TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 78, November 2016

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, November 2016

SCIENCE FICTION

Dinosaur Killers
Chris Kluwe

Under the Eaves
Lavie Tidhar

Natural Skin
Alyssa Wong

For Solo Cello, op. 12
Mary Robinette Kowal

FANTASY

Two Dead Men
Alex Jeffers

Shooting Gallery
J.B. Park

A Dirge for Prester John
Catherynne M. Valente

I've Come to Marry the Princess
Helena Bell

NOVELLA

Karuna, Inc.
Paul Di Filippo

EXCERPTS

The Genius Asylum
Arlene F. Marks

NONFICTION

Media Review: Westworld
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Book Reviews, November 2016
Kate M. Galey, Jenn Reese, Rachel Swirsky, and Christie Yant

Interview: Stephen Baxter
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Chris Kluwe

Lavie Tidhar

J.B. Park

Alyssa Wong

Catherynne M. Valente

Mary Robinette Kowal

Helena Bell

Paul di Filippo

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2016 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Reiko Murakami

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial, November 2016

John Joseph Adams | 1064 words

Welcome to issue seventy-eight of Lightspeed!

We have original science fiction by Chris Kluwe (“Dinosaur Killers”) and Alyssa Wong (“Natural Skin”), along with SF reprints by Lavie Tidhar (“Under the Eaves”) and Mary Robinette Kowal (“For Solo Cello, op. 12”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by J.B. Park (“Shooting Gallery”) and Helena Bell (“I’ve Come to Marry the Princess”), and fantasy reprints by Alex Jeffers (“Two Dead Men”) and Catherynne M. Valente (“A Dirge for Prester John”).

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 and an excerpt from The Genius Asylum by Arlene F. Marks.

Lightspeed Reviews News

This month we’re presenting a special focus on comics and graphic novels by four guest-columnists—Christie Yant, Jenn Reese, Kate Galey, and Rachel Swirsky—who stepped up to pinch-hit for us on short notice. We will announce our new regular book review columnist in the near future, who will be joining Andrew Liptak and Amal El-Mohtar in the rotation.

Awards News

The World Fantasy Awards were presented October 30 at the 2016 World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, OH. We’re very pleased to announce that one of our regular artists, Galen Dara, won the award for Best Artist, and Alyssa Wong’s story, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” from our sister-magazine, Nightmare, won the award for Best Short Fiction! Congratulations to them both and all of the other winners and nominees. To see a full list of the World Fantasy Award results, visit locusmag.com.

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016

As you may recall, in addition to editing Lightspeed and Nightmare, I am also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, which launched last year. The first volume was guest edited by Joe Hill, and the 2016 volume (which came out October 4) is guest edited by Karen Joy Fowler. The table of contents for the 2016 volume includes two stories from Lightspeed (“Things You Can Buy for a Penny” by Will Kaufman and “Tea Time” by Rachel Swirsky), as well as Salman Rushdie, Adam Johnson, Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, Kij Johnson, Maria Dahvana Headley, Sofia Samatar, Sam J. Miller, Charlie Jane Anders, Catherynne M. Valente, Liz Ziemska, S.L. Huang, Vandana Singh, Dale Bailey, Dexter Palmer, Julian Mortimer Smith, Nick Wolven, and Seth Dickinson.

Visit johnjosephadams.com/basff to learn more and/or to order!

New Anthology Release: What the #@&% is That? (Saga Press, Nov. 1, 2016)

My new anthology—co-edited with Douglas Cohen—releases this month. Here’s the cover copy:

Fear of the unknown—it is the essence of the best horror stories, the need to know what monstrous vision you’re beholding and the underlying terror that you just might find out. In this anthology, twenty authors have gathered to ask—and maybe answer—a question worthy of almost any horror tale: “What the #@&% is that?” Join these masters of suspense as they take you to where the shadows grow long, and that which lurks at the corner of your vision is all too real, with stories by Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Scott Sigler, Maria Dahvana Headley, Christopher Golden, Alan Dean Foster, Rachel Swirsky & An Owomoyela, and others.

Visit johnjosephadams.com/wtf to learn more or buy the book.

New Editions of Old Favorites

Lightspeed readers are probably already familiar with most of my anthologies, but in case you missed one here or there, I thought it was worth pointing out that I just released new editions of my anthologies Federations and The Way of the Wizard. The new covers are both by the wonderful and talented Matt Bright at Inkspiral Design.

Visit johnjosephadams.com/federations and johnjosephadams.com/way-of-the-wizard to check out the new covers or buy the books.

People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror and Fantasy!

Last month, our “Destroy” series continued over at our sister magazine, Nightmare, where Silvia Moreno-Garcia served as the guest editor of People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror! She collected original fiction from Nadia Bulkin, Gabriela Santiago, Valerie Valdes, and Russell Nichols to help celebrate the work of creators of color in the horror field. Reprint editor Tananarive Due brought us four horror classics, including one from Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Díaz, and nonfiction editor Maurice Broaddus presented a stellar line-up of essays and interviews.

Next month, the final volume in the POC Destroy series will publish as a special issue of Fantasy Magazine (which was merged into Lightspeed back in 2012). Guest editor Daniel José Older presents original fiction from N.K. Jemisin, Thoraiya Dyer, P. Djeli Clark, and Darcie Little Badger. Reprint editor Amal El-Mohtar selected four fantasy classics, from Sofia Samatar, Celeste Rita Baker, Shweta Narayan, and Leanne Simpson. And last, but not least, nonfiction editor Tobias S. Buckell will be bringing us an assortment of insightful essays and interviews.

Learn more about both of these special issues—and the rest of the Destroy projects—at DestroySF.com.

John Joseph Adams Books News

In my role as editor of John Joseph Adams Books for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, I just acquired a novel by debut author Bryan Camp: The City of Lost Fortunes, a novel about a magician with a talent for finding lost things who is forced into playing a high stakes game with the gods of New Orleans for the heart and soul of the city.

Publication date is tentatively scheduled for Spring 2018. Meanwhile, I also bought a story by Bryan for Lightspeed, so you’ll be seeing his short story debut sometime in the near future as well!

• • • •

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: Cosmic Powers, 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.

Dinosaur Killers

Chris Kluwe | 1560 words

Another rock fell today.

Jaurez, on 54b. Pretty sure that’s who it was.

Maybe.

Didn’t talk much during the daily vidcalls, brown eyes peering out from beneath his shaggy black hair, floating every which way in zee-g. Supposed to keep it short, but company regs don’t apply. Not anymore.

His kids were on Croia Hab. Partner too. Three of thousands, now just clouds of matter joining all the other debris.

They mattered to Jaurez.

Nuke came outwell, Jaurez went inwell. Set his crawler to max cycle, max vent, sold his soul to Newton and pushed the button. One way trip, no ticket back.

He hit London. Pretty sure he hit London. Maybe. Or was it Paris?

Close enough. Rocks don’t care. They just fall.

Falling, falling, sticks and stones, break my bones, nukes will never stop me. They didn’t stop Jaurez. Ground did that. Or maybe it was the atmosphere.

Crawlers aren’t rated for re-entry—company reg Two Eight Four Dash B.

• • • •

Used to watch vids on the old wars in school. Tanks racing across rocky ground, squads with matte black rifles, soundless drones dropping the reaper’s scythe. Gleaming electronics on sleek missiles, atmospheric lasers, the aesthetic art of death changing just as surely as any other fashion. Supposed to warn us, keep us from our heritage. Classmates thought it looked like fun, like a game.

Sanitary violence, actions divorced from their grime, their blood, their cost.

Corps thought they had a monopoly on that violence, up here in orbit. Thought their shiny toys were enough to break from the rock down below. Thought their nanospun suits and self-sustained ecofarms and sheer distance would keep them safe, that their actions wouldn’t have consequence.

The pebble’s lament—nobody ever thinks they’re the one to start the slide.

Nobody ever thinks they’re pushing the button.

• • • •

How do wars start? Same way wars always start. Someone wants something from someone else. Water, food, land, people—all the same. Just a thing to be taken from things to be killed. No isn’t an answer.

Governments wanted their power; saw the habs, and the crawlers, and the farms; saw lives being lived away from their grasp. Saw the structure changing, and they weren’t invited. No wasn’t an answer.

Corps saw a rock dragging them down, sucking profits inwell they didn’t want to lose, and costs they didn’t want to acknowledge. No one pulls themselves outwell by their bootstraps, but they thought they did. Once they got there, just another frontier to exploit. Refused to pay taxes anymore. The rich always do.

Sold it to the habs as freedom. Independence. No wasn’t an answer.

Everything happened the same way it always does.

Doesn’t matter. Everyone ends up in the dirt.

No one wins a war fought with rocks.

• • • •

A beep. Vidcall coming through. First one in . . . don’t know. Used to be daily. Lost track of the days.

Lost track of a lot of things.

Make myself push the button. Huh. Fang is the only one left. Hasn’t been on in a while. And me, I guess. Why do I even bother? Easier to fall. Whole life spent falling, through school, through jobs, through love, through space. Never brave enough to accept the final plunge of commitment, never cowardly enough to take the terminal impact of death. Ended up stuck in zee-g, crawling this endlessly falling rock to pay my debts. What’s one more descent?

Words cut the air, voice like a rich vein of iron—hard, strong, sure. Good building material, iron. Habs used it. Used to use it, before the nukes.

“Where are the others? I just got my comms back up.”

“Fell.”

Eyes a blue so black you could sink in them and never find your way out. Comet ice. Habs used to use that, too.

“Shit. Ovechkin? Descroix? Ugembe? All gone?”

“Can’t you see?”

“No. EMP from when they hit Dehlia Hab fried most of my sensors. All I could do to jury rig a comm. Was hoping to get telemetry from everyone else.”

Clouded words, like the clouds swirling across the planet below. Used to be azure and jade, now it’s mostly grey. Angry clouds. Rock clouds. Dirty rain falling, killing ground and sun, radiation ripping through the sky and stars. Everything falling.

• • • •

“ . . . dammit, say something!”

Red rage, the rosy bloom of rocks crashing home. Of nukes clawing out, screaming through atoms until vacuum silences their frenzied roar. So much red.

“ . . . sorry.”

Something new in the comms. Cold, slithering, an airlock seal about to fail.

Fear.

“We’re the only ones left.”

Not a question. I answer anyway.

“Pretty sure. Habs are gone. Rocks all fell. No calls up here anymore, no lights down there.”

Rage?

Sorrow. No Van Allen belt to protect against reality’s crackling storm.

“ . . . there won’t be. Planet’s dead.”

Forced dispassion. A doctor triaging something terminal, two hours breathing required and only one hour of oxygen for EVA. The calm calamity of crisis.

I have to ask.

“Are you gonna fall too?”

Despair.

“Am I . . . ? No. What the hell’s the point? I just said the planet’s dead. Took a week for us to make this mess, and it’ll take centuries for the temperature to stabilize. If it ever does. Corps are dead, govs are dead, plants and animals are dead, everything’s dead except us, and you don’t even talk half the time . . . ”

Silence, brittle, sharp. Knife-edged spurs on a treacherous rock, eager to flip a crawler into their depths, down below comm range. Trapped forever, if the company doesn’t notice. Supposed to notice, company reg Seven Three Dash E, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes someone falls and no one remembers to care.

• • • •

“What will you do?”

My voice surprises me, a pocket of platinum where scanners indicated copper. I’m not sure I meant to say anything, but I did, and here we are. Drops of water gather in eye corners, then shake free, tiny planetoids drifting serenely. They sparkle in the starlight.

Habs used to sparkle like that, when the sun came over the edge, like plankton in the abyss. One of my only memories of life before, an aquarium vid gifted on a child’s birthday, saved all these years. Specks of life where nothing should exist.

• • • •

Silence, then sound.

“I’m leaving.”

“Leaving?”

“Yes. These crawlers can convert ice to usable water, shape metals and rock—that’s why they had us out here in the first place. Orbital infrastructure. So we could finally get off the planet before something killed us.”

Rueful laughter, a streaking meteorite that makes you jump, only it’s a firefly landing on your nose in the hab park and you accidently crushed it with a clumsy hand.

“I’m going to Mars. Plenty of ice there. There’s enough food in the crawler to make it with the recyclers, and more than enough ice on my stroid. I can cycle some to set velocity, then burrow inside for shielding and wait. I’ll get there eventually.”

Hands fly into motion, a sense of purpose, building something from nothing. Steel bars from rock bones, the skeleton of a hab, or a house, or a home, filling it with life and love amidst the emptiness.

“But you can’t see.”

The briefest hitch imaginable, that tiny instant before the circuit closes and the radiation expands.

“It’s all math anyway. I’ll just have to hope I’m lucky.”

No one’s lucky. Not anymore. No one left to be lucky.

“Why?”

“Because what else is there to do? Sit here and wait to die? Bombard an already murdered world? At least this way I’ll get to walk on Mars before I go.”

A pregnant pause, eyes looking everywhere but the screen.

“You could come too, you know. Help me see. Try and start something new, away from all. . . this.”

Rapid shifting, the treacherous outflow of an unexpected geyser. The world spins, stabilizes, settles.

“I . . . ”

My fingers finish moving. They’ve been moving the whole time, crafting a solution. Max cycle, max vent, join all the others. Fall in. End the uncertainty. The appealing finality of the void.

“I . . . ”

Another course appears on my plot, transferred over the comm. A quick rotation, then steady vent at quarter power for several days. Burrow, and wait—a long fall out. Maybe forever. A fall that might never end. Can I survive it? After everything that’s happened?

Two choices hover in front of me.

What is there worth living for?

• • • •

A beep. Another rock falls today, slowly at first, but gradually picking up speed. Miniscule compared to the dying rock behind it, a mote of nothing in the uncaring universe’s eye in front. It will never make it, not against the titanic forces it faces, blind and alone, racing to another hostile rock where it will shatter and perish. Never.

Maybe.

• • • •

There’s still time for me to follow. There’s still time for me to make a choice.

• • • •

I close my eyes, push the button and fall.

©2016 by Chris Kluwe. | Art © 2016 by Reiko Murakami.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

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

Under the Eaves

Lavie Tidhar | 5010 words

“Meet me tomorrow?” she said.

“Under the eaves.” He looked from side to side, too quickly. She took a step back. “Tomorrow night.” They were whispering. She gathered courage like cloth. Stepped up to him. Put her hand on his chest. His heart was beating fast, she could feel it through the metal. His smell was of machine oil and sweat.

“Go,” he said. “You must—” the words died, unsaid. His heart was like a chick in her hand, so scared and helpless. She was suddenly aware of power. It excited her. To have power over someone else, like this.

His finger on her cheek, trailing. It was hot, metallic. She shivered. What if someone saw?

“I have to go,” he said.

His hand left her. He pulled away and it rent her. “Tomorrow,” she whispered. He said, “Under the eaves,” and left, with quick steps, out of the shadow of the warehouse, in the direction of the sea.

She watched him go and then she, too, slipped away, into the night.

• • • •

In early morning, the solitary shrine to St. Cohen of the Others, on the corner of Levinsky, sat solitary and abandoned beside the green. Road cleaners crawled along the roads, sucking up dirt, spraying water and scrubbing, a low hum of gratitude filling the air as they gloried in this greatest of tasks, the momentary holding back of entropy.

By the shrine a solitary figure knelt. Miriam Jones, Mama Jones of Mama Jones’ shebeen around the corner, lighting a candle, laying down an offering, a broken electronics circuit as of an ancient television remote control, obsolete and useless.

“Guard us from the Blight and from the Worm, and from the attention of Others,” Mama Jones whispered, “and give us the courage to make our own path in the world, St. Cohen.”

The shrine did not reply. But then, Mama Jones did not expect it to, either.

She straightened up, slowly. It was becoming more difficult, with the knees. She still had her own kneecaps. She still had most of her original parts. It wasn’t anything to be proud of, but it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of, either. She stood there, taking in the morning air, the joyous hum of the road cleaning machines, the imagined whistle of aircraft high above, RLVs coming down from orbit, gliding down like parachuting spiders to land on the roof of Central Station.

It was a cool fresh morning. The heat of summer did not yet lie heavy on the ground, choking the very air. She walked away from the shrine and stepped on the green, and it felt good to feel grass under her feet. She remembered the green when she was young, with the others like her, Somali and Sudanese refugees who found themselves in this strange country, having crossed desert and borders, seeking a semblance of peace, only to find themselves unwanted and isolated here, in this enclave of the Jews. She remembered her father waking every morning, and walking to the green and sitting there, with the others, the air of quiet desperation making them immobile. Waiting. Waiting for a man to come in a pickup truck and offer them a labourer’s job, waiting for the UN agency bus—or, helplessly, for the Israeli police’s special Oz Agency to come and check their papers, with a view towards arrest or deportation . . .

Oz meant “strength” in Hebrew.

But the real strength wasn’t in intimidating helpless people, who had nowhere else to turn. It was in surviving, the way her parents had, the way she had—learning Hebrew, working, making a small, quiet life as past turned to present and present to future, until one day there was only her, still living here, in Central Station.

Now the green was quiet, only a lone robotnik sitting with his back to a tree, asleep or awake she couldn’t tell. She turned, and saw Isobel passing by on her bicycle, heading towards the Salameh Road. Already traffic was growing on the roads, the sweepers, with little murmurs of disappointment, moving on. Small cars moved along the road, their solar panels spread like wings. There were solar panels everywhere, on rooftops and the sides of buildings, everyone trying to snatch away some free power in this sunniest of places. Tel Aviv. She knew there were sun farms beyond the city, vast tracts of land where panels stretched across the horizon, sucking in hungrily the sun’s rays, converting them into energy that was then fed into central charging stations across the city. She liked the sight of them, and fashion-wise it was all the rage, Mama Jones’ own outfit had tiny solar panels sewn into it, and her wide-brimmed hat caught the sun, wasting nothing—it looked very stylish.

Where was Isobel going? She had known the girl since she’d been born, the daughter of Mama Jones’ friend and neighbour, Irina Chow, herself the product of a Russian Jewish immigrant who had fallen in love with a Chinese-Filipina woman, one of the many who came seeking work, years before, and stayed. Irina herself was Mama Jones’ age, which is to say, she was too old. But the girl was young. Irina had frozen her eggs a long time ago, waiting for security, and when she had Isobel it was the local womb labs that housed her during the nine long months of hatching. Irina was a pastry chef of some renown but had also her wild side: she sometimes hosted Others. It made Mama Jones uncomfortable, she was old fashioned, the idea of body-surfing, like Joining, repelled her. But Irina was her friend.

Where was Isobel going? Perhaps she should mention it to the girl’s mother, she thought. Then she remembered being young herself, and shook her head, and smiled. When had the young ever listened to the old?

She left the green and crossed the road. It was time to open the shebeen, prepare the sheesha pipes, mix the drinks. There will be customers soon. There always were, in Central Station.

• • • •

Isobel cycled along the Salameh Road, her bicycle like a butterfly, wings open, sucking up sun, murmuring to her in a happy sleepy voice, nodal connection mixed in with the broadcast of a hundred thousand other voices, channels, music, languages, the high-bandwidth indecipherable toktok of Others, weather reports, confessionals, off-world broadcasts time-lagged from Lunar Port and Tong Yun and the Belt, Isobel randomly tuning in and out of that deep and endless stream of what they called the Conversation.

The sounds and sights washed over her: deep space images from a lone spider crashing into a frozen rock in the Oort Cloud, burrowing in to begin converting the asteroid into copies of itself; a re-run episode of the Martian soap Chains of Assembly; a Congolese station broadcasting Nuevo Kwasa-Kwasa music; from North Tel Aviv, a talk show on Torah studies, heated; from the side of the street, sudden and alarming, a repeated ping—Please help. Please donate. Will work for spare parts.

She slowed down. By the side of the road, on the Arab side, stood a robotnik. It was in bad shape—large patches of rust, a missing eye, one leg dangling uselessly—the robotnik’s still-human single eye looked at her, but whether in mute appeal, or indifference, she couldn’t tell. It was broadcasting on a wide band, mechanically, helplessly—on a blanket on the ground by its side there was a small pile of spare parts, a near-empty gasoline can—solar didn’t do much for robotniks.

No, she couldn’t stop. She mustn’t. It made her apprehensive. She cycled away but kept looking back, passers-by ignoring the robotnik like it wasn’t there, the sun rising fast, it was going to be another hot day. She pinged him back, a small donation, more for her own ease than for him. Robotniks, the lost soldiers of the lost wars of the Jews—mechanized and sent to fight and then, later, when the wars ended, abandoned as they were, left to fend for themselves on the streets, begging for the parts that kept them alive . . .

She knew many of them had emigrated off-world, gone to Tong Yun, on Mars. Others were based in Jerusalem, the Russian Compound made theirs by long occupation. Beggars. You never paid much attention to them.

And they were old. Some of them have fought in wars that didn’t even have names, any more.

She cycled away, down Salameh, approaching Jaffa proper—

Security protocols handshaking, negotiating, her ident tag scanned and confirmed as she made the transition from Central Station to Jaffa City—

And approved, and she passed through and cycled to the clock tower, ancient and refurbished, built in honour of the Ottoman Sultan back when the Turks were running things.

The sea before her, the Old City on the left, on top of Jaffa Hill rising above the harbour, a fortress of stone and metal. Around the clock tower coffee shops, the smell of cherry tobacco rising from sheesha pipes, the smell of roasting shawarma, lamb and cumin, and coffee ground with roasted cardamoms. She loved the smell of Jaffa.

To the north, Tel Aviv. East was the Central Station, the huge towering space port where once a megalithic bus station had been. To the south Jaffa, the returning Arabs after the wars had made it their own again, now it rose into the skies, towers of metal and glass amidst which the narrow alleyways still ran. Cycling along the sea wall she saw fishermen standing mutely, as they always had, their lines running into the sea. She cycled past old weathered stone, a Coptic church, past arches set into the stone and into the harbour, where small craft, then as now, bobbed on the water and the air smelled of brine and tar. She parked the bike against a wall and it folded onto itself with a little murmur of content, folding its wings. She climbed the stone steps into the old city, searching for the door amidst the narrow twisting alleyways. In the sky to the south-east modern Jaffa towered, casting its shadow, and the air felt cooler here. She found the door, hesitated, pinged.

“Come in.”

The voice spoke directly into her node. The door opened for her. She went inside.

• • • •

“You seek comfort?”

Cool and dark. A stone room. Candles burning, the smell of wax.

“I want to know.”

She laughed at her. An old woman with a golden thumb.

An Other, Joined to human flesh.

St. Cohen of the Others, save us from digital entities and their alien ways . . .

That laugh again. “Do not be afraid.”

“I’m not.”

The old woman opened her mouth. Old, in this age of unage. The voice that came out was different. Isobel shivered. The Other, speaking.

“You want to know,” it said, “about machines.”

She whispered, “Yes.”

“You know all that you need to know. What you seek is . . . reassurance.”

She looked at the golden thumb. It was a rare Other who chose to Join with flesh . . . “Can you feel?” she said.

‘Feel?’ the Other moved behind the woman’s eyes. “With a body I feel. Hormones and nerves are feelings. You feel.”

“And he?”

The body of the old woman laughed, and it was a human laugh, the Other faded. “You ask if he is capable of feeling? If he is capable of—”

“Love,” Isobel whispered.

The room was Conversation-silent, the only traffic running at extreme loads she couldn’t follow. Toktok. Toktok blong Narawan.

The old woman said, “Love.” Flatly.

“Yes,” Isobel said, gathering courage.

“Is it not enough,” the woman said, “that you do?”

Isobel was silent. The woman smiled, not unkindly. Silence settled on the room in a thick layer, like dust. Time had been locked up in that room.

“I don’t know,” Isobel said, at last.

The old woman nodded, and when next she spoke it was the Other speaking through her, making Isobel flinch. “Child,” it said. “Life, like a binary tree, is full of hard choices.”

“What does that mean? What does that even mean?”

“It means,” said the old woman, with finality, and the door, at her silent command, opened, letting beams of light into the room, illuminating grains of dust, “that only you can make that choice. There are no certainties.”

• • • •

Isobel cycled back, along the sea wall. Jaffa into Tel Aviv, Arabic changing to Hebrew—beyond, on the sea, solar kites flew, humans with fragile wings racing each other, Ikarus-like, above the waves. She did not know another country.

Tonight, she thought. Under the eaves.

It was only when she turned, away from sun and sea, and began to cycle east, towards the towering edifice of Central Station, that it occurred to her—she had already made her decision. Even before she went to seek the old oracle’s help, she had made the choice.

Tonight, she thought, and her heart like a solar kite fluttered in anticipation, waiting to be set free.

• • • •

Central station rose out of the maze of old streets, winding roads, shops and apartment blocks and parking lots once abundant with cars powered by internal combustion engines. It was a marvel of engineering, a disaster of design, Futurist and Modernist, Gothic and Moorish, Martian and Baroque.

Others had designed it, but humans had embellished it, each competing to put their own contrasting signatures on the giant space port. It rose into the sky. High above, Reusable Launch Vehicles, old and new, came to land or took off to orbiting stations, and stratospheric planes came and went to Krung Thep and New York and Ulaan-Bataar, Sydney II and Mexico City, passengers coming and going, up and down the giant elevators, past levels full of shops and restaurants, an entire city in and of itself, before departing at ground level, some to Jaffa, some to Tel Aviv, the two cities always warily watching each other . . .

Mama Jones watched it, watched the passengers streaming out, she watched it wondering what it would be like to leave everything behind, to go into the station, to rise high, so high that one passed through clouds—what it would be like to simply leave, to somewhere, anywhere else.

But it passed. It always did. She watched the eaves of the station, those edges where the human architects went all out, even though they had a practical purpose, too, they provided shelter from the rain and caught the water, which were recycled inside the building—rain was precious, and not to be wasted.

Nothing should be wasted, she thought, looking up. The shop was being looked after, she had taken a few moments to take the short walk, to stretch her legs. She noticed the girl, Isobel, cycling past. Back from wherever she went. Pinged her a greeting, but the girl didn’t stop. Youth. Nothing should be wasted, Mama Jones thought, before turning away. Not even love. Most of all, love.

• • • •

“How is your father?”

Boris Chong looked up at her. He was sitting at a table by the bar, sipping a Martian Sunset. It was a new drink to Miriam. Boris had taught it to her . . .

It was still strange to her that he was back.

“He’s . . . “ Boris struggled to find the words. “Coping,” he said at last. She nodded.

“Miriam—”

She could almost not remember a time she had been Miriam. For so long she had been Mama Jones. But Boris brought it back to her, the name, a part of her youth. Tall and gangly, a mixture of Russian Jews and Chinese labourers, a child of Central Station just as she was. But he had left, had gone up the elevators and into space, to Tong Yun on Mars, and even beyond . . .

Only he was back, now, and she still found it strange. Their bodies had become strangers to each other. And he had an aug, an alien thing bred out of long-dead microscopic Martian life-forms, a thing that was now a part of him, a parasite growth on Boris’ neck, inflating and deflating with the beats of Boris’ heart . . .

She touched it, tentatively, and Boris smiled. She made herself do it, it was a part of him now, she needed to get used to it. It felt warm, the surface rough, not like Boris’ own skin. She knew her touch translated as pleasure in both the aug and Boris’ mind.

“What?” she said.

“I missed you today.”

She couldn’t help it. She smiled. Banality, she thought. We are made so happy by banalities.

We are made happy by not being alone, and by having someone who cares for us.

She went around the counter. Surveyed her small domain. Chairs and tables, the tentacle-junkie in the corner in his tub, smoking a sheesha pipe, looking sleepy and relaxed. The ancient bead curtain instead of a door. A couple of workers from the station sipping arak, mixing it with water, the drink in the glass turning opaque, the colour of milk.

Mama Jones’ Shebeen.

She felt a surge of contentment, and it made the room’s edges seem softer.

• • • •

Over the course of the day the sun rose behind the space port and traced an arc across it until it landed at last in the sea. Isobel worked inside Central Station and didn’t see the sun at all.

The Level Three concourse offered a mixture of food courts, drone battle-zones, game-worlds, Louis Wu emporiums, nakamals, smokes bars, truflesh and virtual prostitution establishments, and a faith bazaar.

Isobel had heard the greatest faith bazaar was in Tong Yun City, on Mars. The one they had on Level Three here was a low key affair—a Church of Robot mission house, a Gorean temple, an Elronite Centre For The Advancement of Humankind, a mosque, a synagogue, a Catholic church, an Armenian church, an Ogko shrine, a Theravada Buddhist temple, and a Baha’i temple.

On her way to work Isobel went to church. She had been raised Catholic, her mother’s family, themselves Chinese immigrants to the Philippines, having adopted that religion in another era, another time. Yet she could find no comfort in the hushed quietude of the spacious church, the smell of the candles, the dim light and the painted glass and the sorrowful look of the crucified Jesus.

The church forbids it, she thought, suddenly horrified. The quiet of the church seemed oppressive, the air too still. It was as if every item in the room was looking at her, was aware of her. She turned on her heels.

Outside, not looking, she almost bumped into Brother Patch-It.

“Girl, you’re shaking,’ R. Patch-It said, compassion in his voice. Like most followers of the Church of Robot, once he’d taken on the robe—so to speak—he had shed his former ident tag and taken on a new one. Usually they were synonyms of “fix.” She knew R. Patch-It slightly; he had been a fixture of Central Station (both space port and neighbourhood) her entire life, and the part time moyel for the Jewish residents in the event of the birth of a baby boy.

“I’m fine, really,” Isobel said. The robot looked at her from his expressionless face. “Robot” was male in Hebrew, a gendered language. And most robots had been fashioned without genitalia or breasts, making them appear vaguely male. They had been a mistake, of sort. No one had produced robots for a very long time. They were a missing link, an awkward evolutionary step between human and Other.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” the robot said. “Perhaps cake? Sugar helps human distress, I am told.” Somehow R. Patch-It managed to look abashed.

“I’m fine, really,” Isobel said again. Then, on an impulse: “Do you believe that . . . can robots . . . I mean to say—”

She faltered. The robot regarded her with his old, expressionless face. A rust scar ran down one cheek, from his left eye to the corner of his mouth. “You can ask me anything,” the robot said, gently. Isobel wondered what dead human’s voice had been used to synthesise the robot’s own.

“Do robots feel love?” she said.

The robot’s mouth moved. Perhaps it was meant as a smile. “We feel nothing but love,” the robot said.

“How can that be? How can you . . . how can you feel?” She was almost shouting. But this was Third Level, no one paid any attention.

“We’re anthropomorphised,” R. Patch-It said, gently. “We were fashioned human, given physicality, senses. It is the tin man’s burden.” His voice was sad. “Do you know that poem?”

“No,” Isobel said. Then, “What about . . . what about Others?”

The robot shook his head. “Who can tell,” he said. “For us, it is unimaginable, to exist as a pure digital entity, to not know physicality. And yet, at the same time, we seek to escape our physical existence, to achieve heaven, knowing it does not exist, that it must be built, the world fixed and patched . . . but what is it really that you ask me, Isobel daughter of Irina?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered, and she realised her face was wet. “The church—” her head inching, slightly, at the Catholic church behind them. The robot nodded, as if it understood.

“Youth feels so strongly,” the robot said. His voice was gentle. “Don’t be afraid, Isobel. Allow yourself to love.”

“I don’t know,” Isobel said. “I don’t know.”

“Wait—”

But she had turned away from Brother Patch-It. Blinking back the tears—she didn’t know where they came from—she walked away, she was late for work.

Tonight, she thought. Tonight, under the eaves. She wiped away the tears.

• • • •

With dusk a welcome coolness settled over Central Station. In Mama Jones’ shebeen candles were lit and, across the road, the No-Name Nakamal was preparing the evening’s kava, and the strong, earthy smell of it—the roots peeled and chopped, the flesh minced and mixed with water, squeezed repeatedly to release its very essence, the kavalactones in the plant—the smell filled the paved street that was the very heart of the neighbourhood.

On the green, robotniks huddled together around a makeshift fire in an upturned drum. Flames reflected in their faces, metal and human mixed artlessly, the still-living debris of long-gone wars. They spoke amidst themselves in that curious Battle Yiddish that had been imprinted on them by some well-meaning army developer—a hushed and secret language no one spoke any more, ensuring their communications would be secure, like the Navajo Code Talkers in the second world war.

On top of Central Station graceful RLVs landed or took off, and on the roofs of the neighbourhood solar panels like flowers began to fold, and residents took to the roofs, those day-time sun-traps, to drink beer or kava or arak, to watch the world below, to smoke a sheesha pipe and take stock of the day, to watch the sun set in the sea or tend their rooftop gardens.

Inside Central Station the passengers dined and drank and played and worked and waited—Lunar traders, Martian Chinese on an Earth holiday package tour, Jews from the asteroid-kibbutzim in the Belt, the hurly burly of a humanity for whom Earth was no longer enough and yet was the centre of the universe, around which all planets and moons and habitats rotated, an Aristotelian model of the world superseding its one-time victor, Copernicus. On Level Three Isobel was embedded inside her work pod, existing simultaneously, like a Schrödinger’s Cat, in physical space and the equally real virtuality of the Guilds of Ashkelon universe, where—

She was the Isobel Chow, Captain of the Nine Tailed Cat, a starship thousands of years old, upgraded and refashioned with each universal cycle, a salvage operation she, Isobel, was captain and commander of, hunting for precious games-world artefacts to sell on the Exchange—

Orbiting Black Betty, a Guilds of Ahskelon universal singularity, where a dead alien race had left behind enigmatic ruins, floating in space in broken rocks, airless asteroids of a once-great galactic empire—

Success there translating to food and water and rent here—

But what is here, what is there—

Isobel Schrödingering, in the real and the virtual—or in the GoA and in what they call Universe-1—and she was working.

• • • •

Night fell over Central Station. Lights came alive around the neighbourhood then, floating spheres casting a festive glow. Night was when Central Station came alive . . .

Florists packing for the day in the wide sprawling market, and the boy Kranki playing by himself, stems on the ground and wilting dark Lunar roses, hydroponics grown, and none came too close to him, the boy was strange, he had nakaimas.

Asteroid pidgin around him as he played, making stems rise and dance before him, black rose heads opening and closing in a silent, graceless dance before the boy. The boy had nakaimas, he had the black magic, he had the quantum curse. Conversation flowing around him, traders closing for the day or opening for the night, the market changing faces, never shutting, people sleeping under their stands or having dinner, and from the food stalls the smells of frying fish, and chili in vinegar, of soy and garlic frying, of cumin and turmeric and the fine purple powder of sumac, so called because it looks like a blush. The boy played, as boys would. The flowers danced, mutely.

• • • •

— Yu stap go wea? Where are you going?

— Mi stap go bak long haos. I am going home.

— Yu no save stap smoltaem, dring smolsmol bia? Won’t you stop for a small beer?

Laughter. Then — Si, mi save stap smoltaem.

Yes, I could stop for a little while.

Music playing, on numerous feeds and live, too—a young kathoey on an old acoustic guitar, singing, while down the road a tentacle junkie was beating time on multiple drums, adding distortions in real-time and broadcasting, a small voice weaving itself into the complex unending pattern of the Conversation.

— Mi lafem yu!

— Awo, yu drong!

Laughter, I love you—You’re drunk!—a kiss, the two men walk away together, holding hands –

— Wan dei bae mi go long spes, bae mi go lukluk olbaot long ol star.

— Yu kranki we!

One day I will go to space, I will go look around all the planets—

You’re crazy!

Laughter, and someone dropping in from virtuality, blinking sleepy eyes, readjusting, someone turns a fish over on the grill, someone yawns, someone smiles, a fight breaks out, lovers meet, the moon on the horizon rises, the shadows of the moving spiders flicker on the surface of the moon.

• • • •

Under the eaves. Under the eaves. Where it’s always dry where it’s always dark, under the eaves.

There, under the eaves of Central Station, around the great edifice, was a buffer zone, a separator between space port and neighbourhood. You could buy anything at Central Station and what you couldn’t buy you could get there, in the shadows.

Isobel had finished work, she had come back to Universe-1, had left behind captainhood and ship and crew, climbed out of the pod, and on her feet, the sound of her blood in her ears, and when she touched her wrist she felt the blood pulsing there, too, the heart wants what the heart wants, reminding us that we are human, and frail, and weak.

Through a service tunnel she went, between floors, and came out on the north-east corner of the port, facing the Kibbutz Galuyot road and the old interchange.

It was quiet there, and dark, few shops, a Kingdom of Pork and a book binder and warehouses left from days gone by, now turned into sound-proofed clubs and gene clinics and synth emporiums. She waited in the shadow of the port, hugging the walls, they felt warm, the station always felt alive, on heat, the station like a heart, beating. She waited, her node scanning for intruders, for digital signatures and heat, for motion—Isobel was a Central Station girl, she could take care of herself, she had a heat knife, she was cautious but not afraid of the shadows.

She waited, waited for him to come.

• • • •

“You waited.”

She pressed against him. He was warm, she didn’t know where the metal of him finished and the organic of him began.

He said, “You came,” and there was wonder in the words.

“I had to. I had to see you again.”

“I was afraid.” His voice was not above a whisper. His hand on her cheek, she turned her head, kissed it, tasting rust like blood.

“We are beggars,” he said. “My kind. We are broken machines.”

She looked at him, this old abandoned soldier. She knew he had died, that he had been remade, a human mind cyborged onto an alien body, sent out to fight, and to die, again and again. That now he lived on scraps, depending on the charity of others . . .

Robotnik. That old word, meaning worker. But said like a curse.

She looked into his eyes. His eyes were almost human.

“I don’t remember,” he said. “I don’t remember who I was, before.”

“But you are . . . you are still . . . you are!” she said, as though finding truth, suddenly, and she laughed, she was giddy with laughter and happiness and he leaned and he kissed her, gently at first and then harder, their shared need melding them, Joining them almost like a human is bonded to an Other.

In his strange obsolete Battle Yiddish he said, “Ich lieba dich.”

In asteroid pidgin she replied.

— Mi lafem yu.

His finger on her cheek, hot, metallic, his smell of machine oil and gasoline and human sweat. She held him close, there against the wall of Central Station, in the shadows, as a plane high overhead, adorned in light, came in to land from some other and faraway place.

©2012 by Lavie Tidhar. Originally published in Robots: The Recent A. I., edited by Rich Horton and Sean Wallace. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), the World Fantasy Award winning Osama (2011) and of the critically-acclaimed The Violent Century (2013). His latest novel is Central Station (2016). He is the author of many other novels, novellas and short stories.

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

Natural Skin

Alyssa Wong | 4190 words

As I shrug on my jacket, moving across the carpet as quietly as I can, my sister Xuemei pushes her blankets aside and rolls over onto her belly with a soft murmur. “Liin jie. Where are you going?”

Fuck. I glance at her across our shared bedroom, her pale skin glimmering in the near darkness. My shoes are already on; no use lying about it now. “Go back to sleep, kiddo.”

“Are you going to see a surgeon?” My throat tightens and she leans forward. “Again? Ba’s gonna be angry when he finds out.”

“He won’t be back til Tuesday. And he’s not going to find out.” I glare at her. “You need to stop snooping around.”

“You’re the one who didn’t delete your browsing history.” Xuemei peers at me through her curtain of black hair. She’s barely more than a child, but she looks older. Her bones are changing under her skin, growing long and elegant as she shifts through puberty. In a few months she’ll be taller than me. “Where are you getting the money for this?”

I start lacing up my sneakers. My phone and wallet are in my pockets already, and if I don’t hurry, I’ll miss my window. “Not important as long as Ba doesn’t notice.”

“You’re too careless. What if you get hurt again?”

“He’s not going to hit me.”

“He’s not going to hit me,” she says. Silence stretches between us, truth stretched tight and delicate in the air. I break the quiet by zipping up my jacket, and Xuemei shakes her head. “Are you really gonna make a break for it soon?” When I nod, Xuemei reaches for my cheeks. “Good. I’ll miss you.”

I turn my face away from her questing fingers and push her back down onto the mattress, tucking the blanket in around her so she can’t move. “Don’t worry. You won’t be around to miss me.”

Xuemei snorts. “I wish you were going to Ottowa instead of me.”

Me too. But I don’t say that, leaning over to kiss her forehead and swallowing my words against her skin. “Sleep tight, kid. Don’t lock the window or I won’t be able to get back in.”

She snuggles in, making a nest for herself. “Okay. Be safe, jie. Don’t get mugged while you’re out. I don’t have much of the good makeup left.”

I wait until my sister’s breathing steadies before slipping out the window.

No one’s awake to see me climb from our tiny apartment onto the fire escape, then eight stories down to the ground. Toronto winters are cold as fuck, and the frost bites at me even through my thick gloves. Fat snowflakes float down around me, covering the black, sunken drifts along the sidewalk with a new, pale skin.

Two men sit smoking on the steps of the convenience store, tobaccoed breath curling into the winter air as I cut through the deserted streets toward the nearest subway stop. I can feel their stares burrowing into my back. “Hey, sis,” croaks one of the men, the stench of hongtashan creeping along behind me. “Where are you going? It’s dangerous to be out, walking all alone at night. Why don’t you come keep us company?”

I slouch further into the scarf wrapped around my neck and pick up my pace, hurrying into the safety of the St. Clair station.

The Chinatown night markets six stops down the University-Spadina line are alive with business, packed with clamoring customers and shouting merchants despite the snow and the late hour. Fruit carts laden with net bags of lychee and clusters of lanzones; vendors hawking knockoff Gucci bags and Burberry scarves; racks of watches and lighters and vouchers for cheap international phone calls. Everything and anything is for sale. Cantonese batters the air and a heady, rotten scent crisps my nostrils—the smell of meat and trampled fruit, old newspapers and sweat.

As I shove my way through the milling throng, a kid dodges in front of me, kicking up dirty snow, his jacket lighting up with a dozen LED bars in alternating patterns. “How about some data infusions, jie,” he says breathlessly. Plastic tubes full of synthetic blood click at his belt, alongside a sheathed, slender hypodermic needle. He’s bundled up against the cold, but the stretch of skin exposed by his scarf is peppered with bandages and tiny purple specks, like mosquito bites. “Untraceable, DRM-free, nice and clean. The newest books from all your favorite authors, or maybe a package of answer keys for the standardized tests of your choice. How about it? A perfect MCAT could be your ticket to a white coat and a surgeon’s degree.”

I ignore him, stalking past a seafood stall; whole fishes and octopuses stare up with dead eyes from their bed of ice. I can feel my phone’s edges digging into my leg with each step, the address and code stored on it burning like coals at the back of my mind. But the kid dogs my steps, weaving into my path. He’s got a tacky, light-up tattoo, luminescent biopigments inked over his brow in the shape of a sun.

“Do I look like an info junkie to you?”

He has the fucking audacity to wink at me. “Ain’t gotta be salty, jie. I only sell high quality, highly reputable shit. Intravenous too! Just one injection in the port of your choice and it goes straight to your brain.” He fumbles in his pocket for a cord. “I’ll cut you a good deal. Two of whichever bundles you want for the price of one. All the needles are sterilized and in a few days you won’t even see the mark.”

“I don’t have a goddamn port,” I say, showing him the patch sewn onto my jacket. The government emblem for Natural Status—no bodily modifications, no drugs, the basic requirements for government jobs—is stitched there in silver thread. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, and you’ll be lucky if I don’t report you at the next police station for it.”

“Bullshit.” He won’t get out of my way, slushing through the muck ahead of me. “Anyone can buy a jacket. You wouldn’t be down here if you weren’t looking for a little something extra, and you’re about as Natural as a two-headed dog. Those eyelid folds are definitely fake. I can even see the scars.”

Shame flares white-hot through me and my hands fly reflexively to my face. The kid throws up his hands and backs off when he sees my expression, flitting into the crowd to find a new target.

It takes a few moments to stop shaking. I run my fingers carefully over my eyelids, feeling the healed incisions.

Expensive. Discreet. Almost natural.

In a few days you won’t even see the mark.

But Xuemei had known that first night I’d come home from a street surgeon’s clinic two years ago, had laughed at my still puffy eyes with her clear, beautiful, cruel voice and chased me around the room, trying to push her fingers into the soft tissue. Here, Liin jiejie, I’ll fix your face for you!

True beauty recognizes its imitators. How many other people could tell? How many others I’d passed on the street tonight had known at first glance, just like my little sister? How many had seen my careful, even embroidery on my jacket patch for what it was: not machine-perfect, not government-issued, but fake, fake, fake?

The scars crawl like mealworms under my itching fingers.

I jerk my hand away before the urge to claw my eyes out gets the better of me. Mentally, I add scar cream and whitening lotion to the list of things to get before the night is over.

The night market gets dodgier the farther I go, the electric streetlamps redder and less frequent, the snowfall heavier. The address I’m looking for turns out to be a room above a murky pool hall and an acupuncturist’s shop. I ring the buzzer, glancing at the tattooed, shaven-headed men gliding like sharks through the jade-colored light next door, pool sticks in hand. One catches my eye and grins, no mirth in his eyes. Despite the cold, my palms are sweating; I strip my gloves off and wipe my hands on my jeans. “Hurry up,” I mutter.

“Neh yiu mut lun?” The voice through the buzzer is harsh, flat.

The words from the deep net forum flash through my head and I dig out my cellphone. Please, please be real. “Nei di Zhao zung ji-si?” I read, stumbling over my Cantonese. The sounds are rusty, ugly and unfamiliar in my mouth.

There’s no sound but the wind, blowing frigid air in my face. “Faan uk kei,” says the voice from the buzzer at last.

“No, please—” I grasp at the door. “I need to see the ji-si. Please. I have an urgent request. He’s the only one who can help me.”

A moment later, the lock clicks and I push my way inside.

As the elevator at the end of the dingy hall creaks slowly upward, I wonder if Xue really will miss me if I don’t come home tonight, or if she’d use my disappearance to put off starting her negotiator training for another year. Baba had sent in an application for her without telling any of us, and when Xuemei’s letter of acceptance had arrived, she pitched such a fit that the neighbors began to bang on our walls.

I’m doing you a favor, our baba had snapped. I’d watched them fight from the hallway door, unnoticed by both. This is what’s best for the family and what’s best for you. There are people who would sacrifice everything for the chance that you have!

Let them have it, then! she’d shouted.

Baba had slapped her across the face, shocking both of them into silence. I’d lingered by the door, unnoticed, my own dreams crumpling in my chest.

Two years prior, when I’d asked him to sign my own application, he hadn’t even glanced at it. My job as the oldest daughter, Baba had told me, was to stay home and keep the household running. Someone had to keep track of the finances while he was away on his long, monthly business trips and Xue was off at school. Don’t be ridiculous, he’d said as I’d stared at the kitchen floor. Xuemei’s much better with people than you are. And do you really expect to be successful with a face like that?

My thumb creeps to my eyelid, but I jerk it back before I start rubbing the scars again. The eyelids had been my first surgery. The first of many mistakes, but the first of many adrenaline rushes, the deep satisfaction of watching my face take on another shape.

My reflection frowns back at me from the smudged chrome walls, mouth drawn thin. Relatives keep saying that the family resemblance between Xuemei and me has gotten stronger with age, but they’re full of shit. There’s nothing between us, no resemblance in her soft, pliant skin to the taut, calculated perfection of mine. Her dark, naturally lush hair versus mine, pin-straight and flawless.

No comparison at all.

The mirrored doors slide open. A hallway with ugly, patterned blue carpet stretches before me, walls slotted with wooden doors. The third room on the left is marked 4C. A full minute after I knock, a series of bolts shudder back on the other side, one after another. It’s nearly pitch black inside the apartment; only a handful of glowing computer monitors light the rooms. With a click, a pair of naked light bulbs flare on.

The ji-si stands on the ratty carpet, shirtless but for a black sports bra, one hand on the switch and the other holding a .22 pistol. Her face, obscured by the long beak and saucer eyes of a burnished mask, is pointed at me. So is the pistol.

“You’re the ji-si?” My voice is a dry croak.

“Neh yiu mut lun?” the flesh broker repeats. Her voice grates within the mask, the deep tones of a voice scrambler cutting the air.

Black market surgeon to the discreet, parts-swapper to the desperate, butcher to depraved folks who hunger for the most decadent, forbidden meats. Urban legend, miracle worker, nightmare, my first spark of hope. She’s real.

I take a step toward her, unconsciously, and she cocks the pistol. I freeze.

“Are you fucking deaf? Or are you just stupid?” It’s in English this time, languid, contemptuous. I straighten up, stare into the mirrored eyes of her mask.

“I’m here to sell,” I say.

After a moment, the gun flicks down. “You’re gutsy.” She tucks it in the back of her sweatpants and beckons me inside. “I appreciate that.”

I follow her, chest loosening.

The ji-si’s voice buzzes through the apartment, distorted by the mask’s metal beak. My eyes roam her body, all lean muscle and webs of scars. “There’s a big blizzard coming. It’s supposed to fuck up the whole city and last all night, but if the anesthesia hasn’t worn off by the time the storm hits, I could put you up until morning for an extra thirty bucks.” As she puts a kettle on the stove, I glance around the apartment. It’s cold, almost as chilly as it was outside, and surprisingly clean. Laminated menus in oversaturated colors hang by a work desk, laying out various surgical options, accompanied by photographs of carefully preserved body parts and posed, smiling portraits. Past them is a sturdy rack of knives and surgical implements, woven through with electrical cords and plastic tubing. A long table stretches along the far wall, with a plastic sheet set up beneath. I swallow.

“I won’t need to stay the night.” My voice is frigid, brittle. My pulse is going crazy. Don’t crack. “This shouldn’t take too long.”

The ji-si laughs, an eerie echo. “They never think so. But good surgery is about more than just hiding the seams. If you want cuts that’ll heal without any of that ugly scarring, I’ll need to take my time.” She indicates the kettle, lit up beneath by a glowing red coil. The ice batters the windows outside. “Tea? It’ll warm you up. It’ll also make everything go nice and dreamy, so you won’t feel a thing when the knife goes in.”

I can’t see her face, but I’m sure she’s smirking. “No thank you,” I say. “That won’t be necessary.”

Zhao crosses the room and we’re suddenly close, too close in this tiny apartment. Her hand closes around my forearm, and I realize, for the first time, skin to skin, how little she’s wearing.

“Come here. Let me get a better look at you.”

She guides me onto the long table, pushing me down so that my spine touches its steel surface. Then she swings her legs up and follows me, ignoring my surprised gasp, her sneakers squeaking against the metal. “What—”

“I need to see what I’ve got to work with. Pretend you’re at the doctor’s.” She’s wiry but much heavier than she looks, and I can’t buck her off with her weight settled on my hips. Panic rises hot in my throat, but instead of fighting, I stay very, very still.

“You have an extraordinary face,” Zhao says as she rearranges my limbs, shifting my hair away from my shoulders. Her hands are clinical and calloused, but her knees press down like blades on either side of my body. When she smoothes her thumbs over my cheekbones, it takes every ounce of self-control not to flinch away. Her fingers feel like they’re leaving a trail of embers down my body. “Nearly all artificially constructed, from top to bottom.” She glances down at the patch on my jacket and says, mockingly, “Even though you’re a Natural.”

A motorized handsaw hangs overhead, its cord coiled like an adder, just out of her reach. Just out of mine. I bark out a laugh, glaring at her. “Disappointed?”

“Oh no, darling. I think it’s beautiful. You’re a walking display of artistry, a testimony to gorgeous knifework.” She sighs. “It’ll be a shame to take you apart, but, well. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”

The way she says it, so reverently, her fingers lingering at the seams of old wounds, almost gives me pause. As if, perhaps, it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing to be taken to pieces by this woman, to have her see what’s inside. I open my mouth, but the shift of her knees makes me gasp.

