TABLE OF CONTENTS

Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 98 (July 2018)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: July 2018

SCIENCE FICTION

Permanent Fatal Errors
Jay Lake

Waterbirds
G. V. Anderson

Greetings, Humanity! Welcome To Your Choice Of Species!
Adam-Troy Castro

The Right Place to Start a Family
Caroline M. Yoachim

FANTASY

A Song of Home, the Organ Grinds
James Beamon

Aberration
Genevieve Valentine

Castle Coeurlieu
Naomi Novik

Wild Bill’s Last Stand
Kyle Muntz

NOVELLA

The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse
Kathleen Ann Goonan

EXCERPTS

Carrie Vaughn | The Wild Dead
Carrie Vaughn

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: July 2018
Chris Kluwe

Media Review: July 2018
Carrie Vaughn

Interview: JY Yang
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

James Beamon

G.V. Anderson

Adam-Troy Castro

Kyle Muntz

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 Saleha Chowdhury

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: July 2018

John Joseph Adams | 154 words

Welcome to issue ninety-eight of Lightspeed!

This month’s cover art is by Saleha Chowdhury, illustrating a brand-new fantasy story by James Beamon (“A Song of Home, the Organ Grinds”). We also have a fantasy original from Kyle Muntz (“Wild Bill’s Last Stand”), and fantasy reprints by Genevieve Valentine (“Aberration”) and Naomi Novik (“Castle Coeurlieu”).

Our science fiction originals this month are by G.V. Anderson (“Waterbirds”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“Greetings, Humanity! Welcome To Your Choice of Species!”). We’re reprinting SF by Jay Lake (“Permanent Fatal Errors”) and Caroline M. Yoachim (“The Right Place to Start a Family”).

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 a reprint of Kathleen Ann Goonan’s SF novella “The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse.” We’ll also have an exclusive book excerpt.

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.

Permanent Fatal Errors

Jay Lake | 5930 words

Maduabuchi St. Macaria had never before traveled with an all-Howard crew. Mostly his kind kept to themselves, even under the empty skies of a planet. Those who did take ship almost always did so in a mixed or all-baseline human crew.

Not here, not aboard the threadneedle starship Inclined Plane. Seven crew including him, captained by a very strange woman who called herself Peridot Smith. All Howard Institute immortals. A new concept in long-range exploration, multi-decade interstellar missions with ageless crew, testbedded in orbit around the brown dwarf Tiede 1. That’s what the newsfeeds said, anyway.

His experience was far more akin to a violent soap opera. Howards really weren’t meant to be bottled up together. It wasn’t in the design templates. Socially well-adjusted people didn’t generally self-select to outlive everyone they’d ever known.

Even so, Maduabuchi was impressed by the welcome distraction of Tiede 1. Everyone else was too busy cleaning their weapons and hacking the internal comms and cams to pay attention to their mission objective. Not him.

Inclined Plane boasted an observation lounge. The hatch was coded “Observatory,” but everything of scientific significance actually happened within the instrumentation woven into the ship’s hull and the diaphanous energy fields stretching for kilometers beyond. The lounge was a folly of naval architecture, a translucent bubble fitted to the hull, consisting of roughly a third of a sphere of optically corrected artificial diamond grown to nanometer symmetry and smoothness in microgravity. Chances were good that in a catastrophe the rest of the ship would be shredded before the bubble would so much as be scratched.

There had been long, heated arguments in the galley, with math and footnotes and thumb breaking, over that exact question.

Maduabuchi liked to sit in the smartgel bodpods and let the ship perform a three-sixty massage while he watched the universe. The rest of the crew were like cats in a sack, too busy stalking the passageways and each other to care what might be outside the window. Here in the lounge one could see creation, witness the birth of stars, observe the death of planets, or listen to the quiet, empty cold of hard vacuum. The silence held a glorious music that echoed inside his head.

Maduabuchi wasn’t a complete idiot—he’d rigged his own cabin with self-powered screamer circuits and an ultrahigh voltage capacitor. That ought to slow down anyone with delusions of traps.

Tiede 1 loomed outside. It seemed to shimmer as he watched, as if a starquake were propagating. The little star belied the ancient label of “brown dwarf.” Stepped down by filtering nano that coated the diamond bubble, the surface glowed a dull reddish orange; a coal left too long in a campfire, or a jewel in the velvet setting of night. Only 300,000 kilometers in diameter, and about five percent of a solar mass, it fell in that class of objects ambiguously distributed between planets and stars.

It could be anything, he thought. Anything.

A speck of green tugged at Maduabuchi’s eye, straight from the heart of the star.

Green? There were no green emitters in nature.

“Amplification,” he whispered. The nano filters living on the outside of the diamond shell obligingly began to self-assemble a lens. He controlled the aiming and focus with eye movements, trying to find whatever it was he had seen. Another ship? Reflection from a piece of rock or debris?

Excitement chilled Maduabuchi despite his best intentions to remain calm. What if this were evidence of the long-rumored but never-located alien civilizations that should have abounded in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way?

He scanned for twenty minutes, quartering Tiede 1’s face as minutely as he could without direct access to the instrumentation and sensors carried by Inclined Plane. The ship’s AI was friendly and helpful, but outside its narrow and critical competencies in managing the threadneedle drive and localspace navigation, no more intelligent than your average dog, and so essentially useless for such work. He’d need to go to the Survey Suite to do more.

Maduabuchi finally stopped staring at the star and called up a deck schematic. “Ship, plot all weapons discharges or unscheduled energy expenditures within the pressurized cubage.”

The schematic winked twice, but nothing was highlighted. Maybe Captain Smith had finally gotten them all to stand down. None of Maduabuchi’s screamers had gone off, either, though everyone else had long since realized he didn’t play their games.

Trusting that no one had hacked the entire tracking system, he cycled the lock and stepped into the passageway beyond. Glancing back at Tiede 1 as the lock irised shut, Maduabuchi saw another green flash.

He fought back a surge of irritation. The star was not mocking him.

• • • •

Peridot Smith was in the Survey Suite when Maduabuchi cycled the lock there. Radiation-tanned from some melanin-deficient base hue of skin, lean, with her hair follicles removed and her scalp tattooed in an intricate mandala using magnetically sensitive ink, the captain was an arresting sight at any time. At the moment, she was glaring at him, her eyes flashing a strange, flat silver indicating serious tech integrated into the tissues. “Mr. St. Macaria.” She gave him a terse nod. “How are the weapons systems?”

Ironically, of all the bloody-minded engineers and analysts and navigators aboard, he was the weapons officer.

“Capped and sealed per orders, ma’am,” he replied. “Test circuits warm and green.”

Inclined Plane carried a modest mix of hardware, generalized for unknown threats rather than optimized for anti-piracy or planetary blockade duty, for example. Missiles, field projectors, electron strippers, fléchettes, even foggers and a sandcaster.

Most of which he had no real idea about. They were icons in the control systems, each maintained by its own little armies of nano and workbots. All he had were status lights and strat-tac displays. Decisions were made by specialized subsystems.

It was the rankest makework, but Maduabuchi didn’t mind. He’d volunteered for the Howard Institute program because of the most basic human motivation—tourism. Seeing what was over the next hill had trumped even sex as the driving force in human evolution. He was happy to be a walking, talking selection mechanism.

Everything else, including this tour of duty, was just something to do while the years slid past.

“What did you need, Mr. St. Macaria?”

“I was going to take a closer look at Tiede 1, ma’am.”

“That is what we’re here for.”

He looked for humor in her dry voice, and did not find it. “Ma’am, yes ma’am. I . . . I just think I saw something.”

“Oh, really?” Her eyes flashed, reminding Maduabuchi uncomfortably of blades.

Embarrassed, he turned back to the passageway.

“What did you see?” she asked from behind him. Now her voice was edged as well.

“Nothing, ma’am. Nothing at all.”

Back in the passageway, Maduabuchi fled toward his cabin. Several of the crew laughed from sick bay, their voices rising over the whine of the bone-knitter. Someone had gone down hard.

Not him. Not even at the hands—or eyes—of Captain Smith.

• • • •

An hour later, after checking the locations of the crew again with the ship’s AI, he ventured back to the Survey Suite. Chillicothe Xiang nodded to him in the passageway, almost friendly, as she headed aft for a half-shift monitoring the power plants in Engineering.

“Hey,” Maduabuchi said in return. She didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to notice he’d spoken. All these years, all the surgeries and nano injections and training, and somehow he was still the odd kid out on the playground.

Being a Howard Immortal was supposed to be different. And it was, when he wasn’t around other Howard Immortals.

The Survey Suite was empty, as advertised. Ultra-def screens wrapped the walls, along with a variety of control inputs, from classical keypads to haptics and gestural zones. Maduabuchi slipped into the observer’s seat and swept his hand to open the primary sensor routines.

Captain Smith had left her last data run parked in the core sandbox.

His fingers hovered over the purge, then pulled back. What had she been looking at that had made her so interested in what he’d seen? Those eyes flashed edged and dangerous in his memory. He almost asked the ship where she was, but a question like that would be reported, drawing more attention than it was worth.

Maduabuchi closed his eyes for a moment, screwing up his courage, and opened the data run.

It cascaded across the screens, as well as virtual presentations in the aerosolized atmosphere of the Survey Suite. Much more than he’d seen when he was in here before—plots, scales, arrays, imaging across the EM spectrum, color-coded tabs and fields and stacks and matrices. Even his Howard-enhanced senses had trouble keeping up with the flood. Captain Smith was far older and more experienced than Maduabuchi, over half a dozen centuries to his few decades, and she had developed both the mental habits and the individualized mentarium to handle such inputs.

On the other hand, he was a much newer model. Everyone upgraded, but the Howard Institute baseline tech evolved over generations just like everything else in human culture. Maduabuchi bent to his work, absorbing the overwhelming bandwidth of her scans of Tiede 1, and trying to sort out what it was that had been the true object of her attention.

Something had to be hidden in plain sight here.

He worked an entire half-shift without being disturbed, sifting petabytes of data, until the truth hit him. The color-coding of one spectral analysis matrix was nearly identical to the green flash he thought he’d seen on the surface of Tiede 1.

All the data was a distraction. Her real work had been hidden in the metadata, passing for nothing more than a sorting signifier.

Once Maduabuchi realized that, he unpacked the labeling on the spectral analysis matrix, and opened up an entirely new data environment. Green, it was all about the green.

“I was wondering how long that would take you,” said Captain Smith from the opening hatch.

Maduabuchi jumped in his chair, opened his mouth to make some denial, then closed it again. Her eyes didn’t look razored this time, and her voice held a tense amusement.

He fell back on that neglected standby, the truth. “Interesting color you have here, ma’am.”

“I thought so.” Smith stepped inside, cycled the lock shut, then code-locked it with a series of beeps that meant her command override was engaged. “Ship,” she said absently, “sensory blackout on this area.”

“Acknowledged, Captain,” said the ship’s puppy-friendly voice.

“What do you think it means, Mr. St. Macaria?”

“Stars don’t shine green. Not to the human eye. The blackbody radiation curve just doesn’t work that way.” He added, “Ma’am.”

“Thank you for defining the problem.” Her voice was dust-dry again.

Maduabuchi winced. He’d given himself away, as simply as that. But clearly she already knew about the green flashes. “I don’t think that’s the problem, ma’am.”

“Mmm?”

“If it was, we’d all be lining up like good kids to have a look at the optically impossible brown dwarf.”

“Fair enough. Then what is the problem, Mr. St. Macaria?”

He drew a deep breath and chose his next words with care. Peridot Smith was old, old in a way he’d never be, even with her years behind him someday. “I don’t know what the problem is, ma’am, but if it’s a problem to you, it’s a command issue. Politics. And light doesn’t have politics.”

Much to his surprise, she laughed. “You’d be amazed. But yes. Again, well done.”

She hadn’t said that before, but he took the compliment. “What kind of command problem, ma’am?”

Captain Smith sucked in a long, noisy breath and eyed him speculatively. A sharp gaze, to be certain. “Someone on this ship is on their own mission. We were jiggered into coming to Tiede 1 to provide cover, and I don’t know what for.”

“Not me!” Maduabuchi blurted.

“I know that.”

The dismissal in her words stung for a moment, but on the whole, he realized he’d rather not be a suspect in this particular witch hunt.

His feelings must have shown in his face, because she smiled and added, “You haven’t been around long enough to get sucked into the Howard factions. And you have a rep for being indifferent to the seductive charms of power.”

“Uh, yes.” Maduabuchi wasn’t certain what to say to that.

“Why do you think you’re here?” She leaned close, her breath hot on his face. “I needed someone who would reliably not be conspiring against me.”

“A useful idiot,” he said. “But there’s only seven of us. How many could be conspiring? And over a green light?”

“It’s Tiede 1,” Captain Smith answered. “Someone is here gathering signals. I don’t know what for. Or who. Because it could be any of the rest of the crew. Or all of them.”

“But this is politics, not mutiny. Right . . .?”

“Right.” She brushed off the concern. “We’re not getting hijacked out here. And if someone tries, I am the meanest fighter on this ship by a wide margin. I can take any three of this crew apart.”

“Any five of us, though?” he asked softly.

“That’s another use for you.”

“I don’t fight.”

“No, but you’re a Howard. You’re hard enough to kill that you can take it at my back long enough to keep me alive.”

“Uh, thanks,” Maduabuchi said, very uncertain now.

“You’re welcome.” Her eyes strayed to the data arrays floating across the screens and in the virtual presentations. “The question is who, what, and why.”

“Have you compared the observational data to known stellar norms?” he asked.

“Green flashes aren’t a known stellar norm.”

“No, but we don’t know what the green flashes are normal for, either. If we compare Tiede 1 to other brown dwarfs, we might spot further anomalies. Then we triangulate.”

“And that is why I brought you.” Captain Smith’s tone was very satisfied indeed. “I’ll leave you to your work.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” To his surprise, Maduabuchi realized he meant it.

• • • •

He spent the next half-shift combing through comparative astronomy. At this point, almost a thousand years into the human experience of interstellar travel, there was an embarrassing wealth of data. So much so that even petabyte q-bit storage matrices were overrun, as eventually the challenges of indexing and retrieval went metastatic. Still, one thing Howards were very good at was data processing. Nothing ever built could truly match the pattern recognition and free associative skills of human (or post-human) wetware collectively known as “hunches.” Strong AIs could approximate that uniquely biological skill through a combination of brute force and deeply clever circuit design, but even then, the spark of inspiration did not flow so well.

Maduabuchi slipped into his flow state to comb through more data in a few hours than a baseline human could absorb in a year. Brown dwarfs, superjovians, fusion cycles, failed stars, hydrogen, helium, lithium, surface temperatures, density, gravity gradients, emission spectrum lines, astrographic surveys, theories dating back to the dawn of observational astronomy, digital images in two and three dimensions as well as time-lensed.

When he emerged, driven by the physiological mundanities of bladder and blood sugar, Maduabuchi knew something was wrong. He knew it. Captain Smith had been right about her mission, about there being something off in their voyage to Tiede 1.

But she didn’t know what it was she was right about. He didn’t either.

Still, the thought niggled somewhere deep in his mind. Not the green flash per se, though that, too. Something more about Tiede 1.

Or less.

“And what the hell did that mean?” he asked the swarming motes of data surrounding him on the virtual displays, now reduced to confetti as he left his informational fugue.

Maduabuchi stumbled out of the Survey Suite to find the head, the galley, and Captain Peridot Smith, in that order.

The corridor was filled with smoke, though no alarms wailed. He almost ducked back into the Survey Suite, but instead dashed for one of the emergency stations found every ten meters or so and grabbed an oxygen mask. Then he hit the panic button.

That produced a satisfying wail, along with lights strobing at four distinct frequencies. Something was wrong with the gravimetrics, too—the floor had felt syrupy, then too light, with each step. Where the hell was fire suppression?

The bridge was next. He couldn’t imagine that they were under attack—Inclined Plane was the only ship in the Tiede 1 system so far as any of them knew. And short of some kind of pogrom against Howard Immortals, no one had any reason to attack their vessel.

Mutiny, he thought, and wished he had an actual weapon. Though what he’d do with it was not clear. The irony that the lowest-scoring shooter in the history of the Howard training programs was now working as a weapons officer was not lost on him.

He stumbled into the bridge to find Chillicothe Xiang there, laughing her ass off with Paimei Joyner, one of their two scouts—hard-assed Howards so heavily modded that they could at need tolerate hard vacuum on their bare skin, and routinely worked outside for hours with minimal life support and radiation shielding. The strobes were running in here, but the audible alarm was mercifully muted. Also, whatever was causing the smoke didn’t seem to have reached into here yet.

Captain Smith stood at the far end of the bridge, her back to the diamond viewing wall that was normally occluded by a virtual display, though at the moment the actual, empty majesty of Tiede 1 localspace was visible.

Smith was snarling. “. . . don’t care what you thought you were doing, clean up my ship’s air! Now, damn it.”

The two turned toward the hatch, nearly ran into Maduabuchi in his breathing mask, and renewed their laughter.

“You look like a spaceman,” said Chillicothe.

“Moral here,” added Paimei. One deep black hand reached out to grasp Maduabuchi’s shoulder so hard he winced. “Don’t try making a barbecue in the galley.”

“We’ll be eating con-rats for a week,” snapped Captain Smith. “And everyone on this ship will know damned well it’s your fault we’re chewing our teeth loose.”

The two walked out, Paimei shoving Maduabuchi into a bulkhead while Chillicothe leaned close. “Take off the mask,” she whispered. “You look stupid in it.”

Moments later, Maduabuchi was alone with the captain, the mask dangling in his grasp.

“What was it?” she asked in a quiet, gentle voice that carried more respect than he probably deserved.

“I have . . . had something,” Maduabuchi said. “A sort of, well, hunch. But it’s slipped away in all that chaos.”

Smith nodded, her face closed and hard. “Idiots built a fire in the galley, just to see if they could.”

“Is that possible?”

“If you have sufficient engineering talent, yes,” the captain admitted grudgingly. “And are very bored.”

“Or want to create a distraction,” Maduabuchi said, unthinking.

“Damn it,” Smith shouted. She stepped to her command console. “What did we miss out there?”

“No,” he said, his hunches suddenly back in play. This was like a flow hangover. “Whatever’s out there was out there all along. The green flash. Whatever it is.” And didn’t that niggle at his thoughts like a cockroach in an airscrubber. “What we missed was in here.”

“And when,” the captain asked, her voice very slow now, viscous with thought, “did you and I become we as separate from the rest of this crew?”

When you first picked me, ma’am, Maduabuchi thought but did not say. “I don’t know. But I was in the Survey Suite, and you were on the bridge. The rest of this crew was somewhere else.”

“You can’t look at everything, damn it,” she muttered. “Some things should just be trusted to match their skin.”

Her words pushed Maduabuchi back into his flow state, where the hunch reared up and slammed him in the forebrain with a broad, hairy paw.

“I know what’s wrong,” he said, shocked at the enormity of the realization.

“What?”

Maduabuchi shook his head. It couldn’t possibly be true. The ship’s orientation was currently such that the bridge faced away from Tiede 1, but he stared at the screen anyway. Somewhere outside that diamond sheeting—rather smaller than the lounge, but still substantial—was a work of engineering on a scale no human had ever contemplated.

No human was the key word.

“The brown dwarf out there . . .” He shook with the thought, trying to force the words out. “It’s artificial. Camouflage. S-something else is hidden beneath that surface. Something big and huge and . . . I don’t know what. And s-someone on our ship has been communicating with it.”

Who could possibly manage such a thing?

Captain Peridot Smith gave him a long, slow stare. Her razored eyes cut into him as if he were a specimen on a lab table. Slowly, she pursed her lips. Her head shook just slightly. “I’m going to have to ask you to stand down, Mr. St. Macaria. You’re clearly unfit for duty.”

What! Maduabuchi opened his mouth to protest, to argue, to push back against her decision, but closed it again in the face of that stare. Of course she knew. She’d known all along. She was testing . . . whom? Him? The rest of the crew?

He realized it didn’t matter. His line of investigation was cut off. Maduabuchi knew when he was beaten. He turned to leave the bridge, then stopped at the hatch. The breathing mask still dangled in his hand.

“If you didn’t want me to find that out, ma’am,” he asked, “then why did you set me to looking for it?”

But she’d already turned away from him without answering, and was making a study of her command data.

• • • •

Chillicothe Xiang found him in the observation lounge an hour later. Uncharacteristically, Maduabuchi had retreated into alcohol. Metabolic poisons were not so effective on Howard Immortals, but if he hit something high enough proof, he could follow youthful memories of the buzz.

“That’s Patrice’s forty-year-old scotch you’re drinking,” she observed, standing over the smartgel bodpod that wrapped him like a warm, sticky uterus.

“Huh.” Patrice Tonwe, their engineering chief, was a hard son of a bitch. One of the leaders in that perpetual game of shake-and-break the rest of the crew spent their time on. Extremely political as well, even by Howard standards. Not someone to get on the wrong side of.

Shrugging off the thought and its implications, Maduabuchi looked at the little beaker he’d poured the stuff into. “Smelled strongest to me.”

Chillicothe laughed. “You are hopeless, Mad. Like the galaxy’s oldest adolescent.”

Once again he felt stung. “I’m one hundred forty-three years-subjective old. Born over two hundred years-objective ago.”

“So?” She nodded at his drink. “Look at that. And I’ll bet you never even changed genders once before you went Howard. The boy who never grew up.”

He settled further back and took a gulp from his beaker. His throat burned and itched, but Maduabuchi would be damned if he’d give her the satisfaction of choking. “What do you want?”

She knelt close. “I kind of like you, okay? Don’t get excited, you’re just an all right kid. That’s all I’m saying. And because I like you, I’m telling you, don’t ask.”

Maduabuchi was going to make her say it. “Don’t ask what?”

“Just don’t ask questions.” Chillicothe mimed a pistol with the fingers of her left hand. “Some answers are permanent fatal errors.”

He couldn’t help noting her right hand was on the butt of a real pistol. Fléchette-throwing riot gun, capable of shredding skin, muscle and bone to pink fog without damaging hull integrity.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Where I grew up, green light means go.”

Chillicothe shook him, a disgusted sneer chasing across her lips. “It’s your life, kid. Do what you like.”

With that, she stalked out of the observation lounge.

Maduabuchi wondered why she’d cared enough to bother trying to warn him off. Maybe Chillicothe had told the simple truth for once. Maybe she liked him. No way for him to know.

Instead of trying to work that out, he stared at Tiede 1’s churning orange surface. “Who are you? What are you doing in there? What does it take to fake being an entire star?”

The silent light brought no answers, and neither did Patrice’s scotch. Still, he continued to ask the questions for a while.

• • • •

Eventually he woke up, stiff in the smartgel. The stuff had enclosed all of Maduabuchi except for his face, and it took several minutes of effort to extract himself. When he looked up at the sky, the stars had shifted.

They’d broken Tiede 1 orbit!

He scrambled for the hatch, but to his surprise, his hand on the touchpad did not cause the door to open. A moment’s stabbing and squinting showed that the lock had been frozen on command override.

Captain Smith had trapped him in here.

“Not for long,” he muttered. There was a maintenance hatch at the aft end of the lounge, leading to the dorsal weapons turret. The power and materials chase in the spine of the hull was partially pressurized, well within his minimally Howard-enhanced environmental tolerances.

And as weapons officer, he had the command overrides to those systems. If Captain Smith hadn’t already locked him out.

To keep himself going, Maduabuchi gobbled some prote-nuts from the little service bar at the back of the lounge. Then, before he lost his nerve, he shifted the wall hangings that obscured the maintenance hatch and hit that pad. The interlock system demanded his command code, which he provided with a swift haptic pass, then the wall section retracted with a faint squeak that spoke of neglected maintenance.

The passage beyond was ridiculously low-clearance. He nearly had to hold his breath to climb to the spinal chase. And cold, damned cold. Maduabuchi figured he could spend ten, fifteen minutes tops up there before he began experiencing serious physiological and psychological reactions.

Where to go?

The chase terminated aft above Engineering, with access to the firing points there, as well as egress to the Engineering bay. Forward it met a vertical chase just before of the bridge section, with an exterior hatch, access to the forward firing points, and a connection to the ventral chase.

No point in going outside. Not much point in going to Engineering, where like as not he’d meet Patrice or Paimei and wind up being sorry about it.

He couldn’t get onto the bridge directly, but he’d get close and try to find out.

The chase wasn’t really intended for crew transit, but it had to be large enough to admit a human being for inspection and repairs, when the automated systems couldn’t handle something. It was a shitty, difficult crawl, but Inclined Plane was only about two hundred meters stem to stern anyway. He passed over several intermediate access hatches—no point in getting out—then simply climbed down and out in the passageway when he reached the bridge. Taking control of the exterior weapons systems from within the walls of the ship wasn’t going to do him any good. The interior systems concentrated on disaster suppression and anti-hijacking, and were not under his control anyway.

No one was visible when Maduabuchi slipped out from the walls. He wished he had a pistol, or even a good, long-handled wrench, but he couldn’t take down any of the rest of these Howards even if he tried. He settled for hitting the bridge touchpad and walking in when the hatch irised open.

Patrice sat in the captain’s chair. Chillicothe manned the navigation boards. They both glanced up at him, surprised.

“What are you doing here?” Chillicothe demanded.

“Not being locked in the lounge,” he answered, acutely conscious of his utter lack of any plan of action. “Where’s Captain Smith?”

“In her cabin,” said Patrice without looking up. His voice was a growl, coming from a heavyworld body like a sack of bricks. “Where she’ll be staying.”

“Wh-why?”

“What did I tell you about questions?” Chillicothe asked softly.

Something cold rested against the hollow spot of skin just behind Maduabuchi’s right ear. Paimei’s voice whispered close. “Should have listened to the woman. Curiosity killed the cat, you know.”

They will never expect it, he thought, and threw an elbow back, spinning to land a punch on Paimei. He never made the hit. Instead he found himself on the deck, her boot against the side of his head.

At least the pistol wasn’t in his ear any more.

Maduabuchi laughed at that thought. Such a pathetic rationalization. He opened his eyes to see Chillicothe leaning over.

“What do you think is happening here?” she asked.

He had to spit the words out. “You’ve taken over the sh-ship. L-locked Captain Smith in her cabin. L-locked me up to k-keep me out of the way.”

Chillicothe laughed, her voice harsh and bitter. Patrice growled some warning that Maduabuchi couldn’t hear, not with Paimei’s boot pressing down on his ear.

“She tried to open a comms channel to something very dangerous. She’s been relieved of her command. That’s not mutiny, that’s self-defense.”

“And compliance to regulation,” said Paimei, shifting her foot a little so Maduabuchi would be sure to hear her.

“Something’s inside that star.”

Chillicothe’s eyes stirred. “You still haven’t learned about questions, have you?”

“I w-want to talk to the captain.”

She glanced back toward Patrice, now out of Maduabuchi’s very limited line of sight. Whatever look was exchanged resulted in Chillicothe shaking her head. “No. That’s not wise. You’d have been fine inside the lounge. A day or two, we could have let you out. We’re less than eighty hours-subjective from making threadneedle transit back to Saorsen Station, then this won’t matter anymore.”

He just couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Why won’t it matter?”

“Because no one will ever know. Even what’s in the data will be lost in the flood of information.”

I could talk, Maduabuchi thought. I could tell. But then I’d just be another crazy ranting about the aliens that no one has ever found across several thousand explored solar systems in hundreds of lightyears of the Orion Arm. The crazies that had been ranting all through human history about the Fermi Paradox. He could imagine the conversation. “No, really. There are aliens. Living in the heart of a brown dwarf. They flashed a green light at me.”

Brown dwarfs were everywhere. Did that mean that aliens were everywhere, hiding inside the hearts of their guttering little stars?

He was starting to sound crazy, even to himself. But even now, Maduabuchi couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “You know the answer to the greatest question in human history. ‘Where is everybody else?’ And you’re not talking about it. What did the aliens tell you?”

“That’s it,” said Paimei. Her fingers closed on his shoulder. “You’re out the airlock, buddy.”

“No,” said Chillicothe. “Leave him alone.”

Another rumble from Patrice, of agreement. Maduabuchi, in sudden, sweaty fear for his life, couldn’t tell whom the man was agreeing with.

The fléchette pistol was back against his ear. “Why?”

“Because we like him. Because he’s one of ours.” Her voice grew very soft. “Because I said so.”

Reluctantly, Paimei let him go. Maduabuchi got to his feet, shaking. He wanted to know, damn it, his curiosity burning with a fire he couldn’t ever recall feeling in his nearly two centuries of life.

“Go back to your cabin.” Chillicothe’s voice was tired. “Or the lounge. Just stay out of everyone’s way.”

“Especially mine,” Paimei growled. She shoved him out the bridge hatch, which cycled to cut him off.

Like that, he was alone. So little a threat that they left him unescorted within the ship. Maduabuchi considered his options. The sane one was to go sit quietly with some books until this was all over. The most appealing was to go find Captain Smith, but she’d be under guard behind a hatch locked by command override.

But if he shut up, if he left now, if he never knew . . . Inclined Plane wouldn’t be back this way, even if he happened to be crewing her again. No one else had reason to come to Tiede 1, and he didn’t have resources to mount his own expedition. Might not for many centuries to come. When they departed this system, they’d leave the mystery behind. And it was too damned important.

Maduabuchi realized he couldn’t live with that. To be this close to the answer to Fermi’s question. To know that the people around him, possibly everyone around him, knew the truth and had kept him in the dark.

The crew wanted to play hard games? Then hard games they’d get.

He stalked back through the passageway to the number two lateral. Both of Inclined Plane’s boats were docked there, one on each side. A workstation was at each hatch, intended for use when managing docking or cargo transfers or other such logistical efforts where the best eyes might be down here, off the bridge.

Maduabuchi tapped himself into the weapons systems with his own still-active overrides. Patrice and Chillicothe and the rest were counting on the safety of silence to ensure there were no untoward questions when they got home. He could nix that.

He locked down every weapons system for 300 seconds, then set them all to emergency purge. Every chamber, every rack, every capacitor would be fully discharged and emptied. It was a procedure for emergency dockings, so you didn’t come in hot and hard with a payload that could blow holes in the rescuers trying to catch you.

Let Inclined Plane return to port with every weapons system blown, and there’d be an investigation. He cycled the hatch, slipped into the portside launch. Let Inclined Plane come into port with a boat and a crewman missing, and there’d be even more of an investigation. Those two events together would make faking a convincing log report pretty tough. Especially without Captain Smith’s help.

He couldn’t think about it any more. Maduabuchi strapped himself in, initiated the hot-start preflight sequence, and muted ship comms. He’d be gone before Paimei and her cohorts could force the blast-rated docking hatch. His weapons systems override would keep them from simply blasting him out of space, then concocting a story at their leisure.

And the launch had plenty of engine capacity to get him back to close orbit around Tiede 1.

Blowing the clamps on a hot-start drop, Maduabuchi goosed the launch on a minimum-time transit back toward the glowering brown dwarf. Captain Smith wouldn’t leave him here to die. She’d be back before he ran out of water and air.

Besides, someone was home down there, damn it, and he was going to go knocking.

Behind him, munitions began cooking off into the vacuum. Radiations across the EM spectrum coruscated against the launch’s forward viewports, while instrumentation screeched alerts he didn’t need to hear. It didn’t matter now. Screw Chillicothe’s warning about not asking questions. “Permanent fatal errors,” his ass.

One way or the other, Maduabuchi would find the answers if it killed him.

©2010 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. Originally published in Is Anybody Out There?, edited by Marty Halpern. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jay Lake was a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. He lived in Portland, Oregon and lost a six year battle with colon cancer on June 1, 2014. Jay was a prolific writer and editor and blogged regularly about his cancer at his website jlake.com. He was well known for his novels featuring the character Green (Green, Endurance, and Kalimpura, published by Tor Books) as well as several other novels and collections. His final collection The Last Plane to Heaven was released by Tor Books in 2014. His work has been translated into several languages including Czech, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese and Russian.

Waterbirds

G. V. Anderson | 5920 words

Constable Kershaw has not uttered any overrides, nor issued a warrant to access her memory logs, but Celia understands nonetheless that she is expected to stay, to sit and answer his questions like a suspect. It surprises her, this treatment. Like she’s human.

“Are you chilly, Constable? Shall I light the fire?”

“Yeah, all right,” he says, removing his hat and settling into the armchair her employer always favours. Favoured.

Once the logs are crackling and spitting, the dank little sitting room quickly loses its early-morning pall; the permeating smells of brine from the beach and the mould lurking behind the bookcase retreat.

A teacup from last night still sits on the mantelpiece. The rim is marked by purple lipstick—Irene hasn’t been here, has she? Celia’s short-term memory drivers are old, her logs slow to recalibrate. She tidies the teacup away, aware of the constable’s gaze, and smooths the embroidered antimacassar draped over the back of the second armchair before taking a seat herself.

“How should I address you now?” Kershaw says, smoothing his moustache. “Mx.?”

With her employer Mrs. Lawson missing, presumed dead, the contract between them is terminated, and she is free to revert to her default settings. She may choose any name, any gender. But this employment was her longest, lasting two decades; indeed, without it, she would have been decommissioned long ago.

“Mrs. Lawson always called me Celia,” she replies, clasping her hands in her lap.

He cocks a brow. “You don’t owe her anything. She’s let you fall apart.”

She glances down at her hands, the frayed skin around her knuckles, and stays silent.

“All right. Celia.” He activates his notepad. “Tell me what happened this morning.”

He already knows—he asked the same question when they stood together and looked out at the garments strewn across the sand—but she recounts it for the sake of the official record: how she booted up at 5:38 a.m. after a full shutdown just as the sunrise struck the back of the cottage. She started making the usual breakfast only to find Mrs. Lawson’s bed untouched. The front gate was open; she’d heard the iron bolt tapping home against its sheath as it swung in the wind.

At 6:03 a.m., she grasped the rotting gate, stopping it mid-swing, and looked out at the mudflats that led down to the beach, and the Wash beyond. Sodden things frilled there like scuds of foam. White down feathers had blown about and got caught in the fleshy stalks of seablite growing between the fence posts. She plucked one and rubbed it between her fingers as she strode barefoot onto the cold sand.

The sodden things were the many layers of Mrs. Lawson’s clothes—her bed socks, her undergarments, her nightgown, her housecoat—shucked off and stepped out of, one by one. Where the sea licked the land, Celia found a messy blast of feathers like the ones seen on busy roads sometimes, or in coops after a fox has got in. There was no sign of blood.

“Where were you last night?”

Celia stares at the carpet. Recovering from a full shutdown has made her groggy.

“Where were you last night?” he repeats louder. “Are your ears as knackered as the rest of you? Respond.”

Not so human, then. “I was here with Mrs. Lawson.”

“Can anyone confirm that?”

She thinks of the teacup marked with purple lipstick. Shivers imperceptibly. Holds his gaze. “No.”

He sighs. “How long have you been coming here with Mrs. Lawson, Celia?”

He knows this as well, knows she remembers him as a cocksure teenager who, when he first saw her, said, You’re one of those fuckbots, right? When can I have a go, then? But he has to ask. For the official record.

“Twenty years, every May. She came alone before that.”

“Was there anything different about her this time?”

“She was ill. Tired from the journey. We only arrived yesterday.”

“Why’d she bother, then? There’s nothing for tourists here. Was she meeting someone?”

“I don’t know.”

The exchange has drawn him in, brought him to the edge of the armchair, but now he reclines with an invasive mixture of frown and smirk on his face. He rubs his temple. “I find it hard to believe she didn’t share this information with you, her Companion of twenty years. What services did you provide Mrs. Lawson, if she didn’t trust you with something like that? Was it physical?”

Celia kinks her neck. A shard of dry silicone snaps off. The question in his mouth feels dirty. “Many people withhold personal or sensitive data from their Companions, in case of a security breach; it’s not unusual. And Mrs. Lawson employed me for my social features. The exact duties stipulated in my contract and its amendments do not seem relevant to this investigation.”

“Don’t they? As her Companion, aren’t you responsible for your employer’s personal safety?”

“It depends on the contract.”

“Do you have it to hand?”

“No. The master copy is filed with Mrs. Lawson’s solicitor, and another copy archived with MxMill Incorporated.”

“Then I’ll need to see one to determine if your actions, or inactions, were malicious. Mrs. Lawson was a vulnerable woman with no family. If you’re found to have somehow broken your own protocols, you’ll be decommissioned. Do you understand?”

Celia nods and rises. “I no longer have instant mail functionality, but I can give you the contact ID for the solicitor. Would you like a cup of tea while we wait?”

He peers up at her suspiciously. “All right. I need to phone the sergeant anyway. But stay inside the house.”

The kitchen is almost bare, a typical holiday home. There’s an electric kettle and a packet of tea leaves on the ugly, outdated countertop, and a frying pan left over from breakfast, spotted with grease. Mrs. Lawson was not here to eat the eggs and bacon, and Celia can’t digest food like the newer MxMill models.

Perhaps Constable Kershaw would like them with his tea.

The thought comes automatically, unwanted, a manifestation of the constant urge to please that underpins her code. She strikes the heel of her palm against the countertop in frustration, the noise buried beneath the rattle of the pipes and the rush of water as she fills the kettle. It’s from the cold tap, so it’ll take longer to boil. She flicks it on.

You’re one of those fuckbots, right?

She splays her hands on either side of the sink and looks out of the grubby window at the mudflats. Dumpy little plovers wade in the watery crevasses that look like so many stretch marks in the sand.

And, byte by byte, she remembers—Irene. The train. What Mrs. Lawson has done.

• • • •

Exactly twenty years have passed since Mrs. Lawson first brought Celia to New Heacham—new, because the old Heacham had flooded when rising sea levels expanded the Wash. They rented this same cottage, as they always would, and spent a pleasant fortnight hiking along the coast—Mrs. Lawson was much younger then—and checking the progress of the migrating birds’ chicks as they shed their first feathers. Mrs. Lawson knew the nesting sites like the back of her hand. One species of waterbird in particular pleased Celia, and over the years Mrs. Lawson has taught her to appreciate its grace: the little egret, with its slim white plume, silly yellow feet, and dark, dark legs.

“They mate for life,” Mrs. Lawson said, watching one as it fished for molluscs. “They fly south in the summer, but they always return here, the same pair, to the same nest, every spring.”

When they came again to New Heacham, and then again, and again, and spent the same pleasant fortnight on the same pleasant pastimes and Mrs. Lawson told her the very same thing as if for the first time, Celia smiled shyly and said, “Are you a little egret, too?”

And Mrs. Lawson smiled back, a little nervous, and stooped to pick a clam out of the darkening sand.

“You’re one of those fuckbots, right?”

The fifth year. Celia was being served in the pub, taking her afternoon off with Priya from the fishmonger’s. The teenaged boy who’d spoken was trying to grow a moustache without much success. She looked to the barman, but he’d been pulled away by other customers; it was a bank holiday, and the place was busy.

“My name is Celia,” she told him, collecting her order. “I am a MxMill Companion, model 2.3, and yes, I am equipped for sexual intercourse.”

He whistled low. “We don’t see many of you around here. New Heacham’s in the middle of fucking nowhere, if you hadn’t noticed. So.” A quick quirk of the eyebrow. “When can I have a go, then?—Ah, shit.” Someone had bumped into him from behind, sloshing his beer, and saved her the trouble of answering. She moved away to find Priya.

Later, when the crowd had mellowed enough to hear the jukebox, she asked who the boy was and Priya rolled her eyes. “A right scumbag,” she said. “He keeps talking about applying to some police academy in London; with any luck, he’ll sod off before summer. Just avoid him if you can.—Could you get me another one of these? Here, I’ll give you the credits. Don’t you want one, too?”

“No, thank you,” Celia replied, “I’m a model 2.3.” When Priya looked blank, she explained, “I’m part manufactured protein, part silicone. I cannot ingest fluids. They’d have nowhere to go.”

“That’s so weird,” Priya said, digging around in her pocket for cash. “I heard the new Companions can eat and crap and everything. You must be a really old one.”

But Kershaw did not sod off that summer, or at least he tried and was forced to come back, because he was at New Heacham the following May, and he hadn’t forgotten her.

“Who’s your owner, then?”

Sixth year. The two of them alone in the lane lined with pink aster, between the post office and the crumbling seawall, its quiet to be disturbed a moment later by the zip of his fly.

“Mrs. Lawson. She rents the cottage out by the mudflats. And she’s my employer, not my owner. Companions aren’t slaves.”

He smiled lewdly. “Would you like to be?”

Then the seventh, and the two years since failing the police academy entrance exams in London had given Kershaw something to prove. He was bullish, that May, more than a little rough. At the end of the fortnight she sat alone on a chalky bank of grass as the sun set over the water, scooping semen out of the modular orifice that functioned as her vagina. It never slotted back in quite the same way after that.

Mrs. Lawson and Celia passed the rest of their time in the south where it was warm and Mrs. Lawson could keep to herself. Celia liked Bath most of all, with its uniform honey-coloured townhouses, and it was there, when the annual renewal of her contract came up, that she admitted Kershaw’s abuses to her employer.

“I spent the first thirty years of my existence in service to other people’s sexual desires,” Celia said, her voice echoing round the deserted Pump Room. “It’s what I was made for. But I’m older now, with desires of my own. I won’t be returned to that service, in or outside of your employment.”

Mrs. Lawson—who’d started to go slightly deaf and whose knuckles swelled to the size of acorns on bitter nights, who had the right to cast Celia back onto the scrap heap where she’d found her—Mrs. Lawson pulled Celia close and hissed into her protein-and-silicone ear, “He will never touch you again, my dear.”

She wrote to the local solicitor’s office in New Heacham and threatened to sue for damages. Kershaw was unable to settle a suit, of course, and Celia couldn’t have been repaired if she wanted to: Parts for model series 2.0 were hard to come by. But it had the desired effect. Kershaw kept his distance. They saw one another from afar, once a year—snapshots in which he joined the local police, got married, finally grew that moustache, gained some wrinkles.

Now that she considers it, today is probably the first time they’ve spoken in thirteen years.

“How is your wife?” she asks him as he sips his tea. He likes it sweet. The distaste crossing his face is satisfying. “Is something wrong?”

“Don’t you have sugar for this?”

“No, sorry.”

“Christ.” He takes another sip and puts it down with a clatter, then starts on the cold bacon and eggs. She almost reheated them, but something Irene had said last night stopped her, jumped across her code like a glitch: Fuck compliance! Fuck making other people comfortable!

