TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 107, April 2019

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: April 2019

SCIENCE FICTION

The Archronology of Love
Caroline M. Yoachim

To Market, To Market: The Branding of Billy Bailey
Cory Doctorow

Gundark Island, or, Tars Tarkas Needs Your Help
Matthew Corradi

The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin
Michael Swanwick

FANTASY

Blur
Carmen Maria Machado

The Seeds of War
Ashok K. Banker

The Lady of Shalott
Carrie Vaughn

A Conch-Shell’s Notes
Shweta Adhyam

NOVELLA

The Speed of Belief
Robert Reed

EXCERPTS

Upon a Burning Throne
Ashok K. Banker

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: April 2019
Chris Kluwe

Media Review: April 2019
Christopher East

Interview: Rebecca Roanhorse
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Caroline M. Yoachim

Ashok K. Banker

Matthew Corradi

Shweta Adhyam

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

© 2019 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Reiko Murakami

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: April 2019

John Joseph Adams | 252 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 107th issue!

Ever wonder what it would be like if archaeology could skip digging in the dirt and just go straight to excavating time? Caroline M. Yoachim explores just this idea in her new short story “The Archronology of Love.” Our cover art this month, from Reiko Murakami, illustrates this story.

Our other original SF short is by Matthew Corradi (“Gundark Island, or Tars Tarkas Needs Your Help”), taking us adventuring with a group of boys and their very interesting companion. You can also enjoy SF reprints by Cory Doctorow (“To Market, To Market: The Branding of Billy Bailey”) and Michael Swanwick (“The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin”).

Ashok K. Banker’s Legends of the Burnt Empire series comes to an explosive conclusion in “The Seeds of War,” a new story about Vrath and the terrible repercussions of his vows. Shweta Adhyam takes a look at the pros and cons of prophecy in her new story “A Conch-Shell’s Notes.” We also have fantasy reprints by Carmen Maria Machado (“Blur”) and Carrie Vaughn (“The Lady of Shalott”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. We also have an interview with Rebecca Roanhorse.

For our ebook readers, we also have a reprint of the novella “The Speed of Belief,” by Robert Reed. You can also enjoy an excerpt from the novel Upon a Burning Throne, by Ashok K. Banker.

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.

The Archronology of Love

Caroline M. Yoachim | 8931 words

This is a love story, the last of a series of moments when we meet.

Saki Jones leaned into the viewport window until her nose nearly touched the glass, staring at the colony planet below. New Mars. From this distance, she could pretend that things were going according to plan—that M.J. was waiting for her in one of the domed cities. A shuttle would take her down to the surface and she and her lifelove would pursue their dream of studying a grand alien civilization.

It had been such a beautiful plan.

“Dr. Jones?” The crewhand at the entrance to the observation deck was an elderly white woman, part of the skeleton team that had worked long shifts in empty space while the passengers had slept in stasis. “The captain has requested an accelerated schedule on your research. She sent you the details? All our surface probes have malfunctioned, and she needs you to look at the time record of the colony collapse.”

“The Chronicle.” Saki corrected the woman automatically, most of her attention still on the planet below. “The time record is called the Chronicle.”

“Right. The captain—”

Saki turned away from the viewport. “Sorry. I have the captain’s message. Please reassure her that I will gather my team and get research underway as soon as possible.”

The woman saluted and left. Saki sent a message calling the department together for an emergency meeting and returned to the viewport. New Mars was the same angry red as its namesake, and the colony cities looked like pus-filled boils on its surface. It was a dangerous place—malevolent and sick. M.J. had died there. If they hadn’t been too broke to go together, the whole family would have died. Saki blinked away tears. She had to stay focused.

It was a violation of protocol for Saki to go into the Chronicle. No one was ever a truly impartial observer, of course, but she’d had M.J. torn away so suddenly, so unexpectedly. The pain of it was raw and overwhelming. They’d studied together, raised children together, planned an escape from Earth. Other partners had come and gone from their lives, but she and M.J. had always been there for each other.

If she went into the Chronicle, she would look for him. It would bias her choices and her observations. But she was the most qualified person on the team, and if she recused herself she could lose her research grant, her standing in the department, her dream of studying alien civilizations . . . and her chance to see M.J.

“Dr. Jones . . .” A softer voice this time—one of her graduate students. Hyun-sik was immaculately dressed, as always, with shimmery blue eyeliner that matched his blazer.

“I know, Hyun-sik. The projector is ready and we’re on an accelerated schedule. I just need a few moments to gather my thoughts before the site-selection meeting.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” Hyun-sik said. “I didn’t mean to intrude, but I wanted to offer my support. My parents were also at the colony. Whatever happened down there is a great loss to all of us.”

Saki didn’t know what to say. Words always felt so meaningless in the face of death. She and Hyun-sik hadn’t spoken much about their losses during the months of deceleration after they woke from stasis. They’d thrown themselves into their research, used their work as a distraction from their pain. “Arriving at the planet re-opened a lot of wounds.”

“I sent my parents ahead because I thought their lives would be better here than back on Earth.” He gestured at the viewport window. “The temptation to see them again is strong. So close, and the Chronicle is right there. I know you’re struggling with the same dilemma. It must be a difficult decision for you, having lost M.J.—”

“Yes.” Saki interrupted before Hyun-sik could say anything more. Even hearing M.J.’s name was difficult. She was unfit for this expedition. She should take a leave of absence and allow Li Yingtai take over as lead. But this research was her dream, their dream—M.J.’s and hers—and these were unusual circumstances. Saki frowned. “How did you know I was here, thinking about recusing myself?”

“It isn’t difficult to guess. It’s what I would be doing, in your place.” He looked away. “But also Kenzou told me at our lunch date today.”

Saki sighed. Her youngest son was the only one of her children who had opted to leave Earth and come with her. He’d thought that New Mars would be a place of adventure and opportunity. Silly romantic notions. For the last few weeks she’d barely seen him—he’d mentioned having a new boyfriend but hadn’t talked about the details. She’d been concerned because the relationship had drawn him away from his studies. Pilots weren’t in high demand now, he’d said, given the state of the colony. Apparently his mystery boyfriend was her smart, attractive, six-years-older-than-Kenzou graduate student. She was disappointed to find out about the relationship from her student rather than her son. He was drifting away from her, and she didn’t know how to mend the rift.

Hyun-sik wrung his hands, clearly ill at ease with the new turn in the conversation.

“I think you and Kenzou make a lovely couple.” Saki said.

He grinned. “Thank you, Dr. Jones.”

Saki forced herself to smile back. Her son hadn’t had any qualms keeping the relationship from her, but clearly Hyun-sik was happier to have things out in the open. “Let’s go. We have an expedition to plan.”

• • • •

We did not create the Chronicle, we simply discovered it, as you did. Layer upon layer of time, a stratified record of the universe. When you visit the Chronicle, you alter it. Your presence muddles the temporal record as surely as an archaeological dig muddles the dirt at an excavation site. In the future, human archronologists will look back on you with scorn, much as you look back on looters and tomb raiders—but we forgive you. In our early encounters, we make our own errors. How can we understand something so alien before we understand it? We act out of love, but that does not erase the harm we cause. Forgive us.

Saki spent the final hours before the expedition in a departmental meeting, arguing with Dr. Li about site selection. When was easy. Archronologists burrowed into the Chronicle starting at the present moment and proceeding backward through layers of time, following much the same principles as used in an archaeological dig. The spatial location was trickier to choose. M.J. had believed that the plague was alien, and if he was right, the warehouse that housed the alien artifacts would be a good starting point.

“How can you argue for anything but the colony medical center?” Li demanded. “The colonists died of a plague.”

“The hospital at the present moment is unlikely to have any useful information,” Saki said. The final decision was hers, but she wanted the research team to understand the rationale for her choice. “Everyone in the colony is dead, and we have their medical records up to the point of the final broadcast. The colonists suspected that the plague was alien in origin. We should start with the xenoarchaeology warehouse.”

There were murmurs of agreement and disagreement from the students and post-docs.

“Didn’t your lifelove work in the xenoarchaeology lab?” The question came from Annabelle Hoffman, one of Li’s graduate students.

The entire room went silent.

Saki opened her mouth, then closed it. It was information from M.J. that had led her to suggest starting at the xenoarcheaology warehouse. Would she have acted on that information if it had come from someone else? She believed that she would, but what if her love for M.J. was biasing her decisions?

“You’re out of line, Hoffman.” Li turned to Saki. “I apologize for Annabelle. I disagree with your choice of site, but it is inappropriate of her to make this personal. Everyone on this ship has lost someone down there.”

Saki was grateful to Li for diffusing the situation. They were academic rivals, yes, but they’d grown to be friends. “Thank you.”

Li nodded, then launched into a long-winded argument for the hospital as an initial site. Saki was still reeling from the personal attack. Annabelle was taking notes onto her tablet, scowling at having been rebuked. Saki hated departmental politics, hated conflict. M.J. had always been her sounding board to talk her through this kind of thing, and he was gone. Maybe she shouldn’t do this. Li was a brilliant researcher. The project would be in good hands if she stepped down.

Suddenly the room went quiet. Li had finished laying out her arguments, and everyone was waiting for Saki’s response.

Hyun-sik came to her rescue and systematically countered Li’s arguments. He was charming and persuasive, and by the end of the meeting he had convinced the group to go along with the plan to visit the xenoarchaeology warehouse first.

Saki hoped it was the right choice.

• • • •

There is no objective record of the moments in your past—you filter reality through your thoughts and perceptions. Over time, you create a memory of the memory, compounding bias upon bias, layers of self-serving rationalizations, or denial, or nostalgia. Everything becomes a story. You visit the Chronicle to study us, but what you see isn’t absolute truth. The record of our past is filtered through your minds .

The control room for the temporal projector looked like the navigation bridge of an interstellar ship. A single person could work the controls, but half the department was packed into the room—most longing for a connection to the people they’d lost, others simply eager to be a part of this historic moment, the first expedition to the dead colony of New Mars.

Saki waited with Hyun-sik in the containment cylinder, a large chamber with padded walls and floors. At twenty meters in diameter and nearly two stories high, it was the largest open area on the ship. Cameras on the ceiling recorded everything that she and Hyun-sik did. From the perspective of people staying on the ship, the expedition team would flicker, disappear briefly, and return an instant later—possibly in a different location. This was the purpose of the padded floors and walls: to cushion falls and prevent injury in the event that they returned at a slightly different altitude.

The straps of Saki’s pack chafed her shoulders. She and Hyun-sik stood back to back, not moving, although stillness was not strictly necessary. The projector could transport moving objects as easily as stationary ones. As long as they weren’t half inside the room and half outside of it, everything would be fine. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Hyun-sik confirmed.

Over the ceiling-mounted speakers, the robotic voice of the projection system counted down from twenty. Saki forced herself to breathe.

“. . . three, two, one.”

Their surroundings faded to black, then brightened into the cavernous warehouse that served as artifact storage for the xenoarchaeology lab. The placement was good. Saki and Hyun-sik floated in an empty aisle. Two rows of brightly colored alien artifacts towered above them. Displacement damage from their arrival was minimal; nothing of interest was likely to be in the middle of the aisle.

Silence pressed down on them. The Chronicle recorded light but not sound, and they were like projections, there without really being there. M.J. could have explained it better. This was not her first time in the Chronicle, but the lack of sound was always unnerving. There was no ambient noise, or even her own breathing and heartbeat.

“Mark location.” Saki typed her words in the air, her tiny motions barely visible but easily detected by the sensors in her gloves. Her instructions appeared in the corner of Hyun-sik’s glasses. She and her student set the location on their wristbands. The projection cylinder was twenty meters in diameter, and moving beyond that area in physical space could be catastrophic upon return. The second expedition into the Chronicle had ended with the research team reappearing inside the concrete foundation of the Chronos lab.

“Location marked,” Hyun-sik confirmed.

Saki studied the artifacts that surrounded her. She had no idea if they were machinery or art or some kind of alien toy. Hell, for all she knew, they might be waste products or alien carapaces. They looked manufactured rather than biological, though—smooth, flat-bottomed ovoids that reminded her of escape pods or maybe giant eggs.

The closest artifact on her left was about three times her height and had a base of iridescent blue, dotted with specks of red, crisscrossed with a delicate lace of green and gray and black. The base, which extended to roughly the midline of each ovoid, was uniform across all the artifacts in the warehouse. The tops, however, were all different. Several were shades of green with various amounts of brown mixed in. The one immediately to her right was topped with swirls of browns and beige and grayish-white and a red so dark it looked almost black. M.J. had been so thrilled to unearth these wondrous things.

Something about them bothered her though. She vaguely remembered M.J. describing them as blue, and while that was true of the bases—

Hyun-sik pulled off his pack.

“Wait.” Saki used the micro-jets on her suit to turn and face her student. He was surrounded in a semi-translucent shimmer of silvery-white, the colors of the Chronicle all swirled together where his presence disrupted it, like the dirt of an archaeological dig all churned together. At the edges of his displacement cloud there was a delicate rainbow film, like the surface of a soap bubble, data distorted but not yet destroyed.

“Sorry,” Hyun-sik messaged. “Everything looked clear in my direction.”

Saki scanned the warehouse. The recording drones would have no problem collecting data on the alien artifacts. Her job was to look for anomalies, things the drones might miss or inadvertently destroy. She studied the ceiling of the warehouse. A maintenance walkway wrapped around the building, a platform of silvery mesh suspended from the lighter silver metal of the ceiling. The walkway was higher than the two-story ceiling of the containment cylinder, outside of their priority area. On the walkway, near one of the bright ceiling lights, something looked odd. “I don’t think we were the first ones here.”

Hyun-sik followed her gaze. “Displacement cloud?”

“There, by the lights.” Saki studied the shape on the walkway. It was hard to tell at this distance, but the displacement cloud was roughly the right size to be human. “Unfortunately we have no way to get up there for a closer look.”

“I can reprogram a few of the bees—”

“Yes.” It was not ideal. Drones were good at recording physical objects, but had difficulty picking up the outlines of distortion clouds and other anomalies. Moving through the Chronicle was difficult, though not impossible. It was similar to free fall in open space. Things you brought with you were solid, but everything else was basically a projection.

“It is too far for the microjets,” Hyun-sik continued, “but we could tie ourselves together and push off each other so that someone could have a closer look.”

Saki had been considering that very option, but it was too dangerous. If something went wrong and they couldn’t get back to their marks, they could reappear inside a station wall, or off the ship entirely, or in a location occupied by another person. She wanted desperately to take a closer look, because if the distortion cloud was human-shaped it meant . . . “No. It’s too risky. We’ll send drones.”

There was nothing else that merited a more thorough investigation, so they released the recording drones, a flying army of bee-sized cameras that recorded every object from multiple angles. Seventeen drones flew to the ceiling and recorded the region of the walkway that had the distortion. Saki hoped the recording would be detailed enough to be useful. The disruption to the Chronicle was like ripples in a pond, spreading from the present into the past and future record, tiny trails of white blurring together into a jumbled cloud.

M.J. had always followed the minimalist school of archronology; he liked to observe the Chronicle from a single unobtrusive spot. He had disapproved of recording equipment, of cameras and drones. It would be so like him to stand on an observation walkway, far above the scene he wanted to observe. But this moment was in his future, a part of the Chronicle that hadn’t been laid down yet when he died. There was no way for him to be here.

The drones had exhausted all the open space and started flying through objects to gather data on their internal properties. By the time the drones flew back into their transport box, the warehouse was a cloud of white with only traces of the original data.

• • • •

We did not begin here. The urge to expand and grow came to us from another relationship. They came to us, and we learned their love of exploration, which eventually led us to you. It doesn’t matter that we arrive here before you, we are patient, we will wait.

The reconstruction lab was crammed full of people—students and post-docs and faculty carefully combing through data from the drones on tablets, occasionally projecting data onto the wall to get a better look at the details. The 3D printer hummed, printing small-scale reproductions of the alien artifacts.

“The initial reports we received described the artifact bases, but not the tops.” Li’s voice rose over the general din of the room. “The artifacts changed sometime after the colony stopped sending reports.”

Annabelle said something in response, but Saki couldn’t quite make it out. She shook her head and tried to focus on the drone recordings from the seventeen drones that had flown to the ceiling to investigate the anomaly. It was a human outline, which meant that they weren’t the first ones to visit that portion of the Chronicle. Saki couldn’t make out the figure’s features. She wasn’t sure if the lack of resolution was due to the drones having difficulty recording something that wasn’t technically an object, or if the person had moved enough to blur the cloud they left behind.

She wanted desperately to believe that it was M.J. An unmoving human figure was consistent with his minimalist style of research. Visiting a future Chronicle was forbidden, and only theoretically possible, but under the circumstances—

“Any luck?” Dr. Li interrupted her train of thought.

Saki shook her head. “Someone was clearly in this part of the Chronicle before us, and the outline is human. Beyond that I don’t think we will get anything else from these damn drone recordings.”

“Shame you couldn’t get up there to get a closer look.” There was a mischievous sparkle in Li’s eyes when she said it, almost like it was a backwards-in-time dare, a challenge.

“Too risky,” Saki said. “And we might not have gotten more than what came off the drones. If it had been just me, I might have chanced it, but I’m responsible for the safety of my student—”

“I’m only teasing,” Li said softly. “Sorry. This is a hard expedition for all of us. The captain is pushing for answers and Annabelle is trying to convince anyone who will listen that we need a surface mission to look at the original artifacts.”

“Foolishness. We can’t even get a working probe down there, we couldn’t possibly send people. Maybe the next expedition into the Chronicle will bring us more answers.”

“I hope so.”

Dr. Li went back to supervising the work at the 3D printer. Like M.J., her research spanned both archronology and xenoarchaeology, and her team was doing most of the artifact reconstruction and analysis. They were in a difficult position—the captain wanted answers now about whether the artifacts were dangerous, but something so completely alien could take years of research to decipher, if they were even knowable at all.

• • • •

Someone chooses which part of our story is told. Sometimes it is you, and sometimes it is us. We repeat ourselves because we always focus on the same things, we structure our narratives in the same ways. You are no different. Some things change, but others always stay the same. Eventually our voices will blend together to create something beautiful and new. We learned anticipation before we met you, and you know it too, though you do not feel it for us.

When Saki returned to her family quarters, she messaged Kenzou. He did not respond. Off with Hyun-sik, probably. Saki ordered scotch (neat) from the replicator, and savored the burn down her throat as she sipped it. This particular scotch was one of M.J.’s creations, heavy on smoke but light on peat, with just the tiniest bit of sweetness at the end.

She played one of M.J.’s old vid letters on her tablet. He rambled cheerfully about his day, the artifacts he’d dug up at the site of the abandoned alien ruins, his plan to someday visit that part of the Chronicle with Saki so that they could see the aliens at the height of their civilization. He was trying to solve the mystery of why the aliens had left the planet—there was no trace of them, not a single scrap of organic remains. They’d had long back and forth discussions on whether the aliens were simply so biologically foreign that the remains were unrecognizable. Perhaps the city itself was the alien, or their bodies were ephemeral, or the artifacts somehow stored their remains. So many slowtime conversations, in vid letters back and forth from Earth. Then a backlog of vids that M.J. had sent while she was in stasis for the interstellar trip.

This vid was from several months before she woke, one of the last before M.J. started showing signs of the plague that wiped out the colony. Saki barely listened to the words. She lost herself in M.J.’s deep brown eyes and let the soothing sound of his voice wash over her.

“Octavia’s parakeet up and died last night,” M.J. said.

His words brought Saki back to the present. The parakeet reminded Saki of something from another letter, or had it been one of M.J.’s lecture transcripts? He’d said something about crops failing, first outside of the domes and later even in the greenhouses. Plants, animals, humans—everything in the colony had died. Everyone on the ship assumed that the crops and animals had died because the people of the colony had gotten too sick to tend them, but what if the plague had taken out everything?

She had to find out.

Most of M.J.’s letters she had watched many times, but there was one she’d seen only once because she couldn’t bear to relive the pain of it. The last letter. She called it up on her tablet, then drank the rest of her scotch before hitting play. M.J.’s hair was shaved to a short black stubble and his face was sallow and sunken. He was in the control room of the colony’s temporal projector, working on his research right up until the end.

“They can’t isolate a virus. Our immune systems seem to be attacking something, but we have no idea what, or why, and our bodies are breaking down. How can we stop something if we can’t figure out what it is?”

“I will hold on as long as I can, my lifelove, but the plague is accelerating. Don’t come to the surface, use the Chronicle. Whatever this is, it has to be alien.”

She closed her eyes and listened to him describe the fall of the colony. If she closed her eyes and ignored the content of the words, if she forced herself not to hear the frailness in his voice, if she pushed away all the realities she could not accept—it was like he was still down there, a quick shuttle hop away, waiting for her to join him.

“The transmission systems have started to go. This alien world is harsh, and without our entire colony fighting to make it hospitable, everything is failing, all our efforts falling apart. Entropy will turn us all to dust. This will probably be my last letter, but perhaps when you arrive you will see me in the Chronicle.”

“Keep fighting. Live for both of us. I love you.”

“You home, Mom?” Kenzou called out as he came in. “I’m going out with Hyun-sik tonight, but . . . are you crying? What happened?”

Saki rubbed away the tears and gestured down at the tablet. “Vids. The old letters.”

Kenzou hugged her. “I miss him, too, but you shouldn’t watch those. You need to hold yourself together until the expeditions are done.”

“I’m not going to pretend he doesn’t exist.”

She went to the replicator and ordered another scotch.

Kenzou picked up the dishes she’d left on the counter, clearing away her clutter probably without even realizing he was doing it. He was so like his father in some ways, and now he wanted to act as though nothing had happened.

The silence between them stretched long. He punched some commands into the replicator but nothing happened.

“He was your father,” Saki said softly.

“And you think this doesn’t hurt?” Kenzou snapped. He smacked the side of the replicator and it beeped and let out a hiss of steam. His fingers danced across the keypad again, hitting each button far harder than necessary. The replicator produced a cup of green tea, and his brief moment of anger passed. “I’m trying to move on. Dad would have wanted that.”

The outburst made her want to hold him like she had when he was young. She’d buried herself in her work these last few months, and he had found his comfort elsewhere. He’d finished growing up sometime when she wasn’t looking.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Go, spend time with your boyfriend.”

He softened. “You shouldn’t drink alone, Mom.”

“And you shouldn’t secretly date my students,” she scolded gently. “It’s very awkward when the whole lab knows who my son is dating before I do!”

He sipped his tea. “There aren’t that many people on station, word has a way of getting around.”

After a short pause he added, “You could ask Dr. Li to have a drink with you, if you insist on drinking.”

“I don’t think she would . . .” Saki shook her head.

“And that’s why your entire lab knows these things before you do.” He finished his tea, then washed the cup and put it away. “You don’t notice what is right in front of you.”

“I’m not ready to move on.” She looked down at the menu on her tablet, the list of recently viewed vids a line of tiny icons of M.J.’s face. He was supposed to be here, waiting for her. They were supposed to have such a wonderful life.

“I know.” He hugged her. “But I think you can get there.”

• • • •

Layers of information diminish as they recede from the original source. In archaeology, you remove the artifacts from their context, change a physical record into descriptions and photographs. You choose what gets recorded, often unaware of what you do not think to keep. Your impressions—logged in books or electronically on tablets or in whatever medium is currently in fashion—are themselves a physical record that future researchers might find, when you are dead and gone.

Saki was with Li in the Chronicle, four weeks after the collapse.

The third floor of the hospital was empty. Not just devoid of people—this was a part of the Chronicle that came after everyone had died, so that wasn’t surprising. The place was half cleaned out. Foam mattresses on metal frames, but someone or something had taken the sheets. Nothing in the planters, not even dry dead plants. This wasn’t long after the collapse, and the pieces simply did not fit.

“Why would anyone bother taking things from the hospital while everyone was dying?” Li messaged. “And why are there no bodies? There was no one left at the end to take care of the remains.”

The crops had failed, the parrot had died, the hospital was empty. Saki knew there had to be a connection, but what was it? She scanned the area for clues. In a patch of bright sunlight near one of the windows, she saw the faint outline of a distortion, another visitor to the Chronicle. The window was at the edge of the containment area, but probably within reach.

“Someone else was here,” Saki typed, “by that window.”

“I think you’re right. Closer look?” Li fished out the rope from her pack. “I’m not a graduate student, so you’re not responsible for my wellbeing.”

Saki caught herself before explaining that as lead researcher she was still responsible for the welfare of everyone on the team. Li was partly teasing, but it held some truth, too. If Li was willing to risk it, they could investigate.

“Can I be the one to go?” Saki asked.

“You think it might be M.J.” Li did not phrase it as a question.

“Yes.”

Li fastened the rope securely around her waist and handed Saki the other end. They checked each other’s knots, then checked them again. If they came untied, it would be difficult or maybe impossible to get back to their marks. They spun themselves around and pressed their palms and feet together. “Gently. We can try again if you don’t get far enough.”

Li’s hands were smaller than her own, and warm.

“Ready?”

Saki felt the tiny movements of Li’s fingers as she typed the word. She nodded. “Three, two, one.”

They pushed off of each other, propelling Saki towards the window and Li in the opposite direction, leaving a wide white scar across the Chronicle between them. Saki managed to contort her body around so that she could see where she was going as she drifted towards the window. The human form that stood there was not facing the hospital, and she couldn’t see their face. She reached the end of the rope a meter short of the window.

“Is it M.J.?” Li messaged from across the room.

“I don’t know,” Saki replied.

The white figure by the window was about the right height to be M.J., about the right shape. But the colony was huge, and even narrowed down to just the archronologists, it could have been any number of people. Saki twisted around to gain a few more centimeters, but she couldn’t see well enough to know one way or the other. If she untied the rope and used the micro-jets on her suit—but no, that would leave Li stranded.

“Whoever it is, they were looking out the window.” Saki tore her gaze away from the figure that might or might not be her lifelove. She’d seen the New Mars campus many times, even this part of campus, because the hospital was across the quad from the archronology building. M.J. had sometimes recorded his vid letters there, on the yellow-tinged grass that grew beneath the terrafruit trees.

Outside the window, there were no trees. There was no grass. Not even dry brown grass and dead leafless trees. It was bare ground. Nothing but a layer of red New Martian dust.

“All of it is gone,” Saki typed. “Every living thing was destroyed.”

No one had noticed it in the warehouse because they’d had no reason to expect any living things to be there.

She and Li pulled themselves back to the center of the room, climbing their rope hand over hand until they were back at their marks. They adjusted the programming of their bees in hopes that they could get a clear image of the other visitor to the record, and set them swarming around the room.

“It’s more than that,” Li messaged as the bees catalogued the room. “That’s why this room is so odd. Everything organic is gone. Whatever is left is all metal or plastic.”

It was obvious as soon as she said it, but something still didn’t fit. “The alien artifacts, back in the warehouse—those were made from organic materials. Why weren’t they destroyed with everything else?”

• • • •

One of our beloveds believes that all important things are infinite. Numbers. Time. Love. They think that the infinite should never be seen. We erase vast sections of the Chronicle out of love, but this infuriates some of our other beloveds. To embrace so many different loves, scattered across the galaxy, is difficult to navigate. It is not possible to please everyone.

Saki stood back to back with Hyun-sik. Their surroundings shifted from gray to orange-red. The two of them were floating beneath the open sky in a carefully excavated pit. The dig site was laid out in a grid, black cords stretched between stakes, claylike soil removed layer by layer and carefully analyzed. Fine red dust swirled in an eerily silent wind and gathered in the corners of the pit.

Hyun-sik swayed on his feet.

“The Chronicle is an image, being here is no different from being in an enclosed warehouse,” Saki reminded him. He looked ill, and if he threw up in the Chronicle it might obscure important data. Even if it didn’t, it would definitely be unpleasant.

“I’ve never been outside. It is big and open and being weightless here feels wrong.” Hyun-sik messaged. He took a deep breath. “And the dust is moving.”

“Human consciousness is tied to the passage of time. In an abandoned indoor environment like the warehouse, there are long stretches of time where nothing moves or changes. It feels like a single moment in time. But we are viewing moving sections of the record, which is why we try to spend as little time here as we can,” Saki answered.

“Sorry.” He still looked a little green, but he managed not to vomit. Saki turned her attention back to their surroundings. There were no visible distortions here, no intrusions into the time record. M.J. hadn’t visited the Chronicle of this time and place.

At Li’s insistence, the team had done a three-day drone sweep of the entire colony starting at the moment of the last known transmission. Wiping out so much of the Chronicle felt incredibly wasteful, especially for such an important historic moment. If some future research team came to study the planet, all they’d find of those final days was a sea of white, the destruction inherent in collecting the data. Though if Saki was honest, the thing that bothered her most was that she couldn’t be there for M.J.’s final moments. They had burrowed into the Chronicle deeper than his death, deeper than his final acts, leaving broad swaths of destruction in their wake.

He was gone, why should it matter what happened to the Chronicle of his life? But it felt like deleting his letters, or erasing him from the list of contacts on her tablet.

She tried to focus on the present. This site was a few weeks before the final transmission. They were here to gather information about the alien artifacts in situ. Perhaps they could notice something that M.J. and his team had missed.

In the distance, the nearest colony dome glimmered in the sun, sitting on the surface like a soap bubble. There were people living inside the dome—M.J. was there, working or sleeping or recording a vid letter that she would not read until months later. So many people, and all of them would soon be dead. Were already dead, outside the Chronicle. Colonies were so fragile, like the bubbles they resembled. The domes themselves were reasonably sturdy, but the life inside . . . New Mars was not the first failed colony, and it would not be the last.

The sun was bright but not hot. Expeditions into the Chronicle were an odd limbo, real but not real, like watching a vid from the inside.

“That one looks unfinished,” Hyun-sik messaged, pointing to a partially exposed artifact. It was an iridescent blue, like the bases of the artifacts in the warehouse, but the upper surface of the artifact did not have the smoothly curved edges that were universal to everything they’d seen so far.

“They changed so quickly,” Saki mused. She’d read M.J.’s descriptions of the artifacts, and looked at the images of them, but there was something more powerful about seeing one full scale here in the Chronicle. “And right as the colony collapsed. The two things must be related.”

She shuddered, remembering the drone vids of the final collapse. After weeks of slow progression, everything in the colony started dying. She’d forced herself to watch a clip from the hospital—dozens of colonists filling the beds, tended by medics who eventually collapsed wherever they were standing. Everyone dead within minutes of each other, and then—Saki squeezed her eyes shut tight as though it would ward off the memory—the bodies disintegrated. Flesh, bone, blood, clothes, everything organic broke down into a fine dust that swirled in the breeze of the ventilation systems.

She opened her eyes to the swirling red dust of the excavation site, suddenly feeling every bit as ill as Hyun-sik looked. Such a terrible way to die and there was nothing left. No bodies to cremate, no bones to bury. It was as if the entire colony had never existed, and M.J. had died down here and that entire moment was nothing but a sea of drone-distortion white.

“Are you okay, Dr. Jones?” Hyun-sik messaged.

“Sorry,” she answered. “Did you watch the drone-vids from the collapse?”

He nodded, and his face went pale. “Only a little. Worse than the most terrible nightmare, and yet real.”

Saki focused all her attention on the artifact half-buried in the red dirt, forcing everything else out of her mind. She searched the blue for any trace of other colors, but there was nothing else there. “I don’t know how the artifacts changed so quickly, or why. Maybe Dr. Li can figure it out from the recordings.”

“Release the drones?” Hyun-sik asked.

“Wait.” Saki pointed toward the colony dome, her arm wiping away a small section of the Chronicle as she moved. “Look.”

Clouds of red dust rose up from the ground, far away and hard to see.

“Dust storm?” Hyun-sik turned his head slightly, trying to disturb the record as little as possible.

“Jeeps.” Saki stared at the approaching clouds of dust, rising from vehicles too distant to see. M.J. might be in one of them, making the trek over rough terrain to get to the dig site. Saki tried to remember how far the dig site was from the dome—forty kilometers? Maybe fifty? The dig site was on a small hill, and Saki couldn’t quite remember the math for calculating distance to the horizon. It was estimates stacked on estimates, and although she desperately wanted to see M.J., her conclusion was the same no matter how she ran the calculation—they couldn’t wait for the slow-moving jeeps to arrive.

“Do you see anything else that merits a closer look?” Saki typed.

Hyun-sik stared at the approaching jeeps. “If we had come a couple hours later, there would have been people here.”

“Yes.”

It wasn’t M.J., Saki reminded herself, only an echo. Her lifelove wasn’t really here. Saki had Hyun-sik release the drones and soon they were surrounded by white, much as the jeeps were enveloped in a cloud of red.

The drones finished, and the jeeps were still far in the distance. M.J. always did drive damnably slow. Saki waved goodbye to jeeps that couldn’t see her. When they blinked back into the projection room, she was visibly shaken. Hyun-sik politely invited her to join him and Kenzou for dinner, but that would be awkward at best and she didn’t have the energy to make conversation. Saki kept it together long enough to get back to her quarters.

Safely behind closed doors, she called up the vid letter that M.J. had sent around the time she’d just visited. He was supposed to wait for her, only a few more months. She’d been so close. The vid played in the background while she cried.

• • • •

We had a physical form, once. Wings and scales and oh so many legs, everything in iridescent blue. Each time we encounter a new love, it becomes a part of who we are. No, we do not blend our loves into one single entity—the core of us would be lost against such vastness. We always remain half ourselves, a collective of individuals, a society of linked minds. How could we exclude you from such a union?

The captain sent probes to the surface that were entirely inorganic—no synthetic rubber seals or carbon-based fuels—and this time the probes did not fail. They found nanites in the dust. Visits to the Chronicle were downgraded in priority as other teams worked to neutralize the alien technology. Saki tried to stay focused on her research, but without the urgency and tight deadlines, she found herself drawn into the past. She watched letters from M.J. in a long chain, one vid after the next. The hard ones, the sad ones, everything she’d been avoiding so that she could be functional enough to do research.

The last vid-letter from M.J. was recorded not in his office but in the control room for the temporal projector. Saki had asked about it at the time, and he’d explained that he had one last trip to make, and the colony was running out of time. She’d watched it twice now, and M.J. looked so frail. But there was something Saki had to check. A hunch.

For the first half of the vid, M.J. sat near enough to the camera to fill nearly the entire field of view. He thought the plague was accelerating, becoming increasingly deadly. He talked about the people who had died and the people who were still dying, switching erratically between cold clinical assessment and tearful reminiscence. Saki cried right along with her lost love, harsh ugly tears that blurred her vision so badly that she nearly missed what she was looking for.

She paused and rewound. There, in the middle of the video, M.J. had gotten up to make an adjustment to the controls. The camera should have stayed with him, but for a brief moment it recorded the settings of the projector. The point in the record where M.J. was going.

Saki wrote down the coordinates of space and time. It was on New Mars, of course. It was also in the future. She studied the other settings on the projector, noting the changes he’d made to accommodate projection in the wrong direction.

M.J. had visited a future Chronicle, and left her the clues she needed to follow him.

She set her com status to do not disturb, and marked the temporal projector as undergoing maintenance. There was no way she could make it through a vid recording without falling apart, so she wrote old-fashioned letters to Kenzou, to her graduate students, to Li—just in case something went wrong.

When she stepped out into the corridor, Hyun-sik and Kenzou were there.

She froze.

“I will work the controls for you, Dr. Jones,” Hyun-sik said. “It is safer than programming them on a delay.”

“How did you—?”

“You love him, you can’t let him go,” Kenzou said. “You’ve always been terrible at goodbyes. You want to see as much of his time on the colonies as possible, and there’s no way to get approval for most of it.”

“Also, marking the temporal projector as ‘scheduled maintenance’ when our temporal engineer is in the middle of their sleep cycle won’t fool anyone who is actually paying attention to the schedule,” Hyun-sik added.

“Thinking of making an unauthorized trip yourself?” Saki asked, raising an eyebrow at her student.

“Come on,” Hyun-sik didn’t answer her question. “It won’t be long before someone else notices.”

They went to the control room, and Saki adjusted the settings and wiring to match what she’d seen in M.J.’s vid. The two young men sat together and watched her work, Kenzou resting his head on Hyun-sik’s shoulder.

When she’d finished, Hyun-sik came to examine the controls. “That is twenty years from now.”

“Yes.”

“No one has visited a future Chronicle before. It is forbidden by the IRB and the theory is completely untested.”

“It worked for M.J.,” Saki said softly. She didn’t have absolute proof that those distortion clouds in the Chronicle had been him, but who else could it be? No other humans had been here since the collapse, and whoever it was had selected expedition sites that she was likely to visit. M.J. was showing her that he had successfully visited the future. He wanted her to meet him at those last coordinates.

“Of course it did,” Kenzou said, chuckling. “He was so damn brilliant.”

Saki wanted to laugh with him, but all she managed was a pained smile. “And so are you. You’ll get into trouble for this. It could damage your careers.”

“If we weren’t here, would you bother to come back?”

Saki blushed, thinking of the letters she’d left in her quarters, just in case. M.J. had gone to some recorded moment of future. Maybe he had stayed there. This was a way to be with him, outside of time and space. If she came back, she would have to face the consequences of making an unauthorized trip. It was not so farfetched to think that she might stay in the Chronicle.

“Now you have a reason to return.” Hyun-sik said. “Otherwise Kenzou and I will have to face whatever consequences come of this trip alone.”

Saki sighed. They knew her too well. She couldn’t stay in the Chronicle and throw them to the fates. “I promise to return.”

• • • •

This is a love story, but it does not end with happily ever after. It doesn’t end at all. Your stories are always so rigidly shaped—beginning, middle, end. There are strands of love in your narratives, all neat and tidy in the chaos of reality. Our love is scattered across time and space, without order, without endings.

Visiting the Chronicle in the past was like watching a series of moments in time, but the future held uncertainty. Saki split into a million selves, all separate but tied together by a fragile strand of consciousness, anchored to a single moment but fanning out into possibilities.

She was at the site of the xenoarchaeology warehouse, mostly.

Smaller infinities of herself remained in the control room due to projector malfunction or a last minute change of heart. In other realities, the warehouse had been relocated, or destroyed, or rebuilt into alien architectures her mind couldn’t fully grasp. She was casting a net of white into the future, disturbing the fabric of the Chronicle before it was even laid down.

Saki focused on the largest set of her infinities, the fraction of herself on New Mars, inside the warehouse and surrounded by alien artifacts. The most probable futures, the ones with the least variation.

M.J. was there, surrounded by a bubble of white where he had disrupted the Chronicle.

Saki focused her attention further, to a single future where they had calibrated their coms through trial and error or intuition or perhaps purely by chance. There was no sound in the Chronicle, but they could communicate.

“Hello, my lifelove.” M.J. messaged.

“I can’t believe it’s really you.” Saki answered. “I missed you so much.”

“Me too. I worried that I’d never see you again.” He gestured to the artifacts. “Did you solve it?”

She nodded. “Nanites. The bases of the artifacts generate nanites, and clouds of them mix with the dust. They consumed everything organic to build the tops of the artifacts.”

“Yes. Everything was buried at first, and the nanites were accustomed to a different kind of organic matter.” M.J. typed. “But they adapted, and they multiplied.”

Saki shuddered. “Why would they make something so terrible?”

“Ah. Like me, you only got part of it.” He gestured at the artifacts that surrounded them. “The iridescent blue on the bottom are the aliens, or a physical shell of them, anyway. The nanites are the way they make connections, transforming other species they encounter into something they themselves can understand.”

“Why didn’t you explain this in your reports?”

“The pieces were there, but I didn’t put it all together until I got to the futures.” He gestured at the warehouse around them with one arm, careful to stay within his already distorted bubble of white.

In this future, she and M.J. were alone, but in many of the others the warehouse was crowded with people. Saki recognized passengers and crew from the ship. They walked among the artifacts with an almost religious air, most of them pausing near one particular artifact, reaching out to touch it.

She sifted through the other futures and found the common threads. The worship of the artifacts, the people of the station living down on the colony, untouched by the nanites. “I don’t understand what happened.”

“Once the aliens realized what they were doing to us, they stopped. They had absorbed our crops, our trees, our pets. Each species into its own artifact.” He turned to face the closest artifact, the one that she’d seen so many people focus their attentions on in parallel futures. “This one holds all the human colonists.”

“They are visiting their loved ones, worshipping their ancestors.”

“Yes.”

“I will come here to visit you.” Saki could see it in the futures. “I was so angry when Li sent drones to record the final moments of the colony. I should have been there to look for you, but that’s a biased reason, too wrong to even mention in a departmental meeting. I couldn’t find you in the drone vids, but there was so much data. Everyone and everything dead, and then systematically taken apart by the nanites. Everyone.”

“It is what taught the aliens to let the rest of humankind go.”

“They didn’t learn! They took all the organics from the probes we sent.”

