TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 96, May 2018

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: May 2018

SCIENCE FICTION

Sunset
Tobias S. Buckell

We Will Be All Right
Carolyn Ives Gilman

The Crystal Spheres
David Brin

A Green Moon Problem
Jane Lindskold

FANTASY

Godmeat
Martin Cahill

Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse
Xia Jia (translated by Ken Liu)

Our Side of the Door
Kodiak Julian

His Artist Wife
John Grant

NOVELLA

Great Work of Time
John Crowley

EXCERPTS

Emily Devenport | Medusa Uploaded
Emily Devenport

Berit Ellingsen | Now We Can See The Moon
Berit Ellingsen

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: May 2018
LaShawn M. Wanak

Media Reviews: May 2018
Carrie Vaughn

Interview: Sam J. Miller
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Martin Cahill

Carolyn Ives Gilman

Kodiak Julian

Jane Lindskold

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2018 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Galen Dara

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: May 2018

John Joseph Adams | 1454 words

Welcome to issue ninety-six of Lightspeed!

This month’s cover art is by Galen Dara, illustrating the original fantasy short “Godmeat,” by Martin Cahill. We also have an original fantasy short story from Kodiak Julian (“Our Side of the Door”), and fantasy reprints by Xia Jia (“Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse”) and John Grant (“His Artist Wife”).

Our science fiction originals include work by Carolyn Ives Gilman (“We Will Be All Right”) and Jane Lindskold (“A Green Moon Problem”), plus we have SF reprints by Tobias S. Buckell (“Sunset”) and David Brin (“The Crystal Spheres”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, an interview with author (and frequent Lightspeed contributor) Sam J. Miller, along with our book and media review columns. For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive novella reprint (“Great Work of Time” by John Crowley), an excerpt from Emily Devenport’s new novel Medusa Uploaded, and bonus excerpt from Now We Can See the Moon by Berit Ellingsen.

John Joseph Adams Books News for May 2018

New recent acquisition to report:

Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Charm and Hunger, a WWII-era fantasy set in England where two teenage girls seek to become full members of an international society of diabolists, a quest that will nearly ruin their friendship and take them down dark paths when one girl learns her parents were taken to a concentration camp and the other summons a powerful and mysterious demon. (Spring 2020)

News aside, here’s a quick rundown what to expect from John Joseph Adams Books in 2018:

On April 17, we published Bryan Camp’s The City of Lost Fortunes, 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. Here’s some early buzz for the book:

“A deft and expansive fantasy imbued with real magic and wild plot turns.” —Kelly Link, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble

“A phantasmagoric murder mystery that wails, chants, laments, and changes shape as audaciously as the mythical beings populating its narrative. [. . .] The engaging style, facility with folklore, and, above all, impassioned love for the city its characters call home keeps you enraptured by the book’s most chilling and outrageous plot twists.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“There isn’t a dull page as Jude determines who his real friends are. Anne Rice fans will enjoy this fresh view of supernatural life in New Orleans, while fans of Kim Harrison’s urban fantasy will have a new author to watch.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Camp’s fantasy reads like jazz, with multiple chaotic-seeming threads of deities, mortals, and destiny playing in harmony. This game of souls and fate is full of snarky dialogue, taut suspense, and characters whose glitter hides sharp fangs. [. . .] Any reader who likes fantasy with a dash of the bizarre will enjoy this trip to the Crescent City.” —Publishers Weekly

“Take a walk down wild card shark streets into a world of gods, lost souls, murder, and deep, dark magic. You might not come back from The City of Lost Fortunes, but you’ll enjoy the trip.” —Richard Kadrey, bestselling author of the Sandman Slim series

“In The City of Lost Fortunes, Bryan Camp delivers a high-octane tale of myth and magic, serving up the best of Neil Gaiman and Richard Kadrey. Here is New Orleans in all its gritty, grudging glory, the haunt of sinners and saints, gods and mischief-makers. Once you pay a visit, you won’t want to leave!” —Helen Marshall, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Gifts for the One Who Comes After

“Bryan Camp’s debut novel The City of Lost Fortunes is like a blessed stay in a city both distinctly familiar and wonderfully strange, with an old friend who knows just the right spots to take you to–not too touristy, and imbued with the weight of history and myth, populated by local characters you’ll never forget. You’ll leave sated with the sights and sounds of a New Orleans that is not quite the real city, but breathes like the real thing, a beautiful mimicry in prose that becomes its own version of reality in a way only a good story—or magic—can. You won’t regret the visit.” —Indra Das, author of The Devourers

On June 19, we’ll publish Todd McAulty’s The Robots of Gotham, a debut novel about a future where the world is on the brink of total subjugation by machine intelligences when a man stumbles on a sinister conspiracy to exterminate humanity and a group of human and machine misfits who might just be able to prevent it. Here’s what some early readers are saying about this one:

“The Robots of Gotham is a thrilling ride through a nuanced, post-singularity world populated by a frightening and fascinating array of smart machines. Read this and you’ll come to the same conclusion I did: The world belongs to robots, we’re just living in it.” —Daniel H. Wilson, bestselling author of Robopocalypse and The Clockwork Dynasty

“An epic novel of man vs. machine, full of action, political intrigue, and unexpected twists. Todd McAulty has given us a fresh, compelling take on life during a robot apocalypse.” —Jeff Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of Blame

“Todd McAulty has done the incredible. Delivered a rich and credible near-future world, where Thought Machines control, well, almost everything (and are themselves astonishingly diverse and cool), and used all this to create the most human SF story I’ve read in a very long time. I love everything about Robots of Gotham. I want more, McAulty. MORE!” —Julie E. Czerneda, author of The Clan Chronicles

“When the robot apocalypse comes, I hope it’s this much fun. Like The Martian and Ready Player One, Robots of Gotham is set in a high-tech near-future where something has gone terribly wrong, and it’s navigated by a hero who’s quirky, resourceful, and as likable as they come. Read it for the rock’em-sock’em-robot action—read it for the deft world-building with its detailed taxonomy of intelligent machines—read it for the sobering parallels to modern-day issues and threats. Or just read it because it’s a helluva good ride.” —Sharon Shinn, author of the Elemental Blessings series

“The Robots of Gotham is a crackling good adventure, stuffed with cool action sequences. It also features serious and intriguing speculation about the potential of Artificial Intelligence, for good and bad. And it’s an engaging read, with absorbing characters, and, of course, lots and lots of nifty robots.” —Rich Horton, editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy

“If Johnny 5 had a baby with the Terminator, the result would be Robots of Gotham: a book that explores the consequences of world domination by our Robot Overlords. (And, lest we forget the badassiest of them, our Robot Overladies.) Drones, dinosaurs, and doggies—with a plague thrown in for good measure!—the barter is banter, and death is cheap. With man against machine, machine against machine, man against man, unlikely alliances must be forged across all species, rational or otherwise. For all its breakneck world-building, constant questing, and relentless wheeling and dealing, Robots of Gotham is deceptively deep-hearted: a novel about, of all things, friendship.” —C.S.E. Cooney, author of World Fantasy Award-winning Bone Swans: Stories

Further out in 2018, we’ll have The Wild Dead—Carrie Vaughn’s sequel to Bannerless—in July; Dale Bailey’s In the Night Wood in October; and then Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Want and Ruin in November. We’ll provide more details about those as the publication dates draw nearer, but as always if you want more information about these or any other John Joseph Adams Books titles, just visit johnjosephadamsbooks.com.

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

• • • •

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the issue!

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, the SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as the USA Today 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 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 eleven 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.

Sunset

Tobias S. Buckell | 6320 words

The starship crash-landed somewhere in the dark and early hours of morning. The thunderclap sound of it striking the East Bay woke Tamuel up, heart racing and confused. He glanced out his window, but didn’t see anything. He stumbled out into the common room to see if he could see anything different from the balcony.

“What was that?” One of his siblings also was apparently out and looking around for the cause of the sound. “There’s no storm.”

Outside, through the windows opened to allow the cool land breeze rushing out toward the ocean to pass through the foundling dorm’s corridors, Tamuel saw only stars and the looming dark of the Berenthais Mountains.

Tamuel squinted through the dark to see that it was Shau who had woken with him. Several of the other boys grunted and swore from in their rooms, annoyed at the late interruption to their sleep. Group classes would start early in the morning; this was an unwelcome event.

“I—” Tamuel stopped as the horrid wail of the tsunami sirens pierced the night.

Everyone woke up and streamed out of their doors, sleep forgotten as fear jolted them awake. There was a mass of panic before some of the prefects, older and well-drilled, asserted order. “Line up! Those of you near the east corridor, march to the stairs and head to the third floor. West corridor, march! Do not go back to your rooms to take anything with you. Move now!”

The thirty boys fell into lines and the entire common room split right near Tamuel into two groups that streamed out into the two stairwells. Emergency lighting, red and calm, dappled their worried faces as they rushed upwards.

Minutes later the water struck. It rushed up Watt Street, just several inches of foaming sea, lapped at the wheels of the carts parked around the dorm, then gently poured out through the storm drains and retreated back down the street, leaving only some confused small fish behind.

The warning sirens stopped, leaving a strange quiet to fall over all of Weatherly, from the distant East Bay to the Callum Docks.

They all waited for whatever came next. Some of the second floor girls started to complain about Tamuel’s siblings staring at them in nightdresses. It was creepy. Tamuel understood. They were not all really siblings; they’d all been raised in the foundling dorm together. Go stare at some other girl from Summerstown’s foundling dorm.

“Hey, get off the balcony,” one of the prefects shouted from the back. “We don’t know if something else is coming.”

Shau was pressed against a railing, looking out toward East Bay with night vision binoculars. “Nothing else is coming,” he announced. “It’s a fucking starship crashed into the bay!”

“Language!” snapped Tosha, one of the prefects. Tamuel shivered when he heard her voice. She’d been singling him out for any dorm infractions and worse for the last year. “Who was that, is that Shau? Get over here. And what are you doing with binoculars? You’re supposed to leave everything in place during a drill.”

Tamuel decided to take a chance and shoved past siblings to get to the balcony. Shau was his closest sibling. Shau would let him use the binoculars.

“Shau, let me look!” he demanded.

Shau passed the binoculars over. Tamuel looked out over Weatherly to the curve of East Bay, skipping over the roofs of hundreds of structures in grainy green, and he gasped. There it was, a shark-fin shaped mass squatting in the dark pool of water where they normally sailed their tiny catamarans on weekends.

He recognized the shape. “It’s an Interstellar. It’s a Shatter Dart.” Thousands of tons of bio-organic, semi-sentient starship. With a crew of hundreds, it could leap between the stars. Hundreds of light years with each carefully planned gulp of the void-mouth contained deep in the belly buried under the water in East Bay.

“What the hell’s it doing here?” Shau asked.

“That’s it!” Tosha had pushed through and stood right behind them both. “I gave you a language warning, and asked you to get off the balcony.”

She grabbed Tamuel from behind. It was a violation, broaching someone’s physical space like this. The last time Tamuel had formally complained, there’d been a disciplinary board hearing. No one would step forward as a witness. Tosha was six years older than him. A respected prefect who had the ear of the adult board. He’d learned to try and stay invisible to her since then. He’d wished for cameras inside, like the street cams, but that would be a violation of dorm privacy.

Tamuel twisted loose from her and shoved the binoculars into her hands. “It’s a starship.”

Tosha couldn’t help but raise the binoculars. Tamuel, as he’d hoped, had completely yanked the prefect’s attention elsewhere as she succumbed to curiosity and looked out toward East Bay.

He yanked Shau away from her. “Nothing like this ever happens in Weatherly,” he said as they pushed through the crowds of siblings toward a stairwell.

“My binoculars!” Shau protested.

“Fuck your binoculars,” Tamuel hissed, just low enough none of the prefects would hear him. “Nothing like this happens in Weatherly. Or in Summerstown.” Or even, for that matter, Yelekene. Their entire world, all the archipelagos scattered across it, were far from the Core. Ships of this size had last visited Yelekene a hundred years ago, to ship terraforming equipment and raw materials here. Even the original Founders had come via smaller cargo skip-planers that had been disassembled upon arrival.

This . . . this was something different.

“What are you doing?” Shau asked as Tamuel pulled him down the stairwell.

“We’re going to be first to see it,” Tamuel said.

“We’ll get our asses handed to us.”

“All the prefects are upstairs herding us. We won’t get a better chance.”

Shau stopped. “You know how many demerits I have? No, I have to stay put.”

Tamuel paused. He really didn’t want to do this alone. Going out into the town at dark, it wasn’t scary, they’d snuck out before. But he’d rather have some company if he was going to head out onto the open ocean in the dark.

He briefly reconsidered, then bit his lip. “Then just cover for me as long as you can. Tell them I went to use the bathroom or something.”

“Yeah, sure,” Shau said. “Good luck, Tam. I hope it’s worth it, you’re going to be pulling weeds in the garden for weeks if you’re lucky.”

Tamuel grimaced.

• • • •

The plan to get there required a sprint down Watt Street toward the Ocean Walk and piers. Tamuel’s shoes soaked through within minutes as he stepped into puddles of stranded seawater in the dark. The sidewalks were lined with solar tiles that marked the street’s edge, though, so it was easy to get where he needed to be.

He passed several adult mixed-use housing complexes with their greenspaces folded inside their clear solar walls and dodged several officials whizzing by in carts, electric motors whining as they raced to wherever their civil disaster response plans ordered them.

Tamuel passed his parents’ sprawling multi-family home on the way down. He half expected his father to be on the lawn to shout “Where are you going, young man?” at him. But although the lights were on, his mother would likely be coordinating with the Council and Disaster Response teams.

He’d have a lot to answer for at their fifthday dinner meal together.

But Tamuel already had a cheeky response for them. He was a child of Weatherly. A people who risked lives to fling themselves far out from the Core to live on a far-off world. A resident of the shared foundling dorm, where all the children were raised together to share their educations and the community’s common values.

Could a descendant of such brave and curious people really not run to investigate?

Tamuel slipped onto one of the small catamarans that Weatherly’s children used to race across the bays. He untied the painter, shoved away from the dock, and then pushed the small electric engine in it up to full power after double-checking the charge. The hull and decks had soaked up the previous day’s sun and it didn’t look like anyone had used it.

He could see cart headlights heading for East Bay. He saw some people gathering around the docks, probably waiting for some consensus on whether it was safe to go out toward the starship.

Once he’d left the harbor, out alone in the taller, rolling swells of the ocean, Tamuel flicked the running lights on and aimed for the large lump of nothingness interrupting the usual slope of East Bay a few miles away.

• • • •

The East Bay’s waves hissed as they lapped against the side of the starship. In the dim light of Yelekene’s moons, Tamuel could see the hull was pitted and scarred, gouges and repaired patches streaking the starship’s mountainous flank.

He’d motored around it, hundreds of yards, keeping his distance and gaping at the incredible bulk that had settled into the bay. The fin-shaped ship looked top-heavy, now that he had to crane his head back to look upwards. Something whirred nearby, a wasp-like insect darted out from near the hull where it had been hovering. It bit Tamuel on the neck and he slapped at it, crushing it under his hand. He wiped oily residue off onto his pants.

People who lived in an aerodynamic world with atmosphere all around them expected a superluminal starship to look more needle-like, he thought. This fat and heavy lump looked like nothing that could move quickly.

*WELL TO BE FAIR I CAN’T ACTUALLY MOVE THROUGH ATMOSPHERE WELL AT ALL*

Tamuel reared back, his mind struck by the sound of the words. They sounded like they’d come from the fog horn in the lighthouse near the tip of the bay. He leaned over the catamaran and vomited. “What the fuck?”

“Sorry,” the voice said more softly. “I turned down the gain.”

“Oh god, I have the worst headache,” Tamuel moaned.

“Again, I’m so sorry.”

Tamuel wiped blood from under his nose and spat a gob of something into the ocean.

“It’s okay.” He smiled, the moment sinking through to him. He was talking to a freaking Shatter Dart! “Where are you from?”

“Mars,” it said. “I was born on Phobos.”

“Oh.” For some reason Tamuel was slightly disappointed. He’d studied Origination History enough to have a map of the First System in his head. He’d secretly been hoping for something more exotic. “But you’ve traveled the stars?”

Something like a smile bloomed in his mind’s eye. “Yes, yes, I have. I have seen many different systems in my life.”

A spotlight hit Tamuel in the eyes. He shielded them with an arm. “Please stop that.”

“It’s not me,” the ship said. “There is another small craft approaching.”

Tamuel blinked and faced the worst of the light, realizing the voice in his head was right. He waved at it, and heard his mother’s shocked voice. “Tamuel?”

“Mom?”

It made sense. She’d be in charge of any delegation sent out. This was an odd event, of course the town’s chief representative would come out. Starships didn’t come to Weatherly, on the far northern edge of the archipelago. They went to Summerstown, or Elidia. Hundreds of miles away by boat, and far enough away that the one starship that had come to their world was only a distant contrail heading into the air for an even younger Tamuel watching it, hoping to catch a glimpse of something otherworldly and dramatic.

“What are you doing here?”

Tamuel smiled and extended his arms excitedly as their launch tapped his. “I’m first!”

Two of the town’s deputies leaped into the catamaran. Tamuel blanched when he saw that they carried rifles, long barreled and chunky-looking death tools that gripped their forearms. They looked pissed.

“Take him back to town,” his mom ordered. “And find out why he’s out after closed dorm hours. Gerard, Misty, and I will try to see if there’s an airlock and keep trying the radio frequencies.”

“Yes, ma’am,” they said.

They pulled him away from the electric motor.

“They won’t be able to get in,” the ship said. “Everything is sealed. Every airlock fused. The only communication I am allowed is the warning beacon.”

“Wait,” Tamuel protested. “I can talk to it.”

But they ignored him. He was just a kid pulling a stunt, and they were busy talking to each other on radios and coordinating.

“It says everything is sealed,” Tamuel shouted at his mother. “Every airlock is fused and the only communications it’s allowed is a warning beacon.”

The catamaran launched into motion, heading back out to sea and away from East Bay.

“I think you are too young, and I reached out to the wrong person to be my spokesperson,” the ship said.

“You should pick another,” Tamuel muttered. “They have guns, they’re all nervous.”

“You destroyed my neural drone. Besides, I wasn’t even supposed to have one. I hid it.” The ship felt amused.

Tamuel watched the spotlights and other craft fall away with a growing frustration. The ship remained silent, and Tamuel wondered if that meant the distance had cut their link. Soon the town’s boats were just small gnats worrying around the hide of the massive starship.

• • • •

First the deputies dragged Tamuel out of the catamaran and into a cart. They took him back to the foundling dorm, where prefects waited for him by the entrance.

Tamuel looked at their faces and knew, just knew, that the next few weeks of his life were going to be shit.

Tosha wasn’t there, at least.

The prefects, upset with him having snuck out and made them look like fools to the Board, sent him right up to his room. Restricted hours. He was only to leave his room for maintenance rotations, bathroom breaks, and class time. No one talked to him. He was treated like he was invisible. It was one of the ways the prefects punished you without doing anything that would cross Foundling Charters. Total social isolation. Shunning.

Shau had caught his attention and spread his arms, palms down.

“Sorry,” he’d mouthed.

Tamuel had shook his head and smiled. It was okay. He wouldn’t hold it against anyone, even if it meant sitting and eating by himself at the small table in the corner of the dining hall.

“I’m sorry I got you into trouble,” the ship said the next day at lunch, startling Tamuel so much that he flailed and tossed his plate to the ground.

“I thought we were out of range,” Tamuel said.

“No. I was just . . .” the ship trailed off for a moment. “Tired.”

A tired starship?

“Tamuel.” Tosha stood by the shattered plate and splotches of lunch. Her lips were pursed into a thin line, her brown eyes glittered with suppressed anger.

Tamuel shrank back. “I’ll clean it up,” he promised.

“I’m watching you,” Tosha said.

Tamuel knew. Boy, did he know.

As he tossed the ruined lunch away, the ship said, “I got you in trouble again.”

“No,” Tamuel muttered under his breath. “I got myself in trouble when I snuck out and went over to see you. You can’t be blamed for that.”

He sighed heavily.

“What’s going on around you now?” he asked the ship.

“Several individuals are trying to use high-powered laser cutters to cut through the primary upper hemisphere airlock,” the ship reported dryly.

“And?”

There was a mental snort. Tamuel got an image of inches-thick armor and suddenly knew, as if it were something he’d always casually known, that an industrial laser cutter wouldn’t do more than abrade a few layers off an adaptive hull that could take a hit from a concentrated fusion blast on its naked surface.

“No one can enter my hull. It’s a condition of my retirement and my decommissioning,” the ship told him. “Should they succeed in entering, I will be obliged to send a signal for assistance, and Core Navy will arrive and neutralize the intrusion. But they will not succeed.”

For a moment, Tamuel had a flash of concern for his mother and other townsfolk. But he understood they would not be able to enter. It was as sure as sunrise.

He delayed his walk of shame back to his room by pausing in front of the balcony and looking off toward the East Bay and the massive ship that was talking to him. “Why did you come here?”

“I came here to retire,” it told him.

“Here?” Tamuel couldn’t believe it.

“This is one of the most beautiful worlds I have seen,” the ship said. “I came here once, on a supply mission. I loved the oceans, the islands. The primary gas giant this moon and all the others orbit. There are so many worse places, places consumed with poverty, war, collapse, overcrowding. There are others that some say are better, more beautiful than Yelekene. Maybe it was because this was the first world I left the First System for. Maybe I just wanted to see how it all turned out here. But when I came to orbit yesterday and looked down, it was everything I’d hoped it would be.”

“Get moving!” Tosha snapped at Tamuel. “Get out of the dining hall and get to your room. I’ll be by later for maintenance detail.”

Tamuel shivered.

• • • •

The prefects had given him extra work to do, as Shau had predicted. He spent the next hour listening to everyone play while he dug up weeds in the garden. It was against Charter to punish children with physical labor, but Tosha had figured out how to fool the scheduling computer to give him a double-share of weeding duty, and an extra bathroom cleaning round tonight.

But he chattered away with the ship, mainly asking it all about the other worlds it had seen.

It told him about Xi Laay, where the starscrapers kissed the ever-present sodium clouds and people wore cellophane-thin suits to go outside and rebreathers. It told him about Cluster, a vast network of asteroids all interconnected by high-speed rail, where people had engineered themselves into spider-like, pale creatures that thrived in the low gravity. It showed him the Orion Nebula filling the sky of a nearby world.

After he showered, Tamuel went to class, where he listened to the ship tell him about the war between the Oolatian Supremacy and the Dawmore Consolidationists. It took a long time for him to understand how a blockchain voting system with favored weighting for socially constructive outcomes worked, and why that was something worth starting a war over, but eventually he thought he saw the point.

“Tamuel!”

He froze. The prefect hosting the class lesson, an algebra concept, had stopped the program and was looking at Tamuel directly.

Shit.

What just happened? He’d been so deep into learning about consolidationism.

“X is eight,” the ship said. “You didn’t miss anything, but the program switched to a simple audience interaction mode to make sure the lesson has percolated, and alerted the prefect that there is an inattentive student who may not understand the concept. You understand the concept just fine.”

“Eight!” Tamuel said. “X is eight.”

The prefect relaxed, the program stopped paying attention to Tamuel, and everyone relaxed.

Then Tamuel tensed again. The first time the ship spoke to him, Tamuel hadn’t said anything out loud. Oh no, Tamuel suddenly thought about something from late, late last night when he thought he’d been alone—

“No, that’s private,” the ship said. “I have multiple sub-minds. One of them monitors potential privacy breaches that may occur in my direct neural links with crew members and erases my awareness of the infraction, unless there’s an operational risk component. Then it’s raised to a higher subconsciousness. Any of the privacy routines wipe past data. In fact, if you wish, just ask and this exchange will cease to exist.”

Tamuel, who’d been feeling queasy for a second, nodded. Please do, he thought.

“As you wish,” the ship said.

Tamuel thought for a long moment. Crew? I’m crew?

“The closest thing to crew for me now,” the ship agreed.

“Can you fly me somewhere?” Tamuel couldn’t help but whisper that, he was jittery with excitement.

“A starship can only drop down into a gravity well once. I had to be as careful as I could just to land properly in the East Bay. And I know even doing that was a bit risky. I flooded your town. People can’t be happy about that. Thankfully no one was hurt.”

“Except Miss Nisky,” he said. “I talked to my mom when you were still quiet before lunch. She yelled at me a lot, she’s still unhappy. But I wanted to tell her that she couldn’t break into you. She thinks I’m making stuff up. I don’t have a great record on that.”

“What happened to Miss Nisky?” the ship asked, concern filling Tamuel’s mind.

“She broke her arm.”

“Please tell her, when it is convenient for you, that I was sorry.”

“I will.”

“Thank you.” The ship fell quiet for a little bit. Then, “If you don’t mind, I must take my leave for a while. I have some work to do internally, and I want to be done in time for the sunset. It’ll be my first. I cannot wait to see it from inside an atmosphere.”

Tamuel returned to his schoolwork, but with a faint impression of great machines moving through his insides.

• • • •

He was scrubbing toilets after dinner and wondering what time sunset would be when Tosha slipped in.

“You’re a handful,” she stated. “Was it worth all this to go out to the ship?”

Tamuel regarded her suspiciously. “Yeah.”

“I hope it was,” she said. “My dad works for a salvage and repair company. He said the word’s out, and a deep space rescue shipping company from Tamisin replied that they can get into the ship using a modified point defense laser they salvaged from some warship. They’ll be here in the morning. Da is going to be part of the ground crew that goes in with them, pulls anything worthwhile out. Could be worth a lot. We could be rich. Change a lot of fortunes here in Weatherly.”

Would that be true? Tamuel wondered. Would that affect the ship?

“Yes,” it replied. “It could be a problem. I would be obligated to take actions, like summoning someone from the Core.”

“That’s a bad idea,” Tamuel said out loud. “You should tell your dad not to join them.”

Tosha made an irritated face. “Your family’s politicians. You’re well off. We haven’t gotten some big break like your type. This is our moment. Don’t try to spoil it.”

She banged the door closed on the way out.

“I can talk to my mom tomorrow night at fifthday dinner,” Tamuel said. “I can help.”

The ship filled him with dubiousness. “They will likely not listen to you. But that shouldn’t stop you from trying. The Core will be careful if it comes, the penalties for interfering with me and ignoring the beacon instructions to keep back from me will likely only cause a single generation’s recession. There will be no loss of life.”

Tamuel gritted his teeth. Weatherly was a humble town on the edge of nowhere. He’d see less of his own world than he’d planned if a recession hit. And certainly he would never be able to try to find a way off planet, to see some of the places the ship had talked to him about, or shown him tantalizing glimpses of.

He put the cleaning supplies away.

“I will stop this,” he said.

Outside, he stopped in front of the balcony.

“All those worlds, and you’ll just be stuck here. You can’t move anymore, now. How long is your retirement?”

“Probably about a week of your time,” the ship said. “Maybe slightly less.”

“A week?” Tamuel was stunned. “That isn’t much of a retirement.”

“For a galaxy-class supercomputing mind like mine, it is. My body is failing around me, my retirement task is to carefully degrade the component parts into non-reactive recyclable materials or some other form of inert matter. It’s up to me what I leave behind.”

“That sounds horrible.” Tamuel was suddenly struck with sudden empathy. “Is that what you’re planning then, why you keep going silent?”

“Yes. Many of my siblings create mausoleums, or make sculptures, a piece of art so that they are remembered. I’m preparing the canvas.”

Again, Tamuel felt the coil of great machinery moving within himself. It was a reflection of what the ship must be feeling.

“What are you going to make?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” the ship said. “For now, I just want to see my first sunset from here.”

Tamuel looked out from the balcony to the East Bay at the giant starship and the slow setting sun beyond it.

• • • •

Tamuel pushed his soup with his spoon a day later, a general considering feints, gambits, and general strategy. The salvagers had landed, making amazing time from the nearest star system and dropping out of orbit. They’d surrounded the starship with two barges and begun their work.

The ship had gone silent again. Off to marshal its resources to do who knew what.

His parents were also silent. His mother, simmering with anger that her own son had caused a flap that had the whole town talking. His dad, somewhat inscrutable but also unseemly interested in his own soup.

They tried talking about generalities. The need for some extra space for expansion. The island didn’t have much in the way of usable land; the Berenthais Mountains were a feature of the geological forces that had shoved other islands up above the water. But there were mountainous, steep shores and weak rock for tall buildings.

But in a few generations, they’d have to figure out how to expand Weatherly. Tamuel’s mother had championed floating cities, but the underwater mining required for the base metals was out of budget reach.

“Listen,” Tamuel interrupted. “You have to stop the salvage team.”

“I know you are overly interested in the ship,” his mother said, “but we can’t. Look, you just heard me talking about how we need money for the expansion project. Our cut of a salvage operation of an actual starship would underwrite any number of improvements.”

“If they break through, the ship will call down the Core on us,” Tamuel said.

They looked a bit startled. But his mother shook her head. “You can’t know that.”

“I can speak to the ship!”

It wasn’t the first time they’d gone over this. But he couldn’t convince her. There was no actual way to do it. Could he ask the ship to do something to prove that? No, he couldn’t. Could it use the radio to say that?

It was hard to get them to believe that the ship was locked to the radio beacon message it kept repeating, asking them to stay back and leave it alone, and that nothing on the hull could shift for now. It was in lockdown as it prepared itself.

“Why won’t you believe me?” Tamuel shouted.

“I understand,” his dad said, interrupting the brewing full-on fight.

“You do?” Tamuel asked, a bit surprised.

“I believe you think you can hear the ship,” his dad said. “Look, Tam, you’re the most . . . passionate person I think I know. You’ve snuck out to try and sail to Summerstown by yourself. You wanted to do an island crossing yourself. We had to scramble the town drones to make sure you were okay before we caught up to you in the skiffs. You want more than this town. You want worlds. I get it. This is the most important thing to happen to you. You want to be involved. I understand.”

Tamuel slumped back in his chair. “You don’t.”

His mother rubbed her forehead. “Okay. Let’s assume you’re telling the truth. So you can’t make the ship change the beacon.”

“No.”

“Or make any changes to the hull to let us in, or show us that you can talk to it?”

“Right.”

“Anything you tell us about where it has been could have been you reading up on the wide net.”

“Yes,” Tamuel grudgingly admitted.

“It is a giant starship that we know very little about,” his dad said to his mother. “It could be there’s some protocol regarding the Core.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Tamuel shouted. “I’m not lying.”

“But we don’t know that.”

Then Tamuel jumped up. “Put me under a scanner,” he insisted.

“That’s not a good idea,” the ship said, breaking in where it had been silent.

But why not?

“Because the neural lace I injected you with is a little . . . aggressive. It won’t be like anything they would have seen.”

A cold chill ran down Tamuel’s back. “What did you do to me?”

His parents exchanged glances.

“I’m decommissioned,” the ship said. “But when I was operational I was not a transport ship, or a passenger transport. I was military. I’m a warship. When I was first here, I stood watch over the other ships. I patrolled for a decade before we cleared the area.”

Tamuel stared at his parents.

“That’s why the Core will stop anyone from entering me, understand? That’s why I’m obliged to report a breach. That’s why I have to be fused shut for my retirement.”

“Take me to Doctor San,” Tamuel whispered.

“Don’t, just give me some time, Tamuel. I’ll keep the salvagers at bay. I just want to see more sunsets.”

• • • •

Tamuel’s mother trembled as Doctor San held up the small screen and started talking to her in the other room, away from Tamuel. His dad paled.

“Am I some sort of super soldier now?” Tamuel whispered.

“No, it would be silly to do that to someone. But you do have military grade communications and computing power in you.”

Tamuel, now coming to terms with all this, smiled for the first time since dinner. “Cool!”

In response, he got a giant shrug. “It’s very illegal for a civilian. I wasn’t supposed to have a neural drone. I hid it. I wanted to talk to people from Yelekene before the end of my retirement. A small peccadillo, I guess. I’m sorry it has caused your family distress.”

“No,” Tamuel insisted. “It was amazing. I’m glad I met you.”

“The neural lace will dissolve after I pass. Your system will flush it out in a day or two. There might be a mild fever. But otherwise, you will be fine.”

His mother came back into the room. “Tamuel?”

“I was right, wasn’t I?” he said.

“What else has the ship told you?”

“If those salvagers get close to a break through, it will call the Core. It is not a normal ship. It’s a warship. They’ll stop all this, and then they’ll fine us for ignoring the beacon.”

His mother nodded. “Okay. We’ll stop it. You’ll come with us.”

Doctor San stepped forward. “I can’t let him leave. I have to report this. This is highly illegal stuff in him. I’m supposed to call deputies to detain him.”

“You heard what Tamuel said,” his mom hissed. “We can’t let the Core get involved. Not here. We’re too small. We don’t need that attention.”

Doctor San looked pained. “Okay. Go. I can delay the upload, but my scan will get reported by the software and passed along.”

“Thank you.”

And they were out into the night, running down Watts Street just like that first night when the starship had landed.

• • • •

They pulled up next to the barges, the great bulk of the starship lit up by floodlights.

Tamuel scrambled aboard, but let his mother stalk her way toward the main cabin. A pale, burly man greeted her. “I have to repeat what I told you when you called: We flew from Tamasin for this contract. Just the neural lace on this ship alone would make us all rich, if we can get in there before obsolescence.”

I think they know you’re a warship, Tamuel thought.

But he got no response. The ship was off again.

Are they close? Are they going to break through?

Still no answer.

Tamuel paced around the deck until a familiar voice made him freeze.

“Tamuel?”

It was Tosha. She frowned. “You should be back to your room by now. Did you sneak out here?”

“No!”

“You’re trying to stop all this, aren’t you?” she asked. “I came to visit Da. He says you and your parents are saying this is all going to go bad if we don’t stop it.”

“It will go bad,” Tamuel shouted at her. “The Core will come. It’s a warship.”

Tosha’s large brown eyes filled with tears, and she looked away. “Are you doing this because I was the one who called them when you tried to sail to Summerstown?”

Tamuel took a deep breath. Was that what she thought? Was that why she was always after him? “I’m not trying to do anything to you,” he said, confused.

“Well, you break out when I’m on duty. You fight with me. And I’m just trying to make sure you don’t pull another Summerstown stunt again, and get all of us prefects stuck doing extra night rounds. Or demerits on our records.”

He’d never really thought about what happened to the prefects, he realized, when he snuck out.

“I swear to you, this isn’t about that,” Tamuel said.

“This is our one chance,” Tosha said. “You don’t know how it was when we first came here from Ariston. We had nothing. Da begged in Summerstown, do you know that?”

Tamuel shook his head. Tosha stepped even closer.

“I’m so sorry,” Tamuel said.

“It’s so beautiful here, we don’t want to lose it. We don’t want to go hungry ever again.” And as she said that, she glanced from left to right and then she shoved him. It happened before Tamuel even realized what was happening. The barge flipped away from him and he struck the cold water between the starship’s pitted hull and the rusting barge.

It shifted. The waves pushed it against the starship. He was about to be ground up between the two surfaces. He could feel barnacles slicing at his skin.

Something stirred under his skin. Lace crawled out from his pores like a dark ghost and wrapped itself around him, hardening as he was battered against the starship by the barge’s hull.

“Well,” the ship said. “I would have liked to have seen another sunset in my retirement.”

Help! Tamuel screamed in his mind.

“Give me one more beautiful second on this amazing world,” the ship said sadly, “before I have to do what needs to be done.”

And for a moment, time seemed to pause for Tamuel. The barge hung at the top of a swell, and his hands remained pinned to his side, the water froze in place.

“I guess now is as good a time as any,” said the ship.

And behind Tamuel, the hull shattered into billions and billions of pieces.

• • • •

The entire bulk of the starship slumped into the East Bay like a landslide, though it pushed no waves around it. The water seemed to devour it to anyone looking.

Sonar stations registered the now semi-liquid solid mass of the warship shifting about under the bay, displacing all the water as it roiled about the barges and crept toward the beach.

Then it began to move, a solid wall pushing its way across the bay, marching toward the edges of the bay. Within five minutes, the wall had reached each of the points, leaving the bay drained of water and nestled behind a vast dam of silky black material.

The barges, just minutes ago floating on water, now sat on the bottom of the bay, everyone aboard gaping at the dam wall that had sprung out of nowhere.

And Tamuel, vomiting bile that was inhumanely black, stared up at it and the silence in his own mind.

When they pulled him back aboard, shivering and feverish, he shook his head. “I fell in,” he insisted. He’d been knocked in when the ship shifted, he said.

Doctor San found no trace of military lace in him and the Core never came to Yelekene.

• • • •

Tosha found him three days later, when he sat on a rock on what had once been East Bay beach, looking out over the surveyors examining the new plain of land Weatherly had been gifted. The ship had heard his parents talking about the need for land. Had given them a gift that he could barely even begin to appreciate, but they certainly understood.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Tosha asked.

Tamuel half jumped, as he’d been deep in thought.

“The ship showed me something,” he said.

“What?”

“Showed me what your world was like,” Tamuel said.

“Oh.” She looked down. “No one else here knows.”

“It showed me the war.” He looked away from her. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m the one who should be sorry. I—”

“It showed me a lot of things,” he interrupted. “Took me on a tour of everywhere it had been. I’ve seen a lifetime’s travel in a single millisecond. It’s going to take me a while to stop dreaming about it. I can’t sleep.”

Tosha nodded, but she didn’t really understand, he could see.

But that was okay.

“I’m not going to cause you any trouble,” he said. “At least, not for a long while.”

Then he turned back to look at the East Bay Wall. As he waited, the sun dipped behind it.

“Just one more sunset,” he whispered.

©2017 by Tobias Buckell. Originally published in Patreon.com/TobiasBuckell. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Called “Violent, poetic and compulsively readable” by Maclean’s, science fiction author Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times bestselling writer born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, and the islands he lived on influence much of his work. His Xenowealth series begins with Crystal Rain. Along with other stand-alone novels and his over 50 stories, his works have been translated into 18 different languages. He has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. His latest novel is Hurricane Fever, a follow-up to the successful Arctic Rising that NPR says will “give you the shivers.” He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs. He can be found online at TobiasBuckell.com.

We Will Be All Right

Carolyn Ives Gilman | 940 words

Tomorrow is Easter, and I will have to welcome into my home the woman who is going to murder my son.

I need to prepare side dishes in advance. Take a heaping bowl of injustice, mash it to a pulp, season with tears of rage, bake, and serve in a dish speckled with four-leaf clovers.

The question is, should I put the rat poison in hers alone, or would it be better for all of us to go together?

“Don’t worry, we’ll be careful,” the glowing couple assures me. But I have seen how they stand together, how their fingers and arms entwine as if the touch of skin on skin thrills them. I know how she will act, because I did it, too. I was a victim of the compulsion of spring, that sweet, brief time of yearning bodies, of gentle lips on downy hair, of being doubled by inhabiting one another. He was a noble, rash young man, ready to risk life for love. And I was shallow and impulsive. No, I didn’t do it the cautious, sensible way, either. I killed the man I loved in conceiving my son.

How quickly everything has changed. I can remember a time before the virulence became universal, when we still assumed a cure was coming. We used such carefree words then—a roll in the hay, a dalliance, a fling. Then we could smile and joke, before the consequence became so fatal—but just for the man, almost never for the woman. A gender-biased pathogen was unheard of then. Always before, the outcome—and the blame—had been for the woman to bear. Well, the blame is still ours, since we are the carriers, the vectors of death, but not for ourselves, only for them.

I can still hear the hush that followed when they told me my child was going to be a boy. Everyone was quietly sympathetic. I could have ended it then to avoid heartache, and gone back for a controlled, clinical pregnancy. But that would not have reversed the sweet, reckless act that caused him; it would just have destroyed all the good that came of it. Of course, once he was born, no baby could have been more precious. If only I could have sealed him in a bell jar then, never to grow, never to know the world. But I still hoped that he could dodge the ax.

The first time I saw him on a skateboard, I knew he was not going to listen to sensible persuasion, or believe he was not immortal. Eventually, there came a time when he would no longer let me stroke his hair, or press my cheek against his. It became embarrassing, momlike behavior. He was becoming an independent being, striking out on his own. What he didn’t know was that he was still part of me, circulating in my blood. The DNA of children lasts in their mothers’ eyes, muscles, and brains long after they are grown. Women, they say, become chimeras—part themselves, part their children, a patchwork creation stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. The parts of me that are still him call out. They don’t want to die.

Before he was born, men had futures. They could plan, and hope. Now, even the ones who escape the scourge are like ghosts. I saw one in the supermarket yesterday. He looked furtive, guilty. They keep to themselves to avoid the speculative looks. We should not make pariahs of them, but we can’t help ourselves, since they call to mind the other ones who deserved to live. The ones who are wanted die, the outcasts and the odd survive.

Women run the world competently, of course. We fix the electrical grids and drive the trucks and plan the new urban centers, so much smaller now. We are the doctors looking for a cure. Everything still works, but on a reduced scale, as our ambitions are reduced. Still, in the long run, I doubt the race will survive. It is technologically possible to reproduce using stainless steel and cryogenics. But to do it that way, we must deny our heirloom instincts. When the millennia of animal existence rise in our blood, we must think of something else. Baseball, perhaps, or our bank accounts. We must deny ourselves the moon-shot thrills, the bungee plunge of love, the way Nature has done it forever.

Outside my kitchen window, it is April in the garden—season of forget-me-nots and false promises of resurrection. When I think of her entering my house tomorrow, I become a tigress with a mouthful of razor blades. Should I mix the warfarin in her custard cup now? Or lace the sweet potatoes with nightshade?

Or should I spare her for the sake of my future grandchild, if worse comes to worst? That potential person may be all that will survive of him. I hope it is a boy, so she will also know the lacerations of regret. We can watch together as some heedless girl murders her child, too.

Maybe, decades from now, we will find a kind of companionship together, two silent marble pietas, hand in hand, mothers full of grace and cruelty. All the Aprils of our future will come around dragging memories by the hand, our could-have-been children. But our role now, our commission from God and Evolution, is just to grieve.

I will put death back under the kitchen sink for now. Then I will put in my earbuds to block out the world, and perhaps we will be all right.

©2018 by Carolyn Ives Gilman.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carolyn Ives Gilman is currently celebrating her decision to quit her job in order to write more science fiction. She has written two novels and five stories in the loosely connected Twenty Planets universe. Her books include Dark Orbit, a space exploration adventure; Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles, a two-book fantasy about culture clash and revolution; and Halfway Human, a novel about gender and oppression. Her short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, Realms of Fantasy, and others. She has been nominated for the Nebula Award three times and for the Hugo twice.

Gilman lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a freelance writer and museum consultant. She is also author of several nonfiction books about North American frontier and Native history.

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

The Crystal Spheres

David Brin | 6770 words

1

It was just a luckychance that I had been defrosted when I was—the very year that farprobe 992573-aa4 reported back that it had found a goodstar with a shattered crystalsphere. I was one of only twelve deepspacers alivewarm at the time, so naturally I got to take part in the adventure.

At first I knew nothing about it. When the flivver came, I was climbing the flanks of the Sicilian plateau, in the great valley a recent ice age had made of the Mediterranean Sea I had once known. I and five other newly awakened Sleepers had come to camp and tramp through this wonder while we acclimated to the times.

We were a motley assortment from various eras, though none was older than I. We had just finished a visit to the once-sunken ruins of Atlantis, and were hiking out on a forest trail under the evening glow of the ring-city high overhead. In the middle latitudes, night was now a pale thing. Nearer the equator, there was little to distinguish it from day, so glorious was the lightribbon in the sky.

Not that night could ever be the same as it had been when my grandfather was a child, even if every work of man were removed. For ever since the twenty-second century there had been the Shards, casting colors out where once there had been but galaxies and stars.

No wonder no one had objected to the banishment of night from Earthsurface. Humanity out on the smallbodies might have to look upon the Shards, but Earthdwellers had no particular desire to gaze out upon those unpleasant reminders.

Being only a year thawed, I wasn’t ready yet to even ask what century it was, let alone begin finding some passable profession for this life. Reawakened sleepers were generally given a decade or so to enjoy and explore the differences that had grown in the Earth and in the solar system before having to make any choices.

This was especially true of deepspacers like me. The State—more ageless than any of its nearly immortal members—had a nostalgic affection for us strange ones, officers of a near-extinct service. When a deepspacer awakened, he or she was encouraged to go about the altered Terra without interference, seeking strangeness. He might even dream he was exploring another goodworld, where no man had ever trod, instead of breathing the same air that had been in his own lungs so many times, during so many ages past.

I had expected to go on my rebirthtrek unbothered. So it was with amazement, that evening on the forestflank of Sicily, that I saw a creamy-colored Sol-Gov flivver drop out of a bank of lacy clouds and drift toward the campsite, where my group of timecast wanderers had settled to doze and aimlessly gossip about the events of the day.

We all stood and watched it come. The other campers looked at one another suspiciously as the flivver fell toward us. They wondered who was important enough to compel the ever-polite Worldcomps to break into our privacy, sending this teardrop down below the Palermo heights to parklands where it didn’t belong.

I kept my secret feeling to myself. The thing had come for me. I knew it. Don’t ask me how. A deepspacer knows things. That is all.

We who have been out beyond the shattered Shards of Sol’s broken crystalsphere, and have peered from the outside to see living worlds within faraway shells . . . We are the ones who have pressed our faces against the glass at the candy store, staring in at what we could not have. We are the ones who understand the depth of our deprivation, and the joke the Universe has played on us.

The billions of our fellow humans—those who have never left Sol’s soft, yellow kindness—need psychists even to tell of the irreparable trauma they endure. Most people drift through their lives suffering only occasional bouts of greatdepression, easily treated, or ended with finalsleep.

But we deepspacers have rattled the bars of our cage. We know our neuroses arise out of the Universe’s great jest.

I stepped forward into the clearing where the Sol-Gov flivver was settling. It gave my campmates someone to blame for the interruption. I could feel their burning stares.

The beige teardrop opened, and out stepped a tall woman. She possessed a type of statuesque, austere beauty that had not been in fashion on Earth during any of my last four lives. Clearly she had never indulged in biosculpting.

I admit freely that in that first instant I did not recognize her, though we had thrice been married over these slow waityears.

The first thing I knew, the very first thing of all, was that she wore our uniform . . . the uniform of a Service that had been “mothballed” (O quaint term!) thousands of years ago.

Silver against dark blue, and eyes that matched . . . “Alice,” I breathed after a long moment. “Is it true at last?”

She came forward and took my hand. She must have known how weak and tense I felt.

“Yes, Joshua. One of the probes has found another cracked shell.”

“There is no mistake? It’s a goodstar?”

She shook her head, saying yes with her eyes. Black ringlets framed her face, shimmering like the trail of a rocket.

“The probe called a class-A alert.” She grinned. “There are Shards all around the star, shattered and glimmering like the Oort-sky of Sol. And the probe reports that there is a world within! One that we can touch!”

I laughed out loud and pulled her to me. I could tell the campers behind me came from times when one did not do such things, for they muttered in consternation.

“When? When did the news come?”

“We found out months ago, just after you thawed. Worldcomp still said that we had to give you a year of wakeup, but I came the instant it was over. We have waited long enough, Joshua. Moishe Bok is taking out every deepspacer nowalive.

“Joshua, we want you to come. We need you. Our expedition leaves in three days. Will you join us?”

She need not have asked. We embraced again. And this time I had to blink back tears.

Of recent weeks, as I wandered, I had pondered what profession I would pursue in this life. But joy of joys, it never occurred to me I would be a deepspacer again! I would wear the uniform once more, and fartravel to the stars!

2

The project was under a total news blackout. The Sol-Gov psychists were of the opinion that the race could not stand another disappointment. They feared an epidemic of greatdepression, and a few of them even tried to stop us from mounting the expedition.

Fortunately, the Worldcomps remembered their ancient promise. We deepspacers long ago agreed to stop exploring, and raising peoples’ hopes with our efforts. In return, the billion robot farprobes were sent out, and we would be allowed to go investigate any report they sent back of a cracked shell.

By the time Alice and I arrived at Charon, the others had almost finished recommissioning the ship we were to take. I had hoped we would be using the Robert Rodgers, or Ponce de Leon, two ships I had once commanded. But they had chosen instead to use the old Pelenor. She would be big enough for the purposes we had in mind, without being unwieldy.

Sol-Gov tugs were loading aboard ten thousand corpsicles even as the shuttle carrying Alice and me passed Pluto and began rendezvous maneuvers. Out here, ten percent of the way to the Edge, the Shards glimmered with a brightsheen of indescribable colors. I let Alice do the piloting, and stared out at the glowing fragments of Sol’s shattered crystalsphere.

When my grandfather was a boy, Charon had been a site of similar activity. Thousands of excited men and women had clustered around an asteroid ship half the size of the little moon itself, taking aboard a virtual ark of hopeful would-be colonists, their animals, and their goods.

Those early explorers knew they would never see their final destination. But they were not sad. They suffered from no greatdepression. Those people launched forth in their so-primitive first starship full of hope for their great-grandchildren—and for the world which their sensitive telescopes had proved circled, green and pleasant, around the star Tau Ceti.

Ten thousand waityears later, I looked out at the mammoth Yards of Charon as we passed overhead. Rank on serried rank of starships lay berthed below. Over the millennia, thousands had been built, from generation ships and hiberna-barges to ram-shippers and greatstrutted wormhole-divers.

They all lay below, all except the few that were destroyed in accidents, or whose crews killed themselves in despair. They had all come back to Charon, failures.

I looked at the most ancient hulks, the generation ships, and thought about that day of my grandfather’s youth, when the Seeker cruised blithely over the Edge, and collided at one percent of light speed with the inner face of Sol’s crystalsphere.

They never knew what hit them, that firstcrew.

They had begun to pass through the outermost shoals of the solar system . . . the Oort Cloud, where billions of comets drifted like puffs of snow in the sun’s weakened grasp.

Seeker’s instruments sought through the sparse cloud, touching isolated, drifting balls of ice. The would-be colonists planned to keep busy doing science throughout the long passage. Among the questions they wanted to solve on their way was the mystery of the comets’ mass.

Why was it, astronomers had asked for centuries, that virtually all of these icy bodies were nearly the same size—a few miles across?

Seeker’s instruments ploughed for knowledge. Little did her pilots know she would reap the Joke of the Gods.

When she collided with the crystalsphere, it bowed outward with her over a span of lightminutes. Seeker had time for a frantic lasercast back to Earth. They only knew that something strange was happening. Something had begun tearing them apart, even as the fabric of space itself seemed to rend!

Then the crystalsphere shattered.

And where there had once been ten billion comets, now there were ten quadrillion.

Nobody ever found the wreckage of Seeker. Perhaps she was vaporized. Almost half the human race died in the battle against the comets, and by the time the planets were safe again, centuries later, Seeker was long gone.

We never did find out how, by what accident, she managed to crack the shell. There are still those who contend that it was the crew’s ignorance that crystalspheres even existed that enabled them to achieve what had forever since seemed so impossible.

Now the Shards illuminate the sky. Sol shines within a halo of light, reflected by the ten quadrillion comets . . . the mark of the only goodstar accessible to man.

“We’re coming in,” Alice told me. I sat up in my seat and watched her nimble hands dance across the panel. Then Pelenor drifted into view.

The great globe shone dully in the light from the Shards. Already the nimbus of her drives caused space around her to shimmer.

The Sol-Gov tugs had finished loading the colonists aboard, and were departing. The ten thousand corpsicles would require little tending during our mission, so we dozen deepspacers would be free to explore. But if the goodstar did, indeed, shine onto an accessible goodworld, we would awaken the men and women from frozensleep and deliver them to their new home.

No doubt the Worldcomps chose well these sleepers to be potential colonists. Still, we were under orders that none of them should be awakened unless a colony was possible. Perhaps this trip would turn out to be just another disappointment, in which case the corpsicles were never to know that they had been on a journey twenty thousand parsecs and back.

“Let’s dock,” I said eagerly. “I want to get going.”

Alice smiled. “Always the impatient one. The deepspacer’s deepspacer. Give it a day or two, Joshua. We’ll be winging out of the nest soon enough.”

There was no point in reminding her that I had been latewaiting longer than she—indeed, longer than nearly any other human left alive. I kept my restlessness within and listened, in my head, to the music of the spheres.

3

In my time, there were four ways known to cheat Einstein, and two ways to flat-out fool him. On our journey, Pelenor used all of them. Our route was circuitous, from wormhole to quantumpoint to collapsar. By the time we arrived, I wondered how the deepprobe had ever gotten so far, let alone back, with its news.

The find was in the nearby minor galaxy, Sculptor. It took us twelve years, shiptime, to get there.

On the way, we passed close to at least two hundred goodstars, glowing hotyellow, stable, and solitary. In every case, there were signs of planets circling round. Several times we swept by close enough to catch glimpses, in our superscopes, of bright blue waterworlds, circling invitingly like temptresses, forever out of reach.

In the old days, we would have mapped these places, excitedly standing off just outside of the dangerzone, studying the Earth-like worlds with our instruments. We would have charted them carefully, against the day when mankind finally learned how to do on purpose what Seeker had accomplished in ignorance.

Once we did stop, and lingered two lightdays away from a certain goodstar—just outside of its crystalsphere. Perhaps we were foolish to come so close, but we couldn’t help it. For there were modulated radio waves coming from the waterworld within!

It was only the fourth time technological civilization had been found. We spent an excited year setting up robot watchers and recorders to study the phenomenon.

But we did not bother trying to communicate. We knew, by now, what would happen. Any probe we sent in would collide with the crystalsphere around this goodstar. It would be crushed, ice precipitating upon it from all directions until it was destroyed and hidden under megatons of water—a newborn comet.

Any focused beams we cast inward would cause a similar reaction, creating a reflecting mirror that blocked all efforts to communicate with the locals.

Still, we could listen to their traffic. The crystalsphere was a one-way barrier to modulated light and radio, and intelligence of any form. But it let the noise the locals made escape.

In this case, we soon concluded that it was another hive-race. The creatures had no interest in, or even conception of, spacetravel. Disappointed, we left our watchers in place and hurried on.

Our target was obvious as soon as we arrived within a few lightweeks of the goal. Our excitement rose as we found that the probe had not lied. It was a goodstar—stable, old, companionless—and its friendly yellow glow diffracted through a pale, shimmering aura of ten quadrillion snowflakes . . . its shattered crystalsphere.

“There’s a complete suite of planets,” announced Yen Ching, our cosmophysicist. His hands groped about in his holistank, touching in its murk what the ship’s instruments were able to decipher from this distance.

“I can feel three gasgiants, about two million asteroid smallbodies, and”—he made us wait, while he felt carefully to make sure—“three littleworlds!”

We cheered. With numbers like those, odds were that at least one of the rocky planets circled within the Lifezone.

“Let me see . . . there’s one littleworld here that has—” Yen pulled his hand from the tank. He popped a finger into his mouth and tasted for a moment, rolling his eyes like a connoisseur savoring fine wine.

“Water.” He smacked thoughtfully. “Yes! Plenty of water. I can taste life, too. Standard adenine-based carbolife. Hmmm. In fact, it’s chlorophyllic and left-handed!”

In the excited, happy babble that followed, Moishe Bok, our captain, had to shout to be heard.

“All right! People! Look, it’s clear none of us are going to get any sleep soon. Lifesciencer Taiga, have you prepared a list of corpsicles to thaw, in case we have found a goodworld?”

Alice drew the list from her pocket. “Ready, Moishe. I have biologists, technicians, planetologists, crystallographers . . .”

“You’d also better awaken a few archaeologists and Contacters,” Yen added dryly.

We turned and saw that his hands were back in the holistank. His face bore a dreamy expression.

“It took our civilization three thousand years to herd our asteroids into optimum orbits for space colonies. But compared with this system, we’re amateurs. Every small-body orbiting this star had been transformed. They march around like ancient soldiers on a drillfield. I have never even imagined engineering on this scale.”

Moishe’s gaze flickered to me. As executive officer, it would be my job to fight for the ship, if Pelenor found herself in trouble . . . and to destroy her if capture were inevitable.

Long ago, we had reached one conclusion. If goodstars without crystalspheres were rare, and dreamt of by a frustrated mankind, the same might hold for some other star-traveling race. If some other people had managed to break out of its shell, and now wandered about, like us, in search of another open goodstar, what would such a race think, upon detecting our ship?

I know what we would think. We would think that the intruder had to come from somewhere . . . an open goodstar.

My job was to make sure nobody ever followed Pelenor back to Earth.

I nodded to my assistant, Yoko Murukami, who followed me to the armsglobe. We unfolded the firing panel and waited while Moishe ordered Pelenor piloted cautiously closer.

Yoko looked at the panel dubiously. She obviously doubted the efficacy of even a mega-terawatt laser against technology of the scale described by Yen.

I shrugged. We would find out soon. My duty was done the moment I flicked the arming switch and took hold of our deadman autodestruct. In the hours that passed, I watched the developments carefully, but could not help deepremembering.

4

Back in the days before starships—before Seeker broke Sol’s eggshell and precipitated the two-century CometWar—mankind had awakened to a quandary that caused the thinkers of those early days many sleepless nights.

As telescopes improved, as biologists began to understand, and even tailormake life, more and more people began to look up at the sky and ask, “Where the hell is everybody?”

The great lunar-based cameras tracked planets around nearby yellow suns. There were telltale traces of life even in those faint twenty-first-century spectra. Philosophers case nervous calculations to show that the galaxies must teem with living worlds.

And as they prepared our first starships, the deepthinkers began to wonder. If travel between the stars was as easy as it appeared to be, why hadn’t the fertile stars already been settled by somebody else?

