was here, doing her work.

As if on cue, she appeared on deck, one hand pressed to her head, holding an earphone: She was listening intently to whalesong. She was bundled up against the chill, and gave a brief wave as she noticed him. Anthony waved back. She paused, beating time with one hand to the rhythm of whalespeech, then waved again and stepped back to her work.

Anthony finished breakfast and cleaned the dishes. He decided to say good morning to the whales, then work on some of the Dweller speech he’d recorded the day before. He turned on his computer, sat down at the console, typed his greetings. He waited for a pause in the conversation, then transmitted. The answer came back sounding like a distant buzzsaw.

We and Anthony wish one another a passage filled with splendid odors. We and Air Human have been scenting one another’s families this morning. 

We wish each other the joy of converse, Anthony typed.

We have been wondering, Two Notches said, if we can scent whether we and Anthony and Air Human are in a condition of rut. 

Anthony gave a laugh. Humpbacks enjoyed trying to figure out human relationships: They were promiscuous themselves, and intrigued by ways different from their own.

Anthony wondered, sitting in his cockpit, if Philana was looking at him.

Air Human and I smell of aloneness, unpairness, he typed, and he transmitted the message at the same time that Philana entered the even more direct, We are not.

The state is not rut, apartness is the smell. Two Notches agreed readily—it was all one to him—and the lyrics echoed each other for a long moment, aloneness, not, unpairness, not. Not. Anthony felt a chill.

I and the Dwellers’ speech are going to try to scent one another’s natures, he typed hastily, and turned off the speakers. He opened his case and took out one of the cubes he’d recorded the day before.

Work went slowly.

• • • •

By noon the mist had burned off the water. His head buzzing with Dweller sounds, Anthony stepped below for a sandwich. The message light was blinking on his telephone. He turned to it, pressed the play button.

“May I speak with you briefly?” Philana’s voice. “I’d like to get some data, at your convenience.” Her tone shifted to one of amusement. “The condition,” she added, “is not that of rut.”

Anthony grinned. Philana had been considerate enough not to interrupt him, just to leave the message for whenever he wanted it. He picked up the telephone, connected directory assistance in Cabo Santa Pola, and asked it to route a call to the phone on Philana’s yacht. She answered.

“Message received,” he said. “Would you join me for lunch?”

“In an hour or so,” she said. Her voice was abstracted. “I’m in the middle of something.”

“When you’re ready. Bye.” He rang off, decided to make a fish chowder instead of sandwiches, and drank a beer while preparing it. He began to feel buoyant, cheerful. Siren wailing sounded through the water.

Philana’s yacht maneuvered over to his boat just as Anthony finished his second beer. Philana stood on the gunwale, wearing a pale sweater with brown zigzags on it. Her braid was undone, and her brown hair fell around her shoulders. She jumped easily from her gunwale to the flybridge, then came down the ladder. The yacht moved away as soon as it felt her weight leave. She smiled uncertainly as she stepped to the deck.

“I’m sorry to have to bother you,” she said.

He offered a grin. “That’s okay. I’m between projects right now.”

She looked toward the cabin. “Lunch smells good.” Perhaps, he thought, food equaled apology.

“Fish chowder. Would you like a beer? Coffee?”

“Beer. Thanks.”

They stepped below and Anthony served lunch on the small foldout table. He opened another beer and put it by her place.

“Delicious. I never really learned to cook.”

“Cooking was something I learned young.”

Her eyes were curious. “Where was that?”

“Lees.” Shortly. He put a spoonful of chowder in his mouth so that his terseness would be more understandable.

“I never heard the name.”

“It’s a planet.” Mumbling through chowder. “Pretty obscure.” He didn’t want to talk about it.

“I’m from Earth.”

He looked at her. “Really? Originally? Not just a habitat in the Sol system?”

“Yes. Truly. One of the few. The one and only Earth.”

“Is that what got you interested in whales?”

Her spoon stirred idly in her chowder. “I’ve always been interested in whales. As far back as I can remember. Long before I ever saw one.”

“It was the same with me. I grew up near an ocean, built a boat when I was a boy and went exploring. I’ve never felt more at home than when I’m on the ocean.”

“Some people live on the sea all the time.”

“In floating habitats. That’s just moving a city out onto the ocean. The worst of both worlds, if you ask me.”

He realized the beer was making him expansive, that he was declaiming and waving his free hand. He pulled his hand in.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “about the last time we talked.”

She looked away. “My fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have—”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” He realized he had almost shouted that, and could feel himself flushing. He lowered his voice. “Once I got out here I realized . . .” This was really hopeless. He plunged on. “I’m not used to dealing with people. There were just a few people on Lees and they were all . . . eccentric. And everyone I’ve met since I left seems at least five hundred years old. Their attitudes are so . . .” He shrugged.

“Alien.” She was grinning.

“Yes.”

“I feel the same way. Everyone’s so much older, so much more . . . sophisticated, I suppose.” She thought about it for a moment. “I guess it’s sophistication.”

“They like to think so.”

“I can feel their pity sometimes.” She toyed with her spoon, looked down at her bowl.

“And condescension.” Bitterness striped Anthony’s tongue. “The attitude of, ‘Oh, we went through that once, poor darling, but now we know better.’”

“Yes.” Tiredly. “I know what you mean. Like we’re not really people yet.”

“At least my father wasn’t like that. He was crazy, but he let me be a person. He—”

His tongue stumbled. He was not drunk enough to tell this story, and he didn’t think he wanted to anyway.

“Go ahead,” said Philana. She was collecting data, Anthony remembered, on families.

He pushed back from the table, went to the fridge for another beer. “Maybe later,” he said. “It’s a long story.”

Philana’s look was steady. “You’re not the only one who knows about crazy fathers.”

Then you tell me about yours, he wanted to say. Anthony opened the beer, took a deep swallow. The liquid rose again, acid in his throat, and he forced it down. Memories rose with the fire in Anthony’s throat, burning him. His father’s fine madness whirled in his mind like leaves in a hurricane. We are, he thought, in a condition of mutual trust and permanent antagonism. Something therefore must be done.

“All right.” He put the beer on the top of the fridge and returned to his seat. He spoke rapidly, just letting the story come. His throat burned. “My father started life with money. He became a psychologist and then a fundamentalist Catholic lay preacher, kind of an unlicensed messiah. He ended up a psychotic. Dad concluded that civilization was too stupid and corrupt to survive, and he decided to start over. He initiated an unauthorized planetary scan through a transporter gate, found a world that he liked, and moved his family there. There were just four of us at the time, dad and my mother, my little brother, and me. My mother was—is—she’s not really her own person. There’s a vacancy there. If you’re around psychotics a lot, and you don’t have a strong sense of self, you can get submerged in their delusions. My mother didn’t have a chance of standing up to a full-blooded lunatic like my dad, and I doubt she tried. She just let him run things.

“I was six when we moved to Lees, and my brother was two. We were—” Anthony waved an arm in the general direction of the invisible Milky Way overhead. “—we were half the galaxy away. Clean on the other side of the hub. We didn’t take a gate with us, or even instructions and equipment for building one. My father cut us off entirely from everything he hated.”

Anthony looked at Philana’s shocked face and laughed. “It wasn’t so bad. We had everything but a way off the planet. Cube readers, building supplies, preserved food, tools, medical gear, wind and solar generators—Dad thought falkner generators were the cause of the rot, so he didn’t bring any with him.

“My mother pretty much stayed pregnant for the next decade, but luckily the planet was benign. We settled down in a protected bay where there was a lot of food, both on land and in the water. We had a smokehouse to preserve the meat. My father and mother educated me pretty well. I grew up an aquatic animal. Built a sailboat, learned how to navigate. By the time I was fifteen I had charted two thousand miles of coast. I spent more than half my time at sea, the last few years. Trying to get away from my dad, mostly. He kept getting stranger. He promised me in marriage to my oldest sister after my eighteenth birthday.” Memory swelled in Anthony like a tide, calm green water rising over the flat, soon to whiten and boil.

“There were some whale-sized fish on Lees, but they weren’t intelligent. I’d seen recordings of whales, heard the sounds they made. On my long trips I’d imagine I was seeing whales, imagine myself talking to them.”

“How did you get away?”

Anthony barked a laugh. “My dad wasn’t the only one who could initiate a planetary scan. Seven or eight years after we landed, some resort developers found our planet and put up a hotel about two hundred miles to the south of our settlement.” Anthony shook his head. “Hell of a coincidence. The odds against it must have been incredible. My father frothed at the mouth when we started seeing their flyers and boats. My father decided our little settlement was too exposed and we moved farther inland to a place where we could hide better. Everything was camouflaged. He’d hold drills in which we were all supposed to grab necessary supplies and run off into the forest.”

“They never found you?”

“If they saw us, they thought we were people on holiday.”

“Did you approach them?”

Anthony shook his head. “No. I don’t really know why.”

“Well.” Doubtfully. “Your father.”

“I didn’t care much about his opinions by that point. It was so obvious he was cracked. I think, by then, I had all I wanted just living on my boat. I didn’t see any reason to change it.” He thought for a moment. “If he actually tried to marry me off to my sister, maybe I would have run for it.”

“But they found you anyway.”

“No. Something else happened. The water supply for the new settlement was unreliable, so we decided to build a viaduct from a spring nearby. We had to get our hollow-log pipe over a little chasm, and my father got careless and had an accident. The viaduct fell on him. Really smashed him up, caused all sorts of internal injuries. It was very obvious that if he didn’t get help, he’d die. My mother and I took my boat and sailed for the resort to bring help.”

The words dried up. This was where things got ugly. Anthony decided he really couldn’t trust Philana with it, and that he wanted his beer after all. He got up and took the bottle and drank.

“Did your father live?”

“No.” He’d keep this as brief as he could. “When my mother and I got back, we found that he’d died two days before. My brothers and sisters gutted him and hung him upside-down in the smokehouse.” He stared dully into Philana’s horrified face. “It’s what they did to any large animal. My mother and I were the only ones who remembered what to do with a dead person, and we weren’t there.”

“My God. Anthony.” Her hands clasped below her face.

“And then—” He waved his hands, taking in everything, the boat’s comforts, Overlook, life over the horizon. “Civilization. I was the only one of the children who could remember anything but Lees. I got off the planet and got into marine biology. That’s been my life ever since. I was amazed to discover that I and the family were rich—my dad didn’t tell me he’d left tons of investments behind. The rest of the family’s still on Lees, still living in the old settlement. It’s all they know.” He shrugged. “They’re rich, too, of course, which helps. So they’re all right.”

He leaned back on the fridge and took another long drink. The ocean swell tilted the boat and rolled the liquid down his throat. Whale harmonics made the bottle cap dance on the smooth alloy surface of the refrigerator.

Philana stood. Her words seemed small after the long silence. “Can I have some coffee? I’ll make it.”

“I’ll do it.”

They both went for the coffee and banged heads. Reeling back, the expression on Philana’s face was wide-eyed, startled, faunlike, as if he’d caught her at something she should be ashamed of. Anthony tried to laugh out an apology, but just then the white dwarf came up above the horizon and the quality of light changed as the screens went up, and with the light her look somehow changed. Anthony gazed at her for a moment and fire began to lap at his nerves. In his head the whales seemed to urge him to make his move.

He put his beer down and grabbed her with an intensity that was made ferocious largely by Anthony’s fear that this was entirely the wrong thing, that he was committing an outrage that would compel her shortly to clout him over the head with the coffee pot and drop him in his tracks. Whalesong rang frantic chimes in his head. She gave a strangled cry as he tried to kiss her and thereby confirmed his own worst suspicions about this behavior.

Philana tried to push him away. He let go of her and stepped back, standing stupidly with his hands at his sides. A raging pain in his chest prevented him from saying a word. Philana surprised him by stepping forward and putting her hands on his shoulders.

“Easy,” she said. “It’s all right, just take it easy.”

Anthony kissed her once more, and was somehow able to restrain himself from grabbing her again out of sheer panic and desperation. By and by, as the kiss continued, his anxiety level decreased. I/You, he thought, are rising in warmness, in happy tendrils.

He and Philana began to take their clothes off. He realized this was the first time he had made love to anyone under two hundred years of age.

Dweller sounds murmured in Anthony’s mind. He descended into Philana as if she were a midnight ocean, something that on first contact with his flesh shocked him into wakefulness, then relaxed around him, became a taste of brine, a sting in the eyes, a fluid vagueness. Her hair brushed against his skin like seagrass. She surrounded him, buoyed him up. Her cries came up to him as over a great distance, like the faraway moans of a lonely whale in love. He wanted to call out in answer. Eventually he did.

Grace(1), he thought hopefully. Grace(1).

• • • •

Anthony had an attack of giddiness after Philana returned to her flying yacht and her work. His mad father gibbered in his memory, mocked him and offered dire warnings. He washed the dishes and cleaned the rattling bottlecap off the fridge, then he listened to recordings of Dwellers and eventually the panic went away. He had not, it seemed, lost anything.

He went to the double bed in the forepeak, which was piled high with boxes of food, a spool of cable, a couple spare microphones, and a pair of rusting Danforth anchors. He stowed the food in the hold, put the electronics in the compartment under the mattress, jammed the Danforths farther into the peak on top of the anchor chain where they belonged. He wiped the grime and rust off the mattress and realized he had neither sheets nor a second pillow. He would need to purchase supplies on the next trip to town.

The peak didn’t smell good. He opened the forehatch and tried to air the place out. Slowly he became aware that the whales were trying to talk to him. Odd scentings, they said. Things that stand in water. Anthony knew what they meant. He went up on the flybridge and scanned the horizon. He saw nothing.

The taste is distant, he wrote. But we must be careful in our movement. After that he scanned the horizon every half hour.

He cooked supper during the white dwarf’s odd half-twilight and resisted the urge to drink both the bottles of bourbon that were waiting in their rack. Philana dropped onto the flybridge with a small rucksack. She kissed him hastily, as if to get it over with.

“I’m scared,” she said.

“So am I.”

“I don’t know why.”

He kissed her again. “I do,” he said. She laid her cheek against his woolen shoulder. Blind with terror, Anthony held onto her, unable to see the future.

• • • •

After midnight Anthony stood unclothed on the flybridge as he scanned the horizon one more time. Seeing nothing, he nevertheless reduced speed to three knots and rejoined Philana in the forepeak. She was already asleep with his open sleeping bag thrown over her like a blanket. He raised a corner of the sleeping bag and slipped beneath it. Philana turned away from him and pillowed her cheek on her fist. Whale music echoed from a cold layer beneath. He slept.

Movement elsewhere in the boat woke him. Anthony found himself alone in the peak, frigid air drifting over him from the forward hatch. He stepped into the cabin and saw Philana’s bare legs ascending the companion to the flybridge. He followed. He shivered in the cold wind.

Philana stood before the controls, looking at them with a peculiar intensity, as though she were trying to figure out which switch to throw. Her hands flexed as if to take the wheel. There was gooseflesh on her shoulders and the wind tore her hair around her face like a fluttering curtain. She looked at him. Her eyes were hard, her voice disdainful.

“Are we lovers?” she asked. “Is that what’s going on here?” His skin prickled at her tone.

Her stiff-spined stance challenged him. He was afraid to touch her.

“The condition is that of rut,” he said, and tried to laugh.

Her posture, one leg cocked out front, reminded him of a haughty water bird. She looked at the controls again, then looked aft, lifting up on her toes to gaze at the horizon. Her nostrils flared, tasted the wind. Clouds scudded across the sky. She looked at him again. The white dwarf gleamed off her pebble eyes.

“Very well,” she said, as if this was news. “Acceptable.” She took his hand and led him below. Anthony’s hackles rose. On her way to the forepeak Philana saw one of the bottles of bourbon in its rack and reached for it. She raised the bottle to her lips and drank from the neck. Whiskey coursed down her chin, her throat. She lowered the bottle and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She looked at him as if he were something worthy of dissection.

“Let’s make love,” she said.

Anthony was afraid not to. He went with her to the forepeak. Her skin was cold. Lying next to him on the mattress, she touched his chest as if she were unused to the feel of male bodies. “What’s your name?” she asked. He told her. “Acceptable,” she said again, and with a sudden taut grin raked his chest with her nails. He knocked her hands away. She laughed and came after him with the bottle. He parried the blow in time and they wrestled for possession, bourbon splashing everywhere. Anthony was surprised at her strength. She fastened teeth in his arm. He hit her in the face with a closed fist. She gave the bottle up and laughed in a cold metallic way and put her arms around him. Anthony threw the bottle through the door into the cabin. It thudded somewhere but didn’t break. Philana drew him on top of her, her laugh brittle, her legs opening around him.

Her dead eyes were like stones.

• • • •

In the morning Anthony found the bottle lying in the main cabin. Red clawmarks covered his body, and the reek of liquor caught at the back of his throat. The scend of the ocean had distributed the bourbon puddle evenly over the teak deck. There was still about a third of the whiskey left in the bottle. Anthony rescued it and swabbed the deck. His mind was full of cotton wool, cushioning any bruises. He was working hard at not feeling anything at all.

He put on clothes and began to work. After a while Philana unsteadily groped her way from the forepeak, the sleeping bag draped around her shoulders. There was a stunned look on her face and a livid bruise on one cheek. Anthony could feel his body tautening, ready to repel assault.

“Was I odd last night?” she asked.

He looked at her. Her face crumbled. “Oh no.” She passed a hand over her eyes and turned away, leaning on the side of the hatchway. “You shouldn’t let me drink,” she said.

“You hadn’t made that fact clear.”

“I don’t remember any of it,” she said. “I’m sick.” She pressed her stomach with her hands and bent over. Anthony narrowly watched her pale buttocks as she groped her way to the head. The door shut behind her.

Anthony decided to make coffee. As the scent of the coffee began to fill the boat, he heard the sounds of her weeping. The long keening sounds, desperate throat-tearing noises, sounded like a pinioned whale writhing helplessly on the gaff.

• • • •

A vast flock of birds wheeled on the cold horizon, marking a colony of drift creatures. Anthony informed the whales of the creatures’ presence, but the humpbacks already knew and were staying well clear. The drift colony was what they had been smelling for hours.

While Anthony talked with the whales, Philana left the head and drew on her clothes. Her movements were tentative. She approached him with a cup of coffee in her hand. Her eyes and nostrils were rimmed with red.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Sometimes that happens.”

He looked at his computer console. “Jesus, Philana.”

“It’s something wrong with me. I can’t control it.” She raised a hand to her bruised cheek. The hand came away wet.

“There’s medication for that sort of thing,” Anthony said. He remembered she had a mad father, or thought she did.

“Not for this. It’s something different.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“I need your help.”

Anthony recalled his father’s body twisting on the end of its rope, fingertips trailing in the dust. Words came reluctantly to his throat.

“I’ll give what help I can.” The words were hollow: Any real resolution had long since gone. He had no clear notion to whom he was giving this message, the Philana of the previous night or this Philana or his father or himself.

Philana hugged him, kissed his cheek. She was excited.

“Shall we go see the drifters?” she asked. “We can take my boat.”

Anthony envisioned himself and Philana tumbling through space. He had jumped off a precipice, just now. The two children of mad fathers were spinning in the updraft, waiting for the impact.

He said yes. He ordered his boat to circle while she summoned her yacht. She held his hand while they waited for the flying yacht to drift toward them. Philana kept laughing, touching him, stropping her cheek on his shoulder like a cat. They jumped from the flybridge to her yacht and rose smoothly into the sky. Bright sun warmed Anthony’s shoulders. He took off his sweater and felt warning pain from the marks of her nails.