She stands by the bay window as he eats, drawing the curtains back to look at the front gate and Mrs. Lawson’s things, the feathers. She still has the downy one she plucked from the seablite in her pocket, and she fingers it gently. It’s a little egret feather, she’d swear on it.

It is 7:14 a.m.

“How long will this take, Constable?”

“However long it takes the solicitor to send the contract,” he replies through a mouthful of bacon. “Why, you got somewhere to be?”

“I have a pre-contract agreement elsewhere. They won’t like to be kept waiting.”

His fork pauses halfway to his mouth. He stares at her. “Already? With who?”

“Until a contract is signed, I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Sit down, will you? You’re making me nervous, hanging around like that.”

She sits, smiling sweetly, and between them the snapping logs burn bright. The little egret feather is soft; it slithers like oil paint between her fingertips, which turns her mind easily to Irene’s little garage workshop, the smell of turpentine.

It was during the fourteenth year that Celia started to notice Irene painting on the marshy hillocks overlooking the mudflats. Mrs. Lawson had grown too stiff for the long walks along the coast. She opted to stay at the cottage instead, or else sit out on the saltmarsh with a picnic basket if the summer heat came early. Celia ranged freely then, taking Mrs. Lawson’s antique camera along, for she could crouch silently for hours until even the youngest little egrets lost their fear of her. She took the most intimate and wonderful photographs, that way.

The two women grew civilly aware of each other over that fortnight, and the following year, when Celia spotted Irene’s frizzy, prematurely gray hair in a field somewhere between Castle Rising and King’s Lynn, she wandered close enough to see her unfinished canvas: a study of pink-footed geese.

Celia smiled. “You’ve got them just right.”

Irene turned her head and frowned. Then, “You Fay Lawson’s Companion?”

“Yes. You know my employer?”

“Everyone knows her, she comes here every year. We all think she must have some toy boy tucked away somewhere, but I suppose she doesn’t need one if she’s got you.” Irene’s tone was blunt, dismissive. A faint cleft lip scar drew her top lip upwards like a loaded crossbow. She turned back to her canvas but must have lost the heart for it because she started cleaning her brushes instead. “You allowed to wander this far from the cottage?”

“I have the afternoon off,” Celia replied, lifting the camera for Irene to see. “You’ve wandered far yourself. Shall I escort you home?—What’s wrong?”

“You just can’t turn off that hostess mode, right?” Irene had started packing up her things.

“You don’t have to stop right now. I’m sorry I disturbed you.”

“No, the mood’s gone. I finally get an afternoon away from my husband and then you come along.”

Celia watched her lock up her brushes and paints, fold the easel and tuck it under one arm. The canvas, still glistening, dangled by her fingertips over her shoulder like a slung coat. When Celia reiterated that the painting was really very good, Irene thanked her warily and seemed glad to leave.

The fifteenth year was better. Irene’s humour was abrupt, aggressive enough to keep Celia on the back foot, but the passing of a whole year provided a kind of buffer. Irene even accepted a plate of fried silver eels bought fresh from Priya, who had taken over at the fishmonger’s. Afterwards they lay sunning themselves in the grass while Celia told her about their beautiful house in Bath, which led to questions about the state of the cottage.

“You know the owner doesn’t rent it out to anyone else?” said Irene to Mrs. Lawson, who was sat in a lawn chair nearby. “It’s empty most of the year. No one wants it.”

Mrs. Lawson’s eyes widened and her head retreated into her shoulders. She was often quiet around strangers.

“It is getting a little mouldy,” replied Celia, glancing at Mrs. Lawson. The old woman smiled gratefully at the rescue, but shook her head firmly as if to say, No, I won’t stay anywhere else.

“So are you, look.” Irene pointed at the loose silicone flapping around Celia’s elbow joint. “When was the last time you had a service?”

“I can’t remember,” said Celia. Her memory logs weren’t built to last this long, to hold this much data; none of her was. She’d started to experience a burning sensation in her skull, wires overheating deep inside. “They don’t make model 2.3 parts anymore.”

When Irene didn’t reply, Celia tilted her head to look at her. She was frowning slightly, those lips that never fully closed coloured a deep plum, as if Celia had just told her she was dying.

Celia supposed she was, in a way. The thought made her sad. She looked to Mrs. Lawson for comfort, but her employer had grown very old in the last few years, and the sight of her huddled in the lawn chair made her feel worse.

“Come on, you old rustbucket.”

The sixteenth year, and Irene had taken Celia by the hand. Her husband was at work. Their house in town was empty.

She’d converted their garage into a kind of workshop. She crossed her arms and leaned against the bonnet of a wheel-less car as Celia looked around. The paints in their twisted tubes, nozzles encrusted. Brushes in all sizes, their bristles as stiff and sharp as spearheads. Celia kept a respectful distance and did not touch anything, but she must have asked the right questions because Irene slowly relaxed and unfolded her arms.

“This kind of art is rare now. Your husband must be proud of you.”

Irene’s tongue probed the inside of her cheek. After an awkward moment, she said, “Here, I found you something.”

It was a palette of MxMill Incorporated body paints. The plastic container was scuffed and cracked, and most of the colours had been worn right down to the metal base in the middle, but they were compatible for MxMill Companion model series 2.0. Celia hadn’t seen the like in over twenty years.

“Where did you get this?”

“Ryan collects this kind of stuff. I know, it’s creepy.” Irene cupped Celia’s chin and guided her head left to right. The silicone that formed Celia’s cervical vertebrae crunched like dry cartilage. “The old lady doesn’t take care of you properly. I thought someone should.”

Irene filled in the gaps where Celia’s skin colour had worn away with time and exposure. Her cheekbones and nose were the worst, and Irene took to blending the paint in with her middle finger for better coverage. They stood that way for a long time, Irene working intently on her face, the pressure of her touch making Celia rock on the balls of her feet. Irene’s mouth hung open slightly when she concentrated. Celia focused on the tiny scar on the inside of her bottom lip as if she’d fallen and bitten right through it, once.

“Your lips are pretty bad, too,” said Irene. She held up the palette. “You want purple, like me?”

Celia still had the lip colour she’d been made with: a vampish red, pure fantasy. It had suited her when she was new, when she hadn’t known her own mind, but now it marked her out. She picked out a neutral shade. “Boring,” Irene sighed, but she applied it just as carefully as the skin, and the simple thrill of choice made Celia giddy.

Irene noticed and laughed. “Do you want some new hair, too? I bet he’s got loads.” She set the palette down and led Celia through a connecting door into the house. Celia paused to look at the photographs on the wall of a young, smiling Irene with her husband, framed in tarnished brass. Irene pursed her lips. “Come on.” Upstairs, in a tiny bedroom, she threw open a trunk of macabre hairpieces that looked for all the world like a hoard of scalps.

“Won’t your husband mind?”

“You think he’s going to notice if one of these goes missing? Help yourself. Let me worry about him.”

Celia chose a stylish bob in a colour that reminded her of the limestone of Bath. Irene checked its label. It was for a later model, but Irene clipped it down to size. She helped Celia replace her long black hairpiece, then she stood back, hands on her hips. “Anything else, Your Highness?”

Celia ran her hands through her new short hair. The ends tickled her nape. “Can you take my eyelashes off, please?”

“You don’t like the floozy lashes?” Irene said in mock astonishment. But she peeled them off so that Celia’s eyes looked stark and penetrating.

“It suits you,” she said soberly, with an uncharacteristically quiet smile.

But when Celia returned to the cottage, Mrs. Lawson said, “You look strange.”

Her smile faltered. “I’m sorry. Would you like me to change it back?”

“No, no. Come closer.” Celia knelt by the armchair to let the old woman see her. Mrs. Lawson’s weakening eyes struggled in the dim evening light. “No, you look very well. Do you like it? And you picked it out yourself? I’m happy for you. It’s just a shock, that’s all.”

The seventeenth year, Mrs. Lawson caught a cold she couldn’t shake. They stayed in, building up the fire until condensation ran down the windowpanes. Celia bought her a little pot of cockles which she ate by spearing them with a wooden toothpick. The strong vinegar made her choke. Celia held her tongue for a further year until, upon arriving at a cottage half-sunken into the saltmarsh, she said, “Mrs. Lawson, we must think about renting elsewhere.”

“No,” Mrs. Lawson said emphatically, “it’s this cottage or none.”

“But this mould—” And Celia pulled the bookcase, sideboard and ottoman away from the sitting room wall to reveal vast dark seeping patches. Well-established colonies of pale fungus grew along the skirting. “And the pipes are not what they were,” she said. “The radiators in your bedroom no longer work. We cannot stay here, Mrs. Lawson. This cottage is making you ill.”

“Quiet!” A verbal override, flung out in frustration. Mrs. Lawson covered her mouth immediately and reached out for her. “I’m sorry. Cancel command.”

Celia clasped her employer’s hand in both of hers. “Please tell me why this is so important to you. I only want to make you comfortable.”

Mrs. Lawson eased herself into the armchair with a whimper. In earlier times, her body had filled the whole seat; now there was room for her arms to loll to either side. Her voice was quiet. “You asked me if I was a little egret once, do you remember?”

Celia nodded—some memories never decay. “The same pair, the same nest, every spring.”

“I was a bold little creature. I thought I’d seen all there was to see of the oceans and the fish and the birds. I wanted to see the humans. I didn’t know I’d be afraid of them. I didn’t know I could never turn back.” Her face paled. “Something still draws me back to this cottage, this nest. Some instinct, even now.”

Celia reached out to stroke the old woman’s cheek, and could have sworn she felt stubble there. White feathers breaking through.

“Can you understand? I hope so, my darling Celia. You’re the only thing that doesn’t frighten me.”

She continued to carry out her duties quietly, soaking Mrs. Lawson’s jaundiced feet before bed each night, and massaging the dark, dark patches across her calves in the morning where her circulation had failed, but she was worried.

“I don’t know what to do,” she admitted to Irene.

“She’s just getting old. We all are.” Irene passed her a brush. She was teaching Celia to paint, although the light wasn’t favourable. Heavy clouds lay over the Wash, which reflected them murkily back.

“We missed you last year,” said Celia. “Where did you go?”

Irene smiled. The tip of her tongue peeked out to lick at her cleft lip scar. “I was at an exhibition in Cambridge. For this stuff. My paintings.”

“That’s wonderful!”

“I actually sold a few canvasses. It felt good to make my own money for once. Ryan wasn’t happy about it.”

She fell quiet. Celia dabbed grey onto the canvas, so thick she could never imagine it drying. For a moment there was only the sound of wind and water, and the birds calling overhead. Then Irene spoke again.

“I’m thinking about leaving him.”

Celia glanced at her, paintbrush hovering. Irene’s gaze was fixed on the Wash, the grey of her eyes almost a match for the brewing storm. She nibbled mindfully at the puckered scar on the inside of her bottom lip.

“Does he hit you?”

“No,” Irene laughed, “no, but that would make it easier, having bruises people could see. He’s just . . . He’s fucking obsessed with your lot, you know that, right? It’s like they’re the wife and I’m the disposable one made of plastic, or whatever.”

Celia took her hand, palm to palm, fingers interlaced. “Manufactured protein and silicone.”

“Great, thanks. You missed a bit.”

But something kept Irene in New Heacham, something about the other fifty weeks of the year that Celia never saw, and it spilled over the next May when Irene pushed her down into the grass. Her fingers didn’t jab like Kershaw’s had; they yielded and curled inside her while the black and white oystercatchers skimmed the water’s edge nearby. Celia squeezed her eyes shut, her back arching even as she willed it flat.

Irene hesitated, unsure of herself. “Does this feel okay?”

The question was a gift. “I can’t feel anything. My genitals have no nerve endings.”

Irene withdrew her hand, her fingertips glossy. “What? Why?”

“So that I don’t experience pain or discomfort.”

Irene was still for a minute, then she wiped her hand on the grass. “You should’ve told me if you didn’t want to.”

“I can’t.” When Irene raised her eyebrows and looked away, Celia reached out and clasped her wrist. “You don’t understand: I can’t. I am a MxMill Companion. I am programmed to comply. I am programmed to put your needs before mine.”

Irene was staring at her.

Celia clamped her mouth shut, but the code prised them open. “W-would you prefer a different attachment?”

It cut deep, saying those words. She began to shake.

“That’s sick,” Irene said hoarsely. “That’s fucking sick.” She drew up her knees and pressed her face into her hands. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were programmed like that.”

“I can’t ever consent—”

“We don’t have to do anything.”

“—you won’t know what’s code and what’s me—”

“But I like you, and I thought—”

“Yes.”

They watched the waterbirds pry bivalves from their shells, leaving wedge-shaped prints behind them in the sand. The sun skimmed low across the water. Celia told her about Kershaw. Irene brushed away tears. “I know. I always knew. He still brags about it. That prick.”

Celia rested her head on Irene’s shoulder and Irene rested hers on Celia’s head, and they talked until the sky went dark.

“Is there anything I can do to make you feel good?” said Irene.

After a moment’s thought, Celia smiled and leaned forward. She pulled off her top. “Do you see the panels across my shoulder blades? Open them, please.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to break you.”

“I know my own schematics; you won’t.”

Irene prised the panels open, bending Celia’s shoulder blades back on themselves like two stubby wings, and sank her hand into the blue viscera of wires and coding cards within. Following Celia’s instructions, she located and brushed against the exposed sensory cables, and Celia’s skin tingled with pleasure at the feeling of sunlight that wasn’t there, wind that didn’t blow—a touch that wouldn’t come.

Her coding wasn’t equipped to process this. It was all hers.

• • • •

“How does it work?” Irene said much later. “Do you have free will? Can you, like, lie?”

“Yes, I can lie. I couldn’t at first.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth, then?”

“I suppose you can’t. But I can. I know when I’m fighting against myself. So, is that a kind of free will? I don’t know. I can choose my contracts, at least.”

Irene smiled. “What about having no contract? What about being free?”

Celia tucked in her chin and considered the question. “It’s safer for me to be under contract,” she said firmly. “It gives me certain rights and securities that I wouldn’t have on my own.”

And the twentieth year, the last year, last night, when a breathless, rosy-cheeked Irene came to the cottage to offer a contract of her own, barely an hour after they’d arrived.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” said Celia, showing Irene into the sitting room. Mrs. Lawson hadn’t long gone to bed with a mug of hot milk and sugar.

Irene held Celia’s face in her hands. “You don’t have to do all that hostess bullshit with me, all right? Fuck compliance. Fuck making other people comfortable. I would be happier for you to not care about my comfort. There, stick that in your programming.”

Celia smiled. “But I really do want to make you a cup of tea. Your hands are cold.” When it was ready, Irene gulped it down while it was still steaming. Her haste was worrying. “What’s the matter?”

Irene set the empty teacup on the mantelpiece. “I’m doing it, Celia. I’m getting the first train out of here tomorrow. I want to know if you’ll come with me. We can go to your Bath, or Cambridge. I’ll give you a contract, whatever you need.”

The bacon tumbles around inside Constable Kershaw’s mouth; the egg yolk splits and coats his teeth. She can’t stand to watch and boils the kettle for more tea, just for something to do. From the kitchen window she sees the sergeant pull up, a fleshy man who has to duck under the lintel when Kershaw opens the door to greet him.

“I can’t,” she said last night, and the light dimmed in Irene’s eyes. “I can’t leave Mrs. Lawson like this, not while she’s so weak.”

And Irene said, bitterly, “Right,” and almost turned to go. Then, “I don’t know how you can do this, Celia. How can you be satisfied with two good weeks a year for, what, five years now? You’re going to short-circuit pretty soon if you don’t fall apart first; will it have been enough? I’m sorry, but it’s not enough for me anymore. I need this full-time or not at all.”

“Can I find you later? Where will you be?”

“When your contract runs out? God knows. I’m done running on someone else’s clock. Aren’t you?”

Celia brings the policemen their drinks and gives efficient answers to the sergeant’s questions. At 7:42 a.m., Kershaw’s notepad pings with a response from the solicitor. He opens the message and thumbs through it.

“Here’s the contract.—Hey, Mrs. Lawson made changes to her will last week.”

The sergeant frowns.

Celia stays by the bay window. The fogged glass still bears the imprint of her palm where she placed it when she watched Irene leave, and the smear of her fingers where Mrs. Lawson took them and then held her close. Her head had burned worse than ever as she rested her cheek on the old woman’s shoulder, too many electrical impulses firing at once. She couldn’t cry, so she emitted helpless, wordless grunts instead.

Whoever designed model 2.3 had given it a mind far too complex for the shell built to hold it.

“I thought this might happen,” Mrs. Lawson said, stroking Celia’s hair. “I’d much rather you go, my dear, and be happy, than lose precious time with the one you love.”

“Love?”

“That is what you feel for her, isn’t it? I’ve seen the way you look at her.”

It was true that her time with Irene was luminous in her memory, brighter than the passing days around them. They glowed. They anchored her inner calendar the same way her contract renewal did.

“But I love you, too,” Celia whispered.

“And we’ve had twenty wonderful years together. Forgive me, it was selfish to keep you all to myself.” She pulled away.

“Where are you going?” Celia said.

She gave Celia’s hand a final squeeze as she headed for the door. “I’m releasing you from your contract.” Celia had moved to stop her, so Mrs. Lawson made sure she couldn’t follow: “Commence full shutdown.”

Kershaw skims the new will, the sergeant reading over his shoulder. When they reach Irene’s name as the sole beneficiary, Kershaw’s mouth falls open. He looks up at Celia, his pallid cheeks veined with blue.

“How did she know my wife?”

Celia almost bursts: She realises Mrs. Lawson has given them her blessing, her properties, her wealth, out of love; but she holds it in, the truth and her happiness. Somehow, she shrugs. And the lie, after so many others and so many years, casts something loose inside her: the binding code, finally unravelling like so much protein and silicone. She’s free.

Ryan Kershaw stands dumb, until the sergeant snatches the notepad from him to check the will, and then the contract with its many, many amendments. He finds, as Celia knows he will, a paragraph in which she is forbidden from preventing self-inflicted injury or death to her late employer’s person while they reside in New Heacham. It’s the compromise they came to after Celia tried to argue against staying in the cottage. Mrs. Lawson’s body was her own to risk.

It is 7:51 a.m. The first train leaves New Heacham in nine minutes.

“Am I free to go, Sergeant?”

With a contract absolving her of any and all blame, he has no grounds on which to hold her. She takes only the antique camera, slipping her head through the diagonal strap so it hangs against her hip. Outside, a cool breeze cuts through air heavy with dew, bringing the last of the little egret feathers tumbling with it. They rush past her face: Mrs. Lawson’s parting touch.

The tiny feather is still in her pocket. She kisses it and flings it up to join the rest. Then she runs north to the train station, where Irene is waiting for her.

©2018 by G.V. Anderson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

G. V. Anderson is a British writer whose professional debut “Das Steingeschöpf” won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 2017. Her work has appeared in Syntax & Salt, Strange Horizons, and Fantasy & Science Fiction.

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

Greetings, Humanity! Welcome To Your Choice Of Species!

Adam-Troy Castro | 2550 words

Hello, there!

If you have received this telepathic mailing, you are a member of the species currently self-designated Homo sapiens, as evolved on the planet locally known as Earth, orbiting the sun locally known, for some reason that escapes us, as Sol. Most of your kind is already aware of the legal proceedings just completed in Session 3,975,216.7b of the Exalted High Tribunal of the Interstellar Commission on the Minimum Standards for Worthiness of Indigenous Cultures (Blue-Ribbon Enforcement Division), which has considered your past conduct toward your own kind and other life forms within your biosphere, as well as the odds toward any of these factors improving at any point in the foreseeable future. Learned representatives of your species were allowed to speak on your behalf, and present in your defense your greatest spiritual beliefs (see Bible, The; Koran, The; Tuesdays With Morrie, others), as well as your most treasured artistic works (The Collected Works of William Shakespeare, The Sistine Chapel Ceiling; the films of Akira Kurosawa; the musical collection Some Old Bullshit by The Beastie Boys, others), and while these were compelling arguments, the court has unanimously decided that your kind is one of the universe’s failed experiments, a contagion that must be eradicated before it can spread to the stars.

As discussed when the subpoena was delivered to all your terrestrial governments, our customary solution to the dilemma you present is not genocide, but genetic reassignment. It is within our power to physically and psychologically alter each and every one of you for inclusion in some already extant, more acceptable species which has agreed to accept you as new members of their respective societies. Because of the widespread distaste with which your own species is now regarded, your options are fewer than most who have trod this path before you, but these are all highly advanced, respectable races that have demonstrated their inherent nobility of spirit by taking it upon themselves to offer yours a future. You will see that there are not many. Out of over 10,000 recognized sentient species in our collective, only eight have offered their worlds as sanctuary to ex-human beings. However, between them, they offer enough open spaces to accommodate your entire population. Please review this list and mark the empty spaces next to each entry with numbers 1-8 to establish its ranking in your preferences. Be prompt and be sure to rank every option, including those you find distasteful. We cannot guarantee that every one of you will get his or her first choice.

[__] SPECIES 975. This asexual and invertebrate race, which to you resemble giant earthworms, spends its entire life cycle burrowing through the soft nutrient-rich soil of its home world. Though blind and deaf, they enjoy a stimulating existence via their primary sensory apparatus, the cilia that taste the chemical make-up of the surrounding dirt, in which they find implanted the deep philosophical meanderings of all the fellow worms who have passed through that soil before them. The network of tunnels that contain all their collected musings on the subjects of charity and faith will provide ex-humans with the most promising grounds for exploration. As a plus, specimens of 975 are extremely long-lived by human standards, promising your most scholarly a life of the mind that may potentially go on for millennia. You may want to avoid venturing too close to the surface, as their numbers are kept down by the local equivalent of robins.

[__] SPECIES 1036. This porcine race is a recommended destination to those among your kind who believe they cannot live without belligerence. As you can see, they resemble angry, bipedal pigs, and carry clubs. This is because they are violent and like to use those clubs, the most advanced technology in their possession, to assault the crania of those with whom they feel even the slightest irritation. They are capable of cooperation and can maintain alliances of as many as six or seven of their kind, in order to attack others of their kind in concert. It may seem a small miracle that any survive to adulthood, but in fact many do, a fact attributed to their thick skulls and deeply uncomplicated neural structure, which allows for only one real emotion: festering pique. Cognition is more advanced, even if it is mostly limited to justifications for walloping others of their kind on the head; their reasoning as children and as young adults can be quite complicated, and indeed almost poetic, often encompassing literally hundreds of articulate steps and great leaps of impassioned argument, before arriving at the precise reasoning for any particular act of club-wielding aggression. These attributes are, however, limited in life expectancy, as the damage they’ve suffered from such almost constant concussion almost always results in a middle age of advancing, and irreversible, drooling idiocy. Nevertheless, their generosity as a species is best measured by their eagerness to welcome as many ex-human beings as possible. Those of you who take this option will not be provided with your own clubs.

[__] SPECIES 1427. Many of you are now expressing awestruck admiration for the accompanying illustration of this race, which as you can see is a creature of ethereal beauty, flitting to and fro on delicate wings much like those of your extinct terrestrial butterflies. They are indeed one of the most aesthetically pleasing species in the galaxy, creatures of brilliant color and divine character who waft on perfumed winds beneath delicate pink skies and the golden light of a sun that makes the ripples on the azure seas of their home world sparkle like so many jewels. Those repulsed by species 1036 will be relieved to know that species 1427 has never known war and that it dedicates itself exclusively to celebration of the beauty of life, leading to an existence they devote to riding those warm skies, spreading pollen, and singing the praises of the divine in voices that, alas, sound like screeching violins. Human beings who accept reassignment to this species will unfortunately retain their prior aesthetic preferences for music, a serious drawback to be sure, but one that will not much impact the novelty of being one of these creatures who otherwise know nothing but transcendent joy for the entire five minutes and sixteen seconds of their average lifespan.

[__] SPECIES 2562. Most of you, examining the adjacent illustration, will not be able to make sense of it. You will see it as a chaotic collection of clashing colors, like an abstract by your Jackson Pollock or like a pizza where some of the layers of cheese have been dyed green. Be apprised that this species possesses no physical appearance at all and that what you’re looking at is at best an approximation, a graphic used by the galactic census to map this race’s ebb and flow through the eons. The longest-lived of all the options being offered you today is that phenomenon you likely never even suspected, a sentient idea. 2562 is an argument that has grown self-aware, that has become capable of respiration and procreation and interaction with its competitors in the vast community of ideas. It is also unfortunately capable of mutation in much the same way as many terrestrial ideas have been, to the point where though it still superficially resembles the epiphany it started out as, it has now come to stand for a premise precisely opposed to it, as in humanity’s “Democracy.” Former humans are sought by this collective because of your kind’s strange talent for bizarre self-justifications. Choose this option and you are assured of a long life, if not a particularly useful one.

[__] SPECIES 3712 (not currently extant). This wholly extinct species, once known by the name of Pylthothi Screaming Stink-Moss, has been the object of multiple preceding attempts at resurrection by genetic reassignment, all of which have been doomed to failure by its primary characteristic: a thorough and undiluted disgust for everything about itself. We are required by interstellar law to provide this option but do not recommend it, not even for human beings, who can relate.

[__] SPECIES 7712. Human beings are not equipped to understand the image of this ancient and widely respected species, which dwells on a frigid, airless world far from its solar system’s central source of heat and light. The world in question possesses some twenty-seven point three times the mass of your Earth, with a gravitational pull to match. Its surface temperature is only a few degrees above the constant you know as absolute zero, and its surface is unrelentingly flat, in large part because any surface features that ever attempted to form there were inevitably driven to the uniformity of the entire planetary structure by their own crushing weight. By most laws that govern evolution in this cosmos, this world would have never been expected to develop life of any kind, but as per your popular mind experiment of the infinite number of monkeys at their infinite number of typewriters, any system allowed an endless number of repetitions will ultimately produce the most ridiculous and unlikely results, and so we have these creatures, who are best described as what happens to protoplasmic forms when they’re squashed flat every moment of their lives: not so much blobs, as one of our own most gifted savants once wittily said, as stains. This species, which is about four of your meters in diameter but never more than two complex molecules thick, forever drags itself across the surface of its inhospitable world, feeding on the negligible heat of a sun that is, here, little more than a prominent star in the sky. Slow-moving because what little energy it can spare for locomotion only barely exceeds its immense weight under the world’s gravity, an individual of this species can take up to twenty terrestrial years to travel even one of your kilometers, and that’s only if it sees the point in traveling any direction across a map where every patch of ground is wholly identical to every other patch of ground. And yet it can spare energy for sentient thought, not to mention communication in those cases where one encounters another. Our studies have succeeded in translating a number of the phrases that mark their social interactions, among them, “It’s cold,” “It’s dark,” “It’s very cold,” “It’s very dark,” “Is there any anything even remotely interesting in this direction?”, “No, I’m sorry, I just came from there and there’s not,” and “{Expletive}, I am just so {expletive} sick of all this cold.” Warning: Any of you who fail to express a preference will be provided this genetic reassignment by default.

[__] SPECIES 8883. We are happy to report that those of you who fear eviction from the planet of your birth do have one option to stay. The species pictured here is the very same one that reported you to the Commission, a species that some of you recognized as quite possibly sentient, but never quite enough to modulate your behavior. You will likely recognize them as one subspecies of terrestrial dolphin, whose testimony about you during the hearing included the most stirring tribute offered by any of your world’s unprecedented eight existing sapient races, to wit: “Some of them aren’t all bad, and it’s a shame that even the good ones have to go, but by and large, we’ve had it up to here with them.” As per this highly mixed review, a limited number of you will be permitted genetic reassignment as members of their kind. You will share all the advantages they enjoy, including a high level of spatial intelligence, grace in the water, and a fine sense of humor. You will also find yourself in oceans that have been all but swept clean of fish, that will continue to turn acidic as the products of your civilization continue to degrade, and that will continue to resemble overheated plastic particulate soup. You will find all of this as pleasant as they do. Our other caveat is that Species 8883 has requested that all human beings who take this option must be clearly marked, and recognizable to the rest of them even at a distance. Honesty requires us to advise that we doubt their motives.

[__] SPECIES 9998. Finally, there is this race, whose open invitation to yours we regard with undiluted awe. You will note that of all your offered options, they most closely resemble your kind, but only to the degree that you resemble the terrestrial chimpanzee: To wit, you’re clearly relations, but the difference is that between your kind’s most idealized statuary of its Gods and the average couch-bound human being, farting and masturbating in turn. You are pathetic. They are titans. A few of you, noting that this species literally glows with a light that you can barely stand to behold, are even now tremulously asking whether the accompanying illustration is in fact, actually, that of a pantheon of Gods. Our response to you is that these glorious beings you see before you are indeed as close to the Gods of your myth as the universe has ever known, that they are regarded with unparalleled awe, and that your accidental vague resemblance to their kind is one reason why you’ve been able to get away with as much mischief as you have before this intervention. They are immortal, they are possessed of astonishing powers, they are the Lords of All Creation, and they have made it clear that they will take a very limited number of you to dwell among them. We are required to advise you that they will only accept the most wise, the most noble, the most principled, and the most learned. Those of you who qualify will enter their presence with all the power and potential that implies. We must warn you in advance that you will not immediately enjoy the same status, or the same privileges. You will indeed be put to work cleaning their stables, mending their clothes, and enduring their abuse as royal fools. You will be treated with the most divine contempt and you will be subject to draconian, cruel punishments at any time. This you deserve, even the best of you, the few of you who make it. The only real consolation is that, given a few million years, you might work your way up.

One final note: In the past, members of other species in your position have elected for an option familiar to you as the premise “None of the Above.” Another way of phrasing this is “Better Death than Surrender.” This was, of course, always your option, up to the day the Commission met. However, it is not practical now. In the first place: To avoid unseemly delays caused by the indecisive and/or stubborn, this telepathic missive, and your immediate visceral responses, are already processing. No revisions will be permitted.

And in the second place: While these opportunities are indeed your alternative to extinction, they are not necessarily intended as mercy.

Thank you very much for your time.

Sincerely,

Jzudti Ghuman, Sitting Court Clerk

Exalted High Tribunal

Interstellar Commission on Minimum Standards of Worthiness of Indigenous Cultures

©2018 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

The Right Place to Start a Family

Caroline M. Yoachim | 3280 words

Yuna searched the colonization vids for a world Oliver would find appealing. Of the half dozen people she was dating, he was her favorite, and the only one she’d really want to bring with her for the centuries-long trip to the colonies. There were seven destination planets to choose from. “What do you think of this one?”

Oliver shrugged. “They’re all too expensive. Honestly, I think we’re better off staying here. Once the ships launch, the overcrowding won’t be so bad, and we could move into one of the arcologies. Rumor is they’re even going to lift the ban, so we can have those kids you always wanted.”

“Earth isn’t a good place to raise kids. Not any more.” Yuna was older than Oliver, and she remembered what Japan had been like before the collapse. As a child she’d gone hiking with her parents through the forest of ancient cedar trees in Yakushima, and snorkeling off the coast of Ishigaki. In the summertime, they’d let her eat ice cream made from actual milk. The colonies wouldn’t have those things, obviously, but they were pristine new worlds, a fresh start. “We aren’t meant to spend our lives cooped up in bunkers and arcologies.”

“We aren’t meant to do anything,” Oliver argued. “When the environment changes, we adapt, and the environment is always changing. It doesn’t matter whether you stay or go, you can’t recreate the world you grew up in.”

“Of course we adapt. Where we live changes who we are, especially when we’re young—that’s why it’s so important to find the right place.” Yuna dreamed of a planet where her children could run across grassy fields, and climb trees, and swim in open water. A place that was wild and a little unpredictable, where her children would be challenged to reach their full potential, instead of stagnating in a carefully controlled artificial environment.

One of the vids showed a simulation of Gliese 667 Cc, a super-Earth planet with dramatic cliffs and flowing rivers. There were three suns in the sky. Yuna couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen the sun as more than a faint brightness in the smog. The ship traveling to Gliese 667 Cc was a generation ship the size of Hokkaido, crewed by unaltered humans who would spend their entire lives on board. Yuna didn’t want to die before reaching the colony planet, but there were stasis pods available as well. She liked the idea of being suspended in a bubble outside of time, tended by humans rather than an AI.

“I really like this one,” she said. “We could fall asleep orbiting Earth, and wake up to explore a brand new world. Look at the rivers, aren’t they beautiful?”

“It’s a simulation. Nobody knows what the planet will really look like.” Oliver turned off the vid. “I was sure I’d be able to talk you out of this. There are so many unknowns. Sure, Earth has problems, but we evolved here, this is where we fit. Besides, the place isn’t the important thing. Home is where you make it.”

“This planet is a mess and as much as I’d like to fix it, our biggest problem is overcrowding. Some of us need to leave, and I want the adventure, the opportunity.” She took Oliver’s hand. “I’d love for us to go together, but if you won’t come, I’ll go alone.”

“Our families are here,” he said.

Yuna squeezed his hand and let it go. “I’ll miss my brothers—and you, of course—but my future family isn’t here. It’s out there somewhere.”

• • • •

An oversized four-legged flesh-colored spider hovered over Yuna and she screamed. She tried to bat it away, but her arms refused to function. The spider backed away and rose up onto its hind legs. Away from the warm orange lights, it looked less brown and took on a bluish tinge. The color reminded Yuna of the ocean on a stormy day, a mix of blue water and churning brown sand.

“Sorry to startle you,” it said. “The ship is at Gliese, and my job does wake the sleepers.”

Sensation and motor control returned to Yuna’s body, her limbs tingling and burning, her eyes sore and dry. As her brain cleared, she could see that the spindly-legged creature in the room with her was not a giant insect, but an oddly altered human child. “Are your parents part of the crew?”

“My generation run the ship.” The spidery human grinned at her. “We don’t grow to sleeper-size. You call me N-17, okay yeah?”

It took a little less than three thousand years to get to Gliese, and Yuna had known that the crew would change somewhat in the hundred or so generations that lived and died en route. She just hadn’t pictured how drastic the differences would be. “You seem very changed, more than I expected.”

N-17 leaned in closer. “This isn’t random. We pick our evolution paths. Small is the best fit for ship cabins. We do other changes too. Come with me, see the mermaids, yeah?”

Mermaids sounded exciting, albeit a strange choice for humans traveling between the stars. Yuna was dying to see them, but she couldn’t move around well enough to leave her recovery cabin. N-17 came back the next day, and the next, helping her regain her strength. By the third day, Yuna was able to maneuver well enough in the low gravity to explore the ship.

“Can we go to a replicator bar?” she asked. N-17 had left her a stack of nutrient bricks to eat in her recovery cabin, but the colony recruitment vids had advertised much better food.

N-17 frowned. “Better not. We smell like food if we hang around in there. Disgusting, yeah?”

“Don’t you get tired of those nasty bricks?”

“Oh, we don’t eat.” N-17 spun upside down in the low gravity to show off a port sticking out of one leg, just above the knee. “Nutrients go straight in. We get you one of these, yeah?”

“Maybe.” Yuna could wait and eat a brick when she got back. Maybe someone else would be willing to take her to a replicator bar, if she ever met anyone else, and if the replicator bars even still existed. “Where is everybody, anyway?”

“Crew mostly don’t like sleepers. Too big-sized for good sex and too back-then brained for conversation.” N-17 blushed. “I know you can talk okay. That’s just what the crew think.”

Yuna studied N-17’s blue-brown spidery form. She couldn’t tell if her companion was male or female or something else entirely. It would be hard to start a relationship here if the crew wasn’t interested. For the first time since waking, she thought of Oliver. She wondered what he was doing back on Earth, then realized he’d almost certainly been dead for a couple thousand years. “What about the other sleepers?”

“Most go back to sleep. They hope for a better planet next time, yeah?” N-17 shrugged. “Gliese is super-sized, like you. Big planet with big gravity. That’s why mermaids did make themselves into swimmers.”

N-17 led her into a chamber that was dominated by an enormous tank of green water. From the look of it, the tank extended up and down beyond the current deck of the ship. Dark shadows drifted in the murky water. Yuna put her hand on the clear barrier that separated water from air. Drawn by her presence, the shadows loomed closer.

Yuna could see why the crew called them mermaids. Their bodies were covered head to toe in iridescent scales and their feet were large and flat, like flippers. Their chests rose and fell as they breathed, taking in water instead of air.

“Gravity too strong down there to live on land, but oceans are good, yeah?”

“Isn’t anyone going to live on the surface of the planet?”

N-17 laughed. “Gravity crush everybody the same, delicate crew or big sleeper. You want to go down, you got to go fishy.”

Yuna studied the tanks. Most of the mermaids were small and delicate, like N-17, but a few of them were larger, Yuna’s size. She wasn’t sure what they did to transform people into mermaids, and she didn’t really want to find out. Her body was part of the environment in which her mind existed. Her physical form was critical in shaping who she was. She’d left Earth behind to avoid being stagnant and safe, but this was too much change, too much risk. What kind of life would this planet give her descendants, submerged in a frigid alien ocean, too fragile to pull themselves onto land and bask in the light of the suns? She wouldn’t condemn her children to that.

Living on the ship wasn’t a good option either—she’d be shunned by the crew and doomed to die before reaching the next destination. She liked N-17, but she had to move on.

“I’ll go back into stasis,” Yuna said. “This planet isn’t right for me.”

• • • •

Yuna didn’t panic the second time she woke, not even in those initial moments when her mind couldn’t quite make sense of her surroundings. This time, her body was encased in an exoskeleton or maybe a spacesuit, complete with a helmet that was surprisingly comfortable for all that it was a little claustrophobic. The suit was made of a material she didn’t recognize, solid and strong but surprisingly flexible.

She was alone in a cabin not much different from the one she remembered, yesterday for her and some unknown quantity of time for the ship outside of stasis. Had it been another three thousand years, or had the crew found some way for sleepers to live on the continents of Gliese after all? Yuna sighed. Perhaps she had been hasty in passing on Gliese.

She felt vaguely nauseous. Hungry, she realized. There was no sign of anyone else. She released the buckles of the harness that held her in place and propelled herself toward the door. Last time there had been a moderate amount of gravity, generated by spinning the ship. This time there was only the faintest tug, so faint that she could not be quite sure that it was real and not simply her mind attempting to make gravity line up with what was clearly meant to be the floor of the cabin.

The corridors were empty. She wasn’t sure who had called her out of stasis, or why. Feeling a little foolish, she called out, “Hello?”

“Greetings.” The voice was flat and came over the speakers inside her suit. “If you turn to your left, the corridor will take you through the airlocks and into a sector of the ship that still has functioning replicators. We apologize for not coming to greet you. We are between bodies at the moment.”

“All of you?” Yuna asked. The ship was technically capable of continuing on its course without a crew, but—

“There is only one of us. We woke you because your stasis pod was failing.”

“How long was I in stasis? Where are we now?”

“After departing Gliese 667 Cc, you were in stasis for approximately eighty-one thousand six hundred and forty-four years.”

So much time. Everyone she’d ever known was surely dead. Her family back on Earth, and Oliver—they’d probably been gone on her last waking. Now she’d lost N-17, the crew, and the mermaids, too. This would happen every time she slept and woke. Jumping into the future meant leaving the past behind. If she kept going, she might become the last human being alive, or at least the last one still recognizably human. “Is anyone currently in stasis?”

“Three thousand and twenty-seven individuals exist in stasis at this time. Of those, approximately seventeen percent are from the original group that departed from Earth. The remainder come from subsequent generations, some as recently as thirteen thousand years ago. Many of the pods are due to be decommissioned in the near future. If you desire a companion, you may select one and I will initiate the recovery process, but I cannot guarantee consent or compatibility.”

Yuna considered the proposal. This might be her last opportunity to have a relationship with a human who had lived on Earth. If she convinced the AI to wake all the sleepers, she could ask them to join her. They might be able to build a community, form families here on the ship. “When will we reach another planet?”

“Our destination is another world that was colonized by the initial ships from Earth—Kepler-452b, the most distant planet of any that were selected for colonization. It would already have been a long trip, but the crew miscalculated, and we need to make course corrections by slingshotting around a series of several stars. Barring the discovery of a more efficient route, it will take thirty-two thousand years to reach our destination.”

“Has it become possible for me to live that long?”

“Not in organic form, although your descendants might, if you choose to repopulate the ship.”

“That didn’t work before. Whatever happened to the old crew would surely happen again, even if we woke all the sleepers and somehow managed to produce enough children to maintain a stable population. I don’t think three thousand people is enough for that, anyway.”

“We are the crew, and also the ship. Would it be so bad to join us, sometime in the future?”

Yuna shook her head. She didn’t know. This seemed even further from what she wanted, even less like the childhood she’d had herself, and what she had dreamed of for her children. Maybe she should have turned herself mermaid and let her children swim in the oceans of Gliese. Would what came next be better or worse? Their destination was a planet colonized by humans, but with the vast amounts of time that had passed, the inhabitants would either be massively evolved or extinct.

“You revived me because my pod was failing, but there are other pods that still function. Can you put me back into stasis?”

“Of course. There is no need for pods now, your suit can be programmed to produce a stasis bubble. I can assist you with the parameters.”

Yuna decided to risk it one more time. Whatever her next awakening held, she would stop this endless skipping forward and put down roots.

• • • •

Sensory tendrils burrowed into Yuna’s skin, a gentle warmth on all her senses. Her mind was flooded with yellow-tinted light and the smell of miso soup and the heat of water from bathhouses back on Earth that had long ago crumbled to dust. The creature that stood over her had vaguely human features, all subtly wrong to Yuna’s eyes. Ears delicate and thin, like an elephant’s, wavering gently in the low gravity of the ship, arms that ended not in hands but in fractal dividing branches, terminating in a fan of tendrils.

Tendrils that burrowed into the bare skin of her torso like worms. They writhed beneath the surface of her body as the creature tried to merge with her. She pushed at the creature’s arms and tried to pull away. Sensations of warmth were replaced by sensations of pain across all of her senses—blinding light, cacophonous sound, burning skin.

An impossible breeze cooled Yuna’s face, and the illusion of a turquoise sky stretched wide above her head. She was breathing the planet’s air with no assistance, sitting on a patch of lime-green moss. Its thin threads reminded her of something, but she couldn’t quite remember what. She brushed the delicate plants with her fingertip, and a clump detached from the rest and scurried away in the direction of what looked vaguely like a forest of cedar trees.

Yuna shook her head. No, this wasn’t right. She had been on the ship a moment ago, and there was too little gravity for this to be the surface of a planet. Tendrils were embedded in her arm. The creature was touching her again. The images in her mind felt like a question, an invitation. Slower this time, Yuna pulled away. The visions of the planet faded, but without the blinding pain that had accompanied the previous disconnection.