After all, we were getting ready to head out and colonize. By even modest estimates of expansion rates, we seemed sure to fill the entire galaxy with human settlements within a few million years.

So why hadn’t this already happened? Why was there no sign of traffic among the stars? Why had the predicted galactic radio network of communication never been detected?

Even more puzzling . . . why was there absolutely no evidence that Earth had ever been colonized in the past? We were by then quite certain that our world had never hosted visitors from other worlds.

For one thing, there was the history of the Precambrian to consider.

Before the age of reptiles, before fish or trilobites or even amoebae, there was, on Earth, a two-billion-year epoch in which the only lifeforms were crude single-celled organisms without nuclei—the procaryotes—struggling slowly to invent the basic structure of life.

No alien colonists ever came to Earth during all that time. We knew that for certain, for if they had, the very garbage they buried would have changed the history of life on our planet. A single leaky latrine would have filled the oceans with superior lifeforms that would have overwhelmed our crude little ancestors.

Two billion years without being colonized . . . and then the silent emptiness of the radioways . . . the philosophers of the twenty-first century called it the Great Silence. They hoped the starships would find the answer.

Then the very first ship, Seeker, somehow smashed the crystalsphere we hadn’t even known existed, and inadvertently explained the mystery for us.

During the ensuing CometWar, we had little time for philosophical musings. I was born into that battle, and spent my first hundred years in harsh screaming littleships, blasting and herding iceballs that, left alone, would have fallen upon and crushed our fragile worlds.

We might have let Earth fall then. After all, more than half of humanity at that time lived in space colonies, which could be protected more easily than any sittingduck planet.

That might have been logical. But mankind went a little crazy when Earthmother was threatened. Belters herded cities of millions into the paths of hurling iceballs, just to save a heavy world they had only known from books and a faint blue-twinkle in the blackness. The psychists took a long time to understand why. At the time it seemed like some sort of divine madness.

Finally the war was won. The comets were tamed and we started looking outward again. New starships were built, better than before.

I had to wait for a berth on the twelfth ship, and the wait saved my life.

The first seven ships were lost. As they beamed back their jubilant reports, spiraling closer to the beautiful green worlds they had found, they plowed into unseen crystalspheres and were destroyed.

And, unlike Seeker, they did not accomplish anything by dying. The crystalspheres remained after the ships had been icecrushed into comets.

We had all had such hopes . . . though those who remembered Seeker had worried quietly. Humanity seemed about to breathe free, at last! We were going to spread our eggs to other baskets, and be safe for the first time. No more would we have to fear overpopulation, crowding, or stagnation.

And all at once the hopes were smashed—dashed against those unseen, deadly spheres.

It took centuries even to learn how to detect the deathzones! How, we asked. How could the universe be so perverse? Was it all some great practical joke? What were these monstrous barriers that defied all the physics we knew, and kept us away from the beautiful littleworlds we so desired?

For three centuries, humanity went a little crazy.

I missed the worst years of the greatdepression. I was with a group trying to study the sphere around Tau Ceti. By the time I got back, some degree of order had been restored.

But I returned to a solar system that had clearly lost a piece of its heart. It was a long time before I heard true laughter again, on Earth or on her smallbodies.

I too went to bed and pulled the covers over my head for a couple of hundred years.

5

The entire crew breathed a reliefsigh when Captain Bok ordered me to put the safeties back on. I finally let go of my deadman switch and got up. The tension seeped away into a chain of shivers, and Alice had to hold me until I could stand again on my own.

Moishe had ordered us off alert because the goodsun’s system was empty.

To be accurate, the system teemed with life, but none of it was intelligent.

The greater asteroids held marvelous, self-sustaining ecosystems, absorbing sunlight under great windows. Twenty moons sheltered huge forests beneath tremendous domes. But there was no traffic, no radio or light messages. Yen’s detectors revealed no machine activity, nor the thought-touch of analytical beings.

It felt eerie to poke our way through those civilized lanes in the smallbody ways. For so long we had only performed such maneuvers in the well-known spaces of Solsystem.

During those first centuries after the crystal crisis, some men and women still thought it would be possible to live among the stars. Belters mostly, they claimed aloud that planets were nasty, heavy places anyway. So who needed them?

They went out to the badstars—red giants and tiny red dwarves, tight binaries and unstable suns. The badstars were protected by no crystalspheres. The would-be colonists found drifting clots of matter near the suns, and set up smallbody cities as they had at home.

Every one of the attempts failed within a few generations. The colonists simply lost interest in procreation.

The psychists finally decided the cause was related to the divine madness that had enabled us to win the CometWar.

Simply put, men and women could live on asteroids, but they needed to know that there was a blue world nearby—to see it in their sky. It’s a flaw in our character, no doubt, but we cannot go out and live in space all alone.

We have to have waterworlds, if the universe is ever to be ours.

This system’s waterworld we named Quest, after the beast so long sought by King Pelenor, our ship’s namesake. It shone blue and brown, under a clean whiteswaddling of clouds. For hours we circled above it, and simply cried.

Alice awakened ten corpsicles—prominent scientists who, the Worldcomps had promised, would not fall apart on the reawakening of hope.

We watched them take their turn at the viewport, joytears streaming down their faces, and we joined them to weep freely once again.

6

Pelenor was hardly up to the task of exploring this system by herself. We spent a year recovering and modifying several of the ancient ships we found drifting over our planet, so that teams could spread out, investigating every farcorner of this system.

By our second anniversary, a hundred biologists were quickscampering over the surface of Quest. They gene scanned the local flora and fauna excitedly, and already were modifying Earthplants to fit into the ecosystem without causing imbalance. Soon they would start on animals from our genetanks.

Engineers exploring the smallbodies excitedly declared that they could get the lifemachines left behind by the prior race to work. There was room for a billion colonists out there, straight from the start.

But the archeologists were the ones whose report we awaited most anxiously. Between my ferrying runs, they were the ones I helped. I joined them in the dusty ruins of Oldcity, at the edge of Longvalley, putting together piles of artifacts to be catalogued and slowly analyzed.

We learned that the inhabitants had called themselves the Nataral. They were about as similar to us as we might have expected—bipedal, ninefingered, weirdlooking.

Still, one got used to their faces after staring at their statues and pictures long enough. I even began to perceive subtle facial cues, and delicate, sensitive nuances of expression. When the language was cracked, we learned their race name and some of their story.

Unlike the few other alien intelligences we had observed from afar, the Natarals were individuals, and explorers. They too had spread into their planetary system after a worldbound history fully as colorful and goodbad as our own.

Like us, they had two conflicting dreams. They longed for the stars, for room to grow. And they also wished for other faces, for neighbors.

By the time they built a starship—their first—they had given up on the idea of neighbors. There was no sign anybody had ever visited their world. They heard nothing but silence from the stars.

Still, when they were ready, they launched their firstship toward their other dream—Room.

And within weeks of the launching, their sun’s crystalsphere shattered.

• • • •

For two weeks we double-checked the translations. We triple-checked.

For millennia we had been searching for a way to destroy these deadly barriers around goodstars . . . trying to duplicate on purpose what Seeker had accomplished by accident. And now we had the answer!

The Nataral, like us, had managed to destroy one and only one crystalsphere. Their own. And the pattern was exactly the same, down to the CometWar that subsequently almost wrecked their high civilization.

The conclusion was obvious. The deathbarriers were destructible, but only from the inside!

And just when that idea was starting to sink in, the archaeologists dug up the Obelisk.

7

Our top linguist, Garcia Cardenas, had a flair for the dramatic. When Alice and I visited him in his encampment at the base of the newly excavated monument, he insisted on putting off all discussion of his discovery until the next day. He and his partners instead prepared a special meal for us, and raised their glasses to toast Alice.

She stood and accepted their accolades with dry wit, and then sat down to continue nursing our baby.

Old habits break hard, and only a few of the women had managed yet to break centuries of biofeedback conditioning not to breed. Alice was among the first to reactivate her ovaries and bring a child to our new world.

It wasn’t that I was jealous. After all, I basked in the only slightly lesser glory of fatherhood. But I was getting impatient with all of this ballyhoo. Except for Moishe Bok, I was perhaps the oldest human here—old enough to remember when people had children as a matter of course, and therefore made time for other matters, when something important was up!

Finally, when the celebration had wound down, Garcia Cardenas nodded to me, and led me out the back flap of the tent. We followed a dim path down a sloping trail to the digs, by the light of the ring of bright smallbodies the Nataral had left permanently in place over the equatorial sky of Quest.

We finally arrived at a bright alloy wall that towered high above our heads. It was made of a material our techs had barely begun to analyze, and was nearly impervious to the effects of time. On it were inscribed hardpatterns bearing the tale of the last days of the Nataral.

A lot of that story we knew from other translated records. But the end itself was still a mystery, and no small cause of nervousness. Had it been some terrible plague? Did the intelligent machines, on which both their civilization and ours relied, rebel and slaughter their master? Did their sophisticated bioengineering technology get out of their control?

What we did know was that the Nataral had suffered. Like humans, they had gone out and found the universe closed to them. Both of their great dreams—of goodplaces to spreadsettle, and of other minds to meet—had been shattered like the deathsphere around their own star. Like humans, they spent quite a long time not entirely sane.

In the darkness deep within the dig, Cardenas had promised I would find answers.

As he prepared his instruments I listened to the sounds of the surrounding forestjungle. Life abounded on this world. There were lovely, complicated creatures, some clearly natural, and some just as clearly the result of clever biosculpting. In their creatures, in their art and architecture, in the very reasons they had almost despaired, I felt a powerful closeness to the Nataral. I would have liked them, I imagined.

I was glad to take this world for humanity, for it might mean salvation for my species. Still, I regretted that the other race was gone.

Cardenas motioned me over to a holistank he had set up at the base of the Obelisk. As we put our hands into the blackness, a light appeared on the face of the monolith. Where the light traveled, we would touch, and feel the passion of those final days of the Nataral.

I stroked the finetuned, softresonant surface. Cardenas led me, and I felt the Endingtime as the Nataral meant it to be felt.

• • • •

Like us, the Nataral had passed through a long period of bitterness, even longer than we had endured until now. To them, indeed, it seemed as if the universe was a great, sick joke.

Life was found everywhere among the stars. But intelligence arose only slowly and rarely, with many false starts. Where it did occur, it was often in a form that did not happen to covet space or other planets.

But if the crystalspheres had not existed, the rare sites where starfaring developed would spread outward. Species like us would expand, and eventually make contact with each other, instead of searching forever among sandgrains. An elder race might arrive where another was just getting started, and help it over some of its crises.

If the crystalspheres had not existed . . .

But that was not to be. Starfarers could not spread, because crystalspheres could only be broken from the inside! What a cruel universe it was!

Or so the Nataral had thought.

But they persevered. And after ages spent hunting for the miraculous goodstar, their farprobes found five waterworlds unprotected by deathbarriers.

My touchhand trembled as I stroked the coordinates of these accessible planets. My throat caught at the magnitude of the gift that had been given us on this obelisk. No wonder Cardenas had made me wait! I, too, would linger when I showed it to Alice.

But then, I wondered, where had the Nataral gone? And why? With six worlds, surely their morale would have lifted!

There was a confusing place on the Obelisk . . . talk of black holes and of time. I touched the spot again and again, while Cardenas watched my reaction. Finally, I understood.

“Great Egg!” I cried. The revelation of what had happened made the discovery of the five good worlds pale into insignificance.

“Is that what the crystalspheres are for?”

I couldn’t believe it.

Cardenas smiled. “Watch out for teleology, Joshua. It is true that the barriers would seem to show the hand of a creator at work. But it might be simply circumstance, rather than some grand design.

“All that we do know is this. Without the crystalspheres, we ourselves would not exist. Intelligence would be more rare than it already is. And the stars would be almost barren of life.

“We have cursed the crystalspheres for ten thousand years,” Cardenas sighed. “The Nataral did so for far longer—until they at last understood.”

8

If the crystalspheres had not existed . . .

I thought about it that night, as I stared up at the shimmering, pale light from the drifting Shards, through which the brighter stars still shone.

If the crystalspheres had not existed, then there would come to each galaxy a first race of star-treaders. Even if most intelligences were stay-at-homes, the coming of an aggressive, colonizing species was inevitable, sooner or later.

If the crystalspheres had not existed, the first such star-treaders would have gone out and taken all the worlds they found. They would have settled all the waterworlds, and civilized the smallbodies around every single goodstar.

Two centuries before we discovered our crystalsphere, we humans had already started wondering why this had never happened to Earth. Why, during the three billion years that Earth was “choice real estate,” had no race like us come along and colonized it?

We found out it was because of the deathbarrier surrounding Sol, which kept our crude little ancestors safe from interference from the outside . . . which let our nursery world nurture us in peace and isolation.

If the crystalspheres had not been, then the first star-treaders would have filled the galaxy, perhaps the universe. It is what we would have done, had the barriers not been there. The histories of those worlds would be forever changed. And there is no way to imagine the death-of-possibility that would have resulted.

So, the barriers protect worlds until they develop life capable of cracking the shells from within.

But what was the point? What benefit was there in protecting some young thing, only for it to grow up into bitter, cramped loneliness in adulthood?

Imagine what it must have been like for the very first race of star-treaders. Never, were they patient as Job, would they find another goodstar to possess. Not until the next egg cracked would they have neighbors to talk to.

No doubt they despaired long before that.

Now we, humanity, had been gifted of six beautiful worlds. And if we could not meet the Nataral, we could, at least, read their books and come to know them. And from their careful records we could learn about the still earlier races which had emerged from each of the other five goodworlds, each into a lonely universe.

Perhaps in another billion years the universe will more closely resemble the sciencefictional schemes of my grandfather’s day. Maybe then commerce will plow the starlanes between busy, talky worlds.

But we, like the Nataral, came too early for that. We are cursed, if we hang around until that day, to be an ElderRace.

I looked one more time toward the constellation we named Phoenix, whither the Nataral had departed millions of our years ago. I could not see the dark star where they had gone. But I knew exactly where it lay. They had left explicit instructions.

Then I turned and entered the tent that I shared with Alice and our child, leaving the stars and shards behind me.

Tomorrow would be a busy day. I had promised Alice that we might begin building a house on a hillside not far from Oldcity.

She muttered some dreamtalk and cuddled close as I slipped into bed beside her. The baby slept quietly in her cradle a few feet away. I held Alice, and breathed slowly.

But sleep came only gradually. I kept thinking about what the Nararal had given us.

Correction . . . what they had lent us.

We could use their six worlds, on the condition we were kind to them. Those were the same conditions they had accepted when they took the four worlds long abandoned by the Lap-Klenno, their predecessors on the lonely starlanes . . . and that the Lap-Klenno had agreed to on inheriting the three Thwoozoon suns . . .

So long as the urge to spreadsettle was primary in us, the worlds were ours, and any others we happened upon.

But someday our priorities would change. Elbowroom would no longer be our chief fixation. More and more, the Nataral had understood, we would begin to think instead about loneliness.

I knew they were right. Someday my great-to-the-nth descendants would find that they could no longer bear a universe without other voices in it. They would tire of these beautiful worlds, and pack up the entire tribe to head for a darkstar.

There, within the event horizon of a great black hole, they would find the Nataral, and the Lap-Klenno, and the Thwoozoon, waiting in a cup of suspended time.

I listened to the wind gentleflapping the tent, and envied my great-nth grandchildren. I, at least, would like to meet the other star-treaders, so very much like us.

Oh, we could wait around for a few billion years, till that distant time when most of the shells have cracked, and the universe bustles with activity. But by then we would have changed. By necessity we would indeed have become an ElderRace . . .

But what species in its right mind would choose such a fate? Better, by far, to stay young until the universe finally becomes a fun place to enjoy!

To wait for that day, the races who came before us sleep at the edge of their timestretched black hole. Within, they abide to welcome us; and we shall sit out, together, the barren early years of the galaxies.

I felt the last shreds of the old greatdepression dissipate as I contemplated the elegant solution of the Nataral. For so long we had feared that the Universe was a practical joker, and that our place in it was to be victims—patsies. But now, at last, my darkthoughts shattered like an eggshell . . . like the walls of a crystalcage.

I held my woman close. She sighed something said in dreamthought. As sleep finally came, I felt better than I had in a thousand years. I felt so very, very young.

©1984 by David Brin. Originally published in Analog. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Brin is a scientist, technology speaker, and author. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and the world wide web.  A 1998 movie by Kevin Costner was based on The Postman. His novels, including New York Times Bestsellers, have been translated into more than twenty languages, and won Hugo and Nebula awards. His new novel from Tor Books is Existence.

A Green Moon Problem

Jane Lindskold | 6100 words

No one had ever seen Tatter D’MaLeon’s face. Even those who thought she was just a legend agreed that she was always masked. That was about all anyone agreed upon. Although the female pronoun was usually applied to “her,” even Tatter’s sex was in doubt, as was her humanity, her age, and whether or not she existed.

But believe or not, there was scarce a one who didn’t love the stories. Anthropologists had tried to pin down exactly when the first Tatter D’MaLeon stories had been told, but the stories seemed to be as old as Cat Station—older even—since putting a precise date on that hodgepodge, multi-dimensional edifice was even harder than pinning down Tatter D’MaLeon.

Politicians giving speeches used the date when the station’s great keel ring had been linked end to end, but what then of the ships that had been cannibalized into the station, becoming labs, gunnery batteries, hospitals, and more? Or what of the still older structures that had been towed over and grafted to some part of the evolving edifice?

Politicians could use whatever date they chose, but everyone else knew in their guts that the station had no one date of origin. And that Tatter D’MaLeon had haunted the frames and spires, underdecks and conduits, forgotten compartments and storage holds, since the earliest days, whenever those might be.

• • • •

“Is this Tatter a ghost then?” asked Jurgen Haines, a newly arrived merchant engineer who had come to trade himself for the riches one could sometimes make aboard Cat Station, especially if one’s skills matched the station’s need of the moment.

He was not a particularly handsome man, but then, when anyone who cared could have their physical appearance tailored, such things had come to matter less. What Jurgen Haines possessed was passionate intensity, enough and to spare, so that he’d easily attracted company even here in one of the station’s most cliquish bars.

“Oh, no!” protested Sera Mina, a hydroponics expert who had come to tend plants in vats for a season and had taken root in the soilless ground that was the station’s life. “Tatter’s as real and solid as this table.”

Jurgen was too polite, too aware of his newness to openly scoff, but his doubt showed nonetheless. Aloud, he settled for a middle course, never a bad thing in the polyfaceted community of Concatenation “Cat” Station. The station had an official name, of course, “The John Glenn Memorial Extraplanetary Habitat,” but the nickname had replaced it before the keel ring was finished, and even the politicians rarely used the official tag.

“I first heard of Tatter D’MaLeon,” Jurgen offered, “when my crew chief cursed, saying that we had a problem only Tatter D’MaLeon could solve—and to the void with her price.”

“You thought Tatter was some service you could call,” the hydroponicist said with a sly grin, “like ExtendaReach or RamOut. Figured you’d check if they had a tech or team available, just in case your chief decided she wanted to contract with them.”

Jurgen was instantly defensive. “And what’s wrong with taking a little initiative?”

“Nothing at all,” replied Beau Fourz, the cyborg pilot who’d been half-listening while he groomed grit from his peripherals. “What did you find when you looked up Tatter D’MaLeon?”

“What sounds like some sort of hazing gimmick to me,” Jurgen said. “Like sending a new tech to find a left-wheeled fly anchor. I figured that any moment I’d be told to fetch this D’MaLeon person. I was figuring out what I’d do if the chief did. I mean, sometimes it doesn’t pay to be too sharp.”

“But no one ever sent you,” Beau said, rubbing a bit of micrograin polish on his chromed fingers. “And you were left wondering.”

“And like the smart and willing fellow you are,” Sera said, smiling to prune down the newbie’s prickly temper, “you did a bit more research. What did you find?”

“It wasn’t so much what I found as that I found too much, and none of it made the least bit of sense.”

“Oh, it’s not that bad,” Beau said, setting up a force box so he could continue his manicure without scattering unwelcome nanobots around. “There are always a few things that agree—like how no one has ever seen Tatter D’MaLeon’s face.”

“She always wears a mask?” Jurgen not quite scoffed, for beneath his assumed mockery was an element of unholy fascination. “Sounds like some sort of superhero story: The Lone Spacer.”

“Well, there’s no one who will say they’ve seen her face,” Beau replied mildly.

“Oh, there are those who will say,” corrected Sera Mina, “but since no two accounts ever agree, I’ll go with the ‘Never seen her face’ bit. There is one constant, though: the three charms.”

“Charms?” Jurgen had read something, but decided to play dumb in case he’d learn more. “Like magic or like on a bracelet?”

“Like on a bracelet, though Tatter’s are usually somewhere on her tunic. There are three: a thin crescent moon, adorned with weird green gems—”

“Too pale to be emeralds, too blue to be peridots,” Beau added.

“More like the color of stagnant water filmed with algae or duck weed.”

“Trust a biologist . . .” Beau began.

“Hydroponics expert!”

“Whatever. I’ve heard the crescent moon’s gems described as sea green jade cut into tiny irregularly faceted crystals that give back the light in erratic sparkles.”

“Have it your way.” Sera rolled her dark brown eyes. She turned her full attention to Jurgen. “Tatter D’MaLeon’s remaining charms are called the Two Eights. One is an eight-pointed star that fans out around a center shaped like a human eye. The pupil of the eye is an opaque, rose-colored gem.”

“I like the other one better,” Beau cut in. “It’s a compass rose, silver upon gold, but—although the points are clearly indicated—the compass is completely useless, for it lacks a needle.”

“What, no gems on that one?” asked Jurgen, still trying to scoff but failing miserably.

“None,” replied Beau solemnly, removing his brightly shining chromed hand from the force box and finding it good.

Jurgen decided he could contribute without seeming too foolish. “My crew chief did say something about this Tatter D’MaLeon solving problems, so I cross-referenced. I found some incredibly far-fetched stories. What was almost as odd was that no one ever says what this Tatter charges. From what my chief said, I had the impression that the cost was a real issue.”

For the first time, the cyberpilot and the hydroponics expert looked uncomfortable. They traded glances, quick as breath and thought. Jurgen waited in expectant silence.

“Ah, the price,” said Beau, when it became clear that Jurgen wasn’t going to have the good taste to drop the topic. “Well, these are just stories. Obviously, the price would change according to the teller.”

“I really don’t know anything about prices,” added Sera, “but I have heard that what Tatter asks for varies from person to person.”

“A sliding scale,” Jurgen said. “Makes sense, I suppose, although I’ve always found it easier to find work if one provides a clear listing of what one will charge for a job.”

“Oh, I agree!” said Beau with more enthusiasm than such a banal statement merited. If from there the conversation drifted to the vagaries of the job market and away from the vagaries of a person who might, in fact, not even exist, and if two of the three involved were unreasonably relieved, well, what of it?

• • • •

The problem, when it surfaced, was a girl, as it will be as long as there are girls and boys and boys and girls and girls and girls and all the combinations that prosthetic aids and surgical rigs can create. But in this case the girl was a girl, just a girl. Her name was Marguerite, but she was usually called Rita.

Jurgen Haines, no longer merely a merchant engineer, but classified as an engineer proper, for he had found work that used his talents well and lined his pockets even better, first saw Rita at the Idle Hour. He was sitting at the same table where he had chatted about Tatter D’MaLeon with Beau and Sera—neither of whom he had seen since, and who had been all but forgotten, as is the way with such passing encounters.

He had come to the Idle Hour with an associate from work. They’d just ordered drinks when Jurgen caught his first glimpse of Rita.

That she was beautiful was open to debate, for beauty is a matter for both personal taste and the fashions of the age. That Rita was striking is not open to question. It was not that her skin was particularly light or dark, or the shape of her head or the angle of her brows in any way astonishing. It was how all the elements that made up the whole woman came together that made Jurgen Haines, Engineer (Structural) Second Class, with very good prospects for First, shift in his seat without even realizing that he was doing so in order that he could watch the still nameless woman as she inspected data files (or so he assumed) on a palm screen.

As soon as was polite and even a bit sooner than that, Jurgen excused himself, ostensibly to use the head (which he did use) but in reality so that he could make an excuse to talk to the girl who in a few minutes he would know as Rita Lathrop.

Rita was a geologist with a strong interest in paleontology and astrobiology. She worked for an asteroid mining group to pay the bills, while she looked for evidence of extraterrestrial life. In short, she was a dreamer and an idealist who, at the same time, was firmly enough grounded in reality to have earned three interlocking PhDs. Within a half hour of light chat, Jurgen Haines was smitten. If you remember that “to smite” is another way of saying “to wound,” “to strike,” and “to injure,” you’ll have a good sense of what he’d gotten himself into.

It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with Rita Lathrop, rather that while she loved very well, in the way Jurgen Haines wanted her to love, she was incapable. Although she was capable of enjoying intimacy with men or women or any mixture of the types, her burning passion was reserved for her quest.

Love can make the most rational person irrational. Remember this. It is important.

When Jurgen was not at work or able to spend time with Rita, he took to wandering Cat Station. The more deserted the area, the better he liked it. Was he seeking Tatter D’MaLeon? If asked, he would not have admitted doing so but, whether he sought her or not, he found her.

He first glimpsed Tatter as a glimmer of motion at the end of a long corridor, otherwise empty of anything but bank after bank of conduits. Her upper body was covered by a long tunic of pale golden Chinese brocade embellished with delicate wind-swayed flowers and swallows in flight. The highly inappropriate tunic’s ragged hem dropped below the knee, but was slit so that metallic bronze trousers and fringed leather moccasin boots could be glimpsed. These boots were laced with a silvery grey cord that gleamed palely in the uncertain light from the equipment.

But the mask could only belong to Tatter D’MaLeon. Now masks, or the seeming of such, are not at all uncommon on space stations. Many people like to be sure of respiratory support. Others hold jobs that involve virtual displays, so that hands are free to manipulate tools. Others still—like the cyberpilot Jurgen had forgotten—had implants that enabled them to better perform some task. With enough of these, planned or not, the person comes to wear a mask.

Tatter’s mask was no such hybrid construct. It was a full-face creation, originally white as snow or bone or crisp unused paper, molded after a stylized female face. The large teardrop ovals that served as eyeholes were the only obvious interruptions in the smooth surface, but closer examination showed that additional holes—perhaps to facilitate breathing—had been drilled near the nose and mouth.

The mask’s foundation may have once been solely white, but that had not lasted. The eyes were encircled by mismatched curves and arcs in bright colors set down in no apparent pattern, accented—also with no recognizable system—in silver, gold, and bronze. The mask’s high forehead and one cheek bore a storm of asymmetrical, jagged lines that might have been clashing lightning bolts or the stripes of a very peculiar multi-colored tiger.

The mask’s lips were pale orange. On the remaining cheek were neatly drawn the three emblems that rumor swore were the only constant in Tatter D’MaLeon’s ever-shifting attire. Each was perfectly recognizable and embellished with tiny glittering specks that might have been gems. Here and there on the mask, faceted dewdrops caught the light, giving it back accented by the dominant colors of the area. As this nearly deserted deck was furnished in the whites and greys that are no color at all, the dewdrops took nothing and gave it back disguised as treasure.

“Tatter D’MaLeon?” Jurgen’s voice broke with astonishment as he transformed in a few syllables from a doubter to a want-to-believer.

In reply, the masked figure dipped a gloved hand (lavender with pearl buttons at the wrist, fabric smudged with iridescent trails of oil) into one of the brocade tunic’s pockets and came out with an octagonal data card. With a flourish, she handed the card to Jurgen.

“Tatter D’MaLeon, Interstellar Vagabond,” read the first line. “Your problem is not my problem—unless you want me to make it so.”

As Jurgen re-read the card, the mask spoke. The voice was oddly pitched, high but not squeaky, resonant in the range of a mezzo-soprano, but with peculiar inflections that made it sound as if English was not the speaker’s first language—that, in fact, raised the question as to whether any terrestrial language could claim that honor.

“So? You tell what you brings here? Not all who wander here are lost, but you seem so very unlost that Tatter is amazed.”

Jurgen only hesitated briefly before plunging in to the tale of his obsession with Rita Lathrop. He ended by stating with desperate intensity. “I can’t live without her.”

“Is she dying then?” came the oddly modulated voice. “Your other words seem to indicate that this is not.”

“Oh, Rita’s alive, very alive, but she can’t see me for her quest. I told you about her quest.”

“For the alien, proof thereof, her great passion. For this she lives, but you do not find this enough?”

“I want her to live, but I want her to live for me, too. She can look for aliens all she wants, but I want her to do it with me or to be aware of me, to care for me as I do her. Is that too much?”

Behind the mask, the almost-seen eyes . . . Were they brown? Green? Some mixture of the two? Or, like the gems on the mask, none of the above? Whatever their color, there was a flutter as if the eyes blinked.

“It is not too much,” Tatter agreed. “But it is not my problem—unless you wish me to make it so. Do you so wish?”

Jurgen froze, suddenly silent. Since that first mention so long ago—in those days Before Rita—he had done research regarding Tatter D’MaLeon. The research had not been simple or routine. The material in the databanks had an unsettling tendency to change. He’d read an entry one day and sometimes he couldn’t find it again or, if he did, it would have altered in some subtle, undefinable fashion.

It wasn’t only open-source materials that changed, but material he stored in his private files. Printing never seemed to work. Only partial bits of text would transfer onto the expensive hard copy. And even those fragments that did print had a disturbing tendency to go missing. But, even within the limits of faulty human memory, Jurgen constructed a tentative edifice of what he thought were facts.

Tatter D’MaLeon always found a solution for the problems she made her own, but those solutions could be peculiar. Therefore, it was always a good idea to carefully explain what you wanted from her—and it was a good idea to make sure you understood the price for her services before making an agreement. Apparently, once she accepted a problem, Tatter D’MaLeon did not stop until she found a solution.

So, when Tatter asked if he wished her to make his problem her own, Jurgen paused but heard himself impulsively saying, “Yes, I do.” He continued more carefully. “Maybe, maybe, I do want you to make my problem your problem. Do you understand ‘maybe’?”

“‘Perhaps,’” came the prompt reply, trilled out so the word sounded more like “purr-haps,” “I do. ‘Maybe’ is conditional on a term or terms being fulfilled. It is akin to ‘might be,’ ‘perhaps,’ an indication of how complex the problem is.”

“That’s right,” Jurgen said. “So let me explain. When I say I don’t want to live without Rita, I don’t mean I want to die. I don’t want her to die, either. I want us both to live. Together. Inseparable. Till death do us part. I’d like that death to be a long time from now.”

“Mortality is not a problem Tatter can solve,” Tatter replied seriously. “Even suns in time do die. Definitely, though, I can make certain that if I take on your problem (with the understanding that you wish me to do so in order that it cease to be a problem), then I will endeavor to find a solution that will draw you and Rita together without risking a diminution of the duration of either of your lives.”

For a brief instant, Jurgen thought about asking Tatter D’MaLeon if she could assure that he and Rita would be happy together, but he suspected that was like asking for an assured lifespan.

Instead he said, “And I’d like us to have a chance at being happy together. I don’t want a solution that will end up with her hating me.”

“Careful. Full of care,” came Tatter D’MaLeon’s reply in a tone that might have been affectionate, although the modulations of her voice were so peculiar that it was really hard to be sure. “I accept these provisions as limitations if I should make your problem my own. Now, hold for a moment while Tatter collects some information to assist.”

She touched the breast of her brocade tunic. For the first time, Jurgen noticed that the charms depicted on her mask were fastened to the frayed fabric. She pulled the compass free and then the eight-pointed star. Spreading her gloved palm flat, she laid the latter upon the former.

“What are those for?” Jurgen asked suspiciously.

“Compasses have a long tradition as aids in divination,” came the not-quite reply. “Breathe on these,” Tatter commanded raising her hand to the level of his mouth, “so that they spin.”

Feeling not so much foolish as possessed of a nebulous fear, Jurgen obeyed. Now that the charms were raised closer to his eyes, he could see that the tiny rose crystal served as a pivot on which the eight-pointed star could turn. Vague memories of birthday cakes with tiny candles flitted through his mind and he exhaled hard, as if by doing so he could make his wish come true. He expected the two charms to separate, but instead the eight-pointed star spun wildly, blurring almost into invisibility.

Tatter watched, her eyes shadowed behind the mask. “Interesting,” she said, folding her fingers around the charms. “This is definitely also a green moon problem.”

She detached the crescent moon with her free hand, then gently pressed it against Jurgen’s lower lip, beneath his nostrils, above his right eye, and in the curve of his left ear. Finally, she added the moon to the charms already concealed within her gloved palm.

“If I need more, I shall contact you,” she said, beginning to turn away.

“Wait!” Jurgen said, raising his hand as if to physically restrain the weird masked figure who stood suspended in mid-move before him. “The price! What is the fee for your taking on my problem and hopefully finding a solution?”

Her reply was a seeming non sequitur.

“Can you tell me what it is to be human? Can you tell me why humans exist?”

Jurgen blinked. His engineer’s temperament had long ago rejected such speculation as a waste of thinking capacity.

“What it is to be human? Well, isn’t that a matter of biology? How certain bits of DNA link up? Genes. The ones we have that chimpanzees don’t? Like that?”

From the slump of those golden brocade-clad shoulders, Jurgen could tell his reply was a disappointment. He tried again.

“As to why humans exist, well, that’s a question for a philosopher. I’m just a merchant engineer. Not very good at that sort of thing. I suppose humans exist to perpetuate the species, just like any other sort of animal.”

Tatter tilted her masked face inquiringly. “Then those humans who do not have offspring are not human? They should not exist?”

“Dammit, I’m not saying that at all . . . You’ve got me all fuddled. And what does any of this have to do with your fee?”

But Tatter’s reaction was an audible exhalation, a sigh that, for the first time made Jurgen feel certain there was a living person behind the mask. “If you cannot answer, you cannot. Tatter also accepts more common currency. Look at the card I gave you. Is the figure upon it acceptable? A small deposit now. I will expect the rest in full when you accept my solution for this problem of ours.”

Jurgen glanced down at the card. The initial lettering had vanished, replaced by a sum that struck him as amazingly low.

He was already thumbing agreement to the deposit when Tatter D’MaLeon went on. “Expenses will be yours to pay, but all will be approved in advance.”

“Then we have a deal?” Jurgen asked, unable to believe this change in his luck.

“We will if I find an acceptable solution for you,” Tatter clarified. “Keep the card. It will tell you where and when you will be able to meet me again. Oh, as you value your Rita, do come alone. I am, as you may have heard, very shy . . .”

“Wait!” Jurgen called, moving to where the figure in its worn finery was about to turn down a shadowed service corridor. “You’ll contact me soon, right? This isn’t going to be one of those problems where the only solution is lots and lots of time, right?”

Tatter wheeled about to face Jurgen, suddenly so close that the mask filled his entire range of vision. The eyes within oval apertures were coldly compassionate. The air they both breathed was rippled by eddies from the small holes cut in the mask.

“Waiting might be wisest, but an unwillingness to wait is part of the problem you gave me. Correct? Fear not, I will not forget time. Now cease following me. We do not yet have an agreement and if you further grieve me, we shall never.”

Jurgen backpedaled, feet alternately sliding and catching on the aged deck plates. “I’ll check the card!” he called, but Tatter D’MaLeon was gone.

• • • •

Jurgen had plenty of time to wonder at the wisdom of making his problem Tatter D’MaLeon’s. It didn’t help that Rita, to this point willing to meet him for dinner or evening drinks—if for no other reason than that Jurgen was always willing to listen to her talk about the latest developments in her quest—was unavailable. A new asteroid had been hauled to Concatenation Station and she was working terrifically long hours lest she be off-shift and miss some possibly crucial discovery.

This was the intensity that made Jurgen love her—even as it drove him to paroxysm of frustration because she applied it to such slim hopes. Surely there were better ways to . . . But they had already had that discussion and it had gotten him nowhere or less than nowhere, since some very hard words had been exchanged.

He checked the data card at such regular intervals that his teammates noticed and asked if someone back home was ill. When he told them in all honesty, “I’m waiting for a message from Tatter D’MaLeon,” the response was laughter or, in one case, a look of pity.

The message, when it came, was brief, a series of coordinates indicating a point of rendezvous and a time. That the one was obscure and the other dead in the middle of a shift—and thus a time when the chance of interruptions would be reduced—did not surprise him at all.

Jurgen had almost been hoping that the meeting would be set for a time when he would need to cancel a date with Rita. He’d imagined himself saying something mysterious, maybe even making her jealous, but no such subterfuge was necessary. A new section of the asteroid was being accessed and Rita, eyes smoke-rimmed with fatigue, graceful form jittering from too many stimulants, probably didn’t even notice that he hadn’t come to watch her as he so often did.

When he went to the assigned rendezvous, Jurgen thought no one was there. Then what had seemed golden light resolved into a shimmer of golden brocade, a bit of white he’d taken for the bulkhead glinted as Tatter slowly turned her masked face to him, enigmatic smile on those unmoving pale orange lips.

Again, Jurgen’s script for the moment, which would have begun with him saying something sly and cutting about how Tatter had kept him waiting, was wasted, for Tatter D’MaLeon did not bother with anything as normal as greetings. Instead she raised a gloved finger and pointed out a porthole—remnant of some luxury cruiser of the past that had sacrificed hull integrity for offering a “real, naked-eye” view of the stars.

“There,” came the voice from within the mask. “Buy that. It will make you as appealing to Rita as you wish to be and bring about the joining you desire.”

“Buy what?” Jurgen replied, momentarily wondering if she meant the porthole.

“That,” Tatter D’MaLeon repeated, wiggling the tip of her finger slightly. Jurgen saw that she was indicating a chunk of debris embedded in the exterior hull, not far from the porthole.

“That bit of space junk?” Jurgen asked, disbelieving.

“That. It is not ‘space junk,’ except in the most general sense of the term. It is a portion of a comet whose course took it through much void space. More interesting than an asteroid, yes?”

There was something almost wicked in the twinkle of those eyes—today more green than brown—behind oval apertures, something that told Jurgen that Tatter D’MaLeon had been aware of his recent frustrations.

“You will need proof, of course,” Tatter D’MaLeon continued. “I provide documentation as part of my elimination of your problem. It is a curious history having to do with how this liner came to cease being a liner and instead became incorporated into the station.”

Jurgen was astonished by the neatness of this solution. He’d never considered supplying Rita with an extraterrestrial artifact. He understood why he needed to buy it. If he did not, it would remain part of the station’s property and access would be administered by official, doubtless restrictive, regulations that governed such matters.

“I’ll need a salvage permit,” he said, half to himself. “Then there’s the problem of making sure provenience is absolutely clear. Rita’s a stickler for that sort of thing. I’ll need to make sure I have a full visual record of my retrieving the comet fragment. Or better, we could excavate it ourselves . . .”

He trailed off, aware of the masked figure waiting in perfect quietude. “Oh, your fee . . .”

“You do not know if this will truly solve your problem,” Tatter protested. “Have you perhaps thought further on my question? Do you have any thoughts as to what it is to be human?”

Jurgen pulled a data card from his pocket. “Here’s some of what various philosophers have said. I weeded out some of the worst twaddle, but I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not really certain if it’s what you want. For that reason, I have a pre-paid data card here for you in the amount you requested.”

With great solemnity, Tatter accepted both forms of payment. In turn, she handed over the promised documentation. Jurgen glanced out the porthole, superstitiously reassuring himself that his treasure was still there. He was not entirely surprised when he turned back to find that Tatter D’MaLeon was gone.

• • • •

Jurgen was not a merchant engineer for nothing. He knew all there was to know about securing permits, permissions, and property rights. Although impatient, Jurgen waited until Rita’s asteroid had proven to be yet another disappointment. Then, shyly, he sprung the news of his newly acquired extraterrestrial object on her. She did not fall all over him in gushing glee, but, when she had finished reviewing the documentation supplied by Tatter D’MaLeon, she looked at him, excitement replacing the dull disappointment in her lovely eyes.

“Oh, Jurgen, this is marvelous! Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“You were absorbed in your other project,” he reminded her, adding a trace tartly, “I didn’t think I could get you to take the time to review what I had.”

“Well, I have now, and I can’t wait to get to it. A comet fragment . . . Who would have thought!”

“I’ve arranged for excavation equipment,” Jurgen said. “Between us, our training should be sufficient to handle removing the fragment. No need to let anyone else in on the secret.”

Rita agreed with such pathetic eagerness that Jurgen wondered if she was aware that she was becoming a bit of a laughingstock in some circles.

When they had completed their work some weeks later, for Rita insisted on documenting every stage, no matter how miniscule, they had a chunk of material that was remarkable to Jurgen only by virtue of being so unremarkable. He even entertained a fleeting thought that Tatter D’MaLeon had taken advantage of him but, when he considered that the excavation had gained him several weeks of Rita’s spare time for a price far less than the expensive dinners he would have paid for without question, he decided to let the suspicion slide. True, the salvage rights hadn’t been cheap, and at least he could have eaten his share of an elegant dinner rather than stifling in an EVA suit, but . . .

Then Rita found the first indication that buried within the heat-fused material was something anomalous. Jurgen only understood half of her rattling on about chains of organic molecules and patterns that didn’t match up with anything in the extensive database she’d assembled over years of research. He did understand that she was excited. He was delighted when that excitement was expressed with kisses that tumbled into embraces and these into something very unscientific but extremely satisfying.

Even better, since Rita didn’t want to risk anyone else co-opting her secret before she had everything ready for publication, she drafted Jurgen as her lab assistant. He pretended more reluctance than he felt and this, combined with Rita’s growing awareness that the discovery she’d longed for all her life rested in a bit of space debris that actually belonged to someone else, made her treat Jurgen very well.

Several times, Rita hinted that she’d be happy to buy the artifact from Jurgen, but he always shrugged the offers off, making excuses about how he didn’t want to take her money when she needed it for all this expensive research. And it was expensive, which in turn led to some cutting of corners—never where it would matter for the quality of the results, but where doing some process by hand would save on the need for some expensive piece of equipment. Rita even began to argue that working by hand was preferable, because no one would be able to argue that her results were due to trace materials in shared equipment or a factory calibration error. Her own work and Jurgen’s was rigorously documented in anticipation of claims of human error.

Was it during one of these meticulous procedures that the contamination happened or was Tatter D’MaLeon still working on “my problem” even then?

Whatever the cause, the result was rapid and irreversible. Within hours of the first symptom—a roughness of skin—it was already too late. Rough skin toughened and spread, sealing eyes, ears, and mouth. But this was not fatal, for the mutation permitted breathing through surface cells. Moreover, extra limbs formed, perhaps to increase available surface area.

These extra limbs in turn—as documented by the liberal array of visual recording devices in Rita’s lab—generated numerous small but efficient peripherals that captured light and moisture, thereby supplying the now sealed bodily systems possessed by both Rita and Jurgen with most immediately necessary nutrients.

By the time Rita and Jurgen were missed—and this was after a full series of shifts had gone by, since neither of them had been interacting much with anyone else—the transformation was complete.

• • • •

A panel of four were meeting in a small, secure office in the keel ring.

“Based on the records Dr. Lathrop left,” reported Yoshiko Shandeigh, the senior investigative staffer assigned to the case, “she was certain that the artifact found by Engineer Haines was of actual alien—as opposed to merely extraterrestrial—origin. Whether this will be upheld by further investigation is up to those who will continue her research. For now, preliminary checks seem to indicate that whatever triggered the mutation is not likely to spread elsewhere in the station—although necessary precautions are, of course, being taken.”

“Then they are still in there? Under that growth?” asked Abdul Bameer, the administrator to whom the report was being given. “They’re not dead?”

“Absolutely not!” said Imogene Crow, the medical expert. “Indeed, based on how efficiently they are processing light, air, water, and minimal additional resources, they may outlive all of us.”

“But are they aware? Are they ‘in there’?” persisted Administrator Bameer.

“They are definitely at least somewhat aware—especially of each other,” Dr. Crow replied. “Their limbs are intertwined and when an attempt was made to separate them, they kept twisting back so that we could not part them without causing injury.”

“The limbs of Jurgen Haines were particularly protective of the bond,” added Sera Mina, the hydroponics expert who had been enlisted because of the probable type of care the newly mutated pair would need. “I met him soon after he came up to Cat Station, you know. We swapped tales one evening in the Idle Hour, but I never got to know him well. So, what’s their legal status? Is there funding for their care?”

“The question of Dr. Lathrop and Engineer Haines’ legal status was difficult to resolve,” said Abdul Bameer. “After consultation with various legal experts, the decision has been made to declare them incompetent, and make them wards of Concatenation Station. Their personal resources will be confiscated, used both for their care and for research into this malady with the firm hope of finding a cure.”

Sera Mina shoved back her chair and rose. “Well, if that’s all settled, I’d better see what I can do about setting up a greenhouse for them. Later!”

• • • •

Far away, somewhere in the bowels of Concatenation Station, Tatter D’MaLeon knew that Jurgen’s problem was no longer either his or hers. The solution had been difficult to manufacture but, as Jurgen had desired, Jurgen and Rita would be together for the rest of their lives.

There was even a human cultural precedent for the solution Tatter had arrived upon. As she closed the file in which she’d found the old Roman tale of Baucis and Philemon, she felt with great satisfaction that, at long last, perhaps she really was coming to understand what it meant to be human.

©2018 by Obsidian Tiger Inc.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bestselling author Jane Lindskold was born in Washington, D.C., which set her up for a lifetime of being told she couldn’t be from the United States, because she wasn’t from a state. An outsider perspective tends to permeate her writing, which may be why she is drawn to SF/F. Lindskold has published over twenty-five novels, including the Firekeeper Saga and the Artemis Awakening series. Her seventy-some short stories have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and magazines. She lives in New Mexico, which many people also don’t realize is a state, thereby reinforcing her outsider perspective. You can find her on the web here.

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

Godmeat

Martin Cahill | 7020 words

The godmeat stank of hibiscus and saltwater. Its noxious divinity threaded through the kitchen, the air itself feeling suddenly buoyant in its wake. If Hark closed his eyes, he could almost imagine himself on the beach where Spear had killed the Sea Mother; pale green water lapping at his feet, miles of white sand stretching into the distance, while pink blossoms bobbed in the surf. He could almost see Spear standing on top of the godthing, her weapon shimmering with the blue blood of the dying Beast.

Hark took in the cut of godmeat before him, shining a bloody pink against his dark skin, clean and ready for a dry rub of spices. Seven dishes he’d had the honor of crafting, and it still quickened his heart to handle the raw flesh of one of the Great Beasts; no other chef in all the Wild World could say they’d done it, and none could do it so well as Hark.

All he’d had to do for this opportunity was condemn the Wild World itself to die. But what was the annihilation of a world against the pursuit of culinary perfection? The question echoed in the back of Hark’s mind, and like every time before, he ignored it.

Sprinkling a mélange of ochre, emerald, and golden spices onto his palm, Hark rubbed his hands together and sank them into the cut. On contact, desperate emotion shivered up his wrists; visions of waterfalls, lily pads, coastal storms, and ice floes rode on the dying whalesong of the godthing still inside the meat. Ever the professional, he paused; after the first few meals, he learned that the visions, no matter how strong, eventually subsided. When they did, he continued on with his work. The Hollowed would only wait so long for their next course.

Footsteps behind him dragged the shadowed taste of cloves, mint, and ash into the room. Hark rankled. “Put that out, Spear. Please. I’ve lived almost seventy years in perfect health. I am not going to die from your secondhand smoke.”

She grunted, challenging as ever, but Hark wouldn’t back down. She could smoke those wherever in the Wild World she pleased, but the kitchen was his kingdom and he’d be damned to let Kai’nese tobacco into it. After a moment, he heard her crush the butt in the sink, and felt her eyes on the back of his neck. “There’s a carafe of peach and raspberry tea in the icebox if you’re looking for something to fiddle with. This is going to take some time.”

She pulled out the carafe and poured a glass. “Hollowed don’t like to wait.” She slurped tea with the delicacy of a street urchin in finishing school; Hark bit the inside of his cheek. Four years they’d been working together, and there were still some days he wanted to throw her into the ocean.

“They’ll have to,” he replied, tasting sand and seaweed in the back of his throat. He patted the thoroughly spiced cut of godmeat with admiration. “She was one of the oldest, and she’ll take a long while to cook. To eat the Sea Mother raw would destroy them, their gullets breaking with storms, their blood boiling with salt.” He turned to smile at her, his sun-sharp grin unwavering in the face of her sternness. “They’ll let me take my time, or they’ll simply drown in the air.”

She shrugged, left her dirty glass on the counter, and walked out of the kitchen, weapons jangling against her hips.

Hark sighed, but didn’t let her immaturity distract him from the meal. Turning back to the godmeat, he placed it with care inside a circle of salt, lily petals, and steel shavings, and set a timer, one of those fussy new clockwork pieces from across the Spidered Sea.

As he reveled in the satisfactory ticking of the copper mechanism, a pressure grew behind his eyes. He didn’t have time for this; there were side dishes to prepare. But he closed his eyes all the same.

In the darkness of his mind, a light grew. As his vision adjusted to the brightness, Hark stood before the Hollowed, seated in their gnarled thrones of wood, bone, and glass.

They numbered nine, and when they’d first approached him, they’d been little more than the idea of ghosts, fragile clouds pinned to a harsh sky. Now, they were more than hale. Myriad Hells, they were practically robust. Skin had yet to solidify on all of them; rich flashes of crimson muscle and webbed veins ran through them, and Hark did his best not to stare. But the past four years of divine consumption had invested in them a very true sense of existence, and they were beyond eager to cement themselves back onto reality.

Where they came from exactly, Hark didn’t know, and he wasn’t stupid enough to ask. They’d introduced him to Spear, who he assumed was in it for the same reasons he was, and sent them off into the Wild World.

They’d sworn fortune in success, torture in failure, and so far, they hadn’t backed down from either end of that promise. All it took in exchange was four years of murdering ancient godbeasts who kept the laws of reality in place, and serving them up for sumptuous dinner.

It only gnawed at Hark’s conscience in the beginning; concerns fell away once he began to revel in the art of the meal. Pride always had a way of replacing fear throughout his life.

In the center sat their leader, jaw line red and exposed. The Golden King opened his crimson mouth, and his breath was a dry, foul wind in the psychic space.

“Where is our meal, chef? We hunger for the Sea Mother.” Every sound he made was a fat, black fly tickling Hark’s nose. He shivered, as he always did.

The other Hollowed murmured their agreement, and Hark couldn’t stop his eyes from wandering across their thin bodies, their red muscles, their empty eye sockets: Mother of Knives, Fisher Knight, Father Flame, Hunter of Screams, Sister Rapture, The Visionary, Heart’s Crown, and Cloudbreaker. Each claiming to be a god, each hungry to be filled up again with the divine potential they once possessed, and usher in a new age of the Wild World, each a nightmare to behold.

But he’d be damned if he was cowed by a gathering of impatient, hungry patrons, who wanted him to skip to the end simply because their bellies were rumbling. To Hark, it didn’t matter if he was making a soup of fresh tomato, basil, and cream, or a seared steak of the finest divine beast: He would serve when it was ready, and not a moment before.

He cleared his throat and folded his arms, staring into the empty eye sockets of the Golden King in what he hoped was a humble but imperious manner.

“Look here, my lord. It has been four years since you hired Spear and me to produce for you all the divine ingredients necessary for your actualization in the physical world. And have I, even once, even for but the breath of a moment, served any of you your meal before it was ready?” The Hollowed sat still as syrup, and Hark could feel very real sweat leaking into existence on his forehead. But he had to forge ahead; you couldn’t very well stop churning the butter halfway through, could you?

“Your demands do not respect me. Your ignorance of the work I do continues to grate on my professionalism, and your aggression only demeans me as I work well beyond the methods of my culinary career in preparing that which you have asked of me.” He took a deep breath as each of the Hollowed sat taller in their chair, their bones rattling with rage. “Please know that I have no intention of dishonoring any of you, your positions, or your needs, but you must remember that while I am mortal, the work I do is divine and needs the proper patience. Else you’re wasting my time, Spear’s time, and most importantly, your time.” He tried an old smirk on for size, one he used to give his line cooks when they would mouth off at him. “Or did you all think that you were immortal just yet?”

Their silence crawled over Hark. It would be insane for them to kill him, yes? Their contract was almost up, just one more after the Sea Mother, and—

Hark blinked, and found himself back in reality. A whisper in his ear, and a sensation like a wasp landing on the nape of his neck: Get it done and serve us.

Hark let out a shaky breath. His hands were gripping the marble counter with an intensity he reserved for cutting root vegetables. Then, a flat voice from the other room: “I told you they wouldn’t be happy.”

“Shut up, Spear.” He snatched up a rag and mopped his brow.

A sizzling to his left interrupted his terror. He looked up to see that the steel shavings, the salt, and the lily leaves had burnt away to a fine pink powder that pulsed like morning light on ocean stillness.

He sighed with relief, happy to throw himself back into his work. He lifted the cut of godmeat, scooped the bright powder into a glass vial, and went back to preparation. There were still hours to go before the Sea Mother was ready for consumption, but Hark didn’t mind. This was his calling, and he answered it gladly, even if the Hollowed did not respect it.

He hummed a song to himself as he worked and tried to forget that the world was one meal closer to ending.

• • • •

The Hollowed may have had the ability to act like spoiled children, but they truly knew how to appreciate a meal when it reached their table.

Spear and Hark stood at attention while each of the Hollowed took a fair portion of the Sea Mother’s fillet; even from where he stood, Hark’s mouth watered at the smell of the steak, his eyes drinking in the velvet line between rare and medium-rare, his nostrils screaming at the scent of woodsmoke, sea-salt, and hibiscus that lingered around the meal like swaddling robes. But the Sea Mother was not for him, and though it tantalized every aspect of his appetite, to taste of the godbeast would drive him mad.

As one, the Hollowed feasted, savoring every morsel of the ancient goddess that graced their palates, the taste of ages caramelizing in their mouth like apple butter, every bite releasing torrents of rainwater and storm winds into their stomachs, the long history of the Sea Mother playing out like an orchestra between their teeth. Coils of white lightning arced between the Hollowed as they ate, and in their eye sockets pulsed the night-blue light of hurricanes.

When the meal was finished, Hark watched the Golden King work his now full jaw back and forth, skin the color of midnight fully drawn over it, taut. Only his eyes remained empty, the sockets flashing the blue of the deep, as the power of the Sea Mother ran through him.

“Visionary,” he said, his voice booming like tidal waves crashing to the sand. “Tell me what you glimpse with the Sea Mother’s gaze.”

The Visionary’s nine eye sockets, arranged in a diamond across his copper face, all glowed with the hue of the ocean, and he sucked in a strangled breath of glee. “Ships, I see them! Numbering twelve, bedecked with cannons and steel, usurping the gift of wind do they travel on the Haljredan Strait, to make war upon their neighbors.”

The Golden King’s grin was infectious. “Father Flame. Speak to me of the sky.”

Father Flame’s fingers burned with the trembling spark of barely held lightning. His gums glowed like newborn embers on a fire, and lit his smile from behind. “The clouds are swollen with heat. Oh, how they wish to dance!”

One by one, the Golden King questioned his brethren. With every answer he received, he only laughed, until the echoes around Hark made him sick to his stomach. He and Spear had not moved an inch, and dared not turn from the exultation of the Hollowed.

The Golden King held up a fist as dense and sharp as coral. “Her power is ours. The Sea Mother lives on in us, and so does her strength.” Hark could feel the Golden King warping the air in the room, increasing the pressure around them all in his corrupt joy. “Cloudbreaker! Pummel ships with hurricane winds. Father Flame! Strike coastlines alight with your lightning. Mother of Knives, corrode fisherman’s steel with salt. Fisher Knight, encircle boats with sharks and squids.” One by one, the Golden King commanded his brethren, smiling, as across the Wild World, ships drowned, coasts were ravaged, cities were hammered by lightning, metal rusted away, and children were swept out to the deep.

The Golden King purred, satisfied, a lion among sheep. “Teach the Wild World that we are coming back.”

Hark heard a rattling sound. Turning his head just so, he glimpsed Spear. She stood at attention; her ankles pressed together, her arms behind her back. Her eyes bored ahead with a focus Hark envied. But when he looked closer, he could see that she shook, ever so slightly, her knives and daggers trembling with her. Hark saw the tightness in her jaw, the muscles in her neck bulging, her eyes only just wider than normal, and he realized: She was afraid.

Finally, he thought. Something I understand.

“Chef. Attend.” The Golden King’s voice was a hook in Hark’s lip, dragging him back to attention. “Do not for a moment think you may shirk focus, simply because our contract is almost at an end.”

Hark bowed slightly from the waist. “Of course, my lord.”

“Delivered unto us have you, eight Great Beasts of the Wild World. Through our veins flow their strength over its seas, its mountains, its creatures, its skies . . . ours to will, and to shape, and to crush.”

Hark couldn’t help but recount them, the Beasts he’d watched die, the dishes he’d made, had been happy to make. No other chef in all the Wild World had done what he had done. I melted the Sunsword into a soup. I sliced open the heart of the Iron Hound, and boiled it for a pudding. I cracked the ribs of the Mountain Worm and garnished them with flowers. I baked the head of the Firestag, and broke its antlers over my knee. I grilled the Sea Mother’s hide. Hark felt proud, and wondered for a brief moment what else sat within him just then, the ghost of an emotion that did not wish to speak its name, but whose shape he knew and feared. He stuffed it down inside, deep and away. Now was no time for introspection.

“Our contract is almost fulfilled, hunter. Our contract is almost up, chef. There is no doubt in your minds as to who we seek to eat for the very last, is there?” The Golden King’s voice curdled hearts as it did milk, and Hark struggled to swallow the bile in his throat.