“The market’s been strange recently. No one knows what they want these days. Skin, of course, but it would be hard for you to walk out of here without any of that.” The ji-si is humming to herself, distorted tones filtering out of her mask. Her palms skim my stomach and slide to my hipbones. “Breast, or belly? Mm, perhaps the thighs.”

“Wait,” I gasp. My blood is pumping so hard that I can hear it ringing in my head, and I’m not sure if it’s fear or something else entirely.

“Why?” murmurs Zhao. The tip of her metal face scrapes my skin as she bends toward my neck. Its round, empty eyes glitter. “So succulent and sweet. So perfect. I could keep every one of your parts for myself, customers and profit be damned.”

“Wait!” I push back on her chest. “You’re wrong. I’m not here to sell any of my flesh.”

Zhao pauses, the muscles in her neck tightening. Her grip on me is bruisingly hard. “Are you playing some kind of game with me, little girl?” she asks, her voice so gentle that it makes my skin prickle with fear. “You walked into my house and promised me a sale. And I intend to collect something for my coffers, whether you like it or not.”

I turn my head to meet her gaze. “You’ll get your money’s worth,” I say. “But not from me. I have a little sister.” My voice catches. “And she is much prettier than I am.”

Moving slowly and deliberately, I slip my wallet from my jeans’ pocket and flip it open to show her the picture tucked inside. It’s Xue’s junior high school promotion photo. She’s posed on a little stool in front of a pastel background, dressed up in her uniform-issue blouse and checked skirt, a blue bow tied loosely at her neck. Darling Xuemei, Baba’s favorite, barely a teenager and already in full bloom. Doe-eyed Xuemei, all smooth, milky skin and rivers of black hair. Beautiful, natural Xuemei.

“I came here to sell her to you,” I tell the ji-si. “Every last inch of her.”

Zhao studies the picture for a moment, the blank eyes of her mask showing me nothing. Cold sweat beads down the back of my neck. “A little young, isn’t she?” she says at last.

I wet my very dry lips. “I hear that’s what people want these days.”

She throws back her head with a horrible, hacking laugh that echoes through her beak. “Auctioning off your own sister? God. You’re a piece of work.” She looks down at me, metal face glinting in the raw, naked light. “I like you.”

I stare her down. “Look at that picture and tell me she’s not twice as beautiful as any of the girls on your menus. People will be clamoring for a piece of her.”

The flesh broker slides her thumb over the photo. “So they will. She’s almost as pretty as what I’ve got on the table now.” She angles her beak toward me. “Tell me. If I let you go, how exactly are you planning on getting her here?”

I shake my head. “I won’t. You’ll have to come to me. My father’s away on business, and I can drug her dinner so she’ll be ready for you tomorrow night. I’ll pay extra for your transportation.”

Zhao studies the picture, hungry. I look away. Eyes always turn greedily toward her, but nobody ever looks at me like that. Nobody but the ji-si, warm and hard on top of me. “Will you, now. You have this all planned out.”

Jealousy burns my voice hot and ugly. “I want you to take every ounce off of her, every hair, every bone. Everything. I want you to package her into little bits and make her disappear.”

The ji-si rocks back on her heels, balancing over me. “My, such animosity,” she murmurs. “Wherever does it come from, I wonder.”

The table is cold beneath my cheek. “What does it matter? You’ll get your business, and I’ll get rid of mine. We both go home happy.”

“I suppose that’s true.” Her fingers grip my chin and she turns my face toward her. “She’s not going to come back if you change your mind,” she says, very quietly.

I think of how Baba looks at Xuemei, how his face softens at the very sight of her. “Good,” I say.

Zhao pats my cheek. I narrow my eyes at the condescension. “Nay hou duk yi, dan hai nay jun hai hou soh. No, we’ll go fetch her tonight, under the cover of the storm, before the rest of the city’s snowed in. I’m not about to let you waltz out of here and leave me empty-handed if your conscience decides to show up.”

I don’t have much choice, not with my own skin on the line. “Fine,” I say. “The apartment’s not far from here, anyway.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” says the ji-si. “Come to the other table with me. Let’s talk numbers.”

When she climbs off me and swings to the floor, there’s a strange, cold feeling in my chest I can’t name. I can’t tell if it’s relief or disappointment.

In the end, we settle on nearly a thousand dollars: the largest sum of money I’ve had in my life, and more than enough to buy me a one-way plane ticket out of town. I know Zhao’s cheating me, but I would take much less to be rid of her for good. One perfect little sister in exchange for a new life, a slate wiped clean.

“I’ll even fix your face if you want,” Zhao offers, a sly twist to her words. She turns Xue’s photo over in her fingers. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed what you’re doing. I can make you look exactly like her, if you’d like.” She places the picture on the table, face down, and slides it toward me. “Think on it. Although to be honest, I like you just as you are. It suits you.”

I bat her hand away. “I’ll think about it,” I say curtly. She just laughs at me.

Before we leave, Zhao makes me drink a shot of scorching baijiu with her. “To your fortune,” she says, toasting me. “And mine. Chinese cuts are selling well. Per ounce, almost as profitable as Japanese.”

To Xue, I think, looking at my bent reflection in Zhao’s mask. My heart coils in me like a viper. To beauty.

• • • •

The blizzard almost catches us on the way home, but the cab cuts through the wind and snow, its driver partitioned away behind a thick, tinted sheet of bulletproof glass.

The ji-si and I make it up the fire escape before the worst of the storm hits, but the snow has begun to fall in thick layers, making climbing difficult. The ji-si is limber, but the cold slows me more than I anticipated. I should have brought a thicker jacket.

At the landing before mine, something drapes over my shoulders. It’s Zhao’s long coat. “Keep up,” she says. “It’s going to be a long night.”

I wrap the coat close and clench my jaw. I can hear her grinning at me. The coat is soft and warm, and it smells medicinal, sharp with sweat. It smells like her.

Xuemei’s nightlight glows soft pink through our bedroom window. My little sister is right where I left her, tucked into bed, her hair spilling over the pillow. Her program acceptance letter rests on the desk beside her.

“Open the window,” I say to the ji-si.

She already has a plastic capsule in hand, a syringe tucked between her fingers. There are teeth in her voice. “Oh no. You’ll have to do that yourself.”

Standing outside our room, I can’t hear the sound of Xuemei’s gentle, even breathing over the relentless howl of the wind. I can’t hear my own. As I place my gloved palms on the window, the ji-si’s jacket heavy around me, Xuemei stirs, rising halfway from the bed. Her large eyes are dazed and luminous, their spark of childish cruelty dimmed with sleep and clinging dreams.

“Last chance,” says the ji-si.

On the other side of the glass, my baby sister. Inside that room, my ticket out and the face I deserve.

Xuemei mouths something. It might be my name.

I smile, feeling the scars on my eyelids stretch, and pull open the window.

©2016 by Alyssa Wong.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alyssa Wong studies fiction in Raleigh, NC, and really, really likes crows. Her story, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” won the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Short Story, and she was a finalist for the 2016 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Locus Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Tor.com, among others. She can be found on Twitter as @crashwong.

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

For Solo Cello, op. 12

Mary Robinette Kowal | 2260 words

His keys dropped, rattling on the parquet floor. Julius stared at them, unwilling to look at the bandaged stump where his left hand had been two weeks ago. He should be used to it by now. He should not still be trying to pass things from his right hand to his left.

But it still felt like his hand was there.

The shaking began again, a tremelo building in his hand and knees. Julius pressed his right hand—his only hand—against his mouth so he did not vomit on the floor. Reaching for calm, he imagined playing through Belparda’s Étude No. 1. It focused on bowing, on the right hand. Forget the left. When he was eight, Julius had learned it on a cello as big as he had been. The remembered bounce of the bow against the strings pulsed in his right hand.

Don’t think about the fingering.

“Jules, are you all right?” Cheri’s voice startled him. He hadn’t heard the door open.

Lowering his hand, Julius opened his eyes. His wife stood silhouetted in the light from their apartment. Her hair hung in loose tendrils around her face, bleached almost colorless by the backlight.

He snatched his keys off the floor. “I’m fine.” Julius leaned forward to kiss her before she could notice his shaking, but Cheri turned her head and put a hand to her mouth.

“No. Sorry. I— I was just sick.” A sheen of sweat coated her upper lip.

Julius slid his good arm around her and pulled her to him. “I’m sorry. The baby?” This close, her lilac perfume mixed with the sour scent of vomit.

His phantom hand twitched.

She half-laughed and pressed her head into his shoulder. “Every time I throw up, I think that at least it means I’m still pregnant.”

“You’ll keep this one.”

She sighed as if he had given her a gift. “Maybe. Two months, tomorrow.”

“See.” He brushed her hair with his lips.

“Oh—” Some of the tension came back to her shoulders. “Your agent called.”

Julius stiffened. His agent. How long would a one-handed cellist be of interest? “What did Leonard say?”

“He wants to talk to you. Didn’t say why.” Cheri drifted away and began obsessively straightening the magazines on the bureau in the foyer.

Julius let her. He had given up on telling her that the accident had not been her fault. They both knew he would not have taken the tour if Cheri had not insisted. He would have stayed in the hotel, practicing for a concert he never gave.

He tossed his keys on the bureau. “Well. Maybe he’s booked a talk show for me.”

• • • •

At the coffee shop, Julius felt the baristas staring as he fumbled with his wallet. Leonard reached for the wallet with his pudgy sausage fingers. “Let me help.”

“No!” Julius grit his teeth, clutching the slick leather. “I have to learn to do this.”

“Okay.” Leonard patted the sweat on his face with a napkin and waited.

The line shuffled behind him. Every footfall, every cough drove a nail into his nerves. A woman whispered, “Julius Sanford, you know, the cellist.”

Julius almost turned and threw his wallet at her. Who the hell was she? Had she even heard him play before the accident or had she only seen him on the nightly news? Since the accident, sales of his albums had gone through the roof.

He wasn’t dead, but he might as well be.

Julius bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood and pressed his wallet against the counter with the stump. The bandages bit into the still tender flesh, but the wallet stayed still.

He pulled out his credit card with his right hand. It was stupid and it felt good and he hated it, all at once.

As if it were celebrating, his phantom hand flicked through the opening passage to Vivaldi’s Sonata in F Major. Jules pressed the wallet harder against the counter, trying to drive out the memory of a hand with each throb of pain.

Avoiding eye contact, he took his iced latte from the barista. He did not want to know if the she was the type who watched him with pity or if she stared with naked curiosity.

Leonard had already picked a table outside. Jules dropped into the chair across from him. “So?”

“So.” Leonard sipped his mocha. “What if you didn’t have to learn to do that?”

“What? Handle credit cards?”

Leonard shrugged, and dabbed the back of his neck. “What would you give to play cello again?”

Julius’s heart kicked against the inside of his ribs. He squeezed the plastic cup to keep from throwing it at Leonard. “Anything.”

The older man looked away. His tongue darted out, lizard-like. “Is that hyperbole, or would you really give anything?”

Shaking, Julius shoved the stump squarely in Leonard’s vision. The phantom twitched with inaudible music. “If the devil sat down with us and offered to trade my hand for my soul, I’d do it. I’d throw yours in with the bargain.”

“Good.” Beads of sweat dotted Leonard’s forehead. “Except he’s already got mine.” He pushed a newspaper across the table, folded open to a page in the Arts and Leisure section.

SVETLANA MAKES TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO FIGURE SKATING

Julius stared at the article. She had suffered from bone cancer and lost her foot. Two years ago, she was told she would never skate again. Now she was at the Olympics.

“How?”

“A blastema bud.”

Jules wiped his hand over his mouth. “I thought those were illegal.”

“Here. Yes. Calcutta? No.” His tongue flicked again, always the sign of a sticking point in negotiations. “But the blastema has to be from a related embryo to reduce chances of rejection.” He paused. “Svetlana got herself pregnant.”

The phantom hand froze.

“I know her doctor.” Leonard tapped the paper. “I can get you in.”

• • • •

Cheri sat in the living room looking at a catalog of baby furniture. When Julius entered, she smiled, barely looking up from the glossy pages. “Did Leonard have anything interesting to say?”

Julius hesitated in the door and then eased onto the sofa across from her. “He’s found a way to get my hand back.”

Her catalogue hit the coffee table, the pages slapping against the wood. Cheri stared at the stump. Her mouth worked soundlessly.

“It’s not legal.” Agitato beats pulsed in his phantom fingers. “It’s—” He broke off, rubbing his left arm above the bandages to ease the ache. She wanted the baby so badly. “I feel like I’m dead. Like this.”

Cheri reached across the coffee table to grab his good hand. “Whatever it takes, Jules.”

He started to shake and pulled back. “The doctors can transplant a blastema bud to the stump and regrow my hand. But we have to do it now, before scar tissue forms.”

“That’s not so bad.” She got off the couch to kneel beside him. “I don’t mind moving to a country where it’s legal.”

He bit his lip and nodded.

Cheri ran her hand through his hair. Cool and soothing, her fingers traced a line from his scalp to the nape of his neck. “Hey. Sweetie. What’s wrong?”

Wrong. She wanted to know what was wrong. The shaking started again. “It has to be related.”

She froze. They hung suspended, as if waiting for a conductor to start the next movement. Julius stared at the carpet until Cheri moved her hand.

She slid it down his back and stood. “Related?”

He nodded. “To reduce the chances of rejection.”

“So it might not work?” Cheri wrapped her arms around herself.

“I don’t have another choice.” He held the stump up so she could see it. “Do you have any idea what it’s like? I can’t play.”

“You could teach.”

A laugh ripped out of him. “It’s not the same thing! I can’t go from being part of the music to hearing it butchered. I mean, can you imagine me with eight-year olds? Christ. Kill me now.”

“Sorry.” Cheri paled, her skin becoming almost translucent in the light. She turned and went to the window. “What do you want me to say?”

Say yes. Say you understand. “I— I just wanted to talk about options.” Julius crossed the room to stand behind Cheri. He reached out to hold her and stopped, staring at the stump. In his memory, the tour-bus tipped and landed with his arm out the window, sliding on his hand. Grinding it away. “I should have stayed in the room.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” He wouldn’t have gone if she hadn’t insisted. “We can make another baby.”

“Can we?” A vein pulsed in her neck. “It’s been two years, Jules.”

“So you miscarried before.” The phantom hand clenched in a tight fist. “You might miscarry again, and then you won’t have a baby and I still won’t have a hand. Is that what you want? Are you happy that I can’t play anymore?”

Her shoulders hitched and Cheri shook her head.

Julius pinched the bridge of his nose. He had gone too far, but she had to understand. “I’m sorry. I just see this chance and it’s the first time I’ve hoped since the accident.” He put his hand on her shoulder. She trembled, her shoulder as tight as a bow. “I’m sorry.”

She nodded but did not turn.

Julius waited for more but Cheri continued to stare out the window. He squeezed her once and walked away.

“Jules?” Her voice caught him halfway across room. “We should do it.”

Afraid to look at her, he stopped. “Do you mean that?”

“Yes.” The word almost disappeared into the hush of the room.

“Because I don’t want to force you into anything.” He tasted the hypocrisy on his lips, but he needed this. She had to understand that.

She turned to face him then. Her face, all cheekbones and dark circles, was blotched red with anger. “You’re offering me a choice between giving you your hand back and raising a child that you hate. What choice do you think there is?”

“I didn’t mean—”

Cheri shook her head, rejecting his apology. “Tell Leonard I said, ‘yes’.” She turned back to the window and leaned her head against the glass.

“Cheri.” He stopped. Nothing he could say would make her feel better, without giving away the thing he wanted. The thing he needed. He plucked at the bandages on his stump. If he could play again . . . “You have to understand what this means to me.”

“I understand that I’m your second love. I said yes. I can’t give you anything else.”

Julius stared at her unforgiving back. “Thank you.”

He slid out of the room to call Leonard. His hand trembled on the receiver.

Down the hall, the door the bathroom shut. Cheri retched once. Then again.

Julius pressed the phone harder against his ear and started running Wilde’s Lament in his mind.

He concentrated on the fingering.

• • • •

The last vibrations of Wilde’s op 12 buzzed through Julius’s thighs and into his chest. He flexed the fingers on his left hand as he released the cello’s neck.

Across the room, Leonard sat with his head tilted down so that his chin vanished in his neck. Julius swallowed, the gulp sounding as loud as it had when he first auditioned for Leonard.

Leonard lifted his head. “What was that?”

“A Lament in Rondo Form for Solo Cello, Op.12.” Julius stroked the cello’s silky wood. The sweat on his palm left a film on the instrument.

Leonard grunted. His tongue darted out to wet his lips. “Well.”

“Well?” Christ, the man was trying to kill him. Julius looked down, loosening his bow as he waited for the verdict.

“Heard from Cheri?”

“She sent me a card on my birthday.” His left hand spasmed. “Are you going to tell me what you thought?”

“Turn the gig down.”

Julius almost dropped the bow. “You’re kidding. It’s Carnegie Hall! I’ve been working for this for the last three years.”

Leonard leaned forward. “Jules. Have I ever steered you wrong?”

“Three years, Leonard.” He’d given up more than the time to be able to play again.

“Take a gig in a symphony, build up your chops again. You wouldn’t have to audition.”

“Screw that.”

“You asked for my opinion. As your agent—”

“Another agent would get me the gigs that I want.”

“Sure.” Leonard shrugged and headed for the door. “Take it, you’ll sell out the house. But after people hear you play, the only gigs you’ll be able to book will be novelty shows.” His words resonated in the belly of the cello. “You aren’t ready. It’s like you’re playing two different pieces now.”

Julius hadn’t thought anyone else could hear it. He gripped the cello between his knees, as if the fragile wood could shield him from the truth. “How long?”

He paused in the doorway. “How long did it take you to become world-class before?”

“Fifteen years . . . ” Fifteen years of études and climbing his way up through the chairs of symphonies.

“Then that’s your answer.” Leonard shut the door.

Within Julius’s left hand, the old phantom hand twitched again and started playing Bach’s Sonata in D Minor. He clenched his hand, but the fingering did not stop.

©2007 by Mary Robinette Kowal. Originally published in Cosmos. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of The Glamourist Histories series of fantasy novels and the a three time Hugo Award winner. Her short fiction appears in Clarkesworld, Tor.com, and Asimov’s. Mary, a professional puppeteer, lives in Chicago. Visit her online at maryrobinettekowal.com.

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

Two Dead Men

Alex Jeffers | 5900 words

Everybody knows everybody else in Fejz, they used to say. They meant the high town, crowded shoulder to shoulder on its twin narrow peaks, not the sprawl of the low town in the bottomlands under the escarpment and the falls.

That was before the little war. It was never true but during the siege you learned how few you had known, how superficially you were acquainted with your nearest neighbors. At the peace talks in Katothtet one of the chief negotiators for the Bala was a woman who, when we were schoolchildren, handed me a sheaf of wheat ears and poppies on Eikis Day and demanded a kiss. When the international court declared the interim government’s reconciliation amnesty illegal and immoral she was tried for war crimes and, though nobody denied she was a very small cog in the Bala war machine, convicted, imprisoned.

By then I was five years away from Fejz, from Iszabal, half the world away in my mother’s country. Believing me broken and useless, one of the wealthy brothers of her house gave me an allowance and a villa on the beach at Suut-ua-Qaza. I believed I would never return to the town of my birth, speak the language of my upbringing.

Hoped, I suppose.

I was a foreigner in tranquil, tropical Suut, more than my foreign name and features had ever made me in Fejz. Once, years earlier, I had briefly been a tourist, when the small fishing village was first discovering itself as a destination, a place subcontinentals and other travellers would congratulate themselves on discovering. We came south from the capital on holiday, my Isz father and Avengi mother and half/half I, all of sixteen. There were no hotels yet in Suut, no hermetically sealed resorts, merely a guesthouse run by a weathered expat of Yf who taught me to ride a surfboard in hours not taken up by the town’s other attractions.

Girls, that is.

Lovely girls with lovely faces, searching eyes and sly lips, with long black hair sleeked with scented oil so they smelled like flowers, with necklaces or coronets of flowers, with sweet breasts they seldom troubled to hide away and long slender brown arms and work-callused fingers.

Girls who found my stumbles through my mother’s language charming, who told me stories from the life of the Kandadal to improve my vocabulary and ethics—older stories of Father Bodo and Mother Flame, of demons and boggarts and shape-shifting creatures that haunted the humid dark of Aveng’s rain forests. In turn, I was meant to relate old stories from Iszabal: how Eikis brought the two peoples, long-settled Bala and invading Isz, together as one nation and built the Old Bridge at Fejz from her own blood and bone. Of the nameless virtues and excellences of the land who watched over us, unseen, unknown, from their dwellings in the earth and rock and trees—who now and then out of whim or dismay or infatuation appropriated human form and name to interfere with our lives. Was Eikis one of those, a curious girl wanted to know, a virtue or an excellence? A question argued for a thousand years and unanswerable, I replied with adolescent airiness.

They would tire of stories eventually, the girls, eager to get me out of confining subcontinental shirt and trousers and shoes—then, after languorous play, to dress me up like a native youth in vividly plaided sarong and my own crown of scented blossoms. Shocking to a boy from sober Iszabal, they were delighted to share me around among their girl friends, puzzled when I declined to explore the pleasures their boy friends might offer.

When my uncle sent me back to Suut fifteen years later I was far less innocent if not especially less straitlaced or stupid. Chiefly, though, I was no longer human and sincerely believed all humans to be vicious and vile. For several months I refused to speak to the woman my uncle had hired to feed me and care for the house. When she impinged on my vision I shut my eyes and turned away. When I smelled the sweet oil and flowers in her hair the odors nauseated me. Once she learned not to watch over me I ate the food she prepared because I was an animal who had been starved, but it often sickened me. That my degraded state saddened her I remained determinedly unaware.

In a popular novel or motion picture intended for the sentimental audiences of Yf and the subcontinent the embittered siege veteran should rediscover his humanity when he learns the woman hired to tend him was the girl who romanced him in his youth, that the stripling lad who now and then aids her labors is the son he never knew.

Avengi sentiment runs in different channels. Elilanongo recollected the prim half-foreign playmate of that long-ago season in the way one remembers a long-dead cat, reminded of its ways by the antics or attitudes of one’s new kitten. She knew as well as I that boy was dead. As for the lad, a son of her household, she was one of his mothers but not the one who bore him. If that girl had been careless or cunning the dead boy could have sired Gorulellu—he was the correct age—as he might have sired several of Gulu’s friends, but the dead man was nobody’s father.

We became friendly eventually, Gulu and I, even before he tattooed the Kandadal’s eleven precepts on my back and an allegory of the siege of Fejz woven around and about the scars on my right arm, but he had always possessed a sufficiency of fathers around and about his mothers’ house.

• • • •

The bridge fell again in my dream, silent, slow. I watched from an impossible, an inhuman perspective. Shells from the Bala artillery in the hills inscribed their whining trajectories over the high town. When the explosives hit—on the bridge or, falling short, in the river’s depths at the foot of the gorge, or against the walls of the tower-gates on either side—white exhalations of smoke billowed into clear air, deceptive and transient as droplets of black ink in a glass of clear water. Small fragments of sharp red stone leapt from the bridge’s parapets, hurtled like shrapnel against the steep walls of the gorge or down to the swirling water as it approached the falls. Dislodged, dressed blocks and ashlars simply fell. Then, at an instant indistinguishable from the moments before or after, the ancient stresses of the span overmastered the balance of the arch—the center of the Old Bridge dropped out and a cloud of dust rose. It seemed to form a tall figure, an immense woman wrapped in the white of mourning: I knew she was Eikis who had built the bridge nearly a thousand years before to bind the two peoples together, but now the bonds were broken. Her hands came up. She scattered red poppies over the river, over the estranged halves of the high town. They fell like rain, like blood. When she raised her eyes I recognized the devotion in those profound blue irises, and my heart stopped.

An instant later Eikis vanished.

On the broken wall of the fallen bridge’s south tower crouched a man. A starved man, lean, wiry, bearing a gaudy polymer bucket and a coil of hemp rope. He meant to collect fresh water from the river twenty meters below for his ailing friend. Our little store of water was stale, suspect, and there had been no food for days.

I seemed to see the path of the Bala sharpshooter’s bullet, hurtling from the emplacement in the peaks above the high town. Could a rifle bullet travel so far, so fast? Perhaps I was mistaken, perhaps the sniper fired from a high window on the north side of the gorge. The bullet struck flesh. Blood burst like a crimson poppy from Djevan’s shoulder and he crumpled. The bucket broke free of his shocked fingers, bounced once, fell free down the cliff, dragging the rope behind it. From my impossible height I watched it tumble, a spot of bright color against ruddy stone. Before it hit the river my friend had regained his knees—before the river brought it to the brink of the falls he had struggled to his feet. He threw up his uninjured arm as if in defiance or to call down a curse.

Before the second bullet hit, he leapt.

My perspective shifted, swerved, dizzyingly, sickeningly. I had witnessed Djevan’s final leap—as I had seen the fall of the bridge two years before—but from a very different viewpoint, as if I were a cellar rat peering through a crack in the wall: I had seen his leap but not the fall.

Abruptly I found myself in the pine-forested hills, near the ground if not walking like a man. Stumbling like a starved and wounded man between the black trees. I came upon one of the Bala artillery emplacements. It had been shut down, cleaned out, by the international forces. By soldiers of my mother’s country or one of its neighbors, U or Dothe or Piq, for tall bamboo stakes stood where the mortars and other heavy ordnance had been mounted. Topknots of brilliant ribbons in the Kandadal’s eleven colors fluttered bravely from each stake. I heard myself explain they were meant to confuse and frighten off the devils of discord drawn to such places. Then, half-lying: And to inspire hope, of course, in the besieged city below.

Then I woke, disoriented, distressed. I often dreamed of Djevan, seldom of his death. Outside the TGV’s window the fertile floodplain of the Sja blurred past, sunswept golden wheatfields and emerald pasture blotted with the red of poppies, the vivid blue of cornflowers. I was still far from the city of my birth, then, although it was unclear to me how long I had slept and what nation this was. A steward brought me chilled lemon water.

• • • •

Like any tourist, when I returned to Fejz a decade after the little war I ascended to the high town in a gondola of the téléphérique. There had been no great sentiment to rebuild the low town as it was before Bala artillery knocked it down so practically the whole of it was new to me. But it was all laid out rationally, scientifically, and I had no difficulty making my way to the téléphérique’s lower terminal. This was new as well, in the swoopy, spidery, over-engineered Uvian style, as of course was the aerial tramway itself. I remembered, as a kid, being thrilled to ride in the rackety, rickety old wooden gondolas with their faded, worn upholstery and ineradicable stink of acrophobic sick.

The new gondola more resembled the Sjolussene TGV that delivered me to Fejz: sleek and austere, perfumed, climate controlled, silent. Unexpectedly, I had it to myself for the fifteen-minute ascent. Its motion was smooth, sway somehow damped. The cliffs beetled up before me—I could not see the walls of the high town. Formerly the cables took a utilitarian straight line, bottom to top, but engineers were cleverer now than ninety years ago and the reimagined téléphérique more a tourist attraction than an urban convenience. Elegant pylons spun the cables in a wide curve above the low town, out over the Gievkoa. I could gaze downriver to where the blue of distance confused itself with the blue of the sea, blurring and muddling the high rises and cranes of the port.

Or I could turn inland. The white thunder of the river hurtled down the fault in the escarpment. Below, the cauldron boiled. However close I pressed myself to curved glass, however I craned my neck, I could not see the top of the falls. I could not see the faded red sandstone arch of the new Old Bridge. It struck me as a failure in the gondola’s design but doubtless there were sound reasons of safety or function to frustrate me.

The gondola dipped to the high-town landing and I climbed out. I carried no baggage, sent ahead to the pension, except memory. Childhood, youth, young manhood. The little war, the famous siege that nearly killed me. I was lucky, they said, the doctors, when I woke in the field hospital of the international forces. Lucky.

I had meant to return sooner. I had meant not to return at all. I had no choice.

Only half Isz, damaged, expatriate a third of my life . . . all that by the by. It was the thousandth Eikis Day and the dedication of her rebuilt bridge. Rebuilt by mortal women and men, engineers, masons, of quarried stone and mortar, not the transmuted bone and blood of myth. Formal invitations had gone out months before to all the farflung refugees and expatriates in the city’s database. The signature on the one that reached me in Suut, half the world away, did not match the printed name of Fejz’s mayor: it appeared to be a single letter, the initial Dj.

I failed to convince myself I misread it.

In any case, my rich uncle was relieved to pay my way. It could only be healing, he agreed, for me to pay my respects at the Field of Martyrs where my Isz father’s bones had been reburied. My Avengi mother’s, when securely identified the year before, had been repatriated, for the new government was scrupulous. My aunts and uncles gave her bones to Mother Flame, the ashes to Father Bodo, and her soul at last was freed to that deep blue sea which is the sky, where the burning spirits of women and men are forever marked by their descendants on earth as stars.

In Iszabal, among both Isz and Bala, the belief is different. Best to be laid beneath the soil, your body to feed the virtues and excellences and the small essential animals that dwell there, your soul to grow green and thoughtful and slow, eternal. Worst, worst to be lost in tumbling waters, spinning, spinning, never to rest.

I walked away from the téléphérique terminal, following the map in memory though the one my ’phone could produce would prove more useful. I was not ready to cross the bridge.

• • • •

The café on the former University Square in the high town had inevitably changed hands, all investment in postwar Iszabal being foreign. Now it wore the livery of a Sjolussene chain, blond wood and crimson lacquer, but the unsubtle spicing of local-style coffee recalled my youth. I recognized the old building’s architectural skeleton under the wood and lacquer better than I had the neighborhood. The university had moved to the low town. A long, arcaded commercial building in antique style replaced the ruins of the Rector’s Palace. In the center of the great public space that was now called Plaza Concord stood a bland committee-designed memorial in place of the rococo extravaganza of the Eikis Fountain or its shocking rubble. I sat in the window, looking out over the unhurried late-morning business of the transformed city, sipped my sweet coffee.

The voice of a dead man said, “Dan—” (he had always had trouble with the Avengi -ngu of my name)—“Dankou.”

My heart pounded, stopped, pounded again.

“Don’t speak,” the dead man said. “I know.”

He had changed, changed nearly as much as our city. If he had looked as he did the day I saw him die I would know him for a vision, a ghost conjured out of nightmare memories. Setting his cup on the table near mine, pulling out the chair opposite, he sat: an unextraordinary person in that place, tall, slender but not gaunt, with the very fair skin endemic in Iszabal and pairs of deep lines bracketing his mouth and hawk nose as if he meant to smile a great deal. His hair was not uniformly grey but brindled distinctly white through black, and cut too short to flatter, clinging to his skull like the fleece of a new lamb.

“Dankou.” He did not smile. His blue-black eyes were very keen, pupils very deep.

“Dangu,” I said, more offended than the first time he mispronounced my name. The uncertain table trembled under my hand. The air in my lungs felt heavy.

“I know. I’m sorry. I hear it in my head . . .” He touched my hand, his fingertips as cool as the Gievkoa’s waters.

I had changed more than he, who had never known me healthy. It was ten years since I was released from the field hospital and sent to my mother’s country to recuperate. Back to my mother’s country, they said, as if I hadn’t been born in Fejz, only ever visited Aveng as a tourist. The dead man’s cool fingers moved to my forearm, tracing the Avengi iconography of tattoos that told stories of a broken nation and a little war the artist had scarcely known existed before he began the work.

“Djevan—”

“I don’t use that name now,” the dead man said. His fingers had moved from tattoos to the scars they meant to highlight and I could no longer feel the chill of his touch, only the pressure.

“You died!”

His nod was equivocal, avoiding my eyes.

“I saw you die.”

“I know. I didn’t mean you to. It happened too quickly—I wasn’t prepared. You should be angry.”

I pulled my arm away. “Ten years—ten years!”

“It was a war, Dankou, the last act.” More graceful than I remembered, he rose from the chair, a man in control of his body.

“You could have found me.”

“I did.” When he smiled the brackets by his mouth dimpled and finer wrinkles fanned across his cheekbones. My eyes burned and blurred. He offered his hand. “You are here.”

• • • •

I was wounded. Shrapnel. My right arm torn open. In peacetime, in civilized nations, not terribly significant wounds. Otherwise in besieged Fejz.

When I rose back to consciousness some unknown person of unprecedented strength was carrying me off the street where I’d fallen toward dubious shelter. I don’t believe he noticed I’d roused—a few moments only, but long enough to memorize the severe face of a stranger, hardened and thinned by privation as we all were, a man who should have no cause to aid me. I would not have stopped for a wounded person likely to die.

Next time I woke, a low fire smoldered in the open mouth of a porcelain stove and I was settled into an upholstered chair drawn up so close I might burn myself with an unwary motion. My arm ached and throbbed but did not excruciate. The coals put out little light yet I saw the careful, boney hand and the chipped cup it held. Steaming. Smelling of . . . meat.

“It’s hot,” the stranger said, lifting the cup to my lips. “Careful. Slowly. Just a little.”

It was very thin unsalted broth but as rich to me that night as four-hour-simmered oxtail stew. Whatever savory vermin flavored the broth, I had eaten worse as the siege reached its anniversary, and would again, and never enough.

“Just a little,” he said again, pulling the cup away, setting it on the stove. “More later. Let me tend your arm again.”

His face moved into the light and I cringed back in the chair for his visage was bloodied, horrifying, stained around the lips with blood. My blood. There were always rumors of cannibalism. My flesh in the broth I drank.

His grip on my right hand was firm. “We have insufficient safe water,” he murmured as he raised my arm. For all his gentleness, I seemed to feel muscle tear further, capillaries weep afresh. “No clean bandages, no medicines, no sutures.” Lowering his head, he began to bathe my wounds with his tongue. Even colder than his fingers, numbing. At first I was terrified for I knew about the ferocious bacteria bred in the human mouth but there was nothing I could do and somehow, slowly, it became soothing and the ache seemed to diminish. I seemed to feel safe.

I should have wondered, I suppose, but wonder was a quality in short supply during the siege. Wonder enough to survive day to day. Much later, when the internationals finally sent in their peacekeepers, when the bombardment faltered and during the period that international aircraft regularly overflew the town, dropped bundles that sometimes contained drugs and other medical supplies, no longer especially helpful, sometimes supplies difficult to recognize as food but nutritious, it was easier to wonder. But by then I had no recollection of my arm healing unnaturally fast and clean.

He did not tell me his name immediately. He already knew mine, although he never learned to pronounce it properly. Perhaps I was still carrying passport or identity card, I couldn’t remember, perhaps I had told him while delirious. Perhaps I was still delirious. I had never felt sexual interest in any man, should not have been capable of feeling anything but horror when he lifted his head from my arm and kissed me so I tasted my own blood. I wanted nothing, nobody else, not peace, not freedom, not the absence of fear. Only him.

• • • •

My young friend Gulu in Suut grew up a handsome fellow. I recognized that, when I became nearly human again. I had always, I think, appreciated masculine beauty but never desired it, until Djevan, and never after. Gulu would have pleased me if I wanted, it’s the way of things in my mother’s country, he liked both women and men, and liked me, and made it clear, but I wanted no man but a dead man, nor any woman either. I told Gulu stories of the little war and the siege because he and his mothers and fathers believed I needed to, and he inked my stories onto my scarred right arm.

My arm was only so long. There were stories left over.

• • • •

The dead man and I left the café, walked across the grey expanse of Plaza Concord. There were people about, visitors as well as citizens of the artificially peaceful, artificially prosperous town, but they were of no moment. Two dead men paced over concrete paving mottled with vivid splashes of crimson. Out of respect and superstition one avoided treading on the poppies of Fejz. Each red blossom marked the impact and fragmentation pattern of a Bala bombard, the scars it left filled in with glassy resin. I remembered the first time I saw one of the poppies, startled by it, certain it was fresh blood but unable to comprehend how so much liquid could drain from a single body. But where was that body?

I remembered a later evening when I spied a frightened, determined student of the university’s arts faculty pouring resin into a new scar. A shell whistled through the dusk above the square and I looked up to follow its path, flinched at the hollow thunder when it destroyed a building some blocks away. When I turned back the girl had vanished but her handiwork glistened innocently, like spilled wine.

In early months, it’s said, the irregulars in the hills launched three hundred rounds or more into Fejz each day, high town and low. I wouldn’t know—in the moment I was more concerned with surviving the bombardment than counting individual shells. Later, of course, when besiegers were themselves blockaded by the international brigades and matériel ran low, they deployed their artillery more circumspectly. The university’s stock of air-drying crimson resin had run out long before: most of the poppies throughout the city were poured after the war. After I was sent away.

I did not speak the other dead man’s dead name. He touched my elbow to guide me around a gleaming red poppy, to herd me into the narrow alleys of Scholars’ Warren. He pointed out the bolthole where we sheltered some months until the morning, returning from our overnight scavenge, we discovered it occupied by a clutch of savage children I was still too sentimental to displace. In a manner both bitter and nostalgic he reminisced about our rat hunts through the streets and cellars, pigeon hunts over the nighttime rooftops. One memorable night we discovered a hidden dovecote and gorged ourselves sick on the sweet small eggs. Returning some weeks later we found the cote broken up—not by a shell but human hands—and wondered thereafter whether by the flock’s clandestine keeper or feral scavengers like ourselves.

He asked to hold my hand as we walked, the other dead man.

Out of the Warren, we turned west on to the High Street built up on bastions from the walls of the gorge. The South High Street before the war, then the Isz High Street, now South again according to recently minted signs. It looked much as it had when I was a child but I remembered too well the rubble of shelled buildings on its one side, the savage bites chewed out of the other. No poppies inlaid in shattered stone or concrete here, or everything in sight would be red.

Taking a moment, only a moment, I leaned against the unweathered riverwall meant to appear ancient. Below, the Gievkoa tumbled noisily between its banks toward the bridge and the falls, white along the edges and where it erupted over uncleared rubble. Bombard scars marred the bastion below me, unrepaired where they didn’t threaten the walls’ integrity. On the far bank, the Bala side, the masonry was largely unmarked except by age and few of the façades on the North High Street had needed repair. Roofs, in a few instances, where bombards fell short.

My fingers gripped the new stone of the parapet above the foaming Gievkoa. Under my hands and all along the river’s course were engraved names, name after legible name. My parents, my professors, colleagues and acquaintances, dear friends and lovers and enemies, strangers I might have met if not for the war, strangers I would never meet. If I walked long enough along the High Street, I knew I would find his name, the name he used before he died, but not my own. As I lifted my hands from the stone, chilled, the dead man placed his arm around my waist and urged me west on the High Street toward the falls. Toward the new Old Bridge.

I pushed off his arm and took his shoulders in my hands. I backed him up step by step into the sheltered doorway of some falsely antique building. “You left me,” I said. “You were all I had, you were everything, you made it possible to continue living in that hell. I never wanted, never thought to want any person so much before you. You left me. You died. Now I’m to take you back?” I kissed the dead man’s cold lips.

• • • •

We believed the Bala bombardiers and snipers would not bother with the High Street again for they were hard pressed by the internationals, low on matériel, and the buildings were nothing but rubble already. We made our last haven, my love and I, in the burnt-out cellar of a broken building near the stump of the shattered bridge’s tower-gate. We had had no food for some days. The internationals’ supply drops had ceased, nobody understood why, though aircraft still roared over the high town. Rats and other vermin were all eaten or fled, birds too wary to be caught by starvation-weakened people, bugs too quick or too small to make a mouthful. I was ill. Feverish. Again or always. My love said he would fetch cool water from the river. Don’t go, I pled, don’t leave me. You need water, he said. They never shoot in daylight anymore. Just a little while. His cold lips touched my cracked lips, and he was gone.

Too parched to weep, too weak to stand and walk, I crept after him to the ragged hole we used as a door. It was very bright out in the world, too bright: I recoiled.

I needed him. I needed him more than water. I needed not to die alone. Blinking, I tried again.

The light made it impossible to focus on anything nearby so I raised my eyes to the deadly hills. I couldn’t actually pick out the stands of beribboned stakes among the pines but I had looked through binoculars before and knew they were there. The Kandadal discouraged prayer, for his is an ethic limited to things one can see and actions one can perform. I prayed. When my eyes were clear again I looked for my love.

I saw him.

Nimble as a child, nimble as a healthy man, he had already climbed what remained of the tower-gate, himself and his bright bucket. Crouched low, he peered down the cliff, working out the best route to drop the bucket.

I did not hear the shot—not mortar but rifle. I saw him stagger on his knees, saw the blood red as poppies burst from his shoulder. Saw the bucket tumble from his hand, bounce, fall.

It was not a fatal wound. In an instant I had convinced myself. Even starved he could survive it. I needed him to live. To live for me.

On the broken red rock he rose to his feet, made himself a surer target for a second shot. He roared—I heard his voice, could make out no words. He leapt into . . . no, over the gorge.

Everything went white. White as cloud, white as snow, white as mourning. Then red.

The internationals broke the blockade the next day, Eikis Day. The nine hundred ninetieth Eikis Day, for anybody counting. I was dead when they found me, collapsed half out of our cellar refuge. In hospital, they said, I raved about virtues and excellences, a new red bridge over the Gievkoa—the dead man who left me, whose body needed to be found and buried lest his soul be caught forever in the whirlpools under the falls.

• • • •

If his soul had been trapped in the maelstrom, now it was free. Under my hands and lips his flesh was chill as river water, but so it had always been. There was no doubting his solidity. Against his cool cheek I said, “You were never human.”

His chest rumbled against my own, answer enough.

“Are you a man?”

“Not always.” His hands tightened their grip in the small of my back. “I chose to be a man for you because you didn’t expect it. Dankou—”

“Dangu.” I was unoffended.

“Those sounds—they’re not natural!”

“Are you?”

I meant him to confirm supernatural or a force of nature but he declined to give me the satisfaction. “Dankou, your room, your pension.” Bearing the weight of his fists down on my hips, he demonstrated the satisfaction he wanted, I wanted. “Ten years! Questions later.” He pushed me out of our shallow shelter.

The pension stood on the north side of the Gievkoa, the Bala side. I knew the address but not where to find it. The ’phone would guide me, or he would. First the new Old Bridge.

We must have walked right by our cellar. The south tower-gate, too, had been rebuilt. Wreaths of wilting poppies and wheat ears for the dedication on the morrow already adorned it but the joins between old stone and new were apparent. Flanking the portal, the three-quarter-round statues of Eikis looked newly sculpted, features sharp and unworn: her nose hawklike, her cheeks dimpled. I compared her face to my companion’s—but the sculptures were not true portraits. “It was here. I saw you. Ten years ago.”

He led me into the dimness under the arch without a glance at the images on either side. “I’m sorry. The opportunity—I was responsible, I’d been waiting. I couldn’t let it slip.”

We passed under the second arch. The red sandstone paving of the bridge might never have been walked upon. I felt certain, although it was in every way unfair, the span could not have been rebuilt if he had not died. The stones underfoot were his bones, colored by his blood—the little war could not end without his sacrifice.

“Tell me—” I said, clutching his fingers, because I needed a smaller thought, “tell me what to call you.”

My newborn love laughed. We had climbed halfway up the strenuous hump of the arch, so familiar from a different bridge, from a time before he found me. “What do you wish to call me, Dankou?”

“Mine.”

“I am that. I was never not that.” At the arch’s crest he drew me to the shoulder-high iron railing clamped to stone, wound with wheat sheaves and poppies—shoulder high to me. We gazed down to the river, and the absence of the river where it broke over the escarpment’s edge. Rainbows dodged in and out of view, multicolored immaterial ribbons. “It took time to . . . collect myself,” he said, holding me as though I might jump, as he had. “I didn’t measure time as you do but it was more time than I liked. You were gone long before I succeeded. Dankou, I’m sorry, there are limits on my actions, my movements. I could not go to you. If it were possible I would be unwelcome. How do they say mine there, where you were?”

In orthodox Kandadael thought a mildly scandalous concept, but I would never return alive to my mother’s country. “Zeu,” I told him, the most emphatic declension of the pronoun.

“Zeu,” he repeated, and laughed again. “I can say that! More importantly, you must.” He held my head so I could look nowhere but into his eyes. The blue of them swirled and boiled like twin whirlpools. “You must believe it. If you had died in the siege—” He pressed his brow against mine so hard it hurt me. “I know you will die. I cannot bear the knowledge, that you will leave again and again I may not follow. It would be very restful to dwell among the stars with you forever. Yet I will bear it.” He shuddered, I felt it, and his voice cracked. “There is nothing, nothing, I must do for now, Dankou, for your now, except be yours.”

“Zeu,” I said. His promise was too large for my mind to contain. As we walked on down the far side of the bridge, arm in arm, he told me the name, as common in Fejz as Djevan, I should expect others to call him. The mayor to call him, for this unextraordinary citizen of Fejz posed as a civil servant. Unless I wished him not to. He had no house or apartment because he hadn’t needed one but finding a place for us to live together was simply something we would do. I had the rest of my human lifespan to persuade him not to send my bones to Aveng when I die but allow my mortal substance to nourish him so long as its virtue persists.

©2012 Alex Jeffers. First published in Icarus, Issue 14, Fall 2012. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Jeffers is the author of the novels Safe as Houses, Deprivation, and That Door Is a Mischief; the novellas Do You Remember Tulum?, The New People, and The Padişah’s Son and the Fox; the novel-length story sequence The Abode of Bliss; and the collection of wonder stories You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home, in addition to many works of uncollected short fiction.

Shooting Gallery

J.B. Park | 2970 words

It took a while, but in the end we bargained it down to a shot right on my chest, with his mom’s gun. I didn’t know anything about guns, but the thing he showed me looked safe enough, a little pistol that was smaller than the palm it rested on. Then we ran into another problem: Nick wanted to bring his buddies, or at least the ones he trusted.

“What, so you guys can all take turns shooting me or something?”

“Nah, that’s all me, dude.” He pulled out his phone. “I can’t handle this while I’m shooting, right?”

“Only one shot,” I reminded him.

“Only one shot.” Then there was a little pause and he said, “Hey, can I see it again?”

By “it,” he was of course referring to the three bullet holes on my chest, where he would soon add a fourth. I took off my shirt and there they were, blackened and more than a little sad, looking somewhat small and pitiful with the blood and dirt cleaned off.

I let his fingers probe around the bullet hole near my collarbone, and then they traced their way down to the second, a little below. I was mostly numb to their touch; what I tracked of their tracing was more by sight than feel. His fingers lingered around the last of the holes, and then he poked at a spot about an inch to the left of the third one with his index finger.

“Bam,” he said.

• • • •

For the privilege of shooting me Nick was paying about five hundred. Only “about” because he wasn’t certain how much he could pull out of his parents’ bank account without them actually asking where the money was going to—they were usually cool with him taking cash out but questions would come up if he took too much, and the too much was this nebulous, shifting thing from what he told me of it. I figured it could be worse. It was still a pretty sizable sum of money.

Because I knew—had known ever since that day in the bathroom with mom—that what I’d gotten wasn’t some super cool superhero bullshit where I’d be immortal and stuff. I could take a bullet or two, but I also knew that before long my body would fall apart on its own. Already my guts had been pulled out and stuffed into black plastic bags. Already they’d been replaced with whatever we could salvage out of the house—cotton shirts soaked with rubbing alcohol, then whiskey and beer when we ran out of the alcohol, then we’d run out of shirts so we’d stuffed underwear and socks in there. It was held together with an entire roll of duct tape.

As I walked back home—the cold not getting to me at all, but still with a jacket on so it wouldn’t look weird—I tried not to think about it. It came up, though, recurring, no matter how I pushed it under the water. Eventually I got it under control mostly, save for this imagery—this memory—of mom, looking at me with this weird empty look, her hands black with clumps of half-clotted blood.

• • • •

When I got back home I got another text from Nick—he’d bought me a cheap phone so we could stay in contact—saying that he’d pick me up around three in the afternoon tomorrow. By now I was somewhat paranoid that he’d bring some of his friends and they’d tie me up and pump bullets into me like I was a human shooting gallery. Well, he already was bringing friends along—two of them, in fact—but he said he’d only shoot me himself, and something told me that he’d keep his promise if only for the thrill of doing so himself, with no one else being able to claim that honor.

Back inside I could already smell her. Mom handled the frying station at the truck stop and just about everything else, in return for letting Samantha handle the showers, which was one of the grossest tasks I’d ever seen anyone have to do. So she always smelled of grease. The smell filled the house whenever she was in it, which with her chaotic schedule didn’t happen very much. Usually I woke in the morning to find her sprawled on the couch, uniform still on, maybe a half-empty can of Miller Lite on the carpet, the TV on and set to the Today show or something. She’d be snoring—she was a big snorer—and I’d maybe get her legs on the couch, straighten them out, toss a blanket over her. If I leaned in close I’d smell her so strongly that for a moment the world was composed of frying potatoes and chimichangas, corn dogs both regular and jalapeno. Maybe a world like that—where everything was shitty fried food—like Willy fucking Wonka but with everything made of crackling fried carbs instead of dark chocolate shells, and its people less some diminutive slaves but instead endless clones of mom and Sam, two portly middle-aged women with work hats too small for their frizzy haired heads frying infinite batches of tater tots and finger steaks.

She was sleeping again. This was her off-day, and she spent most of it sleeping, and the rest of it watching TV and smoking. She had at least retreated to her room, and had changed out of her uniform, before ending up on her bed. She had left the lights on—I turned them off for her. I stood in the doorway on that edge between the darkness of the room and the poorly lit corridor, where a crossroad of sorts presented two choices, between the dank bathroom where once I’d lain in the tub screaming for help, and in the other direction my bedroom.

I pictured myself pushing a neat envelope of money towards her. We’d be sitting at the dinner table, one of those very rare nights where our meal didn’t consist of something she took from the truck stop, expired sandwiches and microwaveable burgers a day past the best-by date, but rather something we cooked, like Kraft or maybe a meat loaf. She’d open the envelope. In it would be the money. She would smile, though this last detail was something I couldn’t get right in my mind. Her face looked weird no matter how I pictured it happening. The lips pulled away, twisted around in unexpected angles. The eyes always tore out and up and to the side and down.

• • • •

Nick Hatloy called at two a.m.

“You up, Paulie?”

“I am.”

“So I was thinking, why not just do it right now? I can pick you up, there’s no one around, and Joseph and Petey are down with going right now.”

“Did you call them?”

“They’re with me right now.” His words came out sticky, a little slurred. “I told ’em everything and the fuckers won’t believe me. You gotta show them what’s up. I can pick you up and we’ll get going in like an hour, and I already got the cash too. Also,” he said, lowering his voice although it wasn’t like doing so would keep his chatter away from his bros, “Joseph was like, you’re full of shit dude, so we bet on it. He’s putting in three hundred and I’m putting in three hundred, and when we win—BECAUSE WE’RE FUCKING WINNING—” the last came out as a yell that made me flinch—“I’ll split it with you fifty-fifty. You cool with that, Paul?”

“I’m down,” I said. So like eight hundred bucks in an hour. Not bad at all. “Pick me up then, let’s do this.”

“Alright, should be there in like twenty. Maybe thirty because—” He didn’t finish before the call ended.

