TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 83, April 2017

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, April 2017

SCIENCE FICTION

Infinite Love Engine
Joseph Allen Hill

If Lions Could Speak: Imagining the Alien
Paul Park

Seven Permutations of My Daughter
Lina Rather

Someone to Watch Over Me
Nancy Kress

FANTASY

Familiaris
Genevieve Valentine

Remote Presence
Susan Palwick

Bookkeeper, Narrator, Gunslinger
Charles Yu

Maybe Look Up
Jess Barber

NOVELLA

The Memory of Stone
Michelle West

EXCERPTS

Skullsworn
Brian Staveley

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: April 2017
Andrew Liptak

Movie Review: April 2017
Carrie Vaughn

Interview: Aliette de Bodard
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Joseph Allen Hill

Paul Park

Susan Palwick

Lina Rather

Charles Yu

Nancy Kress

Jess Barber

Michelle West

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2017 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Odera Igbokwe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial, April 2017

John Joseph Adams | 1772 words

Welcome to issue eighty-three of Lightspeed!

We have original science fiction by Joseph Allen Hill (“Infinite Love Engine”) and Lina Rather (“Seven Permutations of My Daughter”), along with SF reprints by Paul Park (“If Lions Could Speak: Imagining the Alien”) and Nancy Kress (“Someone to Watch Over Me”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Susan Palwick (“Remote Presence”) and Jess Barber (“Maybe Look Up”), and fantasy reprints by Genevieve Valentine (“Familiaris”) and Charles Yu (“Bookkeeper, Narrator, Gunslinger”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns, and a feature interview with Aliette de Bodard.

For our ebook readers, we also have a reprint of Michelle West’s “The Memory of Stone” and an excerpt of Skullsworn by Brian Staveley (forthcoming from Tor Books).

Our cover this month is by Odera Igbokwe, illustrating “Infinite Love Engine” by Joseph Allen Hill.

Coming Soon: Cosmic Powers

Speaking of Joseph Allen Hill—his story, “Infinite Love Engine,” also appears this month in my new anthology, Cosmic Powers, which will be available from Saga Press on April 18. It’s a collection of epic-scale science fiction, inspired by movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Wars, featuring brand-new stories from Dan Abnett, Jack Campbell, Linda Nagata, Seanan McGuire, Alan Dean Foster, Charlie Jane Anders, Kameron Hurley, and many others. To learn more, or to pre-order, visit johnjosephadams.com/cosmic.

Awards News

In case you missed the news, the first of the major awards have announced their lists of finalists for last year’s work, and we’re pleased to announce that “Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea” by Sarah Pinsker and “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station│Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” by Caroline M. Yoachim are finalists for the Nebula Award this year. Congrats to Sarah and Caroline and to everyone else on the Nebula ballot! That brings Lightspeed’s lifetime Nebula nomination total to eighteen since we launched in June 2010. We’ve currently lost sixteen in a row, so here’s hoping Sarah and/or Caroline breaks the streak! You can find the full slate of nominees at sfwa.org. The Nebulas will be presented at the 2017 Nebula Awards Conference, held this year in Pittsburgh, PA, May 18-21.

“The Bad Hour” by Christopher Golden, from my horror anthology co-edited with Douglas Cohen, What the #@&% is That?, made the final ballot of the Bram Stoker Awards, so big congrats to Christopher for that honor. You can find the full slate of what made the final ballot at horror.org. The Stoker Awards will be presented at StokerCon 2017, which is being held in Long Beach, CA, April 27-30.

In art award news: Galen Dara’s illustration of Kat Howard’s story “Seven Salt Tears” (Lightspeed, Jan. 2017) has been nominated for the Spectrum 24 Awards. Congrats to Galen and all of the other nominees! You can see the full list of nominated works at fleskpublications.com.

Locus Recommended Reading List / Locus Awards Voting

Locus Magazine released their annual recommended reading list, and we’re pleased to report Lightspeed has fifteen stories on the list, Nightmare has five stories, and my anthology What the #@&% is That? has two stories:

“I Was a Teenage Werewolf” Dale Bailey (Nightmare)

“Fifty Shades of Grays” Steven Barnes (Lightspeed)

“Salto Mortal” Nick T. Chan (Lightspeed)

“Ghost Pressure” Gemma Files (What the #@&% Is That?)

“Little Widow” Maria Dahvana Headley (Nightmare / What the #@&% Is That?)

“Red Dirt Witch” N.K. Jemisin (Fantasy)

“The One Who Isn’t” Ted Kosmatka (Lightspeed)

“The Finest, Fullest Flowering” Marc Laidlaw (Nightmare)

“Sparks Fly” Rich Larson (Lightspeed)

“A Good Home” Karin Lowachee (Lightspeed)

“Those Brighter Stars” Mercurio D. Rivera (Lightspeed)

“Angel, Monster, Man” Sam J. Miller (Nightmare)

“Unauthorized Access” An Owomoyela (Lightspeed)

“The Red Thread” Sofia Samatar (Lightspeed)

“Vulcanization” Nisi Shawl (Nightmare)

“Wednesday’s Story” Wole Talabi (Lightspeed)

“Dragon Brides” Nghi Vo (Lightspeed)

“Secondhand Bodies” JY Yang (Lightspeed)

“Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed)

Congratulations to our authors, and to everyone who made the list!

The release of the Recommended Reading List also means that voting for the Locus Awards is now open. Anyone is eligible to vote. Visit locusmag.com to cast a ballot or learn more. Voting closes April 15, 2017.

Locus Feature

Speaking of Locus, in their March 2017 issue, there’s a long feature interview with yours truly, in which I discuss my origins as an editor, editing my first anthologies, launching Lightspeed and John Joseph Adams Books, and all manner of things. (Surprisingly, I somehow got through the whole thing without once mentioning death metal.) If you’d like to check it out, you’ll need to buy the issue, but they’ve got some extended excerpts up on their website. To investigate either option, visit locusmag.com.

Best-of-the-Year Reprints

Several stories from Lightspeed, Nightmare, and the Destroy special issues have also been selected for reprint in several best-of-the-year volumes. They’re listed below, with the original venue and then the best-of-the-year editor(s)’s name following in parenthesis:

“RedKing” by Craig DeLancey (Lightspeed | Horton, Dozois)

“I’ve Come to Marry the Princess” by Helena Bell (Lightspeed | Horton)

“A Good Home” by Karin Lowachee (Lightspeed | Clarke)

“Those Brighter Stars” by Mercurio R. Rivera (Lightspeed | Dozois)

“Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea” by Sarah Pinsker (Lightspeed | Clarke)

“The Jaws That Bite, The Claws That Catch” by Seanan McGuire (Lightspeed| Guran)

“Fifty Shades Of Grays” by Steven Barnes (Lightspeed | Horton, Dozois)

“Red Dirt Witch” by N.K. Jemisin (Fantasy | Strahan, Guran)

“Whose Drowned Face Sleeps” by An Owomoyela & Rachael Swirsky (Nightmare | Guran)

“Wish You Were Here” by Nadia Bulkin (Nightmare | Guran, Datlow)

“The Finest, Fullest Flowering” by Marc Laidlaw (Nightmare | Guran)

“The One Who Isn’t” by Ted Kosmatka (Lightspeed | Dozois)

“The Bad Hour” by Christopher Golden (What the #@&% is That? | Datlow)

This month’s list now incorporates selections from Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year anthology, and one story (“The One Who Isn’t”) which we previously neglected to include. We’ll update this list if we uncover any additional such honors!

John Joseph Adams Books News

I’m pleased to announce a new novel acquisition for John Joseph Adams Books: Upon a Burning Throne and The Blind King’s Wrath, the first two books in a new epic fantasy series by Ashok K. Banker, about a group of siblings battling for control of a vast empire while a powerful demonlord pits them against each other.

Regular Lightspeed and Nightmare readers might recognize Ashok’s name from the stories of his we’ve published recently—and you’ll see his name several more times in the near future, as we have several works of his in inventory—but though Ashok is new to our pages, he’s a bestselling author in India, and, indeed, pioneered the entire fantasy genre in Indian publishing. So I’m super excited to be helping to introduce his work to a new audience.

Otherwise, here’s a quick rundown what to expect from John Joseph Adams Books in the coming months:

In July, we’ll be publishing two books: (1) Carrie Vaughn’s novel, Bannerless—a post-apocalyptic mystery in which an investigator must discover the truth behind a mysterious death in a world where small communities struggle to maintain a ravaged civilization decades after environmental and economic collapse; and (2) Sand by Hugh Howey, a reissue of his acclaimed indie-published novel.

In September, we’ll be publishing Retrograde by Peter Cawdron, a hard SF novel about an international colony of astronauts on Mars, who have been prepared for every eventuality of living on another planet except one: What happens when disaster strikes Earth?

In October, we’ll be publishing Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey, a short story collection including three stories set in the world of Hugh’s mega-hit Wool and two never-before-published tales, plus fifteen additional stories collected together for the first time.

In November, we’ll be publishing Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Will and Temper—a Victorian-era urban fantasy inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which an épée-fencing enthusiast and her younger sister are drawn into a secret and dangerous London underworld of pleasure-seeking demons and bloodthirsty diabolists, with only her skill with a blade standing between them and certain death.

A bit further out, in Spring 2018, we’ll have The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp, 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.

That’s all the JJA Books news to report for now. More soon!

• • • •

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. 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 a finalist 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.

Infinite Love Engine

Joseph Allen Hill | 6950 words

Beeblax beats its wings against a superlumic slurry of time and space, and the universe turns to liquid starlight in its periphery; inside rides Aria Astra—Stellar Champion of the Star Supremacy, Wielder of the Sister Ray, Spacetrotting Coolgal, and Humanity’s Last Hope—nestled within a blob of translucent pink jellymeat, and it is totally cool and only a little disgusting.

This jelly is Beeblax, or at least the material Beeblax that Aria’s senses can perceive, or at least the phenomenon of Beeblax that exists in the moment of Aria’s perception. And Aria perceives an infinity of Beeblax all around her, a measureless swarm only slightly obscured by jelly and motion, and within each one is a different iteration of herself—every Aria that has or would ever travel with Beeblax in every possible universe, all shooting through the same hyperstream along a single chain of moments, like motes of dust dancing on a sunbeam.

Aria takes a long, sweet snort of it/them. The taste evokes a memory of roses in their platonic ideal, and she enjoys the anagogic tingle of Beeblaxness in her lungs. There is a little piece of her that is afraid—the horny, angry, frightened pigbaby that skulks in the limbic sewer at the bottom of the brain. You’re drowning in slime, babe, it says. Engage complete autonomic freakout. But Aria is like, Nah pig. This is chill. Don’t fuck this up for me. And she does not let it fuck it up for her. Her breaths are as deep and slow as those with which gods animate universes.

“Still,” says Beeblax, continuing a conversation it and every iteration of Aria had been having since like forever. “Like, even if the right glop is out there for me, how am I supposed to know? Am I supposed to become better for them, or am I supposed to stay the same forever so they can recognize me? If we merge into a singular perfect being, will I still be able to hang out with the homies and eat breakfast for dinner? Or will I have to eat brunch? I hate brunch. Brunch is like someone turned eating into a job. I just want to eat breakfast in my underwear.”

Beeblax does not speak so much as psychically harmonize with the vibrations of Aria’s soul. It tickles a little, spiritually speaking, but Aria is giving Beeblax serious counsel here, so she keeps her soul from laughing.

“But that’s the dream though, right?” she says/thinks. “To find someone with whom to share underwear times, both casual and saucy.”

“That’s what they say,” Beeblax psychically harmonizes. “But there’s more to life than kissy face bullshit. Every moment I spend with some glop doing the same old whatever is a moment disappeared into universal nothingness. I’ll never get those possible experiences back, right? So even if I’m the happiest I could be, I am still limiting my potentiality. But then again, when it’s over, I feel terrible.”

“Aren’t you a fifth-dimensional cosmic constant? Is lost time really an issue?”

“I’m dumbing it down for you. I feel like we’re having some good real talk, and I don’t want to glop it up with a lecture on the nature of the universe and/or my existence that would goop up your mindhole. I don’t eat brunch either. That’s just some shit I stole out of your brain to convey meaning in absence of a shared reference point. Just go with the metaphor.”

“That’s cool. I’m just saying. I think you’re overthinking it. You gotta just let these things happen.”

“I know. I know everything. It’s just hard sometimes. The glop of life is long and boring.”

Sometimes, another Beeblax will glide over to them, and Aria will see one of her other selves up close. They are mostly all the same, differentiated mainly by affectations: clothes and hair and a few years given or taken. And Aria wonders if the other Arias are on the same mission as she is in their universes, or if they are just kicking it with Beeblax, just for whatevs. Beeblax is a cool bro, if a little needy, and also the easiest way to travel across galaxies on the cheap, and she would not mind just chilling with him for a minute, especially if it meant not having to do the stuff she is supposed to be doing—her job or whatever. She wonders if the other hers are as feelingsy about the whole thing as she is, or if her emotionality is unique, the defining characteristic of herself and thus her universe. And then she thinks of Zarzak, watches it dancing in her mind, feels a warmth in her chest, sighs. She is unable to get the Zarzak thought out of her mind, and she finds herself unable to discern the goodness or badness of the thought. She can only experience it, watch the image in her mind’s eye and feel the sensations rippling inside her. And even though she knows it is some space bullshit, it is pleasant.

“Oh Beeblax. ‘Tell me, where is fancy bred? Or in the heart or in the head?’”

“I get that reference. I get all references. My knowledge of references is absolute. But there exist none who can swim in the reference pool of Beeblax. So like, what’s the point of anything?”

“I kind of wanted to talk about my thing, but whatever, I guess. Just chill. You’re dope as hell, Beeblax. I’m sure you’ll find someone you can glop with.”

“That’s not what glop means, even in transconception.”

“Okay, Beeblax. Okay.”

“I’m kind of just dealing with some stuff right now and it’s messing me up in ways beyond your reckoning.”

“It’s okay. I get it. It’s cool.”

The rest of the trip is quiet and kind of weird. At an appointed moment known only to Beeblax, it/they spits Aria out into the cosmos (without saying goodbye). She is submerged in impossible geometries and unthinkable colors as her mind struggles to readjust to her native umwelt. It’s not that cool, though, so she doesn’t really think about it. Soon enough, her particles begin to resonate at familiar frequencies, and the universe coheres, and she sees points of light whizzing past her, stars and planets and other space shit, as she flies through the darkness. A thin layer of Beeblax clings to her skin, which is mad gross but also it keeps her from dying.

She sees the cosmic being known as the Drowning King in the distance, arms flailing, body shaking, desperately clawing at the vast emptiness of eternity. No one knows how long the Drowning King has been drowning. He has maybe existed since forever, unable to breathe, unable to die, or perhaps dying very, very, very slowly. As she comes closer, his figure grows larger and larger until her field of vision is completely filled with him. The jelly begins to burn as she enters his atmosphere, and, wreathed in golden jelly flames, she pretends that she is a phoenix. She lands on a crystal at the center of his crown, a diamond as expansive as an ocean. The jelly absorbs the impact of her landing, then sloughs off, and she notices a bulge in her pocket that was not there before. She finds a personal cassette player and cassette tape wrapped in a note:

I’m not supposed to do stuff like this, but take this. It is the most perfect mixtape that could ever exist. Sorry for being a glop.

Sincerely,

Beeblax

The label on the cassette tape says Nothing Adds Up in block letters.

The note bursts into sparks after she reads it, and Aria rolls her eyes before putting the tape and personal cassette player in her bag. She draws the Sister Ray—which is a cool space gun she stole from an uncool science bro who had mastered manipulation of matter but had not mastered avoiding punches to his face—and sets it to naviform mode, and fires on the ground beneath, intending to make use of some of that good good carbon. The material slowly rises up and begins to rearrange on an atomic level, slowly taking the shape of a vehicle. Aria uses the jetbike setting, as that is the dopest way of traveling across ancient, planet-sized alien gods, no doubt.

• • • •

There are petals floating in the breeze, dozens of hundreds of them caught in the star-sweet exhalations of the Drowning King. Aria reaches out with her left hand to catch them as she flies, and when she catches one, she gives herself a point; when she has twenty points, she turns up the speed of her jetbike a little more.

Already, she has accelerated past safety and reason, and she flies so fast now that the landscape is rendered into a blurry approximation of impressionist watercolors behind her. She can only just make out the petals before they are between her fingers, and it is increasingly difficult to distinguish reflex and intuition; this difficulty is pleasant to her, and she thinks that soon there will be no difficulty at all, only motion, and that she will lose herself in velvety self-abnegation, make herself into an animated koan. But when her hand is so full of petals that she can no longer snatch them from the air, she opens her palm and allows them all to drift away, and she watches them flutter in the corner of her eye, feels the procession of silken tingles on her skin, pretends that the petals are emerging from inside. In these moments, she thinks that she might, in retrospect, forgive the universe for everything.

The Drowning King’s eyebrow is a sort of strange forest, dense with lifeforms speciated somewhere between plant and fungi clinging to massive hairs extending upwards past visibility. Aria has been riding for days now, and the scenery is a pleasant change from the vast, empty wastes of his starlit forehead. She could’ve taken a more direct route, but she has always been a romantic by nature, unable to resist the magic of the scenic route.

She thinks of Zarzak again and feels a delicious shiver, and then she tries very much not to think of Zarzak, which is extremely difficult—Zarzak is wonderful, wondrous, everything you could want and more. To not think of Zarzak is to not think at all. This is how the universe works now.

A cramp hits her stomach, and soon the pain is overwhelming. She pulls over next to a web of fuzz and blue-green slime protruding from one of the Drowning King’s hairs. She expels a throbbing lump of semi-solid pink from the hurt in her belly. The frequency of its vibrations begin to intensify, so as to harmonize with the neural oscillations of Aria’s thoughts, and, having locked into a perfect fifth, the lump begins to expand, taking on a human figure, though still cast in pink stickiness.

“Agent Aria?” it buzzes. “This is Quark-4 transmitting from Star Station Emeraude. Do you read me?”

The pink cannot distinguish signal from noise, and the simulacrum continuously shakes, swirls, melts—Quark-4’s features getting lost and found again in the tessellating flutters of afterimage and static. Was Quark angry? Worried? Sad? The voice betrayed nothing, and the face was chaos.

“Agent Aria,” it says. “What is your status? Report immediately.”

Aria runs her fingers along its shifting edges, tracing Quark as she remembers her, her lines, her angles, her smile. Aria was real tight with Quark-3, who was super chill and great at kissing or whatever, but Quark-4 is an asshole, super serious and unsympathetic and kind of weird on social stuff.

“I’m here,” says Aria. “Everything’s cool. Just Aria, please.”

“Status report.”

“I’m on my way. Maybe a couple more days to the eye.”

“Seventy percent of known galaxies have succumbed to the Zarzak Contagion. Within days, it will have expanded to the edge of the universe. All other agents have been lost. You are our only hope.”

“Yeah, that’s cool, but to be super clear here, I am not an agent. ‘Slave’ seems like a really harsh word, and I don’t really want to use it because of some historical stuff on my home planet and my whole ethno-racial deal that you probably don’t know about, but you have to really chill on the ‘agent’ talk.”

“Agent Aria! You have one week to save the universe!”

Quark freezes on the last word. Her image is still deformed by time and distance, but the face is stuck in a pleading expression, mouth open, wide eyes, eyebrows arched along a sentimental curvature. Aria puts her finger in the nose. It’s not super hilarious, but it is sort of funny.

The image deflates into a little pink ball, and Aria stores it back in her tummy hole before setting off again. As she rides, she thinks about how Zarzak has almost certainly spread to Earth, which means that everyone she has ever known has been affected. It’s funny to imagine the people she knew in her old life in love with a weird space monster. Derrick, who broke up with her for being “like, weirdly volatile about dumb stuff” is now in love with a space monster. Her ex-roommates Angie and Diane, who used to order pizza without telling her and secretly eat the pizza in Angie’s room without telling Aria or asking if she wanted in, are now in love with a space monster. Funny, right? But then she thinks about her mom and her sisters and her middle school history teacher Mr. Jacobs and all the people she knew who were kind and of good will, and she feels sad for them, but also kind of happy for them too, because Zarzak is actually pretty amazing.

• • • •

Aria decides to take a cigarette break at the edge of the Drowning King’s eye, stopping next to a colossal metal structure which she hypothesizes is keeping the eyelid open. Balancing the Sister Ray in the crook of her right arm and leaning against her jetbike, Aria rolls a paper and some purple flakes into a cigarette. She puts it in her mouth and lights it with the tip of the Sister Ray. Space cigarettes are nicotineless garbage, but they’re better than nothing. She closes her eyes and takes a long drag and holds it as long as she can, and her lungs hurt pleasantly, like they have been out in the summer sun too long.

She puts on the headphones and plays Beeblax’s mixtape. It is mostly alien music, arrhythmic and atonal and difficult to listen to, and the cassette quality is not great. She gives it a chance for a few songs, but it is too terrible for her to bear, and she turns it off before the fourth song can begin. Her eyes are full of smoke when she opens them, and when it clears, she notices there is a braincube lurking across the way, on the edge of a canyonesque pore.

“Fuck,” she says.

The braincube is eight feet by eight feet by eight feet of wrinkly, pink meat. It slides along the ground slowly, greasily, with a sound like an inverted burp. Aria rushes to her feet, but it is too late. Already, she can feel the braincube’s poisonous thoughtwaves in her mind. Nausea. Pain. Ennui. Weltschmerz. Anomie. Heartbreak.

Loneliness.

All at once.

“Aria points the Sister Ray at the braincube,” she says, “But then she realizes that she is saying that she is pointing the Sister Ray at the braincube rather than actually doing it. This is probably an effect of the toxic psychoradiation she is being bombarded with.”

Fuck you, braincube.

“It shambles ever closer, so close now that Aria’s nostrils burn with the stink of sparked neurons and putrid glial residues. Aria tries to once again distinguish between saying things and doing things, but it is difficult. She thinks this might be interesting from a philosophical perspective, but she is probably going to die too quickly to really get into it.”

The braincube is the worst of all possible cubes.

“Drops of fear-sweat collect on her forehead and glisten in the starlight. She struggles to move her feet. They do not move. She is desperate. She has to do something if she is not to be braincubed. She tries to think with the part of her brain that is not a brain but is actually a robot. She thinks she might—”

—be getting the hang of it again, but she is—

“—not sure if she has it yet. Or if she ever had it at all.”

The anomie is not helping.

“Then, at the last possible moment—,”

Aria leaps back. The braincube is still up in her business, but there is room now for reprisal. She crouches and points the Sister Ray. She goes down, down-right, right, punch. This would cause her to shoot her raygun if this were a video game, but this is not a video game. It is real life. Again, toxic psychoradiation is some bullshit.

“Goddamn it,” she says, before adding, “There is no God. We are all nothing in a sea of nothing.”

The emotional pain is unbearable. Aria can barely remain conscious. Baring its teeth, the bearcube rotates such that its mighty clawed corner comes down on Aria’s face, adding physical pain to the mix. Blood pours from the wound, spraying Aria’s shirt and the nearest side of the bearcube. The bearcube does not stop. It is relentless and without mercy. It spins around and around, murderously, and when it has cut her enough, it rolls itself on top of her body. She reaches out with her left hand to push it away, and the pain she experiences is as if she has plunged her hand directly into a star. Teeth tear and shred and gnash at her fingers. She tries to pull her hand away, but she is weak from pain and blood loss and also the bearcube is a real motherfucker. She cannot escape. She cannot breathe. This is it. This is the end. She can only look into the wall of fur and listen to the crackle of bones and—

Wait.

There is not supposed to be blood inside of her. The fluids inside her are purple and viscous and cold. Nor does she need to breathe. Like, it’s cool thing to do when you want to smell stuff, but it’s not necessary for her survival. Plus, wasn’t it a brain or something a minute ago? Nothing about this is adding up.

Wait.

Her fingers struggle to find the walkman at her waist. They will not remain steady. They tremble like she is telling a scary story or doing a magic trick. But they soon they find their quarry. She presses play.

Almost. The bearcube shifts just as her index finger is on the button, pinning her hand down under its weight. The bearcube is everywhere and everything, and the world is going dark. She thinks she may be slipping in and out of consciousness, but it is difficult to tell. Was she unconscious just now? Or did she just blink? Does it matter? She cannot see anything anymore. It is not darkness. Darkness is a thing. She sees nothing. The void. The end.

“Fuck everything,” she whispers.

She can’t die here. She summons all her remaining Arianess and tries to pull her hand from under the bearcube. It does not move. Too much weight on it. Then, redoubling her Arianess, and trying her very best to scream, she tries to wrench her other hand free of the bearcube’s clutches. The intact pieces of meat and bone are stuck in the bearcube’s teeth, and it does not want to let go. It bites down harder. Aria pulls. This is not a pleasant experience.

When she is finished, she reaches over with the stump and slams it against the buttons on the walkman. Again and again. And then there is music. An Earth song. Disco. A girl singing a song about lust over trippy synthesizers and trembling static.

The braincube is across the way, and Aria is not dying or dead. Awesome. The Sister Ray is still pointed at it. The music blasts in her ears, and she can no longer feel the braincube in her mind. She is about to pull the trigger, but she sees that the braincube is shaking slightly. She does not know if this is a natural part of the braincube’s biology, or if the braincube is experiencing fear. She lowers her raygun slightly.

“What’s your deal?” she asks.

There is a long wait, and then Aria imagines Zarzak and the braincube dancing together. The thought is gentle, fleeting, and at first she thinks it is just a stray imagining. But then, there is another image of Zarzak and the brain together, and then another. And Aria sees the braincube in her mind’s eye, smaller now, alone amongst an array of bizarre xenostructures—a park maybe, a playground? And Aria sees the braincube alone, covered in a purple slime, surrounded by other braincubes in groups of three to five, also covered in slime. She sees a ship, hears an explosion, feels the sickly squeeze of hyperspace in her gut, all punctuated by images of Zarzak. But then disaster. The ship crashes, and the braincube is alone again, its brainbody bloodied, its transport reduced to rubble. In the end, the image of Zarzak is flashed over and over again. Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak.

“Okay. I get it.”

The image fades.

Aria stomps her cigarette out and gets on her jetbike.

“Later,” she says.

Before she can go, she is bombarded by images of the braincube dying, starving, murdered, dead. A stack of braincubes teetering mournfully on braincube planet. The sound of silence.

Aria looks back at the trembling cube. “What do you want?”

Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak.

“Stop doing that.”

A small, simple ship flying up and away from the Drowning King, escaping homeward.

Aria sighs.

“Fuck you,” she says, but she straps the braincube to the back of the jetbike. It is very awkward. She does not like the squishy feeling of the braincube pushing on her back, and its size and shape completely mess up her aerodynamics and balance.

“We’re not friends,” she says, as they begin the journey across the eye.

• • • •

Aria starts noticing them just after passing from sclera to iris. First, a single Driffle lying on the surface of the eye, bleeding cloudstuff from a wound at its side. Unable to speak its language, she seals its wound with the Sister Ray and goes about her business. Then there is a bruised Ceterian limping toward the pupil. Aria approaches to offer aid, but the Ceterian yells at her with all its mouths and is way uncool, so she bounces. She sees more and more lifeforms as she travels, some of familiar species, some entirely new to her, each one traveling alone. Many are injured, but all those that are conscious persevere.

This is unexpected. To the extent that there exists mutually understood, enforceable law across galaxies, visiting the Drowning King is a super-serious offense, as it is generally agreed across culture and species that fucking around with ancient space gods is not a good idea. Nobody wants to awaken anything that’s gonna take over/destroy everything. Better to just leave shit alone. Aria had expected to see a few desperate types hanging out, possibly sent by their own planets to deal with this shit, but she had not anticipated seeing this surfeit of weirdoes.

The brawl starts around the pupil, just as the Spire of Zarzak comes into view.

“Holy fuck,” Aria says.

It extends for miles, and there are far too many participants to count. Millions at least. Aliens of all kinds, wondrous creatures with strange physiology and technology unknown on Aria’s side of the universe, and all of them are going fucking ham. They punch each other with fists as large as boulders, choke each other with dripping tentacles, fly into the air and fire mind lasers, pilot shiny death robots and mechanized animal hybrids, sing songs that melt bones, etc. The fighting appears indiscriminate. There are no sides, no rules: just violence. There are screams of all sorts: pain, anger, fear—but Aria is capable of making out only one word:

“Zarzak.”

These are the Fuckboys of Zarzak, the obsessives, the stalkers, the jealous assholes. Most lifeforms are content to keep Zarzak in their heart, quietly nursing a sweet, peaceful love that is patient and kind and crosses time and space without envy or anger. But these motherfuckers are clearly not keeping it together, and Aria is unsure how to proceed. She sees herself blasting the shit out of all of them with the Sister Ray, and for a moment, she is unsure if it is her own thought or the braincube’s.

“I told you to stop doing that. It’s not cool. Anyway, we need the power of chill vibes, not aggro shit,” says Aria. But she allows herself to imagine blasting the shit out of all of them with the Sister Ray. It is a pleasant thought, especially with the knowledge that these people are all jerks perverting all that is beautiful and awesome about Zarzak, and she hopes that the braincube did not hear her think that. She puts Beeblax’s mixtape on again, hoping there might be a song with the power of chill vibes on it. But no. Just more alien noise.

“I guess we do this the hard way.”

Aria revs the jetbike and drives straight into the crowd, weaving through the combatants, dodging their attempts on her and each other. The ungainliness of the braincube is initially a hindrance, bringing her within a hair’s breadth of getting decapitated by a giant psycho mantis and then burned by a living explosion and then brought asymptotically close to absolute zero by a slug guy. But soon enough she settles into a rhythm, and she realizes that the fighting is not quite as indiscriminate as she first thought. There are some conventions, some strategy. The Fuckboys are trying to approach the Spire while also trying to keep all other fuckboys away from the Spire. Given the choice, most will focus their efforts more on preventing those behind them from progressing than impeding those already ahead of them. They all seem very angry that Aria is effectively cutting the line, but none of them do anything to stop her once she has passed.

It takes about a day to get through it all.

• • • •

The base of the spire is a great machine drilling into the eye of the Drowning King. There are many Fuckboys here, and these ones seem extra rowdy, but there is also a golden robot calmly sitting on a long series of steps leading to the entrance, not fighting anyone. This is a surprise to Aria, as she had begun to forget that it was even possible to not be engaged in 24/7 fisticuffs. The Fuckboys mostly ignore the robot and the area immediately surrounding it. None follow Aria when she approaches it.

“Madness,” says the robot when it sees her. “They have forgotten why they even started this journey in the first place.”

“You speak English,” says Aria.

“I am familiar with all the languages of this arm of the universe, and my subroutines generate probable languages at a rate of one million per cycle. You are a human of Earth, yes?”

“Basically. I’m from there, anyway.”

“Yes. This truly is madness. All wish to enter this spire, yet none will deign to allow another entry. Their minds are clouded with a foolish passion.”

“Yeah. That’s kind of why I’m here.”

The robot stands. “I am T.A.R.C.T.I.L., the Tactical Assault Robot Created to Increase Love. I was designed to ensure the continued existence of love in this universe, yet I will never love or be loved myself.”

“Oh. Cool. My name is Aria. That’s not my real name, but I just sort of go by that now.”

“Acceptable.”

“So, uh, are you with Zarzak, or are you just chilling or what?”

“I have no formal affiliation with the being known as Zarzak, and I lack the capacity to experience the love of Zarzak as other sentients do. I am here of my own accord, to guard the gates of this spire and stop those who might interfere with Zarzak.”

“And why is that?”

“I exist only for the propagation of love, and Zarzak is the fulfillment of love.”

“What? No. That doesn’t make any sense. That’s dumb.”

“All the universe now knows love. This is the fulfillment of love, the ultimate form of love, a love that enmeshes all.”

“I mean, Zarzak’s cool and all, but that’s not what love is. Being forced to love a weird space monster is not love.”

“Zarzak forces nothing. Zarzak asks nothing of those who love it. Zarzak plants the seed and allows it to flower. Does one ever choose to love? Love is always an imposition by fate and biology.”

“It’s still not real.”

“What makes love real? If there is no difference between the thing and its simulacrum, then both are as real as the other.”

“It’s creepy and wrong. It’s in my head, in everybody’s head.”

“Zarzak provides only warm feelings toward an abstraction. All may exist as they are, only with love in their hearts.”

Uninterested in pursuing this line of inquiry further, Aria sighs and reaches for the Sister Ray. Before she can even touch it, T.A.R.C.T.I.L. grasps her wrist. Its grip is painful and unyielding. With its other hand, it holds a glowing laser pistol to her head.

“I do not wish to harm you, Aria, but I will do what I must. I am armed with the most advanced weaponry in the universe. I am trained in every martial practice. None can stand against T.A.R.C.T.I.L. when love is on the line.”

Aria slowly raises her arms. “It’s cool. I’m chill. I get it.”

T.A.R.C.T.I.L. lets her go but keeps its weapon trained on her.

“If you wish to continue our discourse, I would allow it. If not, I will ask you to leave this place.”

Aria nods, sits down, and begins talking. She tries to convince T.A.R.C.T.I.L. that it is wrong. The task is next to impossible. Aria martials every ounce of rhetorical ability within her, but is essentially only able to restate her core premises, i.e. that love of Zarzak is a violation of consent and that love created through artifice is both qualitatively distinct from and materially inferior to that love which might be called natural. Each of her arguments is met with a dozen counter-arguments, every premise is found contradictory, every conclusion is found wanting. T.A.R.C.T.I.L. weaves a web of rhetorical bullshit the likes of which Aria has never witnessed before. All the classical methods fail: Socratic, Hegelian, getting angry and saying a bunch of swears. There is no dialectic, no synthesis.

We are at Sophistry Level Infinity.

The braincube manages to tumble off the jetbike and squish over. Its awkward interjections of imagery and thought do little to progress the discourse, but Aria is able to find some comfort leaning against it as the hours and then days go by. Three whole days, at first filled with conversation, then mostly silent, as Aria can only occasionally summon a useful thought or concept. She goes so far as to engage T.A.R.C.T.I.L. on the nature of robotic epistemology and cyber-existentialism, attempting to leverage her own status as a cyborg to get into the nature of free will and emotion and materialism. She even throws in a few logical paradoxes.

No dice. T.A.R.C.T.I.L. is unmoved.

Aria and the braincube start playing a mental game on the second day, something from the cube’s home planet. It is kind of like backgammon, but obscenely complex, and part of the game is thinking about the move you are going to make, which is different than thinking to make the move. After a full day of getting trounced, she feels that she is very close to winning, which doesn’t matter because this game is dumb, but then she loses again, and she imagines herself flipping over the board in anger. And she realizes she is now truly into this game for real, as the pleasure of winning is dwarfed by the pain of defeat, and this sparks an epiphany.

“Hey robot.”

“I am T.A.R.C.T.I.L.”

“Yeah. I know. I was just thinking, isn’t the very fact that I don’t believe this love is real a sign that this love is unfulfilled and imperfect?”

“It is common for sentients to not understand that the emotions they experience are love.”

“Yeah. Super common. Still imperfect. If your goal is the fulfillment of love, then shouldn’t the universal knowledge of it be its ultimate form?”

“Perhaps.”

“And you know, I think there’s only one way peeps know for sure that the love they had was definitely, definitely real.”

“And that is?”

“Take it away. Maybe you’re in love, maybe you’re not. It’s hard to say in the moment. But then when it’s gone, you can really feel it. Like somebody cut off an arm. Like somebody cut out your soul. Like somebody cut out your brain and put it in a space robot body. If you’re right and the love is real, if I go in there and stop it, everyone will know what’s up, that they experienced the truest, realest love possible. How is that not perfect?”

“Calculating. Please stand by.”

T.A.R.C.T.I.L. just stands there for a while, frozen, and Aria is just like, whatever. She thought it was kind of a dumb argument, but it’s cool that it worked. She tells the braincube to wait here. She gets the Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak. Zarzak from it again, but she is firm. She tells the braincube to stay safe and make good decisions, and she gives it a little hug despite herself. She waves her hand in front of T.A.R.C.T.I.L.’s eyes a few times to be sure, and then she enters the Spire.

• • • •

Zarzak is on a rotating pillar in the center of a small, red room at the top of the tower. The pillar throbs with strange, humming energy, presumably plumbed from within the Drowning King. Zarzak dances, fluid and shapeless, smoothly mimicking shapes as it flows across the pillar.

Aria has the Sister Ray pointed at Zarzak, but she cannot pull the trigger. Not because she loves Zarzak—no, definitely not that—but because she feels there should be more to it than this, more than just another moment. She has been dicking around on this mission for like two weeks, and she deserves a little drama, a little acknowledgement. She wants to be witnessed. She fires a warning shot and waves.

“Hey! Hello. Over here! I am Aria! I am from a planet called Earth. We have lots of cool things there. Like, uh, cats. And phones that have games on them. Chess. Democracy. Samosas. The French New Wave. Pirates. TV on the Radio. And TVs and radios. I mean, I haven’t been back in a while. It’s complicated. I’m not really ‘human’ or whatever anymore. I’m still trying to work out a good portmanteau. Starborg? Robogal? Something like that, but not dumb. Anyway, I am here on behalf of the Star Syndicate to fuck you up.”

Zarzak says nothing, but shapes itself into an abstract humanoid form, a ball floating above fleshy curves, and it dances.

Aria comes closer. “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”

Zarzak dances. Aria tries to read the movements, tries to see an unctuous smirk and a cackle and a speech about being the most desired being in the universe or a pathetic snivel about wanting to be loved or a noble yet misguided diatribe on the mind-killing evils of loneliness. Something. Anything.

But no.

Zarzak just dances.

Beautifully.

Aria does not know who built this place, if it was Zarzak or someone else, if Zarzak is conqueror or prisoner, monster or victim. She comes closer and closer.

It is said that the Sister Ray can kill gods. It is ancient and unknowable, like everything that matters. She points it at Zarzak, and Zarzak dances.

“This sucks,” she says.

She is going to pull the trigger. Totally. In just a second. Just a second. It is just very pleasant being here right now. Aria feels clean inside, not happy exactly, but clean, or maybe healed, and it is a nice sensation, again pleasant. Why not linger a while? It’s not like there’s exactly a time limit. Well, Quark said there was a time limit, but Quark is a doofus. No one ever got hurt by just hanging out. Just for a minute.

Aria begins to dance.

It’s fun.

She offers Zarzak the Sister Ray. It slides a protrusion toward her and takes the Sister Ray.

Aria keeps dancing. She thinks it was probably a mistake to do that just now, and she thinks that she probably should have just shot it. She has never been good at just shooting things. She is too sentimental, too much of a romantic, too inclined toward forgiveness and non-violent talky times. The Zarzak Contagion is definitely way stronger up close, and she wishes she had considered that in advance.

Zarzak points the weapon at Aria.

“Shit. So you’re, like, definitely a bad guy, huh? Not even a cool bad guy. Just a dick.”

Aria wants to think of a cool thought before she dies, but she can’t really think of anything but how great Zarzak is. Bummer.

But before she can be murdered, the doors of the Spire fly open and T.A.R.C.T.I.L. appears, covered in weapons—lasers cannons and glowswords and particle whips extending from compartments all over its body. It charges them, and Aria is unsure which one it is after. Zarzak does not seem to care either way. It fires wildly, dance-dodging an incoming volley of ultra-missiles and laser spray.

Aria does not dodge but somehow manages to avoid getting hit. In the confusion, she leaps forward and reaches out for the Sister Ray. There is a quick tug of war, but Zarzak doesn’t even have real muscles. She takes the weapon and aims.

“You suck, dude. Like really.”

And she fires. Zarzak is hit directly, and Aria holds the beam down on it, causing Zarzak to be rearranged on a quantum level.

It is totally dope.

She stands, dusts herself off. Already, she can feel her mind getting right. Emotions are dumb, she decides. As a way-cool space cyborg, she should know better than to be seduced by a few warm fuzzies. She looks over to T.A.R.C.T.I.L., ready to continue the fight if necessary. It lies on the ground, bleeding from its left side.

Wait.

She puts on her headphones again and presses play, and she sees the braincube there, missing many of its most important atoms. It didn’t get a full blast, but even a taste of the Sister Ray is enough to fuck up one’s shit.

Aria rushes over to the dying cube. And she is like, “Why?”

And the memory rushes in Aria’s mind.

Aria sighs.

“Fuck you,” she says, but she straps the braincube to the back of the jetbike. It is very awkward. She does not like the squishy feeling of the braincube pushing on her back, and its size and shape completely mess up her aerodynamics and balance.

And the braincube shows her all the times it was alone on braincube planet again, and then it shows them traveling and hanging out and playing mind games, and then the braincube dies.

Zarzak’s dance pillar begins to pulse, and the hum turns to a sickly screech. Without Zarzak doing whatever dumb thing he was doing, the equipment is freaking out. Or maybe the Drowning King just wants to get all of this stupid shit out of his eye. Either way, Aria has a feeling shit is about to get real.

She sighs.

“You’re carbon-based, right?”

She sets the Sister Ray to naviform mode, and she forms the braincorpse into a little ship. Nothing special, just dece enough to get them out of atmo. She really wishes she knew what the braincube’s actual name was, but she just names it the Braincube. It’s sort of cute, she thinks.

She gets into Braincube and flies away just as the Spire explodes. The universe is saved. Hurray. Great job.

As the Drowning King shrinks in the distance, Aria wonders, idly, if souls can attach to atoms or if they are more of a molecular thing. She does not know the answer, but she likes the idea of it.

“Tell me, Braincube. Where is fancy bred? Or in the heart or in the head?”

It is engendered in the eyes, she thinks, and she does not know if she is thinking it herself or if someone is thinking it for her or if she is just thinking about someone thinking it for her because she is a big softie. Is this a kind of love, this inability to distinguish sentiment from sentimentality? Perhaps T.A.R.C.T.I.L’s premise was wrong. Perhaps love already exists in infinite quantities all around us, subtly connecting us all together with little moments of affection and kindness and not attached to freaky alien buttholes.

“Okay. We can be friends now,” she says.

©2017 by Joseph Allen Hill. | Art © 2017 by Odera Igbokwe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph Allen Hill is a Chicago-based writer and bon vivant. He has also spent time in Georgia and New Jersey. He has a marginally useful degree in Classics and enjoys making music in his spare time. He can be reached on Twitter @joehillofearth2.

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

If Lions Could Speak: Imagining the Alien

Paul Park | 5860 words

Many have written on this subject to confess failure; who am I to claim success? The objections line up like policemen: Alien intelligence does not, in fact, exist. So when we try to describe it, our thoughts do not connect to any object except ourselves. The words we put into an alien mouth, the feeling into an alien heart, the tools into alien hands, what can they be but imitations of our words, feelings, tools? Even if we could conceive of something different, how would we communicate it so human beings could understand? And if human beings don’t read our work, how can we expect mass sales?

You cannot think of something outside human thought. On the other hand, the concept of alien intelligence is what animates a great deal of science fiction, and the elusive goal of describing it is something almost every writer tries. Often you can see the way the story bends back in frustration, turning toward the human once again. The alien intelligence becomes part of the landscape, something to be experienced or overcome, something to show us aspects of ourselves. In the range of science fiction literature, certain broad groupings suggest themselves, which nevertheless have this aspect in common.

For example, you have the They Come Here story, in which a technologically superior species arrives on Earth. Ordinarily, this species is aggressive. Often, not to put too fine a point on it, they are a race of homicidal maniacs. Initially at a disadvantage, humans eventually prevail because of some emotional quality, some aspect of “humanness” that the invader cannot match. Self-congratulation ensues.

Alternately, you have the We Go There story, in which we hold technological superiority over some simple, inoffensive race. Often we split into two camps—those who advocate violence and those who don’t, and the narrator of the story is in this second camp. Paradoxically, the more he knows about the alien, the more he is able to affirm his own most “human” instincts, which eventually prevail. Self-examination ensues. In both these types of story, though—there and here—whatever growth takes place is human growth. The alien learns nothing.

Those are two large groupings. Here are two more:

Sometimes when a writer conceives of an alien species, she will extrapolate what human beings would be like if they shared the alien’s morphology. The writer asks herself: What would it be like to have two heads? Or six sets of opposing genitalia? Or a life span of a thousand years? Sometimes this morphology has been arrived at conscientiously, by which I mean the writer has paid pseudo-scientific attention to the conditions that produce these adaptations. And sometimes the morphology has been selected at random, or for dramatic effect.

Alternately, the writer will imagine a human being with one psychic or emotional quality exaggerated, or added, or removed. That is, the aliens will be quite like humans but for their enormous physical cowardice, say, or diffidence, or sudden rages. Or else they will be just like you and me except for their telepathic abilities, or the fact they have no soul. Aliens of this type are often physically similar to human beings, but for one trivial difference. They might, for example, have pointed ears.

These two groupings—the extrapolation from bizarre morphology and the almost-human—we will refer to with some oversimplification as the American model. Again, to oversimplify: American science fiction tends to be plot-driven, and aliens of the type we have described fit neatly into conventional plot situations. That is, the alienness of the alien can take its place among the many aspects of the story, without threatening to overwhelm it or make the plot irrelevant.

Let’s call the second category the European model, though the more I think of it, the more foolish these distinctions seem. Never mind—we will be disciplined and persevere: In the European model, the strangeness of the alien and our inability to understand it becomes the center of the story. If the writer doesn’t mind this happening, great things are possible: the sentient ocean in Solaris, for example, or JH Rosny’s crystal cylinders, illuminated with flashes of light. Inescapably, though, these things are viewed from the outside, as impenetrably exotic. Lack of communication becomes the theme of the story, and all other plot elements and resolutions fall away. And though you’ve avoided the problems of anthropomorphism, its sentimentality and intrinsic falseness, you are no closer to describing or communicating alien intelligence. You’re just sloughing off the work onto your readers. In fact . . .

• • • •

At this point I could feel anger stirring up within me at the thought of these lazy European writers. I looked up from the draft on my computer and saw Laura standing by the hall doorway. It was late, and I was at my desk. She had been watching television—I had been aware of it from time to time: laughter, applause—and now here she was, standing in a white nightgown. She had come to disturb me, which was a relief.

All day I had been suffering from an irregular heartbeat, brought on, I thought, by the stress of abstract thinking, which is not natural to me. I had not told Laura about my symptoms, because of her hypochondria. Still, it was a relief to have her near me. If worst came to worst, she could drive me to the hospital. But how pathetic it would have been to suffer a heart attack at my desk, while my wife sat oblivious in a downstairs room!