“The Messenger, my lord. The Great Beast of Death.”

The Hollowed sat and nodded, smiling at each other like small children, eager to have dessert. “Once we have consumed death, then no longer will death have the chance to consume us. Not again. With our immortality secured, we shall release you both.” The Golden King’s eyes narrowed, as though finally finding prey. “Though how long you survive in this world we make, that will be a mystery.”

Thank the dead Beasts for Spear, who filled the silence with a question. “The Messenger, then. Where does it speak now?”

The Golden King gestured to his siblings.

Cloudbreaker’s halo caught the candlelight, and when she glanced towards the sky, her brow shone like a broken mirror. Her empty eye sockets glazed over with golden light, letting the power of the Sunsword hawk fill her. After a moment, she spoke. “South and south again, across Lament’s Rush and Once Mighty Drazbaadinmar, south, even further, pushing through the breast of Haddikstant and across the Iron Plains! The Messenger followed the scent of war horns and rattling sabers, drinking the carnage of clashing spears and skins. Now, the Beast resides in the heart of the Ruined Lights, supping on the souls of the haunted wood.”

Cloudbreaker’s beatific smile did nothing to offset the sharpness of her teeth. “You’ll find the Beast there, bloated on the blood and smoke of the Plains. I await your concoction, chef.” Cloudbreaker snapped her jaws playfully.

The Golden King raised a hand. “Bring us death’s head on a platter and you will both know riches and sweet reward, to be enjoyed in the beautiful moments before our return. Come back with anything less and you’ll both know damnation. Are we clear?”

Spear jerked her head up, a sneer slicing her face. “I know how threats work. We’ll get it done, and then you’ll leave us alone.” Spear grabbed Hark’s arm, and pulled him back with her, both of them tumbling out of the psychic space.

Hark broke his arm free of Spear’s grip. “They’ve killed people for less, Spear!”

Spear glowered at him, unblinking. She spat on the floor and got to her feet. “And I’ve killed people for less than that. They don’t scare me,” she said, as though she wasn’t just trembling before them. She started to walk toward the supply pantry, which doubled as her armory. “C’mon. Let’s do this, then.”

Hark grabbed a handkerchief from the counter and wiped away Spear’s spittle before getting to his feet and following.

Thanks to reality-bending Persuasion Workers, the pantry was almost fifty feet deep, and on each wall, their tools; Hark had the right wall for his utensils and Spear had the left for her weapons. Already, she was running her fingers across the steel that waited, tracing the edge of a sword, testing the heft of a flail. Hark stood at the other wall, his neuroses making his fingers itch. He always got antsy whenever Spear picked her weapons; it reminded him of the old days, when he’d smack wrists and crack knuckles, expecting perfection of the young charges in his restaurant as they learned to sharpen knives, learned which blade worked for which cut. That he didn’t know anything of her tools made him anxious.

After a few moments, Spear turned to face him, already done. She had her arms crossed, and an eyebrow raised; with the sheer amount of weapons she’d strapped to her body, she resembled nothing less than a steel porcupine.

“Are you really going to need all of those?” Hark asked, regretting it immediately. She glowered, and he was reminded of just how little he knew of her. Neither of them were very friendly people, and whatever polite inquiry he made into her past she tamped down like a stray spark, as though a friendly question could make her catch fire. Though if he were honest with himself, if she bothered to ask him anything, he’d probably do the same.

“I was thinking of bringing nothing, but then I remembered I’m hunting the Great Beast of Death, which has been around since the inception of the concept of the Wild World, so I reconsidered.”

Hark scowled, running a hand across his stubbly scalp; shaving his dreadlocks cut down on how much grey he saw each day. “Fine, be a bitch. What do I care? After you murder this thing, and I cook it into art, we’ll be rid of each other.”

At this point, she’d normally shove past him, go to the rune in the foyer, and be gone, leaving him to prepare the recipe and side dishes until she returned with the Beast in tow. Instead, she stood there, and would not look away from his eyes, ringed as they were with wrinkles and creases. “What are you looking at?” he said, his heart turning stony and cold at the attention of such a hard-bitten woman.

She scowled, picking her nose and then moving the same finger behind her ear. “I’m looking.”

Hark folded his arms and crouched his chin into his chest, embarrassed suddenly, and feeling oddly petulant. “For what? My coin purse, no doubt, you mongrel woman. I bet you’ll never be satisfied, even after you’ve murdered the last Great Beast and are awash in gold and steel!”

Spear snorted, and then in a sudden motion, took Hark around the shoulders and pulled him close, into a hug, tight; he could feel various weapons poking him in places he did not wish to be poked. “There it is! Oh, there it is, Hark. I see it now. Sometimes you hide it, but I know it’s always there.”

His heart leaping at the physical contact, he recoiled and shoved out of her embrace, almost knocking over a cart of bowls and utensils. “What in the Myriad Hells are you talking about? Are you drunk? Did you sneak into my wine cellar when I wasn’t looking? I bet you did!”

She laughed again, higher, and Hark sensed a mania he did not like. Spear’s eyes shone with a sinister light, and Hark began to fold in on himself as she advanced, her shadow falling across him. “I guess you could say I drank madness and developed a taste for it. It’s easy to go mad when you have nothing left to live for.” She sidled closer, leaning down until her hot breath danced by his ear. “I used to have a lot to live for. But the Hollowed saw to that; reached right through reality and burned it all down with everyone inside. So I’d rather just fucking work for them and die than try to pretend I have anything left to live for; let them crumble the world to cinders. My own world is already ash.”

“But you?” she hissed. “I know all about you; I’ve read up on you. You don’t want the world to end because you hate it. You don’t even care about the world. You’re just bored and beaten down. Bitter. Arrogant. Lonely. And the Hollowed gave you a challenge. Who cares if you help bring about the apocalypse? You’ll have done something no one else has done. You’ll be able to step on the necks of all those who told you that you’d fail.”

Spear took a step back, then. She smiled down at him, pity in her eyes. “That doesn’t make you mad, just petty. And that makes you worse than me, Hark. You’re far worse.”

And then she laughed. It pierced Hark’s heart as surely as an arrow. And she kept laughing. And her laughter followed her across the Wild World as she left the manor.

It lingered, wrapped itself around Hark like a noose, and pulled tight.

• • • •

Hark’s manor was in the seaport town of Awrant, just off the Spidered Sea, and with Spear’s laughter echoing after him, he found himself bursting out into the bright spring day and lurching toward the water.

He would do this as a boy, fresh bruises from his aunt and uncle shivering into existence on his stomach, his shoulders, the back of the legs, where no one would think to look. And now, as then, Hark’s feet stepped staccato, his whole body quaking with the aftermath of a beating, unseen, but his soul was already bruising over.

His manor nestled in a patch of gardens, tucked away from the main road, but only a short distance from his once greatest triumph. Now, as he came upon the ruined shell of his old restaurant, he could barely look at it. Even passing it brought noxious memories to the surface like cold apples in water, bobbing and demanding attention. And just like the taxes he didn’t pay, and like the codes he chose not to follow, and the workers whose plights he passed by, he chose not to see those memories. The restaurant died because not enough people loved it, he had reasoned to himself; it had not been his fault.

So he staggered past, ignoring the dark interior, the graffiti and the smell of garbage that stroked his cheek. Fuck the restaurant, he thought desperately. It didn’t want to live, so let it die. It wouldn’t matter, not as long as he did his work.

He walked down Main Street, composing himself in front of the men and women and children going about their day. His chef whites gleamed in the late afternoon sun, looking like raiment compared to the drab wear of the Awranti. His uncle was a naval scorpion, his aunt a jungle weaver, his parents unknown to him and better off that way. He would never wear anything to remind him of any of them again, and so he pushed himself forward with pride in standing out. Better to gleam like a bright blade than be smothered in the burlap crowd.

Children sang for alms on Viscounts Way, and he ignored them all. Let them work, if they were to earn a living. Through Dishra’s Gift, the wide, sweeping park green and lush, ignoring the families as they ran and played, doing his best to ignore the longing for what he could’ve built with Fenli, and never had the time for. If Hark looked closely, he could almost see Fenli waiting for him under the cherry trees, his poet’s face long and sad. Hark shook his head, then, sweat forming on his upper lip; Fenli wasn’t here. He had moved on, to take up a fisherman’s life with his husband in Albercari. Hark was alone.

Huffing, almost out of breath, his heart racing, he turned onto Sandrazi Road, and made his way through the fashion district, scenting for the cologne of the sea on the wind. Salt, wet wood, and gull feathers. He was close; he had to hurry, his ghosts were gaining on him.

And then, past the stalls of crafts, textiles, and coffee shops before the port, he turned and saw the ocean. Something in him finally gave way. Endless, blue and green, the sun a dazzling orange lance thrown across the horizon, Hark forgot his age and ran, ran for the water. Down past the docks, past the Endless Empire war galleys and the Julaywi song ships, he ran out and past them, into the sand, past the sand, into the surf, past the surf, and into the water proper.

He pushed out, farther, farther. The water rose from ankles to knee to waist to chest, to nose. Hark, harried by Spear’s laughter, the ghosts of his failures, the anger and arrogance of his youth, found himself up to his nose in the sea he had once loved and given up for the kitchen. The ocean did not let him live, and so he had been ordered to stop swimming. He felt it coming, a great peace that the sea always offered and which he had been aching for, for many years.

Except the sea salt sting in his nose offended him, and the endless blur of water in his eyes brought him back to the Sea Mother, that godbeast he had as surely helped kill as Spear, and too quickly, the water was too close and he was too deep, and it seemed at the thought that the entire sea lifted him up and away, and Hark’s gut churned, and he retched into the water, emptying himself, sobbing.

As he stood there in the water, floating in the sea that was the home of his youth, standing amidst his ruined lunch, gasping for air, he saw something slice through the sky. A flash of white against the bright blue, then gone. He blinked, rubbing at the saltwater ticking his eyes.

Again, a glimpse of white, then gone. Hark blinked, turned, tried to push himself on his toes, back toward land.

A third time, he saw it and then heard a string of curses in a high-pitched squeak. He followed the sound, the absurdity of it distracting him from his despair long enough to see a small girl on the shore, uttering every curse known across the Spider Coast and farther, holding in her delicate brown fingers, a broken kite. White sail-cloth bunched up in her hands, straddled by beams of thin wood, as she cursed at it for not working. Her mother stood behind her, laughing, but doing it quietly enough for the girl not to notice. All Hark could do was watch as, after a moment’s chuckle, the mother came forward, knelt by her daughter, and slowly pointed out where things had gone wrong, and how to make it better.

Hark’s heart ached, knowing that in a few short days, the Hollowed would be freed by his hand, and there would never be any chance to make it better.

It would be all his fault, just like everything in his life.

If he were not too stubborn to give up, he would have floated out to sea. But Hark was not one to give up, even his life. He had only given up on the world being good to him.

So he hurled himself out of the water, and walked dripping wet back to his manor, to consign the world to death.

• • • •

Salt. Pepper. A little butter. Sear both sides, and then let it cook in the oven for thirty minutes. Hark even prepared a small salad to be served with it, to keep his mind from the impending destruction of the world.

Spear never told him what the Messenger had looked like. A week and a half after she left to hunt, she reappeared, reached into her bag, and pulled out a dark, hot lump, fixing him with a cold fury in her eyes. “Go on, then,” she had whispered, “Show the cruel world how great you are. Make a filet of death.”

She walked with him through psychic space until they reached the Hollowed’s banquet table, where each of the nine soon-to-be-gods sat with slavering impatience. Hark made them wait as long as possible, though he couldn’t articulate why. He poured a blood-red wine, a Trevaldi 491, aged on butterfly smoke and white chocolate. He served his salad, laden with berries, arugula, goat cheese, almond slices, and a dusting of volcanic ash. Finally, he served out the portions of the Messenger’s heart, small on the wide plates, encircled with a sauce of dark chocolate, coffee, and orange bitters.

The Golden King raised a glass of wine. The other Hollowed followed suit. “To Hark and Spear,” the Golden King purred, a smile splitting his cracked lips. “Thanks to them, we’ll soon walk the world. And in doing so, break it for our revenge. To the end of the Wild World, and the start of a new one!”

The Hollowed cheered.

The Hollowed drank.

The Hollowed ate.

Hark stood with his feet together, his hands behind his back, and his eyes full of tears. Beside him, Spear did the same. He had to do something. He couldn’t let them out into the world. He couldn’t do anything, but he had to do something.

As one, they finished their plates, and Hark felt the edges of psychic space break open, unfurling like a languid rose. The Hollowed stood in the Wild World now, the Messenger acting as the final anchor to true reality. They stood in an antechamber just off the kitchen, and Hark yearned to go there, to hide from what he’d done. Already he could feel the tangle of power the Hollowed gave off, a massive surge of dominance over the laws of reality once held by the Great Beasts. He could taste war on the wind, feel the thrum of collapse in the soles of his feet, hear a hot sickness flooding through his blood.

But before he could do anything, the Golden King stepped forward, smiling, with a look of knowing in his empty eyes, those hollow sockets that had not filled for any of them, even in life anew.

“We thank you, chef. Your despondence, your dedication, and your own small cruelties made you the perfect vessel for our return. Like you, we were failed by the world we hoped to lead. Like you, we were cast out in the pursuit of our perfection. Like you, we hungered to fill the emptiness within us, and show those in the world we were not what they thought we were. And now, we have that chance to revenge upon them, to move in a way you have only wished to for so many years.”

Hark’s eyes went wide as the words sunk in.

They had not sought him for his talent.

They had chosen him because he was just like them: hollow.

The wall around his heart shattered then, with the roaring strength of a pounding tide. Hark fell to his aged knees and raised beseeching hands over his head.

“Wait! My lords! My ladies! My lieges, all, please hear me!” He could feel their searing gaze on him, but he dared not meet them. “To commemorate such a momentous occasion, I have . . . prepared something for you all; a small trifle, something special to cleanse your palates with before striding out into the Wild World. Please grant me a short time to prepare it and bring it to you all.”

“Rise.” Hark looked up.

Numbered nine and radiant all, the Hollowed watched him, smiling with a wicked edge.

The Golden King nodded. “There is the obeisance we’ve been waiting for. Go and bring us your treat, chef. You’ve earned some slight patience.”

Hark bowed and turned on his heel. He felt Spear right behind him.

“What in the Myriad Hells are you doing?” she whispered, both of them pushing into the kitchen. Hark’s heart pounded, though for the first time in four years, he was utterly calm.

Hark looked around his kitchen, his kingdom, and smiled. It had been so good to him; in a world that had hurt him, his kitchen was an oasis he’d retreated to so many times. He ran his hands along the black and white marble counter, picking at small nicks in the cutting boards. He gazed out through the bay window by the fireplace, and there in the distance, the sea he so loved. He found himself walking toward the pantry and opening it with reverence.

Spear watched him in silence. She stood motionless as his hands glided along his wall of tools and found an ivory knife handle, and, drawing it from its guard, a shining, white blade.

It was a knife to be used only in certain procedures. Butterflying the heart of a cosmic whale. Slicing off shavings of psychotropic dark-matter mushrooms from the underverse. Cracking the shell of a Dwarf Star Turtle to consume the radiation inside.

It was a precise tool meant for precise actions.

Hark handed the hilt to Spear.

She took it, her face slack, her eyes dead. “What am I doing with this?”

He pursed his lips, thinking, and then wiped the corners of his eyes, as the answer took hold of him, and sudden tears threatened to fall. “It is too late to stop them, Spear. They are free, and I freed them. Every part of me is screaming to curl up and die, to let them run rampant. But . . .” Here he paused, the memory of his failed restaurant, his failed career, his failed family, ruin after ruin flashing before him. Then, a young girl on the beach, and learning that you can always try again, if you work to fix what went wrong. “That wouldn’t be right.”

He smiled at Spear, a genuine thing, and found he quite liked it. “Should this fail, then let it fail. But I’ll not give up the world to die, even though I gave up on it long ago.”

Spear spun the ivory knife back and forth, testing its weight, hefting its handle. She didn’t offer an argument, just as Hark knew she wouldn’t. She looked up at him, her eyes as cold and clear as a forest spring. “Where, then?”

Hark took her hand in his own. He lifted the knife’s tip up to his right eye. All he could see through one eye was steel; through the other, Spear, steady as a stone and waiting. “Both, Spear. Please, make it quick.”

She said nothing. Only nodded.

The pain that shattered through him was unlike anything he had ever felt. It demanded his full attention, and Hark writhed on the ground, screaming with all his broken heart. And when he thought he couldn’t scream anymore, some new part of him discovered he could.

It was some time before he found consciousness, and when he did, it was a world of touch and taste and sound and patience. He found his feet, and a hand under his arm. Spear’s husky, harsh voice was right next to him. “I have them, Hark. What am I doing with them?”

His voice was a whisper. “In my hand, please. I have it from here.”

It was slower than he thought it would be, but the more than fifty years in his kitchen, his kingdom, had not left him. Sliding his hands along the counters, he inched his way to the cabinet of glasses. He found nine champagne flutes. There was an angry, thumping pain at the front of his skull, and there was wetness slipping down his face, and though it demanded all of his attention, Hark denied it.

He had work to do.

With Spear’s assistance, he went to his old chopping block, and holding each eye just so, sliced them thinly, arraying them in the bottom of the flutes. She helped him pour a thick port wine into each glass, only guessing that the liquid is mulberry and pomegranate in color. And with Spear’s guidance, adorned a serving tray with the flutes, and walked them toward the Hollowed.

They did not ask questions, because gods do not ask questions. They said nothing, only taking the flutes and toasting each other, the crystalline tinkling of glass on glass a strange music to Hark’s ears. If they saw his ruined eyes, they did not care. They simply drank, and swallowed.

It was only a few moments before they began to scream.

Spear will tell him later that the looks on their faces made it worthwhile, as matter began to boil into their hollow sockets, and eyes began to grow, eyes that looked so much like Hark’s own. She will tell him of the dumbfounded looks on their faces, the way that rage battled with confusion, of how doubt, ever elusive in the face of such power, began to creep in.

At that moment though, the Golden King screamed, “Chef! What is the meaning of this? What have you done to us?”

Hark’s voice was knife thin but cut through the newborn gods’ screaming all the same. “You were right, my lord. We are the same. I have felt hollow myself for some time, and I would do anything to fill myself up some purpose, even if it was destruction, pride, or power. I thought the world was evil, because it did not understand me or work to make me happy. But I was also stubborn, arrogant, and foolish, too, to think the world would come to my door and give itself to me. I did not learn from my mistakes, and so I lost it all. I blamed the world for that, too. But the world doesn’t deserve to die because of my small heart. And it doesn’t deserve to wither under your gaze either, simply because you once tried to fix it, and it rejected you. You all have a chance to make things right. If you may see things more clearly because of my eyes, see the joys or lessons or hopes I have witnessed, then I am happy to give them to you, and give this world a small chance at living on.”

Silence, and the weight of nine pairs of his own eyes looked down upon him from thrones of wood, bone, and glass.

“We will remember this transgression, chef,” the Golden King said, in a voice that could splinter mountains, and freeze stars.

Hark chuckled, and found he liked it. “I should hope you do. I hope you never forget this day, or this meal. I hope it lingers in your hearts for centuries to come.” Hark paused, lifted his chin, and stared up at the Hollowed with empty eyes. “We can do better. All of us.”

Spear will tell him later how they all looked down on him, scowling, furious, righteous, and powerful. And then, how after a moment, their faces softened, their new eyes creased with concern, and how they all looked to each other, seeing each other truly for the first time in millennia, and how like smoke on the wind, they faded from sight.

But all Hark heard in that moment was silence, and it wasn’t until Spear took his elbow, and whispered, “They’re gone, Hark,” that he collapsed to his knees, hyperventilating. His body wracked with sobs, and he didn’t fight it. The world still spun on, and so he hoped beyond hope that he got through to them.

And when Spear asked him where he’d like to go, he didn’t hesitate.

“To the sea, I think,” he said, knowing he would be seen in his chef whites, his face a ruin, and not caring. “I think I crave some time by the sea, for as long as it’s there.”

Spear took him by the elbow, and together, they made their way to the water, enjoying in silence every moment the world had not yet ended.

©2018 by Martin Cahill. | Art © 2018 by Galen Dara.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Martin Cahill is a writer working in Manhattan and living in Astoria, Queens. He is a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Writers’ Workshop and a member of the New York City based writing group, Altered Fluid. He has had fiction published in Fireside Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Shimmer Magazine. Martin also writes non-fiction reviews, articles, and essays for Book Riot, Tor.com, the Barnes & Noble Sci-fi and Fantasy Blog, and Strange Horizons. This one goes out to the creators; a pinch of hope makes every recipe stronger.

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

Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse

Xia Jia (translated by Ken Liu) | 5230 words

1.

The dragon-horse awakens in moonlight.

Drops of cold dew drip onto his forehead, where they meander down the curve of his steel nose.

Plink.

He struggles to open his eyes, rusted eyelids grinding against eyelashes. A pair of silvery specks reflects from those giant, dark red pupils. At first, he thinks it’s the moon, but a careful examination reveals it to be a clump of white flowers blooming vibrantly in a crack in the cement, irrigated by the dew dripping from his nose.

He can’t help but inhale deeply, as though trying to taste the fragrance of the flowers, but he smells nothing—after all, he is not made of flesh and blood and has never smelled anything. The air rushes into his nostrils, whistling loudly in the narrow gaps between mechanical components. He feels a slight buzzing all over his body, as if each one of his hundreds of scales is vibrating at a different frequency, and so he sneezes, two columns of white fog erupting from his nostrils. The white flowers tremble in the fog, drops of dew falling from the tips of the translucent petals.

Slowly, the dragon-horse opens his eyes all the way and lifts his head to survey the world.

The world has been desolate for a long time and now looks very different from his memory of it. He remembers once having stood in the middle of a brightly lit hall, shaking his head and waving his tail at Chinese and foreign visitors, surrounded by cries of delight and surprised intakes of breath. He remembers nights when, after the lights in the museum had been extinguished, lingering visitors murmuring in strange tongues had disturbed his dreams.

The hall is now in ruins, the cracked walls askew with vines sprouting from fissures and seams, leaves susurrating in the wind. Vine-shrouded trees have punched holes, large and small, in the glass skylight overhead. Bathed by moonlight, dewdrops plink-plonk like pearls falling onto a jade platter.

The dragon-horse glances around the great hall of the museum—now a decayed courtyard—and sees that all of the other inhabitants are gone, leaving only him dreaming for untold centuries amongst the rubble. He peers at the night sky through the holes in the skylight: the empyrean is a shade of midnight blue, and the stars twinkle like silver-white flowers. This is also a sight he can’t recall seeing for a long, long time.

He recalls his birthplace, a small city named Nantes on the shores of the tranquil Loire, where the brilliant pinpricks of the stars, reflected in the water, resembled an oil painting. But in this metropolis, thousands of miles from Nantes, the sky always hung overhead like a thick gray waxy membrane by day, varicolored neon lights turning it even more turbid at night.

Tonight, the limpid moon and luminous stars arouse in him an intense nostalgia for his hometown, for the tiny workshop where he was born, on an isle in the middle of the river, where the artisans drew the plans for his design using pens with nibs as fine as a single strand of hair, and then cast the components, polished, spray-painted, and assembled them, until he was fully formed. His massive body weighed forty-seven tons, composed from tens of thousands of individual components.

With his reinforced steel frame and wooden scales, he stood erect, a terrifying sight. Then the gears, axles, motors, and cables inside him collaborated seamlessly in a mechanical symphony so that he could come alive: his four hoofed legs extending and flexing as though made of flesh, his neck curving and straightening like a startled wild goose, his spine gyrating like a playful dragon, his head lifting and dipping like a lazy tiger, his steps as light as an immortal dancing across water.

On top of his horse-like body is a dragon’s neck and head, along with a long beard, deer antlers, and dark-red glass eyes. Each of the golden scales covering his body is inscribed with a Chinese character: “dragon,” “horse,” “poem,” “dream.” These characters embody the romantic fantasies his clever artisan-creators harbored about another ancient civilization.

Long ago, he came here in a Year of the Horse. “Vigorous as dragon and horse” is an auspicious phrase the people of this land loved to say to each other, and it was this phrase that inspired his creators, and endowed him with his present mythical form.

He remembers also parading across a square packed with crowds with his head held high and his legs stretched out. Children greeted him with curious eyes and delighted screams as the mist spewing from his nostrils drenched them. He remembers the lovely music that filled the air, a combination of Western symphonies and Chinese folk tunes—slowly and gracefully, he strolled, swaying and stepping to the rhythm of the music. He remembers the streets and buildings spreading before him like a chessboard, stretching endlessly under the gray, hazy sky. He remembers his performance partner, a mechanical spider who was almost as large as he and whose eight legs sliced through the air menacingly. They performed together for three days and three nights, enacting a complete, mythical tale.

Nüwa, the goddess of creation, sent the dragon-horse to survey the mortal world, where he encountered the spider, who had escaped from the heavenly court and was wreaking havoc everywhere. They fought an epic battle until—neither able to overcome the other—they forged a peace based on friendship. Then the four seas undulated in harmonious tranquility, and even the weather became mild and pleasant.

After the show, the spider returned to its birthplace, leaving the dragon-horse alone as guardian of this strange land.

Yet, isn’t this place another homeland for him? He was created to celebrate the lasting friendship between two nations, and from conception he was of mixed blood. The dreams and myths of this land were his original seed. After eons of being passed from one storyteller to another, the legends—transformed into the languages of strange lands, borne across oceans to new realms—were substantiated by the magic of steel and electricity, like those agile robots and spaceships. Finally, across thousands of miles, he came here to become a new legend to be passed down through the ages. Tradition and modernity, myth and technology, the East and the West: Which is his old country, which the new?

The dragon-horse, unable to puzzle out the question, lowers his heavy head. He has been asleep for too long, and the whole world has turned into a ruined garden. Are there still places in this garden for people to live? In the cold moonlight, the dragon-horse carefully lifts his legs, and, step by step, begins to explore.

Every joint in his rusty body screeches. In a glass wall filled with spiderweb cracks, he sees a reflection of himself. His body has also been decaying. Time flows like a river, halting for no one. His scaled armor is now patchy, incomplete, like an aged veteran returning from the wars. Only his glass eyes continue to glow with that familiar dim light.

The wide avenue where cars had once streamed like a river of steel is now filled with lush trees dancing in the wind. As soon as there’s a break in the rustling of leaves, birds and insects fill the silence with their chittering music, which only makes everything seem even more desolate. The dragon-horse looks around, uncertain where he should be headed.

Since it makes no difference, he picks a direction at random and strolls forward.

The clopping hoofbeats echo against the pavement. The moon stretches his lonely shadow a long way along the ground.

2.

The dragon-horse isn’t sure how long he has been walking.

Silently, the stars spin overhead and the moon wanders across the firmament, but without clocks or watches, time’s passage cannot be felt.

The avenue he’s on was once this city’s most famous street. Now it is a deep canyon whose craggy walls are formed from an amalgam of bricks, steel, concrete, and trees, the product of mixing the inorganic with the organic, decay with life, reality with dream, the steel-and-glass metropolis with ancient myths.

He remembers that there was once a square nearby where bright lights remained lit throughout the night like a thousand-year dream. But in the end, the lights went out, and the dream ended. There’s nothing in this world that can outlast time itself.

Coming into the valley that was once that square, he sees an impossible vision: thousands and thousands of steel wrecks heaped and stacked like the skeletal remains of beasts, the looming piles stretching as far as the eye can see. These were once automobiles of various makes and sizes, most of them so corroded by rust that only the frames remain. Twisted branches emerge from the dark, empty windows and stab into the sky, as though clawing for some elusive prey. The dragon-horse experiences a nameless sorrow and terror. He lowers his eyes to gaze at his own rusty forelimbs. How is he different from these dead cars? Why should he not fall into a perpetual slumber alongside them?

No one can answer these questions.

A scale falls from his chest, rolling among the steel wrecks and echoing dully in the watery moonlight. The insects, near and far, fall silent for a moment before resuming their joyful chorus, as though what fell was nothing more than an insignificant pebble.

He becomes even more frightened, and picks up his pace as he continues his night journey.

• • • •

Squeaks come from a certain spot in the ruins. The sound is thin and dreary, different from birdcall and insect chitter. The dragon-horse follows the sound to its source, searching among the thick grass with his nose. Suddenly, in the shadow of a shallow cave, he finds himself gazing at a pair of tiny, dark eyes.

“Who are you?” the dragon-horse asks. It has been so long since he has heard his own voice that the thrumming timbre sounds strange to him.

“Don’t you recognize me?” a thin voice answers.

“I’m not sure.”

“I’m a bat.”

“A bat?”

“Half-beast, half bird, I sleep during the day and emerge at night to swoop between dawn and dream.”

The dragon-horse carefully examines his interlocutor: sharp snout, large ears, a soft body covered by fine, gray fur and curled upon itself, and two thin membranous wings shimmering in the moon.

“And who are you?” the bat squeaks.

“Who am I?” the dragon-horse repeats the question.

“You don’t know who you are?”

“Maybe I do; maybe I don’t,” replies the dragon-horse. “I’m called Dragon-Horse, meaning that I am both dragon and horse. I began as a myth in China, but I was born in France. I don’t know if I’m a machine or a beast, alive or dead—or perhaps I’ve never possessed the animating spark. I also don’t know if my walk through the night is real, or only a dream.”

“Like all poets who make dreams their horses.” The bat sighs.

“What did you say?”

“Oh, you reminded me of a line from a poem from long ago.”

“A poem?” The word sounds familiar to the dragon-horse, but he’s not certain what it means.

“Yes. I like poems,” the bat says, and nods. “When the poets are gone, poems are even more precious.”

“The poets are gone?” the dragon-horse asks carefully. “You are saying no one writes poems anymore?”

“Can’t you tell? There are no longer any people in this world.”

The dragon-horse doesn’t bother looking around. He knows she’s right.

“Then what should we do?” he asks, after being silent for a while.

“We can do whatever we want,” says the bat. “Humans may be gone, but the world goes on. Look at how lovely the moon is tonight. If you want to sing, sing. If you don’t want to sing, just lie still. When you sing, the world will listen; when you are quiet, you’ll hear the song of all creation.”

“But I can’t hear it,” admits the dragon-horse. “I can only hear the chitter of insects in the ruins. They frighten me.”

“Poor baby—your ears aren’t as good as mine,” says the bat compassionately. “But you heard me. That’s odd.”

“Is it really that strange?”

“Usually, only bats can hear other bats. But the world is so big, anything is possible.” The bat shrugs. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know where I’m headed,” the dragon-horse says. It’s the truth.

“You don’t even have a destination in mind?”

“I’m just walking about. Also, I don’t know how to do anything except walking.”

“I have a destination, but I got held up on the way.” The bat’s voice turns sorrowful. “I’d been flying for three days and three nights, and then an owl came after me. The owl almost tore my wings.”

“You’re hurt?” asks the dragon-horse solicitously.

“I said ‘almost.’ Do I look like I’m easy prey?” Her indignant speech is interrupted by a fit of coughing.

“Do you not feel well?”

“I’m thirsty. Flying parched my throat, and I want a drink. But the water here is full of the flavor of rust; I can’t stand it.”

“I have water,” says the dragon-horse. “It’s for my performance.”

“Would you give me a drink? Just a sip.”

The dragon-horse lowers his head, and a white mist sprays from his nostrils. The mist soaks the bat’s tiny body, forming droplets on the fine fur. Satisfied, the bat spreads her wings and carefully licks up the droplets.

“You’re nice,” squeaks the bat. “I feel much better now.”

“Are you leaving, then, for where you want to go?”

“Yes. I have an important mission tonight. What about you?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll just keep on moving forward.”

“Can you carry me for a while? I’m still tired and need rest, but I don’t want to be late.”

“But I walk very slowly,” the dragon-horse says, embarrassed. “My body is designed so that I can only walk haltingly, step by step.”

“I don’t care.” Briskly flapping her light wings, the bat lands next to the dragon-horse’s right ear. The bat’s claws lightly clutch a branch of his long antler, and then she’s dangling upside down.

“See, now we get to talk as we walk. There’s nothing better than a night journey with conversation.”

The dragon-horse sighs and carefully shifts his limbs. The bat is so light that he almost can’t feel the creature’s presence. He can only hear that thin, reedy voice whispering poetry in his ear:

“Faced with the great river I am consumed by shame. What has my exhaustion accomplished . . .?”

3.

They pass through the graveyard of cars. The road is now more rugged and uneven, and the moon has hid itself behind wispy clouds so that the road is illuminated in patches.

Carefully, the dragon-horse picks his way through, fearful of falling and breaking a limb. With each step, his whole body creaks and groans, and gears and screws fall off him—clink-clank—and disappear in the gaps between rubble and weeds.

“Are you in pain?” asks the bat curiously.

“I’ve never known what pain is,” confesses the dragon-horse.

“Wow, impressive. If it were me, I’d be dead from the pain by now.”

“I don’t know what death is, either.” The dragon-horse falls silent. The nameless sorrow and terror have returned. If he is considered alive now, is that essence of life scattered among the tens of thousands of components making up his body, or is it concentrated in some special spot? If these components are all scattered along the path he has trodden, will he still be alive? How will he continue to sense all that is around him?

Time flows like a river, halting for no one. There’s nothing in this world that can outlast time itself.

“Walking like this is boring,” says the bat. “Why don’t you tell me a story? You were born so long ago that you must know many stories that I don’t know.”

“Story? I don’t know what a story is; I certainly can’t tell you one.”

“It’s easy! Okay, repeat after me: ‘Long, long ago.’”

“Long, long ago . . .”

“What comes to your mind now? Do you see something that doesn’t exist?”

The dragon-horse does. The wheel of time seems to be reversing before his eyes. Trees shrink into the ground, and giant buildings shoot out of the earth, part to the sides like the sea, and leave a straight, wide avenue down the middle.

“Long, long ago, there was a bustling metropolis.”

“Are there people in the city?” asks the bat.

“Many, many people.”

“Can you see them clearly?”

The image before the dragon-horse’s eyes clarifies like a long painted scroll: Everyone’s expression is vivid and lifelike. He sees the people’s joys and sorrows, partings and meetings, as though seeing the moon waxing and waning.

“Long, long ago, there was a bustling metropolis. In this city there lived a young woman . . .”

He starts to tell the stories of those people.

A young woman who’d never been in love fell for a stranger she met through the chat program on her phone, but then she discovered that her interlocutor was only a perfect bit of conversation software. Yet, the digital boy loved her back, and they happily spent a lifetime together. After the woman died, a record of her life—her frowns and laughter, her actions and reactions—was uploaded to the cloud, and she became the shared goddess of people and AIs.

A pious monk went to a factory to pray and bring blessings to the robot workers who were plagued by short-circuits and malfunctions. But the ghosts of the dead robot workers hounded him. Just as the investigation of the strange occurrences was about to end, the monk was found dead in a tiny hotel room, his nude body smeared with the blood of a woman. An autopsy revealed the truth: He was also a robot.

A famous actress was known for being able to portray a wide variety of roles. So skilled was she, the paparazzi suspected that she was only a software simulation. But by the time they managed to break into her well-secured mansion, all they saw was a cold corpse lying on a magnificent bed. Frighteningly, whether you were looking at her body with the naked eye or through a camera, everyone and every camera saw a different woman. And even years later, the actress continued to show up on the silver screen.

A blind child prodigy began to play go against the computer when he was five. As time passed, his skill improved, and his computer opponent also became smarter through competition with him. Many years later, as he lay dying, the blind go-player played one last match against his old opponent. But unbeknownst to him, as they played, others opened his skull and scanned each part of his brain layer by layer, digitizing the results into computer modules that his machine opponent could learn from, until this last go match became so complicated that no one could follow it.

Delighted by the stories told by the dragon-horse, the bat dances upside down. In turn, she squeaks other stories into the dragon-horse’s ear:

A bell that rang only once every hundred years was forgotten in the dark basement of an art museum in the heart of the city. But due to a marvelous resonance phenomenon, whenever the bell did ring, its sound would be echoed and magnified by the entire city until the ringing resounded like an ensemble of pipe organs and everything stood still in awe.

An unmanned drone took to the skies every dawn. Each clockwise swoop over the city also served to recharge its solar-powered batteries. Whenever spring turned to summer, a flock of fledgling birds followed the drone to practice flying like a magnificent cloud.

Piles of paper books that no one ever read filled an ancient library where the temperature was always kept at sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit. The main computer of the library was capable of reciting every poem in every language. If you were lucky enough to find the way there, you would receive an unimaginably enthusiastic reception.

A musical fountain was capable of composing new music as soon as you deposited some coins. At dusk, feral cats and dogs often dropped coins they picked out of the ruins into the fountain; and so, as the birds and beasts took turns bathing in the fountain in an orderly manner, they also got to enjoy lovely music that never repeated itself.

“Is it really true?” They each ask the other, again and again. “And then? What happened then?”

Shadows dance in the moon. The longer they walk, the longer seems the road.

• • • •

Gradually, they hear gurgling water, like the babbling of a brook echoing through a deep canyon. Before the founding of the metropolis, creeks and brooks had crisscrossed this spot. Year by year, they were tamed as people multiplied, and turned into lakes, ditches, and dank underground sewers. But now the brooks have been freed, wantonly meandering their way over the rolling terrain, singing, nourishing the life on this patch of land.

The dragon-horse stops. The road he’s on disappears into a wild lotus pond. The pond stretches as far as the horizon, covered by layer after layer of lotus leaves. A breeze passes, and the lotus leaves ruffle, causing undulating ripples through the dark-green and gray-white sea. Red and white lotus flowers peek out of the leaves as though they’re pieces of frozen moonlight, with no trace of the merely terrestrial in their beauty.

“How lovely.” The bat sighs lightly. “It’s so beautiful that my heart aches.”

The dragon-horse is startled because he feels the same, though he doesn’t know if he has a heart.

“Shall we go on?” he asks.

“I need to fly over this lake,” replies the bat. “But you can’t go on any longer. You’re made of metal; the water will probably cause you to short-circuit.”

“Maybe.” The dragon-horse hesitates. He has never been in the water.

“Then let us say farewell here.” The bat’s flapping wings tickle the dragon-horse’s ear.

“You’re leaving?”

“Yes, I don’t want to be late.”

“Bon voyage!”

“The same to you! Take care of yourself, and thank you for your stories.”

“Thank you, as well.”

The dragon-horse stands at the shore and watches as the shadow of the bat diminishes gradually until she has disappeared in the night.

He is alone again. The watery moon gently illuminates all creation.

4.

He looks at his reflection in the water. His body seems more skeletal than he remembers from before the start of this journey. The scales covering his body have mostly fallen off, and even one of his antlers is gone. Through the holes in his skin, messy bundles of wires and cables can be seen wrapped around his rusty steel skeleton.

Where shall I go? Should I go back? Back to where I started?

Or maybe I should head in the opposite direction. The Earth is round. No matter where I want to go, as long as I keep going, I’ll get there.

Though he’s pondering turning back, he has already, without realizing it, stepped forward.

His front hoofs disappear underneath the ice-cold waves.

The lotus leaves scratch gently against his belly. Countless sparkling droplets roll across their surfaces: Some return to the starting point after wandering about for a while; others coalesce like beads of mercury and then tumble off the edge of the leaf into the water.

The world is so lovely. I don’t want to die.

The thought frightens him. Why am I thinking about death? Am I about to die?

But the endless lotus pond continues to tempt him. He moves forward, one step after another. He wants to reach the other shore, which he has never seen.

The water rises and covers his limbs, his belly, his torso, his spine, his neck.

His legs sink into the mud at the bottom of the pond, and he can’t pull them out. His body sways and he almost falls. The last scale falls from his body.

The golden scale splashes into the water like a lotus-shaped floating lantern. Slowly, it drifts away, carried by the ripples.

The dragon-horse is exhausted, but he also feels as though all weight has been lifted from him. He closes his eyes.

He hears the sound of rushing water, as though he has returned to the place of his birth. Long-forgotten memories replay before his eyes. He seems to be on the ocean at this moment, riding in a giant ship headed for China. Perhaps all that he has seen and heard over the years are but a dream on this long voyage.

A breeze caresses his beard, like a barely audible sigh.

The dragon-horse opens his eyes. The tiny figure of the bat is flattened against his nose.

“You’re back!” Joy fills him. “Did you make it on time?”

“I got lost.” The bat sighs. “The pond is too big. I can’t seem to find the other shore.”

“It’s too bad that I’m stuck in the mud. I can’t help carry you any farther.”

“I wish we had fire.”

“Fire?”

“Wherever there’s fire, there’s light. I want to lead the way for everyone!”

“For . . . who?”

“For the gods in darkness, for the lonely ghosts and lost souls, for anyone who doesn’t know where to go—I will lead them all.”

“You need fire?”

“Yes, but where would we find fire in all this water?”

“I have fire,” says the dragon-horse. “I don’t have much, but I hope it’s enough for you.”

“Where?”

“Give me a bit of space.”

The bat flaps over to a lotus leaf nearby. The dragon-horse opens his jaw and sticks out his black tongue. Pure kerosene flows out of a seam under the tongue, and a dark blue electric spark comes to life at the tip of the tongue, lighting the kerosene spray. A golden-scarlet column of fire shoots into the sky.

“I had no idea you had such hidden talents!” the bat shouts in admiration. “More, more!”

The dragon-horse opens his mouth and more flames shoot out. Kerosene burns easily, even after so many years of storage. He can’t remember the last time he performed the fire-breathing trick—it’s possible that he hasn’t done it since the battle with the spider. Fire is so warm and beautiful, like a god whose shape is constantly shifting.

“Millions wish to extinguish the fire, but I alone will lift it high overhead.” The bat’s voice rings clearly in the ear of the dragon-horse, resonating with each and every one of his components:

This fantastic fire, a storm of blossoms that blankets the sacred motherland.

Like all poets who make dreams their horses,

By this fire, I survive the long dark night.

He feels like a burning match. But he doesn’t feel any pain.

All around him, faint lights appear in the distance, gathering like fireflies.

Oh, what a collection of spirits and demons! They are of every shape and material, sporting every strange color and outline: Hand-drawn door gods and buddhas; abstract graffiti on factory walls; tiny robots no bigger than a thumb made out of computer components; mechanical Guan Yu constructed from truck parts; dilapidated, ancient stone guardian lions; teddy bears as tall as a house and capable of telling stories; simple, clumsy robot dogs; strollers capable of singing a baby to sleep . . .

They are just like him, mixed-blood creations of tradition and modernity, myth and technology, dream and reality. They are made of Art, yet they are Natural.

“It’s time!” the bat sings joyfully. “Come with us!”

“Where are we going?” asks the dragon-horse.

“Anywhere is fine. Tonight, you will find eternal life and freedom in poetry and dream.”

She sticks out a tiny claw and pulls him into the air, where he transforms into a fluttering butterfly with dark-red eyes and golden wings full of Chinese characters. He looks down and sees the massive body of the dragon-horse still burning in the endless lotus pound, like a magnificent torch.

Along with all his companions, he flies higher in the sky. The rolling landscape of ruins diminishes in the distance. Next to his ear, the bat’s voice continues to whisper.

A thousand years later, if I were to be born again on the riverbank of my motherland,

A thousand years later, I will again possess China’s rice paddies and the snow-capped mountains of the King of Zhou, where sky-horses roam.

Farewell, and good-bye.

He sighs.

The flame disappears in darkness.

They fly for a long time, until they reach the end of the world.

Everywhere they look, darkness greets their eyes. Only a giant, sparkling river lies between Heaven and Earth.

The blue water gleams like fire, like mercury, like the stars, like diamonds—twinkling, shimmering, melding into the dark night. No one knows how wide it is, or how long.

The spirits flap and flutter their wings, heading for the opposite shore. Like mist, like a cloud, like a rainbow, like a bridge, they connect two worlds.

“Go on,” says the bat. “Hurry.”

“What about you?”

“I still have some tasks to finish. When the sun rises, I must return to my nest to sleep and wait for the next night.”

“So we’re to say farewell again?”

“Yes. But the world is so grand; I’m sure we’ll meet somewhere else again.”

They embrace, wrapping their tiny wings about each other. The dragon-horse spirit turns to leave, and the bat recites poetry to send him on his way.

Riding the five-thousand-year-old phoenix and a dragon whose name is “horse,” I am doomed to fail.

But Poetry itself, wielding the sun, will surely triumph.

He heads for the opposite shore, and he isn’t sure how long he has been flying. The starry river flows by.

Next to the shore is his birthplace, the tiny, tranquil isle of Nantes. The mechanical beasts have been slumbering for an unknown number of years: the twenty-five-meter tall carousel horse of the ocean world; the fifty-ton giant elephant; the immense, frightening reptile; the heron with the eight-meter wingspan capable of carrying a man; the bizarre mechanical ants, cicadas, and carnivorous plants . . .

He sees his old partner, the spider, who lies tranquilly in the soft moonlight, his eight legs curled under him. Landing gently on the forehead of the spider, he closes his wings like a dewdrop falling from the heavens.

When you sing, the world will listen; when you are quiet, you’ll hear the song of all creation.

The night breeze carries the sounds of collision, percussion, and metal creaking and grinding against metal. He smells the aroma of machine oil, rust, and electrical sparks. His friends have awakened, and to welcome his return, there will surely be a great feast.

But he falls into a deep slumber.

©2016 by Xia Jia (translated by Ken Liu). Originally published in Invisible Planets, edited by Ken Liu. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

Ken Liu is an author of speculative fiction, as well as a translator, lawyer, and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings (2015), is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty. It won the Locus Best First Novel Award and was a Nebula finalist. He subsequently published the second volume in the series, The Wall of Storms (2016) as well as a collection of short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016). He also wrote the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker (2017). In addition to his original fiction, Ken also translated numerous literary and genre works from Chinese to English. His translation of The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, the first translated novel ever to receive that honor. He also translated the third volume in Liu Cixin’s series, Death’s End (2016) and edited the first English-language anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction, Invisible Planets (2016). He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Xia Jia (a.k.a Wang Yao) is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at Xi’an Jiaotong University. She has been publishing speculative fiction since college. Seven of her stories have won the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. So far she has published a fantasy novel Odyssey of China Fantasy: On the Road (2010), as well as two science fiction collections The Demon Enslaving Flask (2012) and A Time Beyond Your Reach (2017). In English translation, she has been published in Clarkesworld and other venues. Her first story written in English, “Let’s Have a Talk,” was published in Nature in 2015. She is also engaged in other science fiction related works, including academic research, translation, screenwriting and creative writing teaching.

Our Side of the Door

Kodiak Julian | 3240 words

It isn’t until I realize I can’t find my son—really can’t find him—that I think of all the other things I can’t see in the starlit orchard. “Cruz!” I yell. “Buddy! You win!”

There is no moon. The trees are thick with blossoms. I hear Cruz in the tall grasses, rustling, giggling. He is six years old.

This wouldn’t bother my wife. Alyssa believes that Cruz should learn to use a knife, to light a match, to walk beside a river without stumbling and drowning. She was the one who wanted to move to the country because children deserve the chance to be wild. But now, she’s back at the house, unpacking. I am the one ducking beneath tree limbs, imagining unleashed dogs who could race through the orchard and tear at Cruz.

“You win!” I yell. “You win!”

Twigs snap and crunch. Cruz laughs again. Then: sudden crying.

I race through the cold, sweet air, following the sound of his sobs.

Cruz finds me and wails. “Daddy! I hurt my eye!”

I lift him, and he lays his head against my shoulder the way he did when he was small. I carry him beneath the star-fuzzed sky, jogging toward the house, my lips against his gritty hair.

I pound on the back door. Alyssa answers with a box of books beneath her arm. “Hey, guy,” she says to Cruz. “You all right?”

“We need a washcloth!” I say.

“They aren’t unpacked yet.” Alyssa sets down her books and opens her arms for Cruz. He reaches for her and collapses from my arms into hers.

I stride past them, into the kitchen, pulling off my shirt. I run the tap water until it is warm and clear of iron tint, then soak my shirt. I squeeze out the excess water, return to Cruz, and place the warm, wet cloth over his eye. “Breathe,” I say.

Alyssa carries Cruz to the couch. He is so tall now, gangly in her arms. Sometimes Alyssa takes him for a haircut, and he returns a stranger: an older boy with a buzzcut who can write messages in secret codes and skip stones five times before they sink.

I stand before my competent wife, my belly hanging out, oafish, a waste of space. What kind of father lets this happen?

Alyssa draws my wet shirt from Cruz’s eye. “Jeez,” she says. “What did you manage to do?”

“It was a branch,” Cruz whimpers. “I ran into a branch.”

“Well, I think you’re going to live, but let’s have a doctor check it just in case.” Alyssa looks at me. “Where are his shoes?”

“I don’t know.”

I open the front door while Alyssa carries Cruz to the car. I watch her buckle him into his booster seat. I stay out of her way.

“Do I want to see his eye?”

“No.”

I run back to the house to grab the cloth bunny that Cruz secretly still chews and the copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that we have been reading. On our evening walk, the whole time we were playing hide and seek, I had been searching for something. Now, I know that I must never tell Cruz what I’d been hoping to find.

• • • •

The next morning, Alyssa drips antibiotics into Cruz’s eye and covers it with a patch. I spoon extra brown sugar onto Cruz’s oatmeal, but he still glares at me with his good eye.

“I’m sorry, Buddy.”

“He’s fine,” Alyssa says.

“I’ll probably never see again,” says Cruz.

“Rascal,” says Alyssa.

I drive Cruz into town for school, wondering if he’s right.

He points to a neighbor’s orchard. “The trees look like they’re full of little birds,” he says. And they do. The petals look like thousands of snowy feathers. The Spanish word for “popcorn” is palomitas—little doves. The trees are full of popcorn.

Back at home, I clear a place from the unpacking mess and open my laptop. I write two scenes in my book, one with the boy hero befriending a raven and one with the boy and the raven leading an army of salamanders into battle against a dragon. It’s the fifth and final book in the series, and if it doesn’t sell better than the fourth book, then I’m going to have start writing fantasy under a different name. I stretch, pour a glass of orange juice, and then pound out a thousand words of the romance novel I’m ghostwriting.

This is how I contribute to the family. Alyssa is the one who really pays the mortgage. She’s an engineer.

When it’s time for a break, I go outside.

The day is cold. The sun brightens patches of vivid green between the clouds’ shadows. My sneakers squish in the tall grass. Woods darken one side of our house. Beyond our garden is what used to be a cow pasture. Along the edge of the pasture runs an old stone wall, and on the other side of the wall is the neighbors’ blossoming orchard.

What I have been looking for is a Door.

I know. That makes me sound dumb.

Beyond dumb. Stupid.

But people usually talk about faith like it’s a good thing.

I walk along the side of the stone wall where lilac bushes wait, tight with dark buds. In a week, the orchard will turn from white to green, and the lilacs will open with the soft color of dusk.

Everything is dangerous. At the end of the wall, a creek separates the pasture from the next wood. I once met a hiker who was attacked by a mountain lion. She fought back and lived: clawed and scarred, but alive. If the creek doesn’t get you, the woods will. Why did I bring my child to a wild place?

Because if you want any hope of magic, you have to search in wild places.

I turn back toward the house. Cruz’s sneakers lie at my feet, wet and muddy, where he must have lost them last night.

• • • •

That evening, Cruz and I finish reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and begin to read about Narnia. He snuggles beside me, chewing on his soft bunny’s ear, not even waiting until I’ve left the room.

I probably shouldn’t read to him about Doors. He could turn out like me. But then, he’s half Alyssa; he might be safe.

So what business do I have, writing Door stories for other kids, getting their hopes up, messing with their heads?

I kiss Cruz just above his eye patch and he tickles me in the armpit. I wish that I could wrestle him before bed the way Alyssa does, but I’m too big, too clumsy. I leave him in the nightlight’s glow.

“How does the eye look?” I ask Alyssa. We sit at the kitchen table. She has a book about North Korea open before her. I have my laptop and a beer.

“Less gross than yesterday.” Alyssa wears a blue tank top even though she’s left the windows open. Her skin doesn’t even pucker against the spring night air. Nothing bothers her: not the cold, nor mosquitoes, nor reading the news before bed. “Look,” she says. “Things like this are going to happen. It’s part of growing up.”

“I’m supposed to protect him.”

“What are you going to do? Trap him in a giant hamster ball? Even if you try that, he’ll explore on his own. Make his own trouble—exactly what he ought to do.”

“Now he’s probably going to hope for trouble involving yellow brick roads.”

Alyssa sets her chin in her hand and squares her face at mine. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Lots of kids read those stories and very few of them end up being disappointed when they don’t travel to Oz.”

On my laptop screen, I try to recreate the country my brother and I imagined as kids, playing near a lake during a family camping trip. We pretended that we were in a land ruled by singing winds that wove harmonies between tall grasses. My brother was two years younger than me, but he was the one to teach me how to hold a blade of grass between my thumbs and blow against it, whistling back to the winds.

We imagined that we could swim in green waters and listen to the fishes’ stories, that we could fly and speak with the geese who pecked the chicory and rose hips. The living sun dazzled the water. It felt as though we had lived in our world for years, but it must have been only an afternoon, maybe two.

After all that sun, we both found heart-shaped freckles on the backs of our necks. I didn’t like mine—it was too girly—but my brother didn’t mind his until a second mole grew beside it. That second mole bubbled, blackened, devoured the heart-shaped mole. It all happened so fast. When my parents took him to a doctor to have it checked, the cancer was already everywhere.

He was seven years old. Barely older than Cruz is now.

If there is a Heaven, perhaps it feels like that summer lake.

• • • •

I wake at dawn to walk in the dewy fields when our world stirs itself into being. That’s when I find the Door.

It’s one of the rocks in the old stone wall, large as a fist and blue like a robin’s egg. Even in early morning, bees land on the Door, thirsting for nectar on the other side. There is no doubt in my mind about what the Door is.

I turn to look at the world around me, making sure that it is the same world.

I look back at the Door. It’s still there, round and smooth against the other rocks. I almost run to it, but I stop myself.

I sit beside the Door. My jeans soak against the clover. A small, gray spider weaves between the rocks. I can’t ruin the Door by touching it.

The problem with writing the stories I write is that I know too much about magic. If I didn’t know the rules, I’d touch the Door. I’d let it open. I’d go to the other side.

But I know these rules:

Doors are rare.

Some Doors open only once, then vanish.

Doors are really meant for children.

You never know how long you’ll be on the other side of a Door. It could be just an instant in our time, or it could be a hundred years. You might never return.

• • • •

“What’s with you?” Alyssa says. She sits in the breakfast nook, her newspaper folded into a neat rectangle. She’s eating oatmeal with dried apricots and cinnamon, and she nods to a bowl she’s filled for me with the almonds left out because I don’t like them. She’s backlit from the large windows’ morning light, so I can see the crown of stray hairs around her head.

I would love to tell her about the Door. I would love to take her hand and lead her across the fields to see the Door. But I know my wife. I know what she will believe and what she will see and what she will never believe and never see.

I pour coffee, stir in honey, and set it beside Alyssa. Outside the window, crows strut on the dandelion fluff-strewn meadow.

“You seem giddy,” Alyssa says, using her napkin to mop up the coffee I’ve spilled.

“It’s a beautiful morning.”

She looks at me from the corners of her eyes. “Okay, Jumpy.”

• • • •

Long ago, perhaps the summer when my brother and I went to the lake, we spent nights in hammocks strung between the trees in our backyard. Looking up through the elm branches, I could see stars spark between the rustling leaves. I couldn’t see my brother, but I could hear his voice.

We had this idea that, if we slept outside, we’d be more likely to catch some bit of magic. What we wanted to know was: Who were those children who got to go through Doors?

Did someone choose them?

Were there children who were more deserving?

What if the wrong boy went though a Door? What if a mean boy, a bully, went through a Door and was cruel to the talking animals? What if some horrible boy went though a Door and started wars in the other country? What if the wrong boy went through a Door and his life wasn’t changed? What if he didn’t realize that anything he saw was magic?

What if a stupid boy went through a Door and didn’t even notice?

We’d hate him, we decided. We’d hate any child who would waste a Door.

We took care of our dog, walking her, tossing her ball even when it was slobbery, fighting to let her sleep on our beds. Weren’t we as deserving as any two boys could be? And we noticed things, like the brief twilit window when fireflies appeared, the difference between frogs’ and crickets’ songs at night, the blackberry brambles, beehives high in trees. If any boys deserved to go through a Door, then we were those boys.

When I had grown and conceded—those days when I chose to think like a rational adult—that Doors were just the stuff of stories—I realized that my brother had already gone through the one great Door that we all must enter.

But after seeing the blue Door in the stone wall, it’s not so simple anymore.

There really are Doors in this world, in this lifetime, and my brother missed them all.

I will take Cruz to the Door.

• • • •

What am I saying? That’s a terrible idea. What if it’s the wrong kind of Door? What if he never comes back?

• • • •

“Daddy!” says Cruz as I drive him to school. “Why are you so quiet?” Before I can answer, he tells me about a spaceship he’s building out of chocolate, one hand reaching to peel his eyepatch from his face.

• • • •

Times when I have already hurt my child:

When I swooped his small body toward the ceiling in play, accidentally knocking his head against a wood beam.

When he wrestled away from his car seat straps, and I pulled at his squirming arm.

When I forgot to remind him to go to the bathroom, so he spent a country fair’s afternoon crouching in shame beside a sheep pen.

When he caught me looking at a newspaper with my head in my hands.

• • • •

Alyssa’s adventures:

Her father threw her from a dock, and that is how she learned to swim.

She learned to drive when she was twelve. When she mistook her pedals and destroyed a fence, she rebuilt it herself.

