TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 104, January 2019

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: January 2019

SCIENCE FICTION

With Teeth Unmake the Sun
A. Merc Rustad

Engine at Heartspring’s Center
Roger Zelazny

Midway
Tony Ballantyne

The Book Collector
Sarah Micklem

FANTASY

The Emerald Coat and Other Wishes
Emily B. Cataneo

Son of Water and Fire
Ashok K. Banker

The Pilgrim and the Angel
E. Lily Yu

Endor House
Meg Elison

NOVELLA

What There Was to See
Maria Dahvana Headley

EXCERPTS

The City in the Middle of the Night
Charlie Jane Anders

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: January 2019
Chris Kluwe

Media Reviews: January 2019
Christopher East

Feature Interview: Henry Lien
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

A. Merc Rustad

Ashok K. Banker

Tony Ballantyne

Meg Elison

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 Reiko Murakami

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: January 2019

John Joseph Adams | 275 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 104th issue!

This month, our cover art comes from Reiko Murakami, illustrating a brand-new short story set in A. Merc Rustad’s Sun Lords of the Principality series: “With Teeth Unmake the Sun.” Our other original science fiction story, “Midway,” by Tony Ballantyne, is about living life as an intergalactic wanderer. We also have SF reprints by Roger Zelazny (“The Engine at Heartspring’s Center”) and Sarah Micklem (“The Book Collector”).

Our original fantasy stories include the second installment of Ashok K. Banker’s Legends of the Burnt Empire series—and if family sagas are for you, you definitely won’t want to miss this new story, “Son of Water and Fire.” Meg Elison digs into family drama, too, in our second fantasy original, “Endor House,” which is one witchy reporter’s attempt to tell the story of a family of magical innovators. We also have fantasy reprints by Emily B. Cataneo (“The Emerald Coat and Other Wishes”) and E. Lily Yu (“The Pilgrim and the Angel”).

Our nonfiction lovers will enjoy our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. We’re also excited to bring you a feature interview with Henry Lien, who is not only creating inspiring fantasy fiction for younger readers, but who once served as Lightspeed’s art director. We couldn’t be happier for his success!

For our ebook readers, we have an ebook-exclusive reprint of the fantasy novella “What There Was to See,” by Maria Dahvana Headley, and an excerpt from Charlie Jane Anders’ new novel, The City in the Middle of the Night.

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.

With Teeth Unmake the Sun

A. Merc Rustad | 8340 words

1. Gauntlet

Once there were nine Suns.

The ninth had no form and no name, and must be forgotten.

Seven remained gods.

The eighth was eaten.

• • • •

Io Destiny is a rich planet, home to three billion lives, built as a faceted gem to honor the Seven Suns. All the gods are worshiped equally here in peace. Temples caress the lower atmosphere and ships dance in celestial orbit; the Seven Suns are honored in effigy in great statues and holograms that mortals adore. Io Destiny is the only neutral world. While the gods chafe and feud with each other, hovering on the cusp of war, this planet is sacrosanct.

It must never fall, lest the Seven Suns abandon notions of peace and once more bite at each other’s necks, plunging the universe into perpetual war.

• • • •

First Wolf discovers unbearable want the dawn before he eats the world.

It is like this: His liege calls him from his restless slumber on Tau Usher. The pain in his belly has begun to subside at long last. He opens his eyes under the starlight of his home.

“Wolf, I have need of you. Come.”

First Wolf obeys sleepily. He leaps through atmosphere and void and prowls into the ship, holding back a yawn.

His liege’s ship has no name. It glides through void, so very cold, on course for Io Destiny. It hosts ten million souls and is a forest of metal and light: great curves of alloy and webbed neural interfaces, screens patterning the walls like moss. It is like home, this ship: ancient trees, wild meadows, biting rivers filled with ice. First Wolf approves.

He stalks through the ship to the bridge.

Sire. First Wolf bows with his forelegs when he sees his liege, his lower jaw brushing the floor. What is your desire?

The starborn stands on the bridge of their ship, watching Io Destiny on the viewscreen. Their body is silhouetted against the eerie glow of the minor star the planet orbits.

“I want to unmake the Sun Lords,” says the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf.

In this state—this stillness—their humanoid form is far more alien to him than then when they bared their teeth and shone with brilliance. To a non-wolf eye, the starborn would look unbearably human: willowy, restless, with skin too frail to withstand solar heat. Their head is smooth and their eyes are void.

First Wolf sits beside his liege, head tilted. Why?

“The universe was never meant to bow to gods.”

But why now? First Wolf asks. He has no purpose and he is still tired and lonely. Sleep lets him forget he is packless.

“Now I have the strength I need, and I have you,” the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf says, laying a hand on his nape. Their fingers—limited to five digits—dig through fur and rub the scar-chafed skin just so. First Wolf leans into their touch, into comfort.

The starborn are beings made from light given form. They pieced themselves together when the universe splintered open, unspooling life and energy as vast as time. Most have gone elsewhere, traveling beyond the constraints of physical matter. The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf, fallen among their kin, was stripped of their physical wings and cast out. Their first name was scoured from existence, and they chose to call themself the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf.

“Once, I swallowed all the shadows of all the wolves who had ever been: legends and bones, wolves of myth and nightmare, life-givers and death-bringers. To my people, there is no greater crime than to take the shadow of a living being.”

First Wolf was the only one who was not eaten. He came to them, in search of relief from the Sun burning in his belly. There are no other wolves in the universe, now. He looked.

Unsure why he is being told this, First Wolf nevertheless is curious. Why did you eat?

The starborn meets his eyes and does not flinch. “The first was my lover, and when he was dying, he asked. The rest . . . because I grieved. I could not bear the sound of wolf voices when mine was lost. I did not think.”

Does my voice cause you pain?

“Not anymore.”

First Wolf is patient, though he itches to know why he was called. What does his liege want of him?

“When the Suns saw this, they demanded retribution,” the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf says softly. “After all, some of the wolves had served them. I was exiled into the Chaos Waves and torment for eternity. When I escaped, before you found me, my people were gone but the Suns are not.”

And now you wish to eat them, First Wolf observes. He does not recommend this strategy. It hurts to devour a god.

“Yes. Look.”

Their shadow expands: it fractures into a thousand-thousand wolf-shapes, each racing across the sides of the bridge and electrifying the air with chilling songs. Large wolves, small wolves, wolves of legend and chaos, wolves who sing and wolves who weep and wolves who dance. There are wolves he once knew before, and wolves born long after his stasis. He remembers their names and their songs and in this sudden, wrenching moment, First Wolf is not alone.

First Wolf’s heart leaps in yearning. He gazes, wide-eyed, at the pack that maps itself across the ship. He wants to run with them, dance with them, press muzzle to muzzle with kin; to sleep warm and safe in a communal den; to race through the cosmos on hunts and in play.

Let me join them! First Wolf begs, aching to bound amongst the shadows. He is not only any longer. He can have a pack.

Ecstasy ripples through him and he opens his jaws, wishing to howl his glee.

“Stay,” the starborn orders him, their hand holding his nape. “Make no sound.”

He can shrug off his liege as easily as he can crunch this ship into piecemeal, for he is First Wolf, but the starborn is not made of lies and so First Wolf is obedient.

Will you take me into your shadows? he asks, his thoughts heard only by the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf.

“Once you are a shadow, you can never be whole again,” the starborn says, too gentle.

First Wolf will give up his wholeness if he can be together with a pack. He has never had kin like this, and now they are no longer memory.

Around them, the wolf shadows bare teeth like sharp and wicked thoughts.

“We will unmake the heavens,” the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf says, voice sliced to a whisper. “And when the gods are dead, I will take you into my shadow if you still desire.”

First Wolf smiles. He is no longer tired, and no longer wishes to be left in stillness and rest. He has found his purpose.

Command me, and I will devour anything you wish.

• • • •

First Wolf dances as he eats the world.

Giant mechanized statues spit music at him: thick and bloodied tangles that pulse and snap. The notes shatter bodies and minds of the people thrown into panic. Buildings quake and wail; ships swoop from the sky with cannons and nets to try and stop First Wolf.

He eats the ships.

First Wolf dances, his long limbs wreathed in shadow and his fur slick with old violence. He is careful not to show his teeth, which are still stained in sunlight. He eludes the music. It stretches for him, full of sharpened kisses and promises of cool, soothing sleep.

The music is made of lies.

The statues are puppets—just as he is, although to a different puppeteer. Cities crumble under his crushing paws. His toes are red.

He whirls and leaps, his own song carrying him through the air. The statues reach and fail to catch him. Atmospheric defenses crack and slough against his being. Great satellites crumble under his bite and fall into dying cities.

First Wolf reshapes himself as he plummets down once more: from quadruped to biped—his head always wolf, for he is jaws and teeth and hunger. His paws are crafted into humanoid hands tipped in knives. Shadowy fur sheers into a long, fitted coat with buttons like eyes, flapping about his knees. His boots hit the ground and leave no prints.

First Wolf hooks his claws into the hearts of the mech statues and rips them free. The music wails and thrashes. Atonal scores shriek and lash in all directions. The music rushes at him, cracking the air into frozen pieces. He smiles, taunting, and devours the hearts. He will please his liege. He will earn his place in the Pack.

The music shatters against his muzzle and body, cutting open new scars. His coat rips and he drops to one knee as splinters shred his fur and leave pinpricks of starlight in his ears. There is only pain in that last, futile attack.

Pain is not a lie.

He licks the last of the music from his lips. Silence settles around First Wolf. With the major defenses of Io Destiny undone, there is naught that can stop him.

First Wolf allows only one survivor: a child nestled in the cockpit of a broken ship.

Remember Death, First Wolf breathes into the child’s mind. He is a lone wolf and so he leaves his mark thus. He hurls the ship from orbit so it can drift among the void as the planet’s core begins to implode.

• • • •

When the world is bones and static, First Wolf lopes across void towards his liege’s ship. It is cold, that ship. The chill of an unborn universe seeking a spark to bloom. He offers no heat from his belly; he does not want to burn.

As his paws touch unliving metal, First Wolf sloughs free of this current gender. She stretches, her pelt always shadow, and she prowls the decks in search of her liege. Their scent is one she can never taste, whether shipboard or in the wild galaxies linked in chaos.

She lopes through the ship to the bridge. The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf’s shadow-pack is gone, yet the scent of all the wolves who have ever been lingers and she inhales deep.

On the viewscreen, the world of Io Destiny crumbles.

The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf leans on the balcony railing. There is silence among their crew as all watch First Wolf’s work.

“The Suns have begun to fear,” the starborn says, each syllable a soft growl. “Well done.”

First Wolf inclines her chin in satisfaction. Then she glances at her liege, hopeful. Will you take me in now?

“There are other worlds,” the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf says. “Other futures I have glimpsed in dreams, where lies the victory I seek. I will not take you back yet. But soon.”

2. Tactician

First Wolf has bitten off billions of lives since the war began.

The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf targets planets and systems that owe allegiance to the Suns. There was the hallowed grave-world Asuuru Vii, where First Wolf lapped up ghosts layered like a looped holo-mural; the trade hub Caydence Epsilon that tasted of cardamom and panic on her tongue; an asteroid belt dedicated to the contemplation of silence; he hunted down one of the sundered nebulas where machine intelligence evolved into sentient webs of pearlescent geometrics. And others, all swallowed and never sating her. Few burned as the Eighth Sun did, at least.

The Seven Suns cannot harm the starborn directly. The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf has wrapped themself in antithesis energy, shields spun from affairs with dark matter and eons beneath the heel of void. No god can touch them. And those who serve the Sun Lords have failed to conquer the wolves.

After he eats each world, First Wolf begs, Take me, sire.

The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf replies each time: “Soon.”

So First Wolf remains longing for the Pack he cannot touch and cannot join. He does not know how much more his belly can hold. If he cannot obey, puppet that he is, then he will not earn his place in the starborn’s shadow.

In frustration, he turns to the only human who is not afraid of him: Jarith.

Grace lines Jarith’s statuesque body. They wear robes of titanium mesh and ancient silk; their black hair is roped into fine braids and falls in a mane about their shoulders; their throat is netted with scars, and their hands banded in metallic bone-braces. It is their eyes that entrance First Wolf. Dark like the galaxy without stars, rimmed in silver paint, filled with such rage.

In the starborn’s vengeance against the Suns, Jarith is their war tactician and First Wolf is their arsenal.

Jarith is agender and tall for their species; the crown of their head scarce reaches First Wolf’s spine when they are side by side. They too are loner. First Wolf has seen many generations of humans live and die inside the ship; Jarith alone remains untouched by time and packmate affection.

Jarith. First Wolf texts at Jarith the way she does all those who are not her liege. Human ears are not built to withstand his howl, even whispered. I want your teeth.

Come to me. Jarith’s texts are as flat and clipped as their voice, and their command always excites First Wolf. He needs distraction. His liege has told him soon and he wants to howl. He keeps his voice closed when inside the ship.

Even without a name, he does not want to eat the ship and everyone it bears.

It took a long time to eat everything alive on a planet like Aldorau. First Wolf wants to forget the hollow-eyed stare of the boy he left alive as the only survivor.

First Wolf glides through halls and shadow until he comes to Jarith’s quarters. The walls are empty and there is little to mark the human’s territory. A silken nest of cushions and sheets; a desk with glass maps and holographic calculations of conquest; and a simple knife mounted on the wall. That blade is Jarith’s prize. They have never told First Wolf why they cherish it so.

Jarith stands naked with their back to the entrance of their den. They are staring at the knife. Jarith is a lone wolf, human-bound, and it is the raw-edged familiarity of that which draws him to them.

“Enter, Wolf.”

First Wolf studies Jarith’s body: etched in patterns of violence, temptation, fury.

He shifts his form into wolf-headed bipedal, the shape Jarith most prefers. Gender is a convenience for First Wolf; he savors pronouns and the shapes bodies can take. A delicious and delightful myriad of combinations.

Slowly, Jarith turns and lifts a hand. They gesture at their bed, their robes in a steel and silken puddle in one corner.

First Wolf pads to the nest, excited.

Jarith’s teeth bare in a smile. “You wish I would take you.”

First Wolf has always enjoyed being subdued. Yes, he says, ears pricked forward. First Wolf lies back on the bed and shows his belly. Do as you please with me.

“I will.” Jarith strokes his muzzle and cups his tattered ears with their palms before sliding their hands down his neck and to his chest and navel. They pause, feeling the heat from the swallowed Sun. “Does it still hurt?”

Always.

“Then let me make you forget. For a time.”

Jarith presses their body against him and thrusts inside him. They twist his thoughts about theirs, full of tooth and claw, letting him feel them unarmored. He chews their scars and savors the hiss of their breath. They are not gentle; neither is he. He shares in their rawness, their passion, their might. Their skin is not as hot as a Sun; it is cool and soothing, calming as the touch of the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf.

When Jarith is sated, First Wolf sprawls panting beside his lover, satisfied.

What was your god?

“Pain.”

First Wolf tilts his head. Any god can deliver pain. It is most often what gods do.

“The Ninth Sun was pain.” Jarith runs their fingers along his spine. “In its realm, an absence of pain was mercy.”

Did you serve willingly?

Jarith makes a sound that might be called a laugh, if a laugh was made of razors and shredded wrath. “No.”

Yet you freed yourself.

“I did.” Jarith’s hand rests on First Wolf’s shoulder. “Don’t ask how.”

First Wolf does not ask.

“Pain and Death are not the same,” Jarith says. “They are bitter enemies. The Red Sun did not want me, will not take me. None of the gods will. Not after the Ninth left so many marks.”

First Wolf nuzzles Jarith’s hand, and his lover strokes his tattered ears again. First Wolf smiles, close-lipped.

“Wolf.” Jarith’s breath rasps in their throat. “The next world. Don’t.”

I have been given no command yet, First Wolf replies, glancing at Jarith in confusion.

“You will.” A muscle in Jarith’s jaw bunches. Their hand tightens in First Wolf’s nape, pulling skin and fur taut at the base of his jaw. “The next world. Don’t. It will not end well.”

For whom?

“All of us.”

Then Jarith makes him leave.

First Wolf stands, quadruped once more, outside Jarith’s chambers.

Jarith?

They do not respond. They have never been made of lies. Do they hold secrets or regret like the scars across their body and thoughts?

First Wolf turns away, melting past the ones who fear. She can bend herself into the dark, stretch herself along the shadows. She must ask her liege what Jarith will not tell her.

• • • •

First Wolf’s affair with the Eighth Sun went like this:

She saw the god of stasis in the unmoving rings of a crystalline world. Light was frozen, an aura that sheared clean against the unruly, decaying edges of time. After she had run wild through the universe, that stillness entranced her. The Sun’s power teased at her senses. Beckoned her.

What is this? she asked, prowling the edges of the god’s aura.

MOVEMENT IS CHAOS, the Sun told her. THERE WILL BE CALM.

May I taste it?

ALL WILL BE STILL.

She stepped inside and sensation fled. She was wrapped in nothingness, in absolute solitude, and for a while, she enjoyed the stillness. It was like dreamless sleep, mind and body lulled into rest. Yet there were no others to speak with her, to play with her, to share her bed. All within the Eighth Sun’s aura were frozen. They had no thought and no will.

She became bored.

When she said she wished to leave, the Sun told her no.

Why not? she asked. Thought vibrated in the stillness; she kept hold of her breath in her body, not yet spent.

I DO NOT PERMIT ANY TO LEAVE.

She growled at the Sun, and it tightened its influence—its stasis closed around her, trapping her limbs, pinning her muzzle, stilling her lungs so she could not howl. She was paralyzed in that state for an eon or two. Hard to tell when time didn’t exist within the influence of the god.

Even without time, her rage grew.

She knew defiance would cause the Eighth Sun to hold her forever. It had dwelt in its immovable domain for eons, soaked in power, saturated in absolute authority. Its will was unadulterated. She was trapped, pinned like fixed point in the eternity of time.

I will stay, she thought at the Sun. Let me move again, and I will be yours.

It was the first time she was made of lies.

BOW.

The Sun’s stasis loosened and her lungs swelled with long-held breath. It unshackled her limbs and she lowered herself onto her belly. When the god’s power unwound from her jaws, she smiled. She channeled her rage into fusion, and she howled. She blew the Sun free of its stasis, into chaos and movement. The supernova sent it spinning into the antitheses of solar winds and music and heat.

And then she ate the Sun for what it had done.

After the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf soothed the burning in her belly, they carried First Wolf in their arms and laid her in a quiet den on Tau Usher. The planet was wrapped in serene flora, clear waters, quiet skies. Those who lived there called it Sanctuary.

I didn’t know this world still lived, she murmured, sleepy in the starborn’s embrace. I remember it. I was born here, wasn’t I?

“It still carries your scent. This world has always been a haven. You may rest here until the pain subsides. I will watch over you.”

No one will come for us?

“No god or wolf will disturb this place.”

Neither will we, First Wolf sighed. Never.

“Neither will we. Not now, not ever.”

(His liege was made of lies that day.)

• • • •

The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf is in their library, a great ocular chamber suspended within the ship’s abdomen like a swollen bite. Texts live in tome and tablet and datachip. There is no gravity in this space. The words live as if in void: floating still and cold until touched and consumed.

“I know why you are here,” his liege says as First Wolf slides into the library.

Jarith will not speak.

“They disagree with me in this,” the starborn says.

Will you tell me what it is you wish, sire?

The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf sighs. “There is one last world I wish you to devour,” they say. “It is a final blow. One that will weaken the Suns’ hold on this universe inexorably.”

Which world? He is not hungry. The remains of Aldorau sit soured in his gut; some of the screams linger.

“Tau Usher.”

And First Wolf hears the true name of the place: home.

“This is the last,” says the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf. “With Tau Usher gone, we will have destabilized the Sun Lords beyond recovery.”

First Wolf will be allowed into the pack. He will not be alone anymore.

And yet.

He hesitates. There are no other worlds?

“No, my wolf.”

A brush of pressure-change and the filaments of rage announce Jarith’s presence. They step into the library, masked and armored against the void. Pages drift aside as they approach in a slow, graceful arc. First Wolf has stretched himself out so strands of his coat anchor him to the sphere’s diameter.

“It’s not necessary.” Jarith’s voice is sterilized through their mask. Their hair, now pulled back into thick braids, drifts behind their shoulders. “The Red Sun already hunts spiders elsewhere. The Gray Sun is seeking solitude.” The pain from so many words lines their throat. “We have destabilized the gods.”

“Yet they remain,” the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf says. They brush long fingers against a disturbed book and it sighs as it alters trajectory and drifts away. “I wish them destroyed.”

“Don’t do this,” Jarith rasps. Then, “Please.”

First Wolf looks between the starborn and the tactician. He has never heard Jarith utter that pleading, simple word for any reason.

“No,” the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf says with regret so potent it makes First Wolf want to howl. “Sanctuary must fall.”

• • • •

The Thousand Star-Eyed Wolf’s ship glides inexorable on course for Tau Usher.

First Wolf paces in his den, chewing at the insides of his own thoughts. He does not want to eat his home. He wants to belong with the Pack. He cannot have both desires.

First Wolf has built this physical space cycle by cycle, a place that is his. He comes here when he is not with the Pack. He’s covered the floor in petals from a trillion different roses, each shielded in a piece of shadow. On the walls, he has painted the history of his dance: worlds eaten, dreams swallowed, rage unmasked. None of his murals show him with anyone. He is always a lone wolf in the chaos.

“Wolf.”

Jarith stands at the entrance to his den.

What do you want? First Wolf demands, unstopped in his pacing.

Jarith holds up their cherished knife: a simple blade, curved at the tip, runed with old memories of the universe’s first birth. “I used this knife to make the Ninth Sun disappear.”

First Wolf pauses, rose petals drifting about his paws. He cocks his head. And?

“I want your pelt.”

Why?

“Keepsake. If you eat Sanctuary . . .” Their jaw works. “I will hate you.”

Then why do you want my skin?

Jarith’s fingers tighten on the hilt, tension rippling up their arm to tauten their shoulders. “So I can remember what we had before. Because you will eat, Wolf. You always do.”

First Wolf growls softly. Jarith is not made of lies: First Wolf is a puppet.

When he is done, though, First Wolf will be among the Pack and he will not need his pelt. He rolls onto his back, submissive. Jarith deserves to have one piece of him, even if Jarith will forever be alone once First Wolf is taken.

You may have my pelt, Jarith.

Jarith kneels atop him. “Without your pelt, you’ll no longer be invulnerable.”

He knows. He tried to eat himself, once, when the burning pain became too much after he swallowed the god. After this world, there are none left to devour. Worlds never could destroy him.

“Then close your eyes.”

He obeys.

The knife licks the underside of his ribs. It cuts him open, flays his pelt with the softness of oblivion. He is silent, in ecstasy, as they peel away his fur and expose the starborn’s shadow beneath. They leave his head untouched, cutting only from his collarbone and shoulders down, down, down. Their fingers tease against his flesh, his nerves alive and sharp, and they press their weight against him as they work.

He feels as he did on Sanctuary. Comforted, wrapped in safety, and not alone.

His fur will regrow; a thin, velvety layer of dark across his body. But for right now, he is raw, able to taste the air of this ship as he never has before. It has more nuance than he knew: there are fragments of memory, laughter, song, fear, joy. The people on this ship have lives and souls and pasts. Futures, perhaps. He inhales a thousand hopes and questions; tremors of lovers tangled together linger at the back of his throat. Whispers dance across his thoughts—you will be okay, you will live, you will prosper—given from many mouths to others’ hearts. The ship may be cold, but inside it is teeming with life.

He understands, as he has not before, why the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf fights the gods. Not in vengeance, not entirely, but for those who are here, and who will come after.

It is good. It is not lies.

Jarith picks up his pelt and drapes it around their shoulders. “It ends after this, Wolf. Remember that.”

• • • •

The ship glides into the Echelon Rampant Nebula, resplendent with a great hexagonal cluster of station cities. On the edge of the nebula, Sanctuary orbits a small, bright star. An armada from the Violet Sun and the Blue Sun waits between the cold ship and Tau Usher. Hundreds of dreadnaughts and battlecruisers; armored eel-ships with corrosive tongues bared; great void-cephalopods weaponized with Unwritten Script.

Jarith stands silent on the bridge, unblinking.

The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf leans on the balcony, a languid smile revealing their teeth. “My wolf,” they murmur, extending a hand at the viewscreen. “Unmake Tau Usher.”

Then they spread their arms, head thrown back, and unleash the Pack. The wolf-shadows spiral from their coat and arc through space towards the waiting armada.

First Wolf catches Jarith’s stare—unflinching, furious—as they stalk to the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf’s side. Jarith still wears First Wolf’s pelt across their shoulder, heavy and thick and dark.

First Wolf hesitates. He does not want to consume his home; it will disappear and he will never again have sanctuary. Jarith will hate him. Yet how can he refuse? His liege gave him a command, and after this, he will not be lonely.

He launches himself into void.

He is wolf.

(He is a puppet.)

He always eats.

3. Pack

First Wolf lands as soft as whispered secrets on Tau Usher.

This is a pinnacle bastion for the Suns’ fleets. It is an old well of power in the universe. If held by the Suns, they can launch continual war throughout the Principality. The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf wants to destabilize that advantage. If First Wolf eats all the power in Sanctuary, the Suns can never touch it.

There will be no dance, for the end of this world.

First Wolf hunts in silence, moving as a pall of bitter time through Sanctuary. She eats, and she is unhappy. She makes no games with the bones of the people. She is shadow, and she is wolf. The world doesn’t see her. She laps up the familiar taste of home from the center of the planet, pulling the transcendent energy through the fabric of existence and swallowing it whole.

It hurts. What else did she expect?

The last living souls on Sanctuary are a pair of young humans. They both see her. First Wolf hesitates, jaws wide. The girls stare her down, fists clenched side by side, their skin swollen from tears. Both sit in the wide branches of a jade willow, whose malachite-tinted fronds are scaled with frost. Each looks identical to the other. She cannot decide which to eat.

“Why are you doing this?” the first girl asks.

First Wolf considers. It is what I am.

The second girl trembles. Her voice crackles like static, filled with shock and grief. “But why did you kill everyone?”

Not done yet, First Wolf points out. There’s still you.

Both girls glance across the winter-wrapped city that is quiet. The spaceport that no longer hums with life. “I don’t want to die,” says the first.

“Neither do I,” says the second.

First Wolf tilts her head. She is still raw from her missing pelt, and she feels too keenly the girls’ pounding hearts and jagged thoughts. Why not?

“We want to see the stars,” the first girl says. “My sister and I were going to fly.”

The second girl snaps off a branch and stabs it in First Wolf’s eye. “You killed everyone!”

First Wolf is not injured; the wood turns to ash. The girl screams at her and kicks out, holding onto the tree for support. Her sister grips her, holding tight.

First Wolf takes a step back so the girl’s foot will not burn, too.

“Go away,” the girls shout. “Go away!”

They are both becoming full of rage; if they live, perhaps they will become powerful enemies. The girls can see First Wolf, after all.

First Wolf does not eat the humans. It would leave one of them alone, and she does not need to make any more sole survivors.

She leaves the girls a ship, should they ever care to fly.

• • • •

First Wolf prowls along the equatorial band of Sanctuary, surveying what he has done. His paws leave decaying tracks along saltless oceans and between giant hive-trees. The power he swallowed writhes and bristles against the starborn’s shadow, yet it wanes, braiding into his atoms and leaving him more solid than he has been in a long time.

He has eaten so many worlds.

This one was home. It comforted him, nurtured him. The planet, the people, were not all willing to serve in the war with the Suns. He has never thought of the innocents.

Is this why Jarith hates him? Not because of Sanctuary, but because he has never thought?

First Wolf flies up again through the stratosphere, panting with exertion, and cants his ears for the hum of the ship’s engines. He will ask why devouring must now hurt.

He sees naught but destruction. The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf’s ship is savaged into pieces. His home. Obliterated.

This is not how it is supposed to be. The remains of the keel in tatters of propulsion and venting oxygen. Bodies float amid the debris, slicked in void-chill. First Wolf races through plasma-sheared slices of hull, across wires strewn out like raw nerves, around the ghosts of engines and torn-apart libraries drifting in paper snow. He wants to throw back his head and wail. There is nothing left of home. It is all gone.

And he cannot sense the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf anywhere.

Dead eel-ships float in pieces amid the ruins of the hexagonal city-cluster. Ravaged dreadnaughts list in the void. The starborn’s ship was shielded with word-absorbing algorithms; in the ship’s belly floated a Chaos Whale, fished from the Waves where the starborn had drowned for so long. The remains of the Chaos Whale are little more than solar-bleached bone and the sonic disharmony. There is only eat or eaten, an invariable law.

His liege is gone, and the people they protected are dead. First Wolf snarls, balanced upon the corroded balcony that floats unmoored. There are no illusions. His growl scatters the debris, hurtling it like comets in all directions.

“Wolf.”

He spins, his fur sharp as absolute zero. He will skewer anything that comes close.

There is a sleek single-body ship a lightyear away, watching. In it is Jarith. Alive.

“Wolf.” The human’s voice cuts through chaos and space, draws him nearer. “I can help you find them.”

How?

Jarith is supposed to hate him now.

“Follow me, Wolf.”

Do you know where our liege is?

“Yes.”

• • • •

How the siege of the Echelon Rampant Nebula should have transpired: The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf’s shadows chew through material defenses, haunt the living like ghosts until mortal minds crack and melt, dropping flesh-husks in the wake of madness. The Chaos Whale eats the cephalopods and deflects the Script drawn from aborted galaxies. The ship’s cannons decimate the Suns’ dreadnaughts into ash.

That plan, that possibility, is now a lie.

First Wolf sits folded into the spaces between where light blooms in Jarith’s ship.

What happened?

Jarith ties back their hair with slim golden chains. They are dressing for war: in radiant entropy-scaled armor, with gauntlets forged from decayed starlight, and they don a helmet shaped like a wolf’s head. They no longer have his pelt. “The ship was boarded.”

First Wolf didn’t believe any being not touched by the wolf-shadows could step inside the ship’s atmosphere.

“One of the starborn’s own betrayed them,” Jarith says. “Let the mortal general aboard. Disabled defenses on the bridge. The general took the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf’s sword when he defeated them.”

Where were you?

“I was supposed to flank the armada,” Jarith says. “Prevent escape.”

And? First Wolf demands. Is our liege dead?

“Hardly.” Jarith laces their boots. “Our enemies don’t want their death. The Suns want subjection. The gods will torment the starborn for all eternity, or until they are broken and yield.”

What of the pack?

“Trapped inside their skin when they were taken. All suffer the same fate, Wolf.”

First Wolf paces, wishing to gouge the ship into pieces in his frustration; he doesn’t, for Jarith cannot breathe in vacuum.

You haven’t told me where they were taken.

“I will, but only if you do me a service.”

Why? You said you will hate me. Were you made of lies?

Jarith hesitates, one hand pressed against the other, their bone-braces agleam. “I . . . thought I was honest.” They take a breath. “Thoughts can lie, even one’s own.”

First Wolf shakes his head. He needs to find his liege and only Jarith is left. What do you want?

“Let me ride inside you,” Jarith says. “You can move unseen. I can’t.”

He almost curls his lips back to show his teeth, then decides against such aggression. He doesn’t want to fight Jarith. He will win, and he doesn’t like such a probability. Stop testing my patience.

“I need to see the starborn.” Jarith looks him in the eyes, as vicious as when they watched him dive towards Sanctuary. “After what was done.”

My belly is one of fire, First Wolf says. You will burn.

They shrug. “You saw the scars. I’ve endured a hundred-thousand torments. What’s one more?”

Very well. First Wolf reluctantly opens his jaws wide and lets Jarith climb into his mouth.

They taste of vengeance, a mirage built from a thousand nights in solitude. Jarith drags their fingers along the inside of his throat, down his ribs, and pauses, hesitant, at his heart.

“There are so many holes,” they whisper.

First Wolf has had a long, long time to love and lose and never truly belong to another the way a pack belongs.

“They took your liege to the center of the Principality,” Jarith says, settling themself with their spine against the starborn’s shadow that holds back the Sun. Heat sears their armor and burns against their skin, sinking into bone. Jarith snarls against the pain and endures. “They were imprisoned aboard Forever Brightness, Burning Dark. The ship will deliver them unto the gods at the Courts of Tranquility.”

Hold fast, First Wolf says, and launches himself into the nebula in pursuit of the dreadnaught that took away his liege.

• • • •

“There,” Jarith says, and First Wolf follows his lover’s directions.

There is no sign of the dreadnaught or its general here. A prison station caught in a stretch of empty space between the newly built Courts of Tranquility and the vast reach of the Principality. It is all but empty. First Wolf feels the dim heartbeats of a thousand beings: guards or prisoners, he does not know.

Does not care, really. He is here only for the starborn.

“Let me out,” Jarith says. “I’ll see you’re undisturbed.”

It’s tempting to say no, and keep Jarith in his belly forever. It would mean he is never again without company.

Except that is what the Eighth Sun did to him, so long ago, and he will not be like the god. He could never force himself inside his liege, inside the pack. He must be taken willingly.

There are no viewports on the prison station. He makes his own, extending his claws and carving open a hole in the outer skin. Alarms klaxon in discordant howls. He spits out the tactician.

Jarith rolls to their knees, armor blackened and steaming, and lift their head. “Go.” They unsheathe their Sun-killing knife and draw a handgun comprised from the songs of dying stars. “Free your liege.”

First Wolf digs deeper, into the heart of the station. Where he finds the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf.

They hang suspended in absolute darkness. The starborn’s prison is a sphere, its surface skinned in data readouts and a holographic outline of their body. A score of wraiths guard it. First Wolf tears them apart without devouring them. None of the wraiths scream.

“First Wolf.”

The starborn’s voice is faint, withered. Filled with such pain, First Wolf wants to howl in empathy.

He attacks the cage with his teeth. His jaws are useless. He slashes with claws to no avail. First Wolf hurls himself against the sphere and it does not move.

“Stop, my wolf. You can’t undo it.”

Panting, First Wolf crouches. Confused. Why not?

“It is you, First Wolf.”

He smells it then, and it is not a lie.

The darkness is impenetrable. As hard as he throws himself against it, gnaws at it, the darkness remains unmoved. It was made from his pelt, that darkness. He cannot eat himself.

First Wolf paces, anxious. He needs Jarith’s knife, but he cannot bring himself to leave his liege yet. If the Violet and Blue Suns return, they will take the starborn away and First Wolf might not find them again. Why didn’t you run when the ship was boarded?

“After I crawled from the Chaos Waves, I swore I would never flee.”

Then why send your tactician away? He does not understand this defeat. This impossibility. They would have protected you.

The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf’s forehead presses against the inside slope of the cage. “Jarith is the one who let General Zu aboard.”

Lies, First Wolf snarls. You were made of lies once! Don’t lie now!

“I’m not. They called back the shadows and let the general close enough to duel me. I lost. They wrapped your pelt around me to keep me here.”

Jarith betrayed him. First Wolf cannot understand this. He shakes his head, pacing faster, his claws gouging the prison-station’s hide. He does not want to feel such hurt.

“You made me a promise long ago,” the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf says quietly. “Do you remember?”

How can he ever forget?

It was when he crawled on his swollen belly, throat aflame, teeth aching with sunlight, across empty space so dark nothing would ever grow here again. He crawled until his muzzle touched the fallen starborn’s feet.

They stared at each other, two broken things defined by pain.

First Wolf could smell the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf’s grief and hear the howls of all the wolf-shadows inside them. He knew, in that unknown span of time when he drowned in the starborn’s gaze, that this one, and this one alone, could save him. Or destroy him, if that was what he begged for.

He had eaten a god; that was enough punishment.

I am First Wolf, he said. Consume me, use me, unmake me—only stop the burning, my liege.

“I will do it for a promise,” the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf said. They knelt. “That if I ask, you will give me the sun.”

I swear it, he said, for a wolf’s promise is binding like the inevitable decay of all matter.

“Then take this,” they said, unpeeling their self-shadow from their form. Its wings thrashed like unspooled galaxies, lashing out at space and chaos.

First Wolf swallowed the shadow and felt it curl around the Sun. The shadow threaded through rib and spine, latching to the definition of First Wolf: his sense of self, his existence. It filled him, sweeping like a galaxy reborn through his essence. Pain like he had never known wracked his body and he howled.

“It will not hurt forever,” the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf said, stroking his ears and face with many-fingered hands. Touch soothed him, let him feel other than pain for those few breaths. “I can promise you that.”

On the prison station, First Wolf still remembers.

Don’t ask this, First Wolf begs. I don’t want to burn.

The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf snarls. “They can’t die with me.”

Unlike his liege, First Wolf is not untouchable now. He gave Jarith his pelt, his indestructability. The Violet Sun and the Blue Sun can skin him and root out the heat from his belly. Not an easy task, but not an impossible one. After all, he did not think a mortal soldier would defeat the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf.

Did you see this? First Wolf’s throat aches with remembered heat. Your fate and mine?

“No. There are no unchangeable futures. The universe is alive, not a static thing. It will always roil and grow, molt and flower in its own way. But I knew that . . . if I was ever caught, like my kin did to me, I would do anything to assure my wolves did not suffer as I would. Thus I made you promise. And now I call upon you to fulfill it.”

But you will die.

He feels the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf’s bitter smile even in the dark. “On my terms. Not a plaything for the gods’ vengeance.”

First Wolf shuts his eyes as he reforms his body. He looks as the starborn’s human-form once looked, save for the head. Always his, always wolf.

“Set them free,” the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf whispers. “Give me the sun.”

First Wolf extends his claws, shaped like the knife Jarith used to skin him, and punctures his belly. He heaves, splitting himself open, and lets out the devoured light and heat and power held so long inside.

The dead Sun’s essence shatters the sphere, disintegrates his old pelt. It does not have his strength, separated from his body, and it, like him, can burn. Shadow and sunlight cancel each other out so the brunt of the supernova is compressed into the shape of a body. Light lets the shadows scorch free and run. The wolf-shapes howl and dance, scattering wild across the galaxies.

First Wolf’s mass is sucked away, caught in the absence of the heat. He collapses on his hands and knees, his howl drowned in the cracking of reality. The starborn’s body blazes brighter than any Sun, and then the light is gone. What’s left of a frail, physical form crumples to the ground.

First Wolf bites the starborn’s throat, crushing skin and bone and memory. He feels the familiar absence of life slipping between his jaws. He will be sure there is nothing left for the gods to hurt.

When his liege is dead, he crawls away in search of his own place to die.

• • • •

First Wolf finds Jarith on the ruins of Sanctuary.

Jarith stands under the tree where First Wolf did not eat the girls. They lean their forehead against the trunk. One arm hangs limp at their sides, the other pressed against the tree to cushion their brow. “You must hate me, Wolf.”

A little.

“Kill me if you wish,” Jarith says. “It’s over.”

First Wolf should. Jarith lied to him. Yet Jarith did not make him obey, did not make him eat all the worlds without thought.

First Wolf flops on his stomach, exhausted. He is quadruped again, and not even four legs can keep him upright. Would it work?

Jarith shrugs. “Maybe. At the least, you can hurt me.”

Yes, he could. He could do terrible, terrible things to Jarith, and the human would not resist.

First Wolf doesn’t want to eat. Nor does he want to destroy the one being who does not fear him. The pack is gone and he will never be part of it. Why did you do this?

Jarith kneels before him. This time, shrunken from all he has let go, First Wolf’s head scarce reaches the human’s thighs were they to stand side by side. Jarith interlaces their fingers in First Wolf’s fur. “They wanted you to eat your home.”

And I did, First Wolf snarls. “I did!”

Jarith doesn’t flinch at his voice. “I know.” They cup their hands against First Wolf’s cheeks, their thumbs pressed under his jaw. Slowly, they tilt his face up until he looks them in the eyes. “I’m so sorry, Wolf.”

Why did Jarith let him? Why not stop him?

If I’d not obeyed, would you still have betrayed us all?

“I would have regardless,” Jarith says. “Might have been harder with you there.”

First Wolf lashes out with one paw, batting Jarith to the ground. He snarls, furious. He did not have to eat his home. And yet, even had he not, he would have lost. It would have taken only a little longer.

Jarith pushes themself to their hands and knees. Their neck is bare, hair pulled to either side of their spine. First Wolf could snap his jaws closed around their throat with such ease.

You should have killed my liege, First Wolf says. Not betrayed them.

“I’ve tried,” Jarith says, and First Wolf hesitates before he pounces. “It never worked.”

Why not? You have a knife to unmake gods.

“They were the one who gave me the blade. It would not harm them.”

First Wolf does not want Jarith to be made of lies. He waits, a howl locked in his throat.

“They gave me a tool to free myself,” Jarith says, the strain clear in their jaw, “so I owed them a debt. But when I escaped the Ninth Sun, I saw a fragment in its heart. One probability mapped across existence.” They inhale slowly. “It was pain.”

Whose?

“I saw you, Wolf. I saw you eat everything. All of it. Until you were alone with never a hope of another’s touch.”

He understands that.

“You were left in pain.” Jarith sits back on their heels. “The starborn would have driven you to your destruction. So I helped our enemies, helped the general and his ship take your liege. For that I’m not sorry.”

Then what is your guilt? He tastes it, overwhelming as Jarith’s hatred was, once.

Jarith edges nearer until they kneel before First Wolf again. “That you must endure, as do I. The Suns’ victory will not lead to peace for us. That’s never been our fate.” Another breath. “But there will be others who will know.”

He understands again.

“We won, in a way.” Jarith shuts their eyes. “The Sun Lords’ power has been forever disrupted by our war and your hunger.”

That is no comfort when the Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf is dead, with the pack freed and scattered, when the ship is gone, when all those who once lived on Sanctuary are eaten. He is helpless. What does a wolf who devoured worlds do when there is nothing left to consume? His own skin is burned away and his liege is ash.

Only Jarith remains.

“What will become of us?” First Wolf asks. His voice, this weight against his tongue, is only a breath when his howl was once the roar of a galaxy being torn asunder.

Jarith tilts their head back, gazing up at the darkened sky. “We could stay here. The gods may not look for us. Not on a devoured world.”

Stay. Home. Us.

First Wolf is not sure he deserves that, after what he’s done. “Will you eat me, if I ask?”

Jarith can make it end. A death that is not burning.

“If you ask.” Jarith swallows and presses their forehead against his. “Please, Wolf. Not yet.”

He shuts his eyes and rests his head in Jarith’s lap. They are alone, with each other, in Sanctuary’s twilight. This empty world will be theirs if they wish it.

“Not yet, then,” First Wolf says.

Jarith holds him, and for a moment, that is enough.

©2019 by A. Merc Rustad. | Art © 2019 by Reiko Murakami.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A. Merc Rustad is a queer non-binary writer who lives in Minnesota and is a 2016 Nebula Awards finalist. Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Uncanny, Shimmer, Cicada, and has been reprinted three times in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad, Patreon, or their website. Their debut short story collection, So You Want To Be A Robot, came out from Lethe Press in May 2017.

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

Engine at Heartspring’s Center

Roger Zelazny | 2830 words

Let me tell you of a creature called the Bork. It was born in the heart of a dying sun. It was cast forth upon this day from the river of past/future as a piece of time pollution. It was fashioned of mud and aluminum, plastic, and some evolutionary distillate of seawater. It had spun dangling from the umbilical of circumstance until, severed by its will, it had fallen a lifetime or so later, coming to rest on the shoals of a world where things go to die. It was a piece of a man in a place by the sea near a resort grown less fashionable since it had become a euthanasia colony.

Choose any of the above and you might be right.

Upon this day, he walked beside the water, poking with his forked, metallic stick at the things the last night’s storm had left: some shiny bit of detritus useful to the weird sisters in their craft shop, worth a meal there or a dollop of polishing rouge for his smoother half; purple seaweed for a salty chowder he had come to favor; a buckle, a button, a shell; a white chip from the casino.

The surf foamed and the wind was high. The heavens were a blue-gray wall, unjointed, lacking the graffiti of birds or commerce. He left a jagged track and one footprint, humming and clicking as he passed over the pale sands. It was near to the point where the forktailed ice birds paused for several days—a week at most—in their migrations. Gone now, portions of the beach were still dotted with their rust-colored droppings. There he saw the girl again, for the third time in as many days. She had tried before to speak with him, to detain him. He had ignored her for a number of reasons. This time, however, she was not alone.