• • • •

In the car, which was a big black SUV that Nick had said he was sneaking out of the garage, but really, he had his own keys and there was a Post-it note on the dash from his dad about how Nick should remember to fill it with premium if he ever had to fill it up, but anyway, in the SUV—where I sat in the front with Nick driving, with his two buddies in the back looking zoned out and staring out the window when they weren’t staring fixedly at the back of my head, which I observed via the rearview mirror, but anyway, I was worried at first about how drunk Nick was. Then I remembered that I had nothing to worry about. I was already dead anyway. But perhaps my condition was contagious. Perhaps Nick would wreck the shit out of this car and out would come three more of whatever the hell I was. We could become a circus, a traveling freak show. We’d go to small towns like the one we lived in and all the ones we knew of, places where good people would bring their good children and pick up the good rifles chained to the tables separating them from me—or us—and the music would play as they aimed at the targets painted on our chests.

The drive to wherever it was he was going was unusually silent. I’d never been around Nick’s crew, but I’d always had the impression that they had to be more talkative than this. But here they were silent and I had the impression that the two of them were scared of me, which, I had to grant them, was a pretty logical response considering just what I was.

“Show them the holes, Paul.”

“Right now?”

“Yeah, right now.”

So I unbuckled my seat belt—why did I even bother with them—and took off my shirt and got up on my knees on the seat itself, so that I was on my knees facing them, the two dudes trying to look politely disinterested. Nick turned one of the lights on and there was my pale chest with the three bullet holes lit up under the orange glare.

“Shit,” said one of them. I didn’t know which one was Joseph and which one was Petey. There was the taller one, and the fatter one.

“Touch it,” said Nick.

“Okay, okay.” And the taller one leaned over and put a finger in one hole. “Jesus, it’s a real hole.”

The other one plugged another hole with his finger. No messing around touching the edges, they just went straight for the real thing.

“This is fucking gross, Nick.”

“I told you. Remember the bet, Joseph? Fucking pay me.”

“Okay, okay, I will.” The fat one—Joseph—pulled out his wallet and slipped out three neat hundreds.

“Wait,” I said, “where’s my share?”

“That’s yours,” said Nick.

“Oh, okay.” I pocketed it from Joseph and then wondered how this betting thing worked. In fact Nick had gained nothing from it. But then it hadn’t been like he was about to lose the money in the first place, being the only one who’d known the truth about my situation.

The taller one—Petey—pulled out his wallet as well. He pulled out a one-dollar bill and rolled it up into a cigarette-sized thing, and then, after a little pause, as if he was contemplating something, he stuck it in one of my bullet holes and the two of them in the back began laughing their asses off.

Nick, glimpsing this, told me to grab the wheel.

“Why?” I asked.

“Just fucking do it.”

So I did, after sitting back down to get a good grip on it, and Nick pulled out a wad of what looked like twenties from his pocket, presumably what he was going to pay me with after all this was done. He peeled out a single twenty-dollar bill, rolled it into a cig, and stuck in the one of the other bullet holes.

“There,” he said, grinning as his buddies laughed again.

I rolled my eyes. It took some effort, but it worked and made me feel better.

• • • •

We arrived at a dirt lot with lots of dirt heaped up into lots of dirt mounds. There was no one around.

We got out—I’d kept the shirt off, figuring that it didn’t need a bullet hole too—and the others shivered and complained about the cold.

And then Nick brought out his suitcase from the trunk and put it on the ground. He opened it up and I recognized some of the guns he’d shown me already in private, and none of them were what he’d agreed on, the little thing that was his mom’s gun.

“Wait up,” I said. “We didn’t agree on this.”

“C’mon, Paul. These won’t even leave a mark. Basically another hole to match the three you got. It’s like, a once in a lifetime opportunity, you know?”

Joseph leaned in, and told me in a very loud whisper, “it’s because we’ll be recording this and he doesn’t want to look like a pussy with the bitch gun.”

“Fuck off, asshole. Look, Paul, just gimme a break, alright? Besides, Joseph is gonna cover—”

“What?”

“Shut the fuck up, Joseph. But yeah, you’re chipping in an extra hundred, right?”

“Only if I shoot.”

“I’m putting it five hundred, and I set this up in the first place. I’m the one shooting.”

“Wait,” I said. “Joseph, how much you got?”

“Shit,” he said, “like . . . ” and he pulled out his wallet and counted up the bills. I kept count as he flipped through the hundreds one by one. “I got six hundred,” he said triumphantly. “I’m shooting!”

“The fuck you are.” Nick turned to me. “C’mon, Paul. You and me, we go way back—”

“Yeah, like three days, when you found out.”

“We had it all worked out. You and me had a contract going.”

“Which you broke by bringing your fucking shitty ass guns,” I said.

“They’re not shitty. Look, this is a—”

“Hey,” said Joseph, “when do I get to shoot you?”

“How about both of you shut up,” I said. “You can both shoot me, just pay me both the five and the six hundred.”

“I go first,” said Nick.

“I’m paying more than him,” said Joseph. “I go first.”

“What about me?” said Petey.

Nick ignored him. “Look, how about this? I take half the first shot and you can take the rest of the first shot, and then we divide the second shot into halves too.”

“It’s a gunshot,” I said. “How do you divide a gunshot?”

“Maybe he can shoot half and I can shoot the other half.”

“That makes no sense—”

“Nick can go first,” said Joseph, “but I want a headshot.”

I said: “No.”

At the same time, Nick said: “Wait, I want that.”

“No headshots,” I said. “I like having eyes and stuff.”

“This puny fucking thing, you know, like, it’ll barely leave—”

“No,” I said. “Just shut up and shoot me in the chest already.”

“Fine,” he said, looking kinda pissed off, but only for a moment. He took out one of the sleek black things in the case and loaded it up. Meanwhile I saw Petey take out his phone, and handle it with one hand while the other took Nick’s.

“I’ll get Nick’s done this shot,” he said, “and Joseph’s the next.”

“Wait,” said Joseph, “use my phone first.”

“Fuck off, this—”

“Just shoot me already.”

“Yeah. Okay. Oh, man.” A big smile on his face like he just saw light in the dark. The area—lit by the car’s headlight for the most part, that and the faint half-moon light, and the glow of the phones held up like signal flares ready to record—and there in the gloom I saw Nick raise his pistol up, aiming right at me. Hopefully the chest.

I didn’t know how long my body would last. I thought of mom pulling my guts out, throwing up as she did so, but unable to clean it due to how filthy her hands were. In the small house, the awful schedule, the small pay, the Today show on every morning. I’d just made over a thousand bucks for this outing—five hundred from Nick, six from Joseph, and there was the three hundred from the bet, and the small sum that they had stuck in me during the drive here.

I thought of sliding that money across that table, that dinner table with mom. It felt lacking now. I could do more. Not just the next month’s rent or whatever. Something better.

It wasn’t that long until it’d be New Years. Our yearly ritual was waiting for the ball to drop at the end of the year, watching it happen sorta-live on TV. I still remembered her gripping her can of beer so tightly that it got crushed and a bit of it spilled over the top, and a bit ran out of the creases made in her grip. So we could go there, maybe. We would be in the crowd, and we would watch things there in the city, as a part of it rather than some viewer seeing it two hours after the event.

And then Nick fired and I got knocked to the ground and when I got back up Joseph did a crazy cheer and Petey just stared at me with two phones in two hands just recording me get up with really, no blood at all out of the wounds, and there was Nick going what’d I tell you to Joseph over and over. I fingered the new hole—it was near the others, very close to being part of the initial grouping. I didn’t feel a thing.

©2016 by J.B. Park.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JB Park’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Nightmare. His website is maybepark.com.

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

A Dirge for Prester John

Catherynne M. Valente | 5700 words

I. The Habitation of the Blessed

We carried him down to the river.

It churned: basalt, granite, marble, quartz—sandstone, limestone, soapstone. Alabaster against obsidian, flint against agate. Eddies of jasper slipped by, swirls of schist, carbuncle and chrysolite, slate, beryl, and a sound like shoulders breaking.

Fortunatus the Gryphon carried the body on his broad and fur-fringed back—how his wings were upraised like banners, gold and red and bright! Behind his snapping tail followed the wailing lamia twelve by twelve, molting their iridescent skins in grief.

Behind them came shrieking hyena and crocodiles with their great black eyes streaming tears of milk and blood.

Even still behind these came lowing tigers, their colors banked, and in their ranks monopods wrapped in high black stockings, carrying birch-bark cages filled with green-thoraxed crickets singing out their dirges.

The red and the white lions dragged their manes in the dust; centaurs buried their faces in blue-veined hands.

The peacocks closed the blue-green eyes of their tails.

The soft-nosed mules threw up their heads in broken-throated braying.

The panthers stumbled to their black and muscled knees, licking the soil from their tears.

On camels rode the cyclops holding out into the night lanterns which hung like rolling, bloodshot eyes, and farther in the procession came white bears, elephants, satyrs playing mourn-slashed pipes, pygmies beating ape-skin drums, giants whose staves drew great furrows in the road, and the dervish-spinning cannibal choir, their pale teeth gleaming.

Behind these flew low the four flame-winged phoenix, last of their race.

And after all of these, feet bare on the sand, skirts banded thick and blue about her waist, eyes cast downward, walked Hagia of the Blemmyae, who tells this tale.

II. The First Moveable Sphere

When we first found him, he was face-down in the pepper-fields, his skin blazed to a cracked and blistered scarlet, his hair sparse as thirsty grass.

The pygmies wanted to eat him. He must have been strong to have wandered this far, from whatever strange country—they should have the right to bisect his liver and take the strength, wet and dripping, into their tribe.

The red lion, Hadulph, nosed his maimed feet, and snuffled at his dark clothes.

“He smells of salt water and pressed flour,” he announced, “and he who smells of pressed flour knows the taste of baked bread, and he who knows the taste of baked bread is civilized, and we do not eat the civilized, unless they are already dead and related to us, which is a matter of religion and none of anyone’s business.”

I looked down at his shape between the black and red pepper plants, in their long rows like a chessboard. It looked like the end of a game to me: I stood over the toppled kingpiece, a big-shouldered knight who has managed, in her jagged L-shaped steps, to finally make forward progress. I rubbed the soft and empty space above my collarbone—like a fontanel, it is silky and pulsating, a mesh of shadow and meat under the skin, never quite closed, and each Blemmye finds their own way with it, but often we are caught, deep in thought, stroking the place where our head is not. I stroked it then, considering the flotsam that the desert wind had washed onto our hard black peppercorns like the sands of a beach.

“He is wretched, like a baby, wrinkled and prone and motherless. Take him to the al-Qasr, and iron him out until he is smooth,” I said quietly, and the pygmies grumbled, gnashing their tattooed teeth.

Hadulph took the stranger on his broad and rosy back, where the fur bristles between his great shoulder blades, and that is how Presbyter Johannes came into our lives on the back of one beast, and left on the back of another.

III. The Crystalline Heaven

Behind the ivory-and-amethyst pillars of the al-Qasr, which he insisted we rename the Basilica of St. Thomas, I sat with my hands demurely in my lap, fingering Hadulph’s flame-colored tail. We sat in rows like children—the pygmies picked at their ears, the phoenix ran sticks of cinnamon through their beaks, carving it for their nests, the monopods relaxed on their backs, wide feet thrust overhead, each toe ringed with silver and emerald. Grisalba, a lamia with a tail like water running over moss, combed her long black hair, looking bored.

John the Priest tried not to look at me. His hair had grown back, but it was white, whiter than a man his age should own.

I told him once while he ran his tongue over the small of my back that the sun had taken all his blood, and left him with nothing in his veins but light.

He, ever the good teacher, tried to make eye contact with each of us in turn, but he could not look at my eyes, he could not look down to the full curve of my high, sun-brown breasts, and the green eyes that stared calmly from their tips under a thick fringe of lashes. I blinked often, to interrupt his droning, and he tried to look only at where my head might be if I were a woman.

A-ve.

He repeated these words as if they had any meaning for us, sounding each syllable. We did not like Latin. It sat on our tongues like an old orange, sweet-sour and rind-ridden.

A. Ve.

A-ve Ma-ri-a.

A. Ve. Mari. A.

Grisalba yawned and picked at her tail, lazily slapping its tip against the chalcedony floor. Hadulph chuckled and bit into the consonants like elbow joints.

A-ve Ma-ri-a gra-ti-a ple-na. Ti like she. Ple like play. She plays, gratia plena, Maria plays, ave Maria gratia plena.

A. Ve. Mari. A. Gra. Tea. A. Plea. Na.

“I wonder what his sweat tastes like?” Grisalba murmured in my ear. I grinned, but he could not chide me, for that would mean glancing down past my nipple-eyes to the mouth-which-is-a-navel, and he would not risk it.

No, no. She plays. She; play. Shall we try the Pater Noster instead then?

Pa. Tear. No. Star.

IV. Saturn, Cold and Dry

The strange man lay on one of the fallen pillars in the central hall of the al-Qasr—the smooth tower of violet stone had crashed to the floor one day while the quarter-moon market bustled in the portico—tile-shards of gold and splinters of ebony came tumbling after it, and we could all see the stars through the hole it made, like coins dropped into the hand of heaven. A brace of tigers looked up from arguing with a two-faced apothecary about whether she should be allowed to sell the powdered testicles of greater feline castrati as aphrodisiacs; the lamia paused in their venom-dance; I placed an arm beneath my breasts and lifted my eyes from the scribe-work before me to the ceiling. We all looked back and forth from the fallen pillar to the hole in the roof, up and down, up and down: work to sky to ruined architecture.

Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes, I had copied out from one greenish sheet of pepper-leaf paper to another. Animals and their variegated parts exist, and the plants and the simple bodies exist, and we say that these and the like exist by nature.

The pillar had chipped its complex torus, and bitten into the onyx floor.

All the things mentioned present a feature in which they differ from things which are constituted by art. Each of them has within itself a principle of stationariness (in respect of place, or of growth and decrease, or by way of alteration).

The constellation of Taurus-in-Extremis, the Slaughtered Cow, could be seen winking through the broken wood, and ebony dust drifted down on a soft breeze off of the river.

Even motion can be called a kind of stationariness if it is compulsive and unending, as in the motion of the gryphon’s heart or the bamboo’s growth. On the other hand, a bed or a coat or anything else of that sort, insofar as it is a product of art, has innate impulses to change.

Rich black earth had spurted up around the ruptured floor. The pillar’s belly was swathed in it.

As an indication of this, take the well-known Antinoë’s Experiment: if you plant a bed and the rotting wood and the worm-bitten sheets in the deep earth, it will certainly and with the hesitation of no more than a season, which is to say no more than an ear of corn or a stalk of barley, send up shoots.

I could just glimpse the edge of the sardis-snake which guarded the entrance of the al-Qasr, ensuring that no folk who are not lamia and thereby licensed, could bring poison under its roof. Behind it and far off, the Cricket-star flickered as if in chirruping song.

A bed-tree would come up out of the fertile land, its fruit four-postered, and its leaves would unfurl as green pillows, and its stalk would be a deep cushion on which any hermit might rest. It is art which changes, which evolves, and nature which is stationary.

The quarter-moon market gave a collective shrug and went about itself, stepping over the purple column and leaving it where it had fallen—wasn’t it better, the cyclops murmured, to let a little light in, and have a nice place to stretch one’s feet? I glanced back at my thrice-copied treatise, tiresome as all secondhand treatises are, and finished the page.

However, since this experiment may be repeated with bamboo or gryphon or meta-collinarum or trilobite, perhaps it is fairer to say that animals and their parts, plants and simple bodies are artifice, brother to the bed and the coat, and that nature is constituted only in the substance in which these things may be buried—that is to say, soil and water, and no more.

U.

By the time we laid the stranger out on the pillar, it had grown over with phlox and kudzu and lavender and pepperwort, and we rested his battered head on a thatch of banana leaves. He moaned and retched like a sailor coughing up the sea, and I held him while he wracked himself clean. It was past the fishing hour when his eyes slitted open and his moth-voice rasped:

“Thomas, I came searching for Thomas and his tomb, the Apostle, where is the Apostle?”

Hadulph and I exchanged glances. “What is an Apostle?” the lion said.

V. Jupiter, Hot and Moist

We lay down on the altar that is a throne that was a sacrificial mound before the al-Qasr was the Basilica, and when we woke, the nave that was the portico was full of roses and partridges and orthodox hymns, and peacocks lay sleeping on my shoulders. Their blue heads pressed on me like bruises: the pulse of their throats, the witness of their tails.

“Say it,” he said. He sat me on the ivory chair and knelt at my knees, the beauty that all supplicants possess sitting full and shining on his thick features. He closed his kiss over my navel-mouth and his tears were like new wax. “Say it,” he whispered.

The ivory chair is long; it curls at its ends into arm-rests in the shape of ram’s horns, severed from the sea-goat when the first caravan settled in this endless valley, the first enclave of bird and monopod and gryphon and cricket and phoenix and pygmy—and blemmye. And they camped on the beach-head and pulled from the sea with their silver spears a fatted kid, and ate the fat of its tail sizzling from the driftwood fire, and in time those first horns were affixed to the long chaise which became a sacrificial plank which became an altar which became a throne which became my pillow as his weight pressed the small of my back against the cold ivory—

“Please,” he said, and wept, for he had tried not to, tried not to brush his palm against my eyelid, tried not to run his fingers across the teeth in my belly, tried not to glance at the soft place where my head is not. He had tried not to lift me onto the nacreous chair, and tried not to enter me like a postulant sliding his hands into the reliquary to grip the dry bone. Virginity confers strength, he had said. It is the pearl which purchases paradise.

I had led him to the edge of the river which churns basalt against schist, and showed him the trick with the bed—but I had used my favorite lapis-and-opal ring. I moved his hand as I would a child’s, digging the furrow by moonlight and the river’s din, placing the ring in the earth, covering it with moist, warm soil. Wait, I had said, till the pepper blooms black, and you will see what paradise I can purchase at the price of a ring.

We waited; I learned my Latin declensions: rosa, rosae, rosae, rosam, rose. The pepper harvest piled up black and red fruits; the stalks withered; the snows came and went again. Rex. Regis. Regi. Regem. Rege.

I took him to the river which churns agate against marble and showed him the thing we had made: a sapling, whose stem was of silver, whose leaves curled deep and blue, lapis dark as eyes, veined in quartz flaws. Tiny fruits of white opal hung glittering from its slender branches, and the moon washed it in christening light. This is hell, he quavered, as I stroked the jeweled tree. It seemed to shrink from him in shame. I touched his face, his unyielding neck; I wrenched his head towards me, and he stared into the eyes that blink from my breasts, the cobalt leaves peeking around my ribs like the heads of curious peacocks. At the ends of the earth is paradise; look around you, the earth is nowhere to be seen, I had whispered, and I do not need pearls.

As if his hand was dragged through the night by a hook of bone, he had touched the place where my head is not, the soft and pulsing shadowy absence, the skin stretched and taut, and beneath our tree of blue stone he had spilled his seed into me for the first time—it seemed safer than to spill it into the ground.

“Say it, please, Hagia, say it,” he cried, and the muscles of his neck strained in his cry, and I held his face in my hands, and his tears rolled over my knuckles, and I sung quietly under him, and my voice filled the empty choir:

Ave Maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus—

VI. Mars, Hot and Dry

Fortunatus clawed the sand of our crumbling amphitheater, with the nations of our nation gathered—as much as the nations are inclined to gather, which is to say lazily and without much intent of discussing anything. He was nervous; the color in his tail was low and banked, and his throat dry. The hulking beast did not love speaking, and he loved less that his size bought him respect he did not feel he had earned. So everyone listened, and he hated them for listening.

“I think,” he began, his beak glittering gold in the glare of the sun, “that we ought to make him king.”

“Why?” shouted Grisalba, trying to wrangle a slab of honeycomb with her sister, who had thought she was invited to a festival, and not a makeshift parliament. “When Abibas the Mule-King died, we planted him and if we have any disputes we take it to the mule-tree and it’s been as good a government as you could ask for.”

Fortunatus frowned, and the glare went out of his gold. “Abibas has dropped his leaves and it has been far too long since he gave us any velvet-nosed fruit on which to hang the hopes of primogeniture. The Priest will not be partial—there are no other creatures like him among us, no faction for him to favor. And,” the gryphon cast his yellow eyes to the sand, speaking softly—yet the amphitheater did its work, and not one of us failed to hear him, “he must be lonely. There is no one here for him, no one of his kind who understands his passion for the Ap-oss-el, no one to speak his snarled language and look him in the eye without reflecting their own strangeness back to him. I pity him—do you not?”

“He will make us convert!” cried the monopods, snapping their garters in consternation. “He will make the al-Qasr into a church and we will all crawl around begging forgiveness for who knows what!”

Fortunatus shrugged his great, shaggy shoulders. “And when Gamaliel the Phoenix was queen, she called the al-Qasr an aerie, and set it aflame every hundred years. We rebuilt it, and called it what we pleased. This is the way of government. That is the way of the governed. How can he ask for more than she did? Besides, it is a lonely thing to be king, and he is the loneliest of us.”

I held a long green canopy over my torso with both hands to keep out the sun; a pair of rooks alighted on it, and their weight dragged the warm cloth to my shoulders. I said nothing, but scowled and practiced my verbs silently.

Regno, regnas, regnat. Regnamus, regnatis, regnant.

I reign, you reign, he or she reigns over.

VII. The Sun, Benevolent Gold

“My name is John.”

His blistered lips were watered, and he had not yet noticed that I held him in my arms, propped against the breasts he would call demonic and unnatural. He had not yet called us all demons, succubi, inferni—he only asked for bread, and more water.

He had not yet screamed when Hadulph spoke, or trembled when the crickets chirped in iambic rhymes. He had not yet called us all damned, demanded tribute to kings we had never heard of, forbade anyone not made in God’s image to touch his flesh.

He had not yet castigated us for our ignorance of the Trinity, or preached the virgin birth in our mating season. He had not yet searched the lowlands for a fig tree we ought not to touch, or gibbered in the antechamber, broken by our calm and curious gazes, which we fixed on our pet day and night, waiting for him to perform some new and interesting trick.

He had not yet dried his tears, and seen how the al-Qasr was not unlike a Basilica, and how the giants were not unlike Nephilim, and how Hadulph was not unlike the avatar of St. Mark, and the valley of our nations was not unlike Eden. He had not yet decided that all of the creatures of the world were not unlike holy things—except for the blemmyae, except for me, whose ugliness could not be borne by any sacred sight. He had not yet called us his mission, and followed Grisalba home trying to explain transubstantiation, which she, being the niece of a cannibal-dervish, understood well enough, but pretended to misconstrue so that he would follow her home.

He had not yet called her a whore and tried to make her do penance with a taper in each hand. She had not yet sunk her teeth into his cheek, and sent him purpled and pustulant back to Hadulph.

Hadulph had not yet licked him clean, roughly and patiently, as cats will, and called him his errant cub. He had not yet fallen asleep against the scarlet haunch of the lion.

He had not yet retreated into the al-Qasr to study our natures and embrace humility, ashamed of his pronouncements and his pride. I had not yet brought him barley-bread and black wine, or watched over him through three fevers, or showed him, when he despaired, how my collarbone opens into a sliver of skin like clouds stretched over a loom.

He had not yet come crawling through the dark, shame-scalded, to hear my belly speak, and read to him from the green pepper-papyrus of my daily calligraphy, just to hear the way I said my vowels. He had not yet said that my accent sounded of seraphim.

“My name is John,” he said, “I . . . I think I have become lost.”

VIII. Venus, Cold and Moist

The long bones are found in the limbs, and each consists of a body or shaft and two extremities. The body, or diaphysis, is cylindrical, with a central cavity termed the medullary canal.

The Presbyter cloistered: cross-sections of satyr and blemmye are spread out on a low desk of sethym wood, the male blemmye with limbs outstretched, encircled with diagrammatic symbols as though he is pinioned to a wheel, showing the compact perfection of his four extremities, which correspond to the elements. The satyr was bent double, clutching her hooves, a goat-haired ouroboros.

“Please concentrate, John,” begs Fortunatus, his conscripted tutor. “If you do not learn our anatomies how will you live among us? How will you help portion the harvest if you do not know that the phoenix require cassia and cardamom for their nests, while the satyr cannot eat the pepper plants that the rest of us prize? How will you build, brick upon brick, if you do not know that the blemmye orient their houses in clusters of four, facing outward, while the monopods have no houses at all, but lie beneath their own feet, like mice beneath toadstools? How will you sell your goods at the quarter-moon market if you do not know that the lamia especially love honeycomb still clung with lethargic bees, while the dervishes eat nothing but their dead?”

“Where I come from, all men have the same shape,” says the Presbyter, his eyes bloodshot from reading, unwilling to acknowledge the scribe, best of his own discipuli, who translates each of the illuminated anatomicals into Latin so that he will believe them true—for he has told them that Latin is the language of truth, and the vulgar tongues the dialects of lies.

“That is a sad country, and you should give thanks to your God that you need not return there, where every face is another’s twin,” the gryphon says with a long sigh.

“All the same I long for it, and wish myself there, where nothing is strange,” John murmurs to himself, and stares past me to the long, candle-thin windows. His hair still shows scalp in patches, but the scalp itself is not so scorched and peeling as it has been. He shakes himself from dreams of Jerusalem and looks at the wheel of flesh before him.

“I do not understand the blemmyae,” he announces, without turning his head to me. “They carry their faces in their chests and have no head—I suppose the brain is just behind the heart then, in the chest cavity—but how,” the Priest blushes, and shifts in his seat so that it will be clear that he does not address the indecorous question to me, “how would she nurse a child, Fortunatus?”

The gryphon twitches his wings—once, twice.

“Why, she would but weep.”

IX. Mercury, Lined with Quicksilver

I admit it was I who showed him the mirror.

We think nothing of it—it is only a mirror, and we are not vain. Rastno the Glassblower made it soon after the al-Qasr was erected, and it was hung up in the portico before the pillar fell, draped in damask, for its visions were distracting—but for Rastno’s sake we did not wish to dishonor his best-beloved child.

Rastno was a phoenix, and he reasoned that his glass should be finest of all, since he feared no flame but his own. And true to this he filled the capital with beads and baubles and bowls and chalices, plates and amphorae and children’s toys. And mirrors, mirrors of every shape. But the mirror I showed to John was his last, for when Rastno lay down in his pyre he did not rise up again—we do not know why fewer of the orange and scarlet birds return each burning season; some say the cassia crop has been bad, some say they are suicides. Rastno was one of those who went into the flame and did not come out again, but laughing before he sparked his embers, he said that the mirror he fired in his own feathers would be a wonder beyond even the churning river of stone.

When we dragged the shard of glass from the charred bones and blowing ashes of his pearl-lined nest, when we cleared from it the blackened ends of Rastno’s beak and talons, and scraped the boiled eye-wet and blood from its surface, we found a sheet of silver so pure that it showed the whole world, wherever we wished to look, into any dragon-ridden corner of the planed earth.

It disturbed us all, and taught us only that our land was best, best by a length of ten giants, and we covered it—but hung it in the hall all the same, as funerary rite.

“Why did you not bury his remains, if that is what you do with your dead?” John asked, when I rolled the bronze-set glass from its resting place behind a bolt of salamander-silk. I shuddered.

“Would you love a tree whose trunk was ash, whose foliage was burnt and blistered flesh, black with flames you cannot see, but the tree remembers? What terrible fruit it would bear! Better that he be eaten, as the dervishes do, or given to the river, like the blemmyae, than to suffer planting!”

I showed, him, yes, but he was happy in those years, and his belly was fat, and he gripped me gleefully by the hips in the late afternoons and kissed the place where my head is not, opened my legs and said his favorite mass. He hardly even insisted I speak Latin anymore, or take any saltless Eucharist he might fashion, and only cried the name of his Apostle in his sleep. How could I know?

He stood for a long time, watching a city with domes of dust and crosses of gold and chalcedony flicker by, watching its stony streets run rivulets of blood like the porches of a dozen butchers, watched horses clatter over altars and books burn like phoenix, curl black at the edges and never return. He stood with the drawn damask clutched in his white hand, and watched a sullen orange sun set on the city of dust, and his beard grew even in that moment, his scalp showed pink through his hair, and his spine became a bent scythe, until he was an old man in my sight, and he wept like a nursing mother.

X. The Moon, Benevolent Silver

“Why didn’t they come?” Prester John coughed and spat; his blood was bright on the pillow, my hand. “I wrote them a letter, I sent twelve gryphon to deliver it. I wrote them, but they didn’t come. I told them it was beautiful here, I told them it was full of virtuous beasts, and jewels, and every fruit imaginable. I told them about the al-Qasr and even the blemmyae, oh, Hagia, I told them you were a beauty, I told them about the mirror, I told them where I was, and that they only had to come for me and I would save Jerusalem myself. Why did no one come for me?”

“I don’t know, my love,” I whispered, and mopped the sweat on his brow.

“Perhaps I am being punished. I am not righteous; I have sinned in this place. I told them I had converted the land, and you say the Ave as well as anyone, but you don’t mean it, and I knew it, even in the days when I thought myself a missionary, I knew when you put out your tongue for your first communion that you had no faith in your heart, but I did not care, because my fingers could touch your tongue, the sweet tongue of your belly, and I would have given a hundred false communions for that tongue. I lied when I wrote to them, I lied, but they would not understand, they would think you were devils, and I could not bear for a friar to look on my Hagia and spit at her.”

The lines around his eyes over which I had run my fingertips so many times, which I had imagined deepening into a grandfather’s wrinkles, had done their promised work. I leaned over his prostrate form and let my eyelashes flutter against his cheek.

“Perhaps they never got the letter. Perhaps they did not believe it, for who would believe such a tale in a land where all men’s shapes are the same? Perhaps they were too consumed with their horses and bloodletting to come so far. Perhaps they sent someone, and he crossed eight or nine rivers, an inland sea, a jungle thick with panthers and bats, only to perish in the great desert which separates us from the world. Perhaps even now there is a man—a doctor? A clerk?—lying face-down in the sand, his bones whitening under the bone-parched sky, clutching a second letter in his skeletal hand, a letter which says: John, we hear, and we will welcome you home. Perhaps no such man ever set out. Does it matter? I am here, your own sweet succubus—remember how long you called me succubus, after all the other names had silenced themselves on your lips?—is that not enough?”

He asked for water, and in my ears he was wretched as a baby, wrinkled and prone and motherless on a pillar, asking for water for his blistered lips. I held his cup for him, until he pushed it away.

“It is enough,” he rasped, and the rasp became a rattle. “But do you think,” said Prester John, “that if I could bury Jerusalem in this earth, a Jerusalem-tree would grow on the banks of the river, with little mangers for fruit, and a trunk of the True Cross?”

I pressed his clammy cheek to my breast, and our eyes fluttered together, until his were still.

XI. The Spindle of Necessity

We carried him down to the river.

There was some talk of burying him, but I knew that though his book demands burial, he would not like it. He wants the paradise that is bought with pearls, not the pearl itself, which sprouts and blossoms. I would have sat at his roots and told him how Fortunatus was trying to form a school to carry on the language of the Lonely King, but we all snickered; everyone knew that the lion-bird could never keep his declensions straight. I would have told him how the youngest dervishes barely in their first sandals jump and dance under the portico, singing: A! Ve! Marry-A! She plays, she plays! A! Ve! I would have sat beneath his leaves and held my tongue against his fruit, and called it Eucharist. But it is selfish of me to want to take him from the angels, who he had promised were more beautiful even than lamia.

We carried him down to the river and delivered his body to the deeps. The crush of the stones broke his body bone from sinew, and the boulders were stained red with the splash of his fluids. The current soon took him under, and we were left with the crash and grind of it echoing into the night. He had gone from us, and the procession turned under the stars, Virgo-in-Repose wheeling overhead, back to the al-Qasr which was once more the al-Qasr.

I sat cross-legged by the riverbank until the sun came rolling back around, like a whetstone strapped to a drowning man’s back. Grisalba waited by me, her tail all withered and dark, her dry, splay-fingered hand warm on my shoulder.

“Salt,” I said, finally. “His sweat tasted of pressed flour, pressed flour and salt water.”

I took the lamia’s hand and we walked from the cacophony of granite against alabaster against flint against bone.

In later years, the river would throw up a stone stained red, so bright it was as a ruby in all that dusty rock. When we see these, we throw up our arms and cry the name of Prester John, who is with the river and in the river and the river is with us, and the lapis-tree waves its branches, as if it remembers, and he is with the river and with me, his red, red stones and his high blue tree.

©2007 by Catherynne M. Valente. Originally published in Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

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

I've Come to Marry the Princess

Helena Bell | 5860 words

Before Jack can apologize to Nancy, she has to believe that dragons exist.

Nancy’s mad at him because they were supposed to perform a skit at the talent show and he stood her up. They’ve been practicing it for two summers. It’s called “I’ve Come to Marry the Princess.” When Jack didn’t show, Nancy had to go on stage all by herself. He didn’t ditch her on purpose; his dragon egg was hatching and he needed to be there. Jack thinks Nancy would forgive him if he told her this, but she hasn’t given him the chance.

Nancy said her parents would give him a ride home at the end of camp this year and he doesn’t know if the offer is still good. He hopes it is. It would give him a chance to apologize, the two of them sitting on the gray velvet bench seat of her mother’s station wagon, the baby dragon between them.

“I told you dragons were real,” Jack would say.

“Dragons eat people, you know.”

Jack arrived at camp six years and three weeks ago. His mother dropped him off at his cabin with his trunk, book bag, and dragon egg. The trunk held three bathing suits, fourteen t-shirts, ten pairs of shorts, white socks, and underwear, each with Jack’s name written in black permanent marker in thick, block letters. Inside the book bag were five books from the Craven County Public School recommended summer reading list, a Walkman, various toiletries, an Uno deck, stationery, envelopes, stamps, and four bags of chocolate bars he’d stolen from his older brother Robert. Robert was going to a different camp, in the mountains, and Jack knew Robert wouldn’t notice anything was missing until he got there.

Sometimes Jack still gets letters from Robert. Robert ends each one with a running tally of how many chocolate bars Jack owes him now. It’s in the millions. “Because of interest,” Robert says.

Jack also gets letters from his parents. They ask him questions about sailing and motorboating and archery and tell him to be good, they’ll be there to pick him up at the end of the summer. They never do. Every August Jack drags his belongings to a new cabin and different campers arrive. In the fall they learn to play instruments: harp, violin, piano. In the spring it’s always math camp, science camp, or historical re-enactment. There are two weeks in the winter when adults fill the cabins. They play soccer and baseball, jump in the river, and stay up all night in the mess hall playing loud music. His counselor says next year they’re opening up a space camp, but he’s been saying that for a while now. Jack has had the same counselor each summer for seven years; he never remembers Jack’s name.

“This your first year?” he asks. “Don’t worry. You’re going to love it. It can be rough at first, but at the end of four weeks, no one ever wants to leave. You staying for one session or two? Most of us stay for two.”

In January and February the camp lets in high schoolers and college students to practice standardized tests: PSAT, LSAT, SAT, DAT, MCAT, PCAT, and VCAT. Jack wasn’t very good at them at first, but he’s been catching on. Before Nancy stopped talking to him, she lent him her Cosmo magazines for their quizzes. Nancy said there’s an art to multiple-choice questions. There’s always the right answer, the wrong answer that you want to pick anyway, the silly answer, and the answer that leads to the inevitable tragedy of human experience. If you read enough of them, you can figure out which one is which by the way they’re phrased, or the way they’re ordered. When in doubt, pick C, she says. Nancy said she hasn’t studied for a history test in three years because she knows exactly how to find out the key result of the Battle of New Orleans just by the way the teacher uses conjunctions. Jack told her there was no result. The war was over before the battle even started. He knew this because he had to pretend to die on a hill, his foot rotting from gangrene. Then the cook got mad at them because they stole too much cheese for special effects and they had to re-enact treaty signings the next year. And the year after that and the year after. Jack hated it. All they did was stand around in wool coats and sweat.

Even though he’s not very good, Jack has always secretly preferred standardized test camp. They stay inside and read and take snack breaks. He also likes the logic puzzles.

• • • •

A camper with access to the theater hut has six chances to apologize to a girl. The hut holds the following items: carrots, daffodils, earmuffs, and a fire extinguisher. The following requirements must be satisfied:

The girl does not like vegetables.
The girl does not like flowers.
The girl’s ears are quite warm.
The girl is not on fire.

Which one of the following could be a complete and accurate list of ways the boy could be forgiven?

• • • •

The dragon egg was a gift from his grandmother. She said she’d found it in the Wal-Mart parking lot, near the cart return. Jack used to get letters from her, but she died at the end of the first summer. Jack thinks that’s why his parents forgot to come pick him up.

When Jack and his mother first arrived, they drove past the girls’ cabins so they could say hello to one of the counselors. She was related to Jack, a first cousin, but he’d never met her before and had a hard time remembering her name. Whenever he saw her he always nodded and called her “Cuz” because that sounded like something Robert would say. She nodded back. She could never remember his name either. “Pleased to meet you, Jeremy.”

She introduced him to some of the girls in her cabin, girls who were about Jack’s age. Some of them looked as annoyed to be there as he was, which was comforting in its own way.

“They seem nice,” his mother said.

Jack’s cabin was not as nice as the girls’ cabin. The screen door was falling off its hinges and the wood smelled of damp and rot. Jack’s mom kept saying it had “character.” The bunk beds were all different heights and every surface had been written on in multi-colored markers: messages from previous campers and dirty limericks and crude drawings. Jack thought the messages in the girls’ cabin were probably nicer and more intelligent, with cartoon hearts and flowers to match their comforters and Laura Ashley sheets. He was wrong. Nancy told him the girls’ cabins were just as bad-word filled as the boys, that’s just the way camps were.

“But our diagrams are more anatomically correct,” she said.

Jack’s counselor introduced himself, and then the other boys. Jack watched as the counselor patted each of them on the back and surreptitiously pulled back the collars of their shirts where mothers had written out names like Bob and Timothy and George in the same black permanent marker that Jack’s mom used. Jack wondered if the counselor had his name in big block letters somewhere on his clothes too. Just in case he forgot it. Maybe there was a store they all went to that sold pre-named clothing.

When his mother finally left (“Be good”, “Okay,” “Make friends,” “Okay,” “Have fun,” “Okay,” “Don’t get eaten by a bear,” “Okay”), Jack grabbed his dragon egg and went out into the woods looking for a place to hide it.

• • • •

This is how I’ve Come to Marry the Princess goes:

Jack knocks on a pretend door. Nancy answers. She’s a guard.

“I’ve come to marry the princess,” Jack says.

“The princess?”

“Yes, the princess.”

“Okay. I’ll go ask her.”

The guard turns around to talk to the king. That’s Jack now.

“A knight’s at the door. He says he’s come to marry the princess.”

“The princess?” Jack says.

“Yes, the princess.”

“Okay. I’ll go ask her.”

Then the King tells this to the queen who finally goes to ask the princess. That’s Jack again.

“There’s a knight at the door. He says he wants to marry you,” Nancy says.

“Marry me?” Jack says.

“Yes. What do you think?”

“No, no, no, a thousand times no.”

They rotate again until Jack is the knight and the guard tells him No, no, no, a thousand times no.

“Then you must die!” and the knight stabs the guard with a foam sword.

Then he knocks on the door again.

• • • •

When the egg didn’t hatch that first summer, Jack wondered if it was defective. His grandmother had been certain it would hatch, and yet by September it was just as dull and solid as it could be. In the winter he asked one of the men in his cabin to take a look at it. He was a recently divorced ER doctor whose therapist said fresh air and exercise and socialization would do him good. He arrived the first day with a duffel bag full of mass-market paperbacks and refused to speak to anyone else in the cabin except Jack.

Jack asked him if he knew anything about eggs. The man asked if he meant dinosaur eggs. His son used to like dinosaurs.

“It’s not a dinosaur egg.”

“Robin?”

“No.”

“Chicken?”

“No.”

“Platypus? Snake? Ostrich?”

Jack pulled the egg out of his backpack and showed him. “Dragon. Don’t know what kind.”

The ER doctor rolled the egg around on the floor and knocked on its shell. “Looks more like a rock to me.”

The doctor suggested that he place it somewhere cool and dry, where it could get plenty of sunlight. Either it would hatch or it wouldn’t. No way to tell for sure without cracking it open to see what was actually inside.

Jack met Nancy the second summer. He went to his cousin’s cabin on the first day of camp because he knew his mother would want him to. He went early, when he knew there wouldn’t be many girls for his cousin to introduce him to. There was a freckled girl named Anna, and Nancy. Nancy didn’t talk.

“Don’t worry,” his cousin told them, “it’s his first year too. Isn’t it, Justin.”

“Sure,” he said.

His cousin told him Nancy never talked to anyone. Her parents were hoping camp would help.

“My parents thought camp would help too,” Jack said.

Nancy didn’t talk to anyone the first week, nor the second. The boys in Jack’s cabin said Nancy had escaped from juvenile prison and was hiding out. Other cabins had their own rumors.

Nancy was a Kennedy.

Nancy had her tongue ripped out by wolves.

Nancy ripped out her own tongue.

Nancy had tattoos.

Nancy had no parents.

Nancy had seventeen parents, the result of a series of divorces, kidnappings, and illegal adoptions.

Nancy was an alien.

Nancy was a witch.

Nancy didn’t exist.

Jack thought Nancy had it pretty easy. She could join any group she wanted, do anything she wanted, and no one would stop her because they didn’t know what she’d do to them. One time a girl pushed her into the dirt and Nancy got up and then shook the girl’s hand. She didn’t smile or frown; she gripped the girl’s hand in both of hers and then walked away. Later the girl broke her nose after being hit in the face with the boom of a sailboat. Nancy wasn’t there, and that’s when the witch rumor started. But when the girl with the broken nose came back from the hospital, she told everyone that Nancy was just a nice girl who didn’t talk much. And the rumor went away.

“People aren’t nearly as mean as other people think,” Nancy told him.

The boys in Jack’s cabin weren’t mean, but there were too many of them and Jack had a hard time keeping them straight. So he divided them into groups. There were the boys who had been coming to Camp all their lives and already had all the friends they wanted to make. Jack called them the Jonathans. And the boys who were there for the first time but already knew how to sail or play sports or who had mothers who sent care packages every day filled with candy and Mad magazines and soda other contraband. Those were the Roberts. They were always more popular than the Jonathans, until their newness wore off and they became Jonathans themselves.

“This your first summer?” Jonathan asked Jack. “It must be. I’d remember you. Your parents send you with anything good?”

Jack had three trunks now. Summer, winter, and in-between. The summer trunk held five bathing suits, six shorts, six t-shirts, and twenty pairs of underwear. Every time he sent his laundry out with the other campers, more clothes came back. Sometimes they had other boys’ names written in the collars: Barnabus, Crispin, Derrek, and Pierre. Jack never wore these clothes. He was too scared of running into their original owners. Sometimes he wondered if he should take their names too, then maybe people would remember him; maybe another mother would come and pick him up.

That first day, Jack’s mother set up an account for him at the camp store. She said he could buy whatever he wanted, within reason. It’d make his father happy if he got some camp clothes: a hat, sweatshirt, maybe even some of those rubber sandals to wear in the river with the Morehead wheel sewn in white thread on the ankle.

By spring of his fourth year Jack had run up a tab of $1,847. He didn’t only buy clothes: the store also sold stamps, toiletries, and a stale tasting candy bar some camper’s father invented that no one ever ate. Even the ducks wouldn’t touch it. Around Christmas the store sold ornaments, wrapping paper, and better tasting chocolate. Jack liked the store best in February. They had an entire display case of No. 2 pencils stacked in a giant No. 2 pencil pyramid. You had to ask for help to take one. Jack bought several throughout the day, every day, just hoping it would crumble when the cashier reached over to get him one. It never did.

• • • •

When the knight knocks on the door the second time, the king answers.

“I’ve come to marry the princess.”

“The princess?”

“Yes, the princess.”

“Alright, I’ll go ask her.”

• • • •

Nancy was the only one who remembered Jack from year to year. “I’ve got a really good memory,” she said. “I’m constantly correcting people when they tell a story wrong. Details are important, unless they’re made up.”

Nancy told Jack he should try the administrator’s office and ask for his paperwork. “You would have to be registered for each session, each camp, otherwise they wouldn’t let you stay,” she explained. “Bills, medical records, test scores, all of them have to be recorded in the system. Ask for it, any of it, and it’ll collapse.”

Sometimes Nancy suggested that he just walk out the gate and down the highway. He could steal a horse from the barn, or one of the boats. Jack didn’t think those were very feasible, and he didn’t have a very good sense of direction.

Why not the bus? She asked. It dropped campers off at the Episcopal Church right downtown. Didn’t he say he lived on the river? He could walk from there. If he didn’t try, then it was his fault.

“When I was seven years old,” Jack said, “I went to a school that put younger students at tables with older students. Lunch was delivered to the head of the table, and it was the job of the older student to pass them out. That year, I was at a long table. There were two head students, and twelve of us. They passed out eleven plates. I guess each one of them thought the other one had taken care of me. I was reading a book, so I didn’t notice until I could hear the scrape of everyone’s knives. I waited until someone noticed. No one did. I thought about raising my hand, but I didn’t know which one of them to ask. By then it had been so long that I thought I had to think of a reason why I’d waited. They were going to have to ask the kitchen for another plate. One of them would get in trouble. So I kept waiting. I pretended to keep reading, and then I’d have an excuse. Then lunch was over, and I was still hungry, but no one had to be embarrassed about it.”

“That’s stupid,” she said.

“It happened again the next day, and I kept reading. I learned to stuff an apple in my pocket in the morning. I ate bigger breakfasts. Finally, by the third week, I spoke up. ‘Excuse me?’ I said to the older one, a girl. She seemed nice. ‘I don’t have a plate.’”

“Did she give you one?”

“It turned out I was at the wrong table. By the time she’d straightened out, my friend William had eaten his lunch and mine, like he’d been doing every day prior. He was mad at me after that and wouldn’t talk to me.”

“There are these boys in my school,” Nancy said. “They’re on the swim team. They’re always hungry. After lunch they walk around the cafeteria and go up to any girl who still has fries on her plate, or pizza. ‘You really want to eat that?’ they say. ‘You don’t want a paunch, do you?’ They always said ‘paunch.’ We learned it in English class. We all liked the way our lips quivered when we said it. Paunch. ‘Come on,’ they said. ‘We’re helping you out.’ Some girls, they just hold up their trays when they see those boys coming.”

“Why didn’t the school do something?”

“No one complained. The girls didn’t mind. Some girls, they got extra fries just so they could give them away. Of course, some girls spat on theirs, or brought in extra hot peppers or other things to dice up and put on their pizza, just to see what would happen. One boy got sick; he threw up all during fifth period.”

“Did they stop?”

“No. They were stubborn and stupid, like you.”

Last summer, Jack did try the bus. It took him all the way into town, where the campers’ parents were waiting at the Episcopal Church parking lot. Jack could see the top of his house over the trees. The driver wouldn’t let him off until a guardian signed for him. They waited all day. Jack asked the driver if he could go inside the church and call his house from the office.

“How do I know you’ll call your mother? You could be calling a stranger.”

“You could call.”

“Camp told me to sit on the bus and wait till all the campers’ mothers came and signed for them. Can’t leave the bus.”

They waited all night and the next morning the bus driver took him back to camp. A counselor checked his name off a clipboard.

“You’re going to love it here, Jack. What instrument do you play? Did you forget it at home? Don’t worry, we have spares.”

In June, when he saw Nancy, she sighed. “When I never see you again, I’ll know that something good happened.”

• • • •

There’s always a reason a boy finds a dragon egg. Jack didn’t have a reason. His grandmother gave it to him even though he’d asked for a soccer ball. All the boys at camp would know how to play soccer and he wanted to practice before he went.

“It’s an egg,” he said.

“A dragon egg,” his grandmother said.

“Does that make a difference?”

“You’ll be the only one at camp with one, I’m sure,” she said.

“Don’t dragons eat people?”

“That’s just a rumor. Make friends with it.”

He thought about telling people it was a soccer ball. A special one. That was heavy. And didn’t roll very well. And clinked when you shook it (“Don’t do that,” his grandmother said, “it’ll get mad at you”).

The only thing Jack liked about the egg was the thought of having his very own dragon. One that could fly, and speak telepathically, and breathe fire. But after the first summer, and the next, and the next after, he thought maybe his dragon was defective. What kind of dragon would come from a Wal-Mart parking lot?

Jack imagined flying over fields and forests in a dragon-sized silver shopping cart, the balls of his feet balancing on the metal bar as the cart’s front end rose and rose, right into the clouds.

“Rawr,” he said. “Behold the conquering hero.”

When the dragon finally hatched, it was blue. Blue eyes, blue scales, even blue tinted nails at the end of its delicate blue feet. Its wings were membranous wisps that flapped weakly against the dragon’s sides.

“Don’t worry,” he told the dragon. “You’ll grow into them. Then you can take us home.”

Jack thought long and hard about a name. Names had power. An evil wizard could ensnare his dragon by guessing its true name.

“Pencil,” Jack said. “No one would guess that.”

He thought about naming it Nancy, but if anyone in his life were to suddenly turn into an evil wizard, it would be her. Then the name wouldn’t be hard to guess at all.

• • • •

The king asks the queen who asks the princess, who still says no, no, no, a thousand times no. The knight kills the king and then asks the queen, kills her, and finally knocks on the princess’ door.

“No, no, no, a thousand times no,” she says.

The knight kills the princess, sees what he has done, and says “Now I must die!” And he does.

Before the audience has a chance to react, Jack and Nancy get up and repeat the skit, but faster.

Then they do it a third time where the knight kills anyone who answers the door.

They practiced it a dozen times, then two dozen. Sometimes they got mixed up and the king was wearing the princess’ wig when he told the knight no. Sometimes both Jack and Nancy were the princess, saying no to each other. Sometimes they were both the knight thrusting swords into each other’s bellies.

The skit wasn’t original. Robert and his friends performed it in the mountains; that’s how Jack knows about it. Even though he’s never seen it at his camp, Jack fears another cabin will do the skit before they have a chance.

Nancy says it doesn’t matter if theirs is the first, last, or the thousandth I’ve come to marry the princesses. Theirs will be the best.

• • • •

It is given that an average camp theater stage is 20’ wide and 14’ deep.

It is given that Jack suffers from a recurring nightmare in which he forgets to stab Nancy in the stomach and kisses her instead.

Quantity A: The speed Jack can run behind the curtain to vomit in a bucket placed there for just this purpose.

Quantity B: (x-2y)(x+2y) = 4.

D. The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.

• • • •

Every Sunday night at summer camp, they have devotions. The counselor reads a passage from something inspirational: the bible, Chicken Soup for the Soul, a favorite novel. It depends a lot on the counselor. Nancy said her counselor liked to read the embarrassing stories from Seventeen magazine so all the girls would know that it wasn’t just them who passed gas in front of boys, or got their first period while wearing white jeans.

“The stories are obviously made up,” Nancy said. “They have to be. Each Sunday we’ve been writing our own entries. Our counselor collects them and mails them off. We’re going to see which of us can be the first to get in.”

This was Nancy’s, published a year after the end of camp:

One time I fell flat on my face at the talent show. One second I was holding the microphone in one hand, and a foam sword in the other, trying to think of a joke to tell and when the spotlight hit my face, my knees locked and I fell. As I lay there I could hear a girl in the front row whisper Is she dead? And I said into the microphone: Not yet. Everyone clapped and I got up and walked offstage.

Jack looked forward to Devotions every week and tried to keep it up the rest of the year. The band counselor played violin and lectured on music theory. In standardized test camp they read admission essays that “made the difference.” In math and science camp, they went stargazing.