“New tech, right? Synthetic organics that weren’t in use on the colonies, that the nanites didn’t recognize. You can see the futures, Saki. The colony is absorbed into the artifacts, but at least we save everyone else.”

“We? You can’t go back there. I don’t want to visit an alien shrine of you, I want to stay. I want us to stay.” Saki flailed her arms helplessly, then stared down at her wristband. “I promised Kenzou that I would go back.”

“You have a future to create.” M.J. answered. “Tell Kenzou that I love him. His futures are beautiful.”

“I could save you somehow. Save everyone.” Saki studied the artifacts. “Or I could stay. It doesn’t matter how long I’m here, in the projection room we only flicker for an instant—”

“I came here to wait for you.” M.J. smiled sadly. “Now we’ve had our moment, and I should return to my own time. Go first, my lifelove, so that you don’t have to watch me leave. Live for both of us.”

It was foolish, futile, but Saki reached out to M.J., blurring the Chronicle to white between them. He mirrored her movement, bringing his fingertips to hers. For a moment she thought that they would touch, but coming from such different times, using different projectors—they weren’t quite in sync. His fingertips blurred to white.

She pulled her hand back to her chest, holding it to her heart. She couldn’t bring herself to type goodbye. Instead she did her best to smile through her tears. “I’ll keep studying the alien civilization, like we dreamed.”

He returned her smile, and his eyes were as wet with tears as her own. Before she lost the will to do it, she slapped the button on her wristband. Only then, as she was leaving, did he send his last message, “Goodbye, my lifelove.”

All her selves in all the infinite possible futures collapsed into a single Saki, and she was back in the projection room, tears streaming down her face.

• • • •

We know you better now. We love you enough to leave you alone.

Saki pulled off her gloves and touched the cool surface of the alien artifact. M.J. was part of this object. All the colonists were. Those first colonists who had lost their lives to make the aliens understand that humankind didn’t want to be forcibly absorbed. Was M.J.’s consciousness still there, a part of something bigger? Saki liked to think so.

With her palm pressed against the artifact, she closed her eyes and focused. They were learning to communicate, slowly over time. It was telling her a story. One side of the story, and the other side was hers.

She knew that she was biased, that her version of reality would be hopelessly flawed and imperfect. That she would not even realize all the things she would not think to write, but she recorded both sides of the story as best she could.

This is a love story, the last of a series of moments when we meet.

©2019 by Caroline M. Yoachim. | Art © 2019 by Reiko Murakami.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

To Market, To Market: The Branding of Billy Bailey

Cory Doctorow | 4235 words

Billy and Principal Andrew Alty went all the way back to kindergarten, when Billy had convinced Mitchell McCoy that the green fingerpaint was Shamrock Shake, and watched with glee as the little babyface had scarfed it all down. Billy knew that Andrew Alty knew his style: refined, controlled, and above all, personal. Billy never would’ve dropped a dozen M-80s down the girls’ toilet. His stuff was always one-on-one, and possessed of a degree of charm and subtlety.

But nevertheless, here was Billy, along with the sixth-grade bumper-crop of nasty-come-latelies, called on the carpet in front of Andrew Alty’s massive desk. Andrew Alty was an athletic forty, a babyface true-and-through, and a charismatic thought-leader in his demographic.

Hormones. They were the problem.

Billy Bailey was the finest heel the sixth grade had ever seen—a true artisan who kept his brand pure and unsullied, picking and managing his strategic alliances with the utmost care and acumen. He’d dumped BanginBumpin Fireworks (a division of The Shanghai Novelty Company, Ltd.) in the fourth grade, fer chrissakes. Their ladyfingers were too small to bother with; their M-80s were so big that you’d have to be a lunatic to go near them.

But sixth grade was the Year of the Hormone at Pepsi Elementary. Boys who’d been babyfaces since kindergarten suddenly sprouted acne, pubic hair, and an uncontrollable urge to impress girls. Their weak brands were no match for the onslaught of osterones and -ogens that flooded their brains, and in short order they found themselves switching over to heel.

As a result, the sixth grade was experiencing a heel glut. Last year’s Little Lord Fauntleroys were now busy snapping bras, dropping textbooks, cracking grading computers, and blowing up the girls’ toilets.

Hormones. They made Billy want to puke.

Andrew Alty gave them his sternest stare, the one over the top of his half-rims that was guaranteed to reduce a fourth-grader to tears. The poseurs alongside of Billy shuffled their feet nervously and looked away. Billy struggled to control his anger, and to meet Andrew Alty’s stare with his tried-and-true antidote, a carefree, mischievous grin.

“Ten thousand dollars,” Andrew Alty said, for the third time. “What will your parents say, I wonder, when I tell them that it will cost ten thousand dollars to replumb the girls’ change-room? Boys, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when that happens. I imagine that it will go very hard for all of you.” He treated them all to another megawatt of stare.

“But I didn’t do it!” wailed Mitchell McCoy, who’d gotten a Blue Ribbon in the fifth-grade Science Fair for a consumer research report on relative inflammabilities of a range of allegedly fire-proof blue-jeans.

Billy shot him a look of disgust. But I didn’t do it! Suck.

Andrew Alty looked at him. “So you say. You may be telling the truth. No way to find out, though—not unless we bring the police in to fingerprint you all.” The emphasis he put on “police” and “fingerprint” was admirably subtle, Billy thought. He actually liked Andrew Alty, most of the time. The man had a good, strong brand, and he tended it most carefully. “Of course, once I involve the police, it will be out of my hands. It will be a criminal matter.” Again, just the lightest breath of emphasis on “criminal.” Billy had to hand it to him.

“It goes without saying that if any of you know how I could resolve this without involving the police, I’d be glad to hear about it. Why don’t you take a moment to think about it?”

The boys shuffled their feet. A few of them choked back sobs. Finally, Mitchell McCoy swung an accusing finger at Billy. “He did it! I saw him sneak in with the M-80s, and matches! He told me if I said anything, he’d beat me up again!”

Billy had seen it coming. Mitchell was almost certainly the culprit—every science-fair project he’d ever done had involved blowing something up or setting something on fire. And Mitchell had nursed a grudge for an entire year, ever since Billy had sent him into the mud during an autumn game of tackle-tag, and then sent him back again and again when he tried to rush Billy.

He stared coolly at Andrew Alty. Billy could practically see the wheels turn in his head. Mitchell McCoy’s parents were overbearing, with a hands-on approach to Mitchell McCoy’s academic career that often sent one or both to Pepsi Elementary on the pretence of helping out with a bake-sale or fun-faire. Fingering Mitchell McCoy for the Incident would surely call down their interminable wrath. Andrew Alty turned his gaze on Billy. “What do you say to this?”

“Consider the source,” is what Billy said—it was one of his catch-phrases this term, a tie-in with a kids-only newsfeed. Billy had brought it to Pepsi Elementary, and had spread it beyond the sixth grade into the fifth, with some penetration into the fourth. He liked the sound of it—it was subtly insulting and smart.

Unfortunately, Andrew Alty was considering the source—and the source’s high-octane-pain-in-the-ass parents. “That’s all you have to say, son?” he said, with deadly seriousness.

Until I speak to my agent, it is, Billy thought, and kept mum.

• • • •

Billy’s phone was ringing when he let himself into his parents’ place. Billy had paged his agent on the way home from school. He was suspended indefinitely, pending a parent-teacher meeting, but that wasn’t what bothered Billy. He was worried about his brand-identity, and that meant talking to Bennie Beasely, endorsement broker and personal agent extraordinaire. Bennie Beasely was chipper to a fault, and made sympathetic noises as Billy related the day’s events.

“Well!” he said, finally. “What a pickle!”

“What are you going to do about it, Bennie Beasely?”

“Well, it’s a really sticky sandwich, Billy Bailey. You could deny it all, call for a police investigation. But I can tell you right now, that’s going to mean unspun media coverage, and the sponsors aren’t going to like that. In the long run, involving the authorities is going to cost you, big.

“On the other hand, you could admit to everything. The sponsors still won’t like that—they like their heels sane and under control. But you’ve got a relationship with them, Billy. You’re loyal to them, and they’re loyal to you. We could probably hit BanginBumpin up for a post-facto fee, you know. That would salvage things somewhat.”

Billy had already figured all this out, even the part about going to the fireworks manufacturer for some money, but there was one thing bothering him. “Who pays the ten thou for the damages, Bennie Beasely?”

Bennie Beasely sighed. “I’m afraid you’d be on the hook for that. We’ll take it out of the trust. I know it’s a tough jellybean, but you’re going to have to chew it.”

Billy felt the anger bubble up his chest, and he carefully vented some of it. “No. Way. Never. I’m not going to pay a cent. If it takes a police investigation, fine, so be it. If that costs me down the road, I’ll suck it up. But I am not paying out ten grand to cover some half-wit stunt Mitchell McCoy pulled. It’ll dilute me. It’s not my style.” He let the anger give his voice a dangerous edge.

“Billy Bailey! Listen to me! I’m not saying this is a good solution—I’m saying it’s the better of two terrible ones. I’ve got another client who just went though a similar situation. He bit the bacon, swallowed his pie, and toughed it out. You can do that, too. I’m telling you this as your friend, son. If you call the cops, you’re through as a heel.”

Billy felt a lightbulb flash in his head. He pushed the anger all the way down. “I think I’d better talk it over with my parents,” he said, calmly.

“That’s my tunafish!” Bennie Beasely said. “You do that, and call me back, anytime. You’ve got my number.”

• • • •

Billy had three hours until his parents, Barbara and Buford Bailey, came home from the office. He spent it putting together a shareholder presentation. He got out some flip-chart paper and a six-pack of colour markers and carefully wrote:

Rebranding Strategy Notes

Problem: Surplus of amateur heels

Solution: Rebrand property—babyface

Critical Path:

1) Fire Bennie Beasely

2) Initiate police investigation

3) Buckle down on grades

3a) Seek babyface sponsors (other divisions?)

He surveyed it critically, added some colour underlines, then made himself a Skippy SuperChunk on Wonder with Welch’s. Then he fleshed out each point, listing pros and cons, using a separate sheet for each, tacking them to the cork-rail that ringed the family room. He finished up by writing out an agenda, just as Barbara and Buford Bailey came home.

• • • •

Buford Bailey was Billy’s VP Operations, so it fell to him to fire Bennie Beasely. Billy supervised him as he downloaded and filled out the Notice of Intent to Terminate, then faxed it off to Bennie Beasely.

Billy and Barbara Bailey went through his things, packing the slingshots and air rifles and gangsta posters into the FedEx boxes they’d arrived in. They piled up all the war comics and t-shirts with rude slogans and bagged them in Hefty Tie N Tosses. When they were finished, Billy’s room was a pristine expanse of empty Ikea Billy shelves, his wardrobe reduced to his church suit and a few pairs of Levi’s whose knees he hadn’t gotten around to ripping out yet.

They paged Principal Andrew Alty and gave formal notice of their desire to involve the police. Billy listened in on the extension, and was pleased to hear Andrew Alty groaning in frustration.

Billy did four hours of homework, vetted by Barbara and Buford Bailey: Math, Marketing and Society, Geography, and a special report for Consumer Science on the effects of various bottled waters when used in the preparation of Ramen Noodles. Buford dug out an old soft-sided nylon briefcase, and they packed the hardcopy in it, along with a selection of pens and a new, staid, black-and-silver PDA.

Billy and Barbara Bailey went to the Sears Galleria and bought a few outfits, and then he was ready to go back to school.

• • • •

Billy kept his head up as he left for school the next day, for Barbara and Buford Bailey’s benefit. But once he’d turned the corner at the end of the block, he slowed down, dropped his gaze to his loafers, and fretted.

Billy’s brand had been established early on, in the first month of kindergarten. He’d been the first in the category—he’d defined “heel” for his classmates. Sure, there’d been heels in the upper grades, but they had no interaction with his class.

Billy had been the heel. When others followed the trail he’d blazed, pitching spitwads or putting the boot in during a game of British Bulldog, their behaviour had been compared to Billy’s. More than half of the endorsement dollars that flowed into the sixth grade went straight into Billy’s trust account.

As well they should. If you were a sixth-grader looking for a risqué t-shirt, nine times out of ten it’d be a shirt that Billy had worn that week. If you went to see a violent movie, it’d be one that Billy had presented a book report on. If you wanted a PDA with a shotgun mic attachment for cross-playground spying, what better model than the one that Billy could often be seen holding up to his ear, grinning mischievously?

In the minds of the consumers of Pepsi Elementary, Billy owned the word “mischief.” The immutable wisdom of the ages said that nothing Billy could do would change that. It would be like trying to sell Evian Brake Fluid. A brand-killer.

In the searing light of his anger with Andrew Alty and Bennie Beasely and Mitchell McCoy, switching categories had seemed like a bold, sexy move. In the glum winter daylight, it seemed like suicide. What was he doing?

As he neared the playground, he saw the earlybirds, babyfaces all, gathered to play their gentle games in the brief calm before the shouting, shoving heels arrived. And he was gobsmacked by revelation.

Billy Bailey, heel, was synonymous with mischief. That would never change. But who wanted to be synonymous with mischief? The world was full of little bastards, getting into their petty troubles. Sponsors couldn’t care less about them and their weak, puny brands. At the same time, the few babyfaces remaining in the sixth grade were miserable specimens of the category—snivelling wimps, not child-genius virtuosos. The sponsors barely noticed them, so ineffectual were their brands.

Truth be told, sponsorship was lean in the sixth grade. They were nearly ready for Nintendo Middle School, where they’d be lowly seventh-graders, taking every cue from the wise and savvy eighth-graders, who trembled on the cusp of high school. In that tough marketplace, heels were jocks or gangstas, the stakes were raised, and real violence was a genuine possibility. The sixth-grade crop of heels was mostly doomed. Billy had gotten out while the getting was good.

Billy’s brand had been so strong because he was first in the category. Becoming a babyface, he’d be last in the category—he’d be playing catch-up with the snivelling wimps. He just couldn’t stomach the prospect.

But if Billy were to create a new category, he would be first to market in it—the automatic leader. And he could leverage the things that had made his brand important to begin with: his native charisma, his understanding of the importance of consistency and caution when managing a brand.

Billy would own a new word in the minds of the consumers at Pepsi Elementary.

That word would be:

Dissent.

And so Billy Bailey, heel, gave way to Billy “Bug” Bailey, dissenter.

• • • •

His first sponsor came on-board a week later.

The promised criminal investigation had fizzled quietly after a fingerprinting session and an intense series of meetings between Principal Andrew Alty and Mitchell McCoy’s overbearing parental units. And Billy “Bug” Bailey had attended five days of classes without a single logomark, a single brand, or a single label on his person.

He turned in his homework impeccably and on time, but he refused to incorporate any of the school’s approved sponsors into his personal curriculum. His assignments contained no registered trademarks. And they were signed Bug Bailey.

In the playground, Bug’s new brand met with a great deal of consumer resistance. Mitchell McCoy confronted him during a game of tackle-tag, dropping Billy as he charged for the home base at the swing-set.

“Got you!” he hissed through clenched teeth. He had a heavy-metal t-shirt on, with more umlauts than the entire Ring Cycle; a TimePuker watch on a studded bracelet; and Doc Marten’s ButtKicker 2000s, with the plated shin-guards. “You beetle!”

Bug wriggled from beneath him, stood and dusted himself off. “Beetle?” he said, wondering if it was a new insult he’d missed.

“Bug, beetle, what’s the difference? Either way, you’re something disgusting that I squish.”

Bug cocked an eyebrow. “The Doc Marten’s are a bad idea,” he said, off-hand. “Too much line-extension, they’ve weakened the brand. That’s what I told them when they offered me a pair.” Of course, no one had ever offered Mitchell McCoy anything—he always paid.

“Bug!” Mitchell McCoy shouted. He looked around to make sure that any heels in range heard him. “Bug!”

Bug kept his cool, confident that Mitchell McCoy couldn’t muster the support of any of the heels on the playground. And he was right. The others looked a little embarrassed and moved off. Panic flashed in Mitchell McCoy’s eyes.

He charged.

Bug stood perfectly still, let Mitchell McCoy jump on him, force him to the ground. Bug twisted to shield his groin and face, but Mitchell McCoy managed to open a cut over his left eyebrow before a teacher broke it up.

He spent the rest of the day in class, soaking up the blood with one of the janitor’s shop rags: He refused to wear the Band-Aids the school nurse had offered him. Mitchell McCoy’s parents descended on the principal’s office like kingfishers, and left with Mitchell McCoy on a two-week suspension.

When Bug left the schoolyard, a limo was waiting for him.

• • • •

“Billy, Jesus, you look like you’ve been in a war,” is what Ronnie Ryan, the rep from Polygram, said as Bug approached the limo. Ronnie Ryan had always been good for a half-dozen new CDs every week, gangsta rap and narco-mariachi dance stuff. But they had communicated through Bennie, mostly, never this flashy limousine service.

“Can I give you a ride?” Ronnie Ryan asked.

“Sure,” Bug said, and got in the limo.

Ronnie Ryan had an intense cell-phone conversation as they were pulling out, but once they’d hit the highway, he rang off and gave Billy a great big smile. Ronnie Ryan had always reminded Billy of a second-grade heel, more high-strung than mean, with his expensive brand-new casual clothes and his artfully mussed hair.

“I wanted to make a quick stop on the way, I hope you don’t mind,” Ronnie Ryan said. “I think you’ll be interested.”

Bug knew that Ronnie Ryan knew that Bug wasn’t a heel any longer. He was intrigued by whatever it was that Ronnie Ryan thought would tempt him, but cool enough not to show it. He took a Yoo-Hoo from the minibar and settled back for the ride.

They pulled up in front of a warehouse whose broken windows leered at him. From within, he heard wailing guitars and hoarse singing. Ronnie Ryan held the door open for him. “You’re going to love these guys,” he said.

• • • •

The band was called Honey-Roasted Landlords. Three B.Comm. grads—a guitar, a bass and a drum-kit. They wore faded track-pants and plain white t-shirts with off-brand tennis shoes. They weren’t bad.

“I thought you’d like them,” Ronnie Ryan said, after they’d finished rehearsing. “We’re releasing them on our bootleg label, photocopied inserts, home-toasted CDs. They’re testing very high in the eleven to sixteen market.”

Bug nodded sagely. “My rate has doubled,” he said, as off-handedly as he could manage.

Ronnie Ryan swallowed. Bug held his gaze. When you focus a brand down, you end up with a premium product. Rolex makes nothing but watches, and they cost the world; Matsushita makes everything from stereos to space stations, and they have to sell on price, incentives, and rebates. Bug knew which camp he was in.

Ronnie Ryan nodded, finally. The B.Comm. with the guitar watched the proceedings with undisguised interest. He snapped Billy a nod that was a salute, one artist to another.

“Let’s get you home, huh?” Ronnie Ryan said.

• • • •

Things were shaky, that first month, but by the end of it, he had a solid seven sponsors lined up, all at double his old rate. He wore “homemade” band-shirts; did Music Appreciation reports on “indie” singles he downloaded from “pirate” sites; wore street-vendor styles that had been mass-produced—sans label—by DKNY’s Chechen facility.

The kids on the playground spent the first week staring in shock; the second, shaking their heads in pity; the third, covertly studying him; and by the fourth, it seemed like a couple were ready to follow his lead. The umlauts dwindled, the hand-drawn t-shirts multiplied. Bug’s sponsors were delighted.

Bug knew that it wasn’t enough, though. He needed to promote more than himself; he needed to promote the category, to bring some of the stronger heel brands into the fold, to grow the field. Sure, it might decrease his market-share, but it would increase the overall size of the market.

He had to pick his competition.

• • • •

Mitchell McCoy came off his two-week suspension even more hostile to Bug. He spent the entire morning glaring at Bug while the teacher moused through a PepsiOne multimedia on the Civil War.

Bug made a note of his reaction. He liked to know where he stood. And more and more, it seemed that he stood somewhere very fine indeed. He tried to picture the class seen from overhead, and saw the homemade t-shirts clustered densely around his desk and then thinning in proportion to the distance from it. He could almost see his influence rippling outwards.

Mitchell McCoy sat in the opposite corner of the room, one more black speedmetal t-shirt inside a knot of the same. Bug cocked his head at him and pondered until the recess bell rang.

On the schoolyard, he deliberately distanced himself from the other dissenters, sitting in the shelter of an emergency exit, tapping a game of solitaire on his new PDA, which he’d decorated with “underground” stickers for “indie” cartoon shows. He peeked up occasionally and watched Mitchell McCoy make his way across the playground to him. He suppressed a grin. This had all started when Mitchell McCoy hadn’t had the sense to stay down in a game of tackle-tag, and Mitchell McCoy hadn’t learned a thing.

He pretended not to notice Mitchell McCoy’s approach, but peripherally watched the oxblood-coloured ButtKicker 2000s crunch towards him, kick his PDA into the sky.

“Nice shirt, Bug!”

Bug simulated a cringe. “Why can’t you just leave me alone, Mitchell McCoy?” he whined.

Mitchell McCoy grinned wolfishly. “Why can’t you weave me awone?” he said, in a baby-voice. “Because I don’t like you, Bug. You think you’re so great—”

“You’re just jealous because you don’t have any endorsement deals,” Bug said, with a calculated amount of petulance.

Mitchell McCoy purpled. “Oh yeah, and I suppose you’re just rolling in it these days, with crap like that shirt and those shoes and those nasty CDs you keep bringing in . . .” He trailed off, comprehension crawling with glacial sloth across his acne. “That’s it! You’ve got deals with these guys! Independent, my butt!”

“No I don’t,” Bug said, too quickly.

“Oh yes you do! Wait’ll I tell everyone! You’re a dead man, Bug.” Mitchell McCoy rubbed his hands and did a little ButtKicker 2000 dance.

“Don’t!” Bug said. “Please! I’ll do anything.” Bug consciously didn’t hold his breath, tried to play the part to its utmost. This was the moment of truth.

“What can you do?”

“Well, I could hook you up with my sponsors,” Bug said, forcing misery into his voice. “Then you’d be in on it, too.”

“What makes you think I’d want to endorse any of your low-rent sponsors, Bug?”

“How else are you going to pay for the girl’s toilet?” Bug wondered if he was showing too much premeditation, but Mitchell McCoy was hooked.

“How do I know they’ll want to sign me?” he asked, almost drooling.

“I’ll tell them. They’ll consider the source.”

“It’s a deal,” Mitchell McCoy said. “I’ll meet you at the back gate after school.” He walked away, pausing to crush Bug’s PDA underfoot.

• • • •

They met Ronnie Ryan in an alley a block from the school. Once they were in the limo, Bug dropped the pretence that he was scared of Mitchell McCoy. He and Ronnie Ryan tag-teamed Mitchell McCoy, giving him pointers on dress, speech, comportment, and behaviour. Mitchell McCoy’s eyes, already bugged out from the moment he’d seen the stretch limo, grew wider with every moment, and he nodded unconsciously as they tore apart his brand.

Finally, Ronnie Ryan passed him a neatly folded bundle: non-name sneakers, homemade CDs, track-pants, a t-shirt with Honey-Roasted Landlords written in Magic Marker. He dug out a Hefty Tie N Toss and shook it open. “Toss everything in,” he commanded. “The boots, the shirt, anything in your pockets. You’re not a heel anymore.”

Bug and Ronnie Ryan politely turned their heads while Mitchell McCoy changed. Ronnie Ryan had him sign a nondisclosure and a noncompete, then sent him packing.

“You’re sure about this?” he asked Bug once they were alone.

“I’m growing the category,” Bug said. “It’s the natural next-step.”

“But that kid—” Ronnie Ryan gave a dramatic shudder. “Ugh.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bug said. “I’ll make sure he does his part. He’s the perfect number-two brand—dumb and easy to figure out.”

“Take this, will you?” Ronnie Ryan said, holding out the Tie N Toss. “I can’t even bear to hold it.”

• • • •

Mitchell McCoy was a loser. Bug knew that. But he’d underestimated how much of a loser he was. When he dumped out the Tie N Toss in his bedroom that night, he nearly laughed out loud.

Mitchell McCoy’s pockets had been filled with BanginBumpin M-80s. Some people never learn.

Bug got a couple of Zip-Loc bags from the kitchen and put them on like gloves. He picked up the M-80s and carefully slipped them into his pocket.

He set the alarm for seven a.m., so that he could get to school nice and early. Early enough to drop the M-80s—covered in Mitchell McCoy’s fingerprints—down the newly rebuilt girls’ toilets.

As he nestled under the covers, he felt a tremor of doubt. He wasn’t a heel anymore, so wasn’t setting up Mitchell McCoy off-strategy?

He pondered it while sleep overtook him, and in the morning he knew the answer.

Billy “Bug” Bailey could act like a heel if he wanted to. He was a category-killer.

©2000 by Cordoc-Co LLC. Previously published in Interzone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger—the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of Walkaway, a novel for adults, a YA graphic novel called In Real Life, the nonfiction business book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, and young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema, and Little Brother and novels for adults like Rapture of the Nerds and Makers. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Gundark Island, or, Tars Tarkas Needs Your Help

Matthew Corradi | 7219 words

When Tommy Burke took me out to Gundark Island to see the alien, I wasn’t really expecting much. Maybe I was just going because I thought it would be cool to take a ride in Tommy’s canoe. Or maybe I was just hoping Tommy might turn out to be a friend. If there really was an alien there, too, then all the better.

After passing a hand-painted sign that said “Please Don’t Feed the Alien,” we came to a clearing in the middle of the island where I saw a lump in the ground. At first it looked like a small boulder, except that it had a grayish-purple tint to it. Upon closer inspection it vaguely appeared to have scales. Tommy walked around the lump and explained in an authoritative, tour-guide voice that the alien was actually like an iceberg, with most of the body underground and only a sensory crown poking above the surface. He said it was in hibernation at the moment, so he wouldn’t let me touch it, for fear of waking it up.

It really just looked like a painted rock. Tommy had charged me a dollar to come take a look, and ultimately I was kind of peeved that the alien was such a disappointment, but mostly peeved at being out a dollar. Tommy went on about the alien being reptilian in nature, and having tentacles that slithered half a mile underground to help regulate its body temperature. I didn’t actually pay much attention to what he was saying at that point because I didn’t really believe him.

But when we left the clearing and I looked back over my shoulder, I thought maybe I saw an eye in the middle of the mass.

And it was looking at me.

• • • •

That was the summer of 1983, and I was nine. My family had just moved to a small town in upstate New York, not far from the Canadian border. (I can’t really give you the exact name of the town, for fear of compromising certain alien endeavors—you’ll see why eventually). But we had a house near Lake Champlain (I’ll give you that much), and there was a private beach at the end of our street, complete with a dock and boat slips. We could go fishing or swimming or sailing anytime we wanted, there were creeks and cliffs and woods to explore. And there was Gundark Island, a small little bit of undeveloped state land about a half mile out from our beach. It was really an all-around great place for a kid to find adventure.

Naturally all those perks didn’t mean much if you didn’t have any friends to share them with. But it turned out that Tommy Burke not only became my first friend in the neighborhood, he also became my best friend. Tommy would always charge new kids a dollar to see the alien the first time, just as an initiation, but after that we were all part of the club. And once I was in, Tommy and I hit it off like long-lost brothers. In fact, over time we formed the core of the neighborhood gang, and while other kids would come and go, we were always the two constants.

There was never any doubt, however, that Tommy was the leader. Tommy had red hair and a smattering of freckles across his nose, and an infectious enthusiasm. He was also a year older than the rest of us, which gave him an instant credibility. And Tommy always knew the alien was real. The way he talked about it, you could tell he wasn’t just dropping a line, he truly believed. What made Tommy so special, though, was that he never talked down to us about that belief, and he never forced it on us.

I also learned quickly that Tommy liked to throw around strange alien words and ideas, and he said once the ability to believe was directly related to a person’s oro’nahtoo. When I asked him about oro’nahtoo, he merely claimed it was an old mystic concept from the Second Aldebaran Empire. (I’m guessing here at the spelling of oro’nahtoo, since he never actually wrote it down). But apparently you had to have oro’nahtoo in order to believe in aliens hibernating underground on remote islands in upstate New York. And Tommy was content to let people find their own oro’nahtoo, at their own pace and in their own way.

I suppose I was young enough then to accept such a bizarre explanation without question. It wasn’t until much later, of course, that I truly understood what he meant.

• • • •

One day, as Tommy and I paddled out to Gundark Island, I asked him what a Gundark was. He stared at me like I had just sprouted a third eye, then he said, “You know, from The Empire Strikes Back? When Luke is recovering in the rebel base on Hoth and Han Solo tells him he looks strong enough to pull the ears off a Gundark?”

I had to explain to him that I had never seen The Empire Strikes Back, at which point his head nearly imploded in disbelief.

Actually, I had only been to a small handful of movies in my life. It’s not that my parents didn’t want me to see movies, they just weren’t all that interested in them, and so never felt the need to take me. They were more into social events—live theater and dances and things like that.

So that summer, when it came out in re-release to the old theater downtown, Tommy grabbed the money he had saved up from showing off the alien on Gundark Island and took me to see Star Wars.

And that’s when everything changed.

• • • •

The next time I ventured out to Gundark Island with Tommy and the rest of the neighborhood gang, we saw right away the alien had grown. It was gigantic—at least ten feet high and twenty feet wide. It was pulsing, with foul, dank breath wheezing out of several mucus-covered air holes. And the eye was there, at the top of the dome, looking in a full circle around the clearing, just scanning and peering. And waiting. For us.

We all hid behind the trees, and Tommy was the first to gulp down his fear. “It’s morphed,” he said. “Hibernation period must be over. This is big trouble.” He pulled something out of his pocket. It was an Imperial blaster—storm trooper issue. He nudged me and said, “You’re the quickest. You’ve gotta get a sample of the mucus, that’s the best way to gauge if its tentacles are still rooted or not. I’ll cover you.”

I felt a sudden burst of courage—like I was Luke Skywalker, ready to take on the Empire himself. When the eye swept around to the other side of the clearing, I dashed up to the sinewy, muscle-lined trunk of the creature, trying to be as quiet as possible. But just as I dared to reach my hand into one of the slimy, rasping air holes, something grabbed my feet and yanked me into the air. Tommy yelled, “Look out, kid!” and I heard a staccato of blaster shots. Other voices shouted in panic. Suddenly there was a swarm of tentacles around me, all of them flailing and snapping, with more erupting out of the earth from the base of the alien.

The tentacle that held my leg swung me upside down in front of the alien’s great slavering mouth, and I figured my time was up. But then another shot from Tommy’s blaster hit the alien square in the eye, and I felt hands grabbing me and pulling me out of the tentacle’s grip. Somehow my friends carried me through the maze of groping limbs out to the edge of the clearing and then on through the forest. Tommy trailed after us in his best Han Solo imitation, firing the blaster at anything that slithered.

When we finally broke through to the shoreline by the canoe, we all collapsed on the rocks, and after catching my breath I said to no one in particular, “I don’t think the tentacles are rooted anymore.”

Then Tommy stumbled in behind us, gasping and panting. His face was full of dirt and sweat, and his shirt was torn. But he just grinned and said, “Holy crap, that was awesome! Let’s do it again tomorrow!”

To which we all agreed with enthusiastic hoots and howls.

• • • •

So we went back the next day, and the day after that, and as often as we could over the summer. Tommy was the one who said the alien reminded him of the Sarlacc in Return of the Jedi. That was the giant, tentacled mouth in the deserts of Tatooine that Jabba the Hut tried to throw Han and Luke into. We figured that was a pretty good comparison, so from that point on we always referred to the alien as “the Sarlacc.”

Tommy also said the Sarlacc was an advanced scout for a potential invasion from 61 Cygni. Since its tentacles weren’t rooted in the ground anymore that meant it was getting ready to leave the island—and it was up to us to stop it. The Sarlacc was too big to overcome with brute force, but Tommy figured the alien had a very permeable skin and an extremely high concentration of circulatory water on its underside—hence the need for insulating mucus. He also deduced that—just like a slug—the Sarlacc would be susceptible to extreme dehydration from salt.

So we armed ourselves with buckets of salt and tried to shovel it under the Sarlacc’s trunk, but the alien fought us off every time we approached. In the end, the best we could do was line the edge of the clearing on Gundark Island with the salt so the Sarlacc didn’t escape when the lake froze over. (Somehow my father couldn’t figure out why we kept going through so many bags of salt pellets for the water softener that month—and I didn’t offer any theories).

Eventually school came around again, though, and we couldn’t get out to the island as much. And when winter finally arrived, the best we could do then was sit at home and daydream about what evil the Sarlacc was plotting. Lake Champlain could be dangerous when it froze over, and our parents forbade us from venturing past the beach. So saving the planet would have to wait until spring.

It occurred to me then that I still wasn’t sure what a Gundark really was.

But it didn’t really matter.

I just knew it had to be cool.

• • • •

Whenever Tommy and I got together it was always at my house, or out in the neighborhood, or down by the lake. Tommy said he lived a few miles up the road, in a different housing development, but the odd thing was, we never actually went over to his house. In fact, I never met his parents, not even once. He said his mother worked a night shift at the VA hospital and had to sleep during the day, while his father was a traveling sales rep for a bread distribution company. Tommy’s parents had a rule that he couldn’t have friends over when his dad was out of town.

Of course, as a kid, it never really occurred to me to wonder why Tommy’s dad was always out of town.

That’s just the way it was.

One day after school in late December, however, Tommy came over to my house and showed me a beat-up paperback book. The cover art depicted several giant green men with tusks and four arms and long, deadly swords. That was tantalizing enough, but there was also a brawny man carrying a mostly naked woman down a set of ruined stairs in a ruined city, and that certainly looked interesting.

So on the day in early spring when Tommy and I finally got permission to use the canoe, we cheered and ran like madmen back down to the beach. The Sarlacc was holding Dejah Thoris captive and it was the duty of John Carter and Tars Tarkas to rescue the incomparable Princess of Helium. After battling our way through a patrolling horde of green warriors from Warhoon, we approached the center of the island. We both assumed the Sarlacc now would be twice as big as last year, with three extra mouths and maybe new poisoned darts it could shoot out of the ends of its tentacles.

We were shocked when we entered the clearing, however, and found that the Sarlacc was almost dead. The creature’s central mass lay slumped over on the ground, its tentacles were limp and shriveled, and the central eye stared off blankly into space. Tommy got up the courage to go poke it, but that did nothing. We decided it couldn’t be suffering from last year’s salt, because we had never gotten to its trunk, and the ring around the clearing had long since washed away.

After a while we sat down next to the Sarlacc, broke out the stash of Twinkies we had brought in our backpacks, and pondered this sudden mystery. Tommy surmised it might be a War of the Worlds scenario—the Sarlacc had contracted an Earthly disease, like chicken pox, or herpes, or scurvy, and maybe it had no natural defense against it. But then I noticed the Sarlacc’s great eye was staring straight at me, and I heard a rustle at my feet. I looked down to see one of the tentacles grab a twin pack of Twinkies from the backpack and slowly drag it to the Sarlacc’s limp mouth. The Sarlacc then started munching away noisily.

That’s when Tommy hit upon the answer—the Sarlacc was starving. It hadn’t eaten all winter. So Tommy and I gave it the rest of our Twinkies, and the eye of the Sarlacc seemed almost grateful.

The next day we brought the other neighborhood kids out to the island, and as we all stood in a circle around the Sarlacc we decided that even though it was a bloodthirsty invader bent on enslaving the world, we couldn’t just let it die. Of course, we certainly weren’t going to waste any more Twinkies on it, alien or not, so after much debate, we all pitched in, bought an entire case of whole frozen chickens at the local supermarket, paddled them out to the island and fed them to the alien. The Sarlacc gladly crunched them up, bones and all.

We did this on and off for several weeks while the Sarlacc recovered. (About that time, we also figured it was best to take down the sign that said “Please Don’t Feed the Alien.”) Tommy then deduced that the Sarlacc wasn’t really an advanced scout for an invasion force, it was actually an inter-dimensional guardian planted on Earth to protect mankind from other aliens, at least until mankind developed enough to protect itself.

From that point on, the Sarlacc was our ally, and a member of the group—which came in handy when we had to penetrate and destroy a Cylon basestar, or capture and re-program a T-101 cyborg Terminator unit from the future, or outsmart the superior intellect of Khan Noonien Singh.

Tommy, of course, was always the driving force behind our success and our fun. He was the brains of the outfit, while the Sarlacc was the brawn. With them, it didn’t really matter what the galaxy threw our way, be it a rogue Gorn or a full army of nine-foot Psychlos. We were the rulers of Gundark Island, and it seemed nothing could defeat us.

I like to think we all could have gone on having fun out on that island forever, lost in that great, perpetual summer of our youth. And maybe we would have, if not for the most horrific turn of events that I could possibly imagine at the time.

Tommy Burke moved away.

• • • •

It was less than two weeks from the time Tommy told me the news to the time he left. His dad got a promotion in the distribution company and took a supervisory job at the headquarters downstate in Albany. On his last day, we met down at the beach one more time so he could give me the key to the padlock on the old canoe. He said he had permission from his parents to leave it to me and the rest of the boys. It wasn’t really worth much, and apparently there weren’t any lakes near the neighborhood they were moving to.

Before we parted, Tommy tapped the side of his head near his temple and said, “Oro’nahtoo.” Then he walked away. I’ll always have that mental image of Tommy strolling down the beach, his red hair flashing in the setting sun as he turned and waved at me one last time.

I went out to Gundark Island with the guys after that on a few occasions, but it wasn’t quite the same. I thought maybe I could fill Tommy’s place in the group, but it was a harsh reality that I didn’t have quite the flair and imagination that Tommy did. None of us had it, really. No one complained, but our last trip to the island came well before the lake froze over for winter.

Tommy and I wrote a few letters back and forth over the next few months, but eventually I sent one that got no reply, and that was the last I heard from him.

• • • •

From that point on I usually went out to Gundark Island alone, and mostly to escape the real world. There was no sign of the Sarlacc anymore, only a small, plain boulder in the middle of the clearing where the alien used to be. I would often bring a book to read in the quiet solitude. So it was there that I learned that the First Galactic Empire was still alive, and discovered the identity of the Mule, and the true location of the Second Foundation. I eagerly joined the battle of House Atreides against House Harkonnen, then I did my patriotic duty and signed up with the Mobile Infantry to go fight the Bugs on Klendathu.

In the middle of summer in 1986, I went out to Gundark Island to read a book called Ender’s Game. I sat on a blanket in the clearing, my back to the big rock in the center. At some point I realized that I no longer felt like Luke Skywalker, ready to take on the Empire himself, but more like Ender Wiggin, alone in a world of games with difficult rules and implications beyond my skill to understand.

Then a voice in my head said: Is that a good story?

I jumped to my feet, caught off guard that I was not alone. But I didn’t see anyone nearby.

No, down here.

I looked down and saw that the small boulder had turned purple-ish grey, with subtle stripes on it.

Have you forgotten me already?

It dawned on me then that this must be the Sarlacc. But it was a new and different Sarlacc—smaller and more delicate. Its tentacles were thin and its body was covered in a soft, striped hair, almost like a purple tabby cat.

I asked hesitantly, “How come you never spoke before?”

You weren’t ready then. I think you are now.

The Sarlacc seemed to be speaking directly into my mind, perhaps some form of telepathy. I said out loud: “What are you?”

An alien, of course. From your perspective, at least.

“Well . . . What are you doing here?”

Just doing my job. I’m what you might call a “seeder.”

I sat down on my blanket to face the Sarlacc. “What does that mean? You’re seeding this world?”

I’m incubating a cache of eggs. My species is few in number, and incubation is a long, tedious process. We choose secluded places on secluded planets to maximize reproductive diversity. That way if one nest is compromised, there are still plenty more to carry on.

I piped in, “Sorta like, ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,’ right?”

The Sarlacc paused for a moment then said, Actually, my eggs are not in a basket. (And if a multi-tentacled alien could look confused, this one sure did).

“Yeah, well . . . never mind.”

Anyway, I’m only here until my shift is up. A replacement is scheduled to take over when I go off duty.

“When is that?”

In about a thousand years. Your Earth years, I mean.

“Huh . . . So does that mean you’re . . . well, like a girl alien? I mean a female?”

Of the five gender variants of my species, I most closely parallel the female of your species, in that I produce physical offspring. For now, at least.

That’s how the conversation went for the first hour, as I tried to understand what exactly I was talking to. It turned out the last humans the Sarlacc had spoken with belonged to a small patrol of British troops from the War of 1812. After that, it had only seen an occasional fisherman or state park ranger for many years. And that was why it decided to break its silence and speak to me.

It’s against regulations to interact with the natives. I receive occasional language updates and periodic protocol briefs from my superiors. But I still get bored. It’s nice to talk for a change.

And so we talked on into the afternoon, mostly about what I knew of local history since the War of 1812—which wasn’t all that much. But eventually the sun started setting and I had to leave.

