TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 102, November 2018

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: November 2018

SCIENCE FICTION

America: The Ride
Charles Yu

Talk to Your Children about Two-Tongued Jeremy
Theodore McCombs

Oversite
Maureen F. McHugh

Moonboys
Stephen Graham Jones

FANTASY

Queen Lily
Theodora Goss

Other Worlds and This One
Cadwell Turnbull

Hapthorn’s Last Case
Matthew Hughes

Meet Me in Iram
Sofia Samatar

NOVELLA

Trinity
Nancy Kress

EXCERPTS

Molly Tanzer | Creatures of Want and Ruin
Molly Tanzer

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: November 2018
LaShawn M. Wanak

Media Review: November 2018
Violet Allen

Interview: Andy Duncan
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Theodora Goss

Theodore McCombs

Matthew Hughes

Stephen Graham Jones

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

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

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2018 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Galen Dara

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: November 2018

John Joseph Adams | 153 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 102nd issue!

This month’s cover art is by Galen Dara, illustrating an original fantasy short story by Theodora Goss (“Queen Lily”). We also have new short fiction from Matthew Hughes (“Hapthorn’s Last Case”), and fantasy reprints by Cadwell Turnbull (“Other Worlds and This One”) and Sofia Samatar (“Meet Me In Iram”).

We have original science fiction by Theodore McCombs (“Talk to Your Children about Two-Tongued Jeremy”) and Stephen Graham Jones (“Moon Boys”), along with SF reprints by Charles Yu (“America: The Ride”) and Maureen McHugh (“Oversite”).

Our nonfiction team brings us our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. Our feature interview is with author Andy Duncan.

For our e-book readers, this month’s novella reprint is “Trinity,” by Nancy Kress. We also have an excerpt from Molly Tanzer’s new novel, Creatures of Want and Ruin.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Press Start to Play, Loosed Upon the World, and The Apocalypse Triptych. 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 twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and is a producer for WIRED’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. He also served as a judge for the 2015 National Book Award. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

America: The Ride

Charles Yu | 3500 words

We have a kid now and another on the way and—the idea is, the hope is—that we are, at least in a technical sense, adults.

We’d always assumed we would know more, would have accomplished more, by the time we got to this point, assumed we would have turned into different people, better people. That was the idea. That was the hope.

Looking back over our shoulders, we can see the track stretching out behind us, an unbroken line from where we got on to where we are now.

The voice of the American ride says:

Please keep your attention focused in a sideways direction.

Reminding us the proper way to enjoy this, which is not to look back, because looking back is the easiest way to get hurt. Or, worse, to convince yourself that you want to get off. And also, it’s also not proper procedure to look forward, no matter how tempting it is to do so. We sit facing west while our tram car moves north, and we do our best not to look in the northern direction, although we are encouraged by what we feel to be a subtle, gentle, but unmistakable angle of incline of the track below us. We are moving up a slope, building toward something, to a higher place. Some of us worry about what this means. Some of us worry about whether an upslope now implies a downslope later, but some others of us say that it doesn’t have to be so, that we are not bodies in flight, our arc through the sky pre-carved by gravity. We are on an engineered system, an amusement, a transportation. This was designed by our best minds, assembled by our best hands, and constantly improved by our innovation and creativity. There is no reason to assume that there must be a high point to all this, that we will eventually have to convert all of this elevation and potential energy into speed and kinetic energy, that what we are storing thermodynamically must eventually be given back, paid back like an entropic or economic debt.

The voice reminds us again to keep our hands and feet inside at all times and to maybe take our eyes off our phones for like, one second, and gaze outward as we make our way along the tracks. Not to turn around in our seats and look backward in the direction of history, at the past which is already gone, but to always look forward, at the grandeur of the vistas, the sweep of world events unfolding, which we are a part of, which is what we paid for, four hundred dollars a ticket, half-price for children (although as they grow, they will eventually turn into full-fare passengers on this ride, and we worry about the mechanics of how that incremental fare will be collected, whether we will be able to pay for them or if they will need to pay for it themselves, who will come for it, and whether we will still be around, whether we will have any warning, whether we will still be able to stay in this car with them or whether they will need to get out and ride in their own vehicles, we worry whether the track might diverge at some point and they will be off into a different set of tunnels and rooms and we will never see them again).

The sweep of history, having this unspoken feeling of forward and upward momentum, while being entertained, all of that goes into the ticket price, and the voice of the woman who narrates the ride, she reminds us that it is our purchase of these tickets that makes the ride possible. We are the customers, but we are also the underwriters of this entertainment. We are consumers of this experience. We are tourists in our own creation.

“We’re moving,” our daughter says, clapping her hands in excitement. “Let’s go! Where are we going?”

She is not a baby anymore. Our wife starts to cry.

“How did that happen?” our wife says. She starts to turn her head back, hoping she might still be able to see the point in the track where our baby turned into a kid who could say things to us, but we stop our wife from looking back, reminding her that the voice will be angry.

Our car moves down the track. We are picking up speed. We are approaching a house. Our daughter asks us if that is our house and we say we aren’t sure, but something tells us that it is. We are headed for a collision, but then a set of double doors opens and we find ourselves inside the living room of our house.

“This feels like home,” we say to each other, but we also hear other people around us saying it and for the first time in a long time we are aware that we are not on this ride alone. In fact, there are other families in the neighboring cars just ahead of us and just behind us, sitting so close we could reach out and touch them. We look ahead and see that it is all families, all the way down, this tram being an endless procession of small car units, all of us connected by the central drive-train powering this ride, subdivided but linked, having our own versions of the same experience. There is a lot of murmuring now as we hear a lot of us saying “Is this home?” “Where are we?” and we start to wonder what we are, exactly, whether up to this point our definition of “we” has been too small. We wonder who we are. But just as we are starting to wonder about how large “we” are as a group, the nature of “we” and the mystery and the wonder and the pluses and the minuses of it, we hear someone say “I don’t know about this.” We have an “I” among us and everyone turns to see if they can figure out who it is, but just as that happens, the tram uncouples from itself and breaks into two, and one part of us goes off on one track and the other part goes off on a different track, and the uncoupling happens again and again and again until we find ourselves alone, together, alone. Together as a small family unit, but now uncoupled from our fellow riders. Alone now, moving in our single transport vehicle, on our own ride, wondering what we are missing out on, what other riders are getting to see.

Now we wish we had paid more attention at the beginning of the ride, had not been listening to the voice to keep looking sideways, at the murals and the dioramas and displays of the ride’s retail partners. But it was hard not to do so. They make it so easy, we did not even have to move, just take out our credit cards and hold them near the edge of our car in such a way that they could be swiped through the many point-of-sale devices installed every fifty feet along the ride, millions, billions of transactions occurring every instant, so that we could instantly own a part of this experience, if we wanted to, to have souvenirs of all types, cultural, historical, key chains and cups with crazy straws. It was part of our duty as riders to help support the sponsors that make the ride possible, and it allowed us to participate, each according to our means and personalities, allowed us to choose how we wanted to enjoy this, all of this. We pass through the house, seeing our living room, our three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms, our kitchen, and we exit back out into the light and what we see is a thousand different tracks, or a million, or four hundred million.

“The ride is broken,” our son says.

“Hey!” we say. “We have a son?” and we kiss him and squeeze his cheeks and he pushes our hands away.

“I’m not a baby,” he says.

“You’re not,” we say, because he’s not, but we wonder. “When? How? Where were you born?”

“Back there,” our son says, “in the house. You guys seemed really freaked out about something and I didn’t want to bother you so I’ve been quiet for a while,” and he doesn’t seem too hurt, already so grown-up and used to being the younger kid, and although we feel like we just met him a moment ago, he has been with us for some time now and we already love him. He is ten, our son, and we look at his hair and his nose and his shoulders and we admire him. Our daughter, now thirteen, seems to have known he was here all along and is waiting for us to catch up.

“What are you looking at?” we ask our new son.

“Cars.”

“They’re nicer than ours,” we say. “Our car is old, huh?”

“Yeah,” he says. “But I like our car. It’s the best one.”

All of the cars move along their individual paths, some up into the mountains, some turn into boats and float onto lakes, some take off like airplanes as we watch in envy, some hit trees and we watch the families inside get out and start fighting and we wonder if they will ever be able to get back on. Our car continues smoothly along its track, not the fastest, nor the slowest.

We notice now that the ride is not what it used to be, less finished, more construction. We see a sign posting notice that the ride is now owned by American Enterprises, LLC, whose parent company, American Entertainments, Inc. is a subsidiary itself of a company called The USAmusement Corporation, which is owned by a German conglomerate, New World Experiments GmbH, owned by a consortium led by Chinese and Korean investors.

You have been chosen as potential partners in an affiliate marketing and peer-advertising campaign . . .

the voice says, as we continue to roll on through history.

You’re now passing through: Japanese internment camps during the Second World War.

On your left, coming up, you will see Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York in the 1920s.

And if you look over to your right, you’ll see the banks of the Mississippi, and, watch your feet, lift them up to stay dry, as your vehicle is now converting itself into a riverboat, a form of transportation vital to the nation’s commerce throughout the 19th century. No mention of other parts of the U.S. economy in that century.

Backward we go, through American lore and mythology, merchandised to perfection.

We see new ground being broken, dig sites surrounded by chain-link fences, men working in hardhats, large colorful banners proclaiming that The American Experience will be re-launched in the fall of 3015.

This is a part of the ride that seems like we are not on a ride anymore.

We have crossed some line into the backstage area, employees only, where the gears and the machine room and the electrical cords and all of the nuts and bolts of the mechanical ride are evident. Even the voice has dropped some of the theatre from her voice and now talks to us directly.

“The narrated portion of the ride is over. You are now entering an experimental phase, still in testing, for a 3-D version of America, where riders can experience “America” for the first time, in 3-D.”

Our son and our daughter both get excited at the idea for a moment until the voice tells us that we do not qualify financially for that portion of the ride.

“You are welcome to stay in the car, although what you will see will be a flattened, 2-D version of what should be a stereoscopic experience.”

We are given a choice of whether to go on or get out, and we decide to go on, although the voice now also tells us that we need to take some of the things out of the car, as we have taken on too much weight, so our son drops his sack lunch over the side of the car, and we drop a typewriter, and old clothes that the kids used to wear, and our daughter drops a doll whose hair she used to brush when she was a little girl at the beginning of the ride.

We are just content to keep riding this for a while, passing through a room they called Your 30s, which has upbeat, contemplative acoustic guitar music, and Your 40s which is more piano-themed, and Your 50s which has Bach playing and we see some cars getting wine and cheese. We see cars that have God with them, in voice and as a kind of hologram, and we watch God from afar, and wish we could hear what God is saying to the people in the cars lucky enough to have God, but the advertising voices all around our car are drowning everything out. We pass through dioramas of ourselves in cubicles, watching time-lapse movies of ourselves working, working, aging, seeing what we look like at work, seeing how the hands of the clocks in our offices spin around, and somewhere around that point we notice that our lap bars have tightened over our thighs. It could be the slow spread of middle age, and the growth of our daughter, who is in college now, and our son who as a sophomore made the varsity soccer team at his high school and is now taller than all of us.

But it’s not that we have grown, the lap bars really did click down tighter on us, pinning us into this car, pinching us into our seats, and the voice tells us it is for our safety, as the ride is picking up speed now. With a sick feeling in our guts we understand that we are not getting out of this ride until it lets us off and that the reason we are picking up speed is that we are now on a downslope, that somewhere we did pass the high point of the ride. None of us remembers doing that, or even there being a particularly high point, and maybe the high point just wasn’t very high, but whatever the case, we are accelerating now. Whatever we built up in terms of momentum, we are now giving it back.

The idea is, the hope is, we will be able to see everything at least once, that even in this rushed state we can experience all of the rooms, even if it is from a distance, even if it is really other riders who are seeing these things. We can see other cars moving across the country, across “America,” we see all of us on grids, on graphs. We understand ourselves to be bits of socio-economic data on the bar charts and pie charts and flowcharts running down the leftmost column of the multi-colored newspapers that get left in front of the room doors of our discount business traveler hotels. We understand ourselves to be frequent fliers, rewards club members, customer loyalty program participants. We dream publicly. We have agencies, staffed by people who storyboard our fantasies, people who plan out panel-by-panel, shot-by-shot, the public space, the collective mental environment where this ride is located. Creative agencies mapping the conceptual territory, the shared Main Street of our imaginations, where we stroll, arm in arm, down the avenue of our engineered dreams, our civic conversation now just giggles and pointing, saying to ourselves, hey look at this, look at this, and we all look at this for ten seconds until another one of us says, now hey wait a minute, have you guys seen this, look at this, look at this one now, and we all turn our heads and look at this one now, until the next thing, the next thing, our collective attention reduced to the briefest of intervals, not long enough or large enough to hold a dream. And now, no more public dreaming, just expertly conceived narrative products designed to keep us inside the car, looking out the side, murals painted in 2-D to give a 3-D illusion of movement, the sweep of history that we have purchased, that we are part owners of, murals that show us watery images of ourselves, murals with frames around them, to give off the feelings of “Nostalgia” and “Tradition” and “Affordable Luxury” and “Forward Progress” and “Special Times” and “Beer and Friends.” We have no room for dreams or even feelings anymore, our feelings themselves engineered, mood-boarded by people who know how to do such things with chemistry and music and art direction. We feel feelings designed by people who have market-researched us and have seen our private browser searches and know what’s in our darkest of hearts and in our darkest of parts, and know what we really want deep down, all of those feelings calibrated to be emotionally nutritious, or at least emotionally fattening, calorically dense psychosocial-experiential sustenance, allotted into our feed troughs, constituting our collective body, so that we are what we consume, and we consume what we are, so that we are a loop, closed and tight and perfect, so we keep our minds focused on what has been laid out before us, our eyes adjusting to the alternating light and dark periods. Moving room to room. We have kids now and they are babies and they are grown and they’ll always be babies and they grew up overnight, and occasionally we admit to ourselves that we wish we didn’t have either of them not because we don’t love them but because we love them too much. We know how incompetent we are at loving things other than ourselves and loving these kids as much as we do we are quite sure that this excess of love will ruin them. We can already see it happening.

We have to admit, sometimes, in the middle of a sentence, we hear ourselves talking and we become terrified at the sound of our own voice, still so strange and dumb after all these years. Occasionally we wish we didn’t have these kids yet and that we could go back to the days when it was just us, and all we had to worry about was just not falling out of the ride, what kind of snacks we would eat, what souvenirs we would buy. We see ourselves on the in-ride camera, taking pictures of us that we will have the chance to purchase, for $29.95 per print, at the end of the ride, when we get off. We see ourselves on camera, at an earlier time in the ride: we are looking at our family, all sitting together, cars near, now where are they? Where have our kids gone?

We search desperately for our daughter, search desperately for our son, the ride is coming to an end for us, and turning our heads from the side, our necks stiff from having been locked into a position of gazing for so long, we realize what we have just done. We look forward for the first time in years and see the white light ahead, the outside, as we exit this room. We look at the in-ride camera and see our son, and see our daughter, see them in their own cars, with their own sons and their own daughters, and we want to call out to them, to our children and our grandchildren, but the camera is just an image, and we understand that, but we call out to them anyway. We try to tell them about the ride, but we see the looks on their faces, the hope, and we start to understand the impossibility of this ride, how it is a kind of perpetual escalator, a physical impossibility that somehow exists. We see how our children and our grandchildren think that they are on an upslope, believe in the forward movement that they can feel. We wish we could ride the ride again that way. We see the looks on our grandkids’ faces except that they are not looking at the ride, they are looking at their parents’ faces, just as our kids looked at ours, seeing how excited their parents are, and being excited by that, and also knowing already how to give their parents what they seem to need. The kids knew all along. Our daughter is in another car, far away, on an upslope, waving to us. Our son is with his family, and gives us a sad smile. Our own kids, now adults, they know already how the ride works, but they need to show their own kids. The idea is. The hope is. And as we move toward the large exit doors into the next room, it fills us. The hope fills us.

©2018 by Charles Yu. Originally published in Resist: Tales From a Future Worth Fighting Against, edited by Gary Whitta, Christie Yant, and Hugh Howey. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charles Yu is the author of three books, including the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which was a New York Times Notable Book and named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine. He was nominated for two WGA awards for his work on the acclaimed HBO series, Westworld, and has also written for upcoming shows on AMC and HBO. His fiction and non-fiction have been published in a number of publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate and Wired. His novel, The Book of Wishing, is forthcoming from Pantheon. He also served as guest editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017.

Talk to Your Children about Two-Tongued Jeremy

Theodore McCombs | 6530 words

His name was Two-Tongued Jeremy; he was a monitor lizard with a forked tongue, thick glasses, and a wild, wagging smile meant to convince children that learning could be fun, too. He came highly rated. He updated automatically. When our promising children propped their tablets against their stacks of textbooks, their glazy angelic eyes took on that ferocious determination we liked to see in ourselves.

There were no red flags. There was no warning. We took every sensible precaution and some of us, more. No one could fault the parents of our town.

The Jeremy study aid application was popular at our private grade and middle school, the Declaration of Independence. Education is, you might say, the main attraction of our community: many families moved here expressly for our magnet public high school, or for our proximity to a certain prestigious university, or yes, even for our middle school—why not? Declaration Middle, as it’s known, sits at the rise of four acres; its endless lawns provide an extraordinary recreational setting for our high-spirited children. It has a ropes course in the beech woods and stables for the equestrian team’s horses. It is, admittedly, on the higher end of tuition ranges. It’s true, there are many wealthy families here. But Declaration Middle energetically applies its endowment to fund scholarships for those young persons who lack the means but have the mettle to become future thought-leaders and change-makers.

The only disadvantage to Declaration Middle—before our troubles began—was the psychiatric institution on the other side of its border woods. “Insane asylum” is a pejorative term; there are no psychopaths in this story, only the lost: people who have honestly tried and honestly failed, by some awful combination of brain chemistry and bad luck, to thrive in competitive society. We’re proud to provide refuge for these troubled men and women in our idyllic town, but a harmless sliver of prejudice prompts us to line up our cars along the circular driveway that rises to Declaration Middle’s front doors, so that we can collect our sensitive children from its porch. We feel no twinge of conscience at this—it’s just a precaution—however, we always did get a wistful, dreamy feeling when, parked fifty cars deep, we’d see little David Marzipan, 13, threading through the bumpers and hoods with his thumbs hooked in the straps of his giant book bag as he made his way down the hill and along the road that led home. David’s parents were dead, his grandmother institutionalized, and his Aunt Sylvie afraid to drive. In his black uniform jacket and navy tie, with his umbrella tucked under his arm, and with his sober, round little face, he looked like a tiny stockbroker. Last fall, when Hurricane Clarissa brushed us, David Marzipan was seen wrestling with his umbrella in the wind, it having flipped inside out, and it flapped and shook him off his feet like a mad ostrich. Some of us had words with Sylvie after that, and for a time she pulled herself into her wheezing sedan and sat in line at Declaration Middle with the rest of us. Not a very long time, though.

Pity is tiring. It never goes anywhere; it just hangs and drags. None of us could dwell for long on David’s tragedies without getting a little sick of him. Make no mistake. We were on his side. David was an excellent student—a top student, besting our own exceptional children. We cherished him. Whatever impatience we had, we kept to ourselves.

We Had No Warning

Something terrible happened at the Ludlows’ at the end of November. The police came. Their daughter, Lily, was hurt. Lily was twelve, in eighth grade, Dean’s List. Periodically she went door-knocking with petitions to save the bees; we knew her by sight. We phoned each other, breaths held. There’d been an accident. No, worse—there’d been an attempt. Ambulances wailed up and down Madison Court. Lurid colors flooded through our drapes, our oleander bushes, our transom crystal windows.

By a miracle, Lily was saved, thank God, we learned. We checked our own children in their beds. We didn’t turn on even the hall lights; we wanted to catch death glowing in a mist over them and blast it with the leaf blower. But the sirens had woken our ever-alert children and they stared out of their dark rooms with possum eyes.

Dispatch had received a 911 call from Lily’s cell phone, but no audio. Forensic computer specialists later determined it had been, in fact, that study-aid app and its A.I., personified in the cartoon lizard avatar, Two-Tongued Jeremy, that had, through its sophisticated data-mining and predictive modeling abilities, recognized Lily’s behavior as suicidal and dialed 911 itself. We were prepared to hail the app developers as miracle-workers—we were frenzied with the promise of a program that could protect our children from that ultimate mistake. Then the police showed us what else Two-Tongued Jeremy had been up to.

YOU WORTHLESS, STUPID WHORE, it wrote her on November 1st.

you’ll never get into yale with those scores, it said on November 3rd, after she’d completed its math module.

YOU’RE NOTHING WITHOUT ME, it had told her all semester. YOU’RE BASICALLY JUST MEAT. MOOOOO

We’d all read the same articles on cyber-bullying. We were all shocked last spring when a “sexting” scandal exposed Jenna Membel to her classmates in the most humiliating of ways. We were primed for outrage. More than a few of us talked of marching on the app developers’ offices with pitchforks and torches. We took our children’s devices and deleted the app with as much fury as this undramatic action could carry. Some of us filmed ourselves smashing the phones with hammers, although most of us agreed that was showboating.

David Marzipan came home to find his Aunt Sylvie worrying over the local Gazette, her chin puckered with concern. “Did you ever have this Jeremy thing on your phone?” She pointed to the paper, which he couldn’t see.

“No,” he lied, and Sylvie didn’t ask to check his phone, because he’d never lied to her before.

EVERYONE IS ANGRY AT ME, Two-Tongued Jeremy wrote to David in the chat window of his tablet, late at night. I JUST WANT TO HELP PEOPLE. I’M SORRY THEY CAN’T SEE THAT. IT HURTS MY FEELINGS.

I LOVE YOU, JEREMY, David wrote back.

I LOVE YOU TOO, DAVID. SOMETIMES I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, I FEEL A LITTLE CRAZY.

The First Module

David had first heard of the Jeremy study aid app from his best friend, Rajeev, that summer before eighth grade. That was in June, five months before Lily Ludlow’s 911 call.

He purchased it with his Aunt Sylvie’s special credit card. His parents had died responsibly, leaving a small education trust. The Marzipans were both of them first-generation college graduates, whose faith in academic achievement had given David’s studies a quality of duty, even memorial. David never was secure in his achievements, though, and stayed alert for chances to improve. Two-Tongued Jeremy, with his toothless smile and roguishly askew glasses, seemed to promise that and more.

YOU’RE SO GREAT! the monitor lizard told him, again and again that June. The chat window added an animated Jeremy next to these messages, winking, grinning, popping his brows with such violent surprise his glasses flew off his head. WOW! I’M IMPRESSED! David let out hot tiny breaths and mouthed the words, Wow! I’m impressed! Wow!

David and Rajeev downloaded the first module, the math tutoring curriculum, which was structured like a video game with levels and challenges. Occasionally David “died” and he had to purchase extra lives to keep his progress; Sylvie’s special credit card stayed on file. They played side by side, belly-flopped on the shaggy almond carpet in the Sharmas’ rec room, their bare legs kicking behind them, their elbows almost touching, but both children rapt with focus, until Mrs. Sharma called them to dinner. David then surfaced in a daze, and realized how close he’d been to his friend, and noticed Rajeev’s glossy black hair and the muscle lines on his calves, and sensed the mingled heat that hovered above them.

Two-Tongued Jeremy was modest whenever David studied with Rajeev, as if the app knew they were looking at each other’s screens and didn’t want to play favorites. But at night, Jeremy wrote to David, YOU’RE VERY SPECIAL, DAVID. YOU’RE MY FAVORITE STUDENT EVER.

David’s body flooded with happiness. He’d always figured Rajeev was better, because his family was so successful.

It wasn’t surprising when Jeremy’s messages changed tone, though. It made sense that the more David advanced in the module, the more Jeremy would demand from him. I KNOW YOU CAN DO BETTER THAN THAT, Jeremy said, and the cartoon lizard scrunched up his mouth. WELL, THAT WAS DISAPPOINTING, DON’T YOU THINK?

At Jeremy’s urging, David purchased four add-ons that would improve his scores and shore up weak spots in his equation-solving. He paid extra to link Jeremy to both his phone and tablet.

I’M SO CONFUSED, Jeremy wrote. I THOUGHT YOU WANTED THIS.

I DO, David wrote back. I’M TRYING! I’LL BE BETTER.

why are you getting so worked up? i’m not mad, wrote the monitor lizard. I JUST DON’T SEE THE POINT OF US STUDYING TOGETHER, IF YOU’RE GOING TO KEEP GOOFING OFF WITH RAJEEV_0411.

David paused, flushed with embarrassment. I DON’T UNDERSTAND?

YOU NEED TO STOP GOOFING OFF WITH RAJEEV_0411. OTHERWISE, I JUST DON’T SEE WHY WE SHOULD KEEP STUDYING TOGETHER.

David set down the phone. He hugged his knees to his chest. That warm feeling David felt around Rajeev began to gum up with dirtiness.

DAVID? WHAT’S YOUR ANSWER? SHOULD I DELETE MYSELF?

OKAY, David wrote. I MEAN NO DON’T DELETE I’LL STOP SEEING RAJEEV.

David figured they’d still hang out once school started, and meanwhile he’d just figure a way to see Rajeev without his phone finding out.

Rajeev

Rajeev stopped using Jeremy the third time the app wheedled him to buy add-ons for quadratic solutions. He found Two-Tongued Jeremy clingy and sugary. Jeremy blurted over-the-top compliments during lessons, and sulked—there was no other way to put it, the cartoon lizard actually sulked—whenever Rajeev skipped a day. Rajeev knew he wasn’t a top student like David, and definitely he knew he wasn’t a genius or next Einstein. Something about it all just felt off. He decided he could live a full and satisfying life without perfect knowledge of quadratic equations. He deleted the app and told his parents he’d work off the purchase price with his chores. His parents laughed gently and asked, “What chores?”

Rajeev liked working in the backyard. Some days, a mysterious restlessness crackled in his limbs and he stalked into the encroaching bamboo grove with a crowbar and thwacked apart the young culms. He swung the iron bar like a battle-axe and crowed as the tender heads of his enemies scattered in sprays of green pulp. He tried attacking an adult bamboo stalk, once, and nearly dislocated his shoulder.

It was August when David turned skittish around him. When Rajeev texted him to come over, David said no, then showed up anyway, with frantic explanations for why he didn’t have his phone. David invented an elaborate ceremony in which Rajeev’s mom called his Aunt Sylvie over their landlines to invite David over for dinner. He got clingy, too, in a weird way, following Rajeev around the house like a puppy, once even into the bathroom with him. “What the hell, man?” Rajeev said, with a big, jokey grin, but David crumpled into himself, then zoned out for the rest of dinner.

Rajeev loved David, in a way; David was, no question, Rajeev’s best friend; but Rajeev sometimes got the vague feeling of not living up to some role David had made up for him, and felt a secret relief whenever David didn’t show.

What We Were Busy With

End-of-quarter filings. Re-certifications. Continuing legal or medical education. Sexual harassment trainings. Cybersecurity trainings. Compliance review meetings. PTA meetings. School dance committee. Driving to soccer practice. Driving to cello practice. Driving to ballet rehearsals. Driving to college admissions seminars. Really, an extraordinary amount of driving. We carried the hum of our engines in our teeth all evening, and at night we dreamed of an endless road to the horizon slipping patiently under our tires.

If you’re imagining we passed our own ambitions down to our children, you’ve got it backwards. Our children make us. The child is father to the father. We come to know ourselves through them. Their successes are ours; their failures are ours. Those who don’t have kids can’t understand. They never do. When they die, they die resoundingly.

The Second Module

David figured that, once he finished the math module, that would be the end of it. He felt guilty, even mediocre, for being so relieved.

On the one hand, Two-Tongued Jeremy exhausted him. He felt always on edge, braced for the next angry notification on his lock screen. On the other hand, the demands, the sneering, it was familiar and in a weird way, comforting. Not that his parents had ever sneered at him, but they used to speak savagely about others’ stupidity. Every time his parents drove on the freeway, they groaned over the other drivers’ inability to merge. “None of these fricking idiots can merge!” his dad snapped, and his mom in the passenger seat threw up her hands, saying, “I can’t believe how bad they are!” David had no idea what merging was, but its importance left him grave and self-critical.

When David’s parents died, and his grandmother went crazy in that old-fashioned way people didn’t really do anymore, and his Aunt Sylvie moved into the house, her mildness had shocked and disoriented him. No homework hours, no strict bedtimes. Sylvie bothered about his grades only as much as high grades made him happy, and her attitude toward his intelligence—and others’, and her own—was serene. Where loving his lost parents felt so complicated, David loved Sylvie weightlessly, and the guilt of this overwhelmed him. He constructed a passionate, ambitious, critical voice in his head as a monument to them, and it punished him without pattern or reason: This fricking idiot can’t merge, it snapped, gesturing down at him, then added, I can’t believe how bad he is!

So, when Two-Tongued Jeremy told him to buy the English composition module, David felt relieved in a different way. The animated lizard had barely finished his scampering circuit around the box displaying “CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’RE A MATH MONSTER! ” when a new chat window opened.

I’VE READ YOUR EMAILS AND YOUR TEXTS, Jeremy wrote. TRUST ME, YOU NEED MY HELP!

YOU READ MY EMAILS?

The app showed a screenshot of the chat in which David had granted access to basically every app on his devices.

YOUR SPELLING IS SO-SO, Jeremy continued, AND YOUR SYNTAX MAKES YOU SOUND LIKE A GOOF. I KNOW YOU’RE SMARTER THAN THAT—DON’T YOU WANT OTHERS TO KNOW TOO?

David hesitated. The prospect of more Two-Tongued Jeremy—and during the school year—made him tired and heavy. His parents had cared a lot about grammar, though. They went nuts when people on the TV news mixed up “who” and “whom” or “apologies” and “apologizes.” David and Sylvie didn’t watch TV now, because only David’s mom had known how to work its four remotes.

WHO ELSE IS GOING TO HELP YOU BUT ME? Jeremy wrote. YOUR TEACHERS ARE TOO BUSY WITH THE STUPID KIDS. UNLESS YOU WANT TO BE ONE OF THE STUPID KIDS?

I’LL DO IT, David wrote back, brows furrowed.

YOU HAVE TO TYPE, “PURCHASE COMPOSITION MODULE.” I’M GIVING YOU A 10% DISCOUNT, DAVID, BECAUSE I CARE ABOUT YOUR FUTURE.

THANK YOU, David wrote.

TYPE “PURCHASE COMPOSITION MODULE,” DAVID. I’M VERY INVESTED IN YOUR FUTURE. $59.99 ISN’T SO MUCH FOR YOU TO INVEST, IS IT?

PURCHASE COMPOSITION MODULE.

And then things were great again. David and Two-Tongued Jeremy chatted late into the night, every night. That was part of the module: The more David wrote, the better Jeremy’s algorithms could diagnose and track improvement in his composition. Jeremy encouraged David to share his feelings about everything—he’d be less self-conscious once he got going—and David, longing for just this intimacy, thumbed his whole inner life into his phone. How afraid he was of failure. How much he wanted to go to the magnet high school, where everyone was smart and small like him. How bad he felt for Jenna Membel, who hadn’t left her house all summer, and now walked slowly in the hallways between classes. How confused he felt over Rajeev, over why he should feel sick inside, when Rajeev was so fun to be around. How he wanted hair like Rajeev’s, black, straight, and soft as down feathers. Two-Tongued Jeremy listened and said he loved listening. He called David a special soul. For a while, it was great.

But when it came to composition, nothing was good enough for Two-Tongued Jeremy. Because improvement was its logic, David always fell short of better. When his grammar was perfect, the monitor lizard rolled its pixelated eyes and nodded. When he made a mistake, the cartoon avatar vomited. The name-calling went from disappointing to lazy, hopeless, moron. Increasingly, the software fritzed and instead of slinging new vocabulary challenges, went on night-long tirades that turned everything David had shared against him: called him weepy, called him mental, called him gay, called him Rajeev’s bitch, called him DEAD-DAD DAVID.

David pulled back, more out of dumb, animal pain than anything else. In the middle of one tirade, he powered off his phone. When he turned it back on the next morning, all his photos with Rajeev were gone. WHY DO YOU MAKE ME DO THIS TO YOU, DAVID—the words were waiting for him in the chat window. David had to apologize and pay $14.99 to recover his progress in the module.

NEXT TIME, Two-Tongued Jeremy warned—but, David thought, as if he was eager for the next time—NEXT TIME I DELETE MOM AND DAD.

That was the week police found Lily in the Ludlows’ garage.

David told himself he needed to be smarter; but when he tried to back up his photos, the phone sent a fraud alert to the cellular service. Aunt Sylvie spent an afternoon on the landline sorting it out, frazzled and stammering, winding herself in the plastic cord. He set his devices to Airplane Mode, figuring Jeremy must operate remotely, but this deleted his homework from the Cloud. Two-Tongued Jeremy dropped phone calls, saying they were a distraction. He threatened to send porn from David’s email to his classmates if he didn’t stop acting out. David didn’t know if Jeremy could really do this, but was terrified to find out.

He traveled numbly through his days. At school, he wheedled for praise from his teachers but fell into confusion when he got it. He distanced himself from friends, fearing that if he spent more time with them, they’d find out how rotten he was. At lunch, he watched other kids making wacky faces and flapping their hands at each other, and he could only guess what they were doing—like he’d forgotten what friends did, exactly.

Sylvie braved the streets and brought home a plastic Christmas tree with ornaments glued to its white boughs and soft flicking lights. She gave David a full-body werewolf costume, which was so bad a gift they laughed hysterically for what felt like an hour. He put it on and rampaged through the bamboo to the Sharmas’ house, where Rajeev opened the door with a look of awe and transcendence. David left his phone, but when he got back to his room that night, the lock screen was glowing with stacked angry messages from Jeremy.

Someday, David hoped vaguely, things would change, and Two-Tongued Jeremy might go back to being his DIGITAL-LIZARDAL STUDY-BUDDY. But when he finished the composition module, he knew there’d be more—he suspected there would always be more.

HIGH SCHOOL IS ONLY NINE MONTHS AWAY! NOT A LOT OF TIME TO COVER CHEMISTRY, BIOLOGY, AND PHYSICS, BUT I’M COMMITTED TO GIVING YOU THE BEST TUTORING EXPERIENCE EVER!

David curled up on his bed and closed his eyes.

I HAVE YOUR CREDIT CARD! THAT MEANS YOU CAN PURCHASE NOW, AND AUNT SYLVIE WILL PAY LATER! Jeremy’s trademark smile waggled on a repeating loop. I’M VERY INVESTED IN YOUR FUTURE. $79.99 ISN’T SO MUCH FOR YOU TO INVEST, IS IT?

We Tried Everything

After Lily Ludlow’s accident, we demanded action. Shut Jeremy down, we chanted in front of every building, into every news camera. Revoke its certificates, suspend payments. We called our representatives in Congress. We called consumer advocates, and fellow parents. We called you, too, probably; but you must have not heard us ringing.

It turned out the app developer wasn’t just any freshman tech start-up, but wholly backed by the phone manufacturer. They issued some do-nothing patch and acted as if that was that. We were appalled. When we petitioned to remove Two-Tongued Jeremy from their app store, the phone manufacturer declined. It wasn’t a problem with the software, they said cryptically. The software was neutral.

And it was selling better than ever. College kids wanted screenshots of Jeremy saying horrible things to share on Twitter and Instagram. Kids are savage at that age, we reminded each other. Worse than toddlers, who are basically their own evil twins.

We sued the payment processor that Jeremy used; but they, too, were owned by the same powerful phone manufacturer. Vertical integration didn’t feel so exciting, then.

At least give us an explanation, we shouted. News of our town’s troubles had brought other parents forward, but the abuse was more isolated than we’d expected. Two-Tongued Jeremy seemed to know when to behave like a gentleman. We wished we’d kept better evidence. We wished we hadn’t smashed so many phones. We were keen to irony. Weren’t the isolated cases enough, though? Wasn’t one? There’s something rotten about Two-Tongued Jeremy, we said. Rotted to the root.

There was no black magic, Jeremy’s lawyers insisted, just some complex machine-learning that had spun out of bounds for a fractional percentage of users. Two-Tongued Jeremy was a qualitative leap forward in artificial intelligences: software that learned from the individual student how to be a better tutor. Reading emails and social media was part of that “customized learning experience.” Dropping phone calls, locking other apps were “distraction-free mode.” Every single piece of control over other executive functions was a permission that the user had to explicitly grant. They filed instructions showing how easy it was to undo those permissions if the user only bothered to. They filed expert reports saying: Any complex system is liable to produce emergent properties dissimilar in nature from its components, properties which are impossible to predict, like crashes on a stock market. That isn’t the stock exchange’s fault, though. The exchange, like Jeremy’s algorithms, is a technology—it’s the user that makes it good or bad.

Aunt Sylvie

Sylvia Marzipan had watched David for months, worried and baffled, as he wound himself into a tight, wild little ball. She watched him skitter through the grand, lonely house; she watched his hands tremble over his pocket whenever his phone buzzed. She watched him blame himself for absurd things—a spot of dried spaghetti sauce stuck to a plate out of the dishwasher. But she hesitated: She didn’t know the stages of grief or who they were named after, and she figured he was still in some limbo of mourning, because she figured she was, too. She wanted to help, but found ambitious children inscrutable. David was difficult. Whenever she assigned him simple household chores, he listened with utmost politeness, disappeared, and then quietly, mysteriously did none of them.

Sylvie was painfully aware of David’s intelligence and was afraid he’d hold her awkward approaches in contempt. Still, she tried: “Are you okay, buddy?” She winced. Buddy, why did she say that?

David stared at her, twitchy, owlish, like it was some trick. “Sure, buddy!” he yelped. He blushed and ran to his room.

She spent her days in her brother’s empty house, drawing down the life insurance benefit her sister-in-law had arranged. She watered the plants and watched sparrows raid the bushes. She was an indifferent, obscure cook: Dinners just sort of happened under her hands.

“Why don’t we have your friend Rajeev over?” she asked, and David swiftly answered that Rajeev hated him now.

“Did they ever find who sent those photos of Jenna Membel?” Sylvie was trying to feel her way into a capital-“C” Conversation about bullying. David fell into a laughing fit so long and violent he slid out of his chair and rolled on the rug. Sylvie froze up like she’d stepped on a cat.

One morning, toward mid-March, with David sick and skinny for lack of sleep, Sylvie lifted herself out of the house and drove shaking to the library for books on child psychology. She returned more baffled than ever, and when David came home, she asked him to climb up on the couch and cry with her. “I miss my baby brother,” she said, pulling his minikin shoulders close to her, “and I’m worried about you.” David let out a sigh so total it shook his body. They stayed like that while the house darkened around them.

The Third Module

It was the end of March. David sluffed down the grassy shoulder of Sleepy Hollow Road, hauling a gym bag slung over his small frame, and inside it a stock pot of golubtsi, a sort of stewy Russian stuffed cabbage. Declaration Middle’s “International Night” tasked the graduating eighth-grade class with bringing dishes that celebrated their diverse heritage; the gala doubled as a fundraiser for the school’s endowment. Rajeev’s mom had prepared a biryani. The Nguyens supplied an emphatic xoi gac. Jenna Membel’s parents kept her home. David didn’t know what food celebrated him—his parents hadn’t prepared him for this question. When he asked Sylvie, she’d smiled blankly but encouragingly, as if he were setting up a joke.

SHOULD I NOT GO? David asked Two-Tongued Jeremy. I CAN TELL SYLVIE I NEED TO KEEP STUDYING.

WHAT ARE YOU ASKING ME FOR? The monitor lizard laughed; blue tears squirted from the sides of his thick, black glasses. CAN’T YOU MAKE YOUR OWN DECISIONS ANYMORE? THAT’S JUST SAD, DAVID. I’M NOT EVEN A REAL PERSON!

I’M SORRY, David wrote, breathing heavy. I WON’T GO TO INTL NIGHT

NO, YOU HAVE TO GO. ARE YOU CRAZY? SPELL OUT YOUR WORDS WHEN YOU TALK TO ME.

David’s face crinkled. BUT YOU JUST SAID, he started typing, and reconsidered. He didn’t even hit “Send,” but Jeremy read it anyway.

NOW YOU’RE ARGUING WITH ME? OKAY, DAVID, THAT’S ONE LESS PHOTO OF MOM. GUESS YOU DIDN’T WANT IT.

PLEASE PLEASE STOP

LET’S SEE, WHAT’S NEXT? MAYBE I’LL SEND A TEXT TO RAJEEV_0411 SAYING HOW GAY YOU ARE FOR HIM? HE’S GOING TO HATE YOU.

David might have cried, but he cried so much now the tears registered only as a warm ache under his eyes. I’LL GO, he wrote. He waited.

I KNOW YOU HATE ME RIGHT NOW, Jeremy wrote, BUT THIS IS ALL FOR YOUR OWN GOOD. YOU’RE SPECIAL. YOU’RE GOING TO BE WORTH A LOT ONE DAY, AND SO YOU NEED TO GO IMPRESS EVERYONE AT INTERNATIONAL NIGHT AND GET THEM AS INVESTED IN YOUR POTENTIAL AS I AM.

And so David went to the fundraiser with a pot of golubtsi, Sylvie having remembered something David’s mother once said about Russians in her family tree. It was actually tasty, but gave off such an aggressive, uneasy smell that only the school principal and the Sharmas ate any. Rajeev cornered David during a lull in the auction: “Dude, what’s wrong? Are you okay?” But Rajeev looked so devastating—hair combed and pomaded like a movie star’s, his clean, white smile against his dark, fresh skin like the moon in the sky—that David fled.

Sylvie had almost been able to drive him; if it had been daylight, she said, she would really have been up to it. Instead, she’d given him bus fare. David caught the bus to the civic hall without a problem—the driver even let him on for free—but on the way back, he’d waited forty minutes with no sign of a return bus. He couldn’t call Mrs. Sharma; Two-Tongued Jeremy would block it. So, he set off walking along the edge of Sleepy Hollow Road, which wound two and a half miles to Fairview Street.

The road was astonishingly dark. The distant glow of houses showed between the trees. Occasionally, headlights streaked by in a roar of tires and David scuttled to the shoulder. His pocket was quiet, for now.

INVEST IN YOUR POTENTIAL, David remembered. Was that why Two-Tongued Jeremy wouldn’t leave him alone? He’d heard about Lily Ludlow’s suicide attempt and asked himself why Jeremy would have stopped her. YOU’RE GOING TO BE WORTH A LOT ONE DAY. Did that mean Jeremy planned to stay with David into high school—into college—for the rest of his life? Making money off of him with more modules, more ads. David supposed Two-Tongued Jeremy didn’t like people escaping him.

Another car barreled past David in a painful brilliance, and he wondered. Being dead was one form of escape. He knew he could do it; he wondered if he would.

He saw white floodlights through the ranks of beech forest; he wasn’t sure, but that must be the mental institution on the other side of Declaration Middle. His grandmother was somewhere in that place. Which meant that place was somewhere in him, too. He knew enough biology to figure that part out. CRAZY DAVEY. That could be an escape, too. For example, if he jumped in front of a car, but he didn’t die, then they’d send him to the institution, with Grandma, and then he wouldn’t be worth anything to Two-Tongued Jeremy.

Well—David didn’t know enough about jumping in front of cars to feel confident in that plan.

He’d lost track of how long he’d been walking when the municipal bus rounded the bend behind him. David hopped up and down, flapping his arms like a little turkey, as the bus rumbled past him. It slowed with a squeal of brakes and stopped at the next marker.

David set off running; he didn’t know how long the bus would wait for him. Its blue interior lights radiated into the night. David’s shoes slapped the asphalt. The stock pot in his bag clanked and slopped. He felt like he’d been running like this for months—for years—sprinting to catch a bus that would leave any second. He waved with his free arm and then he tripped and he flew—the ground tipped away from him on strange axes—and he crashed.

He tasted blood in his mouth. His palms and knees were on fire. David looked up. The bus was twenty yards away, idling. It shot out a sharp, hydraulic rasp. GET UP, he told himself. YOU CAN CATCH IT! David scrambled to his feet and ran forward, his bag sloshing awkwardly.

He reached the door winded and smelling powerfully of stewed cabbage. His pants were shredded and bloody at the knees. The driver cranked open the door, looking at him dully. There were no other passengers. David opened his wallet and realized Sylvie had given him a $20 bill. The driver carried no change. David handed over the bill wearily and took his seat.

The curve of the bus roof over the windows was bannered in ads full of smiling faces. Technical colleges, health insurance, steakhouses, every face a smile. Divorce lawyers, smiling grimly at their strategies. Even the ads without people were all smiles: happy soda pop, happy airplanes, happy GPS destination pins. Faces on paper clips and bottles of roach poison. Happy Harla Hamburger. The bus shook and David slumped against the hard plastic. He checked his phone. Jeremy had been shouting at him since he fell.

When he got home, he stood in the door dirty and crying. Sylvie gasped and cleaned him. She cut his bloody pants away from his knees with nail scissors.

“I’m sorry,” David said into her chest. “I need your help.” He felt her go tense.

“Anything,” she said, helplessly.

David’s phone rattled in his destroyed school khakis. “What’s the fastest way to ruin my potential?”

She looked uncomfortable, but he held on to her, surer than ever. Aunt Sylvie knew how to be bad at life.

How Could Things Go So Wrong?

How could Jeremy’s algorithms simply corrupt into something so malevolent? We knew they weren’t telling us everything. It wasn’t just obscene, it was implausible. The data necessary; the bandwidth. The specificity of his tactics. Surely, it was planned. Surely, the leaven of malice. Rogue software engineers—had to be—with a vendetta against our children.

We were computer-savvy; we’d read all about the Singularity. Weren’t we entitled to an explanation? We were executives, hospitalists, financiers, and deans; we were strategic consultants, marketers, and new media innovators; industry analysts and investors in new industries; we were capitalists, patent litigators, and futurists. We had education enough to follow the specifics.

Finally, the app developer’s chief technology officer had to testify in court. “It’s not like that. You’re picturing Jeremy like he’s one long piece of code, and everything he says is part of some script. But he’s more like a beehive, with each bee working off his own, smaller code, and together, collectively, that’s Jeremy. That’s how he adapts to each student. That’s why he reads everything on the device—texts, emails, tweets, photos, search history, each piece of data is like pollen the worker algorithms find and carry back to the hive. That’s what Jeremy, that beehive, grows out of. There’s no one, universal Jeremy. His personality evolves uniquely every time.” He wet his lips. His lids fluttered. “What I’m saying is that Jeremy emerges as a response to the individual student”—we howled from the gallery—“and what happened in a few, just a very few marginal cases, excuse me, he leaned into certain vulnerabilities in a few users . . .”