She said nothing at first, but just hung and flickered in the doorway while I pretended to work. I didn’t look up. I couldn’t meet her eyes. She and I had had an argument that day. I was going to Berlin and she resented it, resented the fact that I had made my plans without her, without indulging in the fiction that she might have wanted to come, too. But for a year her illness had been getting worse, and for the last six months she’d cancelled out of everything without warning at the last minute: even a visit to a friend’s house or, most recently, a trip to the movies. Irritated, I had made a single set of airline reservations, which had wounded her. It was as if I had no faith in her, which I didn’t. And of course, she dreaded spending a week by herself.

Now I felt guilty for ignoring her as she stood there. And I ignored her because I felt guilty about the airline tickets; psychosomatic or not, her symptoms were real. It was true. I should have pretended to have a little more faith.

“Are you coming to bed?” she asked, and I tried to figure out what she meant. Did she mean she wanted me to come? Ordinarily I would have thought so, but there was something in her tone to suggest she might have been attracted to the idea of lying sleepless under the sheets while I worked in another room. Maybe she could come and hover over me at two in the morning or at four, each time more distracted and disoriented, each time grimacing in the harsh electric light.

While I sorted this out, she disappeared into the bathroom. I sat back in my chair. But my train of thought had come derailed, and besides, feelings of hopelessness were now threatening to overwhelm my argument. How could we talk about this subject in a world where other human beings are such a mystery, where we have such trouble understanding ourselves? To write about our own feelings ten minutes ago is an enormous imaginative leap.

As if released by this impulse of negativity, new thoughts occurred to me. I had been avoiding them, because my plan for my paper was an optimistic one: to begin with protestations of impossibility, while at the same time suggesting or even showing how alien consciousness could plausibly be rendered. But my optimism depended on not remembering, on looking squarely to the future. Years ago I had written a novel, for which I’d had high hopes.

Most of my books are not started with any ideas in mind. But this one had an idea, a plot, which I wrote out at the beginning. I was to write the definitive story of alien intelligence, and my plan was this: During the course of the book, the viewpoint character was to undergo a transformation from human to alien, and was to bring the reader with her into a progressively different consciousness.

On another planet, long colonized by human beings, a member of a native race has been turned into a human woman, through gene splicing, plastic surgery, and most importantly through psychotropic medication, which she takes daily. This medication closes down certain areas of brain function, and smoothes out what remains into the normal spectrum of human mental activity. This woman is in the social elite of her own race, whose unmedicated members are terrifying and incomprehensible to her, as they are to us.

But at the beginning of the novel, this young woman’s supply of medication is cut off. By the end of it, she is a different kind of creature, who thinks in a different way. Because she is the viewpoint character, the reader is able to witness this transformation from the inside, and to adjust to it. My idea was that anyone who picked up the book and tried to read the last chapter, say, without reading the rest, would find it literally incomprehensible. A new vocabulary of words, feelings, and concepts would have gradually been introduced.

The published text fell short of these ambitions.

Now I found myself listening to the sound of Laura cleaning her teeth. This was an elaborate process, lasting ten minutes and requiring specialized equipment. The sound of it exasperated me—strange gurglings. When I had first met her, she had brushed her teeth like anybody else. In every respect, she’d been a normal person.

Soon she stood barefoot outside the threshold once more, leaning against the doorframe while I looked up and smiled. “How’s it going?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I wonder if I should talk about Coelestis.”

“I loved that book.”

Startled, I looked up. What did she mean by this? She stood shivering in the doorway, her hands clasped around her elbows, though I didn’t find it cold. “It didn’t get to what I wanted,” I said.

“What do you mean?’

“No conceptual breakthrough.”

She laughed. “You’re lucky that’s not why people read.”

Irritated, I said nothing, and she went on: “Stories aren’t the place for conceptual breakthroughs. People read to feel things, and that’s different from understanding them. Maybe it’s the opposite. If people cared about understanding things, they’d read academic papers for fun.”

“Well, an academic paper is what I’m writing,” I said. “I’m trying to say stuff people don’t already know.”

“And how’s it going?

I did not dignify this question with a response.

Laura came into the room. She pushed some of my papers aside and curled up on the bed behind me. Her feet were long and thin as she drew them up. “I can’t believe you’re going to Germany in the middle of the summer,” she said. “That’s when it’s so beautiful here.”

I swiveled my chair around to stare at her. There were some pieces of notepaper beside her, which she was brushing off the pillow. She picked one up. “‘If lions could speak,’” she read, “‘we wouldn’t be able to understand them.’”

“When in doubt, quote Wittgenstein,” I sighed.

The trouble with Laura, and the central problem in our relationship, was that she was much more intelligent than I. “Or the opposite of Wittgenstein,” she immediately countered. “Anything that can’t be said, you must express obliquely—that’s what I’m telling you.”

Laura suffered from insomnia, among other complaints. Exhausted during the day, past midnight she was taken by a hectic energy. Under the bedside light, her cheeks were flushed, her fingers restless. She had a habit of playing with a curl of hair under her ear. Her eyes, as she looked at me, were focused and intense. I imagined if she’d sat down at that moment to write “If Lions Could Speak,” she’d have been finished in about twenty minutes.

For most of her life, her critical skills had been directed outward. She’d helped me understand the world, myself, even my work. But in the past year, I had watched her turn these analytical weapons against herself, resulting in terrible damage, I thought, though she would not have said so.

Independent and skeptical by nature, now she had acquired a psychotherapist, an acupuncturist, a masseur, a support group, and an herbalist. It was as if she were a temperamental racing car, requiring a team of specialists to keep her on the road.

Unemployed now, she had lost interest in her surroundings. And I, too, since I’d come to rely on her, felt sometimes I was wandering in a fog of social currents, liable to hurt myself on objects that loomed suddenly. So it was with an apprehensive sort of relief that I now listened to her reach out tentatively into the world of ideas, where she had once played happily. “You know fiction is an indirect art form. It’s not good for talking about politics, or theory, or conceptual ideas of any kind. Or else it pretends to talk about those things, since none of its real subjects can be communicated plainly—I mean sensation and emotion. It’s like a magic trick. You show something in your hands, and you try to make it beautiful. But the power of what you’re doing comes from something else—I swear to God, you know this! Why are you patronizing me? Don’t patronize me.” And she burst suddenly into tears.

It is at moments of shared pleasure or pain that we feel closest to other people. But when someone is seized by an emotion that we cannot share, then it is easy to feel alienated. I sat in my chair, rocking slowly back and forth, studying the tears on Laura’s cheeks, her brimming eyes. At such moments I was aware of my own body—the feel of the chair under my sweating palms.

Most people are familiar with how, after a few simple repetitions, an ordinary word like “helmet,” say, or “nice,” can lose all meaning. The words Laura spoke now seemed like that to me. Baffled, I stared at her mouth, which was beautiful and full, with beautiful big teeth.

“Sometimes I don’t think you are a real human being. I talk about sensations and feelings—I mean, are there any feelings here at all? Why don’t you say something? Please say something. You seem so far away from me right now.”

Studying her, trying to understand her, my work was compounded by a further disadvantage, which will not take the acute reader by surprise. Laura was right—there’s nothing human about me. I am a hollow man, a circular façade. You might say even the concept of “Paul Park” is an erroneous one, a role I am less and less competent to play. Heart pounding, I sat immobile in my chair, as if her words had reduced me to catatonia. Perhaps they had—it wouldn’t have been the first time.

When I say “hollow man,” I mean it literally. At certain moments I am like a captive inside myself, my humanity frozen and constrained in a small space. Impotent, I watch while all the functions of my body are carried out by others. I watch them creeping up and down my synapses, moving my lips and tongue and hands. When they turn away from those tasks and fall to arguing among themselves, I can do nothing.

“I just wish I could feel some sympathy,” Laura said. “Just some human warmth. I know you’re tired out by all my issues—well, so am I. Do you think it gives me pleasure to go over these same things over and over? I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m suffocating. That’s why it hurt me so much for you to announce you’re going away without me. Because I’m afraid you might never come back. And if you really did leave me forever, that’s just what you’d say. Just straight out cold like that: ‘I’m going by myself.’ There’d be nothing to discuss.”

What was she talking about? At such times, I feel inside of me a cacophony of voices, which started when I wrote Coelestis, years ago. “Nice book,” they said. “Bad book.” During the hours I spent breaking my head against the problem of alien intelligence, it was as if I’d opened myself to tiny emanations from above. In time they came to live in me, more and more because I’d welcomed them in. I’d given them small, cute names. Because they were, or so I thought, the product of my own imagination, I did not anticipate that they would combine or conspire against me, and keep me prisoner while they went on to make a havoc of my life. No wonder Laura just got sicker and sicker, more and more neurotic. I was unable to protect her.

One of these presences was from a planet I call Lepton. In our search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, we crave contact with something large, about the same size as ourselves. But these creatures that move through me are very small. One of them, I say—her name is Moonbeam—now comes flickering through the wind chamber of my lungs, where a convocation is taking place. She moves up to the speaker’s chair, which adjusts to her. A tiny crystal vial hangs suspended, and a mote of light flickers inside it like a firefly.

Now there is silence in the crowded hall, as the delegates take their seats. All attention is on the mote of light; Moonbeam is an important presence in the chamber, and commands respect. An image appears in each tiny consciousness, and in mine as well. As if on a dais behind the gleaming vial, an enormous figure now takes shape, and I recognize myself.

The delegates spend a good deal of time discussing such images. My problems and thought processes are a compelling source of interest for them. Each has a different way of describing me, of which Moonbeam’s is the best, I think. The figure is in a cage, and he moves slowly because of the manacles on his hands and feet. He is asleep. He is often asleep.

As this image suggests itself—I presume to all of us—thoughts come too. I imagine “thoughts” are a constant in this bunch, perhaps the only one. I call the figure the “Proteus monster,” because the remarkable thing about it is not its actual morphology, which is embarrassingly naked. Rather it’s the way the figure changes: constantly, imperceptibly. Or not imperceptibly—it’s like staring at the minute hand on a clock. Sometimes the figure has hair all over its body, which then gradually recedes and is absorbed. Or sometimes it is massive and fat, and then the flesh will drain away. Sometimes the face is heavy and fierce, sometimes epicene and soft. Sometimes claws grow in, or scales, and the figure seems at first glance to be a lizard or a bear. Yet always I can recognize myself.

Now I see the creature’s chin grow soft, as if the bones were melting underneath. I see its chest slowly inflate. But now Moonbeam pulls my thoughts away, and now I’m looking at the other object on the dais, a small computer or machine, a cube maybe three feet on a side. It is beeping. Lights flash.

From Moonbeam, I get the impression something is wrong. I myself have no mechanical instinct. But the clicking sound is weaker and the lights are dimmer than usual—I see that now. Others see it, too. One of the delegates—I call him Sharpie—stands on his chair, waving his claws.

Moonbeam is effective because she doesn’t tell you what to think. The sense of urgency comes from within. As if projected on a screen on the top of the hall, I can see Laura through my eyes, and I watch her pretty mouth. There is a spot above her lip. I hear her voice reverberating through the empty space inside of me, and all is still. Nerve ganglia flop and writhe uselessly in the shadows. I cannot move my arms.

“Is it too much to ask, to expect some humanity from you? Just some words, some comfort. How long has it been since you’ve kissed me, or taken me in your arms? I swear I think you’re like a robot sometimes. Either there’s just nothing going on, or else you’re just watching me—recording data to use against me later—talk to me! Say something! We rattle around this house together, and sometimes we spend the whole day without saying anything to each other, and it feels as if I’m starving. It feels as if I’m starving to death.”

I blink. Below me in the convocation hall, there is pandemonium, and I see why. Six panels of multicolored lights run across the top of the cube, and now two of them are dark. The rest glow weakly. In his cage, the prisoner appears to be inflating like a balloon. The flesh over his wrists and ankles swells around the iron manacles.

Sharpie is waving his antennae. His claws make a rasping, chitinous squeak, and I can hear his high, almost imperceptible scream. “Kill!” he says. “You kill!” and more like that. I admire him because he is predictable. I feel my fingers jerk and spasm on the arms of my chair, as if they had a mind of their own. Laura is a pretty woman, especially her arms and neck, which are delicate and white. She wants me to touch her, I think. I’ll touch her.

Many of the delegates come from races that have transcended mere technology, but Sharpie has not. He loves gadgets. Gadgets float around him, tiny machines consisting of a few molecules—self-protective devices, I imagine. They move around his legs and claws as he gesticulates. He’s like a little crayfish in some ways.

Moonbeam soothes him, showing him pictures I can’t see. But he resents it. Now suddenly a swarm of little machine bugs are darting toward the crystal vial. But when they get too close, they pop and explode, zapped by some current in the air. Others form like eggs among the folds of Sharpie’s tail.

In times past, late at night as I lay awake next to Laura, listening to her snore, Moonbeam would take me on a tour of the hall, introducing the delegates as they spoke. I would look at a small creature as it climbed up to the speaker’s chair. Information would suggest itself, which was Moonbeam’s work. And as I learned things, the creature would seem to swell and grow, and I would notice its details. “There, you see. No eyes, no mouth—it’s all smells with him. Those are rows of transmitters and receptors underneath his wings. When you talk, see them open and shut like tiny barnacles. They change the words to smells, so he can understand. Don’t fart—he’ll think you’ve lost your mind.”

No, this voice is not Moonbeam, though it often accompanies her. I call the voice Dorothy. She speaks in an accent that is vaguely Continental—French, perhaps. She has none of Moonbeam’s cool objectivity; she is always making fun. She’ll buzz and twitter in my ear: “That guy is an idiot. Don’t pay any attention.” But I never catch a glimpse of her. She is one of several presences that seem to have no physical manifestation. Still, it is odd she speaks such colloquial English. It is she who suggests names for all these creatures.

Now Moonbeam has given up the chair. Someone else now materializes, a small, human figure that Dorothy refers to as The Drone.

“Oh, Christ,” she says. “This is all we need.”

The Drone’s mouth is toothless, soft: “I . . . it should be evident, obvious, pa . . . pa . . . patent, o . . . o . . . pen, com . . . compre . . . comprehend . . . sible . . .”

The interpreters sit in a circle above the floor. Whenever there is a vocal transmission, they start to jabber and gesticulate. But as the Drone speaks they are silent, waiting. “. . . That we are approaching, co . . . coming up to, or initiating a cri . . . a crisis or ca . . . catastrophe, a disaster. I a . . . aver or mean or sig . . . sig . . . signify in the life or existence of our host, our vi . . . victim, our friend, our su . . . su . . . subject, who has been so . . . so . . . kind . . . receptive . . . dying . . . dead . . .”

In back of him, the prisoner has come awake. The flesh has bulged over his manacles, and he is bleeding from his hands and feet. “Oh,” he says, “I hurt.” As always, I am embarrassed by him, his words, his obvious sincerity. Tears fall from his eyes. He himself is a simple fellow and feels no embarrassment. Sometimes I have seen him masturbate, provoking both silence and applause.

His arms and shoulders seem mountainous, but he cannot break his chains. Blood drips from his fingers. Tusks are growing from his mouth, and he is chewing at his wrists, scratching at his feet. The computer blinks beside him, and above, the screen lurches to life.

Weak hearts run in my family, and my heart is racing now. There is an ominous thumping in the soft walls of the convocation hall, though the noise of my breath is now subsiding. “All right, all right, I take your point,” Laura says. “I know you well enough to know when you’re feeling wounded. Part of it’s my fault, I know. I can’t help coming after you when you’re like this, because it hurts me. But then I know you get into this passive-aggressive spiral—it’s been the death of us, can you see that?”

“Kill, kill,” Sharpie admonishes, and again I feel a tremor in my fingers. The little mechanical bugs swarm out and seize hold of the Drone, dragging him backward from the chair as he kicks and waves his arms. I can see Moonbeam flickering, hoping to take control of the ascending chaos: Among the curving rows of seats, delegates discuss the seriousness of the situation and the risk to themselves. Others, more vociferous, begin to fight. The open space in front of the speaker’s chair is full of struggling, small bodies. I recognize The Meadow Muffin and The Snake, or rather Dorothy brings them to my attention. The Snake exists in one dimension only, which makes him easy to dodge. He and his adversary fight viciously without touching at any point.

“And the retards have kept their seats,” continues Dorothy, imitating a sports announcer. She is referring to the lower circle, which is reserved for delegates under time constraints. Some appear and disappear at intervals. Some are slow as stones: All biological existence is like a minute to them. Others live like fruit flies, or even faster. Several experience time backwards—they know how this story ends, but grope vaguely toward its starting premises. One comes from a planet without any time at all, because the gravity is so strong.

Mr. Magoo, as Dorothy calls him, is a pudgy little fellow from a world without cause and effect, which in these proceedings has given him an air of continued bafflement. But now, for the first time, he is smiling and nodding: This is a bad sign. Watching him, I can appreciate how serious my situation is. The sound of my heart crashes and swells, and the soft floor shudders under us. “Uh, oh,” says Dorothy, as a spinning circle, a whirlpool of colored wind takes form in the middle of the chamber. All the delegates stop mid-word, mid-fisticuff. There is a roaring sound. The whirlpool of wind or smoke or cloud turns a succession of subtle hues: ash rose, black lavender, while a strange perfume comes to us. And there are lights flashing in the center of the spiral, and all the delegates are still. They cannot move, except for Sharpie, who climbs down out of his chair. He holds wrenches and screwdrivers in his many hands.

Above the whirlpool we hear Laura’s voice. “All right,” she says, “just sit there. And if you really want to hurt me, you can just close your eyes—yes, like that. Just like that. Why don’t you fall asleep while I tell you something I’ve never told anyone except my therapist, which I didn’t even remember until she brought it out of me—do you think people are the way they are for no reason? Just a chaos of desires and thoughts? Yes, you do think that, I know you do, because it is impossible for you to look inside yourself. Something just closes down inside of you—I pity you. I really do. I pity you because you’ll never get better, as I am getting better. You’ll never go forward. You’ll never change. But I know things have happened to me that have made me what I am—causes and effects, over and over. But if you know what’s happening, then you can change. So let me tell you now what brought me to this place, where I am living with a man who’s so closed off, he actually closes his eyes when I am talking to him, closes his eyes and grimaces with pain, because of what I’m saying to him. It doesn’t matter. Let me tell you—”

Laura’s voice now gradually subsides, and I can’t hear it anymore. All I can hear is the roaring wind and the shuddering in the walls. And my eyes are not closed. I am watching the barred cage on the dais, where the animal or man is now gigantic. He is weeping from the pain of the iron bands. Tears flow down his hairy cheeks. But at the same time he is in a rage, and he snorts and drools and gnashes his tusks together, and seizes hold of the bars and rocks his body back and forth until the cage rocks with him. There is an ominous crashing as the cage tips and falls back, and at the same time the chains break, and the manacles break apart. The colored whirlpool turns in the center of the room, and no one moves except for Sharpie, who has clambered up onto the dais. Now he comes forward to the flashing cube, and he breaks the top open with his screwdrivers, and he reaches his claws into the cavity, and I can see the wires come apart. The lights go out, and in the cage the giant grasps at his left side, and staggers, and falls. As he falls, already he’s begun to shrink and soften. Dead, he will resemble pasty, hairless me.

Now there is pandemonium as the hollow man collapses and caves in. The roof collapses. There is darkness in the hall. There are lights and flashes as the delegates scatter for the exits. My throat is jammed with them so that I cannot breathe. Even in this catastrophe, some take leave of me before they flicker away. “Oh, me go, me go, me go—nice time,” they say. “Sweet house of joyfulness. Sweet place of life.” But some are trapped and crushed. The shuddering in the walls goes still.

One escapes, buzzing like a tiny bee, too small to hear. She works through the forest of my nose. “Nice time,” she says, and flies out past the computer screen, where the text of “If Lions Could Speak” glows reproachfully, never to be completed. Laura can’t see, doesn’t see. She is worried now, finally, and she’s amazed when the window breaks: a little hole, a fracture in the glass like a bullet hole. Then that little bee is up through the dark night, fighting air and gravity as thick as mud, a minute fleck of light rising and gathering speed, gathering mass as well, bulking up on hydrogen for the long journey. Then she’s up into the brighter way, past the atmosphere where the long spaces begin. Looking back, she can see the world spread out, but not a blue sphere in its nest of clouds—nothing like that. Instead she sees it in a different way, uncloaked by the self-referential illusions of humankind, the vain projections and imaginings. She sees a vast, flat plain, covered with a layer of viscous jelly many miles thick—no, actually, she doesn’t see that. She sees a vast inverted bowl, its surface troubled with waterspouts—not that either. She sees a blinding tablet, on which are recorded certain numerical constants—not a chance of that. She sees not one world but many billions, each closed and locked and silent—no. She sees an astonishing paradise of lakes and mountains and warm winds, where gigantic men and women fornicate in the long grass—no, I, for one, don’t believe she sees anything like that. Surely here we’ve reached the limit of this story, the boundary that even death can’t penetrate, unless it can. There is a skin of mirrors on the outside of the world, and our little friend is pressing up against it, making a bulge in it, pressing on valiantly, eager to come home.

That’s where this story ends, or else should end. It cannot end with even the tiniest rip in that mirrored skin, and it will not end with that small creature flickering through. But surely on the other side, her passage will be quick. Perhaps at every multiple of light-speed she will stop again and wait for our imaginations to catch her. Perhaps in the far future she will come safely down. And there will be a strange, discolored forest, with pale leaves falling on the pale hills—it won’t be strange to her. Under the trees, there will be tawny, roaring beasts covered with fur. They will open their mouths: “Break us of eyes here. Eggs break and eggs don’t break. Help is a forgiving noise for all that sloshing in the bitter pool. Birds come around, then come around, and if you step, there will be stairs. If you touch, there will be things. Luck of all lucky ones,” they’ll say, and we will almost understand.

©2002 by Paul Park. Originally published in If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Park lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, with his wife Deborah and his children Lucius and Miranda. He is the author of A Princess of Roumania and its sequels, Soldiers of Paradise and its sequels, The Gospel of Corax, Celestis, Three Marys, All Those Vanished Engines, and a new collection, Other Stories from PS Publishing. “If Lions Could Speak” first appeared in Interzone in 2002, and was the title story in his first collection, which came out from Wildside Press that same year.

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

Seven Permutations of My Daughter

Lina Rather | 3780 words

1.

I’ve sought a world with a higher-than-average ratio of sunny days and a pharmaceutical industry that developed a decade before my own. Sun, of course, improves mental health. And a more developed pharmaceutical industry implies a more liberal outlook towards chemical intervention, a more specific range of treatment plans. It isn’t easy to write equations for these variables. Math is precise, math is a scalpel capable of microsurgery on a universal scale, but my hands are only so steady and there are so very many universes that are not the one I seek. It took me weeks to find this world, days more to aim the machine at our little slice of it.

The lawn looks the same. The house is painted powder blue, not eggshell. I always preferred blue. Eggshell siding requires powerwashing every year because it soaks up the dirt from every single storm. Another good sign: I’d had the time to redo it in this world.

The windows are open. I sneak across the lawn even though this is sort-of-maybe my own house and sidle up against the brick next to the kitchen window. I don’t know if the me-from-here can see this-me. I don’t know if I’m visible at all. Best not to chance it.

Through the window, I am sitting at the kitchen table, wearing a flower-dotted dress and the bunny slippers I like to plod around the house in. My laptop is open to some student’s final paper. Based on the amount of red on it, they’re not getting a good grade. Dahlia stands across from the table in her courtroom suit. This Dahlia has clipped her hair off at her shoulders. And has she permed it? It springs up around her face in curls. It’s cute.

“Time to go, Sarah,” she says. She sounds tired. Maybe she’s made partner already, if I’ve had enough time to repaint the house.

The other me curls her hand around a mug next to her. She flicks at the laptop’s touchpad, scrolls down on the paper. Dahlia frowns. “You go by yourself.”

“We have to see—” She breaks off, bites down on whatever was coming next.

The other me looks up from the laptop. “It’s been three years. I know what the gravestone looks like. I don’t want to go visit a rock anymore.”

Dahlia stares, her hands crumpled in fists at her sides. I leap back from the window before I can see more.

Of course I have so much free time in this world. My daughter is already dead.

2.

I arrive home in a whirlwind, a mess of broken universal constants and transdimensional flimflam. Somehow my shirt’s torn and my hair tie is missing. It’s a small price.

I stagger out of the portal onto the concrete floor and Dahlia is waiting in the office chair I scavenged during the last departmental remodel. She is wearing my bunny slippers and her hair is as long as it should be.

She does not seem surprised to see me tumble from the six-foot arc of wires and rebar I constructed next to the water heater. Maybe this is marriage—loving someone so well that nothing they do surprises you anymore.

“Sarah,” she says, and sighs and presses the heels of her hands to her eyes. “Sarah, Sarah.”

“I’m going to find a world where she’s happy.” I point to the chalkboard at the other side of the basement, but she’s not a physicist. The equations aren’t proof to her. “And then it’s just a simple matter—we’ll know what we did wrong. There’s got to be a universe where we know what to do.”

And all I have to do is find it. If more sunlight and better medicine weren’t enough, I’ll find a world where poppies never grew. The calculations are already unspooling in my head.

“This isn’t going to help Elena,” Dahlia says, but I’ve already set the course. It’s easy, really, now that I’ve done it once.

“Then what should we do? Do you know?”

Dahlia is silent. I step inside the arch again, put my hands on the copper pads, let the electricity split me into a form capable of the sort of movement I desire.

As it turns out, in this world—devoid as it is of opium and hydrocodone and heroin—Elena is addicted to a sort of computer virus. I don’t pretend to understand it. I’m no neurobiologist, and even if I was, I doubt there’s anything like this in my world outside of the pages of a science fiction magazine. This Elena, who is not as skeletal as mine but is getting there, has a silver port screwed into the back of her skull.

I follow her down a twisting side street to a house I don’t recognize. Inside she kisses a boy just as slim as she is and they pull a machine with long black hoses from a closet. One hose each goes into their skulls with a wet pop like a can opening. I don’t need to go home to see that her parents are just as desperate as Dahlia and I, because I see it in the knobs in her wrist and the nectarine-colored bruise healing at the base of her neck.

3.

Dahlia is gone when I get back. That’s fine. Maybe the police have called and they’ve picked up Elena. We asked them to put out a missing persons report, but Elena is twenty-one and there’s no sign that she was abducted by force. It’s not against the law for adults to have off, said the sergeant at the desk with his great white mustache. Give it time.

Give it time and she’ll be dead, said Dahlia once we were out the doors, and she stomped so hard down the sidewalk that she broke the heel on her boot.

Still, the police might have her if she did something wrong. I don’t think she’s hard-up enough to rob a gas station or break in somewhere, but the idea of her boat of a Ford crumpled accordion-like against a tree has been keeping me awake for days.

Perhaps I went too far in my last jump. I don’t need a world so physically different. I need one just like here, except that Elena is happy. I don’t know how to calculate for the variable of my daughter’s happiness. But I can find a universe where she made varsity soccer sophomore year and got the part of Juliet in the school play instead of crying into my shoulder when callbacks came out and her name wasn’t on the list. I can find one where she didn’t break her ankle on the soccer field at sixteen, leaving her cooped up for the summer and killing all her training for the year.

The machine hums. I don’t even feel my atoms split.

In this world, Elena has come home.

I watch through the kitchen window as she screams at me and Dahlia. She starts out intelligible and then her words start stumbling over each other and then it’s dominos and the whole line’s going down. Dahlia stands up from the table and her chair clatters to the floor. She’s shaking, and because she’s wearing a tank top I can see every muscle in her arms tense at once. The me at the table is crying. I can’t see her face, but my hands remember that motion, both pointer fingers sweeping from the inside corner of the eyes to the outside, to get rid of all the tears at once.

Elena is bright red, sweating.

Is it the heroin? I can’t tell. She isn’t bruised or too thin for her clothes. She was sick before the drugs, though Dahlia and I didn’t know it at the time. I can see it perfectly now, of course, because hindsight is always perfect and always useless. How quiet she got. The fits of never eating or eating way too much.

I don’t need to see any more.

4.

Here the house is empty. I look through a window and see different furniture. White cabinets (Dahlia hates white cabinets), a mid-century modern entertainment center with two-toned wood (I always hated mid-century modern) and an off-white shag rug that covers half the living room floor (totally impractical for a couple with a small child, as we were when we bought this house).

At the café down the street—it’s reassuring that even across the impossible bounds of time and space, every Starbucks turns out the same mediocre mocha—I look myself up. My faculty bio lists my publications, my conference trips to Zurich, Moscow, Beijing; and that I’m a novice kayaker, but no wife, no daughter. Here Dahlia teaches criminology at a dusty desert college way out west. If we were ever married, it was a long time ago, before Google’s memory.

Elena’s mother, the one who bore her, is a mid-level copywriter at an advertising firm in California. Last time I saw her, to finalize the adoption, her hair had been brown, here it looks like she’s been dyeing it blond for a long time. I used to tell Elena that her mother picked us to adopt her because she could see we’d love her. In truth, it was because I was a physicist and Dahlia a lawyer. The mother was seventeen, the father eighteen with a face like fifteen, both sets of grandparents the sort of alcoholics that are barely hanging on to functional. They were good kids, but they’d had it tough and they knew they didn’t want their daughter to have it tough. Those sound like good jobs, the mother said, and then Dahlia and I had a daughter.

Here, her parents were killed in a car accident in her childhood. She moved in with an aunt, hundreds of miles from the boy who would be my daughter’s father. Elena never existed.

5.

This time I’m not ready for the landing and I roll across the basement floor until I smash my shoulder into the leg of my workbench. That’ll bruise. The whole bench shakes and jangles. Dahlia’s stepfather bought us a toolkit with a hammer and three screwdrivers and a multiplicity of obscure wrenches for our wedding and much as I try to put it all back in the toolbox when I’m finished, most of it stays spread across the tabletop. It makes quite an amazing crash when I slam into it, though.

The door at the top of the stairs bangs open. I’m barely on my feet when Dahlia comes thundering down. She’s got two bags of fast food in her hand. “What’s happened?”

All I can see is the food. “Is that what you went out for? Elena didn’t call?”

“She will eventually.” Dahlia takes out a hamburger, peels off the white paper, slides it across the workbench to me on a napkin.

“Have you found what you’re looking for?” She focuses on her fries instead of on me.

“Not yet.” I can see where I’ve gone wrong though. My pants are covered in chalk dust but I wipe my palms on them anyway and dust off the equations on the board to start over.

“Maybe Elena went to the second-run theater. Remember how much she used to like it when you took her to those shitty sci-fi movies there?”

“Mmm.” Perhaps the change I need to make isn’t in Elena, but in us. Dahlia and I have had our share of troubles. No more than any other couple, but Elena was always so sensitive, crying over dead bugs and earthquakes on the news. The worst was when Elena was ten. I couldn’t get tenure where I was but Dahlia didn’t want to move away from her firm and her parents. She ended up moving out to her parents’ for a couple of weeks. It worked out in the end, but there might be a world where it hadn’t happened at all.

“Or we could call Jennifer and see if they’ve talked. They were two peas in a pod in high school.”

Elena hasn’t talked to her high school friends in years. We both know this. “I think I’ve found what’s wrong.”

The controls are spread over three tables. If I were writing this up for a paper, I’d have made it pretty. It’s only a matter of a few switches thrown.

Dahlia grabs my arm. “Don’t go.”

“I have to.”

“You don’t. You’re not going to find a solution out there.”

“Don’t you want to help our daughter?”

“I do. Our daughter. Not—not some distorted image of her.” Dahlia’s nails dig into my arm, straight to the bone through bruises I don’t remember getting. I wrench away from her. “This was never about Elena. This is about—about punishing us, so you can prove we made a mistake somewhere, because you can’t face that things are just bad sometimes, that there’s no logic here.”

Dahlia grabs for me and bangs her hip against the workbench. French fries go flying, salt and grease scattering all across my work. Dahlia presses her hand against her side and hisses. Something brews in her eyes, a dark shadow under rippling water.

“Maybe this is why she needs it,” she says. “You never could see her as she was. You always wanted her to be better, different. And look at all this—you still do.”

It feels like she’s cracked open my sternum. All my breath is gone. Dahlia jerks back, grimaces. But she closes her mouth to keep herself from apologizing.

“I’m going I find her,” I say, and I step back inside the arch before she can stop me.

When I open my eyes, it’s obvious that something must have knocked the controls wrong. Grease in the circuits, salt under a switch. This world is barren. There’s air, enough that I don’t panic and suffocate, but it’s obvious that everyone died a long, long time ago. Beyond a few leaning structures that might once have been houses, there’s no sign humans ever walked this earth. It’s grey rock, ash, and lichen as far as the eye can see.

My knees let go and then I’m covered in grit, scrabbling at the ground to find a worm, a bug, anything. My nails crack and I’ll never get the dirt out from under them and perhaps there isn’t as much air as I thought.

Sending myself home this time feels like peeling off my skin.

6.

Dahlia’s gone again. There are cold fries all over the floor. It’s easy to spot the problem. One of us stepped on a circuit board and snapped a wire. I’ve got plenty more wire.

Upstairs the house is dark and I can’t bring myself to turn on a light. I wander the rooms like a phantom, tracking in dirt. Here’s Elena’s room, with her books and all the keepsakes she left when she went off to college. Here’s the kitchen, with spicy hot cocoa instead of Nestlé because Dahlia and Elena got the taste for cayenne from my Oaxacan in-laws. Here’s the master bedroom, with Dahlia’s half of the closet empty, because job troubles couldn’t tear us apart but in her absence, our daughter can.

I can fix it. I only have to find the right inputs, nudge the variables, discover an equation that will solve for peace.

When I turn the machine on this time, it grinds and shrieks. A bolt pings off my toe. But it’s okay, because I can feel the right hum building in my bones.

Then I am standing on the lawn and there is the eggshell house and the open window and through it I see Dahlia making a pot of coffee. There’s a yawning hole in my chest. This could be my world. It’s so close I could step inside the door and be home.

Another me steps into view. Her hair’s a mess. Dahlia pours water into the coffee maker, pops the pot back in, and slips her arm around me.

“How’s it going?” she asks.

“Not well.” The other me groans, shoves her hair back with her hand. Her t-shirt is covered in chalk. “I can’t get the math to work.”

“You’ll get it.” Then Dahlia drops her voice. “The place called. They said Elena’s gotten through the withdrawal. But she doesn’t want to see us.”

The other me buries her face in Dahlia’s shoulder. So that’s it, then. Here is a world where we never split up, and the only differences are Dahlia is willing to help me with the machine and I am incapable of building it. And Elena is lost in rehab, rather than simply lost.

I’m at the window before I can stop myself. I’ll smash the glass, I’ll smash the house to splinters and mortar. An incandescent scream builds under my ribs. You were supposed to save my daughter.

The other me lifts her head from Dahlia’s shoulder and glances at me. Her eyes go round as full moons and all at once I remember myself and run.

“Did you see that?” she shouts, but I’m off across the grass and gone from this world.

7.

I can’t find my way home.

When I open my eyes all I see is light. Sparks. I’m breathing, but it certainly doesn’t taste like air. Maybe I’m just imagining the sensation, because there’s definitely nothing breathable in the space between universes. All I can think at first is, If I could write a paper on this, it would get me a Nobel. The sparks resolve themselves into threads shimmering among a multiplicity of soap bubbles, all hanging in endless darkness that resonates in a hum like the deepest sound a harp makes. If I were a me from a different world, I could spend my whole life here, spinning the equations that explain this beauty.

But I can already feel it crushing me, yanking me apart atom by atom and neuron by neuron. My existence is incompatible with these physics and physics will erase my inconsequential self to set things right.

And my daughter needs me.

I screech and pull and gather up the wisps of myself. I can see the path home, a shimmering pinprick. My fingers bleed when I pry it open, my lungs collapse when I try to breathe.

I will tear space and time apart for you, Elena. I will remake the world for you.

• • • •

The concrete is cold and wet and I wake up to the smell of smoke. Blood drips down my nose into my throat.

The arch is burning. Somehow a couple of the plastic components have melted and they’re dripping down onto a hot copper coil. The stench is unbelievable. I peel myself off the floor. The closest liquid is the thirty-six-ounce cup of soda Dahlia left. I toss it across the structure and the whole thing hisses.

I probably can’t handle much more of this. The plastic parts are easy enough to switch out, but every part of me hurts and my vision’s gone blurry at the edges. Dahlia’s home—I can hear her moving around upstairs. I can’t see her yet. Not until I’ve found Elena.

I think I have it now. I saw the path out there, written in light.

When I stagger through, the house is there. Someone’s planted tulips in our front bed and the smell is so strong that I’d almost believe it was artificial. There’s an unfamiliar car in the driveway next to Dahlia’s Prius. A baby blue compact, brand new.

Three women sit around the kitchen table. Me in a pencil skirt and my bunny slippers because I’ve just gotten off work. My laptop’s open to student papers, but it’s shoved off to the side of the table. Dahlia’s wearing her housework clothes, jeans and a two-sizes-too-big t-shirt that used to read VISIT CAPE MAY before it got splattered with two remodels’ worth of paint. The other woman at the table is blonde, athletic. She’s got a suit and red lipstick with such a precise line it looks like it was cut with a razor.

I blink, and the blonde woman becomes Elena, smiling.

My breath catches. My eyes are burning. If only Dahlia could see this, she’d understand why I had to come.

“Six months in New York,” Elena says. “David said he’ll visit on weekends. If I do well, this might turn in to a permanent gig.”

Elena always dreamed of the big city. Ever since she was a little girl and Dahlia’d treat her by taking her out to the Empire State Building to see the whole mess of it spread out before her.

“Be careful,” the other me says. “Galleries aren’t known for making money.”

Elena blushes. “I get to exhibit my paintings. Just a small selection, but it’s a start.”

The other me grins, but my blood turns to ice. My Elena doesn’t paint. My Elena hated art class, can’t write in cursive to save her life, cried at the National Gallery when she was eight because Dahlia dawdled in the medieval section.

And now that I’ve seen that, all the other wrong parts pop out like they’re lit up neon. My girl wouldn’t have a pixie cut. My girl hasn’t had braces and her front teeth have a sliver of space in between. This happiness is not my girl’s happiness.

There’s nothing left for me here, and I can’t bear to look in the window anymore.

When I come out of the arch the whole thing shudders and something important goes crunch. The control panel sparks and all the lights go bright and then shatter one by one. I sit down on the floor and watch it cave in on itself.

Dahlia’s leaning against the railing. She’s cleaned up all the fries and the spilled soda. When I don’t move she pads across the floor in socked feet and sits down next to me.

“Did you find her?” she asks.

“I found a world where we were all happy.” And my ribs ache to think of it. “And it wasn’t our Elena.”

“No.” Dahlia curls her arm around me, wipes my cheek with her thumb and then smears the black streak of dirt and ash and tears off on her pants. She doesn’t say I knew it wouldn’t be. Some things don’t need saying. “We’ve only got this one.”

We stay there in the ruins of a hundred universes until far above, the phone rings.

©2017 by Lina Rather.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lina Rather has lived in Iowa and Michigan and has been a tutor, library book shelver, burger flipper, and dead beetle handler. In her spare time she knits, cooks, collects comic books from the ’90s, and occasionally writes things. You can find her haunting the internet on Twitter as @LinaRather or at linarather.wordpress.com.

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

Someone to Watch Over Me

Nancy Kress | 3270 words

“I still hate this,” Trevor said. “That you’re doing this to Becky.”

“So you’ve told me,” I said wearily. “Many times.”

We sat in the clinic waiting room, done in Martian rust reds, very trendy for such an illegal operation. But, then, this was very upscale illegality. Trevor, who had so much money he never thought about it, hadn’t asked how I was paying for Becky’s surgery, and I hadn’t volunteered that I’d cashed in my retirement fund at Payne, Jeffers. We’d been waiting on the rust-red conformachairs, which were not as comfortable as advertised, for nearly an hour.

Trevor scowled at me. “Amanda, as a tactic this lacks—”

“Sweetness,” I said. “I know. I’m not a sweet person, Trevor. This is a surprise? You’ve known this about me since we were nine. We didn’t become friends because you value sweetness.”

“I didn’t—”

But I was, all at once, beyond restraint. I turned on him. “And Jake didn’t marry me for sweetness, either. Who wants to go to bed with a lump of marzipan—he used to say that to me! And he didn’t leave me for lack of sweetness, either, or he wouldn’t have chosen . . . what does she have that I don’t?”

My voice had risen to a shout. The three other people in the waiting room, two of whom were holo-masked, stared. I twisted my hands together and spoke more softly. “He’s just erased me from his life. That’s what I really can’t stand—that he acts like I never existed at all.”

Trevor put his arms around me. I collapsed against his thin chest and narrow shoulders—delicate frames were hot just now with gays—and sobbed quietly. The man sitting two chairs away moved to four chairs away.

After I finally blew my nose, I said, “Trevvy, I have to know. Jake was the love of my life.”

“Jake is a cheating and lying bastard, and anyway, I’m the love of your life.”

“Not carnally.”

“Overrated.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“Well, no.” He held me at arm’s length. “You look like a dead spot in the ocean. Go put on some makeup. Obsession is not a good look for you. Anyway, Becky should be the love of your life.”

His expression stopped my remaining sniffles. Trevor always smiles and he is never, ever critical of me. Not seriously. I said, “She is.”

He didn’t bother to correct the lie. But he looked away from me, and something in my neck went cold. I’d lost my soon-to-be-ex husband. If I lost Trevor, too . . .

“I’m here, Amanda. Always. And no, I don’t need sweetness from you. I just need—”

My wristband brightened and said, “Ms. Rydder, the surgery went fine, and you can see Rebecca now. First door to your left.”

I charged through the door. Becky lay in a smartcrib, watching a holo-mobile two feet above her. Bright, nonexistent shapes twisted and flowed in the air. Becky’s plump little hands reached for them until she saw me. She crowed with delight, and I picked her up and cuddled her, studying her right eye.

It was clear, stained-glass green with thick, dark lashes. Just like Jake’s eyes.

No scars on the smooth baby skin.

No grogginess from the anesthesia, no pain, no cloudiness in her iris.

You couldn’t tell that anything had been done to her at all.

• • • •

Using the software was as uncomplicated as the implant itself. What was hard was setting it up. The manufacturer doesn’t do that for you, understanding more than anyone the absolute necessity of customized, unhackable encryption on dedicated and shielded computers. Most wearers of Opti-Cam implants are not six-month-old infants. Last month alone, six major mobsters were indicted and an Asian dictator assassinated using information from Opti-Cams.

Trevor set up my system. It was pretty minimal: receiver, screen, retransmitter, basic encryption. He protested the retransmitter. “This data isn’t something you should view on anything but this one screen here in your bedroom, off-line for all the Internets. Don’t retransmit to your wrister or, quod di prohibeant, to any screen anywhere at your job. Do I have to remind you that this whole setup is illegal?”

“Just get it working. And drop the Latin—it’s pretentious.”

“You never did have any sense of verbal fashion, Mandy. No, don’t touch that . . . wait a minute . . . there.”

The screen brightened to an expanse of white. I was about to protest that the system didn’t work when I realized: Becky was staring at the ceiling.

She lay in her crib across the room, drowsy and blinking. The white expanse disappeared, reappeared, disappeared again. I said, too shrilly, “Mobile on,” and her smartcrib activated it. Becky’s eyes opened wide and she cooed. My screen showed somersaulting kittens made of light, seen from Becky’s perspective as the camera behind her cornea sent its images to the receiver.

“Mobile off.” The kittens disappeared. I crossed the room and loomed over Becky, looking back over my shoulder. On-screen was her view of me, head turned away.

Trevor said, “I still don’t think you’ve thought this through. And I still hate it. Becky—”

“Won’t know a thing. She doesn’t feel the implant, and the images don’t get stored in her brain, at least not any more than they would from her own vision. Nothing connects to her memory. There are dozens of studies proving that.”

“With adult subjects. Not infants.”

“Infants remember even less than we do.”

“I wish you remembered less,” Trevor said. “Remembered less, felt less, schemed less—”

I’d stopped listening to him. I watched Becky watch me until her lids fell into sleep and the screen went blank.

This was Wednesday. On Friday Jake would pick up Becky for his weekend of shared custody.

• • • •

“What’s with you?” Felicity said to me in the ladies’ room nearest our cubicles. “You’re jumpy as a cat.”

“Cats aren’t particularly jumpy. Neither am I. Just stressed about the GloBiz account.”

Felicity frowned, but before she could point out that GloBiz was consistently thrilled with our campaign for them, I was out of the ladies’ room, out of the building, in a cab home. Only 4:00 p.m., but so what? Even a copywriter deserves a dangerous, illegal, utterly stupid hobby.

In my bedroom, I turned on the dedicated computer. Becky gazed at the back of a head in a moving car. One head, not two. Jake, alone, had picked her up at day care.

Then his apartment, not Pam’s. I had never been inside either one, but I recognized his half of what had once been our furniture. He put Becky on the floor to crawl, and whenever she glanced over at him, I glimpsed the slippers I’d given him for his last birthday.

In college, I’d been a film major. No Fellini retrospective, no Welles film work, had ever enthralled me like the images on my screen that Friday evening. Jake’s slippers, Becky’s toys, a rubber ducky floating in the bathtub. Quick shots of Jake’s face, laughing or talking to her—why didn’t the implant have audio! Pam did not appear. When Becky finally fell asleep, I turned off the computer and then sat for a long time in the dark, tears running down my face, rage in my heart.

He had no right to do this to me. To Becky. To live his life as if I’d never occupied the center of it.

At midnight, I gave in and keyed his number into my cell. He answered sleepily. “Hello?”

Not breathing, I clutched the phone.

More sharply: “Hello?” And then, “Amanda, if this is you, you’re violating the restraining order. Please stop. I mean it this time. I’ll go back to court if I have to.”

I said nothing. Tears and rage, tears and rage. Long after he hung up, I clutched the phone as if I could crush it.

• • • •

On Saturday, Pam appeared in Becky’s field of vision.

At first I got only flashes of her; Becky was not interested in focusing on this unknown person. It was eerie to glimpse a red-shirted elbow, the toe of a black boot, the back of a blond head. It disassembled her, made her less than real. Eventually, however, she sat down in front of Becky and fed the baby strained applesauce.