The Sarlacc said, I still have many questions for you. Please come back soon.

I said that I would.

Because, really, how could I not?

• • • •

Maybe that wasn’t the proper way to handle an encounter with an alien life form. Maybe I should have gone to NASA, or the CIA, or the local zoo—or maybe the New York State Asylum for the Insane, where I could check myself in. But the way the Sarlacc talked to me, I knew it wasn’t a threat, to me or to the world. It wasn’t a xenomorph from LV-426 with acid for blood. It sounded like all it really wanted was a friend to talk to.

Over the next few years, I often visited with the Sarlacc. It always asked me to bring books, and at first I snuck out my parent’s copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica—one volume at a time. Then the Sarlacc asked for my algebra and chemistry textbooks, then Newton’s Principia and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (which brought it a few chuckles). Then it was more current scientific journals and magazines and publishing abstracts. The checkout clerk at the library must have thought I was the smartest kid in upstate New York.

One day as I was leaving Gundark Island the Sarlacc said—Bring that other book with you next time.

“What other book?” I asked.

The one you were reading when I first spoke to you.

“Ender’s Game? Why?”

I want to read it.

And so I brought it. It was always somewhat comical to see the Sarlacc holding a book with its tentacles, flipping pages occasionally, its eye flitting back and forth as it read. The Sarlacc seemed to note my amusement, but when it finished Ender’s Game it said, Huh . . . Kids running an interstellar war. Typical Altairian strategy, I suppose . . .

• • • •

My sophomore year of high school, the Sarlacc showed me how to build a crude power supply out of an array of car batteries and a bank of solar cells that I ordered out of an Edmund Scientific catalog. I hooked them up to a television with rabbit ears in a small shack so the Sarlacc could watch local TV and stay up on current news (although its favorite show was actually Star Trek: The Next Generation). That took most of my paper route money for the year, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t have many close friends in high school, so the Sarlacc filled that role for me. Whenever I finished a science fiction book, I would give it to the Sarlacc, who would also read it. We spent many long afternoons debating the HAL 9000’s level of sentience, or the best dragon-riding strategy for burning thread out of the skies over Pern, or who would win a duel between Roy Batty and R. Daneel Olivaw.

Several years passed like that, each discussion and each day blending right into the next, the way it does for young people who are still more concerned about how much time is behind them rather than how much time is left in front of them. When I wasn’t looking, I somehow graduated from high school, full of enough optimism and devoid of enough experience to think that anything was possible.

• • • •

I decided to attend Syracuse University—away from home, but not too far away. And there, for the first time since Tommy Burke left, I found other people like me. In the beginning, I was a Stranger in a Strange Land—in reverse. I was from Earth, and everyone else was a Martian who could speak this different literary language and grok the true meaning of science fiction. Discussions with these people weren’t like my discussions with the Sarlacc. They introduced me to the classic authors, and the Golden Age. Together we rode the New Wave and shared Dangerous Visions, and somewhere along the line I became Gully Foyle, jaunting from steampunk to cyberpunk to biopunk, from Transrealism to Post-Futurism. We jaunted deeper and deeper until eventually I found myself immersed in a counter-culture of dystopian realities and post-apocalyptic metaphysical revelations.

I tried to visit the Sarlacc when I went home, but I didn’t make it every time. Once I went out to Gundark Island and the Sarlacc mentioned the series finale of Star Trek. I told the Sarlacc I hadn’t seen it. Star Trek just didn’t seem quite as relevant as it had before—it was an old storytelling model. All the new stories I had read weren’t about stiff, traditional heroes, they were about anti-heroes, full of faults and inner demons. Anti-heroes had to be edgy, and they couldn’t be relevant if the majority liked them, they had to be oppressed, and they couldn’t be happy.

The Sarlacc merely said, Really? I didn’t know that.

On another visit I then explained to the Sarlacc that the colored races of Barsoom meant that Burroughs was a bigot at heart. Starship Troopers was an unrealistic utopian construct that Heinlein merely used as a vehicle for his own political views. And Ender Wiggin’s miraculous escape from xenocidal accountability really ranked him up there not just with Hitler, but with Houdini.

The Sarlacc said, I guess it is true, then—you can’t please all the people all the time. Not on this planet, at least.

And for a moment I doubted myself. But the Sarlacc didn’t ask about Star Trek again after that, and I stopped trying to explain things to it. What did it know, anyway, stuck for centuries out on an island in the middle of nowhere?

By the time I graduated from college, I was armed with a Voight-Kampff test for fiction. My mission was to judge what was real and what was artificial, to “retire” replicant ideas that were phony. And, really, why limit the test to fiction? People were walking, talking stories as well. We all had the false faces we showed to other people, and the real faces we hid underneath. What was real and what was fake? With my newly acquired analytical tools, I thought I could tell.

But just like Rick Deckard, I was afraid to try the test on myself.

• • • •

In college I had learned some rudimentary skills in 3D computer animation. So when I graduated, I found a job with a production company that designed visual aids for government grant proposals and research projects. I moved to Philadelphia, where I got married and had a son and got on with my life. I actually went several years without seeing the Sarlacc. But I wasn’t worried too much—it was still on a thousand-year shift and I knew it wasn’t going anywhere.

After taking that job in Philadelphia, though, I was no longer Rick Deckard, armed with the power of the Voight-Kampff test. I was too busy to worry about what was real and what was fake. All I knew was that my mortgage was real enough. And I hardly even read much anymore. The few movies I saw were Disney or cheap Disney knock-offs, and the television shows were Doodlebops and Dora the Explorer. Now I was lost in the Brave New World of dueling Halloween displays and 401k employer contribution percentages, somehow trying to prove I was better than the ninety-five other Bokanovsky brothers down the street.

When I did occasionally visit the Sarlacc in person, I mostly complained about the monotony of my job. I was really nothing more than an automaton, ruled by the Three Laws of Robotics:

A robot may not harm the company’s bottom line, or, through inaction, allow the bottom line to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders of upper management, except where such orders conflict with the First Law.

A robot must never refuse to work overtime, especially in support of the First and Second Laws.

The Sarlacc was not overly sympathetic. Your pessimism makes my heads hurt. All three of them.

“You have three heads?” I said in amazement. “Where are the other two?”

The Sarlacc ignored the question and cocked its great, single eye at me. When was the last time you watched Star Wars?

I shrugged. I couldn’t really remember. After a long silence the Sarlacc eventually said: You should go home. Kick back and relax. Watch Star Wars.

So I went home—to the deadlines, to the overtime, to the mortgage. But I didn’t watch Star Wars. I just didn’t have time. Besides, I’d seen it before.

• • • •

I did not visit the Sarlacc again for several years. And I probably would have gone many more years without visiting, if not for the terrible news I received on the phone early one morning—that my father had passed away. I returned home to help my mother set all his affairs in order, and take care of the funeral arrangements. It is a terrible irony that those who have to take care of funeral arrangements are those who are in the worst state of mind to do so. But somehow we managed.

Before I left again, I went out to Gundark Island in the little canoe. My father had kept it in the back yard, even though he never used it. But when I pulled up to the shore of the island, I knew something was different. And when I entered the clearing in the middle, there was no alien there with purple fur and tentacles, there wasn’t even a boulder with spotted moss. There was just a scattering of old bones, like a rib cage collapsed in on itself.

I sat there a while, thinking I could hear the echoes of Tommy Burke as he led a Fremen counter-attack against a full Sardaukar battalion, or the cheers of the neighborhood kids as we toppled an Imperial walker on the ice plains of Hoth. Or maybe I could still hear the Sarlacc’s often sarcastic yet always optimistic voice.

I missed them all.

• • • •

As I waited for my flight home out of Burlington, I wandered the airport bookstore. I thought maybe I would buy a book to read to take my mind off the loss of my father. But when did it change that it now cost half a week’s pay just for a paperback? Now it was easier and cheaper to buy books online, though all you got was a file on a computer. You couldn’t hold a file in your hands, or admire its dust jacket, or display it in the collection on your shelf.

In the end, I left the store without buying a book.

On the airplane, I considered watching a movie on my iPhone. But I didn’t do that either. It used to be the only place to see a movie was a theater. And once the movie was gone, the best you could do was imagine it, or dream about it. It would percolate in your mind that way, and eventually grow larger than life. But now you could watch a movie sitting at a bus stop, or sitting on the toilet.

Somehow the “awe” factor was diminished.

• • • •

Several months after my dad passed away, on a Saturday morning, I heard the doorbell ring. I opened the door and no one was there, but a small package sat on the welcome mat. When I opened it up I found an old hardback book entitled, A Princess of Mars. I thumbed through the book and could smell the age rising out of the pages. I checked the copyright—1917. And on the inside cover, written in old, faded ink, was the following message:

I checked outside again but the street was empty, and I didn’t hear a delivery truck at all. It was a mystery—or a very odd joke. But that night, while my wife graded homework papers and my son played Nintendo, I read that story again for the first time since I was a kid. And when I fell asleep later, I dreamed of a grand adventure on a dying world, full of chases across the desolate plains of Thark and battles in the smoking skies over Zodanga.

For a long time after that, I was John Carter, a pulp hero whose deeds were noble, and whose heart was pure—a pulp hero who could escape from any dungeon and conquer an entire world. That’s when I decided to quit my job. It took a long time to convince my wife that I wasn’t crazy, but we put our house up for sale and moved back to upstate New York. I bought a new house in the town where I grew up. It was still the beautiful, gentle haven that I remembered. It was the perfect place to shed the weight of the Big City and get back to basics—and the perfect place to raise my little boy. I started working graphic design projects over the internet from home while my wife found a job teaching first grade.

As soon as I could after settling into our new home, I borrowed the canoe from my mother and set out for Gundark Island. When I got there, though, I saw that nothing had changed. There were only the scattered bones, and the clearing was becoming overgrown. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, or why I felt disappointed. But I didn’t let it bother me. Instead I picked up a piece of bone and stuck it in my pocket. I went home and put my copy of A Princess of Mars on the fireplace mantle, where I could display it as the centerpiece among the rest of my book collection. And I put the fragment of bone in a small decorative box next to it.

Ultimately, it was not my destiny to conquer the world, but maybe I had, in fact, managed to escape my own personal dungeon.

Of course, I wasn’t really John Carter anymore. I was just myself.

But I was okay with that.

• • • •

It took us a while to unpack after the move, and in the process I ran across the old letters that Tommy Burke had written to me all those years ago. Somehow I had stashed them away in a folder and kept them safe. I read through them with a bit of nostalgia and decided to put them in the box on the mantle. But then something odd struck me. I took one of the letters and compared it to the message written on the inside cover of A Princess of Mars.

And the handwriting was the same.

So maybe Tommy Burke was still around after all, and maybe he was pulling strange pranks on me. But why didn’t he stop in and say hello? I could see him writing the message in the book, pretending to be Edgar Rice Burroughs, and initialing it with “E.R.B.” That was really the only explanation for why the writing in the book and the letters matched. Well, the only rational reason, at least.

The whole episode with the book and the letters stuck in my head for a while, and eventually I began to wonder about something else. I took the bone fragment out of the box. I had a sudden ridiculous fear of our border collie chewing on it and burying it in the back yard. My practical mind said it was an ordinary bone, maybe from a deer or elk. Or maybe it was a dinosaur bone, pushed up to the surface after a million years in geologic purgatory.

But then again, maybe it was the Sarlacc.

Eventually it bugged me enough that I called up one of my clients who worked in the genetics lab at Syracuse University. I had done a lot of good 3D modeling recently for their fundraising department. The client said he’d be willing to have someone in the processing lab run a DNA analysis on the fragment when things got slow. So I packed it up gently and shipped it off.

• • • •

One day not long after that, my son pulled A Princess of Mars off the mantle and asked if he could read it. When he finished that, he dove straight in to The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars. And he was hooked. Our border collie’s name was officially changed to Woola, and he was now a Barsoomian calot, with ten legs and razor sharp teeth and a heart of gold.

I realized then that you can’t go back. But you can pass it on.

This was in the middle of winter, and when the spring thaw came and Lake Champlain unfroze, I took my son with me to Gundark Island. Still there was no sign of the Sarlacc, only the old, scattered bones. But while my son was busy tracking a herd of banths along the island’s shoreline, Woola started sniffing around the bones in the clearing. And then he started digging. When I came over to take a look I saw a small, dimpled object poking out of the ground.

It was an egg.

And when I finished digging it out, I found that it was warm.

• • • •

My son and I carefully wrapped the egg in a blanket we had in the canoe, and then we set out for home. We were halfway across the lake when my cell phone rang. It turned out to be my client from the genetics lab. I hadn’t forgotten about the bone fragment, but I had done a good job of pushing it to the very back of my mind.

The client sounded excited: “Hey, I’m sorry, I would’ve asked the lab to run your samples sooner if I had realized what you had. The bone fragment tested out as belonging to Bos Taurus, which is the species designation for cattle. In other words, your animal was probably a run-of-the-mill cow. Beef livestock, I would guess.” The client went on to say that it was actually pretty common for animals to wander across lake ice in the winters, then get stuck there when the ice melted. Most likely this particular bovine got loose from a nearby pasture, blindly found its way out to Gundark Island, and eventually died there.

That wasn’t quite the news I had hoped for. In fact, I couldn’t really think of anything more mundane, though I feigned some superficial interest for my client’s sake.

“But get this,” the client added, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “The lab tech said there was a hair with the bone fragment. A red hair. He wasn’t sure if that was part of the test, so he ran an analysis on that, too, just in case. And here’s the kicker. It’s not an animal hair. But it isn’t a human hair, either.”

The waves on the lake seemed to slow for a moment, and I felt a chill. Then the client added, “Look, my guys say they don’t have a single match across any known species genome in the database, alive or extinct. It’s not even close. There’s all sorts of things wrong with the DNA—radial polymer structures, extra nucleobases, rogue coactivator proteins, it goes on and on. They’ve never seen anything like it at all. But they all want to know—where the hell did it come from? Mars?”

I smiled. Then I nearly laughed out loud.

A red hair—left unnoticed for years in Tommy Burke’s letters, maybe. Or in the book. And packaged up with the bone when I sent it off.

So there really was an alien on Gundark Island in those long lost summers of my youth. But it didn’t have tentacles, or acid saliva, or three heads. It had red hair and an infectious imagination. And it suddenly made sense—I had never met Tommy Burke’s parents, he never went to school, I never even saw his house. Because it was all a charade.

But what exactly was Tommy Burke doing? I somehow suspected that he was a “seeder” just like the Sarlacc—except he was seeding imaginations. And oro’nahtoo. And perhaps, in a way, he was seeding mankind’s future.

I told my client not to worry about the whole thing, that it was probably just a mistake, and I hung up as politely as possible. I wasn’t concerned that the secret would get out. Really, who would believe it? Nothing could really be traced back to Tommy. He was in no danger of being discovered.

As my son and I paddled back to shore, I thought of Tommy dashing across Gundark Island like Han Solo, firing his blaster behind him, that eager smile on his face. There was no way you could fake that smile. He wasn’t just punching his inter-galactic time card so he could pay the mortgage on his space-pad back on Rigel IV. And then there was the matter of the signature in the book. I had a sudden hunch that Tommy Burke had written more of that book than just the small note in the front cover.

So maybe Asimov and Heinlein and Bester were aliens, too. And George Lucas was really from Gleise 423.

And why not? It’s not such a ridiculous idea if you have oro’nahtoo.

Because, for the first time in a long time, I believed.

©2019 by Matthew Corradi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew Corradi lives in Prescott, Arizona where he works as the Chief Engineer for Arizona’s only locally-owned, independent TV station, KAZT. He is a very part time writer, having a small handful of short stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction over the years. Some day he might finish writing his novel, but in the meantime he is busy practicing time travel, as that is the only way to explain how his three kids were in diapers last week, and somehow in high school this week. His most precious yet least marketable skill is being able to identify any Original Series Star Trek episode on TV in less than two seconds.

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

The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin

Michael Swanwick | 4931 words

When I was a girl, my sister Susanna and I had to get up early whether we were rested or not. In winter particularly, our day often began before sunrise; and because our dormitory was in the south wing of the house, with narrow windows facing the central courtyard and thus facing north, the lurid, pinkish light sometimes was hours late in arriving and we would wash and dress while we were still uncertain whether we were awake or not. Groggy and only half coherent, we would tell each other our dreams.

One particular dream I narrated to Susanna several times before she demanded I stop. In it, I stood before the main doorway to our house staring up at the marble bas-relief of a she-wolf suckling two infant girls (though in waking life the babies similarly feeding had wee chubby penises my sister and I had often joked about), with a puzzled sense that something was fundamentally wrong. “You are anxious for me to come out of hiding,” a rasping whispery voice said in my ear. “Aren’t you, daughter?”

I turned and was not surprised to find the she-wolf standing behind me, her tremendous head on the same level as my own. She was far larger than any wolf from ancestral Earth. Her fur was greasy and reeked of sweat. Her breath stank of carrion. Her eyes said that she was perfectly capable of ripping open my chest and eating my heart without the slightest remorse. Yet, in the way of dreams, I was not afraid of her. She seemed to be as familiar as my own self.

“Is it time?” I said, hardly knowing what I was asking.

“No,” the mother-wolf said, fading.

And I awoke.

• • • •

Last night I returned to my old dormitory room and was astonished how small it was, how cramped and airless; it could never have held something so unruly and commodious as my childhood. Yet legions of memories rose up from its dust to batter against me like moths, so thickly that I was afraid to breathe lest they should fly into my throat and lungs to choke me. Foremost among them being the memory of when I first met the woman from Sainte Anne who was the last in a long line of tutors bought to educate my sister and me.

Something we had seen along the way had excited the two of us, so that we entered the lesson room in a rush, accompanied by shrieks of laughter; only to be brought up short by a stranger waiting there. She was long-legged, rangy, lean of face, dressed in the dowdy attire of a woman who had somehow managed to acquire a university education, and she carried a teacher’s baton. As we sat down at our desks, she studied us as a heron might some dubious species of bait fish, trying to decide if it were edible or not. Susanna recovered first. “What has happened to Miss Claire?” she asked.

In a voice dry and cool and unsympathetic, the stranger said, “She has been taken away by the secret police. For what offenses, I cannot say. I am her replacement. You will call me Tante Amélie.”

“‘Tante’ is a term of endearment,” I said impudently, “which you have done nothing to earn.”

“It is not yours to decide where your affection is to be directed. That is your father’s prerogative and in this instance the decision has already been made. What are your favorite subjects?”

“Molecular and genetic biology,” Susanna said promptly.

“Classical biology.” I did not admit that chiefly I enjoyed the wet lab, and that only because I enjoyed cutting things open, for I had learned at an early age to hold my cards close to my chest.

“Hmmph. We’ll begin with history. Where were you with your last instructor?”

“We were just about to cover the Uprising of Sainte Anne,” Susanna said daringly.

Again that look. “It is too soon to know what the truth of that was. When the government issues an official history, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, we might as well start over from the beginning. You.” She pointed at Susanna. “What is Veil’s Hypothesis?”

“Dr. Aubrey Veil posited that the abos—”

“Aborigines.”

Susanna stared in astonishment, then continued, “It is the idea that when the ships from Earth arrived on Sainte Anne, the aborigines killed everyone and assumed their appearance.”

“Do you think this happened? Say no.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“If it had, that would mean that we—everyone on Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix both—were abos. Aborigines, I mean. Yet we think as humans, act as humans, live as humans. What would be the point of so elaborate a masquerade if its perpetrators could never enjoy the fruits of their deceit? Particularly when the humans had proved to be inferior by allowing themselves to be exterminated. Anyway, mimicry in nature is all about external appearance. The first time an aborigine’s corpse was cut open in a morgue, the game would be over.”

Turning to me, Tante Amélie said, “Your turn. Defend the hypothesis.”

“The aborigines were not native to Sainte Anne. They came from the stars,” I began.

Susanna made a rude noise. Our new tutor raised her baton and she lowered her eyes in submission. “Defend your premise,” Tante Amélie said.

“They are completely absent from the fossil record.”

“Go on.”

“When they arrived in this star system, they had technology equal to or superior to our own which, due to some unrecorded disaster, they lost almost immediately. Otherwise they would have also been found here on Sainte Croix.” I was thinking furiously, making it all up as I went along. “They rapidly descended to a stone age level of existence. As intelligent beings, they would have seen what was going on and tried to save some aspect of their sciences. Electronics, metallurgy, chemistry—all disappeared. All they could save was their superior knowledge of genetics. When humans came along, they could not resist us physically. So they interbred with us, producing human offspring with latent aboriginal genes. They would have started with pioneers and outliers and then moved steadily inward into human society, spreading first through the lower classes and saving the rich and best-defended for last. Once begun, the process would proceed without conscious mediation. The aborigines would not awaken until their work was done.”

“Supporting evidence?”

“The policies of the government toward the poor suggest an awareness of this threat on their part.”

“I see that I have fallen into a den of subversives. No wonder your last tutor is no more. Well, what’s past is over now. Place your hands flat on your desks, palms down.” We obeyed and Tante Amélie rapped our knuckles with her baton, as all our tutors had done at the beginning of their reigns. “We will now consider the early forms of colonial government.”

• • • •

Tante Amélie was the daughter of a regional administrator in a rural district called Île d’Orléans. As a girl, she had climbed trees to plunder eggs from birds’ nests and trapped beetles within castles of mud. She also gigged frogs, fished from a rowboat, caught crabs with a scrap of meat and a length of string, plucked chickens, owned a shotgun, hunted waterfowl, ground her own telescope lenses, and swam naked in the backwater of a river so turbulent it claimed at least one life every year. This was as alien and enchanting as a fairy tale to my sister and me and of an evening we could sometimes coax her into reminiscing. Even now I can see her rocking steadily in the orange glow of an oil lamp, pausing every now and again to raise a sachet of dried herbs from her lap so the scents of lemon, vanilla, and tea leaves would help her memory. She had made it to adulthood and almost to safety before her father “inhaled his fortune,” as the saying went on our sister planet. But of the years between then and her fetching up with us, she would say nothing.

It may seem odd that my sister and I came to feel something very close to love for Tante Amélie. But what alternative did we have? We only rarely saw our father. Our mother had produced two girls and multiple stillbirths before being sent away and replaced with the woman we addressed only as Maitresse. None of the other tutors, even those who resisted the temptation to sample father’s wares, lasted very long. Nor were we allowed outside unaccompanied by an adult, for fear of being kidnapped. There were not many objects for our young hearts to fasten upon, and Tante Amélie had the potent advantage of controlling our access to the outside world.

Our house at 999 Rue d’Astarte doubled as my father’s business, and so was redolent of esters, pheromones, and chemical fractions, most particularly that of bitter truffle, for he held a monopoly over its import and used it in all his perfumes as a kind of signature. There were always people coming and going: farmers bringing wagons piled high with bales of flowers, traders from the Southern Sea bearing ambergris, slave artisans lugging in parts for the stills, neurochemists summoned to fine-tune some new process, courtesans in search of aphrodisiacs and abortifacients, overfed buyers almost inevitably accompanied by children with painted faces and lace-trimmed outfits. Yet Susanna and I were only rarely allowed beyond the run of the dormitory, classroom, and laboratory. Freedom for us began at the city library, the park, the slave market, and the like. Tante Amélie was a vigorous woman with many outside interests, so our fortunes took an immediate uptick at her arrival. Then we discovered quite by accident that she had opened a bank account (legal but interest-free) in hope of one day buying her freedom. This meant that she was amenable to bribery, and suddenly our horizons were limited only by our imaginations. The years that Tante Amélie spent with us were the happiest of my life.

For my sister too, I believe, though it was hard to tell with her. That was the period in which her passion for genetics peaked. She was always taking swabs of cell samples and patiently teasing out gene sequences from stolen strands of hair or nail clippings. Many an afternoon I trailed after her, in Tante Amélie’s bought company, as she scoured the flesh market for some variant of Sainte-Anne’s ape or rummaged in disreputable antique shops for hand-carved implements that might be made from—but never were—genuine abo bone. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing,” I told her once.

“Shut up, useless.”

“You’re trying to prove Veil’s Hypothesis. Well, what if you did? Do you think anyone would listen to you? You’re just a child.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“Even if they took you seriously, so what? What difference would it make?”

Susanna stared nobly into a future only she could see. “Madame Curie said, ‘We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.’ If I could make just one single discovery of worth, that would atone for a great deal.” Then she lowered her gaze to look directly at me, silently daring me to admit I didn’t understand.

Baffled and resentful, I lapsed into silence.

• • • •

I did not notice the change in my sister at first. By slow degrees she became sullen and moody and lost interest in her studies. This, for an irony, happened just as I was growing serious about my own and would have welcomed her mentorship. It was not to be. A shadow had fallen between us. She no longer confided in me as she once had; nor did we share our dreams.

Rummaging in her desk for a retractor one day, I discovered the notebook, which previously she had kept locked away, recording her great study. I had never been allowed to look at it and so I studied it intensely. Parts of it I can still recite from memory:

This implies a congeries of recessive sex-linked genes; they, being dependent on the x-chromosome, will necessarily appear only in women.

and

Under the right conditions, activating the operon genes in the proper sequence, the transformation would occur very rapidly, even in adults.

and

Colonization of the twin planets entailed an extreme constriction of genetic plasticity, which renders heritability of these recessives at close to one hundred percent.

and most provocative of all

All this presupposes that abos and humans can interbreed & thus that they spring from a common star-faring (most likely extinct) race. H. sapiens and H. aboriginalis are then not two separate species but specializations of the inferred species H. sidereus.

The bulk of the notebook was filled with gene sequences which, despite Susanna’s tidy schoolgirl script, I could barely make sense of. But I journeyed through to the end of the notes and it was only when I fetched up against blank pages that I realized that she hadn’t added to them in weeks.

That was the summer when Susanna conceived a passion for theater. She went to see Riders to the Sea and Madame Butterfly and Antony and Cleopatra and The Women and Mrs. Warren’s Profession and Lysistrata and Hedda Gabler and The Rover and I forget what else. She even got a small part in The Children’s Hour. I attended one rehearsal, was not made to feel welcome, and never showed up again.

Thus it was that when I had my first period (I had been well prepared, so I recognized the symptoms and knew what to do), I did not tell her. This was on a Sunday morning in early spring. Feeling distant and unhappy, I dressed for church without saying a word to my sister. She didn’t notice that I was withholding something from her, though in retrospect it seems that I could hardly have been more obvious.

We went to Ste. Dymphna’s, sitting as usual in a pew halfway to the altar. Tante Amélie, of course, sat in the back of the church with the other slaves. Shortly after the Mass began, a latecomer, a young woman whom I felt certain I had seen before, slipped into our pew. She was dressed in black, with fingerless lace gloves and had a round, moon-white face dominated by two black smudges of eyes and a pair of carmine lips. I saw her catch my sister’s eye and smile.

I endured the service as best I could. Since the rebellion, the Québécois liturgy had been banned and though I understood the reasons for it, the vernacular sounded alien to my ear. Midway through the monsignor’s interminable sermon, something—a chance shift of light through the stained glass windows, perhaps, or the unexpected flight of a demoiselle fly past my head—drew my attention away from his impassioned drone, and I saw the stranger stifle a yawn with the back of her hand, then casually place that hand, knuckles down on the pew between her and my sister. A moment later, Susanna looked away and placed her own hand atop it. Their fingers intertwined and then clenched.

And I knew.

• • • •

The components for a disaster had been assembled. All that was needed was a spark.

That spark occurred when Susanna returned from cotillion in tears. I trailed along in the shadow of her disgrace, feeling a humiliation that was the twin of hers though I had done nothing to earn it. Nevertheless, as always happened in such cases, as soon as our escort had returned us to our father’s house and made his report, we were summoned as a pair before Tante Amélie. She sat on a plain wooden chair, her hands overlapping on the knob of a cane she had recently taken to using, looking stern as a judge.

“You spat in the boy’s face,” she said without preamble. “There was no excuse for that.”

“He put his hand—”

“Boys do those things all the time. It was your responsibility to anticipate his action and forestall it without giving him offense. What else do you think you go to cotillion to learn?”

“Don’t bother sending me back there, then. I’m not going to become that kind of person.”

“Oh? And just what kind of person do you imagine you can be?”

“Myself!” Susanna said.

The two women (it was in that moment that I realized my sister had stolen yet another march on me and left her childhood behind) locked glares. I, meanwhile, was ignored, miserable, and unable to leave. I clasped my hands behind my back and let my fingers fight with one another. The injustice of my being there at all gnawed at me, growing more and more acute.

Angrily, Tante Amélie said, “I despair for you. Why are you behaving like this? Why can’t I get a straight answer out of you? Why—”

“Why don’t you ask her girlfriend?” I blurted out.

Tante Amélie’s lips narrowed and her face turned white. She lifted up her cane and slammed it down on the floor with a thump. Then she was on her feet and with a swirl of skirts was gone from the room, leaving Susanna shivering with fear.

But when I tried to comfort my sister, she pushed me away.

• • • •

The summons came later than I expected, almost a week after Tante Amélie’s abrupt cane-thump and departure. Tante Amélie escorted us to Maitresse’s austere and unfeminine office—she had been the company doctor, according to gossip, before catching father’s eye—and with a curtsey abandoned us there. Maitresse was a pretty woman currently making the transition to “handsome,” very tall and slender, and that evening she wore a pink dress. When she spoke, her tone was not angry but sorrowful. “You both know that your place in life is to marry well and increase the prestige of our house. A great deal of money has been invested in you.” Susanna opened her mouth to speak, but she held up a hand to forestall her. “We are not here to argue; the time for that is long past. No one is angry at you for what you have done with that young lady. I have performed for your father with other women many times. But you must both learn to look to your futures without sentiment or emotion.

“We are going out. There is something you must see.”

Into the lantern-lit night streets of Port-Mimizon we sallied. This was a pleasure I had almost never experienced before, so that my apprehension was mingled with a kind of elation. A light breeze carried occasional snatches of music and gusts of laughter from unseen revelries. Maitresse had dressed us in long cloaks and Venetian carnival masks—undecorated voltos for us girls and for her a medico della peste with a beak as long as Pinocchio’s—as was the custom for unescorted females.

The slave market at night was dark and silent. No lanterns were lit along its length, making the windowless compound seem a malevolent beast, crouching in wait for unwary prey to chance by. But Maitresse did not hurry her step. We turned a corner and at the end of an alley dark as a tunnel, saw a bright blaze of light and well-dressed men and women hurrying up the steps of a fighting club.

Maitresse led us around to the side, where we were let in at her knock. A dwarfish man obsequiously led the way to a small private waiting room with leather armchairs and flickering lights in mother-of-pearl sconces. “We’ll have tea,” she told the little man and he left. While we waited, for what I could not imagine, Maitresse addressed us once again.

“I spoke of the trouble and expense that went into your educations. You probably think that if you don’t make good marriages, you will simply be sold for courtesans. That was a reasonable expectation a generation ago. But times have changed. Male infants have become rarer and even the best-brought-up girls are a glut on the market. Increasingly more men have taken to pederasty. The reasons are not well understood. Social? Cumulative poisoning from subtle alien compounds in the environment over the course of generations? No one knows.”

“I will not give up Giselle,” Susanna said almost calmly. “There is nothing you can do or threaten that will change my mind. She and I . . . but I imagine you know nothing about such passion as ours.”

“Not know passion?” Maitresse laughed lightly, a delicate trill of silver bells. “My dear, how do you think I got involved in this mess in the first place?”

Our tea came and we drank, a quiet parody of domesticity.

What felt like hours dragged by. Finally, there came a roar of many voices through the wall and the dwarf deferentially reappeared at the door. “Ah.” Maitresse put down her teacup. “It is time.”

We entered our theater box between bouts, as the winner was being wrestled to the ground and sedated and his opponent carried away. Susanna sat stiffly in her seat, but I could not resist leaning over the rails to gawk at the audience. The theater smelled of cigar smoke and human sweat, with an under-scent of truffle so familiar that at first I thought nothing of it. As I watched, people wandered away from their seats, some to buy drinks, others retiring by pairs into private booths, while yet others . . . My sight fixed on a large man as he snapped a small glass vial beneath his nose. His head lolled back and a big loutish grin blossomed on his heavy face. I had never witnessed anyone sampling perfume in public before, but having seen it once, I immediately recognized its gestures being repeated again and again throughout the room. “Your father’s wares,” Maitresse observed, “are extremely popular.” I was not sure if she wanted me to feel proud or ashamed; but I felt neither, only fearful and confused.

After a time, the audience, alerted by cues undetectable to me, reassembled itself in the tiered rows of chairs wrapped around a central pit with canvas-lined walls. The loud chatter turned to a dwindling murmur and then swelled up again in a roar of unclean approval as two girls, naked, were led stumbling down opposing aisles. Their heads were shaved (so they could not be seized by the hair, I later learned) and one had her face painted red and the other blue. Because they were both of slender build and similar height, this was needed to tell them apart.

Several slaves, nimble as apes, lowered the girls into the pit, then jumped down to rub their shoulders, chafe their hands, speak into their ears, and break vial after vial of perfume under their noses. By degrees, the fighters came fully awake and then filled with such rage that they had to be held back by four men apiece to keep them from prematurely attacking each other. Then a bell rang and, releasing their charges, the slaves scrambled up the canvas walls and out of the pit.

The audience below came to their feet.

“Do not look away,” Maitresse said. “If you have any questions, I will answer them.”

The two girls ran together.

“How do they get them to fight?” I asked even though I was certain I would be told simply that they had no choice. Because were I in their place, knowing that the best I could hope for was to survive in order to undergo the same ordeal again in a week, I would not fight someone of my trainers’ choosing. I would leap up into the audience and kill as many of them as I could before I was brought down. It was the only reasonable thing to do.

“Your father creates perfumes for myriad purposes. Some cure schizophrenia. Some make it possible to work a forty-hour shift. Some are simple fantasies. Others are more elaborately crafted. Those below might think they are dire-wolves fighting spear-carrying primitives, or perhaps abos defending their families from human ravagers. Their actions seem perfectly rational to them, and they will generate memories to justify them.” As commanded, I did not look away, but I could feel her gaze on the side of my face nonetheless. “I could arrange for you to sample some of your father’s perfumes, if you’re curious. You would not like them. But if you persisted, after a time you would find yourself liking them very much indeed. My best advice to you is not to start. But once would not hurt.”

I shook my head to blink away my tears. Misinterpreting the gesture, Maitresse said, “That is wise.”

We watched the rest of the fight without further comment. When it ended, the survivor threw back her head and howled. Even when burly slaves immobilized and then tranquilized her, her mad grin burned triumphantly.

“May I stop watching now?” Susanna asked. I could tell she meant it to be defiant. But her voice came out small and plaintive.

“Soon.” Maitresse leaned over the rail and called down to the pit-slaves, “Show us the body.”

The pit workers started to hoist up the naked corpse for her examination.

“Clean her up first.”

They produced a dirty cloth and rubbed at the girl’s face, wiping away most of the red paint. Then they lifted her up again. In death, she seemed particularly childlike: slender, small-breasted, and long-legged. The hair on her pubic mound was a golden mist. I could not help wondering if she had experienced sex before her premature death and, if so, what it had been like.

“Study her features,” Maitresse said dryly.

I did so, without results. Turning to my sister with a petulant shrug, I saw in the mirror of her horrified expression the truth. There came then a shifting within me like all the planets in the universe coming into alignment at once. When I looked back at the dead fighter I saw her face afresh. It could have been a younger version of my sister’s face. But it was not.

It was my own.

• • • •

Susanna said nothing during the long walk home, nor did I.

Maitresse, however, spoke at length and without emotion. “Your mother made many children. You—” (she meant Susanna) “—were natural. You—” (me) “were the first of many clones commissioned in an attempt to create a male heir, all failures. When your mother was sent away, your father resolved to get rid of everything that reminded him of her. I argued against it and in the end we compromised and kept the two of you while selling off the others. I have no idea how many survive. However, the economic realities of the day are such that, were either of you to be sold, you would fetch the highest price here.” She said a great deal more as well but it was unnecessary; we already well understood everything that she had to tell us.

When we arrived home, Maitresse took our masks from us and bid us both a pleasant good-night.

We went to sleep, my sister and I, cradled in each other’s arms, the first time we had done so in over a year. In the morning, Tante Amélie was gone and our formal educations were done forever.

• • • •

Last night, as I said, I returned to my old dormitory room. It took me a while to realize that I was dreaming. It was only when I looked for Susanna and found nothing but dust and memories that I recollected how many years had gone by since my childhood. Still, in the way of dreams, there was a pervasive sense that the entire world was about to change. “You know what to do now,” a rasping whispery voice said. “Don’t you, daughter?”

I turned and the she-wolf was not there. But I felt sure of her presence anyway. “Is it time?” I asked.

She did not reply. Her silence was answer enough.

I grinned, for I now understood where the she-wolf had been hiding all this time.

Not so much awakening as taking my dream-state with me into the waking world, I got up out of bed and walked down the hall to my husband’s room. Then I paid a visit to the nursery, where my twin sons were sleeping. Finally, I went out into the night-dark streets to look for my sister.

The night is almost over now, and we must hurry to finish what we have begun. At dawn we will leave the cities behind and return to the swamps and forests, the caverns and hills from which the humans had driven us, and resume our long-interrupted lives. I have taken off my skin and now prowl naked through the streets of Port-Mimizon. In the shadows about me I sense many others who were once human and I devoutly pray that there are enough of us for our purpose. In the back of my mind, I wonder whether all this is real or if I have descended into the pit of madness. But that is a minor concern. I have work to do.

I have freed the she-wolf from within her hiding place and there is blood on her muzzle.

Only . . . why does the world smell as it does? Of canvas and bitter truffle.

©2013 by Michael Swanwick. Originally published in Shadows of the New Sun, edited by J.E. Mooney and Bill Fawcett. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Swanwick has received the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, World Fantasy and Hugo Awards, and has the pleasant distinction of having been nominated for and lost more of these same awards than any other writer. He has written ten novels, over a hundred and fifty short stories, and countless works of flash fiction. His latest novel, The Iron Dragon’s Mother, will be published by Tor Books in June, 2019.

He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter.

Blur

Carmen Maria Machado | 4049 words

En route to visit my girlfriend in Indiana, I pull over at a rest stop in Illinois to wash my face. It is not my first mistake of the day, but it is the biggest.

The bathroom is full of people. I see them before I place my glasses on the sink. I realize I am flinching after my body is already tight with worry; she will be enraged if I am late again. Children with juice-stained mouths are at the sinks on either side of me. A middle-aged woman with a deflated handbag scolds them. They scream, she screams, all of it rising above the rush of the tap. The water smells vaguely sulfurous, like the Fountain of Youth. I hear the rapid escalation and de-escalation of the hand dryers, and when the family evacuates the bathroom, it aches with the relief of emptiness. I press my hand to my forehead, my cheeks, my jaw. I breathe deeply. Face dripping over the sink, I reach for my glasses. My fingers scrabble over porcelain and close over nothing.

I wipe the loose water from my skin and lean in toward my reflection, my nose nearly touching the mirror. Pulled and bluish, like a fish on the verge of floating. I continue to grope around for the glasses that are no longer there. I drop to my knees and feel. Nothing. Not even the slapstick crunch of glass and wire beneath an unlucky palm.

I run my hands along the walls. More tile. Swinging door. A glass case that is covering a map of the state. Vending machines. Doors. I follow the sound of children’s voices, the digital jangle of their video game.

“Excuse me,” I say at the woman’s shape.

“Can I help you?” she asks. There is a game-over chirrup from the direction of the kids, a yelp of disappointment.

“My glasses,” I say. “I think one of your children took my glasses. They were on the sink in the ladies’.”

Her voice is flat. “They wouldn’t do that.”

I have gone about this all wrong. I have accused when I should have asked for help. “Please help me,” I say. “I can’t see anything. Please just ask the children.”

“Good luck,” she says in a clipped voice.

“My guy keeps dying, Mom!” one of them shrieks as the van door slams shut.

• • • •

I return to the welcome center. It’s an overcast day, so the building is hard to distinguish from the sky.

In the bathroom, I touch everything. I scoot over the tiles on my knees. I feel the crevices, trying not to think about any of it too hard.

No spare pair. No contacts. She warned me not to be late, and not only am I going to be late, I am trapped along an interstate with no way to continue my journey. I could call her, and tell her what happened—as per her rule about keeping her informed—but the idea makes my stomach blossom with anxiety. Should I call the police? Is this a police matter? At least, then, the officer would explain the situation to her. She could not accuse the police of lying to her; she certainly wouldn’t yell at them. “Here is Officer Harris,” I could tell her. “I will let him tell you about this comedy of errors.”

I sit against the wall and close my eyes. My floaters drift against my lids.

