TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 84, May 2017

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, May 2017

SCIENCE FICTION

Ratcatcher
Tobias S. Buckell

This Is for You
Bruce McAllister

Dragonflies
Seanan McGuire

The Heart’s Cartography
Susan Jane Bigelow

FANTASY

James, In the Golden Sunlight of the Hereafter
Adam-Troy Castro

Paternity
Greg Hrbek

Octopus vs. Bear
Kendra Fortmeyer

Weialalaleia
Amal El-Mohtar

NOVELLA

Hypocaust & Bathysphere
Rebecca Ore

EXCERPTS

Sand
Hugh Howey

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: May 2017
LaShawn Wanak

TV Review: May 2017
Jenn Reese and Christopher East

Interview: Steven Barnes
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Adam-Troy Castro

Seanan McGuire

Kendra Fortmeyer

Susan Jane Bigelow

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2017 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Sam Schechter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial, May 2017

John Joseph Adams | 1347 words

Welcome to issue eighty-four of 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. We also have an interview with Steven Barnes. Our cover art is by Sam Schechter, and illustrates Adam-Troy Castro’s “James, in the Golden Sunlight of the Hereafter.”

For our ebook readers, we also have a reprint of Rebecca Ore’s novella “Hypocaust & Bathysphere” and a book excerpt.

New Release: Cosmic Powers

My new anthology, Cosmic Powers, is now available from Saga Press. 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.

Here’s what some reviewers have been saying about it:

“Astonishingly good [. . .] Rich in great stories.” —Rocket Stack Rank

“This collection will prove to be great reading for fans of the space cowboy antics of Guardians of the Galaxy.” —RT Book Reviews

“Highly recommended for anyone looking for a variety of engaging sf experiences.” —Booklist

Visit johnjosephadams.com/cosmic to buy the book, read selected stories from the anthology, or just learn more.

Awards News

The Hugo Award finalists for 2017 have been announced. Alas, no stories from Lightspeed or Nightmare made the ballot this year, but your humble editor is once again honored to be a finalist for Best Editor, Short Form. There are a lot of great finalists this year—including, I’m pleased to see, seven different contributors to Cosmic Powers and many different authors who have appeared in (or are friends to) Lightspeed. Congrats to all of the finalists! To see the full list, visit thehugoawards.org/2017-hugo-awards.

ICYMI, in other awards news, the Nebula Award finalists for this year have also been announced, and Lightspeed stories “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 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.

While the Hugos and Nebulas have only announced their finalists, the Aurealis Award—Australia’s premier speculative fiction awards—has already announced its winners, and we’re pleased to announce that “Salto Mortal” by Nick T. Chan, from our People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! special issue, won in the Best Novella category. (It’s technically a novelette, but who’s counting?) Huge congrats to Nick and to special issue guest editors Nalo Hopkinson and Kristine Ong Muslim for selecting the story. You can find the full list of winners at aurealisawards.org.

“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. The awards are being presented right at the end of the month, so we won’t have that information for you in this month’s editorial, but of course tune in next month or visit horror.org for details. The Stoker Awards will be presented on April 29 at StokerCon 2017, in Long Beach, CA.

And finally, some art awards news! We’re pleased to report that Galen Dara won the Spectrum 24 Silver Award for her cover illustration for Lightspeed’s January 2017 issue (illustrating Kat Howard’s story “Seven Salt Tears“). Huge congrats to Galen! In other art award news: Elizabeth Leggett is a finalist for the Chesley Award, for her Lightspeed, February 2016 cover (illustrating Rachael K. Jones’s story “Charlotte Incorporated“; congrats to her as well! For a full list of the Chesley finalists (which also includes Galen!), visit asfa-art.org.

John Joseph Adams Books News

ICYMI last month, my latest novel acquisition for John Joseph Adams Books is 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.

Ratcatcher

Tobias S. Buckell | 6240 words

Pepper’s vision fades slowly away in the empty midnight as he tumbles end over end. His eyes frost over, moisture crackling and icing over pupils, hardening against his eyelids. The pinpoint stars fracture behind the fractal cold of the ice, then shatter into a multitude of glittering refractions.

Unseeing, he still stares wide-eyed into the vacuum.

A wisp of his last breath congeals in the top of his throat, a half-swallowed spiky sponge of air that clings to his tongue. Two grinding cracks thunderclap in each eardrum, and then there is silence.

The prickling sensation on the inside of his skin has faded. Before that, he endured the pain of fluids being sucked out through his pores. For a while he could feel the cold in his bones, but even that has gone dead.

He is dead.

Dead and coasting through the vacuum in the lonely dark.

Drifting.

There’s enough still working under the skin and muscle to register the impact. Pepper comes alive and grasps for a handhold, slides over pitted metal, then catches something. He can’t tell what it is. He has a half second of strength and awareness to spend. A half second upon which so much depends. He’s investing the precious spark of energy in priming mechanical triggers to force a frozen arm awkwardly into motion.

He blinks. A scraping, cornea-scratching shaving of ice shatters and floats away.

He’s hit the airlock. That was the goal, though it feels like something he decided a century ago. Time is dilated, dialed down.

There’s a cloud of flaking skin, blood, and spit, all of it turned into ice and drifting around him. Pepper pulls himself to it and raises a fist. Strikes it once. Twice.

And that’s all he has.

• • • •

Electricity jolts him back awake, back arching as hearts suddenly kick online with a surge of adrenaline released from artificial glands. Pepper vomits blood. He can feel it seeping out of his pores and starts to raise a hand.

Something slices deep into his wrists. He stops.

Blind and deaf, Pepper retreats. Focuses down until he can feel the presence of footsteps just out of reach.

Then there’s the problem of the nano-filament wrapped around his wrists. It winds its way around his arms, up his chest, around his neck, down his back and binds his legs together. The slightest motion will cut him apart into a hundred different slices.

Unexpected. This had definitely not been part of the plan.

As his eardrum flimsily heals the damage, Pepper listens to the calm breathing from the other person in the room. “I need something to eat,” he croaks.

The tiny machines buried in his bloodstream have been knitting him back together. But they need fuel. They are stripping it from his body’s metabolism, which has fed them all the non-essential tissue it could already. Now he can feel the fever chewing through muscle.

“I’m sorry,” says a voice. High, possibly female, with a faint tremor. “I’m watching you heal, watching your body eat itself. All that meat’s got you back alive, but that’s about it. You’re weak, now. And that is the way I prefer you.”

Pepper’s vision is back. A little cloudy, perhaps, but functional. The floor is a functional self-cleaning industrial plastic. A nearby first class leather recliner is mounted to the floor, and a pair of functional hiking boots shift slightly.

She taps a spot just in front of her ear. “De Fournier, confirm. All available resources to the Hakken Depot of Line Three-Zero-B. Cross check with D. Franklin, case manager, for authorization and budget allocations. Suspect hostile.”

“How about water?” Pepper wiggles slightly. The nano-filament digs deeper into skin on his back from the motion. But he is able to look up above the boots.

“Do I look that naive to you?” the owner of the boots asks, looking down at him. The compact woman’s face has been aged by sun, weathered by time. She leaves her straight hair gray. The crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes tighten as she smiles sadly down at Pepper. Her brown arms are covered in New Anegada tattoos, Teotl-style serpents wrapping both her forearms outside her bulletproof vest.

She’s pointing a high-calibre gun at his temple, but keeps herself at a respectable distance.

“Yamaxtli de Fournier,” Pepper says. “You are anything but naive.”

• • • •

“I’ve been tracking you for five months,” Yamaxtli says. She pulls a small, black notebook out of a shoulder pocket on her vest. Flips through the pages and stops. “The whole story is in here.”

She turns the open notebook toward him. Pepper can see the faded pencil strokes of carefully written Nahuatl. She taps a line. “Yes,” Pepper says. “I remember that.”

Yamaxtli’s lips narrow with disapproval. “I don’t, no thanks to you. I got up this morning and the last good memory I had was twenty years old. Not a happy one, but not a bad one. A fight with my daughter. But I knew something was wrong with it right away: It felt so distant. The haziness everywhere. And then I look down, and on my arm in henna is a note to myself to read my notebook.

“It’s an old habit I had, even before the damage to my brain. When working the case, I keep a narrative. I wrote down what I did, how I came to conclusions. It was the story of my investigation. Apparently, after the neural damage and before my memory implant, I kept the book to help myself live week to week instead of day to day. Thanks to this old wound.” Yamaxtli taps a faint dent on her forehead.

“A bullet to the temple, and yet you stayed on until you helped them catch her,” Pepper says. He looks around the train car. They’re definitely in first class. It’s also been totally cleared out.

No bystanders. Yamaxtli is thorough.

The stars twinkle outside the windows. The train is whipping through tracks out in the gulf of vacuum between two wormholes. Pepper finds himself missing the comfort of the small spaceship he’d jumped out of to get here. At the time it had seemed cramped, barely big enough for just him and his supplies as he lurked out there in the dark, waiting for the signal to leave it.

“According to the crib notes of the story of my life, I’ve been back to work and had quite a successful twenty years. They call me the Ratcatcher. Retrograde amnesia only took a year out of my life. Once I had my neural implant installed and successfully synced up, I could keep memories again. Until you, seemingly deliberately, destroyed my ability to keep memories when I tried to bring you in.” She runs a finger over a burn mark just under her right ear.

Pepper is overriding cramping muscles, sending relaxants down his bloodstreams to handle the fact that he is hogtied by nano-filament and unable to even breathe too hard. “Really?”

“Says here, ever since I started tracing you, others on the case have mysteriously dropped away. No one has shut the case down: That would have gotten noticed. But people kept getting offers to leave for better departments. Others suddenly had family problems. Someone even won an off-planet lottery.”

“Lucky for them,” Pepper observes.

“I cut communications,” Yamaxtli says. “Went dumb with technology. Which is good, because even after you took my memories, the case was all right here for me on the paper. You were trying to knock me out, Pepper, without outright killing me. Which would have been noticeable. But it didn’t work.”

Pepper would nod, if the action didn’t slice his neck. “You are more dangerous than most people might imagine.”

“I’m not dangerous,” Yamaxtli says. “I don’t kill people. I catch people who kill people. Like you.”

“Fair enough,” Pepper says. How much time does he have to get out of the filament? He’s thinking about strategies. He’s not going to be able to talk her out of this. And if he does something really stupid, he might have to hurt her. “What happens next?”

Fucking filament. Where did she get that from? He hadn’t known she had it.

“Now I’m back up on communications,” Yamaxtli says. “You didn’t smash that ability, thankfully. I called for backup to take you in at the next stop.”

“I heard you send up the beacon,” Pepper says. He had hoped she’d stay dark, give him time to convince her to get him out of the filament before the shit hit the fan.

Instead, he is going to have to improvise something.

• • • •

The wormhole’s maw is just minutes away. To Yamaxtli, Pepper knows it doesn’t seem like more than a few minutes before the train hits it. Then there’ll be a faint flip in their stomachs. Darkness. Then the train tracks burst out somewhere else.

They might burst out onto tracks running on barges that bob next to a floating city. Or maybe they’ll be on a coast. Perhaps the other side of that wormhole will see them trundling through the center of a hollowed out asteroid.

In some places the tracks will be out in space again, but hanging over a planet or swinging around some strange sun. The Xenowealth has pulled more and more of the entire wormhole network closer together to run tracks through them. The trains ferry increasing numbers of citizens around every day. The tracks connect planet to planet through wormholes. It takes just hours for a high-speed train to cross from world to world.

In theory, it’s just minutes before the train starts to slow down to pass through the wormhole, and then to stop at a station where people with weapons will swarm the car. Yamaxtli isn’t relaxing, but she certainly thinks the end is in sight.

But things are really only just beginning, aren’t they?

“I have a theory.” Yamaxtli shifts her weight. The gun in her thin hands looks oversized, almost comically large. But she holds it steady and with familiarity. The holster on her left leg is rubbed smooth from use and age.

“Tell me,” Pepper says. He’s only half paying attention. He is more focused on cranking up his senses to reach further out. To listen for any faint sound or any motion that isn’t quite right. He’s been slowly trying to ease the nano-filament around his wrists back down his forearm. If he needs to, he can now slice his hands off at the wrists to gain motion from the elbows forward.

Blood trickles down the small of his back off his arms from the motion as nano-filament tightens and digs in further.

“These implants, the changes to your body. You’ve remade yourself from the core out. I don’t think you’re human anymore, Pepper,” Yamaxtli says. “I think you’ve been gone so long, seen so much blood, fought in so many wars, you have no perspective. And now that the Xenowealth is no longer fighting revolution, now that we’re using economy, research, negotiation, to slowly pull over the League, what is there left for you? These planets, these peoples, there was a time you were desperately needed in the war against our enslavers. But in peace, you became so used to killing that you started searching out chaos and death: It’s your programming. Your reason for being. All those little chips in you, it’s all they know to do. And you found the way to continue on . . . as a serial killer.”

Pepper rolls his eyes. “You say that so confidently, I could almost believe you,” he says. “But you know it’s bullshit your expert ‘researchers’ fed you to make sense of the data.”

Yamaxtli’s expression doesn’t change. “You think I’m unsure?”

“Until I hit you with an EMP to disable your brain backup, you had a memory implant to deal with your retrograde amnesia from that bullet to the brain. You have new eyes. Bone grafts for the osteoporosis. Glands to stimulate muscle growth. How does it feel to walk around without that extra motorized help in your right hip? I noticed you have a bit of a limp. Does that make you less human, or just aging?”

Yamaxtli nods. “You argue that it’s all degrees?”

“Pacemaker . . . or backup heart. It’s very gray,” Pepper says. “I, for one, have just followed the idea that I should be all that I could be.”

“But what are you being?”

Another rivulet of blood splatters to the floor as Pepper shifts filament by shoving it through skin. “You don’t really think I’m the Line Killer,” he tells her. “You have doubts.”

There is a faint discomfort in her face. But Yamaxtli smiles sadly. “Doesn’t matter what I think. I’m the Ratcatcher. I bring you in. The researchers, the judges, they’ll do their bit. They’ll study you, study the evidence, and we’ll find out what is true.”

She has her doubts. It’s written across age lines and the crinkles in the corner of her eye. But she’s a professional. She’s got sixty years of hunting under her belt and she’s damn good.

She’s the Ratcatcher.

“Politically, this has to be complicated,” Pepper observes. “You are brave to have taken it on. Or it is a strange form of career suicide.”

The uncertain look in Yamaxtli’s eyes disappears. “Yes. Franklin thinks that. Give the old woman an impossible task: Catch one of the founders of the Xenowealth: a killing machine that made our enemies nervous and destroyed our oppressors. Accuse him of being a serial killer.”

A smile flicks across her lips. Pepper returns it. “I’ll bet they didn’t anticipate that call you just made.”

“It’s inconvenient, having the founding fathers still around,” she says. “Much like the younger supervisors in my department might wish the old Ratcatcher wasn’t around to correct them and suggest improvements as they muck up basic security work. Maybe some people would prefer you faded away and stopped popping up.”

There it is. A shiver runs through the train. She notices it as well, but doesn’t take her eyes off him. Sharp. She taps an earpiece. Nothing. It’ll be dead.

Yamaxtli, for the first time, looks somewhat unsure. “What’s going on?”

“The train is stopping,” Pepper says. “The real killer has arrived.”

• • • •

Without the acceleration, their cars reorient. The mild feeling of gravity gives way to weightlessness. Pepper shifts to catch blood that has pooled around his lower back, soaking it up so it doesn’t float away. He’s been shoving nano-filament around, letting it slide under his flesh and carve muscle in order to get it bundled up where he wants it. The skin and muscle has healed, but at a cost: energy burned from consuming even more muscle.

He is emaciated now. His clothes hang like rags on him. But even that is giving him room to shift more nano-filament around that had been looped around a different shape.

Yamaxtli kicks off a luxurious designer leather chair to the nearest doors. She forces them to slide open.

As Pepper had suspected, there are no other passengers in the other train car. Yamaxtli buffered them to protect civilians.

The train shivers, and then an explosion further on down toward the engine reverberates through the cars a second later.

“Who?” Yamaxtli asks.

“Your killer is an Individualist. It’s name is a unique encryption key, but I call it Vlad.”

Yamaxtli stares at him from the doorway. “Bullshit.”

“I do indeed call it Vlad. The thing is really into impalement and some other creepy shit. You read your own your notes, you saw all that fucked up shit about flaying. You have to know it isn’t really my style.”

Another shiver from up near the front of the train. Pepper imagines Vlad is going through the train cars one by one. He hopes Yamaxtli has cleared the entire train of people using her authority, but looking at her paling face, he can tell that each explosion and shiver means lives.

“I was tracking the killer as well,” Pepper said. “That’s why I kept showing up. Always minutes behind.”

“But why is it coming at us now? How?”

“It knows you have me. It knows I’m weak, if you are reporting my capture. And for Vlad, I’m one of the bigger trophies around the Xenowealth. It’s tried to snare me. We’ve tumbled. I get away. Study it.”

Yamaxtli is barely keeping an eye on Pepper now. It’s all eyes on the car ahead. “The Individualists, an alien society older than ours and more advanced, crossed thousands of lightyears and a great war to get to this quiet zone of wormholes and survive . . . just to commit serial murder?”

“Serial killers exist no matter what civilization looks like. Why not Individualists? You thought I was capable of it. Why not an Individualist?”

She pulls her notebook out and scribbles notes in.

“Let me go,” Pepper says. “Unleash me.” This has gone too far. He needs to figure out how to protect her.

“No,” Yamaxtli says, though she’s uncertain.

“Listen,” Pepper says quickly. “What’s something you would never tell anyone?”

Yamaxtli ignores him and pushes off into the other train car. She pulls a bag along with her, letting items trail out of it as she moves. Thumb-sized impact drones, flash bang mines, directional EMP emplacements, more high-calibre handguns.

“I’m not letting you go,” she says. “But I do think you are telling the truth that trouble is coming down the train at us.”

She’s sticking defenses on walls and strategic surfaces. But it’s mostly non-lethal shit, aimed at disabling the sort of tough, human trouble that is most definitely not what is moving from car to car toward them.

It is time for this to end. Time to get them free of this. “What is something you would never tell another soul, ever?” he yells again at Yamaxtli.

She glances back at him, frowning.

The door to the car is ripped off its hinges.

• • • •

Flash bangs light up the car’s interior, wild chaotic shadows dancing across the walls and the starry windows. Concussion charges thud. It’s loud and disorienting, but not to Pepper. His eyes adjust to see the shape of the Individualist silhouetted against the spitting sparks left by the dying defenses. The Individualists were a conglomeration of various species struggling to survive against a greater threat. Most of them opted for caterpillar-like body forms: hundreds of manipulators and half-biological, half-machine carapaces.

Vlad isn’t like other Individualists. Vlad takes takes being an Individualist seriously and is its own shape: bipedal. The biological armor exoskeleton it has instead of skin is bone-white and serrated, covered in spikes and maleficent swoops.

Yamaxtli fires into the maelstrom of light at the one persistent shadow, reloading one-handed via magazines floating in a careful line over her knee. Her back is to the nearby bulkhead so that each shot doesn’t propel her backwards in the lack of gravity.

Fall back, Pepper urges. Run.

But Yamaxtli won’t. Not even as the massive heft of bone and spikes launches itself casually across the car at her, ignoring the bullet strikes for the tiny swats of annoyance they are.

The impact drones dart out from behind the sumptuous first class chairs and slap into it. The air ripples. Pepper feels electromagnetic pulses dampen the electronic world.

“Shit,” Yamaxtli says.

Vlad looms, continuing forward.

Pepper finally gets the worst of the nano-filament free with a last, skin-slicing, peeling shrug that leaves muscle bare to the air and streamlets of blood expanding out around him into a cloud of light red mist. He doesn’t have mass anymore; he is no more than a skeletal vision of what he used to be.

But he still has speed.

And armfuls of nano-filament.

Pepper loses his right hand to pull away the last of the nano-filament, then uses it as counterweight. He tosses nano-filament in spinning configurations gyrating all through the room in various patterns. A shield and an attack at once.

But Vlad, in a sudden burst of speed that seems impossible given the eight-foot tall size, weaves, ducks, and spins away from the nano-filament. Yamaxtli keeps firing throughout all this. She throws more drones at it, but it keeps coming.

There is a split millisecond. Pepper makes the decision.

“Let her go, she’s a civilian,” he shouts.

“The hell I am,” Yamaxtli snaps.

And then it is over. Vlad has redirected and spun the nano-filament around them with all the skill of a bony spider. It pulls back. “You are both prey and that is all,” it says, speaking for the first time. “Trophies. You are both mine.”

It jerks the net forward and Yamaxtli screams as the filament bites into flesh. Vlad doesn’t seem to mind the trail of blood hanging in the air as it pulls them back through the cars. Just gently enough not to slice them all up . . . just yet.

Pepper grabs Yamaxtli and spins to put his back to the filament, grimacing as it sinks in. “It’ll dig into my skin, but not past my bone,” he says.

She doesn’t protest this. She curls up slightly as her back keeps bleeding. “You stayed. You should have run.”

Pepper looks around at their crude, wobbly cage and then down at his missing hand. “I was not expecting the nano-filament,” he says.

They fall silent as Vlad pulls them through cars further down the long train. Cars that had been full of living people just minutes ago. They now float in rows, hammered to the luggage racks over their heads by long nails of bone run through their chests. Bubbles of blood grow from the white bone spikes.

Yamaxtli stares at the bodies.

One of them twitches and moves, then groans.

The alien carefully guides them into a large, clear sack. It holds onto Yamaxtli for a moment, pulling out a jellyfish-like device that fastens to her scalp. She hisses and struggles, then goes limp as the tentacles latch on. Blue light pulses, then the alien pulls it away and seals them both in.

Yamaxtli jerks back to consciousness as Vlad pushes open a door. There is no more train in front. Just a mangled mess of metal on the track that used to be the engine. “What did it just do to me?” she asks, voice shaking slightly.

Air whips out with them as they burst into space.

“It scanned your mind for malware,” Pepper says.

“You too? It was horrible.”

“Not me. We tried that once. The Individualists know better now.” He is hardly paying attention to her, though. He’s looking through the sack toward the glint they are hurtling at.

“Zero gravity,” Yamaxtli muses with a sudden half-startled laugh. “It’s comfortable. My doctor suggested that I might prefer moving somewhere lighter. Now I’m cursing myself for not retiring. People tell me: You’ve lived such a long life. Well, I still have a lot to see and do. This is a shitty way to end a long career.”

Pepper has stopped paying attention. He’s looking at the smooth cylindrical object moving towards them.

“There it is,” he whispers. “A rare bird.”

An Individualist ship. One of only five that snuck through into the Xenowealth before they’d managed to shut the wormholes down.

Pepper has always wanted one.

• • • •

Vlad the Individualist pulls them down a corridor of horrors. There are creatures, intelligent or not, Pepper can’t tell, frozen in moments of fear and mounted to the walls. A beetle-like alien rearing back from a door, legs out in some kind of defensive pose. A ten-foot tall hummingbird with fluorescent wings yanked apart into constituent parts, each one framed like some anatomy illustration, looms over a room as they pass by. Pepper glimpses more figures in the shadows.

And the human section. Varnished skulls decorate the bulkheads, teeth wide and grinning into the murk. Full humans, naked, are posed with arms outstretched in a freak show of an honor guard that they pass below.

There is a throne room deep in the heart of the cylinder. The walls are all bone. The throne itself is covered in flayed skin from a multitude of species.

“What’s something you’d never tell another person?” Pepper asks. Yamaxtli jumps. They’ve been quiet for the whole trip down into the throne room of the ship, watching each new contorted body slip out of the dark air toward them, then fade away. “Something so secret, that if I could tell it to you right now, you would know it was a signal from your past self that you could trust me implicitly. Think about that secret, hold it in your head, and I’m going to whisper a single word to you.”

Yamaxtli is staring at Pepper, the horror outside the transparent sack they’re in forgotten. She looks old, vulnerable, and for the first time, scared.

Pepper leans forward and whispers a word into her ear. A word that only she could know the significance of.

She begins to shake. “No.”

“You were a child. The elders told you about the old ways. You couldn’t have stopped them.”

Tears hang in the air. “So I once told you why I became the Ratcatcher, and now I cannot remember,” she said sadly. “Why? What purpose . . .” She is, Pepper knows, thinking about seeing a clearing in a park near the edge of a town, deep in the heart of New Anegada. Leaving with the respected elders, chanting the old words in the old ways. The comfort of tradition.

Only this time it’s different. They are meeting far from the lights of town.

Yamaxtli’s bright, young eyes would have not understood the first few seconds she saw the person tied to the stone at the center. But when the obsidian knife came out and struck ribcage, when the still-beating heart was ripped out from under flesh. And her parents stepped forward toward the blood.

Old-school religion, Pepper thinks. It’s dead now. But Yamaxtli saw it practiced before she could even write.

In the here and now, he sees a quick understanding rushing into her eyes as she moves past reflection, memory, childhood horror, into realizing what this meant. If she has told Pepper this, something she would never have told anyone else, it means she had trusted him at some point and told him and then never written it down.

Pepper nods. “Eat your notebook,” he says.

“That is everything to me.”

“This was your idea,” he says. “Trust yourself.”

“You could have tortured that memory out of me . . .” she starts to say, but Pepper rolls his eyes. Her hands shaking, Yamaxtli nods and pulls her notebook out. Even under torture, she would never have given out that. A secret so dark, so buried.

The sound of a ripping page seems to fill the entire universe, but the Individualist is moving around its throne room, tapping at consoles. It pays no attention. The ship is shuddering, moving away from the train tracks.

“Keep eating,” Pepper urges in a low, measured tone.

Yamaxtli rips page after page, grimacing. “It tastes nasty. What is this?” A tiny wisp of smoke leaks from around the corners of her mouth. “It’s burning me.”

“This is all your idea,” Pepper whispers. He’s keeping himself between Vlad and Yamaxtli, blocking the line of sight. “Keep eating.”

Vlad twists around, suddenly curious.

“Keep eating,” Pepper hisses.

The alien whips toward them. The clawed fingers rip into the filament, ignoring the shards of bone that slice off as it rips a wide hole open. “What are you doing?” it asks, the voice powerful enough to shake Pepper’s chest. “What is this?”

It flings Pepper aside. He bounces off a wall of bone. There are alarms, alien in cacophony but recognizable in their urgency, coming from around them. It fishes Yamaxtli out of the net, knocking the notebook aside as she tries to eat one more page.

“What are you trying to hide from me?” it demands. “What is this?”

It grabs the notebook, and drops it just as quickly.

Smoke roils out of Yamaxtli’s mouth, nose, leaks out from her eyes, and congeals in the air between the spiked, ivory alien and her mouth. Shields of translucent energy rip up out of the floor, seizing Pepper in an invisible fist. Yamaxtli, hovering in the air as well, gasps. More smoke billows from her pores as she’s squeezed.

“I am not the hunter,” Vlad says slowly to Yamaxtli. Then the Individualist looks over at Pepper. There is a battle going on under the bone-white spikes. Something shivering inside of it as its insides are torn apart. “You are not the hunter.”

The smoke is fading. Yamaxtli coughs and clutches her sides.

“This . . . frail thing. This is the hunter.”

“And you,” Yamaxtli spits black bile and goo as she struggles to speak. “You are the prey.”

Vlad the Individualist slumps in the air. The spikes crumble, disintegrating into a fine ash that hang in the air. The rest of the bio-armor collapses away. Hanging in the air is a three-foot long, pale slug, neural implant tendrils tangled in the air.

Yamaxtli attacks it with a pen, stabbing it until fluids mix with the ash in the air and trail around them in wet, ropy strands.

• • • •

The invisible fist still refuses to let Pepper go. He twists in place to better see Yamaxtli.

“Your idea,” he says.

“My idea,” she repeats, voice hoarse. “We were hunting the same killer.”

“Yes. You realized it couldn’t be done alone. You were a little harsh on yourself. You said I should be the bait, and you the Trojan Horse.”

Yamaxtli vomits more black bile. Coughs. “The pages.”

“Let them run their course. A two-part weapon. One half in the pages, the other in a virus present in your saliva. It will pass.” Pepper twists around, looking at the bone-clad walls. “The nano-filament, where the hell did that come from?”

“Black market weapons fabricator,” she says. “What now, Pepper? We’re trapped.”

“There’s company coming,” Pepper twists back to her. “Just hold on.”

Yamaxtli coughs again. This time it isn’t black bile. It’s blood. “I don’t think there’s much more to hold onto.”

“You hang on,” Pepper repeats. “Yamaxtli?”

Her eyes close. Blood hangs in the air around her mouth.

Pepper yanks harder against the force holding him. Magnetic fields, gripping any and all metal in him. Maybe even down to the iron in his blood. He pushes, what little raggedy muscle he has left popping and straining. His veins seem to remain in place, but there is a grating sound on the bone as implants scrape.

The new arm and leg he replaced after visiting Chilo have a lot of ferrous material. They’ll both stay put. Implants, nodes, assorted machinery, that’ll all stay as well.

Messy human remains? All that should be able to move.

Pepper strains. Tearing sounds move to audible. A pop, a crack, and he begins to pull at his right elbow. The joint rips apart. The tearing of skin comes, starting where the bone has punctured the elbow. The pain comes and goes, the regulators are themselves being torn out as Pepper continues to grunt.

His left knee buckles and shatters. Pepper helps it along, digging the fingers of his left hand deep under the skin and pulling.

Implants pierce through the skin and muscle as Pepper finally rips his biological body into the air in a cloud of blood and viscera. He sees himself in the reflection of a mirrored surface: skeletal, missing an arm and a leg, clothes thick with dried and new blood. He was as much a horror as anything else on the ship.

“I made you a promise: that you would drag that murdering fuck back to New Anegada,” Pepper wraps his good arm around her waist and braces against a chest of ribs under his boots with his one good leg. “Now hold on tight, this is going to hurt.”

Yamaxtli is not breathing, and does not respond. Pepper starts to rip her free of the fields, pulling her free of the pins and implants that came naturally with old age in the developed Xenowealth. As they rip away from her papery skin, he winces.

He drags her along with him toward the corridor.

Back through the hall of terrors.

Back to the airlock.

It takes far too long to figure out what an alien manual override looks like. But when he does, the air blows out of the lock instantly.

The temperature begins to drop.

Pepper fastens himself to the wall by looping his good arm through a ladder. As the blood soaking his clothes begins to ice over and stiffen, he looks at Yamaxtli. She is peaceful, wedged near the crack. And ice cold, his eyes tell him.

As for him, what little flesh that is left on his bones sizzles. There is almost nothing left. He is the walking skeleton that is death, sitting here to guard Yamaxtli against Death.

Pepper laughs.

Soon come, Yamaxtli. Soon come.

• • • •

It has been three weeks since an interplanetary train was attacked by an Individualist. Three weeks since agents swarmed the Hakken Depot and waited. And waited.

In the old quarter of Capitol City, deep in the Dread Council’s citadel, alarms sound. The alert goes out: Individualist ship inbound. The planet of New Anegada kicks into high alert. Ships thunder down out of orbit to provide cover on the incoming wormhole a mile outside the harbor.

And still they are unable to do anything as the long cylinder flashes out of the wormhole along the tracks, ignoring everyone as it speeds for Capitol City. It speeds past Parliament, past the citadel and shrugs off the anti-aircraft fire, and it settles right down at the Depot where all train lines connect in the heart of Capitol City.

Agents inside the Rail Agency rush to look out broken windows as the Individualist ship hovers just a foot over the old marble flagstones. Seconds later, Ragamuffin ships still glowing hot from orbital reentry circle overhead to surround it.

The bottom of the ship disgorges Yamaxtli de Fournier and the frozen remains of what is left of the Individualist. Pepper watches from the corner of the ship’s bay as she walks toward the Rail Agency. Yamaxtli’s new eyes gleam silver and her arms are now ribboned with matte black swirls that cut through her tattoos.

She drags the body of Vlad behind her in a large clear sack as Rail Agents stare at her. On the steps to the lobby, she stops in front of someone Pepper assumes is her supervisor. He zooms in, sees the name patch: D. Franklin.

Franklin stares at her. “We thought you were dead,” he says after a too-long moment.

“I was,” Yamaxtli says. “But I’m doing much better now.”

Franklin isn’t sure what to say to that. “That doesn’t look like Pepper,” he finally says, looking at the corpse.

“Pepper sends his regards,” Yamaxtli says. “But he isn’t the killer. This thing is.”

Franklin looks down at the bag of organic sludge. “Really?”

She hands him a chip. “All the info is on there. You had me tracking wrong. Follow the info, and we’ll be dumping a bunch of evidence out of the ship in a few minutes for you to pore over.”

“What about you?” Franklin asks.

“First, I’m owed a favor by the people who are flying that ship around. So I’m going to have them take me to all the horrible vacation spots I’ve always wanted to see throughout the Xenowealth. And after that, I think I’ll consider a new job offer.”

Franklin hasn’t been expecting that. Now that he’s faced with suddenly losing her, he understands what he’ll lose in the department. “What will you do?” he asks miserably.

“We’re going to hunt Individualists,” Yamaxtli says happily.

Franklin makes a face. “What makes you think you can do that?”

Yamaxtli points to the corpse by his feet. “You’re standing on one I already caught. The serial killer was an Individualist.”

Franklin jumps back in surprise.

As she walks back, Pepper gives the command. The bay vomits bones and humans in stasis, the remains of the many numerous species kept as art aboard the ship. They’ll be poring over all this for months.

Pepper moves back into the shadows until the doors seal shut.

“I thought I’d feel more,” Yamaxtli says. “I’ve been a Rail Agent for as long as I can remember. Moving up and down the line, catching criminals that hop from planet to planet and jurisdiction to jurisdiction. I’m neither happy nor sad.”

“It’s going to take a while for the neural connections to your new memory to link up. Another month,” Pepper says gently.

“I know.” They’d both been in healing tanks for weeks after Pepper’s contacts reached them.

“In the meantime . . .” Pepper reaches into a pocket and pulls out a brand new notebook and a pencil. Yamaxtli takes them, flipping through the paper and smiling as her fingers riffle through. “Record some new memories.”

Yamaxtli nods. A whole blank page to explore.

“There’s the whole Xenowealth out there,” Pepper says.

It is time to go see it.

©2015 by Tobias S. Buckell. Originally published in Xenowealth. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, which influence much of his work.

His novels and over 50 stories have been translated into 18 different languages. His work has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author.

He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs. He can be found online at TobiasBuckell.com.

This Is for You

Bruce McAllister | 1260 words

There was one girl I really liked in school when I returned to Earth, but it took me three months to say hello. I wasn’t good with human beings. We’d just gotten back from Pitipek (a red-dwarf star system “just left” of Tau Ceti, as the joke goes). My father had been stationed there for two years with the TU’s Planetary Safety Agency, and living with the slow, enigmatic, bipedal Pitipeki—especially in one of their villages, and under those endless clouds—tends to make you lose your people skills. In fact, it can really change you.

The girl’s skin was as white as Pitipek’s brightest moon, her hair as dark as a pench’s eyes. Just beautiful. I didn’t know what she thought of other colors—in my case, a boy who was on the greenish side because his grandfather, a famous genengineer who’d been incarcerated once for gene crimes, had mapped him to have skin like that . . . and maybe a few other things. Like a little talent at art.

I said “hello.” It was an overcast day, and we were taking a break in the hallway from geopol simming. She said “hello” back. I could tell from her voice and the way she looked at me that my skin wasn’t a problem. A week later I said “hello” again, and I knew this would continue for the entire school year if I didn’t do something special. I’d had a human girlfriend on Pitipek, another PSA officer’s kid, in the village down the road—her name was Clare—but she’d disappeared that second year, her body never found. That does something to you.

No one on Earth makes paintings anymore—not really—but the Pitipeki do. I’d had Pitipeki friends—young males—my age in the village who made them every day. Every painting has a purpose for them, a practical one. Spinota peluga ma villea, the Pitipeki say. A painting must do something. It’s not about “art.” It’s about—how to put it? Relationships. Power. Getting what you want.

I’d learned to paint in that village the way the Pitipeki do—there wasn’t much else to do—but I hadn’t learned everything.

So I made a painting for Mala—that was her name—her dad was a politician, people said—a painting of the village I’d lived in. I gave it to her after school as she was about to board the rail to her neighborhood and I was about to board mine. She looked terrified for a moment.

“It’s a painting,” I said and gave her my best smile. I hadn’t given a girl that smile since Pitipek—since Clare. “I made it with an oil paint you get when you mix the resin of the darmiath tree with the right minerals on Pitipek—lithium, the hematitics, unstable metamorphs. You’ve got to grind them up with a mortar. The paint has a charge. It makes you tingle. Some scientists think the minerals, if arranged right, can affect space in weird ways—quantum ways. That’s why the painting sparkles and looks like it’s moving . . .”

This was a lot more than a “hello.” But if I kept talking, I told myself, she’d calm down, wouldn’t she? I hoped so. I didn’t want to scare her.

She did. The painting was strange, and so was the boy with the greenish skin, but he was just a boy, wasn’t he? Strange, not creepy.

“It’s really big,” she said, trying to be nice.

“I only make big paintings,” I said, laughing. It was a joke.

“Well,” she joked back, “I wouldn’t want you to make a smaller one just for me.”

She liked me. I could tell. Maybe she liked my skin. I really wanted to believe it. As my grandfather—not a nice man at all, but a wise one—told us: “Engineer a person so they’re unique, and you have art that people will want. That is real power.”

Was I art to her?

“I could do that,” I said. “Really.”

That made her laugh. The painting—she kept looking at it—was doing what I’d hoped it would.

“Can I show you something?” I asked. “You won’t miss your rail, I promise.”

“Sure.”

I was holding the painting upright next to us, one hand on it to steady it. It was big, as tall as we were—a vertical landscape, a village, a marlic hut and a door you were supposed to look at, so I’d made the door red and put sunlight on the path leading to it.

I picked up the painting and led her to the shade side of the station.

Everyone else was further down the track.

To be funny, I frowned and said, “You hate it, don’t you.”

“No! I don’t hate it at all.”

“I made it for you.”

This made her laugh too. She was trusting me, and that felt good. “I got that impression,” she said.

“Do you want to touch it?”

She did, and who wouldn’t?

She looked at me, then the painting, then me again. No boy had ever given her a painting before, I knew.

She touched my elbow—her hand lingered, and my arm tingled—and with the other hand reached out to the painting. Then she hesitated.

“Go ahead,” I said. “It won’t bite.”

She did. She moved her hand over the surface, loving the feel of it as everyone does when they touch a Pitipek painting. Like fur, like little teeth, tickly.

When her arm disappeared into the painting, I stepped back to let what needed to happen happen. No one could see us. She screamed once, a tiny sound lost in the whish of a passing rail, and her other arm, in its pretty sky-blue sleeve, tried hard to pull the first one out, grabbing, holding on, but that arm disappeared too in a swirl of green. Her skinny legs, shaking terribly, did their best to fight it, but were swallowed by the oily green, too; and in a second—with one more little scream, one that made me remember a day in the village—she was gone.

She was mine. That’s what this kind of painting was for. You make it and give it to someone you want to have forever. I’d learned that on Pitipek, but I’d never learned the rest. I’d tried hard with the “release” minerals, the required patterns, but could never pull it off. An arm would appear—the skin white as paint, shivering, a voice somewhere far away shrieking—or a hand, or a foot—but then it would snap back into the green. Every time my friends would laugh in that gargly way Pitipek laugh.

What do you do with someone once you have them?

I didn’t know.

I took the painting home, thinking it would feel different, heavier or something, but it didn’t this time either. No sounds from it. Nothing moved on the surface even for a moment. I wondered—just for a moment—what she was feeling, if she was feeling anything.

I started another one late that night. I had lots of paint left. I’d spent weeks in the village making it. There was a girl with yellow hair at school—her skin bronzed by the sun—and I didn’t want to spend months on hellos with her, too. I was pretty sure I loved her, but after Pitipek it’s hard to know.

©2017 by Bruce McAllister.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bruce McAllister’s short stories have appeared over the years in many of the SFF field’s major magazines and in various “year’s best” volumes, and have won or been short-listed for awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Nebula, the Hugo and others. He is the author of the novels Dream Baby and The Village Sang to the Sea, and the collection The Girl Who Loved Animals.

Dragonflies

Seanan McGuire | 7040 words

The dragonfly hung in the thick, humid air like a jeweled miracle, wings beating so fast that they became a blur. Its body was an oil slick of shifting colors, greens and blues and purples, blending together in patterns that would have seemed garish if they hadn’t been natural.

It had a cocker spaniel clutched in four of its six legs. I scowled to see it. Dogs are rare these days; dogs that don’t have defensive, paranoid owners ready to die to protect them are even rarer. My family could have eaten for days off that carcass, and instead, it was going to the dragonflies, who wouldn’t even appreciate what they had. Insects never did. Their lives were all about the mechanics of survival, and not about the little joys that could come with it: They ate, they fucked, they slept, but they didn’t enjoy. Even reptiles enjoyed. Insects . . .

Insects existed. That was what Nature had made them to do, and that was what they were going to keep on doing, right up until somebody found a way to stop them.

Someone tugged on my sleeve. I turned. My baby sister was crouched down beside me, her respirator clamped firmly over her mouth, her spear clasped with equal firmness in her hands. She looked terrified, and rightly so. She was just thirteen years old, underfed and underdeveloped, but old enough to go out into the city with me to scrounge for food. She’d never seen a dragonfly in proper flight before.

“Why are we standing here?” she whispered.

“Because dragonflies eat mosquitoes,” I said. “If there’s a dragon here, there’s not going to be a sucker, and dragons can’t be quiet. You’ll always hear them coming.” The dog must have been old, or deaf, or otherwise infirm; any healthy animal would have found a way to get away.

Molly blanched. “Mosquitoes?” she whispered, in a terrified tone.

“Not here,” I reassured her. “They don’t go where the dragons are. Now come on. Let’s move.”

The dragonflies droned overhead, dangerous and beautiful, as we slipped back into the alley and disappeared.

• • • •

There are no small changes. There are only changes with consequences no one quite foresaw.

Deforestation became a problem after the climate changed: Countries burned and forests died, and there were so many dead spots in the ocean that people began talking direly about how the sky was going to change and leave us all gasping for breath. Then it actually started to happen. The air got thin. I was only ten at the time, a little younger than Molly is now, but I remember my parents stockpiling oxygen tanks and warning me to keep the windows closed, to keep our artificially enriched atmosphere from getting out. The reduced oxygen levels helped a little with the fires. That was the only good thing they did. The plants did okay—they make oxygen, they don’t use it—but everything else was dying.

So a bunch of clever scientists did what clever scientists have always done, and started looking for an answer. Someone hit on the idea of super-oxygenating algae, capable of growing in the oceanic dead zones, capable of pumping out eight, nine, even ten times the oxygen of normal algae. Humanity was desperate. Humanity was dying. The algae got pushed through approvals at the speed of terror, and dumped into oceans all over the world, where it began to do its job. It spread like a green cloak across the water, oxygenating air and sea alike. Sure, some fish probably died, but the fish had been dying anyway, suffocating under the weight of the water. A few had to be sacrificed to save the many.

The air started getting better. That was when my parents had decided to have a second child, to celebrate the salvation of the world. Molly had been born in the lee of the storm, that brief, beautiful moment when the air was breathable and the world was ours again.

But the algae didn’t have an off switch. No one had stopped to consider the fact that oxygen is a poison: that mammals evolved to breathe something that was killing us, one lungful at a time, or that once, the world had been a much more densely oxygenated place. Once, silly things like the square-cube law hadn’t really held much sway, because the air had been so heavy that the insects could stand up proud and tall and dominate their environment. And the algae didn’t have an off switch.