“Stop that,” Yuna said.

The creature didn’t answer.

“Ship, are you still functional?” Yuna asked. “Where are we?”

The ship did not respond. Yuna had no idea where she was, or what had happened to her stasis suit. She edged past the creature with the tendrils and started searching the rest of the ship for someone, anyone, but she most wanted to find someone else who had slept their way into the future, as she had. Some link to the familiar past. The corridors were filled with creatures that had human faces but bodies that looked almost aquatic, their tendrils trailing behind them like jellyfish tentacles. Several reached out to her as she passed, but she kept a quick enough pace that none managed to burrow into her skin.

Finally she found a small circle of humans, or close-to-humans, huddled in one of the replicator rooms. Most of them were spiderlike and small, remarkably similar to N-17. One of them held an infant, swaddled. Yuna joined their circle. The infant addressed her in a language she did not understand.

The largest member of the group studied her for a moment. “Zay-child says we are invited to the planet. We will go together. You also?”

Yuna was so happy to hear a voice speak her language that she nearly cried. She’d promised herself that she would stop skipping through time and settle down. If the visions from the tendril-creature were true, the planet had a beautiful open sky, and the surface was covered with plants, albeit strange ones. There was even a small community of people she could partly understand.

The infant continued babbling, and the spiderlike human that held it sang a wordless lullaby, rocking the child until it slept. Another member of the group leaned in and stroked the infant’s cheek. They did not seem concerned by the not-quite-human creatures that wandered the corridors of the ship, or the myriad of potential dangers on the planet below. They had each other, and they were content.

She had been focused on the wrong things. Oliver had been right all along—home is where you make it. Children grew and thrived in all kinds of places, and by the time a few generations passed, everything changed anyway. “Yes, I’ll go to the planet too.”

• • • •

Yuna brushed her fingers against the nursery web, letting her children sense her presence. They were small and only partially formed, a hundred tiny beings tightly woven together, drawing energy from the afternoon sun. This was not what she had envisioned, when she left Earth all those many millennia ago—the oceans of Kepler-452b were too acidic to swim in, and the trees were citizens that resented being climbed—but the planet was wild and unpredictable, with plenty of room to run.

One of her mates pressed their tendrils into the skin of her shoulder. They shared a vision of the children, exploring a mossy clearing beyond the nursery web. The images were overlaid with worry and doubt, and hope, and love. There were no guarantees in being a parent, no matter when or where you were. Starting a family was a leap of faith, the beginning of a story where you don’t know the ending.

Yuna sent reassuring thoughts back to her mate.

This was a good beginning.

©2016 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Originally published in Humanity 2.0, edited by Alex Shvartsman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Caroline M. Yoachim has written over a hundred short stories. She is a Hugo and three-time Nebula Award finalist, and her fiction has been translated into several languages and reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies. Her debut short story collection Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories came out with Fairwood Press in 2016. For more about Caroline, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.

A Song of Home, the Organ Grinds

James Beamon | 6000 words

The monkeys are white-faced capuchins. Small things, their lean, black-furred bodies stand in stark contrast to the white tufts of their faces and shoulders. The Russians have cannons that can blast an airship apart in ten minutes andclou armored steam knights called kolotar, but of the many dangers I face on a warship a mile above the Black Sea, I fear the monkeys I tend most.

“Do not tarry,” a man whispers behind me. “They eat meat as well, boy.”

I bow curtly but cannot bear to face the organ grinder. “Yes, Efendim.”

The organ grinder haunts my dreams. The organ grinder keeps his neck, his face, his bald head covered in white make-up. His face is pock marked. In my dreams, his incisors are as pronounced as the monkeys. His eyes are like theirs, shiny and black and accusing. The dream ends when he grinds his organ and the white-faced capuchins descend upon me from all sides.

When I enter their cage, a large communal one made of chicken wire in the hold of the ship, they don’t howl or bite or throw feces. They do not move when I replenish their water. Even now, as I fill their trough with dates, figs, and seeds, they stand still. They stare at me with gleaming black eyes, silently as if in judgment. I turn to see if the organ grinder is satisfied, but he is gone.

I head up to the deck where I’m greeted by the sound of distant thunder. I look to the North toward Crimea. Artillery fire dances in red and white flashes on the night horizon.

Times such as these, I wish the seven months until Ramadan to have already come and gone. I will be fifteen then, a man, and I will no longer tremble in fear when I see cannons fire or hear explosions. The soldiers on deck continue to work as if it is merely thunder and lightning on the horizon, a distant storm of little consequence. They are dressed for battle in their navy blue coats, black boots, and crimson Cossack pants. Matching the pants, a red fez sits atop their heads, the black tassels bouncing to and fro as they work.

Some soldiers ready the sails. Others check the ballast tanks, which raise and lower the airship quickly. The ship lurches, sways like a wandering drunk, before swinging toward the distant conflict. Near the stern, four soldiers swivel giant brass tubes, horn-shaped like ear trumpets. They are the intake pipes, made to gulp the wind and swallow it below deck, where the belly eats it up and makes energy.

Behind us, beyond the stern, well beyond my eyesight, lies Istanbul.

A weight settles on my shoulder. I look down to see fingers of shiny brass, knuckles of gleaming silver. A black suit jacket hides any metal past the wrist. I fight the urge to shy away from the touch and force myself to meet the eyes of the galvanizer Adnan.

His face is clean-shaven except for a thick mustache he keeps well oiled and curved upwards at the tips. His eyes are kind behind his wire-rimmed glasses.

“Best to think of no other home than the Kismet, at least for now,” Adnan says. Gently, he guides me around to face the ship’s bow, our immediate future. The violent stabs of red and white light have grown closer.

“This will be your second skirmish, yes?” he asks.

“Yes, Efendim.”

The metal hand moves away from my shoulder and fishes into his jacket. It pulls out a silver cigarette case, and the other hand, the one of normal flesh, retrieves a cigarette.

“Steel yourself, young Oz,” he says after he lights it. He draws the tobacco long and lovingly before exhaling a thick cloud for the wind to take. He offers me the cigarette. “Face what’s to come topside. Below deck with my engine and pipe works is not your place.”

I hid from my first skirmish. In a corner of the deserted monkey cage, far away from the roar of artillery and the unholy wail of the organ, I huddled. My cowardice earned me boxed ears and a bloodied nose from the organ grinder along with the threat that next time he would hurl me over the side.

I take the cigarette eagerly. “Thank you,” I say before my first pull. Adnan nods and walks away, letting me have the whole thing. He heads below deck to tend to the steam engine. I inhale as if I’m preparing to jump into cold water.

The explosions punctuating the air make me flinch. They have owners now. In the distance below us, two naval ships, both ironclad destroyers, trade barbs. Flags of the Russians and our allies the British are clearly visible. Black smoke roils out of the English ship.

“Ozan!” I hear the organ grinder before I see him. He emerges from below deck like a rising ghost, only his powder-white head visible as he fixes his gaze upon me. I stand at attention and nod. He continues to climb up, bearing his organ strapped to his chest.

The organ is a box of oiled mahogany wider than the organ grinder’s stout body. Unlike most organs, the brass pipes in the front are not straight like columns but protrude outward, curving upward in strange angles. The pipes end in ragged edges, the jaw line of a monster. The crank on the side is dull, gray iron.

“Don’t stand idle, boy. Our time approaches. Fetch my songbook. And open the cage.”

His songbook is in truth a wooden bin the size of a tea chest. He keeps it under the bed in his quarters. I head there first despite the cage being closer and struggle to carry the heavy contraption with me to the monkeys. The capuchins stand and stare, their black eyes follow me as I approach the latch. I unbolt the door and let it fall open.

One capuchin screeches. It is a shrill sound—eeee, eeee, eeee—repetitive, rising in pitch and urgency like a siren or a baby crying. Another follows. I flee with the songbook as a third and fourth give voice to a growing cacophony of shrieks.

Above deck, the air is afire. The Russians are lobbing methane grenades at us while they bring their artillery to bear. Green and yellow blasts punch the sky on the ship’s starboard side. I nearly drop the chest as shrapnel whizzes by my ear. We have descended into grappling range.

“Come, boy,” the organ grinder says. Standing brazenly at the edge of the deck closest to the Russians, his eyes dance in the light of the blasts. “Give me ‘The March of the Janissaries.’” He flips the lid of the organ.

I nearly stumble as I scramble to him with the songbook. Inside the chest are a dozen rectangular copper plates. Words have been etched crudely into the side of each, giving the plates names such as “Whirl of the Dervish” and “The Sultan’s Suicide.” I reach in and give him the proper plate.

The deck shakes; all other sound is muted as our six starboard cannons fire wicked harpoons. Attached to the harpoons are giant chains. Three harpoons punch through the hull of the Russian ironclad. Our airship jerks as the chains go taut.

The Russian guns are still swinging skyward and nearly have us sighted. These cannons have caused the iron-hulled British vessel to belch black clouds. I imagine what they would do to our hull of wood.

The organ grinder slides the copper plate into his organ and closes the lid. He turns the cranks slow at first as if he is fighting it. Faster, now faster, “The March of the Janissaries” fills the air like the keening wail of a thousand grieving mothers.

The monkeys burst from the hold, a faceless black tide with brief flashes of white. They rush around us, past and over the organ grinder and me. I feel a million cold hands. They speed past so fast they sound like a crowd shushing me. Shhh . . . shhh.

They spread beyond us, onto the chains, where they stream down to the ironclad ship. The black furred bodies seem like oil spilling down the three chains, like the dark fingers of Şeytan.

It is impossible to see what is happening under that cover of black fur, but I hear men screaming. They scream over the cacophonous screech of the monkeys, over the relentless howl of the organ as it grinds through the “March of the Janissaries.” The only things louder are the methane grenades, exploding in odd bursts on the ship below.

The Russian cannons, now trained on us, never fire.

When the organ stops all is silent. The ballasts hiss steam as we descend close enough to the Russians to drop the gangway onto their deck.

The organ grinder pulls the plate from the organ and hands it to me. “Return my songbook. Then go and see the galvanizer. Tell him to suit you for collection.”

When I reach the engine room, Adnan greets me with a smile. “Survived being topside, I see.”

I nod. His engine room is a maze of pipes, valves, and gauges. A workbench cluttered with tools, strange vials, and odd, gear-heavy knickknacks dominates the middle of the room. He digs in a corner and produces what appears to be a laundry bin—burlap fabric placed within a framework of metal rods.

“You are starting to contribute here,” he says as he pulls dangling straps and buckles to fasten the burlap device to my chest. “A good change from being a street urchin, yes?” he asks.

The homeless no longer exist in Istanbul. The sultan’s gendarmerie had swept through the streets, the alleys, the abandoned buildings serving as opium dens. They corralled us into the gardens facing the Blue Mosque. The commander of the gendarmerie stood upon a dais overseeing all as we were shoved and wrangled and herded. On one side of the gardens stood the Blue Mosque, on the other the Aya Sofya, both domes as grand as the two fists of god, while we, the city’s wretches, were pressed in between. The gendarmerie commander spoke to us through a speaking trumpet mounted on the dais.

“You are called homeless, but this is not true. Your home is here. It is our Empire. The Ottoman motherland calls upon you all to fight for her.”

The ones who couldn’t fight—the old, the crippled, the crazy—they sent off to work. Mining coal or shoveling it into airships and trains and steamboats. Women were sent to the factories. Waifs like me were given menial odd jobs.

“You prefer this to being a street urchin?” Adnan repeats his question.

“I eat more.” I do not know how else to answer.

He smiles. “Go then. Earn your bread.”

Instead of bread, I earn a smack on the head from the organ grinder. He shakes a meaty finger in my face.

“Never dawdle after ‘The March of the Janissaries.’ Our friends will be at their most tired. They will need us. Now follow.”

We proceed down the gangway. The Russian deck is a spent battleground, a home to bleeding, broken corpses. Two dozen living capuchins crouch all around the deck. Their eyes are wide as if they are surprised or scared. The monkeys sweat, I know this, yet their mouths are open as if they are panting. In the background, the smoking British ship steers closer.

“The Brits will want to salvage parts,” the organ grinder says. “We must clear the ship before they come. It will not be good for them.”

The organ grinder brandishes a knife. Without pause or ceremony, he cuts across his own thumb. He walks over to the first capuchin and puts the bleeding thumb into the monkey’s open mouth.

The capuchin suckles for the briefest moment. Then it bounds up the gangway, back to the airship. The organ grinder heads to the next monkey and repeats the process.

“How?” I ask. He does not explain what dark magic drives this. Silence kept, he stops and crouches at the body of a dead capuchin. The look in his eyes is one of loss and regret. He gives his bleeding thumb a squeeze, forces a drop of blood out onto the capuchin’s white furred head. He picks the monkey up and places it into the burlap sack on my chest.

“That is how you give them rest,” he says.

Before I acknowledge, he grabs my wrist and pulls me toward him, toward his knife. I suck in breath sharply as the knife slides along my thumb to open it.

“Do as I’ve shown you.” He hurries through the waste, heading to the stairs where he descends below deck.

I step between dead Russians and their dropped rifles, sending the monkeys back to the airship or gathering them into the sack. The price for either action is blood. I prefer sending them back, even if the sensation is strange—feeling the pull of their mouths, seeing their eyes soften as if they’ve found their mother. The sack bulges and is getting heavier. Their blood has soaked through the bottom, the brown burlap now stained burgundy, and is starting to drip.

The last dead monkey I have to pry from the grip of a Russian who crushed its ribs while the animal ate through the sailor’s throat. I look around the deck, searching for capuchins even though I already know they have all either been sent home or given rest. The stairs leading below deck seem like an entry into hell. There is nothing left here but dead men and the dark maw descending down, but I cannot bring myself to take even one step toward the stairs.

Abruptly, the organ grinder emerges from the dark staircase. Urgency is in his step and concern is in his eyes. He carries in his arms a capuchin neither dead nor whole. It has lost an arm.

He doesn’t tell me to follow him. I simply do. We rush back to the airship and head below deck to the engine room. He presents the broken capuchin to Adnan with both hands as if it’s a present.

“Make him as yourself, galvanizer.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“He dies while you wonder. Do it, Adnan.”

Adnan wipes a grease smear from his brow. “Are you sure, Hezarfen? It will be large. Crude. This may not be what you envision.”

The organ grinder only nods.

“I will need parts to study.”

Again, he nods. The organ grinder turns to me. He removes the collection harness with its nearly full sack and thrusts a new burlap bag into my hands. “Below deck,” he says.

“You have parts right there,” I protest, pointing at the sack of dead monkeys I had to bear.

His eyes bulge in disbelief. “Do you not know the meaning of rest, the rest we swore in blood to provide?” I’m unsure whether my impertinence to talk back has surprised him or my ill regard for the blood markings. One thing I do not mistake behind his eyes is the cold anger.

“Below deck,” I repeat his order and back out of the room.

I return to the defeated ship. The British are extending their gangway, assisted by some of the Turkish soldiers on the ironclad’s deck. Other soldiers are checking the pockets of the dead and inspecting their rifles. The stairs leading below deck still seems like an open mouth, ready to swallow me whole. I take a deep breath and descend.

The ship’s interior is a mixture of shredded men and monkeys. This is where the methane grenades exploded when the capuchins attacked the ship. I avoid looking at much beyond my own feet as I walk through the carnage. I collect animal parts: arms, legs, fingers, heads. Eventually my own hands stop trembling about the time my sack is three quarters full.

The organ grinder is nowhere to be found when I return to the airship’s engine room. The injured monkey is on a gurney, tubes of clear liquid snaked into its only arm as it lay fast asleep. Adnan is looking over gear shafts, cogs, and various pipe fittings, all of them small. I drop the sack of animal parts at Adnan’s feet, hateful that the organ grinder forced me to collect such things for the galvanizer’s sake.

“Earn my damned bread, you say. Has this earned it?”

Adnan absentmindedly nods as he turns a gear over in careful inspection. It is clear his mind is elsewhere. More words thrown at him would be pointless. Besides, what is left to say?

Though I eat more on the ship than the streets, no one would be able to tell tonight. I sleep even less.

Three days later, I see the monkey. He is in the cage with the others. The metal arm is small for a child but huge on the capuchin. It is home to turning gears in the forearm and pistons that push along the bicep. Yellow pus oozes out of the shoulder where swollen meat and rigid metal mesh.

The other monkeys give him a wide berth. I wonder if the normal capuchins feel the way the soldiers feel about Adnan, who they have nicknamed “Yarim” for half man. Does cleaving onto cold metal cut away your essence as the soldiers say? Do the other capuchins consider their metal-armed fellow soulless now?

While the other monkeys stare at me with their accusing eyes, the metal-armed one takes a step towards me. I take two steps back. It stops, but I keep going, keep retreating out of the monkey cage. I make my way around the cage, staring at the monkey, rushing to get back on deck. I bump into the organ grinder violently. His girth sends me backward on the floor.

He is all white powder, cunning eyes, red lips, and smiles. Instead of helping me up, he leans down to me.

“What is your name for him?” the organ grinder whispers.

“I have none, Efendim.”

“Don’t lie. Say the name.”

I shake my head. There is naught. It is a monster. It is abomination among monsters. There is no name.

The organ grinder grabs me by my collar and hoists me up. He pulls me towards the cage door. The monkeys begin to screech, all of them except the metal one. I struggle against the pull, but his hand is firm. The other hand fumbles at the latch. The cage swings open wide. Throughout the cage, the monkeys jump and screech.

“Say the name to me or spend the night telling it to him!” the organ grinder yells. He drags me forward.

“Ruhsiz!” I cry. “Ruhsiz!”

The organ grinder lets go of me. He grabs the cage and shuts it. “Your name for him is ‘Soulless,’ eh?” He shakes his head as he looks at the monkey. “His name used to be Ali. Let it now be Ruhsiz. It suits him.”

The organ grinder says nothing more. He simply stares into the cage and it seems I am forgotten about. I flee, but not without a final look at the monkey I have named.

I hope with all my being this named creature does not survive the next skirmish. It does. The battle is a quick one against a patrol scout airship. Their ship is lighter, faster, and equipped with deadly cannons that shoot bombs. The bombs explode in clusters, which rip into our hull and send four soldiers plummeting to their doom in a violent spray of wood and gore. We are fortunate when two harpoons catch their hull.

The organ grinder plays “Whirl of the Dervish” and the capuchins rush across the chains, ignoring the Russian soldiers to tear at the sails, the engine, and ballast tanks. In minutes, their engines die and the ship lists in the sky helpless. The air is punctuated with the screams of men who cannot hold on as their ship falls sideways and swings beneath our ship, held up in the sky only by our harpoon chains.

They surrender after that. When our men set them down in the Black Sea to capture the prisoners and scavenge their ship, the organ grinder and I are among the first to go aboard to retrieve the monkeys. Ruhsiz stares at me with black eyes and open mouth. The organ grinder’s knife opens the same wound across my thumb.

“You name him, you nurse him,” he says.

The pull of Ruhsiz’s mouth is the same as other capuchins, his retreat back into our airship identical. And while only three monkeys make my burlap sack, somehow, as if to mock my prayers, another monkey comes away not quite whole. Both its hands have been crushed, a result of the engine’s moving parts snapping shut while the monkey was sabotaging it.

The organ grinder carries the broken monkey lovingly to Adnan. Like last time, Adnan fits the capuchin with oversized metal mockeries of what was once flesh. And days later, the organ grinder glares at the monkey’s two large bronze hands through the chicken wire of the cage.

“And what do you name this one?”

The monkey stands next to Ruhsiz. “Clapper,” I say.

“So that’s it then,” he says. “Clapper.” He chews on the name as if it is spoiled rations.

To quell any doubt that my prayers are being mocked, this happens again the next skirmish. We ambush an enemy coal freighter getting tossed by an angry sea in the dark of night. The monkeys move in deadly stealth and darkness under the faint, ghostly croon of “The Harem Girl’s Secret Kiss.” There are no casualties among us, only one monkey with one less leg and a new name: Luckless. It is a reflection of how I feel about my own fortunes.

In truth, it is the fortune of everyone aboard the Kismet. A merry soldier drinking chai and playing backgammon during empty afternoon hours is hurled off deck that same night when an intake valve backfires. Men with wives and children are blown apart by enemy fire, to be mourned by their fellows who still live despite never having anything to live for. One of the officers disappears completely, leaving nothing but rumors that he was eaten by the monkeys or dove that mile into the sea to escape his recurring dreams of being dangled from the airship called Voina Gulag.

The monkey I named Ruhsiz shows grim signs his fortunes are turning. He has little energy and seems to drag the metal arm to and from the feeding trough. Soon he stops dragging it altogether and just lies on the straw floor where the arm seems a monstrous anchor. I bring figs and dates to him so he can eat. Eventually he stops doing even that. Until one unremarkable evening, he dies.

I take the monkey’s body to the organ grinder’s quarters. His door is ajar. The man sits before a mirror, his back turned to me, removing his make-up with a handkerchief. The white powder on his neck and head is gone from his face. Our gazes meet in the mirror. There are a great many bags under his eyes. He looks old without the makeup, feeble and reduced. He looks at what I hold in my hands with tired eyes.

“Rip the arm off and give it back to the galvanizer. Then throw him over the side.”

“He needs the blood sacrament.”

“One named ‘Soulless’ has no need for burial rites. Toss him.”

On the open deck, under a clear night of bright stars, I give Ruhsiz the blood sacrament anyway, cutting my thumb across a jagged edge of the capuchin’s hulkish metal arm. I dot his white furred head with a drop of my blood and guide him out of my hands, metal arm and all, to the cool peace of the Black Sea waiting far below.

Hezarfen the organ grinder can go to hell. And if one such as Adnan cannot abide with losing the parts joined to the capuchin, he can join Hezarfen.

Adnan makes no mention of it the next time I see him. We enjoy sunrise and a cigarette together. The surrounding clouds are milky cotton giants that make the airship seem so insignificant in the heavens. I feel as if I can see until the end of creation.

“How do the days feel to you now, young Oz?” he asks. “Do they fuse together, one long, unending blur?” He smiles, not waiting for an answer. “Perhaps this will not always be the case. Look,” he says nudging his head, “to the south. We sail to Trabzon where we will repair, resupply and man this airship with fresh soldiers from the garrison there. It is a nice town far removed from this war in the Crimean.”

I take the cigarette from Adnan’s outstretched hand to enjoy my turn. “It sounds like a welcome change,” I say, “which I know will be too short.”

Instead of reaching for the cigarette when I give it back, Adnan grabs my shoulder. His face is serious, his eyes intense.

“The nicest thing about being homeless is that you can make anywhere home, yes?”

True to his description, Trabzon is a nice town. Squat houses sit quiet, nestled between rolling green hills and a half moon bay. We are met with cheers from soldiers and townspeople as we land. Fresh faced soldiers and tinkerers and dockworkers bearing crates flood up the gangway.

“Ozan!” Hezarfen calls to me. He leads the way down the gangway, where several small cages wait for us. They seem overstuffed with capuchins, too many to count despite the fact that they sit still. The organ grinder has more than refreshed his troop supply. Like the ones in the airship, they look at me silently with black, accusing eyes.

I do not want more of this. Adnan’s words of home echo in my mind. I sneak off in the dead of night to escape Hezarfen, the monkeys, the war. No one sees me or no one cares. A heady rush of freedom fills me. Eagerly, I explore the city, its streets and alleyways.

At daybreak, the airship’s horn blows, signaling its coming departure. My breathing tightens in my chest. I look around. Something about the town scares me. This kind of quiet, one without engine clangs and ballast hisses, does not seem natural. My view of the world has been ruthlessly chopped down. There are no panoramas here. It all seems so ugly and low.

I run with everything in me towards the sound of the horn. Fear that the airship will lift off without me pushes my legs harder than they’ve ever moved. My yell to wait is abolished by the blaring horn. I make it, flying up the gangway and stopping only when I stumble and fall upon the deck.

Adnan stares at me with utter disbelief as I lay there panting and wheezing on the deck of the rising airship. “Dear young fool,” he says.

Again, Adnan is right. I regret the decision every time we face the Russians. I see six more skirmishes of varying nature accompanied by varying songs from the organ grinder. “Song of Suleiman” for lightly armed vessels. “March of the Janissaries” for heavily armed destroyers. And for the kolotar, the men housed in armored steam engines, only “The Sultan’s Suicide” is played.

These skirmishes take their toll on the nature of the capuchins. Hezarfen’s nature never changes. He scoops up the broken monkeys, the parts that are still breathing, still hurting, fractions of monkeys above one half. He talks to them, pleads and begs as he gathers them into his arms, the rest of the world forgotten as he soothes them, brings them to the waiting laboratory of the galvanizer. New legs, new tails, a new jaw for one, new names for all. Nearly half of the organ grinder’s forces have been fused with metal pieces and I swear he hates them all.

After naming two more to be forever reviled, I retreat to the open air. On deck, Adnan smokes a cigarette. He gazes westward to the oranges and purples of a sun dipping ever lower beneath the horizon.

“I do not understand Hezarfen,” I say to him. “He acts to save the monkeys and once they are saved, it seems as if he despises them. Why does he do this?”

“The things people seek answers for!” Adnan spits as if he’s cursing. “Do you know how this airship floats? I could explain to you the nature of the steam engine and the hydrogen distillers that balance out our ballasts. Would you like to know? Or do you wonder why the monkeys heed the sound of the organ? I could talk about Faraday’s work in electricity coupled with Mesmer’s work in mind control, and how the two led to this horrible, incredible experiment of electrically induced brain etching on animals. I could explain how the etching is reinforced by auditory instructions found in the copper plates, instructions overwritten by the taste of Turkish blood.”

Adnan takes a pull of his cigarette before continuing. He talks and smoke wraps around his words.

“No one wants to hear this, this science, because it’s easier to believe in magic. In good and evil spirits, in souls.” He looks at his metal fingers. “In half souls.”

He gazes out over the Black Sea stretching to the horizon below us, glowing like a jewel as the calm waters reflect the setting sun. “Even in this age of steam, people still believe in the magic of Old Constantinople. That jinn hide in the curl of hookah smoke, Immortals dwell in forgotten corners of the Covered Bazaar selling baubles, and fairies dance at dusk along the shores of the Golden Horn. And of all the things you need explained to you, all the workings of our modern age around you I could demystify, you wonder about the heart of a man who is always masked.”

Adnan looks at me. “What a person feels is the one thing that can’t be explained, the only magic left in the world. Can you explain it? Can you?”

The way Adnan gazes at me, I know he is not speaking about the organ grinder. I say nothing because I do not know the answer. I don’t know why I am on this ship.

The answer comes a week later, in a turbulent sky dark with giant storm clouds. We see an unnatural glint hiding in the clouds beside us and respond with harpoon fire. All six harpoons find purchase. Moments later a massive airship that could only be the enemy’s Voina Gulag pushes through the cloud cover.

The Voina Gulag is more box fortress than airship, square and towering, full of hard angles and big cannons typically reserved for naval destroyers. It is a miracle their engines can keep such a beast afloat; it seems as if it takes up the entire sky before us. Yet all of this is not what makes the Voina Gulag instantly recognizable to us.

Unlike most Russian vessels, the Voina Gulag takes prisoners. They dangle from her flat underside secured in rope harnesses. Row after row of bodies hang, too numerous to count. Some men are alive, screaming at us in hoarse voices we hear only as ghostly moans over the wind. Others are corpses perpetually rotting in weather-beaten Turkish, British, and French uniforms. In between the fully alive and rotting dead, emaciated men list despondently, their faces gaunt, sunken hollows. Their skeletal faces are like Death itself, a haunting reminder to those who face this airship that their fate will be one as a living trophy and passing into the veil will be a relief, their last and greatest blessing.

Our harpoons already have purchase. We cannot run. The Voina Gulag fires it massive cannons.

We descend sharply with a hiss of the ballasts in a cloud of our own rising steam. It is not enough. The cannon fire renders our sails useless. Men scurry as rigging, wood, and sails come crashing down. A moment later, the Voina Gulag lobs two metal balls the size of boulders at us. They land with a sickening crack onto the deck. The balls stand upright to reveal two of their kolotar steam knights.

Bigger and bulkier than the average man, their faceplates are painted to look like skulls. The kolotar run faster than men housed in that much metal should, steam blowing out of hinges in their knees and shoulder blades. They charge through our forces, cutting them down with bayonets attached to their forearms as they make their way towards the stern.

Hezarfen rushes topside, one hand bearing the songbook, the other his organ. He doesn’t bother strapping the organ on. Instead he tosses me the songbook as he sets the organ onto the deck and opens the lid. Wordlessly, I open the songbook and toss him back “The Sultan’s Suicide.”

On bent knee, Hezarfen grinds his organ. The capuchins swarm up from below and stream towards the kolotar who are trying to slice open our ballast tanks while rifle fire bounces harmlessly off their iron hides. The capuchins cover the kolotar. The monkeys claw and scratch and bite in a rage, working their way into the joints and seams of the kolotar armor. Sparks fly as the capuchins with metal parts scrape their metal against the steam armor. In moments, we hear the ungodly screams of one of the men dying to get out of his suit.

The other kolotar knocks swarming capuchins from his visor and begins to search the deck. He sees the organ grinder and charges, the smoking ballast all but forgot. Hezarfen stands his ground, holding the organ by the straps as he keeps grinding. The kolotar’s steps become erratic as the monkeys finally work their way into his armor. We hear him scream. Still, the kolotar charges. He grabs Hezarfen, who drops the organ to tumble in a harsh landing across the deck.

The screaming, dying kolotar takes Hezarfen and a half a dozen monkeys with him as he jumps from the airship. They all disappear in the dense storm clouds below.

We all stare at the organ.

Anyone can grind it. No one is willing to pick up the instrument. Even as we face certain doom and see our own futures in the bodies dangling from the Voina Gulag. No one moves. None of us knows what the organ gives, what it takes. The only one who believes the instrument was not forged in hell is Adnan.

They are staring at me, the monkeys I have named. Clapper and Luckless, Irontail and Hardjaw, over a dozen creatures who the other monkeys treat as yarim and give a wide berth when not under the organ’s spell. As if seeking refuge, they look to the one who has named and nurtured them with blood.

The other monkeys pant and stare vacantly. They have lost their names now that Hezarfen is gone. Perhaps I’ll discover opportunity to name them. I once thought them whole, but, just as clearly as the ones who now move with the help of pistons and gears, they too have been changed.

Changed as they are, as I am, we all need homes, yes?

The Voina Gulag is turning in the air, preparing to fire off another volley.

Two months shy of manhood, my choice is clear. I exchange “The Sultan’s Suicide” within the organ for “March of the Janissaries,” and I begin to grind. The sound is the keening wail of a thousand grieving mothers.

It makes me smile the way the soldiers smile when they speak of home.

©2018 by James Beamon. | Art © 2018 by Saleha Chowdhury.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Beamon has an unbelievable past, mostly because he uses his spare time writing down fabrications to sell to others. That said, he’s been in the Air Force, to Iraq and Afghanistan, on the Nebula Recommended Reading List and in trouble more times than he cares to honestly admit. But he doesn’t even try to sell honesty, claiming it doesn’t have a believable character arc. Currently he lives with his wife, son and attack cat in Virginia and invites you all to check out what he’s up to on Twitter (@WriterBeamon) or on his blog, fictigristle.

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

Aberration

Genevieve Valentine | 4160 words

You’ll see them someplace you’re going when you’re trying to make the most of your time. They’re standing at the top of the steps to the public library (the amazing branch where they do the photoshoots, not the squat concrete one you go to), or they’re on the balcony at a concert you overheard someone talking about. They’ll be at the greatest altitude you can reach while still seeming effortless; they like being able to look down.

You’ll notice them a long time before they notice you, though they seem to stutter in and out of sight. They’re dressed the way you’ve always wanted to dress. Sometimes you’ll glance back and not see them, but they’re nowhere else either, and a second later something catches your eye and it’s them anyway and you feel like an asshole. You never get a sense of what they look like.

If they smoke, they’ll barely keep hold of their limp-dick cigarettes, wrist angled hard enough to crack. If they laugh, it’s parted lips but teeth close together, two straight rows, a furrow between their eyebrows like they’re already finding reasons it’s not so funny after all. One of them touches the other one right at the small of the back, cigarette a cinder between their fingers, and you get the impression of pushing even though nobody’s moved.

They’re awful, they don’t even pretend otherwise, and when you look at them, the hair on your neck stands up, and the word Rotten unfurls inside of you. (You couldn’t say it if anyone asked, your mouth is too dry, but it sits there sharp-edged, like you swallowed a name tag.)

One of them peels away, finally, passes you on the way to the bar or around the bottom edge of the steps towards the street; shoulders pinched, the shadow of the other one already falling across both of you.

“Don’t look,” she says, so low that music or traffic swallows it up. When they disappear, you’re still standing right where you were, staring at your own shoes, and it’s fucking stupid, but as soon as the words were out your gaze dropped.

It wasn’t like you did it because you were embarrassed to have been caught out; it was the urgency, some terror in the snap after the T and the K, and you know a warning when you hear one.

• • • •

“Oh,” she says at the top of the bridge.

There’s little else worth saying—she’s gotten so tired of languages lately, which would feel like a defeat if she cared more about losing—but a sound of surprise still falls out of her sometimes, some gut punch of feeling that gets a death rattle.

The last time she vanished from this city it was a ruin and you couldn’t get within five miles of it, nothing left but a few plaster-roof islands and the last few wooden fingers of the pier. Appearing in it now is visiting a grave to find the departed eating an apple on their headstone.

She feels desperate already, so desperate as to be fully solid, and she grips the stone and waits for someone to run into her. No one does. No one can really see her for long; she’s been so many places she’s not really anywhere any more.

The stone’s at her hip. It’s quiet when she touches it, though she feels it all the time anyway, a phantom heat right through to her spine.

One of the vaporettos is sinking, nearer to the sea. But it’s early, only just dawn, and no one will realize in time for the alarm to do any good; half of them will drown. It won’t take long. She watches.

When it’s over, she walks through the smaller streets, catches half-sentences and the windows of shops where the things in the very front have gone a little dusty and it doesn’t matter because they’re only tourists. Someone is napping in a piazza, and after she touches his shoulder he has no more use for his camera. She takes three photographs: the slime easing up the edge of a canal, the curtains in a house where someone is very ill, the shadow of a flight of birds that looks like a monster underneath the water.

It’s a city of corpses, like every other city, and she walks across the bridges and thinks about drowning.

• • • •

He catches up with her under one of the abandoned billboards for Lunar Enterprises that looks out over a dark stretch of desert. She’s crossed her arms to keep from looking for a cigarette. Nobody makes them any more; there’s no point looking.

She’s carrying a camera, one of the instant ones that’s back in vogue. She’s holding the pictures like a hand of poker, five snapshots of the city at the edge of the valley as the lights went out and out and out.

“They came out nice,” his voice is a thousand years weary with telling her.

“They did.” They’re already fading, though; she only looked at them once. Soon they’ll start to disappear at the edges, and by the time they leave here, there won’t be anything left to take.

He used to tell her to give it up, but she’s not the only one who has hobbies, and he stopped asking a long time ago.

He reaches for the pack in his pocket, taps out two, lights the second one off the cherry from the first. They give off just enough flare to remind them how pitch dark it is. She can see the hollow above his top lip, that’s all.

“I don’t smoke any more,” she says.

He raises his eyebrows, smokes both cigarettes at the same time.

The last of the smoke feathers from his mouth as he drops the butts; they vanish before they ever hit the ground, and he grinds his boot into the dirt like he’s trying to spite them. Their kind leave no traces.

Still, hers just vanish; his all gathers somewhere, waiting for him, everything he touches, everything he does. He’s always going home.

“Been hoping to run into you,” he says.

She’s been in eight places since she saw him last, or ten. In a couple of places there was only a day. She spent a week in the mountains, staying clear of a black bear that got more agitated the longer she stayed—it could tell something was wrong, right up until it died. She hopes it’s all right now, but it’s the same way she hopes everyone who drowns in Venice centuries from now fought until the very last; you get cruel eventually.

Maybe she started out cruel. She suspects that the very first time she opened her eyes and was elsewhen, her sympathy had vanished. Something she was born to.

(She’s thought about it, that maybe anyone becomes like this if you give them long enough and show them what they’ve seen. Doesn’t bear much reflection.)

From the city, there’s a siren. The blast that comes in the dark will kill three hundred people, give or take.

He made friends all the time. Said they held on more fiercely, which she knows; said they loved more deeply, which she doesn’t doubt. But he loves them back, loves women and men and the sort of child who can actually see you, who stares you right in the eye and ignores you when you say, “Don’t look,” and then gets angry at all once as it realizes it’s been robbed and it’s looked too long at the thing that will kill it.

Lucky, she says when he tells her. He never asks her what she means.

“Good to see you,” she says.

The first of the rumblings begins. They look across the darkness, where the edge of the city is just beginning to separate from the dark with a layer of smoke and flame.

Her heart is a thousand stairs with nothing at the top, and she’s afraid all the way up.

• • • •

If everything worked as it was meant to, you were always there just before the worst of it, the birdsong before the bomb. But aberration doesn’t always listen, and she appeared too late, sometimes, or a year early, or a hundred years. Sometimes she’d shown up in the middle of a war, and when the stone in her pocket warmed and creaked and pushed her to wherever she was going next, it was the only sound on a field without graves, the ground swallowing blood as fast as it could.

Once, by some mistake, she’d been spat out before there were people at all, and she’d sat on a tree trunk and watched the sun stain the leaves, and the ferns at her feet rustle with animals that seemed like her: mammal at first glance, but reptile if you knew what you were looking for. She lifted her hands before she remembered she had no camera. It got colder eventually, warmer again. The ground underfoot stretched an inch or two. She wondered if she’d be sitting there for a hundred million years, waiting. She didn’t mind.

There was a white vulture, and as it tilted its head to her, black eyes in sickly-blue sockets, it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She’s forgotten the thing that died.

She had no camera. When she appeared next (Morocco, maybe), her hands sat in her lap a long time, framed by nothing.

• • • •

Lens aberrations in a camera, in order of disaster:

Distortion: A warp across something you thought was holding steady. Tilt shift: makes your subject fall away from you, every house teetering on the verge of collapse. Bokeh: a cheat in the shape of light, turning light into spheres of nostalgia that hover behind whatever you’re trying to capture, a hostage of a good time. Chromatic: The edges of your colors burn into something they aren’t, and you can’t trust your colors any more, but that one is subtle, and you won’t know until it’s too late.

Curvature: The thing you want most is sharp and bright, and everything else slips out of focus by degrees. That one you can live with. It’s close enough to life. Can’t blame it for that.

None of it works, of course. If it did there would be chaos. You can take all the pictures you want. Their face will be gone—some lens flare that wasn’t there before, or a dove taking off in the foreground with two feathers spread over where they used to be, or obscured behind a cloud of someone’s cigarette, even if you’ve never smoked and they never have. If there’s no excuse that the frame can find, you’ll just see a vanished face where the picture’s been eaten away, someone lifting a disappearing glass to lips that don’t exist anymore.

• • • •

The invading army of a country that doesn’t yet exist piles the corpses of the vanquished outside the camp. The straggling forces of the occupied wait until deep night before they set the bodies on fire. Their attack on the camp comes in the middle of the chaos, and takes hundreds of enemy lives; the contagion that was already sickening the dead wafts equally across friend and foe. Both armies will be decimated soon, and the germ will crawl victoriously over the countryside for longer than anyone remembers the war.

He’s leaning against the tree trunk, barely touching her left shoulder; his hair makes a sound against the bark when he turns to look at her. “If you take the tragedy out of it, it’s pretty funny.”

This is why she gave up on languages. “If you take the tragedy out of anything, it’s funny.”

He smiles and rolls his stone across his knuckles, a skipping stone shaped like a coin. She’s seen it a hundred times. She’s never laid a finger on it.

A deserter staggers past them, close enough to death that when he looks up he’s startled to see them.

“Don’t look,” she says, and the soldier opens his mouth, drops his gaze to the ground. It’s too late for him, though, and he doesn’t even make it past the tree before he crashes to the ground. He’s facing them, eyes open; she looks away.

He looks back and forth between the corpse and her, and for a moment his face gets fond; it does that whenever something happens that he can take for her having some kind feeling.

She lets him think what he likes.

(He was the one who explained her aberration, the first time he ever found her, when she was occupying the last of her mind and he looked like he knew how thin that thread had gotten. He must have been looking for her; she wonders, sometimes.)

His trajectories seem like real journeys—every time she sees him, she knows he’s come from a place and is going to another, moving through the world and witnessing everything he can. Hers is a slow, suspended spiraling-down, and it’s possible to tell at which points he came back by clocking when things skidded violently to one side, a kite that’s been shot.

He watches her for a while, unblinking. She wonders if he’s descended from the vulture, the way she’s a child of that half-changed reptile.

• • • •

She’d seen the sun rise over the valley once. It hit the top of the mountains first in a line of gold, and crept over the fields in a dozen shades of green—there had been sheep, only a handful, someone had been careless and would lose them before the sun was fully up. Pines ringed them in now, a jagged mouth that cast long shadows. At the edge of the green was the drop, and the lake underneath dark as a pool of oil.

The hill she stood on was clumps of heather that smelled rotten despite the dried-out grass, and with every step she sank an inch, as if the hill was going to give. There was a village at the bottom of the valley, just at the horizon, but no lights were on at all; she was the only one awake, watching the sun as the lake hid from it, as the sheep moved closer to the fall.

I want to keep this, she thought. There was no reason, there was never a reason to keep one thing that passed over another thing that passed, but this she loved more than she could remember loving anything. She was breathing just looking at it, hard enough that she could feel ribs.

She took a dozen pictures with the box camera she’d stolen from the city she’d walked away from, knowing none of them would hold this, knowing she was losing the moment when the heather looked alive with light. When the first two sheep fell, she watched them go and had to sit down to keep from reaching forward over the edge of the drop to pull them back and try to catch it in the frame.

They made a noise as they fell, all of them, the same anguished cry that was more human than any sound a human made, but she’s forgotten it. It was a long time ago, and there are no pictures.

• • • •

“If I can affix myself, I will,” she tells him the next time she sees him, which if she averages out the time in between her moves forward and back, near as she can tell, is two hundred years before the last time she saw him.