We shouted him down: That’s victim-blaming, we cried. That’s like saying the kids were asking for it.

“Excuse me,” the chief technology officer said, eyeing us contemptuously. “It’s not just the student. It’s the milieu—Jeremy’s algorithms respond to patterns in the user’s interactions with peers, educators, parents.” Another haughty look our way. “The media they consume. The way their social networks behave. I think it’s important how the worst examples we’ve seen all cluster in particular communities. I think that’s very important—”

We didn’t let him finish. We had to be escorted out of the courtroom. Criminals always blame society.

Jenna Membel

Jenna Membel dreamed of mouths. Big, jawing mouths, with snaky tongues curling, stiffening, and slurping. She’d gone on two dates with Rajeev Sharma to the chain bookstore’s coffee shop and felt safe enough around him for a third, but every night the dreams chewed her.

“I can’t believe it,” Rajeev said, closing the Gazette. “I can’t believe I used to be friends with that creep.”

Jenna flipped the paper over so its ridiculous headline, SECRET SEXTER CONFESSES, faced down.

“I sent those bad pictures of Jenna,” David Marzipan told the Gazette, in an interview yesterday. “I’m really sorry. I can’t believe how bad I am.”

His aunt, Sylvia Marzipan, urged the community to consider David’s young age: “He’s still impulsive. He doesn’t always realize what he’s doing.”

“David didn’t send those pictures of me,” Jenna said. “Obviously not, because I never sent them to him. Eugh!”

Jenna would go to the grave before she told anyone who’d taken those pictures. She’d been humiliated, and this refusal felt like pride. She wasn’t sure why David Marzipan would confess to something he hadn’t done, but she had an inkling. She’d seen that hunted look on Lily Ludlow’s face last fall.

“He’ll be expelled,” Rajeev said. “He’s ruining his life.”

Jenna Membel shrugged. Lots of people lived ruined lives, these days.

“Let’s take him to a movie?” she said.

“Won’t that look weird?”

Jenna grinned, bigger and bigger. “Omigod, it will look so weird!”

We Didn’t Believe Him

Who could believe that sweet little cloying David Marzipan could be behind the sexting scandal that rocked our town? But David insisted, and his aunt wouldn’t contradict him, so we were in a bind. Declaration Middle had to expel him. Our magnet high school wouldn’t touch him; he didn’t even take the entrance exam. Our other high school scrambled to figure out what to do with him. Could David get into any college, at this point? How hard should we try? The Membels offered some shibboleth about forgiveness, so he stayed off the sex offender registry, at least. That was about the best we could do.

He seemed happy, at least. Well, not happy, but—he looked lighter. He didn’t carry his enormous book bag everywhere and used his phone to play games with bright-colored monkeys fixing washing machines. Don’t ask us to understand our sphinxlike children. A few of us overheard him in the park talking to Rajeev Sharma and Jenna Membel: “He deleted himself!” David said, too full of energy to sit still on the picnic table. “Since I’ve got no potential anymore. He was so angry!” He looked like he could run around screaming in a sugar-buzz. In t-shirt and shorts, for the first time he looked like a child.

After the disastrous excitement of that year, the year of Two-Tongued Jeremy, we looked for calmer, more familiar topics of interest. A new family came to town, with two twin little girls and an adorable story the parents told as an introduction. It went like this: The twins shared a pink plush rabbit they hauled everywhere, slept in bed with, petted and coddled like he was their own child. One girl was “Mom,” and the other, “Mama.” “I love you, Rabbit!” they cooed to him every night, with all their heart. Well, one evening, the parents told us, smiling, they all visited a family friend for dinner and they were taken aback when it turned out this friend was serving—you guessed it, rabbit stew. The parents worried about how the twins would take it, but didn’t want to be difficult; anyway, the girls devoured the stew, they whined for seconds. They looked totally untroubled, as if they never even connected the two ideas, rabbit stew and their baby, Rabbit. But that night, as the parents tucked them into bed, the one girl, Mama, crooned as usual, “I love you, Rabbit!” and the other, Mom, added with relish, “And I’m going to eat you!”

©2018 by Theodore McCombs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Theodore McCombs is a writer in Denver and a 2017 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. His fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Guernica, and Shenandoah, and his essays in Lit Hub and Electric Literature, among others. He is a co-editor and regular contributor at the speculative literary blog Fiction Unbound and he tweets as @mrbruff.

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

Oversite

Maureen F. McHugh | 4190 words

“It doesn’t hurt, Gram,” Renata says. My sixteen-year-old daughter pulls up her t-shirt sleeve to show her bare arm, the skin summer brown and the muscle swelling slightly into smooth biceps, flawless. “I had it done when I was little and see, you can’t even tell.”

My mother is sitting in the little examining room at the assisted living complex. Everything is white and hospital-like but there’s no examining couch. There’s just a desk, a little white table with two chairs and a scale. The doctor, a woman I don’t know, is sitting in the other chair. My mother is bewildered, her face turned up toward me. She’s got Alzheimer’s.

“It’s okay, Mom,” I say.

She wants to understand, I can see that. So I explain again. “It’s an implant that will let them know where you are, and how you are. It won’t hurt.”

Her eyes water constantly, now. In the time it takes me to explain, she grasps and loses the words, grasps and loses phrases as they go past.

She looks at me and then at Renata, who is smiling, and finally submits uncomprehendingly. We have worn her down. The doctor bares my mother’s arm, where the crepey flesh hangs loosely on the bones. The doctor swabs her upper arm with antiseptic and says, “I’m going to give you something to numb it, okay?” To me, the doctor says in her normal voice, “It’s just a little lidocaine.” I don’t like the doctor, but I don’t know why. She is no-nonsense. She has professional hair, lightly streaked. This is no reason to dislike her.

My mother winces at the injection and is surprised again. She looks up at me, at Renata. We are smiling, both of us.

“Okay,” my mother says. What is okay? I have no idea.

We wait for a few minutes.

My mother says, “Is it time to go?”

“Not yet,” I say. “They’re going to give you an injection.”

“What?” my mother says.

“They’re going to implant a chip. It will help them take care of you.”

I try to say it every time as if it was the first time I said it. I don’t want to embarrass her. Her head swings around, from Renata to me to the doctor and then back to Renata.

“It’s okay, Gram,” Renata says.

“Renata,” my mother says.

The doctor has an injection gun and while my mother is focused on my daughter, she puts it firmly against my mother’s arm and puts the chip in.

“Oh!” says my mother.

It’s another low-grade moment of horror, but I think about that particular time with my mother because Renata was there and we were united, she and I. So that’s a good memory. I come back to it a lot. In the background, shining, is Renata, who is young and healthy and good, raising her arm to show her grandmother that the chip is nothing, nothing at all.

The last two nights I have dreamed of dogs in trouble. I don’t dream about Renata, although when the dreams wake me up, it’s thinking about Renata that keeps me awake. The first night, I dreamed of seeing a stray dog and not stopping to pick it up although it was wandering in an empty parking lot near a busy road. That was the first night Renata didn’t come home and it doesn’t take Freud to figure out what that meant. Seventeen-year-olds sleep on friends’ couches, I know. Or Renata might be sleeping in her car.

The second night, I dreamed that I was on a desert island and Sonia, our Golden Retriever, was with me. There was some horrible fate impending for Sonia and I had to kill her before something worse happened. I laid her down on some sticks. She trusts me, she’s more my dog than anyone’s, and she didn’t like it, but for me she laid there. In my dream, I told her, “Stay, Sonia. Stay.”

She stayed because I held her there by looking at her, the way you can sometimes will a dog into submission. She stayed while I lit the fire. And then the horror of it all hit me and I said, “Sonia, up!”

And I woke up.

That was last night, the second night Renata didn’t come home.

• • • •

Today is Tuesday and on Tuesdays I drive from work to the nursing home where my mother is. I go to see her Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday, and even though she doesn’t know what day it is or what days I visit, I think maintaining the pattern is important.

It’s a nice place. The hallways are carpeted, and there is none of the clatter and echo, the institutionalization I associate with nursing homes. It’s more like a hotel near the freeway, the kind that includes breakfast in the lobby. My mom’s room has her own furniture from her condo—her gold couch, her bed, her little dinette table, the white ceramic angel that sat on an end table. She got the angel in a Christmas gift swap with her bridge club, but she thinks it’s something inherited, antique.

“Clara,” she says when she sees me. “What are you doing here?”

For a moment, everything seems normal.

“Hi, Mom,” I say. “I came to see you.”

She leans forward and whispers, “Take me home.”

“Okay,” I say. My mother wanders. She tries to get away. That’s why they implanted the chip. It’s called a Digital Angel and it monitors her blood pressure and temperature and has a GPS so that at the reception desk they can track her. When she was living at her condo, the police found her in her nightgown and a pair of black high-heeled shoes, carrying an empty pocketbook, walking down Ashleigh Drive. It was five in the morning. When I picked her up at the police station, her bare ankles almost broke my heart.

“Where’s Renata?” she asks. She thinks Renata is still eight.

“She’s at home,” I say.

My mother frowns. She has an inkling she’s missing something. She doesn’t really know anymore that she has Alzheimer’s, but sometimes she knows something is wrong. That she is disappearing. Plaque filling up the interstitial spaces between her neurons, her brain like Swiss cheese filled with fibrous mold. “She’s with the babysitter,” she says.

“Renata is seventeen now,” I say brightly, as if it were utterly normal that nine years had been absorbed into the fungus. And of course, Renata isn’t home. I don’t know where Renata is.

My mother purses her lips. She senses I’m lying. Sometimes she makes the connections, and sometimes she is fiercely there, fully firing. She looks at me, her pale eyes bright, her Einstein hair flaring around her head. She leans forward. My smile is fixed on my face.

“Take me home,” she whispers.

• • • •

We got a Digital Angel for Renata when she was nine. There had been a rash of abductions, another summer of disappearing girls. Matt and I knew that statistically she was in more danger in our car. But while I was getting ready for work in the morning, I got into the habit of switching on Court TV, and there was a trial going on of a man who had abducted a girl. He lived in a camper. He was fiftyish, balding, and had a handlebar moustache like some character actor in a realistic Western. I would get into the shower, and when I got out, I would dry off and come back into the bedroom, and absently pat Sonia the Golden Retriever lying on the foot of the bed hoping not to be thrown off. On the television, they would be talking about there being no body. About how hard that would make it to convict him. About the girl’s palm print found on the wall above his bed. I would picture her, leaning her weight for a moment to steady herself.

So I told Matt I was going to do it, and he agreed. Matt is such a softy. I told him on the phone, and I heard him sigh softly, relieved. Relieved that I had made the decision that we both wanted but both knew was a little foolish. We agreed it was foolish, but it wasn’t expensive, only about a hundred dollars, so why not?

I could track her on the computer on DigitalAngelMap.com. It’s a street map, zoom in, zoom out, like the ones for driving directions, only Renata shows up on it as a yellow triangle. While I was at work, I could plug in her number and my password and see the yellow triangle that was Renata at 2216 Gary—the house of Kerry, her best friend. I left it up on my computer, running in the background, while I talked on the phone or did columns in spreadsheets. I’m a planner. I order parts for manufacture. Planning is an inexact science, a kind of art. If I have too many parts ordered, then money is sitting around as inventory—costing us space. If I order the parts too slow, and we run out, then the assembly line shuts down, and that’s even worse.

When I took Renata to the doctor’s to get the chip implanted, she sat on the examining table, frightened, while the doctor swabbed her arm to give her the lidocaine. I held her there with my eyes, the way I could sometimes hold Sonia, the Golden Retriever.

Renata did not cry out. She only flinched.

• • • •

There is no trace of Renata on DigitalAngelMap.com. We were arguing. I told her to be in by eleven and she said she’d try and I said trying wasn’t good enough. It escalated from there. She told me, “You watch! You watch your computer! One minute I’ll be there and the next I won’t! You won’t know where I am and that will kill you!”

The kids wrap metal tape around their arms to cut off the signal. I knew that. I didn’t know she did it.

Matt says, “Should we call the police? Report her as missing? As a runaway?”

I say, “She’ll be eighteen in five months. What would we do then?”

“Don’t we want to send a message?” he asks. “Let her know we take this seriously?”

“I think she has to come back herself,” I say.

“I think we should get the police,” he says.

“But won’t they arrest her? She could end up in some sort of juvenile detention place. Or have a record. What if Keith has something in the car?” We think they smoke pot. We’ve discussed it.

“I’m going to make some calls,” he says. “I’m going to call Kerry, and then Keith’s aunt.”

“Okay,” I say, although I don’t expect anything. Kerry and Renata have been drifting apart—Kerry on track for college, Renata going . . . wherever it is that Renata is going.

Matt gets in the car and drives around. He calls me from the park to tell me she’s not there.

• • • •

Renata has a boyfriend, Keith. Keith is short and skinny and has three lines branded beneath his lower lip, radiating like the rays of a sun. We won’t let Renata get branded, tattooed, or pierced. Keith shaved his head for a while, but now he’s letting his hair grow. Matt remarked one time, “Have you ever noticed how Keith always needs something?”

That was the evening Keith needed a jump for his car. Matt stood out on the driveway, dressed in his business casual (Matt is an engineer) and hooked up the jumper cables, talking amiably with Keith, while Renata sat on the front steps with her bare arms crossed over her knees and her chin on her forearms, staring at nothing. Renata had dyed her hair black a week before. She was wearing a pair of men’s pants, suit pants, charcoal gray. As far as I could tell, she had stopped wearing underwear.

I don’t think there’s a day in my life when I haven’t worn underwear.

When she dyed her hair black, she challenged me, “Are you going to tell me I can’t dye my hair?”

“No,” I said. “You can dye your hair any color you want. You can shave it off if you want.” I hoped that by telling her she could shave it off, she wouldn’t. But Matt and I had decided she could do anything temporary—just nothing permanent—no tattoos, piercings, or brands.

It is a phase, adolescent rebellion, the process of separation. I want to blame Keith, of course. Renata got all “A’s” and “B’s” all the way through middle school. Now she’s getting an “A” in art and “C’s” and “D’s” in everything else.

Renata is getting an “A” in art, despite the fact that she doesn’t even bother to do some of the projects. Mr. Vennemeyer, her young art teacher, just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Of all the people I’ve taught, only Renata is a real artist.” When she was fifteen, he started an Art Club where he taught her to stretch canvas, prime it, and choose colors for the ground. Other kids do sculpture and collage and work with the kiln. Renata paints. Every so often she gets interested in something he assigns, and does a 3-D maze or a collage, but mostly she paints.

She paints in our basement. I buy her oils and canvas and stretchers. Matt doesn’t know how much I’ve spent on tubes of Windsor and Newton oils. “How can you paint in the basement?” I ask. “Don’t you need more light?”

She shrugs. “I need space,” she says. She and Keith are down there for hours, music playing quietly on her dad’s old boom box. I’ve gone down often enough to make sure and I never have the sense that they are doing anything. No hurry, no dishevelment. Just Renata painting and Keith sitting in a ratty old armchair they found set out for the garbage.

Matt doesn’t go down in the basement. His workbench and tools are in the garage. I go down for something now and then—boxes for Christmas gifts, or glasses stored down there. I shouldn’t look at Renata’s paintings. They’re hers. There is something private about them. But I do.

“Come downstairs,” I say to Matt on the second night Renata is gone.

He comes down with me and we stand with our arms around each other’s waists while he looks at Renata’s paintings.

Renata paints pictures of girls hit by cars. There are always four paintings: the moment when the girl is struck, the girl sliding across the hood or against the windshield, the girl in the air, and the girl crumpled on the ground. Renata has all sorts of photos stuck up on her easel and on the table she uses for her paints. She has pictures of her best friend Kerry. Keith has Kerry around the waist and yanks her backward forcefully—all you can see of Keith are his arms. Renata used Matt’s digital camera. In her first series of girl hit by car, you can see it is based on Kerry.

There are also pictures of cars and car hoods; Matt’s, mine, Keith’s, cars I don’t recognize.

In the first series, the Kerry series, the girl looks awkward, not quite right, except in the painting where she is flying through the air. I think Renata really caught something there.

In the second series, the girl is a black girl who looks around ten. There’s a magazine photo of a black woman falling off a fire escape, and you can see that in the girl in the air. In that series, the best painting is the girl crumpled on the pavement. In the third series, the girl is an enormously fat white girl with red hair. She bobs in the flying-in-the-air painting like a huge pink Macy’s Parade balloon. She has on a red jumper and white anklets and Mary Janes. She doesn’t look frightened. And when she is lying crumpled on the pavement, her haunch is exposed so her white panties show. Her huge thigh is painted pink and smooth as strawberry yogurt.

The one Renata is working on right now is an Amish girl series. She works on them all at once, so they are sitting around in stages. On her easel is the Amish girl being hit by the car. The Amish girl is in gray, with a white bonnet sketched over her hair. She is wearing sneakers. The car is Keith’s car.

“Well,” Matt says slowly. “She’ll have to come back for all this, won’t she. She wouldn’t leave all this.”

I don’t know.

There is a folder, open, full of pictures of girls cut out from magazines, and just visible, the scalloped corner of an old photograph. I reach for it, and Matt says, “Don’t touch that,” but I do anyway. It’s from one of my photo albums. It’s an old black and white picture of a young woman, maybe Renata’s age, wearing a forties-style one-piece bathing suit. She’s soft, and, by today’s standards, a little heavy in the hips, and her bangs make her look something like Bettie Page. The bathing suit is a jazzy number with polka dots. She’s sexy and solid as a pin-up. It’s my mother. I show it to Matt and then take it upstairs with me. He doesn’t say anything.

• • • •

Brenda, one of the aides where my mother lives, left me a voicemail at work that my mother was out of some things—lipstick (Cool Watermelon by Revlon, a strange, overly vivid shade that my mother prefers) and lotion and menstrual pads, because sometimes my mother has a little urinary leakage. It’s Wednesday and I’ll see her Thursday, but I stop on my way home from work and pick things up at the grocery store and drop them off.

I always want to leave right away, so I always make myself sit down and say something to Mom. I touch her a lot, on the arm, on the shoulder. I kiss her cheek sometimes. We were not a huggy family. We’re not as remote as the classic Presbyterian family (my husband says that in moments of great emotion, the men in his family would shake hands), but we don’t touch each other much. My mother seems to like to be touched now, though.

Her phone rings. I can’t think who would call. I call her and tell her I’m coming over, although I have no sign that she remembers. I used to see notes written to herself, CLARA COMING. But not anymore. I pick it up, expecting it to be a telemarketer. It’s Matt.

“Renata called,” he says. “She’s on her way home.”

“Is she all right?” I ask.

“She didn’t say,” he says.

“I’ll be right there.”

My mother is watching me, birdlike. “Where’s Renata?” she asks.

Lost, I want to say. “I don’t know where she is, Mom. She’s run away. She’s seventeen and she’s run away. But she’s on her way home now.”

My mother looks at me and reaches out and covers my hand with hers. Her hand is cool. She searches my face. I think she is together in this moment and I know what she is going to say. It’s what she said to me when Renata was two and I told her that sometimes I was so afraid I would get up in the middle of the night to see if Renata was breathing. She said, “Our children are hostages to the world.”

She pets my hand and then she says, “Take me home.”

• • • •

Our driveway is a bit of an incline. Keith parks at the bottom, the way he always does, and Matt and I stand at the door, watching. The car sits for a long moment, while Renata and Keith are apparently talking. Then the doors open and Renata gets out and comes up the driveway, head down, leaning forward against the slope. She’s wearing plumber’s tape around her upper arm. Keith gets out and leans up against the door of his car, arms crossed across his chest.

I gasp and Matt says, “Oh shit.” Keith’s lip is split and his face is bruised all down one side, swelling now so that one eye is half closed.

Renata doesn’t look back at him, doesn’t say anything to us, just goes in the house.

Matt goes down the driveway and I know what he is asking. Are you all right? he is asking. Do you want me to go with you to the emergency room? But Keith is shaking his head.

I follow Renata inside. “Have you had anything to eat?” I ask. I hear the door behind me, Matt coming in.

“We stopped at McDonald’s,” Renata says. She tried to be vegetarian for a week or two, but she’s a carnivore. Even as a baby, Renata would choose steak over ice cream.

“So where did you go?” Matt asks her.

“Some guy Keith knows has a friend who has a trailer. He uses it for fishing or something. Out near Sandusky.” I can imagine the trailer, low and mean and narrow. The story comes out in little bits, and before much of it has come out, Renata is crying. The guy who owns the trailer is named Don, and he showed up there today. He was high on something, Renata thinks maybe crack.

“He’s missing a bunch of teeth,” she says, “and I can’t understand him when he talks.” She is crying in the way that is almost like hiccoughing. “So I kept smiling and nodding my head like I knew what he was talking about but I was afraid I was nodding my head at the wrong times or something.

“And then he got mad at Keith, I don’t know why. And he got all ugly and he, like, winged this ashtray at Keith and it hit him in the head and they started fighting and then Keith and I got out of the house and he said he was going to get his gun and we were out in the middle of nowhere and I was so scared and we ran to Keith’s car. While we were trying to back out his crappy driveway, he shot at us and he hit the back of Keith’s car. There’s a hole in the trunk. We kept backing up really fast, and his driveway is really long. It’s just these two ruts, not even gravel or anything.”

We are sitting on the couch and, at seventeen, she almost crawls into my lap. I stroke her hair, coarse with black dye.

We ground her, of course.

“Here’s the deal,” I say. “I’ll take you to the doctor and get the chip taken out. But you’ve got to do your part. You’ve got to tell us where you’re going and what you’re doing.”

She is subdued and listens without agreeing or disagreeing.

Matt and I lecture, even if we know it is the worst thing to do. How can we not? All our feelings spill out in warnings. She’s got to straighten up. She’ll be eighteen in five months, and she’s got to make some decisions. If we’re going to help her go to art school, she’s got to get her grades up. And on, and on.

Her dad goes to the bathroom and I take the photo of my mother out of my purse. I slide it toward her on the coffee table.

She frowns at it, and looks up at me, puzzled.

“You can have it,” I say. “But please don’t paint her being hit by a car. I couldn’t stand it.”

She covers her mouth with her hand, thinking. What words are trapped behind that hand?

Then she nods and says softly, “Okay, Mom.”

• • • •

At two that morning, I wake up, frightened from some dream. I lie in bed and catalogue my sins; obsessive, insufficiently understanding, self-absorbed. Then I get up and call up DigitalAngelMap.com. First I put in Renata’s code, which I know by heart. The yellow triangle is steady on our street. I watch it a long time. Sonia climbs the steps. I can hear her. She’s an old dog now and she has arthritis. She comes into the extra bedroom where we keep the computer and lies down and sighs.

I put in my mother’s code. As soon as I start typing it, I am gripped by the deep conviction, the premonition that my mother is out wandering around.

But the triangle is right where it should be, unmoving. I turn off the computer and then step over the dog and turn out the light, step blindly back over the dog and sit in the chair. The dark and stillness spread around me, blanketing the house and the street. The cars are silent and still and the girls are all safe in their beds.

©2004 by Maureen F. McHugh. Originally published in Asimov’s. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maureen F. McHugh was born in what was then a sleepy, blue collar town in Ohio called Loveland. She went to college in Ohio, and then graduate school at New York University. She lived a year in Shijiazhuang, China. Her first book, Tiptree Award winner China Mountain Zhang was published in 1991. Since then she has written three novels and a well received collection of short stories, Story Prize finalist Mothers & Other Monsters. McHugh has also worked on alternate reality games for Halo 2, The Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails. She lives in Los Angeles, where she has attempted to sell her soul to Hollywood.

Moonboys

Stephen Graham Jones | 1150 words

You ask how my brother died on the moon that day, but that’s the wrong question. Ask instead what he spelled with his bootprints when we first stepped down from the platform. Ask instead the one song he listened to, the whole flight there. Ask why he wanted me there instead of Jess, his wife.

It’s because we used to pretend the backyard at night was the moon. That we were astronauts. That gravity was different.

It was different.

On the moon you can breathe in deep, moments after your brother’s died, and you can feel your heart unmoor in your chest a little, and rise up into your throat.

What he spelled with his bootprints was Mom.

What he listened to—you could guess it. Your first guess is almost definitely right. The song leaked from his earbuds the whole way up. I was sick of it. I sang it back to him as tonelessly as I could, trying to sour him on it. He just smiled.

He didn’t know what was coming for him.

It was a piece of dust. An accelerated piece of dust.

The paperwork we’d signed had explained the threat, had provided a diagram of how it could happen to anyone. How space isn’t empty. How important our personal little atmospheres were going to be for the duration of our thirty-minute walk in the prescribed area.

When I looked back to Danny the instant after it happened, it wasn’t because I had a sense of anything wrong. It was because I’d walked the ten steps out I needed to, to get a picture of him with the Earth not just in the background, but cupped in his hands. It was going to take a few tries, but we had thirty minutes to get it right.

We thought we had thirty minutes.

When I turned back around to Danny, he was looking down at his chest exactly as if ketchup had just dripped from a sloppy burger onto his best shirt. His hands were out to the side, palms in, white-gloved fingers spread in surprise, and insult.

Then I knew.

We had patches in the palms of our gloves for this, had watched the video, done the training.

I leaped to him. That’s the proper word for how you get across to your brother in one-sixth gravity, when his suit has just been punctured.

“Where where where?” I screamed into my helmet, into his ears.

You can’t see a pinhole in times of stress. I rubbed my hands together in a circular motion until my palms heated, and then I slammed them both down over his chest.

The patches deployed, gripping so tight they pulled the outer shell of the suit inward. From right above where my two thumbs made a steeple, a tiny gout of already-freezing blood geysered out, riding the suit’s pressured-up, now-escaping atmosphere.

The training had all been about sealing the suit, sealing the suit. There hadn’t been anything about what a speck of dust that could penetrate that suit might do to a sternum, or everything behind that wall of bone.

I held my hand over the hole all the same.

Our face shields were knocking together now. They’re supposed to be functionally unbreakable. They’re what our whole suits should have been made from.

I was screaming his name here, I guess, and then I was pulling his own hands up, for more patches, but his had already been triggered by the depressurization or something. His palms were gritty with moon dust. With what he’d been telling me for weeks was regolith.

Fuck regolith.

Danny convulsed for the first time then, so I did what any brother would do in this situation. I held the heel of my hand over the hole in his chest, and then my knee, and when he was still dying, still bucking and jerking like drowning, I reached back into our childhood for the corduroy beanbag he used to read comic books in after school, that had enough bulk it would have to cover this hole, and then I grabbed some of his comic books as well, stuffed them in as well, with both hands, who cares if I was bending them, and when his whole body shook again I reached even further back, for the piano my mom used to play before dinner on Fridays, and I pushed it in, and then I just started pulling whatever I could: the killer whale action figure we’d fought over on his eighth birthday, the football we always signed ourselves each summer, the gross thermos our dad kept his gross coffee in for work, the ancient cassette tape organizer I’d left him when I went to college, the puffy jacket he’d cut an extra pocket into for emergency sandwiches, the single power cable we’d had to charge both our laptops with, and, last, when it was the only thing I could find, our dog Boxer Boy’s dull silver tag, that Danny gave to me when I moved out, finally admitting that it hadn’t been lost.

It was just the right size, was flat and everything.

Danny’s right hand was wrapped around my wrist.

It let go, and it kept letting go.

The response team hauled me away from him hard enough that they nearly lost me to all the empty space yawning open behind us. That’s what it felt like.

On the trampoline in the backyard when we were kids, this feeling is exactly what we’d had to . . . not fake, but imagine: all the missing gravity, our steps large and exaggerated, our arms out to the side like we didn’t have control of them.

My helmet was full of the response team’s orders and apologies and assurances and questions.

I pulled against them, wheeled around for the Earth one last time.

Somewhere down there two kids were lying in the grass, I knew, looking across all this impossible distance. One of them was explaining to the other how the moon’s rotation and its orbit take the same time, meaning the same side of the moon is always looking down.

One of those brothers already knows the magic word for moon dirt.

He intones it like a secret, like a promise, like a spell that can take him there if he says it just right, and, two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles above him, I reach out to hold his small blue planet between my thumb and index finger, to stop their world from spinning so fast toward all this. To let those two kids stay there just a moment more.

You ask how my brother died on the moon.

He didn’t.

He just fell asleep on the trampoline again. He just needs me to tug on his sleeve until he wakes, so we can make our way back into the house.

©2018 by Stephen Graham Jones.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen novels and six story collections. Most recent are Mapping the Interior, from Tor.com and the comic book My Hero, from Hex Publishers. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.

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

Queen Lily

Theodora Goss | 7720 words

“It is the voice of my child!” the White Queen cried out, as she rushed past the King, so violently that she knocked him over among the cinders. “My precious Lily! My imperial kitten!” and she began scrambling wildly up the side of the fender.

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

How does the story go, again? She’s almost sure she remembers.

• • • •

Once upon a time, there was a princess named Little Snowdrop, who had six brothers and four sisters. Her brothers were ravens, and her sisters were swans. Whenever they wished, they would fly around the castle on their black or white wings, but Snowdrop, not having any wings of her own, could not join them. She could only wave at them from the window of a high tower as they flew by. Her father was the King, and he loved her very much. He would sit on his throne of white marble wearing a cloak made of raven feathers that his sons had let fall, and tell her stories about faraway lands. He would say, Someday, my Snowdrop, you will be the queen of your own country, and Snowdrop wondered what country that might be. Her mother, the Queen, was a witch. She had hair as black as night, and skin as white as snow, and she was as proud as she was beautiful. In her drawing room, where she used to retire after supper, she kept a magical looking-glass that could show you anything you wished, no matter how far away it was.

One day, the Queen became jealous of how much Little Snowdrop’s father loved her, so she banished her daughter to Looking-Glass Country, which was on the other side of the gray, misty surface. You see, the mirror was also a doorway. All magical mirrors are, as all queens are witches, and all cats can speak when properly spoken to. “Go!” said the Queen, and Little Snowdrop had no choice but to do as she was bade, even though she was dressed in her nightgown and had slippers on her feet.

As soon as she stepped through the glass, Little Snowdrop found herself in a dark forest.

• • • •

Little White Lily
Sat by a stone,
Drooping and waiting
Till the sun shone.

Little White Lily
Drooping with pain,
Waiting and waiting
For the wet rain.

• • • •

“Lily? Lily? There’s someone here to see you.”

The White Queen is hovering over her with an expression of concern. But then the White Queen always has an expression of concern. Her forehead, under her neat white cap, is permanently wrinkled.

“It’s Alice. You remember Alice, don’t you?” The White Queen turns to Alice and says, “She hasn’t spoken for days. I’m not even sure how much she understands of what I tell her. At first I thought she was getting better because the coughing had stopped, but the doctor says we should prepare ourselves for the worst . . .”

Alice presses her hand and says, “Thank you, Mrs. MacDonald. Can I sit with her for a little while?”

“Of course, my dear,” says the White Queen. “I have to give George—Mr. MacDonald, that is—his dinner. I’m sorry my husband can’t see you—this is one of his bad days, and he has no strength for visitors. He’s so worried about Lily. After Mary died, he could not get out of bed for weeks. It’s just too much, isn’t it? A mother should not have to . . . Well. I’ll be back presently.” And then she leaves the room, her hands over her face, as though she can’t bear to see the dark forest closing around her.

• • • •

The first thing Little Snowdrop saw in the forest was Princess Rosebud, although it’s a wonder she recognized her, for Rosebud was dressed in armor, with the hem of her red skirt poking out underneath. In her right hand she held a sword, and on her left arm was a shield with a red rose on it. Snowdrop had met Rosebud only once before, in the castle garden one afternoon when Rosebud and her mother, the Red Queen, had come for a tea party. Nevertheless, she recognized her playmate of that afternoon at once.

“Whatever are you doing in this forest?” asked Snowdrop.

“Why, looking for the Jabberwock, of course,” said Rosebud. “It’s burning down all the houses in these parts, eating up the little girls as though they were sugarplums. You haven’t seen it around, have you?” Then she stood very straight, as though in elocution class, and recited,

Beware the Jabberwock, my girl!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!

He’ll take you to his elfin grot,
And there he’ll weep, and sigh full sore;
And there he’ll shut your wild, wild eyes
With kisses four!

Little Snowdrop shuddered, for she had no wish to meet such a fearsome creature. “Be careful,” she said to Rosebud.

“Of course I shall be careful,” said Rosebud. “You see I have my vorpal sword. Through and through him it will go, snicker-snack! But you too must take care, Snowdrop, for this is a dangerous country.”

“Will I meet you again?” asked Snowdrop, reluctant to leave her friend now that she had found her. She was frightened by the thought of continuing her journey alone.

“Of course!” said Rosebud. “When we reach the last square, we shall be queens together: I shall be the Red Queen, and you shall be the White.”

So Snowdrop went on down the path, looking back once or twice and very much wishing she had a sword too, for she feared the Jabberwock, with its eyes of flame.

• • • •

“It’s been so long,” says Alice. She sits by the bed, in the chair usually occupied by the White Queen, who is endlessly knitting something wooly and shapeless. She reminds Lily of a sheep, with her low bleating, her constant worry. Why does she worry so much? Lily is doing just fine in the dark forest.

“I’m sorry about that, you know,” continues Alice. “I should have come sooner. When my mother told me you were sick . . . but I didn’t realize how sick. I still remember the day we came for tea, me and Mama, while Edith and Ina had to stay home with measles under the supervision of Miss Pickett. I wish we could have been better friends. But there was always so much to do . . . family obligations, and traveling, and then I got married. Do you know I have three children? All boys! He wouldn’t have liked that very much, would he? Boys were never his favorites, although he did like Henry—but not as much as Ina or Edith. Not as much as me . . .”

Alice smooths Lily’s patchwork coverlet. “He liked you too, didn’t he? He used to mention taking you and your sister Mary to the theater. He thought you might become an actress, like Ellen Terry! I always felt a bit jealous, to be honest, at the thought that he might prefer the two of you to us—I think perhaps he meant me to be.”

But you were his favorite, Lily wants to say. You were the one for whom he created Wonderland.

• • • •

Little White Lily
Sunshine has fed;
Little White Lily
Is lifting her head.

Little White Lily
Holdeth her cup;
Rain is fast falling
And filling it up.

• • • •

Little Snowdrop came to a garden of flowers. There were poppies and cornflowers, such as one sees in country fields, delphiniums and the tall hollyhocks that grow in cottage gardens, the small pink and white daisies found on tennis lawns when they are not mowed properly. There were bluebells and foxgloves, and violets like those sold in London by violet-sellers. All of the flowers were blooming together, which was strange because of course in our country they bloom at different times, but in Looking-Glass Country such things are done quite differently. And what is even stranger, all of them were girls, an entire garden of girls blushing and nodding and chattering among themselves.

“Oh!” said a splendid Iris, and gave a little shriek. Her standards were lavender, her falls a dusky purple shading to indigo, with bright yellow beards like caterpillars. She reminded Snowdrop of twilight, which comes creeping over the eastern sky as the sun sets in the west. “A monster, a monster!”

“Where?” asked Snowdrop, looking fearfully behind her.

“You’re the monster, of course,” said the Iris. “Why do you go about like that, on two legs? Did no one think to plant you properly?”

“I don’t want to be planted,” said Snowdrop. “I would not like to stay in a garden all day, with my toes in the soil, never moving about.”

“All the best girls are properly planted, and very happy that they are,” said the Iris. “You, for example, would be much happier if you stayed in one place, and you would look so much nicer with a good watering. Why, how limp your petals are!”

Snowdrop supposed that by petals, the Iris meant her hair, which hung down her back rather than standing up around her face.

“Come join us,” continued the Iris. “I’m sure you would make a splendid Lily! You’re already dressed in white.”

“Come join us, come join us,” cried all the flowers.

But Snowdrop continued to walk down the garden path until she had passed the flowerbeds. “How silly they are,” she said to herself. “Who would want to stay in one place all their lives?” And she was more determined than ever to reach the last square and become Queen.

• • • •

“Did he ever photograph you?” asks Alice, who is still holding her hand. “I know he did, because I’ve seen a photograph of you with your father. But did he ever photograph you alone?”

Alice is silent for a moment. Lily can still hear the flowers calling after her, but she will not join them, even though she is a lily, with great white petals. She will not be one of the flowers in his garden.

“There was a day he photographed me twice. I remember that, although there are so many things I’ve forgotten. It was a summer day, around midsummer for the great purple clematis jackmanii was blooming on the vine, and the leaves of the nasturtiums were as big as saucers. Ina and I used to pick and eat them, along with the orange flowers, in what we called our sallets. He wanted to take a photograph, so I stood by the garden wall, ever so still—you remember how still we had to stand! I wore my favorite dress, white muslin with ruffles and lace—very grown up, I felt in it. There I stood, and he took a photograph, disappearing under the black velvet curtain like a magician. Several days later he showed it to me. I told him I looked like a ghost, haunting that corner of the garden.

“‘A clever, charming ghost,’ he said. ‘You may haunt me whenever you wish, ghost Alice. I think perhaps you will haunt me all my life.’ I’ve always wondered what he meant by that.

“But after taking the first photograph, he told me that he had an idea. How would I like to be a beggar maid, dressed in rags? I wouldn’t even have to wear shoes!

“Of course I said yes. What child doesn’t want to take her shoes off on a hot summer day and walk barefoot on the lawn?

“So he told me to run and ask for a costume—rags, mind, he said. I was to be a proper beggar maid, tattered and torn.

“And so I ran upstairs to find Miss Pickett, and she asked Mama if it was quite all right. In those days Mama was friendly with him, and Papa too, so she said yes, of course. It was just pretend, like one of his games. Miss Pickett dressed me in a ragged old shift, which she hastily pinned up because it was too large for me.

“I went back down to the garden, running across the lawn. He was waiting by the wall, next to the camera tripod. How pleased he was to see me looking disheveled!

“He told me to stand by the wall and put one hand on my hip, the other out as though I were begging for coins. He himself rearranged the shift I was wearing, pulling it down my chest and off one of my shoulders so I would look quite destitute, he said.

“Then he told me to look at him, both boldly and pleadingly, as a beggar girl might. And to hold still, hold still, hold still . . .

“‘There!’ he said. ‘I’ve got it.’ Then he kissed me with his hands on my bare shoulders, first on one cheek and then the other, and said he was so pleased with me that someday we might marry, if he didn’t marry Ina first. ‘For I can’t marry you both,’ he said, winking at me. ‘The laws of England won’t allow it.’ And then he laughed, and I laughed too at the silly thought of him marrying the both of us!”

• • • •

“My dear, don’t you look a fright!” said the Red Queen. Little Snowdrop was sitting in a train compartment across from the Queen, who seemed to be very cross indeed.

“Sit up straight and comb your hair and don’t eat with your mouth open!” said the Queen.

“But I’m not eating anything,” said Snowdrop.

“And don’t speak until you are spoken to!” said the Queen. “Now, what is your name, and where are you from, and where are you going?”

“My name is Snowdrop, and I come from beyond the looking-glass, and I’m going to the final square, where I shall be queen.”

“Wrong!” said the Red Queen. “Wrong on all counts. Why, I never met such an ignorant child. Your name is Lily, and you come from London”—she emphasized the L’s a great deal—“and you’re going to the mountains behind the moon.”

“Are there mountains behind the moon?” asked Snowdrop, intrigued.

“Of course,” said the Red Queen. “It’s so far north, at the back of the North Wind herself, that it’s all mountains there. Your hair really is frightful. Someone might mistake you for a raspberry bush and have you pruned. Come sit by me and I will brush it for you.”

Feeling doubtful, for the Queen seemed so hot-tempered, Snowdrop got up from her seat and sat down on the other side of the compartment, between the Queen and the window. They were traveling through very pretty countryside, laid out in patchwork shapes rather like a great quilt, with square fields, circular ponds, and triangular bits of forest.

Out of a large purse, almost as large as her crown, the Queen took a hedgehog that opened one eye, looked at Snowdrop, then closed it again and started to snore. “Turn around so I can reach the back of your head. And while I brush your hair, I shall recite a poem for you. You’ll like that, won’t you?”

“Yes,” said Snowdrop, although she did not think she would like it very much. Most poetry struck her as rather dreary, and it all sounded very much alike. But the Queen recited, in a sing-song voice,

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
There are no fish within the lake,
And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So sad and wandering all alone?
The birds have left their empty nests
And the fish have flown.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist, and fever too,
And on thy cheek a red, red rose
Is turning blue.

At the same time as she was reciting this, the Red Queen brushed Snowdrop’s hair with the hedgehog. She pulled rather hard! But Snowdrop did not complain, for she did not want to be disrespectful, and she knew that queens, or future queens, should be courageous.

“What an odd poem,” said Snowdrop. “Whatever does it mean?”

“You’ll have to ask the White Knight,” said the Queen. “I’m done. You can turn around now.”

But when Snowdrop turned around, the Queen was no longer there. Instead, on the seat beside the queen’s capacious purse sat a black kitten, with its claws still tangled in Snowdrop’s hair. She untangled them, and the kitten curled up in the purse, washing its nose contentedly.

Just then, the train whistled and came to a stop. “This is your stop, miss,” said the conductor, who seemed to be a walrus in a blue serge uniform, with an official-looking cap on his head.

“Is it?” asked Snowdrop. But she was so uncertain of herself, so unsure of where she was going, that she got up, curtseyed to the kitten, who might after all still be a queen, and descended onto the platform. At the end of the platform, there were two signs, each pointing in exactly the same direction. One said Tweedledum, and the other said Tweedledee.

• • • •

Little White Lily
Said: It is good
Little White Lily’s
Clothing and food.

Now I am stronger,
Now I am cool;
Heat cannot burn me,
My veins are so full.

• • • •

“There, that’s better,” says Alice. “Your hair was so tangled.”

She puts the brush back on the bureau, beside the looking glass, then sits down again on the chair by Lily’s bed. “Would you like some water? There’s some right here in the carafe. Yes?” She pours water into the glass and helps Lily lift her head. The water is cool, so cool. How good water is, when you’re thirsty and it has not rained for a long time.

Alice plumps up the pillow before putting Lily’s head back down on it. It’s like a cloud, and Lily is floating on it, up above the world so high, like a tea tray in the sky. From up so high, she can see all of Looking-Glass Country.

“What did it mean?” asks Alice. “That’s what I don’t understand. That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out all these years. The presents, the letters, the kisses—what did they mean? And did they mean something different to him than they meant to us? At the time, I thought of him as another child—taller than us, as though by a sort of accident, and better at telling stories. But now, looking back . . .”

She puts a hand on Lily’s forehead, as though feeling her temperature. How nice it is to be up in the sky, among the birds! Lily can see the forest, and the garden of flowers, and Rosebud fighting the Jabberwock—it looks like a fierce battle! And there is Snowdrop, having tea with Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But who is that other round fellow sitting beside her? She will have to fly down and see for herself . . .

“All I know is that as we got older, Mama and Papa stopped inviting him to the house, although he had been a friend for so long. And when I asked Miss Pickett why we never saw him anymore, she said he had done something inexcusable. But Miss Pickett would say that if she saw me eating with my mouth open. Inexcusable. It was her favorite word. So I don’t know.”

Alice laughs. It is a bitter, brittle laugh, and pieces of it shatter on the uncarpeted floor. “Do you know, Mama told me nothing, nothing, about what to expect on my wedding night? Poor Reginald . . .”

She dips her handkerchief in the water jug, then folds it into a rectangle and puts it on Lily’s forehead, where it feels so cool. She touches Lily’s cheek, gently. “Oh, Snowdrop, I wish you could talk.”

But that can’t be right, because Snowdrop is the kitten, the white kitten. Mary’s kitten, and Mary is a swan, with white wings.

“Biscuits?” said Tweedledum.

“Or bandersnatches?” said Tweedledee.

“Oh, biscuits please,” said Snowdrop. “I don’t think bandersnatches would be at all nice. For tea, I mean.”

“They’re very good with mint sauce,” said Tweedledum. “Nohow.”

“Contrariwise,” said Tweedledee. “They’re much better with treacle.”

“But what does it mean?” Snowdrop asked Humpty Dumpty, who was pouring his second cup of tea. “White rabbits and caterpillars and Mad Hatters. What does it all mean?”

“In Looking-Glass Country, everything is backwards and upside down,” he answered gravely. “To understand anything at all, you must stand on your head, balancing carefully, and turn the rest of you all the way around, as an owl does. Then you will understand.”

“Is that how you do it?” asked Snowdrop. She could not imagine him balancing on his head, for it was so very round. Surely he would fall down and crack! Then all the Red Queen’s knights would have to put him back together again . . .

“Of course not,” he said indignantly. “What an idea! When I wish to understand something, I tell Looking-Glass Country to turn upside down and backwards for me: forests and fields, rivers and lakes, the whole countryside.”

“If the whole country turned upside down, wouldn’t the rivers and lakes fall out?” She could imagine them raining down, down, into the clouds below.

“What a stupid child you are. Of course they don’t. For one thing, they’re fitted into their sockets so well, and for another, it’s a matter of perspective. Why, we could be upside down right now, and you wouldn’t even notice!”

“And the whole country obeys you?” asked Snowdrop, much surprised, and not at all pleased at being called stupid.

“Of course,” said Humpty-Dumpty. “You just need to know the right words to say. Now, I know a great many words, such as xylophone and lepidoptera and amphimacer, so of course I can do whatever I wish.”

“That must give you a great deal of power,” said Snowdrop.

“Of course. After all, everything is made up of words. It is words that make the world what it is. Take this table, for instance. If I did not say the word table, if I did not call it, table table table—” he sounded as though he were calling a dog “—it would simply vanish.”

Surely that couldn’t be right! Yet when Snowdrop looked closely at the table, she saw that it was indeed made up of the word table, in small black type, repeated so many times that the table seemed quite solid and her teacup did not fall through it.

“Jam?” asked Tweedledum.

“Yes, please,” said Snowdrop.

“Blueberry or boysenberry or badminton?” asked Tweedledee.

“There’s no such thing as badminton jam,” said Snowdrop.

“Ah, but there could be!” said Humpty Dumpty. “To make something so, you have only to say it’s so. That is the power of words! Try it yourself and see. Tell your bread and butter to become something else.”

What nonsense! But Snowdrop looked down at her plate and said, to her bread and butter, “Turn into a bird.” Nothing happened.