Molly had been two years old when the respirators became necessary again, this time to filter out the oxygen, which had reached levels that were uncomfortable for human lungs. She had been four years old when mosquitoes the size of kittens had started to appear in Florida and Costa Rica. And she had been six years old when a praying mantis had come in through a broken window and eaten both our parents in their beds.

It’s a whole new world.

We did this to ourselves.

• • • •

Dragonflies were predators, capable of reaching eight feet in length toward the end of their lives. The young, healthy adults were usually only four to six feet long. Still dangerous, but not big enough to take on a full-grown human. They weren’t smart, but they still knew better than to mess with things that could hurt them if they had any other choice.

Nymphs weren’t quite as good at self-preservation as the adults. They were all appetite and aggression, and they would snap at anything that entered the water. They did an amazing job of keeping the mosquito larvae under control—good thing, too; without them, humans would have gone extinct as soon as the mosquitoes reached the size of eagles—but they also ate the fish, and the frogs, and everything else big enough to be a mouthful. Fishing these days was all about the dragonfly nymphs.

Molly had an amazing knack for spearing the quick, slippery things as they darted by under the surface of the water, chasing the shadows we cast on the pond. She stabbed, and when she pulled back her spear, there was a nymph the size of a housecat impaled on her hook. It was thrashing madly, all six of its legs seeking and failing to find purchase against the shaft of the spear. It wanted to survive. I couldn’t blame it for that. All any of us has ever been trying to do is survive. Humans destroyed the old world trying to live in it, and now that we have a new world, we’re still fighting to stay alive, no matter what that might entail.

I opened the cooler and put it down between us, using my foot to help lever the squirming nymph off the spear and into the white plastic box. I slammed the lid back into place before the nymph could buck its way out, and gave Molly the thumbs-up to go back to fishing. We weren’t the only hunting party out for the afternoon, but none of the others had Molly’s skill with the spear; it was up to us to feed the family, if anybody could.

Mark and his urchins would be scavenging in the old Financial District, combing through towers of glass and steel that were more unstable and more picked-over with every year that passed, looking for those precious cans of pre-change food. Most of them had expired years ago, but as long as they weren’t bloated or punctured, they were still worth the risk. Everyone I knew would rather die on a full belly than an empty one—another thing we shared with the insects. Hunger was universal, shared across the animal kingdom, hated by hot- and cold-blooded creatures alike. Hunger was the antithesis of survival.

Maybe that was why we’d been able to do so much damage before everything fell apart. Humans were always hungry. Even on a full stomach, with all our needs met and all our wanting answered, we were hungry.

Molly squealed as she slammed her spear into the body of a second nymph. It was a small, giddy sound: the sound of eating well, the sound of knowing that she had contributed to the group, not merely continued to exist as something that took up resources and occupied space. She’d only been going hunting with me for three years, and there was still so much about the bright world above that was new and delightful to her. We’d been with this colony since a year after our parents died, and she’d spent the three years between home and hunter as my protected shadow. I’d never allowed her to go with Mark and his urchins, or to accompany the other smaller ones on their spider-spotting runs. After Mom and Dad, she was the only thing I had left, and so I’d been prepared to do anything to protect her. Even work double-hard to keep her from needing to work at all.

Molly was always scared, but she had never liked to be coddled. Once she’d turned ten, there had been no chance of my keeping her hidden from the world any longer. Terrified, she’d picked up her spear and followed me into the light, respirator over her face to keep her breathing, surgical gloves over her hands to keep her sweat from scenting the air and telling the other predators what and where she was. Even now, two years later, she was always scared, and she was always willing to accompany me out into the light.

Bravery isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the willingness to keep going despite it. My baby sister was the bravest person I knew.

“How many do we need?” she asked.

“Five should be enough.” Five would buy us a share of anything that came back with the other groups, no matter how rare or precious: Five would be meat for stews, for frying, maybe even for making jerky, which would mean meat later in addition to meat now. Meat later was almost a fantasy, too decadent to be real.

Molly nodded. I helped her scrape the second nymph into the cooler, where the first had stopped thrashing, and she turned her attention back to the water. The air was still. No drone of dragonflies, no buzz of mosquitoes. I allowed my shoulders to unlock, enjoying the brief moment of peace. We never thought about how many insects we existed alongside when I was a kid; we never considered that mammals were in the minority, that only size and the slow change in the oxygenation in the air had made this world ours, instead of being theirs, as it should have been from the beginning.

We were foolish. We paid the price. Molly, though . . . Molly never had the chance to be a fool. She’d been too young to buy into the system of broken values and limitless consumption that had pushed us, one seemingly inevitable step at a time, into a world where dragonflies ruled the sky and spiders ruled the ground.

Spiders. I stood suddenly upright, considering the noise—or lack thereof—in a new light. There were dragonfly larvae here, because there was water, but there were no adult dragonflies. No damselflies, no lurking grasshoppers or wood lice. Why not? There was water here, and thriving vegetation. This should have been an insect’s paradise. Where were they?

“Molly, I think this should be the last one,” I said, voice tight, shoulders locked.

“I can get two more,” she protested, and stabbed at the water again.

I didn’t want to tell her my suspicions. Sending her into a panic wouldn’t change anything, but it could make it a lot harder for us to get back to safety: Even at thirteen, she could slow me down immensely if she lost her ability to cope with the world. Leaving her behind wasn’t an option. It hadn’t been on the night our parents died, and it wasn’t going to become an option now just because I was scared and she was old enough, supposedly, to run under her own power. Maybe she was the last sheltered child in the world. If that was so, then I was going to pay to keep her that way.

“We don’t need two more,” I said. “Three is enough. We can pay for our share of dinner, maybe even get something sweet for later on. Being greedy isn’t going to get us anything.”

Her head snapped up, eyes narrowing as she tried to decide what had gotten into me. Little sisters will always be the same, no matter how many times the world ends and begins anew, changed but still enduring. Molly always knew when I wasn’t telling her something. “What’s wrong?” she demanded.

“Please,” I said. “We need to go.”

“All right—” she said, pulling her spear out of the water and taking a step back toward me. Her feet squelched against the mud, a thick, sucking sound that seemed to echo forever.

She never even saw the spider that came out of the brush and grabbed her. It was a vast, brown, bristling thing, a beast made entirely of broom handles and briars, like a monster scarecrow from another world. Its jaws clamped on the back of her neck, and her eyes widened in surprise before she went limp.

I screamed, not caring what the sound might attract, and charged for the spider. Sometimes, if they were surprised enough, they would drop their prey and retreat, choosing the luxury of living to eat another day over the bounty of whatever they were trying to take. This one was braver than the norm, or just more comfortable in its surroundings, because it didn’t let go of her as it scurried backward, into the brush, dragging Molly along.

The brambles seemed to open up as the spider moved, allowing it to pass with my sister, only to seal themselves again behind it. The spider was gone, and so was Molly, and the scene had played out in a matter of seconds.

I dropped to my knees in the mud, listening to the last of the dragonfly nymphs thrashing in the cooler, and screamed.

• • • •

One of the other foraging teams found me there, curled up around our cooler, my spear clutched loosely in my right hand, and Molly gone. It was a miracle, they said, once they had me back in the tunnels, back in the illusion of safety: They didn’t know how long I’d been lying there, but anything longer than a few seconds should have been enough to spell my doom. Where there was one spider, there were likely to be more, especially in a feeding ground as fertile as the edge of a pond where the dragonflies came to spawn.

I didn’t learn about any of this for days. I was in shock, locked inside my own mind, watching as the scene played out over and over again. Sometimes, in my dreams, I was able to move just a fraction of an instant before the spider appeared, grabbing Molly and yanking her to safety, so that its mandibles closed on empty air. Other times, it would bite down harder, severing her head in a single blow, and then it would come after me, sparing me the anguish of living in a world where I had failed.

But nothing, not even shock, can last forever in a world where the air kills and the things you used to squash in the shower can come for you in the night. Three days after Molly and I had gone out hunting, I opened my eyes and found myself looking at the tunnel roof, gray concrete and industrial lighting powered by the turbines connected to our underground river. The hiss of the air conditioning was a comforting constant, reassuring me that the oxygen levels here were safe for me to breathe, and more, were unsafe for the things that hunted the world outside. The square-cube law operated here exactly as it always had. Any bugs that decided to follow a hunting party inside would collapse under their own weight as their lungs failed to pull sufficient oxygen from the air. The old air was safety.

Safety. “Molly,” I gasped, sitting upright. I was wearing hospital scrubs, old and blue and oft-bleached, used as pajamas and recovery clothes by hundreds since the collapse.

“You’re awake.”

I turned. The voice belonged to Mark, for once apart from his squad of scavenging urchins. He was holding my spear. My eyes widened, and I leaned over to snatch it from his hands before I could think better of the gesture.

Mark smiled. Not happily, but a smile all the same. “I was wondering whether you’d still want that. Miss Nancy doesn’t think you will. She says this is going to drive you underground for good.”

“Molly,” I said again, and stood—or tried to. My legs wobbled, refusing to hold me up. I collapsed back onto the cot.

“Slow down, superstar, you’re just going to hurt yourself,” said Mark, leaning over to put a carefully restraining hand on my arm. “It’s been three days. We’ve had search parties combing the area where we found you. There’s been no sign of your sister.” Unspoken: If there hadn’t been a sign within three days, there probably wasn’t going to be one. Anything that was hungry enough to hunt humans wasn’t going to leave them unconsumed.

And if I allowed myself to start thinking that way, I was failing her all over again. How many times was it possible for me to fail my sister? God help me, but I was starting to feel like I might find out.

“I need food, water, weapons,” I said. “I have to find her.”

“I agree.”

“You don’t under—” I stopped. “You do?”

“Three of my kids have disappeared in the last two weeks. Spiders. Big spiders, just like the one you were raving about when we found you. But we haven’t found bodies, and we haven’t found bones, and people are too damn willing to write them off as lost. I think some people are even glad.” His voice turned bitter at the end, stressing the word “glad” like it was the worst thing anyone had ever said, or thought, since the air had turned against us. “Kids like mine don’t bring in as much as they consume. They never could. Nobody wants to be the one who says we should turn them out—that would be taking a step over the line into monster, and I guess we still think of ourselves as too human for that—but everybody thinks it. Everybody looks at what’s on their plate and thinks ‘this would be more without them,’ and then they look at my kids, and they wish something like this would happen.”

“Not everybody,” I said softly.

His laughter was even more bitter than his voice. “No, everybody,” he said. “At least once. Even me, when I was hungry and tired and every one of those kids looked like my son, and not one of them was him. Even you. I’ve seen it, when you were hungry and cold and Molly was sleeping sound, and not understanding how much you’d given up to keep her safe. We’re both parents to other people’s children. We’re never going to be parents to our own. Not again, for me. Not ever, for you.”

“You don’t have to talk to me like that when my sister is missing,” I said, my voice dropping until it was barely above a whisper.

Mark shook his head. “Yes, I do. You need to understand that no one’s going to help us look for her. I’ll help you. I want to help you. But if you start asking for permission, they’re going to tell you no. They’re going to say that you already owe the community for your care, and demand that you pay them back before you go looking for her. And then the trail will go colder than it already has, and by the time you find your way back into the world, there won’t be anything to find. Do you understand? We go now. We go quietly. We go together. Or neither one of us is going to go at all.”

I was quiet for a moment, just looking at Mark, trying to collect my thoughts. He looked calmly back. He was a few years older than I was, and had arrived at the community at roughly the same time. When he’d come in, it had been with an armful of solemn, wide-eyed little boy, no more than two years old. David, his son. David, who had been born to this strange, terrible new world, who hadn’t lived in it for long enough to learn how to be careful.

David, whose life had ended in the buzz of dragonfly wings, and the screams of his father trying against all odds to chase the monster into the sky. But Mark had survived the loss. Mark had recovered from it, even if he’d never been the same man again, and he’d found other ways to contribute to the community. He’d learned to care for the children whose parents couldn’t, or whose parents had died getting them to us. He’d learned to be a father to dozens, when he could no longer be a father to one.

We weren’t friends. All my energy and attention had been reserved for Molly—and maybe I’d even felt a little superior to him, because my sister had still been there, and his son hadn’t. His son had been long, long gone.

“Do you know where to go?” I asked.

“I know where to start,” he said.

• • • •

We crept through the shadows of the early morning, respirators on our faces and packs weighing down our shoulders. The door to the community’s subterranean warren was behind us, closed and essentially forgotten, because unless we found the children, we could never go back. We’d stolen. We’d taken unauthorized supplies and unapproved equipment, carrying it with us up to the surface, to help us look for the children that no one actually wanted us to find.

But Mark was right when he said that no one could admit that. If we found them, if we brought them safely home, we would be allowed back inside. We’d be punished, penalized for what we’d taken, but no one would ask for us to be exiled, because exiling us when we’d just gone to retrieve our children would be the act of monsters. If we found them, everything could go back to the way it had always been. And if we didn’t find them . . .

If we didn’t find them, it wouldn’t matter that we’d be exiles. It wouldn’t matter that we’d die alone and afraid, torn apart by the menace we had created. Because if we didn’t find them, I would have failed Molly the way I’d failed our parents, and I would deserve everything the world wanted to do to me. If I couldn’t save her, I didn’t deserve to have a home.

More oxygen in the air meant more CO₂, which meant more food for the plants; they thrived in this transformed atmosphere. Mark and I pushed our way through a field of chest-high crabgrass, always watching our feet. Stepping on a resting wood louse was surprising and unpleasant, but not necessarily fatal. Stepping on a sleeping centipede could cost a foot at best, and a leg at worst. Either one would mean a quick and brutal death. The smell of blood attracted more things than I liked to think about, and most of them were happy to feast on man-flesh. Call it revenge for all those rolled up newspapers and plastic cups of my youth, back when the world had been ours, instead of theirs.

“We try to scavenge as far from water as we can, to prevent accidents,” said Mark. “It’s not safe anywhere, but the water . . .”

“The water attracts,” I agreed quietly. Not just insects, although they had grown first, swelling beyond the bounds of the old nature, adapting to the new one: other arthropods were making their own adaptations. There used to be a fisherman with the community, a man who’d fled inland from the sea, shattered and still shaking from the gale-force winds that had erased his hometown from the face of the world. He’d gone to the streams outside the city, using reel and rod to tease crawfish out from beneath rocks and bring them back to feed us. When he’d started, they had been small things, six inches at most. Over the span of three years, they had swelled to a foot, and then two feet, and finally more than three feet, great monsters of the shallows, all claws and chitin.

And then he had gone out and not come back. We all knew that his bones—what was left of them—were somewhere at the bottom of the stream, disarticulated by the crawfish, stripped bare of flesh and forgotten. We didn’t know how big the crawfish were now. The water was hyper-oxygenated, like everything else. They could be monsters in the deep, and we had given that to them.

There were still frogs. Sometimes I heard them croaking when I went out at twilight, and they sounded big enough to swallow the sky. Everything was growing. Everything but us. Maybe, given time, the dinosaurs would rise again, taking a second shot at the world that should have been theirs all along. I wondered, sometimes, whether they would be grateful to us for fixing it for them, or whether they would just keep moving forward, marking time until things changed again.

“Shhh,” said Mark, putting out a hand like I was one of his urchins, too young to know when I needed to be careful. It burned. I stopped all the same, freezing in place, trying to listen for what he’d heard that I hadn’t. Pride has no place in the open air.

Something rustled in the grass ahead of us. We held our place and our peace as a ladybug as large as a dinner plate crawled out, antennae waving, mandibles working against the air. I stiffened. Ladybugs were staples of picture books and cartoons when I was a child. I hadn’t realized until later that they were vicious predators, capable of killing and consuming insects twice their size. We were too big for this ladybug to devour, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t try if it felt threatened.

The only good thing about its presence was that it meant there were probably no mantises in the area. The stealthy ambush hunters snatched up ladybugs like children snatched up candy, devouring them whole. They could coexist, but they usually didn’t.

The ladybug bumbled on. We started moving again, pushing deeper into the grass, moving toward Mark’s unidentified goal. I forced my breathing to stay level. Some insects tracked by following trails of carbon dioxide, using our lungs against us. The respirator meant that I was putting off less than I would have been without it, but less wasn’t the same as nothing at all. It could still be followed. Breathing too fast would just set me up to be devoured.

Then Mark stopped. “Here,” he said, indicating an open doorway, a black cavern into a deserted store. The logo was still visible, red circles against grimy stucco. This had been a wonderland once, taken for granted by the people who walked through its automatic doors into its climate-controlled depths, where the shelves groaned under the weight of so many good things. Vitamins and bottled juices and chocolate; clean clothes and solar batteries that were new, not worn out and run down by years of constant use. Sometimes I thought that if I had a time machine and an hour, and knew that I couldn’t change the world enough to make a difference, that I would spend it looting a store just like this one, stealing from the past the way the past had stolen from all of us.

None of that changed the fact that walking through those shattered doors would be just this side of suicide. “You can’t be serious,” I hissed. “That’s . . . that’s enclosed space.” Enclosed space that hadn’t been reclaimed and cleaned out by human hands; enclosed space that could harbor anything at all. Insects like the dark.

“I know,” said Mark. He looked at the doors. “We were near here when I lost the first of them. I didn’t want to think he could be in there, but now I think there’s not anywhere else any of them could be. We have to go in.”

“And if it kills us?”

“Then it kills us, and we don’t have to do this anymore.” There was a quiet resignation in his voice that I had heard before, in my own, in everyone else within the community’s. We were struggling to hold on because we didn’t see another way; because to be human was to struggle, to keep trying in the face of impossible odds. But here was a choice that meant continuing to struggle while also admitting that maybe, just maybe, we were done.

I closed my eyes. Molly’s face looked at me from the darkness, all pale cheeks and desperation. I opened them again, turned to Mark, and nodded.

“All right,” I said. “We’re going in.”

• • • •

Scavenging teams had been here, pushing as far in as they dared before abandoning the effort as more risk than reward. The shelves near the front of the store were picked clean of whatever they’d once held, be it food, medication, or the latest DVDs. It didn’t matter that most people didn’t have a way of playing DVDs anymore, or that seeing the pre-change world caused depression and mania in a lot of our older survivors; if something had been touched by human hands, created by human hands, people wanted it. People wanted to remember that once, we’d been the dominant species on this planet, not reduced to living in ruins and waiting for the sky to fall. People wanted to pretend that one day we were going to be the dominant species again.

People were fools. The world belonged to the crawling things now, to the bugs and spiders and frogs. And maybe part of the world belonged to the children like Molly, who were young enough not to mourn for something that was never coming back. The old world was dead and gone and buried. Molly and her kind, they could build a new one from the wreckage. People like me and Mark? We were here to get Molly’s generation to adulthood, to protect them in the remains of the world our parents had destroyed until their time could truly begin. We were the liminal generation.

It was an awful thing to be. We were trapped in the doorway between worlds, enough part of what was lost that we would never stop regretting it, enough part of what was found that we looked askance at the people behind us, the ones who were never going to move on. We couldn’t adapt, not really. All we could do was struggle to keep the ones who could alive.

Mark took the lead as we crept deeper into the old super store. He’d clearly been here before; he knew where to put his feet, where the floor would hold him, while I had to trust that he wasn’t guiding me to my death. Only the fact that you can’t bargain with insects kept me from turning and running back to the light. He wasn’t going to trade me for his missing kids. Whatever had taken them would just take him too. One more piece of meat to fill its belly. One more death for the ever-mounting toll.

Would the world even notice when humanity was gone? Had it noticed when the last dodo died, or when the last of the dinosaurs lay down and closed its eyes for good? We’d been so foolish, thinking anything we did could destroy the world. The world didn’t care about us. All we’d ever been in a position to destroy was ourselves.

“Hold on,” whispered Mark. He stopped, and so did I, watching silently as the dark outline of his body bent, fiddling with something near his feet. Then a light came on, red as blood or rust, illuminating the room in front of us. I clapped a hand over my respirator, like I could somehow muffle the urge to scream, or stop the small traces of carbon dioxide from coming through the vents.

The air glistened with webbing, glowing crimson in Mark’s light, like some sort of terrible Christmas. Spiders scurried along the loops, treating them like makeshift highways. Most were the size of dogs, cocker spaniels and pit bull terriers. They paid us no mind. We were too big for them to eat and we weren’t moving fast enough to be a threat; as long as we left them alone, they were going to return the favor.

Mark took a step forward. The light moved with him. I realized that it was attached to his shoe, tilted upward, so that he’d always be able to see where he was going. It was the sort of good idea I’d never needed to have, thankfully; Molly and I had always done our hunting in the light.

Mark was still moving. I followed. There was nothing else for me to do. Not when there was a chance that Molly was still alive somewhere in here.

The webs got thicker as we moved into the store. There was no natural light here; these places had always been built to minimize the presence of windows and make it easier to control the internal temperature. Both things that made them perfect nests for the things that owned them now, the dark and crawling creatures that had come up from the soil and taken the world for their own. A strand of webbing brushed my cheek. I shuddered and clawed it away, resisting the urge to turn and run. The webs were only going to get thicker from here.

What had Molly thought as she was dragged into the dark? Had she believed that I would let her die, or had she known that I would come for her? I thought of her face, innocent and sweet and all I had left of my family, and I kept moving, until we reached a solid wall of web. It stretched from the floor to the ceiling, so thick that it looked like something out of a nightmare. This wasn’t possible. This shouldn’t have been possible.

“Through here,” whispered Mark. He produced a knife from his belt and began to cut, untangling the strands of web with a speed and skill that spoke of long practice. I looked nervously from side to side, waiting for some great monster to rush at us and bring this ill-fated adventure to an end. Nothing moved but the small spiders—small is always a relative term—and they were still ignoring us.

“How do you know?” I whispered back.

“Because wolf spiders hunt during the day, and they like to make larders,” said Mark. His logic was chillingly simple. “Twilight is when this place gets hopping. Now come on.” He pried the hole in the webbing wider, until we could fit through, single-file. I slipped past him, and stopped.

Light had come back into the world.

At some point in the last decade, the roof of the store had caved in, giving way in the face of wind and weather. The spiders had done their best to close off this avenue for the sun, stringing their webs across the hole until the light was washed-out and gray, filtered through a hundred layers of silk. It didn’t matter. I could see now, and what I saw was terrible.

Dozens of cocoons dangled on silken threads, some as small as a wood louse or a squirrel, others larger than a human being. I didn’t want to think about what might be in those larger cocoons, or how big the spider that dragged it back here would have needed to be. Spiders could handle prey that was larger than they were, but normally only if they were webbing it on the spot; not if they were carrying it back to save for later.

How big were they getting, around the edges of the world where humanity was already a fading, forgotten dream? How big were they going to get, now that we’d removed the limits? I hadn’t been old enough when things had changed to know much about pre-oxygen insect life, and the older people never wanted to talk about it at all. They just turned their faces to the wall and refused to admit what they’d done.

Mark began moving forward, eyes on the cocoons. I followed. The older ones tended to be darker in color, the webbing attracting and holding small particles in the air. I was looking for something small, something fresh, something long enough to hold a sister and bright enough to be new.

In the dimness beside me, I heard Mark gasp, a single short, sharp intake of breath that was followed by the softer sound of weeping. He’d found one of his missing ones, and they hadn’t been in the condition he’d been hoping. But his children had been missing longer than mine had. Molly still had a chance.

Something buzzed, close enough to my head that I jumped and nearly toppled over, seized with cold dread. I looked up. It was the dragonfly we’d seen earlier, the dog still clutched in its front legs. It wasn’t cocooned. Webbing was wrapped around its wings, pinning it in place, but it wasn’t cocooned. The buzz had been it struggling to be free, as startled by the sight of me as I was by the sound of it.

Beyond the dragonfly was a row of fresh cocoons. I took a steadying breath and moved in that direction, knife at the ready.

I found Molly in the third cocoon I cut down. Her eyes were closed and her face was serene. She looked like she was sleeping. She was beautiful—she had always been beautiful—but until that moment, I hadn’t fully appreciated that beauty for what it was. She was one of the first daughters of this brave new world, with calluses around her mouth and nose from her respirator, and skin as soft as flower petals. I stroked her cheek. She wasn’t breathing.

Well, of course she wasn’t breathing. She didn’t have her respirator. Carefully, I unhooked my own and placed it on her face, tightening the straps until it fit just so. Her eyes never opened. But they would. They would. They had to. I had promised our parents that I would keep her safe, and she was going to open her eyes. She was going to remember how to breathe. She was going to endure. She was going to thrive. She had to. And if she didn’t, then I wasn’t going to either. All or nothing. That was the way.

Mark made a small choking sound. I turned, and there was no terror as I saw that he’d been grabbed from behind by a behemoth of a spider, something so large and horrible that my mind refused to accept it. It was impossible. It was the inevitable result of the world’s changes, and it was too much. My sister was gone, my lungs were growing heavy and thick with too much oxygen, and it was too much.

Mark didn’t even have time to scream.

The dragonfly buzzed again, alarmed by the nearness of the spider. There were no alliances to be formed here, no unions against a common enemy: The minds of mammals and the minds of insects were too different. But there was something to be said for revenge. I ran to the dragonfly’s side, grabbed the webbing that held it, and began to slice. It bucked and writhed, flashing its mandibles in a threat display, making my task that much harder. I kept going, waiting for the moment when the spider would grab me and jerk me backward, into the dark. I cut, and cut, until suddenly, the dragonfly was free. Suddenly, it rose into the air, wings buzzing, and I realized that it was close enough to hurt me badly.

It didn’t. Instead, it turned, fleeing out the cracked hole in the ceiling, leaving me to my fate. I closed my eyes, resigned to the inevitable.

The sound of wings forced me to open them again, and I watched in helpless awe as the swarm of dragonflies poured in through the hole, following the one I had just cut free. They filled the air with darting, shining jewels, ranging in size from a few feet to larger than an adult man. The spiders reared onto their hind legs, threatening the attackers. The dragonflies descended, and battle was joined. Even the spider that had killed Mark left his body, racing to defend the nest. They wanted to live. They all wanted to live.

I had made a promise to my parents, and I was going to keep it; Molly needed my respirator if she was going to wake up (she wasn’t going to wake up), and so I snatched Mark’s from his face, fastening it to my own as I ran, out of the spider’s lair, through the memorial to mankind’s hubris, and out into the shimmering, newly primeval world.

I ran, and as long as I could keep running, I might be able to find another promise. I might be able to make a promise to myself. One that would be enough.

©2016 by Seanan McGuire. Originally published in The Doomsday Chronicles, edited by Crystal Watanabe. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

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

The Heart’s Cartography

Susan Jane Bigelow | 5107 words

Jade was the sort of backwoods girl who had a map of the countryside tattooed on her heart, and she could feel it in her bones when the pieces of her world shifted. So when the new family moved into the house across the road that late summer, she felt ripples of wrongness radiating out from them and their too-bright clothes, their bizarrely old-fashioned wood-paneled station wagon, and their rolling words that felt just a little to the left of normal.

“Time travelers,” said Jade’s brother, watching them from the window the day they moved in. Jade stood nearby, not daring to move or breathe.

“They are strange,” said Jade’s mother thoughtfully as she unloaded groceries. Jade helped her carry them in. “So . . . maybe. Maybe.”

“Can’t be anything else,” said Jade’s sort-of friend Andy as they rode their bikes into the village. “Gotta be from the future. If I were a time traveler I’d be just as clueless as that.”

Jade agreed, but didn’t say so.

They had a girl just about Jade’s age, who introduced herself as “Sally” with that little hitch before the first syllable that suggested it wasn’t the name she usually wore. Jade was hypersensitive to that sort of thing. People always had that hitch before they said her name, like the word Jason was on their tongues, in their minds, and hanging in the air between them before they placed the polite fiction of Jade in its place.

And so she found solace in the woods and streams and wild green places beyond the farms and tumbledown houses. The forest and the hills didn’t care about gender; there, she could be herself. She could be alone.

The woods sang to her, a chorus of wild, sweet voices. She hummed along as she walked, and she knew where every rock, every trail, every tree was.

One day she was tramping down the path by the ancient stone wall when she stiffened, all senses alert. She knew someone was there, a bright and shining feeling, even before she heard the crack of branches and the hasty rustle of leaves behind her.

She turned and saw a blur of bright orange and pink making their slow way through some trackless part of the woods. She steeled herself before calling out, beckoning. Soon Sally was standing sheepishly in front of her, hair a tangle of branches and knees scuffed and bloody.

Jade couldn’t help it, she burst into laughter. And then, to her amazement, Sally started laughing too.

• • • •

They sat on the rocks by the slow late summer trickle of the old mill stream, shooting the breeze together about the woods.

“I got turned around on Hawk Mountain once,” Jade was saying. “So I just decided to go west, cause I knew Lathrop Road was there. I crashed through the woods for hours, following the sun, until I was completely covered in scratches. And then I took a left to go around a boulder and found the damn trail—it had been like twenty feet away from me the whole time!”

She didn’t say that she’d been only seven at the time, long before her sense of the woods had really begun to develop.

“I adore the forest,” Sally said. Her accent was soft and flat, almost Midwestern, but with longer vowels and a rushing, lilting cadence that vaguely reminded Jade of Spanish. “At home we have some parks and spaces, but it’s not wild like this!”

“I love it here,” said Jade simply. “I never want to be anywhere else. I feel like . . . it’s a part of me. I know every inch of it, in here.” She tapped her chest, amazed at how easy it was to bare her heart to Sally.

“I can see why!” exclaimed Sally. “Wish I had a place like that.”

“So, where is home for you?” asked Jade innocently.

“Oh,” she said, flushing. “Chicago.”

“How far in the future?” asked Jade.

Sally looked up at her, eyes wide with panic. “W-what? No! I mean—”

“It’s okay,” said Jade smugly, thrilled to have been proven right. “Everyone figures you’re time travelers. We’re not stupid.”

Sally swore in a language that wasn’t quite English, then glared up at Jade. “How?”

“Clothes,” said Jade, ticking items off on her fingers. “Car. Accent. The way your dad is always standing around being fascinated by normal things. And your mom kept mentioning something called the Warm Shift, like we’d know what it was.”

Sally groaned. “My dad is an idiot. He’s always so sure, but we always do something to mess it up and then we have to leave!” She swore again. “I’m so tired of having to leave.”

“Don’t worry,” Jade reassured her. “We won’t tell.”

“Thank you,” said Sally, breathing a sigh of relief. “Oh, it’s so nice to stop pretending. I just want to stay somewhere for more than a couple months.”

“Don’t you ever get to go home?”

Sally shrugged, and her eyes were heavy. “Yeah, but Dad keeps getting assignments, so we never stay long.”

“Time traveling is his job?”

Sally gave her a look. “I’m really not supposed to talk about any of this.”

“Aw, come on,” Jade pressed, grinning. “Who am I gonna tell? The trees?”

Sally thought for a moment. Jade could tell she was unspooling a lifetime of training and paranoia. Then she came to a decision, rebellion in her expressive brown eyes. “Okay. I can tell you a little bit. You already know the time travel thing. Dad’s a temporal anthropologist. Mom’s a climate historian. She studies whatever time period we get sent to, she writes papers on things like air quality and whatever. He just makes these really weird observations and then tells us all about them at dinner.” She made a face. “He’s completely obsessed with shoes this time. It’s so annoying. We go home in between assignments, but we never stay more than a week. Mom and Dad say we’re lucky. I guess we are.” She didn’t sound convinced.

“So how far in the future are you from?” asked Jade, circling around to her original question. “What’s it like?”

“Now that I really can’t talk about. I’m not supposed to tell you anything about it!” She shook her finger at Jade. It was such an incongruously old-fashioned gesture that Jade couldn’t hold a giggle back. “Could end up changing the future!”

“Right,” said Jade, still grinning. “So have you been to the past? I mean, farther past than this?”

“Oh, yes!” said Sally brightly. “My favorite is the 1920s. We were there before we came here! The fashions were so nice, and everyone spoke so beautifully.” She sighed. “We only stayed two weeks. I miss it.”

“Wow,” said Jade, burning with jealousy. “I’d have loved to have seen it.”

“It was amazing,” sighed Sally. Then she tapped the side of her head and stared off into space, as if checking something. “Oh, dear. I have to get back. But . . . I was thinking I would come down here again tomorrow. I like being outside like this. Are you doing anything? Um. I mean—”

“I’d love to,” said Jade at once. It was still summer, after all, and there were no demands on her time. The prospect of sharing her woods with someone like Sally was exhilarating. “Wanna meet here? We can go up the waterfall trail. There’s a pond at the top. It’s really pretty there.”

“That sounds bully!” exclaimed Sally. Then she flushed again. “That’s wrong, isn’t it.”

Jade found herself grinning. “Sure, but who cares?”

Sally grinned back. “I’m so glad I came here! Who knew I’d find such a cool girl to hang out with? See you tomorrow, Jade!”

She ran off down the trail, leaving Jade feeling utterly buoyant. Girl. Cool girl.

There hadn’t been any hitch when Sally had said her name, no slight emphasis on her gender. There was no choking, suffocating Jason expanding to fill the air between them, just a clean and fresh future full of possibilities.

Jade hadn’t know how much of a relief that could be until now.

• • • •

She made her winding, casual way home as the sun set, letting herself in the back and then darting upstairs to avoid her father’s stern, disapproving glare. She picked out a skirt and a clean top for dinner and carefully, hesitantly crept back downstairs to eat.

Her father gave her that same look he always gave, then shook his head and banged his glass down a little more forcefully than he needed to. Bourbon spilled out onto the tablecloth, and her mother winced.

“J—Jade—how was it out there?” her mother asked, trying to stay cheerful. She always made such an effort to get things right.

“Fine,” said Jade.

“Did you see anything new?”

Jade shook her head. Her mother smiled, and then poked at her meat.

And that was just about it for conversation. Her brother told her father a little bit about something he was doing at his summer job; her father grunted noncommittally, sipped from his strong-smelling glass, and then the house lapsed back into a thick and cloying silence. Forks clinked against plates.

“Good dinner, Mom, thank you,” said Jade quietly when she was done. Her mother smiled at her again, trying to ignore her father’s sour expression. She picked up her plate and put it in the sink, then escaped back up to her room. The internet was agonizingly slow out this far out in the country, but she could still talk to friends, post to her Tumblr, and soak up everything she was missing.

There was an interview with a famous trans activist, and she watched it even though YouTube stuttered and buffered the whole way through. Everyone loved her. The world was changing.

Please change faster. Please change faster. Please change here, too.

Please don’t forget about us.

• • • •

Sally was waiting next to the stream that morning. She was wearing hiking boots and a practical-looking outfit that seemed to be made of a cross between denim and leather.

Jade asked her about it.

“Can’t tell you,” she said smugly. “Wanna get going?”

Jade laughed. “Bet I can make you tell me before we get there.”

“You won’t!” said Sally, hoisting her pack.

But she did, less than halfway there.

“It’s called saldec,” admitted Sally, exasperated after Jade’s constant prodding. “I don’t know what it means! But a lot of our clothes are made of it, it lasts forever.”

“Better than these old jeans,” said Jade, eyeing a hole in her knee.

“Oh, but I like jeans!” exclaimed Sally. “They get so comfortable after a while.”

Jade laughed, shaking her head as they trudged onward.

They spent the afternoon by the waterfalls and then the pond, eating the weird hard candy Sally had brought with her (“It’s from the past! So it’s okay!”) and talking about the village nearby, Jade’s family, the weirdness of time travel, and all kinds of other things. After a while they just sat together. Jade watched the dragonflies flit from lily pad to leaf, listening to the sound of cicadas, as white clouds drifted overhead. The air was warm but not too humid. There was no pressure to talk, no pressure to be anything but themselves.

Being with Sally was like being alone, but better.

When they separated by the creek as the sun began to set, after a promise that they’d meet up again tomorrow, Jade felt a peculiar emptiness. She was so used to being by herself that actually missing someone’s company was strange.

She decided she could get used to it.

• • • •

Their friendship grew as the weeks passed. They started hiking in different directions—into town, down by the ruins of the Seven Acres farm, out by the highway. Sally liked the town and the old farm, but she loved the highway. She watched the cars and trucks go by for hours, eyes wide.

“It’s just so different!” she exclaimed. “We don’t have anything like it!” Then she clamped her hand over her mouth while Jade laughed, filing the information away.

She’d learned a lot about the future from the little hints Sally had let slip. She’d started writing them down at night in a notebook she kept by her bed.

Hotter

Wetter? More rain?

No cars or highways

No United States?

Probably a couple hundred years

Really great clothes material

There were some big wars but people survived them?

Everyone has tech that’s part of them—Sally’s is mostly disabled and she misses it

No robots (damn)

No aliens either (double damn)

But nothing lasted forever, and summer’s shadows lengthened while fall began to loom over Jade’s life.

“Are you gonna go to school with us?” asked Jade. They were sleeping over at Sally’s house. Sally’s dad had been excited about the prospect, and had spent the whole evening, from the suspiciously normal meal of precisely-made hamburgers to an awkward, forced few hours sitting in front of the television watching a shopping channel, making surreptitious notes about her. He’d interrogated her at length about her sneakers, too. She caught Sally miming him a few times and had to stop herself from bursting out into howls of laughter.

But now the lights were out, and the girls were in their sleeping bags on the floor of the tastefully finished basement. Clearly Sally’s family hadn’t decorated the house at all. Jade had propped up a flashlight for them to see by.

“I don’t know,” said Sally, her face falling. “Dad’s already saying he’s got most of what they wanted him to get. And Mom thinks people in town are getting suspicious. So . . .”

“What? No! You’re not leaving, are you? Please say you’re not!”

“I—I really want to,” said Sally, downcast. But then she made a visible effort to brighten the mood. She was always doing that—she didn’t like staying sad too long. Jade was reminded of her mother whenever her father was halfway through his bottle of bourbon. “But I bet it’ll still happen! Sometimes we’ve stayed a lot longer than we expected. Right? So tell me about school! I bet you have lots of friends. Are there boys? Girls? Are there boys or girls who like you?”

“Oh,” said Jade, flushing. “Um. Not really.”

“But you’re so pretty! They’re missing out oh so much.”

Pretty? “They don’t like me,” mumbled Jade.

“But why?” asked Sally, clearly mystified.

“Oh come on,” said Jade, suddenly cranky. “You know!”

“I do?” asked Sally, blinking.

Jade sat up, bewildered. Could it be possible that Sally hadn’t picked up on it? She was so used to never passing, never being seen as herself. She’d stopped trying so hard when Sally was around; she just assumed Sally knew.

What if she didn’t?

Her heart pounded. Did she really want to swing a wrecking ball through all that?

But then Sally neatly shattered her illusions. “Oh! I bet I know. Was it because you were born a boy?”

“Shit,” muttered Jade, bracing herself for the deluge of awkward questions, reassurances, and worse.

But it never came. “I forgot that about now,” Sally continued. “It’s so weird. In my home time it’s fine to move around between all the genders. I was a boy for a week in third level! But it didn’t work out, I like being what I am.” She grinned, then her face fell again. “People don’t give you a hard time about it, do they? Is this one of those times where they do that?”

Jade just looked at the floor. “Oh. Nah. It’s . . . I just . . . I’m alone a lot. People are fine. They’re nice. But nobody gets too close, you know?”

“I do know,” said Sally softly. “Nobody really likes time travelers, either.”

“Even at home?” asked Jade, surprised.

“It’s . . . it’s all political,” Sally said, waving her hands in frustration. “People say we’re messing up the past. That we’re polluting it. That’s . . . like a huge deal. So people don’t like us. I’m usually alone, when I’m back there. Why do you think I go with my parents? I have a sister who just stays home. But not me, I want to be here. Because . . . every time we go I might make a friend.”

She was crying. Jade hesitated, then put a hand on hers. “Even though you have to leave them?” she asked.

“It’s better than nothing,” whispered Sally.

Jade squeezed her hand. “I want to tell you something,” she said.

Sally blinked at her.

Jade took a deep breath. She wanted to give Sally something, and she couldn’t think of anything else worth giving her. “Everyone else knows it. But . . . I want to share it with you. When I was a boy . . . my name was Jason. I don’t go by it. I don’t like it at all—please don’t ever call me it. But maybe it’s a secret you can take with you. Some little piece of me I don’t need anymore.”

Sally wiped a tear away. “Thank you, Jade. I like going by Sally. I always go by it, now. But back home . . . my name is Rehabetha.” She laughed bitterly. “I hate it. Please don’t ever call me it, either.”

“I like Sally way better for you,” said Jade with a grin. “It fits.”

“Jade fits so much more for you, as well!” Sally exclaimed. “Oh, let’s always be Sally and Jade!”

• • • •

Late that night, with Sally snoring softly in the bag next to her, Jade took out her notebook with her observations about the future. She switched on her light, and quickly wrote:

We survive

As she put it away, she was filled with a wild, wonderful hope. The future could be better than the past.

Things could keep changing.

• • • •

One morning, just two days before the school year started, Jade’s mother’s voice woke her up.

“Hon,” she said softly. “The woman from across the road is here. Your friend’s mother is downstairs. She wants to talk to you.”

“Uh? Sure,” said Jade, blinking sleep from her eyes. “I’ll come right down.”

“Don’t wake your father,” her mother whispered. “He’s . . . not feeling well.”

Hungover, then. Best to avoid him.

“Got it,” said Jade, and mother and daughter shared a nod, a little moment of we-are-in-this-together solidarity. Her mother left and Jade quickly dressed, ran a brush through her wild mane of hair, and tip-toed downstairs, taking care to skip over the creaky step.

Sally’s mother was in the front room, eyes wet. When she saw Jade she hurried to her and grabbed her hand.

“Jade,” she said, and Jade saw the awful, aching fear in her eyes.

“Oh no,” said Jade, heart stopping. “Sally?”

“She left early this morning. I don’t know where she is. We need to find her! We’re—we’re traveling today.” Her mother looked away. “We can’t leave her behind.”

Traveling. They were leaving today. It hit Jade like a punch in the gut.

No wonder Sally had run.

“Do you know where she is?” Sally’s mother asked, desperation in her voice.

“No,” said Jade. Sally’s mother’s face fell. “But—I’ll find her.”

“You will?” asked Sally’s mother, confused.

“If she’s lost anywhere in the hills, my girl will find her,” Jade’s mother said firmly from the kitchen doorway. “No one knows the woods better.”

Jade’s heart swelled with pride. She looked Sally’s mother in the eyes.

“I’ll bring her back before you have to go. Promise.”

• • • •

Jade stepped out of her house into the cool morning air. She closed her eyes and pictured the vast sweep of the land in her mind. She knew every fold, every rise, every creek, every tree . . . every blade of grass. Every stone.

They sang to her with that majestic chorus, alive and vital and sweet. She opened her mouth and sang along, her heart opening and her senses sharpening.

Suddenly, she knew the location of every rabbit, every cricket, every deer . . . and every human.

Sally. The sense of her was as bright and clear as the sun.

She’d gone to their place by the waterfall. Jade never even considered telling the adults. This, she knew, was between the two of them. She shouldered her pack and set off at a jog.

• • • •

The sun was obscured by threatening clouds when Jade arrived, exhausted and panting from running. She’d fixed her mind on the sense of Sally, and now here she was in front of her, sitting by the water, sullenly casting stones into the pond.

“I knew you’d come find me,” she said softly as Jade sat next to her.

“Everyone’s looking for you,” said Jade. “Your mom came to my house.”

Sally swore. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. She said . . . you’re traveling today. Are you . . .?”

But Jade couldn’t bring herself to ask the question.

Sally started to cry. “I don’t want to go back. I hate leaving all the time! I finally make a friend and now—and now—”

Jade hesitantly put an arm around her, rebellious tears slipping down her own face. “I don’t want you to go, either,” she sniffed.