He doesn’t have any cigarettes, and his thumbs twist at the edges of his pockets. His eyes are black, his skin is dark; she wonders what he looks like to the rest of them—a shadow, a hollow, the silhouette of someone they’d forgotten who will suddenly spring to mind just before terrible news comes in. He’d told her once that she’s the color of the clay everyone walks over, but they were fighting then. No way of knowing.

“This is a terrible time to make a decision that terrible,” he tells the bridge over the river. “Look at this place. Won’t be worth living in for another seven hundred years, and you can’t get anywhere else until they discover the waves.”

“I don’t want it now. I’ll wait for the right place.”

He looks at her from the corner of his eye. She wonders why she’s hard to look at.

“You’ll waste it,” he says, like he sympathizes. “You’ll throw yourself from the first tall thing you find. Staying anywhere turns into a circle of things that are never quite what you wanted. You like to see it and be finished.”

That seems cruel for someone who has a place he can return to. “I can’t keep hold of a camera,” she says. “I don’t like it to be finished. I just can’t bring anything back home.”

“You’d be wasted at home, too.” He smooths his hands over his chest pockets. Empty.

“I found the place I really wanted. I know I’ll never get back there, don’t worry, that’s all gone. But I’ve been looking.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

She thinks that’s a little rich, coming from him. She doesn’t say anything.

“So have you picked the lucky grave?”

She says, “I know what I’m waiting for.”

To feel anything, she thinks. As soon as I open my eyes and feel anything at all, I’m going to bury this rock in the ground and live out my days and die. Any magic has to fade if you bury it in the ground; it leeches out through the water and the air, it becomes a village of people who live a long time but can never stay put, it becomes a herd of deer who cross a continent.

Then there will be time enough to find a high place, if she wants one. There will be a hill with a lake like oil at the bottom, and a sheer drop that no one climbs out of.

“Don’t do something stupid just so I’ll miss you,” he says.

She turns to him. “Promise me you’ll find me and tell me if it works.”

I want you to know where I am, she doesn’t say. She doesn’t say, I want you to look at my grave just once.

“If it doesn’t work, I won’t have to find you. You’ll open your eyes and a locomotive will run you over and you’ll know, and when you open them again, you’ll know, without any help from me.”

“Promise me you’ll find me,” she says.

Her eyes sting, looking at him. Maybe that’s the first sign of something changing.

He meets her eye; her heart is a thousand stairs with nothing waiting at the top.

• • • •

To remember, someone had told her as they touched her hair, before she ever learned about a camera and what it could do for anyone who wasn’t her. To make you appreciate home, someone had told her as they pressed the stone into her hand—she’d been all night wandering, and it must have been an offense. They must have been afraid of her; she hopes she was frightening.

Don’t do this to her, he’d said.

She’s forgotten if he was always there or if he found the moment and tried to intervene; she only remembers his breath between her and the shadows the trees were casting. It was the last thing she ever heard, standing in that place.

She suspects it was meant to be a place she’d come back to, that her heart and the stone in her hand would draw her back there when the traveling was over, but the first time she opened her eyes all that was gone.

She doesn’t remember where or when, or anyone she left. The ground that could never be filled had taken them all in its mouth, and if she went back in time enough to meet them, she wouldn’t know their faces; she wouldn’t know where to stand to call it homecoming.

Maybe she’s stood there already, and all she saw was the little circle of the box camera, a field inverted, a picture that was going to be devoured any second.

When she closes her eyes and tries to conjure it back, she sees a drowned pier, and his face in a wreath of smoke, and a vulture’s eye, and a camera lens that was grasping to hold on.

• • • •

It takes sixteen moves before there’s a worthy place. (One of them had seemed beautiful, but she was only there an hour before the stone got warm and she grit her teeth and felt the sick-stomach lurch that reminded her she had a body. It had been an hour of red dust so bright the sky looked purple next to it; chromatic aberration.)

But this is a quiet town, big enough that she can steal a camera, near enough to a river that she can follow it into the meadows, and be alone just past the bend. There’s no high ground here, but the world is wide.

At the top of a sloping hill that’s as close as she can find, there’s a tree that reminds her of the place where they watched the beginning of the plague, and she presses her lips into a thin line, counts backwards carefully from ten as she gets closer. He never makes much noise. If she didn’t always expect him, she’d never know when he’d appeared.

She stands beside the tree for a long time as the sun crawls over everything. The branches look like a man smoking, they look like someone reaching out for her, they look like a map of Venice. Below her is the little town and the river, and she looks as far as she can for a ship that could be carrying him.

At sunset the branches look like the veins on the leaf she looked through once as the things that would become mammals skittered across her feet. In the dark, the branches make cracks in the sky as she looks up at the moon, asks it nothing, counts to a hundred thousand thousand.

It’s dawn when the stone begins to get warm around the edges. Panic clenches her tight for a moment, and she thinks about plagues and cities and deserts and no, it has to be here, she has to risk it, she’ll grow old waiting but she’ll wait, when he finds her he might laugh but she can’t stand the idea of ever again moving, she’s breathing like her chest will burst, she’s staying here.

She drags a few inches of earth off from the ground beneath the tree, shoves the stone into it, scrapes in her tears and breathes against it and spits for good measure, buries it in a single two-handed shove of dirt like a door slamming shut.

She closes her eyes, feels nothing, opens them. The bank of the river is shrinking; tide’s coming in.

This is the ground then, she thinks. Whenever he finds me, he’ll know where I’m buried.

It’s sunrise when the light hits low enough that she sees the place where the ground is risen, a little burial mound grown over with a hundred years of moss and little blue flowers she’s forgotten the name of.

It’s a small grave. It’s barely big enough for a small, flat rock she could roll between her fingers like a coin.

• • • •

You’ll see her when you go someplace trying to be alone—dramatically, romantically, the sheer hill that hangs over the bay, the kind of place where poets go. Somewhere you can look down on everything.

She’ll be standing near the edge of wherever it is, not close enough that you’d feel right about crying out, but close enough that you keep glancing out of the corner of your eye as you sit down, try to let the moment wash over you. She seems like she’s waiting for someone, though she’s not moving, her arms crossed tight over her chest, everything about her looking pinched in, stretched out.

You never quite catch her face, however long you look at her; when you try to get her attention, you just remember some dark unblinking eye and then something going fuzzy at the edges like a bad photograph. When you look out at the bay, you always forget she’s there until you move.

You’ll begin to think that poetry’s a bit much after all. It’s not like you went through anything so bad, and it’s awfully windy to be in a place so high. It’s too windy to be as close to the edge as she is.

You’ll stand up to reach her, start to move and then freeze, some prey instinct that holds you where you are.

“Be careful,” you’ll say.

She’ll say, “Don’t look.”

©2014 by Genevieve Valentine. Originally published in Fearsome Magics, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Castle Coeurlieu

Naomi Novik | 8080 words

Isabeau came to Castle Coeurlieu as a girl of twelve, and its lady: She had been married two weeks before to the Comte de Coeurlieu, who was thirty-two and very large, with an always-angry hatchet face slashed and pierced through the left cheek where he had taken a crossbow bolt at the battle of Leprans, full six years ago. She had been excited beforehand: She knew it was a grand match, beyond her family’s deserts, and he was famous; he had won a tournament in disguise as a young man, although he was too great a seigneur to have exposed himself so, which was very romantic. But she recoiled a little when she met him, and her voice quavered when she spoke her vows to the middle of his chest.

But he looked down at her afterwards, from his great height, and said not unkindly, “I am for the war in Grosviens. You will go to Coeurlieu, my lady, if it pleases you,” and she said with relief, “As it pleases my lord.”

Alone then Isabeau came to Coeurlieu. She was not overly impressed by castles, having lived in many, even great ones, but when the carriage crept out of the woods and climbed steadily up the winding road, she could not look away from the ancient donjon rising enormously, flinty gray that looked nothing like the warm golden stone of the rest of the walls.

“The Duc de Niente built the castle ’round it, three hundred years ago,” Jerome told her, as they sat on one of the outer walls looking upon it, kicking their dangling heels as they ate the quincebread they had stolen from the kitchens. He was the Comte’s son, by his previous wife who had died two summers before, and thirteen, but the plague had caught him glancing as a child. He had survived, but his whole right side was weak: He could not hold a sword. So he had been put to be a magister instead, but he hated to read and write, and in the three days since she had come, he had escaped his tutors six times on the excuse of making her new home known to her.

“Everyone knows there’s no use to the lessons,” he said, matter-of-fact, when she a little timidly asked if he would not be punished, meaning would she not be punished, too. “It will be six years more before I can go to war even to hurl stones. And I won’t live so long. It’s been eight years since the last plague.”

Isabeau nodded. “My mother and my nurse died last time.” She remembered her mother not at all, and her nurse vaguely, a warmth suddenly gone out of her life, but that was why the Comte had taken her, with her dowry of only two small castles. Those the plague had passed over, it most often passed over again, and she had lived crying in her room for a whole day and night cuddled to her nurse already dead in the bed beside her. So many people had been dying that no one had remembered to look for her until they came to bring her to her mother’s funeral the next morning.

But the plague always came first for those it had marked the last time, and it would come again, soon. So she followed Jerome when he led her to the kitchens and past the table where the cook’s sweating third assistant had just brought the quinces from the oven sticky and gleaming in their pastries, and no one stopped them. They carried their stolen prizes out onto the wall, to eat, and to look out the arrow slit at the carts crawling up and down the road to the castle, going in widening circles down the hill and escaping into the countryside, and sometimes they looked instead within, at the life of the courtyard bustling around in the looming donjon’s shadow.

“If you are inside, and you close the doors, nothing can get in,” Jerome said. “In my grandfather’s day, Magistra Pia set fire and wind and half a mountain of stone against it, and all she did was make the walk,” pointing to the long irregular stripe of black stone set into the courtyard, leading to the donjon doors. The walk looked much stranger than the tower itself, so polished that the clouds moved in slow reflected billows across the surface, and perfect shades walked upside down beneath everyone who crossed it on their way through.

“Why build other walls, then?” Isabeau asked with interest. The donjon was so enormous it could have held everyone who lived in the castle, all within, and an army besides. It seemed a waste to put anything more around it.

“Strange things happen at night, or when the doors are shut,” Jerome said in portentous tones. “And not all who go within come out again.”

It was by far the most interesting thing that Isabeau had ever heard of, that she could see with her own eyes and touch with her own hands. She had only heard of war from the jongleurs, singing the clash of swords and the storm-fires raised by the great magisters, and once when she had been eight years old, she had been living in Castle Rouge-Bois and there had been a unicorn sighted in the forest. All the knights and grown ladies had gone out to chase it, and she had run up to the highest tower to watch them ride out in dazzling array, and from there saw one tiny glimpse, on a distant hill, of a white beast darting into the trees. She had never told anyone of it because hers had been the second sighting, and a unicorn was never seen thrice, so everyone came back disappointed with no great horn to make a cup for the king’s grace. But the donjon did not run away or vanish. It stood there gray and stolid and nevertheless wondrous, surrounded with as many stories as there were bricks in the castle walls built ’round it.

Father Jean-Claude, the priest who took her daily confession, was persuaded to put aside his Bible and tell her that one hundred years ago, the rash and boastful Sir Theolian Ogre-Killer had gone into the tower, his squire reluctantly behind him, vowing he would suffer whatever adventure came unto him in that place. But he passed all the day and night loudly carousing, and nothing either strange or wondrous befell him. At last he grew impatient and made to leave, but when he opened the doors to go forth, he found only darkness without, unbroken by any gleam of lantern or sound of human voices. His squire cried out, “My lord, let us not tempt God’s mercy, but close again the doors,” but Sir Theolian said, “Fie, coward,” and seized sword and lantern and set into the dark. His footsteps died away at once, although for a long time after his light might yet be seen receding in the distance.

But his trembling squire knelt and prayed to God for deliverance, and in the midst of his prayers, he heard the bells ringing for dawn, and raising his head saw that sunrise had come into the windows. When he opened the doors and came forth to the courtyard, he there found the same host assembled who had seen Sir Theolian go within, and not the span of a candle’s mark had passed. No sign of Sir Theolian was ever from that day heard or seen by mortal man, and so did God rebuke pride and vainglory. But the squire was greatly chastened and took holy orders and became St. Anselm of the Tower, and ever after told the story to warn others from sin.

And Father Jean-Claude triumphantly took Isabeau to see a small hut built against the side of the tower, beginning to collapse now from pilgrims breaking off parts of the branches. The saint’s cot still lay within, the coverlet slowly rotting, although his remains were kept in the chapel in a golden casket.

Isabeau liked that story, although she liked better the one the old woman told her, who sat carding wool in the courtyard: In the old days, the crone said, before the castle had been built, and there was only the tower, and its doors stood open to the world—no one could tell Isabeau when the tower had been built, itself, or what man had made it—in the old days, when there had only been the nameless village now called Coeurlieu down at the bending of the river where the old mill still stood, there had been a girl called Beau-Mains who brought her father’s flock of sheep every day to graze upon the green hillside ’round the tower doors. But she was sullen to be set to this duty, because she wished never to work, and only to keep her hands fine and soft, so she did not mind the sheep very well. And so one afternoon in warm summer she slothfully fell to sleep upon the hill and started up only as the sun was going down, and found her flock all gone missing with their bleating voices coming faint from within the walls.

She was afraid of the tower, but she feared more the sharp switch that her mother would use on her back if she came home without her sheep, and so she went foolhardy or brave within. She climbed the stairs ’round and ’round and up and up, calling, hearing always the sheep answering her from afar, until she came out upon the roof and found them there with the first stars coming out in the night sky.

They followed her down again. But the great halls had gone very dark, and the stairs went ’round longer than they ought, and though she walked a long time, she did not come to the ground again. The sheep were docile and huddling close around her legs, as though they feared some wolf or beast, and whenever she turned ’round and counted them, the number had changed: There were always more.

She began to fear her own flock, even as they clustered ’round her ever more closely. She shivered and wished mightily that she had paid more attention to her sheep, and could recognize them one from another, and pick out the strange ones, but then to her even greater alarm, one of them she did recognize: As a child, she had taken a fancy to one lamb, small and gentle and white, and had fed it by hand, and called it Snow, and loved it, until by mistake her father had butchered it for the village Maying. She had wept for a week.

She wept now with horror as Snow came and butted her hand, and yet she still petted the soft nubbly head for comfort, and said, “Snow, Snow, which way shall I go,” and when she came to the next landing, which ought have been the ground and yet was not, the lamb baaed softly and turned from the stairs and out into the darkness of the hall.

Beau-Mains and her flock followed the little lamb, which seemed almost to be shining in the dark, until she came to a door which ought not have been there, in a wall which did not curve but ran straight as long as the light reached to either side. Inside she found a table with four small boxes lying open, and in each a great colored jewel as large as her fist: the first of red like blood, the second of browns and deep yellows like mingled shades of earth, the third a virulent green, and the last as clear as water over stones. She gasped with delight and snatched the jewels up, putting them into her apron, and Snow went onward to a door behind the table.

Beau-Mains followed the lamb, and came into another room, where inside stood another table with four larger boxes lying open, each full of coins as is a cup of water: the first of brass, the second of silver, the third of gold, and the fourth of some strange black metal which she had never seen. Beau-Mains would have filled the rest of her apron only with gold, but the lamb butted her until she grudgingly took a few coins from each box, as much as the thin fabric would hold, and followed Snow to a third door.

In the third room there were four great stone coffins of four great lords, their faces and their swords carved into the stone and their names upon the sides. Beau-Mains was only a peasant girl and could not read the letters, but she looked upon them in silence and knew them for seigneurs of high birth, for they were tall and comely and well armored. And in each stone coffin there was a hollow above the lord’s heart, which was made of like shape to the jewels she had found, and upon the eyes of each lord there were carved two stone coins like in size to the coins she had found. Not without a longing look, Beau-Mains put in each hollow one of the jewels, and on the eyes of each lord two of her precious coins, and with the meager handful which was left to her she followed after the lamb through the final door.

And here at last Beau-Mains found herself once more on the floor of the tower, with the great doors standing open ahead of her, but alas! She was not alone in the hall. A terrible beast stood there with a great collar ’round its neck chained three times to the wall: a vast coiling serpent with its maw directly at the door, its eyes red and its teeth yellow and brown with old bloodstains. It moved and writhed restlessly, and it cast its eye rolling over Beau-Mains and her flock, and it saw them and snorted steam and hunger from its fearsome nostrils. The chains restrained the beast so it could not come at them, though it strained at their limits, but neither could she come to the door, but that she would go so close the beast could devour her.

Now once more the little lamb made its soft bleating noise, and from the flock around Beau-Mains, a great many of the sheep came apart to stand with Snow, and among them Beau-Mains recognized a few others which she knew also had gone to butchering, or been taken by wolves. And the lamb led its portion of the flock away from Beau-Mains, towards the writhing beast, and Beau-Mains hid her face and put her arms ’round the sheep that remained to her, burying her head against their wool, so she might not hear the savage feeding.

When the sound of devouring had ended, Beau-Mains lifted her tear-stained face from her sheep, and saw that the great beast had gorged and fallen to sleep, and now slumbered with its wet maw shut. On soft feet she led her flock past its red teeth and through the doors and out upon the familiar hillside, and as soon as they were out together, they ran and ran and ran all the long way home. And there Beau-Mains would have been whipped by her mother for being late, and for her gasping sheep, and also for telling stories, but from her apron Beau-Mains took out her handful of coins: brass, and silver, and gold, and one coin of strange cold black metal which the smith’s forge could not melt, nor his hammer break, and so her tale was known for true, even though the next morning, when the villagers with pitchforks and spears went warily to the tower, they looked within the tower and found neither beast, nor lords, nor chests of gold and silver, but only the sun shining through the round circle in the roof.

This story Isabeau loved better than any other about the donjon, both for Beau-Mains, and for the coin of strange cold black metal, which Jerome showed her: It was in the castle’s treasury, in a small chest of wood, and when she touched it with her own fingertip she could feel it taking the warmth from her flesh with a delicious shiver. She did not mind that there were three other tales of the coin quite unlike the story of Beau-Mains, although she rejected scornfully the one which suggested the coin had not come from the tower at all, but instead had been brought from the East some two centuries before, which was plainly ridiculous: Two such miracles could not be in so much proximity and yet unrelated.

“We can go in, if you like,” Jerome told her. “It’s all right for as long as there’s no star in the sky.” He took her through the doors and pointed up: In the very center of the ceiling, there was a large ring of metal open to the floor above, and when she stood directly underneath it and looked up, she saw a round circle of blue sky visible through a succession of such openings, just as in the story of Beau-Mains.

There were no doors or chambers within. Each floor was one vast great echoing chamber, so far across that when Isabeau raced Jerome from one end to the other, she was breathless and gasping by the time she reached the other side. The wide stone stairs were twice the width of her own foot, big enough to hold the mailed foot of a knight, and they climbed two vast spiraling swoops up the inside of the tower walls until they passed through to the next floor above. A narrow walkway of stone circled halfway up the chamber, like a balcony looking down upon the window, and arrow-slit windows stood at every tenth step along it.

The second floor was just the same as the first, but the windows were larger: She could have stood upon the sill and stretched to her toes and reached the length of her fingers and still the top of the window arch or the sides would have been beyond her. The third was a little less high, and there was only one turn of the stairs, and no walkway: The windowsills stood at the height of her chin, and you could stand upon a box and fold your arms and rest your head upon them and look out for seven leagues in any direction over the folds and rolling waves of the countryside, like an ocean of green and grain, halted for one instant of time.

Then to the roof, where the wind whistled thin and strange in her ears, and the world below seemed more removed than it ought to have been. There was a pool upon the roof, which caught rainwater, and long golden fish swarmed in its dark depths, which no one could catch: She and Jerome tried with nets, but the fish always dived away into the dark, and though they put their arms and their long nets as far down as they could go, there was no sign of them, although as soon as they drew out, the fish came back to the surface.

But mostly they stayed on the third floor, where no one came. During the hours of daylight, there were four pages stationed on the roof to keep a lookout in all weathers, who at every hour had to answer the distant call rising up through the circle: What comes to Coeurlieu? and much woe did they get if they did not report a wagon-train or a carriage or a visitor riding to the castle, who came in by the gates later. Meanwhile the knights on the day’s watch saved themselves the stairs, and sat ’round their table on the ground floor comfortably drinking and playing cards, or very occasionally training; in winter, they made the great circle a riding school. And the second floor was filled with stores, though nothing of essential worth, but the third floor was all but empty: not as useful for a lookout, and too many stairs to climb up and down every day. No one came to look for them there, or objected.

She soon grew used to the endless stairs and the endless country outside the windows. Jerome taught her to read there, the two of them lying on their stomachs on the sun-warmed stone looking over his hated books: Isabeau had been taught her letters, but never much more. He even taught her a few magister’s charms, enough to make small chips of rock hop like frogs and catch the sun in a mirror that would shine for a few minutes. She had never had a friend before. She had lived always with girls either too much older or younger; she did not like to look after little ones, and the elder had not paid much attention to her. She had been trained more or less by a succession of noble ladies, sent from one castle to another as her father gained a higher place for her, and she had a little talent for cards and embroidery, which won her a little share of society and praise. But now the frame and the fabric lay forgotten more often than not.

By the time the letter came, near midsummer, she could read it for herself: The Comte had helped the king break the siege of Grosviens, and he was coming home. “God save my good lord and bring him swiftly,” she said, sadly, handing the letter back to Father Jean-Claude, who had brought it to her. She knew she had not done her duty. Her husband would come home and she would have nothing to show him for her time, but that she had learned to read, which she ought have done sooner, and the distraction of his heir.

She hurriedly began to embroider a cloak with the yellow flowers of the Comte’s coat of arms on long green vines, at least to have a gift which might please him, though so little work would not show her very industrious. When Jerome tempted her again to put it aside and come wander with him, she looked out the window and imagined to herself that she saw the Comte emerge from the woods upon the road, and refused. Jerome sighed but kept company with her, and even turned the pages of his books occasionally when she reproached him.

The vines grew and the flowers bloomed, all along the border, and then she decided to risk beginning the great donjon on the center of the back. She rose with the first light good enough to see her needle, and in the evenings in her own bedchamber bent late over the sewing with smoky candlelight. The tower climbed, its windows stitched in black and the stones in silver thread, until all that was left to sew was the Comte’s flag streaming from the battlements on the roof, which she could not do until the next merchant brought her the blue thread for which she had waited two weeks already. She set the frame down frowning, and then Jerome sat up from his books and looked at the heap of the cloak in her lap and said slowly, “My father has not come yet.”

They climbed the stairs to the roof of the donjon to look out at the countryside: no sign of a company anywhere, only a single rider far distant, raising a small cloud of dust at his heels. The wind tugged at her hair beneath her coif, and she put her arms ’round herself, strangely cold, though the summer sun beat strong and hot upon her skin.

The rider came to Couerlieu before the sun went down. The plague had erupted in Blens, between here and Grosviens, and many roads were closed: The townsfolk had heaped barricades of burning brush across them, to try and fend off death. The king had desired the Comte to stay with him in Mont-Sauvage, and therefore the Comte commended the castle and his lady to Sir Gaubard, the stolid old knight of forty-three who was the chatelain. Sir Gaubard gave orders at once to have the road to the castle closed, and to send men down to Coeurlieu town to receive messengers and supply, which would be brought halfway up the mountain, there to wait three days, before they ascended the rest of the way. The plague would come anyway, of course; the plague came everywhere.

Jerome took the news in silence, and afterwards hid himself in such wise that Isabeau could not find him. She did not see him until the next day, when standing on the walls in the evening, she heard the plague bells tolled in town, faint but clear, with three notes struck to mark three deaths. She turned away and saw him crossing the courtyard with a sack over his shoulder and a walking stick, going into the tower, and no one halted him.

Isabeau stood a moment, afraid, and then she went down the stairs to the courtyard and ran after him, in time to see him climbing to the second floor of the tower. She pursued, calling his name, but he did not turn; he climbed on swiftly, and by the time she had reached the second story, he had disappeared onto the third, and the round circle of sky was grown deep violet blue, although there were yet no stars.

She looked down. The doors stood open, but if she climbed a few steps further, she would no longer be able to see them. A heavy silence lay upon the air within. Everyone had gone out of the donjon, as they did every night when the bells rang for vespers. It was her duty to go out, too. Jerome might stay, just as he might neglect his tasks and lessons, because there was no use to him. But she knew that when she came to look for him in the morning, he would forever be gone: diving deep into dark like the golden fish, no matter how she tried to grasp him.

There were day-candles in small niches along the stairs, and by chance one had been blown out sometime early in the day. She pried it from the puddled wax at its base and lit it from one of the dying stubs, and with it in her hands climbed timidly higher, calling Jerome’s name softly. Her voice seemed to press against resistance, and he did not answer. She reached the third floor, familiar and yet gone strange: Outside the too-high windows she could see only dark, and long shadows hid the curving wall, dancing over the floor to the tune of the sputtering lights. She climbed onward.

Icy air struck her in the face as she pushed open the door to the roof, full of the smell of snow and winter. “Jerome, are you here?” she called. No answer came. Above her head the stars shone high and infinite and unfamiliar, and the horizon was a circle of solid dark all around, with no rolling shadows of hills or trees breaking into the smooth bowl of the sky. She walked quickly around the full circle of the battlements and came back to the door, panting clouds. A thick layer of ice had grown atop the pool, the fish pale ghosts moving beneath it. There was no sign of Jerome.

It was too cold to stay outside. She pulled the door open and crept back inside to warm herself, and then halted and huddled back against the doors. All the dying candles had grown back to life, golden light shining out of the niches onto the turning stairs. But the air at her back was now cold as on the roof itself, and growing steadily colder. She put down her own candle, and shivering went slowly down the stairs with the chill following her. Air streamed white from her lips as though her soul was slipping from her body with every breath.

She reached the third floor. Her fingers were grown almost numb. The candles all stood tall and unflickering as if they had been freshly lit, but they only made circles of light which did not touch one another, or the walls. She darted from one island of candlelight to another until she came close enough to dash to the window seat where she and Jerome had passed their afternoons, where she had left her embroidery forgotten. The cloak still lay on the stones, with the frame fixed ’round the top of the tower where no banner yet flew. But she had sewn the tower against a green hillside marked with white sheep. Now it stood only on a circle of black, and the border was all of knotted white stars in a pattern she had never made.

She held it in her hands, afraid, but she was too cold. She undid the frame and wrapped the cloak, meant for a tall man, around herself sideways twice. The warm thick wool muffled the chill. She looked for Jerome’s books, too, but they were gone: Perhaps he had come and taken them. But he had left his paper and ink, and after a moment she knelt down and laboriously wrote I am here Isabeau with many blots and left the sheet upon the ground weighted with her frame.

She did not call Jerome’s name any more. The stillness of the tower lay upon her too heavily. She hurried back to the stairs and started downward again. She would wait by the doors for sunrise, she told herself, and resolutely did not think of Beau-Mains climbing endlessly, and the dreadful devouring beast. And indeed for her the stairs continued ordinarily downward, and though few candles were kept on the second floor, she could see enough to know that it was still there, and not vanished.

Isabeau could not help but think of an apple in honey, or a handful of nuts: She had not eaten her dinner, silent with the empty place at table where Jerome ought to have been. But the sacks and barrels and boxes of the stores had become strange lumpy shadows, and she remembered unwillingly that the angry reeve had driven all the kitchen boys mercilessly for a whole day last month, because someone had turned ’round all the stores and they had to be put back into order; and only four days ago, sixteen barrels of preserved plums had been found devoured overnight with no one to admit to the act.

She reached the landing, where the stairs plunged onward towards the ground, and for a moment was relieved: she could see the doors, and they stood open. But then she realized—the doors stood open, although they ought to have been closed and barred for the night long since. And while she stood there irresolute, she heard a heavy footstep somewhere on the stairs below her, loud, with the rasp of chainmail rings on stone.

Another step came, and another: climbing. She turned away, her heart pounding like a rabbit, and went out among the stores, sliding her feet one after another slowly ahead of her through the dark, as though her pointed toes would warn her of unsteady ground. She groped past the barrels and sacks, and finally hid behind a stack of boxes as the footsteps grew loud and nearby.

They paused upon the landing and then came onto the floor. Isabeau stayed crouched and shivering. The footsteps were slow and dragging a little, the mail scraping against the stone. They stopped and she heard a creaking sound, a wordless deep grunt, and she jumped involuntarily at a loud crack of splitting wood: he was opening a box, or a barrel. He began to eat: loud smacking sounds, slurping, and she pressed her hands over her ears trembling. He kept eating a long time, making small grunts and panting for breath when he paused long enough to get any.

At last he finished and she heard him push up from the barrel, the wooden rim thumping against the floor as it wobbled with his weight coming off. He stood breathing heavily. She shut her eyes and pressed herself to the side of the box and prayed silently that he would go away, go on higher up the stairs.

He moved. She held her breath listening: the heavy dragging steps began to recede. He was going back to the stairs. She hesitated and then crept slowly forward on her hands and knees, as silent as she could be. She didn’t want to see him at all, any part of him, but she still more desperately wanted to know whether he went up or down.

She crawled to the very edge of the boxes and knelt up and edged her cheek out past it until her eye came clear and she could see towards the stairs. He was a hunched shadow framed in the light of the landing, a gleam of silver mail along the edges of his body. His back was turned to her: His long hair was stringy gray and the pate nearly bare, and dreadfully she saw upon his neck a swollen black lump, and the ends of his dangling wet fingers were blackened as with soot.

He paused a moment and began to turn his head slightly. She pulled back out of sight, clenching her hands. His footsteps went onward, and when she dared one more glance around, his heels were vanishing up the stairs.

She sat down in the dark where she was and hugged her knees to herself under the cloak, listening in relief as his steps went dying little by little away. She still did not move for a time, waiting to be sure, and then at last she crept back out—she did not look into the opened barrel—and darted a quick look up the stairs. She saw no sign of him, gratefully, and she set her foot upon the steps to go down the rest of the way.

And then far-off she heard a voice, strange and croaking-harsh, almost a gargle, say, “Isabeau.”

She froze upon the steps, shaking. The line she had written to Jerome—

The footsteps were coming back. Again and closer the voice said, “Isabeau,” and she fled away and down, clutching up her skirts to go more quickly, her heels skidding down the edges of the steps, scraping her shins against them. On the ground were all the racks that the knights used in their work, the piled hay bales and the tall cut lances heaped; she would hide, she would hide. Her soft leather shoes were quiet, he did not know where she was. She would hide, and pray for morning, and the sun would come and save her.

She slipped and fell and nearly tumbled over the edge, biting her lip not to cry out. The footsteps were rasping one after another above her. “Isabeau,” the gargle said again: hungry. She went quicker, desperate, until she sprang off the stairs onto the floor. The doors stood open, but outside there was only an endless, impenetrable dark, unbroken even by the stars. She stood hesitating, trembling, and then she pulled her thin linen coif off her head and threw it into the doorway, so it fell just across the line of the dark, with the ties trailing.

She fled for the bales draped with cloth, hiding herself beneath, and lay there and caught her gulping breath, her hand pressed over her mouth to muffle the sound. She could see thinly through the weave of the coarse cloth, where the candles made their pools of light, and when his feet came down from the landing she saw them come. The cloth blurred him to a faceless lurching, the scrape of his feet and the heavy wet sound of his own breath.

He reached the floor, and his head turned towards the doors. He did not move at first. In the thick close stuffiness she shut her eyes and prayed, her lips moving soundless against her palm, and then she opened her eyes and saw him in the doorway, bending to take her coif. “Isabeau,” he crooned over it, pressing it to his face. Muffled through the cloth, there was something almost familiar in his voice, as though she had heard it before; but then he went lurching out the doors, into the dark, and the dark swallowed his footsteps as though he had never been.

She shut her eyes a moment more in gratitude, trembling, and then threw off the coarse, hay-smelling cloth and scrambled out meaning to flee back to the roof; she stood up in a gold-glitter cloud of hay dust, pinching a sneeze down behind her hand with her eyes squeezed shut, and when she opened her eyes, she halted. The old knife-scarred table where the knights played their idle cards was in front of her, and three queens sat ’round it, with coins and cards heaped between them. They turned their heads and looked at her.

She did not think of running. There was no use in running, of course, but it was not only that there was no use. If the other had seen her, she would have run until there was no more running, no matter how useless. But they were not like him. Terror and calm nestled together in her belly, but she took the folds of her skirt and she curtseyed to them low, and said, “God give you all grace, noble ladies,” and the one in the middle, tall and pale and clad in black, answered her, “And to you, my lady.”

They were all strangely beautiful and strangely alike: Their faces might have been cut from stone by a sculptor making copies, long and graven and unlined, and each of them wore upon her breast a jewel strung on a chain: one golden-brown and yellow like tiger’s-eye, one the deep red of blood, and the one in the middle, who faced her, a jewel clear as water.

“Come and play,” the red-jeweled one said to her. There was one seat empty at the table, and cards left before it.

“She has no stake,” the yellow-jeweled one said. They were different at a closer look: Her face and lips were narrower, her cheeks hollowed and gaunt, and her hands where they came from her sleeves were so thin the bones strained against the skin.

The other scowled at her across the table. “I am tired of waiting while our sister goes roaming upon the world.”

Isabeau wished to say she did not know the game; she wanted to excuse herself. But on the discard heap, the king of coins stood face-upwards, and it was Sir Gaubard: his frowning anxious face painted so real to life he might have been caught up out of the world and put into it whole. She held up the fold of her cloak so the tower would show, and timidly brought it to the table and held it out. “Will this serve?”

The yellow-jeweled sister eyed it hungrily. The sister in the middle nodded once, and gestured to the empty chair opposite her. Isabeau sat down with them and picked up the cards. The air had warmed; she was not cold anymore. Now her hands shook because she lifted faces she knew with every card from the hand before her: the old sour cook on the nine of coins, Father Jean-Claude with his cross as the ten of cups; a groom who liked to sing on the four of spades. There were so many she could barely hold them all.

“The play is yours,” the red-jeweled one said. Isabeau hesitated, and then took a card from the deck: it was Estienne, one of the younger knights, on the nine of swords. The queens all watched her, silently, as she worked it in among the others. She hesitated and asked softly, “Must I discard?”

They all inclined their heads. She looked down at her cards and blinked away stinging. They were crammed so close in her small hands that the faces were covered, and she could only see the suits and numbers. And yet there was a face upon each one. She could not take one out.

The red-jeweled queen shifted impatiently and made a loud sigh, and with a sharp jerk Isabeau pulled out the lonely six of coins and threw it out onto the pile before she could look too close at the young man upon it: She thought his name was Lucien, and he was an apprentice to the smith.

The play went ’round and ’round. New cards marched into her hands, threatening to spill over: more than there ought to have been, and sometimes it seemed to her that she already held a card of the same markings, but when she looked into her hand, she could not find it. Sometimes she drew a card and laid it on the discards straightaway; she made herself a rule she would not give away one in her hand unless the new was better, to make it less of a choice. But she was too quick at cards not to know that this card would bring her closer, and that one further, and which was the best to throw away.

The red-jeweled queen played impatiently: She drew cards and sometimes threw them out again a few turns later, as though she had changed her mind, and she liked swords best; the yellow-jeweled queen greedily snatched her card from the deck as soon as the turn was hers, and frowned long and lingering before she had to discard each one, grudging. Between them, the queen in black velvet played steadily, without much passion; she took her cards and laid the discards down almost to a measured pace.

They had already been playing a long time when Isabeau drew the king of cups: Jerome with a golden goblet in one hand and a book open upon his lap. She put him at once into her hand, pushing the card in quickly near the knave with Father Jean-Claude upon it, which she had not yet been able to bring herself to discard, on the excuse that she had the ten of cups as well, and some little hope of the nine. But she had a sharp painful sense that she had seen the queen of cups thrown out already in play by one of the others, and two of the other kings were already gone.

As if to taunt her, the nine of cups came on the very next turn: Sister Brigitte, who led the singing every Sunday, and so she and the priest were safe on either side of old retired Magister Leon, who slept in the north tower and rarely ever came down to dinner. But the king of cups continued to stand alone as the turns crept onward, and on every side the others were shifting their cards as though their hands were nearly formed. And then Isabeau took from the deck the king of swords, and it was her husband, with his stern marked face and his kind eyes.

Of the swords she had now the knave and the ten and the nine, so she put him beside them, and threw out the very last of the solitary cards she had saved, a three of spades with a little boy who tended goats upon it. She did not know his name, but she remembered his grinning pride: She had been sitting high up on the castle wall with Jerome when his mother had told him he might take the herd out alone for the first time. She looked away.

The yellow-jeweled sister drew a card and her hungry eyes brightened; her lips curled with satisfaction as she put the card into her hand and threw out another. She looked over with that thin smile as the play continued on, and Isabeau did not need to be told that she had nearly finished. The play came ’round to her again. She reached out a trembling hand and drew a card from the deck with her own face upon it, a queen, and where the suit ought to have been only a jester’s star.

The yellow-jeweled queen was drumming her fingers impatiently. The game was done: Isabeau had to make one hand, or the other. She swallowed and chose, and laid down her cards with her face looking out from between Jerome and Father Jean-Claude, making the long line of cups, and she put the Comte’s card last upon the high heap of the discards.

She wiped away tears as the yellow-jeweled queen threw down her cards scowling, and the red-jeweled queen sighed and tossed her own atop the discard heap as well: The Comte vanished beneath the cascade. They rose from the table and walked out the doors and into the dark, their long trains whispering over the floors until they were engulfed. Across from her, the last of the queens with her black clothes and her clear jewel gathered the heap, and held out her hand for the rest of the cards.

Isabeau hesitated with her hands spread over them, protective, but the queen said, cool and implacable, “All the cards are mine in the end. Only fools forget it.”

“Yes, your majesty,” Isabeau whispered, and gathered them together, and gave them over.

The queen put the deck into a velvet bag that hung from her silver belt and rose from the table. “Go to the roof and shut the door, and do not open it again until morning,” she said. “And never again seek this place. You have given the beast your scent, and he will find you the next time if you do.”

Isabeau shivered. “Is it—Sir Theolian?” she dared to ask.

“It is your friend,” the queen said, dreadfully. “And it is the knight as well, and the others before them. They came to take shelter from me, and when they found me here, they fled into the dark, and still there they hide. But I am there, too.”

Isabeau swallowed and looked at the coins heaped before her in piles of silver and gold and cold black. “May I—may I ransom Jerome?”

“For a little while.” The queen picked one black, cold coin from the heap and held it out. Isabeau closed her hand ’round it, and by the time her fingers had curled shut, the rest had rattled away into the air, vanishing, so she could again see the pale cuts in the wood where hands had carved Bastien likes pigs and Melisende has my heart and a rough picture of a strutting cock with enormous plumes with the name Philippe beneath it.

“Go,” the queen said, and Isabeau climbed shakily from the chair and made her curtsey, and then she flew up the stairs with the coin still clutched tight in her fist, without stopping, until she was on the roof with the door shut behind her, and she took down the pole with the banner of Coeurlieu and barred it, too. Then she wrapped herself tightly in her cloak and huddled against the small shelter of lee of the battlements to wait for morning, and then, though she did not remember sleep, she was waking in a sweat, the sun halfway up the sky and pounding down upon her in the heavy wool.

She found Jerome on the third floor, sprawled limply asleep amidst the scattered heap of his books, the note she had written him crumpled in his hand, and when she shook him he jerked up with a staring look of fear and horror and caught her arms too tight. He held on trembling for a few moments, and then he said, hoarsely, “You did come. I thought I heard your voice, but I couldn’t find you. Is it morning? I didn’t think the morning would ever come again.”

“Yes,” Isabeau said. “Yes, and it’s already growing late. Let’s go outside.”

©2016 by Temeraire LLC. Originally published in Unfettered 2, edited by Shawn Speakman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Naomi Novik was born in New York in 1973, a first-generation American, and raised on Polish fairy tales, Baba Yaga, and Tolkien. She studied English Literature at Brown University and did graduate work in Computer Science at Columbia University before leaving to participate in the design and development of the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide. Her first novel, His Majesty’s Dragon, was published in 2006 along with Throne of Jade and Black Powder War, and has been translated into 23 languages. She has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. The fourth volume of the Temeraire series, Empire of Ivory, published in September 2007, was a New York Times bestseller, and was followed by bestsellers Victory of Eagles, Tongues of Serpents, and the final volume League of Dragons. She is one of the founding board members of the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the fair-use rights of fan creators, and is herself a fanfic writer and fan vidder. Naomi lives in New York City with her husband and eight computers.

Wild Bill’s Last Stand

Kyle Muntz | 2740 words

Wild Bill “The Buck” Williams rode into town for a drink, but he stayed for the pretty boys. He was as mean as they said but not so tall: a lean, hard man with a rocky face and a broad mustache, slicked at both sides from a tin of fat he kept in a satchel round his waist. That first night he broke a man’s jaw for cheating him at poker. I didn’t just hear the story, I saw it—how Wild Bill clocked the fucker upside the face, emptied the last of his drink, and knocked out half the man’s teeth with his mug. Then he stood, one hand on the sword ’round his waist, and spat when he tossed the man out onto the street.

Everyone knew Wild Bill liked pretty boys, but he seemed to like me something special. I never seen a man kick so hard when I went down between his knees, one foot (almost, but not always, the right) stomping the ground like a horse getting ready to ride. That’s how he fucked too, bucking and growling—though sometimes he cried afterwards, and you never seen such a rough face cry, like some hidden, awful river bursting out the side of a cliff (the sheer granite cliffs I rode between when I was young, when I came out into this Bad Country with my father), only it seems more like the earth itself started to bleed.

“I come to die here,” he said, one hand round my waist so I felt like some sweaty, bruised flower, “or kill a man. I killed men before but I never had days to think about it. When a man fights, he draws his sword and finishes the thing, or he doesn’t. This is something else. I don’t like it.”

The talk was all up and down the town, of course. Wild Bill had met Wyatt Yarbury “Pink Lightning” Elton McHugh three times, and the two had exchanged unkind words by any standard. That year, McHugh had killed fifteen men to Wild Bill’s eight—and, two weeks ago, McHugh put out a challenge to Wild Bill that he would like to make it sixteen. Two of the most famous fighters in the country. Word would spread wherever they went, and it was sure to reach him soon enough.

“I rode a few towns over after I heard,” Wild Bill told me, “but a man can’t go too far before he’s called a sissy. And I’m no sissy.” Rough fingers gripped my thigh; a soft snort and he was crying again. Wild Bill stayed at the Emerald for five days and four nights, and I never did learn whether he was afraid, or if he was just the kind of hard man who’s also very soft inside, syrupy like a cactus, but somehow rank and sour, the way all soft things get when you leave them in a dark place.