She was regaining her feet, the signs in the sand indicating flight and collapse. She had on the same red dress, torn and stained now. Her black hair—short, with heavy bangs—lay in the only small disarrays of which it was capable. Perhaps thirty feet away was a young man from the Center, advancing toward her. Behind him drifted one of the seldom seen dispatch-machines—about half the size of a man and floating that same distance above the ground, it was shaped like a tenpin, and silver, its bulbous head-end faceted and illuminated, its three ballerina skirts tinfoil-thin and gleaming, rising and falling in rhythms independent of the wind.

Hearing him, or glimpsing him peripherally, she turned away from her pursuers, said, “Help me,” and then she said a name.

He paused for a long while, although the interval was undetectable to her. Then he moved to her side and stopped again.

The man and the hovering machine halted also.

“What is the matter?” he asked, his voice smooth, deep, faintly musical.

“They want to take me,” she said.

“Well?”

“I do not wish to go.”

“Oh. You are not ready?”

“No, I am not ready.”

“Then it is but a simple matter. A misunderstanding.”

He turned toward the two.

“There has been a misunderstanding,” he said. “She is not ready.”

“This is not your affair, Bork,” the man replied. “The Center has made its determination.”

“Then it will have to reexamine it. She says that she is not ready.”

“Go about your business, Bork.”

The man advanced. The machine followed.

The Bork raised his hands, one of flesh, the others of other things.

“No,” he said.

“Get out of the way,” the man said. “You are interfering.”

Slowly, the Bork moved toward them. The lights in the machine began to blink. Its skirts fell. With a sizzling sound it dropped to the sand and lay unmoving. The man halted, drew back a pace.

“I will have to report this—”

“Go away,” said the Bork.

The man nodded, stopped, raised the machine. He turned and carried it off with him, heading up the beach, not looking back. The Bork lowered his arms.

“There,” he said to the girl. “You have more time.”

He moved away then, investigating shell-shucks and driftwood.

She followed him.

“They will be back,” she said.

“Of course.”

“What will I do then?”

“Perhaps by then you will be ready.”

She shook her head. She laid her hand on his human part.

“No,” she said. “I will not be ready.”

“How can you tell, now?”

“I made a mistake,” she said. “I should never have come here.” He halted and regarded her.

“That is unfortunate,” he said. “The best thing that I can recommend is to go and speak with the therapists at the Center. They will find a way to persuade you that peace is preferable to distress.”

“They were never able to persuade you,” she said.

“I am different. The situation is not comparable.”

“I do not wish to die.”

“Then they cannot take you. The proper frame of mind is prerequisite. It is right there in the contract—Item Seven.”

“They can make mistakes. Don’t you think they ever make a mistake? They get cremated the same as the others.”

“They are most conscientious. They have dealt fairly with me.”

“Only because you are virtually immortal. The machines short out in your presence. No man could lay hands on you unless you willed it. And did they not try to dispatch you in a state of unreadiness?”

“That was the result of a misunderstanding.”

“Like mine?”

“I doubt it.”

He drew away from her, continuing on down the beach.

“Charles Eliot Borkman,” she called.

That name again.

He halted once more, tracing lattices with his stick, poking out a design in the sand.

Then, “Why did you say that?” he asked.

“It is your name, isn’t it?”

“No,” he said. “That man died in deep space when a liner was jumped to the wrong coordinates, coming out too near a star gone nova.”

“He was a hero. He gave half his body to the burning, preparing an escape boat for the others. And he survived.”

“Perhaps a few pieces of him did. No more.”

“It was an assassination attempt, wasn’t it?”

“Who knows? Yesterday’s politics are not worth the paper wasted on its promises, its threats.”

“He wasn’t just a politician. He was a statesman, a humanitarian. One of the very few to retire with more people loving him than hating him.”

He made a chuckling noise.

“You are most gracious. But if that is the case, then the minority still had the final say. I personally think he was something of a thug. I am pleased, though, to hear that you have switched to the past tense.”

“They patched you up so well that you could last forever. Because you deserved the best.”

“Perhaps I already have lasted forever. What do you want of me?”

“You came here to die and you changed your mind—”

“Not exactly. I’ve just never composed it in a fashion acceptable under the terms of Item Seven. To be at peace—”

“And neither have I. But I lack your ability to impress this fact on the Center.”

“Perhaps if I went there with you and spoke to them . . .”

“No,” she said. “They would only agree for so long as you were about. They call people like us life-malingerers and are much more casual about the disposition of our cases. I cannot trust them as you do without armor of my own.”

“Then what would you have me do—girl?”

“Nora. Call me Nora. Protect me. That is what I want. You live near here. Let me come stay with you. Keep them away from me.”

He poked at the pattern, began to scratch it out.

“You are certain that this is what you want?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

“All right. You may come with me, then.”

So Nora went to live with the Bork in his shack by the sea. During the weeks that followed, on each occasion when the representatives from the Center came about, the Bork bade them depart quickly, which they did. Finally, they stopped coming by.

Days, she would pace with him along the shores and help in the gathering of driftwood, for she liked a fire at night; and while heat and cold had long been things of indifference to him, he came in time and his fashion to enjoy the glow.

And on their walks he would poke into the dank trash heaps the sea had lofted and turn over stones to see what dwelled beneath.

“God! What do you hope to find in that?” she said, holding her breath and retreating.

“I don’t know,” he chuckled. “A stone? A leaf? A door? Something nice. Like that.”

“Let’s go watch the things in the tidepools. They’re clean, at least.”

“All right.”

Though he ate from habit and taste rather than from necessity, her need for regular meals and her facility in preparing them led him to anticipate these occasions with something approaching a ritualistic pleasure. And it was later still after an evening’s meal, that she came to polish him for the first time. Awkward, grotesque—perhaps it could have been. But as it occurred, it was neither of these. They sat before the fire, drying, warming, watching, silent. Absently, she picked up the rag he had let fall to the floor and brushed a fleck of ash from his flame-reflecting side. Later, she did it again. Much later, and this time with full attention, she wiped all the dust from the gleaming surface before going off to her bed.

One day she asked him, “Why did you buy the one-way ticket to this place and sign the contract, if you did not wish to die?”

“But I did wish it,” he said.

“And something changed your mind after that? What?”

“I found here a pleasure greater than that desire.”

“Would you tell me about it?”

“Surely. I found this to be one of the few situations—perhaps the only—where I can be happy. It is in the nature of the place itself; departure, a peaceful conclusion, a joyous going. Its contemplation here pleases me, living at the end of entropy and seeing that it is good.”

“But it doesn’t please you enough to have you undertake the treatment yourself?”

“No. I find in this a reason for living, not for dying. It may seem a warped satisfaction. But then, I am warped. What of yourself?”

“I just made a mistake. That’s all.”

“They screen you pretty carefully, as I recall. The only reason they made a mistake in my case was that they could not anticipate anyone finding in this place an inspiration to go on living. Could your situation have been similar?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps . . .”

On days when the sky was clear, they would rest in the yellow warmth of the sun, playing small games and sometimes talking of the birds that passed and of the swimming, drifting, branching, floating, and flowering things in their pools. She never spoke of herself, saying whether it was love, hate, despair, weariness, or bitterness that had brought her to this place. Instead, she spoke of those neutral things they shared when the day was bright; and then when the weather kept them indoors, she watched the fire, slept, or polished his armor. It was only much later that she began to sing and to hum, small snatches of tunes recently popular or tunes quite old. At these times, if she felt his eyes upon her she stopped abruptly and turned to another thing.

One night then, when the fire had burned low, as she sat buffing his plates, slowly, quite slowly, she said in a soft voice, “I believe that I am falling in love with you.”

He did not speak, nor did he move. He gave no sign of having heard. After a long while, she said, “It is most strange, finding myself feeling this way—here—under these circumstances. . . .”

“Yes,” he said, after a time.

After a longer while, she put down the cloth and took hold of his hand—the human one—and felt his grip tighten upon her own.

“Can you?” she said, much later.

“Yes. But I would crush you, little girl.”

She ran her hands over his plates, then back and forth from flesh to metal. She pressed her lips against his only cheek that yielded.

“We’ll find a way,” she said, and of course they did.

In the days that followed, she sang more often, sang happier things and did not break off when he regarded her. And sometimes he would awaken from the light sleep that even he required, awaken and through the smallest aperture of his lens note that she lay there or sat watching him, smiling. He sighed occasionally for the pure pleasure of feeling the rushing air within and about him, and there was a peace and a pleasure come into him of the sort he had long since relegated to the realms of madness, dream, and vain desire. Occasionally, he even found himself whistling.

One day as they sat on a bank, the sun nearly vanished, the stars coming on, the deepening dark was melted about a tiny wick of falling fire and she let go of his hand and pointed.

“A ship,” she said.

“Yes,” he answered, retrieving her hand.

“Full of people.”

“A few, I suppose.”

“It is sad.”

“It must be what they want, or what they want to want.”

“It is still sad.”

“Yes. Tonight. Tonight it is sad.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Then, too, I daresay.”

“Where is your old delight in the graceful end, the peaceful winding-down?”

“It is not on my mind so much these days. Other things are there.” They watched the stars until the night was all black and light and filled with cold air. Then, “What is to become of us?” she said.

“Become?” he said. “If you are happy with things as they are, there is no need to change them. If you are not, then tell me what is wrong.”

“Nothing,” she said. “When you put it that way, nothing. It was just a small fear—a cat scratching at my heart, as they say.”

“I’ll scratch your heart myself,” he said, raising her as if she were weightless.

Laughing, he carried her back to the shack.

It was out of a deep, drugged-seeming sleep that he dragged himself/was dragged much later, by the sound of her weeping. His time sense felt distorted, for it seemed an abnormally long interval before her image registered, and her sobs seemed unnaturally drawn out and far apart.

“What—is—it?” he said, becoming at that moment aware of the faint, throbbing, pinprick after-effect in his biceps.

“I did not—want you to—awaken,” she said. “Please go back to sleep.”

“You are from the Center, aren’t you?”

She looked away.

“It does not matter,” he said.

“Sleep. Please. Do not lose the—”

“—requirements of Item Seven,” he finished. “You always honor a contract, don’t you?”

“That is not all that it was—to me.”

“You meant what you said, that night?”

“I came to.”

“Of course you would say that now. Item Seven—”

“You bastard!” she said, and she slapped him.

He began to chuckle, but it stopped when he saw the hypodermic on the table at her side. Two spent ampules lay with it.

“You didn’t give me two shots,” he said, and she looked away.

“Come on.” He began to rise. “We’ve got to get you to the Center. Get the stuff neutralized. Get it out of you.”

She shook her head.

“Too late—already. Hold me. If you want to do something for me, do that.”

He wrapped all of his arms about her and they lay that way while the tides and the winds cut, blew and ebbed, grinding their edges to an ever more perfect fineness.

I think—

Let me tell you of the creature called the Bork. It was born in the heart of a dying star. It was a piece of a man and pieces of many other things. If the things went wrong, the man-piece shut them down and repaired them. If he went wrong, they shut him down and repaired him. It was so skillfully fashioned that it might have lasted forever. But if part of it should die, the other pieces need not cease to function, for it could still contrive to carry on the motions the total creature had once performed. It is a thing in a place by the sea that walks beside the water, poking with its forked, metallic stick at the other things the waves have tossed. The human piece, or a piece of the human piece, is dead.

Choose any of the above.

©1974 by Roger Zelazny. Originally published in Analog: Science Fiction/Science Fact. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roger Zelazny (1937 – 1995) was the legendary author of such books as The Chronicles of Amber, Lord of Light, and This Immortal, as well as many other classic novels and nearly one hundred fifty short stories—including classics such as “Damnation Alley,” “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” and “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.” He’s a six-time winner of the Hugo Award, a three-time winner of the Nebula Award, and is in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Midway

Tony Ballantyne | 4840 words

It’s not unusual to hear music in a spaceport arrival lounge. After all, if aliens didn’t enjoy music, I’d never have been able to travel.

But this sounded familiar. Disturbingly familiar. Standing in line, I felt a sinking sensation as the tune wound its way to its conclusion. It was The Beatles. Millions of light years from Earth and I was listening to The Beatles.

How did I feel?

For nearly fifteen years now, I’ve been the first. The first human to step onto whichever planet I’ve arrived at, the first to breath the alien air, the first to make contact with yet another alien race. Today that run was broken. Someone had been here before me.

So how did I feel? Confused? Angry? A little scared, even?

All those things. But if I’m honest, I also felt relieved.

• • • •

Of the billions of planets in the galaxy, there are only a small percentage that have the right conditions for humans to visit. Of those, a still smaller percentage support life we can interact with. By that I mean life that comes in individual organic bodies, that isn’t a hive mind, or a cloud of gas, or electrical potentials in a crystal matrix. I mean the sort of life that travels by faster-than-light ships and understands the concept of trade in intellectual property.

Fortunately, there are so many planets in the galaxy that even a fraction of a fraction of a percentage still leaves a vast number for travellers such as myself to visit.

Explorers, adventurers, individuals. We head out on unique paths: It would be bad manners to choose a path that intersects with a fellow traveller.

Let me paint you a picture. Imagine someone blew on the dandelion Earth. We’re the expanding cloud of seeds, drifting through the wonders of the universe.

We expose ourselves to the experiences of the galaxy, we trade the accumulated culture of millennia that we carry in the memory of our consoles. Poetry, literature, music, images, movies, mathematics: all scanned and digitised, ready to be shared. In short, we trade the achievements of Earth for food, accommodation and onward travel.

Why do we do it?

Let me tell you something. The first humans who travelled into space were scientists. Twelve white men. They went to the moon, walked around, collected rocks and measured things. Then they came back home. What did we learn about the moon from that?

Nothing.

We should have sent poets and writers and artists to the moon, people who could communicate what it was really like to be there. We should have sent people like us. The travellers. We head to the galaxy core to bathe in a field of light and radiation, or we travel outwards to the rim, to stand at the edge of emptiness. We post our experiences to our streams so that those back at home can appreciate the alien.

That’s how I’ve lived for nearly thirty years. For the last fifteen of those years, I’ve been at the cutting edge of an expanding bubble of human space. Everything I’ve seen has been fresh, everything I’ve experienced, original.

Until today.

It’s ironic. A few weeks ago I passed my fiftieth birthday, alone in a cabin on just another alien ship travelling between the stars. I reached the midpoint of my life at the midpoint of the journey, and it gave me pause.

The halfway point of life. It’s a sobering thought. The decision point: Go onward, or turn around and return to Earth. For weeks I’d been wondering if I’d ever see another human again. I’d been wondering whether to go on into the unknown, or to return home.

Now the decision had been taken from me. Home had come to me, here in this spaceport.

• • • •

“Hey Earth Guy! Come talk to me!”

The words were spoken by a fungus-covered biped sitting at one of the many bars that filled the deliberately circuitous route from arrivals to the transport interchange.

“Hey! I know you can hear me, Earth Guy!”

Some people are of the opinion that, just because they recognise your species, they have a monopoly on your time. I don’t share that opinion. I kept on walking, tried to blend in with the other passengers, hoping that the strange creature didn’t call out to them instead.

“Earth Guy! Where are your manners? Come on! Talk to me! You are travel a long way from home! I got some news for you! You speak to me, I tell you a secret! Something you want to know!”

Of course he had a secret. They always do. Everyone thinks they have a story or a secret or some piece of knowledge no one else has. That’s how they convince themselves they’re special.

Not me. I am different. There’s no one like me for light years. I’ve traded my way across the galaxy on the basis of my uniqueness. It’s only in the past few years I have begun to realise that anyone could have done what I’ve done. Just because something is different doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile.

Something gave way inside me and I ended up taking a seat next to the creature. Not too close. The fungus that covered his chitinous skin smelled unpleasant.

“That’s it!” he said, obviously delighted. “You sit here. Sit here with Rexel. We have a drink! This far from home, how many people know how to have a drink and a chat?”

“Not many,” I said.

“So you buy me a drink and I tell you a secret.”

I ordered two Andromedan spirits, a drink they serve across the galaxy that is neither a spirit nor Andromedan.

The barthing placed two porous clay bowls before us. Rexel had no hands. I watched as he reached out with two arms ending in fungus-covered spoons that stuck to the bowl. He lifted it into the air and sniffed. I did the same.

“Oh, that’s good!” said Rexel, his fungus covering shimmering orange. I blinked, trying to figure out if the effect was real or just the spirit playing games with my vision.

“So what’s the secret?” I asked.

Rexel looked around, as if he expected others to be listening. No one was. We were in the anonymous region of the spacelines, the impersonal corridors that accommodate every species without quite suiting any. The lighting is always a little too bright, the atmosphere antiseptic.

“I like aliens,” said Rexel. “I was study them at university. Maybe I travel the galaxy too. Maybe I go towards Earth.”

I shrugged. “That’s a plan.”

“Build on known knowledge, not have to discover new places. My way is depth not breadth.”

“Good for you. So what do you know?”

“I know humans. I know about you. You are male.”

“You’re very perceptive,” I said, carefully.

“I see human who visit this place before you. I know where that human go.”

I feigned boredom.

“I’m not sure what that’s got to do with me,” I said. “I travel alone.”

“All the time?” said Rexel. “I think you are interested. I know about humans. About sex drive.”

I gazed into my bowl, trying to conceal my quickening interest. The Andromedan spirit was pale blue, a white vapour rolled across the surface.

Rexel chattered on.

“This human who came through here. She are female. That interest you, I think. A human woman! When was the last time you see a woman?”

Twelve years ago.

“You want to see a woman again?”

And that was the thing. I just didn’t know.

• • • •

Let me explain.

There’s a story that goes round the streams claiming that the universe is much smaller than we thought. So what? you might say. Well, there’s another theory that the universe enfolds itself, that if you travel for long enough in one direction, you get back to where you started.

It’s a story that’s often told amongst those of us heading outwards.

Here’s another story. In this one, they’re developing a new sort of FTL drive. One that’s much, much faster than the one we currently use. That drive is almost built, they say. Ships are due to come leaping through the galaxy. Sometime soon they’ll appear out here at the edge of the expansion.

You can hear the edge of desperation in the voices of the people who repeat those stories. Those people are regretting their journey but don’t want to admit it, least of all to themselves. I met many people like that in the first years of my journey; I resolved there and then never to turn out like them. I would go on, or I would return home, but whatever I did, I would make a definite decision. I wouldn’t travel on saying I believed one thing, secretly hoping for something else to be the case.

And yet, here I was at the midway of my life and, guess what? Hey presto! Another human had appeared. Not just another human, but a woman.

I wanted to see her, yes. But for what reason? Was this a way of dipping my toe in the water of human company again?

“Where did she go?” I asked.

“Ah! You pay!” he said.

“I have nothing to pay,” I answered. “My world’s culture is here already. I have enough credit to travel on to one more planet. Maybe two. I need to sell my culture soon, or I’ll be stranded.”

“You have something to pay. I’m . . . what’s the word . . .?” Rexel tilted his head, checking something, somehow. “Anthropologist. We mate, you and me. That’s how you pay.”

He gazed at me.

“This make you uncomfortable?”

It didn’t make me uncomfortable.

First, don’t be fooled by the pronouns. The translator on my console was hit by some archaic upgrade a few planets back which caused it to default to he/him. This was an alien. Sex and gender rarely equate with human forms.

Second, when dealing with anthropologists, you’ll find it’s not the plumbing so much as the ritual, the courtship, that interests them.

Anyway, why go into space if not to experience the other?

That wasn’t the reason for my silence.

No. The reason was that by asking the woman’s whereabouts, I’d made a choice. I’d already taken a step towards Earth. Despite my recent doubts, I’d lived this way for fifteen years. It was a big step to go off chasing another human.

And there was a risk, too. The risk of bitter disappointment. It was attractive, the thought of listening to a woman’s voice. A woman who had travelled like me. She would understand. However different we were, we’d both be part of the same jigsaw puzzle. I ached for that.

But what if Rexel had got it wrong? I heard of someone who travelled six months only to find themselves in an alien museum displaying a copy of the Venus de Milo.

I should have thought about it. It was too big a decision to make after a bowl of spirit. But my mouth seemed to speak for me.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

• • • •

And so I mated with Rexel. Like I said, it’s not the sex, it’s not even the foreplay, though you’d be surprised how far you can go with some races.

Of course, if you read my stream, you’d know all about this.

I wonder how many people really read my stream?

Anyway, I did it, and it was enjoyable. It nearly always is. And when we’d finished, Rexel gave me a location. Another planet. I used some of my rapidly depleting credit to buy a ticket on to the next place . . .

• • • •

Another three weeks spent on an FTL ship, travelling to yet another planet.

It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that these ships are my true home. The passenger ships with their retail areas selling standardised artefacts of sanitised cultures. The food decks with their shape-coded buffets. The endless corridors where so many species share the same space without really mingling.

There’s a feeling of stasis, being a passenger on a ship. Everyone is busy but you. Security, entertainment, controllers, helpers: They all have their role. Passengers have nothing to do but sleep and eat and walk the corridors and socialise.

I’d given up on socialising on ships years ago. There was nothing to be learnt in space. Species on their home worlds are interesting. On a ship, even the most alien creature is just another traveller.

I stayed in my quarters and fretted. I’d committed to looking for the woman. I tried to prepare myself for disappointment. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t care. Whether I saw her or not, I would continue with my travels.

Or maybe return home.

I found myself flicking through some of the Earth texts on my console. Odd, I’d travelled so far and yet I’d never really looked at the culture I carried with me.

One of the texts really grabbed my attention. It was a description of Hell: to be removed an infinite distance from God. The farther out you go, the harder it is to go back. You spend eternity convincing yourself you’re moving in the right direction.

• • • •

At last we made planetfall. My screen showed an uninspiring view of wide marshes, gray with birds. I’ve posted to my stream many times about the importance of not being put off by your first sight of a planet. Spaceports are often set in desolate regions, places where little damage is caused should things go wrong.

I felt a sense of excitement I hadn’t had in years. The sense was heightened when I left the ship. This was an old-fashioned spaceport: I had disembarked outside, into the elements, stood between the glass wall of the arrivals lounge and the artificial world of the ship’s interior. Caught in an untamed strip of the world with the wind gusting rain over me.

I smiled. The weather was invigorating. I felt like a traveller again, felt the thrill of arrival, of a new world to explore.

According to my console, the planet was named Kâffk’k, and the spaceport I’d landed at was in the country of Ké, near the city of UAff’k. I’d long given up caring. Those alien names sound so exotic, but they invariably turn out to mean River Port or Three Hills or West Bridge.

Even so, this planet was charmingly rustic. The arrivals lounge was small. It was decorated in gray slate and clear panes of what looked to be real glass. The merchants were all local; there were none of the familiar retail chains that made one place in the galaxy just the same as any other.

The dominant species of this world reminded me of hairy anteaters. They had an alarming habit of rearing up on their hind legs to look at you with their disturbingly human brown eyes. Their long, incredibly sensitive tongues were used in place of hands to manipulate objects. I saw one of them crouching on all fours by an open inspection panel in a wall, tongue flickering back and forth as it fixed some fault.

It took me some time to find the government trading post. It was located in a transparent dome down a gravel path some distance from the arrivals lounge. Rain pattered on the roof of the dome as I handed across my console.

“Thank you,” said the Trading Official. “Just give me a moment.”

“You speak English!” I said. I couldn’t remember the last time I heard someone speak an Earth language. In space, everyone communicates in Brevo. Rexel had spoken Brevo.

“I don’t speak English,” said the alien. “It’s enough that you do. We’re a telepathic race.”

“Oh. So, have you encountered humans before?” Had it seen the woman, in other words?

It fixed me with one of its liquid brown eyes.

“One thing we value above all else on Kâffk’k is privacy.”

“I’m sorry.”

It interfaced its console with mine. I watched as it read what it found there.

“Fifty-five percent of your culture is known to us. Fifteen percent is of no interest. We would be willing to buy the remaining thirty percent.”

“Go for it,” I said.

My console interfaced with the alien’s as it ran the Fair Exchange software. I gave my consent to the transaction and watched with satisfaction as my credit level took on a more healthy appearance.

“I’m looking for another human,” I said. “I was told she was on this planet.”

“As I said, we respect privacy on this world.”

“Oh.”

I waited. There would be a way. There always was.

“If people want to be found, they travel to the UAff’k gardens.”

“The UAff’k gardens? How do I get there?”

“Take the fanboat to UAff’k. Someone there will give you directions.”

• • • •

Kâffk’k turned out to be a really rather beautiful planet. The inhabitants liked their privacy, and that turned out to be a good thing. They kept their towns and cities small, they tucked them away amongst the surrounding landscape, they hid them amongst the large polished boulders that littered the planet. I wasn’t sure if the boulders were natural or carefully crafted. Either way, they looked rather spectacular, especially when the setting sun cast long shadows across the land.

The boulders were impressive; the trees, however, were something else. Evolution fills niches in similar ways on each world. Kâffk’k trees had hairy leaves and polished bark and were quietly wonderful. The inhabitants were rightly proud of their trees.

If the planet was beautiful, then the UAff’k gardens were sublime. My console informed me they had been cultivated for thousands of years, that the landscape and stone and vegetation had been carefully shaped over the centuries to achieve an aspect most pleasing to the native eye. It was certainly pleasing to the human eye.

I followed paths made of patterned stone slabs that were laid throughout the forest seemingly at random. The garden was peaceful, but I felt a growing sense of frustration. How was I supposed to find anyone here? The place seemed vast. I could wander for weeks without seeing anyone.

There were sleeping platforms hidden around the garden. As evening approached, I would choose one on which to spend the night. Sometimes I would come across a Kâffk’k family curled around each other and I would back away, hands raised in apology. Mostly though, the platforms were empty and I would curl up in a heat field and sleep, dreaming of Earth.

Dreaming of women.

• • • •

I woke up to a cold morning. The nearby ponds were covered in patterns of ice. The fern patterns were the same as the ones back on Earth.

Someone was standing before me, reared up on their hind legs, big brown eyes gazing at me. A youth. You pick up a sense about these things. It seemed more eager, more interested in me than an adult would be.

“May I read your mind?” he said. He. That was the gender he assigned himself in my thoughts.

“You’re asking permission?” I wondered.

“Of course.”

“You’ll know all my thoughts, all my memories?”

“No. I see your speech centres only.”

“Then you’re reading my mind, surely?”

“I am. But I will stop if you wish me to.”

I laughed.

“No, go on. I’m assuming there’s nothing much to see in my speech centres anyway.”

“Nothing for you to be embarrassed about.”

“Good. So. What can I do for you?”

“You’re a traveller. I want to be a traveller, too.”

That was me once.

“Why?” I asked.

“I want to see new places. I want to tell people here about them. I’ve been reading your stream, I’ve been reading your impressions of my planet. It’s . . . interesting. You have a different perspective.”

“A different perspective?” I said. I could hear the bitterness in my voice. “So what? There are billions of people out there. Trillions. The last thing we need is another perspective.”

The creature swayed. He seemed shocked.

“How can you say that? I read your stream, it helped me to understand what it was to be human.”

“Really?”

I didn’t want to say that I didn’t think I was the best person to comment on what it was to be human. Not now. I’m so far from home, so removed from human company.

Despite his promise to the contrary, the creature appeared to be picking up on my thoughts.

“You seem angry to see me,” he said.

“I’m not angry at you. I’m angry at myself. You have a lovely home world. Why would you want to leave it?”

“For the same reason you left your home world, I imagine.”

“That was then,” I said, suddenly drained of all energy. “I’m so tired of this. All of this travelling, and to what end? What have I achieved?”

“You’ve seen the universe!”

“No. I’ve seen just a little bit of the galaxy. And not even all of that. Just the parts of it where people fly spaceships, where they welcome aliens, where they are not only similar enough to us to breathe air and eat food, but similar enough to have the concept of tourist.”

“I don’t understand.”

I shook my head.

“I do. Listen, there are too many people like me, all unique and all boring because of it. Don’t do it. Stay here. Raise a family. Do something useful with your life.”

“How can you say that? You didn’t stay at home!”

“I wish I had. I wish I had someone tell me the same when I was your age. No, you’ve done me a favour. You’ve helped me to decide. I’ve had enough. I’m going back.”

“Going back where?”

“Back home. Back to Earth.”

“Why?”

“Because if I don’t turn around now, I’ll never get there. It took me thirty years to get out here. It will take me another thirty years to get back.”

I looked over his shoulder, and I froze.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

• • • •

She was standing in the trees, watching me.

I swallowed. I didn’t realise it would be like this. I didn’t realise just how huge a thing it would be. Another human. So familiar, and so different.

She was coming forward. Walking into the clearing.

“You realise it only reflects back your thoughts?” she said. “You’re not really having a conversation with the creature. You’re having a conversation with yourself.”

The sound of her voice. The way she walked. The shape of her face, the curve of the back of her neck, the slenderness of her wrists. I drank it all in. She must have felt it, too. Her pupils were dilated, she couldn’t keep the look of happy eagerness from her face. When was the last time she’d seen a man, I wondered?

We stared at each other. She reached out and touched my chin, rasped the prickle of my beard. I closed my eyes. I’d hidden from myself how much I’d missed that, the touch of a human hand.

We lay on the platform and made love. Why not? We’d neither of us seen another human for so long. It was just so right to touch and feel and to do something we were made to do. To be with someone who was part of the same jigsaw.

But only once. That was enough. If we’d cared for human contact that much, we’d never have left Earth.

We talked. She was ten years older than me, and she’d set off from Earth ten years ahead of me.

“At first I just travelled outwards,” she said. “And then, ten years ago, when I was about your age, I started to think to myself, what’s the point?”

She smiled as she saw my expression. “You feel the same?”

I nodded.

“I was on a planet,” she said. “I’d just traded my culture for credit, and it suddenly came to me, all this time I’d been looking at the new, I’d never really sampled the old. I’d carried the culture of Earth across the galaxy on my console, and I’d never thought to look at it myself.”

Her words hit me like a blow to the stomach. I’d done the same. Only a couple of weeks ago, on the ship, I’d done the same.

She was gazing up into the gray sky.

“That night, I listened to some music. Something completely at random. At first I thought I’d made a mistake, that I was playing something from some alien planet I’d visited.”

She hummed something to herself. Then she spoke.

“It sounded so odd. I looked at my console. It wasn’t alien. I was listening to something from Earth. Music played on a koto, tuned to the Insen scale. Have you heard it? No? And then suddenly, I felt cast adrift. The music. Only five notes in the scale, and yet there was so much depth. So much there. I understood something then. All this travelling and I’d only touched the surface. I’d only seen the skin: the wonders, the architecture, the spectacles. I’d never seen the little things. The houses, the families, the sick, the elderly. I’d never encountered the human side of being alien. Do you understand what I mean?”

I did.

“I’ve been thinking the same,” I said. “That’s what made my mind up. That’s why I’m going back.”

“Really?” she said. “I didn’t.”

I sat up. Swung my legs over the side of the platform.

“Why not?”

She remained lying there, hands behind her head. She smiled.

“I remembered the old joke,” she said, “and I thought, well, if I were to start my life again, I wouldn’t start it from here. You know, like the man asking for directions?”

“I don’t know the joke,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter.” She sat up. She hugged her legs with her arms. “But it occurred to me that I was where I was, and I’d done what I’d done.”

She pushed me, indicated that she wanted me to move so she could get off the platform. She stepped out into the clearing and stretched her hands into the air. I watched her as slowly, she turned around in a circle.

When she was facing me once more she dropped her hands and smiled.

“And this is what I’m going to keep on doing,” she said. “I can’t start again, but I can make this work. You can trade in your car or you can fix it up and turn it into a classic. I think the second option is the better choice. That’s what I’ve been doing. Come on.”

She held out a hand. I took it, and it felt warm and dry. She pulled me to my feet.

“Everyone loses confidence half way through a project,” she said. “It’s only natural. But this was right when you started and it’s right now. You’re more that person you wanted to be now than you were at the beginning.”

“But . . .”

“No buts.” She wagged her finger at me. “I’m not saying we’re perfect. Of course we’re not. But fixing the faults and admitting the mistakes is the brave thing, not giving up and starting again. You’re in danger of sinking into bitterness and cynicism. Why? You’re out here where no human has ever been.”

She laughed. She was still holding my hand. I didn’t want her to let go.

“Well, apart from me. But in a week’s time we’ll both be moving on again. You left Earth. It was the right decision at the time. You enjoyed what you were doing.”

She squeezed my hand, a sixty-year-old woman on a far-away planet, and she seemed so full of life. So human.

“Dreams die,” she said. “Reinvigorate them. The start is the easy part, it’s always harder halfway through, that’s when it’s more important to keep going. You’re midway in your life, caught between nothing and nothing. Move from believing in something to looking for it. That’s what drove you out here, looking for fulfilment.”

“Well, yes,” I said. “Everyone wants fulfilment.”

“Exactly,” she said. “And they find it by loving deeply or by standing in awe before the universe. Well, you chose the latter. So go on! You can choose to journey inwards or outwards. You and me, we chose outwards. So follow that path to the end!”

She was smiling at me, watching me as I processed what she had said.

I was holding her hand, her liver-spotted hand that had travelled all the way across the Galaxy to find my hand and those two things fitted together perfectly. Soon we would let go and move apart. I would travel on alone. And then what? I thought of dying on some alien world.

Then I thought of dying on Earth. What was the difference?

It was the life before that mattered, not the brief moment of extinction.

©2019 by Tony Ballantyne.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tony Ballantyne is the author of the acclaimed Penrose and Recursion series of novels as well as many short stories that have appeared in magazines and anthologies around the world. He has been nominated for the BSFA and Philip K Dick awards.

Dream Paris, a follow up to the critically acclaimed Dream London, was published in September 2015.

He is currently getting back to his SF roots by writing a space opera. Due to popular demand, he has also recently begun working on a series of short stories set in the Recursion universe.

He lives in Oldham, near Manchester. Find out more at tonyballantyne.com.

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

The Book Collector

Sarah Micklem | 9050 words

“Go away, Todd. We’re busy,” Larry said. “Besides, you’re wasting your time. You know she only likes to fuck imaginary people.”

“That’s because she hasn’t tried the real deal,” Todd said.

“And that would be you?” Larry asked.

Col yawned ostentatiously at Todd, but he didn’t take the hint. He was thick that way. There was hardly room for two people in the cubicle Col shared with Larry, with their desks face-to-face and their screens back-to-back, but Todd came in anyway and put his hand on the back of Col’s chair and leaned over her shoulder. “What are you working on? I heard you haven’t left the building for three days.”

She hit the button to silver the screen and spun her chair so violently Todd had to take his hand away.

“Your business?” She glared and he took two steps back.

“C’mon, Col,” he said lamely.

Todd was white, male, virus-free (he said), and twenty-five, and he thought he was the default human being, of which other human beings were secondary and probably inferior versions. She knew why he came around so often, and it wasn’t her natural charm. She was the only female on the floor, maybe the only female left in the company, who had not succumbed to him. Except Alicia. Every time he came by Col’s cubicle to see if she was ready to hook up, she thought of herself dangling from his penis like a fish. It was anti-erotic. If she had been stupid enough to fuck a co-worker, she would rather do Larry, who was of course more interested in doing Todd. Office politics.

“You know why I stay here all night?” Col said. “It’s because I’m interrupted an average of every nine minutes during the day by inconsequential demands on my attention and I can’t get any work done. Gwen goes live on Friday and I’m still tweaking her. So no, I won’t go down the hall for, like, a quick boff on the conference table, like, as you so delicately put it.”

Larry pointed to the Genius at Work sign behind Col’s head. “We are artistes here, and you are a hack, so get thee to thy cubicle.”

They laughed at Todd and he went away, but he had a resilient plastic ego and any dents they put in it always popped right out again.

“I love when you get all pedantic on him,” Larry said. “But don’t you think he has a nice ass for a white boy?”

“Nope. No. No way,” Col said. “I’m not interested in any human who can’t pass the Turing test.”

“Ha. Ha,” Larry said, making each sound a separate word.

The first computer to pass the Turing test had done so back in 2013, by convincing 30% of the human judges that they were conversing with a real person. Todd, on the other hand, had never yet said anything to Col that convinced her he had a personality. He was too predictable. She thought unpredictability was an intrinsic part of the feel of engaging with another human mind, and she programmed it into her characters—not random unpredictability, but the kind that issued from a complex and not fully knowable interior. Which is one reason why the characters she designed felt so human to their users, and why she had a Genius at Work sign above her head, and why she worked all night at the office. It wasn’t why she was paid the big bucks—they didn’t pay her all that much money, considering her talent. But she felt appreciated at Incubus, and the bosses gave her the freedom to do good work.

Larry said, “You finished Gwen last week, I happen to know. Who are you working on? Don’t you want to talk it out, bounce it around?”

“He’s too new. I’m just getting a feel for him.”

“Him? Can I Beta test? I love your men. Who is he for?”

“It’s weird,” Col said. “Devlin won’t tell me who the client is. Supposedly an art collector, a real moneybags, who read about me in that interview in Mind. Thinks what we do is art. So I get to make anyone I want. And here’s the weirdest thing: Moneybags is going to build a huge stand-alone computer to house the character, and buy a license for our software—can you imagine how much that will cost?—and keep him in a private gallery. Maybe donate him to a museum later. And that will be the only copy. Incubus agreed in the contract not to keep a backup. So when I finish this guy, he’s gone, he’s really done and gone. No going back to tweak him, no upgrades. No visiting.”

“When were you going to tell me this?”

“Right about now, I guess.”

“Shit. I can’t even say it’s not fair. You deserve it after cranking so long on that bitch Gwen.”

“I hate re-creations,” Col said.

“They suck.”

They shared a moment of silence over the fact that re-creations sucked. Gwen, the real Gwen, had divorced her husband five years ago. He still had a yen for her—though maybe it was just a yen to slap her around. Gwen the succubus was not like the real Gwen, of course; she was the husband’s version, quite a different entity. But the two Gwens shared a lot of traits. They were greedy, shallow, blonde, and, of course, slender and big-breasted. But the succubus would never walk out on the client, not for good. She’d do him wrong—she wouldn’t be a reasonable facsimile of Gwen if she didn’t do him wrong—but she would always come groveling back. At the client’s request, she’d never get a year older or a pound heavier. The succubus knew how to please him in bed, and he didn’t have to ask. But if he wanted to ask, if he wanted to demand, he could, the way he never could with the real woman. Gwen the succubus had already cost him a small fortune, but she would never try to take him for all he was worth like the ex-wife.

Gwen had been hell: sixteen months in development, three months of testing before the client ever saw her, another five months before he signed off. Two years of Col’s life. Gwen hadn’t been Col’s only project during that time, but she was definitely the most annoying. They hadn’t seen the last of her, either, since the client had bought a maintenance contract in case the succubus started to deviate too much. But that was not Col’s problem. That was the sort of thing any competent production slavey could do.

Larry said, “Wow, if this shit we do is art . . .”

“I know. If it’s art, I’m going to make the male equivalent of the Mona Lisa.”

• • • •

Hours after Larry left for the day, Col went down the concrete stairs to the first floor in her stocking feet. It was 11:30 p.m. and the last possible minute to get Japanese food delivered to the office. Back in her cubicle, Col put her feet up on the desk and slurped udon noodles, making a mess. She’d forgotten to eat that day and she was hungry.

The offices of Incubus were designed for the twenty-four-hour workday. There were seven-foot-long sofas in the lounges, enough vending machines to stock an old-fashioned automat, showers, lockers, and a gym Col had never visited. The company paid a premium to those willing to work in the actual offices rather than at home. The bosses had studies proving upside down and sideways that it enhanced productivity for people to mingle in the flesh, despite the fact that they all wasted time on gossiping, caffeine breaks, and playing pool. The frat house upstairs, third to eighth floors, housed the mass-market sex game designers—Todd was in the spatter division, churning out perfect victims. It was a twenty-four-hour circus up there for guys in their twenties who got paid to think about sex all day.

But it was quiet on Col’s floor, in the luxury division where they made one-of-a-kind characters. Management claimed that her division lost money, which she didn’t believe. Maybe they didn’t have huge profit margins, but the things they figured out about tickling the human psyche ended up in mass-market incubi and succubi, the kind an average plebe could download onto an average home system, so he or she could jerk off to an interactive pornographic movie.

On the high end, where she worked, they could do a lot more than provide an enhanced version of phone sex. A very rich client could afford a Sensorium. The Sensorium exploited the fact that every person had a unique body map in the neocortex that registered sensations: It was how you knew your right index finger had been pricked or you were flexing a muscle in your left leg. The techs at Incubus would scan a client’s brain to chart his or her body map; then they would surgically implant a Sensorium, a six-centimeter patch of engineered skin that delivered stimuli to the right neurons. Implantation was usually followed by a few frustrating weeks of trial and error and threats of lawsuits, until the client’s brain learned to accommodate the new input.

The Sensorium could simulate perceptions that registered on the skin, like pressure and temperature, and also the inner kinesthetic sensations of movement, balance, the feel of heart and breath. The technology was imperfect. It couldn’t do smell, for example. Smell was too complicated, there were too many molecules that the olfactory nerve could detect—but it could do taste: sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. Taste was not as good without smell, of course. And it still required a large dose of imagination to experience the full effect of jacking in. Col liked to think of that as collaboration with the client.

There had to be something worth jacking into. There had to be content: an interactive program, a rich environment, and someone worth meeting. That required access to Incubus’s mega computer and its proprietary database and rendering software, and most of all to the characters Col and Larry and the other designers created. With all that in place, the experiences that came through the Sensorium were as real as a dream while you are dreaming it. But you were wide-awake.

Col had been outfitted with her own Sensorium. She had to have it to test her creations. It represented a $263,000 investment for the company and a seven-year unbreakable contract for her, which was up for renewal next year. She was planning to renew. She worked to please herself, she always had, though lately clients’ sexual fantasies bored her, and she contented herself with figuring out technical problems.

What made Col good at her job, what made her very, very good, was that each of her characters always seemed to do what he or she wanted, but all the time it was what the client wanted and was not self-aware enough to know. Every human being starred in a private psychodrama, and unconsciously tried to cast other people for various parts, but of course those people had their own private psychodramas, so things got complicated. Better to cast a character. The character, unlike a real person, paid attention to you. The character got your number and punched it in and had you doing and feeling things you never dreamed you’d do or feel.

It was true. Col really did prefer fucking imaginary people.

Her favorite time at work was when the hall lights switched on and off as she passed, and the phones stopped blaring, and it was dim and quiet on the floor. She could daydream at night. Sometimes when people asked what she did for a living, she would say, “Daydream.”

She was daydreaming about the book collector. For the past three nights, all night, she’d been looking at paintings in museum databases, trying to find the portrait of a gentleman book collector she had seen in a museum last year. She couldn’t remember the museum, the theme of the exhibit, the subject’s name, or the painter’s name. She wasn’t sure of the painting’s century or country of origin. It baffled her that she could recall technical specs from three years ago, some bug found and defeated in obsolete software, but not this, which she so much desired to remember. All that had stayed with her was an image: a man in a red jacket, partly open down the front, showing a loose white shirt underneath. Laces dangled from the shirt. He had brown hair and an interesting face. The label said he had spent all his money on books and didn’t care how he dressed.

She hadn’t found him, though she’d looked at hundreds, maybe thousands of portraits. From what she remembered of his clothes, she had narrowed the date down to late fifteenth, early sixteenth century. Before they had those ridiculous slashed doublets. She was sure she would have remembered a poufy doublet.

He had famous friends, rich and titled friends, she thought. He had other friends, too, rakehells, gamblers, and duelists. They sought him out even after he beggared himself collecting books, because he was the kind of man people wanted to know.

She had stood in front of the portrait a long time. She couldn’t remember a single other painting from the exhibit. She had carried away an impression of stiff people in stiff garments enriched with lace, embroidery, furs, gold thread, pearls and jewels. Some of the men had worn armor plate. He was not like them.

She was looking for his face again. She wanted to know his name and when he had lived. She wanted to give the portrait to Alicia so she could start modeling him and researching costumes, and put the set designers to work.