Sally turned to her, eyes suddenly wild and fiery. “Come with me. Come with us! I’ll say I told you everything. I’ll say you can’t stay here. It would contaminate the timeline! There are rules. We could go to the future. We could be together!”

“What?” said Jade, taken aback. Her arms fell from around her friend.

“Please!” wailed Sally. “Please come with me. You—you can be anything you want there. No one will be mean to you!”

The wind picked up, and Jade tasted danger in the sudden cold. “Storm,” she said, cursing herself. She’d been so intent on finding Sally that she’d missed all the signs. “Hell. We have to go. Come on.”

“No,” Sally said, the wind blowing her hair into her face. “I’m not leaving. Not until you say you’re coming with me!”

Jade felt a chill that had nothing to do with the storm. The future stretched invitingly in front of her. The future had to be better than today. She could see all the wonders Sally had hinted at, she could be herself, and she would be with the only person she’d ever felt had really understood her.

But then she looked around at the pool and at the forest growing tall behind it, and felt her heart like an anchor connecting her to this place.

“I can’t,” she said, her heart breaking as the words left her lips. “I’m so sorry. I can’t go.” She dragged Sally to her feet.

“Why?” asked Sally, starting to cry again. “Don’t you want to come with me?”

“Of course I do! I wish you could stay. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. I mean that.” Jade thought of how to put it. “But . . . this is home. Right? And I can’t just leave. I wouldn’t be me anymore if I left.”

“You have to go sometime,” said Sally, sniffling. “To go to college? People do that here, right?”

“Maybe I won’t go to college,” said Jade. The wind was blowing in gusts, now. “Or I’ll go to Callville State, just over the hill.” She pointed, sure of the direction. “I want to be a park ranger someday, I think, or a guide. Something where I can be outside, and be here. This place, this here and now, is so important to me.”

Sally nodded, eyes still wet. “I know. I know it is. But what about the people? Everyone’s so awful.”

“They can change,” insisted Jade. “They already have. The future doesn’t have to be like today. You taught me that.”

Sally shook her head, miserable. And then a fat raindrop sailed out of the sky and hit her square on the nose.

She started to laugh.

“Sally, we have to go!” said Jade.

“I know,” said Sally, and hugged her. “I know! I—I’ll come back. You’ll see. I’ll come back and find you someday.”

“I believe it,” said Jade, grinning. “Now, come on!”

They sprinted for the cover of the woods as the rain began to fall in earnest.

• • • •

Three soggy hours later they finally arrived, soaking wet, at Jade’s house. Jade’s mother ran to fetch Sally’s while the girls changed into dry clothes. Thankfully Jade’s older shirts fit Sally fairly well.

Jade stayed out of listening range for the hushed, intense conversation Sally had with her mother, but she couldn’t help but tear up when Sally and her mother ended in a long, heartfelt embrace.

A hand on her shoulder. “You did real well,” said her mother. “I knew you’d find her.”

“Is Dad here?” Jade said, not sure what else to say.

“Out with his friends at the bar. He won’t know about it,” she said, a small smile on her lips.

Sally walked over, her eyes red from crying. “We’re . . . we’re going now. We’re already late.”

Jade looked at her mother, who nodded slightly.

“I’ll walk you over,” she said.

• • • •

The rain had stopped, and the world smelled damp and clean. The sun peaked out from behind a distant cloud.

They said nothing on the walk to Sally’s house. Jade had so many things she wanted to say to Sally, but couldn’t think of how to start. There was too much to know where to begin. Sally’s mother was walking ahead, giving them privacy.

Jade took Sally’s hand and squeezed it. Sally squeezed back.

They arrived to find Sally’s father waiting inside the wood-paneled station wagon. He grinned when he saw Jade there.

“I hear you’re the one who found our girl,” he said. “Thank you. We . . . ah, have to travel today.”

“You’re going home to your own time,” said Jade, meeting his eyes. “I already know.”

Jade’s father’s mouth dropped open, and he shot Sally a shocked look.

“I didn’t tell her,” said Sally. “She guessed it the first day.”

“Oh,” said her father. “Ah. That invalidates some of my notes, then.”

Her mother gave Jade an appraising look. “I’m glad you came to say goodbye,” she said. “R—Sally really likes you.”

“I like her, too,” said Jade shyly.

“Well,” said her father. “Come on. We’re late. Let’s go!”

He got into the station wagon.

“I’ll give you girls a minute,” Sally’s mother said, getting in the passenger door.

They were alone, for a last moment.

“I hate goodbyes,” said Sally.”

“Yeah,” said Jade, trying not to cry. “How will I ever find you again?”

“Time has a map,” said Sally, voice quavering. “It’s written on my heart. And on yours, too.”

Jade hugged her friend hard.

“I looked you up in our databases,” whispered Sally. “I know where to find you.”

“What did you find out?” asked Jade. “What am I going to be like when I’m older?”

Sally shook her head, fighting all her training, all of the things she’d believed since she was little. Then she gave Jade a last squeeze and whispered, “You’re going to be amazing.”

And with that, she got into the car. Jade stepped back.

Sally waved. The engine started up—and then the car was simply gone, as if it had never been there.

• • • •

Jade walked back to her house, feeling an aching loneliness like nothing she’d felt before. She kept thinking how she would laugh about this with Sally later, or she’d see her on her walk tomorrow. She searched for the bright sense of her, but she was nowhere, now. She was beyond her reach.

Her mother was waiting for her at the door.

“Oh, hon, I’m so sorry,” she said. “She left?”

Jade nodded and collapsed into her mother’s arms, sobbing, the dam burst at last.

“My poor Jade,” said her mother softly. There was no hitch in her voice this time, no hesitation. “My poor girl. It’s all right. It happens. It’s hard, but it happens.”

“I miss her already,” cried Jade.

“I know. I know. Come on in to the kitchen. I have the teapot on. Your dad won’t be home for a while. We can have a cup of tea together, and you can tell me all about her. Okay?”

Jade nodded, grateful. She followed her mother inside.

As she crossed the threshold she felt a sudden ripple in the world around her, and then an achingly familiar bright, shining sense. She whirled around, and inhaled sharply.

A young woman stood there, dressed in clothes that looked nothing like anything Jade had ever seen. She had to be in her mid-twenties, and her deep brown eyes were full of tears. And next to her . . . stood a tall woman dressed in camouflage and hiking boots, with twigs in her gnarled hair and a wicked grin on her face.

Their arms were around one another. They both raised their hands in greeting, and farewell.

Jade waved back, grinning. The first woman touched her hand to her heart, and then they both vanished again.

The sun was shining overhead. Jade shut the door, and headed for the kitchen where her mother waited with hot tea and a smile.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Jane Bigelow is a writer, librarian, and political columnist from Connecticut. She is the author of five science fiction novels from small press Candlemark & Gleam, including the Extrahumans and Grayline Sisters series. Her short fiction can be found in the magazines Strange Horizons, The Toast, and Apex Magazine, and in the anthologies War Stories and the Lambda Awards-winning The Collection: Short Fiction From the Transgender Vanguard. Her weekly column on Connecticut politics can be found at CTNewsJunkie.com. She lives in northern Connecticut with her wife and a herd of very fuzzy cats, where she spends her days writing and playing video games.

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

James, In the Golden Sunlight of the Hereafter

Adam-Troy Castro | 6380 words

It took James Washington forever, almost literally forever, to remember that his wife and children were as dead as he was. For a while, he barely even realized that he was dead himself. Heaven, for lack of a better word, is bliss, and as anybody who has known euphoria can tell you, bliss doesn’t always allow room for rational thought. Bathed by otherworldly radiance, lulled by the music of the spheres, every atom of his being screeching a level of happiness impossible in any terrestrial realm, James was as stupid in the moment as any opium addict had ever been.

But the nagging memory of those he had loved marred all this perfection in the same way a single mosquito bite can ruin a perfect weekend in the best tropical resort in the world. The more it itched the less he could ignore it. And so, after a period of time that may have been longer than civilization had been extant on Earth, he managed to ask, “Where are they?”

One of his perfect golden servants murmured, “You will be happier if you do not ask.”

For many lifetimes more he allowed this to mollify him.

The golden servants were beautiful. He knew that they were angels, by all useful definitions of the term; they didn’t have wings and they didn’t walk around with little halo-rings attached to their heads on sticks, but they were beings of glowing vitality who embodied all the grace and nobility possible in any version of the human form. They were his dedicated caregivers, his wanton lovers, his tireless servants—given how little his own participation was required of him, they were more than capable of delighting him all on their own—the dedicated gardeners of a crop that consisted of only one flower, himself. They should have been enough.

But memory’s itch remained persistent. James’s car had been t-boned by some lunatic asshole who hadn’t even slowed down, not even a little bit, while running the intersection. It came to rest lying on its back, the passenger cabin crushed on two sides, the two adults and two children inside broken in ways that might have been already been terminal, even before the fire. His own legs, pinned beneath a compressed steering column, were like a pair of meat-sacks filled with gravel; his chest was so battered that breath was an exercise in arguing with a chest full of razors. Six-year-old Keisha was behind him, maddened by agony and fear, screaming for Mommy. But sweet Tish was not answering, and throughout this little Ty was not crying, the way a toddler in a car seat should have been; he was just silent, and despite waves of unimaginable agony, James had felt his sanity cracking from the understanding of what that likely meant. Then tongues of bright orange began to erupt from the upholstery. The afterlife had been kind enough to edit out the rest.

“Where are they?”

Those responsible for maintaining him in an eternal state of joy turned down the music, diluted the perfume, drew the shades on the euphoric lamps, and led him from the chamber dedicated to sustaining him in an eternity of bliss to some sort of balcony where, for a while, he was stupefied all over again by the skyline of the creator’s capitol city. Imagine Paris or Manhattan if there were no ugly parts and every glittering light was part of the substance of God. Now wipe away your feeble imaginings because it is by infinite orders of magnitude greater than any being shackled to Earthly existence can summon. That’s what his new home was like. But though other balconies were visible from where he sat, and indeed the broad light of the eternal day illuminated any number of public spaces where he would have expected other human beings to gather, James did not see so much a single human figure, anywhere in that immensity; it was a city that appeared to be absent of people.

“Hello.”

The new arrival on the balcony was another of the achingly beautiful golden people. He was not clad in the diaphanous robes of the more modest Earthly renditions, nor in the spotless white suit so common in pop culture. He wore no clothing at all, but though he had a magnificent set of Earthly equipment, this was not coupled with any sense that he was naked. It was just his nature, sans artifice, and his dangling immensity was neither homoerotic nor confrontational, just part of the truth of who and what he was.

James said, “Who are you?”

“The Blessed has not seen fit to provide your humble servant with a name. If it makes things easier for you, you may call me Isaac.”

James was still too drugged from Heaven’s ministrations to manage more than a bland reiteration. “Isaac.” Then: “But who are you?”

Isaac sat down opposite him and regarded him with a combination of infinite patience and infinite sadness. “The closest word to your Earthly experiences is ‘concierge.’ It is my privileged duty to serve as your advocate in any disputes you might have with the accommodations offered by a loving God.”

Laying eyes on Isaac was not like staring at the sun, but it was close. There was just too much beauty there, so much more than the human eye, even the human eye adapted for the afterlife, was capable of perceiving. Out of self-preservation, James averted his gaze toward the streets below. They were still spotless, uncontaminated by so much as a single moving figure. They were so empty that for the very first time he felt uneasy.

“People are imperfect,” Isaac said.

“What?”

“I answer your unspoken question. People are imperfect. Good people mean well. But they argue. They fight. They force you to contain your preferences to humor theirs. They have bad breath and BO. Many who come here try to be social, seeking out others for stimulating conversation, romance, and joint ventures of mutual interest. We’ve seen our share of Stratego tournaments. But these are all things that come to pall when existence is asked to last forever. It is one reason the eternal, those who stay, tend to the solitary. And why would they not, James? Next to the pleasures we offer, a social life is redundant.”

James considered this. In the chamber where the golden had dedicated themselves to servicing him, playing their music for him, applying their oils to his skin, inciting every millimeter of his self that was capable of feeling pleasure to heights he had never imagined, he had lost time and radiated contentment from every pore. No; loneliness, the need for companionship among his fellow human beings, had not been a problem. But now that the memories of those he’d left behind had intruded, he could not blithely put them aside. “What about my family?”

“Oh, James. Don’t ask me that question.”

He felt something tearing at the edges of his happiness. “Tell me.”

“You’re the only one, out of anybody you ever cared about, who ever made it. Everybody else suffers eternal torment in Hell.”

Whereupon Heaven knew a sound it knew too often, from too many of those who made it there: the anguished screams of one who had made it to that blessed place, while leaving loved ones behind.

• • • •

How could James retreat to the ministrations of Heaven’s eternal joy, after that?

Truth to tell, it was distressingly easy.

Imagine the most clichéd cautionary tale beloved by those who seek to warn others about the dangers of recreational drugs. In this fable, a young mother, kind and good and with only the best and most loving intentions toward her child, indulges herself when she thinks it’s safe, and gets high. Lost in her induced haze, she hears her daughter crying for help but cannot muster the mental energy to interpret what that sound means. Lost in her induced haze, she hears those calls become violent thrashing. Lost in her induced haze, she relaxes when those sounds turn to silence. It is only when the effects of the narcotic recede that she wanders into the bathroom and finds that her child has drowned in the tub, while she herself lazed in stupor.

Now imagine that the narcotic of the fable is not a mere chemical but the radiant adoration of the divine, experienced in a realm where all Earthly concerns, like the horror a man just naturally feels at the unimaginable suffering of those he loves, are distant and beyond his capacity to worry about. Imagine that the divine will is bent to making that man forget all about it, and remember that for all his best qualities as a father, he still only possesses the limited will of a mortal.

You can understand why, faced with knowledge too terrible to be borne, James could not be blamed for fleeing back into the infinite consolations of the chamber he’d just left, losing himself into the massaging caresses of those whose merest touch could make his every cell erupt with spasms of delight greater than the sum total of every honeymoon night experienced by every loving couple since the dawn of the civilization he’d known. It is far more impressive that, in less than the time it would take some Earthly mountains to crumble to dust, James was still able to drag himself away from their attentions, and return inconsolable to that balcony, where Isaac was still waiting to answer his questions.

Like a gentle old country doctor imparting the news that there is no point in a given patient making plans for New Year’s, or that creeping paralysis will soon leave him a motionless figure who will need to be turned regularly to avoid bed sores, or that the recent forgetfulness that has left him groping for the names of old friends will soon grow to encompass all he knows of this life, including who he is and where he lives, Isaac never raised his voice, never condescended, never delivered a soul-crushing detail until the last one had already been weighed and accepted. He many times said that he was sorry and that he deeply regretted having to share his terrible knowledge. He was practiced, of course, having had to say it before. But if the test of how well any being has learned how to share such bad tidings is how little the recipient comes to hate him in the process, this was a test that the golden man passed; for while James was left devastated by what he learned, he did not in the process come to hate the golden man at all.

The cruel truth Isaac shared with him was that the rules of virtue, as Mankind had always understood them, had always been far subtler, far more subjective to the whims of the divine, than any terrestrial sermon could have portrayed. Even now, it would have been a waste of time to even try to explain it to him. Imagine having a great legal mind and trying to explain the laws of inheritance to a dog. You can’t. The most you can manage, in teaching that creature the rules of right and wrong, is getting it to comprehend a few basic prohibitions against pooping on rugs. So it was with Man. In truth, the Ten Commandments were irrelevant; the Golden Rule was whimsy; everything said by the carpenter from Nazareth or any of his peers in the salvation business had been a very rough approximation, ventured only because the actual requirements were literally impossible to explain in terms mortals could understand. A human being can earn his way into Heaven only by blindly stumbling past obstacles he cannot comprehend, by randomly following rules he would never be able to fathom, past a set of goalposts he could never imagine.

It happened more often than anybody would have expected, mostly because of a forgiving God; one human being out of every ten thousand born.

Otherwise, Isaac concluded, almost everybody went to Hell.

• • • •

It was a good thing that James was still dazed by his eons of reward, because otherwise he would have been screaming.

“My children are in Hell?”

“Your children,” the golden man said. “Your wife. Your parents. Your sister. Your best friends from grammar school: Titus, Lamar, Ceci, Jason. Every single member of your extended family, including both sets of grandparents, your uncles and aunts, and your most distant cousins. With very few exceptions, everybody you’ve ever known, everybody you’ve ever heard of, certainly almost everybody you’ve ever believed in. Saint Nicholas, for all his Earthly celebrity, is in Hell. Who else? I am aware that you loved the Beatles; they’re in hell. I know you loved Ray Charles; he’s in hell. I know you admired Norman Borlaug and Jonas Salk and Abraham Lincoln and Samuel Clemens; they’re all in Hell. Ellen Greene, the lady from the school who makes the pies your wife used to bring home once in a while; she’s in Hell. Lincoln’s in Hell. Gandhi’s in Hell. Audrey Hepburn is in Hell. Nelson Mandela is not in Hell, but I assure you, he only made it to a brighter afterlife by the skin of his teeth, and not by any of his achievements as a man of peace; they had nothing to do with it. He just happened to fit entrance requirements he never would have been able to understand. As did you. And I’m afraid there’s no point in allowing this to upset you, because there’s nothing you can do to change that. It’s just the way things are. The only question is, will you allow this to ruin Heaven for you?”

In the other room, the music started up again, inviting him back to the infinite consolations of happy and stupid oblivion. But James found he wanted nothing more in that moment than to torture himself with a full accounting of the ways in which he’d fallen short of perfection in his own life. He thought of the times when he’d made himself a trial to his parents, two teen years in particular, when adulthood had been on the horizon and the little bit of childhood he still had left had seemed more than he should have had to bear. He thought of the girls he’d lied to, when he was still figuring out not just what he wanted from them and had yet to incorporate what he owed them in return. He remembered Tish, the first to really see through him, pointing her elegant finger in his face not long after they met, and telling him, “You want me to stick around, you had better be a better man than that.” He remembered almost taking too long to decide on which side of the fence he should fall, hurting her in that way, too stupid to realize what it meant that she was waiting him out. He remembered the little lies that accumulate in marriage, and in parenthood, some necessary and some unworthy of him. He remembered holding little Keisha when she was still young enough to think of Daddy as the all-powerful center of the universe, and telling her that he would never let anything hurt her; he remembered knowing even then that this was a promise he’d never been able to keep, and felt his insides curdle at the grander implications that broken promise had taken on now. He remembered Ty, little Ty, still buckled in the toddler car seat before the accident, during the last taste of the world he’d ever know; happily shrieking just to make noise the way children his age always have; falling silent but for snuffles when Daddy got angry and told him to be quiet, which was the misery he’d been living when that maniac burst through the intersection and cut off any further chances of exuberance he might have still had left. In context, making him cry now seemed an unforgiveable crime. But how could James have known that there would be a context, one with death only minutes of pain and terror away, and something worse than death waiting on the far side of that?

All that and he had not been condemned to Hell.

“You should go back inside,” Isaac said.

“No,” James said, choking. “I should not.” He thought of Keisha at four, wrapping her little arms around his shoulders, giggling, saying in her childish voice that she loved her daddy, and then he thought of her in Hell, whether Hell matched or exceeded its reputation in legend. He thought of the requirement Heaven now required of him: that he forget this.

Because he wanted it, and not because he traversed any stairways or descended any elevators, the next instant delivered him far from the golden man, far from the temptations to be found in his celestial home. He was down in the eternal city’s streets now, streets that were as empty of other people as the deserted apartment blocks of Chernobyl or the suburban residences closest to the toxins at Fukushima. The whole metropolis seemed to have been built as a stage setting for his own devastation. Stumbling on pavement as bright and as false as any Dorothy had found in Oz, he fought to hold on to this fresh feeling of grief and misery despite the drugged perfumes that made up the air and the overwhelming radiance that shone down on him from the sky. It was surely his duty to hate this place where he was, hate the beings that staffed it, hate the being of unimaginable power who had compiled the criteria deciding who was fit enough to dwell here. It was the least that could be expected of him as a man and as a father.

But denying all the power urging him back to joy was as impossible as trying to blot out the direct light of the midday sun with nothing but that thin strip of flesh known as the human eyelid; looking straight at the sun, such measures are inadequate, and the limited capacity of the human soul to hold on to grief was inadequate against the determined light of Heaven. In instants, he felt it slipping away, and raged; felt the rage slipping away, and despaired; felt the despair slipping away, and tried to hold on to the self-loathing he knew he deserved to feel, for betraying everyone he loved. But Heaven, damn the place, would not allow him even that.

Isaac found James sitting in one of the eternal city’s many sprawling parks, a place where soft breezes carried flower-scent across lakes as placid as crystal. James sat alone on the grass, hugging his knees with both arms. He was happy, but twitching just enough to reflect the failing war he fought with everything that urged him toward an unwanted sense of contentment.

James said, “I’m a terrible person.”

“By the standard of Heaven, of course you are.”

“I don’t want to be here if everybody I’ve ever loved is suffering.”

“You will have plenty of time to get over it.”

James felt himself beam. He felt himself glow. He felt himself wearing the expression of a man who had won the lottery, been nominated for an Oscar, fallen in love, gotten his dream job, found religion, eaten his all-time best slice of chocolate cake, bungee-jumped, and first had the tip of his nose grasped by his own newborn child. He knew this, and it cost him serious effort to contort his beatific mask into a frown. “I’m sorry. But I’m not sitting still for this. You will either take me to talk to God—”

“Impossible. Nobody gets to talk to God.”

“—or you will bring me to them.”

• • • •

Nothing is denied in Heaven. Or at least, it seemed, almost nothing. And so, faced with a direct command, Isaac produced a vehicle for the journey: a palanquin for a visit to hell. It was a plush throne in a sealed transparent bubble where the anesthetic scents of Heaven were recycled via some means not far removed from that which once kept the most recent strains of viral misery re-circulating through the air pressurized atmosphere sustaining airline passengers; all while the joyous hymns to the infinite majesty of the universe kept playing in the background, at a volume that he was not allowed to lower for his own good. It kept him serene during the journey even as the golden streets fell far away and the skies began to darken, first to the gray of approaching thunderstorms, then to the sickly black of a topsoil whipped loose by cyclones, then finally to a look like bile finger-painted over a fresco of stacked corpses.

Hell turned out to be much larger than Heaven.

There were outskirts, inhabited by filthy teeming masses too numerous for the land they occupied, who fought an eternal war slashing at one another with razors, to cut themselves a bit of standing room before the press of humanity trampled them underfoot. They waded in ground made up out of those whose entrails they’d spilled, always at danger of sinking beneath the muck, always bleeding from the wounds others had inflicted on them. Isaac flew low to point out James’s childhood pastor, the first woman he’d ever loved, the next-door neighbor who had always been available to babysit his children when asked; they were wild-eyed, insane, lost in the endless parody of killing, deprived of even a moment’s rest from cutting and being cut.

“Hitler’s in there,” Isaac said, as chattily as a tour guide at the Louvre.

Then they flew further in, past Hell’s first set of walls, past the plain of crucifixions where millions (including several of James’s past friends who Isaac did not hesitate to point out) hung in eternal misery while vultures picked at their livers; past another plain where shrieking people stood chained by the wrists to a ground hot enough to bake the soles of their feet while burly creatures the size of subway cars wiled away the eons whipping gobbets of flesh from their backs—the home, Isaac said, of James’s grandparents; past a writhing bowl of blood-bloated worms that slithered in and out of the carcasses of things barely recognizable as humanoid, whose half-devoured flesh sealed behind every bore-hole, thus obliging the worms to chew their way back out—the fate, Isaac said, of James’s sister, and in fact there she is, right over there.

His beautiful wife Tish was on a mountaintop by herself, bloated into immobility, her breasts inflated into shapes like sacks of grain, her jowls hanging to the ground. She was too defeated to protest as an endless parade of razored cockroaches the size of footballs marched in single-file across the blasted earth, skittered up her rolls of fat, and forced their way down her throat, cutting septic furrows at the corners of her ruined lips. Her eyes flickered with vague recognition when James called to her. But by then the next roach was at her mouth, and she shut her eyes, refusing the additional hell of being seen by one who’d known her in life. Tish had been a kind woman, a loving woman, the possessor of the sweetest and sexiest whisper that James had ever known; a woman whose deepest rages had been soft and dangerous rather than loud and berating, now being violated anew at the rate of once a second, without surcease, for more years than there were stars in the sky.

Isaac said only that there were worse places, and that James did not want to see where the powers that be had put his children. James, struggling to feel anything but contentment, said that he did.

And so Isaac flew on.

He took James low over a boiling ocean of something not water, so super-hot that James could sense its radiant heat through his protected bubble. Isaac assured him that it was not that hellish cliché, lava, but something even hotter, something more akin to the center of the sun, churning at impossible depths under impossible pressure. “The fuel should have run out eons ago,” Isaac said, “but this is Hell, where nothing is ever allowed to change states after the docents here have decided what to make.”

“What is it?”

“Everybody born in the course of your thirteenth century, with a few additional thousands added in the years that have passed since. They are all molten. They inter-mingle and stream by one another, not understanding where they are, not knowing why they are here except that they are being punished. Your daughter, Keisha, is with them, her substance blended among the rest, one drop per every four or five hundred million; I therefore have no way of showing you her face. But I should tell you that she discerned no real difference between burning alive in your wrecked automobile and burning where she is now, and therefore failed to notice the brief intermission that marked her death. She still cries your name, asking you to make it end. Do you have any questions?”

The trembling James had none, and so Isaac flew on, leading him past any number of similar atrocities until they reached the special mountaintop that had been reserved for his little boy, Ty.

This was the only revelation that got past the numbness that had been inflicted on him by Heaven.

James saw what had been done and hurled himself against the walls of the bubble, hammering at the walls, and screaming obscenities at an afterlife that had ever allowed things like this to exist. His heart shattered into more fragments than he could have thought it could hold, and his mind shattered into more, and the voice he would have spent damning Heaven was instead spent burbling incoherent noises, which just happened to be the only eloquence possible.

Given the ability, he would have shattered the bubble and leaped into Hell, grateful for the chance to mingle his pain with so many others.

But he did not have the ability, or the chance.

The bubble filled with soothing mists, and Isaac brought him home.

• • • •

This was the moral that itched at him, during the few scattered moments of coherent thought that his bruised soul was still able to muster, over many of the years that followed.

Heaven is as corrupting, in its own way, as they tell you the devil is supposed to be. The human animal, or even just that part of the human animal that can make its way to Heaven, is hardwired to prefer reward to punishment. Reward is feeling secure, cared-for, happy, and undisturbed by any suffering that may be taking place elsewhere. It can be just being oblivious. Punishment can be just having what you’d rather not know shoved in your face. When the truth you cannot bear sits to your left, like a sharp edge that cuts you if you ever forget and turn that way, you soon learn to not turn to your left. You retreat in the other direction, the padded one, the one that coos to you, the one that plays the soft music and summons pleasure, that makes everything good even when that good should be overwhelmed by a far more encompassing bad.

You try to make that enough.

But sometimes, even that escape proves inadequate, and you push away the ancient beings tasked with anticipating your every whim. You make your way back to Heaven’s deserted streets, pursued by the lulling melodies that insist on comforting you, wherever you try to find the shadows that better fit the way you know you should feel. You close your heart to the sincerity of your creator’s boundless love, and your soul to the effervescent breezes that bathe you in more adoration with their every touch. You hammer boards over your unwanted feelings of well-being and joy, and you find that one spark of resentment and injustice and you fan it into an open flame that is little more than a wisp at first, but that nevertheless remains defiant, in that it can even exist in this place where such fury should not be able to survive.

You make your way to one of the parks, where you sit beside one of those mirrored lakes and you find enough rebelliousness inside you to toss a stone. It lands in the middle of the water with an audible ker-plunk, but no ripples spread from the sight. Of course. Ripples are disturbances; ripples cannot be borne. They are what makes the measurement of a placid surface possible, but this is a place that cannot tolerate any state but the placid, that insists on preserving the illusion of peace even when the perfection is a lie.

For a long time, merely acknowledging this with your regular visits to the park is enough.

You are human enough to keep returning to those responsible for your induced state of happiness, because they are the only possible escape from what you know and can do nothing about.

But even as you do, that wisp of a flame keeps growing, and you know you’re approaching the day when you can no longer control it with comforting lies.

And inevitably, that day came.

James walked the golden streets, closed to Heaven’s consolations, indeed immune and resentful of them, his eyes stony and incapable of tears. From time to time, a golden servant approached him with blandishments, offers of rewards that once he would have chewed open a vein to receive. He listened to the offers and each time he shook his head, cold in his rejection of their kindness. Some of the golden fell back as if slapped. He realized that his dissatisfaction hurt them, and he made the journey to his habitual brooding place in what amounted to a rampage, every no-thanks filling him with such savage glee that for a time he found some satisfaction there, until realizing that this was only enabling them to serve him by other means.

It was while he sat on the shore, stewing and unable to think of what he should do next, that he became aware of his old guide, Isaac, standing behind him.

Isaac said, “We want you to be happy.”

James did not turn to meet his eyes. “Fuck you.”

The golden man sighed, which startled James, for it was the first time he had heard any sound like that from one of Isaac’s kind. The angel sat down beside him, regarding the clear surface of the lake with the same seeming helplessness that James had long since experienced at the sight, and could only offer a petulant, “They’re damned.”

“I don’t give a shit,” James told him. “Un-damn them. Bring them here and make up for everything they’ve been through.”

“It can’t be done. You must understand. They carry the taint of Hell upon them. If they so much as set foot on any ground belonging to Heaven, the corruption will spread everywhere they touch. The streets will crumble. The gardens will wither. Any of my kind who encounter them will be infected with the darkness, rendered useless to Heaven and good for no other purpose other than being sent down to Hell and set to work as tormentors. They will all have to endure an eternity of assisting in the torment. Do you not understand that, for those whose holy duty was providing joy, that is also damnation?”

“I don’t feel sorry for you. You’re assisting in the torment now. Bring them to me.”

“Assuming that we could even transport them out of Hell, we are by our nature physically incapable of assisting them. You know this. It would be like asking you to handle some of the burning matter at the center of your sun. Once, that would have vaporized you in a nanosecond. Accept my word that even laying hands on your loved ones would have the same effect on us.”

“I accept that,” James said, “and it makes no difference. Heaven is supposed to make me happy, from now until the end of the time. The longer it allows what has happened to my family to go undisturbed, the more it becomes like Hell, itself. You’re destroying yourself anyway, even if you don’t see it yet. Do you know, Isaac, that to my mortal eyes you look twenty years older than you did when I met you? It’s not much, but at the time scale we’re talking about, how much more can you afford? For your own goddamned good, stop telling me what you can’t do and start telling me what you can.”

Isaac said nothing, staring at the mirrored water with the same inconsolable attention it was receiving from the man. Perhaps he saw it as a lie, as well. Or maybe he was just trying to come up with some way to shatter the impasse. But for a long time, even by the standards of this place, he just sat, and there was no way of telling whether that amounted to a heartbeat or an epoch.

Then he said, “I hoped that you be one of the few who never insisted.”

“What?”

“My kind cannot touch them. But yours can. There is a contingency, almost as cruel as what your family suffers. It is available to you if you can bear it. I need you to know that if you choose this option, I will hold you in an esteem that rivals what I feel for the creator. But I also need you to know that I pray, with all my being, that you choose otherwise.”

James studied the golden man’s eyes and saw no signs of deception there. But how could he tell? He had always heard it said that the devil was the master of all lies, but who could tell, when it was an angel offering the lie? Or, worse, when the lie was part of the plan of that angel’s master? He almost retreated, but knew that if he surrendered himself now, it would only mean having this conversation again, in another thousand years, or another billion after that. For him, it could never be avoided. “Tell me.”

Isaac told him, “You are only capable of choosing one.”

• • • •

It was not Heaven. Nor was it Hell. Instead it was a dun, featureless shallow sea, far larger than Heaven, sprawling beneath a sky lit by only a few resentful stars. The water was only a couple of inches deep, by mortal reckoning. Thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands, already knelt in it. They did not look at each other and they did not converse, but rather addressed their full attention, forever, to the various shapes lying broken and twisted and burnt in the water, shapes that writhed and moaned and sometimes cursed the kneeling ones in the manner one would expect from those to whom even the slightest touch meant unbearable pain.

Each caregiver held a cloth, and each caregiver dipped that cloth into the waters that fed the springs of Heaven before dabbing it against the skin of the ruined beings before them. No touch seemed to help much, but then the rate of healing always reflects the scale of the original hurt. These people rescued from Hell had been hurt to a nearly infinite degree and therefore would likely need a nearly infinite amount of nursing before the taint was washed from them and their bodies were healed enough to allow their entry into the paradise their caregivers had forsaken.

James, offered his choice between everybody he’d ever loved, could have pulled out his parents, or any of his friends, or Tish or any of the other women he’d loved, or his sweet Keisha; anyone, really. It had taken him an unbearable length of time just to get over the idea that choosing any one would mean betraying all the rest, even longer to figure out who he would kneel before and try to heal, until even the stars were rumors forgotten for eons. But in the end there had only been one choice, the one whose suffering had seemed most disproportionate to his innocence.

What was left of Ty, after everything they’d done to him, was not recognizable as a little boy. He was broken and twisted and parts of his flesh crackled like burnt parchment when he moved. His gaze was no longer innocent. But as James touched the cloth to his kin, some of Hell’s grease seemed to come off; some of the corruption at the surface seemed to turn watery, dissolving in the thin bath his father had arranged. For James, it was hard to imagine, but not beyond all possibility, that with enough attention he might one day be clean.

It was heartbreaking and unrelenting labor. But since when had love been anything but?

James dipped his cloth in the water again, moaned a little at the thought of all those remaining, who he had not been able to pull out, whose own circumstances he might never be able to address, unless he summoned the fortitude to keep going whenever Ty was better. He wept for them, and his tears fed the waters. Maybe that was what made them so therapeutic. But that kind of thinking, like any kind of thinking, was just a distraction from the job at hand. He dabbed again at his son’s ruined flesh. And again, weeping each time for the many he was not yet available to help, resolute each time in his renewed attention to the one he could. He could only wish that Isaac had not told him it would be possible to declare the task too overwhelming and return to Heaven, without penalty, at any time. It was a thought that would be coming up all too many times, in the eternity that awaited.

But he knew what would keep him resistant, and it was not, so much, his love for his boy.

It was the sheer revulsion he now felt for any further acquiescence to the place where the virtuous received their reward.

©2017 by Adam-Troy Castro. | Art © 2017 by Sam Schecter.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to SPY magazine in 1987. His 26 books to date include four Spider-Man novels, 3 novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and 6 middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. The penultimate installment in the series, Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows (Grosset and Dunlap) came out in August 2015. The finale appeared in August 2016. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands And Other Stories (Prime Books). Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). He lives in Florida with his wife Judi and either three or four cats, depending on what day you’re counting and whether Gilbert’s escaped this week.

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

Paternity

Greg Hrbek | 5450 words

THE CLINIC

You have been trying to start a family. And failing. The problem, it will turn out, is with you. This is what they tell you at the fertility clinic at the medical center. The first thing, discovered during a physical exam, is that your testicles are smaller and softer than average. At the time of this revelation, your wife actually says to the urologist, in a tone of maternal defensiveness: “That’s strange, because I would say his penis is a little too big.” At which the doctor smiles and explains that the penis is not in question. He gives you a glass vial. Lock yourself in a room where Playboy magazines are tastefully fanned out on tabletops and framed prints of Georgia O’Keeffe flowers hang on the walls. You will have abstained from ejaculation (according to doctor’s instructions) for at least two days, but not more than five days, prior to this sample collection. Your apparently undersized balls have been blue. Now, in this weird setting, you’ll be damned if you can get an erection. But if you look across the room you will notice a large book: a monograph of erotic art through the centuries. Page through it until you get to a painting called Naked Young Witch with Fiend in Shape of Dragon from the year 1515. The dragon is using a long phallic tongue to penetrate a woman from behind. For some reason, this image will turn you on.

SEXUAL DEFICIENCY IN EARLY AMERICA

Nathaniel Pritchard was a husbandman who, like you, had much trouble impregnating his new wife. Other similarities will become evident. But let us note some differences. Firstly, he was younger than you. Twenty-one at the time of the difficulties, which occurred in the Connecticut Colony of New England in December of 1691. Secondly, he was a farmer: principally of corn, though he also worked a field of rye. As for his wife, Bridget, what her society expected her to be, she was: a weaver, a seamstress, a keeper of chickens. And with her long black hair and pearly skin and eyes the virginal green of an unopened flower, she was all a man from any time could hope to see.

Before the marriage, they bundled.

For twenty-eight nights, in Bridget’s girlhood bedchamber, they slept, according to Puritan custom, in separate sheets. Touching only hands and face. Kissing only lips. Nights when desire flourished so powerfully, Nathaniel felt as if floodwaters were threatening to break a dam built at the mouth of his manhood. The barrier did not hold. One morning, he woke in the wee hours, stunned for a few moments that Bridget had unwrapped the blankets and accepted him inside her, before realizing that she was asleep (as he, also, had been asleep) and that his crotch and breeches were wet with ejaculate. Only a dream. Of what the minister would call ‘lewd fornication.’ He lay awake, the spill between his legs hardening like glue. There was nothing lewd about his love for Bridget—but to have this filthy accident right beside her! Later, bidding her farewell in the crisp outdoors, surrounded by hills of trees whose leaves were blushing and burning with autumn, he said:

‘Other young couples in the township do not wait.’

‘Ungodly ones,’ she replied.

‘Godly ones, too. What think you, my love?’

‘Methinks you have lost your wits. ’Tis a sin, Nathaniel. You would fain see me whipped at the post?’

‘Nay, but—’

She kissed him to stop his mouth. ‘Think of me softly,’ she said. ‘We will know each other soon enough.’

At last, the long-awaited day arrived. They were married by Reverend Moody in a plain service followed by simple refreshments: bride-cake; wine and beer; apples and peaches. No dancing, no music. The affair concluded by five of the clock. The late-year sun was nearly down when the newlyweds climbed onto the seat of the horse-drawn wagon, and Ezekiel drew them to the cottage at the northern edge of the settlement, where they started a fire in the hearth and ate a dinner of bread and meat—and suddenly, like people awaking from a swoon, found themselves in the bedchamber, Bridget removing her dress and shift and Nathaniel his shirt and breeches, commencing to touch, to embrace, to treat one another by loving mouth. But even as Nathaniel felt the lust that had tormented him all through the harvest season being transmuted into a divine rapture, something strange and frightful began to happen. Or, rather: strangely and frightfully, something failed to happen. ‘My love is such,’ whispered his wife, as if reciting a psalm she could not fully remember. ‘Communion with thee.’ And so lay back, and, draping one arm across her forehead while the other wilted over the bedside, opened her legs. The tallow candle burned: its flame a tiny heart in whose beating Nathaniel could see, about her groin, a down of hair, a sheenful coat of soft fur. ‘In the name of heaven,’ thought Nathaniel. But no matter how he chafed his member it would not erect. As surely as Christ had died for him, Goodman Pritchard was limp.

AZOOSPERMIA

What the test shows is that you’re screwed. Because you have no sperm in your semen. The condition is called azoospermia. You possess a normal libido; you exhibit normal sexual function; and your ejaculate looks like that of any other male. Only it isn’t. But there is hope. Because oftentimes men like you do have a “tiny focus” of sperm production in their testicles; and these non-moving sperm can be removed, during a testicular biopsy, via an ultra-micropipette. A single retrieved sperm can then be injected into the woman’s egg with a forty-six percent chance of successful fertilization.

Approaching the car after the appointment, your wife will say in a sympathetic tone: “Why don’t you let me drive.” As if you have been deemed, on top of all else, unfit to operate a motor vehicle.

Don’t respond.

Drive the highway and stare through the windshield at the looming skyscrapers of Boston—you who cannot inseminate a female of your species, who just whacked off in a urologist’s office to an image that rivals, in its pornographic derangement, anything accessible on the Internet.

“Honey,” she will say.

“What.”

“It’ll work. There’s a sperm in there. The Little Zoa That Could.”

“What if he can’t?”

“Look, I know you’re scared of the needle.”

“It’s not the needle. It’s— It’s the whole thing. Having a baby that way.”

“What.”

“I don’t know. It’s not natural.”

“It grows in me,” she’ll say. “They put the egg back in me and the baby grows natural as can be.”

That night, lie in the dark and think about how you and your wife have been mating like animals for a year with never a snowball’s chance in hell of her getting pregnant; and how you agreed, back when you were dating—before the wedding day, before the engagement, before the proposal—that you would have children.

Soon.

In the morning, make the appointment. Schedule a time to get a needle stuck into your nut sack.

THE DISAPPEARANCE

And so it went for a fortnight. For two week did Nathaniel lie with Bridget and try to erect himself, and she to erect him with all manner of allurements to venery. But night after night, Goodman Pritchard suffered the same dreadful weakness—until, on the morning after the fourteenth failure, something more than weirdish, something unnatural and unspeakable befell him.

A cold winter morning.

He rose before his wife, whom he could not see at all in the shuttered darkness of the bedchamber, though he could see the phantoms of his own breath, and could, in his mind, judge the way and distance to the door. In the common room of the cottage, a few embers were still glowing in the hearth. (He’d been up in the night to tend the fire.) Now he laid some kindling on the hot remains of cedar wood. Then pulled on a cloak and stepped into his boots and went outdoors. To urinate. The air was bitter; stars were spread like a hoarfrost on heaven; and as Nathaniel walked over the icy ground toward the privy, he thought of the night before—of how, once again, he had tried to do his duty as a husband, and had failed, and finally had buried his face shamefully in his wife’s bosom and wept.

Now he opened the door of the privy. Stepped in. Unbuttoned his breeches and reached inside the flap. And felt . . .

Nothing.

For a long moment, Goodman Pritchard did not understand, experiencing, like a man at market feeling in vain for the coins which are never not in the pocket of his coat, more perplexity than panic. Then, all at once, a feverish heat flamed over him; and with shaking hands, he pushed down his underclothes and touched all about the crux of himself—and touched nothing but an absence. His mind capsized. ‘In God’s name,’ he choked out. Going to his knees. To pray to the Saviour, one might think. Though one would be mistaken. For to the poor husbandman, dizzy now with terror, it seemed not impossible that the things he was missing might have simply fallen to the floor.

‘Nathaniel?’

It was the sweet voice of his new wife, who through the fortnight of his impotence had been nothing if not gentle and kind. But this. How could Bridget fathom this? How could he explain—

And then: the cold blast of a different question that turned the goodman’s blood to ice:

Am I witched?

Aye, it stands clear. Someone in unholy covenant with the powers of the dark hath stolen your member.

INTRA CYTOPLASMIC SPERM INJECTION

Of course they numb the scrotum; and as the anesthesia takes effect, you will have a sense that your testes are fading out of existence—although, like an amputee who claims to feel the phantom of a missing limb, you think you can feel the needle go in. From your wife, several ripe eggs, clustered like caviar in the ovaries, have already been harvested, and are waiting in a lab room for your sperm. A few of which are found. Hiding in the seminal depths. Girl-afraid introverts who can’t swim, and who hold for dear life onto the apron strings of your little nuts while the fluidic riptide of the needle rages all around them. In the laboratory—which you imagine to be white and rectilinear and devoid of sound, a set from a movie about a future world in which, beneath the flawless exterior of scientific advancement, lurks a terrible secret—the reproductive endocrinologist will microinject a single sperm into each of the four oocytes. A day later: good news. Fertilization and cell division are underway. Return to the clinic. In a white silent room, hold your wife’s hand while she opens her legs and a catheter is inserted into her vagina.