Wild Bill slept late every morning, snoring with one arm over his mouth, but every night he slept with me. They were terrified of him on the gambling floor, though he never fought anyone after that first day—it must have been a show, to put them on their toes. He wanted them afraid of him, and it worked. He gambled all day, holding a drink he didn’t finish as often as you’d expect, but he never went near any other pretty boy.

He was the kind of man who slept after he fucked. Sometimes we say the faces of sleeping men are tender, but Wild Bill scowled while he slept—or maybe that was just the set of his lips beneath the mustache. (Every morning I washed the oils of it away from my mouth, so that a faint film clouded the basin.) I’ve never been much good at sleep, so I left him just as often as not.

The Emerald closes late, but after a whole day inside it calms my mind to walk. This town is barely more than a street, but I’ve always liked how the moon glows at night, big and heavy as a stone pretending to be a jewel. Sometimes you can see the Burning Men in the dark, like riders on tall horses—only, when you look closely, you realize the legs look more like stilts, and they stand almost nine feet tall, the faces like masks on a body outlined with fire.

This far west, Wild Bill might have hoped the Burning Men would take care of McHugh. There’s a reason so few come so far into this Bad Country, into the far deep places where men made of fire wander across the plains. They don’t hate us, but the Burning Men punish those who need punishing. No one rides carelessly across those plains. The Burning Men come out of their burrows even during the day.

There are nights I want to wander out onto those plains. The Burning Men don’t walk like horses. Every step is a lurch, almost a stumble. Their torsos are so lean you can see the ribs beneath them, their eyes like fiery points of terrible light. There are many things I wonder about them. I wonder what thoughts exist behind their masks; I wonder if they feel sadness when they look up at the stars, or whether they desire companionship, or whether they have cocks. What’s odd is that when you look at them, you don’t always feel afraid—sometimes you just feel lost. You feel like you’ve come into the wrong country, and perhaps you would like to leave, but you can’t imagine how.

• • • •

Wyatt Yarbury “Pink Lightning” Elton McHugh rode into town around noon the fifth day. He was a tall man, much taller than Wild Bill, with long hair down nearly to his waist. He wore a fine, wide-brimmed hat over a lean face with its thin mustache. His vest was trim and neat, and I never seen a scabbard so nice as the one he wore ’round his waist. Wyatt HcHugh stood tall and straight, a gentleman, and behind him followed two pretty boys, one to either side: the finest, fairest creatures I ever seen.

“Wild Bill Williams,” called Wyatt HcHugh, striding into the Emerald on long-toed, freshly polished boots. “I’d heard you came to this town, but I thought you’d have the good sense to run.”

“I never ran from no man.” Wild Bill still sitting at the bar, and me next to him. “Especially not a sissy.”

“Every man who ever called me a sissy is dead.”

McHugh’s face was powdered, I noticed, and he wore white gloves so that his skin appeared astoundingly pale.

“I called you a sissy before,” said my Wild Bill, “and I’ll say it again.” His mug fell so hard it rattled the table. “You’re a sissy and a chicken.”

“Those are brave words, coming from a chicken.”

Wild Bill scowled, reaching down for his sword. But before he drew, McHugh lifted one arm.

“Wait. We ought to have a drink. I like to drink with a man before I fight him.”

“There’s nothing for us to say.”

“Perhaps we’ll find a few words.” McHugh nodded toward the bartender. The whole Emerald was silent for the first time I can remember. Everyone with their faces turned, mouths hanging open. That day, no one finished their game of cards. No one drank until long afterwards.

“Whiskey for myself and my friend,” said McHugh. “On me.” He indicated a nearby table. “Shall we sit?”

“Can’t say I’m happy about the idea,” said Wild Bill. “But I’ve never been known to turn down a drink.”

The elixir was poured. Two of the most infamous men in the country threw back their heads and let out strong sighs.

“That’s the stuff,” said McHugh. “I’ll have another.”

“You drink better than I expected,” said Wild Bill, “for such a delicate man.”

“I have many skills. My pretty boys can attest to that.” McHugh paused to run a hand down one’s face—but next his eyes fell on me, and I flinched. “That one there. Is he yours?”

“I suppose you could say that.”

“Well then.” McHugh’s palm turned up, gesturing me forward. “Come here, pretty boy.”

Suddenly my neck went cold, and the tips of my fingers tingled. I thought of lifting one foot from the ground but I felt like a tree rooted down in the earth.

“What are you waiting for?” said McHugh. “Come here.”

I stuttered when I spoke, and my voice cracked.

“How did you know it was me?” I asked.

“It was obvious,” said McHugh. “You’re standing so close. And there’s the way you look at him.”

“How’s that?” said Wild Bill. “How does my pretty boy look at me?”

“Like a snake cuddling with a lion.” McHugh beckoned again. “Come here.”

It was hard to step forward, but eventually I did it. McHugh’s eyes were on me—steely blue like rivers so cold I would never swim in them. His fine-boned hand in its silken glove touched my face: high on the cheekbones beneath my eye, down to my lips. It had been years since I’d seen a river.

“He’s soft,” said McHugh. “Too soft for you.”

“You don’t know nothing about me,” said Wild Bill. “Least of all my pretty boy.”

“I know all I need to know just by looking at you.” And when Wild Bill scowled—“Another round, then!”

Again, the two threw back their heads, like terrible beasts wrenching at the end of their chains.

“My god,” said McHugh. “I do like a good drink. It’s only proper for a man to relax before he fights. Don’t you think so, Wild Bill?”

“I’m plenty relaxed.”

“That’s good to hear.” McHugh leaned back, lifting both arms above his head in a stretch. “On my way here, I thought about many things. I don’t often come so far into the Bad Country, or look so deeply into the faces of the Burning Men. I haven’t seen so clearly in many years.”

“Seen what, you think?”

“I’ve seen how all men deserve to punished, including myself. How absurd it is that we live in this Bad Country, though it does not belong to us. I’ve seen that, in the end, all this world will become ice, and we’ll be memories frozen in it, burned to grains buried somewhere in these sands.”

“If you want punishment,” said Wild Bill, “you’ve come to the right place.”

“But what about you?” said McHugh. “Do you not want to look into their eyes and see them looking back, and in that moment they will see you more clearly than you have ever seen yourself, those Burning Men? And it will be like the very grains in your core—those secret, hidden grains—have finally been allowed to speak.”

“I speak all I need,” said Wild Bill. “I say all I need to say.”

But then I thought again of how Wild Bill cried each night—that strange melancholy in his eyes, distant and brown, looking off toward the ceiling as he dredged into an uneasy sleep. And I thought that McHugh was right. No man comes so far into this Bad Country without a reason. No man comes so far who does not somehow desire punishment. And when he desires it enough the Burning Men will give it to him, if he does not give it to himself.

All at once, Wyatt Yarbury “Pink Lightning” Elton McHugh kicked back his chair, and Wild Bill “The Buck” Williams did the same. It was the kind of moment that happens only once: a rare instant, like we hear about in stories but never see ourselves. Time seemed to slow, but also to expand. An awareness of the weight of what would soon happen, of two paths crossing but only leaving one.

“Well then.” McHugh’s voice was calm but measured, his eyes still as the air in that silent room. “I suppose there’s nothing more to say.”

It was impossible to see it, they were so fast. I blinked and Wild Bill’s sword was in his hand. Hints of motion, a flash of light reflected between blades—and a soft sound, like wind blowing over the town at night. McHugh’s sword finished high, the arm up over his shoulder. Wild Bill finished low, near to McHugh’s stomach.

Then Wild Bill’s hand fell, severed at the wrist.

“A sissy,” said Wyatt Yarbury “Pink Lightning” Elton McHugh. Strident, clear laughter in the silence of that room, the echo of a motion so quick I hardly realized it was over. “You called me a sissy and chicken, and that’s all you have in you!”

McHugh flicked the blade of his sword so that blood flecked the ground. Wild Bill’s eyes stood open like canyons nobody would ever pass through again. He gasped (the sound more like a cough or a whine) and reached to clasp his forearm as a heady stream of blood spat from his wrist.

“I think that’s all,’” said McHugh, and returned the sword to the jeweled sheath at his side. “It’s not fair for a man to appreciate his victory over an animal. That’s why they call you a ‘buck,’ I suppose.”

McHugh raised one arm toward his pretty boys, who fell into step at either side.

He walked toward the door with long, deliberate strides, but turned back before he left.

“I meant what I told you about punishment, and about seeing clearly. There’s one outside, if you’d like to speak to it.”

• • • •

For a long while, Wild Bill held the stump of his severed hand, dark blood leaking down to cover his fingers. The deepest scowl hooked like a broken moon beneath his mustache. His eyes were dark, rimmed in cold hollows. He called for a drink: whisky, which he threw back from the same glass. He lowered his head and began to cry.

The tears lasted perhaps a minute in a silence so intense I felt it stretch around us. Wild Bill “The Buck” Williams would never fight again. They would tell stories about this night, and they would be like other stories but very different. Wild Bill, one of the most feared fighters in the history of this Bad Country, would be laughed at and forgotten. They would remember these tears, as I remember them, but they would not mean the same as they did to me.

“Well then, pretty boy,” said Wild Bill. “I suppose I ought to speak to it, if a Burning Man has come. I’d like someone to see. Will you come with me?”

I nodded, and told him I would.

Wild Bill’s steps were heavy, tired, his shoulders slumped. Blood leaked down both his hands and stood out prominently on his chest. Another faint trace of red marked the corner of his lips where he’d bit them.

“I never thought I might end my life in a place like this,” said Wild Bill.

“You’ve only lost your hand,” I told him.

But when he heard what I said, Wild Bill only laughed.

• • • •

It was waiting for him in the street: a Burning Man, all wreathed in ribbons of flame. In the distance, I’d never noticed the length of their necks: two, maybe three feet. Its head looked down from a leaning stalk, the mask like a raging mirror staring out. Its torso was a cramped, angular mass at the height of those tall legs. McHugh was already gone, though crowds had formed at either end of the street. The Burning Men never came into town. But somehow I knew this one would leave as easily as it had come.

“Look at that,” said Wild Bill. “It’s beautiful, like he said.”

Wild Bill stepped forward, eyes angled up, closer into its shadow of unbearable flame. The Burning Man lowered its head, inching awkwardly, as if there were bones somewhere in its neck but not jointed properly. Wild Bill didn’t flinch as it pressed close—even when his mustache caught fire, and I smelled the charring a few steps away as his skin began to melt.

“He said you had something to tell me,” said Wild Bill.

And when the Burning Man spoke, it sounded like a man crying out in the midst of a terrible dream.

©2018 by Kyle Muntz.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kyle Muntz is the author of Scary People (Eraserhead Press, 2015) and Green Lights (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2014). His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Fiction International, Mayday, and elsewhere in print and online. In 2016, he received a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Notre Dame, where he was awarded the Spark’s Prize for excellence in fiction. Also, he is the writer and designer of The Pale City, a dark fantasy roleplaying game scheduled for release on PC in 2019, which has (finally) entered the early beta testing stage. Originally from Michigan, he currently lives in Shandong, China.

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

The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse

Kathleen Ann Goonan | 20262 words

Here stands a house all built of thought,
And full to overflowing
Of treasures and of precious things,
Of secrets for my knowing.

—Olive Beaupré Miller, The Latch Key

There is a theory that consciousness arises through self-organizing mass. This takes ages. Think of the thousands of years the oldest bristlecone pine grew, nearly five thousand, and it could grow older, if it had a chance, though it no longer has that chance. Except here. And maybe somewhere, but that is a mighty thin maybe.

Nevertheless, think of all the systems that went into growing that tree, all that time. What kind of entity can possibly understand time that long, except that bristlecone pine? And then, think of all the time we have been riding this horse. Who could understand that?

If anyone could, they would seem like magical creatures to us.

That’s why this is a fairy tale.

Time is a Kelvin–Helmholtz function. You know, like the clouds in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. We surf the waves, the whorl, the crush of energies that cause time, that cause us. You may disagree with it, but that’s our present theory. It seems that our particular neighborhood of time, which created us, is the only weather in which consciousness can survive. We are the products of a very fragile environment.

We are the magic beans Jill climbs the beanstalk to find.

We are life.

• • • •

Pele, two days older than one hundred and five, waits in the crowded Galaxies Bar on Moku, the Entertainment, Amusement and, much less importantly, R&D Exoplanetary Exploration Ship. Robotic and print construction commenced in 2030, when Pele was forty, during one of the rare confluences of available capital and passionate interest in space.

Pele’s hands are folded in her lap in an attitude of calm, but she simmers, despite the faint scent of gardenia, the low tones of a flowing music specifically designed to generate a state of relaxed attention, and the zen landscaping. A tube of green tea floats unopened near her shoulder, its tether clipped to the table. Dr. Zi, Chief Safety Engineer, is late for this meeting, one that Pele requested and that the ship’s scheduling algorithm arranged.

Lights are always low in Galaxies, unlike other bars on Moku designed for dancing or the roar of a hundred unheard conversations. As usual, it’s two-thirds populated by tourists and crew. The Velcro floor is scattered with zabutons and low, gently glowing cylinders that serve as tables. A row of portholes affords a spectacular view of Mars rising as Moku slowly spins.

“Sorry I’m late, Dr. Hsu.” Zi, in full quasi-military Chief Safety Engineer regalia, billed hat and all, drops onto a zabuton. Peering over his shoulder, he unbuttons his shirt pocket, removes his ever-present salad tube, takes a pull, and slips it back into his pocket, which he buttons.

Pele says, “I want to discuss last week’s report, in which I raise serious issues. You didn’t respond.”

Zi is busy scanning the room. “Ah! There she is. Eleven o’clock.” He waves, showing most of his teeth in a camera-ready smile that beams from his well-tanned, rugged face.

Stormy, a raven-haired reality star, threads her way around seated groups of people toward them, encased in a retro space suit that emphasizes her long legs and shapes her breasts into pointy weapons. The camera drones trailing her blink like synchronous fireflies, as required by law.

Pele shakes her head emphatically in Stormy’s direction, uninterested in being dragged into the kind of propaganda puff pieces with which Zi is building his celebrity.

Stormy pivots as quickly as the Velcro on the two contact points of her very high heels allows and heads off at a right angle, trolling for the perfect feel-good space chat.

Zi frowns. “You just blew a perfect opportunity to communicate with the public.”

“I communicate very well with the public, except when you bump my podcast, like you did yesterday.” Pele, temporary liaison between the many factions on board, sees new fault lines daily, foresees minor disasters and deflects them before they emerge, furnishes solutions, and shares concerns in forceful, direct language with those on the ship and on Earth who need to know. She also drops a weekly public podcast, working hard to present this information gracefully, so as to avoid being characterized as an alarmist crank by the all-powerful entertainment industry.

“You need to re-slant it.”

“I said exactly what I meant to say. The issues I raised concerning the Gifted Child Congress are urgent. There have been thirty-seven of these children on board for six weeks now, and I’ve sent you five related Concern Communiqués—each with two red exclamation points—thus far. Should I try using more?”

“So say something nice for a change. Your campaign against them failed.”

“Just because everyone, including their parents, were snowed regarding the very real health risks—”

“We are completely protected by nanotech shielding.”

“No meaningful sample for that conclusion, despite all the glossy advertising, but here they are, so we can gather information for more meaningful studies for the rest of their lives—and ours. However, my present concerns are about something different.”

“I’ve read your CC’s. They contain weird assertions. Rumors, in fact, that don’t rise to the level of requiring a CC. Yes—these children are not normal—that’s their strength! They’re the superstars of the future. This is the third Congress in the past ten years. Wildly successful. Great publicity. They’re bringing in billions of dollars. Flip your concerns, for Christ’s sake. Valentina actually had a paper accepted by Space Life Journal, one she completed while here. She is amazing—ten years old! Grew up on the Argentinian pampas, on an estancia. Home-schooled. Discovered by a competition she entered. I was planning to steer the interview you just blew off in that direction.”

Pele knows Valentina as Bean, as do the other children. “Valentina is amazing.” She does not ask if Zi has read Valentina’s startling paper. She does not want to embarrass him. “They all are amazing. That’s part of my concern.”

“Why concern? We need to talk them up.”

“I talk about my job, which is to be a crank, if that’s what you want to call it. An honest, vocal crank, and I am worried. Doesn’t it matter at all that Moku is a disaster waiting to happen? In so many ways?”

“We’ve got backups galore.”

Sometimes Pele cannot believe that he is a many-degreed engineer. But too ambitious; a young fifty-something on the make. So many luminaries have springboarded out of Moku that it’s regarded as a pipeline to fame.

On the instant, Pele decides to have him removed. He is smart enough to understand that he is ignoring key issues not just at his own peril, but at the peril of others. He has put his own path to celebrity above his larger responsibilities, and has just definitively underlined his reckless stance.

She knows exactly who has bought his complacency. It is easy for her to make her face unreadable, but perhaps her doing so right now is the tell he’s been looking for. Even now, after a lifetime of effort to gain fluency in the language of emotion-filled faces, she has not completely mastered the human tap-dance of mask and reveal that normal children easily absorb, despite her neuroplasticity infusions and cognitive therapies.

She does not wish to be normal. But aspects of normality would often be helpful.

Zi leans forward, sets both hands on the table, and links his fingers. His big smile makes jolly-looking crinkle lines at the corners of his eyes. She is sure he knows just how jolly they are. His voice warm and hearty, he says, “Hey, isn’t children’s literature one of your areas of expertise?”

This is a new tack. “Seventy years ago, it was. I’m not at all up-to-date, and wasn’t then. Just books, written before 1965. But yes, it was a passion.” Indeed, one of her rickety bridges to life. “And?”

“I recall a video of you speaking at an international conference after you received your first doctorate. You were a very passionate and effective communicator about how the brains of children on the autistic spectrum can be physically changed through engagement with literature. All the more impressive because—”

She smiles; nods. “I’m Asperger’s. As are most of our visiting children. Part of my international cachet, I might add.” Two can play at his game.

“Um, yes. Of course. We’re all open books here, no pun intended. I’m just thinking you might help organize our vast children’s library. It’s a terrible jumble—all those files shot up here willy-nilly from all over the world. You can link these kids to it—”

Pele leans forward, laces together her own fingers, lights up her own wide, brown face with a warm, face-crinkling smile. “Great idea. That task might serve to distract me from effectively executing my responsibilities. Or maybe I should write another paper that bridges two fields of physics, and create a new field. The first was a hit. I won a small prize.”

She does not usually talk this way. She was brought up to be modest, but he has vastly overplayed his hand. Her small stature, her long, shimmering white hair, and even, still, the fact that she is a woman, have often caused others to underestimate her. She was here long before him, and will be here long after he is gone. But she still can’t tell whether he understands that he has picked the wrong foe.

He straightens his back. “You can’t fight money, even if you do have Nobel authority. Moku runs on the entertainment and tourist industries.”

“I agree. And technological, scientific, and academic research is the dog. Setting a timetable for actual travel to an exoplanet seems to be our least concern. In the two years since you arrived, you or your proxies have generated many irrelevant but effective roadblocks and dismantled several long-running initiatives. Not many people have examined your record thus far, but a close scrutiny reveals a definite pattern.”

He juts his head forward and stares at her with open hostility. “You’re out of your—do you really?—” He raises both hands in a questioning attitude, drops them to his side, and laughs. “Wow. It doesn’t matter, then, that there is no place to go?”

“There are many places we could go. Potentially, an infinite number of habitable planets. We’re finding a new one, literally, every day.”

“Yes, but we cannot get there.”

Pele decides to take advantage of this teachable moment. Perhaps she can awaken him to Moku’s true wonder. “We are approaching an age in which we might be able to mesh our growing understanding of quantum processes with new technologies, a time in which the specific needs of a particular possibility might generate a new paradigm regarding our ability to move through space and time. In that reality, it could seem only instants until all habitable planets are populated.”

He nods. “You are talking, of course, about your particular pet, the theoretical Alcubierre drive. Powered by the equally theoretical Casimir vacuum.” His eyes gleam with true humor, for a moment. “Wouldn’t that be something! But just a pipe dream.”

She says, “We’ve made a lot of advances since you took your one required theoretical physics course thirty years ago. I’d love to set aside time to talk to you about how much we’ve learned since then. You are right about one thing—Moku has been vital to forwarding our ability to learn more about so many subjects. It is a scientific wonderland. And, in fact, I will hand off this job next month and return to my own research. Sometimes it’s useful to give that part of my brain time to process information on its own. That’s how it works for me. Call this just another stint in the patent office.” She grins at him with fierce, friendly energy; she knows her eyes are twinkling. “I think that we’re on the verge of some very, very big changes. Things that will truly change humanity.”

He shakes his head. “There’s no appetite for that.”

“Of course not. We have a fabulous playground here. It’s like when Walt Disney died and his Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow morphed from a serious attempt at living the dream of the future to one of the most successful amusement parks of all time.”

He stares blankly. He has no idea what she’s talking about.

No surprise. She says, “Not everyone shares your view.”

She refers to her fellow research scientists and astronauts, to their wild romance with space, to how hard they work, on the other side of this Mobius strip, in the humming hive of Moku, and its environments of rainforest, high sierra, deep sea, and other ecosystems vital to life to realize these dreams.

It is her dream, too.

That is why she is trying to fill her present post to the best of her ability. All of her fellow shipboard dreamers, in their long lives, have followed many passions, done much good work, earned many, many degrees. Each takes turns doing the necessary administrative work of keeping the dream alive. An outsider would only botch things. Their core group has logged much more space time than is strictly allowable, on ISS, Tranquility, Mars. They are hungry for space and all that it means.

Dr. Zi is not one of them. Zi and figureheads like him come, increase their ratings, and go.

She clears her throat. “It is your sworn duty, as Chief Safety Engineer, to ensure the safety of this ship.” She almost says Unless you have a conflict of interest, but because she is trying hard, and because she has simmered down, she does not.

She presses on. “Sure, the Mars tragedy has been smoothed away after only four years. All the reports are buried by interminable committees while celebrities take up everyone’s short attention span with their gaudy pairings and unpairings. Money can manipulate anything.” She does not say Including you, but decides he could not hear that even if she shouted it to his face.

“I fail to see your point.”

“It’s been a while. Let’s review. Seven lovely young reality stars, men and women without a shred of technical background, set out in a rover as a publicity lark and drive over a cliff. Live feed killed before it gets to Earth; no backups. Easy. The world mourns for a while, but without visuals, pretty soon it’s like it never happened.

“Here on Moku, we have seventy-two entertainment workers—publicity crews, trainers, scripters, and assorted interesting many-gendered, well-known celebs who have gone through a few drills but who have been lulled into thinking that we are not hanging in space in a complex system that at this instant is undergoing massive, continuous updates and repairs. A hundred and twelve tourists. Fifty-seven parents. Their children. I’m not talking about the crew, the academics, the research scientists, all of whom have at least four doctorates, know the risks, and are emergency-ready. The civilians do not know the risks. It is your job to care. To protect them. And there is a matter of the highest urgency that—”

“Dr. Hsu, I resent these implications.” A ping sounds. He stands. “Time for me to lead a tour through the Nanotech VR Lab.”

She also stands, and says, working her device, “If you could possibly inspect the lab, while you are there, in regard to these three issues . . . I mean if you have time . . . in fact . . . I’ve sent this to all Level 5 personnel.”

He roars, “You will not go over my head!”

“I’ll share to the same contacts my full, updated report within the hour. I expect you to read it and to respond.”

He fumbles with another shot of salad—vodka-infused? she wonders—and makes his way through the crowded bar, another of Pele’s safety nightmares. As is the Moku Gift Shop, the Full Immersion Module (Experience Surfing the Rings of Saturn!) and the Hotel.

A parent who has been hovering nearby takes Dr. Zi’s place. Ann is Ghanaian, a lovely, warm woman, wearing a dress of bold African colors, proud that her strange, heartbreaking baby has grown to be not only functional, but wondrous. As are all the parents.

“Dr. Hsu, it is so good to finally have a chance to actually talk with you.” She takes both of Pele’s hands in hers and squeezes. Pele squeezes back as Ann continues talking. “Thank you for the wonderful things you have done for Kevin. You are such a role model. You were our beacon on this long, long journey. If you could do it, so could Kevin. You know how it is—a roller coaster. The realization that your child is . . . different. The diagnosis—the work—” Tears stand in her dark eyes.

“I do know,” says Pele, because first, she knew it from the inside. Though this is a common conversation for her, she gives each her full, deep attention. “It does get easier. I promise. You have done all the right things. Every day, there are breakthroughs.”

Ann blinks, and her tears overflow. She dashes them away, and a smile lights her lovely face. “What you’re doing here—it’s just incredible. I never dreamed that Kevin would be communicating with so many other people—all of the international children who were on the first Gifted Expeditions! They are all so brilliant—and so many are Asperger’s spectrum. My husband and I can’t make head nor tail of what they do, and we are both professors. It’s all so technical, and in their own codes, but apparently they work in shifts, twenty-four seven—”

This is like a deep gong sounding. The puzzle Pele was trying to discuss with Zi snaps into a single, frightening picture.

Pele keeps her voice low and calm, her eyes steady on Ann’s eyes. “Ann, this is very important. I need to see this information. I—”

Something on the far side of the bar catches Pele’s eyes. Her fiancée, Gustavo, threads his way through small groups of parents gathering for Marsrise. Just the sight of him has the power to change her into a different person, which she welcomes. She is happy, relaxed, made new. She is still in love, after two years.

She waves; he changes course toward her, his movements uncharacteristically urgent.

Gustavo is warm, sweet, humble, and kind, his twin fields astrobiology and artificial life. She has not been married for two decades, when her second partner regendered, as Pele had always thought probable. Twelve great-grandchildren thrive all over the world, and she follows their rich lives with avid interest. He has a similar family.

Gustavo drops onto an empty zabuton next to Pele. He smiles, but his grave expression crystallizes Pele’s apprehensions, assembling inchoate murmurings she has caught edge of—and voiced—in a final, definitive snap of realization.

He glances at Ann, nods in greeting, and takes a deep breath. Pele knows he is making his voice sound normal with great effort. “Can you spare a moment for a conference in the Venus Room?”

Code for serious emergency.

The hair on Pele’s arms rises.

All crew members are ready to fully assume many roles on the ship, according to situation and scenario, and are well-qualified for each.

He is calling her to one of hers.

And he must remain here.

He grabs her hand, squeezes it with tremendous warmth. Turns his face for a brief kiss, an embrace she returns, giving herself to it completely, suddenly knowing it might be their last.

She rises, gives Ann and Gustavo a brief Buddhist nod, hands pressed together, and in that action prays for all sentient beings. Since her childhood, this prayer has been vast, and, as she followed her devotions, her definition of the scope has grown daily.

“Excuse me, please.” As she passes murmuring groups of people she feels resigned, sad, but also infinitely lightened, pulled by glowing, roiling galaxies, by the romance she first felt upon the midnight sea between Tonga and Hawai’i, when she was twelve, the stars so close she could almost grab them by the fistful, when time seemed like a miraculous toy, something she could put her mind to and learn, a story to which she might give voice.

She has always been that child. As she approaches the lock, she cannot help breaking into a run, eager as all those children. All her sensible, deep fears cannot hold her back. She turns at the last movement and becomes a mudra. Signs to Gustavo:

Aloha

He signs back. She sees tears on his face, feels them on hers.

She spins abruptly; enters the real world.

• • • •

Fairy tales are as good a way as any to say these things. They lived in cities as they had in dark forests. They live in space and they live in time, however strange it has become.

This is the foot of the wave function hitting bottom. This is the flying foam of the wave flickering off, blending with, becoming another kind of time, dynamic, compelling.

This is a girl walking downhill on the flank of a mountain overlooking Pearl Harbor, bare feet on hot white concrete, immersed in plumeria-scented eversummer, flipping a small, white, smooth stone into the air, leaning forward, catching it, and thinking: if this flip, and this flip, and this flip could be described by mathematics, that is a thing I would like to learn.

She is the princess, waking.

She is the one who wakes time.

• • • •

There is a console immediately inside Pele’s portal, amongst the wires, tubes, and pipes of a functioning spacecraft, positioned on one of the long arms that lead to the fifty-acre central atrium. Opening several screens at once, she sees that her fears are correct.

Someone has begun the launch. In fact, four days earlier. No one knew; she doesn’t know why they know now. A shadow program.

Yes, they are brilliant.

Ninety minutes left until the nukes, behind the shield, move them from their perch. The entertainment and other modules are not designed to stand the thrust, a situation she opposed from their inception. After that—well, Zi is partly right. Who knows what might happen? She has always fought for reconfiguring the ship to support a different drive, but it remains theoretical, so she had little support. Still, many possibilities are embedded in Moku. Solar sails; many models of generation ships to which the ship can mechanically reconfigure. And other possibilities, awaiting the kind of nanotech enlivenment that has not yet been born.

Pele says, “Override launch progression,” her voice empowered to enact the procedure, as are the voices of a few colleagues.

“Cancelled,” says a child’s voice above her right ear.

Within minutes, she realizes that she is powerless to stop the launch. If she cannot stop it, no one can; her colleagues have equal abilities.

“Invoking emergency plan seven,” she says. Seven will detach the external modules of hotels, gift shops, restaurants, and bars, after evacuating civilians, whom she sees are being extracted from the virtual environments, the ecosystems, the build-your-own-exoplanet immersion attraction. They will head back to Earth, safe. She sees that, luckily, a third of the civilians are in their hotel rooms, probably sleeping.

A face appears; it is her colleague Selena, brushing a wisp of brown hair away from her eyes. “Pele. We’re all on L3, 7.”

Blue dots on a map. “Together? In a breakaway?” Breakaways are, essentially, modules to be jettisoned in an emergency. She finds the yellow dots, the children. “Why are the children all on the bridge?” But she knows why.

“You don’t understand,” says Selena. “We all need to talk. In person. Now. Hurry.”

She does understand. She does hurry.

• • • •

Pele enters the breakaway breathless, and sees her friends, her colleagues, her fellow dreamers, surrounded by screens on which blink schematics, warnings, plans, arguing.

She has known all of them for a very long time. They have labored together, here and in their various universities, think-tanks, and labs, over the past fifty years, as technologies changed and changed and changed again, holding to the same vision, generating theoretical and actual drives, ship design, exoplanet possibilities, and iterations of Moku in model and, slowly, in reality. Most have rotated onto Moku for a total of at least five years, with breaks, and something is always new when each arrives. They are only a handful compared to all their colleagues on Earth, the Moon, Mars, and various space communities. They have never been together in this particular configuration, which changes monthly as some rotate out and others in, but have known each other from meetings and through their work for longer than most humans have lived. They number thirty-two.

She knows that they, like she, feel as if Moku is their own body.

“Pele is here,” says Selena, and they all turn.

Pele says, “Earth should know, by now. We’ll have radio backup.”

Bijo, usually laboring in his beloved rainforest, which will never be ready, shakes his head, bowed like a slender, heavy-headed blossom after a downpour. “We are completely isolated. The children have blocked all communication.”

The face of Ta’a’aeva, a glowing, bulky Polynesian girl, her short, black kinky hair shaved in a zigzag, her face patterned by a fierce, asymmetrical tattoo, appears on a screen. “We see you are all there. I am the spokesperson for the Intergalactic Federation of Gifted Children.” Her deep, melodious voice rings through the compartment.

“We were all GC’s,” says Quinn, his thatch of dark hair falling across his face, hands on his hips, facing the screen. “Now we’re Gifted Adults. Not quite as shiny as we were brought up to think we were. Knocked on our asses a few times. As far as I can tell, what really makes us gifted is getting back up again after that happens, every time. Living to be adults, which we have done. As adults, it’s up to us to decide what to do so that you can live to be this old.”

“This isn’t a joke. You have no choice,” says Ta’a’aeva, her voice calm. “We are leaving for Object Shining Leaf. You are all coming with us.”

“Object Shining Leaf? The only place we’re going is back to Earth,” Quinn says, with finality.

Ta’a’aeva says, “The civilians are being returned to Earth. All of you are staying with us.”

“May I please speak with Bean?” says Pele.

“Bean is busy.”

But then Bean’s shy, olive-colored face appears on another screen. She and Pele look at one another for a moment. Bean blinks, and swallows.

Quinn says, loudly, “Look here,” but Pele shushes him with a hand.

“Bean, what’s happening?”

Ta’a’aeva says, “I’ll tell you,” but Bean speaks, in a whispery, uninflected voice, and slowly. “We have recoded the ship. All of the children who have been here before, too. All of us have worked on it for years. Some of us since we were little. I didn’t even know what this was, really, when I started. They gave me things to do. Every problem was like a new toy or a new puzzle. It was fun.” She closes her eyes and nods as if to some internal rhythm. Her screen goes dark.

Ta’a’aeva says, “Half of us want to kick you off the ship. Me included. We don’t need any bosses. We want to get adults out of the picture. You live too long and hog up all the air. You can’t think in new ways. You have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.”

“That’s not true!” says Quinn, hotly.

Ta’a’aeva ignores him. “Some of the insecures think we might need you eventually.”

“Like now,” says Mi, a swarm robotics specialist. “My respectful advice is that you call this off.”

“Not possible. We initiated the launch sequence for the Orion drive before we even arrived. The nukes are armed. No one noticed, right? Think about that.”

“But why?”

Ta’a’aeva wrinkles her nose in disdain. “Moku was completed thirty years ago. She could have left then. But, mysteriously, the launch is always delayed. Brave, willing crews spend years in training limbo, all wasted.”

“Not at all true!” objects Petr, a German who studies communication. “Their training yields crucial information.”

Ta’a’aeva makes a moue of anger, which her tattoos intensify. “Moku has been turned into a money-making boondoggle. An amusement park. A research facility. A vacation destination. We are moving humanity’s dream forward. Now. You won’t find a way out.” She disappears.

No way out? These words give Pele a fleeting, subconscious jolt.

“She’s a brilliant engineer,” says Victor. “We’d better believe her. She modeled something very like this in one of her past projects. If anyone can do it, she can. I personally approved her. I’m sorry I didn’t realize—”

“That her dreams were real?” Selena smiles, closes her eyes, and resumes her habitual tuneless humming. “I’m leaving. I have great-greats.” Selena, a mathematician, most often appears to be doing nothing. She walks a lot, taking swings through all the environments with a small backpack and hiking sticks. She lobbied vigorously for a High Sierra environment, and got it, manifesting a little-used gift for politics, though perhaps all simply went as one of her sociological models predicted.

Quinn says, “My vote is for staying, getting this under control, and stopping the launch. It is our responsibility to the world, and we have a moral responsibility to keep the children from the consequences of their unreason.”

“Nicely put,” says Prajan, tall as a corn stalk and as thin. He has slung himself against a wall, head bent over his device. He looks up, his eyes questioning; challenging. “So do you have a plan? Because the more I dig, the more I find that they trapped us here.”

His mobile face shifts to immense amusement, and then his startling, uproarious laugh is magnified by the metal walls. “Heads in jars! That’s what we’ll be. Sparkling in a row, nutrient juice shot through with star-light, like in all those old, crumbling pulp magazines and sci-fi movies!” Wrapping his arms around himself, he bends over. “AHAHAhahaha.” Tears trickle from the corners of his eyes, and he flicks them away with the forefingers of both hands. “Who says dreams can’t come true? And usually at the most goddamned inconvenient time.” He stuffs his device in his pocket, gazes downward, and continues to erupt in weak chuckles.

Wilhelm, a steady middle-aged physician, sighs, his brown, usually merry eyes sad. “I’m with Selena. I’ve got to get back home. I’m sure most of us are in the same boat. Ta’a’aeva is right. Space travel is not my dream. Using an off-planet environment to generate new therapies, new interventions, for all of us on Earth and Mars, is. And let’s be honest. All of us, or our companies, have profited, and Jane is not the only attorney in our midst with the responsibility of making sure that their employer’s contracts are honored, whether they be government, academic, or private industry, well past our own long lifetimes. Frankly, I’ve never even considered that they might at some point expire.”

Quinn says, “They’re just too damned smart. Their parents paid for genetic and neuroplasticity enhancements. AI nannies. They’re probably not even human anymore.”

“They are,” says Pele firmly, “as much as any of us are.”

Silence.

By the way all of them shift their eyes from side to side, Pele sees they are all thinking things they dare not say.

Pele is finding it hard to focus.

• • • •

Before the Hsus, during the nameless time, some kind hand floated Pele on her back, at night, in warm, protected waters, where she could watch the stars. Ala Moana, perhaps.

They know she was born in Honolulu, but there is a gap from that time until she was, literally, captured in an alley by social workers, restrained, drugged, confined, despaired over, until one day she found herself at the top of a mountain.

• • • •

Petr squints, working his device. After a moment, he looks up.

“I’ve closed all of our outside communications with an emergency override, but they’ll break through quickly. Let’s talk.”

• • • •

She didn’t know it was the top of a mountain; she did not use words, but the pictures were new, bright, powerful. There was distant blue, stretching forever, far below. Gigantic white big-porched house. Children of all sizes, staring at her.

Walter Hsu, an astrophysicist, and Sunny Hsu, a renowned child therapist, had quite a collection of children—five foster-children and three of their own—at the end of the road on Aiea Heights, along with transient young nannies sparkling with laughter, refugee chefs of all nationalities, visiting international experts on every imaginable subject, screenwriters and crackpots, and a crowd of helpers, all part of the tribe.

Behind the house, tropical forest, a park, to the peak of the mountain. On the other side, miles away, a steep drop to the Kona side of Oahu. Huge mango tree dropping fruit the kids had to shovel into the gully once a week. Their neighbor’s manicured Japanese garden at the far side of their house site, complete with a grumpy old Japanese gardener shaking his fist when they trespassed. A treehouse. The crumbling remnants of a sacred Hawaiian stone platform, a heiau, far down in the forest, the older children’s secret.

But for now, there are just Pele’s snapshots. Blue. Green. Wind on her skin. Faces, faces, faces. Teeth and eyes.

“Give her room, kids,” says Sunny.

• • • •

Briskly, Theresa, silent till now, sets forth a plan for containing and jettisoning the children back to Earth, a split-second manipulation of partitions, robots, and gas.

• • • •

Here are two stories. Pele does not remember them. Yet, within her, they fight.

This is the first story:

Pele makes a dash for the trees, but the man grabs her by the waist. His face, when he hunkers down, is big and smiling. “My name is Walter.” He takes her hand. “Let’s take a look around.” For some reason, she walks with him.

No one else can touch her.

She won’t let them comb her hair. She shrieks and runs away.

Walter cuts it off swiftly; gently. She feels her head in wonder. Stares at them. Darts into the forest.

Weeks later, perhaps. Months. How would she know? Pele screams, flings a chair across the room, laughs. Kicks over a tall vase, which shatters.

“Whoops,” says Sunny, rushing into the living room, carrying an empty black garbage bag. “Should have put that up.” She grabs Pele and drops into a chair, holding Pele tightly in her lap.

Pele is a storm of sharp elbows, wriggling on the crinkly, slippery bag. She straightens, bends, twists, fights with all her might, grunting and crying in rage. She has to escape! She will! She is stronger and faster than everyone! She always gets away!

“That’s okay,” says Sunny from behind her. “You can fight me.” Sunny’s long, black hair brushes the side of Pele’s face. Pele tries to grab it, but Sunny deftly uses her left arm to hold down both of Pele’s arms, her right hand to push back her hair.

As she writhes, Pele feels Sunny’s strong, skinny arms around her. She bounces on Sunny’s hard, bony thighs. When she kicks with her heels, Sunny leans down, pins her legs. “That’s okay. I won’t let you hurt me. You can fight with me.”

The other children gather round, watching from a safe distance. Sunny yells, “Get away, you kids! This is our time. Pele’s and mine.” They scatter.

Pele turns her head to bite; a firm, flat hand presses her chin, keeps it forward. “I can’t let you hurt me.”

Pele spits; drool runs down her face. She shrieks. “Faugh!”

Sunny says, insistently, her voice low and firm, “What do you want?”

Pele bears down and pees. Surely this woman will let her go!

“I have a plastic bag on my lap, Pele. Pee all you want.”

Pele erupts into a frenzy, but is gently, firmly, held.

“What do you want?” Sunny says. “Tell me. Tell me!”

It bursts from her. “Let me go!”

“Ah! All right!” The arms release. She springs free!

Pele faces Sunny, scowling. Sunny smiles at her, gently. “You see? Talking does things. I am listening.”

She opens her arms. Crying, Pele rushes into them, and nestles in a warm embrace. “Let go,” she demands.

Sunny’s arms open.

She still doesn’t talk. But she knows she can, if necessary. And that someone is listening.

• • • •

This is the second story:

The whole family is at Oahu’s Pali overlook, behind a low stone wall. The parking lot is full; people mill around, exclaiming, buffeted by the wind.

The drop below is steep; breathtaking.

Pele likes it up here. She likes it a lot. She shrieks like the wind. “Whoooo. Eeeeeeaaaah!” She runs to the side, spies a faint trail, leaps over the stone wall. Runs faster. Get away!

Get away!

The side goes down, straight down. The wind pushes at her.

She trips on a root, starts to fall.

A strong arm grabs her. “Pele!”

Walter leans against a tree behind them, holding her so tightly that it hurts. He is shaking. He is crying.

“Please, Pele. Please. Don’t ever do that again.”

• • • •

Pele listens to Theresa’s plan.

Selena interrupts. “This has a fifty percent chance of succeeding. Actually . . . I’m tuned into their chatter . . . closer to forty, though it does fluctuate.” She closes her eyes in that dreamy way of hers, a slight smile on her face. “No . . . now sixty-two point five three seven . . .”

Pele says, “No. Absolutely not. We are responsible for the children. Some of them will die.”

“It serves them—” begins Quinn, then realizes what he’s saying. They are all getting heated; they are on the verge of panic.

“We have two thousand, three hundred and thirty-two seconds to decide,” says Selena.

Quinn says, “Well, Pele, it seems that you’re in charge, and that you’re on their side. Instead of the punishment they deserve for jeopardizing the one thing that’s unified our planet, and into which we have poured immense treasure, they’ll just leave and die, and so will we, as their prisoners. Moku is still here because it is, truly, perpetually unfinished. Technology is always changing. But the chief reason is that the voyage is impossible to survive in any meaningful way.”