Adult camp had no counselor, so Jack improvised.

“This is what we do: we each tell a story. It has to be a true story. If you don’t have one, maybe just tell us about why you’re here. I’ll start. I’m here because my parents forgot to pick me up.”

“I’m here because my house is being tented for termites.”

“I was too cheap to go to Bermuda.”

“I went to Bermuda. It’s overrated.”

“I cut a kid’s chest open when he came into the ER. He had bullet holes in his chest, up near the neck. He was practically dead. So I cut his chest open. When the surgeon got there, she looked at me and said ‘What did you do and why did you do it?’ I cut his chest open, through the breast plate. I used a saw. ‘What did you do?’ the surgeon said. Couldn’t she see I didn’t know? The kid was dying. I’m a doctor. It’s what I do. She said he’d had a heart beat. She wasn’t there. She didn’t know. ‘It’s on the chart,’ she said. She wouldn’t operate. ‘You did this,’ she said. We scared the nurses. The hospital sent us both to anger management. Later, we got divorced. My therapist thought camp would help.”

The doctor left camp the next day. He left Jack his duffel bag full of books. “Sometimes when my wife got called into the ER to do a central line, it wouldn’t take too long and she’d be sent home. Only it was too late to go back to sleep, and too early to go to the office, so she told me she’d go to Wal-Mart and wander the aisles. She said the nice thing about Wal-Mart was it was always open and no one would talk to you. After the divorce I would drive by the parking lot looking for her car. I figure when I finally know what to say to her, she’ll be there.”

“What if she isn’t?”

“Then I’ll say it to somebody else. Hope that egg of yours hatches, Jack.”

• • • •

The morning after the talent show, Jack stole a dozen fish filets the cook was saving for the end-of-camp banquet. He wrapped them in a dishcloth and brought them out to the woods. He thought they’d help him train Pencil.

“Sit,” Jack said. His dragon did nothing.

“Sit,” Jack said. And the dragon did nothing.

“Come,” Jack said. And the dragon did nothing.

Jack figured that one day he and his dragon would develop telepathy of some sort. He didn’t know when that would be.

“Maybe I’ll bring you Nancy. You could eat her instead.” The dragon bit him.

“You’re right, that’s not very nice.”

When he got back to the cabin, the other boys said Nancy had stopped by to tell him that she’d never forgive him and she hoped he died.

“Your girlfriend was pissed,” they said.

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” Jack said.

“Damn straight,” they said.

By lunch everyone was talking about their breakup. About how she’d dumped him. About how she’d thrown bug juice in his face. And how he had cried.

Jack still hadn’t seen Nancy. He pictured her throwing bug juice in someone else’s face. A pretend Jack: a prop from the theater hut done up in Jack clothes and Jack makeup. He imagined the pretend Jack taking it on the chin. Pretend Jack listened to Nancy’s complaints, accepted responsibility, and apologized. Pretend Jack wouldn’t have missed the talent show in the first place. He would’ve left the egg all alone in woods while he pretended to run a foam sword into Nancy’s belly, and Nancy pretended to run a foam sword into his. The other campers would remember Pretend Jack the next summer.

“That was a hell of a skit you did last year, Jack,” they’d say. “I almost believed you both died up there. I was afraid I’d never see you again.”

• • • •

The dragon grew a little every hour. By dinner it was the size of a large dog. By breakfast the next morning, it was the size of a pony. Jack moved the dragon into the theater hut. It was always empty the last week of camp and Jack didn’t want Pencil getting lost in the woods. Jack still didn’t know what it ate. He brought it scraps from the mess: spaghetti, meatloaf, scrambled eggs, but Pencil wasn’t interested. Maybe dragons didn’t need to eat.

• • • •

Nancy and Jack tried revising I’ve Come to Marry the Princess to make it their own. They spent every afternoon in the theater hut. Nancy said it was her favorite place at camp. Jack agreed because it was the only building with air conditioning.

In one of Jack and Nancy’s made-up versions, the princess said yes. The knight said “Great!” and they proceeded to spend forty-five minutes making wedding preparations, passing messages through the guard, king, and queen. The climax of the story was when the guard misheard lilies for daffodils and it turned out the knight was allergic and he died from anaphylactic shock. The princess died from grief. Nancy said it was very important that they both die in the skit, otherwise people wouldn’t know it was supposed to be funny. If only one of them kicked the bucket, then it’d be a different kind of story entirely.

In another, Nancy and Jack developed an elaborate backstory for the knight and the princess. They wrote it out on cue cards to hold up to the audience to read before the skit so they would know the context.

The knight and princess went on a quest together. They fell in love and the knight has finally returned to marry her as he promised, only the princess is really mad it took him so long to get here.

“What if he had a good reason,” Jack asked. “Maybe he went on another quest.”

“Then he should have brought her with him,” Nancy said. “That’s what you’re supposed to do in these situations.”

In another, Nancy played all the parts. Jack stayed behind the curtain. Tech crew. This was Jack’s favorite version. The only time he appeared on stage was to drag Nancy’s body off when she died for the last time. If he wore all black, no one would be able to see him at all.

“Just imagine the entire audience in their underwear,” Nancy said. “And remember that no one will remember you anyway.”

“They will if I throw up all over the first row.”

In another, Nancy answered the door as a dragon, who ate Jack and then the princess.

“Maybe it’s a nice dragon,” Jack said.

“Don’t be stupid. Dragons eat people. It’s what they do.”

In the end, they decided the original version was best.

“But we can keep practicing until you get over your stage fright,” Nancy said. “If you want. I don’t mind.”

• • • •

Each evening, Jack decides to go to Nancy’s cabin first thing in the morning and explain everything. He always chickens out. She’ll want to see Pencil. She’ll want to know why he didn’t tell her about Pencil before. She’ll tell his cousin. His cousin will tell the government. The government will take Pencil and perform experiments in Nevada.

Finally Jack writes a letter to his mother. “If it’s not too much trouble,” he says, “please pick me up early this year. Please come get me on Sunday morning, before everyone else leaves. Before 10 a.m. if possible. I don’t like being the last one.” He knows when his mother picks him up, she’ll ask him why he didn’t say anything before. “I didn’t feel that way before,” he’ll say.

After Jack mails the letter, he feels good. Good enough to walk by Nancy’s cabin to ask for her address so they can keep in touch. He’ll write her a letter when he gets home. “I didn’t need you after all.” When Pencil is grown, he’ll go visit. They can go on quests. They’ll be friends again. Pencil won’t eat anyone. He won’t be that kind of dragon.

His cousin tells him she’s not there. “ How’d you like your first year at camp, Jonathan? Did you love it? Everyone loves it. This is my twelfth summer, you know. If I had a choice, I’d never leave.”

“People with choices always say that.” Jack looks for Nancy on the pier. He looks for her at the soccer fields, baseball, the archery and riflery ranges. No one has seen her. She’s still mad at him.

“Girls,” the boys say. “They get mad and stay mad. It’s what they do.”

Jack looks for her everywhere and at lunch he waits by the flagpole as all the cabins stream past him so he can catch her walking in. She never shows.

Jack runs to the theater hut even though he knows everything will be fine. The door is closed and everything is quiet.

• • • •

Nancy believes (C) that dragons exist. When she meets the dragon, it (C) doesn’t eat her. Nancy (C) teaches the dragon tricks. They become (C) good friends. Nancy (C) forgives Jack. (C) Jack’s mother picks him up at the end of the summer. (C) Everyone lives happily ever after.

• • • •

The afternoon before the talent show, Jack and Nancy decided to do the original version of the skit: I’ve come to marry the princess. I’ll go ask her. No, no, no, a thousand times no.

“You’ll be there, right? You won’t chicken out? I’m counting on you. I’ll never forgive you if you leave me up there all by myself.”

Jack knocks. “I’ve come to marry the princess,” he says.

He knocks again. “I’ve come to rescue the princess.”

He knocks a third time. “I’m going on a quest, and I would like the princess to come with me if she would be so inclined.”

Jack knows that Nancy will open the door and forgive him. He believes it with the certainty of choice; there are no other options.

“He’s such a sweet dragon,” she’ll say. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

©2016 by Helena Bell.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Helena Bell lives somewhere. Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, The Indiana Review, and Shimmer Magazine, the anthologies Upgraded and Surreal South ’13, and other publications. She has an MFA in Fiction from North Carolina State University and one in Poetry from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She’s also a graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop. If you have any suggestions as to what other programs she should attend, you can contact her via her website (helbell.com) or Twitter @HelBell.

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

Karuna, Inc.

Paul Di Filippo | 24200 words

He learned about pain and death from an ugly dying dog. It had been run over and lay by the side of the road, its chest crushed, bloody foam bubbling from its mouth. When he bent over it the dog gazed at him with glasslike eyes that already saw into the next world.

To understand what the dog was saying he put his hand on its stumpy tail. “Who mandated this death for you?” he asked the dog. “What have you done?”

—Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion

1.
Memories of the 37th

Maybe he should get himself a dog.

A dog—a pet, a constant companion, something to fuss over—might help.

But then again, maybe not. It was so hard to know, to make up his mind.

Considering his unique situation. His special troubles. His extra share of suffering.

Adding any unknown factor to the sad equation of his life might disguise its solution, remove any answer forever beyond his powers of philosophical computation. (Assuming his life—anyone’s life—was solvable at all.)

But how could he know for sure without trying?

Yet did he dare try?

Foolish as the dilemma seemed, it was a real quandary, seemingly his alone.

Others seemed not to have such problems.

For instance. Everyone in Thurman Swan’s life had a dog, it seemed. All the people he hung with daily at the Karuna Koffeehouse. (He felt odd calling them “friends,” upon such short acquaintance, even though they were starting to feel a little like that.) Shenda, Buddy, Chug’em, SinSin, Verity, Odd Vibe . . . . They were all dog owners, every manjack and womanjill of them. Big dogs or little dogs, mutts or purebreds, quiet or yippy, reserved or exuberant, shaggy or groomed, their dogs came in all varieties. But one thing all the animals had in common, Thurman had noticed: they were inseparable from their masters and mistresses, loyal beyond questioning, and seemed to repay every attention lavished on them in some psychic coin.

Call it love, for lack of a less amorphous word.

Thurman could have used some of that.

The cheap clock radio came on then, dumb alarm-timer, unaware of Thurman’s insomnia, activating itself needlessly. The device was the only item on his nightstand. There had been a framed picture of Kendra and Kyle, but when the letters and calls stopped coming, he had stored the picture of his ex-wife and child in his lone suitcase on the high closet shelf.

Thurman had already been lying awake for hours, although he hadn’t had the energy to get out of bed. He didn’t sleep much these days. Not since the war.

The war that had held so many mysteries in its short span, and changed so much—for him, if no one else.

Furnace skies. Sand lacquered with blood. And greasy, roilsome black clouds . . . .

He was in one of the ammo-packed, barrel-stacked bunkers that made up the conquered fortified maze at Kamisiyah, laying the charges that would bring the place down like a bamboo hut in a typhoon. He wore no protective gear, hadn’t thought he needed it. His superiors certainly hadn’t insisted on it. Dusty sunlight probed through wall-slits like Olympian fingers. Sweat leaked out from beneath his helmet liner. He took a swig from his plastic liter bottle of water, then returned to work. His deft actions raised spectral echoes in the cavernous concrete room, ovenlike in its heat and feeling.

But exactly what was it baking?

So intent was Thurman on the delicate wiring job that he didn’t notice the entrance of visitors.

“Specialist Swan.”

Thurman jumped like a cricket.

Major Riggins stood in the doorway. With him was a civilian.

Civilians made everyone antsy, and Thurman was no exception. But there was something extra disturbing about this guy.

As thin as a jail-cell bar and just as rigid, wearing an expensive continental-tailored suit so incongruous in this militarized desert setting, the guy radiated a cold reptilian menace. A stance and aura reminiscent of a fly-cocked iguana was reinforced by shaved head, pasty glabrous skin and bulging eyes.

Major Riggins spoke. “As you can see, Mister Durchfreude, the demolition is calculated to leave absolutely nothing intact.”

Durchfreude stepped into the room and began running a gnarly hand lovingly, as if with regret, over the piles of crated munitions. Thurman’s gaze followed the ugly manicured hand in fascination, as if fastened by an invisible string. For the first time, he noticed what appeared to be a trademark stamped on many of the crates and drums and pallets.

It was a stencilled bug. A termite?

The civilian returned to the doorway. “Excellent,” he dismissively hissed, then turned and walked off.

Major Riggins had the grace to look embarrassed. “You can return to your work, Swan,” he said brusquely.

Then his commander left, hurrying after the civilian like a whipped hound.

Thurman went back about his task. But his concentration refused to return.

And a day later, at 1405, March 4, 1991, when Thurman and his fellow members of the 37th Engineer Battalion assembled at a “safe” distance from the bunkers, video cameras in hand, the proper signals were sent, liberating a force that shook the earth for miles around and sending up a filthy toxic plume that eventually covered thousands of surrounding hectares, including, of course, their camp. Thurman, uneasily watching, thought to see the mysterious civilian’s face forming and dissolving in the oily black billows.

A commercial issued from the bedside radio. “Drink Zingo! It’s cell-u-licious!”

A drink would taste good. Not that Zingo crap, but a very milky cappuccino. More milk than coffee, in fact. With half a plain bagel. No schmear. Thurman’s stomach wasn’t up to much more.

Now, if he could only get up.

He got up.

In the bathroom, Thurman hawked bloody sputum into the sink—pink oyster on porcelain—put prescription unguent on all his rashes, took two Extra-strength Tylenol for his omnipresent headache, counted his ribs, combed his hair and flushed the strands in the comb down the toilet. In the bedroom he dressed gingerly, in loose sweats and unlaced sneakers, so as to avoid stressing his aching joints. Halfheartedly, he neatened the sweaty bedcovers. No one would see them, after all.

In the entryway of his small apartment, he scooped up pill vials and inhalers, pocketing them. Claiming his aluminum cane with the foam back-bolster clipped to it, he left his two semifurnished rooms behind.

Another busy day of doing nothing awaited. Retiree city. Adult day care. Park bench idyll.

Not the worst life for a sick old man.

Too bad Thurman was only twenty-seven.

2.
Bullfinch’s Mythology

“No!”

Shenda Moore burst the shackles of her bad dream with an actual effort of will. There was nothing involuntary or accidental about her escape. No built-in handy mental trapdoor opened automatically, no cluster of ancient guardian neurons on the alert triggered its patented wake-up! subroutine. No, it was all Shenda’s own doing. The disengagement from the horrifying scenario, the refusal to participate in her subconscious’s fear-trip, the determination to leave the grasping fantasies of sleep behind for the larger consensual illusion called reality— It was all attributable to the force of Shenda’s character.

Really, everyone who knew her would have said, So typical of the girl!

Sometimes Shenda wished she were different. Not so driven, so in-charge, so capable. Sure, mostly she was grateful every minute of every day to Titi Yaya for bringing her up so. Shenda liked who she was.

But being responsible for everything was really so much work! An endless roster of sweaty jobs: mopping up messes, straightening crooked lives, building and repairing, shoring up, tearing down, kissing all the boo-boos better. Mwah! And now: stop yer sobbin’.

Dancing with the Tarbaby, Shenda called it.

And there was no stopping allowed.

Especially now—with Karuna, Inc., taking off and demanding so much of her time—Shenda awoke most mornings with a hierarchical tree of chores arrayed neatly in her head, a tree where any free time hung like forbidden fruit at the farthest unreachable branch tips.

But even coming online to such a formidable task-array was better than waking like this.

Shenda’s heart was still pounding like a conga, her shouted denial still bouncing around the bedroom walls. She clicked on a table lamp and swung her slim and muscular caramel legs out from under the sheets, sitting upright in her cotton Hanro nightshirt. She massaged each temple with two fingers for a while, lustrous and wavy black hair waterfalling around her lowered face, while contemplating the nightmare.

It was not the first time she had had the nightmare.

She was on a flat graveled rooftop in broad daylight, level with the upper stories of many surrounding buildings. Tin-walled elevator-shaft shack, a satellite dish, door to a stairwell, whirling vents, a couple of planters and deckchairs. Highly plausible, except that she had never been in such a place.

With her was Bullfinch.

In her hand, Shenda suddenly realized she clutched a tennis ball.

Bullfinch capered around her, leaping up for the Holy Grail of the ragged green ball, begging her to throw it.

So she threw, sidearm, expert and strong. Wildly, without care or forethought.

The ball sailed through the air, Bullfinch in hot pursuit, claws raking the gravel.

Over the parapet the ball sailed.

With a majestic leap, Bullfinch madly, blithely followed, sailing off into deadly space.

In the dream, Shenda screamed her denial.

Now she merely murmured, “No . . . .”

The “meaning” of the dream was plain enough: her duties were getting to her, the weight of her responsibilities to those she loved was making her imagine she might easily fuck up.

Hell, she knew she was gonna fuck up sooner or later. It was inevitable. Everyone fucked up continuously. That could almost be a definition of human existence. The 24-7 fuck-up. She didn’t need any dream to remind her of that.

All she prayed was that she wouldn’t fuck up too bad. Be left with enough of her faculties to pick up the pieces and start again.

Luck came into this somewhere.

And luck was one of the things beyond her control.

Her heart had calmed. Rising determinedly to her bare feet (the purple paint on her toenails was all chipped—she’d have to make time to see SinSin for a pedicure—not that she had, like, any man in her life these days to appreciate such details), Shenda went about getting ready for her day.

Her first instinctive action after the nightfright was to check on Bullfinch.

She found the dog snoring in the dining room.

Disdaining his very expensive catalog-ordered puffy cushion bed, Bullfinch had made himself a nest.

Somehow he had reached a corner of Titi Yaya’s antique linen cloth (remnant of old high times in Havana) where it hung down from the tabletop. He had dragged the cloth down, bringing two brass candlesticks with it. (God, she must have been dead to the world!) Then he had chewed the irreplaceable cloth to the shredded state most suitably evocative of some genetic memory of an African grass lair.

“Oh, Bully! Whatever is Titi going to say!”

Bullfinch swallowed a final snore in a gurgle, then awoke. His wattled, enfolded face peered innocently up at her. Breaking into an ingratiating, tongue-lolling smile, he wagged his stubby tail.

Shenda found her anger instantly dissipating.

Most empathetic people found it impossible to stay mad at bulldogs for long, as they were so mild mannered and goofy looking.

Especially one colored like a canary.

The employee at the animal shelter—a bearded, spectacled fellow with some kind of East European accent and a nametag reading JAN CLUJ—walked Shenda back among the cages so that she could make her choice. Ambling down the wet cement aisle, she found herself wanting to take every one of the abandoned yelping mutts home. But it was not until she saw the bright yellow occupant of one cage that she stopped decisively.

“What’s the story with this one?”

“To my eyes, which are admittedly not of the most expert, our friend is the variety of English Bulldog. Was picked up on Kindred Street, near the college. Of tags, none. Meeting his maker in—” Jan Cluj checked the page slipped into a galvanized frame wired to the cage “—five more days.”

“But what about that color?”

Jan Cluj shrugged, as if the matter were of little interest. “It is unnatural. Most assuredly obtained chemically. I accuse some likely college boys. They are insufficiently studious and given to madcaps.”

Crouching, Shenda extended her fingers through the wire separating her and the yellow dog. He snuffled her fingers eagerly and sloppily. She stood.

“There’s no roots showing, or normal-colored patches the dye job would’ve missed.”

Exasperatedly: “Dear lady, the dog is as you see him, fit and active by medical ukase, most normal save for his hue. Explanations are superfluous. Will you have him?”

“I will have him.”

After signing the relevant forms, Shenda took the happy bounding yellow dog straight to a grooming salon known as Kanine Klips (recommended by Pepsi, who had her poodle, French Fry, done there regularly), where she had the anomalous bulldog dipped and clipped.

Then she waited for his normally colored fur to grow out.

Three years later, she was still waiting.

The dog was some kind of genetic sport. His naturally unnatural coloration was a shade most commonly associated with avian life forms.

Shenda had resisted naming the bulldog until he assumed his true form. Called him “Hey, you!” and “Here, doggie!” for weeks, out of some kind of feeling that to name him wrongly would be to warp his personality. But when the true state of his freakish coat became evident, there was no other possible name for such a specimen.

“Bullfinch,” said Shenda with weary patience, “get up off that tablecloth please. It’s time for you to go out and do your business.”

Bullfinch obeyed. He arose and trotted over to the back door of the house. Shenda opened it and the dog went outside into her small fenced yard.

While the criminally destructive canine was busy outside, Shenda gathered up the precious tatters, surveyed them mournfully, estimating possibilities of repair, then, clucking her tongue, chucked the rags into the trash.

Bullfinch re-entered the house. Promptly, the dog went over to the wastebasket and dragged the ruined fabric out and over to his bed. With great care and exactitude, employing paws and muzzle, he arranged the cloth atop the puffy cushion to his liking. He plopped his rear haunches down on his new dog blanket, and sat regarding his mistress.

Shenda gave up. “I don’t have time to play no tug-of-war with you, Bullyboy. My day is fuller than usual. And it starts now.”

As if to say, Mine too! Bullfinch nodded his weighty corrugated head several times, then lowered his forequarters and was soon asleep.

Shenda showered and groomed. Those toenails had to go! In a robe, towelling her hair dry, she flipped on the bedroom radio automatically, thinking to catch the news, but then hardly listened. She put her panties on ass-backwards, caught herself, swore, and re-donned them correctly.

Dressed in baggy Gap jeans and a green silk shirt, she ate a chocolate Pop Tart standing up at the sink, washing it down with a tumbler of chocolate milk. Her face was blank, as if her mind were vacationing in a more alluring country than her body.

“—cell-u-licious!” declaimed the radio.

Shenda snapped out of her fugue, looked at the clock, and exclaimed, “Louie Kablooie! Bully, I’ve got to run! You got plenty of kibbles, and tonight I’ll bring you a real treat. Promise!” She scuffled on a pair of open-toed Candies, grabbed up a courier-style satchel and her car keys.

The door slammed behind her. Bullfinch opened one eye, then the other. Seeing nothing that needed his attention, he closed them and returned to sleep.

He could fly. He really could. And that airborne tennis ball was no problem.

3.
Frozen Furniture

No dreams, pleasant or otherwise, but rather a mechanical device, awoke Marmaduke Twigg from his Midas-golden slumbers.

Like every other member of the Phineas Gage League, Twigg was physiologically incapable of dreaming. The relevant circuitry, along with much else, had been chemically and surgically excised from Twigg’s altered brain.

As a consequence, he was radically insane. And in the worst possible way.

The mania didn’t show, didn’t impede his daily functioning. Indeed, Twigg’s brand of insanity increased his cunning, ingenuity, deftness, manipulative social skills and will to power. Minute to grasping minute, hour to scheming hour, day to conquering day, he appeared to himself and others as a single-minded superman, apparently a paragon of efficient, rational action. Perched on the very uppermost rungs of the social ladder, Twigg seemingly owed all his accomplishments to the secret devastations willingly wrought on his grey matter.

Yet it was as if a dam had been erected in the brains of Twigg and his compatriots, a dam behind which fetid black waters were continually massing.

A dam which must one day give way, taking not only the well-deserving Twigg and his peers to their vivid destruction, but countless others, the more or less innocent and the less or more complicit.

Right now, of course, such a fate seemed vastly improbable.

Twigg thought—rather, knew—that he was a new and improved breed of human, superior to anyone not a League member.

He knew that the world was his oyster.

The only thing left to determine was at precisely which angle one should work the knife into the hapless stubborn bivalve, and how best to twist the sharp instrument properly.

Crack!

The shell halves fell apart.

And the raw meat was sucked greedily, gleefully down.

Twigg lay sleeping on his back in the exact center of the mattress of his enormous four-postered canopied bed. His chest-folded arms were clad in ebony silk salted with white dots. Beneath his crossed arms, crimson satin sheets and a crest-embroidered white duvet were drawn up in unwrinkled swaths. (The crest on the coverlet depicted a heraldic shield enclosing crossed iron rods with a superimposed eye, and the Gothic initials PGL.) Resting in the middle of a softer-than-down pillow, Twigg’s unlined face seemed the ivory mask of one of the lesser pharaohs.

Suddenly, without visible stimulation, Twigg’s pebbly eyes snapped open like rollershades, and he was instantly alert.

Twigg could feel the small unit consisting of pump and segmented reservoirs implanted inside him stop its gentle whirring. The same device (which regulated many hormonal functions previously so crudely performed by now missing grey matter) had sent him efficiently to sleep exactly four hours ago, during which time he had not stirred a limb.

He knew that most of his servants—especially those who had the least personal contact with him, knowing his peculiarities only through rumor—jokingly referred to him as one of the undead. But Twigg cared not.

All the lesser cattle were the true phantoms, without substance, ineffectual. Only he and his kind were truly alive.

Twigg’s breakfast would soon arrive, carried to him by his loyal factotum, Paternoster. In the meantime, he flew the jetcraft of his mind over the varied terrain of his day.

Meetings, public and private: legislators, aides, ambassadors, presidents, CEOs, media slaves. Acquisitions and sales: companies, divisions, patents, real estate, souls. Phone calls: conferenced and one-on-one. Presentations: from scientists, PR experts, lawyers, brokers, military strategists. Wedged into the interstices: meals and an intensively crafted scientific workout.

All of it absolutely necessary, absolutely vital to keeping all the delicately balanced plates of Isoterm’s myriad businesses spinning.

Yet all of it absolutely tedious.

But tonight. Tonight would make up for all the boredom.

For tonight was the monthly meeting of the Phineas Gage League.

Twigg smiled at the thought.

His smile appeared like fire burning a hole in the paper of his face.

Memories of his own entrance into the League trickled over his interior dam. These were not so pleasant. The initiation rituals were stringent. Had to be. No whiners or losers or weaklings allowed. Cull out the sick cattle right at the head of the chute. Still, the shock and the pain—

Twigg reflectively fingered a small puckered scar on his right temple. His smile had disappeared.

To recover his anticipation of this night’s pleasures, Twigg reached up to stroke one of his bed’s four canopy supports.

At each corner of the enormous imperial bed stood a life-sized naked woman, arms upstretched over her head, thus pulling her breasts high and flat. Each woman supported one corner of the heavy wooden frame that held the brocaded fabric canopy.

These caryatids were each one unique, sculpted with absolute realism, down to the finest hair and wrinkle. They were colored a uniform alabaster. Their surfaces were absolutely marmoreal, as unyielding as ice. Twigg’s hand, lasciviously molding the butt of one woman statue, neither dented nor jiggled the realistic curves. Rather, his hand slid over the human rondures as if they were curiously frictionless.

The door to Twigg’s bedroom, half a hundred feet away, opened. A man entered, bearing a domed tray. He crossed the carpet with measured elderly steps.

Twigg bounded out of bed lithely.

His black pajamas, it was now revealed, were embroidered with hundreds of identical white termites.

“Ah, Paternoster! Well done! On the table if you please!”

The old and crabbed servant—longish hair the shade of old celluloid—set his burden down.

The table was a large piece of gold-rimmed glass borne aloft on the backs of two kneeling naked men arranged parallel. One of the humaniform trestles was a middle-aged paunchy type; the other young and lean.

Twigg moved to an antique desk of normal construction, where a high-end computer incongruously sat. He powered it up, eager to begin his day of bending and shaping, betrayal and coercion. Simultaneously, with seeming unconcern, he questioned his servant.

“Birthday this week, Paternoster? Am I correct?”

“As always, sir.”

“Not thinking of retirement yet, are you?”

A fearful tremor passed over Paternoster’s worn features. “No, sir! Of course not! I served your father for his whole life, and his father before him! How could I even think of retiring!”

“Very good!” Twigg ceased his typing. As if pondering a different topic, he said, “I must find a hassock for this room! Well, I’ll get around to it some day.”

The servant seemed on the verge of fainting. “Any—anything else, sir?”

“No, Paternoster, you may go.”

Twigg’s braying laughter escorted Paternoster out.

Whipping the silver cover off the tray, Twigg disclosed his breakfast.

It was a single uncapped bottle of sinisterly effervescent Zingo, whose label featured the famous lightning-bolt Z.

Twigg grabbed the bottle and downed its bright Cool Mint Listerine-colored contents.

Cell-u-licious!

Setting the empty bottle down, the man picked up a device off the table. It resembled a standard remote-control unit.

Pivoting, Twigg raised the unit and pointed across the vast room.

On the far side of the interior acreage stood a full-sized statue of a Siberian tiger, absolutely lifelike save for its unvarying artificial whiteness. The beast’s face was frozen open in a toothy snarl, every ridge of its pallid gullet delineated; one mammoth paw was lifted in midgesture. Separate from the statue, strapped around its neck, was a collar and small box.

Twigg pressed a button.

The tiger’s anguished roar filled the room, its striped face a Kabuki mask of rage. Like an orange, white and black express train, it raced at its tormentor. Twigg stood like a statue himself.

Several yards distant from its infuriating quarry, the tiger leaped, its maw a slick red cavern, claws extended.

At the last possible moment Twigg pressed another button.

The stasis-transfigured tiger, now vanilla white, fell with a heavy thud to the deep carpet, nearly at Twigg’s bare feet.

“Yes!” said Twigg gleefully. “Like to see even that cool bastard Durchfreude do better.”

Naming the Dark Intercessor aloud seemed to cast a shadow on Twigg’s pleasure.

The man was a valuable nuisance. Every use of his talents simultaneously decreased his utility and increased the liability he represented.

One day the balance would tip decisively on the side of liability.

And then, Twigg grimly suspected, it would take more than the easy press of a button to put Kraft Durchfreude away.

4.
Espresso Eggs

The wide, welcoming, windowed wood door to the Karuna Koffeehouse had its own unique method of announcing customers.

Mounted inside above the entrance was a Laff Bag: one of those innocuous sacks that contained a device to play tinny mechanical maniacal laughter. Every passage through the door pulled the string that triggered the abridged five-second recording.

Making a pompous entrance into the gaily-painted Karuna was practically impossible.

Not that there weren’t folks who still tried.

Fuquan Fletcher for one.

Thurman had just arrived that morning, setting off his own personally impersonal gale of guffaws. This early, he had found his favorite table empty, the one by the moisture-misted south window. Taking a seat, he unclipped the cylindrical foam bolster from his cane and arranged it against the small of his back.

The fragrant atmosphere of the Koffeehouse was filled with the gurgles and chortles of various brewing devices, the chatter of the trio of workers on duty, the savoring sipping sounds of sleepy humans gradually coming up to full mental speed with the aid of friendly plant derivatives. The ceiling-mounted speakers suddenly crackled alive with the sounds of Respighi. A wide-mouthed toaster noisily ejected its crisped bagel passengers.

All was right with the world.

If not with Thurman himself.

Lining up his various prescriptions on the tabletop, Thurman tried not to feel too sorry for himself. An attitude that didn’t do any good, he knew from the recent bitter years, though surely easy enough to fall into.

Looking up from his chesslike array of bottles, Thurman saw one of the baristas approaching.

Normal service at the Karuna involved placing one’s order while standing at the long, oaken, display-case-dotted counter separating customers from the employees and the exotic tools of their trade, and then maneuvering with the expeditiously filled order through the crush toward an empty or friend-occupied table. The baristas generally ventured out only to clear tables of post-java debris and swab them down. (And even these incursions into the customer area were infrequent, thanks to the unusual self-policing neatness of most Karuna patrons.)

But for Thurman—and anyone else who obviously needed special attention—exceptions were easily made.

Just part of the thoughtful charm that found expression in the Karuna’s motto:

The place to come when even home isn’t kind enough.

The phrase Thurman always involuntarily associated with the young female barista named Verity Freestone was “pocket-sized.” Pixie-cut black hair topping a seventy-five pound package of cheerful myopia.

Today Verity wore a striped shirt that exposed her pierced-navel belly, brown corduroy pants that would’ve fit Thurman’s twelve-year-old nephew, Raggle, and a pair of Birkenstocks. Verity filled her pants, however, in a more interesting—to lonely Thurman—fashion.

Verity pushed her thick glasses up on a mildly sweaty snub nose. “Hi, Thur. The usual?”

“Um, sure. Except maybe just wave the beans over the cappuccino, okay? The old stomach—”

“Thurman, you look wicked peaked. Are you okay?”

“As okay as I’ll ever get.”

Verity eyed the pill vials ranked before Thurman and frowned. “All those unnatural chemicals can’t be good for you. Haven’t you tried any alternative healing methods? Maybe get the old chi flowing. What about vitamins? You take any vitamins?”

Thurman waved the advice away. “Verity, really—I appreciate your concern. But I can’t change any part of my medical care right now. Strict doctor’s orders. I’m barely holding on as it is.”

Verity’s expression changed from faintly hectoring to triumphantly assured. “I know just what you need, Thur.”

This was more than Thurman himself knew. “And what might that be?”

“Some espresso eggs! They’re not on the menu. We—the help, that is—we make them just for ourselves. But I’m gonna fix you up some special!”

The treat sounded nauseating to Thurman. “Verity, I don’t know if I can take any espresso in my eggs—”

“Oh, they don’t have any coffee in them. We just call them that because we make them using the espresso machine steamjet.”

“Well, if they’re mild—”

“Mild don’t even come close!”

Before Thurman could object any further, Verity clomped determinedly off.

Thurman plucked the rumpled morning newspaper from the adjacent window ledge and unfolded it. A headline caught his attention:

DISPOSAL LOGS MISSING FROM GULF WAR
CIA BLAMES ACCIDENTAL ERASURES

He made an effort to focus on the smaller print.

Just then the door laughed.

Fuquan Fletcher was the Karuna’s coffee-bean roaster. A master at his craft, he was indispensable to the quality of the Karuna’s drinks, and thus responsible for much of its success.

That single and singular virtue failed to compensate for the fact that he was an utter prick.

At least in Thurman’s eyes. But not, he suspected, in his alone.

Always dapperly dressed and impeccably groomed, the trim mustachioed Black man had no admirers more fervent and appreciative of his immense hypothetical charms than himself. He was a loud walking arrogant billboard for his own athletic, sexual, financial and terpsichorean prowess.

“Ladies!” bellowed Fuquan from the door. “Show me a hot oven, and I’ll get right down to some sweaty work!”

Returning to Thurman’s table, an unfazed Verity passed by her coworker. “Morning, Fuquan.”

The man made as if to embrace her, a move Verity deftly eluded with a twist and a skip, all without spilling a drop of the drink on her tray.

“Freestone! I got you pegged, girl! You’re one of them sex elves like I seen in a comic once! Show the world your pointy ears, girl! Let them puppies out to play! Then you and me will go into your fantasy world!”

Thurman was highly embarrassed by this display. For the nth time, he pondered putting Fuquan in his place. Once he would have done it automatically. Visceral memories of R&R barroom brawls tweaked his flaccid muscles. But now he had neither the energy nor the ability.

Verity was unfazed by the familiar routine. “Fuquan, you’d better cut the talk and get to work. We’re running low on Jamaican.”

“One day you’re gonna give me some of your good stuff, Miss Peanut.”

“Don’t count on it. Thurman, here’s those eggs I was talking about.”

Moving irrepressibly on to other equally futile love conquests and bouts of braggadocio, Fuquan went behind the counter where Thurman could see him donning a neck-to-knee apron.

“Don’t you ever get sick of him?”

“Oh, he’s harmless. It’s the ones who don’t say anything you have to watch out for.”

Thurman instantly felt that perhaps he was one of those suspiciously quiet ones, and fumbled for some sort of conversational tidbit, as Verity disburdened her tray onto the table.

“Uh, how’s your dog doing?”

Verity owned a long-haired dachshund (referred to by Fuquan as, of course, “Hairy Weenie”). “Slinky Dog is just fine. He goes out to stud next week. Slinky makes his girlfriends happy, and I make a little extra cash.”

The mention of even canine stud duty saddened and embarrassed the unstudly afflicted Thurman. “Um, great, I guess . . . .”

“Now, try these, Thur, and tell me what you think.”

Before him, fluffy white-flecked yellow clouds of whipped and steam-cooked eggs seemed to float an inch off their plate. Thurman had never seen such ethereal scrambled eggs. Plainly, there was a component of antigravity to their recipe.

Thurman forked some up and delivered them to his taste buds.

There was not even any sensation of them resting on his tongue. The sweet creamy taste of the eggs seemed to suffuse directly into his bloodstream. Chewing was definitely superfluous.

“These—these are the best eggs I’ve ever had!”

Verity smiled and patted his shoulder. “Part of your regular order from now on, Thurman. We’ll get a little flesh back on those bones.”

Thurman finished his eggs with gusto, as well as his usual plain bagel half and cappuccino (oh, all right: weakly flavored hot sugary milk). Feeling better than he had in months, he settled back to absorb the busy evolving scene around him.

People-watching was Thurman’s main recreational activity these days. Cost nothing, and took little strength.

Odd Vibe came in. A quiet and generally unsmiling Norwegian who bore the unfortunately twistable name of Otto Wibe, he was the Karuna’s baker.

Thurman could hear Fuquan greet his backroom coworker.

“Odd Vibe, my man! You sleep in those clothes or roll a bum and strip him?”

“Fletcher, you go and sit on a biscotti, by gosh!”

“Oh, sharp one, Oddy! We’ll have you playing the dozens yet!”

Around eleven, Tibor “Chug’em” Gruntpat made his daily appearance. Chug’em was a sanitation worker, fiftyish and gnarled, just coming off shift. He had been up since about 3:00 A.M. Without a word, Buddy Cheetah—drummer for a struggling band called the Beagle Boys, who was working the counter with Verity—lined up four double-mochaccinnos in front of the grey-haired muscular man, who knocked them back in a total of sixteen seconds. Then Chug’em left to sleep through the day.

Others less and more memorable came and went, the latter category featuring SinSin Bang and Pepsi Scattergood from the Kwik Kuts salon three doors down the block. As usual, the brace of beauticians were impeccably trigged out. The Misses Mode O’Day. And, natch, their hairstyles had changed since last week.

Nelumbo Nucifera, good-looking Italo-American boy who kept all the females happy with his tight T-shirts, came out from behind the counter to clear Thurman’s dish and refill his cup.

“Thanks, Nello.”

“Hey, want to hear a joke, man? This guy walks into a bar with an alligator on a leash . . . .”

In the buttery sunlight after Nello’s departure, Thurman began to grow sleepy.

And then the door’s chortles, sounding somehow lighter and more vibrant, announced Shenda Moore.

Her arrival had the same effect on Thurman’s nerves as a Scud missile intersecting the Aegis defense system. He came instantly awake, his heart thumping to a salsa beat.

Wasn’t she just so achingly damn beautiful?

And wow!

Peeking out of her open-toed shoes—

Those Easter-egg nails!

5.
Money Comes

The Tarbaby wanted to tango today!

Shenda’s hasty departure from her apartment had set the tone for the rest of her morning. From one appointment to another she had raced. Suppliers and building contractors, City Hall and DEM, office supply stores and printshops, the homes of employees out on long-term sick leave. The odometer on her little green Jetta seemed to revolve madly like one of those movie time-machine displays as the decades whipped by. Shenda’s Day-Timer was thick as a slice of Sequoia, stuffed with loose business cards that took flight at the slightest provocation, making her feel like an utter idiot as she stooped to recover them under the noses of leering sneering straight-edge white guys in suits!

(Whenever Shenda heard this putdown tone in her mental monologue, she would automatically pause, disengage the gears on the aggression machinery, and try to radiate a little human warmth, the way Titi Yaya had taught her when she was a little girl. The practice had been hard at first, gotten easier over the years—although the mental trick never ceased to be something she must consciously invoke as a counterweight to natural human impatience. This refusal to hate or impose false separations lay at the heart of Shenda’s personal MO, and at the heart of her vision for Karuna, Inc.)

As she dashed about town, attending to all the daily hassles associated with running the expanding set of enterprises loosely linked under the umbrella of Karuna, Inc., Shenda felt a twinge of irreducible guilt.

She had not taken Bullfinch for a walk in days. (That dream—) The dog was uncomplaining, but Shenda knew that he missed the exercise. Hell, so did she!

If walking with Bullfinch pleased them both, then why hadn’t they done it in too long?

Was her life becoming the kind of White Queen’s Race she had always derided in others?

Was she forgetting what was really important in life?

She hoped not. Natural optimism made her ascribe this unnaturally busy and stressful period to the fact that now, after three hard years, Karuna, Inc., was really taking off.

Maybe soon now she could even hire a helper!

Stopped at the traffic light at the corner of Perimeter and Santa Barbara Streets, Shenda looked idly to her left and saw a big truck emblazoned with some kind of insect logo.

Must be exterminators . . . .

The light went green. Shenda wheeled right on Perimeter toward her final two stops before lunch. (Both stops had been planned to mix pleasure and business, one of Shenda’s survival tactics. At Kwik Kuts, she’d get her pedicure and instead of dishing dirt, discuss business. Then, at the Karuna, she’d lunch after tending to their affairs.)

As she expertly threaded the traffic, she thought back to the beginnings of this whole unlikely scheme.

Three years ago, she had been a business major fresh out of the university, temping in a series of dead-end jobs, unsure of the path before her. The what and why of her life were plain enough, but the how was shrouded in mystery. Then Titi Yaya had phoned, a day in advance of her standard weekly call.

“Shen-Shen, dear.” Only Titi Yaya called her that old childhood name anymore. “You remember Titi Luce?”

“Of course, of course. I saw her once when I was six. She visiting from Miami?”

“Not anymore, dear. She’s dead. Nine days ago. I just got back.”

“Oh boy . . . . Sorry to hear it, Titi.”

“I know you are, dear. Now, pay attention. I can’t get out of the house today. Too much to make ready. So I need you to pick up a few things for the oro Ilé-Olofi ceremonies tonight. Seven white candles, a pigeon, eight coconuts, some cascarilla, Florida Water . . . .”

Shenda scribbled dutifully, although she was not truthfully looking forward to attending the oro Ilé-Olofi. Titi Yaya and the other santeras would ask when she was at least going to take the Necklaces, embrace the Warriors—never mind making the saint!—and they would press upon her protective bracelets at the very least—the idé—which she would have to refuse, saying that she didn’t follow the Religion anymore, had never really done so since reaching adulthood. Unpleasantness would result.

Titi Yaya finished her list. “And be here sharply at nine, dear. Oh, by the way: Luce left you a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Goodbye till nine.”

The connection was severed on Titi Yaya’s end but not on Shenda’s, as she held the phone stupidly in her hand until the recorded operator’s voice came on.

The first thing Shenda did was press the disconnect button on the handset, then dial the temp agency and resign.

The second thing she did was walk (no car then) to the Karuna, where she could sit and have a coffee and think.

In those days, the Karuna looked nothing like its current self. Didn’t even have the same name, but was known instead as the Corona Coffeehouse. Drab, dirty, dusty and disagreeable, it was mismanaged by absentee tax-finagling owners and patronized by shady types, the yuppies they preyed on, and a clique of arty poseurs.

Liars and strivers and bores, oh my!

Only a handful of the employees redeemed the joint. Folks glad to have a job and trying their best to overcome bad conditions.

Sitting with a cup of acidic, burnt coffee, thinking alternately of the nameless yellow adopted dog back home in her tiny walk-up and the bequest so cavalierly dropped in her lap by her ever-surprising aunts, Shenda tried to imagine what she might do with the money, how best to put it to work.

There came an unbidden moment then—a moment most incommensurate with the tawdry surroundings, a self-catalyzing timeless nanosecond Shenda would never forget—when the whole world seemed to blossom, to split open like a fruit, revealing the seeds of her whole future.

Shenda was at the bank the next day.

Depositing the bequest and using it as collateral, she took out a loan. With that money, she bought the Corona from owners eager to dump it cheap and write off the loss.

Rechristening the place was easy. Somehow the sound-a-like new name surfaced, recalled from a college philosophy class.

Shenda wasn’t quite sure what the exact definition of “karuna” was. But it had something to do with warmth and spaciousness, and it sounded suitably exotic. Plus, anyone who went looking for the old “Corona” would likely end up at the new “Karuna.”

Firing the incompetent and surly employees had been positively pleasant. Shenda was not one to flinch from necessary triage. The girl could be positively brutal when brutal was called for. (She would have made a good nurse or general, and had in fact become a mixture of both.)

Once the Karuna was running on a steady footing (about six months; guess those business courses were worth something after all), Shenda incorporated a holding company that also utilized the Karuna name.

This parent company had but one purpose. Its short prospectus was perhaps unique in the history of capitalism. Shenda was very proud of it. She had written all of it herself.

“Karuna, Inc., is a cooperative overseeing entity whose sole purpose is to facilitate and maximize the functioning of its subsidiaries through any ethical means available, including but not limited to group purchasing agreements; joint bargaining and sales forces; intersubsidiary loans and personnel exchanges; healthcare coordination; shared management, training and education; pooled charitable donations and grants; mutual information sharing; etc., etc.

“A company wishing to become a subsidiary of Karuna, Inc., must first redefine its sole business mission to be the creation of environmentally responsible, non-exploitive, domestic-based, maximally creative jobs to be filled without prejudice or favoritism. The performance of all employees shall be regularly evaluated, partially on accomplishment of defined goals and partially on native abilities and attitudes of employees, with the latter considerations outweighing the former in cases requiring arbitration. While maximum product and service quality are to be always striven for, the primary goal of the subsidiaries shall always be the full employment of all workers meeting the qualifications of goodwill and exertion of individual levels of competence. It is to be hoped that the delivery of high-quality goods and services will be a by-product of such treatment.

“Upon demonstration of such a redesign, a company will be admitted as a subsidiary, with all rights and obligations pertaining thereto, upon a positive vote of the Karuna, Inc., board.

“Profit making is naturally encouraged. Each subsidiary shall pay a tenth of its profits to the parent corporation for the furtherance of the shared mission as outlined above.

“All owners of subsidiaries become members of the board of Karuna, Inc., and at regular meetings—open also to all subsidiary employees and their relatives, as vested shareholders—the board members shall vote to determine any future corporate actions outside the stated scope of this document, or amendments thereto. A simple majority shall carry all votes. In the case of ties, the vote of the President (Shenda Moore, undersigned) shall be called on. The President may also veto any board decision in the best interests of Karuna, Inc.”

Shenda wavered a little over that last bit. It sounded kinda dictatorial. (Especially since she really had two votes: one as the owner of the Karuna Koffeehouse, the first subsidiary, and one as president.)

Hell! It was her idea, her money and her effort!

Let anybody who wasn’t satisfied stage a coup!

Smith and Hawken. Ben and Jerry’s. Tom’s of Maine. The Body Shop. Sure, they all tried to live up to some of the same principles Shenda had outlined in the formation of her company. But none of these others had as their primary mission the simple creation and sustainment of good jobs for those who needed them. (Perhaps the national figure who came closest to Shenda’s conception of how to treat people was Aaron Feuerstein, the owner of the fire-destroyed Malden Mills in Massachusetts, who had maintained his idled help on a full payroll throughout reconstruction.)

In each of those other companies, the ultimate emphasis was on the product, on making and selling it, grabbing market share. Whatever the company rhetoric, when push came to shove, the workers drew the short straw.

“Doing well by doing good” was their motto.

“Doing good and maybe doing well” was Shenda’s.

It was a real, although subtle, difference.

(And in the end, there didn’t even seem to be any maybe about it. Loan paid off, house and car bought, the Karuna turning a nice monthly profit. Louie Kablooie! What more could you ask of a business plan?)

Shenda didn’t really give a flying fuck about product. People were drowning in products, they bought too much too cheaply anyway. It didn’t take a genius to turn out quality goods. That part was simple.

What took skill and talent and vision and general resourcefulness—qualities Shenda was a little surprised to find out she had in abundance—was promoting conditions that opened up satisfying, decent-paying vocational niches for everyone. Getting people into a harness that didn’t bind and having them all pull together, for the common good.

General Shenda, jetting in her Jetta toward a pedicure and lunch.

Never thought being a general might someday mean having to fight an actual war.

6.
Nailed

Marmaduke Twigg adjusted the bib of his black rubber apron, smoothing the cord where it passed around the collar of his five-thousand-dollar suit. The long, butcher-style garment bore the PGL crest in the middle of the chest.

Unlike the Masons and their aprons, the Phineas Gage League had adopted theirs for strictly practical reasons.

The lovely expensive fabrics favored by the League members reacted so poorly to bloodstains!

Confident he was looking his best, Twigg walked forward to the clustered PGL members who had arrived before him.

They stood on a subway platform, lit by a single scanty light. The dusty station was a deserted one, off the maps, reachable only through a certain subbasement’s concealed door.

Of course, a League member owned the building that included that subbasement.

Empty for over ninety years, the station possessed a certain Victorian feel to it, wonderfully consistent with the period of the League’s founding. Twigg could almost believe that he had traveled back in time, back to that romantic age of the great industrialist Robber Barons: Carnegie, DuPont, Rockefeller, Getty, Rothschild, Hearst, Krupp—

Not that he would have traded places with any of those legendary figures. Sure, they had had a few nice perks. No inflation, no taxes, no government regulations. Truly classy playgrounds like Newport and Saratoga and Baden-Baden. Half the world’s resources and population subjugated as colonies under their boots. The respect and ass-kissing admiration of society.

But taken all in all, the present offered so much more!

The assembled members—eleven, Twigg quickly counted, making him the last to arrive—hailed him with varying degrees of civility and enthusiasm. Here were important personages—competitors and rivals—who would, upon receiving any news of Twigg’s painful demise, lose not a minute in popping their finest champagne, toasting his anticipated afterlife roasting, and pissing the metabolically transformed fluid on his grave. Yet they were constrained by the rules of the League from doing more to his person now, or elsewhen, than uttering a mildly cutting bon mot.

Such was the strength of the bond between them.

The League members were a motley assortment of international figures, most of whose faces would be instantly recognizable to the average newspaper reader or television viewer, all leaders of enormous, globe-girdling enterprises, media talking-head sources of quotes and advice.

Twigg catalogued his peers.

Sasha Kapok, of Kalpagni, Ltd.

Ernest Firgower, of Stonecipher Industries.

Isabelle Fistule, of Burnes Sloan Hardin Hades.

Jack Burrows-White, of Crumbee Products.

Nick Potash, of Harrow & Wither.

Edouard Ensor, of Somnifax et Cie.

Alba Cumberbatch, of Asura Refineries.

Osada Sarakin, of Preta-Loka Entertainments.

Abruptio Placentae, of Culex, SA.

Cooper Stopford, of Brasher Investments, Plc.

Klaus Kunzi-Fuchs, of Rudrakonig, GmbH.

Lastly, of course, came the nervous-looking new recruit, Samuel Stanes, of LD-100 Pharmaceuticals, whose initiation would bring the League up to its full strength of thirteen.

After greeting his compatriots, Twigg moved to the absolute edge of the platform and looked down the tunnel for the train. Not seeing it, he made a dismissive noise and stepped back, joining the rest.

Like a group of commuting meat cutters, they waited silently.

At last the train arrived.

Not modern subway cars, nor even antique carriages, but rather primitive open mining cars like riveted iron buckets with seats, pulled by a tough little engine, at the helm of which sat the Dark Intercessor.

Kraft Durchfreude.

Durchfreude was one of the League’s rare failures. Something had gone wrong in the procedure that would have made him a full-fledged League member. A portion of his higher individualism and initiative had been unfortunately excised. The team and head surgeon responsible for the screw-up had soon come to wish they had never seen a scalpel. Durchfreude himself had been declared officially dead, and his corporate empire had devolved to a son, who knew nothing of his father’s actual fate, nor of the League.