That night, she will drape her body in white lingerie that gives her the look of an angel about to fall from grace.

Ask: “What are you doing?”

“Sexing up.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. What if we break it?”

She laughs. “What do you think it is, a dinner plate? I read about this in a book. Make love when they transfer them.”

So, do it—but be warned: The transaction will be a strange one, because you will feel like actors attempting to convince an audience that you’re doing something you’re actually not doing; and yet the whole thing will make both of you uncommonly hot, as if this pretense of knocking someone up is a fantasy you get off on, though of course it’s nothing but a fantasy—the implications of which will make you angry and spark the kind of erotic fracas that characterized your early fucks, complete with forcible restraint, slapping, and sexual slurs, until finally, sobbing with want, she will get on all fours. Offering her back parts. The position reminds you of the painting from the book in the urologist’s office. The witch and the demon. When the orgasm finally comes, she presses her face to the bed and screams.

DRINKING AS COMPULSIVE BEHAVIOR

The truth is that, for quite some time, for weeks before his sudden and unbelievable castration, Goodman Pritchard had been a frequent, almost nightly, patron at the Anchor, an ‘ordinary’ kept by a friend, Jacob Armitage. A penny for an ale-quart of beer. Which Nathaniel would drink by the fire while staring into the flames and listening to the sound of vapours escaping from the burning fuel: a sinister hiss.

In those days, a man was forbidden to continue tippling above the space of half an hour; but on the night of the day on which he lost his manhood, Nathaniel Pritchard had been in the taproom of the Anchor for nearly an hour already when he said: ‘Pray, another ale.’ To which Goodman Armitage, the keeper of the tavern on that road that joined Boston to Stamford, replied: ‘’Tis past nine of the clock.’ But Nathaniel professed not to care about the commandments of, or the punishments threatened by, the General Court of Connecticut. Cannot a man quench a thirst without he pay a fine. Et cetera. To quiet him, the innkeeper brought him another beer, and stood by while Nathaniel drank a long draught. The fire cracked and hissed. The two were alone in the taproom.

‘Nathaniel, what ails you?’

‘I know not.’

‘And I believe you not.’

Goodman Armitage seated himself. Nathaniel drank another draught and looked into the fire. His brain was bobbing on drink like a cork on water. In the glowing coals he perceived an impression of hell. Fear outweighed shame. He confessed to his friend everything: about the nights of bundling and the episode of nocturnal pollution; about the night of his wedding and the weakness in his penis that had lasted ever since; and how, finally, just this morning, he had waked and gone out to the privy and found—found that it wasn’t there at all . . .

‘The privy?’ said Jacob.

‘No.’

‘Man, surely you can’t mean . . .’

‘Aye, I do.’ Tears dripped down Nathaniel Pritchard’s cheeks, hot as wax down the shaft of a candle molded by the hand of his newlywed wife. ‘What think you, Jacob?’

‘Be it— Be it there now?’

Sniffling, wiping his face on his sleeve, Nathaniel shook his head. Looked his friend at last in the eye, hoping . . .

He knew not what.

Goodman Armitage said: ‘Show me.’

‘I’d as lief not.’

‘Nathaniel, mark me. I think you be somewhat bewildered. If your claim be true, we shall go straightaway to the reverend, for conjuration be the only conclusion. But I pray you, let us touch the bottom of this.’

Goodman Pritchard stood up. Stood before Goodman Armitage in the taproom of that tavern at the crossroads. He loosed his trousers and let them fall. Then he summoned all the will in his person and pushed down his breeches.

‘What see you?’

‘What see I? I see your yard, man. Plain as day.’

When Goodman Pritchard put a hand between his legs, he could feel none of himself. ‘It is not there.’

‘Nathaniel. It will take no prize, but it sufficeth. Now, I pray you,’ the innkeeper said, confiscating the tankard, ‘get you home to your wife—and use your member for that which God gave it you.’

YOUR LESBIAN FRIEND

Fast-forward to the winter of the year. By which time the sperm injection procedure will have failed. Twice. Leaving two frozen embryos. The doctors defrost them: One does not survive the warming. Have the last transferred to your wife’s uterus. A week later, the blood will come. Examine the stain together. Like a pattern left by tea leaves. Not difficult to read the meaning. You know what is coming next. The idea frightens you and twists your stomach into jealous knots. Still, as your wife drops the underwear into the trash and sits on the toilet in an attitude of unconditional surrender, there will be an urge to speak of it, to agree to it . . .

Don’t.

This is no time to be rushing into such a thing. You have to get your head straight. You need advice.

Next day, show up at a local pub. Sit at the bar and order a beer with a high alcohol content. Wait for your friend, whom you think is the ideal confidante. She is a beer connoisseur, she’s married, and she’s the parent of a child, a two-year-old girl, conceived with donated sperm. Here she comes, in the usual attire: a collared shirt tucked into trousers. At her wedding, she wore a tuxedo.

Say, after some small talk: “Did you guys ever consider adoption?”

“Yes.”

“But you wanted . . .”

“Kara wanted,” she says, bringing her glass to her lips. She is a woman of words so few and precise that you sometimes feel, in conversation with her, that you’re talking to a well-coached witness. Tell her, straight up, that you currently find yourself in a position she will understand. Don’t embarrass her with the details. Suffice to say, your wife’s only hope of growing a baby in her womb rests with the semen of a third party . . .

Lull in the bar.

As if the words have been transmitted, on some drunken frequency, to the ears of all patrons.

Your friend will say: “I don’t understand these women.”

Nod in assent.

“It’s like temporary insanity,” she says. “They become convinced they have to experience the thing. If they don’t, life is . . . meaningless. So what’s marriage? Is marriage just a presupposition?”

“But you agreed.”

“True.”

“And . . .”

“And it’s over and I love Eli. He’s half Kara and that’s all I think about now. It’s all I care about.”

On the way home, think only of your wife. Filter out all thoughts of him, who in a way is no one, who will be nothing more than a list of physical traits and genetic data: neither enemy nor friend; never to be seen or heard from; all but nonexistent. It is nearly ten of the clock when you open the door. Call out a hello. You will find her on the bed with a glass of wine and a book. Swallow your heart. Tell her. You’ll do whatever is necessary. There’s no option you won’t consider.

CONTRACT WITH SATAN

And so did Goodman Pritchard find himself in a great strait. Unable to tell anyone else of his affliction, for he knew they would seem to see what most assuredly had vanished; and unable even to attempt communion with his wife, for how could he enter her if he had no means? He did not return to the tavern those next three night, but sat by the hearth in his home, feeding the fire, watching flame consume wood.

‘Nathaniel,’ said Bridget on the third night.

‘Aye.’

‘’Tis past ten of the clock. Will you not come to bed?’

He did not answer, expecting her, as she had done two nights past, to withdraw passively into the bedchamber.

She did not.

But stood in the doorway for a long time while he gazed into the fire. Finally, she said: ‘I think you like me not, Nathaniel. To tell you true, I am entirely amazed. Wherefore marry me, if only to keep such cold company?’

He couldn’t speak. The fire burned. And still, Goodwife Pritchard stood on the threshold of the bedchamber.

‘Hear me now, Nathaniel. Do you hear me?’

‘Aye.’

‘I want not a pretended husband.’

It was much later, toward midnight, when he quit the cottage and hitched the horse to the cart.

The land of Goodman Pritchard, one hundred acres of it, lay by the northern border of the village, not far from the road that led to Boston. Very near the wilderness—and very soon was he in the wilderness. In a sea of trees that seemed endless. In whose infinitude lurked wild animals, and savages more wild than animals, and, aye, agents of the Devil. On that winter night, as he steered his wagon farther and farther from the village, deeper and deeper into the forest, Nathaniel was affrighted by all such danger and evil. But more affrighted was he by the spectre of a shame to which the embarrassments of the last month would pale in comparison. For in those days, it was well-known—suggested both in books of advice and by the laws of the colonial courts—that a man’s domestical duty was to make his wife’s womb skip with joy. So, Nathaniel was terrified now: not only of the real possibility of being called before the reverend and the village elders to answer for his failures but also of the prospect of losing Bridget, in whose bosom his heart had long taken up its lodging, and of a future in which he would be all alone, with no woman and no children . . .

He pulled on the reins.

The horse slowed and stopped. The goodman had reached a very dark place. Where the road was scarcely visible. Where the trees, though stripped naked by the season, blocked the light of the waxing moon, for the upper branches had come to intertwist—and when Nathaniel looked up, he believed the boughs overhead to be writhing like serpents in a nest. And how cold it was! Scarcely did a tear drop from his eye before it turned to ice. He wiped the crystal from his cheek. And then, in the frozen silence of that place, where no sound had yet come to Nathaniel’s ears but that of his own heart—and certainly he had heard no footfalls—a voice said from very near:

‘Hello, friend. You have some few queer questions. Come down and walk with me, and we will speak on it.’

THE WEBSITE

Open an account. Decide upon a password. Confirm it. Choose a lost-password question. You can now begin to search for donors by selecting attributes. Ethnicity; height; education level; ancestry. The fathers-to-be have no proper names, only numbers. Donor 11936. Making you think of some science-fictional dystopia in which all procreation is controlled by an evil cryobanking corporation that exploits a genetically engineered workforce of breeders. Pay for a Level III subscription and gain access for ninety days to extended profiles, facial feature reports, and childhood photos.

Here is the plan:

You and your wife will search the profiles separately, choose ten donors, and see if you make any choices in common.

Late one night, fifth of bourbon in reach, visit the website. Thinking, while the home page invites you to narrow the search: Christ, even this online. Select the skin, hair, and eye colors corresponding to your own. Then ask yourself: Why the same colors? What is the goal here? To blur the line between you and the genetic father and so secure a future unfraught with suspicions and questions? Click on a profile. Picture of a four- or five-year-old with thick shiny hair and a winning smile, a boy destined to grow up and get paid to shoot his load into a glass tube that can now be purchased for a price between 119 and 479 dollars (US) depending on motility—i.e., number of sperm with normal forward movement that will soon be in your wife’s fallopian tube and storming the plasma membrane of her ovum, each carrying within itself a familial history of health/physique/intelligence that will (assuming one of them breaks through) merge and blend with that of your wife to form a new human destiny with zero chromosomal input from you.

In the end, reach a kind of agreement. Green eyes. Average build. Education: Bachelor’s degree with departmental honors. Musical instrument: Trumpet. Paternal grandmother: Artist. Favorite color: Cerulean. Number of mobile spermatozoa per milliliter after thawing: Twenty million.

CONCEPTION

And the word of the evil one did prove good. For Nathaniel, on his return from the forest, passed neither cart nor rider; and upon emerging from the trees and coming in view of his frozen fields, saw no wood smoke rising heavenward from the chimney of his cottage. He stabled the horse. Entered the house. Indeed, his wife was still asleep. He laid a log on the embers in the hearth; and with a few breaths directed at the bed of glowing coals, brought the fire to life. He removed greatcoat, then boots. And touched there. Aye. The bargain he had struck in the forest was no dream. Not only was his member returned to its rightful place—it was erected, and as solid as the rock upon which the Lord had built His Church.

On that morning—and many time more through the grey and cold winter of 1692—did Nathaniel fulfill his nuptial duty (on one blessèd occasion inspiring in Bridget’s privy parts three successive pangs of pleasure) until at last, three month later, just before the thaw . . .

‘My husband.’

‘Aye?’

They were at table, enjoying a supper of pork and turnips with cups of fermented cider. A tallow candle burning between them.

‘I wonder if you have suspicioned anything of late.’

‘I know not.’

Even in the dim light, the bloom in her cheeks was unmistakable. ‘When we last . . . conversed. Noticed you no change in me?’

‘Let me think on it,’ he replied.

But sure he knew. It had happened, as he knew it would. As the Infernal Chymist had guaranteed. His wife was with child. By Nathaniel’s reckoning, she would be delivered somewhere about summer’s end—on which day a kind of hourglass would be turned, and sand begin to trickle through the neck. A fortnight. Such were the terms of the hellish compact. Signed in his own blood. Within a fortnight of the birth day must Nathaniel Pritchard return to the forest. Not alone: with his newborn child. He wasn’t sure which amazed him more. That he was soon to be a father. Or that he had sworn to do a thing that no Gospel Christian would ever dream of.

EARLY DECISIONS ABOUT OPENNESS

See how similarities continue to accrue. Each of you has done something you don’t want the world to know about. (Of course, if you confide in someone, that person is unlikely to set in motion a series of events resulting in your being publicly burned to death. But this is a question for historians.) What you have to do is sit down with your wife, whose belly, entering into this second trimester of pregnancy, is in a state of erotic distension—filled, you cannot stop yourself from thinking, by him—and make a list of people open-minded and discreet enough to be candidates for membership in an “inner circle.” Listen to her nominations, which will include parents, siblings, pals from college, childhood BFFs—and realize there is not a single living soul to vote for. Not one. If she says you’re being unreasonable, she does have a point. However, reason is only part of the picture. Other forces in operation here include: will, emotion, imagination. If you are going to be a father—a real father—you must believe you are one, and must lose yourself in a story of fatherhood, to a point maybe where you almost forget the thing that began the story, in the sense that it becomes so irrelevant over time that, for all intents and purposes, it never happened.

Attempt to explain your position in these terms. She, after giving you a long look teetering on the edge of patience, will close her eyes, shake her head, and, unlocking her phone, proceed to check messages.

INFANT MORTALITY

All through that spring and summer of 1692 were the dreams of Nathaniel Pritchard corrupted. He would return to the cottage after a day of ploughing or sowing to find his sweet wife in the kitchen, belly full of child, humming a hymn tune, and he would eat the evening meal with her, speaking on topics such as the making of a cradle or the choosing of a name—afterwhich, frighted, he would carry these notions into sleep, where they would be made monstrous by the powers of the dark.

Day by day did the baby grow in the womb; in the fields grew the flint corn and rye. Until, one Indian summer morn after the harvest, the pains began. In accord with custom was the father sent away. He took an axe and went as far as he could, all the distance to the northern fence—and while the neighborhood women fed the mother eggs and broth and cheerfully conversed in support of her spirits and held her on the birthing stool as she moaned and pushed, the goodman set to clearing a new acre, swinging the tool against the trees, chopping for hours with all his angry might until at last, near to three of the clock, the midwife’s daughter came stumbling across the fields, calling out: ‘’Tis finished, goodman! ’Tis a girl!’ The news struck hard upon him. If a boy, the task would be terror enough. But a girl. Like a man walking to the gallows, he walked back to the cottage—and he entered the bedroom and saw his sleeping wife and his infant child asleep on her breast, and he sat by them until the sun went down, thinking, as darkness fell over New England: ‘Child. Dear child . . .’

Pray, judge him not. For in those days there was a moving plot in the country and scarce did anything happen but the Devil be in it somewhere. It was merely one child. Who might in the normal course have been lost to any number of ills or accidents. Over the next twelve year, there would be between Nathaniel and Bridget much corporeal communion. Six more children would she bear (two would die before speaking a word), but not a single one without the first had served as payment. It may move you little that Nathaniel Pritchard cried an ocean of salt tears the night he stole his firstborn and took her into the forest. But he did cry an ocean. As he would each year thereafter, on the anniversary of that September day. For always on that day did Nathaniel go into the forest, into that realm of abominations, with a garland of wildflowers to lay upon the spot where he had stood that night in 1692, holding the baby in his arms, smelling her milkbreath, waiting for the bootheel of Lucifer.

DREAMS AS CLUES TO HIDDEN PATTERNS

You are in this dark forest. And you’re naked. Whatever. Ever since your diagnosis, your dreams have pretty much been clothing optional: you’ve been buck naked in the supermarket, at the office, in the church you went to as a kid—and now in a strange forest in the middle of the night. At least this time no one can see you. Whoever was here is going away—in what sounds like a horse-drawn cart. Clopping hooves, circumvolving wheels. Fading, fading, gone. Leaving you completely alone. Or maybe not. Because it suddenly comes into your head that you’re here to help someone . . .

Find her lying at the base of a tree. Swaddled in a blanket of loom-spun wool. Asleep.

Lift her up.

No sooner will her tiny head come to rest on your chest than you will be torn away from that world. Wake up. The baby—the real one—is crying. Squint at the numbers on the clock. Your wife will nudge you in the small of the back. Your turn. As you go to the crib, the dream is forming again, like a wave, in the deep of your mind, now cresting, now crashing. For a few seconds, you are in that forest again. Holding the baby. She isn’t yours. She belongs to someone else. Someone long gone into a darkness outside the scope of your subconscious. But you. You are there for her now. In the dream, it all makes perfect sense. She called out to you. From far off. Across dimensions, with a silent voice you were somehow able to hear. Of all the men in the world, she called for you.

©2015 by Greg Hrbek. Originally published in Tin House. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Greg Hrbek’s Not on Fire, but Burning was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and an NPR Best Book of 2015. His first novel, The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly, won the James Jones First Novel Award. His short stories have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Tin House, and The Best American Short Stories anthology. A first collection of stories, Destroy All Monsters, was awarded the 2010 Prairie Schooner Prize in Fiction.

Octopus vs. Bear

Kendra Fortmeyer | 5240 words

You woke up female this morning, so now you have a choice: do what other people want, or be a bitch.

It is a thing you know without precisely knowing it. The knowledge is built into the muscle memory of this miraculous new body; it is draped across the bones like a weight. You shudder, stretching your delicate female limbs beneath the unfamiliar, sun-drenched sheets. Female for a day, you think. You’ve always wondered.

• • • •

The game begins the moment you leave the house. It would have started before you left the house, but you spent hours too excited by your new body—touching your breasts, rolling the nipples between your fingertips until they are hard as button candy—to consider other people. But when at last you leave, and stumble to the bus stop in your butter-colored female shoes, a man is waiting there. He looks up at you. Your options hang heavy in the air, like overripe fruit:

You may duck your head and fiddle with your phone, as though you are reading something intensely engrossing, or

You may gaze into the distance with a vaguely grumpy expression, or

You may say hello like a normal person.

Three is what you choose. Of course: You are a normal person. Well, perhaps not today; in fact, today you are the antithesis of normal, but still, you have unique opportunity to act as a representative of all women speaking to all men at all bus stops, and that is a normal interaction. It should be a normal interaction. Why must we make such a big deal out of everything?

You smile. “Nice afternoon,” you say.

The man smiles back at you. He is a little older. The pleasure in his face is genuine. “It sure is,” he answers.

You sit back, feeling flushed and warm. See? you think, though you’re not sure to whom. To the legions of girls you pass every day with their noses buried in their phones, or held coldly in the air. To anyone who’s ever worn a fake engagement ring to be left alone at bars. That was so easy. Simple human connection, just like that. You smile up at the sky, and the tree, and the bus stop bench where someone has scratched 4SKIN into the green paint. When the bus comes, the man smiles and gestures for you to step on first, and you do, not because you are female, but because he is being nice, and it is a nice thing to accept someone else’s generosity. “Thank you,” you say, and smile at the bus driver, who smiles back.

• • • •

You are, as it happens, female in a sprawling Southern city. You checked your wallet (nonbedazzled white leather, which both disappointed and relieved you) before leaving the house, but it gave no clues as to your quotidian life or employment. A driver’s license with an outdated photo, two credit cards, some crumpled dollar bills, and a business card for a plumber. No employee swipe card, no student ID. Your female body didn’t come, unfortunately, with the muscle memory needed to type its email password or unlock its phone. You wonder if your female body will get in trouble for skipping work today, but there’s not much you can do about that now. You wonder, briefly, if she woke up today in your body. You wonder what she is doing, what trouble she is getting into. Panic trickles through your belly, followed swiftly by cold resolve. You undo the top button of your shirt, roll up your skirt an inch. Two can play at that game, you think, though you aren’t sure what game it is you are playing.

The man standing beside you side-eyes the strip of your belly skin as you pull the cord and signal a random stop. You catch his gaze and quirk a grin, then slide off the bus, laughing, as his widened eyes follow in your wake.

You clatter to the sidewalk on a walkway over the river crawling sluggishly through the city center, a warm breeze shivering the leaves on the trees. You arch your back and wind down the riverwalk in the late afternoon sun, sweat crawling deliciously down the curve of your spine. Everything about being female is sensual to you: the arch of your foot in your shoe, the softness of your face against the backs of your knuckles.

You are not, to your disappointment, overwhelmingly attractive (you checked, this morning, and even after brushing your hair and attempting, disastrously, to put on makeup, you can reckon yourself—your body mid-twenties but too curvy, with wide-gapped teeth—no higher than a six), but still, now that you are female, the whole world seems to bend toward you. People look up more, smile more. Faces turn toward you behind the wheels of passing cars. Even the leaves, skipping down the street, seem to follow in your wake. You think of the loneliness you’ve felt your whole life, and anger floods hot through your stomach. All the embarrassment, the disastrous and clumsy groping. Always having to be the one to approach, to grin and bear it when girls turn away, and now this? You are inundated with attention. You cannot help but have it fall into your lap. You want to grab the closest woman and shout, You don’t know how easy you have it! But the closest woman is you: a thought that makes you laugh and laugh, and makes everyone, of course, look at you, as though maybe they can share in your laughter. As if, for the first time in your life, the entire world wants in on your private joke.

You have never felt this powerful. You could do anything. You could take off your shirt and run down the street, singing, and the world would burst into a musical number behind you.

So you do.

Grinning up into the sun, you undo your blouse, button by button, with your smooth-knuckled female fingers. Then you drop your shirt to the sidewalk and rush out into the street, the water-balloon weight of your breasts bouncing hilariously in their lacy black bra, arms flung wide. Because what are the stakes, really? If this body gets hit by a car. If it gets arrested. You woke up here today, like this, no reason, no explanation; you figure you’ll be gone again tomorrow: This day a strange gift in a strange wonderland.

A truck swerves out of your way and into the other lane, horn blaring angrily. Behind it, cars slam on their brakes, the scream of rubber piling up in the air like dominos. An acrid whiff of burned plastic curls up in your nose as you smile up at the sky, spinning.

“Crazy bitch!” a driver shouts from his window. “Get out of the street!”

Across the way, you see a group of yo-pro guys lounging outside of a bar—thirties, business casual, expensive cell phones forgotten in hands. They look at you, chuckling.

“Hey, guapa loca!” one of them, a white guy, calls.

You grin at them and shimmy your shoulders like a Vegas dancer, sending a ripple through your sun-drenched chest. One man shakes his head and thumbs through his phone, but the others whoop and holler.

The first man yells, “Come over here, party girl!”

You laugh. Even now, even half-deranged in the street, you are wanted.

You collect your shirt and jog over to greet them.

Your new admirers are named Owen and Luke and Paul and Will and Barry, sales reps at a software company that does something something with healthcare solutions. They are headed to a happy hour at a place called The Thirsty Nickel.

Do you like The Thirsty Nickel?

You don’t know. You don’t know, either, that you’re ready to duck into a small dark place with these people, not when the world is enormous and the water is sparkling in the river and there are so many things you want to try in this free body of yours. But you are becoming hungry, and if you know anything about the world, these men would probably very much like to pay for you to eat.

You grin. “Sure,” you say, breezily. “I’m down for whatever.”

They like this. “Down for whatever!” they say. One of them high fives another one, and then high fives you. Then they all want to high five you, and take selfies with you as you follow them down the crowded street in your skirt and bra. They ask you your name, and without thinking you say Alice, which is not the name on the driver’s license in your wallet, but the name of your high school crush: the one who got away and who, today, can get away with anything.

Luke and Will and Paul and et cetera head into the bar, and you pause outside the bar to tug on your shirt. Owen(?) waits with you. He makes a mock pouty face as you do up the buttons (awkwardly, on the wrong side), which is a little annoying. It’s not Mardi Gras, dude, and the sign clearly says no shirt no shoes et cetera.

There’s a tickling in your side: your cell phone, vibrating in your purse. You pause, digging for it. Owen makes a little huffing noise, steps a little closer. Definitely annoying. “Go inside,” you tell him, but he doesn’t move, just widens his eyes at you and jerks his chin, like, come on. “I’ll be right there,” you say, irritated, because what you wanted to say was I’ll get there when I damn well want to get there, and somehow, instead, you have said this thing which is what neither of you want. You turn your back to him and pull out your phone. There’s a breath of cool air on your neck as the bar door swings shut.

Your purse vibrates, and you check your phone. Elena, says the caller ID, over a photo of a smiling Latina woman. Her face is broad, her front tooth slightly crooked. From the reflection you saw in the mirror this morning, you suspect she may be your sister. Or any other Latina woman, really. This day is making you wonder lots of things, and the latest is that you are possibly a racist.

You swipe your thumb across the screen to answer. “Hello?”

The answer blurs across your ear in a smear of foreign syllables. You open your mouth to say, I’m sorry, I don’t speak this language, please speak to me in English, but the words emerge in Spanish. Your lips, somehow, responding in this language you do not understand.

There is a pause on the other end, then more Spanish: irritating, probing, questioning.

Please, you try again, and this you know you are saying correctly: por favor. You say, or hope you say, I know this is strange, but please.

The phone is quiet a minute.

Then a voice says, thickly accented, “What the hell is even your problem today?”

“I don’t know,” you say, honestly.

“You were supposed to get to Abuelita’s hours ago.”

“Oh,” you say, hoping this sounds convincing. “Shoot. That’s right. I forgot.”

The voice says, “What the fuck, Laura. What the actual fuck.”

A college girl saunters by in a tight skirt and you find yourself staring after her pert ass as she goes. Is this just habit, or is your body a lesbian? There is so much you do not understand.

The voice on the other end is getting higher in pitch now, and starting to cry, and there are words like sick and last chance and responsibilidad filtering through, and man, you did not sign up for this. The sky is burning a deep blue over the bridge, and the sun, beginning to sink in the sky, makes all of the buildings look washed so clean, and you cannot fathom spending your one day in this body trapped in a foreign room and pretending to cry while watching a stranger die.

“It’ll be fine,” you say into the phone now. You’re not sure where this is coming from—some new faith, some female intuition. Some hoping for it to be true. “Text me the address. I’ll be right there. I’m on my way.”

Fuck.

You were not present when your grandmother died. You were on your study abroad, in college, in Germany, paying a Euro a minute in a cybercafé while on the screen your father cried and cried. The girl next to you, a beautiful Norwegian backpacker, asked what is wrong and you knew that in that moment you could turn to her with a sad face, and tell her this sad thing, and that she would have comforted you against her beautiful Norwegian bosom. But you weren’t that kind of guy. The shit kind. You were the nice kind, finishing last and spinning out your moral code into the empty, unlistening air of your lonely single dorm room.

You drop your phone into your bag and walk into the bar.

• • • •

Owen and Luke and Paul and Will and Barry (Larry?) are already into their second pitcher by the time you get inside. They see you and shout, “Hey!” as a table and something warms in your chest. They scootch to the side, making space. One of them goes to the bar to get another glass. Another gives you eyebrows of approval.

“Everything okay?” Owen asks. His tone is casual, solicitous. Perhaps you imagined your claustrophobia outside. Surely, that is it.

You waver for the moment on the edge of an honest answer. My abuela is dying. Just thinking the words makes you feel delicate and fragile.

You reach for your glass.

“No,” you say. “It’s not okay. Because I’m fucking thirsty.” And they roar, and clap you on the shoulder, and say party girl gotta party, and it is all okay, because you earned this, you made this, and finally, finally, this is the thing you want.

• • • •

An hour later, you are halfway to hammered. More than halfway, actually. Okay, let’s be honest, you are pretty damned wasted. This body has shitty tolerance. You keep almost walking into the wrong bathroom, but once you get to the ladies’ you are pretty grateful to sit down to pee, because you do not feel exceptionally reliable in regards to the whole equilibrium thing.

“You’re really cool,” one of them tells you when you come back to the table.

“Thanks,” you say. He blinks at you a second, and you remember belatedly how your ex-girlfriend was always bitching about how women had to duck beneath compliments, never accepting credit for anything, and you wonder if you should have said, no, you’re the cool one, or I’m okay, I guess, but then you realize he’s just very, very drunk.

The guys closest to you are talking, you think, about reincarnation. What they would want to be if they got to come back as an animal. “Bear,” maybe-Luke says, pounding the table. “Bear all the way. Think about it. You’re huge, right? Total boss, nobody fucks with you. You spend all winter napping. And then summer?” he leans back, satisfied. “Endless pick-a-nick baskets.”

The one with glasses nods. “That’s what up,” he repeats, softly. “That’s what’s up.”

“No way,” you blurt. “I’ve actually given this a lot of thought. Octopus.”

Luke and Glasses both look at you, surprised. Owen leans across the table, muttering to Luke, “What’d she say?” and Luke answers, “Octopus.”

“Think about it,” you say. You tick off the points on your fingers. “One, awesome swimmers. Two, super smart. They basically can’t be contained in a tank, because they find ways to break out all the time. Three, they’re crazy good at camouflage. Even the word ‘octopus’ is awesome; it even has two plurals: octopi, octopuses. You really can’t go wrong.”

“It’s actually octopoda,” says Larry-Barry.

“Who would win in a fight,” says Paul. “Bear or octopus.”

“Bear,” says Luke.

“It depends on where the fight is,” says Glasses.

“In a forest, definitely bear,” says Luke.

“But a swimming pool,” Owen challenges.

“Is it chlorinated or not?” you ask. Nobody seems to hear you, so you ask again, louder. “Is it chlorinated?”

“Yes,” Owen says, at the same time that Luke says, “No.”

“Okay,” says the one with the beard. “Imagine it’s on land, but the octopus can swim through the air like it’s water.”

“Still bear,” Luke says. “Claws, teeth: no contest.”

“She’s still got camouflage,” Larry-Barry says, resting a hand on your shoulder. “She’s still got ink.”

Your head swims, cloudily. His hand is heavy on your shoulder, and you’re not sure when you became the octopus, or how to acknowledge his hand, or how to shrug it off. If you should shrug it off. Because you know this game, only from the other side: the testing of boundaries. Figuring out what you can get away with before being repelled. You wonder when it became this way, that men were always pushing, and women were always pulling away. If there was ever a moment in history where it was all equal: everyone leaning toward each other in a great rush, saying yes and yes and yes. How easy and warm the world must have been, then, and how fast. You feel suddenly, deeply homesick for this world without no.

Glasses says, “The ink wouldn’t work in the air, though.”

Luke leans across the bar, his shirt grazing the gleaming ring left behind by your beer. “Dude, regardless. Ink versus claws. Have you seen grizzly claws? It’d be like an infomercial: Make this octopus into calamari in five seconds flat.”

Everyone laughs, and though Glasses is half-shouting, “Calamari is squid, bro,” the group’s attention has flowed to Luke, and he catches your eye, eyebrows raised, like, eh?

But then the bearded one says, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” and a low groan of approval swells up from the group. You look up at Beardy and smile, and, like a silent easing of weight, you can feel the other men drop away, one by one. As simple as that: You have your champion.

• • • •

The bearded one is named Will. The two of you sit at the end of the table and he buys you drink after drink. He reminds you, weirdly of yourself: early thirties, not quite happy, a thin veneer of alcohol and confidence plastered over the nervous hope that trembles in his face.

It is extremely surreal. You watch him watch you as you talk. You think, I know this game. I know it inside and out. When he listens, when he doesn’t. When he’s just looking for an opening to insert himself a little bit closer. He casually drops a hand on your knee while describing a rock-climbing trip he took to Croatia and your heart aches a little bit. He thinks he’s so close to getting some. He can’t believe his luck. He’s never that guy—never. It’s always Luke, with his handsome, asshole grin, who spent his teen years smiling and saying “yes, sir,” to parents and then calling everyone a faggot in the locker room.

You hate that it is this way. That the Lukes of the world work their way through girl after girl, and the guys like Will—like you—go home alone. Will says something funny, and you throw back your head and laugh, and the joy in his eyes hurts you a little bit, because you are definitely not going to have sex with this dude.

Although. You know.

Call it the alcohol. Call it cosmic justice. And, you know, you’ve always wondered what it’s like. And also, YOLO. And certainly YOWUFO (You Only Wake Up Female Once). And so you find yourself ducking under Will’s arm as you leave the bar together, him turning back and grinning at the coworkers whose envious faces you can imagine so well you do not need to see.

• • • •

Will takes you to his apartment. Dusk has crept up the shoulders of the summer night outside, cooling the edges of the sky as he unlocks the door and invites you inside with an awkward sweep of his arm. You sail in grandly, taking everything in with a smile (that falters slightly at his DVD collection—the entire American Dad boxed set, really?) as if to say, I know it is vulnerable to reveal your inner life to someone you have so far tricked into thinking she would like to have sex with you, but it is okay, you can be yourself, I am not going anywhere.

But. Will doesn’t seem embarrassed. He seems, in fact, satisfied? Like, maybe he wasn’t really nervous at all? Like maybe he saw this as a foregone conclusion?

You know, because he’s like you—he is like you, despite the complete lack of The Wire in his DVD collection—that he didn’t see this as a foregone conclusion, that his relaxed air is just a play for confidence because he knows intellectually that Women Find Confidence Sexy. But that satisfied smirk has you thinking about what the foregone conclusion actually is.

And then he’s pulling you into his arms and kissing you, which is whoa, but actually, you know, not too terrible. You expected this whole sex thing to be awkward, but this man you have chosen is surprisingly self-assured, and (ha ha) cocky. Maybe a little too cocky. Maybe a little pushy, in fact, you think, as he tugs at your clothing. You want to slow down a little, absorb every detail. This is a pretty special thing for you, after all. His beard is scratching your cheek, and that’s a little annoying, but his hands are cupping your breasts, and your ass, and you are intoxicated by the soft weight of them. How light you feel, how heavy and thrumming. You are flooded with a sensation you almost recognize, and you laugh a little when you realize it is lust.

He draws back, examining you through his eyebrows. “What?” he asks. There is hurt laced through his voice, and beneath it, the beginning of anger.

“Nothing,” you say. You want to shout, Can’t you tell? Doesn’t this seem wrong? Different? But you just say, “This is nice.”

He smiles and then leans back in. He kisses down the line of your neck, hand working up your thigh. “Hey,” he says gently, muffled in your neck. “Touch me, baby.”

You comply, reluctantly. You’ve forgotten for a moment that this is not all about you, the shape of your body beneath foreign hands. You slide your hand down to his crotch, thrilling with excitement and something like dread. Everything in this moment is surprising and unsurprising: the hook of his thumb in your underwear. The hard lump of his cock beneath his fly. These are all things you know and you do not know. You wonder how it would be to have sex as anybody. If these things ever cease to be so painfully thrilling and boring all at once.

He guides your fingers to the zipper and pulls it down, and, yup, there it is. All . . . phallic. Being a phallus. You get lost a moment, sizing it up (is it bigger than yours, or smaller? it is difficult to tell from this angle), and he guides your soft brown hand onto it. After a few minutes he tries pushing your head down, too, but nope, ha ha, no way, you are not interested in that. He tries again and the energy between you falters for a second. He’s saying things as you stroke him like, “Uh,” and “Yeah,” and “Baby, that’s good,” but his mouth is tweaked at the edges by annoyance. Your mouth feels thick and dry with the memory of beer. You are starting to sober up a little bit, and trying to remember what you did the first time Layla came home with you, and also what exactly you thought you were accomplishing here now.

There is a low hum in the room: the buzzing of your phone in your purse as Will slides your underwear down your hips and starts to push you back into the couch. You look down at your female body, which this morning looked so ripe and so lush, an impossible landscape of desire, and now, it looks only like flesh, defenseless.

You are not sure you want what will happen next, but the options are scattered across the floor like your unfamiliar clothing:

You may make a lame excuse, or fake an emergency. As in, my God, I have forgotten to feed the dog. I have forgotten, there is a Labor Day sale at Macy’s. I must go, I must go.

You may pull yourself together, smooth your hair. You may say, I know that every action I have taken up until this point signals consent, and that desire is raging in your body, and that my reasons may seem inexplicable to you, but I have decided that I no longer want to have sex with you, here, tonight. And you may be angry, and you may not understand, and it may seem incredibly unfair, but I need to go, now. Thank you for your time. Thank you.

You may tell yourself that you want this, and smile bravely when it is over.

• • • •

You once asked your high school girlfriend how rape could really be bad. “I mean,” you said, fumbling awkwardly with the words, “sex feels good, right?” You remember her look of horror. The way, after that moment, there always seemed a space between your bodies that you could not close, no matter what you said. How hard, or soft, you tried.

• • • •

And it does feel kind of good, although more dimly than you are used to. You are not sure how to describe what you are feeling, because you are not used to having these parts to describe.

• • • •

You leave while he is in the shower, dressing awkwardly in the dim light of the television. You’re out on the darkened street when you remember that you can’t unlock your phone. You could go back and ask Will to call you an Uber, but you can’t fathom knocking on that door now. The busy highway swims ghostly up out of the trees in the distance, and beyond it, impossibly far, the beautiful, deaf city skyline.

You lean back against a street post and pull out your phone, hoping that maybe there will be something you can do. The lock screen is filled with texts from Elena.

DONDE ESTAS??????? >: (

en serio, date prisa

si vengas, ven ahora mismo

Unbidden, the translation pops into your head, the ghost of Spanish 102: If you’re coming, come now.

And then, one hour ago: nvm.

That’s it.

You take a long, shuddering breath and stare up into the streetlight. Everything is blinding, and outside of the blindness, dark. There’s a crimson throbbing in your pelvis. You try to remember if Will used protection, wonder if you should leave a note for this body when it wakes up tomorrow without you in it—Go to pharmacy for Plan B. And also, I’m sorry.

You dig in your purse for a paper and a pen, when a movement to your left scatters your heartbeat into a thousand pieces: a man standing on the sidewalk across the street from you. He is stooped and unshowered, carrying a stained backpack. He looks up at you and then down again, up and down, twitchily. Like a marionette nodding, yesyes. Yesyes.

He’s got seven inches on you, probably, and fifty or sixty pounds. These are not odds you are accustomed to.

You pull out your useless phone, power-walk away. You want to break into a run, but you are afraid, because if you start to run, then he might run, too, and right now, like this, when you can pretend you are just walking—just getting exercise, nothing out of the ordinary—you can pretend that nothing is wrong, and maybe this means nothing will be.

• • • •

There was a game you used to play at night when you were little, riding in the back seat of your father’s car. You would focus very hard on the feeling that you had of sleepiness and warmth and tranquility, and then tell yourself, This is all a lie. Everyone here is a zombie and they are all out to get you. Everyone: your parents. Every person in every passing car. If you managed to jump from the car and roll, there would be nowhere to get away from the zombies: The yellow lamp-lit houses would be filled with zombies, and the gas stations, and even the fluorescent McDonald’s, all the people pretending to stand in line for Big Macs and McFlurries ready to turn and catch you and splinter your bones between their teeth. You would run and run and never be safe. In glimpses, sometimes, you could make yourself feel it, that thrill of not-safety. It was not so much a whole feeling as a layer: everything-you-know-plus-this-other-thing. Everything plus the awareness that it is all a lie.

• • • •

Somehow, you reach the freeway. You are unscathed, or maybe not.

You climb the concrete barrier and cross, gasping, in your stupid and impractical shoes. The lights of strange trucks roaring up at you out of the darkness, and then away.

• • • •

Somehow, you find your way back to your house. Somehow, you stumble up the front walk and through the door. You expect, in the plain yellow light of Laura Guzman’s tiny apartment, to find your butter-colored shoes scuffed and stained, but they look, much to your amazement, exactly the same.

A phone is ringing when you come inside: a salmon-colored landline phone shrilling tinnily beside the fridge in the galley kitchen. It goes silent just as you reach it, the echo buzzing in your ears.

You lift the receiver, thinking to dial *69, the callback code. But instead, you dial your own phone number.

You’re not sure what you expect. Maybe that Laura Guzman will answer. Maybe that she’ll say, I don’t know how this happened either, ha ha, but how was your day? Or even I have spent the day as you, a stranger, and I understand and forgive you now more deeply than anyone has before; can we meet, I need to tell you everything.

But instead the phone just goes to your voicemail. You stare absently at the photo pinned to the fridge—an old woman smiling from behind a pair of Coke-bottle glasses—listening to your own voice unspool in your ear: all chipper and impregnable and whole. How complete you sound from the outside, you think, studying the red, inflamed skin peeking out of the heels of your butter-colored shoes. How easily life must come to the person who sounds like that.

You drop into bed and stare up at the ceiling, waiting for darkness to consume you and set the world to rights. You are still waiting when you wake the next morning to the same ceiling, dawn pinking the horizon and the sun rising over a brand new day.

©2017 by Kendra Fortmeyer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kendra Fortmeyer is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer whose fiction has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016, One Story, The Toast, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ workshop in 2016, and received her MFA in fiction from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. Her debut magical realist YA novel, Hole in the Middle, is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2017. She also serves as the prose editor for Broad!, a women’s/trans*/nonbinary writers’ literary magazine. She loves mermaids, the word swamp, and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Find her at kendrafortmeyer.com or on Twitter @kendraffe.

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

Weialalaleia

Amal El-Mohtar | 2130 words

IDENTIFICATION AND BEHAVIOUR

The Weialalaleia (Hirudo Threnophaga) is difficult to observe, and is more recognisable by the sound that accompanies its presence than by its shape. It floats on the air like a jellyfish in water, and, like a jellyfish, is translucent, although there is some debate within cryptohirudological circles about whether the Weialalaleia lacks pigment, controls its pigmentation in order to blend seamlessly with its background, or bends light away from itself through processes that have yet to be competently analysed.

At any rate, it is invisible.

One knows that one is in the presence of a Weialalaleia by the effects attendant on its feeding—a process which is best understood in comparison to three more mundane creatures: the leech, the jellyfish, and the mosquito. It eats like a leech, though its food is grief, not blood; it processes nutrients like a jellyfish, though it possesses no mouth; and it leaves a mark similar in cause, but opposite in effect, to the mosquito, for where the mosquito’s legacy is an unpleasant itch, the Weialalaleia’s is a heady euphoria.

The Weialalaleia’s membranous body has evolved to absorb nourishment in an unusual way. In order to feed, the Weialalaleia must find one who is suffering, and enter her body through the mouth; once there, tiny hooks (sometimes classed as claws) latch onto the glottal folds of the throat, allowing the Weialalaleia to stretch itself across the vocal passage. It then secretes a substance which, much like a medicinal leech’s anti-coagulant, loosens grief from its host’s emotional wells to facilitate its feeding. After stirring the humours in this way, the Weialalaleia braces itself for the sobbing torrents that will soon be pushed upwards through its absorptive body. The host’s voice carries grief as water carries plankton, and the sound of a human voice vibrating through the body of Hirudo Threnophaga is the sound for which it is commonly named: weialalaleia.

APPEARANCES IN LITERATURE

Most primary sources describing the Weialalaleia come from Western Asia, and consequently its representation in European literature has often been distorted; ululation being associated with war cries in the eyes of the uneducated, incidental mentions of the Weialalaleia in medieval Christian texts usually depict it as a demon which inhabits the bodies of vicious Saracens to give them courage in battle; other times, as in this anonymous eleventh-century extract cited by Adémar de Chabannes, the Weialalaleia is not perceived as anything more than a dangerous eccentricity of its host:

We had not travelled far together when my companion grew very still. Turning to me, he asked whether I had recently wept; I frowned and said no, for what man sheds tears like a woman? I saw him grit his white teeth, then open wide his mouth, and close his eyes, and his body shook and convulsed, and as he did he screamed WEIA LA LA LEIA to the sky. Fearing for my life, I fled, and knew thereafter never to trust—nor to question the manhood of—a Saracen.