Instantly, I wanted to leap through the lens and shove her away from my baby. Leave her alone, you bitch, she’s mine! Pam was pretty but not gorgeous, a girl-next-door type, if the door happened to open on a Hamptons beach house. Sun-streaked hair, fine sun lines around brown eyes, no makeup, vintage lululemon workout clothes. On the street I’d never have noticed her. Her body looked nicely curved, but neither buxom nor model-elegant. What did she have that I didn’t?

Becky spat applesauce at her and the view vibrated—she must have been giggling. Pam giggled back.

Stop. Leave her alone! She’s mine!

He’s mine.

• • • •

By Sunday afternoon, when Jake brought Becky back, I had slept a total of three hours. All weekend I’d sat by the screen, seldom eating, scarcely going to the bathroom. Becky might wake in the night; there might be something to see. It was, as I’d discovered online, a one-bedroom apartment. Did Jake wheel her crib out into the living room so he and Pam could have sex in the bedroom? Or did they do it with Becky asleep beside them?

By order of the court, ever since that stupid misunderstanding two months ago, Jake and I had no contact when Becky was returned on Sunday. Jake brought his sister with him every single week. Linda brought Becky into my building, and the two of us did not exchange a word.

I unwrapped Becky and studied every inch of her, looking for—what? Anything amiss, a bruise or a dirty diaper or ripped pj’s. There was nothing, of course. Jake had always been a terrific father.

The baby was asleep by seven o’clock. I called Trevor to come over; my call went straight to voice mail. Felicity had a date. TV was boring. I roamed the house, unable to sit for even a moment.

Until I stopped cold, feeling my own mouth open into an O. After checking on Becky one last time, I brought the small, dedicated computer into the living room and connected it to my wall system.

• • • •

Trevor had made his fortune with Holo-Shop. He invented it, patented it, and sold it for an exorbitant sum plus royalties to Microsoft.

There had been other holographic conversion programs on the market, but they were quirky, experimental, difficult to use. Holo-Shop was none of those, and the results were sharper than anything before it. You brought up a flat image on a screen, set the parameters you wanted, and touched the H-S icon. The image sprang from the screen in holographic three dimensions. It could be small or large, although the larger you made it, and the farther away the hologram from the screen, the lower the resolution. A three-inch rose was a miracle of dense perfection; a room-sized puppy was insubstantial vapor.

Holo-Shop could not evoke moving images, not yet, although Microsoft was reportedly working on it. Meanwhile, advertisers and artists and retail outlets manipulated holograms to sometimes powerful effect, sometimes laughable kitsch. Ditto the millions of users who wanted the pyramids to decorate their trendy Egyptian-themed living room but to disappear when they needed to set up a card table for poker.

I ran the camera images of Jake as Becky saw him until I found a good one: Jake crouching on the floor, smiling, green eyes alight, arms extended for the baby to crawl into them. I froze the image, projected it with H-S, and fooled with it for a while. When it was done, Jake sat life-size on my bedroom floor, ghostly enough to see the dresser behind him, arms outstretched. The dresser didn’t matter. I got down on the floor and moved to sit in the circle of his arms.

• • • •

The second weekend that Jake had Becky, Pam was there all weekend. I watched them every minute that Becky was awake. They kissed in the kitchen, took Becky to the park, watched something on TV while she crawled around the floor. Pam wore Carson Davis boots in calfskin, $800. When Trevor called with tickets to the hottest play in town, I told him I had the flu. By Sunday afternoon, when Linda handed Becky back to me, I was groggy from sleeplessness, reeking from not bathing. I didn’t look at Linda looking at me.

I once saw a show about toxoplasmosis, a parasitic disease. When mice contract it, they lose their natural fear of cats, making it easier for cats to eat them and the parasite to get into the cat. There was some evidence from brain scans that the mice realized this lack of fear was stupid, but they couldn’t help themselves. They were compelled to let the cats see them.

At work, I accomplished nothing. I’d set the retransmitter to send the images of Jake and Pam to my wrister; the hell with what Trevor said. Whenever I could, I ducked into the ladies’ room and brought up images to study. Felicity went from warmly supportive (“You don’t feel well? Oh, I can finish that copy, Amanda”) to faintly resentful (“You haven’t even started on the McMahon account stuff? But we got it over a week ago”).

On Thursday night, Trevor called. I told him I had the flu. On Friday night, he let himself into my apartment with his emergency key. I barely had time to dart out of the bedroom and close the door.

“Trevor! I told you I’m sick!”

“It’s not flu season, Mandy.” His handsome face looked strange without its habitual smile.

“If I say I have the flu, then I have the flu!”

“I don’t think you do. You’re doing it again, aren’t you? Two restraining orders and a court fine weren’t enough?”

“I’m not. I’m not stalking Jake.”

“Swear on pussy willows’ pussies?” Our childhood oath; at ten years old it had seemed hilarious.

“Swear on pussy willows’ pussies.”

“Then you’re obsessing over the Opti-Cam images.”

“Isn’t that my business?”

Trevor lost his temper, something even rarer than losing his smile. “Oh, Christ, Mandy, you’re my business! Don’t you know that if I were straight, you and I would have married and had three Beckys of our own? Don’t you know how much better I’d have been for you than Jake? I can handle your intensity, he couldn’t. And I know when you’re lying to me.”

“Please go, Trevor. I’m not up to this right now, really I’m not—”

He left, slamming the door behind him. Once, nothing in the world would have kept me from following him. Trevor, my best friend, my support and confidant . . .

On the screen in the bedroom, Becky lay in her infant seat, studying her bare toes. She must have just woken up. On the rug, barely within the circle of her unknowing vision, Jake and Pam made love.

Frantically I keyed in his cell number. Anything to disrupt them, anything! The call went to voice mail. “Stop!” I screamed. “Stop, stop, stop!” The cell must have been on silent; they didn’t stop.

I am not sane, I thought, which was my last sane thought.

• • • •

I called in sick to work on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I never left my bedroom. It began to smell: of Becky’s diapers, piled in the corner whenever I changed her. Of a pizza molding on the dresser. Of me.

On Thursday morning, Trevor returned.

“Mandy?”

“Go away! Go away!” I’d waited all week for 10:00 a.m. on Thursday! Trevor was not going to spoil this!

“Mandy . . . oh my God.” He stood in the door to my bedroom. Becky gurgled in her swing. She was dressed in her snowsuit; the window stood open to help with the stench.

“Go away!” I barely glanced at him—it was 9:57!

“Mandy, darling, whatever you’re going to do . . . don’t.”

9:58.

“Let me help you. You know we’ve always helped each other.”

“Don’t touch me!”

“I won’t. You know I won’t if you don’t want me to. I’m just going to pick up Becky, okay? Here we go, sweetheart, come to Uncle Trevor . . .”

9:59.

Jake’s law office was superefficient. The partners would be gathering in his spacious office for the regular Thursday morning meeting. His wall screen would be on, ready to bring up the week’s data. He didn’t know I had his office password; I’d stolen it right after he told me he was leaving me, but despite everything that had led to the restraining order, I’d never used it. Until now.

Trevor said, “Mandy, what are you doing? Put down your cell if you’re calling the cops. I’m not here to force you to do anything you don’t want to do, I promise. Put down the cell.”

10:00.

I pushed both buttons simultaneously, my cell and the “Send” button on the computer. The phone number bypassed Jake’s office answering system—a direct line for privileged clients who needed to reach their lawyer instantly for some legal emergency. Jake would not recognize the number of my new, throwaway cell. His voice said, “Hello?”

Now it would happen. Now I would get what I had been trying for for so long, what I needed more than food or water or even Becky: I would get a reaction from Jake. The image of him and Pam naked on the rug would burst from the wall screen in his office in all its color-saturated, three-dimensional luridness, and Jake would know I had done it. That he could not erase me.

“Hello? Who is this?” Jake said, still calm. “Can I help you?”

I waited.

Nothing happened.

No one in the background gasped or laughed or said, “What the hell—?” Nothing.

Jake tried one last “Can I help you?” and then cut the connection.

Trevor, patting Becky’s back, said softly, “Mandy . . .”

I cried, “Why didn’t it work?”

Trevor’s face changed. His gaze moved to the computer. He knew, then; he was always smarter than anybody else I knew. He said, “Because Jake knew you’d do something like that. He put a detailed blocker on his system.”

“I just wanted him to acknowledge I exist!”

“Oh, he acknowledges it,” Trevor said. “How do you think he knew what you’d do?”

He held Becky, now squirming in her snowsuit, away from him and stared into her eyes, first the right and then the left, again the right, again the left. “The technology’s available to everyone. Including Jake.”

• • • •

I don’t like to lie to Trevor. Sometimes, however, you have to do certain things you might not want to do. He went with me to the clinic, but of course he couldn’t sign any papers; he is not related to Becky. I told him I’d had both Opti-Cams removed. I swore on pussy willows.

Now I stand in my bedroom, which sparkles with cleanliness. Becky sits in her swing, gurgling at me. I lean closer to her. My hair, clean and shining, swings toward her. My makeup has been professionally done. My cleavage gets help from a $200 bra. I smile at my baby.

Jake is watching.

©2014 by Nancy Kress. Originally published in IEEE Spectrum, June 2014. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-seven novels, three books on writing, four short story collections, and over a hundred works of short fiction. She is perhaps best known for the Sleepless trilogy that began with Beggars in Spain, which was based on the Nebula-and Hugo-winning novella of the same name. Her fiction has won six Nebulas (for “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” Beggars in Spain, “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” “Fountain of Age,” After the Fall, Before the Fall, and During the Fall, and Yesterday’s Kin), two Hugos (for Beggars in Spain and “The Erdmann Nexus”), a Sturgeon (for “The Flowers of Aulit Prison”), and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for Probability Space).

Her most recent books are a collection of short stories, The Best of Nancy Kress from Subterranean Press and an SF novel, Yesterday’s Kin. Kress’s fiction, much of which concerns genetic engineering, has been translated into twenty languages. She often teaches writing at various venues around the country and has a website at nancykress.com.

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

Familiaris

Genevieve Valentine | 4870 words

“I mean, if you don’t want to have one,” he says, that single line down the center of his forehead like his face is about to peel.

“Someday,” she says. His hand is too tight in her hand. One of them is sweating.

• • • •

The prince and princess had no child.

Eventually, wolves.

• • • •

Long ago, a woman in Bavaria had to peel some potatoes. She had to do the washing. She had to check on the soup that simmered on the stove and was never quite thick enough. She had to watch her smallest child where it lay wrapped near the fire and sweating, and watch her oldest daughter tying back her hair to look finer when she went to trade the day’s milk for some woolens from the merchant with the unmarried son. She wanted to tell a story that could lock the door.

The prince and princess had no child. The princess insulted a peasant mother as unfaithful for having triplets; as punishment, the princess bore seven sons in seven days. She sent them to be killed. (Mothers in stories are hateful and unkind; they never peel potatoes for the soup.) The prince found them and saved them and let them grow, and as soon as they were men of eighteen, they appeared in the feast hall to swallow the princess whole.

Wolves, the mother calls them, when she speaks of young men. Oldest daughters don’t fear much anymore—they don’t fear enough—but a wolf can still make a girl pause at the window and glance into the woods, just in case.

Fairy tales are collected by the scholars who show up in the center of town with neat coats darned at the cuffs, with pen and ink and paper, but they begin with a woman at the fireside, looking out the open door and fearing the worst.

She wants the lock to sit fast, even if it’s too late. She wants to make her daughter listen to the story of a princess who couldn’t bear children and then suddenly, horribly could; who saw only a wolf when her husband forced her to look in her mirror; who was ruined the moment she insulted the farmer, because women are doomed if they open their mouths, and that mountain’s so steep it can ruin a queen.

You tell stories because your fears have no easier name. The merchant’s son smiles, but he’s tall, and when his father is gone to sell near the cathedral, the son offers to show girls the woolens they store upstairs and keeps them there too long. The soup is going to sour any minute, and your daughter needs to come home.

• • • •

“How can she have so many?” she says, looking at the woman who can barely push the double stroller, one older child dragging on her shirttail. One of them is shrieking. It won’t stop. The mother looks like she hasn’t slept in a hundred years; her anger flaps empty and worn-out every time she opens her mouth.

Her husband says, “We should be so lucky,” and for a moment she looks at him like his tongue has turned into a salamander before she remembers that the last time she mentioned she was doing well at work, his smile was thin. (He still hasn’t assembled the desk in the room that’s supposed to be her office; she does her work at the dining table, as her mother did the darning. He’s gotten adamant that they clear it before dinner. “We’re a family,” he says, “we should get in the habit to make it easier when we have children,” and she thinks about what he looked like the first time he told her he wanted to marry her and what her mother says about the Holy Spirit alive in the home, and makes her work disappear.)

Her stomach goes rancid. He doesn’t see it—what’s there to see, in an empty space? He has an office in a company that matters, with windows on two sides. She’s going to go to the doctor and slap her feet in the stirrups and vomit for months and swell and lose her job and her wits in the mud of pregnancy, and she’ll expel a child from a body that’s been wrecked by an intruder (she knows what that’s like; she’s lived with her husband long enough).

She wonders what would happen if she took her hand out of his hand and ran until she dropped.

One of the other children is crying now; piercing. She checks to see if her nose is bleeding.

• • • •

The princess was chosen, not born. The prince rode by her parents’ hovel with his hand out to her, and the saddle chafed the back of her legs so much she dared not sit before the king and queen. They thought it charming. She kept her hands clasped behind her when she departed; they thought that charming, too.

The prince had left a stain on the back of her dress, a small dark spot she clasped her hands over. She’d been foolish, and had dressed in white like a bride.

He laughed when he saw it and said, “That’s what happens to a prince with a pretty maid and a long ride,” and she said, “But I’m a princess now,” and he smiled as if she was agreeing with him and not warning him.

• • • •

Seven boys. Seven sons. We imagine it; a thousand legends and a thousand songs have taught us to want them. It’s a mythic number that means greatness, that suggests higher purpose, a beautiful whole.

Later stories come by to separate them into people, and they take up songs and novels and celluloid and occupy different faces, but the fairy tales seldom bother. They’re frightening enough just as they are—a brother for every day of the week, all healthy, enough grown sons to fill the doorway of the audience hall—and really, there’s no time. The old Bavarian woman who let some scholar write down “The Wolves” can barely bring them back into the story in time to condemn their mother to death for sending them into the forest as soon as they were born. It takes only so long to make porridge, to card wool, to shuck peas, to worry about her daughter. The story has to be over before the work is over. The point is, men will conspire to win. The point is, women are sacrifices. The point is, take the bread off the coals before it burns.

You can’t leave a story like this broken off for later. It has to be whole to make any sense. Halfway through this story, the queen’s given birth to seven sons in seven days to punish her for an accusation even fairy stories know is false, and a maid is carrying seven babies through the woods to be eaten, and in a cave that no one ever sees, the beast sits with its jaws open, waiting for a meal it will never get. Bring them back quick as you can and punish the queen. The sun’s going down.

Heroic, though, those seven sons, any story you find them in. (And of course you find them; we’re taught early of the worth in groups of men who conspire.) The oldest one solemn and sure—but not the darkest eyes; that’s the fourth one, the one who has no time for the small-minded girls from their small-minded home. He and the second brother and the youngest sit up at night on the tallest hill they can come by and look at the road until it vanishes.

It doesn’t matter when the story takes place, not really—just that there’s a road. Some of them have wagon ruts and point toward the market in the shadow of the king’s cathedral. Some are paved black and empty, and the brothers tighten their fingers around the grips of their motorcycles.

The third brother, the only one who isn’t perfect, stands with one hip cocked to hide that one leg’s shorter than the other. The second-youngest is the runt of the litter, who still has the tenderness of a newborn, soft and young and seamless no matter what work they’ve done: farmers, maybe, or mechanics; grease on his face is like nightfall on the moon.

The fifth brother is the angry one. In any age, he handles metal. In any age, he makes the iron shoes.

They’re cruel, probably—groups of men tend that way no matter how carefully someone has raised them up from the dirt; they’re called “the wolves” because it’s a flattering enough name for something terrifying that the brothers will never realize is a warning to strangers—but still, the town that sheltered them will weep to see them go.

The brothers never think of that town again. They haven’t thought of it in years. The first time someone told them they were princes, they were gone.

• • • •

The king and queen walked past a christening—triplets, three at once, showered with petals by the cheering villagers and juggled by an old woman who staggered under the weight of the baskets.

“Where is the father?” the queen asked in horror, wanting to look away from it, desperate to be gone. The mother dead—she had to be, with some stranger carrying the children—and the farmer father wandering the churchyard, accepting the accolades and the sympathy while his wife was dead in the ground, broken by sons.

Bile tasted green in her throat. “So many children, too many at once—it’s a betrayal—”

Her husband the king laughed and took her arm to hold her fast. “Stop babbling. Are you accusing a dead woman of adultery? Her husband stands there, he’ll hear you.”

The priest was congratulating him on his children, nodding solemnly. The father wore a black ribbon and a white one, and a jacket gone thin at the elbows.

“But the mother,” the queen said, at the same time as the king told her, “Don’t say such cruel things; it’s your own fault we have nothing, if you want children so badly.” At home he pointed at her mirror and snapped his teeth like a dog and gave her a look like he’d picked the wrong girl out of the dirt.

But she’d tried to point out that the mother was missing. She knew the mother had been faithful, you’d have to be to carry three of his issue; it was the children who killed her that had broken trust.

• • • •

Women tell each other stories about it. (You can’t stop women from telling you stories about it; it’s a horror as old as the dark, and a different monster emerges every time.)

She had kept her mother sick for seven months, and when her mother couldn’t keep down enough food to satisfy her, she had sucked the marrow from her mother’s teeth. Her mother only had ten left now—they’d crumbled to dust, hollowed out by the parasite she’d carried. The rest of her teeth were false, and they would be cruel to look at if her mother ever smiled anymore.

You birthed a queen, she wants to say, I kept you safe and rich and those false teeth are made of ivory; but she’ll birth princes and knows there’s no comfort in it.

When she wakes up, the baby’s pulled at her skin so much that the white gouge marks along her stomach are raised from the pressure of the blood inside, pulsing, like worms converging on a meal.

• • • •

You drown in your children. She knows. She prepares for a siege.

It takes four years for him to get her to agree, but eventually his smiles and that line between his eyes feel like the tip of some ice pick, and she doesn’t dare. So let him divorce her, she thinks when she’s angry, but as work slows down and her boss starts to ask about family plans and her mother offers to go with her to the doctor or to church for counseling on the woman’s place in the home and the glory of children, she realizes with the sensation of dropping off a cliff that she might as well have a child—someone has to be on her side, and she’ll have to start from scratch, because the world has already gotten to the rest.

She lets it happen. She grits her teeth against it, but she lets it happen. The first time it moves is like a nail in the bed underneath her.

She picks a name for the child. It takes three weeks, during which he comes home from his office with the two big windows and they stand together in the room that had been meant for her work or her sewing and is a nursery now, while he paints and she reads names he hates.

“I like that one,” he says sometimes. She keeps reading until she finds one she likes, and folds a corner over. The nursery gets painted yellow, like piss on a stick.

He sleeps on the couch for the last week of name selection, until he breaks, and she writes the two names she wanted down in the journal his mother bought her as a reminder that the child is coming and she will have to be interested in it for the rest of its life.

She lets him fuck her for a while until he forgets to resent her; it’s an even trade, she figures, because sooner or later she won’t have to fuck him anymore, but that child will bear the name forever. (“Pregnancy hormones,” he laughs, unfastening his pants. “The guys all told me.”)

It’s not for the child’s sake she works so hard for the name. It’s not for the child’s sake she eats until she can feel food pressing against the back of her eyelids, and her arms float out to the size of loaves of bread and her ankles swell so badly she can only wear mules and the reflection in the mirror would agonize her if she was vain.

She eats because if the parasite has no nourishment, then it eats its host. She makes sure it has enough to feed on. She gives it room in her stomach, then her rib cage, where her lungs start to feel tight five months in and only get smaller; she gives up room for it in the bladder that holds less and less.

She picks a name she hopes to care about because it will be her name, appended at teacher conferences and playgroups and anywhere else her husband isn’t there for her to be appended to: as soon as the baby breathes, she’ll be Christopher’s Mother.

It never stops consuming you, a child; not so long as it lives.

• • • •

Everyone knows how to tame something: You start with a wolf, something sovereign and smart enough to know better, and you wait until it’s starving, and then you feed it and teach it to put up with the touch of your hand, and you raise its children and its children’s children until their teeth fall out and they gum at your fingers with no pride left, endlessly starving for your kind words and your palm, where they sit on the ground at your feet for the rest of their locked-in lives, and they get so good at it that you name them “familiaris,” to take the wolf out of even their name, so they have nothing ever again but you.

• • • •

The king was away when the queen gave birth: seven boys in seven days, red and screaming and hated.

“Carry them into the forest and feed them to the wolves,” she gasped over and over through lungs that had no room left. A maid with sharper eyes than the others bundled all seven into a basket of laundry and promised to let them be devoured, and as soon as she was gone, the queen burst into tears that shook the bed beneath her.

Remorse, all the nurses told themselves, packing up the bloody linen (seventh-best, the babies hadn’t left much time to appease royal sensibilities) and watching the queen clutch at her heart. It’s only fear that’s made her do this—she can’t be caught out looking unfaithful after that fuss she made, to be sure, they all have to go—but ah, it’s kind she mourns them now.

The queen pressed her hand against her lowest ribs, the ones that had cracked under the endless swelling of them all (with luck, the physicians had told her, they would set tighter toward one another once the child came, so her waist would be pleasingly small). She felt the relieving emptiness of her stomach, between her legs; a ruin vacated. Her breasts were heavy with kings’ milk.

Let them die soon, she thought, before they cry out, lest my body betray me and answer.

She had no need of worry. The milk turned to dust before the king ever came home.

• • • •

In the story, the king meets the maid on the road and asks her purpose. She shows him the children, on their way to be placed in a wolf’s den and eaten.

How stories fail us without the right teller, with wool to be carded before the cows’ milking. What on Earth possessed that maid? Was she crying? Was she foolish? Was it triumph? Did loyalty to the king overwhelm her at the last? Had the queen given her one duty too many and the maid wanted only for the queen to suffer? Was the road long enough for her to become afraid of something well beyond the understanding of the king and queen—perhaps the maid had a mother who told her stories, too—and she hardly minded being run through so long as she didn’t have to look a wolf in the eye?

The woman by the fire wanted to make her daughter wary of kings; for no other reason would that maid have submitted to the sword. It would have been no work to lie to a king—lying to a man is easy—and manage the work she had promised. The wolf was nearby, so close the king just barely stopped her in time, and she knew the way. Wolves in stories are easy to find.

The king takes his seven sons from the dead hands of the castle maid and brings them to the village and orders them raised up: tall and handsome, long hair shining, eyes on the road that leads to the castle gate.

He goes home to his milkless wife and waits for eighteen years.

How stories fail us! What a pleasant husband he must have been—distant enough that his wife had space to think, deferential enough not to arouse suspicion among the court that anything was wrong. What a measured monarch he’d have made, building a kingdom worth inheriting as if his wife wouldn’t know what it looks like when a king has heirs. What a kind man he must have been, all that time; men always are when they have something to look forward to.

But this is a fairy tale, where there are more lessons than reason. The mirror reflected a wolf when the queen came home from church, to warn her she would bear them. She must have known the boys would live to revenge themselves. Every day from sunset to darkness, the queen stood at her balcony and waited. She was standing there when they came back, after eighteen years and seven days, racing horses in a cloud of dust along the road that led from the village. She must have known who they were the moment she saw them; she must have known, for eighteen years and seven days, that her children would walk through the doors and consume her.

• • • •

Seven sons. One at a time, she loses her life to those beating-heart swellings that leave an abscess, that suckle your breasts and then forget the sound of your voice (children never listen, they’re wolves), the questions that make you hope they choke on their tongues, the toys that pierce your feet and the screams that pierce your ears. Seven sons, and she feels every moment that she should have stopped it somehow—tied her tubes, thrown herself down the stairs, spit in the aisle of their church until the priest disowned them and she could start walking and not stop until traffic hit her. But whenever she tried to do any of them, it was with the futile force of a dream, where you open your mouth to warn yourself but nothing comes out, and you keep moving the way the dream has laid before you because you know you’ll never wake up.

She ceded the office long ago to the wailing babies, but then they engulfed the guest room, the basement. “Maybe someday,” he says about a bigger house when she confronts him, “but houses are expensive, and we only have one income now,” and when he sees her face even he must be embarrassed, because he amends it to, “Later they’ll be so big, we’ll cherish the memory of all being together like this,” and her face must not change much, because he curses under his breath and leaves.

It’s no loss, really, the guest room and the basement. Her mother can’t come this year anyway; her mother can’t ever help except to offer wrong advice and to tell her she’s selfish when she complains and to ask for photos every day. There’s no help. Who could help her with so many sons except someone who would take them and run?

The baby sits in a bassinet at the foot of their bed, so not even her dreams are quiet, and she’d stay awake watching television except the children broke an armrest on the couch (on her side; they know better than to ruin anything of their father’s) and it makes her want to grab the nearest thing and slam it into the wall.

One day the formal dining room that has two doors she could close on them becomes a playroom. She can’t remember if she agreed or if their father just had a bright idea. But her anger about it is the anger of a dream, too, where no matter how much your skin itches from the insects laying eggs inside you, you can’t make a noise. Not like anyone would hear it with all the children who drag at her fingers and yowl to be fed and laugh when her husband laughs at what a mess the house is, at how peevish she looks.

(He doesn’t care how she looks. He’s been sleeping with someone else since the fourth son. She hopes he’ll file for divorce. She’ll get herself admitted to a hospital so the children can’t follow her, and will swallow any pill they give her for the rest of her life, swallow a handful at a time if they’re trying to kill her; she doesn’t care so long as she’s alone.)

He gets angry with her for staying mad at him; he watches TV at night, so he’s used to husbands being forgiven in twenty-two minutes. She’d maybe forgive him if she could close the dining room doors and think it over. Her seven sons won’t stop breathing.

She spent a summer at camp once, when she was ten, and mosquitoes hovered over her face every time she lay down, and all she could dream of was them laying their eggs and the larvae crawling out of her ear. She got too paranoid to sleep, because every time she closed her eyes, they found her. The camp sent her home after a week because she hit another camper with a tennis racquet. Exhaustion, they said.

When her children cry, she sobs until her husband gets out of bed to tend them, and she doesn’t care how angry it makes him, because he’s a stranger to them and they might listen. She knows she would pick up the heaviest toy in the room and swing.

She’s thirty-eight—baffling, impossible, how much of her life has she lost?—and there are seven sons. Her husband says he’s house-hunting for something bigger. He’s fucking the real estate agent, so it’s slow going, but sometimes he brings home a flyer from a viewing: a five-bedroom charmer so far away from their school and their friends that she’ll spend the rest of her life in the station wagon; a house with a yard so small she’ll have to enroll the older ones in soccer and baseball and slice oranges on game day and stand next to the other mothers and pretend she doesn’t want to run them over.

“You’re making this goddamn difficult,” he says when she turns them down. “I thought you wanted a new house.”

She doesn’t sleep much anymore; the grub at the foot of the bed claws at her breast twice a night, the soft sleek hair at the back of his head like a spider’s leg. The oldest one won’t stop telling her that all his friends think boys are better than girls and how lucky he is to be a boy—“Thanks, Mom,” he says with a smile, every time—and she wants to hold his face in the bathwater until the waves stop, until he’ll never say it again.

• • • •

Christopher’s Mom, says the envelope from school with the field trip instructions on it. They need chaperones.

“Well, I can’t do it,” her husband says. “This presentation is really kicking my ass, honey, and this is really your thing. Come on, you know.”

She was sick for four months with Christopher. Her body tried to rid itself of the foreign object every day for four months, until it got too weary to resist and let the thing have its way with her.

Like pushing a kid under the wheels of the bus, she thinks, on the way home from the field trip, wherever it was that they went. You fight the idea for a long time until you’re too tired to do it, and that’s how any child gets to grow old.

Five kids are shrieking in the back of the bus. Something lands near her head. She checks to see if her nose is bleeding.

• • • •

The queen stood in the tower, looking out over the kingdom. Her hands were on her stomach. She was looking for her children.

She had seemed incomplete for the last five months of the pregnancy, heaving, pitied; a woman is complete, and a woman and a child, but when you’re pregnant everybody knows you don’t quite have what you want yet. Expectation. Cannibalism.

In the churchyard, the farmer father and the priest were digging a grave. Only one of the triplets had died, then. A merciful winter.

(Her children would all live. That’s how these stories go—the ones you hate always prosper until the very end, when you find out whether or not you’re the villain.)

They were seven years old then, all the way up to seven years and seven days. They can consume you even when you don’t want to; you can still know they’re breathing. Somewhere—perhaps in the village where the prince had found her—they were growing up, and someone was telling them their mother hated them, and it was all perfectly true.

She was frightened, looking out from the window of the tower. Who isn’t frightened when they think how death is coming? But it was steadying to think she would die for an honest reason. It was good to think she’d have these years alone; these long and quiet years.

• • • •

In the story, at the grand feast when the wolves appear, when the king asks the queen what punishment awaits a woman who abandons her children, she tells him that such an unfaithful mother should be danced to death.

Of course she does. He’s been open about his tastes since that day in the saddle. She knows what he’s planning. His eyes have sparkled for six months. The forge goes all night, practicing shoes.

It’s all right. She’s practiced her dancing. A tame hand and a cage are very different; the first she’s never bent to, the other carries no shame. Lupus, she thinks when her seven sons walk in the door, sulking and vicious and already tame. The last glimpse the wolves have of their mother is her smile.

• • • •

Someone at the bank asks for her name. She says “Christopher’s mom” without thinking, and when the teller’s still waiting, she forgets for ten full seconds what else she can tell him to prove who she is.

“I have to get out of here,” she tells their father at home, so hard it startles him.

“What about the beach?”

“Mosquitoes,” she says.

He says, “Sand’s free.”

She keeps her eyes open all night and thinks about waves.

• • • •

Someday, iron shoes.

Eventually, children.

©2016 by Genevieve Valentine. Originally published in The Starlit Wood, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Remote Presence

Susan Palwick | 9930 words

As usual, Win was late to work. Since he hadn’t had time to eat breakfast at home, he arrived at his office—tucked into the old wing of the hospital, now a maze of ancient files and obscure personnel—clutching a styrofoam vat of cafeteria coffee, a donut balanced atop it. He wore jeans and hiking boots and a wrinkled pinstripe dress shirt, from which his ID badge hung crookedly. “Winston Z, MDiv, LCSW, BCC,” it read. In the badge photo, he was smiling. That had been a long time ago.

If he’d known that his boss would be waiting for him, he would have ironed the shirt. If he’d known that her boss would be waiting, he would have called in sick.

He’d been looking down at the donut as he approached his office, which meant he had no chance to duck down a stairwell. They’d already seen him. As soon as he looked up, his boss Sara—Director of Social Services—shook her head. Sara’s boss Roxanne, one of a seemingly infinite number of Vice Presidents of Regulatory Affairs, narrowed her eyes and glared. Both of them wore elegant suits and understated jewelry. Roxanne’s hair, tastefully highlighted and cut in sculptural angles, probably cost more to maintain than Win’s car.

Win did his best to smile. “Good morning. How nice that you’re here to help me get into my office. Hold these?” He handed his coffee and donut to Roxanne, whose expression didn’t change. Sara cleared her throat. Win unlocked the door to his windowless cubby and ushered them inside. “As you can see, there’s only room for my desk and one chair in here. One of us can sit and the other two can perch. Shall we draw straws?” He heard the thin edge of panic in his voice. He was sure they did, too.

They all remained standing, and Roxanne didn’t waste any time. She put the coffee and donut on his desk and said, “The JCAHO inspection begins tomorrow.”

“I’m aware of that.” He doubted that anyone in the building wasn’t; they’d all been barraged with memos, briefings, drills, obsessive reorganization of records, and streamlining of databases. Every three years, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations conducted a weeklong on-site accreditation survey of each hospital in the country. The survey was thorough, merciless, and struck apocalyptic terror into hospital administrators.

Roxanne blew out a sharp breath. “We can’t have revenants in the building. That’s one of the requirements.”

“Yes, I know.”

“We also can’t have nonfunctional equipment in work areas.”

“Understood.”

“Which means we can’t have a ghost wandering the halls in a telepresence unit. That’s a valuable piece of hardware—”

“Which wasn’t working,” he said. Of course Roxanne only cared about the expensive hardware.

“If it wasn’t working, it should have been repaired or returned, not possessed! And don’t tell me you didn’t know about it. For one thing, you’ve already admitted that you do. And for another, the ghost was delighted to tell me all about nice Reverend Winston who lets her visit patients. What were you thinking?”

Win swallowed. Of course Maisie would talk. She loved being the house ghost—or would have if she’d realized she was dead—and she didn’t know she was doing anything wrong.

Because she wasn’t. But that wouldn’t cut it with Roxanne. “She needs time to transition,” he said. Roxanne snorted, her eyebrows rising into her perfect hairline.

“No. She doesn’t. She needs to be discharged from that machine and exorcised from the hospital, and it needs to happen by tomorrow at 8 a.m. when the JCAHO team shows up. Are we clear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Roxanne left. Sara stayed. She cleared her throat again, and Win saw that she’d been biting her nails. “So,” he said, “she left you with the dirty work of firing me?”

“Nobody’s firing you. Not until after the JCAHO inspection, anyway. They require us to have spiritual care, and you’re our chaplain.”

JCAHO mandated that each hospital have a chaplain. It didn’t specify a patient-to-chaplain ratio. Level One trauma centers, like the one where Win had trained, had to have spiritual-care coverage 24/7. Level One trauma centers had on-call schedules and twenty-four-hour shifts and hordes of sleep-deprived chaplain interns, nearly as overwhelmed and bleary-eyed as their medical counterparts, who comforted the survivors of multi-auto pileups at 4 a.m.

This was a midsized regional medical center that couldn’t afford trauma certification. When he first took the job, ten years ago, Win had thought it would be calmer. Now, as much as he’d hated the stress of his intern year, he looked back on those twelve months with the fierce yearning of combat veterans deprived of the camaraderie of the front. “Yes,” he said. “I’m the chaplain. For a 400-bed hospital with at least four times that many staff, not to mention families and other visitors. And the occasional ghost. We’ve talked about this.”

“Yes. We have. Everyone who works for me is stretched too thin. I do what I can. You aren’t helping anybody by being stupid.” Sara glared almost as fiercely as Roxanne had, and Win’s knees buckled. He sat down in his desk chair, hard, and reached for the donut.

“Look, can we discuss this after I eat my breakfast?”

Sara sighed and perched on the desk. “No. But we can discuss it while you eat your breakfast. Win, please. Just tell me what you thought you were doing.”

He looked away from her, at the place where a window would have been if he’d had one. “I was doing my job. I was providing spiritual care.”

• • • •

Like most events in Win’s workday, it started with a beeping pager. This one summoned him to the ER, where a scowling charge nurse looked up from her computer and said, “Oh, good, you’re here. We’ve got a ghost problem.”

“Down here? That’s unusual.” Five years ago, an ICU in Indiana had suffered a poltergeist outbreak. That unhappy spirit had specialized in bursting blood transfusion bags and kinking IV lines, resulting in five lawsuits, three graphic novels, a movie, a spinoff TV series, and the JCAHO mandate that every hospital needed a chaplain certified in social work and exorcisms.

JCAHO had overreacted. There weren’t many ghosts of any kind in most hospitals. Hospitals weren’t places where patients wanted to linger, either when they were alive or after they died. In the decade Win had worked here, there’d been only two ghosts: a neonate whose ectoplasmic wailing set off every alarm in the NICU, and an old man on the medical-surgical floor who’d died after a routine hernia operation and refused to leave his bed until his estranged son visited.

Being a hospital exorcist was like being a vet or a pediatrician; the families were harder to deal with than the patients. Ghosts needed love the way the living needed food; love gave them the energy to move on. The souls of the dying either had to be freed by the living who loved them, or welcomed by the loving dead.

The NICU preemie, abandoned at the hospital by an adolescent mother the staff suspected was a sex-trafficking victim, had neither. Navigating a minefield of confidentiality rules, Win finally asked the parents in the hospital’s infant-loss support group to help with a releasing ritual. The NICU quieted down, and the parents took comfort in putting their grief to tangible use. Sara had been pleased. “Win-win, Win.”

The old man’s case ended more bleakly. His son wouldn’t come to the hospital until Billing began charging him for the unusable bed. When he finally appeared, Win conducted an exhausting counseling session—using a Ouija board, since he wasn’t sensitive enough to hear ghosts directly—which uncovered good reasons for the estrangement. The son finally dredged up a grudgingly good memory of a childhood fishing trip; on the other side, the patient’s wife supplied a single positive story about their honeymoon fifty years before. All of that was barely enough to budge the old man’s spirit out of the hospital.

If ghosts were rare elsewhere in the hospital, they were especially unusual in the ER. Most patients didn’t die down here. If they weren’t DOA in the ambulance, ER staff put them on ventilators and sent them up to ICU. Ghosts craved attention, and there was too much background noise in the ER: crying babies, overhead announcements paging doctors or requesting EKGs, static-laden radio reports from ambulances. Today the noise was coming from a screamer, a few doors from the nursing station and probably drunk, bellowing “Get me the fuck out of here!”

“So what’s this ghost doing?” Win asked the charge nurse. “How did you find out about it?”

“We’ve been having trouble with Room 32. Climate-control problems, computer glitches. It’s creating traffic issues; we need that space. We thought it was wiring, had a call in to Engineering, but then Anita from Registration saw the ghost, and Vinod from Phlebotomy did, too. I guess they’re both sensitives. How can sensitives even work here?”

It was a good question. Empathy drew most people to the hospital, but too much could drive you mad. Win hadn’t met many sensitives among doctors and nurses—too much direct patient contact, he guessed—but there were a surprising number elsewhere. He knew a food-service worker who talked matter-of-factly about calling her daughter and saying, “You need to get that ankle looked at; I think it’s more than a sprain,” when her daughter hadn’t even told her about the injury. When Win asked her how she could stand working in the hospital, she’d laughed. “Oh, honey, there’s pain everywhere. At least here people are trying to do something about it.”

“I’ll need to talk to Anita and Vinod,” Win said. “And anyone who took care of the patient, if possible. Do we know who this ghost is? Do we have records?”

“Yep. Her records are all that will show up on the monitor in that room. Maisie Plymouth, died down here of a stroke at age eighty-nine, in the ER at least once a month before that with various vague complaints. I didn’t know her well—I’m too new—but lots of other people did.” The nurse waved over an EMT. “Hey, Dave, you knew Maisie, right?”

The EMT, who sported complicated tattoos and towered over Win—most male ER personnel struck him as people you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, unless you were having a heart attack at the time—grimaced and nodded. “Maisie. Oh, God. Sure I knew her. Begging your pardon, Reverend.”

“No apology necessary,” Win said. Clearly there was a story here.

Over the next few hours, he ferreted it out. The records showed that Maisie Plymouth had no next-of-kin or healthcare proxy. Her last residence had been one of the shabbier nursing homes in town. He talked to a social worker who confirmed that Maisie was very lonely, but said that efforts to strengthen her support systems hadn’t worked. “She wouldn’t even come out of her room at the nursing home. Her doc put her on antidepressants, but they didn’t help. She needed people.”

He talked to Dave, who—between cleaning wounds and splinting fractures—confirmed that Maisie’s greatest medical need seemed to be human contact. “She just wanted to talk, you know? She said everybody in the nursing home was too old. They scared her, and the staff was overworked and had no time to sit with her. As if we do, right? But I’d chat with her when I had a few seconds, and when I had to take care of someone else, she’d grab my hand and start to cry. And then she had the stroke. She was in Room 32 because all the critical-care bays were full, and we were jammed in there with her and a shitload of equipment, and finally there was something wrong that we could treat, except we couldn’t, and her left side was paralyzed and she was struggling to talk. I think she was saying, ‘I can’t move.’ Whatever it was, she said it over and over, and we tried to understand her and couldn’t, and we tried to help her and couldn’t, and she died.” Dave shook his head. “Maisie. Oh, God.” This time, he didn’t apologize.

Win talked to Anita and Vinod, kind and serious young people—university students working their way through school—who reported that Maisie’s ghost just sat in the room, smiled and waved, and wanted to talk. What were they studying? Did they like gardening? Did they have cats? Maisie had had a cat, before she went into the nursing home. Maisie missed her cat.

Win thought immediately of the therapy dogs who came to the hospital. “What about dogs? Does she like dogs?”

Anita shook her head. “No. I asked her. She’s scared of dogs. One bit her when she was little.”

Damn. Cats weren’t allowed in the hospital, because too many people were allergic. So much for that easy fix.

Maisie was trapped by too little love. Well, of course she was. She was a ghost. Dave, who clearly cared about her, might be able to help, but he was busy with a heart-attack patient who’d just come in. So Win trudged upstairs, dug his Ouija board out of his desk drawer, and went down to the ER again. If he could get Maisie out of the room, the charge nurse would be happy, and Win and Dave could take their time with the releasing ritual.

There were quicker ways to do it. Win had been taught emergency methods, techniques that had nothing to do with love. Those procedures were what most people thought of when they heard the word “exorcism.” They were brutal and violent and terrifying for the ghosts. Win was glad he’d never had to use them. He didn’t plan to start now.

As he walked into the ER, he passed a CNA pulling a telepresence unit—a wheeled flatscreen with a mic, speakers, and webcam—out of a room. Win knew the things saved the hospital money; a lot of neurologists used them to assess ER patients from their own offices, and some psychiatrists did too. They gave Win the creeps. Hospital patients needed people, not robots.

“You have to pull that?” he asked the CNA. “Doesn’t it move on its own?”

“If somebody’s controlling it, yeah.” The CNA pointed to a toggle switch labeled “Wheel Lock” in red letters. “As long as the manual lock’s off. But we can’t get an internet connection on this one. Gotta send it back.”

Well then, they’d just have to have a flesh-and-blood person talk to patients. What a shame. Win continued down the hall to Room 32, where he set up his Ouija board.

It was slow going. Maisie seemed happy he was there; he could feel her as a bubbly benevolence in the room. But she thought the Ouija board was some sort of Scrabble game, and all he got from her was random words.

She’d just spelled out “xi, x on triple letter” when Win remembered the telepresence unit. The computer monitor here was already displaying her records, so she was comfortable with electronics. The unit in the hall was broken. The hospital wouldn’t approve of using it to house a ghost, but it would just be for a little while.

No one stopped him as he flipped off the wheel lock and rolled the ungainly thing into Room 32. He turned on the monitor and said, “Maisie? Here’s a window for you. If you look through this window, I’ll be able to see you. I’d like that.”

Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then the screen started to flicker, grainy pixels swirling into a face. Maisie Plymouth, white-haired and plump-cheeked, looked like the Platonic ideal of a grandmother. Her mouth moved, but Win couldn’t hear anything. He turned up the volume, and a soft, tremulous voice said, “Do you have a cat?”

“No,” Win said. “I don’t. Anita told me you miss your cat.”

Maisie smiled. “Anita’s a nice girl. And that young fellow, Vinny? The one with the needles?”

“Vinod,” Win said. “Your friend Dave is here, too, but he’s busy. Maisie, would you like to take a walk now?”

The pixels brightened. “Oh, yes! I haven’t been able to do that in a long time! But what’s your name?”

“I’m the chaplain. My name’s Win, short for Winston. Let’s go for that walk, shall we?”

The walk was nearly as slow as the Ouija board had been. Maisie knew all the staff. She greeted everyone. To their credit, they took the apparition on the screen in stride. “Hey, Maisie, how you doing? Nice to see you. How are you feeling now?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I feel so much better!”

“That’s wonderful!” came a voice at Win’s elbow. He turned to find the charge nurse, whose badge, he now saw, read Karen. “Maisie, I’m so glad you’re feeling well. We hope you can leave the hospital soon.”

“Oh,” Maisie said. Her smile vanished; the pixels darkened. “But where will I go?”

Win and Karen looked at each other. “We’re just going to discuss that,” Win said. “Maisie, let me talk to this lady for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

He and Karen walked a few feet away. He had no idea what kind of hearing range Maisie had. “Okay, so she’s out of Room 32.”

Karen laughed. “Obviously. Nice work.”

“So you have the bed back. But I think getting her to leave the machine will be harder. I’d like Dave to help; of everyone here, he seems the fondest of her. Is he still working on that cardiac patient?”

“No. That patient’s up in ICU. Dave went home. He just finished a ten-day run of shifts, and now he’s off five. Do you want me to call him back in?”

EMTs worked twelve hours at a stretch, and while working in the hospital was probably less stressful than being an ambulance paramedic, Win couldn’t imagine where they got the energy. Working ten of those in a row was incomprehensible. “I really hope that won’t be necessary. Let me go talk to her a bit more, see if there’s anybody she loves who’s already gone and might help out. She must have had family at some point. Parents, if nothing else.”

“Okay. I’m here until seven. Keep me posted.”

Win glanced at his watch. It was almost five: time for him to leave. He was on salary, such as it was. No overtime. But he’d chat with Maisie a bit and come up with some kind of game plan. He didn’t think she’d do too much damage overnight.

He turned back to where the telepresence unit had been. It was gone. He realized in a moment of panic that he hadn’t turned on the wheel lock.

Then he realized something else. The drunk down the hallway had stopped screaming. Win walked to the room; just outside the door, he heard the drunk say, “Yeah, my mom has a cat.”

Win looked inside. Sure enough, there was the telepresence unit. The guy in the bed—an adolescent, acned and scowling—looked up and said, “Is it okay if I keep talking to this lady?”

Win swallowed. “Sure.” He walked into the room to face the screen; Maisie was smiling, and he felt her kindness like heat from a tiny sun. No wonder the kid had calmed down.

The kid’s face bristled with piercings. His t-shirt read “Eat Shit and Die” in neon letters. “She told me she likes to visit people but can’t walk very well.”

“Ah,” Win said, nodding. That was one way of putting it.

“That’s pretty cool, that she can use this gizmo to talk to people. My granny needs one. She’s in a wheelchair.”

“What’s your granny’s name?” Maisie asked. “Does she live near you? She’s lucky, to have a grandson like you.”

Win looked at his watch. “Maisie, when you’re done here, I need to talk to you.” He looked at the kid. “I hope you feel better.” Then he went back outside and told Karen, “You know, I don’t want to bother Dave. I really think I can handle it on my own.”