The door opens. Someone comes in, pausing long enough to tell me that she is curious about me but doesn’t want to be rude. She leaves me for a stall and pees for a long time, hard and decisive, like a horse, or like she’s been holding it for a long distance. She flushes, washes her hands at the sink farthest from me. Then:

“Are you all right?”

“This is very embarrassing,” I tell her. “I’ve misplaced my glasses. I think they’re here, somewhere.”

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, you poor dear. Let me help you look. Where were they?”

“On the edge of the sink,” I say.

She drifts like a peach phantom up and down the row, humming a song to herself. She does not pause anywhere, and before she talks I know what she’s going to say.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “There’s nothing here. I’ve gone to every sink.” The heat on my face is tears, but I don’t know it until she says, “Don’t cry! Can I call someone for you?”

I imagine it, the call. The friendly woman handing me the phone, and my girlfriend’s voice on the other end, acidic with suspicion. Who is that? Who is calling me? Who are you fucking? Where are you? I told you not to be—

“No, no,” I say. “I’m fine. Thank you for your help.”

She awkwardly touches my shoulder. I can hear the rustle of her leaning over, the dry hiss of a delicate chain striking the synthetic fabric of her blouse. She has the mushroomy smell of a bra removed after a long day.

“I hope your afternoon gets better. I believe it will. Do you pray?”

“I think it will only get worse from here, to be honest,” I say. “And no, I don’t pray.”

“I’ll pray for you,” she says. “Better than a phone call, even.”

The door slams. Someone else will be along presently, I think. I dig into my pocket and locate a loose pill small as punctuation. I take the Xanax. When I am feeling calmer, I will have someone call her for me. I take another Xanax. A man, preferably, though I will have to leave the bathroom for that to happen. I take a third Xanax.

• • • •

Outside the welcome center, I feel along the wall and sit on a bench. The sun has come out. The highway traffic sounds both calamitous and purposeful, as though everyone is escaping an apocalyptic event. I could be sitting here as a wall of fire creeps toward me. Or a horde of zombies.

Every time a large truck rumbles by, the bench shivers beneath my thighs. My phone is in my purse, my purse is in the car. I should just get my phone and call her and get it over with.

I don’t move.

The traffic travels along the highway like a droning procession of insects, sunlight glinting off the vehicles’ chassis. Then, a single car breaks away; moving toward me like a gleaming thread fraying from a rope. Music throbs from the car before it crunches to a stop and the door opens. The footsteps suggest a long stride, and the figure moves past me in a beat of color. The owner of them does not angle toward the bathroom, but to the vending machines. There is a clink of coins, a metallic hum, the crinkle-crash of a candy bar being dropped. The footsteps start up again, and stop directly in front of me. The owner is tall, and dressed in something blue and structured, like a suit.

“Hello,” a voice says. A man’s voice, I think. The best possible development. She would never accuse me of sleeping with a man.

“Hello,” I say.

“You need help?” he says.

“Yes,” I say. “But, how do you—”

“You’re sitting here looking at nothing,” he says. “Or everything? But probably nothing.”

“I’ve lost my glasses,” I say. “I’ve lost my glasses and I can’t drive without them. My vision is very poor.”

The bench creaks a little as he sits down next to me. He presses something pillowy, but with a firm center, into my hand, and I bring it close to my face. A Milky Way Midnight.

“I don’t eat candy,” I say.

“You should eat it anyway,” he says.

Someone walks toward us and goes into the bathroom. I should ask her about the glasses, I am thinking, even as she walks back out and gets into her car. When she pulls away, I sigh.

“Where were you going?” he asks.

“To Indiana,” I say. “To visit my girlfriend.”

“Have you called her? To tell her you’ll be delayed?”

“I’m afraid,” I admitted.

“Afraid of what?”

“Of what she’ll say.”

“What will she say? Have a bite.”

“She will yell at me for being late, for losing my glasses. Evidence.”

“Evidence of what?”

“Of not loving her properly.”

The chocolate stings my throat; it is sweeter than anything I’ve eaten in years. I swallow without chewing well. There is the promise of a choke, but it passes, though the painful lump of nougat reminds me all the way down.

“You could walk to her,” he suggests.

“Walk from here?”

“Sure. That’s proof that you love her, if you come toward her on your hands and knees.”

“You want to me to walk on my hands and knees?”

“It’s just an expression,” he says, though he doesn’t sound as though means it.

The man in blue takes my hand. His is soft and warm and a little damp, as if he’s just finished washing dishes. We stand, and the wrapper drops from my fingers. We go down the sidewalk, past the dog-walking patch and the picnic tables and the fragrant trash cans. Past my car, which sits obediently where I left it.

We drop off the sidewalk and onto the pavement. He walks me along the entrance ramp to the interstate.

“I don’t think we’re allowed to do this,” I say. “I think the police will stop us.”

He does not answer. From the strip of gray stretching out before me, I can tell that he is guiding me down the shoulder.

A car drives by with its window down, and I hear fluttering ribbons of sound: top forty shredded by speed. The autumn trees that line the highway are backlit by the sun, bokeh-bright and pixelated. The shadows are harder to read: murky, indistinct. The feathery tips of tall grasses scrape dryly against my jeans.

We are walking in gravel before I remember that I left my phone behind, in my purse, in the car. I pull back a little, but his hand is firm, and we continue to move forward.

This feels like a dream, in that I always go blind in dreams. I both know and don’t know what’s around me. I perceive it but can’t see it, precisely, sense it but could never describe it. Also, something always follows me as I make my way around the dreamscape: something stepping after me in the dark. Except no one is following me now; the man in the suit and I are walking into the future together.

“This will be a good story,” I say. “A good story to tell, one day.”

If he agrees, he does not say.

• • • •

One recent morning, I woke up with something in my right eye—a tiny cluster of shapes that, after a millisecond’s pause, followed the direction of my gaze. It looked, in turn, like the contents of a petri dish in a news special about Ebola, then like a tick scuttling just out of reach of my peripheral vision. Before I made an appointment to do something about it, another one appeared in the opposite eye. I drove to my longtime doctor certain I was on the cusp of losing my vision blotch by tiny blotch.

His office had a plastic model of an eye on the filing cabinet, with the name of a prescription drug printed across the base. He lifted the eye to show me, running his finger along the cord of nerves to swipe away a layer of dust. He demonstrated where the floaters lived and explained what they were: the shadows of tiny, desiccated strands of the eye’s vitreous humor that clung to each other like survivors of a shipwreck in a wide and lonely sea.

“You’re a bit young to have them,” he confessed. “The worse someone’s vision is, the more likely they are to get them earlier in life. But they’re inevitable, floaters. Everyone gets them eventually.”

“So there’s nothing I can do about them? I just have to think I’m seeing bugs for the rest of my life?”

“The Romans actually called them ‘flying flies,’” he said. “But in Latin, of course. Whatever’s Latin for ‘flying flies.’ Isn’t that funny? Flying flies? Like there’s any other kind. Anyway, at some point your brain will adjust to their presence, and you’ll stop noticing them.”

But I could not. As I looked out into the bright day, or stared at my computer screen, the shadows cast by the dead jelly of my eye continued to flit and made me think that insects were darting past me. I was constantly jerking my head to the side to avoid them, as if I were cowering before a raised hand.

• • • •

“I’m thirsty,” I tell the man in blue. We have been walking for what feels like hours, and I can no longer see the outline of the rest stop in the blur behind us. He sits down in the weeds and wildflowers and draws me into his lap, as if I were an infant, and tilts the ridged mouth of a bottled water between my lips. I take long pulls but never feel quite sated. In the air I smell the faint burning of rubber, the hot grease of fast food, and a fresh, breezy core: nature, persisting through everything mankind can throw at her. Someone tosses litter from a passing car, and whatever it is clatters down the embankment near us. I release the bottle, and it burbles and squeals.

“Sometimes,” I say, startling myself, “she grabs my arm, hard.” This sounds so minor, and I try to explain. “There is no love behind that touch and it’s the worst thing.”

From the tree line, something yelps in pain and then falls silent.

“Do you have a phone?” I continue. “She told me to call her if I was going to be delayed, but also she told me not to be delayed at all, and I don’t know if she will remember which instruction is more pressing. Sometimes she tells me that she hates me, that she has always hated me, but then the next day she says that she’s never said that. Is it possible to do terrible things and not remember? Do you think something is wrong with her? Do you think she’s sick? In any case, I think we should call her.”

He doesn’t say anything. I feel soothed by my plan for a few breaths before a needle of anxiety plunges through my sternum. Even if he were to call, I’d have the same problem. Even though I have never been interested in men, not even a little, she very well could accuse me of cheating on her and changing sides. Betrayal squared.

“Never mind,” I say. I press my face into his suit jacket, which smells like a campfire.

He rocks me. The cars whiz by like bees.

• • • •

Once, in the city of her birth, my girlfriend became angry at my exhaustion and abandoned me at a carnival at dusk. “I don’t want you here. You should leave,” she said, and disappeared into a crowd of people. I sat down on my suitcase and pulled out my phone, but there was no one to call, so I opened up my book and read by the flickering lights of a nearby ride: the Matterhorn, which tooted a vaguely Bavarian song as it swung screaming patrons in an elliptical orbit. As I strained to decipher the text, I was reminded that when I was a child, my doctor told me that my eyes were bad because I read so much beneath my blankets by the beam of a dying flashlight. I had cried, because I loved to read and I thought he was telling me I had to stop.

She found me there, hunched over unread pages. She was furious that I hadn’t come to find her. As I dragged my suitcase through the dust and watched the back of her head, I remembered his response.

“All I’m saying,” he’d said, his voice rising above my tears, “is if you keep reading by dim light, your eyes will fail you, and there will be no one to blame but yourself.”

I tried to listen. I really did. But there are just some things you can’t help doing.

• • • •

Anything can happen on the road. That’s what my dad always said, the reason he insisted on buying me a jack-and-lug-nut multitool and a tiny red backpack full of army rations and a set of flashing battery-operated flares for emergencies. (Maybe if I’d been thinking straight the first time it all went sideways, I would have laid myself down in the dust with a circle of those lights around me, a blinking fairy ring no one dared step inside lest it make them invisible, too.)

The man in blue laughs. Well, not laughs, precisely. It’s more of a chuckle. I didn’t know anyone did that, actually chuckled, but he does, and my head taps against his chest with every pulse of sound. As if I’m his heartbeat and he’s thinking about someone he loves.

I don’t know what’ll happen if I keep following him. I do know what’ll happen when I show up at her doorstep. My dad also used to say, Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, but what he didn’t understand was that not-knowing always leaves room for hope.

• • • •

We stand up and keep walking. With every step, something in my cardigan pocket knocks against my hip, and I draw out a tangle of keys. When I squeeze them, their teeth bite, like a devil I know. I lean back and hurl them toward the tree line. I don’t hear them land, but a pocket of birds bursts into the sky as though a bomb has gone off.

The man in blue murmurs something low.

“What?” I say.

“Have you heard the story,” he says, “of the woman who saw nothing?”

“Ha,” I say. “Is that my story?”

“N-o,” he says slowly, as if the joke is lost on him.

“Tell me the story of the woman who saw nothing,” I say.

“There once was a woman who had the same nightmare every night: that a monster slept next to her, purring, burbling blood. The monster would sometimes wake and give her gifts: stars, pearls, the pith of tangerines, and she tucked them under her pillow. When she woke up, she went about her day, but every night she returned to sleep and thus to the monster’s side.

“One night, she dreamt that she handed the monster the eyes straight out of her own head. The monster put them in a jar. Every night after that, she arrived into her dream with new eyes, and handed them over to join the others. Soon, the jar was full of them, round and unblinking as jawbreakers.

“And with her eyes so captured, like a selkie without her skin, the woman knew that she had no way of leaving. Upon waking, she wondered why she’d given them over, but she never had an answer. It just always seemed to make sense.”

The candy bar lurches against the base of my esophagus. “What did the monster look like?”

“Oh, the monster was terrifying. It had claws sharp as time and teeth filed to bony points. It had the eyes of an octopus and the head of a queen and the belly of a bear and an albatross where its heart should have been. When enraged, it would make a horrific screaming sound that caused the house around them to tremble—”

And I can feel it, then, the foundation shuddering beneath the monster, a shuck shuck shuck like an earthquake. I can feel the heat of its breath.

“—and everything would smell like metal and burned hair and fear.”

And yes, it does, it does smell that way. The pavement trembles underneath my feet. I gasp and pull, and his grip tightens.

“Let’s go down into the ditch,” I say. “Wait for it to pass.”

“No.” His voice is calm. “Stay right here.” He guides my body until I am standing on the edge of the shoulder. He leans into my hair and drops a whisper in my ear: Sh-hh-hh.

The trembling grows more agitated. I whimper. “You have to trust me,” he says. “I’m the only one that’s here. You have to trust me. There is no one else to trust.”

“Please let me go,” I say.

My ears pop from the force of the eighteen-wheeler that screams past us, blasting its horn. I smell the rank sweetness of manure and hay, and I know what’s in the back of that truck: bristly, terrified pigs, being carried to their deaths. The spray of gravel and dirt stings my face. I begin to weep.

“Stop, stop,” he says. “Sweet girl, don’t cry.”

“I can’t help it,” I say.

“But you can,” he says. “You can help it. You know you can. I told you to trust me. Why are you crying?”

“Because I don’t think I’ll ever see the world right again.”

“But glasses can be replaced. I will deliver you to your girlfriend, and she will deliver you home,” he says. “All will be right.”

I cannot imagine her driving me back, but I suddenly have an image of being bundled, sightless, onto a plane, of looking out a plane’s window and seeing nothing but loose snarls of blue and white and brown. Will they tow my little car, I wonder. After a few days, will they take her away? Put her in a lot until she is deemed abandoned, where she will be shipped off to a more responsible owner?

“You never told me the end of the story,” I say, as I kick off my shoes. “Of the girl who saw nothing.”

“Oh,” he says. “Yes. The girl and the monster got married. The end.”

• • • •

Cold strains through my sweater. The light is getting gold and thin, as if we are drifting to the upper level of the atmosphere.

“The sun is setting,” I say. “Earlier and earlier these days.”

“Yes,” he says, “but we need to keep going. Indiana’s not coming to us. It has roots. You are the moveable object.”

I tilt my head back and open my eyes as wide as they will go.

“Step to your right,” he says. “There’s a deer.”

I tilt my head down, eyes watering, and see the shape of it. The broken body is massive, corkscrewed, utterly still. We drop down the side of an embankment, and my face is level with its opened gut: the dark, unknowable silhouettes of its organs; the aluminum bite of blood; the rancid heat of organic matter turning. I hear the titter of flies. They flutter past my face like animated dust, and I cough.

“I love her, but she makes me afraid,” I say.

“Maybe she loves you because she makes you afraid,” he says.

The buzzing fades. He rises up to the shoulder and brings me along with him. The pavement feels like the damp cornstarch sand that lives beneath the tide—solid, unless you stand on it too long. I think about the miles in front of me. It feels impossible, and yet, isn’t that love? An impossible thing, taken on inch by inch?

“It’s sort of beautiful, when you think about it,” I say to him. “Walking along the road, to her. It’s like a movie. We’re gonna get to her, and you can explain what happened. She’s gonna be so happy I’m there, and she’ll listen to you, I know it.”

Silence. A breeze strokes my open palm. I lift it to my face, cupping the bright chill of my cheekbone, and then turn back and forth along the empty highway. Somewhere in the distance, a car flips on its headlights, and then another, and then another, like streetlamps going on at dusk.

I keep walking as the light drains from the sky. Within minutes, the whole world has closed its eyes on me.

©2017 by Carmen Maria Machado. Originally published in Tin House. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the World Fantasy Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

The Seeds of War

Ashok K. Banker | 6754 words

1

Hastinaga was ablaze with word of Vrath’s amazing feat. Vrath’s stepmother, Dowager Empress Jilana, while taken aback at the manner in which it had been done, nevertheless bit her tongue when she saw what he had accomplished. That the two daughters of the king of Serapi were beautiful there was no doubt. At the wedding, they were the envy of every woman in the court. Tall, with full heads of thick, lustrous blue-black hair, fingernails and toenails painted blood red, heavy of hip and breast, heart-faced with a glow to rival the moon, they walked like queens already.

Virya was equally astonished the instant he met his wives-to-be, and he quickly found that they brought out the best in him. He never looked handsomer or more alive and virile than on his wedding night, and after a grand ceremony and lavish festivities which ranged across the land for days, it soon became evident that the quiet young king was in fact an artful lover. He disappeared for days on end with both his beautiful wives, and the reports the serving maids and wet nurses brought to Jilana’s ears were enough to make her blush with embarrassment. Clearly, the new groom and his brides were consumed by passion.

As the days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, and months into years, the passion of the lovers neither dimmed nor faded. Virya blossomed and became a great patron of the arts, compared by the court poets more than once to Cassa himself, lord of love and pleasure. He lived like Cassa, too, often seeming more interested in pursuing the arts of pleasure than the craft of kingship. Jilana often complained to Vrath that he took too much of the burden of governance on himself—indeed, that he took all of it on himself—and he spoiled Virya by letting him dally his life away in the arms of his wives. But secretly, she was glad to see her son so happy and full of life and vigor. For the truth was, Virya could never equal Vrath’s skill at managing the kingdom. In a sense, his real responsibility was producing heirs for the dynasty. And how else was he to accomplish that if not by pursuing such acts of pleasure?

And so Virya passed the next several years in blissful ecstasy, tasting of the fruits of desire to his heart’s content. Despite this, however, his seed produced no heirs. Neither of his wives conceived by him for eleven long years.

Yet as the seventh year came to an end, the royal healers came to Jilana and Vrath with even darker news: Virya had been stricken by consumption, the awful affliction of the lungs for which there was no known cure. The healers tried everything within their power, and Vrath sent envoys far and wide across the world to seek cures in other, foreign lands.

But, alas, all their efforts were in vain. For Virya steadily sickened and, even as his beautiful wives wept over his wasting body, he passed into Shima’s abode one dark evening of but his twenty-third year. As the sun set that night, so did it seem to be setting on the Krushan dynasty.

In the absence of an eldest son, Vrath performed the funeral rites at Jilana’s request.

And so once again, the Krushan dynasty was without a legitimate heir, or, indeed, without even the possibility of one. For now there remained no sons to further the lineage.

None except Vrath.

2

Jilana came to his chamber after hours. Vrath was never truly at rest. He seemed tireless, forever dealing with some aspect of kingship or another. Watching him work, she marveled at his ability to devote every iota of his energy to building, consolidating and expanding an empire in which he himself had no future stake—with no progeny of his own who would inherit the fruits of all this labor.

And during his lifetime, he was as much a servant as a ruler. Regent in name and deed, he had not once behaved like a king or sought undue power or credit. Truly, he was a god among men, Jilana thought as she waited for him to finish dictating some order of business to a trio of scribes who stood by listening reverentially to his every word.

When he was done, he thanked them for their time and effort politely. That in itself was a marvel. Most kings would have snarled and told them to be gone when the work was done, eager to get on with carousing and whoring. Even the best-behaved, most righteous lords would at best have remained silent.

To actually thank even the lowest minions who served under his aegis was a hallmark of Vrath’s regency. It earned him his loyal following and devout subservience, even though he did not do it in order to gain these benefits. Jilana herself had encountered her share of arrogant nobles and aristocrats, as well as rude warriors full of wine and their own self-worth, men who tossed coins at her, made lewd advances or comments, or generally acted boorish. And yet here was Vrath—the greatest warrior of the time, ruler of the wealthiest and most powerful empire, legitimate son and heir to the very dynasty that had originally settled and civilized this vast subcontinent—and he lived frugally, as austerely as any ascetic or hermit.

His chambers in which she now stood were as bare and bereft of luxury as the hut of any sage in a forest hermitage. He partook of no intoxicants, possessed no vices, and spent all his waking hours engaged in service to the kingdom. Truly Jilana had known priests who took more pleasure from life than he.

When they were alone, she said, “Vrath, my son. We face a great crisis. A dynasty without an heir is like a pillar that could crack and crumble at any time, bringing down the empire it holds in place. All this work you do, your life’s work, your constant effort to build, grow, establish, expand, consolidate—all this will be for naught if the Krushan line is not extended.”

He sighed and looked down at his large broad palms. “This is true. It concerns me as well, Mother.”

“Then do something about it.”

He looked up at her. “What would you have me do?”

“Virya’s wives.”

“Ember and Umber? Yes, what of them?”

“Claim your right as a son of Sha’ant and as half-brother to Virya. After the untimely death of a brother, if his wife remains childless, you are entitled to seed her in order to birth an heir. Take my daughters-in-law as your wives. You are no less than my son. Take them with my blessings and sire heirs upon them.” She added after a moment, “They will not object either. I know this well. They look up to you as a god ever since the day you brought them here. Marry your brother’s wives and sire children, Vrath. It is the right thing to do.”

He sighed again as if he had been expecting something along these lines. “I cannot. You know this, too.”

“Because of your oath of celibacy?”

He looked at her again. “Yes. Of course. Because of the oath.”

“That oath has no meaning anymore! My father only asked that my sons inherit the throne. My sons are both dead, and now their inheritance is in danger of being squandered forever! What do you think will happen once you pass on? Hastinaga will be stormed within the day, the Krushan empire will be dismantled, and each piece will become a trophy for our rivals and enemies. The Krushan line will become extinct in every sense of the word and your father’s and forefather’s efforts will all be in vain.”

Jilana paused, gazing at a portrait of Sha’ant which was the centerpiece of Vrath’s private chamber. “You loved your father deeply. You took your oath in order to ensure he found happiness once more in life, bereft and desolate as he was after losing your mother. How do you think he would feel today if he were to see this state of affairs? Would he smile and give you his blessing to remain celibate or would he try to reason with you, make you give up your vow of acolyte and do what is right under Krushan law?”

“What is right under Krushan law,” he replied, rising from his seat calmly and walking away from her, “is that a Krushan always abides by his vows. That is immutable.”

“Circumstances change,” she said, following him, “and we must change with them. In season, flowers bloom and give out sweet fragrances, and out of season, they wither and lose their aroma. Water changes color under different light. Light itself changes its appearance under different conditions. The great force of fire alters its form and appearance constantly. Everything changes when it must. That is part of nature. To be Krushan is to know what is natural and what is right for a certain time and situation. Your duty itself has changed now, Vrath! Rescind your vow, take back your terrible pledge, give up your state of celibacy, do what you must for the good of this House of Krushan. You alone have the power to save it.”

Vrath stood with his back to Jilana, gazing out a casement high on the western wall through which the setting sun was visible. “Flowers may lose their fragrance forever, light may lose its luster, water lose its form, fire fail to provide heat. The sun may cease its radiance, the moon may turn dark and set forever. The stonefire may extinguish itself, the Burning Throne no longer blaze forth with sacred flame, Hastinaga and the Burnt Empire may be destroyed and every last living being be reduced to ash. All this may come to pass, but I can never give up my vow. Accept it, Mother. You know this in your heart to be so.”

Jilana passed a hand across her face, her brow creasing with anxiety. “Then we are lost, my son. I know not what else to suggest. What can we do? How are we to resolve this problem? You know that this is nothing less than a calamity. Every day we do nothing about it, our rivals and enemies watch and plot against us, knowing that it is only a matter of time before the House of Krushan ends forever. Already they build their alliances and lay their plots to overtake us when the time comes. Only by taking decisive action can we stop this plotting and planning and restore our supreme authority. Tell me what has to be done. I suggested the only solution that seems possible. If you will not accept it, then you must offer a solution of your own.”

Vrath turned from the casement to meet her eyes. With the setting sun behind him, he appeared like a god with a corona of light around his head and beard. “I have a solution,” he said. “One that is acceptable under Krushan law and will violate no vows or laws.”

She stared at him, hope flowering in her heart. Vrath would not say such a thing lightly. If he had a solution, one that pleased him, then it would most certainly please her as well. “Tell me,” she said eagerly. “What is the solution you propose?”

He shook his head. “It is not my solution, but is an ancient time-honored tradition of our culture. It dates back to the time when Viminor, son of Jarin Blood-Axe destroyed the warriors of the world. Their widows were bereft and childless. They beseeched the priests to unite with them in order that they might produce offspring and further their line. Thus was the line of warriors re-established on earth.” He looked at his stepmother. “An heir can be produced by either the father or the mother. Were Virya to father a son on either of his wives, the son would be accepted as his rightful heir. Similarly, in Virya’s absence, either of the wives may invite a suitable priest to her bed and engender a son. The child would legally be considered a Krushan and a legitimate heir to the throne.”

Jilana nodded slowly. “I have heard of this before. It is not common among my father’s people, but I have heard that it is a common custom among Krushan.”

“It is,” Vrath said confidently. “I have consulted with all our preceptors and they confirm it as a legitimate and acceptable way for the House of Krushan to further its lineage.”

Jilana rose and took a few steps away, thinking as she paced. “Then all we need is to find a priest who would cohabit with Ember and Umber. He need not even marry them, merely cohabit with them and then depart once his task is completed?”

“That is preferable. To all appearances, it will be as if the gods themselves have blessed the queens with progeny. As indeed they have, since priests are the caste closest to the Stone Gods on earth.”

Jilana thought deeply and did not say anything further. After observing her silence for a while, Vrath asked her gently, “Mother, is something the matter? Have I said something to offend you? Did this solution not please you somehow?”

She looked up at him as if startled out of a reverie. “No, my son! You could never say anything to offend or displease me. You are the epitome of goodness in every respect. I was thinking about the priest who would be suitable enough for this task.”

“Yes?” he asked, not sure what she meant. “There are many suitable candidates. I have already asked the preceptors to suggest the most appropriate ones for our perusal. Once we decide, we shall summon the one we have chosen and—”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “I understand. But what if I told you there might be a way to achieve both things at once.”

“Both things?” Vrath was puzzled. “I fail to follow your meaning, mother.”

“The ideal situation of asking a Krushan himself to further the Krushan dynasty legitimately, and resorting to the time-honored tradition of asking a priest to sire a child upon a widowed wife.”

“Yes,” he replied. “That is what we are discussing. Since the first option is not possible, we are considering the second . . .”

“Yes, but what if I told you there may be a way to do both. By calling upon a Krushan of the same bloodline as us who also happens to be a priest possessed of all the auspicious qualities one would seek.”

Vrath stared at her. “How is that possible? There are no Krushan priests! I am the sole Krushan male and I am a warrior.”

She paced a few times, revealing her anxiety. “Son, what I am about to tell you is a secret I was forced to keep for many, many years—and from your father as well. I regret keeping such a secret, but I had no choice at the time. I feared that it might deplete his store of happiness and make him sorrowful. He already had so much sadness in his life, I had no desire to risk endangering the joyful companionship we enjoyed together. I thought in time I would tell him . . . But then we ran out of time.”

He frowned, sensing that she needed something from him . . . acceptance? Understanding? Forgiveness? A combination of all the above, perhaps? “I understand . . . And I do not mind. My father is no more. You need have no regrets and feel no guilt at keeping this secret. Whatever it is, I will not judge you for it nor blame you. It is not a son’s place to do so anyway.”

She sighed deeply as if achieving some great release. “Thank you, my son. In that case, I shall tell you my secret.”

She turned away, as if embarrassed to show him her face when she made her admission. She appeared to struggle with herself before speaking further.

Vrath waited patiently.

Finally, Jilana said, in a tone far softer than her usual authoritative voice. “I have a son by a previous union.”

Vrath stared at her, seemingly unsure how to react. Ultimately, he said nothing.

She went on. “It was no mere dalliance, I assure you. The great sage Shapaar was a passenger on my boat and he grew amorous and was overcome with a powerful lust for me. He expressed a desire to lay with me. I was reluctant as well as flattered, for to have one as illustrious as he father a child upon me would be to guarantee progeny of great qualities. He assured me that the child of our union would be born swiftly and would ascend to manhood just as quickly. After much further discussion, I agreed and we consummated our mutual lusts upon a small island in the middle of the Jeel river.” She paused, reflecting. “One might even say that Goddess Jeel herself blessed our mating.” She continued briskly. “The copulation was intense and illuminating to a young woman such as I was at the time. Afterward, Shapaar departed after some kind words. To my astonishment, I felt my womb quicken at once, and expand with our mutual conception. The child, my son, was born only moments after. Before my very eyes, he grew to adulthood and stood before me within the hour, a fully grown man, capable of eloquent speech and already gifted with his father’s knowledge. Such was the power of Sage Shapaar. Later, I learned that Sage Shapaar was in fact the erstwhile master of Hastinaga, Emperor of the Burnt Empire, and that he had retired voluntarily from the throne to pursue his spiritual advancement. Which meant that my son was a Krushan by bloodline.”

She looked at her stepson. “This is a secret I have shared with no one. I entrust it to you.”

Vrath received the extraordinary tale with his characteristic equanimity. “I thank you for your trust, Mother. May I inquire as to the name that you gave your gifted son?”

“Vessa.”

“Vessa,” Vrath repeated the name slowly. “So named after my own siblings and myself in our earlier lives for his dedication to the lifelong task of collating and archiving the sum of human knowledge in his legendary scroll, The Vessad. Naturally I have heard of him. He is a great mind and a renowned scholar of Krushan law. They say his gift for poetry and composition is unparalleled. I have long sought to engage him as a court poet, but he is dedicated to pursuing his own course and seeks no patrons. He is regarded as the greatest scholarly mind of our age. He is your son?”

She was pleased to hear such high praises for her son from the lips of Vrath. “He is my son,” she said proudly. “Although I have not seen him even once since I gave birth to him, he gave me the power to summon him at will at any time. I have but to think of him and he shall arrive here instantly.”

Vrath mused on this extraordinary revelation. “He is most appropriate. It would be our great fortune for the House of Krushan to have a priest of his stature and immense qualities further our line. And since he is your son, and you are Sha’ant’s widow, therefore he is my brother, and the brother of Gada and Virya as well. And since Virya is dead, he may legitimately cohabit with his brother’s wives and produce offspring. Even if he were not a priest . . .”

“But he is,” Jilana exclaimed. “And being a priest, he is celibate! Hence there is no fear that he will engender other progeny who might lay claim to the throne of Hastinaga either. This shall be the sole exception and only on my request.”

Vrath rubbed his beard briskly as he did at times when arriving at a solution to some long-frustrating dilemma. “It is an excellent solution, mother! You must summon your son Vessa at once. I can find no fault with this plan.” He frowned, as if remembering something, then added, “Except that I must offer one caution . . .”

“What, my son?”

“There is one risk involved with asking priests to produce progeny. Even a cursory study of our Krushan history reveals numerous instances of this danger. Priests are notorious for being easily offended and for cursing or inflicting conditions upon those who offend them. We must take great care that this does not happen.” He added quickly, “This has nothing to do with our calling your son to do the task. It applies to any priest.”

She nodded, understanding. “Tell me, what is it?”

3

In ancient times, Vrath said to Jilana, there was a great sage named Utay’thayan. He had a wife named Mamita and they loved each other deeply. Now, Utay’thayan’s younger brother was the sage Brihas, who is known to us as the famous guru to the Stone Gods, preceptor of the gods. Brihas coveted his brother’s wife and was filled with desire for her. He wooed her with great eloquence and passion. But she spurned his advances, saying that she was already pregnant with his brother’s child. Undaunted, Brihas made love to her and spilt his seed inside her. Utay’thayan’s child, though still an infant in the womb, had already mastered Krushan law. When his uncle’s seed attempted to enter his mother’s womb, he complained aloud, saying “There is no room for your seed here, I was here first. You have unnecessarily wasted your seed.” He spoke at the exact moment of climax, spoiling Brihas’s pleasure.

Brihas was angered by this reply. “Little one, because you spoke at an inappropriate moment and ruined my pleasure, therefore I curse you to be mute.”

Thereafter, Utay’thayan and Mamita’s son was born incapable of speech. He grew up to become the Sage Dirgha. In time, he fathered many illustrious sons of his own, starting with the renowned Guntam.

But, in time, Guntam and the other sons of Dirgha grew greedy and avaricious. They felt their unseeing father was a burden and sought to be rid of the responsibility of caring for him.

Deluded by maya, the urrkh art of magical illusion, they sought to commit the terrible crime of patricide. Binding their blind father to a log of wood they threw him into the waters of the Jeel, leaving the fierce river to do the rest. But Rishi Dirghatama did not drown and die as they expected.

Rishi Dirgha floated down the length of the mighty Jeel, passing by many kingdoms and despite all odds surviving, even in his helpless condition.

As the river took him through the Banaspulan, he was seen by a king named Banas, who was a scrupulous man. Banas was troubled because his wife was unable to bear sons and his line was at risk of ending. When he saw the sage tied to the timber, he felt as if the gods themselves had offered him a solution. For he recognized Dirgha from a previous encounter and had great reverence for the sage.

Wading out into the roaring rapids of the river, he risked his life to rescue the sage. Untying him and bringing him to solid land, he bowed down before Dirgha and beseeched him, “Great one, surely you have been sent to eliminate my anxiety. Grant me the blessing of fathering sons who are knowledgeable in morality and law.”

Rishi Dirgha was thankful for being saved and so readily agreed. Unable to speak, he conveyed his gratitude by laying his hand upon his rescuer’s head. Banas rose to his feet, invigorated by the sage’s blessings.

But when King Banas told his wife Sudina his intentions, she was repulsed. Rishi Dirgha was old, mute, and cantankerous. She had no desire to cohabit with him, however urgent the need for heirs, so she sent her wet nurse, a low-caste, in her stead.

Rishi Dirgha blessed the daiimaa with his seed time and again, fathering eleven sons upon her over time. The eldest of these sons was named Kavikshat and he was a handsome boy with many fine qualities. Seeing him, King Banas assumed he was the son of his wife Sudina. But the sage shook his head in denial, surprising the King. It was evident from Dirgha’s expressions and manner that he was deeply offended by the queen’s refusal and resented her greatly. On further probing, Banas learned what his wife had done and was shocked.

Banas pacified the rishi’s anger and persuaded him to give the queen one more chance. This time, he personally ensured that Sudina went to the sage. The sage felt the queen’s limbs carefully, pressing them hard enough to draw tears from her eyes. But she had been warned by her husband not to object to anything the sage said or did and kept her silence. Pleased by her silent acceptance, the sage thought to himself, “She is contrite and sincere. Banas and she deserve my gift of progeny. I will ensure she bears a great and powerful son, who will always be truthful.” Thus was born the seer-mage Anakh from Sudina.

4

Vrath finished his tale and then cautioned Jilana, “Therefore you must ensure that the queens Ember and Umber are well prepared and wholly willing to accept the procreator who comes to them. They must not offend him in any way, or he may well curse or inflict some condition upon their progeny.”

Jilana understood. “I shall see to it.”

She then left Vrath’s chambers and secluded herself in her own palace. Meditating, she thought of the day she had cohabited with Shapaar and in a rush, the memories coalesced into actual events. She experienced every detail of that day all over again: the fog that enshrouded them during their act of coitus; the departure of the sage; her rowing back to the island, her giving birth to an infant who grew from a babe to a full-grown adult male within the space of an hour; the tall, dark, fierce, and proud Vessa standing before her and joining his palms in greeting to his mother. She recalled his last words to her: “Mother, if at any time you have need of me, you need but think of me and I shall arrive before you instantly. Whatever the purpose, do not hesitate to call on me.” She remembered thinking at the time that this extraordinary message indicated her own conviction that their bond was an unusual one that would serve some greater purpose in time. And she knew now that this was that purpose—the reason for which she now wished to summon him.

Closing her eyes, she conjured an image of Vessa in her mind. Even across the great physical distance that separated them, Jilana was able to see her son as clearly as if he sat only yards away in the same chamber.

He was seated on a cloth beneath a banyan tree in his hermitage, reading a scroll and thinking deeply. She knew that he was likely reading through Krushan law and separating individual mantras and verses into separate volumes and sections. She hesitated to interrupt his brilliant work. But Vessa himself sensed her presence and opened his eyes.

“Mother, do you have need of my services?”

“Yes, my son, I do,” she heard herself reply. Her voice sounded strange, for though she spoke here in her chamber in the palace, her words resounded in that distant forest hermitage where Vessa resided.

Vessa smiled and rose to his feet. With a single step he covered the distance from his hermitage in the forest to her chamber.

Jilana opened her eyes.

There, before her, stood her son, much as the he had appeared the day he was born. Tall, as black of complexion as she herself, fierce of visage, and with the knobby, bony limbs of an austere penitent who devoted his days to meditation and self-deprivation.

His palms were joined in respectful greeting. He touched her feet and took her blessings. “Mother, command me. How may I serve you?”

Her throat was choked with emotion. “My son! First come and let me embrace you. That is my first command!”

She embraced him warmly, tears spilling onto his back as she unleashed the dam of pent-up emotions she had kept hidden in her heart all these many years. Her son! And she had not seen him but once in all his life, since the day she had given birth to him. She was flooded with feelings of guilt and self-recrimination.

But Vessa reassured her. “Do not blame yourself, Mother. I have had a good life. I am content.”

This made her cry even more copiously. But finally her tears subsided and she was able to explain to him why she had summoned him.

He listened carefully to the full account as he fetched water and washed her face of the residue of her tears.

“I shall do as you ask, Mother,” he replied when she had finished speaking. “I shall produce sons as magnificent as Varuna and Mitra. You have my word.”

She was overjoyed. She had never expected him to agree so readily and was thrilled at his acquiescence.

“I shall explain some vows and rituals Virya’s wives must follow,” he said. “They must observe these strictly and without deviating for a full year. When the year is over, I shall come to the palace and do as you ask.”

Jilana was dismayed at this response. “A full year? But my son. The kingdom could well be in disarray by then. Already we are hearing reports of unrest and conspiracy. We must act soon. Can you not forego the observance of vows and cause them to conceive at the earliest?”

He thought for a long moment then said, “I understand, Mother. And, indeed, I can make them conceive this very day if you wish. For it is a propitious time, I sense, and if I cohabit with them now, then all the signs point to their bearing great sons who will further your lineage. Bid them prepare to receive me at midnight. I shall come directly to their chambers.”

Jilana thought rapidly. It was a sign of great fortune that the very day on which she summoned Vessa was suitable for the act of conception. She took that to mean that she must ensure the deed was done at once, rather than risk waiting for the next suitable time. “Very well, then,” she said, “I shall go and prepare them.”

Vessa nodded. “But you understand that due to my ascetic vows, I am not bathed. As a hermit, I live in this manner, unwashed, clad in rags, my beard and hair wild and unkempt. My own natural appearance is none too pleasing to women either. I fear your daughters-in-law may not welcome me to their beds in this condition.”

Jilana said, “I shall make sure they do. Have no doubt. When you arrive in their chambers at midnight, they shall be ready to receive you.”

5

Jilana passed that night in tense anticipation. She found herself questioning her own decision to summon Vessa more than once but finally her sense of duty reaffirmed itself. If you don’t act, this family will die out like so many other dynasties have for want of progeny, she told herself. An empire is only as powerful as its current lieges, and without a suitable heir, the Burnt Empire would be devoured alive by its enemies.

And then there was Jarsun. Both kin and mortal enemy to her and all her family.

He was out there, somewhere, building his own unearthly powers and earthly assets, biding his time. She had no doubt of that. Sha’ant had warned her of the inevitability of their greatest enemy returning someday. For all she knew, once he heard of the absence of heirs, he might well turn up and lay claim to the Burning Throne. In point of fact, he had a legitimate right to the claim, and there might even be allies who would support him. To deny him would be to defy Krushan law, the bedrock of their society.

Vrath was the only one strong enough to stand against such a claim, but his own unwavering adherence to law might well see him come down on Jarsun’s side. The only reason Vrath had not brought up his name thus far was because he knew that if Jarsun took the Burning Throne, that would be the end of Jilana. Vrath’s loyalty to his late father extended to Jilana and he would give his life for her, but when it came to matters of law, Vrath could be vexingly adamant. His loyalty to his stepmother might make him avoid suggesting Jarsun’s name, but it would not extend to denying a possible claim. Which was all the more reason why she had felt the need to act now. And this had been her only remaining option.

She was still ruminating when Vessa returned to her chambers.

Jilana knew something was amiss the instant she saw his face. Her heart pounded. What had gone wrong? Still, she waited for him to speak and only when he remained silent for longer than she could bear did she ask aloud: “How went it, Vessa? Were the signs auspicious? Will she conceive an heir as desired?”

He did not meet her eyes as he responded. “The son she births will have the strength of a thousand elephants and the knowledge of as many seer-mages. He will experience good fortune, great progress, and be both valiant and wise.”

She felt a great burden lift from her heart. Smiling, she said, “That is wonderful news! Then the line of Krushan is saved.”

He went on in the same tone as if she had not spoken, “In time, he will sire many, many sons of his own. There will be no shortage of heirs in the Krushan line henceforth. If anything, there shall be too many.”