One can find more recent expression of this confusion regarding the Weialalaleia in an examination of Northern Welsh alternative rock music of the 1980s, where Weia la la leia is the chant aggressively sounded by The Alarm during the hardship of economic recession. It is likely, however, that The Alarm’s chant was borrowed from a misreading of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which is most certainly aware of the Weialalaleia and its history, containing as it does a scholar’s elegant rendering of the process of grief-eating:

The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia

The “brisk swell” in question is clearly the body of the Weialalaleia rippling itself outwards to hook “both shores” of the vocal cords; the southwest wind, proceeding from south to north, is the grieving voice; the memory of pealing bells and white towers is the source of the river nymph’s grief, which, pushed vocally through the leech’s body, produces the eponymous sound as a result.

The Weialalaleia has also sometimes been confused with the Book Bear documented by Catherynne M. Valente, PhD., in this volume, as it has been known to feed on the intangible expressions of the human psyche in addition to the written texts it devours, but the Weialalaleia does not eat memories—if anything, it is often useful in allowing events to be recalled with a clarity separate from the emotions they provoked.

MEDICINAL USES

The science of cryptohirudology—vulgarly, the study of leeches one is not certain exist—advanced in leaps and bounds after the discovery and translation of the Hama Codex, which, in addition to shedding tremendous light on the so-called “dark years” of the city of Hama under Hamdanid rule, described in clear detail a ritual involving the elusive Weialalaleia which had long been lost, partially recovered, and substantially corrupted. A passage purportedly written by the ostentatiously named Alissar Al-Zabba is translated as follows:

The ritual was performed every new moon night, on the shores of the Orontes River. Throughout the month, those judged by physicians to be deepest in suffering were sent to the leech-handlers. By the light of the stars, one could see them lined along the shore, while a master leech-handler walked slowly among the sufferers, extending towards them a fistful of draw-strung netting heaving with the weight of nothing at all, and paying close attention to its thrashing and swaying. Where the netting bucked hardest, the leech-handler judged pain to be greatest; and, with great care, the sufferer’s mouth was opened, the draw-string loosened, and the Weialalaleia released into her throat. Within seconds, the sufferer would be doubled over in agony, weeping and ululating without ever moving her tongue, as the Weialalaleia did its work; and when, sated, it unhooked its claws from her glottis and floated outwards and upwards into the dark, she would be left sprawled on the earth in an ecstasy of relief, drawing deep breaths of sweet night air.

Al-Zabba also relates how the Weialalaleia’s euphoric properties came to be coveted as a recreational drug, with sometimes unwelcome effects:

It has been my misfortune to observe the ritual poorly executed on one or two occasions. Where the leech-handler is imperfect—as sometimes happens among the nomads, who starve their leeches while they travel from village to village plying the easing of grief as a trade, instead of as the holy rite we keep in Hamath—many things are likely to be mistimed. The leech will squirm hard towards its first whiff of food, and in its hunger will plunge too swiftly, too deeply into the throat, where, unable to find purchase, its claws merely scrape the oesophageal walls of its victim, causing her to choke on the thorny lump of Weialalaleia in agonized silence. In other instances, the leech-handler is not deft enough to release the beast into the throat at the right moment, and the sobs gush out from the sufferer before the Weialalaleia has entered her mouth, pushing it away in a violent wave of anguish upon which it cannot feed.

For these reasons did Abdallah ibn Hamdan, may his name and wisdom be exalted, forbid the buying and selling of Weialalaleias, and issue a decree passing the strict licensing of all leech-handlers into law.

It did not end there, however; the Hamdanid dynasty was fraught with skirmishes between Northern and Southern principalities, and though we lose Al-Zabba’s clear recounting, it is clear from the Codex that Byzantine forces saw the practice of grief-eating as grotesque, and banned it wholesale. It is to be supposed that while leech-handlers lost their art, or found it significantly damaged by the need for secrecy, the Weialalaleia nevertheless prospered, perfectly capable of gorging themselves on grief without ritualised human assistance.

RECENT RESURGENCE

In From Dust to Damascus, Leila Karam writes,

When I was a child, weeping over the fall of a sparrow or the loss of a cat, my grandmother would gather me up into her arms and tell me stories to soothe me. She spoke of a village in the western mountains of Syria, by a great river that flowed south to north, where, most evenings, women of all ages gathered to sing.

Some were seated; some were standing; all had work to occupy their hands as well as their throats. Washers, winders, warpers, all raised their voices to the wind and sang songs sweet as mulberry wine and bitter as the sea.

While they sang, they wove fine silk nets. While they wove, they sobbed over their work, soaked the nets in the salt of their tears. They rubbed their pain into the silk, weighed their windings with laments, all to an important purpose. For once the grief-heavy nets were complete, they would hang them up between the branches of their tallest mulberry trees, and wait to see if their nets were bait enough to lure a swarm of hungry Weialalaleia into captivity.

The Weialalaleia, my grandmother would say, feed on grief. And in this village, the elders knew how to domesticate and raise them for use in their healing rituals. For if anyone were sad, ah! She had only to open her mouth while a grandmother held the wriggling creature over it—here my grandmother would usually produce a sweet—and carefully, carefully lower it into the girl’s throat; there it would find her pain and eat it up, and in joy at feeling the pain gone, the girl would exclaim weialalaleia! And she would feel happy, and join her friends, and play games again.

She always ended the stories by shouting weialalaleia, and I would laugh and join her, and indeed, would feel much the better for it.

As any cryptohirudologist worth her salt will recognize, this account indicates that the ritual described by Al-Zabba had already been corrupted by 1913, when Karam’s grandmother would have been a young girl hearing a story that was as much an echo of its origin as the sadness saturating the women’s nets. The broad lines of the ritual are of course the same, but it is in the details that we find the means to unearthing the roots of corruption which have led to the region’s present abuses of the creature, such that experts in the field are attempting to determine whether the Weialalaleia is in danger of extinction.

The accounts are similar in the following respects: the recognition of grief; the care required in handling the leech; the exclamation of Weialalaleia, and the resultant feeling of happiness. The key difference between Karam’s account and Al-Zabba’s is that Karam does not describe the Weialalaleia’s departure. In her repetition of her grandmother’s recollection, it is the sufferer who exclaims weialalaleia after being relieved, when in reality the relief follows the exclamation. Even more dangerously, Karam’s story weds the idea of the Weialalaleia’s entrance into the body with the eating of a sweet, suggesting that the leech needs to be consumed before its healing effect can be felt.

This is why, now, when youths overburdened with the despair of generations of disenfranchisement discover a swarm of Weialalaleia tangled in the silk-wrapped tops of mulberry trees, they know enough to capture them; they know enough, and have tears enough, to trap them in clumsily woven nets; they know enough to open their mouths. But instead of allowing the Weialalaleia to enter, to hook, to ease, and then to leave, they swallow the creatures whole, or puncture them with their teeth, dripping a lymph-clear liquid from their weeping mouths as they work the creatures into their stomachs, thinking them an antidote to their pain. They fill their bellies with all the grief the Weialalaleia has absorbed, and think the bloating is a healing, think the difficulty breathing is a sign that they have done it right. They think themselves suffering less than they were.

And who, after all, can say they do not? Who can say that there is no relief to be had in the sharing of another’s grief, in the filling of oneself with another’s pain? Perhaps their angers and their fears and their betrayals mingle in their stomachs, mix so thoroughly with their own that they become indistinguishable from each other—make them feel, ultimately, less alone in a world where so much is taken from them.

Certainly, by all accounts, after the eaters of leeches have had their fill, after they have stumbled to their knees, clutching their sides, throats scorched by the juices of the shredded membranes leaking grief, the sound of their voices raised raw and ragged to the sky is remarkably similar to weialalaleia.

©2015 by Amal El-Mohtar. Originally published in The Bestiary, edited by Ann VanderMeer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amal El-Mohtar’s essays have appeared in Chicks Unravel Time, Queers Dig Time Lords, Science Fiction Film & Television, Apex, Stone Telling, The Outpost, Cascadia Subduction Zone, and Tor.com. She reviews books for NPR, edits and publishes the poetry in Goblin Fruit, is a Nebula-nominated author and founding member of the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, and has been known to deadlift other genre professionals. Find her on Twitter @tithenai.

Hypocaust & Bathysphere

Rebecca Ore | 20270 words

A boy breaking deadwood in the forest saw God send two more future people to the time glade. He left his wood and crook and ran to tell the manor.

The Lord was sparring with his nephew in the courtyard, stopping sword blows with shields and padded coats. “My Lord,” the boy said, pulling at his greasy hair as if he had a cap to remove.

The Lord nodded to his nephew and both lowered their swords and shields. “Must be more people from the future.” The boy nodded enthusiastically. The Lord tried to remember if this boy was kin to his reeve, Tod Ball, and if so, how.

“I’ve never quite understood why God sends them here,” the Lord’s nephew said. “Especially since we haven’t met one yet who planned to come to this time and place.”

The boy said, “The priest says God doesn’t want them roaming all over time. They come here because Cecil can explain them to us.”

The Lord said, “Perhaps this is a place they can come without tearing the fabric of the universe, but I can’t believe a peasant boy is responsible. We’re either going to die of the pestilence or we’re not going to talk about them for the historical record. Tell the house staff to fire up the hypocaust. That always amazes them.”

“Uncle, it’s better to wear clothes than to heat a house. Frost kills the fleas.”

“But watching time travelers step onto a Roman style warm floor is so amusing.” The Lord left his practice gear to his nephew, picked up his sharp sword, and went down to the millpond to see if the priest’s youngest brother, Cecil, was still watching perch and bream from inside his iron ball with the polished glass windows.

The pond bubbled. A villein girl worked bellows. “My Lord,” she said, trying to bob and pump the bellows at the same time. She looked as though she was on the verge of womanhood, twelve perhaps if she’d been well fed. Otherwise, perhaps as old as fifteen.

“Can you signal him to rise? We’ve got more time travelers.”

“My Lord, Cecil told me he hates them. The last one accused him of being a . . . a . . . chrah . . .”

“Anachronistic,” the Lord said. “So are they. Does the priest really believe they come here because of Cecil?”

“The priest thinks God wants them to know Cecil. Cecil thinks time is like a thread, and this is the beginning of the fibers that extend to their times.”

“I hate metaphors that come from textiles,” the Lord said. “I prefer those that come from swordplay.”

The girl said, “And it may be that they come here because the more they come here, the more they have to come here, like a road where feet grind down a passage until horses and carts find it the only way to travel.”

“Is that what you think?”

She shrugged. “They come here because they come here,” the girl said.

“Tell them to be polite to Cecil. He’s really pissed because none of them have ever heard of him.”

• • • •

Morty and Sara materialized through the gate. Morty scuffed the ground and said, “Perhaps this is a cultic deep woods dancing ground; the earth seems well-packed.”

“Do you have any idea what time it could be?” Sara said.

“Bath, 1352, if the machinery worked properly, but since it’s obviously fall and we were supposed to arrive in the spring, something’s off.” Morty had a brain chip and visual enhancements, but the internal clock needed to be reset. His implants gave him the temperature.

Sara pulled out her compass and chronologically believeable astrolabe. “If we’re not too far off, then we should be able to shoot Polaris tonight and figure out from the maps in your file where the nearest manor might be.” She checked the liquid nitrogen freezer they’d brought with them to collect tissue samples. It was disguised as a wooden distaff, heavier than most distaffs Sara had seen in museums, a long staff of oak about an inch thick. All women in the Middle Ages carried distaffs. Some Medieval illustrations showed them being used as weapons.

Had the Pestilence been caused by rat fleas and Yersinia pesti? Or by anthrax aeresol spores? Or by combinations of diseases? Until the twentieth century, everyone believed in the black rats and fleas explanation, but by the late twentieth century, Twigg, in The Black Plague: A Biological Reappraisal, wondered how a rat and a flea that originated in Southeast Asia survived British summers, much less British winters. Fresh tissue samples should stop the debate.

• • • •

The Lord told the priest, “They’ll stay in the wood tonight to see the sky. Most of them have astrolabes to check where and when they are.”

“I could go to them, my Lord.” Over the years, the priest had learned several dialects of Future as well as Latin, Welsh, and Saxon.

“Suit yourself,” the Lord said in one of those dialects.

The priest remembered that he’d nailed the Lord with a quarterstaff the last time they’d sparred. He bowed and said, “Perhaps thieves will be out, my Lord. I’d be pleased if I had your protection.”

Yes, I did appoint this priest, the Lord thought. The Lord’s father had let the priest’s father pay the fine to have him educated. I appointed him here because otherwise it looked like he was headed for Oxford. But that was before Crecy, and before his younger brother’s infernal bathysphere machine. He said, “Between your cudgel and my sword, we should prevail against any number of thieves and future people.”

“With your permission, my Lord, I’ll arrange for their baptism, as, since they haven’t been born yet in real time, whatever sacraments they may have won’t be valid.”

The Lord thought, And how many angels can God put to dancing on the head of a pin? He nodded, then walked back to the stable to have his horse saddled. “What happened to your donkey?” he asked the priest.

“My Lord, I had expenses.”

“Your sister whelped again. Why didn’t you see to it that she did better than to marry a cottar?”

“Yes, my Lord, but my sister was headstrong. I’m the only one who bent to the Lord’s will.”

And which Lord did he mean? the Lord wondered wryly. The Lord said, “I think we’ve got a donkey you could ride.” He felt very grateful for his distant cousin, who served as the family confessor. That priest had no gift for languages, not even Latin, but one did prefer to confess to a peer, not to the son of a man one had owned.

“My Lord, there’s no need to rush,” the priest said, bowing his head. “Time travelers generally bring weapons and sufficient supplies.”

“I’d like to get a few Cokes before they drink them all,” the Lord said. “And your brother Cecil likes to play with the cans. He’s down in the pond; isn’t it a bit too cold?”

“He wants to find winter frogs. I told him the tad breed out of pond scum in the spring and the frogs all die of frost, but he’s not sure.”

“Perhaps your brother has involved us in paradoxes. Perhaps because of him, we all die off, and my renovated hypocaust and manor become lost in a navigation canal.”

“Yes, my Lord, but we don’t necessarily die off. You can count on this village to be closed-mouthed. We know we’re not mad or deluded by demons, but since the next village tends to be jealous of some of our more prosperous people, we know we’d have grief if we spoke.”

“I suspect we mostly die of the plague, but then, I’ve been black-biled since Crecy. Give a villein a long bow, but make from the point and never turn your back on them. If those time people are so concerned about paradoxes, they shouldn’t sneak in canned drinks.”

“My Lord, you’re so right.”

• • • •

About dusk, the time travelers saw two men, one obviously a knight, the other a tonsured priest, ride up. Both men wore linen head covers that looked like cropped versions of women’s wimples. The Lord had a beard. The priest had stubble. “When are you from?” the priest asked, saying it, “Qhwne air yay freom?”

Morty pulled on his ear to start the translation chip. The priest said, “We might out gay through the sounds to teach your computer.”

The Lord said in French, “Je ne parle pas vos langues. Parlez vous avec le padre.”

Sara thought he was trying to speak Spanish or Italian. He pronounced every letter. “How do they know we’re time travelers?” Sara asked.

“Oh, that dialect of Future!” the priest said. “Our future Englishmen.”

“Why do they all come from the same three-hundred-year span?” the Lord asked the priest.

“Perhaps because the Final Judgment comes in the twenty-second century,” the priest said.

Morty said, “They’re talking about final judgment.”

“Goodly sirs, when are we?” Sara asked, hoping that much would be intelligible to English-speaking people who’d been dealing with time travelers.

“The year 1348. We’re waiting for the plague, which may kill all in this village to avoid temporal paradoxes,” the priest said, looking sideways at his Lord to see if the terrible worm in the steel cocoon understood. “Then our relics will be obliterated by a navigation canal. We inherited a modern map and some books from one of your people who died here.”

Sara was more than a bit confused. These people sounded like they’d entertained different time traveler teams each week for decades. All she could say at that moment, though, was, “But we’re not near Bath, are we?”

The Lord said, “She’s attractive for a peasant descendent. I’ll order boiled sheets and steamed blankets so vermin won’t shock her passion.”

“Oui, mon signeur,” the priest said, thinking better time travelers than village girls. “Ma’am, no, you are not near Bath. You’re in what used to be the Danelaw. God sends time travelers to us for His own mysterious purposes, perhaps to avoid paradoxes, perhaps to show you how true Christians live, perhaps to subdue my younger brother’s pride. Since you haven’t been born yet, we need to arrange a christening.”

Sara decided the only sensible response was a curtsey. Morty bowed and said, “I understand that you’ve had trouble with the murraine and don’t have a lot of food. We can leave now, or we can leave in two weeks.”

The Lord spoke. The priest said, “My Lord wants to know if any of you smuggled in any canned soft drinks. He’s especially fond of Dr. Pepper. You could spend gold at the manor, copper in the village. Surely, you brought something to trade for your keep in these poor times.”

Morty bowed and fished a handblown glass bottle out of his pack. He said, “Tell him to mix it with water. It’s concentrated Dr. Pepper syrup.”

Sara said, “Morty, you’re not supposed to bring stuff like that! Good-father, tell your Lord that we brought some Saracen-style gold coins and some shillings and pennies. They are actually duplicates from our time, but the metal weights are honest.”

“No can?” the Lord asked almost comprehensibly. New cahn? He trusted the future coins would not appear to be counterfeit. But if they proved badly made, he’d resmelt the gold ones.

Everyone shook heads and bowed low, even Sara. This knight hadn’t seemed to recognize her earlier curtsey. He smiled at them and turned his horse, stopping from time to time so they could catch up to him.

The Lord wondered why God always sent him such obvious peasants. Cleaner than their ancestors, though. He wondered if time travelers realized that the very threads of their clothes made people nervous. His wife, after much examination of time traveler clothes, said that the machines that made time travelers’ clothes were too dumb to leave subtle messages in the spinning and weaving. That’s why the villeins had turned their wool combs on the first time traveler. He wore inhuman clothes and was obviously no saint. He also perhaps discovered a pot quern or two, or a fulling trough. Some villeins couldn’t be broken of cheating their Lord’s mills.

The second time traveler looked like a peasant trying to evade her Lord’s fulling mill by weaving and wearing unfulled cloth so sleazy one could see through the loose weave. Underneath, she wore brain-dead machine cloth. The Lord knew none of them expected to be undressed by fourteenth century hands. From her, the Lord had learned how to unhook bras.

When they caught up to his horse the third time, the Lord said, “At least you didn’t try to fool us with bad post-Modern hand spinning and weaving.”

Sara made out the word “post-modern,” and said to Morty, “You’ll never learn anything true and uncontaminated about the Middle Ages now.”

The priest said, “Only God knows true and uncontaminated things. A human would have to sacrifice his life completely to another to even begin to know the surface of that other. All humans get is gists and piths in lives that were surface sketches of immortal souls.”

Morty asked, “What did he say about the Post Modern?”

The priest said, “My Lord’s glad you didn’t try to fool us with bad hand-weaving. Machine-made cloth strikes us as odd, but some of the handwoven crap worn out of the twenty-first century is positively insulting.”

“This duplicates hand-spinning and weaving,” Morty said.

“Machines don’t leave the same signs,” the priest said.

Sara said, “I can spin. I learned over the summer.” She flourished her distaff.

The priest smiled and translated for the Lord. The Lord said, “If true, my lady wife will be so surprised.” One earlier time traveler could spin as well as a six-year-old girl. She claimed she’d sprained her wrist earlier when she saw how well his lady and her women spun. No other time traveler did even that well. “You people generally cook marvelously.”

Finally, they reached the manor house. The time travelers saw Norman walls built on a Roman stone foundation. One small shed attached to the main hall was wattle-and-daub. The main hall was stone, but it was smaller than Sara had expected, and so looked like a triple-wide prefab with delusions of grandeur. Jutting above was a round tower. The Lord’s own confessor came out from the tower and glared at the vicar priest. The Lord swung off his horse and said, “They brought Dr. Pepper syrup.”

Morty said, “But it doesn’t fizz.”

“Fizz?” the priest asked.

“Little bubbles in the beaker.”

The Lord’s confessor said, “Ask them if they might bring it in cans next time. Cecil collects the cans.”

Sara understood. She saw smoke rising from the wattle-and-daub shed, but none from the manor’s roof vents. Fleas, lice, rats, and greasy rushes waited inside for her, she was sure.

In front of the door was a box stood on end, one long side open. A man, obviously the porter, lay curled in the box. When the Lord kicked the box, the man flinched and climbed to his feet. He was four inches shorter than the Lord, dressed in a calf-length tunic that looked like grey upholstery with black stripes, and black leggings that looked like the maker couldn’t decide whether these were to be trousers or hose. Bowing, he opened the door.

Inside, the floor was warm. The windows were green glass that looked as though someone had heated drink bottles and spun them out into lumpy sheets. Though the light was dim, Sara made out the center floor mosaic of Neptune on dolphins.

Morty asked, “Have you always had the hypocaust?”

The Lord said, “We built on top of it. Roman, don’t you know. Not really practical in this climate, but the weather’s been unseasonably warm for the Little Ice Age. Men of the Danelaw weren’t so feared of pagan things as the Anglos.” He didn’t tell them that another time-traveler had discovered it under the ancient foundation when the Lord had been a boy, visiting here with his uncle.

“What will you do?” Sara asked.

“For now, when it’s colder than this, we build fires in tripod braziers, so not to mar the floor tiles. We vent the smoke through the roof. The creosote in the smoke kills wood-eating insects in the roof timbers, so our system is quite practical for our time. My wife might have some castoff fur-lined dresses you could wear. You said you had Saracen coins.”

“But the smoke. You’d have sinus problems all the time,” Morty said.

The Lord smiled and said, “I have enough villeins to get my wood cut a year before we burn it. Good aged wood doesn’t smoke as badly as green wood. If you find you’re too cold, you can help out in the cookhouse. Otherwise, I can put you up with my reeve.”

“We thought we’d be your guests,” Sara said.

“What did your ancestors do in the nineteenth century?” the Lord asked. He was beginning to understand them better, or else they’d figured out how to speak better, probably some combination of the two.

Sara’s nineteenth century ancestors had been colliers, agricultural laborers, a ditcher, and textile workers, so she knew better than to answer. She said, “If you’re not happy to have us around, we could have gone straight back to our time before we left the woods, but now we’re stranded here for two weeks.”

“My dear, you don’t need to rush away. I think you’re going to be as comfortable in the village as you could be here. You can come up to my house from time to time.” The Lord turned to the priest and said, “Put them up with my reeve, Tod Ball.” The Lord knew the priest hated rich villeins almost as much as he despised Lords, both as equally descended from Adam and Eve as the lowest he. The priest grumbled, but Ball had married the priest’s cousin. The Lord continued, “You’ll learn so much from my reeve. Village life is the core of Medieval existence. My kind simply defends it.”

Morty said, “I’m a specialist in medieval technologies, so I want to see everything.” Sara, the med tech, had always been an avid amateur history buff, with an undergraduate degree in it, but the more she studied history, the more she realized that the past would have been more complicated than the future if the past had been as densely populated. Morty shrugged at Sara, who hoped that shrug wasn’t recognizably Jewish. The Jews had been expelled from England over sixty years earlier, when the king owed them too many marks.

• • • •

The priest told Morty and Sara, “The reeve, Tod Ball, has the biggest allotment in the village, plus the Lord farms out the oven to his brother. He’s always had beautiful daughters who ally him with many other families. He’s married to one of my kinswomen. One son came back to weave for the village. Ball always gets re-elected reeve.”

The priest led Sara and Morty on foot through strip fields, some furlongs planted in winter crops, some fallow in hay, others now stubble or dead bean vines.

“They look just like oxen at the reenactment villages,” Morty said when he saw the first oxen. “I thought they’d be tiny or something.”

The priest said, “We’ve lost a lot of our stock to the murraine, so what’s left has plenty of fodder.”

Sara said, “The animals in the Luttrell Psalter looked big enough.” The oxen were definitely bigger than Jersey cows, not as big as Holsteins. Sheep ate away at bean and grain stubble, fenced-in with wattles. Sara felt that the past too much resembled a reenactment village. A boy sat on a log weaving more wattles, sticking withes through wood sticks lashed into rectangles. Outside, among the village houses, geese hissed at pigs over scraps, while chickens scratched up bugs, just like their descendants did.

In a small garden, two peasant men were spading. Morty said, “Turning over the garden so frost breaks up the clods. Amazing.”

“More peasants,” Sara said. The peasants wore shapeless garments in striped and dotted browns, blues, and yellows. Most of the wool looked almost like felt, fulled into a solid sheet that wouldn’t fray when snagged or cut. The belts looked card-woven when they weren’t leather. The women’s garments were long, to mid-calf, while the men’s were shorter, but Sara could see no shaping other than gussets and gores. No darts, no curved cuts.

Not quite like a reenactment village. The weaving was better.

“Does that look like card-weaving to you?” Morty said to Sara.

The priest said, “It is card-weaving. Weaving cards are fragile, thick parchment, thrown out when the holes in them tear, and so don’t survive often in the historical record.”

In front of them, on the path, two women wood gatherers, in tunics and with their heads covered in beige kerchiefs, drove a pair of oxen yoked to a sledge. Not oxen, but rather cows? Yes, the draft animals had udders, shriveled now, and big bellies. The cows seemed unenthusiastic. Morty grinned like a teenaged boy seeing his first naked willing girl. He went up and walked around them, touched the yoke, then came back to Sara and the priest and said, “The Medievals really did use cows as draft animals!”

The cows lurched unevenly in the yoke, twisting their hindquarters and tossing their heads. The women broke off branches from every tree they passed and threw them onto the pile on the sledge, which scraped across the ground on runners. One of the women had a distaff loaded with unspun wool tucked in her belt. A heavy stick, though not as thick as Sara’s, it could have served as a prop weapon in one of the Medieval drawings. The top was carved, not lathe-turned, to a knob where a linen ribbon descended in spirals to bind the wool. The spindle, with a wooden whorl, dangled in a half hitch from the distaff’s top knob. Sara knew she couldn’t spin thread so evenly. Her liquid nitrogen cooler looked less and less like a real distaff, no wool tied to it, no spindle dangling from spun thread half-hitched around the top ball.

Sara looked around and saw that almost all the women had distaffs stuck through their belts. At least she’d gotten that right. A few wore even wider belts stuffed with straw, one steel knitting needle almost two feet long stuck into a belt, hands working stitches from the needle in the belt to other needles. Knitting surcoats in the round, Sara thought. The thread came down from the left hand. When the knitters turned to other tasks, they flung the knitting over their shoulders, or stuck a couple of the pins into their knitting belts.

Morty said, “I thought knitting came later.”

Sara stopped between two houses and looked back. The village would just be visible from the manor. Some of the houses looked like small versions of Elizabethan houses, half-timbered with clay infill. Others were wattle-and-daub hovels. Each had a small garden surrounding the house, dead now except for what appeared to be kale, cabbage, and bean stubble. The village smelled of urine, but not so much of shit. The priest led them to the largest of the timber-framed houses and said, “Tod Ball may not be free, but he is rich.”

Ball’s house was larger than the manor. His roof smoked at both ends. His door was paneled oak, quite smoothed and fitted, and swung open. Morty ran his hand around the door and said, “Mortise and tenon frame, free-floating panels. Quite well done.”

The priest said, “Tod Ball traded Curt the Carpenter for that door.” He knocked on it, and a woman opened it a crack, looked out at them.

Tod Ball the reeve was a big serf about five feet, nine inches, with ginger beard stubble and a basin hair cut. He wore somewhat more shaped clothes than Sara’d seen earlier, but wore no shoes. His feet were huge, and callused along the insteps as well as on the soles. What he spoke was Middle Anglo with chunks of Danish. Morty’s and Sara’s computers chopped at the speech for a few minutes, but obviously, they were being welcomed in.

About twenty-five watts for the whole house, Sara thought, after her eyes adjusted. The only light came from the doors and the fire on a stone hearth in the center of the floor.

When the computers recovered, Morty and Sara heard the reeve saying, “We’re like this, the Lord and I.” He held up his forefinger and middle finger twined together.

The priest said, “I’ve got hens to tend. My sister is recovering from childbed.”

“Your cousin my wife and me’ll entertain these time people,” Tod Ball said. “I got plenty as long as God doesn’t send too many of them. Can the woman spin?”

“Probably not,” the priest said, “even if she thinks she can, but they’ll pay their way with passable coppers.”

“We can understand you now,” Morty said. “I’m Morty, and the woman is Sara.”

Sara said, “I can spin a little but I hurt my wrist.”

“Good.” Ball came over and patted both of them on the shoulders. “Most time people do best at cooking. If you can make us a custard and ham pie, with chopped Good King Henry, what you call a quiche, I’ve got an oven.”

Sara remembered that the contemps ate a domesticated cousin of lamb’s quarters. The priest said, “It’s really the Lord’s oven.”

Ball said, “I helped my brother get the oven farm, paid the Lord’s fee for him, but a man who’s not active won’t make good of the farming of even a mill, much less an oven. Come, sit, tell me about how men make crops in your time.”

Hanging from hooks in the ceiling beams were huge wooden mallets, wooden spades with iron only along the cutting edge, other wooden rakes, billhooks. In the corner, a younger man worked on a floor loom, various parts rising and falling, his bare feet moving over long treadles hinged at the back. A woman and four girls made thread, one from flax on a drop spindle with a stone whorl, the others wool thread on the more usual spindle. Ball said, “My goodwife, my little ones. The two older boys are at the butts, shooting. The boy’s supposed to be working for his master, but the man died in the pestilence down south and my boy felt he’d be safer if he came home with the cart and loom.”

Sara said, “I guess no one in the village would inform the guild or his master’s heirs.”

Ball said, “My Lord said the boy could weave here until we knew what better was to happen, and he’d clear the boy with the guild and the heirs, if they survived.”

Morty said, “The other boys? Practicing with long bows?” He peered back up at the collection of Medieval farm tools.

Sara said, “You have a large family.”

The woman finally spoke, “We lost two boys and several girls.” She was pregnant now. Sara thought that Ball’s wife looked to be about fifty, although probably she was really only thirty or thirty-five. She’d lost several teeth, pulled when the rot got too bad, perhaps.

“More to come,” Ball said. “I feed her well.” He nodded to the priest, who left them then. Sara felt slightly uneasy.

Morty said, “Does the village have a bathhouse?”

Ball’s wife, whose name they never learned, said, “Bathhouses are dangerous.”

Ball said, “I’ll go with you, Morty.”

Ball’s wife sighed and said, “The Lady will be coming by tomorrow to take linen for shifts. If Sara can wind quills, my son will appreciate it.”

The weaver said, “Mother, couldn’t you wind them? These time travelers . . .”

Sara asked, “I’d be perfectly happy to do it if I can do it fast enough. How do you wind quills?”

The weaver sighed and shook his head. Ball’s wife pulled from one corner of the parlor what looked like a miniature spinning wheel and a handful of goose quill barrels, cut open at each end.

Sara watched as the woman slipped the quill onto a spike stuck out beyond two small upright posts. A leather cord went around the wheel and around the base of the spike set between the two posts. The woman pulled out a handshaped but fired and glazed clay bowl with sides curved in slightly at the top. In the bottom, to one side, was a clay loop. Ball’s wife turned to a basket and pulled out a ball of fine linen thread and a leather bottle. She poured water in the bowl up to the top of the clay loop in the bottom, then threaded the linen through the loop and handed it, wet, to Sara. “Wind it back and forth,” Ball’s wife said. “Don’t wind so the threads can slip between each other.” She took Sara’s hand and showed her how to turn the wheel by pushing the spokes away from Sara’s body.

Sara wound the thread so that each thread round lay beside the next, trying for the neatness of a spool of thread or a level winding fishing reel. When she began to wind back the other way, the weaver said, “Get her to do it right, Ma, or wind them yourself.”

Sara felt a blow between her shoulders, not an attack, but a solid thump.

Ball’s wife had hit her. “Back and forth, from one end to the other, make the spirals slant, not straight up and down. Otherwise the next level will bind,” Ball’s wife said. “And it must fit in this.” Ball’s wife held up the shuttle. It was only an inch high, but longer than the shuttles Sara had seen in her own time. Ball’s wife put down the shuttle and guided Sara’s hands through the movements, then thumped her again, as if that would make Sara remember better. The weaving boy turned his head toward Sara and grinned. He looked to be about fourteen, with a freckled face, a shock of sandy hair, strong legs, and bare feet treadling the loom.

Sara remembered what Samuel Johnson had said later, that the Medievals felt corporal punishment was less spiritually damaging than bribes, flattery, competitiveness, and other mental tricks used to get people to learn. They bumped their boys against village boundaries on Rogation Day. Dubbing knights was done with blows calculated to knock a man off his feet. Pain aided memory. To avoid another thumping and to prove she wasn’t just another incompetent from the future, she was very careful with the next quills, but the weaver had to wait for them.

Ball’s wife sighed and asked, “What do you do in the future?” She put another ball of linen thread in the bowl and added more water.

“I study diseases,” Sara said. She pulled the end of the thread through the clay loop and up to the winding wheel.

“I’d offer to exchange herbal lore with you, but I already know that you can’t compound your own simples. What’s the point of studying diseases if you can’t make the cures?”

Sara wanted to ask what was the point of fooling yourself that you could cure illnesses when you couldn’t, but decided to try filling bobbins faster. The weaver wove them still damp. Sara’s hands were cold and chafed by the thread when they stopped. The room was dark. A bell was ringing.

Ball’s wife said, “Midnight. Five yards since vespers.”

“I’m good,” the weaver said. He stood up from the bench and rubbed his bottom and lower back.

Sara wondered where Morty and the reeve had gone, but didn’t say anything as Ball’s wife led her to a huge bed. The girls and the boy came and joined them in it, wiggling out of their clothes when they got under the covers.

Sara stripped down to bra and panties. Ball’s wife, obviously familiar with time travelers, said, “One of those make-your-tits-look-younger things. Take off that rig and sleep in your shift. Linen won’t startle us out of sleep.”

• • • •

“We slept over at the bathhouse,” Morty claimed. All five men standing around the hearth looked clean and roughly shaved.

“How are the boys doing?” Ball’s wife asked her husband.

“Cutwit said he almost had a girl to wife, but she’s marrying a freeman. Poor freeman, buying such a piece of ass from the Lord.”

The son who must have been Cutwit said, “I do want to get married.”

“Find a more faithful girl,” his mother told him. “Not so pretty.”

Morty said, “The bathhouse plumbing is really neat. The pipes into the big tub have real valves. Who’d have thought this small village would have had a bathhouse?”

Ball’s wife said, “Good women go on alternate days. Our bishop insists.”

• • • •

The Lady came to inspect the linen at noon the next day. She rode in astride on a mare that looked like a somewhat coarse American Saddle Horse or Tennessee Walker. Genuine medieval amblers, Sara thought, the stock that provided those two more recent breeds with their comfortable gaits. The horse’s head was more like a pony’s head, round jaws and short ears. Two young squires and a page followed the Lady on similar horses, but only the page dismounted to help her off her mare. Then he climbed back on his horse, and the three gentlemen waited while the Lady came in.

Sara felt that she looked peasanty in comparison to the Lady. The Lady’s hair was completely concealed under her linen headdress, but her eyebrows and lashes were dark blonde. She wore a little square silk hat over the linen coif, and her wimple was tied back as if it had been hair. She had blue eyes, was wrinkled but very fair. She seemed never to bare her teeth, and had probably lost many of them in child bearing and nursing, if ladies nursed their own babies in this period. Otherwise, she looked healthy. The Lady wore a dark blue surcoat of fine wool thread over a silk underdress, dyed crimson. Sara felt that the Lady was overdressed for a visit to villeins, but perhaps the Lady wanted to intimidate them with her elegance.

“So you’re the time traveler’s woman? I see our reeve gave you a shift.” Her nails looked shaved, not cut, pared with a penknife. Sara had learned that the medieval penknife was nothing like a twentieth century penknife. Quills took a stout sharp blade.

As the Lady bent over the loom, the reeve’s wife whispered, “She eats shell and bones when she’s breeding. I tell my girls if they want more of their teeth through breeding, they ought to eat burnt shells. Some say ashes help.”

Sara decided to be perverse. “Sure she’s not a witch?”

“No, it’s shells. Marl gives good heart for the land, shells give good heart for a breeding woman.”

The Lady unwound the linen from the cloth beam, checking it, then piling it in erratic folds on the floor rushes. Sara saw now that the boy had woven complex treadled patterns in that dim light, not plain weave. The Lady said, “Open the door wider,” and the reeve’s wife did. The children all backed away and sat on benches around the wall.

The Lady said, “You did good work with my thread.” The boy weaver smiled and bowed to her, then grinned at his mother. He seemed genuinely pleased with the compliment. “Wash it and bring it up to the house. We’ll give you a sweet, a goose, and two hares.”

“Yes, my Lady,” the boy said. Sara suspected that the hares would come to the family, but he’d get all the sweet. It didn’t sound like he was getting any actual money for his work, though.

The Lady said, “Morty, we understand you know something about the pestilence.”

“Not enough,” Morty said. “If it’s related to the cattle murraines, but isn’t the anthrax of our day, we could die, too. Or if it’s a different illness than we’ve been led to expect. Probably more than one disease entity is involved.”

Sara knew that if they caught anthrax, despite what vaccines and bioenhancements they’d had, they were to throw just the frozen samples through the gate. Then a team dressed in biohazard suits would come through the gate and take them straight into an isolation unit.

The Lady said, “Of course, you’d like to believe it was something we were too ignorant to deal with, but something your physicians could manage quite well.”

“I don’t have that bias,” Morty said, “but most people in my era still believe that the plague came from fleas and rats, because we can control them. Personally, I suspect it was anthrax, a murraine that killed people as well as sheep, like wool sorter’s disease, only worse. Perhaps anthrax and another couple of diseases.”

The Lady said, “I will survive. I’m well nourished.”

“Perhaps, my Lady,” Morty said.

“What does kill me?” she asked.

Morty’s eyes defocused as he consulted his implant. He said, “I don’t have a file on any county north of Somerset. You’re not in the historical records for Somerset County.”

“We are north of there,” the Lady said. “Enough. We’ll guard our manor from strangers. Where would be safest for my sons?”

“Scotland,” Morty said.

“I think not,” the lady said. “Scots would kill my sons.”

“Isolated castles,” Morty said. “The rich don’t suffer as much as the peasants.”

“Say villeins, virgaters, cottars, honor them with what status God gave them,” the Lady said.

“Why don’t you honor the poorer ones with more food?” Morty said. “I saw them all naked in the bathhouse.”

“Look at our reeve’s family. Does his family look pinched and starving?”

“No.”

“It’s up to the peasants. They breed themselves out of land. Perhaps God sent this pestilence to thin them.”

Sara hoped that Morty didn’t ask her why she needed imported silk, and how many bushels of wheat and shillings of rent bought it. He said, “I’m not used to your era, even though I’ve read about it.”

The Lady said, “I’m so glad I don’t live in your rude future. You come to this place, eat my folks’ food, talk away their time, pay them in false coin, then say to me that I make them to starve.”

The village church bell tolled three times then. All heads turned toward the sound. The Lady said, “The other time people didn’t come to study the pestilence.”

“We did,” Morty said. “But we were planning to arrive after the worst of it.”

Sara said, “I’m glad we can be honest with you. You know what we are. I guess I’d feel unclean being a spy from the future watching people die around me.”

The Lady said, “You’d never have fooled me into thinking you were my rank, or even my countrywoman.”

“But I am British,” Sara said.

The Lady said, “I’m Norman and Dane. Not Welsh, not Saxon, not British, not Scot nor Pict. We beat them.”

Sara hoped that Morty didn’t argue with her about the Danes. Everyone bowed the Lady out. The weaving boy cut the cloth off the warping beam, pulled away the unwoven threads at the end of the warp, and put them in a leather bag. “For the papermakers,” he said to Morty and Sara.

Ball said, “I get along well with my Lord, but my Lady is a cunt.”

Sara said, “Morty, I’m sure glad you didn’t argue with her about the Danes not being such hot conquerors.”

Morty said, “What a bitch. What can I do around here to help out, other than by just being some sort of time-traveling tourist? Why do you keep your tools hanging from the roof inside here and not in a tool shed?”

Ball said, “Tools cheap when you come from?” He reached up and brought down two wooden spades with iron tips, handing one of them to Morty. “Woman,” he said to his wife, “you got some clogs that would fit this man?”

The weaver son shaved a bit at the insides of the wooden soles of a pair of shoes with a scorper until Morty felt reasonably comfortable. Ball went out barefooted.

Sara asked, “What are they going to do?”

“Dig a clamp for cabbages and parsnips, or hill the leeks,” Ball’s wife said. “You know anything about setting up a warp? We’ve got to get the loom redressed for field clothes.”

“Perhaps if you can show me.”

The weaving boy shook his head.

“It’s a wool warp,” his mother said. “They’re a lot more forgiving.”

“Let her cook, Ma,” the boy said.

His mother said, “My journeyman son’s a very smart boy.”

Sara wasn’t sure quite what Ball’s wife meant by that. “What do you have to cook?”

“Parsnips, cabbage, beans been soaked, salt herring, couple cheeses, bread in the hamper. Got a bit of honey if you want to make a frumenty with the summer wheat.”

The hamper was a wooden box suspended by ropes from the rafters. After setting the beans on to cook in a covered pot suspended on a crane over the fire, Sara checked the hamper to see if the bread was anything she’d want to eat. It looked a little hard, but otherwise edible. “Got any ale and flour?” she asked, wondering if she’d be inventing Welsh rabbit for the first time. She’d spotted a tripod pot on the hearth.

Sara chipped the cheese into little bits with a knife, then dusted flour over it. The goodwife seemed to know what Sara planned to do and dipped out ale from a bucket and put it in the pot. She told Sara, “I’ve even got a peppercorn and salt.”

While the beans cooked, Sara fried cabbage in lard and poppy seed, then crushed the peppercorn and added it to the boiling ale. She dumped in the floured cheese, stirred, then pulled the concoction back from the fire.

The goodwife had been cutting bread slices and toasting them upright on an iron angle plate all the while.

The boy stopped his warping, washed his hands, and came up with a wooden bowl and spoon. They all broke the bread into spoon-sized bits in their bowls before pouring the cheese sauce over. The medievals put the cabbage in with the rest of the meal.

“Smart girl,” the goodwife said. Sara realized how hungry she’d been and nodded as she ate. The bread was made of more grains than wheat, and the cheese tasted vaguely like feta, or goat cheese. Ewe cheese. The solitary peppercorn got lost in the wilder flavors.

After Sara finished, she said, “I thought you ate off trenchers. Bread.”

“Stuff soaks through bread. Bowls are better,” the goodwife said. “You did good cabbage, though it’s still a mite green. I’ll beat you if we get the flux of it.”

“The lard was quite hot.”

“We can’t use lard every day now,” the goodwife said. “You’ll have to learn to cook cheaper.”

“Couldn’t I buy the household some oils?”

“What with the pest, no oils or fats to be had other than what the village grows.”

• • • •

The weaver sent the newly woven linen to the bathhouse to be washed. After the linen was dry, he laid it over a log and beat it with a wooden club. Morty said, “I wish I had a camera.”

“The Lord wants Sara to come with me to the manor house,” the weaver said.

After Sara bathed by the fire in a wash barrel, Ball’s wife dressed Sara in a best linen shift. Fussing through her chests, Ball’s wife pulled out a blue-dyed overdress with dark pink flower patterns across the top of the bodice. Sara was about to ask if the overdress was embroidered when she remembered that peasant weavers often wove in patterns rather than take a needle to them after they were woven. Then she wondered why Ball’s wife wanted her to be so dressed up? Probably to show how prosperous the reeve was.