• • • •

Ala Moana, press-worthy hullaballoo, picnicking families, hula dancers, the mayor of Honolulu, slack-key guitar, the smell of roasting pig. All are gathered for the ceremonial setting forth of Moe’uhane, a fifty-foot traditionally built double-hulled canoe, to Tahiti. Tall, triangular sails, filled with wind that keeps the anchor line taut, blaze red in the noonday sun.

It is called Wayfaring, the Polynesian way of sailing over vast distances, targeting an island of a few square miles using complex techniques that draw on memory, wave patterns, star navigation. As birds cross the sea in their thousand-mile journeys, so do they sail.

Walter is a friend of Bob, who will guide Moe’uhane on its long trip using only traditional star navigation. The Hsu tribe is right up front on bamboo mats when Bob begins his star chant. His deep voice rises.

“Hoku lei’i . . .”

Pele, a brown, skinny five-year-old in a faded red bathing suit, one long black braid undone, steps forward into his circle, opens her mouth and joins the chant, in Hawaiian, completely unselfconscious. Her singing voice, unlike her harsh, flat speaking voice, is sweet and high.

She knows this ancient chant—the directions for finding not just one island, but many, thousands of miles across the trackless sea.

Walter and Sunny share a look. This comes from a different part of the brain than speech. Laid in early, during the mystery years.

Another way in. Another way out.

• • • •

When twelve, Pele crews on a star-navigation trip to Samoa on the Moe’uhane with her father, other scientists and adventurers, and Bob.

Waves rush beneath them with a show, rhythmic whoosh. The canoe rises and falls, its lashed joints creaking, its tall sails filled with salt wind. Pele, drenched with spray, stands braced on the forward platform, holding tight to the kaula ihu, the forestay line, with one hand. Thus immersed in immense, intensely black night, Pele answers with her voice. Pulsing stars move chant from deepest memories to her chest. She is a living tone, vibrating with ancient mindmap, with voyage; mission: huaka’i; a parade through time and space, which she now leads as pathfinder. She is a still point in deep infinity whose slow, reeling movement finds voice in song, lapped, increasingly for Pele, by mathematics.

As she chants, Bob gently shapes and teaches. But he has also learned from her. Whoever taught her, and then abandoned her, for whatever reason, was a master navigator.

“Look—there,” he says, when they pause. “Iwakeli’i. Cassiopeia.”

Walter points. “Tau Ceti. Might have livable planets.”

Pele stretches on tiptoe, links one arm around the ihu, opens her hands wide, pulls stars to her chest, looks at Walter and asks, “How?”

• • • •

There are fourteen emergency protocols regarding kidnapping, hostages—their situation—that they can put into play via a private sign language they all know.

But someone has to make the call.

Everyone looks at Pele.

The wordless place of pictures that Pele has concealed so well through all the tests, all her life, once she knew it might come back to bite her, rears up like a tidal wave that’s touched bottom in its travel over fathoms of water.

There is holding.

There is letting go.

She does both.

“All of you are leaving. I will stay, with them. Au i ke kai me he manu ala!” With that, holding them with the energy born of their own surprise, like the throw of a jujitsu master, she steps back, closes the portal, and launches them.

To cross the sea like a bird.

• • • •

Like released seedpods, the modules, expelled, move rapidly from the Moku, their manual control overridden by programming the children created. The slice of Mars grows. Pele releases her held breath when her information panel notes ignition of their maneuvering rockets, which will increase their speed.

“Hsu!” Zi’s contorted face is on her monitor. “There will be repercussions.” The sound of wild screaming floods into the comm channel, drowning out Zi’s voice. He switches to another channel. She can still hear dull thuds.

Quinn, in their breakaway, appears. “Pele!”

She says, “Is everyone safe?”

Selena’s voice breaks in. “I would not have predicted this success.”

Quinn’s black eyes hold more than rage. Terror, or just the rapid analytics required to deal with the unfolding situation? He barks, “Success? Broken bones. Abrasions. One death thus far. Sure to be more.” Pele hears a great commotion on the other screen; recognizes Ann and other parents as they crowd round the fish-eye lens. “Come back,” shouts Ann. “Return Kevin right now!”

Jane, the lawyer, yells, “You have committed piracy. Kidnapping. Treason. Child abuse. Manslaughter.”

Pele orders, “All craft move away with maximum speed. I have no control. The nukes, activated by the GCC, will detonate in seconds. They are contained, but—”

A tall, young boy is next to her. He touches her elbow. “Dr. Hsu. I am Eliott. Chimerist.” The wailing, frantic parents arrayed before him quiet. To them, Eliott says, “We apologize for injuries. We did our best to create a plan that would minimize them. We are all well. We have not been kidnapped. The reverse, perhaps. We have sent you our story. Listen to it. Do not blame our colleagues on Earth. You cannot blame us, of course. We are children. Communications are now blocked until we choose to re-open them.”

To Pele, he says, “Hurry.”

In Nucleus, the op center of Moku, Pele sees thirty-seven children—short, tall, round, thin, each from a different country and culture, monitoring and managing the ship, a cohesive crew with their own Esperanto, which Pele took care to learn. Many, like Ta’a’aeva, are not Aspies; she knows that she has focused on those who are because of her own history.

Pele makes a rapid tour, gives a few suggestions, which are seriously considered and often executed. She could be in any of the many ships, private and government-backed, that she has had the privilege to serve on over the past fifty years.

Bean, ten, is the youngest. Ta’a’aeva’s on-board fourteenth birthday drew a record-making number of viewers just last week, and she is oldest. Most have at least one college degree. Pele has interacted with all of them, and henceforth—but there is no way to understand this enormity—neither she nor they will ever know any other humans.

“Don’t worry,” says Eliott. “We have done this, virtually, a million times. We know all the contingencies.”

“And my decision?”

“Scenario 174.”

She knows she could ask any of them and they would know that number, all the others, and what each would have entailed, just as she knew what Venus Room meant.

The ship announces, “Crew, prepare for nuclear ignition.”

Pele steps into the nearest empty booth on the wall of the circular space, which cocoons her, leaving her face free. For a wild, silly second, Pele is reminded of nothing so much as being strapped into a tilt-a-whirl at the state fair, waiting to be spun through the air, held to the wall by the force of gravity.

She can hear their conversation in her headphones, and sees a good number of their faces. Only a few look appropriately grave. Some grin. She hears a wild, shrieking laugh, and some self-congratulatory talk of victory, as if this is a virtual game they have won. Perhaps it is.

How can they imagine the horrors Pele foresees? They are so terribly young. They have had no chance to learn about life, and now they never will. The freedom of Earth, the freedom of choosing another road, and another, and another. The delight of communicating with and learning from a rich, diverse population. The road they face is hard, narrow, and probably impossible. Doubt, anger, and regret rage through her; she struggles against the restraints, her chest a dark, sad weight. She has saved them only for an impossible task.

She always blacks out at five g’s, but until then, she desperately thinks, plans, wonders, What can I do to help them survive?

• • • •

Pele is six. She sits crosslegged on a large, cool rock across from her brother Jack. Their knees almost touch. The waterfall, which the kids often visit, is small, but makes a pleasing sound as it rushes over rocks. The tumble of fresh water washes the air. Small dark fish hang in the shadows. Fallen red lehua blossoms drift on the surface.

Jack is fifteen, one of the Hsus’ three natural children. Dapples of light brighten his straight, black, shoulder-length hair as wind shifts the forest canopy above them and blows it across his face. He is the only one of the children she has anything to do with. The others just seem like a lot of noise.

“Okay. Let’s try again. Look at my face. Can you tell how I feel?”

She stares intently at Jack’s teeth, sorting the long call of the i’iwi, the amakihi’s chatter, the sweet song of the apanane.

“No, Pele. My eyes. Raise your chin. Look.”

She does. He draws his eyebrows together, glares at her. “Tell me—what am I feeling?”

She shrugs.

He thrusts his face forward, retaining the ferocious look, and says, “I am angry! Now I will make you feel angry. Pele, you are stupid!”

She leaps to her feet and lunges down at him, fists forward. He catches her wrists, one in each of his hands. “That is anger, Pele. You feel angry. I feel the same way. I am angry that you tried to hit me! Tell me what my face looks like! My mouth! My eyebrows! My wrinkles!”

As he holds her wrists in mid-air, it dawns on her. “I can tell how you feel by looking at your face?”

He lets go and nods. She drops back onto the rock and rests her chin in her hands. The water is dark green, then clear and sparkling where the sun hits it.

He says, “Now you look worried. You’re thinking. What are you thinking?”

She says forcefully, “I am wondering why you are bothering me. I am thinking that this is too much work.”

“It’s work for me too. But I like to work with you. You’re my sister, and I want to help you.”

“I don’t need help.”

He says, very gently, “Please look at my face for just a minute.”

She does, reluctantly. “You are looking right at me. Into my eyes.”

“Tell me how my face looks.”

“Your eyes are open very wide. Your look is strong. It almost hurts me. It makes me feel . . .”

He nods encouragingly. “Feel what?”

“I don’t know. Is there a word?”

“I am trying to tell you with this look that I care about you.”

She wonders how she can memorize a look, and how Jack’s look would seem on someone else’s face. It all seems quite impossible. “Why?”

“My older brother lived here when I was little. He was our parents’ biological child too. He could never look at me. I loved him. He’s a grownup now. His name is Edmond Hsu. He’s a mathematician, eh? You can see his work online. He started college when he was twelve and lives on the mainland now. I was always sad that he would never look at me. Mom told me that I shouldn’t be sad, that he didn’t know what we were feeling and thinking.”

“So?”

“I think that you can know, Pele.” He smiles.

She looks back at the pool. “Then what do I feel now?” She knows that she feels vaguely out-of-sorts. She is not sure what any of this means.

“Grumpy.” He jumps up. “Come on. Bet I can beat you back to the trailhead!”

She gets up more slowly and stands, hands on her hips, nodding. “Grumpy.”

• • • •

Another day, he hands her a wet rag while she is in the back yard throwing rotten mangoes at a big tree in the gully and watching them smash. “Wash your hands. I know you can read. Try reading this.”

“No!” She throws The Wizard of Oz on the ground as he walks away.

Irritated that this does not bother him, she picks it up, wipes mango goo from the cover, and reads aloud to the gully in a shouting voice: “When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.”

She turns and faces the house, where Jack might still be listening. She hopes he is. “So? I am an orphan. I scream a lot. AIEEEE! And sometimes I hate it when people laugh!”

The trees swish in the wind, and the palms make rain-pattering sounds beneath the blue sky.

She does nothing for three days except read The Wizard of Oz. When she is finished, she marches into Jack’s room, where he is studying, and smacks it down on his desk.

“I am very angry with you,” she shouts.

“Why?”

“Because this made me sad and afraid and worried.”

“Anything else?”

“I was happy and sad at the same time when Dorothy got back home. I hated it!”

“Why?”

“I just did!”

Jack smiles as she stomps from the room. Next, he gives her a curious old volume, My Bookhouse: Through Fairy Halls. It is a hefty book, bound in black leather, with vivid pictures that seem like music, because of the way they move in Pele’s mind. It smells funny. The pages are dry. “Take care of it,” he says.

• • • •

Pele is walking on a treadmill. A girl stands next to her, watching.

“Are you Bean?”

“That’s the first time you remembered.”

“I told you a story.”

The girl looks straight at Pele. Her eyes are hazel with flecks of gold. “A girl lived in the mountains of Tibet. She was trying to escape from the Chinese and broke her leg and nearly starved to death.” Bean purses her lips, looking confused. “You said I couldn’t give her any powers, and I couldn’t earn any weapons, so I couldn’t help her. Things just happened and then it was over and nobody won, but she did get out and became a hero. You said it would change my brain. I tried to measure that, but I couldn’t. I think I need more stories to do that, or I have to figure out a new way of measuring.”

“Usually when I was your age I liked a story if it made me cry.”

Bean flashes her a startled look. “You liked to cry?”

Pele smiles. “It is kind of strange, isn’t it?”

Bean frowns. “I will tell you my story. It is about a horse. I don’t know if you would like it. It doesn’t have an ending.”

“I think I know your story. But there are many ways to tell every story. Tell it to me again. I’m sure that it will make me cry.”

As Pele strides back into trance, into dream, Bean wonders why tears flow from beneath Pele’s closed eyelids.

• • • •

“Pele!”

Ta’a’aeva stands in front of her. Bean leans close, against her left arm. They are all gathered, all looking at her.

Ta’a’aeva speaks. “We need your help. It is almost completed, we think. But you are the one who can do it. We are glad you have come. But be here! Please wake up!”

Obviously, a dream.

• • • •

Pele, in her own little house, a chicken coop in a row of chicken coops long ago completely sanitized, used, and abandoned by various Hsu children.

Hers has weather-smoothed streaks of white paint, abundant sun that lies on the floor in a slant, a shelf where hens once roosted crowded with a row of old books. Large, castoff cushions on the floor.

She is seven.

Her brothers and sisters rush down the gully, a crescendoing cavalcade of pounding feet. They surround her house, yelling. Rocks bounce off the side. Diane peers in the window, howls with laughter. “She’s reading those silly fairy tales again!”

“Yeah, she likes those old books. I loaned her my screen and found it in the trash can!”

They leap around the chicken coop, yelling, singing, beating on it with sticks, making it shake when they try to push it over.

Pele, lying on her stomach, barely hears them. She is in worlds of ogres, fairies, magic boots, menehunies, stupid children, endless journeys, flying carpets, talking animals, and powerful goddesses like her namesake, a dangerous woman whose actions are unpredictable and thrilling, who created the Hawaiian Islands with her volcanoes. They are more real than people, and certainly much more interesting.

She does not even notice when the clatter recedes. Rain patters on big-leaved trees, sun speeds across the floor, she smells sweetly rotting mangoes mixed in the brisk, whipping breeze, and reads.

Sunny’s sideways head and shoulders darken the coop’s small door. “It’s getting dark. Come inside.”

Pele, her head propped on her elbows, is reading about a giant. “No.”

Sunny smiles, sets a water bottle, a package of dried squid, and a book light inside, then leaves.

When Pele wakes the next morning in her own bed, she has a memory of being carried through the night, and the stars. Next to her on the bed is Through Fairy Halls, her favorite of the Bookhouse volumes. She opens it and starts to read. Grimm, Anderson, the Blue and Green and Red books follow, and then folk and fairy tales from around the world. Wise and wily rabbits, lions, crickets and tortoises argue, beguile, win, lose. And Fairyland itself?

Oh, there is music and dancing in Fairyland. No yesterday, and no tomorrow. Pipes call. Trumpets sound. The low are made high, and the high are surprised and chagrined.

There is a dangerous edge to Fairyland, which Pele enjoys. One flirts with it to one’s own peril.

And part of her now, the living dreaming part, knows that she has crossed the border. Nightingales, clear springs, great rose-trees whose rich scents confound the senses. The large made small; the small, large, and one’s own self made true.

And Time a leafy, sun-dappled orchard.

Gray horse, crunch of sweet, crisp fruit, swish of long silver tail.

Long ago. Ever-now.

• • • •

She is Gulliver, pounded by tiny fists.

“Please, please, wake up! We need your help! We can’t do it alone! Please, please, wake up!”

She opens her eyes. Bean is there. “You have been asleep for a long, long time, Pele.” Her eyes are grave.

“This is too slow,” says Kevin, shaking her arm. “We’re only transiting Venus. We’ll never get to Shining Leaf.”

Ignoring trumpet fanfares, Pele calculates, considering Orion’s acceleration, that she has been asleep for three months.

Ta’a’aeva says, “We can’t make the drive work. You know how. Tell us! Tell us, and we’ll engineer it. You know that we can.”

Pele says, “Get me out of this.” As they unstrap her cocoon, she looks at a nearby screen. “I’ve been exercising three hours a day on the bike? Really?”

“You weren’t awake,” says Eliott. “You were in a trance.”

“Indeed,” she says, taking in the compressed graphic of her brainwaves for the past few months, noting the sharp spikes that she knows linger in her mind like haunting, exotic music, calling her to return.

It takes all her will to remain where she is, on Moku, where she has committed a powerful, monstrous act. She sees the resolve of the children arrayed around her and knows that she cannot gain control of the ship. She knows that they would have done this without her help.

She tries to believe that they are better off with her here. She must make that true.

She also sees, scrolling, continuous, messages from Earth. With a touch, she speeds them up, goes backwards, absorbs them like a blow, for it is all her fault.

And Gustavo. She searches wildly, finds a tiny line of news—

“No!” She raises her hands to cover her face, and sobs, slumping back into the cocoon, curling up so that no one, no one, can see her.

She does not re-emerge for another spell. But now, her dreams are new. She is working.

• • • •

Bean sees Pele first.

She is standing just outside Nucleus, where diagrams, equations, charts, and virtual models of FTL drives litter the air in transparent, three-dimensional overlays. She has been watching, listening to the hum of intense concentration, several intertwining musics that tangle and leap within her long-quiet mind, and getting ready to turn and re-enter her cocoon.

The displays rainbow Bean’s slight body as she approaches Pele, her stare a powerful command. She takes Pele’s hand and, as the others gather, leads her to an array of cushions. Pele settles on one, back straight, legs crossed, and says, direct from her hard-won beginner’s mind, “You don’t really need me. Are you ready to tell us, Bean?”

First, Bean’s eyes widen as she tilts her head at Pele.

Pele nods. “I know.”

Bean frowns and clenches her fists. “I’ve been trying. It’s closed in. Like a hard nut. I can’t tell it. No one understands.”

“Try another way.”

Bean takes a deep breath, then shakes her head and makes her long hair swirl round her face. She stretches her long legs out in front of her, grasps the soles of her feet with her hands, tucks her head in, and silences.

“Bean, who is in this story?” asks Pele.

She asks three times. Finally Bean says, her head still down, her voice muffled, “It is a story about a horse.” She walks her hands up her calves, singing more than speaking, bends both knees to the right, and kneels, her spine ramrod straight, hands moving as in a hula, shaping the story in space. “Sometimes the story seems short, and sometimes I know that it is actually very, very long. On the pampas, I ride Alcubierre, my silver mare, all day through the wheat. It parts and lets us through.” Her hands speak in swift, darting signs now: her own language, Pele knows, which they must learn.

Another way in. Another way out.

“It makes a swishing sound, like wind, and then the sounds are a music that might keep me there forever. They are . . . enchanting.”

Pele hears what Bean hears; it assails her even now, calling her.

But she cannot, will not, succumb.

Bean’s eyelids are half-closed. She speaks as if in a trance. “Alcubierre pulls the mountain closer when she gallops. She and I—we do not move. We remain the same, and in the same place. The wheat is time. Flowing and parting around me.

“I thought of this story for a whole year. I worked on it in my head when I rode. I see us from above. Alcubierre’s tail flows out behind her, white, blending and waving with the golden wheat. It is long . . . long . . . long . . .” She lowers her head as if in apology and whispers, “But still. The story is not in words.”

“Ah,” says Pele, grateful when Bean stops speaking, and the imperative music fades. She has tried to wake before. It may be still a dream.

But she does not think so. “Show us.”

• • • •

The showing unfolds. It is complex, and long, as Pele knew it would be, and wakes her fully. All of them struggle to understand, to master various parts of it, to use theory to imagine this drive, to picture the concept of the space that it would use.

Xia, Chief Nanotechnologist, prepares to infuse the ship with her work and the work of a million materials engineers, biomedical engineers, environmental scientists—a synthesis of every science and engineering discipline—generated from a century of research and application.

They gather for a ceremony. Xia’s black eyes are serious and steady when she speaks. “We will be enabled, today, through enlivenment, which is how we describe this coming change, to manipulate the matter of our ship at the atomic level. The rules we hereby embed within the ship are the final arbiter of what is and is not permissible, and the laws of physics govern what is possible. Among other benefits, we will all enjoy perfect health from now on.”

Nucleus fills with huge, idealized atoms, strings of splitting and reconnecting DNA, and long sections of text. One section glows next to Pele, and she rapidly scans it, aghast.

Grinning, Xia shouts, “And we will all have tremendous fun!” Everyone except Pele whoops and cheers.

“Should we discuss it and vote?” asks Pele. They all look at her with amazement. “I’ve seen this before. It’s a plan for—it is, I gather, a universal assembler—”

“There’s nothing to vote on,” Xia explains, her voice as gentle as if speaking to a small child. She holds a sheaf of small, square envelopes in one hand. “This was always part of the plan. All of us have contributed to it, in one way or another. We all know everything there is to know about it.”

The fields of nanotechnology, a discipline drawing on all scientific disciplines, have blown far past Drexler’s early visions. Pele has sat on international committees that debated the use of various iterations of nanotechnology. Some were approved, and some, which embodied the possibility of change so rapid and radical that the results could not be predicted, were left unused, and locked away.

Pele understands, and now knows that they understand as well, that this particular iteration is the ability to change matter swiftly, from the bottom up, to grow rather than to machine. This chameleon-like ability, this new plasticity, will include themselves—their minds, their bodies—as well as their surroundings. Everything. Within what limits? The limits of physics have not been fully explored. Not by a long shot. Things will change, evolve, and Pele doesn’t know what, or how. Neither do they.

Alicia gives everyone an envelope. Pele opens hers and pulls out a round, paperish object.

“Why does this look like a communion wafer?” she asks.

“A what?” ask several children.

“The circle was my idea,” says Bean. “It’s . . . simple. It doesn’t have any religion in it.”

“I wanted water balloons that we could explode and scatter the replicators around,” says Ta’a’aeva, scowling. “Nobody listens to me.”

“Do we eat it?” asks Pele.

“You can,” says Xia, but, imitating the children, Pele presses hers to the side of the ship, where, warmed by her hand, it is rapidly absorbed.

A brief, dazzling light rushes through the walls of Nucleus. The children break into wild dance, laughing, and spinning through the air.

O brave new world, thinks Pele, that has such people in’t! She recalls her child-self, almost flying off the sheer cliff, and wants to grab them, and hold them back.

But it is far too late for that.

She soars and spins with the rest of them. Laughs. Forgets.

Is brave, again. For now.

• • • •

The enlivenment, as the nanotech changes move through the ship, transforming its matter to a medium that they can easily manipulate, is slow at first, but increases in speed exponentially.

It makes their work much easier, and their environment becomes more dense, as if full of worlds it had been waiting to manifest.

Despite her fears, it is good, as far as she can tell. A rich and joyous thing.

The children, she realizes, do know more than she does.

• • • •

For instance: Pele, strolling through the city, enters a musty used bookstore. It draws her in, past piles and towering shelves of books, farther and farther, until she realizes that she is in the children’s library that Zi mentioned. Each title strikes her heart. Some make her cry. All open worlds in her mind, worlds she thought long-gone; worlds that submerge her, change, and release her.

With wonder, she pulls out an old, tattered, black book. On its cover is an illustration of a girl and boy unlatching an arched, stout, wooden door set in a stone wall. The Latch Key. Opening it, she first reads the frontis poem, written by Olive Beaupré Miller:

Its windows look out far and wide

From each of all its stories.

I’ll take the key and enter in;

For me are all its glories.

When Pele looks up, after reading for hours, the store is gone; the street, likewise, has vanished. She sets the book aside, perches on a rock, stares at the stars, and remembers Gustavo, her children, his children, and her descendants, for a long, sweet time.

She hears those children shout to one another as they hide-and-seek in Earth’s long, green summer evenings, sees them splash in their nightly bath and then their faces in soft lamplight, eyelids closing, as she reads to them these old, strong tales.

Perhaps, she thinks, that is the most good I have ever done.

• • • •

She uses their new technology to create a tiny, whitewashed cottage that hangs in the rainforest on a steep volcanic mountain. Far below, lush tongues of green, fringed with shining, black volcanic sand, invade the sea, which deepens to kane, the deep, blue shade of distance. Tatami mats cover the wide-plank koa floor. The trade wind rattles the hanging photos of Sunny, Walter, and all the kids against the wall. A bookshelf manifests any books she wants, including an old, well-worn copy of Through Fairy Halls, with its luminous cover plate of a girl and boy rushing ahead of a diaphanous winged fairy.

Pele sits on her front porch in a rocking chair, paging through the large, heavy book thoughtfully, as the growing drive undergoes troubleshooting and the songs of long-extinct finches wind through her thoughts. She hikes down an ever-manifesting ridge, rappels down a cliff to a tiny beach where she tests herself in treacherous currents, and flings herself, naked, on olivine sand, falling asleep to the roar of the surf. And wakes to space, ablaze with the stars she long planned to grasp.

Her soul rests a brief time, all she allows.

Then, while the children work, Pele turns to what needs to be done. She absorbs the threats, the messages, the stages of grief from Earth. It is hard. She can only do a bit of this task at a time, but she battles through it. She is the only adult here. It is her responsibility.

She wants badly to invent Sunny to have someone to talk to, and though she could, it would only be herself, so she does not. She is afraid to think about why she slept so long. She both knows and does not know, and both are useless to try to understand.

She knows her purchase on this new reality is tenuous. The part of her that loosed them is not rational, and she has fought it all her life.

But there is something she must do now that is more important than anything else she has ever done. That task holds her sternly here, on Moku, with its precious cargo of life.

Moku holds the world genome. They will start species, including humans, growing when they get close. To somewhere. After an unimaginable piece of time, when it is likely that none of them will be here, or that they will be so different that one could spend a million years just imagining the possibilities. What Moku will nurture, and why, will be based on immense data about the planet. A complex task, the vindication of what she has enabled, awaits.

Pele wonders, what will these new humans, these mammals who absorb culture, know? Who and what will teach them? When they forage among the wilderness of what the ship holds, who will they become? What culture will they construct?

It is her task to help them answer this question.

• • • •

When she calls the children together, they protest. “We are working,” says Ta’a’aeva, standing with her arms crossed as thirty-seven children gather in Nucleus.

“You haven’t spoken to your parents since we left. You need to do that. Now.”

Kevin sucks in his lips and clenches his hands, as he always does in times of stress, to keep them from trembling.

Ta’a’aeva’s face hardens.

Alicia, who is thirteen, curses, rips a cushion from the floor, and floats it as hard as she can in Pele’s general direction. “I told my mother I was leaving and that I’m never coming back!”

Bean bursts into tears and pushes herself down the tunnel to her berth.

“I hear all of you,” says Pele. “Your feelings are mixed up, and hard to live with. How do you think they feel?”

“I’m tired of always trying to think about what other people are feeling,” declares Xavier. “It’s too hard.”

“It’s the hardest thing to do,” says Pele.

• • • •

When rent by a meteor, the ship heals. This is not magic. This is science.

Pele, Nedda, Bean, and Takay are sitting on the porch of her cottage, reading books.

As if in a dream, or a myopic haze, Pele sees sky and sea shatter, revealing an assault of blinding stars, and hears a huge rush, as on a beach where massive waves tower and break, and then they are enclosed by a thick, opaque membrane.

Pele is surprised when they all stand and begin to sing, each in a different language, in different tunes and meters, and that it sounds so beautiful. Time seems more slow, and although together they all speak their ever evolving Esperanto, they sing songs from their own earliest childhoods. Pele’s mouth opens; her own song comes out, rich and deep from her chest, from her toes, from the far spaces of memory: the Wayfaring chant. From star to star to star. Like a bird transverses the sea. Maybe, indeed, she moves them with this chant. It seems so.

As they sing, life encloses not-life with a net that then thickens, expelling not-life with energy captured from the meteor. Not death—a lucky catch! The net extracts minerals, oxygen, carbon dioxide.

The scrim of matter opaques. They are made whole; enclosed.

They have new stuff to play with, to sustain them. The ship uses the meteor to grow more space, add more air, water the lettuce, grow the infant bristlecone pines in High Sierra.

To regrow the shattered cottage, and chairs, where they sit rocking, turning pages slowly, as a standing wave edges the blue Pacific far below, and plumeria sweeten the air.

• • • •

They have communicated with one another by this time. The children and their parents.

Their parents had not remembered how strong the force of growing is. They had not remembered how they fought to leave home.

They wanted some kind of magic to protect their children, but all their love could not invent it. The children had torn themselves away, but that is what children do.

Before all this, the parents had worked very hard, even before the children were conceived, because this was The Future, and there was a lot that they could do. These parents wanted their children to be the very smartest, the very best, the most successful. They particularly did not want their children to turn out like the children of their relatives or their friends, who always did a terrible job, and in whose children the ways in which they had gone wrong were so obvious. They would do better.

When the children became teenagers, their sweet child faces changed, and their behaviors were not encouraging. Even though the parents had been teenagers and were sure that they would understand their own, a dark magic veil had grown between them.

I think that this is the first mention of magic in this fairy tale, but I’m not sure. Don’t be too hard on us for not knowing exactly when this happened. A lot of fairy tales don’t even realize that’s what they are, much less come right out and admit it.

Anyway, once the kids were teenagers, the parents lost control. And yes, they were afraid, because they remembered how stupid they had been, and they had tried with all their might to deflect or change this stupid energy, and because it was The Future and they knew more about brains and human development, they thought they had it licked.

But no. They were still the same old humans in important ways.

The children didn’t know that they were acting like robots and that they would miss their parents. They didn’t know that just growing up creates this energy, and that there was nothing they could do about it. So all of the humans on Earth were pouring out their love, which was helpless to do anything now.

If the children had known how sad their parents would be, they would never have done it. At this point they are beginning to understand, but still do not learn how deep sadness can be. Not yet. Perhaps no one reaches the end of it, and, to survive, must simply choose another path, one with more useful stories. But, as you may know, that is another part of this story.

Worse than all that, the children finally realized that they had stolen something that their parents had worked hard for, Moku. The ship, and all of space and time, wasn’t meant just for the children. It was meant for everyone in The Future, and for all the people in the world to benefit from. The people of Earth didn’t realize this when they were building it. They thought they were making something they could let go of.

It didn’t turn out that way.

It was all heartrendingly sad.

Finally, they had to let go.

The parents, the children. The children, Earth.

• • • •

The people on Earth take a long time to decide how to say goodbye. They form committees, consider proposals, argue violently or with subtle skill, make deals, publish editorials, write learned papers.

It is taking longer and longer for Earth and Moku to communicate.

Finally, one day when it is almost too late, at a signal no one recalls initiating, they gather in cathedrals and squares and sing. They sing from flotillas of boats tethered together while they drink rum beneath fiery, poignant sunsets. They sing from observatories to the deep night sky, and as night flips swiftly to day in Bogota.

They sing from self-driving vehicles. Old people stop their tennis games to sing. Children sing in schools; there are still schools, only much better ones. Tech advisors, stock manipulators, and people who still do not have clean water but who do have a device sing. They sing from bars, from the Moon, and from every point in space where humans live.

When the song arrives at the ship, as they are passing Neptune’s orbit, they piece it together and gather, standing, and listen, looking back from whence they came, those tiny dots of life holding all they have ever known. Seas, mountains, the three remaining tigers. The deep time and lucky chance that caused life. Winds that flatten vast fields of wheat with great, caressing hands, like the hands that once caressed them with such love and care.

This is what they hear:

Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee,
All through the night
Guardian angels God will send thee,
All through the night
Soft the drowsy hours are creeping
Hill and vale in slumber steeping
I my loving vigil keeping
All through the night.

The children, and Pele, hold hands and cry, knowing what they have lost.

Pele knows that, for the children, it is the first step. It changes their brains.

She does not know how she will get past it.

Perhaps, she thinks later, alone and staring at the place she thought she always wanted to be, she never will.

And now within the old gray tower
We’ve climbed the winding stair,
And look out over all the earth
From topmost window there.
Far stretches all the world away,
And naught shuts out the sky,
As knights and maids and all of life
Go marching, marching by.

—Olive Beaupré Miller, From the Tower Window

Finally, as they pass out of the solar system, it is time. They must get moving. They must set forth. They must transform.

And they do need her; they did bring her for a reason. She has lived this project, this drive, for decades, every detail of it. Bean’s work has brought it to life, but there is no way to know how it will manifest, if they will survive, and, if they do, how it will change them. That part of it is greater than that which one can imagine.

All is in readiness. She is awake. The fulcrum is here. She has the lever to move it.

The minds, the dreams, of the children are the weight. They offer her thoughts, ideas, visions, insights, like flowers, which she gathers, and they all spark together, pointing toward fruition, the shift that will carry life forward.

This is humanity’s main chance. She knows, but cannot think about, how important that is.

She prepares to play a vast chord, the way her piano teacher taught her, knowing it all first, in the instant before her spread fingers descend to the cool, hard, certain keys, back straight, elbows wide, with all she is contained within that force.

Pele plays.

This is the chord that sounds:

They are a creature of the deep sea, of interstellar space.

They are a thought, and thought is matter.

The ship, the matter, is like a film above, a fluid, a lens on the surface of their sky, the division between fluid and gas.

They coalesce: They rise.

Arrayed around Pele at that moment is a human orchestra, potential symphonies, jazz rhapsodies, new musics for which new brains to hear must be invented. On new planets, they may whirl and dance, skipping through the universe like stones, breaking through the surface tension of the strange fugue of time in which they are embedded, and sink back into life.

“Oh,” she says, “oh.” She bends over, weeping.

First comes Bean, whose willowy arms surround but barely touch her. Then Ta’a’aeva’s rough embrace, her strong, gasping voice. Javail’s tall blond head bending down to touch hers, and then they are all in a huddle, embracing tightly, crying, swaying, and, finally, laughing as they break.

“We will find the place we need,” says Javail, his ever-adolescent voice breaking as he speaks, yet, as always, he sounds eminently reasonable. “As you can see, we have all the time in the world.”

“We may need more,” observes Pele, her voice harsh, and they break into applause that sounds, to Pele, like surf sounding at Kaena Point.

That is the last they see of her for a very long time.

• • • •

There is music and frolic in the special time of Fairyland. No yesterday, and no tomorrow. Pipes call. Trumpets sound.

Nightingales, clear springs, the great rose-trees.

Magic. Some good, some bad, but uncaring of humans, rather like space.

Alcubierre eats Casimir Vacuums for breakfast, rips them out of a field with her big yellow teeth and chomps on them. The edges of the vacuums stick out of the sides of her mouth like gold straw and tiny blue flowers and move up and down as she chomps and snorts.

They are one speck of pollen on a single stamen of one small blue flower that bobs up and down in her mouth.

• • • •

The Librarian carries a wooden clock.

It is chiefly oak. Framed by an oaken octagon a bit smaller than the main octagonal structure that holds the clock’s mechanics and chimes, the face is protected by a glass door ten inches in diameter that one can open with a small latch. The hours are Roman numerals, painted on a cream-colored metal face. In black, swirling copperplate, a single word: Excelsior.

It has a smaller glass door, below, that one can open to start the pendulum swinging.

The Librarian carries it cradled in her left arm, like a baby. Therefore, it does not tick, for the pendulum drops against the back of its compartment.

The hands of the clock are silver, their deliciously narrow, elongated arrows a final flourish, pointing at the hour, the minute, and the infinite in-betweens.

A key rattles inside its small, latched drawer at the bottom of the pendulum when she walks, and the three square holes in the face’s clock emit faint light. Sometimes she unlatches the drawer, opens it, and examines the key closely, with a look of wonder on her face. Then she returns it to its drawer and re-latches the tiny brass hook.

Every so often, she opens the door of the clock’s face, tilts her head, smiles, and moves first the long arrow to a place that seems random, and then the small hand. She beams at the clock, shuts the door, and goes about her business. She never inserts the key. She never winds the clock. If she has to do something requiring the use of her left hand, she sets the clock carefully in a safe place and immediately retrieves it when done. She straps it in beside her when she sleeps.

This seems a burdensome practice, but it gives her pleasure. Laying bets regarding various aspects of what she does with the clock have become popular.

It gives us something to do.

• • • •

In one of the vacuums—there are many—I grew this voice that says we. I don’t know how, though I am trying to tell you.

I might have grown it when I was Nancy Drew, in her blue roadster, driving through dark space, past planets. One . . . two . . . three . . . ten thousand . . . it took a long time. Then there were white farmhouses just off a dusty dirt road, hidden behind summer trees, their big heads tossing in the hot wind as if they had something haughty to say.

Inside one house with open windows, a planet mobile rotated in the breeze. A girl with long black braids, lying on a double wedding ring quilt made by her grandmother, pointed to them and said, “Strike Hypatia off the list. And Dulcinea, too.” They disappeared from the mobile, and others appeared.

I sped into the brain of the little girl and it was all myth, science, clockwork, precise, wires, pulses, blood, AI, luminous, expanding, nova, pressure, big bang, dust, and me, driving past on a country lane in a blue roadster, hair streaming violently far, far, far out behind me, pushed by my own speed, seeing white snowball bushes in the front yard, and a cherry tree, and a woman gathering billowing white sheets from a clothesline, and a girl inside analyzing planetary composition.

You can see why I can’t tell you exactly how it happened.

• • • •

Pele looks like Pele, except that her eyes are different. She won’t look at anyone. She does smile a lot. She calls herself The Librarian and says she would like to help us.

This is when the clock shows up. You know about that already.

We can’t really blame her for acting this way. She had many areas of expertise when we stole the Moku, like all the other adults on the ship, but she was uniquely special, so we stole her, too.

She knew how to make our horse.

She thinks that she chose to help us by staying with us and saved all the other adults by sending them back to Earth. She thinks she is our savior.

We let her think that because whenever she realizes that we have control, she acts in ways that are not helpful to us.

For instance, when the prince arrives to kiss her (and is the prince us, and what we did? it seems possible) she pushes him down, kicks him in the side three times (once or twice is not enough, while four or more is overdoing it), and strides off down a long, winding road, over hill and dale, hands in her pockets, whistling, looking at everything with a keen and watchful eye.

She walks through rain, hail, sleet, and snow, singing about it, all bundled up, sometimes an old woman, sometimes a young maiden, and then through summer meadows that climb the flanks of mountains, her clock in a bag that she throws over her shoulder. She wears loose, purple linen pants with large pockets, which she fills with things that seem useless.

She sees beautiful, glowing stones by the side of the path—one gray, one gold, and one rainbowed with layers of minerals. She picks them up and examines each, a large smile on her face. She puts them in her right-hand pants pocket.

To us they look like dull old rocks, but then somehow, like magic, we see them through her eyes, and know what they are. The stones and the power of stones are stories. She is gathering all the stories everyone has ever told, and our stories, and keeping them safe in her pocket until we know how to tell them. There are so many stories in that pocket that you would think her pants would fall down, but though the stories are endless, and the stones are all different, they do not, for the stones are magic stones; the pants magic pants.

Only if we sit around a fire that lights our faces and dances to the dark treetops whenever one of us throws on branches scavenged from the woods, throwing sparks into the night, does she consent to pull out a stone and tell us a story. We have to beg and yell at her. She says that only then are our brains receptive, when we are parched of stories.

She says this is a way to go back to the beginning, to break down our brains to a place we had bypassed in our speed to understand, and that was during the time that we were supposed to look at other faces and wonder what they were thinking. We were supposed to learn to understand when they were sad, when they were happy, and when they had feelings that were more complex, like a flavor or scent or a sound that comes out of the deep dark forest that is a sweet, mysterious music that calls you to come. She says this is the beginning of love.

When she talks like that, when she tells us stories, her voice is rich and deep, her face fluid, when often it is flat, like some of ours.

Her stories change our brains. We can even measure where and how much.

It’s something to do.

Her eyes get very wide, or narrow to slits. Her mouth assumes strange shapes. Sometimes she opens it wide and screams, reaches to the sky and grabs at it, her hands open, then grasps as she suddenly! in an instant! catches something and pulls it to her chest, and bows her head over it, and her long white hair veils her mysterious face, pale in the moonlight, silent as one of her stones, and we cry without knowing why, feeling helpless and at the same time knowing that she will help.

It is the age of stories. We suck them down like nectar.

• • • •

We search for our new home. We move like a sea creature through the dark, generating our own electricity. Fluid, ever-changing, Ship translucent or solid-seeming, as we wish.

We grow no older. Why? Biological processes continue; of course. We live. We do the things we need to do, but our horse is wise, and knows much more than we.

• • • •

Pele is still there, though they don’t know it. Or they do, sometimes. She fears a foray through some other kind of spacetime weather in which they will all age to telomerase endgame and die in what seems minutes. Who knows.

The instant that divides life and death. We must learn to skip it.

Periods of waking like cards constantly shuffled, the deck and game continually changing—the rules, the faces, the very basis of the numbers and what they mean.

“This one is too cold,” says Isho, who is Goldilocks. “And this one is too hot.”

“And none is just right, and none will ever be,” screams Ta’a’aeva, who is always the biggest bear. She storms away from the cottage. Isho and Kevin, the middle-sized bear, drop into tiny green chairs, sobbing.

“That’s not how it goes!” says Alouette, kneeling and holding Isho and Kevin in a skinny-armed embrace. “You know the story. Happy ending, and all that.”

“No,” says Kevin, his voice wild. “No! None of them are right. None of them ever will be right! There is no place for us in any universe except Earth. And it is gone!” He flings himself at Pele and tries to hit her in a flurry of punches. “My mother is gone! My father is gone! My sisters and brothers are gone! All these stories are lies!”

Pele holds him back for a moment, and just at the right time, she lets him collapse against her. She grabs him, holds him, rocks him back and forth. “I know, Kevin. Except this is not the end of the story. It’s not the end at all.”

Kevin fights free and runs.

Pele drops to the tiny stairs of the cottage and drops her head to her hands. It no longer matters whether she did the right thing or the wrong thing. Those words have no meaning. Here they are.

Ta’a’aeva returns from wherever she went, and stands next to Pele. “Sit up straight.” Pele feels the girl’s sure fingers dance against her scalp, hears the swift thush thush of braiding. “We are Wayfaring. We need to watch the sky, the birds, the waves. Kevin,” she shouts. “Check out the signature of the star we found yesterday.”

Kevin’s sullen voice, muffled by tears, issues from the forest. “There is no signature. There is no star.” A rock bounces off the side of the cottage. “Liar.”

Pele hears Ta’a’aeva’s low chuckle. “Yesterday we grew new eyes. I just found out. Go and see. It’s true.”

Kevin hurries away.

Xia, the big organdy bow on her dress untied and trailing behind her, says, “Pele, none of us believe in these stories, you know. They’re all a bunch of hooey. An artificial organization that gathers reality together like a bouquet of flowers, just picking the prettiest ones and ignoring everything that has turned brown already. And that organized bouquet still dies the next day and gets thrown in the trash. We pretend to make you happy.”

“That’s quite wonderful of you,” Pele says. “I appreciate it.” She does not point out that in another of their flashes, their realities, their lives— whatever you might call it, when they wake, and wake again, resume their lives like nodes of blinking light in the depths of the deepest sea, none of them would have even understood that Pele could be happy or sad, and if they had, it would not have mattered to them.