The drifters were colony creatures that looked like miniature mountains twenty feet or so high, complete with a white snowcap of guano. They were highly organized but unintelligent, their underwater parts sifting the ocean for nutrients or reaching out to capture prey—the longest of their gossamer stinging tentacles was up to two miles in length, and though they couldn’t kill or capture a humpback, they were hard for the whale to detect and could cause a lot of stinging wounds before the whale noticed them and made its escape. Perhaps they were unintelligent, distant relatives of the Deep Dwellers, whose tenuous character they resembled. Many different species of sea birds lived in permanent colonies atop the floating islands, thousands of them, and the drifters processed their guano and other waste. Above the water, the drifters’ bodies were shaped like a convex lens set on edge, an aerodynamic shape, and they could clumsily tack into the wind if they needed to. For the most part, however, they drifted on the currents, a giant circular circumnavigation of the ocean that could take centuries.

Screaming sea birds rose in clouds as Philana’s yacht moved silently toward their homes. Philana cocked her head back, laughed into the open sky, and flew closer. Birds hurtled around them in an overwhelming roar of wings. Whistlelike cries issued from peg-toothed beaks. Anthony watched in awe at the profusion of colors, the chromatic brilliance of the evolved featherlike scales.

The flying boat passed slowly through the drifter colony. Birds roared and whistled, some of them landing on the boat in apparent hopes of taking up lodging. Feathers drifted down; birdshit spattered the windscreen. Philana ran below for a camera. A trickle of optimism began to ease into Anthony at the sight of Philana in the bright morning sun, a broad smile gracing her face as she worked the camera and took picture after picture. He put an arm around Philana’s waist and kissed her ear. She smiled and took his hand in her own. In the bright daylight, the personality she’d acquired the previous night seemed to gather unto itself the tenebrous, unreal quality of a nightmare. The current Philana seemed far more tangible.

Philana returned to the controls; the yacht banked and increased speed. Birds issued startled cries as they got out of the way. Wind tugged at Philana’s hair. Anthony decided not to let Philana near his liquor again.

After breakfast, Anthony found both whales had set their transponders. He had to detour around the drifters—their insubstantial, featherlike tentacles could foul his state-of-the-art silent props—but when he neared the whales and slowed, he could hear the deep murmurings of Dwellers rising from beneath the cold current. There were half a dozen of them engaged in conversation, and Anthony worked the day and far into the night, transcribing, making hesitant attempts at translation. The Dweller speech was more opaque than usual, depending on a context that was unstated and elusive. Comprehension eluded Anthony; but he had the feeling that the key was within his reach.

Philana waited for the Dwellers to end their speech before she brought her yacht near him. She had heated some prepared dinners and carried them to the flybridge in an insulated pouch. Her grin was broad. She put her pouch down and embraced him. Abstracted Dweller subsonics rolled away from Anthony’s mind. He was surprised at how glad he was to see her.

With dinner they drank coffee. Philana chattered bravely throughout the meal. While Anthony cleaned the dishes, she embraced him from behind. A memory of the other Philana flickered in his mind, disdainful, contemptuous, cold. Her father was crazy, he remembered again.

He buried the memory deliberately and turned to her. He kissed her and thought, I/We deny the Other. The Other, he decided, would cease to exist by a common act of will.

It seemed to work. At night, his dreams filled with Dwellers crying in joy, his father warning darkly, the touch of Philana’s flesh, breath, hands. He awoke hungry to get to work.

The next two days, a furious blaze of concentration burned in Anthony’s mind. Things fell into place. He found a word that, in its context, could mean nothing but light, as opposed to fluorescence—he was excited to find out the Dwellers knew about the sun. He also found new words for darkness, for emotions that seemed to have no human equivalents, but which he seemed nevertheless to comprehend. One afternoon a squall dumped a gallon of cold water down his collar and he looked up in surprise: He hadn’t been aware of its slow approach. He moved his computer deck to the cabin and kept working. When not at the controls, he moved dazedly over the boat, drinking coffee, eating what was at hand without tasting it. Philana was amused and tolerant; she buried herself in her own work.

On preparing breakfast the morning of the third day, Anthony realized he was running out of food. He was farther from the archipelago than he’d planned on going, and he had about two days’ supply left; he’d have to return at flank speed, buy provisions, and then run out again. A sudden hot fury gripped him. He clenched his fists. He could have provisioned for two or three months—why hadn’t he done it when he had the chance?

Philana tolerantly sipped her coffee. “Tonight I’ll fly you into Cabo Santa Pola. We can buy a ton of provisions, have dinner at Villa Mary, and be back by midnight.”

Anthony’s anger floundered uselessly, looking for a target, then gave up. “Fine,” he said.

She looked at him. “Are you ever going to talk to them? You must have built your speakers to handle it.”

Now the anger had finally found a home. “Not yet,” he said.

In late afternoon, Anthony set out his drogue and a homing transponder, then boarded Philana’s yacht. He watched while she hauled up her aquasled and programmed the navigation computer. The world dimmed as the falkner field increased in strength. The transition to full speed was almost instantaneous. Waves blurred silently past, providing the only sensation of motion—the field cut out both wind and inertia. The green-walled volcanic islands of the Las Madres archipelago rolled over the horizon in minutes. Traffic over Cabo Santa Pola complicated the approach somewhat; it was all of six minutes before Philana could set the machine down in her slip.

A bright, hot sun brightened the white-and-turquoise waterfront. From a cold Kirst current to the tropics in less than half an hour.

Anthony felt vaguely resentful at this blinding efficiency. He could have easily equipped his own boat with flight capability, but he hadn’t cared about speed when he’d set out, only the opportunity to be alone on the ocean with his whales and the Dwellers. Now the very tempo of his existence had changed. He was moving at unaccustomed velocity, and the destination was still unclear.

After giving him her spare key, Philana went to do laundry—when one lived on small boats, laundry was done whenever the opportunity arose. Anthony bought supplies. He filled the yacht’s forecabin with crates of food, then changed clothes and walked to the Villa Mary.

Anthony got a table for two and ordered a drink. The first drink went quickly and he ordered a second. Philana didn’t appear. Anthony didn’t like the way the waiter was looking at him. He heard his father’s mocking laugh as he munched the last bread stick. He waited for three hours before he paid and left.

There was no sign of Philana at the laundry or on the yacht. He left a note on the computer expressing what he considered a contained disappointment, then headed into town. A brilliant sign that featured aquatic motifs called him to a cool, dark bar filled with bright green aquaria. Native fish gaped at him blindly while he drank something tall and cool. He decided he didn’t like the way the fish looked at him and left.

He found Philana in his third bar of the evening. She was with two men, one of whom Anthony knew slightly as a charter boat skipper whom he didn’t much like. He had his hand on her knee; the other man’s arm was around her. Empty drinks and forsaken hors d’oeuvres lay on a table in front of them. Anthony realized, as he approached, that his own arrival could only make things worse. Her eyes turned to him as he approached; her neck arched in a peculiar, balletic way that he had seen only once before. He recognized the quick, carnivorous smile, and a wash of fear turned his skin cold. The stranger whispered into her ear.

“What’s your name again?” she asked.

Anthony wondered what to do with his hands. “We were supposed to meet.”

Her eyes glittered as her head cocked, considering him. Perhaps what frightened him most of all was the fact there was no hostility in her look, nothing but calculation. There was a cigarette in her hand; he hadn’t seen her smoke before.

“Do we have business?”

Anthony thought about this. He had jumped into space with this woman, and now he suspected he’d just hit the ground. “I guess not,” he said, and turned.

• • • •

“Qué pasó, hombre?”

“Nada.”

Pablo, the Leviathan’s regular bartender, was one of the planet’s original South American inhabitants, a group rapidly being submerged by newcomers. Pablo took Anthony’s order for a double bourbon and also brought him his mail, which consisted of an inquiry from Xenobiology Review wondering what had become of their page proofs. Anthony crumpled the note and left it in an ashtray.

A party of drunken fishermen staggered in, still in their flashing harnesses. Triumphant whoops assaulted Anthony’s ears. His fingers tightened on his glass.

“Careful, Anthony,” said Pablo. He poured another double bourbon. “On the house,” he said.

One of the fishermen stepped to the bar, put a heavy hand on Anthony’s shoulder. “Drinks on me,” he said. “Caught a twelve-meter flasher today.” Anthony threw the bourbon in his face.

He got in a few good licks, but in the end the pack of fishermen beat him stupid and threw him through the front window. Lying breathless on broken glass, Anthony brooded on the injustice of his position and decided to rectify matters. He lurched back into the bar and knocked down the first person he saw.

Small consolation. This time they went after him with the flashing poles that were hanging on the walls, beating him senseless and once more heaving him out the window. When Anthony recovered consciousness he staggered to his feet, intending to have another go, but the pole butts had hit him in the face too many times and his eyes were swollen shut. He staggered down the street, ran face-first into a building, and sat down.

“You finished there, cowboy?” It was Nick’s voice.

Anthony spat blood. “Hi, Nick,” he said. “Bring them here one at a time, will you? I can’t lose one-on-one.”

“Jesus, Anthony. You’re such an asshole.”

Anthony found himself in an inexplicably cheerful mood. “You’re lucky you’re a sailor. Only a sailor can call me an asshole.”

“Can you stand? Let’s get to the marina before the cops show up.”

“My boat’s hundreds of miles away. I’ll have to swim.”

“I’ll take you to my place, then.”

With Nick’s assistance Anthony managed to stand. He was still too drunk to feel pain, and ambled through the streets in a contented mood. “How did you happen to be at the Leviathan, Nick?”

There was weariness in Nick’s voice. “They always call me, Anthony, when you fuck up.”

Drunken melancholy poured into Anthony like a sudden cold squall of rain. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Nick’s answer was almost cheerful. “You’ll be sorrier in the morning.”

Anthony reflected that this was very likely true.

• • • •

Nick gave him some pills that, by morning, reduced the swelling. When Anthony awoke he was able to see. Agony flared in his body as he staggered out of bed. It was still twilight. Anthony pulled on his bloody clothes and wrote an incoherent note of thanks on Nick’s computer.

Fishing boats were floating out of harbor into the bright dawn. Probably Nick’s was among them. The volcano above the town was a contrast in black stone and green vegetation. Pain beat at Anthony’s bones like a rain of fists.

Philana’s boat was still in its slip. Apprehension tautened Anthony’s nerves as he put a tentative foot on the gunwale. The hatch to the cabin was still locked. Philana wasn’t aboard. Anthony opened the hatch and went into the cabin just to be sure. It was empty.

He programmed the computer to pursue the transponder signal on Anthony’s boat, then as the yacht rose into the sky and arrowed over the ocean, Anthony went into Philana’s cabin and fell asleep on a pillow that smelled of her hair.

He awoke around noon to find the yacht patiently circling his boat. He dropped the yacht into the water, tied the two craft together, and spent half the afternoon transferring his supplies to his own boat. He programmed the yacht to return to Las Madres and orbit the volcanic spire until it was summoned by its owner or the police.

I and the sea greet one another, he tapped into his console, and as the call wailed out from his boat he hauled in the drogue and set off after the humpbacks. Apartness is the smell, he thought, aloneness is the condition. Spray shot aboard and spattered Anthony, and salt pain flickered from the cuts on his face. He climbed to the flybridge and hoped for healing from the sun and the glittering sea.

• • • •

The whales left the cold current and suddenly the world was filled with tropic sunshine and bright water. Anthony made light conversation with the humpbacks and spent the rest of his time working on Dweller speech. Despite hours of concentrated endeavor he made little progress. The sensation was akin to that of smashing his head against a stone wall over and over, an act that was, on consideration, not unlike the rest of his life.

After his third day at sea, his boat’s computer began signaling him that he was receiving messages. He ignored this and concentrated on work.

• • • •

Two days later, he was cruising north with a whale on either beam when a shadow moved across his boat. Anthony looked up from his console and saw without surprise that Philana’s yacht was eclipsing the sun. Philana, dark glasses over her deep eyes and a floppy hat over her hair, was peering down from the starboard bow.

“We have to talk,” she said.

Joyously we greet Air Human, whooped Sings of Others.

I and Air Human are pleased to detect one another’s presence, called Two Notches.

Anthony went to the controls and throttled up. Microphones slammed at the bottom of his boat. Two Notches poked one large brown eye above the waves to see what was happening, then cheerfully set off in pursuit.

Anthony and Air Human are in a state or excitement, he chattered. I/we are pleased to join our race. 

The flying yacht hung off Anthony’s stern. Philana shouted through cupped hands. “Talk to me, Anthony!”

Anthony remained silent and twisted the wheel into a fast left turn. His wake foamed over Two Notches’ face and the humpback burbled a protest. The air yacht seemed to have little trouble following the turn.

Anthony was beginning to have the sense of that stone wall coming up again, but he tried a few more maneuvers just in case one of them worked. Nothing succeeded. Finally he cut the throttle and let the boat slow on the long blue swells.

The trade winds had taken Philana’s hat and carried it away. She ignored it and looked down at him. Her face was pale and beneath the dark glasses she looked drawn and ill.

“I’m not human, Anthony,” she said. “I’m a Kyklops. That’s what’s really wrong with me.”

Anthony looked at her. Anger danced in his veins. “You really are full of surprises.”

“I’m Telamon’s other body,” she said. “Sometimes he inhabits me.”

Whalesong rolled up from the sea. We and Air Human send one another cheerful salutations and expressions of good will.

“Talk to the whales first,” said Anthony.

• • • •

“Telamon’s a scientist,” Philana said. “He’s impatient, that’s his problem.”

The boat heaved on an ocean swell. The trade wind moaned through the flybridge. “He’s got a few more problems than that,” Anthony said.

“He wanted me for a purpose but sometimes he forgets.” A tremor of pain crossed Philana’s face. She was deeply hung over. Her voice was ragged: Telamon had been smoking like a chimney and Philana wasn’t used to it.

“He wanted to do an experiment on human psychology. He wanted to arrange a method of recording a person’s memories, then transferring them to his own . . . sphere. He got my parents to agree to having the appropriate devices implanted, but the only apparatus that existed for the connection of human and Kyklops was the one the Kyklopes use to manipulate the human bodies that they wear when they want to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. And Telamon is . . .” She waved a dismissive arm. “He’s a decadent, the way a lot of the Kyklopes turn once they discover how much fun it is to be a human and that their real self doesn’t get hurt no matter what they do to their clone bodies. Telamon likes his pleasures, and he likes to interfere. Sometimes, when he dumped my memory into the nth dimension and had a look at it, he couldn’t resist the temptation to take over my body and rectify what he considered my errors. And occasionally, when he’s in the middle of one of his binges, and his other body gives out on him, he takes me over and starts a party wherever I am.”

“Some scientist,” Anthony said.

“The Kyklopes are used to experimenting on pieces of themselves,” Philana said. “Their own beings are tenuous and rather . . . detachable. Their ethics aren’t against it. And he doesn’t do it very often. He must be bored wherever he is—he’s taken me over twice in a week.” She raised her fist to her face and began to cough, a real smoker’s hack. Anthony fidgeted and wondered whether to offer her a glass of water. Philana bent double and the coughs turned to cries of pain. A tear pattered on the teak.

A knot twisted in Anthony’s throat. He left his chair and held Philana in his arms. “I’ve never told anyone,” she said.

Anthony realized to his transient alarm that once again he’d jumped off a cliff without looking. He had no more idea of where he would land than last time.

• • • •

Philana, Anthony was given to understand, was Greek for “lover of humanity.” The Kyklopes, after being saddled with a mythological name by the first humans who had contacted them, had gone in for classical allusion in a big way. Telamon, Anthony learned, meant (among other things) “the supporter.” After learning this, Anthony referred to the alien as Jockstrap.

“We should do something about him,” Anthony said. It was late—the white dwarf had just set—but neither of them had any desire to sleep. He and Philana were standing on the flybridge. The falkner shield was off and above their heads the uninhibited stars seemed almost within reach of their questing fingertips. Overlook Station, fixed almost overhead, was bright as a burning brand.

Philana shook her head. “He’s got access to my memory. Any plans we make, he can know in an instant.” She thought for a moment. “If he bothers to look. He doesn’t always.”

“I’ll make the plans without telling you what they are.”

“It will take forever. I’ve thought about it. You’re talking court case. He can sue me for breach of contract.”

“It’s your parents who signed the contract, not you. You’re an adult now.”

She turned away. Anthony looked at her for a long moment, a cold foreboding hand around his throat. “I hope,” he said, “you’re going to tell me that you signed that contract while Jockstrap was riding you.”

Philana shook her head silently. Anthony looked up into the Milky Way and imagined the stone wall falling from the void, aimed right between his eyes, spinning slightly as it grew ever larger in his vision. Smashing him again.

“All we have to do is get the thing out of your head,” Anthony said. “After that, let him sue you. You’ll be free, whatever happens.” His tone reflected a resolve that was absent entirely from his heart.

“He’ll sue you, too, if you have any part of this.” She turned to face him again. Her face pale and taut in the starlight. “All my money comes from him—how else do you think I could afford the yacht? I owe everything to him.”

Bitterness sped through Anthony’s veins. He could feel his voice turning harsh. “Do you want to get rid of him or not? Yes or no.”

“He’s not entirely evil.”

“Yes or no, Philana.”

“It’ll take years before he’s done with you. And he could kill you. Just transport you to deep space somewhere and let you drift. Or he could simply teleport me away from you.”

The bright stars poured down rage. Anthony knew himself seconds away from violence. There were two people on this boat and one of them was about to get hurt. “Yes or no!” he shouted.

Philana’s face contorted. She put her hands over her ears. Hair fell across her face. “Don’t shout,” she said.

Anthony turned and smashed his forehead against the control panel of the flybridge. Philana gave a cry of surprise and fear. Anthony drove himself against the panel again. Philana’s fingers clutched at his shoulders. Anthony could feel blood pouring hot from his scalp. The pain drained his anger, brought a cold, brilliant clarity to his mind. He smashed himself a third time. Philana cried out. He turned to her. He felt a savage, exemplary satisfaction. If one were going to drive oneself against stone walls, one should at least take a choice of the walls available.

“Ask me,” Anthony panted, “if I care what happens to me.”

Philana’s face was a mask of terror. She said his name.

“I need to know where you stand,” said Anthony. Blood drooled from his scalp, and he suppressed the unwelcome thought that he had just made himself look ridiculous.

Her look of fear broadened.

“Am I going to jump off this cliff by myself, or what?” Anthony demanded.

“I want to get rid of him,” she said.

Anthony wished her voice had contained more determination, even if it were patently false. He spat salt and went in search of his first aid kit. We are in a condition of slow movement through deep currents, he thought.

• • • •

In the morning he got the keys to Philana’s yacht and changed the passwords on the falkner controls and navigation comp. He threw all his liquor overboard. He figured that if Jockstrap appeared and discovered that he couldn’t leave the middle of the ocean, and he couldn’t have a party where he was, he’d get bored and wouldn’t hang around for long.

From Philana’s cabin he called an attorney who informed him that the case was complex but not impossible, and furthermore that it would take a small fortune to resolve. Anthony told him to get to work on it. In the meantime he told the lawyer to start calling neurosurgeons. Unfortunately there were few neurosurgeons capable of implanting, let alone removing, the rider device. The operation wasn’t performed that often.

Days passed. A discouraging list of neurosurgeons either turned him down flat or wanted the legal situation clarified first. Anthony told the lawyer to start calling rich neurosurgeons who might be able to ride out a lawsuit.

Philana transferred most of her data to Anthony’s computer and worked with the whales from the smaller boat. Anthony used her yacht and aquasled and cursed the bad sound quality. At least the yacht’s flight capability allowed him to find the Dwellers faster.

As far as the Dwellers went, he had run all at once into a dozen blind alleys. Progress seemed measured in microns.

“What’s B1971?” Philana asked once, looking over his shoulder as he typed in data.

“A taste. Perhaps a taste associated with a particular temperature striation. Perhaps an emotion.” He shrugged. “Maybe just a metaphor.”

“You could ask them.”

His soul hardened. “Not yet.” Which ended the conversation.