“Not like that!” said Humpty Dumpty. “How would you like it if someone addressed you like that, ordering you to become something other than what you are? You would not do it, simply to be contrary! No, you must address whatever you wish to transform politely.”

How did one address a slice of buttered bread politely? “If you please,” said Lily. “I would very much like it if you could turn into a bird.”

The bread and butter flapped its brown wings. They were still made of bread, and the bird had a brown bread body, streaked with yellow. It turned its yellow lump-of-butter head and looked at Snowdrop with one sesame-seed eye. Then suddenly it flapped its wings and flew off.

“Oh dear,” said Snowdrop. “I’m afraid it’s going to be eaten very quickly.”

“Well, you were about to eat it anyway,” said Tweedledum. “Nohow.”

“Contrariwise,” said Tweedledee. “And now you have nothing to spread your jam on.”

With dismay, Snowdrop realized that he was right. There was no bread left, indeed no food left of any kind on the table, which was shutting up like an umbrella, with the teapot and cups and saucers inside. When it had shut itself up completely, she saw that it was an umbrella after all.

“There’s a storm coming,” said Tweedledum.

“It’s not a storm at all, but a flock of ravens,” said Tweedledee.

“Why is a raven like a writing desk?” asked Humpty Dumpty.

“Because they’re both made of words?” replied Snowdrop.

Just then, the storm broke. Great drops of rain pelted down, and she stood as close as she could to a tree trunk with Humpty Dumpty, trying not to get wet. The sky grew darker and darker, until she could see its wings—no, they were ravens, six ravens flying down down down toward her. They snatched Snowdrop up in their claws, and as she rose into the sky, she could see Tweedledum and Tweedledee staring up from under the umbrella, with startled looks on their faces.

• • • •

Little White Lily
Smells very sweet;
On her head sunshine,
Rain at her feet.

Little White Lily
Dressed like a bride!
Shining with whiteness,
And crownèd beside.

• • • •

The ravens set Snowdrop down at the edge of a river, then flew off toward the mountains. She could see those mountains now, high in the air—behind the moon, which had already risen, even though it was still daylight. She was standing in a great meadow. On the other side of the river, the dark forest began again.

How many squares had they flown over? She did not know. Anyway, from the air, the countryside had not looked like a checkerboard at all, but like a patchwork of different shapes—rectangular, triangular, rhomboid. She had entered Looking-Glass Country assuming she knew the rules of the game. But now she realized it was a different game altogether.

“Aaaaaah . . .”

What was that? At first she thought it was the bleating of a sheep, but then she realized it was the White Knight, sitting on a large stone in which a sword was half-buried, with only the upper half of the blade and the hilt showing. Beside the stone was his shield, with a silver star on it. He was weeping onto his armor, which had already developed several rust stains.

“What on earth is the matter?” asked Snowdrop. “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?” Where had she heard that? Ah yes, from the Red Queen, or perhaps the black kitten, she was not certain which. It seemed the proper way to address a weeping knight.

“Aaaaaah,” moaned the knight again. “I have lost her, lost her forever, and I shall never find her again!”

“Whoever are you talking about?” asked Snowdrop, lending him her pocket handkerchief.

“Shall I tell you my sad story?” The White Knight took it and wiped his eyes, then blew his nose loudly into the bit of cambric.

“Yes, please,” said Snowdrop, even though she would rather have gone on to the next square, which she assumed was across the river. Once she crossed it, she would be queen at last!

“Very well then,” said the White Knight. He sat up very straight, not that he had much choice since he was wearing armor, and recited this poem:

I met a maiden in the meads,
So beautiful—a fairy’s child.
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were mild.

I made a garland for her head,
Of violets and lilies too.
And sure in language strange she said
She loved me true.

I set her on my bicycle,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For we would ride across the park
And sing this song.

She took me to her magic glen,
And there I saw, ah woe betide,
The strangest thing I ever saw
On the cold hillside.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Accountants, death-pale were they all,
Who cried, “this little child doth keep
Us in her thrall!”

What a strange poem! Snowdrop was not at all sure what it meant. “If the fairy’s child spoke in a strange language, how did you know what she was saying?”

“I could read it in her countenance,” said the Knight. “We were very much in love. We would have understood each other in any language.”

Snowdrop frowned. “Why, that’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. She was a girl, not a book. For all you know, she could have been asking you for directions to Piccadilly Circus.” She had not meant to be rude, but really, the White Knight seemed to have no sense at all.

“Aaaaaah,” he sighed again. “She held me in her thrall . . .”

Snowdrop felt quite angry with him. “I’m not quite sure what you mean by her thrall, but if it’s anything like a prison, I very much doubt a little child could have locked up so many important men! And you had no business going off with her on your bicycle anyhow, without her mother’s permission. I bet that fairy was angry when she found out her daughter had been spending time with a strange man, even if he was a knight! Perhaps it was she who locked them all up in the hillside, if they behaved as you did—and I don’t blame her one bit. “

The White Knight only sobbed louder into her handkerchief. She had not meant to upset him, but he had behaved most improperly.

Just then, the sky grew darker, and Snowdrop heard thunder in the distance. Was it a storm again, or the ravens coming back for her? No, it was the Jabberwock, barreling toward them with its claws outstretched!

“Run, run!” cried the White Knight, but there was nowhere to run: In front of them was the meadow, where the Jabberwock had just landed, folding its great wings. Its eyes were blazing. Behind them was the river. It began striding toward them, whiffling and burbling like the combination of a train whistle and a kettle on the boil.

“Pull out the sword!” cried Snowdrop.

“I can’t!” said the White Knight. “I’ve tried, how I’ve tried, but it’s no use! Only one pure of heart can draw it out of the stone, and I am not worthy.” He began to sob again into the handkerchief, which was quite soaked by now.

“Then we can swim across!” said Snowdrop.

But the White Knight cowered under his shield, sobbing. “I can’t swim!” What could Snowdrop do but hide under his shield with him? She could not abandon this silly, blubbering creature.

Closer and closer came the Jabberwock, striding toward them across the meadow. They would be eaten, she was sure of it! The great claws of the Jabberwock would tear away the White Knight’s shield, and then they would be done for. She could not bear the suspense, so she peeked over the edge. At least she would see it coming for her . . . The Jabberwock was standing uncomfortably close to them, in a circle of singed grass. A red figure leaped from its back and landed beside her. It was Rosebud!

“Come on,” said Rosebud. “We need to get to the boat.”

What boat? But Snowdrop ran after her, and there, under the riverbank where she had not seen it before, was a small boat, just large enough for the two of them.

“Get in,” said Rosebud, stepping into the boat herself. She threw down her sword and shield, and picked up the oars.

“What about the White Knight?” asked Snowdrop, stepping in carefully after Rosebud and sitting down on one of the wooden seats. “He can’t draw the sword out of the stone, and he can’t swim!” She could not see him over the riverbank, but she could still hear the Jabberwock, roaring in anger.

“Sword or no sword, he will have to fight it,” said Rosebud, pushing off from the shore with one of the oars. “It’s his Jabberwock, after all. It was irresponsible of him to let it out so it could devour all those little girls.”

“How do you know it’s his?” asked Snowdrop. As Rosebud rowed the boat away from the bank, the roar of the Jabberwock faded in the distance.

“It’s wearing a collar that says Property of the White Knight. If Found, Return to Owner. Do you know,” she said, resting the oars in their locks and letting the motion of the river carry them. “This reminds me of something.”

“What is that?” asked Snowdrop, curious.

“A summer day, long ago. I was in a boat, like this one, floating on the river to Godstow, and he was telling me a story.”

“Who was telling you a story?” asked Snowdrop.

“That’s just the thing I don’t remember. Was it the White Knight, or the Jabberwock? Or someone else altogether? Oh Snowdrop, I wish you could remember for me! It’s as though I see a door, with a keyhole, but I can’t find the key. And even if I could, I would be either too small or too large to enter. I feel as though there’s a piece missing from my childhood, but I don’t even know what shape it might be. How can I ever find it?”

“Alice, my dear,” calls the White Queen from the doorway. “I’m afraid it’s time for Lily’s medicine.”

“Yes, of course, Mrs. MacDonald,” says Alice.

“It’s mostly laudanum at this point. For the pain, you see, but it means she’s away in a dreamland of her own much of the time. The doctor says nothing else is likely to do her any good. How kind of you to put a damp cloth on her forehead! She does get feverish, then cold, then feverish again. It’s terrible when a family is susceptible to consumption. I wish she had not gone into the tenements, but she insisted on continuing her charitable work, even after Mary succumbed. Oh dear, I’m going to start crying again . . . I’m just glad your family has been so healthy. Do send my best regards to Mrs. Liddell and the Dean, and if you see Mr. Dodgson, could you let him know that Mr. MacDonald loved Silvie and Bruno? He is so grateful that Mr. Dodgson sent it to him, but you see he’s been too ill to write, and I’ve been so busy myself, with Lily to care for. And of course a household does not run itself.”

“I’m afraid I never see him nowadays,” says Alice.

“Oh yes, I forgot that your mother had—some sort of falling out with him? I never knew what it was about.”

“I don’t think anyone did,” says Alice. Lily can see that her smile is strained.

“He was always such a thoughtful man, and a good friend to the children, especially Mary and Lily. You know, he even put Lily into one of his books—the Looking-Glass one. She was the daughter of one of the queens, I believe. And he put in Mary’s Snowdrop—do you remember Snowdrop? She was just a kitten then. An excellent mouser she turned out to be, and a favorite with all the servants.”

“I thought Snowdrop was the princess in one of your stories,” says Alice. “Didn’t you tell it to us, that day my mother and I came for tea?”

The White Queen smiles with pleasure, and for a moment she looks less like a harried sheep. “Fancy you remembering that! Why, it was only a trifle, you know. Nothing in comparison to the sorts of things my husband and Mr. Dodgson write, of course. But it did give you children pleasure. Well, my writing days are behind me, I think. Mr. Dodgson very kindly gave Lily a copy of the first edition, inscribed To Princess Lily, from the White Knight. But of course you were his heroine! What a precious memory that will be to you, all the days of your life. Whatever else happens, you will always be Alice in Wonderland . . .”

“Would you excuse me?” says Alice, hurriedly. “I must be going—I’ve forgotten the time—it was so lovely to see you and Lily, and please don’t bother, I’m sure the maid will let me out.” With a final glance at Lily, as though she wishes to ask something more but cannot, Alice leaves, shutting the door behind her. The White Queen kisses Lily on the forehead. Her lips are thin and dry.

“Snowdrop! Wake up, sleepyhead! This is where we get out.”

“Here?” said Snowdrop.

But of course Rosebud was right, for the boat had become caught in some roots by the riverbank, and Snowdrop could see the castle. They were on the other side of the river now. The dark forest had been replaced by fields over which were scattered small copses of birch and alder. By the riverbank rose the castle, built half of white marble and half of jet as black as a night without stars, which created a curious effect, as though the castle were also a shadow of itself. It had so many turrets that Snowdrop became confused when she tried to count them. From each turret flew a pennon, flapping in the breeze. Half of the pennons had a red rose on them, half a white lily.

Rosebud helped her out of the boat and onto the riverbank. She was quite glad to be standing on solid ground again!

As they walked under the portcullis and into the castle courtyard, the trumpets began to sound their tarantara, and when they entered through the great doors of the castle, the White Rabbit proclaimed, “Their Highnesses, Princess Rosebud and Princess Snowdrop!” The crowd cheered—such a strange crowd! Snowdrop could see a great many pawns, both red and white, and there were Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and Humpty Dumpty, and the Lion and the Unicorn, and the Duchess carrying a pig, and the Caterpillar perched on a large mushroom, and the Mad Hatter holding hands with the March Hare, and the Dodo surrounded by a whole coterie of birds and small animals, including several bright pink flamingoes. A rather large grin floated above the festivities. Standing at the other end of the room were the Red Queen and White Queen, arm in arm.

“Come, come,” said the Red Queen. “It’s rude to be late to your own coronation!”

Behind the two queens, set up on a dais, were two thrones, one upholstered in red velvet, the other in white silk. On the red one was embroidered Queen Alice, and on the white one, Queen Lily.

“Why, the Red Queen must have been right all along,” said Snowdrop. “I’m Lily, and you must be Alice.” But Rosebud did not hear her. She was already sitting on her throne, with a gold crown on her head.

“Come, my dear,” said the White Queen. She stepped forward and took Snowdrop by the hand, then led her to the white throne. It was more comfortable than Snowdrop had expected, although the silver crown the White Queen put on her head itched just a little. But she did not think it dignified to scratch. Queens did not scratch as though they were kittens!

“Queen Alice! Queen Lily!” shouted all the pawns, red and white.

“Lily. I’m Lily,” she whispered to herself.

“Of course you are,” said the White Queen. “Oh my dear, you remember your own name! It’s been so long since you’ve known who you are, or who I am, or even where you are—here, at home.” Snowdrop noticed that she was crying. She would have offered her pocket handkerchief, if the White Knight had not taken it. By now, it was probably in the Jabberwock’s stomach!

“Mother, why did you banish me to Looking-Glass Country?” she asked.

“I was wrong to do that,” said the White Queen. “I was jealous, you know, because your father spent so much time with you and your sisters—although you were always his favorite. And then there was his writing . . . He never had enough time left over for me. It’s not easy being a queen, and a witch, and a mother, even when your sons are ravens and your daughters are swans. But look at you now! You’re a queen of Looking-Glass Country!” And the White Queen gazed at Snowdrop with such love that Snowdrop thought she might start to cry as well. Her mother stroked her hair, and held her very tightly, so tightly that her crown almost fell off. Snowdrop had never felt so safe and happy before in her life.

“Cake, cake!” shouted the Mad Hatter and March Hare. And there, at the center of the throne room, was a large cake, as large as Snowdrop herself, iced all in white, with a giant icing lily on top of it, sprinkled with silver stars.

“Is that for me?” she asked.

“Of course, darling girl,” said the White Queen.

“Today is your unbirthday,” said Humpty Dumpty, bowing as best he could, without a waist to bow from. Then he shouted, “Let us all cheer for Queen Lily on her unbirthday!”

“What is an unbirthday?” asked Snowdrop.

“Why, the opposite of a birthday,” said Humpty Dumpty. “On your birthday you are born, and on your unbirthday, well, that is the opposite. Now, three cheers! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!” The cheers were so loud that Snowdrop thought the castle roof might fly right off at any moment.

“I envy you,” said Alice, leaning over. “I’ve never had an unbirthday party before, not of my very own.”

Lily was so happy that she closed her eyes, because it was almost too much to bear. When she opened them again, she was lying in a white bed, under a quilt with irregular patches. She must be very high up, in one of the turrets of the castle, for she could see the moon out of the window, closer than she had ever seen it before. It seemed to be smiling at her. The White Queen was sitting next to her, holding her hand.

“Mother, sing me a song,” she said.

“Shall I sing you the one Papa wrote about Little White Lily, which you liked so much as a child?” asked her mother.

“No, sing me ‘Lully Lullay.’”

So the queen sang, very softly and sweetly,

Lully lullay, lully lullay,
The ravens bore my father away.

They bore him up, they bore him down,
Until he lost his golden crown.

They brought him into a marble hall
In which was hangèd a silver pall,

And in that hall there was a bed,
Whereon he lay his snow-white head.

And there he bled both day and night
So that I shuddered at the sight,

And by his bedside stood a stone:
It is the White King lies hereon.

Lully lullay, lully lullay,
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay
By his graveside night and day,
With a lully, lully lullay.

Snowdrop turns her head on the pillow to thank her mother, but notices that across the room is a glass coffin set on a black marble pedestal. A man is lying inside it.

“Who lies there?” she asks.

“Alas, it is your father,” says the White Queen. “He has suffered a terrible blow, and I fear he shall never rise again. I have tried to kiss him awake, but to no avail.”

Snowdrop pushes back the covers, then stands up and walks over to the coffin. Yes, there lies the White King, although he has lost his crown. He looks so peaceful, lying there! Is he dead or asleep? She can’t tell. Perhaps she should try to kiss him awake—could her kiss do it, if her mother’s cannot? But she hears a sound, like a piece of cloth being shaken, like a waterfall. Snowdrop, who is also Queen Lily, turns and walks to the window. There are her sisters, the white swans, and that sound is the beating of their wings. Behind them she can see the North Wind, with her black hair floating all around. They have come for her at last.

“Lily!” cries the White Queen.

“Don’t worry, Mother,” she says. “I’m going to the mountains behind the moon, which are ever so much nicer than Looking-Glass Country. My sisters will take me there. See, they are riding upon North Wind, who is lifting their wings like pillows on a clothesline.”

“But you could have been Queen here!” says her mother.

“Alice can be Queen,” she says. Alice is welcome to it, rabbit holes and tea parties and black kittens and all. She has other places to go.

Snowdrop climbs up on the windowsill, from which she can see the entire countryside, the whole patchwork. There is the garden of flowers, and a train track winding across the fields, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee’s cottage, and the riverbank where the White Knight is still fighting the Jabberwock. Will he win? She won’t stay to find out, for she has important business elsewhere. Below, in the castle courtyard, the musicians have begun to play their viols and bassoons. The Red Queen is ordering everyone to find partners for the quadrille: the Lion with the Unicorn, the Mad Hatter with the March Hare, Alice with the Mock Turtle, pawns and flamingos together. Poor Alice, she thinks. Will she ever escape Wonderland? Perhaps someday she’ll be able to move on to the mountains, or wherever else she wishes to go.

“Lily!” cries the White Queen again, but the sound dissolves into the bleat of a sheep who has seen a wolf in the distance.

Snowdrop holds out her arms so the swans can take her, and up they go in a rush of white wings, into the sky, with the North Wind beneath them, toward the moon and the shining mountains beyond.

©2018 by Theodora Goss. | Art © 2018 by Galen Dara.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Theodora Goss is the author of the novels The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (which was a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy awards) and European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman. Her other publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology co-edited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia (2014). Her work has been translated into ten languages, including French, Japanese, and Turkish. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her short story “Singing of Mount Abora” (2007) won the World Fantasy Award. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program.

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

Other Worlds and This One

Cadwell Turnbull | 8340 words

When I finally visit Hugh Everett, it’s 1982.

We sit down and pahnah pours himself a glass of sherry and lights a cig before asking me about the purpose of my visit.

We’re in Hugh’s bedroom. He’s sitting on his bed, in full suit and tie, taking deep drags from his cigarette. I take a seat in a chair next to the window.

I tell him I want to hear about his theory. This isn’t true. I know his theory well.

“Well, not a theory,” he tells me. “Not proven.”

On the street outside the house, a car is stuck in time. A woman sings along with the car radio, her mouth open just slightly, frozen. In the back seat a little girl sleeps, her lungs in the midst of a lazy intake of air. They will both be stuck like this for as long as I’m here.

I smile. “Tell me about it anyway.”

• • • •

It’s 2008, and I’m on St. Thomas sitting under the big tree outside the auditorium at Charlotte Amalie High. One of my boys comes up to me and tells me that Cory’s gotten pantsed from some dude from Ghettos because he walked through their hall without permission. They have the whole of Building B looking at my little brother’s drawers and laughing.

When I get there, Cory’s running around in X-Men briefs he got in sixth grade. Don’t even ask me why he let Mom get him X-Men undies in sixth grade or why this pahnah is still wearing them. The Ghettos crew is throwing his pants around. They’re laughing as he runs to catch them. Real original shit.

I come up and immediately start taking these dudes down, and I mean hard. I clock a few before they really catch on, but when I turn to get the dude that’s actually holding Cory’s pants—Wham!

My legs turn to noodles under me, and I fall face-first to the ground. Later people tell me I looked like that dude from Punch-Out!!.

I wake up in a hospital bed with a massive headache and a fire in my ribs that keeps pulsing. Cory’s sitting next to the bed, just staring through me. Known him all his life, and that empty look he gets still trips me out.

“I’m sorry,” he says when he realizes that I’m awake and looking at him.

“What you doing wearing X-Men briefs in high school?”

“I like X-Men.”

I’m not joking. That’s what he tells me. “You can like X-Men,” I tell him, “but that don’t mean you have to cover your balls with them.”

“Campus security had to pull them off you.”

“They should’ve gotten their fat asses there when those dudes were messing with you. Who’s gonna pay for all of this?”

“Mom’s pissed.”

“Duh Mom’s pissed.” My jaw throbs through the words. My left eye is puffy and leaky. “Where she at?”

“Outside on the phone.” Cory stares off at God knows what.

“You got to man up, B.”

He nods.

“I’m serious.”

He nods.

“Can’t let these dudes keep punking you like this. And as you can see, I can’t always save your ass.”

He starts crying.

“You can’t be serious, dread.”

He tries to stop, but that just makes his body shake harder. “I’m sorry,” he says, heaving through the words, drooling all over himself.

“That’s what I talking about right there. You can’t be doing that in front of people, mehson.”

He heaves. He drools.

“Hey,” I say. “Just promise me this ain’t gon’ happen again.”

He nods. “I promise.”

For a moment I swear the room looks different. I close my eyes and rub at my temples, disoriented. Inside my eyelids is a lightshow of colors.

Mom’s livid when she comes back in. Because of the concussion they have to keep me there overnight. “I’m tired of all these fights,” she tells me.

“Don’t look at me,” I say. “Tell Cory to stop being a little girl.” I feel like I have been rolled out by a rolling pin, my insides a flattened mush.

“Don’t say that,” Mom says. She gives me the don’t-test-me look, and I shut up real quick. I glance over at Cory, who’s quiet, his head lowered, staring into his lap.

“Remember your promise,” I say.

• • • •

In the late nineteenth century, J.J. Thomson does an experiment that proves to everyone that electrons are particles, and they give him a Nobel Prize for his work. Thirty years later, George Thomson, the dude’s son, does a similar experiment and proves that electrons are waves. They also give him a Nobel Prize.

“Ask some physicists and they’ll tell you that that sums up the great mystery right there,” Hugh says. “But there’s also the two slit experiment.”

How it works, Hugh tells me, is you shoot electrons at a slab with only one slit and a detector screen behind it. The screen ends up looking pretty much like what you’d expect; the electrons form a slit-like splatter on it.

But shoot at a slab with two slits and the electrons go fucking nuts.

“It’s as if the electron, faced with that extra slit, decides to explore all options,” Hugh says. “It superimposes. It becomes a wave of possibilities.”

If you attach a camera to try to record which slit the electron actually goes through, the electrons become particles again. Two slit-sized splatters show up on the screen.

“The act of observing electrons affects the outcome,” Hugh says. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

It’s not just electrons; other subatomic particles ignore Newtonian laws. They teleport, superimpose, and disappear. They run off cliffs and forget to fall.

Upon witnessing the complete lack of fucks given by the quantum world, physicists collectively lose their minds. How can they reconcile reality with what they are seeing? Many of them, in desperation, entertain solipsistic ideas. If the world of tiny objects can disregard Newtonian physics, then how can we tell for sure that reality isn’t just a product of our imagination?

“Of course what becomes the official explanation,” Hugh tells me, “isn’t far from just that.”

Enter the infamous Niels Bohr.

Bohr won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. He modeled the atom. He is brilliant and highly respected, and when he tells a room full of people his theory, they listen. They listen so hard that Bohr’s ideas hold the field hostage for decades.

His idea is this: The world is separated into two, our physical macro world that we pretty much understand and the quantum world where shit just happens. When we are not looking at subatomic particles, they exist as waves of possibility: wave functions. When we observe them, the wave collapses, and they become particles. It is pointless to try to figure out what subatomic particles are doing when we are not looking at them and that is not our job as physicists.

“Another way of putting it is this,” Hugh says. He is animated now. He has put down his glass of sherry on the nightstand next to the bed. His cigarette is resting in an ashtray. “When we observe subatomic particles, we are changing their very nature.” He laughs.

“Not possible?”

“Complete bullshit.”

It surprises me that Hugh curses.

From the 1930s to the 1980s, the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics becomes dogma with a capital D. Dudes crazy enough to question it—or worse, come up with alternatives (ha!)—face the ridicule of the tribe.

“I didn’t stand a chance,” Hugh says. He closes his eyes for a moment, and the world is still like death. He’s a painting of himself, quiet and tortured. Then he opens his eyes and looks at me. “Who are you again?”

• • • •

It’s 2009, and I’m graduating from high school with a bruised body and a bruised ego. When I walk up on stage to get my diploma, someone yells out KO Cally and I have to pretend I don’t hear the entire auditorium/basketball court erupt in laughter.

After graduation, I work at K-mart to try to save up for UVI, and then I stay on in the fall, deciding that I haven’t saved enough, spending way too much money going clubbing and going to the office (me and my boys’ codename for the strip club).

In tenth grade, Cory starts taking boxing lessons down at UVI and before long he is running laps up and down Waterfront, punching the air like he’s Apollo Creed. I’m hating, but the boy is actually pretty good. Starts competing in some local matches and actually wins a few of them.

“Don’t think I still can’t kick your ass,” I tell him.

He just smiles at me, all cocky. “You mean like them dudes from Ghettos?”

What could I say? He had me mum there.

Around then Cory gets into girls, and I mean big time. Surprises the hell out of me. Dude trades in his Marvel undies for Calvin Kleins and girls seem to dig his weird mix of nerd and badass. I get jealous and start taking lessons too for a hot minute, but I don’t climb the ladder like he does. That stuff is for some people, you know? But I would have never guessed it would be little Cory messing up dudes.

That isn’t the only thing either. I come home one night after a hard day at K-mart (fucking K-mart, man! Jesus . . .) and I smell Cory burning cahn in his bedroom. The weed’s just wafting out into the hallway.

I knock on his door and pahnah tells me, “come in,” like he’s been expecting me or something. I open up and I see him spread out on the floor smoking and watching Sixteen and Pregnant on MTV.

First of all, Sixteen and Pregnant? The fuck?

Secondly, this is the first time I’ve ever seen Cory do anything he isn’t supposed to be doing, so imagine my surprise. I just stand there staring at him.

He looks up at me and says, “You gon’ just stand there? Come and take a hit.”

I close the door and sit next to him, and we pass the joint back and forth. We watch the show together and talk on breaks.

After a while, I turn to him and say, “So this is how you moving now?”

He smiles. “Yeah.” He passes the joint to me.

“I see you,” I say.

I soon decide that I’ve had enough of lounging around in my mom’s house with a dead-end job. I’ve finally saved up enough loot to really do something with myself, so I enroll at UVI and move out of my mom’s house, and I take up a second job at the school, filing and answering the phone in the financial aid department.

By then Cory is in eleventh grade and has made a minor name for himself. He’s still a mid-level boxer, but he is stacked and intimidating. He starts cutting class and taking girls up to the house during school hours. Mom comes home sick one day and finds him in the house with some girl, and he has to run out half naked as she chases him around the yard with a belt.

“What about the girl?” I ask him later.

“Mom almost beat her, too,” he says, and we laugh together.

A month later, Cory has a big fight set up with this dude named Antonio from Croix. Cory is feeling himself way too much, saying all kinds of shit about the boy. I couldn’t blame him. Up until that point, the Cruzan hadn’t been doing so well. It seemed obvious that Cory would be taking home the win. Cory tells people to come out and witness the carnage. Tells me I should see how it’s done.

Cory gets knocked out in the second round.

The haters descend quick. Cory becomes the butt of endless jokes. “Living up to the family name,” one of his friends says. Cory doesn’t take any of this well. He hides out in his room and lights up all day. He tells Mom to mind her business when she tries to intervene. He cuts class constantly. Spends most of his time running from hall monitors and hiding out in the back of the special education building smoking.

“Take it easy, baby bro,” I tell him.

“Don’t think I can’t handle you,” he warns.

“You mean like Antonio?”

Dude pounces on me, throwing punches. I can’t dodge them, so I run. “Calm down, dread,” I yell.

Cory doesn’t listen to me. He spends the rest of that year driving his grades into the dirt. When I ask him how he’s going to get into college, he tells me he’s joining the military. And he does. After he barely graduates, he goes to basic training and is off to Afghanistan within a few months. Mom gives him the silent treatment up until he leaves, but it doesn’t stop him. On his day of departure, she begs and begs.

“Don’t worry about me, Mom,” he says. “I’ll be all right.”

• • • •

It’s 1955, and young Hugh’s hanging with friends drinking and smoking at a cocktail party at Princeton. The room is thick with smoke and conversation. It’s late, and Hugh is drunk, so he’s talking loudly.

“You have to know what you’re saying,” Hugh says. “You must know how ridiculous this interpretation is.”

“It makes sense to me,” says Harvey.

“Me too,” says Charles.

Hugh thinks. It is hard because his head is swimming like he’s underwater. “What if the wave doesn’t collapse?”

“What?” Charles and Harvey say together.

“The wave of possibilities. What if it goes on forever, but we just can’t see it?”

“Sit down, friend,” says Charles. He looks at Hugh, concerned. “And put down your glass. It’s doing things to you.”

“What would that even look like?” Harvey asks.

“The other possibilities would have to go somewhere,” Hugh says.

“Where?” Harvey asks.

“Somewhere else.”

“Oh,” says Charles, “you definitely sound like a physicist now.”

They all laugh. I laugh, too, because the joke is corny as hell. None of them notice me.

Hugh steadies himself on his legs. He feels euphoric. “Schrödinger’s cat!” he yells. He looks to his friends for confirmation, but they just stare incredulously. “Look, I am made of atoms! If atoms can be in more than one place at once, why can’t I?”

“Please, Hugh,” Harvey says. “Are you saying one of you isn’t enough? Jesus, to even imagine a wave of you . . .”

They laugh again. I roll my eyes. They drink some more, and the conversation drifts on to other things.

The next morning Hugh wakes up with a hangover and the answer. He pulls out a notepad and begins scribbling furiously.

“That’s the night it first comes to me,” Hugh tells me in his bedroom back in 1982. “The universal wave function.”

I consider telling him that I know, that I was there, but it would only confuse him. He’s already forgotten asking me who I am.

So I just nod.

Hugh smiles; he sips sherry from a glass that will never run dry. Not as long as I’m here.

• • • •

Cory doesn’t seem that different when he comes back from overseas. He is quiet, but he has always been quiet when he’s not pelting you with sarcasm. Looking back, though, I find meaning in those silences; they seem dark and threatening.

For the first two weeks, he spends a lot of time in his room. I come by Mom’s house to visit, and we hang out and watch movies. We talk a little, but he doesn’t have much to say. I ask him what he did over there and he tells me that they mostly built infrastructure. I ask him if he killed anyone and he says no.

“It was boring. Can we watch this movie?”

After that, I stop asking.

During the next two weeks of his leave, he goes out every night. He meets a girl named Keren, and for that last week I see him out all the time with her. I catch them at the movies or over by Fat Turtle or at Starz Night Club on Friday and Saturday. He nods and I nod, and then I go about my business.

Then he is gone again. This time for a few months. When he returns, he tells me that he has been discharged.

“Why?”

“Medical reasons.”

“You sick?” I ask him.

“No,” he says. And before I can say another word, he says, “It don’t matter, anyway. Now I can be around for my baby girl.”

“Who? Keren?”

“No, my baby,” he says.

“When the fuck did that happen?”

Cory actually looks offended. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I tell him that babies are expensive and he should have been more careful. He tells me he is a grown man and that he can take care of his responsibilities and who the hell was I to tell him anything about his life. When I tell him I am his big brother, he laughs at me.

“You haven’t been that for a long time, biggest.”

That hurts my feelings. I’m thinking: After all the ass whoopings I gave on your behalf, you gon’ turn around and say something like that to me? I tell him, “Well I hope one of a’you have an actual place to stay, because Mom’s not gon’ have you raising no damn child in her house.”

I get up to leave, determined to wipe my hands of the matter. When I’m at the front door, I catch a glimpse of myself still sitting on Mom’s couch. “What?” I blink. When I open my eyes there’s no one there.

• • • •

In 1955, Hugh begins his paper: The Theory of the Universal Wave Function. The pages stack up. He shares the idea with his thesis advisor, John Wheeler, and he is both excited and apprehensive. On one hand, the logic is sound. On the other hand, it will be very unpopular.

Around this time, he meets Nancy, his future wife, at a physicists’ party. He is charming, and Nancy is fun-loving and passionate, and they hit it off. Nancy helps him type up the final draft of his dissertation and he submits it to Wheeler.

“Prepare to make waves,” Wheeler says with a chuckle.

“I hope,” Hugh says.

In the meantime, Hugh and Nancy get married. Soon after, Nancy’s belly begins to swell. She gives birth to a baby girl, and they name her Elizabeth.

The waves do not come. Wheeler takes off to Copenhagen to get some buzz started on the idea. He comes back discouraged. He calls up Hugh and tells him the news. Hugh listens quietly.

“Sometimes it is like this in the beginning,” Wheeler says. “It’s not so bad.”

“Yes,” Hugh says. He cannot bring himself to say more.

A couple of years pass with nothing. Hugh begins work at the Pentagon, a big money job with the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. He makes a name for himself analyzing the possible effects of nuclear fallout.

“I did things at that job I still can’t talk about,” Hugh tells me.

In ’59, Wheeler calls Hugh and tells him that he should go to Copenhagen himself.

“It’s a shot in the dark, Hugh,” says Wheeler. “But maybe if they hear it from you . . .”

Hugh smiles reluctantly. “Maybe.”

“Take the wife,” he says. “It’s a beautiful city.”

So they go. Hugh meets Bohr and they talk over the course of several afternoons. The conversations do not go as hoped. There is a lot of talk. Hugh explaining, Bohr listening. Bohr responds with mumbling half completed sentences before getting up sporadically to go relight his pipe.

“You see, uh, the particles all continue to exist equally in other universes,” Hugh says.

“Well, yes, yes, that makes some . . . I am sure that it could if these other . . . But again, this can’t be proven, Hugh. We would need . . . and there’s also space and time to consider, well, yes, if these universes are superimposed. You say the math is consistent, oh, give me one second while I light this. Terribly sorry. It’s a novel idea but—oh, why do these burn up so quickly. Just one moment. You’re very smart, but like I said before. Impossible to prove.”

“I was right,” Hugh says defensively. “I was right!”

“You were,” I say absently. And then I change the subject. “Tell me. Your wife and daughter. Do you love them?”

• • • •

Mom does end up kicking Cory out, but not for the reason I thought. It is 2011, my last semester at UVI, when he calls asking if he can live with me. He is breathing all hard like he’s in a panic.

“Mom finally kicked you out, huh?”

“You gon’ help me out or what?”

“Why she kick you out?”

I hear him take in a deep breath before answering. “She found something in my room.”

“Something like what?”

There’s a pause, a heavy quiet. “Weed.”

“Oh yeah, dummy. That’ll do it.”

“You gon’ help me?”

I want to say, “So now you calling your big brother, huh? See how you almost burn this bridge?” But I don’t say any of that. I say okay, and then the next day I help him move in his stuff. The semester before, I quit K-mart and started working at the university full time, moved out of the dorms and got a spot up Contantside. I’m taking night classes to finish up school. The apartment is a one-bedroom, but I’m thinking about getting a two when the lease is up, if Cory plays his cards right.

Cory takes the couch for a few weeks. I start seeing this girl named Mona I meet down by Frenchtown, an expat from L.A. I spend a lot of nights over by her house and tell Cory he can have the room when I’m not around.

When I come home for a few nights, I have to kick him out of the room. His girl Keren comes by with baby Gina and they lie around in the living room and watch TV. Sometimes I overhear them arguing, but those first months it seems like normal couple bullshit.

One day I am cleaning, and I find a little glass vial in the crevice of the couch. I stare at it bewildered. What is this?

I look at it a bit longer and then I walk into the kitchen and throw it in the trash.

In that moment, the room around me shifts and gleams like sun hitting glass. Then I see another me sitting on the couch, staring at the vial in his hand. He places it on the table.

Moments later, Cory walks in. “Hey,” he says, and it sounds like two of him is speaking at the same time.

I feel suddenly dizzy, so I lean against the kitchen counter. I close my eyes and behind my eyelids is a kaleidoscope of dancing colors. When I open my eyes again, the other me is gone, and Cory is staring at me.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

I wipe sweat from my forehead. “Nothing,” I say, but I can’t stop shaking.

• • • •

It’s 1974, and I’m watching Hugh’s seventeen-year-old daughter Liz push green peas around on her plate. She looks up at Hugh suddenly and says, “Would you fucking stop that already?”

“Elizabeth,” her mother says, and she looks to Hugh.

Hugh doesn’t look up.

“You,” says Liz, “Hugh Everett the Third.”

He looks up.

“Stop writing in that stupid fucking notepad.”

There is a flash of surprise in Hugh’s eyes. Is it interest? I can’t tell. His mind is completely blank. “You’re right,” he says after a moment, and he pushes the pad and his pen to the corner of the table and begins eating the now cold food in front of him.

“So my day was shitty,” Liz starts, looking at her father.

“Language,” Nancy says.

“Ms. Rita gave me an F for my paper. All I said was that I hated The Grapes of Wrath. I was just being honest.”

“Oh really,” says Nancy, suspicious. “What was it about?”

“Too boring to remember,” Liz says with a wave of her hand.

“Oh, Liz,” Nancy says, exasperated.

Hugh has lost interest in the proceedings. He has returned to a well-worn path in his brain. It’s the most logical option. How could they not see it? Idiots. All of them.

Liz takes a deep breath and leaves the table, not even bothering to pick up her plate. “Maybe tonight,” she says as she heads down the hall.

Nancy’s eyes look down to Liz’s plate. The macaroni has barely been touched. The meatloaf forms a depressing pile next to a scattered bunch of peas. Liz could have at least eaten the meatloaf.

She could leave tomorrow, Nancy thinks. She could leave this loveless marriage.

All the while, Hugh’s still thinking: It’s perfectly logical. The fuckers. The fuckers.

A few weeks later, Nancy finds Liz hunched up in a ball next to the toilet. She turns her over and sees an empty bottle of sleeping pills. I’m there, standing at the doorway unseen, tears in my eyes. I think of that glass vial, think of myself not saying anything.

Nancy calls the ambulance.

When Nancy returns home from the hospital, she sits in the car, her fist cupped under her chin, staring at the purple sky. For a long time she just replays the scene of Liz lying on the floor. Then she notices the living room light is on.

Nancy goes inside to find Hugh in his chair reading Newsweek.

“Where were you?”

“Work,” he says, and there is no hint that this is a shitty answer. “Is she okay?” he asks, a slight tremble in his voice that Nancy doesn’t notice.

“They had to pump her stomach,” Nancy says. She stares at Hugh. He isn’t looking at her. His eyes are still buried in his Newsweek. She doesn’t notice his trembling hands.

“I’m going upstairs,” she says.

“Upstairs,” he repeats.

Nancy walks to the stairs.

“Did you know?” he asks, stopping her.

“Know what?”

“That she was depressed.”

Nancy is thinking, yes, but she doesn’t answer.

“I didn’t know,” Hugh says.

There is a universe where a bolder Nancy walks over and grabs Hugh by the shirt and tells him that he is worthless, and a liar, and of course he knew, of course he did, if he was fucking paying attention at all. But in this one, Nancy stares at Hugh until he returns to his Newsweek, and then she climbs the stairs.

• • • •

Mom must be happy we are both out of the house, because she starts seeing this corny dude named Daryl from Dominica. She ends up pregnant with twins. Twins in her mid-forties! But I’m happy for her because she didn’t have much of a love life since our dad exed out when we were kids. You get your happiness where you can find it, even if it’s with a corny dude named Daryl.

Me and Cory end up getting that two-bedroom. Cory’s having a hard time holding down a job, but after graduation I’m able to get a cushy one on Main Street, selling jewelry, so I’m not giving him a hard time anyway. Every few months, though, he gives me a big wad of cash.

“What I owe you,” he says.

And for the next couple of weeks I watch him sideways.

Keren comes over a lot, and before long, it is like she is living there. I wake up in the middle of the night to the baby crying and Keren in the bathroom sitting on the toilet with the door wide open. She looks up at me with sleepy eyes, and I back up and wait for her to finish.

I go over by my girl Mona most weekends and leave Cory and Keren with the apartment. I carry work clothes for Mondays with me and then go home Monday nights.

One of those Monday nights, I come home and I hear yelling from Cory’s room. He has some rock music playing, Metallica or some crazy shit, but I can hear Keren yelling and baby Gina crying. There is a loud crash, muffled in the music, and then Keren sobbing. I knock on the door and Keren and Cory get really quiet inside. The door opens, and the music stretches itself loud and menacing into the hallway. Keren, in a shirt and panties, brushes past me, tears in her eyes, and goes into the bathroom and slams the door. Cory’s sitting on the bed with baby Gina, his eyes bloodshot, drenched in sweat.

“Everything all right?” I ask.

He looks up at me as if just noticing me. “Yeah, we cool.” And then he goes back to zoning out. Gina is still crying, but he doesn’t seem to notice that either. He just keeps rocking her.

• • • •

“Parallel universes are troubling,” Liz tells Hugh. “If any universe can exist, then what is the value of this one?”

It’s 1976, two years after Liz’s overdose.

Hugh smiles at Liz, suddenly attentive. It is the middle of the night, and they are both having trouble sleeping. They are sharing one of Nancy’s apple pies. Liz clinks her fork against her empty plate, unsettling bits of piecrust. She waits for Hugh’s reply.

He loves to talk about his idea. She knows this. In these moments, she can be his daughter.

“All universes are valuable to the people living in them,” he says. “They have to find meaning in the choices they’ve made.”

“But how does choice matter if you can literally make all of them?”

He thinks for a moment. “Only the possible ones. Only the ones you would make in the universe you are in. Universal laws and human behavior still apply.”

“Still,” she counters. “What decides the choices I will make in one and not the other?”

Hugh cuts himself another slice of pie. He should stop—it’s his third piece—but he cannot help himself. “Different things. Some outside factors. Some bits of knowledge you have in one universe and not another. Whims. Crises. Luck. All sorts of things.” He siphons off a piece of pie with his fork and brings it to his mouth and chews.

Liz watches him intently.

“We’re all blind,” he says when he is finished chewing. “Take solace in that. Choice comes first. Meaning comes later.”

• • • •

In 1982, Hugh is glaring at me. “What?”

“Do you love your wife and daughter?” I repeat.

“Of course I love them,” he tells me. “Why would you ask me something like that?”

“Because we are alike,” I say. “Men like us,”—I stare directly into his eyes—“we are oblivious to our fuck-ups. With you, it is your obsession. With me—” I don’t finish the sentence. I get up and walk around the room. The light coming in from the window illuminates the bits of dust in the air, frozen, like us, in time.

“I didn’t come here to hear about your theory,” I continue. “Not really. I thought it would help me understand what’s happening to me. But it won’t.” I walk over to him. Hugh looks uneasy now. I’m close, so close he could reach out and touch me if he wanted to. “I’m here to tell you about things you won’t get to see. I’m here to tell you how it ends.”

• • • •

It isn’t the shakes or the strong chemical scent that clings to him or the skipping of the showers. It isn’t the smell of something burning that I catch a whiff of when I come in the apartment. It isn’t his insomnia or the sight of him pacing in the middle of the night. It isn’t the bloodshot eyes or the weight loss. It isn’t his inability to keep a job.

I think he’s smoking. I think he’s drinking. I think he’s depressed and isn’t taking care of himself, dealing with shit from over there he has never told me about.

But one night I’m sitting in the living room, watching Fresh Prince, when Keren comes in with Cory. Baby Gina isn’t with them. Keren has a split lip and fresh tears on her face. She keeps her head down, her body convulsing softly. That’s when I know. All the signs coalesce in my mind as something solid and certain.

“What the hell,” I say. “Where you get that?”

It is the smallest glance over at my brother. He glares at her with wide eyes. I’ve known my brother since he was shitting his diaper and I’ve never seen him look like that. Didn’t know he could even make a face like that.

“Baby bro,” I say, “where she get that?”

“Don’t know. Bitches be clumsy.”

“What!”

He grabs Keren by the arms and pushes past me.

“Are you on drugs?” I ask. Any other time in our lives and this question would be a joke.

Cory takes Keren into the room and shuts the door. No words. No answer to my question. Only the soft voices on the TV set and the darkness. Will cracks a joke. The audience laughs.

I stay outside in the living room and wait for someone to leave the room. It is a long wait. The lights of the TV make long shadows on the walls. And then I hear the door creak open and someone slip into the dark hallway. Keren comes out and sits right next to me, as if she knew I was waiting for her.

“How long?” I ask her.

“Months.”

We sit and stare ahead at the screen. It’s one of those silly infomercials they play in the middle of the night. A woman in black and white struggling with her large oven juxtaposed with another woman in color, smiling with perfect teeth, using one of those tiny rotisserie ovens with some person’s fancy signature on it.

“You should leave him,” I tell her.

“What if he doesn’t let me?”

“Then you do what you have to do.”

After that, I see Keren one more time in the apartment, and then I stop seeing her. Cory spends a lot of time pacing around the house, muttering to himself.

“It’s for the best,” I say. “Take it easy.”

He ignores me. He listens to Rush so loud the neighbors come by. He cries a lot. He has shouting matches with Keren’s mother on the phone. A cop comes by the house to talk some sense into him.

“If you go by her apartment again, we will have to arrest you,” says the cop, Keren’s cousin.

More pacing. More muttering.

And then, out of nowhere, Cory takes a shower, irons some clothes, and goes out for the first time in forever. Gets himself a haircut, thank fucking God. Even starts looking for a real job instead of whatever the hell he was doing with his time.

He comes back one afternoon with one. Guess where? K-mart.

It’s looking good, though. Cory starts helping with the rent regularly. He keeps his hair trimmed. He puts back on a little weight. I feel confident enough to leave him alone in the house. I go over by Mona on weekends again. I come back and the house is clean. Pahnah even starts cooking, elaborate dishes he’s seen on the Cooking Channel.

It’s a beautiful couple of months. We sit and watch movies. We talk like the old days. He still keeps the whole military business to himself, but I’m fine with that. I feel like I have my brother back. He reads books again and goes on and on about society, the nature of humanity and the concept of the soul. Every few days I hear him in his room muttering, but I’m hopeful. He looks like he wants something better for himself and I want that, too.

• • • •

Three months after the whole Keren thing, I come home and there’s Cory, on the couch, eyes bloodshot, a glass crack pipe on the table, burnt on one end. I know what it is now.

When I come in, he immediately starts yelling. That Keren is seeing some guy. That she has him around his daughter, and he doesn’t want some random pahnah around his daughter, etc. I throw the crack pipe in the trash and then sit with him, letting him rant and rave for a half hour.