Yet a use and further half-life had been found for Durchfreude. Unwaveringly loyal and obedient, he made an excellent cat’s-paw, a unique tool, disposable if need be, rotating his services among the League’s initiates as requested.

And in fact, if no one had a more pressing need for Durchfreude’s services, Twigg himself intended to borrow the creature soon for a short and simple private assignment on behalf of Isoterm.

Stepping carefully, the PGL’ers filtered into the various cars, except for the caboose.

That car was filled with bound unconscious bodies.

Men, women, children. Some animals.

Once they were all aboard, Durchfreude rang a little mechanical bell (with what mix of sardonicism and actual childlike glee, Twigg could not discern in the dimness), and the train chugged off, its single kerosene lamp the only illumination.

Not far beyond the station, the tracks began to slope to a non-negligible degree. Soon, the train’s brakes were squealing, the engine’s gears in low, as they dropped into the earth’s depths, torturing rasping shrieks from the rails.

After a time, the tracks leveled out. A light at the end of the tunnel appeared after they rounded a bend.

The train emerged into a cavernous room hewn from the living rock, and stopped. Naked flames from bracketed torches illuminated the rough clammy walls. Hidden vents created slight air currents that caused the flames to jump and lick like hungry tongues. Thick Persian rugs—stained despite the best cleaning attempts—softened the hard floor.

Durchfreude leaped down and hustled carpeted wooden steps up to the cars so that the thirteen passengers could dismount.

The room was furnished with various comfortable chairs and couches—as well as shrouded equipment whose shapes implied a more sinister nature. Scattered tables were laden with fine gourmet food and vintage drink, as well as various recreational pills and needles. Full sanitary and ablutionary facilities were half-visible behind a folding screen.

At one end of the room was a kind of dais supporting a lectern. On the wall behind the podium hung a large reproduction of the PGL crest as well as a framed portrait. The painting depicted a mustachioed white man with the looks typical of the mid-1800s. There was, however, a curious deformity to a portion of his skull.

The members dispersed among the furniture, helping themselves to the refreshments, making small talk. After unloading the unconscious cargo, stacking the hogtied bodies like cordwood, Durchfreude had vanished somewhere, down the tunnel or behind the screen.

When the men and women of the League had settled down, business began.

As the oldest member, Ernest Firgower ascended the dais to conduct the meeting. Behind the podium, not much of the short elderly man was visible save for his vigorous shock of silver hair towering over his wrinkled brow (where that same small scar, which Twigg and the others shared, leered obscenely), and his green eyes shining like the tips of poisoned stakes. Twigg fancied that his countryman resembled Bertrand Russell, had that philosopher ever included in his CV the management of, say, a concentration camp.

Firgower coughed, began to speak in a reedy voice. “Fellows of the Rod, let us commence our business. The first matter on the docket is the division of Zairian natural resources—”

Twigg listened with only half his attention. The rest was focused on a blonde woman sprawled atop the pile of warm and gently respiring bodies. Her immaculate features and contorted limbs evoked the air of a Renaissance martyr portrait.

Twigg sucked in her delicious helplessness, tuning Firgower out. Twigg was a man who believed firmly in granting business and pleasure equal status.

At last the humdrum League affairs had all been dealt with. Twigg suppressed a yawn. It was hours before his normal sleep period. Was his onboard pump working as well as it should? He made a mental note to have it checked.

Now Firgower had begun the ritual preface to the initiation of Samuel Stanes, the last duty before they could all cut loose in that hot red festival that was a simultaneous abandonment and affirmation of their unique privilege.

Twigg perked up in his seat and listened. The old story never failed to enthrall.

“We are gathered together tonight in honor of our symbolic founder, the hapless yet lucky Phineas Gage. While he did not literally lay the first bricks of our organization—that honor belongs to the farsighted entrepreneurial visionaries of our great-grandparents’ generation—Gage provided the actual inspiration for our magnificent accomplishments.

“Phineas Gage was a simple untutored manual laborer during the middle of the last century. At the time of his remarkable transformation, he was helping to construct a railroad. The blasting of interfering rock ledges was underway. Gage was assigned to make sure the explosive charges were well in place. Taking his tamping rod, he went to work.”

Firgower waved a thin arm backward at the crossed bars of the PGL crest, then almost toppled. He righted himself and continued.

“Gage performed his task a trifle too enthusiastically. At one drill hole in the stone, he created sparks and ignited the powder charge.

“The iron rod was sent rocketing upward, out of the channel as out of the barrel of a gun, through Gage’s right eye, blazing a trail of gorgeous destruction across his lobes, and emerging in its entirety out the top of his cranium.

“Let us leap ahead, over the confusion attendant on this accident and the subsequent primitive medical treatment. Gage survived his wonderful injury. But as all his old friends attested, he was utterly changed. From an easygoing, laughing, careless sort, he turned moody and unpredictable and demanding. He seemed to be without the normal constraints of civilization. Regard for his fellow humans, he had none. Completely self-centered, his actions—reprehensible to an ignorant milksop society—led to a life of ostracism and despair.

“We now know, of course, that along with much needless peripheral damage, Gage was the first man to undergo the removal of his brain’s ethical nucleus. Or, as some of the more old-fashioned among us refer to it, his conscience.

“Lacking all power, occupying the wrong social stratum, Gage never benefited from his inadvertent surgery. He could not fully make use of the miraculous ease and fluidity of action which one who is blessed with the destruction of one’s conscience experiences. Never to doubt, never to allow pusillanimous sentiments for human cattle to interfere with one’s own self-interest, never to waste a moment of one’s precious time in introspection. To see clearly the quickest path to one’s own ascension. Such is the legacy given to those of us who have undergone the perfected operation.”

Firgower stepped out from behind the lectern. “And now, Samuel Stanes, we of the Phineas Gage League invite you to join our ranks. What sayest thou?”

Stanes stood on visibly weak knees. “I—I accept!”

Durchfreude had appeared from nowhere.

“The Dark Intercessor will administer the sacrament,” intoned Firgower.

Twigg watched as Durchfreude fastened a stasis box to Stanes’s wrist. The leader of Isoterm found his finger straying almost of its own accord to his own temple, and restrained the traitorous digit with an act of will. Someone else flicked a wall-mounted switch, and the hissing of an electric-powered air compressor resounded.

Sweat like an oily evil dew spontaneously broke out on Stanes’s brow. He closed his eyes.

Durchfreude brought into view a heavy-duty carpenter’s nail gun, its tumescent hose trailing. He placed the muzzle against Stanes’s right temporal ridge and squeezed the trigger.

The pop of the gun was followed by the crunching sound of the short nail driving through flesh, striking and partially penetrating the skull.

Stanes turned then into a rigid snowy sculpture of himself, as the stasis box was activated by the control in Firgower’s veined hand.

Durchfreude caught the unstable toppling figure, hoisted it and loaded it into the train. Mounting the engineer’s seat, he drove Stanes off to the awaiting surgery.

No ride home for the others would be needed for hours.

For now the fun commenced. Already, as planned, the victims were waking up.

Twigg moved swiftly to claim the blonde.

But he need not have rushed. There were plenty of subjects to go around.

When Twigg next looked up amidst the screams and howls and guttural roars—the animals sounding human, the humans animal—he saw Cumberbatch with her mouth incarnadined, a wide red clownlike smear, Ensor holding a fluid-darkened saw, Sarakin pulling tight a noose, Fistule with her arm imbrued, buried inside a dog’s split mortal shell.

Not jealous in the least, the superman returned to his own pleasures.

7.
“What’s Wrong With You?”

Alert, almost vibrating, Thurman watched the regal and youthfully glamorous Shenda Moore stride swiftly across the Karuna’s polished floorboards and pass behind the counter. She set her courier’s case down with visible relief.

Verity eagerly started up a conversation with the Karuna’s owner, of which Thurman caught only the opening.

“That sleazy new distributor came to the delivery door again, Shenda. This time he had a couple of greaseballs with him. Heavy muscle. Thought I’d be scared or something. Huh! I told them to go fuck themselves—”

Shenda’s face darkened into a scowl. Thurman thought her intense and concentrated protective wrath was nearly as attractive as her general wide-focus warmth. She opened her mouth to speak, but her reply (beyond a prefatory “Those bastards—”) was lost to Thurman in a sudden swell of noise: kitchen clatter, door laughter, street traffic, patron hooting. By the time things had quieted somewhat, Shenda had disappeared into the rear of the shop.

Thurman slumped down in his seat, cut off from the source of his momentary invigoration. For a moment, he had actually forgot his illness, succeeded in imagining himself whole again.

What he wouldn’t give to get a little closer to this intriguing woman! He envisioned the way their conversation would swiftly flow, from easy early friendliness to gradual whispered intimacy. And then, in some quiet, private setting—

At that moment Thurman began to cough. Not a polite, out-in-public cough either, but one of his regularly occurring TB-victim-in-the-isolation-ward, lung-ripping, throat-searing gaspers. Clutching a sheaf of napkins for the expected expectoration, he tried to turn his body toward the window, away from the other customers. His knee jerked involuntarily, bumping the small table and sending his pill vials tumbling to the floor.

In the midst of his agony, Thurman felt waves of searing humiliation.

Nothing could make his embarrassment any worse.

Nothing?

A soft yet strong hand descended on his shoulder, followed by a familiar voice.

“Are you all right? What can we do?”

Oh, Sweet Mary!

It was her!

Thurman struggled to get his body under control. He finished gagging into the napkin wad, then instinctively stuck the filthy mass of tissue (paper) and tissue (cellular) into the pocket of his sweatpants. Trying to compose his mottled features into a semblance of normality, Thurman turned to face a standing Shenda Moore.

A sweet floral scent wafted off her. She clutched half a bite-rimmed sandwich unselfconsciously in one hand. Her exquisitely planed Afro-Caribbean face, framed in lax layered Fibonacci curves of thick hair, was a blend of alarm and curiosity, her taut body poised for whatever action might prove necessary.

Weakly, Thurman found a joke. “I—there was a fly in my coffee.”

Shenda laughed. The sound was like temple bells. In a bold tone she completed the old joke: “Well, don’t spread the word around, or everyone will want one!”

Then, just when Thurman expected the Karuna’s proprietor to turn and walk off, she pulled up a chair and sat down beside him. Now she spoke in more confidential tones, and the watchers attracted by Thurman’s discomfort turned back to their own business.

“Do you mind if I finish my lunch here?”

“No, never! I mean, sure, why not? It’s your place.”

This hardly sounded the note of gracious invitation Thurman intended. But Shenda seemed not to take offense. She waved over Nello.

“Nello, I’ll have a Mango-Cherry, please. And—what’s your name?”

This information was not immediately retrievable. After a dedicated search, however, involving all his processing power, a few syllables surfaced. “Thurman. Thurman Swan.”

“Get Mister Swan whatever he wants.”

Thurman had never tried any of the many Tantra-brand juices available at the Karuna. “Um, I’ll have the same.”

Nello left. Shenda took a bite out of her sandwich, meditatively studied Thurman while she chewed. Their juices arrived. Shenda uncapped hers and drank straight from the bottle, her lovely throat pulsing. Thurman took a tentative sip, cautious as always when introducing new acquaintances to his hermit stomach. Not bad.

Shenda finished her sandwich with deliberation and obvious enjoyment, washing it down with the rest of the sweet juice. She set the empty bottle decisively down. Still, she said nothing. Thurman was dying.

But when she finally spoke, he almost wished she hadn’t.

“What’s wrong with you?”

Of course. She wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t zeroed in on his obvious sickly condition. Still, Hunchback Thurman had hoped the pretty gypsy girl could have avoided the touchy subject.

He wearily started to recount his sad and baffling tale with its lack of a clear conclusion or moral.

“Well, you see, I was in the Gulf War—”

Shenda impatiently waved his words away. “I don’t care about that shit! That’s old shit, kiddo! I assume you got a doctor for whatever happened to you there. Maybe not the best doctor or the best kind of treatment. That’s something you gotta look into some more maybe. But what I want to know is, what’s wrong with you?”

His mouth hanging open, Thurman couldn’t answer.

Shenda leaned closer, drilling him with her unwavering gaze. “Look. I see you in here every day of the week, any hour I come in. Now, I certainly don’t bitch about anybody taking up space without spending a lot. Hell, that’s one of the things this place is for! And I’m flattered that you find this joint so attractive. But no one should be so desperate or lonely or unimaginative that they’ve only got one place to go! I mean, like Groucho said, ‘I love my cigar, but even I take it out of my mouth sometimes!’”

Thurman struggled to recover himself. “Well sure, I agree, if you were talking about a normal person—”

Shenda banged her hand flat down on the table, raising a gunshot report. “Where’s your tail? You got a tail? Show me your tail! Or maybe you’re hiding a third eye somewhere?”

Shenda pressed a finger into his brow.

“Ouch!”

“No, I didn’t think so. Thurman, you are normal. Maybe a struggling kind of normal, but who isn’t? No, you’ve let your spirit get a kink in it, Thurman. You’ve been dealt a lousy hand, but you’re still supposed to play it. Instead, you’re down a well of apathy without a bucket to piss in! You need to get out and around, my friend.”

The word “friend” was like a life raft. “I—what could I do?”

“How about a job?”

“A job? What kind of job could I possibly handle?”

“There’s a job for everyone. Wait right here.”

Shenda got up and walked to the counter, where she retrieved her bag. She strode briskly back, dropped down, and removed her appointment book from within the satchel. A single business card shot out under its own volition onto the tabletop. Shenda picked it up and read it.

“Perfect! Go to this address today. This very afternoon, do you hear me? Tell Vance I sent you and said for him to put you to work.”

Shenda stood then, extended her hand. “Welcome to the Karuna family, Thurman.”

Thurman found himself standing somehow without reliance on his cane. He took Shenda’s hand. Her grip was a pleasant pain.

When she was halfway across the room, Thurman impulsively called out, “Shenda Moore!”

She stopped and whirled. “Yes!”

“I like your toenails!”

Shenda eyed Thurman with new interest. Coyly angling one foot like a model, she said, “Me too!”

And then she was out of the Koffeehouse, force of nature dissolving in a burst of laffs.

Thurman sank back down gratefully into his seat, feeling his face flushing. He was almost glad she was gone.

Now that he had gotten some small fraction of his crazy wish fulfilled, however unpredictably, he wasn’t sure how much of Shenda Moore’s intense company he could take!

Someone else was now standing by his table.

Fuquan Fletcher was smiling. But the smile was not pleasant, nor meant to be.

“Big man. Likes the lady’s toenails! Gonna let the world know it!”

“Fuquan, what’s your problem?”

“You my problem, man, you try to move in on Shenda Moore. That girl is mine! She got her nose open for me!”

“Is that so? You sure she feels that way?”

“Sure? I’ll show you sure, man!” The irate coffee roaster jabbed a finger into Thurman’s chest.

This was the second time Thurman had been poked in the space of a few minutes. Unlike the first educational prodding, this poke made him mad. So—after he did not respond with immediate belligerence, causing Fuquan to laugh coarsely and turn to leave—Thurman felt completely justified in using his cane to hook one of the Black man’s ankles and pull his foot out from under him, sending him crashing to the floor.

Fuquan was up and heading with bunched fists for a risen shaky Thurman when Buddy and Nello and Verity intervened, referee baristas holding the opponents apart.

“Hey, c’mon, guys, who started this?”

Neither antagonist said anything. After a tense moment, Fuquan brushed himself off and stalked into the back.

Gathering up his pills and accoutrements, feeling that his life was becoming more interesting by the second, Thurman departed the Karuna.

Outside, he studied the business card.

KUSTOM KARS AND KANVASES
VANCE VON JOLLY, ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
“HOUSE OF THE WINGED HEART”
1616 ROTHFINK BOULEVARD

Thurman checked his wallet. Not a lot of green. But hey—he had a job now!

In the cab, Thurman speculated on what he would find at the end of the ride.

Disembarking, he discovered the wan products of his imagination to be a pale shadow of reality.

He stood facing an old garage: four cinderblock bays flanked by an office space. The entire nondescript structure, however, had been studded with brightly colored glazed ceramic objects in bas-relief, executed in a zippy cartoon style. Animals, trees, people, cars, toys, musical notes.

Above the office door was the biggest piece of pottery, big as a sofa: an anatomically correct heart sprouting white-feathered angel wings.

Thurman entered the cluttered office. No one home. He moved into the bays.

The first three were occupied by exotic cars: hotrods in various stages of being gaudily decorated. The last bay was filled with easels and wall-leaning stacks of canvases, also in various stages of completion. The paintings exhibited the same daffy sensibility as the outdoor ceramics. A beat-up workbench held brushes, tubes of color, tins of thinner and crusty rags. A tatty couch with mussed blankets, a metal-topped kitchen table and a small refrigerator seemed to hint at regular overnight human occupancy.

A toilet flushed. Through an opening door—whose frosted glass bore the calligraphic legend INSPIRATION: TEN CENTS—walked a very pale muscular man with a trendy arrangement of dark facial hair offset by a thinning on top. One earlobe, his left, was studded with segments of a severed silver snake, like the colonial DON’T TREAD ON ME. He was concentrating on tucking his paint-splattered green mechanic’s shirt into his Swiss Army-surplus wool pants, and so did not immediately notice Thurman. Lacking sleeves, his abbreviated shirt revealed several tattoos, including a winged heart.

“Er, Vance?”

The guy stopped and looked up with neither welcome nor discouragement. “Who’re you?”

Thurman, growing more and more doubtful, volunteered his name. Then: “I was sent by Shenda Moore. She said you’d have a regular job for me . . . ?”

“You know kandy-flake? Or striping? I could use some help striping. How about bodywork? Can you do bodywork?”

“Well, I’m good with tools, and I picked up a lot of special skills in the Army.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Well, basically I was a demolition expert. But I can learn new things quick.”

Vance von Jolly had gotten his shirt stuck in the zipper of his pants, and was now struggling mightily to restore his apparel to its proper functioning. Thurman wondered if he should offer to help.

“Jesus! That Shenda! She drives me nuts! All right, I suppose you can start by washing brushes. Any thumb-fingered idiot can wash brushes.”

Thurman was hurt. “Wait just a minute now—”

“Oh, did I mention I can’t work with anyone who gets pissed off at my dumb mouth?”

“No. Unless that was the warning just now.”

Unable to free his shirt from the toothy tangle, Vance ceased struggling and moved to the workbench. Buttoning his waistband, he found an alligator clip and pinched shut the upper open portion of his fly. The clip projected outward like a small groin antenna.

“It was. Okay, let’s start by showing you where everything is.”

Thurman had one question. “Vance—will I be working with a lot of chemicals? I’ve had some bad luck with chemicals in the past.”

Vance seemed to see Thurman and his condition for the first time. He shook his head ruefully. “Man, someone really fucked you up, didn’t they?”

“I guess you could say that.”

The painter moved to Thurman’s side, hanging an arm over his shoulder. A complex odor of sweat, garlic and solvents wafted off the man.

“Thurman, my pal, I want to let you in on a little secret. The Army made you handle the chemicals of death! But here we work with the chemicals of life!”

“What’s the difference? Chemicals are chemicals, aren’t they?”

Vance von Jolly merely tapped a finger against his head and winked.

8.
“Let the Dogs Vote!”

Sun like a fusion-powered pomegranate in a pristine blueberry sky. Whipped cream clouds. Breezes holding kites and balloons aloft and trying to tug high women’s skirts and slither up men’s pants legs. Acres of open lawn green as celery, with shaded patches the color of new money. Shouts and squeals of running playing wild children. Over-the-top, can’t-stand-myself canine pack yelping. Bee-buzz adult chatter: gossip, business, philosophy and seduction. Teenage odd-stressed argot in the perpetual search for cool. Pointillistic laughter. Competing music from half a dozen boomboxes, holding the sonic fort until the Beagle Boys finished their cable-laying, equipment-stacking preparations underway ‘neath a Sgt. Pepper bandstand. Smell of mesquite burning down to perfect grilling coals, and aromatic dope leaves combusting.

Just another partially organized, partially spontaneous monthly shareholders’ meeting of Karuna, Inc.

Shenda thought back to a poetry class.

Rip those boardroom doors from their jambs, rip the executive jambs from the walls, then rip down the corporate walls!

You go, Walt!

Amidst and amongst the several hundred people and several score dogs assembled in Morley Adams Park, Shenda circulated happily, Dame Kind with her flock.

Mama! These festivities always made her high!

Every face smiled to see her, every adult hand juggled drinks or spatulas or books or tapes or purses or babies in order to clasp hers. Children hurled themselves at her as if she were some natural feature of the landscape placed here for their rightful pleasure: a tree, a mountain, a beach. Shenda caught them up, whirled them and set them down. Fur and tongue and tail foamed around her like breakers, then raced away.

A splash of lemon yellow, a flash of jell-o wattles: Bullfinch scampered to keep up with his fleeter cousins.

This was what Shenda lived for. Not all the petty details of running her brainchild, the squabbling altruistic quasi-corporation known as Karuna, Inc. Certainly not all the hourly, daily, weekly headaches and stress. They all faded like phantoms in the sunshine of this assemblage. Here, under her watchful, beneficent gaze, she could gauge the actual good she had accomplished, count all the people she had helped and observe how that help had spread—was continually spreading—outward in circles of big-heart, wide-mind action.

Shenda really wanted nothing else. (A man, a mate, hell—a date? Well, perhaps . . . .) This gathering was her total and complete yardstick of satisfaction.

This very day would have been perfect, in fact, if not for one matter.

Zingo, that cell-u-licious horsepiss.

The actual owner of Maraplan Importing—this brashly illegitimate distributor new to their city—had visited the Karuna Koffeehouse several times since that day Verity had told his men unequivocally to fuck off. At last managing to snare Shenda, he had delivered one final classic performance of intimidation and blustering. Ignorantly self-assured, crudely sly and warthog-aggressive, he refused to take Shenda’s “Blow me!” reply-in-kind for an answer.

“Little lady,” said Faro Mealey in their ultimate interview, rasping a simian hand across his chin stubble, “you are not being very smart.”

Shenda was a little scared at this confrontation. But stronger emotions were a sense of the scene’s absurdity, and utter infuriation at the nerve of this guy!

“On the contrary, Mister Mealey. It’s you who’s acting like a juvenile dumbshit schoolyard thug! You come in here and practically order me to drop my old distributor and replace him with you. Then you tell me that I’ll have to take just as many cases of that poisonous antifreeze you call soda as you decide is good for me. Moreover, I’m not the only business you’re trying to pull this scam on. You’ve been to some of my friends, as well as dozens of unrelated concerns throughout the city. Does the word ‘shakedown’ hold any meaning for you, Mister Mealey? Do you know what would happen to you if I went to the cops?”

Mealey unsealed a sporadically gold-capped grin. “Not a fucking thing, babe, I assure you.”

Shenda looked the man up and down. Clad like a cheap racetrack tout, Faro Mealey seemed an unlikely type to actually command the clout he now boasted of. Still, Shenda probed for more information.

“Oh, yeah? Who’s gonna come bail your ass out? The International Brotherhood of Slimeballs?”

“Very funny. I like broads with a sense of humor. They’re always good in bed. No, my business has some important backers. Let’s just say that the makers of Zingo take a big interest in insuring their product gets top placement in the marketplace. Now, why doncha think about my proposition for a few days? I should warn you that our terms in the future might not be so generous.”

“Mister Mealey, you can take a fucking Zingo enema. Now, get the hell out of here!”

Over the next few days, Shenda had done a little financial-pages, web-searching, library-stack sleuthing, following a not-too-shadowy paper trail.

The company that perpetrated Zingo was owned by another. And that one was owned by yet another. But beyond that level, the path seemed to lead conclusively to something called Isoterm. Who or what motivated them, Shenda had been unable yet to learn.

A Nerf football hit Shenda in the side of the head.

“Sorry!” called out little Tara Vadeboncoeur, her face a mix of horrified chagrin and stifled delight.

“No malo, chica! That’s what I get for daydreaming in a rowdy crowd!” Shenda lofted the ball back, and moved on.

She stopped and talked with Joe Ramos of Kan-do Konstruction for a while. His firm planned to bid on part of the new Westside highway job. Shenda gave him a rundown on what she had picked up on his likely competitors through the grapevine. After a gleeful handshake, she left Ramos crunching numbers on a calculator.

Mona Condeluccio staggered by under the weight of two aluminum pans, each as big as an unfolded Monopoly board and deep as a footbath. Shenda quickly relieved her of one, and peeked beneath the foil lid.

“Mmm-mm! Potato salad!”

“And this one’s macaroni. I got six more in the truck!”

Mona ran Kozmic Katering. She was providing about half the food for today’s bash, partially in lieu of her tithe. The rest was all deliciously homemade. Oh, except for the donuts from Krishna Murphy’s Krispy Kreme franchise.

Following Mona toward the picnic tables, Shenda said, “Louie Kablooie, I wish the business part of the day was over already!”

After a few spectacular failures, Shenda had mandated that Karuna, Inc., finish discussing all its outstanding business matters prior to falling like wolves and vultures and savages on the food and alcoholic beverages. Otherwise, not a hell of a lot got done. And also, while Shenda didn’t mind being heckled, she found that the intellectual quality of the catcalls and witticisms was higher when the audience was sober.

The women deposited their burdens on the groaning buffet. Shenda grabbed the first teenager to fall within her reach. “You, Haley Sweets! What you thinking, standing there like a goofball statue when there’s work to be done? Help Mona! Right now!”

Haley Sweets—acne like strawberry fields—gazed at Shenda with besotted puppy love. He gulped, sending a hypertrophied Adam’s apple yo-yoing, said without satire, “Yes sir!”—then trotted obediently off.

Shenda laughed silently. Boy—we got to find you a woman!

And then she saw Thurman Swan.

Thurman sat on a folding plastic-basketweave lawn chair, his cane hung from the armrest. If his seat had been a gold throne in a Byzantine palace, his enjoyment would obviously not have been increased one iota.

On either side of him stood the gorgeously decorative SinSin Bang and Pepsi Scattergood, owner-beauticians of Kwik Kuts. SinSin was half-Vietnamese, half-Chinese, one of the few good things to come out of the last border war between those two countries. Pepsi was a Nordic-Anglo mix who—Shenda had always privately observed to herself—resembled no one so much as that infamous comix icon, Cherry Poptart.

The two women were fussing inordinately over Thurman. All they lacked for their role of houris were giant palm fronds to fan him with.

“Can I get you some more juice, Thurman?”

“Would you like another cushion, Thurman?”

“Is that sun too much for you?”

“Have some potato chips, Thurman! They’re fresh!”

A burst of jealousy ignited like a Roman candle in Shenda’s chest. What did those two think they were doing!

Ever since Shenda had told Pepsi and SinSin that Thurman had admired her pedicure—Shenda’s footwork their handiwork—they had taken a silly fancy to him.

“You know how rare it is for a man to notice something like that, Shenda?”

“And then to say it out loud in a public place!”

“Wow!”

Additionally, Thurman’s sickly condition had sent their unfulfilled maternal nursing instincts into overdrive.

It was all very innocent and probably good for them all.

But somehow, today, it made Shenda’s blood percolate!

Shenda marched over.

When Thurman spotted her, he got guiltily to his feet.

“Un, hi, Shen—”

Shenda cut off the feeble greeting. “You, Swan—come with me!”

“I’ll be right back—”

“No, you won’t! Hurry up!”

Shenda stalked off, leaving Thurman to stump after her.

When they were some distance away, Shenda stopped under the semiconcealing foliage of a willow. Fronds whispered at her passage. Thurman caught up and leaned gratefully against the trunk, out of breath.

“Do you know what those two are?” demanded Shenda. Without waiting for an answer, she spat, “They’re lovers! Lesbians! Lipstick lesbians!”

Thurman looked puzzled. “So what? I can’t be friends with them? It’s not like I want babies or anything.”

Shenda’s ire deflated. She lowered her head and pinched her brow. “Oh my god, what am I saying? They’re my friends too. I don’t care they’re lesbians. I never even thought twice about it before! I swear it! That’s not me!”

Thurman moved next to Shenda. Cane in his right hand, he took her left in his. He didn’t press any advantage that her confusion provided, but simply said, “Don’t worry about it, Shenda. You must have a lot on your mind.”

Shenda felt immense gratitude for the sympathy. The same tactical pause she employed not to prejudge others, she now used to forgive herself. “I do, I do! In fact—” she consulted her watch “—I’ve got a meeting to call to order that’s already late!”

“Let’s go then.”

People were already gathering expectantly about the central focus of the bandstand, growing quiet and alert. The crowd parted for Shenda, and she found Thurman somehow still behind her, his face drained from the small exertions.

“Oh, shit, I am so sorry I dragged you around like this!”

“I—I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

“Listen—you can’t stand for the whole time, and the only seat is up there with me. Do you mind?”

“Nuh-no,” panted Thurman.

They ascended the three stairs, finding themselves amid the band’s equipment and instruments. Thurman collapsed onto Buddy Cheetah’s drumset stool. Shenda picked up the microphone and tested it. It was on. With a backward glance to make sure Thurman was okay, she shifted into business mode and began.

“This meeting of Karuna, Inc., is now officially underway. Can I have the minutes of the last meeting, please? Ellen Woodrose, are you out there?”

Business was conducted. People ascended the stage as called. Officers read reports. Motions were proposed. Yays and nays were tallied. People were praised or confronted. Plans were debated and modified. Arguments expired in compromise. Agreements were reached. No blood was spilled.

At last Shenda was able to utter one of her favorite sentences. “If there is no more business, then this meeting is adjourned—”

Chef Mona called loudly out from the mass of people. “Shenda, I got a shortage of help and grill space today! Which should I cook first? The veggie burgers or the meat?”

The crowd went into noisy spasms. “The meat, the meat!” “No, the falafel first!”

Then an anonymous voice called out: “Let the dogs vote!”

The whole crowd took up the absurd chant: “Let the dogs vote! Let the dogs vote!”

Children ran off screaming to herd the romping packs up to the tables. Like a madman’s cattle drive, the dogs were chivvied toward the food tables.

Shenda knew them all by sight. Spaniels, briards, whippets, shepherds, Scotties, terriers, Great Danes, greyhounds, sheep dogs and many a miscegenetic mongrel. Hounds and lapdogs, hunters and retrievers. Ten thousand years of human-inspired breeding. There was French Fry, Slinky Dog, Muzzletuff, Oftenbark, E. Collie, Dogberry, Wagstaff, Nixon, Tuff Gong, Gromit, G-Spot, Snake, Whiskey, Deedles, Subwoofer—and dozens more.

And of course, sticking out like a bright bouncy beachball, the resplendent Bullfinch.

The kids had succeeded in massing the dogs around Chef Mona. In her hands, she held two patties: one meat, one bean. The crowd fell still as Arctic night.

Strangely, the dogs too had grown calm and composed. They seemed aware of the responsibility that had devolved on them.

Mona bent and offered the patties.

Not a single dog moved forward out of the ring. Instead, they seemed to consult with muted growls and ear prickings among themselves.

Then one animal emerged from the pack as if nominated by the rest, strutting with immense dignity right up to his own personal canine Judgment of Paris.

Bullfinch.

And without a second’s hesitation he chose the falafel.

Half the crowd applauded, half booed, before dissolving into a disorganized surge toward the buffet.

On the stage Shenda turned to Thurman, whose face was wreathed in amazement.

“And that’s how we do things por la Karuna!”

9.
The Illogic of Conquest

In his vast, statue-littered bedroom, before his official busy day began, Marmaduke Twigg sought to fortify himself for his off-the-record meeting with Kraft Durchfreude. The guiding black light of Isoterm lifted his silken pajama top, revealing a small titanium port like a robot’s nipple implanted in his side. He attached a transparent feedline leading to an IV sac hanging on a stand. Triggered by the connection, his inner pump began to hum. Blue fluid flowed directly into his veins.

No time to get the Zingo through his slow digestive tract now! Durchfreude would be here any moment.

Twigg dreaded the meeting. All he could picture was Durchfreude holding the nail gun and firing into Stanes’s head. The expression on the creature’s face! Something not present at previous initiations—a trace of deadly disengagement, of schizoid withdrawal—had crawled beneath the tightly held surface of the Dark Intercessor’s face.

Twigg suspected that Durchfreude’s unstable brain was finally fractionating. As when a glacier meets the sea, parts were calving off, achieving or struggling for autonomy. The jigsaw pieces of Durchfreude’s mind were twitching with a life of their own, hopping out of their former plane of alignment.

Of course, this made the cat’s-paw of the PGL highly unreliable—dangerous in fact—and subject to immediate termination.

Still, Twigg hoped to get just one more assignment out of him. A simple one, to be sure, but necessary.

As the IV bag collapsed with an accompanying mechanical sucking sound from Twigg’s thorax, he felt a twinge of regret at Durchfreude’s disintegration and imminent demolition. None of this had been the man’s own fault, of course. Why, Twigg remembered when Kraft Durchfreude had been the ultra-competent head of Squamous Securities, a legend in the world of cutthroat business dealings. And even after the surgical bungle he had lived a useful life, performing with eclat and brio the dirtiest tasks the PGL members could dredge up for him. Why, even as far back as six or seven years ago, when Twigg had sent the Dark Intercessor to the Persian Gulf, the monster had still been at the top of his form. Look how ingeniously he had raked Isoterm’s nuts from the fire, destroying all evidence of the company’s sales to Iraq of CBW materiel. Even the highly over-rated CIA had been unable to prevent Durchfreude’s access to pertinent records of theirs, which had forever after gone conveniently missing . . . .

But now—now was a different story.

After this job, Twigg would present his suspicions and proofs to the godsons and goddaughters of Phineas Gage. Surely they all must have noticed the falling-off in Durchfreude’s performance, the strains in his behavior, and would agree on his lethal disposition, despite any temporary inconveniences.

Twigg suspected that only one real issue, never made explicit, had stayed their hands thus far.

Where would they ever find a successor with Durchfreude’s exquisite taste in kidnap victims for the monthly rites?

The bedroom door opened as Twigg was unsnapping his feed. A quivering Paternoster ushered in the bald and skeletal Kraft Durchfreude, then hastily backed out, as if from the vicinity of a cobra.

Dropping his pajama shirt, Twigg manufactured affability out of unease. “Kraft, my good man! Come right in. I hope they fed you well downstairs.”

The thing’s voice was as uncontoured as a worm. “I ate.”

“Wonderful! Never conduct negotiations on an empty stomach, that’s my rule. Makes one too eager to have them over! Not that we’re performing what one might term negotiations, of course.”

“No.”

Unnervingly, Durchfreude’s popeyed gaze never strayed from Twigg’s mouth, as if the Dark Intercessor were contemplating cruel refinements in the form and function of that organ. Twigg stammered, “Yes, well, be that as it may.” He tried to project authority. “Here is your assignment. I have recently encountered several nuclei of resistance across the nation, holdouts fighting the introduction of a new Isoterm product. Zingo, a soft drink. I’d like you to visit each of these sites and insure that they are permanently removed as sources of opposition. You should start with one in particular, more organized than most. It’s at the head of the list. You’ll find the specifics in these papers.”

Twigg handed over a file folder. “Is everything clear?”

“Why?”

The simple word stopped Twigg like a wall. He couldn’t recall Durchfreude ever uttering that syllable before. Further sign of his slide into mental chaos.

“‘Why?’ What do you mean?”

The monster struggled to cloak nebulous thoughts in the proper words. “Why must—why must you go where you aren’t wanted? Can’t you purchase those who would be purchased, and—and leave the others alone?”

“Kraft, my good fellow, surely you jest! It is my absolute nature to flow into all available niches, to drive out and break all competition, to smash and burn and crush, to grind the faces of the conquered into the dust, until only I alone am left standing, regnant over all I survey, even if that should be a smoking wasteland of my own devising! My categorical imperative is that all my actions must conduce toward the magnification of my supreme presence. Why, had I infinite time and infinite space to fill, it would still not be enough to hold my tremendous vitality! It’s not that I particularly want to sell soda pop! Great Satan, no! And there is nothing sinister about Zingo, no addictive properties or brainwashing qualities. In fact, the drink is a not completely unhealthful, if nasty tasting mix of electrolytes, Olestra, Nutrasweet, and some artificial flavors and coloring. Good for keeping the masses fit for the assembly line. And of course, the money is trivial. No, it’s simply a matter of not allowing my will, however arbitrary and capricious, to be thwarted.”

“I—I see.”

Twigg clapped a hand on Durchfreude’s shoulder. “Of course you see. You may do no other.”

Twigg’s shifted line of vision now encompassed the stasis-control device on the tabletop. On a powerful whim, he picked it up, aimed and brought his tiger nemesis instantly to life. At the same time he stepped behind Durchfreude as a screen, so that the tiger would spot that man first.

The enraged wild tormented beast rocketed toward Durchfreude. But the Dark Intercessor never so much as flinched.

Twigg froze the big cat only when its whiskers were nearly touching Durchfreude, who—only upon seeing the threat neutralized—stepped deftly aside to allow it to crash to the carpet.

Durchfreude regarded his employer emotionlessly. Then he turned and left.

Twigg sensed then that he should have let the Siberian finish the job.

But now it was really rather too late.

10.
Karuna Kaput

Thurman really could not think of much he would want to change right now in his life, except of course for the state of his health, the less-than-optimal condition of his tainted organs and flesh and bones. A collection of mismatched parts barely holding together (although seemingly, thankfully, not getting worse).

And yet—even with that grim toe-stepping partner, Miss Function, he was learning to dance, to shuffle gamely around life’s ballroom.

After all, as Shenda had said, his problems were old shit.

He was really getting his act together at last, after the disastrous end to his Army career. Coming out of his shell, turning over a new leaf, climbing every mountain, and a raft of other natural metaphors.

Why, one day it seemed possible he might even own a dog!

Things looked sweet.

Every morning he arose early after a semidecent night’s sleep. (His joints still pained him, his stomach still often rebelled against supper, but somehow his mind was more at ease, and that helped a lot.) Dressed, he measuredly walked the ten blocks to the Karuna Koffeehouse and through the laffing door, where he was treated to Verity-whipped espresso eggs and the latest creation of that baking genius, Odd Vibe: a buttery, cheddary croissant with fractal flaking layers.

“You eat good now, Tor-man, you betcha!”

“Very good, Odd Vibe. Thanks!”

The familiar faces and repeated rituals of the place soothed him. There resounded Chug’em’s fourth long slurp, here came Nello with his latest dirty joke, there was Buddy executing intricate rhythms on the countertop with two wooden spoons.

Even the mean scowl and mimed expressions of distaste directed his way each day by Fuquan Fletcher (who had never again verbally or physically accosted Thurman) were an integral part of his daily routine.

The place to come when even home isn’t kind enough.

Indeed, indeed.

At a quarter to nine, the taxi from Kall-a-Kab would pull up and beep for him, and he’d ride to his job.

Vance von Jolly had proved to be a decent boss. Any sternness or disdain exhibited by the man was a tartness solely in service to his art, and would just as likely be turned toward himself.

“Thurman, I ask you—have you ever seen such a pitifully derivative waste of canvas? If Big Daddy or the ol’ Kootchie-Koo hisself could see this sad excuse for a painting, they’d break all my brushes in half and throw my ass out on the street. Scrape it down, will you, before I barf. I’m gonna go sand down that T-bird.”

Having no artistic talent or insight, Thurman simply did as he was told. (When working with potentially noxious chemicals, he wore full protective duds: respirator, gloves, smock. The proximity to pigments and sprays and solvents seemed not to be worsening his ailments anyhow.) His natural obedience and alacrity, modified by his body’s limits, seemed to suffice. For the past two weeks he had collected a more than generous paycheck.

And many times a week, he got to see Shenda Moore.

The vibrant, seemingly inexhaustible leader of the Kompassionate Konglomerate (as Thurman had mentally dubbed Karuna, Inc., inspired by its treatment of himself and all others) blew into the garage like an hourglass-shaped twister at unpredictable intervals, bearing directives, advice, questions, checks, official forms, gifts of food and flowers. And she always offered up a personal comment or two, out of that massive Rolodex concealed in her pretty head.

Whenever she wasn’t around, Thurman thought he had no illusions about Shenda ever being more to him than a not-too-intimate friend. That moment of connection under the willow tree had been a fluke, never referred to again.

But when her warm and radiant body and blithe spirit actually occupied the same room as Thurman, he was convinced he loved her and always would.

Maybe all he needed was another opening . . . .

Early Saturday evening in Morley Adams Park. Dusk calls of birds, skybowl purpling, lawns releasing their night odors, stone wall still warm against his back, planks of the bench rough under his butt. Hands folded in his lap, Thurman contemplated the foot-gouged trough of dirt at his feet.

What had brought him here? Usually he was abed by now, watching TV or listening to the radio. Hoping to recapture some of that magic willow-shrouded day perhaps . . . .

A tennis ball rolled up to nestle between his V-angled sneakers.

Then a beautifully ugly jonquil dogface appeared, tongue lolling out to drip approximately a pint of slobber on Thurman’s Nikes.

“Hey, Thurman, what’s up?”

Shenda dropped down beside Thurman. If a transdimensional imp had materialized and hauled a giant cartoon moneybag out of some fold of hyperspace and offered it to him, Thurman could not have been more stunned.

Shenda ignored his blank amazement. “Me and Bully are out for the first time in days! I could kick myself sometimes! Get so involved in the biz, you know. And what’s it all for, if not minutes like this?”

“I agree. Minutes. Just like this.”

Shenda said nothing for a time. Thurman recalled the silence she had cultivated prior to blasting his psyche apart, and inwardly flinched. But when she spoke, her words were mild.

“How’re SinSin and Pepsi and you getting on these days?”

“Oh, them! Great, fine. They’re very nice to me. They even took me to the beach the other day. I don’t remember the name of the place, but there was a real big-hair crowd—”

“Uh-huh. Been there once with them myself. You should have seen this one lifeguard. Buff but dim! Well, he just went straight after Pepsi like—”

Shenda’s story was long and involved and funny. She rattled on as if she hadn’t talked recreationally in too long a time. Thurman had only to nod and interpolate a few monosyllables to keep the narrative flowing. One tale segued into another. Every few minutes one of the humans offhandedly tossed the ball for Bullfinch. When it became too dark for the dog to see anything, he lay beneath the bench and began to snore.

Thurman began to talk a little about himself. Presently he found that their roles had flipped, with Shenda doing most of the listening and nodding.

Around ten-thirty, Shenda jumped up. “Louie Kablooie! I have to make my rounds!”

“Your rounds? At this hour?”

“Before I can sleep, I go around to all our businesses and make sure they’re locked up safe. The Koffeehouse is last, at midnight.”

Thurman thought this sounded obsessive, but only said, “Even on the weekend?”

“Like maybe thieves don’t work weekends?”

“Well, I guess I’ll say goodbye then—”

“No, don’t! Please. You can keep me company.”

“Ride shotgun?”

Shenda made pistol fingers and fired a few imaginary shots into the dust. “Dance, pardner!”

The three of them got into the Jetta, Bullfinch sprawled in the back seat, and were soon circulating down lonesome urban trails.

Their small sedate city was winding down by the time they pulled up to the Karuna.

All dark, save for a lone light still on in the kitchen.

“That’s probably Fuquan, getting the beans ready for tomorrow so he can sleep in late. He’s got a key.”

Emboldened by this time spent together, Thurman was about to inquire just what, if anything, Shenda felt for that obnoxious guy.

Then a gunshot sounded, plain as a million dollar vase shattering.

From inside the Karuna.

“No!” yelled Shenda.

The woman and the dog were out of the car before Thurman could even get the unfamiliar door open. Damn, where was the handle—!

All hell arrived, with bells on.

An enormous CRUMP!, followed by a WHOOSH!, and the Karuna burst into flames, sending glass flying like deadly stars into the street.

A stick figure in a business suit emerged from the storeside alley like a demon stepping from an inferno. He walked calmly away from the blazing structure, gun hanging down by his side.

Shenda hesitated, but Bullfinch did not.

The dog raced across the street and catapulted himself at the man.

The living skeleton’s reaction was out of all proportion to the unarmed assault. As if facing some supernatural creature, the arsonist-killer dropped his gun, screamed, threw up his arms and tottered backward.

Bullfinch impacted, sending the man over completely to bounce his head off the curb.

By the time Thurman made his lame way over, Shenda was kicking the unconscious man in the side and screaming.

“Bastard! You fucking killer bastard!”

Thurman pulled her back. “Shenda, stop!”

Shenda collapsed like a string-and-bead toy whose pushed button releases the tension that sustains it. Thurman kneeled to hold her up. A migraine was flowering behind his eyes.

And then he saw the killer’s face.

Furnace skies. Sand lacquered with blood. Greasy, roilsome black clouds . . . .

And to his instant horror, Thurman knew he knew him.

11.
La Iyalocha

Nothing would ever, ever be the same.

And Shenda Moore was the one to blame.

This sad couplet ran and ran in Shenda’s brain. Like a mean virus of found poetry self-assembled from fridge-magnet vocabulary. As towers and spurts of crackling fire illuminated her dog and the two men and her own crumpled self on the oil-slicked macadam, Shenda realized with absolute certainty that what she had long awaited and pretended not to fear—like a child whistling in Oya’s graveyard—had now found her. The unraveling of all her careful labors. The major fuck-up. The explosion of chaos you’re lucky to walk away from. The shitstorm that takes innocent bystanders and chews them up like pumpkin seeds.

Innocents like Fuquan Fletcher.

Poor Fuquan!

And despite all prior pretense of equanimity, the disaster scared her.

Scared the piss out of her—

And made her fighting mad!

Some sick and evil motherfucker was going to pay.

Sirens began to wail like delighted banshees. Shenda leaped to her feet.

“In the car with this pig. Quick!”

Thurman’s expression revealed major perplexity. “But the police—”

“The police are whores! They know this man and his bosses! They suck at the same hindteat! Believe me!”

Thurman bent and lifted the unconscious killer’s arms. Shenda saw the crippled Swan try to hide a wince and grunt.

“Oh, Thurman, I forgot. Can you do it?”

“I can do it—”

Between them they hustled the guy into the back seat of the Jetta. Shenda lashed his arms and legs together with rope from the trunk. Bullfinch leaped in and sat atop the man’s chest, proudly on guard. Shenda and Thurman piled in. They tore off in the direction opposite from the hastening firetrucks just a block away.

“Where are we going?”

“To my aunt’s house.”

Shenda hadn’t known the answer to Thurman’s question until he asked it. But as soon as she opened her mouth, their destination was obvious.

Only Titi Yaya could help her now.

As she drove, Shenda filled Thurman in on the shakedown moves being directed at the Karuna and other businesses in town.

“This has to be Maraplan’s doing. Mealey and his fucking Zingo! He practically told me something like this was coming. And me, the stupid smart bitch, so muy competent, thinking I could handle everything myself! Look where it got me. Look where it got Fuquan!”

Shenda could feel tears threatening to spill out. No, not yet. She sought to relieve some of her feelings by smacking the steering wheel with her fists; the car veered; she recovered.

Thurman looked appalled. “Shenda, don’t be so hard on yourself. If the authorities were in on this, what else could you have done?”

“A lot! I could have hired some security guards, for one thing.”

“And then maybe more people would have died. No, these are jokers who don’t mind how many bodies they leave in their wake.”

Shenda turned to study her passenger’s face. “You sound so sure. What do you know?”

Thurman shared what he knew.

“Louie Kablooie,” whispered Shenda. El pulpo grew more and more tentacles. In a louder voice: “Then the jerks behind Zingo—they’re the same ones who fucking poisoned all you Gulf War vets!”

“It sure looks like it.”

“I hate them!”

Thurman said nothing for a moment. Presently: “Well, I was full of hate for a long time too. Then you told me it was all old shit.”

Shenda was too angry to listen to her own past advice. “Well, it’s new shit again. Get pissed.”

Their cargo did not awake during their journey cross-town. Within twenty minutes, Shenda was in the neighborhood of her childhood, parking in front of the brownstone where Titi Yaya lived.

They hustled the killer up the steps like a sack of cornmeal, the pudgy daffodil Bullfinch somberly following, one awkward jump at a time, tags on his collar jingling. Shenda rang her aunt’s bell just to alert the woman, but used her own key. They were quickly in the tile-floored foyer without anyone seeing their unconventional arrival.

Thurman was gasping. “Is there an elevator?”

Shenda was winded too. And everything felt unreal. “Not needed. Just down the hall.”

They half dragged their captive down the hall. At the end, a door was already opening.

There stood Titi Yaya, elder sister of Shenda’s Mom, Consolacion Amado.

La iyalocha.

The small and trim old woman wore a blue-striped white-flannel robe and corduroy slippers. Necklaces and bracelets adorned her form. Long, unbound coal-black hair was at odds with her age-lined, dark honey-colored face. Equally unlikely—yet so comfortingly familiar to Shenda—was a vibrant power, tinged with sexuality, that radiated off her, blazed in her eyes.

“I was not sleeping,” said Titi Yaya. “The cowries told me there would be trouble tonight, Shen-Shen. And I encountered the twisted branch of Eleggua in my path on the way to the store this morning. I knew that you would need me.”

“Oh, Titi! Everything’s gone wrong!”

“We’ll fix what we can. Although I have to tell you the signs are not good.”

They were inside, door shut, as safe as possible, considering.

Shenda looked around. Nothing had changed since the day a scared and tearful five-year-old had come to live here, after the child’s father, Tresvant Moore, crack-addled, had killed Consolacion and himself.

All the furniture was old-fashioned and immaculate, much of it in transparent plastic covers. Worn rugs had been vacuumed speckless. Artificial flowers and innocuous prints decorated end tables and papered walls. Smells of cooking, ancient and recent, permeated the air—and below that olfactory layer, the unmistakable whiff of omiero, that potent herbal concoction.

So far, so normal, an apartment like that of any other aleyo, any other nonbeliever.

But then Shenda’s eye traveled to the altars and shrines, earthly homes of the celestial orisha gods and afterlife eggun spirits. Colorful and cloth-draped, laden with statues, pictures, vases, sopera tureens, instruments of sacrifice. Sumptuously bestrewn with offerings of live flowers, toys, cigars, rum and food.

Titi Yaya’s apartment was a casa de santo, a Santeria temple, site of a thousand, thousand ceremonies, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly observances and propitiations, possessions, beseechings and repayments, spell-castings and curse-cleansings, a refuge for petitioners and meeting place for Titi Yaya’s peers, the male babalawos and female iyalochas.

All of this had been taken for granted by the growing child named Shenda Moore. She had hardly given a thought to the various sanctified weirdness that she had often witnessed. The tambors, the rogación de cabeza, the Pinaldos. It had all been part of the new stability she had experienced upon being taken under the wing of her unmarried aunt.

And yet, somehow, she had never penetrated fully into the Religion—or it had failed to penetrate her. About the time she would have been expected to commit to Santeria, she began hanging with the Black kids at school—her father’s seductive heritage—and the Cuban half of her background grew even less interesting to her. Analogue, antique and uncool.

After testing the stubborn strength of her niece’s convictions, Titi Yaya had refrained from coercion. Only an occasional mild reminder from time to time that the door was still open.

Santeria didn’t proselytize, didn’t do missionary work.

You came to la iyalocha because you needed the orishas.

And now Shenda was here.

But maybe too late.

Titi Yaya stooped to pet Bullfinch and whisper in his ear. The dog’s tail propellered. Rising, the santera addressed Shenda.