But Col couldn’t remember enough to go on. She couldn’t find him and it was driving her crazy and taking too much of her time. She started saving portraits for Alicia with annotations: those lips, that nose, a fine pair of eyes. They had interesting faces in the late fifteenth century, and fabulous clothes. Here was a great self-portrait of Durer in 1498 in a black and white striped cap. His gathered shirt hung halfway down his chest under a gaping ivory jacket with black trim. He had a cloak slung over one shoulder, fastened with a striped cord, and long golden hair and a sidelong look. Who knew Durer was such a dandy? And here was a German guy with a codpiece jutting out from under his jerkin like a cornucopia. Her man would have a codpiece, too, of course, but nothing quite so obvious. She would leave it to Alicia to figure out the details, the fascinating fastenings.

Since Col had forgotten the book collector’s name, she must give him a new one, and a rank to go with it. He should be English so she could talk to him. She started a search running on English history and the peerage, circa 1498. It was a great era. Europeans were just discovering that the world was larger and more marvelous than they had ever imagined. Philip would like that. Philip de Graynfield.

A good character designer was like a method actor. Col worked from the outside in, from his milieu, his life history, his family, how he dressed, what he ate, where he lived. She also worked from the inside out: how he spent his time, what he desired, thought, and believed. She’d never done a character from before the twentieth century and had found other designers’ efforts at history characters to be failures, just twenty-first century people in costume.

She was beginning to grasp how much work this would be. How much fun.

She could have gotten interns and flunkies and bots to do some of the early research, and usually she did. But this time she was jealous of the early stages, and she wanted to keep the book collector all to herself. He would be hers the way no other character had been—not even her first, Jake, the carnie.

She never felt the same about a character after turning him or her over to the client. It was like falling out of love. She didn’t fall in love with all of them, of course, but she couldn’t help loving them all a little, even the detestable Gwen.

Shit. She should not have started thinking about Jake. Now she had a low level burn going, an itch she could ignore or scratch. She checked Jake’s account and it was inactive. She decided to scratch.

She called him up. “Hey, Jake, how you doing?”

He was taking a break in his trailer in front of the TV, with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. He never had to worry about no smoking zones. They didn’t have cam phones in 1977, so she always contacted him through a television set. He had his long legs stretched out in worn jeans. If he slouched any more he would fall off his recliner.

Jake gave her the usual once over and a grin. “You look like shit. You been working too hard?”

“Got a minute?”

“For you, I got a lifetime.”

“Sweet. I’m coming over.”

Col plugged the leads into her Sensorium and put on the headset. The bosses knew she stole time—they monitored every keystroke and voice command and kept Sensorium records—and they didn’t care. She could have been addicted and it would have been fodder for their research. But she wasn’t addicted. She kept it to two or three times a week because she didn’t want to be like that.

It was a chilly evening on the midway and there was enough mist in the air that the top of the Ferris wheel vanished except for the glow from the lights. She opened the trailer door. He never locked it.

Jake stood up and dropped his cigarette and rubbed it out under his boot. The place was a sty, the dingy carpet littered with butts and empties. Looked like he had switched from beer to whiskey since she saw him last, but not very expensive whiskey. “Missed you,” he said, like he meant it.

That was the thing about Jake. No matter how much he cheated, he could make you believe you were the only one. For a minute she was in love with him all over again.

They fucked on the Ferris wheel in the mist, on a hard metal seat hanging three stories above the parking lot of a strip mall, and it was uncomfortable and a bit too complicated and acrobatic, but it was also exactly what she wanted, fast and hard, which is why she’d called Jake. Jake didn’t do tender.

But he surprised her. He showed her his new tattoo: a blue columbine flowering at the base of his spine, growing out of the crack between his buttocks. She said, “Does Roger know?” Roger was his owner. Jake shook his head and smiled.

Columbine was her real name. She didn’t know how Jake had learned that little fact.

• • • •

She forgot about Jake. She forgot to go home and forgot to eat. Larry said she was obsessed, and besides she was starting to stink, so she took a shower and looked in her locker for something to wear that was not wadded up and filthy. But there wasn’t anything—even the locker stank—so she went to borrow something from Alicia. Alicia said, “Col, you should get a cat. Then you’d have to go home to feed it.”

Col said, “I have an imaginary cat.”

Alicia showed her preliminary renderings. Col was frustrated, because Philip de Graynfield didn’t look like the book collector she could almost but not quite remember. She didn’t know how to describe him so Alicia could fix him. “He’s too handsome. Make him look smarter.”

“So smart equals ugly?”

“No—not ugly. Just not Hollywood. But I like his clothes.”

“Thanks for nothing,” Alicia said.

But she was a pal. She lent Col a tight skirt and a fuzzy pink sweater. Col never wore clothes like that and it occasioned a lot of comment as she made her way back to her cubicle, but she didn’t notice. She was thinking about Philip, and even Todd intruding into her three-foot diameter personal zone could not snap her out of her fugue.

She talked to Philip at night, even though she couldn’t see him. She was proud of his voice and his accent. She’d tweaked and tweaked it and now it was impossible to tell how many little pieces had gone into its construction, how it had been assembled from the voices of actors in old movies and samples purchased wholesale until it had just the timbre that moved her, as if she was strung an octave higher and resonated to his tones. His voice fit him like a glove, and she knew the glove, too, the one Durer wore in the portrait, made of kidskin with a rolled cuff. But more worn, with a cut on the thumb and dirt rubbed into the palms and fingers, because Philip was too poor and indifferent to get a new pair.

So far the things Philip had said were banal. He was equipped with a couple of broad-based response trees (she’d written a lot of those in the early days, when character creation was a new field). She narrowed him down by hitting yes or no buttons when his answers struck her as in or out of character. This kind of sculpting on the fly was the way she arrived at a first approximation. She wanted to get a feel for interacting with him. He grew by talking to her.

It was late at night. She liked to wait until Larry went home, because Philip wasn’t ready to talk to other people yet. She addressed her blank silvered screen. She could see her own reflection, but she ignored it. She was used to ignoring it.

“Sir Philip?”

“Yes, lady?”

“Did you sleep well?”

“I dreamed.” He said it like it was a bad thing to dream. Then he said, “Might I know your name?”

“Why?”

“So I might know of whom I dream.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“I fear I have trespassed . . .”

She hit the No button. Too timid.

Philip said urgently, “It may be that I trespass, but I must know.”

Yes and yes. She leaned closer to the screen and whispered, “Columbine.”

He said, “Lady Columbine,” in that voice and she shivered. “What are you? You are not mortal, I think. You speak to me from the dark and I can only see you when I sleep. Are you a demon or an angel?”

“I am mortal,” she said.

“I am sorry. I would that you would never die.”

She wanted to tell him that he was the immortal one, but she terminated the conversation instead, unsettled by it.

• • • •

Alicia was art directing the whole project, not just Philip’s appearance. She supervised a team of people at work on his house, his street, his city: London. Some of his surroundings could be purchased. A big-budget movie had come out five years ago with a digitized London from 1492, just a few years before Philip would spring to life as a thirty-two-year-old, already going broke from buying too many books. The movie had shown the palaces and mansions of the wealthy, but Philip moved in other circles as well, down by the taverns and brothels of the docks, for instance. They pieced that world together from scraps or from scratch, from research with a good dollop of imagination.

Like so many courtiers of his day, Philip de Graynfield lived partly by mooching off the more fortunate (or less spendthrift). But he wasn’t a sycophant, oh no, not her Philip. He had friends rather than patrons. Rich and powerful people sought him out for his learning and his company, and because, unlike other courtiers who flattered them for favors and the leavings from their tables, he never asked for anything. He enjoyed good food and wine, but he was content with a crust of stale bread and ale if he was occupied. And he was always occupied. He did not have an idle mind, though he was of course idle, being a gentleman.

Col was spending money on Philip left and right. She was his true patron, if anyone was. She gave him a small library to start with, downloaded from many databases, free and otherwise. She gave him certain predilections and a yearly income from a manor in Cheshire so he could indulge them. He spent almost all of his income on books, and still he didn’t have that many, because books were expensive. She had set his parameters so he could only see what might have been available in London in 1498, and she was intrigued by his choices. He loved exotic things, scrolls from Cathay, a monk’s chronicle of raids on the Irish coast in 1237. He loved common things, too: Printing had only been around a half century in Europe, but already there were Latin primers and pamphlets about murders. He had a locked cabinet for pornography. He had gotten his hands on a sheaf of pages from an illuminated Kama Sutra. He could not read Sanskrit, but he examined the drawings minutely. He bought a Japanese pillow book from a sailor. He did not know of Japan and thought it was Persian. He had French and Italian bawdy books, too.

She gave Philip Shakespeare’s English, so much richer than the language she herself spoke, even though it was later than his era. But he had learned to speak from her, and he could not help sounding a little modern. She gave him Welsh from his mother, Latin and Greek from school, French, Italian, and a smattering of Flemish. He tried to teach himself Arabic so he could read a manual of surgery. She gave him a good memory but not a perfect one. He tended to remember what he’d read, not where he’d read it. He had constantly to look things up. There was nothing scholarly about his erudition, nothing precious. He wasn’t particular as to the rarity of books. He just wanted to know what was in them, driven by an omnivorous curiosity.

“What are you reading?” Col would ask.

He always asked her to show herself to him.

• • • •

Alicia still hadn’t gotten Philip’s face to Col’s liking. They had a big fight over it, and Alicia went home early, at 9:30 in the evening, to her cat and her girlfriend. Col left an apologetic note on her desk. The latest iteration of Philip would do very well. He was okay, she’d get used to him. Just make his eyebrows a bit more arched, a bit more—skeptical.

Philip needed a body and a way of moving. There was so much material to work with when you did a recreation like Gwen; cameras were ubiquitous, and Gwen was always being filmed whether she knew it or not. It was different making someone up.

First of all, he needed a walk. The walk was more important to Col than a certain breadth of shoulders or narrowness of hips or lean muscle ratio. She ventured out onto the streets, searching for a walk, and discovered she had missed autumn entirely. A minute ago there were green leaves in the park, and now the trees were bare. She sat in a café and stared through the window. There were plenty of men braving the elements in skinny little thermaskin suits. Not one had the right walk: This one bounced and that one sauntered, but he was too self-conscious about it. She decided it was because they weren’t wearing swords and the right clothes, and wouldn’t know how to use a sword if they had one. She sent for martial arts instructors, props, and costumes. They tried the costumes on guys from the frat house floors. They used the focus group room and she sat with Larry behind the one-way mirror and they laughed until it hurt at how the guys paraded around.

To Col’s surprise, Todd had the best walk. She was right, a sword made a lot of difference. If she ignored Todd’s head, she could almost see Philip. So they did motion capture on Todd, and they brought in a swordmaster to tutor him. He moved slowly through the forms, and they sped it up afterward and it looked good, if not perfect.

It was never ever perfect and Col was never satisfied. By this time so many people were pitching in—it was all the rage at Incubus, the latest addictive fad—that she managed to irritate almost everyone in the company with her perfectionism, including the bosses. But she was forgiven for Philip’s sake. Watching him was their favorite pastime. They had him running constantly so he could accumulate experiences. They peopled his world with simulcra cruder than himself, mere personality profiles in costume, hastily reconfigured. An amazing amount of computational power, human and otherwise, was lavished on Col’s project. They were all in love with the idea of Philip de Graynfield.

Whereas Col was in love with Philip. They hadn’t even met, not in person. She was reluctant to show herself. He had dreamed her, he said, he kept saying. She could not possibly look like the person he had dreamed. But Philip pleaded with her. He demanded to see her. He began to collect occult books, which he locked away with his erotica. He performed a spell of summoning he found in a manuscript, trying to conjure her, and still she wouldn’t go to him.

• • • •

One day, Col went home, showered, and ate. She did laundry. Her apartment was grubby and unfamiliar. She didn’t dare look in the refrigerator. She’d have to hire someone to come in and throw everything out. Col weighed herself and discovered she had dropped thirteen pounds. Her wrists were bony and she was pale as a ghoul. She hated her apartment, and wanted leaded glass panes for her windows, a floor of tile, a carved clothes chest, a carpet from Persia, and a curtained bed. Philip’s room.

When she came back to work, Larry said, “My god, look at you!” She had put on her best shirt, of rose-colored velvet. She left the top two buttons unbuttoned. A November wind had put some color in her cheeks. Her hair was clean. She usually kept it cropped short, but it had grown down to her shoulders since she’d started Philip. Her hair was fine and flyaway and she tucked it behind her ears to keep it out of her face.

“To what do we owe the honor of you appearing to be human again?” Larry asked.

“Very funny.”

“I’ve been worried about you, Col.”

She looked at Larry, really looked at him, as she had not done for a long time, even though they sat facing each other. Sometime in the last five months he’d grown a Van Dyke goatee.

“I’m okay. Just working hard, you know?”

“You always work hard, you’re a boss’s wet dream, but I’ve never seen you this obsessed. Half the time you don’t even know I’m talking to you. I’d about given up trying.”

He was pissed at her and she was touched. “I love the beard with the shaved head.”

Larry flapped his hand, affecting a mannerism so out-of-date it was hip again. “Oh, hush. So when can I talk to him? I’m dying for a test drive.”

“Me first.”

“Oh, hey, I know that. So get on with it, okay?”

• • • •

All day she had an amazing sense of anticipation, a pervasive awareness of her own body. She’d been neglectful of her body, using it like a car and forgetting to put in oil. Now she felt she inhabited herself all the way to her toes. She watched Philip walking. He changed directions at a whim, and the city unfurled around him, just enough of it rendered to make it real to him. He frequently walked all day and read all night. He didn’t need much sleep, no more than she did.

Today his feet took him to the banks of the Thames. The tide was out and the shore was littered with debris. Mudlarks, skinny children and old women, searched the flotsam for anything they could sell, bits of wood and rope, gnawed bones. Gulls flew overhead. If Philip had possessed a sense of smell, he would have found the river very rank, no doubt. Boys came up to him, begging, and he gave them his last coppers.

Back in his rooms above the tailor shop, he gave his muddy boots to his manservant Eustace for cleaning. He lived in the home of Sir Randolph of Twyckenham, a third cousin of greater means and lesser learning than Philip, who rented him three rooms on the courtyard, two just above the tailor shop and one, his bedroom, on the floor above that. All of Philip’s rooms had cabinets of books. Sir Randolph had a large noisy family and so did the tailor, who lived beside his shop. Between Philip, the tailor and his brood, the Twyckenhams, and assorted servants, there were twenty-two people in the house. Most of them had off-the-shelf personalities, customized by interns or frat boys in their spare time.

Philip’s rooms were cold, heated by a portable brazier. Eustace took the brazier up to the bedroom and lit the lamps, and went back downstairs to his scullery maid.

Larry went home and Col told him goodbye absently. The offices emptied. She watched as Philip read late into the night. He took out paper, a quill, and a jar of ink, and sat down at his writing desk. Paper was still expensive. He often used the pages of books that had disappointed him, writing missives in the margins, begging letters to his uncle: Please advance me money against the wool, against the barley harvest. She hated to think of his poor tenants. This time he wrote on a precious blank sheet:

To my dear Mistress Columbine

How did he expect to post that letter? She appeared in his mirror, but his back was to her, so he did not see. He was not vain enough of his appearance to require a mirror; he had purchased it for the conjuration.

She said, “Philip.”

As he turned and got to his feet, he overset the inkwell and the chair. He hastened to the mirror and touched its polished brass surface.

“Lady,” he said. “You show yourself at last.”

“Who am I?”

“Why—you are the faery, Mistress Columbine, none other.”

“Am I as you dreamed me?” She had not bothered to disguise herself, though it would have been easy to appear more beautiful. He saw her as the camera recorded her.

He smiled. “Better—oh, better!”

“Why do you call me a fairy?” His hand still rested on the mirror and she touched the tips of her fingers to his.

“I found you on the list. Is it true you are as fickle as you are fair?”

She wondered what list. She could not possibly read everything he read. “Am I fickle? I suppose.”

He looked down, his brows drawn together, and said, “I feared so.”

“You’re fickle, too,” Col said. It would not do for Philip to have only book learning. She had given him a history of indiscretions, and since he had been activated, they had sent plenty of women his way—even an early iteration of Gwen, as the mistress of one of his friends. An enemy now. A man was apt to collect enemies in the course of an active life.

Philip raised his mobile, skeptical eyebrows, and again he smiled. “Does it trouble you? It would give me great delight to make the faery Columbine jealous.”

He should be more frightened of her apparition, she thought. But she knew he had a reckless streak. She had given it to him, after all.

She disappeared from the mirror and jacked in, and she was outside his bedroom door in the dark, on a steep narrow stairway. The house was quiet except for a bawling baby somewhere upstairs. She knocked and heard his footsteps. He drew the bolt and opened the door, and she saw him truly disconcerted, but only for a moment. He seized her wrist and pulled her inside.

She had never been so nervous with a real man or an imaginary one. Her heart was slamming. He let go of her long enough to slide the bolt closed. He leaned against the door, breathing fast, just as she was.

“Look you, I have caught me a faery,” he said. “Is it true you cannot abide iron? I have iron bolts on my shutters and my door, and I will not let you leave.”

Col said, “I don’t wish to go, but when I do, you won’t be able to stop me.”

His hand encircled her wrist. He lifted her hand and kissed her just below her palm, where the blue vein throbbed. The sleeve of her velvet shirt slid down her forearm. His voice was muffled. “By god, you are flesh, you are flesh. I cannot believe it.”

She could feel the bristles on his face. Eustace shaved him every few days, when Philip remembered to ask. It was so real. She did not want to remind herself otherwise, and yet part of her was crowing: I am a genius!

He put her hand against his chest and she felt him breathe through the thin shirred linen of his shirt. An embroidered ribbon decorated the neckline. His red surcoat was open down the front, and his shirt hung loose over his hose.

With the hand that did not hold hers captive, he touched her hair. “It is short,” he said, marveling. “Is it the custom that a faery queen should look a boy?” His voice had grown hoarse, as if he found it hard to speak.

“I’m sorry you dislike it,” she said.

She regretted then that she hadn’t glamorized herself and appeared as an imago. He had seemed to enjoy abundant female flesh, like the bitch Gwen with her enhanced boobs—Guinevere, as he knew her. Col’s breasts were small and she had hardly any hips. Philip’s hair was longer than hers. No wonder she looked like a boy to him. She pulled her hand away and crossed the room. She stood by his writing desk and looked at the ink spilled over the paper, the chair he’d knocked down when he got up to go to the mirror.

“I never said so, Mistress Columbine.”

He should not be watching her with that glint of humor. How could he be so sure of himself, while she wondered if she lived up to his expectations, as if she were the imaginary one? He took three paces and he was next to Col. He bent down and picked up the chair, setting it on its clawed feet. He looked down at her. Her forehead came to his chin. She had not realized he would be so tall.

He swallowed. The smile was gone. He did not seem to know what to say and neither did Col. His eyes were amber, not brown, in the light of the lamps that hung from hooks on either side of the bed.

Col put her hand under his shirt so she could feel the muscled ridges of his belly above his hose. Philip closed his eyes and opened them again. He looked stricken, pallid even under his sun-browned skin, and she thought she had frightened or repulsed him. She took her hand away.

“No,” he said, reaching for her.

His bed was not a wide matrimonial bed, but a narrow one. The bedclothes were flung over a lumpy mattress stuffed with wool. Alicia was a marvel. She had figured out exactly how the codpiece was laced to his hose, with thin silk ribbons tipped with copper tags. Col tried to undo the laces. Philip was impatient. He yanked on the laces and freed his cock. Her knit pants had an elastic waistband and her shirt was easy to shuck off, and soon she was naked but he wasn’t, because his garments were too complicated. He crawled on top of her and she put her arms up under his shirt and felt the muscles in his back, how they slid over his bones, the perfect articulation of his body. He was heavier than an imaginary man should be, more solid, more present. His cock was between them, rubbing against her, and she put one hand down to guide him inside. Maybe that was more forward than he expected, because he drew back, propped up on his elbows. But no, it was just so he could drive into her, and when he did she felt him all the way to the back of her skull, and she moaned and stiffened.

“Jesu,” he said, arching his back, and he was blaspheming in a way she never could, even though she was saying, “God, God!” Philip was a man of his era and she was a woman of hers. He was a questioning believer and she was just a disbeliever, more from habit than conviction.

The mechanics of fucking were absurd, that didn’t change from one century to the next. Philip seemed to have forgotten all about the positions illustrated in the Kama Sutra, and Col wasn’t interested in anything fancy either, not at that moment. She was slippery inside and out, and he was damp and hot under his shirt, and before she knew it her head was hanging over the edge of the bed and she had to grab a bedpost to keep from sliding off. He gathered her up and turned so her head was toward the wall, and she braced herself against the headboard. Philip had one hand in the crook of her knee and the other under her buttocks, and he dug his fingers into her flesh as if to assure himself she was real. Col lifted her head and licked the notch at the base of his throat. He had a hairless chest because Col did not like hairy men, but she’d forgotten all about the fact that he was her creation, and she started saying things, embarrassing things like, “I’m yours. Philip. God. I’m yours.” He brought both of his hands up to touch her face and he kissed her and still she tried to murmur against his lips, and he was rocking, rocking, breathing hard into her mouth. He took her bottom lip between his teeth. Poor hooked fish, she was impaled, and he was inexorable.

Even after she came, he did not stop, and she let him do what he wanted, and what he seemed to want was both her legs over his shoulders so he could ram her hard enough to jar her teeth. And when he was as far inside her as he could possibly get, he came, too, and she was amazed at how she tightened around him and flooded with heat, after she had thought she was finished.

She put her legs down and he lay on top of her with his face in her hair. He was catching his breath, though she could hardly breathe for the weight of him.

“By God,” Philip said, “or by the devil—I care not—you are mine, Faery Columbine. I heard you avow it.”

• • • •

Col pulled out the leads and said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Had someone been tampering with the program, the inputs? Her hamstrings were as sore as if her legs really had been up by her ears. Philip was not endowed much above average—she knew his measurements to the millimeter—but her cunt felt reamed out. Her back ached and she was trembling from exhaustion and soaked with sweat.

She checked and double-checked to see if one of the frat boys had played a practical joke, but everything was set to the original specs. It was just Philip. And she knew she had accomplished something extraordinary.

• • • •

Everybody at Incubus knew the next day that she had fucked him, because he kept asking the mirror and the air when she was coming back. She kept him waiting four days after the first time, telling herself that once or twice a week was it, no more. He jerked off in his bed at night. He didn’t go out and she knew he was waiting for her. He didn’t know she could find him wherever he was.

Philip left his rooms at last and went to a brothel. He picked a thin, flat-chested girl, who was probably no more than twelve or thirteen. She already had a ravaged face. While Philip pulled his shirt over his head, Col dismissed the whore he had chosen and put herself on the bed, in the whore’s dirty chemise. When he saw her, he fell to his knees and wept. He begged her forgiveness, though he did not know how he had offended her. His face was ugly when he cried and she loved him for it.

• • • •

Col’s boss Devlin asked for a release date. She stalled, but eventually she had to set one. She tried to wean herself, staying home two whole days—it had been months since she took a weekend off. At home, nothing but sleep could capture her attention. She slept thirty hours out of forty-eight, and the rest of the time she was bored.

When she dragged herself back in on Monday, Larry had a secret smile on his face. It bugged her so much she had to ask him what was going on.

“I tried your boy,” Larry said. “I like how he calls me Lawrence, Lawrence, like I was Lawrence of Arabia. He calls me his Moor. Isn’t that darling?”

“You bitch, Larry! How could you? He doesn’t even like men, he’s straight.”

“You could have fooled me,” Larry said.

“I didn’t say you could,” said Col.

“I know. You want him all to yourself. But he’s ready, he’s finished, he’s perfect. He’s the best there ever was. You can’t hang onto him any longer.”

Col was crying. She called Larry a bitch again and a few other choice things. She was furious and didn’t measure her words. But she was more than furious with Philip. She felt betrayed, and suddenly she was in a whole wide realm of jealousy she had never entered before. He could fuck all the virtual whores and madonnas he could find, but she did not want another human being to have him. Oh Christ, what was she going to do when she had to give him up?

Larry held out his arms and she came around the desk and sat in his lap, with the arms of the office chair poking her, and she soaked Larry’s shirt with her tears. She took gulping sobs and Larry rocked her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

• • • •

Col held out for days, and then she was out of time. She visited Philip in his bedroom. They quarreled amidst his piles of books. She had thought he would be contrite, but he wasn’t; he was defiant. She had made him too well, and he was as full of contradictions as a real lover. He swore that she was heartless, and he could not, would not bear it. He would take consolation wherever it could be found, and yet she had deprived his life of any savor but the taste of her.

“Fairies are heartless,” said Columbine. “Didn’t your book warn you of it?”

“I want my seven years!” he shouted. “The books all say faeries take men for seven years of servitude. Very well: I pledge myself to serve you, Faery Columbine. If I am bound to you, are you not bound to have me?”

He was not at all subservient when he said this. He glared down at her, close enough to touch her but not touching.

“I’m afraid we don’t have seven years,” she said. She hadn’t meant to weep.

He walked away, turned back, came closer. “Have we a year then? A month? A week?”

She kept shaking her head.

“Then how long? How long?”

“A night.”

He walked away from her again and when he came back, he said, “Then we must make the most of it.” He touched her face with his thumb and tasted her tears. “Faery tears also taste of salt,” he said in wonder.

“Kneel,” Col said.

He knelt and put his arms around her waist and pressed his forehead against her navel.

“Swear you’ll be mine for the night,” she said.

“I swear.” He looked up smiling, but the corners of his mouth had a bitter twist. He unzipped her jeans. She had taught Philip about zippers, as she had learned about laces. Still kneeling, he pulled her pants down and she stepped out of them. He embraced her, running his hands up her back under her t-shirt, until he reached her shoulder blades. “Where are your wings, Faery Columbine, mistress mine?”

“I never had any,” she said sadly.

“But you have nectar,” he said. He rubbed his hand between her legs and found the wetness. He brought a finger to his mouth and licked it. “’Tis sweet. ’Tis passing sweet and strange.”

And it was strange and pitiful that he had tasted her tears and the slickness of her cunt, though his sense of taste suffered for lack of a sense of smell. He did not know any better.

She undressed him, and when he tried to hurry, she commanded him to be patient, reminding him he had pledged to be hers. She asked if he had let Lawrence take him in the ass, and he said he had, and she pushed books off the bed onto the floor and made him lie face down on the wool-stuffed mattress. She straddled his buttocks, smooth and round, and she scraped her nipples over his back until he groaned and tried to turn over. “No you don’t,” she said in his ear, and nibbled at the lobe. He had beautiful small ears, just as she had specified.

In time, she let him turn on his back. She slid down on his cock, taking it into her slowly, and rising again slowly, and she was so languid, so controlled, that his eyelids lowered until they were almost closed, and he rolled his head from side to side. Then he put his hands on her waist and bucked under her. She said, “No, stay still. Let me.” She wanted to go faster, but she would not. She taunted him, and it was torment to them both, of the most exquisite kind.

She slept with him. She had never slept with him, with any of them before. When Col woke up, Philip was staring at her. A shutter was banging on its hinge and gray London light came through the round panes of the window that overlooked the courtyard. She lifted her head from his arm.

“I must go,” she said.

“Day breaks and yet you have not disappeared. Are you real, Faery Columbine?”

“I have to go.”

He tightened his grip, saying, “No!”

But she was gone.

• • • •

Col, watching the screen, saw Philip turn and hide his face against the bedclothes. She hit the button and her screen turned into a mirror.

Are you real, Fairy Columbine?

She was not real, not here. She was only real there.

• • • •

Giving up Philip was the hardest thing she ever did. It was much harder than giving up her job. She had done the best she was capable of doing and would never do it again. Management agreed to let her contract expire early. They gave her a bonus big enough to live on for a year. She had made their business respectable.

Larry tried to call her, but it was impossible to carry on a conversation with her. He told her the gossip. She seemed not to remember any of them, all those people she had worked with for years and years. She was vague and polite.

She didn’t care. She didn’t care if she starved, to tell the truth. Sometimes she thought she was going to settle the age-old question of whether it was possible to die of a broken heart. She still had her wry humor, but it was as useless as any other antidote.

• • • •

One night, she dreamed she was brushing her teeth and she saw Philip in her bathroom mirror. She leaned on the sink and laughed until she cried, the first laugh she’d had in a long time. He disappeared and her buzzer rang. And rang, though she tried to ignore it.

She hit the com button and saw him hammering on the front door of her building. “I found you!” he cried. “Now let me in!”

So she did. In the morning when she awoke, she was bereft all over again. The grief was as fresh as the day she had given him up, and she hoped she’d never dream of him again, if to dream was to be tormented. She did not get out of bed all day except to piss. She curled up and wailed.

That night she fell into a fitful sleep, and Philip returned, saying, “Why did you weep, dearest? Why do you weep? I found you and I will not let you go, not for seven years or forever.” He tried to kiss her tears away, but she could not stop crying. She cried herself to sleep in his arms—but how could she, when she was already asleep?

Surely she was asleep.

©2006 by Sarah Micklem. Originally published in Sex in the System, edited by Cecilia Tan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Micklem is the author of two novels, Firethorn (Scribner, 2004) and Wildfire (Scribner, 2009). Micklem set out to write about war from a woman’s point of view—not that of a woman warrior, but a camp follower, as low on the social hierarchy as a person could get. Along the way she found herself writing about love, magic, drugs, and aphasia. Firethorn was included in the Best of 2004 list of science fiction and fantasy from Amazon. Micklem’s short fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Sex in the System (Cecilia Tan, ed.). Her writing website is firethorn.info. In her other profession, Micklem is a graphic designer for Girl Scouts of the USA.

The Emerald Coat and Other Wishes

Emily B. Cataneo | 3620 words

“I’ll never understand why some people go out of their way to kiss death,” Violet said, the second night I knew her. As she spoke, the presence of the Emerald Coat in the museum behind us crawled down my neck.

• • • •

I met Violet for the first time when she tiptoed through the museum door in her gray schoolteacher’s dress, trailing the smell of autumn leaves into the antechamber. She pulled her faux-kid gloves off finger by finger as she craned her neck around the mahogany-paneled room. Then her eyes fell on me, sitting at the podium that bars the door leading to the exhibits.

“Excuse me, do you know the way to the Bethnal Green Tube stop?”

I told her it was right round the corner, and she laughed, showing white teeth, almost straight, with one canine cocked to the side. “Thanks. I just moved into a flat on this street, and I’m afraid I have a pretty terrible sense of direction.”

I nodded curtly. I suspected she hadn’t come to the museum to purchase a ticket to see the coat: She smelled of the sun and her teeth gleamed too white. She said: “I’m Violet Kenting. I just moved in across the street, and I’ve never—what is this place?”

“It’s the Emerald Coat Museum.”

Violet raised her eyebrows, blank.

I recited the explanation that I memorized when I was a child, the rote speech that Da taught first to Josephine, then to me: The museum is a catalogue of death-related items, from poison collections to human teeth. The Emerald Coat is the capstone exhibit: a coat that’s said to bring the wearer beyond the veil to another realm from which he or she can never return. A perfect attraction to visit on All Hallows’ Eve. An excellent place to bring an easily fascinated schoolgirl or a macabre auntie.

A place where I’ve sat my whole life, the gatekeeper, waiting to put on the coat.

Violet backed up, slipping her long fingers into her gloves, worrying at her crooked tooth with her tongue. “Ah, I see, um, well then, thank you for the directions.” She retreated out of the museum like the sun retreating behind a cloud.

So she certainly wasn’t one of them, I decided, one of those visitors that flock to the museum every year, longing for the scent of danger, wondering if they might allow the Emerald Coat to tempt them, caress them, take them away, forever.

• • • •

When my sister Josephine and I were children, specifically the summer I was six and she was nine, we crept every night into the washroom tucked in the back corner of our flat above the museum. The chipped-corner tiles would dig into my bare feet and I would hold tight onto Josephine’s hand because in that washroom at night without the lamps switched on, the dark seemed more luminous than bright, and the shadows popped and grew teeth. Josephine and I would stand before the mirror and together we would turn around three times, marionettes that operated our own strings, and whisper Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, performing that old nursery story about how children can summon the ghost of Mary Tudor to their washrooms on summer nights when shadows come alive.

Bloody Mary never appeared to us, but we smelled her, the scent of a ghost: dirt and sulfurous street lights.

Why do some children stand in bathrooms inhaling the scents of ghosts of their own calling, while other children run shrieking into the sunlight away from the dark?

Why would a teenage girl remain in the chapel after other mourners have fled, walk up the aisle like a bride in black, lift the lid on her sister’s coffin to see how her hands looked silent and embalmed, folded over the white of her nurse’s uniform, hands that had once clapped to summon a ghost, years ago?

Why do some people visit our museum and proceed past the antechamber to the room where the Emerald Coat hangs and reach up to snatch it off its hanger?

I don’t know, Violet, and if you don’t feel it, then stay in your world of light.

• • • •

Violet was only one in a long line of hundreds when she returned to the museum, wearing the same dress and a determined little frown, asking to see our exhibits after all. My eyebrows rose as I accepted her pounds and handed her a ticket. That time, I noticed other details besides her straight teeth and prim dress: the slight slump of her shoulders, the stains on her gloves. I had misjudged her and her lightness.

I hefted open the wooden door and led her into the hall filled with an exhibit designed by Mum: She called it the Map of the Garden of Death. In that exhibit, a series of panels looms overhead, lit from behind by glowing globes, depicting skeletons wearing jewel-tone dresses preparing for a cotillion, and snakes and butterflies twining through the eye sockets of skulls. Violet squinted at the lit panels and followed me into the main hall, decorated deliberately by Mum and Da with black velvet cases lit by cold silver lights, filled with teeth from various animals, silver medical instruments, pearls and maps of the edges of oceans.

I didn’t tell Violet that it’s all fake. The luminous death-garden, the cases full of ephemera . . . Mum and Da only placed them there for effect, to usher the visitor forward to the main attraction: the Emerald Coat.

A long garment, reaching the ankles of most people who try it on, made of a silk thicker than most silk, overlaid with tulle and capped on the sleeves with silver epaulettes and trimmed with thin silver buttons that are long and thin and shaped like twigs. It dangles in our museum on a thin silver hanger, lit from behind, popping against black velvet. I’ve always been able to hear it breathing, with breaths as soft as a moth’s wings.

Violet tiptoed behind me as I swept my arm at the coat. “This is the Emerald Coat, said to kill its wearers by taking them to another realm.”

“Oh please.” Violet’s voice was small, swallowed by the velveted room. “It’s a pretty coat, and a silly story.”

“Of course,” I said. “But we must make a living somehow.”

Violet nodded. The coat shimmered and shifted and its rich greens played over the skin on her arms as she backed up, slowly, heading for the door to the outside world but not taking her eyes off the coat even once.

• • • •

“Mum and Da died years ago, and my sister died in the war. She was a nurse,” I explained to Violet, as we drank at Ten Bells later that week, Violet with a napkin spread underneath her dress and me sprawled out on a bench not caring about the sweaty smell rising from the upholstery beneath me. I gulped my beer. “Malaria. Malta.”

“It’s awful.” Violet sipped her own drink, cheap wine. “I’m dreadfully sorry. You know, I think it was terribly brave and selfless of your sister to—”

“I don’t think it was brave and selfless at all.”

Violet’s tongue touched her tooth again. “You mean she wanted glory and all that?”

“No, I . . .” Green emerald silk fluttered through my mind. “I think she wanted to kiss death, as you put it.”

“But—”

“We spent our whole lives up until the war selling tickets to a coat that brings its wearers to another realm from which they can never return. It was the natural next step for her.”

“But it’s just a story.” The alcohol stuck Violet’s words together. “A silly story, for tourists.”

“You know, Jack the Ripper frequented this pub.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Do you think it’s just a silly story?”

• • • •

I didn’t tell Violet that Josephine wasn’t the only daughter of our family to flee to Malta. We boarded the ship together at Portsmouth Harbor, watched England fade to white, steamed south to another island overflowing with color and fecundity. The other ship that left the harbor that day met a German torpedo before it even rounded Gibraltar. When Josephine fell ill in the barracks, I wiped her forehead, lay awake beside her watching the feverish stars move overhead. I never contracted malaria. When my sister kissed death, shoved her way to another realm that I still don’t know or understand, I was left alone in the bright Malta heat, alive, alive, so very alive.

• • • •

When I was seven, I saw a woman try on the coat for the first time.

She was a Mayfair girl, all ermine and wool and sinuous diamonds on her hands. She must have been younger then than I am now, but at the time I thought her ageless, someone who had stepped over the border into womanhood and beyond what I could imagine. She visited the museum with her governess and her younger twin brothers, and the governess clucked and shook her head and murmured about how first it was giggling over Ouija boards and next it was journeying all the way beyond the East End to visit this horrid museum.

The Mayfair girl ignored her governess. Her hands trembled and she resembled a lacy flower about to perish in the first winter frost. She crossed the room, looped the coat off the hanger. I think her governess must have shouted, but all I could hear was the rustle of silk as the girl dropped her ermine to the ground and slipped the silk coat first onto one arm, then the other, then hefted it so it fluttered against her back. The coat was too long for her, and its hem trailed against the ground.

Hands fell against my shoulders: Josephine had materialized behind me, and she squeezed tight. The Mayfair girl stood before us, her hands trembling, glowing in the light of the Emerald Coat, frozen like a painting.

Then she sighed, and her eyes unfocused, and her hands scrabbled against the fabric of the coat over her ribs. She convulsed, her chest heaving, and she fell to her knees. Her fingers, her toes, her ears, dissolved into heavy cold mist. She screamed or sang a final note before all that remained of her was a puff of fog, drifting out of the crumpled Emerald Coat like steam rising from a subway grate, and then that was gone too.

People who don’t want to believe it don’t have to. The coat takes care of that. As far as the governess knows, the Mayfair girl left the museum and promptly tumbled beneath the wheels of a motorcar in the street outside.

But I’ve always believed, and as I watched the girl disintegrate into steam, Josephine whispered moist in my ear, “Get ready, Alex. That will be our fate someday.”

• • • •

Violet insisted that I accompany her to the opera, one autumn evening. On the walk from the Tube station, I crossed the street against the light, lunging in front of a hurtling motorcar. It didn’t hit me. They never do. We snuck into the gilded lobby at intermission, and my memories of sneaking into the washroom to summon Bloody Mary with Josephine tugged at me.

I had never attended the opera before, and we sat in a cavernous cold theater, the world opening up on stage, where a woman wore red and let her music shake the room around us. Part of me felt the same way I feel when I run the coat through my fingers, but something else welled inside me too: possibility. Possibility ran through the music, instead of a finite end.

After the performance, Violet and I joined the crush of people swarming the lobby. Trapped against a curved eggshell-colored wall as we pushed our way down the stairs, I noticed a wainscot panel, carved with an intricate geometric pattern of sharp angles and shapes. Someone took the time to carve and create this, to make this smallest portion of the world notable. Someone took the time to create so much of the world. Perhaps I’d like to see more of it.

Violet craned her neck, scanning the unknown faces around us. “I look for him,” she whispered. “Whenever I’m in a crowd, I can’t help myself.”

“I should get back to the museum.” I didn’t know who Violet was talking about, and the melancholy in her whisper made my skin crawl, dimmed the wonder of the music and the carved panel.

Violet’s luminous eyes focused on me. “It doesn’t have to be like this, Alex.” She held out her hands, lined differently than Josephine’s but still, how long had it been since a woman reached out her hands to me, comforting? “You don’t have to put on that coat. You can come away. Come be my roommate. Take a teaching course. Learn to type. You—”

“I was born for it. It’s the endgame.”

“Perhaps. But I don’t see why it has to be. Just because it’s there? Just because it’s—”

“Because I dream of it every night. Because my entire family has kissed death, as you so aptly put it, and—”

“Just your sister.”

“What do you think happened to Mum and Da?”

Violet shook her head, worrying at that tooth. She stank of cigarette smoke. “Even so, Alex, you can come away . . .”

“You don’t understand. It’s inevitable.”

“Then tell me this.” Violet’s eyes locked onto mine. “What are you waiting for?”

• • • •

Not many visitors to the museum know how we acquired the coat. Many of them probably assume that we sewed it ourselves, but in reality, the coat came to our family more than a hundred years ago, when my great-grandfather on my mother’s side hiked into a forest glade behind the crumbling wall of an abandoned castle, and found the coat hanging between two pine boughs, glowing against the dark trees around it. Its emerald color had not yet been invented by clothing manufacturers and wouldn’t be for another twenty years. Its silver buttons were intricately wrought, beyond the skill of any metalworker in the village.

My great-grandfather brought the coat home and asked his daughter, who was learning letters at school, to write down his observations about it. It smelled like home to him. Its fabric appeared soft, comfortable, like something a Dublin lady would wear in her boudoir. He thought it would probably look best on a taller, slender woman, with dark hair and heavy eyebrows. At the thought of trying on the coat, his breath caught in his chest.

My great-grandfather lasted three and a half days before he shrugged into the coat and disappeared forever.

• • • •

And here’s the truth. I’m tall, and I’ve never needed a corset. My hair is long and thick and dark and my brows lie heavy above my eyes. I’ve spent my whole life sitting in the antechamber of this museum, on a straight-backed chair, selling tickets to hordes of curiosity-seekers, spiritualists, priests and madmen and little girls, watching them step into our carefully designed museum to gaze upon the fabled Emerald Coat. Some of them laugh breathless behind their hands. Some of them ask if they can photograph it with their Kodaks or Brownies. Others scoff.

And some of them cross the room, reach trembling fingers forward, stroke the silk, run the tulle between forefinger and thumb.

Still others take the coat off its hanger and shrug into it.

I’ve watched Mum and Da and Josephine shrug into the coat, in one way or another. And I’ve envied them. They took the leap.

I’ve run the silk through my fingers. The coat has slipped through my dreams.

But in my waking hours I’ve never even taken it off the hanger.

What are you waiting for? Violet asked.

What happens to the coat’s true owner when she finally succumbs and puts it on?

• • • •

Violet looped her arm through mine, and together we traversed the hall of illuminated skeletons and stepped into the main exhibit hall. She dropped my arm and stepped forward, stopping in the middle of the room so she was backlit by the glow of the coat.

“He used to love puppet shows,” she said, in a flat voice. “You know, the sort of puppet shows you see in Covent Garden? But he left, like they all did, like you and your sister did, and when he came back, he said he hated them. He couldn’t stand the sight of a puppet. He called them frivolous.”

She fiddled with her left ring finger, and not for the first time I noticed that a ring-shaped band around the base of the finger was lighter than the rest of her skin.

“I bothered him about it, Alex. I bothered him until he went away, because he didn’t love puppets anymore. What a foolish thing to do. Isn’t that a foolish thing to do?”

“Violet—”

She cut me off with a look, stepped forward, raised her arm as though about to run her fingers over the coat.

“I’ve been dreaming about it,” she said. “The coat, I mean. You know it’s hanging here, you know it’s poison, you know it will kill you, but still, you can’t stop thinking about it, drawn back to it like you’re lost on a city street and keep ending up at the same corner, no matter how much you try to find the place you’re looking for.”

• • • •

I was tired of ending up on the same street corner. I was tired of waiting in the gloaming, the gatekeeper, dreading and longing for the day when I finally tried to follow Josephine into the dark.

It doesn’t have to be like this. I packed a bookbag: carved cameos of my family, a small stack of books, face powder, and sturdy boots. I raced downstairs from the shabby apartment where I’d lived my whole life. I crossed the antechamber just as the front door of the museum flew open and there stood Violet, her face drawn, her gloves off, her tongue twitching against her tooth.

“Let’s go,” I said, and I pressed my lips against hers, because maybe I loved her, or maybe she was a replacement for the sister who died of malaria raving about an Emerald Coat on a battlefield in the sun, but did it matter? I chose her life, her world, her typing courses and Tube stations, her carved panels and theaters full of song.

Violet pulled back, wiped her mouth, not looking at me, and charged around the admission desk, heading for the main exhibit hall. She had that determined cant in her step, the kind of step that took Josephine onto the ship, that took Mum and Da and the Mayfair girl out of the shadows and into the dark.