Ball’s wife said, “Our master lets us keep some of the lambs’ wool for our own clothes.” She pulled out a pair of dark pink stockings made from bias-cut woven wool that matched the color of the weft insertions. They were cut at the top in a pattern that allowed for a cord to run through the holes. Sara used the cords as garters above her knees. She didn’t like the seam under her foot, but peasants didn’t wear knitted socks, at least not in this village.

The weaver boy asked, “Is she ready yet?”

“We haven’t finished with her hair, but you can come in now.”

The weaver boy came in, the linen rolled and under his arm. He looked for a clean place to put it, shrugged, and kept holding it. “Ma, she’d look quite nice if you set her cap back a bit to show her hair.”

Ball’s wife nodded and arranged the cap and wimple accordingly. Then she went through the chest again and pulled out a pair of slippers. “Pull off the hose and don’t dress your feet until you get to the castle,” she told Sara.

“Is there frost?”

The boy asked, “Ma, better give her clogs.”

“Is Morty going too?”

“Your companion is down at the pond with Cecil and his bathysphere.”

“Bathysphere?”

“Yes, Cecil’s my cousin,” the woman said, “and our priest’s youngest brother. Decided that if a boy was to polish glass as jewelers do the Lord’s jewels, then he could see through it much better than if it were left blown glass.”

“Did he get the idea from time travelers?” Sara asked.

“He described it to one before he made it. Cecil claims that all the future person did was name his machine a bathysphere. Don’t ever tell him he didn’t invent it himself. Hates being accused of being derivative. We think that the Lord should release him for the priesthood. We’re all saving to pay the fee.”

“Sounds like an extremely bright boy.” Unfortunately, Cecil must have died in the plague, since Sara’d never come across anyone like him in the fourteenth century historical accounts.

“Well, you’re ready for the Lord, now,” Ball’s wife said, pulling the cap back a bit more, exposing Sara’s earlobes.

• • • •

Morty saw the girl and the boy pulling the bathysphere up to the bank. Cecil was saying, “It’s too cold now to go down anymore, but I got one frog from the muck at the bottom.”

Morty said, “Where did you get the iron?”

Cecil said, “The smith’s a kinsman. On my dad’s side.”

Morty asked, “Did he steal the iron from the Lord, or did you get bog iron, or what?”

“What,” the boy said, not asking.

The girl said, “Do we want to cover the bathysphere for the winter?”

Morty said, “You ought to grease it so it doesn’t rust.”

“We can’t spare grease for that. We won’t be slaughtering hogs until November,” the boy said.

Morty walked around the bathysphere. “How did you figure to make an exhaust valve?” The valve was a lid sealed with greased leather, a rod in the middle tying the lid back to a segment of chain, then to a cross rod where the tube came into the main body of the bathysphere. Whoever was in the bathysphere could close the valve manually if necessary. Normally water pressure would keep the valve shut, but as the air pressure rose, the valve would open. Obviously the boy couldn’t go too deep or the chamber would be hyperbaric, but even if the valve stayed closed, the bathysphere could hold enough air to last for maybe half an hour.

Perhaps this medieval boy had quizzed time travelers about bathyspheres? “Who told you how to make the air escape tube?” Morty asked the boy.

The boy hit Morty. As Morty wondered if he should paddle the boy or pretend that this hadn’t happened, the boy said, “I’m tired of you people now. You mock me. Don’t ever tell me I’m an anachronism! I have a Walther PPK.”

Morty said, “A Walther PPK?” Then he remembered that that was a twentieth century handgun. “Who was stupid enough to bring that? You people have a murder rate at least four times greater than America in the twentieth century.”

“I inherited it from a time traveler,” the boy said. “And I did not make the plans for my bathysphere from what time travelers told me. You just can’t believe that anyone back in time was smart enough to invent anything themselves, can you? We’re all so dumb we think that slime generates tadpoles.”

“How did you inherit a handgun from a time traveler?”

“She died of disease,” Cecil said. “Did you have to have teeth fresh seeded in your jaws before you came here? Do your tooth surgeons really drill out tooth rot and put in clay or epoxy insets?”

“Yes. If we die here, we can’t leave traces, since there were no traces of us in either the historical or archeological records. We’d cause paradoxes.”

“We all die,” Cecil said. “If I lived, I’d become known as the greatest medieval scientist in history!”

Morty wondered if the boy could be right. “I don’t believe you have a Walther PPK, because that doesn’t show up in the historical record. And if it had plastic grips . . .” Morty tried to remember if anyone could date plastic.

The boy reached into his tunic and pulled out a semi-automatic pistol. He said, “And a shoulder holster, and an extra magazine. The lead and steel will oxidize over the centuries into something you future people couldn’t identify, but I do have it. The grips are walnut. They rot, as I do.”

Rust was already pocking the blued steel. Morty asked, “Do you practice with it?”

“No, I don’t have enough bullets. And it takes a different kind of gunpowder than we’ve got now.”

Morty’d read enough about twentieth century teenage gangs to know not to challenge the boy any further. “I’m sorry.”

“I can’t believe in God like my brother the priest, so either I die to nothing, or I die to eternal torment. So what kills you?”

“I don’t know,” Morty said.

“I could kill you. But I won’t if you give me two shillings, so that I can buy a bathhouse woman before I die.”

“They don’t cost two shillings,” Morty said.

Cecil pulled back the slide on the pistol. The girl watching them both giggled. Morty fumbled through his purse, aware that the boy could take it all, and tossed the boy two shillings. The girl picked them up and handed them to Cecil.

Cecil put them in a pouch at his waist, then uncocked and holstered the gun. He said to Morty, “You think that I’m just a savage using an object I couldn’t possibly have invented. Well, what have you invented?”

“Nothing,” Morty said. “Everything I need has been invented already by my time.”

“I doubt it,” the boy said. He didn’t turn his back on Morty as he and the girl covered the bathysphere with an oiled linen tarp. “And remember, I’m related to the reeve by marriage, so you’d better not try to pay me back for my hitting you. I don’t think you’re as smart as some of the other time travelers. You’re boring!”

• • • •

Sara, stumbling a bit in her clogs, followed the weaver with the linen. Approaching from this angle, the manor looked like a nasty small fort more than a house, the green lumpy glass more like laser ports than entrances for sunlight. They knocked at the back entrance porter’s box, now closed in front with doors that looked like shutters. A different porter than the one at the front, an old short man in what looked like cast-off lordly clothes, flung back the shutters and said, “You can’t come in.”

“We’re allowed,” the weaver boy said.

“I told them you brought the pest with you, running from Norwich.”

“I brought no wool. I washed in hot water, even purged the cart with smoke. So I didn’t bring anything but myself to the village, and myself is healthy.”

“The woman?”

“The Lord wants to see her.”

“I must check,” the porter said. He opened a small door, about a foot square, in the bigger door and called, “Villein with cloth and a time woman here!”

A muffled voice said, “Let them in.”

“We don’t want the pest here,” the porter said, opening the doors. The weaver stepped inside. Sara wondered if she should change her clogs for slippers outside, or go in, and then change.

The Lady was just inside the door. She said, “We could order ale from the village if you brought a couple of shillings.”

Sara was about to pull out her purse with the twenty-first-century handcrafted shillings when she saw the boy shake his head. He said, “I could get us ale for a penny.”

The Lady said, “If one of my servants must go, the cost will be three shillings of what money that woman has with her. Considering that it’s not really our King’s coin, we’re doing her a favor to disperse it before she’s caught with it.”

Sara said, “Okay. I know blackmail when I hear it.”

The two fourteenth century people looked confused for a second, then the Lady smiled at the weaver. Sara realized that the Lord and Lady of the Manor shouldn’t be able to get yards of linen for only two hares and a sweet. Sure, we’ll make sure that you don’t get into any trouble for running away with your master’s cart when he died. Just weave for us cheap.

“My Lady,” the boy said, bowing, “if you’d give me my hares and my next thread allotment, I’ll go back to the village.”

“Don’t you want your sweet?”

The boy said, “Oh, was there to be a sweet in the payment? I’m sure one of the small children would like that. For me, doing quality work is sweet, regardless of who wears my linen when it’s cut. You’re so gracious, my Lady, to keep me so employed, and for hares and sweets.”

My Lady’s face flushed slightly, then blanched. “I’ll send one of my spinsters out with the thread.”

“Some touched by your gracious hand, I trow,” the boy said, bowing again with a smile.

“Woman, come with me,” the Lady said, walking across Neptune’s face, headed toward stairs at the end of the hall.

“My name is Sara.”

“Is your companion’s name short for Mordechai?”

“It may have started out that way.”

“Morty, Sara. Those are Jewish names. Are you converts?”

Sara didn’t feel like explaining that her name had been very Christian since the Protestant Reformation. “Yes.”

“You’ll both have to be baptized again, as you haven’t been born yet. My confessor or the vicar can do it. Do you feel you’d be comfortable with my husband alone? I would prefer to go back to supervising the household.”

Sara wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say. Probably, no, I wouldn’t, but she knew karate, and should be able to fend off a randy medievaloid. Sara doubted he’d tell anyone he was bested by a woman. “Would you vouch for his honor?”

The Lady turned back and stared at Sara as if Sara was daft. “His honor is never questioned in this house.” They went upstairs to the solar.

In a room hung with tapestries of deer and boar, the Lord, dressed in silk as soft as underclothes, sat in a chair by rows of little green glass diamonds lead-camed into a casement window. On the floor was a two-inch-thick square of grainy stone, about two feet on a side, carved in flowers around the edges. On the stone, a brazier stood on foot-high legs, looking like an out-of-context hibachi. Charcoal glowed under the brazier grate. The scene was medieval as hell.

“Tell me news of the future,” the Lord said. He sounded tired, fatalistic. He knew that his world came to a close between 1400 and 1900. He might have seen Crecy, aristocrats slaughtered by peasants. Worse, he knew that the Black Death was coming.

The Lady said, “My lord husband, she said she’ll feel safe with you.”

The Lord smiled wanly, waved one hand languidly. “So odd to talk to people not born yet, who know what happened after we died.”

The Lady bent her head and then said, “I’ve given that saucy boy more thread.”

“As long as he weaves well and we can pay him in hares, let him talk.”

“Yes, my lord husband,” the Lady said. She looked back at Sara and turned pale again.

So, the Lord put his Lady in the bad cop position. The Lady wasn’t from around here. Whatever the Lord did that was stingy or mean, he could make it seem to be the Lady’s work. He’d protect the boy from his weaving master’s heirs, if the loom’s real owners lived through the plague themselves and wanted the cart and loom back. Meanwhile, his wife got cloth for hares and sweets.

After the Lady left, Sara went up and checked the heavy oak door the Lady closed behind her. It hadn’t been locked from the outside. The Lord said, “Do you want to bar it?”

“No.” She sat down on the bench by the door.

“You might want to walk around a bit outside when I get ready to bathe. My wife had fresh linen sheets put on the bed this morning, and the blankets have been washed and steamed. Would you want to stay in those clogs, or would you rather put on your slippers?”

The clogs were a bit cold. Sarah slipped her feet out of them and tucked the clogs under the bench. The Lord watched her as she pulled the stockings up and retied them at her knees. Only after she pulled her skirts down did she remember that medieval women rarely showed much leg to a strange man in private.

The Lord opened the casement window. Fresh but cold air came in. The coals in the brazier turned a brighter red. “Would you put some more coal in the brazier?” the Lord asked. He pointed to a basket full of black branches and chunks of wood. Sara knew medieval charcoal wasn’t made into briquets, but these branches and chunks looked so much like real wood, only black and cracked. She picked one branch up and saw the grain at the cut end.

“You’ve never seen charcoal before,” the Lord said, not asking at all, not particularly wondering.

“The Balls don’t use charcoal.”

“Can’t,” the Lord said. “It’s reserved for the manor.”

Sara broke the branch up. She lifted the brazier grate with a poker lying on the stone hearth, put the charcoal on the fire, then lowered the grate back. “Do you cook on it?”

“We’re going to heat water on it.”

“For your bath.”

The Lord nodded. Then he asked, “Have you seen the villagers practicing with their long bows?”

“Not yet.”

“I was at Crecy.”

Sara wondered at the pain in his voice. After a moment, she asked, “Were you injured?”

“In spirit. A time traveler warned me about it before I went to France. I didn’t believe the time travelers were real until then. Thought the villagers lied to hide bondsmen fleeing their lords. But I heard about Crecy before it happened.”

“You won. The English won.”

“The longbow won.” He turned to her and said, “I knew one of the French nobles. I couldn’t save him. I told the bowmen I’d ransom that man, but they grinned like wolves when they shot him. Shafts in him up to the feathers.”

“The army had been up all night with dysentery,” Sara said. “They were tired and angry.”

“Killing nobles cheered them right up. And now we’re hoping the pestilence you came to study doesn’t come here. Will it?”

“I didn’t get a chance to use my sextant, so I don’t know where we are. Where are we?”

“North of Somerset.”

“Where people prayed to stop the plague while it was still raging in France.”

“Where the bishop thought words could stop the pest. When no one had microscopes to show tiny enemies.”

“I’m sorry,” Sara said. She got up in her stocking feet and put her hand on his shoulder. He put his own hand over hers and looked up at her.

In my time, he’s a skeleton, dust, nothing. The hands stayed fixed.

“I need my bath. Talk to me, tell me funny stories.” He pulled a bell-rope. Three boys came in with buckets and a copper cauldron. They didn’t look at Sara as they put the cauldron on a stand over the brazier and filled it.

One said, “My Lord, have you fresh straw in the mattress or are you using the feather bed?”

“Both. New ticks for both of them, too. Sara, these are some of my brother’s and sister’s children. My own boys are squires with them and one with the Earl of Norfolk.”

“Daughters?” Sara asked.

“Three at different nunneries, one married. The babies are with my wife’s people.”

Two of the boys filled the tub with about ten buckets of cold water, the third stirred the cauldron. Sara leaned back against the tapestry behind her and felt it sway backward to the stone wall. She sat up straighter, but was beginning to feel sleepy and relaxed as she watched the boys watching the cauldron. The Lord stood up and stretched, then closed the casement. The room became quite warm, a dark place full of wool and green light. The boys finally dipped the water out of the cauldron and added it to the tub.

“You could go if you’d be embarrassed,” the Lord said. “Or you could avert your eyes, but stay to entertain me. Tell me hopeful things.”

She hauled the bench around so she could look out the window while the Lord bathed. The squires bowed and closed the door behind them. Sara heard silk rustling behind her, water moving, splashes, then a huge sigh. She wanted to turn back and look at him, but didn’t. “Hopeful things?”

The Lord said, “You live in a beautiful age where criminals have their crimes painted on their eyeballs with light, live their crimes in dreams until they sicken of crime or die.”

“Someone told you about cyberias. They’re just in the concept stage in my era. Civil liberties types are opposed.”

“They become reality in the late 2100s,” the Lord said. “Also tiny machines that can clean the microscopic vermin from the blood and biles.”

Sara said, “Nano-tech. It’s not quite out of the security labs. Everyone’s a bit afraid of it.”

“Why?”

“Because the machines could break and hurt the body they’re supposed to help.”

“Worse than the plague hurts? I would so love to see through a microscope,” the Lord said. “Would you wash my back?”

Sara felt a bit nervous about doing that, but when she turned around to look at the Lord in his tub, she saw that his eyes were red as though he’d been crying. “All the wonders,” he said, “and I won’t leave heirs to see them.” He put his hands over his head as though the tears that must have come from his red eyes embarrassed him.

The soap was hard, not the soft caustic jelly Sara expected. It looked just like bathsoap.

“Soap of Castile,” the Lord said.

“Yes, my Lord, I thought so.”

“Everyone in your day has hard soap. And cheap, too. I wish you’d brought one of those razors better than those of my time.”

Sara soaped his back, feeling scars beneath her fingers. Weren’t they supposed to be on the front?

“My scars? Those came from a boar when I was a boy. Would you shave me, or should I call back one of my squires?”

“I’m not sure how to do it with a straight razor, my Lord.”

“Ring the bell, then.” Sara did, and the oldest squire came in with a razor, a stone, and a strop. Sara sat back on the bench and watched while the squire shaved the Lord and washed his head. Then the Lord said, “Turn to the window again while I get dried and dressed.”

Sara peeked. The Lord’s body gleamed, shoulders and arms tightly muscled even though the muscles weren’t huge. An endurance body. She turned to the distorted view out the window when she saw the Lord looking back.

The bed creaked, linen moved. The oak door closed. “I’m in bed now with sheets and blankets up to my chin,” the Lord said.

Sara turned back. By the bed, a wick burned in a pottery lamp, giving off a yellow fluttering light. The Lord’s eyes looked molten. He had one hand under his still damp head. The other lay on top of the covers.

I could sleep with him, Sara thought. I can’t get pregnant and they don’t have syphilis or AIDS in this era. She wondered what the straw mattress and linen sheets felt like, too.

“Would you like to sit down on the bed?” He twisted and sighed as though he was supremely comfortable, between linen sheets, on a feather bed over a straw mattress.

Sara, very curious, sat down. The Lord placed one hand on her leg as though bracing her, not moving it. She slid her hand between the mattresses. The straw mattress felt strange, a crisp but giving surface, somewhat like a leaf pile under a tarp. The feather bed softened it. Her hand moved up. The linen sheets were fabulous, smooth and cool.

“I didn’t know . . .” She was going to sleep with him. “The linen.”

“I pity you that you can’t have the pleasure of down and linen in your future.”

“Your life’s so hard, then this.”

He moved his hand on her thigh as she moved her fingers on the linen sheets. She said, “They claim our fibers duplicate any natural fiber, but they lie.”

He said, “These would have been harsher when they were new, but they’ve been worn, washed, and boiled to this.” His fingertips brushed the sheet, then returned to her thigh.

She looked at him and wondered if the Lady would kill her for sleeping with the Lord. “What . . .?”

“It’s all right,” he said, still with one hand under his head, propped up. He took his other hand away from her thigh and put another pillow under his head. The blankets and sheets slipped down to show his chest. His hand came back to her knee and slid up her dress.

“You’re dead in my day.”

He closed his eyes, the lashes quivering against each other.

“Morty isn’t my lover or husband.”

The hand on her leg pushed all layers of fabric up to her hips, then went back to her naked thigh and spread out over it. The fingertips moved like tiny soft animals. She wanted to feel linen against her skin.

He said, “Linen is so lovely for tupping. It soaks away the sweats.”

She leaned forward and he undid the laces on the dress, then pulled her under the covers, against the sheets, and kissed her. The shift she wore was not so smooth and fine as his sheets. He slid it off her and she felt the linen caress her. His fingers quickly released the bra. He pulled it off and sat up in the bed to look at it.

“You’re a dab hand with a bra.” Sara giggled. “I’m not the first, then.”

“Are your tits flabby without this? Sit up.”

Sara sat up, drew her shoulders back. The Lord ran his fingers from her collarbone to her navel, and said, “Such a sensely anachronism.” He moved his body between her legs.

Then he grabbed her hands in one of his, pulled them over her head, and fucked her.

Sara couldn’t have possibly used karate. She was more bewildered than outraged. “Let me go. Let me help you. Let my hands go.”

The Lord slowed down and said, “Sometimes, women cry ‘holy me’ after they’re naked. I don’t rape, but I don’t allow women to try my patience.”

“I certainly wasn’t planning to try your patience. Okay.”

He didn’t let her hands go, but slowed down enough to catch her back up to his speed, then tried to tease coherent speech out of her. When Sara’s tongue tumbled in her mouth, the words tangled in her lust, she felt him speed up, her body going with his.

The sheets did soak up all the sweat. “Don’t grab my hands like that ever again,” Sara said.

The Lord seemed amused by her pique. “Why should I leave your hands free? Show me,” he said.

She was too spent to do anything, but said, “When I wake up.”

The Lord put one hand between her legs and the other on her left breast, and they both went to sleep. In the morning, he lay in bed naked and watched her dress. Sara said, “What’s your wife going to say?”

“She wondered if your tits stood up without a bra,” the Lord said. “I’ll tell her they did.”

Sara thought, They’re both dead in my real time. “I hope my Lord was pleased.”

“Tupping is always a pleasure. We both, of course, will have to do some sort of silly penance, but my confessor knows to make that light.”

The Lady came in. Sara blushed. “Her tits stood up,” the Lord said.

“So nice for you,” the Lady said. “Sara, you can take the thread back to the weaver. Tell him we don’t want any of his lip.”

She has to put up with this without showing any signs of jealousy, but I bet she is jealous, Sara thought. She pushed her feet into the clogs and tucked the slippers in her belt.

“If you were a village girl, I’d send you a sweet,” the Lord said to Sara as she followed the Lady out.

• • • •

At the edge of the village lived the weird people, a brother and sister who wore clothes in the oldest fashions, whose teeth showed signs of gritstone wear. Morty heard about them from the Balls. The sister spun, but never brought her thread to the floor loom weavers. She wore clothes whose threads turned sideways, woven into the cloth, then made another right-angled turn to travel in a different direction. Morty said, “A survival of the warp-weighted loom? It was traditional in Europe until Crusaders brought the floor loom concept back from Asia.”

“Still used in Scotland,” the boy weaver said. Sara didn’t say anything, wondering whether the Lady would poison her or if the Lord would call for her again.

Ball said, “Those people are mean as snakes.”

Morty asked, “Are they Celtic? Picts? Welsh?”

“Welsh,” Ball replied, but Welsh was Anglo-Saxon for all foreigners, that didn’t prove anything.

“Not Danish,” his wife said.

“Alice wears unsewn clothes that pin at the top,” the weaver boy said.

“She takes at least a year to weave one garment.”

“I’ve got to go see them,” Morty said.

“Wouldn’t be smart. They don’t work well with others. The Lord must have tupped Alice when she was younger, since he leaves them be.”

Sara hunched her shoulders.

Morty said, “Archaic technologies are my specialty.”

Ball’s wife said, “I’ll point them out when they’re up for ale. Don’t poke around. They hardly miss an alehouse, even if she never brews herself.”

Morty said, “Alehouse? Who’s doing the next one?”

“I am,” Ball’s wife said. “We should have it ready tomorrow if the ale taster approves.”

• • • •

Morty and Sara discovered that alehouses were the rent parties and garage sales of the Middle Ages. A woman brewed ale, paid the taster off if she’d skimped on yeast or got the wort chilled. Once the taster approved the ale, the ale wife hung her mixing whisk out by her door. The neighbors came over with musical instruments, got drunk, wailed away at subversive ballads that would get their composer on medieval most-wanted lists, plucking dulcimers and harps, beating tabors, drinking ale, gossiping, drinking ale, sending the children home for a cold joint, eating hearthstone breads raised by the ale yeast left in the bottom of the brew kettle, drinking.

In the ballad, the lord didn’t pay his bills and lost his child to a vindictive nurse and her carpenter lover. “God,” Sara said, “That’s ‘Lord Weary’s Castle.’ Do any of you know who wrote the words?”

“Nobody wrote the words,” Ball’s wife said. The tunes from the dulcimers and harps turned wordless.

Just as most of the people were leaving to try the other ale brewed that day, the weird brother and sister, Jethro and Alice, came in, black-haired and smaller than the other villagers, both looking like they were in their mid-thirties, probably actually in their twenties. Morty knew cloth from a warp-weighted loom when he saw it. Even more thrilling, the two used Celtic shoulder pins. The sister wore a rusty black tunic top, woven in a circle without visible joins and pinned at the shoulders, and a checked wool skirt that closely resembled a skirt rescued from a Danish bog in the twentieth century. The brother wore a woad-blue tunic that reached his knee tops, pinned, like his sister’s, at the shoulders. Morty wondered if these two people came from a deposed aristocracy. Alice looked at him, eyes flickering over his clothes, then she stared hard at Sara, aware, no doubt, that the Lord had called for her that morning, but that Sara had stayed for the ale house. Morty saw the brother’s knife and bow, how the other villagers left space around him.

Morty said, “Alice, may I examine your weaving?”

“Alice is what they call me, but it isn’t my true name,” she said. “But I will answer to it.”

“I’m from the future, a scholar of medieval technologies. We understand that warp-weighted looms survived in Central Europe until the sixteenth century and in Scandinavia and the Hebrides until the nineteenth century, but we didn’t know how long people used them in England.”

“I don’t know nothing about them Engles,” Alice said. “I magic the cloth from sticks and stones and let the little people wash and stomp it when I’m asleep.” She smiled as if wanting him to deny it.

“Of course, we only can prove the existence of warp-weighted looms if we have drawings or paintings, or if, as happens rarely, we find a row of stones parallel to a house wall. That happens if a roof collapses while the loom’s set up.”

“And if nobody digs out what was half-wove on the loom,” Alice said. “I’m like a spider, making a web without knowing like. So my brother says.”

“How do you make your garden? Digging sticks? Hoe? Plow?”

“With plow beasts,” she replied, looking at him as though he were daft.

Jethro, the brother, came up with two clay beakers of ale, said, “Alice, this traveler mucking with you?”

“I’m really interested in your tool kits.”

The brother laughed as though Morty had said something obscene. “So’s the Sir up in the stone house,” he answered. “I heard he’s been into your companion’s weaving.”

Morty saw that the beakers were handmade, of a pattern close to Beaker Ware, perfectly Neolithic.

Jethro smiled and said, “I found ’em.”

Morty remembered a Roman slave chain found in the 1940s and used to pull trucks out of mud until someone noticed that the links and shackles were hand-forged. He wondered how many Neolithic beakers got broken in medieval alehouses, how many ancient garments worn to rags went to the paper makers or, if silk, were used to clean eighteenth century mill gears. Moths and beetles got wool scraps. Otherwise, what tons of fabric would smother us?

Alice said, “He made ’em like what he found.” She drank her ale and smiled slightly.

Copies. Morty wondered if all the Beaker Ware surviving to his day had been dated by isotope. The past suddenly seemed more shifty than he’d anticipated. “Would you have made them even if you weren’t visited by time travelers?”

“Yes,” Jethro said. Like his sister, he smiled slightly.

“You’re Jethro. You and your sister live on the edge of the village.”

“They call me Jethro,” he said.

“I’m Morty.”

“I heard you proved Jew or Saracen at the bathhouse. When do they let you people come back to England?”

“I’m not a practicing Jew, actually. Cromwell let my ancestors come back in the 1640s. After Charles the First was beheaded.” Morty was uneasy about mentioning regicide.

“A King, killed. Used to happen all the time,” Jethro said. He went to get more ale. Morty followed and noticed that the coin Jethro used looked more unreal than the usual village coppers. From an earlier time traveler’s hoard?

“And what are you, Jethro? A freeman? I understand the Danelaw area had some other ranks, sort of half free.”

“I’m who I am, regardless of who might think he had me,” Jethro said. “My sister’s barren, so free of a husband. Don’t you want to tell me you’re a convertite?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, what we say. I need a lord, so I’m told, to avoid getting hanged,” Jethro said. “My sister and I, we’re on the manor roll, but inside my head, I’m freer than you.”

Morty said, “I don’t doubt it.”

Ball said, “Why do you time travelers find people unlike the most of us so good to talk to?” He thrust a wheel-thrown beaker into Morty’s hands.

Morty sipped the ale and stared at Alice, speculating about the body under her tubular clothes. Since Sara had fucked the Lord, he’d felt sexually edgy. Two pins pulled and he’d see the woman’s tits. A belt whipped away and the skirt would puddle around her feet.

Ball said, “Be careful, Time Traveler.”

Morty said, “Time travel is supposed to be risky.”

“Don’t go prodding around. Some people’s got stuff they wouldn’t want research papers writ on. Maybe the Lord would find out from a later traveler what’s on his land.”

Jethro and Sara moved away, drinking ale from their anachronistic beakers. Jethro turned back and smiled at Morty. His teeth seemed shorter than usual teeth, but Morty couldn’t be sure in the rush light.

Just as Sara got drunk, a messenger came from the manor to invite her back to the Lord’s bed.

• • • •

Morty found Jethro and Alice’s hut at the end of the village. It was a beehive hut, somewhat like a stone igloo. Even though Morty had noticed it before, he’d thought it was a granary or the village strong box in hut form. Morty wondered why the rest of the villagers didn’t use stone, or why these people did.

The door wasn’t corbeled or the classic arch. It was framed in timbers and wasn’t big enough to walk through upright. Morty saw skins on the walls inside. He called out, “Hello, the stone hut.”

Alice popped her head out and said, “One of the convertites. You don’t really want to come in.”

“I traveled all these centuries to see how your people lived.” Morty thought he smelled stale urine.

“My people?” She looked over her shoulder at her hut, then pointed to the other houses up the lane. “These aren’t my people.”

“I suspected as much. But I’m still curious.”

“We’re sort of like you, only from the past, not the future. Don’t study us. What most folks do is different. Study them.”

“I’ve studied warp-weighted looms from Aegean times to the twentieth century.”

“Most people don’t use them. They’re too slow.”

“Why do you use one, then?”

“I’ve got the time. No children. Go away. I’m glad to know that we all die, that it’s not just my people who’re going, but go away.”

“Please.” Morty knew he could force his way by this woman, slight as she was.

“No, I don’t want a paper writ on my loom.”

“You also have a pot quern, don’t you?”

“You stupid git, go away!”

“Please talk to me. I’m personally curious. I’ll promise not to write a paper on your tool kit.”

“You’ll crave to. And then something will happen so that you must. Don’t they call it getting tenure? Go away.”

Morty decided to wait until she left the hut, then he’d check. “How do you keep the rain out?”

“Skins inside. Brain tanned,” she said.

Circumpolar tanning practice, Morty thought. “Do you have any skin shirts?”

“Only for deep winter,” Alice said. “When the plague comes.”

“Don’t you want the future to know you existed?”

“The future’s none of my business.”

“That’s awfully unfair to me.”

“I don’t care,” Alice said. “You keep me from my light. If you stay here, I’m going to bar the door.”

Morty said, “Please, I’m not trying to be nosy.”

“I know you time scholars. You think because your people survive for generations to birth you that you own this past.”

“If you didn’t know we were from the future, would you be so upset with my curiosity?”

“I’m less upset. Among us, only the landlord’s men would be so curious.”

“I promise not to write a paper. I’m not interested in what you do, what tools you work with, for merely professional reasons. I’m truly fascinated by how humans do things.”

“Also, with my body, old as I am.”

Morty shut up, looked to see if anyone was watching, if the brother was coming back. “We have ways to make babies out of flesh samples.”

“I don’t care. Even if I sent a baby into the future, the baby wouldn’t be of us, wouldn’t know how to warp for stones, weave with string heddles, grind corn, make dark beer, sing the songs. What we were is over. Done. My brother and I lived beyond our own time.”

Morty said, “But doesn’t it matter to you that someone remembers?”

“Our ways didn’t work well enough to survive.”

“What were your people?”

“The foreigners called us Welsh.”

“Can you speak a different tongue than English?”

“I forgot it,” she said. “The tongue didn’t save us.”

“What if I told you that the Welsh in Wales still speak Welsh, have bardic contests.”

“We’re not Welsh like the Britons.”

Morty thought the tone of her voice had changed. She hadn’t thrown him out, barred the door, or yelled for her brother. “Pict?”

“Pict?”

Morty remembered that that term stemmed from Latin, meaning painted people. “I don’t know what you called yourselves.”

“We don’t share that.” Now she moved to bar the door.

Morty said, “I don’t want to spoil your light. I’ll leave you to work.”

Perhaps, Morty thought, she and her brother are Romanized Celts, children of native women and Roman legionnaires. Or Picts, whatever they called themselves. He went back from her stone hut and climbed a tree, where he could spy on her from the first crotch. His left visual field magnified the scene. He adjusted the mix of visual spectrum and infrared until he could see through the door into the shady interior.

Alice pissed into a clay pot and added the urine to a large cauldron. Dye pot? Lichen fermentation? Woad or indigo vat? Whatever, the pot wasn’t over the hearth fire, but rather beside it. After covering the pot with a skin, she looked out the door, but not up, not directly at Morty. Then, pulling on a cloak, she walked out of the hut. Morty saw she was carrying a sack. He climbed out of the tree and began to follow her.

She scrambled down a gully. Morty heard a small creek running at the bottom, trapped in underbrush. Then he heard stone against stone, a pot quern grinding.

Of course, Alice wouldn’t keep her quern in her hut. They were illegal. If the Lord’s agents found it out in the cave by the creek, they couldn’t prove who owned it.

Morty keyed his visual chip to map the place, and went back to Tod Ball’s house.

Sara came back from the manor house a few hours later with a black eye. Morty said, “How did that happen?”

“I told the Lady about infant mortality in our era.”

“She didn’t hit you because you slept with her husband?”

“No, I’m no threat to her that way. But she sure didn’t like hearing that modern women raise most of their babies. I suspect she’d slit my throat if I’d told her about frozen ova and zygotes.”

Tod Ball and his wife sat very still while Sara and Morty talked about this. Morty and Sara were silent and looked around at the grim faces. Ball’s wife said, “We think you rude when you talk Future in front of us. We don’t tell you about what travelers from your future told us. To tell us how you keep babies alive so easily is cruel.”

The weaver boy said, “Sara, don’t be slack-handed. Wind some quills for me.”

Tod Ball asked, “When will the plague be here?”

Morty asked back, “Where precisely are we?”

“You have to ask at the manor about that.”

“Don’t you know?”

“We know the boundaries. Beyond that, Scotland is north. London is south. The French are over the water to the west.”

“How far is the water?”

Tod Ball said, “One of the village bad boys actually went to the proper exile port when they outlawed him. Ships didn’t come, so he came back and got properly hanged a couple months later by the King’s court. Mussels and cockles packed in seaweed come here live, so the sea’s a day or two away.”

“I need plague samples,” Sara said.

“They’ll come to us soon enough,” the weaver boy said. “You might as well wait here and be useful. We can’t tell you the roads away, and the Lord isn’t tired of you yet.”

The weaver boy took the quills from Sara and got back on his bench, treadling slowly at first, beating the webs with his head cocked, as though he wasn’t quite paying attention to his weaving. Then he caught the rhythm of it and began to weave faster.

• • • •

Morty waited until Alice and Jethro were with the other villagers, threshing wheat with flails on the Lord’s wooden-floored threshing barn. The flails were long pieces of oak or ash with a shorter piece attached with either a leather strap or a chain, medieval physics in action. The hinge allowed the short end pieces to bounce all over the wheat heads when the flails hit.

Children laid a linen tarp down on the barn floor, and the adults began to flail the wheat. Despite the cold fall air, everyone sweated, stripped downs to shifts or breeches, and continued to swing the flails. Then they’d pause while old women forked the long straw away, lifted the tarp, and poured the wheat and chaff into shallow baskets. The old women and children began winnowing the grain, throwing basketfuls up so that the breeze could take away the lighter chaff. The adolescents and adults resumed flailing.

“Sara, I’m going to check something. Tell them I’ve been called up to the manor if anyone asks.”

When the Lord rode down from the manor house, Morty ducked behind a tree. The Lord spotted him, smiled, and kept riding.

Morty wished he’d told Sara something else to say. But now he could do a tool inventory, perhaps of the whole village. First, he’d see what was in Alice and Jethro’s stone hut.

The door was closed, but not barred. A Paleolithic woman sculpture leaned against the door by the leather hinges. The statue, about five inches high, wasn’t carved in stone but in wood, with huge curves in the tiny figure. Morty picked it up, then wondered if Alice or her brother positioned the statue precisely so as to know if someone broke in. He touched the carved vulva, framed by short and long fringes of a string skirt. Where could they have seen a Paleolithic Venus? Or had the tradition of these statues survived in wood after the rise of agriculture? The string skirt itself survived at least to the nineteenth century in the Balkans, though worn by then over clothes and with longer strings.

Or had they heard someone from the future talking about Paleolithic and Neolithic stone figures, and decided to make one of their own to confound the next time traveler? How could you know? Morty went on into the hut.

Yes, Alice wove on a warp-weighted loom, the already woven cloth near the top stick, the warps hanging down in bundles, tied to weights at the bottom. She’d improvised loom weights—clay bottles filled with pebbles, stones naturally shaped so a cord could be tied to them, a couple of partially fired clay doughnuts that were in the pattern of true loom weights. The weaving above seemed finer than possible with such a crude loom, though not so fine as the boy weaver’s linen. The pattern was birds’ eye twill, with a tiny dot of purple in the center of each eye, framed with blue and red on a brown ground.

None of the cloth survives. Even later, from Elizabethan time, Morty knew that only a couple of dresses, and those of doubtful provenance, survived. Tapestries survived. Ages and ages of work, and only a few European scraps to show for it. The Incas had left far more.

Morty felt dizzy thinking of all the dead generations doing ephemeral work, then reminded himself that they were working for themselves, not for later historians. But, from his perspective, this woman laboriously wove dust and moth food.

In the hut, Morty found a semi-lunar knife that could have been either an Eskimo woman’s knife or a parchment maker’s scraping blade, or the intermediary between both traditions. By the blade, he found an elm whistle.

The strange siblings cooked in a brass cauldron with figures hammered into the rim. They slept on wicker woven cots padded with animal skins.

One of the skins came from a wolf. Morty tried to remember when the last wolves died in England.

Then he looked up and saw a reindeer skull looking back down at him. Bromley Horn Dance, he thought. Reindeer antlers had survived centuries in a British village, into his own time. No one ever knew quite where they came from. Perhaps Jethro knew.

I don’t think they’re Latino-Celt at all now.

Morty turned around the hut, but nothing else looked so strange as the first things he’d spotted. He swept his footprints from the floor as he backed out, and put the doll back against the door under the lower leather hinge.

Now to see what Alice has at the cave. Morty triggered retrieval of his map to her ravine, and moved until virtual reality matched the on-time scene. What streaked when he turned his head too fast was the re-play.

At the gully, he turned off the re-play, and found the dug-out. It was roofed with timbers and sods, cut from the top down, not into the bank, the beginnings of a basement for a yet un-built house or the ruins of a Neolithic half-buried hut. The entrance was covered with brambles.

That’s why I could hear her grinding so clearly. I must have been standing almost on top of her. But the cave didn’t have an entrance through the sods over the timbers. Morty found a dug tunnel down in the gully, hidden behind brambles. He wished he had a flashlight. Since he hadn’t even brought a torch or candle, he went back up to the top and cleared some of the turf away from the timber roof. What with his augmented eyes, enough light would come through the cracks.

Back in the dug-out, he saw the pot quern, one stone like a giant doughnut on top of a thick stone saucer. The wooden handle in the top stone was greasy. Alice had cleaned up all the grain before she left, even washed the stones. Obviously, spilled grain and meal would draw insects here.

Along one wall was a drying frame. On it a piece of fulled wool, still wet. Even though the wool surface had become felted and the individual threads obscured, Morty saw the Greek key pattern woven into it. Alice either fulled it by walking it in the creek or had a fulling trough by the creek.

Evading the Lord’s mills was a crime for the manor court. Jethro and Alice looked like cottars, not virgaters, not among the wealthier villagers. They could never afford to pay a fine. They had to keep this secret.

Something hit Morty, and before he could figure out what had happened, he lay on the ground. Semi-conscious, he managed to roll over. Through the overlaid squirming of a random play-back from his shocked storage chip, he saw Alice and her brother with flails in their hands.

“Put a hide over him so we don’t get the flails bloody,” Alice said.

Morty tried to crawl away, but Alice broke his knees. Then the brother threw the wolf hide over him.

“Not that skin,” Morty tried to say, but the flails hit him. He could never have imagined that they could hit so hard. The computer chips in his head went haywire, throwing up random stored imagery, as though virtual reality could save him. What was happening came at eighty million polygons per second, his chip told him. Morty thought he remembered that reality was about that.

The flails kept falling at reality’s eighty million polygons per second until he was dead.

When the siblings took the wolf hide off the body, Jethro picked something like pieces of amber from Morty’s brains.

“Maybe they know it’s in him,” Alice said. “You leave it with the body.”

“I heard some of these brain ambers trap sounds and sights like real amber traps insects,” Jethro said. “I wouldn’t want a future army coming for revenge.”

He put the future brain things on a stone and bashed them with another stone. “Run them through the quern. Mill them to grit.”

Alice said, “They’ve got brain grease on them. I don’t want fat on my stones. Drop the bits in the creek.”

“What about that?” Jethro said, pointing at the future man’s body.

“Since he hasn’t been born yet, it can’t be manslaughter,” Alice said, “but let’s either get him away from the quern or the quern away from here.”

“Less messy to move the quern and the fulling trough,” the brother said, so they did.

• • • •

Morty was missing. “Somebody probably put the feathers to him for being too curious,” Ball’s wife told Sara, “but you stay right here.”

The weaver boy said, “That’s our talk for he probably got himself killed. Couple of other time travelers did that, too.”

The talk terrified Sara. She should live to tell the future time travelers what happened to them.

“Would the Lord’s wife kill me?”

The weaver boy said, “Shut up and stay out of everyone’s way.”

“What were the next people after me like?”

“What are your dates?”

“I was born in 2152. We came here in 2183.”

“You don’t look that old,” the boy said. “Don’t tell the other women how old you are, or they might kill you, too. The people who came here three months ago from 2200 pretended to be shipwrecked Basque sailors until we told them we wouldn’t let them leave without telling us their time, so maybe you lived to warn them.”

“What happened to them?”

“After we told them that we knew they were time travelers and they told us their time, they left. Perhaps the King’s coast guard picked them up on the Norfolk Road. Beyond that, I don’t know. I wasn’t here then.”

“Why do we keep coming back here? Why here?”

“God sends you here to keep the fabric of space time unbroken. Maybe it’s because Cecil is here to explain you to us. Or perhaps we all die of the pestilence. Or perhaps we don’t talk, ever. In our time, the Church accuses the unduly prosperous of being witches. I understand that in the future, the fey and uncanny get burned and hanged instead. Perhaps . . .”

“I don’t want to die here,” Sara said.

“What kind of weaving do they do in your future?” the boy asked.

“I don’t know. I just buy clothes, wear them, send them to recycling. They’re melted down or something and made back into clothes. Machines do it.”

“How often?”

“Our clothes wear out after a couple of wearings, but they’re very dirt and-odor resistant.”

“Are they pretty weavings?”

“I don’t pay much attention to that. We got reconstruction clothes before coming here. So they could be washed.”

The boy treadled the loom without throwing the shuttle, as though imagining a time that didn’t need him. “What would someone like me do without this work?”

“Maybe you’d have a skill implant, or maybe you’d design skill implants.”

“Skill implant?”

“A machine that feeds you information so that you remember better. Sometimes something inside your skull. Learning isn’t so tedious in our time.” Sara almost forgot that the villagers assumed one of theirs had murdered Morty.

The boy said, “Cecil found some amber in the brains of a couple of dead time travelers. He collects odd time traveler things.”

“He threatened Morty, didn’t he? With a Walther PPK.”

“What does a Walther PPK do to kill a man?”

“It’s like a very fast crossbow with a little lead quarrel. If you find lumps of lead at the ends of Morty’s wounds, then we’ll know Cecil shot him.”

“And how much would you want?”

“What?”

“You’re in his guild, so to speak. What would you want for Morty’s murder?”

“Isn’t murder a capital offense?”

“It’s not as bad as stealing from your Lord. Murders generally stem from people fighting each other. In Lincoln, people kill each other all the time. A man gets killed by other folks if he makes a habit of it.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t you know what our laws are?”

“We expected to arrive in a deserted village, just after the plague died back.”

“The false Basques didn’t seem too surprised to find themselves here. Perhaps you live.”

“I need to get back to where you found me.”