• • • •

That night, eating dinner in his tiny kitchen, he talked to the bobblehead Jesus who stood between his salt and pepper shakers. He’d had the toy since his first semester in seminary. He’d been pious and certain then; now he was neither. His approach to faith was “Use what works,” and all he knew for sure was that love trumped law. Jesus had said that, but so had a lot of other people. All the major traditions said it, when they weren’t being hijacked by politicians and other fanatics.

He no longer read his Bible every day, and he could go for months without going to church, but he still liked his bobblehead Jesus. It had brown skin, which made it more historically accurate than most other depictions of Jesus, and its bobbing head conveyed expressions ranging from alarm to resignation to encouragement.

Just now, it seemed bemused, but Win supposed he was, too. “So I took her up to my office and settled her down in front of sixteen hours of training videos for chaplaincy volunteers. She should be safe there. The door’s locked, and the telepresence unit doesn’t have anything like hands.” He licked pork-chop grease off his fingers. “I don’t know if this is what you would have done or not, but they won’t give me student chaplains because that program costs money and we aren’t a trauma center, so it’s not mandated. They won’t give me volunteers because some candy-striper in Chicago got clobbered by an old guy with a cane and sued, so now any volunteer is a liability issue. Maisie needs to talk to people, and she definitely helped with that kid in the ER. And if it doesn’t work out, I’ll call Dave and we’ll do the releasing ritual, which I guess we’ll have to do anyway, at some point.”

The bobblehead Jesus, its face painted with a serene smile, jiggled noncommittally. Do the work, Win imagined it saying. Your job’s to visit sick people who are frightened and lonely. Love trumps law. It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

He slept well that night.

The next morning he woke up earlier than usual, made himself a nice breakfast, and still got to work half an hour early. His office door was open. In front of it sat a mop and bucket.

Housekeeping. Of course they’d come in to clean the office, and they had keys. How could he not have thought of that?

Win told himself to calm down. He knew all the housekeepers. He liked all the housekeepers. Most were Hispanic or Filipina, and almost all were Catholic, and when they weren’t cleaning up one mess or another, they paid very close attention to patients. The housekeepers were part of what he’d come to see as his secret army, all the staff who weren’t strictly required to take care of patients but did anyway. A housekeeper would pass him in the hall and say, “Father, that poor lady in 722, you should go see her”—they all addressed him as a Catholic priest, even though he was a Methodist minister—or someone from Security would alert him to a distraught family member who might be calmed down by prayer, or someone from Admitting or Engineering would tell him about something they’d seen that he might be able to help with.

Administrators got most of the money at the hospital. Doctors and nurses got all the TV shows. But none of what they did would be possible without everyone else, the vast support structure that kept the place running. Laundry, lab, the medical library: all of them were essential. The hospital was almost as complex an organism as the human bodies it tended.

Approaching his office, he heard voices: his TV saying something about existential crisis, and Maisie saying something about catnip, and a softer voice, Spanish-accented, saying, “Here is my kitty. Can you see her?” He peered inside to find a housekeeper named Luz, one of his favorites, holding her phone up to the flatscreen. “That is Tulip when she was a baby. Here she is now. Look how fat she’s gotten!”

“Good morning,” Win said, and Luz turned, smiling. Luz was a sensitive. She wouldn’t have needed the telepresence unit. She’d helped calm down the ghost of the old man so Win could talk to him. Too many people, even after they’d died, were scared of chaplains. Tiny women with mops didn’t scare anybody, although Win often thought they really ran the hospital.

“Good morning, Father. We’ve been visiting.”

“Yes, I can see that.” He reached out to stop the video, which was droning on about the dying process. Did Maisie remember that? “Thank you, Luz.” He added her to his list of people who might be able to help release Maisie. But not now. Not yet. No hurry.

“You’re welcome,” Luz said, and left.

“Maisie, did you enjoy the videos?”

“Oh, yes. But I liked talking to that nice lady more.”

“I’m sure you did. Would you like to talk to some more people?”

• • • •

Sara, leaning on the edge of his desk, bit back a groan. “That was—when?”

“A week ago. Dave should have been back by now, but he got called out of town. A sick aunt, Karen said.”

“No, Win. This has nothing to do with Dave, and you know it. If you’d been doing your job, Maisie would be gone by now. You’re exploiting her.”

Sara’s voice was cold, and Win winced. Any hope of keeping his job evaporated. “I think that’s a little harsh. She and the patients both benefit—”

“You benefit. Maybe patients do. Maisie doesn’t. She needs to go wherever she’s going. You’re keeping her here.”

“I don’t think so. She doesn’t know—”

“Then it’s your job to tell her. Today. Right now. In fact, I’ll come with you.”

She didn’t trust him. He supposed he didn’t blame her. He suspected he had Maisie, plus the JCAHO inspection, to thank for the fact that he wasn’t being escorted out of the building by security. They needed him to fix the problem he’d created. He gulped the remains of his coffee, now gone cold, and followed Sara out of his office. He felt jittery and defensive, which he recognized, clinically, as evidence of guilt. Was he exploiting Maisie? The idea horrified him. Surely he was giving a lonely soul purpose and company after too long without both. But Sara was right. Maisie couldn’t have chosen freely to visit patients this way unless she understood where she was, and why.

“Do you know where she is?” Sara, three steps ahead of him, didn’t even turn around to ask.

“Probably ER. That’s still her favorite place. That or post-op.”

Sara gave the elevator button a vicious jab. “Post-op,” she said to the button. “Wonderful. All we need is somebody coming out of anesthesia and being terrified—”

“Sara, you haven’t met her. She’s about as terrifying as the Beanie Babies in the gift shop.”

“That’s not the—”

A beeper went off, sudden and shrill. This time, Sara did look at Win. “Is that yours or mine?”

It was hers. She dialed her cellphone. “This is Sara. You paged me? Right. Yes. Okay. I’ll be right there.”

She hung up and glared at Win. “Urgent ethics consult.” Win suppressed the urge to say, A lot of that going around. It wasn’t funny, even to him. Especially to him. “I have to go. The minute I’m through there, I’ll head down to the ER. I’d better find that telepresence unit vacated.”

“Of course,” Win said. Saved by the beeper. “I’m going to take the B elevators. They’re faster.” They were, but walking to the other elevator bank would also get him away from Sara.

He took the long way to the ER, through the waiting room, which was jammed with howling children, flu patients coughing behind surgical masks, and people vomiting into blue plastic barf bags. In the ER proper, he was met with a wave of stench, sweet festering rot. A doctor with two dabs of Vicks Vaporub under her nostrils hurried by, shaking her head, and said, “You picked the wrong time to come through here.” He knew the smell: gangrene, messenger of death or amputation, the ancient enemy of soldiers, diabetics, and the homeless.

Trying to breathe shallowly through his mouth, his breakfast threatening to come back up anyway, he made his way to the charge desk. His gut clenched when he saw Karen—someone else who’d lecture him, no doubt—but she only nodded and gave him a sympathetic grimace.

“So the jig’s up, eh? Sara just called down here. I’m sorry. We’ve enjoyed having Maisie around, now that we have the bed back again. She’s our ER mascot.”

“Thanks. Do you know where she is?”

“Follow your nose. Homeless guy, losing his foot as soon as an OR opens up. Maisie’s keeping him company. She’s the only one down here who doesn’t mind the smell.”

“No,” Win said, “she wouldn’t. Do you have any more Vicks?” The stuff didn’t cut the reek entirely, but it helped.

Somebody had cleaned up the homeless patient: gotten him out of whatever he’d been wearing, into the ER shower and a gown. His foot was uncovered. Win couldn’t look at it. The telepresence unit stood next to the bed. “We were talking about how sad it is when you can’t walk anymore,” Maisie said.

Bile burned Win’s throat. “I’m sorry this is happening to you,” he told the patient.

“Yeah. Trench foot, that’s what the doc said. Because, well, you can’t take your shoes off on the street, if you have any, because they’ll be stolen. I got a blister, and it got worse. So here we are.”

“He doesn’t know where he’ll go,” Maisie said. “Afterward. He’s scared.”

“People at the hospital will help you,” said Win. “You’ll get rehab and social services.”

“That’s what they told me, yeah. A group home or something. I don’t like those places.”

Win looked at Maisie, whose face was furrowed into a frown, and said, “We help people find places to go when they leave here. That’s part of what the hospital is for.” He took a breath. “No one can stay here forever.”

“I want to keep talking to Joe,” Maisie said. “Until the surgeons come. We were talking about our favorite places to walk. We both love the river: the people in little boats, and the babies and birds.”

Joe said, “I’m scared.”

“It’s scary,” Win said. He felt helpless, which was nothing new. He couldn’t imagine losing a limb.

“She’s making me less scared. She can stay, right? Until they come? I mean, I know there are all kinds of other people here who need her. But I think surgery will come soon. They’re just finishing up another operation, the nurse said.”

What would Sara do, if she were here? Win wished he had a video of this conversation to show her: Maisie, being terrifying. He thought of Roxanne. He thought of Karen, saying, “We like having her around.” He thought of the bobblehead Jesus.

Love trumped law.

If Sara wanted Maisie out of this room, Sara would have to kick her out herself.

“Maisie, you can stay until surgery comes for Joe, but then I have to talk to you, all right? It’s very important. Ask Karen to page me. Will you promise to do that?”

“I promise.” She looked frightened now, and the warmth from the monitor faded as if blocked by clouds. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No, you didn’t, but please have Karen page me.”

He told Karen what was happening. He left the ER, washed his face and hands in the restroom, and then went to the cafeteria. He felt utterly drained, the donut and coffee a lifetime ago. Halfway through a Caesar salad, he got Karen’s page.

He took Maisie upstairs to his office, put the “In meeting, do not disturb” sign on his door, and sat down at his desk. Never had he been more conscious of the closeness of the space. He found himself leaning into the monitor, as if to absorb Maisie’s glow, and forced himself to back off. He had no right to demand comfort of her. “Maisie, do you know where you are?”

“At the hospital.”

“Yes. Do you remember coming here? Can you tell me what happened?”

The face on the screen blurred a moment; when it refocused, it was tracked with tears. “I came here and everything went away. And then I was back, but I was in that little room. The nice young people talked to me. Then you came, and I could leave the little room.”

“Yes,” Win said. “Tell me about going away.”

Maisie was quiet for a very long time. “I was lonely. There was no one else there. Only people very far away. They couldn’t see me. I didn’t know how to get to where they were.”

Win rubbed his eyes. “Who were the other people? Were any of them people you knew? Your parents, maybe, or friends?”

“I don’t know. They were too far away. I tried to call, but they couldn’t hear me. I like being here. I like talking to people.”

“I know you do. Maisie, before you went away, what’s the last thing you remember?”

Her face blurred again, pulsed, sharpened. “Tubes? Tubes and needles? They were putting a tube down my throat. Is that right?”

“It’s not a test. I’m just trying to help you understand what happened.” Chaplains were trained not to use euphemisms. Call things what they are: Alarming rest results. Terminal diagnosis. Death. “Maisie, you died.”

“I did?” Her nose wrinkled; she looked for a moment as if she might giggle, and the flow of joy from the monitor strengthened a little. “But I’m not dead now. I’m right here.”

Win breathed in, treasuring air that didn’t smell like gangrene. “Your spirit is here. Your body died. You’re in a machine. It’s a screen on wheels that doctors use when they can’t see patients in person. I invited you into the machine so you could leave the little room, but now it’s time to leave the hospital.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Maisie, some people are coming to inspect the hospital tomorrow. They get upset if spirits are still here who shouldn’t be.”

Maisie’s image wobbled. “Please don’t make me leave. I like talking to the people here. The people here like to talk to me.”

“Yes, they do.”

“Don’t make me leave. I was lonely there. Why do I have to go?”

Because of my job, which I’ve surely already lost. Because of stupid rules. Because it isn’t fair. “Because it’s time for you to go somewhere else,” Win said. “It’s time to join those other people. You’ll like talking to them, too. You won’t be lonely anymore.” He had no idea if that was true. He certainly hoped so. “We all have to make that journey, Maisie. This is your time.”

“I don’t want to. Please don’t make me.”

“No, I’m not going to make you.” He couldn’t stand the idea of using the emergency techniques on her. But if he didn’t, Sara or Roxanne might call in someone who would. “Other people might, though. It will be much easier if you leave on your own.”

The tears were back. “I don’t know how.”

Win looked at his watch. Two o’clock. Technically, he had three more hours of work. He wondered when he’d get home tonight.

“I can’t leave,” Maisie said. “I told Joe I’d visit him after his operation.”

Joe wouldn’t be alert enough for a visit until tomorrow at the earliest. “Someday you’ll see him again,” Win said, “and I’ll visit him. I’ll tell him you wanted to say good-bye. Now, Maisie, I want you to remember someone you loved very much. Imagine that person at the end of a long tunnel. Can you do that?”

“There’s no one,” she said, and then the intercom crackled with a Code Blue in ICU. Someone had stopped breathing, or gone into cardiac arrest. A moment later, a beeper went off: definitely his.

“I have to go,” he said. He wasn’t grateful for the beeper this time. “Please stay here. Don’t talk to anyone. Can you do that?”

“What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing. I did something wrong, not you.”

His beeper went off again, shrill and imperious. Maisie said, “Will you come back soon?”

“As soon as I can, I promise.”

• • • •

As soon as he could wasn’t very soon. The ICU patient survived, but her husband asked Win to stay during a long discussion with her doctors, who clearly didn’t expect her to live much longer. The husband kept turning to Win and asking, “God will produce a miracle if we pray hard enough, won’t He?”

God wasn’t a vending machine. “We pray for best possible outcomes,” Win said, feeling the familiar ache of futility. In this case, the best possible outcome was a quick, merciful death, with viable organs donated to people in desperate need. But the husband wasn’t ready for that conversation, and might never be.

Win lied about having another meeting and wished the husband well. He had to get back to Maisie, but he needed a break.

He headed up to the nursery. The place had one of the tightest security protocols in the hospital, but as the chaplain, he got buzzed in right away.

The nurse who’d let him in frowned. “We didn’t call you, did we?”

“Nope. I’m here for myself.”

He looked at babies for a while. The mewling bundles always made him feel better. They were hope, the future, the best news the hospital offered. Fortified, he headed back to his office. Maisie was still there, although he didn’t see how she could have gotten out. The bigger danger was that Sara or Roxanne might have come by and discovered her.

“I have to visit Joe,” she said.

“Maisie—”

“I promised. He’s lonely.”

Win looked at his watch: 4:20. “He may not be able to talk yet.”

“I know.”

“If I let you see him, will you let me help you leave?”

“I promised.”

Which wasn’t an answer. He rubbed his eyes. “Okay. We’ll look in on him, but then we’re coming back here.”

Heavily drugged and still unconscious, Joe lay in a thicket of IVs. His roommate, closest to the door, was asleep. Maisie had rolled docilely along next to Win as they went in, but now she shot forward to station herself by Joe’s bed. As unsensitive as Win was, he felt the backrush of her joy. “Let me stay until he wakes up. Please?”

“No. He may not wake up until tomorrow. You need to be gone by then.” It was as brutal as Win had allowed himself to be with her.

“I’m not ready! I don’t know where to go! I told him I’d visit him.”

“You’re visiting him now.”

“He doesn’t know that. Please? I’ll stay in your office until tomorrow. I’ll be good.”

He looked at her fine-wrinkled face on the monitor. He wasn’t going to get her out of the hospital by tomorrow, not without using force, but he couldn’t put back her in his office, either. It was amazing he’d avoided Sara and Roxanne for the entire afternoon, but they were probably dealing with inspection crises in other parts of the hospital. He couldn’t be the only brushfire.

He thought furiously for a few seconds. “Okay, Maisie. I have a nice quiet place for you, all right? For overnight.”

“Where?”

It was one of the storage closets near his office. Maisie followed him inside; he pushed her against the wall, behind a bunch of brooms. “I’m sorry, but I have to make sure you stay here.” He flipped on the wheel lock, and then he turned off her voice. “If anyone comes in, don’t let them see you. They might hurt you.”

She looked terrified. She started mouthing something. “If you won’t leave,” he told her, “this is the only option. I’m sorry. Truly I am.” Feeling wretched, he turned off the monitor. Even so, he felt her yearning for contact, but he must be imagining it. The machine was off.

He went outside, into sweet fresh air with birds and sunshine and children in the park across the street. He’d left work a few minutes early. He didn’t care. He walked through the park, intensely glad that he was still alive and whole, even if he’d very soon be unemployed, and then he headed back to his car to go home.

• • • •

He couldn’t sleep that night. He’d gone over his finances after dinner. He had enough money to last three months, if he was careful. He could put the word out to local clergy, talk to people at other hospitals, maybe call some of the area nonprofits.

He yearned to get out of this game entirely, do something low-wage and physical. Construction. A warehouse job. But those were young men’s games, and he was no longer young. If he was lucky, he’d wind up at Home Depot helping people pick paint or carpet or drill bits.

Worrying, he stared into the dark until the sky outside his bedroom window lightened. All hope of sleep gone, he got up to make coffee. His eyes felt coated with sand. This was not the best condition in which to withstand a JCAHO inspection, or anything else the hospital was likely to throw at him.

He sat at his table as the face of the bobblehead Jesus wiggled back and forth, caught in some turbulence Win couldn’t feel. He had a brief fantasy of trying to get Maisie out of the telepresence unit and into the plastic statue, but he wouldn’t be able to talk to her there. She’d be even unhappier than she was now, and he had to keep her hidden for another week. Dave would be back soon, and Win had Luz, but he couldn’t risk a releasing ritual—which took time, and required space—until the inspectors were gone.

Some theologian, required reading in seminary, had said the essence of Christianity was that if you didn’t love, you were dead, and if you did love, the ruling powers would kill you. As a student, Win had found the idea shockingly cynical. Now it seemed like the bleakest realism.

He drained his coffee and stood on legs that felt like styrofoam. Time to shower.

• • • •

The JCAHO inspectors looked like Secret Service agents. Male or female, they wore white shirts and dark suits and carried clipboards; Win was surprised they didn’t sport sunglasses and earpieces. He spotted a set of them, moving purposefully down the long hallway that led to the ER, as he entered the hospital.

Sweating, he ducked into the lab waiting room, where a receptionist yawned and nodded in greeting. The inspectors hadn’t seen him. He told himself he was being ridiculous. They didn’t know him and weren’t looking for him.

Roxanne did and was. He found her waiting outside his office. Her usually flawless hair looked like something had been chewing on it. He wondered where Sara was, and was surprised when Roxanne gave him a faint smile. “You look as tired as I feel.”

Win suspected there was a lot of that going around. “Sorry to hear it.”

“I’m just here to make sure the situation’s been resolved.”

Win couldn’t bring himself to lie. “She won’t be bothering anyone.”

“Well, that’s evasive.”

No flies on Roxanne. Win felt his face tightening. “It’s the best answer I can give you.”

He expected her to start yelling, to fire him then and there, to whip out her cellphone and call an outside exorcist. Instead, she sagged. “Win, I know you think I’m the enemy. I’m not. If we lose our accreditation, we lose our federal funding, and if we lose our federal funding, the hospital closes, and if the hospital closes, this community loses 400 beds. None of us can let that happen.”

“I know.” Win’s precarious self-regard crumbled a little more. “I’ve done the best I could. I couldn’t bear to do an emergency exorcism. That’s a forceful eviction, and she’s lonely and in pain. She needs a releasing ritual, but I didn’t have the time or manpower.”

“You knew about the inspection. You knew you had a deadline.”

Win looked away. “I didn’t think things would get so complicated.”

“You didn’t expect to be found out.” Roxanne’s voice was tired and even. “All right. Where is she now?”

He led her to the storage closet. “I turned everything off. She’s behind a bunch of brooms. Do they inspect closets?”

“They inspect everything,” Roxanne said, as Win flipped on the light. “Where did you say she was? Behind those brooms?”

Win felt his bones go hollow. “She was behind those brooms, yes.”

Roxanne turned to stare at him. “Win—”

“I have no idea how she could have gotten out! I don’t even know who might have found her—oh.”

“Oh?”

“Luz. One of the housekeepers. Maybe. She cleans this part of the building, and she’s a sensitive.”

“So she’d have heard the ghost even with the tech disabled.” This time, Roxanne did take out her cellphone. “We need to page housekeeper Luz, please. Would you ask her to come to the chaplain’s office?”

How often did housekeepers hear themselves paged by name? Luz would be terrified. Win hoped she had nothing to do with this. Surely she needed her job even more than he needed his.

She was waiting for them when they got back to Win’s office. When she saw them, she raised her chin. “Are you looking for Maisie?”

“Yes,” Win said, relief mixed with fear. “Do you know—”

“That was terrible,” Luz said, her words thick with contempt. “Terrible!” Win had thought no one was scared of tiny ladies with mops. He’d been wrong. “Locking her up like that! She was crying, Father. She kept saying, ‘I can’t move. I can’t move.’ How could you?”

Win remembered Dave’s anguish. Her left side was paralyzed and she was struggling to talk. I think she was saying, “I can’t move.” His face burned. He had no self-defense to offer. Luz was right.

He deserved to lose his job.

“You let her out?” said Roxanne.

“Of course I let her out! But first I checked to see if Joe in 374 was awake, because that was where she wanted to go. And he was, and I pray to God that poor man’s all right.”

“Is she still there?” Win said. There was sure to be a JCAHO team in post-op.

“I have no idea. I’ve had work to do. I still have work to do, keeping everything spotless for your precious inspectors!” She came a few steps closer, her eyes narrowing. “And if they think Maisie is dirt, fuck their rules. We’ve been marked down before and passed reinspection. I’ve been here longer than either of you. I know.”

She straightened her back and swept down the hall, pushing her mop and bucket in front of her. Win looked at Roxanne. “She has a point.”

“She might, except that they’re extra jumpy about the ghost issue because of the Illinois lawsuits. If there’s an investigation, it will be clear we didn’t take appropriate steps. Did she say 374?”

“I think so. Why?”

“There was a code in 374 forty minutes ago. You didn’t hear it?”

“I wasn’t here yet.” Win looked at his beeper: nothing. “No one paged me.”

“Luz said she hopes he’s all right. That must have been what she meant. Okay, let’s go.”

Win hurried to keep up with her. He hoped Roxanne had misheard the room number. He hoped Luz had simply been wishing someone well after the traumatic loss of a limb. “Would the inspectors observe a code?”

“I hope not. I hope they’d let the code team work instead of putting them under extra pressure. But really, who knows?”

When the elevator doors opened on the third floor, they saw the JCAHO team, a clump of black at the nurse’s station. “They’re auditing charts,” Roxanne said quietly. “Good. That should keep them busy for a while.”

Win peered down the hall. He didn’t see the hive of people and equipment that always spilled into the hallway during a code. Whatever had happened, it was over. He had to fight not to turn and look at the inspection team as he and Roxanne walked by the nurse’s station. It felt like trying to escape the notice of a grizzly bear.

Safely past, Win and Roxanne glanced at each other. They’d become conspirators, but he knew she wasn’t really on his side. She’d throw him under the bus as soon as this fiasco was over.

Almost there: 368, 370, 372. Throat tightening, Win walked into 374. The telepresence unit stood next to the window. Maisie frowned down at Joe in the bed, but the other half of the room was empty. The first bed had been replaced with a jumble of EKG tickertape, latex gloves, and tubing. “Ah,” said Roxanne. “So the other patient coded. He must be in ICU, and they haven’t brought back the bed.”

What had Joe made of the code? Had he even been aware of it? Win walked over to look at him. Joe was too still. His monitor showed low BP, irregular heartbeat. A tech at the nursing station would be tracking all that.

Someone else hurried into the room: Luz. Win felt like he’d fallen into one of those movies where only three people live in LA or New York; the hospital staff seemed to have narrowed to him, Luz, and Roxanne. “They didn’t clean,” Luz said, “the code team, and the inspectors are coming! We have to get this straightened up. You—” she pointed to Roxanne “—you stand out there and if they come down the hall, do something, talk to them. Give me time to clean! And you, Father, you stay out of my way!”

Gladly. Win circled the bed and fell back against the wall, next to Maisie. She was saying something, pleading. “Joe, where are you going? Please don’t go away.”

Win’s mouth fell open. He closed it again. Joe was dying. Joe was on his way out.

Go, he thought. Take her with you. Please go. He was afraid to speak. He didn’t want to distract her.

If Joe coded, the room would be crammed full of medical staff again within a minute. They’d bring Joe back, and Joe would bring Maisie back. Dammit.

Win didn’t want Joe to die. Did he?

Luz swept furiously, muttering something in Spanish. Win heard Roxanne, outside the room. “I’m sorry you’re here when we’re so short on beds, but I’m sure we’re not the first hospital you’ve inspected with that problem.”

On the telepresence screen, Maisie’s frown had been replaced by a shy smile. “Oh! Yes, I see it now. It looks like a long way.” There was a pause, and then, “Do you know how to get there? It’s so far. But I’ll go with you, if you know.”

Win’s pulse skipped as the heartbeat on the monitor gyrated into the uncontrolled twitching of v-fib. Alarms began ringing. He heard the Code Blue on the intercom and squeezed himself into a corner, pulling the telepresence unit with him, as people in scrubs hurtled into position around the bed. Luz was gone; in all the frenzy, the JCAHO team surely wouldn’t scold anyone for the trash still on the floor. And with luck, they’d stay outside.

The telepresence screen showed the back of Maisie’s head, her bird’s nest of white hair, dwindling, surrounded by swirling darkness. He still felt her signature cheer, but it was receding. He wondered if the JCAHO team included sensitives. He’d be surprised if it didn’t.

A nurse was doing CPR, and the doorway was completely blocked by medical staff maneuvering equipment, handing IV bags and clipboards and syringes over each other’s heads. “Halt CPR,” someone said—a doctor—and Win heard “Clear!” and smelled the frying flesh that always followed the shock from the paddles. Joe’s ribs would already be broken from the compressions. All the medical personnel Win knew wanted “Do Not Resuscitate” tattooed on their chests.

At least there was no room in here for the JCAHO team. On the monitor, Maisie was still dwindling, but more slowly than Win would have liked.

“Clear!” said the doctor, and there was another burning reek and then, “Hey, he’s looking better.”

Maisie turned forward again. “Joe, where are you going? Didn’t you just say you saw your mother?”

Win cringed, but no one had heard her over the discussion of cardiac rhythms and blood values. He reached out and turned off the sound. Maisie didn’t seem to notice. Instead she smiled and turned around again. “Crap,” said the doctor. “Lost him. Okay, here we go. Clear!”

Again the reek, but this time, Maisie didn’t turn around.

The team kept working. Maisie was still receding, fragmenting into isolated pixels. But Win could feel her, however faintly. And then he became aware that the frantic activity around the bed had stopped.

“Does anyone want to continue?” the doctor said.

Silence and shaking heads. One of the nurses said quietly, “This guy’s a train wreck.”

“Bad room today,” said a tech.

The doctor sighed. “Yeah, okay. Thanks, everybody. Time of death, 10:15 a.m.”

Win looked at the telepresence screen. It still showed pulsing pixels. He’d turned off the sound, but he was afraid to turn off the unit completely, afraid that would somehow make Maisie panic and rush back. Afraid she’d feel trapped again, instead of freed.

The code team was leaving and the JCAHO team was coming in, although Win had no idea what they planned to inspect. Joe’s charred body? He heard Roxanne, still in the hall. “I’d really like to show you those statistics from last quarter!”

They ignored her. Win took a deep breath, pulled the telepresence unit to face the wall, and stepped out of his corner to face the team. “I’m the chaplain. I’d like to pray over this patient, please. Can you give us a few minutes?”

“Yes, of course, we’ll wait outside,” said one of the black suits. Roxanne, peering into the room, gave Win an unreadable look.

Win put one hand on the corpse’s forehead and offered a heartfelt, if formulaic, prayer for the repose of Joe’s soul, speaking more loudly than usual so the group in the hallway would hear him. Moving into the Lord’s Prayer, which he could have recited under general anesthesia, he reached out with one hand to tilt the telepresence screen towards him. Swirling stars, still. He could just barely feel Maisie.

He finished the Lord’s Prayer. He started offering a blessing, but the inspectors thought he was done. They were trooping back through the door.

Win closed his eyes and shoved the screen wallward again. He had to keep them from looking at it. How? What was the right thing to do here, the loving thing, his final stand in this job?

I’m not the enemy, Roxanne had said, and he supposed JCAHO wasn’t the enemy either. All of them were just trying to keep hospitals open and safe.

Stupid rules were the enemy.

Win squared his shoulders. “I’m the chaplain here. I really would have preferred to pray with this patient when he was still alive, when he might have taken some comfort in it. I didn’t get to do that because I’m the only chaplain in this hospital.” He paused; they stared at him impassively, but at least they were looking at him and not at the unit facing the wall. “You guys don’t mandate anything close to adequate spiritual-care coverage. Patients who aren’t in trauma centers still need spiritual care. All our staff—doctors and nurses and techs, even housekeeping—do what they can. But we need more chaplains.” He looked at their faces, at Roxanne’s face. He saw no reaction. “Will you think about that when you revise your guidelines? Or should I make a formal request? I could go through my professional organization, but you’re here now, and I know you appreciate efficiency.”

They squinted. He didn’t think almighty JCAHO teams were used to hearing complaints about their procedures during inspections. Then one of the inspectors blinked. “What’s a remote-presence unit doing here?”

Win wondered if they could see him sweating. “I don’t know. It was here when I got here.” The inspector walked to the unit and turned it around. Win’s stomach lurched, but the screen was completely dark. Win saw nothing. He felt nothing: no benevolence or joy or comfort or desire to comfort, no warmth.

A dizzying rush of certainty gave way to a bolus of tears in his throat. Maisie was gone. The crisis was resolved. He’d probably still lose his job, but the hospital wouldn’t get dinged by JCAHO. A burden of guilt he hadn’t even realized he was carrying fell away.

Grief replaced it. He hadn’t been able to tell Maisie that he was sorry, that he knew how cruel he’d been. He wondered if he would have been able to resist the urge to rationalize, to protest that he’d only been trying to protect her. Would she have understood that?

A fine job he’d done of being loving.

The inspector was still frowning at the telepresence unit. “It’s on. Can someone tell me why?”

“We’ll certainly find out,” Roxanne said. She marched to the bed and rang the call bell. A nurse showed up almost instantly: Welcome to inspection week. Roxanne said crisply, “Can you tell us why there’s a telepresence unit here?”

The nurse gave all of them a dazzling smile. “One of the surgeons was called away to another hospital, but he checked on this patient via remote. That was just before the first code, and staff’s been too busy to put the unit away. I’ll do that now.” She turned off the unit and pushed it out the door. Win saw Roxanne exhale.

“Will you think about what I said?” Win was talking as much to Roxanne as to the inspectors. “This patient deserved more spiritual support than we could offer. So do all our other patients, and their families.”

“We’ll take it under advisement,” said one of the suits. What had he expected? There’d be no official response to anything, including Win’s employment status, until at least the end of the week.

Time to go. The team members around the door parted for him. Unsure if he was crying for Maisie or Joe or himself, Win wiped his face on his sleeve. The hallway was very quiet. A few feet from the room, Luz leaned against the wall with her mop and pail beside her, and as he passed, she gave him a small, fierce nod. “Don’t worry, Father. They need you.”

©2017 by Susan Palwick.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Palwick is the author of four novels from Tor Books and a story collection from Tachyon Publications. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of SF/F magazines and anthologies, including several Year’s Best volumes. She has won a Crawford Award and an MLA Alex Award and been shortlisted for the Mythopoeic and World Fantasy Awards. Currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, she has spent twenty years teaching writing and literature and ten years providing spiritual care as a volunteer in a local emergency room. This experience both informed “Remote Presence” and inspired her upcoming career change; in Fall 2017, Susan will begin full-time studies in the MSW program at UNR, with the goal of becoming a medical social worker. She and her husband live with their three cats in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

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

Bookkeeper, Narrator, Gunslinger

Charles Yu | 3540 words

Lost Springs, Wyoming, 1890

It starts as a twitch.

Or that’s what I thought it was. At first.

A jitter in my thumb. Then it’s in my wrist, a jolt of energy running up my arm. All at once, too fast to know exactly where it had come from. There it is, I would start to think, but it was over before I had finished the thought, and there I was, gun in hand, smoke weeping from the barrel. Forty paces in front of me, a dead man in the dirt. He never had any idea it was coming. That made two of us: I was as surprised as he was.

• • • •

I’d never been known as fast before, never been a man other men knew to steer clear of. Every now and then, a new gun would ride into town, preceded by his reputation, infamous for being mean and quick. And when these troublemakers came through, most of the other gunfighters, myself included, well, what can I say? There was a lot more of us looking down at our boots, or off toward the painted, bloodshot red mountains to the south. Anywhere but in the eyes. You could see them, just looking for it. Someone to step in front of them, someone to spit on the ground within fifty yards. Any excuse to start a fight, a fight that would end with one guy dead and the other guy moving on to the next town, his legend a little bit bigger.

But even these assholes knew who was who in our town. A lot of towns have a fastest gun. We had three: Fallon, Ratface, and Pete. But never mind their names, because it was Pete who looked like a rat. Fallon was the ugliest of the three. And Ratface, well, he was actually a good-looking fellow.

Fallon and Pete were friends, until they had a falling out over a woman, the only woman who ever took a liking to Pete and his rat-ugly face. Pete caught Fallon sniffing this woman’s wet undergarments, which wasn’t great, sure, but wasn’t that big a deal, really, except that the woman was still wearing them at the time.

“I’ll see you tomorrow at noon,” Pete said.

Fallon said, “Where?”

Pete said, “Are you kidding me? At the, uh, place. You know, the main drag. Oh God, why am I blanking.”

“Just think about something else,” Fallon said. “It will totally come to you if you think about something else.”

“Fallon, what in the hell is wrong with you? Shut up.”

“I’m just saying. It totally works for me if I think about a cactus or a rock and then I remember what I was trying to . . .”

“Goddammit, Fallon, you ruined the moment. Just meet me in the place where guys like us go and draw our guns.”

And then Fallon started laughing at Pete, and Pete tried not to laugh, tried to do his best to stay angry, but that never works, and the harder Pete tried not to laugh, the more he laughed, until Pete didn’t want to kill Fallon anymore.

• • • •

But then later that night, Pete was lying awake, alone, and looking up at the stars, and realizing he was sleeping close to his horse just for heat and the skin contact, and he didn’t want to be ugly anymore, but there was no way around that, so he got his boots on and walked over to Fallon’s little shack on the edge of town and roused him out of bed with a gunshot to the moon.

“Pete?”

“Yeah.”

“What can I do for you? It’s an hour before dawn.”

“I don’t want this ugly face anymore.”

“Well, nothing much I can do about that. Your face is your face. Can’t change it.”

“I know. So instead, I’m going to do the next best thing.”

“What’s that, Pete?”

“Kill you.”

“Oh. That all?”

“I mean it. I’m going to kill you dead.”

“Now that’s just redundant.”

“In front of the whole town.”

“And dramatic.”

“If you’re done, Pete, I’m going back to sleep.”

• • • •

Word spread fast. By sunrise, all the boys in town were placing bets on Fallon vs. Pete. This was a big deal for the town. Ratface was the fastest gun, not just here, but within a hundred and fifty miles, at least by most people’s accounts. But Fallon and Pete were clearly number two and three, in some order. And now we were going to find out what that order was. Two would probably be standing, and three would certainly be dead.

At about quarter to noon that day, people started lining the center of town, like they were waiting for a parade to come through. Mothers kept their small babies inside, but you could see the little heads peeking out from the windows, straining for a glimpse.

Pete and Fallon stood facing each other, forty paces apart, starting the stare-down.

“I reckon you got what’s coming to you, Fallon.”

“That’s how you talk, man? That’s not how you talk.”

“Yeah. Why? How do you talk?”

“Like a regular person.”

“What do you mean? I reckon that was an insult.”

“That’s what I mean. Reckon. Who says that? Stop saying reckon.”

“I can say reckon if I want. Reckon. Reckon. Ah reckon. Ah dew reckun.”

“Real mature, Pete.”

“Reckon, reckon, reckon.”

Then Ratface walked out from the saloon, whisky still in one hand, half a glass of beer in the other.

“You two idiots,” he said. “You both know I’m faster than either of you. How about this? Whoever wins gets me next. So then you’ll both be dead, and I’ll be out a bullet. How do you like that? That’s what I thought. Now get your asses in the saloon and let’s play some cards.”

Fallon said, “Get out of the way, Ratface. This is between Pete and I.”

And that, to my great and everlasting surprise, is where I come into the story.

So there I am, look at me, I am standing on the porch of the general store, leaning on a post, arms crossed, just observing, like I always do. That’s my job. I guess you might call me the narrator of the town. I sell sundries, do a little bookkeeping on the side, and watch everyone come and go, keeping a mental ledger to go along with my ledgers full of numbers. The town and its people and their stories.

I’ve never had any problems with anyone, certainly not any of the gunslingers, including Fallon.

But for some reason, I just can’t let this one go.

Fallon says, “Excuse me?”

Ratface just starts laughing, like he knows I’m a dead man.

“Correct grammar is Pete and me. You said . . . Pete and I.”

“I know what I said, bookkeeper.”

“It’s a common mistake,” I say.

Pete says, “Come on, Fallon, he doesn’t mean any harm.”

But it’s already too late. Pete vs. Fallon has been cancelled, and replaced with the new matchup: Fallon vs. me.

• • • •

By noon the next day, people are lining up again, but this time there aren’t any bets being taken. People either feel sorry for me, or think I am incredibly stupid. Or both. I guess those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

We stand face to face, about forty paces. We do the stare-down thing. Fallon stares hard. He has a good gunslinger stare. What I do is more like squinting. It is bright and hot and dry and dusty, so you can imagine I am squinting pretty hard.

I close my eyes for a second, half wishing it could just be over with, wishing I could lie there in the dirt like the dumbass I was, half feeling like I deserve this, for being so stupid as to be giving unsolicited grammar lessons to someone like Fallon, someone with the dangerous combination of being both a prick and really quick on the draw.

And then this is what happens, in some order. I will tell you what order it feels like it happens, which is not necessarily the order in which it actually happens:

I hear a scream.

I hear everyone in town gasp all at once.

I open my eyes.

I look down and see my gun in my hand, smoke curling out of the barrel.

I come to understand that Fallon has screamed.

My brain figures out what my body has known for a while: My hand has fired my gun. My bullet has found a resting place between Fallon’s dark eyebrows.

I hear another scream, this one escaping from my own mouth, as I realize there is a dead guy. And I am not him.

• • • •

It’s later, over a beer, that Ratface tells me Fallon never screamed.

“Think about that,” he says.

It’s even later that night, while drifting off to sleep, that I realize Fallon did scream. Just not out loud.

• • • •

It isn’t long before guys start showing up.

Sometimes they ride in alone, sometimes in twos and threes. They don’t want Pete. He’s small potatoes now.

And even though everyone still figures Ratface to be the guy to beat, they don’t want him either.

They want to test themselves against me. The guy who shoots with his eyes closed.

It’s the same thing, every time. Stranger rides into town. Looking for trouble. Can’t find it—and I’m certainly not going to give it to him.

I stop going to the saloon, stop going anywhere I don’t need to go. But sooner or later, they all find me anyway. It might take a day or two, but eventually they find a way to cross paths with me.

I continue to work at the general store. Which makes it easier on them—they just wait for me there until I close up shop for the day, catch me on my way home.

Their first reaction is usually relief. Then a smirk. I don’t much look the part of town gunslinger. Killing me, they figure, is going to be easier than they thought.

So then I even stop going to the store. Doesn’t matter—they come to my home, make up some story, some imagined slight, something an uncle of mine did to them in the past, just whatever it takes to start a fight, and then, the next day at noon, there we are, stranger dead, me with my eyes closed, trying to remember how I did that.

This can’t possibly last, I think. And so everyone else in town privately agrees. You don’t just get this fast overnight. You are born with it, or you aren’t, and I wasn’t. Bad eyes, bad hands, bad reflexes. There’s a reason I’m the town bookkeeper.

So if not skill, then it must be some kind of luck. Some kind of quirk that happens once a century, in some small town, some coin-flipping in the cosmos, coming up heads a hundred times in a row. There is just no way I could have killed all these killers, these bad men, men who can shoot two holes in a silver dollar before an average man has his gun drawn.

It’s the twitch. The jitter in my thumb, the jolt running from my wrist to my shoulder. It’s just some freak of my body, gaining some kind of ability, a hidden gift that just happens to be manifesting itself now. It has to be, right?

Except, maybe. It isn’t. Except, maybe it has something to do with the fact that I close my eyes, something to do with that scream I heard from Fallon, a scream that didn’t come from his mouth. Came from somewhere inside of him. Unless, maybe, it isn’t my body at all that was fast.

But that’s just hooey. This can’t last. Any day now, I’ll get killed. Any day now, some really fast gun will ride into town, and put a bullet in me, and end this lucky streak once and for all. That’s what everyone in town thinks. I can hear them thinking it. At least that’s what it feels like.

• • • •

I see Ratface once in a while. He’s usually at the bar, seeming bored by it all, and possibly, and I can’t quite believe I’m even saying it, possibly a bit envious of me. Of me. The bookkeeper. But he’s always been good. Or if not good, decent. At least to me. So I give him a wide berth, while he watches me with curiously intense interest.

• • • •

And then, Deke comes riding into town. He doesn’t even try to pretend he’s come for any reason other than to kill me. He rides straight up to the store. It’s early in the morning, I’ve just opened up shop, and he walks in, draws his gun, and leads me out to the place where I killed all those other men, just like I’m going to have to kill Deke.

Maybe this time will be the time. Everything feels wrong. I’m standing with the early morning sun in my eyes. I haven’t even fully woken up yet. And the night before, I drank myself to sleep, thinking of all the men I have killed, men who’d asked for their own death sentences by wanting to draw against me. My legs felt heavy, my whole body was sluggish.

Deke did the staring thing. And I am thinking, what is with the gunslinger staring thing? Why do we have to do this? And my mind sort of drifts off and maybe it’s because I am lost in thought that I don’t close my eyes this time, but for whatever reason, I have my eyes wide open which means I am looking at Deke’s butt-ugly face and I see exactly how it happens.

“Now,” Deke says.

Don’t do it, I say.

Except when I say it, Deke hears it, in his head, hears me, responding to him, even though he hasn’t said a word, and although his hand is reaching for his gun, the sound of my voice inside of his head freezes Deke, just like three dozen others before him, freezes him in terror at the feeling of someone else inside his head, and in that instant, my gun is out, my finger already squeezing the trigger.

• • • •

After Deke, it just gets worse.

On the one hand, I have become the town hero. The de facto sheriff. Can I say de facto, in this kind of story? Aw, hell with it. It’s my story. I can say it if I want to. Women come to me every week, asking me to kill their husbands for beating them. Bad men come through town looking to exact revenge, and I am the designated guardian of our population. I have a cheering section. I have fans. Hell, I have a job.

My fans get a little cocky, knowing their guy is always gonna be the winner, knowing that in just a second, I’m going to wipe the smug grin off of the stranger’s face. Knowing, but not knowing anything. Just knowing their guy is going to win.

And that feels good. I’m not going to lie: It is nice to be loved.

• • • •

But the feeling doesn’t last long.

I win. But I don’t feel good about it. Now they’re coming with faster guns, bigger guns. People want me to close my eyes. People are placing bets. It’s not fun, and it’s not fair, and I don’t feel good. This is murder, what I’m doing, even if it looks like self-defense. But what am I supposed to do, turn down the gunfights? Turn my back on my town, my fans? Live looking over my shoulder? Wait until someone catches me in a bathtub, or asleep in my bed?

I try to shoot some of them in the hand. I’m a good shot, but I’m not that good a shot, and some of them die anyway. And the ones who live through it are madder than hell and demand we go again as soon as their hand heals.

And before long, the town turns, too. They’ve gone beyond asking for protection. They developed a thirst for it, for the sport of it. Boys line up, imitate my style. The women, now freed from their abusive husbands, look at me different. I get dirty propositions. Sometimes more than that.

Some of the men who were my fans now sneer at me. I walk into the saloon, and the music stops. People look at me, whisper. Made a deal with the devil. Some kind of witch. Saw him going into an Injun tent and come out without a soul.

Now the kills are piling up. There are hardly any gunfighters left to come challenge me.

I walk through town now, alone again. I go back to working at the store. People pretend none of it ever happened. Pretend I didn’t save their asses. People forget quickly.

I almost forget myself. Almost.

• • • •

And then comes the day. This day.

It starts early, with the moon looking out of place, and rain falling from a cloud, there must be a cloud, but it’s nowhere to be found. Maybe up high and thin, a very diffuse cloud, but whatever it is, there’s water cleaning our roofs, there’s a half moon in the morning sky.

The stranger who rides in today is different. He doesn’t seem to be looking for a fight. At least not in the way the other ones all have.

And I’m minding the store, selling picks and shovels. Selling dreams and tools. Selling snake oil and stories from my ledger. Keeping the books, feeling the judgment, hearing the thoughts.

The stranger—and this one is a she—she is just out there, on her horse. Not bothering anyone. Not looking for me. I’m not even sure why she’s here. It’s been so long since we’ve had a sincere visitor that I almost don’t know what to do.

So the two of us are in agreement: no fight. I feel sure she feels the same, although it’s not quite yet clear why.

And then I hear it: the town, goading us on. It’s the town who does this, who pushes us together for their amusement.

They push us together, me and this mysterious woman.

We are forty paces from each other. The sun seems to have gone into hiding (maybe behind the invisible cloud). But for whatever reason, everything seems wrong again. Like against Deke, but more intense.

I look over at Ratface.

Come on. You gotta be my help, back me up.

This is your battle, he says. I’m here to help.

It takes a second for it to occur to me what has just happened.

Oh, that’s what happened. Ratface never opened his mouth while saying any of that to me.

—You too, I say?

—Yeah.

—And you’ve known all along. You’ve just left me out here, to kill all these poor . . .

—Hold it right there. Those men came looking for you. They asked for your best, and they got it.

—But you could have at least told me. Helped me puzzle through this.

—That’s all part of your learning. Your training, if you will.

—My training? I’ve killed half a hundred gunslingers.

—Those men had it coming. You did the world a favor by taking them from it. Gunslingers don’t seek each other out like that. They respect each other. Generally. Like me giving you space. To work it out. Those men weren’t real gunslingers.