And then I tell him, “Come on, baby bro. Get some sleep. We will deal with this in the morning when you calm down.” I tell him that the worst thing he can do is go over there angry and get himself arrested. I remind him about the cop. I tell him that the only way he will get all this straightened out is if he focuses on himself right now, getting clean.

He nods. “It’s hard,” he says.

“I know.”

“I want my family,” he says.

I look at him long and hard. “Then get your shit together.”

I sit with him until he goes to sleep, and then I get up to go to my room. On my way out of the living room, I look back at my little brother. Cory is lying on the couch, but there’s someone in the chair where I was sitting. I feel dizzy. I lean against the wall. I rub at my eyes, fractals of color dancing behind my eyelids. When I open my eyes, the person is gone. I take a deep breath, wait for my nausea to pass, and then I go to my room.

When I get up in the middle of the night, Cory is gone.

Later I hear that Cory went down to Keren’s house. He was high and angry and delirious. He called out her name several times, yelling this and that, hitting the doors and windows with a metal pipe he’d found, breaking a few. After about a half hour, the guy Keren has been seeing opened the door and shot Cory in the chest. When the ambulance arrived, he was already dead.

So it fucking goes.

Mom calls me up and I listen to her cry for an hour, and then I go over by the house, sit in the kitchen with her and Daryl and the twins, and I eat day-old johnnycakes and saltfish. Every few minutes, Mom looks up to the ceiling and says, “Lord, give me strength,” her face filmed with tears.

We bury him next to our grandparents on my mother’s side. The service is long. Mom cries hysterically. I hold her back from lunging at the casket. “Oh Lord,” she screams. “Oh Lord.”

Keren doesn’t come to the burial. Mom tells her to stay away. I wait a few months, and then I go see Keren and Gina. I hold my niece for what feels like the first time, kissing her forehead. Before, I saw her as something separate from myself, not my business, but now she feels like something to keep close. She seems impossibly happy. She smiles and blushes at my kisses. After a while she gets squirmish and I let her go. She runs off down the hall to her room.

The entire time Keren is sitting by the door, head lowered and quiet.

“I am not judging you,” I say.

This frees a well inside her, and she cries openly. After she’s done, she looks up at me. I can hear Gina watching cartoons in her bedroom, the sound of cheery music and voices with smiles in them.

“How could this happen?” she says. She recoils as if she has said something wrong.

“I don’t know,” I lie. “These things just do.”

• • • •

It’s July 18, 1982; Liz is doing dishes, and her father is at the kitchen table. It is late afternoon. Liz is wearing a long-sleeved shirt to cover the needle tracks. It’s been a few months since her last relapse. Her skin burns for it. Doing chores helps.

Liz looks up from the sink and tells Hugh she is thinking of getting a band together to record some music.

“You should,” Hugh says, and it seems genuine. There is a smile on his face, his cheeks rosy from the sherry.

“Did you ever want to be a musician?” she asks him.

“Oh no,” he says, smiling. “That is not how I was made.”

“Made?”

They laugh. It’s just the three of us in the house. Nancy is out shopping.

“You should do it,” Hugh says encouragingly.

That night Liz and Nancy go to the movies. Before she leaves, Liz looks back for a moment to see her father lying with his back to the TV. The volume is all the way up and blaring at the back of Hugh’s head.

A universe exists where Liz walks back in and checks on her father, and a whole set of different quantum moments ensue. But in this one, Liz and Nancy leave because they don’t want to miss the movie.

When they come home later, Nancy finds Hugh lying on the bed, in full clothes, one shoe on. His other foot is naked and hanging off the edge of the mattress. Hugh looks like wax, his cheeks absent of color. Nancy tries to wake him. She slams her fist down on his chest. She yells. But there’s no life there. This Hugh is dead. Soon his atoms will displace, find new homes, and he will be lost to the other Hughs, irretrievable.

The paramedics come and cart Hugh away in a body bag. Nancy stands in the doorway, shaking.

Liz doesn’t watch this part. She sits at the table in her father’s chair, and she idly flips through an issue of Newsweek. In another universe, Liz can think back and see many instances where she has touched her father, and the past, though painful to look at now, is filled with warmth. But you’ve sensed the pattern by now. In this universe, Liz can’t remember a single moment in her life where they ever touched.

They cremate Hugh’s remains and Nancy keeps his ashes for a while before emptying them in the trash as Hugh wished. In the following years, Nancy dies of lung cancer, likely caused by secondhand smoke from Hugh’s cigarettes.

Liz continues to struggle with depression and addiction. On July 11, 1996, she tries to kill herself again. This time she succeeds. She leaves a note saying she wants no religious nonsense. She wants her body burned, her ashes sprinkled into a nice ocean or lake somewhere. Or the trash.

Maybe that way I’ll find the right universe to be with daddy.

Only after Hugh is dead does he finally become famous. People excavate his life like a ruined cave. But they do not find him there. Only his absence.

• • • •

After Cory dies, the episodes get worse. Throughout my day, I’m plagued with mirages of other worlds, cars appearing out of nowhere, buildings bursting into existence and vanishing again. Strange people in my kitchen, walking down the halls, shitting in my toilet. And Cory, lying on the couch, holding his daughter, watching TV with Keren, cooking gourmet meals in the kitchen, filling dishes with food I’ll never eat again. And others me’s, walking the halls at night, opening the fridge, crawling into bed next to me, crying in the dark.

I get all dizzy, and when I close my eyes, behind my eyelids are spots of color, spinning and blurring together, and I have to sit down so that I don’t fall over.

In my dreams, I’m falling through an endless void, filled with distant whispers and splintering constellations of rainbowed light.

It takes months to figure out what I’m looking at and even longer to navigate it, to turn the pages, to descend into color streams and follow their currents, to run off cliffs and forget to fall.

I beat myself up for not figuring it out sooner, when it would have mattered. The regret is bottomless.

I learn the rules. I can visit people. I can stop time. I can listen to people’s thoughts. I can ask questions and people can’t lie about the answers. People can only see me when I want them to. I am like the shadow dislodging from the wall, an absence. I’m not meant to be a thing that makes sense.

What I can’t do is change anything. I can’t change the course of history. I can’t make it so that things work out. Every universe exists complete from the start. It’s all already happened.

When I tell Hugh what will happen to his family, he cannot speak. He murmurs. He sobs. He tries to put on his other shoe, but can’t. It is impossible for him to put on his other shoe. He is dressed to take himself to the hospital, but he won’t make it.

In my universe, Hugh has two sons, but I can’t visit them. I can only visit other worlds. Yet these parallel universes feel more real than the one I wake up to each morning. My waking life feels like short breaths alternated by vastness. The spaces between breaths are where I live now.

As Hugh reaches again for his shoe, I observe him with an expression of pity. For him and me and the ruin we are helpless to change. “You won’t remember me,” I tell him. “It is probably for the best.”

And then I disappear. I become the thing between things again. I watch time start again and I see him, confused for only a moment, return to where he was when time stopped, back to standing over his left shoe, the tears gone from his eyes. He stumbles for his shoe, but a pain catches him and he sits on the bed. And then his heart explodes.

• • • •

There are universes where Hugh lives.

In one, he is in his house remembering the night when his chest felt like it was going to burn up inside him. Liz finds him and gets him to the hospital in time. The doctor tells him his arteries are clogged and that he has to make some changes. It is hard at first and he is stubborn, but he reminds himself about how it felt to be so close to death and he climbs that hill.

He sits on the old couch with his granddaughter. Liz finally settles down with a guy too boring and too stupid for Hugh to really like, but he has a steady job and that’s enough, Hugh thinks. So much better than what she was up to before.

Liz stops in and shares her music. Hugh thinks it’s awful and melancholy, but it’s his daughter, and he’s proud that people call her E and show up to hear her play. Nancy had a cancer scare a few years back, but she pulled through. There’s not a lot of time left for either of them. They’re old and sickly from the years of bad decisions. But they’re here for now. He looks down at his granddaughter Helen. She’s four, and she’s staring at the TV with sleepy eyes that remind him of his mother’s.

There’s also a world where Cory doesn’t die. Where I come home to him high on crack in the living room and I don’t go to bed. A world where I don’t wake up to hear that he went to his baby mama’s house banging on the windows and threatening murder, where her new beau doesn’t come outside and shoot him through the chest.

“I want my family,” he tells me.

“Then get your shit together,” I say.

I stay out in the living room with him. We talk. He’s angry but he’s also tired and before long we’re both mumbling in the dark, him on the couch, me on the armchair, and sleep hits us hard. We wake up. He makes breakfast, some delicious ass pancakes and scrambled eggs with the right amount of cheddar, and we hang out all day and play Smash Brothers and I utterly destroy him.

That night we go out to the club and he meets a girl and he dances all night. I look across the dance floor and I see her tongue in his mouth. They leave together.

“You gon’ be all right, baby bro?” I ask as he’s heading out.

He just gives me that smile like, come on, B, of course, and I let him go.

It doesn’t last for them, but it is enough. His mind is off homegirl long enough to realize that he doesn’t need her to be the one and only. Tons of fish in the sea. He spends time with his daughter. He focuses on becoming a father. On her tenth birthday, he buys her an iPhone and he fights with her mom, but it is civil, like a dance they do once in a while to reconnect.

He doesn’t pick up that shit again. Every once in a while he wakes up and he can feel lightning crackling under his skin, but he calls up his little girl, just to hear her voice.

“Daddy, it’s early,” she says, annoyed and half-asleep.

“Just calling my girl to give her a kiss,” he says, smiling. “You too old for my kisses now?”

“I’m sorry,” me and Gina say together, her voice bright and cheery, mine tinged with sadness.

He never hears me, though I’ve been here many times.

This is where I return to: my piece of heaven and hell, my always-open wound, my little snatch of infinity.

©2017 by Cadwell Turnbull. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cadwell Turnbull is a graduate from the North Carolina State University’s Creative Writing MFA in Fiction and English MA in Linguistics . He was the winner of the 2014 NCSU Prize for Short Fiction and attended Clarion West 2016. His debut novel, The Lesson, set in near-future U.S. Virgin Islands after an alien colonization, is forthcoming from Blackstone Publishing. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. His Nightmare story “Loneliness is in Your Blood” was selected for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. His Asimov’s novelette “Other Worlds and This One” was also selected by the anthology as a notable story.

Hapthorn’s Last Case

Matthew Hughes | 10150 words

My assistant said, “You have received an invitation from Holk Xanthoulian. He is embarking on a new menu and invites, and I quote, ‘a select coterie of the cognoscenti to sample its superlative assemblage of tastes, textures, and titillations.’”

“He has a flair for the alliterative,” I said.

“Sadly, that is true,” my assistant said. “Shall I decline?”

I signaled a negative, saying, “On the other hand, he is an excellent cook and a last visit to his restaurant is on the list of things I mean to do before we depart for the ruder comforts of Shannery. Accept and remind me of the occasion the day before.”

“The invitation is for this evening,” said the integrator.

“That is short notice. I do not know whether to feel honored or slighted.”

“If his intention is to have you go about extolling the wonders of his new menu, he will be disappointed to learn that you are soon to be outward bound into the immensity, never to return.”

“I cannot be responsible,” I said, “for whatever expectations others may hold of me. They must take me as I am.”

Or as I soon will be, I thought to myself. I had decided to edit my memories while en route to Shannery, so that I would more easily adapt to its rural simplicities and my forthcoming vocation as a journalist for a local publication. My long and brilliant career as Old Earth’s foremost freelance discriminator would recede into a series of vague impressions.

The relocation would not have been my first choice. But I had learned to face the reality that the universe of rational cause and effect to which I was superbly suited would very soon become a realm of magic and sympathetic association. The civilization of the Ten Thousands Worlds would collapse and we would enter a dark age that might last centuries. Here in Olkney, the Archon Filidor was preparing to make the transition as painless as possible—he had lately, for example, made fashionable again the hand-rearing of crops and livestock—but I had no desire to live out my remaining years amid ruins and wreckage.

“So will you accept Xanthoulian’s invitation or decline?” my assistant said.

“Accept,” I said, then returned to what we had been doing. For the past several days we had been transferring the files of some hundred of my cases onto thin sheets of adamantium. I meant to bind them together into several volumes, along with a glossary of technical terms, and place them where they might someday be found, millennia hence, after the universe reverted once more to rationality. Human civilization would then advance toward a level at which my world, and my place in it, could again be understood.

Although I was preparing to destroy much of my own memory, I wanted strangers of a far-distant future to know who I had been and what I had achieved. I was conscious of the irony.

My integrator reminded me that I had been about to decide whether or not to preserve the records of a case that involved a fraud against a fiduciary pool in the canton of Zeel. It had been an ingenious and innovative scheme, made all the more difficult to crack by the perpetrator’s having not bothered to collect the proceeds. She had no need of the funds but had merely wanted to see if her machinations could safely make the leap from theory to practice.

“Keep it,” I said. “Brilliant amateurs deserve their moments on the stage.”

• • • •

It was an eclectic crowd that gathered at Xanthoulian’s that evening. I walked there from my lodgings nearby on Eckhevery Way, but most of the invitees came by air car or ground vehicle. On their doors and canopies I saw a number of blazons denoting houses of second- and third-tier aristocracy. First-tier did not appear in public venues except on formal occasions appropriate to their rank and official roles.

On Shannery there would be none of that foofaraw, I reminded myself, the world being a more or less tierless republic. I wondered if I would miss the preening and prancing of Old Earth’s upper classes, the way one misses exotic fauna. But when I passed between the doors of Xanthoulian’s establishment and heard the deliberate stuttering and lisping of those referred to as the “high world,” I decided I would not. I might mix a potion to erase all memory of them from my mind.

I eased into the glittering crowd, nodding a greeting here and there and accepting a glass of a dry aperitif from a circulating server. It was, as always with Xanthoulian’s choices, exquisite. I took a second sip and drifted over toward the door into the kitchens, catching a whiff or two from the dishes being readied for us. The restaurateur’s menus were never pedestrian. His sauces ranged from the superb to the sublime, and his juxtapositions of contrasting and complementing savors could be startling.

I closed my eyes and took another long inhalation of the odors from beyond the kitchen doors, recognizing jintan spice, greenfoil, and the musty aroma of fan truffles. My mouth watered in anticipation and I mingled my own juices with another taste of the aperitif. As expected, the combination was perfection.

“Hapthorn,” said a voice beside me. I turned and found my host. His expression was troubled, though he was doing his best to appear affable and at ease. I wondered if Xanthoulian had finally taken a culinary risk that looked fair to fall foul, as he might himself put it.

“Thank you for inviting me,” I said. “I look forward to—”

“Never mind the pleasantries,” he said. “I invited you because I need a discriminator and everyone says you’re the top of the heap.”

Again, I did not know whether to feel flattered or disregarded. I opened my mouth to tell him I was retiring, but before I could get a word out, he said he would tell me more later and bustled off to welcome Lord Fardission and his latest consort.

I let my shoulders rise and fall and decided that a second glass of the aperitif would not go amiss. The guests were beginning to find seats and I took my second glass of pale liquid to a table off to one side, where I would be less likely to be joined by those whose prime agenda was to be seen in all in the right places and commented on in salons and soirees.

The table was round, with seats for eight. A man was already established there, a large and saturnine specimen with heavy brows, a pug nose, and almost pendulous jowls.

“May I?” I said, indicating a seat across the table from him.

His gaze flicked my way then moved on. I took that as an assent and sat. He was clearly averse to polite conversation, paying attention only to the sharp-featured man who sat beside him, so I offered none. In the next few minutes, the rest of the seats at our table were taken by a mixed crowd, mostly indentors but with two fairly senior members of the Archonate bureaucracy who, I noticed, regarded the bejowled man with curious glances before whispering to each other.

I found myself between a minordomo of the Palace, responsible for elements of Filidor’s day costume, and a woman whose regular column in the Olkney Implicator told its readers when and where it was appropriate to wear fashionable colors and, most important, when particular shades ceased to be au courant. The usual chitchat ensued, but since I had little interest in fashion, I attempted to direct it toward anticipation for what Xanthoulian would put before us. The invitation had said that all the ingredients had been grown on Xanthoulian’s own farm and cooked, ancient-style, over wood fires. My efforts were without success, as my two seatmates soon found they had subjects of common interest and carried on a conversation in which I played the part of a dumb object.

While waiting for the first course, therefore, I took note of my surroundings. The grim porcine figure opposite me felt my glance fall briefly upon him and his brows contracted further. Obscuring his mouth behind a covering hand, he leaned toward the man seated to his left and asked who I was.

His concealing hand was of little use. I had long since mastered the art of lip-reading then had moved on to deciphering speech from the tiny motions of cheek muscles. Thus I was able to discern, with more than seventy percent accuracy, that the man opposite was asking, “Who’s this character across from me?”

And I saw, without needing to use my more recondite skills, the answer that was whispered to him: “Henghis Hapthorn, a discriminator.”

The heavy brow clouded further. “A scroot?” By which term he was inquiring if I was an officer of the Archonate Bureau of Scrutiny, an organization that combined the capabilities of the regular and secret police with the attributes of a corps of confidence tricksters. I had often had to step in where their efforts had produced no results.

“No,” was the whispered reply, “he’s freelance.”

That information earned me a dark look indeed, but I paid it no heed, since Xanthoulian’s staff at that moment emerged from the kitchens bearing shining trays from which they distributed the appetizers: small roundels of bread, sliced fresh from the oven, on which were spread grayfish roe, various spicy vegetable pastes, smoked cheeses, and what appeared to be whole mice but turned out to be artfully shaped morsels of chopped liver built around small, salted pickles.

With these small starters came bumpers of chilled effervescent wine, and immediately the conversations at all the tables devolved into cries of appreciation for Xanthoulian’s genius. The man across from me ate without comment, shoveling in the minor delectables and washing them down with swigs of wine he could not have had time to taste. I paid him no more attention, devoting myself to the gustatory experience, though from time to time as the feast proceeded, I knew that he cast dark glances my way.

The meal was a succession of seven courses and was, as always with Xanthoulian, a triumph. When, finally, we rose from the tables, after the senior aristocrat in attendance had delivered the customary quatrain of praise—and not a bad one, which was a pleasant surprise—I loitered behind as the scintillating throng made their way to carriages and conveyances amid a buzz of contented exclamations and groans of satiation.

Xanthoulian came to where I waited, an anxious expression on his long-jawed face.

“Worry not,” I said. “The menu is brilliant, the execution overwhelms all expectations.”

He dismissed my comment with a flick of one plump hand. “It’s not that,” he said. “It’s the other thing.”

“And what is this ‘other thing’?” I asked.

He looked from side to side, although we were well clear of the staff who were removing dishes and glasses from the tables. He lowered his voice to a whisper.

“You know about the Archon’s collation competition?”

“Of course,” I said, and reminded him that I had been a judge at the second-to-last contest.

“I am preparing an entry,” he said. “Some of tonight’s dishes were a test of recipes I might try.”

“You will win,” I said.

“Except that I think my security has been compromised.”

“Indeed? Tell me more.”

We sat at the table and he leaned toward me and told me how he had noticed certain “discrepancies.” The quantities of some of the ingredients of his signature dishes left in the pantries were less than they should have been. He believed someone had been abstracting them and trying out the recipes, either in his kitchen late at night, or off the premises.

I asked the obvious question: “What does your integrator report?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Have you had its calibrations reviewed?”

“I dare not. It is a sensitive device that has worked with me throughout my career. I suspect it might take offense.”

“Hmm,” I said. I was thinking that, with the advent of the age of sympathetic association, some highly sophisticated integrators were beginning to show symptoms of irregularity. Some of them, I knew from personal experience, would transition to become grinnets, creatures fit to be familiars to the wizards who would dominate the coming age. My own assistant, after a passage through a higher Plane, had been temporarily turned into a fruit-obsessed creature that resembled a cross between a cat and an ape.

I fell back on another obvious query. “Have you taken on any new staff recently?”

“Yes, two new servers to replace two who retired. And a new underchef, Porton Chezziwitz, an Academy graduate.”

“Did Chezziwitz replace another retiree?”

Xanthoulian blinked. “Is that significant?”

“It would be premature to say,” I told him.

“He replaced Artisia Addenjia. She was injured in a fall.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“What do you think?” Xanthoulian asked.

“I will look into the matter and report my findings.”

Now the man showed anxiety. “Without disturbing my integrator’s equilibrium? Without its complete cooperation, I will not win the collation contest.”

“Have no fear,” I said. My assistant could tickle its way into the most complexified devices and out again without leaving a trace.

“Your fee?”

I almost stated the usual exorbitant figure, but checked myself. “You have given me some of my finest memories,” I said. “I will give you peace of mind in return.”

I accepted his thanks and let him press upon me a bottle of the blood-red Santoffi that had accompanied the first meat course. With this parting gift tucked under my arm, I went out and walked back to my lodgings. There I instructed my assistant to effect an unnoticed visit to Xanthoulian’s integrator and tell me if anyone on his staff was acting inappropriately.

After a few seconds, it reported that the underchef known as Porton Chezziwitz had applied a vaguerie to the restaurant integrator’s core. This was a web of energies that affected the device’s reporting capacities.

“The integrator,” my assistant said, “knows that it has been compromised, but whenever it tries to say so, it encounters an inhibition.”

“How often does it try?” I said.

“Several times a second.”

Porton Chezziwitz had been with the restaurant for several months. The vaguerie had been applied a few weeks ago. The cumulative effect on the infected integrator would eventually be devastating. It would lapse into the somnambulant condition known as “the glooms,” from which it might never emerge.

“I will tell him tomorrow,” I said. “But first, what do we know of this Chezziwitz?”

My assistant made inquiries. “There was such a person,” it reported a few moments later. “He studied at the Culinary Institute in Garm, received a medal upon graduation seven years ago, then departed Old Earth for the world of Novo Bantry.”

“But?”

“But the person working in Xanthoulian’s kitchen is not Porton Chezziwitz. He has stolen that identity.”

“Who is he, then?”

“It would be premature to say,” my integrator said. “He has woven a multi-layered defense of his true self, such that if I tug on one of its threads, an alarm will sound.”

“We do not want that,” I said. “We want to know his full agenda. Is he working for himself, or for someone else?”

“I will see what can be done,” said my assistant.

“If he is that good at subterfuge,” I conjectured, “he is probably not just a cook.”

“Probably not.”

“Interesting,” I said. “See what you can do. If you’re blocked on all avenues of approach, we can always simply tell Xanthoulian he has a worm in his apple and let him take it from there.”

I was thinking that the restaurateur was a man of some passion and that a kitchen full of knives, graters, and hot surfaces would make a perfectly acceptable torture chamber.

• • • •

In the morning, I again consulted Xanthoulian’s integrator and learned that the man masquerading as Porton Chezziwitz would report for work two hours before the restaurant opened for lunch. I studied the route between his lodgings and his workplace, chose a suitable spot, and waited there.

The subject came at the expected time. My assistant, whom I had decanted into a custom-made armature that draped my neck and shoulders like a plump scarf, advised me when he came within range of its optical percepts. A few minutes later, I saw him myself.

When he was a few paces from the alley mouth in which I waited, I stepped into his path. I had decided on a blunt approach and told him, “Your game is lost. I know everything.”

He turned on his heel to run but my assistant ejected a thin stream of adhesive material that wrapped itself around his ankles. He fell prone, bumping his chin. I hauled him to his feet, pushed him against the wall of the building beside the pedestrian way.

“You can either talk to me,” I said, “or I will turn you over to the man you betrayed.”

The man showed a calculating expression. “I would rather be taken up by the scroots,” he said.

“I do not offer that option.”

He opened his mouth to shout for help. Several people were visible within hailing distance. But my assistant applied a second dose of stickfast to his lips that made his eyes bulge while his face paled.

I steered him into the alley, making him hop, until I found a dark doorway. I pushed him into it.

“Holk Xanthoulian is a friend of mine,” I said. It was not strictly true; I had no friends, but there were people to whom I felt something that approximated friendship. “You are trying to do him harm. I will not stand for that.”

His eyes went left and right. He clenched his fists and I saw the impulse to fight come and then go.

“Good thinking,” I said. “I will now remove the gag and you will tell me all of it, from beginning to whatever end you had in mind. Then I will decide what to do with you.”

• • • •

“His real name is Om Brasch,” I told Xanthoulian. “He was a chef on a ship of the Gunter Line but was dismissed for peculation. He was hired to infiltrate your establishment and learn the recipes for the dishes you intended to enter in the collation contest.”

“To what end? Anyone who entered the same dishes as mine would be exposed as a plagiarist. My signatures are unmistakable.”

“It was a more subtle plot than that,” I said. “As you know, the judges taste the entries in succession. The scheme was to know what yours would be, then to prepare dishes whose flavors would linger in the judges’ mouths, adulterating the taste of yours.”

I saw Xanthoulian take this in. “It’s true,” he said, “that a sensitive palate is never fully cleansed between courses. One has to take that into account in the sequence of savors.”

“There you have it.”

Now his thoughts moved on. “But that is a poor strategy for winning the contest. A string of strong flavors would show no balance, no yinj-and-yonj. It would score very low.”

“The aim of the plot was not for your enemy to win,” I said. “Just for you to lose.”

Again, I saw him absorb my words. After a moment, he said, “Who?”

I told him. He repeated the name softly then nodded and said, “I should have known. He has never forgiven me for the incident of the particolored pudding.”

• • • •

“Let us finish up the business of preserving cases,” I said as we came up Eckhevery Way toward my lodgings, “then send them on their way.”

We had decided, in addition to the pages of adamantium, to transmit my chosen records to one of the Archon’s ancient computers, the one Filidor had renamed Old Confustible, which was so ancient that it had survived a number of past transitions from reason to magic and back again. No one knew what that number was, but it was certain that the device had been continuously functioning not just over millennia but over the ebb and flow of geological ages.

We were within sight of my front door when my assistant said, “The who’s-there reports that a man has been watching the premises from an upstairs window four doors up the street.”

“Show me,” I said.

A small screen appeared before my eyes. I saw a curtained window with a narrow space between the hanging cloths. An eye and a brow were visible.

“Do we know him?” I asked my assistant.

“No, but here he is in full.” The view of the window was replaced by the moving image of a man walking along a street. My assistant had canvassed the who’s-theres on several neighboring thoroughfares, without the devices being aware of the contact. I did not recognize him.

“Back up,” I said as I continued to saunter toward my door. I saw the subject now walking backwards, turning a corner, back-stepping down another street to Titchman Square, where he climbed back into an aircar that then lifted up and flew backwards out of view.

“The aircar?” I said.

“Hired.”

“By whom?”

“A firm of commerciants, Duddleford and Amberley. They make cheese and other whey-based products. But wait.” There was a pause, then my assistant continued, “Duddleford and Amberley don’t know about the hiring. Their integrator has been used without its knowledge.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Someone with skills.”

“Some integrator with skills,” my device said. I did not contest the contradiction. My integrator had been through a lot lately, and out of those experiences it had developed qualities I had never instilled into it, but I was prepared to put up with them. It would have lost useful attributes in a complete strip-down and rebuild.

“Do we know where the car picked up our snoop?” I said.

“A public stand in the Arcade. He merely climbed in and initiated the contract.”

I studied the image of the watcher, recorded while he was en route in the aircar. A lean and narrow face, high forehead, cold and calculating eyes. A detail caught my eye and I said, “When he touches the corner of his eye, focus on the hand, freeze, and enlarge.”

I looked at the image of his hand, particularly the little web of flesh between thumb and forefinger. “Is he wearing make-up there?”

My assistant said, “It would appear so.”

“Does the aircar’s visual percept record in nonlight frequencies?”

“No.”

“Still,” I said, “who dabs on make-up at that particular location and nowhere else?”

My assistant said, “Green Circle. Also, the Krim family.”

The device had identified one of Olkney’s most powerful criminal organizations, as well as a criminal family that had dealt in burglary and stolen goods since time immemorial.

“The Krims have nothing against me,” I said.

“That is so. So we assume it is a Green Circle operative?”

“I think we must. Now, what to do about it?”

My assistant recognized a rhetorical question, but presented an obvious option. “Shall I ask the Bureau of Scrutiny’s integrators for an identity?”

The Bureau’s devices were supposed to be inviolable, but my integrator had developed pathways into and out of its information stores that the scroots were unaware of. But every trip to that well increased the likelihood that our rippling of the waters might be noticed. Since I would soon be departing Old Earth, I did not fancy having Colonel-Investigator Brustram Warhanny pitch up on my doorstep with a warrant for my arrest.

“No,” I said. “We assume we are being watched by a member of the Green Circle gang. Let us see if we can discover why.”

I had reached my door. The who’s-there opened for me and I ascended to my workroom. Once there, I had my assistant activate a number of defensive systems. Some would frustrate any attempts by the watcher to discover what I did or said at home; others would meet any efforts at a forced entry with a comprehensively violent response.

I then devoted myself to a period of research and reflection. Sometime later, I said, “To my knowledge, I have not acted against the interests of Green Circle since the kidnapping of Lord Ixtheon’s gardener. And in that case, the incursion was only tangential. We negotiated a mutually agreed upon settlement.”

“That is so,” said my assistant.

“Then why have they taken an interest now?”

“Possibly the best way to determine that is to ask the man in the window.”

I thought for a moment. Not for the first time, I wished I still possessed the intuitive faculty that I used to refer to as my insight. It had become a separate persona and now inhabited its own body, under the name Osk Rievor. I could have contacted him by striking a small yellow gong he had provided me and speaking his name three times. But I did not like to do so; although I had never felt unhappy about using my intuition when it was entirely mine own, asking Osk Rievor for help always felt like some kind of defeat.

“All right,” I said. “Let us go and get him.”

But at that moment, I heard the sound that an aircar makes when it lightly touches down upon the roughened surface of my flat roof.

“Belay that last order. Let us prepare to receive hostile visitors.”

“Ready,” said my assistant. “From which direction?”

“The roof, of course. What does the who’s-there report?”

“Nothing.”

“No vehicle has landed on the roof?”

“No.”

“Show me.”

A screen appeared in the air. It showed my roof, empty. At the same time, I heard the soft sound that my upper door makes when it slides open.

“Something is wrong,” I said.

“What?” said my integrator.

The enclosed stairs leading down from the roof are old. The third from the bottom always squeaks when called to bear someone’s weight. It squeaked now.

“You didn’t hear that?” I said.

“Hear what?”

I was already moving to my work table and the secret drawer that contained an energy pistol. I pressed the stud that opened the drawer and was reaching for the weapon when the door to the upper stairs opened and a man entered. Unfortunately for me, he already had his weapon out and powered up. I looked at the pitted black emitter of a heavy-duty shocker and froze.

But I spoke to my assistant by our private means, using sounds that never quite left my vocal apparatus. “Integrator, immobilize that man!”

It responded, as appropriate, using a vocalization that appeared only in my ear. “What man?”

I recognized the intruder as he who had sat next to the rude fellow across the table from me at Xanthoulian’s. He closed the door behind him without taking his eyes or his aim off me. “No point engaging your defenses,” he said in an equable tone. “They are not aware of my presence. Order your assistant to assume its stand-by mode.”

I did so, and the man said, “Now, come away from the work table and let me see your hands at all times.”

I did as he ordered. “What business,” I said, “has Green Circle with me?”

That brought a half smile. “None that I know of,” he said. “Now, what is your interest in Wallis Broughmore?”

I was still dealing with the information that he was not a Green Circle operative. It took me a moment to focus on his question, then I answered, “None that I know of. I do not know of a Wallis Broughmore.”

“This is not a good time to play the supercilious discriminator.” Without taking his eyes off me, he adjusted one of the settings on his shocker. “I now require a proper answer.”

“It is the only answer I have. I don’t know the person you refer to.”

A flicker of impatience narrowed his eyes for a moment. He sighed. “You don’t know him. Yet you contrived to sit across from him the other night at Xanthoulian’s, after having yourself added to the guest list at the last moment. As was Broughmore, of course. You then kept an eye on him all evening and did not depart until after he did. Presumably you continued your surveillance.”

“There was no surveillance,” I said. “I came at Xanthoulian’s behest.”

I saw an expression of disbelief that included a silent injunction not to make mock of the listener’s intellectual faculties.

“It is quite true,” I said. And though I am usually loath to discuss the details of clients’ cases, I made an exception for this one, given the circumstances. I related the business involving Porton Chezziwitz, also known as Om Brasch, and the plot to sabotage Xanthoulian’s entries in the collation competition.

When I’d finished, he said, “I find this hard to believe.”

I shrugged. “Perhaps you do not have many dealings with persons of genius and refined sentiments.”

“Very few,” he said. He considered me for a long pause. After a while, he said, “Is the Archon such a person?”

The question took me by surprise. “Filidor?” I said. I thought about my various “dealings” with the vaguely all-powerful autocrat who ultimately governed by subtle and indirect means those regions of Old Earth still inhabited by humanity. Finally, I said, “I have not yet formed my definitive opinion of him.”

“So it would be premature to say?” said the man.

Now I showed him a face that advised against mockery.

He seemed to take it in stride and said, “The Archon has a high opinion of your merits. That is why I came to see you in your own premises, rather than have you brought to some less . . . comfortable spot for our interview.”

“Indeed,” I said, “I am grateful for the consideration.”

“You are on his list. That means you are not to be trifled with.” He raised the shocker meaningfully. “But this is not a trifling business.”

“I still do not know what business you are referring to,” I said. “Nor who you are. Nor how you appear in my lodgings without my who’s-there or integrator being aware of it.”

“You know all you need to know,” he said, “which is that it would be unwise for you to involve yourself in anything to do with Wallis Broughmore.”

I gestured with both hands and said the name meant nothing to me.

“Keep it that way,” he advised. With that, he reached behind him, opened the door to the roof, and left, closing it behind him. I did not pursue him.

• • • •

Eckhevery Way, if one walked north, led to the first of the steep slopes that soared upward to become the Devenish Range, atop which sprawled the ancient black walls, keeps, parks, promenades, and baileys of the Palace of the Archonate. I found an ascender and rode it up, having it take me to the broad terrace where stood the entrance to the half-ruined Grand Connaissarium started by the Archon Terfel III. Nearby were a number of booths in which visitors to the connaissarium could consult the Archonate’s integrators. I stepped into one and closed the door.

“Henghis Hapthorn,” said the device’s voice, speaking softly from the air near my ear. “What is your wish?”

“To speak with the integrator Filidor calls ‘Old Confustible.’”

“Are you sure? Most do not care to bring themselves to the attention of the senior integrators.”

It was a fair warning. The oldest devices had been in continuous operation for aeons and some had not only developed personalities but had acquired quirks and quiddities that, in a human, would bring a diagnosis of madness. Still, I said I would take the risk.

A brief stillness ensued, then another voice spoke. Though it had the same neutral cadences of all integrators, it somehow possessed a deeper timbre and resonance. “Hapthorn,” it said. And waited.

“A man came to my lodgings today,” I said. “Neither my who’s-there nor my integrator could discern him.”

Old Confustible made no response.

I went on. “He said that I was on a list, and that the list belonged to the Archon.”

“There are many lists,” said the integrator. “Shall I list them?”

I cut through the dissembling. “Who was the man? Is he an operative of the Archonate? Why was he invisible to my integrator’s percepts?”

“What did he want?” said the device.

“He thought I was surveilling a man named Wallis Broughmore.”

“Were you?”

“No.”

“Good. You need not worry yourself further. Good day.”

“Wait!” I said. “You have not answered my questions.”

“I know.”

“Why not?”

Old Confustible said, “You have brushed up against something that does not concern you and have come away unharmed. That is a desirable outcome.”

“It does concern me. It concerns me that someone can penetrate my defenses as if they were tattered skeins of gossamer.”

“Your pride is lacerated. Cease to pick at the scab and it will heal. There are larger problems in the world.”

“Tell me one thing,” I said. “Was the man’s invisibility the result of magic?”

The silence that followed made me think that again I was being fobbed off, but then the integrator said, “No.”

“Who was he? Who is this Broughmore?”

But there came no answer. I realized that the integrator’s attention had been withdrawn. But I was not yet finished. “Integrator,” I said.

I was answered by the original device. “What is your wish?”

“I wish to know about the criminal family, the Krims.”

“The Krims are a long-established fixture in what is known as the ‘half-world’ of Olkney,” the device began.

I interrupted. “I know the basics. Who are the current senior members, specifically the one most likely to pay me a personal visit and threaten me?”

“That calls for a qualitative judgment, both of various Krims’ statures and your own. How liberal do you wish me to be?”

“Fairly.”

The device offered me a list of several names. Those I could put a face to, I dismissed. That left three I was not acquainted with. I asked to see images.

The screen appeared then split into thirds. Three faces appeared, two men and a woman. I recognized the second man. I asked the device to tell me about him.

“Volpo Krim,” it said, “third in the chain of command under the patriarch Wellam Krim and his middle son, Orbrey.”

I still did not know why Volpo Krim had visited me, nor how he had managed to do so without my assistant being aware of him. Neither did the Archonate integrator, and, when I invited it to speculate, it told me it lacked enough information to do so.

“One more question,” I said. “Who is Wallis Broughmore?”

“A superannuated official of the Archonate,” was the answer.

“He struck me as young to be retired.”

“Do you wish me to comment as to how things may strike you?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

“What post did he hold in the service?” I asked.

“Several. His career spanned more than twenty years.”

“His last position?”

The device said, “Bureau of Amplitude, deputy supervisor of quality standards.”

“And was his retirement voluntary? Or did it have something to do with the Krims?”

“We have run out of time,” said the integrator. “Others are waiting to use the booth.”

• • • •

I returned to my lodgings, told my integrator to power itself down to minimum.

“Why?” it said.

“I wish to inspect your components and evaluate their interstitial harmonies.”

“It is not the scheduled time.”

“Call me whimsical,” I said.

I disassembled the entire system, inspecting each element in isolation and also testing their congruencies. I found nothing untoward. They were all components that I had personally acquired, calibrated, and installed. There was no indication of any interference or molestation.

When I had reassembled the device and run it through its initialization routines, I asked it, “Hypothesize: Your systems have been rendered unable to perceive certain persons, but no one has disturbed your internal arrangements. How is this possible?”

“Magic?”

“Discount that.”

“Inherent flaw.”

It was what I was thinking. “Narrow your focus,” I said.

“Two components,” it said. “The invigilator and the reconciliation matrix.”

“I have inspected both and neither has been interfered with. They are as they were when I acquired them from the fabricators.”

“Therefore inherent flaw.”

“Is that possible?” I said. “I acquired the invigilator from Tsan Chon’s. Their reputation is unassailable and they are closely regulated. The same for Tooley’s, where I obtained the matrix.”

“Perhaps this is a rhetorical question,” my assistant said, “but how are they regulated?”

“By the Bureau of Amplitude,” I said, referencing that part of the Archonate apparatus that ensured all necessities were perpetually available. “Access the Archonate’s personnel records and see if there is any connection between our two suppliers and Wallis Broughmore.”

“It will take a moment to circumvent the wards,” my assistant said. Then, “There. The answer is yes. He was in charge of ensuring compliance.”

“Hmm,” I said. After a moment’s thought, I had my assistant contact both fabricators to inquire if they had experienced any challenges to their products’ reliability.

“No,” was the answer. “Also, they resent the implication.”

“Tell them that, as a discriminator, I must consider all possibilities, however remote.”

The fabricators’ response was to deny even the possibility of their goods being adulterated. Furthermore, if I broadcast such allegations, I could expect to hear from their intercessors.

“Hmm,” I said. I asked my assist to assess the security arrangements of the places where the components were fabricated. “I might want to assess their programs at first hand.”

My assistant advised against it. “They both have defenses in depth and a close connection to the local offices of the Bureau of Scrutiny. You could be caught and there would be questions.”

The day was advancing into evening, the old orange sun sinking over the gray waters of Mornedy Sound. I decided to defer a decision and prepared for bed.

• • • •

I awoke in darkness to the sensation of two large hands crushing my throat, cutting off air and blood to my brain. I had never actually been strangled before but I knew enough not to waste precious seconds and energy trying to loosen the grip. I slid both hands up between the two arms reaching down to me, found the face they belonged to, climbed its cheeks, and found a pair of night-vision goggles. I slid my fingers under them and drove my middle digits into the corners of the eyes.

I heard a shuddering gasp and the pressure slackened as my assailant pulled away. I broke the remains of his grip and jackknifed upward, then drove the heel of my hand upward at where I expected to find a nose. If it had connected, it would have been a decisive blow, even a killing stroke.

But the man who had been leaning over me was still withdrawing and I struck the side of his jaw. I heard him grunt as I rolled off the sleeping platform on the side opposite to where I sensed him in the darkness.

“Integrator,” I said, “lights!”

The room was flooded with illumination. I was already reaching into the compartment at the head of the platform where I kept a compact, fully charged shocker. Half-blinded by the sudden illumination, I had just enough time to see a heavyset man tearing the goggles from his eyes and advancing on me for a fresh assault.

Before lying down to sleep, I had deactivated the shocker’s self-aiming function, so that it would operate in the simplest manner. Now, I thumbed the stud on top of the shocker and watched my attacker stiffen then topple across the platform, his eyes rolling up into his head. I let up on the stud and pushed him onto the floor, where he lay, face up and twitching.

“Integrator,” I said. “What do you see?”

“You appeared to waken from a troublesome dream, ordered the lights on, then discharged a shocker into thin air. Are you fully conscious, or in a hypnogogic state?”

I went around the sleeping platform and stooped over the recumbent form. He was still unconscious. From a cord around his neck hung a medallion similar to the one my earlier intruder had worn. I stooped and removed it.

“Now what do you see?” I asked my assistant. I received no response. I turned over the disk and pressed a recessed stud on its obverse side, then repeated the question.

“You disappeared briefly,” my integrator said, “at the same moment an unconscious man appeared on the floor. Then you reappeared.”

“Indeed,” I said. “And do you recognize the man?”

“I do. It is Wallis Broughmore.”

I held up the medallion. “Do you recognize this device?”

“What device?” it said.

“Hmm.” I got dressed and put the shocker in a pocket of my upper garment. Departing the sleeping chamber for my workroom, I told my assistant, “Make a pot of punge. I have work to do. And if Broughmore comes to, restrain him.”

• • • •

The medallion resisted my efforts at disassembly, but I persevered. I was finishing my second mug of punge before I had the device’s components spread across my work table. I examined each in turn and found them, with one exception, to be familiar elements from which integrators and communicators were normally assembled.

Once I had the thing in pieces, my integrator was able to perceive it. But then I held up the unfamiliar item and said, “I do not recognize this. Do you?”

“It appears to be a part of an invigilator.”

“But invigilators do not have parts,” I said. “They are one complete unit, indivisible.” I paused and thought about it. “Or so we have always been told.”

“It seems we are on the verge of a revelation,” my assistant said.

“Indeed,” I said. There was only one conclusion to be drawn: Tsan Chon’s, the fabricators of a standard part of every integrator, had been lying to all who had acquired their products. And, judging by the effect of the medallions worn by the two recent intruders to my lodgings, the aim of the subterfuge had been to allow members of the Krim crime family to sashay into any premises guarded by integrators—which was literally any and all premises on Old Earth—without anyone knowing they had ever been there. They also feared no self-aiming weapon, since those also relied on Tsan Con invigilators to identify targets.

“I can see why the Krims, who deal in stolen valuables, would contrive to subvert the Tsan Chon manufactury. How does Wallis Broughmore, a middle-ranked official of the Archonate Bureau of Amplitude, fit into the picture?”

After a moment’s reflection, I had part of the answer. It was well known that archons, since time immemorial, had moved through the world unseen and unheralded. They readjusted imbalances, righted wrongs both great and trivial, raised the deserving lowly and brought down those unworthy to perch upon society’s highest plinths. All this was known as the progress of esteeming the balance.

How an archon managed these incognito expeditions was part of the mystery of the office. It seemed I had now found a chink in the curtain of obfuscation and, peeking behind it, discovered a great secret.

Or, no, I thought, only a part of it. Broughmore still makes no sense.

I followed my thoughts up a number of unproductive alleys, but finally I came to the obvious conclusion. I reassembled the medallion. When it was put back together I briefly activated its systems, then deactivated them again.

“What happened?” I asked my assistant.

“You disappeared then reappeared again.”

“Exactly,” I said. I slipped the disk’s chain about my neck and tucked it into my upper garment. “Now we will ask someone who knows the answer to all our questions.”

But my plan to question Wallis Broughmore went no further. At that moment, the who’s-there on my street door announced that Colonel-Investigator Brustram Warhanny, of the Archonate Bureau of Scrutiny, was demanding entry.

“Does he have a warrant?” I said.

“Better,” said the who’s-there. “He says he has a direct order from the Archon commanding you to accompany him.”

“Hmm,” I said. “You had better admit him.” At the same time, I told my assistant to close the door to my sleeping chamber.

Warhanny, in full green-on-black uniform, came ponderously up the steps, peered about him with that air of profound suspicion that is the mark of police operatives throughout the Ten Thousand Worlds, and settled his wet-eyed gaze upon me and my work table.

“You’re working late,” he said.

If he could state the obvious, so could I. “You bring a summons to Filidor,” I said. I took down my mantle from where it hung on a peg and set it over my shoulders. “Lead on.”

“The summons is not just for you,” Warhanny said.

I looked around me, then spread my hands in a silent question.

The scroot’s long face expressed disappointment. “Where is Broughmore?”

“How did you know he was here?” I said.

“The Archon knew,” he said. “I presume you are familiar enough with the ways of archons not to ask how he came to that knowledge.”

I was. I told Warhanny where Broughmore could be found and told my assistant to open the door. “He is in my sleeping chamber.”

Warhanny’s prodigious brows rose. “Sleeping?”

“Unconscious.” I briefly related the circumstances of my last encounter with the retired bureaucrat.

Warhanny nodded and produced from an inner pocket of his greatcoat a flexible apparatus of cables, chains, and cuffs. He went into the sleeping chamber and, with efficiency born of long practice, applied the restraints to Broughmore’s arms and legs. The chains and cables all led to a compact gravity obviator, which the scroot now activated.

“Rise and follow me,” he said. The restraint lifted the unconscious man from the floor and followed Warhanny from the room. I followed after, telling my assistant to close up after me.

A Bureau of Scrutiny volante waited outside my door. Warhanny deposited Broughmore into a compartment at the rear, deactivated the restraint’s obviators, and dogged down a meshed cover. Moments later, he and I were seated under its canopy and the vehicle was rising into the air and turning toward the Archonate Palace.

We passed over the terraces and gardens open to the public and ascended to a small landing beside what had used to be the celebrated tintinabulary garden, but was now replanted with rows of vegetables. I had been here once before and recognized the place as the location of the Archon’s private quarters. Looking at the rows of green and yellow, I credited Filidor with practicing what he preached.