“Get that man in a chair. And untie him.”

“But Titi, he’s a killer!”

“He can cause no harm here.”

With Thurman’s help, Shenda did as she was told. Shanghaied into this mess, the man was being more accepting than Shenda had any right to expect.

Thurman whispered. “Your aunt. She’s some kind of witch?”

“Not witch. Priestess.”

“Oh. Her place is weird. But nice. You know—I had a massive headache when I came in here, but it’s gone now.”

“That always happens.”

Across the room, Titi Yaya, now barefoot, took no notice of them. She made the foribale, the prostration before the altar.

The altar of Babalu-Aye.

Louie Kablooie, as five-year-old Shenda had dubbed him.

Saint Lazarus was the plaster Catholic disguise the orisha wore: a loincloth-clad, sore-riddled, bearded beggar with crutch, his loyal dog always by his side.

Standing now, shredding coconut husk fibers before the statue, feeding with liquid the saint’s sacred stones concealed in the ornate tureen, chanting in Yoruban, Titi Yaya was invoking his help.

She paused, turned to her visitors.

“I need the derecho.”

Shenda’s purse was forgotten in the car. She said to Thurman, “Give me a dollar.”

Thurman dug in his pocket and came up with a bill. Shenda passed it to la iyalocha, who tucked it into a niche of the statue.

The ceremony was long and complex. The day began to catch up with Shenda. Despite all the terror and turbulent emotions, she found her eyelids drooping. She cast a glance at Thurman Swan. He seemed riveted, as did an alert Bullfinch. The Maraplan-Isoterm hireling remained eyelid-shuttered and unstirring.

Suddenly Titi Yaya spun and was upon them. It was not as if she had moved, but as if the room had revolved around her.

Behind her face Babalu-Aye dwelled.

The old woman clutched the killer around the waist with both hands. His body jolted as if electrified, his eyes snapping open.

Then she—or rather, the orisha within her—lifted him as if weightless, holding him effortlessly aloft.

Babalu-Aye’s voice was a guttural growl. “Speak!”

The man began to recite his personal history, starting with his name.

Kraft Durchfreude’s story unreeled for hours. Shenda and Thurman sat transfixed at the enormity of the far-stretching, long-living evil his tale contained. Dawnlight filtered through the gauzy curtains before he was done. For the whole time Babalu-Aye held him ceilingward like a doll, a rigid tableau.

When at last the recitation was finished, Babalu-Aye dropped Durchfreude back in the chair. The orisha departed his servant, and Titi Yaya returned, her loaned body seemingly unaffected by the superhuman exertion.

Shenda rubbed her grainy eyes. “Titi Yaya, what—what is he?”

“An egungun, a shell. He is possessed by the dead man he once was.”

Thurman spoke. “A zombie?”

“If you will.”

“What can we do with him?” asked Thurman.

“I can end his artificial life with the proper spell—” suggested la iyalocha.

Shenda had been thinking about the immense horrors wrought by Durchfreude and the Phineas Gage League. Now she spoke.

“No. Wake him up enough to realize what has been done to him. Some of the things he said make it seem he’s halfway there already. Then—send him back to his masters.”

Titi Yaya reached out to touch Shenda’s wrist. “That will set large and uncontrollable forces in action, daughter. You play one orisha against another. Are you ready for the consequences?”

Shenda felt emptied of emotions. Pity, remorse, fear, hope, hate—all were just words without referents. Her body was thin as a piece of paper. Only weariness ached inside her.

“All I know is that I don’t want to live in a world where such things go on. Let’s end them if we can.”

“Very well.”

Into the kitchen stepped Titi Yaya. Sounds of bottles and tins being opened, bowls and spoons and whisks being employed trickled in to Shenda and Thurman.

She returned with two small vials full of subtly differing cloudy mixtures, one open and one corked. From the open one, she anointed Durchfreude’s joints and head, made him swallow the remaining pungent liquid, chanting all the while.

The egungun’s eyes showed white, his limbs twitched. Bullfinch barked. Durchfreude got spastically to his feet. When his vision was again functioning, he lurched out of the casa de santo.

Shenda knew it was time for them to leave also. “Titi, you know I can never repay you.”

“The debt is all mine, daughter. I should have been more forceful with you, made you take the Necklaces, gotten you under the protection of the orishas. Now I fear it is too late. The gods do not like being ignored for so long. And they are vengeful when slighted. I will work for you despite this.”

Shenda hugged her aunt. “Thank you, Titi! That’s all I can ask. Come on, Thurman. I’ll drive you home.”

Thurman and Bullfinch preceded Shenda. At the outer door, when Thurman was already down the stairs and on the street, Titi Yaya pressed the second vial into Shenda’s hand. “This is for your sick boyfriend, dear. It will help him.”

Boyfriend?

Shenda regarded Thurman thoughtfully.

Boyfriend.

What didn’t Titi Yaya know?

12.
A Cavern Measureless to Man

Samuel Stanes wore only a small head bandage a month after his surgery. Even in the dim light of the abandoned subway station, Twigg could detect the powerful knowledge of the limitless freedom conferred by the neuro-alteration alight in the newest member’s eyes.

Now the Phineas Gage League was up to full strength. The resulting synergy and competition would doubtlessly inspire them all to new heights of ambition and conquest. At times, Twigg enjoyed the cruel play that flourished amongst them. At other times, he would have preferred to have the entire world to himself, resenting the presence of the others. But such had been the way since the League began.

Not that there could never be changes.

And yet Twigg, even in his speculative heresy, failed to intuit that changes waited literally just around the corner.

Out of the darkness and into the station pulled the little mining train, Kraft Durchfreude at the helm.

The Dark Intercessor looked like a poorly constructed scarecrow from the fields of Dis. He seemed to have spent a longish period of dirty action without bathing or changing his normally immaculate suit, resulting in a shambolic appearance.

Twigg shook his head ruefully. Deplorable and dangerous. Shameful, if such a word could apply. It was like watching a corpse rot. This would have to be the meeting where they dealt with Durchfreude. They could send him on an errand and discuss his fate then.

Climbing aboard with his peers, Twigg noticed two oddities.

The pile of victims in the last car was covered with a tarp.

And instead of the expected whiff of unclean flesh, a strange herbal odor wafted off their driver. Twigg found it instinctively repugnant.

Down the long dark descent the train chugged, finally arriving in the flambeau-lit charnel cave.

The cold flyblown broken meats of their last feast still festooned the tables. The corpses, thankfully, had been removed. But no pleasant repast awaited their delectation. The smells of old rot were gagsome.

Further strangeness: Durchfreude did not servilely hasten to move up the portable steps for their ease of disembarking. He seemed frozen at the controls of the train.

With Twigg taking the initiative, the League members got awkwardly out.

Now Durchfreude did an unprecedented thing. He backed up the train until the last car effectively blocked the narrow tunnel mouth, their only exit from the meeting place.

Twigg began to feel very ill at ease.

Durchfreude stepped down. Jerkily, he moved to the caboose. Awkwardly, he pulled the tarp off.

The victims therein were already unfairly dead, some of them quite messily. With a burgeoning horror, Twigg recognized one of the corpses as a highly placed Isoterm executive. Others he knew as important members of other PGL-led companies, a fact confirmed by gasps and demands made by his compatriots.

“What is the meaning of this?” “Is this some kind of obscene joke?” “I can’t believe what I’m seeing!” “Durchfreude, explain yourself!”

Give their senior member full credit for bravery. Creaky old Firgower moved toward the Dark Intercessor, relying on old patterns of dominance.

“We want to know the meaning of your actions right now!” quavered the very illustrious head of Stonecipher Industries.

By way of explanation, Durchfreude reached in among the bodies and retrieved an exceedingly sophisticated automatic weapon.

A rubber apron was not a satisfactory shield. The first blast cut Firgower to gory flinders, giving the others time to scatter.

But in the final sense, there was no place to run.

With stoic lack of affect, Durchfreude calmly potted the screaming members wherever they sought to hide. In their frantic scrambles and inevitable death throes, all the furniture of the chamber was overturned and smashed.

Twigg’s mind on the conscious side of the dam was blank. But not for long. A single stray bullet in his side filled his superman’s brain with crimson anguish.

He fell to the carpet, facedown, a hand going to his wound.

Metal. He felt metal. His pump had caught the bullet, stopped it penetrating further.

Twigg lay still.

Eventually the screaming and inarticulate gurgling stopped.

But the shooting continued, a single round at a time.

Ever conscientious, Durchfreude was slowly walking around the scene of slaughter, putting a coup-de-grâce shot or three into each surgically altered brain.

Twigg opened his eyes.

He was staring into the lifeless blood-freckled face of Isabelle Fistule a few feet away.

Between them lay a familiar machete, often employed for fun, now his last hope for survival.

With infinite slowness he snaked his hand toward it.

Just as he stealthily clasped the handle Durchfreude’s shoes appeared in his vision. The man’s back was toward Twigg, as he pumped mercy shots into Fistule.

Still supine, Twigg swung up and around with all his strength.

A deep pained grunt.

Hamstrung, the mad assassin collapsed, rifle flying off.

Twigg was atop the creature in a kind of parody of sexual mounting. The face of the Dark Intercessor remained blank as ever.

Seeking to compose his mind, Twigg felt a greatness invade him from outside. Perhaps it was only his damaged pump flooding him with an uncontrolled mix of hormones and chemicals and soft drink. But whatever the source, amidst the stench and clotting filth, something celestial descended and rode Twigg like a horse.

“Speak,” ordered Twigg.

Durchfreude began a mechanical recitation covering the past few days.

When he was finished, Twigg said, “The servant is not to blame for the master’s mistakes. Die cleanly now.”

Durchfreude’s jugular blood sprayed Twigg from waist to head, feeding his power.

Twigg stood up beneath the splattered gaze of Phineas Gage.

Alone. He was all alone, the only one of his kind in all the world.

How wonderful!

13.
Fuquan’s Sendoff

In the three days following the burning of the Karuna and the visit to Titi Yaya’s, much happened.

Thurman felt dizzied by it all.

First, the police. They had found the dropped gun in the street and conclusively linked it to the bullet obtained from Fuquan’s charred corpse. The fact that the only fingerprints on the pistol were those of a long-dead respectable businessman proved only that the weapon had probably been stolen and kept unused for years, then handled by a gloved killer. Much persistent questioning ensued. The firemen had reported a fleeing car, but had been unable to provide positive ID that would link it to Shenda. Still, as with any business-related fire—especially one involving apparent concealment of a death—the suspicions of the authorities turned first on the owner and putatively disgruntled employees and customers.

“Now, Mister Swan,” said Sgt. Botcher. A comb-over, a plump ruddy face, and a black vinyl belt distinguished the policeman. This did not cause Thurman to underestimate him however. “Witnesses report that you had a little run-in with the victim some weeks ago.”

“It—it was nothing. He got mad when he thought I had eyes for a woman he wanted.”

“Ah-ha. I see. A woman. Would you mind divulging her name?”

Thurman knew he couldn’t lie, and also how suspicious all this would sound. “It was Miss Moore.”

“Miss Moore. The owner. Hmmm. She sure has her hand in a lot of businesses in this city. All properly insured, though, I bet.”

Sgt. Botcher made a little tick in his notebook. Then he threw Thurman a wild pitch that appeared to be an attempt to establish a specious bond.

“You’re a vet, Mister Swan?”

“Yes. The Gulf War.”

“Me too. ‘Nam. One long hellacious fuck-up and fuck-over. Yours was penny-ante. Just a few months of the bosses testing some new systems and keeping their hand in.”

Thurman tried to imagine his debilitating chronic illness as something penny-ante. Maybe to someone outside Thurman’s skin that was how it looked. “I guess . . . .”

“Learned all about guns in the service, naturally.”

“Well, sure, the necessary drill. But I don’t think I ever fired one in combat. Mainly I was a demolitions man.”

Sgt. Botcher’s eyes got as wide as camera shutters in a dark room. “That’ll be all, Mister Swan. And please—don’t leave town without letting us know.”

But the police were only a minor upset in Thurman’s existence. They were blind and unknowing of the strange new reality that had been revealed by Kraft Durchfreude’s hypnotic confession. (And God help the authorities if they were ever unlucky enough to track down that monster!) Tiresome as they were, they grew bored, went away eventually and could be forgotten. A number of other things were more disturbing, less forgettable, and did not seem likely soon to go away.

The shattering of his newly fashioned cozy routine, for one. With the destruction of the Karuna, he had no way to start his day. No familiar faces and rituals, no laughter and jokes, no hearty boost of generosity, goodwill and nourishing food. It left a void at the center of Thurman’s day. And whenever he encountered other members of the Karuna family, he saw the same sad feelings at work in them.

“Go home, Thurman,” Vance von Jolly told him when he showed up for work the next morning after the dawn departure from Titi Yaya’s casa de santo. The artist was stretched out on his couch, paint-stained covers pulled over his face. A small rigid tower poked the blanket up at groin level. “Someone’s scraped the canvas of my heart with a blowtorch. The palette of my soul is crusted dry. I drag raced with the Devil and lost.”

Thurman could take a hint. He left. Back in his lonely apartment, he felt that his life was shutting down again. Old physical and mental aches began to reassert themselves. It would be so easy to slip down that dark bottomless well once more—

Thurman got up and went looking for Shenda.

He found her exiting the Kandomble Brothers Funeral Home.

Shenda looked ragged. Red tired eyes, new downward-dragging lines around her mouth. The mainspring of Karuna, Inc., was plainly unwound. Thurman still found her beautiful.

She hugged Thurman tightly, then released him.

“Fuquan’s mother asked me to handle the arrangements. She’s old, and doesn’t have two nickles. It’s all taken care of now. No wake, just the funeral day after tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there. Shenda—”

She placed two fingers gently on his lips, as if in a blessing. Electricity sparked. “Not now, Thurman, okay? After the funeral. Right now I have to cobble together temporary jobs for Verity and Buddy and the other baristas who are out of work. Then there’s a lot of official crap connected with the fire. And I want to find a new home for the Karuna. And the police—”

“Sgt. Botcher. I know. Okay, Shenda. See you back here.”

He watched her drive away.

On the morning of the funeral—bright, fragrant, dawn rain-washed, implacably beautiful—Thurman was dressing in his lone suit and leather shoes, disinterred from the closet. It felt strange to be out of sweats and sneakers after so long. Too bad it wasn’t a wedding . . . .

The radio was giving the news. There seemed to have been an inordinate number of executive corporate jet crashes over the past twenty-four hours, all inevitably fatal. It was almost as if—

Thurman put that notion firmly out of his head.

The Kall-a-Kab dropped him off at the funeral parlor. Thurman thought he’d be among the first. But there was already a crowd numbering in the scores. All the people he knew personally, Shenda prominent, plus dozens of faces he recognized from the happy park meeting. Apparently, every employee of Karuna, Inc., had determined to attend, in a show of solidarity that actually brought tears to Thurman’s eyes.

Fuquan’s relatives were bunched in a tight, slightly suspicious and leery family knot that quickly unraveled under the warm pressure of greetings, introductions and expressions of condolence. Soon they were interspersed among the Karuna Korps, hugging, crying, smiling.

Inside Kandomble Brothers it was a more somber, closed casket affair, a photo of Fuquan in his off-work finery propped atop the silver-handled box. Foot-shuffling in the general hush, chair-creaking and weeping.

Thurman hitched a ride to the church with the respectful but ultimately irrepressible SinSin and Pepsi in their absolutely fabulous Miata. Now that was a ride and a half! His brain was put to the test to handle the disorienting transitions, from a folding chair in the parlor to a lap perch in the car to a pew in the church.

Thurman hadn’t been inside a church in years, and this one wasn’t his old denomination. It felt strange but good. Maybe that incredible visit to the casa de santo had awakened something dormant in him.

After the preacher spoke his formal eulogy, the lectern was opened to anyone else who had words to offer.

To Thurman’s surprise, a steady stream of people trekked up to speak.

Time to toast the roaster.

Fuquan had been a prick. The speakers neither dismissed nor highlighted that fact. But he had been loved.

People talked about the man’s high-energy approach to life, his unique entrances and exits, his unstinting involvement with whatever thrilled or irked him. Memories of brawls and love affairs, ups and downs, flush times and bust times, generosities and ingenious scams were trotted out and lovingly recounted.

Thurman found himself listening with increasing enchantment. There had been a lot more to the feisty guy than he had ever suspected.

As the flow of speakers ebbed, Thurman realized that one important aspect of Fuquan’s life hadn’t been touched upon.

Without conscious intention, Thurman found himself heading up the aisle to speak.

Facing the sea of attentive faces, Thurman hesitated for a nervous moment, then began.

“I, uh, I only knew Fuquan for a couple of months, and we didn’t always get along, so, um, I don’t have a lot to say. But I do know one thing. He made a lot of people happy and wide-awake with his coffee-roasting, er, prowess. And that’s better than letting them stay grouchy and sleepy. So we all owe him. And who’ll take his place?”

Thurman stepped down to loud applause and chants of “Amen, brother!” His face burned and his mind spun. It was only by the graveside, as the large crowd dispersed, that he really returned to earth.

Shenda approached him. She wore a black wool dress molded to her opulent figure and a single string of pearls, black nylons on the strong pylons of her legs. Her high-heels pierced the turf with each step. She laid a hand on his arm.

“Thurman, I don’t want to be alone. Come home with me.”

Bullfinch was waiting behind the apartment door. He leaped and cavorted about them like a bright sunny jowly gnome, barking in a queerly modulated way.

The humans had little attention to spare for the dog.

Shenda kicked off her shoes and led Thurman into the bedroom.

They were kissing. Then she loosened his tie and began to unbutton his shirt. Thurman felt suddenly awkward. He stopped her hand.

“I used to look better than I do now,” he said.

“But I know you only now.”

Thurman couldn’t argue with that.

Sprawled naked on the bed, face alight, cocoa arms and legs open to him, Shenda made Thurman think of a dryad who shared the hue of the exotic heartwood of her home tree, or of an unburnished copper woman.

Shenda was gentle with his disabilities. At climax, it was as if lightning entered his head and blazed along his spine. Something shifted permanently within him, as when an object was lifted from a balanced tray. A coffeecup, perhaps.

Thurman fell asleep cradled in Shenda’s embrace. When he awoke, it was twilight. Shenda still held him. Bullfinch had climbed onto the bed, and was snoring. Thurman shifted to look at Shenda’s face. Her eyes were open, and tears trickled down her cheek like the first rivulets of spring.

“What’s wrong? Did I—?”

“No, not you. It’s only that nothing lasts. But what else is stinking new, right? Like I should be exempt for my good deeds! Forget it.”

They talked about many things for the next few hours. At one point Shenda said, “Thurman, the most important thing in my life is the Karuna idea. It has to go on, even if I’m not around. But I never found anyone who could take over. Now I think maybe you could.”

“Me? How could I ever do what you do? You—you’re like a force of nature! I’m just a washed-up old rag next to you. Besides, you’re not going anywhere anytime soon.”

“Can’t say, Thurman. Never can say.”

After some further conversation, Thurman happened to notice a familiar vial atop the dresser.

“Is that the second potion your aunt concocted the other night?”

“Oh, yes, I almost forgot. You’re supposed to drink it.”

Shenda hopped out of bed. Her hand was reaching for the potion.

The apartment door blew off its hinges with a plaster-shattering crash and two burly men, stocking-masked and armed, burst in.

14.
Tarbaby’s Clinch

For the whole day—one whole wasted, unrecapturable day!—after the destruction of the Karuna Koffeehouse and the revelation of the dark forces behind the disaster, Shenda had felt enervated and full of despair. All her efforts, all her hard work of the past few years toward achieving her vision, had seemed a pitiable, naive facade erected against chaos, a tent in a hurricane. She even let the spontaneous blame and guilt that had erupted that fiery night fester and grow.

If I hadn’t been so stubborn over my foolish damn principles, if I hadn’t stuck my head up above the mass of the herd, trying to change things, then none of this would have happened. Fuquan would still be alive, and the Karuna would still exist. It’s all my fault for being so uppity, so arrogant, so greedy to make things better. Why couldn’t I have been content with my lot?

But as she got caught up in managing the myriad details of Fuquan’s funeral and salvaging her business from the ruins, her natural optimism, tempered and reforged, began to reassert itself.

It wasn’t my fault! If some jerk steals my car, do I blame myself for having too nice a car? No! There’s right and there’s wrong! Titi Yaya taught me that! I didn’t light the match under the Karuna, that pathetic egungun did, following the orders of some bastard named Twigg! Karuna, Inc., is the best and most honest thing I’ve ever done. I built and he destroyed! That’s what it boils down to, making and breaking, sane adult or vicious child.

This reborn confidence brought something new to light.

Before the disaster, she hadn’t thought much about living and dying, just gone naturally from day to day.

After the tragedy, life seemed worthless and she had felt like dying for nothing.

Now, with the change of heart, she felt like living, and, only if need be, dying for something.

So when the midnight intruders crashed through her door, Shenda did not meekly surrender.

Her hand closed not on the potion but on a small necklace box atop the dresser and she hurled it at one of the men. At the same instant Bullfinch flew in a snarling rage at the second.

But these were not supernaturally sensitive zombies like Durchfreude, these were hardened mundane professionals.

The first man took the box in the chest without flinching or pausing.

The second shot Bullfinch in midflight. The dog squealed and thumped to the floor.

“No!” screamed Shenda, seeing her nightmare realized.

Thurman was struggling with treacherous limbs to rise from the bed. One of the men was quickly upon him.

“Hey, feeb,” said the man, “chill.” He used his gunbutt on Thurman’s skull.

The other now grappled with Shenda, succeeding in pinning her arms.

Within seconds they had her wrists and ankles secured with duct tape, a strip across her mouth. Then they bundled her nakedness in a sheet and carried her outside.

She was dumped into a car trunk. The car took off.

For a timeless interval her mind raved, visions of lover and dog and her helpless self, spinning in kaleidoscopic disarray.

Then Shenda, with greater effort than ever before, forced her habitual mental pause upon herself.

A curious calm enveloped her now. Always dynamic, always a doer, always proactive, she was now in a situation where she could only lie still, could only react.

Was this the paralysis of the rabbit frozen before the snake? Shenda thought not, hoped not. The calmness felt too big to be simply an instinctive neural shutdown. Instead, it felt more like an opening up, like an activation of an untapped higher function, a heightened receptivity to something she had previously been only dimly aware of.

As the car accelerated toward its unknown destination, a memory came back to Shenda. It was one long sealed away, one she had never had access to before.

She was five years old. Her parents were dead. Titi Yaya had custody of her now. They were on a trip to the ocean. That should be fun.

But they ended up not at a public beach, but at a secluded rock-shored Atlantic cove barren of homes or other people. Titi Yaya had told the little girl to undress then.

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

Then la iyalocha had given the naked Shenda a white handkerchief knotted around seven bright pennies.

“Step into the sea, child, and offer the coins to Yemaya while you ask for her protection.”

Shenda waded out tentatively, the rocks bruising her feet. Waist deep, she tentatively stuck her hand holding the offering under the water.

Something pulled.

Shenda didn’t think to let go of the coins, and was dragged under.

There was a face below the waters. Kindly and wise and warm. Shenda could have looked at it forever.

But Titi Yaya was already pulling her up, coinless.

“Yemaya accepts your offering, little Shen-Shen. The orishas are your friends now forever, as long as you honor them.”

The car went over a bump, and Shenda knocked her head.

All this time. All this time she had had help waiting, but had been too proud to heed the numerous offers.

If any flaw of hers deserved punishment, this was it. Trying always to go it alone.

And now she finally was. All alone.

Or was she?

15.
The Lady Is the Tiger

It was very convenient for Marmaduke Twigg that his bedroom was wired, boasting all the electronic conveniences that allowed him to run the Isoterm empire remotely.

For he had found in the days after the massacre underground that, having attained a safe refuge, he could not summon the will to leave his room.

Oh, of course the phobia was quite understandable and certainly only of temporary duration. After all, what survivor of such carnage wouldn’t jump at every sharp report or look with suspicion at formerly trusted faces? He just needed a little time to regather his wits and confidence, his sense of the rest of humanity as easily manipulated cattle.

But: dangerous cattle, who could gore.

That had been his mistake. Not to realize that even witless subhumans could inflict pain.

But not as intently and ingeniously as he, Twigg himself, could.

Therein lay his superiority.

Twigg had not delayed in pursuing what would strengthen him.

Immediately upon receiving the requisite medical attention, he had begun to sweep up the crumbling empires of his erstwhile PGL peers. Kalpagni, Ltd.; Stonecipher Industries; Burnes Sloan Hardin Hades; Crumbee Products; Harrow & Wither; Somnifax et Cie; Asura Refineries; Preta-Loka Entertainments; Culex, SA; Brasher Investments, Plc.; Rudrakonig, GmbH; LD-100 Pharmaceuticals. All these firms, unlike more democratic ones, had been particularly susceptible to disintegration upon the lopping off of their heads. Now Isoterm, the insect god of homogeneity, was engulfing them.

With every glorious business absorption, Twigg felt power flow into him.

And yet, something was missing. These conquests were all ethereal affairs of bytes and EFTs, votes and bribes. Too impersonal.

What Twigg needed to fully reinvigorate himself was much more elemental.

Blood. The blood of the cow that had set off the stampede that had nearly trampled him.

And this was the day, now the hour.

A knock came at Twigg’s door. He took his feet off his new hassock, pausing to pat the frozen kneeler appreciatively before he stood.

Alas, poor Paternoster. Decades of loyal service undone by one incautious aged stumble while bearing the breakfast tray. Now enjoying his retirement.

Without pension.

“Enter,” called out Twigg imperiously.

The unconscious woman carried into the room by the two thugs was not in immaculate condition. Contusions mottled her naked form, and her features were smeared. An arm dangled crookedly. Experts had inflicted a certain high degree of damage on her prior to her delivery here. Twigg had not fully recovered his strength yet, was used to dealing with drugged victims, and had heard that this one was a fiery bitch. Best to have her vitality taken down a notch or three beforehand.

Twigg was not greedy. There was plenty of play left in her still.

The men dumped her on the rug and left. Twigg picked up his favorite knife, a slim Medici stiletto, and kneeled beside her. With expert prickings and a final slap across the face he managed to raise her eyelids.

“Ah, my dear, so pleased to meet you. I’m Marmaduke Twigg, your new best friend. Here is my calling card.”

Twigg sliced shallowly across the bridge of her nose. Blood flowed, crimson on brown like lava down a hillside.

“We’re going to get along famously, I can tell. What do you think?”

The woman was murmuring something. Twigg had to lean over to listen, since her bruised lips and lacerated tongue had trouble forming words.

“Dog. Your . . . name. A dog.”

Twigg straightened. “Oh, dear. How gauche. I’m afraid I must register my dismay.”

Twigg began to carve.

Delightful hours passed. Despite all his experience at prolonging agony, matters seemed to be reaching a terminal point. So Twigg paused for refreshment.

A deep swallow of Zingo.

Lowering the bottle from his avaricious mouth, Twigg was inspired. He bent over the shattered woman lying curled up on her side.

Her lips were twitching. Twigg thought to hear her mutter, “Lou—Loui . . . .”

“He’s not here, dear. Would you care for a drink? I know you’re famously not partial to this beverage though. Too much like vinegar, I take it? Oh, well, if you insist—”

Twigg emptied the cobalt liquid onto her grimly painted face.

It seemed to revive her a bit. With infinite exertion she rolled fully onto her stomach and began to crawl. Twigg watched indulgently.

She reached the table supported by the two male statues. Using their organic irregularities as handholds, she dragged herself upward until she managed to catch the gilt edge of the glass top.

The active workstation across the room chimed, signaling its need for a share-selling authorization. Twigg moved quickly to attend it, so that he could resume his pleasures.

When he looked again, the woman held the control for the tiger.

“No!”

Too late.

Death roared.

The neuronal dam crumbled.

Twigg dashed insanely for the door.

Impossibly, the woman stood like an iron wall between him and safety.

Something supernaturally strong dwelled now within her.

She clasped Twigg in an iron embrace.

“Come with me,” rasped a voice not hers.

And then the tiger was upon them both, claws, jaws and tropical volcano breath.

But tigers are not cruel.

16.
Long May You Run

A key turned in the repaired door to Shenda Moore’s apartment. The door swung inward.

First entered Titi Yaya.

Behind her, Thurman, cane thumping.

After him hopped a three-legged Bullfinch with bandaged front stump.

Titi Yaya stopped.

“I know this won’t be pleasant. But we need to go through all her papers if we are to salvage what she built. You know that’s what she wanted.”

“Yes,” said Thurman. The word came out of him easier and more evenly than he would have expected, given the surroundings. Apparently, he was, for the moment anyway, all cried out.

He had been dreading returning here, had delayed the necessity till a week after the funeral. (Shenda’s savaged corpse had come home to them only through Titi Yaya’s string-pulling on both supernatural and earthly powers.) But now, with the future of Karuna, Inc., at stake, they could delay no longer.

“You take the desk here,” ordered Titi Yaya. “I will look in the bedroom.”

Thurman was not inclined to argue. The bedroom was not a place he cared to revisit. “Feeb—” He sat at the desk chair; Bullfinch dropped down beside him. He began to leaf through papers. Shenda’s handwriting was everywhere.

After a time Titi Yaya emerged, bearing various folders, Shenda’s big satchel—and a small glass vial.

“What is this doing unopened?” she demanded. “How do you expect to accomplish anything if you stay sick? Here, drink this now!”

Thurman did as he was told. The potion was not exactly pleasant, but not vile either. Musty, loamy, musky, powerful.

“I have to go now, child. Meet me at my apartment when you are finished.”

Alone, Thurman sorted through a few more sheets and ledgers. Then an irresistible drowsiness started to creep along his limbs from his feet on up, until it crested over his head and swallowed him entirely. His hand dropped down to graze Bullfinch’s back.

He was on a flat city rooftop. Bullfinch was with him, smiling and rollicking, lolloping about on his remaining three legs.

“Throw the ball! Throw the ball! Quick!” said the bulldog.

Thurman realized he held a tennis ball.

“I don’t know how! Get Shenda to do it. Where is she?”

“She’s everywhere! Just look! She’s always here! Now let’s play!”

Thurman looked around. The sun, the sky, the commonplace urban fixtures. Was that Shenda? It seemed a poor substitute, a deceitful trade for the living woman.

“Don’t you see her? Wake up so we can play! Wake up!”

Bullfinch’s last words seemed to echo and reverberate. The rooftop scene wavered and dissolved.

Thurman opened his eyes and saw Shenda.

It was only a picture of her as a child, an old snapshot lying atop the papers on the desk.

But it hadn’t been there when he fell asleep.

Thurman stood to go. He reached for his cane, then hesitated. Somehow his legs seemed stronger.

Cane left behind, he moved with increasing confidence toward the door.

Behind him gamely trotted Bullfinch.

Thurman guessed that now he had a dog.

[Compassion or karuna] does not seem to die. Shantideva says that every uncompassionate action is like planting a dead tree, but anything related to compassion is like planting a living tree. It grows and grows endlessly and never dies. Even if it seems to die, it always leaves behind a seed from which another grows. Compassion is organic; it continues on and on and on.

—Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

© 2001 by Paul Di Filippo. Originally published in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Di Filippo sold his first short story in 1977, and since then has sold over 200 more, as well as several novels. He lives in Providence with Deborah Newton, his partner of forty years. His literary criticism appears in several places, including The Barnes & Noble Review and Locus Online.

EXCERPT: The Genius Asylum (EDGE)

Arlene F. Marks | 2896 words

The Space Installation Authority (SIA) was first established in 2153 C.E. to provide civilian oversight of Earth’s then-nascent colonization program. Its purview was expanded in 2190 C.E. to include the establishment and governing of Ares, the newly constructed settlement on Mars. To provide law enforcement on Ares, the High Council then created the Space Installation Security Agency (SIS), a fully-empowered police organization commanding a corps of officers who came to be informally referred to as the Rangers. These off-world officers were charged with keeping the peace, investigating criminal activity, and making arrests. In densely populated sectors of Earth space, Rangers were posted directly to colonies or space stations (known as hubs). In sectors where the Human population was sparse, Ranger detachments were headquartered in orbiting observation platforms. In 2308 C.E., following the bombing of a conference on Asimov Hub that claimed the lives of three representatives of the League of African Nations, the High Council approved the establishment of an off-world intelligence agency, called Space Installation Security Covert Operations (SISCO). Although they sometimes cooperated with one another, the SIA, the SIS and SISCO were separate and equal organizations, reporting directly and only to the Earth High Council.

—Sic Transit Terra, An Unauthorized Planetary History (2673 C.E.)

Chapter 1

The video clip came in from Surveillance shortly after 8:00 a.m. Drew Townsend had just arrived at his desk and was shrugging out of his jacket, already feeling weary at the thought of another day spent spinning his wheels. He could have shortened it by arriving an hour or two late, like the other Eligibles in the precinct, but he’d been a field investigator for too many years to feel comfortable about trimming his shift.

“We’ve got a body!” bawled Captain Romero, leaning out the door of his office. “Our friends in the Zone have apparently been at it again. Adult male, Emerson and Fifth. Lupo and Truman, get over there. And be careful. It may just be a body dump, but that’s Warrior Kings territory.”

The Kings? Romero had to let him take this one.

“Captain, if this is gang-related, two men may not be enough—”

“You’re right, Townsend. Dinally and Gluckstein, you’ll go as backup.”

Dinally looked pained and Gluckstein threw Townsend a helpless shrug as they headed out the ward room door together.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” Drew protested.

“I know what you meant, and the answer is no. You’re an Eligible now, which means I’m forbidden to put you in even potentially dangerous situations.”

“We both know that a body dump is one of the safest places for an investigator to be,” Townsend argued. “And I have a history with the Kings—”

“You used to be a Warrior King. There’s a difference. In any case, you can stop wasting your breath, because I’m not sending you into the Zone.”

“But if the vic is a King I may be able to ID him.”

“Great. I’ll have Lupo transmit a snap of the body to your desk screen.”

Frustration hardened Townsend’s voice. “Dammit, Captain, I’m one of your top field investigators!”

“Yes, and I was very sorry to lose you. But the moment the Relocation Authority took you back into the fold, you leaped to a higher plane of existence. Now you have to mark time, and I have to like it. And if you get so much as a boo-boo on my watch, they will come down on me and mine like a ton of high explosives. So it’s desk duty for you, pal. Desk duty and java runs,” Romero said, returning to his office and closing the door.

Drew Townsend was very good at a lot of things, but sitting around waiting for others to make things happen had never been one of them. He’d heard stories about Eligibles marking time measured in months or even years before being posted off-world. For Drew, the last three weeks had felt like an eternity, and he wasn’t sure he could take much more.

So, he let the moment settle, then counted to fifty and punched the intercomm on his desk. “Hey, Cap,” he said in his best casual voice, “I could use some java. You?”

After a beat, Romero replied, “No, thanks, Townsend.” There was a smile in his voice. It figured. The captain was too smart to fall for a con this transparent, but smart enough to recognize deniability when it was offered to him on a platter, so Townsend forged ahead.

“In fact, since things are so slow at the precinct right now, I think I’ll drink it at the cafe.”

“If you put yourself in danger, you risk losing your Eligibility again, you know that.”

The warning was pro forma. Drew knew that Romero would love to put him back to work in the field.

Don’t wait up for me, Dad.

• • • •

Romero had called ahead. As Drew steered his PV carefully along the cracked and rubble-strewn pavement of Emerson Boulevard, he saw Truman standing on the road a good block away from the scene, waving to him to pull over. Obediently Drew parked and waited for his former partner to stroll to the driver’s side window.

“Captain warned me you might get lost on your way back from the cafe,” said Truman with a grin, then laughed out loud as Townsend handed him a steaming cup. “Mm-hmm,” he said after savoring a sip. “Black and extra sweet, just like my lady.”

“I got one for Lupo, too. I wasn’t sure which one of you would be heading me off.”

“Lupo hates cold java, so we’ll make this quick. The vic is light brown, mid-fifties, about five foot ten and medium build. No ID on him, but he’s wearing a business suit and expensive shoes, and diamond ear studs, two per lobe. Whoever this guy is, he’s not a ganger. And he still has his diamonds, so I’m pretty sure the Kings had nothing to do with this.”

The mention of ear studs had set off alarms at the back of Townsend’s brain. “Show me his face.”

“It’s been mutilated, Drew. We’ve transmitted the snaps to the precinct—”

“You can either show me his face here or back off so the PV door doesn’t hit you when I get out to take a personal look,” Townsend told him in the calmly authoritative voice he normally reserved for the suspect interrogation room. “Your choice.”

Truman knew better than to argue. Wordlessly, he reached into his pocket and handed over his compupad. “You think you might know this guy?” he inquired softly.

Drew called up the image file and stared at the screen, feeling his jaw muscles work as his stomach slowly twisted itself into a knot. For a long moment he studied the snap, letting each grisly detail burn itself into his memory. Then, forcing himself to breathe normally, he closed the file. “I knew him. He was my friend. His name is Bruni Patel.”

Truman had the grace to look uncomfortable while delivering the formula speech. “Drew, I’m really sorry for your loss.”

“Yeah. I’ll see you back at the precinct.” He thrust the compupad and Lupo’s java cup into Truman’s fumbling hands and drove away before the rage beginning to boil up inside him could find its way to his mouth.

Townsend reached the urbanway in record time and joined the grid, programming his on-board computer to take him back to the 33rd Precinct. And, as Auto Traffic Control merged his vehicle seamlessly into the southbound stream, he came to a decision.

Bruni Patel had been much more than a friend to him. Bruni had bossed the wing of the detention center where Drew had been sent eighteen years earlier for possession of stolen property. Bruni’s steady guidance during the next five years was the sole reason that Drew was able to complete his education while detained and have a decent life waiting for him upon his release. The job with Security had been a challenge Bruni threw at him. A slammer rat in Security was practically unheard of, but that only made Drew more determined to qualify. The day he was hired, Bruni brought a printout of the employment contract to his cell along with a bottle of wine and two juice glasses, and they toasted Drew’s victory over adversity.

Approached years later by the Earth Intelligence Service, Townsend discovered by chance that Bruni had also been recruited. Bruni did a lot of traveling, but they’d managed to stay in touch off and on for nearly eight years. And now Bruni was lying dead in the Zone with empty eye sockets, deep gashes around his ears, and letters carved into his forehead.

Eligible or not, authorized or not, Drew owed it to his friend to do everything possible to solve his murder and bring to justice whoever was responsible.

• • • •

The rest of the Eligibles had arrived and were sitting at their desks pretending to be busy when Townsend strode through the door of the ward room and immediately booted up his screen.

“Looking for something?” came Romero’s voice from directly over his left shoulder.

“E-F-T. Those letters were carved into Bruni’s—into the vic’s forehead. What the hell is that, Captain? Someone killed him because they thought he was an amphibian?”

One of the Eligibles found that amusing. Drew silenced him with a look.

“Earth for Terrans,” sighed Romero. “Just what we need right now, another bunch of crazies crawling out of the woodwork. This group began taking out ads on the InfoCommNet a couple of weeks ago, warning that Earth’s population has been infiltrated by alien spies. We’ve had no reason to take action against the EFT because up until now it’s been nothing but talk. However, if they’ve upshifted to committing murder to make their point—”

“We need to haul in their leaders for questioning,” Drew decided.

“I’m way ahead of you. And you need to step back from this and let us do our jobs. The M.E. is pushing this case to the top of her list. Gluckstein is combing databases to reconstruct the vic’s last twenty-four hours, and Truman and Lupo are interviewing persons of interest as we speak. They’re all good investigators, Townsend. They’ll get whoever killed your friend, I promise.”

Drew pasted a grateful smile on his face and kept it there until Romero had returned to his office and shut the door. The other Eligibles, meanwhile, were studiously avoiding making eye contact, even with one another, for fear of triggering an explosion of rage across the room.

Good, thought Drew as he reached into his desk drawer and palmed the device he’d concealed there. A small black tube ringed with ridges along half its length, it had been given to him by his Earth Intelligence handler. The encrypting comm was keyed to Drew’s DNA. As he wrapped his fingers around it and squeezed gently, he could feel a soft tingling in the skin of his palm. He released his grip, then squeezed again, three times more in quick succession—a standard request for a meeting. There was no emergency, not yet.

The rest of the day went by with tortoise-like slowness and a suspicious lack of hard intel about the Patel murder crossing Drew’s desk. To help take his mind off the case, Romero assigned him to Surveillance Monitoring—Sensitive Areas. These were the high-crime-rate blocks surrounding the Zone. His eyes roving constantly over a bank of twenty flat screens, in a period of four hours Drew witnessed—and forwarded video coverage of—fifteen muggings, more assaults than he could count, and the beginnings of two weapons deals, which were aborted when the parties involved realized they were being watched by remote vidcam. At the end of his shift, fighting an eyestrain headache that he was sure would have brought down a bull moose, Townsend found himself looking down the business end of a zapper as a ganger took careful aim at the surveillance drone that had followed him into an alleyway. Cursing, Drew punched the ‘evade’ button, a half-second too late. The screen went black.

“Bull’s eye,” he muttered darkly. Good work, kid. One down and only about seven thousand to go.

• • • •

The EIS contact waiting for Townsend when he pulled into his half of the garage behind the octoplex on Lamont Street that evening was not Drew’s handler.

“Where’s Gow?”

The other man shrugged. “Otherwise occupied, so I’ll have to do. What’s on your mind, Townsend?” he asked, the patronizing tone of his voice suggesting that he already knew the answer.

“Bruni Patel was murdered last night.”

“An unfortunate loss for all of us. He was a good agent.”

“Save it for his eulogy,” Drew snapped. “What’s the EIS going to do about this?”

The man took a second to change expressions. Now he wore a superior, faintly feline smile on his face as he said in that same condescending voice, “Rest assured, Mr. Townsend, we are already doing it. We do not take lightly the murder of one of our operatives. An investigation has already been launched into the activities of the EFT.”

“I want to be assigned to that investigation.”

“Understandable—he was your friend.”

“He was more than that. I owed him my life. And since I couldn’t repay him by saving his, I plan to do the next best thing, which is to see to it that whoever killed him pays full price.”

“An admirable goal, I’m sure. However, not a practical one. You have been entrusted with a very important mission, one with a narrow window of opportunity, and you need to devote your time and all your energy to preparing for it. Meanwhile, we will ensure that Mr. Patel receives justice, never fear.”

This was the second time that Drew had been figuratively patted on the head and told to stay out of the way. Fighting to keep his voice steady, he pointed out, “My mission doesn’t begin until I board a ship bound for Daisy Hub. Until then, be advised that I’m putting myself on this murder case. And you can tell the higher-ups not to worry about the mission—I’ll be ready when that ‘narrow window of opportunity’ opens up.”

“Excellent! I take it that you are fluent once more in Galactic Standard, then. All packed up? Ready to go at a moment’s notice . . . ?”

The threat implied by his words caused Drew’s hands to curl into fists at his sides.

“Just because you have been forced into wait mode for the past three weeks doesn’t mean the rest of us have,” the man continued. “You’re on the clock, Mr. Townsend, and we’ve been building you a credible backstory. Clearly, you’ve been too preoccupied lately to monitor your credit account. Perhaps you should check it out. And we’re done here.”

Without another word, the man strode past Drew, out of the garage and down the alley to the street, where a large black PV sat idling, waiting for him.

• • • •

Townsend raced up the three flights of stairs to his apartment and went directly to the InfoComm unit on his desk.

There had been a lot of activity in his credit account over the past couple of months, none of it initiated by him.

Flowers purchased and ordered delivered to an address in Fairhaven Enclave six weeks earlier, and again two weeks ago. Dinner for two once a week at different restaurants. Box seat tickets to a low-grav basketball game. Pairs of admissions to the sim-arcade and the thrill park. A whopping big fuel bill. And that afternoon while on his way home from work, he had apparently stopped at a jeweler’s shop and put a down payment on a ring. Drew called up a snap of his ‘purchase’. The stone was modest but unmistakably a diamond.

All the relevant video footage had been expertly doctored. He didn’t recognize the woman shown cuddling up to him in the various venues, but she had to be related to someone with influence. Someone who would do anything to prevent an ex-slammer rat from marrying into his or her family, including pull strings to have Drew’s name put on the Relocation Authority’s FIA list—For Immediate Assignment.

A chill trickled down his spine. He would need time to ferret out Bruni’s killer. With luck, it would be a while before the “narrow window of opportunity” opened. But if Drew had learned one thing in his thirty-six years of life, it was not to trust anyone’s luck, especially his own.

Copyright © 2016 by Arlene F. Marks. Excerpted from The Genius Asylum by Arlene F. Marks. Published by permission of the author and EDGE. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in Toronto, Arlene F. Marks found her muse at the age of 6 and has been writing and sharing her stories ever since. Her work has appeared in H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror and has been published by Daily Science Fiction. Her first science fantasy novel, The Accidental God, was nominated for the 2015 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Arlene lives with her husband on Nottawasaga Bay but spends an inordinate amount of time in the Sic Transit Terra universe.

Media Review: Westworld

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 10763 words

This review first appeared in October 2016 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.

• • • •

David: Today we’ll be discussing the new HBO series, Westworld, based on the 1973 feature film written and directed by Michael Crichton. This may involve spoilers for the first four episodes of the show, so just be aware of that.

I’m joined by three guests. First up, we’ve got our producer, John Joseph Adams. He’s the editor of Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines, and he also oversees John Joseph Adams Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He’s the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and he’s also edited many other anthologies including a book of weird west fiction called Dead Man’s Hand. John, welcome back.

John: Howdy, partner!

David: Next up we’ve got Theresa DeLucci making her seventh appearance on the show. She’s written about Hannibal and Twin Peaks for BoingBoing, and she’s also a frequent guest on Den of Geeks’ “You Still Know Nothing” Game of Thrones podcast. She’ll be reviewing Westworld for Tor.com, and you should all go check out her Tor.com article “Six Guns and Strange Shooters: A Weird West Primer.” Theresa, welcome to the show.

Theresa: Hi, thanks for letting me join your posse again.

David: Also joining us today is Rajan Khanna making his sixth appearance on the show. His first novel, Falling Sky, a post-apocalyptic adventure with airships was released in 2014 from Pyr Books and a sequel, Rising Tide, is out now. His weird west story “Card Sharp” appears in John’s anthology The Way of the Wizard, and a sequel story, “Second Hand,” appears in John’s weird west anthology Dead Man’s Hand. Raj, welcome to the show.

Raj: Let’s saddle up.

David: As I mentioned in the intro, this new TV show is based on the movie Westworld from 1973. Theresa, you told me that you saw this movie—what did you think of it?

Theresa: I just watched it for the first time about two weeks ago in preparation for the show. Definitely looks like it was made in 1973, but it’s still pretty good. Michael Crichton directed and wrote it, and you could see some elements he’d explore later in Jurassic Park, but really the TV show is so different that you definitely don’t need to watch the movie to enjoy the show.

David: I’d also never seen the movie before. People had talked about it growing up, so I kind of knew about it, but I’d never actually watched it. After I watched the TV episodes, I went back and watched the movie . . . and the TV show is a vast, vast improvement over the film. It’s a pretty low budget thing. It’s actually at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, which kind of surprises me. I can only assume there’s a healthy dose of nostalgia at play there.

I think that the movie has two things going for it. One is Yul Brynner, who plays an amazing robot. That guy was born to play a robot. I also thought that the way they portrayed the amusement park was quite interesting. But the big liability of the film is that the two main characters, the human characters, are completely uninteresting. It’s really slow, and I think that I wouldn’t particularly recommend it except for kind of historical interest at this point.

Raj: Are the themes similar at all?

David: No, it’s completely different. It’s basically “evil robots go crazy and try to kill people.”

Theresa: I felt like I knew it from that Simpsons episode where they parodied Westworld with Itchy and Scratchy World. If you’ve seen that episode of the Simpsons then you’ve basically seen Westworld.

Raj: So, basically, dinosaurs kind of escape and try to kill people.

David: Yeah, it’s like Jurassic Park with robot cowboys.

John: When I was watching the show, I was thinking, “How did I never realize this before?”—that Westworld was basically Michael Crichton’s dry run for Jurassic Park. It totally is. Come up with a crazy theme park and then have the draw of the theme park turn on the guests. It’s like he literally just did the same plot over again.

Raj: I’m surprised no one has done cowboys riding dinosaurs attacking people at a theme park.

David: Well, there’s always Jurassic World 2, right? One thing that’s interesting about the film, though, is that Westworld is just one of three areas in this park. There’s also “Medieval World” and “Roman World.” And the characters end up going to all three in the course of the movie.

Theresa: Yeah, I wonder if they’ll ever open it up to more worlds, or if they’ll just stay in Western World.

Raj: They could reuse the Game of Thrones set.

Theresa: And the sets from Spartacus.

John: I wondered about that. With a TV show you have much more flexibility and time and space to move around and check out other facets of this world. When I was doing a little bit of research into Westworld, I discovered that there was a sequel called Futureworld. And there even was a TV show called Beyond Westworld, which apparently only aired three episodes and was not well-received.

It’s so crazy that I’ve never even heard of either of those because I was a huge Michael Crichton fan. He got me into science fiction, basically. That’s essentially the context in which I watched Westworld. I hunted it down originally because I was trying to read and/or consume every bit of entertainment produced by Michael Crichton.

David: Everything I read suggested that those are dramatically inferior to Westworld, and since I just barely made it through Westworld, I’m not in any hurry to go looking for those.

John: Dave, you’d asked us if any of us had seen the movie, and I have, but I blocked most of it out of my head. I didn’t really like it very much. I do remember that I definitely agree with what Theresa said, that it feels like it was made in 1973. And like you said, Yul Brynner was great, but I don’t really remember the rest of it. I think that’s always a bad sign.

David: Raj, what were your overall impressions of the new Westworld TV show?

Raj: I actually have this weird affinity for the concept of Westworld. I haven’t actually seen the movie, but I always wanted to, and for some reason I just never did. I’ve seen little bits and pieces, but I don’t know why I never got around to watching it, because it’s right up my alley—early ‘70s science fiction, western, robots, Yul Brynner: that’s all right in my wheelhouse. But when I heard they were remaking it for HBO, I thought, “This will be interesting because this is a modern take, and if it still hits the same points, that will work for me.”

Honestly, the pilot episode didn’t really completely win me over, but as I went through the additional episodes, I started to appreciate it more. I’m a big fan of westerns, and I’m a big fan of science fictional concepts like artificial intelligences, or robots on the verge of artificial intelligence, etc. Those two things together worked really well. I’ll say that I feel like all the concepts worked, actually, and intellectually I was really invested in it, but there was something lacking in terms of me connecting with it on an emotional level or some kind of personal level. Maybe that’ll change as the series goes on, but there are very few characters that I felt connected to.

David: Theresa, I mentioned that you’ll be reviewing this for Tor.com. Overall, what’s your review going to look like?

Theresa: Well, the review for the pilot is going to be pretty glowing because it left me with so many interesting questions that I was dying to know more. I haven’t felt this excited after a first episode since probably Lost, and that scares me because I know how Lost ended up.

I think the show is going to have quite a few comparisons to Lost because it seems like they’re coming up with their own Dharma Initiative mythology and a central mystery, but overall, I love the first episode. I love the first four in general, but the very first episode was my favorite just because everything was so new, and it was so different from what I was expecting—partly because I’d seen the movie, so I had some expectations that they definitely flipped around. Overall, I enjoyed the look of it, the scenery, the music, the costumes, the little attention to detail, and then all of these interesting questions about humanity’s next evolutionary step, which I thought were handled in a pretty sophisticated way.