Anthony wasn’t sure whether or not he wanted to touch her. He and Jockstrap were at war and Philana seemed not to have entirely made up her mind which side she was on. Anthony slept with Philana on the double mattress in the peak, but they avoided sex. He didn’t know whether he was helping her out of love or something else, and while he figured things out, desire was on hold, waiting.

Anthony’s time with Philana was occupied mainly by his attempt to teach her to cook. Anything else waited for the situation to grow less opaque. Anthony figured Jockstrap would clarify matters fairly soon.

• • • •

Anthony’s heart lurched as looked up from lunch to see the taut, challenging grin on Philana’s face. Anthony realized he’d been foolish to expect Telamon to show up only at night, as he always had before.

Anthony drew his lips into an answering grin. He was ready, no matter what the hour.

“Do I know you?” Anthony mocked. “Do we have business?”

Philana’s appraisal was cold. “I’ve been called Jockstrap before,” Telamon said.

“With good reason, I’m sure.”

Telamon lurched to his feet and walked aft. He seemed not to have his sea legs yet. Anthony followed, his nerves dancing. Telamon looked out at the sea and curled Philana’s lip as if to say that the water held nothing of interest.

“I want to talk about Philana,” Telamon said. “You’re keeping her prisoner here.”

“She can leave me anytime she wants. Which is more than she can say about you.”

“I want the codes to the yacht.”

Anthony stepped up to Telamon, held Philana’s cold gaze. “You’re hurting her,” he said.

Telamon stared at him with eyes like obsidian chips. He pushed Philana’s long hair out of his face with an unaccustomed gesture. “I’m not the only one, Maldalena. I’ve got access to her mind, remember.”

“Then look in her mind and see what she thinks of you.”

A contemptuous smile played about Philana’s lips. “I know very well what she thinks of me, and it’s probably not what she’s told you. Philana is a very sad and complex person, and she is not always truthful.”

“She’s what you made her.”

“Precisely my next point.” He waved his arm stiffly, unnaturally. The gesture brought him off-balance, and Philana’s body swayed for a moment as Telamon adjusted to the tossing of the boat. “I gave her money, education, knowledge of the world. I have corrected her errors, taught her much. She is, in many ways, my creation. Her feelings toward me are ambiguous, as any child’s feelings would be toward her father.”

“Daddy Jockstrap.” Anthony laughed. “Do we have business, Daddy? Or are you going to take your daughter’s body to a party first?”

Anthony jumped backwards, arms flailing, as Philana disappeared, her place taken by a young man with curly dark hair and bright blue eyes. The stranger was dressed in a white cotton shirt unbuttoned to the navel and a pair of navy blue swimming trunks. He had seen the man before on vid, showing off his chest hairs. The grin stayed the same from one body to the next.

“She’s gone, Maldalena. I teleported her to someplace safe.” He laughed. “I’ll buy her a new boat. Do what you like with the old one.”

Anthony’s heart hammered. He had forgotten the Kyklopes could do that, just teleport without the apparatus required by humans. And teleport other things as well.

He wondered how many centuries old the Kyklops’ body was. He knew the mind’s age was measured in eons.

“This doesn’t end it,” Anthony said.

Telamon’s tone was mild. “Perhaps I’ll find a nice planet for you somewhere, Maldalena. Let you play Robinson Crusoe, just as you did when you were young.”

“That will only get you in trouble. Too many people know about this situation by now. And it won’t be much fun holding Philana wherever you’ve got her.”

Telamon stepped toward the stern, sat on the taffrail. His movements were fluid, far more confident than they had been when he was wearing the other, unaccustomed body. For a moment Anthony considered kicking Telamon into the drink, then decided against it. The possible repercussions had a cosmic dimension that Anthony preferred not to contemplate.

“I don’t dislike you, Maldalena,” the alien said. “I truly don’t. You’re an alcoholic, violent lout, but at least you have proven intelligence, perhaps a kind of genius.”

“Call the kettle black again. I liked that part.”

Two Notches’ smooth body rose a cable’s length to starboard. He exhaled with an audible hiss, mist drifting over his back. Telamon gave the whale a disinterested look, then turned back to Anthony.

“Being the nearest thing to a parent on the planet,” he said. “I must say that I disapprove of you as a partner for Philana. However—” He gave a shrug. “Parents must know when to compromise in these matters.” He looked up at Anthony with his blue eyes. “I propose we share her, Anthony. Formalize the arrangement we already seem to possess. I’ll only occupy a little of her time, and for all the rest, the two of you can live out your lives with whatever sad, tormented domestic bliss you can summon. Till she gets tired of you, anyway.”

Two Notches rolled under the waves. A cetacean murmur echoed off the boat’s bottom. Anthony’s mind flailed for an answer. He felt sweat prickling his scalp. He shook his head in feigned disbelief.

“Listen to yourself, Telamon. Is this supposed to be a scientist talking? A researcher?”

“You don’t want to share?” The young man’s face curled in disdain. “You want everything for yourself—the whole planet, I suppose, like your father.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I know what Philana knows about you, and I’ve done some checking on my own. You brought the humpbacks here because you needed them. Away from their home, their kind. You asked them, I’m sure; but there’s no way they could make an informed decision about this planet, about what they were doing. You needed them for your Dweller study, so you took them.”

As if on cue, Two Notches rose from the water to take a breath. Telamon favored the whale with his taut smile. Anthony floundered for an answer while the alien spoke on.

“You’ve got data galore on the Dwellers, but do you publish? Do you share it with anybody, even with Philana? You hoard it all for yourself, all your specialized knowledge. You don’t even talk to the Dwellers!” Telamon gave a scornful laugh. “You don’t even want the Dwellers to know what Anthony knows!”

Anger poured through Anthony’s veins like a scalding fire. He clenched his fists, considered launching himself at Telamon. Something held him back.

The alien stood, walked to Anthony, looked him up and down. “We’re not so different,” he said. “We both want what’s ours. But I’m willing to share. Philana can be our common pool of data, if you like. Think about it.”

Anthony swung, and in that instant Philana was back, horror in her eyes. Anthony’s fist, aimed for the taller Telamon’s chin, clipped Philana’s temple and she fell back, flailing. Anthony caught her.

“It just happened, didn’t it?” Her voice was woeful.

“You don’t remember?”

Philana’s face crumpled. She swayed and touched her temple. “I never do. The times when he’s running me are just blank spots.”

Anthony seated her on the port bench. He was feeling queasy at having hit her. She put her face in her hands. “I hate when that happens in front of people I know,” she said.

“He’s using you to hide behind. He was here in person, the son of a bitch.” He took her hands in his own and kissed her. Purest desire flamed through him. He wanted to commit an act of defiance, make a statement of the nature of things. He put his arms around her and kissed her nape. She smelled faintly of pine, and there were needles in her hair. Telamon had put her on Earth, then, in a forest somewhere.

She strained against his tight embrace. “I don’t know if this is a good idea,” she said.

“I want to send a message to Telamon,” Anthony said.

They made love under the sun, lying on the deck in Anthony’s cockpit. Clear as a bell, Anthony heard Dweller sounds rumbling up the boat. Somewhere in the boat a metal mounting bracket rang to the subsonics. Philana clutched at him. There was desperation in her look, a search for affirmation, despair at finding none. The teak punished Anthony’s palms. He wondered if Telamon had ever possessed her thus, took over her mind so that he could fuck her in his own body, commit incest with himself. He found the idea exciting.

His orgasm poured out, stunning him with its intensity. He kissed the moist juncture of Philana’s neck and shoulder, and rose on his hands to stare down into Telamon’s brittle grin and cold, knowing eyes.

“Message received, Anthony.” Philana’s throat convulsed in laughter. “You’re taking possession. Showing everyone who’s boss.”

Horror galvanized Anthony. He jumped to his feet and backed away, heart pounding. He took a deep breath and mastered himself, strove for words of denial and could not find them. “You’re sad, Telamon,” he said.

Telamon threw Philana’s arms over her head, parted her legs. “Let’s do it again, Anthony.” Taunting. “You’re so masterful.”

Anthony turned away. “Piss off, Telamon, you sick fuck.” Bile rose in his throat.

“What happened?” Anthony knew Philana was back. He turned and saw her face crumple. “We were making love!” she wailed.

“A cheap trick. He’s getting desperate.” He squatted by her and tried to take her in his arms. She turned away from him.

“Let me alone for a while,” she said. Bright tears filled her eyes.

Misplaced adrenaline ran charges through Anthony’s body—no one to fight, no place to run. He picked up his clothes and went below to the main cabin. He drew on his clothing and sat on one of the berths, hands helpless on the seat beside him. He wanted to get blind drunk.

Half an hour later, Philana entered the cabin. She’d braided her hair, drawn it back so tight from her temples it must have been painful. Her movements were slow, as if suddenly she’d lost her sea legs. She sat down at the little kitchen table, pushed away her half-eaten lunch.

“We can’t win,” she said.

“There’s got to be some way,” Anthony said tonelessly. He was clean out of ideas.

Philana looked at Anthony from reddened eyes. “We can give him what he wants,” she said.

“No.”

Her voice turned to a shout. “It’s not you he does this to! It’s not you who winks out of existence in the middle of doing laundry or making love, and wakes up somewhere else.“ Her knuckles were white as they gripped the table edge. ”I don’t know how long I can take this.“

“All your life,” said Anthony, “if you give him what he wants.”

“At least then he wouldn’t use it as a weapon!” Her voice was a shout. She turned away.

Anthony looked at her, wondered if he should go to her. He decided not to. He was out of comfort for the present.

“You see,” Philana said, her head still turned away, “why I don’t want to live forever.”

“Don’t let him beat you.”

“It’s not that. I’m afraid . . .” Her voice trembled. “I’m afraid that if I got old, I’d become him. The Kyklopes are the oldest living things ever discovered. And a lot of the oldest immortals are a lot like them. Getting crazier, getting . . .” She shook her head. “Getting less human all the time.”

Anthony saw a body swaying in the smokehouse. Philana’s body, her fingernails trailing in the dust.

Pain throbbed in his chest. He stood up, swayed as he was caught by a slow wave of vertigo. Somewhere his father was laughing, telling him he should have stayed on Lees for a life of pastoral incest.

“I want to think,” he said. He stepped past her on the way to his computer. He didn’t reach out to touch her as he passed. She didn’t reach for him, either.

He put on the headphones and listened to the Dwellers. Their speech rolled up from the deep. Anthony sat unable to comprehend, his mind frozen. He was helpless as Philana. Whose was the next move? he wondered. His? Philana’s?

Whoever made the next move, Anthony knew, the game was Telamon’s.

• • • •

At dinnertime, Philana made a pair of sandwiches for Anthony, then returned to the cabin and ate nothing herself. Anthony ate one sandwich without tasting it, gave the second to the fish. The Dweller speech had faded out. He left his computer and stepped into the cabin. Philana was stretched out on one of the side berths, her eyes closed. One arm was thrown over her forehead.

Her body, Anthony decided, was too tense for this to be sleep. He sat on the berth opposite.

“He said you haven’t told the truth,” Anthony said.

Anthony could see Philana’s eyes moving under translucent lids as she evaluated this statement, scanning for meaning. “About what,” she said.

“About your relationship to him.”

Her lips drew back, revealing teeth. Perhaps it was a smile.

“I’ve known him all my life. I gave you the condensed version.”

“Is there more I should know?”

There was another pause. “He saved my life.”

“Good for him.”

“I got involved with this man. Three or four hundred years old, one of my professors in school. He was going through a crisis—he was a mess, really. I thought I could do him some good. Telamon disagreed, said the relationship was sick.” Philana licked her lips. “He was right,” she said.

Anthony didn’t know if he really wanted to hear about this.

“The guy started making demands. Wanted to get married, leave Earth, start over again.”

“What did you want?”

Philana shrugged. “I don’t know. I hadn’t made up my mind. But Telamon went into my head and confronted the guy and told him to get lost. Then he just took me out of there. My body was half the galaxy away, all alone on an undeveloped world. There were supplies, but no gates out.”

Anthony gnawed his lip. This was how Telamon operated.

“Telamon kept me there for a couple weeks till I calmed down. He took me back to Earth. The professor had taken up with someone else, another one of his students. He married her, and six weeks later she walked out on him. He killed her, then killed himself.”

Philana sighed, drew her hand over her forehead. She opened her eyes and sat up, swinging her legs off the berth. “So,” she said. “That’s one Telamon story. I’ve got more.”

“When did this happen?”

“I’d just turned eighteen.” She shook her head. “That’s when I signed the contract that keeps him in my head. I decided that I couldn’t trust my judgment about people. And Telamon’s judgment of people is, well, quite good.”

Resentment flamed in Anthony at this notion. Telamon had made his judgment of Anthony clear, and Anthony didn’t want it to become a subject for debate. “You’re older now,” he said. “He can’t have a veto on your life forever.”

Philana drew up her legs and circled her knees with her arms. “You’re violent, Anthony.”

Anthony looked at her for a long moment of cold anger. “I hit you by accident. I was aiming at him, damn it.”

Philana’s jaw worked as she returned his stare. “How long before you aim at me?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“That’s what my old professor said.”

Anthony turned away, fury running through him like chill fire. Philana looked at him levelly for a moment, then dropped her forehead to her knees. She sighed. “I don’t know, Anthony. I don’t know anymore. If I ever did.”

Anthony stared fixedly at the distant white dwarf, just arrived above the horizon and visible through the hatch. We are, he thought, in a condition of permanent bafflement. “What do you want, Philana?” he asked.

Her head came up, looked at him. “I want not to be a tennis ball in your game with Telamon, Anthony. I want to know I’m not just the prize given the winner.”

“I wanted you before I ever met Telamon, Philana.”

“Telamon changed a few things.” Her voice was cold. “Before you met him, you didn’t use my body to send messages to people.”

Anthony’s fists clenched. He forced them to relax.

Philana’s voice was bitter. “Seems to me, Anthony, that’s one of Telamon’s habits you’re all too eager to adopt.”

Anthony’s chest ached. He didn’t seem able to breathe in enough air. He took a long breath and hoped his tension would ease. It didn’t. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not . . . a normal situation.”

“For you, maybe.”

Silence hung in the room, broken only by the whale clicks and mutters rising through the boat. Anthony shook his head. “What do we do, then?” he asked. “Surrender?”

“If we have to.” She looked at him. “I’m willing to fight Telamon, but not to the point where one of us is destroyed.” She leaned toward him, her expression intent. “And if Telamon wins, could you live with it?” she asked. “With surrender? If we had to give him what he wanted?”

“I don’t know.”

“I have to live with it. You don’t. That’s the difference.”

“That’s one difference.” He took a breath, then rose from his place. “I have to think,” he said.

He climbed into the cockpit. Red sunset was splattered like blood across the windscreen. He tried to breathe the sea air, clear the heaviness he felt in his chest, but it didn’t work. Anthony went up onto the flybridge and stared forward. His eyes burned as the sun went down in flames. The white dwarf was high overhead when Anthony came down. Philana was lying in the forepeak, covered with a sheet, her eyes staring sightlessly out the open hatch. Anthony took his clothes off and crawled in beside her.

“I’ll surrender,” he said. “If I have to, I’ll surrender.” She turned to him and put her arms around him. Hopeless desire burned in his belly.

He made love to Philana, his nerves numb to the possibility that Telamon might reappear. Her hungry mouth drank in his pain. He didn’t know whether this was affirmation or not, whether this meant anything other than the fact there was nothing left to do at this point than stagger blindly into one another’s embrace . . .

• • • •

A Dweller soloed from below, the clearest Anthony had ever heard one. We call to ourselves, the Dweller said. We speak of things as they are. Anthony rose from bed and set his computer to record. Sings of Others, rising alongside to breathe, called a hello. Anthony tapped his keys, hit TRANSMIT.

Air Human and I are in a condition of rut, he said.

We congratulate Anthony and Air Human on our condition of rut, Sings of Others responded. The whooping whale cries layered atop the thundering Dweller noises. We wish ourselves many happy copulations. 

Happy copulations, happy copulations, echoed Two Notches.

A pointless optimism began to resonate in Anthony’s mind. He sat before the computer and listened to the sounds of the Deep Dwellers as they rumbled up his spine.

Philana appeared at the hatch. She was buttoning her shirt. “You told the whales about us?” she said.

“Why not?”

She grinned faintly. “I guess there’s no reason not to.”

Two Notches wailed a question. Are Anthony and Air Human copulating now?

Not at present, Anthony replied.

We hope you will copulate often. 

Philana, translating the speech on her own, laughed. “Tell them we hope so, too,” she said.

And then she stiffened. Anthony’s nerves poured fire. Philana turned to him and regarded him with Telamon’s eyes.

“I thought you’d see reason,” Telamon said. “I’ll surrender. I like that.”

Anthony looked at the possessed woman and groped for a vehicle for his message. Words seemed inadequate, he decided, but would have to do. “You haven’t won yet,” he said.

Philana’s head cocked to one side as Telamon viewed him. “Has it occurred to you,” Telamon said, “that if she’s free of me, she won’t need you at all?”

“You forget something. I’ll be rid of you as well.”

“You can be rid of me any time.”

Anthony stared at Telamon for a moment, then suddenly he laughed. He had just realized how to send his message. Telamon looked at him curiously. Anthony turned to his computer deck and flipped to the Dweller translation file.

I/we, he typed, live in the warm brightness above. I am new to this world, and send good wishes to the Dwellers below.

Anthony pressed TRANSMIT. Rolling thunder boomed from the boat’s speakers. The grammar was probably awful, Anthony knew, but he was fairly certain of the words, and he thought the meaning would be clear.

Telamon frowned, stepped to gaze over Anthony’s shoulder.

Calls came from below. A translation tree appeared on the screen.

“Trench Dweller” was probably one of the Dwellers’ names. “Bubbleward” was a phrase for “up,” since bubbles rose to the surface. Anthony tapped the keys.

We are from far away, recently arrived. We are small and foreign to the world. We wish to brush the Dwellers with our thoughts. We regret our lack of clarity in diction.

“I wonder if you’ve thought this through,” Telamon said.

Anthony hit TRANSMIT. Speakers boomed. The subsonics were like a punch in the gut.

“Go jump off a cliff,” Anthony said.

“You’re making a mistake,” said Telamon.

The Dweller’s answer was surprisingly direct.

Anthony’s heart crashed in astonishment. Could the Dwellers stand the lack of pressure on the surface? I/We, he typed, Trench Dweller, proceed with consideration for safety. I/We recollect that we are small and weak. He pressed TRANSMIT and flipped to the whalespeech file.

Deep Dweller rising to surface, he typed. Run fast northward.

The whales answered with cries of alarm. Flukes pounded the water. Anthony ran to the cabin and cranked the wheel hard to starboard. He increased speed to separate himself from the humpbacks. Behind him, Telamon stumbled in his unfamiliar body as the boat took the waves at a different angle.

Anthony returned to his computer console. I/We are in a state of motion, he reported. Is living in the home of the light occasion for a condition of damage to us/Trench Dweller?

“You’re mad,” said Telamon, and then Philana staggered. “He’s done it again,” she said in a stunned voice. She stepped to the starboard bench and sat down. “What’s happening?” she asked.

“I’m talking to the Dwellers. One of them is rising to say hello.”

“Now?”

He gave her a skeletal grin. “It’s what you wanted, yes?” She stared at him.

I’m going over cliffs, he thought. One after another.

That, Anthony concluded, is the condition of existence.

Subsonics rattled crockery in the kitchen.

Anthony typed, I/We happily await greeting ourselves and pressed TRANSMIT, then REPEAT. He would give the Dweller a sound to home in on.

“I don’t understand,” Philana said. He moved to join her on the bench, put his arm around her. She shrugged him off. “Tell me,” she said. He took her hand.

“We’re going to win.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet.”

She was too shaken to argue. “It’s going to be a long fight,” she said.