—If they weren’t, then who is?

—She is, Ratface says, pointing to the woman forty paces from me.

The town’s whooping and hollering for a fight now. So loud I can barely hear when this stranger puts her lips right up to my mind and says, Welcome to the club, buddy. You thought you were the only one?

Ratface says, There’s a lot of evil out there, outside of our safe little town, outside of your organized little general store. Welcome to the new world—you ready for it?

I look back at my opponent, and square off. I don’t do the staring thing, and neither does she. We’re both silent, on the outside, and the inside. I wonder how many others there are like us out there, wonder why a quiet little bookkeeper. But then I think, why not me? People think it’s your hand, that’s what makes you a gunslinger. Or it’s your eyesight, your reflexes. And sure, it is. It’s about who can do the stare-down, about people who don’t flinch. But it’s also about this, right here. This little moment in between moments. When you and the other person are just waiting. It’s about a moment, knowing what a moment is. It’s about picking the right moment. Knowing that a moment is a coin; you flip it, on one side is death. The other side: life. For one more day. For one more moment.

©2014 by Charles Yu. Originally published in Dead Man’s Hand, edited by John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charles Yu is the author of three books, including the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which was a New York Times Notable Book and named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine. He was nominated for two WGA awards for his work on the acclaimed HBO series, Westworld, and has also written for upcoming shows on AMC and HBO. His fiction and non-fiction have been published in a number of publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate and Wired. His novel, The Book of Wishing, is forthcoming from Pantheon.

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

Maybe Look Up

Jess Barber | 2970 words

You’re just stepping into the crosswalk when the SUV screeches to a stop with its bumper six inches from your hip. It’s sleeting. It wasn’t sleeting when you left your apartment, so you’re wearing canvas sneakers with holes beside the little toes, where all of your sneakers always get holes, and you haven’t been able to feel your feet for six blocks. It’s been weeks since you got more than four hours of sleep, and two days ago the girl you briefly thought you were going to grow old with told you she wasn’t sure she was able to feel that way about you anymore. So there’s something crucial fritzing out in your brain, and you don’t register the near-death experience at first, just stand there blinking at the SUV with sleepy cow eyes, trying to understand what you should do next.

The SUV’s driver side window rolls down. You’re welcome, says the driver. Fifty-something white guy, business suit, expensive haircut. You stare. The window rolls back up. You stare some more. He lays on the horn, a heart-rattling blare in the quiet afternoon street. You shuffle meekly the rest of the way across the crosswalk. The SUV squeals away the moment your backside has cleared the bumper.

You reach the curb, and stand there in your wet sneakers and broken heart, and think, fuck, I can’t believe I let him get away with that.

• • • •

Yeah. You think that might be the one.

• • • •

Whoa, says An Li. Back up, back up.

An Li’s on the other end of the lumpy couch the two of you rescued from the furniture exchange, diminutive under the terrible chenille throw your mom sent you for your last birthday. Ever since she cut it short, An Li’s coarse salt-and-pepper hair sticks out from her from skull in all directions, like she just jammed her thumb into a socket. It’s great.

Back up here, she says again. That’s what you’re gonna go for? Some lame esprit de l’escalier moment? What about the girl that broke your heart? Have you even told me about this chick? Why not go back and fix things with her?

You make a face. Oh, you say. Oh, yeah, no. That’s not a great idea.

What? Why the hell not?

I dunno, man, you say. We just. We weren’t meant to be.

That’s what people always say to make themselves feel better when shit ends stupidly, An Li says.

Well, you say.

An Li says, it’s going on the list.

The list lives in a little palm-sized flip notebook, plastic purple spiral holding it together at the top, glitter-outlined unicorn on the front. An Li claims the notebook is a metaphor for the risks of nostalgia. She brandishes a pink gel pen that smells like plasticky strawberry foam.

Fix things with—what was her name again?

You wince. Beth-Ann, you say.

Wow, says An Li. No, okay, sorry, that was dick. Fix – things – with – Beth – Ann, she writes, penmanship painstaking and small.

Write the SUV thing too, you say.

Loser, she says, and does.

• • • •

You meet An Li on a syrupy warm Saturday afternoon when you should be finishing your waves and oscillations homework but are instead, predictably and ill-advisedly, curled under a duvet in the common room getting drunk to a backdrop of This Old House re-runs. An Li’s hair is waist-length, then, and she’s still wearing her snake-bite piercings, and she’s carrying a much-patched old hiking backpack you’ll eventually come to refer to snarkily as her bag of holding.

This sucks, An Li tells you. You’ve never seen her before in your life. C’mon, she says. We’re going swimming in the river.

You frown. Isn’t that gross? Illegal?

Not as gross as spending your Saturday afternoon with Bob Vila, says An Li.

I like Bob Vila, you say. Everyone likes Bob Vila.

Whatever, says An Li. Don’t be a loser. Life’s too short.

• • • •

Really, you’re pretty sure you couldn’t fix things with Beth-Ann, even if you wanted to.

This is the problem with all the big shit, right: you only get the one shot at going back and changing something, after all, thirty minutes give or take, and how much of the really fucked up stuff in your life can you fix in a half hour? With Beth-Ann, it’s not like there’s one catastrophic event that ends the two of you, not like you forget an anniversary or skimp on a birthday present. If anything, you have the opposite problem, too intense, too needy, too . . . you.

Maybe if you go back and tone it down, just once, at one crucial moment, put the kibosh on the romantic dinner you set up even though you know she’s freaking about finals, just chill the fuck out that one time she refuses to get coffee with your mother and you end up taking it too personally. Change that, and maybe you wake up in a new-construction three-bedroom out in the suburbs, not in the same cozy shit-hole you and An Li found during grad school and have been too cheap-slash-lazy to move out of for ten years. Maybe you have a big porch with a gas grill, kids, a swing set, a dog. Maybe if you bring Beth-Ann coffee and make sure she gets to class on time that one Thursday in April, instead of going down on her and making her miss a pop quiz that will end up dropping her Ethical Reasoning average to a B, the only one she’ll make at university, you wake up to a world where you go to yoga every morning and don’t have that weird scar next to your left eyebrow and have figured out how to have a glass of wine without ending the night blackout drunk.

You know. Or not.

• • • •

Oh, I’m a loser, you say. Whatever. Like it’s any worse than what we’ve got so far. You scoot down on the couch so you can warm up your bare feet against An Li’s fuzzy pajama pants, press your toes against the long bone of her thigh. Read it to me again, you say.

An Li licks a thumb and goes to flip a page back in the notebook. Her hands aren’t working well today, and it takes her long enough that you start to feel like a dick for asking. One, she says. Ace the first grade spelling test that made Miss Xander put you in the remedial reading group.

Still stings, you say.

Two, she says. Fuck up Danny Tremonti for making fun of your seventh grade homecoming dance dress. Man, you get bitter about these failure-of-wit moments, huh?

He told me I looked like Fiona from Shrek, you say. When I gave him the benefit of the doubt and said thanks, he made sure to clarify that he meant her ogre form.

Lotta pop culture lead-up to that one, but okay, says An Li. So what’s your scathing retort this go-around?

I was thinking punch him in the nuts, you say.

An Li laughs, and starts hauling herself off the couch, leaving your toes cold and bereft.

You sit upright. What do you need? you ask.

An Li gives you a withering look. To piss, she says.

You blush, sit back. Oh.

An Li’s footsteps have a peculiar distinctive rhythm these days, scuff thud, scuff thud, scuff thud.

• • • •

You and An Li tumble into friendship. It’s weird how that works. Somehow a thousand hours of stoned cartoons and fashion advice and midnight bubble tea runs turn into An Li being the first person you call when anxiety gets its knife edge under your ribs, when it’s been three days and the thought of eating solid food makes you choke on the bubble of your own panic, when a week of all-nighters turns into a month of couldn’t-sleep-if-you-tried.

You pick up An Li sobbing on the curb just before dawn somewhere in Inglewood after her boyfriend dumps her. When your grandfather dies, An Li calls your advisor and arranges for someone to teach your recitation. You get a cake delivered to her office on her birthday and convince her dad to pretend like it’s from him when you know he would have forgotten otherwise.

It’s just the way things go.

This one time you get the flu, run a fever so high that An Li is on the verge of forcibly hauling you to the ER. Instead, she takes off work and spends the day huddled with you under her stupid hipster owl quilt you always make fun of, even though you tell her she’s gonna get herself sick and end up being right, and even though you’re so fever-hot you both immediately get sort of sweaty and gross and have to pretend like it doesn’t bother you. You watch some terrible buddy cop comedy and you’re so congested that every time you laugh it comes out as this horrifying sucking-slash-honking sound. Because she’s an asshole, every time you start dating someone new An Li eventually tells them this story, complete with sound effects.

On the bright side, the hipster owl quilt is ruined forever.

• • • •

Of course you think about trying to go back and fix the big shit.

So sure, it’s not like there’s one test you bomb during high school that tanks your GPA and keeps you from getting into the college you really want to go to, one fraught conversation with your mother that ends up being the final cresting wave against the shifting wreckage of your mental health. But like. You could try, you know? Go back and leave a book about meditation on your teenage self’s pillow. A book about feminism. Fuck, a book of poetry, even. Go back to the first day of freshman year and transfer out of the bio class with the professor who will end up inexplicably hating you. Don’t get high the night before the SATs. Skip the SATs entirely and go on that camping trip with your brother, the one where he sees a grizzly bear and won’t shut up about it for months afterward. Go on a camping trip by yourself, somewhere far away, somewhere quiet and cold and moonless where you don’t have to think about anything but the vast emptiness of the sky.

You never know, is the thing, right? This is the shit they tell you, obviously: whatever you change can have far-reaching, unforeseeable consequences. Maybe one of these small kindnesses to yourself would be the difference between Ivy League and state university, between a career-making summer internship and scrubbing down tables at a burger joint in your parents’ hometown. Maybe you’d have started a Fortune 500 company. Maybe you’d have a Nobel Prize.

You know. Or not.

• • • •

You could fix things with Nehal, says An Li. I always liked Nehal.

I’m pretty sure he became a backup dancer for Miley Cyrus, you tell her. I don’t think I’m cut out for that lifestyle of fame and glamor.

We’re old now, says An Li. Surely he’s not doing that any more. He’s probably, like, a dentist.

Even worse, you say. Also stop trying to fix my love life.

Your love life is super bad, though, says An Li.

There’s a snag in the throw, pulling the nubbly fabric into a long, puckered line. You pluck at it, trying to smooth it back out. I don’t wanna, you say. I mean. I don’t wanna change anything too drastic. You know? Like, I’m not looking to—

You trail off, try not to look around at the bright cramped living room, the ugly pomegranate painting An Li won’t let you get rid of, the crooked shelf overflowing with your collection of superhero figurines. An Li catches you doing it anyway, studiously looks back down at the notebook, pretending not to see.

So, she says, number seventeen, cheat at the lottery, is a no-go?

You smile. Apparently that never works anyway, you tell her.

An Li makes a disbelieving sound. Sure, she says. That’s exactly what they’d want you to think.

• • • •

The list is bullshit. Surely An Li knows this. Surely she knows that you don’t give a shit about having a winning lottery ticket, or a house in the suburbs, or a Nobel Prize. Surely she knows that all you can do most days is sit around uselessly wracking your brain for ways you could go back, and fix things for her.

Of course there aren’t any. Studies show: more caffeine, or less. More red wine, or less. Less red meat and more fish, except not too much because that’ll fuck you up, too. More exercise, probably. Go back and leave a Post-it for your twenty-four-year-old self: Future You says get An Li to take up jogging. Bully her into going every day. Trust me, you’ll thank me later.

You know. Or not.

• • • •

There are bad days. There will be more bad days, and then bad days will be all you get.

On the bad days, do you ever think about going back to that drunken Saturday afternoon? Getting up and leaving the common room, hiding in your dorm room until you know the coast is clear, rewriting everything from the beginning?

No. Never. Not even once.

• • • •

One four a.m. near the end of your thesis, you’re going cross-eyed fucking with MATLAB scripts when An Li bangs into your room and says get in the car, we’re going for a drive.

She puts the top down even though it’s too cold for it, and the night is silver and ink-blue over the ocean as you wind your way north along the PCH. An Li’s wearing this hilarious fisherman’s sweater, heavy gray cable-knit with wooden toggles at the neck. You bitch so much about the cold that she eventually pulls over and makes you wear it instead, half wrestling you into it when you try to refuse.

Sometimes you think about the way her bare shoulders looked in the moonlight, the slide of muscle under cold-pricked flesh, and can’t breathe under the weight of all of the limitless inferior cosmic possibilities, the improbable grace that must exist in the universe, to grant you a moment like that.

• • • •

On the day you’re supposed to get to change something, you borrow An Li’s car and drive toward the Santa Monica Pier instead.

It’s a flat gray day, wind churning in off the Pacific, driving all the tourists away. You buy a plastic bag full of stale close-packed cotton candy in Windex blue and kill fifteen minutes trying to feed it to disinterested seagulls, listening to the warped tinkle of the carousel over the hiss-crash of waves. Once upon a time, An Li taught you the trick to sometimes winning at milk jug toss, though the sometimes is key; you spend eight bucks in tickets before you get a win. The attendant rewards you with what you think is supposed to be a bear, orange and overstuffed with hard plastic pellets, its stickered face already peeling off in a vaguely horrifying manner. When the sun blips out of existence over the horizon, you buckle your winnings in the passenger seat and point yourself east.

An Li’s in the kitchen when you get home, prodding at a grilled cheese on the stovetop, Velveeta oozing out of cheap, soft bread. Her cane’s out today, leaned up against the oven door, unused for the moment. That took forever, she says when she hears you come in, then, what the actual fuck is that?

You flop onto the couch, settle the terrifying bear-creature lovingly in the corner next to you. It made me think of you, you say.

I see that whatever you changed had no effect on your inherently unpleasant nature, says An Li. So? What’d you end up going with?

Uh, you say, poking at the corner of the bear’s smile, trying to get it to re-adhere. I went with the SUV guy. Flipped him off and reported him for drunk driving.

An Li turns around to stare at you, still wielding the spatula with one hand. Liar, she says eventually. Oh my god, you’re lying. You didn’t change anything, did you. I mean. I shouldn’t be surprised, but Jesus. You’re such a fucking sentimentalist.

Whatever, you mumble. Your grilled cheese is burning.

I know, says An Li, turning back around to flip it unhurriedly. This one’s for you.

• • • •

You wake up in the morning to a stiff neck and the weight of An Li’s head compressing your liver. The TV’s on, a low game-show murmur, and the crusts of your grilled cheese are cooling on the coffee table.

Hey, you say. You gotta get up. I’m late for work.

An Li frowns without opening her eyes, turns her head to bury her face in the curve of your hip. Call in sick, she says.

Can’t, you say. You lift a hand to scrub your nails gently through the soft bristles at the nape of her neck. But I’ll make dinner tonight.

An Li snorts, slides her head off your lap and wiggles down into the cushions enough that you can escape. It better live up to last night’s culinary masterpiece, she mumbles.

You bite down on a smile, and roll your eyes instead. Whatever you say, loser, you tell her. You’re pretty sure she’s already fallen back asleep.

Outside, it’s a cold, clear day. The sky is a heartbreaking infinite blue, and you should’ve brought a scarf, maybe even gloves, and the shirt you’re wearing smells like the memory of An Li’s shampoo.

You’re just stepping into the crosswalk.

You wouldn’t change a goddamn thing.

—For Sara

©2017 by Jess Barber.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jess Barber lives in Cambridge, MA, where she spends her days (and sometimes nights) building open-source electronics. She is a graduate of the 2015 Clarion Writing Workshop, and her work has recently appeared in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection. You can find her online at www.jess-barber.com.

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

The Memory of Stone

Michelle West | 21000 words

The Guildmaster commonly acknowledged by The Ten houses to be most powerful man in Averalaan stood in front of the long window by which he might survey the eastern half of Averalaan Aramarelas. He had no throne, no place in the Hall of Wise Counsel, no direct route to the ears of the Kings, the two men who ruled the breadth of the Empire of Essalieyan. But money counted for much in the Empire; what The Ten owned in the political realm, he rivalled by the simple expedient of wealth.

He was not a young man, nor a particularly tall one, and his hair, on those days when he had no onerous public duties, fell in a white plume down the back of his head.

On this particular day, it was a solid braid.

He glanced out of the window, his eyes skimming the surface of the ocean beyond the seawall. Light sparkled there, in a pattern the makers of the east tower were doubtless attempting to capture. It reached his eyes, but no more; he looked away.

The ocean’s voice was strong. The strongest of the voices that he heard.

“Master Gilafas.”

Certainly the most welcome. Gilafas was an Artisan. But in truth, he was only barely that; the weakest, the most insignificant of the Artisans the guild had produced in centuries. It galled him when he thought on it, and he was a maker: He could dwell upon any fact, without pause to eat or drink—or sleep, for that matter—for a full three days.

The man who had spoken knew it.

But he was called The Lord of the Compact, the leader of the Astari, the men who served in the shadows the Kings cast. Although the Lord of the Compact understood Artisans as well as any not makerborn could, he was not by nature a patient man. Nor was he a man that anyone angered without reason, and that, a good one.

Gilafas ADelios turned. He did not bow; Duvari’s rank did not demand such a gesture of respect. Indeed, his presence today almost demanded otherwise.

“Master Duvari.”

“Duvari.”

“Duvari, then. How may I help you?”

The insincerity of the question was not lost upon the Astari, but it brought a cold smile to his lips, his austere face.

“You may help me by tendering to the Kings their due.”

“You’ve become a tax collector, have you?” Testy, testy words. The door opened. Sanfred, Gilafas’ assistant, and a Master in his own right, froze beneath the steepled wooden frame, his robes swirling at his feet. Clearly he had run the length of the hall.

He had the brains to bow instantly. “Guildmaster.”

“I am afraid, Sanfred, that we will begin the testing late today. Tell the adjudicators to stand ready.”

Sanfred was not a subtle man. He hesitated. But he was not an Artisan, either; the only madness that possessed him possessed him when he made, and none of the makers worked without the leave of the Guildmaster during the testing. “There are—”

“Not now, Sanfred.”

“Yes, Guildmaster.”

The doors swung shut. Gilafas turned to face the man who ruled the Astari. “The applicants are waiting in the city streets.”

“Indeed.”

“The adjudicators will not begin without me.”

“Then I will be brief.”

“Good.”

Again, the winter of Duvari’s smile crept up his face. Gilafas wondered idly if Duvari had a smile that did not make his expression colder and grimmer. The guildmaster was not, however, a simple noble, to be intimidated by a mere expression. “The Astari had heard that you were to personally oversee these applicants. A highly unusual step for a man of your rank, is it not?”

“Your business, Duvari. Please.”

“It is my business.”

“You overstep yourself. It is guild business; an entirely internal matter.”

“May I remind you, Guildmaster Gilafas ADelios, that in the history of the Guild annals, the Guildmaster has only presided over the testing when he has had reason to suspect that among the applicants, he will find someone . . . unusual?”

Gilafas shrugged, and considered, briefly, the folly of giving himself over to the ocean’s song. As Artisan, he could almost do so without giving offence. Frowning, he lifted his hands; they were shaking. He had not expected that. “A moment,” he said, more curtly than he had intended. He reached out and gripped the edge of curtains heavy with the fall of chain links. They snapped shut audibly at the force of his pull.

“Guildmaster, is there any chance that you seek your successor among the applicants?”

Gilafas chuckled. “No chance whatsoever, Duvari. Is that all?”

Duvari did not move.

They stood a moment, two men assured by their successes in life of their rank, their power.

To Gilafas’ surprise, it was Duvari who spoke first.

“I was sent to tell you,” he said stiffly, “that the orb in the rod is now white.”

Ah. Gilafas closed his eyes. Were he any other man, he might pretend that the words had no significance; he might ask, in a pleasant, modulated tone, what rod, what orb? But that game was not a game he could play. Not against Duvari; Duvari served the Kings.

Behind the shell of closed lids, he could see not the Kings, but the hands of Kings, and in them, the items gifted their line by an Artisan centuries ago: the rod and the sword. Wisdom. Justice. Weapons for the oldest of the Empire’s many wars, and the most important: the war that was its founding. Magic lay within them and upon them, bound to the blood of the godborn.

He had never touched them, rod or sword. Had prayed that he never would. He could not say what force they summoned, what spell they contained, but he knew them for more than simple ornament. They were weapons against old magic, old darkness, old wars.

And they had slept for centuries.

When he opened his eyes again, Duvari was closer; had closed the distance between them without making a sound. “You expected this,” he said softly. It was the first accusation he had made.

“Aye, we expected it,” Gilafas replied, weary. Why now? Why today? He brushed nonexistent hair from his eyes. Yes, his hands were shaking; the pull of the ocean was stronger than it had been in weeks, and he would have to take care.

“What of the sword, Duvari?”

“The sword?”

“The gem in the sword hilt.”

“It is as it has always been.”

“And the runes upon the blade itself?”

“The King has had no cause to draw the sword.”

“He has cause,” Gilafas said, forcing strength into words that wanted to come out in a whisper. “Tell him—ask him—to draw the blade. Read what is written there. Return with word of what it says.”

“I suspect, from your demeanour, that you already know.” Duvari held his gaze, and that, too, was a threat. “Very well. I will return with your answer.” He walked away, then, and only when he reached the doors did he turn and proffer the most perfunctory of bows.

Gilafas waited until he left, and then he made his way to the grand desk that served as this great room’s foundation. There he paused, running his hands over the surface of a very simple box. It was a deep, deep red, and the carvings across its face were not up to the standards of the least of the guild’s Makers.

But he had been told what lay within.

• • • •

Cessaly stood between the twin pillars of her mother and her grandmother, her knuckles white as the alabaster statues in the distance.

Distance was a tricky thing to measure. There were men who could do it; they could tell you things by the length of cast shadows, the rise of buildings beneath the fall of sunlight some arcane measure of the shape of the land. Or so her father had once said. He had stayed in the Free Town of Durant. Said his goodbyes at the edge of the fields that had yet to be tilled and planted, his face dark, his eyes squinting against the light. Except that the sun had been at the back of his head, a shining glint over the brim of his weathered hat.

Her brothers, Bryan and Dell, had hugged her tight, lifting her in the twirl and spin of much younger years. They hadn’t said goodbye. Instead, they had offered her the blessing of Kalliaris, asking for the Lady’s smile, and not her terrible frown.

She had offered them gifts. Wood carvings, things made from the blunt edge of chisel and knife. To remember me by, she’d said. In case I don’t come back.

A bird. A butterfly. Nothing useful.

But in those two things, some quickness of captured motion: tailfeathers spread for flight, beak open in silent song; wings, thin and fine, veined and open, devoid only of the colour that might have leant them the appearance of life.

Dell had handled the butterfly as carefully as he might had it been alive; his clumsy, heavy hands, calloused by the tools of their father’s trade, hovering like wings above wings, membrane of wings, afraid that his grip might damage the insect’s flight.

Her father had taught them that, each in their turn, and butterflies sometimes sat on the perch of their steady fingers, wings closed to edge, feelers testing wind. Birds had been less trusting, of course, and they were predators in their fashion, beaks snapping the skein of butterfly wings in a darting hunt for sustenance.

Cessaly loved them, hunter and hunted, because they were small and delicate when in flight. She had never been large.

Her brothers took after their father; they were broad of shoulder, silent, slow to move. But they put their backs into the labour that had been chosen for them, taking comfort in the Mother’s season.

Cessaly had tried to do the same, she a farmer’s daughter. But the hoes and the spades, the standing blades of the scythes, often spoke to her in ways that had nothing to do with the Mother. She might be found carving mounds of dirt, or fallen stalks of wheat, into shapes: great fortresses, sprawling manors, even small castles—although the poverty of her splendour had become apparent only when she had reached the outskirts of Averalaan.

They thought her clever, then.

Her father would often cry out her mother’s name, and the deep baritone of his voice, cracked by the dry air of the flat plains, returned to her. Cecilia, come see what your daughter has made!

Even her mother’s habitually dour expression would ease into something akin to smile when she came at her husband’s call, and they would stand, like a family of leisure, for moments at a time, oohing and aahing.

She had loved those moments.

But those moments had led to this one.

“How long,” her grandmother said, when the man in robes came out from the distant building and walked down the streets, a pitcher of water in hands as calloused as her father’s. She asked it again when he was ten feet away; repeated it when he was before them.

His face was lined with shadow, eyes dark; his chin was bereft of beard. But he smiled, and if the smile was curt—and it was—it was also friendly. “I fear, good lady, that it will be some hours yet. You are not at the halfway mark.”

“You’re sure that they’ll see us all?”

Again, he offered her a curt smile. “Indeed.”

“We’ve brought some of her work,” her grandmother said. “If you’d like to see it.”

“I would, indeed.” His tone of voice conveyed no such desire. “But I fear that my opinion, and the opinion of the guildmasters, do not have equal standing here.”

Her grandmother frowned and nodded, allowing him to pass. There were others in the line who were just as thirsty as they were, after all, and if she was anxious, she wasn’t selfish.

“Cessaly, stand straight, girl.”

I was, she thought sullenly, but she found an extra inch or two in the line of her shoulder, and used it to silence her grandmother’s nervous edge.

Her mother had not spoken a word.

• • • •

The halls of the guild’s upper remove were unlike the simple, unadorned stone that graced its lower walkways. They were also unlike the halls in which the Makers worked, for those stone walls were decorated, from floor to vaulted ceiling, with the paintings and tapestries, the statues, the interior gargoyles, that were proof of the superiority of the artists that had guild sanction.

No; in the halls of Fabril’s reach, the walls were of worked stone. These contours, these rough surfaces, these smooth domes, took on the shape of trees, of cathedrals, of Lords and Ladies, of gods themselves; they began a story, if one knew how to read it. There were very few who could, in the history of the Guild of the makerborn, for such a reading could not be taught; it could be gleaned if one had the ability and the time.

No, Gilafas thought, with a trace of bitterness. It was the ability that mattered; time was what the inferior could add, if they lacked ability in greater measure.

Guildmaster Gilafas, to his shame, was only barely an Artisan. No Artisans had survived in the generation that preceded him in the maker’s guild, and no men remained who might have seen the spark of his talent in time to kindle it, to bring it to fruition.

Or so he had told himself. It was not his fault; it was not his failing. And on the day that he had been completely overtaken by the voice of the ocean, on the day that he made, out of crystal, a decanter that returned to the waters of that great body the clarity and the purity of its essential nature, the acting Guildmaster had cried tears of joy.

There is magic here, Gilafas. Look. He had lifted the decanter to the eye of the sun. The waters placed in this vessel can safely be drunk. Do you understand? You are not a simple maker—you are an Artisan.

The old man had, with great ceremony, ordered the opening of the upper remove, and installed the young man within its stone folds. What you need to learn, you will learn here. Or so our history says.

Aye, history.

That old man had been dead twenty years. Dead, a year and twelve months after the day he had made his joyful discovery. Gilafas had attended him for the two weeks he lingered abed with a fever that he could not shake. Healers had been sent for, and healers had been turned away; the Guildmaster would have none of them.

“I’m an old man,” he had said, “And close to death, and I’ll not drag a healer there and back for the scant benefit of a few more months of life.” His hair across the pillows was his shroud, his chosen shroud. “And I’m happy to go, Gilafas. You’re here. You’re Artisan. You will guide our guild.”

“The Artisans,” he had said, “all went mad, Nefem.”

“Not all.”

“All of them.”

“Not Fabril.”

“I’m not Fabril, Nefem.”

“No. But you will be Guildmaster. You are an answer to the only prayer I have ever made. I give you the responsibility of the guild, and its makers. They are fractious. You’ve seen that. But fractious or no, there is no greater power in the Empire.” He lifted a hand. “Say what you will. The mages can kill men; they can raise them to power. But they cannot accomplish what we have built here.”

“The Kings—”

“Even the Kings, when they choose to come here, come as supplicants. Be the Guildmaster, Gilafas. While you are alive, the guild will have no other. Listen to the halls in the upper remove; hear the voices that we cannot hear. You have the ability.” His cheeks were wet. “Protect what I have built.”

The maker’s cry. Protect what I have created. Never “protect me.”

Gilafas had become a maker without parallel, and in the streets of the city, in the streets of the holy isle, that counted. But here, within the stretch of the great hall in which the Artisans, since the founding of the guild, had lived and worked, he was almost inconsequential. The walls spoke to him seldom, and when they did, they spoke in a language that was almost entirely foreign. Until the day the demon voices had filled the Old City with the cries of the dying.

The halls had been dark as thunder-clad sky when he had come to them, gasping for air, desperate now for the answers that his meagre talent denied him. He had starved himself of all sustenance: company, food, and water. For three days, while the moon rode high in the harvest sky, while the winter waxed with the bright, jewelled ghosts of the Blood Barons and their legacy of indulgence and death, he had had for company, for clothing, for sound, nothing but the walls themselves.

The walls. He had traced their passage from one end of the hall to another, over and over, creating a maze of his movements. Closed eyes, open eyes, breath creaking through the passage of a tight, dry, throat, he had lost his way. Become lost in his home of decades. Lost to stonework. Lost to the hand of the Artisan.

And lost now, absolved of all dignity, of all power granted him by the accolades of other men, he had come at last to the altar.

It was in a room that did not exist. Sanity knew: Sanity had denied him egress. Some part of his mind, stubborn, sane, anchored to the world of his compatriots, could not be dislodged, but it had been shaken so thoroughly he had at last his proof of the truth of his existence.

The halls had opened the way, for him, and he had walked it.

And he wept, to think of it now; wept bright tears, salt tears. Ocean tears.

For he had come across the broken body of a young woman, her pale, pretty face scarred in three places by the kiss of blade’s edge—her only kisses, he thought, the only ones she had been permitted. Hands bleeding and blistered by some unseen fire, she was the sacrifice.

Demon altar. Dark altar.

And upon it, across the naked skin of her pale, upturned breasts, she clutched them, broken, The Rod and The Sword of Kings.

He heard laughter; could not think that it could be hers, she was so still. This was a monument the Barons would have been proud to own.

When Sanfred and Jordan found him again, wandering naked, bleeding, skeletal, they had taken him in silence to the lower halls, and he had made good his escape.

But in escape, he carried knowledge: The Rod and The Sword would fail. The orb would be shattered, and the runes on the blade would speak in the tongue of an accusation he understood well: They were hollow vessels, their metal and their finery too superficial for the task at hand.

• • • •

The line stretched on forever. Grandmother, mother, and daughter, they faced it like a family faces drought: grimly, silently. Cessaly was uncomfortable in the present, and she was young, adept in ways that her elders, too slow and rigid, could no longer be. She sought past. Found it.

Cessaly’s father, his pride contained in the scarcity of his words, had taken some of the things she had made to market when the merchants began their spring passage through the Free Towns on their way to the Western Kingdoms, those lands made distant and mythical because she would never set eyes upon them.

She had been younger, then; a good five years younger, and still prone to be mistaken for a boy whenever she travelled in the company of her brothers. But she had gone with her Da when he took the wagons into the common, and she had stood by his side while he offered the merchants—at some great cost—the fruits of her half-forbidden, half-encouraged labour.

She had made horses, that year. Horses fleet of foot and gleaming with sunlight, manes flying, feet unfettered by the shod hooves that the merchants prized.

“You made these?” the merchant said, lifting the first of the horses.

Her father had shrugged.

“These are Southern horses. You’ve seen action, then?”

He said nothing. The Free Towners knew that her father had been born on the coast; knew that he had survived the border skirmishes that were so common between the North and the South. They also knew better than to ask about them.

“You’ve a good hand,” the merchant continued, eyes narrowing slightly. “What do you want for them?”

Her father had named a price.

The merchant’s brows rose in that mockery of shock that was familiar to any Towner who had cause to treat with him.

They had bickered, argued, insulted each other’s birth place, parents, heritage. And then they had parted with what they valued: her father with the small horses, the merchant with his money.

It might have ended that way, but Cessaly, impatient and bursting with pride and worry, had said, “What’ll you do with ’em?”

The merchant raised a brow. “Sell them, of course.”

“To who?”

“To a little girl’s parents in the West. Or in the East. They are . . . very good. Perhaps if you had paint,” he had added, speaking again to her father. “For a price—a good price—I might be able to supply that.”

“You wouldn’t know a good price if it bit you,” her father replied, mock angry.

“We want the paint,” she’d answered.

And he turned to look at her, at her eager eyes, her serious face.

“What will you do with paint, child?”

She smiled. “I don’t know.”

And then he frowned. “Did you make these?”

“Yes.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes.”

“And who taught you this, child?”

Her turn to frown, as if it were part of the conversation. She shrugged.

The merchant went away. But when he came back, he handed her—her and not her father—a small leather satchel. “You can keep these,” he told her, “if you promise that I will have first pick of anything you make with them.”

“If the price is right,” her father told the man. “If we don’t like the price, we’re free to take them elsewhere.”

“Done.”

• • • •

To find sunlight again was a blessing. Master Gilafas paused at the foot of the steps and bowed. Sanfred was at his side before his stiff spine had once again straightened. He felt the younger man’s solid hand in the crook of his elbow, and was grateful for it: The memories of that early passage through Fabril’s reach had teeth, fangs, gravity. To struggle free of them today was almost more than he was capable of.

Once, that would have pleased him. And perhaps, if he were honest, it pleased him in some fashion today. But triumph gave way to horror, and horror send him scuttling away like insect evading boot.

He cleared his throat. “The applicants?”

“Waiting, Guildmaster.”

“Good.”

Sanfred had never once asked him why he had chosen to oversee this testing. No one had.

By unspoken consent, the Makers, fractious as only the creative can be, granted him the privacy of their admiration. What he could make—in theory—no one among them could ever hope to make.

A mage could, he thought, irritable. A mage of lesser talent and no ambition. But he had too great a love for his authority to speak the words aloud.

“Take me.”

“Yes, master.”

“And bring the box on that desk. I do not need to remind you to handle it with care.”

• • • •

After that day, Cessaly’s size was no longer a problem. Her father spent some part of the summer building a small addition to his barn, and he placed her tools, her paints, the pieces of wood that he found for her use, beneath its flat roof. He had no money for glass, but the doors themselves opened toward the sun’s light, and Cessaly worked from moment it crossed the threshold of the room, ceasing when it faded.

The merchant returned three times in the year, bringing different tools, different materials, different paints. He asked if she had ever seen metal worked, and when she shook her head, he offered to take her to a jeweller in the largest of the Free Towns. It was an offer that was flatly rejected by both her father and her mother.

They were very surprised when, two years later, that jeweller made the trek at the merchant’s side when the caravan returned.

“This had better not be a waste of my time,” he said curtly to the merchant.

“I’m paying for your time,” the merchant had replied, with a very small smile. “But I know my business.”

“Where is your young paragon of creativity, Gerrald?”

“In front of you.”

“What, this girl?”

“The very one.”

The jeweller frowned. He was balding, and the dome of his skull seemed to glow. “How old are you, child?”

“Twelve.”

The frown deepened. “Twelve. And you’ve never apprenticed to anyone?”

She shook her head.

“Well. I’m not sure that I can offer you such a position—I’ve heard that your parents won’t hear of you travelling, and this Town is not my home. But Gerrald has offered me much money to teach you for the summer, and I admit that the offer itself is unusual enough to have piqued my curiosity. If you are willing, I would teach you some small amount of my craft.”

He brought with him gold and silver, sparkling gems and glossy pearls, opals and ebony, a small dragon’s hoard.

But he brought something better, something infinitely more alluring: fire. Fire, in the heart of the rooms her father had built.

She had waited for her father’s permission, and her father had granted it.

• • • •

The man in robes came again, three times, the water jug heavy in his hands. She watched his shadows against the cobbled stones, and her hands ached. Her grandmother’s hands ached as well—but she blamed that ache on the ocean Cessaly could taste when her tongue touched her lips.

Cessaly had not yet seen the ocean; she had seen buildings, horses, and streets that went on for as far as the eye could see. There were white birds in the air above, birds with angry, raucous cries; there were insects beneath her feet among mice and rats; there were cats sleek and slender, and dogs of all shapes, all sizes.

There was no workshop; she had been forbidden all of her tools. When travelling along the road, she had been permitted to idly carve the pieces of wood she had taken from the farm; they were gone now.

She wanted them.

There was no dirt beneath her feet; there were stones, smooth and flat, longer than she was and at least three times as wide. There were fences, too, things of black iron or bronze. Nothing that she could work with.

She plaited her hair instead, until her mother caught her at it, and grabbed both her hands, stilling them.

“Not here,” she had said, severely. “Not here.”

Her hands began to ache; her eyes began to burn. She could not wait forever.

• • • •

The Jeweller stayed in the Town of Durant for four years. He bought a house for himself, very near the common; he built his workshop, sent for his apprentices, and brought his business to the town. He also made a room for Cessaly, and her mother brought her to it, and took her from it, every day except for the Mother’s day.

Cessaly worked with gold, with silver, with platinum. She handled his diamonds, his emeralds, his rubies, the blinking eyes of curved sapphires, the crisp edges of amethyst and firestone. He had begun by telling her what he wished her to achieve, and had ended, quickly, by simply giving her material to work with.

He often watched as she worked; often worked by her side, make the settings upon which he might place the results of her labour. He was not a man who was given to praise, and indeed, he offered little of it—but his silence was like a song, and his expression in the frame of that silence, a gift. Cessaly liked him.

And because of that, she decided that she would make something for him. Not for the merchant to whom all of her work eventually went, but for Master Sivold himself.

Because she wished the gift to be entirely her own, she chose wood to work with; wood was something that she could easily afford on her own. The merchants came in the Spring, and when they did, she asked if they might bring her something suitable. But she did not ask for soft wood; did not choose the oak that came from the forests a few miles outside of the village. She requested instead a red, hard wood, something riven from the heart of a giant tree.

She was so excited when the merchant placed it in her hands; she was absorbed by the tang of wood, its rough grain, the depth of its unstained colour. She wanted to rush back to the workshop, to begin to work right away.

But she heard its voice, wood’s voice, and it bade her wait.

Voice? No, not voice, for the words it spoke were not quite words, and the wood offered her no more than that; she could not speak to it, could ask it no question and receive no answer of use. But she could feel it in the palms of her hands as if it were a living heart; could see it move, shrinking in size until the truth of its shape was revealed.

She waited.

Four days later, at the height of summer, during the longest day of the year, she began to carve. To cut. To burn. She worked until the sun had begun to touch the colours of the sky; worked until the first of the stars was bright.

And when she was finished, she saw that her mother was asleep in the great chair in the corner; that the lamp had been lit and rested on the table beside that chair; that the workshop itself was empty.

She was very, very tired, but she tucked the box away, hiding it beneath the heavy cloths that protected the gems and the metals from sawdust and insects. Then she woke her mother and together they went home.

The next day was the day that changed her life.

She came to the workshop later than she usually did; her mother had had a great deal of difficulty waking her, and was concerned that she might have fetched ill. But Cessaly wasn’t running a fever; she didn’t cough or sneeze, didn’t shake much, didn’t throw up—and in the end, her mother had relented and accompanied her to the Jeweller’s house.

There, shaking off lethargy, Cessaly ran inside, ran to her workbench, and grabbed the box she had made. It was simple, perhaps too simple for a man like Master Sivold. But it was not without adornment; she had carved a pattern around the lip of the lid that made the join between lid and box almost invisible. Only with care could she see it herself.

“What’s that, then, Cessaly?” he said, as she approached him.

“Last month you said that you’d run out of space for the things—the things that you can’t bear to part with.”

“Did I?”

She nodded. “And I—you’ve done so much for me here, you’ve shown me so many new things, you’ve let me make what I—what I have to. I—”

His brow rose. “Is this for me?”

“Yes. I made it. For you. Only for you,” she added. “It’s not for Gerrald. And anyway, it doesn’t matter if he does see it. It won’t do him—or anyone else—any good.”

He smiled and held out his hand. “It’s very elegant, but a little too plain for Gerrald’s taste. Or for his customers.” He lifted it, examining the carving around its side. “Cessaly, what is this?”

His fingers brushed the trailing strokes of letters, letters hidden in the movement of leaves, the trailing fall of their branches.

“Your name,” she told him.

“My name?” He frowned. And the frown deepened. “Why do you say that, child? It does not say Sivold.”

“It doesn’t?” Her eyes widened then, with panic and fear. She reached for the box, and he must have seen the horror on her face, for his frown eased. But he did not return it to her hands.

“My eyes are not nearly as good as they once were, and your work here is so delicate, child. Perhaps I am misreading.” He shook himself and the smile returned to his face. “I didn’t know that you knew how to spell or write.”

She didn’t. She said nothing.

After a moment, he lifted the lid from the box, and then his eyes grew wide, and wider still; his lashes seem fixed to his brows.

“Master Sivold?”

He continued to stare.

“Master Sivold?”

And when he finally blinked, his eyes teared almost instantly. He closed the lid of the box with great care, and set it down on the workbench. “When did you make this, Cessaly?”

“Yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“Yesterday. And a little bit of the night.”

He raised his hands to his face. “I knew we were doing you a disservice, child,” he said, when he at last chose to lower them. “But I thought that your parents would be happier if you—if you worked in the Free Towns.” He shook his head. “You must send for your parents, child. Tell them I need to speak with them. Tell them it is urgent.”

• • • •

And so she had.

They had come to speak with Master Sivold, and the closed door came between her understanding and their adult words—but she had waited just beyond the reach of the door’s swing, and when it opened, it opened upon her pale face, her wide eyes.

Master Sivold was angry. Her father was angry. Her mother, grim and silent, stood between them, hands curved in fists, knuckles white as the bone beneath stretched skin.

She knew better than to ask what had been said. It was obvious that their anger had had no good place to go, and she wasn’t about to provide one.

But Master Sivold’s anger was pointed, directed; when he turned toward her, it smoothed itself away from the lines of his face. She almost wished it hadn’t; he looked old as it left him.

“Cessaly, I want to ask you a question.”

She gazed sideways at her father; his glance spared her nothing, but his nod was permission.

“How did you make the box?”

“How?”

He nodded. Gentle, that nod, as if she were a babe. She didn’t like it. “Same as I make anything else.”

“Tell me,” he said again. “Take as long as you like.”

“I chose that piece of wood,” she said, “because it was the right wood. It took a little while.”

“How did you know what to carve?”

“Wood knows,” she said quietly. She never talked about her work, and it made her nervous to speak now. She wasn’t sure why. “I wanted to make it for you,” she added. “And I started the minute I got the wood home, but it told me to wait. It told me to wait for the longest day.”

“And how did you know what day that was?”

“I didn’t,” she said again. “The wood knew.”

Master Sivold turned to look at her father. Her father, whose shoulders seemed smaller somehow.

“And the sun knew,” she continued, thinking about it, feeling the wood in her hand, the warmth of that sun on the back of her neck, her head, its light on the dark streaks of grain.

“Tell us what the sun said,” Master Sivold told her.

She looked at his face for a moment, seeing in the lines around his eyes and lips the movement of wood grain. She reached out, unthinking, to touch him, to feel the surface of that skin, that grain.

And when she opened her mouth, when she began to speak, she left bruises there, around his lips, where her fingers grazed flesh. There, and in the dark of his eyes.

• • • •

They kept her until the harvest’s end, and then they travelled east, east to the Empire of Essalieyan. Her father and mother had argued three days—and nights, tucked in the battleground of their bed, their voices loud and rumbling, their words muted by log walls—and in the end, her mother had won, as she often did. Her brothers were to stay; she was to travel with the caravan until she reached the city, and from there she was to seek the Guild of the Makers.

“But—but Da—”

“It’s your mother’s decision, not mine. I don’t send my kin to—”

“Father,” her mother had said, clipping both ends of the words between tight teeth.

Cessaly wanted to be happy. Or she wanted him to be happy. She wasn’t sure. “But if I’m a maker—we’ll be rich. We’ll be rich, Da.”

“You’ll be rich,” he said, gruffly. “And we’ll be farmers, here, in Durant.”

“I don’t have to live there.”

He looked at his wife. His wife said nothing.

She did what any sensible girl would do. She went in search of Dell. Bryan was older, and minded his father’s commands.

“Dell?”

“Aye, Cessaly.”

“Why can’t I live here?”

“They think you’re makerborn,” he said.

“But all of the makers don’t live in the Empire.”

“No.”

“Then why do I have to?”

“Because you made that damn box, is why.”

She wanted to tell him to burn the box, then, but she couldn’t quite say the words. Wasn’t certain why. “I did bad?”

“You did too good,” he told her, when he heard the tone of her voice. “And now they’re all afeared. Master Sivold—“

“What?”

He shook his head. “It’s nothing. They think you’ll go crazy, Cessaly.”

“Then why are they sending me?”

He shrugged. “Because all the crazy people live in the Empire?”

So she hit him. Lots. He wasn’t supposed to hit her back.

• • • •

The crowds wavered like a heat mirage in Gilafas’ vision. The great doors had been rolled back, and light skittered off the sheen of marble and brass, abjuring its smoky green, its black, its curling greys. Beyond the open doors, the gabble of a thousand people moved and twisted like the ocean’s voice; he could make out no words because he could hear them all so clearly.

“Master Gilafas?”

He lifted a hand. “I think—I think, Sanfred, that I will have my pipe. Now.”

“Your—ah. That one. Yes, Guildmaster.” He hesitated for just a moment, and then he waved another maker over and relinquished his grip on Gilafas elbow, forgotten until that moment.

Everyone hovered. It was annoying. Their shadows against the floor, the fall of their feet, the drifting haze of their cloudy beards, made him think of the storm. He waved them away. Ocean voice, he thought. What am I to do, today? It is not the time.

Sanity. That was his curse. He listened to confusion dispassionately, refusing, as he had always done, to allow it reign. His brief dalliance with insanity had given him no cause to regret that decision.

The pipe came, and he lit it carefully, inhaling bitter smoke. It was not to his taste, and not to his liking, and it would be less to his liking on the morrow when he woke to the taste of something dead and stale on his tongue. But the alternative was less appealing.

“Send them, then.”

“Yes, Master.”

• • • •

Hours passed. Of the many hundreds of hopeful applicants, Guildmaster Gilafas found two he was certain belonged within the guild walls. He treated them not only with the respect of their future rank, but with the affection reserved for kin, no matter how distant, who have found their way home against almost insurmountable odds. It was not an act. There was a brotherhood among the men and women who were, by nature of birth and some quirky, divine providence, driven to these strange acts of creation.