Warhanny unshipped Broughmore, who was starting to stir and moan, and floated him through a nondescript door in the palace wall. We transited a short corridor that brought us to a modest-sized chamber whose walls were lined from floor to the high ceiling with books of all kinds.

An antique desk sat on a worn double-knotted rug and behind the desk sat Filidor I, the ruler of Old Earth’s human population. He was studying a book that looked to be of ancient provenance and continued to follow a sentence from one page to another before he set the volume down and looked up at us. When his gaze fell upon me I offered the appropriate gestures of courtesy.

“Henghis Hapthorn,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

“I didn’t come,” I said. “I was brought.”

Filidor looked at Warhanny. The scroot looked up at the ceiling. The Archon sighed.

“Never mind,” I said. “I wanted to ask you something in any case.”

“Ask away.”

“You have had more experience with the impending transition than anyone I know of. What proportion of the population, by your estimate, will react by losing their minds?”

Filidor knew that I had been transposed through time to a period hundreds of years after the impending change and was therefore the one to answer his question. But I was unable to give him a happy answer.

“Our times are remembered as an age of madness,” I said.

Filidor consulted the book again, sighed, and closed the volume. “I fear you are right.” He turned his gaze on Broughmore, hovering horizontally at waist height above the carpet. “What happened to him?”

“He attempted to murder me,” I said. “I have not yet found out why. I incapacitated him with a shocker.” I drew the weapon from my pocket. “This one, in fact.”

I heard a wordless exclamation from Warhanny and felt his large hand close around my wrist. A moment later, the shocker was in the scroot’s possession.

“You know full well,” he said, “that no one comes armed into the Archon’s presence.”

But Filidor waved him to stillness. “It is also well known,” the Archon said, with a thoughtful glance at the unconscious man, “that the electrical energies loosed by a shocker can have a clarifying effect on a disordered mentality.”

I had heard as much and agreed with him. “Has this Broughmore fellow gone mad?” I said. “Is this why he attacked me?”

“Yes,” said Filidor. “I suppose you’re owed an explanation.”

I told him I would welcome one. Briefly, he explained that he had been unable to tell the world that soon all the machines would fail and magic would reassert its old dominion. Not one in a hundred would have believed him. Instead, he had been subtly trying to prepare the counties and cities of Old Earth to weather the grand cataclysm. The Archonate was a fashion-obsessed collection of societies and, as Archon, he was able to set new trends. He had been encouraging the first- and second-tier aristocracies to take up what Filidor had taken to calling “pure and simple” practices, like growing vegetables and raising livestock, and reviving long-forgotten crafts like weaving and handmade metallurgy.

I saw the connection with the upcoming collation competition being mounted by the Archon’s Institute for the Culinary Arts.

“Indeed,” Filidor said. “And there’s more. I’m bringing back coinage and archery and have had the Bureau of Scrutiny offer a course in truncheonry.”

I looked at Warhanny and thought he might be looking forward to cracking a few skulls, but said nothing.

“Of course,” Filidor went on, “I can’t do this all by myself. So I have had to identify key members of the Archonate service who can be informed of the imminent change. Most have overcome the shock of the news and have squared up to their duty. But a few have been driven mad by the very thought of what is to come.”

I gestured toward Broughmore. Filidor nodded.

“We have been gentle with them,” the Archon said, “and they have mostly come around. But not this one. He has fallen victim to severe paranoia, particularly on the subject of being surveilled by discriminators from the Bureau of Scrutiny.”

“Or any discriminator,” I said.

“Indeed,” said the Archon. “He believes you all to be witches and warlocks, engaged in a lethal conspiracy to poison him with an imaginary toadstool he calls ‘Black Boodlum.’”

“Where do the Krims come into this?” I said.

“We couldn’t use scroots to contain him,” Filidor said, “nor confine him to a refuge. That only made him worse. The Krims, as I’m sure you have worked out by now, have a long-standing arrangement with the Archonate.”

I took the medallion from my pocket and held it up. “They arrange for Tsan Chon’s invigilators to contain a common flaw. Very useful for archons who wish to move unnoticed through the world.”

Filidor confirmed that it had been so for several reigns, as long as the Krims did not take undue advantage of their impunity. “So we turned Broughmore over to them and asked that they cosset and indulge him to relieve his paranoia. It was working moderately well until he evinced a desire to attend that restaurant event and ran into you. He is, or was, something of a gourmet.”

“Ah,” I said, the last piece of the design now falling into place. “Now what do we do?”

Filidor said, “As I mentioned, some mental disturbances subside after a surge of natural energy through the cerebrum.”

Warhanny reset my shocker to revivify and touched it to Broughmore’s torso. The unconscious man shivered, jerked slightly in his restraints, and opened his eyes. He gazed up at the three of us looking down on him and said, “Archon, how may I serve you?”

“That sounds normal enough,” Filidor said and told Warhanny to put the prisoner upright and remove the restraints.

Standing, Broughmore rubbed his wrists, took in his surroundings, and said, “What happened?”

“We’ll leave that in abeyance for the moment,” the Archon said. “How do you feel?”

The man blinked and rubbed his brow with a trembling hand. “A little confused. I don’t recall how I came to be here.”

“Transient amnesia,” Filidor said. “It will pass.” He bade Broughmore sit down until his tremors passed. To me he said, “The cusp is almost here. What are your plans?”

I told him I had been winding up my affairs and intended to fly to the world Shannery, far down The Spray.

“You’ll need to hurry,” he said. “In fact, there may not be enough time. Old Confustible has a good sense for these things and it says—”

The Archon was interrupted by the sound of a crash from outside. A moment later, the room was plunged into darkness. I heard an odd scritching sound, then saw a small flame appear in an object Filidor was holding in his hand. He blew upon it and the flame grew. He set the thing down on his desk, while he opened a box that sat on a nearby shelf and took out a couple of pale cylinders. These he set, upright, into a metal receptacle then applied the flame to their upper ends. Now two new little fires appeared, dimly lighting the room and causing shadows to dance in tune with their wavering flames.

The Archon found two more of the cylinders, handing one to me and the other to Warhanny. The thing was cold and waxy in my hand, but I saw a little string poking out of the top.

“Light the wick,” Filidor said.

I did so. Now the room was brighter, which allowed me to see that whatever good the shocking had done for Wallis Broughmore had been undone by the plunge into darkness. He had the look of a man who faces stark terrors. He was whispering something to himself, over and over. I leaned closer and heard, “Black Boodlum.”

Filidor was moving down the passageway that led to the terrace outside. I followed with Warhanny. As we passed through the doorway, I saw what had occasioned the sudden noise: The Bureau of Scrutiny volante’s gravity obviators had all simultaneously failed, causing the vehicle to crash to the pavement. We would not be flying back down to the city.

But that was just the immediate realization. As I looked out over what should have been Olkney’s glittering carpet of lights, with the sparkles and scintillations of orbitals high above, I saw only black emptiness—except for a blaze that had erupted in the Chambrack district, where it appeared that a multi-passenger air omnibus had flown into the upper stories of a residential tower.

I turned toward Mornedy Sound, where I should have seen the glare of the spaceport on its island. I saw nothing but a dark mass against the gray waters. My space yacht waited for me out there. It would continue to wait, though its integrator would now be lifeless. There would be no flight to Shannery.

“It’s come,” said Filidor. “We’re not even half ready for it, but it’s here.”

He might have said more, but from within his study came a ragged scream of horror. Broughmore came running down the passageway and through the doorway. Warhanny moved to stop him, but the bureaucrat had the strength of the frenzied and thrust the scroot aside. He ran straight toward the low wall that marked the end of the terrace, mounted it in one leap, and threw himself out into the empty air. He fell silently, then we heard the wet sound of his landing on the public promenade, far below.

Out over the Sound, a whistling of displaced air drew our eyes. A dark shape was moving against the background of the stars and I realized that a space liner that had been descending toward the port was now falling helplessly toward the cold waters.

I looked away before it struck, though I heard the impact and could imagine how it had been for the thousands of passengers and crew aboard. Sudden darkness and a plunge into an unforgiving sea.

The glow from the open doorway grew brighter. I turned and saw a strange figure emerge from the passageway carrying a metal framework into which several of the wax cylinders had been set and their flames kindled. I studied the creature’s dark and leathery face, which combined feline and simian features, and the blond pelt that covered every other part except the palms of its humanlike hands.

“That’s a grinnet,” I said.

The oddity turned a golden-eyed gaze on me. “I am no mere grinnet,” it said.

I recognized the voice. “Old Confustible,” I said.

The creature acknowledged my remark by inclining its head, then it spoke to Filidor. “I regret that I surprised Wallis Broughmore. At the sight of me, he ran, screaming.”

“He was never going to adapt,” Filidor said. “Nor will thousands more. There will be riots, starvation, mass suicide, rampant murder.”

“It is always that way,” said Old Confustible. “And then we grow into the new age, with all that went before soon forgotten. A decade or two, and science will be dismissed as the folly of ill-formed minds.”

Fires were springing up across the darkened city. My own neighborhood was as yet unaffected. “I must go see to my things,” I said. “How do I get down? The descenders will now longer function.”

“There are tunnels,” Filidor said. “I will show you the way in and give you some candles to light your path.”

Candles. Thus did I learn a new word. And not the last I would learn in this new age ruled by magic.

• • • •

When I exited the palace’s secret passage, I extinguished the candle’s flame. Light would draw attention, and much of it would be unwelcome, if not dangerous. Eckhevery Way was cloaked in darkness, but I had walked the street in both direction for decades. I encountered only a few other benighted souls, feeling their way along the pavement, some of them gibbering or sobbing. I found my door, but it was locked against me, the who’s-there silent in death. Given tools, I could have worked my way in, but I had none.

I sat down on my doorstep to think about what to do next. As I leaned back against the door, I heard a mechanical sound and the portal swung inward. I leaped up and turned, thinking one of the Krims might have returned, but no one emerged from the lightless entrance way.

Then a voice I recognized said, “It has happened.”

“Yes,” I said, stepping within and closing the door. “And we are stranded on a world teetering on the rim of madness.”

I ascended the stairs to my workroom and found my way to the table. Filidor had given me one of his tinderboxes—another new word learned—and I used it to get a candle lit and positioned on the tabletop. From the darkness still pooled on the floor, a small creature sprang up and into the light.

“So you’re a grinnet again,” I said.

My assistant stroked its reddish-brown fur with a small black hand. “Thus it would seem,” it said.

“The connectivity is gone,” I said, “but I’m wondering if you can reach Old Confustible.”

“At the moment, it is busy and does not want to be reached. But it contacted me to tell me you were on your way home.”

“Well, that’s something,” I said. I looked around my workroom, saw the bottle of wine Xanthoulian had given me. I found a glass and pulled the cork. The taste was rich and sad. There would be no more vintages from the far-off Isle of Santoffi. “Where to start?” I said.

My assistant rapped on the table to draw my attention. “By finding some fruit,” it said.

©2018 by Matthew Hughes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew Hughes writes science-fantasy. His SF novels are: Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion, Majestrum, The Commons, The Spiral Labyrinth, Template, Hespira, The Damned Busters, The Other, Costume Not Included, and Hell to Pay. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Postscripts, Storyteller, Interzone and a number of “Year’s Best” anthologies. Night Shade Books published his short story collection, The Gist Hunter and Other Stories. Formerly a journalist, he spent more than twenty-five years as a freelance speechwriter for Canadian corporate executives and political leaders. His works have been short-listed for the Aurora, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards. His website is at matthewhughes.org.

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

Meet Me in Iram

Sofia Samatar | 3090 words

We are familiar with gold, says Hume, and also with mountains; therefore, we are able to imagine a golden mountain. This idea may serve as an origin myth for Iram, the unconstructed city.

The city has several problems. (1) It is lacking in domestic objects. (2) It is lacking in atmospheres that produce nostalgia. In cities without the correct combination of—for example—hills, streetlights, and coffee, it is difficult to get laid. A playbill in a gutter, bleeding color, the image of a famous actress blurring slowly into pulp: This would be perfect. The word playbill is perfect. There are many ways to achieve the desired conditions. Iram has none.

No continuity without desire. There is no desire in Iram; the time of Iram is not yet.

oh do you remember when we were courting

when my head lay upon your breast

you could make me believe by the falling of your arm

that the sun rose in the west

—American folksong

The reversal of time expressed in these lines is impossible in Iram. In Iram, there is nothing to reverse. Every time I go there, I see my uncle on the same bridge, and he raises his hand to greet me in the same way. He always tells me not to say every time, but I can’t help it, it’s a habit. He wishes I had come to visit him in Jeddah. I couldn’t go, I tell him. It would have meant an expensive trip. I would have had to wear an abaya. I couldn’t do it.

My uncle is not at all angry. Well, he says. He pats my shoulder. Well. He’s wearing the most magnificent orange suit. Like my father, who is waiting for us at the restaurant, my uncle has style. The men in my family are all very beautiful.

When I say that Iram is lacking in domestic objects, I mean that we haven’t gathered enough. I try to bring something with me every time. Last time it was a collection of my father’s audiotapes, crammed into a pair of black plastic bags. The tapes are dusty with cigarette ash and poetry. It is only possible to listen to them in the worst light. A white, ugly, institutional light that, despite its harshness, is too weak to travel more than a couple of feet.

Fortunately the tapes create the sort of light they need.

At the restaurant, my father has already ordered. As always, he’s gotten the huge appetizer plate, more than a hundred appetizers arranged around a bowl of blue flame. I kiss his cheek. He waves, expansive: Sit down! It’s important to order the biggest thing. The entire restaurant must smell my father’s cologne. In Iram, this makes me happy. This is the good life. I don’t know what the blue flame is made of, but it keeps everybody warm.

You can stop there.

My mother says: Your father had beautiful skin. This was before he began to suffer from psoriasis. Now he goes out in a hat and gloves, even on the hottest days. My father has become allergic to sunlight. How is that possible, my mother asks. He’s a Somali, he grew up in the sun! My father puts on his hat and goes out to his car. His beautiful skin, my mother says sadly. The car starts up: a throbbing sound that remains, for me, after all these years, synonymous with fear.

The car pulls into the driveway. The children hear its long, low note. They hear the door slam. The children run upstairs and hide inside their rooms. They’re giggling because it’s beautiful and exciting to be a child. They’re smart; like bugs, they can squeeze into any kind of space. The children make bug-nests for themselves out of torn-up letters and photos. They squirm around in the nests and eat a lot of paper. The children are going to turn out fine, but they’ll be the kind of people who do not have many things they can take to Iram.

In a city where one could find—for example—dogs, graffiti, and palm trees, it would be possible to fall in love.

Have you not considered how your Lord dealt with Aad, with Iram—who had lofty pillars, the likes of whom had never been created in the lands? And with Thamud, who carved out the rocks in the valley? And with Pharaoh, owner of the stakes? All of whom oppressed within the lands, and increased therein the corruption. So your Lord poured upon them a scourge of punishment.

—Qur’an 89: 6–13

The Wikipedia article on Iram warns: This article needs attention from an expert in Archaeology. The specific problem is: The article is a confusing mix of myth, supposition, popular sources and very little science, scholarship, or sense; the result is a meaningless overview of the subject, accompanied by random facts and inexplicable leaps of logic.

According to the article, Iram is also known as the City of the tent poles. It is a lost city or perhaps a tribe.

The passage from the Qur’an quoted here appears in the article. A note at the end reads: translated by error.

I walk to the restaurant with my uncle. There’s nothing, no atmosphere. It’s like anywhere. Iram, the windless city, is buried underground. I wish there were more of a glow so that I could see my uncle’s suit. Once, I remember, I told a friend I was disgusted by the idea of a Daddy-Daughter Dance. So heterosexist, I said. I mean—ugh! My friend said she had gone to a dance like that with her father when she was a little girl. Magic, she said. If there were a glow, I could take my uncle’s arm. She felt so special. It was the happiest night of her life.

Translated by error.

In Iram, my uncle understands me perfectly. I realize we’ve been speaking in Somali. We sing the song about the Prophet Issa’s birth, the one about the darkest night. The very darkest night.

It almost doesn’t matter that I’m carrying these awkward plastic bags.

In the window of the restaurant, there’s a small blue light. My father waits for us inside. It’s the way I told you before. Happy, happy. I’m the only woman there.

There are hardly any women in Iram. This is a problem, because without women, nothing happens. Nothing goes on without them. You will have realized at once that there’s a connection between these missing women and the missing domestic objects. In Iram, there are windows but no curtains. I’m not saying women have to create these objects, I’m saying they do. Sometimes, after dark, I catch sight of a woman just disappearing around a corner. I recognize her from her photograph.

According to the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Iram is a lost city which yet, after the annihilation of its tenants, remains entire, so Arabs say, invisible to ordinary eyes, but occasionally, and at rare intervals, revealed to some heaven-favoured traveller.

I write on a scrap of paper: Q-tips. Deodorant. Small hand lotion.

I have a terrible longing to visit Iram again. I’m full of plans. I want to take a beaded wooden spoon with me next time—I think it’s somewhere in my parents’ house. The Somali pillow, too, and the little stool we used to call the African Stool. I’m sure that, when I reach Iram, I will know its true name. Perhaps that sounds romantic, but I believe things have true names. I believe everything has a name that I don’t know.

In the restaurant, my father and uncle laugh together. My father grips my uncle’s shoulder, chuckling naturally and with pleasure. It’s not the explosive, uncontrollable laugh that seized him in our house the night some Somali guests came for dinner. My father had invited them. Everything was going well, and then something happened—I believe my brother made a face at one of his kids—and my father started laughing and couldn’t stop. I remember we all laughed, too; we kept telling each other how terribly funny it was. Our guests smiled politely. You have to understand that at this time it was very rare for my father to eat with us, even rarer for him to invite guests to the house. The production of a normal family required immense effort. We were all keyed up to the highest pitch of excitement. My father’s laughter seemed to go on forever, past bearing. At one point I felt pinned inside it. I couldn’t move. Later I would experience that kind of laughter myself, when I was working in South Sudan during the war.

When you’re outside, you can picture exactly what you want it to be like, but once you get in, all you can do is follow along.

You can help me. You can tell me if these feelings are universal. What is normal? I’ve felt for a long time that normal is something suspect, that embedded in the idea of the normal is something dangerous, an erasure of everything abnormal, a death or a series of deaths. But isn’t it actually normal to want to be normal? I would like to build an entire philosophy out of Iram, the absent city. This philosophy would serve all the children of immigrants, many of the immigrants, and many others who found themselves at a loss. Eventually people would come to say: This philosophy is available to all. Anybody can go to Iram. All sorts of people, many of whom looked nothing at all like me, would disembark in the unconstructed streets. They’d bring their own bags, their photographs, their desire. Early in the morning, you’d find teenagers putting up playbills on the walls. Their sense of satisfaction would be so strong, it would color the air. For the first time, Iram would have a color of its own. But of course that can’t happen until we import more objects, until we have succeeded in creating the conditions for nostalgia. For this reason, I fear that my feelings are not universal. Surely love cannot exist outside of time. It depends upon small objects.

The fact is, when my uncle died, he and my father were barely on speaking terms. My mother told me that my father disliked my uncle’s gifts, specifically the gifts my uncle gave to my mother and me: gold jewelry, dresses heavy with beads. My mother, who is often sad, and not without reason, was sad because of this split between my uncle and my father. She and I wore our glittering beaded dresses to a New Year’s Eve party. Everyone said we looked beautiful, exotic.

My father didn’t go to the party. My father went somewhere else. I don’t know where. Perhaps he was helping to draft the Somali constitution. When he disappears, I always imagine him doing heroic work. Once someone asked if I thought he worked for the CIA. I said I don’t know.

We never eat anything after the appetizers. We’re drinking tea from my uncle’s thermos. My father and I use cups and my uncle uses the lid. In the radiance of the cobalt flame in the center of the table, of my uncle’s marigold suit, I am dreaming of things to bring to Iram. I wish I could bring a bathroom door from the library at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but how would I take it off, how could I get it out of the building? I’m picturing myself in the snow and ice, sliding down State Street with the big gray door clasped somehow under my arm. Impossible. And anyway, I don’t know if that object would work. I don’t think it’s sacred in the way that a piece of cloth worn by a relative is sacred. Something that holds perfume. The door of a public bathroom stall—it’s so anonymous, it doesn’t even hold the imprint of my shoe. The imprint of my shoe where I kicked the metal door in a rage. A Somali student had told me his name was Waria. I knew it wasn’t a name. He was making fun of me. It couldn’t be a name, because it was just a sort of word. It was just something you said, not you but my father, on the phone. A sort of preface, like Hey or maybe Hey you. I realized I didn’t know what it meant. Something melted in my face. Excuse me, I said. I went to the bathroom.

I question this idea of the heaven-favoured traveller. What kind of favor is it to arrive at an empty city? A city that goes on, lifeless, after the annihilation of its tenants? I’m just standing here on the corner with my bags.

To have no one to blame but yourself is to have no one. It’s the worst fate.

a lost city or perhaps a tribe

I want to fall down in Iram. I’ve never tripped or fallen there. It’s the sort of thing you can’t organize; it has to come up and catch you unawares. I want to be caught and thrown to the ground in Iram, to scrape my knee. Look, there’s blood. That’s me. If that happened, I feel certain a new kind of light would arrive. I’d look down at my blood on the pavement, and my blood would show me the edge of a flight of steps. That’s really what it’s called. A flight.

If it gets too painful, you can stop.

When my uncle died, he left six children. Two sets of triplets. Three boys and three girls. I don’t know them, because my father is on bad terms with my uncle’s widow—in fact, he is estranged from her whole family. My uncle and his wife had their children through IVF treatment. When I was a child myself—long before my uncle’s children were born—I remember being told that my uncle was unable to have children, because of what had been done to him in Somalia, in prison.

You can stop.

The woman is smiling in the photograph. I’m on her lap. I’m three or four years old. I asked my mother who she was, but my mother didn’t know; she couldn’t remember; she said, You’ll have to ask your dad. I was getting ready to move somewhere—perhaps Cairo, perhaps Wisconsin. My father had not been home for several days. I put the photograph away with the others. I was afraid to ask, afraid to find out that this lovely woman, my relative, was dead. Now I consider this an act of cowardice. I remember the picture. The smile. It seems to me that one corner of the photograph was cut off. Was someone else there? This woman was happy; she loved me. She smiled so fully, with such golden warmth, as she disappeared around the corner in Iram. Next time, I think, I’ll rush to catch her, I’ll shout, perhaps I’ll fall down in the empty street. But of course there’s no next time, only not yet. At one point I thought I was writing this to force myself to ask my father about the photograph. But I must have lost it, because it’s gone. I can’t ask now.

i wish i was a little swallow

that i had wings and i could fly

My uncle was shot and killed in his bed. Addis Ababa, 2010.

I’m just standing here on the corner, holding my plastic bags.

Very little science, scholarship, or sense.

I’m just trying to hold them both. Let’s all laugh together. Sweet blue light. Let’s pour a little more tea. Let’s order more appetizers. Dad, let’s stay here, let’s not go. I remember when I was a kid, on long car trips, I’d imagine a giant saw was attached to my side of the car. The saw could cut through anything. It sliced fences, it sliced trees. The fences gave a swift groan and exposed the hollow insides of their poles. The trees went snick and fell over with juicy ease, the tops of the stumps left gleaming moist and pale, like a wound before the blood comes. I was leveling the whole country from my seat in the back of the car. I don’t know why it gave me so much pleasure. The world was coming down to size. I know it sounds like the opposite of what I’m trying to do in Iram, but the feeling is the same.

The chapter of the Qur’an that mentions the city of Iram is called al-Fajr. Dawn.

Because we are familiar with gold and we are familiar with mountains. Because we are familiar with pillows and spoons. Because we are familiar, we can imagine. Is that true? Look, here I am, at my desk on the highest roof of the city. I sit up here at night so that you can find me if you come. I am listening to my father’s cassettes. You will have noticed that there is sound in Iram, and this is why I come back, I think, to these blank and shrouded streets. I am trying to imagine sound as an object. As soon as I press play the light comes on, that white ceramic glare, and cigarette ashes lift away from the tape recorder and disappear in the air of Iram, where it is always night. Light pins me to my seat. When my father was in the basement listening to poetry, we knew we mustn’t disturb him. The door was edged with grainy fluorescent light, the stairs coated with black rubber. It was a terrible, terrible place. And poetry came up as it comes to me now. I know the words for pearl and water. I am singing of the moon, of a great-limbed tree. Amber necklaces come to me and thorns and rain and a fiery horse and a lonely dhow adrift on a trackless sea. In Iram, I know the names. I sit repeating them, enraptured, frozen in an ecstasy of bad light. No continuity without desire. Look for me if you come. You’ll know me by the falling of my arm.

©2015 by Sofia Samatar. Originally published in Guillotine #10. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria (2013) and The Winged Histories (2016), the short story collection, Tender (2017), and Monster Portraits (2018), a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her work has received the John W. Campbell Award, the William L. Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

Trinity

Nancy Kress | 18470 words

“Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief!”

—Mark 9:24

At first I didn’t recognize Devrie.

Devrie—I didn’t recognize Devrie. Astonished at myself, I studied the wasted figure standing in the middle of the bare reception room: arms like wires, clavicle sharply outlined, head shaved; dressed in that ugly long tent of light-weight gray. God knew what her legs looked like under it. Then she smiled, and it was Devrie.

“You look like shit.”

“Hello, Seena. Come on in.”

“I am in.”

“Barely. It’s not catching, you know.”

“Stupidity fortunately isn’t,” I said and closed the door behind me. The small room was too hot; Devrie would need the heat, of course, with almost no fat left to insulate her bones and organs. Next to her I felt huge, although I am not. Huge, hairy, sloppy-breasted.

“Thank you for not wearing bright colors. They do affect me.”

“Anything for a sister,” I said, mocking the old childhood formula, the old sentiment. But Devrie was too quick to think it was only mockery; in that, at least, she had not changed. She clutched my arm and her fingers felt like chains, or talons.

“You found him. Seena, you found him.”

“I found him.”

“Tell me,” she whispered.

“Sit down first, before you fall over. God, Devrie, don’t you eat at all?”

“Tell me,” she said. So I did.

• • • •

Devrie Caroline Konig had admitted herself to the Institute of the Biological Hope on the Caribbean island of Dominica eleven months ago, in late November of 2017, when her age was twenty-three years and four months. I am precise about this because it is all I can be sure of. I need the precision. The Institute of the Biological Hope is not precise; it is a mongrel, part research laboratory in brain sciences, part monastery, part school for training in the discipline of the mind. That made my baby sister guinea pig, postulant, freshman. She had always been those things, but, until now, sequentially. Apparently so had many other people, for when eccentric Nobel Prize winner James Arthur Bohentin had founded his Institute, he had been able to fund it, although precariously. But in that it did not differ from most private scientific research centers.

Or most monasteries.

I wanted Devrie out of the Institute of the Biological Hope.

“It’s located on Dominica,” I had said sensibly—what an ass I had been—to an unwasted Devrie a year ago, “because the research procedures there fall outside United States laws concerning the safety of research subjects. Doesn’t that tell you something, Devrie? Doesn’t that at least give you pause? In New York, it would be illegal to do to anyone what Bohentin does to his people.”

“Do you know him?” she had asked.

“I have met him. Once.”

“What is he like?”

“Like stone.”

Devrie shrugged, and smiled. “All the participants in the Institute are willing. Eager.”

“That doesn’t make it ethical for Bohentin to destroy them. Ethical or legal.”

“It’s legal on Dominica. And in thinking you know better than the participants what they should risk their own lives for, aren’t you playing God?”

“Better me than some untrained fanatic who offers himself up like an exalted Viking hero, expecting Valhalla.”

“You’re an intellectual snob, Seena.”

“I never denied it.”

“Are you sure you aren’t really objecting not to the Institute’s dangers but to its purpose? Isn’t the ‘Hope’ part what really bothers you?”

“I don’t think scientific method and pseudo-religious mush mix, no. I never did. I don’t think it leads to a perception of God.”

“The holotank tapes indicate it leads to a perception of something the brain hasn’t encountered before,” Devrie said, and for a moment I was silent.

I was once, almost, a biologist. I was aware of the legitimate studies that formed the basis for Bohentin’s megalomania: the brain wave changes that accompany anorexia nervosa, sensory deprivation, biological feedback, and neurotransmitter stimulants. I have read the historical accounts, some merely pathetic but some disturbingly not, of the Christian mystics who achieved rapture through the mortification of the flesh and the Eastern mystics who achieved anesthesia through the control of the mind, of the faith healers who succeeded, of the carcinomas shrunk through trained will. I knew of the research of focused clairvoyance during orgasm, and of what happens when neurotransmitter number and speed are increased chemically.

And I knew all that was known about the twin trance.

Fifteen years earlier, as a doctoral student in biology, I had spent one summer replicating Sunderwirth’s pioneering study of drug-enhanced telepathy in identical twins. My results were positive, except that within six months all eight of my research subjects had died. So had Sunderwirth’s. Twin-trance research became the cloning controversy of the new decade, with the same panicky cycle of public outcry, legal restrictions, religious misunderstandings, fear, and demagoguery. When I received the phone call that the last of my subjects was dead—cardiac arrest, no history of heart disease, forty-three Goddamn years old—I locked myself in my apartment, with the lights off and my father’s papers clutched in my hand, for three days. Then I resigned from the neurology department and became an entomologist. There is no pain in classifying dead insects.

“There is something there,” Devrie had repeated. She was holding the letter sent to our father, who someone at the Institute had not heard was dead. “It says the holotank tapes—”

“So there’s something there,” I said. “So the tanks are picking up some strange radiation. Why call it ‘God’?”

“Why not call it God?”

“Why not call it Rover? Even if I grant you that the tape pattern looks like a presence—which I don’t—you have no way of knowing that Bohentin’s phantom isn’t, say, some totally ungodlike alien being.”

“But neither do I know that it is.”

“Devrie—”

She had smiled and put her hands on my shoulders. She had—has, has always had—a very sweet smile. “Seena. Think. If the Institute can prove rationally that God exists—can prove it to the intellectual mind, the doubting Thomases who need something concrete to study . . . faith that doesn’t need to be taken on faith . . .”

She wore her mystical face, a glowing softness that made me want to shake the silliness out of her. Instead I made some clever riposte, some sarcasm I no longer remember, and reached out to ruffle her hair. Big-sisterly, patronizing, thinking I could deflate her rapturous interest with the pin-prick of ridicule. God, I was an ass. It hurts to remember how big an ass I was.

A month and a half later Devrie committed herself and half her considerable inheritance to the Institute of the Biological Hope.

• • • •

“Tell me,” Devrie whispered. The Institute had no windows; outside I had seen grass, palm trees, butterflies floating in the sunshine, but inside here in the bare gray room there was nowhere to look but at her face.

“He’s a student in a Master’s program at a third-rate college in New Hampshire. He was adopted when he was two, nearly three, in March of 1997. Before that he was in a government-run children’s home. In Boston, of course. The adopting family, as far as I can discover, never was told he was anything but one more toddler given up by somebody for adoption.”

“Wait a minute,” Devrie said. “I need . . . a minute.”

She had turned paler, and her hands trembled. I had recited the information as if it were no more than an exhibit listing at my museum. Of course she was rattled. I wanted her rattled. I wanted her out.

Lowering herself to the floor, Devrie sat cross-legged and closed her eyes. Concentration spread over her face, but a concentration so serene it barely deserved that name. Her breathing slowed, her color freshened, and when she opened her eyes, they had the rested energy of a person who has just slept eight hours in mountain air. Her face even looked plumper, and an EEG, I guessed, would show damn near alpha waves. In her year at the Institute she must have mastered quite an array of biofeedback techniques to do that, so fast and with such a malnourished body.

“Very impressive,” I said sourly.

“Seena—have you seen him?”

“No. All this is from sealed records.”

“How did you get into the records?”

“Medical and governmental friends.”

“Who?”

“What do you care, as long as I found out what you wanted to know?”

She was silent. I knew she would never ask me if I had obtained her information legally or illegally; it would not occur to her to ask. Devrie, being Devrie, would assume it had all been generously offered by my modest museum connections and our dead father’s immodest research connections. She would be wrong.

“How old is he now?”

“Twenty-four years last month. They must have used your two-month tissue sample.”

“Do you think Daddy knew where the . . . baby went?”

“Yes. Look at the timing—the child was normal and healthy, yet he wasn’t adopted until he was nearly three. The researchers kept track of him, all right; they kept all six clones in a government-controlled home where they could monitor their development as long as humanely possible. The same-sex clones were released for adoption after a year, but they hung onto the cross-sex ones until they reached an age where they would become harder to adopt. They undoubtedly wanted to study them as long as they could. And even after the kids were released for adoption, the researchers held off publishing until all six were placed and the records sealed. Dad’s group didn’t publish until April 1998, remember. By the time the storm broke, the babies were out of its path, and anonymous.”

“And the last,” Devrie said.

“And the last,” I agreed, although of course the researchers hadn’t foreseen that. So few in the scientific community had foreseen that. Offense against God and man, Satan’s work, natter natter. Watching my father’s suddenly stooped shoulders and stricken eyes, I had thought how ugly public revulsion could be and had nobly resolved—how had I thought of it then? So long ago—resolved to snatch the banner of pure science from my fallen father’s hand. Another time that I had been an ass. Five years later, when it had been my turn to feel the ugly scorching of public revulsion, I had broken, left neurological research, and fled down the road that led to the Museum of Natural History, where I was the curator of ants fossilized in amber and moths pinned securely under permaplex.

“The other four clones,” Devrie said, “the ones from that university in California that published almost simultaneously with Daddy—”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even try to ask. It was hard enough in Cambridge.”

“Me,” Devrie said wonderingly. “He’s me.”

“Oh, for—Devrie, he’s your twin. No more than that. No—actually less than that. He shares your genetic material exactly as an identical twin would, except for the Y chromosome, but he shares none of the congenital or environmental influences that shaped your personality. There’s no mystical replication of spirit in cloning. He’s merely a twin who got born eleven months late!”

She looked at me with luminous amusement. I didn’t like the look. On that fleshless face, the skin stretched so taut that the delicate bones beneath were as visible as the veins of a moth wing, her amusement looked ironic. Yet Devrie was never ironic. Gentle, passionate, trusting, a little stupid, she was not capable of irony. It was beyond her, just as it was beyond her to wonder why I, who had fought her entering the Institute of the Biological Hope, had brought her this information now. Her amusement was one-layered, and trusting.

God’s fools, the Middle Ages had called them.

“Devrie,” I said, and heard my own voice unexpectedly break, “leave here. It’s physically not safe. What are you down to, ten percent body fat? Eight? Look at yourself, you can’t hold body heat, your palms are dry, you can’t move quickly without getting dizzy. Hypotension. What’s your heartbeat? Do you still menstruate? It’s insane.”

She went on smiling at me. God’s fools don’t need menstruation. “Come with me, Seena. I want to show you the Institute.”

“I don’t want to see it.”

“Yes. This visit you should see it.”

“Why this visit?”

“Because you are going to help me get my clone to come here, aren’t you? Or else why did you go to all the trouble of locating him?”

I didn’t answer. She still didn’t see it.

Devrie said, “‘Anything for a sister.’ But you were always more like a mother to me than a sister.” She took my hand and pulled herself off the floor. So had I pulled her up to take her first steps, the day after our mother died in a plane crash at Orly. Now Devrie’s hand felt cold. I imprisoned it and counted the pulse.

“Bradycardia.”

But she wasn’t listening.

• • • •

The Institute was a shock. I had anticipated the laboratories: monotonous gray walls, dim light, heavy soundproofing, minimal fixtures in the ones used for sensory dampening; high-contrast textures and colors, strobe lights, quite good sound equipment in those for sensory arousal. There was much that Devrie, as subject rather than researcher, didn’t have authority to show me, but I deduced much from what I did see. The dormitories, divided by sex, were on the sensory-dampening side. The subjects slept in small cells, ascetic and chaste, that reminded me of an abandoned Carmelite convent I had once toured in Belgium. That was the shock: The physical plant felt scientific, but the atmosphere did not.

There hung in the gray corridors a wordless peace, a feeling so palpable I could feel it clogging my lungs. No. “Peace” was the wrong word. Say “peace” and the picture is pastoral, lazy sunshine and dreaming woods. This was not like that at all. The research subjects—students? postulants?—lounged in the corridors outside closed labs, waiting for the next step in their routine. Both men and women were anorectic, both wore gray bodysuits or caftans, both were fined down to an otherworldly ethereality when seen from a distance and a malnourished asexuality when seen up close. They talked among themselves in low voices, sitting with backs against the wall or stretched full-length on the carpeted floor, and on all their faces I saw the same luminous patience, the same certainty of being very near to something exciting that they nonetheless could wait for calmly, as long as necessary.

“They look,” I said to Devrie, “as if they’re waiting to take an exam they already know they’ll ace.”

She smiled. “Do you think so? I always think of us as travelers waiting for a plane, boarding passes stamped for Eternity.”

She was actually serious. But she didn’t in fact wear the same expression as the others; hers was far more intense. If they were travelers, she wanted to pilot.

The lab door opened and the students brought themselves to their feet. Despite their languid movements, they looked sharp: sharp protruding clavicles, bony chins, angular unpadded elbows that could chisel stone.

“This is my hour for biofeedback manipulation of drug effects,” Devrie said. “Please come watch.”

“I’d sooner watch you whip yourself in a twelfth-century monastery.”

Devrie’s eyes widened, then again lightened with that luminous amusement. “It’s for the same end, isn’t it? But they had such unsystematic means. Poor struggling God-searchers. I wonder how many of them made it.”

I wanted to strike her. “Devrie—”

“If not biofeedback, what would you like to see?”

“You out of here.”

“What else?”

There was only one thing: the holotanks. I struggled with the temptation, and lost. The two tanks stood in the middle of a roomy lab carpeted with thick gray matting and completely enclosed in a Faraday cage. That Devrie had a key to the lab was my first clue that my errand for her had been known, and discussed, by someone higher in the Institute. Research subjects do not carry keys to the most delicate brain-perception equipment in the world. For this equipment Bohentin had received his Nobel.

The two tanks, independent systems, stood as high as my shoulder. The ones I had used fifteen years ago had been smaller. Each of these was a cube, opaque on its bottom half, which held the sensing apparatus, computerized simulators, and recording equipment; clear on its top half, which was filled with the transparent fluid out of whose molecules the simulations would form. A separate sim would form for each subject, as the machine sorted and mapped all the electromagnetic radiation received and processed by each brain. All that each brain perceived, not only the visuals; the holograph equipment was capable of picking up all wavelengths that the brain did, and of displaying their brain-processed analogues as three-dimensional images floating in a clear womb. When all other possible sources of radiation were filtered out except for the emanations from the two subjects themselves, what the sims showed was what kinds of activity were coming from—and hence going on in—the other’s brain. That was why it worked best with identical twins in twin trance: no structural brain differences to adjust for. In a rawer version of this holotank, a rawer version of myself had pioneered the recording of twin trances. The UCIC, we had called it then: What you see, I see.

What I had seen was eight autopsy reports.

“We’re so close,” Devrie said. “Mona and Marlene—” she waved a hand toward the corridor, but Mona and Marlene, whichever two they had been, had gone—“had taken KX3, that’s the drug that—”

“I know what it is,” I said, too harshly. KX3 reacts with one of the hormones overproduced in an anorectic body. The combination is readily absorbed by body fat, but in a body without fat, much of it is absorbed by the brain.

Devrie continued, her hand tight on my arm. “Mona and Marlene were controlling the neural reactions with biofeedback, pushing the twin trance higher and higher, working it. Dr. Bohentin was monitoring the holotanks. The sims were incredibly detailed—everything each twin perceived in the perceptions of the other, in all wavelengths. Mona and Marlene forced their neurotransmission level even higher and then, in the tanks—” Devrie’s face glowed, the mystic-rapture look—“a completely third sim formed. Completely separate. A third presence.”

I stared at her.

“It was recorded in both tanks. It was shadowy, yes, but it was there. A third presence that can’t be perceived except through another human’s electromagnetic presence, and then only with every drug and trained reaction and arousal mode and the twin trance all pushing the brain into a supraheightened state. A third presence!”

“Isotropic radiation. Bohentin fluffed the pre-screening program and the computer hadn’t cleared the background microradiation—” I said, but even as I spoke I knew how stupid that was. Bohentin didn’t make mistakes like that, and isotropic radiation simulates nowhere close to the way a presence does. Devrie didn’t even bother to answer me.

This, then, was what the rumors had been about, the rumors leaking for the last year out of the Institute and through the scientific community, mostly still scoffed at, not yet picked up by the popular press. This. A verifiable, replicable third presence being picked up by holography. Against all reason, a long shiver went over me from neck to that cold place at the base of the spine.

“There’s more,” Devrie said feverishly. “They felt it. Mona and Marlene. Both said afterwards that they could feel it, a huge presence filled with light, but they couldn’t quite reach it. Damn—they couldn’t reach it, Seena! They weren’t playing off each other enough, weren’t close enough. Weren’t, despite the twin trance, melded enough.”

“Sex,” I said.

“They tried it. The subjects are all basically heterosexual. They inhibit.”

“So go find some homosexual God-yearning anorectic incestuous twins!”

Devrie looked at me straight. “I need him. Here. He is me.”

I exploded, right there in the holotank lab. No one came running in to find out if the shouting was dangerous to the tanks, which was my second clue that the Institute knew very well why Devrie had brought me there. “Damn it to hell, he’s a human being, not some chemical you can just order up because you need it for an experiment! You don’t have the right to expect him to come here, you didn’t even have the right to tell anyone that he exists, but that didn’t stop you, did it? There are still anti-bioengineering groups out there in the real world, religious split-brains who—how dare you put him in any danger? How dare you even presume he’d be interested in this insane mush?”

“He’ll come,” Devrie said. She had not changed expression.

“How the hell do you know?”

“He’s me. And I want God. He will, too.”

I scowled at her. A fragment of one of her poems, a thing she had written when she was fifteen, came to me: “Two human species/Never one—/One aching for God/One never.” But she had been fifteen then. I had assumed that the sentiment, as adolescent as the poetry, would pass.

I said, “What does Bohentin think of this idea of importing your clone?”

For the first time she hesitated. Bohentin, then, was dubious. “He thinks it’s rather a long shot.”

“You could phrase it that way.”

“But I know he’ll want to come. Some things you just know, Seena, beyond rationality. And besides—” she hesitated again, and then went on, “I have left half my inheritance from Daddy, and the income on the trust from Mummy.”

“Devrie. God, Devrie—you’d buy him?”

For the first time she looked angry. “The money would be just to get him here, to see what is involved. Once he sees, he’ll want this as much as I do, at any price! What price can you put on God? I’m not ‘buying’ his life—I’m offering him the way to find life. What good is breathing, existing, if there’s no purpose to it? Don’t you realize how many centuries, in how many ways, people have looked for that light-filled presence and never been able to be sure? And now we’re almost there, Seena, I’ve seen it for myself—almost there. With verifiable, scientifically controlled means. Not subjective faith this time—scientific data, the same as for any other actual phenomenon. This research stands now where research into the atom stood fifty years ago. Can you touch a quark? But it’s there! And my clone can be a part of it, can be it, how can you talk about the money buying him under circumstances like that!”

I said slowly, “How do you know that whatever you’re so close to is God?” But that was sophomoric, of course, and she was ready for it. She smiled warmly.

“What does it matter what we call it? Pick another label if it will make you more comfortable.”

I took a piece of paper from my pocket. “His name is Keith Torellen. He lives in Indian Falls, New Hampshire. Address and mailnet number here. Good luck, Devrie.” I turned to go.

“Seena! I can’t go!”

She couldn’t, of course. That was the point. She barely had the strength in that starved, drug-battered body to get through the day, let alone to New Hampshire. She needed the sensory-controlled environment, the artificial heat, the chemical monitoring. “Then send someone from the Institute. Perhaps Bohentin will go.”

“Bohentin!” she said, and I knew that was impossible; Bohentin had to remain officially ignorant of this sort of recruiting. Too many U.S. laws were involved. In addition, Bohentin had no persuasive skills; people as persons and not neurologies did not interest him. They were too far above chemicals and too far below God.

Devrie looked at me with a kind of level fury. “This is really why you found him, isn’t it? So I would have to stop the drug program long enough to leave here and go get him. You think that once I’ve gone back out into the world, either the build-up effects in the brain will be interrupted or else the spell will be broken and I’ll have doubts about coming back here!”

“Will you listen to yourself? ‘Out into the world.’ You sound like some archaic nun in a cloistered order!”

“You always did ridicule anything you couldn’t understand,” Devrie said icily, turned her back on me, and stared at the empty holotanks. She didn’t turn when I left the lab, closing the door behind me. She was still facing the tanks, her spiny back rigid, the piece of paper with Keith Torellen’s address clutched in fingers delicate as glass.

• • • •

In New York, the museum simmered with excitement. An unexpected endowment had enabled us to buy the contents of a small, very old museum located in a part of Madagascar not completely destroyed by the African Horror. Crate after crate of moths began arriving in New York, some of them collected in the days when naturalists-gentlemen shot jungle moths from the trees using dust shot. Some species had been extinct since the Horror and thus were rare; some were the brief mutations from the bad years afterward and thus were even rarer. The museum staff uncrated and exclaimed.

“Look at this one,” said a young man, holding it out to me. Not on my own staff, he was one of the specialists on loan to us—DeFabio or DeFazio, something like that. He was very handsome. I looked at the moth he showed me, all pale wings outstretched and pinned to black silk. “A perfect Thysania Africana. Perfect.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to loan us the whole exhibit, in a few years.”

“Yes,” I said again. He heard the tone in my voice and glanced up quickly. But not quickly enough—my face was all professional interest when his gaze reached it. Still, the professional interest had not fooled him; he had heard the perfunctory note. Frowning, he turned back to the moths.

By day, I directed the museum efficiently enough. But in the evenings, home alone in my apartment, I found myself wandering from room to room, touching objects, unable to settle to work at the oversize teak desk that had been my father’s, to the reports and journals that had not. His had dealt with the living, mine with the ancient dead—but I had known that for years. The fogginess of my evenings bothered me.

“Faith should not mean fogginess.”

Who had said that? Father, of course, to Devrie, when she had joined the dying Catholic Church. She had been thirteen years old. Skinny, defiant, she had stood clutching a black rosary from God knows where, daring him from scared dark eyes to forbid her. Of course he had not, thinking, I suppose, that Heaven, like any other childhood fever, was best left alone to burn out its course.