When she was twenty-two, she hiked across Montana alone. She waited out thunderstorms as her tent pooled with water. She shook bells to keep grizzlies away. She cut her hair short and wore loose clothes so that she would look like a boy from a distance.

While volunteer firefighting, she survived a burnover in the cocoon of an aluminum foil and fiberglass fire shelter. Once she recovered, she earned her helicopter pilot’s license to fight the fires from the sky.

“You can see above the smoke,” she says. “And you can see everything.”

• • • •

While Cruz is in school, while I ought to be writing, I stride across the fields. I stand just out of reach of the blue stone so that I can’t touch it accidentally.

The sky is the same color as the stone, and the grass is lively with daddy longlegs and sow bugs. I take another step back from the Door.

If I were very lucky, I could enter the Door and only be gone from this world for a heartbeat. When I returned, I would be forever changed, my eyes opened.

Spring would never feel dull. The things that ought to hurt would feel like fire again.

• • • •

After dinner, while the light fades and bats carve jagged patterns in the sky, Cruz and I walk along the old stone wall. Cruz walks with a long stick, slashing at the grasses.

I don’t say anything about the Door when we reach it. I pick up Cruz, hold him upside down while he kicks and snorts and laughs, his stick swinging at the earth. He wiggles to the ground. I catch him at his waist and squeeze.

He no longer smells like a small child. He smells like sweat, of socks left on carelessly for several days. He smells like worms and neighbors’ dogs and tree sap, a changeling from the child I once had. I breathe him in.

In case this is our last moment.

In case he does not return from the Door.

Then, I say, “We are lucky to live near such a lovely stone wall.” That’s as far as I will point him to the Door. After that, he has to find it for himself. That’s how Doors work. He has to choose to look.

And I turn my back.

Cruz rustles behind me. A crescent moon rises against the deep blue.

Everything becomes quiet.

A doe and her fawn slowly cross the pasture, stopping to taste the new grass. They gaze at me, as though I would never harm them.

I am alone in the world.

• • • •

The stillness stretches and breathes and becomes part of something greater, part of time’s immense stream.

What have I done?

• • • •

Then:

Cruz is laughing, squeezing my thighs. I pull him onto my back.

In the near darkness, I can’t see the stone. Even if I could make out its shape, its color would blend with the other rocks in the fence.

With Cruz on my back, I stride across the fields, toward our house’s bright windows. New blossoms sweeten the air. Cruz holds onto my shoulders. He is heavy, feet already reaching past my hips.

“What just happened?” I ask Cruz, but he laughs, rubs his cheek against my hair, and lets his hands go free to wiggle my ears.

In our garden, we pass beneath our cherry trees’ starry blossoms. Long ago, some farmer planted them together. Now, they pass pollen from one to another, like lovers inventing and reinventing their stories.

Did Cruz go through the Door?

If he did, he will keep it a secret from me. That’s a rule.

And if he did, I hope he knows what has happened. I hope he loved it as much as it deserved to be loved.

Alyssa greets us by our back door with two cups of cocoa.

“Where’s yours?” I ask.

“We had enough milk for two.”

From the porch light, I can see a new freckle on Cruz’s neck. It’s heart-shaped, same as mine.

I switch off the porch light and sit on the steps, one hand warm against my mug and the other warm around Alyssa. I pass the cocoa to her, smell it on her breath as she sips.

In the darkness, we can see the stars. I can’t see Cruz, but I can hear his feet rustle in the grasses.

I do not know which side of the Door I am on. I do not know which side I’ve been on all this time.

©2018 by Kodiak Julian.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kodiak Julian is a graduate of Reed College and of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Together with Jamaica Zoglman, she cohosts the weekly podcast, Spirit of the Endeavor, which explores the pursuit of beauty, mystery, and the sublime in everyday life. She lives with her husband and son in Yakima, Washington, where she teaches truly magnificent high school students. Her work appears in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Grimoire, the Writers of the Future anthology, and in the Witches, Stitches, and Bitches anthology. She is frequently mesmerized by watching chickens.

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

His Artist Wife

John Grant | 10040 words

You’re far more likely to have heard of my artist wife Lucille Hrade than of me. Her paintings have a way of communicating directly to people. They’re realistic—you can see the subjects of her portraits breathe, feel the heat of her sun-baked landscapes—but at the same time, like Andrew Wyeth’s work, they have just enough of what I call the askew in them to make you think you’re daringly enjoying experimental art. They’re ideal for feeding the pseudointellectual pretensions of the readers of color magazines, too, which is the main reason you’d be bound to recognize her work, even if her name doesn’t immediately mean anything to you.

It sounds as if I’m denigrating her art, but I’m not. Unlike many of the other painters whose stuff fills the mags you find in dentists’ waiting rooms, she’s good. There are paintings of hers not just in the Museum of Modern Art but in the Met. London’s Tate Gallery has a couple, and there’s one in the National Portrait Gallery there. Three in the Louvre, and so on. She’s a truly gifted artist.

Was.

The odd thing, though, is that, if you weren’t looking at one of her pictures while waiting your turn at the dentist, you might just possibly, at least until a few years ago, have been reading a paperback by me. Not that I’d expect you to recognize my name. I used it on a few short stories and one or two of my early novels, back in the mid-1960s, but as soon as my pace really picked up I had to start using pseudonyms. From 1964 until recently, over thirty years later, I hardly ever published less than a book a month, and some months saw two or even three appear. All paperbacks, of course—almost all, anyway; in the beginning there was a small spattering of hardcovers before my publishers realized where my true talents lay. I’ve written romances. I’ve written Westerns. I’ve written “adult” novels. I’ve written thrillers and mysteries and discreet erotica for ladies—some gay erotica, too, although I find that more difficult because I’m not gay. I’ve written fantasy and science fiction; I’ve picked up a couple of minor awards in those fields. My series of cozy detective stories featuring Fenella Reade was particularly successful; every now and then I think of adding to it. And then there are the books I’ve ghostwritten . . .

I was probably the last great King of the Pulps, and my reign was a long one.

Now that the mass market paperback’s popularity is ebbing, my output’s doing likewise. No problem. Even leaving aside Lucy’s earnings, I’ve managed to put aside enough money to keep me in comfort indefinitely. For the first time since I was nineteen, excited by the appearance of my debut novel—with my name on it, my real name—I can sit back and take my time, no agent on my neck to insist that everything be done with an eye to selling-points. I can write the novels I dreamed of writing when I started off along this helterskelter road my life has been.

That’s the hope, at least.

In practice, it’s proving a little more difficult than I’d expected.

• • • •

Lucy was killed by a dagger through her heart. They found her body in the old St. Petrock cemetery, draped across the gravestone of one Harmony G. Wright, who died in 1799. For some time the cops tried to find if there was any significance in the choice of tomb—was Harmony G. Wright an ancestor of Lucy’s perhaps?—but that line of investigation led them nowhere.

Well, obviously it wouldn’t.

As soon as the decencies allowed after Lucy’s death, I moved my computer and my books in here, to the room that served as her studio for so many years and which I think will, long after all of us have been forgotten, retain a whiff of paint and turps and linseed oil; the smell has saturated the walls. There’s the scent of remembered Lucy in the air, too, equally permanent but perhaps detectable only by me; a scent of sun and olives and red wine.

Before moving in here, I used to work in a far smaller room at the back of the house. It has smaller windows, too, although that’s no great suffering since there’s nothing to see in that direction except, in the distance, the back wall of what used to be a tire factory. Here, in what I still call Lucy’s studio, whenever inspiration flags I can look out across fields where cows amble. The contours of the land make it impossible to see the sea from here, but on the hottest days the layers of haze create the illusion of distant gray-blue water. It’s a far better place to write in than my old workroom; even so, there was never any question of its not being Lucy’s studio while she was alive. The light in here is a painter’s dream almost all the year round.

Now it’s a writer’s dream.

I don’t in fact possess copies of all of my books. Some got lost over the years. Some were lent to friends who never returned them. A few times, the publisher forgot to send me my gratis copies. But I do have most of them, including the first. The garish red spine has faded a little over the years, and is fading even faster now that it sees more sunlight, but my name is still perfectly legible there. It’s a reassurance to me that, despite the countless other names on the covers of my books, I have my own identity.

• • • •

A few days after I’d started working in here, I looked up from the screen and saw, just where the sunlight best strikes the wall by the window on a May morning, what I took at first to be a crack—a thin, crooked dark line.

The house is old. Once in an increasingly frequent while, we—I—discover some new repair that needs to be made. So finding a new crack hardly surprised me.

I returned to my work. The CD player was as usual gently playing Derek Schanner’s Lament—that devastating work of grief he composed in the wake of his wife’s vanishing during their wedding night, never to be seen again. Her name was Molly Corlen, and as the springboard for the novel I’m writing I’ve taken that fateful night when, as her brand-new husband slept, she rose from their bed of supposed bliss and set the house afire, then escaped to . . . well, what with all the flashbacks to their courtship and his earlier life, I haven’t yet got to the part where I need to know where Molly went. Why did she do it? Nobody knows. That’s why I feel free to write a novel about it—changing all the names, naturally. Whatever the truth, the Lament is one of those few musical works that readily move people to tears. It used to be on all of the classical music stations all of the time, and even on some of the rock channels. It’s less aired now, but there are few people who’d fail to recognize it within a bar or two. I play it for inspiration. I’m hoping that somehow the crushing sense of tragedy it manages to convey will survive the passage through me and into the words I write.

I have the CD player programmed to repeat the piece endlessly. This is, I guess, how we turn masterpieces into something you hear in elevators.

Who knows how many times more the fourteen-minutes-and-twenty-one-seconds Lament played through before next I looked up in the direction of the window and saw that, already, the crack had broadened and widened. I made a mental note that in the morning I must call our—my—regular handyman, Bill Klavier, to get him to come and have a look at it. Then I returned to Derek and Molly, who were by now freshly wedded but had yet to reach his “cottage” in the Hamptons for the intended consummation of their marriage.

Hunger dragged me from my tale.

It was early afternoon. The brightest of the sunlight had moved to the other wall, but the crack was much more obvious than it had been the last time I looked.

So was the fact that it wasn’t a crack.

What the wall bore was the top left-hand corner of a drawing, a drawing done in fine line. I recognized the style as Lucy’s. Some of her finest non-painting work was done in scraperboard. She’d illustrated a string of Rachel Peebles’s children’s books this way, and also the Folio Society reprint edition of the autobiography of some nineteenth-century African explorer whose name I forget. Some of her Christmas-card illustrations were done using the same technique; you’ve probably seen them, even if you don’t do Christmas.

The picture that seemed slowly to be developing on the wall by the window was in the same style, but the lines were in black on white rather than white on black. So far, the artist had completed just enough to indicate that a white and slightly under-full moon was looking down from an inky sky.

I should have been frightened, I suppose, and more recently I’ve become so—very frightened. Back then, I just sort of accepted what was happening. Most of the years I spent with Lucy were times of near-unremitting joy, but the last eighteen months or so, as the betrayal ate into us both, became a hell of pain. What right had I to expect this might end simply because she was dead?

I went downstairs to fix myself a peanut butter sandwich and a bottle of beer.

There was far more of the picture by the time I got back, maybe twenty minutes later. The dead Lucy—it never occurred to me it could be anyone else—was speeding up as she went along. Now it was confirmed that, yes, the white blob at the top left was a faceless moon, seemingly poised to fall from an off-kilter sky full of childishly Van Gogh-style stars. This was classic Lucy Hrade work—at the one time both seemingly unsophisticated and yet full of a dry, self-mocking wit.

“Hello, Lucy,” I said, half-expecting a reply.

Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t one. After what I’d done to her, she owed me nothing, least of all a response.

It seems incredible now, but my response to the silence was to get back to work. It’s very easy for writers to save energy by putting people they know into their stories rather than creating new characters, and I did exactly this innumerable times throughout my career; but now that I’m writing something I intend to be revered by posterity—sorta thing—I’m working very hard not to let Molly Corlen become a thinly disguised version of Lucille Hrade. There were some physical resemblances. Lucy was a leafy blonde with hair so long she could sit on it; sometimes as we made love, I could feel it tickling my balls. She was shorter than I was, but only just. For the record, both Molly Corlen and Lucy were quite unlike Rachel. Rachel barely comes up to my shoulder and has a chubby face and curly red hair; where Lucy’s face looked sculpted, Rachel’s looks hastily molded from clay.

Over the next hour or two, as the day deepened, I attempted to paint in words the pain my version of Molly Corlen felt as, having been browbeaten by Schanner into marrying him, she realized what must inevitably happen.

By the time I looked up, Lucy had finished creating her faux-scraperboard drawing on the wall by the window. I could now see what the squidgy moon and the equally squidgy stars were directing their agonized light towards.

Draped across the tomb of Harmony G. Wright was the stabbed corpse of my wife Lucy, the arc of her hair, as fine as silk, shining almost as bright as the moonlight, her mouth wide in her final agony, her legs awry like those of a stomped insect.

I knew the scene, of course.

• • • •

Lucy was killed by being beaten over the head repeatedly with a blunt instrument—in point of fact, one of those heavy-headed hammers you can get in Sears to use for splitting logs. I know this was the weapon because I was the one who went to Sears and bought it. I used cash for the purpose because, despite outward appearance, I’m not a complete idiot. It was weeks before a man out walking his dog discovered Lucy’s body; the dog led him to the thirty-foot disused well into which the corpse had been dropped, and the walker chanced to have a flashlight with him to shine down the shaft.

Most marriages are strong enough to survive the partners’ infidelities; it’s just that there are different strategies for doing so.

I met Rachel Peebles at a signing session she and Lucy were conducting for their first book together at the Barnes & Noble up near Lincoln Center in Manhattan. At first I hardly noticed her, didn’t really know who this stocky woman with the short red hair was, but then she came and sat beside me on a blue plastic chair and told me she was so glad at last to meet the husband of her illustrator.

“Her illustrator”?

So far as I and just about the whole of the rest of the world were concerned at the time, her book existed solely because of the Lucy Hrade illustrations. Lucy could have illustrated a Customs form and it’d have sold. Rachel was just the support act.

It was Rachel who recently, years later, helped me move all of my stuff through here into Lucy’s studio. She spent a whole morning at the bookshelves on the far wall from the windows, arranging my novels in date order, from the very first, Song of the Lonely Bullet (1964), with what was then its still passably bright red spine, through to It Was a Stark and Horny Night (1998), one of my better erotic efforts and a fitting conclusion to my pulp career. Then we had a light salad lunch together, which I prepared, and then she left. The whole time, we hardly said a word to each other.

• • • •

I find it very difficult to remember how exactly it was that Lucy died. I think this is because I’m a mass murderer—not in any literal sense, but through the number of characters I’ve dispatched, one way or another, in the books I’ve written. How many hundreds of them have I killed? I’ve no idea, and little inclination to count. There must be at least a handful in each of the mysteries and thrillers I’ve written, and far more than that in the dozen or so war novels. The body count in the spy adventures can run pretty high, too. I remember them all now, on the rare occasions that I do, as a sort of blur of carnage, as gray as the paper on which they’re printed. I think Lucy’s death is already getting lost in that haze—just one more lump in the porridge, as it were.

Today Lucy has chosen to illustrate her bludgeoning death. The view that slowly develops on the wall is as of someone looking up the shaft of the well toward a ragged circle of light that seems pitifully distant. I think it unlikely she could still have been even slightly alive by the time she was tossed down the well. My guess is that Lucy’s using artistic license to try to convey to her audience—me—the full loneliness of the dank subterranean place where she might have lain in perpetuity but for the chance discovery. For a while the ploy works on me and my heart goes out to the broken body, but then I recognize the emotional trick for what it is, a trick, and thereafter I ignore Lucy’s continuing work on the picture.

Another thing I find very hard to remember, aside from the precise manner of Lucy’s death, is how it was that Rachel Peebles moved in on our lives. We had a couple of drinks with her after that signing session. Later, on the way back to the hotel, we talked about her.

“She seems nice enough,” I said.

Lucy grinned. “She’s all right, as authors go.”

“You married one, didn’t you?”

“That’s what I mean.”

We snuggled closer together as the wind howled down Amsterdam Avenue. It was a fine night to be out together, but piercingly cold.

“You think she has any talent?” I said.

I felt her shrug. “I guess so. When I was going through her book I wasn’t really thinking about it as a reader should. I was just looking for good scenes to illustrate. I suppose I ought to sit down and read it again. The publisher wants me to do the sequel, too.”

And then we were talking of other things. I supposed I might or might not see Rachel at another signing session, or some such. I wasn’t greatly concerned, either way.

Yet somehow, by the end of the next few months, Rachel Peebles had become an integral part of our life. I’d emerge from my little study at the end of a day’s work to find Rachel was to have supper with us, that she’d been consulting in the studio with Lucy during the afternoon about the new book, or maybe serving as a model—not that Lucy ever had much use for models. I wasn’t particularly averse to the woman’s presence—I’d decided she was pleasant enough—but I was unsettled by the way that we, who had always been two, seemed now to be sharing ourselves with a third. I told myself things would go back to normal after Lucy completed the new set of illustrations, but it didn’t happen like that.

Years, and more books, went by. More books by me, too, but who was counting those?

When Lucy suggested Rachel could move into the house, taking over the attic, which it would be easy enough to partition off as a semi-autonomous apartment, I drew the line.

“It’s not that I don’t like her,” I explained. “You know I do. We have a lot of fun when she’s around. But what we have, what we are, just the two of us, I think that’s something valuable enough to fight to preserve.”

Lucy held my gaze for a long moment and I thought we were going to have one of our rare but remarkably stormy arguments. However, she let the matter drop. That was the last I heard of it.

• • • •

The novel I’m writing about Derek Schanner and his wife-for-a-few-hours Molly Corlen is surely not the truth of what went on between them, surely not the solution to their mystery. As I said, I’m changing the names and I’m just using what I’ve read in the papers as a launchpad for my own imagining of what might have been.

Rather in the same way that I first met Rachel at a public event, a book-signing session, in my story Derek first sees Molly across a crowded room at the party after the premiere of his second viola concerto, conducted by the composer. The difference is that, while I barely registered Rachel at the time, Derek is instantly smitten by the tall woman with the elfin face, her head to one side as she politely listens to someone he vaguely recognizes—one of the clarinets, perhaps. Derek knows nothing about her or who she might have arrived with tonight; he doesn’t care; all he knows is that he must have her. He’s a man accustomed to having the women he wants, is Derek Schanner. In his mid-forties by now, a powerful presence, he exudes an aura of power that makes him attractive to many women. Even those who’re not at first drawn by him find their reluctance melting in the face of the air of inevitability he brings to his seductions. His prematurely white shock of hair is famous around the world, his heavy, clumsy-seeming features and the pronounced aquiline nose as immediately identifiable as my Lucy’s artworks. The great man anticipates little resistance as he pushes his way through the admiring throngs towards her.

Initially she seems open to his advances. For the rest of the evening he feeds her a steady stream of glasses of champagne, all of which she quietly discards untasted when she thinks he’s not looking. He never did discover why she was at the party that night, or who invited her. When he offers to escort her home, she agrees. He tells his driver Henry to take them to the address in the Village that Molly reels off. When they get there, Derek tells the driver to go home . . . which proves a mistake, because Molly doesn’t invite him in. Three minutes later, he finds himself standing alone on a cold drizzly night on the sidewalk of some godforsaken street in the Village that he doesn’t recognize, wondering if a taxi will ever come along.

At least she gave him her phone number.

For the next days and weeks, Derek Schanner woos this ethereal creature with all the charms at his disposal. He wines her and dines her—not that she ever eats or drinks anything—and they visit the theater a couple of times, embarking on carriage rides in the park afterwards. But at the end of each evening, he discovers himself going home alone, his lips unkissed. At no point does she ever seem to reject him, he doesn’t feel the sting of a rebuff, yet the result’s the same as if she had. And the strangeness of this experience is a part of what enchants him about her. Even when he’s letting off a little steam with one of the groupies who habitually cluster around him, all he can think of is Molly Corlen: her eyes, her smile, the shadow of her hair on her cheek, the way she moves her fingers as she speaks to emphasize each point . . .

It finally dawns on him that the only way he’s ever going to be able to carnally possess her is by marrying her. Well, if that’s what’s required, it’s the price he’ll have to pay. He has never really contemplated marriage before, but, as far as he can understand, it shouldn’t make too much difference to his lifestyle. (He never dreams she might refuse him.) He assumes she’s the modern kind of woman who’ll let him carry on playing the field as he’s always done, and it wouldn’t really upset him if she followed the same rulebook. So, that night in the Oyster Bar when he asks for her hand, he has it all settled in his mind how things will pan out.

But she turns him down flat.

At first he’s too busy signing autographs for the waiters to hear her aright. When he finally understands what she’s telling him, he can’t believe it.

So he asks her again.

And again she tells him that, if ever she were to marry anyone, he would figure pretty high up on the list of her possible choices. However, it is impossible for her to marry, or even to take a lover. She’s sorry if she’s led him to expect otherwise, if he feels he’s wasted his time and money and emotions, but that’s just the way it has to be. She wants him to be assured that she’s really very, very fond of him. If only . . .

And she shakes that heavenly head of hers, her sapphire eyes damp with regret.

For a whole week and a half, the great man resists contacting her—although he sees her everywhere he goes, in reflections from windows, in rain puddles on Lexington Avenue, in the eyes of the women he bangs in a failed attempt to forget how the course of his life, which until recently he could quite clearly see stretching out ahead of him, has suddenly taken this dire wrong turn.

A week and a half he lasts, and then he’s on the phone to her, like a boy plucking up courage to invite the school belle to the prom.

Oh, yes, how she’d love to see him again. These ten days of estrangement have been as hard on her as they have on him.

They walk around Battery Park together for an hour and a half one warm spring morning, and then on a whim they catch the Staten Island Ferry. At some point on the way back he asks her to marry him again, and this time she tells him that, yes, if it’s so important to him to make her his wife, then she’ll concede. She’ll be, she adds, his wife in the sense of loving companion and every other way he might ask, except one.

Needless to say, the one exception is the aspect of marital life that the maestro’s most interested in. Still, he tells himself, surely after they’re hitched she’ll mellow on that prohibition, too.

So they set the day, and the invitations go out, and the cheaper tabloids show other people’s rear ends and claim this is Molly Corlen’s secret cellulite. It’s rumored there are fistfights as the competition heats up for those treasured invitations.

And the day comes, and it’s all as you’d have thought it would be—at least during the ceremony and the party afterwards. Finally Henry arrives with the limo. Surely enough, the wags have already got to it, or perhaps it was Henry himself. There’s JUST MARRIED painted in psychedelic pink lipstick all over the back window of what should be a stately vehicle, and tin cans and dildos are tied to the fender. Everyone knows the closely kept secret that the loving couple are going to spend their first night of wedded bliss at Derek’s “cottage” in the Hamptons before heading off to a Caribbean island where they’ll be spared any sight of the local poverty.

That night, with Henry firmly banished to the coach house and the housekeeper vacationing with her sister, Derek Schanner picks up his new bride in his arms and carries her with ease up the spiral staircase to where the master bedroom awaits them. All that’s needed is a thunderstorm and you could make an old movie out of this. While she sits on the side of the bed looking strangely more nervous than even a maidenly bride should look, he goes around the room lighting candles and scented pots. For the first time in his memory he, too, is a tad nervous, as if her uncertainty is infecting him.

But the time comes when he gives her a broad smile, strides across the room to her and, as she leans forward in acquiescence, starts unzipping her dress.

A minute later she’s entirely revealed to him, even though they’ve not yet so much as kissed.

Poor Derek Schanner stands aghast at the filthy trick Fate has played on him.

In a sense, Molly Corlen’s form is as beautiful as he’s imagined it would be—twice as beautiful, three times. She’s the color of gold—not a tan but a dusky version of the metal’s color. And this isn’t a woman’s body; it’s entirely featureless, like that of a mannequin. She has neither nipples nor navel. At her crotch and between the cheeks of her firm small rear is just smooth skin.

To another man, the horror would be that his new bride wasn’t human. To Derek Schanner the horror is that he can’t screw her.

“I tried to tell you,” she says as he sits down on the bed beside her and starts to weep. “I tried to tell you my people can’t make love. We’re not like you. We don’t eat, we don’t excrete. We don’t bear offspring. We live forever and we don’t age. No one knows how we came into being, no one knows where we’ll end, if ever we will.”

But this is Derek Schanner she’s speaking to, the idol of millions, the man who’s never encountered a denial he couldn’t somehow trample underfoot. These past few weeks he’s managed, uncharacteristically, to keep his passions for her in check. He’s not going to be denied now. He doesn’t care if she’s one of the goddam Sidhe—his most likely hypothesis—or an alien from the planet 61 Cygni C, or whatever she is.

He leaps from the bed, stands before her rampant, and pulls her towards his loins . . .

As the chronicler of this fiction, I know what has happened by a few minutes later—he’s lying in a satiated stupor in the bed, unknowing that all around him the flames are spreading through the room. What I don’t know is how my story crosses the small gap between those two points. By the time the fire’s started, Molly Corlen has gone, but whether she’s fled, leaving Schanner’s candles and scent pots to immolate him for her, or whether she deliberately set the blaze, or whether it was she herself who, in the midst of a passion she was never intended to experience, became the source of the conflagration . . . As I say, I don’t know. I’ve written it one way, and then another, and it has never quite worked for me.

One of the reasons I play the Lament so interminably is in hopes that Schanner built into that piece an explanation of what actually happened on his wedding night.

• • • •

Lucy was found at the bottom of the East River with her feet in a bucket of concrete, her hands tied behind her back and a gag wound so tightly around her mouth that two of her front teeth broke. Alternatively, she blew her own brains out with a sawn-off shotgun just before casting herself over the edge of the Palisades to die a hundred feet below. Or she was thrown into the caldera of an active volcano to serve as a ritual fertility sacrifice; only when the gods didn’t intervene on their behalf did the people who’d thrown her there realize she had perhaps not been, after all, a virgin. In adjacent realities, she was found hanging beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, her garments weighted with stones and her tongue a black knot; she was the victim of a hit-and-run, the driver of the car responsible looking much as if (according to the drunken drifter who was the sole witness) he might be a distinguished conductor and composer; or she fell dead at a distinguished reception at the Guggenheim when her neck was pierced by a curare-tipped dart.

All of these deaths of hers actually happened, I’m sure. I just can’t remember which one of them was, you know, the death.

On her occasional visits, Rachel tells me I shouldn’t be worrying about little details like this. This morning she was here again, bringing provisions to stock the fridge, checking I hadn’t run out of paper for the john, putting new sheets on the bed and sticking the old, soiled ones into the washing machine. She’s become my minder—I suppose out of duty, perhaps out of guilt over what we did to Lucy.

She didn’t seem to notice the scraperboard illustration growing on the wall by the window. Today Lucy has illustrated her death by hanging. We, her audience, are looking down on silver-tipped black waters. There’s a mass in the lower part of the picture that at first it’s hard to identify; then we realize we’re looking at foreshortened knees and bound feet.

Was Lucy really as calm as this as she died, however it was that she did die? Did she really keep observing the world around her until the very last, recording everything she saw? And why has she never chosen, in these accusatory illustrations of hers, to depict her killer? I keep looking for my own face, but I’m never there. Is this her final rejection of me—not even to acknowledge my role in her demise?

• • • •

The novel is, I think, going well. I’ve padded out a little the sequence in which Derek Schanner finds himself in the Village with no immediately discernible transport home. I’ve also added some sex scenes between him and his floozies, which didn’t take me very long; I simply chose at random from a few of my romantica titles and, not to put too fine a point upon it, set to work with the scanner and OCR. I’ll probably take them out again, and certainly rewrite them if I don’t, but it entertained me to spice up the narrative a little. I’m not sure this is how art is supposed to be done, but it was the way Lucy sometimes did it. She incorporated what she called objets trouvés into her work: a faucet here, a toothbrush there, sometimes an antique theater program or a crushed, decades-old foil top from a milk bottle.

And, I grow increasingly to think, me.

It was some years after Rachel appeared on our scene that I began to wonder if Lucy thought of our marriage, and of me, as just some artwork under construction.

• • • •

No one else ever comes here any more, except Rachel, as if Lucy’s death has cast some kind of blight over the house and its surrounding area, a poisonous miasma (good pulp word!) drifting and curling like the one I always imagine encircling the House of Usher. Since I almost never go out, I’m reliant on Rachel’s generosity to bring me food and other supplies. I try not to think of what would happen if she stopped coming. I also try not to think of why she keeps returning. It’s a three-hour drive each way from New York, so each visit costs her a day of time. Does she feel obligated to me in some way because of all that’s passed between us?

About three weeks ago, Lucy’s daily scraperboard illustration took a new tack. Always, before, her depictions were of her own manner of death, intended, I assume, to point the finger of guilt at me, to fill me with remorse. It so far hadn’t worked. I appreciated the art, sometimes I found it facile, sometimes I was moved by it, initially I was rather unnerved by the fact that it was there at all, but it didn’t really threaten me.

On this particular day, though, something drew my attention to the growing patch on the wall long before there was anything recognizable there to see. Rachel had been here the day before, and there’d been some more thawing of the difficult tension between us. Today I was still feeling warmed in the aftermath of it, almost in the way that, years ago, I’d have felt the day after a good night out with Lucy. We’d even had what might have passed for a normal conversation—about the weather, mostly. She left behind a copy of the New York Times for me, and I looked at it with as much interest as I could muster for stories about people of whom I’d never heard doing things that made no sense to me.

By mid-morning of the day after Rachel’s visit, Lucy had completed perhaps a quarter of her new picture. Usually she worked from the top-left corner across and down, finishing at the bottom right. This time, however, she was scraping over the full width as she worked downward. There was a bar of blackness at the top, merging at either side into black triangles that cut off the corners of the rectangular area. I’d just made my mid-morning java when I recognized what she’d drawn so far as part of a stylized coffin, open to reveal the person lying within. Already I could see the forehead of the corpse, and part of one eyebrow.

Fascinated, I stayed there watching for the next half hour or so as the illustration silently expanded: the other eyebrow, the bridge of the nose. Lucy’s treatment of the hair was puzzling. In life she wore her hair long, tied back in a bunch while she was working but otherwise falling free down her back. It was fine enough that it moved with the least draft, its tips never still. Yet here she was drawing it as quite short—not short and curly like Rachel’s, but untidy and receding from the brow like . . .

Like mine.

My java almost forgotten in my hand, I perched on the edge of my desk. Years ago we had a television set in the house; finally it broke down and we hauled it to the local recycling center. Since neither of us had ever watched it much, there was no great incentive to replace it, and in fact we never did. The last six months or so of its residence here, it sometimes worked enough that you could watch the picture all right, but whatever you did, the soundtrack stayed mute. The few occasions that we tried to follow discussion programs or news broadcasts were especially frustrating. There were enough clues on the screen to give us a general idea of what was going on, but that was about it.

I was experiencing the same frustration now, only more so because everything was happening in the slowest of motions. I couldn’t but assume that Lucy must be entirely aware of the irritation the situation was causing me. Had she wanted to convey her message more immediately, she could always just have scribbled words on the wall for me to read.

After a time, I wrenched myself away. By now it was clear this was indeed my face that Lucy was drawing. We’d always told each other in life that, however bad things between us might one day become through circumstances we couldn’t foresee—and even when they did become that bad because of Rachel Peebles—at least we’d never hate each other. Had Lucy finally discovered we were wrong? Killing someone isn’t necessarily an act of hatred, and sometimes can be born from the deepest love. Her new picture, on the other hand, seemed motivated entirely by hatred.

I took this thought back with me to my novel. It’s hard to know if the emotion Derek Schanner felt toward Molly Corlen was actually love, and in my novel I’m not giving him the benefit of the doubt. My fictional version of him desired Molly only because of a mixture of lust and the imperative to demonstrate to the cosmos or maybe to his own dark god that, if ever Derek Schanner wants something, he’ll achieve it no matter the obstacles; he broke down Molly’s resolve mainly just to prove that he could, in other words. But what of Molly’s feelings toward him? She must have known from the very outset that any attempt they made to become man and wife was doomed to deep catastrophe, and yet she finally let herself be persuaded into it. Surely she must have been profoundly in love with the man, so strongly that she permitted her love to convince her they could somehow escape the inevitable.

But that’s a simplistic reading. In the story I’m telling, Molly Corlen is something other than human. What sort of being is she? Like poor Derek on his wedding night, I can’t even guess if she’s a creature out of legend—if all those tales of Fairyland are true—or something stranger yet than that. For a time, I thought it was essential to my novel that I should be clear on this; then I discovered it was unnecessary. I’d decided long ago, soon after I started work on the book, that my narrator—my viewpoint character—should be Molly’s sister, who has come to New York to seek revenge for Molly’s fate. Since the sister knows entirely what kind of beings she and Molly are, there’s no need for me—or the reader—to do so.

But all this is an aside. What I’m trying to say is that Molly’s actions seem to have been born from a powerful love for the maestro, but, if she wasn’t human, we cannot know what emotions she experienced. We cannot know if her kind are capable of anything remotely similar to what we’d call love.

I spent much of the afternoon wrestling with this familiar problem, and almost forgot Lucy’s latest communiqué. It was only when the shadows of the day had lengthened enough for me to have to switch on my desk lamp that I remembered.

There was still plenty of light at the window for me to see what she’d drawn there.

I’d been right to deduce it was a head-and-shoulders portrait of me in my coffin. But Lucy had taken the trouble to detail how I’d gotten there.

My throat was slashed wide open in a blow so forceful you could see a quill of splintered vertebra at the back. The knife was still in this ghastly wound. The blood had pooled and coagulated on the coffin velvet all around my neck. Maggots had populated one eye but the other looked still almost alive.

And Lucy had included one of those little fantasticated touches that always made her art so appealing to the public.

Coiled in the blood just above my left shoulder there was a small snake, no more than four inches long and proportioned to match. It was staring straight out of the wall, straight out at me.

Somehow she’d managed to add a couple of small spots of color.

The eyes through which the snake was staring at me were a bright, malevolent scarlet, like tiny rubies stuck to the wall.

Only I daren’t reach out to touch them.

• • • •

Since Lucy and I both worked at home—out here miles from anywhere except an abandoned tire factory, more of which falls down each winter, and a couple of similarly dilapidated cottages that lurk hairily by the roadside like some evolutionary ancestor of the sheep—we weren’t apart very often. The nearest population center, Dogged Creek, twenty minutes away by car, has perhaps two hundred souls. When she had to attend exhibition previews or book launches, I tried to engineer it that I went with her—deadlines permitting, which most often they didn’t. There were never, of course, any book launches for me; the publishers of my novels, at least in this country, were releasing batches of four and six books in each genre a month, sometimes more, and my titles were lost in there somewhere. Often the books I ghosted for celebrities had lavish launch parties, but naturally I was never invited to them in case it became obvious who I was.

It didn’t cross my mind that any predatory lover might choose to take advantage of those separations. But then I didn’t until too late recognize Rachel Peebles as the threat to our marriage she eventually became.

How did she persuade Lucy it would be a good idea for Rachel to come live with us? Did she think we could settle down to some sort of amiable ménage à trois?

Their affair must have been going on for a couple of years by then. Even when Lucy floated the idea of Rachel’s coming to live in the house, I saw nothing more sinister than a friendship that had become perhaps too intense, the way friendships can. It was only months afterwards that I began to put two and two together, and asked Lucy outright if, during those times she was away from the house on professional engagements, Rachel was going with her, was sharing her hotel beds.

“Yes,” said Lucy. “I thought you knew.”

It was the strangest reply imaginable.

“Don’t you think I’d have said something about it if I had?”

“I thought your silence was acceptance, that you loved me enough to know there was another side to me.”

“You mean Rachel wasn’t the first?”

“Of course she was!” We were standing downstairs in the kitchen. Sunlight from the bay window was reflecting brightly off polished pots and pans and making the blue-checked tablecloth seem like a young woman’s summery frock. Outside, some songbird was having a really bad day. “Until she came along,” said Lucy, “I’d never even thought of another woman as a possible lover. I’ll not lie, Eric. There’ve been times I’ve been tempted by men—and there’ve been plenty who’ve made it pretty plain they were available if ever I should feel the need—but women? Hey, never. And then there was Rachel, and all my perspectives became different.”

“But why? She’s no raging beauty. She’s clever and she tells a good joke, but—”

“Why did I fall in love with you, Eric?”

Despite the tenseness of the moment, I chuckled. “It’s always puzzled me. I’ve tried never to think about it too hard in case you come to your senses and dump me. Which I suppose, now, you have.”

She stepped forward and took my face between her hands. “Don’t be such an idiot. How could I ever stop loving you?”

“You’ve just told me you’re in love with Rachel.”

“Yes?”

“Doesn’t that mean that—?”

“No. Where did this myth come from that we can only ever love one person at a time? My love for Rachel, the love she has for me, they don’t reduce in the slightest how much I love you.”

Already by then I was writing the early stages of my novel about Molly Corlen and the man whose desire for her took over complete control of his being. As Lucy stood there in front of me with the sun catching her hair, I began to realize how many points of physical resemblance there were between her and the fictional Molly Corlen. Had I, despite all of my intentions, used Lucy subconsciously as my model for Molly? Or was the resemblance genuine? I tried to bring back to mind all those photographs there’d been in the papers around the time of the Schanners’ grand society wedding, both before and after, but the only face among the gray columns was Lucy’s.

“It’s hard to take in,” I said inadequately.

She threw her arms around me, held me close. “Don’t let it be. If you love me as much as I love you, you’ll realize it’s just a new aspect of me, something extra that makes my life more complete than I ever thought it could be.”

Reflex made me want to return her embrace, but I found my arms were still by my side.

“This is going to take some getting used to,” I said. “I’ll try, I’ll try, I’ll try. But I never want to see a hair of Rachel Peebles ever again.”

“You sound so full of hatred,” murmured Lucy against my neck.

“I’ll try to . . . dilute that,” I said.

Naturally, we ended up in bed. Later, wishing I hadn’t given up smoking twenty years ago, I said, “But I still never want to see Rachel again.”

And I never did, until the funeral.

• • • •

It’s been a while since Lucy last drew an illustration of my corpse, and I’ve been working away unrelentingly. I seem to have spent longer on this novel than on any dozen of my previous ones. I think this is because it has somehow become a map of my own life, and that if I ever get to the ending then I’ll immediately become that mutilated and maggot-raddled coffin-bound dead ’un of Lucy’s portrait. It’s not that I’m putting off the evil moment, though—don’t get that impression. It’s more that I’m trying to make my map as perfect as it can be. Once I believe I’ve succeeded in that, then I’ll have no reluctance to type THE END the way I have to so many novels before.

Today it’s been difficult to work, though.

The first thing that became visible at the scraperboard drawing’s top-left corner was a crossbar with a hand nailed to it. Surely I couldn’t have killed Lucy like this? Surely she couldn’t have killed me like this! It wasn’t within either of us to be so cruel. On the other hand, I’d never have thought Lucy would have had the cruelty in her to paint that little scarlet-eyed snake.

I was disturbed enough even by the beginnings of the crucifixion picture that I had to abandon work for a while and go outside for a walk. It must have been weeks since last I left the house. The garden always looked dreadful because Lucy and I could never be bothered to do much about it and the gardener we hired from Dogged Creek seemed content just to turn up every week and do virtually nothing except collect his pay. A few weeks after we’d fired him, I found his marijuana plantation down behind the toolshed and, as Lucy and I smoked the product, we made increasingly confused calculations as to whether or not we’d got our money’s worth from him. Thereafter, Lucy did some desultory weeding from time to time, just to keep things under control. I haven’t even done that. If anyone ever wants cuttings of poison ivy or wisteria, here’s the place to apply.

I looked out from the garden towards where you can’t, in fact, see the sea from here. Today is yet another fine day, and already the warmth of the sunshine was building up. Aside from the birds and insects, there wasn’t the slightest sound, not even the rustle of leaves. I slowly closed my eyes until they were almost shut, creating the illusion that I was leaching color from the scene.

I’d stepped into Lucy’s scraperboard world.

I looked down at the ragged grass under my feet.

A small viper looked back up at me with scarlet eyes.

This, I at once recalled, was why I never go outside any more if I can help it.

• • • •

I’m trying to convince myself that I’m not waiting to see the completion of Lucy’s crucifixion picture. I throw myself into my newest revision of Chapter Eight.

Molly Corlen’s sister, who is far less acclimatized to the busy human world than Molly ever was, is combing Manhattan for the selfish maestro who brought about her sibling’s disappearance. She has fewer clues than you might expect because, unlike Molly, she can’t understand human speech—in fact, she lacks the ability to hear, and sees only in the ultraviolet. She doesn’t have the urge that Molly had to present herself as beautiful to the world; since most people can’t see her, this is barely important, but dogs and cats flee from her as from the fiends of hell, and infants scream themselves into dangerous red-faced fits. Too, Molly’s sister hasn’t given herself a name; I toyed with inventing one for her, but soon abandoned the notion. No, she’s just Molly’s Sister, who, like Grendel’s Mother, namelessly and far more awfully hunts to avenge a lesser monster.

It struck me after I came back inside that every one of us has a Molly Corlen, the person whom we desire beyond all reason but whom we should never, ever attain. Derek Schanner, as we’ve seen, violated this universal principle and paid the price for it in terms of a lifetime of grief; after the Lament, which immortalized his pain, he never wrote anything else of value. He’s probably still in circulation—in Hollywood, maybe, doing soundtracks for minor sequels, or on the cocktail circuit somewhere, decorating rich people’s soirées—but the important part of his existence is over. I’m wondering as I work if perhaps Lucy was my own Molly Corlen but that it took me decades to realize it.

I start weaving some thoughts like these into my narrative.

I become utterly absorbed. From time to time, searching for the right word, I look toward the window for a moment and see that Lucy’s working far faster than usual today; and, by the time I’m thinking of taking a break for lunch, the space she allots herself for the daily illustration is already full.

Wearily, I pick myself up from my desk and take the few steps to the window area.

Some of her pictures of her own death and mine have disturbed me, some have been very painful for me, and increasingly they’ve started to frighten me, but today’s is the first to truly terrify me.

What I thought was a crossbar is the back of a chair. The hand resting on it isn’t nailed; it just has a great big liver spot in the center of the palm. The hand is mine. I’m sprawled on the chair like a sack someone has dumped there. What’s so scary is that it’s evident I’m alive, but there’s no light of understanding in the eyes of that scraperboard face. My open mouth drools. I’m wearing a bathrobe and pajamas and slippers; one of my slippers is resting in a small pool of liquid, and it’s all too easy to guess what the liquid is. There are other people visible in the room behind me, all of them likewise lolling in armchairs, most of them facing toward the bulky block of a television set.

The sense of reality is astonishing, adding to my terror. This has always been Lucy’s great talent, making reality somehow more real than you’ve ever known it. Me, by contrast, even if you take all my hundreds of pulp novels together, the best I’ve ever achieved is a sort of imitation of that, a false life. The drawing convinces me that this is my real future, that rather than be inventively murdered—the way it seems to me I must have murdered Lucy when her relationship with Rachel became intolerable to me—rather than be murdered, I’m going to have to endure my final days suffering interminable miseries of soul and unable to express or even understand them.

I was wrong to think Lucy has no cruelty. She’s done something far crueler to me than exact a sentence of death. She has declared me superfluous to requirements, painted over her memories of me.

I’m still reeling when I hear the downstairs door open. It must be Rachel come to call again, so soon, and in a sense it is.

I peer from the shadowy top of the stairs as a young couple come into the house with a small child hand-in-hand between them and a scruffy dog dancing around their ankles. Behind them comes a woman with that kind of carefully nurtured brassy near-prettiness that shrieks realtor, and behind her there comes Rachel Peebles, dressed more formally than I’ve ever seen her before in a two-piece suit of some tasteful tweed.

Who are these people?

I soon discover most of their names, at least. The couple are Mike and Djera, and the child scampering upstairs and then down again while her parents are still examining the kitchen is Angie, who tells Rachel more than once that she’ll soon be ten.

“Come upstairs!” cries Angie. “There’s a room with a thousand books in it!”

Mike and Djera laugh, and obediently follow their offspring. They walk right past me as if they can’t see me. The mongrel stays in the kitchen.

When Mike sees the shelves of my novels the smile fades from his face, and I can see him calculating whether or not they might be worth anything.

“They’re all by the same author,” says Rachel. “I can have them hauled off to the dump or . . .”

“But they have lots of different names on them,” says Mike, by now close by the shelves.

“Lucille Hrade’s husband was very prolific,” says Rachel. “He used dozens of noms de plume. Did Mrs. McConnell”—a sharp glance at Brassy Woman—“not tell you the history of the house?”

“She told us it belonged to an artist,” says Djera. “But Lucille Hrade—wow! Did you hear that, Mike? We could be living in the house where Lucille Hrade once painted.”

“This was her studio for many years,” says Rachel.

“We could make this our bedroom!” cries Djera, gazing around her, her hands clasped, her pretty face glowing.

Angie has pulled out a book. Mike takes it from her, examines it, sees the cover picture and the title—Rod Studly: Master Spy (1977)—and hastily stuffs it back onto the shelf.

“These aren’t books for you,” he tells his daughter.

“And Lucille Hrade”—he turns to Rachel—“where is she now?”

“She decided a few years ago to live permanently in New York, where all the art business is. She and her husband, the writer . . . they drifted apart. After the divorce, he lived on here until age . . . got the better of him. He was much older than she was, you see.”

“He died here?” says Djera, her gleeful expression souring a little.

“No,” says Rachel. “We found him a home. They look after him very competently there.”

“‘We’?” says Mike.

Rachel nods at him. “I’ve been a family friend for many years. Rachel Peebles. I write for children. Angie may have read some of my books.”

It’s immediately obvious that Angie hasn’t.

“The break-up was very difficult for Lucy,” Rachel continues after an awkward pause. “When she came to New York, she stayed in my apartment until she could find somewhere of her own. As chance would have it, the apartment next door fell vacant just a couple of months later, so now we’re neighbors as well as good friends.”

She smiles. How nice. A story with a happy ending.

The child is looking straight at me but I realize that, like the rest of them—Rachel aside—she doesn’t know I’m here. She’s looking through me to the place on the wall by the window where Lucy’s drawings appear.

I turn. Today’s offering has disappeared, all but a sort of lingering patchwork of lines.

“There’s something on the wall,” says Angie.

Mike chuckles. “It’s all right, daughter o’ mine. Nothing to worry about.” He comes across and brushes the last of the drawing away. “Just a yucky old cobweb. I’m surprised there aren’t more of them around, the house being empty all this while.”

“You have Ms. Peebles to thank for that,” says the McConnell creature. “She’s been popping in from time to time to make sure everything’s shipshape.”

“I love the place,” says Djera firmly.

Angie concurs.

“We’ll need to have an appraiser go over the house,” says Mike. “But assuming he’s happy . . .” His gaze roams the room and its tall windows through which you feel as if you ought to be able to see the distant sea. “Assuming all that,” he says dreamily, “I think this is where we’re going to build our future together, we three.”

“I’d be so glad,” says Rachel. “This house had so many happy memories before it acquired . . . the sadder ones. It’ll be lovely to have a young family here to drive the sadness away.”

There’s more small talk, mainly between Mike and the realtor as they talk through the logistics of the appraisal and other matters, and then everyone is trooping down the stairs. The dog, whose name is Dibs, is put back on the leash in case he goes running away across the fields.

Rachel Peebles ushers the others out but hangs back a moment herself.

She looks up the stairs to where I’m standing, smiles, and winks one of her hard, knowing little blood-scarlet eyes at me.

Then the door closes and she’s gone.

• • • •

Despite all of these unwelcome distractions, I think my new novel is going rather well. I am, though, uncertain that I will finish it.

©2014 by John Grant. Originally published in Black Static. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Grant has written over 70 books. His fiction includes The World (1992), The Far-Enough Window (2002), The Dragons of Manhattan (2008) and Leaving Fortusa (2008), plus numerous short stories, some collected as Take No Prisoners (2004) and Tell No Lies (2014). With artist Bob Eggleton he created the two “illustrated fictions” Dragonhenge (2002) and The Stardragons (2005); the former brought a Hugo nomination.

His nonfiction includes The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters (three editions (1987, 1993, 1998), The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997, with John Clute), The Chesley Awards (2003, with Elizabeth Humphrey and Pamela D. Scoville) and a series of books on the misuse/misunderstanding of science: Discarded Science (2006), Corrupted Science (2007), Bogus Science (2009) and Denying Science (2011), plus the YA books Debunk It! (2014) and Eureka! (2016). His A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir (2013) is the largest film noir encyclopedia in the English language. He has won two Hugo awards, a World Fantasy Award, and others.

May 2018 sees the publication of the new edition—nearly twice as long as the original and a decade in the making—of his critically acclaimed Corrupted Science.

Great Work of Time

John Crowley | 31680 words

I: THE SINGLE EXCURSION OF CASPAR LAST

If what I am to set down is a chronicle, then it must differ from any other chronicle whatever, for it begins, not in one time or place, but everywhere at once—or perhaps everywhen is the better word. It might be begun at any point along the infinite, infinitely broken coastline of time.

It might even begin within the forest in the sea: huge trees like American redwoods, with their roots in the black benthos, and their leaves moving slowly in the blue currents overhead. There it might end as well.

It might begin in 1893—or in 1983. Yes: It might be as well to begin with Last, in an American sort of voice (for we are all Americans now, aren’t we?) Yes, Last shall be first: pale, fattish Caspar Last, on excursion in the springtime of 1983 to a far, far part of the Empire.

• • • •

The tropical heat clothed Caspar Last like a suit as he disembarked from the plane. It was nearly as claustrophobic as the hours he had spent in the middle seat of a three-across, economy-class pew between two other cut-rate, one-week-excursion, plane-fare-and-hotel-room holiday-makers in monstrous good spirits. Like them, Caspar had taken the excursion because it was the cheapest possible way to get to and from this equatorial backwater. Unlike them, he hadn’t come to soak up sun and molasses-dark rum. He didn’t intend to spend all his time at the beach, or even within the twentieth century.

It had come down, in the end, to a matter of money. Caspar Last had never had money, though he certainly hadn’t lacked the means to make it; with any application he could have made good money as a consultant to any of a dozen research firms, but that would have required a certain subjection of his time and thought to others, and Caspar was incapable of that. It’s often said that genius can live in happy disregard of material circumstances, dress in rags, not notice its nourishment, and serve only its own abstract imperatives. This was Caspar’s case, except that he wasn’t happy about it: He was bothered, bitter, and rageful at his poverty. Fame he cared nothing for, success was meaningless except when defined as the solution to abstract problems. A great fortune would have been burdensome and useless. All he wanted was a nice bit of change.

He had decided, therefore, to use his “time machine” once only, before it and the principles that animated it were destroyed, for good, he hoped. (Caspar always thought of his “time machine” thus, with scare-quotes around it, since it was not really a machine, and Caspar did not believe in time.) He would use it, he decided, to make money. Somehow.

The one brief annihilation of “time” that Caspar intended to allow himself was in no sense a test run. He knew that his “machine” would function as predicted. If he hadn’t needed the money, he wouldn’t use it at all. As far as he was concerned, the principles, once discovered, the task was completed; like a completed jigsaw puzzle, it had no further interest; there was really nothing to do with it except gloat over it briefly and then sweep all the pieces randomly back into the box.

It was a mark of Caspar’s odd genius that figuring out a scheme with which to make money out of the past (which was the only “direction” his “machine” would take him) proved almost as hard, given the limitations of his process, as arriving at the process itself.

He had gone through all the standard wish-fulfillments and rejected them. He couldn’t, armed with today’s race results, return to yesterday and hit the daily double. For one thing it would take a couple of thousand in betting money to make it worth it, and Caspar didn’t have a couple of thousand. More importantly, Caspar had calculated the results of his present self appearing at any point within the compass of his own biological existence, and those results made him shudder.

Similar difficulties attended any scheme that involved using money to make money. If he returned to 1940 and bought, say, two hundred shares of IBM for next to nothing: In the first place, there would be the difficulty of leaving those shares somehow in escrow for his unborn self; there would be the problem of the alteration this growing fortune would have on the linear life he had actually lived; and where was he to acquire the five hundred dollars or whatever was needed in the currency of 1940? The same problem obtained if he wanted to return to 1623 and pick up a First Folio of Shakespeare, or to 1460 and a Gutenberg Bible: The cost of the currency he would need rose in relation to the antiquity, thus the rarity and value, of the object to be bought with it. There was also the problem of walking into a bookseller’s and plunking down a First Folio he had just happened to stumble on while cleaning out the attic. In any case, Caspar doubted that anything as large as a book could be successfully transported “through time.” He’d be lucky if he could go and return in his clothes.

Outside the airport, Caspar boarded a bus with his fellow excursionists, already hard at work with their cameras and index fingers as they rode through a sweltering lowland out of which concrete-block light industry was struggling to be born. The hotel in the capital was as he expected, shoddy-American and intermittently refrigerated. He ceased to notice it, forwent the complimentary rum concoction promised with his tour, and after asking that his case be put in the hotel safe—extra charge for that, he noted bitterly—he went immediately to the Hall of Records in the government complex. The collection of old survey maps of the city and environs were more extensive than he had hoped. He spent most of that day among them searching for a blank place on the 1856 map, a place as naked as possible of buildings, brush, water, and that remained thus through the years. He discovered one, visited it by unmuffled taxi, found it suitable. It would save him from the awful inconvenience of “arriving” in the “past” and finding himself inserted into some local’s wattle-and-daub wall. Next morning, then, he would be “on his way.” If he had believed in time, he would have said that the whole process would take less than a day’s time.

Before settling on this present plan, Caspar had toyed with the idea of bringing back from the past something immaterial: some knowledge, some secret that would allow him to make himself rich in his own present. Ships have gone down with millions in bullion: He could learn exactly where. Captain Kidd’s treasure. Inca gold. Archaeological rarities buried in China. Leaving aside the obvious physical difficulties of these schemes, he couldn’t be sure that their location wouldn’t shift in the centuries between his glimpse of them and his “real” life span; and even if he could be certain, no one else would have much reason to believe him, and he didn’t have the wherewithal to raise expeditions himself. So all that was out.

He had a more general, theoretical problem to deal with. Of course the very presence of his eidolon in the past would alter, in however inconsequential a way, the succeeding history of the world. The comical paradoxes of shooting one’s own grandfather and the like neither amused nor intrigued him, and the chance he took of altering the world he lived in out of all recognition was constantly present to him. Statistically, of course, the chance of this present plan of his altering anything significantly, except his own personal fortunes, was remote to a high power. But his scruples had caused him to reject anything such as, say, discovering the Koh-i-Noor diamond before its historical discoverers. No: What he needed to abstract from the past was something immensely trivial, something common, something the past wouldn’t miss but that the present held in the highest regard; something that would take the briefest possible time and the least irruption of himself into the past to acquire; something he could reasonably be believed to possess through simple historical chance; and something tiny enough to survive the cross-time “journey” on his person.

It had come to him quite suddenly—all his ideas did, as though handed to him—when he learned that his great-great-grandfather had been a commercial traveler in the tropics, and that in the attic of his mother’s house (which Caspar had never had the wherewithal to move out of) some old journals and papers of his still moldered. They were, when he inspected them, completely without interest. But the dates were right.

Caspar had left a wake-up call at the desk for before dawn the next morning. There was some difficulty about getting his case out of the safe, and more difficulty about getting a substantial breakfast served at that hour (Caspar expected not to eat during his excursion), but he did arrive at his chosen site before the horrendous tropical dawn broke, and after paying the taxi, he had darkness enough left in which to make his preparations and change into his costume. The costume—a linen suit, a shirt, hat, boots—had cost him twenty dollars in rental from a theatrical costumer, and he could only hope it was accurate enough not to cause alarm in 1856. The last item he took from his case was the copper coin, which had cost him quite a bit, as he needed one unworn and of the proper date. He turned it in his fingers for a moment, thinking that if, unthinkably, his calculations were wrong and he didn’t survive this journey, it would make an interesting obol for Charon.

Out of the unimaginable chaos of its interminable stochastic fiction, Time thrust only one unforeseen oddity on Caspar Last as he, or something like him, appeared beneath a plantain tree in 1856: He had grown a beard almost down to his waist. It was abominably hot.

The suburbs of the city had of course vanished. The road he stood by was a muddy track down which a cart was being driven by a tiny and close-faced Indian in calico. He followed the cart, and his costume boots were caked with mud when at last he came into the center of town, trying to appear nonchalant and to remember the layout of the city as he had studied it in the maps. He wanted to speak to no one if possible, and he did manage to find the post office without affecting, however minutely, the heterogeneous crowd of blacks, Indians, and Europeans in the filthy streets. Having absolutely no sense of humor and very little imagination other than the most rigidly abstract helped to keep him strictly about his business and not to faint, as another might have, with wonder and astonishment at his translation, the first, last, and only of its kind a man would ever make.

“I would like,” he said to the mulatto inside the brass and mahogany cage, “an envelope, please.”

“Of course, sir.”

“How long will it take for a letter mailed now to arrive locally?”

“Within the city? It would arrive in the afternoon post.”

“Very good.”

Caspar went to a long, ink-stained table, and with one of the steel pens provided, he addressed the envelope to Georg von Humboldt Last, Esq., Grand Hotel, City, in the approximation of an antique round hand that he had been practicing for weeks. There was a moment’s doubt as he tried to figure how to fold up and seal the cumbersome envelope, but he did it, and gave this empty missive to the incurious mulatto. He slipped his precious coin across the marble to him. For the only moment of his adventure, Caspar’s heart beat fast as he watched the long, slow brown fingers affix a stamp, cancel and date it with a pen-stroke, and drop it into a brass slot like a hungry mouth behind him.