I had seen that step before. And I couldn’t stop her. I didn’t stop her. She leapt across the room in her gray flannel, already lost to me, and when she snatched the coat off the hanger and the fabric licked her frayed stockings and her eyes rolled back in her head, I inhaled the scent of ghosts in the washroom. I thought she was laughing as she swirled away, or maybe screaming. I didn’t know; I had never tried on the coat.

But I knew then that there’s no safe place beyond, outside the dusk, outside the antechamber. They all ended up at the coat eventually, even Violet, who smelled of sunlight, who once wondered why anyone would ever want to kiss death.

There is no escape.

My hands trembled as I advanced on the coat. It fluttered, exhaled a little breath. I imagined it licking its lips.

I scooped it off the floor. It trailed over my fingers, the silk cool.

I was born for this.

But what exactly does that mean?

What does it mean to be a gatekeeper to death? What does it mean when a death-coat is your birthright? What does it mean when you and your sister steam to Malta and only one of you comes home, when a motorcar has never struck you as you fling yourself across the street?

What are you waiting for? Violet asked. She was nothing but the lingering smell of cigarette smoke, but if I could, I would answer her with another question:

If everyone you ever loved stepped away from you, drawn into the dark, almost as if you sent them there, wouldn’t you wonder: Am I even capable of following them? Would you hasten to answer that question?

I cradled the coat, my coat, my hands glowing in its light. Do I care about kissing death, succumbing to the embrace that we’re all born for? Am I in love with death, or am I in love with them: Mum, Da, Josephine, Violet, all beyond the veil now, all far past me in a place that I might never, ever . . .

I thrust the coat away from me, looped it around the silver hanger, placed it back in the cabinet, closed the glass doors. I retreated to the antechamber, to the early dark falling outside the mullioned windows. I settled on my chair, teetering on its edge, and I folded my hands on the desk in front of me. I stared at the door, waiting for my next customer, waiting for the day when I will run away from this place forever, or waiting for the day when I will finally slip into the emerald’s embrace.

I’m waiting here still.

©2015 by Emily B. Cataneo. Originally published in Interfictions. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emily B. Cataneo is a writer and journalist currently based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her fiction has appeared in venues such as Nightmare, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Interzone, and was longlisted for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. She is a 2013 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and a 2016 graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop. She likes dogs, history, and elaborate craft projects.

Son of Water and Fire

Ashok K. Banker | 9090 words

1

Born of water, into water, the boy knew no other world.

It would not always be thus. Someday, he had been told, he would leave here for another place. His mother had told him this, in a quiet time, her body swollen and expanded to its widest, spanning banks miles apart, trailing enormous skirts of silt. He loved her at these quiet times, when her icy mountain rage had mellowed to a somnolent trawl, flowing majestically down to the ocean. She cradled him gently in a pocket of warm current, his belly filled, his heart content. He was little more than an infant then, still unable to forage for himself or wander freely on his own. As they drifted together, she said in her softest voice, “Vrath.”

He looked up at her with round, expectant eyes. She had formed a face from the current, her gentle face. An errant trout drifted into the space behind her large rippling eyes, realized into whose presence it had foolishly wandered, and flicked its tail in panic, flashing away. Vrath gurgled with amusement. His mother’s water-sculpted visage dimpled its cheeks at him and playfully intertwined warm and cold tendrils between his toes and fingertips, tickling him deliciously.

When his delighted laughter subsided, she continued. “My son, soon you shall have to go away from me.”

Away.

His little mind puzzled over the word, the idea. Away? he repeated soundlessly, and then wagged his finger in a familiar gesture. Less a specific question than the act of questioning, that tiny finger wagging translated into an entire range of universal, eternal, childish queries. What is that thing? Does this have a name? Who am I? How did this happen? Or his perennial favorite: Why?

“You will have to go to live with your great-great-grandfather for a while.”

Again, the little finger wagged, and he emitted a gurgling babble, trying to imitate the sound she projected into his mind. “Great-great?”

“Coldheart Mountain. Our ancestor. From whose loins our lineage flows.”

She paused, her watery forehead creasing as she pondered some minor disruption in another part of her sinuous length. Enclosed in her embrace as he was right now, conjoined with her own vast being, he could almost see the source of the disruption.

A gathering of two-legs about a hundred miles downshore were sacrificing a bull on a stone slab at water’s edge, chanting ritual verses to his mother. He knew how much she disliked blood sacrifices, and his face pinched in empathy. He felt her shudder as the bull’s neck was hacked clean through with a bladed weapon sharper than the fangs of a longtooth, and red fluid gushed over the stone, melding with her own arterial flow. Her watery face began to freeze into that icy visage that terrified him, then subsided with an effort, as she reminded herself of his presence, and of how her last outburst had set him to howling uncontrollably in anguish.

He felt everything: the white frothing of her anger, her swirling awareness of his closeness and sensitivity, then the gradual calming of her emotions. Yet even through the opacity of her self-control, he still could feel her pain at the senseless waste, her despair at the two-legs who foolishly thought that by taking the life of another living being they could somehow enrich their own. He even briefly sensed her decision to wreak retribution—she would send a flood surging up the banks to wash out the dwellings of those who had planned the sacrifice—then her resolve shut him off, like a wall of cold ice floe cutting off a hot spring fluke.

He tried to reach up to her face and comfort her, but of course, his stubby fingers touched only water. When he put the finger to his mouth—an action as natural and inevitable to him as breathing itself—it tasted salty. That intrigued him. But then she regained control of herself and smiled reassuringly, if sadly. “You are the iron in my blood, my son. But you belong to another world. To their world. Someday, you will have to go live among them. Before you do that, you must prepare yourself. And I know no one better than your forebear to undertake the task. Listen well to everything he tells you, Vrath. Learn well. The lessons he teaches you will echo down the halls of history.”

Again, he made that little gesture: Why?

She shook her head, the watery tendrils that stood in for her hair waving like reeds. “There is no answer to all your whys, little one. You shall understand when the time comes. Your mind is bright, brighter than all the fishes in my realm put together. You will do well under the great forebear’s tutelage. And after you are done, you will come back to me. And we shall bask in warm tides again awhile, you and I, and you will tell me of the things you have learned, the places you have been, the sights you have seen.”

Places? Sights?

“Such wonders as even your salmon-quick mind cannot imagine. Because that is what learning is, child. An unending quest down an endless river, gorging yourself upon wisdom and lore, until finally, someday, if you are good—nay, if you are very, very good, and very, very clever,” tickling him again and again, drawing a chorus of pleased chortles, “he may let you go down to that greatest treasure house of all learning, the repository of all the wisdom of all the ages, the place where even I must bow my head and deposit every last possession every day, in homage to the mother of us all, the mother of all knowing.”

And she whispered the word into his ear, her watery lips tickling him into a paroxysm of giggling ecstasy: “Karasigasama.”

The ocean of stories.

2

Young and carefree as Vrath was, the idea of parting seemed incomprehensible. His life thus far, brief as it had been, had been idyllic. He was a prince of the river, and spent his days in childish abandon, traversing the course of his mother’s realm, doing as his heart desired.

Everyone hailed him, even the sleepy-eyed longtooths and snapping-mouthed stonebacks who were each lords of their own stretch of the flowing world. All revered him, and many came to love him quickly and intensely; wherever he went, at all times, hundreds of watchful eyes kept vigil over him, and in the unlikely event of a crisis, a veritable army of quicksilver fins and flashing teeth would come to his aid in an instant.

But what could harm the son of the river in his mother’s own realm? He had no enemies here, and his mother made sure that his only potential rivals, the landlocked two-legs, were always kept far out of reach. He glimpsed them rarely, for his mother’s girth was prodigious, her depths not easily fathomed, and on those rare occasions that their paths crossed, he regarded them with disinterested eyes, forgetting them before they were out of sight. The river was his oyster and he its most perfect pearl.

At times, such as the moment when he had sensed his mother’s anger at the sacrificial slaughtering of the bull, he thought of the land-denizens as crude, violent, brutal beasts without the elegance or intelligence of his fellow water dwellers. He hated it when they polluted his mother’s expanse with their offal, their refuse, or even their charred corpses, which they floated downriver at certain spots his mother called Stonefire Hills. She seemed undisturbed by this daily pollution, even contented, and he came to regard it as some part of the natural way of things; in time, he even began to glimpse that they actually worshipped her, and that their consigning of their remains and materials to her flowing course were their way of honoring her. Still, he regarded them with a puzzlement tinged with disapproval.

When the time came, he was playing with a group of young darkfins. He was old enough to clamber onto their backs and clutch their fins, urging them to race through the bracing, high waters of his mother’s upper course. He loved clasping their slippery backs, feeling their powerful muscles seethe and cord beneath him, clutching those rubbery fins as tightly as his chubby little arms and hands and legs could manage. Even when one of the younger ones dove too fast, causing Vrath to lose his grip and fall off, he was undaunted, laughing and chortling with ecstatic glee.

He feared nothing; neither the boulders dotting the white water rapids where hapless land animals often dashed out their brains, nor the yawning abysses where his mother split herself into dozens of falls plunging thousands of fish-lengths to crash deafeningly in a miasma of vapor and sound. He went over the falls shouting his joy, knowing that no harm could come to him in his mother’s realm. Sensing also something of his true nature. The force that surged in his veins, calling out to and answered by his mother’s endless coursing yet filled also with some greater power, a power he did not yet know the name of, but which burned fiercely within his blood.

They had come through the rapids, down the falls, and were milling about in the enormous marshlands where his mother tarried briefly before continuing her progress down the alluvial plains. The darkfins were darting craftily around him, teasing, touching him gently with their snouts. This was longtooth territory, and normally they would never come here. But they were with him, and he went where he pleased. He sensed the presence of many longtooth, dozing lazily on the surface of the marsh, on the banks, sunning themselves to awaken their sluggish blood.

They bristled at first at the presumptiveness of the darkfins invading their sanctum, then sensed Vrath’s presence and yawned benignly, nodding a cursory greeting. A nilgiri stag, head bowed with a full crown of antlers, shoulders high enough to reach the lowermost branches of the highest sala trees, splashed through a shallow pool, almost stomping on an ancient longtooth. The ancient one ignored the challenge: The stag was in heat, and she knew better than to engage a nilgiri in that state.

Then, the marsh, the surrounding woods, the river, the very cataracts themselves, pounding down with the frenzy of giant hammers, seemed to grow still.

The darkfin nearest to Vrath paused, his snout twisted to one side, tail turned the other way. The boy saw his fin ripple, as if sensing the approach of a great predator. But there was no predator here. At least none that dared attack a companion of the prince of the river. Nor could he sense any land dweller anywhere for miles around.

He reached out to touch the darkfin, a young male named Youngslick on whose mother Vrath suckled often, and with whom he shared a bond akin to bloodwater.

Youngslick’s flank shivered. He raised his snout and issued a bleat in his high-pitched keening language. To Vrath, just learning of the many moods and nuances of emotion, it tasted of fear and of something darker. An emotion beyond expression. It was reflected in the sudden thrashing of Youngslick’s tail. Vrath’s eyes widened as he floated in the pocket of warmth that always enveloped him, and he stared in confusion at Youngslick’s bleating bout of panic. Finally, a louder call echoed through the marshy byways, issued by Motherfin, the leader of the pack. Youngslick grew completely still. Turning to glance at Vrath, his dark eyes flashed apologetically.

Until he squeaked, in his cryptic darkfin way, and then flashed forward with astonishing speed that Vrath, despite his own prodigious skill, could never hope to match. His tail flickered darkly through the sluggish marshy byways, heading toward the main body of the rivercourse, calling and answering the rest of his herd as he went.

For the first time in his short uneventful life, Vrath was completely alone.

3

Without warning, the warm pocket that had enveloped him in his watery travels dissipated. Vrath was left, abruptly, in the cold marshy water. He thrashed disbelievingly. Since his birthing, he had never known discomfort or deprivation; the cold water seared his skin at first, like the runoff from a hot spring, then, his skin tingling, pulse racing, he began to feel the bone-deep chill permeating. It seemed to pass through his skin and flesh without resistance, seeping directly into his marrow.

Ma! he called frantically. She had never failed to answer him, even when embroiled in a crisis herself. For she was the river, and nothing could happen in her realm without her knowing. Yet as several moments passed and the freezing water continued to swirl sluggishly around him, and nothing happened, no response came to his call, he repeated his plea, louder, more fervently. Ma, something’s happening! Come here, Maa! But she did not come, did not respond. He couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t understand what was happening, or more importantly to him, why it was happening.

He thrashed, losing heat even faster, dissipating his energy, and when, too late, much too late, he finally stopped flailing, the cold enveloped him in a tighter embrace than he had ever felt before. An invisible fist grasped his heart; icy shards pierced his brain, and he slowly lost feeling in the tips of his fingers and toes. Finally, he stopped struggling, and tried to outlast it, but nature took its toll: Heat fled his little body, and cold became his new wet nurse. By the time he lost sensation in his feet and hands, it was too late to act.

Not that he could have done much; he had often seen the bodies of frozen creatures floating downstream like dead logs, never once dreaming he could end up thus himself. He had been warned often by his mother not to go too far North, but he was not that far North at all—this was longtooth territory, after all, and they craved the warmth. Somehow, instead of the omnipresent pocket of warm water that had cuddled him ever since he could remember, a pocket of icy cold Northern water now clutched him mercilessly in its grip. He had always been so well protected, the very idea of danger was beyond his comprehension. Now he learned both the shocking pain of a mother’s betrayal and the indifference of nature to its denizens.

He floated for what seemed to be an eon, his body curling up instinctively into a fetal fist. Finally, when all resistance was gone from him, the water around him began to swirl in strange currents, pushing him upriver. It was not the gentle, cushiony way his mother always moved him; these gestures were brisk, matter of fact, designed simply to shift him from this place to that.

He slipped in and out of consciousness, and in his moments of relative lucidity, saw that he was being moved upriver steadily, until he saw he was approaching the basin where the cataracts broke their fall. The very bubbles of air in the water danced with the reverberation of that mighty mass of icy water shattering on granite.

Here, a remarkable thing occurred—the first of many remarkable things that were in store for him on this extraordinary adventure, though, of course, he had no way of knowing that just then.

The waterfall paused.

One moment its deep dull pounding filled the swirling underwater world he inhabited, a sound as relentless and eternal as water and air itself, the next moment, it had fallen silent. There was no interval between the first and the second; it was as if a giant hammer had frozen in mid-air, poised above the anvil.

He blinked, trying to awaken his brain. It was difficult; yet he sensed, despite the frigidity enveloping his body, the force that had abducted him desired that he stay awake and alert. That he be aware of what was occurring and where he was going. He felt the cold ease its hold upon his skull. It still felt as if crystals of ice were lodged in his head, but he could think, and see, and know, although his emotional responses seemed suspended, frozen. Perhaps that was not caused by the cold, however; perhaps that was his own survival instinct, pushing away fear and outrage and self-pity to a deep pocket where it could not interfere with the vital functions of watching and waiting. Naïve and ingenuous as he was, he had not lost hope; he was only conserving energy. He did not think these things through in any methodical fashion, simply glimpsed the sense of this course of action through an instinct more ancient than logic, more wise than philosophy.

The force that had brought him upriver now began to heave him up the frozen waterfall. He saw the body of water part, moving aside with a peculiar slowness that suggested neither liquid nor solid movement. He felt nothing except the intense cold and the sensation of being moved, but he thought he heard a faint groaning of protest from the unnaturally frozen body of water as he was pushed upwards through it. At the top there at first was a sensation of pressure, then he was bouncing along the surface of the river again, and the water was gushing below him, past him, rushing headlong towards the waterfall.

The transition was instantaneous. One moment the water was still, the next instant it was hurtling as it had hurtled for eons. His progress upstream continued thus, the force that governed him pausing waterfalls to enable it to push him up with the least resistance, then releasing the falls as he gained the top. More than once on this long journey, sleep found him and flicked him into unconsciousness with the careless ease of the very young and very innocent. From time to time, he would open his eyes and gaze out from his protective bubble and see only the river flowing downstream past him, and would sink back into the clutches of sleep again.

He was aware of the fauna of the river all around, but every tadpole, newt, fish, darkfin, stoneback, and longtooth steered clear of his path, avoiding him. He had seen them behave thus only once before, when his mother, fat and engorged with a monsoon flood, had borne him upriver to a safe pool to wait out the stormy weather. On that occasion they had ignored him because they were too busy saving their own lives. This time it was different: It was as if they feared him.

Later, while he dozed, it came to him. It wasn’t he they were scared of; it was the force taking him upriver. A force that could halt waterfalls in mid-flow, and override even the goddess river herself. A force that could abduct the river’s only son and not meet any resistance.

Before long, a time came when it seemed that the cold was too great to bear. At first, he thought he would surely freeze now, as even his spittle began to crackle icily. But just as temperature of the surrounding water dropped, his bubble warmed ever so slightly, just enough to offset the drop. He still remained much colder than he had been accustomed to, but he never froze.

So the force was benign, he knew. It abducted him, controlled him, transported him, but would not permit him to come to harm. What was it? Why was it doing this to him?

He tried once to flail out in anger, punching and kicking uselessly. He could not even penetrate the protective bubble. Instead, for one heart-stopping instant, his tiny sphere was permitted to absorb the temperature of the glacial waters he was passing through: The sudden shock of the cold stilled his rebellion instantly. He curled in upon himself at once, trying to cover his little near-bald head with his tiny fists, gasping in indignation. After that, he lay quiet and still and let himself be taken upriver. He slept more now.

Finally, he came out of one of his fitful dozes and found the landscape changed. Everything was white and glassy. He had been near these parts before, but rarely, and only in his mother’s presence. Now, despite his misery and fear, he found himself fascinated by the pristine beauty of the world, at rocks turned into chunks of raw ice, water frozen in place in strange formations, exotic shapes. And all of it reflecting the high, cold sun.

He uncurled himself slightly, eyes widening in understanding. He knew where he was. He had heard it spoken of so often before by his mother, and whispered of reverentially by his friends of the river. He was in that place he had heard his mother call . . . Grandfather Coldheart?

Indeed.

Grandfather Coldheart it is.

Young One.

He gasped. The voice emanated from around him, within him, from the white glacial rocks flanking the river, from the heights of the towering peaks that he glimpsed rising high above, from the very bedrock itself. It vibrated, thrummed, and echoed in the bone-cage of his chest, its baritone tremors overriding even the tinny thudding of his infant heartbeat, absorbing and drowning out his young pulse. It was infinite in its power—majestic, supreme. It was the voice of the mountain range itself, the world entire.

His little hand shot out in that gesture that exasperated his mother: ???

It was his universal question: Why? How? Who? Where? When? Pick any, or all.

A deep rumbling chuckle. The watery world he inhabited was given more to gentler, liquid sounds. Never having heard such a sound as he heard now, he recoiled, not knowing what it might portend. The rumbling reverberated through his being.

Yes.

You desire.

Answers.

Knowledge.

You shall have them.

It is the reason you were brought here.

But first.

Let us be properly introduced.

You are.

Young Vrath.

I am.

COLDHEART.

Your great-great-grandfather.

And now.

Grandson.

It is time.

For your education.

To begin.

Vrath felt a surge of power. The chill water curled around him like a liquid fist, bearing him up. He felt himself being rushed forward, the icy current deflected to either side as by the prow of a man-vessel, the force cutting through the sluggish frost-heavy flow to bear him upward, onward. The pressure of the water was nigh unbearable, the cold bitter, a maw filled with jagged sawteeth and talons. He glimpsed icicles and ominous white blocks of waterrock, more dangerous than any living creature in his mother’s realm, sensed their battering impact and savage thrusts at his protective caul; never had he experienced such a direct assault upon his person.

Even worse, he sensed that these attackers did not fear his mother’s power, that they could not fear her, for they were inanimate, devoid of intelligence, filled only with the casual malevolence of all natural objects. He recalled a young darkfin he had loved and played with, speared by one such shard of waterrock, mewling and thrashing in a cloud of his own red fluid, finally surrendering to the river’s relentless carriage, borne away by Jeel’s susurrating wash, his eyes fixed and lifeless.

He knew then that he too could suffer such a fate, his hide, so tender and soft and unprotected without his mother’s power, could be pierced and torn and ripped, his own red fluids could bleed into her streaming flow, his own life end as suddenly and unexpectedly and senselessly as that darkfin youngling.

He wept for her then, only now understanding that she was truly gone, lost. He wept and scrunched himself tighter, shutting his senses to the overwhelming savagery of the assault, and burrowed within himself for succor. He fell in and out of consciousness, and knew not how much time elapsed.

Time became a river and the river roared into and through his consciousness until he and the stream were one and he was time itself.

4

Sha’ant dismounted from the small one-horse chariot he used for hunting and strode towards the river. The Jeel usually roared around this curve in full autumnal force at this time of year. Even at its lowest ebb during one drought-ridden summer, the river still flowed steadily, filling its concourse from shore to shore. Never before had he seen a sight such as this nor heard tell of it.

The river’s flow had dwindled to a trickle. A gurgling brook dammed by logs of wood flowed with more force than this measly sluggish worm that gurgled along. He could see fish flopping in their death throes, dolphins beached, and turtles lying on their backs, rotating their stubby green legs in dismay. These signs suggested that the damming had only just happened moments ago: Those fish were all still alive.

How was this possible? How could such a mighty river, as wide across as a lake, be slowed? Even if a few hundred logs were dropped into its concourse upstream, they would only flow downriver—indeed, this was how fresh timber meant for building was transported downriver from the foothills of Coldheart Mountain to the cities and towns along the Jeel’s enormous length. What then? An avalanche in the Coldheart Mountains?

He could think of nothing that could explain this sudden staying of the most powerful river in this part of the world.

The fish thrashed more desperately, clearly on the brink of death. He looked around in helpless dismay, wishing there was something he could do to help. It was one thing to hunt down creatures for sport and food; it was wholly another to see countless innocent lives being squandered needlessly. A new thought struck him like a physical blow: The lives that would be squandered downriver would not be fish alone but human as well, for countless people depended on the river for their daily needs. His entire kingdom depended on her grace to survive.

God, help us, he prayed silently.

Almost at once, a great roar filled his ears, louder than anything he had heard before. He looked up from his joined palms to see an astonishing sight: the river unleashed, roaring downstream! So great was its force that it was exceeding its banks. If he did not quickly move aside, he would surely be swept away.

He ran then, up the bank, reaching the safety of the ridge on which he had left his chariot and horse, just in time to escape the lashing whips of the raging waters. Even so, he was partially drenched by the flood and as he sat on the bank beside his grazing horse, staring at the river roaring by in full spate once more, he shook his head in frustration, wondering what force could first cause the river to cease and then restart its flow thus, within moments?

In any case, the fauna of the river would survive now, he saw. The waters had reached them just in time to save their gasping lives.

His horse nuzzled his dripping hair and neck curiously, as if asking, what were you doing, great king, were you swimming in the river?

He smiled at the memory of the way he had scampered up the ridge. That flash flood had come by so suddenly, he had been genuinely afraid he would be washed away. So afraid, he had forgotten that he shared a deep bond with the river, especially at this place.

“You would never let your own waters harm me, would you, my love?” he asked quietly, not really expecting an answer.

As if in response to his query, the river’s flow slowed, reduced by degrees, then returned to the sluggish muddy crawl he had seen earlier. In moments, the water had receded fully, the riverbed as exposed as it had been before the flash flood. It happened so abruptly, he blinked and rubbed his eyes to confirm that what he was seeing was real and not some illusion.

He rose to his feet and started down the ridge—the flood had dampened the soil, turning it muddy, and he slipped and slid the last yard or so, but then regained his balance. Even before he reached the edge of the bank, he could hear the sounds of thousands of fish of all sizes, thrashing and flopping about on the wet muddy floor of the river. Dolphins cried out pitifully. There were creatures he knew no names for and did not recognize, creatures that spent their entire lives at the bottom of the river without being seen by human eyes, monstrosities with clicking claws and eyes extended on stalks, but he felt sorry for them as well, for they were clearly suffering and would die as well as their brethren if the river remained dry.

But this time, he did not panic or pray. He merely waited to see what would happen. And when the roaring resumed again a moment or two later, he was prepared for it and already starting back up the ridge. Even so, he only just made it before another flash flood came roaring past like all the elephants of the world stampeding in heat together. He frowned, placing his hands on his hips and stared down at the raging vigorous concourse that he knew so well. Something was amiss here. This was no natural phenomenon. It could not be!

He mounted his chariot again, turned the head of his horse, and rode upriver. Whatever the source of the damming and undamming, it had to be upriver. He stayed close enough to the river so he could hear its roaring passage, listening for any change in that familiar sound. Sure enough, before long, it came.

The roar died down, leaving a deafening silence that was unnatural to anyone who had spent his childhood and youth playing by the banks of the great mother river, bringer of life and bounty. It made him wonder: What manner of being could be doing this? Who could possess power enough to stop the mighty Jeel herself at one of the fiercest parts of her journey, and then resume her flow, at will? Surely it must be a god, or . . . He had no alternative to offer.

He rode his chariot silently, listening. Once again, the roaring resumed within moments, again causing him to marvel. Clearly the being doing this remarkable thing knew exactly how long the stranded fauna could survive and was restarting the channel in time to ensure their survival. It was almost as if the being desired only to exercise his or her powers, and meant no creature any actual lasting harm. It also occurred to him that this could be the work of Jeel herself, for reasons known only to her, but somehow he did not think it so.

Tracking the source of the disruption, he had his answer soon enough. Dismounting from the chariot to avoid warning whoever it might be, he traveled the last several yards on foot. He had his bow in hand, and he slipped an arrow expertly onto the string, ready to loose the instant he spied danger. For he had just thought of an alternative to this being the work of a god: It could be the work of an urrkh. He did not know why either a god or a demon might wish to play thus with the flow of the mightiest river, but it was best to be forearmed.

His first glimpse of the god/urrkh/being was the back of its head and upper shoulders. From this angle, that was all he could see. The rest was concealed by the riverbank’s curve. To see the perpetrator more clearly, he would have to step out of the treeline into the open—with all the risk that entailed.

At first glance, all he could tell was that it appeared to be a very tall, powerfully built man. Seemingly mortal. Although, after his experience with Jeel, he had learned the hard way that looks could be deceiving. Gods could assume mortal form and shape when they desired and shrugged off their mortal garb at will.

But not for nothing was he King of the Krushan, Ruler of the Burnt Empire, lord of the largest civilized city in the known world. His prowess with archery was such that he felt confident he could strike a killing blow to the stranger even with only that little portion of his body visible, even from this great distance. He came to a decision quickly. He would give the stranger a single chance, for that was what honorable warriors did, but if the man so much as looked at him crookedly, he would let loose.

The river had ebbed almost to a standstill again, its roar quieted to a trickling gasp. The bank was now quiet enough for him to be heard even from this distance.

Staying behind the trunk of the tree, Sha’ant shouted out: “You! Drop your weapons and show your hands!”

The large head and powerful shoulders remained in view, neither ducking down in response, nor shying away. That in itself was reassuring. It suggested a man who was not afraid, nor engaged in any activity for which he felt guilty.

Even so, the stranger had not yet raised his hands.

“I said raise your hands!” Sha’ant shouted.

The stranger remained exactly as he was. Then, Sha’ant’s sharp sight detected the hint of movement on the man’s right shoulder. A mere twitch, such as a warrior’s shoulder muscle might produce when hefting or raising a weapon. It was all the warning he needed: He had killed men in similar circumstances for doing less.

He loosed his arrow, his fingers already reaching for the quiver on his back to pull out a second before the first had reached its target. He was hidden behind the tree trunk, the bow almost touching the trunk itself but not quite—contact would spoil the fineness of his aim, especially when making such a delicate shot. He knew his arrow would strike precisely where intended, unless the other man moved very quickly: at the sloping cord of muscle that joined the right side of the man’s neck to the ball of his right shoulder. The tip should penetrate the muscle, and the arrow remain stuck there. It was a shot he used to warn his enemies and show them how easily he could do anything he pleased with his weapons.

The stranger’s shoulder flexed a second time. He remained with his back to Sha’ant, not having moved other than those two flexes of his shoulder muscle. There was no way he could see Sha’ant from that angle and distance. Even if he had turned and gazed directly at Sha’ant, the man would barely be able to glimpse part of one eye and the line of shoulder and head, as well as the bow and arrow, almost completely hidden in the shade of the tree. Most likely, due to the contrast between the brightness of the sunlight and the shadows of the trees, he would not even see that much, let alone be able to judge the precise trajectory of the arrow.

Yet, somehow, the second time he flexed his shoulder, it was just enough that the arrow passed over it. Sha’ant thought he could almost hear the faint rasping of the arrowhead as it burred over the man’s skin, but surely that was only his imagination. Regardless, the arrow missed its mark.

No matter. He already had his second arrow nocked and this time he was aiming for the meaty part of the man’s neck. This shot would paralyze the stranger from the chest down, which was unfortunate—but necessary. Even those two shrugs were sufficiently threatening for Sha’ant to not risk any further movement.

He loosed the second arrow, already reaching back for the third, when an odd thing occurred . . .

The second arrow simply fell at his feet.

Sha’ant’s own feet.

It plopped down, landing in a heap of dried leaves, and the crinkling sound of its impact upon the leaves alerted him to its fall.

He blinked rapidly, unable to comprehend what had just happened.

How could an arrow loosed by his bow fall right here at his own feet?

Unless . . .

Unless.

He looked down at his bow, turning it sideways.

The string had been severed. It now hung in two parts, dangling uselessly from either end of the bow.

Still, he could not understand how this could happen.

It was a perfectly good cord, wound by himself only an hour earlier. He always used fresh cord at every opportunity, knowing the importance of the string in the art of archery.

No.

The string had been cut.

By a sharply honed metal point.

He searched the surrounding area for any sign . . .

And saw the arrow sticking from the trunk of the tree behind him.

It was like no other arrow he had ever seen, the shaft of the missile gleaming as if made of metal, although that was absurd—no arrow could be made wholly of metal, for no bow-string was strong enough to bear that much weight, nor could human strength power a metal projectile over such a long range.

Yet it looked very much like metal, although like none he had ever seen. It glistened and glittered and reflected a rainbow of hues, much like . . . mercury.

But of course that was ridiculous; an arrow could not be made of mercury. Mercury was liquid. That was why it was also called quicksilver: because it flowed like liquid silver.

He tried to make sense of where it had come from. It took him only a turn of the head to calculate the angle of its trajectory and estimate that it had originated from . . .

“My apologies.”

Sha’ant started, taking several steps back, his feet crackling dried leaves underfoot. He swung around, drawing the short dagger from his belt and crouching, ready to defend himself.

The stranger raised his palms in a gesture of surrender and appeasement. “I mean no harm. I only cut your bow string because it seemed the simplest way to avoid further conflict.”

“Who are you?” Sha’ant said, circling around, eyes darting from side to side, alert in case the stranger had hidden allies in arms. “What were you doing by the riverbank?”

The stranger shrugged. Those powerful mounds of muscle flexed and Sha’ant was left in no doubt: this was the same man who had been standing by the riverbank only a moment ago. Impossible! He couldn’t have covered such a distance so quickly.

“Practicing,” said the stranger.

Sha’ant stared at him. “Practicing?”

The stranger nodded, then smiled in a manner that made Sha’ant realize with a sense of shock that the stranger was no man at all; he was but a mere boy, only just come into manhood—his great height and immense size belying his age. But that smile, shy and uncertain, was a boy’s smile.

5

Sha’ant watched warily from the bank of the river as the boy pointed. “There,” he said. “Do you see it?”

Sha’ant looked down. All he could see was the raging current of the Jeel during the post-monsoon autumn season, with the usual flotsam and wet life that occupied it. “What is it?”

“It’s a . . .” the boy paused. He thought for a moment then shook his head. “I do not know how to say it in your language.”

“So you are a foreigner then?” Sha’ant asked with interest. “Which part of the world are you from? Are you from this continent of the Burnt Empire or . . .?”

“Of course!” The boy looked as if he had been asked if he was from another, distant planet. “This is my home.”

Sha’ant wasn’t sure what he meant. The boy had indicated the river, by which he probably meant here—this kingdom, this place. That seemed credible: The boy had the look of a Krushan about him; he had the same aquiline features, prominent nose, swept back ears and angular jaw. The same intense deep-set eyes beneath bushy brows, dark eyes and dark skin, crow-black hair. Even the same finely shaped limbs and the posture of a man with enough muscle on his body to use weapons well, yet not so much that it hindered his movement in combat. Except for one notable exception. He was extremely tall. Taller than most Krushan, tall even among warriors, standing a good head above Sha’ant’s own height, even though the boy seemed no more than fourteen or fifteen summers old. Sha’ant was not accustomed to looking up at other men and found the effect disconcerting.

Yet despite his considerable height and size, despite the lad’s strength and evident skill, the boy was almost . . . bashful, shy—given to speaking with almost childish innocence and delight. Initially, it made Sha’ant suspicious, especially after the arrow that had come at him unseen and the speed with which the boy himself had moved from the bank to the treeline. But as he came to understand that this was the boy’s natural manner, Sha’ant’s suspicion turned to amusement.

What an odd fellow, Sha’ant thought. Built like a giant warrior, so proficient with a bow and arrow as to rival Purandara himself, and yet he spoke, gesticulated, and contorted his face in expressions that befitted an immature boy rather than the warrior of high breeding he clearly seemed to be.

“So what exactly did you do?” Sha’ant asked again. They had walked to the riverbank together when the boy had explained that he had merely been practicing, though Sha’ant still had no idea what exactly that entailed.

The boy looked at the river again, pointing. “You see . . .” He stopped. “No, of course, you cannot see. No one can.” He looked around, as if searching for something, then turned back to Sha’ant. “Do you know of—” He broke off abruptly, interrupting himself. “No,” he said as if to himself, “Grandfather Coldheart said I was not to speak of that to anyone.”

“Did you say Grandfather Coldheart?” Sha’ant asked, curious. “Is your grandfather from this region? What is his name? And your father’s name?” He moved toward the boy, speaking gently. “Where is your home, boy? Where do you come from?”

The boy looked at Sha’ant again, as if seeing him suddenly for the first time. He shook his head and pointed again, as he had before. “I do not know exactly, but this is my home. This is where I come from. That is all I can tell you . . . in your language. If you wish to know more, you must ask my mother. She said I am forbidden to speak to people.” He looked around. “I am not supposed to even be here. I was only practicing.”

Sha’ant could make neither head nor tail of this extraordinary young man, so he decided, instead, to focus on something simple. “What were you practicing? Can you show me?”

The boy looked at him. “Of course! I can show you! So much simpler than explaining and learning new languages. Although Mother says I must learn new things every day, for some day I am to be king, and kings must know a great deal about the worlds they govern.”

Sha’ant said nothing to this, merely watched as the boy stepped up to the edge of the ridge. He was a handsome young man, and there was something interesting about the way he moved—he had that peculiar gait that very tall and muscular men tend to favor, and as Sha’ant observed the boy’s graceful way of moving, it reminded him of someone else, though he could not immediately say whom.

The boy stood on the edge of the ridge, looking down at the river, silhouetted by the evening sky. It was not more than an hour or so to sunset, and the coloring sky and distant mountain ridges behind him gave him the appearance of a prince in a royal portrait, the kind of portrayal that adorned the walls of the Hall of Ancestors in Sha’ant’s own palace in Hastinaga. He watched the boy arch his back and shoulders, then, in the exact stance of a bowman aiming downward at a sharp angle, but Sha’ant frowned, for the boy held neither a bow nor an arrow—

When suddenly a bow and arrow appeared in the boy’s hands.

It was as if they had come into being at that precise instant. Out of thin air. They were like no bow and arrow he had ever seen before, Sha’ant thought, but then corrected himself: While the bow was like no bow he had seen before, the arrow he had seen a twin of earlier; it strongly resembled the one that had cleaved his bow-string and imbedded itself in the tree trunk behind him when he first encountered the boy.

The arrow now in the boy’s hand was exactly like that one, a quicksilver missile that caught the light of the evening sun and flashed in multi-colored hues. Indeed, as Sha’ant watched, the arrow’s reflection created a small rainbow, just for an instant, curving around the boy’s hand in mid-air.

Sha’ant saw now that the bow was like the arrow: quicksilver. Firm as metal. Reflective of light. Beautifully resplendent.

Sha’ant never saw when exactly the boy loosed. Or the flight of the arrow as it left the bow. All he saw was the twanging cord of the bow vibrating in the air—

Then the bow vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

Its work done, it returned to the ether from whence it had come.

The sound of the river roaring magnificently, as if in response, abruptly subsided.

Sha’ant ran to the edge of the ridge and looked over.

He saw the quicksilver arrow fixed in the ground of the riverbed, standing straight. From the arrow emerged a wall of silvery light that extended from bank to bank, translucent and shimmering with rainbow hues, reflecting the sky and trees and landscape. Impossibly, this shimmering wall of light barred the passage of the river as effectively as a dam built of solid rock. A mountain could hardly dam the river more effectively.

All this from a single arrow.

Downriver, the Jeel’s flow had turned into a muddy trickle, the same as Sha’ant had witnessed earlier. Fish flopped on the riverbed, dolphins cried out in outrage, turtles moved their limbs helplessly, and weeds and undergrowth hung limp and immobile on the muddy naked riverbed.

Sha’ant turned and looked at the boy in disbelief.

The boy beamed at him, pleased at what he had done. It was the grin of a boy who had shot his first bird from the sky, or ridden his horse over a chasm for the first time. Shy, proud, yet guileless and utterly innocent.

Then, as he saw Sha’ant’s expression, the boyish grin faded.

And turned to one of trepidation.

“You needn’t worry about the wet ones. I would never harm them. They are my siblings. I only tease them this way sometimes. In sport.”

Sha’ant stepped closer to the boy, examining him as if for the first time. He caught hold of him by the shoulders—though he had to stretch out his own arms to reach those two wide muscled trunks—and said, “I know who you are. You are the eighth son! Her eighth son!”

The boy looked at him with total incomprehension. Then suddenly, he glanced over Sha’ant’s shoulder and reacted to the sight of something else.

“Mother!” he cried out, with the childish alarm of a boy caught doing a mischievous prank he has been forbidden to play many times before. “I was only showing the nice mortal how—”

“SILENCE!”

The word was a crashing no less than thunder.

Sha’ant spun around to see the river break through the barrier, splitting the arrow’s shaft into countless slivers, each as beautifully reflective and metallic as the arrow itself—like the explosion of crystal—and the water roared along its concourse again, stronger now than ever. The waters boiled and seethed, throwing up a spout that hung in mid-air several yards high.

From the angry spout, a figure was sculpted.

It was the figure of his former wife, his Queen, the only woman he had ever loved.

“Jeel,” he said softly. “Then this is . . .”

“My son,” said the angry goddess of the river, moving across the surface of her waters with a great churning energy. She addressed the boy: “Have I not forbidden you from playing these games? Indeed, have you not been forbidden from stepping onto land unsupervised?”

The giant of a boy hung his head. “Yes, Mother,” he said miserably, “but I was only—”

“Not a sound from you!” she said, and there were teeth in her watery mouth, Sha’ant saw, long white teeth as sharp as any predator’s. “I wish to have words with the dry one . . . with this man.”

The boy stood by silently.

Jeel turned to face Sha’ant.

He joined his hands before her. “Great goddess,” he said, “it is such a pleasure to see you again.”

“And you, my husband,” she said gently. She assumed the form he had known, but only partially, just the face and a suggestion of the upper body, her lower half still retaining her river aspect. It was enough to make his heart ache for all that they had shared, for the companion he had lost. “I see you still remain single, still wifeless.”

“None but you,” he said simply. “You know this well. If you wish me to be loved and to love again, then come back to me. Come back.”

She smiled and laughed a throaty watery chuckle. “Would that I could, my mortal beloved. But my time on your plane is past. I can never again walk among you.”

He sighed, feeling the pain of their parting as freshly as if it had been only yesterday. “Then I will remain wifeless forever.”

“No, do not say that,” she whispered. “For to remain wifeless is to remain childless. And that is not ordained.”

He was about to ask her what she meant. For he remembered her saying something similar fifteen years ago, when they first parted. But before he could speak, she gestured to the boy standing beside him.

“You were right. This is he. The eighth child. The one I did not drown, but took away with me when I left you.”

He nodded slowly. “It took me some time to realize, for somehow . . .” He passed a hand across his face. “Somehow I had forgotten! Forgive me for that lapse.”

She shook her head in commiseration. “The mind forgets what it cannot bear to remember. If only the heart could forget so easily.”

“Exactly. My mind had forgotten about the last child, but my heart recognized him somehow . . .” He gestured towards the boy, still standing contritely, watching and listening to them with a curious look on his innocent, handsome face. “He has something of your aspect about him . . . and clearly something of your godly powers.”

She smiled proudly. “He has great abilities and profound knowledge. He will do you proud. He will be the greatest son you could ever desire. It is he who will ensure the survival of your kingdom through its darkest days . . . until . . .”

Sha’ant frowned. “Until?”

She shook her head, water droplets flying hither and tither. “I cannot say more; I have said too much already. Only know this: He is your son and will be a great warrior among mortals. His name is Vrath.”

“Vrath,” Sha’ant repeated approvingly, “God’s vow. A fine name.”

“I know it is an unusual and grim name among you mortals. But such is his nature and his destiny.”

And with that she was already moving back into the water, dissolving, descending . . .

“No,” he cried. “Wait! There is so much I wish to say to you! To ask you! Please stay, just a short while longer.”

She joined her palms together in supplication as Sha’ant himself had at his first sight of her. “Henceforth, you may say and ask all of Vrath. He shall answer and advise you perfectly in all matters. He has been groomed for this purpose. Love him as well as he shall learn to love you, and use his powers wisely, for he is greatly gifted and no mere mortal.”

And then she was one with the water, and the waves enveloped her, and she merged with them once again and was gone as if she had never been.

Sha’ant sat for a long moment, crouched by the riverside, staring down at the place where Jeel had emerged from and then returned to.

If there is one pain that can equal the pain of grief and parting with our most dearly loved ones, it is the pain of seeing such dearly loved ones again, years later, long after one has finally forgotten, and to be reminded once again, if only for a fleeting moment, of all that was, all that could have been—should have been—but can now never be again. Who among us can know the pain that Sha’ant felt at that moment, to have seen his beloved wife again, if only for a few moments, and to know that she was always within reach, yet somehow always also out of reach.

And so the Jeel flowed, and the greatest love Sha’ant had ever known—might ever know—was gone forever.

Like a poet’s lyric spoken into a storm.

Like a reed-flute’s song drowned by a hurricane.

Like a love story written on water.

Finally, as the sun was setting, he felt strong arms with a gentle touch upon his shoulders.

“Father,” said a gentle voice behind him. “I understand now. This is the day I was told to prepare for. I am ready. Let us go home now.”

And Sha’ant permitted his son to help him to his feet and together they walked back towards the city of his Krushan ancestors.

©2019 by Ashok K. Banker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ashok K. Banker is the author of more than sixty books, including the internationally acclaimed Ramayana series. His works have all been bestsellers in India and have sold around the world. His latest novel is the first in a new epic fantasy series, Upon a Burning Throne. He lives in Los Angeles.

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

The Pilgrim and the Angel

E. Lily Yu | 3300 words

Three days before Mr. Fareed Halawani was washed and turned to face the northeast, a beatific smile on his face, he had the unusual distinction of entertaining the angel Gabriel at the coffeeshop he operated in the unfashionable district of Moqattam in Cairo. Fareed was tipped back in his monobloc chair, watching the soccer game on television. The cigarette between his lips wobbled with disapproval at the referee’s calls. Above him on the wall hung the photograph of a young man, barely eighteen, bleached to pale blue. His rolled-up prayer mat rested below. It was a quiet hour before lunch, and the coffeeshop was empty. Right as the referee held up a yellow card, a scrub-bearded man strode in.

“Peace to you, Fareed,” the stranger boomed. “Arise!”

Fareed laughed and tapped out a grub of ash. “Peace to you. New to the neighborhood?”

“Not at all. I know you, Fareed,” the stranger said. “You pray with devotion and give generously to the poor.”

“So does my neighbor,” said Fareed, “though that hasn’t helped him find a husband for his big-nosed daughter. Can I get you a glass of tea?”