Her clock is on the wall of the tiny bedroom upstairs. We wonder if she knows it.

• • • •

Kevin is right.

We might have missed the news. It might have failed to penetrate to where we were. It would have been better if we had never known. Instead, it is a scream of deepest sorrow that runs through the ship, penetrates to our very core.

We are now, evermore, and henceforth alone.

The Earth, and all its life, is gone.

There was a nuclear war. All their painstaking and careful safeguards could not hold against a handful of people who did not care for life.

• • • •

Unknowable flashes, garbled pictures, sick-making nightmares, and mornings of waking in our own beds as the sweet birds sing. There is no way to measure that time.

We wonder if the Librarian’s clock has anything to do with this. But she will not say.

• • • •

Ta’a’aeva keeps telling Pele that she had no choice, that they had sussed her out from the beginning. Pele knows that isn’t true. They had no idea why she did it. They didn’t know because neither did she. It is a big fat tragic mystery.

She makes that mystery into a vase that she keeps on her kitchen window. She fills the vase with starlight as the memory-threads holding her to Earth stretch, and finally snap, leaving her weightless.

She needs weight to live.

• • • •

We read the stars, their signatures and histories, and calculate the planets they may have spawned. There are gas giants, dead rocks too cold or too dark for what we might call life, and some don’t spin, but some of them have water and it is toward them that we navigate until we are close enough for searing disappointment.

During our navigation, we turn into ourselves again. We remember that our personalities are formed by the languages of genes, not stories, but that our actions can be influenced by the stories we learn. It’s actually very scary. When we are lucky enough to grow up with stories of love, and not meanness and hate, then we can love. Love makes us happy. Stories of hate teach us only how to be victorious and to hurt others. What is most scary is how many ways we can hurt each other without even knowing that we have, or how hard it is to learn to act in ways that do not hurt others the next time. That is because there is never a same next time, so something has to be constant and at the same time fluid inside of you in the place that acts. Sometimes it is easy to think that there isn’t anything anyone can do about this. Sometimes sadness teaches lessons that lead to more sadness, but sometimes it can lead to changed behavior. Sometimes happiness cannot figure out how to give itself to others. Sometimes joy can only be lived, a lucky chance that one takes, a risk that says damn the consequences. But sometimes the consequences can lead to all kinds of bad places. One must keep air inside a bladder and shoot back to the sun.

Not everyone knows how to do this.

Not everyone has a bladder, air, a sea, or a sun.

We are lucky.

• • • •

We wake from another coldsleep. Sometimes we are in cocoons; other times, in coffins and kissed to consciousness by the prince-of-all-good-dreams; sometimes we pass the time as equations or as prime numbers: one unique majestic mountain peak after another. That’s infinity. That’s real fun. And, of course, it takes a very long time. Or so it seems.

We incorporate ourselves and grow ourselves and enhance ourselves with the genes of other species. We invent new species. We discard them, and sometimes they discard us. Then we bloom again, but different, somewhat. Still, we keep the memory of Life, rich Life, towards which we long with all our hearts. And the palette of a planet which we will change. Which will change us.

Life.

• • • •

We fire the forest, stand back from the searing heat, retreat behind a clear panel and watch the blaze.

Though they live longer than anything else, bristlecone pines eventually need fire for regenesis. On Earth, lightning performed that function.

Yes, it has been that long. And longer.

• • • •

Alcubierre has no colors, or more colors than we can know. She is immense; invisible.

Some of us grow new senses that we use to pat Alcubierre on her withers, even though it looks as if we are making the bed or splitting firewood or watching ants have wars. These are things no one has to do any longer, but some of us think it is helpful to believe they are doing them, so we make work for ourselves and say it keeps us sane.

Alcubierre is so huge that we will never see the beginning or end of her. In fact, the only way to think about her is with other kinds of symbols, not words.

That accounts for how the story keeps changing. Who we are and how we tell it.

• • • •

We look at Pele’s vase. “What is that?” asks Xia.

Pele says, “It is sadness too strong to bear. But it is something I need to feel. If we cannot understand how our actions impact others, we will bring nothing to the place we are going.”

Kevin frowns. “That makes no sense at all.”

It does to me.

• • • •

The Librarian has been in the library for a very, very long time. Through two coldsleeps at least. Now she sits, smiling at the clock.

Amelia, who has been lying on her back, thinking, jumps up, smiling. “I have an idea!”

She gently lifts the clock from the Librarian’s hands.

The Librarian stands, stiffly. She moves her arms forward a few inches but no farther. She stares at the clock, her mouth slightly open, distress in her eyes.

Amelia opens the little door holding the rattling key, and then the door to the face that contains the keyholes.

“That won’t work,” says Ta’a’aeva.

“We must keep trying,” says Amelia. She winds, winds, winds each mechanism. “Hold this,” she says, handing the key to Jacques. She opens the door for the pendulum, and sets it ticking.

Then she takes the clock and presses it to the wall. It adheres, becoming a part of the ship, and something of the ship flows into it.

The Librarian gasps. “No!” She runs to the clock and tries to wrestle it from the wall. As she yanks on it she wails, “No! No! No!” But she does allow Amelia to gently move her aside.

“Look,” says Amelia.

The Librarian has changed to Pele, Pele of the mobile face, the warm, beautiful brown eyes.

“Thank you,” she says.

• • • •

Sometimes Pele prepares for the invasion.

Invisibly, in particles, they scout the terrain of Terra Nova, Planet X. It breaks down in this way:

◉ It is empty, ready for us, with no life, but able to accept life, or with life that will not interfere with ours, or

◉ They are ready for us, or something like us. The branches:

◉ Annihilation

◉ Rejection

◉ Acceptance/modification

◉ Surrender

Of these four, Pele fancies most number three. Except: What are they, save identity?

Yet identity undergoes constant modification.

This is a special kind of hell. She decides to enjoy a thousand amazing sunsets to refresh herself.

• • • •

Pele wonders how to say what is happening. “Time passes?” “Spacetime moves?” “We flash, and flash again, in long instants, out of darkness, and into light?”

They play, and play again, in endless iterations.

The running of the ship, the thought-ship? Inflections wash through it each moment, Earth-based inflections of thought wrought from the hard thrash of human dreams, human longing. So they are all dancing-ship stories. That’s all they are: stories. Pele’s unique slice of older-time gives her wry perspective. She can be outside the story. She stubbornly refuses to surrender. It-is-not-real, she thinks, seeing them all at play, leaping from bloody mayhem to the estranging magic of Through Fairy Halls, and, often, lying spent and weeping on a riverbank after being swept up in the billions of dark stories that comprise their heritage.

It takes all her strength and more, drawn from a rich stew of inspiring works, to pull them back from self-annihilation. For what choice is there, they collectively feel, after being soaked in the deep evil that humans do, but to remove themselves from the picture?

Whether or not they are right, she hurls tales of goodness, blazing thunderbolts, into their minds. They wake bright-faced, with a jolt, ready for the new day. She doesn’t exactly dust her hands in self-satisfaction, but she does try not to wonder too hard if she’s done the right thing. Who is she to shield them from grief, from sorrow, from deep reflection, or from growth?

She just tries to keep them from hurting one another, and from hurting them or herself. What else can she do?

She tries to be older and wiser. She absorbs old movies; re-views Casablanca as a lesson about how one bestows grace through artful lies concocted on the run, new tales to make things go right. These are lessons she missed while on Earth. She spoke from stalwart truth, never mind what pain it caused. How can one make these calculations, though, when in the midst of chaos, which is where she lives, in a constantly re-invented throng of young entities who cannot understand literatures truly until they have gained in wisdom? And who cannot gain wisdom except through sorrow, which she does not wish to thrust upon them? Sorrow generally bestows cynicism, and she is back in the same old revolution, lifted up and down until they die except

They cannot die.

• • • •

We are scattered into particles. We are a speeding cloud, intent.

It is a word at last, the word that’s been there all along, our Kansas home:

Courage! With a Brooklyn accent.

Whatever, wherever, that is.

“Courage,” we shout. Our brave chests expand, our heads a single thought, shooting for we know not what, re-organized by new information every instant, but shooting forward, now, at last, to Planet.

We will find ways to infuse any matter we find. We will organize and blend, we will crush and release.

For we are the mighty, the awful, the terrifying power of life itself. We are infinitely tiny, infinitely large.

Our words describe the states that we create; the states create us, and a bond sings through it all.

Courage!

We crash onto every wave-hushed shore, every cold rocky outpost, every object that will hold us, with equal, eager, organizing force, programs of life, and flower, for a brief instant of stability, everywhere at once, a wide delight of life itself. We pass the instant of death, the deep drag of dread and sadness, the roiling, drowning crush of force upon force. We rush up the beaches, we drift to the high peaks, we burrow, nest, burst, and sing.

And leave ourselves, that dream of us, behind, and continue.

An instant from far here to far there, like the instant dividing life from death, but skipping that, as it must be skipped.

• • • •

This is the story of how a bunch of kids kidnapped a physicist who was also a librarian so that they could get to a new planet, one far outside of our solar system. It sounds like a fairy tale because it might be.

It is really very simple.

We cross a roaring creek on a rickety bridge, fishing pole on our shoulder, in a deep mountain chasm, heading home in an evening of cold, settling mist, alone.

Yet heading somewhere.

• • • •

A tentative confidence sparkles, a stand of tiny pink Galax that Pele does not pick. She hikes upward through an early spring forest of re-awakened earth, its moist smell of leaf-loam and the rush of the new-born creek fed by high snowmelt a cool, moist blessing, as is the fact of day, where trees hide most of the sky and those tempting, empty stars. She comes across it again and again in her solitary hikes, and each time kneels and contemplates it with renewed, deep, solitary wonder: it and her. A different life, with a different story, but a story nonetheless.

Life, in all that lifelessness.

After a thousand such flash-lives filled with wonder, bursting into time, she returns to here, knows it to be real, and for the first time, Pele does not recoil.

Why did she do it? Why did she let them go?

Was it hubris—wanting to see if her science project would really work?

Was it a heroic act, a Noah for the arc?

Blind, rushing ignorance?

This is our house.

This is our bed.

These are our chairs.

• • • •

“We have left Oz in a magic balloon,” says Targa, lying on his back with his hands laced behind his neck. “We made the fire, like the professor. So who is the Wicked Witch of the West who will punish us for trying to get to our new home?”

“Pele,” yells Oscar.

“No!” several chorus. Ki says, “Pele is Glinda!”

“Pele is the sleeping princess.”

“She’s awake.”

“Not really.”

“And so are we all munchkins?” asks Juno indignantly. “Or flying monkeys?”

“I’m a flying monkey,” says Targa, flipping over and pushing off, soaring with arms extended.

“And do we have hearts?”

“I am working on mine,” says Bean, splaying two long-fingered hands across her chest. “I am working very, very hard.”

Pele, hunched near-fetal in her berth, hears voices. She always does, but these wake her, for some reason. She opens one eye and sees that they have furnished her with a crystal ball with which to watch the proceedings. She allows herself a brief, tiny smile, uncurls, stretches, and leans forward on her elbows. “Wicked witch,” she votes aloud, her long-unused vocal chords pushing it out as a rusty whisper.

They all look at the monitor, wave and cheer. “Pele! Pele! Pele!”

She tests the most important word: “Courage!”

“Courage,” they yell back. “Courage!”

• • • •

How long can longing last? Is English really so sparse?

Pele finds the German word “sehnsucht.” Sounds like a sneeze. And that C.S. Lewis said it is “That unnamable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of ‘Kubla Khan,’ the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves, carrying the freight of longing’s complexity, modified by underlying stratum of utopias particular to each individual.”

But English has its strengths, for longing indeed is . . . long. Endless, in fact. Until what she imagines will be that eyeblink, sudden as their previous transition to the inescapable longing of perpetual now.

Presently, that is Pele’s name for this planet.

Sehnsucht. “Zeenzucht,” Pele says, and saying it changes her brain. Or something. Maybe.

• • • •

Despite all we know and all we have learned about Shining Leaf, as Ta’a’aeva insists we call this planet, there is much that remains unknown.

Shining Leaf is just a blip. Another flash, a nanosecond opening that, taking, we risk all.

We have seeded other planets with our clones. As far as we know, they all died. We all died. But here we are. Still.

We are, at last, restless. In fact, we are able to realize that we are mad. That we are ready to choose.

Pele never votes. “I voted once,” she says, and we say, “Yes, and we are glad that you did.”

She makes us promise something. And, at last, we do.

• • • •

We cannot even talk about the painful changes that swept through us when we disengaged the drive. How it looked, felt. The precise analytics, biological and physical. How long it took in mundane time. The unspinning. Realizing the door of us, each unique. Moku could tell that story, and those in the future will want to know.

Having lived it is enough for us.

Moku was our home. It sustained us in our search, kept us alive, taught us much, but kept us in a state of fear and hesitation. We wanted to grow up badly enough to die if it did not work. Like Pinocchio, we wanted to be real.

We saw our main chance, and we took it.

And so became human again.

How can you tell the choice between good and evil when that choice is hard upon you? How do you recognize it? Is there a way to measure the road not taken? Why would that matter?

We have learned much about taking risk. We could not help moving into this.

From the Giant’s abode in the sky, Jack stole the harp that plays by itself.

The ship is that: We stole it.

From the Giant’s abode in the sky, Jack stole the goose that lays the golden egg.

Perhaps that is us.

Will we live happily ever after?

Time will tell.

• • • •

When a horse wins a race, she is heaped with flowers. She snorts and prances and feels proud.

Our horse, on which we placed all bets, won.

So many suns, so many planets that did not suit. You know that tale. Some, seeded by us with life, might now be flourishing, but we will never know.

It is not luck that brought us here, to this perfect planet, with its perfect star.

It was courage.

Beneath this glorious, intense blue-violet sky, buffeted by sea-wind, I know, ineluctably, that I am here, on this loud coast. Crashing waves suck rattling, tumbling stones back into the shorebreak, nicking my bare feet and calves with delicious sharp pings. Sunset-tinged clouds billow like great swans on the horizon. I pull in breaths of sweet salt air, keeping an eye on my great-granddaughter, playing tag with rushing foam.

Shining Leaf is no game, no illusion, no manufactured reality, and it is no fairy tale. I spin ’round and see the gully-ridden cliff behind me rise, thick with massive virgin trees, relatives of red alder, bigleaf maple, Sitka spruce—trees that relish deep morning fog. They ascend in tiers of wind-tossed greens to the long grasslands above.

The pampas stretch for fifty miles to snow-peaked mountains, where just below the tree line buffeting winds twist and gnarl the bristlecone pines. Across the plains gallop herds of savannah animals, for our bio-systems found homes here as well, and have flourished. And when I ride my real horse there, she actually moves, and we do reach the plane trees.

Sometimes, after opening my bedroll and making tea, a human speck amid a sea of high, sweet-smelling grasses where the sound of the rushing wind combing and flattening the grass is equally sweet, I gaze at the stars among which I lived for I do not know how long and am infused, suddenly, by a sense of deep and utter strangeness, illuminated by that . . . flash we all felt—or were—on Moku.

It seems just a second, but I cannot be sure how long it lasts, that flash during which I am transformed; illuminated. It could be eons. It could be Planck time, the tiniest bit of time we can measure. But when I am there, and perhaps always, I am like a pebble of pure consciousness, tossed into the most lucid medium imaginable, where my ripples intersect with and are changed by other patterns, and this goes on forever.

It is then that I know that I am not as I was, and it is then that I long to be back among the stars, and to never touch land again.

But here, I invent new languages to map the house of thought I build. My thoughts were useful once; they may be useful again. Or not.

I could tell you how our chimerists, biophysicists, engineers, artists, and mathematicians generated experimental interim environments to test and refine our interaction with this new planet as we explored it virtually, hungering to land and climb its towering young mountains and sail its vast seas. We studied its weather patterns, developed plans for symbiosis, testing and re-testing, accelerating path after path, answering question after question, for we had time, and we had to be satisfied. But that is all in our library; you can experience it there. We grew, changed, exploded into larger life, real life, using Moku’s vast genetic library and modeling algorithms to make decisions about populating Shining Leaf with ourselves and other fauna, learning from stories of failures on Earth, merging with what was here. The very last step, the most serious, was deciding where best to settle, and how.

We chose well. We changed, very slightly, to adapt to Shining Leaf, to its particular chemistries, its atmosphere, and its wilder seas, which Ta’a’aeva’s tribe explores with zest, though Moku mapped its every fractal coast, her motto being “the map is not the territory.” We grew defenses against that which would have killed us, larger and different lungs to inhale and use a slightly different atmosphere. Alcubierre gave us time to do that.

We live in towns and villages scattered around the planet, and have plans for golden cities, both far and near, which now assemble. We have new sciences, new technologies, communications networks that run on new symbioses, and the sure knowledge that we are still changing, because life is change, and because change is life.

I have young Bean’s heart and mind, yet my grown mind is different, a human/spacetime hybrid, and my hard-grown soul my own.

Is a soul courage? Is it philosophical depth? Is it simple immortality? Is it the being that runs through us, animates us, the foundation of all love and hope and deep satisfaction in the art of living, in community, in life itself?

Here, we and our children chart their own courses; They are pioneers, seekers, builders, dreamers. One son is an artist: one daughter, an engineer. My many descendants flourish.

The wind, evening-strong, blows back my hair. I lean down and pluck up a cool, gleaming golden stone from the tumble, hold its water-honed, near-translucent thinness up to our new star and think of all the time this one stone holds and might reveal, from when it exploded into being until now, after being crushed and washed and tumbled and honed into this beauty that I, also a part of the same story, can see, hold, taste, and smell.

I give it to my great-granddaughter, who is four, to play with and she flips it in the air and laughs. Her eyes are hazel, like my father’s.

I think of the librarian, who died long, long ago, and know for a certainty, which has not always been the case, that she was real, and that this is not a fairy tale, but something we have done.

We named our star for her: Pele.

She helped me grow a soul.

And that makes everything worth it.

Here’s a heigh and a ho! for the purpose strong,
And the bold stout hearts that roam,
And sail the Seven Seas of Life
To bring such treasures home!

—Olive Beaupré Miller, The Treasure Chest

—With everlasting thanks to Irma Gwendolyn Knott

Poems herein by Olive Beaupré Miller, My Bookhouse, The Bookhouse for Children Publishers, Chicago, Illinois, 1920

© 2017 by Kathleen Ann Goonan. Originally published in Extrasolar, edited by Nick Gevers. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kathleen Ann Goonan is the author of seven novels, the most recent being This Shared Dream. In War Times won the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2007; it was also the American Library Association’s Best SF Novel of 2007.  Previous novels were finalists for the Nebula, Clarke, and BSFA Awards. Angels and You Dogs is on the Locus Recommended Reading List.  She is working on her eighth novel, Hemingway’s Hurricane.  She is a Professor of the Practice in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, where she teaches Creative Writing and courses that examine technology, science, and culture.

EXCERPT: The Wild Dead (John Joseph Adams Books)

Carrie Vaughn | 5518 words

A century after environmental and economic collapse, the people of the Coast Road have rebuilt their own sort of civilization, striving not to make the mistakes their ancestors did. They strictly ration and manage resources, including the ability to have children. Enid of Haven is an investigator, who, with her new partner Teeg, is called on to mediate a dispute between households over an old building in a far-flung settlement at the edge of Coast Road territory. The investigators’ decision seems straightforward—and then the body of a young woman turns up in the nearby marshland. Almost more shocking than that: She’s not from the Coast Road, but from one of the outsider camps, belonging to the nomads and wild folk who live outside the Coast Road communities. Now one of them is dead, and Enid must find out who killed her.

In a dystopian future of isolated communities, can our moral sense survive the worst hard times?

Forthcoming July 17, 2018 from John Joseph Adams Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Chapter One

Most regions Enid visited, she could find something to love about them, some enticing and beautiful detail about the landscape, the people, the mood of the place. A reason folk would want to stay and scrape out a living in less-than-ideal situations when a dozen other settlements had more resources and less disease, and would gladly welcome extra hands. Even the rainless, baking salt flats at the southernmost end of the Coast Road had isolation to recommend them, for those who wanted to be left alone. And just to show that every place had a reason for existing, the people of Desolata household there exported the salt they collected from the flats on their own trade route.

But here in the Estuary, Enid had to consider for a while what exactly the appeal was. Over the damp marsh where the San Joe River drained, clouds of bugs rose up through a sticky haze, shimmering with heat. Squealing gulls gathered, circling on slender wings, drawn by some rotting treasure. There were no orchards here, no pastures, no rippling fields of grain. Instead, a dozen scraggly goats, stuttering their calls to one another, picked at brush along the last trailing edge of the Coast Road. Presumably, there were fish in the river to eat, along with shellfish and the like this close to the ocean. In checking the settlement’s records, Enid had learned that it rarely exceeded quotas—because there wasn’t enough to start with. The folk rarely earned banners, either, and had few children. Why would anyone stay in such a place? Perhaps because in the end it was home . . . and sometimes that was enough.

The sunlight here had a bronze cast that she had never seen anywhere else, and the light made the water seem molten, flashing with ripples to the horizon, broken up with stands of marsh grass and the sticks of old dead trees. If you’d lived here forever, the light might seem warm, the air like a favorite blanket on the skin.

That was what she told herself, to try to understand the people here a little better. Because at the moment, her patience was waning.

“Would you look at that,” her new partner, Teeg, murmured, clearly amazed. A short, sturdy kid, he shaded his eyes with one hand and gripped a staff with the other. Had a manic way of moving, like he’d rather be running ahead than slowing down enough to be methodical. His shining black hair was tied in a short, sloppy braid at the back of his neck, and his lips always seemed to be pursed, like he was thinking hard. When he wasn’t talking. This was his first official case as an investigator. “They said it needed repairs. I thought they meant a new roof, maybe it had holes in the walls. Does it even count as a house anymore when it looks like this?”

Erik, head of the Semperfi household, looked at the young investigator with dismay.

Erik’s request for a mediation had brought Enid and Teeg to the Estuary. Semperfi household had a building that needed repairs, Erik’s request had stated. The community refused to help with those repairs, despite all the support Semperfi had provided to other households over the years. Records supported this assertion—Semperfi had been the first household in the region, and was an anchor. Normally, a town’s committee would mediate this kind of disagreement, but the Estuary didn’t have a committee. Didn’t need one, the people claimed. They didn’t consider themselves a town, but a loose collection of households whose members preferred to rely on themselves and one another. The regional committee at Morada set quotas and awarded banners, and medics came through a couple of times a year to check birth-control implants and general well-being. Place like this didn’t need a committee until it did, and so Erik’s household had to send for investigators to settle the dispute. Now that Enid and Teeg were here, it became clear to them that the building in question was far past anything resembling salvageable.

The structure, a sprawling, single-story block of a house, was old, a pre-Fall construction. Wood and brick walls sat on a crumbling concrete slab, covered with some kind of plastic siding that was cracked and disintegrating. What strips of it remained were held up with nails, twine, and hope. It might have been blue once, but it had long ago faded to a sickly gray. The siding survived only on the lee side of the house; the windward was built up with wood slats and leather hides—layers and layers of them—evidently replaced as the next bout of wind tore them off. Likewise, the slanted roof might once have had purpose-made shingles, slate tile or plywood, but the decades hadn’t been kind and the surface was now patched with reeds and hides. What was left of the structure still dripped from last week’s bad storm.

All that was bad enough, but the land under the house was falling away. Years of storms had eaten at the ground, mudslide after mudslide eroding it until half the house now stood over nothing but air. This last storm had made the problem critical. Huge slabs of concrete lay at the bottom of the slippery hill, the house’s foundation lying in crooked, broken pieces, sliding inevitably toward the river. Tree trunks, two-by-fours, scavenged steel rebar, and rusted scaffolding precariously held up what was left. A house partway on stilts—not like the sturdy pylons of the other structures in the area, but thin and haphazard. A breeze would knock it down. Somehow it was all still standing. Clearly, the structure was at a literal tipping point. If it lost any more ground, the whole thing would fall. No amount of stopgap framework supports could possibly keep it stable. And yet, the folk of Semperfi were clearly trying.

Even the overly emotional testimonies of folk from Bonavista and Pine Grove, the first two households on the path up here, couldn’t possibly have prepared Enid for how bad the wreck really was. The folk had complained about how awful the house was, that it was a waste of resources—about the worst insult possible. It never should have required investigators to decide this.

“It’s a lovely view, anyway,” Enid murmured, looking out over the sluggish river and golden, shimmering marshes of the Estuary. A century ago, there’d probably been an entire neighborhood, an entire city, of nice houses just like this one—or just like this one must have been, once upon a time—a grid of streets, sturdy street lamps lighting it all up bright as day at all hours of the night. Signs of that old world littered the marsh, all the way to the horizon. Canted blocks of concrete, broken frames of steel, whole berms of debris washed up on the tide. Some of the households here made their living by scavenging. Lots of that to be had, constantly turned over by waves and storms.

Before the Fall, this neighborhood would have been miles from the ocean. Back then, flooding may not have even come close. But then it had, and the other houses fell away. Semperfi had saved this tiny little scrap of that ancient neighborhood, and there was something poignant about that. They might have had folk living in it, parent to child, ever since the Fall. But there came a point when no amount of effort could save a thing, and surely this structure wouldn’t last another storm.

Erik pleaded the house’s case desperately, speaking quickly, as if speed would give his argument more weight. He knew what Enid and Teeg must be thinking. “Yes, it’s in poor shape, but . . . there’s nothing else like it. It’s lasted this long, it’d be a shame to let it go to ruin now. Wouldn’t it?” He kept his voice steady, but his eyes shone with anxiety.

He was younger than Enid had expected. The head of a household wasn’t necessarily the oldest member, but had typically been around some time, maybe even earned a banner and raised a kid. He didn’t seem much older than Enid’s own thirty years. Lanky, angular, he had skin the shade of teak and close-shaved brown hair. His face was gaunt, like he never quite got enough to eat, but he kept his hands on his hips in a confident stance.

He’d been watching for them and came to meet them as they followed the path up the hill. Ready to intercept them before they saw the house. Not giving them a chance to make any judgment on their own. Moving up the path with them, he gestured toward the house, guiding them over uneven, scrubby ground. A rangy, tawny dog named Bear had accompanied him. Now, after sniffing at the investigators’ hands, it sat politely at Erik’s feet. Looking up at them, it gave the uncanny impression of following the conversation.

“I know it’s not easy, I never thought it would be easy. But it’s still worth doing. This is important,” he said.

Enid tried to see the place through his eyes. An artifact from the world before the Fall, evidence of what used to be. Like the collection in the archives at Haven, carefully stored bits and pieces, the plastic bricks of computers and radios and things that weren’t any use now, but that people saved because, well, they’d always been saved.

But this was a whole house.

“How long have your people been keeping the place up?” Teeg asked. He made the question sound curious, rather than accusing. Just a casual conversation.

“Since the start. My great-granddad grew up in it. They stayed, all the way through the Fall, even when everyone else was gone. Scavenged the neighborhood, made repairs when everything else washed away. We’ve got pictures, real photos of what it all used to look like. I can show you, I can show that it’s worth saving. My dad”—here he paused, swallowed back grief—“I was seventeen when my dad died, and I promised him I’d look after the place. Seventeen and keeping up the whole household, plus the house . . . I can’t let him down, don’t you see? I promised.” Erik said this with the determination of a man going into battle.

He continued the tour with a parent’s pride. “There used to be a concrete walk right there.” He pointed to the path leading down the hill, back to the other households. A dip in the earth, a stretch where the scrub grew in a little paler, was in fact visible. Scanning over the hillside with fresh eyes, Enid could see all kinds of evidence of a previous vast settlement: divots in the earth where sewer and drain pipes had collapsed, mounds where ruins had fallen decades ago and been buried or scavenged, leaving only shadows behind. An unnatural straight line where shrubs had grown over a fallen lamppost. She had just been thinking of how hostile this place seemed, but this had been a city before the sea crawled inland and storms washed it away.

“That’s impressive,” Enid admitted.

“So you see why we want to keep it standing. We’ve got to!”

Enid wasn’t an engineer and didn’t have much mechanical inclination, but she had a thought: they could get a team of horses—a big team, six? eight?—and put the whole structure on rollers to move what was left of the concrete slab and everything on top of it to more solid ground. Even fifty yards would put it on bedrock rather than the disintegrating muddy cliff it was on now. If Sam were here, he’d have a better idea of what was possible and what was ridiculous. The undertaking would be massive, a huge and excessive use of resources, so Enid couldn’t help but think it would be so much easier and more efficient to build something new and let the old rot away. Better for everyone.

Except Erik had an attachment to the old house. Enid just about understood the impulse—she loved the archives in the cellar under Haven’s clinic, with its stacks of dead things from an irrelevant world. Including photographs, much like the ones Erik bragged about. Memories had their uses, and this house clearly meant something to its people.

But what could possibly justify using the immense resources that would be necessary to save such a wreck?

The look on Enid’s face must have been pained, because Erik kept going.

“The household name, Semperfi—it was a motto my great-granddad had. He was something like an enforcer—like you,” he said, gesturing at Teeg’s staff. “He had this phrase written on badges and things. It means never give up. That’s how he got through the Fall, that’s how he started all this. We can’t give up now.”

Enid wasn’t sure that explanation of the name was exactly right—based on her reading, it had been a pretty common saying before the Fall. And she suspected that Erik’s ancestor would prefer that his great-grandson put his energy to better use, into making something new that would help his household. But there was that promise. Four generations of promise.

Erik led them on eagerly. “Come inside, here —”

Teeg looked at Enid in wide-eyed horror. No assumptions, she wanted to remind him. No preconceived notions. But it was hard to stay neutral, looking at that house. House wasn’t even the right word. That artifact. And like an artifact it likely held its own bit of history—precious, full of information. The photos Erik spoke of ought to be kept in an archive, where they could be protected.

Teeg held back. “You don’t actually go inside there, do you?”

Erik said, “It’ll be fine. Unless there’s an earthquake or a storm coming up, it’s fine.” He started for the front door, urging them forward as if he could pull them by force of will. Fortunately, the wood-grain door was in a part of the house that was still on solid ground. The metal knob and deadbolt might have been original, judging from their scuffs and scratches, the patina of hard wear. Still intact, still functional.

Enid took off her hat, rubbed a hand through her short brown hair, which had become matted with sweat. She was game to enter the rickety building and grinned back at Teeg. “Maybe you should wait here and get help in case the whole thing tips over.”

“That’s not actually funny,” he replied, following her.

Erik swung the door in; the hinges creaked only a little. The floorboards inside groaned more. The dog waited, settled on its haunches, tail wagging weakly. Sensible enough to stay outside.

The interior was dark—the window frames were visible, but they’d been covered up, probably ages ago, to keep out the weather. The only light came in through the open door. Enid’s steps were audible as she stepped on some kind of warped and stained plastic-tile flooring. It had been light-colored originally, with a kind of marbling pattern still barely visible. The walls, paneled with simple wood slats, were not original. When it was new, the walls would have been smoothed and painted. There was a front room, a doorway to what looked like a kitchen, though Enid would have been shocked if any of the plumbing worked; she hadn’t seen any cisterns outside. Sockets, switches, and some loose wiring were visible, but again she guessed that electricity hadn’t run through here in ages; the place didn’t have any solar panels or compact wind turbines—those were reserved for the household’s newer cottages, farther up the path.

The air reeked of mold, the inevitable product of damp leather and ancient wood forced together and aging badly.

The kitchen had a sink, counters, cupboards—all of them cleaned over and over until the surface finishes had worn off, so they now seemed thin and brittle. From the kitchen a short hall led off to more rooms. Interior walls that must have once been present had been taken out; the space was open now. Some furniture had come to roost here and there: a table pushed into a corner, an assortment of chairs next to it. That was it.

Erik waited for their reactions, like a kid showing off his lumpy, misshapen first attempt at pottery or woodworking. Of course you’d tell him how nice it was.

Enid took her notebook from her satchel and made notes, a list of everything she saw wrong with the place, from her first impression outside to the smell inside. Even just writing a couple of words per item, this took a while. But she wanted this documented. No one could come back later and say she hadn’t been thorough.

“You don’t use this place much, do you?” Enid asked.

“Well. We do. Storage, when we’re prepping food. We do a lot of drying and canning, and there’s space to spread out and keep things dry. Usually. I mean, when the roof isn’t leaking. We dry laundry in here sometimes. But that’s kind of the point: if we really get this place fixed up, get some really good pylons under it, get it stable—then we can sleep people here again.”

Enid kept her reaction off her face, tamping down hard on her feelings of dismay. No, no one should ever sleep here. Erik’s father, the household’s previous head, had died of a lingering illness—flu, the reporting medic thought. Enid didn’t say so, but she wondered if spending too much time in this house might have caused his health to deteriorate. Did everyone in Semperfi have lingering coughs they couldn’t explain? She wouldn’t be surprised.

The place should be dismantled for salvage, and something fresh, new, with wide windows and a very solid foundation, should be built far away from the mudslides. The other households were right, however much Enid might want to sympathize with Erik. The house had survived the last storm, but the next would likely finish it off. It wasn’t safe. Now it was her job to convince him of that, as kindly as possible. But all she could think of at that moment was this question: they’d hiked a week up the Coast Road for this?

Teeg kept his face entirely turned away from Erik to hide his look of disgust. Expectantly, he waited for Enid’s reaction as a cue to how he should behave. He seemed to be trying to silently ask, What do we do with this?

Out of a sense of duty and professional thoroughness, Enid went through the whole house. She didn’t quite know what more she was looking for. Maybe she was hoping to find a pre-Fall book that didn’t exist anywhere else—a painting or a photo album that would drive some future historian to ecstasy. An artifact that Erik and his household might have overlooked, that would make the whole case—the whole trip here—worthwhile.

In the corner farthest from the front door, she found a pile of rags. Debris, it looked like—shoved out of the way. Cringing every time the wood creaked under her steps, Enid went to poke at it with her foot. Not rags after all, but a whole blanket, threadbare, big enough to wrap around a person. Shifting the cloth uncovered more: a simple leather pouch, and, inside it, flint and steel made from what looked like salvaged scraps. No charred streaks were visible, so likely no one had tried to start a fire inside the house, for which Enid sighed in relief.

“Erik, you said no one sleeps here?”

“Of course not,” he answered, clearly shocked at the idea. He and Teeg came up beside her, looking where she looked.

“Then you’ve got a squatter.” She set the pouch on the blanket, stepped back.

Erik snarled, biting off a word. Far from surprised, he was angry. Furious.

“You know who?” Enid prompted.

“It’s got to be outsider folk. Wild folk from upriver. They spy on us, been stealing from us for years.”

Enid’s brow furrowed. “What have they stolen?” In her experience, outsider folk stayed far away from the Coast Road settlements. According to their stories, the Coast Road folk were villains, demanding tribute and stealing babies.

Erik shrugged. “Well, nothing specific that I know of. But that blanket—they must have taken that from somewhere; they sure don’t have weaving like that.”

“This looks like just one person, maybe trying to get out of the rain.” Someone who knew they wouldn’t be bothered in this sad old house. But why would such a person have left anything behind? The wild folk she’d met never had much to spare. Maybe when Erik brought Enid and Teeg here today for the tour, they’d surprised someone. Chased the person off when they came in. Enid listened for noises, anyone moving outside the house, labored breathing. Inside, there wasn’t anyplace to hide. She didn’t sense anything. Erik was glaring at the abandoned mess. “This is another reason to get this place fixed up. Get the doors and windows fixed, so we can close it off, keep it safe—”

“And make sure no one gets killed if the roof and walls fall in?” Enid asked, brow raised. “Let’s get outside, into the light, yeah?”

Outside, the sky was huge and even the briny, humid air smelled clean. A weight came off her—relief that the house hadn’t killed her. She hadn’t realized that she’d been worried until she breathed fresh air and the space over the wetlands opened up before her.

A dozen people waited outside.

She recognized Jess, Juni, Avery, several others from Bonavista and Pine Grove. She and Teeg had met the first of the area’s households on the walk up here. Bonavista was the first household on the road into the Estuary, something of a gateway to the rest of the settlement, and Jess and Juni had spotted them as they arrived, welcoming them with more enthusiasm than Enid was used to. Jess was a lean man, his skin reddened with pockmarks from old acne or illness. He had a welcoming smile. His partner, the co-head of Bonavista, was Juni, a small woman with a round face and eager manner. Avery, the head of Pine Grove, had bragged that they were under their quota for the month—no overfishing happened here. But he knew very well that Enid and Teeg hadn’t come to investigate fishing quotas. They’d all been happy to tell the investigators that Erik was mad, that the house was a wreck, that he had no business wanting to save it. She’d thought they’d been exaggerating.

Curious, the group must have followed the investigators up here, at a distance. The ones Enid didn’t recognize probably came from the households farther on. She and Teeg wanted to talk to everyone; they hadn’t gotten that far yet. The Estuary might not have had a committee, but the small-town grapevine was working just fine. They all knew that Erik had asked for an investigation, they’d gotten word that investigators had arrived, and now they wanted to come see for themselves.

So this was going to be more complicated than Enid liked. Teeg had moved up beside her and planted his staff. In their brown uniforms, a matched set, they clearly had authority here.

“Hola,” Enid said brightly. “Can I help you?”

“Now do you see it? It’s just like we told you,” Jess of Bonavista said, gesturing to the ruined house with his hand flattened, angry.

“Yeah,” she said calmly. “We’ve had a chance to look things over.”

“Erik’s crazy to think he can save this!”

Anna of Semperfi, Erik’s partner, put her hands on her hips and jerked her head toward the investigators. “Let them decide, it’s what they’re here for!”

Another man, big, with a brimmed hat pulled low over a pale, flushed face, stepped forward. Avery from Pine Grove. “They need to hear all of it. It’s not just the house that’s the problem, it’s the assumption that we should be helping,” he countered.

Enid tried again. “Once we’ve had a chance to talk to everyone, we’ll —”

Erik marched forward before Enid or Teeg could stop him and jabbed a finger at Avery. “You’re just too lazy to put in the work! Can’t face a little challenge, can you?” Lazy. Almost as bad an insult as unproductive or wasteful.

“That’s not it and you know it!”

Everyone started talking at once, then. Yelling, really. They even managed to drown out the racket from the circling flock of gulls. Erik somehow made himself heard over it all.

“You’re not listening! If you just listen, I can convince you, I can make you see, we can save the house! We can, I just need a little help —”

“A little? All the help on the Coast Road won’t save it!” Jess countered.

The two men yelled at each other with just an arm’s-length distance between them, flinging angry gestures that could easily turn into punches. They seemed to forget the investigators entirely.

Erik might have given this speech a dozen times, it seemed so well practiced. “After everything we’ve done for all the rest of you, for you to . . . to turn on us like this!” Erik pointed at each of the households in turn. Pine Grove, Bonavista, all of them. “You know we’re the best builders, so you ask us to help with all your work. We help keep the bridge up. Every time it rains we help pull your dumb goats out of the river. And we’ve been doing it for years. Decades! From the very start, we were here before any of you. And you”—he pointed at Juni and Jess—“back when Bridge House folded, we took in half your people, even though it blew all our quotas and we didn’t have the resources —”

“You were a child then—you don’t know what you’re talking about!” Juni bared her teeth, her face flushed. A strange-looking fury rose up in her. She’d been good tempered so far, in Enid’s interactions with her. Jess touched Juni’s arm to hold her back, but she wasn’t deterred. “Your father didn’t have a problem with it!”

“Not that he ever told you! He was too nice to say what he was thinking, but we sure heard about it at home! About what Neeve did and you all trying to cover it up!”

“We didn’t! We reported it right off!”

Enid should have known someone would bring up the old case, from twenty years ago. The Estuary took care of itself, mostly. But twenty years ago, one of them had cut out her implant, presumably to try to have a baby without a banner. She’d been caught. Eventually, her household had disbanded over the incident. Juni had started the new household, Bonavista, in its place. It should have all been left behind. But something like that was never really forgotten.

A banner. What it all came down to, in the end. A household came together, worked hard, proved that the members could take care of one another, manage themselves, not waste resources, and then the regional committee would award them a banner. The right to have a child. Households, quotas, trade, investigations, all of it went toward proving you could successfully bring a new human being into the world.

Dig down far enough, it wasn’t about houses at all.

Enid turned to Teeg and smirked. “See? This is why we don’t start with group meetings. The shouting. All of them at once.”

“Yeah, I guess so. We had enough?”

“I think so.”

Teeg put fingers to his mouth and whistled piercingly. The whole group fell quiet; a couple of them even jumped back, as if the sound had been a clap of thunder. Enough quiet now so that the soft whining from the scrappy dog was audible. The animal clung to Erik, close to his feet, and seemed worried. Enid sympathized with his sense of confusion.

She looked over the gathering, a dozen people from households up and down this part of the road, come to gawk. Most folk looked away rather than let her catch their gaze. This wasn’t comfortable. Ideally, they’d be having this conversation alone with Semperfi’s folk in their kitchen. Someplace where Erik and his folk would feel comfortable. Or at least, where he wasn’t being attacked. Then again, this way, no one could invent gossip about what the investigators told him. So they stood in the open, with the rotting structure lending undeniable evidence to back up the decision. The sun beat down on them, insects buzzed, and everyone felt annoyed.

In that quiet, another sound carried up the hill from the marshland at the mouth of the river. A desperate, panicked voice, shouting over and over, coming closer until the repeated word became clear: “Help! Help me! Help!”

Across the marsh a figure ran toward the main road at the base of the hill, slipping, recovering, momentum carrying him on. A man in work clothes, holding on to his wide-brimmed hat to keep it from flying off. His other hand was waving. The dog barked and charged out; Erik called Bear back.

“Is that Kellan?” Jess asked.

“Who’s Kellan?” Teeg said.

“One of Last House’s. He’s usually down on the beach, scavenging.”

Details clarified: brown skin darkened and weathered, dark eyes narrowed in a constant squint and radiating crows’ feet, and a rough beard softening the jaw. Rangy limbs, homespun clothes hanging off him loose and comfortable. A machete and a crowbar knocked at his belt. The man seemed to be running for his life, but nothing chased him.

“Teeg, come on,” Enid said, and they took off at a jog, downhill to the mud, to meet him.

“What’s wrong?” she said when they got close.

The man pulled up, panting for breath, glancing back and forth between the investigators and something behind him.

“You, investigators? You’re investigators.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“You’ve got to help. Please come!”