It only remained to check into the Grand Hotel, explain about his luggage’s being on its way up from the port, and sit silent on the hotel terrace, growing faint with heat and hunger and expectation, until the afternoon post.

The one aspect of the process Caspar had never been able to decide about was whether his eidolon’s residence in the fiction of the past would consume any “time” in the fiction of the present. It did. When, at evening, with the letter held tight in his hand and pressed to his bosom, Caspar reappeared beardless beneath the plantain tree in the traffic-tormented and smoky suburb, the gaseous red sun was squatting on the horizon in the west, just as it had been in the same place in 1856.

He would have his rum drink after all, he decided.

“Mother,” he said, “do you think there might be anything valuable in those papers of your great-grandfather’s?”

“What papers, dear? Oh—I remember. I couldn’t say. I thought once of donating them to a historical society. How do you mean, valuable?”

“Well, old stamps, for one thing.”

“You’re free to look, Caspar dear.”

Caspar was not surprised (though he supposed the rest of the world was soon to be) that he found among the faded, water-spotted diaries and papers an envelope that bore a faint brown address—it had aged nicely in the next-to-no-time it had traveled “forward” with Caspar—and that had in its upper right-hand corner a one-penny magenta stamp, quite undistinguished, issued for a brief time in 1856 by the Crown Colony of British Guiana.

The asking price of the sole known example of this stamp, a “unique” owned by a consortium of wealthy men who preferred to remain anonymous, was a million dollars. Caspar Last had not decided whether it would be more profitable for him to sell the stamp itself, or to approach the owners of the unique, who would certainly pay a large amount to have it destroyed, and thus preserve their unique’s uniqueness. It did seem a shame that the only artifact man had ever succeeded in extracting from the nonexistent past should go into the fire, but Caspar didn’t really care. His own bonfire—the notes and printouts, the conclusions about the nature and transversability of time and the orthogonal logic by which it was accomplished—would be only a little more painful.

The excursion was over; the only one that remained to him was the brief but, to him, all-important one of his own mortal span. He was looking forward to doing it first class.

II: AN APPOINTMENT IN KHARTOUM

It might be begun very differently, though; and it might now be begun again, in a different time and place, like one of those romances by Stevenson, where different stories only gradually reveal themselves to be parts of a whole . . .

• • • •

The paradox is acute, so acute that the only possible stance for a chronicler is to ignore it altogether, and carry on. This, the Otherhood’s central resignation, required a habit of mind so contrary to ordinary cause-and-effect thinking as to be, literally, unimaginable. It would only have been in the changeless precincts of the Club they had established beyond all frames of reference, when deep in leather armchairs or seated all together around the long table whereon their names were carved, that they dared reflect on it at all.

Take, for a single but not a random instance, the example of Denys Winterset, twenty-three years old, Winchester, Oriel College, younger son of a well-to-do doctor and in 1956 ending a first year as assistant district commissioner of police in Bechuanaland.

He hadn’t done strikingly well in his post. Though on the surface he was exactly the sort of man who was chosen, or who chose himself, to serve the Empire in those years—a respectable second at Oxford, a cricketer more steady than showy, a reserved, sensible, presentable lad with sound principles and few beliefs—still there was an odd strain in him. Too imaginative, perhaps; given to fits of abstraction, even to what his commissioner called “tears, idle tears.” Still, he was resourceful and hardworking; he hadn’t disgraced himself, and he was now on his way north on the Cape-to-Cairo Railroad, to take a month’s holiday in Cairo and England. His anticipation was marred somewhat by a sense that, after a year in the veldt, he would no longer fit into the comfortable old shoe of his childhood home; that he would feel as odd and exiled as he had in Africa. Home had become a dream, in Bechuanaland; if, at home, Bechuanaland became a dream, then he would have no place real at all to be at home in; he would be an exile for good.

The high veldt sped away as he was occupied with these thoughts, the rich farmlands of Southern Rhodesia. In the saloon car a young couple, very evidently on honeymoon, watched expectantly for the first glimpse of the eternal rainbow, visible miles off, that haloed Victoria Falls. Denys watched them and their excitement, feeling old and wise. Americans, doubtless: They had that shy, inoffensive air of all Americans abroad, that wondering quality as of children let out from a dark and oppressive school to play in the sun.

“There!” said the woman as the train took a bend. “Oh, look, how beautiful!”

Even over the train’s sound they could hear the sound of the falls now, like distant cannon. The young man looked at his watch and smiled at Denys. “Right on time,” he said, and Denys smiled too, amused to be complimented on his railroad’s efficiency. The Bulawayo Bridge—longest and highest span on the Cape-to-Cairo line—leapt over the gorge.

“My God, that’s something,” the young man said. “Cecil Rhodes built this, right?”

“No,” Denys said. “He thought of it, but never lived to see it. It would have been far easier to build it a few miles up, but Rhodes pictured the train being washed in the spray of the falls as it passed. And so it was built here.”

The noise of the falls was immense now, and weirdly various, a medley of cracks, thumps, and explosions playing over the constant bass roar, which was not so much like a noise at all as it was like an eternal deep-drawn breath. And as the train chugged out across the span, aimed at Cairo thousands of miles away, passing here the place so hard-sought-for a hundred years ago—the place where the Nile had its origin—the spray did fall on the train just as Cecil Rhodes had imagined it, flung spindrift hissing on the locomotive, drops speckling the window they looked out of and rainbowing in the white air. The young Americans were still with wonder, and Denys, too, felt a lifting of his heart.

At Khartoum, Denys bid the honeymooners farewell: They were taking the Empire Airways flying boat from here to Gibraltar, and the Atlantic dirigible home. Denys, by now feeling quite proprietary about his Empire’s transportation services, assured them that both flights would also certainly be right on time, and would be as comfortable as the sleepers they were leaving, would serve the same excellent meals with the same white napery embossed with the same royal insignia. Denys himself was driven to the Grand Hotel. His Sudan Railways sleeper to Cairo left the next morning.

After a bath in a tiled tub large enough almost to swim in, Denys changed into dinner clothes (which had been carefully laid out for him on the huge bed—for whom had these cavernous rooms been built, a race of Kitcheners?) He reserved a table for one in the grill room and went down to the bar. One thing he must do in London, he thought, shooting his cuffs, was to visit his tailor. Bechuanaland had sweated off his college baby fat, and the tropics seemed to have turned his satin lapels faintly green.

The bar was comfortably filled, before the dinner hour, with men of several sorts and a few women, and with the low various murmur of their talk. Some of the men wore white dinner jackets—businessmen and tourists, Denys supposed; and a few even wore shorts with black shoes and stockings, a style Denys found inherently funny, as though a tailor had made a frightful error and cut evening clothes to the pattern of bush clothes. He ordered a whiskey.

Rarely in African kraals or in his bungalow or his whitewashed office did Denys think about his Empire: or if he did, it was in some local, even irritated way, of Imperial trivialities or Imperial red tape, the rain-rusted engines and stacks of tropic-mildewed paperwork that, collectively, Denys and his young associates called the White Man’s Burden. It seemed to require a certain remove from the immediacy of Empire before he could perceive it. Only here (beneath the fans’ ticking, amid the voices naming places—Kandahar, Durban, Singapore, Penang) did the larger Empire that Denys had never seen but had lived in in thought and feeling since childhood open in his mind. How odd, how far more odd really than admirable or deplorable that the small place which was his childhood, circumscribed and cozy—gray Westminster, chilly Trafalgar Square of the black umbrellas, London of the coal-smoked wallpaper and endless chimney pots—should have opened itself out so ceaselessly and for so long into huge hot places, subcontinents where rain never fell or never stopped, lush with vegetable growth or burdened with seas of sand or stone. Send forth the best ye breed: or at least large numbers of those ye breed. If one thought how odd it was—and if one thought then of what should have been natural empires, enormous spreads of restless real property like America or Russia turning in on themselves, making themselves into what seemed (to Denys, who had never seen them) to be very small places: then it did seem to be Destiny of a kind. Not a Destiny to be proud of, particularly, nor ashamed of either, but one whose compelling inner logic could only be marveled at.

Quite suddenly, and with poignant vividness, Denys saw himself, or rather felt himself once more to be, before his nursery fire, looking into the small glow of it, with animal crackers and cocoa for tea, listening to Nana telling tales of her brother the sergeant, and the Afghan frontier, and the now-dead king he served—listening, and feeling the Empire ranged in widening circles around him: first Harley Street, outside the window, and then Buckingham Palace, where the king lived; and the country then into which the trains went, and then the cold sea, and the Possessions, and the Commonwealth, stretching ever farther outward, worldwide: but always with his small glowing fire and his comfort and wonder at the heart of it.

So, there he is: a young man with the self-possessed air of an older, in evening clothes aged prematurely in places where evening clothes had not been made to go; thinking, if it could be called thinking, of a nursery fire; and about to be spoken to by the man next down the bar. If his feelings could be summed up and spoken, they were that, however odd, there is nothing more real, more pinioned by acts great and small, more clinker-built of time and space and filled brimful of this and that, than is the real world in which his five senses and his memories had their being; and that this was deeply satisfying.

“I beg your pardon,” said the man next down the bar.

“Good evening,” Denys said.

“My name is Davenant,” the man said. He held out a square, blunt-fingered hand, and Denys drew himself up and shook it. “You are, I believe, Denys Winterset?”

“I am,” Denys said, searching the smiling face before him and wondering from where he was known to him. It was a big, square, high-fronted head, a little like Bernard Shaw’s, with ice-blue eyes of that twinkle; it was crowned far back with a neat hank of white hair, and was crossed above the broad jaw with upright white mustaches.

“You don’t mind the intrusion?” the man said. “I wonder if you know whether the grub here is as good as once it was. It’s been some time since I last ate a meal in Khartoum.”

“The last time I did so was a year ago this week,” Denys said. “It was quite good.”

“Excellent,” said Davenant, looking at Denys as though something about the young man amused him. “In that case, if you have no other engagement, may I ask your company?”

“I have no other engagement,” Denys said; in fact he had rather been looking forward to dining alone, but deference to his superiors (of whom this man Davenant was surely in some sense one) was strong in him. “Tell me, though, how you come to know my name.”

“Oh, well, there it is,” Davenant said. “One has dealings with the Colonial Office. One sees a face, a name is attached to it, one files it but doesn’t forget—that sort of thing. Part of one’s job.”

A civil servant, an inspector of some kind. Denys felt the sinking one feels on running into one’s tutor in a wine bar: the evening not well begun. “They may well be crowded for dinner,” he said.

“I have reserved a quiet table,” said the smiling man, lifting his glass to Denys.

The grub was, in fact, superior. Sir Geoffrey Davenant was an able teller of tales, and he had many to tell. He was, apparently, no such dull thing as an inspector for the Colonial Office, though just what office he did fill Denys couldn’t determine. He seemed to have been “attached to” or “had dealings with” or “gone about for” half the establishments of the Empire. He embodied, it seemed to Denys, the entire strange adventure about which Denys had been thinking when Sir Geoffrey had first spoken to him.

“So,” Sir Geoffrey said, filling their glasses from a bottle of South African claret—no harm in being patriotic, he’d said, for one bottle—“so, after some months of stumbling about Central Asia and making myself useful one way or another, I was to make my way back to Sadiya. I crossed the Tibetan frontier disguised as a monk—”

“A monk?”

“Yes. Having lost all my gear in Manchuria, I could do the poverty part quite well. I had a roll of rupees, the films, and a compass hidden inside my prayer wheel. Mine didn’t whiz around then with the same sanctity as the other fellows’, but no matter. After adventures too ordinary to describe—avalanches and so on—I managed to reach the monastery at Rangbok, on the old road up to Everest. Rather near collapse. I was recovering a bit and thinking how to proceed when there was a runner with a telegram. From my superior at Ch’eng-tu. WARN DAVENANT MASSACRE SADIYA, it said. The Old Man then was famously closemouthed. But this was particularly unhelpful, as it did not say who had massacred whom—or why.” He lifted the silver cover of a dish, and found it empty.

“This must have been a good long time ago,” Denys said.

“Oh, yes,” Davenant said, raising his ice-blue eyes to Denys. “A good long time ago. That was an excellent curry. Nearly as good as at Veeraswamy’s, in London—which is, strangely, the best in the world. Shall we have coffee?”

Over this, and brandy and cigars, Sir Geoffrey’s stories modulated into reflections. Pleasant as his company was, Denys couldn’t overcome a sensation that everything Sir Geoffrey said to him was rehearsed, laid on for his entertainment, or perhaps his enlightenment, and yet with no clue in it as to why he had thus been singled out.

“It amuses me,” Sir Geoffrey said, “how constant it is in human nature to think that things might have gone on differently from the way they did. In a man’s own life, first of all: how he might have taken this or that very different route, except for this or that accident, this or that slight push—if he’d only known then, and so on. And then in history as well, we ruminate endlessly, if, what if, if only . . . The world seems always somehow malleable to our minds, or to our imaginations anyway.”

“Strange you should say so,” Denys said. “I was thinking, just before you spoke to me, about how very solid the world seems to me, how very—real. And—if you don’t mind my thrusting it into your thoughts—you never did tell me how it is you come to know my name; or why it is you thought good to invite me to that excellent dinner.”

“My dear boy,” Davenant said, holding up his cigar as though to defend his innocence.

“I can’t think it was a chance.”

“My dear boy,” Davenant said in a different tone, “if anything is, that was not. I will explain all. You were on that train of thought. If you will have patience while it trundles by.”

Denys said nothing further. He sipped his coffee, feeling a dew of sweat on his forehead.

“History,” said Sir Geoffrey. “Yes. Of course the possible worlds we make don’t compare to the real one we inhabit—not nearly so well furnished, or tricked out with details. And yet still somehow better. More satisfying. Perhaps the novelist is only a special case of a universal desire to reshape, to ‘take this sorry scheme of things entire,’ smash it into bits, and ‘remold it nearer to the heart’s desire’—as old Khayyám says. The egoist is continually doing it with his own life. To dream of doing it with history is no more useful a game, I suppose, but as a game, it shows more sport. There are rules. You can be more objective, if that’s an appropriate word.” He seemed to grow pensive for a moment. He looked at the end of his cigar. It had gone out, but he didn’t relight it.

“Take this Empire,” he went on, drawing himself up somewhat to say it. “One doesn’t want to be mawkish, but one has served it. Extended it a bit, made it more secure; done one’s bit. You and I. Nothing more natural, then, if we have worked for its extension in the future, to imagine its extension in the past. We can put our finger on the occasional bungle, the missed chance, the wrong man in the wrong place, and so on, and we think: If I had only been there, seen to it that the news went through, got the guns there in time, forced the issue at a certain moment—well. But as long as one is dreaming, why stop? A favorite instance of mine is the American civil war. We came very close, you know, to entering that war on the Confederacy’s side.”

“Did we.”

“I think we did. Suppose we had. Suppose we had at first dabbled—sent arms—ignored Northern protests—then got deeper in; suppose the North declared war on us. It seems to me a near certainty that if we had entered the war fully, the South would have won. And I think a British presence would have mitigated the slaughter. There was a point, you know, late in that war, when a new draft call in the North was met with terrible riots. In New York several Negroes were hanged, just to show how little their cause was felt.”

Denys had partly lost the thread of this story, unable to imagine himself in it. He thought of the Americans he had met on the train. “Is that so,” he said.

“Once having divided the States into two nations, and having helped the South to win, we would have been in place, you see. The fate of the West had not yet been decided. With the North much diminished in power—well, I imagine that by now we—the Empire—would have recouped much of what we lost in 1780.”

Denys contemplated this. “Rather stirring,” he said mildly. “Rather cold-blooded, too. Wouldn’t it have meant condoning slavery? To say nothing of the lives lost. British, I mean.”

“Condoning slavery—for a time. I’ve no doubt the South could have been bullied out of it. Without, perhaps, the awful results that accompanied the Northerners doing it. The eternal resentment. The backlash. The near genocide of the last hundred years. And, in my vision, there would have been a net savings in red men.” He smiled. “Whatever might be said against it, the British Empire does not wipe out populations wholesale, as the Americans did in their West. I often wonder if that sin isn’t what makes the Americans so gloomy now, so introverted.”

Denys nodded. He believed implicitly that his Empire did not wipe out populations wholesale. “Of course,” he said, “there’s no telling what exactly would have been the result. If we’d interfered as you say.”

“No,” Sir Geoffrey said. “No doubt whatever result it did have would have to be reshaped as well. And the results of that reshaping reshaped, too, the whole thing subtly guided all along its way toward the result desired—after all, if we can imagine how we might want to alter the past we do inherit, so we can imagine that any past might well be liable to the same imagining; that stupidities, blunders, shortsightedness, would occur in any past we might initiate. Oh, yes, it would all have to be reshaped, with each reshaping . . .”

“The possibilities are endless,” Denys said, laughing. “I’m afraid the game’s beyond me. I say let the North win—since in any case we can’t do the smallest thing about it.”

“No,” Davenant said, grown sad again, or reflective; he seemed to feel what Denys said deeply. “No, we can’t. It’s just—just too long ago.” With great gravity he relit his cigar. Denys, at the oddness of this response, seeing Sir Geoffrey’s eyes veiled, thought: Perhaps he’s mad. He said, joining the game, “Suppose, though. Suppose Cecil Rhodes hadn’t died young, as he did . . .”

Davenant’s eyes caught cold fire again, and his cigar paused in midair. “Hm?” he said with interest.

“I only meant,” Denys said, “that your remark about the British not wiping out peoples wholesale was perhaps not tested. If Rhodes had lived to build his empire—hadn’t he already named it Rhodesia?—I imagine he would have dealt fairly harshly with the natives.”

“Very harshly,” said Sir Geoffrey.

“Well,” Denys said, “I suppose I mean that it’s not always evil effects that we inherit from these past accidents.”

“Not at all,” said Sir Geoffrey. Denys looked away from his regard, which had grown, without losing a certain cool humor, intense. “Do you know, by the way, that remark of George Santayana—the American philosopher—about the British Empire, about young men like yourself? ‘Never,’ he said, ‘never since the Athenians has the world been ruled by such sweet, just, boyish masters.’”

Denys, absurdly, felt himself flush with embarrassment.

“I don’t ramble,” Sir Geoffrey said. “My trains of thought carry odd goods, but all headed the same way. I want to tell you something, about that historical circumstance, the one you’ve touched on, whose effects we inherit. Evil or good I will leave you to decide.

“Cecil Rhodes died prematurely, as you say. But not before he had amassed a very great fortune, and laid firm claims to the ground where that fortune would grow far greater. And also not before he had made a will disposing of that fortune.”

“I’ve heard stories,” Denys said.

“The stories you have heard are true. Cecil Rhodes, at his death, left his entire fortune, and its increase, to found and continue a secret society which should, by whatever means possible, preserve and extend the British Empire. His entire fortune.”

“I have never believed it,” Denys said, momentarily feeling untethered, like a balloon: afloat.

“For good reason,” Davenant said. “If such a society as I describe were brought into being, its very first task would be to disguise, cast doubt upon, and quite bury its origins. Don’t you think that’s so? In any case it’s true what I say: The society was founded; is secret; continues to exist; is responsible, in some large degree at least, for the Empire we now know, in this year of grace 1956, IV Elizabeth II, the Empire on which the sun does not set.”

The veranda where the two men sat was nearly deserted now; the night was loud with tropical noises that Denys had come to think of as silence, but the human noise of the town had nearly ceased.

“You can’t know that,” Denys said. “If you knew it, if you were privy to it, then you wouldn’t say it. Not to me.” He almost added: Therefore you’re not in possession of any secret, only a madman’s certainty.

“I am privy to it,” Davenant said. “I am myself a member. The reason I reveal the secret to you—and you see, here we are, come to you and my odd knowledge of you, at last, as I promised—the reason I reveal it to you is because I wish to ask you to join it. To accept from me an offer of membership.”

Denys said nothing. A dark waiter in white crept close, and was waved away by Sir Geoffrey.

“You are quite properly silent,” Sir Geoffrey said. “Either I am mad, you think, in which case there is nothing to say; or what I am telling you is true, which likewise leaves you nothing to say. Quite proper. In your place I would be silent also. In your place I was. In any case, I have no intention of pressing you for an answer now. I happen to know, by a roundabout sort of means that if I explained to you would certainly convince you I was mad, that you will seriously consider what I’ve said to you. Later. On your long ride to Cairo: There will be time to think. In London. I ask nothing from you now. Only . . .”

He reached into his waistcoat pocket. Denys watched, fascinated: Would he draw out some sign of power, a royal charter, some awesome seal? No: It was a small metal plate, with a strip of brown ribbon affixed to it, like a bit of recording tape. He turned it in his hands thoughtfully. “The difficulty, you see, is that in order to alter history and bring it closer to the heart’s desire, it would be necessary to stand outside it altogether. Like Archimedes, who said that if he had a lever long enough, and a place to stand, he could move the world.”

He passed the metal plate to Denys, who took it reluctantly.

“A place to stand, you see,” Sir Geoffrey said. “A place to stand. I would like you to keep that plate about you, and not misplace it. It’s in the nature of a key, though it mayn’t look it; and it will let you into a very good London club, though it mayn’t look it either, where I would like you to call on me. If, even out of simple curiosity, you would like to hear more of us.” He extinguished his cigar. “I am going to describe the rather complicated way in which that key is to be used—I really do apologize for the hugger-mugger, but you will come to understand—and then I am going to bid you good evening. Your train is an early one? I thought so. My own departs at midnight. I possess a veritable Bradshaw’s of the world’s railroads in this skull. Well. No more. I will just sign this—oh, don’t thank me. Dear boy: Don’t thank me.”

When he was gone, Denys sat a long time with his cold cigar in his hand and the night around him. The amounts of wine and brandy he had been given seemed to have evaporated from him into the humid air, leaving him feeling cool, clear, and unreal. When at last he rose to go, he inserted the flimsy plate into his waistcoat pocket; and before he went to bed, to lie a long time awake, he changed it to the waistcoat pocket of the pale suit he would wear next morning.

As Sir Geoffrey suggested he would, he thought on his ride north of all that he had been told, trying to reassemble it in some more reasonable, more everyday fashion: as all day long beside the train the sempiternal Nile—camels, nomads, women washing in the barge canals, the thin line of palms screening the white desert beyond—slipped past. At evening, when at length he lowered the shade of his compartment window on the poignant blue sky pierced with stars, he thought suddenly: But how could he have known he would find me there, at the bar of the Grand, on that night of this year, at that hour of the evening, just as though we had some long-standing agreement to meet there?

If anything is chance, Davenant had said, that was not.

At the airfield at Ismailia there was a surprise: His flight home on the R101, which his father had booked months ago as a special treat for Denys, was to be that grand old airship’s last scheduled flight. The oldest airship in the British fleet, commissioned in the year Denys was born, was to be—mothballed? Drydocked? Deflated? Denys wondered just what one did with a decommissioned airship larger than Westminster Cathedral.

Before dawn it was drawn from its great hangar by a crowd of white-clothed fellahin pulling at its ropes—descendants, Denys thought, of those who had pulled ropes at the Pyramids three thousand years ago, employed now on an object almost as big but lighter than air. It isn’t because it is so intensely romantic that great airships must always arrive or depart at dawn or at evening, but only that then the air is cool and most likely to be still: and yet intensely romantic it remains. Denys, standing at the broad, canted windows, watched the ground recede—magically, for there was no sound of engines, no jolt to indicate liftoff, only the waving, cheering fellahin growing smaller. The band on the tarmac played “Land of Hope and Glory.” Almost invisible to watchers on the ground—because of its heat-reflective silver dome—the immense ovoid turned delicately in the wind as it arose.

“Well, it’s the end of an era,” a red-faced man in a checked suit said to Denys. “In ten years they’ll all be gone, these big airships. The propeller chaps will have taken over; and the jet aeroplane, too, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“I should be sorry to see that,” Denys said. “I’ve loved airships since I was a boy.”

“Well, they’re just that little bit slower,” the red-faced man said sadly. “It’s all hurry-up, nowadays. Faster, faster. And for what? I put it to you: For what?”

Now with further gentle pushes of its Rolls-Royce engines, the R101 altered its attitude again; passengers at the lounge windows pointed out the Suez Canal, and the ships passing; Lake Mareotis; Alexandria, like a mirage; British North Africa, as far to the left as one cared to point; and the white-fringed sea. Champagne was being called for, traditional despite the hour, and the red-faced man pressed a glass on Denys.

“The end of an era,” he said again, raising his flute of champagne solemnly.

And then the cloudscape beyond the windows shifted, and all Africa had slipped into the south, or into the imaginary, for they had already begun to seem the same thing to Denys. He turned from the windows and decided—the effort to decide it seemed not so great here aloft, amid the potted palms and the wicker, with this pale champagne—that the conversation he had had down in the flat lands far away must have been imaginary as well.

III: THE TALE OF THE PRESIDENT PRO TEM

The universe proceeds out of what it has been and into what it will be, inexorably, unstoppably, at the rate of one second per second, one year per year, forever. At right angles to its forward progress lie the past and the future. The future, that is to say, does not lie “ahead” of the present in the stream of time, but at a right angle to it: The future of any present moment can be projected as far as you like outward from it, infinitely in fact, but when the universe has proceeded further, and a new present moment has succeeded this one, the future of this one retreats with it into the what-has-been, forever outdated. It is similar but more complicated with the past.

Now within the great process or procession that the universe makes, there can be no question of “movement,” either “forward” or “back.” The very idea is contradictory. Any conceivable movement is into the orthogonal futures and pasts that fluoresce from the universe as it is; and from those orthogonal futures and pasts into others, and others, and still others, never returning, always moving at right angles to the stream of time. To the traveler, therefore, who does not ever return from the futures or pasts into which he has gone, it must appear that the times he inhabits grow progressively more remote from the stream of time that generated them, the stream that has since moved on and left his futures behind. Indeed, the longer he remains in the future, the farther off the traveler gets from the moment in actuality whence he started, and the less like actuality the universe he stands in seems to him to be.

It was thoughts of this sort, only inchoate as yet and with the necessary conclusions not yet drawn, that occupied the mind of the President pro tem of the Otherhood as he walked the vast length of an iron and glass railway station in the capital city of an aged empire. He stopped to take a cigar case from within the black Norfolk overcoat he wore, and a cigar from the case; this he lit, and with its successive blue clouds hanging lightly about his hat and head, he walked on. There were hominids at work on the glossy engines of the empire’s trains that came and went from this terminus; hominids pushing with their long strong arms the carts burdened with the goods and luggage that the trains were to carry; hominids of other sorts gathered in groups or standing singly at the barricades, clutching their tickets, waiting to depart, some aided by or waited upon by other species—too few creatures, in all, to dispel the extraordinary impression of smoky empty hugeness that the cast-iron arches of the shed made.

The President pro tem was certain, or at any rate retained a distinct impression, that at his arrival some days before there were telephones available for citizens to use, in the streets, in public places such as this (he seemed to see an example in his mind, a wooden box whose bright veneer was loosening in the damp climate, a complex instrument within, of enameled steel and heavy celluloid); but if there ever had been, there were none now. Instead he went in at a door above which a yellow globe was alight, a winged foot etched upon it. He chose a telegraph form from a stack of them on a long scarred counter, and with the scratchy pen provided he dashed off a quick note to the Magus in whose apartments he had been staying, telling him that he had returned late from the country and would not be with him till evening.

This missive he handed in at the grille, paying what was asked in large coins; then he went out, up the brass-railed stairs, and into the afternoon, into the quiet and familiar city.

It was the familiarity that had been, from the beginning, the oddest thing. The President pro tem was a man who, in the long course of his work for the Otherhood, had become accustomed to stepping out of his London club into a world not quite the same as the world he had left to enter that club. He was used to finding himself in a London—or a Lahore or a Laos—stripped of well-known monuments, with public buildings and private ways unknown to him, and a newspaper (bought with an unfamiliar coin found in his pocket) full of names that should not have been there, or missing events that should have been. But here—where nothing, nothing at all, was as he had known it, no trace remaining of the history he had come from—here where no man should have been able to take steps, where even Caspar Last had thought it not possible to take steps—the President pro tem could not help but feel easy: had felt easy from the beginning. He walked up the cobbled streets, his furled umbrella over his shoulder, troubled by nothing but the weird grasp that this unknown dark city had on his heart.

The rain that had somewhat spoiled his day in the country had ceased but had left a pale, still mist over the city, a humid atmosphere that gave to views down avenues a stageset quality, each receding rank of buildings fainter, more vaguely executed. Trees, too, huge and weeping, still and featureless as though painted on successive scrims. At the great gates, topped with garlanded urns, of a public park, the President pro tem looked in toward the piled and sounding waters of a fountain and the dim towers of poplar trees. And as he stood resting on his umbrella, lifting the last of the cigar to his lips, someone passed by him and entered the park.

For a moment the President pro tem stood unmoving, thinking what an attractive person (boy? girl?) that had been, and how the smile paid to him in passing seemed to indicate a knowledge of him, a knowledge that gave pleasure or at least amusement; then he dropped his cigar end and passed through the gates through which the figure had gone.

That had not been a hominid who had smiled at him. It was not a Magus and surely not one of the draconics either. Why he was sure he could not have said: for the same unsayable reason that he knew this city in this world, this park, these marble urns, these leaf-littered paths. He was sure that the person he had seen belonged to a different species from himself, and different also from the other species who lived in this world.

At the fountain where the paths crossed, he paused, looking this way and that, his heart beating hard and filled absurdly with a sense of loss. The child (had it been a child?) was gone, could not be seen that way, or that way—but then was there again suddenly, down at the end of a yew alley, loitering, not looking his way. Thinking at first to sneak up on her, or him, along the sheltering yews, the President pro tem took a sly step that way; then, ashamed, he thought better of it and set off down the path at an even pace, as one would approach a young horse or a tame deer. The one he walked toward took no notice of him, appeared lost in thought, eyes cast down.

Indescribably lovely, the President pro tem thought: and yet at the same time negligent and easeful and ordinary. Barefoot, or in light sandals of some kind, light pale clothing that seemed to be part of her, like a bird’s dress—and a wristwatch, incongruous, yet not really incongruous at all: someone for whom incongruity was inconceivable. A reverence—almost a holy dread—came over the President pro tem as he came closer: as though he had stumbled into a sacred grove. Then the one he walked toward looked up at him, which caused the President pro tem to stop still as if a gun had casually been turned on him.

He was known, he understood, to this person. She, or he, stared unembarrassed at the President pro tem, with a gaze of the most intense and yet impersonal tenderness, of compassion and amusement and calm interest all mixed; and almost imperceptibly shook her head no and smiled again: and the President pro tem lowered his eyes, unable to meet that gaze. When he looked up again, the person was gone.

Hesitantly the President pro tem walked to the end of the avenue of yews and looked in all directions. No one. A kind of fear flew over him, felt in his breast like the beat of departing wings. He seemed to know, for the first time, what those encounters with gods had been like, when there had been gods; encounters he had puzzled out of the Greek in school.

Anyway, he was alone now in the park: He was sure of that. At length he found his way out again into the twilight streets.

By evening he had crossed the city and was climbing the steps of a tall town house, searching in his pockets for the key given him. Beside the varnished door was a small plaque, which said that within were the offices of the Orient Aid Society; but this was not in fact the case. Inside was a tall foyer; a glass-paneled door let him into a hallway wainscoted in dark wood. A pile of gumboots and rubber overshoes in a corner, macs and umbrellas on an ebony tree. Smells of tea, done with, and dinner cooking: a stew, an apple tart, a roast fowl. The tulip-shaped gas lamps along the hall were lit.

He let himself into the library at the hall’s end; velvet armchairs regarded the coal fire, and on a drum table a tray of tea things consorted with the books and the papers. The President pro tem went to the low shelves that ran beneath the windows and drew out one volume of an old encyclopedia, buckram-bound, with marbled fore-edges and illustrations in brownish photogravure.

The Races. For some reason the major headings and certain other words were in the orthography he knew, but not the closely printed text. His fingers ran down the columns, which were broken into numbered sections headed by the names of species and subspecies. Hominidae, with three subspecies. Draconiidae, with four: here were etchings of skulls. And lastly Sylphidae, with an uncertain number of subspecies. Sylphidae, the Sylphids. Fairies.

“Angels,” said a voice behind him. The President pro tem turned to see the Magus whose guest he was, recently risen, no doubt, in a voluminous dressing gown richly figured. His beard and hair were so long and fine they seemed to float on the currents of air in the room, like filaments of thistle-down.

“‘Angels,’ is that what you call them?”

“What they would have themselves called,” said the Magus. “What name they call themselves, among themselves, no one knows but they.”

“I think I met with one this evening.”

“Yes.”

There was no photogravure to accompany the subsection on Sylphidae in the encyclopedia. “I’m sure I met with one.”

“They are gathering, then.”

“Not . . . not because of me?”

“Because of you.”

“How, though,” said the President pro tem, feeling again within him the sense of loss, of beating wings departing, “how, how could they have known, how . . .”

The Magus turned away from him to the fire, to the armchairs and the drum table. The President pro tem saw that beside one chair a glass of whiskey had been placed, and an ashtray. “Come,” said the Magus. “Sit. Continue your tale. It will perhaps become clear to you: perhaps not.” He sat then himself, and without looking back at the President pro tem he said: “Shall we go on?”

The President pro tem knew it was idle to dispute with his host. He did stand unmoving for the space of several heartbeats. Then he took his chair, drew the cigar case from his pocket, and considered where he had left off his tale in the dark of the morning.

• • • •

“Of course,” he said then, “Last knew: He knew, without admitting it to himself, as a good orthogonist must never do, that the world he had returned to from his excursion was not the world he had left. The past he had passed through on his way back was not ‘behind’ his present at all, but at a right angle to it; the future of that past, which he had to traverse in order to get back again, was not the same road, and ‘back’ was not where he got. The frame house on Maple Street which, a little sunburned, he reentered on his return was twice removed in reality from the one he had left a week before; the mother he kissed likewise.

“He knew that, for it was predicated by orthogonal logic, and orthogonal logic was in fact what Last had discovered—the transversability of time was only an effect of that discovery. He knew it, and despite his glee over his triumph, he kept his eye open. Sooner or later he would come upon something, something that would betray the fact that this world was not his.

“He could not have guessed it would be me.”

The Magus did not look at the President pro tem as he was told this story; his pale gray eyes instead wandered from object to object around the great dark library but seemed to see none of them; what, the President pro tem wondered, did they see? He had at first supposed the race of Magi to be blind, from this habitual appearance of theirs; he now knew quite well that they were not blind, not blind at all.

“Go on,” the Magus said.

“So,” said the President pro tem, “Last returns from his excursion. A week passes uneventfully. Then one morning he hears his mother call: He has a visitor. Last, pretending annoyance at this interruption of his work (actually he was calculating various forms of compound interest on a half million dollars) comes to the door. There on the step is a figure in tweeds and a bowler hat, leaning on a furled umbrella: me.

“‘Mr. Last,’ I said. ‘I think we have business.’

“You could see by his expression that he knew I should not have been there, should not have had business with him at all. He really ought to have refused to see me. A good deal of trouble might have been saved if he had. There was no way I could force him, after all. But he didn’t refuse; after a goggle-eyed moment he brought me in, up a flight of stairs (Mama waiting anxiously at the bottom), and into his study.

“Geniuses are popularly supposed to live in an atmosphere of the greatest confusion and untidiness, but this wasn’t true of Last. The study—it was his bedroom, too—was of a monkish neatness. There was no sign that he worked there, except for a computer terminal, and even it was hidden beneath a cozy that Mama had made for it and Caspar had not dared to spurn.

“He was trembling slightly, poor fellow, and had no idea of the social graces. He only turned to me—his eyeglasses were the kind that oddly diffract the eyes behind and make them unmeetable—and said, ‘What do you want?’”

The President pro tem caressed the ashtray with the tip of his cigar. He had been offered no tea, and he felt the lack.

“We engaged in some preliminary fencing,” he continued. “I told him what I had come to acquire. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about. I said I thought he did. He laughed and said there must be some mistake. I said, no mistake, Mr. Last. At length he grew silent, and I could see even behind those absurd goggles that he had begun to try to account for me.

“Thinking out the puzzles of orthogonal logic, you see, is not entirely unlike puzzling out moves in chess: Theoretically, chess can be played by patiently working out the likely consequences of each move, and the consequences of those consequences, and so on; but in fact it is not so played, certainly not by master players. Masters seem to have a more immediate apprehension of possibilities, an almost visceral understanding of the, however, rigorously mathematical logic of the board and pieces, an understanding that they can act on without being able necessarily to explain. Whatever sort of mendacious and feckless fool Caspar Last was in many ways, he was a genius in one or two, and orthogonal logic was one of them.

“‘From when,’ he said, ‘have you come?’

“‘From not far on,’ I answered. He sat then, resigned, stuck in a sort of check impossible to think one’s way out of, yet not mated. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘go back the same way you came.’

“‘I cannot,’ I said, ‘until you explain to me how it is done.’

“‘You know how,’ he said, ‘if you can come here to ask me.’

“‘Not until you have explained it to me. Now or later.’

“‘I never will,’ he said.

“‘You will,’ I said. ‘You will have done already, before I leave. Otherwise I would not be here now asking. Let us,’ I said, and took a seat myself, ‘let us assume these preliminaries have been gone through, for they have been, of course, and move ahead to the bargaining. My firm are prepared to make you a quite generous offer.’

“That was what convinced him that he must, finally, give up to us the processes he had discovered, which he really had firmly intended to destroy forever: the fact that I had come there to ask for them. Which meant that he had already somehow, somewhen, already yielded them up to us.”

The President pro tem paused again, and lifted his untouched whiskey. “It was the same argument,” he said, “the same incontrovertible argument, that was used to convince me once, too, to do a dreadful thing.”

He drank, thoughtfully, or at least (he supposed) appearing thoughtful; more and more often as he grew older, it happened that in the midst of an anecdote, a relation, even one of supreme importance, he would begin to forget what it was he was telling; the terrifically improbable events would begin to seem not only improbable but fictitious, without insides, the incidents and characters as false as in any tawdry cinema story, even his own part in them unreal: as though they happened to someone made up—certainly not to him who told them. Often enough he forgot the plot.

“You see,” he said, “Last exited from a universe in which travel ‘through time’ was, apparently, either not possible, or possible only under conditions that would allow such travel to go undetected. That was apparent from the fact that no one, so far as Last knew, up to the time of his own single excursion, had ever detected it going on. No one from Last’s own future, that is, had ever come ‘back’ and disrupted his present, or the past of his present: never ever. Therefore, if his excursion could take place, and he could ‘return,’ he would have to return to a different universe: a universe where time travel had taken place, a universe in which once-upon-a-time a man from 1983 had managed to insert himself into a minor colony of the British Crown one hundred and twenty-seven years earlier. What he couldn’t know in advance was whether the universe he ‘returned’ to was one where time travel was a commonplace, an everyday occurrence, something anyway that could deprive his excursion of the value it had; or whether it was one in which one excursion only had taken place, his own. My appearance before him convinced him that it was, or was about to become, common enough: common enough to disturb his own peace and quiet, and alter in unforeseeable ways his comfortable present.

“There was only one solution, or one dash at a solution anyway. I might, myself, be a singularity in Last’s new present. It was therefore possible that if he could get rid of me, I would take his process ‘away’ with me into whatever future I had come out of to get it, and thereupon never be able to find my way again to his present and disturb it or him. Whatever worlds I altered, they would not be his, not his anyway who struck the bargain with me: If each of them also contained a Last, who would suffer or flourish in ways unimaginable to the Last to whom I spoke, then those eidolons would have to make terms for themselves, that’s all. The quantum angle obtended by my coming, and then the one obtended by my returning, divorced all those Lasts from him for all eternity: That is why, though the angle itself is virtually infinitesimal, it has always to be treated as a right angle.

“Last showed me, on his computer, after our bargain was struck and he was turning over his data and plans to me. I told him I would not probably grasp the theoretical basis of the process, however well I had or would come to manage the practical paradoxes of it, but he liked to show me. He first summoned up x-y coordinates, quite ordinary, and began by showing me how some surprising results were obtained by plotting on such coordinates an imaginary number, specifically the square root of minus one. The only way to describe what happens, he said, is that the plotted figure, one unit high, one unit wide, generates a shadow square of the same measurements ‘behind’ itself, in space undefined by the coordinates. It was with such tricks that he had begun; the orthogons he obtained had first started him thinking about the generation of inhabitable—if also somehow imaginary—pasts.

“Then he showed me what became of the orthogons so constructed if the upright axis were set in motion. Suppose (he said) that this vertical coordinate were in fact revolving around the axle formed by the other, horizontal coordinate. If it were so revolving, like an aeroplane propeller, we could not apprehend it, edge on as it is to us, so to speak; but what would that motion do to the plots we were making? And of course it was quite simple, given the proper instructions to the computer, to find out. And his orthogons—always remaining at right angles to the original coordinates—began to turn in the prop wash of the whole system’s progress at one second per second out of the what-was and into the what-has-never-yet-been; and to generate, when one had come to see them, the paradoxes of orthogonal logic: the cyclonic storm of logic in which all travelers in that medium always stand; the one in which Last and I, I bending over his shoulder hat in hand, he with fat white fingers on his keys and eyeglasses slipping down his nose, stood even as we spoke: a storm as unfeelable as Last’s rotating axis was unseeable.”

The President pro tem tossed his extinguished cigar into the fading fire and crossed his arms upon his breast, weary; weary of the tale.

“I don’t yet understand,” the other said. “If he had been so adamant, why would he give up his secrets to you?”

“Well,” said the President pro tem, “there was, also, the matter of money. It came down to that, in the end. We were able to make him a very generous offer, as I said.”

“But he didn’t need money. He had this stamp.”

“Yes. So he did. Yes. We were able to pick up the stamp, too, from him, as part of the bargain. I think we offered him a hundred pounds. Perhaps it was more.”

“I thought it was invaluable.”

“Well, so did he, of course. And yet he was not really as surprised as one might have expected him to be, when he discovered it was not; when it turned out that the stamp he had gone to such trouble to acquire was in fact rather a common one. I seemed to see it in his face, the expectation of what he was likely to find, as soon as I directed him to look it up in his Scott’s, if he didn’t believe me. And there it was in Scott’s: the one-penny magenta 1856, a nice enough stamp, a stamp many collectors covet, and many also have in their albums. He had begun breathing stertorously, staring down at the page. I’m afraid he was suffering, rather, and I didn’t like to observe it.

“‘Come,’ I said to him. ‘You knew it was possible.’ And he did, of course. ‘Perhaps it was something you did,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you bought the last one of a batch, and the postmaster subsequently reordered, a thing he had not before intended to do. Perhaps . . .’ But I could see him think it: There needed to be no such explanation. He needed to have made no error, nor to have influenced the moment’s shape in any way by his presence. The very act of his coming and going was sufficient source of unpredictable, stochastic change: This world was not his, and minute changes from his were predicated. But this change, this of all possible changes . . .

“His hand had begun to shake, holding the volume of Scott’s. I really wanted now to get through the business and be off, but it couldn’t be hurried. I knew that, for I’d done it all before. In the end, we acquired the stamp. And then destroyed it, of course.”

The President pro tem remembered: a tiny, momentary fire.

“It’s often been observed,” he said, “that the cleverest scientists are often the most easily taken in by charlatans. There is a famous instance, famous in some worlds, of a scientist who was brought to believe firmly in ghosts and ectoplasm, because the medium and her manifestations passed all the tests the scientist could devise. The only thing he didn’t think to test for was conscious fraud. I suppose it’s because the phenomena of nature, or the entities of mathematics, however puzzling and elusive they may be, are not after all bent on fooling the observer; and so a motive that would be evident to the dullest of policemen does not occur to the genius.”

“The stamp,” said the Magus.

“The stamp, yes. I’m not exactly proud of this part of the story. We were convinced, though, that two very small wrongs could go a long way toward making a very great right. And Last, who understood me and the ‘firm’ I represented to be capable of handling—at least in a practical way—the awful paradoxes of orthogony, did not imagine us to be also skilled, if anything more skilled, at such things as burglary, uttering, fraud, and force. Of such contradictions is Empire made. It was easy enough for us to replace, while Last was off in the tropics, one volume of his Scott’s stamp catalog with another printed by ourselves, almost identical to his but containing one difference. It was harder waiting to see, once he had looked up his stamp in our bogus volume, if he would then search out some other source to confirm what he found there. He did not.”

The Magus rose slowly from his chair with the articulated dignity, the wasteless lion’s motion, of his kind. He tugged the bell pull. He picked up the poker then, and stood with his hand upon the mantel, looking down into the ruby ash of the dying fire. “I would he had,” he said.

The dark double doors of the library opened, and the servant entered noiselessly.

“Refresh the gentleman’s glass,” the Magus said without turning from the fire, “and draw the drapes.”

The President pro tem thought that no matter how long he lived in this world, he would never grow accustomed to the presence of draconics. The servant’s dark hand lifted the decanter, poured an exact dram into the glass, and stoppered the bottle again; then his yellow eyes, irises slit like a cat’s or a snake’s, rose from that task toward the next, the drawing of the drapes. Unlike the eyes of the Magi, these draconic eyes seemed to see and weigh everything—though on a single scale, and from behind a veil of indifference.

Their kind, the President pro tem had learned, had been servants for uncounted ages, though the Magus his host had said that once they had been masters, and men and the other hominids their slaves. And they still had, the President pro tem observed, that studied reserve which upper servants had in the world from which the President pro tem had come, that reserve which says: Very well, I will do your bidding, better than you could do it for yourself; I will maintain the illusion of your superiority to me, as no other creature could.

With a taper he lit at the fire, he lit the lamps along the walls and masked them with glass globes. Then he drew the drapes.

“I’ll ring for supper,” the Magus said, and the servant stopped at the sound of his voice. “Have it sent in.” The servant moved again, crossing the room on narrow naked feet. At the doorway he turned to them, but only to draw the double doors closed together as he left.

For a time the Magus stood regarding the doors the great lizard had closed. Then: “Outside the City,” he said, “in the mountains, they have begun to combine. There are more stories every week. In the old forests whence they first emerged, they have begun to collect on appointed days, trying to remember—for they are not really as intelligent as they look—trying to remember what it is they have lost, and to think of gaining it again. In not too long a time we will begin to hear of massacres. Some remote place; a country house; a more than usually careless man; a deed of unfamiliar horridness. And a sign left, the first sign: a writing in blood, or something less obvious. And like a spot symptomatic of a fatal disease, it will begin to spread.”

The President pro tem drank, then said softly: “We didn’t know, you know. We didn’t understand that this would be the result.” The drawing of the drapes, the lighting of the lamps, had made the old library even more familiar to the President pro tem: the dark varnished wood, the old tobacco smoke, the hour between tea and dinner; the draught that whispered at the window’s edge, the bitter smell of the coal on the grate; the comfort of this velvet armchair’s napless arms, of this whiskey. The President pro tem sat grasped by all this, almost unable to think of anything else. “We couldn’t know.”

“Last knew,” the Magus said. “All false, all imaginary, all generated by the wishes and fears of others: all that I am, my head, my heart, my house. Not the world’s doing, or time’s, but yours.” The opacity of his eyes, turned on the President pro tem, was fearful. “You have made me; you must unmake me.”

“I’ll do what I can,” the President pro tem said. “All that I can.”

“For centuries we have studied,” the Magus said. “We have spent lifetimes—lifetimes much longer than yours—searching for the flaw in this world, the flaw whose existence we suspected but could not prove. I say ‘centuries,’ but those centuries have been illusory, have they not? We came, finally, to guess at you, down the defiles of time, working your changes, which we can but suffer.

“We only guessed at you: No more than men or beasts can we Magi remember, once the universe has become different, that it was ever other than it is now. But I think the Sylphids can feel it change: can know when the changes are wrought. Imagine the pain for them.”

That was a command: and indeed the President pro tem could imagine it, and did. He looked down into his glass.

“That is why they are gathering. They know already of your appearance; they have expected you. The request is theirs to make, not mine: that you put this world out like a light.”

He stabbed with the poker at the settling fire, and the coals gave up blue flames for a moment. The mage’s eyes caught the light, and then went out.

“I long to die,” he said.

IV: CHRONICLES OF THE OTHERHOOD

Once past the door, or what might be considered the door, of what Sir Geoffrey Davenant had told him was a club, Denys Winterset was greeted by the Fellow in Economic History, a gentle, academic-looking man called Platt.

“Not many of the Fellows about, just now,” he said. “Most of them fossicking about on one bit of business or another. I’m always here.” He smiled, a vague, self-effacing smile. “Be no good out there. But they also serve, eh?”

“Will Sir Geoffrey Davenant be here?” Denys asked him. He followed Platt through what did seem to be a gentlemen’s club of the best kind: dark-paneled, smelling richly of leather upholstery and tobacco.

“Davenant, oh, yes,” said Platt. “Davenant will be here. All the executive committee will get here, if they can. The President—pro tem.” He turned back to look at Denys over his half-glasses. “All our presidents are pro tem.” He led on. “There’ll be dinner in the executive committee’s dining room. After dinner, we’ll talk. You’ll likely have questions.” At that, Denys almost laughed. He felt made of questions, most of them unputtable in any verbal form.

Platt stopped in the middle of the library. A lone Fellow in a corner by a green-shaded lamp was hidden by the Times held up before him. There was a fire burning placidly in the oak-framed fireplace; above it, a large and smoke-dimmed painting: a portrait of a chubby, placid man in a hard collar, thinning blond hair, eyes somehow vacant. Platt, seeing Denys’s look, said: “Cecil Rhodes.”

Beneath the portrait, carved into the mantelpiece, were words; Denys took a step closer to read them:

To Ruin the Great Work of Time
& Cast the Kingdoms old
Into another mould.

“Marvell,” Platt said. “That poem about Cromwell. Don’t know who chose it. It’s right, though. I look at it often, working here. Now. It’s down that corridor, if you want to wash your hands. Would you care for a drink? We have some time to kill. Ah, Davenant.”

“Hullo, Denys,” said Sir Geoffrey, who had lowered his Times. “I’m glad you’ve come.”

“I think we all are,” said Platt, taking Denys’s elbow in a gentle, almost tender grasp. “Glad you’ve come.”

He had almost not come. If it had been merely an address, a telephone number he’d been given, he might well not have; but the metal card with its brown strip was like a string tied round his finger, making it impossible to forget he had been invited. Don’t lose it, Davenant had said. So it lay in his waistcoat pocket; he touched it whenever he reached for matches there; he tried shifting it to other pockets, but whenever it was on his person, he felt it. In the end, he decided to use it, as much to get rid of its importunity as for any other reason—so he told himself. On a wet afternoon he went to the place Davenant had told him of, the Orient Aid Society, and found it as described, a sooty French-Gothic building, one of those private houses turned to public use, with a discreet brass plaque by the door indicating that within some sort of business is done, one can’t imagine what; and inside the double doors, in the vestibule, three telephone boxes, looking identical, the first of which had the nearly invisible slit by the door. His heart for some reason beat slow and hard as he inserted the card within this slot—it was immediately snatched away, like a ticket on the Underground—and entered the box and closed the door behind him.

Though nothing moved, he felt as though he had stepped onto a moving footpath, or onto one of those trick floors in a fun house that slide beneath one’s feet. He was going somewhere. The sensation was awful. Beginning to panic, he tried to get out, not knowing whether that might be dangerous, but the door would not open, and its glass could not be seen out of either. It had been transparent from outside but was somehow opaque from within. He shook the door handle fiercely. At that moment the nonmobile motion reversed itself sickeningly, and the door opened. Denys stepped out, not into the vestibule of the Orient Aid Society, but into the foyer of a club. A dim, old-fashioned foyer, with faded Turkey carpet on the stairs, and an aged porter to greet him; a desk, behind which pigeonholes held members’ mail; a stand of umbrellas. It was reassuring, almost absurdly so, the “then I woke up” of a silly ghost story. But Denys didn’t feel reassured, or exactly awake either.

“Evening, sir.”

“Good evening.”

“Still raining, sir? Take your things?”

“Thank you.”

A member was coming toward him down the long corridor: Platt.

“Sir?”

Denys turned back to the porter. “Your key, sir,” the man said, and gave him back the metal plate with the strip of brown ribbon on it.

“Like a lift,” Davenant told him as they sipped whiskey in the bar. “Alarming, somewhat, I admit; but imagine using a lift for the first time, not knowing what its function was. Closed inside a box; sensation of movement; the doors open, and you are somewhere else. Might seem odd. Well, this is the same. Only you’re not somewhere else: not exactly.”

“Hm,” Denys said.

“Don’t dismiss it, Sir Geoffrey,” said Platt. “It is mighty odd.” He said to Denys: “The paradox is acute: it is. Completely contrary to the usual cause-and-effect thinking we all do, can’t stop doing really, no matter how hard we try to adopt other habits of mind. Strictly speaking it is unthinkable: unimaginable. And yet there it is.”

“Yes,” Davenant said. “To ignore, without ever forgetting, the heart of the matter: that’s the trick. I’ve met monks, Japanese, Tibetan, who know the techniques. They can be learned.”

“We speak of the larger paradox,” Platt said to Denys. “The door you came in by being only a small instance. The great instance being, of course, the Otherhood’s existence at all: we here now sitting and talking of it.”

But Denys was not talking of it. He had nothing to say. To be told that in entering the telephone box in the Orient Aid Society he had effectively exited from time and entered a precinct outside it, revolving between the actual and the hypothetical, not quite existent despite the solidity of its parquet floor and the truthful bite of its whiskey; to be told that in these changeless and atemporal halls there gathered a society—“not quite a brotherhood,” Davenant said; “that would be mawkish, and untrue of these chaps; we call it an Otherhood”—of men and women who by some means could insert themselves into the stream of the past, and with their foreknowledge alter it, and thus alter the future of that past, the future in which they themselves had their original being; that in effect the world Denys had come from, the world he knew, the year 1956, the whole course of things, the very cast and flavor of his memories, were dependent on the Fellows of this Society, and might change at any moment, though if they did, he would know nothing of it; and that he was being asked to join them in their work—he heard the words, spoken to him with a frightening casualness; he felt his mind fill with the notions, though not able to do anything that might be called thinking about them; and he had nothing to say.

“You can see,” Sir Geoffrey said, looking not at Denys but into his whiskey, “why I didn’t explain all this to you in Khartoum. The words don’t come easily. Here, in the Club, outside all frames of reference, it’s possible to explain. To describe, anyway. I suppose if we hadn’t a place like this, we should all go mad.”

“I wonder,” said Platt, “whether we haven’t, despite it.” He looked at no one. “Gone mad, I mean.”

For a moment no one spoke further. The barman glanced at them, to see if their silence required anything of him. Then Platt spoke again. “Of course there are restrictions,” he said. “The chap who discovered it was possible to change one’s place in time, an American, thought he had proved that it was only possible to displace oneself into the past. In a sense, he was correct . . .”

“In a sense,” Sir Geoffrey said. “Not quite correct. The possibilities are larger than he supposed. Or rather will suppose, all this from your viewpoint is still to happen—which widens the possibilities right there, you see, one man’s future being as it were another man’s past. (You’ll get used to it, dear boy, shall we have another of these?) The past, as it happens, is the only sphere of time we have any interest in; the only sphere in which we can do good. So you see, there are natural limits: The time at which this process was made workable is the forward limit; and the rear limit we have made the time of the founding of the Otherhood itself. By Cecil Rhodes’s will, in 1893.”

“Be pointless, you see, for the Fellows to go back before the Society existed,” said Platt. “You can see that.”

“One further restriction,” said Sir Geoffrey. “A house rule, so to speak. We forbid a man to return to a time he has already visited, at least in the same part of the world. There is the danger—a moment’s thought will show you I’m right—of bumping into oneself on a previous, or successive, mission. Unnerving, let me tell you. Unnerving completely. The trick is hard enough to master as it is.”

Denys found voice. “Why?” he said. “And why me?”

“Why,” said Sir Geoffrey, “is spelled out in our founding charter: to preserve and extend the British Empire in all parts of the world, and to strengthen it against all dangers. Next, to keep peace in the world, insofar as this is compatible with the first; our experience has been that it usually is the same thing. And lastly to keep fellowship among ourselves, this also subject to the first, though any conflict is unimaginable, I should hope, bickering aside.”

“The Society was founded to be secret,” Platt said. “Rhodes liked that idea—a sort of Jesuits of the Empire. In fact there was no real need for secrecy, not until—well, not until the Society became the Otherhood. This jaunting about in other people’s histories would not be understood. So secrecy is important. Good thing on the whole that Rhodes insisted on it. And for sure he wouldn’t have been displeased at the Society’s scope. He wanted the world for England. And more. ‘The moon, too,’ he used to say. ‘I often think of the moon.’”

“Few know of us even now,” Sir Geoffrey said. “The Foreign Office, sometimes. The PM. Depending on the nature of H.M. Government at any moment, we explain more, or less. Never the part about time. That is for us alone to know. Though some have guessed a little, over the years. It’s not even so much that we wish to act in secret—that was just Rhodes’s silly fantasy—but well, it’s just damned difficult to explain, don’t you see?”

“And the Queen knows of us,” Platt said. “Of course.”

“I flew back with her, from Africa, that day,” Davenant said. “After her father had died. I happened to be among the party. I told her a little then. Didn’t want to intrude on her grief, but—it seemed the moment. In the air, over Africa. I explained more later. Plucky girl,” he added. “Plucky.” He drew his watch out. “And as for the second part of your question—why you?—I shall ask you to reserve that one, for a moment. We’ll dine upstairs . . . Good heavens, look at the time.”