She laughed, thinking he was jesting. “Too many! There can never be too many heirs in a royal line.” Then she saw his face remained as rigid and unmoving and felt another twinge of concern. “All is well, is it not? The goal we desired has been accomplished successfully. Then why do I sense such ambivalence on your part, my son?”

He turned to look at her. She saw his eyes were sorrowful, angry and vexed. “Your daughter-in-law refused to look at me during the act. She kept her eyes shut. Clearly she found me ugly and undesirable.”

Jilana’s hand rose to her mouth, shocked. “But . . . what does that mean? She still conceived, did she not?”

He nodded once, grimly. “She did, Mother. Of that do not worry. But though she gave herself willingly, I was made to feel as an unwelcome intruder in her bed, and I fear that this will bode ill for the young prince.”

She swallowed, suddenly afraid. “But you said her son would be a great man, a great king, even . . .”

He looked at her silently for a moment longer, then said, “He will be that, and more, Mother. But he will also be born blind.”

Jilana staggered back, her hand to her chest. “Blind! But . . .” Her voice caught and she found herself unable to speak for a moment. With an effort she regained her voice. “But how can a blind boy become king? It is not possible under Krushan law. He must confront and overcome his enemies face to face in order to earn respect. Without the power of sight, he will be an object of ridicule and scorn!”

Vessa did not say anything.

Her mind in turmoil, Jilana thought of the choices available to her.

Finally, she spoke up decisively. “You must cohabit with my other daughter-in-law, Umber. Conceive a son upon her. I ask this of you by the bond that binds us together eternally.”

He nodded once. “I shall do as you ask, Mother. But prepare this one carefully. She must accept me willingly and with joy. The state of mind of the mother is vital to the creation of a suitable son.”

Jilana nodded. “It shall be done.”

6

But once again things did not go according to plan.

Umber reacted similarly to her sister. In fact, as the youngest and most sheltered, she was so deathly frightened at first sight of Vessa, she turned white as milk with shock. This time, Vessa was incensed and angered by her reaction. He told her, “Because you have turned white on seeing me, therefore your son shall be born white-skinned and unnatural among men. He shall have your beauty, but his skin shall be without hue, marking him out as unique in a world of wheat-colored and crow-black people. He shall be derisively known as Shvate, The White One, by all men.”

When Jilana heard this news, she was shaken to the core. Her magnificent plan to save the dynasty seemed to be worsening the situation rather than resolving it. Vessa told her, “Shvate the White shall in his turn sire five great offspring, who shall be famous and remembered to the end of human history. I have done my part, Mother. I cannot help it if your daughters-in-law were unwilling to cooperate and do their part as well.”

Jilana acknowledged his words. “What you say is undeniable, Vessa. But even this will not suffice. The Krushan line cannot be ruled by either a blind king or one whose appearance is certain to earn the derision and laughter of his people. After a suitable interval, you must father yet another son upon one of my daughters-in-law.”

He bowed his head. “I shall always serve you, Mother. But this time, prepare them well.”

But the third time, when Vessa went to Ember’s bedchamber, he found another woman in her place, bedecked in her garments and ornaments and lying in her bed. He knew this was not the queen he was to mate with, and yet this woman was wholly willing and eager to cohabit with him. Pleased at her reaction, the son of Jilana united with her with great pleasure and they both achieved mutual satisfaction in the act. After the night was over and daybreak came, he rose to leave her, saying, “Blessed One, I know that you are not Queen Ember but her maid servant. No matter. Henceforth, you shall no longer be a maid nor shall you serve anyone. You shall bear a great and virtuous son, who shall embody the aspect of Krushan itself upon this mortal plane. Indeed, though I sired him in body, in spirit he shall be Shima himself reborn, the lawful son of the Lord of Death and Law.” So saying, he disappeared.

The next day, Vessa came to visit Jilana again, and when she heard that her daughter-in-law had substituted her maid and that though the son born to the girl would be a great man and an incarnation of Shima himself, he would not be an eligible heir to the Burning Throne under Krushan law, she despaired of resolving the problem of progeny in this manner. She thanked Vessa profusely for he had done what had been asked of him.

Vessa then disappeared for the last time but before he left, he said these prophetic words:

“The seeds sown in the wombs of these Queens of the Krushan line could well yield a harvest of great heirs and descendants in this great House. But they may also be the seeds of a less desirable outcome. Be cautious in the extreme, Mother, for I fear that they may be the seeds of war.”

In the years to come, Vessa’s parting statement proved prophetic, for everything that followed thereafter in Krushan history would be the bitter harvest reaped from those same seeds, culminating ultimately in the greatest war of all time, one terrible enough to almost entirely wipe out the entire Krushan race from the face of Arthaloka, and shatter not just an empire, but a continent.

©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 Lady of Shalott

Carrie Vaughn | 4200 words

As far as she could remember, the Lady had never been outside the tower. She might have been born here. She assumed she had been born, but maybe not. Maybe she just appeared, her complete adult self, flowing red hair and porcelain skin, dressed in a gown of blue trimmed with gold, with no memory of anything outside these rounded walls.

All day, every day, she wove a tapestry set on a loom against the wall. She might have been weaving forever, and she didn’t know if she would ever finish. The cloth was filled with pictures: ivy climbing up an old stone wall, willows dripping into rivers, tangled rose vines, flocks of birds soaring in a blue sky. At least, she thought that was what she was making. She could only shape what her mind told her, not what she saw.

She knew one thing for certain, as firmly as she knew she had bones inside her skin and flesh: She must not look out the window set in the wall of her tower. She must never look outside, because that was her curse.

And what would happen if she looked out? She didn’t know that either.

• • • •

A knight must do good.

Make a name for himself by doing good, by going on quests and such. Succoring the weak. Slaying monsters. Or all of them at once, if the opportunity presented itself.

Sir Lancelot found a task that might encompass all the fame and virtue he could wish for. If only he could be clear as to what this was actually about.

“A curse, you say?”

“On the tower,” the lowly swineherd replied, pointing.

“That tower there?” Lancelot asked, also pointing.

“Aye, that’s the one.”

Across the vale, past a river, down a glen, and nestled in the middle of a dense copse, the tall stone edifice stretched straight up. The top was crenellated, and a single window gazed out. The space was black, nothing visible within. He hoped there might be a maiden looking out, brushing her hair while humming with a sweet voice.

He had seen the tower from the road. It looked promising, so he asked around. Nobody seemed to know anything about the storm-gray tower, except that it was cursed.

“Does anyone go there?” Lancelot asked.

The swineherd scowled. “No. It’s cursed.” The grubby man looked the knight up and down, squinting, appraising. Encased in shining armor, Lancelot sat mounted on a powerful white steed, great sword secured to the saddle, all bedecked in bright colors and heraldry, but the fellow didn’t seem very impressed. Well, after all, this was the road to Camelot. Knights passed this way all the time.

“How long has that tower stood there? And who built it? What banner does it fly? What manner of folk travel to and from it? Are they armed?”

Clearly overwhelmed, the swineherd gaped at him.

“Then simply tell me this: How many men guard the tower?”

“None, sir!” the swineherd declared. “There’s just a maiden lives there, but she’s cursed!”

The knight brightened. “A maiden? Then she is a prisoner. I must rescue her and lift the curse!”

The swineherd gaped at him again and said, “I need to be going, sir.”

“Right then! I thank you!”

The grubby man trundled off, walking stick digging into the dirt along the side of the road. There were no pigs in sight.

• • • •

Lancelot could not find anyone who knew the manner of this curse, so he assumed it was the usual: A witch, envious of her beauty, had locked the maiden away until some true knight might rescue her. This was going to be a good day, he decided.

• • • •

The silk thread she wove with had always been there, piled in a basket by the loom. Sometimes in the evening, when the sun no longer came into her chamber, and her eyes grew too weary for weaving, she’d light her lanterns and sort the thread into colors and thicknesses, imagining what pictures she might make of them, what scenes they’d be best for. Then she’d gather them all up and sort them again, seeing different scenes and shapes this time. She’d stroke the fibers, brush the skeins along her cheek. They felt so rich.

Only rarely did she wonder where the thread came from and why she never seemed to run out, no matter how much she used or how long and ornate the tapestry became. She had never taken the whole thing down to measure it—the finished length of it was rolled up on the loom’s cloth beam, waiting. The rolled cloth seemed quite thick. Surely she’d woven enough and could finish—bind off the edge, pull it down, consider the whole of what she’d made.

But she never did. She kept weaving because it was all she had. She might throw all her thread out the window just to see what happened, but she never did that either, because doing so would require going to the window, and she did not dare look out. As long as there was always thread in her basket, she would keep on. She hummed to herself sometimes, but apart from that, all she ever heard were sounds that came in through the window. A breeze, maybe. Distant thunder. The music that she knew came from birds. She had seen a bird once—it flew in through the window and perched at the top of her loom. The drab little thing had brown streaked feathers and a black eye. But it made such beautiful sounds, warbling and trilling through its tiny beak. It only stayed for a minute or two, hopping back and forth, fluttering its wings, obviously distressed. When it finally took off and swooped out the window, she almost watched it go, almost looked out to see the sky that must be there. But she did not.

One morning, a new sound came from outside the window, something she had never heard before, and she could call up no image in her mind to match it. It was like the sound when she dropped a bobbin on the floor, wood and stone crashing together, but much louder. Like pigeons clambering on the roof. Like banging on a rug to clean it. Rhythmic, loud, like thunder but going on and on. And there was shouting. There were voices. Other voices, not hers. Outside the window.

She couldn’t ignore it, and she couldn’t look out.

It was the curse coming to life, and she curled up on her pallet with her arms around her ears, trying to block out the noise, wondering what she’d done wrong—she hadn’t looked out, not even once, not even to see the sky.

Once, she tried to cover the window to curb her fear that she might accidentally steal a glimpse. It was difficult, attempting to peg a blanket from her bed to the stone, while also not, again and always, looking out the window. She managed it somehow, but the air in the room grew quickly stuffy and smoky. With the sunlight blocked, she only had lanterns, and they filled her chamber with fumes. She had to leave the window open or suffocate.

Truly, she was cursed to be trapped here without knowing why. She wondered if she had angered someone, but she couldn’t remember who. She couldn’t remember how it had begun.

The noise stopped at dusk, but started again in the morning. When she tried to weave, her hands shook with every beat and banging. She left the loom to wash her face and brush her hair, to distract herself.

She had a mirror stored in the same little box where she kept her brush and knife and other essentials. The circle of polished bronze on a filigree handle showed her pink lips and blue eyes, locks of red hair framing her face. She did not know if she was pretty or not, because she had nothing to compare to. Moreover, she wasn’t entirely sure why being pretty was so important, but she thought it must be, or she would not have a mirror.

The mirror reflected back anything, which was how she got the idea that maybe she could hold it up to the window, then look at the mirror and not out the window.

Hunkering down, keeping her face and eyes well below the sill, she held the mirror up. Angling it back and forth, she tried to alight on some discernible image. Blinded herself for a moment by flashing a bit of sun into her eyes. But then, finally, she resolved a picture of blue sky and clouds. They must be clouds, the white smears and shapes. She angled the mirror again, panning it down, and saw trees. She knew all this, as if she must have spent some time outside the tower at some point. A great green carpet standing on tall posts of living wood. Trees, yes.

And then she saw men cutting down the trees. That was the noise, sawing and chopping with axes, the crashing as a tree fell through its fellows, ripping branches as it went. She couldn’t hear the words they shouted. Instructions, maybe. Warnings.

There were so many people, she was afraid. Who were they, what did they want, what were they doing to her tower, and did they know she was cursed? They were clearing a wide space and using the fallen lumber to build—ladders, maybe? Scaffolding? Whatever it was, a latticework of wood was taking shape below her.

She moved the mirror again, and the reflection showed her a new picture: a figure standing apart from the others, mounted on a pure white horse, observing. He was silver, his hair blond and gleaming gold in the sun. His jaw was square, his bearing noble.

A knight in armor she thought he must be, and he was beautiful. He was the moon and sun. Someone nearby spoke; he turned to the voice and smiled. She fell in love with him, just like that, without warning, without choice, without hope.

Now she truly saw the depth of her curse.

• • • •

When Lancelot first went to the tower, he left his steed behind and crept forward carefully, sword in hand, waiting for the demons or ogres who must be guarding it. Nothing opposed him. The place might have been abandoned.

He shouted a hail up to the single window, but his voice fell flat, absorbed by the forest, and a chill went up his spine. Of course someone lived in the tower, how could they not? An abandoned tower would have been crumbling and covered in ivy. There would be ghosts and creatures nesting amid the broken stones. This was a perfectly serviceable tower. Only it was not attached to any castle, and he had no way of getting inside.

He must reach that window and rescue the maiden. And so he went to Camelot, to the chief castle builder, who suggested constructing a scaffold to reach that height.

It didn’t make quite as good a story, a knight seeking help from a castle builder, but he only had to think of that maiden trapped in the tower. He would do anything to help her, and so he did. Hired the castle builder, brought in all the workers and tools required, and got to work. The scaffold would be finished in a week, and then he could simply climb to the top and look within.

“But sir, my lord,” the chief castle builder said to him on the first day. “What of the curse?”

“Ah yes, the curse,” Lancelot agreed. “What of it?”

“The locals have been telling the men stories of the maiden in the tower, and of the curse laid upon her.”

“Do they say what the curse is? What will happen because of it?”

“Well, no . . .”

“Then that is why I must go up there.” He smiled at the window in the tower with great anticipation. “To rescue the maiden. That is her curse, that she is trapped in the tower.”

The chief castle builder furrowed his brow. “Sir, my lord—it is my impression that there is more to it, that she is perhaps trapped in the tower because she is the curse.”

Lancelot frowned. “How so?”

“Well, no one seems to know. My lord.”

“I’m sure this has all been blown entirely out of proportion.”

“You’re probably right, my lord.” The man went away to supervise the clearing of the forest and the raising of the next level of scaffold.

• • • •

The Lady went into a panic. According to her mirror, the workmen below had built a third level on the scaffold. They were getting closer, and she wasn’t entirely sure what would happen when they reached her. She knew, absolutely, that she should not look outside the window. But what happened if the outside came in?

“No no no!” she muttered, putting the mirror away and pacing around her little room, tugging at her hair. Maybe they didn’t know about the curse. Maybe they didn’t realize the danger of what they were doing.

She ought to send a message. Maybe scrawled on a scrap of paper secured to the leg of a pigeon. A flaming arrow. However, any message she sent would require looking out the window to deliver it. This was terrible.

Her tapestry hung on its loom, showing mountains and forests blending into a scene of ducks flying above a silver lake, or how she imagined such things might look if she could remember seeing them. For the first time ever her heart ached, thinking she might never get to complete the tapestry, that she might never see it finished. Even though she still couldn’t imagine what she might do with it when it was finished. If it ever was.

She could send them a message. Find some way to tell that beautiful knight with his silver armor to stop building, to save them all. Maybe she could even find a way to tell him how much she loved him. Such a thing was absurd—he’d never even seen her. He would think she was mad, and maybe she was. But she had to try, and if she was going to send a message anyway, she ought to tell him.

Choosing several skeins of yarn and thread, she set up a makeshift loom, tying down the threads of her warp, stretching the warp and securing it to a weighted basket. This would be a band, like a girdle, with words crafted upon it: Stop, I am cursed, you must stop or we are all doomed. (I love you I love you I love you!)

She had to weave faster than she ever had, but the weaving also had to be clean and neat, so they could read the words she stitched. She had to do it before the scaffold grew any higher.

• • • •

By the third day the scaffold was more than halfway up the tower, and Lancelot knew that very soon he’d be looking through the window. The anticipation was almost more than he could bear. Who was this maiden, and what had she suffered?

To pass the time, he rode to various settlements in the area, searching for more news about the tower and its curse. No one knew the details. But everyone was sure there was a curse, and that it was no doubt terrible.

This lack of information was frustrating.

In the middle of the fourth day, an object sailed out of the window. He’d left his horse picketed some ways off and was walking a circuit of the tower once again, searching for any detail he might have missed, when the thing fluttered down like a wounded bird. He was in just the right spot to catch it.

It was a woven band made of silk, slippery in his hand. The kind of favor a lady might tie around his arm before he rode in a tournament. It was black and red with hints of gold, a swirling pattern running through it, odd swoops and curls that drew the eye but that he could not follow. It might have been runes, it might have been some spell woven in arcane patterns. Between the colors and strange shapes, the thing hurt his eyes. The pattern seemed to writhe of its own accord.

It might have been a plea for help.

This must have been the meaning, surely. The maiden was there in the tower, she was real, and he would see her soon. This token she’d sent him was an omen, a sign of hope. Lancelot’s heart soared. Only one more day, perhaps less.

• • • •

They did not stop building the scaffold, and the knight gazed up at her window—as she saw in her mirror—with such an expression of longing and assurance that her heart nearly gave out. She swooned, falling back upon her pallet. Oh, how she loved him! He must be the noblest knight in all the world!

And she wept, because she did not know what would happen next, and she was terribly afraid.

Her unfinished tapestry looked down on her, bright colors mixed with pale, swirls and patterns that she once thought made a picture, even a blurred one, of the world she could never see—what she thought she might see if she ever looked out the window. Now she saw that the picture she had woven was chaos, all abstraction: shapes and shadows, meaningless splashes of clashing color. The cloth now seemed to expand, mocking her, filling the room with the beautiful and terrible truth of her life, of her curse: None of it was real, and none of it mattered.

Only he mattered. The knight. He was perfect.

If she was cursed anyway, if the workmen and the scaffold came relentlessly closer, if they were so determined to ruin her by disrupting that boundary that encapsulated her life—why then, she would look out. She would see the knight with her own eyes and know the truth before the curse—whatever it was, whatever doom it held for her—came to pass.

First, though, she tore the tapestry from the loom, ripped apart every careful knot she’d made, sliced through it with her knife until the chamber was covered with a flurry of wool and silk. Fiber flew everywhere, a choking mess of it that made her laugh. The true worth of all her work, all this time, however much time it was. Colored bits of thread flashed as they floated through the air, catching bits of sunlight.

Then she fell to the floor and crawled. Her goal: the stone ledge of the window. The space within its arcing frame shone blindingly, the sun coming directly at her. She reached up, put her hands on the ledge. Gripped hard, pulled herself up, and looked out.

Where the images in the bronze mirror were blurry, wavering, uncertain, what she saw directly with her eyes was clear and sharp. The pale naked wood of the scaffolding, the brown and green tunics of the men working, passing to and fro across the newly made clearing around the tower. The brilliant blue of the sky—the blue thread she had been using to make skies was dull in comparison.

She passed over all this quickly, wanting only to see one thing, one solitary image: the knight in armor. He was tall; he was handsome. He stood with hands on hips, gazing upward. His smile was uplifting; his eyes shone with depth. She could see rivets and fluting in the steel across his chest and shoulders that she couldn’t see before.

Leaning on the window ledge, she gazed her fill of him.

She had a hope, for just a moment, that nothing was going to happen. The curse wasn’t real, and she wouldn’t be punished in any way for looking, as she always believed she would be. She leaned out the window to feel the sun on her face, a fresh breeze on her skin. She smiled, and then she laughed, because the world was beautiful and she was free.

The knight saw her and raised a hand in salute. She started to wave back.

That was when the skin of her hands split and red flesh spilled out in a ropey mass, dripping blood.

An earthquake rocked the land, shaking the tower, rattling stones from the walls above her. Clouds gathered, blocking the sun, turning day to night. And she thought—ah, so this is the curse. So this is what happens if I look out the window.

And the monster that burst out of her swallowed the trappings of her mortal self.

• • • •

He saw her, and she was lovely. Because of course she was, being a maiden in a tower in need of rescue.

She waved at him, laughing, and his heart sang. This was a worthy maiden. Perhaps this was fate, and they were meant to be together. He cupped his hands and started to shout at her, to ask how she fared and assure her that all would be well—

And then things got very confusing very quickly.

The maiden vanished. Or something. She was, apparently, instantly replaced by a spray of blood and a glabrous mass of dripping tentacles, writhing out from the window as if reaching for the sky itself. They curled and gripped like fingers around the edge of the window and ripped, tossing the stones away. The tower cracked like a snail’s shell, and a massive, pulsing body oozed out. The thing was far larger than ought to have been contained by the tower that had until recently stood there.

It smelled of swamp and despair.

The chief castle builder came up to Lancelot, shoulders slumped, a defeated look in his eye. His men were running, screaming in terror. One of the tentacles grabbed one of the workers and thrust the poor screaming soul into what was presumably a mouth. It wasn’t entirely clear.

“I told you,” the chief castle builder said tiredly. “Cursed.”

“Huh,” Lancelot replied.

Well, he was here to either rescue maidens or slay monsters. He could no longer attempt the former, but at least he still had the latter. He drew his sword, which would have glinted nobly in the sun, but undulating black clouds had roiled in from every horizon and now covered the sun utterly. An unbreakable darkness fell upon the land.

Lancelot wanted to drop his weapon and weep uncontrollably, but that just wouldn’t do. He was a knight. Of Camelot. And he was here to slay monsters. This encounter would be legendary.

He gave his sword a swing, and it whistled as it sliced the air. He squared his shoulders, set his jaw, and knew that this was what he’d been born for.

One of the dozen—three dozen? three hundred?—gray and veined tentacles came for him, cracking like a whip, curling as if weightless, ready to snatch him and squeeze until he popped. But Lancelot was ready. With a quick lateral cut and a slash down, he separated the tip of the offending limb from the rest of it, and stabbed it where it lay writhing on the ground. The monster groaned, a bone-leeching noise that rattled the very earth. Thunder and lightning rocked the air continuously.

The next awful limb attacked before he could catch his breath, and he dispatched this one as well. His heart was proud, his arm strong, and his sword true. He turned to the panic that had erupted throughout the clearing.

“Men! Draw weapons! To me, to me!”

But these were workmen, not knights and warriors. Not a trained soldier among them. These were men who might pick up a pitchfork to defend a homestead from marauders, but they were not his vassals to call to some greater need of war.

Still, at his voice they paused at the edge of incipient madness. They looked at their hands and saw their tools, looked at Lancelot and saw his sword. And they saw what might be possible. They raised a cheer and turned to face the monster that was now sprawling over a great swath of countryside.

For a while they rallied. Axes, saws, awls, and hammers in hand, the workmen formed a line, slashing and stabbing until the thing’s fetid blood soaked the ground. The shattered stone of the tower seemed to melt in the acid ooze of it. More tentacles grew to replace the old, but for a time they seemed to keep ahead of the onslaught, and drove back the creature from whence it came. They learned to brace against its howls and screams. They somehow grew accustomed to the stink of its slime.

But the thing had an eye. A great, muddy, golden eye. And when it opened and turned its gimlet gaze upon him with all the power of its unholy origin—that was when Lancelot finally dropped his sword and screamed.

And then it was over. All of it.

©2016 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC. Originally published in Swords v. Cthulhu, edited by Jesse Bullington and Molly Tanzer.  Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Vaughn’s latest novels include the post-apocalyptic murder mystery, Bannerless, winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, and its sequel, The Wild Dead. She wrote the New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty, along with several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, and upwards of 80 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at carrievaughn.com.

A Conch-Shell’s Notes

Shweta Adhyam | 2572 words

Part I: Kwa

This is the story of a conch-shell, and the man who answered its call to adventure.

The powerful and mysterious conch resided in a seaside temple on the outskirts of Peacetown. Whenever a resident of the town found themselves at life’s crossroads, wondering which path to take, notes from the conch-shell sounded in their ears and sang of what lay ahead in each direction.

When danger lay in the town’s future, it called one of its young men, bright of mind and clean of limb, to fight it.

That evening, it sounded in the ears of Kwa, a citrus-seller who was piling fruit upon fruit into neat pyramids, turning the best faces outwards. It was good but tedious work, a good but tedious profession, and it would earn him a good but tedious life.

Leave it all, Kwa, rang the conch-shell in his ear, you have a choice! In seven years, a terrible dragon will attack Peacetown. Come with me and I will teach you to beat him before he even has the idea. You will survive the encounter intact, and return home a hero, enormously rich. Or stay: You will marry and have a child within a year, and work in this shop until your dying day.

Kwa did want a wife and children, but not so soon. And how much more pleasant family life would be if he were wealthy Kwa the Hero, rather than barely-scraping-by Kwa the Fruit-Seller!

Kwa walked out of his shop. First he went to see the woman he loved, to ask her to wait for him. As steady and loyal as she was beautiful, she promised, and so he set off.

It was a long and difficult road Kwa had to walk, but the conch-shell was there at every step.

Creep past the giant sleeping spider, or fight it for its magical sword? It will be perilous, but not fatal. He chose to fight, breaking a couple of ribs, but gaining the sword.

A wizard lives here. Convince him to give you some spells, or not? It will be difficult, but not impossible. He chose to barter with the wizard, leaving with spells of fire and wind and earth and water, and minus his fondest childhood memories.

Here is the dragon’s lair. Use the wizard’s spells to close the mouth of its cave, or challenge it to a fight? Closing the cave meant no treasure, so Kwa chose the deadly battle. He was burned and torn and broken, but he slew the dragon.

Using the last of the wizard’s spells to transport the dragon’s vast hoard, he went back to Peacetown. Having had seven years of adventure, Kwa eagerly anticipated a warm home, a loving wife, charming children.

When he set foot in Peacetown, the mayor stood ready to greet him with a welcome troupe. There was great pomp and celebration, for the conch-shell had sung of Kwa’s exploits to every citizen. But nowhere in the crowds was the one face Kwa was looking for.

To cap off the celebrations, the mayor had arranged a thanks-giving ritual for the conch-shell at its temple. The shell would be decorated, hymns would be sung in its praise, and a tender coconut sacrificed to it. At the temple, the mayor called to his wife; she came followed by her two children—and the sight of her drove a sharp pain through Kwa’s heart, for she was none other than his beloved, who had not, in fact, waited for him.

Part II: Var

Or perhaps it is the story of that shell, and the man who did not answer its call.

That evening, just before it approached Kwa, the shell sounded in the ears of Var, a seller of pots and pans in the same market. But Var was thinking of Shai, the coconut-seller’s daughter, luminescent, with slender hands that thwacked the tops off coconuts with a sharp curved blade, and a smile that caused the stars to pale in comparison. There was none of the simpering coquette about her, the kind that turned into a whiny, nagging harridan after marriage. Var did not even hear the shell’s grand promises, and his choice was made by default.

Days later, as Var gathered courage to ask Shai’s father for permission to marry her, the conch-shell sounded in his ears again and this time he listened: Shai’s father will be pleased with you, but cannot give you much dowry. The wealthy timber-merchant’s daughter though, is plain and perhaps a couple of years past marriageable age. You will have money troubles soon and a substantial dowry will help.

This was an easy choice for Var to make and within a couple of months, he was married to Shai.

The shop’s fortunes took a downturn almost immediately after. A competitor set up right opposite, and began selling for half Var’s prices. When Var confronted him, the man had no qualms admitting he intended to drive Var out of business and then hike prices.

Expose him to the townspeople, said the conch-shell. It will be a dirty fight, but you will win. Or earn more goodwill by offering to mend dents and holes in your wares at no charge.

Var chose the latter. There was an uptick of customers, enough to keep the shop going, but not much more.

Then one day, the town wastrel came to him asking for a whole set of pots and pans on credit. An inheritance was due him, he said, promising to pay as soon as it came.

This is true, said the conch-shell, but others will start asking for credit if you agree. Not all will pay up, and I cannot advise you on each one.

Kind Var chose to extend the man credit. Var’s shop soared in popularity, but nearly everyone asked for credit. Var had to judiciously choose whom to patronise and whom to let down gently, a tiring task that he carried out for months.

Until a caravan of wealthy merchants arrived to trade in Peacetown. Hearing nothing but good about Var, his wares and his service, they chose to trade with him rather than his competitor. Two years after his troubles began, Var’s fortunes changed. The contracts he signed would keep him comfortable for the foreseeable future.

Over the next four years, he ensured his business ran like a well-oiled cart, until he no longer had to devote much energy to it. He decided it was only fair to enter public service, to give some happiness back to the town.

Thus it was that, later that year, Var was elected mayor of Peacetown.

Part III: Shai

Or yet perhaps, it is the story of that shell, and a woman.

Shai was up a coconut tree in her harness, taking in the blue skies, and the green treetops, and the foamy sea some distance away, when Kwa came to see her. She climbed down, thrilled to see her love so unexpectedly. But when she heard his news, her heart shrank in fear. And rightly so, for when he asked if she would wait, the conch-shell said: Kwa will be gone for many years. You will not be able to avoid marriage that long. If you promise, you will be lying. But standing there, in Kwa’s arms, looking into his brown eyes, Shai could not believe that. They had made so many promises to each other standing in this very grove, it would be traitorous not to make this one. She would wait. She had to. So she held him close, and kissed him, and made her promises.

Some days later, when her father gave Var permission to court her, Shai was taken aback. Their shops were close, she had spoken to him a bit, they had shared polite platitudes, but the conch-shell had not told her he was interested. Var seemed a little oblivious, but a good man, hard-working and not unattractive. Indeed, Kwa was the only good reason she had to refuse him, and she had no answer when her father asked where this Kwa was and why he had not yet asked for her hand. So she agreed to walk an hour with Var every afternoon before their shops opened, hoping she could delay an actual wedding until she thought up a way out of it.

It had been so different with Kwa. They had run into each other at temple festivals, caught the other’s eye, met in the coconut groves when Shai went to harvest the fruit. Let his shop turn a profit, Kwa said, and he would speak to Shai’s father. But that never happened, and here, after twenty days of walking together, Var was proposing.

What was she to do besides pursue Kwa on the road? He was a whole month ahead of her, and a woman travelling alone would be a target for all sorts of unsavoury characters. Shai was out of ideas.

You can’t refuse Var after walking with him for nearly a month, the conch-shell said. And besides, Kwa will be a different person when he returns. He will remember all your charms and none of your faults, so that after a week of marriage, he will tire of you. And if you turn Var down now, no other man will waste his time.

Shai cried bitterly that night and a month later, she and Var were married.

• • • •

Every morning, Shai woke early, dusted the shop and their house, just above; did the previous day’s dishes; shopped for vegetables, cut them and prepared a hot lunch; washed clothes and prepared dinner before Var returned home for the night.

When money started becoming scarce, the conch-shell told her: You will need to economise. Your fortunes will turn, but only if the shop is still in business two years from now.

But they already lived a sparse life. Shai could not see where to cut expenses.

Halve your vegetables, eat more rice.

The next day, Shai only bought half the quantity of vegetables. She served Var his half-portion for lunch, and the conch-shell came to her: What are you doing? Var’s pleasant nature is the only thing keeping whatever customers he still has. If he thinks you are suffering, he will be so demoralised, that famous pleasantness will vanish.

But Shai persisted, for she had just learnt she was pregnant, and she needed the nutrition. Sure enough, the shop’s fortunes took a further dive. On the tenth day, Shai had to dip into savings even to buy their half-serving of vegetables. This time, she served it all to Var.

He seemed to regain some energy, for a day later he came up with the mending service, and there was a little more money.

Some months later, the conch said: The baby is the wrong way around, Shai. Spend the next weeks on your hands and knees so it’ll turn, or you won’t live through it.

Terrified, Shai complied, bending while doing the dishes and cooking, mopping the floor on her knees. It was enormously uncomfortable, but fear carried her through it.

She delivered a beautiful baby girl—and lived.

Only to be told two months later, You’re pregnant again. If it isn’t a boy, Var will lose some of his patience with you. Avoid coconut for the rest of your term to ensure a son.

Shai could not believe this. Var loved her. He told her so, often. And coconut was an essential ingredient, food would be flat and tasteless without it. How could she eat like that for months; how could she expect Var to?

And yet, no matter how unthinkable, everything the conch-shell had predicted had come true. And that was its function, was it not? That was its divinity, its reason for existence.

And because she had learnt her lesson about imposing her difficulties upon her husband, Shai doubled her cooking, making different meals for herself. When the baby came, Shai was thinner, emaciated, her cheeks hollow, her eyes dull, but it was worth it, for he was a boy.

• • • •

When Var announced his run for mayor, Shai had the busiest time of her life. With two small children, she entertained people at their house night and day, as Var and his friends planned and campaigned. Her chores increased four-fold, even with hired help. Thankfully it paid off.

Soon after, the day came when the conch-shell announced Kwa’s return to Peacetown. Shai hoped and prayed that he had met someone else, that he would not care that she was married, that he would somehow understand. She did not go to the celebrations, there was time enough for matters to come to head at the temple.

And indeed, when Kwa saw Shai, his face fell. Shai could see his heart break, his dreams shatter.

Kwa’s strife was not lost upon Var either. “What is it, sir?”

The weight of Var’s voice brought a hush upon the gathered crowd. A sob breaking through his hard-kept composure, Kwa told Var all.

“I slew a dragon for you, Shai. For us. And how long did your promise last, a whole two months?”

Var turned to her in surprise and disappointment. “Why did you not tell me of Kwa when I began to court you, Shai?”

“The—the conch-shell said I had to marry you—”

“Had to?” interrupted Var. “The conch-shell never says had to. It merely lays out options.”

Shai’s brows furrowed, her voice pitched higher, as she panicked trying to remember the shell’s exact words. “It said Kwa would not want me after his adventures—”

“And yet, here I am to contradict that,” said Kwa. “Are you saying the conch-shell lied to you?”

Shai’s eyes filled with tears. Any explanation of the dire alternatives foreseen by the shell, anything more she said, would seem weak and whiny, and already they did not care to listen. Not Kwa for whom she had shed so many tears; not Var for whom she had done so much. How could anyone who knew . . .

. . . And then something struck her, something that would explain the bewilderment on their faces.

They didn’t know. The conch-shell had not told them.

Shai fingered the curved blade for the coconut-sacrifice hanging at her waist. The conch divined what was in her mind and said, in alarm: I only spoke the truth; it’s not my fault it was unpleasant!

Had it, though? Every citizen had heard of Kwa’s victories over the wizard and the dragon, of Var’s goodness and morality while conducting business. But had Var heard anything of her sacrifices during their marriage? Or Kwa of her torment while Var courted her? The conch-shell was silent and Shai had her answer. That was it, wasn’t it? It sang of the men’s work, their sacrifices, but not of the women’s. Shai hefted the blade.

You’ll be cast out of society! Out of family!

She would just have to trust to the coconut groves then. And she had to hurry, before the shell found someone to stop her.

Shai dropped a quick kiss on each of her children’s heads, all the explanation, all the farewell, she could afford. She lifted her blade high, and—

—with a mighty heave and a cry that reverberated through the small stone chamber—

brought it down upon the conch-shell, shattering it into a thousand pieces.

©2019 by Shweta Adhyam.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shweta is an Indian-American writer of speculative fiction. In her professional past, she has been an Astronomy grad student, actuary, and data analyst. In her personal life, she lives with ADHD, and parents an autistic child. She spent a childhood immersed in Hindu/Indian-subcontinent mythology, and deals with adulting by writing in it.

Shweta was part of Clarion West’s class of 2017, and can be found on the web at www.shweta-adhyam.com and on Twitter as @shweta_adhyam.

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

The Speed of Belief

Robert Reed | 20883 words

1

Water dreamed of flowing downhill, and despite their bluster and brains, humans were nothing but fancy water.

That robust, endlessly useful lesson came early. Rococo was growing up on a colony world undergoing the final stages of terraforming. Man-brewed storms were transforming the barren highlands, and knowing where the new rivers would rise, the boy would find high ridges where he could watch the churning, muck-infused flows. Majestic violence was a reliable pleasure, and he adored the painful rich stink of alien rock being torn apart. But most of all, Rococo loved his own wild panic, and standing where everybody could see him, he couldn’t help but dance along with the trembling world.

Strangers warned the boy to be smart and step back. Friends knew that he was quite smart, and so they begged him to be more careful, please. But Rococo’s parents didn’t trust his brains or his common sense, and that’s why they simply banned their son from wandering the wastelands alone. But of course rules were nothing but treaties, and every treaty was just words wrapped around flaws. A charming lad could always convince some old fool to go with him, and then through one clever trick or another, he would slip away to do just what he wanted.

Then one day a mountainside collapsed. Rococo was prancing joyously, and then with no warning, rock and flood swallowed him. Rancid salty mud killed the body in every little way. Oxygen metabolisms shut down. His bioceramic brain retreated inside itself. Limbs were torn off, his chest was gored, and the shattered head was finally buried under a young river delta. Blind and helpless, that remarkable mind had little choice but to consider its own nature. And that’s when Rococo began to appreciate how he was being carried through life by some very simple urges. Curiosity, for instance. That was a drug forcing him to find out what would happen next. He also had an instinctive love for mayhem, his senses coming alive only when the world turned wild. And there was always satisfaction in doing what nobody else would try, which was evidence that smug pride was the most useless, marvelous force in the Universe.

Modern humans had engineered minds wrapped inside ageless, nearly immortal flesh. But their flesh was still mostly water. Water was a sanctuary for the ancient emotions. Love and lust, status and revenge. Those were the simple dictates in every person’s actions. Furthermore, emotion had a pathological need to string the Universe into a personal narrative. Every person lived within a story. That tale was adaptable and selfish, and it worked best if it served the soul’s needs. No matter how small, every journey demanded purpose. Just rising from the chair and crossing the room involved planning and a successful arrival. But where the average person was happy with small successes, Rococo wanted more. That’s what he decided sixty thousand years ago. Robots and family dogs were yanking his corpse out of the river mud, and his parents were weeping over and screaming at the mummified face, and AI doctors preparing to heal him completely. But the boy inside witnessed none of that drama. He was a calm soul reveling in his mighty ambitions, an epiphany born inside a temporary grave. And now he understood that he would risk anything for just the thin chance of being part of history.

• • • •

“People don’t dream,” Rococo began, as a joke and not as a joke. He felt as if he believed every word, declaring, “It’s our water that dreams, and that’s what makes us simple. Solvents are uncomplicated and transparent. Water or liquid methane, sulfuric acid or supercritical carbon dioxide. Every species is compelled by the fantasies of its broth.”

Pausing, he tried to gauge his audience’s reaction.

Silent indifference held sway.

“And nobody is better suited than me when it comes to deciphering what an organism believes,” he continued. “Knowing the beast across the table: That’s what makes the premier diplomat. Which isn’t my only skill, no. But it’s a talent, and I’m not an animal that keeps quiet about his talents. Particularly when I’m walking beside the Ship’s most famous exobiologist.”

These were old boasts, but Rococo had never made them sound so ludicrously grand. He wanted to push the issue this morning. Eight days after their vault landed in the high country, and seven days into a desperate march across this lovely, half-dead wilderness, he was hungry for energy. Rococo wanted to kindle scorn or mocking laughter and maybe an exchange of insults. Big emotions would give everyone enough fire to keep them distracted. The question was: How would Mere react to his inspired nonsense about dreams?

Two more steps, and then the tiny woman stopped walking. Staring at the horizon, not at him, she said nothing. A native bug landed on her head and then flew away again, and she said nothing. They had a destination and a timetable, but it was more important to make everyone wait. Then, as if addressing the horizon, she said, “Water doesn’t dream, and only an idiot would think so.”

Diplomats could smile on command—either a human grin or some disarming, alien-inspired expression. But Rococo never lost sight of ultimate destinations. Whatever happened, he wanted to become Mere’s lover, and at this point in the negotiations, smiles would diminish his odds. Frictions were essential, and that’s why he bristled. “Don’t try to insult me,” he warned. “I’ve destroyed worlds because someone insulted me.”

Not true, although he had seen a few worlds die.

Mere finally looked at him. “Have I ever told you?” she asked. “You’re a silly, pretentious man, and you have no deep understanding of any creature besides your ridiculous, self-important self.”

A good swing. He granted her that much.

“But simple ideas are pushing us,” he maintained. “They shove us across worlds and through the aeons. You’ve seen it, Mere. More than anyone, you’ve experienced what ideas do to the tiny soul. Yet you still won’t concede the truth. That I know something useful. Because you’re stale and stubborn and full of pride. The ancient, wondrous Mere.”

The woman’s gaze returned to the horizon. Rugged, ice-clad mountains rose into the dusty sky. A valley was resting at the mountains’ feet, and all of that ground should have been the darkest blue-black. But the valley was mostly gray, the air stinking of cinders more than life, and knowing the tragic reasons why, a weaker soul might have sat down and quit.

But there weren’t any weaklings in this group.

Mere had a starved slip of a body that never grew tired, and she had big lovely eyes that looked human and looked alien, managing the trick inside the same glance. The ageless lady had endured the most spectacular life: Raised by extinct, deeply peculiar aliens, she carried a unique outlook toward the Universe. And later, having survived the long, unlikely voyage to the Great Ship, she became the captains’ favorite instrument to investigate the most alien worlds.