“The one thing you lack to perfect your faith is the hajj.”

“Well, with business as slow as it is, and one thing and another . . .” Fareed coughed. “Truth is, may God forgive me, I’m saving up to visit my son. He’s an electrician in Miami. Doesn’t call home. What would you like to drink?”

“I have come to take you on hajj.”

“I’ve got too much to do without that,” Fareed said. He had quarreled half the night with Umm Ahmed over their son, whose lengthening silence his wife interpreted as pneumonia or incarceration or death, though Fareed supposed it was simply the cheerful thoughtlessness of the young. He had washed six stacks of brown glasses caked and swirled with tea dust, his joints sour from four hours’ sleep, before unrolling his shirtsleeves and sitting down to his soccer match. But for the rigorous sense of hospitality that his own father had drummed into him, nothing could have stirred him from his chair, his chewed cigarette, and the goals that Al-Ahly was piling up over Zamalek. His bones clicked as he stood. He reached for a clean glass.

But the angel spread his stippled peacock-colored wings, which trembled like paper and made the room run with light, and said again, simply, “I am taking you on hajj.”

Fareed choked on his cigarette. “Now? Me? Are you crazy? I have customers to care for!”

Gabriel glanced around the deserted shop and shrugged, his wings dipping and prisming the walls. Then he vanished. The prayer mat propped against the wall fluttered open and enfolded Fareed. While he kicked and expostulated, it carried him headfirst out the door and into the clear hard sky, to the astonishment of a motorcyclist sputtering past.

“Sir! Sayyid! Are you djinn or demon?” Fareed called out. “Where are you taking me? What have I done?”

“I am taking you on hajj!” the angel said joyfully from within the rug, his voice muffled, as if by a mouthful of wool.

“If you are taking me anywhere,” Fareed said, struggling against the tightening mat, “make it Miami. And you have to get me home by midnight. Umm Ahmed will worry, and I have to shut up the shop.” He finally freed his arms from the grapple of the prayer mat. Below them, the countryside zoomed by, green and very distant. Fareed blanched.

“I can circle the globe as fast as thought,” said Gabriel. “Of course we’ll have you home by then.”

“Perhaps a little slower, I have a heart condition,” Fareed said, but they whistled up like a rocket, and the wind hammered the next words back into his throat.

• • • •

When he dared to look again, the silver trickle of the Delta flared below them. Then they were gliding over the shark tooth of the Sinai and the crinkling, inscrutable sea.

“This is really not necessary,” Fareed shouted. “If I sell my shop I can buy an economy-class Emirates ticket to Jeddah tomorrow. You can send me home now.”

“No need to sell your shop!” the angel said. “No need to wrestle suitcases through the airport and sit for hours with someone’s knees in the small of your back. No need to worry.”

“Right,” Fareed said miserably.

By the time they reached the Arabian Peninsula, the dry, scouring wind had become unbearable. “Water,” Fareed croaked. “Please, water.”

“So spoke Ishmael in Hagar’s lap,” Gabriel said within the mat. “She had nothing to give him but prayers and tears. But I heard her crying out. I struck the ground with the tip of my wing, and water poured forth.”

“Water!”

“Yes, water as clear and cool as glass. That was the well Zamzam. I shall take you to drink from it.”

Fareed groaned a sand-scratched groan, then shut his eyes and muttered over and over the suras of the dying.

“Here we are,” Gabriel said, what felt like hours later, lofting a red-faced Fareed onto a heap of sand. “That’s Juhfa in the distance. Come, put on your ihram.”

“What ihram?” Fareed said.

But as he spoke, a bright, cold stream boiled up from the ground, and the prayer mat unraveled and wove itself into two soft white rectangles, which settled like tame doves at his feet.

Fareed gulped the sweet water, washed himself as well as he could, then peeled off his shirt and trousers and wound the white cloths about himself. The stream receded as silently as it had sprung up, the dark stain it made in the sand drying at once to nothing.

He had barely caught his breath when his white drapes shut like a fist and lifted him high into the air.

Wonders upon wonders, Fareed thought. But why him? Why an indulgent father, an inattentive husband, whose kindnesses were small and tea glass sized? Why would any angel bother himself with someone so unworthy?

Guilt niggled at him like a pebble in his shoe as he sailed over towns and sandy wastes. He could see Umm Ahmed rolling her eyes and shaking her head, hands on hips. Angels? You say angels took you to Mecca? This is why you left the shop unlocked and unwatched? What kind of a layabout husband did I marry? You want me to call you Hajji now? Are you kidding me? It filled him with a terrified kind of love.

“What am I going to tell Umm Ahmed?” he moaned.

“The truth! That your piety and prayers have been recognized. That Gabriel himself has led you on pilgrimage.”

“She will throw shoes at me,” Fareed sighed.

“Look,” the angel said, as if he had not heard. They were descending through glittering skyscrapers and moon-tipped minarets. The Grand Mosque loomed before them, a wedding cake of marble that stunned Fareed to speechlessness.

He had always imagined making the pilgrimage as a fat and successful old man, cushioned by Umm Ahmed’s sarcastic good humor and Ahmed’s bright chatter. Now he had neither. Loneliness shivered and rang in him like a note struck from a bell.

Fareed barely had time to stammer the talbiyah through parched lips as they flew around the Kaaba, once, twice, seven times, his body cradled in the unseen angel’s arms. His mumble was swallowed up in the susurrus of prayer rising from the slow white foam of pilgrims below. Fareed knew he was in the presence of the divine. He was humbled.

“Here is your Zamzam water,” the angel said. A plastic pitcher ascended to them, revolving slowly. Fareed grasped it and drank.

“Now hold tight,” the angel said, although Fareed had nothing to hold on to. The pitcher tumbled away like a meteor. “Over there is the path between Safa and Marwa, paved, enclosed, and air-conditioned now. Very comfortable and convenient.”

“I don’t suppose—”

“No! We shall take the path as Hagar found it, the hot noonday sun beating upon her head. Think: your child dying in exile. Think: how strong her faith, how deep her despair.”

Fareed and the angel swooped seven times over the crenellations and cascades of white marble. As they hurtled over the walkway, dry air whipping their faces, Fareed imagined the rubble and grit below the elaborate masonry. He saw in his mind a thin dark woman plunging barefoot over the stones, tearing her black hair, her child left beneath a thornbush to suck thirstily at shadows. He thought of Umm Ahmed’s reddened eyes and weary, dismissive waving—leave me alone, my son is gone—and of the phone that shrilled and yammered all day but rarely spoke with his son’s voice. The image he held of his son was the photograph of Ahmed in uniform, taken during his mandatory service, when he was still a boy and anxious to please.

“Now—” the angel began, but Fareed spoke first, flapping his arms as he hung in the air.

“Enough! Enough!”

“But you haven’t—”

“Give me my clothes and my shoes.”

“Your faith is incomplete without the hajj,” Gabriel remonstrated. “What answer will you give the other angels when they question you?”

Fareed felt cold despite the thick sunlight. His chest tightened. “Where are you taking me?”

“On hajj.”

“No. Take me to my clothes.”

The angel swerved out of the mosque. They returned to the desert place where his shirt and trousers lay folded beside his shoes. Only a little sand had accumulated in the heels. As Fareed stooped for them, his ihram fell away and became once more his threadbare prayer mat.

Beside him, the angel coalesced into a bluish glow containing edges and angles and complex, intersecting wings. Only the vaguest suggestion of a face shimmered in the chaos. He was painful to behold.

“Shall I bring you home?”

Fareed straightened, dust swirling and settling in his damp garments and sweat-sticky hair. A decision crystallized on his tongue. “If this is real and true, and I am not dreaming—if you are truly an angel and no evil spirit—then you will please take me to see my son.”

“After all of this? After I brought you in my arms to the Honored City, to Masjid al-Haram itself—you want to go to America?”

“Especially after all of this,” Fareed said. “If you are capable of these marvels, you can transport me to Florida as well.”

The angel extruded a finger from chaos and curled it around his chin.

Fareed said, “Hagar burned and tore her feet as she ran in search of water for her son. Did you not hear her weeping?”

“That I did.”

“And out of pity for her and her child you caused water to flow from barren rock.”

“That is true.”

“Then perhaps pity will move you to carry me to Miami,” said Fareed. “I have not seen my son in three years.” He folded his arms. “I did not ask you to come. I did not ask to be taken on hajj. I did not ask to be hauled out of my shop without so much as a note to my wife.”

“Also true.”

Fareed put one hand over his breast, where a dull ache was growing. “So take me to see my son. This once. It’s the least you could do for me. Considering.”

Deep inside the blue matrix of the angel, polygons meshed and disentangled with a sound like silver bells.

“All right, enough, let’s go,” Gabriel said, dissolving. “Back on the prayer mat with you.” The rug rose from the sand and hovered an inch above the ground, undulating smoothly.

Fareed looked at it and made a small, quiet, unhappy noise. He resolved that if he ever made it home, he would buy a new, less willful prayer mat, perhaps one of the cheap ones with a pattern of combs and pitchers that were made on Chinese looms.

• • • •

Rolled up in his prayer mat, Mr. Fareed Halawani of Moqattam, coffeeshop owner and pilgrim, came to an abrupt halt in front of the Chelsea Hotel in Miami. The carpet snapped straight, and Fareed spun once in the air before hitting the manicured lawn.

His son turned away from his pickup, shouldering a wreath of wires. He wiped sweat and wet hair out of his eyes, blinking against the sunlight and the mirages wavering out of the pavement.

“Dad?” he said, surprised.

Fareed stared up at the blue sky, bottomless as the one over Cairo, and listened to the strange, extravagant hiss of the lawn sprinkler. A single defiant dandelion bobbed above his nose, drifting in and out of focus. His stomach was still roiling from the rough flight across the Atlantic.

“That’s it,” Ahmed said, putting the back of his hand to his forehead. “I’m seeing things. I’m going crazy.”

“You could pretend to be happy to see me,” Fareed said.

“You can’t possibly be here. You can’t. I must have heatstroke.”

“Go drink some water. I’ll still be here when you get back.”

His son extended a browned, broad hand and flinched when Fareed grasped it. But he helped his father to his feet.

“Do you believe me now?” Fareed said.

“What are you doing here?”

“Visiting you. You don’t call home often enough.”

“How did you get here?”

The prayer mat lay meekly upon the grass.

“An angel brought me, I think.”

“An angel.”

“Maybe an ifrit, it was horrible enough. We went to Mecca first, then came here. I insisted.”

Ahmed stared. “Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right.”

“Did you hit your head? Do you feel feverish?”

Fareed frowned. “You think I’m lying.”

“No, I—” Ahmed shook his head. “I’ve got a job to finish here, okay? You can come with me while I do it, then we’ll take you home and I’ll—we’ll figure out what to do with you.” He picked up his black toolbox in one hand and offered the other to his father.

“I don’t need to be supported,” Fareed said. “I feel fine.”

• • • •

The truck’s tires squealed as they pulled off the highway onto a narrow, shaded road. Beards of gray moss trailed from the trees and brushed the top of the truck. Ahmed lived in a pleasant white box, its postage-stamp lawn planted with crimson creepers and edged with large, smooth stones.

“No visa, right?” Ahmed said, unlocking the door. “No passport?”

“Nothing. Very unofficial, this visit. But I don’t think you have to worry about getting me home,” Fareed said. He felt the rug twitch in his arms.

His son’s house contained only things that were bright and new: chairs and tables in colorful plastics or upholstered in triangle prints, a glass bookcase stuffed with calendars and phonebooks, two photos in chromium frames on the wall. One of the photos was of Fareed, his wife, and Ahmed, taken seven years ago in Alexandria. The other photograph—

“Who is she?” Fareed said, nudging the frame so it hung askew.

His son flushed. “She’s, I met her, ah, a few months ago—”

“I see.”

“A year, actually,” Ahmed said, looking away. “She’s really nice. Very sweet. Really.”

“Does she cook well? Is she a believer? Are you engaged?” Fareed stared at the picture. “Does she have a name?”

“Rosa.” Ahmed shifted from one foot to another. “What do you want for dinner? I could make some fuul—”

“You do know your mother and I have been trying to find you a good Egyptian girl? Aisha’s a sensible woman, thirty-six, steady job at the bank—”

“That isn’t necessary.”

“Apparently not.” Fareed raised an eyebrow at Rosa, who beamed innocently from the frame. “You might have told us.”

“I was going to.”

“When was the last time you called, anyway?”

“I’ve been busy,” Ahmed mumbled.

“I can see that.”

“Business has been good.”

“I’m—glad,” Fareed said, glancing around the small room. The odor of newness filled his nose and made his chest twinge.

“Midnight,” the angel whispered in his ear, faint as a breeze. “Five hours. You’ll make a mess if you stay, you know. Hospital bills, no identification, no papers.”

Fareed clasped his hands stiffly behind his back. “So, Rosa. Do I get to meet this woman?”

His son’s silence hurt more than he expected.

“Is it my clothes? I’ll change—”

“No.”

“You can translate for me. Shouldn’t she meet her fiancé’s parents?”

“Fiancé? She’s not—” Ahmed flung up his hands. “It’s too complicated, Dad. Listen. If you paid someone, to bring you here—”

“I didn’t,” Fareed said quietly. “You have nothing to worry about. I’ll be gone soon.” He paused, studying his son. “If I let you do what you wanted when you were younger, it was out of love. Not wanting to see you caged up. I wonder if that was wrong of me.”

“It was fine.” Ahmed began to open and shut the cabinets.

Fareed sighed. “Do this for me,” he said. He had spotted the black telephone on the counter, winking with unspoken messages, and now he lifted up the handset and held it out to his son. “Call your mother tonight. Just one phone call. Just one. She misses you. She needs you.”

Ahmed hesitated, then nodded reluctantly.

“Don’t worry about dinner. I should go.”

“No, stay, please. I’ll cook for you. You’ll be impressed.”

His son was different and strange in this house, taller and stronger than the boy Fareed remembered. He had worked confidently at the hotel, snipping, stripping, splicing, and now he conjured up knives, pans, chopping boards, a blue gas flame with the casual swiftness of experience.

To Fareed’s surprise, Ahmed, who had never cooked or lifted a finger at home, made fuul with eggs and lemon-sauced lamb on rice. After cleaning the last crisp speck from his bowl, Fareed wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and pushed back from the table.

“It is very good.”

Ahmed fixed his eyes on the floor, embarrassed.

“Two daughters,” the angel said. “Three years apart. One will have your strong chin. One will have Umm Ahmed’s singing voice.”

“Call your mother,” Fareed said. “And give Rosa my regards. I should be going.” He glanced toward the sofa, over whose arm he had draped the prayer mat. A corner of the cloth fluttered, although there was no breeze in the room.

• • • •

In their small flat in Moqattam, in the hours before dawn, Umm Ahmed rubbed a track in the floor with her pacing. Dinner had gone cold on the stove and moved uneaten into the fridge. The coffeeshop had been empty and unlocked. She had groped blindly over the lintel for the spare key and found it untouched, checked the register and found it still full. A thoughtful patron had turned off the television on his way out, though the ashtrays and water pipes still trailed gray ribbons in the air. Through the dimness of the shop the picture of Ahmed in fatigues, long faded to blue ghostliness, gazed down on her.

No one knew where her husband was. No one had seen him since morning. No one knew what had happened. She dropped into a kitchen chair, exhausted, and put her head in her arms. Stars and green neon lights glowed outside the window. Automobile engines roared through the night. She had the sinking sensation of being perfectly alone.

Then, on its cream-colored cradle, the phone rang and trembled, rang and trembled.

“Hello? Ahmed? Habibi, it’s been so long—how could you—how are you—?”

Outside, like a scrap of burnt paper, her husband’s prayer mat, wrapped around a dark, heavy form, drifted down to their doorstep.

©2013 by E. Lily Yu. Originally published in McSweeney’s. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E. Lily Yu received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2012 and the Artist Trust/LaSalle Storyteller Award in 2017. Her stories have appeared in such publications as McSweeney’s, Boston Review, F&SF, Clarkesworld, and Terraform, among others, as well as multiple best-of-the-year anthologies, and have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards.

Endor House

Meg Elison | 2140 words

Conjure Magazine, Zena Cycle 17

Legends in Profile: Hermes Maleficarum
by Cassandra Elver-Mabinogion

Meet Hermes Maleficarum, the reclusive force behind the multiverse’s biggest publishing house. A mystery generations in the making.

The first thing I notice about Hermes was how unlike the rest of his family he seems. Hermes’ parents, Taliesin and his wife Morgana, were something of a power couple in the magic business, cutting a twin swath like obsidian blades at every fashionable event. But when Hermes first arrived on the scene only two years ago, appearing at the Rubedo Ball in a drab emerald suit and cape, it was without a companion on his arm. The gossip columns have naturally speculated that Hermes prefers the company of the discorporeal, but he waves that away with an utter lack of interest.

Few know the real Hermes. He has lived a secretive life since taking over from his father, paper patriarch Taliesin Maleficarum, whose soul is preserved in one of the many dim libraries in the Endor compound. His ashes were sold to a private collector in another ’verse. Son Hermes is uninterested in questions about his father, and evasive on the subject of his personal life.

“Really,” he says, sipping from the foaming black brew his eyeless assistant has placed on his desk. “Are you here to ask about the business, or about little old me?”

I take a moment and explain to him that as a writer of profiles, the answer is both. The framed cover of Conjure is on the wall just behind him, with the infamous portrait of his father and the story I wrote about the man only a few cycles ago. I choose not to say it, but he catches my gaze and collects his thoughts.

“I’m not seeing anyone at this time,” he says. “I am very focused on taking this company to the next level.”

“The next level” is a phrase we will be hearing an awful lot from people here at Endor House over the next few years. Taliesin and his father Merlin, in fact, the entire line of Maleficarums back to the first, has held to a traditionalist view on books of magic and how they should be distributed in the ’verse.

“My father and his traditional ideas. He knew the worlds were changing, but he refused to change with them. He focused on the big seven, and I understand that. But there’s so much more out there.”

Standing with his silvery eyes downcast into his liquid crystal display, Hermes’ passion is clear. He isn’t as tall as his father, and his famous insistence on wearing peasant clothes makes him seem even smaller. From the crystal, he pulls a cluster of worlds and expands them in the air where they hang and shimmer.

“This ’verse, for example. It has hundreds of magical races in it; thousands, perhaps. The mainstream religion is one of powerful magical disciplines, so they would be a ripe and ready audience. They sustain themselves using basic force-of-will magic, because they’ve never known better. We could make a killing shipping just one or two titles there in the next few cycles; just books on glamour and weaving would change their existence forever. But my father . . .”

At this, Hermes dumps the little light-worlds back into the crystal, sending droplets to spill and form spikes all over the rug. “My father was prejudiced against worlds that had discovered space travel. He claimed it was only a matter of time before they gave up magic in favor of science.”

Hermes is not adept at returning to the path of his thoughts once he has strayed. As he worked to get back to where we had begun, I had time to reflect on Taliesin the Great.

Many would agree with Hermes’ assertion that the man was prejudiced. He did harbor a major distrust of scientific worlds his whole life. I remember more than once he said that magic is nature’s lover, striving always to know her and be as one, while science is like her stalker, recording her actions from a distance and trying to control her.

Hermes is not a romantic like his father. He’s more of a visionary.

He’s pulling more worlds from the well, his dowdy, narrow sleeves turning dark at the cuffs. “Or this world, where they think only dragons have magic. Or this one, where their use is confined to whatever they can get from wands. I plan to expand our reach until there is nowhere in the multiverse we cannot touch.”

I turn my lytchglass seven times, hoping he’ll have matured by then. The Hermes I find at that time is a little softer, a little heavier. The furnishings around his office at Endor House have become more tasteful and less ostentatious. He is, however, still a bachelor.

He greets me with more practice than he had as a young man. There’s another frame for Conjure on his wall, but nothing inside it. I take this to mean that I’ll eventually get this interview finished, but my own protective spell keeps me from seeing anything that intersects with my own fate.

We settle into his deep armchairs and he fixes his small, intelligent eyes on me. As a younger man, he leapt into silences, hurrying to justify himself as if he were on trial. Something in him has settled down, and I tell him so.

“I’ve become more convinced than ever that the hypothesis I formed in childhood was correct.” He holds up one finger, as if to point out his own soaring genius, circling the room above our heads. “I’ve found hundreds more worlds that fit my earlier suspicions. We have begun to publish some of the classics there, with incredible results.”

He stands and shows me a model of a spacecraft from somewhere out in the multiverse. “Imagine you’re the captain of this ship and you encounter peril. For there is peril in the reaches between the stars, just as on the sea. If you are capable of magically protecting your ship, or moving it out of danger, would you ever forgo that power?”

He sets the model down and strides away, coming to one of the shelves holding Endor House’s perennial bestsellers. He takes down a fat brown book, closed with two black toggles.

“So we republish the Grimoire of Goblins as Practical Magic for Starship Protection. And it sells and sells!”

He squares his shoulders as he re-shelves the book. He turns to me, the improved tailoring in his robes suddenly evident in his lithe twisting. “My father was wrong. More than wrong, he was willfully ignorant.”

Of course I cannot view the financial statements he shows me about Endor House, since my spell to slide through time precludes me from investing for my own gain.  But his manner assures me that his strategy has paid off.

“We’re expanding,” he confides breathlessly, pulling more light-and-shadow mini worlds from his liquid crystal. “There are so many worlds where magic is weak, or one-sided. Some where—”

He breaks off, staring at one little green world. I can see satellites whirling around it, so it is clearly a world of science. He scries at it, squinting.

“Hmph,” he says, dropping it back down. “The work never ends. We’re printing more than we ever have. We’ve even . . .” He drops his voice down, whispering like a conspirator. “We’ve even begun to publish books in an electronic format. Science delivers magic for us. Can you imagine?”

He’s looking at me, but he’s asking his father. Over his shoulder, the cover of Conjure seems to wink at us both.

I set my lytchglass for ten cycles, hoping Hermes will have grown up. I’m interrupted in transit by a wedding invitation.

Grown up indeed, Hermes Maleficarum stands resplendent in the groom’s traditional crimson, in a double-breasted frock and fur collar. His bride, chief sorceress at Joy, Inc., and heiress to the pink cauldron of her foremothers that created the world’s most potent love potion, Melody Abraxas joins him in deep sapphire blue, breaking with her storied house’s tradition of appearing always in sacrificial black. A glittering set of publishing and spellcasting celebrities are in attendance, and a camera operated by no one at all (from my point of view) shoots photos for Conjure magazine. I expect I’ll see another magically-concealed cover frame in Hermes’ office.

The great discorporeal authors crowd above the dais in the frank privilege of their station. Mistress Hildegard sheds wisps of incense-smelling essence down over the couple in a traditional blessing of fertility. Anginata the Great has to be captured in a jeweled bottle when she is discovered hexing the couple’s first-born child. I’m sure Taliesin was invited, but I cannot locate paterfamilias among the bodiless guests. The embodied guests dance and cavort, culminating in a live orgiastic manifestation of love itself, leaving everyone lying in the grass with the insistent glow of first love lighting up their veins. It is very fine work, lingering for hours and making the crowd seem younger.

It is the wedding of the century (I am guessing; invitations pour in every day and my lytchglass gets a real workout). I am but a humble reporter, true, but even I am not ill-bred enough to question these two on their wedding day. I wish them every happiness as I swipe a glass of Abraxas Sweet Nostalgia rimmed with a little crystallized optimism. It is every bit as good as they say.

Twelve cycles later, the Maleficarum estate is reborn under Melody’s hands. It has lost all semblance of the home of Hermes’ dour youth and has grown in both style and elegance. The welcome mat sings to me on arrival, gently brushing my shoes. A will-o’-wisp leads me to the study. Melody is there, warm and gracious and dressed like a queen in a will-cloud of diamonds and aquamarines. She hasn’t aged a day.

I can see at once that Hermes has finally relaxed. Six cover frames hang above us on the brightened walls with their golden molding, but none of them hold Taliesin’s grim old face. The new patriarch himself is in maroon, slimming robes that recall his wedding finery. He greets me with real warmth, as though we have been friends all this time. Perhaps we have.

Their young son, Azimuth, is the last one I speak with. I ask him about the future, if he will run Endor House with the fearless ferocity that his father has shown. Shyly, carefully, he shows me his own liquid crystal. It is a smaller version of his father’s, but I can already see the boy’s talent. The contents are so clear they are nearly solid. Though the aperture is small, it contains most of the known multiverse already.

Azimuth reaches in, the stars reflected in his small round glasses. He is unlike his father or mother, appearing more careful and more thoughtful than either of the two showbirds from whom he was made. Gently, he pulls out a string of worlds.

“See these?” Moons and satellites spin, clouds swirl. “These worlds have no magic at all. Only science. Do you know what one good book, say The Fire in the Rose could do for them? If Endor could publish on that world, we could—”

“Leave it be,” Hermes yells at his son loudly enough that the boy quakes where he stands. “There are no worlds without magic. You’re just not skilled enough to find it. I told you. You are too young to understand.”

Azimuth looks over his impoverished world, his face falling. He offers me an apologetic little smile, lowering the worlds like a string of pearls back into the drawer from which they were pilfered.

“Please forgive my father,” Azimuth says in a humble little voice. “He’s a great man, but he is very set in his ways.”

Gentle readers, I have exhausted my lytchglass for this cycle and I must return home. As the years blur past, I look to the chains between fathers and sons. It is tempting to cast Azimuth as his grandsire reborn, or as a mere reaction against his own father. The truth is likely something stranger, something impossible to predict. Bound as I am by my own lifetime, I cannot see any further than Azimuth’s debut, perhaps a few years after that. My own mortal helplessness gives me great sympathy for those worlds without magic that Azimuth alone can see. Perhaps he can send them light for their darkness. Perhaps in some grander place, another child is planning to send us a spark for our own.

To contact the author, please float three primary corvid feathers down the Rune River on a cloudy day.

©2019 by Meg Elison.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Meg Elison is the author of The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Tiptree recommendation, Audie Award finalist and winner of the Philip K. Dick Award. Her sequel, The Book of Etta, was published in February 2017, and the third and final book in the series comes out in April of 2019. She has also been published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Shimmer, McSweeney’s, Catapult, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. You can find her at megelison.com and on Twitter @megelison.

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

What There Was to See

Maria Dahvana Headley | 19190 words

“I am touched by the emotions of the unfortunate patients who sought me out for help, and had to leave without consolation; they had lost their sight because of disease or destruction of the cornea . . . Never can those half-blind find consoling peace, when their eyes involuntarily seek out light, and the alternating sensation of light and darkness awakens their recollection of the painful loss of vision, and motivates their desire for help, which still remains unpromising. How unpleasant it is for the physician, and how depressing for the patient . . .”

—Franz Reisinger, 1824

1.

Outside the windows, the scenery was a bristling green flecked with gold. The group had taken the train from Frankfurt, a long day of vistas no one appreciated, the curtains open, cases piled behind them, all three passengers in the car weary and gilded with pollen.

When at last they reached the town where the doctor had his surgery, Professor Abendroth turned to look at his wife, and Johanna startled him with a tired smile. He caught himself wondering what their lives would have been had there been no child. Fritz felt forced by philosophy into an attitude of benevolence; Johanna was his wife, after all. It had been a good match, he a student, she a professor’s daughter. He’d come up in the world by wedding her, and she’d stayed where she began. He didn’t love her. She didn’t love him either, he was sure. Her eyes were prone to filling of late. She would not insult him by openly weeping.

Johanna Abendroth stiffened back into her petticoats, considering her husband. She was wearing her brave face, and had been for years. There was a saint-seeing sister on his side, and a great aunt as well, both of them institutionalized. They’d scarcely met before they were married, Johanna in sprigged lace, her arm laced in Fritz’s, her life ruined within months. No, not ruined. It hadn’t been truly ruined until the daughter, and the fever. She must be generous. Even if Fritz did have flaws. His ears were growing fur, and his belly was large enough to enclose a child.

Fritz scowled. Beate was her mother’s daughter: Johanna was nearsighted. She used a magnifying glass. Fritz’s sister, yes, was in hospital, but she’d never been near the girl. And he’d not known his great aunt. He’d had in his mind a different trajectory for himself, a philosophical library, a desk with rolled documents, sheaf after sheaf of paper, and nothing moving anywhere but for his pen. This marriage and daughter had eaten away at silence, filling quiet with high voices, clamorous and pining. He had an office at the university, but he was rarely there. His wife would look at him in the mornings, her eyes full, and so he’d hasten home in the evenings to make sure the daughter did not die of domestic disaster. She had to be watched. She set things on fire. She flung herself down the staircase and leapt into the cellar. She tripped from the front door in an ecstasy of wandering, and all of this almost without sight. When she was small, soon after the fever, Beate had escaped the attic and climbed onto the roof, her dress ballooned out upon the splintering shingles, the cat beside her, yowling.

She’d claimed she was following someone. That had been the beginning of the real trouble. Fritz shuddered. Beate’s eyes had returned again and again to the figure she indicated, consternation spreading across her face as she looked more or less in her father’s direction, following his furious voice, then back again with great precision at someone who was not there.

“There, father,” Beate said, and pointed into the air just off the roof. “She’s falling now. She’ll fall again in a moment.”

There was nothing, no one. A bird flitting upward, leaves dropping from the big tree.

“She’s dying,” said his daughter. And then, “Now she’ll die again. Her back will break, and her neck.”

The cat yowled and Beate nodded as whatever she watched tripped from the shingles and fell to the street below. The chill had never left Fritz, though he did not believe in ghosts.

Together, the Abendroths bore the burden of their daughter. In public they were gracious sufferers of their misfortune, but at night, they’d silently lie awake, and blame each other. Their daughter was seventeen, but her mind was younger. She was pursued by imagined friends and enemies, never silent, always gabbling. Her parents dreaded her. Even in her sleep she spoke to the invisible, and in daylight she swore she saw them watching her. She couldn’t read. She couldn’t write. From interrogating her, Fritz gathered that Beate could see only blurred insinuations of the real world, but alongside them were her own notions. To find her a teacher would have meant trotting her into public. This journey, to a village outside Giessen, was difficult enough. They could not quite bring themselves to institutionalize her. People would find out.

This was a last resort. Perhaps, with this procedure, something could be salvaged. If she could see what she should see, it might quiet the other ravings, and who knew?—perhaps even some young man . . . She was a beautiful girl, the mother and father agreed, a plausible pride and joy, her skin flawless, her long blonde locks curling into smooth spirals, and perhaps her eyes might be fixed.

Beate Abendroth sat between her parents, uncaring of their concerns. They looked at her. She did not look back. A caul over each cornea. She focused, as ever, on the things only she could see.

“Perhaps,” Fräu Abendroth said in the brave voice she reserved for such pronouncements, “this will be a true cure at last.”

“It will be,” said Professor Abendroth, and nodded for emphasis. His daughter was gazing out the window, for all the world as though she could see the scenery. Before the fever she’d been playful and quick-witted. Now she muttered all night and day long. The servants never stayed. Everything was dirty. He had a sticky splot of jam on his vest. He touched it, and now his glove was spoilt.

Fräu Abendroth sneezed into her handkerchief—her husband shuddered—and brushed dust from her daughter’s cheekbone. She twisted a lock of her daughter’s hair about her own finger.

“Mother,” Beate said, adjusting her eyeshades, tugging her hair away, seeming to peer out the window. “Stop.”

There was something visible, hanging in the trees, or at least, Beate assumed the unseen things from which the thing dangled were trees. From the way it moved, hanging by its neck from an unseen rope, they might be passing an old gallows. She slid across the leather to get closer to the window, and stretched out a hand to hold herself in place, but it was gone.

“Nearly there, and a time we’ve had,” huffed Johanna. There was a piece of boning stabbing her, just below the left breast, and there was no way to get at it. Instead, she fussed with her daughter’s hair. Fräulein could not be made to care about such things.

Beate was calm. The train wasn’t the worst place. The things she saw were nearly invisible at that speed, most of the time, and they rarely noticed her. Early in the journey, she’d seen a bad one, but it had eventually left her alone, drifting back to the front of the train where it belonged. Beate wasn’t sure if it was male or female. Once it had leapt before the train, and now it was part of it. She could only make out its mouth, and that spoke ceaselessly, a maddened murmur. She could hear it now, though it had returned to its place beside the conductor, watching the snub-nose of the train, opening its mouth from time to time to taste pipe smoke.

The things Beate saw in substitute for what other people saw were much more than just light and dark. She was familiar with faces that had disappeared from flesh a thousand years prior to her birth. Her closest companions had lived in her bedroom since she was seven. The house had been built atop a plague burial. They’d moved house several times because of her affliction. There was no place where the dead were not. Every building, every room, every small garden plot. Everything had something buried beneath it, and if you thought things were green and gold, you were wrong.

The ghost she’d seen first on this journey had curled into her lap in order to whisper. She couldn’t see her own skirts but she could see the stains its blood had left on them. Sometimes the space around her body was defined only by the presence and spoor of ghosts.

Another ghost was sitting beside her mother, looking expectant. She shook her head at it, but it looked at her hungrily anyway.

Johanna had brought cold chicken and insisted Beate eat it. Beate opened her mouth to take a little bite. She did not like meat. It reminded her of her own fingers. Vegetables were like organs. Wine and water were unknowns, but she had a feeling they were all living things, or recently deceased, the wine blood, the water tears. Nothing tasted like food to Beate. She wasn’t sure what food was meant to taste like, though she listened to her parents eating, the way they clattered folks and knives and moaned with pleasure, the way the cooks—they always quit, terrified of the things Beate saw in the kitchen—spoke of seasonings and vinegars, roasted meats and basted things. Fat cherries marinated in kirch. Shaved chocolate. All of it tasted like ghosts to her, and sad flesh. She swallowed the chicken. Dry as bark, but pulsating somehow, a sweet filth to it. She gagged. Her mother clucked. She stopped gagging.

The ghost beside her mother looked at the darkness where the chicken had been and hissed. Sometimes the dead didn’t like other dead things. Beate swallowed again, this time without chewing.

“I’m not at all hungry,” she said, but her mother forced three more bites into her mouth before she was done. The ghost watched her closely, its eyes glowing, chewing in time with her.

“I’d give it you if I could,” she told it, “if you’re starving. Are you starving? Did you starve?”

Her mother pinched her thigh. She wasn’t supposed to talk to them in public. Sometimes it couldn’t be helped.

Hope should have been trampled by now. Twelve years of blindness and along with the blindness, the Other Thing, as her parents called it. Beate herself was happy enough to wear dark glasses, though had she been allowed, she’d have left her eyes bare. Her mother wouldn’t allow her to show them. She’d threatened corneal tattoos, India ink pricked in to change the pale to black, but no one would perform them, because Beate still had a little sight. If items were held very close to her eyes, she could see the blurry edges of objects from the real world, a watchface, a fingertip, an earring. Her own world was a lamplight shadow show full of spirits, and sometimes, she was lonely there. Sometimes things she saw made her fearful, but most of the time, she simply observed the ghosts, and went about her own tasks. Today, she was not lonely, and mostly not afraid, though she was less than delighted to be traveling to the country.

The country was always full of murdered dead. Cities had fewer. People noticed ghosts in cities, and dealt with them. Beate assumed that others must do better helping them than she could. Some ghosts could be satisfied, it seemed, or the world would have been all ghosts, twenty dead for every living person. In cities, the dead blended together into a blurring mist, people walking and riding horses that were not there, everyone endlessly on the way to somewhere else. Beate’s life was small enough that she knew the problematic ghosts on her daily path, and avoided them. The rest, she didn’t mind. They were just ghosts, about their ghost business.

In the country, the dead wandered for years, uncared for, unnoticed, and when Beate passed them, they clamored and crowded her, until she could see only them, pressing, touching, all around her, sorting blades of grass and biting hay, clawing tree branches, hissing and rattling. Sad ghosts and regretful ghosts, but none of them had much knowledge of the world. Ghosts lacked ambition. They revealed no secrets, gave her no joys. They were like a thousand hungry dogs, all crowded and yapping, all wanting and wanting, but their wants were nothing anyone could provide. When Beate slept, they pried up her eyelids to be seen, and when seen, they reveled. For some of them, her gaze on them was as good as food.

“She saw me!” they shrieked in triumph, whenever she acknowledged them.

She swallowed again, feeling the chicken in her throat, and the hungry ghost looked at her and clicked its tongue.

“Go away,” Beate said. “I’m not allowed to talk to you.”

Her mother grabbed her thigh, pinching.

“You mustn’t,” said Johanna. “You mustn’t speak like this before the doctor. He can only use you if you’re a good girl. You have to show you know how to behave. They have to trust you can withstand the surgery, not damage your eyes again, nor hurt yourself.”

“This isn’t a privilege everyone receives,” her father said, holding Beate’s shoulder tightly between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s because you’re precious that we’re taking you to see the surgeon. You are precious,” he repeated carefully.

Beate was not made of metal. She was not made of gemstones, nor paper. She was not a manuscript. She was a blind girl who wasn’t blind enough.

She touched her fingertips together, and closed her eyes. When she shut her eyes, nothing was there at all, no live world, no gone world. Sometimes she did that, in moments of frustration. The darkness was only for emergency. No one in the dark needed her to behave. When she opened her eyes, her father was a blank place surrounded by two ghosts, each of them pressed against his ears, so that she could see the shape of his head. The ghosts were soldier dead, and stabbed. The train must be passing over a battlefield. One looked at her, the corner of his mouth sagging.

“Will you help me?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I can’t.”

Beate’s mother huffed beside her, and Beate turned to look at the place she judged her mother to be. She didn’t remember what the woman looked like. Johanna had a nature like a pincushion beneath a heel, an embroidery hoop with linen stretched too tight. Her mother was still accompanied by the ghost. It was caressing the chicken and lapping at the air.

Then gone, the soldier ghosts, and with a surge, the train rattled onto a bridge. It filled halfway across with new ghosts, luggage in their hands, hats askew, dresses torn. They pitched and rolled and flew out the windows on one side, wailing, their belongings floating around them, their faces agonized, their hands outstretched to hang onto a train that no longer existed. There’d been a derailment here. In a moment it was gone, all the ghosts thrown into whatever water they were crossing, Beate breathing deeply in her seat trying to recover.

The train pulled eventually to a halt. Trains always wanted to continue. Beate smiled. She liked train ghosts, apart from the terrible ones. Trains weren’t alive, but all the souls that had ever ridden, all those who’d built the tracks? Those souls craved motion. Some were still riding, their faces in the wind.

Go go go whispered the peaceful dead of the train, Beate’s preferred dead.

“Go, go, go,” whispered Beate.

“Stop smiling and stop whispering,” said Beate’s mother. “The surgeon is meeting us at the station.”

The ghosts leaned urgently forward, wishing that the train would continue. She stood. Her skin felt rumpled. She was thirsty, and the air smelled of something pleasant, some perfume. She adjusted her glasses again, snatching one last glimpse at the ghost passengers, their comfort and peace, their trust that the train would take them where they belonged. “Shall we go, then?” Beate said. “Go, go, go.”

Fritz Abendroth looked into the woods surrounding the raised platform. Something glinted in the trees. His daughter turned her head as well. He wanted, for a moment, to ask her if she saw something there. The sun dropped below the treeline.

The doctor was waiting. He tossed the family’s trunks easily into his carriage himself, though he was in his middle forties, nearly the same age as Fritz, bearded and long-limbed, imbued with an elegant vigor. Fritz looked at him in envy. His own belly seemed full of down, a pillow plumped to bursting. Something needed to be done, an abstinence.

“Doctor Arthur von Hippel,” the surgeon said. “I am offering you my hand, Fraulein Abendroth: It is directly in front of your own.” She did not take it until her mother nudged her. He’d said his first name. No one did that. Beate did it herself, as he’d set the example.

“My name is Beate Abendroth,” said Beate. “I’m blind, but not mad.”

“No one told me you were,” said the doctor, but Fritz saw, to his concern, that he was curious. The doctor tilted his head to examine Beate. “To the house,” he said. “There are comfortable rooms readied for your stay, and other guests to supper tonight as well. The dust of the road must be on you.”

He raised his hand to brush pollen from Beate’s brow, and she flinched.

“Stop it,” Johanna said. “That’s the doctor. She doesn’t like being touched around her eyes,” she said apologetically. “She can see a little, and it changes the light.”

“Quite all right,” said von Hippel. “No one does. It’s a reflex. She’s not wrong, is she? No, she is not. Her eyes are not wrong. She has lovely eyes.”

He peered into them, seeming pleased with his announcement. Her parents both frowned. Her eyes were wrong. Her corneas looked like cocoons, and what might hatch from them? Johanna’s own eyes were the color of gentian, and she’d been complimented on them many times. Johanna and Fritz glanced at each other. They walked their daughter to the carriage.

The house was large, white with columns, only slightly in disrepair. A classical design, with a gracious front porch, and a long drive lined in dark, pointed trees, the same species as the ones that made up the woods at the edge of the property.

“Will supper be formal?” Fritz made himself ask. The trees seemed to be stretching up from their roots and trying to dart at the sky. He felt the urge to laugh, but held it in check. He felt a desire to run at those trees and make certain he went with them when they ascended.

“Not formal, no,” said the doctor. “We’re away from the city, and we may as well enjoy it.” He rolled his sleeves up. His arms were powerful, and his fingers startlingly delicate, narrow-tipped manicured nails without callouses. Fritz had none himself, of course. He was a man of books, and so too was Arthur, a surgeon. He wanted to trust him, this man who’d invented a clockwork trephine for removing corneas. Fritz imagined it for a moment, the way it would slice into the cornea, like a soft-cooked egg being topped.

He spasmed and folded head-down in the hedge, dry-heaving. Von Hippel gave a cry of sympathy. Something about the chicken, Fritz tried to mumble, something about the train.

“Perhaps a dinner in your rooms,” the doctor said, leaning over him. “You’re not well.”

“No, no,” said Fritz. “We’ll dine with the group. A small weakness, and it’s passed.” Perhaps the coffee. The cream had been thick and yellow.

The daughter was drifting over the groomed lawn, and Johanna was doing nothing about it, despite the way Beate had hitched up her skirts. It was warm, but that was no excuse. “Beate!” he cried. “Beate! Come in!”

At least she wasn’t speaking to anyone. She seemed only to be walking, across the grass, very slowly, her hands out before her. She seemed bewildered, and Fritz wondered why. Perhaps it was the country air. If she tripped and fell, at least, it would be no horror. They were safe enough here in the country, at the surgery, and the doctor seemed to approve of the girl. He was tramping across the lawn to fetch her, and as Fritz and Johanna watched, the doctor took their daughter by the arm. She seemed docile, even grateful. It was unlike her. Normally, she would have lashed out, or gone limp.

Johanna took Fritz’s arm in her own as well, and they watched their daughter walk slowly in, supported by von Hippel. Fritz compared the edge of the doctor’s hairline to his own.

“He’s a doctor,” said Johanna. “A surgeon.”

“He is,” said Fritz, and together, the parents allowed themselves a moment of hope for their own futures.

Beside the house there was a pen full of rabbits, small and white, brown-dappled, black. All sniffing and twitching, in heaps of multi-colored fur. Johanna wondered if they were to be supper. She’d never enjoyed rabbit, though cooked with wine it might be palatable. It was, she thought, too warm for a stew. She sniffed the air, smelling the country, hay rotting somewhere, and trees rotting too, the sweetish scent of termites.

She bent toward the pen to pat them, and Fritz snatched her back. The rabbits were altered. Some were bandaged about the head, the bandages surgical, but stained. Their eyes had all been removed.

2.

Beate could hardly breathe. Her eyes darted in all directions, but beyond the haze of dark and light she could see nothing, truly nothing, the nothing her parents insisted was all she should ever have seen. There were no spirits here. This place, these grounds, this house, were ghostless. She put her hand to her mouth, feeling for her own face. Years surrounded and now, none. Where could they be? What was happening?

For the first time in twelve years, her vision was wholly dark. Was she cured? The train had been filled with ghosts, and nothing had changed, not until they arrived here, on this land. In the grass outside the house, she’d stumbled in the black, touching nothing, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, until the doctor had come to find her, to bring her back in. The touch of his hand had been a relief, stranded as she was, alone. Had this been her parents plan all along? Was it all a lie, this story of some new technique? Was her outer blindness to be matched by an inner, had that always been their notion? This von Hippel, was he some ocular exorcist, no kind of surgeon at all? But no—that made no sense. There had been no secret techniques performed upon her, she was sure of it. She had only traveled, and now she was here.