“It’s been more than two weeks now, but you could still leave, couldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“The Lord said to keep you here until we found Morty’s body.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“You need to help us determine the fine.”

“You want me to stay until the plague comes?”

The boy treadled without throwing the shuttle across the separated threads again, the loom pulleys and treadles creaking. “So hard to learn all that can be learned about a craft, but I don’t think I’d like living in a time that made it easy.”

“Morty was fascinated with your crafts.”

“He knew instantly that Alice wove on sticks and stones. The oldest way we know, the women’s way. I suppose my loom made Alice’s skills worth less. My arm could become a machine, the treadles worked with a cogged mill. Like a saw mill or a fulling mill. We invented the cogged mill here in England for sawing and fulling.”

Perhaps true. Perhaps not. “Too bad Morty isn’t here. He knows all about that stuff.”

“Hugh the smith said Morty watched as though he’d turn apprentice.”

“What do future people seem like to you?”

“People who want to take credit for things that past people invented. People who find physical work amusing, but who hate to sweat their minds to build links between mind and hand.”

“I thought you liked me.”

“You tried to learn something useful, at least. Morty mostly wanted to look. I suspect Alice and Jethro killed him. They hate people looking.”

“Are the stone and stick looms against the Lord’s rule?”

“Pot querns are. Fulling troughs are. Since you’re the first, people thought Morty would write an account for other time travelers and those people might tell the Lord.”

“But didn’t the time travelers all come last to first?”

“Perhaps not all. Some of you run when they realize where they are. But of those we spoke to, all.”

“So Morty doesn’t live to write about pot querns and fulling troughs.”

“Others wrote about the bathysphere and the hypocaust. We knew, because they weren’t surprised. Then they were surprised again. Perhaps the earlier records were destroyed in a fire.”

“Three hundred years worth of time travelers.” Sara couldn’t imagine what that might mean. Three hundred years back into her own past, the world worked more like the medieval world than like her present. The nineteenth century was the medieval with telegraph, photograph, telephone, and a steam engine with the same system, only made in metal, that turned rotary motion into reciprocal, round and round to up and down.

Ball came to the door then and said, “We found him. Flailed his brains open, they did. Couldn’t tell him by the face, but the body’s his.”

“Who did it?”

“We found him in a dug cave in the woods. Outlaws, perhaps.”

The weaver boy wouldn’t look at Sara. Sara suspected that the villagers knew who killed Morty, but would protect them against the Lord and his time-traveling whore.

Ball, however, as reeve, was a perfectly skillful liar. “Perhaps he surprised the halfwit leper. Old leper wanders through about this time of year. Sure is hard for you, being all alone with past people, and the plague coming.”

He led her to Morty’s body.

The body lay on boards held up by two saw horses. Sara reached for the left hand and listened to what was recorded inside the sesemoid bone. She heard no legal proof, but enough to convince her that either Alice or Jethro had killed Morty. Someone who didn’t speak smashed Morty’s ear or the brain link between ear and implant. Earlier, he’d muttered about querns and looms. The device should have continued to record after Morty died, but his ear . . .

The whole braincase was open. Sara tried to consider what she was doing to be just a dissection project, reached into the brain matter, and found nothing. No strange wandering leper did this, but rather someone who knew about futuristic brain inserts.

The Lord on horseback and his men on foot came up leading Alice. Sara said, “You or your brother did this.”

“A leper wandering through,” Ball said.

The Lord swiveled in his saddle, stared at Ball, then at Alice. Cecil said, “Sara, you didn’t find amber in his brain, did you?”

“No.”

Alice said, “You didn’t find him in my hut, did you?”

Ball said, “No.”

“Spilled grain or meal, where you found him?” Sara asked. She felt bolder with the Lord there.

“Just a leper’s bell and a porridge pot,” one of the other villagers said. “Ah, Alice, I haven’t seen you at the mills for either fulling or for grinding,” the Lord said, the tone that of a Lord to an ex-lover peasant.

“No,” Alice said. “We are poor, with only a few rods in wheat and maslin. We eat porridge.”

“What is that you have on?”

“Cloth from a wanderer,” Alice said. “I traded beakers for it.”

The Lord looked at Sara, his present peasant lover. “Do you have any high-tech proof?”

“He muttered something about a pot quern and a warp-weighted loom before he died. That’s all that was recorded. The blows that killed him damaged the apparatus. But Alice wears cloth woven on a warp-weighted loom.”

The weaver boy said, “No tiny lead quarrels?” Cecil came in behind him, looking nervous. The priest came up and laid a hand on Cecil’s shoulder, murmured in his ear. Cecil relaxed.

Sara hated them all that moment.

The Lord asked, “Alice, where is your brother?”

“On a pilgrimage, my Lord.”

“Without my permission?”

“When he comes back, my Lord, he will pay the fine.”

“Alice, bring your clothes to my mill. We can take one in three as payment. And your grain. We need to see you at the mill from now on.”

Alice said, “Neither of them born yet, so what is killing them out of time?”

The Lord said, “Nobody’s accusing you of anything other than not using my mills. So use them, and we’ll have no future trouble.”

“May my brother come back, then, without hurt?”

“I want you married away from him, and will forgive the fee.”

A man deep in the crowd muttered, “If she couldn’t be knocked up by all the men who’ve had her, she’s got to be barren.”

The Lord nudged his horse with his heel and rode into the crowd of peasants. “Isn’t this satisfactory for everyone?”

“My Lord,” Sara said. “Protect me.”

“Don’t go poking around my people. We don’t like being your research projects.”

The weaver boy said, “She knows the plague signs.”

Cecil said, “In a bit of brain amber, not from real learning.”

Sara said, “You may have invented the bathysphere independently, but you stole that Walther PPK. My Lord, I can help. I need to find out what causes it. We’re not sure in my day.”

The priest said, “Contagion.”

The Lord said, “She’ll tell you next that that’s over-simple. There are breeds of tiny contagion too small for men to see clearly. Various forms of dust.”

Sara wanted to say, smaller than dust, but she wasn’t interested in educating them now, just in watching them die. Morty was dead, and they weren’t going to hang the woman who did it, nor turn her over to the royal court. “Do you just let killers go?”

The priest said, “If she confesses to me, I’ll assign her proper penance. If she did kill your friend and dies unshriven, Hell takes her. But then, are you baptized, and why haven’t I heard your confession?”

The Lord’s horse stirred restlessly. Sara said, “I’d like to just go back to my own time.” Morty knew better than she how to work the traveler, but they’d both been cross-programmed on it. “Back where we first came.”

“In the time glade,” Cecil said. “But you can’t leave yet. You don’t have plague samples. You came here for cuts from our plague-killed flesh. We’re going to make sure you can get them.”

Sara asked, “You didn’t steal the traveler, did you?”

Cecil didn’t answer. The Lord said, “Cecil, give it back.”

“She has to promise to take me with her.”

Ball said, “Take us all away from the pest.”

Sara said, “It doesn’t work that way.”

The Lord said, “You came for tissue samples. What is a man but a large tissue sample?”

“Something small from the past, yes. And frozen.”

“Perhaps you’re lying.”

The priest said, “Could you take a man’s child back with you in your womb?”

Sara could, but she wouldn’t. She wondered if the technicians had lied to her about the impossibility of bringing larger unfrozen samples, live people, from the past. The future was overcrowded, and many pasts wanted rescuing.

The Lord said, “I’ve heard of plague down on the river. Men who have it breathe out death. I can’t send one of my own to that, so no, Sara, I won’t send Alice to the royal court. Perhaps you should take a child back. Cecil, are you man enough already? Would you trade your son’s life for the woman’s time-traveler device?”

Sara almost protested, but Ball’s wife gripped her arms. Cecil said, “How do I know, my Lord, that the child won’t be yours?”

“Have your aunt hold her until she bleeds, then keep her up for you alone until the bleeding stops.”

“Does she talk a lot about the future?”

“Not much,” the Lord said.

“Will you tell me about the future?” Cecil said.

“If you give me my traveler back. Not if you rape me.”

“She only whores for Lords,” Ball’s wife said.

The Lord said, “Sara, we will keep you until we die.”

“They’ll come looking for me.”

“You obviously do go home again. The fake Basques wanted little to do with us. They must have been warned.”

Sara almost said, I’ll see you dead, but instead bowed her head. She couldn’t conceive with the implant feeding contraceptives to her ovaries. Then she wondered if Cecil was the Lord’s natural son.

The priest said, “God sent you here.”

Cecil said, “I still want a son in the future.”

The Lord said, “Why don’t we let our seed fight? I wouldn’t mind sending a son in the future myself.”

Cecil pulled out the Walther PPK and said, “She’ll have a device set in her body so she can abort at will. Any scars on the belly or buttocks, my Lord?”

“A hard place on her left butt cheek,” the Lord answered. The Ball family took her inside their house. Ball’s daughters held her down while Ball’s wife pushed a knife against the edge of the birth control implant. Sara said, “You don’t have to cut me. Please, I can take it out without that.” She opened the flesh pocket and disconnected the shunts and leads, then slid out the implant. “Now your nephew can get me pregnant, or the Lord.” Easy enough to abort the fetus when she got back to her own time. “You don’t need to hold me until I bleed. I couldn’t get pregnant until I disconnected this.”

Cecil came to her that night. He held a knife to her throat while he fucked her, quite ineptly. Ball’s wife or Cecil watched her constantly, keeping her from seeing the Lord again.

• • • •

The time threads moved forward. Jethro brought the plague back with him when he found out he could return to the village.

Alice brought her cloth to the fulling mill, and the fullers died within two days. Alice dropped dead in church.

“Stay away from wool,” Cecil told the other villagers. “Let the bodies rot. Or burn them.”

Now Sara could get her tissue samples. She cut into Jethro’s buboes. The insides were anthracite black. As she froze her samples for the fake distaff, the plague moved into her body. The plague differed considerably from the bacteria and viruses used to develop the vaccines that enhanced Sara’s immune system.

When Sara came back from cutting into Jethro, the villagers waved her off with torches. She went down to the pond and saw Cecil. He sat beside his bathysphere inside a circle of fires.

“I heard that the pope saved himself this way,” Cecil said.

“Cecil. I need the traveler.”

“You could be carrying it.”

“The plague or your baby?”

“Either.”

“Perhaps I can use it to escape myself.”

“I won’t help you if you strand me here.”

“We’ll have to see if you caught it from Jethro before I can do anything.”

In a day, Sara felt knots under her armpits. I have the plague! I’m not supposed to be able to get it, whether it’s Yersinia pesti or anthrax. Sara went into Alice and Jethro’s stone hut at the end of the village. The villagers burned fires between her hut and their houses.

“Sara, Sara!” Ball’s wife called. Sara came out of the hut and saw poles with bottles waving over the fires. “Take them before the fires burn the poles,” Ball’s wife said.

Sara reached for the first swinging pole, grabbed the clay bottle tied to it. Water. “Thank you.”

“Will Cecil bring me the traveler?”

The weaver boy came up and listened while his mother said, “He says there’s no need to spread the pest through time.”

“Please, I need it.”

The weaver boy said, “We’ve burned Alice and Jethro’s bodies. Is the traveler you speak of small enough for one person to move?”

“No. It would take two people.”

“We’ll find it for you and put it back in the time glade. If you live, you can leave. Cecil’s just jealous.”

But I’m dying. It’s not supposed to happen.

Sara didn’t die the first day, nor the next. She found a kettle and managed to make porridge. They could take her out now.

The traveler did look like a fake rock when she saw it again. Cecil, the weaver boy, and a serf girl stood by it.

“I was going to try to go through without you,” Cecil said. “But now that you’re here, you can help me.”

Sara stared at them. Cecil had a leather bag on his lap. Sara guessed it was the Walther PPK. Open the gate, woman, and we’ll see who goes through.

Sara said, “I’m still sick.” She felt disconnected now from both this past and the future. “Where’s the Lord?”

Cecil asked, “Are you bearing a child?”

“Probably not.” I’ve gone insane. We’re supposed to be superior, but they’ve tricked me.

“You should have used something as heavy as a real rock,” the weaver boy said.

“Cecil pushed at everything new until he found it. Checked even fallen branches. It was too light, so he knew it had to be from the future,” the serf girl said. “Cecil is so smart.”

“Cruel to come here,” Sara said. “Sorry.”

“If you’d been one of us and got the pest, you’d have died,” Cecil said. “We think the Lord is ill. He’s hiding his neck.”

“I can’t go through immediately. They’ll only open the gate large enough for my tissue samples.”

Cecil said, “Someone gets through. The next group that comes through is afraid of us.”

Sara opened the rock and called up her training. Fever broke down the biolinks. She remembered as best she could. The traveler helped her and opened a gate. Sara said, “I’m ill of this,” and threw the biopsy sample freezer concealed as a distaff through the gate. “Will it be safe to come home?”

The medieval children stayed off from her, watching, sharing between them a small leg of cold lamb. Four hours passed. Sara sat down on a log and cried, then said, “You should go home.”

“If you can’t go back, we need to know.”

Meaning that they’d have to burn her body if she died on them. “If you live, you don’t talk about what happened here, about us. What do you become?”

“A people who remake church and country,” the little serf girl said. “My mother told me the stories when I was a baby. I’m going to move to Bath and become a weaving woman with dead husbands by the score. Others became pardoners with a yen for boys, preachers who give the Bible to the common man. We won’t stay owned. You’ve told us. The ones the pest doesn’t kill don’t talk about time travelers, but don’t we become different anyway?”

Yes, Chaucer’s people, the peasant rebels of the 1380s, not talking directly, not wanting to be accused of lying or witchcraft, but spreading an attitude. Sara couldn’t look at the girl anymore, but stared instead at the gate, waiting to know what happened next.

• • • •

When the weaver and Cecil’s girl helper didn’t show up at sunset, the Lord called for two men at arms to ride with him to the time glade. The serf girl laughed when she saw the Lord and his men. Cheeky little bitch, the Lord thought. Sara lay on the ground, not dead, on her side, one elbow cocked to prop up her head. She stared out at the centuries, eyes flicking toward him, then back to the long time stare. “We’re still waiting,” she said. “I may be quarantined here.”

“Quarantined?”

“If they think I’m carrying the pest. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“One thing I can tell you is that you don’t infect your future,” the Lord said. Cecil was sitting on a log. He held his anachronistic and stolen gun between his legs. The Lord wanted to ask his men to take the weapon from the boy. “Cecil, what do you need that gun for?”

“I’m going to make them take me.”

Then the gate shimmered, and things came through in smooth silver armor that flexed like heavy tweed, glass plates before their eyes, people in cloth of aluminum, perhaps. Cecil didn’t raise his gun.

“Sara, are you infected?” a man’s voice asked. “Feeling unusual?”

“They killed Morty.”

The figures looked around at the Lord and his men. “These people?”

“No, others. The killers died of the plague. They knew we were from the future. They all know.”

The villein girl said, “Take us with you.”

The Lord said, “No, you’ve got to die of the pest.”

“My Lord,” Sara said. The men in the flexible armor opened a suit for her. The pest could kill them, too, the Lord thought. Good.

“That boy, what does he have?” one of the strange men asked.

“A Walther PPK,” the Lord said. “Someone stole it from your future to have protection here.”

“Damn, get it away from him!”

Cecil said, “No.” He raised the pistol. “My Lord, how do you know I die of the plague?”

“There were no records, no memory of someone so brilliant, so inventive. But you.” The Lord pointed to the weaver. “Perhaps you don’t have to die. You’re just a weaver who stole from his master. History doesn’t record the deaths of such as you. You and the girl, leave.”

The weaver and the serf girl backed away, but didn’t leave. Curious and cruel peasants.

Cecil pointed his gun at the Lord and pulled the trigger. The shot went wild, but something stuck out of the stop of the gun, the spent brass jammed in the mechanism.

One of the men in the strange armor said, “Stovepipe!” Sara grabbed Cecil. Now, I’m killing him, she thought as she spat in his face, spittle in his eyes. Serves him right. The Lord signaled his men to help. They wrestled the Walther PPK from her. “May I see it?” the Lord asked. None of this was real. He didn’t order his men to hold the girl. “Why did you let Cecil keep it, my Lord?” one of his men at arms asked.

“I thought the anachronism was . . . amusing,” the Lord said. He remembered the archers at Crecy and wondered if time-traveler tales had made him fatalistic. “I probably die, too.” He felt dizzy as he said that, knowing his men would abandon him now. He’d been trying to hide the signs since the day before, but now he needed air. He pulled his clothes away from his neck.

Cecil smiled. The Lord almost ordered his men to hold him, but what Cecil had failed to do, the plague was doing, killing him. One of his men at arms bolted on horseback, the others backed their mounts away from the Lord.

The men from the future in their strange clothes took Sara and the stolen handgun away with them.

One man came back. Had time passed on the other side? “We didn’t mean to come to this time,” he said.

“None of you do. God may be sending you. The first came from your future. Or maybe Cecil is right about this being the beginning of your time, so here’s where you must return.”

The man had Morty’s hungry look then, but his own time took him back.

Cecil said, “My Lord, you look bad. Are you going to infect me now that I don’t have the gun?” The weaver took the girl by the hand and began backing away slowly, as though the Lord or Cecil might stop them.

The Lord remembered Sara’s spit, but wanted to mark Cecil himself. Mark him for hell. The Lord nudged his horse with his heel, riding up to Cecil. “Boy, neither of us win. The future doesn’t remember you or your bathysphere.”

But Time only forgot Cecil. His temperament dominated the future, that was clear, those inventions, that machine that opened holes in time the way his bathysphere took air below water. While Cecil would die/had died, his kind, those peasants with a fascination for aluminum, obviously won. Would win. Had begun winning.

More bathyspheres. Bathyspheres and their machine kin forever, moving through air, fire, and water. Time didn’t need the hypocaust, but the bathyspheres . . .

Perhaps future children of the work folk he owned now would even build machines that crawled through earth, that would find his bones. Had found his bones in that distant future. Put them in a museum somewhere. Owned his bones, the way he’d owned their ancestors.

The Lord told Cecil, “The future killed me.” He reached down and gripped Cecil very hard. “But you—the past got you.”

The Lord’s sword worked better than future guns that jammed.

© 1995 by Rebecca Ore. Originally published in Asimov’s. Reprinted by permission of the author. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rebecca Ore is the pseudonym of science fiction writer Rebecca B. Brown. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1948. In 1968 she moved to New York and attended Columbia University. Rebecca Ore is known for the Becoming Alien series and her short stories. Her novel, Time’s Child, was published by Eos in February 2007. Centuries Ago and Very Fast, described as a “collection of linked stories” was published by Aqueduct Press in April 2009.

EXCERPT: Sand (John Joseph Adams Books, forthcoming July 2017)

Hugh Howey | 2811 words

The old world is buried. A new one has been forged atop the shifting dunes. Here in this land of howling wind and infernal sand, four siblings find themselves scattered and lost. Their father was a sand diver, one of the elite few who could travel deep beneath the desert floor and bring up the relics and scraps that keep their people alive. But their father is gone. And the world he left behind might be next.

Welcome to the world of Sand, a novel by New York Times best-selling author Hugh Howey. Sand is an exploration of lawlessness, the tale of a land ignored. Here is a people left to fend for themselves. Adjust your ker and take a last, deep breath before you enter.

New edition forthcoming July 2017 from John Joseph Adams Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

5 • The Dive

The ropes pinched Palmer’s armpits as he was lowered down the shaft. He descended in jerks and stops, could feel the work of the men above handling the rope with their gloved hands. The dive light illuminated the smooth walls of the shaft as he spun lazily this way and that. Hap drifted a few meters below him on his own line.

“It’s fucking quiet,” Hap said.

Palmer added to that quietude. He reached out and touched the wall of this unnatural shaft and felt with his fingers the unmistakable packed grit of stonesand1. This shaft had been made. A chill spread across his flesh. He remembered Yegery saying something about two hundred suits. ‟They created this,” he whispered.

He and Hap inched downward, spinning as they went.

“They’re using vibes to hold this together. And to loosen the sand before they pump it.” Palmer remembered the soft and slushy feel of the sand as they had worked their way down the crater.

“The bottom’s coming up,” Hap announced. “I can see the sand down there.”

Palmer imagined the generator shutting off, or someone killing the power that held back this wall of sand, and all of it collapsing inward in an instant. It became difficult to breathe, thinking about the press of earth. He nearly turned his dive suit on, just in case.

“I’m down,” Hap said. “Watch your fins.”

Palmer felt Hap’s hand on his ankle, steering him so he wouldn’t land on top of his partner’s head. The shaft was tight with the two of them on the ground. They worked the knots around their chests loose and tugged twice on the ropes like Brock had said. “I’ll take lead,” Hap offered. He pulled his regulator from his chest, checked the line, then reached over his shoulder to spin the air valve. He made sure it was locked before biting down on his regulator.

Palmer was busy doing the same. He placed his regulator between his teeth and nodded. Somehow, an odd calmness overcame him as he pulled that first deep breath from his bottle. Soon he would be beneath the sand, the only place he had ever felt at peace, and all of this craziness around him would be forgotten. It would be just him and the depths, the calm cool sand, and the chance, however crazy, of discovering Danvar deep beneath their fins.

Hap powered on his suit by slapping the large button on his chest. Standing this close, Palmer could feel the vibrations in the air. They both set their homing beacons on the sand and turned them on. Palmer reached to his own chest and turned on his suit, then folded the leather flap over the switch so the journey through the sand couldn’t accidentally shut it off and trap him.

Hap pulled his visor down over his eyes, smiled, and waved one last time. And then the sand loosened around his feet and seemed to suck him downward—and Hap disappeared.

Palmer turned off his dive light to save the juice. He pulled his visor down and switched the unit on. The world went black, then gelled into a purplish blotch of shifting shapes. The air screwed with the sandsight, making it impossible to see. With the visor’s headband pressed to his temples, Palmer thought about what he wanted the sand to do, and it obeyed. The suit around him vibrated outward, sending subsonic waves trembling through molecules and atoms, and sand began to move. It began to act like water. It flowed around him, and down Palmer went.

Once the sand enveloped him, Palmer felt the exhilaration a dune-hawk must feel in flight, a sense of weightlessness and liberation, the power to glide any direction he liked. He directed his thoughts like his sister had taught him so many years ago, loosening sand below and pressing with a hardening of sand from above, keeping a pocket loose around his chest so he could breathe, diverting the weight of the earth around him to hold back the pressure, and taking calm sips from his regulator to conserve his air.

The wavering purple splotches were replaced with a rainbow of colors, the cool purples and blues of anything far away, bright orange and red for anything hard or close by. Glancing up, the shaft above him glowed bright yellow. It glowed like only the sand hardened by a suit could glow. It was so bright that the white pulsing of the transponders was difficult to spot, but one beacon was as good as any other. He looked down and found Hap, a spot of orange with green edges. His new visor worked great, had a much better seal to keep the sand out and far better fidelity than his last pair. He could clearly make out Hap’s arms and legs where once he would’ve seen a single blotch. Diving down after his friend, he spoke in his throat to let Hap know he had a visual on him.

I hear you, Hap responded. The sound came from behind and below Palmer’s ears, vibrating in his jawbone. The two of them went straight down, letting the sand flow around them. The pushback on the suits grew, making the flow more strenuous the deeper they went, making it more difficult to breathe. Palmer calmed himself by thinking of this as a quick down-and-up. No need to scavenge. Just one of those braggart dives where you go hard and fast as deep as you can, take a glance, come back up. A dive like his sister warned him about. But this wasn’t for ego; this was for coin. This was a job, not him proving something.

You picking anything up? Hap asked.

Not yet. Palmer watched the depth gauge in his visor. The distance was fed from the transponder left behind. Fifty meters. A hundred meters. It grew more and more difficult to breathe, and it required more concentration to move the sand. The farther down they went, the more packed and heavy the column of sand above them. This was where many divers panicked and “coffined,” or let the sand freeze stiff. His sister had pulled him out of a coffin twice while training him on some of her old gear. When the desert wraps its great arms around your chest and decides you won’t breathe anymore, that’s when you feel how small you are, just a grain of sand crushed among infinite grains of sand.

Palmer kept his mind clear as they drifted through one fifty. He hit two hundred meters. This was about as deep as he liked to go. He calmed his mind, ignored the bit of sand getting past his visor and into his ears, the sand at the corner of his mouth as it filled that gap between lips and regulator, the sand crunching between his teeth, and just concentrated on the flow. The batteries on his suit were strong; he’d doubled them up a few dives ago. His gear and mind were good. He felt that serenity that hits him when he’s able to hold his breath for minutes at a time, that complete feeling of peace, the sand cool on his scalp and neck, the world drifting further and farther away.

Two hundred and fifty meters. Palmer felt a surge of pride. He couldn’t wait to tell Vic—

Shit. Shit. Shit.

The words rattled through his teeth—Hap must be shouting in his throat. Palmer looked down at his friend, and then he saw it too. A bright patch. Something hard. Something huge.

Where’s the ground? Palmer asked.

No fucking clue. What is that?

Looks like a cube. Maybe a house? Quicksand got it?

Quick don’t go this deep. Fuck, it goes down and down.

Palmer could see that now. The square of bright red glowed into orange as they got closer, and he could see how the hard edges of the structure faded through to greens and blues as it went down. It was a square shaft of some sort, buried beneath the sand, sitting vertical and massive and deep.

Getting hard to breathe, Hap said.

Palmer felt it as well. He thought it was this strange object in his sandsight making it difficult to breathe, but he could feel how much more packed the sand was, how much harder to make it flow. He could still sink, but rising up would be a test. The weight of all that sand above him could be keenly felt.

We turn back? Palmer asked. His goggles said two fifty. It was another fifty or so down to the structure. With the two hundred meters they’d cheated from the dig, they were technically at four fifty right then. Damn. He had never dreamed of diving so deep. Only two fifty of it was him, he reminded himself. But still, his sister had told him he wasn’t ready to go even that far. He had argued with her, but now he believed. Goddamn, was she ever wrong about anything?

Gotta see what it is, Hap said. Then we go back.

The ground must be a mile deep. Don’t see an end.

I see something. More of these.

Palmer wished he had Hap’s visor. His own was digging into his face, pushing on his forehead and cheekbones like it might smash right through his skull. He worked his jaw to lessen the pain, strained downward, and then he saw something too. Bright blues down there, more square shafts, and another to the side a little deeper, just a purple outline. And was that the ground down there? Maybe another three hundred meters down?

I’m getting a sample, Hap said. His words came in loud. The sand was dense, the visor bands transmitting the words from throat to jawbone louder than usual. Palmer remembered Vic telling him about this. He tried to remember what else he’d heard about the deep sand. He was sucking so hard to get a breath now that it felt like his tank was empty, but the gauge was still in the green. It was just the tightness around his chest, which was growing unbearable. It felt like a rib might snap. He’d seen divers taped up before. Seen them come up with blood trailing from their noses and ears. He concentrated. Told the sand to flow. He followed Hap, when his every impulse was to get out of there, to turn and find his beacon, to push the sand up as hard and as fast as he could, pile of coin be damned.

Hap reached the structure. The walls appeared perfectly smooth. A building. Palmer could see it now—an impossibly tall building with small details on the roof, some so hard and bright that they must be solid metal. A fortune in metal. Machines and gizmos. Something that looked like ducting, like the building used to breathe. This was not built by man, not by any man Palmer knew. This was Danvar of legends. Danvar of old. The mile-deep city, found by a bunch of smelly pirates, Palmer thought. And discovered by him.

6 • Danvar

Hap reached the building before Palmer. It was a sandscraper that put all the sandscrapers of Springston to shame, could swallow all of them at once the way a snake could eat a fistful of worms. The top was studded with goodies, bright blooming flashes of metal untouched by scavengers: threads of pipe and wire and who knew what else. Palmer could feel his skin crawl, even with the sand pressing him so tight.

I’m taking a sample, Hap said.

Normally they would grab something loose from the ground, an artifact or scrap of metal, and rise up with it. Palmer pushed deeper and watched Hap scan the vast landscape of the building’s roof. The adrenaline and the sight of such riches made it a little easier to move the sand—the sudden rush of willpower and desire helped as well—but breathing had become an effort.

Nothing loose, Hap complained, exploring the roof. The top of the building had to be as large as four blocks of Springston.

I’ll break something free, Palmer said. He was now as low as Hap. Lower. His competitive spirit had driven him down past the edge of the building, dipping well past three hundred meters. The concept of breaking a personal record was lost in the rush of such a discovery. Such a monumental discovery. He worried no one would believe them, but of course their goggles would record everything. They would store the entire dive, would map the shapes beneath them, those great pillars reaching up like the fingers of a deity long buried.

And now the palm of this great god, the ground between the scrapers, was dimly visible. It was studded with bright metal boulders that Palmer recognized as cars, all preserved in great shape, judging by the signal bounce. But it was hard to read the colors this deep. He was in unfamiliar territory. As if to highlight this, the air indicator in his visor went from green to yellow. One of his tanks had gone dry, a dull click as a valve switched over. Not a problem. They weren’t going any deeper. This was halfway. And he would use less air going up. Fuck, they were going to get out of here. They were going to do this. Just needed to look for something to break loose, a souvenir.

He probed for any sand that might be inside the building, sand he could grab and flow toward himself in order to breach the scraper and grab some small artifact. The flat wall before him had the signal bounce and the wavering shimmer of colors that screamed glass. Hollow, he told Hap. I’m ramming it.

Palmer formed a sandram with his mind, pictured a hardening of the sand in front of him and a loosening of the sand around that. His left hand twisted and turned inward the way it did when he concentrated, and he could feel himself sweating inside his suit despite the coolness of the deep sand. The ram was there. He made himself know the ram was there. And then he threw it forward, flowing the sand around it, losing control of the sand around his body for a moment, feeling it tighten everywhere at once like a coffin, his throat held fast by two great palms on his neck, chest wrapped with a wet and shrinking blanket, arms and legs tingling as the blood was cut off, and then the ram hit the building and dissipated, and Palmer had the sand flowing around him once again.

He took a deep breath. Another. It felt like pulling air through a narrow straw. But the flashes of light in his vision stopped their blinking. Palmer sank a little, but finally he righted himself. The view before him had changed. There was sand inside the building now. He had shattered the glass. A wavering patch of purple told him that there was air in there. A hollow. Artifacts.

I’m going in, he told Hap.

I’m going in, he told himself.

And then the sandscraper swallowed him.

Copyright © 2013 by Hugh Howey. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hugh Howey is the author of the acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel Wool, which became a sudden success in 2011. Originally self-published as a series of novelettes, the Wool omnibus is frequently the #1 bestselling book on Amazon.com and is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller. The book was also optioned for film by Ridley Scott, and is now available in print from major publishers all over the world. The story of Wool's meteoric success has been reported in major media outlets such as Entertainment Weekly, Variety, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Deadline Hollywood, and elsewhere. Howey lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife Amber and his dog Bella.

Book Reviews: May 2017

LaShawn Wanak | 1765 words

This month, I’ll be reviewing Tremontaine, created by Ellen Kushner, Buffalo Soldier by Maurice Broaddus, and Wicked Wonders by Ellen Klages.

Tremontaine
Created by Ellen Kushner, written by Ellen Kushner, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Malinda Lo, Joel Derfner, Patty Bryant, Racheline Maltese, and Paul Witcover
Hardcover / Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781481485586
Saga Press, May 2017
688 pages

I don’t think I had the pleasure of reading Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, although I seem to vaguely remember reading Privilege of the Sword. Luckily, Tremontaine does not require previous reading of those two books because it’s considered a prequel to both stories, which is nice because it gives those like me a lovely entry into this fantasy world.

Tremontaine has been out since last year from Serial Box as a series of episodes you can buy and read. Season One has been gathered into a printed volume, which I’m reviewing here. The book is thick at 688 pages, but each episode/chapter is introduced with a lovely shadowbox illustration. In keeping with the episodic format, Kushner ups the ante by not writing this on her own, but has gotten several authors to collaborate with her in writing the story. The result is a cup of dark chocolate, rich and deep and intertwined with complex flavors.

Ixaab Balam, Kaab for short, a swordswoman trained in the spy arts, arrives in Riverside to aid her family, merchants who import chocolate. She becomes friends with Micah, a farmer girl who has a strong aptitude for numbers, and Rafe Fenton, a scholar who wishes to open a university of his own. She also eventually meets Duchess Diane Tremontaine, who is working to protect her name, her fortune, and her life.

Diane truly exemplifies the saying, “Every villian is a hero of their own story.” Despite the machinations she undertakes to keep the life she knows, I was surprised to find myself sympathizing with her . . . sometimes. It doesn’t help that the other characters’ goals interfere with her own: Kaab wants to make sure her family are the only traders the city gets their chocolate from. Rafe unexpectedly finds himself having a hot and passionate affair with the Duchess’s husband, William Tremontaine. Even Micah’s push to solve mathematical equations becomes a hindrance to the Duchess’s plans.

Tremontaine is notable for its queer romance. The book contrasts the fast, hot passion of Rafe and the Duke with the slow, romantic build of Kaab and Tess, the red-haired forger (oh, the chocolate making scene . . . so decadent). But really, it’s all the political maneuvers that move the story along like a curious clockwork dance, as all the characters work to attain their goals without the others getting in their way. The best example is the chapter “The Swan Ball,” a delightful tour de farce that, to me, is the pinnacle of the book.

At times, I forgot that the story was written by different authors. The ending was deliciously satisfying and . . . huh, this book has made me surprisingly hungry. I hope Season Two is just as satisfying.

BuffaloSoldier
Maurice Broaddus
Ebook / Paperback
ISBN: 9780765394293
Tor.com, April 2017
176 pages

Black Steampunk. Yeah!!! I was so bummed I didn’t get a chance to review Nisi Shawl’s Congelese steampunk novel Everfair, so when I learned that Maurice Broaddus had also written a steampunk novella, I snatched it up. And oh, did it not disappoint. It’s not just steampunk, it’s western steampunk!

Desmond Coke, Jamaican member of the Niyabingi, a Rastafarian group of military radicals, is on the run with a young boy, Lij Tafari. On the surface, Lij is just a boy, like everyone says. But the kid has a secret: He’s been manufactured from the cells of an ancient hero. What does that make him? A weapon? A clone? Whatever he is, people want him for their own use. Desmond is there to make sure that doesn’t happen.

A lot of people want Lij, though. Chief among them is Cayt Siringo, a psychic detective who is trying to capture Lij for her unnamed client. Other people keep getting in her way, however, so sometimes she has to join forces with Desmond to keep Lij out of wayward hands so she can steal him for herself.

The novella is a short read, but a fun one. The setting is alternate history steampunk, but it was hard to pinpoint the exact time period. Sometimes it feels rustic dystopian. People travel by carriages or on foot and use folk healers. Desmond uses a sword cane to fight. But then again, there’s sign of advanced technology: Cayt uses two modified Colt Mustangs. There are steam-powered cyborgs. And, of course, Lij.

The first half has a wonderful western feel. The gunfight in the bar Redeemer (in the town Abandon) is fast-paced and fun. While the exposition leading up to it is heavy, Maurice breaks it up with the characters knowing this is all for show, and by showing the tension building in the bar patrons watching, waiting. The other half of the novel is compelling in its own right, as Desmond and Lij stumble into Wewoka, an eco-friendly city populated by the Niitsitapi, descendants of Seminole and African American slaves. Their pregnant leader, Kajika, treats her city with the same care as she treats her husband, Inteus, the captain of the guard: trusting in their ability to protect her, yet no-nonsense in her decisions to protect the ones she love.

But the most interesting things in this novella are the stories the main characters tell to Lij. Stories serve a function, used for dreaming, for warning, for passing on heritage. What is the purpose of these stories? For Lij to hear them? I found Cayt’s story about the boy who has Death as his Godparent most compelling. What will Lij do with these stories? How will they shape him? Or is his power drawing stories out of others?

Broaddus does a good job with the characters, portraying Desmond as a world-weary homesick traveller. Despite his life on the road, he manages to dress dapper. Cayt is fun, wild. Her skirmishes in battle are a joy to read. She contains secrets. When she reveals herself to Lij, it is poignant and makes me want to know more about her life. She’s just as world-weary and cynical as Desmond. I want to see more of the two of them together. And Kajika’s story of how she founded Wewoka deserves a tale in itself.

Of course, being a novella, the ending came all too soon. But as Broaddus himself says through Kajika: “No story ever ends, but sometimes the telling of it has to.”

Wicked Wonders
Ellen Klages
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781616962616
Tachyon Publications, May 2017
240 pages

I first fell in love with Ellen Klages’s writing with her story “In the House of the Seven Librarians.” She was the writer who I wanted to be when I grew up, and I didn’t discover her until my late thirties. I snapped up her first short story collection Portable Childhoods. In Wicked Wonders, she continues her stories centered around women of all ages, with witty, sly, wicked, and poignant points that slip into your ribs when you least expect it.

Klages’s protagonists never settle for the status quo—from the opening story “The Education of a Witch,” where Lizzy is taken to see Sleeping Beauty and becomes enamored with Maleficient, much to her mother’s dismay (“she can turn into a dragon, purple and black, breathing green fire!”), to “Hey Presto!” where a British girl stays with her magician father, thinking she’s going to be bored, but ends up becoming captivated with his acts.

The stories range from speculative to literary to science fiction, with the emphasis on science. A children’s game of magic square becomes a means of escape in “Gone to the Library,” while the history of suet provides the catalyst for the “Sponda the Suet Girl and the Secret of the French Pearl” (which was a laugh-out-loud tale of a thief that gets his comeuppance in the most delicious way possible). Indeed, you can tell when Klages has fun with some of stories, such as “Friday Night at St. Cecilia’s,” where game night turns into something almost deadly absurd, and “Mrs. Zeno’s Paradox,” which must be read aloud for its side-splitting (pun intended) wit.

Other stories punch you with such poignancy it takes your breath. My favorite is “Amicae Aeternum,” about a girl rising up early on the last day in her home. Her going out to experience her town for the last time is slow as she takes in details, a meditation on experiencing things she will never see again, and when we learn why, it hits in a hard way. “Echoes of Aurora” is a meditation on the passage of time and impending loss through the love of a tree dryad. “Caligo Lane” is the story of an unusual cartographer who has a heart-wrenching quest. And “The Scary Ham” is probably the most straightforward story in the collection, and, it becomes apparent, the most personal story of Klages, I think.

The best part, for me, was the Story Notes. I’m a sucker for author’s notes on stories. They give an inside look on how stories are created, which is valuable for writers. It is like Ellen is right there with you, beer in hand, cracking wise on the wonderful and mysterious world that is fiction writing, and you want to follow her down into it, craziness, drama, and explosively beautiful moments all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak is a graduate of the 2011 class of Viable Paradise. Her fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Ideomancer. She served as Associate Editor at Podcastle, and has written nonfiction for Fantasy Magazine, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the anthology Invisible 2.

TV Review: May 2017

Jenn Reese and Christopher East | 2137 words

The 100
Created by Jason Rothenberg
Produced by Bonanza Productions, Alloy Entertainment, Warner Bros. Television, CBS Television Studios
2014-current

The CW is known for its wide array of superhero and dark fantasy shows, from Arrow to iZombie. It’s even doing well in the non-speculative arena with breakout hits like Jane the Virgin and the critically acclaimed Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. But one of the network’s strongest offerings is the ambitious post-apocalyptic epic, The 100, now in its fourth season and renewed for a fifth. You might be sick of apocalypse stories. You might not want another grim show in your nightly lineup. Maybe you have something against teen protagonists. We’re here—as two people who rarely agree on what to watch—to tell you why you need to give it a try anyway.

Developed from a young adult book series by Kass Morgan, the premise of The 100 is simple enough: In the distant future, radiation has rendered Earth’s surface uninhabitable. Humanity has fled to a number of massive “arks” in Earth’s orbit. Due to dwindling resources, however, the arks have started to fail. Leaders make the cold calculation to send criminals back to Earth’s surface to test its survivability. Because adults are immediately executed when convicted of crimes, the only criminals available are juveniles: one hundred of them, in fact. Sending these young people to Earth serves the dual purpose of conserving life support on the arks and providing valuable intelligence on Earth conditions. But when the hundred arrives on Earth, nothing turns out the way they expect.

Chris: You introduced me to The 100. What was it about the show that first hooked you?

Jenn: I was onboard from the pilot. It does a great job setting up the premise and establishing characters who have compelling backstories and goals, sometimes in line with others, sometimes not. The first few episodes have a Lord of the Flies feel as the characters face their newfound freedom in various ways. But as the series progresses, it quickly develops into a rich, multifaceted drama that is riveting, addictive, and morally complex. If there’s one thing you should know about this show, it’s that nothing stays the same. Characters change over time, and the plot and tone can change in the space of one or two episodes. If you don’t like where the show is going, just keep watching. It’ll be going somewhere new in a few hours.

That said, I almost stopped watching early in season one, at the death of one of the more likable characters. A friend urged me to keep watching and I did. Soon after, the show shifted away from its early chaotic episodes and hooked me completely. So my recommendation is this: If you love it or hate it immediately, go with that feeling. If you’re anywhere in between, give it a good five episodes before you decide.

Chris: That’s great advice. It took me an episode or two to get past my impression of the show as superficial eye candy . . . which may have been my initial barrier to entry. Whatever its origins, The 100 quickly proves to be a robust and challenging series, initially as a survival drama. You mention Lord of the Flies, which certainly leaps to mind; the more genre-specific comparisons are surely Battlestar Galactica and Lost, ensemble shows with similarly urgent and compelling openings. But while both of those shows gradually exhausted their early goodwill with rambling, seat-of-the-pants narratives, The 100 manages to always feel structurally on-target, even as its episodes are jam-packed with character and plot . . . and even as it shifts gears and adds levels from season to season. For me, in fact, it sometimes feels like several different shows at the same time: There are so many angles from which to view it. Young adult, survival story, war epic, allegory, and so forth. This makes it a great crossover show, since I think it services numerous tastes and viewing styles.

Jenn: This works because The 100 never loses sight of its themes. Some shows have writers’ rooms that are making everything up as they go (I’m looking at you, Battlestar), and that is so clearly not the case here. Perhaps that’s a holdover from The 100’s YA roots—you can have just as much death and destruction in YA (indeed, the casualties in this show rival or perhaps exceed those in Game of Thrones), but the deaths are thoughtful. They can be senseless within the story, but must be purposeful from behind the scenes. I think a lot of TV shows equate tragedy with art, but The 100 is art about tragedy.

Chris: Absolutely agree on this. And it calls to mind another strength of a show: By and large, it is very much in control of its messaging. The show has a sprawling cast of characters, and throwing them into conflict is inherently necessary in this style of ensemble series, but unlike many shows, the characters of The 100 choose sides mindfully, and often both sides of the argument have valid points of view. Compare this against Lost, for example, which is rife with contrived, arbitrary factioning. There, the showrunning seams often show: Characters have arguments for the sake of it, or for logistical reasons, or to pad the plot. In The 100, the conflicts are organic, the factions aren’t arbitrary, and the substance of the arguments actually matters. From an ethics perspective, it may be the most interesting show on television.

Jenn: This emphasis on theme is brilliantly realized through the show’s characters. Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor) is the show’s hero, the charismatic daughter of one of the Ark’s leaders, imprisoned because she threatened to tell the truth about the Ark’s doomed future. She is idealistic but practical, both an artist and an apprentice medic used to making tough decisions. Indeed, triaging becomes one of Clarke’s most utilized skills. Her journey through the show sees her struggling to find a balance between keeping her people alive and making the sorts of ruthless calculations the adults made in the pilot episode. She is the living embodiment of the fear that we will become our parents. But Clarke knows herself well and her change is incremental. Most of the other characters are neither burdened nor blessed with such self-knowledge, and undergo more dramatic personal transformations.