Rococo also had considerable experience with every sort of creatures. He was the Ship’s first diplomat, after all. And like a lot of observers, he held the opinion that despite being human, Mere was a species of One.

They didn’t have time to stand, yet the woman stood. For another precious minute, nobody moved. Then Mere finally turned, looking at Rococo when she said, “Water doesn’t dream, you idiot. It’s the salt.”

“The salt?”

“Water’s the container. Ions passing across borders. That’s where our simple lives come from. We’re walking, talking salt.”

Ah. She was teasing him.

Rococo’s laugh was honest, but he cut it short for effect.

Then the captivating woman turned to the third person in their ranks. “Amund, what do you think? Is it water that dreams, or is it salt?”

Amund wasn’t immortal. A luddy by birth and by outlook, he rarely showed any patience for these long debates.

Until now.

The man turned serious. Hands opened and then closed, forming fists. The aging face turned harsh, but the eyes were soft. “You’ve got your shit backward,” the luddy stated. “There’s just one dream. Water and salt, people and rivers. And all of us obey the dream.”

There was no bioceramic brain inside him, just water and salt, and Amund had come here for one exceptionally awful reason. Except the reason had gone missing, and regardless of what happened to his ancient companions, he was certain to die without fulfilling his purpose.

Three people traveling across a half-dead world.

How could anything so simple become so complicated?

• • • •

Wildfires had remade the land. Combustive wildfires, not nuclear blasts. At least not here. But the dense native air was heavily oxygenated, and the bedrock had been scorched clean of its forests and soil. Which made the walking easier, yes. Just another two days, plus the usual delays for Amund’s fatigue, and they finally reached the valley and the river. Only it wasn’t the river they would have hoped for. Spring water and melted snow fell into a body that made no noise beyond bubbles chewing at pitched rock. The waterscape was thinly populated, every swimming creature ready to eat its neighbors. But of course the water knew how to move, and that was another stroke of luck.

To return home, Rococo needed to reach this river’s end. He dropped the pack that was carrying their survival kit, and wading in up to his waist, he pulled off his shirt and extended the sleeves, setting the garment on its back.

“Do us the favor, friend,” he said. “Learn to float.”

Living clothes were popular with a few sentients—commensal skins and engineered organics, plus slaves worn for one brutal tradition or another. This shirt wasn’t alive, but the fabric carried a tiny mind and many useful talents, including a genius for rebuilding itself into useful and unuseful forms. Gathering dissolved minerals and little breaths of air, the garment expanded and inflated itself, and the man stood over it, offering suggestions and then his approving silence.

Rococo’s homeworld was massive and bathed in UV light, and that environment had dictated his carefully tailored frame: the long body and short powerful limbs, plus a chest harkening back to an age when power was carried as muscle and big ribs wrapped around the mortal heart. Projecting a sense of youth, his bare skin was brilliantly black in the day’s glare. That handsome face never needed adjustment, an elegant ooid wrapped around widely spaced, deeply purple eyes. His teeth were gold and the gray hair never grew past the point where the nubs were barely felt, and he had a smart voice that could shout until the sky rang, or the voice might say very little and say it softly and everybody heard the words just the same.

Mere wasn’t even a third his size, yet she enjoyed her own power. The black hair was thick and grown long, and her body was as tough as hyperfiber, or at least seemed to be. This woman had outlived her homeworld, and serving the Great Ship, she had traveled alone to the most bizarre realms, risking her life many times. It was easy to believe that no other human, alive or lost to history, was as wondrously peculiar as her, or a tenth as lucky, or a millionth as blessed.

Mere knelt where the river was swiftest, toes to the water, her hands coaxing her shirt to change its form.

Rococo had no choice. Her breasts wanted to be seen, and he watched them until he could feel them under his hands. His imagination did the caressing, and enjoying this one immortal pleasure, he smiled.

Then he noticed the luddy staring at her too.

Funny. A man could admire any lady, knowing that he might never touch her. And despite pride and his own high opinions of himself, that same man could accept celibacy all the way home to the Great Ship.

But this was too much of a stare. Amund wasn’t just giving a polite, appreciative glance. No, the mortal was very serious about his lust. A butcher carving his way to the bone. That’s what he looked like. Not a vicious stare, or cold, but definitely immune to humor or other distractions. To Amund, nothing in the Universe mattered as much as a creature older than hundreds of generations of luddies.

“Amund,” said Rococo.

Nothing changed. The voice that couldn’t be ignored was being ignored.

Again, louder this time, the diplomat said, “Amund.”

A name old beyond old.

The thin, sunburnt face turned slowly, grudgingly looking at his competitor’s face. A brain with more water than thought needed time to frame its response. Giving him no time, Rococo said, “Just as we planned. Wet your shirt and we start floating downstream before sunset.”

Saying nothing, Amund kicked off a pair of freshly grown boots and stepped past the bare-chested Mere, clambering down a steeply cut bank, frigid water quickly to his chest, to his chin. Then a pained voice yelled, “Hey, shirt.”

He said, “Make me a boat or drown me. You decide which.”

2

Amund was little more than a boy when the captain came to his home. But that boy had a finished body, and being healthy as well as crafty-smart, he had several young women already helping plan out his promising life.

His future seemed to be locked inside one kind of wonderful, and Amund thought that he understood what his story would be. But then Washen strode into the Highland of Little Sins. That was a remarkable occasion on its own merit. Captains never visited the sanctuary, certainly not a captain as powerful and famous as this entity. Knowing voices claimed that she was one of the Master Captain’s favorites, and Washen brought a famous history as well as that very famous face. Amund knew the face well enough to recognize it from the high ledge. That’s where the children were told to gather while the important adults stood below, forming a neat half-circle around an immortal machine carrying a lady’s face and a god’s invincible powers.

Every Highland citizen was human. That was the law. Humans were archaic animals, noble and true, while every captain was a contraption full of mechanical parts and magic. And without question, Washen was a striking machine. Tall and graceful as a willow, not only did she look more human than Amund would have guessed, but nothing about her voice or manners seemed artificial. The local hour was twilight. With darkness spreading, the visitor bent low before the important residents. She had mastered their local language, presumably for this single occasion. With passion, Washen spoke about the honor of breathing holy air and apologized for the pollution that she had brought to them. But important matters had been pressed into her hands. She warned her audience that duty sometimes gave her little time to act. And while she was asking for an enormous favor, the captain promised to deliver ample compensation as well as the hope that this insult, horrible as it was, could be forgotten by future generations.

Amund didn’t want to be impressed, but he was. This captain had mastered certain customs, and how many minutes did that take her?

“But she’s not a ‘her,’” he muttered under his breath.

“What’s that?”

“What you see down there,” he said. “That’s nothing but machines wrapped inside machines.”

Where stone turned to air, he was lying on his stomach, his favorite girl beside him. She was a beauty by every measure, though less creative than some. Perhaps a little simple, and very definitely conservative. Yet Amund’s lover was charmed by that woman-faced creation, and that’s probably why she didn’t appreciate his tone, slipping out of his grasp and then crawling out of his reach.

Abandoned, Amund had little choice but to watch the drama below.

“This beautiful realm is your home, and your home lives inside my ship, and the Great Ship lives within the Galaxy,” Washen said. “As I stand here, one distant world is actively begging. It wants permission from the Master Captain to come onboard. Which is wonderful news. Captains are sworn to many jobs. But after we ensure the safety of our passengers and the safety of this vessel, our primary task is to welcome every guest that we can carry. For a reasonable fee, we make them comfortable, and we allow them to build homes among us, and we promise to carry them safely through this glorious wheel of stars.”

The Highland was a cavern furnished with jungles and jungle birds and artful crisscrossing waterfalls. It was also rich with blindfolds and stubborn indifference to everything beyond these wet green walls. Amund’s neighbors looked as if they absorbed the machine’s prattle without complaint. Didn’t they understand? Washen was stripping the situation down to its simplest, most appealing core. Amund saw the trick. This was what he would do, if his chore was to explain stars to idiots or language to dogs. And that’s why he was offended. Dressed in charm, offering up some carefully crafted words, this outrageous entity had mastered a dog’s vocabulary.

“‘Where-the-rivers-live,’” said the machine.

“What is that?” Amund’s lover asked. “What’s that mean?”

The boy didn’t know. And judging by faces, nobody else understood. A muddled, confused rumble filled the cavern, and Washen responded by taking a step backward before repeating that very peculiar phrase.

“‘Where-the-rivers-live.’” She said, “That’s our best translation of the world’s name. A large terran planet. There’s a dense atmosphere, minimal seasons. More ocean than land, but every continent has a spine of young mountains. The natives possess a vibrant, relatively advanced toolkit of technologies. In that, nothing is unique. Except for the fact that the population is a little under one thousand individuals, and each citizen is a living, sentient river.”

Washen said, “River,” and the cavern was suddenly flooded with illusions. Sculpted light was focused on every open eye, and sounds were driven into the ears and teased the vestibular systems. Suddenly Amund felt like a bird. Towering white clouds stood in an otherwise azure sky, and below him, the exuberant vegetation was every shade of blue. What looked like a dark blue river was pinned to the valley floor. Save for those colors, that could be any earthly jungle. But when he dropped low over the river, the water ceased to be water. The quivering dark surface was more gelatin than fluid. Capable of motion in any direction, this river was pushing upstream, and it was far larger than the trickles flowing through the Highlands or even the Earth’s famous rivers. Flexible trunks that weren’t trees lined the nearest shoreline, a canopy of arms or tentacles pushing toward the sky. Except those weren’t arms and they weren’t tentacles. Amund was reminded of sea anemones. That’s what these were. Gigantic terrestrial anemones. And against every expectation, the boy was thinking how interesting and how pretty everything was.

Curiosity was an indulgence at best, a hazard at the worst. The Highlands couldn’t have survived two generations if its citizens chased every sweet question. But long history and his culture didn’t matter. All at once, Amund was intensely, selfishly curious.

The captain’s voice returned.

“The Great Ship is a beggar too,” Washen said. “Our hull is covered with telescopes that beg the Milky Way for light and radio noise. My ship never stops studying local planets and the distant ones too. And between the telescopes are enough antennae to shout at those worlds, begging to be heard and to be answered by any mind with the means and the desire.

“What you’re seeing here is a fresh transmission. Where-the-rivers-live sent these images along with explanatory texts and certain diplomatic overtures. This world is six billion years old and clever. Commensalism is the norm. Unrelated species have woven themselves into unified bodies. The native genetics have found a very stable point where there’s no boundary between the forest and the river. What you see is one creature, and, as it happens, this entity controls the central watershed of the wettest continent. Rather like our Amazon does. Except this river is longer than the Amazon, and it extends far beyond the continent. Which is another marvel, and if you want to see where the living water flows, don’t close your eyes for more than a moment.”

Amund clamped his eyes shut.

A foolish, incurious reflex, and he didn’t know why he did it. Perhaps the eyes were thinking for him. Opening them again, he discovered that the spell had been broken, the living river was lost, and he had nothing to see but his lover staring at nothing, her gaze spellbound, shameful. Everyone but Amund was happily trapped inside that other world. And nobody else understood. That machine-infused captain had one goal for her day, and she knew just what to say to them and just what to show to them.

The boy had suffered enough. Slip home, close his door, and pretend to sleep or eat or accomplish any other human task. That’s what he was planning to do. Except his legs had a different opinion. Instead of taking him home, they found the quickest stairs, carrying him toward the captain and her fine voice and that very pretty face—the polished face of a beautiful marble statue dedicated to some ancient, unreachable deity.

Washen’s voice continued to sing out.

“Serving as a captain, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet multitudes,” she boasted. “Species from very strange worlds, and species from worlds unnervingly similar to the Earth. And every point between. But this realm, Where-the-rivers-live, is like nothing else. It’s fresh and it’s wondrous, and on the basis of novelty alone, I would invite a trickle of any river into the Great Ship. I would build a habitat where their nature and beauty could thrive. And if the creature didn’t have the resources to afford passage? I’d pay its way. That’s how interesting these creatures are to me.

“But there isn’t any need for charity. Where-the-rivers-live happens to be the only inhabited world inside a solar system rich with potential. This transmission came with an offer. In exchange for passage on the Great Ship and certain new technologies, the living rivers will grant us full possession of two hot planets and two cold moons. Four worlds, each of which can be terraformed, and any one of which can become a home for humans.”

She said the local word for “humans.” That was a critical detail. Or she was careless, which seemed very unlikely. by then, Amund had reached the cavern floor. Elders and the high faithful were crowded around the captain. A few of them had stopped watching the show, but they continued to stare at their guest, mindlessly smiling and nodding. Most of the audience remained lost in the astonishments. But of course nothing they saw had to be real. Everything was a lie. That possibility ambushed Amund, frightening him and making him angrier than ever. Which was rather pleasant. The boy enjoyed being enraged by the one-sided nature of this mess. An immortal machine had marched into their little cave to tell them a ridiculous story, forcing them to watch invented lights and invented sounds, and this was such an easy trick for a god, making stupid little humans believe in any preposterous world.

But why would Washen lie?

To embarrass Amund’s people, obviously.

That paranoid idea was exactly what he needed. Rage gave him courage, and courage gave him the power to say anything or do anything.

“Safety for the passengers,” said Washen. “That’s every captain’s first duty. After that, we care for the Great Ship, and then, we welcome new passengers onboard. But there’s a fourth duty waiting. Humanity used to be a minor species. We were late to the business of star travel, but then we found the Great Ship. In the tens of thousands of years since, this beggar of a starship has left multitudes in its wake. New worlds by the thousands, all claimed by our people. Immortals like myself, and humans like you. And those colonists, your brethren and mine, will rule the galaxy for the next ten billion years.”

With that, she paused.

The invisible spectacle must have finished. Eyes were blinking, faces smiling or frowning, and many people shyly looked at their neighbors, trying to gauge what this magician’s trick had done to their tiny souls.

That’s when the great captain was rudely interrupted.

“So what the shit do you want from us?”

Amund shouted those caustic words.

Turning, Washen looked at nobody but the rude boy.

He instantly regretted his action, but in the next moment he was angry all over again. For his doubts, for her invasion. But mostly because he was a stupid little bit of humanity. Amund existed only because the captain machines allowed him to live inside what was little more than a tiny drawer. Washen’s kindness was what kept all of them alive. Unless it was her utter indifference to their little existences, and when the time came, she would throw them out, replacing them with richer, more interesting tenants.

That’s what passed through one young head.

Washen’s thoughts were a mystery, then and always. What kinds of elaborate calculations was she making, transforming this complex, ever-shifting event into the best action? But of course the mathematics were easy. After all, she was one of the finest machines ever fabricated, standing before a tribe of primitives, all of them easily swayed and just as easily forgotten.

“So what the shit do you want from us?”

For a long breath, nothing happened. Except that Amund kept finding reasons to grow angrier.

“The Great Ship,” the captain began.

Another pause.

“And our hands,” said Washen, holding her hands towards the basalt sky. “Ships and hands have limits. We’re passing through the Galaxy, and yes, we’re aiming for the most fascinating portions of the Milky Way. But our speed and course are inflexible. Most solar systems remain out of reach. In reality, there’s only a narrow cylinder of space that our shuttles can reach, and then they have to return to us again.

“Where-the-rivers-live is very close to that cylinder’s edge. Velocities are law. Time is short. And wise as these rivers seem to be, they don’t have their own starships. They might build some workable craft soon. Even a tiny river has astonishing talents, and working together with a world’s full resources . . . well, they could possibly launch a starship or two in the next few years. But there isn’t time to wait and hope. If we want the rivers to live with us, we have to make our own round trip. And to achieve that, there is a plan. The plan is underway already. This morning, a special streakship was launched. That ship was pre-built and then mothballed for a day like this. It’s massive and full of fuel and exceedingly well protected from the dangers of deep space. But there is no crew. Shaped nukes and war-grade lasers are accelerating it to a healthy fraction of light speed. It’s exactly the kind of vessel that can race out to an alien world, landing under the guidance of AI pilots, and then wait for its passengers to board.”

Washen was ageless. Except when she paused, as she did then, she looked like a woman who had endured a long, difficult day.

Two breaths and she spoke again.

“The living rivers have explained themselves. And that includes some inflexible ideas about ceremony and symbol and the value of life. Which they cherish, by the way. More than most species, the sanctity of organism is held in the highest regard. Perhaps because they are so few, and by any measure, they are so very old.”

The captain took a long step forward, studying the ignorant young fellow who seemed to have forgotten how to talk.

“Their largest river claims to be older than earthly vertebrates, older than our sponges,” she said. “So we’re battling some instinctive, unyielding ideas. There are also the horrible limitations of time and our room to maneuver. We spotted their world years ago, studied them and built an offer of friendship. Two Venus-class worlds, two icebound moons. That was our initial offer. Which is a fair price, a modest price, considering the technologies we’ll share and the places that we will take them. And the rivers have agreed with us. They’ll give us everything we want. Four substantial worlds, with space for hundreds of trillions of good people. When you talk about mortals. If you can imagine millions of generations of humans living beneath this orange sun.”

Washen took another step forward, standing that much closer to Amund.

He wanted to run.

His feet preferred to hold their ground.

“One icy moon will be warmed and then bathed in a delicious atmosphere,” the captain promised. “Then it will be given to you, the humans, and you and your trillions of children will live out their lives on this spectacular new realm.”

Except there wasn’t any joy in the machine’s words or her face. She was a grim, all-knowing god, talking to tiny entities who couldn’t appreciate the shitty choices that she had to walk through.

“Four worlds would be an enormous gain for our species,” she said. “But it requires one quick mission that culminates with a brief, brief ceremony.”

“Which is what?” Amund meant to shout, but his words emerged as a guttural whisper.

Did she hear him?

“What ceremony?” asked twenty other voices.

“This is a very ancient dance,” Washen explained, “One creature must symbolically merge with another. Two unrelated rivers must join. And to accomplish that, the rivers demand that we offer a single mortal. ‘A piece of your river,’ they call it. Which means that they’re demanding a human sacrifice.”

Amund was ready to feel surprised, yet he wasn’t. He anticipated being enraged, but nothing like anger offered its help. One life? Not only did that seem reasonable, it was such a tiny gesture, and he was instantly thinking about the people that he grew up with. Idiots who wouldn’t be missed, at least after a few happy years.

“Two officers will accompany our offering,” Washen continued.

It was the first and only time someone used that word.

“Offering.”

She said, “My finest exobiologist and my best diplomat are going. The goal is to change the terms of this agreement. Surrender an arm or kidney, or give away a beating heart that we can replace without fuss. But I can’t guarantee survival for anyone. This will be a long sprint through deep space, and shit happens. Yes, it does. But if this mission does reach Where-the-rivers-live, and if any deal is struck, then more starships will be dispatched. Slower, much larger and safer vessels will drop away from the Great Ship, make some complicated dances with other stars, and after a few centuries, your descendants will set down on your new home.”

She paused, and most of the audience imagined Paradise.

“I won’t make your choices,” she said. “And I wish I could explain more and answer every question. You must have endless questions. But there’s a timetable at work. Moments matter. The second streakship has to carry passengers, which means that it can’t accelerate as quickly. And it has to launch within two hours and seventeen minutes, or it doesn’t leave. Which might be the best solution. That could be argued.

“Do nothing, let this opportunity pass, and consider ourselves fortunate, even if we aren’t.”

On the one hand, Amund was listening carefully. Yet he was also thinking about nothing. An empty place waited inside his skull, black and ready. Ready for what? Then it arrived. The obvious, unavoidable idea. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of luddite communities were scattered across the Great Ship. “Luddies.” That’s what the machines called humans. Luddite was an ancient word that was never charitable, never endearing. And if time was critical, then dozens of captains must be standing inside those enclaves. Right now, each persuasive machine was making her best plea to the silly luddies. One tiny, awful sacrifice. That’s all that was needed, and the gods were playing a very cruel game.

Infuriated, the boy felt justified as he marched straight toward an entity who couldn’t have looked taller or more formidable. His plan was to smack Washen and get killed for it. Which almost certainly wouldn’t happen. What harm could he do to any captain? But no, that promise of violence made him brave, and the courage lasted until she smiled at him, revealing what on any face looked like grave, sorrowful pain.

A step short, he paused.

His little world fell silent, every eye fixed on the empty air between the two of them.

And that’s when Amund finally realized what was obvious. That he wasn’t angry at captains or distant alien rivers. Not then, not ever. The emotions lived inside him, and they couldn’t be anywhere else. Self-doubt and self-loathing had eaten away too much. He was a frail incurious idiot, suddenly looking back at the elders and up at the woman that he had slept with and probably would have had children with.

“Except I won’t sleep with her again,” he was thinking.

Why was he thinking that?

Standing at the center of the only world he knew, Amund was utterly helpless, trying and failing to see where any silly idea came from.

3

Exobiologists didn’t take worlds as lovers, and no mission deserved to be confused for an elaborate, high-stakes courtship. Missions were missions. That was the blunt, clean, simple, and inescapable truth. Civilians, ignorant captains, and even a few of Mere’s colleagues insisted on confusing the exploration of new realms with sex. But sex was simple. Lust wanted to be kindled again and again, and that’s why it was so very easy to lose one object of affection and find another. For Mere, an impressive sequence of temporary husbands had proven the fallibility of love. She had had alien ex-husbands and the rare human, plus hundreds of intense brief passions. Well schooled in every aspect of coupling, Mere enjoyed herself well enough, thank you. But walking gracefully across the face of a new world was something else entirely—an undertaking so much larger and richer and far more rewarding than any fireball infatuation.

In love, there was a rough sense of equality. Two souls in harmony, and so on and on. But even the ugliest little world was far greater than any soul. There were missions where Mere’s footsteps and her shadows were never noticed. And even if her presence was experienced by the natives, what did that mean? Very little. No world ever dreamed about Mere’s touch or the heat of her breath, and even if ten billion citizens knew Mere’s face, it didn’t mean that one of them ever woke up expecting her beside him in bed.

Missions were asymmetric, and because of that, they were infinitely beautiful. Standing where no human had stood was so much richer than copulating with a beast or high officer. Romance meant choice, but Mere never had choices with worlds. She went where she was needed and did what she did very well, and for as long as necessary, too. Had she ever studied a realm that didn’t deserve to be admired, if not outright worshipped? Once, perhaps twice, but no more than that. Love held the promise of disappointment, even out and out treachery. But the sane mind couldn’t be disappointed by worlds, much less blame them for their failures. Creative, experienced eyes could see the momentums that defined a planet, and Mere understood firsthand how the great momentums refused to be changed. Orbits and seasons were decided by suns that cared nothing about their children. Likewise, the world’s inhabitants carried their biological limits as well as a compelling, often poorly understood history, and enduring cultures were entitled to their grudges, plus the occasional out and out war.

But individuals weren’t worlds. Individuals didn’t have excuses, and that was certainly one reason why Mere’s marriages rarely lasted longer than a decade or two.

No individual deserved any excuse.

That’s what the little woman believed, and she held herself to the same maxim. Her job was to be as a one-souled invader. She might be disguised, swimming unnoticed among the schooling aliens. Or to suit some dramatic need, she rode thunder and fire into a world capital, little arms raised as she introduced herself as a small, peculiar god. Each mission had its first goal and its second and the rest. Each was a mess of calculation and improbability. The hardest, best, and most often memorable missions were those where Mere and only Mere decided who would ride on board the Great Ship. Did she make mistakes? Too many, yes. The Ship’s history wore a few blunders. And because Mere was ageless and strong in so many ways, the woman could spend centuries considering her personal grief about each blundering step.

She despised evil, but true evil was scarce in the Universe, and once identified, it usually proved frail. Broken thinking and self-made idiots were common hazards, but they weren’t the most dangerous enemy. The inability to feel responsibility: That was what terrified Mere. It was the capacity of too many colleagues to misstep horribly and then retreat back to safety, nothing learned, not so much as a wisp of grief inside their happy minds. And worse than that, there were people with famous biographies and tremendous powers who didn’t deserve to throw their boasts at others.

Rococo.

Mere’s opinion was Mere’s. Few shared her disgust for the diplomat. Even reasonable, compassionate Washen disagreed with her tiny, alien-born exobiologist.

Of course, it helped that Rococo began his service to the Great Ship long before Mere arrived. Also, the man’s work had transformed alien worlds into good friends, and partly because of his considerable record, humanity was spread across a twenty thousand light-year journey. And Rococo was instrumental in some famous missions and critical moments where the impossible was accomplished. For instance, he willingly joined the bal’tin on a breeding/slaughter mat, legs properly crossed while ten thousand entities coupled and died around him. That was a nightmare ready to test even the most flexible-minded entity. Yet Rococo managed to sit where no other diplomat would sit, offering the best words while enduring the foulest odors. And now the bal’tin were devoted allies, and their metal-rich comets were home to millions of human settlers.

Mere understood the diplomat’s mission. A proud, vainglorious creature like Rococo could accomplish miracles.

But she also happened to be the first scout to meet with the bal’tin. Before any diplomat arrived, she lived in their ranks for years, secretly and then openly. As the first face of the Great Ship, she instructed her new friends about her origins and the ancient laws of the Galaxy, preparing the way for the researchers and diplomats bearing down inside that much larger second wave. And in every report, Mere was blunt. The bal’tin were blessed with unusual minds. Left alone, they would likely avoid the disasters that often killed species and worlds. War wouldn’t be an issue. They loved death too much to waste it on useless slaughter. They also didn’t have careless hands that too often led to ecological disasters or vicious AIs. No future was set in hyperfiber, but the bal’tin were on a tangent that might lead them across thousands of light-years, and as a consequence, the Milky Way would be a much, much richer place.

But the scout was only a scout, and she was replaced by a fellow with huge reservoirs of charm and confidence. Rococo sat on the same ritual mats that Mere had experienced. He had to suffer the most bizarre behaviors known to exobiologists, and to his credit, he endured longer than Mere had. And the outcome was a deal that left humanity with a considerable portion of that solar system’s resources. Comets weren’t often laced with iron and uranium; bal’tin comets were a prospector’s dream. The natives would have flourished once they reached their Oort, but one exceptional diplomat impressed them too well, and now the odds had changed, the bal’tin far less likely to mount any assaults on galactic history.

“There’s no translation for their name,” she mentioned.

They were several years into the present mission. Their streakship was still accelerating, obliterating fuel until that point where they would flip and then fire the engines again, convincing the Universe to slow down around them.

“But the concept behind the name is simple enough,” Rococo said. “The Universe is a spectacularly narrow line, and that line is drawn between spawn and oblivion. The bal’tin are celebrating that line. That’s what I kept telling myself. And that’s why it was critical to sit there calmly, farting preplanned farts, and if they wanted to play with my genitals, I let them.”

“I know the mats,” she reminded him. “And I know how to fart, too.”

Rococo had a fine smile when he wanted. But not then. “So, Mere. What is your difficulty about me?”

“You took more than you should have,” she said.

He laughed. Without his usual decorum, Rococo acted as if she was an idiot and pitiable because of her silly mind.

Amund was sitting nearby. He had little choice. Their ship’s mass had been stripped away at every turn, increasing their range but limiting space. Amund only had his tiny quarters and this slightly larger common room, and they were accelerating to the brink of what a mortal body could tolerate. Simple motion was a struggle for the young man. More than not, he would spend years on his back, and with nothing to watch but two ancients acting like petty bureaucrats.

But not that day. That day, the man interrupted them. A sharp little voice said, “I have an opinion, if you want to hear it.”

“I do,” Rococo said.

“By all means,” said Mere.

Their companion was a stubborn, frustrating puzzle. Whatever they called themselves, humans or luddies, the mortals were usually courageous believers in the temporary nature of life, and most importantly, they were endowed with the sacred duty of passing out of existence, making way for others. Yet Amund didn’t seem to be that sort of animal. Surrendering his life for a cause? No, he was missing the noble heart, and more importantly, the self-congratulatory flair. And there was no trace of the natural explorer either. They were traveling to a realm as alien as any, yet day after day, he asked nothing. Read nothing. Even went so far as to ignore the latest broadcasts from the rivers. Even his conviction for his faith failed to convince. He was an authentic human sharing a tiny volume with machines that pretended to be human, yet he couldn’t muster the proper disgust. Particularly when he stared at Mere, which was often and always with a keen intensity. In other words, Amund was exactly the wrong kind of fellow to willingly sacrifice anything so precious as his own life.

“I have an opinion, if you want to hear it.”

“I do.”

“By all means.”

He smiled, in a fashion. “First of all, I don’t give a shit about those left-behind aliens. The bal’tin.”

Rococo smiled, and Mere smiled.

Their companion glanced at the diplomat. Then he twisted his neck and stared at Mere. Whatever he wanted to say was ready. That much was obvious. Perhaps he wrote the words months ago, biding his time for the perfect moment.

“Just so I’m certain,” Amund said. “You two have never worked with each other. Not in any direct fashion. Is that right?”

They never had, no. And they wouldn’t have collaborated here, except both were available when the rivers shouted at the Great Ship, and a mission built on high stakes and inflexible parameters had to use the very best people.

“Well, that answers one mystery,” the mortal decided, lifting his body from the cushions, apparently for no reason but to shrug his shoulders at them.

“What does that explain?” Mere asked.

“We’re going to visit some peculiar beasts,” Amund said. “As soon as we get there, the two of you are going to do your dances and give speeches, trying every kind of magic. And when the job’s done, you’ll declare the winner.”

That earned a long pause from his audience.

“That’s all that this loud stupid endless dance of yours is trying to decide,” Amund said. “Who is the goddamn best.”

4

Five days of floating and then water stopped being water. The cold river thickened and grew blue, but still not blue enough and not nearly thick enough. This was good news or bad. The immortals offered conflicting opinions along with evidence that always seemed starved. Which was the inevitable problem. Orbiting war machines had hammered their little streakship. Nothing but their crash vault survived the landing. Sensors and other fancy tools would have been invaluable, if only they could have been salvaged. What they possessed was one heavy backpack with a survival kit onboard. The fist-sized reactor was powering a Remora-built factory, food and pure water delivered without fail. The kit also supplied lights in the darkness, and for one of their ranks, medical help. Everything else was done by the smart fabrics. Clothes and boots, boats and shelter. Honestly, if the immortals were a little less brilliant and a little more shrewd, they would never leave their homes. Shirts and trousers could march into the unknown Universe. Ruled by some very strong underwear, of course. With gloves and boots ready for the really hard shit.

“You’re laughing,” Rococo said.

“I am,” Amund agreed.

Mere was kneeling below them, studying the boundary between normal water and what was alive. The living rivers were built from protein weaves, concentrated salts, and dissolved metals, giving the bodies their characteristic density, the irresistible mass. That’s why the wild river flowed over the blue flesh, and the flesh drank what it wanted for the next few hundred meters, which was the point where the wild water was swallowed up and gone.

Amund and Rococo stood on higher ground, accompanied by a knee-high forest of blue-gray toadstools that weren’t toadstools. Little winged beasts were resting nearby. They resembled bats but perched like birds. Not alien so much as wrong. This ecosystem was simple, weedy, and inefficient, but the living river was close. Its blue body was viscous and warmer than the surroundings, promising that it had recovered from the firestorms. The immortals were assuming that the river was conscious. Which was a good sign, Mere claimed. Rococo claimed. But that didn’t mean that this was the same river that spoke to the Great Ship, promising planets and moons. In some fashion or another, that creature was a casualty of a very peculiar war.

A long while passed, and then Mere finally stood, gesturing to her colleague.

“Wish us luck,” Rococo said.

“I’m stupid,” Amund said. “But I’m not superstitious.”

Laughing at that, Rococo set down the pack and walked down to join Mere. The two of them spoke for a moment and then walked together without walking together, working their way downstream.

Amund tried to lift the pack and kit with one hand and couldn’t. He barely succeeded with both hands and his back. This world had too much gravity, which was another reason to feel endlessly tired. After age, that is. The pack was hyperfiber mesh doctored to look like old canvas. Amund made a request, triggering small motions inside, and he reached beneath the top flap, his hand closing around an edible flask filled with a flavored water. Then he drank the chilled sweetness before eating the exterior like an apple.

The immortals continued their hike, and Amund tried to think about anything besides them. The antirad patch riding his neck began to itch. He scratched at the irritation. Machines didn’t care about radiation, certainly not at these background levels. But without the patch, Amund would die in a matter of months. And without the filters moored inside his windpipe and lungs, the over-oxygenated air would poison him in minutes. This was a landscape populated with survivors, and that included one extremely fortunate human.

Another laugh, and without the help of mood enhancers or alcohol.

What a day!

A final piece of honest ground allowed the two machines to stand beside the gelatinous blue. That’s when a historic conversation commenced, or there was no conversation. Either way, they spoke to the river and nothing happened. Mere and Rococo offered words, and nothing changed, and nobody should be surprised. The captains had taught this world the Ship’s common language, but that was before the carnage. That was before most or all of the original river boiled away. This new creature might be as ignorant as a baby. They might have to start from the beginning, teaching the baby how to talk and what to think about them. And superstitious or not, it was hard to ignore the luck required to reach the return ship and reach it with time to spare.

That first streakship was Amund’s home for too many years. He never liked it and always dreamed about escaping from it. Yet there were moments, baffling frustrating moments, when he caught himself grieving for that frail machine.

“Salvation.” That was their nickname for the return ship. Standing like a mechanical hill, like a castle of superior hyperfibers and fusion engines, Salvation had landed years ago. It set down on a small coastal island. The onboard AIs were always awake, busily sending out promises that the machinery was healthy, fueled, and eager to help. But those giant engines were configured to launch directly into space, not rise slowly and then conveniently set down beside them. Half of the continent needed to be crossed. There was no other way. And without a wild river to ride, this living river had to help. Otherwise the walk would take months or years to complete, and long before that was done, the Great Ship would be unreachable.

And Amund would most likely be dead too. A thousand obvious causes offered themselves. Accidental falls, self-inflicted wounds. Cancers born from myriad decaying atoms. Or inevitable age. But not Mere and not Rococo. Even marooned on this broken world, their modern guts would learn to digest the native organics, and the fallout would cause nothing more than odd, beautiful blemishes. Standing together or apart, the immortals would be able to watch the stars slowly shuffle positions in the night sky. Three hundred thousand years later, the Great Ship would come back around, and those two machines might still be standing here. Except for little changes wrought by the experience, they would be the same machines. And blessed with perfect memories, they would have the power to see Amund’s face and hear his voice, remembering every word that he shared as well as his bitter little laugh. In that fashion, the human would be kept alive long after his time.

The sun moved today, and the machines didn’t move. What was human about them looked bent-shouldered and worried.

“We’re screwed,” Amund muttered.

Then came a slight pressure. The patch on his neck was being touched by a finger, but not his finger. And with the pressure came heat, not scorching but distinct and out-of-place.

A voice was behind the finger.

“You,” it said.

Not a man’s voice, not a child’s. Female, perhaps.

“What about me?” he asked.

“A pure river.”

Amund began to turn, but several warm fingers grabbed hold, fixing his head where it was.

“Who’s a pure river?” he asked.

“You are.”

The voice was close, and she sounded scared. Except nothing about the voice could be trusted. A vast strange and utterly gigantic creature was projecting noise for the same reasons that anything spoke to anything. To be understood, and hopefully, to manipulate her audience.

“You are the pure river,” the alien said. “You are the undiluted true river that came from the stars to join us.”

A few words, and one man’s life shifted.

“That’s how I look to you?” asked Amund.

“How you look, how you are,” she reported. Then a long blue digit appeared beside his head, jointless and rigid and very thin. What wasn’t a real finger was pointing at Mere and Rococo. “Machines,” she said.

“My companions?”

“You call them ‘machines.’”

“So. You’ve been watching us, have you?”

“Since your arrival,” she warned.

This surviving trickle of a river had an unsuspected reach. Studying them through the flying bugs, perhaps? Amund smiled at the news, feeling nervous and alive. “What do you think about those two machines?” he asked.

“They terrify us.”

That deserved a good laugh. But Amund stifled the reaction. “Why are you scared?”

“They attacked us.”

“Did they?”

“Yes.”

“But how did they attack you?” he wanted to know.

Silence.

Holding a hand to the sun, the pure river cut the glare in his eyes. “What weapons did they use?”

“Poison,” she said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Poisonous beliefs,” she said.

Amund nodded politely, understanding nothing.

The blue digit was retracted.

“Those dangerous machines down there,” Amund said. “They’re hoping to reach that second starship. Which leads to the question: Are you going to help them?”

“No.”

“No?”

“They are dangerous, and I won’t help them.”

Amund lowered his hand, sunlight burning his eyes. “Believe it or not, you sound like the pure little rivers I grew up with.”

“How do I sound?”

“Like a cowardly little puddle of piss,” Amund said.

The giant river said nothing.

“Those monsters don’t scare me,” he added. And after that, Amund felt as if he could take his time, sitting quietly while deciding what he wanted most, and then finding the very best way to make it all come true.

5

Bold action or bolder inaction. Those were possibilities, but only once. Only at the beginning and for a ludicrously narrow moment. Ignorance was the chief problem, but there was also a reflexive sense of duty, and at least in Rococo’s case, thousands of years of hubris stirring him to action. Those living rivers were a grand mystery, and mysteries always generated curiosity. The actual voyage promised to be a routine haul across empty, well-mapped space inside a proven machine. The diplomat had survived wilder dashes through space. It was the target world that was unique, barely studied, and unlike anything else. But at least they had the long voyage to prepare. In that light, the plan felt reasonable. Where-the-rivers-live promised to maintain its high-density broadcasts. The Great Ship would continue studying their target and send updates. Even better, Rococo and Mere were the best two for this work. And the third member of the crew was free to offer odd insights as well as his skeptical silence—qualities that Rococo appreciated more and more as the journey unfolded.

The midway point was reached without incident. Telescopic data from home remained enthusiastic, but of course those were old images growing even staler when they traveled back up to the streakship. The direct alien transmissions were a few years old but younger with every breath, and they offered updates about every subject: industrial growth and half-finished star drives, plus some exceptionally precise measurements about the world’s general enthusiasm.

“Bullshit.”

Amund refused to be confident.

“Pictures and noise,” the luddy warned. “Those aliens shape the data however they want.”

Naturally, every broadcast was a staged event. That was true when humans threw shadow puppets up on their cave walls, and it was certainly true about the rivers as well.

“This could all be a con job,” Amund said.

Rococo didn’t believe that. There was no great deception. AIs analyzed the feeds, proven algorithms raking the data for lies and signs of madness and any other flaws. Because every lie carried telltale flaws. But this was a long-closed society opening up to a greater world. The evidence said nothing else. Inspired by the Great Ship, those ancient rivers had decided to reach into space. To help their prospects, they were giving away four of their worlds, but that left plenty of other cold moons and comets for them to claim and then transform.

They were two years out, and nothing had changed. Nothing was wrong. Not a sign, not a rumor. But in mid-broadcast, the largest river stopped transmitting, and within minutes the rest of that world had fallen silent. A full day passed without words. Mere was working with the shipboard telescopes, trying to boost their sensitivity high enough to get a good glimpse of what was happening. But before she finished, the voices returned. Except they weren’t voices. The scarce and weak and urgent transmission showed them nothing but wordless imagery. Every river had been struck by fusion weapons. The aliens were boiled on the land and shredded under the ocean. The diplomatic mission was dead, every agreement lost. And Rococo realized that years ago, facing a choice, the bold, brave, and exceptionally wise decision would have been to do anything but go on this fool mission.

“I should have strangled my curiosity.”

He said that to himself and the others. Obviously, telescopes and automated probes could have done the necessary research, and today the three of them would be sitting safe inside the Great Ship, watching a distant world burn itself to a cinder.

But of course this was where they were. Trapped inside a streakship whose engines were punching at the Universe. There were zero choices. They were on a collision course with disaster, nowhere else to fly. Mere and Rococo continued studying the rare broadcasts. Preferring to ignore awful news, Amund remained inside his cabin for days at a time, appearing only to hear a few specifics. And even though he had little experience with aliens, and very steep barriers to learning, the man did try to make sense of what was happening.

“It’s greed,” he declared. “The rivers got selfish, and some of them went to war with the others.”

Rococo and Mere shared a glance.

Reading faces, Amund said, “Unless I’m wrong. And I know you’re not shy about telling me that.”

“It’s not war,” Rococo said.

“What then? Did two big rivers get into a brawl?”

The luddy had made another obvious, very human mistake. “War” and “brawl” were two good human words, and deceptive. Rococo had the same problem. He couldn’t reliably explain the situation, and that’s why he smiled at the exobiologist, saying, “Tell our friend his mistake.”

“Oh, I was wrong, too,” she offered.

It was sickening, this abundance of ignorance.

“If I’d studied those first transmissions more thoroughly,” Mere began. “Or better, if I’d taken the trouble to model the rivers’ biology. I could have seen the problem. If I’d made all the right assumptions, which I probably wouldn’t have done. But let’s pretend I did.”