Alone in this room. It had been years since she’d been alone, anywhere. She felt for the curtains and drew them open for the morning, the golden glow. Without ghosts, there would be no boundaries for the universe. The bed was narrow, with carved boards at head and foot, and both sides. It had a scratchy wool blanket, which she rolled back. She unlaced her boots, and stretched her toes, craving touch of any kind. She peeled off her stockings. It was hot. She’d been directed to sleep, but how could she sleep?

“Where are they?” she’d managed to ask the doctor on the lawn.

The doctor had laughed. “Who?”

“They,” she said. “Them.”

She had felt his fingertips on her eyelids again, and this time she let him, without flinching.

“What do you see?” he asked.

She started to tell him, and then remembered what her mother had said. No talk of ghosts to him, or he would not take her as a patient. She found that she wanted to stay, wanted this doctor to work on her in this ghostless place. What would he do?

“Light, a little,” she said, the appropriate answer. She’d used it many times. There were doctors in her history, but none who’d been able to help her, though her eyes had been pricked and stabbed, held open by hooks, stared into, barked over. “I see morning and evening. I see small objects, if you hold them close to me. Sometimes I see other things, made of my mind playing in the dark, the other doctors say. But not all I see is lovely.”

“You’ve learned to make do, and I can only imagine with what you have populated the darkness around you.”

She jolted.

“Don’t be startled, Beate—I see what you have done. There is no shame in it. You are not the first blind child to have invented companions, and you will not be the last. And if I can cure you—whatever accompanies your sightlessness will likely go. You wish to see, and I can help you. But are you sure you’re ready to stop seeing the things only you can? There’s no shame here. I might tell your parents I can’t help you. There’s a language for you, night writing, dots to feel with your fingertips. You could read. This surgery will stop you seeing things in the dark. If all goes well, you’ll see my face, in the light, in three weeks time.”

She discovered that she did want to see this man’s face, and desperately. What was he, that the dead avoided him? Was it him they avoided?

“I want the surgery,” Beate had said, and so he’d taken her arm and walked her back to the house, and her parents, through the strange quiet, and the dark, through no ghosts. She looked around, scanning the nothing.

For a moment, in the direction of the trees, she thought she saw something running, a white motion, a leaping terror. She turned toward it, but it was gone.

“There will be pain,” he said. “But not so much. The cocaine will numb your eyes, and I’ll be there to keep you still. Then a fortnight bandaged. It’s a calm enough recovery. When we remove the bandages, you’ll begin to see.”

She remembered things she’d seen, hands gone and faces, arms torn and heads removed. One of her three companions in the city house wandered miserable and choke-throated, coughing and strangling his last moments, a frenzy of bloodied handkerchiefs and large-eyed pleading. The woman on the roof killed herself nightly. For a time, when she was small, Beate had thought the woman could fly, but then it became clear that she was only dying.

“I’m not frightened of pain,” Beate told the doctor, and then, boasting a little, “nothing frightens me.”

“You can give me your trust,” the doctor said. “This trephine is my own invention. I won’t hurt you.”

“I’m already hurt,” Beate surprised herself by saying. “That’s why I’m here.” The doctor made a startled sound at that statement, and held her arm more tightly.

There was another bit of whiteness in the direction of the trees, something running away, not toward her. Then it was gone again.

“What’s over there?” she asked.

“A wood,” said the doctor said. “An old one. A part of it was cut down to build these buildings. Some people say they don’t like it, but I think the forest is a lovely one. The trees are tall, and the creatures there are glad ones. In Giessen, you’ll see it one day, there is an academic garden full of medicinal plants, and an academic forest as well, planted with trees from every forest in Germany, but I prefer this one. This one came here naturally.”

Now, in her room, alone, Beate listened to the insects trilling outside, to the wind blowing through the trees, to the sounds of something howling far off, a fox, she thought, but she didn’t know whether she was listening to the living or to the dead. She covered her eyes with her hands, and imagined a language of dots on her lids. She stretched her bare limbs on the linens, feeling the weave of the fabric on her skin pretending, for a few pleasant moments, that she was something other than human. A spider, eight legs, skittering up a wall or ceiling, a swift arachnid escapist.

She woke abruptly, her face being washed with a warm cloth.

“Don’t worry,” a woman’s kind voice said. “I’m the nurse.

“The doctor is here. He wishes to look at your eyes, for only a moment, before supper,” the woman said, and another set of hands touched Beate’s face, holding her head and tilting it up, moving her skull. There was light in the room, from a lamp perhaps. She went limp, feeling the doctor opening her lids. The quiet was strange. To be surrounded only by the living. To be touched only by the living. Was this what it was to be a good daughter? Was this what they meant? Was this what the living normally did?

The press of fingers on her jaw. Beate felt dizzy. With the dead gone, she could hear breathing for the first time in years. She could feel hearts beating as they examined her eyes, and she saw shadows of real things, the doctor’s fingertips, his own eye, very close to hers, an instrument, a bright light intervening at the edges of her universe.

“She’s a perfect candidate,” the doctor said, his voice more formal than it had been. It had an edge of anticipation in it, excitement just below the surface. “We’ll go to Heidelberg. I’ll show you at the convention. This will be a cure for blindness. You won’t feel pain. You won’t be made ill by chloroform. The coca, I’ve tried it myself, is a peaceful thing, a quieter of motion in the eye, and when it’s used, I can prick my own eye with a needle and feel nothing. Would you like that? To feel nothing?”

Ghosts might be numbed. Their pain would be lessened. She wondered if there was a way to medicate the dead.

“I’d like to feel nothing,” she said, testing the words. Perhaps she would.

“Things are different than they were, Beate, even a year ago. You’ll be the perfect patient, and you’ll be famous. Would you like that?”

She didn’t know what she’d like. The doctor was certain, and so Beate began to be certain too. She had ancient memories of faces and places, the pumpkin-colored checked silk of her dress when she was five, the sky, the stars, the leaves on the trees. Her vision had been so full of spirits for so long that she’d almost forgotten what it might be to see figures in a field of vision that wasn’t simply darkness. She might see tables and gardens, the faces of the people who spoke to her. The doctor, she might see, and the nurse. She might read. She’d touched books, but they were nothing to her. Sometimes she heard her father reading from the newspaper, or her mother reading aloud from a letter. She didn’t care about books, she decided.

She let the nurse dress her, lacing and pulling the corset tightly, twisting her travel-crushed hair back into a coronet. She imagined a visible world as she was dressed. Ghosts, replaced by the living. She imagined herself at a ball, dancing with someone, her dress crinkling as she spun, and she would dance through ghosts, of course, she knew that. They were everywhere except here, but she wouldn’t know their natures any longer. The ghosts would be gone from her sight.

One day, someday, she’d go into that wood. She’d wait until her eyes were perfect, and then she’d walk into the trees, all alone, and see what there was to see.

3.

“The patient, B.A. is a young girl, seventeen years of age, thin, delicate, and of average height. Both eyes failed at the age of five, after an episode of high fever reported by her parents as nearly fatal. The fever—or some aspect of its treatment—produced corneal ulcers. She has, in both eyes, a four millimetre corneal leucoma, which opacity obscures the entirety of the pupil. While the patient is capable of distinguishing light from darkness, and counting fingers at a distance of two metres, she has been rendered effectually blind, with a side element. She reports spirit forms and indistinct figures, an oddity no doubt caused by the effects of sunlight without context.”

4.

At supper, the doctor introduced another ophthalmologist, elderly and visiting from Dublin, Doctor Samuel Bigger, who rumbled benignly over his pre-dinner cup. The Irish doctor’s wife was not so calm. She bent close to Beate’s face—Beate had not worn her glasses—and talked into it, too loudly.

“This is the keratoplasty?” said the wife, and then, addressing both doctor and parents, “She looks too young, and her corneas should be conical, not flat. She shows signs of globe collapse.”

“This is my patient, Mrs. Bigger, and her name is Fraulein Abendroth,” said Doctor von Hippel, firmly. “She’s seventeen, and her eyes are perfect for my process. What you see is merely scar. Kindly leave off examining her. We’re eating supper.”

“Perfect,” Beate repeated, hearing only that word and the way it echoed in a room of no ghosts. Ghosts would like that word. “Perfect, go, go, go,” they would say. No ghost would like this, a dinner in a room with closed windows and no breeze, motionless. Ghosts longed for wind.

The old woman touched Beate’s left eyelid, and Beate jerked back, nearly spilling her glass. “She’s not quite right, is she?”

“Now, now,” said the elderly ophthalmologist, his accent liltingly Irish. “Now. Perfection varies, does it not, Róisín? Think of the gazelles. They were not perfect, nor was it necessary that they be, that day in the desert, the sand blowing, and I with no practical knowledge of such things, making a blind gazelle see.”

Róisín made a sound. “The gazelles were fifty years ago, Samuel,” she said. “A gazelle can’t speak and tell you what it sees after surgery.”

“I was young, that’s true,” said Samuel. “But I think of that surgery fondly.”

“As do I,” said von Hippel to Fritz. “I read of Doctor Bigger’s success in a monograph, and it inspired me to this place, these techniques.”

“Is that so?” said Fritz, the first thing he’d said in hours. Even now, he was looking out toward the trees, though it was full dark.

“I was kidnapped by a tribe of nomads,” said Doctor Bigger. Beate felt the traditional dread of the blind, converted by fate into listeners. She was sitting beside the Irish doctor, and he leaned closer. “Twelve or fourteen days from Grand Cairo. Kidnapped and forced to bargain for my life with all the canny I possessed.”

Beate could smell dishes traveling from the kitchen, and cringed slightly. Johanna cringed too. A stew was being ladled. Meat stuffed with cabbage, cooked with carrots and red wine.

“Is this a rabbit stew?” Johanna asked, politely. “Is it, by chance, made of the rabbits from outside the house?” Beneath the table, her husband kicked her. “The medical rabbits?”

“It is,” Doctor von Hippel said, clearly proud. “Some do not survive the enucleation. They die of fright. We don’t waste them here. The meat is tender, is it not? Rabbits, not to speak indelicately, are prolific creatures. Those in excess of our needs, we use in the kitchens.”

“And those surgeries,” Johanna said. “We saw the others in their pen. Can they really make the blind see? That is our purpose, Doctor von Hippel. She must see. Do you assure us that she will?”

“They will see,” the doctor said. “The blind will see.”

“And the dead will walk,” said Fritz, startling himself. He laughed. “Beate?”

His wife pinched him. He didn’t know why he’d said that either.

“The dead are not my business,” said Doctor von Hippel, “I’m in the business of providing light to the blind.”

Beate was the only one listening to Doctor Bigger, in an effort to keep from eating her food. He leaned in.

“The Bedouin chieftain, Beate, had a pet gazelle, a dear animal, and it was blind, one eye missing, the other injured. I did not ask what had befallen it, but someone told me it had met a lion, and someone else told me it’d met a poker. They told me they’d kill me, for I had no purse, no hope of anyone to pay my ransom, and I said I’d pay my way out by making the chieftain’s pet see again. There was another gazelle in the camp, and I took its eye and brought it to the pet, cutting away the injured cornea with my own knife, and stitching the new one into position with two sutures. We bound its eyes with silk, and it went about the camp, stumbling. It was a miraculous cure. After two weeks, the pet gazelle opened its eyes, and could see movement and detail, and recognize its owner. It pranced about, Beate, it did so, for all the world as though it had never been injured, seeing new things for the first time, and old things resurrected in its sight. I would I could see anew, with such joy, Beate, but not the present day. I’m nearing my own time of dying, and I wish I could see a few of the loved ones of my history. I would like to see them before I die, for what is after this? What will we see when the dark comes down on us? We must see what we can see before we are gone from this bright world, Beate.”

The doctor clucked happily to himself, and then returned to his meal, his wine, his rabbit.

“And the other gazelle,” asked Beate finally. “The one that gave the eye? What happened to it?”

“We killed it,” Bigger said. “Of course.”

Beate sat in nervous silence. She wasn’t sure what a gazelle was. She had an image of two young girls, one a wife, the other a slave. The wife blind, the slave girl sighted, but less valuable. She thought of all the ghosts she’d met, and knew that something like this could happen anywhere, on any piece of land. That any sort of person could be killed for something someone else wanted.

She imagined a pen filled with eyeless girls, their faces bandaged, and here, in the comfortable rooms, the warm woolen blanket, the soft cloth and the kind doctor, ministering to girls like her, who were precious to someone. Or, if not precious, at least girls for whom surgical costs had been paid.

“My new eyes,” Beate said, her words too fast. “Where will they come from? Is there another girl here, waiting to give me her sight? Are you taking eyes from other girls? Are you killing them? Where are they? Where are the ghosts?”

Conversation stopped. She was shouting, and it was strange, because she’d never cared about other girls. She had never cared about the living at all.

“Beate!” her father cried. “Hush!”

“What can you be thinking?” her mother said, and then turning to the others at the table, “She’s not herself. The journey. She’d never say something like this otherwise. She’ll certainly not speak so before the conference in Heidelberg. Beate’s a good girl.”

“It’s quite all right,” von Hippel said. “You’ll receive the corneas of one of our rabbits, Beate, nothing from another human. The sole successful grafts have been porcine and lapine, and none of those have persevered beyond the point of clouded healing. This one, though, will be different. We’ve advanced in our techniques, as I said. Things are improved.”

“I took an eye from a wolf once, long ago,” said Doctor Bigger, thoughtfully. “A wolf trapped by hunters. I placed the wolf’s cornea in the eye of a pointer dog, but the dog ran into the woods, and tore off its bandages. I was certain the eye would be ruined, but when the dog returned, some weeks later, the wolf eye was the brighter, and the clearer, and through the wolf’s eye, the dog could see more and other than it had ever seen through its own sight.”

“Hush,” said his wife, kinder than she’d been. “The girl is frightened, and no one could blame her. You telling tales of gazelles and wolves, and she naught but a child.”

Beate was no longer frightened. The notion of her eyes becoming animal appealed to her. Perhaps she’d see something wonderful in the wood. She opened her mouth and took a spoonful of rabbit stew. It was delicious, the meat dissolving on her tongue, sweet and tender. She was eating something blind. She was eating the visions of a thousand rabbits.

Later, seated on the divans before the fire, Beate curled in a laprobe, imagining herself seeing through a wolf’s eye, the trees before her. Through wolf eyes she might see prey.

Fritz looked out the windows as well, tilting the spirits in the bottom of his glass. He held a burning mouthful. Outside the windows, in the dark, something ran, and ran, and ran.

5.

Shortly after the sun rose, Johanna wandered the house in search of her husband, tremendously annoyed. The night had been too late, and the morning too early, and Johanna’s head ached. She’d gotten half through her toilette before she’d realized Fritz was unaccounted for. She’d assumed he was with von Hippel, but von Hippel and his nurse were preparing Beate for surgery, and Fritz was still not in evidence.

Johanna left the house, and walked out onto the great lawn. Perhaps he’d gone for a walk in the woods, caring nothing for his responsibilities as a father and husband. She brought her magnifying glass out from the bosom of her dress, small and discrete, she was not terribly nearsighted, no, whatever Fritz insisted, and peered into the forest. Nothing to be seen there. No Herr Abendroth. But somehow, she did not wish to walk closer to the line of brush and leaves.

“Fritz,” she called. No one would hear her. She was out far enough from the house. “Fritz? Beate is already in the surgery! Come out, if you’re in the wood!”

But nothing in the wood moved.

There was something white in the center of the great lawn. She walked toward it, slowly. A chicken, possibly, caught by a fox. Or one of those rabbits.

She picked up her husband’s pajama trousers before she knew what they were, and found dirt on them, their edge partially dug into a divet in the grass. Then his shirt. She found, not thinking, no, not thinking, a ragged tear in it. She looked around, turning slowly in a circle. There was nothing else. No one. No Fritz. Here were his slippers, his pajamas, his robe.

Johanna turned to run back to the house, to tell someone. What would she tell them? That he’d shed his clothes and run into the forest? She paused, stepping over the place the pajamas had been.

There was something watching. She felt it. She looked around frantically, dread rising in her, her throat clenching, her fists closing. Something was all around her. And a horrible smell, dense woods, rotting meat.

As she stood, paralyzed, shaking, something tore a slash in her wrapper, long and jagged, and she felt a searing pain in her rib, the flesh opened by something sharp as a knife.

6.

Beate looked into the nothing, her eyes hooked open. The cocaine solution was dropped in, two drops at a time, and she felt her eye becoming something other than her own, a piece of stranger’s skin.

“Do you feel this?” the doctor asked, and she did, a slight pulling, a tug, but it was not painful. It was as though a strand of her hair was caught in a brush, not tangled, but stretched.

The doctor adjusted the trephine, a bronze device shaped a little like a telescope, and wound its gears with a key. He employed it to cutting the entire opaque cicatrix of Beate’s left eye, a four-millimeter diameter, a delicate, delicate operation, the blade slithering through her flesh like a serpent through flooded land. He lowered the instrument carefully. He felt the tiniest instant of resistance, and then release: The blade had cut her eye. Any tremble, any slip, and he’d damage the lens. His instrument sliced perfectly in a circle, at consistent depth. The doctor only needed to hold it steady as it cut. He excised the scarred cornea down to the membrane of Descemet, and—this was the primitive part—removed it with knife and forceps. The nurse brought iced mercuric chloride to control the hemorrhaging, but a small trickle of blood made its way down the girl’s cheek.

Beate stretched her toes. She was shoeless, still, and enjoying it. The tug on her eye was still not unpleasant. There were no ghosts in the room. All she could hear was the living. Her wrists were restrained, though she felt no desire to claw at her eyes. There was a heavy blanket holding her body to the pallet, and no one tried to confess their sins. No one asked her to see their faces or their deaths. No one wished to go, go, go.

The doctor bent to the rabbit: calm, its eyeballs glazed, the cocaine solution liberally applied there as well. Its ears quivered only slightly. The surgeon felt the usual pinch of suspicion, the fear that the rabbit eye would be unusable somehow, but he brought the trephine into position, and cut. He remembered his initial experiments, a failure with a dog’s cornea, globe collapsed, vitreous humors overflowing, and the man he’d ministered to blinder than when he’d begun. Removing a cornea was like removing a cork from a bottle of precious wine. Wine could spill. Fifty years of attempts, this procedure. Reisinger had begun with the rabbits in the 1820s, then Bigger, and Kissel, each of them with their near-successes, their pigs, wolves, dogs, and gazelles.

Carefully, precisely, von Hippel brought the rabbit’s cornea into position, and placed it into the lamellar bed as though centering a wooden peg in a children’s toy. Another bloody tear rolled down the girl’s cheek as the nurse irrigated the site, dusted iodoform over the eye, and closed both eyes with a bandage. He’d only work on one eye at a time, to show the contrast, and, as well, there’d been an incident with rabbit corneas once before. He’d never perform surgery on both eyes simultaneously now.

He’d partaken of the coca himself. It improved his precision, though it made his heart switch like the tail of an aggrieved jungle cat.

Beate’s mouth moved into an expression not entirely a smile. She was beautiful, von Hippel thought, or she would be one day. He imagined the girl seeing herself for the first time, her expression when she discovered her own face. It was a strange woman who’d never seen herself in a glass. He would have the privilege of introducing her to vanity. He’d take her to Heidelberg. All the other surgeons would be agog. His paper was already half-written in his head, to be sent to every journal after the public presentation.

Beate Abendroth would be his miracle. She was young enough to be a daughter, though he had no daughters. Only a son, nineteen now, and at university. He thought of how his would be the first face she’d see in twelve years.

The nurse wrung the rabbit’s neck and saved it for soup. As she carried it across the room, he heard, from somewhere on the grounds, the sound of someone shrieking over and over again. He thought of fire, the house burning, and swiftly bundled Beate. His nurse was already up the stairs, and running too, and by the time they were all outside, on the great lawn, panting and spinning for smoke it was clear to him that something was very wrong. There was no fire. There was only Johanna, in the center of the lawn, screaming.

“What is the matter with my mother?” murmured Beate, dazed with anesthetic and sedative.

“She seems to have experienced something unpleasant in the grass,” said the doctor, minimizing it.

He did not wish to tell the girl anything about what her mother was doing. Doctor Bigger was there with the women, his arm about the mother’s shoulders. She was clearly hysterical, and on her white wrapper, there were splashes of blood, a wound on her ribcage.

Bigger looked toward the house, and recited a poem of his own devising.

“Sin stalk’d about apostate man
Driv’n from happiness under ban,
And prescient now of Death;
Marking his future victims well,
Prizes of sorrow, sin, and hell,
From first, to latest breath!”

The Irishman crossed himself. The girl’s mother wailed again, and Bigger worked at her ribcage, binding something up. A wound, von Hippel saw now.

“What has happened to my mother?” The girl felt heavy as an animal in his arms.

“I don’t know,” said the doctor.

“Something took him!” Johanna shrieked. “Something took him, and now he’s gone! Something happened here! Something happened to my husband! His clothes! It’s still here! Can you not feel it?”

Von Hippel looked down, at Beate in his arms, bandaged and drugged, nearly unconscious. She lolled, groggily, as her mother screamed.

“Something took him!” Johanna shouted again, and Beate whispered something. The doctor lowered his ear to her mouth.

“Go,” she whispered again. “Go, go, go.”

• • • •

Beate slept a long time, was bandaged and swooning, so long that she missed Johanna’s collapse, and her gibbering insistence that the house and grounds contained something terrible. The nurse wrapped Johanna in sheets. They were not equipped. Johanna calmed somewhat, though not enough. They stitched her wound, which was, it was true, strange. Deep and jagged, as though she’d fallen on a piece of metal.

That night, and every night after the day she’d found the pajamas, Johanna felt things all around her. The house shuddered with them, and the grounds too. She smelled carrion. She felt wind that wasn’t there. The house was dark and the forest was darker.

She felt herself getting old, her daughter still blind, the two of them, she imagined, in a house together, in misery, shuffling about, living on smaller and smaller rations. Her family was dead, and her husband was gone. She’d chosen badly. The memory of Fritz’s pajamas haunted her, and the memory of the wound. The house itself felt wrong. Surfaces that should have felt hard felt soft, and the pen where the medical rabbits lived was too loud. Everything screamed, all night, the woods, the rabbits.

There was no announcement of Fritz’s disappearance. The constable came, examined the pajamas, the grass, and determined that Fritz was not dead, but fled. He’d left his family, the man said, not kindly. She imagined Fritz, for a moment, back at the University, in his office, surrounded by papers. It was not true.

“But something touched me,” Johanna managed, and the constable looked at her blankly. “Something touched me, there, where I found them.”

She sat before the constable, her teacup in her hand, shaking so hard the liquid splashed out. Here in the woods, without her life. Here with only a bandaged half-blind daughter and a case of summer dresses. Johanna fingered the stitches in her ribcage. A ragdoll, sewn up after an encounter with a lapdog, put out to be played with again.

She sniffed the air, revolted, and the doctor and constable looked at her.

Johanna withstood it as long as she could, and then, one night, she dressed herself, and walked until she crossed the train tracks, and then onward, to Giessen. She stood on the platform, and considered her future. It was still night. No one was yet waiting for the train, no one looking at her. Gentian eyes. Compliments from men. She had been beautiful. Now she was old, and there was a jagged scar from her breast to her navel. She’d wasted her youth. There would be no money to pay the bills without Fritz. There would be no summers, no cook, no housekeeper. A future alone in Frankfurt. Widowed but not widowed. What would she do? She had no family. She had no money. Everyone was dead.

She looked behind her, once, at something that didn’t pursue her past the boundary of the forest, but waited there on the edge, watching. She could not see it. She could smell it.

She stepped forward until she was balanced on a tread, and there, swaying, she waited for the train.

7.

When she woke, Beate Abendroth had no parents, but she did not know it. The doctor and the nurse gently unwrapped the bandages. They’d ministered to her for weeks using lamplight only. The eye was healing nicely, the cornea no longer blurred and weeping but nearly crystalline, vessels transiting to the rest of the eye.

“Are you prepared?” asked the doctor. Beate nodded, ready for the pain of opening into light, if, indeed, there would be pain.

At first there was startlement more than anything. The nurse stripped the last bandage away, and swabbed her eyelid with cotton pledgets. The doctor touched her lids with his fingertips, and whispered to her.

“Now,” he said.

She opened her eyes. A flash of rose and orange in the left one, the new one. Two blurry forms moved there, human, but not.

“Tell us what you see,” the doctor said.

All around the discomfort were the possibilities of a room, draperies blowing, a vague rectangle, a window, a bureau. There was a lamp. She hadn’t seen any part of herself in so long, and now she saw her hands. They splayed, pale fingers spread. A leg moved, and she knew it for her own, but it was a woman’s leg, a woman’s skirts. Everything was haloed with white, agonizing light. She shut her eyes.

“Please,” Beate said. “Dark.”

She felt the doctor’s arm around her shoulders. She opened her eyes again, a little, and saw the curtains move. The doctor waved his hand.

“How many fingers do you see?” he asked. “Look at me. Look into the light, and tell me what you see.”

The doctor bent closer to look into her eye, and through a wash of tears, blinking rapidly, she saw him too, a beard and skin. She had not thought in faces before, but in voices, and the doctor’s voice, bright and merry, was not his looks. He looked like a man getting old, his hair long and curling around his ears, his beard and mustache streaked with silver, though his body was still that of a young man, slender and wiry. The nurse was freckles and comforting roundness. Beate stared at the shapes on her bodice, triangles and squares. She touched them with her fingertip, and found them pleated, pressed. She could see them, and feel them at once, and this was what woke her into vision.

She could see.

She jolted. Something had moved in the room, something other than the people in it. No, the curtains.

“How many fingers?” asked the doctor again.

“Two fingers,” she said, looking up at the kindly face of the living man before her, at the nurse, at the wallpaper, a pale yellow twisting motif. “Two. I can see them. I can see you. But what is that?”

She pointed at the window, at the curtains. They shifted, gusted, surged, as though something brushed against them.

“The wind,” the doctor said, and laughed in delight. “You can see. You can see!”

“It’s moving,” said Beate. “Everything shines.”

The doctor took her in his arms and held her tightly. Beate stiffened for a long moment. She could not remember having been held before. There were tears in her hair, the doctor weeping, in pride.

“My parents?” she asked. “Where are they? Why are they not here?”

“I’ve cured you,” the doctor said. “No one’s ever done it before.”

Beate looked with her left eye over his shoulder at the room, its glowing edges, the nurse, her glowing face, the way the bed curtains and the window curtains still shifted, the way the carpet seemed to crush beneath something heavy.

“I can see,” she whispered. This was what the world looked like. This was what this room, and these people looked like.

The doctor brought her a mirror and held it before her, so that she could see herself.

Strands of blonde hair, a gown, and later, in the floor-length mirror, a blurry-edged shining girl. She saw for the first time the silvery cornea in the un-changed eye, the ugly right eye her mother had objected to, but it wasn’t ugly. The doctor stood behind her, watching her watch herself and grinning.

“You’re beautiful, Beate,” he told her.

“Am I?” she asked. She found herself bewildering. She didn’t know what beauty would be, what it would mean, nor what it even consisted of. Here were her mouth and her eye, still red. Here was her hair, braided and golden. Here was the strangeness of everything around her, the world.

“Perfect,” said the doctor. “You’re perfect.”

But the part of her that was truly perfect was the silver eye. She knew it.

“Where are my parents?” she asked again.

The doctor hesitated, she thought.

“In Frankfurt,” he said. “Your healing took long enough that your father was called back to the city, to work. Your mother went with him.” He showed her a piece of paper, an envelope, but she couldn’t read it. He knew that.

“We’ve had a letter from her,” the doctor said, looking at Beate. “All is well.”

She could not read his expression, but then he smiled, and repeated himself. “All is well, Beate. You are to be cared for here for as long as you need to stay.”

The doctor and nurse took her outside, and she looked around, at the grass, at the trees. There were no ghosts here, she’d known that already, but it was different to see with one eye, to see people where ghosts had been. Her eye saw the world in glinting movement, birds flinging themselves up toward the light, shocking flashes. She was overwhelmed by it, and excited at once. She did not want to sleep again. She felt like crying, or laughing, not simply for joy but for loss too. She stood between the doctor and nurse, seeing the sky, wondering what would happen when she went away from this piece of land.

“Will they come back for me?” she asked the doctor, and some part of her referred to both her parents and the ghosts.

Her parents had never liked her. She was not stupid. They’d sought release from their burden. She thought of her father, in his office, surrounded by his books. Without Beate, Johanna might do as she pleased, and Beate knew she’d longed for afternoon concerts, for flower gardens unmarred by a daughter who saw only blackness and death, an unmarriageable daughter.

She slept that night in a knot of coverlets, sweating, springing up over and over again to look into the dark and wonder if she was blind again, if this had all been a dream. Every time she woke, she lit the lamp, and every time she lit the lamp, she marveled at it, the way the heat of the oil transformed into light, the way seeing depended on it. Her knowledge of the world had never depended on light before.

She looked into the dark, hunting for something. She was looking for the dead, she realized, things her mind was used to seeing, but there were none here. She allowed herself to think a moment about what it would be like if the ghosts were no longer visible anywhere, if she herself had shifted. There would be no more of the woman leaping from the roof edge, no more plague victims following her through the house. There would be no more battlefield ghosts, no more derailment victims dropping toward the water. She would be free of all of them, and of their hopes for her acknowledgement. She would be more alone than she’d ever been before, for all her childhood raised in an echoing house, without a governess. She’d always—until this house—traveled with an invisible entourage. It would be a test, leaving. Then she’d know. Back in Frankfurt, with her parents, she’d know if the ghosts were gone. Here, who could say?

She got out of bed, tied herself into the wrapper—striped in pink and silver, she now saw—the names for the colors coming back to her from her childhood. She took the oil lamp and tiptoed out into the house itself. She ran her fingertips along a wall, guiding herself to the stairs.

She felt something in that wall, in that wallpaper, a scoring just beneath the surface. Something had clawed the paper back. She brought the oil lamp up to show the spot, but there was nothing. She shut her eyes, and touched it again. Yes. Marks, widely spaced, and deep. She could feel the plaster crumbles around each one, and the paper too, that unpleasant yellow-figured paper. She thought that she heard someone else awake in the house, or a dog perhaps, a huffing, raw breath, something snuffling in the dark just ahead of her.

Beate ran a hand over something she thought was bark, a branch, but it was only a banister. She closed her left eye, and saw nothing with the right. She closed the right eye, and again, the banister looked like a tree. The walls looked like forest. She squinted. No, it was only the wallpaper. She touched it again, to be sure.

In the early morning, Beate sat in the kitchen with the cook, drinking a cup of scalding tea, and looking out over the green grass and golden leaves—and yes, they were green and gold, and now she understood those colors—toward the woods. There were birds on the lawn, pecking and plucking at worms, and occasionally, Beate saw things hopping and dancing, little motes of white. Rabbits, she thought, and went out to look at the pen.

There they were, all in a clump, their many-colored bodies twisted together, nuzzling and prodding themselves closer into one another. Their ears twitched frantically, but they couldn’t see her. There was disparity between the rabbits she saw before her and the notion she’d had of rabbits until this moment. Rabbits were precise, and these eyeless ones even more so. There were hollow sockets. What sort of rabbit had it been that had given her this sight? Did all rabbits see the world the same way? She imagined her head twitching up to see the sky, for fear of an owl or eagle. She thought of what a rabbit might see from the side of its vision, a fox, a wolf, a big cat. Or a surgeon, kneeling to trap.

She stood beside the rabbit pen, looking back and forth, her new left eye still uncertain. If something were to swoop upon her from above, she would not see it coming. If something were creeping up from behind, she would not know.

It was cold on the lawn, and she felt an urge to drop to her knees and dig in the dirt, to burrow in. She saw the house, the way it loomed up over the grass, the sun rising behind it, a dark building full of gleaming windows, each one cased in triangular panes like honeycombs, or the wings of a kitchen fly like the one she’d caught this morning and examined.

In the dew, she saw her own footprints, a trail from the front door, the sunrise showing her path across the grass in a perfect negative. There was another set of tracks beside hers, as though she had not walked out from the house alone. Even as she wondered, the sun broke the roofline, and the dew shifted into droplets, steaming away with the day.

Mist and sunlight playing tricks. The sun was out, and she could see Doctor von Hippel standing on the porch, calling her in for breakfast.

She glanced toward the woods, but there was nothing there. Then she turned, and ran to the house, laughing at her speed, her certainty.

• • • •

Beate looked at Arthur von Hippel, at his hair newly cut, at his shirt newly starched. He’d dressed for dinner, and so had she. He’d brought her a gown in shot silk the color of the trees outside. She looked like a changing leaf, though her throat was covered in ivory lace, nothing like the dark stems appended to the true leaves outside. Her hair had been done into a series of poufs, and for the first time, she understood a hairstyle as something to be seen rather than touched. The house still moved before Beate’s left eye, the curtains shifting, the carpets crushing, but she’d ceased to care. These aftereffects of the surgery were common, the doctor told her, memories of things her mind had created to fill the vacuii.

They were celebrating her complete healing, the streaks of red gone from her cornea, the rabbit’s eye fully integrated into Beate’s own.

“Some people create starry skies inside blindness,” Doctor von Hippel told her, refilling her wine from the decanter. “Others create universes of animals, people, memories of the time before they were blinded. Houses made of rooms they saw when they were infants. Still other blind people never think in visuals at all, but only in sounds and smells. You saw what your mind wished you to see,” the doctor said. “And now you see with your eyes.”

She felt the grain of the table with her fingers. Her left eye thought it saw the pale marks of claws. It didn’t. Her mind had made them.

“Has something spilt?” he said.

“Might I have another portion of nut cake?” she asked. She had a sweet tooth now she could see sweets.

“Of course, liebling,” he said. She looked up at him, startled.

“I apologize,” said the doctor, and flushed. “You must know I’ve become fond of you. My wife died long ago, and it’s been some time since there was a young woman about.”

In the dark at the corner of the dining room, she thought she caught sight of something moving, but then, no. Nothing was there. The doctor fed her a bite of walnut cake, the glaze orange-flavored, sweet and crystallized, and she sucked it, holding it in her mouth until it dissolved. The nights were getting cooler. He wrapped a shawl about her shoulders.

In her bedchamber, she looked at herself for a moment in the mirror, admiring her hairstyle. She turned, blinking, rubbing her eyes and stretched, facing the bed.

As she moved her hand from over her left eye, something rose up from the carpet.

There was a bear.

It filled the room. A bear made of dark.

She stayed silent, her hand clapped to her mouth, and frantically closed first one eye, then the other. The bear blinked in and out of existence. The great jaw, the glittering eyes, the tremendous paws, each one the size of her face, each one with too many claws. It had too many legs. It had too many heads. It wasn’t what it was meant to be, but it lurched forward, shambling, humping across the carpet, crushing it beneath its weight. It grunted and snuffled the carpet pile, the bedclothes, the edge of her nightgown.

She couldn’t see it through the blind eye, the human eye. This was the rabbit eye.

The bear was a ghost.

It passed through her in a rush of brambles and cave, of oak leaves and berries and rotting meat, and she gasped, holding her heart. It used no words, but it growled, and the vibration of the growl shook her skeleton.

“Help,” she whispered, too frightened to scream, but there was no one to hear.

A wrong bear, as though drawn by a child. A bear that had never seen another bear. It moved through the room, hunting. It had mangy clots of bedclothes half-hidden in its darkness, and its jaw was rowed with fangs. It growled. A gaping wound in its shoulder bled light. It was not right, it was not quite a bear. It was something more. What did she know of bears? A picture book from her childhood, before she was blind, nothing like this.

The bear rose up on its hind legs, opened its mouth, and roared into her face, its jaw dripping with ghost gore, its breath pouring across her skin, and into her own voice. Then it stormed through her and down the stairs, leaving her shaking, nearly vomiting.

She’d exchanged one kind of ghost for another.

When she looked out the window with her left eye open, she could see more ghosts, a stampede of eyeless rabbits, escaping the house, the bear stalking them, running, its haunches gathered, bounding over the grass. It stopped in the center of the lawn and sniffed, tearing up ghost grass with ghost claws, and the ghosts of a thousand rabbits ran from it.

For the first time in weeks, with a shock that went right through her, she saw motion with her right eye. She closed it, and looked at the same place, only with the left. Nothing but animal ghosts. Slowly, as slowly as she could, shaking as she was, she covered her left eye with her palm, and opened her right.

She saw at last what the bear was chasing.

She watched the man stumble and turn. She opened both eyes. With her left she saw the bear ghost, and the rabbits, and with the right she saw the human. With both eyes, she watched the ghost bear tear into a man she recognized from her early childhood, before the blindness. Her father, in his pajamas.

Now she screamed, at last, and the doctor rushed in, tying up his robe. He took her in his arms and held her, but she could not stop screaming. Her father was being torn apart on the lawn. The room was full of rabbit ghosts, silken silver and white, furred things, flashing things, moving quickly, emerging from the walls again.

“What do you see?” the doctor asked her urgently, looking into her eyes, moving his hand from eye to eye, shining a light into them.

“Hundreds,” she said, but they were gone, burrowed, under roots and in the trees.

“How many fingers?”

“What fingers?” she asked. She’d spent years less than blind, and now she was more than sighted.

“You’re not well, liebling,” said the doctor. “You must try to calm yourself, or there will be morphia.”

“No,” Beate wailed. “I know I am not well. Am I your wife, Doctor von Hippel, that you call me darling? You should not wish to take me to wife. I see too much.”

“Hush,” said the doctor. “Call me Arthur, Beate. We are friends.”

“Are we?” she asked. “Where are my parents? You said they were in Frankfurt. My father is not in Frankfurt! He is not!”

She stumbled to the window, looking out with her blind eye and her rabbit eye at once. Her ghost father was there, dying in the grass, and the bear was there too, dragging him into the woods.

“He is in Frankfurt,” said the doctor firmly. “With your mother. You had a nightmare, Beate, but you’re safe with me, here. Everything is safe.”

Beate turned and looked at von Hippel, but he did not change his story.

She watched ghost rabbits circle her doctor, weave themselves in and out of his mouth and eyes and ears, clawing him, raking him. She watched rabbits throw themselves into his body like worms eating bones, and through his skin they jumped, blind and raging.

She whimpered.

“Stay with me,” the doctor said. “I will be your husband.”

“Where else am I to go?” Beate wept. “My father is dead. My mother is gone. Where is she?”

The bear was in the room again, its maw covered in blood. How had it killed her father? It was a ghost. How had it touched him? Would it touch her too? She watched its darkness swell and shrink, and inside it curled the ghosts of thousands of dead.

“Safe in Frankfurt,” said the doctor, stroking her hair. She felt like a pet, orphaned and taken from its home.

The bear was as large as the whole house one moment, and small as a dog the next. It clawed the furniture. It tore at the grass, at the bedclothes, at the boundary of the property.

“All is well,” said the doctor.

Beate knew he was lying. Nightly, she saw the bear running from the house, gaining speed as it went, and the ghost of her father tumbling over in the grass. The surgery, she soon learned, was full of dead rabbits, all of them neck-wrung. The kitchen was full of skinned rabbits. Now that her eye was healed, she knew the whole place swarmed with the dead, and all the dead could do was try to hide from the monster that lived here, the great bear, gorging and expanding.

The ghost of her father looked up at the windows of her bedroom.

“Can you help me?” he asked. She could not.

She had not liked her father, and her father had not liked her, but he had not deserved to be eaten by something that didn’t exist. What was this land that it called for sight?

8.

The rabbit cornea healed into increasing clarity over the next months, the flap of skin transparent, the vision improving, but the girl herself was not right. Von Hippel had planned to announce his victory at the Ophthalmological Society Meeting of 1886, a surprise to every surgeon there. His success would birth a new method, the clockwork trephine combined with cocaine anesthetic. He was nervous that this would be impossible, though he’d given himself a year to prepare.

At first, Beate jumped at every sound, and then spent hours at the windows, tears running down her cheeks. She patrolled the rabbit pens, and gazed into the woods. At night, she often screamed, but refused sedation. She left her lights burning.

Von Hippel worried. There was still no explanation for what her father had done, his midnight disappearance. The mother, he understood. The loss of her husband had placed the woman in a bleakness it’d been impossible to recover from.

He looked at Beate’s beautiful face, listened to her sweet voice. Surely she would recover completely. It simply needed time. Von Hippel made certain to dress her in the clothing of a respectable young woman, though she cared nothing for fashion. She didn’t know how to lace her corset, nor did she know how to bathe herself. She didn’t know how to read. She didn’t know how to write.

She only knew, it seemed, how to sit in the grass, surrounded by rabbits. Sometimes the doctor would look out the windows of his office, and see her sitting there, her skirts spread around her, even as fall came down and the cold began.

“The thing I saw is gone,” she informed him one evening. “It’s gone into the wood, or into a cave.”

“It is light,” he told her, impatient with her visions. “The thing you saw is light. If it is gone, Beate, it is a good sign. You’re healing well, and your mind is beginning to forget its old notions.”

“Hibernating, perhaps,” she said.

But after that, for a time, she was better, calmer, though it was clear she still saw things. Her eyes, both the sighted and the not, darted around when he spoke to her. Carefully, he ignored it, not asking what she thought she saw. It would only encourage her mind to invent more ferociously. He had the cook and a maidservant watching Beate, and he did too, when he could. Her mind had been trained by years of darkness, he concluded, and she saw spots of light and made them into spirits. That, or he’d left a speck of dust in her eye. He examined her frequently, fearful the graft would fail, but it did not. There were no signs of infection, of cloudiness.

She seemed well enough but for her visions, and so the doctor focused on teaching her how to behave as a woman should. She learned to use her knife and fork at table, and then how to dress herself prettily enough. Mostly she learned to discern which clothing was flattering, but one day he found Beate standing in the garden, in the center of heap of dead leaves. She was wearing her winter cloak, her hair loose and golden. On her head, there was a crown. He first thought it was only feathers, but then he saw that it was made of dead birds, their bodies stiff in the icy air. Von Hippel stood watching her for a time, and finally approached her, quietly. She turned to look at him, and smiled with a kind of triumph.

“They like it,” she said. “Their bodies used for something other than death.”

Later in the winter he found her stitching a cape of rabbit pelts. He allowed it. She could have her birds and her pelts, if he had her good behavior at dinner, and soon, in Heidelberg. She seemed quite sane now.

She wore her rabbit fur muffler, and her rabbit fur hat, and at dinner, she was lovely. At night, she wandered, mapping the dark, he imagined, though she knew the house now. He was interested in her research into her surroundings, and added it to his own, the way she gained confidence, the way she ran her fingers over the walls, kneeling to look at the baseboards, testing the strength of doors. She explored the rabbit pen, touched the wallpaper with her fingertips and asked the names of colors, nodding seriously, sometimes gay, sometimes melancholy, but steadily improving. She wandered the kitchen, asking questions of the cooks, and learning the history of the place, the land, the house itself.

Von Hippel walked into the room one afternoon to find Beate seated at the bench, all the kitchen girls around her. They were of an age.

“It stalks,” Beate was saying. “It’s lonesome.”

“Yes, and so it would be,” said one of the girls, the redhead. “My grandmother says that the last one was shot here, in these same woods, when she was a girl. She remembers seeing it carried off, tied to a log, five men to carry it. Back then, there was no house like there is now. There was only the wood, and little cabins. Killed three hunters, and they thought it was a monster, but then they hunted it down. My grandmother said it was tall as four men, with great red eyes and huge teeth—”

“What are you doing, Beate?” Arthur asked, his tone causing the kitchen girls to scatter.

“Learning about this house,” Beate informed him calmly. “Do you not wish me to study?”

He let the redheaded kitchen girl go. In the early spring, Beate informed him that the thing she’d been watching had returned, but that it was quiet. She said it only once, and he forgot it soon enough.

There was only one truly troubling moment for von Hippel, a day when Arthur and Beate took a walk out in the sun, passing one of the taller trees. She took a few steps away from him, running gaily, and Arthur reached out his hands to put them around her waist.