“I don’t care.”

Philana took a breath. “I’m scared.”

“So am I,” said Anthony.

The boat beat itself against the waves. The flying yacht followed, a silent shadow.

Anthony and Philana waited in silence until the Dweller rose, a green-grey mass that looked as if a grassy reef had just calved. Foam roared from its back as it broke water, half an ocean running down its sides. Anthony’s boat danced in the sudden white tide, and then the ocean stilled. Bits of the Dweller were all around, spread over the water for leagues—tentacles, filters, membranes. The Dweller’s very mass had calmed the sea. The Dweller was so big, Anthony saw, it constituted an entire ecosystem. Sea creatures lived among its folds and tendrils: Some had died as they rose, their swim bladders exploding in the release of pressure; others leaped and spun and shrank from the brightness above.

Sunlight shone from the Dweller’s form, and the creature pulsed with life.

Terrified, elated, Philana and Anthony rose to say hello.

© 1988 by Walter Jon Williams. Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Walter Jon Williams is an award-winning author who has been on the best-seller lists of the New York Times and the Times of London. He is the author of twenty-seven novels and three collections of short fiction.

His first novel to attract serious public attention was Hardwired (1986), described by Roger Zelazny as “a tough, sleek juggernaut of a story, punctuated by strobe-light movements, coursing to the wail of jets and the twang of steel guitars.” In 2001 he won a Nebula Award for his novelette, “Daddy’s World,” and won again in 2005 for “The Green Leopard Plague.” He has also written for George RR Martin’s Wild Cards project.

Walter has written for comics, the screen, and for television, and has worked in the gaming field. He was a writer for the alternate reality game Last Call Poker, and scripted the mega-hit Spore.

His latest work is The Fourth Wall, a near-future thriller set in the world of alternate reality gaming.

BOOK EXCERPT: Stories of Your Life and Others (Vintage Books)

Ted Chiang | 1812 words

from “Seventy-Two Letters”

When he was a child, Robert’s favorite toy was a simple one, a clay doll that could do nothing but walk forward. While his parents entertained their guests in the garden outside, discussing Victoria’s ascension to the throne or the Chartist reforms, Robert would follow the doll as it marched down the corridors of the family home, turning it around corners or back where it came from. The doll didn’t obey commands or exhibit any sense at all; if it met a wall, the diminutive clay figure would keep marching until it gradually mashed its arms and legs into misshapen flippers. Sometimes Robert would let it do that, strictly for his own amusement. Once the doll’s limbs were thoroughly distorted, he’d pick the toy up and pull the name out, stopping its motion in mid-stride. Then he’d knead the body back into a smooth lump, flatten it out into a plank, and cut out a different figure: a body with one leg crooked, or longer than the other. He would stick the name back into it, and the doll would promptly topple over and push itself around in a little circle.

It wasn’t the sculpting that Robert enjoyed; it was mapping out the limits of the name. He liked to see how much variation he could impart to the body before the name could no longer animate it. To save time with the sculpting, he rarely added decorative details; he refined the bodies only as was needed to test the name.

Another of his dolls walked on four legs. The body was a nice one, a finely detailed porcelain horse, but Robert was more interested in experimenting with its name. This name obeyed commands to start and stop and knew enough to avoid obstacles, and Robert tried inserting it into bodies of his own making. But this name had more exacting body requirements, and he was never able to form a clay body it could animate. He formed the legs separately and then attached them to the body, but he wasn’t able to erase the seams fully; the name didn’t recognize the body as a single continuous piece.

He scrutinized the names themselves, looking for some simple substitutions that might distinguish two-leggedness from four-leggedness, or make the body obey simple commands. But the names looked entirely different; on each scrap of parchment were inscribed seventy-two tiny Hebrew letters, arranged in twelve rows of six, and so far as he could tell, the order of the letters was utterly random.

• • • •

Robert Stratton and his fourth-form classmates sat quietly as Master Trevelyan paced between the rows of desks.

“Langdale, what is the doctrine of names?”

“All things are reflections of God, and, um, all–”

“Spare us your bumbling. Thorburn, can you tell us the doctrine of names?”

“As all things are reflections of God, so are all names reflections of the divine name.”

“And what is an object’s true name?”

“That name which reflects the divine name in the same manner as the object reflects God.”

“And what is the action of a true name?”

“To endow its object with a reflection of divine power.”

“Correct. Halliwell, what is the doctrine of signatures?”

The natural philosophy lesson continued until noon, but because it was a Saturday, there was no instruction for the rest of the day. Master Trevelyan dismissed the class, and the boys of Cheltenham school dispersed.

After stopping at the dormitory, Robert met his friend Lionel at the border of school grounds. “So the wait’s over? Today’s the day?” Robert asked.

“I said it was, didn’t I?”

“Let’s go, then.” The pair set off to walk the mile and a half to Lionel’s home.

During his first year at Cheltenham, Robert had known Lionel hardly at all; Lionel was one of the day boys, and Robert, like all the boarders, regarded them with suspicion. Then, purely by chance, Robert ran into him while on holiday, during a visit to the British Museum. Robert loved the museum: the frail mummies and immense sarcophagi; the stuffed platypus and pickled mermaid; the wall bristling with elephant tusks and moose antlers and unicorn horns. That particular day he was at the display of elemental sprites: he was reading the card explaining the salamander’s absence when he suddenly recognized Lionel, standing right next to him, peering at the undine in its jar. Conversation revealed their shared interest in the sciences, and the two became fast friends.

As they walked down the road, they kicked a large pebble back and forth between them. Lionel gave the pebble a kick, and laughed as it skittered between Robert’s ankles. “I couldn’t wait to get out of there,” he said. “I think one more doctrine would have been more than I could bear.”

“Why do they even bother calling it natural philosophy?” said Robert. “Just admit it’s another theology lesson and be done with it.” The two of them had recently purchased A Boy’s Guide to Nomenclature, which informed them that nomenclators no longer spoke in terms of God or the divine name. Instead, current thinking held that there was a lexical universe as well as a physical one, and bringing an object together with a compatible name caused the latent potentialities of both to be realized. Nor was there a single “true name” for a given object: depending on its precise shape, a body might be compatible with several names, known as its “euonyms,” and conversely a simple name might tolerate significant variations in body shape, as his childhood marching doll had demonstrated.

When they reached Lionel’s home, they promised the cook they would be in for dinner shortly and headed to the garden out back. Lionel had converted a toolshed in his family’s garden into a laboratory, which he used to conduct experiments. Normally Robert came by on a regular basis, but recently Lionel had been working on an experiment that he was keeping secret. Only now was he ready to show Robert his results. Lionel had Robert wait outside while he entered first, and then let him enter.

A long shelf ran along every wall of the shed, crowded with racks of vials, stoppered bottles of green glass, and assorted rocks and mineral specimens. A table decorated with stains and scorch marks dominated the cramped space, and it supported the apparatus for Lionel’s latest experiment: a cucurbit clamped in a stand so that its bottom rested in a basin full of water, which in turn sat on a tripod above a lit oil lamp. A mercury thermometer was also fixed in the basin.

“Take a look,” said Lionel.

Robert leaned over to inspect the cucurbit’s contents. At first it appeared to be nothing more than foam, a dollop of suds that might have dripped off a pint of stout. But as he looked closer, he realized that what he thought were bubbles were actually the interstices of a glistening latticework. The froth consisted of homunculi: tiny seminal foetuses. Their bodies were transparent individually, but collectively their bulbous heads and strandlike limbs adhered to form a pale, dense foam.

“So you wanked off into a jar and kept the spunk warm?” he asked, and Lionel shoved him. Robert laughed and raised his hands in a placating gesture. “No, honestly, it’s a wonder. How’d you do it?”

Mollified, Lionel said, “It’s a real balancing act. You have to keep the temperature just right, of course, but if you want them to grow, you also have to keep just the right mix of nutrients. Too thin a mix, and they starve. Too rich, and they get over lively and start fighting with each other.”

“You’re having me on.”

“It’s the truth; look it up if you don’t believe me. Battles amongst sperm are what cause monstrosities to be born. If an injured foetus is the one that makes it to the egg, the baby that’s born is deformed.”

“I thought that was because of a fright the mother had when she was carrying.” Robert could just make out the minuscule squirmings of the individual foetuses. He realized that the froth was ever so slowly roiling as a result of their collective motions.

“That’s only for some kinds, like ones that are all hairy or covered in blotches. Babies that don’t have arms or legs, or have misshapen ones, they’re the ones that got caught in a fight back when they were sperm. That’s why you can’t provide too rich a broth, especially if they haven’t any place to go: they get in a frenzy. You can lose all of them pretty quick that way.”

“How long can you keep them growing?”

“Probably not much longer,” said Lionel. “It’s hard to keep them alive if they haven’t reached an egg. I read about one in France that was grown till it was the size of a fist, and they had the best equipment available. I just wanted to see if I could do it at all.”

Robert stared at the foam, remembering the doctrine of preformation that Master Trevelyan had drilled into them: all living things had been created at the same time, long ago, and births today were merely enlargements of the previously imperceptible. Although they appeared newly created, these homunculi were countless years old; for all of human history they had lain nested within generations of their ancestors, waiting for their turn to be born.

In fact, it wasn’t just them who had waited; he himself must have done the same thing prior to his birth. If his father were to do this experiment, the tiny figures Robert saw would be his unborn brothers and sisters. He knew they were insensible until reaching an egg, but he wondered what thoughts they’d have if they weren’t. He imagined the sensation of his body, every bone and organ soft and clear as gelatin, sticking to those of myriad identical siblings. What would it be like, looking through transparent eyelids, realizing the mountain in the distance was actually a person, recognizing it as his brother? What if he knew he’d become as massive and solid as that colossus, if only he could reach an egg? It was no wonder they fought.

Excerpt of “Seventy-Two Letters” by Ted Chiang. From Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. Copyright © 2002 by Ted Chiang.  Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ted Chiang is the author of Stories of Your Life and Others. He was born and raised in Port Jefferson, New York, and attended Brown University, where he received a degree in computer science. His debut story “Tower of Babylon” won the Nebula in 1990. Since then, he has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992, a Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for “Story of Your Life” (1998), a Sidewise Award for “Seventy-Two Letters” (2000), a Nebula Award, a Locus Award, and a Hugo Award for his novelette “Hell Is the Absence of God” (2002), a Nebula Award and a Hugo Award for his novelette “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” (2007), a Hugo Award and a Locus Award for his short story “Exhalation” (2008), and most recently, a Hugo Award and a Locus Award for his novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010). He lives outside of Seattle, Washington.

Movie Review: Warcraft

Carrie Vaughn | 1609 words

A Mage, a Knight, and a Half-Orc Walk Into a Tavern . . .

Let me state up front that I have never played Warcraft the game in any of its incarnations, and so may be in a good position to judge this as a movie and not as an artifact of some other thing. Honestly, the only thing I really know about Warcraft is Leeroy Jenkins.

But I have played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons.

One of my own personal categories of movies is “a million times better than the actual Dungeons and Dragons movie.” You know, the one that came out in 2000 and didn’t have any scenery left after Jeremy Irons finished chewing it. It’s a very low bar. It includes films like The Forbidden Kingdom, Your Highness, and Dragon Crusaders. (The Asylum’s very best movie, in my opinion. I understand this is also a very low bar, but I would watch Dragon Crusaders again.) My biggest question heading in to see Warcraft: would it earn a place in this category?

Answer: Warcraft is a million times better than the actual Dungeons and Dragons movie.
This is not to say Warcraft is a good movie. It’s the kind of movie that forces a great actor like Ben Foster to use his talents to intone lines like “I live to protect the realm!” Where an orc mother sets her baby afloat in a basket on a river and is killed right after. Where “From light comes darkness, and from the darkness light!” is passed off as profound philosophy.

I suppose this is where I should mention that Warcraft is directed and co-written by Duncan Jones, who directed and co-wrote Moon, which won a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation in 2010. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

The real charm of a D&D-style movie that’s better than the actual Dungeons and Dragons movie (a charm that movie lacked) isn’t its quality, but the number of times over the course of the film you find yourself thinking, “Oh my gosh I was totally in that campaign. That totally happened to my character.” Like this scene, when the ancient floaty glowy artifact produces an oily doorway, and the young mage asks, “Am I supposed to go in?” and the crotchety old mage answers, “I don’t know, it’s never done that before.” Yeah, I’m pretty sure I once had a character involved in that scenario. Also, when our heroes are on the road, they set a watch, just like every adventuring party in D&D history, and they make the young mage go first. It’s awesome. I giggled pretty much all the way through the movie. (“Doesn’t this seem kind of cumbersome?” my friend leaned over to ask not ten minutes in. “No,” I insisted. “It’s adorable.” I’m pretty sure the filmmakers weren’t going for adorable.)

Our story opens with a sweet domestic scene between an orc couple who are expecting their first child. It’s fun. It’s nice. (Spoiler: Both mom and dad orc end up dead by the end of the movie. Considering I thought these were going to be our viewpoint characters all the way through, which would have been very cool, this was disappointing.) The future of the orcs is uncertain—their world is dead, but a powerful orc mage, Gul’dan (yes, it has an apostrophe, I checked), has discovered how to open a portal to a new, vibrant land. All they have to do is overrun this new land of Azeroth and they’ll be set. However, Durotan, brand-new orc father and war chief main character (temporary), discovers the truth: they will destroy this new land, too, because the Gul’dan’s power is drawn from the land itself, and he will kill whatever he touches. Durotan must ally with the humans in Azeroth if any of them are to survive. Meanwhile, the human king and his best knight, Lothar, make plans to defend against this invasion. Along the way we meet a young human mage, the powerful human Guardian mage, the king’s kind and beautiful queen, and a hottie half-orc who feels rejected by both her peoples but comes to find a home among the humans. Until she doesn’t. It’s a long story.

Spoiler: Things go badly. There’s this strange theme of characters insisting that they have to die in order to rally their people against the forces of darkness. It doesn’t seem to ever work but it keeps happening. What story there is completely falls apart in the third act, when our heroes triumph, the bad human mage turns good and saves the day right before he dies, and it looks like we’re going to get a happy ending with kissing and everything. But no. The portal that will save them all slams shut, the king demands the hottie half-orc kill him because then she’ll become leader of the orcs and make peace. Except she doesn’t, and long after the story should already be over there’s a big fight between Lothar and one of the main bad orcs—I sort of lost track because there were more than one—and Gul’dan, the really bad orc mage who’s ruining everything for everybody, who you know is the big bad guy because he has an apostrophe in his name, isn’t defeated at all, which is very frustrating and that’s when I realized this all mainly serves to set up a sequel. Total pain in the ass.

Our very last scene shows the baby orc floating down the river, both his parents dead. But I’m not worried about him because the Nelwyns will find him and he’ll meet Madmartigan who will protect him from Bavmorda—

Oh wait. Wrong movie. Sorry.

I felt bad for the actors. The human king is played by Dominic Cooper, last seen charming the pants off us in late ’40s LA as young Howard Stark in Agent Carter. The last time I saw Ruth Negga, who plays his queen, was as delicious villain Raina in Agents of SHIELD. Here, these two lovely charming actors didn’t get to do anything but look serious and trustworthy. I couldn’t even figure out who Clancy Brown was playing until the closing credits ran. (He’s the orc Blackhand.)

For all its easily identifiable faults, Warcraft has a few cool things I didn’t expect. Some beautiful scenes that ought to be the foundation of any fantasy movie. I love the gryphon, which provided an easy way for the characters to show us distant corners of the kingdom quickly. In one scene the young mage Khadgar goes into a magical library, because of course, and when he slams a book shut, dust puffs from it into a sun beam. It’s a lovely moment I might have imagined for any of my various D&D characters.

The movie also passes the Bechdel test, and quite nicely. The hottie half-orc Garona is actually an interesting, developed character. While her background of horrible abuse, including rape, is stereotypical, the movie’s handling of it is not: it’s only ever obliquely referenced (“Broken bones heal stronger. My bones are very strong.”), and Lothar expresses his sympathy kindly and without condescension. Queen Taria does everything she can to welcome and comfort Garona, as if she understands how difficult and traumatic it must be as a woman alone, surrounded by strangers. No default cliché catty competition here. I can try to fault the movie for maybe treating the women characters like tokens, but moments like this mean I can’t, really. There is effort here, maybe imperfect but still visible, to include female orcs in the crowd scenes, at least one female human warrior in the background, and people of color among the king’s advisors.

I found myself a little bit overwhelmed and unhappy with the sheer quantity of FX. Vast seas of CGI orcs, many motion-capture orc characters, mages with glowing eyes (good = blue, bad = green), complicated animated spells, CGI cityscapes and mountainscapes and gryphons and so on. I started feeling nostalgic for what I consider the golden age of fantasy cinema, which produced movies like Conan the Barbarian, Beastmaster, Ladyhawke, Dragonslayer, The Neverending Story, Willow, and The Dark Crystal, all of which might have been simple but were also solidly real. Where the magic and monsters really inspired awe because they weren’t pervasive. Warcraft the game has been around for twenty years, and I’m certain the movie looks very much like the World of Warcraft incarnation that so many are familiar with. So what’s special about the movie, then? I don’t know.

I’m absolutely certain I missed some things, not being a player of the game. In fact, the best way to describe the movie might actually be as a giant Easter egg for people who love the game. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t really aimed at a general audience. Not even a D&D playing one.

Alas, the movie makes no reference to Leeroy Jenkins.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series, the most recent of which is the fourteenth installment, Kitty Saves the World. Her superhero novel Dreams of the Golden Age was released in January 2014.  She has also written young adult novels, Voices of Dragons and Steel, and the fantasy novels, Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age. Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, from Lightspeed to Tor.com and George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.

Book Reviews: July 2016

Andrew Liptak | 1583 words

In my last column, I took a look at a handful of space operas; this time around, I wanted to jump genres and look at fantasy—particularly some of the earliest tropes. There’s been a handful of relatively recent novels, such as Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, which draw on European folklore for their inspiration. While folklore was a major inspiration for fantasy when the genre was beginning, this changed in the middle of the twentieth century, when J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings provided a roadmap for the next fifty years for genre literature. However, new books such as Mark Tompkins’ The Last Days of Magic and Mishell Baker’s Borderline look back to the genre’s roots in new and interesting ways, demonstrating that solid fantasy novels don’t need to take place in a secondary world. The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment, edited by Brian Copenhaver, provides a nonfiction perspective on the genre.

The Last Days of Magic
Mark L. Tompkins
eBook / Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0525429531
Viking, March 2016
400 Pages

Fantasy literature has a long and distinguished canonical line, which ultimately stretches back to humanity’s earliest stories told around fires late at night. The earliest works of recognizable fantasy literature drew heavily on the mythos of Europe. Early authors such as George MacDonald and William Morris wrote about fairies and other assorted supernatural creatures in a new frontier for literature.

In his debut novel, The Last Days of Magic, Mark Tompkins takes the fantastical world depicted in folklore and European fourteenth-century history and distills them into a single story. Tompkins runs with the idea that an entire ecosystem of the supernatural rose from God’s creations and His Angels, from Fomorians to Nephilim, Sidhe, Elioud, gnomes, Pixies, Leprechauns, Dryads, and others, as well as a goddess, Morrígna.

As the Roman Catholic Church sought to consolidate its hold over Europe, it began to exterminate these other creations, employing teams of mercenaries to do their dirty work. The creatures were seen as an aberration of God’s will: mistakes that held humanity back from recreating Eden, or at least returning to Heaven. Tompkins’ novel largely takes place in Ireland, the last frontier of magic in Europe, as the Catholic Church seeks to complete its bloody task.