When Mere spoke, Amund stared at her. Even when the topic was too new and too complicated, the mortal appeared to be intrigued by whatever she had to offer. And when Mere wasn’t speaking, the man would watch her face and watch her hands, waiting for that inevitable moment when those odd, oversized eyes glanced at poor idiot him.

And with the same sturdy resolve, Amund kept ignoring Rococo. The most obvious drama in the Universe was the luddy’s hatred for the other male onboard this one-lady ship.

“This isn’t war, and this isn’t a grudge match,” Mere was saying. “The blast patterns. The transmission patterns. And both of you, pay close attention. Look at the flow in these videos.”

Rococo focused on the images, but he wasn’t sure what he should be seeing. He and that other fellow were on the same footing, both spellbound by the tiny woman who was explaining how thoughts and planning crept their way through each of these great rivers.

“The speed of belief,” she said.

Thousands of years old, and Rococo had never heard that expression.

“What the hell is that?” Amund asked for both of them.

“The speed of belief,” she repeated. “One river acts like a single organism. It moves and speaks as if it’s unified. Which is very reasonable. We know its thoughts are quick. Chemoelectrical speeds, hundreds of kilometers in a second. The largest river can react to any outside stimulation and every interior need. Resources pulled from the crust. Reserves tapped for projects deemed suitable. Like its desire to build starships. The rivers claimed that they didn’t see the need before us. They barely had enough curiosity to build giant eyes and watch the Universe. And what did they see out here? Tiny creatures gathered around lesser stars or riding inside ridiculous little spaceships. And a lot of empty cold space too.

“But then the rivers saw us. They saw the Great Ship. Here was the first genuine marvel. A billion years old, and the organisms had finally found their superior. And because of that, they made promises to do everything possible to gain passage on our grand home.”

She paused, returning Amund’s gaze.

Did he understand any of this?

The man was sitting up, which was unusual. But this was an important, sit-up-worthy moment. That body would never adapt to the high gees, yet he never complained about aches or the occasional cracked bone. Rococo held some uncharitable opinions about Amund, but despite being doubtful and sullen, the man never quit proving that he was also an exceptionally tough mortal.

“What does that mean?” the luddy asked. “‘The speed of belief?’”

Mere glanced at her colleague. “Would you like to explain?”

“You’ll manage so much better,” Rococo said instantly. The portrait of gracious confidence, he had no interest in trying to convince the others that he knew what he was saying.

Mere nodded and thankfully continued.

“Belief isn’t thought,” she said. “And belief isn’t a reflex either. What we believe is woven into our nature, and regardless of how we act and what we say, we can never kill the voice that says, ‘This is what should be, and the rest of it is wrong.’

“And the principle of belief . . . well, that can be far, far more important inside giant creatures. Vast minds have to work around their size and sluggish reflexes. That’s why convictions are something held everywhere at once. Every million tons of neurological matter is infused with complex expectations and stubborn faiths. The river has one mind, yes. But not a mind we would recognize. Spread yourself across thousands of kilometers. Trillions of tons of stubborn water. That’s what I think we’re watching here. At some level, the rivers decided to embrace this new existence, building industries and reactors and tremendous new machines. Except nothing was decided. One belief had the power, and that power was wielded right up until the contrary belief decided enough was the hell enough.”

Rococo stopped her. Lifting a hand, he said, “Wait. That last transmission, the one that got cut out in the middle.”

Mere nodded, smiling grimly.

“The largest river was sending us some very detailed plans,” he said. “Plans for the conquest of its solar system, including construction of a hundred billion kilometer-long river that would spiral out from the sun. A living river thriving inside cultured diamond and fusion light.”

“That might have been the trigger,” Mere admitted. “A fantasy of dream and high physics, and it was too much. Too crazy, too wild. Too dangerous. There’s no being certain here, but sure, that’s why the conservative beliefs had enough and panicked. One daydream, and that’s what nearly killed this world.”

Amund was relatively young, not particularly gray, and carrying those boyish eyes. But his voice had always been older than his appearance, more lucid, and far more thoughtful than Rococo might have expected.

Speaking plainly and slowly, Amund said, “This giant mess. What we’re flying toward. You’re claiming it’s because some voice or voices told a story nobody else liked?”

Mere said, “I don’t know.”

Then, “But I believe that’s possible, yes.”

There was a joke here, but nobody laughed. Glancing at Rococo, Mere’s expression grew even more serious than before. Something new had to be shared, perhaps something that she just discovered.

“What else?” Amund asked.

“What else?” Rococo echoed.

“There’s another belief at work here,” she warned. “I can see it in the last few broadcasts. The rivers that are alive now . . . they don’t just simply hate the deal made with us. They’re acting like they don’t want to allow us to come close. Maybe we’re contaminants. Or we’re a disease. Perhaps we’re even monsters.”

“But you are all those things,” Amund said. “Didn’t you know?”

The immortals tried to laugh, and the luddy grinned while saying nothing else.

Closing her eyes, Mere examined the latest data.

Rococo couldn’t shake that crippling premonition of being doomed.

“Their world’s mangled,” she reported. “But there’s enough organization and industry left to throw new satellites into orbit. Right now, my best look is showing me a single pusher stardrive powered by hundred-megaton charges. It’s orbiting close to the sun. Judging by its orbit and its focus, I’d guess that it’s watching a specific piece of the sky. The piece of sky that we’ll fall out of. And it could be used to intercept intruders. Which is nobody except for us.”

Their engines surged or Rococo was suddenly weaker. Either way, he felt his legs folding, delivering him to the cabin’s floor.

“Any more splendid news?” Amund asked.

“Actually there is good,” she said. “The rivers tried to attack our other streakship. I don’t know how many bombs were launched. But what’s the difference between a comet approaching at half-light speed and a fusion charge bearing down at a few thousand kilometers per hour? The difference is that bombs are easier to stop. Lasers tore them apart. Only a few detonated, and those at a distance, and the streakship’s armor is too high-grade and proud to shatter.”

She paused long enough to sigh.

“Our salvation ship claims to be ready to launch, and that’s what I would make it do now. I’d launch it now and have it meet us and save us. If I could get the orbital motions to agree. But the motions don’t work and never will. The one blessing we have is that if we survive the megatons, and if we live to reach the surface, and if we happen to be in walking distance, too . . . well, then we have a viable way home.”

One of them was destined to die soon, regardless of events. And he was the one who insisted on laughing.

“Belief,” Amund said.

“That’s what this is about?” Amund asked.

“Stubborn, stubborn, slow to change, and far too big to see the need,” he said. Then he shook his head, saying, “Shit, that sounds like you and me. And particularly, both of you.”

6

The rivers’ pre-catastrophe broadcasts used the Ship’s language, and that’s what the two of them spoke now. Most of the day was invested in vain efforts at conversation. The creature didn’t respond but there was no end of noise, moving water and the slurping of slow gelatins mixed with the chirpy whine of little creatures lurking along the shoreline. Sometimes Mere would hear what sounded like a spoken word. Or Rococo. Except no, that was imagination at play. Only one of them heard the voice, not the other. Fear and fatigue were on display, and despair, the desperate mind inventing a soft “hello” just to feed itself that momentary dash of hope.

Preset strategies were followed, but without any sense of being heard, Rococo eventually abandoned that original script. A wink to Mere, and he launched into a peculiar story about the roaring majesty of a newborn river, and how a boy stood too close and was swallowed, drowning without dying and then left lost inside a wasteland of mud.

Mere found herself listening, and then listening carefully. But just as she became intrigued by the buried head and the thoughts trapped within its mind, the story was interrupted.

A clipped, clumsy sentence was offered.

“I hear you,” said the river.

“Are you listening?” They’d asked that hours ago. Was this the river’s response, and what did its timing mean? Mere had no way to answer either question. She’d never conversed directly with any river. Was the alien innately slow? Maybe those words had to be drawn from memories stored hundreds of kilometers from here. Or maybe rivers were patient, or this river was being cautious. Unless it had taken this much time to build a working mouth. Or the river wanted to ignore them entirely, and this phrase had leaked free, like a small social blunder.

“I hear you,” came out from that blue-gray surface.

A rather human, entirely feminine voice.

Rococo quit sharing his secrets.

Then the river said, “I hear you and understand every word, and you say you need me.”

“We need you,” Mere agreed.

“You need to be somewhere else,” said the river.

Rococo said, “Yes.”

“On your great ship,” said the river. “But you need to cross me and stand inside your little ship. Yes yes yes?”

“Yes” was an excellent word for most situations.

Mere said, “Yes.”

There was a pause, almost too brief to notice. Then the voice declared, “I will carry you.”

It was Mere’s experience that the Universe was built from questions. And every question, particularly the richest few, triggered a cascade of possible answers. But she refused to push any hypothesis ahead of the others. In her work, guesses were hazards. Every insight invited belief, and nothing was more dangerous than revelation. The exobiologist never stopped fighting the impulse to frame what she was seeing. Believing the bare minimum. That was a wise strategy, and that’s why she couldn’t accept the river’s good words or its sudden promise to help.

Whatever the situation, it was time to call to Amund.

The mortal hadn’t moved for hours. Sitting on the high ground, he nodded down at her while pulling a hand across his mouth, as if pushing his jaw closed. Then he stood, one arm and then both arms helping him lift the backpack and kit, and as he walked down the brief hill, Mere noticed what was different about Amund. The local gravity was intense, and the man had to be tired, but she thought that she saw the beginnings of a swagger riding on those short, careful steps.

The river had fallen silent. Sacks of salty water gathered on its surface, proteins inside the sacks weaving structures that quickly linked with their neighbors. Then the water was yanked away from the sacks, with a shrill keening screech, leaving behind a peculiar and mostly dry object that looked like a boat and smelled exactly like fresh meat.

Mere didn’t believe any good news, but Rococo was a portrait of enthusiasm. Looking back at the mortal, he shouted, “We have a yacht now.”

Amund was smiling and then he wasn’t.

Winking at Mere, Rococo said, “Every world looks better when you don’t have to walk it. Don’t you agree?”

The gift was no yacht. The object resembled ancient pontoon boats, except unlike any vessel cobbled out of animal hides or spun boron, this boat would never float. Certainly not like two bottles riding on a current. The river was semi-solid and denser than water, the darkest blue flesh marbled with little white threads and spinning red wheels of light. To her bare palm, the creature was warm enough to be pleasant and a little stubborn when shoved. A person could walk across its surface, but only for as long as the river cooperated. On a whim, it could liquefy. That’s what the old videos showed. Whenever it wished, the river could engulf the pontoons and platform and then everybody on board. That grim prospect had to be in Rococo’s mind too. Yet the man didn’t hesitate to walk across the blueness and climb on board, practically running from one end to the other. Following warily, Mere found a wood-like platform edged with simple low rails. There were three cabins, each with a flat roof and its own walls, and one door that could be swung closed. And there was a fourth room with nothing inside but a toilet. The biggest shock was how planned everything was, functional and unadorned yet entirely useable, perhaps even comfortable.

What should the two of them offer in response? Praises and thanks, perhaps. With few hard threats against anyone who might try to set a trap. Rococo and Mere shared glances, trying to guess each other’s mind.

Amund had reached the shoreline.

And the blue flesh rippled, pontoons rising up on newborn ridges. This must be how they would move. What wasn’t a river would carry them on its wiggling skin, and what wasn’t a river valley would pass on both sides. Mere didn’t want to make guesses, much less fall for wrong speculations, but a sudden confidence shook away some of her doubts.

She looked at Amund again.

The mortal seemed to prefer the shore.

Like muscle, like people, a living river preferred to find easy routes. That’s why their distributions resembled earthly rivers. Born in the sea, lazy flesh was pushed wherever the climbing was easiest, which meant following existing drainages. Living tissues absorbed rain and glacial melt as well as the minerals and every organic treat. Each creature fed on an extraordinary range of energy sources. Sunlight and wild insects were food. Infrared radiation from the ground was food. But the most coveted meals were from beneath the ocean floor and the high mountains. Piezoelectric and geothermal. That’s what delivered true, trustworthy power.

To Mere, this was a wonderland. Regardless of what life brought, death tomorrow or in another ten million years, she might never experience an entity so strangely remarkable as this.

That sounded like belief, didn’t it?

She laughed to herself.

Rococo noticed, and for one reason or many, he laughed with her.

Then both looked at the shoreline, at Amund.

Was he going to balk at the ride? No. His hesitations ended with a few long steps across the river. Then he was standing beside them, saying nothing, letting the pack and kit fall to the deck, but breathing hard while staring at Mere.

Something was different, was wrong.

Possibilities offered themselves. Mere accepted none of them, but her intention was to flat-out ask their companion about his mood.

Except there wasn’t time for questions.

Looking past both of them, Amund called out, “I’m ready.”

The boat that wasn’t a boat shivered.

“And I want this to be a quick trip,” Amund commanded.

Suddenly the boat rose even higher, and they were streaking downstream.

Laughing, Rococo sounded like a nervous boy.

Mere felt warm and afraid.

Meanwhile the man in charge seemed to relish their reactions, stepping between them as a smile came and then faded again, a slight embarrassment offered with the hard words, “For the moment, both of you are under my protection.”

What was this?

And the man in charge said, “Madam, I want you to know. I’m looking forward to sleeping with you.”

7

Leaving his homeworld, bound for duty aboard the Great Ship, the youngster envisioned his life as a sequence of long leaps through darkness, with spectacles and wonders waiting at the end.

That was a self-absorbed notion, and deserved. The Great Ship commanded respect as well as envy, and it was in the best interest of every world to enthrall the Ship’s diplomats. As the ultimate tourist, Rococo was sure to be afforded every comfort, every grace. Standing on the windswept lip of an endless canyon, walking the sacred glen past the sacred desert, or, if the mood struck, riding what wasn’t a whale into the depths of a frigid methane sea: Those were memorable events from his first thousand years.

But spectacle rises only so high. Even an intensely curious mind grows numb to vistas and symphonies and all of those rich, sweet stinks. And every grand majesty eventually becomes nothing but another good day.

Yet this living river . . .

The beast was like nothing else.

And their journey to the coast?

Without the high stakes, this voyage would have been momentous. But the perils were close and impossible to forget. Amund, for instance. The man was dying. Age was murdering him, and the omnipresent radiation, and the capricious will of an alien had elevated him to a high, utterly ridiculous station. But for how long? Meanwhile the two immortals were stripped of every resource, nothing to aid them but considerable experience and the fact that one of them had survived worse disasters than this. Which was Mere. Rococo had never experienced any mission this harrowing. But why would he? Diplomats weren’t explorers. The captains didn’t toss his kind into shitstorms. And in particular, they wouldn’t risk Rococo, one of their best. Not for an adventure with less than two percent chance of survival. Which was his estimate, weighing what he knew and what his guts said.

“Two percent,” he mentioned to Mere.

She stared at the living river and the swiftly passing shoreline. Having outlived at least one world, he assumed she would generate a more optimistic number. But no, she surprised him.

With confidence, she said, “I don’t know.”

“It’s an estimate,” he allowed.

Then she warned him, “Guesses are just another danger.” And on that cryptic note, she turned away, walking into the cabin that she was sharing with the dying man.

Rococo remained on the bow of what wasn’t a boat. Boats were buoyant, but there was nothing to float on here. What wasn’t a river carried them where it wished, and it was wishing them toward the ocean, usually at speeds that drove strong winds into his face. Everything in sight was one creature, a wonder of salt-infused gel and migrating impulses, bioelectric currents, and free oxygen, plus reflexes and cross-purposed desires and whatever memories happened to have survived the recent nightmare. Unless every memory had endured, which was possible. Who knew? A field team and labs and AI savants running free. That’s what they needed, and that was impossible. This river was safe from study, and a man riding the swift nonboat couldn’t understand what he was seeing, much less appreciate what he couldn’t see, and that was another reason why Rococo found himself spellbound.

The beast had grown wider and presumably much deeper over the last few days. More than three kilometers across, the blue-black gelatin appeared slick and dark and exceptionally nonreflective. Water always invited the sky, but this wasn’t water. They rode on a ribbon of meat and reflex and furious power. And where true rivers were flat, this creature made itself tall, flexing into a ridge that carried tiny people and their tiny prison where it wanted, as quickly or as slowly as it wished. Now, for instance. Rococo felt the sudden change of direction. What wasn’t a current swept him close to what wasn’t a shoreline, and he stared at a scraggly false forest of sessile bodies waving long tendrils at him or at the sky. Maybe they were feeding on airborne plankton, or perhaps this was something else entirely. Watching the forest dance, he realized that the tip of each tendril was cracking like a whip. Bits of tissue were torn loose, and the bits rose high and then fell until wings sprouted and those new bodies flew away, dissolving into the thick alien sky.

Had he seen this before? Inside the videos sent by the original river, did Rococo ever observe this talent?

No.

A skill unleashed during the rebuilding phase? Rococo suspected Mere would feel just as ignorant as he did. No, there was a person to ask, but he was inside his cabin with his lover. This world didn’t bother speaking to diplomats or exobiologists. Only Amund was given that honor, and only on the river’s schedule. “Next time the two of you chat,” Rococo should say. “Ask about the tendrils sprouting wings. Would you please?”

He smiled out of habit and held tight to the railing. The river had yanked itself as high as ever, Rococo perched at the edge of what looked like a wet purple cliff, and that’s when the sessile forest vanished. Busy life was instantly replaced with what looked like a dead city. Blockish shapes resembled buildings, and there were signs of fire that must have burned hotter as they continued downstream, the black outlines of foundations sketched on the blasted ground, and then long reaches of filthy irradiated glass. Cities were human inventions, and of course this world never had cities. But a facility must have stood here, a sprawling factory where the previous river refined metals and wove the antennae that spoke to the Great Ship, and maybe the bones of those early starships. Maybe this was an intentional side trip, one man shown the devastation wrought by some very bad thoughts. Or maybe this was all chance. Either way, the blast zone impressed him. Rococo estimated distances and the megatons, both of which were substantial. And then the glass vanished, the river spreading into a gelatinous purple lake inside a crater, and Rococo couldn’t stop thinking about what a nuclear device would do to his tiny, perpetually scared mind.

Suddenly that two percent chance of survival felt wildly optimistic. He suffered that revelation and then embraced it. Freedom always came when the odds were at their worst. There was no getting off this world. The new river didn’t trust them, and maimed as it was, it had enough power to demand whatever it believed was best, and that included ignoring the two creatures that could transform its future in the most amazing ways.

Holding his breath, Rococo listened to his thoughts.

Far out on the lake, the beast was pulling itself into what looked like a mountain, and then it lifted the prison and prisoners until they were at the summit, hundreds of meters above the land. That’s when they stopped, and a great voice rose from below, shaking the world as it called out, “Amund.”

A few moments passed before the naked man appeared, obviously interrupted from pleasures that didn’t appreciate interruptions.

Rococo continued to hold his breath, his body tingling, alternate metabolisms waking as the last of his oxygen was spent.

Still naked, Amund hurried down the blue slope, and where nobody else could hear him, he paused, speaking a few words while waving his hands.

Mere emerged, wearing clothes and a watchful, unreadable expression.

Rococo breathed again.

The sugar inside his flesh began to burn, the tingling becoming a general warmth, and once again, his thoughts shifted. He wanted to speak to Mere. Honestly and unheard. But that meant using a tongue that the creature beneath them couldn’t understand.

More breathing, more thinking.

The luddy continued to wave his hands, chatting happily with one of the largest creatures in the galaxy.

Rococo cleared his throat. “I’m thinking of that bal’tin proverb.”

The bal’tin were familiar to both of them, and that included a language that this world couldn’t have heard.

Mere stared at him.

Rococo offered a brief statement that sounded like music.

Straightening her back, the woman smiled and then let the smile fall away. This hadn’t been a long meeting. Amund was already returning to the prison, marching uphill because his great friend wouldn’t think of making the journey easy for aging legs. How much radiation was punching up from the lake floor? Probably quite a lot. The entire world was saturated with fallout, and Amund was halfway dead, and even if the cancers didn’t kill him, it was only a matter of decades before he was finished.

With those bleak thoughts swirling, Rococo offered another bal’tin proverb. “Doom and eggs, doom and eggs,” he sang. “Our souls are the boxes that carry forth the doom and the eggs.”

As he spoke, he realized that he was crying.

When did the tears start?

Rococo had never earned a warm smile from Mere. Until now. The tiny woman looked at him, offering a sigh while showing him such a delicious smile. She cared. She felt for him and for both of them. Perhaps she even thought about holding his hand. And there weren’t enough sensors in the Universe to measure the pleasure that smile delivered to one old and very doomed diplomat.

8

Some voices wanted Amund frozen. The streakship was being fueled and provisioned, and he had minutes to prepare for a quick trip to the Ship’s port, and after that, a sudden introduction to his fellow crewmembers. But friends and strangers had to approach him before he left the Highlands. Using confident voices, they advised him to step inside a cold bottle. None of them had any firsthand experience with spaceflight, much less alien desires, but they promised that his life would be spared at the end of this adventure, and did he want to waste his youth living inside a streakship? His ex-lover was particularly adamant. The voyage was sure to be dull, and he really should freeze himself for both journeys, out and back again. But she didn’t go so far as promising to wait for him, ludicrous as that would be. Instead she offered a fetching look, saying, “I’ll have a daughter or two by then, and I know they’ll be eager to meet the most famous human ever born in the Highlands.”

Those were the last human words spoken to Amund’s face.

When he reached the Port Alpha, a few low-ranking machines took the trouble to offer the same advice. Deep space was full of obstacles. One shard of comet could slip past his streakship’s defenses, and the impact would slow their trajectory by several hundred meters a second. And when that happened, the liquid bodies inside would continue forward at several hundred meters every second. Thrown against the walls, Amund would be turned into dead goo. Nobody wanted that. “Sleep through the journey out, enjoy a fine adventure on the target world, and then you’re free of this ridiculous obligation,” they told him. “Another good sleep, get swaddled in kinetic buffers, and who’s bigger than you when you come home?”

And all those pretty girls waiting, no doubt.

Amund listened to every word, but what he heard were the selfish fears: These machines didn’t want their human wasted, and they certainly didn’t want to lose the four new worlds that his tiny death was going to buy.

Washen never mentioned cold bottles, and perhaps she didn’t know what her officers were suggesting. Her last moments with Amund were spent introducing the two-person crew, then with warm touches, reiterating her boundless appreciation for what one noble man was doing.

Rococo never brought up the topic of freezing anyone. What mattered was boasting about his infinite skills as a diplomat and how he would face down the rivers. “Saving a young man’s life,” he said.

Except he didn’t say, “Saving a graying, half-spent man’s life.” Did he?

In a day jammed with the unforeseen, the greatest surprise was Mere. So tiny next to the captains and diplomats and everyone else. So plainly, ridiculously different. Amund didn’t think of her as pretty, yet he couldn’t stop staring at the little face that looked starved because it was starved. This body and those enormous bottomless eyes were born on a crippled starship. Amund heard that story. With a rush of words, Rococo told how she crashed on an alien world where she was tormented like a demon and worshipped like a god. Mere was human only in the most glancing fashion . . . but wait, she wasn’t human. Amund forgot what was obvious. This was another immortal machine who couldn’t be trusted. Those wrong eyes were full of sympathy, or she was pretending to care. Either way, she offered very few words. No talk about cold bottles or her thanks for his sacrifice or even the particulars of the mission. She just took hold of him, her hand hot and his hand suddenly feeling cold. Mere gripped him just enough to prove her unnatural strength, and then she smiled in the saddest fashion, confessing, “I like very little about this mission. Just so you understand.”

Mere wasn’t beautiful, but gods didn’t have to wear beauty. It was enough that they were powerful, ageless entities deserving adoration and long stares, and any mortal would be stupid not to be thrilled to live in their shadows.

The low-ranking machines were the ones that argued for the cold bottle. Those would-be deities were scrambling for anything that smelled like power. “We’re going to save you,” they promised. As if they had any role in future events. “A kidney, a hand. You give the rivers a gift, and they let the rest of you return home again. You won’t be half a year older, and then you’re the young hero leading your people to the new world.”

How simple/stupid did they think he was?

“No bottles,” he told them emphatically, and just once. The entities had perfect recall, after all. Let them remember the words and his blatant scorn. “I’m going to live a few years, and then I’ll die one way or another,” he said. “But you’re not fooling me into hope. Because there isn’t any hope. And that’s the same for all of you. Machines don’t run forever, no matter how much you try to fool yourselves.”

• • • •

The voyage proved even more grueling than expected. Regardless of painkillers and cushions, the hard acceleration made Amund ache, and each new day was desperate to repeat every day that came before. The ship’s mess could generate any food, but he usually ate the same reliable meals. He knew where he would lie down and what he would think about when he let his mind wander, and for those early months, Amund thought about ex-lovers and the cavern that had seemed so tiny until he came to live here.

Those left-behind people were obviously thinking about him. Good wishes kept arriving, and there were some elaborate, intimate messages buried among the clichés. Responding to everybody was tedious, and he gave up that chore soon enough. But a few people received his thanks along with observations about a dreary life inside a machine-infested closet, and sure enough, that honesty helped diminish the inflow until a week might pass without noise from home.

One of the later messages was memorable. A girl who Amund had never met sent him a long video of herself. She resembled Mere, undersized and big-eyed. But she was also a child through and through, and a youngster’s enthusiasm was on display. Grinning, she told him that she had studied the river’s video very closely, the same video shown to everybody in the Highland. She realized that Amund saw only a few moments before he ran downstairs to volunteer. “Everybody knows your story,” she said. But the rest of the video was far, far more impressive. “Don’t you think so?” Of course the living rivers weren’t rivers. They were more like trees, and the bulk of every tree was hidden underground. The dense, supersalted gel didn’t stop at the ocean. The aliens reached across the continental shelves after rising from the depths, and they glowed as they moved, feeding on volcanic seams and microbes and sunlight brought from above. That was the spectacle worth seeing. Not the ordinary business on land, but on the ocean floor. That was what she would see, if she could. And she only hoped that Amund had time and the opportunity to experience that very wonderful paradise for himself.

Amund had never bothered to watch the full video. Inspired by the enthusiasm, he took the challenge and felt impressed, but not as awed as his new friend sounded. No, she was what impressed him. “You seem like such a bright, excited person,” he told her in his reply. “My advice? Get the fuck out of that cavern. Go out and live anywhere else that will take you.”

That message went home, and after that, nobody called to him.

Which was perhaps what Amund wanted all along.

It was impossible to guess what his companions would talk about on any day, or even inside a single minute. Topics varied widely, crazily, often shifting in mid-sentence. But Amund knew that he wouldn’t understand much, and the subjects’ importance would evade him. Yet that ridiculous noise became a reliable joy in a small, painful life. Two gods shooting the shit, and sometimes, now and again, offering up words that fascinated the human in their midst.

Those gods weren’t having sex. But Rococo’s lust was aimed at Mere’s blatant indifference, and his frustration was another reliable joy.

Maybe all that would change when they reached the rivers. An entire world as their playground and out of sight of the doomed man, the gods would take their pleasures by any and all means. Imagining sex with Mere. That was another trusted pleasure. She was a wise god who didn’t want Rococo, and of course she didn’t have desires for a mortal beast like Amund. Mere had lived happily among aliens. She even married a few of them. This female deity seemed capable of any perversion, which meant that she was saving herself for the rivers. Her next husband was a ten thousand kilometer ribbon, and how could anything as small and ordinary as Rococo feel reason to be optimistic? But freed from hope, Amund could spin endless fantasies about the god-machine.

Not a terrible fate, all in all.

Then the rivers started to murder each other. An entire world was burning, and that’s when Amund honestly contemplated the cold bottle. Suspend his life, and with him unaware, they would land beside the first streakship. That vessel was safe enough, protected by hyperfiber and aggressive banks of defensive lasers—two features missing from their minimal ship. Frozen, Amund would endure one kind of dreamless nonexistence, and if he woke again, they would be approaching the Great Ship, most of his life left to be lived.

Except he never mentioned the bottle.

And the others didn’t offer.

The following times were interesting and awful. Morning began with breakfast and premonitions of disaster. A comet shard was about to strike their thin, low-mass hull. Amund knew it, and later, he was equally sure that a nuclear weapon would meet them. The sense of doom gave each moment its spark, and every minute crossed felt like victory. And the human was surprisingly fond of this new life, fear churning emotions while his thoughts kept bending in fresh, peculiar ways. He didn’t waste neurons dwelling on bottles or his left-behind life. It was an endless, secret joy to stretch out on the padded mattress, watching gods struggle with events beyond their control, maybe beyond their understanding.

One hundred million kilometers out, Mere looked at him and then looked away, telling the wall, “Bottle time.”

Bombs and the need to make hard maneuvers left no choice. Amund had to be frozen and wrapped in protective garb, then loaded with the rest of the essentials inside the crash vault. He was one kind of dead when the ship suffered a string of attacks, and then the vault was on the ground and the hyperfiber door was blown clear. The defrosting took hours, his last breath still inside the soft pink lungs. Alien air was allowed past preset filters, and a wardrobe of smart clothing swaddled him, helping lift his temperature to happy human norms.

A fiercely hot hand touched his forehead. A mother’s gesture, and Amund recoiled.

Mere said his name.

“Who?” he asked.

The vast eyes blinked, startled.

“Who are you?” he asked.

But he couldn’t fool the tiny god. She laughed, warming him with her gentle pleasure. Then with a minimum of sentences and a few hopeful nods of her head, she explained what had to be done if they were going to survive.

“Wait,” Amund interrupted.

She stopped talking.

“The old deal is shit, isn’t it?”

“And there’s no good reason to slaughter you,” she teased.

Rococo was standing close but not standing with them. The man obviously wanted to add his genius to the conversation, but he managed to keep his machine tongue quiet.

“If we go home,” Amund said to Mere.

“If,” she agreed.

“I want to ride inside the bottle.”

“With the rest of your days ahead,” Rococo interjected.

The man was unlikable. But Amund nodded as if those were the wisest words ever spoken, and then he did what he had never done before. One of his cold hands reached out, touching smooth hot skin and the very sharp cheekbones of a face that couldn’t be more amazing.

“That’s not why,” he told Mere.

“No?” she asked.

“No,” he confessed. “I just want the chance to stop thinking about you.”

9

“I’m looking forward to sleeping with you.”

Those words were buried inside the noise about protecting them. But having said them, Amund didn’t repeat himself, not even in the most tangential, cursory fashion. That first night, after their kit provided dinner, the three of them sat on the open deck. Nobody spoke. The only noise was the groaning and creaking of the giant beneath them. Amund never mentioned sleeping arrangements. Mere watched the tired face and the man’s bent posture, noticing how the left hand rubbed the right elbow. That joint was giving him trouble. Arthritis, perhaps. The backpack was heavy, yet he had carried it down to the river. The kit could synthesize any substance, and that’s why she opened the pack and verbally walked it through a menu of archaic compounds. Pink tabs of salicylic acid and sugar were delivered, and Mere studied the mortal once again. A creature of water and passion, and so far removed from simple.

The medicine remained inside her tiny hand.

Standing, Mere said nothing. From the corner of an eye, she saw Rococo watching her slow walk. Maybe Amund watched her, too. She didn’t look back at the man. She was done trying to decipher him.

The sun was nearly set when she entered the cabin that Amund had already chosen. His boots were waiting inside the door, self-cleaned and new heels generated for the next hike. The room was dark and felt small and smelled a little like blood agar. She left the door open. A woven bed was waiting in the back corner, the mattress pulpy and soft and just a little damp, and it would be awful sleeping. Mere wondered if she could ask their protector to speak to the river, give the creature a little helpful instruction about making people comfortable.

Entering the cabin, Amund was greeted by soft laughter.

To the blackness, he said, “Hello.”

“Here,” she answered.

He closed the door, and that was all he did for the time being. Standing opposite her, Amund was breathing loudly enough to be heard over the creaking river. The lack of windows did nothing to isolate them. Every motion beneath them was felt, the twitches and shivers and the rising sensation as they were carried aloft, accelerating downstream. Mere shivered out of fatigue and fear, and then she laughed once again, louder this time.

“What’s funny?” Amund asked.

He still stood beside the closed door. Two thin lines of starlight managed to slip past. Mere’s eyes had totally adapted, but mortals had lousy night vision. And Amund wasn’t young anymore.

“You and the river,” she said. “The two of you were having a conversation on the hillside.”

Her companion shifted his weight from one leg to the other.

“While we were being useless, you and it were achieving important diplomatic overtures.”

“She.”

“Okay. She.”

Amund took one blind step forward.

“I have something for you,” Mere said.

The river shuddered and creaked, but the larger sound was a deep breath being taken and then held.

“Medicine,” she said. “For your elbow.”

“Is that what you did in the kit?”

“Yes.”

Amund didn’t speak.

“What did you think I was doing?”

“Making poison,” he said. “Or some kind of madness pill. You know. So you can enslave my will and all.”

Interesting, paranoid ideas.

“I wish I’d thought of that,” she said.

Amund broke out laughing, but not for long and not hard. Then he crossed the room until his feet blindly hit hers.

“Sorry,” he said.

“For what part of this?”

The man sat beside Mere, but a good deal of the bed was between them. “She and I talked, sure. She told me what she thinks about you. And Rococo. She was ready to kill both of you, just as soon as she thought of the best way.”

“But you stopped her.”

He didn’t respond.

“You saved us.”

He sighed. “Apparently so.”

“Hold out your hand,” Mere said.

Amund reached for the voice, and she grabbed his hand with her empty hand. His skin was cool and damp, rather like the bed was cool and damp. But she suspected that Amund would make a far more comfortable mattress.

Mere held three of his fingers inside her five.

He pulled back until he felt pressure, and then he relaxed.

“If I say, ‘No,’ to sex,” she said.

He said, “Well.”

He said nothing.

“Open your mouth,” she said.

His face was in profile, and in that very poor light Mere saw the mouth obey her command, his entire body alert and blind and very hopeful.

She dropped two pills onto the tongue.

“Sweet,” he said.

“You’re right, it’s poison,” she said. “And it takes only forty years to work.”

Then Amund was laughing and not quietly. He laughed until he sobbed, and Mere wasn’t certain when she began to chuckle at some of this or all of this.

Sitting like that, they stayed awake half the night, gradually moving closer on the unappealing mattress, and Mere kept hold of those three fingers while both of them pulled reasons to laugh out of nothing at all.

10

Amund was making love to one god when a second god called to him. He didn’t dress or bother to let his erection die. A happy fleck of naked water, he hurried off to speak with the river. This would be a pivotal conversation. He had that sense from the beginning, and the human felt a little omniscient when his premonition came true. Among her many promises, the river claimed that they would reach the coast tomorrow, around midday, and the waiting streakship wasn’t far beyond the horizon. Great news was heaped on top of great news. Amund practiced what he would say first and next and last. Returning to the nonboat, the human was wishing that smiles could be infinite. How enormous would his face and mouth have to be to capture this transcendent joy? Then he noticed the two gods standing behind the railing. They watched him, and Amund let his finite face drop for a moment, watching his bare feet crossing the blue flesh. Then he looked up again. Mere and Rococo were standing close to one another, perhaps a little closer than before. Amund was still in an exceptionally good mood, and Mere was smiling too. But at Rococo, and not just politely smiling.

Humans, genuine mortal humans, were less than brilliant. But even ordinary middle-aged men had the innate genius to find the meaning in faces. Amund looked at those faces. Tenderness and acceptance and a new chain of possibilities were on display, and he saw the future. Those two machines were going to sleep together. Suddenly the highest, frothiest portions of Amund’s joy were being shaved away. That was what the revelation did to him. Amund was jubilant and then he wasn’t. He was the pinnacle of history for untold billions, and then without losing that gift, he became another lover for a woman who might have a thousand husbands before her life and soul were obliterated on some alien world.

Amund didn’t know what to do next. He felt as if he was watching himself finish the walk, one hand grabbing the railing and his body climbing onboard with as much grace as possible, each piece of him acting of its own accord. He was responsible for nothing, including what he said to the others. “A pleasant day,” his voice allowed. But not Amund. Amund was a ghost trapped behind the flesh and behind the words, as surprised as anyone when he entered the toilet room and closed the door, one hand and then the other slowly rubbing the face that still couldn’t put an end to the endless smile.

Three minutes, and he stepped back into the sun.

Rococo was standing at the bow. The nonboat was moving again, sliding down a long slope fast enough that the machine had to tilt a little bit forward, leaning against the wind. But Mere had disappeared. Amund looked in her cabin first, but she wasn’t there. What if she was waiting inside Rococo’s cabin? That’s what Amund saw, in his mind. She was lying on Rococo’s bed, waiting for a god, which was exactly what she deserved. Amund waited for jealousy to take hold. He was hoping for ugly emotions, something to give the next moments even more importance. But even when he was convinced that Mere had abandoned him, he couldn’t find any useful anger or need for vengeance.

To himself, he muttered, “What makes a god?”

Power, vast and deadly but also capable of great accomplishments.

Amund pushed open the door of his cabin. Mere had returned to bed, and she was naked again. What had been her clothes had formed blankets across the damp, fleshy mattress. She smiled at Amund and sat up a little more, starting to speak and then thinking better of it. What did she notice in his face? Probably more than he would ever tease out of her face.

“Four gods,” he said.

She blinked. “What’s that?”

“Sorry. Nothing.” Amund offered the apology. But he meant it. Four gods were present, but it just so happened that one of the deities had only a few hours remaining, and then he would be nothing but a mortal man again.

The nonboat twisted slightly, and sunlight fell through the open and over the naked woman. So scrawny, so odd. She was a stick with tiny breasts and the wrong eyes, and Amund wondered why he had ever cared so much about sex with that creature. Then in the next instant, he wanted to throw himself on top of her and take her until he was exhausted. Which was what he should do, he told himself. Because this could well be the last time for this sort of fun.

“Come outside,” he heard himself saying.

Mere tilted her head, those eyes gaining a slightly different perspective.

Then he added, “I have news,” and still naked, he walked to the bow, claiming a patch of the deck where he was close to Rococo.

How much did he hate this man?

Not nearly enough, he decided.

But that didn’t mean there weren’t good reasons for what was going to happen. That’s why Amund didn’t wait for Mere to dress and join them. He looked at a face that never changed, and feeling a smile building, he told the face and the machine behind it, “There’s a new agreement. In place of that old, lost treaty of yours. That’s what I’ve been doing these last days.”

The surprise seemed genuine, suspicions tagging along behind.

“A new agreement,” the diplomat repeated.

“But not for four worlds,” Amund said. “I convinced the river to agree to give us full rights to both hot worlds and the original two ice moons, plus twelve other moons. And one gas giant. Which is pretty useless in the short term. But maybe someday. And also, I’ve won the right for the colonists to bid on this system’s Oort, if someday they ever want to do that.”

Rococo opened his mouth.

One word emerged.

“Good,” he said.

“It is,” Amund agreed.

Mere was clothed and emerging from the cabin.

Amund continued. “And by colonists, I mean humans. Mortals. Nothing but. This solar system is and will always be a sanctuary for luddies, whether they’re human or big ribbons of living gel.”

Rococo said, “Oh.” Then his natural poise took charge, and he said, “Goddamn impressive, sir.”

“Sir,” he said.

Mere was close but the wind was blowing, and what could she hear?

Amund leaned against the man, his mouth next to Rococo’s ear. And that was when he said, “Oh, and the river still needs its sacrifice. And she left it up to me to choose which one of us gets the honor.”

11

Rococo was friendly with three former luddies, a fourth was an out-and-out enemy, and there was a fifth luddy who he met while she was still a child. Apparently he made an impression, because two decades later, having decided to leave the faith, she asked this important immortal to accompany her to a facility that did nothing but transform her kind into his kind.

“I want to live and live and live,” she claimed, holding her companion’s knee. “But can I confess what scares me?”

“That you’ll grow bored,” Rococo said.

She was startled until she stepped outside herself. Then she laughed, admitting, “That’s the cliché, I suppose. Lives always become tiresome, and ten thousand years leaves a girl empty and dull.”

“That’s what some people want to believe,” he said. “But then again, luddies need every reason to think themselves right. No matter how much of a lie that reason happens to be.”

“So you don’t feel bored.”

Rococo winked at her, and with a happy voice said, “They won’t tell you. The luddies who want to keep you small. But that thing you call boredom? It doesn’t exist. Not for my kind. Monotony and apathy are symptoms of a weak mind, not a condition that afflicts those with too much time. For us, life is furiously rich. With our memories and our big eye for detail, it’s very difficult to keep us from being enthusiastically involved in every facet of the day. Every breath and good thought and the little pains too. Which are almost never large pains, by the way. Every circumstance is another fascinating element inside a grand parade that doesn’t need to stop for any reason short of death.”