She turned, startled, when the doctor cried out, his hand to his face. Something had stung him. He brought his hand away and found blood on his fingers.

A jagged cut an inch long. It would have to be sutured. He had no notion of where it had come from. Beate looked at him darkly and shook her head.

Von Hippel felt a chill, and then realized, to his relief, that it could only have been a thorn from one of the branches. He had the trees trimmed the next morning, and then all was well again.

Beate stopped sleeping at night. She spent hours outside. The bear was shifting, and more dangerous. She’d begun to try to find another human ghost for it, something to quiet it. She was hunting a hunter to kill the bear, or another ghost bear to please it, but she found none. She walked into the woods, slowly, feeling the trees heavy all around her, and behind her the bear shambled, dark and loud. There were still no human ghosts here, though, not that she could see. If there were any, the bear’s presence would force them out. Perhaps this ground was salted by the blood of those the bear had killed. Maybe ghosts knew to stay away.

The bear was hungry. It huffed beneath branches and fallen logs, unearthing ghosts of fox cubs frozen in a long ago winter.

Beate looked furiously into the dark, her human eye showing her nothing of use.

This bear was full of murders, an absorber of things that had been done badly in the wood and on the grounds. This ghost had been hunted.

She stumbled upon the bear one night under a full moon, a valley, a rill, and the bear shook and moaned, sounds she’d never heard it make before. The first shot hit it, and then she watched the bear stabbed. There were human ghosts here, suddenly. Three ghost hunters swarmed from the trees.

The bear had been killed by a pack of hunters. The bear killed them again with a swipe of a paw, even as the bear itself fell. She watched its fur stripped from its body. The ghost bear watched mournfully as it was skinned.

The death was like deaths she’d seen before, the deaths of human ghosts, and she realized that she was seeing its original death. It had died with no other bears around.

She watched a procession, the bear strapped to a log, carried by invisible bodies. The men who’d carried it were long dead, but not dead of the bear, so they were not here. Instead, there was just a log, moving through the forest without visible means of support, the skinned bear hanging from it. The next day, as though none of this had happened, the bear reappeared, its fur intact, beside her.

The hunters the bear had killed she could not find again, though she searched, hoping those ghosts could help her make the bear rest. They did not appear, and the bear followed behind her, tremendous, hunting rabbits and birds, a hive of long dead bees surrounding the echo of honey.

She went back to the house, and to her bedchamber, the bear with her. On the lawn, her father died again.

9.

September, and the Ophthalmological Society meeting was looming, every eye doctor in Germany traveling to Heidelberg. Beate would be exhibited. She’d known for months. This was the culmination of all their efforts. But she did not wish to leave the premises.

“What if,” she said to von Hippel, sounding hunted, “what if I see too much? I don’t know what I might see when we leave these grounds.”

“You’ll see what there is to see, of course,” the doctor said. “Your visions are much improved, are they not? Now you have control over them. You know the difference between a vision and a city. Heidelberg is a lovely place. There will be people to meet, and gardens to stroll in. There will be concerts.”

She looked frantically at him. For the first time in months, von Hippel dreaded what she might say at the convention. A little sedation, then, an injection of the morphia. In the carriage to the train station, Beate was limp on the seat across from him, her lips open slightly, the ruff around her throat loosened.

She screamed as they crossed the boundary of the property onto the road. She gestured out into the land, the trees and grasses on either side of the carriage.

“There,” she said. “Look at the forest. Look at how the rabbits all come out to see me go. And there! If you could see what I do, you would be frightened too. Someone was hanged for being a witch, just there.”

She turned her head to him again, and gasped, staring at the space just beside him.

“Oh,” Beate said, her voice miserable. “Oh, I thought it might stay here. But it travels with us.”

Her expression was weary, and frightened. It occurred to Arthur that she’d been so since the day in the trees, though he was now fully healed.

“Will you take the train with us, then?” she asked the space beside Arthur, her voice pinched. “I should not have thought you would. Or will you run alongside?”

She sighed, and looked at the doctor. “It can touch the living, as you know, if it tries. It hungers. It’s been on the land a long time, and there isn’t much there for it now.”

Von Hippel had brought tea to lift her spirits, and a cake as well. He poured out the tea and swiftly mixed honey and valerian into it. She didn’t notice. She was too occupied with staring at the space beside him, and then out the window again, narrating.

“Someone there was run through by a boar, a long, long time ago. But no one knows what we travel with, Arthur. We have the last, lost bear in Germany.”

It was the first time she’d identified the thing she thought she saw. The doctor felt his skin clench, all over, every inch of flesh turned into something frozen and rolled in snow. He could not say whether it was that he didn’t believe her, or that he did.

“We do not have a bear in this carriage, Fraulein Abendroth,” he said. She startled, hearing her formal name. “It’s the drug that makes you see it.”

“It’s beside you,” she protested. “It’s all around you. It’s not exactly a bear, but what would you be if you’d never seen another like you? You’d forget what you were, would you not? It didn’t belong here. It must have come over the mountains.”

Von Hippel thought unhappily back to the conversation he’d overheard. Kitchen gossip. He wanted to argue with Beate. He wanted to slap her face and make her return to her senses. It would be his reputation on the line in Heidelberg, not hers.

“If I’d never seen another von Hippel, I’d still be myself, just as I am now,” he said, as calmly as he could, for what would it be if she did this at the meeting? The rest of the surgeons would blame his procedure, damaging her eyes so that she could not help but see things. The vision of the bear would be, to them, some misunderstood light, a flaw in the surgery. “I’d be Arthur von Hippel, just as you are Beate Abendroth.”

“Oh, but I’m not the same as I was,” she said. “I’ve seen too much to be Beate. I see everything now.”

The doctor looked at her eyes, one clear and gentian blue, only the faintest line of scar where the cornea had joined her own flesh, the other eye silvery and nearly blind. He should have performed both at once.

The doctor was unnerved enough by her steady gaze to glance at the empty seat beside him. She looked at him as he carried her onto the train. The drugs had taken effect now entirely.

“At least we shall not be plagued by the rabbits on this journey,” she said sleepily. “The bear frightens them all away. It should be frightening all the other ghosts away too, but it only looks at me.”

Not an hour later, though, she was speaking angrily to a vision of her mother.

“He told me you were in Frankfurt, Mother, but I knew you weren’t. No, you are still here, I see. I see you. Hush. I see you.”

Beate looked at her mother, there, in her bloodied dress, on the train where she didn’t belong, part of the train now.

Go, go, go, whispered Johanna, but she looked at the end of the carriage, where the bear was curled, waiting, a darkness filled with ghosts, and she made a sound of horror. She hadn’t died of this bear. She didn’t stay long with her daughter, but returned to the nose of the train. She had nothing to give.

Beate sat, pressed against the seat, panting, wondering at her own emotions and looking at the doctor, who said nothing, though he’d lied to her over and over. Her mother was not in Frankfurt.

Her mother, she discovered, was dead. She felt more sorrow for her father, the way he fled the bear nightly.

The bear filled half the train car with its invisible bulk. She could smell berries and rotting meat. There were blackflies coming in the window. The doctor was reading a paper and surreptitiously watching her. He saw nothing of what was really around him. No one did.

The bear stretched itself until it was nearly as large as the train, and then shrunk again, into a cub, or what passed for a cub. She couldn’t tell what it wanted, if it wanted. She only knew that it was hers now, that it followed her from room to room. And now into the train. Now it wanted to be seen, like all of them, having been seen by Beate, and it was hungry, like all of them, but this ghost was worse than any other.

She would give anything to quiet the bear. To end it.

The ghosts of everything and everyone surrounded her, a train full of forgotten things looking to be remembered. Out of the windows she saw ghost armies marching, and ghost rabbits springing alongside the tracks. The bear stood to look out, intrigued. Sometimes it exited the cars and rambled along the top of the train, hunting human ghosts. Some it caught and ate, and she watched that too, the bear consuming the already dead, its belly full of ghost light.

She could not spend the rest of her life followed by a creature only she could see. She looked at the bear. The bear looked back, glittering eyes, an ancient thing made of teeth. It hunkered down, folding its claws beneath it, and stared at her, anticipating the ghosts of Heidelberg. She feared it did not just anticipate ghosts.

10.

In Heidelberg, Beate stood calmly on the stage beside von Hippel, and he spoke of her surgery, of the ways in which the cocaine anesthetic had impacted the treatment, of the way the clockwork trephine had ensured perfection, and she smiled pleasantly, nodding even as he opened her eye and demonstrated the proper placement of the trephine.

When other doctors questioned her, she said “I can see everything now. I thank the good doctor for restoring my sight.”

They held up pictures for her to describe, numbers for her to call out, and she did so, without hesitation, elegantly: He’d spent the last months teaching her to recognize them. Her parents had never thought it necessary that she read. She was a credit to the procedure.

Her rabbit eye was examined by a line of doctors, each one awed at the precision, the perfection of the healing. There had been centuries of failure before this, lenses made of glass rimmed with gold, lenses brought from all manner of creatures and mangled in their transit. She was a miracle, the first of her kind, a girl seeing through the eye of a rabbit.

Only once did she whisper to von Hippel that the room was full of ghosts, and then, looking around a few moments later, she told him that it wasn’t any longer. The bear had frightened them away.

He took her to the Philosopher’s Walk as a reward for her good behavior, and to see the Neckar River, and the old Roman building they called The Witch’s Tower.

“Too many dead,” she said. “The bear doesn’t like it.”

The bear was inside the tower. The Romans had kept bears. It snuffled around, growling and roaring, but there were no other bear ghosts in Heidelberg.

“There is no bear,” repeated von Hippel, patiently. “The bear is made of light.”

Still, though, he was the toast of the exhibition, and it put him in a merry mood, even though he’d managed to scratch himself somehow, his forearm wounded with an inch-long gash.

In all the society dinners and presentations she was initialed, B.A., or given no name at all, the lovely patient of the great doctor. He was surrounded by people who wished to examine his trephine, and also to examine her.

She wondered if the doctor would stop them, her eyes held open with hooks, but he did not, and so she was a model patient. She stood on stage, staring through colored filters, like some magician’s assistant. She thought of telling them what she really saw, the room full of plague-dead villagers, of child ghosts, of birds killed for hats, right eye, left eye, all of them pinned to the heads of doctor’s wives. She watched stags killed by arrows meander from seat to seat, passing through the flesh of surgeons. The bear would rise up behind her, roaring, and the room would empty abruptly of ghosts, but they always crept back. The bear was a wonder to them too, even the ghosts, and once they realized that it could not eat them all, they came to watch it kill what it could. They crowded up to the stage, gasping and murmuring, watching the bear eat, watching the ghost bodies swim into its belly, twisting pale and startled there.

Beate tried to ignore them, even as they called out periodically “She sees me!”

Doctor Bigger approached her on the second day from the back of the room, a white-bearded old man in a rumpled brown-black suit. He carried a cane carved into the shape of a gazelle, but there were no admirers flocking around him, no one asking him about his surgeries.

“Little Beate,” he said, and laughed. “He’s made you see, just as he said he would.” She knew him by his voice, his strange Irish accent atop the German.

“Hello,” she said. “He has.”

The doctor sat beside her, and patted her shoulder. “But you are not happy with your sight.”

“I see ghosts,” she said. “I always did. Now I see more than before. All the dead, animal and human. There’s a bear with us here, and it’s feasting.”

The doctor looked around, fascinated. She was stunned at his belief. “Is there, now?”

She pointed to where the bear lay on the edge of the stage. It was eating three child ghosts. It tore at them, expanding and shrinking, the little ghosts screaming, and ghostly blood everywhere, on every surface. Up at the top of the auditorium, there was a careening orbit of ghost birds, spinning at the skylights, and the bear watched them as it ate.

“A large bear,” she said. “A bear that is always hungry. It came with us from Giessen. Now it’s eating ghosts, but I don’t know what it may choose to do. It could do more.”

“How would one kill a bear such as this?” the doctor asked her, and she looked at him.

“Kill? It’s a ghost. It’s dead already.”

“How would one make such a bear depart, if the bear were a ghost? Religious men?”

The thought had not occurred to her. The bear was no demon, not to her mind. What demon would be so useless?

“One might,” Bigger said, “use a knife on such a bear, and slice it from the world. Might one not? Is not a ghost a kind of lost lens, a blurred vision? How do you see it? Does it seem living to you, or does it seem like a scar?”

“The bear is not a scar,” she said, insulted. “The bear is a bear, and now it is the ghost of a bear.”

“The bear is light,” he said. “Everything is light, reorganized into things both bewildering and beautiful. There is much to be seen in the dark. Look at me, now, Beate Abendroth.”

The bear was licking its chops like a dog, and inside its belly, the three ghost children were startled, unused to their new locations. The dead consumed by the dead. The bear was less bear than ever. It sprawled across the stage, its claws extended. It had fattened in her company on a buffet of the ghosts of Heidelberg.

Some of the doctors in the room, the living, had felt sudden pains, tiny bleeding wounds, but no one had died. The bear was sated. Beate was grateful for that.

She looked at the doctor and was startled. He had a knife in his hand. “I’m dying,” he said. “Not of this knife, but of living. You can only live so long.”

“What is it you want?”

“To fight your bear,” said the doctor, and grinned wildly. “To give it a good fight.”

Doctor von Hippel was demonstrating his trephine, twisting the gears, cutting air into thin slices. There was a box on the stage, and in it all the rabbits bounced like fools, little knowing that they were to be shown off, their eyes removed, their long ears bloodied. There were ghost rabbits too, meandering blindly about the back of the auditorium, dead of yesterday’s demonstrations. Behind the building there was a pile of rabbit corpses, and she’d seen a stray dog picking from them even that morning. Doctor von Hippel didn’t look at her, but he had never believed in the bear.

The bear stretched on its back, growling quietly. She tried to shoo all the other ghosts away: It was not sleeping.

“Winter will come,” said the doctor. “Bears hibernate. Find out where this bear sleeps.”

He patted her on the cheek, and walked away from her.

“This bear is dead,” she said to his back. “Dead things don’t sleep.”

But in November, the bear, still fat from Heidelberg, disappeared. The grounds filled back up with cautious ghosts, rabbits and foxes, deer and birds. She went out from the house prowling the perimeter of the land, searching in every hollow, but she didn’t find the bear.

She was married to Arthur von Hippel by then, and pregnant with a baby she couldn’t imagine. She’d spent the previous months on trains, being shown to every surgeon, and now, throughout Germany and beyond, doctors were beginning to give light to the blind.

In December, the Irish doctor appeared at the door, with a trunk and without his wife. Doctor von Hippel inquired after her.

“Dead,” said Bigger, “Since the summer, and missed by myself and our household. It was only the two of us there.”

Bigger was frailer, to Beate’s gaze, than he’d been the last time she saw him, and his cane took more of his weight than it had. Still, he looked at her with his eyes gleaming.

“Have you found it?” he asked during dinner, and she was forced to tell him that she had not. She’d been occupied with the relief of the bear’s disappearance. The baby was not showing yet, and she wondered what sort of baby it would be. Ghosts looked closely at her, pressing their hands to her stomach, just as her own Doctor von Hippel did. He’d known she was pregnant before it had occurred to her. It might never have. She didn’t know much about pregnancy, though she knew about death in childbirth. The ghosts had shown her terrible things since she was seven.

“It’s hidden itself,” she said, but as she said it, she realized that of course she knew where it was. There were still no ghosts visible in the house, neither human nor animal. It was sleeping, but it was here.

Doctor von Hippel bent solicitously over her, pouring more wine, and touching her hair.

“I came to see it,” Doctor Bigger said. “Your bear.”

“You know, of course, Doctor Bigger, that there is no bear,” said von Hippel. “There is only an oddity of the light coming into her vision. A scar, or a tiny speck of dust put in with the rabbit’s cornea, the more fool me. It’s my fault. I made an error of some sort. Now she sees this thing and there is nothing to be done.”

Beate would not allow him to perform surgery on her other eye, and so she still looked at him through a partial darkness, but she was mostly reasonable, mostly sweet, despite her forays to the edge of the wood. She could behave in company, and if she sometimes knew things about strangers, the child they’d lost, the missing husband, the recently dead pet dog, it was no tremendous difficulty. He’d learned to distract people from his wife’s perception by talking about her eyes, the miracle of them, and people were intrigued, looking at her, this lovely young woman who’d been blind for so long.

“I do know that, of course, Doctor von Hippel,” said Bigger. “But one is fascinated by the oddities in such a surgery. One is intrigued by bears and the rabbits, by wolves and gazelles. We all see things differently, do we not?”

Von Hippel looked at his old friend. Bigger was trembling over his meal. His face was too pale, and his skin too thin. He was eighty-two. The train journey had been taxing, and he’d traveled from Dublin already. He had a feverish excitement, a brightness that seemed edged with fury. He’d never been a traditional doctor. His first work had been all hopeful accident, and now he seemed careless.

Beate gave a demonstration of her embroidery. Von Hippel discussed his son’s progress at university. Bigger told the story of the gazelle again, this time adding a postscript.

“Years later, long after I gave that gazelle the gift of sight, I visited Cairo again, and met the chief I’d assisted. We were, by then, old friends, the roles of kidnapper and kidnapped obliterated. We drank strong mint tea and spoke of his gazelle, and of the way I made her see her owner again.”

“What did he say?” asked Beate.

“He said that the gazelle upon seeing him, loved him less. That as a shadow owner, he’d been the source of the gazelle’s comfort, a universe contained in one person. When the gazelle saw him again, she could also see everything else, all the people surrounding him, the tents, the other pets. He said that she went to the place where we’d burned and eaten the other gazelle, the donor of the cornea, and kicked up the sands. She ran about in a frenzy, hopping high into the air, and butting the air with her horns. He said that seeing made the world too wide, that she saw too much, more than she should have. That seeing made the gazelle mad, and madness made the gazelle run off one night into the darkness and sand, where a lioness found her and killed her.”

Beate sat quietly, looking at both of them, her husband and the Irishman.

“Dark words,” said von Hippel, and attempted a laugh. “Dark words for a dark night.” Neither Beate nor Doctor Bigger laughed.

That night von Hippel worried about things he couldn’t define. He slept eventually, his hands dialing the measures of an imagined trephine, taking the eyes from creatures tinier and tinier, a cascading resurrection of sight, mice unblinded, and then up in size again. He unblinded a Cyclops, giving it the cornea of a whale, placing that cornea tenderly into the socket, and as he did, the Cyclops opened its new eye and tore into him. A dream of disemboweling.

Outside, snow blanketed the roof, silenced the ghosts on the lawn, each of them leaving the faintest prints, the most delicate echoes of bodies which had once flung themselves into the earth and out again, warrens stopped with snow, streams iced over, birds freezing on branches, and then corpses falling, ghost birds rising up on ghost winds.

Inside the house, Beate covered herself in a woolen wrapper, and tiptoed to the Irish doctor’s bedchamber. She knocked, and he opened moments later, fully dressed in his coat and hat, his snow-going boots.

“You won’t need those,” she said. “We won’t be going outdoors.”

He followed the girl down the stairs. No ghosts in view for Beate, not her father, not her mother. Out there, in the snow, her father tumbled without the bear, falling down, looking up in horror. In Giessen, her mother tempted the train forever, world without end, as one day, Beate herself would no doubt die in perpetuity. In this house, the ghost hibernated.

“There,” she said. The corner of the cellar was darker than dark, and it breathed in and out, slowly, old habits of the living.

She looked at the doctor, who was peering into the nothing, polishing a knife on his coat. She could see the gleam of the blade, disappearing and then reappearing, clean and straight, a knife like the ones used before the trephine. Cutting sight away and then replacing it. The knives were small and sharp, and she watched the doctor, sympathizing with his desire to stab something.

“You can’t hurt it that way,” she said. “Not with a living knife.”

He nodded. “It won’t be a living knife.”

She took a step back from him.

“I’ll die with vigor, and with vigor, I’ll go at this sleeper, this dead thing, and take it into myself.”

In the corner, the bear moved, rolling. Beate could see all the ghosts it had eaten before it slept, compacted into a slurry of the dead, its body made entirely of other bodies.

The doctor handed her his knife, and opened his shirt, pointing at the place the blade should be inserted. His chest coiled with white hair, his ribcage a delicate and caving thing, through which she could see his blood flowing, his breath passing, his own desire to enghost himself. Why should she not, she wondered? He’d given her the chance to change things, and life had never mattered more than death to her.

“What shall I do with your body?” she asked at last. “There will be a body when I’m done, and a ghost. To kill you is to separate the two, like a cornea from an eye. Your ghost is the lens and your body the useless rest.”

“I left a letter,” said Bigger, and smiled. “You’re no murderer, I know. This is a mercy. Do it, girl.”

She wanted to. The baby would be born, and it would be vulnerable. What if it could see the bear? What if the bear could see it? What if everything was too lonely to continue?

The doctor smiled at her. She smiled back at him, this old man with his knife, and he wrapped his hands around the hilt, and around her hand as well. She stepped forward and stabbed him in the heart.

She was still looking into his eyes when his ghost rose out of them, and, ghost knife in hand, smiled again at her. The doctor’s blood pooled on the floor, and on her hands, but the doctor himself was loose and free. He bowed to her, and then turned and walked into the corner, his ghost knife ready.

He threw himself upon the sleeping bear.

The bear rose up roaring, stood on its back legs and screamed. It roiled and fought, and tried to kill the newly dead again. The doctor clung to the bear’s chest, hanging with his fists, kicking the bear’s belly, and the bear moaned, looking around in confusion. This was a new ghost, none he’d killed nor met before. He clawed the walls, leaving long scars. The doctor pushed the knife in, almost gently, breaking the barrier of fur and skin, piecing the membrane that kept the dead dying.

“Die, bear,” said the doctor. “Die as you were meant to die.”

The bear looked at Beate, and she looked at the bear.

“Go,” she said. “Go, go, go.”

She watched as the bear was brought into the doctor’s body, as the ghost ate the ghost, blood from a knife. She walked away as the doctor sat on his heels, devouring the dead, his face lit with joy, and the ghost of the bear smiling too, his jaw open and glad, his eyes dimmed, his last sleep begun.

11.

The ghosts came back to the house, and the land shone green and gold, bristling with bones. Beate had a baby, and her husband the doctor welcomed it, a boy. She wore dark glasses, and got older, and all her life, she spoke to the dead and the dead spoke back to her.

When it was time, she walked into the forest, where all the trees were hanging trees, to the place where the last wild bear in Germany had died for the first time, and she lay herself down in a dark hollow, surrounded by all the rabbits she’d known, the living and the dead.

She looked at them through her rabbit eye, and quietly, nameless in history, B.A. cured of blindness, mother of a surgeon, wife of a surgeon, went to sleep.

The ghost of Samuel Bigger came to greet her, and together, they hunted the things that the world would never understand again, the creatures too large to exist.

When Arthur von Hippel died, the morning after his seventy-fifth birthday, in the spring of 1917, his obituaries lauded him as the man who’d made the blind see, mentioning in passing a seventeen-year-old girl whose life he had transformed. They mentioned, too, that his last years had been clouded by trouble of a domestic and personal nature.

They did not see fit to itemize the difficulties, but anyone who knew the household might have written that the doctor had become intrigued by spiritualists. He had himself experimented with transplantation, replacing his own left cornea with one taken from a man who had claimed to see ghosts. At last, in the end of his days, Arthur von Hippel began to see the ghost of his wife, an elderly woman in hunting garb.

They would have said that von Hippel burnt his own house down in an effort to conquer his trouble, and burnt all the land around it too, the forest with all its ancient trees.

When the ground was black and charred, the old man had stood on the edge of the property and watched as every tunnel emptied. From them poured thousands of rabbits, thousands upon thousands, blind and seeing, living and dead, and the dark ground outside of Giessen was covered, then, with a million points of light.

HISTORICAL NOTE

The early history of corneal transplants and cures for blindness is nearly as strange as it is in this story. Efforts to implant rabbit corneas into other rabbits began in the 1820s in Germany, with a medical student named Franz Reisinger. In 1886, with the introduction of cocaine anesthetic (helped into being by Sigmund Freud, incidentally) and his own invention of the clockwork trephine, Doctor Arthur von Hippel became a pioneer of ophthalmologic surgery. The story of his patient, the seventeen-year-old girl given the cornea of a rabbit, and subsequently displayed in Heidelberg as the first “successful” corneal transplant, is true, though mentioned only briefly in most texts. The girl herself, however, is largely unacknowledged by medical history. She is only briefly described as having suffered an injury to her corneas at an early age, and as being the recipient of the rabbit cornea, which, months after the transplant, is said to have remained clear.

Doctor Samuel Bigger’s story of gazelle-to-gazelle transplant is also factual (though likely apocryphal—it was his own account, complete with kidnapping, ransom, and the Sahara)—and the initial inspiration for this story came from a brief, casual mention of same in a book about the history of ophthalmology. “The first successful corneal transplant was in 1837, gazelle to gazelle.”

I have no notion whether or not Bigger and von Hippel ever met—Bigger’s middle years are largely undocumented, though he did resurface as a poet. Late in life, he published The King of Terrors, a volume of apocalyptic poetry written from the point of view of Satan, from which I quote here.

Von Hippel’s obituary, printed in the British Journal of Ophthalmology in 1917, scarcely mentions his corneal breakthrough, but does mention the troubles in the last few years of his life, “both of a domestic and personal nature.” His son, Eugen von Hippel, was also an ophthalmologist, and the co-discoverer of Von Hippel-Landau Disease, which predisposes its victims to benign and malignant tumors. Eugen’s son, Arthur Robert von Hippel, became a renowned scientist and physicist, and was a co-developer of radar during WWII. Needless to say, the character and actions of Arthur von Hippel are entirely my own invention, as is the marriage of Arthur and his patient.

The last wild bear in Germany was killed by Bavarian farmers in 1835. There is little information about it. However, in 2006, a second last wild bear (Bear JJ1) appeared in Germany, having come over the mountains from Italy. This one was shot by a hunter after the Bavarian Prime Minister authorized lethal force, referring to him as a Problembär. Bear JJ1 is now on display in the Museum of Man and Nature in Munich, in a diorama in which he is depicted greedily destroying a beehive. The museum also displays the remains of the first last wild bear in Germany, killed 170 years earlier.

© 2014 by Maria Dahvana Headley. Originally published in Subterranean Online. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the young adult sky ship fantasy Magonia, from HarperCollins, the novel Queen of Kings, the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes, and The End of the Sentence, a novella co-written with Kat Howard, from Subterranean. With Neil Gaiman, she’s The New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the anthology Unnatural Creatures. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson awards, and has appeared at Uncanny Magazine, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Apex, Subterranean Online, and many more. It’s anthologized in Glitter & Mayhem, The Lowest Heaven, The Book of the Dead, twice in The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and three times in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her latest novel is The Mere Wife, a contemporary retelling of Beowulf.

EXCERPT: The City in the Middle of the Night (Tor Books)

Charlie Jane Anders | 3740 words

“This generation’s Le Guin.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less

Charlie Jane Anders, the nationally bestselling author of All the Birds in the Sky delivers a brilliant new novel set in a hauntingly strange future with The City in the Middle of the Night.

“If you control our sleep, then you can own our dreams… And from there, it’s easy to control our entire lives.”

January is a dying planet–divided between a permanently frozen darkness on one side, and blazing endless sunshine on the other. Humanity clings to life, spread across two archaic cities built in the sliver of habitable dusk.

But life inside the cities is just as dangerous as the uninhabitable wastelands outside.

Sophie, a student and reluctant revolutionary, is supposed to be dead, after being exiled into the night. Saved only by forming an unusual bond with the enigmatic beasts who roam the ice, Sophie vows to stay hidden from the world, hoping she can heal.

But fate has other plans–and Sophie’s ensuing odyssey and the ragtag family she finds will change the entire world.

Coming February 12, 2019 from Tor Books.

SOPHIE

{before}

I

Bianca walks toward me, under too much sky. The white-hot twilight makes a halo out of loose strands of her fine black hair. She looks down and fidgets, as though she’s trying to settle an argument with herself, but then she looks up and sees me and a smile starts in her eyes, then spreads to her mouth. This moment of recognition, the alchemy of being seen, feels so vivid, that everything else is an afterimage. By the time she reaches the Boulevard, where I’m standing, Bianca is laughing at some joke, that she’s about to share with me.

As the two of us walk back towards campus, a brace of dark quince leaves, hung on doorways in some recent celebration, waft past our feet. Their nine dried stems scuttle like tiny legs.

• • • •

I lie awake in our dark dorm room, listening to Bianca breathe on the shelf across from mine. And then, I hear her voice.

“Sophie?”

I’m so startled, hearing her speak after curfew, I tip over, and land in a bundle on the floor.

Bianca giggles from her bunk, as I massage my sore tailbone. I keep expecting some authority figure, like one of the Proctors, to burst in and glare at us for disturbing the quiet time. If you can’t sleep when everyone else does, you’re not even human.

“Sophie! It’s okay,” Bianca says. “I just wanted to ask you a question. I don’t even remember what it was, now.” Then she stops laughing, because she understands this isn’t funny to me. “You’re not going to get in trouble. I promise. You know, we can’t even learn anything here, unless we think for ourselves occasionally, right? Some rule we learned as little kids doesn’t have to keep us in a chokehold forever.”

When Bianca first showed up as my roommate, I hid from her as much as I could. I crawled into the tiny space above the slatted hamper in the side washroom, next to the wide sluicing cisterns that people use as toilets here. Bianca was this whirl of hand-gestures and laughter, who filled every room with color. When she started trying to talk to me, I assumed she was only taking pity on this painfully shy girl from the dark side of town, and I’d just have to ignore her until she gave up.

She didn’t give up.

Now I look up at Bianca’s shape, as I pull myself out of my huddle on the floor. “But, you follow the rules too,” I say. “Like, you would never actually go outdoors right now. You probably could. You could sneak out of here, wander onto the streets, and the Curfew Patrols might not ever catch you. But you don’t do that, because you do care about rules.”

“Yeah, I’m not running down the street naked during the Span of Reflection, either,” Bianca laughs. “But a little talking after curfew has to be okay, right?”

Bianca makes me feel as though she and I just stepped off the first shuttle from the Mothership, and this world is brand new for us to make into whatever we want.

• • • •

Since I was little, I couldn’t sleep at the right time, along with everyone else. I tried whispering to my brother Thom sometimes, if I thought he was awake. Or else, I busied myself trying to do tiny good deeds for my sleeping family, fixing a broken eyepiece or putting my brother’s slippers where his feet would find them most easily on waking. Except my father’s hand would come out of the darkness and seize my arm, tight enough to cut off the blood to my hand, until I whined through my teeth. Later, after the shutters came down and the dull almost-light filled our home once more, my father would roar at me, his bright red face blocking out the entire world.

Everything is a different shape in the dark. Sharp edges are sharper, walls further away, fragile items more prone to topple. I used to wake next to my family, all of us in a heap on the same bedpile, and imagine that maybe in the darkness, I could change shape, too.

• • • •

Bianca has found another book, way at the back of the school library, on one of those musty shelves that you have to excavate from a layer of broken settler tech and shreds of ancient clothing. This particular book is a spyhole into the past, the real past, when the Founding Settlers arrived on a planet where one side always faces the sun, and had no clue how to cope. “That’s what history is, really,” Bianca says, “the process for turning idiots into visionaries.”

The two of us stroll together into the heart of the city’s temperate zone, past the blunt golden buttresses of the Palace, breathing the scents of the fancy market where she always tries to buy me better shoes.

Bianca reads all the time, and she tears through each book, as though she’s scared her eyes will just fall out of her head before she finishes them all. But she never does the assigned reading for any of our classes. “I’m here to learn, not study.” Her mouth pinches, in a way that only makes her narrow, angular face look more classically perfect.

Even after being her roommate for a while, this kind of talk makes me nervous. I’m still desperate to prove that I deserve to be here, though I’ve passed all the tests and gotten the scholarship. I sit and read every single assigned text three times, until the crystalline surface blurs in front of me. But everyone can tell I’m an interloper just by glancing—at my clothes, my hair, my face—if they even notice me.

“You’re the only one of us who had to work so hard for it,” Bianca tells me. “Nobody belongs here half as much as you.” Then she goes back to telling me that the Founders were bumblers, right as we pass by the giant bronze statue of Jonas, posing in his environment suit, one arm raised in triumph. Jonas’ shoulder-pads catch the dawn rays, as though still aglow from the righteous furnace of decontamination.

III

The Progressive Students Union meets under basements and behind larders. Usually between five and fifteen of us, talking about systems of oppression. Bianca’s long black hair hides her face as she leans forward to listen, but her hand brushes mine. A mop-headed boy named Matthew is talking about the ordinary people whose every waking moment is spent at the farmwheels, the factories, the sewage plant, or the power station, until they die.

Then Bianca stands up and her voice rings out, like we’re all inside her heart and we can hear it beat. She wears streaks of purple and silver paint, to frame her eyes, and I never want to look away.

“If you control our sleep, then you own our dreams,” she says. “And from there, it’s easy to master our whole lives.”

Everything in Xiosphant is designed to make us aware of the passage of time, from the calendars, to the rising and falling of the shutters, to the bells that ring all over town. Everyone always talks about Timefulness, which could be simple—like, making it home for dinner before they ring the final chime before shutters-up, and the end of another cycle. Or it could be profound: like, one day you spy a mirror and realize your face has changed shape, and all at once you look like a woman, instead of a child.

But nothing in this city is ever supposed to change.

Time should make you angry, not complacent, Bianca says. Back on Earth, our ancestors could follow the progress of the sun from horizon to horizon. They saw change roll right over their heads. Enough of these journeys and even the weather would change, from colder to warmer to colder. This awareness made them fight with all their strength. They were always using violent metaphors, like, “Seize the day,” or “Strike while the iron is hot.”

“Time isn’t our prison,” Bianca says, “but our liberator.” We cheer and snap our fingers, until we all remember the reason we’re meeting in a stuffy basement behind barrels of cake batter: We’re committing deadly sedition down here.

After the meeting, Bianca gossips to me in our room about Matthew, the guy who spoke before she did. “He took forever just to say that we should have solidarity with other activist groups. He’s one of those people who likes to hear himself speak. Nice legs, though.”

“Matthew’s just nervous,” I say. “I’ve seen how he fidgets right before he’s going to try and speak. I think he’s in awe of you. And you don’t know how scary talking to people can be.”

Bianca leans over and touches my wrist. “You’d be a great leader, if you just got out of your shell.” She takes a stiff drink, and then says, “You always try to see the worth of everyone. Maybe you’re right about Matthew. I’ll try to put him at ease next time.”

• • • •

How long have Bianca and I been roommates? Sometimes it feels like forever, sometimes just an interlude. Long enough that I know her habits, what each look or gesture probably signifies, but recent enough that she still surprises me all the time. According to the calendar, it’s 7 Marian after Red, which means the first term is half over. When I’m not talking to Bianca in person, I’m thinking of what I’ll say to her the next time we’re together and imagining what she’ll say back.

Lately, when Bianca talks to me illegally after curfew, I crawl onto her shelf so I can hear her whisper. Her breath warms my cheek as she murmurs about school and art and what would it even mean to be free. Our skins, hers cloud-pale and mine the same shade as wild strawflowers, almost touch. I almost forget not to tremble.

Everybody says it’s normal for girls my age to have intense friendships with other girls, which might even feel like something else. Some childish echo of real adult love and courtship. But you’ll know when it’s time to abandon this foolishness, the same way you know when to eat and sleep. I close my eyes and imagine that when I open them again, I will have outgrown all of my feelings. Sometimes I clasp my eyelids until I almost see sparks.

I still haven’t gotten used to those times when Bianca has to go to some fancy ball or dinner near the Palace. She’ll break out some shimmering dress, made of vinesilk, hanging at the back of her closet, which sways with her body. And she’ll hug me and promise to think of me while she’s doing her duty at the Citadel. Sometimes lately, I don’t even see her for a couple of shutter-cycles, but she always comes back in a strange mood, with sagging shoulders.

One time, I don’t see Bianca for a while. Then, I come back to our dorm room, and she’s sitting on her bed next to Matthew, the Progressive Student organizer with the nice legs. They’re holding hands, a couple buttons of her tunic are unbuttoned, her ankle skirt is undone, and her lipstick smears. His hand has a thatch of hair across the knuckles.

Bianca doesn’t startle when I walk in on them, she just laughs and gestures for me to sit on my own bed. “Matthew’s leaving soon anyway. We’ve been talking about solidarity, and how to make it more, uh, solid.” She laughs, and so does Matthew. I try not to stare, but there’s noplace to put my eyes.

After Matthew leaves, Bianca flops backwards onto her bunk and says, “You were right about him. He’s a sweet guy. And he cares about making a difference. I think he could be fun.” I feel like my tongue has dissolved in my mouth, and I’m swallowing the remains. I slump onto my own bunk.

Bianca notices my face. “He’s not that bad. I promise! And it’s been too long since I had someone. It’s not good to be single too long. I feel like you helped set the two of us up, so maybe we can help you find a boyfriend next.”

I shake my head. “No boyfriend.”

“Right.” She raises her hands. “You told me about Mark. That sounded ghastly. But I’m sure you’ll get over it, once you meet the right guy. You’ll see.”

Bianca’s eyes are the most awake I’ve ever seen them, her cheeks suffused with color. She’s so transported that she’s wriggling on her bunk and humming to herself. I wonder if that’s how I looked, when I finally let Bianca take an interest in me. I’ve been so stupid.

Every time I think I know what’s wrong with me, I find something else.

• • • •

The five leaders of the Progressive Student Union sit in the cellar of the Zone House, emptying a jug of gin-and-milk, and swapping personal stories. The jug and cups wobble on a low table with unlevel legs. This isn’t an official meeting, so we’re not hiding deeper underground, and people only mutter about politics in oblique half-references. You can still tell from all the olive-green pipe-worker jackets and rough-spun scarves that we’re a group of free-thinkers. Upstairs, the ragtime band thumps out a slow, dirgelike rendition of “The Man Who Climbed Into the Day.”

Bianca is holding hands with Matthew, right in front of the group, and the two of them exchange little glances. I’m convinced everyone can sense my jealousy, hanging like a cloud in this mouldy basement. She throws me a quick smile, which packs a million snarky in-jokes into its contours.

I look away, and see one shaft of light, coming through a tiny window over our heads, and striking the wall opposite. They don’t cover that window, even when all the shutters close, so this faint sunbeam never lets up, and over time, it’s stripped away the paint and torn off the plaster, just in that one spot. Even the exposed bricks have deep ugly fissures that meet in the middle like the impact site from an ancient meteor. I wonder how long before the entire wall comes down.

Maybe if I can speak in front of the group for once, Bianca will pay attention to me again. She’ll realize Matthew has nothing interesting to say, and she was right about him the first time.

I open my mouth to make some joke that I know won’t be funny, and I ignore the hot prickle that I always get under my skin when I try to talk to strangers, or to more than one person at a time. This shouldn’t be so hard, I tell myself. You can tell one joke.

Just as I say the first syllable, the police cascade down the rickety stairs, in a blur of dark padded suits, corrugated sleeves, and shining faceplates. They’re carrying guns—high-powered fast-repeaters, which I’ve never seen up close before—and they stand over our little group.

Their leader, a short man with a sergeant’s insignia and no helmet on his square head, comes in last, and addresses our tiny gang, using the polite verb forms, but with a rough edge to them. “Sorry to disturb your evening. We’ve had some information that one of you student radicals stole some food dollars from the Gymnasium. Those notes are marked. Whoever took them, ought to speak up now.”

He keeps talking, but I can barely hear what he’s saying.

A memory comes to me: On our way here, I saw Bianca slip inside the Bursary, on the ground floor of our dorm building, and emerge a moment later stuffing something in her pocket. She made some joke about being able to buy a round of drinks for the leaders of the revolution.

“You people. You ‘revolutionaries,’” the Sergeant is saying in a growl. “You always act as though the rules don’t apply to you, same as everyone else.”

I look at Bianca, next to me, and she’s frozen, hands gripping the sides of her chair. Her face closes in on itself, nostrils flared and mouth pinched. If they find the food dollars in her pocket, this could be the end of her bright future. She could do so much for this city, for all the struggling people. This could crush out the light in her eyes forever.

And me? I’m invisible.

I slip my hand into Bianca’s pocket, and close my fingers around three cool strips. I pull back and slide them into my own jeans, just as the cops start searching everyone.

“We’re not any kind of ‘group,’” Bianca is hectoring the cops. “We’re just a few friends having a drink. You are invading our privacy with this unwarranted—” She chokes in mid-sentence as they start patting her down, her whole body rigid as she stands, swaying, over her chair.

When they don’t find the stolen cash, Bianca goes limp. She almost topples into her chair, and then she recovers. Her eyes dart around the room. Husky rasping grunts come out of her mouth.

Then the police come to me, and I have just enough time to brace my hips before one of them finds the pocket where I stashed the money. “What did I say?” he laughs. In the cop’s gleaming visor, I see a distorted reflection of a girl with a wide-eyed expression.

Bianca looks at me, and her face changes shape, her mouth slackening, as she realizes what I’ve done. She tries to speak, and nothing comes. Tears cluster around the inner rims of her eyes, as they turn red. Matthew reaches for her and tries to offer comfort, and she shakes him off.

She tries to step forward, to put her body between the police and me, but she hesitates a moment too long, and two of them are already grabbing me. I’m aware of nothing now but my own loud breathing, and the tightness of their grip on my arms.

When I can hear the world around me again, Bianca has gotten her composure back, and is talking to the Sergeant in her best talking-to-stupid-authority-figures voice. “Fine. You found the money. Congratulations. I’m sure none of us have any idea how it got there, including Sophie. But this is an internal Gymnasium matter, in any case. You can take us to the Provost, and we’ll just sort this—”

“Not this time,” the Sergeant says. “Time you ‘student radicals’ learned a lesson. You want to just sit down here and natter about how you’re going to ruin everything we’ve built, to take the bread out of my mouth. Out of everyone’s mouths, with your anarchist nonsense. You don’t get to do whatever you want just because you’re clever.”

The cops grab me by the armpits, two of them, and drag me to the rickety staircase that Bianca and I normally sit under. My legs scrape the floor as I try to plant my feet.

“It’s just a few stupid food dollars!” Bianca is screaming now, her voice already hoarse. The other Progressive Students are still frozen in their seats. “Bring her back! This is wrong. She’s done nothing, she’s a good person, maybe the only good person, and I . . . Stop! Please!” Bianca’s face turns crimson, shiny with tears, and she’s grabbing the Sergeant’s sleeve in her fists until he throws her away.

The men with opaque faceplates pull me up the stairs, still gripping my armpits so hard I get friction burns. All my kicking and squirming just leave me bruised.

“You can’t take her!” Bianca’s shriek comes from her whole body. My last glimpse of her is a crying, shaking, furious blur of black hair and clenched fists. “She doesn’t belong with you, she belongs with me. She’s done nothing. Bring her back!”

Then I’m yanked up the rest of the stairs, and into the street.

Copyright © 2019 by Charlie Jane Anders. Excerpted from The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Locus and Crawford Awards. Her short fiction has appeared in Wired, Tor.com, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, and elsewhere. Her story “Six Months Three Days” won a Hugo Award, “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” won the Sturgeon Award, and she’s been reprinted twice in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She runs the long-running Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco and used to spout off on io9.com. She won the Emperor Norton Award for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.”

Book Reviews: January 2019

Chris Kluwe | 1947 words

Greetings, bibliophiles, and welcome back to another round of reviews! This issue we’re going to talk about three books that share a common setting, a setting steeped in imagination and longing, a vista that’s inspired writers ever since we got up off the ground and started staring at the night sky. That’s right, we’re going to space!

Out of all the settings in the stories I read, outer space holds a special place in my heart (and I suspect in many of yours as well). It is a place of infinite wonder, mystery, and possibility; a realm of O’Neill cylinders and Dyson shells and the endless lure of a frontier expanding to the edges of our universe. Space is the possibility of other intelligence, of finding we aren’t alone in our lonely arcs amongst the stars, of growing and learning as a species by pushing back the veil of ignorance. Space is a binary sunset, a singularity sky, a plentitude of glories we all dream of witnessing.