The story begins in 2016, but is set in the 1300s, leading up to an invasion of the island refuge, and the interpersonal drama of those involved. I can’t help but wonder if the book should have simply remained in the 1300s, rather than bookending the story in the modern era. Tompkins’ book is rich with detail, beautifully written, and presents a fascinating backdrop from which this story plays out. The drama unfolds from all quarters, from the exorcists who are seeking to purify the continent, to the half-goddess who oversees Ireland. The resulting story is tragic, horrifying, and invigorating all at the same time.

What strikes me the most about his story is the intermingling of history and fantasy—indeed, in the introduction to the novel he notes that mere centuries ago, much of this book could be taken as a truthful story. While second-world fantasies such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire have largely defined our current understanding of “fantasy,” Tompkins demonstrates that the elements from which the genre first came still have significant value to storytellers.

Borderline
Mishell Baker
Ebook/Paperback/Audio
ISBN: 978-1481429788
Saga Press, March 2016
400 pages

Mishell Baker has also produced a debut novel this year: Borderline, a work which fits comfortably next to Tompkins’ The Last Days of Magic. Like Tompkins’ book, Borderline draws heavily upon the earliest fantasy traditions.

Unlike The Last Days of Magic, Borderline is set in modern-day Los Angeles, following Millie, who is recruited to work for the Acadia Project, an organization designed to help patrol the border between our world and a parallel fantasy world.

In this novel, a prominent fey goes missing, and as Millie and the Arcadia Project dig into the disappearance, they realize that what they’re dealing with is a complicated plot with ramifications that will impact both worlds.

Millie isn’t your typical protagonist: She was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and is missing both legs, the aftereffect of a suicide attempt. This is notable, in that impaired characters rarely feature so prominently into a narrative. Millie is abrasive, vulnerable, troubled, and dedicated, all at the same time. As a result, Borderline is a novel that is both invigorating and eye-opening.

With this novel, Baker unloads with both barrels, and the inclusion of the fey and the actors of Hollywood feels not at all out of place: Both are creatures of the fantastic, where the unreal becomes real, and live where you’ll find a populace that doesn’t quite fit in anywhere else. Borderline moves quickly, with short chapters and rapid-fire dialogue and narration.

This is also a book that demonstrates that the earliest tropes of fantasy needn’t be relegated to retrospectives on the genre or fantasies set in the Victorian era: They can be fully fleshed, entertaining urban fantasies as well.

The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment
Brian Copenhaver (editor)
eBook / Harcover
ISBN: 978-0241198568
Penguin Classics, March 2016
672 Pages

Both Borderline and The Last Days of Magic deal with some of the genre’s fantastical roots. While reading both, I picked up a nonfiction book that dealt with this very subject: The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment. In my inaugural review in January 2015, I took a look at Katherine Howe’s Book of Witches, which is an anthology of historical works that looks at the historical basis for witches. This book follows the same model, although the physical tome is a bit more impressive. With excerpts from books of the Bible to classical literature to philosophy and theater, it provides a fairly extensive overview of some of fantasy’s basic roots.

There’s a lot to take in, which makes this a useful read for anyone who’s interested in the basis of the fantasy genre. I’ve found this to be a useful book to look over; genre tropes are akin to a game of telephone, passed from story to story until the original is lost or horribly corrupted.

There’s a range of content represented here, from The Holy Bible to Shakespeare: it’s a decidedly Eurocentric book. In his introduction, Copenhaver notes that “Applying the word ‘magic’—free and clear—to something non-Christian and non-Western (like ngua) will be difficult, maybe impossible,” and defers this argument to another of his books, Magic in Western Culture. I’m not sure how accurate that is, considering the religions and beliefs of populations elsewhere around the world.

Nevertheless, for authors writing in the European tradition of fantasy, this is a useful guidebook for understanding a couple of things. In his introduction (and backed up throughout the book), he paraphrases author Max Weber by noting that magic is ritual, where religion is ethics: Essentially, magic is where the rubber meets the road between belief and the unexplainable.

This is certainly something which guided Tompkins’ book, where spellcasters and witches used magic to serve their own ends, either for the church or within its belief system. Baker’s novel largely ignores religion, but uses many of the same tropes.

What would make The Book of Magic useful for authors is by helping to show real source material within these traditions: how unexplained forces were wielded or interpreted by writers, which in turn became the basis for a literary genre. In many ways, it’s an excellent resource for understanding how a world works, and the environment within which magic would be used.

While certainly not aimed at genre writers, it’s an interesting volume for genre scholars or writers looking to get a leg up on their world building chops—I found it most useful to dig a little more into after reading The Last Days of Magic, which draws heavily on biblical material. While most fantasy novels don’t do this, it represents an interesting look under the hood at what powers genre literature at its most basic elements.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He is a 2014 graduate of the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, and has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, Lightspeed Magazine, and others. He can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter. His first book, War Stories: New Military Science Fiction is now out from Apex Publications, and his next, The Future Machine: The Writers, Editors and Readers who Build Science Fiction is forthcoming from Jurassic London.

Interview: Alex Garland

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 7647 words

Alex Garland’s first novel The Beach was adapted into a feature film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Garland then worked with the director of that film, Danny Boyle, on the movies 28 Days Later and Sunshine, for which Garland wrote the screenplays. He also wrote the screenplays for the recent films Never Let Me Go, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Dredd, based on the British comic book character Judge Dredd. Garland also wrote and directed the new science fiction thriller Ex Machina.

This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the interview or other episodes.

I mentioned that this is a show for fantasy and science fiction book fans primarily, so growing up, what were some fantasy and science fiction books that were favorites of yours and got you into the field?

The guy I kind of reach for typically when I think of that is J.G. Ballard. There are books that exist in this kind of floating state between all sorts of different genres, and in some respects they’re just themselves. Some of them are quite overtly science fiction and some of them aren’t. They’re in a sort of edge area. And some of them are very grounded in a sense, like Empire of the Sun for example. So, Ballard, and then John Wyndham. I read a lot of John Wyndham when I was a kid. And Ray Bradbury. And then inevitably there’d be these people like Heinlein, and Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke that you would kind of encounter by the book jackets as much as anything else. I’m talking about, like, the late ’70s and early ’80s. You’d find these in school or in shops. There would be these amazing covers, and the cover would drag you in. And sometimes the spaceship on the cover would not in any way appear in the novel, but it got you reading. If I was going to pick out a book that made a lot of impact on me and I read several times, it would probably be The Day of the Triffids.

That’s a great book. John Wyndham.

John Wyndham, yeah.

Did you have friends who were into science fiction, or were you just discovering it on your own?

No, pretty much on my own. Except nudged at times by both parents, but I guess it was my dad that got me to read. I think it was my mom that got me to read Ray Bradbury, and it was my dad that got me to read John Wyndham. So, it was at home. But, with friends, no. I mean, I’m in my mid-forties, and there’s been a huge culture shift over my lifetime about how some of these things are seen, like video games, and science fiction, and stuff like that. When I was growing up with those things, they were much more fringe: comic books and stuff like that. They’ve become incredibly mainstream. There’s some part of me that’s still surprised that comic book movies dominate the horizon to the extent they do, because I remember slightly hiding the fact that I read comic books when I was a kid.

You did the screenplay for the Dredd movie, so I know you’ve read the Dredd comic book.

Oh, I grew up on Dredd. 2000 AD. Actually, if you said books and comic books, I would have brought 2000 AD into it because 2000 AD was a massive influence on a lot of people. There’s a lot of British writers and film makers and comic book artists, you name it, where you see this amazingly long shadow that 2000 AD cast within the UK.

What other comic books were you reading growing up?

2000 AD was the main one. There was a spinoff one called Starlord, which I used to read as well. Then the comic book I got into was, here, Heavy Metal or Métal Hurlant. It was very rarely—just to be honest about it, it was very rarely the writing that pulled me in. It was the artwork.

Chicks in chainmail or…?

Did you say “chicks in chainmail”? [laughter] No, it wasn’t that, because my dad is a cartoonist, so I grew up around drawing and comic books. When I say it was the artwork, I mean it really was the artwork. So, I’d look at Moebius, and I would think, wow. And the wow would have nothing to do with chicks in chainmail. It would be the way he was drawing a figure or the sort of atmosphere created by the strange landscape he was drawing or the strange objects in the landscape. I was very, very aware of how beautifully drawn they were. I really used to look at that and copy those drawings. So, genuinely, it was more that. They were fantastic draftsmen and quite weird draftsmen. You used to get some quite interesting and strange artists in 2000 AD, but they were even more strange and out there in Métal Hurlant or Heavy Metal.

And then, as a result of Alan Moore and a few writers, but particularly Alan Moore, who then went from 2000 AD over the Atlantic and started writing, say, DC Comics—some of them DC, some Marvel. Alan Moore started writing Swamp Thing and so I picked up Swamp Thing as he started writing it. I was completely blown away. That felt like next level stuff to me. Likewise Watchmen. That then opened up DC and Marvel to me, but kind of late. I wasn’t reading that stuff so much when I was ten or eleven, it was when I was in my teens, I guess.

I heard you say that you initially wanted to be a cartoonist or a comic book artist or something?

Yeah, it was kind of an assumption, I think. Just because of what my dad did, just growing up around comic books, and some, again, really brilliant draftsmen. So, there were these guys, Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Elder. I think these two are probably lost in time, these names now, but a lot of comic book artists would probably know them. Dad loved these guys, particularly Kurtzman and Elder, and, also from then, Robert Crumb, a lot of the underground comic book artists like Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb, [he was] incredibly influenced by those guys. Because there’s another whole separate sort of lineage of American comics, nothing to do with DC and Marvel, Action or anything like that, which was from Mad Magazine in its early incarnation, not that Mad that existed by the ’70s. If I went down to the corner shop and bought a copy of Mad Magazine, it was not really related to the Mad Magazine of the ’50s and ’60s, which is what I grew up reading in anthologies that my dad had collected.

But then you actually ended up becoming a novelist initially.

Yeah, because when I was about twenty-one, I was drawing comic books, and then writing the stories, mainly because I didn’t know a writer. This was a completely self-contained exercise. I didn’t really know other people that were into comic books . . . I mean, a few, kind of, but not really. So, I was like a sort of one-man band. I was writing, and drawing, and coloring, and lettering, and all that kind of stuff. I think a lot of people start out that way. By the time I was in my early twenties, I learned that I was not as good at drawing, and I never would get as good at drawing as I needed to get, because I understood enough about drawing to see my precise limitations. So, I ditched the pictures and just stuck with the words.

Given how much of your work is involved with science fiction stuff, your first novel, The Beach, actually was not science fiction.

None of the novels I wrote were SF. I wrote three novels and none of them were SF.

Was that a conscious choice at all? Or did you think at all about not writing any science fiction?

No, it’s like horses for courses, I think. You write the story in the medium to which it seems best suited.

I’d got really into backpacking when I was about seventeen and spent years and years to-ing and fro-ing between the UK and Asia, mainly Southeast Asia. I accumulated lots of stories, and the comic books I’d started writing and drawing were comic books about Southeast Asia, because you write about what you know, typically, I think initially, in the early days. Either you write about what you know, or you retell a story that you loved as a kid. It’s one or the other, you know? So, I wrote about backpacking, and I did comic books about backpacking. I remember one, it was the point I consciously decided, “I’m going to stop doing this.” I did either sixty-two or sixty-four pages, which was the length of a Tintin comic book. I love Tintin. I thought, “Tintin manages to tell a whole narrative within sixty-two pages, so that’s a reasonable thing to aim for.” Then I spent a long, long time writing and drawing it, particularly a long time drawing it. And then gave it to my dad to read. I literally handed it over to him and said, “Here, look, I just finished this comic book.” Then I went away to go and make a coffee or something, and by the time I’d got back, he’d finished it. I realized it took about seven minutes to read, and I thought, “Wow, that took me like a year, and it takes seven minutes to read.” And I just thought, “I’ve got to stop drawing.”

I know that you did the screenplay adaptation for Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, but I hadn’t realized you guys were actually friends in real life, was that during your period as a novelist? How did you first meet him?

When I moved from comic books to novels, I hadn’t spent my teenage years trying to figure out how to write prose. Many, many novelists, that’s what they’ve done because they figured it out quite early, that that’s what they wanted, but I hadn’t done that. And I hadn’t gone to college to learn creative writing, which could also help. So, I really was in a kind of . . . not exactly a backward position, but I was only just off the blocks. I really had to figure stuff out. I didn’t know very basic stuff, like, literally, how you attribute dialogue. I didn’t know how you did it.

There were a few writers who I took off the shelves simply to, on a technical level, look at how they did it. One of them was Ishiguro, another one was Ballard. Ballard often would not do any attribution of dialogue. It would just be by proximity of the last person mentioned that you would figure out who was speaking. And Graham Greene, I think it was, would do “he said, she said” every line, and that fascinated me, because it didn’t feel like repetition. The word “said,” why didn’t it feel like repetition? Why does your brain not register it? Very mechanical things like that. And I ended up modeling a section of the dialogue in this first book I was writing, The Beach, on a section of dialogue in Ishiguro’s work because I’d been looking at it to see how he did it, and I modeled it in a self-conscious way. I wrote this book, it got published.

It’s this kind of thing you get asked, sub-editors or commissioning editors at newspapers are constantly trawling for new people to drop into their paper to feed the incredibly voracious writing rate that those mediums required, so I got asked, “Will you write about your favorite book? You’re a new novelist. What’s your favorite book?” So I did it about an Ishiguro novel and mentioned that I had stolen this thing, and he then wrote me a nice letter, and we had coffee, and became pals. I don’t know many writers, but he’s one of the only ones I know. I’m a big fan, and it’s kind of weird to work on someone’s stuff when you also have learned a great deal as well. It’s a complicated relationship.

When we interviewed him, he actually ended up interviewing me for half the time about science fiction and what could he learn about science fiction from me.

Yeah, because he’s so curious.

He actually just emailed me yesterday to continue the conversation. But he said in an interview I saw that you and he had been having this conversation too about science fiction, and he said he wouldn’t have written Never Let Me Go, probably, were it not for these conversations with you talking about how science fiction could be used to make a serious message.

I have no idea if that’s true because the thing about Ishiguro is that (A) he is very intellectually curious and (B) he’s genuinely very generous. I’m not just saying that.

As a young writer, I sometimes used to encounter older writers, and you’d get often this incredible vibe of hostility. They didn’t like you. They don’t want young writers coming up. They’re not into that. And with him, it was exactly the opposite. You’re quite tuned into that in your mid-twenties, if some bloke who is fifteen years older than you is looking at you with a bit of contempt or dislike, you pick up on it. You also pick up on the absence of it. He’s a very sort of generous bloke.

So, I don’t know if what he just said is true, but we did use to talk a lot about SF, and I think I just came from a position—I’m like this about every genre, really—I’ve got no irony about it. I just like it. There’s nothing stepped back too analytical about it. SF gives these incredible permissions to talk about whatever you want, and it’s not embarrassed about big ideas.

In other genres, including literary fiction and adult film drama, in other words, the sort of grown-up ends of those mediums, there’s a kind of embarrassment with big ideas that I find really kind of lame. If I’ve got any area of slight wariness about a genre, it’s actually literary fiction and adult drama. It’s because they’re so concerned with their status. What they don’t want is self-consciously big ideas, because they’re all so educated, the people working in those fields, and they’re so worried about looking sophomoric or pretentious. They’re kind of stuck in a paralysis with this thing, and so they repeat these endless same stories about microcosm human relationships in a marriage, or whatever it happens to be.

So, that was the kind of conversation Ishiguro and I would have, I suppose. But I honestly think he’s configured this in his mind, and it wasn’t really like that. He’d have written that book anyway, because he sits outside the mainstream within literary fiction. He does stuff that the other guys just don’t do, and he’s always been like that. Right from the get-go. I can’t appropriate that.

It’s always struck me that, in fiction, if you publish one book of a certain type, you’re expected to keep writing that type of book forever.

By who though?

Well, by your publisher, for example.

I suppose there is some truth in that. It sounds so stupid when you say it, but I think it’s actually true. It’s such an idiotic requirement. Like, why on Earth would you state something like that? Why be restrictive? It makes no sense to me.

But, I remember when I wrote this first book, The Beach. It’s all about backpackers and a kind of attempt at a utopian society in Southeast Asia. And then I wrote my second book, called The Tesseract, which took as its title a kind of four-dimensional cube, a hypercube. And the blood drained from the publisher’s face as I handed this over. It’s got largely Filipino characters, set in the Philippines, and doesn’t have any of the kind of mainstream appeal that The Beach turned out to have, rather surprisingly, from my point of view.

Anyway, then I was sitting down to write another book, mulling it over, and I got sat down by someone here in New York, actually not very far from where we’re sitting now, who said, “You know what? I think it’s great that you tried something different, but maybe you should start something again about young people in a foreign location, and maybe they’re trying to set something up again.” And in other words, trying to get me to rewrite The Beach again, and I remember thinking, “I now have no respect for you, and I can never work with you again.” So, yes, that does happen, but it’s pathetic.

In film that doesn’t seem to be the case; that James Cameron can start out making Terminator and then he can make Titanic and nobody says like, “No, you’re just a robot director.” Or Ridley Scott.

So, you think it’s located particularly in books?

It seems that way to me, yeah.

You’re probably right, because you’ve thought about it, and I haven’t. Well, I guess it would depend, wouldn’t it? So, let’s say James Cameron said that he was going to do a kind of eight-million-dollar adult drama about three generations in a family learning to love each other again after some seismic event, which is the classic terms of that kind of drama. I think people would definitely raise eyebrows.

I’m partly saying that just to be contrarian with you, that’s all. I don’t really know if I believe that or not. But, it would be heavily commented on in some respects, whereas making Avatar Two and Three, people might get excited about it, but they feel like, yes, this was always somehow on the horizon or in his future. But, you know what, I’ll just concede it. I’m automatically contrarian. I shouldn’t be. It’s really irritating.

Well, no, I mean because I certainly don’t think filmmaking is pure in this way. I’ve actually heard you say that you’ve gone in to meetings with development people who said idea movies don’t work ever, something to that effect.

Yeah, categorically, quite explicitly. In fact, right before I started working on an explicit ideas movie. I was saying, “This is the film I want to work on.” And they were saying, “That won’t work because it’s an ideas movie.”

Which film was that?

Ex Machina.

Okay.

In a very visceral way, not in a contrarian way, not the way I was just doing then with you, but in a sort of visceral way, I just thought, “That’s bullshit, and I don’t believe in it.”

And so were they saying that it wouldn’t sell tickets? What exactly was their . . .

Yes, they were saying that, but they were also saying it just won’t work on a creative level. Ideas movies fail, because film is economical and reductive and therefore can’t explore things in a complex way. But more to the point, I think what they were really saying is that at the heart of a film, you can’t have an idea. They really believe that.

In a way, it’s unfair of me to present their argument because I disagree with it so strongly, that I’d only ever make them sound stupid in the repetition of it. All I remember was that what came into my head immediately, sort of almost before they’d finished the sentence, was A Clockwork Orange. Because A Clockwork Orange is, from my point of view, an ideas movie. There’s a really sophisticated set of ideas in that film, and when I leave the film, I’m not thinking about visceral moments. I’m thinking about the ideas that it provoked. So, from my point of view, that makes it an ideas movie. But, like I said, you see, what they do is they’d say, “No, no, that’s, like, about teenage gangs in an SF setting. And that’s what people dig and the ideas are the texture.” I guess something like that.

What are some other things you would say are idea movies in science fiction? Like 2001?

2001 is definitely an ideas movie. In a way, I think The Thin Red Line is an ideas movie. That is to say, what happens with these things is that you quickly get into an area of debate whether something is an ideas movie or not. But, for me, The Thin Red Line is an ideas movie. There is a narrative of sorts, but again, what happens is when the film is over, I start thinking about what the film provoked rather than narrative beats or a dilemma that a character was in: “Will they get out of the trap or not?” or “Wasn’t that funny when they said X?” I’m actually thinking about something much more abstract than that, so in those terms, I guess it’s an ideas movie. The Tree of Life is an ideas movie. It just is, isn’t it? But they’d say, “Yeah, The Tree of Life is an ideas movie, and it’s lousy.” That’s what they’d say because they would have an objective response to it. They’d say, “I get it is, but I don’t like it.” But I do like The Tree of Life.