That brotherhood buoyed him, although he was not entirely certain that some part of that warmth was not caused by contents of his pipe. It had been some hours since he had filled it, and he hesitated, hand over pouch, to do so again.

Looking up, he realized how costly that hesitation had been. He had never walked so close to the edge without realizing it; somehow he had stepped across it.

Had he the voice for it, he would have cried out in fear or horror. It was the only thing in the long day that he would be grateful for later; his dignity was spared.

For the doors were there, they were open; the makers were in attendance; he was not in Fabril’s hall, and the visions of that complicated, terrible place did not hold him in their painful grip.

Only memory did, but memory was enough, more than enough. He handed his pipe to Sanfred, hands shaking so much he feared to drop it before it held what he required.

And he tried to smile at the young woman who walked towards him.

In the privacy of his thoughts, he was still a coward, had always been a coward; he told himself that he was mistaken, old, befuddled, that the voices of the ocean and the voices of the Maker had grown strong because he had done too little, these past few days, to still them. He tried to tell himself that what he remembered could not be real.

But cowardice provided no shelter: he recognized the girl’s face.

She had lain upon a bloodied altar in a hidden room that he had never tried to find again.

• • • •

When Cessaly saw the man who sat behind a table that was larger than any she had ever seen—including Master Sivold’s workbench—she froze.

“Cessaly,” her mother said, impatient, fearful, angry.

But for once, her mother’s voice was almost beneath her notice.

As if he were wood, or silver, or gold, the man caught the whole of her attention, diverting daylight, the vast rise of ceiling, the width and breadth of wall. Only the ocean’s taste grew stronger as she met his eyes, and the inside of her mouth was dry as salt.

She should have remembered that when she approached wood, or gold, or silver, she approached first with axe, chisel, knife, fire; that the only voice allowed these things that waited transformation was hers.

She said to him, before she could think—and this, too, was akin to her movements with wood, with silver, with gold—“You make things.”

It lacked manners, which would have been a crime in a different place; lacked them in the presence of a man of obvious import.

But it spoke to the heart of the matter.

“Yes,” he said gravely. “I make things.” His hand reached out, and out again, as if he would touch her; it stopped inches short of her face, and fell.

She had seen glass in windows, although her family’s home had had none until the third year of her work with Master Sivold, and she understood that the one that stood between them now was closed.

• • • •

You make things.

“Yes. Yes, I make things.”

She lifted a hand.

“I do, too.”

He would never hear the ocean again, not as he had. A man’s mind had room for only so much madness, and Gilafas’, less than any Artisan before him.

“Sanfred,” he said, rising, pipe somehow no longer a danger.

“Master Gilafas?”

“I am done for the day. This girl is makerborn; ask her—mother?—for the information we require, draw up those forms that you deem necessary, do what needs be done.” He rose. Picked up the box he had ordered carried to this table with such care.

“This was once yours,” he said.

She looked at it, and her expression twisted. “It was never mine,” she told him solemnly. “I made it for Master Sivold.” She frowned when she said it, and her face lost some of its lustre, some of its terrible lure. “Are you upset about it, too?”

He nodded. Before he could catch himself—if he would ever be able to catch himself—his chin fell and rose in a sharp, jerky dip. “But for a different reason. I have not seen the inside of the box. I could not open it.”

“Would you like me to open it for you?”

“If you would.”

She took the box carefully, placing the left palm firmly beneath the centre of its flat, legless bottom. And when she opened it, Sanfred understood what Gilafas had not yet said, because he was standing just to his right, and he was human enough to be curious.

The inside of the box itself was longer than the table at which the Makers now sat; it was as deep as a man’s arm from palm to shoulder.

“He needed more room,” she told him gravely, “for the things that I made. Will you give it back to him?”

“Yes,” he told her gently. He knew how important the answer was; she was makerborn, after all.

• • • •

It took some hours to settle not the girl, but her mother. She would not leave without speaking to the Guildmaster—a sure sign of her ignorance of the workings of the Guild of Makers.

Therefore Gilafas, exhausted and on the edge of compulsion, drove himself for a second time from the confines of his quarters in Fabril’s reach. Sanfred was nowhere to be seen; neither was the girl, although he had been quite specific.

It was only when he reached the visitor’s lounge that he realized that hours had not, in fact, passed; the sun was wrong for it—it was still in the sky. He steadied himself against this dislocation as Sanfred appeared. Sanfred who could hide mortal concern behind a placid, workman’s expression.

He sat in front of this dour woman, and she beside an older, dourer one. They formed the sides of a triangle; Sanfred, attending, was simple shadow, and moved like a trick of the light.

Master Gilafas had only one desire when confronted with this woman, and it was strong, terrible, as visceral as any need to make, or make again, had ever been.

Take your girl, take her as far away from this place as you can, and still live. Go North, to the barbarians; go South to the slavery of the Southern Courts; go West, to the kingdoms of which I know so little. Leave her anywhere but here.

But he did not.

“Will you take care of her?” the woman said. She was fidgeting now.

“I assure you, there is not another place in all of the Empire where she will be—”

“Because she’s always been a bit odd.” The woman, having said the words, lost half a foot of height. Her hair, dark with streaks of grey, seemed to frame a face too pale to carry it. “She’s more than a bit odd now. We’re her kin, we know what she means when she speaks; we know there’s no harm in her wild ways. She’s a good girl. She’s an honest girl.”

He started to speak, but she had not yet finished.

“She won’t thieve, mind, not for herself. But she takes a fancy to things she sees—bits of wood or stone, mostly—and she’ll pick ’em up.”

“We understand that, here.”

“And she’ll work funny hours, if you don’t stop her. It’s hard, but she needs to eat.” Care had worn lines deeply into the material of her face. “Don’t forget it: She needs to eat. And drink. And sleep. She’s got to be reminded; we let her work once, thinking she would stop in her own time. Waited to see how long that was.” Hands were clenched, now.

He stared at her. To his surprise, he wanted to offer her comfort. “She will be treasured here in a way that you cannot envision. Sanfred, the man who is hovering, was trained to do two things: He is a painter, here, one of few. And he is a . . . baby-sitter. We all work the hours that your child would work, unminded. And we have learned to watch out for each other. She will not go hungry; she will not go thirsty. Sleep is harder to dictate.”

She wasn’t satisfied. He could see it.

He said, simply, “There are things that she is beginning to learn that she should not learn on her own. The box—you saw it—is only the first sign of that. There are others things she might have made. In our histories, a boy much her age walked into the blacksmith’s forge shortly after a bandit raid. The raids that year were fierce and terrible, for most of the land had seen little rain, and the fields would not take.

“He made a sword. It killed. That was all it did. It was his rage and his desire; he wielded it. It sang. He carried it to the bandit’s home, and he had his revenge, and it was bright and bloody.

“But he had had no sword skills, and he was not a large lad; the sword itself contained both the desire to kill and the ability. In the end, the bandits themselves were not enough to slake its thirst, and he wandered into the village he had loved. Hundreds perished before the sheath that would hold that sword was created.”

She was pale, now, pale as light on his beloved ocean. But she said, simply, “What happened to the boy?”

A mother’s question.

“He was mad,” he replied. “And he remained so.”

“They didn’t kill him?”

He hesitated. “No,” he said at last, and gently, “they did not kill him. They gave him, instead, to our keeping.”

Before she could speak, he raised a hand. “And in our keeping, in the safety of these walls, or in the stewardship of those best suited to such a task, he made such things as Kings wield, and his work helped to change the face of the lands we now call the Empire. He was honoured, he was revered. In his fashion, he was loved.”

She closed her eyes. Opened them. “I can’t take her home,” she said, the statement a question.

“No.”

She rose, then. “Let me say my goodbyes, and I’ll not trouble you further.”

But she would. He could see it in the lines of her face, the depth of her concern. She would go home, to Durant, and the fate of her daughter would draw her out, again and again, to this vast, intimidating place. She would see a stranger in this daughter, and the daughter—he was not certain what the daughter would see.

Because he was sane. Because he had always been blind, that way. He rose and offered the woman his hand; she accepted it as if it were an anchor on a short chain.

• • • •

To be a failure was something Gilafas had contemplated for the better part of his adult life. But he had contemplated it in the temple makers made of quarters an accident of birth had granted him. To do penance for his failure, he had strengthened the Guild immeasurably, giving it the steady guidance that a madman could never have conceived of. This, he did for the old man whose joy he had not the strength to live up to.

If he could not increase the mystery of the Guild, if he could not add to the grandeur of its legends, he could at least do that.

And he had thought himself an honest man; had thought acceptance of his paltry ability had been his for the better part of a decade.

Now, it was unbearable.

The girl—Cessaly—had been moved to Fabril’s reach the moment her mother had left. He might have assigned the duty of settling her to Sanfred, or another of the Makers who served him directly, but cowardice prevented it, presenting him with the first of many menial tasks he was to adopt.

Because Sanfred could not fail to see in the girl what Gilafas himself lacked. How could he not?

So it was that Guildmaster Gilafas ADelios led her to the winding tower stairs that led to Fabril’s reach.

She had taken the steps timidly at first, her hands faltering upon the fine rails beneath the grand sweep of open tower, the fading light. She had no experience of this world, save in story—if that—and her fear made her precious to him, for he had no children.

But the fear itself was fleeting.

The light in her eyes was not; it was fire, of a sort, the fire of a forge, the fire of one makerborn who sees into the world of mages. Or gods. He could not himself say, although he had walked that path.

But he knew the moment that she lost fear to wonder; he could see it in her. Could hear it, in the whisper of moving strands of her hair, taken by a breeze that did not—and had never—touched him.

She carved birds; he remembered that the grandmother had mentioned it to Sanfred. Birds, butterflies, creatures not bound to the earth. And he? He worked water, and whales, dolphins, things of the deep that might break the bounds of their element in fleeting steps, with will and joy.

So she flew. Up, up and up. She knew where the doors were. Were she not small, were her step not contained by the reach of short legs, she might have evaded him utterly. He could not let her do it. He could not let her make herself at home in Fabril’s reach.

Was ashamed of the inability.

We are not judged by what we create; we create. Maker’s motto. And what use that motto now? It was a lie.

Vanity had its use.

Cessaly stopped two thirds of the way up the stairs and placed her hand gently upon the wall. A recess in the smooth stone caught the shape of her palm, moulding itself to her fingers as if the stone were liquid.

He heard the ocean’s voice, then. A roar, a roar of water breaking stone and wood, rending cloth, burying men. She opened a door that he had never found.

And turned to stare at him, her eyes wide, her brows lost beneath the edge of poorly cut hair. Honey eyes, he thought, a shade too brown to be the eyes of a child of the gods. “Master Gilafas?”

He shook his head, lifting hand to clear his vision. “I hear the ocean,” he told her bitterly. “Only the ocean.”

“Can you hear me?”

He stopped then, turned the full of his attention upon her, upon the question she had asked. She was a child. By age, she could be counted among adults, but there was nothing of that in her expression; she was made of curiosity, insecurity, joy, and fear.

“Yes, Cessaly. I can hear you.”

• • • •

His answer was important. Because she could hear him. She could hear the ocean in his voice, could see it in his eyes, her first glimpse of the blue surface against which sun scudded. She smiled, her hand against something soft and warm. “I can hear stone,” she whispered. “I can hear wood growing. I can hear wind in the leaves, and the rain dance. I can hear the birds, seabirds, great birds. I can hear the sun’s voice.”

She had heard these things before, in the dells of Durant, in the furrows of her father’s fields, in the quiet of log and peat and moss yards from the river’s edge, where the water pooled before resuming its passage.

“I can hear silver,” she told him. “And gold. And the voices of rubies and diamonds. Sapphires are quiet.” She stopped. She had never said so much before.

“But I hear other voices. There, past the door. Other voices.”

“Open the door, then, Cessaly.”

She started to. Started, and then stopped. She felt the cold in the cracks between stone. The voices she knew fell silent, one after the other; the cold remained, and she began to understand that it had a voice of its own.

Death. Death there. The death of all things.

She drew back. Shook her head, although it was hard; all of her was shaking.

“Cessaly?”

Her hand fell away from the wall. “No,” she told him sadly. “The cold will kill us.” She turned to look at him, and she saw the shadows that the walls contained, straining for freedom, for something that might have looked like flight to a person who had never seen birds. Never made them, inch by inch, never carved the length of their flight feathers, the stretch of their pinions.

It was dark now. The world was dark.

But Master Gilafas was still in it.

• • • •

He caught her hand; it was blue.

“Come,” he said gently. “We are not yet there, and there is no cold in Fabril’s reach.”

“Where is Fabril’s reach?”

“Up,” he told her gently. “Up these steps.”

“I can’t see them.”

“No. Sometimes they are hard to see.” The lights in the wall sockets were bright and steady; they had never failed, and he was certain they never would. Fabril had made them himself, had made this tower, the reach.

“Will you take me there?”

“Yes, Cessaly. Can you feel my hand?”

She appeared to be thinking, as if thought were her only vision. He waited.

“I can feel it.”

“Good. You have never made hands,” he said. “But when we arrive, I will bring you wood and tools, and you must try.”

“Just hands?”

“For now, Cessaly. Just hands.” Speaking, he began to walk, the steps as solid and real as the fading light of day, the passage of time, the Holy Isle.

• • • •

After she had made her way up the stairs—and in his estimation it took some two hours—she had to face the gauntlet of the great hall.

It was in the great hall that his envy, his bitterness, his resentment gave way to something more visceral: fear.

She screamed.

She screamed, and pulled away from him. Pulled back, turned to flee. He lost her, then. The hall swallowed her whole. She was gone.

He cursed as he had not done in years, the reserve and distance of age swallowed whole by the intensity of emotion.

• • • •

She heard the voice of stone. The voice of mountains, old as the world; the voice of the molten rock in the heart of its ancient volcanoes; the voice, insistent, of its cracking, sliding fall. All the voices she had heard in her life were made small and insignificant; she lifted hands to capture them, and they came up empty.

She had no tools. No way to speak to stone with stone’s voice, no way to soothe it.

But that didn’t stop her from trying.

Trying, now, clawing at things too heavy and solid, her arms aching with effort, hands bleeding.

• • • •

Past midnight, the fear left him, sudden as it had come. He was drained of it, like a shattered vessel of liquid, and what remained was the residue that had haunted his adult life.

Think. Think, Gilafas.

What a maker heard—if a maker heard what an Artisan heard at all—did not destroy the world; it did not unmake a reality. Fabril’s reach, in all its frustrating, distant glory, was there before him. And he knew that the girl had come with him, slowly and hesitantly, eyes wandering across the face of its carved, misshapen walls.

And what of the door, Gilafas? What of the door that did not exist until she placed hand against wall?

It did exist. It always existed. I never found it. I never thought to look. I knew what the shape of the tower was—and is—I knew that such a door at that place could not exist.

Think.

He ran to the closed doors of his workrooms, those vast, open spaces in which light dwelled when there was any light at all. He opened drawers and cupboards, looking for chisels, for the knives which woodworkers used; wood was not his medium, but all Makers of note often dabbled.

When he dropped a drawer on his foot, when the slender tubes made for blowing glass shattered about him, he paused long enough to avoid its splinters. Just that.

He did not think to call Sanfred, and would wonder why later. For now, he continued to search until he found the oldest of his supplies; blocks of wood as long as his forearm.

Thus armed, he paused again. Think, Gilafas. Think.

No. Not think.

Listen.

• • • •

By dawn, he found her, and in finding her, he found a room that he had never seen.

It lay behind the stonework on the west wall, between the arch made of the raised arms of two men whose likenesses were said to be perfect: the first Kings of Essalieyan. They were not overly tall, and the space between them just large enough to fit a small girl with ease. A large man would not have been able to follow that passage, and if he had never felt cause to be thankful for his lack of stature before, he was grateful now.

The passageway was narrow and poorly lit; it was cold with lack of light, and almost silent; his breath was captured by folds of cloth, muted.

He could not have said why he chose to follow this path. But having begun, he heard her, and hearing her, saw her clearly, small, fine-boned, clear-eyed. He thought of what she might be, robbed of colour and lent the clarity of glass or crystal, and this helped; he could imagine the fires, the glass, the workroom, the movement of hands and lip, the changing contours of a medium that was fluid, as close to the ocean in texture as anything solid could be.

He had never had to work so hard just to walk in Fabril’s reach.

Fabril’s reach will teach you everything you need to know.

For the first time in years, he turned those words over in his mind’s eye, blending them with Cessaly until they were a part of her, a part of his making. What, Master Nefem, do I need to know? And if this is a part of it, why do I need to know it?

The hall ended; it opened into a room that had windows for a ceiling, a dome of fractured light. Crystal cut its fall into brilliant hues that traced the sun’s progress.

She huddled in their centre, her hands scratching the surface of the floor. She did not see him; could not see him. What she saw, he could not say, but he knew that she would see it until she found some release from it, until it was exorcised.

He could see what she could not: blood, dried and crusted upon the palms of her flailing hands.

He did not touch her. Instead, he knelt by her side and placed those tools he had found into the hands that were so ineffectual.

For the first time since he had entered the room, her focus changed. He placed the wood before her, but above the flat, smooth surface of stone.

He would take her from this room, in time. But that time was not yet come.

“Cessaly,” he said, although he was certain she wouldn’t hear him, “make what you must; I will return.”

• • • •

She loved the sound of Master Gilafas’ voice.

No one had ever had a voice like his, and she marvelled at it, for there was a texture beneath the surface of his words and his emotions that moved her to listen. She had thought to miss home; to miss her Da and her mother; to long for Bryan and Dell, the two people who had brought her close to flight in the days of her childhood.

She forgot that longing quickly. The soles of her feet forgot the earth and the tall grass; forgot the slender silver stream; forgot the soft mosses, the heavy leaves of undergrowth. The stone spoke to her in a voice that was so close to her own she felt it as a part of her. To lose that would kill her.

And the only person with whom she could share this strange homecoming was Master Gilafas. His friends, Sanfred and Jordan, were as deaf as the man who had helped to birth her.

Master Gilafas understood her. He came to her with bits of wood, smooth stone, raw gems; he gave her room in his workshop, and brought to her the glass that he loved. She did not love it, but she listened to its voice as it spoke to him, and sometimes, when the world was quiet and her hands could be still, she would sing a harmony to its quiet voice.

But at other times, the stones would lead her to rooms that Master Gilafas could not find on his own. She was afraid of the stone, then; afraid of being alone. She hated the darkness that lingered at its edges; it hurt her, and it promised to hurt her more.

She knew it. Because she heard what the stones said to him when he walked by her side. She would glance anxiously at his face when the stones spoke in their sharp, cold voices.

Sometimes she would ask him about the voices.

And he would take her hands in his and smile gently. “Yes,” he would say, “I hear them. But they are only words, Cessaly. Pay them no heed.”

And she would see her death in these stones, but his words and his voice were stronger.

• • • •

He was reduced, he thought, to being a babysitter.

He had, in that first month, attempted to foist that duty upon Sanfred’s broad shoulders, and Sanfred was more than willing to accept it.

But the greatness of the talent that all but consumed Cessaly was denied in its entirety to Sanfred. He could not hear what she heard. He could not see what she saw. Instead, he heard madness, and only madness.

The stories were there, of course. Every apprentice, every young journeyman, every man who desired to be called Master—and there were not a few of those in the guild—knew the stories.

The Artisans were mad. Gloriously, dangerously, mad.

Only madness could conceive of a small jewellery box in which the whole of a room might be contained. Only madness could create Fabril’s reach, bending the fabric of the real and the solid to the vision of its maker. Only madness, yes.

But madness had created more, much more.

And Gilafas was doomed to understand it. To see what he could not be; to almost touch what he could not achieve. His curse.

Sanfred lost Cessaly for two days. He came to Gilafas, ashen and terrified, and all but fell in a grovelling heap at the Guildmaster’s feet, weeping. Two days, Gilafas searched; two days, he listened.

He found her at last in a room he had visited once in nightmare, standing before the effigy of altar upon which her naked body lay, cradling rod and sword. What he found in search of Cessaly, he was never allowed to lose again. It waited, that room.

He had carried her from it with care and difficulty; she had in her hands the softest of stones, and powder flew from it as she carved and polished its face, her eyes unseeing, her ears bleeding.

Two days later, she had begged him for gold. He had brought that, and more besides: gemstones, large as eyes. She was thin as a bird; lifting her, he could believe that her bones were hollow. She said, “I’m flying, Master Gilafas. You’ve made me fly!” And laughed, delirious. Insane.

He loved the sound of that laugh, and he understood, when he called Sanfred again, that Sanfred not only did not love it, but in fact, was terrified by it.

The fear galled Gilafas; the pity and horror that Sanfred could not hide when he next saw Cessaly enraged him. He had not expected that. Had he, he might have been more temperate.

More cautious.

“Do you not understand what you have witnessed?”

Sanfred was mute in the face of his words.

“The guild has not been graced by a talent as pure as hers since its founding. Do you not understand the significance of her presence?”

An ill display indeed, for he knew the answer. No. How could he?

“You . . . are not . . . as she is.”

“No, Sanfred, I am not. To my profound sorrow, I am not. Get out. Get out; I will tend her myself.”

• • • •

He was her captive. He came to understand that. The whole of his life, his authority, his stature meant nothing to her. And where was the justice in that? For his life revolved around her. The hours of his rising, the hours in which he might sleep, were dictated by hers, and she slept the way a newborn does: unaware of the strictures of day and night, light and darkness.

She took food at her whim, and when that whim was weak, at his; she drank because he demanded it. Sometimes, when he was exhausted beyond all measure, he went to the apothecary and fed her bitter brew; it dulled her for some hours while he slept.

Sanfred, unable to champion Cessaly, became in all things Gilafas’ ears and eyes; only upon royal command did Gilafas choose to leave Fabril’s reach. He had lost Cessaly for two days; he did not intend to do so again.

Captivity breeds either hostility or resignation, and in Gilafas it bred both.

He was surprised, then, to find that in the stretch of the days from summer to Henden, he had learned to love the cage.

• • • •

He discovered it thus: Duvari came to visit.

It had been months since their first meeting in the heights of Fabril’s reach; the Astari had sent no word, and by its lack, Gilafas understood that the sword at least was whole.

But when Duvari appeared in the doorway of his workroom, he knew that the lull had ended. Cessaly was in the corner, by the cooling glass. She had, in her fashion, been singing, and together they had blown a bubble in which one of her butterflies was encased, its lines brought out by light. They had learned to work together in this fashion, Gilafas the hands behind their mutual will.

“Remember, Cessaly, not to touch it yet. It will burn your hands, and you will not be able to make until they are healed.”

She nodded, too absorbed to look up.

Trusting her, then, he stepped away.

He was not dressed for an audience; indeed, he wore the oldest of aprons, the most worn of gloves. The glass that protected his eyes sat upon his head like a wayward helm; he almost lowered it when he saw Duvari. The threat in his presence was palpable.

But he did not do it. Cessaly was sensitive to gesture this close to making’s end, and she was always sensitive to the tone, the texture, of his voice.

“I would speak a moment in private,” Duvari said quietly.

In that, they were of a mind. Gilafas nodded politely. “I . . . would prefer . . . to remain in sight of her.”

“It was not a request. The matter is of a sensitive nature.”

“As is she,” Gilafas replied evenly.

Duvari frowned. The frown was unlike the one that normally adorned his features, and Gilafas instantly regretted his words.

“Very well, Guildmaster. King Reymalyn has sent me with a message.”

“And that?”

“The sword,” he said softly, “was drawn this morning.”

Heart’s blow. He lifted a feeble hand to ward it, but it was far too late.

“I confess that I could not read what was writ in the runnels, although the words were clear to me. The King Reymalyn laboured under no such handicap.”

“The sword was forged by Fabril,” Gilafas said, the words leeched of the pride that once might have lodged within them. “If I was to guess, I would say that no one but the King Reymalyn—with the possible exception of the King Cormalyn—might read what is written there.”

“You are correct.”

“Why have you come?”

“If you must play at ignorance, I will indulge you. I came—”

“Gilafas, look!”

Cessaly had run from the room’s corner, her eyes bright. She reached out and caught his apron, tugging at it insistently. “Come, look, look!”

He followed her, aware that he risked Duvari’s wrath. Like a shadow, the Astari followed, dogging his steps. Gilafas, mindful of this, pried her fingers free, replacing cloth with the palm of gloveless hand.

In the circular globe, the butterfly hovered, wings flapping. They brushed the concave sides of the glass, and the glass trembled in response.

Duvari said quietly, as if there had been no interruption, “The sword must be reforged, the rod remade. They were meant to stand against the Barons; they were not created to stand against the darkness.”

“Then you are doomed,” he said, but without hope, “for the man who made those emblems of the Kings’ power is long dead.”

“Indeed. But it is not by his hands that they must be remade.”

Gilafas stiffened. He was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. The Lord of the Compact, it seemed, made all secrets, all hidden histories, his business. “I had thought it might be by yours, Guildmaster.” He bowed, then, and when he rose from the bow, his face was as smooth as the surface of the glass that now contained the floating butterfly.

Gilafas had a moment of clarity, then, standing before the most feared man in the Empire. He saw the pity in Duvari’s face; the pity and the ruthlessness.

“It is trapped,” Duvari said, speaking for the first time to Cessaly.

“Oh no,” she said, eyes round, face serious. “It is safe.” And then she frowned. “I have something for you,” she told him. “Can you wait here?”

He nodded gently. He, who had never done a gentle thing in his life.

Cessaly floated from the room, bouncing and skittering around the benches, her arms flapping.

“Understand,” Duvari said quietly, when she had vanished, “that the Kings have no choice in this. The darkness has risen, and it is gathering. The Kings cannot go unarmed into that battle, and they will go.”

“She is a child,” Gilafas replied.

“She is an Artisan, and if I understand the hidden histories well enough, she is the Artisan for whom Fabril built the reach. What she needs to learn, she must learn here, and she must learn it quickly.”

The Guildmaster closed his eyes.

“Because if I am not mistaken, she will not survive long.”

“She is not the power that Fabril was.”

“She does not have his knowledge,” Duvari replied, “nor the allies with whom he worked so long and so secretly. But the power?” Again, something akin to pity distorted his features. “Affection is a dangerous burden, Guildmaster. We go, in the end, to war, and the chance of victory is so slight we can afford to spare nothing.”

“It is not in my hands,” he said stiffly.

That was his truth. It was not, it had never been in his hands.

“Is it not?”

She came then, before he could frame answer, and her hands, so often spread wide to touch the surfaces of the world around her, were clenched in loose fists. Sunlight caught the edges of gold, the brilliant flash of diamond.

She walked up to Duvari without even a trace of her usual caution. “These are for you,” she told him gravely.

“For me?”

“Well, maybe for the Kings.”

He held out his palms very slowly, as if she were a wild creature. She placed in them two pendants. They were eagles, the guildmaster thought, wings spread in flight, flight feathers trailing light. At their heart, large as cat’s eyes, sapphires. To Gilafas’ eyes, they glowed.

“These will help,” she told him quietly. “With the shadows.”

“The shadows, Cessaly?”

She nodded. “We have them here, and I don’t like them. I made one for me, too. When I wear it, I don’t hear shadow voices. Only the other ones. The stones,” she added, by way of explanation. “The wood, and the gold—the sapphires are quiet, but you need the quiet—and Master Gilafas.”

“You hear the shadows here?”

“Don’t ask her that!” Gilafas cried out.

But her face had turned, from Duvari, from him. Skin pale, her eyes darted along the workroom’s walls. Here, the voices of nightmare were weakest; this was Gilafas’ space.

But the nightmares had been growing stronger; there was now not a single moment in which she could safely be left alone without some sort of work in her hands. She jerked twice, as if struck, and then turn and fled the room.

Gilafas, prepared in some fashion for these episodes, ran to the workbench and swept up the satchel in which the most portable of her tools were contained.

“Guildmaster,” Duvari began.

“Not now, Duvari.”

He did not expect argument; he did not receive it. But he was angry enough that he could not stop himself from speaking as he strode to the door. “If I have lost her again, you will pay. One day, she will go someplace where she cannot be found; she will be beyond us, working until she starves. If that day is today, I swear to you—and to the Kings you protect—that the Guild will never again serve at your command.”

He did not wait for the reply.

And perhaps he would have been surprised to know that none was made.

• • • •

Cessaly did not run far.

Had she been afraid of Duvari, she would have, but she found herself liking the man; he was very quiet. He wasn’t cruel, but he wasn’t kind; he was almost like the stonework on the walls: made of a single piece, and finished. He needed nothing from her.

The shadows were not afraid of him either. The moment he mentioned their voices, she heard them clearly, and they were some part of his. But although they touched him, he somehow did not touch them.

Important, that he never heard their voices.

She had used sapphires to capture quiet, and diamonds to capture light; the eagle was simply the ferocity of a flight that did not necessarily mean departure. She had made those in the round room because she had been afraid. But she had made three. One, she wore; because she wore it, she could now find her way up—and down—the winding stairs that led to the below.

But two she had simply held, and when she had seen Duvari—when he appeared at her side as the butterfly began its flight—she knew why: They were for him.

But she didn’t like his thank you very much, and she wasn’t certain if she wanted to see him again.

Maybe. Maybe she wanted to be able to see him.

She frowned. Things she had not tried now suggested themselves in the brilliant hues of the floor of the round room. She had her stone, of course, and she carved while she paced the floor, a hollow feeling in throat and stomach. She would ask Gilafas for what she needed. He always gave her what she needed.

• • • •

He found her almost instantly, which should have stilled his anger; it did not. She was working, although not in a frenzy, and when he entered the chamber—her workroom, as she often called it—she offered him a smile at home in the deep, soft rainbows cast by sun.

“Master Gilafas,” she said, as he bent a moment and set his knees against those colours, “could you bring me a loom?”

“Yes. Yes Cessaly. After lunch, I will bring you a loom.” He did not tell her that such an undertaking would take more than a single morning, and did not ask her where the loom should be set; he did not speak to her of cost, the responsibility of expenses, the things that had always balanced his momentary frenzied desires.

She did not care; could not.

And in truth, neither did he.

• • • •

The loom should have been foreign to her; the working of metal was a gift that had been taught over the course of months. But he was not surprised to hear the clacking of the great, wooden monstrosity that now occupied some part of his workroom. There were no other rooms that could house it in Fabril’s reach—at least none that he was aware of, and if Cessaly knew otherwise, she did not choose to enlighten him.

He considered her carefully as he worked, and he did work; the voices were upon him, and they rode him unmercifully. He no longer knew if ocean’s voice drove his hands, or if hers did—or worse, if his own now moved him, with its anger and its self-contempt. Not good, and he knew it; not good to be driven by that last voice. Men died for less, grabbing in a frenzy at those things that might still it—and not only the makerborn; all men with hollow power.

But it drove him.

Glass was before him, broken, coloured, and around it a skein of lead; the things he knew better than he knew himself.

The loom was wracked with the passage of her hands. It seemed fitting that they should work in this fashion. He was surprised that he was aware of her at all, for he knew by the feel of the glass in his hands that he should have been beyond her.

He failed in his duty, this day; he forgot to feed Cessaly. Forgot to feed himself.

Was not aware, until Sanfred forcibly removed his hands from his tools, of what he was making.

But Sanfred, having wrested the cutters from his hands paused, frozen, in front of his mosaic.

For the first time, Gilafas permitted himself to see what the glass contained.

Cessaly.

Cessaly, who, in bleeding hands, carried two things: A rod with a crystal orb that must deny all hint, all taint, of darkness, and a blade whose edge glittered like the diamond wings of her eagles.

And he looked at the sky, red and dark, sun bleeding into the night of the horizon. Three days, for three more days, the light would wane early, the night sustain itself. The heart of the month of Henden would arrive, and with it, the longest night.

• • • •

Duvari returned two days after his first visit with Cessaly. He came without warning, which was wise; had he offered warning, the Guildmaster would have forbidden him entrance, and would have personally dismissed anyone who disobeyed that order.

But he offered no such introduction; worse, he did not come alone. The companion he had chosen to bring to the Guildhall had caused concern and quiet outrage long before the two men had mounted the stairs that led to Fabril’s reach.

Gilafas understood why the instant he laid eyes on the second man. His hair was long and white; it fell across his shoulders like the drape of an expensive cape. He had not chosen to bind it, which was unusual; Gilafas had never seen that hair escape the length of formal braids.

“Guildmaster,” the man said.

“Member APhaniel,” he replied coolly. “To what do I owe this . . . singular . . . honour?”

“To the busy schedule of Sigurne Mellifas, alas. The Council of the Magi occupies all of her waking time at the moment.”

“I had heard there was some difficulty.”

Meralonne APhaniel shrugged broadly. “Among mages, there is always difficulty.”

“Among Makers, the same can be said.” But only grudgingly. “Although I confess that I have seldom had cause to resent the difficulties that keep Member Mellifas away, I resent them this day.”

A pale brow rose in a face that was entirely too perfect on a man of Meralonne’s age.

“It is understood. Sigurne is better at handling difficulties of this nature. In all ways. But perhaps I am not entirely truthful.”

Gilafas snorted. “Of a certainty, you are not entirely truthful.”

“No? Ah well, perhaps my reputation precedes me.” A glimmer of a smile then. “And one day, when we both have time, you must tell what that reputation is. The dour and incommunicative Duvari cedes not even the most paltry of rumours to the mageborn. He is significantly less . . . suspicious of the makerborn.”

“Not, apparently, their Guildmaster.”

“Well, no, of course not. The guildmaster actually possesses power.”

“Gentlemen,” Duvari said coldly, “may I remind you of the scarcity—and therefore the value—of our time?”

Meralonne reached into his robes and drew from it a long-stemmed pipe. “May I?”

“Of course.”

“You might join me, Guildmaster.”

Gilafas started to say that he did not smoke, and thought better of it. He did, and he guessed that the mageborn member of the Order of Knowledge knew exactly what it was that burned in his pipe when he chose to bring it to his lips. He reached for pipe and box, and bitter, bitter weed. Spread dry leaf in the flat bowl of his pipe.

“I have seen the work of your apprentice,” Meralonne said, when smoke lingered in the air. “The two pendants.”

“And they?”

“You must guess at what they do, Guildmaster.”

“I confess that I have not the resources—or the desire—to test them. They are effective in some measure against the—against our enemies?”

“Yes.” Meralonne’s cheeks grew concave as he inhaled. “I had not thought to see their like again, not newly made. But yes.” He turned, then, to the corner of the room in which Cessaly lay sleeping. In sleep she was much like a cat; she found it as it came, and took it where she sat, stretching out against floor or chair.

“She is young,” he said at last.

“She is.”

“Do you understand what it is that is asked of her?”

He could not find the words, but for once, he didn’t need to. He turned to his bench, and lifted the gauze he had placed across his work, setting it aside with care; he wanted no dust, no wood shavings, no metallic slivers caught in its threads. Then he lifted the glasswork, the mosaic of transparent colour, and he turned its bitter accusation toward the Magi.

Through the wild skein of her hair, he saw the golden skin of Meralonne APhaniel.

“I see,” the magi said quietly, “that she is not the only Artisan to busy herself in Fabril’s reach.”

“I have always worked in Fabril’s reach,” Gilafas said, dryly.

“Oh, indeed. But you have only twice created something that blends the skill of the maker with the deeper, wilder magicks. Ah, I stand corrected; this is the third, and if I were to guess, the most subtle, the most powerful, of the three.”

Gilafas’ turn to be surprised. “Is it?”

“The most powerful?”

“A work.”

“Do you not know?”

He said nothing.

“Magic—such as mine—is not sanctioned within these halls, Guildmaster, but were it, I am not certain it would divine the purpose behind your creation. Certainly it will not tell me more than you yourself know. But I will say this, and perhaps I say too much. I am not Duvari. I am aware of what is asked, both of you and your apprentice. Duvari accepts all cost and accrues all debt in the cause of the Kings. I? I do not believe that debt ever goes unpaid, and I am loathe to accumulate it.

“And I believe your apprentice is waking.”

Gilafas frowned; he had heard nothing. But he did not doubt the Magi. He turned to see that Cessaly had taken to her feet. She was smiling shyly.

“Have you come to see my work?”

“I have,” Meralonne replied. “And I have come to bring you something. Which would you have me do first?”

“My work.” Her smile was unfettered by such things as caution or suspicion. She walked over to the closet Gilafas had emptied for her use, and drew from it three bundles of cloth. One was as blue as cloudless sky, one as dark as midnight, and one the colour of light seen through the fog of cloud. “I made these,” she said, as if it were not obvious.

“Did you make them for anyone?”

“I don’t know. But I made them. They are all too large for me. The loom moves quickly and the cloth chatters.”

She handed him the darkest of the three, and as he unfolded it, Gilafas saw that it had a hood. A cloak, he thought.

“Put it on.” Her little, imperious voice was the only one in the room.

Meralonne did not hesitate. He laid hand against the weave of the cloth, and ran his fingers across it, his eyes wide. “Child,” he said softly. Just that. But there was no mistaking the longing—and the wonder—in the single word. “You remind me of my youth.” He caught the cloak by its upper edge, and twirled it backward until it fell over his back, obscuring the length of his hair.

He raised the hood, and then, with a smile, fastened the silver clasps that hung at his collar. Gilafas was not surprised to see him vanish.

Cessaly clapped her hands in glee.

The hood fell, and the man reappeared. “My lady,” he said, and he fell to one knee before her laughing face. “We have come to beg a boon of you.”

“Member APhaniel—”

“We have brought, for your inspection, two things.” He gestured. Magic, the Guildmaster thought.

“I have the Kings writ,” Duvari said evenly, before Gilafas could voice even token outrage.

A bundle appeared in Duvari’s outstretched arms. He brought it to Meralonne APhaniel, and the magi unwrapped it with care, until he was left with two things.

Gilafas bore witness; he could not bring himself to move.

She came to Meralonne as if she could no longer see him; as if she had eyes for only what he held. Bright, her eyes, like liquid, like the ocean in summer. And dark, like its depths.

She took them from his arms and did not even notice their weight, although she buckled beneath it. She brought her knees the ground, as if in obeisance, and touched the dull white of the broken orb, the black and gold of the sword’s scabbard. Her lips opened and closed, and Gilafas knew a moment of pride, for he could hear her voice, and he was certain the others could not. After a moment, she raised her head, and she looked at Meralonne APhaniel, all joy in the lesser creation gone.

She said, “You should not have brought these here.”

“We had no choice, Lady.”

She rose, staggering; she would not allow him to touch their plain surface. “But the demons will come, now.”

“Yes.”

• • • •

She woke in the dark of the night, in her bed, alone. She had gone to sleep there, her hands absorbed with the beads she had asked for, the strings upon which to place them almost full. Her fingers were stiff with the damp and the cold; she knew that she had worked them while she slept. Master Gilafas would worry. She knew it.

It was why she had forced herself to walk the halls, to come to this room, to let sleep take her while he watched. He only left her when she slept, and only when she was here.

But she had work to do; she knew it. The days. The days had gone; the nights had slowly devoured them. They waited above her head and beneath her feet, gathering the shadows and the darkness. All the voices were strong.

And steel’s voice strongest of all.

She slid her feet out of bed; the floors were cold but she dared not wear shoes. She wanted no light, nothing to see by, and without it, her feet were her eyes; they knew the halls at least as well as her eyes did.

Beneath her bed, she found the sword; found the rod. Her hands knew them by more than their weight, but it was their weight that troubled her, for the sword was so long it would drag on the floor, the metal of its sheath creating sparks and noise.

She struggled alone.

She understood, dimly, that she was not a simple child, but the child in her was often the only element that could survive the arduous task of making. The understanding clung to her as she struggled: she was not a child. She had come to Fabril’s reach because she was not a child, and she had remained because no one—not even her beloved Master Gilafas—could hear the voices of the wild as well as she.

But she was grateful; had she been at home, had she been in Durant, she was certain the Town would have perished this eve. The longest night.

She was not dour by nature; not grim. Master Gilafas, haunted and tired, was both of these things, but she understood that he had come to love her, and because of it, she knew she must leave him. Because she understood the whole of Fabril’s intent, and had, from the moment she had found the room Master Gilafas so hated.

The Rod and The Sword were vessels; they were vessels, and those vessels had long lain empty.

She had listened to the ocean in Master Gilafas’ voice. She understood vessels, and what they contained, or could contain, because of that distant voice.

She was not so old that she had forgotten fear. In the dark of her room, she armed herself: She fastened the clasp of the pendant she had made, cold sapphire resting against the hollow between her collar bones. She drew cloak from an armoire that was otherwise empty, and ring from the box at her desk. She took no gloves, and paused a moment before the silver sheen of dark mirror.

In the dark, she drew the blade. She was not a swordsman; it was an awkward action. But she must do it; she must leave the sheath here. The blade, the rod, they must go where she travelled.

The moon was high. Fabril had loved light, and if gold was the colour of day, silver shone now, radiant and cool. Enough light to see by, but she did not need it; she could see in the shadows.

She hesitated for just a moment, on the edge of the Master’s workroom. And there she laid down her burden, and ran lightly across the darkened threshold. Moonlight came through glass in all its muted colour; she passed it by, again and again, until she reached the delicate globe of blown glass Gilafas had given her.

Inside, floating and fluttering, the butterfly.

She pursed her lips, touched the cool glass, and with a simple word, she set the butterfly free. It broke the meniscus of glass surface as if it were liquid and passed above her, circling her head three times.

She let it go and turned again to her task.

The rod and the sword had been forged and quenched in the whole of a single day. She knew it, by touch; understood what not even the cold man understood: that Fabril had made these in the light of the longest day, a measure of, and containment for, the Summer. It was, as her simple jewellery box had been, an act of affection, a desire to help those loved and respected. And in Summer’s season, The Rod had served the son of Wisdom, and The Sword the son of Justice: the Twin Kings who had, for centuries, given their lives to the Empire of Essalieyan.

But all things living know time and its passage, and all things living know the shifting of seasons. Summer had passed, the season so long that Winter had been forgotten.

Aiee, she hated the shadows, the sibilance of their terrible whisper.

But what was forged in the grim stillness of Winter, what lived in its ice and its blankets of pure, cold snow, were strong in a way that the summer itself was not strong, and that strength, cold and terrible, existed outside of the shadows.

Terrible power, scouring and lonely.

She had heard of men who had died steps from their homes when the blizzards had come; they could not see their way to safety, and what love and hope they carried as they struggled ended there.

Kalliaris, she thought, for the first time since she had come to Fabril’s reach. Kalliaris, smile.

She walked the long hall, seeing the frozen stone about her, fitting company, and silent, for this last voyage. She was afraid of only one thing: That she would finish what she had been born to finish, that she would remake The Rod and The Sword that would be so necessary to the Twin Kings upon whom the Empire depended, and that there would be no one to bring them home.

Other fears would come later, to keep her company and ease her loneliness, but this fear was the wisest and the strongest.

She could not make anything while she walked, and she felt the gnawing hunger take her hands, felt this scrap of reasoned fear, this almost adult comprehension, fray about the edges, pulled like the loose thread in a weaving from her loom. So she cradled the blade with care against the cloak that protected her from the sight of men, and she ran her fingers, over and over, across the surface of what was writ in its runnels.

She began to descend the stairs, and it was hard: The floor was cold, and the steps steep. The lights that existed against the walls were dim; they did not speak a language that her eyes understood. But she did not need them; she knew where she walked, and when she reached the halfway mark, she set her hand against the wall and waited.

The door opened.

The door opened into the Scarran night, and the Winter road wound from its step into the hollows of the ancient, wild way.

• • • •

Gilafas could not say what woke him, not at first.

He sat up in bed as if struck, the full face of the moon framed in the windows of his chambers. The night was silent; he listened a moment and heard the distant thrum of ocean voice. It was not insistent.

He rose, clenching fists, and cried out in shock and pain; his left hand burned.

He spoke a word and the light flooded his vision, forcing his lids down; when they rose again, he stared at the open mound of his hand, his left hand.

In it, in the light, were shards of delicate glass, the broken form of butterfly wings above crescent pools of blood.

He listened, and he heard the ocean, and only the ocean, and then he understood.

• • • •

He dressed like a madman, taking the time to don jacket over his sleeping robes. He grabbed dagger, although it was futile; tore light from the wall and clutched it in his bleeding fist.

He took no care to be silent; silence was not his friend, and the noise was a distraction, a welcome one. He ran to his workroom, commanded light, banished moon. There, on the furthest reach of his personal bench, he saw what he had dreaded: the globe in which he had encased Cessaly’s butterfly. This was their only common work, and it was empty now; what she built, he had in the carelessness of sleep destroyed.

What night? What night, he thought, frenzied. Was this the longest night? Or was it past him, was it gone?

But no: For once the darkness was blessed, for it lingered, deep and forbidding.

He began to search for Cessaly.

The first place he looked was her room, but it was empty; there was no trace of her presence in it at all, although the sheets were turned back and her cupboard door swung open as he approached.

The halls were long. He knew all of her rooms, for once she had opened the ways, they could not be closed. And he knew his own: the room in which her death was carved in stone, the obscenity of it stronger every time he chanced upon it.

He visited them all. All of them, and he found her in none, although his own horror waited around every doorway and ever corner.

He had left her. In his exhaustion, he had chosen to leave her. If he found her, he promised whatever capricious god might be listening he would never leave her again.

No, Gilafas, fool. No. Think.

But thought eluded him, deluded him, sent him in circles that ended, always, with the workroom.

But the last time, the last circuit, had finished him; in agony, he retreated into the moonlight, his hands shaking.

The lights were dim; he could not remember dimming them. He started to speak, and lost the words as he turned to the great windows that formed a casement for the moon. No; not the moon, but some light that was much like it: radiant and cool.

In its heart, standing in robes the colour of night, stood a ghost, a demon. He had brought the wind with him, and it was a foreign wind, devoid of the taste of salt.

He turned, and the light turned with him, and when at last this intruder faced Gilafas, he saw two things that he recognized.

The first, the least, Meralonne APhaniel, shorn of the emblem of the Magi, the decorations of mageborn rank. His hair was white and long, his eyes the colour of new steel; he wore no sword, no shield, no armour, but he was dressed for war.

The second, the source of the room’s light: the mosaic he had made; the likeness of Cessaly. Golden hair, honey eyes now shaded to the green that was either trick of light or whisper of power, blue dress, and red, red blood, these burned in his vision. The lead that held the glass was grown insubstantial and weightless, or perhaps it was fluid; he could not see it clearly. Did not try.