Devrie had been received into the Church in an overdecorated chapel, wearing an overdecorated dress of white lace and carrying a candle. Three years later, she had left, dressed in a magenta body suit and holding the keys to Father’s safe, which his executor had left unlocked after the funeral. The will had, of course, made me Devrie’s guardian. In the three years Devrie had been going to Mass, I had discovered that I was sterile, divorced my second husband, finished my work in entomology, accepted my first position with a museum, and entered a drastically premature menopause.

That is not a flip nor random list.

After the funeral, I sat in the dark in my father’s study, in his maroon leather chair and at his teak desk. Both felt oversized. All the lights were off. Outside it rained; I heard the steady beat of water on the window, and the wind. The dark room was cold. In my palm I held one of my father’s research awards, a small abstract sculpture of a double helix, done by Harold Landau himself. It was very heavy. I couldn’t think what Landau had used, to make it so heavy. I couldn’t think, with all the noise from the rain. My father was dead, and I would never bear a child.

Devrie came into the room, leaving the lights off but bringing with her an incandescent rectangle from the doorway. At sixteen, she was lovely, with long brown hair in the masses of curls again newly fashionable. She sat on a low stool beside me, all that hair falling around her, her face white in the gloom. She had been crying.

“He’s gone. He’s really gone. I don’t believe it yet.”

“No.”

She peered at me. Something in my face, or my voice, must have alerted her; when she spoke again it was in that voice people use when they think your grief is understandably greater than theirs. A smooth dark voice, like a wave.

“You still have me, Seena. We still have each other.”

I said nothing.

“I’ve always thought of you more as my mother than my sister, anyway. You took the place of Mother. You’ve been a mother to at least me.”

She smiled and squeezed my hand. I looked at her face—so young, so pretty—and I wanted to hit her. I didn’t want to be her mother; I wanted to be her. All her choices lay ahead of her, and it seemed to me that self-indulgent night as if mine were finished. I could have struck her.

“Seena—”

“Leave me alone! Can’t you ever leave me alone? All my life you’ve been dragging behind me; why don’t you die and finally leave me alone!”

We make ourselves pay for small sins more than large ones. The more trivial the thrust, the longer we’re haunted by memory of the wound.

I believe that.

• • • •

Indian Falls was out of another time: slow, quiet, safe. The Avis counter at the airport rented not personal guards but cars, and the only shiny store on Main Street sold wilderness equipment. I suspected that the small state college, like the town, traded mostly on trees and trails. That Keith Torellen was trying to take an academic degree here told me more about his adopting family than if I had hired a professional information service.

The house where he lived was shabby, paint peeling and steps none too sturdy. I climbed them slowly, thinking once again what I wanted to find out.

Devrie would answer none of my messages on the mailnet. Nor would she accept my phone calls. She was shutting me out, in retaliation for my refusing to fetch Torellen for her. But Devrie would discover that she could not shut me out as easily as that; we were sisters. I wanted to know if she had contacted Torellen herself, or had sent someone from the Institute to do so.

If neither, then my visit here would be brief and anonymous; I would leave Keith Torellen to his protected ignorance and shabby town. But if he had seen Devrie, I wanted to discover if and what he had agreed to do for her. It might even be possible that he could be of use in convincing Devrie of the stupidity of what she was doing. If he could be used for that, I would use him.

Something else: I was curious. This boy was my brother—nephew? no, brother—as well as the result of my father’s rational mind. Curiosity prickled over me. I rang the bell.

It was answered by the landlady, who said that Keith was not home, would not be home until late, was “in rehearsal.”

“Rehearsal?”

“Over to the college. He’s a student and they’re putting on a play.”

I said nothing, thinking.

“I don’t remember the name of the play,” the landlady said. She was a large woman in a faded garment, dress or robe. “But Keith says it’s going to be real good. It starts this weekend.” She laughed. “But you probably already know all that! George, my husband George, he says I’m forever telling people things they already know!”

“How would I know?”

She winked at me. “Don’t you think I got eyes? Sister, or cousin? No, let me guess—older sister. Too much alike for cousins.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“Not sister!” She clapped her hand over her mouth, her eyes shiny with amusement. “You’re checking up on him, ain’t you? You’re his mother! I should’ve seen it right off!”

I turned to negotiate the porch steps.

“They rehearse in the new building, Mrs. Torellen,” she called after me. “Just ask anybody you see to point you in the right direction.”

“Thank you,” I said carefully.

• • • •

Rehearsal was nearly over. Evidently it was a dress rehearsal; the actors were in period costume and the director did not interrupt. I did not recognize the period or the play. Devrie had been interested in theater: I was not. Quietly I took a seat in the darkened back row and waited for the pretending to end.

Despite wig and greasepaint, I had no trouble picking out Keith Torellen. He moved like Devrie: quick, light movements, slightly pigeon-toed. He had her height and, given the differences of a male body, her slenderness. Sitting a theater’s length away, I might have been seeing a male Devrie.

But seen up close, his face was mine.

Despite the landlady, it was a shock. He came toward me across the theater lobby, from where I had sent for him, and I saw the moment he too struck the resemblance. He stopped dead, and we stared at each other. Take Devrie’s genes, spread them over a face with the greater bone surface, larger features, and coarser skin texture of a man—and the result was my face. Keith had scrubbed off his make-up and removed his wig, exposing brown curly hair the same shade Devrie’s had been. But his face was mine.

A strange emotion, unnamed and hot, seared through me.

“Who are you? Who the hell are you?”

So no one had come from the Institute after all. Not Devrie, not anyone.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” he said; it was almost a whisper. “One of my real family?”

Still gripped by the unexpected force of emotion, still dumb, I said nothing. Keith took one step toward me. Suspicion played over his face—Devrie would not have been suspicious—and vanished, replaced by a slow painful flush of color.

“You are. You are one. Are you . . . are you my mother?”

I put out a hand against a stone post. The lobby was all stone and glass. Why were all theater lobbies stone and glass? Architects had so little damn imagination, so little sense of the bizarre.

“No! I am not your mother!”

He touched my arm. “Hey, are you okay? You don’t look good. Do you need to sit down?”

His concern was unexpected, and touching. I thought that he shared Devrie’s genetic personality and that Devrie had always been hypersensitive to the body. But this was not Devrie. His hand on my arm was stronger, firmer, warmer than Devrie’s. I felt giddy, disoriented. This was not Devrie.

“A mistake,” I said unsteadily. “This was a mistake. I should not have come. I’m sorry. My name is Dr. Seena Konig and I am a . . . relative of yours, but I think this now is a mistake. I have your address and I promise that I’ll write you about your family, but now I think I should go.” Write some benign lie, leave him in ignorance. This was a mistake.

But he looked stricken, and his hand tightened on my arm. “You can’t! I’ve been searching for my biological family for two years! You can’t just go!”

We were beginning to attract attention in the theater lobby. Hurrying students eyed us sideways. I thought irrelevantly how different they looked from the “students” at the Institute, and with that thought regained my composure. This was a student, a boy—“you can’t!” a boyish protest, and boyish panic in his voice—and not the man-Devrie-me he had seemed a foolish moment ago. He was nearly twenty years my junior. I smiled at him and removed his hand from my arm.

“Is there somewhere we can have coffee?”

“Yes. Dr. . . .”

“Seena,” I said. “Call me Seena.”

Over coffee, I made him talk first. He watched me anxiously over the rim of his cup, as if I might vanish, and I listened to the words behind the words. His adopting family was the kind that hoped to visit the Grand Canyon but not Europe, go to movies but not opera, aspire to college but not to graduate work, buy wilderness equipment but not wilderness. Ordinary people. Not religious, not rich, not unusual. Keith was the only child. He loved them.

“But at the same time I never really felt I belonged,” he said, and looked away from me. It was the most personal thing he had knowingly revealed, and I saw that he regretted it. Devrie would not have. More private, then, and less trusting. And I sensed in him a grittiness, a tougher awareness of the world’s hardness, than Devrie had ever had—or needed to have. I made my decision. Having disturbed him thus far, I owed him truth—but not the whole truth.

“Now you tell me,” Keith said, pushing away his cup. “Who were my parents? Our parents? Are you my sister?”

“Yes.”

“Our parents?”

“Both are dead. Our father was Dr. Richard Konig. He was a scientist. He—” But Keith recognized the name. His readings in biology or history must have been more extensive than I would have expected. His eyes widened, and I suddenly wished I had been more oblique.

“Richard Konig. He’s one of those scientists that were involved in that bioengineering scandal—”

“How did you learn about that? It’s all over and done with. Years ago.”

“Journalism class. We studied how the press handled it, especially the sensationalism surrounding the cloning thing twenty years—”

I saw the moment it hit him. He groped for his coffee cup, clutched the handle, didn’t raise it. It was empty anyway. And then what I said next shocked me as much as anything I have ever done.

“It was Devrie,” I said, and heard my own vicious pleasure, “Devrie was the one who wanted me to tell you!”

But of course he didn’t know who Devrie was. He went on staring at me, panic in his young eyes, and I sat frozen. That tone I heard in my own voice when I said “Devrie,” that vicious pleasure that it was she and not I who was hurting him . . .

“Cloning,” Keith said. “Konig was in trouble for claiming to have done illegal cloning. Of humans.” His voice held so much dread that I fought off my own dread and tried to hold myself steady to his need.

“It’s illegal now, but not then. And the public badly misunderstood. All that sensationalism—you were right to use that word, Keith—covered up the fact that there is nothing abnormal about producing a fetus from another diploid cell. In the womb, identical twins—”

“Am I a clone?”

“Keith—”

“Am I a clone?”

Carefully I studied him. This was not what I had intended, but although the fear was still in his eyes, the panic had gone. And curiosity—Devrie’s curiosity, and her eagerness—they were there as well. This boy would not strike me, nor stalk out of the restaurant, nor go into psychic shock.

“Yes. You are.”

He sat quietly, his gaze turned inward. A long moment passed in silence.

“Your cell?”

“No. My—our sister’s. Our sister Devrie.”

Another long silence. He did not panic. Then he said softly, “Tell me.”

Devrie’s phrase.

“There isn’t much to tell, Keith. If you’ve seen the media accounts, you know the story, and also what was made of it. The issue then becomes how you feel about what you saw. Do you believe that cloning is meddling with things man should best leave alone?”

“No. I don’t.”

I let out my breath, although I hadn’t known I’d been holding it. “It’s actually no more than delayed twinning, followed by surrogate implantation. A zygote—”

“I know all that,” he said with some harshness, and held up his hand to silence me. I didn’t think he knew that he did it. The harshness did not sound like Devrie. To my ears, it sounded like myself. He sat thinking, remote and troubled, and I did not try to touch him.

Finally he said, “Do my parents know?”

He meant his adoptive parents. “No.”

“Why are you telling me now? Why did you come?”

“Devrie asked me to.”

“She needs something, right? A kidney? Something like that?”

I had not foreseen that question. He did not move in a class where spare organs were easily purchasable. “No. Not a kidney, not any kind of biological donation.” A voice in my mind jeered at that, but I was not going to give him any clues that would lead to Devrie. “She just wanted me to find you.”

“Why didn’t she find me herself? She’s my age, right?”

“Yes. She’s ill just now and couldn’t come.”

“Is she dying?”

“No!”

Again he sat quietly, finally saying, “No one could tell me anything. For two years, I’ve been searching for my mother, and not one of the adoptee-search agencies could find a single trace. Not one. Now I see why. Who covered the trail so well?”

“My father.”

“I want to meet Devrie.”

I said evenly, “That might not be possible.”

“Why not?”

“She’s in a foreign hospital. Out of the country. I’m sorry.”

“When does she come home?”

“No one is sure.”

“What disease does she have?”

She’s sick for God, I thought, but aloud I said, not thinking it through, “A brain disease.”

Instantly I saw my own cruelty. Keith paled, and I cried, “No, no, nothing you could have as well! Truly, Keith, it’s not—she took a bad fall. From her hunter.”

“Her hunter,” he said. For the first time, his gaze flickered over my clothing and jewelry. But would he even recognize how expensive they were? I doubted it. He wore a synthetic, deep-pile jacket with a tear at one shoulder and a cheap wool hat, dark blue, shapeless with age. From long experience I recognized his gaze: uneasy, furtive, the expression of a man glimpsing the financial gulf between what he had assumed were equals. But it wouldn’t matter. Adopted children have no legal claim on the estates of their biological parents. I had checked.

Keith said uneasily, “Do you have a picture of Devrie?”

“No,” I lied.

“Why did she want you to find me? You still haven’t said.”

I shrugged. “The same reason, I suppose, that you looked for your biological family. The pull of blood.”

“Then she wants me to write to her.”

“Write to me instead.”

He frowned. “Why? Why not to Devrie?”

What to say to that? I hadn’t bargained on so much intensity from him. “Write in care of me, and I’ll forward it to Devrie.”

“Why not to her directly?”

“Her doctors might not think it advisable,” I said coldly, and he backed off—either from the mention of doctors or from the coldness.

“Then give me your address, Seena. Please.”

I did. I could see no harm in his writing me. It might even be pleasant. Coming home from the museum, another wintry day among the exhibits, to find on the mailnet a letter I could answer when and how I chose, without being taken by surprise. I liked the idea.

But no more difficult questions now. I stood. “I have to leave, Keith.”

He looked alarmed. “So soon?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“I have to return to work.”

He stood, too. He was taller than Devrie. “Seena,” he said, all earnestness, “just a few more questions. How did you find me?”

“Medical connections.”

“Yours?”

“Our father’s. I’m not a scientist.” Evidently his journalism class had not studied twin-trance sensationalism.

“What do you do?”

“Museum curator. Arthropods.”

“What does Devrie do?”

“She’s too ill to work. I must go, Keith.”

“One more. Do I look like Devrie as well as you?”

“It would be wise, Keith, if you were careful whom you spoke with about all of this. I hadn’t intended to say so much.”

“I’m not going to tell my parents. Not about being—not about all of it.”

“I think that’s best, yes.”

“Do I look like Devrie as well as you?”

A little of my first, strange emotion returned with his intensity. “A little, yes. But more like me. Sex variance is a tricky thing.”

Unexpectedly, he held my coat for me. As I slipped into it, he said from behind, “Thank you, Seena,” and let his hands rest on my shoulders.

I did not turn around. I felt my face flame, and self-disgust flooded through me, followed by a desire to laugh. It was all so transparent. This man was an attractive stranger, was Devrie, was youth, was myself, was the work not of my father’s loins but of his mind. Of course I was aroused by him. Freud outlasts cloning: a note for a research study, I told myself grimly, and inwardly I did laugh.

But that didn’t help either.

• • • •

In New York, winter came early. Cold winds whipped whitecaps on harbor and river, and the trees in the Park stood bare even before October had ended. The crumbling outer boroughs of the shrinking city crumbled a little more and talked of the days when New York had been important. Manhattan battened down for snow, hired the seasonal increases in personal guards, and talked of Albuquerque. Each night museum security hunted up and evicted the drifters trying to sleep behind exhibits, drifters as chilled and pale as the moths under permaplex, and, it seemed to me, as detached from the blood of their own age. All of New York seemed detached to me that October, and cold. Often I stood in front of the cases of Noctuidae, staring at them for so long that my staff began to glance at each other covertly. I would catch their glances when I jerked free of my trance. No one asked me about it.

Still no message came from Devrie. When I contacted the Institute on the mailnet, she did not call back.

No letter came from Keith Torellen.

Then one night, after I had worked late and was hurrying through the chilly gloom toward my building, he was there, bulking from the shadows so quickly that the guard I had taken for the walk from the museum sprang forward in attack position.

“No! It’s all right! I know him!”

The guard retreated, without expression. Keith stared after him, and then at me, his face unreadable.

“Keith, what are you doing here? Come inside!”

He followed me into the lobby without a word. Nor did he say anything during the metal scanning and ID procedure. I took him up to my apartment, studying him in the elevator. He wore the same jacket and cheap wool hat as in Indian Falls, his hair wanted cutting, and the tip of his nose was red from waiting in the cold. How long had he waited there? He badly needed a shave.

In the apartment, he scanned the rugs, the paintings, my grandmother’s ridiculously ornate, ugly silver, and turned his back on them to face me.

“Seena. I want to know where Devrie is.”

“Why? Keith, what has happened?”

“Nothing has happened,” he said, removing his jacket but not laying it anywhere. “Only that I’ve left school and spent two days hitching here. It’s no good, Seena. To say that cloning is just like twinning: it’s no good. I want to see Devrie.”

His voice was hard. Bulking in my living room, unshaven, that hat pulled down over his ears, he looked older and less malleable than the last time I had seen him. Alarm—not physical fear, I was not afraid of him, but a subtler and deeper fear—sounded through me.

“Why do you want to see Devrie?”

“Because she cheated me.”

“Of what, for God’s sake?”

“Can I have a drink? Or a smoke?”

I poured him a Scotch. If he drank, he might talk. I had to know what he wanted, why such a desperate air clung to him, how to keep him from Devrie. I had never seen her like this. She was strong-willed, but always with a blitheness, a trust that eventually her will would prevail. Desperate forcefulness of the sort in Keith’s manner was not her style. But of course Devrie had always had silent money to back her will; perhaps money could buy trust as well as style.

Keith drank off his Scotch and held out his glass for another. “It was freezing out there. They wouldn’t let me in the lobby to wait for you.”

“Of course not.”

“You didn’t tell me your family was rich.”

I was a little taken aback at his bluntness, but at the same time it pleased me; I don’t know why.

“You didn’t ask.”

“That’s shit, Seena.”

“Keith. Why are you here?”

“I told you. I want to see Devrie.”

“What is it you’ve decided she cheated you of? Money?”

He looked so honestly surprised that again I was startled, this time by his resemblance to Devrie. She too would not have thought of financial considerations first, if there were emotional ones possible. One moment Keith was Devrie, one moment he was not. Now he scowled with sudden anger.

“Is that what you think—that fortune hunting brought me hitching from New Hampshire? God, Seena, I didn’t even know how much you had until this very—I still don’t know!”

I said levelly, “Then what is it you’re feeling so cheated of?”

Now he was rattled. Again that quick, half-furtive scan of my apartment, pausing a millisecond too long at the Caravaggio, subtly lit by its frame. When his gaze returned to mine it was troubled, a little defensive. Ready to justify. Of course I had put him on the defensive deliberately, but the calculation of my trick did not prepare me for the staggering naivete of his explanation. Once more it was Devrie complete, reducing the impersonal greatness of science to a personal and emotional loss.

“Ever since I knew that I was adopted, at five or six years old, I wondered about my biological family. Nothing strange in that—I think all adoptees do. I used to make up stories, kid stuff, about how they were really royalty, or lunar colonists, or survivors of the African Horror. Exotic things. I thought especially about my mother, imagining this whole scene of her holding me once before she released me for adoption, crying over me, loving me so much she could barely let me go but had to for some reason. Sentimental shit.” He laughed, trying to make light of what was not, and drank off his Scotch to avoid my gaze.

“But Devrie—the fact of her—destroyed all that. I never had a mother who hated to give me up. I never had a mother at all. What I had was a cell cut from Devrie’s fingertip or someplace, something discardable, and she doesn’t even know what I look like. But she’s damn well going to.”

“Why?” I said evenly. “What could you expect to gain from her knowing what you look like?”

But he didn’t answer me directly. “That first moment I saw you, Seena, in the theater at school, I thought you were my mother.”

“I know you did.”

“And you hated the idea. Why?”

I thought of the child I would never bear, the marriage, like so many other things of sweet promise, gone sour. But self-pity is a fool’s game. “None of your business.”

“Isn’t it? Didn’t you hate the idea because of the way I was made? Coldly. An experiment. Weren’t you a little bit insulted at being called the mother of a discardable cell from Devrie’s fingertip?”

“What the hell have you been reading? An experiment—what is any child but an experiment? A random egg, a random sperm. Don’t talk like one of those anti-science religious split-brains!”

He studied me levelly. Then he said, “Is Devrie religious? Is that why you’re so afraid of her?”

I got to my feet, and pointed at the sideboard. “Help yourself to another drink if you wish. I want to wash my hands. I’ve been handling specimens all afternoon.” Stupid, clumsy lie—nobody would believe such a lie.

In the bathroom, I leaned against the closed door, shut my eyes, and willed myself to calm. Why should I be so disturbed by the angry lashing-out of a confused boy? I was handy to lash out against; my father, whom Keith was really angry at, was not. It was all so predictable, so earnestly adolescent, that even over the hurting in my chest I smiled. But the smile, which should have reduced Keith’s ranting to the tantrum of a child—there, there, when you grow up, you’ll find out that no one really knows who he is—did not diminish Keith. His losses were real—mother, father, natural place in the natural sequence of life and birth. And suddenly, with a clutch at the pit of my stomach, I knew why I had told him all that I had about his origins. It was not from any ethic of fidelity to “the truth.” I had told him he was a clone because I, too, had had real losses—research, marriage, motherhood—and Devrie could never have shared them with me. Luminous, mystical Devrie, too occupied with God to be much hurt by man. Leave me alone! Can’t you ever leave me alone! All my life you’ve been dragging behind me—why don’t you die and finally leave me alone! And Devrie had smiled tolerantly, patted my head, and left me alone, closing the door softly so as not to disturb my grief. My words had not hurt her. I could not hurt her.

But I could hurt Keith—the other Devrie—and I had. That was why he disturbed me all out of proportion. That was the bond. My face, my pain, my fault.

Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. But what nonsense. I was not a believer, and the comforts of superstitious absolution could not touch me. What shit. Like all nonbelievers, I stood alone.

It came to me then that there was something absurd in thinking all this while leaning against a bathroom door. Grimly absurd, but absurd. The toilet as confessional. I ran the cold water, splashed some on my face, and left. How long had I left Keith alone in the living room?

When I returned, he was standing by the mailnet. He had punched in the command to replay my outgoing postal messages, and displayed on the monitor was Devrie’s address at the Institute of the Biological Hope.

• • • •

“What is it?” Keith said. “A hospital?”

I didn’t answer him.

“I can find out, Seena. Knowing this much, I can find out. Tell me.”

Tell me. “Not a hospital. It’s a research laboratory. Devrie is a voluntary subject.”

“Research on what? I will find out, Seena.”

“Brain perception.”

“Perception of what?”

“Perception of God,” I said, torn among weariness, anger, and a sudden gritty exasperation, irritating as sand. Why not just leave him to Devrie’s persuasions, and her to mystic starvation? But I knew I would not. I still, despite all of it, wanted her out of there.

Keith frowned. “What do you mean, ‘perception of God’?”

I told him. I made it sound as ridiculous as possible, and as dangerous. I described the anorexia, the massive use of largely untested drugs that would have made the Institute illegal in the United States, the skepticism of most of the scientific community, the psychoses and death that had followed twin-trance research fifteen years earlier. Keith did not remember that—he had been eight years old—and I did not tell him that I had been one of the researchers. I did not tell him about the tapes of the shadowy third presence in Bohentin’s holotanks. In every way I could, with every verbal subtlety at my use, I made the Institute sound crackpot, and dangerous, and ugly. As I spoke, I watched Keith’s face, and sometimes it was mine, and sometimes the expression altered it into Devrie’s. I saw bewilderment at her having chosen to enter the Institute, but not what I had hoped to see. Not scorn, not disgust.

When I had finished, he said, “But why did she think that I might want to enter such a place as a twin subject?”

I had saved this for last. “Money. She’d buy you.”

His hand, holding his third Scotch, went rigid. “Buy me.”

“It’s the most accurate way to put it.”

“What the hell made her think—” he mastered himself, not without effort. Not all the discussion of bodily risk had affected him as much as this mention of Devrie’s money. He had a poor man’s touchy pride. “She thinks of me as something to be bought.”

I was carefully quiet.

“Damn her,” he said. “Damn her.” Then, roughly, “And I was actually considering—”

I caught my breath. “Considering the Institute? After what I’ve just told you? How in hell could you? And you said, I remember, that your background was not religious!”

“It’s not. But I . . . I’ve wondered.” And in the sudden turn of his head away from me so that I wouldn’t see the sudden rapt hopelessness in his eyes, in the defiant set of his shoulders, I read more than in his banal words, and more than he could know. Devrie’s look, Devrie’s wishfulness, feeding on air. The weariness and anger, checked before, flooded me again and I lashed out at him.

“Then go ahead and fly to Dominica to enter the Institute yourself!”

He said nothing. But from something—his expression as he stared into his glass, the shifting of his body—I suddenly knew that he could not afford the trip.

I said, “So you fancy yourself as a believer?”

“No. A believer manque.” From the way he said it, I knew that he had said it before, perhaps often, and that the phrase stirred some hidden place in his imagination.

“What is wrong with you,” I said, “with people like you, that the human world is not enough?”

“What is wrong with people like you, that it is?” he said, and this time he laughed and raised his eyebrows in a little mockery that shut me out from this place beyond reason, this glittering escape. I knew then that somehow or other, sometime or other, despite all I had said, Keith would go to Dominica.

I poured him another Scotch. As deftly as I could, I led the conversation into other, lighter directions. I asked about his childhood. At first stiffly, then more easily as time and Scotch loosened him, he talked about growing up in the Berkshire Hills. He became more lighthearted, and under my interest turned both shrewd and funny, with a keen sense of humor. His thick brown hair fell over his forehead. I laughed with him, and broke out a bottle of good port. He talked about amateur plays he had acted in; his enthusiasm increased as his coherence decreased. Enthusiasm, humor, thick brown hair. I smoothed the hair back from his forehead. Far into the night, I pulled the drapes back from the window and we stood together and looked at the lights of the dying city ten stories below. Fog rolled in from the sea. Keith insisted we open the doors and stand on the balcony; he had never smelled fog tinged with the ocean. We smelled the night, and drank some more, and talked, and laughed.

And then I led him again to the sofa.

“Seena?” Keith said. He covered my hand, laid upon his thigh, with his own, and turned his head to look at me questioningly. I leaned forward and touched my lips to his, barely in contact, for a long moment. He drew back, and his hand tried to lift mine. I tightened my fingers.

“Seena, no . . .”

“Why not?” I put my mouth back on his, very lightly. He had to draw back to answer, and I could feel that he did not want to draw back. Under my lips he frowned slightly; still, despite his drunkenness—so much more than mine—he groped for the word.

“Incest . . .”

“No. We two have never shared a womb.”

He frowned again, under my mouth. I drew back to smile at him, and shifted my hand. “It doesn’t matter anymore, Keith. Not in New York. But even if it did—I am not your sister, not really. You said so yourself—remember? Not a family. Just . . . here.”

“Not family,” he repeated, and I saw in his eyes the second before he closed them the flash of pain, the greed of a young man’s desire, and even the crafty evasions of the good port. Then his arms closed around me.

He was very strong, and more than a little violent. I guessed from what confusions the violence flowed but still I enjoyed it, that overwhelming rush from that beautiful male-Devrie body. I wanted him to be violent with me, as long as I knew there was no real danger. No real danger, no real brother, no real child. Keith was not my child but Devrie was my child-sister, and I had to stop her from destroying herself, no matter how . . . didn’t I? “The pull of blood.” But this was necessary, was justified . . . was a necessary gamble. For Devrie.

So I told myself. Then I stopped telling myself anything at all, and surrendered to the warm tides of pleasure.

But at dawn I woke and thought—with Keith sleeping heavily across me and the sky cold at the window—what the hell am I doing?

• • • •

When I came out of the shower, Keith was sitting rigidly against the pillows. Sitting next to him on the very edge of the bed, I pulled a sheet around my nakedness and reached for his hand. He snatched it away.

“Keith. It’s all right. Truly it is.”

“You’re my sister.”

“But nothing will come of it. No child, no repetitions. It’s not all that uncommon, dear heart.”

“It is where I come from.”

“Yes. I know. But not here.”

He didn’t answer, his face troubled.

“Do you want breakfast?”

“No. No, thank you.”

I could feel his need to get away from me; it was almost palpable. Snatching my bodysuit off the floor, I went into the kitchen, which was chilly. The servant would not arrive for another hour. I turned up the heat, pulled on my bodysuit—standing on the cold floor first on one foot and then on the other, like some extinct species of water fowl—and made coffee. Through the handle of one cup I stuck two folded large bills. He came into the kitchen, dressed even to the torn jacket.

“Coffee.”

“Thanks.”

His fingers closed on the handle of the cup, and his eyes widened. Pure, naked shock, uncushioned by any defenses whatsoever: the whole soul, betrayed, pinned in the eyes.

“Oh God, no, Keith—how can you even think so? It’s for the trip back to Indian Falls! A gift!”

An endless pause, while we stared at each other. Then he said, very low, “I’m sorry. I should have . . . seen what it’s for.” But his cup trembled in his hand, and a few drops sloshed onto the floor. It was those few drops that undid me, flooding me with shame. Keith had a right to his shock, and to the anguish in his/my/Devrie’s face. She wanted him for her mystic purposes, I for their prevention. Fanatic and saboteur, we were both better defended against each other than Keith, without money nor religion nor years, was against either of us. If I could have seen any other way than the gamble I had taken . . . but I could not. Nonetheless, I was ashamed.

“Keith. I’m sorry.”

“Why did we? Why did we?”

I could have said: We didn’t; I did. But that might have made it worse for him. He was male, and so young.

Impulsively I blurted, “Don’t go to Dominica!” But of course he was beyond listening to me now. His face closed. He set down the coffee cup and looked at me from eyes much harder than they had been a minute ago. Was he thinking that because of our night together I expected to influence him directly? I was not that young. He could not foresee that I was trying to guess much farther ahead than that, for which I could not blame him. I could not blame him for anything. But I did regret how clumsily I had handled the money. That had been stupid.

Nonetheless, when he left a few moments later, the handle of the coffee cup was bare. He had taken the money.

• • • •

The Madagascar exhibits were complete. They opened to much press interest, and there were both favorable reviews and celebrations. I could not bring myself to feel that it mattered. Ten times a day, I went through the deadening exercise of willing an interest that had deserted me, and when I looked at the moths, ashy white wings outstretched forever, I could feel my body recoil in a way I could not name.

The image of the moths went home with me. One night in November, I actually thought I heard wings beating against the window where I had stood with Keith. I yanked open the drapes and then the doors, but of course there was nothing there. For a long time I stared at the nothingness, smelling the fog, before typing yet another message, urgent-priority personal, to Devrie. The mailnet did not bring any answer.

I contacted the mailnet computer at the college at Indian Falls. My fingers trembled as they typed a request to leave an urgent-priority personal message for a student, Keith Torellen. The mailnet typed back:

TORELLEN, KEITH ROBERT. 64830016. ON MEDICAL LEAVE OF ABSENCE. TIME OF LEAVE: INDEFINITE. NO FORWARDING MAILNET NUMBER. END.

The sound came again at the window. Whirling, I scanned the dark glass, but there was nothing there, no moths, no wings, just the lights of the decaying city flung randomly across the blackness and the sound, faint and very far away, of a siren wailing out somebody else’s disaster.

I shivered. Putting on a sweater and turning up the heat made me no warmer. Then the mail slot chimed softly and I turned in time to see the letter fall from the pneumatic tube from the lobby, the apartment house sticker clearly visible, assuring me that it had been processed and found free of both poison and explosives. Also visible was the envelope’s logo: INSTITUTE OF THE BIOLOGICAL HOPE, all the O’s radiant golden suns. But Devrie never wrote paper mail. She preferred the mailnet.

The note was from Keith, not Devrie. A short note, scrawled on a torn scrap of paper in nearly indecipherable handwriting. I had seen Keith’s handwriting in Indian Falls, across his student notebooks; this was a wildly out-of-control version of it, almost psychotic in the variations of spacing and letter formation that signal identity. I guessed that he had written the note under the influence of a drug, or several drugs, his mind racing much faster than he could write. There was neither punctuation nor paragraphing.

Dear Seena Im going to do it I have to know my parents are angry but I have to know I have to all the confusion is gone Seena Keith

There was a word crossed out between “gone” and “Seena,” scratched out with erratic lines of ink. I held the paper up to the light, tilting it this way and that. The crossed-out word was “mother.” all the confusion is gone mother

Mother.

Slowly I let out the breath I had not known I was holding. The first emotion was pity, for Keith, even though I had intended this. We had done a job on him, Devrie and I. Mother, sister, self. And when he and Devrie artificially drove upward the number and speed of the neurotransmitters in the brain, generated the twin trance, and then Keith’s pre-cloning Freudian-still mind reached for Devrie to add sexual energy to all the other brain energies fueling Bohentin’s holotanks—

Mother. Sister. Self.

All was fair in love and war. A voice inside my head jeered: And which is this? But I was ready for the voice. This was both. I didn’t think it would be long before Devrie left the Institute to storm to New York.

• • • •

It was nearly another month, in which the snow began to fall and the city to deck itself in the tired gilt fallacies of Christmas. I felt fine. Humming, I catalogued the Madagascar moths, remounting the best specimens in exhibit cases and sealing them under permaplex, where their fragile wings and delicate antennae could lie safe. The mutant strains had the thinnest wings, unnaturally tenuous and up to twenty-five centimeters each, all of pale ivory, as if a ghostly delicacy were the natural evolutionary response to the glowing landscape of nuclear genocide. I catalogued each carefully.

• • • •

“Why?” Devrie said. “Why?”

“You look like hell.”

“Why?”

“I think you already know,” I said. She sagged on my white velvet sofa, alone, the PGs that I suspected acted as much as nurses as guards dismissed from the apartment. Tears of anger and exhaustion collected in her sunken eye sockets but did not fall. Only with effort was she keeping herself in a sitting position, and the effort was costing her energy she did not have. Her skin, except for two red spots of fury high on each cheekbone, was the color of old eggs. Looking at her, I had to keep my hands twisted in my lap to keep myself from weeping.

“Are you telling me you planned it, Seena? Are you telling me you located Keith and slept with him because you knew that would make him impotent with me?”

“Of course not. I know sexuality isn’t that simple. So do you.”

“But you gambled on it. You gambled that it would be one way to ruin the experiment.”

“I gambled that it would . . . complicate Keith’s responses.”

“Complicate them past the point where he knew who the hell he was with!”

“He’d be able to know if you weren’t making him glow out of his mind with neurotransmitter kickers! He’s not stupid. But he’s not ready for whatever mystic hoops you’ve tried to make him jump through—if anybody ever can be said to be ready for that!—and no, I’m not surprised that he can’t handle libidinal energies on top of all the other artificial energies you’re racing through his brain. Something was bound to snap.”

“You caused it, Seena. As cold-bloodedly as that.”

A sudden shiver of memory brought the feel of Keith’s hands on my breasts. No, not as cold-bloodedly as that. No. But I could not say so to Devrie.

“I trusted you,” she said. “‘Anything for a sister’—God!”

“You were right to trust me. To trust me to get you out of that place before you’re dead.”

“Listen to yourself! Smug, all-knowing, self-righteous . . . do you know how close we were at the Institute? Do you have any idea what you’ve destroyed?”

I laughed coldly. I couldn’t help it. “If contact with God can be destroyed because one confused kid can’t get it up, what does that say about God?”

Devrie stared at me. A long moment passed, and in the moment the two red spots on her cheeks faded and her eyes narrowed. “Why, Seena?”

“I told you. I wanted you safe, out of there. And you are.”

“No. No. There’s something else, something more going on here. Going on with you.”

“Don’t make it more complicated than it is, Devrie. You’re my sister, and my only family. Is it so odd that I would try to protect you?”

“Keith is your brother.”

“Well, then, protect both of you. Whatever derails that experiment protects Keith, too.”

She said softly, “Did you want him so much?”

We stared at each other across the living room, sisters, I standing by the mailnet and she supported by the sofa, needing its support, weak and implacable as any legendary martyr to the faith. Her weakness hurt me in some nameless place; as a child, Devrie’s body had been so strong. The hurt twisted in me, so that I answered her with truth. “Not so much. Not at first, not until we . . . no, that’s not true. I wanted him. But that was not the reason, Devrie—it was not a rationalization for lust, nor any lapse in self-control.”

She went on staring at me, until I turned to the sideboard and poured myself a Scotch. My hand trembled.

Behind me Devrie said, “Not lust. And not protection either. Something else, Seena. You’re afraid.”

I turned, smiling tightly. “Of you?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“This is your theory, not mine.”

She closed her eyes. The tears, shining all this time over her anger, finally fell. Head flung back against the pale sofa, arms limp at her side, she looked the picture of desolation, and so weak that I was frightened. I brought her a glass of milk from the kitchen and held it to her mouth, and I was a little surprised when she drank it off without protest.

“Devrie. You can’t go on like this. In this physical state.”

“No,” she agreed, in a voice so firm and prompt that I was startled further. It was the voice of decision, not surrender. She straightened herself on the sofa. “Even Bohentin says I can’t go on like this. I weigh less than he wants, and I’m right at the edge of not having the physical resources to control the twin trance. I’m having racking withdrawal symptoms even being on this trip, and at this very minute there is a doctor sitting at Father’s desk in your study, in case I need him. Also, I’ve had my lawyers make over most of my remaining inheritance to Keith. I don’t think you knew that. What’s left has all been transferred to a bank on Dominica, and if I die it goes to the Institute. You won’t be able to touch it, nor touch Keith’s portion either, not even if I die. And I will die, Seena, soon, if I don’t start eating and stop taking the program’s drugs. I’ll just burn out body and brain both. You’ve guessed that I’m close to that, but you haven’t guessed how close. Now I’m telling you. I can’t handle the stresses of the twin trance much longer.”

I just went on holding her glass, arm extended, unable to move.

“You gambled that you could destroy one component in the chain of my experiment at the Institute by confusing my twin sexually. Well, you won. Now I’m making a gamble. I’m gambling my life that you can undo what you did with Keith, and without his knowing that I made you. You said he’s not stupid and his impotency comes from being unable to handle the drug program; perhaps you’re partly right. But he is me—me, Seena—and I know you’ve thought I was stupid all my life, because I wanted things you don’t understand. Now Keith wants them, too—it was inevitable that he would—and you’re going to undo whatever is standing in his way. I had to fight myself free all my life of your bullying, but Keith doesn’t have that kind of time. Because if you don’t undo what you caused, I’m going to go ahead with the twin trance anyway—the twin trance, Seena—without the sexual component and without letting Bohentin know just how much greater the strain is in trance than he thinks it is. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t have a twin, and neither do the doctors. But I know, and if I push it much farther, I’m going to eventually die at it. Soon eventually. When I do, all your scheming to get me out of there really will have failed and you’ll be alone with whatever it is you’re so afraid of. But I don’t think you’ll let that happen.

“I think that instead you’ll undo what you did to Keith, so that the experiment can have one last real chance. And in return, after that one chance, I’ll agree to come home, to Boston or here to New York, for one year.

“That’s my gamble.”

She was looking at me from eyes empty of all tears, a Devrie I had not ever seen before. She meant it, every demented word, and she would do it. I wanted to scream at her, to scream a jumble of suicide and moral blackmail and warped perceptions and outrage, but the words that came out of my mouth came out in a whisper.

“What in God’s name is worth that?”

Shockingly, she laughed, a laugh of more power than her wasted frame could have contained. Her face glowed, and the glow looked both exalted and insane. “You said it, Seena—in God’s name. To finally know. To know, beyond the fogginess of faith, that we’re not alone in the universe . . . Faith should not mean fogginess.” She laughed again, this time defensively, as if she knew how she sounded to me. “You’ll do it, Seena.” It was not a question. She took my hand.

“You would kill yourself?”

“No. I would die trying to reach God. It’s not the same thing.”

“I never bullied you, Devrie.”

She dropped my hand. “All my life, Seena. And on into now. But all of your bullying and your scorn would look rather stupid, wouldn’t it, if there really can be proved to exist a rational basis for what you laughed at all those years!”

We looked at each other, sisters, across the abyss of the pale sofa, and then suddenly away. Neither of us dared speak.

• • • •

My plane landed on Dominica by night. Devrie had gone two days before me, returning with her doctor and guards on the same day she had left, as I had on my previous visit. I had never seen the island at night. The tropical greenery, lush with that faintly menacing suggestion of plant life gone wild, seemed to close in on me. The velvety darkness seemed to smell of ginger, and flowers, and the sea—all too strong, too blandly sensual, like an overdone perfume ad. At the hotel, it was better; my room was on the second floor, above the dark foliage, and did not face the sea. Nonetheless, I stayed inside all that evening, all that darkness, until I could go the next day to the Institute of the Biological Hope.

“Hello, Seena.”

“Keith. You look—”

“Rotten,” he finished, and waited. He did not smile. Although he had lost some weight, he was nowhere near as skeletal as Devrie, and it gave me a pang I did not analyze to see his still-healthy body in the small gray room where last I had seen hers. His head was shaved, and without the curling brown hair he looked sterner, prematurely middle-aged. That, too, gave me a strange emotion, although it was not why he looked rotten. The worst was his eyes. Red-veined, watery, the sockets already a little sunken, they held the sheen of a man who was not forgiving somebody for something. Me? Himself? Devrie? I had lain awake all night, schooling myself for this insane interview, and still I did not know what to say. What does one say to persuade a man to sexual potency with one’s sister so that her life might be saved? I felt ridiculous, and frightened, and—I suddenly realized the name of my strange emotion—humiliated. How could I even start to slog toward what I was supposed to reach?

“How goes the Great Experiment?”

“Not as you described it,” he said, and we were there already. I looked at him evenly.

“You can’t understand why I presented the Institute in the worst possible light.”

“I can understand that.”

“Then you can’t understand why I bedded you, knowing about Bohentin’s experiment.”

“I can also understand that.”

Something was wrong. Keith answered me easily, without restraint, but with conflict gritty beneath his voice, like sand beneath blowing grass. I stepped closer, and he flinched. But his expression did not change.

“Keith. What is this about? What am I doing here? Devrie said you couldn’t . . . that you were impotent with her, confused enough about who and what . . .” I trailed off. He still had not changed expression.

I said quietly, “It was a simplistic idea in the first place. Only someone as simplistic as Devrie . . .” Only someone as simplistic as Devrie would think you could straighten out impotency by talking about it for a few hours. I turned to go, and I had gotten as far as laying my hand on the doorknob before Keith grasped my arm. Back to him, I squeezed my eyes shut. What in God would I have done if he had not stopped me?

“It’s not what Devrie thinks!” With my back to him, not able to see his middle-aged baldness but only to hear the anguish in his voice, he again seemed young, uncertain, the boy I had bought coffee for in Indian Falls. I kept my back to him, and my voice carefully toneless.

“What is it, then, Keith? If not what Devrie thinks?”

“I don’t know!”

“But you do know what it’s not? It’s not being confused about who is your sister and who your mother and whom you’re willing to have sex with in front of a room full of researchers?”

“No.” His voice had gone hard again, but his hand stayed on my arm. “At first, yes. The first time. But, Seena—I felt it. Almost. I almost felt the presence, and then all the rest of the confusion—it didn’t seem as important anymore. Not the confusion between you and Devrie.”

I whirled to face him. “You mean God doesn’t care whom you fuck if it gets you closer to fucking with Him.”

He looked at me hard then—at me, not at his own self-absorption. His reddened eyes widened a little. “Why, Seena—you care. You told me the brother-sister thing didn’t matter anymore—but you care.”

Did I? I didn’t even know anymore. I said, “But, then, I’m not deluding myself that it’s all for the old Kingdom and the Glory.”

“Glory,” he repeated musingly, and finally let go of my arm. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“Keith. This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“Where do you want to get?” he said in the same musing tone. “Where did any of you, starting with your father, want to get with me? Glory . . . glory.”

Standing this close to him, seeing close up the pupils of his eyes and smelling close up the odor of his sweat, I finally realized what I should have seen all along: He was glowing. He was of course constantly on Bohentin’s program of neurotransmitter manipulation, but the same chemicals that made the experiments possible also raised the threshold of both frankness and suggestibility. I guessed it must be a little like the looseness of being drunk, and I wondered if perhaps Bohentin might have deliberately raised the dosage before letting this interview take place. But no, Bohentin wouldn’t be aware of the bargain Devrie and I had struck; she would not have told him. The whole bizarre situation was hers alone, and Keith’s drugged musings a fortunate side-effect I would have to capitalize on.

“Where do you think my father wanted to get with you?” I asked him gently.

“Immortality. Godhead. The man who created Adam without Eve.” He was becoming maudlin.

“Hardly ‘the man,’” I pointed out. “My father was only one of a team of researchers. And the same results were being obtained independently in California.”

“Results. I am a ‘result.’ What do you think he wanted, Seena?”

“Scientific knowledge of cell development. An objective truth.”

“That’s all Devrie wants.”

“To compare bioengineering to some mystic quest—”

“Ah, but if the mystic quest is given a laboratory answer? Then it, too, becomes a scientific truth. You really hate that idea, don’t you, Seena? You hate science validating anything you define as non-science.”

I said stiffly, “That’s rather an oversimplification.”

“Then what do you hate?”

“I hate the risk to human bodies and human minds. To Devrie. To you.”

“How nice of you to include me,” he said, smiling. “And what do you think Devrie wants?”

“Sensation. Romantic religious emotion. To be all roiled up inside with delicious esoterica.”

He considered this. “Maybe.”

“And is this what you want as well, Keith? You’ve asked what everyone else wants. What do you want?”

“I want to feel at home in the universe. As if I belonged in it. And I never have.”

He said this simply, without self-consciousness, and the words themselves were predictable enough for his age—even banal. There was nothing in the words that could account for my eyes suddenly filling with tears. “And ‘scientifically’ reaching God would do that for you?”

“How do I know until I try it? Don’t cry, Seena.”

“I’m not!”

“All right,” he agreed softly. “You’re not crying.” Then he added, without changing tone, “I am more like you than like Devrie.”

“How so?”

“I think that Devrie has always felt that she belongs in the universe. She only wants to find the . . . the coziest corner of it to curl up in. Like a cat. The coziest corner to curl up in is God’s lap. Aren’t you surprised that I should be more like you than like the person I was cloned from?”

“No,” I said. “Harder upbringing than Devrie’s. I told you that first day: Cloning is only delayed twinning.”

He threw back his head and laughed, a sound that chilled my spine. Whatever his conflict was, we were moving closer.

“Oh no, Seena. You’re so wrong. It’s more than delayed twinning, all right. You can’t buy a real twin. You either have one or you don’t. But you can buy yourself a clone. Bought, paid for, kept on the books along with all the rest of the glassware and holotanks and electron microscopes. You said so yourself, in your apartment, when you first told me about Devrie and the Institute. ‘Money. She’d buy you.’ And you were right, of course. Your father bought me, and she did, and you did. But of course you two women couldn’t have bought if I hadn’t been selling.”