I can imagine a more robust form of that argument just being: A book can deal with ideas, a novel can deal with ideas, in a much more robust way than a film can, so express the ideas in a book.

In its best medium.

In its best medium, right.

And then I’d say, “Well, it probably depends on the idea. And it depends on the way you want to explore the idea.” If you want to explore it in a forensic way, then what you said is probably true, because just in terms of information, you can get much more information into a novel. Rather, you can get explicit information into a novel that allows you, in a concrete way, to see exactly what the sentence is at least attempting to say, within reason. In film, the ideas are more often alluded to. In the film I just worked on, which is an ideas movie, I would say some of the ideas are very explicitly put out there and literally discussed, and others of them are there by illustration or by inference, just maybe simply in the presentation of a thing. Of a robot that looks like a woman, but isn’t a woman, but maybe it is a woman. There’s an idea contained within that. There is, in fact, a brief discussion about it. But, broadly speaking, in a novel, you would be able to have much more full and forensic-type explanations or discussions.

Film relies much more on inference, but that’s its strength, too. I’ve often thought, as someone who has worked in books and film, about what you can do in a film by doing a close-up, or even a mid-shot, of a glance where somebody notices something, and how easy it is to pack massive amounts of information into that glance in terms of what the character has just seen, or what they haven’t seen. And in a book, how you can never quite throw the moment away, and yet contain as much within it as you can with film. The thing I like most about film is probably that thing. It has this terrific way of being able to load moments that it’s also throwing away, and that’s harder in a novel.

To be contrarian about that, for a second though . . .

Cool. [Laughter]

In a book you can actually get inside someone’s head and just tell the reader what they’re thinking or inhabit their consciousness.

Absolutely.

In a film, everything that the character is thinking has to be conveyed through their facial expression or body language.

Or a bit of voiceover, yeah.

One thing that strikes me a lot about movies is that the character is deceiving other characters in the scene, but they have to be doing it in a way that’s obvious enough that the audience sees through them, whereas, why don’t the characters in the scene see through them?

Well, it’s funny you should say that, because actually in Ex Machina, the characters are often simultaneously deceiving the audience and the other characters. One of the conversations with the actors, prior to shooting, was about making sure that we didn’t telegraph in the way that film often does, in exactly the way you said, that you abandon that relationship. Now, that’s problematic in some ways, because it makes character motivation more ambiguous, but in other ways, that’s also a strength. That may be something I’m pulling from novels, I don’t know, but I didn’t think I was. I thought it was a more explicit version of show-don’t-tell. It was taking show-don’t-tell to a sort of extremist degree, or something like that. But interestingly, there are many, many times in Ex Machina where a lot of effort is made to not have a complicit understanding, or an implicit understanding, between the audience and a character.

This is absolutely a movie that just layers deception all around. It’s a hard movie to talk about without spoiling it, and I actually . . .

We don’t have to talk about it. I wasn’t trying to artfully bring it around to the reason I’m out in New York, trying to promote this bloody film. I mean, I really, truly wasn’t. We can carry on talking about whatever you want.

Oh no, it’s a terrific movie. I’m happy to talk about it, but I’m just pointing out . . . the less you know about it the better, and I actually had people warn me not to watch the trailers before I saw the movie, and I think that was a really good decision.

I agree. When I saw that trailer, I felt quite alarmed, but that’s not untypical of people who work on films when they see trailers, because of what information is contained within it. In a more blanket way, in the order I structure it in my head, the best way to see a film is knowing nothing about it. On the rare occasions that you do get see films like that, it’s fantastic having a narrative unfold in front of you that you have not been frontloaded about. It doesn’t happen very often to me, maybe because of the area in which I work, but it does still happen sometimes, particularly with older movies that you catch on TV or something, and it’s such a pleasure. Then probably the second best, which is everything I fight against, in some respects, but probably the second best is for everyone to say it’s terrible, so that you go in there thinking it’s going to be rubbish and then are open-minded. When everyone has told you it’s good, then you’re in that sort of, “Well, prove it” type mode as the lights go down. “Right, here we go movie. Prove it.”

Are there any science fiction movies you can think of specifically that you watched expecting them to be terrible and then you said afterward, “Actually, that was pretty good.”

Probably lots. 2010, actually. I remember people were very rude about 2010 because it came after 2001, so it was that sort of default state. I mean at the time of 2001, lots of people said it was no good, but by then the world had decided it was a masterpiece, so then 2010 is a sacrilege. I remember thinking, “I’m really digging this movie.” So that one.

There’s a Roger Zelazny quote, he’s an author that I really like, where he said, “Critics only ever say two things about you. They say, ‘This guy is no good.’ Then after you have been around for a while, they say, ‘This guy has really lost it.’”

[Laughter] That’s brilliant. That’s very funny. I’ll tell you a film that I saw that I knew nothing about and was blown away. One of my favorite ever film-watching experiences was Starship Troopers, the first one. I just knew nothing. It was hardly promoted in the UK. I don’t know why I went in there. Maybe it’s because it said “Starship” or something. I have no idea. I didn’t know the source material. And a few minutes in, I was thinking, “Oh my god, this is the best film I’ve ever seen.” And I consciously enjoyed every second of the film from it beginning to it ending, and then walked out totally exhilarated. So, 2010 for they undercut it, and Starship Troopers for I didn’t know what to expect. And they were both great.

One thing I was really curious to ask you about, so I listened to an interview with you on the Inquiring Minds podcast, and the host, Indre Viskontas, she mentioned a scene in the movie that you thought you had cut out, and she described this scene.

And it was cut out.

Yeah, and I have no recollection of the scene whatsoever.

I’ll tell you what that’s about. I found out later by email, but at the moment that I did that interview, I was in a semi-comatose state. My brain was barely functioning in all sorts of different respects just through repetition of talking about this bloody film, and moving around too quickly from city to city and all that kind of thing.

I’ve often had this happen before, that is, a scene I wrote and then cut. I don’t trust my memory. I really don’t. There are things I can remember clearly, and if somebody tells me, “That’s not what happened,” my immediate response is not actually to say, “No, no, that’s definitely what happened,” but actually to say, “Oh, maybe it didn’t.”

I’ve just had it demonstrated in an empirical way so many times that my memory is not to be trusted. I thought there were two people there, but actually there were six. Like, really way off stuff like that. So, when she said that to me, I remember feeling really confused, but even within the interview, I then sort of said, “Okay, all right, well, I’ll go along with that, but it’s kind of weird because I don’t remember it.” This is a film I worked on as hard as I’ve ever worked on anything in my life, and suddenly I’m doubting whether something is in it or not. Now, I just find that interesting from a memory/brain point-of-view, I guess.

What actually happened was, when I wrote this script, there was a whole bunch of things in it, some of it was to do with science, and some of it was to do with gender politics, and I sent the script to various people to check it, partly because I know my limitations. I know that I can attempt to understand something and fail to understand it. And I know that I can think I’m doing something one way, but because of other unconscious things, I’m actually doing it another way, so I distrust myself in the same way as that memory thing. It’s actually completely related.

So, I wanted to test this stuff on a bunch of people, and get them to respond and talk about it, and correct me if I’d gotten something quite wrong. One of those people is a friend of the person that was interviewing me in that podcast, and I had separately sent that person the dialogue. I think the person on the podcast was interested in talking about that point because that was a philosophical science-based thing, and that particular section of the film is about free will, and so they wanted the dialogue because they couldn’t remember it. So, my friend, who I had tested some of the politics on, sent that section, which included this other stuff that we didn’t shoot. The whole thing was really confusing for me, but what it stems from is the testing process of the film and self-doubt, I guess.

When you sent it to these beta-readers, in a sense, did you get a pretty accurate sense of how audiences were going to react to the movie?

No.

Did something blindside you subsequently?

Oh, yeah. I’ve never not been blindsided. I’ve never, ever not been blindsided every single time I’ve worked on a story. The only thing I can anticipate is that I will get blindsided. I had a hunch about some of the areas where it would come from, but some of the specifics, I encountered them, and I would think, “Are you kidding?” But, at the same time, I’m also thinking, “Eh, I know how this happens. I know what subjective response is. I know how, in some respects, even very structured narratives are very formless in the way they exist in people’s heads, and in terms of what they attribute to those narratives, in terms of what exists or doesn’t exist.” So, it’s both surprising and unsurprising, I suppose.

Without giving spoilers, is there anything you can say about some of the reactions that surprised you?

It’s hard to talk about because, it’s like, I don’t want to defend myself. I don’t want to unwittingly get myself into the position of defending myself. I feel like I figured out in my terms what this movie was about, and then I did that to the best of my ability, and then I checked it with people who I respect, and then shot and cut the film, and actually retested it with that same group of people, and then said, “Did the translation of what you saw in the script make it through to the film?” Now, at that point, on some level, I feel acquitted. I feel satisfied. I can’t accommodate for every subjective response and for the agenda of the person arriving at the narrative. It’s accusations that I have a political position that is in fact the exact opposite of the political position that I have . . . or that I’ve completely misunderstood something about sentience where the inference I’m making would be in agreement with the person that is making that critique. It’s that kind of thing.

Speaking of subjectivity, when you talk about showing the film to an audience and then showing it again to that same audience, I’ve noticed this with stories I’ve workshopped. Once somebody has experienced it in one form, they’re kind of polluted forever. You can’t show them a revised version of it and get a clean response out of it.

So true.

People will often prefer the original version, even if the revised version is objectively better, just because that’s the first one that they encountered and they kind of get attached to that.

It’s very true. It’s actually something that comes up in filmmaking a lot, in terms of people submitting scripts to financers too soon. Often people will approach me and say, “We want to send this now.” And I’ll look at it to give advice or whatever context it is, and I always think, “You want to go too fast. Just slow down, because you’re only going to get one shot. If these people turn this down, you’re not going to be able to go back to them.” You might be able to, in a technical sense. You can literally send it again, but the decision is essentially made. It also, in a funny way, applies to assembly cuts in films, very early clumsy edits of stuff. If you show that rough cut, which will be a very clumsy, ugly thing to look at, and very unfinessed, people who like it will still like the finished film, and people who don’t like it still won’t like the finished film. The big fundamentals are just entrenched into it in some kind of way. I mean, unless you really significantly . . . like they did in The Thin Red Line, you lose your protagonist, Adrien Brody, and create a new one in the edit. Maybe that might do it, but that’s an extreme example. Broadly speaking, I think that’s what it’s like.

You’re doing an adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.

Trying to, yeah, that would be a better way of putting it.

I interviewed Jeff about that book in 2014. I read the first two. I really loved them. Do you want to talk about what attracted you to that project or what you’re hoping to do with it?

Just to put it in a truthful, accurate context, Scott Rudin, the producer, said, “You should read this book.” I read the book. I thought it was brilliant. I really loved it and thought, “Okay, I think I’ve got a handle on a way to adapt this.” Then I adapted it, and it’s now in with a studio who are going to make a decision about whether they want to pay for it. So, it’s in a kind of fifty/fifty state. It could be eighty/twenty against, it could be eighty/twenty for, it could be fifty/fifty. I’ve got no idea. It’s just in a sort of unknown state where it hasn’t landed yet, one way or the other. So that is what’s going on with that.

In terms of my approach to it, I’ve done different kinds of adaptations. Never Let Me Go, apart from a sort of philosophical aspect in the presentation of the narrative in terms of a subtext—which is in that subjective realm we were just talking about—it’s like holding a mirror up to the novel within the parameters of a film. Not being able to show everything a book does because you’d end up with an eight-hour film. So, within that caveat, it’s like holding up a mirror to the book, I would say, in some crucial respects.

It’s the closest film I’ve ever worked on to being an auteur movie, and the auteur was Ishiguro because we referred so tightly to the tone and everything, dialogue, narrative. Then Dredd, and in the case of Dredd, which is based on the 2000 AD character Judge Dredd, there’s a very faithful, I would argue, and tested as well, actually, representation of the character in aspects, but also something which is very different from the comic book in other respects. The comic book has aliens and robots and a level of futurism that, on our budget, we couldn’t begin to do, so we just looked the other way. We look at a tower block with no aliens and robots and implicitly there are no aliens and robots in this universe. I don’t want to be disingenuous about it; we just sort of changed those terms.

Annihilation is somewhere between these states, I think, in terms of the way I’ve approached it. It’s definitely not holding up a mirror to the novel. But it’s true to my subjective response to the novel. It’s true to what I responded to and got out of the novel. And that was partly to do with some narrative aspects of this group of women entering into this strange sealed-off zone and finding something that . . . well, I don’t want to talk too much because there’s a plot point embedded within it. I think that’s wrong, forget the film, just for people who might want to read the book. But, also, a tone. There is a tone in there that, to me, related to what I used to feel reading certain kind of Ballard novels. It’s not in any way derivative, this novel, it’s actually very much its own thing, but it made me feel something like what I used to feel reading The Drowned World or The Crystal World, Ballard novels that took a strange central conceit and then just kind of exist within them, like the world is turning to crystal. There’s a sort of dream-state aspect to that that I found incredibly alluring and hypnotic, and it’s that that’s pulled me in to Annihilation, I think. The premise and the atmosphere and a very particular thing about the ending as well. These are the things that really sucked me into that book.

I’ve read the first two books in the Annihilation trilogy—I didn’t read the third one because it wasn’t out yet when I interviewed Jeff—but I’ve been told that he actually wraps things up very nicely. I always thought that the TV show Lost would have been the best show ever made if they had an ending in mind when they started it. So I was wondering, do you see Annihilation as something that is going to actually fulfill that promise of having this really bizarre, weird setup, and it’s actually going to pay it off in the end?

I actually wrote the screenplay before reading the later stuff, and then was really interested that there were some really quite strange connections that get repeated. What’s interesting about that is it shows what is unconsciously embedded within the novel in the way it makes your mind work. I find that really strange and fascinating. But also, the way I go into these things is it’s hard enough to get one movie made properly, and so my goal is to try to make this film. I really want to make Annihilation. I really want to try to do it. And what I want to try to do is make one good film. That would be my ambition, and then after that, who knows? It probably wouldn’t be me attached anyways.

Unfortunately, we’re all out of time, but we’ve been speaking with Alex Garland. His movie is called Ex Machina, and everyone should go check it out. It’s one of the smartest science fiction movies, and we should all support smart science fiction movies. Alex, thank you so much.

Thanks, man. Much appreciated. Thank you.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

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.

Author Spotlight: Genevieve Valentine

Laurel Amberdine | 748 words

I’ve seen stories with android replacements, and I’ve seen stories with nanobot healing, but I don’t think I’ve seen a story with both. I loved the interplay between these two futuristic ideas. What inspired this combination?

So, this story is actually in the same universe as another story of mine, “The Nearest Thing” [Lightspeed, August 2011], but in “Small Medicine” I wanted to explore a wider world. And I’m fascinated by the ways in which personal technology asks so much of us. (There are more invasive examples, but for me, the idea that your FitBit tracks your sleep is the most bizarre; you can discuss quantifiers all you want, but there is a little corporate-data computer on your wrist watching you dream, and I don’t understand the appeal.) But as a function of story, it means Sofia and Grandmother have to navigate a world in which they only seem to be able to make space for each other.

What is your usual process for writing a story, and did “Small Medicine” fit that pattern?

I actually don’t have a usual process. Sometimes I sit down and know exactly what I’m hoping to say and it’s like building a house. Sometimes I wander around a perfectly dark house turning on lights until eventually I can see what I’m standing in. With “The Nearest Thing,” I was irising out on everything, starting with the people who understand the most about what a Mori is capable of. In “Small Medicine,” no one involved will ever rise up against AI unfairness, or blow the whistle on sentience; they have no power in that sense. Their power is limited to the breadth of their own understanding, and I wanted to show that process.

It seems like this future society you’ve envisioned is determined to shortcut the experience of pain: Grieving, major diseases, even normal injuries, are swept away without much thought to the way this alters someone’s sense of identity. Is this a trend you are noting for the future, or are there present-day issues which brought the theme to mind?

I think that’s a very interesting observation, especially since my idea of the Moris was always less the curtailing of grief so much as a savagely indefinite suspension of it; a constant reminder you have something to grieve but without a loss to accompany it. The nanos are definitely part of a no-pain lifestyle, and one of the benefits of privilege, which Sofia encounters again and again, right down to a room that uses people’s memories as public examples of a job well done. All that privilege, still no control.

Initially, the end of “Small Medicine” felt abrupt to me, but then I considered what might happen next. I think Grandmother ultimately gets shut off, and Sofia either finds a way to destroy herself, or gets another “cure” that tamps down her desire for self-determination. Does that sound about right, or do you imagine a brighter future for either of those characters?

For a lot of my stories, I’m coming to realize, the pivotal point is not effecting outside change. The thing that can always change in a short time, in small ways, without us noticing, is ourselves. Whether this is Sofia’s grandmother or the Grandmother construct that knows the difference, she still loves Sofia. Sofia, who has had a fairly difficult time accepting what Grandmother’s existence means about her family and the burden it places on her, has stopped asking which of them loves her. So the story ends with Sofia and Grandmother as a unit; two people who know each other’s secrets and accept each other. There are still some aspects of this story I would be happy to continue someday—especially the fact that, at story’s end, two functionally immortal people have decided to join forces. But for me, there was no better place to leave them than there in the dark, together.

What are you working on lately?

I’m putting together a short story collection, which is a terrifying process, and—likely to counter that—I’ve started a new novel. Right now, I’m still wandering the dark house, but hopefully I can turn some lights on soon.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she writes science fiction and fantasy and works for Locus Magazine. Her YA fantasy novel Luminator is forthcoming from Reuts Publishing in 2017. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

Sandra Odell | 1737 words

“Magnifica Angelica Superable” is a whirlwind story of revelation, renewal, and possibility. The prose and narrative voice dance across the imagination with unapologetic glee. Can you tell us a little about what inspired this tale?

“Magnifica Angelica Superable” was born out from a moment of superb glee. I was visiting with Aliette de Bodard and on one of the evenings, her husband and a group of friends sat down to play a game. Watching this group of men around the table woke up a mischievous spirit inside me. The image of men seated around a table absorbed in a game made me think of a number of instances where men sit down to discuss something they consider a man’s province. I thought of how surprised men get when a woman inserts herself into their space and how that insertion often leaves them somewhat discombobulated—and in particular when the insertion is in the form of a woman who engages and embraces her own power.

Magnifica Angelica herself was inspired by my memory of my grandmother, Rosalina Ramirez Castro. She was a big-bodied woman who took and occupied the spaces she was in. She passed on early in life, so I only have my childhood memories of her, but in my child’s mind, she was someone who could make or unmake a world if she wished it. The stories told about her are of a woman who never backed down when she was in the right, not even from the governor himself. And yet, she was very much loved.

I thought to myself: What would happen if I inserted a woman like my grandmother into a space men had claimed for their own? How would my grandmother enter and occupy such a space?

I then thought of how women are often pressed by societal expectation into a certain kind of role, sometimes to the extent where a woman feels compelled to erase the self. I believe that for each of us who slumbers, there is a moment in time when we are woken up. What triggers that awakening? How does the awakening change us? How does that awakening impact the world we live in?

What first struck me was your masterful use of sensory detail to keep the reader grounded in the otherness of the story: the table painted shiny white; Magnifica’s red face; salt crackers; the fire of Magnifica’s kiss; the fragrance of dreams. As a writer, how important is it to you to establish a strong sensory framework to support your work?