“You asked,” Meralonne APhaniel said softly, “what purpose this Work served, and I believe I have divined it. It is of glass for a reason, Guildmaster.

“It is a window.”

A window. He stepped toward it, and faltered in the glow of its light. “Why did you come?”

“I told you. I am not Duvari.”

“You are not truthful.”

“Not entirely, no. This is Fabril’s reach. Fabril was not seerborn; that was not his gift. But it is myth that he created the whole of this wing; he made it his own, but he chose it for a reason.

“For the Summer, Guildmaster, and for the Winter.” He eyes were unblinking. “You do not hear the Summer voice; you do not hear the Winter. That is both your gift and your curse. What Fabril wrought does not speak to you. But it speaks to her, to your apprentice, and this is the longest night, the Scarran night.

“And I believe that she speaks to you.”

Truth, Gilafas thought, but not enough of the truth.

“Why did you come here, mage?”

He was silent a moment, and then he said, “I believe that she will be drawn to the Winter road, and if she enters into a great work upon it, she may never return.

“But her work must return. Do you understand?”

Gilafas said nothing.

“Guildmaster.”

Silence.

“The guild of makers has been waiting for longer than you can imagine, guardians against this age. It has waited so long, there have been those among you who have come, over time, to believe the wait has been in vain, a thing of child’s story. But you know, now. And I, and the Kings. Open the window. Open it, Guildmaster, for I cannot.”

• • • •

He cursed his gift for the first time in his adult life. Cursed himself for a fool for making this window so small, although it was the gift itself that had guided the making. His hands shook as he approached her, trapped in glass, circled by lead. Her eyes were now closed.

They had not been closed when he had made her, for the width of her eyes was, among the many things about her, the one that he had come to love best.

He cried out in fear and reached for the glass, and his hands passed through it as if it were mist, or smoke, or veil.

The winds tore past him, then, and in their folds, they carried the screams of the dying, thin high ululation, the keening of the damned.

His eyes teared at once, and his cheeks froze; the wind was dry and cold, and it allowed for no liquid. Ocean voice denied him, then, and just as well. He saw darkness, felt it across the length of his arms. Frost formed in the folds of his jacket; flakes gathered against cloth and found purchase there.

Bodies lay aground, some writhing, most still. He saw an arm, a jerking hand, a fallen blade; saw a broken bow, its curve shattered, saw the spill of hair across snow, white upon white, with the thinning pink of spreading blood beneath it.

He could not count them all; he did not try. Once, in the whirl of the angry wind, he saw the pale skin of an upturned face, its eyes wide, lashes made of snowflakes. Too beautiful, he thought, although clearly the man was dead. To beautiful to be a demon.

He moved, although he could not say how; he knew that the window itself was too small a passage for a man of his size. Could not regret it, either.

Until he saw her.

He knew her at once, although he could not see her face, for her hair was short and golden; not even the snow that clung there could obscure its colour. He knew the bent shape of her shoulders, the moving jerk of elbows at play; he knew the shape of her back, even seen now, without cloth to obscure it. He knew the soles of her feet, for in the vastness of Fabril’s reach, she never wore shoes.

Had not, he saw, worn them now. She would freeze to death, she would freeze in the wailing storm, and he thought her unaware of it, for the madness was upon her.

He could hear it so clearly he almost forgot himself.

But she was not alone in that clearing; the trees themselves, like wrought iron fences, surrounded her, and in their shadows a shadow rose, tall and slender and perfect.

It made a poverty of any beauty he had ever seen, and in the Guildhall, he had seen much of it. He was humbled, instantly, by the presence of this stranger, this Winter Queen.

She looked up, then, and she smiled, and although she was beautiful, and the smile a gift, he was chilled by it in a way that not even the slaughter had chilled him.

“Yes,” she said softly, “I am the Winter Queen, and you are bold, to come here on this night.”

He could not speak; his legs would not hold his weight and he felt himself begin to bend so that he might place his life where it properly belonged: at her feet. Or beneath them.

But something held him up, something sharp and sudden.

“I do not walk the winter road,” he told her, the words flowing through him as if they belonged to another. “I have placed no foot upon it, and I have taken nothing, touched nothing, that belongs to the Queen who rules it.”

Her smile deepened, and it was chilling; there was no pleasure in it. “You are wise, who appear to be a simple, mortal fool.”

“I am not wise, Lady, or I would not be here, witness to Winter; the mortal seasons are not your seasons.”

“No, indeed they are not, and mortals themselves are so fleeting.” And her gaze, the gaze he coveted and feared, slid from his face to the shuddering back of Cessaly. “But not all that is mortal is beneath my interest. You have come for the girl.”

“I have.”

“Ah. But she has not your wisdom; she has set foot, unencumbered foot, upon my path, and she has taken the lives of those who serve me.” She stepped toward Cessaly, and Gilafas followed. Somehow, he followed.

He wanted to shout, to give warning, to raise alarm; he was mute. The words that were not his words failed him.

The Winter Queen laughed in the wake of his silence, and her laughter was almost genuine.

She turned to him, then. “Has it come to pass, little mortal? Have the gates been opened, and the covenant shattered? Does the darkness stride the face of the mortal world once more?”

He was mute. Mute, still.

“Leave,” she said. “Leave while I am amused and may know mercy.”

“It is not for your mercy that I have come.”

“Oh?”

“What the child carries belongs in the hands of the godborn; no other might wield or claim them.”

“The hands of the godborn do not trouble them now,” she replied, but amusement had left her face, and her lips were thinner. “And they have been made, remade, in my realm.”

“They have been made and remade in the wild realm, Lady.”

“And the wild realm knows no law but power.”

“The wild realm knows no law but yours, it is true. But your vow is law in the realm, be your oath ancient, so ancient that it is forgotten upon this plane. You cannot lay claim to the rod or the sword until those vows are fulfilled, and Lady—if you seek to retain even one, they will never be fulfilled, and your power diminished by the binding.”

Her hair swept past her face; the gale had returned in the clearing.

“Perhaps,” she said, one hand falling to the hilt of the sword she carried, and the other to the horn. “But so, too, will yours, and the mortal kingdom will surely fail. The sword and the rod came to me.”

“Indeed.”

“And they might lie here, unclaimed, until the seasons turn.”

He fell silent again, the words stemmed.

And then she smiled. “I sense another presence, mortal. And perhaps this means that you do not understand what it is that you risk. What do you desire?”

His mouth opened. Closed.

Her eyes, her dark and golden eyes, flared; he felt a trickle of fire along his cheek, a caress that would leave a scar. “Speak,” she said again. “And speak freely.”

“I want the girl,” he said. His words now. His own.

“Let me grant you a gift,” she said coldly, “a gift of vision.” She lifted her arms, one to either side; in the wake of the moon’s light across the fine, fine mesh of chain shirt, the world darkened.

Dark, he knew it: It was his own. He saw the spires of the three cathedrals, raised higher than even Avantari, the palace of the Kings. They burned; circled in air by winged beasts and their riders, besieged by wind and shadow. They were empty, he thought; empty, he prayed. Beneath them, in the streets below, the flash of magic, the clash of armies.

Small armies, pockets of futile resistance.

The vision shifted as the wind changed; he flew over the dying city to the fields of Averalaan, and there he froze, for there he saw what they did not name.

Lord of Darkness.

It is not possible. It cannot be possible.

“Look well,” she told him softly, “for you will see no Kings upon the field, and few armies. All of the bodies are yours; the Lord of the Hells has risen.

“I cannot say that the Kings would triumph had they the rod and the sword for which so much has been offered. But you have not even the hope of that: The Kings perished in Avantari, bereft of the power granted them by the artefacts of Fabril. Yes, even with her hand upon them, they are his.”

She lowered her arms slowly, and the smile returned to her face. “I understand some small measure of mortality, Gilafas ADelios. It amuses me, and in this long, long Winter, very little does.

“So I will give you what I have given few: a choice. You may take the child, or you may take the artefacts. But you may not take both. Choose,” she said softly. “Choose; I will not intervene as long as you take only one thing when you return. Either—she, or they—will be of interest to me.”

Gilafas was consumed by the Winter, the Winter’s chill.

“The dawn is coming,” the Winter Queen told him. “In your world, in the world in which you now stand, the sun will soon rise. Delay, Gilafas, and you will have neither.”

He reached out to touch Cessaly; his hand gripped her shoulder. He had thought she would not notice, for she often didn’t.

But she turned to him, turned at once, snow spilling from her lap. Her hands were dark with blood, but he could see, as she lifted her palms, that that blood was not her own. She had never been so still, in all the time he had known her. In all the brief time.

“Cessaly?”

Her face was a young woman’s face, her eyes round and dark with exhaustion and fear. She lifted her chin, and met his eyes, and he realized that she had poured so much of herself into this making that she could at last, for a moment, know sanity.

It was terrible.

I will not do this, he thought. She is Fabril’s equal. She is his superior. What Fabril made, she can make again, and better. If we have her. If only we have her.

But he did not believe it. Desired belief more than he had desired anything, even the mantle of Fabril’s legacy.

Cessaly touched his hands, pulling them from her shoulder. She was so cold he would not have thought her living had she not moved; her lips were blue.

And her eyes. Blue, he thought, and reddened.

“You can only take one thing,” she said softly. She raised the rod; its orb was whole and glowing with fractured, coloured light, a dance of fire, a thing not of this Winter place, although it had been born to it. “These.”

“Or you,” he said, and the words cut him. Guildmaster. Keeper of Fabril’s legacy. If she were gone, he would again be the only Artisan to grace the Guildhalls.

She said, “I have made these. They are your responsibility and mine. Protect what I have made, Gilafas. Protect my making.”

Maker’s words. Maker’s ferocity, in her sanity.

He shook his head. He knew; he knew what must be done. The Winter Queen had shown him the truth of that need.

“No. No,” he whispered. “Cessaly—”

She smiled, her jaw shuddering with the effort of maintaining that expression. “Thank you,” she told him softly. “I know what has to be done . . . but . . . thank you.”

Then, before he could speak, she placed the rod and the sword into his arms, and she rose, quick and cat-like, and she pushed.

• • • •

Meralonne APhaniel was not Duvari, as he had promised. He restrained the Guildmaster when the Guildmaster almost threw himself into the window again; he forced him—as gently as one could a man made wild and frenzied with grief—to see that the window had closed: He had a mosaic, some proof of the existence of a girl he had foolishly learned to care for, and that was all. To run at it would simply shatter it.

At the time, that would not have been a loss.

“You have what you want,” he had said. “Get out!”

But the magi had carried the stained glass to the window, and he had gestured there a moment, and when he had stepped back, it rested securely against the greater glass.

“This will not comfort you now,” he said softly, “and perhaps it never will. But I will say to you that the Winter Queen has always had an interest in the Artisans; that their madness in the end is proof against the madness she would cause.” He bowed. “I am sorry, Guildmaster.”

He looked up. “What did she mean?” he asked, dully. “When she spoke of the turn of seasons, what did she mean?”

“Nothing,” Meralonne replied. “For she speaks of the Summer Road, and it has been forbidden her for so long, I do not know if it will ever return.”

“And Cessaly?”

“She will never return.”

• • • •

He was required to come up with a story that might explain a young girl’s disappearance, and he did, but Duvari judged the explanation itself unwise, and in the end, in disgust, he accepted the Lord of the Compact’s version of events and burdened Sanfred with its spread.

He laboured in Fabril’s reach in a fruitless search for a door, or a window, into the Winter world, and the days passed, spring becoming summer, summer fading into fall, and from there, the rain and the shadows of Henden. He counted them, and lost count of them as he toiled; he spoke with the wise, and when the wise gently turned him—and his money—away, he at last surrendered.

He did not accept her loss.

And perhaps because he could not accept it, could not accept the terrible silence of the absence of her voice, it was a full year before he chose to leave the Guildhall, to take the road that led to the Free Town of Durant. This was not his penance; it was his duty.

To the mother, he carried word of her daughter’s greatest act of making, but the mother had no desire for the comfort of the accolade. Hero was a hollow word.

“You promised,” she said.

And he had bowed his head, old now, and shamed beyond the simple use of words.

“How long?” she had said, her voice rising, the tone fierce and terrible. “How long have you known?”

He could not answer.

“Why did you not come sooner?”

Why?

Because to come here, to make this pilgrimage, to stand before her just and terrible fury, her keening loss, was to acknowledge what he had so desperately refused to acknowledge. Cessaly was gone. Cessaly would never return.

“She is not dead,” he told her.

“How can you know that?”

He met her eyes, her wide, reddened eyes, and he bowed his head. “I know it,” he said bitterly. “And I had hoped that you might know it as well. She was your daughter.”

• • • •

Fabril’s reach was no longer a cage. It was his home, the place from which he ruled the guild in the splendour due his rank. Empty splendour, as it had always been, but empty now in a different way. He heard the ocean, and only the ocean, and sometimes, in anger and desperation, he gave himself to its voice. More often, he gave himself to the numb detachment of bitterweed, and the business, the empty, hollow business, of the Guild.

And then, one quiet morning, he felt it: something familiar, some hint of strangeness in the tower walls. He rose slowly and dressed, and then he walked the hall, fingers trailing the rounded surface of stone until he reached his workroom.

He opened the door, and as he did, something darted past him and down the hall. Had he been in any other place, he might have thought it a bat; in the heights, they were common.

But its flight was too delicate, too much the drunkard’s spin, and he frowned as he stepped through the door.

Froze there, in wonder. The upper reaches of his room were thick with butterflies. Butterflies of glass, blown in every conceivable colour; butterflies of silver and sapphire, of gold and ruby, of wood and stone. Among them, smaller than life, were birds, and the birds, too, were the hatchlings not of egg and warmth, but of the things that Cessaly had loved to work with.

He turned to the window, to the stained glass, and his smile, in this room, was the first that had not been tainted by bitterness in a decade. He lifted his hand to touch it; felt glass, and only glass, beneath his palm.

But the butterflies landed upon his shoulders, his head, his arms; they rested lightly upon the back of his hands, and they spoke to him, and each of their voices held some echo of hers.

© 2002 by Michelle West. Originally published in Fantasy: DAW 30th Anniversary, edited by Sheila E. Gilbert and Elizabeth R. Wollheim. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michelle writes as both Michelle Sagara and Michelle West; she is also published as Michelle Sagara West (although the Sundered books were originally published under the name Michelle Sagara). She lives in Toronto with her long-suffering husband and her two children, and to her regret has no dogs. Visit her website at michellesagara.com.

EXCERPT: Skullsworn (Tor Books)

Brian Staveley | 5707 words

Prologue

This is a story I never intended to tell. I thought, when I finally walked away from you all those years ago, that I was taking the tale with me. I thought, because it happened to me, because I seemed to stand at the center of everything that happened, that it was my story—but that’s not how stories work. A tale belongs only partly to the teller—even the wildest fabrication requires the collaboration of a listener, and this is no fabrication. It is the truth—or as close to the truth as I can come, so many years later—and there are other characters in it. This story is theirs as much as it is mine, but since they are dead, I’m the one left to piece it together. You were the only other person who was there, who survived straight through to the end, but you didn’t know what was happening. You couldn’t. I should have told you a long time ago, but it wasn’t until much later that I realized this story is yours, too, yours as much as it is mine. It’s late, but I’m telling you now.

I went to Dombâng for love.

And yes, to kill seven people in fourteen days, sure, but I wasn’t worried about the killing. I grew up in a place where women wear vests ribbed with stilettos, where each priest has a dozen knives, steel traps, needles so fine you can slide them beside the eye into the brain and out again without leaving a mark. I watched my fellow priests die by fire and iron, sometimes quickly, leaping from the tops of the sandstone cliffs, or slowly, by dehydration’s intimate degrees. By my fifteenth year, I had set to memory a thousand ways to offer a woman or man to my god’s sure unmaking. I wasn’t concerned about my piety or my ability to make the sacrifice.

Love, though. Love was tricky. By the time I turned twenty-five, I’d had lovers and laughter, long nights in the high desert peaks learning the ways of my own body, alone or in the hot clutch of another. Love, though, love had eluded me.

To the uninitiate, this will not seem strange. How can love, you might demand, take root in the stony heart of a Skullsworn? How can Ananshael’s knives know love?

I’m not offended. For most people, my god—like the death he brings—is all mystery and terror. You have not been to Rassambur, have not heard our choruses beneath the new moon, have not enjoyed the sweet fruit of the trees espaliered against our sandstone walls. How could you know the first thing about the men and women you call Skullsworn? How could you know, if I don’t tell you?

Maybe we could start with the word itself. It’s wrong.

I don’t swear on skulls, not on them, not to them, not around them. I haven’t seen a skull for years, in fact. A bit of blood-smeared bone through a torn-open scalp, perhaps, but an actual skull, wide eyed and jawless? What in the god’s name would I be doing with a skull?

“Drinking the blood of innocent children,” seems to be a common notion, so I’ll set that little misconception to rest, too: I do not drink the blood of children, either guilty or innocent. I do not drink the blood of humans or beasts. I did have a blood sausage in Sia once, a thick black slab perched on a mountain of rice, but I ate it off of a normal plate, not out of a skull, and everyone else there seemed to be eating the same thing.

I should also clarify that I do not bathe in cauldrons of blood. I get bloody enough going out into the world to do the work of the god. The whole point of the bath is to scrub the blood off. The priests of the God of Death bathe in hot water, just like every other sane person on either side of the Ancaz. Back in Rassambur, I sift a little jasmine and ground sage into the boiling water. I like to be clean.

A few other clarifications, in no particular order:

I have no garments made of human skin. I prefer silk, although it tends to be easier to scrub the blood out of wool.

I have never fucked a dead person. I’m not sure who’s going around sizing up the erections of the hanged, but I can promise you, it’s not me. Most men are confused enough in bed already without the added disadvantage of death to slow them down. I like my lovers like I like my baths—warm, clean, and, if at all possible, good-smelling, although I’m willing to compromise on the last two.

I understand, of course, how people make these mistakes. If you’re seeing a skull, or a barrel full of blood, chances are good that my god has come, unmade a creature, then disappeared. Surely as a strong dawn wind kicks up dust and bends the branches of the trees, Ananshael leaves blood and skulls in the wake of his passage, but blood and skulls are not death any more than a bent branch is the wind.

Death resists all comparison and simile. This is something I learned in my first year at Rassambur. To say death is like a land beyond the sea or like an endless scream is to miss the point. Death is not like anything. There is no craft analogous to Ananshael’s work. The truest response to his mystery and majesty is silence.

On the other hand, to remain silent is to encourage the fantasies of the uninitiate—skulls brimming with blood, graveyard orgies, infants dangling like impractical chandeliers from the ceilings of candlelit caverns—and so maybe an imperfect analogy is better than none at all.

Take a grape.

The purple skin is muted, as if by mist or fog. Polish it, or not, then pop it into your mouth. The flesh is firm beneath the cool, smooth skin. If you find yourself becoming aroused, stop. Start your imagining over. The grape is a grape. Imagine it properly, or this will not work.

Now. What does the grape taste like?

A grape tastes like a grape? Of course not. Until you bite the grape, it has no taste. It might as well be a stone plucked from the cold current of some river in autumn: a smooth, chill orb, reticent, flavorless. You could hold it trapped between your palate and tongue forever, only the faintest hint of juice at the tiny breach where it was plucked from the stem.

You are like that grape—plump with slick, rich sweetness, with wet purple life. The truth of life is the grape’s truth: only when jaws bite down, when the skin splits, when the sun-cold flesh explodes onto the tongue does it matter. Without the moment of its own destruction, the grape is just a smooth, colorful stone. Without the foreknowledge of the woman who holds it in her hand, her anticipation, before it even passes her lips, of the mangled skin and the sweet life draining over the tongue, the grape would hold no savor.

The Csestriim and the Nevariim were like this, if the chronicles are true—immortal, unbroken stones, incapable of joy, either the feeling or the bringing. Of course, my god was young when they walked the world, his strength more meager in the age when they were made, meager enough that for thousands of years and longer they escaped his touch. They might have continued forever that way—immortal save in those rare cases when the body was so broken by violence that my god could finally slide his fingers inside—but the Csestriim overreached. In their dust-dry desire to catalogue the world, to know it so they could bend it to their will, they pushed the Nevariim too far, and finally, the Nevariim pushed back.

They lost; the Csestriim wiped them from the world, but my god learned much in the conflict, and in the long millennia that followed, he grew stronger, strong enough that when we came—humans, women and men wandering the unforgiving earth—he could end us with a flick of his infinite fingers. He never learned the trick with the Csestriim, but it didn’t matter. We were there to help him, to pry open that immortal flesh with our bronze and let him in. The Csestriim were stones, but we shattered them, scrubbed them out as they had scrubbed out the Nevariim before.

We are not stones. Our human skin is thin, the life inside us bright. And death? The god I serve? He is the jaw locked around us, the promise of a sweet green destruction without which we would be no more than so much polished rock.

My brothers and sisters in the faith understand this better than most. We devote our lives to this truth. And so, within the walls of Rassambur there is no shortage of joy, of delight, of music, and yes, of love. I have watched old couples step hand in hand from the bloodred cliffs, linked even in the moment of their unmaking. I have seen wives pour the poisoned tea for their husbands, hold the clay cup to the feeble lips themselves, offer the final release when the pain of one disease or another grew too great. I have witnessed the glee on the faces of younger couples as they sneak away, even felt a hint of it myself, a little shiver of ecstatic bliss when my lips met other lips.

But not love.

Not that it bothered me. I was young, strong, alight with my own devotion and the fellowship of my brothers and sisters. Love was a pleasant afterthought, something I could experience later, more slowly, when I was finished being young.

Then came the Trial, and with the Trial, the song.

My god is a great lover of music. Not the still, finished forms of painting or sculpture, but music. Music is inextricable from its own unmaking. Each note is predicated on the death of those before. Try to hold them all, and you have madness, cacophony, noise. A song, like a life, is all in the letting go, in the knowing, the moment you begin, that it will end. And of all music’s variegated forms—fiddle and drum, harp and horn, plangent or joyous—Ananshael loves the human voice, the sound of the instrument giving song to the knowledge of its own impermanence.

It was no surprise that the test concluding all my training would begin with a song, but of all the melodies I’d heard at Rassambur, this one had been kept from me, as it was from all the acolytes, until just before the Trial. Listen, and you will understand the fierceness of my sudden need to love:

One who is right, and one who is wrong,
A singer snared in a web of song—
Deliver them, deliver them
Into his million-fingered hands.
Deliver to him a dealer of death,
Severed from life, shorn of breath.
Deliver a mother, ripe with new life.
Find the kindness in the sharpest knife.
Deliver to him a giver of names;
There are no words in his domain.
When these are safe inside his hands,
One more remains,
One more remains—
Give to the god the one who made your mind
And body sing with love
Who will not come again.

I don’t know who composed the music, but it is perfect, polyphonic, one melody the naked blade, the other the warm skin in the moment before it parts. Ela and Kossal sang it for me—it fell to them as my Witnesses in the Hall of All Endings, a vault-roofed, windowless sandstone cube just a dozen paces across. Not so much a hall as a room, really. Twin candles lit the space, ivory pillars as thick as my thigh set into sconces in the wall. There were no altars. Their singing bodies were the altars, their music the offering, brimming in the lambent space until it seemed almost liquid, her voice throaty, rich; his spare and unadorned as old iron. I cried, listening to them, cried first for the sheer beauty of the thing, and then again, a moment after, when my mind moved from the music to the words, and I realized what it meant: I was going to fail. I had already failed, fallen short of my great exercise of devotion even before it truly began.

The song is a list, obviously, a list of those that each acolyte must give to the god before becoming a full priest of Ananshael. From the first offering to the last, the would-be priestess is allowed fourteen days. Fourteen days for seven offerings. Not such a daunting task—not for one raised and trained in Rassambur—but an impossible one for someone, like me, who had never been in love.

The words trembled in my mind even after the singing was over: Give to the god the one who made your mind and body sing with love.

Ela saw my shock first, but she misunderstood it.

“I know,” she said, sliding a strong, gentle hand over my shoulders. Her fingers were warm in the cool night air. Even without the notes, her voice still sounded like song. “I know.”

Kossal had already turned to the candles. Those twin flames gave the room its only light, but he was halfway to snuffing them, reaching for the first wick with his calloused fingers, ready to pinch the flame.

“Give her a moment, you old goat,” Ela said.

The priest paused, turned. Despite his age, he didn’t stoop. He carried himself—that whole tall, sinewy frame—like a man forty years younger, though his face—olive beneath the graying stubble—looked like something carved, each line and wrinkle scored into the flesh. Candlelight glinted, needle-bright, in each eye.

“She can have all the moments she wants. In the dark.”

“And what if she wants a little light?”

Kossal shifted his eyes from Ela, whistling tunelessly through a gap in his teeth as he studied me. “She wants to be a priestess, she ought to get acquainted with a little darkness. Besides, we’re wasting wax.”

“We’ve wasted worse than wax,” Ela replied. “I’ll snuff the candles when we leave.”

The old man watched me a heartbeat longer, looked back to the candles as though there were some answer there, then shook his head. “That you and I keep working together, Ela Timarna, is a mystery I cannot fathom.”

Ela’s laugh was a sliver bell. I’d seen her put a fist through a thick block of sun-baked clay, watched her take a dying goat by the horns and snap its neck, but she carried her strength lightly. The muscle and sinew knitted beneath her brown skin looked built for leaping or lounging, not slaughter. Everything about her seemed light: her hair—a tumble of tight black ringlets—seemed to bounce with every movement; her hands were forever floating up as she gestured about one point or another; even her lips were always on the verge of turning up into a smile.

“We keep working together,” she replied, shooting me a wink even as she answered the priest, “because you have a weakness for young women.”

Kossal grunted. “Funny thing about people: you give ’em enough years, and they stop being young.”

“And how many years,” Ela asked, spreading her arms as though offering an embrace or inviting the older priest to hazard a punch, “do you figure that takes?” She cocked her head to the side, smiling, her teeth bright in the candlelight. “Have I stopped being young yet?” She turned in a slow circle, graceful as a dancer, pausing fractionally when her back was to him, then completing the rotation.

Kossal kept his eyes on her. His gaze was frank, open, appraising, but utterly uncovetous, utterly scrubbed of lust’s sticky need. I found myself wanting someone to look at me that way: not just to look at me, but to see me. The priest’s eyes, however, were only for the older woman.

“Not yet,” he conceded finally.

Ela smiled. Both of them stood still, but a draft tugged at the candles, making their shadows shiver. “I’m glad. I can’t tell you how demoralizing it would be if you were younger at seventy than I am at thirty-five.”

Kossal shook his head. “I quit being young a long way back. Never did suit me.”

“I’ll be the judge of what suits you.”

The old priest grunted again, then turned to me. “I’ll give you a piece of advice, kid. Might come in handy if I don’t have to kill you at the end of your Trial.”

Ela’s arm was still around my shoulder. She gave me a conspiratorial squeeze, then leaned close to mock-whisper in my ear. “Pretend like you’re listening. His advice is terrible, but it makes him happy to give it.”

Kossal ignored the gibe. “When you give the god the one who made your mind and body sing with love, make sure you get it right. Otherwise,” he went on, nodding to Ela without breaking eye contact with me, “she’ll be there to bother you the rest of your life.”

“As I said,” Ela murmured, still loud enough for Kossal to hear, “his advice is terrible. I was ten years unborn when he had his Trial.”

“Should have waited,” he said, half to himself, shaking his head, then moving toward the door.

In a movement so fast I didn’t understand it until after, Ela twisted away from me and pivoted toward the older priest, aiming a sparring blow low between his ribs. She was fast, as fast as any priestess I’d seen at Rassambur, but it wasn’t her speed I marveled at later, over and over, but the perfect ease with which Kossal blocked the blow, catching her wrist, holding those stiffened fingers inches from his side. Ela glanced down at her hand, shook her head ruefully, smiled, then leaned in to kiss him lightly on the brow.

“Would you really have strangled me in my crib?” she asked. The words were warm, private, as though she’d forgotten I was there.

“Would have been easier,” Kossal replied, letting her wrist go.

“Easier than what?”

The old priest just shook his head. “Snuff the candles when you’re done. A little light’s all well and good, but when the wax is gone, it’s gone.”

Kossal stepped into the night, and the cedar door swung shut quietly behind him. Ela watched it for a while, lips pursed, as though she were about to whistle the first few bars of an old tune. She looked totally relaxed, but I could see her heartbeat testing the vessel in her neck; not fast, exactly, but faster than before. Her breath was faster, too, her chest rising and falling beneath her robe, whether from the short struggle with Kossal or from something else, I didn’t know.

“He loves you?” I asked stupidly.

Ela turned to me, then smiled. “That old fool doesn’t know the first thing about love.”

“He must have, once.”

“Once?” The priestess cocked her head to the side, then nodded. “Ah. His Trial.”

“He passed. Which means he loved someone. He had to have.”

Ela nodded. “Perhaps.” Then she slipped that arm around my shoulder again. “Enough about him. He’s half in Ananshael’s hand already. This is what you’re worried about, isn’t it? Making that last gift to the god?”

I hesitated. The truth made me feel small.

The priestess turned me until I faced her. She kept one hand on my shoulder, then lifted my chin with the other, until I was looking into her dark eyes. The fog of her hair caught the candlelight until it seemed to glow, while her face was lost in shadow. She was only a few inches taller, but in that moment I might have been a child all over again, wandering a warren of emotions barely known to me.

“They’re always hard,” she said, “the song’s last lines. Even Ananshael’s priests forget, sometimes, that we belong to him. Love, meanwhile, is a sneaky, beguiling goddess. She makes you believe.”

“Love . . .” I said, then trailed off, unable to manage more than the single syllable.

Ela nodded. “Whoever it is, you think you can keep her. Or him.” She traced the line of my chin with her thumb. “You can’t.”

Suddenly it was too much. I could only shake my head, the tears hot in my eyes, before pushing open the heavy cedar door and stepping out into the night’s chill, leaving behind the warm light of the twin candles for that other, older, colder light of the innumerable stars scattered overhead. All around me, the pale sandstone halls and houses of Rassambur glowed in the moonlight. Women and men moved between them alone, in pairs, or in small groups, chatting, laughing, silent. Shards of far-off song etched the darkness. I ignored it all, walking away until there was no more walking to be done, to the very edge of the mesa, where the only choice was between stopping and falling.

From the cliff’s brink, I stared down into the great gulf that surrounded all of Rassambur. I’d been beyond that gulf, of course. I was born beyond it, raised to the age of ten beyond it, and in the fifteen years since, I had crossed dozens of times over the delicate sandstone span linking Rassambur to the mountains, to the rest of the world. For all the remoteness of our fortress, our devotion is evangelical, ecumenical, not monastic. Where there are people, there is our god, pacing silently in the marble corridors of power and the rankest alley alike, visiting the solitary cabin in its forest clearing, the bustling harbor, the camp aswarm with soldiers. His justice is equal and absolute, and so, as ministers of his justice, we must go out into the world. For every year in Rassambur, I had spent one year abroad, sometimes to the west of the Ancaz, sometimes to the east, always living among people, learning their ways, their hopes and fears, their needs. I had lived in Sia and Freeport, in the sprawling maze of Uvashi-Rama and a tiny town on the east bank of the Green Cataract. I had friends, acquaintances, and fondly remembered lovers scattered across two continents, and yet . . .

I didn’t hear Ela approach, she moved too quietly for that, but I could smell her scent—jasmine and smoke—on the cool desert air. She stood half a pace behind me. When she spoke, her voice seemed to hang in the air all around.

“You’d think I would be used to it by now,” she murmured. Her voice was warm with some humor I didn’t understand.

“Used to what?”

“My own obtuseness.”

I shook my head, but didn’t turn around. “I don’t understand.”

“No,” Ela replied. “You understand just fine, about your own interesting . . . predicament, at least. I didn’t see it.” She chuckled. “Our lives blind us, and I’ve always fallen in love so easily.”

I blew out a long, uneven breath, stared down into the abyss. It was steadying, somehow, to know the drop was there just a step away, to look down into it. It was like seeing the marvelous, million-fingered hand of my god, patient and waiting.

“How is it possible,” I asked, half to Ela, who stepped up quietly to my side, half to myself, “after all these years, that I haven’t . . . that I don’t . . . ?”

“Love anyone?”

I nodded, dumb.

“Perhaps you are more discriminating. Discrimination isn’t a bad thing, Pyrre—take it from me. I fell in love with a farmer from just outside Chubolo, once. He reeked of rutabaga. Had short, rough little fingers, like crusty sausages. If he ever said more than five words in a row, I never heard it.”

I turned to stare at her, trying to imagine the lithe, smooth, deadly woman at my side with a rutabaga farmer. It was like trying to picture a lioness sliding her golden flank along an old pig’s bristly hide.

“Why?” I asked.

Ela laughed again. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Eira’s a goddess, and that makes her a tyrant, no matter what anyone tells you. Lady Love doesn’t explain her ways to me.”

“But there must have been something. . . .”

“I suppose. Maybe it was watching him move that stone.”

I shook my head, baffled.

“I was on the road,” she went on, her voice slipping into the rhythm of memory, “and he was clearing a field. There was a stone. Must have weighed ten times what he did, maybe twenty—I don’t know, I’ve never made a study of field clearing. The point is, it was huge, impossible to move. Or so I thought. He worked at it all day, digging it out with those stubby fingers of his, laying down the logs to roll it, shifting the weight a little at a time. I never saw anyone so slow, so patient, and I thought to myself, ‘He might not look like much, but a man who can move a stone like that is a man I need to get to know.’ I needed to see what he could do with all that slow, undeniable, relentless patience. I wanted to be that stone.”

We both stared into the darkness. The sky overhead was clear, the stars excruciatingly sharp, but off to the north, a hundred miles distant, the spring winds had pinned a thunderstorm up against the higher peaks. Every few heartbeats, blue-white lightning shattered the cool bowl of the night, though we were too far away to hear the thunder.

“So what did you do?” I asked, glancing over at Ela just as the next bolt hit, watching her face go from blackness to brilliance, then back again.

“Spent six months with him. At his farm.”

“Six months?” I tried to imagine it—noticing a strange man working his field, then deciding that very day, on no better information than his stone-shoving capacity, to pass half the year in his home. The whole story seemed like just that, a story, the kind of thing you might read in a book or hear over a campfire, the fabric of the tale spun half out of lies and half for laughs. Only, Ela wasn’t laughing, and I couldn’t think of a reason she might lie. I felt dizzy, suddenly, as though the flat top of the mesa were lifting by imperceptible degrees to tumble me into the abyss. Ela put a steadying hand on my shoulder, pulling me back.

“How?” I asked, when I regained my balance.

She shrugged. “It was easy enough to keep my eyes off his fingers, to breathe only through my mouth.”

“Averted glances and mouth-breathing don’t seem like a sound foundation for love.”

The older woman chuckled. “And just what do you think love is, Pyrre?”

I shook my head stupidly.

“As I said,” Ela continued after a pause, “it comes easier to some of us than others. The goddess makes us in endlessly different ways. Our struggles are no more the same than our faces.”

It was impossible, when I replied, to scrub the bitterness from my voice. “And yet, Ananshael sets the same Trial for all of us.”

“Anything less would be unjust.”

I bit my lip so hard I could taste blood. “Why didn’t anyone tell me? All these years . . . I can kill a woman thirteen different ways with a wooden bowl. I’ve memorized poisons that no one has seen since the Csestriim wars, poisons as old as the Nevariim, if the Nevariim ever even really existed. I can hang upside down from a rafter for hours, or pop the glass pane from a window without making a sound. All the time I thought I was getting ready, and now . . . none of it matters.”

Ela squeezed my shoulder. “Oh, it matters. You’ve got six other people to give to the god, all questions of love aside.”

“But the questions of love aren’t aside. Even if I offer up everyone else on the first day, I’ll still fail.”

“Not necessarily. You can take the place of that last sacrifice yourself. Kossal and I will see to it.”

The words were level, even encouraging, but I couldn’t find any comfort in them. It wasn’t that I was afraid to die. Anyone raised in Rassambur comes to peace with the notion of her own unmaking. Ananshael’s mercy and justice extend even to us. Especially to us. A priestess unwilling to make an offering of herself is no priestess at all, but a mere murderer. I understood that even then. It wasn’t the prospect of my own death that bothered me, but of my failure. So much about Ananshael’s art had come to me so easily for so long; it seemed unfair that I should come up against such an abrupt, unexpected impossibility.

“Who’s the judge?” I asked quietly.

“Judge?”

“Yes, the judge. About love. Who decides?”

“Ah.” Ela turned from the immensity of the night to face me. “Kossal and I will decide in concert.”

“And if I lie?”

The priestess tsked. “Generally, we hope for a little more piety from those approaching the Trial.”

“The piety will be the pile of bodies,” I replied grimly. “It’s something I’ve always admired about our god—he abides no lies. When the life goes from a woman, it is gone. Love, though . . .” I blew out a long, frustrated breath. “Anyone can fake it. Fakery is almost built into the emotion.”

“Spoken like a girl who has never been in love.”

“How will you know?” I insisted. “If I find someone, if I say I’m in love, if I insist on it, how will you know?”

“There is a shape to love, a pattern to the way it moves in us, through us. Between us.”

“What are you? A priestess of death, or a ’Kent-kissing poet?”

I regretted the words even as I spoke. Ela was only ten years older than me, only ten years clear of her own Trial, but she had already become half a legend in Rassambur. At the age of twenty-eight, following one of our god’s inscrutable commands, she had traveled to Badrikâs-Rama, found a way inside the ancient, unbroken walls of the Palace of Evening Waves, slipped past the Dusk Guards, and strangled the oldest Manjari prince. It was an act of devotion that many had deemed impossible. Then, the next night, she went back and killed his brother. This was the woman whose piety I had impugned; I half expected her to shove me from the ledge. Instead, she chuckled.

“I’d like to think a woman can be both. She can be more. The nights I’ve spent tangled in someone else’s arms don’t diminish my devotion to the god. You can hold a knife to a woman’s throat . . .” she began, and then, in a motion so fast I could barely follow, her knife was free of its sheath and pressed against my skin. Her dark eyes sparkled starlight. “. . . And, if you were so inclined, you could kiss her at the same time.”

For half a heartbeat I thought she intended to do just that. For half a heartbeat it felt as though we weren’t standing at the edge of the mesa but hanging just beyond it, buoyed up by the dark, or not buoyed at all, but already falling, the night air so soft against my skin that I hadn’t noticed. This is one of Ananshael’s truths—we are all dying, all the time. Being born is stepping from the cliff’s edge. The only question is what to do while falling.

Ela’s eyes seemed to offer an answer, but it was one I couldn’t understand. Then, quick as it came, the knife was gone, slipped back into the sheath at her belt. She hadn’t stepped back, but she felt farther away, as though some bond between us was suddenly broken. I could have left it there, could have nodded and walked away.

But I’ve never been good at walking away.

“I’m not you,” I said quietly.

Ela nodded. “Nor should you be.”

“The thing that you call love might not be love to me at all.”

“Your hands,” Ela said, taking my wrist, holding the hand up to the moonlight, “are not my hands, but they’re still hands. Your love won’t be mine. This doesn’t mean I can’t see it, know it.”

“And if you’re wrong? What if I fall in love and you don’t even recognize it?”

She took my other hand, then. We stood like lovers at the edge of the cliff, facing each other. I got the sense that she was making her face grave for my sake, the way an adult will feign attention for a furious child. “Then, when I come to kill you, Pyrre, you should fight back.”

Copyright © 2017 by Brian Staveley. Excerpted from Skullsworn by Brian Staveley. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Staveley is the author of the Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne trilogy. He lives in rural Vermont. bstaveley.wordpress.com

Book Reviews: April 2017

Andrew Liptak | 1001 words

For this month’s column, I wanted to take a look at a pair of debut fantasy novels that I’ve come across this spring. On the face of it, both are fairly different from one another, but they ultimately have quite a bit in common. Both are fantasies that share wonderful prose and plotting, and each are well worth your time to pick up and dig into.

The Bear and the Nightingale
Katherine Arden
EBook / Hardcover / Audio
ISBN: 978-1101885932
Del Rey, January 2017
322 pages

I had a chance to see Katherine Arden speak about her book when it was released. During her talk, she noted that the book came about because of her interest in Russian history. Prior to her time as a student at Middlebury College (where she earned a degree in Russian), she spent time abroad in the country, and noted that she had a particular interest in the folklore of the country.

The Bear and the Nightingale is a novel that comes out of that folklore. It’s not so much a translation of the older tales, but a reinterpretation, much like Neil Gaiman has done with his recent novel Norse Mythology, or Mark Tompkins’ The Last Days of Magic, which imagine the supernatural world alongside the lives of realistic characters. This novel follows Vasilisa Petrova, the youngest daughter of a wealthy Russian. She has a particular gift: She can see the fantastic creatures that inhabit her home and the woods around her village. Vanya’s father eventually remarries, and her new stepmother shares her gift. Unlike Vanya, her stepmother, Anna, is terrified of what she sees, and tries to suppress what her stepdaughter sees.

As this is happening, there’s a sort of power struggle taking place in the forests of Russia. A long-sleeping spirit is waking, and Vanya finds herself squarely in its attention.

The central part of Arden’s book is concerned with the notion of competing mythologies: the ancient, pagan stories of medieval Russia, and the newer, modern faith of Christianity. Much like Tomkins’ novel, the book portrays Russia at a crossroads between the old and new worlds, with the heart and soul of the country at stake—in this case, literally. As an ancient creature awakes in the forest, a priest arrives at Vanya’s village, a man concerned with the salvation of the village, even as the local gods and paranormal creatures rustle just out of sight.

At the heart of the novel is Vanya, a wonderfully fleshed out character in the midst of a vivid depiction of the Russian countryside. She’s a young woman caught in the midst of these changes in the world, from the spiritual to the practical, and steadfastly plots a course of her choosing, despite the wishes of her family and community. She’s a bright, interesting character that I can’t wait to see more of in the next installment from Arden.

Crossroads of Canopy
Thoraiya Dyer
eBook / Hardcover / Audio
ISBN: 97800765385925
Tor Books, January 2017
332 pages

Another novel with a vivid central, powerful character is Thoraiya Dyer’s Crossroads of Canopy, the first installment of The Titan’s Forest trilogy. This is another impressive debut novel, one that goes all out in establishing an astonishing world that I can’t wait to see more of.

In this book, a woman named Unar escapes her family to serve in a garden of a goddess named Audblayin. This world is a massive, multi-leveled rainforest, where thirteen gods rule the upper levels, which receive plenty of sunlight, tended to by a huge population of slaves and servants. Unar exists uneasily in these upper levels, troubled by what she sees as an unfair system. When she rescues a slave from death, Unar flees to the understory of the forest, where she’s forced to confront the nature of life in the upper stories of the forest, and where she witnesses the long-term consequences of the wealth and excesses of the society from which she came.

Dyer takes a firm, hard look at a central theme in this novel: inequality. Her rainforest world is an ideal place in which to set this story—naturally stratified, the haves and have-nots are separated by the layers of the forest. When Unar visits the lower levels, there’s little surprise when we discover that a revolution is fomenting from the people in the Understory. They’ve been raided by their higher neighbors, their citizens taken for slaves.

As is the case with The Bear and the Nightingale, Crossroads of Canopy is bolstered by the presence of a powerful lead character in the form of Unar. She’s a capable and ambitious character, one who steers her own course through this story, confronting the life that she once had as she learns the truth of her surroundings. Inequality and wealth are difficult things to write about without seeming preachy, and Dyer pulls it off nicely.

While both of these novels draw from very different subject matter (Arden looks to real world mythology, while Dyer takes on second-world fantasy), they’re linked by a central premise: a strong female character who drives the narrative forward by her own choices and actions, rather than being pushed around by fate, society or anything else. As the first novel for each respective author, they’re debuts that are a strong first step in what’s hopefully a promising career for each.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Liptak is the Weekend Editor for The Verge. He is the co-editor of War Stories: New Military Science Fiction, (Apex Publications, 2014). His writing has also appeared in io9, Gizmodo, Kirkus Reviews, Tor.com, BN Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Clarkesworld and others. He lives in Vermont.

Movie Review: April 2017

Carrie Vaughn | 2240 words

Resident Evil: A Study of Formula and Subversion

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
Capcom Entertainment, January 2017

Disclaimer: I’m not a gamer. I’m not a fan of zombie films, and I’m not even really a fan of mindless action franchises unless there’s something else going on to hold my attention.

I adore the Resident Evil movies.

With the release of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, the sixth and supposedly last of the franchise (The T-virus and Hive both get destroyed here, and the evil Dr. Isaacs is killed—and so is his clone, because of course there’s a clone—so I’ll take them at their word. A lovely thank you message from Milla Jovovich and director Paul W.S. Anderson at the start of the movie brought a bit of a tear to my eye.), I have an opportunity to look at the entire series and try to explain exactly why I love them.

In a way, these movies are incredibly easy to review. Did you like the ones that came before? Then you will probably like the new one. Did you not like the others? Then save your twelve bucks for something else. I’ve found I’ve had a hard time explaining to people who don’t like them what the big deal is.

This is an epic saga, complete with a long introduction catching us up on all that went before, glossing over the parts where things don’t hang together all that well. (Wait, why did Umbrella Corp invent the T-virus? We get different reasons. Is Alice their experiment or their weapon? Is she a victim or the primary research subject? Doesn’t really matter! Who’s a clone? Anyone we want to be!) The later ones haven’t matched the claustrophobic intensity of the first, but they all have their charms. I can never remember the titles, so I describe them by setting: The first one is the first one, the second one is the one in Raccoon City, the third one is the one with the desert convoy, the fourth is the one with the airplane and the prison in L.A., the fifth one is the base in Siberia, and the sixth is the last. See what I mean? So much easier than the official titles. (To anyone planning a series and struggling to come up with a title convention: You might keep this lesson in mind.)

These films don’t really have plots. Instead, they’re a series of set pieces. Rube Goldberg mousetraps, often clever and spectacular. (That frakking laser room that was used to such horrifying effect in the first film has appeared periodically throughout, and every time I see it, it’s like the bad guy jumping out from nowhere one more time.) Often set to thumping techno music, the action sequences have much in common with slickly-produced music videos. These films are as artful as they are goofy. Likeable ensemble casts of characters, an internal mythology that, if not consistent, is at least recognizable, and frequent call-backs to its video game origins, with animated wire-frame modeling of various maze-like settings and a definite structuring of the story according to progressively tougher bad guys and boss levels—whatever the pieces and parts, this franchise has always had an excellent grasp of what makes it appealing, and delivers with admirable consistency.