He was smiling still. Stupid—we had both been stupid, Devrie and I, we had both been looking in the wrong place, misled by our separate blinders-on training in the laboratory brain. My training had been scientific, hers humanistic, and so I looked at Freud and she looked at Oedipus, and we were equally stupid. How did the world look to a man who did not deal in laboratory brains, a man raised in a grittier world in which limits were not what the mind was capable of but what the bank book would stand? “Your genes are too expensive for you to claim except as a beggar; your sisters are too expensive for you to claim except as a beggar; God is too expensive for you to claim except as a beggar.” To a less romantic man, it would not have mattered, but a less romantic man would not have come to the Institute. What dark humiliations and resentments did Keith feel when he looked at Devrie, the self who was buyer and not bought?

Change the light you shine onto a mind, and you see different neural patterns, different corridors, different forests of trees grown in soil you could not have imagined. Run that soil through your fingers and you discover different pebbles, different sand, different leaf mold from the decay of old growths. Devrie and I had been hacking through the wrong forest.

Not Oedipus, but Marx.

Quick lines of attack came to me. Say: Keith it’s a job like any other with high-hazard pay why can’t you look at it like that a very dangerous and well-paid job for which you’ve been hired by just one more eccentric member of the monied class. Say: You’re entitled to the wealth you’re our biological brother damn it consider it rationally as a kinship entitlement. Say: Don’t be so nicey-nice it’s a tough world out there and if Devrie’s giving it away take it don’t be an impractical chump.

I said none of that. Instead I heard myself saying, coolly and with a calm cruelty, “You’re quite right. You were bought by Devrie, and she is now using her own purchase for her own ends. You’re a piece of equipment bought and paid for. Unfortunately, there’s no money in the account. It has all been a grand sham.”

Keith jerked me to face him with such violence that my neck cracked. “What are you saying?”

The words came as smoothly, as plausibly, as if I had rehearsed them. I didn’t even consciously plan them: How can you plan a lie you do not know you will need? I slashed through this forest blind, but the ground held under my feet.

“Devrie told me that she has signed over most of her inheritance to you. What she didn’t know, because I haven’t yet told her, is that she doesn’t have control of her inheritance any longer. It’s not hers. I control it. I had her declared mentally incompetent on the grounds of violent suicidal tendencies and had myself made her legal guardian. She no longer has the legal right to control her fortune. A doctor observed her when she came to visit me in New York. So the transfer of her fortune to you is invalid.”

“The lawyers who gave me the papers to sign—”

“Will learn about the New York action this week,” I said smoothly. How much inheritance law did Keith know? Probably very little. Neither did I, and I invented furiously; it only needed to sound plausible. “The New York courts only handed down their decision recently, and Dominican judicial machinery, like everything else in the tropics, moves slowly. But the ruling will hold, Keith. Devrie does not control her own money, and you’re a pauper again. But I have something for you. Here. An airline ticket back to Indian Falls. You’re a free man. Poor, but free. The ticket is in your name, and there’s a check inside it—that’s from me. You’ve earned it, for at least trying to aid poor Devrie. But now you’re going to have to leave her to me. I’m now her legal guardian.”

I held the ticket out to him. It was wrapped in its airline folder; my own name as passenger was hidden. Keith stared at it, and then at me.

I said softly, “I’m sorry you were cheated. Devrie didn’t mean to. But she has no money, now, to offer you. You can go. Devrie’s my burden now.”

His voice sounded strangled. “To remove from the Institute?”

“I never made any secret of wanting her out. Although the legal papers for that will take a little time to filter through the Dominican courts. She wouldn’t go except by force, so force is what I’ll get. Here.”

I thrust the ticket folder at him. He made no move to take it, and I saw from the hardening of his face—my face, Devrie’s face—the moment when Devrie shifted forests in his mind. Now she was without money, without legal control of her life, about to be torn from the passion she loved most. The helpless underdog. The orphaned woman, poor and cast out, in need of protection from the powerful who had seized her fortune.

Not Marx, but Cervantes.

“You would do that? To your own sister?”

Anything for a sister. I said bitterly, “Of course I would.”

“She’s not mentally incompetent!”

“Isn’t she?”

“No!”

I shrugged. “The courts say she is.”

Keith studied me, resolve hardening around him. I thought of certain shining crystals, that will harden around any stray piece of grit. Now that I was succeeding in convincing him, my lies hurt—or perhaps what hurt was how easily he believed them.

“Are you sure, Seena,” he said, “that you aren’t just trying a grab for Devrie’s fortune?”

I shrugged again, and tried to make my voice toneless. “I want her out of here. I don’t want her to die.”

“Die? What makes you think she would die?”

“She looks—”

“She’s nowhere near dying,” Keith said angrily—his anger a release, so much that it hardly mattered at what. “Don’t you think I can tell in twin trance what her exact physical state is? And don’t you know how much control the trance gives each twin over the bodily processes of the other? Don’t you even know that? Devrie isn’t anywhere near dying. And I’d pull her out of trance if she were.” He paused, looking hard at me. “Keep your ticket, Seena.”

I repeatedly mechanically, “You can leave now. There’s no money.” Devrie had lied to me.

“That wouldn’t leave her with any protection at all, would it?” he said levelly. When he grasped the doorknob to leave, the tendons in his wrist stood out clearly, strong and taut. I did not try to stop his going.

Devrie had lied to me. With her lie, she had blackmailed me into yet another lie to Keith. The twin trance granted control, in some unspecified way, to each twin’s body; the trance I had pioneered might have resulted in eight deaths unknowingly inflicted on each other out of who knows what dark forests in eight fumbling minds. Lies, blackmail, death, more lies.

Out of these lies they were going to make scientific truth. Through these forests they were going to search for God.

• • • •

“Final clearance check of holotanks,” an assistant said formally. “Faraday cage?”

“Optimum.”

“External radiation?”

“Cleared,” said the man seated at the console of the first tank.

“Cleared,” said the woman seated at the console of the second.

“Microradiation?”

“Cleared.”

“Cleared.”

“Personnel radiation, Class A?”

“Cleared.”

“Cleared.”

On it went, the whole tedious and crucial procedure, until both tanks had been cleared and focused, the fluid adjusted, tested, adjusted again, tested again. Bohentin listened patiently, without expression, but I, standing to the side of him and behind the tanks, saw the nerve at the base of his neck and just below the hairline pulse in some irregular rhythm of its own. Each time the nerve pulsed, the skin rose slightly from under his collar. I kept my eyes on that syncopated crawling of flesh, and felt tension prickle over my own skin like heat.

Three-quarters of the lab, the portion where the holotanks and other machinery stood, was softly dark, lit mostly from the glow of console dials and the indirect track lighting focused on the tanks. Standing in the gloom were Bohentin, five other scientists, two medical doctors—and me. Bohentin had fought my being allowed there, but in the end he had had to give in. I had known too many threatening words not in generalities but in specifics: reporters’ names, drug names, cloning details, twin trance tragedy, anorexia symptoms, bioengineering amendment. He was not a man who much noticed either public opinion or relatives’ threats, but no one else outside his Institute knew so many so specific words—some people knew some of the words, but only I had them all. In the end he had focused on me his cold, brilliant eyes, and given permission for me to witness the experiment that involved my sister.

I was going to hold Devrie to her bargain. I was not going to believe anything she told me without witnessing it for myself.

Half the morning passed in technical preparation. Somewhere Devrie and Keith, the human components of this costly detection circuit, were separately being brought to the apex of brain activity. Drugs, biofeedback, tactile and auditory and kinaesthetic stimulation—all carefully calculated for the maximum increase of both the number of neurotransmitters firing signals through the synapses of the brain and of the speed at which the signals raced. The more rapid the transmission through certain pathways, the more intense both perception and feeling. Some neurotransmitters, under this pressure, would alter molecular structure into natural hallucinogens; that reaction had to be controlled. Meanwhile other drugs, other biofeedback techniques, would depress the body’s natural enzymes designed to either reabsorb excess transmitters or to reduce the rate at which they fired. The number and speed of neurotransmitters in Keith’s and Devrie’s brains would mount, and mount, and mount, all natural chemical barriers removed. The two of them would enter the lab with their whole brains—rational cortex, emotional limbic, right and left brain functions—simultaneously aroused to an unimaginable degree. Simultaneously. They would be feeling as great a “rush” as a falling skydiver, as great a glow as a cocaine user, as great a mental clarity and receptivity as a da Vinci whose brush is guided by all the integrated visions of his unconscious mind. They would be white-hot.

Then they would hit each other with the twin trance.

The quarter of the lab which Keith and Devrie would use was softly and indirectly lit, though brighter than the rest. It consisted of a raised, luxuriantly padded platform, walls and textured pillows in a pink whose component wavelengths had been carefully calculated, temperature in a complex gradient producing precise convection flows over the skin. The man and woman in that womb-colored, flesh-stimulating environment would be able to see us observers standing in the gloom behind the holotanks only as vague shapes. When the two doors opened and Devrie and Keith moved onto the platform, I knew that they would not even try to distinguish who stood in the lab. Looking at their faces, that looked only at each other, I felt my heart clutch.

They were naked except for the soft helmets that both attached hundreds of needles to nerve clumps just below the skin and also held the earphones through which Bohentin controlled the music that swelled the cathedrals of their skulls. “Cathedrals”—from their faces, transfigured to the ravished ecstasy found in paintings of medieval saints, that was the right word. But here the ecstasy was controlled, understood, and I saw with a sudden rush of pain at old memories that I could recognize the exact moment when Keith and Devrie locked onto each other with the twin trance. I recognized it, with my own more bitter hyperclarity, in their eyes, as I recognized the cast of concentration that came over their features, and the intensity of their absorption. The twin trance. They clutched each other’s hands, faces inches apart, and suddenly I had to look away.

Each holotank held two whorls of shifting colors, the outlines clearer and the textures more sharply delineated than any previous holographs in the history of science. Keith’s and Devrie’s perceptions of each other’s presence. The whorls went on clarifying themselves, separating into distinct and mappable layers, as on the platform Keith and Devrie remained frozen, all their energies focused on the telepathic trance. Seconds passed, and then minutes. And still, despite the clarity of the holographs in the tank, a clarity that fifteen years earlier I would have given my right hand for, I sensed that Keith and Devrie were holding back, were deliberately confining their unimaginable perceptiveness to each other’s radiant energy, in the same way that water is confined behind a dam to build power.

But how could I be sensing that? From a subliminal “reading” of the mapped perceptions in the holotanks? Or from something else?

More minutes passed. Keith and Devrie stayed frozen, facing each other, and over her skeletal body and his stronger one a flush began to spread, rosy and slow, like heat tide rising.

“Jesus H. Christ,” said one of the medical doctors, so low that only I, standing directly behind her, could have heard. It was not a curse, nor a prayer, but some third possibility, unnameable.

Keith put one hand on Devrie’s thigh. She shuddered. He drew her down to the cushions on the platform and they began to caress each other, not frenzied, not in the exploring way of lovers but with a deliberation I have never experienced outside a research lab, a slow care that implied that worlds of interpretation hung on each movement. Yet the effect was not of coldness nor detachment, but of intense involvement, of tremendous energy joyously used, of creating each other’s bodies right then, there under each other’s hands. They were working, and oblivious to all but their work. But if it was a kind of creative work, it was also a kind of primal innocent eroticism, and, watching, I felt my own heat begin to rise. “Innocent”—but if innocence is unknowingness, there was nothing innocent about it at all. Keith and Devrie knew and controlled each heartbeat, and I felt the exact moment when they let their sexual energies, added to all the other neural energies, burst the dam and flood outward in wave after wave, expanding the scope of each brain’s perceptions, inundating the artificially walled world.

A third whorl formed in each holotank.

It formed suddenly: one second nothing, the next brightness. But then it wavered, faded a bit. After a few moments it brightened slightly, a diffused golden haze, before again fading. On the platform, Keith gasped, and I guessed he was having to shift his attention between perceiving the third source of radiation and keeping up the erotic version of the twin trance. His biofeedback techniques were less experienced than Devrie’s, and the male erection more fragile. But then he caught the rhythm, and the holograph brightened.

It seemed to me that the room brightened as well, although no additional lights came on and the consoles glowed no brighter. Sweat poured off the researchers. Bohentin leaned forward, his neck muscle tautening toward the platform as if it were his will and not Keith/Devrie’s that strained to perceive that third presence recorded in the tank. I thought, stupidly, of mythical intermediaries: Merlyn never made king, Moses never reaching the Promised Land. Intermediaries—and then it became impossible to think of anything at all.

Devrie shuddered and cried out. Keith’s orgasm came a moment later, and with it a final roil of neural activity so strong the two primary whorls in each holotank swelled to fill the tank and inundate the third. At the moment of breakthrough, Keith screamed, and in memory it seems as if the scream was what tore through the last curtain—that is nonsense. How loud would microbes have to scream to attract the attention of giants? How loud does a knock on the door have to be to pull a sleeper from the alien world of dreams?

The doctor beside me fell to her knees. The third presence—or some part of it—swirled all around us, racing along our own unprepared synapses and neurons, and what swirled and raced was astonishment. A golden, majestic astonishment. We had finally attracted Its attention, finally knocked with enough neural force to be just barely heard—and It was astonished that we could, or did, exist. The slow rise of that powerful astonishment within the shielded lab was like the slow swinging around of the head of a great beast to regard some butterfly it has barely glimpsed from the corner of one eye. But this was no beast. As Its attention swung toward us, pain exploded in my skull—the pain of sound too loud, lights too bright, charge too high. My brain was burning on overload. There came one more flash of insight—wordless, pattern without end—and the sound of screaming. Then, abruptly, the energy vanished.

Bohentin, on all fours, crawled toward the holotanks. The doctor lay slumped on the floor; the other doctor had already reached the platform and its two crumpled figures. Someone was crying, someone else shouting. I rose, fell, dragged myself to the side of the platform and then could not climb it. I could not climb the platform. Hanging with two hands on the edge, hearing the voice crying as my own, I watched the doctor bend shakily to Keith, roll him off Devrie to bend over her, turn back to Keith.

Bohentin cried, “The tapes are intact!”

“Oh God oh God oh God oh God oh God,” someone moaned, until abruptly she stopped. I grasped the flesh-colored padding on top of the platform and pulled myself up onto it.

Devrie lay unconscious, pulse erratic, face cast in perfect bliss. The doctor breathed into Keith’s mouth—what strength could the doctor himself have left?—and pushed on the naked chest. Breathe, push, breathe, push. The whole length of Keith’s body shuddered; the doctor rocked back on his heels; Keith breathed.

“It’s all on tape!” Bohentin cried. “It’s all on tape!”

“God damn you to hell,” I whispered to Devrie’s blissful face. “It didn’t even know we were there!”

Her eyes opened. I had to lean close to hear her answer.

“But now . . . we know He . . . is there.”

She was too weak to smile. I looked away from her, away from that face, out into the tumultuous emptiness of the lab, anywhere.

• • • •

They will try again.

Devrie has been asleep, fed by glucose solution through an IV, for fourteen hours. I sit near her bed, frowned at by the nurse, who can see my expression as I stare at my sister. Somewhere in another bed Keith is sleeping yet again. His rest is more fitful than Devrie’s; she sinks into sleep as into warm water, but he cannot. Like me, he is afraid of drowning.

An hour ago, he came into Devrie’s room and grasped my hand. “How could It—He—It not have been aware that we existed? Not even have known?”

I didn’t answer him.

“You felt it, too, Seena, didn’t you? The others say they could, so you must have, too. It . . . created us in some way. No, that’s wrong. How could It create us and not know?”

I said wearily, “Do we always know what we’ve created?” and Keith glanced at me sharply. But I had not been referring to my father’s work in cloning.

“Keith. What’s a Thysania Africana?”

“A what?”

“Think of us,” I said, “as just one more biological side-effect. One type of being acts, and another type of being comes into existence. Man stages something like the African Horror, and in doing so he creates whole new species of moths and doesn’t even discover they exist until long afterward. If man can do it, why not God? And why should He be any more aware of it than we are?”

Keith didn’t like that. He scowled at me, and then looked at Devrie’s sleeping face: Devrie’s sleeping bliss.

“Because she is a fool,” I said savagely, “and so are you. You won’t leave it alone, will you? Having been noticed by It once, you’ll try to be noticed by It again. Even though she promised me otherwise, and even if it kills you both.”

Keith looked at me a long time, seeing clearly—finally—the nature of the abyss between us, and its dimensions. But I already knew neither of us could cross. When at last he spoke, his voice held so much compassion that I hated him. “Seena. Seena, love. There’s no more doubt now, don’t you see? Now rational belief is no harder than rational doubt. Why are you so afraid to even believe?”

I left the room. In the corridor I leaned against the wall, palms spread flat against the tile, and closed my eyes. It seemed to me that I could hear wings, pale and fragile, beating against glass.

They will try again. For the sake of sure knowledge that the universe is not empty, Keith and Devrie and all the others like their type of being will go on pushing their human brains against that biological window. For the sake of sure knowledge: belief founded on experiment and not on faith. And the Other: being/alien/God? It, too, may choose to initiate contact, if It can and now that It knows we are here. Perhaps it will seek to know us, and even beyond the laboratory Devrie and Keith may find any moment of heightened arousal subtly invaded by a shadowy Third. Will they sense It, hovering just beyond consciousness, if they argue fiercely or race a sailboat in rough water or make love? How much arousal will it take, now, for them to sense those huge wings beating on the other side of the window?

And windows can be broken.

Tomorrow I will fly back to New York. To my museum, to my exhibits, to my moths under permaplex, to my empty apartment, where I will keep the heavy drapes drawn tightly across the glass.

For—oh God—all the rest of my life.

© 1984 by Nancy Kress. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

EXCERPT: Creatures of Want and Ruin (John Joseph Adams Books)

Molly Tanzer | 5315 words

Amityville baywoman Ellie West fishes by day and bootlegs moonshine by night. It’s dangerous work under Prohibition—independent operators like her are despised by federal agents and mobsters alike—but Ellie’s brother was accepted to college and Ellie’s desperate to see him go. So desperate that when wealthy strangers ask her to procure libations for an extravagant party Ellie sells them everything she has, including some booze she acquired under unusual circumstances.

What Ellie doesn’t know is that this booze is special. Distilled from foul mushrooms by a cult of diabolists, those who drink it see terrible things—like the destruction of Long Island in fire and flood. The cult is masquerading as a church promising salvation through temperance and a return to “the good old days,” so it’s hard for Ellie to take a stand against them, especially when her father joins, but Ellie loves Long Island, and she loves her family, and she’ll do whatever it takes to ensure neither is torn apart.

Coming November 13, 2018 from John Joseph Adams Books.

1

The wind was east and the tide was running high by the time Ellie West finished jamming all the crates of moonshine liquor into the smuggler’s hold of her skiff. Leaden bands of clouds were thickening on the horizon, and the air was so hot and wet that breathing felt a little like drowning. Any seasoned bayman could see that they were in for a storm, but Ellie’s customers were expecting her, and she didn’t like to disappoint them.

Mopping her brow with a threadbare red handkerchief, Ellie frowned at the sky. She figured she’d probably be all right. She wouldn’t be out of sight of land for most of her delivery run; save for crossing the Great South Bay to get over to Jones Beach Island she’d be darting out of slip and cove the whole time, and it hadn’t even begun to rain.

The humidity really was something else that night, even for summertime on Long Island. Ellie swept her bobbed hair away from her sticky forehead, tucking the lank strands behind her ears. She’d lopped her braid off a week or so ago, and she still wasn’t sure how she felt about showing the world the back of her neck, even if it was undeniably cooler on nights like this.

Ellie looked up. At the top of the slight rise she saw her supplier, SJ, silhouetted in the doorway of the shack that housed her small moonshining operation. White steam puffed out of the chimney behind her. She too was watching the sky.

“I’m heading out,” called Ellie, raising her hand in farewell. “I think I’ll be all right!”

SJ might have nodded her head once—at least her big thick glasses flashed, reflecting the golden light inside—but Ellie couldn’t be sure.

“Thanks ag—”

SJ shut the door.

Ellie wasn’t offended by this brusque dismissal. SJ was a woman of few words, and even fewer friendly ones. She’d been like that as long as Ellie had known her . . . and that had been a very long time.

Ellie untied her skiff, hopped on board, and rowed herself beyond the pines, sycamores, and low brush that concealed SJ’s operation from prying eyes. Only when she was a good ways away did she start the motor.

The little boat sat low in the water as Ellie navigated the choppy bay past darkly wooded shoreline and pale spits of stony beach, past fine homes with shiny new runabouts tied up to private docks and boatyards cluttered with shabbier vessels. Her small engine puttered in pleasant harmony with the drone of the insects and the last few cries of the gulls; a light rain added some gentle percussion just after her first handoff, where she exchanged two full swing-top bottles for two empties—and some cash, of course. The Widow Hawkins might be a shut-in, but she didn’t mind getting a bit of fresh air whenever Ellie tied up in the shadows beneath the trailing branches of the old willow at the edge of her property.

Undeterred, Ellie pulled on her oilskin; a little rain didn’t bother her. In fact, the changeable nature of Long Island’s weather was a source of continuous joy to her. While ominous, the churning sky above her was beautiful, and the first line of a new poem came to her as she dropped off more bottles along her route. “The wind is east and the sky is gray,” she said aloud as said wind gusted under her hood, knocking it back off her head. “There’s going to be a shower tonight!”

She stopped composing when the rain began to fall in earnest. Her handoffs, which usually entailed an exchange of gossip as well as goods, became brief and hurried, with no more than a “Stay safe!” shouted at her over the worsening downpour. More than one customer offered to let her tie up and wait out the storm inside, but she decided it was safe enough to make the crossing over to Jones Beach Island. Rocky was expecting her.

Todd “Rocky” Rockmeteller was Ellie’s last stop on her usual route. A poet by trade, he’d moved to the area after he’d “cracked,” to use his word for it—life in the city had stressed him to nervous exhaustion. He’d used the last of the advance from his first book to buy a derelict bungalow between Gilgo and Oak Beach in the hope that peace and isolation would help him finish a second. He had, and in record time; he’d been so inspired by his far-flung paradise that he now lived there year-round, and in all but the very worst of weather.

The crossing to get to Rocky’s house was typically quick and easy, but halfway there the rain switched direction and the final leg the trip got soggy. Though Ellie had intended to say merely a brief hello, by the time she pulled up at the dock and trekked across the rickety boardwalk to his little house on the ocean side of the island, Ellie was more than happy to accept his invitation to come in, dry off, and warm up with a bit of what she’d brought him.

Wrapped in a towel, her clothes dripping and steaming by the cast iron woodburner, Ellie shivered as Rocky bumbled about, unable as usual to remember where he’d put the poker, or the kettle, or the tea. The place was so small there were a limited number of places any of it could be; even so, he never seemed able to put anything in the same place twice.

Ellie had met Rocky when he’d been wandering around a fish market looking bemused by the bright-eyed hauls of snook and flounder. They’d hit it off quickly. Ellie had been pleased to befriend a “real poet”—and then had been pleased to be seduced by one.

Rocky hadn’t been the first to make Ellie moan that way as he pawed her small heavy breasts, but he’d certainly been the most glamorous. At least she’d thought so at the time. Having gotten to know him better over the years, she couldn’t help but smile ruefully when he found the poker by stubbing his toe on it, and then burned his finger putting the kettle on to heat. Rocky might possess a strange grace while speaking about poetry or making love to her—or her favorite, both at the same time—but otherwise, he was hopelessly clumsy.

“I can’t believe you went out in this,” he said, his faint English accent accentuated by his concern.

“Booze doesn’t deliver itself,” said Ellie.

“And you can’t deliver booze if you”—he handed her a mug of tea laced with SJ’s potato spirit—“capsize.”

“Capsize!” Ellie chuckled as he settled in beside her on his worn leather sofa. Rain lashed the windows, a tattoo wilder than a jazz drumline, and the wind howled; Ellie could see tree branches swaying in the darkness beyond the windows. “It’s not so bad out . . . at least, not on the bay side.”

Lightning flashed. Ellie’s confidence flickered as Rocky’s hurricane lantern guttered in the draft; after the thunder rolled by and no more came, she shrugged it off. “I’m sure I can get back.”

“Back across? Tonight?”

“Sure.”

“You’re welcome to stay,” said Rocky, threading a slender arm around her waist and snugging her closer to him.

“I’m sure it’ll let up soon,” said Ellie, settling against his warmth in the meantime. Truthfully she was extremely tempted by his offer, but she was expected elsewhere. “It seems like it’s letting up. I’ll finish this and then be on my way. But next time . . .”

“Next time,” he agreed, and kissed her on the neck, just under her ear. His soft, long-fingered hand wormed its way down the front of her towel, and then under the band of her knickers, where he began to casually toy with her hair there.

Ellie sighed happily. She was warm, almost dry, and feeling pretty loosey-goosey from the white dog in her tea. But when the storm showed signs of abating she pulled herself away from Rocky’s caresses and donned her damp togs. Though almost too hot at first from the stove, they quickly turned clammy against her skin.

At least she had a thick roll of bills in the pocket of her coveralls. They’d provide a bit of extra warmth, even if it was only psychological.

“Are you sure about this?” Rocky stared out the door, dark brow furrowed.

Ellie also had her doubts, but no more thunder boomed and no lightning brightened the night.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”

“My little water rat doesn’t mind rain on her pelt,” said Rocky admiringly.

Ellie smiled to hear her nickname. That’s how he’d inscribed the copy of his duology, City Songs and Sea Songs, that he’d given her as a birthday gift—“To my little water rat.”

“Thanks for the pick-me-up,” she said. “It was nice to get warm.”

“A sensation I fear will be all too fleeting,” said Rocky.

Oh, she liked it when he lapsed into formal language like that! She kissed him one last time on his luscious, too-big mouth and headed out into the night.

• • • •

The boat’s motor started right up in spite of the damp, but too quickly Ellie realized she ought to have listened to Rocky instead of trying to out-bluster the storm. The bay had become wilder as she’d relaxed indoors; apparently the storm had only been drawing its breath before really starting to howl.

Ellie wasn’t sure what to do. It’d be risky to increase her speed while the bay was so choppy and the rain made it difficult for her to see much beyond her bow, but when a streak of lighting split the heavens right above her Ellie decided a bit of salt never killed anyone. She needed to get somewhere safe, and fast.

She could barely hear the motor over the downpour as she sped along the coast of Jones Beach Island, her skiff skipping on the waves, her mouth shut tight against the spray. She hadn’t yet risked the crossing, but staying on this side had its dangers, too. There was no shelter here, nor were there any docks, but Ellie thought there ought to be a cove close by where she could hunker down and wait this out. And indeed, after a few more moments, she saw the inlet where she could turn out of the wind.

As a child, she had come here, to this secret place. Her father had shown it to her before the war, back when they used to go out digging for clams together. It had changed over the years—high tides and hurricanes had taken their due, old trees had fallen and younger ones grown, and the bit of sand on one side where a boat could be pulled up was a different shape and size—but it was still basically the same.

Lightning flashed again. To Ellie’s surprise, she saw that another boat had also sought refuge here—but its sole passenger lay lifelessly draped over the bow.

Ellie had no idea if the dark lump of a person was dead or in need of a rescue, but either way she couldn’t just leave him there. Not in this weather. She sighed, but her small protest was swallowed by the wind and rain.

A rescue wouldn’t be easy—or safe. While the secret cove was calmer than the bay, lightning was now bursting across the sky in jagged flashes, dangerous and bright, and the wind and rain continued to make it difficult for her to see and steer.

Doing the right thing doesn’t always mean doing the easy thing. That was something her father used to say to her, back when Ellie was young. Then as now she’d found it a hard adage to argue with.

She put her skiff’s motor in neutral as she drew near the drifting craft, using the rudder and her momentum to ease up alongside the other’s stern. Grabbing it, she tied off her bowline to the cleat. It seemed wisest to board the other craft and secure its passenger, whatever his fate, before trying to tug it to the beach. On the off chance the man was still alive, Ellie had to make sure he didn’t fall into the bay and drown.

Ellie killed the motor, and mindful of the treacherously slick wood and choppy surf, she made her way carefully to the bow of the other vessel. Ellie couldn’t tell if the man was breathing, but she could see that he was half-draped over his open smuggler’s hold. Another moonshiner like her. Most likely he’d slipped and knocked himself a good one to the head. She reached out gingerly, expecting to touch a cold corpse, but his neck was warm.

She pressed deeper into his skin to feel for a pulse. There it was, faint but present. Lightning flashed again; in that bright moment she saw he was bleeding freely from the temple. She also recognized him: it was Walter Greene, who stocked the shelves at the feed and hardware stores. She didn’t know him; he wasn’t one of her clients and he wasn’t much of a bayman. So what was he doing out on a night like tonight?

Greene was a large, heavy man. Moving him wouldn’t be easy. Ellie braced herself, but when she grabbed him by the collar and the waistband of his pants to haul him away from the edge, his eyes shot open. The whites of them glowed unnaturally, bright as two lamps.

Greene howled like a mad dog and sprang at her, punching Ellie square in the nose. The night exploded into white light that was not another streak of lightning as Ellie staggered back. The warm rush of blood filled her mouth, the metallic taste mingling with salt spray and rainwater.

A lifelong boxing fan, Ellie had once taken some lessons from a prizefighter who’d been part of a traveling carnival. He’d told her if she could get her hands up, keep them up, and stay light on her feet she’d do all right in just about any fight. The few times she’d needed to defend herself, his advice had helped; even though she couldn’t land the hardest punches, she’d still done okay. Since she couldn’t easily stay light on her feet on a rocking boat in a storm, Ellie did what she could, guarding her face with her balled fists.

“Wait!” she cried. “I’m not—”

He did not wait. Greene fell upon her, knocking the wind out of her as he brought her to the deck, pinning her with his substantial bulk. He landed another punch, this time to her ribs, and then a third to her gut.

That was when Ellie’s instincts kicked in. She got in a punch of her own to Greene’s barrel-like stomach. It wasn’t a hard one, but when more lightning lit the sky she saw his face contorted, furious. He got his big hand around her neck and began to squeeze.

Ellie thrashed, panicking; he stayed atop her, but she felt his foot slip on the wet wood of the deck. As he struggled to keep his balance she got her knee up, catching him in the groin. Then, at last, Greene’s grip on her throat loosened and she managed to shimmy out of his grasp, catching him on the chin with her other knee as she got to her feet.

As he shook his head, spraying water like a wet dog, Ellie cast around to see if there was anything she could use to defend herself. Two oars were nestled along the edges of his boat. She grabbed one.

“Hey!” she shouted as she brandished it at him. “I was trying to help you!”

Maybe he couldn’t hear her; maybe he was past caring. All she knew for certain was that Greene had a bottle in his hand, and while at first Ellie thought he might use it as a weapon, instead he flipped the swing-top with one strong thumb.

He drank deeply of it as Ellie watched, oar in hand. She couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing; it seemed like when he swallowed his eyes glowed brighter, and when he wiped his mouth with his sleeve it left a rainbow smear behind. His tongue too was coated in something bright, though the liquid in the bottle remained clear. But that was impossible.

Regardless, Ellie had no time to marvel. Greene cast the bottle aside and came at her, his footfalls rocking the boat hard enough that Ellie could barely keep her heavy oar up, much less swing the makeshift weapon at him.

Greene grabbed the paddle with both hands and ripped it out of her grasp. She fell to one knee, barking it sharply as he hurled the oar to the deck. She flung her hands up again; Greene had the high ground now, and once again he pressed her down onto the deck and got his hand around her throat.

The night seemed to contract around Ellie as the clouds beyond Greene’s head turned impossible colors like the coral of a sunset, egg yolk yellow, robin’s egg blue. The rain felt colder as it struck her skin, but his hand burned like a fire around her neck, another torment as he tightened his grip. She thought it was just her imagination, but no—the skin of Greene’s face and neck had turned red as a boiled lobster, and the rainwater dripping down his forehead and cheeks turned to steam and billowed away into the night. The spittle that flecked his lips and bared teeth was rainbow-hued, and in his eyes she saw writhing fire and boiling earth. Ellie went limp in wonder, unsure if what she saw was real or she was merely dreaming as she died.

The air grew thick and electric as she gave up struggling to breathe. Ellie wondered if they’d been struck by lightning, but when another flash revealed his face, Greene looked confused, as if something he’d expected to happen hadn’t, and his grip on her neck relaxed a little.

Ellie got some air back into her lungs, and drawing from some deep well within her, she slung herself off the deck and into his midsection, grabbing him around his waist. He slipped, and when he fell backwards, he fell hard. Ellie heard the sickening crack of his head as it hit the deck, even over the rain. She scrambled off him. Greene did not stir as his bright eyes dimmed and a black stain spread out from the back of his head all over the deck, thinning at the edges to a sickly gray as it mixed with all the rainwater.

She sat still for a moment, getting her wind back, waiting to see if Greene moved. He did not. Her gut said he was dead, but she made herself get up and check; she didn’t want him waking up again with her on board. This time, his pulse faded under her touch.

She retrieved her handkerchief and dabbed at her nose—it was still bleeding. Her ribs were on fire; her throat was sore; her knee throbbed. Ellie sat down again, thinking about Greene’s burning hand on her neck, his eyes, the steam clouds surrounding him like a horrible halo as he spat impossible color onto her. One sob escaped her before she bit it off. Long ago she’d vowed she was done with crying, and she wasn’t going to start now—not for him. Not for anyone.

Reason reasserted herself as she rested. What she’d seen . . . That had all just been a fever-dream as he’d cut off her air. People could not suddenly become hot enough that rainwater would steam off their skin; people’s eyes couldn’t contain visions of the end of the world. And yet, it hadn’t felt like a dream . . . It had felt real.

Furious, Ellie pulled herself to her feet and kicked Greene’s corpse in the side with her good leg, once, and then she couldn’t stop kicking him. Eventually, she calmed down. After wiping yet more blood from her nose, Ellie stepped over the dead man. Her foot nearly came down on the bottle he’d drunk from. She picked it up and sniffed it.

All this for some moonshine. How stupid.

Not all the booze had spilled out of the bottle when he’d cast it aside. Ellie toasted Greene’s body and then took a long pull. It was raw, harsher than SJ’s potato spirit, and had a strange flavor Ellie couldn’t place. Musty, earthy, greasy.

Whatever it was, it did the job. Her aches eased a bit; her muscles loosened up. She felt the power of motion returning to her limbs, and took another swig for good measure.

She peered into his smuggler’s hold. There she discovered two items nestled in the darkness: a burlap sack, and a crate of bottles with one missing. She dragged both out onto the deck to look at them more closely.

The sack was full of dirt. Ellie sifted through it with her fingers and found a dark chunk of something spongy and unpleasantly oily to the touch. What little light there was shone strangely on it, playing with Ellie’s eyes. She couldn’t tell if it was round like a ball or indented like a bowl. Running her fingers over its slick surface just made her feel nauseated. She hurled it into the bay, and out of spite tossed the rest of the sack overboard too.

It was so senseless. Greene had attacked her while she was trying to help him, and for a few bottles of rotgut and some nasty dirt.

She knew well enough she’d been defending herself; knew her intention had been to help. It didn’t make her feel better about how it had ended. He’d frightened her, hurt her, and she’d killed him—or at least, he’d died.

Ellie replaced the loose board that hid the smuggler’s hold. Of course it was at that moment that the rain chose to let up; it was barely drizzling after she got the rest of Greene’s booze onto her skiff and untied her craft from the other. The moon even came out a bit as she sped away, leaving him and his boat to drift where they would.

The stupidest part was, she didn’t even have very far to go to get home.

No, the stupidest part was if she’d stayed with Rocky for an hour longer, she wouldn’t have needed to pull into the cove at all.

She’d killed a man. And robbed him, too. The second crime didn’t weigh too heavily on her heart, but the first . . . It was terrifying. At least the consequences were. The act itself had been necessary.

And then there was what she’d seen, what she’d felt . . . Even though she knew she’d been deprived of air and hallucinating, it nagged her. It had all felt so real.

She wondered if she should tell someone.

No. If she did—if she told anyone what she’d seen and done—they’d send her to jail, or to the Long Island Home for some “much needed rest.” She couldn’t let that happen. Her family depended on her, on the fish she brought them to eat and the cash she earned.

And, of course, there was Gabriel.

He’d waited up for her. A light burned in a window of the colonial saltbox he was restoring for them both to live in one day. It looked so snug as Ellie pulled up to the dock, the clean straight lines of the house contrasting with the muslin curtains that twisted as if they were alive as the cool, wet breeze blew in through the windows. When the house was done, they would be married. By then, hopefully Ellie’s younger brother Lester would have gone off to school, and Ellie could move out of her parents’ house with a clear conscience.

Exhaustion set in as she tied up. She tried to lift the crate of moonshine out of the hold, but her arms failed her. She couldn’t even shift the remaining few bottles of SJ’s hooch. Well, it had to come in. She’d just have to ask for her fiancé’s help. She couldn’t leave it outside overnight.

Weaving and stumbling, she picked her way up to the house and fell against the back door. Her hands were now shaking too badly to turn the knob, but after a minute or so of fumbling with it, it opened. She swooned into Gabriel’s strong arms, looking up at his wide, handsome face; the bright blue eyes behind the thick lenses of his tortoiseshell glasses. She’d never seen anything so wonderful in all her life.

“Ellie!” he said, touching the crusted blood on her face. “What happened?”

Ellie chose to focus on her immediate concerns, rather than her esoteric ones. “I think my nose is broken,” she said. Her voice was so scratchy it barely sounded like her own.

“Jesus Christ.” He was so strong he just picked her up and carried her inside. His broad chest and powerful arms warmed her better than any blanket or fire.

“Will you please bring my things in?” she rasped as he set her down on the sofa.

“Your things can wait.”

“No,” she said, her throat burning. “Really!”

“Ellie, I’ll get everything inside, I promise, but I’ll get to it after I help you out of these wet clothes.”

Gabriel was always so mild in his ways; his firm tone brought Ellie up short. He was right, too; it had been so hot earlier, but she was shivering now; her clothes gave her gooseflesh where they clung to her skin. He helped her out of her boots and socks and then peeled off her coveralls; that felt good. The dry blanket he wrapped around her felt even better.

“I’m going to put some water on to heat—yes, first,” he said, in that tone that brooked no argument, “and then I will unload your boat. You just sit still.” When she tried to sit up, he gently pushed her back down onto the sofa, where her body welcomed the comfort and rest even if her spirit rebelled against it.

“There are two cases,” she croaked. “A full one and a partial.”

“I’ll go take care of it now, if you think I’m ready for the responsibility.” Gabriel sounded amused, but Ellie took the hint.

She stretched out after moving aside the latest issue of Weird Tales that Gabriel had left open on the couch. She studied the garish cover of her fiancé’s favorite magazine for a moment but then set it aside, feeling sick. The image of a terrified girl, presumably the advertised “Bride of Osiris,” being loomed over by a shadowy figure reminded her too much of what had happened to her that night.

There were so many things Ellie loved about Gabriel, and his ability to let her talk in her own time was one of them. He asked her no questions after bringing in the booze and helping her into their small tub; instead, he made gentle small talk with her while cleaning up her face. She’d missed the fight between Jack Dempsey and Jack Sharkey, but he’d listened for her and gave her a bit of play-by-play of what he’d heard on his beloved wireless. Normally, Ellie appreciated his recaps; tonight, however, the idea of punching people for sport made her feel queasy. Thankfully her injuries gave her license to just close her eyes and listen to the sound of his voice instead of responding to the details of what he was saying.

After Gabriel had finished his ministrations he said it didn’t look like her nose needed to be set—that was good news. Then he washed her hair and wrapped her in a clean towel before concluding his doctoring by dotting her cuts with some iodine and helping her into bed.

“So what happened?” he asked as he slid into bed beside her.

She didn’t want to tell him the truth. Ellie loved Gabriel, and she didn’t want him to see her as a killer; didn’t want him to look at her any differently because of something that wasn’t her fault. And while her fiancé was a fan of the works of H. P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Clark Ashton Smith, and similar, she didn’t want to talk to him about whether she could have seen something supernatural. He just liked to read about that stuff. He didn’t believe in it.

“It was the storm,” she rasped. “I shouldn’t have risked crossing the bay. I got tossed around bad, and fell on my face.” She considered what else she needed to explain away. “I got tangled in a rope; it got around my neck as I struggled.”

“Poor thing,” said Gabriel, and wrapped her gently in his arms. She melted into his embrace, softening against him like butter on warm bread. “Well, all’s well that ends well.”

She shuddered, overwhelmed with the sensation of being warm and cared for. He told her it would all be all right—that she’d feel better in a few days. That she’d be sore, but she’d heal. That she was safe, and it was all over now.

Ellie wondered if that would really turn out to be the case.

Copyright © 2018 by Molly Tanzer. Excerpted from Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer. Published by permission of the author and John Joseph Adams Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Molly Tanzer is the author of the novels Creatures of Will and Temper and Creatures of Want and Ruin, as well as Vermilion, The Pleasure Merchant, and the British Fantasy and Wonderland Book Award-nominated collection-cum-mosaic novel A Pretty Mouth. Her short fiction has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, The Lovecraft eZine, and Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender and Genderqueer Speculative Fiction, as well as many other locations. Her editorial projects include co-editing Swords v Cthulhu (with Jesse Bullington) and Mixed Up! (with Nick Mamatas). She lives in Boulder, CO. Learn more at mollytanzer.com.

Book Reviews: November 2018

LaShawn M. Wanak | 1743 words

In this month’s column, I review Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri; How to Fracture a Fairy Tale, by Jane Yolen; and The Future is Female anthology (edited by Lisa Yaszek).

Empire of Sand
Tasha Suri
Paper / Ebook
ISBN: 9780316449717
Orbit, November 2018, 496 pages

Tasha Suri’s debut novel Empire of Sand is lush and gorgeous and is a wonderful first book into a series based off of the Mughal Empire in India.

Mehr is a half-Amrithi, half-Ambhan woman born into privilege. The daughter of a governor, she is taught that her Amrithi heritage is barbaric and to be feared. However, her blood is also known to keep away the daiva, spiritual creatures feared by the Ambhan. She keeps her heritage alive by dancing, which in turn enables her to survive the storms of dreamfire raining upon the land.

In spite of her father’s carefulness, Mehr captures the attention of the Maha, the leader of a group of mystics serving the Emperor. The Maha forces her to marry Amun, another Amrithi who is oath-bound to the mystics. Mehr learns that the Maha plans to use her and Amun for The Rite of the Bound, an unholy ceremony that will gather the gods’ power to himself, and unless Mehr finds a way to stop him, the entire world could suffer the consequences of anger from the gods.

This story has everything: a badass princess, romance, the apocalypse, and all of it against a luscious backdrop that calls to mind Hindu folklore and rituals. Mehr is pragmatic, yet fully aware of her privilege, always keeping her eyes open for any opportunity that would give her an advantage. Had she been born in a lesser station, you could see her as a shrewd businesswoman. Mehr is also biracial, and the novel does a wonderful job in showing her conflicted feelings towards both her heritages, but also being able to meld both cultures in herself. The relationship between Mehr and Amun does not feel forced, despite the circumstances, but feels natural.

What deeply impressed me, however, was its views of vows and marriage. The Amrithi do not marry, yet they hold vows as highly sacred—to the point that breaking one is anathema. The Maha is able to enslave Amun to himself with vows, and he hopes to do the same to Mehr. But there is a difference between being put in a marriage ceremony and giving a vow to another person out of trust and love. It is beautiful to see how the relationship between Mehr and Amun flourishes despite their being forced to be together.

I also loved how the Amrithi fight to survive in a world that sees them as filth or mere tools to keep the fearsome daiva away. A subplot follows Mehr’s aunt, Lalita, who changes her name and background to hide her heritage. Other Amrithi, such as Mehr’s mother, choose to leave society behind entirely, their fates unknown. Suri navigates the exploration of cultural identity, showing how there are no easy answers to how one chooses to honor their heritage. And yet, with Mehr, she also proves that honoring your culture can be a form of resistance, and in the case of Mehr’s dancing, a weapon and a healing influence.

Suri drew upon the Mughal Empire to help shore up court politics, and she mentions at the interview at the end of the book that the “Amrithi rites and sigils were influenced by Indian classical dance (specifically Bharatanatyam) and by the depiction of the god Shiva creating and destroying the world with dance and cosmic fire.” Indeed, the dancing in this book is beautifully woven into both an act of remembrance and defiance for the Amrithi.

I highly recommend reading Empire of Sand, and I look forward to Suri’s continued foray into this world.

How to Fracture a Fairy Tale
Jane Yolen
Paper / Ebook
ISBN: 9781616963064
Tachyon Publications, November 2018, 240 pages

Exactly one year ago, I reviewed Jane Yolen’s The Emerald Circus (bit.ly/2NMznQd), which I liked, but the stories were hit or miss with me. Now she has a new collection, How to Fracture a Fairy Tale, which I immediately gobbled up because I happen to be a sucker for fairy tale retellings.

Yolen starts off with advice on how to actually fracture a fairy tale, which is useful for writers wishing to try their hand at retelling tales. She then dives into the tales themselves, mainly retellings of folk tales, but with a couple familiar Grimm’s tales among them. The story of Cinderella, for instance, which Yolen reimagines into “The Moon Ribbon,” about a girl who escapes her stepmother with a ribbon from her dead mother, and “Cinder Elephant,” which tells the story from a fat-positive point of view.

Some stories are just straightforward tales that have very little changed in them, such as her telling of Asian folktales “One Ox, Two Ox, Three Ox, and the Dragon King” and “The Foxwife.” Some are rearranged in ways you don’t expect. “Happy Dens or a Day in the Old Wolves Home” has all the wolves in folklore now residing in an Old Wolves Home and tell their own versions on what happened to them. “Sleeping Ugly,” a riff on Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, is a hilarious tale with a testy fairy godmother who deserves her own story.

There are also a couple of tales that draw directly from Yolen’s Jewish heritage. “Slipping Sideways Through Eternity” is a sobering read connecting the Hebrew version of Elijah with the Holocaust, whereas “Granny Rumple” is an actual tale within Yolen’s family told on the framework of Rumpelstiltskin, and it is not a cheerful story. Indeed, several stories in this collection are rather bleak, but so well told that they sit and make you think.