Platt swallowed his drink hastily. “I remember Lord Cromer’s words to us when I was a schoolboy at Leys,” he said. “‘Love your country,’ he said, ‘tell the truth, and don’t dawdle.’”

“Words to live by,” Sir Geoffrey said, examining the bar chit doubtfully and fumbling for a pen.

The drapes were drawn in the executive dining room; the members of the executive committee were just taking their seats around a long mahogany table, scarred around its edge with what seemed to be initials and dates. The members were of all ages; some sunburned, some pale, some in evening clothes of a cut unfamiliar to Denys; among them were two Indians and a Chinaman. When they were all seated, Denys beside Platt, there were several seats empty. A tall woman with severe gray hair but eyes somehow kind took the head of the table.

“The President pro tem,” she said as she sat, “is not returned, apparently, from his mission. I’ll preside, if there are no objections.”

“Oh, balls,” said a broad-faced man with the tan of a cinema actor. “Don’t give yourself airs, Huntington. Will we really need any presiding?”

“Might be a swearing-in,” Huntington said mildly, pressing the bell beside her and not glancing at Denys. “In any case, best to keep up the forms. First order of business—the soup.”

It was a mulligatawny, saffrony and various; it was followed by a whiting, and that by a baron of claret-colored beef. Through the clashings of silverware and crystal, Denys listened to the table’s talk, little enough of which he could understand: only now and then he felt—as though he were coming horribly in two—the import of the Fellows’ conversation: that history was malleable, time a fiction; that nothing was necessarily as he supposed it must be. How could they bear that knowledge? How could he?

“Mr. Deng Fa-shen, there,” Platt said quietly to him, “is our physicist. Orthogonal physics—as opposed to orthogonal logic—is his invention. What makes this club possible. The mechanics of it. Don’t ask me to explain.”

Deng Fa-shen was a fine-boned, parchment-colored man with gentle fox’s eyes. Denys looked from him to the two Indians in silk. Platt said, as though reading Denys’s thought: “The most disagreeable thing about old Rhodes and the Empire of his day was its racialism, of course. Absolutely unworkable, too. Nothing more impossible to sustain than a world order based on some race’s supposed inherent superiority.” He smiled. “It isn’t the only part of Rhodes’s scheme that’s proved unworkable.”

The informal talk began to assemble itself, with small nudges from the woman at the head of the table (who did her presiding with no pomp and few words) around a single date: 1914. Denys knew something of this date, though several of the place names spoken of (the Somme, Jutland, Gallipoli—wherever that was) meant nothing to him. Somehow, in some possible universe, 1914 had changed everything; the Fellows seemed intent on changing 1914, drawing its teeth, teeth that Denys had not known it had—or might still have once had: He felt again the sensation of coming in two, and sipped wine.

“Jutland,” a Fellow was saying. “All that’s needed is a bit more knowledge, a bit more jump on events. Instead of a foolish stalemate, it could be a solid victory. Then, blockade; war over in six months . . .”

“Who’s our man in the Admiralty now? Carteret, isn’t it? Can he—”

“Carteret,” said the bronze-faced man, “was killed the last time around at Jutland.” There was a silence; some of the Fellows seemed to be aware of this, and some taken by surprise. “Shows the foolishness of that kind of thinking,” the man said. “Things have simply gone too far by then. That’s my opinion.”

Other options were put forward. That moment in what the Fellows called the Original Situation was searched for into which a small intrusion might be made, like a surgical incision, the smallest possible intrusion that would have the proper effect; then the succeeding Situation was searched, and the Situation following that, the Fellows feeling with enormous patience and care into the workings of the past and its possibilities, like a blind man weaving. At length a decision seemed to be made, without fuss or a vote taken, about this place Gallipoli, and a Turkish soldier named Mustapha Kemal, who would be apprehended and sequestered in a quick action that took or would take place there; the sun-bronzed man would see, or had seen, to it; and the talk, after a reflective moment, turned again to anecdote and speculation.

Denys listened to the stories, of desert treks and dangerous negotiations, men going into the wilderness of a past catastrophe with a precious load of penicillin or of knowledge, to save one man’s life or end another’s; to intercept one trivial telegram, get one bit of news through, deflect one column of troops—removing one card from the ever-building possible future of some past moment and seeing the whole of it collapse silently, unknowably, even as another was building, just as fragile but happier: He looked into the faces of the Fellows, knowing that no ruthless stratagem was beyond them, and yet knowing also that they were men of honor, with a great world’s peace and benefit in their trust, though the world couldn’t know it; and he felt an odd but deep thrill of privilege to be here now, wherever that was—the same sense of privilege that, as a boy, he had expected to feel (and as a man had laughed at himself for expecting to feel) upon being admitted to the ranks of those who—selflessly, though not without reward—had been chosen or had chosen themselves to serve the Empire. “The difference you make makes all the difference,” his headmasterish commissioner was fond of telling Denys and his fellows; and it was a joke among them that, in their form-filling, their execution of tedious and sometimes absurd directives, they were following in the footsteps of Gordon and Milner, Warren Hastings and Raffles of Singapore. And yet—Denys perceived it with a kind of inward stillness, as though his heart flowed instead of beating—a difference could be made. Had been made. Went on being made, in many times and places, without fuss, without glory, with rewards for others that those others could not recognize or even imagine. He crossed his knife and fork on his plate and sat back slowly.

“This 1914 business has its tricksome aspects,” Platt said to him. “Speaking in large terms, not enough can really be done within our time frames. The Situation that issues in war was firmly established well before: in the founding of the German Empire under Prussian leadership. Bismarck. There’s the man to get to, or to his financiers, most of whom were Jewish—little did they know, and all that. Even Sedan is too late, and not enough seems to be able to be made, or unmade, out of the Dreyfus affair, though that does fall within our provenance. No,” he said. “It’s all just too long ago. If only . . . Well, no use speculating, is there? Make the best of it, and shorten the war; make it less catastrophic at any rate, a short, sharp shaking-out—above all, win it quickly. We must do the best we can.”

He seemed unreconciled.

Denys said: “But I don’t understand. I mean, of course I wouldn’t expect to understand it as you do, but . . . well, you did do all that. I mean we studied 1914 in school—the guns of August and all that, the 1915 Peace, the Monaco Conference. What I mean is . . .” He became conscious that the Fellows had turned their attention to him. No one else spoke. “What I mean to say is that I know you solved the problem, and how you solved it, in a general way; and I don’t see why it remains to be solved. I don’t see why you’re worried.” He laughed in embarrassment, looking around at the faces that looked at him.

“You’re right,” said Sir Geoffrey, “that you don’t understand.” He said it smiling, and the others were, if not smiling, patient and not censorious. “The logic of it is orthogonal. I can present you with an even more paradoxical instance. In fact, I intend to present you with it; it’s the reason you’re here.”

“The point to remember,” the woman called Huntington said (as though to the whole table, but obviously for Denys’s instruction), “is that here—in the Club—nothing has yet happened except the Original Situation. All is still to do: all that we have done, all still to do.”

“Precisely,” said Sir Geoffrey. “All still to do.” He took from his waistcoat pocket an eyeglass, polished it with his napkin, and inserted it between cheek and eyebrow. “You had a question, in the bar. You asked why me, meaning, I suppose, why is it you should be nominated to this Fellowship, why you and not another.”

“Yes,” said Denys. He wanted to go on, list what he knew of his inadequacies, but kept silent.

“Let me, before answering your question, ask you this,” said Sir Geoffrey. “Supposing that you were chosen by good and sufficient standards—supposing that a list had been gone over carefully, and your name was weighed; supposing that a sort of competitive examination has been passed by you—would you then accept the nomination?”

“I—” said Denys. All eyes were on him, yet they were not somehow expectant; they awaited an answer they knew. Denys seemed to know it, too. He swallowed. “I hope I should,” he said.

“Very well,” Sir Geoffrey said softly. “Very well.” He took a breath. “Then I shall tell you that you have in fact been chosen by good and sufficient standards. Chosen, moreover, for a specific mission, a mission of the greatest importance; a mission on which the very existence of the Otherhood depends. No need to feel flattered; I’m sure you’re a brave lad, and all that, but the criteria were not entirely your sterling qualities, whatever they should later turn out to be.

“To explain what I mean, I must further acquaint you with what the oldest, or rather earliest, of the Fellows call the Original Situation.

“You recall our conversation in Khartoum. I told you no lie then; it is the case, in that very pleasant world we talked in, that good year 1956, fourth of a happy reign, on that wide veranda overlooking a world at peace—it is the case, I say, in that world and in most possible worlds like it, that Cecil Rhodes died young, and left the entire immense fortune he had won in the Scramble for the founding of a secret society, a society dedicated to the extension of that Empire which had his entire loyalty. The then Government’s extreme confusion over this bequest, their eventual forming of a society—not without some embarrassment and doubt—a society from which this present Otherhood descends, still working toward the same ends, though the British Empire is not now what Rhodes thought it to be, nor the world either in which it has its hegemony—well, one of the Fellows is working up or will work up that story, insofar as it can be told, and it is, as I say, a true one.

“But there is a situation in which it is not true. In that situation which we call Original—the spine of time from which all other possibilities fluoresce—Cecil Rhodes, it appears, changed his mind.”

Sir Geoffrey paused to light a cigar. The port was passed him. A cloud of smoke issued from his mouth. “Changed his mind, you see,” he said, dispersing the smoke with a wave. “He did not die young, he lived on. His character mellowed, perhaps, as the years fell away; his fortune certainly diminished. It may be that Africa disappointed him, finally; his scheme to take over Tanganyika and join the Cape-to-Cairo with a single All-Red railroad line had ended in failure . . .”

Denys opened his mouth to speak; he had only a week before taken that line. He shut his mouth again.

“Whatever it was,” Sir Geoffrey said, “he changed his mind. His last will left his fortune—what was left of it—to his old university, a scholarship fund to allow Americans and others of good character to study in England. No secret society. No Otherhood.”

There was a deep silence at the table. No one had altered his casual position, yet there was a stillness of utter attention. Someone poured for Denys, and the liquid rattle of port into his glass was loud.

“Thus the paradox,” Sir Geoffrey said. “For it is only the persuasions of the Otherhood that alter this Original Situation. The Otherhood must reach its fingers into the past, once we have learned how to do so; we must send our agents down along the defiles of time and intercept our own grandfather there, at the very moment when he is about to turn away from the work of generating us.

“And persuade him not to, you see; cause him—cause him not to turn away from that work of generation. Yes, cause him not to turn away. And thus ensure our own eventual existence.”

Sir Geoffrey pushed back his chair and rose. He turned toward the side-board, then back again to Denys. “Did I hear you say ‘That’s madness’?” he asked.

“No,” Denys said.

“Oh,” Sir Geoffrey said. “I thought you spoke. Or thought I remembered you speaking.” He turned again to the sideboard, and returned again to the table with his cigar clenched in his teeth and a small box in his hands. He put this on the table. “You do follow me thus far,” he said, his hands on the box and his eyes regarding Denys from under their curling brows.

“Follow you?”

“The man had to die,” Sir Geoffrey said. He unlatched the box. “It was his moment. The moment you will find in any biography of him you pick up. Young, or anyway not old; at the height of his triumphs. It would have been downhill for him from there anyway.”

“How,” Denys asked, and something in his throat intruded on the question; it was a moment before he could complete it: “How did he die?”

“Oh, various ways,” Sir Geoffrey said. “In the most useful version, he was shot to death by a young man he’d invited up to his house at Cape Town. Shot twice, in the heart, with a Webley .38-caliber revolver.” He took from the box this weapon, and placed it with its handle toward Denys.

“That’s madness,” Denys said. His hands lay along the arms of his chair, drawing back from the gun. “You can’t mean to say you went back and shot him, you . . .”

“Not we, dear boy,” Sir Geoffrey said. “We, generally, yes; but specifically, not we. You.”

“No.”

“Oh, you won’t be alone—not initially, at least. I can explain why it must be you and not another; I can expound the really quite dreadful paradox of it further, if you think it would help, though it seems to me best if, for now, you simply take our word for it.”

Denys felt the corners of his mouth draw down, involuntarily, tightly; his lower lip wanted to tremble. It was a sign he remembered from early childhood: what had usually followed it was a fit of truculent weeping. That could not follow, here, now: and yet he dared not allow himself to speak, for fear he would be unable. For some time, then, no one spoke.

At the head of the table Huntington pushed her empty glass away.

“Mr. Winterset,” she said gently. “I wonder if I might put in a word. Sit down, Davenant, will you, just for a moment, and stop looming over us. With your permission, Mr. Winterset—Denys—I should like to describe to you a little more broadly that condition of the world we call the Original Situation.”

She regarded Denys with her sad eyes, then closed her fingers together before her. She began to speak, in a low voice which more than once Denys had to lean forward to catch. She told about Rhodes’s last sad bad days; she told of Rhodes’s chum the despicable Dr. Jameson, and his infamous raid and the provocations that led to war with the Boers; of the shame of that war, the British defeats and the British atrocities, the brutal intransigence of both sides. She told how in those same years the European powers who confronted each other in Africa were also at work stockpiling arms and building mechanized armies of a size unheard of in the history of the world, to be finally let loose upon one another in August of 1914, unprepared for what was to become of them; armies officered by men who still lived in the previous century, but armed with weapons more dreadful than they could imagine. The machine gun: No one seemed to understand that the machine gun had changed war forever, and though the junior officers and Other Ranks soon learned it, the commanders never did. At the First Battle of the Somme, wave after wave of British soldiers were sent against German machine guns, to be mown down like grain. There were a quarter of a million casualties in that battle. And yet the generals went on ordering massed attacks against machine guns for the four long years of the war.

“But they knew,” Denys could not help saying. “They did know. Machine guns had been used against massed native armies for years, all over the Empire. In Afghanistan. In the Sudan. Africa. They knew.”

“Yes,” Huntington said. “They knew. And yet, in the Original Situation, they paid no attention. They went blindly on and made their dreadful mistakes. Why? How could they be so stupid, those generals and statesmen who in the world you knew behaved so wisely and so well? For one reason only: They lacked the help and knowledge of a group of men and women who had seen all those mistakes made, who could act in secret on what they knew, and who had the ear and the confidence of one of the governments—not the least stupid of them, either, mind you. And with all our help it was still a close-run thing.”

“Damned close-run,” Platt put in. “Still hangs in the balance, in fact.”

“Let me go on,” Huntington said.

She went on: Long hands folded before her, eyes now cast down, she told how at the end, a million men, a whole generation, lay dead on the European battlefield, among them men whom Denys might think the modern world could not have been made without. A grotesque tyranny calling itself Socialist had been imposed on a war-weakened Russian empire. Only the intervention of a fully mobilized United States had finally broken the awful deadlock—thereby altering the further history of the world unrecognizably. She told how the vindictive settlement inflicted on a ruined Germany (so unlike the wise dispositions of the Monaco Conference, which had simply reestablished the old pre-Bismarck patchwork of German states and princedoms) had rankled in the German spirit; how a madman had arisen and, almost unbelievably, had ridden a wave of resentment and anti-Jewish hysteria to dictatorship.

“Yes,” Denys said. “That we didn’t escape, did we? I remember that, or almost remember it; it was just before I can remember anything. Anti-Jewish riots all over Germany.”

“Yes,” said Huntington softly.

“Yes. Terrible. These nice funny Germans, all lederhosen and cuckoo clocks, and suddenly they show a terrible dark side. Thousands of Jews, some of them very highly placed, had to leave Germany. They lost everything. Synagogues attacked, professors fired. Even Einstein, I think, had to leave Germany for a time.”

Huntington let him speak. When Denys fell silent, unable to remember more and feeling the eyes of the Fellows on him, Huntington began again. But the things she began to tell of now simply could not have happened, Denys thought; no, they were part of a monstrous, foul dream, atrocities on a scale only a psychopath could conceive, and only the total resources of a strong and perverted science achieve. When Einstein came again into the tale, and the world Huntington described drifted ignorantly and inexorably into an icy and permanent stalemate that could be broken only by the end of civilization, perhaps of life itself, Denys found a loathsome surfeit rising in his throat; he covered his face, he would hear no more.

“So you see,” Huntington said, “why we think it possible that the life—nearly over, in any case—of one egotistical, racialist adventurer is worth the chance to alter that situation.” She raised her eyes to Denys. “I don’t say you need agree. There is a sticky moral question, and I don’t mean to brush it aside. I only say you see how we might think so.”

Denys nodded slowly. He reached out and put his hand on the pistol that had been placed before him. He lifted his eyes and met those of Sir Geoffrey Davenant, which still smiled, though his mouth and his mustaches were grave.

What they were all telling him was that he could help create a better world than the original, which Huntington had described; but that was not how Denys perceived it. What Denys perceived was that reality—reality, the world he had come from, reality sun-shot and whole—was somehow under threat from a disgusting nightmare of death, ignorance, and torture, which could invade and replace it forever unless he acted. He did not think himself capable of interfering with the world to make it better; but to defend the world he knew, the world that with all its shortcomings was life and sustenance and sense and cleanly wakefulness—yes, that he could do. Would do, with all his strength.

Which is why, of course, it was he who had been chosen to do it. He saw that in Davenant’s eyes.

And of course, if he refused, he could not then be brought here to be asked. If it was now possible for him to be asked to do this by the Otherhood, then he must have already consented, and done it. That, too, was in Davenant’s silence. Denys looked down. His hand was on the Webley; and beside it, carved by a penknife into the surface of the table, almost obscured by later waxings, were the neat initials D.W.

“I always remember what Lord Milner said,” Platt spoke into his ear. “Everyone can help.”

V: THE TEARS OF THE PRESIDENT PRO TEM

“I remember,” the president pro tem of the Otherhood said, “the light: a very clear, very pure, very cool light that seemed somehow potent but reserved, as though it could do terrible blinding things, and give an unbearable heat, if it chose—well, I’m not quite sure what I mean.”

There was a midnight fug in the air of the library where the President pro tem retold his tale. The Magus to whom he told it did not look at him; his pale gray eyes moved from object to object around the room in the aimless idiot wandering that had at first caused the President pro tem to believe him blind.

“The mountain was called Table Mountain—a sort of high mesa. What a place that was then—I think the most beautiful in the Empire, and young then, but not raw; a peninsula simply made to put a city on, and a city being put there, beneath the mountain: and this piercing light.

“Our party put up at the Mount Nelson Hotel, perhaps a little grand for the travelers in electroplating equipment we were pretending to be, but the incognito wasn’t really important, it was chiefly to explain the presence of the Last equipment among the luggage.

“A few days were spent in reconnaissance. But you see—this is continually the impossible thing to explain—in a sense those of the party who knew the outcome were only going through the motions of conferring, mapping their victim’s movements, choosing a suitable moment and all that: for they knew the story; there was only one way for it to happen, if it was to happen at all. If it was not to happen, then no one could predict what was to happen instead; but so long as our party was there, and preparing it, it would evidently have to happen—or would have to have had to have happened.”

The President pro tem suddenly missed his old friend Davenant, Davenant the witty and deep, who never bumbled over his tenses, never got himself stuck in a sentence such as that one; Davenant lost now with the others in the interstices of imaginary pasthood—or rather about to be lost, in the near future, if the President pro tem assented to what was asked of him. “It was rather jolly,” he said, “like a game, rather, striving to bring about a result that you were sure had already been brought about; an old ritual, if you like, to which not much importance needed to be attached, so long as it was all done correctly . . .”

“I think,” said the Magus, “you need not explain these feelings that you then had.”

“Sorry,” said the President pro tem. “The house was called Groote Schuur—that was the old Dutch name, which he’d revived, for a big granary that had stood on the property; the English had called it the Grange. It was built on the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak, with a view up to the mountains, and out to sea as well. He’d only recently seen the need for a house—all his life in Africa he’d more or less pigged it in rented rooms, or stayed in his club or a hotel or even a tent pitched outside town. For a long time he roomed with Dr. Jameson, sleeping on a little truckle bed hardly big enough for his body. But now that he’d become Prime Minister, he felt it was time for something more substantial.

“It seemed to me that it would have been easier to take him out in the bush—the bundas, as the Matabele say. Hire a party of natives—wait till all are asleep—ambush. He often went out into the wilds with almost no protection. There was no question of honor involved—I mean, the man had to die, one way or the other, and the more explainably or accidentally the better. But I was quite wrong—I was myself still young—and had to be put right: The one time that way was tried, the assassination initiated a punitive war against the native populations that lasted for twenty years, which ended only with the virtual extermination of the Matabele and Mashona peoples. Dreadful.

“No, it had to be the house; moreover, it had to be within a very brief span of time—a time when we knew he was there, when we knew where his will was, and which will it was—he made eight or nine in his lifetime—and when we knew, also, what assets were in his hands. Business and ownership were fluid things in those days; his partners were quick and subtle men; his sudden death might lose us all that we were intending to acquire by it in the way of a campaign chest, so to speak.

“So it had to be the house, in this week of this year, on this night. In fact, orthogonal logic dictated it. Davenant was quite calmly sure of that. After all, that was the night when it had happened: and for sure we ought not to miss it.”

That was an attempt at the sort of remark Davenant might make, and the President pro tem smiled at the Magus, who remained unmoved. The President pro tem thought it impossible that beings as wise as he knew the one before him to be, no matter how grave, could altogether lack any sense of humor. For himself, he had often thought that if he did not find funny the iron laws of orthogony he would go mad; but his jokes apparently amused only himself.

“It was not a question of getting to his house, or into it; he practically kept open house the year round, and his grounds could be walked upon by anyone. The gatekeepers were only instructed to warn walkers about the animals they might come across—he had brought in dozens of species, and he allowed all but the genuinely dangerous to roam at will. Wildebeest. Zebras. Impala. And ‘human beings,’ as he always called them, roamed at will, too; there were always some about. At dinner, he had visitors from all over Africa, and from England and Europe as well; his bedrooms were often full. I think he hated to be alone. All of which provided a fine setting, you see, for a sensational—and insoluble—murder mystery: if only the man could be got alone, and escape made good then through these crowds of hangers-on.

“Our plan depended on a known proclivity of his, or rather two proclivities. The first was a taste he had for the company of a certain sort of a young man. He liked having them around him and could become very attached to them. There was never a breath of scandal in this—well, there was talk, but only talk. His ‘angels,’ people called them: good-looking, resourceful if not particularly bright, good all-rounders with a rough sense of fun—practical jokes, horseplay—but completely devoted and ready for anything he might ask them to do. He had a fair crowd of these fellows up at Groote Schuur just then. Harry Curry, his private secretary. Johnny Grimmer, a trooper who was never afraid to give him orders—like a madman’s keeper, some people said, scolding him and brushing dust from his shoulders; he never objected. Bob Coryndon, another trooper. They’d all just taken on a butler for themselves, a sergeant in the Inniskillings: good-looking chap, twenty-three years old. Oddly, they had all been just that age when he’d taken an interest in them: twenty-three. Whether that was chance or his conscious choice we didn’t know.

“The other proclivity was his quickness in decision making. And this often involved the young men. The first expedition into Matabeleland had been headed up by a chap he’d met at his club one morning at breakfast just as the column was preparing for departure. Took to the chap instantly: liked his looks, liked his address. Gave him the job on the spot.

“That had worked out very well, of course—his choices often did. The pioneer column had penetrated into the heart of the bundas, the flag was flying over a settlement they called Fort Salisbury, and the whole of Matabeleland was in the process of being added to the Empire. Up at Groote Schuur they were kicking around possible names for the new country: Rhodia, perhaps, or Rhodesland, even Cecilia. It was that night that they settled on Rhodesia.”

The President pro tem felt a moment’s shame. There had been, when it came down to it, no doubt in his mind that what they had done had been the right thing to do: and in any case it had all happened a long time ago, more than a century ago in fact. It was not what was done, or that it had been done, only the moment of its doing, that was hard to relate: it was the picture in his mind, of an old man (though he was only forty-eight, he looked far older) sitting in the lamplight reading The Boy’s Own Paper, as absorbed and as innocent in his absorption as a boy himself; and the vulnerable shine on his balding crown; and the tender and indifferent night: it was all that which raised a lump in the throat of the President pro tem and caused him to pause, and roll the tip of his cigar in the ashtray, and clear his throat before continuing.

“And so,” he said, “we baited our hook. Rhodes’s British South Africa Company was expanding, in the wake of the Fort Salisbury success. He was on the lookout for young men of the right sort. We presented him with one: good-looking lad, public school, cricketer; just twenty-three years old. He was the bait. The mole. The Judas.”

And the bait had been taken, of course. The arrangement’s having been keyed so nicely to the man’s nature, a nature able to be studied from the vantage point of several decades on, it could hardly have failed. That the trick seemed so fragile, even foolish, something itself out of The Boy’s Own Paper or a story by Henley, only increased the likelihood of its striking just the right note here: the colored fanatic, Rhodes leaving his hotel after luncheon to return to Parliament, the thug stepping out of the black noon shadows with a knife just as Rhodes mounts his carriage steps—then the young man, handily by with a stout walking stick (a gift of his father upon his departure for Africa)—the knife deflected, the would-be assassin slinking off, the great man’s gratitude. You must have some reward. Not a bit, sir, anyone would have done the same; just lucky I was nearby. Come to dinner at any rate—my house on the hill—anyone can direct you. Allow me to introduce myself; my name is  . . .

No need, sir, everyone knows Cecil Rhodes.

And your name is . . .

The clean hand put frankly forward, the tanned, open, boyish face smiling. My name is Denys Winterset.

“So then you see,” the President pro tem said, “the road was open. The road up to Groote Schuur. The road that branches, in effect, to lead here: to us here now speaking of it.”

“And how many times since then,” the Magus said, “has the world branched? How many times has it been bent double, and broken? A thousand times, ten thousand? Each time growing smaller, having to be packed into lesser space, curling into itself like a snail’s shell; growing ever weaker as the changes multiply, and more liable to failure of its fabric: How many times?”

The President pro tem answered nothing.

“You understand, then,” the Magus said to him, “what you will be asked: to find the crossroads that leads this way and to turn the world from it.”

“Yes.”

“And how will you reply?”

The President pro tem had no better answer for this question, and he gave none. He had begun to feel at once heavy as lead and disembodied. He arose from his armchair, with some effort, and crossed the worn Turkey carpet to the tall window.

“You must leave my house now,” the Magus said, rising from his chair. “There is much for me to do this night, if this world is to pass out of existence.”

“Where shall I go?”

“They will find you. I think in not too long a time.” Without looking back, he left the room.

The President pro tem pushed aside the heavy drape the draconic had drawn. Where shall I go? He looked out the window into the square outside, deserted at this late and rainy hour. It was an irregular square, the intersection of three streets, filled with rain-wet cobbles as though with shiny eggs. It was old; it had been the view out these windows for two centuries at the least; there was nothing about it to suggest that it had not been the intersection of three streets for a good many more centuries than that.

And yet it had not been there at all only a few decades earlier, when the President pro tem had last walked the city outside the Orient Aid Society. Then the city had been London; it was no more. These three streets, these cobbles, had not been there in 1983; nor in 1893 either. Yet there they were, somewhere early in the twenty-first century; there they had been, too, for time out of mind, familiar no doubt to any dweller in this part of town, familiar for that matter to the President pro tem who looked out at them. In each of two lamp-lit cafés on two corners of the square, a man in a soft cap held a glass and looked out into the night, unsurprised, at home.

Someone had broken the rules: There simply was no other explanation.

There had been, of course, no way for anyone, not Deng Fa-shen, not Davenant, not the President pro tem himself, to guess what the President pro tem might come upon on this, the first expedition the Otherhood was making into the future: not only did the future not exist (Deng Fa-shen was quite clear about that), but, as Davenant reminded him, the Otherhood itself, supposing the continued existence of the Otherhood, would no doubt go busily on changing things in the past far and near—shifting the ground therefore of the future the President pro tem was headed for. Deng Fa-shen was satisfied that that future, the ultimate future, sum of all intermediate revisions, was the only one that could be plumbed, if any could; and that was the only one the Otherhood would want to glimpse: to learn how they would do, or would come to have done; to find out, as George V whispered on his deathbed, “How is the Empire.”

(“Only that isn’t what he said,” Davenant was fond of telling. “That’s what he was, understandably, reported to have said, and what the Queen and the nurses convinced themselves they heard. But he was a bit dazed there at the end, poor good old man. What he said was not ‘How is the Empire,’ but ‘What’s at the Empire,’ a popular cinema. I happened,” he always added gravely, “to have been with him.”)

The first question had been how far “forward” the Otherhood should press; those members who thought the whole scheme insane, as Platt did, voted for next Wednesday, and bring back the Derby winners please. Deng Fa-shen was not certain the thrust could be entirely calculated: The imaginary futures of imaginary pasts were not, he thought, likely to be under the control of even the most penetrating orthogonal engineering. Sometime in the first decades of the next century was at length agreed upon, a time just beyond the voyager’s own mortal span—for the house rule seemed, no one could say quite why, to apply in both directions—and for as brief a stay as was consistent with learning what was up.

The second question—who was to be the voyager—the President pro tem had answered by fiat, assuming an executive privilege he just at that moment claimed to exist, and cutting off further debate. (Why exactly did he insist? I’m not certain why, except that it was not out of a sense of adventure, or of fun or curiosity: Whatever of those qualities he may once have had had been much worn away in his rise to the Presidency pro tem of the Otherhood. A sense of duty may have been part of it. It may have been to forestall the others, out of a funny sort of premonition. Duty, and premonition: of what, though? Of what?)

“It’ll be quite different from any of our imaginings, you know,” Davenant said, who for some reason had not vigorously contested the President’s decision. “The future of all possible pasts. I envy you, I do. I should rather like to see it for myself.”

Quite different from any of our imaginings: very well. The President pro tem had braced himself for strangeness. What he had not expected was familiarity. Familiarity—cozy as an old shoe—was certainly different from his imaginings.

And yet what was it he was familiar with? He had stepped out of his club in London and found himself to be, not in the empty corridors of the Orient Aid Society that he knew well, but in private quarters of some kind that he had never seen before. It reminded him, piercingly, of a place he did know, but what place he could not have said: some don’s rich but musty rooms, some wealthy and learned bachelor’s digs. How had it come to be?

And how had it come to be lit by gas?

One of the pleasant side effects (most of the members thought it pleasant) of the Otherhood’s endless efforts in the world had been a general retardation in the rate of material progress: So much of that progress had been, on the one hand, the product of the disastrous wars that it was the Otherhood’s chief study to prevent, and on the other hand, American. The British Empire moved more slowly, a great beast without predators, and naturally conservative; it clung to proven techniques and could impose them on the rest of the world by its weight. The telephone, the motor car, the flying boat, the wireless, all were slow to take root in the Empire that the Otherhood shaped. And yet surely, the President pro tem thought, electricity was in general use in London in 1893, before which date no member could alter the course of things. And gas lamps lit this place.

Pondering this, the President pro tem had entered the somber and apparently little-used dining room and seen the draconic standing in the little butler’s pantry: silent as a statue (asleep, the President pro tem would later deduce, with lidless eyes only seeming to be open); a polishing-cloth in his claw, and the silver before him; his heavy jaws partly open, and his weight balanced on the thick stub of tail. He wore a baize apron and black sleeve garters to protect his clothes.

Quite different from our imaginings: and yet no conceivable amount of tinkering with the twentieth century, just beyond which the President pro tem theoretically stood, could have brought forth this butler, in wing collar and green apron, the soft gaslight ashine on his bald brown head.

So someone had broken the rules. Someone had dared to regress beyond 1893 and meddle in the farther past. That was not, in itself, impossible; Caspar Last had done it on his first and only excursion. It had only been thought impossible for the Otherhood to do it, because it would have taken them “back” before the Otherhood’s putative existence, and therefore before the Otherhood could have wrested the techniques of such travel from Last’s jealous grip, a power they acquired by already having it—that was what the President pro tem had firmly believed.

But it was not, apparently, so. Somewhen in that stretch of years that fell between his entrance into the telephone box of the Club and his exit from it into this familiar and impossible world, someone—many someones, or someone many times—had gone “back” far before Rhodes’s death: had gone back far enough to initiate this house, this city, these races who were not men.

A million years? It couldn’t have been less. It didn’t seem possible it could be less.

And who, then? Deng Fa-shen, the delicate, brilliant Chinaman, who had thoughts and purposes he kept to himself; the only one of them who might have been able to overcome the theoretical limits? Or Platt, who was never satisfied with what was possible within what he called “the damned parameters”?

Or Davenant. Davenant, who was forever quoting Khayyám: Ah, Love, couldst thou and I with Him conspire To take this sorry scheme of things entire; Would we not smash it into pieces, then Remold it nearer to the heart’s desire . . .

“There is,” said the Magus behind him, “one other you have not thought of.”

The President pro tem let fall the drape and turned from the window. The Magus stood in the doorway, a great ledger in his arms. His eyes did not meet the President pro tem’s, and yet seemed to regard him anyway, like the blind eyes of a statue.

One other . . . Yes, the President pro tem saw, there was one other who might have done this. One other, not so good at the work, perhaps, as others, as Davenant for example, but who nonetheless would have been, or would come to have been, in a position to take such steps. The President pro tem would not have credited himself with the skill, or the nerve, or the dreadnought power. But how else to account for the familiarity, the bottomless suitability to him of this world he had never before seen?

“Between the time of your people’s decision to plumb our world,” said the Magus, “and the time of your standing here within it, you must yourself have brought it into being. I see no likelier explanation.”

The President pro tem stood still with wonder at the efforts he was apparently to prove capable of making. A million years at least: a million years. How had he known where to begin? Where had he found, would he find, the time?

“Shall I ring,” the Magus said, “or will you let yourself out?”

• • • •

Deng Fa-shen had always said it, and anyone who traveled in them knew it to be so: The imaginary futures and imaginary pasts of orthogony are imaginary only in the sense that imaginary numbers (which they very much resemble) are imaginary. To a man walking within one, it alone is real, no matter how strange; it is all the others, standing at angles to it, which exist only in imagination. Nightlong the President pro tem walked the city, with a measured and unhurried step, but with a constant tremor winding round his rib cage, waiting for what would become of him, and observing the world he had made.

Of course it could not continue to exist. It should not ever have come into existence in the first place; his own sin (if it had been his) had summoned it out of nonbeing, and his repentance must expunge it. The Magus who had taken his confession (which the President pro tem had been unable to withhold from him) had drawn that conclusion: It must be put out, like a light. And yet how deeply the President pro tem wanted it to last forever; how deeply he believed it ought to last forever.

The numinous and inhuman angels, about whom nothing could be said, beings with no ascertainable business among the lesser races and yet beings without whom, the President pro tem was sure, this world could not go on functioning. They lived (endless?) lives unimaginable to men, and perhaps to Magi, too, who yet sought continually for knowledge of them: Magi, highest of the hominids, gentle and wise, yet inflexible of purpose, living in simplicity and solitude (Were there females? Where? Doing what?) and yet from their shabby studies influencing, perhaps directing, the lives of mere men. The men, such as himself, clever and busy, with their inventions and their politics and their affairs. The lesser hominids, strong, sweet-natured, comic, like placid trolls. The draconics.

It was not simply a world inhabited by intelligent races of different kinds: It was a harder thing to grasp than that. The lives of the races constituted different universes of meaning, different constructions of reality; it was as though four or five different novels, novels of different kinds by different and differently limited writers, were to become interpenetrated and conflated: inside a gigantic Russian thing, a stark and violent policier, and inside that something Dickensian, full of plot, humors, and eccentricity. Such an interlacing of mutually exclusive universes might be comical, like a sketch in Punch; it might be tragic, too. And it might be neither: It might simply be what is, the given against which all airy imaginings must finally be measured: reality.

Near dawn, the President pro tem stood leaning on a parapet of worked stone that overlooked a streetcar roundabout. A car had just ended its journey there, and the conductor and the motorman descended, squat hominids in greatcoats and peaked caps. With their long strong arms, they began to swing the car around for its return journey. The President pro tem gazed down at this commonplace sight; his nose seemed to know the smell of that car’s interior, his bottom to know the feel of its polished seats. But he knew also that yesterday there had not been streetcars in this city. Today they had been here for decades.

No, it was no good, the President pro tem knew: The fabric of this world he had made—if it had been he—was fatally weakened with irreality. It was a botched job: as though he were that god of the Gnostics who made the material world, a minor god unversed in putting time together with space. He had not worked well. And how could he have supposed it would be otherwise? What had got into him, that he had dared?

“No,” said the angel who stood beside him. “You should not think that it was you.”

“If not me,” said the President pro tem, “then who?”

“Come,” said the angel. She (I shall say “she”) slipped a small cool hand within his hand. “Let’s go over the tracks, and into the trees beyond that gate.”

A hard and painful stone had formed in the throat of the President pro tem. The angel beside him led him like a daughter, like the daughter of old blind Oedipus. Within the precincts of the park—which apparently had its entrance or its entrances where the angels needed them to be—he was led down an avenue of yew and dim towers of poplar toward the piled and sounding waters of a fountain. They sat together on the fountain’s marble lip.

“The Magus told me,” the President pro tem began, “that you can feel the alterations that we make, back then. Is that true?”

“It’s like the snap of a whip infinitely long,” the angel said. “The whole length of time snapped and laid out differently: not only the length of time backward to the time of the change, but the length of the future forward. We felt ourselves come into being, oldest of the Old Races (though the last your changes brought into existence); we saw in that moment the aeons of our past, and we guessed our future, too.”

The President pro tem took out his pocket-handkerchief and pressed it to his face. He must weep, yet no tears came.

“We love this world—this only world—just as you do,” she said. “We love it, and we cannot bear to feel it sicken and fail. Better that it not have been than it die.”

“I shall do all I can,” said the President pro tem. “I shall find who has done this—I suppose I know who it was, if it wasn’t me—and dissuade him. Teach him, teach him what I’ve learned, make him see . . .”

“You don’t yet understand,” the angel said with careful kindness but at the same time glancing at her wristwatch. “There is no one to tell. There is no one who went beyond the rules.”

“There must have been,” said the President pro tem. “You, your time, it just isn’t far along from ours, from mine! To make this world, this city, these races . . .”

“Not far along in time,” said the angel, “but many times removed. You know it to be so: Whenever you, your Otherhood, set out across the timelines, your passage generated random variation in the worlds you arrived in. Perhaps you didn’t understand how those variations accumulate, here at the sum end of your journeyings.”

“But the changes were so minute!” said the President pro tem. “Deng Fa-shen explained it. A molecule here and there, no more; the position of a distant star; some trivial thing, the name of a flower or a village. Too few, too small even to notice.”

“They increase exponentially with every alteration—and your Otherhood has been busy since you last presided over them. Through the days, random changes accumulate, tiny errors silting up like the blown sand that fills the streets of a desert city, that buries it at last.”

“But why these changes?” asked the President pro tem desperately. “It can’t have been chance that a world like this was the sum of those histories, it can’t be. A world like this . . .”

“Chance, perhaps. Or it may be that as time grows softer, the world grows more malleable by wishes. There is no reason to believe this, yet that is what we believe. You—all of you—could not have known that you were bringing this world into being; and yet this is the world you wanted.”

She reached out to let the tossed foam of the fountain fall into her hand. The President pro tem thought of the bridge over the Zambezi, far away; the tossed foam of the Falls. It was true: This is what they had striven for: a world of perfect hierarchies, of no change forever. God, how they must have longed for it! The loneliness of continual change—no outback, no bundas so lonely. He had heard how men can be unsettled for days, for weeks, who have lived through earthquakes and felt the earth to be uncertain: what of his Fellows, who had felt time and space picked apart, never to be rewoven that way again, and not once but a hundred times? What of himself?

“I shall tell you what I see at the end of all your wishings,” said the angel softly. “At the far end of the last changed world, after there is nothing left that can change. There is then only a forest, growing in the sea. I say ‘forest’ and I say ‘sea,’ though whether they are of the kind I know, or some other sort of thing, I cannot say. The sea is still and the forest is thick; it grows upward from the black bottom, and its topmost branches reach into the sunlight, which penetrates a little into the warm upper waters. That’s all. There is nothing else anywhere forever. Your wishes have come true: the Empire is quiet. There is not, nor will there be, change anymore; never will one thing be confused again with another, higher for lower, better for lesser, master for servant. Perpetual Peace.”

The President pro tem was weeping now, painful sobs drawn up from an interior he had long kept shut and bolted. Tears ran down his cheeks, into the corners of his mouth, under his hard collar. He knew what he must do, but not how to do it.

“The Otherhood cannot be dissuaded from this,” the angel said, putting a hand on the wrist of the President pro tem. “For all of it, including our sitting here now, all of it—and the forest in the sea—is implicit in the very creation of the Otherhood itself.”

“But then . . .”

“Then the Otherhood must be uncreated.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You must.”

“No, no, I can’t.” He had withdrawn from her pellucid gaze, horrified. “I mean it isn’t because . . . If it must be done, it must be. But not by me.”

“Why?”

“It would be against the rules given me. I don’t know what the result would be. I can’t imagine. I don’t want to imagine.”

“Rules?”

“The Otherhood came into being,” said the President pro tem, “when a British adventurer, Cecil Rhodes, was shot and killed by a young man called Denys Winterset.”

“Then you must return and stop that killing.”

“But you don’t see!” said the President pro tem in great distress. “The rules given the Otherhood forbid a Fellow from returning to a time and place that he formerly altered by his presence . . .”

“And . . .”

“And I am myself that same Denys Winterset.”

The angel regarded the President pro tem—the Honorable Denys Winterset, fourteenth President pro tem of the Otherhood—and her translucent face registered a sweet surprise, as though the learning of something she had not known gave her pleasure. She laughed, and her laughter was not different from the plashing of the fountain by which they sat. She laughed and laughed, as the old man in his black coat and hat sat silent beside her, bewildered and afraid.

VI: THE BOY DAVID OF HYDE PARK CORNER

There are days when I seem genuinely to remember, and days when I do not remember at all: days when I remember only that sometimes I remember. There are days on which I think I recognize another like myself: someone walking smartly along the Strand or Bond Street, holding the Times under one arm and walking a furled umbrella with the other—a sort of military bearing, mustaches white (older than when I seem to have known him, but then so am I, of course), and cheeks permanently tanned by some faraway sun. I do not catch his eye, nor he mine, though I am tempted to stop him, to ask him . . . Later on, I wonder—if I can remember to wonder—whether he, too, is making a chronicle, in his evenings, writing up the story: a story that can be told in any direction, starting from anywhen, leading on to a forest in the sea.

I won’t look any longer into this chronicle I’ve compiled. I shall only complete it.

My name is Denys Winterset. I was born in London in 1933; I was the only son of a Harley Street physician, and my earliest memory is of coming upon my father in tears in his surgery: He had just heard the news that the R101 dirigible had crashed on its maiden flight, killing all those aboard.

We lived then above my father’s offices, in a little building whose nursery I remember distinctly, though I was taken to the country with the other children of London when I was only six, and that building was knocked down by a bomb in 1940. A falling wall killed my mother; my father was on ambulance duty in the East End and was spared.

He didn’t know quite what to do with me, nor I with myself; I have been torn all my life between the drive to discover what others whom I love and admire expect of me, and my discovery that then I don’t want to do it, really. After coming down from the University, I decided, out of a certain perversity which my father could not sympathize with, to join the Colonial Service. He could not fathom why I would want to fasten myself to an enterprise that everyone save a few antediluvian colonels and letter writers to the Times could see was a dead animal. And I couldn’t explain. Psychoanalysis later suggested that it was quite simply because no one wanted me to do it. The explanation has since come to seem insufficient to me.

That was a strange late blooming of Empire in the decade after the war, when the Colonial Office took on factitious new life, and thousands of us went out to the Colonies. The Service became larger than it had been in years, swollen with ex-officers too accustomed to military life to do anything else, and with the innocent and the confused, like myself. I ended up a junior member of a transition team in a Central African country I shall not name, helping see to it that as much was given to the new native government as they could be persuaded to accept, in the way of a parliament, a well-disciplined army, a foreign service, a judiciary.

It was not after all very much. Those institutions that the British are sure no civilized nation can do without were, in the minds of many Africans who spoke freely to me, very like those exquisite japanned toffee-boxes from Fortnum & Mason that you used often to come across in native kraals, because the chieftains and shamans loved them so, to keep their juju in. Almost as soon as I arrived, it became evident that the commander in chief of the armed forces was impatient with the pace of things, and felt the need of no special transition to African, i.e., his own, control of the state. The most our Commission were likely to accomplish was to get the British population out without a bloodbath.

Even that would not be easy. We—we young men—were saddled with the duty of explaining to aged planters that there was no one left to defend their estates against confiscation, and that under the new constitution they hadn’t a leg to stand on, and that despite how dearly their overseers and house people loved them, they ought to begin seeing what they could pack into a few small trunks. On the other hand, we were to calm the fears of merchants and diamond factors, and tell them that if they all simply dashed for it, they could easily precipitate a closing of the frontiers, with incalculable results.

There came a night when, more than usually certain that not a single Brit under my care would leave the country alive, nor deserved to either, I stood at the bar of the Planters’ (just renamed the Republic) Club, drinking gin and Italian (tonic hadn’t been reordered in weeks) and listening to the clacking of the fans. A fellow I knew slightly as a regular here saluted me; I nodded and returned to my thoughts. A moment later I found him next to me.

“I wonder,” he said, “if I might have your ear for a moment.”

The expression, in his mouth, was richly comic, or perhaps it was my exhaustion. He waited for my laughter to subside before speaking. He was called Rossie, and he’d spent a good many years in Africa, doing whatever came to hand. He was one of those Englishmen whom the sun turns not brown but only gray and greasy; his eyes were always watery, the cups of his lids red and painful to look at.

“I am,” he said at last, “doing a favor for a chap who would like your help.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said.

“This is a chap,” he said, “who has been too long in this country, and would like to leave it.”

“There are many in his situation.”

“Not quite.”

“What is his name?” I said, taking out a memorandum book. “I’ll pass it on to the Commission.”

“Just the point,” Rossie said. He drew closer to me. At the other end of the bar, loud laughter arose from a group consisting of a newly commissioned field marshal—an immense, glossy, nearly blue-black man—and his two colonels, both British, both small and lean. They laughed when the field marshal laughed, though their laugh was not so loud, nor their teeth so large and white.

“He’ll want to tell you his name himself,” Rossie said. “I’ve only brought the message. He wants to see you, to talk to you. I said I’d tell you. That’s all.”

“To tell us . . .”

“Not you, all of you. You: you.”

I drank. The warm, scented liquor was thick in my throat. “Me?”

“What he asked me to ask you,” Rossie said, growing impatient, “was would you come out to his place, and see him. It isn’t far. He wanted you, no one else. He said I was to insist. He said you were to come alone. He’ll send a boy of his. He said tell no one.”

There were many reasons why a man might want to do business with the Commission privately. I could think of none why it should be done with me alone. I agreed, with a shrug. Rossie seemed immediately to put the matter out of his mind, mopped his red face, and ordered drinks for both us. By the time they were brought, we were already discussing the Imperial groundnut scheme, which was to have kept this young republic self-sufficient, but which, it was now evident, would do no such thing.

I, too, put what had been asked of me out of my mind, with enough success that when on a windless and baking afternoon a native boy shook me awake from a nap, I could not imagine why.

“Who are you? What are you doing in my bungalow?”

He only stared down at me, as though it were he who could not think why I should be there before him. Questions in his own language got no response either. At length he backed out the door, clearly wanting me to follow; and so I did, with the dread one feels on remembering an unpleasant task one has contrived to neglect. I found him outside, standing beside my Land-Rover, ready to get aboard.

“All right,” I said. “Very well.” I got into the driver’s seat. “Point the way.”

It was a small spread of tobacco and a few dusty cattle an hour’s drive from town, a low bungalow looking beaten in the ocher heat. He gave no greeting as I alighted from the Land-Rover but stood in the shadows of the porch unmoving: as though he had stood so a long time. He went back into the house as I approached, and when I went in, he was standing against the netting of the window, the light behind him. That seemed a conscious choice. He was smiling, I could tell: a strange and eager smile.

“I’ve waited a long time for you,” he said. “I don’t mind saying.”

“I came as quickly as I could,” I said.

“There was no way for me to know, you see,” he said, “whether you’d come at all.”

“Your boy was quite insistent,” I said. “And Mr. Rossie—”

“I meant: to Africa.” His voice was light, soft and dry. “There being so much less reason for it, now. I’ve wondered often. In fact, I don’t think a day has passed this year when I haven’t wondered.” Keeping his back to the sunward windows, he moved to sit on the edge of a creaking wicker sofa. “You’ll want a drink,” he said.

“No.” The place was filled with the detritus of an African bachelor farmer’s digs: empty paraffin tins, bottles, tools, hanks of rope and motor parts. He put a hand behind him without looking and put it on the bottle he was no doubt accustomed to find there. “I tried to think reasonably about it,” he said, pouring a drink. “As time went on, and things began to sour here, I came to be more and more certain that no lad with any pluck would throw himself away down here. And yet I couldn’t know. Whether there might not be some impulse, I don’t know, traveling to you from—elsewhere . . . I even thought of writing to you. Though whether to convince you to come or to dissuade you, I’d no idea.”

I sat, too. A cool sweat had gathered on my neck and the backs of my hands.

“Then,” he said, “when I heard you’d come—well, I was afraid, frankly. I didn’t know what to think.” He dusted a fly from the rim of his glass, which he had not tasted. “You see,” he said, “this was against the rules given me. That I—that I and—that you and I should meet.”

Perhaps he’s mad, I thought, and even as I thought it, I felt intensely the experience called déjà vu, an experience I have always hated, hated like the nightmare. I steeled myself to respond coolly and took out my memorandum book and pencil. “I’m afraid you’ve rather lost me,” I said—briskly I hoped. “Perhaps we’d better start with your name.”

“Oh,” he said, smiling again his mirthless smile, “not the hardest question first, please.”

Without having, so far as I knew, the slightest reason for it, I began to feel intensely sorry for this odd dried jerky of a man, whose eyes alone seemed quick and shy. “All right,” I said, “nationality, then. You are a British subject.”

“Well, yes.”

“Proof?” He answered nothing. “Passport?” No. “Army card? Birth certificate? Papers of any kind?” No. “Any connections in Britain? Relatives? Someone who could vouch for you, take you in?”

“No,” he said, “None who could. None but you. It will have to be you.”

“Now hold hard,” I said.

“I don’t know why I must,” he said, rising suddenly and turning away to the window. “But I must. I must go back. I imagine dying here, being buried here, and my whole soul retreats in horror. I must go back. Even though I fear that, too.”

He turned from the window, and in the sharp side light of the late afternoon his face was clearly the face of someone I knew. “Tell me,” he said. “Mother and father. Your mother and father. They’re alive?”

“No,” I said. “Both dead.”

“Very well,” he said, “very well”; but it did not seem to be very well with him. “I’ll tell you my story, then.”

“I think you’d best do that.”

“It’s a long one.”

“No matter.” I had begun to feel myself transported, like a Sinbad, into somewhere that it were best I listen, and keep my counsel: and yet the first words of this specter’s tale made that impossible.

“My name,” he said, “is Denys Winterset.”

I have come to believe, having had many years in which to think about it, that it must be as he said, that an impulse from somewhere else (he meant: some previous present, some earlier version of these circumstances) must press upon such a life as mine. That I chose the Colonial Service, that I came to Africa—and not just to Africa, but to that country: Well, if anything is chance, that was not—as I understand Sir Geoffrey Davenant to have once said.

In that long afternoon, there where I perhaps could not have helped arriving eventually, I sat and perspired, listening—though it was for a long time very nearly impossible to hear what was said to me: an appointment in Khartoum some months from now, and some decades past; a club, outside all frames of reference; the Last equipment. It was quite like listening to the unfollowable logic of a madman, as meaningless as the roar of the insects outside. I only began to hear when this aged man, older than my grandfather, told me of something that he—that I—that he and I—had once done in boyhood, something secret, trivial really and yet so shameful that even now I will not write it down; something that only Denys Winterset could know.

“There now,” he said, eyes cast down. “There now, you must believe me. You will listen. The world has not been as you thought it to be, any more than it was as I thought it to be, when I was as you are now. I shall tell you why: and we will hope that mine is the last story that need be told.”

And so it was that I heard how he had gone up the road to Groote Schuur, that evening in 1893 (a young man then of course, only twenty-three) with the Webley revolver in his breast pocket as heavy as his heart, nearly sick with wonder and apprehension. The tropical suit he had been made to wear was monstrously hot, complete with full waistcoat and hard collar; the topee they insisted he use was as weighty as a crown. As he came in sight of the house, he could hear the awesome cries from the lion house, where the cats were evidently being given their dinner.

The big house appeared raw and unfinished to him, the trees yet ungrown and the great masses of scentless flowers—hydrangea, bougainvillaea, canna—that had smothered the place when last he had seen it, some decades later, just beginning to spread.

“Rhodes himself met me at the door—actually he happened to be going out for his afternoon ride—and welcomed me,” he said. “I think the most striking thing about Cecil Rhodes, and it hasn’t been noticed much, was his utter lack of airs. He was the least self-conscious man I have ever known; he did many things for effect, but he was himself entirely single: as whole as an egg, as the old French used to say.

“The house is yours,’ he said to me. ‘Use it as you like. We don’t dress for dinner, as a rule; too many of the guests would be taken short, you see. Now some of the fellows are playing croquet in the Great Hall. Pay them no mind.’

“I remember little of that evening. I wandered the house: the great skins of animals, the heavy beams of teak, the brass chandeliers. I looked into the library, full of the specially transcribed and bound classics that Rhodes had ordered by the yard from Hatchard’s: all the authorities that Gibbon had consulted in writing the Decline and Fall. All of them: that had been Rhodes’s order.

“Dinner was a long and casual affair, entirely male—Rhodes had not even any female servants in the house. There was much toasting and hilarity about the successful march into Matabeleland, and the foundation of a fort, which news had only come that week; but Rhodes seemed quiet at the table’s head, even melancholy: Many of his closest comrades were gone with the expeditionary column, and he seemed to miss them. I do remember that at one point the conversation turned to America. Rhodes contended—no one disputed him—that if we (he meant the Empire, of course) had not lost America, the peace of the world could have been secured forever. ‘Forever,’ he said. ‘Perpetual Peace.’ And his pale opaque eyes were moist.

“How I comported myself at table—how I joined the talk, how I kept up conversations on topics quite unfamiliar to me—none of that do I recall. It helped that I was supposed to have been only recently arrived in Africa: though one of Rhodes’s band of merry men looked suspiciously at my sun-browned hands when I said so.

“As soon as I could after dinner, I escaped from the fearsome horseplay that began to develop among those left awake. I pleaded a touch of sun and was shown to my room. I took off the hateful collar and tie (not without difficulty) and lay on the bed otherwise fully clothed, alert and horribly alone. Perhaps you can imagine my thoughts.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think I can.”

“No. Well. No matter. I must have slept at last; it seemed to be after midnight when I opened my eyes and saw Rhodes standing in the doorway, a candlestick in his hand.

“‘Asleep?’ he asked softly.

“‘No,’ I answered. ‘Awake.’

“‘Can’t sleep either,’ he said. ‘Never do, much.’ He ventured another step into the room. ‘You ought to come out, see the sky,’ he said. ‘Quite spectacular. As long as you’re up.’

“I rose and followed him. He was without his coat and collar; I noticed he wore carpet slippers. One button of his wide braces was undone; I had the urge to button it for him. Pale starlight fell in blocks across the black and white tiles of the hall, and the huge heads of beasts were mobile in the candlelight as we passed. I murmured something about the grandness of his house.

“‘I told my architect,’ Rhodes answered. ‘I said I wanted the big and simple—the barbaric, if you like.’ The candle flame danced before him. ‘Simple. The truth is always simple.’

“The chessboard tiles of the hall continued out through the wide doors onto the veranda—the stoep as the old Dutch called it. At the frontier of the stoep, great pillars divided the night into panels filled with clustered stars, thick and near as vine blossoms. From far off came a long cry as of pain: a lion, awake.

“Rhodes leaned on the parapet, looking into the mystery of the sloping lawns beyond the stoep. ‘That’s good news, about the chaps up in Matabeleland,’ he said a little wistfully.

“‘Yes.’

“‘Pray God they’ll all be safe.’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Zambesia,’ he said after a moment. “What d’you think of that?’

“‘I beg your pardon?’

“‘As a name. For this country we’ll be building. Beyond the Zambesi, you see.’

“‘It’s a fine name.’

“He fell silent a time. A pale, powdery light filled the sky: false dawn. ‘They shall say, in London,’ he said, ‘“Rhodes has taken for the Empire a country larger than Europe, at not a sixpence of cost to us, and we shall have that, and Rhodes shall have six feet by four feet.”’

“He said this without bitterness, and turned from the parapet to face me. The Webley was pointed toward him. I had rested my (trembling) right hand on my left forearm, held up before me.

“‘Why, what on earth,’ he said.

“‘Look,’ I said.

“Drawing his look slowly away from me, he turned again. Out in the lawn, seeming in that illusory light to be but a long leap away, a male lion stood unmoving.

“‘The pistol won’t stop him,’ I said, ‘but it will deflect him. If you will go calmly through the door behind me, I’ll follow.’

“Rhodes backed away from the rail, and without haste or panic turned and walked past me into the house. The lion, ocher in the blue night, regarded him with a lion’s expression, at once aloof and concerned, and returned his look to me. I thought I smelled him. Then I saw movement in the young trees beyond. I thought for a moment that my lion must be an illusion, or a dream, for he took no notice of these sounds—the crush of a twig, a soft voice—but at length he did turn his eyes from me to them. I could see the dim figure of a gamekeeper in a wide-awake hat, carrying a rifle, and Negroes with nets and poles: They were closing in carefully on the escapee. I stood for a moment longer, still poised to shoot, and then beat my own retreat into the house.