David: I agree. I really liked the first episode. I was totally on board afterward. Why was it not working as much for you, Raj?

Raj: Maybe because my expectations were too high. That’s always possible. I think a pilot always has to do a lot of work, and it’s obvious that it’s trying to do too many things at once to give you the sense of what this world is about. I think that was the thing.

The first episode was trying to sell the world. But then as they went on, you got to relax a bit. Like there’s an episode where a character is introduced to the theme park aspect of Westworld for the first time, and I felt like that was a way better introduction to the audience member because it shows exactly what this experience is about.

I think honestly it was just high expectations and thinking, “Can they do this justice?” And it wasn’t until I was two or three episodes in that I saw where the plot was going, and I think that’s what I was looking for.

David: John, where do you come down on this?

John: I really liked it. I didn’t have very high expectations at all. Like I said, I wasn’t a fan of the movie, though I was encouraged by the trailers that I’d seen of the show, so I was hopeful. But I was careful to temper my expectations.

The reason I was hopeful was because of a lot of people involved. Jonathan Nolan is one of the creative team leading the show, and science fiction author Charles Yu¹ is on the writing team as well.

So I was hopeful, but I was very cautious. And it really did exceed all my expectations. I’m really excited about it. I can’t wait to watch more of it. It was one of those situations where, after we watched an episode, me and my wife would really discuss and dissect it. After we watched all four, we actually had an hour-long conversation in which we put forth our various theories of where things might be going.

I think that’s always a really great sign. It’s kind of an obvious comparison, but I think the last time I had those types of conversations was when Battlestar Galactica was on and was really firing on all cylinders—before everything got ruined. Hopefully this won’t get ruined like that.

David: You mentioned that Jonathan Nolan is co-writing the show with his wife, or they’re the main people behind it, anyway. I saw one review that was making the point that there’s a lot of Memento in this where all of the robot characters constantly have their memories wiped and are just baffled all the time by things that they don’t remember. Did you like that? The way that it portrayed these characters whose memory is constantly being yanked away from them?

John: I thought that was really interesting, and I like the way they were really focusing on Dolores, really drilling into that one character, and having her be the one that’s coming to this realization that what she believes may not be reality. I thought they did a really good job.

People might only know Jonathan Nolan as the brother (and collaborator) of director Christopher Nolan, but Jonathan Nolan actually wrote the story “Memento Mori” that Memento was based on, so obviously that theme goes way back for him. It’s not surprising that he would want to explore that more here. I think it makes a lot of sense in this context, and I think it’s a really interesting way to explore that idea.

David: I saw that Nolan said after going back and reviewing the original Westworld movie the take he wanted to put on it was, “What if we make the robots the good guys and people are the ones who are horrible and fucked up?”

Theresa, you could see that’s pretty much what this show is like, right?

Theresa: Oh yeah, absolutely. The rich inner lives of NPCs. I’ve played so many Rockstar games, and I remember what a big deal it was in the press when Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’s A.I. was updated to make all of the nonplayable characters more lifelike. The traffic patterns changed based on time of day. Little pixel Californians jogged, ate burgers, talked to each other . . . That’s kind of like what we see with Dolores and these other androids. They’re on these loops going about their day and the human players, the human park visitors, are there to mess up their storylines and get involved in ways that they see fit. I thought that was really, really interesting.

The humans that we met—at least the ones going to the park—largely seem horrible. I really hate Logan. He’s awful. I don’t think I really need a show to show me how depraved humans can be. There’s plenty of that on TV. The robots are way more interesting. I’d rather watch them work out their flickering of sentience. That’s much more interesting.

John: Just to piggyback on what Theresa was saying about the relation to video games, I really like that aspect of it as well. I think it was important to try to integrate that into a show like this that’s being made now, today, as opposed to 1973. I would feel very weird if they didn’t try to parallel that video game notion, where you’re walking through a town and a random person comes up to you, and it’s like, “Oh no, he’s just trying to give me some bullshit quest. I don’t want to do that.” It’s just like in a roleplaying game. I really like that aspect of it, and it made it feel realistic to me.

One question that I have about the realism of it is that I would like to understand how the guns function, because there’s something unusual about how they work.

For instance, we see Ed Harris’s character, the gunslinger, we see him get shot, and it’s like nothing happens to him. So, clearly, if a person can get shot, there’s some sort of protection that keeps them from getting hurt, right? I’m really curious, how is that supposed to work? I assume however it’s designed to work is going to be subverted on the show somehow, but if so, what’s going to be the method of that subversion?

Raj: I agree that I love that they picked up on what the modern technology is, because I was watching with my girlfriend—who doesn’t play video games—and I was explaining to her that if you’re playing Skyrim, there are people going about their business, talking to each other . . . I guess the more recent games, they have their own little scripts, they’re doing their own little things, and sometimes you interrupt that and it influences what you can do.

But what I found completely horrendous [on the show] as a video game player is that generally in those games, if you kill somebody indiscriminately within the logic of that world, the police or the guards or whoever will come after you. In Grand Theft Auto you can ride it out, and you’ll be fine in a little while. Or, in Skyrim, you could escape and no one really remembers it. But the fact that this park caters to people to the extent that they don’t care if you go around shooting people or torturing people or whatever with these non-realistic people kind of drove it home even more to me.

David: That’s not the wild west theme though?

Raj: It is, but nobody else ever reacts, or they’ll look, but they don’t actually say, “Oh my god, he just shot that guy, let’s go after him.” Or, “Let’s tell the sheriff.” Or whatever. I think that’s fine because it shows that the park is catering to wealthy people who have possibly very disturbing appetites, and that’s what it’s about. It’s not about providing an adventure. I mean, it is, for those people who want it, but for other people it’s, “Let me go shoot a bunch of people,” or “Let me go do horribly depraved things in this non-real universe.” That made it even darker for me.

David: Theresa, I thought you were going to mention Red Dead Redemption because I know you’re a big fan of that.

Theresa: I was getting ready.

David: I saw that Jonathan Nolan said explicitly that was an influence on this show. Did you see that influence?

Theresa: Oh my god, absolutely. Even down to Westworld’s main town being called Sweetwater. Red Dead’s main town is Blackwater. There’s an Escalera in Red Dead. There’s an Escalante down in Mexico in Westworld. The look of it. The outfits.

Raj: That pseudo-Mexican city looked exactly like one of the towns in—

Theresa: Chuparosa. It was totally Chuparosa.

Raj: Yeah, exactly.

Theresa: Which is really interesting. Again, just thinking about the NPCs and that A.I., in Red Dead—they boasted like over two hundred random encounters with NPCs programmed to live these frontier lives. You could kidnap the whore and tie her to train tracks for a trophy or you could bounty hunt and play high honor.

In the second episode of Westworld, there was a scene where Ed Harris gave a speech, and it reminded me of a random encounter in Red Dead where a randomly spawned man wept over the corpse of a loved one. You’re alone on the plains at night, and this guy appears, and he’s just weeping on the side of the road over this dead body of his wife, until he pulls out a pistol and shoots himself in the head. It’s like, “Why program a suicide?” Why have Dolores’ parents get murdered every night or her lover get gunned down all the time? And these events happen even if no guests are watching? So are these droids supposed to be more sophisticated versions of the pedestrians I run over in GTA or is it like Ed Harris’s gunslinger says: “When you’re suffering you’re most real.” Would anyone as a guest buy a constructed world as authentic if there was no pain in it?

David: What do you think, Theresa, about Raj’s point that in Westworld you’re allowed to kill people indiscriminately in a way that you couldn’t in most games. Is that true of Red Dead Redemption? That there would be more consequences to just gunning down random people?

Theresa: Oh yeah. The posse will come after you, like a posse of marshals, and as it gets more serious, eventually the army will come.

John: I think what would make it somewhat more realistic, or more analogous to video games, is if in the show the park would fine you for each indiscriminate murder that you did that wasn’t part of a narrative. There’s one scene where this guy just shoots up the bar for no reason. He just shoots everybody. He’s not roleplaying. He just decided to go blast everybody away. If the park would fine you, then at least there would be some consequence—that’s how it would happen in most video games. Like, in Skyrim, if you went and murdered a bunch of people in a town, you could escape, and you’d be fine if you were outside that town, but if you went back into that place, you’d have this bounty on you, and guards would recognize you as soon as you walked in, and you’d have to pay that bounty or they’d try to kill you on sight. You can make it go away by paying this bounty, but depending on how bad you were, it might be significant. I thought that would actually help the show explain some of the culture that they’re playing with.

One thing that bugged me about the way the park works is that I was saying how the human guests can’t be killed, right? Which, obviously, that makes sense. One guy gets shot who’s a human, and he discovers that he didn’t get killed, but it did hurt a little bit, and he was surprised that it hurt a little bit. It wasn’t just pain-free. So, that’s good, but on the other hand, you don’t have a health meter or anything, so you can just run into a building full of bad guys guns blazing with no regard for your personal safety. Maybe you’re going to get shot a few times, and maybe it’ll hurt a little bit, but you’ll be fine in terms of the narrative. I wish that there was some way that they could actually “take damage” like in a video game so that you can’t just run in shooting indiscriminately. Like, you’ve got to play the game. You have to play. Otherwise it makes it seem a little bit pointless to some degree.

Theresa: Yeah, it’s like you’re playing a game with a cheat code.

Raj: It’s not a game, though. That’s the thing. And it’s not a roleplaying experience. If that were the case, you would have police. You would get thrown into jail. Maybe if you got shot you would have a time out for a little while.

It’s more of a whorehouse that reaches beyond sex in the sense that you can do violence, and you can go on adventures, and you can do all kinds of things, but it’s catering toward base desires for the most part. Obviously, there are some people who they’ve shown in the show who want to play the bounty hunter—they want to do those things—but how engaged can you be if you know you’re never going to get hurt? You know what I mean? That’s the thing about games. I think, if you’re a gamer, you play for the challenge. You don’t want to walk in and just be able to do anything because you’re trying to figure it out. Or, in roleplaying games, I think a lot of people are trying to play a character. How do I get into this sealed place? Do I stealth into it? Do I just run in attacking? It’s fine that’s what this park is about, but, to me, it makes it so much more of a dirty place.

David: I want to pick up on John’s thing about the guns. I could go on for an hour about logistical questions I have about this. But just a couple of things:

I was never sure how often they reset the robots’ memories.

For a place that’s supposedly safe for the guests, it seemed just ridiculously dangerous, even when they’re having the horse pull the safe out of the bank and run it through town. Like, how can you have robots just doing that kind of stuff without the unacceptable risk that guests are going to be injured in the middle of this?

Raj: What’s interesting to me is that all of this is happening at the same time, and the timing is very unclear about how this stuff loops. Because let’s say I’m in Westworld and John is in Westworld, and I’m going to be sadistic and just start shooting up people, but he’s there to go on an adventure, and he wants to talk to the old prospector, or he wants to talk to somebody who’s going to send him on an adventure, and I just go ahead and shoot that dude in the head. Isn’t that interfering with his experience? I know that the park is catering to everybody, but you think that they would have some rules in place so that one guy doesn’t ruin everything for everyone else.

David: But that kind of comes up in one scene, right? Where two of the guests are at loggerheads, and they can’t shoot each other, but they can threaten to shoot the robots that the other one wants for their storyline, right?

Raj: That’s true.

John: I think Raj makes a good point. It’s also confusing from an economic standpoint, because if this one guy goes off and shoots up the bar, he paid the same daily fee to get into the park as anybody else and yet he just caused an extensive amount of damage to all of these androids. You see the behind-the-scenes shots where the park staff are basically rebuilding these androids almost from scratch when they get all shot up. If one guy can just do that without any repercussions, then it’s kind of ridiculous. It also comes into play when, like Raj says, it’s going to interfere with the fun of everybody else who want to come in and not just indiscriminately murder people.

Theresa: What if Westworld is like a cruise? You think it’s all inclusive, but at the end they hit you with the saloon bill and then they hit you with a “dead robot” bill. And it’s like another $40,000 right there. That’s what the gunslinger is about. He’s the most disgruntled character.

Raj: But what would be interesting is, say you’re a regular. You’re one of those guys who goes to Disney World all the time, and so you’re like, “Oh god, I hope Dolores is free this time because I really want to do that storyline.” But somebody else got to Dolores first. You have to wait your turn. But, I agree, logistically I think it starts breaking down the more you look into it on a certain level.

John: I’d kind of like to see them pull back outside of the park at some point so we can see what the perception of this park is in the real world. I don’t know if that would be an interesting episode, but I’m very curious about it.

I can only imagine that hundreds and hundreds or maybe thousands of people have died at this park. Even with all the safeguards that they have. I can imagine other safeguards we didn’t get to see, like when they’re going to pull the safe out, they could have had certain background character androids who are programmed to make sure that the street is clear, or something like that. But still, even with that protection in place, people are going to get trampled.

So I’d be interested to see how the real world perceives this park, because it seems crazy.

David: From a plausibility standpoint, they try to have it both ways. This is like Disney World where people come on a lark and bring along the wife and she’s not that into it and stuff like that. But it’s also like a big game safari hunt, or climbing Mount Everest where it’s super dangerous, and you’re paying a lot of money to do it, and only people who are really, really motivated, it seems, would be interested in it. I think it should be more like the latter. I could believe you’d be signing all sorts of waivers where you’re risking getting injured.

Raj: But they did say that if you stay in the center of town then you’re probably going to have that kind of relaxed “I’m in the wild west experience,” and the farther you went out of town it got more dangerous and more risky. To me that’s how they set it up. So, if you come with a family, just stay in the center of town, and maybe one day the husband goes off to do some kind of risky thing or the wife goes off to do some risky thing. I don’t know exactly how that’s clear. In the first four episodes, we’ve obviously seen some dangerous stuff happen out in the wilderness, but on the other hand, I agree that in town seems pretty dangerous too.

John: Yeah, in the middle of town is where the safe thing happened. I totally get what you’re saying, though, Dave. That would make more logical sense to me.

David: Another thing that just doesn’t seem to work in this show to me, from a science fictional standpoint, is that everybody comes here and doesn’t seem to understand how Westworld operates at all even though they’ve paid all this money to do it. And the idea of having sex with a robot . . . to a lot of them that possibility hadn’t even occurred to them. They’re like, “Really? You can do this?”

It also seems like this is the only place in world you can have sex with a robot. I just don’t understand how this park could exist in a world where having sex with a robot isn’t something you could do outside the park. Why would that be the case?

John: The only thing I can think of is that this guy pioneered these robots, and he’s got some sort of patent on whatever makes that artificial intelligence work, thus Westworld would be the only place, but I don’t know. It does seem incredibly hard to believe that people would go there and not realize that that’s a thing you can do at Westworld. That’s probably the main selling point for like half the population. It is a little bit ridiculous.

Raj: Do you think, based on what you’ve seen, that the androids are made out of living tissue or something approximating living tissue, or do you think it’s all simulated?

John: It seems like it’s very realistic tissue, if not actual flesh. I think that’s one of the things that wasn’t clear in the preview episodes we watched because I think that maybe those visual effects were not yet final. So when they were building the androids, we couldn’t quite tell how that was happening. I was imagining that was a stand-in, and that it was actually going to look like they were building real flesh onto these robots. Because when they get shot up and stuff, it has to look realistic, right? I was imagining that they were more like biological . . . sort of like the humanoid cylons in Battlestar Galactica.

David: I want to go back to the sex thing for a second. Theresa, what did you think about the robot sex and nudity and all that kind of stuff in the show?

Theresa: I had heard a lot of talk about the portrayal of rape in this show before I watched any episodes, and I was kind of warned about it by the blog manager at Tor.com. Like: “Hey, you cover Game of Thrones, I’m hearing Westworld is kind of rapey. Is this something that you want to cover? If you’re tired of that from Game of Thrones, it’s cool. You could just say you’re not interested.”

But I think the show handles rape and consent and sex in a really interesting way because it’s asking you to ask these questions, like “What is intelligent?” “Are they living?” “What are they?”

The nudity in the Westworld universe, like in their dream, behind the scenes—it’s really creepy to see them so matter of fact nude. A robot doesn’t feel modesty, it doesn’t feel shame, so they’re naked and we’ll stack them like cordwood and hose them down at the end of the day. It was very disturbing imagery. I thought it was handled very nicely. It made it feel more creepy, and it made you ask why? Why does this storyline for Dolores exist? It was interesting.

David: Did you guys follow this controversy about the consent agreement with the extras? All the robot extras in all of the backgrounds were all naked all the time. There was this controversy because of the consent agreement that they all had to sign came out. It’s pretty amazing. It says, “This document serves to inform you that this project will require you to be fully nude and/or witness others fully nude, and participate in graphic sexual situations. By accepting this project assignment, you may be required to do any of the following: if you’re fully nude wear a pubic hair patch, perform genital to genital touching, have your genitals painted, simulate oral sex with hand to genital touching, contort to form a table-like shape while being fully nude, pose on all fours while others who are fully nude ride on your back, ride on someone’s back while you are both fully nude, and other assorted acts the project may require.”

John: Whoa.

Theresa: And this is why Spartacus hired adult entertainers. We’re four episodes in. I didn’t see any kind of nudity like that.

John: Yeah, as far as the nudity goes, that document sounds shocking to me, and it’s honestly hard to imagine that many people signed it.

In the storage facility where they had the non-functioning robots—that made sense to me; they’re going to store them nude in there because they’re just robots, and they’re powered down. There’s no reason to have them all dressed up, and they probably need those outfits to put on some other robot. But when they were working on them, and they were sitting down and talking to them face-to-face, like a bunch of the conversations with Dolores, they’re just sitting there naked and that seemed a little bit weird to me. Like, “Hey, guys, this is HBO, we have to have a bunch of nudity. We have to have as much nudity as possible because people like to see them titties, you know?”

It was really confusing to me that they would do that. Even to the extent where, Anthony Hopkins’s character, saw somebody who actually had one of the androids covered, and he goes over and takes the covering off of them—I guess just to make the point via infodump that robots have no shame. They don’t have any modesty, so there’s no reason to cover it, which obviously you would understand.

I just thought it was weird that they emphasized that they had to be there naked all the time. Because, well, if they’re just going fix them—

Theresa: Maybe their clothes are in the laundry. Or getting mended.

John: I mean, maybe.

Theresa: It is weird.

John: It felt a little exploitative.

David: Raj, what did you think of the robot sex and the nudity?

Raj: I think that it got better as we progressed through the four episodes. I think in the first episode it felt not only a little gratuitous in places re: nudity, but it felt very gratuitous in terms of violence. Then I think from episodes two to four, it got better. A lot of the violence was done off screen. A lot of the nudity, again, became that weird kind of uncomfortable situation—these are androids treated in an almost off-hand way.

I’m probably the one person here who thought it was still a bit too rapey, and I think part of that is I understand what they’re going for, but I also found it hard in some places to pick up on who is supposed to be a real person and who is supposed to be part of the park. So, I’d be more willing to say, “Oh, they built a bunch of rape into this western fantasy because they figure that’s what the west was all about,” or whatever, but then obviously the humans who come in are kind of rapey. I think part of it was just, well, they had the whorehouse, and they have these androids who are willing to sleep with any of them if they want. Obviously, the idea is they’re trying to show there are some really sick people who go to this place to experience really sick fantasies.

I think I’m just fatigued by rape in television because it’s so omnipresent that it just felt like more of the same. Maybe if that hadn’t been a factor it wouldn’t have bothered me so much.

David: When you say the guests are all sick, I thought the show really hit that pretty heavily. They just go into this park and are shooting people and having sex with robots . . . it’s just inherently degrading to your humanity. It made me wonder—people play Grand Theft Auto and run over people and all this kind of stuff in the game: Is there anything different about going to Westworld and shooting robots? Do we think video games are for sick people?

Raj: I think the difference would be that if you saw somebody that seemed human on every level and reacted in a human fashion that your empathy would automatically kick in, whereas when you’re watching a pixelated human on a screen, it’s a very different experience. The other thing I want to say is many people who are not depraved and not terrible people and who would never rape somebody play out rape fantasies in their healthy sexual lives. I do see that you could make the case that if they don’t think these are real people then maybe they’re just playing out fantasies that they could never express in real life. But I think there’s one thing from imagining that in your head and then being confronted with a person who looks, to all intents and purposes, real.

I think that’s an interesting thing about the show. Even if somebody tells you, they’re not real, they’re not real, they’re not real, what does it take to overcome that? Because, obviously, there are some characters who we’ve seen in the show who react as if they’re real people. They’ve talked about how people fall in love because they react as human beings. Does the fact that you can see these people as non-human beings make you smarter or does that make you more depraved? I don’t know. It is an interesting thing to think about.

David: Theresa, what do you think? Is it worse to do something in Westworld than in Red Dead Redemption?

Theresa: Hmm, well, in Red Dead, you go into it as one set character, and you can play him however you want. You can be a black hat or a white hat; with his backstory and experience, I usually play high honor.

But if it’s something like Grand Theft Auto—no, I’m a psychopath. I’m bad. I’m a very bad person in Grand Theft Auto. In Westworld, I would say there’s not as much difference between that and Grand Theft Auto. What makes it different now watching Westworld and knowing that the androids are starting to come into consciousness, makes it absolutely wrong to be treating them like you do.

David: Right, because that was actually one of my issues with the show. I think it’s good. I would recommend everyone watch it. It’s really well-acted, and well-written, and dramatic, and good visually. But as science fiction, it was a little less interesting to me.

I saw a comment years ago that I think is really true, where it said that science fiction movies in particular can only see robots in one of two ways: either they’re killer monsters or they’re an oppressed minority. There are so many other ways that they could be handled, but it seems like they always fall into one or the other, or both.

That’s kind of the case here. Obviously, if the robots are sentient then the ethics are all determined, right? They’re victims and everyone who is doing bad things to them is horrible. It’s very black and white and simple how we feel about this.

Whereas, if the robots aren’t sentient, or at least we have no good reason to think that they are, then how people treat things that look human but aren’t sentient is a much more interesting question. It’s a big problem for this park that people are constantly falling in love with the robots and trying to save them, even though they’re just like characters from Grand Theft Auto. They’re not sentient at all. And people get into fights over them. That just seems more interesting to me, and the ethical things that come out of that seem more interesting to me. Now that we know that the robots are sentient and they’re basically like humans, and they’re getting their memories back, there’s only one place where this story can go, and it’s where stories have gone millions of times before. I would rather have seen something different.

John: That’s a really interesting point. Definitely the show doesn’t explore it with a real science fictional lens. It’s kind of using the furniture of science fiction to tell this interesting story, and what it’s doing, it’s doing pretty well. But as a piece of serious science fiction, it doesn’t really work. I think that’s the frustrating thing about it, but I think it’s firing on enough cylinders otherwise that I find it really interesting, and I’m curious to see where they’re going to go. But I agree it would be great if somebody would do something with A.I. at some point that broke that mold a little bit, but until then, I’m happy to get something that deals with the trope as well as this does.

David: I’ll just mention the Spike Jonze movie Her as an example where the A.I. in that is intended to be sentient, but it doesn’t fall into that killer monster or oppressed minority trope. If people are reading this and wondering, “Well, what could Westworld do that’s different?”—Her is an example of how you can tell a more inventive story.

Raj, do you agree or disagree or anything?

Raj: I mostly agree. It’s not treading much new ground. I think what’s more interesting are the motivations of the people who started this park because I think that seems to be one of the underlying mysteries or plot threads. What are their intentions? Why are these things happening? Is there an ultimate reason behind them? It seems like some people are invested in this evolutionary growth in the thinking of the androids, and some people are opposed to it. I think that’s more interesting to me. Also, because I think we all probably have a sense of where the main plot thrust is going. How do they intend to sustain this if it’s going to last beyond a season or two seasons or three seasons?

David: I don’t know if you saw, but James Marsden was quoted as saying that they’re talking about five or six seasons for this show. They have some sort of long-term plan in mind.

Theresa, what do you think about the ambitiousness of the show as science fiction?

Theresa: All right, so, first off, this week as it happens, I’ve been rewatching some Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I got to the episode where there’s a trial about Lieutenant Data. Is he a man? Is he property?

John: That’s the best episode!

Theresa: It was fantastic. And I’m like, wow, it’s really funny that I got to this episode while I’ve been watching all this Westworld because I thought in their one hour episode they summed up this great quandary.

The judge in that episode says, “It [Data] sits there looking at me, and I don’t know what it is. This case has dealt with metaphysics, with questions best left to saints and philosophers. I am neither competent nor qualified to answer those. I’ve got to make a ruling to try to speak to the future. Is Data a machine? Yes. Is he property of Starfleet? No. We’ve been dancing around the basic issue. Does Data have a soul? I don’t know that he has. I don’t know that I have. But I’ve got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself.”

Which is something that I thought was really interesting as we’re looking at Doctor Ford and that he sees humans in this world as having reached their evolutionary peak, that the only thing left to challenge is death, really, to make ourselves immortal. So, it would kind of stand to reason that humanity’s next step would be to make a version of ourselves that cannot die. But what are you actually making? Is it real? Is it independent?

Westworld is working very well at that level, and I’m really curious to see what’s up with Doctor Ford, because he’s a really strange guy, and I wonder what his ambitions were when he started to build the park with his partner Arnold, and where they are now.

David: John, it sounds like we’re getting into the section of this discussion that we previously agreed we might want an extra-super-special spoiler warning, so if anyone really doesn’t want to read details about episodes three and four, wait until after you’ve watched them to read this.

There’s the issue of what is the main project of this secret group within the park hierarchy. There are some people, obviously, who want to create sentient life. I also have a feeling they might want to be getting these robots good enough before they can release them to the mass market, and so they’re planning to just mass produce these robots now that they’ve got them perfected, and have them in every house. That’s going to have profound ethical implications. It’s not just going to be a few hundred of these things. It’s going to be potentially millions of them being mistreated by humans.

John, you said you have some ideas about where you think the story might go?

John: I’m just going to throw this theory out there. I feel like I have a bunch of the puzzle pieces, but I’m not sure about how they go together quite yet, so if it doesn’t really quite make sense, keep that in mind.

So, Ed Harris’s character—the gunslinger—I actually thought that he was an android until a guest in the park recognized him. A real person recognized him as being some famous philanthropist. He’s never named, but up until that point, I thought he was maybe an android, possibly partly because his character is the most analogous to Yul Brynner’s character from the movie, a gunslinger that goes crazy and starts killing guests. I was thinking that Ed Harris was maybe that same character, but he had discovered some way to protect himself against the guns the same way real people have that protection.

I got derailed along those lines when somebody recognized him, but then I was thinking, well, what if Arnold, the mysterious missing park co-creator—I think he killed himself, or he died, anyway, he’s gone now—I was thinking that perhaps he figured out a way to download his consciousness into this Ed Harris robot and enabled it with some capabilities that make it a “super android.” And this whole maze thing that he’s hunting around for is somehow going to allow him to “discover himself.”

I felt like there were a lot of pieces that supported that theory, but a lot of it is all just guesswork at this point. I still feel like there’s something not right about that guy. He’s not just a regular person as he seems to be.

David: Even on Wikipedia he’s just called “The Gunslinger.”

Theresa: I’m with you, John, because at first I thought, “Oh, surely Ed Harris is going to be badass enough to step into Yul Brynner’s shoes and do this role.” Then you’re like, oh wait, no. So, he’s not an android. Then I thought, what if he’s like a manifestation of this contagion malware that’s short-circuiting the robots in this existential way? Is he the one who painted the picture? Planted the gun by Dolores’ ranch? He’s wanting everyone to remember, and he seems to be going after the older robots in the park. Ones who have had really long running stories—several iterations.

I think of Dolores’ dad. That actor was fantastic. When he’s so flummoxed by this picture of a woman in modern times, he can’t even get out his sentence, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He just stumbles over it. Then they decommission him. He had that old story that was part of a cult in the hills, and it seems like there’s something to that horror narrative that’s starting to come back, and it’s one of the older storylines in the park, and the gunslinger was around for that for some reason. Was he like a third partner or something? How does he know all of this? Until a human from the outside world recognized him, I thought maybe he was a virus.

David: Interesting. I don’t remember a lot about Arnold, but the impression I was left with was maybe that he had killed himself because he had discovered that the robots could become sentient and was consumed by guilt by how they had been treated. Maybe Anthony Hopkins knew that? Maybe he killed him? Or maybe he kept secret the reason he killed himself because obviously he cares about the park more than he cares about anything else.

John: I hadn’t actually thought of this until you just said that, but that kind of fits with my theory. What if he tried to stop Anthony Hopkins from continuing down this line of advancing the androids and continuing to use them this way even though they’re becoming sentient, and he finally got to the point where trying to destroy it from the inside was the only way he saw that he could save everybody? So, he would create this version of himself, and then download himself into it.

Although, if he was going to do that, it doesn’t actually make sense that he would make himself look exactly like himself because then Anthony Hopkins would be able to recognize him. But that kind of potentially fits.

Raj: My first thought was that he was Arnold himself, and everyone says he died, but he actually just went deep into the world. He kind of went off. But why wouldn’t they be able to find him?

But I do like the idea of downloading his consciousness because I think that’s the aim of several people. For example, Jeffrey Wright’s character, Bernard—it seems like his ultimate aim is to recreate his son.

So if that technology is what people are playing with, then maybe Arnold could download himself. But the things that are giving me pause are what you mentioned: (1) Somebody recognized him, and (2) that QA guy, the gunslinger came up two times to him, and at one point he said “He gets anything he wants.” Maybe he’s from outside and has just contributed a lot of money. I mean, we know from the asshole brother-in-law guy that there are people who have investments in this company.

I think the Arnold connection is too blatant. I would be surprised if it was anything other than that. But the question is, what’s going on here? What’s the maze? That’s actually the most interesting thing to me. I’m interested to see where it goes. But it sounds like Hopkins wants to keep these things as just servitors and non-sentient creatures, whereas Arnold, it sounded like, wanted to give them more. That was my interpretation.

David: I strongly suspect that they’re going to get to the center of the maze and there’s going to be a button that you have to push every hour.

Theresa and Raj: Nooo!

Theresa: Then I’m out. I’m out.

David: J.J. Abrams is a producer on this show.

John: That’s true.

Theresa: He is, but this show, the way it’s treating its mythology, at least in the first couple of episodes, reminds me a little bit of the other Lost creator’s, Damon Lindelof’s, his drama The Leftovers.

I don’t really know what else Lindelof has done since Lost except for this other HBO show, The Leftovers. It kind of approaches its center mystery in a similar way to Westworld. It’s like, okay, what caused the rapture event in The Leftovers? And they answer it with this restraint and basically ask you to ask a different question: Does it matter what caused the rapture when no explanation will cure the characters of feeling like utter shit?

So, there might be a larger dream within a dream at Westworld, and perhaps maybe that’s what Ed Harris wants, but will any revelation be as interesting as watching the androids next evolutionary step as it’s happening from their point of view? I don’t think it will.

I think maybe a lot of Lost and Galactica and a zillion other shows have made me lower my expectations, just a little bit, and not try to hope that anything will ever be answered in any satisfying way. Ever.

David: I think that’s a good note to end on. We should wrap this up because we’re pretty much out of time. Do you guys have any other final words? Raj, any final thoughts on Westworld?

Raj: Just that I’m interested to see where the story goes, and I’m slightly annoyed that I have to wait a month until new episodes air.

David: How about John?

John: I’m really happy with it so far. I’m really curious to see where it’s going to go. I’m not too tied onto my theory there so if it goes in some other direction, I’m not going to be disappointed, but I’m really curious to find out if I’m right. I like it a lot.

David: And Theresa, anything else you want to add?

Theresa: I’m really curious to see where Doctor Ford is going with his big narrative that’s taking over the world, and you’re getting a little hint of him as a very powerful designer. At first, I thought he was kind of the sad Vincent Price inventor in Edward Scissorhands. We’ve seen that character before, but now that he’s demonstrated some of his power over the world that he’s created, I’m really interested in seeing what this bigger, deeper storyline is.

It’s an HBO show. This definitely has that HBO pedigree of cast and acting and music and visuals. It’s good. It’s giving me a lot to think about, and it’s pretty fun too. I think once I get a better handle on some of the characters, I’ll definitely find some more charm in it.

David: I really loved the first four episodes. I blazed through them, and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing more. I think that I’ll probably be totally on board for the first season. I’m a little skeptical about this going to five or six seasons and me sticking with it, but if it does, they’re going to need to mix things up a lot more than just robots good, people bad.

John: I will say I am a little worried that it’s all going to go terribly awry somehow because it has that type of plot, like you described, comparing it to Battlestar Galactica or Lost. I’m worried. I’ve been burned before. I am concerned, but I like it so far.

David: I think we’re going to wrap things up there. We’ve been speaking with John Joseph Adams, Theresa DeLucci, and Rajan Khanna. Thank you so much for joining us.

Raj: Thank you.

Theresa: Thank you. Let’s play some Red Dead.

John: It’s time to giddy-up on out of here, folks.

¹. Lightspeed published a short story by Charles Yu way back in Year One called “Standard Loneliness Package” (Lightspeed, November 2010).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

Book Reviews, November 2016

Kate M. Galey, Jenn Reese, Rachel Swirsky, and Christie Yant | 2042 words

This month, we bring in a group of special reviewers to look at what’s new and exciting in the world of comics and graphic novels.

Doctor Strange and the Sorcerers Supreme #1
Robbie Thompson (writer), Javier Rodriguez (penciller), and Rafael Albuquerque (cover artist)
Print/Ebook
UPC 75960608608500111
Marvel, October 2016
21 pages
Reviewed by Kate M. Galey

I have a confession to make. Despite ten sustained years of hardcore comics geekery, I am almost entirely unfamiliar with Doctor Strange. I have a passing acquaintance with him, of course—as every storyline in comics inevitably intersects, he’s dashed through the pages of a few titles I’ve read—but I know him as little more than a striking hairdo and an impressive cape. This puts me on even footing with what I imagine to be the vast majority of the population of Earth going into the Sorcerer Supreme’s first foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But fortunately for me, and the other couple billion laymen who lack the time to dive into the character’s daunting back catalogue, Marvel released a new title featuring the character this month. Written by Robbie Thompson, with art by Javier Rodriguez, Alvaro Lopez, and Jordie Bellaire, with lettering by Joe Caramanga, Doctor Strange and the Sorcerers Supreme #1 introduces us to the character and his world with a bang.

Sorcerers Supreme #1 is gloriously, psychedelically weird in a way that no other medium can properly convey. We’re talking Merlin, time travel magic, Sir Isaac Newton, invisible monsters in Manhattan, and that’s just for starters. The book opens in 507 AD with Merlin himself, at what is apparently a turning point in the fight against evil. The action then moves to New York City, where Doctor Stephen Strange, bereft of the bulk of his magical powers, battles a tentacle monster with a battleaxe. Merlin appears and rescues him, only to take him on a mind-bending journey through time and into the thick of another battle—he has plucked several Sorcerers Supreme from their times to help him fight a terrible evil known as The Forgotten. Strange, along with the reader, is thrust headlong into a team-up with the great sorcerers from history both past and present. The team includes Sir Isaac Newton, an adult Wiccan from the Young Avengers, The Ancient One, a badass sorceress called Kushala, later identified by Merlin as Demon Rider, and a dual sword-gun (yes, sword-gun) wielding woman identified only as Nina.

By introducing Strange into a team that already exists without him, the story cuts to the chase. It’s a clever move for a new team book to not get bogged down in introductions, and it’s extremely well-executed—introducing five new characters in two pages mid-battle isn’t easy to do, but Thompson wastes no time or words getting right to the good stuff. But it’s the art of Rodriguez, Lopez, and Bellaire that really sells this book.  Every panel is dynamic, but none more than the pages in which Strange and Merlin traverse the “backroads of time.” The two-page spread is one of the most complex and beautiful I’ve ever seen in comics, a saturated trip reminiscent of the silver-age greats.

If this inaugural issue is indicative of the weirdness to come, Doctor Strange and the Sorcerers Supreme is definitely going on my pull list. I highly recommend checking it out.

Mighty Jack: Book One
Ben Hatke
Trade Paperback/Ebook
ISBN 978-1626722644
First Second, September 2016
Reviewed by Jenn Reese

Everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, and I expected Ben Hatke’s Mighty Jack, the first in a new series, to hew close to the line. (Pun very much intended.) However, where the fairytale takes Jack high into the sky to steal from—and then murder—a giant, Hatke’s contemporary Jack has more complicated problems. His single mother works two jobs and wants Jack to step up and help out more, particularly by watching his young sister Maddy, who doesn’t speak.

There’s nothing Jack won’t do for his sister, so when she wants a box of strange seeds at the flea market, Jack acquiesces to the seller’s demands and hands over the keys to his mother’s car. From those seeds a wondrous garden grows—full of delights and dangers in almost equal measure. Joined by their fearless neighbor Lilly, the three of them joyfully wrangle the garden . . . until an accident forces Jack to face some harsh realities.

“Everything is dangerous, Jack! Living is dangerous.”

This story, like its source material, tackles the knotty issue of growing up. Where is the line between adventure and responsibility, between safety and risk? Thankfully, Hatke offers no easy answer. The garden is glorious, the garden is dangerous . . . just like life. I can’t wait to see how Jack navigates this thorny issue and finds his place in between. (Most of us are still looking for that place ourselves.)

Fans of Hatke’s brilliant Zita the Spacegirl series will love this story as well. (And if you haven’t bought Zita and given a copy to every kid you know while also accidently keeping a copy for yourself, then we can’t be friends.) The same strengths are on display here: wild creativity, an intoxicating sense of wonder, and a clean, expressive art style that highlights the characters and makes the story easy to follow. Hatke’s garden creatures can morph from awe-inspiring to terrifying and back again in the space of a single panel. The colors, achieved by Alex Campbell and Hilary Sycamore, are muted and almost glowing, creating a magical overtone that keeps some of the scarier moments from veering too dark. The minimalist style and emphasis on visual storytelling also make the book an excellent choice for children or adults unfamiliar with graphic novel reading conventions. (You never have to guess which panel to read next; it’s always obvious.)

How to Talk to Girls at Parties
Neil Gaiman (writer), Gabriel Bá & Fábio Moon (pencillers)
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN: 978-1616559557
Dark Horse Comics, July 2016
Reviewed by Rachel Swirsky

“How to Talk to Girls at Parties” (2006, Fragile Things) is my favorite Neil Gaiman short story. (You can find it online now, too: bit.ly/1kiIYnA) When I saw it had been adapted into a graphic novel, illustrated by brothers Gabriel Bà and Fàbio Moon, I was eager to pick it up.

Two fifteen-year-old boys, Vic and Enn, are on their way to a party. To Enn, girls are daunting, mysterious, incomprehensible. Confident Vic assures him girls aren’t so strange; they’re not from a different planet. “Just talk to them.”

After Vic disappears with the beautiful hostess, Enn wanders. Taking Vic’s advice, he talks to girl after girl, only to find they are as strange as he’d imagined and feared. They let slip disjointed pieces of alien lives in which they were incarnated as insects, or swam in sunfire. Enn doesn’t seem to register their odd narratives. They are girls; of course they speak strangely. In surreal moments, he responds to a confession about alien slavery by offering water, and to another girl’s story about being engulfed and reincarnated by attempting to put his arm around her.

Enn’s lonely, adolescent struggle to place himself in a universe he doesn’t understand is lovely and poignant. Although the story places him in a universe stranger and more vast than the one we know, all adolescents eventually have to make the leap from a childhood world to something immensely broader.

Although the short story handles it well, this kind of plot lends itself to a severe potential pitfall: Girls aren’t actually aliens. Obviously, everyone knows this, but there remains a substantive volume of sexist, or at least aggravating, text that treats women as if they are. Fortunately, the graphic novel avoids that trap using the same techniques as the short story, including Vic’s contrasting point of view, the alien girls’ inner lives, and the retrospective narrative voice of Enn’s older, wiser self. (Although the retrospective voice is an important part of the story, it also sometimes felt clunky, like an interjection from the older work.)

The art is glorious.

The alien girls are rendered with distended figures, odd proportions, and enormous staring eyes, lovely but also slightly disturbing in a way that immediately, viscerally places the reader within the surreal world. Hot and cold colors wrestle with each other, the sharpness of their contrasts and shadows mimicking the tug between the real world and the surreal one. The images are often cramped, filled with figures ranging from fully rendered to barely sketched, with the sound-effects of heavy music winding between them. The panels are inflected with Enn’s point of view; he sees the objects of his obsession—women’s faces, women dancing— while unknown boys only appear as foils.

An important test of an adaptation is whether the new form gives the old one new perspective and depth. With this graphic novel, Gaiman, Bà, and Moon have definitely accomplished that goal.

Nimona
Noelle Stevenson
Hardcover/Ebook
HarperTeen, May 2015
ISBN: 978-0062278234
272 pages
Reviewed by Christie Yant

Given how many awards Nimona has won since it came out in 2015, one could say that I’m a bit late to the party. It was actually its acclaim that made me hesitant to pick it up—would it be dark, heavy, important reading? Was I up for that?

Why, yes, in fact, it’s all of those things—it’s also warm and funny, absurd and delightful.

Ballister Blackheart wasn’t looking for a sidekick, but he found one anyway in Nimona, a shape-shifting teenaged girl with pink hair, multiple piercings, chain mail and a knack for super-villainy. Blackheart reluctantly accepts Nimona’s aid in bringing down the nefarious Institution and its plot to cultivate the deadly jaderoot plant—a plan made more difficult by the Institution’s employment of Blackheart’s nemesis, Sir Goldenloin.

The setting is a mashup of medieval-esque fantasy tropes and super-hero science fiction, perhaps best summed up in a panel of the “Science Expo,” where peasants wander between half-timbered houses and festival tents beneath a banner announcing “Robot Fight!” A lair lit entirely by torchlight and candles comes equipped with a big-screen television and video conference capabilities; characters may be armed as readily with bow and arrow as with ray guns. Blackheart’s scientific view of the world is confounded by Nimona’s failure to conserve mass when shapeshifting. The contradictions add a light-hearted absurdity to a story that becomes deeper, darker, and sadder as it progresses.

As Blackheart warms to his new role as Nimona’s friend and mentor, both find past betrayals revisited in the present. Stephenson treats every character with tremendous respect, revealing to the reader their complicated motives and imperfections while still celebrating their strengths and inherent morality. Nimona is a funny, thoughtful and revealing exploration of trust, love, and compassion, and a moving reminder to look deeper at those we think we have figured out.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate M. Galey is a speculative fiction debutante, with Queers Destroy Science Fiction! being her first publication. She migrated from the Colorado mountains to the Californian central coast, where she works at a beautiful zoo and lives among a wonderful menagerie with her oldest sister and her family.

Jenn Reese writes science fiction and fantasy for readers of all ages. She’s published numerous short stories in places such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Paper Cities. Above World is the Norton Award-nominated first novel in her middle-grade trilogy from Candlewick Press and combines science fiction, mythology, and martial arts. Jenn works as a freelance graphic designer and spends her free time playing video games, watching way too much TV, and planning all the activities she’d enjoy if she ever left her cozy house in Portland. Jenn can be found online at jennreese.com.

Rachel Swirsky holds a masters degree in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and graduated from Clarion West in 2005. She’s published over 50 short stories in venues including the New Haven Review, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Sturgeon Award, and in 2010, her novella The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window won the Nebula. If it were an option, she might choose to replace her hair with feathers, preferably bright macaw feathers.

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.

Interview: Stephen Baxter

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 8577 words

This interview first appeared in July 2016 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.

Stephen Baxter is the author of over forty books, including the Xelee Series, the Manifold series, and The Time Ships, the only authorized sequel to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. He’s also collaborated with Terry Pratchett on The Long Cosmos series and with Arthur C. Clarke on books such as Time’s Eye and The Light of Other Days. Baxter’s latest book, which he wrote with Alistair Reynolds, is called The Medusa Chronicles.

• • • •

We’re here with Stephen Baxter. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, it’s great to be here.

Your new book, which you wrote with Alastair Reynolds, is called The Medusa Chronicles, and it’s a sequel to Arthur C. Clarke’s story “A Meeting with Medusa.” First of all, tell us about the original Arthur C. Clarke story. What’s that about?

It’s from 1971, and I think it’s generally seen as his last significant piece of short fiction. It won a couple of awards. The Medusa of the title is a lifeform that lives in the clouds of Jupiter. All of this comes from Carl Sagan, actually. In Jupiter’s deep cloud layers, it’s very hot in the center and cold at the top, so somewhere in the middle, he hypothesized that it would be Earth-like. You could have a kind of great, gaseous ocean, where gigantic creatures could live.

The story is about an astronaut, Howard Falcon, who goes on a balloon dive into Jupiter and encounters these whale-like Medusas, as the title suggests. He has various perils along the way, and just escapes with his life, but there’s a twist at the end when you find out that actually Falcon is an experimental cyborg. He’d been through an accident early in his career, which had left him crippled, and he’s now half-man half-machine, which is how he was able to withstand Jupiter’s high gravity and so on.

That was what inspired our doing a sequel. There’s a great line at the end where he says, “He was neither man nor machine, but both sides of that divide, which have need of him in the troubled centuries to come.” And so the young Alistair Reynolds, that really inspired him to wonder what would have happened next. What would have happened in these troubled centuries as a conflict on an interplanetary scale developed between man and machine? That was where we started from.

I want to say a little more about Arthur C. Clarke because obviously he’s just one of the all-time greats when it comes to science fiction. Could you just say a little bit about what makes him such an important writer?

He was certainly important to me because of his very cool and kind of lofty intellect, and his great prose as well. He’s in the tradition of H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon. Stapledon wrote on the vast scales of space and time with a kind of authoritative science background to it all. The future of mankind in a billion years and so forth, and that was what inspired the young Clarke, who was a farmer’s boy from Somerset. He aspired to this same kind of sensibility, but he told compelling human stories as well.

For instance, Childhood’s End, one of his more famous novels, is about aliens who come to the Earth, but why? Because humanity is about to evolve into a higher form, which is a common thing for the universe, and the aliens are here as kind of midwives to this process, so this is a very lofty theme, a very high concept. But the story Clarke actually tells is of a mother who’s going to lose her child. A boy, he grows up to the age of ten or so, and then he starts developing strange powers, the aliens recognize what’s going on, and he gets taken away in the end. So, on the one hand, you’ve got this magnificent, high-concept story of human evolution going on, but it’s told through the tale of a mother and a son, and it resonates with how you’re going to lose your kids when they grow up, anyway. It’s great artistry combined with great themes that he was dealing with.

He’s also well known for coming up with the concepts for the space elevator and the communication satellites.

Absolutely. That’s the other side of him. His background was engineering. He worked on experimental radar techniques during the Second World War for the RAF. He came out of that with an understanding of telecommunications and satellites. As you say, he came up with the notion of twenty-four-hour orbit satellites beaming signals across the whole hemisphere of the Earth, and the space elevator. He wasn’t original with that, I don’t think, but he kind of dug it up from the writings of Tsiolkovsky, who was an old Russian from fifty years earlier, I think.

Clarke proposed how it might be built, and then the engineers get ahold of that and say, well this wouldn’t work, but you could do it like that. He was a genuine visionary in terms of his nonfiction output as well. He definitely inspired the NASA guys who later went to the moon. As I recall, one of the Apollo crafts was called Odyssey after 2001: A Space Odyssey, and one of the Apollo orbital missions—I think it was Apollo 10—were planning to play a prank, where, having gone around the back of the moon, they were going to say there’s a huge monolith standing there. But they chickened out in the end. That shows the influence, you go around the moon, and you’re thinking about Clarke’s movie.

You actually knew Clarke pretty well, right?

Well, I worked with him. We wrote four novels together, in the end.

My own first novel was published twenty-five years ago, and I sent it to Clarke to blurb, and he gave it a nice blurb, “a promising writer.” Then a few years later, I did a sequel to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and that was sent to Clarke. He really liked it. He didn’t actually produce a blurb that we could use on the cover of the book, but we got in contact after that. He had a souvenir postcard of H.G. Wells that he sent me, for instance, and we started corresponding. I interviewed him a couple of times for magazines.

A few years after that, in the late ’90s, he came up with an idea for a book. By that time, his health wasn’t great, and he looked for collaborators, so I was in the frame as a collaborator for this next novel series that he wanted to work on.

I only actually met him once. He came to Britain in the early ’90s for one of the Arthur C. Clarke award events. It was in his hometown, so he came there, and I met him. He was with his brother, who was also a successful writer, in plumbing, would you believe? He wrote plumbing textbooks that became the standard for students in Britain. He claimed he made more money from writing that textbook than Arthur did from science fiction. That could well be true.

Face to face, Clarke was a quite shy man, but he was friendly. I think he found it easier to communicate through emails.

After that we communicated mostly through email and phone calls. He lived in Sri Lanka, so there was a big time difference, and plus he was in his eighties when we were working together, so he’d be awake at three in the morning, and he’d want to work on something, and sometimes he’d call at ungodly hours.

What I learned from him in terms of going forward was how enthusiastic he stayed. Throughout his life he’d be doing an interview about 2001 or he’d be given a doctorate by Liverpool University. He’d always want to talk about the latest book. The next project. Always going forward and producing new stuff and new ideas. So, that’s what I want to be when I grow up: like Arthur in his old age.

Speaking of the latest book, why don’t you tell us about The Medusa Chronicles. How did the idea for this come about?

It was Alistair’s idea, I suppose, but it was more something that exploded in the middle of an email conversation. We’ve known each other for twenty-five years, and we email about this and that. That story, “Meeting in Medusa,” in particular, grabbed Al at a young age. There was a serialized version in England with great illustration in a boy’s magazine. We were talking about this, and Al said to me, “We should do a sequel.” I think it was just a throwaway joke, but then I thought, “Wow, hang on, could you do that?”

So, I went to read the story, and I could immediately see how you could develop enough material for a novel. There’s a hell of a lot in there. Falcon’s own personal story. There’s Jupiter. There are the hints about the conflict between man and machine in the future, which itself is a kind of alternate history because it has a scene from 1971 that computers were going to be like HAL in 2001. Kind of mainframes with personalities. Clarke didn’t really foresee the internet as we have it now, with lots of dumb machines connected together in a kind of big smart network. So these machines would have personalities. They would be more like HAL, maybe embodied somehow. But that’s an alternate history, a different kind of technological development. Then, in the background of the story as well, there are Clarke’s general concerns and his themes. He wrote most of his stories against the background of a world government. This story is set in 2099, and by this time there’s a mature world government in place. Once we’re no longer fighting wars and spending money on armaments, we can spend it on expensive space programs and cleaning up the planet and so forth. You’ve got this very utopian picture, and a near future of how the world could be made a better place. It’s kind of a vision that’s been lost now. Again, it was good to go back to. All of this kind of struck me in a blinding flash really in the first half an hour or so of reading the story. So, I got back to Al quickly, and we started bouncing the idea backward and forward.

Say a little more about this alternate history because you had to come up with some way to get from 1971 to people exploring Jupiter in 2099, right? So what was that sequence of events that you dreamed up?

We could ignore Clarke’s dates altogether, although it seemed more interesting to make it fit to Clarke’s timetable. There didn’t seem any way to me, starting from where we are now, that we’re going to get to Jupiter by 2099. We’ll be lucky to get to Mars with humans by then. But, looking back to 1971, we’re still in the middle of the Apollo lunar landings. The space shuttle was going to lead to a space station soon, which was going to lead to a Mars mission, perhaps in the ’80s or the ’90s, so clearly the history that Clarke was basing his story on, looking from our perspective now, was an alternate history.