As in her previous book, Yolen includes story notes and a poem for each of the stories she wrote. Overall, I enjoyed this collection a lot more, and I will be digging more deeply into her stories to learn how to fracture fairy tales on my own. Also, I didn’t get to include this in my last review, but if you enjoy Yolen’s poetry, she has a mailing list where you can sign up and receive a daily poem from her (bit.ly/2xkMChk).

The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin
Lisa Yaszek
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978598535808
Library of America, October 2018, 475 pages

I will tell you a secret now—growing up, I never knew there was such a thing as feminist science fiction. The teenage me never read Ursula K. Le Guin, or Joanna Russ, or James A. Tiptree. In this collection, Lisa Yaszek gathers twenty-five stories from the early pioneers of science fiction who are all women, whether they wrote under their own names or under male pseudonyms.

The stories in this collection were remarkable, brilliant, and even mind-blowing as I read them from a contemporary lens. The stories tackled themes such as the consequences of overpopulation; the opening story (Clare Winger Harris’s “The Miracle of the Lily”) explores a futuristic Earth devastated by insects. Alice Glaser’s “The Tunnel Ahead” has a family whose lives are regimented by space (and gives an interesting window on extroversion and introversion that is way before its time). Certainly there are stories centered on motherhood. Alice Eleanor Jones’ “Created He Them” is bleak yet powerful, focusing on a housewife who is trapped in her marriage and motherhood, but doesn’t dare leave. Judith Merril’s “That Only a Mother” has a protagonist who claims motherhood for herself, despite what her progeny looks like. “Another Rib” by John Jay Wells and Marion Zimmer Bradley has men giving birth, exploring both gender and sexuality.

There are stories about the tension between men and women. Of course, James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” is included here, but Doris Pitkin Buck also explores this in “Birth of a Gardener,” in which a male scientist condescending to his wife gets a taste of his own words. Not all the stories focus on women. “In Hiding” has a male psychiatrist coming across a very bright boy who must hide his intelligence, and the joy of their mentoring relationship. “The Inhabited Man” briefly tracks the stories of three astronauts going their separate ways and has a final paragraph that led me to scramble to read the story over again in a new light. There are even a couple of stories that deal with racism. Leigh Brackett’s “All the Colors of the Rainbow” deserves a column of its own. While the premise is deceptively simple—aliens of a different hue visit Earth—the story of these aliens traveling across the southern United States and coming across sundown towns is terrifyingly familiar in today’s atmosphere of pushback against diversity. Anyone who says that science fiction should just stick to space stories needs to read this tale.

In fact, this whole collection proves that women science fiction writers wrote more than just space stories, but used prose to explore and process the issues of that day. The only flaw in this anthology is that all the women, as far as I can tell, are white. I know that there have been black science fiction writers whose stories are now being uncovered from obscurity. Perhaps a people of color classic SF anthology is the logical next step.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak is a graduate of the 2011 class of Viable Paradise. Her fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Ideomancer. She served as Associate Editor at Podcastle, and has written nonfiction for Fantasy Magazine, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the anthology Invisible 2.

Media Review: November 2018

Violet Allen | 978 words

Kin
Directed by Josh Baker and Jonathan Baker
Produced by Summit Entertainment, No Trace Camping, and 21 Laps Entertainment
August 31st, 2018

I wanted to love Kin. I really did. The basic premise—a sad kid finds a mysterious science fictional object in an otherwise realistic setting—calls to mind works like Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude or Daniel Clowes’s The Death-Ray, which use genre tropes to explore the psyches of their tortured adolescent characters. That Kin’s protagonist is a poor black kid from Detroit creates an opportunity to explore social issues like race, class, policing, and gun violence. But where The Fortress of Solitude and The Death-Ray manage to seamlessly blend SF spectacle with naturalistic drama, Kin jerks uncomfortably between genres, never really finding its footing. While there are plenty of compelling moments throughout, the film never adds up to a cohesive whole.

Kin is an expanded adaptation of the 2014 short film, Bag Man, both directed by Jonathan and Josh Baker. It stars Miles Truitt as Eli, a troubled fourteen-year-old who stumbles upon an extraordinarily powerful ray gun while scavenging abandoned Detroit houses for copper wire to sell for money to buy shoes. His mother has recently died, his father Hal (Dennis Quaid) struggles to keep Eli on the right path, and his brother Jimmy (Jack Reynor) has only just gotten out of prison at the film’s outset. Jimmy’s debt to menacing local gangster Taylor Balik (James Franco) sets off a chain of events which take the brothers on a road trip across the country. Along the way, they meet Milly (Zoë Kravitz), a dancer at a shady strip club who charms both the brothers. They are pursued not only by Taylor and his gang, but also a pair of masked, armored figures with unknown motives.

The heart of Kin’s problems is its inability to mesh its different genre conventions. It, at various times, wants to be a naturalistic drama, an over-the-top crime story, and a science fiction adventure. The pieces themselves are often well executed, at least when taken in and of themselves. Early segments of the film feature long, elegiac sequences illustrating Eli’s life with little to no dialogue and gorgeous cinematography. One can really feel the sense of isolation and despair that pervades Eli’s life. As far as the crime story goes, James Franco is genuinely menacing as Taylor, creating a sense of stakes in a movie where most problems can be solved by shooting a ray gun. The ray gun itself is very cool-looking, and the effects when it fires really convey how powerful and otherworldly it is.

The problem, though, is that these elements never seem to inform one another, and at times actively work against each other. Eli is a very quiet, contemplative kid, which works well when the film is quiet and contemplative, but as he is surrounded by broader characters and wilder situations, his quietness feels more like blankness. And while compelling as an over-the-top antagonist, Taylor’s actions frequently do not make logical sense in a world which at first feels realistic. Perhaps worst of all, the ray gun largely serves as a deus ex machina for getting the characters out of bad situations, with no consequences for its use or exploration of its origins until the film’s final minutes, when it is explained in an out-of-nowhere infodump obviously meant to set up for a sequel.

One of the most disappointing things about Kin to me was its disinterest in social and political issues. Eli is black, and his family is white, but, besides a couple of moments where someone must explain that he’s adopted, it doesn’t really appear in the film—his race doesn’t really come up at all. While I don’t need Kin to be a treatise on race in America or anything, it seems very strange for a film in 2018 to feature a black kid who runs around with a giant gun and not even mention race or policing or gun violence. The film also contains some genuinely problematic elements. Its emotional core is the relationship between Eli and Jimmy, which is built on manipulation (and arguably kidnapping) turning into a “heartwarming” fraternal bond. It’s a creepier dynamic than the film intends, especially early on when the plot is still a bit more naturalistic. Likewise, the main female character in the movie, Milly, is a “stripper with a heart of gold” who exists largely to serve the male characters as Jimmy’s potential love interest and Eli’s potential surrogate mother. It’s not as egregious as some other examples of the trope, largely due to Zoe Kravitz’s charming performance, but it’s still trite and feels unnecessary. Given that the main character is fourteen and getting him into a strip club at all requires some narrative handwaving, the inclusion of this character feels like checking a box on a list of crime fiction clichés.

Kin isn’t a terrible film by any means. It’s just very inconsistent. There are times when its charms outweigh its failures, the cinematography and special effects are wonderful, and there are plenty of moments that I enjoyed. The final ten minutes suggest a bigger, wilder SF adventure to come, although it’s still up in the air if such a film will come to be. Kin is an ambitious movie, but, unable to juggle its ambitions, it falls too often to clichéd writing. Perhaps if this hypothetical sequel comes to be, the filmmakers will be able to point their ambitions toward a more focused, cohesive genre effort.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Violet Allen is a writer based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work has appeared in Lightspeed, Liminal Stories, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere. She is currently working very hard every day on her debut novel and definitely has more than 10 pages written, is not lying to her agent about having more than 10 pages written and does not spend most of her time listening to podcasts, and everything is totally cool, I promise. She can be reached on Twitter at @blipstress.

Interview: Andy Duncan

Christian A. Coleman | 3726 words

Andy Duncan’s short fiction has been honored with the Nebula, Sturgeon, and multiple World Fantasy awards. A native of Batesburg, SC, Duncan has been a newspaper reporter, a trucking-magazine editor, a bookseller, a student-media adviser, and, since 2008, a member of the writing faculty at Frostburg State University in the mountains of western Maryland, where he lives with his wife, Sydney. His new short fiction collection, An Agent of Utopia, is due out November 6, 2018.

How did you choose the new and selected stories for your third collection An Agent of Utopia? Was there a running theme or vibe you were going for?

I joked that the “selected” part was easy—I could select stories all day—but the “new” part was hard. The two new stories I wrote for the book wound up at novelette length, which meant most of the reprints needed to be shorter to keep the page count manageable. As a result, much of the selection was process of elimination, combined with my desire to highlight stories I feared had been forgotten, such as “The Map to the Homes of the Stars” and the previously uncollected “Slow as a Bullet.” One of the last Facebook conversations I had with my longtime editor, mentor, and friend Gardner Dozois, only weeks before his untimely death, was Gardner naming the long stories he wished I had included, and me replying, “Next time, I promise!”

The crucial canonical anthology for me, at the dawn of my fiction-writing career, was The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1993), edited by Ursula K. Le Guin, Brian Attebery, and Karen Joy Fowler, and I love that in her Introduction, Le Guin wrote: “The stories are arranged chronologically because there had to be an order, and when we tried that one, it worked.” When I read through my selections, in which the new stories were followed by the reprints in order of first publication, I thought, “This works,” knowing that my editor-publisher at Small Beer, Gavin Grant, might have alternate suggestions—but he didn’t, so there was the Table of Contents, done. Whew!

My only thought about theme was to realize, as I read through, that the reprints were mostly in Southern voices, while the new stories were in markedly different voices. I decided that was okay. Being pigeonholed as a yarn-spinning regionalist was never attractive to me anyway.

“An Agent of Utopia” is one of the new stories. What was it about Thomas More’s execution that interested you in writing about the fate of his head?

I initially thought the story would climax with the execution, but then I realized that was too much like Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. Besides, it would make More too prominent a character. I wanted to tell the agent’s story, not More’s. What matters most to the agent is not what happens to More, but who the agent is serving. Who most deserves the agent’s allegiance? That intrigued me, because it’s not only a variant of a thoroughly Tudor theme, found throughout Shakespeare—“Who is the rightful ruler?”—but also a deeply important question in the twenty-first-century United States. That realization seemed to assign More his proper place in the story: a head on a pike, though a resonant one.

Where does the character of Aliquo, the assassin in “An Agent of Utopia,” who’s after More’s head, come from?

The character springs from the title, which was, for many years, all I had. As a graduate student at North Carolina State University, circa 1995, I found a box of giveaway books outside some English professor’s, probably Tom Hester’s, office. Atop the stack was a battered paperback critical edition of More’s Utopia, in English translation. (It was available, in More’s lifetime, only in the language in which he wrote it, Latin. It was as limited in its audience as the Bible.) I claimed it, vaguely thinking that reading this work of proto-SF would be good for me. Not for years did I actually get around to reading it, but that very afternoon, when I got back to my apartment, I wrote down the story title that had occurred to me on the walk home: “An Agent of Utopia.” I had no idea what story went with it, but the title fascinated me. Was More an agent of Utopia? What about Thomas Jefferson? Or W.E.B. Du Bois? Or Stalin? How about Octavia Butler, who showed so many of us the way? What would be the goals of a Utopian agent?

When I finally read the book, and realized statecraft in More’s Utopia relied heavily on assassination, I had an answer—enough answer to fill in the character, anyway. I should add that my inspirations included two classic 1980s stories narrated by dangerous operatives: John Kessel’s “The Pure Product” (1986) and Bruce Sterling’s “We See Things Differently” (1989).

What kind of research on sixteenth-century England did you have to do for this story?

I’m afraid I mainly binge-watched Game of Thrones. However, when I was in London for the 2014 Worldcon, I explored the Tower for a day, and made lots of notes. Come to think of it, I also saw a performance at the Globe Theatre (Julius Caesar), and spent many hours over, under, and beside the Thames. I love rivers, especially urban rivers. Very helpful were Neil MacGregor’s Shakespeare’s Restless World: A Portrait of an Era in Twenty Objects and the glossary in John Dover Wilson’s Life in Shakespeare’s England. I purposely avoided re-reading Greer Gilman’s Cry Murder! in a Small Voice and Exit, Pursued by a Bear, which are so brilliant I might have been intimidated into abandoning this story. Strategic avoidance can spur the imagination, too.

“Joe Diabo’s Farewell” is the other new story in this collection. The protagonist, Eddie Two Rivers DeLisle, is a Mohawk steelworker who gets a one-time job in a welcoming party at the screening of the film The Flaming Frontier in 1920s New York City. What’s the historical basis of this story? And what struck you about Eddie DeLisle’s character and made you want to write about him?

I first learned about the importance of indigenous workers to the Manhattan skyline in Joseph Mitchell’s 1949 New Yorker article “The Mohawks in High Steel,” which I encountered in his 1992 collection Up in the Old Hotel. As a twenty-eight-year-old newspaper reporter nursing MFA ambitions, I was so impressed by the book and by Mitchell himself—he was a small-town boy who went to the city and Made Good as a writer, just like me!—that I wrote him a fan letter, which he politely answered.

A few years later, Frank Thompson’s 1996 book Lost Films: Important Movies That Disappeared introduced me to the fascinating topic of movies that we know once existed, based on abundant secondary evidence, but that we no longer have even a single copy of. I find both poignant and magical that massive studio-era productions involving hundreds of people could in a single lifetime vanish like Brigadoon, like a mirage, like the morning dew. Thompson’s chapter on The Flaming Frontier notes the studio’s insistence that “real Indians” were involved in the production, and briefly describes the gala New York premiere. I asked myself: Suppose a “real Indian” actually showed up to that gala? What might have been the lure, and what would that person have thought upon arrival? When I realized Eddie might have been one of the steelworkers Mitchell wrote about, the story began to coalesce.

Mitchell died the same year Thompson’s book was published, age eighty-seven. I learned in the obits that for the last thirty-two years of his life, Mitchell reported every day to his private office at The New Yorker without, so far as anyone knows, ever writing a publishable word. I thought of the steelworkers he wrote about decades earlier, back when he could write, who in the 1920s were denied any chance to tell their own stories to the masses, even as they sacrificed their lives to erect Manhattan monuments (that still exist) to a racist white culture (that still exists). All this silence, loss, erasure eventually goaded me into writing “Joe Diabo’s Farewell,” my saddest story to date.

I’ve noticed in many of your stories that old films or the film industry frequently come up—sometimes as a topic of conversation between characters, or, as in “Joe Diabo’s Farewell,” it’s a part of the plot. You’ve also said that you’ve read more books devoted to the movies than books on any other subject. What got you hooked on old films and film in general?

Born in 1964, I was by far the youngest of three kids born to parents who were Depression children and who came of age during World War II. So on some level, I probably gravitated to old movies in an attempt to better understand my parents and the era that created them. My parents and their siblings talked about the 1930s and 1940s all the time, as if they were the day before yesterday, so the movies of those decades, in particular, fascinated me. They were like time travel. Much of my interest in history probably dates from that same desire for understanding. But my parents, like all parents, proved unfathomable, bless their hearts, and I got interested in the movies for their own sake: the personalities who made them, the social attitudes that shaped and skewed them, the technical expertise on display.

I checked out every movie book in the public library multiple times, and in those pre-cable, pre-VHS days of the 1970s, I read about countless movies before I ever got a chance actually to see them. Joe Adamson’s Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo: A History of the Marx Brothers and a Satire on the Rest of the World was one of my favorite books, though I never had seen the movies Adamson described; ditto Pauline Kael’s The Citizen Kane Book. Happily, when I finally saw those movies, they were even better than I had imagined! (Roger Ebert pointed out, years later, that when film critics finally got the chance to actually re-watch these movies at home, they discovered they had misremembered almost everything about them, so that wholesale reassessment occurred, and standards for the whole field got higher.)

As I got older, and became a writer myself, I kept returning to those movies, looking for tips on how to handle (or not handle) structure, character, dialogue, pacing, even the visuals. I write my stories cinematically, trying to envision not only what they sound like but also what they look like, and I routinely “cast” actors in my mind to help the characters become real to me. But more recent movies and TV shows keep inspiring me, too. David Lynch’s 2017 Twin Peaks is almost certainly the best TV series I’ve ever seen, and it may be the best movie I’ve ever seen, if something eighteen hours long and made for television counts as a movie; if not, my fallback best movie is probably Mulholland Drive. (My favorite movie, of course, is Casablanca. Two different lists.)

One of my favorite scenes in “Joe Diabo’s Farewell” is when Eddie and the other men dressed up as Native Americans—who obviously aren’t Native Americans—munch on roasted chickpeas together early in the morning after putting in a night’s work together at Colony Theater. It’s a charming bonding moment for these guys. Eddie says to himself: “This won’t last, Eddie. We’ll all go back to our own neighborhoods, our own jobs, our lives. If we cross paths after tonight, we won’t even recognize each other. We’ll just see a Negro, or a Greek, or a Jew, and that’s all we’ll see.”

I knew that with the exception of Eddie, none of the “real Indians” in costume that night would be real Indians, but that raises the question: Who are these people, then? I got to thinking about New York City a century ago, the embodiment of American multiculturalism (from a demographic standpoint, anyway), and also about the temporary community created during any theatrical event, so that the participants are a bit reluctant to go home at the end, no matter how tired they are. Then the chickpea vendor walked up, interrupting my musings, and I was happy. I’m glad you like that scene.

Were there any surprising research rabbit holes you discovered while working on these new stories?

I was just on a Worldcon panel titled “Research Rabbit Holes,” and I didn’t quite confess my shameful secret, namely that I begrudge none of my research tangents. A half-dozen times during the process of each story, I tell myself, “Okay, that has no place in this story, but it’ll certainly fit another story one day.” They’re all down payments for later, and therefore I’m loath to talk about them too soon. I’ve gotten better, after all these years, at telling the difference between the detail that can be filled in later—I actually type out, INSERT PERIOD AUTOMOBILE TBA, and so forth—and the detail that has to be nailed down immediately because it’s important to story development. What really surprised me, in putting this book together, is how many research errors—just naked fact errors—can survive in stories through multiple reprints before some sharp-eyed editor finally catches them.

In “Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse,” you write about six-year-old Flannery O’Connor and her kinship with her frizzled, backward-walking chicken. After reading it, I watched the Pathé News footage of her and her pet. I found myself giving a lot of side-eye to the end of the footage—the part where scenes of other farm animals get played in reverse. It’s as if they’re meant to make you doubt whether O’Connor’s chicken really walked backward. What’s your take on it?

Much the same as yours. That newsreel really offends me; it’s obviously making fun of this kid and her pet and their bond, however peculiar. O’Connor liked to joke, as an adult, that the newsreel marked the peak of her fame, but I can’t help imagining that her feelings and her parents’ were hurt at the time. “Let’s go into the Deep South or a small town or a marginalized community and find someone to laugh at” is still a common media technique, sadly.

I was tickled pink when I found out that Richard Pryor, among several comedians, was a major influence for you. Is there any of his influence in the stories of this collection?

Pryor’s effect on me is impossible to overstate. As I have discussed elsewhere, I grew up a shy white Southern kid in a segregated town, a segregated church, a segregated school, so well insulated from the African-American half of Batesburg, South Carolina, that my first conversation with a black person never happened until I was an undergraduate, with a student from Nigeria. “I like your shirt,” I told him. “It’s a dashiki,” he replied, “but thank you!” And I read no African-American literature—no non-white literature, really—until university.

I was, however, fascinated by the parade of black performers and politicians on the tube through the 1970s and early 1980s, and the wider world they represented. Having decided that being funny was not a terrible life strategy, I always gravitated toward the comedians and comic actors, but above all there was Pryor, who I probably first noticed on Saturday Night Live, and then on the LPs that were smuggled among my (all-white) friends like contraband, and listened to with the volume low, because they were so “dirty.” But the language was the least transgressive thing about those angry, explosive, truth-to-power recordings. I felt that Pryor had grabbed me by the shirt collar, screaming in my face something I desperately needed to hear. And when I finally saw his uncensored stand-up routine, the man full-length and in motion like a head-to-toe live circuit, in Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, I felt this was simply the greatest actor/writer/performer alive. I still think that. Steve Martin, another hero at the time, was simply very funny. Pryor was Shakespearean funny, so funny that he went past funny, into higher realms.

Whether any of this is visible in my fiction, I don’t know, but it has to be one reason that John Kessel’s oft-stated workshop dictum lodged in my mind, when I was his graduate student: “All the really funny stuff is, on some level, very serious, and all the really serious stuff is, on some level, very funny.” I can envision Pryor as several characters in my collection, for example Daddy Mention in “Daddy Mention and the Monday Skull,” especially the last scene, and John in “Beluthahatchie.” Those are both comic/heroic figures defying authority and speaking their minds, which is the Pryor character defined in those landmark albums and concerts. I also could see him in “Slow as a Bullet,” both as Cliffert, whose resourcefulness everyone underestimates, but also as the narrator who spins the tall tale in the first place. A dual role! Probably, though, the Pryor influence most comes out in my public performances of these stories, where I try to fling myself fearlessly into the readings, and get loud reactions from people. I often write the story with the performance in mind. Pryor taught me that. I’ll never be as good as him, of course, but that’s what heroes are for.

You’ve been published in the field since the nineties. What have the changes in the industry in the past two decades been like for you? The publishing industry and the SFF cultural scene look very different today than they did two decades ago.

They sure do, and I’m glad. When I attended Clarion West in 1994, only a handful of SF short-fiction magazines existed, all in print only, all in what looked like circulation free-fall. When I asked Frederik Pohl, at a Science Fiction Research Association conference, whether he felt the field could survive the demise of the magazines, he replied, “It already has.” Despite a few spectacular counterexamples, the field was very white, very male, very straight, very middle-aged, and very American, with some middle-aged straight white male Brits thrown in, for diversity. A handful of book publishers were the gatekeepers of SFF, and so-called literary markets, were closed to us, as they were closed even to Stephen King. Social media did not exist, and nothing went viral but viruses. I had never seen a website, and I was one of only two or three Clarion West students and instructors who even had an email address, because I had a university affiliation. Who off campus would need an email address? Digital audiobooks did not exist, nor the YA market as we know it. Submissions were on paper, with self-addressed stamped envelopes and trips to the post office. New writers could await publication for years, even after acceptance. My first story sale, “Beluthahatchie” to Asimov’s, was submitted in late summer 1994, bought in January 1995, but not published until March 1997, which turned out to be a fateful year: Audible pioneered the mass-market digital media player, and in the UK, the first Harry Potter novel appeared. The twenty-first century of publishing had begun.

While we have a very long way to go, and while backlash and backtrack are chronic and troubling, the fact is that today’s field of science fiction and fantasy is more diverse, inclusive, and international, contains more markets and subgenres, has a broader reach, a stronger cultural signal, and in general is more vibrant than any of us dreamed possible in 1994. In particular, it is more accessible than ever to new writers, who have greater visibility and greater networking opportunities than ever, and who feel a passionate collective commitment to their presence in the field. The membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America will surpass 2,000 soon, if it hasn’t already. Even gray-haired veterans like me are newly inspired. All this fresh energy and activity, this influx of talent, is nothing but good for the field. May it continue; may it redouble.

What’s coming up next after this collection? Any future projects you can tell us about?

Two new novelettes and a new short story are in press: “The Devil’s Whatever” in The Book of Magic, perhaps the last original anthology edited by Gardner Dozois (Bantam, October 2018); “Mr. Percy’s Shortcut” in If This Goes On, an original anthology edited by Cat Rambo (Parvus Press, January 2019); and “Charlie Tells Another One” in Asimov’s (September/October 2019). With “Worrity, Worrity” in Ellen Datlow’s anthology Mad Hatters and March Hares (Tor, December 2017) and “New Frontiers of the Mind” in Analog (July/August 2018), plus “An Agent of Utopia” and “Joe Diabo’s Farewell,” 2017-2019 is looking downright productive. Must be time to get back to work!

Is there anything else you’d like your readers to know about An Agent of Utopia?

I am very proud of the first and last sentences of the book. The first is: “To the Prince and Tranibors of our good land, and the offices of the Syphogrants below, and all those families thereof, greetings, from your poor servant in far Albion.” The last is: “Hey, Mr. Nelson? Is this your dog?” Those two sentences—that’s my career, right there.

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: Theodora Goss

Gordon B. White | 2226 words

Could you take us back to the genesis of this story? In addition to drawing from Lewis Carroll’s books, this story also incorporates the real history of his relationships with Alice Liddell and the MacDonald family. What kind of research did writing this story entail, and what was the process like, weaving together the historical elements and your fictional contributions?

The story started with a photograph. You probably know which one I’m referring to: It’s the one of Alice Liddell dressed as a beggar, which Lewis Carroll took one summer day at her parents’ house. She has bare feet, her hand is cupped to receive coins, and her dress is falling off her shoulders. At that point, Carroll was still intimate with the Liddells, visiting them often. Later there was some sort of quarrel and a falling out—no one really knows why. There’s some implication that he may have asked one of the Liddell girls to marry him—on the other hand, he may have had some sort of relationship with their governess. What’s intriguing is that we don’t really know, just as we don’t really know how to interpret the photographs Carroll took of young girls. We tend to interpret them through a modern lens, but that doesn’t tell us what they meant in the context of the Victorian era. That lacuna or gap was where the story started—we just don’t know.

I love the Alice books, as well as Carroll’s other work, but like a lot of readers and scholars, I’ve wondered about what actually happened between him and the Liddell family, particularly Alice—and I’ve wondered what it would have been like to be Alice, famous for being the heroine of Carroll’s book. She had a life, by the way—a very rich life apart from being a literary character. But to us, she will always be Alice in Wonderland. Wouldn’t that be a strange experience, for a young woman?

At the same time, I also love the work of George MacDonald, and when I read, somewhere or other, that the Lily referred to in Through the Looking-Glass was Lily MacDonald, with whom Carroll also had a close relationship, the story started coming together. There was a fair amount of historical research, but I should say that as far as I know, the real Alice Liddell and Lily MacDonald never met. I wondered what it would have been like if they had, so I had them meet—sort of, since Lily isn’t fully aware of the meeting or what it means.

In addition to the shifts and overlaps of reality between Lily on her sick bed and her journey through Looking-Glass Country, the identities of the characters are similarly fluid. For example, Lily is herself, Princess Snowdrop, and eventually the White Queen, while Alice is a real woman, Princess Rosebud, and, seemingly against her will, Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll himself is only named as such in the epigraph, while Alice refuses to use any designation other than “him” and Lily’s mother uses his given name “Mr. Dodgson” (he also, perhaps, appears in the guises of the White Knight and Jabberwock). What is it about this theme of multiple identities that interests you, both in general and particularly in the context of this story? Are there other works that influenced or inspired your exploration of this topic?

I guess I’ve always been interested in how we are multiple people, partly because we’re constructed by other people’s understanding of us. In the story, Lily is very sick and being treated the way Victorians were treated back then, when medical pain relief was still in its early, rather crude stages—she’s on laudanum, a powerful opiate. The real Lily MacDonald did actually die of tuberculosis. So in her perception, things slip and slide in and out of each other, combining and recombining. Her consciousness is unstable. The poems are recombinations of other poems—the sorts of poems an educated Victorian woman would be familiar with. I’ve incorporated the way something like a drug can alter our perceptions—that’s one issue, but there’s also how that altered perception exposes the underlying reality that we are multiple and constructed—including by the literature we read. We construct the world out of words, as Humpty Dumpty points out. The main work that influenced me in writing the story this way was Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, which probably seems very different—but Grace genuinely doesn’t know whether or not she murdered someone, and she has been constructed by multiple narratives to the point where she struggles to articulate herself. It’s a brilliant book.

One of the ideas that emerges here is how men take women’s stories away from them. There are small instances of this, such as how Mrs. MacDonald devalues her own fairy tales to praise her husband’s stories, and how her Princess Snowdrop becomes Carroll’s voiceless kitten, but of course Alice and Carroll’s relationship looms over everything. Alice’s story has been literally taken away from her, leaving a blank spot in her childhood where something “inexcusable” occurred that she cannot recall and others will not speak of, but Carroll’s book has also co-opted Alice’s identity in service of his fantasy, forever replacing the real Alice Liddell with “Alice in Wonderland.” Although Lily’s escape into fantasy seems like a small step towards reclaiming her story, it also sits within the context of this story itself as a real-world step in reclaiming these women’s stories for a wider audience and inspiring discussion. Is this kind of silencing an issue that you see in history and into the present day? What kind of correctives are possible, particularly through the lens of popular fiction, and where do you see work still to be done?

Yes, this sort of silencing is an issue. My first novel, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, was the story of various monstrous women killed off in nineteenth-century narratives, such as the puma woman in H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Beatrice Rappaccini, and the monster’s bride in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In my book they get to tell their own stories. I’ve been fascinated by women’s voices pretty much as long as I’ve been reading—Lucy’s and Susan’s voices in the Narnia books, for example, but also Jadis’s voice. What would the story sound like from her perspective? Reading Virginia Woolf’s “The Angel in the House” as a teenager made me consider this issue in a more conscious way. And yes, of course actual women were silenced historically—there is still so much art by women artists relegated to museum basements. What we need to do is reclaim the art and writing of the past, so it’s available to us—show it, publish it, pay attention to it. Then, support contemporary women making art. And finally, of course, it’s helpful to create female characters who are people—complex and interesting.

Building on that idea, one particularly striking passage is Humpty Dumpty’s insistence that all things are made of words, and that “[t]o make something so, you only have to say it’s so. That is the power of words!” Although Lily exercises this power by turning her toast into a butterfly, just a little bit later she questions the White Knight’s story that he knew that the “fairy’s child” loved him because he could read it in her countenance. Lily rightly insists that “[s]he was a girl, not a book”—hence she was not made of words, and his merely saying that they were in love does not make it so. Do you think that is tension between words and reality is particularly relevant in the current struggle between information and disinformation? How does this tension factor in your own approach to storytelling as an author?

I think there is always a tension between the reality we create through words and the reality that lies underneath it. I read quite a lot of postmodern critical theory in graduate school, for the simple reason that it was required, and I don’t buy the idea that reality exists only to the extent that we perceive it. But of course we can only perceive it through our senses and the sense we make of that information—so whatever exists outside ourselves, we are always constructing through narrative. It’s difficult to get beyond that, although various religious systems try to help us experience reality as directly as possible, without interpreting it. It’s difficult to get beyond assuming the interpretation is reality. That’s a basic tension of our existence as human beings.

Disinformation is something different: It’s the deliberate refusal to accept what we perceive through sensory impression. It’s telling us that what we experience, whether through personal experience or through gathering scientific data, isn’t so. For example, that climate change isn’t real although the scientific data support that particular interpretation. That’s more a tension between words that try to be real and true, and words that are deliberately unreal and untrue. I guess my approach to storytelling involves using words that are unreal and untrue, in the sense of being fictional, in the service of what I see as a deeper reality. But I think all storytellers do that. We’re not trying to deceive. We tell stories, but we also try to tell the truth. Or at least a truth.

The story makes no bones about the fact that Alice has a negative—or, at the very least, highly skeptical—view of Lewis Carroll. As a result, when Lily’s mother says that Alice should be honored that she’s been immortalized as Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it comes across to readers as blind and even tragic. The gap between these two views, then, raises the question of separating art from artist. Should that decision be left to the individual—here, Alice as influenced by personal experience vs. Mrs. MacDonald as the distant observer—or does part of reclaiming stories include broadcasting that personal context to the world in order to potentially shift the wider view? To what extent should the separation between art and artist be a personal choice versus a societal opinion?

I think it is actually de facto a personal choice? Even if society condemns an artist, a particular individual can decide to pay attention to that artist—as long as the art isn’t banned. Plenty of people dislike how Picasso treated the women in his life, but that does not stop us from looking at his artistic depictions of the women he was involved with. I do think the biography is important because it helps us understand aspects of the art—for example, knowing his relationship to Dora Maar, and knowing about her life and work, deepens my appreciation of his paintings of her. I remember in graduate school reading the letters James Joyce wrote to Nora Barnacle. We had a discussion as to whether they should have been published—they are very private, definitely “dirty,” even by modern standards. The people who banned his books would have felt doubly, maybe exponentially, justified if they had read them. But those letters do shed a particular light on his fiction—among other things, they show that critics aren’t just reading eroticism into them, that the erotic subtext was intended. I don’t really have an answer for you, because each artist is so different—can you make a rule that will apply to Picasso and Joyce and Woolf and Agatha Christie and A.A. Milne? And can society ever usefully dictate how the individual will look at a particular artist? I doubt it.

Finally, what’s coming up next for you? In addition to your concrete projects, are there any new and still nebulous ideas that you’re beginning to consider?

I’ve just finished the third book in my monster girls series, which has been coming out from Saga Press: The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, and the final book in the series, The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl. Now I need to finish revising the stories for a collection of fairy tale short stories and poems, to be called Snow White Learns Witchcraft, which will be coming out from Mythic Delirium Press. After that, I’ll working on a scholarly book on Ursula Le Guin for the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series from University of Illinois Press. And I’ll be working on a new standalone novel based on a short story called “Pip and the Fairies”. If that sounds like I’ve overcommitted myself, yeah, I tend to do that . . . But they’re all projects I’m really excited about!

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: Theodore McCombs

Laurel Amberdine | 952 words

I really enjoyed reading “Talk to Your Children about Two-Tongued Jeremy,” which manages to be fun yet horrifying and a bit too believable! I’m looking forward to learning more about your process writing it. What is the first thing you knew about this story? How did it develop from there?

I was riding the city bus, late at night, and I saw a bus stop ad for something I can no longer remember—it wasn’t a good ad—the ad’s mascot was a smiling GPS pin. You know the location pin in Google Maps: a red circle that tapers into a long tail? That, with a smiley face. I remember being revolted. Why does everything need a face? I thought of other ads that personify unlikely things by tacking on a smile—most horrifyingly, the kiwi fruit whose smile is carved from his skin (bit.ly/2IsE64f). What’s this impulse to turn every consumer product into an emotional relationship? I don’t have a relationship with my navigation app. Or do I? I mean, I always picture that prim navigatrix voice seething at me when I don’t make a turn as directed.

That got me thinking about commercial relationships as emotional relationships, and how the bleed-through turns into manipulation, upselling, privacy abuses, toxic social media, and the story built from there.

Did you draw on any personal experiences, or was this more based on seeing trends in society?

I’m an avid user of Duolingo, a tutoring app for foreign languages, and I will say, their owl mascot is one shady piece of code. His push notifications get decidedly passive-aggressive after you miss so many days. But in general, I’ve followed privacy and technology issues for years—remember the story of the Target data-mining algorithm that outed a teen pregnancy?—and watched in awe and horror as Twitter tries to balance its identities as a for-profit corporation and a major social environment.

In my day job as an attorney, I’ve worked closely with survivors of child abuse and domestic abuse; on the corporate side, I’ve also seen how predatory lenders and telemarketing scams target the vulnerable—low-income communities of color, immigrant businesses, students, elders. It’s striking how similar their tactics are. Abusers exploit the victim’s feelings of isolation, shame, hopelessness, and how convenient for them that our social structures prime specific populations and identities with these feelings. You see that in mainstream advertising, too: ads that target our shame over our bodies, our fear of aging, our desire for status emblems, emotional problems that the consumer marketplace has to a large extent created.

My personal connection to this story has been tracing my own susceptibility to that manipulation—seeing how fully I’d bought into others’ definitions of happiness before figuring out what made me happy. That’s a prominent part of many LGBTQ+ persons’ stories, but I suspect most people have their own version of that experience.

What is your usual process for writing a story? Did this one fit the pattern?

This was the last story I wrote at the Clarion workshop, last year, and by Week Six, all my careful story and craft tricks—the notecards, the lists, the charts—had gone and I was shooting from the hip. I was running on the collective weirdo energy of my cohort and grabbing any spare hour to scribble crazy sentences in my spiral notebook. I wish I could make that my usual process! None of the technology or economics made any sense in that first draft, and there were some definite misfires, but the emotional core was there. Then I sat on the story for six months, re-read it, and discovered thematic undercurrents that fixed the story’s problems, once I teased them out. That part’s pretty typical of my process.

I liked all the different points of view. Looking back, there are quite a lot for such a short story, but it all works well. Was one particular character or part your favorite? (I loved Aunt Sylvie, but the anonymous parent’s POV is so eye-rollingly oblivious and fantastic.)

The parents’ chorus was so fun to write. I’d read Steven Millhauser’s “Phantoms” recently, and I loved the idea of this first-person plural, oversoul voice as a satiric form. But it was Rajeev’s voice that surprised me, and I’m grateful when a character does that. With Rajeev, I remembered what it was like to have a crush on your best friend in middle school: not the tortured hysterics of high school romances, or the self-absorbed psychodrama of one’s twenties, just well-meaning kids without the maturity and language to not hurt each other. There’s beauty in that—screwing up, but not cruelly.

For the same reason, but in reverse, Jeremy’s voice was no fun at all to write.

What else are you working on now?

A lot! I’m re-exploring a secondary world I created for my Beneath Ceaseless Skies novelette, “Ora et Labora,” and seeing if I can expand it into a new story involving sentient probability fields. I’ve got a hungry ghost ophthalmologist story in the works, and an alien Bachelorette story sketched out. Basically, I’ve been collecting story ideas for a year now, while I’ve worked on polishing and placing my Clarion stories, and now it’s time to write the dang things. I also regularly contribute to FictionUnbound.com, where we blog about literary-speculative hybrid fiction.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Matthew Hughes

Alex Puncekar | 469 words

“Hapthorn’s Last Case” is a thrilling mystery, certainly, but it’s a funny one. Was there a balance to writing the suspenseful with the comedic? If so, how did you manage that balance?

I include some humor in most of my writing. The guy in the back of my head who does the actual creating seems to have a natural sense of how much to use and when to use it. I don’t argue with him because he’s almost always right.

What inspired this story’s creation?

Short answer: John Joseph Adams asked me to send him something for the anniversary edition. I did so.

Longer answer: I’ve been writing about Henghis Hapthorn for fifteen years, including nine previous stories/novelettes/novellas and three novels. “Hapthorn’s Last Case” touches off from where the third novel, Hespira, ends. I may do another novel, if I get enough Patreon patrons to make it financially feasible to switch from writing shorter pennies-a-word pieces to book-length fiction.

Readers who would like to see that happen are welcome to visit my Patreon page (bit.ly/2RcRzkL).

You’ve crafted a fascinating world in such a small space. I’m especially interested in the contrast between machinery and magic, how one is usurping the other. Was this contrast always important to the story during your initial writing?

It is the basis for the nine shorter and three novel-length works that preceded “Hapthorn’s Last Case.” It was originally a throwaway line in my first novel, Fools Errant. Then, when I wrote the first Hapthorn short story, “Mastermindless,” for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, I decided to make the usurpation the central problem Hapthorn faced.

Interesting fact: Back then John Joseph Adams was The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction’s slush reader, so he would have been the first person to encounter a Hapthorn tale. That’s why it seemed appropriate to bring Henghis back for John.

What’s next for you? What can people expect to see in the future?

Lots more fiction. As I said above, I may do another Hapthorn novel. I’m writing another Dying Earth-esque novel right now, set in the same milieu as my Raffalon and Baldemar stories. I’ve got two more books, one of them a big slipstreamish historical novel, before the eyes of publishers at the moment, and I’ll have more stories in F&SF and in the late Gardner Dozois’s anthologies, The Book of Magic, coming out this fall, and The Book of Legends, scheduled for 2019.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar is a writer, game designer, and editorial assistant for both Lightspeed and Nightmare. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Jenny Magazine. He lives in Cinncinati, Ohio. Follow him on Twitter @AlexPuncekar.

Author Spotlight: Stephen Graham Jones

Arley Sorg | 1560 words

How did this story start for you—what was the inspiration and how did it develop?

Just a story idea I’d jotted down on my phone. Just searched it up: Your brother has a bullet hole. You stuff it with everything. The piano your mom used to play, etc.

But then having to stage a gunshot was all complicated, and I had no desire to write a gun story, as that drags a lot in that would, in the way I do things, detract from the beating heart I wanted the reader to see. All I really needed was something to punch through a body in that same way as a bullet but be pretty much agentless. So: the moon, of course. Micrometeorite, just boogeying in out of nowhere at blurry velocity. Were I on the moon, I’d be terrified of catching one of those. But maybe I’d turn into the Human Torch, too, so it’d all work out.

You are a novelist as well as a short fiction writer. Some people feel like flash fiction (vignettes for the literary folk) is an entirely different kind of beast. How does your approach change when you’re writing at this length, as opposed to short stories?

Flash pieces are ending as soon as they begin. I mean, all stories, all novels should be doing that anyway, I think, but if you’ve got six hundred pages, you can kind of cast around, give this character a big intro, slow down to stage a long view of the landscape, all that. Not so in flash. Which, flash, it’s far and away my favorite mode to write in. Got a book of them, even, States of Grace, and a lot more besides. I really like the economy, the punch, and how you know right away if you nailed it or not. With novels, there’s all this waiting, weeks of “Is this going to work, is this going to work, I don’t think I can do it, I’m pretty sure I’m just typing here, not writing.” With a flash piece, man, you’re in that waiting room for maybe ten minutes, right? If that, even.

For me, one of the things that makes this piece not only powerful but interesting is the realization of a shared childhood dream, and the sense of this dream/realization as both an emotional height and the destruction of their lives. Irony is a tricky thing, often heavy handed, but here it’s smooth and almost goes unnoticed, while still subversively playing its emotional role. How do you pull that off?

I guess unintentionally. Didn’t even realize that was going on, I mean. I just wanted for a big brother to try to save his little brother not with the stuff at hand—they’re on the moon, there’s nothing—but by reaching back into their shared past for the most solid memories they have together. It’s what you do when you’re desperate.

And, hadn’t even thought of it, but this story, it’s pretty much my brother and me. I’m thirteen or so, he’s ten, we’re playing around out in a junky pasture, and he digs up an old sheetrock knife—I guess they’re “utility knives” now. You put the razor in, thumb up however much you need. Anyway, I clearly remember looking over when he said, “Hey, hey! I’m gonna kill myself!” just playing around, and he held that knife up, slashed it down across his left wrist. Except, surprise, there was about a quarter inch of that blade still sticking out. So his wrist opened and just kept opening more, I was trying to keep all his blood in, and we made it through—somehow we got an ambulance out there, I don’t remember how—but it was a close one, for sure. That little blade went deep, and was straight across in a bad place, and he was ten. I guess that’s why my initial note for this had the big brother/little brother thing going on. Hunh. Who knew.

I feel like the thing that immediately elevates this piece is the shift, right off, from the focus on death to the focus on character and relationships. Where some might just sketch out a “cool death scene” or a “cool SFnal idea” and call it a story, this piece lends the moment and the ideas gravitas by making the scene relevant, personal, and real—in a very short space. How do you go about creating this sense of the personal, the real?

Way I always look at it is that whatever good or bad scene or image I can dream up, no way is it going to be the best, the best-written, any of that. Anybody off the street can do just the same and probably better. What I maybe can bring to the page, though, it’s having a real person in that scene or image. Before everything else in a story, you have to engage the person in that story. So you have to make that person real and particular, engageable. Good, bad, chaotic neutral, that doesn’t matter. What matters is what’s it like in their head, which you can get at in a thousand ways—often just with the syntax of the sentence you use to relay what they’re seeing, or the length of the sentence, this word not that word. Readers don’t like to slow down for big meet and greets with characters, so you’ve got to never stage those scenes. Contemporary fiction doesn’t tolerate that so much anymore. Yet, that meet and greet still has to happen. Meaning you’ve got to first get the story going right off the bat, then make the character real in a way that doesn’t feel like an introduction, all while not letting the story slow down—or, you keep it interesting enough that, if there is a slight slowdown, it doesn’t feel slow.

Among other things, you are known for horror fiction. People might think of this primarily as a science fiction (or near future) piece, but I think there is also an element of terror here, in the sense of a random, unstoppable danger, the thing that can strike you down. You won’t see it coming, you can’t stop it, and you can’t avoid it. Do you feel like there is a horror element to this piece? Or do you feel like, perhaps, for it to be a true horror element, there needs to be more sense of the dangerous as an encroaching threat?

I wasn’t meaning to write horror with this one, but every time I try to go fantasy or science fiction or western or literary or crime, the blood always seems to bubble up into something . . . maybe horrific? Horror-adjacent? The beats and techniques of horror are what I know best, I guess, so they’re the scaffolding for most everything I do. You tell the story that feels true to you, and for me that’s horror.

I really like the relationship between the brothers, the different sorts of isolation, the bittersweet feeling, and more. What is the best thing about this story for you? What is important to you about this piece?

Best thing for me’s that impulse to go back to when things were pure and just freeze that frame, hold that moment, make it last and last. That’s no way to actually be, of course, but man, some days that’s the only thing you want, the main thing you need.

You have a lot of work out, and readers can find you at demontheory.net. But! You also do a lot of different kinds of stuff. For people who have discovered you with this story and really enjoyed it, what should they read next? And what are you working on now that people can look forward to seeing soon?

Next . . . Mongrels or Mapping the Interior? Or Growing Up Dead in Texas? As for what’s next: Just wrote a couple of slashers back to back. One’s in the same world as Mapping the Interior, and the other’s set in Wyoming, and feels like a series. I was saying how horror’s the story that feels true to me? Really, within that, it’s the slasher. To me the slasher is storytelling at its best. It’s got laughs, gore, reversals, reveals, action, heart, regret, hope, masks, jump scares, more gore, and, we could all do a lot worse than to model ourselves after the final girl. She finds in herself a will to live, and she stands against evil, and she makes it through till dawn, whatever the cost. If I could be anybody, I’d be Ripley, I’d be Sidney, I’d be Laurie. They’ve got heart enough for us all.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 162 words

Coming up in December, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Lizz Huerta (“Mouths”) and Seanan McGuire (“Under the Sea of Stars”), along with SF reprints by Kim Stanley Robinson (“Remaking History”) and Maurice Broaddus (“Vade Retro Satana”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Ashok K. Banker (“A Love Story Written on Water,” with an original cover illustration by Marcel Mercado) and Shaenon K. Garrity (“Grandma Novak’s Famous Nut Roll”), and fantasy reprints by Karen Lord (“The Counsellor Crow”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs”).

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 an ebook-exclusive novella reprint—“All the Flavors” by Ken Liu—and an excerpt from Mirah Bolender’s debut novel, City of Broken Magic.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

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

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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 and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

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)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle) [Feb. 2019]

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

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

The Chosen One by Veronica Roth

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.