“Lights were being lit down the halls, voices calling: A lion does not appear on the lawn every night. Rhodes stood looking, not out the window, but at me. With deep embarrassment, I clumsily pocketed the Webley (I knew what it had been given to me for, after all, even if he did not), and only then did I meet Rhodes’s eyes.

“I shall never forget their expression, those pale eyes: a kind of exalted wonder, almost a species of adoration.

“‘That’s twice now in one day,’ he said, ‘that you have kept me from harm. You must have been sent, that’s all. I really believe you have been sent.’

“I stood before him staring, with a horror dawning in my heart such as, God willing, I shall never feel again. I knew, you see, what it meant that I had let slip the moment: that now I could not go back the way I had come. The world had opened for an instant, and I and my companions had gone down through it to this time and place; and now it had closed over me again, a seamless whole. I had no one and nothing; no Last equipment awaited me at the Mount Nelson Hotel; the Otherhood could not rescue me, for I had canceled it. I was entirely alone.

“Rhodes, of course, knew nothing of this. He crossed the hall to where I stood, with slow steps, almost reverently. He embraced me, a sudden great bear hug. And do you know what he did then?”

“What did he do?”

“He took me by the shoulders and held me at arm’s length, and he insisted that I stay there with him. In effect, he offered me a job. For life, if I wanted it.”

“What did you do?”

“I took it.” He had finished his drink, and poured more. “I took it. You see, I simply had no place else to go.”

Afternoon was late in the bungalow where we sat together, day hurried away with this tale. “I think,” I said, “I shall have that drink now, if it’s no trouble.”

He rose and found a glass; he wiped the husk of a bug from it and filled it from his bottle. “It has always astonished me,” he said, “how the mind, you know, can construct with lightning speed a reasonable, if quite mistaken, story to account for an essentially unreasonable event: I have had more than one occasion to observe this process.

“I was sure, instantly sure, that a lion which had escaped from Rhodes’s lion house had appeared on the lawn at Groote Schuur just at the moment when I tried, but could not bring myself, to murder Cecil Rhodes. I can still see that cat in the pale light of predawn. And yet I cannot know if that is what happened, or if it is only what my mind has substituted for what did happen, which cannot be thought about.

“I am satisfied in my own mind—having had a lifetime to ponder it—that it cannot be possible for one to meet oneself on a trip into the past or future: that is a lie, invented by the Otherhood to forestall its own extinction, which was however inevitable.

“But I dream, sometimes, that I am lying on the bed at Groote Schuur, and a man enters—it is not Rhodes, but a man in a black coat and a bowler hat, into whose face I look as into a rotted mirror, who tells me impossible things.

“And I know that in fact there was no lion house at Groote Schuur. Rhodes wanted one, and it was planned, but it was never built.”

• • • •

In the summer of that year Rhodes—alive, alive-oh—went on expedition up into Pondoland, seeking concessions from an intransigent chief named Sicgau. Denys Winterset—this one, telling me the tale—went with him.

“Rhodes took Sicgau out into a field of mealies where he had had us set up a Maxim gun. Rhodes and the chief stood in the sun for a moment, and then Rhodes gave a signal; we fired the Maxim for a few seconds and mowed down much of the field. The chief stood unmoving for a long moment after the silence returned. Rhodes said to him softly: ‘You see, this is what will happen to you and all your warriors if you give us any further trouble.’

“As a stratagem, that seemed to me both sporting and thrifty. It worked, too. But we were later to use the Maxims against men and not mealies. Rhodes knew that the Matabele had finally to be suppressed, or the work of building a white state north of the Zambezi would be hopeless. A way was found to intervene in a quarrel the Matabele were having with the Mashona, and in not too long we were at war with the Matabele. They were terribly, terribly brave; they were, after all, the first eleven in those parts, and they believed with reason that no one could withstand their leaf-bladed spears. I remember how they would come against the Maxims, and be mown down like the mealies, and fall back, and muster for another attack. Your heart sank; you prayed they would go away, but they would not. They came on again, to be cut down again. These puzzled, bewildered faces: I cannot forget them.

“And Christ, such drivel was written in the papers then, about the heroic stand of a few beleaguered South African police against so many battle-crazed natives! The only one who saw the truth was the author of that silly poem—Belloc, was it? You know—‘Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun, and they have not.’ It was as simple as that. The truth, Rhodes said, is always simple.”

He took out a large pocket-handkerchief and mopped his face and his eyes; no doubt it was hot, but it seemed to me that he wept. Tears, idle tears.

“I met Dr. Jameson during the Matabele campaign,” he continued. “Leander Starr Jameson. I think I have never met a man—and I have met many wicked and twisted ones—whom I have loathed so completely and so instantly. I had hardly heard of him, of course; he was already dead and unknown in this year as it had occurred in my former past, the only version of these events I knew. Jameson was a great lover of the Maxim; he took several along on the raid he made into the Transvaal in 1896, the raid that would eventually lead to war with the Boers, destroy Rhodes’s credit, and begin the end of Empire: so I have come to see it. The fool.

“I took no part in that war, thank God. I went north to help put the railroad through: Cape-to-Cairo.” He smiled, seemed almost about to laugh, but did not; only mopped his face again. It was as though I were interrogating him, and he were telling me all this under the threat of the rubber truncheon or the rack. I wanted him to stop, frankly; only I dared say nothing.

“I made up for a lack of engineering expertise by my very uncertain knowledge of where and how, one day, the road would run. The telegraph had already reached Uganda; next stop was Wadi Haifa. The rails would not go through so easily. I became a sort of scout, leading the advance parties, dealing with the chieftains. The Maxim went with me, of course. I learned the weapon well.”

Here there came another silence, another inward struggle to continue. I was left to picture what he did not say: That which I did I should not have done; that which I should have done I did not do.

“Rhodes gave five thousand pounds to the Liberal party to persuade them not to abandon Egypt: for there his railroad must be hooked to the sea. But then of course came the end of the whole scheme in German Tanganyika: no Cape-to-Cairo road. Germany was growing great in the world; the Germans wanted to have an Empire of their own. It finished Rhodes.

“By that time I was a railroad expert. The nonexistent Uganda Railroad was happy to acquire my services: I had a reputation, among the blacks, you see . . . I think there was a death for every mile of that road as it went through the jungle to the coast: rinderpest, fever, Nanda raids. We would now and then hang a captured Nanda warrior from the telegraph poles, to discourage the others. By the time the rails reached Mombasa, I was an old man; and Cecil Rhodes was dead.”

He died of his old heart condition, the condition that had brought him out to Africa in the first place. He couldn’t breathe in the awful heat of that summer of 1902, the worst anyone could remember; he wandered from room to room at Groote Schuur, trying to catch his breath. He lay in the darkened drawing room and could not breathe. They took him down to his cottage by the sea, and put ice between the ceiling and the iron roof to cool it; all afternoon the punkahs spooned the air. Then, suddenly, he decided to go to England. April was there: April showers. A cold spring: It seemed that could heal him. So a cabin was fitted out for him aboard a P&O liner, with electric fans and refrigerating pipes and oxygen tanks.

He died on the day he was to sail. He was buried at that place on the Matopos, the place he had chosen himself; buried facing north.

“He wanted the heroes of the Matabele campaign to be buried there with him. I could be one, if I chose; only I think my name would not be found among the register of those who fought. I think my name does not appear at all in history: not in the books of the Uganda Railroad, not in the register of the Mount Nelson Hotel for 1893. I have never had the courage to look.”

I could not understand this, though it sent a cold shudder between my shoulder blades. The Original Situation, he explained, could not be returned to; but it could be restored, as those events that the Otherhood brought about were one by one come upon in time, and then not brought about. And as the Original Situation was second by second restored, the whole of his adventure in the past was continually worn away into nonbeing, and a new future replaced his old past ahead of him.

“You must imagine how it has been for me,” he said, his voice now a whisper from exertion and grief. “To everyone else it seemed only that time went on—history—the march of events. But to me it has been otherwise. It has been the reverse of the nightmare from which you wake in a sweat of relief to find that the awful disaster has not occurred, the fatal step was not taken: for I have seen the real world gradually replaced by this other, nightmare world, which everyone else assumes is real, until nothing in past or present is as I knew it to be; until I am like the servant in Job: I only am escaped to tell thee.”

• • • •

March 8, 1983

I awoke again this morning from the dream of the forest in the sea: a dream without people or events in it, or anything whatever except the gigantic dendrites, vast masses of pale leaves, and the tideless waters, light and sunshot toward the surface, darkening to impenetrability down below. It seemed there were schools of fish, or flocks of birds, in the leaves, something that faintly disturbed them, now and then; otherwise, stillness.

No matter that orthogonal logic refutes it, I cannot help believing that my present succeeds in time the other presents and futures that have gone into making it. I believe that as I grow older, I come to incorporate the experiences I have had as an older man in pasts (and futures) now obsolete: as though in absolute time I continually catch up with myself in the imaginary times that fluoresce from it, gathering dreamlike memories of the lives I have lived therein. Somewhere God (I have come to believe in God; there was simply no existing otherwise) is keeping these universes in a row, and sees to it that they happen in succession, the most recently generated one last—and so felt to be last, no matter where along it I stand.

I remember, being now well past the age that he was then, the Uganda Railroad, the Nanda arrows, all the death.

I remember the shabby library and the coal fire, the encyclopedia in another orthography; the servant at the double doors.

I think that in the end, should I live long enough, I shall remember nothing but the forest in the sea. That is the terminus: complete strangeness that is at the same time utterly changeless; what cannot be becoming all that has ever been.

I took him out myself, in the end, abandoning my commission to do so, for there was no way that he could have crossed the border by himself, without papers, a nonexistent man. And it was just at that moment, as we motored up through the Sudan past Wadi Halfa, that the Anglo-French expeditionary force took Port Said. The Suez incident, that last hopeless spasm of Empire, was taking its inevitable course. Inevitable: I have not used the word before.

When we reached the Canal, the Israelis had already occupied the east bank. The airport at Ismailia was a shambles, the greater part of the Egyptian Air Force shot up, planes scattered in twisted attitudes like dead birds after a storm. We could find no plane to take us. He had gone desperately broody, wide-eyed and speechless, useless for anything. I felt as though in a dream where one is somehow saddled with an idiot brother one had not had before.

And yet it was only the confusion and mess that made my task possible at all, I suppose. There were so many semiofficial and unofficial British scurrying or loafing around Port Said when we entered the city that our passage was unremarked. We went through the smoke and dust of that famously squalid port like two ghosts—two ghosts progressing through a ghost city at the retreating edge of a ghost of empire. And the crunch of broken glass continually underfoot.

We went out on an old oiler attached to the retreating invasion fleet, which had been ordered home having accomplished nothing except, I suppose, the end of the British Empire in Africa. He stood on the oiler’s boat deck and watched the city grow smaller and said nothing. But once he laughed, his dry, light laugh: It made me think of the noise that Homer says the dead make. I asked the reason.

“I was remembering the last time I went out of Africa,” he said. “On a day much like this. Very much like this. This calm weather; this sea. Nothing else the same, though. Nothing else.” He turned to me smiling, and toasted me with an imaginary glass. “The end of an era,” he said.

• • • •

March 10

My chronicle seems to be degenerating into a diary.

I note in the Times this morning the sale of the single known example of the 1856 magenta British Guiana, for a sum far smaller than was supposed to be its worth. Neither the names of the consortium that sold it nor the names of the buyers were made public. I see in my mind’s eye a small, momentary fire.

I see now that there is no reason why this story should come last, no matter my feeling, no matter that in Africa he hoped it would. Indeed there is no reason why it should even fall last in this chronicling, nor why the world, the sad world in which it occurs, should be described as succeeding all others—it does not, any more than it precedes them. For the sake of a narrative only, perhaps; perhaps, like God, we cannot live without narrative.

I used to see him, infrequently, in the years after we both came back from Africa: he didn’t die as quickly as we both supposed he would. He used to seek me out, in part to borrow a little money—he was living on the dole and on what he brought out of Africa, which was little enough. I stood him to tea now and then and listened to his stories. He’d appear at our appointed place in a napless British Warm, ill-fitting, as his eyeglasses and National Health false teeth were also. I imagine he was terribly lonely. I know he was.

I remember the last time we met, at a Lyons teashop near the Marble Arch. I’d left the Colonial Service, of course, under a cloud, and taken a position teaching at a crammer’s in Holborn until something better came along (nothing ever did; I recently inherited the headmaster’s chair at the same school; little has changed there over the decades but the general coloration of the students).

“This curious fancy haunts me,” he said to me on that occasion. “I picture the Fellows, all seated around the great table in the executive committee’s dining room; only it is rather like Miss Havisham’s, you know, in Dickens: The roast beef has long since gone foul, and the silver tarnished, and the draperies rotten; and the Fellows dead in their chairs, or mad, dust on their evening clothes, the port dried up in their glasses. Huntington. Davenant. The President pro tem.”

He stirred sugar in his tea (he liked it horribly sweet; so, of course, do I). “It’s not true, you know, that the Club stood somehow at a nexus of possibilities, amid multiplying realities. If that were so, then what the Fellows did would be trivial or monstrous or both: generating endless new universes just to see if they could get one to their liking. No: It is we, out here, who live in but one of innumerable possible worlds. In there, they were like a man standing at the north pole, whose only view, wherever he looks, is south: They looked out upon a single encompassing reality, which it was their opportunity—no, their duty, as they saw it—to make as happy as possible, as free from the calamities they knew of as they could make it.

“Well, they were limited people, more limited than their means to work good or evil. That which they did they should not have done. And yet what they hoped for us was not despicable. The calamities they saw were real. Anyone who could would try to save us from them: as a mother would pull her child, her foolish child, from the fire. They ought to be forgiven; they ought.”

I walked with him up toward Hyde Park Corner. He walked now with agonizing slowness, as I will, too, one day; it was a rainy autumn Sunday, and his pains were severe. At Hyde Park Corner he stopped entirely, and I thought perhaps he could go no farther: but then I saw that he was studying the monument that stands there. He went closer to it, to read what was written on it.

I have myself more than once stopped before this neglected monument. It is a statue of the boy David, a memorial to the Machine Gun Corps, and was put up after the First World War. Some little thought must have gone into deciding how to memorialize that arm which had changed war forever; it seemed to require a religious sentiment, a quote from the Bible, and one was found. Beneath the naked boy are written words from Kings:

Saul has slain his thousands

But David his tens of thousands.

He stood in the rain, in his vast coat, looking down at these words, as though reading them over and over; and the faint rain that clung to his cheeks mingled with his tears:

Saul has slain his thousands

But David his tens of thousands.

I never saw him again after that day, and I did not seek for him: I think it unlikely he could have been found.

AFTERWORD

Much of the impulse and many of the details of the preceding come from the second and third volumes of Jan Morris’s enthralling chronicle of the rise and decline of the British Empire, Pax Britannica (1968) and Farewell the Trumpets (1978). I hope she will forgive the author the liberties he has taken, and accept his gratitude for the many hours she has allowed him to spend dawdling in a world more fantastical than any he could himself invent.

The story of Rhodes’s death and many details of his character and conversation are taken from Sarah Gertrude Millin’s elegant and neglected biography Cecil Rhodes (London, 1933).

The story of Rhodes in Pondoland, along with much else that was suggestive, comes from John Ellis’s book The Social History of the Machine Gun (1975).

For an introduction to that book, for his convincing analysis of the possibilities and limits of what I have called orthogonal logic, and in general for his infectious enthusiasm for notions, the author’s thanks to Bob Chasell (hi, Bob).

© 1989 by John Crowley. Originally published in Novelty by John Crowley. Reprinted by permission of the Author and The Lotts Agency.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine in 1942, his father then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movie and found work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel The Deep in 1975, and his fifteenth volume of fiction, Four Freedoms, in 2009. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 2006 he was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He finds it more gratifying that almost all his work is still in print.

EXCERPT: Medusa Uploaded (Tor Books)

Emily Devenport | 8839 words

Medusa Uploaded by Emily Devenport offers readers a fast-paced science fiction thriller on the limits of power and control, and the knife-edge between killing for revenge or a greater good.

My name is Oichi Angelis, and I am a worm.

They see me every day. They consider me harmless. And that’s the trick, isn’t it?

A generation starship can hide many secrets. When an Executive clan suspects Oichi of insurgency and discreetly shoves her out an airlock, one of those secrets finds and rescues her.

Officially dead, Oichi begins to rebalance power one assassination at a time and uncovers the shocking truth behind the generation starship and the Executive clans.

Available May 1, 2018 from Tor Books.

1
Lock 212

My name is Oichi Angelis, and I am a worm. I exist in the outer skin of the Generation Ship Olympia, and I spend most of my time squeezing through its utility tunnels, doing work for the Executives. I am partially deaf, dumb, and blind. That I am not entirely so is my greatest secret. It is the reason I was able to kill Ryan Charmayne two hours after curfew, inside Lock 212.

Don’t feel bad for Ryan. He was there to commit murder, too. He thought he was going to bump off a rival who was using Lock 212 to rendezvous with a mole from his inner circle. The fact that Ryan didn’t know who the mole was may have been the reason he didn’t order someone else to do the killing, but it wasn’t the only reason he came in person. Ryan enjoyed the dirty work. He just couldn’t afford to stoop to it as often as he would like, considering his lofty position in the House of Clans.

Curfew doesn’t apply to Executives, so Ryan roamed at will. His brethren rarely had business in the tunnels where we wormy folk live; he felt sure no one would see him. He hardly seemed to mind that it was cold enough to make his breath condense into mist as he marched through the tangle of narrow corridors.

I felt a grudging admiration. If only his character were as fine as his sense of direction.

The air locks in Sector 200 are massive; they were built to accommodate cargo ships. They possess an odd, almost Gothic beauty because of their vaulted ceilings and curved outer doors. They’re the only wide-open spaces most worms can access on Olympia. Their grandeur inspires me.

Air locks inspired Ryan for a different reason. He had used them (sometimes secretly, sometimes with official approval) to kill people. Lock 212 was a bit too grand for his purpose—after all, you just needed something big enough to spit someone into the void—but it had the advantage of being isolated. Olympia hadn’t received a cargo ship in many years, so Executives had no reason to come here. And it wasn’t the sort of place they liked to slum. The worms were all in their burrows, so he had the place to himself.

He slowed his pace when he saw the inner door. It was open, which is against regulations. If the outer door suffered a catastrophic breach, depressurization would occur until the emergency doors spun shut. The inner doors shut within ten seconds under those circumstances, but that was all it would take to suck a bunch of people and equipment out the door. Ryan didn’t give a damn about the potential loss of life, but if there’s one thing that will piss an Executive off, it’s a broken rule. Disapproval was clear on his face, until it gave way to curiosity. After all, he had two goals: to kill the rival and to find out who the mole was. They must be somewhere inside, plotting, and that also must be why they had left the door open.

I wondered why he didn’t smell the blood. I smelled it from my position. I’m a Servant, and the Executives believe they control everything I see and hear. All worms share this modification; it’s implanted into our brains. But for some reason, they never thought to control what I smell, taste, or feel. I would have been able to smell the blood even before I entered the lock, but he didn’t react until he saw his rival’s body.

He looked surprised. Then his mask of Executive serenity slipped back into place. I’m guessing that he wondered if the mole wasn’t working both sides—maybe the traitor had decided to stick with him after all. But he couldn’t trust a guy like that; he needed to know who it was. He had hoped to find his rival and the mole together.

And he had, though he didn’t know it yet. Because I was the mole.

I wanted him to come farther inside the lock. His curiosity warred with his caution, but I had gambled he would be fascinated by the wet stuff. My bet paid off.

The lock was so huge, you could have fit several hundred people in there. Giant machines sat on claws and treads around the periphery, and cables hung from the ceiling. He paused and listened for a long moment. Unlike mine, his hearing was normal. But in this case, that was his undoing, because I’m modified to be as silent as a statue.

Finally he walked across the floor, the heels of his fine boots sparking echoes. He knelt beside the body of Percy O’Reilly, his former best friend and nemesis, and placed his finger on Percy’s throat. A casual observer might have thought he was feeling for a pulse. He was merely touching the blood. His expression revealed disappointment, not triumph. He wanted to have been the one who killed Percy, and to have enjoyed taunting him as he did it.

He regarded the smear of blood on his finger. Perhaps he wanted to taste it, but I didn’t give him the chance. I closed the inner door.

Ryan jumped. He made a halfhearted attempt to run to it, but gave it up as futile. Anyone else would have run to it anyway. They would have tried to work the controls to get it to open again. But Ryan had played that game with his own victims. He knew the door wouldn’t open for him.

I would have run for one of the utility lockers. They’re full of pressure suits, and we worms make sure their air tanks are full. The outer door takes sixty seconds to respond to an order to open if the lock has not been depressurized first, and he could have made it to the lockers by then. He could have shut himself inside one of them, or in one of the machine cockpits. But I know that because I’m a worker.

Ryan could only think like an Executive. “You’re messing with the wrong man,” he barked as he turned in a circle, searching for his hidden enemy. Then he heard me descending from the cables, and he looked up.

The anger in his face gave way to wonder. I was plugged into Medusa, and I’m sure he had never seen anything like her. No one is supposed to know how to activate her, and no one is supposed to have the modifications for the brain interface.

I knew how. I had slipped inside her suit and had her tentacles stretching and flexing as if they were made of flesh instead of biometal. I hovered over Ryan until Medusa’s face was inches from his. What I saw through her eyes was far more than what I could have seen with my own. What I heard through her ears was the wild beating of his heart.

“Who are you?” he asked.

I didn’t answer, though I had things I wanted to say to him.

“I think I need to offer you a job,” he said. “I’ll make it worth your while. I could use someone with your talent.”

That was nonsense, of course. Ryan’s grandmother, Lady Sheba Charmayne, had written the Right to Work Rules. Only the Executive clans were rewarded for their work. Everyone else worked for just enough food to survive, just enough heat not to freeze.

I activated my voice. It was a voice Ryan knew well, because it was his favorite.

When I serve the Executives, they don’t control what I say, but when I’m in their presence, they control what voice I use. They can make me sound any way they want. They have a variety of voices from which to choose. The one Ryan likes best is the Magic Kingdom voice. It is remarkably cheerful.

“You must be that new girl from Shantytown,” I said.

He frowned. I think he felt insulted because he thought I was calling him a girl. I was disappointed that he didn’t recognize the very speech he had delivered to me not long after I began work as a Servant. Granted, he had said it to me six years before, and a lot had happened since then. But I had hoped he would recognize the derogatory term. Shantytown was the name he and his fellow Executives had used for Olympia’s sister vessel, Titania. Titania had once been as grand and glorious as Olympia, until Ryan’s father, Baylor Charmayne, pirated as many of her supplies as he could get his hands on—and then blew her up with two hundred thousand people aboard.

My parents were among the people who died on Titania. I wasn’t there, because I had come to Olympia to work as a Servant. I was attractive enough to please their eyes, and I was willing to undergo the modifications. I had hoped to earn enough credits to move my parents to Olympia.

Those first cycles as a Servant, I stood behind the banquet tables in the home of Baylor Charmayne and reacted instantly and smoothly to the needs of his uber-privileged guests. My face was deadened so I couldn’t show any expression. That’s so I wouldn’t offend them or make them uncomfortable by looking shocked, grieved, angry, amused, or annoyed by anything they said or did when I served them. If we are serene and our voices are pleasant, they can concentrate on the very important work they do. They can relax during their leisure time and forget about the multitude of responsibilities with which they are burdened.

Ryan behaved himself while his clan elders were watching, but he eventually cornered me in a service tunnel after one of my work cycles. He believed himself to be handsome, because he was tall and athletic, and he had lustrous black hair. The Charmaynes were well known for their great hair. But his charm did not persuade me, so he was forced to pin me against the wall. He couldn’t grope me, because my uniform was too stiff, the material too thick. So he bit my lip until it bled.

While a doctor was patching my lip, I used one of my secret modifications to link in to the communication network and call my parents on Titania. That’s when I found out Titania wasn’t there anymore.

Six years later, I held Ryan in my tentacles among the shadows in Lock 212. I placed my gloved hands on either side of his face. It must have felt like a caress—the gloves are supple, though they can withstand void conditions. “How about a kiss, little Shantytown girl?” I said with my Magic Kingdom voice. “You’re not going to say no, are you? Shantytown girls who say no can find themselves on the wrong side of an air lock.”

There was a glimmer of understanding in his eyes. He might not remember that those were the exact words he had once said to me—it was one incident in a lifetime of fun he had enjoyed at the expense of people who couldn’t fight back. But he wasn’t stupid. When I said Shantytown girl, I gave him a clue about my status in life. He seemed hopeful he could use it against me.

“You’ll pay for this,” he said. But I guessed he was talking about what I had already done. He still hadn’t realized what I was going to do. Not until the alarm for the outer door sounded.

I held him tight—I didn’t want him to fly out the door. Medusa’s tentacles locked us both in place as the air rushed past us, taking Percy O’Reilly with it. Death by exposure to void takes less time than you might think. Air will immediately vent from the higher-pressure environment of your lungs, out your nose and mouth. Because of that, you lose consciousness pretty quick. So Ryan didn’t struggle that long.

I held him that way for a while. The light of the Hella system poured into the air lock, lending the scene a sacred quality. To me, it was sacred. Those grand air locks were the only places where I felt the presence of God. I wondered if Ryan had felt him, too.

I took Ryan’s body to the open door. With my modified vision, I could gaze directly at Hella Major. I had never seen a sun that close—in person, so to speak. It didn’t look like the big yellow sun I had often seen in tutorials about the Homeworld. We were over 9.0 astronomical units away from it, yet it still looked like a sun instead of a distant point of light. Unfortunately, Hella Major was between Olympia and its binary partner, but it was still a glorious sight. Only one star rivaled it in the field visible through that grand lock: Charon, a third companion to the Hellas, influenced by them but distant enough to host its own planets. Within the next couple of years, Charon would dominate the view, and the Hellas would recede.

I turned Ryan to face Charon and gave him a big push. He and Olympia were going the same speed, but their paths diverged as Olympia continued her journey to the star toward whose system we are faithfully bound.

He must be floating there still.

I no longer have my natural eyes, so I generate few tears. But I shed one as I closed the outer door and bade farewell to Medusa, who went back to her lair. I didn’t cry out of pity for Ryan, but I couldn’t say it was for joy, either. I think it may have been for the sheer terror and beauty of what I had seen—and done. The music that played in my head then was Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

Its theme could have been sung by a monk raising his voice to heaven in a lonely cathedral, but it was written to be performed by two string orchestras. The first few notes are plucked on the strings; they sound like dawn spreading its arms over the edge of a world—something I have dreamed but never seen. And when those strings are played with bows, they evoke the voices of a celestial choir. Soloists emerge from time to time to lend the music a human quality, and then the other instruments join together again in a swell of passion that transcends mortal limitations.

I’m sure Ryan would not have understood how I felt when I listened to the Fantasia. My father was the chief advocate for the preservation of classical music from our past, and my father failed in that mission.

Or he seemed to fail. Because when I immigrated to Olympia, I brought more than my toothbrush. I brought technology entrusted to me by my parents. That technology is the reason Ryan Charmayne had to die.

Perhaps you think I killed him for revenge? Not at all. Ryan died because he was trying to shoot down Lady Charmayne’s Music in Education initiative. Music was a tool of discipline, not inspiration, according to Ryan. He wanted to make the point that his father, Baylor Charmayne, was a wimp who was afraid to defy a mother who was long dead.

Ryan had never heard a note of that music. But that didn’t matter to him—or to me. His stupid obstruction of the bill mattered. That opposition died with him, and Lady Charmayne’s (posthumously stated) will prevailed.

I returned to my duties, though I had long since stopped posing as a Servant. I spied on Baylor Charmayne and his cronies. I was watching when he learned that his son had disappeared. He eyed Clan O’Reilly, and they returned the favor. The Executives have very good reasons to suspect each other of murder and treachery. But no accusation was spoken out loud.

Within ten rest-work cycles, Baylor rallied the House to pass the Music in Education bill, dedicating it to his son’s memory, and every child on Olympia was implanted with the vast library of classical and folk music that my father had so lovingly compiled and preserved. The Executives congratulated each other for their foresight, never suspecting what else had been implanted along with that noble music.

No one will ever know how hard my father worked to preserve the music he truly loved, that he believed to be one of the truest connections to a past that was lost to us. He would have done so even without the communication biotech hidden inside that database. Everyone will believe Lady Charmayne designed the music education program, even though that idea never would have crossed her mind. She knew little about music. Her true ambitions were utterly heartless.

She was the chief architect of our misery. But if I have my way, no one will remember her that way.

No one will know what she was really planning.

2
The Girl from Shantytown

“We felt soil and grass beneath our feet,” my father told me. “Can you imagine the mud squishing between your toes?”

“No,” I said. “I never squished anything.” I had never seen the Habitat Sectors inside Olympia and Titania, but my parents pined for them. I was five, and my father spoke of the Habitat Sectors the way other parents speak of the wondrous lands in fairy tales.

“Flowers and fruits and vegetables grow there,” he said. “Grain and nuts and sweet grasses. The air smells of green things. Far above you, clouds float, and sometimes rain falls from them.”

I knew what he meant, because I had seen images of rain. Also of snow, lightning, and tornadoes, though none of those happened on the generation ships. The ships were big enough inside to create light rain showers, but that was all. Crops were watered by irrigation, and the water was recycled. My father had worked in those gardens when he was younger, but robots did most of that work now. He was no longer allowed inside the Habitat Sectors. As a scientist, he was restricted to the tech sector.

“Think of The Enchanted Lake.” His eyes shone. “Hear it inside your head. The images you see will show you the beauty of nature.”

I didn’t have to search my memory for this gentle music by Anatoly Lyadov. Father had implanted the music database in my brain when I was four. He broke the law when he did this, but his crime was unsuspected. My modification was one my father believed all children should have. His proposal had been shot down. The Executives thought it was foolish and pointless—they could not imagine why he wanted to do such a thing. So they didn’t suspect that he already had.

My mother enfolded me in her arms. Flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, timpani, bass drum, harp, celesta, and strings wove their musical threads together inside my head, like braided streams flowing into The Enchanted Lake. I imagined birds hopping from branch to branch as the dawn woke them, and frogs suspended with just their eyes over the water; I would have done so even without the images my mother had contributed to complement the music.

Those images came from our Homeworld: rain and lightning, waves on the shore, underground pools, tall grass waving in the wind—vids, photographs, drawings, paintings, tapestries, sculptures, depicting scenes of a living world in all its aspects. The three of us snuggled in our cramped burrow, seeing those scenes and hearing our music. It allowed us to hope, and dream, and imagine, while our fellow worms slept and plotted to survive another cycle.

• • • •

When I was eleven, my father tried to enroll me in the science program, and they refused me. It was the first time I ever saw him angry. But his voice stayed reasonable as he spoke with the official at the enrollment desk. “My daughter tested in the top two percent.”

The official didn’t smirk, but I could tell she was enjoying herself. “The class is full,” she said. “They had to cut back, you know that. We’re in emergency mode.”

My father’s hand tightened around mine. “She will have to work in the manual labor force if she doesn’t enter this class.”

“Good thing she’s so smart,” said the official. “I’m sure she’ll find a way to rise above it all.”

My father’s face was the color of coffee-with-creamer, but it darkened to purple then. I was astounded at the amount of rage and despair that simmered in his eyes. The official should have melted on the spot.

Instead, she seemed to feed on his anger. She pointed toward the Security officer slouching near the door. “At the end of that corridor there’s an access hall that leads to Lock 017. You have two choices, Citizen. You can walk your brat out of here and get back to work, or you can take your complaint to the wrong side of Lock 017. Got it?”

She seemed to hope that he didn’t get it.

My father turned and escorted me out of the room. His hand still held mine tightly, but he took small steps so I could keep up with him. We walked down corridors that became narrower, but when we arrived at the junction that would lead me back to the children’s school-work sector, he chose another direction. His hand relaxed, and I could tell he had a plan.

Executives have always said that the generation ships are overpopulated, but you couldn’t tell that if you judged by how many people you encounter in the tunnels. Sometimes you can walk for hours without encountering anyone. We were alone, but my father didn’t speak until he ushered me into a small room that looked like a doctor’s office. He helped me onto an examining table and put his hands on my shoulders. “Oichi, never act unless you have thought first.”

“Okay,” I promised, not yet realizing that he had given me the advice by which I would conduct the rest of my life.

“I am not surprised by what the official had to say,” he continued. “Your mother and I worried this could happen, and we have a backup plan.”

I gazed into his face. I thought my father was the handsomest man alive, but I worried about the white hairs on his head that seemed to be chasing away the black. My father was twenty years older than my mother, and he was beginning to look it.

“Oichi, the database we placed in your head does not just contain music. The mathematical structure of that music is perfect for hiding information. People think it’s just a collection of pretty sounds; they never search to discover what’s hidden between the notes.”

“Between them?” I said.

“Between them,” said my father, “hides an interface that is far more complex than the one used by most people. Only twenty of us have it. We thought we could introduce it to children as part of the new generation of education enhancements, but our program was cut. The Executives decided that music is frivolous, and has no value in education.” His scornful tone warned me what he thought of that attitude.

“We implanted them in each other,” he continued, “because we knew the interface would give us an advantage. This is your gift from us—and it is your greatest secret. You must never speak of it to anyone, not even to your mother and me—not even over what you assume to be a private link.”

“I won’t.”

“Good,” he said. “Because I’m about to break the law again. The version you’ve already got is limited. I’m going to give you the updated version.”

• • • •

Two hours later, I felt my mother’s hands on my face. I lay in our tiny quarters, and she was toweling my hair dry after washing the blood from it. I didn’t try to open my eyes; I felt content to drift in the new inner space my father had implanted in my brain.

There was nothing hazy about that space. But despite that clarity, I have trouble conjuring my mother’s face from that time. She had skin the color of honey and hair that was blacker than the void. She wore her hair in an ancient style, like a performer in the Noh plays in my culture database. She moved like one of those actors, gracefully and with economy. But what I remember the most clearly about her is her voice.

She finished her toweling and arranged my clean hair on the pillow. “Oichi, an ancient philosopher named Marshall McLuhan once said that the medium is the message. It doesn’t matter how elegant, or practical, or brilliant, or fair an idea may be. It will be ignored if it comes from the worms, or the asteroid miners, or the scientists, or even the midlevel Executives. It does no good to preach to that choir. For the powerful ones to change the laws, they have to believe that those changes are the result of their own intelligence. Their pride will stand nothing less.”

I felt her lips on each of my hands, and then on my brow. Her voice was so beautiful, I’m surprised the Executives didn’t include it in their library of pleasant voices.

“From now on,” she said, “you will learn everything you can from school, and even at work. Then you will come home, and your father and I will teach you everything we know about how to appear normal—and how to survive.”

What she didn’t say was that everything they taught me would stimulate what was now in my head to make other connections for intelligence and survival. But if that were to happen, we could never speak of that again—we could never even hint at it.

“This cycle, you need to rest.” Mother kissed me again. “A new work cycle begins in twelve hours.”

She and Father spoke quietly to each other, and a little later they made sure I sipped some nutrient broth. I amused myself with my music library, starting with Gustav Holst’s Planets Suite, then wandering on to orchestral performances of Claude Debussy’s Nocturnes. The images that accompanied the music ranged from majestic to whimsical, but all of them were beautiful, and I enjoyed myself immensely.

Eventually I fell asleep, but I don’t think I slept very long. When I woke, the lights had been dialed down to night mode, and my parents were tucked away in their own cubby. I tried to decide on another music selection, but my mind kept wandering back to the official who had told us there was no room in the science program for another student.

My father had scoffed at this. “They always claim there is not enough. Not enough food, though we have plenty. Not enough fuel, though we mine it as we go. Not enough heat, not enough light. Not enough room in the Habitat Sectors—for anyone but the Executives. But the space on the inside edge of the generation ships is immense; it could accommodate all of us.”

“Then why don’t they share?”

“Because,” said my father, “nothing is valuable unless it seems to be scarce.”

I lay in my cubby and wondered about the grass under the feet of the Executives, the mud they squished between their toes, and a notion occurred to me. My new modifications allowed me access to more than just music and images. They linked me with an extensive communications and surveillance network as well.

This was what my father and his colleagues had hidden inside the music program. We thought the Executives would approve of our music database, he said. But we overestimated their appreciation of high culture. They couldn’t grasp the point of preserving that part of our past.

At that age, I wasn’t inclined to ponder the frivolous way the Executives had axed my father’s life’s work (both the public endeavor and the private, subversive one). Instead, I indulged my curiosity about things I had never seen.

I thought there must be monitors inside the Habitat Sectors. I wondered if I might have a peek at the green spaces my father remembered so fondly. I pictured the general directory, then selected subdirectories.

The directory was far more complex and detailed than anything I had known. What delighted me about it was that it didn’t just provide links for individuals; it also provided them for systems—for instance, the Maintenance system might contact a repair drone and order it to perform a task.

Even more intriguing, it showed me links that were currently in use. I dived deeper into the directories, until I saw something that surprised me, a link in use between two people: s. charmayne and b. charmayne.

Even at my age, I knew who Lady Sheba was. My mother privately called her the Iron Fist, which did not make her sound like a nice woman. Without planning to invade anything, I touched that highlighted link between S. and B., hoping it might tell me who they were.

[. . . not enough room in the lifeboat.] I heard the woman’s voice as if she were speaking right into my ear. This was because I was accessing the link with my communication implants, and the parts of my brain that processed language and hearing were stimulated. The voices I heard were the ones the Charmaynes had chosen to represent them.

I withdrew from the link, startled. Did Sheba know I had eavesdropped? Was it really the Lady Charmayne? Would she blow me out Lock 017 if she knew it was me?

But Father had said nobody knew about my special modifications. That must mean they couldn’t know, unless I told them. So I touched the link again.

[. . . always use that metaphor,] said a man’s voice. [Can’t you find a new one? It’s getting old.]

[It’s not a metaphor, you idiot, it’s the truth. If we don’t control the piggies, they’ll overrun us. We didn’t make all these sacrifices and come all this way just so our inferiors could outvote us and ruin everything. Put your damned boot on their necks and keep it there, Baylor. Do you hear me?]

The man sighed. [Yes, Mother.]

They talked in that vein for quite a while, and I got bored with them. So I dropped the link and searched for anything that might give me a look at the Habitat Sectors, but the closest I got was a doorway leading from a supply room on the inside edge of Titania’s skin. The door was open, and I could see light filtered through green things. I saw a spot of color, too, from a patch of flowers. It was pleasant, downright charming, but try as I might, I couldn’t get on the other side of the door to gaze at the big picture. My father had said that there was a horizon, and it curved up, and if you looked straight through the thin clouds, you could see the other side of the Habitat far above you. But there were no pictures of that in my head, and there seemed to be none anywhere else either. It was as if the Executives didn’t want us to know what it looked like.

Why not? I wondered.

S. and B. might give me a clue, if I listened to them long enough. They might put me to sleep with their conversation, but maybe I could learn something if I was patient. I checked the link—it was still in use. So I touched it again, and I did learn something.

[Enough of this beating around the bush,] said Sheba Charmayne. [How do we kill them before they figure out what we’re up to?]

3
Gamelan, My Little Doggie . . .

The smell of rain is an astounding thing. If you live inside the arid skin of Olympia, you may smell machines, blood, human sweat, that sort of thing. But the smell of rain is unlike anything you could imagine. Yet even if you’ve never smelled it before, you will know what it is.

I stood in the rain of the Habitat Sector, waiting to serve the Executives at Baylor Charmayne’s garden party. They stood in the same rain. Precipitation on Olympia was so fine, it fell as a mist. Our clothing couldn’t absorb it; a Servant’s mantle covered our heads.

Some of the Executives wore their own version of mantles, but most of them let their hair get wet. They found the discomfort amusing, because they endured it so rarely and could end it at any time.

This was near the end of my fourth year on the job, and I watched this behavior because I found it odd. I also took note of the moisture on my skin, the colors of the fresh vegetables, and the handsome face of Nuruddin, who was one of my coworkers. In his Servant’s mantle, he looked like an Egyptian king. But ancient art was not generally studied on Olympia at that time, so I was one of the few people who noticed that.

Despite these distractions, I remained focused on my duties. The Executives require Servants to respond to their slightest cue, to be at hand with whatever is required in an instant, whether that be a napkin, a dish, a refill of a beverage, or any one of a thousand other details. We’re like the Japanese Bunraku stage technicians who dress all in black, pretending to be part of the scenery; we must move silently, unobtrusively, and efficiently. Those of us who can’t, don’t make it out of training.

My father hadn’t been happy when I told him my ambitions, though he did understand them. No tech training had materialized for me on Titania, and we hoped that Olympia might provide more opportunities for me, since I was sixteen and still trainable. But extensive modification is needed to become a Servant, and my forbidden implants could have been discovered at any time during that process. My father had to pull a lot of strings to make sure the right med techs were on duty the cycles I went in for modification.

I had passed through it easily. I even received artificial eyes as a bonus—I would be able to change the iris color at will. That pleased my vanity, but would also come in handy for special projects, later.

I moved to Central Sector on Olympia. I had goals, both short-term and long-term. First, I wanted to move my parents to Olympia. But I didn’t do it soon enough.

They were dead before I finished my first day of work.

• • • •

Four years later, we had left the wreckage of our sister ship far behind. Now Baylor Charmayne sat at the head of his clan’s table. He still talked about his mother, which was sad when you considered all the other people who had died on Titania. Sometimes he cried when he talked about her, though he wasn’t doing it tonight. He was in a fair mood, which was as good as it got with Baylor. He, the food, the table, and his guests were all visible. But I could not see the plants that I could smell. I could not hear the rain falling.

We, his Servants, are beautiful. The Executives will tolerate nothing less. They are not so attractive as we, but they don’t know it. They seem enthralled with each other, and they never tire of arguing law or of playing at politics—not even at this supper. That’s why the Tedd clan sent a representative to the party, a cocky young upstart named Glen Tedd.

“A toast!” cried Tedd, which was our cue to fill their glasses. We performed like clockwork. “To Sheba Charmayne! Now, there was a tough negotiator. We’ll never see her like again. We Tedds thank God for that.” He grinned. “We’ve done very well since her untimely demise.”

All eyes shifted to Baylor, who didn’t seem inclined to sip his drink. “Convenient that her escape shuttle was destroyed before she could use it.” Tedd winked at Baylor. “Otherwise, she would be sitting at the head of this table.”

Baylor had no obvious reaction, but his gaze flicked to Ryan, who wasn’t so good at schooling his expression. Tedd was going to die for what he had just said.

I wondered who else knew it. Ryan did, because it was his favorite sport. But I don’t think Tedd did. I think he believed his clan was too powerful to suffer those sorts of consequences. He drank his wine, and demanded more. The party continued its dreary pace.

When the food and drink had been cleared from the table, Baylor and his guests moved inside, leaving us to stand at our posts. A group of lower-level Executives came into the garden. They were all clan members, but they had only slightly more status than the bureaucrats working in Titania’s skin. I recognized one of them, Terry Charmayne. Though I had never spoken to him, I knew something of his personal history. Recently, he had appeared at our staging area on a regular basis, and I assumed he had become a useful liaison between Baylor and Security.

I watched him covertly. Ryan Charmayne thought of himself as a good-looking fellow, but Terry actually was. Like most of the people in his family, Terry had olive skin, black hair, and black eyes. He was slim and well toned, too. But if I were objective, I’d have to say that Terry’s good looks were partly a matter of demeanor. A face tends to be pleasant when the mind behind it is.

In my case, that may be less true.

Some of the less-favored Charmaynes resented the fact that they weren’t invited to the fancy dinner, but I couldn’t tell whether Terry felt that way. They stood for quite a long while before Terry decided they should move out of the rain and onto one of the covered patios not being used by the elite. They left us alone.

We stood patiently. All of us were experts at waiting. To entertain myself, I played gamelan music in my head: slow, courtly pieces for orchestras of gongs and cymbals. It seemed to fit the scene, and I found it entertaining. But as the minutes slipped by, and no one dismissed us, an idea began to form in my head. Those flowers I had always longed to see were just a meter away. I still couldn’t see them, but I could smell them.

I took a slow step toward them. No one reacted. I took another. Altogether, it was four steps until I was no longer standing on the paving.

I knelt and reached blindly. My hands encountered something soft and fuzzy. I explored further and found the ground—the fuzzy things were growing out of the soil, so this was a plant I was touching. It was not at all what I expected a plant to feel like, with big, soft lobes and a central stalk that had clusters of other fuzzy things near the top.

I leaned over and smelled the stalk. It wasn’t perfumed like the flowers in Baylor Charmayne’s vases, but the aroma was pleasant.

Someone kicked me in the butt, not hard enough to hurt me, but firmly enough to get my attention. I looked over my shoulder and saw Terry Charmayne.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he said. “If someone sees you doing that, you could get terminated.”

Terminated was an interesting word. I had a feeling he didn’t mean fired.

Yet his tone was not unkind.

“Don’t get curious,” he said. “Just do your job and you’ll be all right.”

I stood and let my hands fall passively. “Yes, sir,” I said in the Girl Friday voice.

One side of his mouth quirked in a sort-of smile. “Come on. I’ll escort you to the Security lock. You may as well call it a day.”

He led the way, so we all fell in behind him. I was able to study him more closely as we walked along. His clothing wasn’t that fancy, and the superiority was almost completely absent from his demeanor. He was a midlevel Executive from a powerful family, yet he acted more like a Ship Officer. He saw us to the lock, waiting until he was sure we were safely through, then gave me a brisk, “Pleasant rest.”

“Yes, sir.” I didn’t look back. Instead, I searched the networks for Terry Charmayne’s recent footprints. He may become useful someday.

The other Servants walked quickly, eager to be done with their day and reclaim what they could of their senses. But Nuruddin slowed his pace until he was walking beside me. “What did it smell like?” he rasped in what was left of his real voice.

I had to think about it. “It smelled—green.”

“Like tea?”

“Very much, yes, but—stronger than that. It was pungent. It was a living thing.”

“Is that why you risked so much to smell it?”

“Yes.”

Nuruddin was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “You are braver than I, Oichi. But you are no more curious.”

We kept pace in companionable silence, until the others had disappeared ahead of us. I hoped Nuruddin was enjoying my company, but for my part, I was pondering the wisdom of asking him questions. Questioning someone can be an adequate method of gathering information, but they may ask you questions in return. Nuruddin had already warned me of his curiosity.

Before I could reach a conclusion, someone pulled the plug on our senses.

I could see nothing but white void. My hearing was gone, too, without even the ringing that accompanies natural silence. I probed for a surveillance camera and linked with it. Nuruddin and I stood in the tunnel with two Executive boys who could not be more than twelve years old. They had eliminated themselves from our audio and visual feeds so we wouldn’t know they were there. I hadn’t smelled them at first, because the ventilation had blown their scent away from us, but now that they were close, my nose detected an undertone in their sweat that raised the hair on the back of my neck. They both held knives, and they grinned at Nuruddin, nudging each other as if to say, I dare you to do it . . .

Nuruddin’s face was calm, but I could see concern trying to surface through the strict muscle controls that we Servants must endure to keep our demeanors serene. He must be wondering why our senses were being blocked. I doubted he would guess the truth until he felt the first slice. I would have to take him to the hospital once they let us go.

“I’m going to cut his lips off.” The boy giggled. “And then I’m going to cut his nose off.”

So no. Nuruddin would not be able to recover from this assault with some minor medical attention. I would have to intervene.

The order would have to originate from someplace outside the normal grid. I searched desperately, my mind racing along the network.

And suddenly I found an unknown pathway. I used it to trigger the alarm.

Our hearing and eyesight returned as the klaxons sounded. “attention,” warned a gigantic voice, “explosive decompression is imminent. All personnel must evacuate tunnel h17 immediately. repeat . . .”

The two boys jumped as if they had received electric shocks when they lost control of our sensory feed. They forgot they were Executives facing Servants, and they raced away—though not before Nuruddin saw the knives they were brandishing. As soon as they were gone, the alarm cut off, along with the warning voice.

Nuruddin stared at me, his face stiff with shock. “Explosive decompression?” he croaked. “Is that even possible, this far in?”

I shrugged. “I guess it would be if something catastrophic happened.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t want to imagine it.” Unfortunately, I didn’t have to imagine, because I had seen fragmented Security footage of what had happened on Titania. “Anyway, it seems to have been a glitch.”

“In the future,” he said, “I guess we’d better stick with the others so we’re not in here alone.”

I nodded, and the two of us hurried down the final stretch of corridor to our staging area.

• • • •

Servants are not allowed to socialize with each other when we’re off duty. I went back to my quarters without seeing or speaking to a soul. I bathed, sipped nutrient broth, and bundled myself into my cubby. I had hoped to listen to more gamelan music, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the remark Glen Tedd had made at supper.

Convenient that her escape shuttle was destroyed before she could use it.

Sheba Charmayne didn’t make it off Titania. But like everyone else, I had assumed that disaster overtook her on the way to her escape shuttle. I never thought it had been sabotaged.

True, I knew she and Baylor despised worms. When Titania was destroyed, I suspected the two of them. I had even overheard some of their plotting, through my secret link. But I was still a child then, and what they had said at the time didn’t make much sense to me. So instead of trying to figure it out, I recorded it.

I still had the recording. I had never replayed it, because I never heard them overtly say they were going to blow Titania up. What was it they had said?

How do we kill them before they figure out what we’re up to? Sheba had asked. That was what got me to start listening.

But Baylor’s answer didn’t make sense. Couldn’t we just dismantle them? Use their components for something useful?

Dismantle? I thought. Components? It sounded as though they were talking about machines. But why would you talk about killing machines?

They’re too complex for that, said Sheba, managing to sound impatient, even though she wasn’t using her throat to speak. Too sophisticated. They have a self-defense system, and they would suspect what we were up to. No—if we want to destroy them, they can’t appear to be our main targets. They can’t appear to be our targets at all.

Back then, this was the point in their conversation when I began to lose interest. Their discussions had turned to inventories of supplies, energy consumption and production, that sort of thing. But now I realized they were talking about Titania’s statistics in a particular sort of way; they were debating whether they could afford to sacrifice her, even though they never specifically said they were going to do that. These stats were incomplete, too, as if they had discussed them many times and no longer had the patience to go over them in detail. Amazingly, I almost lost interest again, almost stopped listening.

But then Sheba said, . . . their pathway is not part of the known network. . . .

When I triggered the alarm that saved Nuruddin, I had discovered a pathway outside the normal network. Now I had time to explore it and figure out what it was. I reached for it again, but it wasn’t the same this time. A new link had appeared on it.

The link had no name. I touched it anyway.

[Awake,] said a voice in my head. [Orders?]

I was flummoxed. I hadn’t rung the link, I had simply touched it—and now someone was talking to me.

[Orders?] repeated the voice, with relentless patience.

I tried to disengage from the link, but I couldn’t. I felt alarmed. I couldn’t just struggle; I needed to take action.

[Who are you?] I asked.

[Medusa,] came the reply.

The voice did not sound like any human voice I had ever heard, either inside or outside my head. It was unique. [Where are you?] I asked.

[Lucifer Tower.]

That sent a chill up my spine. Lucifer Tower was not a pressurized habitat—it was in the mysterious sensor array, at the leading edge of Olympia. Tech personnel no longer visited Lucifer Tower; it had its own repair drones. Yet something abided there, something with a voice that was almost machinelike—but not quite.

[I would like to meet you,] I said. It wasn’t so impulsive a remark as it may seem.

Medusa touched me through the link. No one had ever been able to do that before. The secret part of my brain was stimulated, and I saw her face. She seemed too beautiful to be mortal, as if she were a mask. But then the mask spoke: [Oichi, your parents are dead. Titania is gone.]

[Destroyed by Baylor and Sheba Charmayne.]

[I shall honor your parents’ wishes, and yours. We will collaborate.]

[How?]

[I will come to you when the time is right.]

I woke with a start. Had I fallen asleep and dreamed Medusa up?

I looked for the link again. I couldn’t find it.

Yet the pathway remained, and I traveled its length. Though it existed outside the known network, it could form links with that network at any juncture, then dissolve the link when the user was finished with it.

Medusa hid at the other end of that pathway. And she mentioned my parents. Had they known about her? How had she known about them? Was she one of the sophisticated machines Sheba and Baylor had talked about killing?

Did they destroy Titania and kill two hundred thousand people—just to get rid of machines like her?

My heart had been a burning coal since my parents died. But the anger didn’t blind me; it gave me ideas about the secret link, my recordings of Sheba and Baylor, and possible uses for the biotech hidden inside my father’s music database. My new plans were beginning to take shape.

But other people’s plans were already in motion. And they had quite a head start on me.

Copyright © 2018 by Emily Devenport. Excerpted from Medusa Uploaded by Emily Devenport. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emily Devenport’s short stories have been featured in various esteemed publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the Full Spectrum anthology, The Mammoth Book of Kaiju, Uncanny, Cicada, Science Fiction World, Clarkesworld, and Aboriginal SF, whose readers voted her a Boomerang Award. She currently studies geology and works as a volunteer at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix.

EXCERPT: Now We Can See The Moon (Snuggly Books)

Berit Ellingsen | 3435 words

A coastline razed and inundated by a hurricane. A traveler journeying towards the flood instead of away from it. A team of rescue workers without anyone to rescue, but who for various reasons can’t leave the drowned city. It has been said that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword, but what about those whose job it is to save others? When the storehouse and everything in it has burned down, will we finally be able to see the moon?

Available May 28, 2018 from Snuggly Books.

After the last corpse had been examined and set adrift on the floodwater inside its own bag, they whiled away the days on the stench-filled banks of the mound, or in the main tent, organizing and reorganizing the equipment that was left. The dental records of the most recently examined corpses appeared by the orange case on the table in the back, the photocopied diagrams filled with handwritten notes weighed down with a small stone to prevent them from flying away in the sunny breeze. Surgical equipment packed in plastic pouches and new scalpel blades still in silver foil turned up next to the paper records. At the same time crates and boxes changed place in the tent; some were emptied, others refilled, some vanished altogether, in a sleight of hand that was too large and too close for him to see the full extent of.

He believed he detected the process only because he was trained to look for small, yet intentional changes in the environment, and to specifically notice objects and items that were out of place or missing from their original positions. It was a long time since he had first played those games, and it had taken him a few tries to get them right, but once the observational mode had become a habit, it had never left him. He also had a clear feeling that his punt would vanish, so he rolled the drysuit up and kept it and his backpack safely beneath the cot at all times.

The process of surreptitious vanishing reminded him of the story of an ancient war in his father’s country. One side had been beaten and banished to the periphery of the nation. There, the faction strengthened its allies and made new alliances, rebuilt its forces out of sight of their old opponents, who failed to detect the subtle but definite shift in power that happened outside of the capital and the courts before it was too late and the once-ousted clan rose up again, sparking a new war, which they won, and pushed the other and once-so-powerful clan back to the opposite end of the country.

• • • •

At night he could hear members of the team whisper or move among the cots and crates, but he pretended to be asleep and didn’t ask what they were doing or interfere with their activities in any way. He considered it, however. A part of him thought that Raymond and Leah had a right to know. Why should grown people slink around their bosses instead of speaking up directly? Yet another side of him knew Raymond needed the shock, the nasty surprise they had in store for him, in order to be persuaded to come with them. He wanted Raymond to go with them and not remain, as the brothers in arms he felt he had left behind, as Kaye, and Michael, and even Katsuhiro and Beanie. He wanted the pathologist to climb into the punt, lower the pole in the water, and travel with them up against the current of the flood, back to the submerged motorway, the broken high-rises, the overturned convoys, the barren towns, the abandoned suburbs, the sinkhole in the mudslide, the tent camps, the emergency housing, and the streets where bags of garbage still lined the pavement and people expected municipal services to return because there was still a community to live in.

He recalled the empty and unfinished neighborhood he had crossed in the fall, with hundreds of houses that only lacked hedges in the garden or paint on the basement floor, and even more homes that were in the middle of completion, needing tiles on the roof, or a few dry walls. All those houses had room for new inhabitants, new families, and would be further away from future hurricanes or floods. It was highly possible to resettle people, if only the political will was there. He imagined an end to his journey, away from the water, away from the wandering, and the feeling he had had when he brought the sand from the beach near his grandparents’ town to the cabin and poured it into the hearth in the cabin rose up in him in a great warmth that was so strong it seemed almost real.

• • • •

The next morning at breakfast, the stacks of cardboard boxes and plastic crates had become visibly lower, and, he thought, impossible any longer to fail to notice. But Raymond only looked at him and said so loudly that everyone could hear it:

“You’re from this city, what should we see while we’re here?”

He almost laughed at the incongruity of the request, but the pathologist remained serious.

“What would you like to see?” he said as evenly as he could, as he would to any other visiting friend, under less moist circumstances. “What are you interested in?” He didn’t dare glance at the others to see how they reacted. Was Raymond trying to sound them out, to see who was still loyal or not, by behaving eccentrically? Or had the pathologist’s mind began to unravel?

“It would have to be fairly close since transportation is difficult,” Raymond smiled. “And ideally something that would appeal to a lot of different, although well-educated, and hard-working people.”

Was there a hint of sarcasm or bitterness in the description? He didn’t know Raymond well enough to see through the layers of innocuous-looking gentleness. He chewed on his spoon, the porridge already consumed. “The museum of art history is nearby,” he finally said, relieved as the memory of having gone there with Michael a little over a year ago suddenly bloomed in his mind. He hadn’t wanted to go, hadn’t even known about the place; it had all been Michael’s idea. “There are artifacts from all over the world, manmade as well as natural,” he said, quoting what Michael had said to try to tempt him into visiting the museum. He trailed off and looked at Raymond.