First of all, thank you. It always pleases me to hear about what works well in a story that I’ve written. When I am busy with a new work, my entire self can become so immersed in it. I try to visualize the world inside my head and I try to capture and make that world as real as possible on paper. I think to myself, how can I make this story as real to the reader as it feels to me? I’ve often wished that I could paint what I see inside my head, but since I can’t, I try to bring the world and the story into being on the page as best as I can. Creating a sense of texture and an almost sensual feel to the story pleases me because it makes things feel much more real. I ask myself about sounds and tastes and smells, and I try to evoke these sensations on the page.

With a single line (“I mean, no decent woman—no woman in their right mind—would swear so.”) you both lay bare the heart of the story and skewer the image of a “proper” woman. How aware were you of such attitudes growing up in the Philippines? Do you feel the presence of male privilege and bias influenced your writing?

Growing up, I came to realise that Philippine society is so soaked in unspoken expectation with regards to proper womanhood. I don’t know if readers have heard of it, but a lot of Filipinas grow up hearing about the Maria Clara image and how we are supposed to conduct ourselves in a certain way. A woman must not be bold (for instance); speaking up and speaking out is viewed as being unladylike. As a young woman, I struggled with this unspoken expectation because my body was inconveniently large and I was also inclined to speaking my mind. I don’t think I ever quite fit into the mold of what a proper woman should be. Coming to The Netherlands was a relief, because I didn’t have to work so hard on being a proper Filipina anymore. Although . . . the pressure to be a proper housewife came in its place. I think that I also don’t quite fit into that square of being a proper anything.

For a period of time, I did try to fit into what was viewed as proper, but after trying and failing many times, I thought: To hell with being proper. Let me just embrace being improper about everything. Giving myself permission to break away from imposed expectations was very freeing. It marked, for me, a coming into my self. As I matured as a writer, that willfulness and refusal to conform to expectation became more pronounced.

I’m not sure what you mean by your follow-up question with regards to how male privilege and bias influenced my writing. I do know that I have had to struggle against the temptation to conform and to write to expectation. I played very briefly with this idea, and then decided that it was a bad idea and that I should simply go ahead and write what I want to write, the way I want to write it.

The divine feminine has long been a favorite topic in genre fiction. Here, Magnifica reflects aspects of the Hawaiians’ Pele, the Hindus’ Maya, and the early Celts’ Brigit, including a male “helper” aspect/god in the last two instances. Was the multi-cultural blend of images and symbols intentional or pleasant happenstance?

Wow. I have to say that I’m quite blown away. As I hadn’t delved deeply into these cultures, I find myself quite stunned by the aspects of these cultures that appear in my story. I think that there is a certain resonance in various cultures and it pleases me to see that pure happenstance brought these resonances to light. Or perhaps it wasn’t happenstance, but a certain intuitive recognition of something belonging to all of us.

Your fiction embraces the varied facets of the people and cultures of the Philippines, sharing them with readers around the world. If you could reach out to young writers of color who worry their stories are not interesting enough to tell, that their voices will go unheard, what would you say to encourage them?

First of all, always be curious. Always ask questions and don’t look for easy answers. Be true to your story vision and be true to your self. Worry about whether it’s interesting for others after you have written the story. I believe that the writer who writes from a place of vision and a place of wanting to create a wider space for other stories to be heard is a writer whose stories will always find their space.

I know that we wish to live from writing, but we also have to ask ourselves how we want to live. The burden for the writer of color is much different from that of the white writer. Whether we wish it or not, we still carry the burden of expectation. Still, rather than succumbing to expectation, I would say, find the story that makes you feel and come alive. Write that story. It doesn’t matter if the story doesn’t seem to have any social or political “value” (a thing we often find ourselves burdened with). Ask yourself: Does this story make me laugh? Does it make me cry? Does it move me as a writer? There is nothing more deadly than writing a story you’re utterly bored with.

A discerning reader can easily tell if the writer was nodding off while writing a story. If your story doesn’t interest you, why are you writing it? If you’re not interested in finding out what happens next, how can you possibly expect your reader to even be interested?

Try to look at all sides of the story you’re writing. There are no one-dimensional heroes and there are no one-dimensional heroines. Also . . . a little humor is always a welcome thing.

When you look to get your speculative fiction on, what authors treat your imagination? Who stirs your blood with every turn of the page?

Ooooh. I have a long list. I’ve read a lot of authors and I’ve read a lot of work that just inspires me and blows me away. This is like the ultimate difficult question to ask a bookworm.

I am thankful to the authors who became my gateway into science fiction and fantasy, and I am also thankful to the authors whose work became a source of challenge and encouragement to me. Nalo Hopkinson, Kelley Eskridge, Nisi Shawl, Octavia Butler, Aliette de Bodard, Zen Cho, the brilliant Karin Tidbeck, Elizabeth Bear, Angela Carter, Pat Cadigan, Claire Light, Joanna Russ, Nnedi Okorafor, Jeff VanderMeer, Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, Iain M. Banks (I think I’m forgetting a slew of names, but those are among the toppers on my super long list, and I admit that I read more women writers than I read male writers). One of the newer authors I follow writes with a fearlessness and an energy that never fails to draw me. I’m talking about UK-based writer Tade Thompson. I’m not just saying this because I know Tade, but if you follow and read his available short fiction online, it’s quite easy to see what it is that makes the work jump and crackle. It also says a lot that his first novel, Making Wolf, won The Golden Tentacle for best debut. I’m keeping my eyes open for what’s coming next.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Ted Kosmatka

Sandra Odell | 1001 words

“The One Who Isn’t” is an intricate study of relationships, conflict, and the thin line between love and hate. Can you tell us a little about what inspired this story?

I like writing about the intersection of technology and consciousness. It’s a rich seam to mine because it touches upon so many different areas, and unfurls into so many different possible futures. You can pick your rabbit hole and jump. A lot of my stories tend to be thought experiments where I extrapolate from a premise and follow an idea through to a logical conclusion, but with this story I wanted to reverse that process. I had the conclusion right there at the beginning, and then the rest of the story became about answering how we got there.

The initial inspiration in this case came from a fairly mundane visual that flashed in my head. A boy in a room being told a bedtime story. Nothing particularly unusual there, but even in that initial flash, I had the idea that the boy was maybe more than just a boy, and the bedtime story was maybe more than just a story, and even the room was more than it seemed to be. Suddenly there were secrets, and then the rest of the story just kind of grew out of my understanding of the characters, until I had this whole interlocking little puzzle box.

There are elements of Greek and Egyptian mythology, of Morgana le Fey and Mordred from the Arthurian cycle. We see the woman as both the creator and destroyer, the boy as both sacrifice and his own parent. How conscious were you of reimagining a classic myth cycle? Are there other myth cycles or classic stories that have attracted your attention as a stepping stone for future stories?

If you think about it, creation myths are the ultimate stories told in reverse. We know where we are now, and we can guess where we’re going in the future, but the old myths often act to backfill a past that helps us make better sense of the present. They do this in much the same way that some science fiction invents a future that helps us make sense of our lives today, so in a strange way, myths are the inverse of science fiction. Or maybe they’re just another form of science fiction (if without the science). Both serve the same function, but from different directions.

I don’t think I was consciously reimagining any particular classical myth so much as trying to come up with a mythological framework for the lives of the characters that they themselves might have recognized and been able to make sense of. In understanding their own myths, they might better understand who they were.

There are no easy answers in this story. It is an exploration of love, loss, and grief, a conflict with hope as the hostage. As a writer, what elements do you feel make up a strong conflict?

I’ve found that the best stories are sometimes riddles, particularly when grief is involved, because the power behind grief can be so overwhelming. It’s like staring at the sun, and it’ll core you out and burn you blind if you look at it directly, so the way to approach is from the periphery. You sneak up on it, taking only sidelong glances at the subject. Live to write another day. Grief and loss will always win eventually, but you can sometimes earn a little victory here and there. Sometimes a story is a little victory.

Your work has been translated into a dozen or more languages, including Russian, Czech, Polish, French, Hebrew, Romanian, and others. In recent years, more American publishers and audiences have been eager to explore the worlds of international speculative fiction. How have your own works been received in other countries?

 I love seeing my writing translated in overseas markets, and not just because it’s a chance to find new readers. Even more than that, I love the idea that there’s a interconnected community out there, with stories going in all directions, and some of the same works of fiction that are being read in the UK are being read in Poland, and Russia, and France, and China, and all over. I’ve been lucky enough to have a fair chunk of my fiction translated, but to be honest, how my stories are received often remains something of a mystery, since I can only read English myself. I do get the occasional nice bit of fan mail from other countries, though.

What sparked your interest in writing fiction?

I think my interest in writing grew naturally out of an interest in reading. Once I fell in love with books and started diving into speculative stories, it seemed natural to start trying to write them myself. I was fairly horrible at it for a long time though. Now that I’m thinking back, I did win a Young Authors contest at my school in second grade, so maybe we can pin some blame on them for encouraging me early. (I lost every year after that, thus tempering me for future decades of rejection.) My mother was also great encouragement to me, and we often talked about the plots of the various stories we read in Asimov’s and F&SF.

Between your novels, short stories, and work on video games, you are busy, busy, busy. What’s next for Ted Kosmatka? What can eager readers and gamers expect in 2016?

I have a couple of different projects in the works, (or solidly started at least,) but video game writing has really been my main focus for most of the last year. Hopefully, I’ll be turning in my next novel sometime before the end of 2016.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: A. Merc Rustad

Liz Argall | 2193 words

How did “Finding Home” come about?

“Finding Home” was one of those stories where the first line popped into my head while I was at work, and I just had to know where it led from there. I knew from the outset that, even with an opening about a family fleeing their reality, it needed to be positive, and have a happy ending.

What role did the awesome productivity tool Habatica play in the creation of this story, and how do you use it to boost your creativity in general? It’s such an open-ended way of questing for getting stuff down, how do you min/max it?

I love Habitica! All the avatars and pets and mounts and monsters are just so cute. I tend to use it for positive rewards—so setting up habits with a positive side only means that when I do something, I get XP and gold or loot. And if I didn’t do something, well, nothing happens. I dislike punishment systems since I don’t find that helpful to me at all. I keep the dailies to a minimum, and don’t involve writing in that column. I can’t write every day, and that’s fine, so I keep the writing-focused goals (habits or to-dos) separate. Habitica is awesome for allowing lots of customization for whatever process works for you. Also? I just got a blue T. rex and it is ADORABLE.

I loved your essay “I Don’t Want Your Queer Tragedy: A Parable.” This story, and your body of work overall, engages with the important mission of EVERYONE SHOULD SEE THEMSELVES IN HAPPY ENDINGS! Why do you think some straight writers are so fond of killing queer characters?

Society and wider narratives, whether written or visual or both, have for a long, long time framed queerness as something wrong or tragic. Of course this is a lie. The problem is that, to varying degrees, we’re all taught by culture or fiction narratives that only cishet people (often white, usually male) deserve positive endings to their stories, or can go on when the story ends. The trope of “tragic queers” is, for me, incredibly toxic, because when that was all I saw as a small!Merc, I did not think I was allowed to grow up or live or look forward to a future if I wasn’t straight and cis.

So, I try to believe that for most straight authors, it’s not malicious (I know sometimes it is, and this makes me so sad). Perhaps it’s unconscious bias, unexamined mindsets, ingrained beliefs that are never questioned—whatever the case may be, if it’s ignorance, at least that can be adjusted, if the author wishes to learn and do better.

The question I would ask most straight authors who feel a need to include tragic queers is: “Why?” Why do you feel this is necessary? Why do you feel this is your story to tell? Can you not see us alive, with a future, and happy? Or do you not want to see us that way?

It’s incredibly hard to envision a future for yourself when you are told, explicitly or implicitly, to your face or through stories you want so badly to see yourself in, that you don’t deserve to exist. We need more empathy, compassion, kindness, hope. We need to see ourselves with a future.

Each choice in a story—who to include, who lives, who is happy—says something. If your story kills off the only queer people shown, what do you think that tells the young queer reader who’s turning the pages, hoping they don’t see themselves dead yet again? Please consider what you are saying when you write.

Stories are powerful; they can change lives. I want so much for more stories to offer hope for us to live.

For queer (and non-queer) readers yearning for stories about queer characters that aren’t tragedies, what stories or lists do you recommend? What are you reading right now?

I’m following a couple comics, like Eth’s Skin (eths-skin.com) (which has a non-binary protagonist and a cute queer mermaid and an ace guy and a cranky selkie and is just ADORABLE!), and O Human Star (ohumanstar.com) (gorgeous, queer, adorable SF!). In the short fiction scene, I tend to follow recommendation lists by fellow queer and trans writers, such as what author Bogi Takács (prezzey.net/speculative-fiction) curates with #diversestories and #diversepoems hashtags on twitter (you can find em at: @bogiperson); I love what Nebula-nominated author Rose Lemberg (roselemberg.net) is doing in their Birdverse series of stories; when I come across stories I love, I try to promote them—usually on Twitter or Facebook—because it always delights me when I find wonderful things.

You’ve written on your blog about having auditory/sensory issues. How do you think this has influenced your writing process?

It’s definitely affected where I can physically write. Super bright or florescent lights are painful for extended periods of time (over thirty minutes at a stretch). I like dimmer settings, or natural lighting, so windows are great if they allow in daylight. For auditory, this is actually a bigger issue than lights for me—I can’t deal with unfocused sound. So, for example, I love music that has a strong beat, and I will listen to Rammstein at high volume all the time, but I can’t handle crowded spaces where everyone is talking, or there is a high reverb quality (large spaces, or venues with echo-y rooms) because that’s painful. I need to control the volume of sound, and the specific kinds of sound. Total silence is good. I bring earbuds or headphones pretty much anywhere I go so, if needed, I can either mute out some of the ambient noise, or else cancel out whatever sounds are hurting me with music that I’ve specifically picked and am familiar with. (This is also why I can’t listen to the radio and dislike being in spaces where there is music on the overheads—unfamiliar, or even familiar songs I dislike, are difficult to cope with for more than a few minutes at a time due to having to process the audio.) So, yeah. As long as I can control the auditory input, I can work with or without music, though I do prefer to write to music.

Auditory and lighting stimuli are themes I work with quite often in my stories—whether it’s how things sound, or the interplay of sound and silence, light and shadow, the different sensory issues I experience have found their way into fiction quite a lot!

If you could biologically reconstruct yourself into any entity, what would you pick?

A spaceship. A SPACE SQUID. Because how awesome would that be? (This is totally Ada Hoffmann’s (ada-hoffmann.com) fault, by the way. She’s written about squidships and it’s all so great.)

In your mind, did the original universe literally end? Or was it a metaphorical ending after the dad left, which compelled Mama to jump from universe to universe?

I think it’s more a metaphorical ending; since they left when Joseph was a child, he’s inclined to believe it was literal, though. Sometimes loss can feel like your whole universe has been upended or just ended.

Why do you think Mama is still so compelled to travel? Do you think she will ever hook back up with Dr. Amelia?

Part of Mama’s motivation to travel is, I think, the fact that she is still processing her grief. She has lost someone deeply important to her—her husband. Healing is not a quick, or linear, or understandable process, sometimes. It’s messy and awkward and sometimes it takes a long, long time, if at all. And that is okay.

Also, spoiler alert, but yes, she totally gets back with Amelia later on. Because I believe in happy endings.

What is your home?

This is a hard question, because I don’t know. I’m still looking, I guess. There are places I have lived, I have had a “home address,” but on a gut-level I don’t know that I’ve found home. One day I think I will. I’m optimistic that way.

Joseph is such an amazingly together person. He finds a home with Amand, but I feel that in order to do that, he first found a home in himself that helps him find such a lovely connection. Joseph seems to have a great gut sense for who he is and recognizing what is good and what he wants. How do you think he cultivated such togetherness and trust in his gut instincts?

From his mom, and friends met and sometimes lost along his journey. In a lot of ways, this is how I feel I have formed a sense of self: My own mom is amazing and such an inspiration and support to me, and I have a blessing of so many wonderful friends who have helped me realize my best self. I may not literally be traveling through other universes (YET), but different sets of changes and growing up to understand who you are as a person are factors I think a lot of us wrestle with in life. I wanted to imply as much as show/tell that Joseph has had many wonderful connections in his life, even if many are bittersweet or sad when he had to move.

I’m trying to think of a good question about queerness or trans-ness in this story, but my mind just goes to “awesome, yay!” It’s part of the story, part of a person finding their home and skin, but it feels like a natural part of their wholeness, and finding joy in unconditional acceptance. Is there a queer/trans question you would like to be asked? Is there a queer/trans question that you would love to never be asked again?

A question I really don’t want to be asked again, or see other queer and trans writers asked, is the one about “but why did you make X trans/queer/NB/something-other-than-cishetwhite-norm?”

It’s weird to see or read fiction that so heavily relies on one subset of humanity, as if 99% of the population consists of cishet white men. Despite what some gatekeepers appear to think, that’s not reality. Reality is vast and complex and awesome; there is no homogenous monolith of queer or trans people, any more than there is for any other person group.

A question I am okay with being asked is along the lines of “why do you write about happiness and hope and positive things with regards to queer and trans and non-binary characters?” Because that is important. It is overwhelmingly, mind-bogglingly important! Everyone needs to see themselves. But more importantly, for me, at least, people need to have the opportunity to see themselves portrayed well. With compassion and complexity, with respect and dignity, with happiness and joy and hope.

If all you see is darkness, it’s hard not to succumb to that despair. We need light. We need to know that there are others out there who are like us, that it is okay to be yourself, that we deserve to live.

Until positive queer and trans narratives are as common as tragic ones, I will always try for positives. For hope.

Do you have any projects you would like to tell us about?

I’m super excited about several forthcoming stories, yes! I’ll have a story about queer families and gender and robots in the July/August issue of Cicada; a post-apocalypse tale about a genderqueer person searching for their family that’ll be in Shimmer at some point; and a flash fic about love, cursed roses, and hope that’ll be published in Daily Science Fiction.

I got derailed on the novel front for the last six months or so because I was finishing college (!!!) in March, and needed some time to recover. But soon I plan to dive back into that wordsmithing adventure—I’m aiming to finish revisions on a fantasy novel about necromancers by late summer, and I will be drafting a space opera novel, set in my Principality Suns universe, over the summer/fall as well. YAY FOR STAYING BUSY.

And of course writing more short stories with happy queer and trans characters. If one of my stories can help someone who’s struggling, help them find hope and the will to keep trying, I consider that the highest success and that’s what makes all the difficult times worth it.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Liz Argall’s short stories can be found in places like Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death. She creates the webcomic Things Without Arms and Without Legs and writes love songs to inanimate objects. Her previous incarnations include circus manager, refuge worker, artists’ model, research officer for the Order of Australia Awards, farm girl, and extensive work in the not–for–profit sector.

Author Spotlight: Seth Fried

Jude Griffin | 878 words

How did this story come about?

I’ve always been interested in the idea of eternal recurrence and had been wanting to write something like this for a while. When I finally got around to it, I had also just watched a film called Timecrimes. I really admired how the element of time travel in that film (spoiler alert) rigorously limited the actions of the protagonist and made the audience contemplate things like cause and effect and free will. I wanted to write about some form of immortality that would raise similar questions.

What was the most interesting response to “Hello Again” when originally published?

I’m really surprised by how nice and enthusiastic everyone has been about “Hello Again.” It’s such a weird story without central characters or scenes or dialogue. When most people talk about fiction in the US, they’re referring to realism, which depends heavily on all three of those things. So I was expecting this piece to be a tough sell. But it originally appeared in a great literary magazine called Tin House and was then shortlisted in Best American Short Stories and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also appeared in translation in one of Japan’s premiere literary magazines, Monkey, and on the Spanish speculative fiction site, Cuentos para Algernon.

I loved the way the arc of emotion and perspective about knowledge of the nature of the universe comes full circle, and how the final line brings it to such beautiful closure. Did you have the end in mind when you started this story?