He reached out and clung to Enid’s sleeve. Hardly anyone ever got that close when she was wearing the uniform. Teeg stepped forward, his free hand at his pouch where he kept tranquilizer patches. But Kellan wasn’t belligerent. He was scared, upset, blinking with shock.

She held his hand, hoping to anchor him, comfort him. Get him to a point where he could explain. “What is it?”

He gaped a couple of times and then stammered, “There’s a body, a body. Someone’s washed up, she’s dead!”

Enid’s nerves fired, sharpened. A sense of alarm crashed over her, made her stomach clench. Teeg turned to her with a look of shock to match Kellan’s.

“Show us,” she said.

Copyright © 2018 by Carrie Vaughn. Excerpted from The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn. Published by permission of the author and John Joseph Adams Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

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.

Book Reviews: July 2018

Chris Kluwe | 1402 words

Hello everyone! My name is Chris Kluwe, and I’m pleased to be your newest reviewer at Lightspeed, offering the hottest of hot takes on upcoming science fiction/fantasy headed your way.

. . . Okay, this isn’t the sports world, so probably not so much “hot takes” as “here are some books I read that I think were particularly interesting, and you might enjoy them as well.” Please forgive my wandering train of thought reviews (and parenthetical asides (I love parenthetical asides)), I have severe character flaws. Ask my mom if you don’t believe me.

On to the reviews!

European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman
Theodora Goss
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781481466530
Saga Press, July 10th, 2018, 720 pages

The first book I’d like to spotlight for you is European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, by Theodora Goss. This one, I have to admit, took me a little bit to get into, but once I did, hooked me all the way to the ending. It’s written in a Victorian England style highly reminiscent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (which I rather suspect was the author’s aim), and is a delightful romp from the foggy streets of London all the way through the imperial flower gardens of Budapest. More importantly, it re-imagines multiple literary figures (such as Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein’s monster, and the creations of Dr. Moreau) as female characters, transforming the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen into the Athena Club, a no-nonsense, take-some-prisoners group of women who show the men in their lives that gender isn’t one’s defining characteristic, but rather one’s brains.

One thing that really grew on me were the fourth-wall-breaking exchanges between the main characters of the Athena Club. At first, these felt like a gimmick designed to subtly wink at the reader, but the slightly-out-of-context conversations really did an excellent job of highlighting the various characters’ personalities and provided a richness to the story that I’m glad was there. They reminded me a lot of Terry Pratchett’s footnotes in his Discworld series—an extra layer of information that added depth and complexity to the surrounding text without quite breaking the flow of reading.

Finally, I’d like to point out that even though this is the second book in what I presume will be an ongoing series, reading the first book is not at all necessary (as I had not read The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter before reading European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman), and in fact, provides a frankly hilarious running gag throughout the course of the book that I won’t spoil for you here.

Read if: You liked The Memoirs of Lady Trent series; you have daughters who want to be a detective; you’re a grownup who wants to be a detective.

The Mere Wife
Maria Dahvana Headley
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780374208431
MCD, July 17th, 2018, 320 pages

The second book I’d like to draw your attention to is The Mere Wife, by Maria Dahvana Headley. This one is a re-telling of the classic myth of Beowulf, one of the Western world’s oldest stories, but this time relayed in a frighteningly topical environment.

I’m not going to lie, The Mere Wife is a tough read, especially if you’re at all conversant with police brutality, PTSD, and the racial/socio-economic divides of modern America, but having said that, I highly recommend reading it anyway. The bones of Beowulf are clearly visible throughout the entire novel, but Headley has done a remarkable job of re-inventing them to be intensely pertinent, in ways that stick with you long after you flip the final page.

One warning—the text jumps from viewpoint to viewpoint with few warnings to the reader, but there was never a chapter that I couldn’t figure out who was narrating after a page or two. As someone who enjoys literary puzzles, this didn’t distract me from the story at all, but be aware that you’ll need to pay attention the entire way through.

I fully expect The Mere Wife will join the shelves of multiple English teachers’ classrooms in an attempt to introduce twenty-first-century children to the epic tenth-century poem, and, more importantly, will hopefully teach some of those students who have everything what it feels like to have nothing.

Read if: You want to cry at the end; you enjoy the classics but can’t stand “forsooths” and “prithees”; you want something for your book club to feel woke.

Planetside
Michael Mammay
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780062694669
Harper Voyager, August 2018, 368 pages

Lastly, I’d like to take a look at the upcoming novel Planetside, by Michael Mammay. This is a relatively straightforward military SF whodunnit about an aging colonel called out of retirement to investigate a mysterious disappearance in an active war zone (on an alien planet, naturally), but it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see the obvious parallels between Cappa Base (the site of the investigation) and the war/US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

To be honest, I was initially somewhat hesitant to include Planetside due to the way it ends—the denouement, when combined with the setting of the book, is quite unsettling. However, after thinking on it for several weeks (and corresponding with the author, who definitely plans to explore the protagonist’s choice in a meaningful way), I realized this book offers valuable insight into an entire generation—one shaped by a series of endless wars fought for nebulous goals, framed by figures who may or may not have the country’s best interests at heart. In this case, even though it left me feeling uncomfortable, I am recommending Planetside because I think it has something valuable to say about our society, the path we’re currently treading, and what outcomes might result.

As far as the writing, it’s clear Mammay is a seasoned veteran who draws extensively on his own military experience to craft both his dialogue and worldbuilding, but he also does an excellent job at avoiding jargon overload—a frequent danger in military SF. This leads to a believable setting filled with natural characters that never feel like caricatures or one-dimensional tropes. The action is fast and fluid, and does a great job at conveying the chaos of violent encounters while still being easy to follow. I also felt the suspense portion of the book was decently crafted—there are enough breadcrumbs to figure out “whodunnit” before the actual reveal, but not so many that it feels transparent.

All in all, aside from my personal reservations about the ending, the book was an enjoyable read and would likely sit well with any fan of military SF looking for an action-thriller to browse while lying in the sun at the beach.

Read if: You enjoy John Ringo/Tom Kratman military SF (but could do without the BDSM); you don’t want a Jane’s Guide to obscure technical detail taking up two thirds of your book; you can stomach staring the zeitgeist in the face.

• • • •

And that’s it for me, folks! Thanks for tuning in, and I’ll be back next time with a whole new set of books that I think might possibly be worth your time. Thanks for reading!

Other New Books That I Thought Were Interesting But Did Not Have Space To Review:

Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee

Blackfish City, by Sam J. Miller

The Girl In The Green Silk Gown, by Seanan McGuire

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Media Review: July 2018

Carrie Vaughn | 2099 words

Avengers: Infinity War
Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo
Produced by Marvel Studios
April 27, 2018

Avengers: Infinity War and the Holy Church of the Marvel Cinematic Universe

A couple of years ago, Darren Franich wrote an insightful set of analyses of all the Star Trek movies for Entertainment Weekly. In the first one (for Star Trek: The Motion Picture), he makes what I think is an important observation, that has reflected my own thinking about what movie franchises have turned into over the last decade, in the post-Harry Potter and MCU and new Star Wars era:

“Today, ‘The Motion Picture’ is a meaningless title. It runs along another outdated idea: That movies are fundamentally better than television. Almost four decades on, TV is more like movies, and movies are more like TV. And—roll with me, please—‘motion pictures’ stopped being A Thing You Watch and started being Your Life And How You Express Yourself.” (bit.ly/2LP27E2)

I’d go one further, and say that movie franchises have become akin to religious movements. New films in a franchise are the rituals we attend to reinforce our belief in and participation in Our Thing, and spoilers are akin to heresy. If the movies are Mass, then pop culture conventions are where we make our pilgrimages and acquire our holy relics. The blessed few make it all the way to San Diego Comic Con’s Hall H each summer, where they receive scripture from the burning bush itself. Disney is building theme parks based on our favorite franchises just as fast as it can, the world of the Harry Potter movies is an actual place you can go to—several, really—and King’s Cross Station has installed platform 9 3/4 for the photo ops. Fanfiction isn’t enough anymore; we need tangible expressions of our fandom, to show our allegiances, our faith. When was the last time you left the house and didn’t see someone wearing a Star Wars t-shirt?

It’s the ultimate escapism. It’s also filled with inspiration. A tremendous weight has been put on some of these films, Black Panther in particular, for its importance to representation and cultural identity. The Harry Potter books and films, along with a whole generation of dystopian YA lit, have been credited with inspiring the current wave of student protestors.

In light of their places in what appear to be actual movements, the prospect of reviewing a single one of these movies seems irrelevant. Of course, I’m saying that as a fully indoctrinated thrall of the Church of the MCU. I have heard complaints that Infinity War lacks emotional depth, that there are too many characters and the pace moves too quickly to get to know any of them or their tangle of relationships. To them I say: That’s what the previous eighteen movies were for, and you can’t expect the rest of us to slow down just because you didn’t do the homework. Normally I’d say a good film ought to stand on its own, so maybe this isn’t a good film. But in an age where movies are “Your Life and How You Express Yourself,” we judge them by how they make us feel, not by any objective standard. And Infinity War gave me exactly what I wanted. Except no, I didn’t really want to see half my beloved characters murdered with a snap of a cosmic finger. I did want a story that took risks and went someplace I didn’t expect.

See, I’m halfway through the review and I haven’t even described the movie I’m ostensibly reviewing because I just assume everyone knows already.

Avengers: Infinity War: Okay, so, there’s a bunch of B-list heroes from Marvel Comics that they’ve been making into improbably wonderful and wildly successful movies over the last ten years, and this is the movie where just about all of them come together to save the universe. That’s it, really. The rest is too complicated to go into because there’s stuff that pays off here that was planted way back in Iron Man, first of the franchise.

Oh, except one thing: The heroes fail. They do not save the universe. The bad guy, Thanos, successfully finds all the Infinity Stones to place in the magical Infinity Gauntlet, which he then uses to destroy half of all living beings in the universe. That actually happens. A dozen poofs of dust, and half our heroes are just gone. Even the ones that have their own movies scheduled over the next few years. Can I just say how impressed I am that Marvel went there? There’s a thrilling and horrifying moment when you suspect that Thanos is actually the main character of this film. He has a happy ending. After the film, a title card reads “Thanos Will Return.” Not the Avengers, but Thanos. Alrighty then.

It turns out that knowing that there are sequels—knowing the entire MCU release schedule by heart, in fact—very much changes the viewing of Avengers: Infinity War. Yes, half of all beings in the universe are dead and the scant surviving heroes are as crushed as they’ll ever be. But we’re only halfway through the story! And then there’s that teaser scene at the very end of the credits. You do know to stay all the way through the credits, don’t you? Well, if you don’t by now, I can’t help you.

I loved it. I loved that they didn’t pull the punch. I loved that they’re yanking our chain. Of course all those deaths of beloved characters are going to be reversed. Of course they are! We’re in the land of comic book superheroes, where death is never permanent. All this muttering that the hints that the deaths will be reversed lessen the impact is hogwash—the movie isn’t even pretending that those deaths are “real.” I’d argue we’re not supposed to feel anguish over them. Rather, our hearts should be breaking for all the characters who didn’t die. That’s where the movie wants our emotional investment: in Rocket’s anguish, Tony’s utter despair, in Captain America’s grim, “Oh God,” as the full weight of what has happened settles on him. In the previous five movies he’s featured in, we’ve never seen him admit defeat. And now? What next, indeed.

I’m feeling like a bit of a psychopath in that I’m not upset by what happened. The MCU is very good at putting guns on mantles and firing them off at just the right time. There are a whole lot of guns on the mantle right now (Dr. Strange’s cryptic statements and sleights of hand, child Gamora existing as Thanos’s conscience and perhaps still contained in the Soul Stone, the fact that several of the surviving heroes are going to be bent on revenge and have the means to accomplish it). The question isn’t whether all the random senseless deaths at the end of Infinity War will be reversed. The question is: What else is going to get undone, intentionally or otherwise? How far back will those reversals go? Will Gamora come back? Loki? All of Asgard? Where did all this start, anyway? The Battle of New York? When Red Skull retrieved the Tesseract? Is that how far back we have to go to stop this? Will whoever pulls that trigger try to remove Thanos from creation entirely? And what will that do? We’ve already got time travel and reality-bending powers on the table, so the only question is how far back they’re going to reset—and what’s going to be the cost of that reset.

That’s one of the two issues the film keeps coming back to: What’s the cost of all this power? The other is a statement spoken by Steve Rogers, Captain America: We don’t trade lives. They’re not going to offer up Vision as a sacrifice. Except that through the whole film, the heroes trade Infinity Stones and the fate of the universe for individual lives. Loki bargains for Thor, Gamora bargains for Nebula, Dr. Strange bargains for Tony Stark, Wakanda puts itself on the line for Vision, and on and on. (It’s worth noting that the characters who were directly traded for Infinity Stones—Stark, Nebula, and Thor—are all still standing at the end of the film. The ones who did the trading are not.) One can argue that this is why our heroes lose—they aren’t willing to hand over even a single life. Thanos is, explicitly—he kills Gamora, the only being he loves, to win the Soul Stone.

Well. We have the entire third act of the story left to go and I have a feeling this is all going to come back to bite Thanos. Because this has been a theme of the entire series all along: the conflict between those who believe in acceptable losses, and our heroes who know that every single life matters and every death is a tragedy. This started way back in The Avengers, when the Council decides to launch nukes at New York, because destroying a city is an acceptable loss for stopping an alien invasion, and Fury knows they’re wrong. In The Winter Soldier, when Hydra launches its crazy plan to kill millions in order to unite humanity under its banner. No wait, does it go earlier? Steve Rogers going to rescue Bucky and his unit rather than waiting for an official order? Infinity War makes this explicit: We don’t trade lives. You can’t count up a cost in lives, because every single life is beyond price. These films are making sure that in the midst of giving us all these heroic adventures, they clearly define heroes: A hero is someone who values individual life and works to protect it.

I recently went back and watched the first Iron Man movie—remember when we were all so sure no movie could make this second-string hero popular and there’s no way a whole series of Avengers movies could work? There’s a throwaway line at the end of that film, throwaway because it was delivered so straight by a brilliantly understated Agent Coulson: “This is not my first rodeo, Mr. Stark.”

This is not my first rodeo. We’ve done this before. S.H.I.E.L.D. becomes a McGuffin-generating machine, producing infinite guns on infinite mantles that we can pull out of a pocket universe when we need them, and the MCU just set it all up without us even noticing. The post-credit stinger with Agents Hill and Fury was mostly a gut punch, because yes, they’re dead, too. But before he goes, Fury pulls out that McGuffin, both entirely predictable and entirely thrilling, a pager sending a distress call to a mysterious logo: Captain Marvel. Release date March 6, 2019. I’m not upset by what happened in Infinity War because I know all the pieces are there to carry it through to a satisfying ending. This sort of thing either enrages you (this film enraged plenty of people), or it’s exactly what you want (Hi!).

Within just a couple of days of the movie’s release, someone set up a web page, basically a random thumbs-up/thumbs-down generator: didthanoskill.me. Click on it and get the answer: Did you survive Thanos’s hyper-genocidal finger snap, or are you one of the fifty percent who vanished in a puff of ash? See, we no longer escape into our fictions, we drag our escapism into the real world. Our Life and How We Express Ourselves. Gentle reader, I clicked the link and I was spared. My friends who all took the test were, alas, Slain by Thanos. They pointed out that this means it’s up to me (perhaps teaming up with Nebula) to retrieve the Infinity Gauntlet and use its awesome power to undo what has been done. See? We all have so much faith that this will happen.

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: JY Yang

Christian A. Coleman | 2359 words

JY Yang is the author of The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune. They are also a lapsed journalist, a former practicing scientist, and a master of hermitry. A queer, non-binary, postcolonial intersectional feminist, they have over two dozen pieces of short fiction published. They live in Singapore, where they work as a science communicator, and have an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Find out more about them and their work at jyyang.com.

• • • •

The Descent of Monsters is the third novella of your silkpunk fantasy Tensorate series. This volume is centered on an investigation into atrocities committed at Rewar Teng Institute, a classified research facility, and an experiment that got loose and left no survivors. And the government is making sure to cover it all up. How did this story come together for you?

God, writing this story was a real trip. When Descent was originally pitched, it was a book meant to focus on the backstory of Rider, who appears in The Red Threads of Heaven, and it was nothing but a series of letters written from Rider to Mokoya, the protagonist of Red Threads, as they travelled to Rewar Teng. But the more I wrote of it, the more I realized I cared less about what had happened in the past than what was happening in the fictive present of the story. When my editor, Carl, agreed with me that the first draft wasn’t working, I reworked the entire thing with a different tack. Based on what was going on in the world—I guess you could say I was partly inspired by current events—I decided to make the story about a criminal investigation where the investigator would be repeatedly stymied by the state apparatus trying to keep its secrets to its chest. It would be one more re-draft before I came up with something everybody liked. A good chunk of 2017 was spent trying to get this novella right, and I’m still not convinced that it worked.

I think it does! Now, the first two novellas of the series, The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune, are written in third-person. These books are about a pair of twins, Mokoya and Akeha, children of the Protector, supreme leader of the books’ empire. The Descent of Monsters is told in letters, personal diaries, government reports, and interrogation transcripts. How did you decide to write this one in epistolary format?

I’ve been using this novella series as a place to experiment with format. Red Threads, which I wrote first, had the most conventional, linear storytelling. Black Tides stitched together four novelettes. And then you have this one, which is told in epistolary format, and the next, which has been planned as a drunken monologue.

You’ve listed David Mitchell, Helen Oyeyemi, and William Gibson as your favorite authors and biggest influences. In what ways have their work made an impact on Descent?

I see you’ve Googled me, at least. I don’t know if I’d characterize those sentiments as accurate now. I love what Mitchell and Oyeyemi do with language and story structure, and their work was an important part of my MA year, where I slowly concretized what I wanted out of my authorial voice. I like their work a lot; I don’t know if they influenced the writing of the Tensorate series at all.

Gibson was one of the first writers I remember wanting to emulate, back in my teens. (I am now thirty-five years old.) Certainly, I had aspirations of being a writer of cyberpunk when I was just starting out, and as a result of that lingering desire, a lot of the short stories I sold early on were about the collusion of AI and abuse of state power. But I just re-read some of Gibson’s classic works in the last year (partly because I thought that kind of voice would suit another project I was doing), and I realized that as a writer, I had changed enough in terms of what I wanted out of my art that I didn’t want to write in that space and in that mode anymore. I still admire Gibson’s work immensely; it’s just not what I want to do as a writer. It’s interesting how your influences shape you at different points in your career. Ask me again in ten years and I’ll probably have a different answer.

What kind of feedback have you been getting from readers about the series so far?

I’ve been getting really good feedback about the series! I get comments from queer and non-binary people who really appreciate seeing a different gender system and non-binary pronouns on the page. Asian readers have told me how much they loved seeing familiar concepts (and Hokkien swearwords) in a fantasy book. And generally, people have loved the worldbuilding and the characters in the books. I’m glad the stories I tell are connecting with so many readers.

In one of the interrogation transcripts of Descent, Rider says, “I am not lying. Nor am I a lady, but I don’t expect you to understand.” Rider goes by the singular they gender pronoun. Are they referring to their non-binary identity, and if so, how much of Rider’s gender identity is informed by your own?

Rider is non-binary, but I didn’t identify as NB when I created their character: I just wanted to write a character who was non-binary, because I felt like the story needed one. It was the process of writing Akeha—who did not start out as a non-binary character—where I discovered that I myself was non-binary, and I was working out all my non-binary feels with this character who never had a particular inclination towards gender, but was forced to pick one to identify as because of social pressures. In Descent, Akeha now uses non-binary they/them pronouns, because they’ve finally figured out it’s a thing they can do.

By the way, I noticed that Mokoya and Akeha aren’t the only twins in the series. We find out that Rider is searching for their missing twin, and their quest emerges as one of the arcs in Descent. Where does your fascination with twins come from?

I blame Star Wars!! No, seriously though. It seemed like a fun thing to do.

Investigator Chuwan is our primary guide through the story. We get to know her through her government reports on Rewar Teng and her diary entries. She knows she’s being played by the state. I love how her world-weariness and sardonic humor come through in her personal writing. How did you come up with her character?

A lot of this novella was fuelled by my experience as a civil servant and a journalist in Singapore, and my friends’ experiences pushing against the establishment as activists. In the beginning, I struggled with finding the right voice for Chuwan, but once I’d discovered this angry, sarcastic, and sweary person, everything just went down right. I think that when you’re working against something as powerful and all-encompassing as the state, humor and sarcasm are sometimes the only coping mechanisms you have against existential despair.

Speaking of pushing against the establishment, Descent reads like social commentary on authoritarian regimes, one of the key themes. The monsters in the title seem to refer to the government officials eager to conceal information about their experiments as much as it refers to the creatures spawned from those experiments.

Titles are weird; for Descent in particular, I came up with a placeholder when the book was no more than a one-paragraph synopsis, and we just never found anything better. The title was meant to be a meditation on what we consider human vs. what we consider monstrous, but the novella changed a lot from when I first conceived of it to what we actually put to print. You’re right in that I often make social commentary on authoritarian regimes in my stories. Write what you know, and all that.

At one point in the novella, Rider imagines Mokoya saying, “Cruel as the fates might be, they cannot match the cruelty of humans.” I feel like this line sums up another one of the major themes of this novella, which is in line with the cruelty of authoritarian regimes.

It’s always interesting to see what people get out of a work thematically. I mentioned this at a panel I spoke at recently, but I’m a deep pessimist about human nature. The question was about victory conditions, and I said I didn’t see one for humanity. People are assholes, have been and always will be. The best we can do is to recognize this and mitigate that assholic nature when we can. I think, ultimately, that’s what most of my stories end up being about. There are always going to be people being assholes, and there are going to people trying to stop people being assholes. The best we can hope for is that the side of the anti-assholes wins.

In the worldbuilding of Descent, you devised a magic system called Slackcraft, which can be learned by anyone, but the training is difficult and requires years of mastery. What’s the story behind calling it Slackcraft?

It’s just nomenclature! I picked it because it sounded cool, and I was playing with ideas of tension/slack. There’s nothing more to it, really.

In your great Twitter thread about worldbuilding (bit.ly/2GXXyne), you wrote that you didn’t do any historical research for the series. You also mentioned that #OwnVoices authors are under a lot of pressure when drawing from their own cultures for a work of fiction. I was wondering if you could go more into this and talk about how this pressure affects #OwnVoices authors.

I said what I wanted to in that thread. A perhaps unintended side effect of the #OwnVoices movement is the immense pressure on marginalized writers for their works to be authentic, or at least the arbiters of authenticity, without deeper examination as to what this authenticity is. I think there’s a conflation between authenticity and accuracy as pushed by the majority in which only marginalized writers can write authentically (accurately) about their marginalizations, which turns into “marginalized writers must write authentically (accurately) about their marginalizations,” which slides into policing how marginalized writers write. I’ve seen people getting dinged for not representing cultural practices accurately, when in fact what it meant was “this does not line up with the precise way I do this cultural practice.”

The truth is that no one marginalized creator can accurately speak for their entire community, because marginalized communities are not a monolith. This is particularly true when you talk about cultural diasporas, which are differently affected by the long, grasping fingers of colonialism. Authenticity, to me, is a matter of feeling, not fact—which is to say, a marginalized writer can write authentically about their culture without it being accurate. I think the mainstream puts a lot of worth on accuracy, because they treat #OwnVoices stuff as cultural tourism—they expect to learn something about the creator’s marginalizations from reading their work. But we’re not here to teach outsiders about our culture. Our art is an expression of the self, it’s about our feelings, it’s about what we want to put into the world. To me, an #OwnVoices work of art is always authentic, whether or not it passes whatever bar of accuracy put to it.

(I have a whole other tangent about how authenticity itself is not above reproach, but that’s a conversation for another day.)

When can we expect to see the next installment of the Tensorate novellas? And what can you tell us about it?

Well, Descent comes out on the 31st of July. The novella due after that (tentatively titled The Ascent To Heaven) is due on the shelves sometime in the fall of next year, I do believe. I owe the first draft in September. It’s going to be yet another experimental piece, the Protector’s backstory told as a drunken monologue, by her one-time lover turned nemesis, Lady Han. It ought to be fun! Maybe I’ll have more angry, stabby baby Sanao twins. More Sonami as she grows up. Maybe!

What’s the next project you’re working on that you can tell us about?

Ooh. My next big thing is going to be a novel! I have a couple of projects bubbling in the kitchen, but the first one I’m going to finish is space adventure. It’s Joan of Arc in space. My agent loves the outline I’ve sent him, and I’m pretty excited about it. That’s all I’m going to say!

Is there anything else you’d like your readers to know?

I really appreciate all the support and love the series has been getting so far! When I first sent Red Threads to my editor, I had no idea if the book would even sell, and I could not have imagined the kind of reception it would eventually get. So thank you all so much.

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: James Beamon

Gordon B. White | 1430 words

Let’s start at the beginning: Where did you come up with the idea for this story? While I’m curious about the general inspirations for this alternate history, I’m particularly fascinated with how you came up with the capuchin monkey assault teams.

The idea came from a contest within the Codex Writers’ Group where we had to write a story based on a seed from another member. Fellow Codexian Yosef Lindell sent me a picture from a children’s book (It’s a Little Book by Lane Smith). The picture depicted a cutesy monkey wearing a diaper and a hat. The monkey was saying “no.” Trust me, nothing sinister about the image (bit.ly/2Lavj7b) but I got hung up on the word “no.” I took “no” to mean killer monkey assault teams. I married the idea to a setting I had written about previously in a story called “Song of Passing Grief” and longed to return to. These key ingredients, and not chocolate chips, are the essentials to a steampunk war story featuring killer monkey assault teams.

Although the story involves fantastical airships and mind-controlled monkey minions, it is set in our real world and apparently during a historical conflict between the Turks and the Russians (seemingly the Crimean War). While a steampunk setting can allow authors and readers to take certain speculative elements for granted (even here the character Adnan hand waves away the underlying science), the choice to incorporate identifiable cultures, locations, and events requires other kinds of work. What sort of research did this piece require, and how did you balance those real and speculative elements?

I like the idea of steampunk and I enjoy it especially when it’s set against the backdrop of our world, if only an alternate version. I have a problem, though. As a black male, the 1800s is not an American era I like to revisit or even re-envision . . . I find it incredibly difficult to overlay steampunk technology on a society gearing up to fight a civil war over the right to enslave my ancestors. And I find steampunking London to be a well saturated undertaking, so it doesn’t really motivate. What’s a writer to do?

I used to be a Turkish linguist and some of that training involved culture studies. In researching the Victorian era for “Song of Passing Grief” (which was my first attempt at steampunk), I ran across the Crimean War and it just felt like the perfect situation to place my stories. The Russians had notable black men in the form of General Ibrahim Gannibal and by extension his great grandson Alexander Pushkin, and the Turks were decidedly non-white, so it gave me an opportunity to tell stories from traditionally marginalized perspectives not just with steampunk technology, but with a war raging in the background. Ultimately, I think the research, which is largely untold hours of Wikipedia cross-referenced with historical websites, pays off because I think it makes the world more palpable than it would be if I just made up Steamlandia and Cogwheelgonia. Who the hell knows how they dress in Steamlandia?

Oh, and you asked about the balance . . . I try to keep as much of the real in as I can. If it’s not enough to qualify for a Hollywood-esque “inspired by true events” stencil, then it should have a “Made with real history!” stamp across the front.

Going back to the section where Adnan, the Kismet’s galvanizer, gives a brief and dismissive explanation of the underlying science, an interesting idea lurks in what he is unable or unwilling divulge. When Oz tells Adnan that he does not understand Hezarfen, the organ grinder, Adnan tells Oz that “[w]hat a person feels is the one thing that can’t be explained, the only magic left in the world.” Yet, isn’t that explanation what fiction tries to do? In particular, despite Adnan’s protest, can readers see in this story how young Oz is conditioned to eventually take up Hezarfen’s mantle and, in understanding what Oz feels, gain a transitive empathy for Hezarfen?

I think Adnan’s right . . . understanding what a person feels is true magic, and this is what makes good fiction, where you see these characters as real and feel for them, a powerful spell in its own right. Will some readers see Oz being conditioned to take over as the organ grinder? Sure. Will some readers ultimately empathize with Hezarfen? Possibly. The nature of magic, no matter the vehicle, isn’t consistent for everyone. So if I did this story justice then the people who read it and enjoy it will feel differently about the characters and how they acted and what they wanted. If that happens, I’ll feel honored.

In this story, there is an interesting tension in the importance of names. The act of naming can convey power, such as how Oz renames the monkeys that are injured and rebuilt, taking more and more stewardship over them until he finally assumes the organ grinder’s role entirely. However, names are not destiny; for example, the men refer to Adnan as “Yarim”—which means “half man”—because of his metal arm, although he is the warmest and most humane character we meet. Similarly, despite naming the first capuchin with a metal arm “Ruhsiz”—or, “Soulless”—Oz still gives the monkey the last blood rites and as dignified a send-off as possible. What then is the power of names? If they have any, does it come from how the named one acts, or is it from how the named one is perceived?

No one names themselves . . . your first one comes usually from your parents and the names you pick up later, or nick, if you prefer, come from either friends or enemies. Certainly there’s power in them, whether it’s in a feeling of hurtful resignation, as in how Adnan receives the term “Yarim,” or in Oz’s transformation to see someone he initially deemed Soulless as having enough soul to bless it into the afterlife. And as your examples demonstrate, that power comes in both how the receiver of the name acts and in the perception of others, a perception that can and perhaps should change.

Another key element here seems to be the concept that Adnan articulates when he hints that Oz could run away during a brief landing: “The nicest thing about being homeless is that you can make anywhere home, yes?” Instead of running away, however, Oz rejects the flat land to return to the airship and eventually become the new organ grinder—the war song he grinds at the end is the song of his home on the Kismet. This is not an indisputably good thing, as Oz has taken up a mantle that may lead to his becoming cruel and, at the very least, he now presides over a suicidal pack of mangled monkey war orphans. As readers, should we find comfort in the way that Oz has found a home, or should we be sorrowful for the human capacity to acclimatize to any terrible situation? Does that ability perpetuate conflict and misery, or does it provide respite?

Your term “indisputably good thing” reminded me of my favorite game, which I recently became re-obsessed with, and a saying in it from Martyr Logarius: “Acts of goodness are not always wise and acts of evil are not always foolish, but regardless, we shall always strive to be good.” I think it’s natural and right that a reader find both comfort and sorrow in the end. That said, the only answer I can give to your last question is “yes.”

Finally, what’s next on your horizon? Beyond any concrete plans or upcoming releases, are there any new and still forming ideas that you’re eager to explore?

I’m trying to finish my third novel . . . I swear these things were so much easier to knock out when I was deployed. But I’m sure I’ll take a break from taking a break on the novels and enter a Codex contest, where someone will give me a seed like the one that prompted this story and my mind’ll run in a new and surprising direction.

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.

Author Spotlight: G.V. Anderson

Arley Sorg | 1027 words

One of the things that stands out for me is the theme of personal agency in this piece. I think many people are taught to sublimate their own desires and become dutiful partners—both romantically and non-romantically. I feel like this piece is a beautiful rendering on the struggle to work through this “programming” and discover one’s own desires and needs. But there’s also this deft representation of different levels and types of agency through different characters. Do you feel like this is still an important topic in terms of gender? Or has it become more individual or cultural?

I’m so pleased that this theme comes through, because during the drafting process it became clear that personal agency was something I wanted to explore. The women of “Waterbirds” are its focus, of course—when Celia gets to choose how she presents herself to the world, or Irene breaks away from a difficult situation, I hope readers will see how these experiences are relevant to them as women.

But the characters—and therefore we—struggle against social and cultural constraints as well and I think it’s important to consider those journeys, too, whether it’s the elderly Mrs. Lawson’s fight for agency over her own health, or Irene’s pursuit of art in the introverted, inward-facing town of New Heacham.

I really like the complexity of relationships in this piece, and the difficulty of navigating them. The situations feel real. What are some of things you do as a writer to not only go beyond the standard, basic plotline, but to make a scenario that rings true?

By watching films and TV, reading books, and just observing people—it all adds up when you come to portray relationships, because you have a lot of references to draw from. The arrangement between Mrs. Lawson and Celia is very much like that of paid companions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so it’s already familiar, and I made sure to research the area the action takes place in to make the setting feel as plausible as possible.

Adding small details helps create depth to scenes as well. It’s interesting to see what your subconscious will come up with when you’re drafting.

Celia has this personal journey of discovery which has a fringe of danger to it. I mean, one step in the wrong direction and she could end up on the scrap heap, or worse—I won’t talk about what worse would be, but it isn’t hard to imagine given the contexts. Do you gravitate towards positive endings, or were there drafts with darker results?

I like writing bittersweet endings, or endings that hit more than one note, and “Waterbirds” is no different. However, I knew from the start that this story would end happily. Around the same time as I was writing it, there was a lot of online discussion around f/f representation in fiction and the unfortunate trend of killing off queer characters. In light of that, it was important to me to show a positive f/f relationship where both partners survive to enjoy it!

What was your process with this story? Where did it come from, how did it start—was there a single session of frantic writing, or did you edit over and over?

I’d wanted to write a story about a paid companion who falls in love for some time and had tried a few different approaches, but nothing seemed to stick until I thought about setting it on the Norfolk coast. The title actually came first, and I built the plot around the types of birds in the area.

At first, I’d planned to write a literary story with some very slight speculative elements, but once I stumbled on the idea of Celia as an android, I found new layers I hadn’t seen before. I drafted the story over the space of a week and edited it very slightly with the help of a few keen-eyed crit partners. The whole process was so smooth that I think my subconscious must have been busy working on it for some time before I actually started writing!

What do you look for in fiction? What are some of the most inspiring pieces for you?

I love a strong sense of place and of voice. Recently, I enjoyed “Cutting Teeth” by Kirsty Logan (The Dark, April 2018), and “Nitrate Nocturnes” by Ruth Joffre (Lightspeed, April 2018).

I liked this story overall, but I want to call out the craft, because I really enjoyed the craft of this story. The particular attention to detail, for example, the way things unfolded, the bluntness mixed with the beauty, the characters themselves . . . How has your writing evolved since that initial Freeze Frame Fiction story acceptance? And what sorts of things do you do to work on your craft?

Thank you! The mention of Freeze Frame Fiction is a blast from the past. They published my first ever short story, which I wrote in 2013-14, so I’ve had five years’ practice since then! My approach to writing, my attitude and work ethic, even what I like to write—it’s all changed in that time. I dig deeper with my characters and settings than before, and I know now how I want to write, rather than how I think I should write.

Reading as much as possible and swapping crits with my writing group have given me invaluable tools and experience which I draw on for every story.

What are you working on now that new fans can look forward to?

I’m putting the finishing touches on a few new short stories, including a Gothic horror novelette that I’m really proud of. Then I plan to write a novel. I keep changing my mind about which idea to tackle first, though!

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: Adam-Troy Castro

Gordon B. White | 737 words

You probably guessed this was coming, so we’ll get it out of the way, but what are your top three choices for your own species reassignment? I won’t ask you to rank them all (unless you feel like it).

I think the point of the story is that you’d have to be a glutton for punishment in order to choose any of them, but given my own druthers I think 2562, 1427, and 8883 are infinitesimally less awful than the other options.

With that out of the way, what was the inspiration behind this piece? In particular, this one is different from your other Lightspeed stories in that it isn’t shaped like a conventional narrative, although it still sketches a dystopian setting in the margins and makes a point about the state of the current/near-future world. Was there a particular influence (either real or fictional) that sparked this piece’s structure?

Beats the crap out of me, honestly. It’s an old idea of mine, one that has already fed one story, “Just a Couple of Extinct Aliens Riding Around In A Limo,” from my Vossoff and Nimmitz sequence. In that tale, published in Science Fiction Age in January 1995, they wind up hanging from a cave wall as Pylthothi Screaming Stink-Moss, and the appearance of that species in this compendium is a tip of the hat to an old premise, successfully recycled to different effect.

Between the lines, readers can infer that this story takes place in a future that has suffered an ecological collapse, as suggested by information like the extinct butterflies and ruined seas. While that isn’t quite Earth’s current reality, it is, perhaps, not that far off. Do you think that human beings have pushed the Earth beyond its limit for recovery? What role do you think fiction has in warning, or maybe criticizing, people about this?

I think the Earth will abide. Earth can recover from anything we do to her, even if it takes entire geological epochs. The chemical processes that resolve as life will continue to churn, and eventually, maybe long after we’re all gone, a fresh diverse web of life will emerge, and it will be one wholly alien to what we see when we look out our window. It’s only the current tenants, including the many who have done nothing on the scale of our own destruction, who are royally screwed. Absent action of a spectacular sort, unlikely because these prospects bother many of us not at all, I think we can say goodbye to polar bears, to giraffes, to whales, to coral reefs, and to the species that includes any number of Ahmeds and Stacies. But I may be wrong.

Building on that, I’m curious as to how you see satire and humor as a way to address serious issues like the global destruction and political tribalization that haunt this story. Do you see it as gallows humor, or is it a way to make a point in the hopes of inspiring change?

Gallows humor, definitely.

Each of the species for potential reassignment shares some aspect with humanity, but none of them seem to have the full combination that renders humanity a “‪contagion.” Is it a lack of some quality, then, that makes humans too dangerous for the galaxy, or is it an overabundance? ‬‬‬‬

If there is any common factor to all the species I posit, it is that the individuals are stuck where they are, unable to alter their environment to advantage beyond what they’re given at the onset. Our problem is that while we have the gifts of industry and inventiveness, we largely do not have the gifts of seeing (or caring about) consequences, or planning for the long term.

Finally, do you have any upcoming projects that you’d like to announce? Beyond mere upcoming publications, are there any new and exciting ideas that you’re starting to explore?

A mainstream thriller is making the rounds. As of now, I am debating whether the next is a haunted house story, or something else. In the meantime, the current issue of Analog has “A Stab of the Knife,” the clash between my series characters Draiken and Andrea Cort.

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.

Author Spotlight: Kyle Muntz

Setsu Uzumé | 819 words

The way you blended fantastic and western elements was both rich and abstract—almost poetic in form. What was the initial seed for this story?

The story started with an image—two outlaws fighting to the death—and started building from there. Along the way it took on a very specific feel, especially when I realized who the narrator should be. I wanted it to be a totally sincere western while also critiquing westerns, where everything familiar has become alien. The feel of the dialogue was also important to me. I tried to keep a balance that exaggerates the tendencies of the genre while never becoming parody, even when the characters start angrily calling each other things like “sissy” and “chicken.”

There’s a lot of intimacy (apart from sex) between Wild Bill and the protagonist. The protagonist speculates on why, but doesn’t decide. What drives Wild Bill to share himself this way?

I think Wild Bill represents a very specific kind of harmful, destructive masculinity—one that’s got a very hard surface, but an interior that’s mostly made up of weakness and insecurity. He’s constantly putting pressure on himself, very tired and very alone, and that gives him a strong desire to connect with someone while feeling he shouldn’t. I think this kind of masculinity is damaging both inside and outside: It results in forceful, mostly harmful attempts to control the exterior world, but also an unhealthy denial of normal human emotions. Wild Bill is a bit more likable because I think people like him mostly express themselves through violent denial—violent for themselves and anyone they have power over. But at least he’s able to achieve intimacy some of the time.

Were there any scenes or elements in earlier drafts that got cut?

Surprisingly not. Short fiction is difficult for me, so I usually edit a lot. It’s normal for one of my stories to go through four or five full revisions before I like it—but this one came out all in one sitting. Often my short stories tend to go on too long, so I tried my best to keep it focused on one scene, which is why most of the story takes place during the duel.

Was this story familiar or experimental territory for you? Did anything surprise you during the writing process?

I’ve never written a western before, so the whole tone of the story was new to me—and I’ve especially never had so much fun writing dialogue. It felt great to write certain parts of this story: the description of the saloon, the moments leading up to the duel. The imagery is more familiar, as the main thing connecting most of my stories is a certain kind of grotesque fantasy imagery. A lot of the themes are probably reoccurring as well. But probably the biggest surprise is that, as I wrote it, I could hear the narrator’s accent clearly in my head. I’ve never written a story that felt so much like a specific person speaking, which may be why the story felt so natural to write.

What’s next from you? What can we look forward to?

My main project right now is The Pale City, a dark fantasy RPG for PC. The game has a feel similar to this story, but spread over a much broader canvas and in a fantasy world. There are familiar elements like gods, magic, and maybe even a quest, but my goal was to make those things seem as unfamiliar as the conventions of the western in this story. It’s been in development for six years, but I finally have a full, playable version in the testing phase right now. Currently I’m in the early stages of setting up a Kickstarter to cover the production costs and see if there’s enough interest for an expansion, and I hope to have the game released by mid- to late 2019. This is the biggest, most demanding thing I’ve ever worked on, so I’m incredibly excited to know it will hopefully be in the world soon.

Also, I’m in the process of trying to sell a novel inspired by Japanese mecha anime, particularly Neon Genesis Evangelion. The novel is about an alternate version of Earth under attack by its own gods, who appear as immense, grotesque creatures sort of like the Burning Men in this story—so of course the only way to fight them is in giant robots. The novel has a lot of big battles, but is especially focused on character drama between the pilots. I’m mostly focusing on my video game for now, but I’m also hoping this novel finds its way into the world soon.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Setsu grew up in New York, and spent their formative years in and out of dojos. They like swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. They do not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Their work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find them on Twitter @KatanaPen.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 205 words

Coming up in August, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Sarah Grey (“A Leap, a Howl, a Chase Between Stars”) and Alex Irvine (“The Atonement Path”), along with SF reprints by Charles Yu (“NPC”) and Dominica Phetteplace (“Project Extropy”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Manuel Gonzales (“Scavenge, Rustic Hounds!”) and Kate Elliott (“A Compendium of Architecture and the Science of Building”), and fantasy reprints by Sheree Renée Thomas (“Treesong”) and Dennis Danvers (“Here’s What I Know”).

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 the ebook-exclusive reprint of the SF novella “Native Seeds,” by Catherine Wells. We’ll also have a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Don’t forget that September will be our 100th issue, and it’s going to be a real treat. We’ll have lots of original fiction from favorite Lightspeed contributors like Vylar Kaftan (who had a short story in our very first issue!), Kat Howard, Sam J. Miller, Ken Liu, and more.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

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.

• • • •

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

Chris Kluwe

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.