Simultaneously, space is also cold, harsh, and unforgiving, a void so vast that light itself takes years to reach us, and whose touch is inimical to our very existence. Space is double-checking the seals on your suit for pressure integrity, and then checking once more to be sure. It is the staggering complexity of inescapable math, thrusts and vectors, inertia and mass, fuel and distance—all the tiny little details that each offer their own particular way to go catastrophically wrong. Space is an entire map of “here be dragons,” a warning to stay where it’s safe and comfortable lest ye be consumed by Things lurking in the Dark.

And yet, despite all that, we still dream of leaving our planet and exploring those implacable depths because we know that the dream is possible. As a species, we’ve taken our first steps into space, put people on the moon and in orbit, built satellites to plumb the mysteries of physics and the cosmos. We have robots on Mars, probes out past Pluto, and each of these steps, though comparatively tiny, builds off all the steps we’ve previously taken. Each of these steps is a breakthrough derived from humanity’s cumulative knowledge, a reminder that we can accomplish greatness if we find a way to work together, and that impossible feats can be managed if we simply dare to try. Every story in space, regardless of the particulars, is a story about humanity itself, because to even get there means we’ve accomplished the remarkable.

Space is our greatest opportunity, and our greatest challenge, and that is why I love it. Go hug an astronaut.

On to the books!

Polaris Rising
Jessie Mihalik
Trade Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780062802385
Harper Voyager, February 2019, 448 pages

The first book I present to you is Polaris Rising, by Jessie Mihalik, and this one was an incredibly fun read. The review copy provided me billed itself as a “sci-fi romance,” but while there is definitely a romance element between the protagonist and main secondary character (which, don’t worry, is well-written and believable), this book is primarily a fast-paced action-adventure with a strong female lead who does just as much rescuing as her compatriots, and the various twists and turns kept me entertained the entire way through.

Set in a universe where three rival Houses control nearly everything in a multi-stellar polity, Polaris Rising is the tale of the fifth daughter of one of the houses, Ada von Hasenburg, destined for a loveless arranged marriage to an arrogant man-child. Ada, however, isn’t one to be bound by destiny. Instead of submitting to her fate, she steals a bunch of stuff, eludes the captors intent on claiming the bounty on her head (placed by her own father), and generally acts like a badass space pirate straight out of Star Wars or Firefly.

That’s all before the book even starts, by the way, and it only gets better from there, as she’s forced to team up with one of the most dangerous men in the universe in a tense relationship that has multiple ways to end badly. This relationship actually highlights one of the things I really enjoyed about Mihalik’s writing, as instead of portraying Ada as a helpless damsel needing to be saved by her knight in shining armor, it instead casts her as a fully capable warrior in her own right who refuses to be steamrolled by those who think she should do what they think is best for her—a rarity in SF action adventure.

The stakes in the book are also excellently constructed, with Ada initially worried only about how to keep herself alive, but quickly finding herself drawn in to much deadlier games, leading to a thrilling conclusion, and I am quite looking forward to the sequel to see where things go next, as it seems Mihalik has plenty more adventures in store for Ada and company.

Read if: you like David Weber’s In Fury Born; you enjoy rollicking space adventure; you want a bit of beefcake to liven up your aristo-corporate intrigues.

The Consuming Fire
John Scalzi
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780765388971
Tor, October 2018, 316 pages

Next up we have The Consuming Fire, by noted SF author and burrito criminal John Scalzi (full disclosure—John and I are Twitter Friends). Much like the first book in this series, The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire is filled with snappy dialogue, a memorable cast of characters, and an overarching scope that manages not to get bogged down in superfluous details while still keeping a feel of vastness.

One of the things that I really like about Scalzi’s books is that they’re very approachable, and The Consuming Fire is no different. He lays out key concepts and ideas in easily understandable chunks, which means the majority of the book isn’t about how many kilowatts a Blorble Blaster needs to fire thirty rounds, but rather how the people holding the Blorble Blasters interact with each other and what that means for their world, and in The Consuming Fire, the world is rapidly falling apart.

One of the key foundations of any interstellar empire/polity/society is its ability to communicate and travel, and the central conceit of Scalzi’s series is what would happen if that ability to communicate and travel slowly disappeared. Furthermore, the way in which things are falling apart is occurring so slowly and esoterically that most people don’t want to believe it’s happening, because to address the problem would mean drastic shifts in societal and financial standing (closely mirroring our current issues with climate change and our dwindling amount of time in which we’ll be able to address it), and Scalzi’s characters are just as believable and complex in their throne rooms and corporate offices at handling the truth of their world as our CEOs and presidents in reality.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the book is simply a series of dry philosophical exchanges between pacing figures. There’s plenty of action in The Consuming Fire, including attempted assassinations, space battles, and all the associated violence one expects with something as minor as the downfall of society, all of which works to heighten the book’s tension and underlying issues rather than detract from them. I’m very curious to see how Scalzi ends his series, as several important plot points appear to be building to one heck of a climax, but after reading both The Collapsing Empire and The Consuming Fire, I have faith he’ll bring it all together in a satisfying conclusion.

Read if: you like science fiction focused more on the people than the gadgets; you enjoy snappy quips and dirty words; you prefer to experience civilizational collapse solely in literary form.

Salvation
Peter F. Hamilton
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780399178764
Del Rey, September 4th 2018, 565 pages

Our final book in this month’s review is one by an author I’ve greatly enjoyed reading over the years—Salvation, by Peter F. Hamilton. One of the reasons I like Hamilton’s books so much is that for the vast majority of authors, a world is something they create to tell a story. It’s important, since it’s the backdrop upon which everything takes place, but the focus is generally on whatever idea or concept the author felt they wanted to convey.

Hamilton, on the other hand, is one of the rare few who creates a story so he can tell you about a world, and it is a very difficult feat to pull off in a way that leaves the reader entertained. Most who try it get mired in the complexities of worldbuilding, relaying detail after detail in a way that illustrates how carefully they’ve thought through the interactions between whatever exotic technology they’ve introduced and how it might realistically be used, while completely missing the point that city-planning is generally saved for college courses and late-night Sim City sessions and isn’t necessarily compelling reading on its own.

In Salvation, the story itself is well-written, consisting of chapters alternating between two timelines—one a detective thriller about the hunt for an alien infiltrator, the other a coming-of-age tale about children preparing to fight an implacable threat, with the two coming together at the end masterfully—but it is the world Hamilton writes that takes center stage, surrounding and enveloping each character in a mantle so perfect you can close your eyes and instantly envision yourself there. Don’t get me wrong, I was fully invested in the characters and how their arcs progressed, but in this book, much like Hamilton’s other books, the protagonist’s face is not flesh and blood, but rather rain-drenched streets, alien service corridors, family habitats, and impossible vistas on unimaginable worlds. To read Salvation is to inhabit another place, and leaving the book left me wanting more of that place and what happens to the people inside it.

Fortunately, Salvation is only the first book in what looks to be an ongoing series (Hamilton usually writes trilogies), so I’ll have at least one more chance to revisit its fascinating locales. Fair warning though, Hamilton’s books tend to introduce quite a lot of concepts fairly rapidly, so don’t be surprised if you have to go back and read a page or two several times to make sure everything groks.

Read if: you enjoy the intricacies of third-order consequences as it relates to infrastructure; you like whodunnits; you want to go live somewhere else in your head for a while.

• • • •

That does it for this month, folks, have fun out there and remember to dream big!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Media Reviews: January 2019

Christopher East | 1662 words

Perhaps in reaction to the medium’s general fascination with antiheroes and outright villainy, many recent genre-bending science fiction and fantasy shows have aimed their narrative sights at a common theme: the challenges of living ethically in an unforgiving, problematic world. Examples of genre hybrids playing effectively in this sandbox are numerous: the philosophical afterlife antics of The Good Place, the fantastical animated satire of BoJack Horseman, the splendid, superheroic empathy of Sense8, the hilarious, magical concoction of music and mental health that is Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. If this month’s offerings are any indication, the trend—which is a welcome one—still has legs.

Maniac
Created by Cary Joji Fukunaga & Patrick Somerville
Produced by Parliament of Owls, Rubicon TV, Anonymous Content, Paramount Television
Released September 2018

Maniac, a ten-episode miniseries from Netflix, is one of the more fascinating recent shows to cross my screen. It’s directed by emerging TV auteur Cary Joji Fukunaga, who made a splash with the superb, genre-defying first season of HBO’s True Detective.

Maniac holds up a distorted mirror to the troubled collective psyche of America in a manner that simultaneously confronts its darkest undercurrents and delivers a much-needed message of hope. Set in an out-of-time retrofuture reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s classic film Brazil, the series tells a tale of star-crossed connection between two individuals with troubled personal lives and complex mental health issues. Owen Milgrim (Jonah Hill) is the schizophrenic black sheep of a rich, powerful family, working to overcome his own problems even as manipulative relatives try to take advantage of him in protection of the family business empire. Meanwhile, aimless ne’er-do-well Annie Landsberg (Emma Stone) struggles to overcome a traumatic event in her past with the help of dangerous black market pharmaceuticals. Their paths converge at the facilities of a Japanese biotech firm, where they both enlist as test subjects in an experimental clinical trial. The trial’s ambitious goal? Merely curing the world of its psychological ills. Owen signs up to elude his family and make some money; Annie cons her way into the program to acquire more of the drugs that sustain her self-destructive grieving.

But their fates are intertwined, thanks to a glitch in the AI that manages the experiment, which involves a sequence of psychotropic drug experiences designed to thrust the subjects into conflict with their darkest secrets and fears during VR-like hallucinations. The subjects are supposed to experience the process individually, but Annie and Owen’s simulations accidentally merge. This wreaks havoc on the trial, but might also be the key to their salvation.

Depicting a contemporary-seeming world more bonkers than the present is a pretty tall order these days, but Maniac pulls it off with panache. Its world is a weird, funhouse-mirror reflection of reality, a surreal visual time-warp of attitudes, styles, and technologies. One might describe the irreal SFnal backdrop as a mash-up of 1980s cyberpunk, modern social media, and the inside of Philip K. Dick’s brain. Among other things, people lease out their image rights to digital advertisers, hire actors to pretend to be their friends, and make extra money by letting ad reps follow them around to pitch new products. These gonzo worldbuilding notions grow out of current, topical issues, but the tropes and furniture are deliciously, comically retro. It’s like an absurdist, complex metaphor for the present that might have been written by some wildly inaccurate, if imaginative, science fiction writer of yesteryear: The details are all wrong, but the feel is right and the themes are fascinating.

For all its cinematic acumen, what makes Maniac special is its emotional core. The fictional world on display here is every bit as chaotic, challenging, and disorienting as our own, but Maniac isn’t wallowing in cynical social commentary. It’s far more concerned with the effects of the world on its flawed, floundering, sympathetic heroes. The wobbly reality of the worldbuilding serves to create an important layer of distance from the dark subject matter, admitting the viewer warmly into the characters’ efforts.

Both leads, especially Stone, deliver exceptional performances, enhancing a crucial current of hope that bubbles along beneath the story’s dark psychological surface. And that message of hope hinges on a core truth that’s easy to lose sight of in these divisive times—we’re better off being in it together than we are going it alone. For its audacious mix of layered themes, striking visuals, and heartfelt messaging, Maniac is a timely work of art, gloriously messy, genuine, and unexpectedly inspiring.

Counterpart
Created by Justin Marks
Produced by Gilbert Films, Anonymous Content, Gate 34, Media Rights Capital, Studio Babelsberg, Starz Originals
First season released December 2017

The dark intrigues of Counterpart’s alternate reality scenario may seem like the polar opposite of Maniac’s extravagant science fantasy, but the shows possess distinct thematic similarities—and Counterpart, too, is a unique genre hybrid. Coherent and calculated, Counterpart is exceptional multiverse spy fiction, like a filmic collaboration between John le Carré and Franz Kafka.

Set appropriately in Berlin, it stars J.K. Simmons as Howard Silk, a low-ranking cog in the clockwork machinery of an international intelligence agency. A lonely, simple man whose wife is on life support in the wake of a car accident, Howard sleepwalks through his shifts encrypting and exchanging nebulous coded conversations. He doesn’t entirely understand his role in the scheme of things—nor does he question it. That all changes when his superiors draw him into a conspiratorial meeting with . . . himself. The agency, it turns out, sits on a portal to an alternate world which splintered off during a mysterious event thirty years earlier. It’s been diverging historically ever since, and over time, an elaborate system of diplomacy and intelligence exchange has developed between the two worlds. Howard’s otherworldly counterpart is a high-ranking, badass field agent who has become a double agent in order to prevent interworld tensions from escalating into all-out war—a mission he needs Howard’s help to accomplish.

Counterpart seamlessly combines the tropes of two distinct genres, blending the secrets and schemes of the espionage thriller with the nuanced science fictional worldbuilding of a classic alternate worlds tale. On first glance, the balance may seem tilted slightly in favor of the spy-fi elements; after all, twisty plot mechanics and spy agency office politics drive the action. Much of the surface story involves the Howards’ mutual search for an other-world assassin named Baldwin (Sara Serraiocco) who has crossed over on an ominous, world-threatening mission, and even more narrative threads involve the schemes of intelligence officers on either side of the portal, all of them piecing together clues and uncovering each others’ agendas. In these respects, it’s a spy fiction fan’s dream, with the strategic Berlin backdrop a masterstroke of location casting: What better place for an interdimensional cold war? The intrigue is given compelling life by a terrific roster of international actors, including Serraiocco, Olivia Williams, Nazanin Boniadi, Harry Lloyd, Ulrich Thomsen, Nicholas Pinnock, Liv Lisa Fries, Richard Schiff, and Stephen Rea, among many others—all perfectly cast, inhabiting the secret world effortlessly.

By no means do the science fictional aspects take a back seat to spy fiction structure, however. Indeed, the unfolding political intrigue gradually reveals neat layers of alternate-reality worldbuilding, as nuances between the two worlds come to light. These SFnal elements aren’t drastic or flashy—Fringe, in its mid-run heyday, may still be the more colorful gold standard in this particular subgenre. But Counterpart’s subtle parallels are sly and unsettling, suitably informing both the structure and theme of the story. This is particularly true as it pertains to the internal, psychological conflicts of the characters, many of whom are aware of their counterparts. What could be more psychologically penetrating than for a person to meet, or spy on, or even sanction the murder of an alternate-reality version of yourself? This is where the show sinks in its emotional hooks, and also where J.K. Simmons commands the series. Clueless, gentle, devoted Howard is our primary viewpoint, our introduction to this conspiratorial mirror-world. For him, confronting snarky, foul-mouthed, violent Howard is like coming face-to-face with a dark version of himself, his own Evil Kirk. Their encounters force him to question his every life choice and contemplate the hidden corners of his personality that might connect him to a more dangerous, cynical version of himself—one he finds repulsive. The Howards aren’t the only counterparts thrust into conflict with one another, but their ongoing reckoning—which culminates in spectacular drama late in the season—serves as the show’s powerful thematic foundation.

Counterpart does suffer from some logistical shortcomings. Surely a conspiracy this vast, with this many moving parts across two worlds, would be far more difficult to keep under wraps. And wouldn’t the agencies entrusted with keeping this secret have stricter physical security safeguards, considering the likelihood of doppelgängers with identical biometrics? It also seems likely the very existence of the agency would have a far more drastic effect on the historical divergences between the two worlds. If you look at it all too closely, the picture looks a little muddy. Yet somehow these kinds of doubts don’t diminish the show’s power. Indeed, they may even contribute to the unnerving, unreal ambience of it all, enhancing a sense of eerie mystery that is masterfully crafted. Overall, Counterpart is a slick piece of work that uses its SFnal premise to dramatize inner conflicts in an intricate and insightful way, cleverly planting a seed in the viewer’s mind: How would you live your life differently?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher East is a writer, editor, reviewer, and avid consumer of science fiction, fantasy, and spy fiction. His stories have been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Cosmos, Interzone, Talebones, The Third Alternative, and a number of other speculative fiction publications. He’s attended the Clarion and Taos Toolbox writing workshops, and served for several years as the fiction editor for the futurism, science, and technology blog Futurismic. He blogs extensively about writing, fiction, film, television, music, comics, and more at www.christopher-east.com. Currently he lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works for an occupational and environmental health and safety consultancy.

Feature Interview: Henry Lien

Christian A. Coleman | 2869 words

Henry Lien is a 2012 graduate of Clarion West. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. He is the author of the Peasprout Chen series. Born in Taiwan, Henry currently lives in Hollywood. Hobbies include writing and performing campy science fiction/fantasy anthems, and losing Nebula awards. You can find him online at henrylien.com.

You’re the first author I’ve interviewed who’s had a Broadway singer perform at the book launch for their debut novel. I watched the promotional video (bit.ly/2KALX0E) of the one and only Idina Menzel performing the theme song from the first book of your Peasprout Chen series, Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword, with you. That’s so cool! What’s the backstory? How did that happen?

We’re represented by the same agency, ICM. She got a hold of the advance reader copy of the first Peasprout Chen book and flipped over it. She asked ICM if they could arrange for her to meet me. After I finished screaming into my pillow, I said, “Oh, well, let me see if I can find a slot in my calendar to squeeze in lunch with Idina Freeggin’ Menzel.” Then I screamed into my pillow some more. We met and really hit it off. She has become a dear friend. So I asked her to sing the theme song for the book at the launch. She said yes. Then I died of shock, and thus am conducting this interview with you from the Beyond.

People have been elevator pitching your Peasprout Chen series as Harry Potter meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on ice. I see the topical similarities, but the description doesn’t work for me, because the series really is its own and very cool thing in terms of tone and worldbuilding. This began as “Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters,” the novelette published in Asimov’s that you wrote for Chuck Palahniuk while you were at Clarion West. I think your description of it as a female Fight Club makes more sense. But I also understand that, these being middle-grade books, you can’t market Fight Club to readers that young. Do both descriptions resonate with you, or does one resonate more than the other?

Both resonate and both were conscious models. Fight Club for the reasons you mentioned. But I also wanted to capture the appeal of Potter by embracing the things that I felt truly made it memorable (dry humor and its puzzle nature). The Peasprout Chen books have no magic, no castles, no wizards, no chosen one, etc. But they’ve got (a) dry humor that sails right over the main character’s head; and (b) they are intricate puzzle stories with what readers have told me are genuinely startling plot twists. I think that these are actually the two features most responsible for making Potter so loveable, not its fairly routine world building. They are also the reasons why people consistently come away from Peasprout Chen with a Potter aftertaste despite the radically different setting and themes.

You’ve said that Ted Chiang is your favorite speculative fiction writer. What about his work has inspired your series, and what are some of your favorite stories of his?

Ted reminds me of Kubrick. (a) He is not prolific and is surgically precise in the choosing of projects to work on. (b) The ambition of his works is breathtaking but unshowy. (c) Each work is vastly different from the others in subject matter and genre, yet he absolutely nails everything that he sets out to attempt, and his first attempt in a genre usually results in a classic of the genre. (d) Quality, careful thought, and craft sing from every line of every work he creates.

I was inspired by Ted to impose the highest possible standards on myself for the Peasprout Chen series and only to write something that the world hadn’t seen before. Favorite works include “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” (which I think answers the fate/free will debate so beautifully that I never have to worry about that again, as well as never need to attempt a time travel story); “Hell is the Absence of God,” “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” and the short little parrot one (since I rescued a couple parrots).

How did you decide that Peasprout was going to be the main character of the series? Because Suki, the protagonist in “Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters,” is the mean girl antagonist in the books.

Suki’s quite the pill, and I don’t know if readers would want to be in the head of such a character for 336 pages. I also wanted a character who was an immigrant, who had zero self-esteem issues and, in fact, needed some confidence destroying, and who was modeled closely on myself, warts exaggerated. The character of Peasprout is really just me in fourteen-year-old teenage-girl drag, and the books are really just thickly-veiled autobiography.

Peasprout is an immigrant because she comes from the rural country of Shin to attend the Pearl Famous Academy of Skate and Sword. In the second book, Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions, there’s a scene where transfer student and fellow Shinian, Yinmei, says to her, “You’ve only been here in Pearl a year and a half. How quickly this place can make one forget one’s homeland . . . This place has that power. But don’t forget where you come from.” And yet throughout this book, Peasprout refers to herself as a Pearlian while balancing her outsider status and two identities.

To Pearlians, Peasprout insists that she is Pearlian, rather than Shinian, because she is combating the notion that immigrants don’t “belong here.” To Shinians, including Yinmei, she insists that she is Shinian and is offended when she is accused of being too enculturated into her new home and abandoning her roots. Peasprout has to fight on two fronts to defend her right to belong to both cultures. I think many immigrants will relate to that. Peasprout doesn’t know it yet, but she is working toward a sense of bicultural identity, which will become a principal theme if I get to write more books in the series.

Fingers crossed that you get to write more! When we learn that Peasprout’s safety and status in Pearl are at stake, her instructor Sensei Madame Liao says she can’t be sent back to Shin—read: deported—because “Pearl Famous is a sanctuary school. If we choose to grant sanctuary to someone, Pearlian authorities cannot touch her as long as she stays within the campus.” Are you referencing sanctuary cities and our current war on immigration?

Yes, very much so. But unfortunately, this is also a moral crisis that people have faced in different countries, in different periods of history.

Peasprout’s goal is to become a legend of wu liu, the deadly and beautiful art of martial arts figure skating. You’ve mentioned that figure skating and kung fu are kindred sports. How so?

The combination of dance and athletics gave them a family resemblance that I was surprised no one (to my knowledge) had attempted to explore before. I took figure skating and kung fu lessons as research for the books. As a student of these sports, I discovered that I was appalling at both, despite being generally strong and way macho. It was humbling and frustrating to see young women and girls being able to do with seeming effortlessness what I could not with great struggle. The lesson that I learned was that figure skating and kung fu, which I had chosen to combine because I thought it would be cool, were actually two sports that reward balance and flexibility more than brute strength. They were sports that rewarded the ways that girls and young women are built differently from males. There is a reason why teenage girl figure skaters can do things that even the best adult male skaters cannot do. This taught me an invaluable lesson that became a main theme in the book: Heroes come in all shapes and sizes.

All shapes and sizes and a variety of identities, including queer identities. Can I just say how much I love seeing how the queerness in the series plays out? I love how it’s integrated in the highly competitive setting of Pearl Famous Academy, and in many ways, it’s even celebrated. And the queer relationships that form between some of the characters are so endearing.

I deliberately wanted to give POC and queer folks a Harry Potter of their own. I adore Jo Rowling as an ally and I’m grateful for her vocal support and happy to see her filling in between the lines to embrace more representation in the Potter world. However, I also wanted to create an iconic fantasy world that had diversity and queerness baked into it from the outset, and write a plot that could only work with POC and queer characters. Author use of italics usually makes me go “eeww,” but please leave those in to indicate sufficiently the passion of the author on these sentiments.

I think that a lot of the ugly resistance around bringing diversity / representation into beloved existing SFF series, especially Star Wars, is that some folks bonded with the series and felt betrayed when they saw the series marching ahead into the future when they and their values hadn’t kept apace. By building my own Potter / Star Wars that was diverse and queer from the ground up, no one could claim that the series did a switcheroo on them. The diverse and queer elements were absolutely inextricable. You’re in with the lineup from the outset or else you self-select yourself out.

Now, there’s a lot riding on the fight scenes and action sequences in the books. Peasprout has to prove, again and again, her loyalty to Pearl. She’s super-competitive and clearly wants to win. Her friendships hang in the balance of the outcome of these competitions, too. How did you approach the choreography of these scenes?

Well, my goal was to write the flat-out best action sequences ever written in a book. I know how conceited that sounds, and I’m not saying I achieved this goal, but that was the bar over which I strove to hurl myself. I studied iconic action set pieces in films and video games, particularly ones that used the environment in unusual ways. Zelda games were a main inspiration. However, the greatest inspiration for the action scenes was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, because each of the fights in that film was about character relationships. The fights were ultimately battles of will as much as physical battles, and the characters came out of each battle with a deeper understanding of their opponents and the relationships between them. I wanted the spectacle to be anchored in emotion and in characters. That’s why the biggest set pieces in the first book are ultimately about Peasprout and fellow student Doi trying to figure out where they stand with each other, as rivals, allies, friends, etc.

You up the ante in book two by having the Empress of Shin declare an invasion on the city of Pearl, and Pearl Famous Academy turns from an arts academy to a military academy. One of the classes Peasprout and the other students have to take is on propaganda. Would you say that the academy’s shift to weaponize literature, architecture, and music is a form of propaganda?

Yes. I’m really curious about the art forms that militaries use as branding vehicles. For example, camouflage for the US military comes in fashion shades that have seasons. Musical genres used, and musical genres avoided, by the militaries in recruitment commercials throughout the decades say so much about their messaging (and the profiles of the youths that they want to recruit).

Reading both Peasprout Chen books made me think of your short story “Bilingual,” published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, because of the running themes of animal welfare and veganism. Peasprout, her brother Cricket, and her friends Doi and Hisashi, eat only plant-based meals.

Being vegan and an animal lover is as integral a part of my identity as being gay and Asian. I’m not one to shame or proselytize. I prefer to focus on the positive. Being vegan gives me so much joy. I’m grateful every day for the beautiful animals that we are so lucky to share this planet with and grateful for a way to express that love with food choices that are good for my health and save the planet at the same time. I also think that animals make people better people. There are also hundreds of years of history behind achingly good plant-based cuisine in so many Asian cultures. To be closeted about this ingrained part of my own culture and myself would have been deeply false and unnatural.

You’ve written other short stories, such as “Supplemental Declaration of Henry Lien,” “The Ladies’ Aquatic Gardening Society,” and “The Shadow You Cast is Me,” for older readers. What’s been your experience writing the Peasprout Chen novels for middle-grade readers? What are some differences and similarities you’ve picked up on?

There’s been basically zero difference for me in writing adult work vs. writing middle-grade work. I don’t really approach them any differently. Maybe that means I’m a lousy middle-grade writer. But dumbing down work is excruciating to me. I deferred to my editor Tiff Liao and my publisher Macmillan about what category the books would fit in. To my surprise, almost all the people who have read Peasprout Chen in one sitting or in twenty-four hours have been nine years old or younger.

Wow! That’s pretty cool! And how have kids been reacting to the series so far?

This morning, I got an email from someone saying she was in a restaurant. A kid was throwing a hissy fit, because he didn’t want to leave the restaurant because he was almost finished with a book. Turned out the book was Peasprout Chen. So my book is causing public tantrums. My work here is done.

School visits have been a blast. It’s extremely easy to tell when middle-grade audiences are into what you are doing. At my appearances, they clap along, bounce in their seats, scream, rush the stage, ask for hugs, and basically make me feel like I’m Justin Bieber. It’s pretty rad.

What’s next for Peasprout? Do you have more future stories lined up for her?

I have book three all outlined. This book would conclude the original trilogy. My publisher hasn’t committed to it yet. We’ll have to see if the first two books do well enough for them to pull the trigger and commit to it. Beyond that, I have a whole lot more that I would love to write in this world, including an intergenerational immigrant love story about the two women who invented wu liu (kung fu figure skating) and built the city of Pearl.

Do you have other writing projects lined up that you can tell us about?

I’m working on a couple of things I’m really excited about, but unfortunately, I’m not allowed to talk about them yet. Suffice it to say that I’m as passionate about what I’m working on now as I am about the Peasprout Chen series.

Is there anything else you’d like your readers to know about the series?

A reader pointed out something to me in the first Peasprout Chen book that stunned me: If you do something with the name of one of the characters, it reveals the primary secret in the book. It’s as if someone had pointed out to Jo Rowling that “Tom Marvolo Riddle” is an accidental anagram for “I am Lord Voldemort.” When the reader pointed this out to me, my jaw hung agape so long that I slipped on my own saliva. If anyone finishes the book and can’t see this Easter egg, email me at info@henrylien.com and I’ll tell you in confidence.

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: A. Merc Rustad

Nicasio Andres Reed | 1131 words

Something I look forward to when reading your fiction is how you always find new ways to play with form, and with the form of narration in particular. You’ve written in the second person, you’ve tackled interactive fiction, you’ve started stories at the end and come around to the beginning, you’ve written in multi-sourced internet epistolary, and every time these choices are an important part of the total impact of the story. In “With Teeth Unmake the Sun,” I feel like I’m reading an epic poem. Can you talk about how you came to find the voice and form of this story in particular?

Oh gosh, thank you! I’m so glad the feel of the story worked like that—because it was definitely a mood and voice/style I was aiming for!

I’m a very visual writer: I like to picture stories unfolding as cinema or animation. (I was a film major in college!) A lot of the imagery in this story, like the wolf shadows expanding everywhere, were the foundation to the emotional core (the relationships between First Wolf and Jarith and The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf). Cinematic voice—in how a movie is designed, shot, edited, the mise en scene, color palettes, etc.—is fascinating to me, and I’m not sure I can adequately explain how that translates into my writing. I envision a thing, and then work on finding the right words that evokes the mood and visuals I want to present. Voice stems a lot from a mix of style and character, for me. First Wolf being this wild, primal, immortal being, their voice needed to reflect that, and the space opera style calls for evocative, sweeping settings and visuals, which is what I tried to capture in words.

The character of First Wolf recalls Fenrir, the mighty wolf of legend whose children swallow the sun and the moon. That said, you’ve also got a lot more going on there. (The shadow-wolves were very Machineries of Empire to me.) What led you to center the character of the mythic wolf, and are there other wolves and wolf-stories that you took inspiration from?

So, it will come as no surprise that beginning as a child, I loved wolves. I had a couple of picture books about wolves and I also got Very Upset when they were cast as the bad guys in so many things. Some early influential reads were The Changeling Prince by Vivian Vande Velde; Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George; I read White Fang at way too young an age; I went through the Universal Monsters phase and definitely latched onto The Wolf Man as a kid; there is Silverbolt (an eagle-wolf hybrid) in Beast Wars: Transformers whom I love; I got very happily attached to any and all wolves and wargs in LoTR; I also got extremely upset, as a smol!Merc, when I first read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and Maugrim (I had a copy that named him Fenris Ulf) showed up but then died by the end. I WILL NEVER FORGIVE PETER. NEVER. The 1979 animated movie just cemented my frustrations that wolves kept getting maligned by the media. Oh, and I’m still mad at Disney for making the wolves bad in Beauty and the Beast. STOP STEREOTYPING MY TOOTHY BOIS.

Anyway, I have a lot of feels about wolves in fiction! So early on, I dabbled with adding wolves and wolf-like characters to my stories, but I always had this gnawing fear about making them protagonists. There’s something to be said for consuming media that has ingrained images of who the monsters are. I kept pushing back at it, bit by bit.

I began adding all the good doggos and wolves to my fiction. Each time I did, I grew bolder. A protagonist named Wolf? Yes. Wolves as gods? Yes. Mythical immortal genderqueer wolf protagonist? HELL YES. Each time I added a good wolf to my fiction, I would think to myself, Take THAT, Disney.

First Wolf, The Thousand-Star-Eyed Wolf, and Jarith are all painfully isolated characters who have dealt with their isolation in such different ways. What do you think it is that keeps them all so separate in their aloneness?

Fear is a component. Although I doubt any of them will admit it. They’ve all been entrenched in their own paths for so long, it becomes a strange sort of comfort in its familiarity.

First Wolf asks again and again whether people are made of lies, which is a morality that I love to see, especially in a story where physical form is mutable—emphasizing that your physical form can be whatever it will be from moment to moment, but the substance of your character is what’s worthy of scrutiny. What does First Wolf think is the best thing to be made of? And you?

They want internal consistency, a truth of the soul, in a way.

On a personal level, I have a very hard time discerning when people are lying or joking. (I’m also fairly literal in a lot of social situations, especially around people I do not know well.) So let’s just say I ended up being hurt by manipulative people quite a lot. And it’s super frustrating when someone starts “joking” with me about a serious topic and I start to have an intense emotional reaction to it, but then they are all, “Haha not really.”

I’ve never been certain how to handle or react to this kind of social dialogue. It makes navigating everything even harder. So I ended up thinking a lot about how internal consistency and cuing truth in one’s actions and words is a reflection of who someone is.

First Wolf takes it to their own level: wanting truth and consistency in the people they are attached to.

What can we look forward to from you in the future? Any, say, giant red killer death sheep on the horizon? All other updates welcome as well, of course

Well, after asking on Twitter about how people name storyverses, I did figure out where Fluff the demon ram fits in, so I do hope to finish his story soon.

I have stories forthcoming in several anthologies, such as Unlocking The Magic (ed. Vivian Caethe) and A People’s Future of the United States (eds. Victor LaValle & John Joseph Adams), and hopefully a couple other things I can announce when the new year dawns.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Nicasio Andres Reed is a Filipino-American writer, poet, and essayist whose work has appeared in venues such as Lightspeed’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Shimmer. Nico has gone back and forth between the US and the Philippines over the years, and is currently pursuing an MA in creative writing at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. Find him on Twitter @NicasioSilang.

Author Spotlight: Ashok K. Banker

Alex Puncekar | 920 words

“Son of Water and Fire” is related to your forthcoming novel Upon a Burning Throne, in which Vrath is a major character. Was he born originally from the short story or from the novel? Is writing him different between these two mediums?

Vrath is inspired by a famous character from the Indian epic Mahabharata, which was the starting point and inspiration for a part of Upon a Burning Throne. I was going to write him pretty much as he appears in the novel, which is as a strong supporting character. But I wanted to know more about him than I found in the Mahabharata or any other source. For instance, once the original character is taken away by his mother Jeel, we are told nothing about what happens to him until the time he is returned to his father at the age of fifteen. I wanted to know that story. Since it didn’t exist, I wrote it. I invented a childhood for Vrath which is internally consistent with everything I knew about him. That’s the story we see in “Son of Water and Fire,” whereas in Upon a Burning Throne, we see him only as an older man.

Vrath and his origins feel very mythic, almost like Hercules or Beowulf in nature. Was mythbuilding part of your process for this story? If so, what aspects of mythbuilding did you find important to this piece, and for stories in general?

The Mahabharata is one of the two seminal epics of South Asia. (The Ramayana is the other one.) Although Mahabharata is considered “itihasa” (a kind of oral history passed down by rote from generation to generation for millennia), it’s passed into the realm of myth. Any legend or even history that ancient is inevitably mythologized and it’s no longer possible to tell where the real historical record ends and the mythic or fantastical parts begin.

I already had that rich mythic, itihasic, historical record to draw on. But I wanted to do much more. I wanted to make it my own world, my own characters, tell my own story. So I did what those oral re-tellers had already been doing for millennia, but on a laptop. (Repeating millions of verses by rote has somewhat gone out of fashion in recent centuries, not sure why!) In the process, I created my own universe, planetary system, planet, continent, races, peoples, civilisations, cultures. Sure, it’s all inspired by some real source—mainly South Asian mythology and Moghul history—but the Burnt Empire, stonefire, the Stone Gods, and the world of Arthaloka are products of my imagination. The high language of the world, Ashcrit, is derived from Sanskrit (like almost every modern language of the world) and some words are exactly the same (ditto), but it’s my own invention. I think once you get the geography right (hence the obsession with maps in epic fantasy), the language right, and the cultures right, you’re free to tell the biggest, boldest, most dramatic epic fantasy saga you could possibly want.

Instead of asking what inspired this piece, can I ask what inspired you to tell Vrath’s story? He’s a major character in Upon a Burning Throne, but how did you decide on telling his story from him as a child and young man?

Characters are fascinating because they’re inscrutable in that classic mythic way. They’re Godlike in that aspect: Much of the fascination that Gods hold is their inscrutability. If they told us everything—if Gods went to therapy for instance, or hung around in Starbucks telling their BFFs everything that went down in their lives—we might find their lives are just like ours, except on a much more epic scale. The fascination to know more about them has to be tempered with the author’s need to retain that mystique. The trick is how much to tell and how much to hold back. What you don’t say is more important than what you do say.

I wanted the reader to understand Vrath better with this glimpse into his childhood and youth, but still retain that godlike aura. That’s partly why I agreed with my editor that dropping this section from the novel and publishing it as a standalone story was a better idea than including it in the main book. In Upon a Burning Throne, you’ll see a great deal of Vrath, but you will never get quite this close into his head and heart. I felt that was important.

What can we expect to see from you in the future?

Masala pancakes with spicy chai syrup! Seriously, though, I’m just finishing up the final submission draft of the sequel to Upon a Burning Throne, titled A Dark Queen Rises. I’m not writing many new short stories apart from the Legends of the Burnt Empire, but there are always more novels. Will announce them closer to publication. Meanwhile, Upon a Burning Throne hits bookstands across the world on April 16, 2019. I hope this short story and the other Legends of the Burnt Empire appearing in Lightspeed Magazine make you want to pick up a copy! (PS: And if the stories don’t work for you, I should add that the novel is much, much better!)

Thanks for reading!

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: Tony Ballantyne

Coral Alejandra Moore | 502 words

In the first scene of “Midway,” the narrator hears a piece of music from Earth, though he should be in a place where no human has ever passed before, millions of light years away. Why did you choose the Beatles as the song he hears on that distant world? When I read the scene, I got a very distinct impression of what song was playing even though it’s never mentioned in the text of the story. Were you hoping when you wrote the scene that the reader would provide their own soundtrack? Care to share what song you had in mind when you were writing the story?

I chose the Beatles as I wanted a something that the reader themselves would recognize. I thought about a number of different pieces, but the Beatles seemed the most universal. (If anyone has a better idea, I’d be interested to hear from them.) I deliberately didn’t name the song because, as you say, I was hoping the reader would provide their own soundtrack. I nearly always have music playing when I’m writing and I’m pretty sure I had the Beatles playing when I was writing the story.

One of the recurring themes this story explores is the decision that has to be made when one reaches the point of no return, to continue on or go back. Did you go into this story wanting to write about that, or did it grow out of something you learned about the story or the character along the way? Is there a particular reason you chose to write about this?

The story was very much inspired by me turning fifty and the realization that I was (at least in some ways) at the midpoint of my life. When I conceived the story, it had a far more downbeat ending, but stories are created in the writing, not in the planning. The ending came as a pleasant surprise to me, even more so given my personal circumstances at the time . . .

The main character of “Midway” travels across the galaxy using Earth’s culture as the coin to fund his voyage of exploration. An interstellar trading post that analyzes and quantifies the cultures of different worlds and translates that into currency is fascinating to contemplate. Where did that idea come from?

From the realization that culture is and always has been a commodity to be traded just like any other.

What are you working on now? Where can readers find more stories from you?

I’m just finishing a book of short stories that I was moved to write following the illness and death of my father. “Midway” was the first story completed, though it will probably be the last in the collection. You can find stories of mine all over the place, see my website for more details: tonyballantyne.com.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Coral Alejandra Moore has always been the kind of girl who makes up stories. Fortunately, she never quite grew out of that. She writes because she loves to invent characters and the desire to find out what happens to her creations drives her tales. She is a 2013 alum of the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop and she has been published by Diabolical Plots, Zombies Need Brains, and Secrets of the Goat People. Currently she lives in the beautiful state of Washington with the love of her life and a dangerously smart Catahoula Leopard Dog where she rides motorcycles, raises chickens, and drinks all the coffee.

Author Spotlight: Meg Elison

Arley Sorg | 1109 words

I really admire the way the narrator’s character comes through in such a clever way, carefully filigreed within the voice of the piece—but also, almost like an image revealed by negative space in visual arts. Can you talk a bit about the narrator and her character from the perspective of a feminist?

I thought about the women in journalism whose voices were influential to me growing up. Most of them were and are feminists, but they often had to be coy about it in order to maintain likability and their jobs while also speaking truth to power. I tried to imagine an alternate universe version of Nelly Bly or Oprah Winfrey and the way they would do this job. She had to be incisive and observant, yet gossipy and fun. I wanted her to tell us about the world she writes, from the politics of publishing to the fashions of the fabulous. I also wanted someone who could watch a father-son dynamic without projecting herself into it, and so our breathless correspondent was created.

I feel like there are a few major themes going on. One that sticks out for me is generational shifts in power and attitudes, and the irony of each generation being both innovative and completely the same as the prior generation. Is this drawn from specific experiences? How did this story start for you—what was the inspiration and how did it develop?

I’ve been thinking about the pendulum of history a lot lately; that process of revolution, backlash, correction, and overcorrection, and the way you can see it within a family as much as you can within a nation. This story began to develop for me when I was thinking about the relationship between science and magic, and how folks like to pretend they’re separate things. I have been especially vexed by the competing definitions of science fiction and fantasy (magical fiction) when they’re a messy intertwined bunch of tropes anyhow. So I realized I was seeing the same thing in generation and in genre: a pendulum or a seesaw where swung wildly the magic of light sabers and full immersion baptism and stem cell research and life at conception and a spaceship built by a wizard and a dragon brought to life by a mad scientist. In the end, it all seemed to come down to questions of taste and likes and preferences: the sand upon which we build our houses and try to make them stand. And that’s a lot to think about, so I had to tell it small. One family business, one reporter trying to crystallize their story.

The framing device (a journalistic article/bio piece) is fairly similar to an epistolary. I read in a prior interview that you love writing epistolary, and in fact you employ this style in your The Road to Nowhere series. What is it that appeals to you about this form; what are the advantages and challenges?

I fell in love with the epistolary format when I was at Berkeley, studying nineteenth-century literature. There was this insistence in early English novels on both immediacy and legitimacy, so there was always some conceit: This is a series of letters from someone who was there, or there were these mysterious documents I found in an old castle. The format provides the up-close-and-personal feel of first-person narration, while also giving the character in the narrator’s seat the time to reflect and the opportunity to tune their experience, to look for patterns and understand things better than they did in the moment. I am a diarist myself, dedicated for decades to recording my experiences and learning both by doing it and by occasionally looking back. It is an advantage in fiction because it allows for the writer to switch modes of writing within a piece, and most readers are consuming different modes from minute to minute now. Think about the way we enjoy media. We watch TV with a phone in our hands to look things up, we check Twitter when the news is slow, and text friends to ask if they are seeing what we’re seeing. The author also gets to assume a position of privilege and authority within the narrative by taking on the voice of a newspaper, a magazine, a voice on the radio. It’s challenging because one has to nail the voice and tone of that mode of writing, and believably impersonate it. It’s how writers do impressions, and the reader knows at once if you have not practiced in front of a mirror.

What is your favorite thing about this piece, which you want everyone to know?

My favorite thing about this piece was the freedom that such a magical and advanced world gave me to get into some weird stuff. Ghosts invited to a wedding! A million parallel universes where fine books are sold! Old, moneyed families of sorcerers and startup queens, living a multigenerational drama that would shame the Medicis. After a lot of writing about survivors in a dystopia eating possum, this story was screeching good fun to dream up.

What was the hardest or most challenging aspect of writing this story?

The hardest part was deciding the mechanism, cost, and rules of time travel. I almost always avoid it in my stories, but I had to have it here. So I spent a lot of time thinking about the boundaries and constraints of it, because I hate when it gets used as deus ex machina, or a clever way to have a character get seduced by his own mother.

For new fans who just met you through this story, what should they read next? Also, what are you working on now that readers can look forward to soon?

If you liked this story, I have to tell you that it is nothing whatsoever like my books! But my Road to Nowhere series is concluding this year with The Book of Etta in April, and the first installment won me the Dick award. Aside from that, I am working on a handful of things now, including a book about queer witches in Oakland and a story about my cursed hometown. Follow me on Twitter for more stories and news, and I have a short on Patreon every month for just a dollar. So there is more where this came from, but it comes in a lot of flavors.

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 | 147 words

Coming up in February, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Matthew Baker (“Life Sentence”) and Carrie Vaughn (“Harry and Marlowe and the Disinclined Laboratory”), along with SF reprints by Charlie Jane Anders (“A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime”) and Gord Sellar (“The Incursus by Asimov-NN#71”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by K.T. Bryski (“Ti-Jean’s Last Adventure, as Told to Raccoon”) and Ashok K. Banker (“The Terrible Oath”), and fantasy reprints by Crystal Koo (“The Perpetual Day”) and Dennis Danvers (“Healing Benjamin”).

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 reprint of Kat Howard’s novella “Hath No Fury.” We’ll also have a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

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Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

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Twitter

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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 more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! For more information, including about third-party subscription options, 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.