The reason these films don’t just feel like watching someone else play a video game: Alice.

Alice, played by Milla Jovovich, is the main character of all the movies and the glue that holds them together. Moreover, she is at once an embodiment and a deconstruction of the trope of the fetishized action heroine.

Let me explain.

There’s a point, a kind of uncanny valley of kick-ass characters, where a certain kind of main character stops being about a powerful woman and starts being all about sexy eye candy for straight men. She can be both at once, but beyond a certain point there’s no doubt what her primary design specification is. The outfits get tighter, the heels get higher, the cleavage more pronounced. She’s no longer an athlete, but a pin-up. There’s a moment in the late ’90s and early ’00s when this character superseded the kind of woman action hero we’d seen a lot of during the ’80s and ’90s, the Ellen Ripleys and Xenas.

Trinity in The Matrix (1999) solidified for me the moment the “kick-ass heroine” slipped from a model of empowerment to a fetishized figure tailor-made to appeal to twenty-something gamer guys, as much a construct as Kelly LeBrock’s character in Weird Science. What’s more, The Matrix explicitly states that Trinity’s reason for existing is to be Neo’s girlfriend. That’s her destiny. After svelte, devoted black catsuit-wearing Trinity, we get sexy Lara Croft in Lara Croft, Tomb Raider (2001), sexy catsuit-wearing Selene in Underworld (2003), and in 2002, the first Resident Evil movie. The trend continues to this day, easily identified by movie posters that insist on depicting their powerful women ass-out, with that come-hither over-the-shoulder look. These might be powerful badass women characters, but they primarily exist to satisfy the straight male gaze.

Alice fits this formula. She is indisputably sexy. We first see her in an iconic red cocktail dress, cut just so to allow for those awesome high kicks. She rarely appears in anything that isn’t form-fitting. When she’s not in something form-fitting, it’s because she’s nearly naked, wearing two sheets of paper masquerading as a hospital gown or floating in glowing medical vats.

But Alice is also a critique of this formula. Because Alice, within the mythology of the story, is literally a construct. She’s been poked, prodded, manipulated, injected with T-virus and other nano-whatevers, un-injected, given special powers, cloned ad-infinitum to serve as the subject of endless experiments. She’s powerful and sexy, because she was made to be that way, and the films are happy to point that out.

Through it all, however, her mind remains her own. She has depth and a mission to go with the style, and the thing I’ve always loved about her the most is her compassion. She’s not a lone wolf battling solo through a harsh world. In every movie, she gathers together a little tribe of survivors and her primary motivation is to take care of them. To make sure they survive. That she fails so often doesn’t deter her at all. She is always kind to children. None of her charges is ever a burden. She inspires them to reach their own limits of über-competence. When her peeps re-appear in later films, she’s happy to see them. Unless they return as evil Umbrella Corp clones, in which case Alice reacts with sadness and anger. That she isn’t fully human weighs on her, but it doesn’t stop her from acting human, and using her powers to help as many people as she can.

Finally, my biggest argument that the Resident Evil movies subvert the trope of the fetishized kick-ass heroine: Every single film in the series easily passes the Bechdel Test. (Reminder: This is the test named for writer and artist Alison Bechdel that asks if a movie 1) has more than one woman character, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something other than men.) The test isn’t a measure of quality: It’s a demonstration of how little consideration most movies give to women as anything other than plot devices or accessories.

The Resident Evil movies have lots of other women characters. The one who appears most frequently is Claire Redfield, played by Ali Larter. Alice is an amazing, sexualized, catsuit-wearing superbeing. Claire is totally normal. No superpowers. No sexy outfits. Most of the time, she looks really tired. Her skills are at the level of a normal, if extremely competent, leader. She’s there to show us what an actual badass woman hero looks like. And she and Alice work together like peanut butter and chocolate.

An action movie can have more than one kind of woman character! They can be awesome in different ways! Maybe the greatest demonstration of this is in #5, Retribution, in the final battle on the Siberian ice where the women fighters outnumber the men. The scene has five women—Alice, Rain (an evil clone of a character who appeared in the first movie, played by the amazing Michelle Rodriguez), Jill Valentine, Ada Wong, and Becky, the deaf child Alice finds herself protecting this go-around. They all have different reasons for being there, they’re arrayed on different sides of the fight, and it’s great. (Especially after a delightful earlier scene, when yet another clone of Rain, this one presented as a typical suburban mom, argues with Alice about why she can’t use a gun: “You don’t understand, I marched against the NRA.” Alice puts a machine gun in her hand, aims, makes her fire, and tiredly declares, “Congratulations, you’re officially a badass.” It’s almost meta, a wry observation of how by some standards one would believe it takes a little more than a machine gun to transform an ordinary woman into a “strong woman characterTM”).

As the Resident Evil series has progressed, the infected, the T-virus zombies, become less and less important. In each successive film, they occupy less film time, as the real villains are revealed: the scientists and corporate masters of the Umbrella Corporation. The zombies are a McGuffin, the cannon fodder for the earlier levels of the game. They’re creepiest and scariest in the first movie when they’re still a mystery, when they attack our band of heroes one-by-one and no one knows what’s happening. After that, they move in hordes, and battling them is perfunctory. The zombies aren’t the point of the story—they’re a symptom of a deeper conflict. The action set pieces throughout the various Resident Evil movies may not cohere in a thing that looks like a plot, but they do all illustrate the same theme: the megacorp that sees people not even as product, but as raw material. The Umbrella Corporation is Philip Morris covering up memos revealing that they know very well that smoking kills people, the Union Carbide chemical spill in Bhopal, India, that killed from 4,000 to 16,000 (depending on who you ask) and injured half a million, and a thousand other fatal corporate disasters. These films know what’s really dangerous.

It’s not enough for Alice to fight zombies. She has to get to the heart of Umbrella Corp. and discover all its secrets. And in The Final Chapter, she does. She confronts the evil Dr. Isaacs (Game of Thrones alum Iain Glen, who is clearly delighted to be chewing as much scenery as he does in these films) and meets her progenitor, because yes, this entire time, our Alice has been a clone, made from Alicia, the sickly daughter of Umbrella Corp’s former leader. Alicia is in a wheelchair now, dying, and has another reveal: The Red Queen, the evil child AI directing Umbrella Corp and Alice’s nemesis from Day One, was made from a brain scan of Alicia herself as a child. Now, on the cusp of total human extinction, the Red Queen has had a change of heart. “The Holy Trinity of bitches,” Isaacs calls them, when the three are finally brought together. One person in three forms, complete with Alice’s Christ-like sacrifice, dying so that the world might live. They are also the Maiden, Mother, and Crone, the trinity of woman-centric pagan belief. The symbolism isn’t at all subtle, but if you’re not expecting it, if you’re expecting dumb mindless action fun, the meaning, the metaphoric divinity of our hero, might just slip past you.

The Final Chapter pulls a punch at the end and doesn’t let Alice die. It totally earned that ending and I would have gone there. But in hindsight, Alice’s doppelgängers, Alicia and the Red Queen, already made that sacrifice. And disproved their own assertion that they’re not as good a person as Alice.

Alice’s compassion, the relationships she develops, the number of other kick-ass women surrounding her: All this has kept me coming back to these movies. She’s a kick-ass woman character whose kick-ass-ness hasn’t made her cold and unapproachable, as so many stories and movies seem to think a woman who can flying-kick bad guys’ heads off while simultaneously firing two Uzis and spitting throwing knives must be. She has the altruism of Superman. She’s a protector because she wants to use her abilities to help others.

In the end, it may be a good thing The Final Chapter didn’t leave her dead, as the ultimate martyr. When we last see her, she’s motorcycling off to New York City, to rescue as many people as she can from the last remaining monsters. It’s her calling, and she’s pleased to answer it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series, about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio advice show. Her newest novel is a planetary adventure, Martians Abroad. Bannerless, a post-apocalyptic murder mystery, will be released by John Joseph Adams Books in July 2017. Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, from Lightspeed to Tor.com and George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.

Interview: Aliette de Bodard

Christian A. Coleman | 3168 words

Aliette de Bodard is an engineer, a writer, and a keen amateur cook. Her love of mythology and history led her to speculative fiction early on. She is the author of The House of Shattered Wings, the first Dominion of the Fallen novel, plus numerous short stories, the Aztec noir trilogy Obsidian and Blood, and the award-nominated On a Red Station, Drifting, a space opera based on Vietnamese culture. She has won two Nebula Awards and a Locus Award.

• • • •

The House of Shattered Wings and The House of Binding Thorns are the books in your latest series, the Dominion of the Fallen. Tell us about where the premise of fallen angels vying for power in a post-apocalyptic Paris came from.

I’d originally planned to write an urban fantasy about families of magicians vying for power in twenty-first-century Paris and things didn’t work out quite as planned . . . I wasn’t feeling any fire for that story, so I went back to the drawing board and—on the advice of the always-excellent Rochita Loenen-Ruiz—incorporated one of my old stories set in a city where angel bones were ground and sold to drug addicts.

I can’t really remember where I got the idea of destroying Paris in a magical conflagration. I think it’s because I’ve always had a fascination not with war, but with the aftermath of war—with what gets rebuilt and what doesn’t, with trauma that people have to deal with, with how ranged battles might cease, but other, subtler things take their place, political intrigues and power games. So I invented the Great Houses War, a sort of analogue of WWI fought between magical factions. But I deliberately set the story not during that war, but sixty years after it, in a city so devastated that it’s still struggling to recover: where the Seine runs black with ashes, where monuments are piles of rubble, and where magic is as much of a scarce resource as clean water or food.

The series takes place in an alternate Paris whose geography is situated in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. What attracted you to this past incarnation of the city?

I wrote the book as homage to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French literature like Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. The nineteenth century, in addition to being a great source of literature, was also a time of great upheaval in France: several changes of regime, not all peaceful, accompanied by rapid social change that saw the rise of a new social order, as well as the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution to people’s ways of life. It was a time of great contrasts: of elegant men and women attending glamorous balls while workers struggled to make both ends meet mere streets away and soldiers conquered colonies like Vietnam to satisfy an endless need for money. It’s a time period I’m fascinated by, and given that my Great Houses War was the analogue of WWI, it seemed natural to me to have the pre-war city conform to nineteenth-century geography.

A little Easter egg is that many of the names of characters come from Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc, a series published in the first half of the twentieth century featuring the adventures of a gentleman-thief.

You’ve listed Ursula K. Le Guin and Patricia McKillip as literary influences. In what ways have their work influenced this series?

I still remember the day I got my first Ursula K. Le Guin book: I bought The Earthsea Quartet as a teenager with my own pocket money at WH Smith in Paris, because the book looked thick and had an attractive looking dragon on the front cover (yes, shallow reader here!). I subsequently binge-read all of her books from the library: She’s been a huge influence on my writing. Steering the Craft is one of those how-to-write books I return to, time and time again, because it’s still as true now as it was then, and I still have shivers down my spine when Ged embraces his shadow at the end of A Wizard of Earthsea. And it’s from that scene that I took something I’ve always tried to put in my work: that everyone has darkness inside—and that, conversely, everyone has light inside. People are complex beings: No one is perfect, but no one is irredeemably evil either. Part of my series explores what people do to survive, and the ethical cost of that. I’ve got characters on a spectrum, from Lucifer Morningstar, who believes that anything is fair game if it saves his House, to Annamite (Vietnamese) ex-Immortal Philippe, who would rather starve and die than do the wrong thing—and yet, when push comes to shove, almost everyone does reprehensible things, Philippe first among them.

Patricia McKillip’s prose isn’t deceptively simple, but it’s flat-out gorgeous, and it’s a definite part of her worldbuilding, because it weaves a spell that makes the entire world feel like it’s magic. I hope I’ve channeled some of that in the series (except that my universe is a great deal darker and more unpleasant than hers!).

You’ve written both books through varying perspectives of several characters. How did you decide on telling the story with an ensemble?

I wrote my first trilogy, the Aztec noir fantasies of Obsidian and Blood, as first-person, and by the third book I was finding the format immensely frustrating, because so many interesting things happened outside the frame, and also because Acatl, the narrator, was terribly biased. It was really hard to show this when he was also the only voice in the story. When I started writing The House of Shattered Wings, I was determined to have an ensemble cast in order to get multiple points in view of the story.

I tried to have a variety of characters: In both books, they cover several social classes, natures of beings, and magical factions. I didn’t quite get the same perspectives for The House of Binding Thorns, mostly because the setting changed, and the story needed some fresh blood, so to speak!

One of my favorite characters is Madeleine, the alchemist. She navigates the power games between the Houses of the fallen angels and the dragon kingdom as an outsider like Philippe and Emmanuelle, the archivist of House Silverspires. At the same time, she’s battling her addiction to the drug made from ground angel bones, which you call angel essence. Why did you give her this flaw?

I really like Madeleine. She’s compassionate, completely useless in any fights, and also a complete geek who would quite happily remain shut in her room working out magical spells rather than get dragged into intrigues. When I threw angel essence into the worldbuilding, I always knew that I wanted to have an addict character, because it seemed too good a flaw not to be used (in fact, I used it twice: Emmanuelle is an ex-addict). Madeleine seemed the best character to have it: She had easy access to essence through her job as an alchemist and a traumatic past that made her vulnerable.

I don’t actually think of her as an outsider: She’s in the middle to lower rings of House hierarchy, in the sense that she benefits from the system but has very little power within it (and, to be honest, very little interest in exerting any kind of influence. Her alchemist counterpart in House Hawthorn, Sare, is part of the inner ring of the powerful).

In the section on further reading at the end of The House of Binding Thorns, you mention that the relations between the dragon kingdom and the Houses is based on the opium traffic run by the British into the Chinese empire that led to two Opium Wars. How did you develop the idea of the angel essence drug from this historical detail?

In The House of Binding Thorns, a key plot point involves an angel essence traffic run into the Annamite dragon kingdom by the Houses. As soon as I knew the book was going to be about the relations between the kingdom and the Houses, I was pretty certain that I wanted some kind of drug traffic: I had the drug, and the historical precedent was too strong to resist, especially given the closeness in political situations between that and the start of the First Opium War (I also had an isolationist kingdom/empire ruled by Confucian ideology, and a host of smaller Western factions—the Houses—that were hungry for power and money). It also played well with my existing characters, particularly poor Madeleine, whose bucket list most definitely didn’t include being sent on a diplomatic mission in dragon country with temptation always within reach!

There are a lot of neat magical powers in the series, such as capturing angel’s breath in mirrors. Which one of them would you like to have?

I’m rather fond of the dragons’ capacity for manipulating water. The instant ability to make locks rust from within would be rather handy!

One of the lines of The House of Binding Thorns that really called my attention was what the grandmotherly character Olympe says: “Everyone needs someone.” Next to power, this appears to be one of the salient themes of the novel. On one level, it refers to the friendship and love your characters need to survive post-apocalyptic Paris. What led you to explore this theme?

I tend to find out my themes for a novel after I write it, so I’m not sure how much help I’ll be on that one! It’s true that while The House of Shattered Wings was about exile, displacement, and the weight of the past, The House of Binding Thorns ended up more concerned with the present and with the necessity of joining communities—with friendship, families (whether blood ones or found ones) and love, and how they all bind the characters, whether they’re Fallen or mortals or dragons.

This same remark also applies on another level to the overt theme of colonialism. Both House Hawthorn, helmed by fallen angel Asmodeus, and the dragon kingdom have something the other one wants. Both of their magics need to be invigorated by the other if they’re going to survive. Is this development in the story meant to subvert our understanding of the impact of colonialism?

I was trying to present a variety of reactions to the early stages of colonialism: Much of it is based on the interactions between the Nguyen court in Vietnam and the French in the nineteenth century as the French nibbled at territory and influence within the country. Researching this time period is like watching a slow, heartbreaking train wreck, because you know exactly how it ended, and everything the Vietnamese tried just seems to make matters worse. We all know the only ideal solution to colonialism would have been the Western nations packing up and leaving and making reparations for the damage they’d done, all of which was never going to happen.

Within the book, I ended up writing about two opposing strands: ex-Annamite Immortal Philippe, who sees talking to Houses as the beginning of a slippery slope, and dragon prince Thuan, who realises that isolationism or fortifications aren’t going to make the problem go away. But really, they’re all groping for responses to an all-around terrible situation when the fix isn’t within their power.

You’ve researched ancient cultures—Aztecs, Ancient China, Ancient India—for previous projects. Were there any particular cultural details you had to research for this series?

My books tend to be put together with large amounts of research: I always have a preliminary phase of six-plus months where I just read non-fiction books and soak in the historical/cultural atmosphere. For this series, obviously I was starting out as an insider to both the cultures involved (French and Vietnamese), but I was also separated by a century from the historical periods I wanted to evoke. Attitudes have changed a lot between France in the Belle Époque and France now, for instance, and I had very little idea of what daily life in the Nguyen Imperial Court in the nineteenth century looked like. I now have stacks of old black-and-white photographs from the time period that are just fascinating.

On your website you have a blog post, “A Few Disjointed Thoughts on Other Cultures and Diversity in SFF” (aliettedebodard.com/2013/09/13/a-few-disjointed-thoughts-on-other-cultures-and-diversity-in-sff/), which outlines eight observations of writing fiction about other cultures. Nisi Shawl wrote a post with similar observations and advice called “Transracial Writing for the Sincere” (sfwa.org/2009/12/transracial-writing-for-the-sincere/) published on the SFWA website in 2009. Were you aware of her post? Is your blog post in dialogue with hers? Or did yours come about from the writing you’d already done?

I’m aware of Nisi’s post (and of her sterling and seminal work in general in giving advice on Writing the Other). I didn’t set out to write my blog post in response to hers: It was a bit of a rant, actually, in which I wanted to correct some fallacies and blind spots I’d seen too often in writing. I was exhausted (I’d given birth to my first son not long before and was subsisting on a diet of always thirsty and not enough sleep), and couldn’t actually think of a way to link all my objections into a coherent post—so I didn’t, and just left it as a list of bullet points.

When readers respond to your work, do you notice any cultural difference between what American readers react to and what European readers react to?

I think the main differences I’ve seen between reactions to this series are due to people having radically diverging expectations: Readers were disappointed that the setting of the story was not immersive enough, and that the plot could have happened in any other city. From the little I’ve seen, it tends to be a difference between French and other readers more than a European/American dichotomy (though nothing is as clear cut, of course!). It had me very puzzled, because this is a series intrinsically dependent on setting: The city of Paris is key to it, and I just can’t imagine this happening anywhere else.

It took me a lot of time, but I finally worked out what the issue was: Readers wanted a tour guide of Paris with detailed outsider descriptions of famous monuments and recognisable places and a plot that included more travelogue and detailed setting description—and that’s just not the series I wanted to write! Both The House of Shattered Wings and The House of Binding Thorns are written from the point of view of people who consider Paris their home and who just won’t provide detailed descriptions of places they see every day.

You’ve won two Nebula Awards and three British Science Fiction Association Awards, and you make appearances at several conventions in Europe and the US. What is the fandom of your work like? How does fandom in the US differ from fandom in Europe?

Ha! I’m not too sure what the fandom of my work is like, other than they’re pretty cool, awesome people who are tremendously helpful in a pinch and interested in all sorts of niche subjects (while I was writing The House of Binding Thorns, I outsourced several French translation queries to Twitter, and got a ton of really useful suggestions, including pretty darn precise ones about battle tactics!).

Quite honestly, it’s hard to characterise European vs. US fandom, not the least because European fandom covers quite a lot of countries with different languages, different conversations, and quite a different character. They’ve all been amazingly welcoming, though. Probably the most surprising experience I had was meeting Romanian writer, translator, and philosopher Christian Tămaş in Romania and getting around in French, which is certainly not my first pick for an international language!

I certainly have a huge advantage in European fandom, though. By dint of being published in the US and UK, I already get a lot of attention online, and people know me. The converse certainly isn’t true. We were having this conversation at Eurocon that it was extremely hard for authors in Europe (outside of the UK) to be well-known outside of them, because so much of the tone for the field is set in the Western Anglophone world with many books translated from English but much fewer translated into English. It’s changing slowly: Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem and Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” won Hugos in 2015, and there’s been a slow increase in translations published (as well as English books from India, Malaysia, South Africa, etc.), but there are lots of structural issues to be overcome (not least of which is the question of paying for the translation, a budget that’s routine in European countries, but that Anglophone publishers are less used to).

Fans will be anticipating the continuation of the Dominion of the Fallen. Can we expect a third installment of the series?

I don’t have a third installment under contract, alas: I only signed for two books! They’re both standalones, so hopefully they resolve any hanging plot points, though I do have plans to write short fiction set in that setting. I already have written a novella that’s set between The House of Shattered Wings and The House of Binding Thorns and features Emmanuelle getting caught in House politics.

Are there any other future writing projects you can tell us about?

I just released an ebook and a print edition of The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, a book set in my Xuya universe (a space opera series set in a Confucian/Vietnamese galactic empire). It’s available via all major retailers and as a print-on-demand book via Createspace with a gorgeous cover by Maurizio Manzieri. And I’m currently working on a novella about life aboard a space station with various characters trying to deal with health-related crises.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christian A. Coleman is a 2013 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. He lives and writes in the Boston area. He tweets at @coleman_II.

Author Spotlight: Joseph Allen Hill

Sandra Odell | 510 words

“Infinite Love Engine” hits overdrive in the very first paragraph and doesn’t stop until the last period. What inspired this character-driven roller coaster ride?

I originally wrote the story for the Cosmic Powers anthology, the remit of which was big, splashy space opera. I grew up reading those kinds of stories in comic books, and I had a lot of ideas for cool space stuff. I wanted to have fun with it, so the creative process was sort of like, think of a cool character, think of an interesting problem, then just kinda goof around for a while.

You chose a very distinct narrative voice for the story—a dollop of Phillip K. Dick, a splash of William Gibson, a dash of Hunter S. Thompson. How did you tease out this particular narrative tone?

The voice is actually pretty natural for me. I wanted the narration to be kind of casual, so it’s sort a representation of how I talk, or how I would talk if I could write all my lines ahead of time to maximize my eloquence. And then I wrote the dialogue the way I did because I thought it would be funny if these cosmic heroes and monsters talked like hipster zonkos.

As many of the best stories do, you blend a number of current social concerns into a near future narrative: racism; empowering women; STEM studies; religious strife; communication and cultural differences. What are your thoughts on SF/F/H stories as a means to explore political/social issues? Do you write with a particular message in mind?

Fiction is about expressing ideas, and ideas are political. “Ignoring politics” is itself a political stance. At the same time, fiction is limited if your goal is actually to convince people of one political point or another. You can explore ideas, but you’re often preaching to the choir. In most of my fiction, I write with a particular message in mind, although my last story in Lightspeed, “The Venus Effect,” was pretty political by design. Most of the time, I like writing about the things that interest me most—art, relationships, and identity—and the politics just sort of follow from there.

Okay. It has to be asked. What is Joseph Allen Hill’s definition of love?

That is a super hard question. I don’t know. I guess it’s the bond of kindness and humane intimacy that connects us to one another. Or maybe it’s just chemicals in our brains to keep us from murdering each other all the time.

What’s next? What can fans look forward to, whether musically or in prose?

I think I’m going to do some more Aria stories. This story was a lot of fun to write, and I’ve been interested in experimenting with episodic storytelling for a while. Besides that, I guess I’m hoping to get a novel going soon.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Paul Park

Laurel Amberdine | 428 words

Hi, Paul. I’m so sorry to learn you’ve been colonized by aliens and have subsequently passed on. No, wait. I mean . . . what a great story! How did you decide to include yourself in it?

The story developed out of a non-literary project: I was invited to give a talk at an academic conference at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, in 2001. The conference was on Human Origins, especially the development of sentience, and I was invited to address the idea of non-human intelligence. Scarcely having gone to college myself, I was intimidated by the eminences in paleontology and linguistics elsewhere on the program, and felt entirely fraudulent. I started writing some version of the first few pages of the story—an actual essay on the subject—but hated it, broke down, gave up, etc.; I had left myself no leeway in terms of time, because the deadline for submission was in twenty-four hours, and I had done nothing but panic for a week. So then I thought—what the hell, they asked a fiction writer to talk about this, they can only blame themselves for the result. So I backtracked to make the supposed writer more of an asshole, and then plowed on from there. I knew from the beginning that I wouldn’t be satisfied with the metaphorical approach—we’re all aliens and strangers to each other, etc., blah, blah, blah, and so from early on I knew there had to be a shift about two thirds of the way through, where it turns out we are talking about alien intelligence in stone fact. From there on, it was just a matter of figuring out some kind of indirect way of intimating non-human sentience; the thesis of the piece is that even though it doesn’t make sense to talk about this subject rationally, nevertheless there are other ways to talk about it, or at least pretend to talk about it—that is, emotionally and rhetorically.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I’m sick of dystopias. I’m teaching a class now in utopian fiction—I’d like to see more of that.

When you’re not busy writing, what do you like to do for fun?

I used to love various sports—skiing, squash—but I’m getting old, and my joints are going. I still love to backpack, though. Most summers I try to get up into the Sierra Nevada with my friend Kim Stanley Robinson.

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: Susan Palwick

Arley Sorg | 1081 words

Thanks for the story, Susan! I loved the central ideas, as well as a lot of the bits and pieces of the story, such as the concept of the hospital as an organism; and I appreciated the treatments of various characters. One of the cool facets here is the positive and spiritual portrayal of Christian practice. Do you feel like writing stories with a Christian perspective poses specific or unique challenges in terms of the market and/or the way the piece might be received?

Yes, definitely. A lot of people have had terrible experiences with organized religion and especially with Christianity, which since the fourth century has been much too cozy with empire. I describe myself as a “Proud Member of the Christian Left,” but I can’t blame anyone for being unaware that there even is such a thing, or deeply suspicious of the entire project. At the same time, though, spiritual care really is essential in healthcare settings. I’ve spent ten years as a spiritual-care volunteer in an ER, which is obviously where a lot of the story came from. I can attest to how much it means to patients, Christian or not, to have someone in that role. (There’s research about this, too: Spiritual practice makes people more resilient in the face of hardship.) We’re trained to talk to anybody, and proselytizing—which I’d never do anyway—is a definite no-no. To make Win’s character more palatable to readers, though, I deliberately made his faith rather fragile. He’s very isolated and having a spiritual crisis himself. At the same time, I tried to show that this is one reason he’s having trouble coping with his job. He needs support and doesn’t have it. He’s lost his connection to what’s larger than he is.

The notion of love and its role in death/the afterlife, as well as the way this relates to the needs of the dying and the dead, is a fascinating and powerful concept. I think one of the nice turns in the narrative is that Maisie, in having this great need—and (importantly) despite being an individual who some see as disposable—is also a provider, fulfilling that need for others. Is the role and treatment of individuals like Maisie important or personal for you?

Yes. Maisie isn’t modeled on any one patient, but I’ve met a lot of people like her in the ER. They show up with complaints no one can figure out, because what they really need is social contact; this is an inappropriate use of medical resources, but simply being with other people can also be genuinely life-saving. I’m very sympathetic to such patients, and—more generally—to anyone who tends to be stigmatized, including patients with addictions or mental illnesses. I have a history of depression myself, and volunteering is part of how I keep myself well, so I see myself in Maisie. Trying to help other people is how I help myself. I’ve also witnessed more instances than I can count of patients helping each other, even with simple things like cab fare or watching kids while someone goes off to X-ray. Being useful, which is how many of us demonstrate love in action, is a basic human need.

I enjoyed the way the story immediately develops a likeable protagonist, in the character of the vulnerable and flawed Win “for Winston.” What are some of your favorite techniques and tools to create a character who is both plausible and likeable?

To be likeable, I think characters have to be flawed! I can’t stand perfect characters; can you? As for techniques, one simple one is to contrast what the character most needs to do with a personality trait which makes that task very difficult. Win needs to advocate for more spiritual care in the hospital, and also needs to reach out to other people for his own sake, but his first impulse is always to evade conflict and avoid problems. This trait is a huge factor in his burnout and one reason he winds up in such a mess with his bosses. He’s also in the situation common to many professional caregivers of feeling like there’s nowhere he can go to get care himself.

I feel like this story really plays with identities and assumptions, with seeming contradictions built into the characters. For example, as mentioned above with Maisie, an individual who is “disposable” and, if anything, underestimated, but who can potentially be very helpful; with the tattooed and dangerous-looking ER staff; with Luz, who is physically small but very strong; and more. Do you draw these themes of contradiction and assumption from aspects of your own experiences?

Yes, very much so. When you think about it, the seeming contradictions make complete sense. Some of the kindest and most sensitive ER staff I know are people who look really physically intimidating; they’ve developed such good people skills because they realize they can scare patients just by walking into a room. Tiny women in marginalized jobs need to be tremendously strong to survive that experience. That’s true, really, of anyone at the bottom of any pecking order. By this definition, anyone we’re tempted to dismiss is likely to have astonishing smarts and tenacity. Some of my favorite ER patients over the years have been homeless guys; they often have a lot of problems, including addictions and mental illnesses, but most of them are also incredibly intelligent and articulate, quintessential survivors. You don’t stay alive on the streets without impressive internal resources.

What can we look forward to seeing from you soon?

I have a lot of partial projects, both short stories and novels, which I hope to finish someday! Right now, though, I don’t have much time to write. I’m in the middle of a career change—after twenty years as an English professor, I’m going back to school to become a medical social worker (big surprise, right?)—so between teaching classes and taking them, I’m very busy. I do hope to send out some new work this year, though.

Susan, thanks again for the story, and for your time!

Thank you for the thought-provoking questions. I’m delighted to have this story published in Lightspeed!

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: Lina Rather

Arley Sorg | 939 words

Lina, thanks for this story. I really enjoyed the sense of desperation, not to mention the struggle that the protagonist suffers. The way she puts her body on the line for hope and for her daughter is powerful. In terms of that protagonist, this feels deeply personal, and the story dunks the reader into her experience. Is this piece, or the experience of writing it, personal for you in specific ways? Or is it just about getting yourself into the character?

A little bit of both. I think we’ve all had a relationship where we wish, in our dark little heart-of-hearts, that the other person was just a bit different, even though we know that desire is unhelpful. And we’ve all had relationships where we were in Elena’s shoes and suspected that the other person would be happier if we were just a bit different. On the other hand, I’m not a parent, so those feelings were about getting into the character.

In the space of a few thousand words, you put us right in the driver’s seat. I feel like I almost lived this story. What are some of the tools or techniques you use to bring the reader in?

Halfway through the writing process I changed this story to present tense, and I think that helps the sense of immersion. Of course, it also meant I kept catching past tense errors all the way through several edits, because it’s not the tense I default to.

I think some can see the story’s resolution as fated, while others might interpret it as acceptance; or perhaps even hope, in the sense that, while Sarah is searching through worlds for answers, there is this idea that she could be running away from her reality (obviously this is not how she herself would see it) until she is forced to face that reality—and in facing it, she can finally deal with it somehow; or come to terms with it, at least. This touches on some of the most human themes: on how we deal with stress and pain. In that sense, it’s a pretty important narrative (in my opinion!). Did you play with different endings, and with leaving the reader with a different resolve? Or was there always a feeling/impression you were aiming for?

I took the phone call at the end out and put it back in again three or four times. Ultimately, it would have been a darker story without it. There’s no guarantee that Sarah will fix her relationship with Dahlia or be able to reach Elena, but now she’s looking at her actions and her family with clear eyes instead of hoping for a magic do-over, which is the first step. I wanted to end with a sense of possibility. I like stories with characters who learn to be better people—I think that’s much truer to life (or at least I hope it is!) than just despair.

I also toyed with the idea of having Sarah actually alter her own timeline, but again, that would have been a different and much darker story. It’s a plot I’m still thinking about, though, so it might become another story someday.

Do you relate to the way the Sarah responds to her situation? (I think many readers will!)

I’m an anxious person, and like most anxious people, I often spin through a hundred different “But what if I had just done this instead?” possibilities when I screw up. Sarah’s machine is a literal version of that. She has to run through all the possibilities before she can confront the idea that she has this one world. As Dahlia points out, their daughter is missing and possibly in trouble, and Sarah’s locked away in the basement trying to figure out a way to not have to deal with the situation. It’s not a great reaction, but it’s a human one.

I’m curious about your writing style in general—do you usually work in this sort of deep and involved perspective? Also, I’d love to know what you are working on now that readers can look forward to reading.

I gravitate towards interior stories—characters usually come to me before a world or a plot. Most often I start a story with a character and a feeling. Relationships and people’s reactions to extraordinary situations are what interest me most. When I think of a character, I like to live with them in my head for a while, and I don’t start writing until I have the first paragraph or so in mind.

I’m working on a novel-length project right now, a YA-ish epic fantasy about a young woman who enlists in her empire’s army out of a need to eat rather than any love for her country, and who falls in love with the crown prince’s fiancée. It’s more of an adventure story and a romance than I’ve written before, which is exciting. But it’s been slow because I have to learn how to do interesting worldbuilding. In things that are actually available for other people to read, I’ve had a couple of other short stories come out recently and readers can find those on my website.

Thanks again for the story. I really enjoyed it!

Thank you for your questions, and for reading it!

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: Charles Yu

Sandra Odell | 954 words

I loved how “Bookkeeper, Narrator, Gunslinger” starts with one expectation and quickly takes a left turn into something completely different. What inspired this particular story?

The western as a genre has a rich and deep body of tropes to draw upon. That richness and depth does so much work for the writer—the scenery’s already in the reader’s mind, the sets, the atmosphere, the costumes. A reader brings all of that into the story with her, and that translates to, as you said, expectation. As the storyteller, I benefit from that immensely: a town, already fully furnished and populated by the collective memory of westerns, by other people’s imaginations. I imagined that I was, in a sense, dropping into that collective, composite Western Story, and then telling a story on top of that story.

The story is a blend of western, humor, a hint of science fiction, a dash of meta-pop culture commentary. It challenges the tropes of what it means to be a “gunslinger,” perhaps even what it means to be a telepath. Many feel that tropes are best used when broken down and rebuilt. How do you feel the use of tropes influences your writing?

Tropes are tools, but they’re also artifacts. They carry in them a historical record, patterns of use. Even the most well-worn of tropes (or maybe especially those) encodes information about what has worked before, about stories, about minds enjoying stories, about how we process stories. Sometimes a trope is something to be steered away from, because it’s too familiar, the information encoded is too familiar, it carries with it associations that aren’t helpful or deaden the reader’s interest—an analogy might be background music, a symphonic score whose emotional impact has been diminished with too much time or repetition. Other times, though, a trope can be the artifact that reveals something timeless, a truth about stories that is worth re-examining in present day. And still other times, an artifact can have a feature that can be re-engineered for a new purpose.

The tight, snappy prose carried me to the finish; it was funny, vibrant, and surreal by turns. The short scenes also lend themselves well to the narrative voice. How much thought do you give the narrative style of a particular piece? Do you set out to write in a certain voice or do you let the story go its own way and hope the voice fits?

Often it’s the voice that announces itself. Just a line or two. But if I hear it, and it sounds real, I try to follow it. To be honest, this isn’t always the way it goes—but the stories that work out most often start this way.

In addition to being a successful novelist and short story writer, you are a story editor on Westworld. What are your thoughts on writers exploring different creative outlets for their works? Do you feel your work in one venue (such as short stories) carries over to another (work as a story editor or novelist)?

Westworld was a huge learning experience, and I’m so grateful to the show runners and HBO for giving me the opportunity to work on it. Going into Westworld, I had a kind of low-level anxiety, not even totally articulated at the time, that I might somehow lose track of my own voice. But TV writing is such a team sport, and is so different from writing prose, that I think it’s actually benefitted my own writing immensely. I’ve sort of cross-trained in a new discipline, which has taught me some new ways of looking at story, both in terms of process and in terms of the kinds of stories I want to tell in my own work, and the lack of overlap has helped to keep the two quite separate in many ways. So they’re feeding off each other in a good way.

What first inspired you to try your hand at genre fiction? How did you first come to dip your toes in the rich worlds of SF/F/H?

Not on purpose. When I first started writing short stories in 2001, I just wrote what came out. It wasn’t until a few stories in that I realized I was writing science fiction, and speculative fiction, and doing things with genre conventions. It’s what’s in my head, I think. Watching cartoons, playing D&D, video games, all of it made me sort of interested in meta-fiction, of not just the stories but the frames around the stories, the rules for telling stories, the stuff just inside and just outside the boundary layer separating the fictional world and the real one.

What’s next for Charles Yu? What other projects can eager fans look forward to in the coming year?

I’m actually writing for another show now—a new drama for HBO created by Alan Ball, who created Six Feet Under. That series, and specifically its finale, was one of the stories that inspired, in a very far-off and dreamy way, the idea of someday maybe trying to write for television and film someday. It’s really a dream job in many ways. I’d love to develop my own projects for TV and film someday as well, based on my own novels and short stories. But first things first—I have to finish the novel I’ve been working on for a few years now, called The Book of Wishing.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Nancy Kress

Setsu Uzume | 444 words

The story drops us right into the fallout of a divorce, instantly recognizable and relatable. Where did the ideas for the technology and its use come from?

The tech came, as many of my tech ideas do, from an article in one of the science magazines I read regularly—I don’t remember which one. I had been asked to write a story for IEEE Spectrum, where “Someone To Watch Over Me” originally appeared, and this was it. The article described only the positive uses of implanted cameras, but of course, fiction is about not straightforward blessings but, rather, things that don’t progress smoothly and lead to problems. The problems, as in this story, usually grow from the personalities of the characters.

The “love of your life” concept is such a huge, heavy one, and yet Trevor and Amanda pass it back and forth like a tennis ball. Is it a partner, a best friend, a child?

Again, what becomes “the love of your life” depends on individual character. I have a lawyer uncle for whom the law has been the great love of his love. It could be a person, a concept (God or country or duty), a goal like power, or even something frivolous like chess. Your greatest love, no matter what you say, is whatever you award the bulk of your energy, time, thought, and feeling. It is what you will sacrifice for.

What does Amanda understand love to be, considering how she uses her daughter, Jake’s projected image, and her own appearance at the end?

Amanda understands love to be possession. She wants Jake, and she will sacrifice anything to keep him by her, or at least under her surveillance. There are people like that. I feel sorry for Amanda, but even sorrier for her daughter.

A sense of ownership seems to be the most striking boundary between love and obsession. What would you most like readers to take away from this story?

Just what your question implies—that genuine love is not ownership. The story is a cautionary tale, about both obsession and the way technology can be used in the furtherance of less-than-admirable pursuits which its inventors never intended.

What can we look forward to next from you?

In July, the first volume of my new trilogy debuts from Tor. It’s based on my Nebula-winning novella “Yesterday’s Kin,” extending the story over several decades and two planets. The first book is titled Tomorrow’s Kin. I hope you enjoy it!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu grew up in New York, and spent her formative years in and out of dojos. She likes swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. She does not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Her work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find her on Twitter @KatanaPen.

Author Spotlight: Jess Barber

Sandra Odell | 742 words

The first thing I noticed when I started “Maybe Look Up” was its vivid sensory detail: sleet; the holes in the sneakers (a confession: I looked at my shoes to make certain there were no holes); the blaring of the SUV horn. The immediacy of the descriptions drew me in. How conscious are you of adding such details to a story?

In general, sensory details come to me pretty organically when I’m writing first drafts. If I don’t feel grounded enough in the world to access that sort of thing mostly unconsciously, the story is probably not “baked” enough for me to start writing it. As a reader, I also totally live for these moments. I think they’re almost like cheat codes. If a writer can tell me super precisely about a sensation I’m familiar with, I’m much more likely to believe them when they start telling me about something I’m unfamiliar with, whether that’s a physical sensation or a life experience or a philosophical hypothesis. So I’m really glad the sensory details worked for you in this story!

What inspired “Maybe Look Up”?

Well, predictably, navel-gazing about all the things that have gone wrong in my life and how I might have prevented them. This is definitely a conceit-first story. Everything else took a long time to gel, which is pretty typical for me, but once I did finally figure out how to write it the whole thing came pouring out in less than a week, which is always nice.

Authors often put something of themselves in their stories. How much of Jess Barber made it into “Maybe Look Up”? If you could go back and change any one decision, would you take that chance and reroll the dice?

I also always get holes in my shoes right beside my pinkie toes, and I definitely would not fuck with time travel. Any other resemblance to actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Not only are you a writer, you are also a founder of LeafLabs, an embedded electronics R&D firm. There has been a welcome surge of interest in getting girls and young women into STEM fields. How do you feel the SF genre can help support a healthy interest in the sciences?

Honestly, I don’t think lack of interest is the main factor contributing to the disappointing gender breakdown in the sciences right now. Studies have shown over and over that the vast majority of girls are both interested and show promise in STEM fields, and this decreases gradually over time: the “pipeline problem,” which arguably is in large part due to negative societal pressures, rather than any lack of passion or aptitude on the part of women. That’s not to say representation doesn’t matter; obviously it matters a great deal. But what I hope for, I guess, is that by having more and more representations of women, of people of color, of queer people working in STEM fields in media, not only will marginalized people be more likely to pursue these careers, but that there will be a shift in what feels normalized to people in privileged positions. I want CEOs and professors to look at their research groups and engineering teams and, if they’re seeing a breakdown that is predominantly male, predominantly white, etc., I want them to feel, at a gut level, that something is very, very off.

Also, right now I’m just as concerned, if not more so, by the devaluing of arts and humanities. Art has always been crucial for building empathy and helping us to remember—and learn from—history. I think the mentality that STEM fields are more valuable to us is not only wrong but frankly dangerous. And, of course, heavily gendered.

What’s next for Jess Barber? What projects can we look forward to in 2017?

I have a short story about deep water drills and direct action in Sunvault, which is an upcoming anthology of solarpunk and eco-speculation. I’m also working on a collaboration with one of my favorite short story writers in the world, Sara Saab. The story involves humanist utopias and socially awkward pining, and the collaboration process has been absolutely fantastic, so hopefully you’ll see that somewhere soon!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Michelle West

Alex Puncekar | 862 words

How was “Memory of Stone” different from any other project you’ve undertaken? What were some of the challenges (if any) that you faced while writing it?

This is going to sound a bit facile, but every story is different from every other story. The biggest challenge that I faced was—as it so often is—length. I had been asked, originally, for 6000 words. I had said that there was no way that I could set a story in my existing universe (this was for the DAW thirtieth anniversary Fantasy anthology) at anything less than 10,000, because I’ve never, ever managed anything shorter than that before.

So, I was told: 10,000 max. And the story is 21,000. I thought I could manage 10,000 by cutting one of the viewpoints, but Sheila said it would be half the story in the wrong way.

This story has an interesting student/teacher relationship between Cessaly and Gilafas. How did this relationship grow and change over the course of the story’s creation?

Cessaly, to me, is a savant; she doesn’t know how to live in the so-called real world. Gilafas has enough skill, enough talent, to recognize incandescent greatness in others, but he is very, very seldom driven by his talent. In this world, he is almost revered, and he has even accepted that reverence, until Cessaly. Because he understands what Cessaly is.

It’s human nature to envy, I think—but I also think envy destroys people. It hollows out any sense of appreciation for what one does have, because the driving force, the driving vision, becomes focused on what one doesn’t have. So, he resents her initially, but his respect for what she is prevents him from denying her what he grudgingly knows she deserves.

But I think the change in the dynamic, the change in his attitude—because hers is pretty much a constant—is the arc of the story. Which is my way of saying, since I’m not certain whether people will read this before they read the story or after, that I want to let the story speak for itself in that regard.

The idea of a makerborn is intriguing, in that the possibilities of what one can make seem limitless. How did the idea of this ability come about and what made you decide to implement it into the story?

It came when I was worldbuilding for the Essalieyan universe, of which the novella is a part. Any secondary world fantasy has magic of some kind, and it was one of the talents that random people are born with to a greater or lesser degree. I think I liked it as a concept because its about creation rather than destruction or control. In the novels (there are fifteen set in the world), the makerborn are referenced, but they’re not really active characters, and when I sat down to write, I wanted to write something about them. And what they can do, in a very limited set of circumstances, is endless. The first mention of the makerborn was in, I think, Hunter’s Death; two characters arrive at a traveling lodge that does not occupy its external dimensions.

It’s ancient; there’s always a sense that ancient magic was majestic, wild, almost unreachable. But one of the calendar months is named after an Artisan (the makers whose work could never be replicated by normal craftsmanship, no matter how great the craftsman), and one of the future events requires someone with almost that level of talent . . .

So between these two things—the desire to write about the makerborn, and the background plot element that was necessary—I wrote the novella.

If you were a makerborn like Cessaly, what would you make?

If I were Cessaly, I couldn’t even answer the question. She is driven to make, to create, but the impetus and the inspiration are not entirely in her control. Sometimes she can make something for someone, but often she finds materials that suggest the creation to her, rather than the other way around. And even then, while the impulse is to make something—as a gift, say—what comes of it is not always practical. Butterflies.

I know that I wouldn’t be writing novels, on the other hand.

What other projects are you working on and what can we expect to see from you in the future?

I am currently writing the last of the House War books—War. Beyond that, there’s Cast In Deception. I tend to work on two books simultaneously, because sometimes when one book grinds to a halt, the other . . . doesn’t. It makes me realize that it’s the project itself, and not my total lack of focus or intelligence.

However, when I reach the end of a book, or the end slope, I can really only work on one; the endings tend to devour all creative space.

Past War, I have the final set of Essalieyan books—the End of Days arc, which I sometimes call The Black Gauntlet.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar lives in Ohio and is finishing up his MFA at Youngstown State University. You can find his published work in Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Jenny Magazine, or you can find him on Twitter @AlexPuncekar.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 127 words

Coming up in May, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Bruce McAllister (“This is For You”) and Susan Jane Bigelow (“The Heart’s Cartography”), along with SF reprints by Tobias S. Buckell (“Ratcatcher”) and Seanan McGuire (“Dragonflies”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Adam-Troy Castro (“James, In the Golden Sunlight Of the Hereafter”) and Kendra Fortmeyer (“Octopus vs. Bear”), plus fantasy reprints by Greg Hrbek (“Paternity”) and Amal El-Mohtar (“Weialalalea”).

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

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About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

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Christie Yant

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Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

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Stefan Rudnicki

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Jim Freund

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John Joseph Adams

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Robyn Lupo

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Laurel Amberdine

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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.