Chris: Some of which are quite harrowing, and others inspiring . . . I’m tempted to name names, but I want to avoid spoilers! Instead I’ll veer into why I think it’s important to start the discussion of character with Clarke: because she’s a leader. The 100 is extremely interested in leadership, providing many strong characters displaying different leadership styles: Clarke’s rival in the hundred, Bellamy (Bob Morley); the embattled adult leaders of the ark, Thelonious Jaha (Isaiah Washington), Dr. Abigail Griffin (Paige Griffin), and Marcus Kane (Henry Ian Cusick); and later, the stoic Grounder leader Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey) and the ruthless Charles Pike (Michael Beach). This fascination with leadership goes beyond merely providing figureheads for obligatory TV conflict; it harkens back to the show’s consistent, deep focus on ethics. These leader characters (and more) are emblematic of ways of existing in the world, of how to behave and interact and govern, and how to handle the complexities of coexistence. This is the show’s driving central allegory, its pointed commentary on the timeless human struggle, and the show feels so much bigger than it looks . . . if that makes sense.

But there are also the followers, those characters swept up in the forces beyond their control, who chose sides and back up positions and make their own tough choices. My favorite is still the show’s itinerant, chaotic-neutral survivalist Murphy (Richard Harmon), but there are many, many others—some of them, perhaps, failed or defeated leaders. When faced with opportunity, or injustice, or tragedy, how do you react? The 100 delves into the psychology of those decisions, and leverages its huge, talented cast toward exploring all the options.

But now we’re gushing. Is there anything about the show you don’t like?

Jenn: Let’s be honest: Most of these characters should be dead ten times over by the fourth season, and only some of them are. Go in with your disbelief pre-suspended, and you’ll be fine. It’s worth it.

Chris: I have to agree on the characters’ superhuman resilience. Were they all descended from Jack Bauer? Come on, now, cauterizing wounds with a red-hot poker shouldn’t cure all ills!

Jenn: And then there’s season three. The writers chose to handle an event in season three so poorly that even their most diehard fans rebelled and tried to sink the show’s ratings. That is a serious amount of (justifiable) anger. The 100 is a fantastically diverse and feminist show. Women are doctors, engineers, soldiers, warriors, and leaders. There are times when there are two, three, or four factions all with different agendas, and none of them are being led by white men. By season four, there is regular LGBTQ representation. They do all this and they make it look easy. (Because, seriously, it is easy.) But even when a show does so much right, without full representation in the writers’ room, it’s still possible to promulgate harmful tropes. Since the show is in its fourth season now and has been renewed for a fifth, they have time to try to earn back their fans’ trust.

Chris: And I hope they do. The narrative wind-down at the end of season three was epic, and if the series can pull together a few more sequences that strong before sticking the landing on its ultimate finale, it could cement itself as an SF classic. This current Golden Age of TV is so robust that it’s easy to overlook a gem like The 100, which perhaps looks disposable at a casual glance, but really has so much more going on than some of the prestige dramas snapping up all the awards.

Jenn: From the beginning, the showrunners have described The 100 as a tragedy, and they certainly don’t flinch from killing characters. Normally I wouldn’t go anywhere near a show as dark as this one, but there are a few things that keep me watching anyway. We’ve already mentioned the complex characters and thoughtful exploration of theme. Let’s add cool science fiction concepts, epic battles, and moments of grace. I can’t talk about the science fiction without spoilers, but I’ll say this: I have had more than one Fringe moment, where I think I know what’s happening and a very cool twist has completely surprised me and taken the story in a new direction. As for battles, you can expect shoot-outs, close-quarter struggles for survival, sword fights, and full-scale sieges. That’s not even mentioning the battlefield medicine, biological warfare, and actual missiles. If at least three characters are not covered in blood and injuries by the end of every episode . . . well, I frankly can’t imagine it.

But here’s where the moments of grace come in. Ultimately, almost every character is simply trying to survive, and most are trying to help others to survive. This isn’t the story of cruelty for cruelty’s sake or some dictator’s grab for more and more power. People want to live, and they want their friends and families to live. And in this struggle, allies are forged, friends are made, lovers find one another. There are victories to celebrate, even if the new season brings a host of new threats. It may be a tragedy, but it is not solely about survival.

Chris: Which circles me back to the point about the show’s versatility. My first tendency is to geek out about the wide-angle analysis: the worldbuilding, the political subtext, the show’s thought-provoking science-fictional allegory. But when you zoom in, you’ve also got that intense human drama, those epiphanies and triumphs or even just quiet moments of connection between characters you’ve grown to care about. Whether you stand back for the spectacle, lean in for the personal, or both, The 100 has got you covered.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Christopher East is a writer, editor, reviewer, and avid consumer of science fiction, fantasy, and spy fiction. His stories have been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Cosmos, Interzone, Talebones, The Third Alternative, and a number of other speculative fiction publications. He’s attended the Clarion and Taos Toolbox writing workshops, and served for several years as the fiction editor for the futurism, science, and technology blog Futurismic. He blogs extensively about writing, fiction, film, television, music, comics, and more at www.christopher-east.com. Currently he lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works for an occupational and environmental health and safety consultancy.

Jenn Reese writes science fiction and fantasy for readers of all ages. She’s published numerous short stories in places such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Paper Cities. Above World is the Norton Award-nominated first novel in her middle-grade trilogy from Candlewick Press and combines science fiction, mythology, and martial arts. Jenn works as a freelance graphic designer and spends her free time playing video games, watching way too much TV, and planning all the activities she’d enjoy if she ever left her cozy house in Portland. Jenn can be found online at jennreese.com.

Interview: Steven Barnes

Christian A. Coleman | 3721 words

Steven Barnes is a best selling, award-winning screenwriter and novelist from Los Angeles. He has written over twenty novels and worked on shows such as The Outer Limits, Stargate SG-1, and Baywatch. His true love is teaching balance and enhancing human performance in all forms: emotional, professional, and physical. He is a life coach, Circular Strength Training coach, and certified hypnotist, as well as a trained yoga instructor, Tai Chi instructor, and fourth-degree black belt. His new novel, Twelve Days is due out June 2017 from Tor Books.

You wrote Twelve Days thirty years later as a sequel to The Kundalini Equation. What changed for you during those years in terms of the concept and your approach to the subject matter, in particular the mystical/martial arts practices?

The most important thing is that The Kundalini Equation was speculation based upon what I’d read, or heard in lectures. But apparently I’d made some pretty interesting extrapolations, and people with genuine knowledge began to pay attention to me, and offered entrance to some fascinating circles. I extensively studied Pancultural Shamanism, and apprenticed to a Native American medicine man, as well as intensified my studies of martial arts. Over the thirty intervening years, the things I learned there enabled me to sort through a vast amount of information on the human body-mind.

There are concepts that cannot be put into words. Things that cannot be taught, although they can be learned. So a good teacher will create a situation in which you have a great chance to experience something, and then if you do, they can rap you on the head and say, “That!” The same kind of “ah-hah” moments can happen when you are multidisciplinary. I had this experience studying martial arts, and the same experience in meditation, and the same experience entering a writing flow state, and the same experience studying sexual magic (for instance). This suggested that a specific term used in an esoteric yoga text was referring to the same phenomena, and that realization was like a Rosetta Stone opening the door to understanding things that can’t be put into words. There are no words. But there are experiences that point the way toward truth. Those truths then provide light for still other things. At some point I hit a threshold and started glimpsing the entire construct: how all these body-mind disciplines connect, why they work, the ways that yoga, martial arts, meditation, prayer, flow state, peak performance, and all these things are all parts of the same reality.

In other words . . . writing The Kundalini Equation put me on the path to actually experiencing it. The path is real, and all these different disciplines have elements of it, different paths up the same mountain. The book was a fantasy, but I’d intuited something important.

Twelve Days features an altogether different set of characters, while giving a cameo to Adam Ludlum, the original protagonist from The Kundalini Equation. What did you want to explore with the new protagonists—journalist Olympia Dorsey, her children Hannibal and Nicki, and her neighbor and love interest Terry Nicholas—that you hadn’t explored with Adam?

Adam was seriously out of balance, and had a tiny piece of the puzzle. I wanted to ask what would happen if someone had more of the answers, and wasn’t starting from such a damaged place.

[Editor’s note: Steven Barnes would like to warn readers that the next three questions may contain information about the plot of Twelve Days that some might consider a spoiler.]

The driving force of the novel is the mystery surrounding the Reaping, the doomsday scenario orchestrated to kill off most of the world’s population by Christmas. In the middle of this, two characters come into conflict because of their opposing motives for self-actualization through harnessing mystical powers. Army veteran Terry Nicholas uses his powers to protect Olympia and her family. Guru Madame Gupta, inversely, puts hers to destructive and self-serving purposes. Why did you want to explore this idea? [Possible spoiler.]

Well, a protagonist needs an antagonist to push against. Allowing their worldviews to collide provides conflict and automatically suggests scenes. Curiously, though, I see Olympia as the core protagonist: She sits at the center of the circle. Everyone connects to her.

I find Madame Gupta intriguing: Although she turns out to be the antagonist, she’s a wounded mentor figure with a heartbreaking backstory. She’s a compelling shape-shifting figure, too, adopting a variety of guises to get what she wants. Tell us a little about how you came up with her character. [Possible spoiler.]

She started as a stick figure, as an archetype. I needed to ask a question: How are these books connected? Ah . . . through Adam’s notebooks. Who could have come into contact with them? If it were some large project, lots of people. That wasn’t intimate enough. But how do I limit it? So I created two different characters: the woman she would become, with power and authority, and then the woman she had been, with just enough information to understand things that even seasoned analysts would not, but enough damage that the power running through her would corrupt her, as a crimp in wiring can create a burn-out. But there was more.

I met a woman who was an extraordinary martial artist name Germon “Mama G” Miller-Bey. African martial arts. Never met anyone quite like her. She was kind enough to share her story with me, the how of how she came to be. And frankly, the pressures that created her were heartbreaking. When I heard that story, I could no longer see Madame Gupta as a villain, but as another victim of an uncaring universe. Only love warms us, and she never had it. I had to give her the hope of redemption, or I was abusing her as had so many others.

The narrative tension in the novel stems from your use of dramatic irony. About halfway through, we the readers figure out who’s behind the Reaping before Olympia, Terry, Hannibal, Nicki, et al. do—and that puts us in the overseeing/omniscient perspective of Madame Gupta. How intentional was this? [Possible spoiler.]

Oh, very. And I was laughing like a loon once I had Terry taking Nicki to Madame Gupta for “protection.” God, I’m such a bastard sometimes.

We see three forms of family and loyalty play out: Olympia’s family (which Terry joins); Terry and his veteran buddies; and Madame Gupta and her followers and guards. Was this a theme you set out from the beginning to write about or did it happen on its own as you developed the story?

I think that themes are best developed after the first draft. It took me three years just to figure out how to balance the structural elements!

You mention in the acknowledgments of Twelve Days that autism and ADD can be highly charged subjects. Did you have any hesitation about making Hannibal a neurodiverse character? Were there any challenges with balancing characterization and research?

Yes. I knew that I was flirting with danger. That Hannibal could be a painful “Daredevil” archetype: blind people get superpowers! Autistic people are all geniuses! But I had to sigh and move forward. The truth is that some autistic people do have unusual capacity. And if that is true, then if I present my characters and their trials accurately, I’ve harmed no one. However, I know that I’m still vulnerable to criticism. People are very sensitive these days. Personally, I’d rather be too sensitive than too callous, and those are the only real choices. But I also think that artists have the right to express themselves; they just have to take responsibility for what they create. I have friends with autistic children, my own son has ADD, and I read extensively on the subject. Studied Temple Grandin and others, and decided that I could give it a shot. I love that little boy, and if hoping that autistic children have a rich inner world is a sin, I guess I’m a sinner.

You feature martial arts and yoga practices prominently in the novel. You also write about them on your blog, which you update very frequently. Do your blog posts contribute in any way to your fiction and vice versa?

Really, both of them are expressions of me. The blog posts empty my brain out every morning, and my teaching and writing are then more explicit explorations of what Jed McKenna might call “Spiritual Autolysis,” the working-through of the core questions: “Who am I?” and “What is true?” that are paths to unraveling the ego-cocoon and awakening.

In your 2002 Strange Horizons interview (bit.ly/2oz9QO0), you said you got involved with the martial arts for self-defense and that they helped you develop a spine. What does practicing martial arts mean for you now?

Intellectual curiosity, fun, companionship. Pleasure in moving excellently. Being exposed to mastery that manifests on the physical level, so that I can study the subtler aspects of it. I gave myself a Christmas present in 2016: three hours of private lessons with one of the greatest living martial arts instructors, Danny Inosanto. Whenever you have a chance to be in the presence of someone who is an unquestioned master, you should take it. I love to ask questions about what has motivated them to continue past “good” or “excellent” into “mastery.” The basics are always the same: There is something they love, they found a way to support themselves doing it (usually), they love both teaching and performing the thing. There is often a core memory that triggers an emotion that is sustaining and gets them up in the morning and staying up late at night.

I don’t believe in “talent” very much. Except for one thing: the “talent” of focusing on something until you have integrated it at the level of unconscious competence. Those 10,000 hours. I think in most cases, people use “talent” to explain why they don’t try. Every time I’ve gotten close to excellence, they spent more time, energy, emotion, and thought than the people they exceeded. Never seen a convincing exception.

Hypnosis is another specialty of yours featured in the novel. In fact, you’re a certified hypnotist. How did you get involved with hypnosis?

Curiosity about consciousness. Really, human beings are in a trance state all the time; the only question is where on the consciousness continuum you are at a given time. Think of it like a radio band. Everything from hyper-alert to dead asleep. There are frequencies appropriate for study, playing sports, making love, or anything else. Meditation is just the science of teaching your mind to hit a given part of that spectrum. Some of those points are very useful for piercing illusion, and therefore have spiritual power: Spirit is what remains when all the lies have been removed. Self-hypnosis is just putting yourself in a very observant and suggestible state for things like relaxation, stress relief, learning, implanting new belief patterns, and so forth. Hypnosis from outside you is allowing another human being to lead you into these states. There are fascinating connections between hypnosis and the “story trance” that all writers would profit by understanding. I’d suggest studying Ericksonian Hypnosis: Milton Erickson was a friggin’ genius.

Along with the martial arts, you feature many shout-outs to major genre touchstones: 2001: A Space Odyssey; The Matrix; Star Wars; Blade Runner; and The Terminator, just to name a few. The references bring an intertextual/meta dimension to the novel. Are you commenting on how much the mythology of science fiction is embedded in our culture?

Mostly having fun. It felt right. I could step back and agree with you, take credit for consciously manipulating symbols to some metatextual effect, but that pattern would exist because a writer creates unconscious competence integrating multiple aspects of storytelling and philosophy in the “mere” practice of saying “once upon a time.” Layers on layers on layers. Wheels within wheels in fractal array, like matryoshka Russian dolls. So much fun, and so many ways to approach it. My dear friend Charles Johnson of Middle Passage fame writes metatextually. And he takes years between books, and it shows. I’m just a storyteller. All I ever wanted to be. But as I deepen my craft, God willing and the river don’t rise, the aspects will start to resemble a living thing rather than a hodge-podge of parts. And living things have symmetry, and yield themselves to endless study and analysis. Great question, by the way.

In one scene, Olympia and Hannibal escape from Madame Gupta’s lair through a topiary maze while it’s snowing. This must be a reference to The Shining, right?

Not at first, although as I got into it, it certainly occurred to me that that connection could be made. I think my first exposure to such things was a sixties’ horror movie called The Maze I watched when I was a kid. Something about a guy who’d turned into a frog, if memory serves. All this stuff blends together in the attic.

You mention 2001: A Space Odyssey as one your favorite works in a 2007 NPR group interview with Tananarive Due and Sheree R. Thomas (n.pr/2nHbgC1). Why do you say the film is virtually nonpareil in science fiction?

It is my favorite movie. Nothing else has ever blown my mind like 2001. Part of that is undoubtedly my age when it came out. I was sixteen. That was 1968 . . . my God, I wasn’t born yet! My mother was pregnant with me, dropped acid, and sat in the first row. . .

No, I was sixteen. Sigh. Anyway, part of it was that you had two supremely brilliant artists (Kubrick and Clarke) collaborating and asking what contact with an alien species might be, and devising an answer that was both direct and oblique: We cannot imagine. Part of it was McLuhanesque: The medium is the message. In other words, a film about the technology of the future that utilizes technology to create images that we’d never seen before, used in ways we’d never seen, to a purpose we’d never experienced. All of that together just rattled my cage. One of the great pleasures of my life was sitting down with Arthur C. Clarke for two hours, having lunch, trying not to babble like a fan-boy.

Science fiction is a mythology of possible futures and alternate realities. You’ve stated in previous interviews, however, that it’s socially conservative. Notwithstanding the drama of Sad/Rabid Puppygate, have you seen any perceptible shifts, however big or small, leading science fiction on a more progressive path?

It’s more conceptually conservative than it thinks it is. The people working within it try to break that box, but human beings are only so flexible. So ninety-nine percent of Golden Age SF, up to the eighties, was what I call “white people and their imaginary friends,” with the rather grotesque delusion that depicting aliens was somehow equivalent to depicting, say, black people.

Thanks a bunch.

The self-congratulatory nonsense of that broke my heart when I first realized that some people believed it. Others were just as bigoted as folks in the mainstream, but broke their arms slapping themselves on the back about how open-minded they were. Lovely chaps. Ugh. But the answer is: Absolutely, things have improved. After Chip Delany left the field, it was just me and Octavia, and I was the only black male SF writer I ever heard of for almost twenty years. I cannot begin to tell you how lonely that was. And the horror was that many apparently well-intended fans and even editors believed, really believed, that this absence was due to the fact that, why, black people just didn’t like science fiction. That melanin poisons the imagination centers of the brain, y’know.

No, we’re just the same as anyone else: White people create images of white people and are more attracted to those. Asians create images of Asians and are more attracted to those. And black people create images of black people and are more attracted to those. The idea that that near-total exclusion might somehow influence our willingness to invest ourselves emotionally never seemed to occur to them, as if they were thinking: “Well, we will read anything, about anyone, why won’t you?” without dealing with the ironically obvious: “No, you won’t.” Nor will you create it. Nor do you notice that you don’t, and haven’t, and you blame us rather than assuming we have the same humanity, hopes and dreams as you do, and might be reluctant to go where we’re not welcome.

This is changing, and that’s a beautiful thing. But you have to remember that the ugly stereotypes that justified slavery didn’t really start breaking down until about 1970, when fifty-one percent of America finally decided black people were fully human and able to assume the full burden of citizenship. The white kids born after that point bear none of the guilt and shame for what came before, and many of them are genuinely curious about what “others” are really like. “If you aren’t the stereotypes my grandparents needed to believe in to protect themselves from guilt, shame, and fear of reprisal, then who are you, really?”

I think that the artists who can answer that question elegantly have the chance to succeed.

You’ve recently organized a ten-week workshop, “Afrofuturism: Dreams to Banish Nightmares,” (bit.ly/2nHentN) with Tananarive Due. The first workshop was held on March 25. Tell us what it’s about and the goals you and Tananarive Due have for it.

Afrofuturism is the creative output of the African Diaspora. Most essentially, the slaves had their languages, cultures, names, religions, history, mythology, and more stripped away from them, like wiping a hard drive and implanting “Slave 1.0.” And then, we never had the generational isolation necessary to build a new culture. But human beings are resilient, and we began creating our own black American mythological heroes (“John Henry” for instance) and then, when we had generations sufficiently educated and middle-class to produce both scientists and artists, it became inevitable that we’d also create science-fiction literature, art, and even music.

The goal of the class is to educate future black artists, as well as inform consumers and fans of Afrofuturism of all kinds. In addition, those with a touch of conceptual flexibility will be able to step back and say: “Hey! I could do something similar with the issues I support in my own life!” The meta lessons apply to women’s rights, Asian issues, cultural issues, LGBTQ issues . . . whatever. It all stems from a belief in human equality, and a wish to look unblinkingly at both the evil we do to each other, and how amazing human beings can be when we open our hearts.

Guests and subjects of your workshop include Luke Cage Netflix series creator Cheo Hodari Coker, Nnedi Okorafor, Samuel R. Delany, artist and activist Bree Newsome, and many others. Wow! How did you put together such a stellar (pardon the pun) lineup?

We’ve met and interacted with a lot of folks over the years. Harlan Ellison introduced me to Samuel Delany many years ago, and he was present at the “African American Fantastic Imagination” conference at Clark Atlanta University twenty years ago, when I met my wife. Nnedi was one of my Clarion students. Bree Newsome came to speak at a symposium Tananarive sponsored when she was resident scholar at Clark Atlanta. Cheo Hodari Coker is a Facebook buddy. It’s a small world. We all know each other, or know people who know people. Black America is tiny. I’d never met anyone who had ever known a President, until Obama. And I know about six people who know or have met him. One of my best friends went to prep school with him, and I’ve shaken his hand. Six degrees of separation? Hah! Try three. So T and I are known to these folks, and to the degree that we’ve done something worthy of note, they believe our intentions are positive, and they are. My goal is to create one million awake, aware, adult human beings by supporting one thousand awake, aware adult artists and writers. That’s what Afrofuturism is about; they got it, and they gave us the precious gift of their time to help us make it so. People who want to be a part of it can go to afrofuturismwebinar.com, or write me at stevebarnescoach@gmail.com.

In addition to the workshop, are there any new projects you’re working on now that you can tell us about?

As we speak, T and I are working on a television pilot, fun stuff. Horror, not SF. I’m finishing a novel with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the sequel to The Legacy of Heorot. And we’re guiding young writers at our “Lifewriting” Facebook group (bit.ly/2oA2CJg). Keeps me busy!

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: Adam-Troy Castro

Wendy N. Wagner | 1158 words

We get a lot of submissions about heaven and hell, and over the years we’ve only published a handful (this piece and Dale Bailey’s “The Ministry of the Eye” are two that spring to mind). Do you have any theories about what makes these places so irresistible for short fiction writers to write about?

I’ve written a few Heaven and/or Hell stories over the years, including my first published horror story, “Clearance to Land,” and the Johnny Cash tribute “The Train Stops.” One of my many novels in progress is yet another visit to the inferno, which you may or may not see completed at some point. (I am not currently working on it, so don’t hold your breath; just saying that I’m not quite done with the questions.)

Many folks attack the trope at one time or another, whether they’re believers or not. Mark Twain did, multiple times. (See: “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” part of a novel he couldn’t quite make work; also, “The Mysterious Stranger.”) I think what attracts the writer of the fantastic to these premises is that they’re such platonic absolutes, which immediately pose logical questions, much as the speed of light does. Posit a God and you are immediately forced to wrangle with the implications of an omnipotent being (as I was very consciously doing with my prior Lightspeed story “The Boy and The Box”); posit the existence of a place where the virtuous are rewarded and another where those who don’t meet the entrance requirements are punished, and you are immediately forced to questions about the practical implications. Theologists do it with argument and fiction writers do it in story. In my case came the not-unprecedented question: How can Heaven be Heaven if not everybody you love made it there?

One of this piece’s strengths—to me, at least—is the tremendously complicated model of virtue that James discovers he’s managed to fit when the rest of his family, even his very young children, haven’t. How’d you come up with it?

Ha! Fooled you! I didn’t. The story doesn’t present the rules. It simply says that the rules are too insanely complicated for any mortal being to comprehend. To us, they translate as completely arbitrary. For all we know, maybe James just never talked while he ate.

 I really liked the character of James. He’s sort of an everyman, but he has memories of specific unpleasant behavior that made him seem very, very real. I feel like building complicated characters with difficult hang-ups and imperfections is one of your strong points. Who are some of your favorite characters that you’ve written?

Andrea Cort would certainly be among my all-time favorites, though even in her books I have to give an edge to her love interest, the Porrinyards. Fernie What, from my Gustav Gloom novels, would certainly be up there, too. I can’t claim a creator’s pride, but I certainly enjoyed the hell out of writing Spider-Man, too. Of the characters who only appeared once, I must confess deep love for the titular old couple in “Sunday Night Yams At Minnie and Earl’s.”

It seems like you’re a pretty prolific creator—this will be the tenth story we’ve published by you here at Lightspeed, and of course you’ve got something close to thirty books out or soon to be released. And you write loads of nonfiction, too. I know there are people who definitely prefer writing nonfiction over fiction or novels over shorts. Is there a style or a size of writing project that you best enjoy?

Horror takes a lot out of me, which is one reason it only accounts for about a third of my short fiction, but honestly: I like attempting stuff I haven’t attempted before, which is why the novel I am working on right now is in a genre I’ve never attempted, not even at short length.

You’re a bit of a movie buff, too. I know you and your wife Judi ran a movie blog called “The Remake Chronicles,” about, well, movie remakes. What do you think are three best movie remakes? Feel free to share links if you wrote about them!

This is actually a pretty easy question to answer, since the all-time best movie remakes would have to be those where the originals were inferior to the remakes that are now recognized as classic films.

But there are two ways to interpret the question. If you’re asking: What were the best movies that qualified as remakes?, the first three are obvious. To wit, the Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon is the third. (bit.ly/2noBXuk) The Karloff Frankenstein was at least the second (bit.ly/2ojw6eg). The Judy Garland version of The Wizard of Oz is (depending on how you count prior films) multiple versions in, following an absolutely disastrous 1926 version that featured Oliver Hardy as the Tin Man. Those would likely be the best three, but the list actually goes on and on. The best version of Les Misérables ever was likely the one made in France one year before the Hollywood classic with Charles Laughton, and that was something like the seventeenth. The best version of The Three Musketeers is almost certainly the Richard Lester production (bit.ly/2nTZUxm), which was also at least one dozen versions in. Then there are those where the original version is almost impossible to see: One of the funniest movies ever made, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, is also actually a remake.

If you’re talking the best remake of a film that was a classic to begin with, that managed to be a classic itself, another question entirely, I would nominate either the The Magnificent Seven (a remake of Seven Samurai), or Sorcerer (a remake of The Wages of Fear).

And that, my friends, is the short answer.

Here at Lightspeed, we’re pretty obsessed with pets. So I have to ask: How are your cats?

As it happens, my composition of the reply to this question was interrupted by the sound of feline puking, elsewhere in the house. What are the odds? And now that I’m back from a mission with paper towels: Just fine. Uma Furman, Meow Farrow, Harley Quinn, and Gilbert the Gray are all gratified by your best.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Wendy N. Wagner is the author of Starspawn and Skinwalkers, Pathfinder Tales novels inspired by Viking lore. Her novel An Oath of Dogs will be out from Angry Robot in Summer 2017. She’s published more than thirty short stories in anthologies like Cthulhu Fhtagn!, Armored, and The Way of the Wizard, and magazines like Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Farrago’s Wainscot. She serves as the managing/associate editor of Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines. She is also the non-fiction editor of Women Destroy Science Fiction!, which was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014, and the guest editor of Queers Destroy Horror! She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family.

Author Spotlight: Seanan McGuire

Arley Sorg | 1398 words

I really enjoyed this story. It reminded me of Stephen King’s “The Mist,” only more intense, more palpable, scarier; not to mention brought into that lovely, fully-fleshed-out apocalypse-mode. I just devoured 7000 words the way a dragonfly might devour a puppy.

Since “The Mist” is one of my favorite novellas ever, I take this as high and awesome praise. You are now my favorite.

I rarely have moments of fear/chill when reading horror, but I actually had a moment or two in this piece! For me, that’s delightful.

You are my double favorite.

As someone who is somewhat *cough cough* prolific . . . has horror become strategic writing and formula? Or do you enter deity-mode, gleefully yanking wings off characters? Or . . . are you immersed into your moments and people so that you experience what’s happening: the dread, the hopelessness, the . . . you know, emotions?

I try to sink as far down as I can, because it only really works if I can be caught up in the moment as I’m transcribing it. For me, part of being and staying as prolific as I am is about living in that narrative. I only go for a little while at a time, and we’re all pretty glad, since otherwise I’d be lost forever in a world of my own making.

I feel like there is a lot of mastery on display in this story. If I examine elements, lines, structure, I can pull out great aspects of the writing itself. You’ve generated tons of words, as well as spent considerable time studying writing. What are the things that you feel like you’re missing or haven’t yet achieved in your craft? Or, what are the things that you struggle with, that are harder for you to get “right”?

I have trouble with commas. I know, I know, but it’s true! I tend to view punctuation as a way to pace and space a sentence: When I put a comma in, it’s because I want the reader to take a breath before plunging onward. It’s almost like writing very long structured poetry. When I’m working in first person, I can get away with it, to a degree, but when I move to third, or even second, it can get awkward. So I have trouble with the actual, grammatical rules of punctuation.

Some of the story focus here is on being productive, “relevant” members of a surviving society. While narrative allows for exaggeration and bringing discussion to bear through analogy, I feel like “Dragonflies” really represents our own culture in ways that are closer than we’d like to admit. The notion of people being secretly grateful for younger members going missing, for example, and the line we negotiate between making demands vs. being monsters, reminds me of similar ideas/circumstances around homelessness, around mentally challenged individuals, and so on. Do you see this as the inevitability of human nature, that we are just a shade better than bugs, driven by the “mechanics of survival”? Or do you think we could potentially survive in ways that are sincerely gracious and generous? (And what would that take???)

I think we have it in us to be better than we are, but it is going to take reframing some attitudes that are currently very baked into our culture. We need to let go of the idea that health and wealth are somehow tied to virtue: that my busted-up ankle means I was somehow “bad” or “naughty” and need to be punished. We need to stop pretending that only people who fit our personal standards are worthy of life and love and happiness. We’re mammals. It’s natural to be a little greedy, to want a little more. But we’re also empathic and compassionate and capable of seeing the need for kindness. We just have to be kinder.

There’s something really interesting about the way the protagonist defines courage, applies it to Molly (as the bravest person she ever knew), but then actually steps into that definition later in the spider’s lair. It’s almost as if the story deliberately sets up the reader to realize how amazing the protagonist is, in case they might not get it. But in a sense, it’s also the protagonist becoming the person she admires, regardless of how she feels about failing in the extremely important goal of protecting Molly. Is this a personal reflection—are there specific moments or experiences of your own that come to mind as similar? Or is this simply a really wonderful literary element?

It’s what I strive for, always. Not maybe in such a dramatic fashion, but I am constantly trying to live up to the people I admire.

There are several things I really enjoyed about this piece. What is your best, most favorite thing about this story, for you? Or, what do you want readers to know about it?

Honestly, my favorite thing was coming up with a scientific justification for having giant bugs. I really, really like giant bugs.

This is such a cool story that I want to recommend it to friends. Which is saying a lot—I’m very picky (as you know, ha ha). For recommendations, what is your go-to story to date, the piece that, if someone has never read your work, if they are only going to read one thing, this is the one you want them to read (and why)?

Oh, goshbiscuits. Um. Right now, I would have to say Every Heart a Doorway. It’s short and sweet and sort of shows people where my wheelhouse is, even if there’s a tragic lack of chainsaws and mermaids.

Are you working on a Poképocalypse (Pokémon Apocalypse)? If you could say something about Pokémon to someone who knows nothing about Pokémon (ahem . . . no one in particular . . .), what would you want to tell them?

Always. And I’d want to tell them that I’m going to be the very best, like no one ever was. To catch them all is my real quest, but to train them is my cause. I will travel across the land, searching far and wide, each Pokémon to understand the power that’s inside. Also my Gym is Ghost/Fairy and it’s in a spooky cornfield, good luck.

The protag seeks a new promise at the end, rather than being crushed by the weight of her failed promise. Did you play with different ways to end this piece? What were some of the reasons you went for a tentative hope rather than a darker resolve?

I feel like if you never let hope have a moment, you’re being bleak for the sake of bleakness. I can do that much more quickly, and have a lot less fun doing it.

I’m supposed to keep this relatively short (fail!), but as someone who enjoys horror myself, I’m always curious about what other people who enjoy horror get out of it. Especially since many people can’t stand horror. So—what, if anything, do you get out of horror, both the writing and the watching/reading, that you don’t get from other types/genres of entertainment?

I love the thrill of it, the surprise, the slow expansion of what dread can mean. I love the tension. When I’m doing it right, I can even scare myself. That’s delightful. It is, as Stephen King once said, a kiss from a stranger in the dark, and there’s something beautiful about that.

Seanan, thanks for your time, and for the awesome story! I know you post updates on forthcoming works, appearances, and more at your site: seananmcguire.com. Is there anything coming up you want new fans to know about?

I have a lot of cons this summer, and some really awesome projects coming up, so both my website and my Twitter feed (@seananmcguire) are a great place to be!

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: Kendra Fortmeyer

Setsu Uzume | 1455 words

I recently read “Asymmetry” in addition to “Octopus vs. Bear,” and I love the way your characters find (and lose) themselves in the role of the “other.” Could you talk a little about your process?

Exploring otherness is, I think, the essential work of the fiction writer. We develop our skills by sitting on the outside edges and observing; we create people on the page who are not (to the extent that we can help it) ourselves. The better we are at creating not-us on the page, the better people think we are at writing fiction. This is all very lovely and twisty, because of course, we can’t write anything but ourselves. I mean: We can make our character profiles all day, and we can dream up Beatrice, a ninety-two-year-old Italian immigrant in New Haven with a polio limp and a knack for boredom-inspired arson, but we are still, no matter what we do, writing Beatrice as we would write her. You cannot escape your own head, even if you get very, very close to being very, very good at it. And so, in a way, the art of fiction is the art of losing oneself in an other that is not an other at all, but just some previously unexplored facet of ourselves.

All this to say: I think otherness is a natural state (also a lonely one) for a fiction writer, and one that we are endlessly finding and losing ourselves in: It’s no wonder I constantly subject my poor characters to the same! Ah, well. At least they sometimes get to be mermaids (an arguably fair price to pay for embodying absent-minded existential crisis).

What would have been different about the story if the assumed body had been an eight? Or a three?

It’s important to note, before diving into this luscious question, that this story operates almost entirely on a surface sexual plane. Except for Laura, who’s rightfully baffled and outraged that her sister is (uncharacteristically, we assume) flaking out on their dying grandmother, we never see the narrator interact with anyone who knows and loves her, or sees her as anything but what she is at the most surface level: a body. (And which is exacerbated, of course, by the narrator’s enacting a reductive and sexualized performance of Being A Woman.) All this to say, this is a story; this is not real life; don’t @ me.

All that out of the way: It’s tempting to pursue the what-ifs of being an eight or a three. But to be honest, the narrative course might not run very differently if the narrator’s borrowed body were an eight, as opposed to the six that he (extremely reliably and not at all judgmentally) deems it to be. Conventionally beautiful women arguably wield more power than conventionally unattractive women, but it’s a power explicitly derived from, and therefore operational within, the patriarchal bargain. As a beautiful woman, you have more power (to attract men for sex); people are more inclined to pay attention to you (because you are sexually appealing), and so on. It’s like, you get more Chuck E. Cheese tokens, but they’re still only good at Chuck E. Cheese.

I do think, sadly, that the story would have gone about the same if the woman were a three, but with a key difference, which is that she would have been shamed more for expressing herself sexually. We talk a lot about the virgin/whore dichotomy—both of these are losing hands, but the ugly woman risks falling into a third category: desperate. Pathetic. Trying too hard. The same society that demands that women be sexually attractive while punishing them for being sexual is terribly cruel to women who don’t conform to conventional (thin, white, able-bodied, etc.) beauty standards.

None of this is to say that this story represents the Objective Female Experience: This narrator could easily have gone to work (where this body’s owner may be respected, or not); or met up with Laura, with whom she has a lifetime of memories and inside jokes and the intimate understanding of hopes/dreams/failings/etc.; or gone to the library and downloaded viruses onto all of the computers and cackled like a sea witch as security escorted her from the building. But this complex and treacherous relationship with female beauty and sexuality is woven indelibly into our society at every level; in the sphere of sex and strangers, it’s only compounded.

How much of this story is about power, and how much is about empathy? And what about this story surprised you while you were working on it?

I write about the things that trouble me, and in doing so, attempt to take power over them. This was the first story I wrote at Clarion, and elements of it had been bouncing around in my head for a while—the strange, sticky trap of the patriarchal bargain that makes being female-bodied in public a dual pleasure and liability; frustrating conversations with well-meaning but misunderstanding male friends; a growing fatigue with rape culture and street harassment—problems that I wanted to solve, and in doing so, rid them of their ability to trouble me.

In the process, I came to have a surprising amount of sympathy for the focalizer. Even as he’s doing monstrous things (justified, as are so many monstrous things, by the sense that he is owed something), culminating in the rape of a stranger, I found him and his situation to be terribly sad. It is terrible to be prey, yes, but it is also terribly lonely to be a predator.

Writing this story did not untrouble me.

I will say: I came away from the writing of this story with a crushing dismay about the overall Cthulhu-ness of the patriarchy (which is the real and uncrushable and omnipresent villain), and also an immense love and respect for the male friends in my life: those who have been steeped in unconscious power since birth and have made an incredible effort to wrench the power from their hands and examine it and demand “What the fuck?” and tread extremely carefully. To make room for women’s voices when they’ve never been taught to, and when it’s easier not to: to be intentionally, persistently human in a cruel and dehumanizing social system. And for all of my women, of course, for continuing against unspeakable odds to rise.

Ultimately, I believe empathy is our way out, and as fiction writers, we wield enormously powerful tools to create empathy. I want to be clear: Understanding that the focalizer of this story is lonely does not forgive him his trespasses. But. When we understand this person, when we see that he is lonely, we feel a small pang. Reverberating at the center of that pang are the words: I also know what it is to be lonely. Which creates a space for understanding. Which means we can begin to have conversations. Which means we can begin to heal.

The great Cthulhu patriarchy depends upon us not seeing one another as people (worthy of kindness, of speaking without interruption, of access to health care, of not being raped). The more we understand where the other is coming from, the less we other each other. The less we other each other, the less we Women-Are-From-Venus-Men-Are-Only-After-One-Thing, the weaker the patriarchy becomes. It’s a system that depends upon dehumanization, which means that it crumbles in the face of empathy. And so perhaps this is the greatest thing that surprised me in writing this story: that writers, as those who allow readers to find and lose themselves in characters, are such enormous creators of empathy. Let us use this power for good.

What’s next from you?

I have a few stories heading the world’s way this June (including “Asymmetry” on PodCastle), which I’m throwing down as my gauntlet in my unceasing quest to vanquish my literary nemesis, Jenn Grunigen (who appeared in April’s issue of Nightmare and was brilliant, damn her). My first novel, a magical realist book for young adults about bodies and otherness called Hole in the Middle, debuts on July 6, 2017 from Little, Brown, a fact about which I am proportionately (that is to say, astronomically!) excited. And currently, I’m head-down in a draft of a novel about sex that’s guaranteed to cause trouble, so keep an eye out.

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: Susan Jane Bigelow

Arley Sorg | 948 words

What an absolutely beautiful story. I really love Jade, and even love her town, to be honest, because it’s filled with people who are imperfect but who are actually trying to do better. I think that oftentimes people will gravitate towards finding communities where they will be more accepted. But Jade feels a strong sense of home in nature, in the environment to which she is bonded. This is more important to her than being in a more accepting community. Is this choice, this decision, this sort of perspective, similar to your own experiences?

It is and it isn’t like what I’ve experienced. I live in a fairly forgiving area, the Connecticut River Valley, but I can’t imagine myself leaving here even if things were a lot harder. I wanted to write a story where a queer character from a small town doesn’t have to leave, doesn’t have to find community elsewhere. If Jade leaves home, she loses such a part of herself, and I feel the same way. We see this narrative of having to go somewhere else, of moving around to find your one true place, a lot, and there’s an awful lot to it. It’s a very American thing, in some ways. But there’s also something to be said for staying put, letting yourself sink into a place, and standing your ground where you are.

There’s a deliberate choice at play here, to make this story positive and bright, to avoid overt violence, and to depict a culture/world that is on the cusp of massive social change (or perhaps, more properly, in the middle of massive social change). In a sense, Jade’s experience is very different from many who are bullied or worse, whether over race, sexuality, gender, disability, or other factors. What are the advantages, disadvantages, or challenges to writing it this way? Or why is writing it this way important?

It was very important to me to write a positive story. I experienced a lot of that bullying you mention when I was young. I was someone who was perceived as a weird, feminine boy, and in the 1980s and early 1990s that was a very hard thing to be. There are many stories out there about LGBTQ people dealing with this awful, crushing weight of difference and exclusion and violence. I think, though, that it’s important to have stories that are not dark and brutal, but show that yes, there can be life, friendship, love, and family, too.

I have seen a few stories now where biologically shifting from male to female or vice versa becomes commonplace, and where people do it sort of on a whim. Sally does it for a week and “it didn’t work out. I like being what I am.” But this sort of idea, someone undergoing a change on a whim, stands in stark contrast to an experience where an individual strongly identifies as a gender other than what they have been assigned. Does presenting shifting sex as a casual option and practice risk devaluing the experience and struggle of people for whom change is a deep necessity?

I don’t think so, because everyone experiences gender and physicality so differently. For some people, it really is a desperate need to shift from one perceived gender to another. It was for me. But lots of people want to play with gender, to explore and experiment, to find out what’s really right for them, and to pick that one star in the sky where they are at peace and happy. Imagine a society where that desperate need is easily met, and where people who want to really can explore and try on different things without any issue at all. To me that sounds wonderful and hopeful, and I like to imagine that society as beautifully diverse in gender expression.

As the world is changing, so too is the field changing. Many new, emerging, and unpublished writers are nervous about creating pieces that directly discuss certain topics: racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and so on. Do you believe that writing a piece like this, which is so clearly focused on gender, presents problems in terms of selling the work? Or do you feel like there are plenty of markets nowadays that will happily take something like this, and that putting this piece out there has little impact on a writer’s career?

I don’t think it’s as big a problem as it used to be, because the markets are changing. There are short story markets now that are very forward-thinking, accepting, and progressive, and make it a point to publish diverse stories. Lightspeed is one of those, thank goodness! One of the proudest moments of my career was having my story “Die, Sophie, Die” published in the Queers Destroy Science Fiction! issue in 2015. So there are markets out there, and that’s positive. That said, there’s obviously a huge part of this field that deeply dislikes and distrusts how the field is changing, which is discouraging. I hope that someday empathy will overcome fear for them.

Congrats on Extrahumans coming out from Book Smugglers in October! What are you working on now that readers (and new fans, after reading this story!) can look forward to?

In 2017, the Book Smugglers are publishing my space opera series about three sisters dealing with alien conspiracies, repressive governments, and personal triumphs and tragedies. So keep an eye out for that!

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.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 221 words

Coming up in June, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Scott Dalrymple (“Marcel Proust, Incorporated”) and Matthew Kressel (“Love Engine Optimization”), along with SF reprints by Vandana Singh (“Yakshantariksh”) and Elizabeth Bear (“The Heart’s Filthy Lesson”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Shweta Narayan (“World of the Three”) and Pat Murphy (“Crossing the Threshold”), and fantasy reprints by Carlos Hernandez (“The Magical Properties of Unicorn Ivory”) and Ben Hoffman (“Substitutes”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our cover art is by Randy Gallegos, illustrating Shweta Narayan’s “World of the Three.”

For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive reprint of Yoon Ha Lee’s “Iseul’s Lexicon” and a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. Over the next few months, you’ll find work by John Grant, Ashok K. Banker, Jaymee Goh, A. Merc Rustad, and many more.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

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The Editors

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Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

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

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

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John Joseph Adams

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Robyn Lupo

Editorial Assistants

Laurel Amberdine

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Andrew Liptak

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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)

Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu) [forthcoming Oct. 2017]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

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.