So, we chose to do it straight as an alternate history. In the book, history changes as an asteroid approaches Earth in the ’60s. Instead of going to the moon with Apollo Saturn technology, we deflected the asteroid with the Saturn Vs and so forth. Great sacrifice, huge cost, sacrifice to the astronauts. The moon landings are postponed, but the astronauts are heroes, and the value of a space effort couldn’t have been made more graphic, so the White House and around the world were happy to invest masses of money into an expensive space program and move on from there.

Larry Niven, another great science fiction writer, came up with a good line a while ago. He said, “The reason that dinosaurs got extinct was because they didn’t have a space program.” That’s pretty much it. We were like the dinosaurs. But with the asteroid having missed, people realized that we need a space program just to stay alert for things like that. A space program would have brought benefits of other kinds, such as maybe power from space as opposed to sources on the ground and so on. Resources from space instead of mining the Earth. It would have made a difference technologically as well. In our alternate history, we have very advanced spacecraft, but primitive computers comparatively.

Say a little more about these efforts to draw resources from the solar system because you have these robots out in the Oort Cloud flinging ice meteors back at Earth.

That’s the idea, yeah. There are masses of resources out there if you can only get to them. The big hurdle, really, is getting off the Earth, or getting stuff back to the Earth at the cost of our gravity well, but once you’re up there, it’s very easy to fling stuff around.

If you wanted to make Mars like the Earth, you really need water and nitrogen to give you not just a gaseous atmosphere but for plants and so forth. But all this stuff is out there. You’ve just got to build an infrastructure to bring it home. You’d have an Earth which could be reduced to a kind of park. Or a garden. Leave the Earth to do what it’s really good at, which is support a biosphere, all the resources of life. Bring down the resources from space as you need them to maintain an advanced civilization. Meanwhile, move out into the solar system, like safety caches of humans scattered around the system so that no one dramatic event could destroy us, ever.

But also just the sheer adventure of exploring the moon, exploring Mars, and so forth. In one of my own novels, called Voyage, which is a different kind of alternate history in which the post-Apollo decisions to proceed with the space program were slightly different—instead of building the shuttle, you build a quick trip to Mars, the way Apollo Saturn was a quick trip to the moon with not really much of a follow on. A quick trip to Mars without much of a follow on. But you still get to Mars. So, the astronauts who walked on the moon would have been young enough, at least some of them. Like John Young for instance, who flew the space shuttle: you could imagine him walking on Mars in 1985 and 1986. How fantastic!

Even if we hadn’t really followed it up, what a fantastic adventure it would have been. Also, the science would have been great as well. One geologist on Mars for a day could probably achieve more than all of the probes we’ve sent up there so far. Working on a book now is kind of a fulfillment of all these lost visions, if you’d like.

You have this civilization, and they’re exploiting the resources in the Oort Cloud, and then they’re also doing mining in the upper atmosphere on Jupiter.

Yes. This is another old space dream, really. Jupiter is a great source of isotopes for fusion. There’s one isotope of helium called helium-3, which is ideal for relatively clean fusion, but it’s vanishingly scarce on the Earth. I’ve seen one study that one interstellar space probe, unmanned, would use up all the resources on the Earth of helium-3. It’s much too valuable to use. It’s on the moon, but scattered very thinly. You’d have to scour the entire face of the moon to extract this stuff.

It’s there on Jupiter. Very thinly scattered, but again, Jupiter is so big. There’s a lot of it. So you could have floating factories to produce this stuff and export it to the Earth for relatively clean energy. But Jupiter is not really a place for humans, so it’s an ideal place for the machines. Our machines are more like androids, human-like individual entities but with robot bodies, so they’re capable of withstanding the conditions within Jupiter. Off they go, but they start pursuing their own agenda within Jupiter. Exploring its interior, and obviously making contact with the kinds of lifeforms on Jupiter.

A lot of this book deals with Falcon and other characters descending through the atmosphere into the depths of Jupiter. When you’re writing about what’s down there, how much of that is based on known science and how much is based on your imagination?

It’s kind of both, really. I think everything we come up with in there is possible. There’s nothing actually ruled out by physical law or by observation, but, we do know very little. The models of the atmosphere that we have are quite old now. They certainly go back to the ’60s. Carl Sagan, as I said, came up with this idea of life forms in these cloud layers. You have a layer of ammonia ice, and then you have a layer of water ice or water vapor, maybe, and methane in there somewhere, and so forth. These components would separate out. The organic chemistry from the sun is at the top of the atmosphere, so a lot of organic chemicals are floating around in there. You could have some kind of aerial life form evolving in this kind of soupy, thick atmosphere. Is it really like that? We don’t know. We’ve thrown one probe in, Galileo, which arrived in the ’90s. It burned up quite quickly, but it did return readings on the structure of the atmosphere, and they found it was much drier than expected. Much less water than everyone expected from external readings. But that’s typical. You could throw a probe at Earth, and it would land in the desert, say, and you think there’s no water. Or it lands in the ocean, and you think the world’s full of water. So one pinpoint probe isn’t really a proof of anything one way or the other.

The thing is, though, what we know evolves so quickly now, which is fantastic. Just in my lifetime alone, you’ve got this revolution in what we know about the planets. For a fiction writer the main thing is just trying to keep up. What new possibilities does this open up? What would it be like to live on these worlds as they are being revealed to us, and what kind of life might we find there inside?

Right, my dad is a scientist. He works in low-temperature superconductivity, so this line caught my eye where you say that the interior of Jupiter might be composed of metallic hydrogen that might be useful as a room temperature superconductor or a high-energy-density fuel.

Yeah, to be honest, I know very little about that beyond what you said there. But there is speculation that there are exotic forms of hydrogen. I think the idea of mining it is fairly far away. But Jupiter is a natural laboratory.

It’s strange that we seem to understand the sun pretty well. The model of the sun’s interior has stayed pretty static since, I think it was the 1920s. It’s fairly simple physics. It’s just hydrogen and helium with this immense mass crushing everything, and you can predict what the temperature of the core must be. So the models of the sun are fairly stable, but the models of Jupiter are kind of similar between the Earth and the sun. Jupiter is 300 times the mass of the Earth. We don’t know what happens to hydrogen or the simplest elements in these strange conditions of high temperature and pressure that you find in there. It’s fascinating to think that we might dig down there one day and see what’s going on in this kind of natural laboratory.

In this book, you also have some really advanced futuristic technology. There’s the momentum pump and the asymptotic drive. Could you talk about those?

Those are some of the more advanced technologies in the book. Stolen a bit from Clarke. One thing we did was read a lot of Clarke outside the novella itself to get more of a background of where it fit into his general work.

In the near future, he imagined fusion rockets, nuclear fission rockets, for instance, taking Falcon out to Jupiter as in, say 2001. And the design of those things was fully stable, in Clarke’s mind, at least, a big dumbbell shape like Discovery in 2001. He’d been working on designs like that since the ’50s. However, he was interested in exotica as well. There were two things in particular that caught his attention in his later life. One was the idea of an inertialess drive where you could somehow take away the inertia of an object, like making it matterless.

In a way, that’s become more plausible in recent years because of the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is an exotic particle which gives other particles mass, strangely. So matter is imbued by the Higgs. If you could somehow turn off the Higgs or detach it from a body then you could reduce the mass and so reduce the inertia. Or maybe inertia has something to do with being coupled into space-time. That’s another speculative possibility.

The momentum pump is another variant of that. How you could move a moon with a small engine. This is pushing at the boundaries, but there are speculative papers that you can find at the fringe of physics on how this kind of thing might be done. I think, really, the reason there’s room in physics for doing that kind of thing is because physics is so incomplete. We don’t have a good theory of where general relativity and quantum mechanics meet, which is quantum gravity. I know there are many models of it around. That’s where these exotic possibilities like hyper drives and inertialess drives and so forth might lurk. Which is great for the science fiction writer. If you want something beyond the known then you go for that. Clarke would fill his books with afterwords listing the references for these speculations: hyperdrives and so forth. It’s not authoritative. This is only guesswork, but at least it’s educated guesswork about how this thing might be possible. It’s not magic. But it’s very speculative science.

One of the wildest ideas in this book is one of the characters talks about enclosing the entire planet of Saturn in kind of a shell that people could walk on and live on.

I think that, in a way, is less fantastic than some because the gravity of Saturn is only about one G, the same as the Earth’s. So a structure that’s capable of withstanding one G would be able to support itself—if you could build that thing in the first place. It’s not like, say, Larry Niven’s Ringworld, this belt whirling around a sun so fast that it gives you a spin gravity of one G, but so big that it’s about the same distance that the Earth is from the sun. The stresses on that would be similar to the stresses that hold the nucleus of an atom together. So that’s a pretty exotic material that you need.

I suspect that you could build a shell around Saturn. You might need some magic carbon nano-fiber tubing, that sort of stuff, but nothing beyond the bounds of possibility. The big trick with that would be building it in the first place, assembling the material, and so forth. Probably the way to do it would be to mine Saturn for the material itself and build it in place. I think as megastructures go, it’s relatively plausible, which is a pleasing thought. That strange thing was one of my personal contributions to the book, which I dreamed up from knowing that Saturn had gravity of about one G.

I started to wonder how come a gas giant has got a similar gravity to the Earth? How can that be so? Even Jupiter is only a couple of times or a few times Earth’s gravity. There have been studies of exoplanets, planets beyond the solar system, showing a strange kind of convergence of planetary formation or a coincidence of planetary formation that you get about a G. The big rocky planets compress and sort of stabilize their gravity at about a G. And the gas giants as well seem to diffuse out to a certain size so that you’ve got much larger masses, but they’re so big that the gravity is about a G or a couple of G.

So it’s a strange thing being adapted to a gravity well of about a G. It doesn’t suit you to live on the moon, which is only a sixth of a G, or in a space habitat with zero G. It would actually suit you quite well to live on a lot of worlds around the universe where the gravity is near to one G, more or less, even a shell around a gas giant would give you about a G. My interesting fact for the day.

You said that that was one of your contributions. Could you just lay out what you and Al Reynolds each brought to this project?

We had a quickfire exchange of emails and ideas and phone calls to begin with, coming up with a lot of ideas. Then we met face to face at the World SF convention in London in 2014, just for half a day, but by then we had masses of material and ideas. I think we’d already gotten a notion of how we go forward, but we came up with a breakdown there. We put the thing into six parts. The whole thing was going to be episodic anyway, which we could split up between us.

Roughly speaking, I did more of the earlier episodes, including the alternate history of the Apollo days. Al did more of the later episodes out in the solar system. Originally, we were going to go out to the stars as well, but in the end we stayed in the solar system. I think that shows a slight difference of bias there. I’ve done the grand, very far future stuff in my own novels, but also a lot of alternate histories and near future books as well.

Al is somewhere in the middle of that. Off in the middle distance somewhere out in the Oort cloud, but not yet reaching the stars.

There is another difference between us, as some of the reviews have picked up, which is a difference in style. I think I’m a bit more like Clarke in writing style. Slightly more cerebral in a way, and cooler, and the characters interact in a thoroughly restrained way. They feel deeply, but they don’t necessarily act on impulse. At one point, Falcon watches the machines take over the Earth. As an observer, he’s coolly reporting what happens. He’s angry, and he’s newly motivated to take on the machines again, but he takes it coolly.

Al, though, is a more kind of visceral writer, I think. He gets into the guts of the characters. He has very physical confrontations between them. He writes in a very physical way as well. You see the quivering lips and the clenched fists. His confrontations were much more vivid, I think.

In the end, we wrote these chunks, put them together, and went through the books several times. Smoothing out the joints, if you like. Rewriting all the sections together. It isn’t a Clarke book. It’s not a Baxter or a Reynolds book, either. It’s something in between.

There’s actually a funny story that I heard about the first time that you met Al Reynolds. Could you tell that story?

We met about twenty-five years ago at a sixty-fifth birthday party for Brian Aldiss, the great writer, which was being run by Interzone. Al is about ten years younger than me, which matters a lot less now, but back then, I was mid-thirties and Al was mid-twenties. I’d had a couple of books published. Al was just starting out. He comes up to me slightly star-struck, and he said to me, “Oh, Steve, nice to meet you. Of the previous generation of writers, you’re the one who most inspires me.”

I’m thirty-five, and I felt like a hundred and five. I felt like H.G. Wells. It was a shy and awkward moment, but I tease Al about that regularly ever since.

You put an actual scene in this book that was inspired by that?

Yes. It’s somewhere near the beginning. You have Falcon, who goes to Jupiter. It’s actually in Clarke’s novella. A guy called Springer lands on Pluto in the same year, so you had these two big events during 2099. At the end of the year, they’re both invited to a big oceanic event with the world president to see in the new year. And Springer, this guy is more media savvy than our rather clumsy cyborg hero, Falcon. So, trailed by cameramen and so on, Springer walks up to this guy and goes, “Falcon. What a good guy here. Of the previous generation of explorers, you’re my big inspiration.” And then he’s called away from the photoshoot, leaving Falcon seething. We smuggled that in, yes.

Speaking of the world president, you mention that in Clarke’s universe there’s this world government. I’m wondering what you think about the prospects of world government from our current vantage.

Clarke didn’t write a consistent universe, although the 2001 series did fit into a single universe. But he did have these consistent themes, and one of them was the emergence of a world government, which he thought would come about peacefully, I think, thanks mostly to communication. Global communication. That would spread education, for one thing, and just increase our global awareness. If you can see the other guy suffering, it makes you less willing to go to war. His technological interests mapped out to those political interests. He’d known Olaf Stabledon, who was a great visionary of political future and a future without war.

He was never a political activist, I don’t think, but he thought this was the way for an advanced society to go. Of course, he was a generation who lived through the Second World War, and after the war you did get great global institutions emerging. The United Nations for one thing.

I do think global action, in the end, is necessary. Because we face global problems. The migration crises, climate change, resource depletion, all of these things are going to hit us on a global level, and so, for instance, the UN organized climate change initiatives, imperfect as they are, all of those seem entirely in the right direction to go to me. We have to work as a species to manage the planet.

I think we’re slowly moving towards that kind of arrangement with more power, effectively, being invested in the international and global institutions and less at the national level. I really think the big challenge, as Europe has shown, is democratic legitimacy. Americans would say the same thing. You want to be able to vote that guy out, whether he’s your local mayor or the world president. You’ve got to be able to vote the guy out. Otherwise, you’re not going to accept the deal. I think we’re at a bump in the road from that point of view. I’m not sure how Clarke himself would have voted. I think he would have railed against the democratic deficiency of the actuality versus the goals of the post-war founders. It is kind of interesting that we published a book about the world government just as it leaves the European government, but I suppose it shores up the issues.

You’ve mentioned that you’re a big fan of H.G. Wells, who also campaigned for world government, and I also saw you say in an interview, that you were actually pretty critical of his conception of that. I was wondering if you could say a little more about that?

That’s my other big project at the moment, I’m doing a sequel to The War of the Worlds by Wells called The Massacre of Mankind. That will be out next year. It’s like another collaboration, actually. It’s like the same as working with Al and with Clarke. You read around the guy’s work.

He could clearly see what was wrong with late Victorian society and Edwardian society. He abhorred the First World War when it came along. He could see the need for universal education, for a start, proper education for women, which he saw as a great waste of human potential. Some things that are also of his time: he was for cleaning up the cities, clean streets; you have a lot of filth in the contemporary cities, which his books are set, but the futuristic cities are always very clean. He’s writing from the late age of the horse, everything is sort of horse dung and rubbish and the streets and cities are black from soot. So he wanted cleanliness, and education, and good food, and so forth. But how to achieve that?

In A Modern Utopia, for instance, which is the most striking fictional version of this, it’s actually an alternate history that developed from a Roman empire that never fell, but they have a kind of senate of self-appointed scientific minds who run everything on behalf of everybody else, so at that point in his life, this is about 1905, I think he thought democracy was a bit of a bust. You had to give up control to the smart people. They would run things for us. They would allocate education for us. They’d weed out defectives from society one way or another and send them off to colonies elsewhere.

And he couldn’t seem to see where this kind of scientific government was liable to lead, and it led, of course, to Nazi Germany. A scientific elite, a scientific running of humanity, a scientific categorization of humanity, kind of quasi-scientific, in a way, leads directly to eugenics and the gas chambers, unfortunately.

Wells lived long enough to see the Second World War come about and the horrors of Nazi Germany. And George Orwell, who later wrote 1984, skewered Wells with one quote. He said, “Nazi Germany is what you’ve been arguing for all your life.”

So that’s why I think you have to be critical, in retrospect, at least, of Wells. He had this great vision of a unified utopian world, but early in his life, he couldn’t seem to see that scientists aren’t to be trusted, basically. Nobody is to be trusted, as Churchill said. Democracy is the worst system of government in the world except for all of the others. At least you can vote the guy out, you know?

Wells did evolve his views later in life, very greatly. He died in 1946, but in the later stages of the war, they were already planning for the peace and the founding of the UN, and Wells was very influential in getting the Declaration of the Rights of Man drawn up. The Universal Declaration as excerpted by the UN, and later by bodies like Europe. I think, if nothing else, he should be remembered for that. He’d seen the folly of his ways. By the end, rather than prescribing forms of world government, he was looking for ways to ensure the rights of the individual, so a fair life and a decent education and so forth. He will be critical, I think, of his early musings, but we all learn by experience, don’t we?

You’ve mentioned that you collaborated with Clarke and Alistair Reynolds, and in way, with H.G. Wells. You also collaborated with Terry Pratchett. I was wondering if there are any marked differences between working with these different authors?

I think the commonality is enthusiasm. We’d all had a background in the stuff that we read. Even with Clarke, who was forty years older than me. Enthusiasm for the background of the material, and for the actual writing itself.

Obviously Terry was a very different writer to Al or Clarke, but he was a science fiction fan as a young reader. His first stories were science fiction. I think what he really wanted to be was an SF writer. His first couple of novels were SF.

He actually met Clarke when Terry was about sixteen, a young fan, and Clarke was kind to him, so he always called Clarke “Uncle Arthur” after that. Not to his face, but you know, that was his position in the genre, as far as he was concerned.

By the time I’d worked with Terry, he’d gone through the whole of Discworld, and he’d developed that very dry humorous voice, on the one hand, and his approach to characters was quite different.

We had a big science fictional frame. The project we worked on, The Long Earth, is about a universe full of have parallel Earths that you can simply walk into, each one slightly different from the rest. It’s a big idea that I think was too big in a way for Terry, who likes to work with individual people. When we collaborated, I brought the framework, the maps, timelines, and so on of how this universe could be structured, but what Terry was brilliant at was getting hold of a character and really drilling down into their motivation.

That’s one big difference, this really deep characterization which Terry was capable of. You clearly need characterization in SF, and I think it’s underrated, actually, how good the best are at characterization. Clarke and Wells, for instance.

In SF the hero is really the idea. Or maybe the universe itself is a character overwhelming everything else, and there’s no room for this kind of deep characterization that you might get in mainstream fiction. But Terry got really deeply into the heads of these people in this fantastic world. I think that’s certainly one difference. The balance of characterization versus ideation, if you like.

I saw a quote that said that as a writer, you’re order, and Terry was chaos, and it’s kind of an interesting mix of order and chaos when you came together.

Did I say that? Somebody said it. But, yeah, at one point we were trying to figure out the structure of The Long Earth, infinite in principle, but how could you make it more interesting? Each is slightly different from the rest, I thought. After about a hundred worlds, you get to an ice age world, and you go a bit further, and there’s a dinosaur world and so forth. But, Terry was all for randomness. So, you go along ten worlds, and then suddenly, bang, it’s entirely different from anything you expect. So, it could be a desert world in the middle of the ice ages, but it could be something very strange. One of his favorites was a cue ball world, entirely smooth, like an abstraction. There’s nothing there. There’s air to breathe and so forth, but there’s a blank landscape. Nothing there at all, like a huge roller skating rink. So, Terry liked to break this up with random changes and so forth.

We talked to a mathematician at one point, Ian Stewart, who collaborated on The Science of Discworld books, talking about this kind of structure, and Ian said, in modern thinking, with the mathematicians, the most fertile structures you can have are a balance between order and chaos. Modern fighter planes are deliberately made unstable, all controlled by computer, so that if it’s unstable you can deliberately flip it quickly into another state, so you can do very fast turns and quick maneuvering and so forth. It’s managed chaos, in a way. So, this mathematician said maybe our Long Earth was the same kind of thing. It’s orderly, but it’s on the edge of chaos, so interesting things can happen. The whole time you’re about to tip over the edge of the wave.

I think between me and Terry this clash of order and chaos was quite productive in the end. One thing I was careful to see about in the beginning was to make a note of every mad, random idea we had and try to get as many of them into the early books as possible, just in case we wanted to go back to them later, in case they turned out to be really good, as a sort of hook for the sequels. And that paid off, I can tell you.

I was also curious if you’d seen the Syfy channel adaptation of Childhood’s End, and if so, what you thought of that?

Oh no, I haven’t seen it actually. No. I’m behind on that one, I’m afraid.

Then you said in an interview, “NASA, I’m afraid, has become a sclerotic, big organization locked into the space station project, which will generate a lot of jobs but little else.” I was wondering if you could say what you think we should be doing in your terms of space exploration?

I think that’s probably a fairly old quote, which I suspect was valid fifteen years ago, maybe. I did a little research into NASA when I wrote my novel Voyage. It’s an alternate history of the space program in the seventies and eighties.

They were extremely generous because there are a lot of science fiction fans in NASA, as you can imagine. I was shown around the hardware, crawled around a space shuttle simulator, saw a shuttle launch, which is an astounding experience, a very physical experience, very visceral. Shown some of the plans they were drawing up at the time for Mars missions, if the call ever came. But the space station, I’ve never been a big fan of that project, to be honest. It’s kept a presence in space. We’ve learned lessons from it. But we could’ve done much more with the money, I tend to feel.

And, if you go around NASA, this was true about ten or fifteen years ago; at least, you did get the impression that it was kind of hanging on. It was a long program with an extended deadline, which never actually gets anywhere but keeps the jobs going. You can understand why that was. From the Apollo peak, I think there was something like half a million people in the space program, including the contractors, as well, at the peak. So, what do they do when Apollo is gone and the program starts shrinking?

I had been quite a fan of Robert Zubrin, of Mars Direct, looking for lean, mean ways of getting to Mars quickly. Whittle it right down. In the spirit of the sixties actually. Before Apollo there was a pretty expansive, long term program for building gigantic successors to the Saturn V, and using those to get to Mars. In the end, they focused on the goal, just get to the moon with the Saturn V, a kind of middle-sized rocket. Do it quickly with this ingenious way of landing, a separate lander. Lots of ways to save mass and size and the allotment of time and so forth. Just go for the goal.

I think that once Zubrin’s work came along, which must have been about twenty years ago now, I couldn’t quite see why this wasn’t taken with more enthusiasm by NASA, and by Congress, and those who hold the purse strings as well. I spoke to Clarke a lot about this, and asked him if he was disappointed that the kind of alternate future that we describe in Medusa didn’t come about with missions to Jupiter by the end of the century and so on. He said, no, he wasn’t disappointed at all. He said that realistically when he started back in the thirties or the forties, he didn’t really believe that humans would walk on the moon in his lifetime or that we would get as far as we have. He’s kind of disappointed that we stopped at the moon as far as human exploration, but he loved all the deep space exploration. It inspired his fiction. The early internet was great for him because he could just go on to the NASA sites and download everything that they had. He loved it.

I think NASA now is going more in the right direction, given the constraints on them. Very imaginative missions. Some great science being done. Unfortunately, I don’t think in my lifetime that we’re going to see a human walk on Mars because a huge funding boost will never be there, but maybe some motive to it, discovering life, for instance, and a real motive to get there. But, I have to praise the half of NASA that does the uncrewed probes and the fabulous science over the years, which I talked about this before, has absolutely transformed humanity’s vision of the universe in my lifetime, and indeed mine as well.

You also, in that same interview, talked about how we’re at this absolutely critical moment in human history. You say, “If we get it wrong over the next few decades, our descendants, if there are any, might not forgive us.”

I think that could be true. Don’t you? With the challenge of the climate shift, it seems very real to me.

At the same time, we’ve got the challenge of the oil running out, and the very fact that the energy sources we need to fix these problems could potentially worsen the climate problems as well. But it seems to me that we still have a window to do things like clean up the power generation systems, and maybe use off-Earth resources to support the Earth as we go towards, it seems to be, these two competing goals.

One is high civilization which supports everybody to a high standard of living, as we have in the western countries and the other goal being a healthy, stable ecology going forward to future generations as well. So, it’s one heck of a challenge, but I’m fundamentally an optimist.

Anyone of my age has lived through the horrible fear of nuclear war. I think that when my generation were kids we didn’t think there would be a nuclear war tomorrow, but I feel we didn’t think we’d grow old. Sometime between now and then, we thought the bombs would fall, so we’d never get to plant a tree in the garden and see it grow fully.

If we can survive the threat of nuclear war, the fall of the Berlin wall, and all that’s happened, then I think we can muddle our way through this in the end. It’s a challenge that we can’t shirk. But previous generations haven’t shirked their challenges, going back to Clarke’s generation. The West stood up to the Nazis even though that was a huge human and political and economic hit. If you look at it that way, we all came out of it better in the end.

Absolutely. We’re pretty much out of time. Do you have any final words you want to say, or any projects you want to mention, or anything like that?

No, I think I’ve covered everything. I will just say my projects I’m working on now are my own solo projects, so a break from collaborating, and off to the far future. My own starting point was a universe called the Xeelee Sequence. Off in the far future. That’s a real expression of my own influences, including Clarke, my first stories and books were set in that universe. I’ve kept on going back, which I think is a good idea. Clarke kept on going back to some of his early works and rewriting, and reworking, and expanding them. It’s not a bad idea, I don’t think, because the beginning is where your unconscious is more in control of your creative process than your consciousness. So, looking back to that is a good way of thinking, “What am I really interested in? What are my real concerns?” My current project is a rework of some of that stuff. A kind of a reboot with my current sensibilities, more modern science, and so forth. That’s great fun.

I’m really looking forward to that. We’ve been speaking with Stephen Baxter, and this new book, once again, is called The Medusa Chronicles with Alastair Reynolds. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

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: Chris Kluwe

Arley Sorg | 1242 words

I find a nihilistic sort of irony in this piece, which seems to allude to our sense of purpose as being tied to each other/society, while presenting an overriding, large-scale drive to destroy each other. Do you believe that this sort of ending is inevitable, or perhaps, probable? Or do you see it as allegory for the way we treat each other now?

So this is probably due to me being a history/political science major (which I don’t recommend if you want to keep your illusions about the inherent goodness of people). Looking back through humanity’s history, we find time and time again that civilizations destroy themselves, either by starting wars with other civilizations, or by starting wars against their own people. It happens fairly regularly once a civilization gets big enough, and to me it’s this interesting paradox of “We have to work together to establish a niche for ourselves in the world, but if we get too big it falls apart,” and I think a large part of it is driven by all the baggage we’ve inherited from our evolutionary ancestors. In geologic time-frame terms, we’ve been “civilized” for not even an eyeblink, and we’re still trying to figure out how to make it work. Based on the evidence we’ve accumulated, I’d say this sort of ending is highly probable, but if we acknowledge that and constantly work to avoid it, we might be able to write a different ending. Won’t be easy though.

Another irony presents itself in the hesitation after Fang says, “You could come too, you know.” Especially when up against isolation and desolation; this notion that, in some way, not sticking together is preferable to working together. It actually reminds me of the loneliness of the introverted, the conflict of a need for company against the discomfort of having it. Do you attribute this sort of moment to human nature, to a particular psychology, or to a culture that is somewhat individualistic? For example, would someone from a culture whose philosophy is “the group is more important than the individual” make the same decision as these characters?

So this part is meant to invoke the idea that, on a purely animal level, people generally make one of two decisions when confronted by an overwhelming disaster. One decision is to curl up and die. The other decision is to keep going, no matter what the odds are, perhaps even knowing that those odds are futile. We know what decision Fang makes. We don’t know what decision the narrator (and by extension, the reader) makes, because that decision can only be made by the person reading the story. Only you can know which way you’ll fall.

In the story, vids of the “old wars” are “supposed to warn us, keep us from our heritage.” And there’s this great line: “The pebble’s lament—nobody ever thinks they’re the one to start the slide.” The PoV character talks about greed as being the reason for this conflict, but these other lines imply a certain level of ignorance, and perhaps accidentally ending up in a terrible situation, despite efforts to avoid it. What sorts of measures could we realistically implement to avoid self-destruction?

A big one is placing a heightened value on the idea of empathy. A lot of conflict (pretty much all of it, actually) arises from a lack of empathy—of seeing someone else as the “other,” rather than part of your own tribe (or as Terry Pratchett so wonderfully put it, “seeing people as things, not as people”). We need to expand our idea of our “tribe” to include all of humanity, otherwise we’re eventually going to kill ourselves.

A big thing that I talk about to anyone that’ll listen is the idea of technological progression versus empathic progression. As a species, our technological progression is increasing exponentially. We build on the discoveries of those who came before us, and it keeps picking up pace. Unfortunately, our empathic progression is only increasing linearly, because we don’t really place much value on being empathic, and so it muddles along in fits and starts. However, we really need to, because as our tools (and therefore our weapons) become increasingly powerful, the only thing stopping someone from ultimately pushing the button is if they’re empathic enough to understand what pushing the button will mean for those they care about, and eventually, all it takes is one button push to end everything.

So many ideas live in this one. Did this story start as a statement piece, or as a cool idea? Where did this story come from?

So this idea actually came to me when I was at the Nebula awards last year (2015). Someone (I think it was Larry Niven) was giving a speech, and he was talking about dinosaurs, and for some reason my mind wandered to the idea of what a mass extinction would look like from the perspective of being in the middle of it, and knowing how it all happened. I also tend to think that it’s entirely plausible that this is the way we go out, since we’re beginning to open up space as a new frontier, and historically, whenever you get new frontiers, you get wars between those on the frontier and those back home, and it would be ironic as hell if we killed ourselves the same way the dinosaurs went, except we did it on purpose, even knowing the consequences.

I’m a blast at parties!

Is there anything about this story that I haven’t asked, that you’d really like to share with readers?

One thing that I thought was a big part to the piece is that you don’t know who the narrator is. There’s no gender, no name, no hint of sexuality, nothing except a blank slate on which you, the reader, write your own view of the world (and that’s important to me, because everyone should be able to see something they can relate to in a story). At the end of the story, does the narrator fall into the planet, one last sacrifice to the death of a species? Or does the narrator fall outwards, follow Fang (as a friend? a partner? A spouse?), maybe beat the odds and restart humanity again? Only you know. What you see there is what you bring.

Thanks so much for the story. For me, at least, obviously, it carries a lot of elements that can be brought into larger, longer conversations, despite its brevity. What are you working on now that we can look forward to?

Right now I’m working on the sequel to Prime: A Genesis Series Event, which is an SF book I co-authored with my good friend Andy Reiner. The sequel is called Splice, and I’m really excited for people who liked Prime to get a chance to read it. We learned a lot writing the first one (Prime’s a bit rough, and mistakes were made), but I think Splice is going to be pretty awesome. We’re hoping to have it out before the end of the year on Amazon.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Author Spotlight: Lavie Tidhar

Arley Sorg | 1429 words

Lavie, what a story. For me, so emotionally resonant. So representative of the complexity of relationships and love, against a backdrop that is, through metaphors, very real. Tell me about the inspiration for Isobel and her “robotnik” love interest—where did these people come from?

Thank you so much! The origins for this actually go a long time back. People might notice that the Central Station stories (a sort of mosaic novel, really, which is now collected/out from Tachyon Publications) contain a lot of references, but what might be less apparent is that they correspond quite a lot not just with American SF but also Israeli SF. Which, in fairness, would be obscure to the vast majority of any kind of reader.

In this case, a very early inspiration for me were a pair of short stories published in the magazine Fantasia 2000 in the mid-1980s (and which I only read, I suspect, years after they were published, in worn-out library copies). They were by a guy called Mordechai Sasson, and to the best of my knowledge were the only things he ever published. They were called “The Stern-Gerlach Rats” and “The Conman and the Tin Beggar,” and they were set in a sort of future Israel where robots were basically begging for spare parts. They really stuck with me, through all the years, and I started exploring this idea with an early story called “Crucifixation,” which I sent to an unknown little magazine called Apex Digest, edited by Jason Sizemore. It turned out it was the first story Jason ever bought for his magazine, and it began a long association between us, which eventually resulted in my early collection, HebrewPunk, and of course The Apex Book of World SF series. But back then, I had no idea!

So, this is kind of where the robotniks came from . . . and they kept popping up in the sort of interconnected future history I was writing throughout that time, and they kind of evolved and got more complex as time went on, until the Central Station cycle kind of allowed me to go back to their origins in a more . . . mature form? But really the start of it all was sitting in the library as a kid in the SF stack and reading these beat-up old magazines.

And, of course, I’d argue at the heart of Central Station is, well maybe not romance but love, relationships, and that is kind of what “Under The Eaves” is about. But it feeds through all of the stories and, in fact, if you pick up the actual book, you can see the Isobel/Motl arc kind of extended a little bit there.

“‘Is it not enough,” the woman said, ‘that you do?’” This was an incredible moment for me. I loved the way the sense of power and weakness—not to mention confidence and fear—struggled for prominence within Isobel, a woman facing uncertainty, essentially. In your writing, what tools and techniques do you use to so effectively treat shifting, powerful emotions?

It’s an interesting question! Nothing consciously, I would say. I am very fearful, as a writer, of emotional manipulation (which I’d argue can be a quite common element in certain science fiction stories). Really I just try to write as honestly as possible. I am actually very fond of books where a lot of the stuff is under the surface, the sort of paired-down noir style (which is much more predominant in my novels like The Violent Century or A Man Lies Dreaming), but my goal with these stories was very different, and more gentle. I just wanted to explore the characters and their interactions, to kind of look at an ordinary life against an extraordinary background, if that makes sense.

“Under the Eaves” is a brief, but captivating, exploration of your Central Station world. One of the noticeable themes here is the confluence, or perhaps crashing and swirling, of cultures (in this case not only of various human cultures, but also digital and alien). How is identity and culture important to you, personally, and what do you hope to convey (or perhaps gift) to the reader?

Well, I’m a bit of a mishmash of identity at this point—I grew up in Israel, to an extent in South Africa, I’ve lived in the UK for a long time, but also in places like Vanuatu and Laos, I speak and write in three languages—my latest project is actually writing a series of short literary fiction vignettes in Bislama, the South Pacific pidgin/creole that is the official language of Vanuatu (and which I stole for my “Asteroid Pidgin”). So these are coming out every month in The Vanuatu Daily Post, which is kind of amazing! The idea of Bislama becoming a sort of universal language is actually not new, the radical playwright Ken Campbell was a big believer in that idea, going so far as to stage a version of Macbeth adapted into Bislama at the Royal National Theatre in London (back in 1998). And Campbell was well into his science fiction, putting on an epic stage version of the Illuminatus! trilogy and trying to adapt V.A.L.I.S. for stage . . .

But I digress! So I was living back in Tel Aviv for a little while and was captivated by the area of the giant bus station, which is where a lot of African refugees, and Asian economic migrants, had settled, and I wanted to kind of explore that, and in turn explore contemporary Israel, and Golden Age science fiction . . . a whole bunch of stuff.

So, yeah . . . I kind of feel like a bit of a stranger wherever I go, and obviously my own cultural/linguistic/etc. baggage is pretty much unique in the field, which has been both a help and a hindrance, but it has been interesting to me to be able to explore a more personal story, something connected to my own identity(ies). Of course, I’m not entirely sure I ever expected it to actually work!

Your latest book, Camera Obscura, just came out—congratulations! But I have a feeling you’ll have more for us soon enough. What are you working on that we can look forward to? And I also wonder: will we be returning to the Central Station setting soon?

Camera Obscura is actually a new edition of my book from 2011—we’ve been re-issuing all three of the Bookman Histories novels, with new covers and new bonus material—it’s been quite gratifying to see new people pick it up. The Bookman came out in August and The Great Game is due very shortly. And besides those three, A Man Lies Dreaming, which came out in the UK in 2014 (and picked up a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize for Best British Fiction, and a British Fantasy Award nomination, and this year was also shortlisted—in the Italian edition—for the Rome Prize), was out in March from Melville House in the US. And then of course the Central Station book just came out from Tachyon, and besides that I did a little non-fiction book with my friend Shimon Adaf, called Art And War. So that’s six books out in one year in the US! I think, you know, let’s maybe take a short breath before talking about a new one . . . though actually I’ve been quite busy, there’s just nothing I can talk about right now.

I’ve also had a pretty good year with short fiction—I had stories I was very happy with in places like Tor.com and F&SF this year and so on, and I have some forthcoming from Analog and Apex and in Conjunctions, which is very cool.

As to going back to Central Station, well, they say never say never! Though I’m working on a new, “pure SF” project at the moment, which is quite exciting to me, only it’s on the opposite side of the spectrum to Central Station. I can’t talk about it much either, at this point, but it’s going to be very interesting in the way it will be published!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Author Spotlight: J.B. Park

Laurel Amberdine | 349 words

So how does an undead teen boy down on his luck make some quick money? Letting his friends shoot him, of course. What a great idea. How did you come up with it?

I’m not sure. Originally the story was going to be about the protagonist chasing down his murderer, but then the current opening scene happened and the story just went from there.

Though my summary above was kind of flip, “Shooting Gallery” is quite somber. Paulie’s own undead state is sad, but his mother’s situation is just devastating—poor and alone, yet with her dead son still around, slowly falling apart. Even the boys wanting excitement through a video of shooting someone are pathetic in their way. Does any of this have an underlying meaning that you want to share?

For Paul and his mother, I wanted to write about people with no options. They recognize that the other needs serious help, but for both this help is beyond their means and so they can only watch as the other fails. And this helplessness has led to frustration and a breakdown in communication between the two; they no longer talk, and Paul prefers to dwell on what he remembers of her before his death.

As for the boys, they have this rather fantastic, violent wish and it’s all carried out without the usual consequences of shooting someone with a gun. But Paul on the other hand cannot fulfill his more mundane wish without the destruction of his body. The worries that haunt him do not apply to them, and I wanted to show that contrast.

Did the story surprise you or give you any trouble as you were writing it?

Not many surprises, no. Once that opening scene happened the ending came along, too.

What projects are you working on now?

I’d like to finish a book. Something for young adults, but writing is hard. Hopefully I can get something done before the end of the year.

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: Alyssa Wong

Laurel Amberdine | 535 words

What was the first thing you knew about this story before you began to write it?

I knew that I wanted to write a story set in Toronto Chinatown! One of them, anyway. And I knew that the story was about two sisters who seem to love each other dearly, but as the story progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that their relationship is complicated at best.

The revelation that your protagonist is at the skin dealer not for more surgery, but to sell her sister’s skin is so stunning! That seems like such a tough thing to write, and a difficult character to empathize with. How did you approach it?

I love complicated, morally ambiguous protagonists, and I think the key to making them sympathetic is focusing on traits and feelings that are very simple, but very relatable. Sure, not many people have the exact experience of selling off their younger sister’s skin, but comparing yourself to a sibling, feeling inadequate or jealous, or being unable to forget hurtful comments may sound very familiar. What I do is take those feelings and amp them up to an unhealthy level. For example, as long as all we know about Liin, the protagonist of “Natural Skin,” is that she’s jealous of her little sister and insecure about her appearance, her quest to find the ji-si seems perfectly reasonable. When we realize that we were wrong about her motivations, though, it feels like an error in judgment, and, like her closest family members, as though we never knew this character at all.

I adore fairy tales, and with “Natural Skin,” I actually started with the core of “Snow White”: a young, beautiful girl with black hair and red lips, and an older woman full of murderous jealousy. For this story, I decided that I wanted to write about the complicated relationship between sisters as they go through puberty, watching their bodies change into something foreign and painfully aware of the physical difference between themselves and others. That, I feel, is very relatable.

Do you have a typical process for writing a story? Did “Natural Skin” fit that pattern, or give you any surprises?

The first draft of “Natural Skin” might actually have been my first, actual short story. I wrote it when I was nineteen, and it topped out at about 1,000 words. Like many of my other stories, I wrote a clean first draft and kept its thematic core and protagonist through every subsequent draft. And like those stories, it took me a handful of years to figure out the best way to tell the story I wanted to tell. In that sense, it did fit a pattern—and in a way, “Natural Skin” set it.

What are you working on lately?

I’m working on a couple of stories, including a horror novelette about bird pregnancy, a novella about maimed ex-pop idols, and a short collaboration piece with visual artist Grace Fong for Uncanny Magazine. I’ve been deep into Southern Gothic recently, too, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that surfaces in another piece 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: Catherynne M. Valente

Robyn Lupo | 1 words

TK

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Robyn Lupo lives in Southwestern Ontario with her not-that-kind-of-doctor partner and three cats. She enjoys tiny things, and has wrangled flash for Women Destroy Science Fiction! as well as selected poetry for Queers Destroy Horror! She aspires to one day write many things.

Author Spotlight: Mary Robinette Kowal

Robyn Lupo | 402 words

“For Solo Cello” demonstrates a great insight into what internalized ableism can do in a person’s life. What was it like digging into these themes?

There are so many different ways in which society can put blinders on a person. We often don’t realize that we are participating in our own oppression. You see this across a wide range of axis of oppression. For me, one of the things that “For Solo Cello” was doing was exploring what it does to our self-identity.

For me, the image of Cheri at the outset, sweaty with morning sickness and backlit really got me seeing the story. I know it’s been a while, but was it an image that began “For Solo Cello” for you? Can you recall from the mists of 2007 anything surprising about the writing process?

This story was a real turning point for me as a writer. The initial draft of it was significantly sparser in sensory details. That moment was initially simply, “Cheri sounded tired.” Damien Broderick, the fiction editor at Cosmos, suggested adding the sense that she had just vomited moments before. He pushed me on adding “sensory specificity”. This is what a good editor can do.

You’re a professional puppeteer as well as an award-winning writer. You also do voice work; I can imagine there’s lots of wonderful ways that the different modes of work complement each other. Do they ever interfere with each other? Do you work on multiple projects at once, or do you find yourself working on each discretely?

I work on multiple projects all the time. It’s part of being a free-lancer. I find that my design brain and my narrative brain are pretty much the same thing, so when I am designing a show my fiction output drops enormously. Likewise, when I’m writing I have very little desire to work on puppetry. Performance is the exception. I find that performance only makes me more excited about the narrative underpinnings.

What’s next for you, Mary?

To demonstrate what I mean about multiple projects . . . I’m designing puppets for a stage adaptation of Alastair Reynolds’s “Diamond Dogs,” narrating Michael Underwood’s Genrenauts, and writing a pair of sequel novels to my story “The Lady Astronaut of Mars.”

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Robyn Lupo lives in Southwestern Ontario with her not-that-kind-of-doctor partner and three cats. She enjoys tiny things, and has wrangled flash for Women Destroy Science Fiction! as well as selected poetry for Queers Destroy Horror! She aspires to one day write many things.

Author Spotlight: Helena Bell

Christie Yant | 757 words

Welcome back, Helena! Your story “I’ve Come to Marry the Princess” is a wonderful collision of the mundane—summer camp, Walmart parking lot cart returns—and the surreal, absurd, and fantastic. It’s one of the things I’ve most enjoyed about some of your past work, as well. What goes into that collage, and what attracts to you to it?

Many of my stories (including this one) usually start with me remarking to someone “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if . . . ” Only I don’t know how to write humor, so the hilarious idea (in this case it was “wouldn’t it be funny if instead of helping him save the world, the dragon ate the farm boy?”) usually gets paired with something decidedly unfunny (like remember that time my brother and I got sent to camp, and I read eight books in three weeks because I didn’t know how to talk to people, and my brother got bullied?) and going from there. And since I don’t know how to write plot, I tend to fill my stories with bits I’ve stolen shamelessly from real life. For example, my brother really did fall flat on his face (on purpose) at a camp talent show and my father really did used to wander the aisles of Wal-Mart after being called to the hospital in the middle of the night. Even I’ve Come to Marry the Princess is a real skit with dozens of variations though none seem to end as bloodily as the one I wrote. Beyond helping me get words on the page, it helps keep me focused on the characters rather than worrying about the believability of the situation.

The details of summer camp seem to be universal—this story took me back to my own childhood experiences. What was your own experience of camp? Was it a place you dreaded or looked forward to?

A little bit of both? The camp in the story is a mishmash of two different camps I went to as a kid. The first and biggest influence was Camp Morehead, a co-ed camp for feral children. My brother and I got sent there because my father and his siblings had gone and loved it. Like I mentioned above, I read eight books and my brother got pushed around a lot. Next we went to Seagull and Seafarer, which were significantly more organized. I still had a hard time making friends since I was still very much an introvert (hint to parents: camp doesn’t cure that), but the camp also managed to maintain a hyper-friendly atmosphere bordering on the cult-like. Even though I dreaded going each summer, I would bawl at the candlelight ceremony the night before we were going to be sent home. One of my dreams is to have a summer camp only attended by writers, with someone like Ben Percy as Director. To be clear: there would be no writing workshops; it would be a traditional summer camp in the mountains with campfires and ghost stories and talent shows and awkward dances . . . only we’d all be adults and able to enjoy it for once.

Despite being forgotten by everyone, including his own parents, Jack is special in that he has a dragon egg. I saw the dragon egg as Jack’s unhatched potential, the thing that made him unique that nobody else noticed—but once it hatched somewhere in his future, no one would be able to ignore. (And aren’t grandmothers always the ones who see that when no one else does?) What might you say to the invisible and forgotten kids like Jack?

I would say that my brother and I were introverted weirdos, and we turned out okay. The important thing is to figure out what you like to do and keep doing that.

You’re also a poet, with an MFA in poetry. How does your study and practice of poetry inform your prose?

The biggest influence is probably on the way that I construct stories. I don’t really understand how to plot so most of my stories end up progressing via leaps of association. Sometimes I also have the issue of wanting to take the last words of the first six lines and repeat them throughout the story in a set pattern ending in an envoi . . .

What’s next for you?

The CPA exam. Exciting right?

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: Paul di Filippo

Moshe Siegel | 946 words

Your novella, “Karuna, Inc,” was first published in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination (and later reprinted in your collection Strange Trades)—what can you tell us about this story’s genesis?

I have long been interested in utopias, or quasi-utopias: futures or alternate contemporary scenarios—sometimes known as “temporary autonomous zones” or TAZ—where new systems of living are tried that offer more and better opportunities for individuals to live healthy, sane and productive lives. My tale “Harlem Nova” was one such, as was my novel Spondulix. This story was another in the sequence, and was also a weird hybrid tribute to Heinlein’s Gulf and Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves.

Karuna, Inc.’s corporate structure is uniquely humane and employee-oriented, in obvious contrast to the literally-unconscionable “chattle”-centric worldview held by the Phineas Gage League CEOs. Shenda herself reacts to the Koffeehouse arson with guilt for trying something that bucks the system. What do you make of these polar approaches to business and ethics: is each too extreme to be sustained? Do you think the inevitable endgame of a corporatist society is a handful of elites HQ’d in a secret bloodstained cavern? Because it reads as plausible and we (I!) need reassurance.

Since the publication of this story, I fear we have seen many confirmations along both vectors. There have been numerous instances of unbelievable corporate perfidy—Wells Fargo fake accounts, Yahoo email spying, etc—and yet lots of instances of grassroots TAZ-type enclaves, which maybe receive less media attention. The David and Goliath battle seems to be eternal, with one side on the upswing at certain times, then the other side rising. I do think that lots of current or upcoming technologies do empower the Little Guy, so we can hope that the balance will begin to shift more in favor of the average citizen, whether in groups or solo.

Dogs! This is a dog-heavy tal—er . . . novella. It’s prefaced by the image of a (sadly, dying) dog (courtesy of Philip K. Dick); throughout, dogs of all varieties abound, with the easy fan-favorite, canary-yellow Bullfinch, stealing all his scenes. But why dogs? Please tell us more about the dogs—including the all-important question, are these the names of dogs you know, or did you get to make them all up?

I made up most of the dog’s names. I think I was just trying to counterbalance a little bit the love of cats found everywhere in fantastika. I do adore cats, but my heart goes out more to dogs. Having just lost my canine buddy Brownie, I am particularly aware of the role they play in the lives of us humans lucky enough to have their companionship. Also, dogs can actually play active roles in stories! Have you ever heard of a feline Lassie or Rin Tin Tin? Of course not! If Timmy fell into the well and relied on his pet cat to fetch help, he’d be long drowned!

Cultural identity plays a role in this story, most notably in the case of Shenda’s ambivalence toward her aunt’s Santeria practice. What do you make of the dynamic between these two generations of women and their more-or-less divergent perspectives on tradition?

I guess this story was a little ahead of the hot cultural topics along these lines: assimilation versus multiculturalism. I have to say that I am rather old-school on the currently out-of-favor “melting pot” theory of the USA. Yes, as a nation of immigrants we all bring our different strains to America, sharing them in public, embracing them at home. But they cannot remain undiluted and dominant. Sacrifices have to be made and national traditions have to be adopted, or else we become just a geographical zone of warring tribes.

When writing a story that contains elements as disparate as the Gulf War, magic realism, dog appreciation, and stasis technology, do you find yourself approaching the project from one particular angle or another? One point/topic/theme of interest or another?

As a veteran cyberpunk, I believe in the theory, enunciated most plainly by my pal Rudy Rucker, of “eye kicks.” I want to stuff a story to bursting with interesting stuff, all the elements given their proper weighting. Hopefully it will all blend together into a gourmet fruit cake, where every bite has a half-dozen delicious flavors, and not into “prison loaf,” that infamous jail concoction that turned a bunch of good ingredients into a horrible inedible mass. An earlier generation writer, Charles Harness, famously said of his novel The Paradox Men that he put every idea he had over the course of a year into the writing of it. When this trick works, a piece of fiction can feel as substantial as life. It’s a kind of Pynchonesque maximalism.

Do you have anything in the works, or upcoming, that you would like to share with us?

My new book of stories, Lost Among the Stars, appears on December 1 from WordFire press. And I just completed a crime novel titled The Big Get-Even which is out searching for a home. It even features a kind of TAZ theme!

Thanks so much for allowing me to chat with your audience!

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 December, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Rich Larson (“The Cyborg, the Tinman, the Merchant of Death”) and Joseph Allen Hill (“The Venus Effect”), along with SF reprints by Margo Lanagan (“The Fifth Star in the Southern Cross”) and Christie Yant (“This Is As I Wish To Be Restored”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Carlie St. George (“Every Day Is the Full Moon”) and Charles Payseur (“The Death of Paul Bunyan”), and fantasy reprints by William Alexander (“The War Between the Water and the Road”) and Shweta Narayan (“Daya and Dharma”).

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 and a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

Thanks for reading!

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The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes 96 stories (about 480,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! For more information, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

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Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

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About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

Henry Lien

Assistant Editor

Robyn Lupo

Editorial Assistants

Laurel Amberdine

Jude Griffin

Book Reviewers

Andrew Liptak

Sunil Patel

Amal El-Mohtar

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

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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)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers [forthcoming April 2017]

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)

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.