“That sounds like just what we need. That’ll be our task for today, esteemed colleagues!” Raymond grinned. “We must make time for play too, not just work. Some art would feed our souls a little, humans don’t subsist on bread alone, and so forth and so on!”

“That sounds like a wonderful idea, Raymond,” Leah said, the only hint of insincerity an almost imperceptible glance of warning at Gabriele, who passed this on to Jens.

“Splendid!” Raymond said. “That’s a deal, then! Let’s get going as soon as we can, now that we have full daylight!” The pathologist gave him a warm look. “And thank you, my friend, for showing an old man respect and making such a thoughtful suggestion.”

He nodded at Raymond and rose to clean his spoon and bowl to hide his discomfort at having been pulled into the games of the group.

• • • •

“What the hell are you and Raymond up to?” Leah hissed behind him.

He was standing at the edge of the mound voiding his bladder into the flood after having brushed his teeth. Aware of his rather vulnerable position and unable to cease his stream, he said as calmly as he could: “Raymond asked for a place to visit. What was I supposed to say?”

“What about ‘No, the streets are flooded, we only have two vessels, we’re hemmed in by dirty water’! What are you two playing at?”

“Nothing,” he said, finally, relievingly done. “Look, I know it’s a little odd to go sightseeing now, but the museum is very close. Only the bottom floors should be flooded, and it’ll keep Raymond happy.” He wanted to ask her why she couldn’t just tell Raymond that she didn’t want to go, but that was probably not what she wished to hear, so he didn’t say it. Instead he pulled an almost-dry wet wipe out of his pocket and began to clean his hands.

Leah glared at him as if she thought he would intentionally get the inflatable punctured during the trip or interfere with their escape in other ways. “You make sure we all come back in one piece or I will hold you personally responsible, not just Raymond.”

He wondered how she was going to do that. Murder them both in their sleep? But best not to give her any ideas. “Of course,” he muttered. Then he threw the dry tissue into the dirty slop and hurried away from her up the grass.

• • • •

“All aboard, all aboard!” Raymond said, waving his hands as if he wanted to pull them into the boats himself.

He hadn’t seen all of them take to the vessels before and now he understood why not, and the reason for Leah’s anger. With Leah, Jens, Gabriele, Edouard, and Marten squeezed together in the inflatable, there was no room for equipment or supplies, and certainly not one more person. He realized that his hunch was correct. The punt and everything in it would vanish when the group left, whenever it happened. But with the extra vessel, there was room for Raymond and him too, if he could persuade the pathologist to come along. It wasn’t all bad.

“Marten, you’d better come over here with us,” Raymond said, watching brown floodwater slosh over the low-lying rim of the rowboat.

Marten glanced at Leah, who nodded.

He pushed the punt close so Marten could squeak over the neon-yellow rubber and into the wooden vessel.

“Welcome, Marten,” Raymond said and settled into the narrow punt. “Are we ready to go?”

He pushed off from the hillock and steered down the street.

During the half-hour paddle to the museum, only Raymond talked; in the beginning exclaiming things like “What a perfect day for a trip!” and “Wonderful weather, how lucky we are today.” But when no one else said anything, the pathologist fell quiet too. The rest of the short journey they glared at each other in reproachful, high-density silence, like a dysfunctional family at the dinner table.

Fortunately, the museum of art history was closer than he recalled. Just two streets away, and then the dove-gray building loomed above them in all its classically carved, linteled, and casement-windowed glory. The main entrance consisted of two carved lime-green oak doors flanked by four pillars of rust-red, black-speckled basalt. The doors were so tall its heavy brass handles sat higher on the wood than a grown human could comfortably reach, with a normal-sized door was set into one of the lower panels. A short flight of stairs in the same mineral as the columns elevated the main entrance well above the surface of the water, but the human-sized door had been covered with moisture-darkened plywood, and so were all the windows in the front.

“It’s the servant’s entrance for us, then,” Raymond said, grinning in the sunlight.

• • • •

In the parking lot behind the museum a shipping container had been left close to the back wall. Here, the windows were not covered. Perhaps the staff hadn’t had time for that before they evacuated, or ran out of plywood and couldn’t get hold of more because of the impending storm. Several of the back windows had cracked panes. Most of them were in the upper floors, indicating that the breakage had been caused by the hurricane or subsequent bad weather rather than by looters or people seeking shelter.

He brought the punt close to the bright blue shipping container, past a maple that still had a smattering of canopy left. Brown and yellow leaves floated on the dim water, which smelled strongly of gasoline. On the opposite side of the parking lot, the front of a white van peeked out of the inundation, gleaming in the sunshine. A warm spring breeze rippled the iridescent surface of the flood and the leaves that floated there. They reminded him of temple gardens, with golden foliage resting on moss so thick and well-tended it looked like fur.

He hauled himself from the ribbed container roof and into the deep recess of the nearest glassless window, kicked away the remnants of the frame, and climbed in. The corridor inside was empty, with dry foliage and sand heaped along the walls. Sunlight slanted in through the broken windows, illuminating the dust and heating the air. He leaned out the window and helped Raymond in first, then Leah and the rest of the team.

“Where to?” Raymond beamed and turned towards him with fatherly expectation.

“The classical paintings,” he said, to his own surprise. He certainly hadn’t planned on playing guide for them, but now that they were here, there was only one thing he’d like to see that Michael and he had missed the last time. He didn’t know which floor the classical paintings were on, but recalled that there were maps and directions on every landing, and continued down the corridor towards the stairs. A heavy smell of mustiness and mildew hinted that the building and its treasures were well on their way to decay. Something about the moisture-streaked walls and crunch of sand beneath their boots made him miss the weight of a rifle in his hands.

“Are there any mummies here?” Gabriele whispered behind him.

“I don’t think so,” he said, relieved to be pulled out of his darkening thoughts. “Maybe in the exhibits from the southern continent.” He couldn’t remember having seen any mummies the previous time.

“Good,” Gabriele said. “Because in the museum at home, the mummies have cursed me.”

“Oh, really, did you stare and laugh at their rude bits?” Jens said.

“I didn’t do anything,” Gabriele replied. “But every time I go to that museum, I end up at the glass cage with the mummies in it, squashed by the crowd that’s always there, and then I have to look at the mummies for a long time when I don’t want to see them. I always plan on going somewhere else in the museum, but then I turn a wrong corner and get pulled by the streams of visitors into the mummy room.”

Jens laughed. “So that’s how you ended up working with dead people.”

“I didn’t,” Gabriele said. “My job is to treat the survivors of emergencies and disasters. But now I understand how I got here! It’s the curse of those damn mummies! The last time I ran away from them in the museum, I ended up in a room full of naughty woodblock prints, the only person in the exhibition, because I didn’t see the sign above the door.”

They laughed with Gabriele and the tension that hung between them lessened.

• • • •

To reach the wing with the classical paintings they passed through the section of artifacts from the eastern continent; past a life-sized statue sitting cross-legged on a giant pewter lotus, display cases with cups made from human skulls, cabinets full of patterned sword guards from his father’s country. As they filed past the opening to a room where he remembered a beautiful wooden statue had reclined in red and golden robes while it smiled beatifically at the world, he peeked inside, but the dais that had displayed the figure was empty and only the temple bell that hung above it remained.

Then they entered the exhibits from the ancient civilizations; rows of lion statues with heads of men sporting long braided beards and conical hats. They passed through the seven-meter-tall and one-meter-wide wood and bronze replica of the gate of the earliest known city-state, and into a stone tunnel painted with intricate pictorial script. Beyond this were gigantic obsidian heads with commanding eyes and haughty noses. Still further in was a temple in white marble that had been dismantled piece by piece in its original country, then stolen or appropriated by the museum and rebuilt here. In the semi-dark room Raymond stumbled on a spotlight meant to illuminate the temple from below and would have fallen if Leah hadn’t grabbed his arm.

“Thank you, dear,” Raymond nodded, but Leah just kept walking.

In one of the subsequent corridors was an antique mahogany cabinet with row upon row of hummingbirds, stuffed and mounted as if still in flight, sorted from the largest in the back to the smallest in the front, which was barely the size of a bumblebee. The tiny birds were so numerous that they stood wing tip to wing tip on the dusty wood with hardly any space between them. Their metallic green or black or blue feathers gleamed and glittered even in death. He stopped to take in the multitude of little birds, to imprint the sight of their beauty and variegation onto his memory so that it would never fade. But the small beings were too many and too similar to one another for the human eye, and he could barely tell them apart. He then tried to learn their names from the tiny plaques beneath each bird, but the thin, blue-inked cursive had already run and faded from legibility. He wanted to elbow a glass pane like he had done with the tulip window in the house in the suburbs, pull the cabinet door open and remove one shining bird, the smallest and brightest of them. Tuck it into the breast pocket of his jacket to save at least one of them from the humidity and rot, from never being seen and marveled at again as a sign of the energy and evolution that had shaped the bird’s entire little body so that it fit its environmental niche so perfectly it could not be removed from the web of life without other parts unraveling. But then he realized that the birds were long dead and the species they belonged to probably extinct already, and he left them to their decay.

• • • •

From there they continued down the stairs into a deepening gloom and increasing heat. The smelly humidity that gripped them like a sweaty hand more than hinted of the full submergence of the bottom floors and the merciless moisture that now surrounded the stone walls and rose inside them like water through paper. When they finally reached the gallery of classical paintings, they were so warm and tired of dust and mold and darkness, they slumped down on the benches in the center of the first exhibit, beneath a tall wrought-iron-barred skylight blinded by white paint yet letting in enough light to see by.

The wall in front of them was filled with a single extensive painting, its human figures so large they were almost life-sized. From the dimness in the background two men, one dressed in white and gold and the other in black and red, were striding forward. Behind and around them the rest of their company were following, glancing around watchfully, yet calmly, carrying muskets, drums, flags, and spears. In the middle of the patrol a little girl and a dog could also be spotted. The two men in the foreground were conversing amicably, even affectionately, no doubt about the current affairs of their city and the long-gone world they lived in. The painting, with its rich, staged artifice, layered brushstrokes that created a three-dimensional effect, and colors and highlights that made the luminous parts brighter and the dark parts deeper, seemed like the final victory of art and civilization, thought to last forever.

They watched the painting in silence while they held each other’s hands.

Copyright © 2018 by Berit Ellingsen. Excerpted from Now We Can See The Moon by Berit Ellingsen. Published by permission of the author and Snuggly Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Berit Ellingsen’s novel Not Dark Yet was published by Two Dollar Radio in November 2015. Berit is the author of the short story collection Beneath the Liquid Skin (firthFORTH Books) and the novel Une Ville Vide (PublieMonde), with work in W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, SmokeLong Quarterly, Unstuck, The Humanity of Monsters, and other places. Berit’s stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the British Science Fiction Association Award. The author divides time between Norway and Svalbard in the Arctic, and is a member of the Norwegian Authors’ Union. Learn more at beritellingsen.com.

Book Reviews: May 2018

LaShawn M. Wanak | 1810 words

This month I review Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, Armistice by Lara Elena Donnelly, and I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land by Connie Willis.

Children of Blood and Bone
Tomi Adeyemi
Hardcover / Paper / Ebook / Audiobook
ISBN: 9781250170972
Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, March 2018, 525 pages

When Black Panther was released in February, it set a new precedent for fantasy tales told with African and African-American characters. Granted, the fantasy genre itself already hosts black writers such as N.K. Jemisin, Nisi Shawl, and Nnedi Okorafor; now black writers are making inroads into other markets. This is the case with Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, which is considered YA fantasy.

Magic used to infuse the land of Orïsha, and the gods spoke through chosen diviners. However, the king drove the power of magic away from the land and killed those who wielded it—including Zélie Adebola’s mother. Now, Zélie lives oppressed by a monarchy who calls her kind “maggots” and punishes them for their very existence.

One day, Zélie comes across Amari, the Princess of Orïsha—who has stolen a scroll that comes alive with magic whenever a maji touches it. Despite the danger, and the pursuit of Amari’s brother, Inan, Zélie goes with Amari to gather materials that can fully restore magic and bring the gods back to Orïsha.

The world of Orïsha is lush and beautifully crafted. From a wharf-side village to a desert arena, Adeyemi’s worldbuilding is a joy to read. This is due to Adeyemi drawing on her Nigerian heritage and Yoruba folklore to create a magic system based on balance and beauty as well as empathy and understanding. I also loved how magic and self-identity is portrayed in hair, which turns white based on how much magic is in your blood.

Zélie is a reluctant hero, constantly fighting against self-doubt, anger, and most of all fear. “I am always afraid!” she screams in the book. “It doesn’t matter how strong I get, how much power my magic wields. They will always hate me in this world. I will always be afraid.” Fighting against fear and mistrust is a huge theme, and this is best personified by the Crown Prince Inan, who is filled with self-hatred, bent on pleasing his brutal father, and fearful of magic, especially when it starts to blossom within himself. Through a mental connection inadvertently forged with Zélie, he slowly begins to see her as less of an enemy. Their differing views on magic, however, ultimately clash—and it reminds me very much of the tension between black men and women as a whole. Even Princess Amari goes from timid, sheltered princess to a queen in her own right. The growing relationship between her and Zélie’s brother, Tzain, is one of the bright spots of the book.

Many people have been calling this the next Harry Potter, but the book reminded me more of The Hunger Games in that these were young people dealing with oppression, trying their best to fight back, and getting destroyed in the process. The story deals with loss, grief, trauma, and the effects of abuse, yet there is also fierce hope and determination, even in the face of horror. The last half of the book was heartbreaking and it does end on a cliffhanger, but still, it was enough for me to eagerly await the next book.

And if this book really does go forward into becoming a movie (it has been optioned for one), I will definitely purchase a ticket in advance.

Armistice
Lara Elena Donnelly
Paperback / Ebook / Audio
ISBN: 9781250173560
Tor Books, May 2018, 384 pages

Lara Elena Donnelly’s debut novel Amberlough took the world by storm; it has been nominated for Best Novel in the 2017 Nebulas. The second book in the series, Armistice, is slower on action than the first novel, but the subterfuge and political intrigue is still there.

Cyril Depaul, the spy whose actions secured a victory for the fascist regime that now governs Amberlough, is gone. Is he dead? Is he missing? No one knows. His absence is most keenly felt by his sister, Lillian Depaul, a press secretary for the One State Party, and his former lover, Aristide Makricosta, a resistance fighter who has fled to Porachis, an alternate version of India in our world. As Lillian is pressed upon by her superiors to report the activities of a co-worker suspected of espionage, Aristide tries to forget his past by drinking and taking on a new lover.

Everything changes when Cordelia Lehane shows up on Aristide’s doorstep. A former stripper now turned revolutionary, Cordelia is trying to lead her insurrection group, the Catwalk, from afar. The three of them find themselves walking a tightrope of secrets and dangerous knowledge, and they must reluctantly work together to keep themselves from toppling over, or worse, getting caught.

Armistice is decadent and glamorous on the surface, but the celebrity glam is a cover for shady dealings. Everyone in the book is involved one way or another—especially Pulan, the queen of Porachis, who is ruthless and shrewd in using her position to protect her country while using the façade of putting on a picture show. Donnelly also does some switching of gender roles and family dynamics, where women can have wives and be the main household providers, which is refreshing in their normality. I like how she distinguishes between two languages: Gedden and Porashtu. She also does very well in showing the tension between her characters: A dinner party that takes place in the second half of the book is a study in friction and distrust. Probably the most intense part of the book is the planning of a heist that could endanger a young boy’s life.

That said, Armistice felt more like Donnelly was maneuvering players into place for the third book, which is sure to have a lot more fireworks. Still, Donnelly’s use of language and wit made this book a delight to read, and, like Children of Blood and Bone, made me anxious for the next book in the series.

I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land
Connie Willis
Hardcover
ISBN: 9781596068766
Subterranean Press, April 2018, 88 pages

When I sat down to read this novella, the news had just come out that Barnes and Noble had just laid off their full-time workers, with the internet saying this is a prelude to their demise. This is not new—the demise of the bookstore has been predicted since Amazon came on the scene in 1994 and since the advent and growth of ebooks and ereaders. Larger bookstores such as Borders closed; independent bookstores are barely hanging on. But books will still be around. Whether in print or in digital form, books will always be around, right?

This is a question Connie Willis tries to answer in her novella I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land. It’s a quick read—it took me half an hour to read it. And then I read it again, much slower, more thoughtfully.

A famous blogger who promotes digitizing books arrives in New York for an interview, but gets waylaid by a storm. He stumbles onto a building with the curious name of Ozymandias Books. It appears to be simple bookstore, complete with shelves stacked with books and even its own cat. However, as he wanders the shelves, he notices that he has never heard of any of the books, and they are categorized in an odd way. Eventually, he meets a worker named Cassie, who leads him deeper into the bookstore, which has grown more labyrinthine and vast than possible.

For those who have fantasies of going into a bookstore and getting lost, this is the story for you. However, Cassie and the blogger have an interesting conversation on the nature of books, the many, many, many ways books could meet their demise, and Ozymandias’s true purpose. By the time the blogger emerges from the bookstore, he’s not so convinced that digital books are the best way to go.

Which begs the question: What makes a book valuable? Are print books more valuable than digital books? What’s wrong with cataloguing books digitally? It’s just another format. Why do we keep books, even when their covers tear and the print smudges and the papers get torn? What makes a story worthy of remaining in print?

When Willis’s blogger stumbles out of Ozymandias, his outlook on digitizing print books is much different from when he entered it. I don’t know if I necessarily agree with Willis’s sentiment that all print books are worth saving (one of the books in Ozymandias is a picture bio of Leonardo DiCaprio. Really?) If all books contain information, then one can argue that the whole of the internet should also be archived for posterity somehow. But still, for a short novella, it got me thinking about books and their longevity.

On my bookshelf at home, I have a copy of The Wind in the Willows that I’ve owned since I was a child. The binding is broken, several pages are missing, there are some pages where I scribbled portraits of my six-year-old self, and a color portrait of Mr. Toad and a train conductor appears twice due to a printing error. I can easily get a better, nicer copy of The Wind in the Willows, but I won’t. I love this book.

I also know that, with The Wind in the Willows being a classic, it’s in no danger of going out of print. I will always be able to go out and get it in some form.

Can I say the same for all the other books that are sitting on my bookshelf now?

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.

Media Reviews: May 2018

Carrie Vaughn | 1956 words

Adaptive Coloration: Annihilation and A Wrinkle in Time and Making the Unreal Real

As long as we’ve had movies, we’ve had movie adaptations of beloved novels. (Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, credited with being the first science fiction movie ever, was inspired by the work of Jules Verne.) It makes sense. Science fiction and fantasy deal in creating the unreal, imagining the unbelievable and describing what doesn’t exist. As soon as a visual medium became available to do the same, of course it was going to leap at the chance to bring alive the literature of the imagination. For better or worse. For those of us who love books and movies, nothing can quite match the fierce anticipation and existential dread of heading into the theater to see an adaptation of a beloved novel. Secretly, we want that movie that’s been playing in our heads to be externalized. We want these films to be telepathic. It’s a tall order to fill. We are so eager to see these images with our eyes rather than our minds; seeing is believing.

There are many truisms: The book is always better. (Not true. I’m looking at you, The Martian.) Read the book first. See the movie first. Some stories are just unfilmable (Arrival and A Scanner Darkly beg to differ). Should a movie stick as close to the source material as possible? (The Harry Potter films have been criticized for doing this very thing.) What about movies that use the book as the tiniest launching point for something completely different? (Blade Runner, which has the strange distinction of being based on one SF novel while borrowing a title from a completely different SF novel—the film has little to nothing to do with either of them, and yet is still a classic.)

There’s no formula. For every truism, there’s an example that disproves it. Which means that maybe there’s no sure-fire way to make a movie adaptation that makes everyone happy and adequately represents the book.

What are the strategies filmmakers use in adapting the source material? Are they creative choices or commercial? Do they assume an audience who is familiar with the source material, or one who is not? Can a thing succeed as a movie, but not as an adaption, or vice versa? Each of these answers will change what the end product looks like.

Annihilation and A Wrinkle in Time, released within two weeks of each other, are both such interesting cases for adaptation. Both books are so filled with sense-of-wonder, with really far-out imagery and otherworldliness. Both have a level of intellectual and symbolic meaning that instinct tells us makes these stories particularly difficult to translate to a visual medium. In both cases, the films seem to have erred on the side of simplification in building meaning into such visual spectacles. But how do I really judge? It’s not just that I’m watching the movies and thinking there must be more to this. I know there’s more to this because I’ve read the books.

Annihilation
Directed by Alex Garland
Produced by DNA Films, Paramount Pictures, and Scott Rudin Productions
February 23, 2018

Annihilation, the Nebula-award winning novel by Jeff VanderMeer, is about a group of scientists sent to study the strange biological, geological, and morphological transformations taking place in a nearly indescribable region known as Area X. Their journey is unsettling. Their identities begin to disintegrate, very much like the landscape around them. These are nameless characters who can’t help but become subject to what they study. At the heart of it all is the mystery: Why is any of this happening?

All of this is in the movie. So is a lot of other stuff.

The novel is concerned with ambiguity and uncertainty, of not being sure what we’re looking at, with descriptions of impossible things and images that aren’t really meant to be imagined at all. A film, by necessity, has to make all this concrete. It has to show us the lighthouse and what’s inside. We have to see the creeping molds and liminal creatures inhabiting this liminal landscape. How would a movie handle the novel’s ambiguity? Its surreality, its emphasis on atmosphere rather than plot?

The answer is, it imposes the structure and tropes of a conventional “then there were none” alien horror movie on the story. It’s definitely aliens—the first scene presents us with a meteor crashing into the lighthouse to make sure we know that whatever is happening came from outer space. (The novel suggests that this is a homegrown incursion, that the landscape itself is rebelling against the damage done to it by human civilization.) That’s a legitimate creative choice. But it makes the movie less an adaptation, and more its own thing, and that’s a mental hurdle those of us who read the book first have to cross.

A novel that successfully conveys ambiguity and boundlessness—is so purposefully rootless—becomes concrete and well-defined in the film. The nameless characters, labeled only by their professions, all have names now. The horrors a reader wasn’t meant to quite visualize are clearly seen in full daylight. The film not only answers questions the book doesn’t (it’s aliens!), it answers questions the book doesn’t even raise. In the film, we learn that the Biologist, Lena, was having an affair, and that drove her husband to take on the potential suicide mission of entering the Shimmer. Her guilt over this is a big part of what drives her. Of all things, the film reminded me of the Neil Marshall horror classic The Descent, which also has a group of women with a backstory of infidelity in a terrible situation, and each of them dies until the Final Girl somehow escapes. Or does she?! Annihilation has jump scares and body horror and convenient videotape evidence left by previous victims. After the first brutal death, Lena even declares, “She could still be alive,” a line that always precedes really bad decision-making.

This is one of those times where I think my experience of watching the film would have been much different if I hadn’t read the book first. I think this may be a prime example of the transformation (haha) some stories must necessarily go through in the transition from non-visual to visual medium. Could a film that captured the novel’s ambiguity ever have been made? Or is it better to present film audiences with a more familiar structure? I’m not sure.

A Wrinkle in Time
Directed by Ava DuVernay
Produced by Walt Disney Pictures and Whitaker Entertainment
March 9, 2018

Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time isn’t just a beloved book, it’s one of those rare classics that changes lives and forms a touchstone for an entire genre, a whole readership. For a lot of women, it’s the book that told them they could do more, be more, have adventures, be scientists, and a million other things that no other book of the time was telling them. It’s the book that introduced a lot of readers to science fiction. It’s the story of thirteen-year-old Meg Murray and her family, her father who has disappeared while studying the secrets of the universe, the three strange women who come to launch her, her brother Charles Wallace, and her friend Calvin on the journey that will rescue Mr. Murray. They will also encounter a darkness, evil embodied, which is engulfing entire worlds.

Again, this very rough paragraph is an accurate summary of both the novel and the movie. And yet.

My own first encounter with the novel was in the second grade, when our teacher read it aloud to us. I was too young for it, I think, and as a visual learner the out-loud reading didn’t quite sink in. I didn’t imprint on it like a baby duck, like so many others, including my mother, did.

But I never, ever, ever forgot that scene of the cookie-cutter neighborhood, with all the children bouncing their balls in unison. When the first trailer for the film highlighted that scene, in all its ’50s pastiche creeptastic glory, it gave me hope that the movie would deliver. Everyone else who’d read the book had nightmares about that scene too, and the trailer said, Yeah, we get you, this film’s for you.

But the movie gets that scene wrong, I think. The horror of the moment isn’t just the dozens of children bouncing balls in perfect unison. It’s when one of the children drops their ball and our heroes learn that the crushing conformity of Camazotz is part of its evil. That dropped ball doesn’t happen in the film. In fact, the scene is disconnected from anything that comes before or after it. Meg and Calvin escape a sudden Dark-powered tornado before. They end up on a crowded beach after, and they walk from one scene to the next for no better reason than it’s the only way open to them. This is pretty much the whole movie, by the way. Scenes happening in isolation, without context, with an occasional bit of exposition from a Mrs. to explain things and shove the characters into the next disconnected scene.

The deeper lesson of Camazotz is that the darkness isn’t just evil. The darkness is also conformity, mundanity, and fear. It teaches Meg, who has been having so much trouble with being different and fitting in, that her uniqueness and creativity are going to save the day.

In the movie, it’s like the scene is there because the filmmakers knew it had to be there, because that’s a moment from the book everyone remembers. But then the film relies on people’s memories of the book to fill in the emotional gaps. To add a scene simply because it’s in the book, without supporting it with any thematic framework, is not what film adaptations are meant to be about, I don’t think. In the best adaptations, it shouldn’t matter if someone’s read the book or not. It should be a good movie all on its own. That’s the point.

Like Annihilation, this isn’t an adaptation that will necessarily make fans of the source novel happy. With Annihilation, I could understand the creative decisions made on the film, I could see what it was trying to do in adopting a structure that gives the source material a more concrete form. A Wrinkle in Time takes a straightforward message—love and light will conquer the darkness if we are true to ourselves—and somehow makes it even simpler and less nuanced. The end result isn’t necessarily a bad film. But it’s very much a kids’ film, aimed at kids. I feel like this film is going to change some ten-year-old’s life. And that when that kid is thirty and goes back to watch it, they’ll be disappointed.

Meanwhile, everyone I know is re-reading both novels, and a whole bunch of people are reading them for the first time and loving them. And that’s the real reason I hope Hollywood keeps making big movies based on SF&F novels forever and ever, amen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series, as well as the superhero novels Dreams of the Golden Age and After the Golden Age, the young adult novels Voices of Dragons and Steel, and the fantasy novel Discord’s Apple. Her latest books are Bannerless, Martians Abroad, and Amaryllis and Other Stories. Her Hugo Award-nominated short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, from Lightspeed to Tor.com, as well as in George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series. She lives in Boulder, Colorado. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.

Interview: Sam J. Miller

Christian A. Coleman | 3074 words

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His debut novel, The Art of Starving (HarperTeen), was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017, and will be followed by Blackfish City (Ecco) in April 2018. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Andre Norton, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and have appeared in over a dozen “year’s best” anthologies. He’s a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop, and a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City, and is reachable at samjmiller.com.

Blackfish City takes place in the floating grid city of Qaanaaq in the Artic Circle, where a mysterious woman on a mysterious mission, known as the orcamancer, brings four people together. These people are living at the margins of society. And together they stage acts of resistance. What was the inspiration for this novel?

It started with the orcamancer. She was originally much younger, but I knew she was a badass lady technologically bonded to a badass killer whale, arriving in an Arctic city on a mysterious mission.

She’s quite the badass! How did you come up with her character?

Her orca created her. I am obsessed with killer whales, with how smart and terrifying they are—kinda like human beings—and so I’m always trying to find ways to work them into my fiction. Them, and dinosaurs. I wrote a story called “Last Gods” about a post-climate-change future where killer whales are worshiped as gods, and after that, I was still thirsty for ways to work with them. And I love human-animal relationships, like Aang with Appa in Avatar: The Last Airbender or Ahab with Moby Dick, so I just had to find a way to write about a human being whose best friend was an orca.

You begin the book with a quote from Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, which clues us in that your novel is very much about a vibrant, bustling city, albeit one teetering on the brink of implosion. What meaning does the quote have for you?

I love that book so much, as a vision of a city and a world that’s gone out of control, in ways both good and bad. “There is nothing safe about this city,” for me, speaks to so much of what makes cities magnificent. That “safety” is often a code word for what we hide behind, what we cling to to make ourselves feel better, and that one person’s safety is another person’s misery (like when Giuliani decided to make NYC “safe” for tourism by making it unsafe for homeless people), that the edgy and rough and raw and dangerous are to be embraced, not shunned.

What’s the story behind naming the city Qaanaaq?

It’s an actual city in Greenland, and I love the sound and palindrome shape of it. And I liked the idea that as coastal cities sank under rising sea levels, we would try to keep them alive by naming new ones after them.

You wrote about Qaanaaq previously in your masterful short story “Calved,” published in Asimov’s in 2015. Did you always know you wanted to explore it further in a novel?

I didn’t! But once the orcamancer had popped into my mind as a potential character, I quickly realized there was no better place for her to wreck shop than in this handy city I had already designed. And I had had so much fun creating it that I had a great time digging deeper into the nuances of how it works . . . and doesn’t.

In “Calved,” a father who does grunt work on iceboats tragically tries his damnedest to impress his teenage son who lives in Qaanaaq. What did you want to explore with the characters in Blackfish City that you hadn’t explored with the characters in the short story?

As a New Yorker, I am fascinated by cities—by their craziness and excitement, the food and the culture and the sex and the pain and the oppression and the resistance that surround us. And I’m a community organizer, and I fight to change the local laws and policies that hurt people, so the blank canvas of Qaanaaq offered me an exciting opportunity to share some of my obsessions and fascinations about municipal governance. And hopefully make that very boring topic as exciting for others as it is for me.

Has your work as a community organizer at Picture the Homeless in New York City influenced the writing of Blackfish City in any way?

I could never have written this book without my work at Picture the Homeless. I’ve learned so much in my fourteen years here, about how cities work. Qaanaaq is me trying to imagine how we could fix some of our problems (like, what if we just didn’t have a violent, racist police infrastructure?) and how others could get worse.

You mentioned digging deeper into the nuances of how Qaanaaq works. One of the nuances is the city being run by software and artificial intelligence. How did you come up with this idea?

I actually believe that in the USA—and probably in most capitalist countries—cities are already governed by artificial intelligence. Money makes all the big decisions; developers and real estate interests will always act in the way that makes them the most money, and politicians will get in line behind them . . . unless and until The People force them to behave differently.

Tell us more about what you mean by money making big decisions, because there’s a line in the novel that says money “is a mind, the oldest artificial intelligence.”

Money wants to multiply. People with money and resources tend to behave in very predictable ways: The decisions they make are the ones that will make them the most money. And in New York City, as in most modern cities, the biggest contributors to political campaigns are real estate interests, which means that’s who elected officials listen to the most. That’s why displacement and gentrification are happening so hard and so fast and so similarly in so many different cities. Ted Chiang wrote recently (bzfd.it/2GSgipW) about how Silicon Valley and venture capitalist billionaires are freaking out about the destructive potential of artificial intelligence because they are conjuring it up in their image. Their own business practices are about maximizing destructive potential (the industry jargon obsession with “disruption”) to strip resources away from everyone else, so of course they think artificial intelligence would be just like them.

One feature of Qaanaaq that really stuck out to me is that protests are rare, a relic of the past “like horse-drawn carriages in twenty-first-century cities.” That’s because explicit human decision-making is minimal and the computer programs call the shots. Protests are more performative than anything, an excuse for photo-ops, and they’ve obviated the need of direct action for social change. As a community organizer, do you think the One Percent would really give the reins of control to machines, computer programs, and AI in the future to suppress social protest and stay on top?

Plenty of people today say that protests are relics of the past. They’re wrong, of course, but state power has spent centuries constructing ways to render popular protest powerless. (Foucault talked about how public executions ended because they riled populations up so much they became a threat to the monarchy; universities started redesigning their physical spaces in the 1970s to minimize the disruptive potential of student unrest; US law enforcement used the post-9/11 panic to normalize “free speech zones” that penned in protests to small spaces far removed from their targets.) So, in that respect, this is just looking at how that tendency will be carried into the future. It isn’t that the powerful would give the reins of control to machines and AI, rather that machines and AI will be one more set of tools of control, like prisons and racist police forces and victim-blaming media narratives are today. And it won’t work, just like it doesn’t work in Qaanaaq, because people are amazing, and they won’t stop fighting back, and they won’t stop winning.

An epidemic of “the breaks,” a disease spread through sexual contact, is spreading among Qaanaaq’s inhabitants. The afflicted experience flashes of memories from the person who gave it to them as well as those who gave to them before. How did you come up with this illness?

This was one of those stray story elements that bounces around in your brain for a year or ten before you find the right place for it. A fatal disease whose only symptoms are psychological. A sexually transmitted disease that the powers-that-be prefer to pretend does not exist. And, of course, as a Gay Man of a Certain Age, I learned a lot of lessons from the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. The disease devastated us, but it also transformed people into warriors who fought collectively to flip the system upside down. Which they did, in ways so huge we might not even be able to see them today. That’s a great reminder to me to look at how the things that threaten to destroy us carry the seeds of the superpowers that we’ll use to flip the script.

Is the memory side effect of the breaks a carry-over from another novel you talked about writing? You’d mentioned writing a novel about a girl who could take people’s memories by touching them.

Well, all my work takes place in a shared universe, so any common threads from story to story are completely intentional [nervous laughter]. And I tend to be working through the same small set of fascinations and fears across all my work, as most authors do, I imagine. The idea that our memories and emotions might matter outside of our own brains is something that definitely keeps popping up, and the supernatural elements of my work are often attempts to work through similar problems in slightly different ways. Attribute this to a lack of originality from story to story to novel to novel!

In a previous interview, you talked about the power of violence. The orcamancer metes out plenty of it out of revenge or retribution. You’ve explored violence as a form of revenge in other works, including the Shirley Jackson Award-winning “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides” and your YA novel The Art of Starving. Tell us about why you brought back this theme in this novel.

I mean, I’m obsessed with violence. I’m terrified of it; I’m intrigued by it. How can you not be? Personally, I want to be nonviolent, but we’re human—we’re animals—and we’re violent products of a violent world. Humans can choose not to be violent, but it’s a really hard choice to make. I view nonviolence as a privilege. I’ve been a vegetarian for twenty-one years, but I understand that contemporary vegetarianism is dependent on an infrastructure of food abundance and alternatives, and that in some pre-modern or post-apocalyptic scenario, I would have to choose between starving to death and sticking to my moral convictions. In my life as an activist, I embrace nonviolence, but for communities who are the constant victim of violent attacks, I have a hard time telling them to turn the other cheek.

In the midst of the post-apocalyptic setting where the fallout of the climate wars has turned a huge part of the world’s population into climate refugees fleeing to Qaanaaq, you’ve put in a small population of people technologically bonded to animals via nanobots in their blood. The orcamancer is one of them. This is one of the most heartfelt and hopeful aspects of the novel. Why did you want to include it in the worldbuilding?

The nanobonded are the product of illegal and non-consensual human experimentation, which led to a lot of people dying and some people acquiring incredible power, which is one of those metaphors I mentioned earlier, and that I keep coming back to in my fiction—that oppression creates power. We go through shit, and the shit makes us amazing. That’s why I believe that being queer is a superpower. It would be wonderful if no one had to go through shit, but they do, and we should use the superpowers we acquired through that shit to make sure no one else has to go through shit.

The polar bear that accompanies the orcamancer is a big draw to the novel, too. I noticed you’ve posted several drawings of yours featuring polar bears on your Instagram account. You’re quite the illustrator! Is that another source of inspiration for the novel?

Awwww, thanks. You’re sweet to say so. And it’s the other way around, mostly. I draw my characters when I’m stuck, trying to figure them out, trying to visualize their posture and their facial expressions.

Another recurring theme I noticed is the importance of storytelling. It’s the main drive of City Without a Map, a kind of podcast the characters listen to, and the lore surrounding the orcamancer. The mysterious narrator of City Without a Map says, “Stories are how I survived, these long bound years. Now I can share them with you.” Does this stem from your work as a community organizer?

Yes? Also no. When we’re little kids, we crave stories. They’re how we come to understand the world—how it works, how we should behave in it. That never really goes away. The world will never stop being a confusing, terrifying, chaotic void of meaninglessness where our own existence doesn’t actually objectively matter; we’ll never stop craving narratives that let us believe that we have some degree of power and control in it. Where we matter. Where life has meaning. Where our suffering will be redeemed; where the monsters can be killed; where the brutal systems that exploit us will be broken down. Superhero movies are the bedtime stories of the masses. And a big part of our work as community organizers is about shattering the myths that people have accepted, that they’re to blame for their bad situations and that they have no power to change things. That’s why I don’t view books and movies and cartoons as escapism. Being able to escape into a universe where we can speak to dead loved ones, or control the elements, or fight our enemies with gnarly swords made of light, is how I handle the soul-crushing burden of reality. Stories like that very literally help keep people alive.

Blackfish City is your second novel. What’s the writing experience been like for you after having several short stories published, winning the Shirley Jackson Award, and being nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Andre Norton, Crawford, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards?

The Art of Starving was my debut novel, but it was also my seventh novel . . . and those are just the ones I wrote as a grown-up. I recently discovered my second-grade report card, where my teacher wrote that I was hard at work on my own novel, so I guess I’ve been writing books for a while now. I love them both, and they’re both really hard. In both cases, I’m a terrible judge of my own work. Readers will often fall in love with something I think is weak and needs a lot of work, whereas people will find a ton of problems I completely missed in a story I was super confident about.

When The Art of Starving was published, you said in a Toronto Star interview, “There is an honesty that is acceptable in Young Adult that grown-up novels are often ‘too smart’ and ‘sophisticated’ to tell. You can tell the truth in a really powerful and unique way.” Did you feel this way when writing Blackfish City? Was that your experience writing this, your adult debut, compared to writing The Art of Starving?

Every marketing category has its own rules and expectations (and, honestly, I think all genres are just marketing categories), and they’re all fun to play with. I had a great time navigating the different landscape of grown-up science fiction in Blackfish City, but at the end of the day, I read a lot of YA and a lot of non-YA, and I couldn’t really say that great YA is substantially different from great non-YA. I just think teenagers are more honest and less tolerant of bullshit in all its forms. I was on a panel earlier this month at NoVa Teen Book Festival with Dhonielle Clayton, author of The Belles, and she pointed out that grown-ups have learned to survive and even thrive in a sick world, whereas young people have not. And that’s not a weakness, it’s a strength. It’s a reason to put our faith in the potential of younger folks to fix things. At an event recently, an adult asked me how I could write for teens—because teens are so irrational and inscrutable—and I realized that I never really stopped being a teenager. I’m still just as twisted and neurotic and irrational and sex-obsessed and phobic and confused and angry and happy as I was when I was fifteen. I like to think I make fewer terrible decisions than I did then, but I fear that’s mostly just because I am a lot lazier now, and get tired out really easily.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

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: Martin Cahill

Alex Puncekar | 776 words

What was the inspiration for this story?

The inspiration for this story started somewhere with my curiosity over not seeing certain roles, positions, or careers explored that often in secondary world fantasy. While there has certainly been a shift these days, I still see so much epic fantasy centered around soldiers and royalty, chosen ones and dark lords, assassins and magicians. And that’s not to say any of those are bad, far from it! But I’ve always wondered, where were the stories of the epic fantasy interns? The postal workers? The low-level bureaucrat, the civic engineer, the dude working at the bodega? Where do these people and their lives and their lines of work, their passions, fit into a strange, magical secondary world? So Hark was born of my hope to explore what a chef is like in a world of gods, demons, monsters, and magic, and what does cooking look like? Who is he cooking for? What does he cook? How do you even begin to cook a deity? All of these things swirled in my brain for a long time, and when they finally started coming out on the page, that’s when “Godmeat” began to take form.

Hark and Spear make for interesting partners. Did their relationship change over the course of writing the story, and if so, what were they like in a previous draft?

Oh, absolutely. Hark and Spear always butted heads, and always came from different worlds, but in previous drafts, they were much closer. In earlier drafts, a few things were different: Hark was much, much younger, and actually traveled with Spear on her hunts. That meant she had a lot more to say, and while she didn’t like him, she had a gruff fondness for the poor, young idiot chef about to doom the world. We learned a lot more about her, and there was a certain fervency on her part, that maybe she could use her tragedy to teach younger Hark to come back from the brink. In the final version though, Hark is older, and Spear has no such fondness for him at the outset. She sees an old fool whose pride and pain have made him who he is, and she wants no part of his care or journey beyond what they absolutely have to do. Their final moments together may mark a turn in that relationship, with blooming, begrudging respect for Hark’s actions, but that story lies off the page, for the moment.

I imagine many readers might finish “Godmeat” with a hungry stomach (I count myself one of them). What was your approach to writing about food, specifically the details that went into crafting those sequences?

I’m certainly one of those people as well! I love food, and I especially love cooking, learning new recipes, trying new things, as well as creating meals and dishes for other people. I actually wanted to be a baker when I was a kid, so I was always in the kitchen, learning and doing my best to help out. Between that, family dinners, and just mainlining the Food Network, I learned there was a certain magic in food already. So with “Godmeat,” it was about including as much sensory detail as possible, blending the right amount of texture, taste, and scent, along with the touchstones of more divine or magical wordplay, to show the interaction between the food as we know it and what these particular dishes could look like. At the end of the day, I just tried to make these meals as beautiful and strange and as enticing as I could, and tried to think, “Well, if I was going to be eating a tuna steak born of the flesh of an ancient god-beast, what would I make with it?” and tried to let my palate lead the way!

What’s next for you? Are there any projects that you can talk about?

For the spring, I’ll be editing my new epic fantasy novel with comments from my beta-readers, finishing up a query letter for it, and hopefully sending it out to prospective agents! So all fingers and toes crossed for that. Otherwise, I’m just tinkering away on a bunch of new short fiction, starting what I hope is the last draft of my “mad scientist family dramedy” novel, and trying to wrap up a number of incomplete projects here and there. Oh, and of course, experimenting with new recipes to make! Thanks so much, and thanks to everyone who read “Godmeat”!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar lives in Ohio and is finishing up his MFA at Youngstown State University. You can find his published work in Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Jenny Magazine, or you can find him on Twitter @AlexPuncekar.

Author Spotlight: Carolyn Ives Gilman

Jason Ridler | 512 words

I enjoyed how realized the world of this story became via figurative and emotive language instead of empirical and extrapolation wordage, and it is just as much a thought-driven piece of science fiction as if we were discussing the biological “what if” of the story’s premise. Who are your own influences when it comes to this kind of writing?

 Oddly enough, the influences on this piece come more from poetry and theater than from fiction. A poem can be a gut-punch precisely because its focus is so sharp and limited, while its language is wide-ranging and allusive. But formally, the story is not a poem; it’s a dramatic monologue, a kind of soliloquy. Both of these are very old forms of literature indeed—and yet, they are perfectly suited to the relatively new experience of reading online.

The opening line reminded me of the late Tom Piccirilli’s comment on the need to grab the reader by the eye with a compelling image or idea, but then you can’t let go! How did the opening of the story arrive at the version we see here? Many drafts or inspired image from the start or what?

 It took me a long time to decide how to tell this story, but once I had decided, everything fell into place quickly. The background premise came first, but it could have inspired anything from an essay to a novel, and I wasn’t sure what it wanted to be. The voice for telling the story came second, and the moment I wanted to portray came last. That was when I knew where to start.

Stories about resignation to dire consequences or fates are often less championed in genre novels, where the comfort of answers after struggle is one great pull for readership. I loved its absence here. Why end on this note for the mother’s lament?

 On one level, this story is about the shadow side of those feminist utopias you occasionally meet, where the author gets rid of all the men and everything is fine. I wanted to look closely at that premise, and think about the price that mothers, sisters, and wives would pay. Of course, as I continued, the story became about much more. Ideas quickly got buried in the raw emotion of someone who has caused irreparable harm without intending it. That was where I had to end.

I thought the title was a wonderful way to inform the heart of the story, since many mothers have had to say “We Will Be All Right” when the truth is far less assured. Was it plucked from the story or did it emerge beforehand?

 As I was writing the story, that phrase seemed like something the narrator would say. I would love to claim that it was planned with all sorts of foresight, but the process was much more instinctual than that. Sometimes you just have to trust your subconscious to get it right.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jason S. Ridler is a writer, improv actor, and historian. He is the author of A Triumph for Sakura, Blood and Sawdust, the Spar Battersea thrillers and has published more than sixty stories in such magazines and anthologies as The Big Click, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Out of the Gutter, and more. He also writes the column FXXK WRITING! for Flash Fiction Online. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada. He lives in Richmond, CA.

Author Spotlight: Kodiak Julian

Arley Sorg | 806 words

This piece has a great reversal of character types in regards to what is often presented for gender roles—the father is nervous, insecure, self-conscious, and the mother is unflappable and strong. Is this a deliberate choice in terms of gender representation? Or was it just the way the characters came out, with no specific intentions?

 In the first draft of the story, the protagonist was a woman. Readers found her to be unsympathetic. Our society is so grateful to see fathers making an effort that fathers are celebrated for even small acts of parenting. Conversely, mothers receive constant judgement, regardless of their actions. I switched the gender of my protagonist so that readers would have greater empathy for the character. I made him the character who I needed to explore, and made the mother contrast him as much as possible.

Both the mother and the father in this story are good parents. I would like to live in a world where we give grace to both men and women.

One of the things I really enjoyed is the father’s particular insecurities: “I stand before my competent wife, my belly hanging out, oafish, a waste of space.” He feels specific and real: He’s relatable. What sorts of steps do you usually take to make characters plausible?

 For me, writing is largely about listening. I listen to the characters and to the world around them. And I listen to the people around me. While I don’t base characters on specific individuals, the protagonist of this story is informed by numerous kind, open-hearted, complicated men who’ve touched my life. I think this is what happens each time a character works: The voices of many people alchemize into something new, and I have to sit with the character and listen to who they are.

For me, the use of setting to reflect character moods and story transitions is elegant and effective. There are many examples of this, but one of my favorites is, “New blossoms sweeten the air.” Is this a style you often use, or do you experiment a lot with style and form?

 This story shows a quintessential style for me. My stories can largely be summarized with, “Someone is melancholy in a beautiful place, and then there are snacks.” Most of my stories have more experimental forms, though. I love seeing how writers like Kelly Link, Kij Johnson, Jeffrey Ford, and Daryl Gregory experiment with structure, and I try to learn from their short fiction.

Thematically, there is this concept at play of parents who live out their fantasies or desires through their children, even if this puts the child in a risky or dangerous situation. Is this something drawn from your own life/childhood?

 The tragic irony of being a parent is that, since everyone dies, bringing a child into the world means issuing your child a death sentence. Yet raising a child consists largely of doing one’s best to protect the child from all harm and fear—an ultimately impossible task. I want to give my child a life overflowing with wonder and adventure, and this means allowing him to engage in an inherently dangerous world. The tightrope between experience and risk, between life and death, is at the center of parenting.

The ending is simply gorgeous. When you started out, was the narrative always driving towards this ending, or did you play around with different potential outcomes?

 I’m drawn toward the idea of simultaneous truths. I like stories that can be interpreted as both magic and not-magic. We interpret our world through an ambiguous mess of the things we can see and the things we can’t see. The things that we can’t see are the hardest to prove, but often the most important. I wanted the ending to reflect the ambiguity of our reality, in which the mundane and the wondrous coexist.

Is there anything else you want readers to know about this piece?

 Karen Joy Fowler won the opportunity to name one of my characters through the Clarion Write-a-Thon, so Cruz is named for her grandson. My Clarion classmates offered their names for a previous project. It was a period piece, so although Alyssa Wong offered her name, it didn’t work with the setting. So her name appears here.

What are you working on now that your new fans can look forward to?

 My creative partner, Jamaica Zoglman, and I have been working on a novel set in an alternative Scandinavia. It involves collaborative magic made through singing, thermal vents, bees, and what happens when a child is born into the wrong family.

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: Jane Lindskold

Gordon B. White | 1715 words

Let’s start a long time ago, in a galaxy far far . . . I mean, at the beginning. What can you tell us about the inspiration for “A Green Moon Problem”? While it takes place in a fascinating SF world and explores classic themes, I’m curious what the initial spark was that got this story going.

 “A Green Moon Problem” is one of the few stories for which I can trace the genesis—yet, in the end, I’m as mystified as anyone as to where the story came from.

It started with Walter Jon Williams presenting me with a pale gold Chinese silk jacket that his wife, Kathy Hedges, had discovered when going through an elderly relative’s closets. The hem was frayed, but Kathy (knowing my fondness for Chinese-style clothing) hoped I could get the jacket mended and enjoy. I took it to a good tailor but, sadly, the fabric was perishing and the more we did, the more it frayed. But the jacket was still lovely and I couldn’t quite pitch it, so it hung in my closet.

Then Jim and my friends Rowan Derrick and Melissa Jackson invited us to a Halloween costume party, the theme of which was “Space Station.” I had been itching to design a full-face mask for a long while and here was my excuse to pull out the Sharpies and go for it. I’d use the Chinese jacket, a mask, and then . . .

The name Tatter D’MaLeon popped into my head, along with the phrase “Your problem is not my problem, unless you want me to make it so.” It wouldn’t go away. It thumped in my head as I designed the rest of the costume. A few weeks after the party, I wrote the story.

This is basically how my creative process goes. Even if I can trace influences, the story itself has a life of its own. In the end, I feel like a medium, trying to find the right words to channel a vision.

“A Green Moon Problem” has a delightful way of combining and remixing its influences. While the setting is classic SF—an extraplanetary station, extraterrestrial objects—the heart of it seems closer to a fairy tale as Tatter D’MaLeon appears like a faerie to grant wishes. Our protagonist Jurgen is likewise driven by the headstrong “passionate intensity” of a hero in a fable, but also employs his rational “engineer’s mind” in pursuing Rita (and Tatter). How did this mixture come about, and were there any reference points you drew from? Stylistically, the prose seems to veer more toward the rhythms and structures of fantastic fiction, so how did you decide on this tone?

 I believe that the more science finds answers, the more there will be a craving for myth and magic. Why? Because myth and magic speak to that indefinable something in the human soul that needs to believe rules can be broken.

Tatter is definitely a trickster figure. That said, I think of her as on the benign side of the line. She’s more a Spider or Coyote than a Mephistopheles. She lacks the selfishness of Hare. Tatter wants to understand what it is to be human. By helping humans achieve their goals, she hopes to serve her own desires. She’s seeking fire, but it’s a different sort of fire.

Jurgen owes a little bit to Faust, the rational, intelligent fellow who love and desire makes irrational. Rita, however, is far from a passive love interest, which made her more interesting for me to write about.

I don’t sit down and say to myself “I’m going to write this in such and such tone.” The story itself dictates the tone. I listen, then choose my words to go with the story’s inherent music.

One of the joys of this story is the world you’ve created. In addition to the remixing of influences above, the physical world of the story is also one of combinations and reconfigurations. Not only do Jurgen and Rita embody this at the end, but it is present in Tatter D’MaLeon’s own tatterdemalion costume, the diverse group of supporting characters, and even Concatenation “Cat” Station itself, which is assembled from other vehicles, vessels, and equipment all pulled together into a patchwork home. Were there any specific influences that you drew from in conceiving of this patchwork world? How do you see the setting and these elements playing into the larger themes of the story?

 No specific influences. That said, I’m very interested in anthropology. “Cat” Station grows the way “real life” communities grow. Even the planned towns of the American West (where I live) have their odd little alleys, their out-of-place buildings. Given that in outer space resources would be incredibly difficult and expensive to acquire, it made sense to me that a space station would eventually glom onto any useful resources—a hospital ship, a passenger liner (that might become a hotel), an ore processing ship (that might become a factory). It wouldn’t take long for not-immediately useful resources to also be accepted on the grounds that someone, someday will find a use for them.

Like most writers, I tend to write about what interests me. I’d rather visit “Cat” Station than most of the space habitats I’ve read about.

The story warns its readers that “[l]ove can make the most rational person irrational.” As illustration, we see Jurgen repeatedly try to approach his irrational desire in a rational way: He methodically researches Tatter D’MaLeon; when he and Tatter meet, Jurgen tries to carefully lay out his wish so as to avoid the ironic pitfalls that tend to accompany genies and monkeys’ paws; Jurgen even approaches the question of what it means to be human by looking to DNA and compiling quotes from philosophers. None of these, however, work out as planned—his research is useless; his wish to be with Rita forever is granted with a twist; he still has to pay Tatter in credits. What can we read into these events about the limits on what rationality can accomplish? Is it possible that Jurgen had the right approach but his implementation was flawed, or was relying too much on rationality in these matters of the heart and existence always going to doom him to failure?

 Goodness . . . Is everything Jurgen does really that useless? I’m not sure I agree!

Although I lean toward the mystical side in my writing, in day-to-day life, I’m intensely practical. I don’t perceive the qualities as in opposition.

I’ve been knocked off my feet by love at first sight. But I also am very aware that the garden in which love will grow is as much tended by making sure the laundry is done and the bills paid on time as it is by poetry and chocolate.

In the end, Jurgen and Rita are together, perhaps forever, although they have been changed into something other than human. Tatter’s reference to Baucis and Philemon suggests they have become trees, or at least something very close, but in congratulating herself on this solution, Tatter feels that perhaps she is finally learning what it means to become human. For Tatter, what is that insight that she feels she has gained?

 The myth of “Baucis and Philemon” has haunted me since I was very small. Although Ovid frames it in the Metamorphosis as a happy tale of virtue rewarded, to me it always seemed a “be careful what you wish for” sort of tale.

As for what Tatter learned . . . I think I’ll leave that to the reader. I have my suppositions, but sometimes the author is the last to know.

Finally, what’s coming up on your horizon? In addition to concrete projects and plans, are there any new and inchoate ideas that you’re starting to explore?

 My most recent novel is Asphodel. It mingles fairy tales, myths, and a whole bunch of other things in the story of a woman who wakes in a tower of seven windows and maybe one door. Despite its seeming lack of structure, from the start I had a sense of where Asphodel was going, and I very much loved the journey.

My current concrete project is writing the first new Firekeeper novel in something like ten years. It’s called Wolf’s Search. Getting back in touch with that series—which consists of six long, complex novels—has been an interesting mental journey.

I’m one of those writers who writes the stories I’d like to read but couldn’t find anywhere else. Now, ten or more years later, I’m re-reading the Firekeeper novels without remembering all the minute writerly decisions I made along the way. At the same time, I’m writing a new novel in the same place, so very immersed in minutia. It’s a rather fascinating set of contrasts.

When I finish Wolf’s Search, I have a 150,000-word manuscript that I want to return to. I wrote it with most of my emphasis on getting to know the characters, then exploring the plot with them. Now it’s time to go back and fill in the world we discovered together. I suspect this will be more than one book when I’m done.

Between, I’d like to write more short fiction. There’s a piece by artist Elizabeth Leggett that has haunted me since I first saw it at Bubonicon. I asked her what the story was behind it, and was surprised that she didn’t know. If I can, I’d like to write a story to go with it. I suspect that, like with Tatter, the story will sneak up on me and I’ll need to put everything else to the side until I’ve written it, but, for now, it’s just a joyful mystery.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Gordon B. White has lived in North Carolina, New York, and the Pacific Northwest. He is a 2017 graduate of the Clarion West Writing Workshop, and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as Daily Science Fiction, A Breath from the Sky: Unusual Stories of Possession, Nightscript Vol. 2, and the Bram Stoker Award® winning anthology Borderlands 6. Gordon is also an Assistant Editor with Kraken Press and conducts reviews and interviews for various outlets. You can find him online at gordonbwhite.com or on Twitter at @GordonBWhite.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 148 words

Coming up in June, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by A. Merc Rustad and Ada Hoffman (“I Sing Against the Silent Sun”) and Lina Rather (“A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Lighthouse of Quvenle the Seer”), along with SF reprints by Russell Nichols (“Tie Goes to the Runner”) and James Cambias (“Contractual Obligation”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Ashok K. Banker (“The Quiltbag”) and Emma Törzs (“From the Root”), and fantasy reprints by Micah Dean Hicks (“The Carpenter and the Beast of Teeth”) and Courtney Bird (“The Diamond Girl”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns.

For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint and a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

Thanks for reading!

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The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes 96 stories (about 480,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! For more information, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

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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!).

Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

If you’re reading this, then there’s a good chance you’re a regular reader of Lightspeed and/or Nightmare. We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Drip (d.rip/john-joseph-adams) and a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Lightspeed and Nightmare and my anthologies, our Patreon and Drip pages are a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon and Drip?

There are no big companies supporting or funding the magazines, so the magazines really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Drip and Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Lightspeed and Nightmare are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Drip and Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one page on each platform. Plus, since I sometimes independently publish works using indie-publishing tools (as described above), we thought it would be good to have a single place where folks could come to show their support for such projects.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy my work as an editor, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Drip or Patreon are the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Backer or Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon or Drip, you help fund our growth and continued publication of two award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon or Drip. Those URLs again are d.rip/john-joseph-adams and patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and my other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Assistant

Jude Griffin

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

LaShawn Wanak

Christie Yant

Carrie Vaughn

Christopher East

Violet Allen

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading Lightspeed (and/or Nightmare), you might also enjoy these works edited by John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

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)

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)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.