It was such a complicated idea that I kind of had to tease it out a little bit at a time. When I finally got to the ending, I was pleased by the sense of vulnerable hopefulness that I managed to land on. But that was never anything that I was deliberately working toward.

I admired that the story worked so well without a defined protagonist, adding emotion and engagement through specific details of universal experience. Were you always going to write the story this way? Did you want to give up on the approach at any point?

It’s fun to get to jump around like that, moving from a father teaching his daughter how to ride a bike to the discovery of an Egyptologist revolutionizing an entire field of study. That kind of freedom is really fun, but it can also be a bit of a challenge. With a story like “Hello Again,” the only thing you have to pull you forward is an abstract line of thought. It’s tough to know when to include concrete details and what kind because the possibilities are endless. But in the end, this approach felt like the only way to tell this story, since it had to encompass so much in such little space.

Did you come to any new understandings of the universe while working out the structure of “Hello Again”?

I think, for me, the main takeaway of the story was that the transient nature of existence isn’t always a bad thing. People have been pointing out for as long as we’ve had the written word that death and decay are both total bummers. And I agree, they absolutely are. But I think that’s been well documented at this point and it might be valuable to spend more time considering ways in which a lack of permanence could actually be a good thing. One of the ideas being explored in “Hello Again” is that if life became permanent by repeating itself perfectly for an infinite amount of time, then on a personal level existence would become meaningless.

Do you believe in multiverses?

I’m fascinated by the idea, but for me, writing a story like this isn’t really about expressing my belief in any given theory as much as it’s about asking myself how that theory would change the way I feel about my life or existence in general. In this sense, current theories can be as instructive as ones that have long been debunked. The same is true when it comes to matters of faith. For me it’s never been interesting enough to make a hardline statement like, “There’s definitely an afterlife” or “There’s definitely not an afterlife.” I don’t see any reason to decide between those two options when a) there’s absolutely no way to know which of those two statements is true and b) both statements can be equally illuminating and cathartic if you consider them in earnest.

What else would like readers to know about “Hello Again”?

If they enjoyed this story, I would like to recommend the books Cosmicomics and t zero by Italo Calvino.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

I just finished my first novel, which I’m pretty excited about. With any luck it should be coming out in the not too distant future.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

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: Kenneth Schneyer

Christie Yant | 1041 words

This story breaks the fourth wall, with you, the writer, addressing the reader directly, and then you also inject an additional meta element into the tale as the narrative comments on the very story it is a part of. Why did you approach the story with that unusual style and structure?

I’d call it an authorial narrative voice, rather than the voice of Ken Schneyer, the singular guy sitting in the lobby at Balticon typing answers to these questions. The story repeatedly reminds the reader that it is an artifice, something created. At the same time, there are elements designed to submerge the reader in the story and feel like she’s there. So there’s an oscillation—you’re drawn in, then you’re jerked back, then you’re drawn in again. You are aware of your own vulnerability to manipulation and of the author’s intent to manipulate you, so that you must choose whether to allow that manipulation. It mirrors the central concern of the story: what it means to choose what you will and won’t do, what you will and won’t see or notice or say.

In the story, you write: “for all the good or evil, creation, or destruction, your living might have accomplished, you might just as well never have lived at all.” Is this intended to be a call to action for readers?

It’s a quotation from Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Doctor Lao (1935), a prediction made by an overly truthful carnival fortuneteller. When I first read it as a teenager, I felt that it was about as awful a curse as it’s possible for someone to impose; partially as a result, I’ve spent my life looking for what I call “evidence of impact”—some sign that my passing through the world will leave some mark for good. Other quotations on the same theme are sprinkled throughout the story.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call that particular line (or, for that matter, the story) a call to action. But it does, maybe, ask what a call to action would be. One of the frustrations of art is that it does nothing immediately material for anyone, except maybe the author and publisher. But readers can consume a work of art that involves something important and imagine, through their reading/listening/viewing, that they’ve accomplished something. Part of what this story does is to ask: Is enlightenment enough? Is changed perception the goal, or is it a means to something else?

You attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and some of the meta elements of the story are reminiscent of the kind of writing advice writers tend to get at such workshops. Was this story a direct response to your workshop experience—a way to apply the advice, yet also deconstruct it at the same time?

I loved Clarion, and indeed some of those lines came from my teachers. I actually believe in most of them and usually try to follow them. But this story plays with those principles. An early title was “The Passive Protagonist and the Wheel of Fire,” because I knew the protagonist wasn’t ultimately going to do anything, just Feel A Lot. Principles and rules of writing are useful—essential—for beginners; they help you recognize the dynamics of what you’re doing, to analyze problems and see patterns. They provide a vocabulary and even a technology for composition. But once you get to a certain level, you need to treat them as tools and devices, not as commandments. You have to know when to jettison a rule that you would otherwise use 90% of the time. So the absolutist voice of the critic is in conversation with the narrative voice telling the story, and they’re both in conversation with the reader. Stepping away from and examining the process of creation is also stepping away from and examining the process of reading. If I’m not always following the rules (and shouldn’t be), then maybe you shouldn’t either.

We labeled this story as “fantasy” when we published it, but it incorporates elements of both science fiction and fantasy. And though the fantasy element is the fact that the protagonist “was a man who was born, who lived, and who died” over and over again, it feels like it might be more appropriately thought of as science fiction. Which do you see it as, and do you think genre labels matter much?

The first draft actually contained the lines, “Ah, you say, now it’s a fantasy story!” and “Ah, you say, now it’s science fiction!” So I was certainly playing around with genre definitions, although, like a lot of the commentary in the story, those lines express some of my own perplexity about what I was doing.

I’m skeptical of genre boundaries, which usually break down upon close examination. I also don’t think they ultimately make much difference, because the impulse of the reader—to think beyond the limits of everyday experience—is similar in both fantasy and science fiction. To the extent that there is a difference, I think it lies in the epistemological assumptions behind the narrative voice: whether all things that we would want to know are knowable in principle, through reason, the senses, and such devices as we may someday create, or rather whether some crucial things are perpetually ineffable. I read some wonderful recent novels that were marketed as fantasy—Nicola Griffith’s Hild, Fran Wilde’s Updraft, N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season—and they all seem like science fiction to me, because of the habits of mind they convey.

What’s up next for you on the publishing horizon?

I have stories coming out in two anthologies: “A Lack of Congenial Solutions,” a bleak far-future science fiction tale, will appear in Alex Shvartsman’s Humanity 2.0. “You in the United States!,” which I guess I’d call “political speculative fiction,” will appear in Jeanne Thornton’s Procyon Science Fiction Anthology for 2016.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, Associate Publisher for Lightspeed and Nightmare, and guest editor of Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction special issue. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines including Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 (Horton),  Armored, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, io9, Wired.com, and China’s Science Fiction World. Her work has received honorable mentions in Year’s Best Science Fiction (Dozois) and Best Horror of the Year (Datlow), and has been long-listed for StorySouth’s Million Writers Award. She lives on the central coast of California with two writers, an editor, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @christieyant.

Author Spotlight: Jilly Dreadful

Jude Griffin | 696 words

How did “5×5” come about?

I wanted to tell the story of two high school girls who meet at a summer camp and become collaborators on their science projects, and, by nature of their collaboration, their relationship develops and deepens in way that neither of them expects. Furthermore, I wanted their collaboration to be antithetical to the competitive spirit of the science fair at the end of camp. It is my hope that, in this way, readers understand that Fox and Scully’s relationship defies expectations due, in part, to the expectations placed upon them by the fine sciences summer camp setting and the competition at the end.

During a summer where everyone is making scientific discoveries in order to compete for a college scholarship, Fox writes to Scully that she’s thankful that they discovered each other. That’s it. That’s the thing right there: When the awards, accolades, and accomplishments are stripped away, all we have is each other and that’s all that matters.

Ultimately, the story itself is a love letter to someone very important to me.

I loved the epistolary structure, modernized. What were the challenges / rewards of framing the story this way?

Personally, I worried that writing the story in this way was cheating myself out of writing a traditional linear story. But I tried writing that linear story and it was a lesser story for my efforts. Worse, though, was that when I wrote it in the way I thought I “should” be writing it, it privileged Fox over Scully in terms of point of view, and it was vital to the story I wanted to tell that the points of view be balanced.

It was important to me that, regardless of how effusive or long-winded Fox might be, Scully got to respond in equal measure—maybe not always in terms of length, because, as a character, Scully is more reserved and laconic. But that she gets to respond and push back against Fox is important to the dynamic they develop as friends and collaborators.

The glowworm scene is so cinematic: Were you tempted to break from the Bunk Note structure for this piece?

Absolutely. That final scene is partly why I wanted to write the story in a traditional, linear way. But when I remembered that Charlie Jane Anders published an article on io9.com a few years ago about whether or not science fiction could bring back the epistolary form—I finally gave myself the permission I needed to write the story in the way it was meant to be written, as opposed to the form I thought it “should” take.

Are there any epistolary stories you admire?

Epistolary stories tend to be my favorite types of stories, actually. Starting with Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Dracula by Bram Stoker, up to and including Stephen King’s Carrie; Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison, and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks.

Any news or projects you want to tell us about?

I run The Brainery: Online Speculative Fiction Writing Workshops + Resources, and we’re gearing up for our summer session. In addition to expanding our services to include private manuscript consultations for people who can’t take the workshops, we’re launching a Kickstarter in September to fund our first anthology, which includes work from both alumni and previous guest speakers like Aimee Bender, Francesca Lia Block, and Cat Rambo.

My writing partner, KT Ismael, and I just got an audio drama project greenlit by The Ed Greenwood Group, tentatively titled Joe Fearless, which will follow a father and daughter team investigating and uncovering daemonic activity in small town local government. We’re also almost done writing and close to production on our personal audio drama project following a super villain love story between Slender Man and Cassette Girl set in the ’90s.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

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: Spencer Ellsworth

Sandra Odell | 1124 words

I adored “The Child Support of Cromdor the Condemned.” It covers so much territory: religious and cultural differences; aging; myth; friendship; the terrible cost of violence; responsibilities to family; single parenting; parent-child relations. The list goes on and on. Not only is this a story that entertains, it also encourages the reader to think. When writing, how conscious are you of any social messages in your stories and how they may be received?

Thank you! The story means a lot to me so it’s wonderful to see it connect with others. It originally appeared on Podcastle in audio form, if you want to hear the great reading by Graeme Dunlop.

Social messages . . . that’s tricky, isn’t it? You can’t really sit down at the type-o-matic and say, “I want to write a story about misogynist culture!” That’s a good way to write a polemic. I find that once a story finds a heart, a theme, that theme lends itself to social commentary.

This story started out (you can tell from the title) as a goofy pastiche, but it found its heart when I had to talk about Amir’s mother. All of the sudden, I was looking at the problematic sex in the Conan stories. There was no way to talk about statutory rape and keep the story quick and light-hearted. With every draft of the story (and there were quite a few) I had to go deeper into that. It was really tricky, keeping Cromdor a sympathetic character while acknowledging the horror of what he had done.

What inspired you to write a takeoff of the usual lone wolf/barbarian sword-and-sorcery trope?

The title! I don’t remember what the prompt was, but I was writing off prompts with a group of friends, and I came up with the title “The Child Support of Cromdor The Condemned.” It was too good not to use.

I first encountered Conan in Robert Jordan’s work-for-hire novels, reprinted in the 1990s to take advantage of Jordan’s Wheel of Time fame. And I liked being Conan. You get a kind of rush, a heady feeling of power from being the guy. Every problem can be solved by a sword stroke and a mug of ale. Yet at the same time, I recognized that Conan was “that guy” in the locker room—the one who “never lost a fight” and “bagged a chick last weekend.” You have these constant moments, as a sixteen-year-old boy, wondering, “Is that manhood?” And then you look at gentler men, men who would get creamed in a barfight but are genuine healers and teachers, and you think, “Is that manhood?” My father is a therapist, and a wonderfully understanding guy. He wasn’t about to go crack any jaws over a mug of ale, though. And my mother and sisters were a lot stronger and more complex than Conan’s “wenches.” So this story became really personal, because it was a story about different kinds of manhood, about unexamined assumptions, and about trauma and how it shapes us.

Worldbuilding in fiction can be tricky, yet here you seamlessly blend secondary and historical references from Ursalim to coffee to the Calderians to the Amarites. What do you find to be the most challenging aspects of building a world that is not only a backdrop for the story, but a place where the characters live even after the story is done?

You’re going to laugh: I am the only fantasy writer who is terrible at worldbuilding. I don’t make linguistic charts and extensive maps and a game-ified magic system—not at all. Usually I come up with a character’s journey and build the world around that. In the case of this story, I got lucky, because I had been working on a never-ending Crusades fantasy, and so it was very easy to borrow from that cosmology to put background in this story. I did invent the Frosthands, although that in itself was a takeoff of an archetype.

Basically, kids: Steal from everywhere, including yourself.

You’re not only a writer, you’re a musician. Do you find one ever influencing the other, cross-pollinating as it were?

Hm . . . I do, but the creative processes are different. Music is entirely intuitive. Something sounds right in a song or it doesn’t. I also hyper-focus when I start recording; I can work on a recording for twelve hours at a time. (Let us pause to thank my wife for her patience when I’m tracking drums.)

When I write, I’m very aware of structure, where characters are in their journeys, and I don’t ever write for more than three-hour chunks, or I get burnt out. I have it down to a science in a way I don’t music. Weird, huh? I would kind of like to trade one for the other. I would get a lot more writing done the other way, although I’d forget to eat or go to work.

I have written a few stories that revolved around music. I’ve got one book in the works that uses music as a part of the “magic system,” and I’ve been shopping around a mainstream YA novel about kids in high school trying to write the perfect song. But yeah, they’re very different “siblings.”

Tell us a bit about your writing process. Do you have a particular time of day when you’re most productive? Are you a pantser or a plotter?

I pants short stories and plot novels. Is that allowed?

I have three kids and two jobs, so I get most writing done by taking the early bus to work. I get to work about 6:45 and write from 7:00 until 7:45 or so, then on the weekends I write in longer chunks. I am one of those morning people that everyone loves to hate.

What’s next for Spencer Ellsworth? What can readers look forward to in the coming months?

I have a novelette coming out on Tor.com sometime this summer called “When Stars Are Scattered,” and it’s an absolute monster, an Israeli-Palestine-esque conflict on another planet, about religious conflict and agency. Oh, and aliens shaped like kites. It took ten years to write, and I think it’s finally ready.

Beyond that, there are some longer things in the works, but I can’t officially tell. Watch my site for announcements, and find other stories there, and other magical things.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Walter Jon Williams

Moshe Siegel | 923 words

Your Hugo- and Nebula Award-nominated novella “Surfacing” was first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1988. Can you tell us about the genesis of this story and its relation to your novel Knight Moves?

The story is set in the same future as Knight Moves, though each can be read independently of the other.

Knight Moves was a book surrounded by trauma for me, which I fear leached over into my perceptions of the novel. I had the impression—despite uniformly good reviews and an award nomination—that the book had failed, or at any rate failed at what I’d set out to do.

In this I was wrong, but it only took me twenty-eight years to figure it out. (For the full story, see the related essay at bit.ly/1rocxP2.)

Be that as it may, “Surfacing” was an attempt to revisit the themes of the novel: love, communication, obsession, life, death, immortality, and a nigh-hopeless quest to unravel one of nature’s more imponderable mysteries.

Knight Moves and “Surfacing” are very different stories, however related they may be thematically, so you can read them both without fear of having to go through the same tale twice.

Many of your stories reflect an appreciation for the high seas (whatever world they happen to cover) and those who sail them; do you have real-world experience living the nautical life?

I was born on the shores of Lake Superior, a body of fresh water larger than many so-called seas, and I spent much of my boyhood on lakes and rivers. I’ve taught small-boat sailing, and I’m an active scuba diver.

My interest in naval history led me to my first career as a writer of sea-adventure tales, the Privateers & Gentlemen series, now available as ebooks after years of being out of print.

So yes, even though I currently live in a desert, I’m still as engaged with open water as it’s possible for me to be.

This novella contains some amazing linguistic concepts and semantic charts. Is this field of interest to you, beyond the confines of this tale?

Words are, so to speak, my job, and this was a story about the difficulties of communication: communication between species, between humans, between lovers. So the words the characters chose to use became important.

Words never cease to fascinate me—c.f. the word games in my novel Deep State—but I try to stay away from the higher realms of theory, and instead focus on the rich abundance and variety of human expression.

You’ve spoken in the past about the metaphor contained within Philana’s at-the-outset-mysterious-yet-somehow-familiar difficulties. Can you talk to us a bit about that, today?

This (once again) was something it took me years to realize, but it did occur to me (long after writing the story) that Philana’s problem is a metaphor for a certain type of mental illness. For a while I had a close encounter with someone with that particular problem, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

The story has a more hopeful suggestion.

Anthony judges Telemon for exploiting his Kyklopsian clone hosts, but the decadent nth-dimension entity flips the script and accuses Anthony of hoarding his own research—to the benefit of no one but Anthony himself—and Anthony seems likewise aware that transporting the humpbacks to an alien world was more for his advantage than for theirs. Do you think there is any moral high ground here, for either man? Or do you think they are both overdue for the Interplanetary Ethics Board?

I don’t think Anthony’s desire to sit on his data is a particularly egregious sin, for the simple reason that nobody gets hurt. The humpbacks might have been deprived of company and the latest songs on their hit parade, but they weren’t damaged in any way.

Whereas Telemon damages Philana every time he engages with her. So while both characters may be bastards, Telemon is a horrifically abusive bastard, and Anthony isn’t.

Do you have anything upcoming/in the works that you would like to share with us?

For fifteen years now, readers have been asking for more stories set in my Praxis universe, a series that begins, conveniently enough, with The Praxis. Now Tor.com is publishing a short novel set in that universe, featuring its most popular character, Caroline Sula. Impersonations will appear in October. More information may be found at: bit.ly/28CinhM.

This will be followed by three full-length Praxis novels, though the earliest won’t appear until 2018 at the earliest.

I’m also working on Quillfer, the first novel in a new series. This is a secondary-world fantasy, a genre which I haven’t attempted till now, and which gives me the opportunity to luxuriate daily in the glories of the English language. My job allows me to use words like “fustilarian bellygods” in a sentence! How cool is that?

Also, if you want to learn more about “Surfacing,” check out bit.ly/237QLNu. But don’t click that link until you’ve read the story, because maybe there are spoilers lurking therein.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Moshe Siegel interviews at Lightspeed, works in the New York State library system, and hatches indie publishing plots from his Hudson Valley home office. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 152 words

Coming up in August, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Mercurio D. Rivera (“Those Brighter Stars”) and Jeremiah Tolbert (“Taste the Singularity at the Food Truck Circus”), along with SF reprints by Kameron Hurley (“The War of Heroes”) and Maureen F. McHugh (“Laika Comes Back Safe”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Adam-Troy Castro (“The Assassin’s Secret”) and Tristina Wright (“The Siren Son”), and fantasy reprints by the team of Kevin J. Anderson and Sherrilyn Kenyon (“Trip Trap”) and Delia Sherman (“The Red Piano”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns.

For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint (“The Bone Swans of Amandale” by C.S.E. Cooney) and a novel excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

Thanks for reading!

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The Editors

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About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

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Christie Yant

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Rich Horton

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Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

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Henry Lien

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Robyn Lupo

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Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, you might also enjoy these anthologies edited (or co-edited) by John Joseph Adams.

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler) [forthcoming Oct. 2016]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Dead Man’s Hand

Epic: Legends Of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

The Way Of The Wizard

What the #@&% Is That? (with Douglas Cohen) [forthcoming Sep. 2016]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above. Each project also has a mini-site devoted to it specifically, where you’ll find free fiction, interviews, and more.