His friend went through the necessary surgeries and rebirth, and unlike a few patients, she quickly adapted to her new state. And fifty years later, while Rococo was leading a distant mission, he received news that his friend died in a tragic accident involving plasmas and AI errors.

The two of them were never lovers. Yet the woman was first in his thoughts that evening, and she stayed with Rococo throughout the sleepless night. Long stretches of conversation came to mind, word for word, and there were intervals where memory was far larger than the present. Once again, Rococo was sharing a drink with a perpetually young lady who was throwing her new cognitive skills at new languages and exotic faiths, all while touring exotic corners of the Great Ship. She was also making friends and then throwing the same friends aside when they proved to be the wrong sorts for a girl who was preparing for the next million years.

“A million years,” she said.

Night had reached its middle, and Rococo sat on the deck, in the open. Sometimes he looked at stars, sometimes down at his empty hands. But all he saw was a girl who was so thrilled, standing on the edge of Forever, and all she was asking from the Universe was a brief million years.

Three times, Mere came to him in the night. The first two visits proved nothing but that the man didn’t want to speak to her, regardless of what she said. But that didn’t stop her from explaining that Amund was a shit. He was a shit who should have told them what was happening, even if the river forbad any warnings. “He could have used the Highland language to keep us ready. I learned enough words to follow the topic. If he had thought about doing that, which he would have. If the shit had ever bothered to try.”

Shrugs didn’t capture Rococo’s indifference.

Silently gazing at the back of his hands. That’s what convinced her to walk away. Twice.

Somewhat more effective was the third visit. With the sun rising behind them, Mere sat on the deck, legs crossed, near enough to Rococo that they might bump knees. With a careful quick voice, she said, “Of course it’s possible that everything is a lie.”

He looked at her, looked away. “About a sacrifice.”

She nodded.

“And he’s the one who decides who.”

This time, Mere glanced at her own hands. Waiting him out, apparently.

Finally, Rococo said, “I believe the man.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t know him,” he explained.

Face and mouth both asked, “What do you mean?”

“I mean that if I did know the man, then I’d be able to yank the fabrications from the truth. For instance, if I’d slept with the fellow. Then I’d have a perspective. Then maybe I wouldn’t feel as if I’m guessing about everything.”

• • • •

“Everything,” she repeated. “Including this alleged agreement,” he said. “We don’t know if this world has offered worlds to us, much less tossing us most of the solar system. And how can we be sure that luddies are the only organisms that are welcome here? We have no details. We have nothing but words and posturing from a creature that you don’t know either. Do you, Mere?”

“Not particularly well,” she said.

The sun was suddenly bright and wonderfully warm, baking into his flesh. “All right,” Rococo said. Then after a long pause, he added, “I’m going through the morning as a doomed man. All right? That’s how I want to approach my last day, even if it isn’t today. All right.”

• • • •

When they reached the ocean, the river had built itself into a towering blue-black wave. Five hundred meters above the surface of any normal river, they were being shoved forward so fast that the air blasted past them. But Rococo remained outside. Stress or habit was at play, or maybe the absence of imagination that comes with the gallows. The man could do nothing but watch the ocean retreating before the gelatin wall and before him. What wasn’t calmness had come into him, or maybe this quiet had always been present, in secret. Being someone who was always loud or ready to become loud, he didn’t know the tricks about lasting silence. But he was trying to learn. How much time remained? Don’t calculate that. The best trick was to do nothing but sit and watch everything at once, committing nothing to memory because nothing was more useless now than fresh remembrances. Not for Rococo, not anymore. Just sit still and merge with each breath and the glorious sight of saltwater fleeing from a giant that was bearing him faster and faster toward their destination.

There.

The streakship was waiting exactly where it was expected, where it promised. Thick legs straddled an island that had sunk into the waves, just from its terrific mass. Where the destroyed streakship had been minimal hyperfiber and maximum vacuum, this beast was a marvel of deep armor and utter indifference to its surroundings. It was a bright gray cone that could have hidden happily inside a mountain range. It was a machine that would welcome them and protect them, and if the resident AIs were tweaked just so, the ship would fall in love with each of them, probably forever.

“What if Amund was lying?”

Rococo said it to the wind or himself, or maybe no one. Maybe the wind was talking to him, or the river had marshaled the words, perfectly mimicking how Rococo sounded to himself.

Either way, the hope was offered, and an instant later, it died.

Amund never explicitly said, “I’ll have you killed.” Because that was such an obvious answer. But what if the river and this world didn’t think that Rococo was enough of a sacrifice? If these entities didn’t approve of immortals, maybe Mere was on the platter, too. Which meant that Amund could step alone into the streakship, and being the only surviving member of this awful mission, he would easily take charge.

These ideas needed time to bake, except there was no time.

Rococo saw quite a lot, but most of his focus was on the gray cone trying to stand above the onslaught of flesh and vengeful rage.

When he stood, he stood quickly, putting his back to the wind. The pack and kit were secured to the deck’s middle. Rococo claimed both and entered his cabin, opened the pack and gave instructions. Was this request too detailed, too odd? Was he wasting valuable time? But no, Remoras had built the kit, and Remoras designed wondrous machines. A sculpture of pure carbon—the narrow diamond blade and an elaborate, bone-shaped graphite hilt not meant to fit any human hand, but useful enough for a man about to commit murder.

The streakship was minutes away, and the towering wave decided to slow itself, beginning a steady, graceful collapse.

Rococo stepped inside Amund’s cabin. Sitting on the mattress, legs too stiff to be crossed, the mortal body was wearing comfortable clothes without boots. For a moment, nothing happened. The man looked as if he might rise any moment, or he might close his eyes and nap. But then the bal’tin ceremonial knife caught the sunlight, flashing like a beacon, and Amund responded with a sudden sound. A laugh, or perhaps something else. It could have been a sob, a muddled word, or maybe just some miserable noise escaping on its own.

Rococo managed two steps before his legs quit working, before both hands failed him and the weapon struck the floor.

Softly, one of them said, “Do what you want.”

Whose voice was that? Rococo wasn’t certain, and he didn’t care. What mattered was that he had done nothing wrong. He was bringing his colleague a fancy memento, and no crimes were being attempted, nothing was behind him but an open door and sunshine.

Except Rococo had said, “Do what you want.”

“Thanks for the advice,” the other man said. “I’ll try to do just that.”

Retreat began with a small step, then a pause. Embarrassment took hold, forcing Rococo to drop his eyes.

Amund pulled in his legs and rose, both arms helping fight gravity. Then he stepped close, saying, “You’re the great diplomat. And so smart, too. If I believed half of what you’ve told me, I’d have no choice but to consider you one of the most brilliant creatures ever born from circuits and salt.”

Rococo looked up, finding hard eyes and a broad grin that quickly turned into an ugly, disgusted expression.

“You’re the genius,” Amund said. “So of course you realized the truth. Probably long ago.”

“What truth?”

“Well, that the rivers, and I mean all of the rivers, have been playing a spectacular game with us.”

“Game?” Rococo muttered.

“Or don’t you see it?” Laughter bubbled out of him, but the man’s expression remained cold, furious. “When the rivers first learned about you, millions of tiny immortal machines riding inside one giant machine, they were afraid. Disasters were looming. Maybe like never before, they spoke to one another. They asked what they could do to save themselves. And after consideration and hard debate, they decided to send you promises. Four worlds offered, and three of those worlds were dedicated to the machines. Except they never wanted you on their shoreline. That’s why they demanded someone like me. One pure river. And after a lot of hard, invisible preparations, they staged a terrible war between stubborn beliefs.”

“Staged,” Rococo echoed.

“Be honest,” Amund said. “Bad as this damage looks, how many rivers were killed? Zero. That’s how many. Each creature is diminished, yes. But still enormous compared to little us. And then they attacked our ship, stripping our resources to a desperate minimum. But of course that should have bothered a genius like you. Against tremendous odds, you survived. So did I. We lived because that was the plan, and then the river spoke to me. Which was the main reason why I was invited in the first place. To negotiate.”

Rococo had no voice.

“The rivers were hoping I’d settle for four worlds, the same as you did. But I saw the game and held out for quite a lot more. Which is why I have to thank you. Half of my life listening to you chatter about how great you were at your job, and I learned a few things. Stupid as I am, I still managed a treaty guaranteeing that these aliens will be surrounded by billions of pure rivers but very few machines.”

Rococo couldn’t remember his last breath. Through clenched teeth, he asked, “And I’ll be the sacrifice?”

“No, I am,” Amund said instantly, without regrets. “I always have been. Aren’t you paying attention?” Then he stepped close and bent just low enough to grab up the knife, holding it sideways on two flattened hands while adding, “You’re not the great diplomat. They pulled a con on you. From the start and without you suspecting. And here I am, the dreamy piece of water that saw what you couldn’t even imagine.”

The knife weighed nothing, and the flesh offered no resistance when the tip went inside the man’s stomach and out again.

Amund collapsed, letting out a long scream.

A tiny portion of the sunlight was blocked when Mere ran inside, grabbing Rococo’s hands. “What are you doing, why would you?” she was asking. “How does this help anything anyone anywhere . . .?”

She was carving up her own fingers, trying to yank the diamond blade free of his grip. But Rococo wouldn’t let go. Feeling nothing and hearing nothing, his mind was focused only on the idea that if he was very good, and very lucky, only a million years would have to pass before this woman would willingly touch him again.

12

Three weeks after the streakship launched, bound for the Great Ship, the AI doctors pronounced Amund well enough to travel. His stitches hadn’t healed completely, and the scar tissue would never vanish. But those problems were bearable, and at least his guts were back where they belonged.

Besides, there was too much to do.

Amund was always the sacrifice. The one lie that he told was that he had any choice in this matter. But there wasn’t going to be a staged event full of fake religious noise. The culmination of change and age and his own willingness to continue: That was why he would die. His flesh had nowhere to go but to join with the rivers, and these creatures were older and far more patient than any captain or clerk wandering long among the stars.

Along with the AI doctors, Mere had left behind portions of the streakship’s machine shop and enough raw material to build a fleet of reasonably mindless devices. And following his instructions, a submarine was built and ready.

The river still listened to him, but it wasn’t talking back anymore. Which was understandable. Honestly, what more could be said at this point?

Amund stepped inside the submarine and asked to be moved. No engines were necessary. The ship supplied breath and clear windows and spotlights. But those lights weren’t needed. That was obvious soon after the river pulled him under the surf. The blue flesh of the land was replaced by glowing white flesh that lit the water and Amund’s face and his great wide smile. The entire day was spent crossing the continental shelf, and then the edge came and the river set him where he could see the spectacle. A great current was crawling its way out of the depths. A waterfall flowing backward, milky and brilliant and vast. The world was shaking as the river pulled its reserves out of the abyssal plain: The first surge of an invasion that would rebuild the planet in less time than it would take this one man to die of old age.

How many people were able to watch a new world made?

Everybody could, of course.

But at the end of the day, how many ever took notice?

© 2017 by Robert Reed. Originally in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Reed is the author of nearly three hundred published stories, plus more than a dozen novels. He is best known for his Great Ship stories, including The Memory of Sky. And for the novella, A Billion Eves, which won the Hugo Award in 2007. Many of Reed’s favorite titles are now available on Kindle. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and daughter.

EXCERPT: Upon a Burning Throne (John Joseph Adams Books)

Ashok K. Banker | 12983 words

From international sensation Ashok K. Banker, pioneer of the fantasy genre in India, comes the first book in a ground-breaking, epic fantasy series inspired by the ancient Indian classic, The Mahabharata.

In a world where demigods and demons walk among mortals, the Emperor of the vast Burnt Empire has died, leaving a turbulent realm without a sovereign. Two young princes, Adri and Shvate, are in line to rule, but birthright does not guarantee inheritance: For any successor must sit upon the legendary Burning Throne and pass The Test of Fire. Imbued with dark sorceries, the throne is a crucible—one that incinerates the unworthy.

Adri and Shvate pass The Test and are declared heirs to the empire. But there is another with a claim to power, another who also survives: a girl from an outlying kingdom. When this girl, whose father is the powerful demonlord Jarsun, is denied her claim by the interim leaders, Jarsun declares war, vowing to tear the Burnt Empire apart—leaving the young princes Adri and Shvate to rule a shattered realm embroiled in rebellion and chaos. . .

Coming from John Joseph Adams Books April 16, 2019.

Prologue:
The Test of Fire

1

They came to watch the children burn.

The royal criers had gone about the city the night before, calling out the news that Dowager Empress Jilana and Prince Regent Vrath would appear before the royal assembly at the auspicious hour to issue an important announcement. One that they had all been waiting to hear for over a year.

That was the official word.

The unofficial word, passed shivering through the body of the great metropolis like a fever through a favela, was that there would be a Burning.

The imperial palace would not confirm this; they did not deny it either.

People believed the rumor. They always do.

They came from far and wide, high and low, leaving work unfinished, doors unlocked, food half eaten, eager for entertainment.

Who could blame them?

After all, it isn’t every day one gets to see princes and princesses burned to a crisp.

People packed the avenues and roadways, sat atop rooftops and terraces, crowding every dusty field, every mud-tracked street, every bylane leading to the palace. Children sat on their fathers’ shoulders or on their mothers’ hips. Caste was ignored; class, forgotten. Merchants and traders, hunters and farmers, priests and soldiers, all stood jostling one another. Two million perspiring bodies anxiously awaiting the royal proclamation. Runners awaited, the reins of their mounts in hand; horses, camels, elephants, wagon cart trains, and other transports all ready to depart for cities across the known world, for the outcome of a Burning could change the course of history, influence the rise and fall of empires, or launch a thousand wars.

Inside the magnificent palace stronghold, the great Senate Hall was thronged from wall to wall with kings, princes, ministers and merchant lords, preceptors and traders, as well as ambassadors from a score of distant foreign lands. Even the sentries posted at each of the thousand and eight pillars of the vast hall were pressed back against the cold stone by the crowd of humanity. The influence of the Burnt Empire extended not only to the far corners of the continent, but the entire civilized world. Traders and priests crossed oceans and deserts, mountain ranges and war-torn regions, braved barbarian hordes and bandit bands, to visit Hastinaga, City of Elephants and Snakes.

There were ambassadors with ebony complexions as dark as Dowager Empress Jilana’s as well as pale-skinned foreigners with yellow hair, strange garb, and stranger tongues; men from the East with long beards and drooping mustaches; allies, tributes, and even royal emissaries. Some were of dubious loyalty. A few had warred, allied against, or otherwise opposed the expansion and growth of the Burnt Empire, before being compelled by force, expedience, or simple economic necessity to join its ever-burgeoning expansion. Many of those present had ancestors who had been present at the legendary founding of this capital city. More than a few had lost ancestors in battles or rebellions against the Krushan.

Former enemies or past rivals, they were all as one on this historic occasion. In place of poison-tipped daggers, they brought honeyed words. In lieu of arrows and legions, they offered rich tributes and exotic gifts.

All present, without exception, bowed their heads with humility before the fabled and feared Burning Throne.

2

At first glance, it looked like nothing more than a big rock.

As first impressions go, this was a perceptive one.

If seen in a different setting, in the high rocky mountains of Kalimeru perhaps, or the desert wilderness of Reygistan, or even the inhospitable forests of Jangala, one would have passed it by without a second glance.

It was just a rock.

Yet it was not a rock at all.

The jet-black substance perfectly emulated the appearance and texture of a rock.

Yet unlike any ordinary rock, it was imbued with deep, powerful sorcery. For one thing, it evaded the human gaze. The obsidian-dark surface drank light as parched earth drinks rain. The jagged texture made it deadly to touch: a passing graze could strip the skin off one’s arm with the ease of a shredder.

Most importantly, if touched by living flesh, it burst into flame instantly and did not cease burning until the unfortunate limb or individual in possession of said limb was completely and conclusively consumed.

Stonefire, as it came to be known, did not simply burn you.

It devoured you.

A stonefire boulder in the wild could lash out with a tongue of fire reaching several feet, or yards, to snare its victim, yank them back into its fiery core and devour the unfortunate one, alive and screaming.

It emitted sounds as it ate its victims, terrible, inhuman noises comparable only to mythic beasts, and those who witnessed a Burning never forgot the sounds or the sight of the fire as it cavorted, frolicked, leaped, and laughed whilst consuming its prey.

It was no ordinary rock.

Yet little was known about it beyond these observed behaviors and qualities. For one thing, stonefire did not lend itself to examination but reacted to any living gaze. One indication of its presence was the utter absence of any fauna in its immediate vicinity. Even the fiercest predators gave it a wide berth. Those foolish few who sought to unearth its mysteries were consumed by its fiery flame, their ashes scattered by the wind.

All that was left then, as with most of life’s mysteries, was speculation.

The gurus said it came from the celestial void, the emptiness between stars. A fragment of time and space, hurtling across unimaginable distance to strike our planet like a stone hurled by a disorderly god.

Its arrival upon our planet caused a cataclysm that disrupted the natural order for millennia, led to the extinction of most life, displaced continents and oceans, raised new mountain ranges, erased entire civilizations, and brought a million years of geologic turmoil and volcanic changes.

When the ash clouds finally settled, those few mortals who had survived the million years of cataclysm emerged, tempered by fire, to repopulate Arthaloka.

Of those few, the Krushan blazed the brightest.

The gurus claimed that Kr’ush, the forebear of the dynasty, was formed of the burning rock itself, a fragment of that celestial substance that took the shape of a man and walked Arthaloka. Ten thousand years later, it was impossible to separate myth from reality. The truth, be it as it may, was forever submerged in the ocean of lost knowledge.

What was true then, as it was today, was that Kr’ush and all those born of his seed were possessed of a symbiotic link to the stonefire.

This link manifested itself in different ways with each individual, but there was one thing all Krushan had in common:

They did not burn.

3

The crowds had grown restless, the gossip more spirited, by the time the tall, dark, stately form of Dowager Empress Jilana appeared upon the dais of Senate Hall. Her appearance was met with instant silence as every pair of eyes turned to her, every pair of lips quieted, and every pair of ears awaited her proclamation.

She began with the customary homilies, made the usual ritual declarations, and honored the ancestors, gods, and all those required to be acknowledged by tradition. Priests surrounded her like a swarm of bees around their hive queen, prompting her with suitable quotes from Krushan scriptures, performing the ritual consecrations and other religious rites with efficient economy, condensing what would have been a ceremony lasting an entire moon-cycle into a sprightly three hours.

When all the formalities were over, she took to the dais, a raised, circular platform of polished marble with veins of gold and silver. Sunlight descended through the painted skylight dome a hundred yards above her head, pinning her with a shaft of brilliant gold.

Behind her, the brooding stonefire seat loomed.

The dais turned slowly, presenting her sharply angled features to all the thousand and eight rulers present in turn. Each represented a kingdom or a nation. Each was accompanied by only one armed aide and watched over by one armed Krushan guard.

From the periphery of the great circular hall, acolyte priests observed and recorded every detail, passing along a running commentary that was then repeated by royal criers to the perspiring people outside.

The ritual formalities ended, Dowager Empress Jilana came to the crux of the matter. Not one to waste breath, knowing she already had a captive audience eager to receive her words, she voiced the name of Prince Regent Vrath.

The man in question stood in full court armor, gleaming and resplendent, the most magnificent specimen of manhood in the entire assemblage, the symbol of power of the entire Burnt Empire and pillar of the dynasty.

Vrath approached Jilana with a bow and a kneel that displayed a son’s respect, though, as a demigod, he was far more powerful than she. Yet that show of humility was significant, intended as a message to all who observed them both, this unlikely duo of stepmother and stepson. For it was by Vrath’s leave that she ruled Hastinaga and through Vrath’s power and influence and reach that she maintained that post. This kneeling and show of respect was to convey to the world at large that all was well between the dowager empress and her stepson, the steward and regent of the Burnt Empire. All was well and as it had been since the demise of her husband, the late emperor Sha’ant.

A thousand wagers collapsed on that look alone.

A thousand fortunes were won and lost because of that kneeling and the angle of Vrath’s bowed head.

The Krushan Empire, better known as the Burnt Empire, was, as it had been, ruled by the late Sha’ant’s widow, Jilana, and protected by his son Vrath. Let no one doubt or question that status quo, on pain of death.

This message conveyed, Vrath took his place beside his stepmother on the dais. After a few gruff formal words—the prince regent was not fond of public speaking—he bowed again to Jilana, leaving it to her to make the proclamation that all were waiting to receive.

“It is a great day for the Krushan dynasty, a great day for Hastinaga and the dawn of a new epoch,” she said with a regal tone and manner that belied her origins as a fisherman’s daughter who had spent her youth ferrying pilgrims across the sacred Jeel River all day long, clad in scanty garb and stinking of fish. Now, as she stood before the diamond-bright eyes of the world’s most powerful and wealthiest monarchs, she was the very image of what a widowed queen should be, proud and dignified, the gold tiara on her head and gold scepter in her hand leaving no doubt of her authority.

“The Krushan dynasty has two male heirs,” she said. “The princesses Ember and Umber have each given birth to a son. Both boys are healthy and well.”

The cheer that exploded from two million throats buffeted the humid air and filled the metropolis. In the great hall, the thousand and eight were equally vocal in their exuberance, each vying to outdo the others in expressing their joy—and, more importantly, to be seen and heard expressing that joy.

After the deafening uproar finally died down, Prince Regent Vrath took over again, announcing in his military commander’s bullfrog voice, “In the name of my father, Emperor Sha’ant, and all the ancestors back to Almighty Kr’ush himself, I call upon the new heirs to undergo the Test of Fire.”

4

A double row of Krushan fire maidens had entered the great hall during Jilana’s speech, forming a long path from an inner palace doorway to the foot of the dais. Every last one was armed and held her weapon at the ready. The fire maidens favored the bladed weapon called a Flame, held by a fist-shaped grip from which protruded four inches of layered razor-sharp steel that curved in a semicircle with a flame-shaped tip at the top. They each held two Flames in the resting position, the flat of the blades overlapping to form a shield against their navels, and stood facing the dais.

As the princesses Ember and Umber emerged from the inner palace, the fire maidens let their mistresses walk past, then turned smartly to face outward, forming a wall of blades that only one intent on suicide would dare challenge.

Despite having given birth only days earlier, both young women walked with the regal dignity that was expected of them. If there was a bead of sweat on one’s brow or a queasiness in the other’s belly, it was only to be expected. Their lives, their reputations, their futures, as well as the fate of their birth nation, rested upon the outcome of the next few moments.

The gathering in the great hall and in the city outside observed the approach of the princesses, hawkishly seeking any show of nervousness. The biggest bets were now being placed on which of their offspring would be the lucky one today and which the less fortunate.

They reached the dais together, but Princess Umber, being the elder, permitted her sister Ember to precede her up the steps.

Upon the dais, both turned the tiny bundles that they held against their chests so that the audience could see with their own eyes the children they brought to the test.

The difference in the two babes was striking.

One was dark as pitch, with eyes as white as alabaster.

The other was white as alabaster with eyes as colorless as glass.

The thousand and eight monarchs gasped.

A blind prince and an albino?

Murmurs of unease began at the corners of the great hall. Darting looks of doubt.

In the streets and avenues, the news caused consternation.

Envoys and dispatches wanted to ride at once, for this very news was enough to draw doubt, suspicion, even anger down on the Burnt Empire. What good, after all, many would say, were two such heirs? How could either of them prove worthy of the Burning Throne? How could a blind prince or an albino prince rule the Burnt Empire? Were Jilana and Vrath seeking to enrage the thousand and eight kingdoms? How could a dynasty as powerful as the Krushan possibly expect to command the world’s greatest empire with either of these two on the throne? Surely they were not fit to even be put to the Test of Fire? What mockery was this?

The mood turned mutinous; the air thickened with the possibility of violence.

Vrath sensed this sudden turn of mood and stepped forward.

“Does anyone here challenge the right of these two boys to undergo the Test of Fire?” he demanded, his voice edged with steel, his grey eyes the color of frost, his hand resting on the hilt of his sheathed weapon.

Eyes that had sparked defiance softened at once, voices stilled.

The city grew quiet.

None dared challenge the son of the late emperor Sha’ant and the river goddess Jeel.

Vrath held his posture and gaze a moment longer, to suppress any further thoughts of rebellion.

Then, when he was satisfied, he stepped back, offering a clear path to the throne to the princesses Ember and Umber.

“Let the test begin. As the younger, Princess Ember’s son will go first.”

Princess Ember walked the dozen steps across the dais to the massive throne, the eyes of the world upon her slender form.

She stopped a full ten yards from the stonefire and held up the tiny bundle of life with both hands, displaying the child to the black rock. She kept her eyes low, her posture obeisant, and her tone prayerful, as she had been taught and made to rehearse a hundred times.

“I, Ember, daughter of the Serapi nation, wife of the late prince Gada, daughter-in-law to Dowager Empress Jilana and the late emperor Sha’ant, submit my son, Adri, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, life of my heart, to your keeping. I pray to thee, bear him with grace, guard him with fire, empower him to rule the great Burnt Empire.”

The last echoes of her words faded, leaving a pall of silence.

The great black throne loomed, five yards taller than the princess, two yards wide, a cold, malformed darkness in the center of the vast chamber that was not human, yet brooded with sentient life.

With a roar as savage as a vyag in the deep jungle, a tongue of fire shot out and grasped the tiny infant held aloft by his mother.

Princess Ember cried out as the tongue of flame enveloped her newborn babe, took hold of him in a fiery grasp, and snatched him out of her arms. She fell to the gleaming dais, her fingertips scorched and smoking from the mere brush with the fire.

The fire curled with tortuous slowness, drawing the infant to the great mass of black rock.

The child himself was either too startled or too terrified to make a sound. The boy Adri stared, his arms and legs flapping wildly in consternation, but remained silent.

The flame formed fingers that caressed and stroked the baby’s soft cheeks and round face. The fire reflected in his milky white eyes, but there were no pupils to contract, nor any reaction to the searing heat that must surely have been produced by that intense flame.

The fire spoke to the boy in its own savage voice, whether threatening or cajoling, it was impossible to say which, for none of those watching spoke its language, and the only grown person who did understand, namely Vrath himself, showed no inclination to offer a translation.

The babe calmed, his limbs slowing, his agitation ceasing.

The fire murmured again, and perhaps this was just a fancy of their imagination, but the monarchs thought it sounded . . . pleased.

Either that or it approved of the meal it was about to enjoy.

Without further delay, the flame lowered the babe to the flattened part of the rock, the seat of the fabled throne.

Held by the fist of flame, the babe appeared to be sitting upright of his own accord, caped by fire.

Then: a slow growl, deep and rumbling as if from the bowels of Arthaloka.

The throne burst into flame.

A conflagration to match a giant bonfire.

Yet a hundred oak logs ignited at once could not have produced a fire so intense.

The thousand and eight gasped and stepped back, no longer eager to be close to the dais.

Those who stood only a few dozen yards away swatted at their hair, their eyebrows, their mustaches, their fine robes and shawls, sweat popping out on their faces as they stared in amazement.

The Burning Throne burned, and as it burned, it sang.

You did not need to speak the language of fire to know the meaning of that song.

It was a song of fire and fury, war and blood, death and glory.

It blazed fifty yards high and ten yards wide, the throne itself disappearing, lost in a blaze too intense, too searing to look upon directly.

Hands shielded eyes, the desire to witness overpowering the fear of fire. One ancient urge dominating another ancient need.

Upon the dais, Princesses Ember and Umber, Prince Regent Vrath, Dowager Empress Jilana, stood unscathed and unharmed by the heat and the flames. If they felt the scorching fire, they showed no sign. Though the three women were only wedded to Krushan men—not Krushan by birth—they too were protected by the power of the stonefire.

Vrath—as the child of both fire and water, on his father’s and mother’s sides, respectively—was both Krushan and immortal, and as such, doubly protected and empowered. He looked into the heart of the blaze and saw all, though he said not a word to anyone else. He listened to the savage song of the stonefire and understood every word and sound—and of these too, he said nothing.

The monarchs assembled in the great hall, the fire maidens, and the royal guards were neither impervious to the power of the stonefire, nor were they immune to its appetites. Many recalled the terrible tale of the Great Devouring, when a false aspirant had angered the stonefire with his disrespect and arrogance. The throne had responded by lashing out and burning not only the aspirant himself, but every last monarch present, reducing them to a thousand and eight piles of ash in moments. Even the fire maidens, the guards, and the aides had not been spared, and the gurus said that the floor of the vast chamber was a foot deep in ash by the time the throne was finally done burning. Only the Krushan family members had themselves been left untouched, but that was only to be expected.

Fear of a recurrence had some of the thousand and eight turning to look toward the exits, but none were permitted to leave or enter once a Burning began, and the ready spears of the royal guards outside would end their lives as surely as the fire. The fire maidens were unafraid, having been raised from birth to serve the Burning Throne; every last one expected to end her life in sacrifice to its service. If that end came today, so be it. It would be as much an honor to be taken by fire as to fall in bloody battle.

But the Burning Throne did not seek any other prey.

No tongues of flame darted out to yank nervous monarchs.

The blaze, intense and white-hot though it raged, remained confined to the throne itself, and within the perimeter of the dais.

Slowly, by degrees, the blaze subsided.

The terror of the crowd abated.

The thousand and eight heaved a silent sigh of relief, glad that they would not perish today.

Their fear was replaced by their desperate desire to know the fate of the aspirant, the young prince Adri.

They lowered their hands and stared at the Burning Throne.

Almost to the last, all in attendance expected to see a tiny pile of ashes, no more than a handful or two perhaps, thus ending the foolish ambition of a mother who dared to suggest that a blind prince could rule the Burnt Empire.

The flames diminished, soon relegated to but a few wisps and licks shrouding the throne, though the black rock from which the seat was carved now glowed crimson—or in some places white-hot—from the searing heat.

Smoke, thick and white as fog, then dissipated with frustrating slowness, revealing at last, with tantalizing coyness, the result of the Test of Fire.

5

Prince Adri sat, held by gentle fingers of flame, upon the Burning Throne.

A roar of excitement rose from the great hall.

It was echoed by the crowds outside.

The Burning Throne had chosen a new heir for the first time in a quarter of a century.

Prince Regent Vrath silenced the gathering with a mildly raised voice. “Princess Umber may now offer her son.”

The gathering stilled again, befuddled. What was the point of testing another aspirant? The throne had already chosen. Even the gurus were puzzled. There was no precedent for such an event. Never before had two aspirants been born on the same day. Krushan tradition demanded that once an heir was chosen by the stonefire, he or she ruled until their death. Yet it was true that, in the rare event that twins or triplets or multiple siblings were born, the eldest of them would undergo the test and, if accepted, would rule. By that same logic, it also followed that Princess Umber’s son, being the firstborn of these two boys, should have taken precedence.

Later, it would be speculated that it was Dowager Empress Jilana and Prince Regent Vrath’s joint decision to put the younger boy to the test first, thereby giving him an opportunity to prove his legitimacy. Had they simply called upon Princess Umber to offer her son first, she being the eldest and her son the firstborn of the two, the point would have been moot. Princess Umber’s son would have passed the test and been accepted as the rightful heir of the Burnt Empire, destined to rule till his death. There would have been no call for Princess Ember to place her own son upon the Burning Throne.

On such decisions are empires built, dynasties founded, and wars waged.

But at that instant, in the great hall, none dared challenge the right of the elder princess to offer her son to the fire test, not while Vrath stood by and endorsed her.

So the assemblage watched in silent wonder as a second child was offered to the Burning Throne.

“I, Umber, daughter of the Serapi nation, wife of the late prince Virya, daughter-in-law to Dowager Empress Jilana and the late emperor Sha’ant, submit my son, Shvate, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, life of my heart, to your keeping. I pray to thee, bear him with grace, guard him with fire, empower him to rule the great Burnt Empire.”

What followed was a reenactment of what had gone before.

The Burning Throne took Shvate, son of Umber, and embraced him in its fiery heart, sang its savage song, blazed with as much fervor and delight, and accepted him as rightful heir of the Burnt Empire.

This time, when the flames died down and the white smoke cleared, the exultation that met the sight of the living infant was no less enthusiastic—for to show anything less than complete ecstasy over the anointing of a Krushan heir would have been unforgivably disrespectful—but there was also consternation and confusion amongst the monarchs as well as the people.

What did this mean?

How could there be two heirs?

And what of their afflictions? One was born blind, the other an albino. In their own kingdoms, neither boy would have been deemed fit to rule.

But there was more to come.

After Princess Umber had retrieved her little bundle of flesh and stood proudly beside her sister, both now equal in their roles as the mother of an heir of Krushan, and therefore in line to be future Queen Mother of the Burnt Empire, Prince Regent Vrath made a final announcement.

“As each of the two princes is gifted with special needs, and since both have been anointed by fire and proven fit to rule the Burnt Empire, it is the decision of the elders that they shall rule jointly for the time being.”

The questions had been answered. The confusion had been cleared. The reasons for the dual Burning explained.

There was some relief among the monarchs and the people.

Perhaps this was tenable.

The cruel consensus was that a disabled prince, on his own, was hardly a worthy ruler by the measure of tradition.

But two princes, working together, well, perhaps they would be able to compensate for each other’s shortcomings.

But there was one more surprise still in store.

The Burning was not yet over.

6

A monarch stepped toward the dais.

At once, the guards moved to stop him, weapons drawn.

The monarch ignored them and called, “Prince Regent Vrath, Dowager Empress Jilana, I ask your leave to approach.”

Vrath and Jilana exchanged a glance.

Jilana spoke. “The court recognizes King Aqron. Speak. What is your purpose?”

“By the law of the Krushan, I demand the right to submit my grandchild to the Test of Fire.”

This was met with such deafening silence that even the earlier roars of exultation could not match its impact.

On a day without precedent, here was yet another unprecedented event.

Vrath said, “The throne has chosen its heirs. Prince Adri and Prince Shvate shall rule the empire jointly. The test is over.”

King Aqron replied, “Nevertheless, by Krushan law, I demand that my grandchild be permitted his test.”

Vrath’s thick brows beetled. He was not known for his patience. Before he could speak again, Jilana spoke. “King Aqron, you are not of Krushan blood. Neither is your wife, nor your daughter. How then do you claim the right to test your grandchild?”

King Aqron gestured toward the nearest entrance. A young woman stood there, bearing an infant child. At his gesture, she held up the child proudly.

“My daughter, Princess Aqreen, bore a child of Krushan blood six months ago. We have traveled here from the kingdom of Aqron, far beyond the white deserts of Reygistan, to submit to the test. We were set upon by dacoits in the Ravines of Beedakh and held captive for months until my aide could ride back home and fetch our ransom. When we finally arrived here in Hastinaga and sought to present ourselves to the court, we learned that there was to be a Burning. It was such fortuitous timing that it cannot be a coincidence. Only the gods themselves could have planned it thus. Pray, command your guards to let my daughter enter the great hall, that we may submit to the test.”

Eyes flicked from King Aqron to the dais, watching and drinking in every word and gesture, nuance and intonation. This was turning out to be quite a day.

Quite a day indeed.

Now it was Jilana’s turn to frown. Her slender, artfully plucked brows arched as she asked, “You say your grandchild is of Krushan blood. Who, then, is the father?”

King Aqron offered a peculiar expression, neither a smile nor a scowl. “My daughter has not confided that to me, and refuses to do so to anyone. She says it is a woman’s business whom she chooses to take to her bed, and I cannot argue with that.”

Jilana and Vrath put their heads together briefly to consult, and neither looked very pleased when they parted.

Vrath asked with obvious irritation, “You understand what it means to fail the test?”

“I do,” Aqron said. “As does my daughter. I sought to dissuade her, but she is as stubborn as I am when she sets her mind to something. She will not rest until her child is tested.”

With obvious reluctance, Jilana said, “Let Princess Aqreen and King Aqron approach the dais.”

The sentries at the door parted, the princess entered, watched by all eyes. She wore the head-shawl of the Aqron people, a mark of their faith, and her finely carved features were as delicate as a profile drawn in desert sand. Like her father, and like most Aqron, she was taller and thinner than most of the grown men in the great hall, except for Vrath, who was the tallest by far. Accompanied by her father, she strode to the dais, bowed gracefully to the dowager empress and prince regent despite the burden in her arms, and ascended. The two princesses Ember and Umber glared at her without any attempt to conceal their disapproval. If their resentment could have been expressed with fire, Princess Aqreen would have been burned to a cinder right there and then.

She approached the stonefire and raised her child, offering the thousand and eight their first clear view of the infant. It was a handsome girl of some six months of age, her tiny features a miniature of her mother’s but with a high, flat forehead. She gazed with intelligent eyes at the vast hall filled with men and women in garments of every color and style, and gurgled happily, stuffing a fist into her toothless mouth.

“I, Aqreen, princess of Reygistan, child of my father, Aqron, and my mother, Aqreela; and servant of the prophetess Aquirella; unwed mother to my daughter, Krushita. I submit this flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, life of my heart, to your keeping. I pray to thee, bear her with grace, guard her with fire, empower her to rule the great Burnt Empire. In the name of the prophetess, namas!”

More than a few brows other than Vrath’s were raised at this dramatic deviation from the traditional words of offering, but none objected or intervened.

The child’s fate was now in the hands of the stonefire.

Moments later, the Burning Throne delivered its verdict.

It embraced the child with fire and warmth, and when the smoke and flames cleared, the little girl sat of her own accord, chubby arms splayed, patting the razor-sharp black rock as affectionately as if it were a beloved pet. Where her tiny fingers made contact with the jagged stone, sparks flared. She laughed at the phenomenon and clapped her hands together in approval. Her laughter echoed around the great hall, for words spoken upon the Burning Throne were amplified by its power.

Vrath and Jilana exchanged a stormy glance. It was clear to everyone present that they were furious at this turn of events. Tradition and Krushan law demanded that they acknowledge Princess Krushita as the rightful heir and yield the throne to her, with her mother and father managing the empire until the girl was of age. This meant, in effect, that both Jilana and Vrath would have to relinquish their roles and step down. Neither appeared willing to do so.

Vrath was renowned for his adherence to Krushan law. Those who knew his expressions and body language read the telltale indications. Despite his resistance to relinquishing the reins of power, Vrath was prepared to step down because it was the right thing to do.

He spoke. “The law of my ancestors is clear. King Aqron, your granddaughter has passed the test of fire. She has proven her right to sit upon the Burning Throne and rule the empire. Under the circumstances, I have no choice but to—”

“One moment, Vrath.”

The prince regent frowned at the interruption.

He glanced at his stepmother.

Dowager Empress Jilana’s face was as stormy as a monsoon cloud, her sharp tone of voice leaving no doubt about her refusal to accept the situation. “There is still the question of succession. Before we can accept this aspirant as our future ruler, the people of the Burnt Empire have the right to know from what bloodline she is descended. Princess Aqreen, I demand to know the name of this child’s father.”

Princess Aqreen, her baby safely in her arms again, lowered her chin to the shorter, older, woman, completely unabashed by Jilana’s imperious tone and manner. “Among the Reygistani, a child is known by their mother’s name. We are a matriarchal society. A woman may take as many husbands as she wishes, or bed a hundred men, it matters not. Her children are her children.”

Though Jilana had to raise her head to look at Aqreen directly, she did so in a manner that made her seem the taller and more threatening woman. “This is not the white desert. You are not in Reygistan. Krushan law is patriarchal, paternity is determined by the father. You must name the father of this child.”

Aqreen set her jaw defiantly, showing Jilana her long, delicate neck. “The stonefire has proven her legitimacy. She is of Krushan blood. That is all you need to know.”

“Stepmother,” Vrath said cautiously, for once in the unlikely role of intermediary, “what she says is true. Under Krushan law—”

Jilana responded with a tone as scathing as the stonefire. “I am Krushan law. As dowager empress, I still hold the reins of power in my fist. I will not relinquish ten thousand years of greatness to a desert rat and her bastard daughter!”

Aqron’s face turned dark with blood. “You insult my daughter and grandchild and our people! Prince Regent Vrath, will you stand for this? Is this how the great Burnt Empire treats its own heir and her family?”

Vrath, for once in his life, looked as if he would rather be anywhere else than upon this dais at this moment. He raised both hands. “Clearly, we are not all in agreement. I recommend we convene in chambers to discuss the matter further. It is not seemly to continue a family dispute in the public view. ”

“It is hardly a family dispute,” Jilana countered, breaking with tradition again by publicly correcting her stepson. “These people are not family by any definition.”

“My father told me you would not accept the stonefire’s test,” said Princess Aqreen, cradling her daughter. “He told me that the only way to force you to let us take the test was to make our demand publicly, during the Burning. I am sorry that he was right. Had we approached you privately as I wanted, you would not have accepted us. I see that now. I was foolish to ever think that the high and mighty Jilana would ever loosen her iron grip on the reins of power. But my daughter has no part to play in your politics and your bigotry. She is of the same blood as Prince Vrath, the same blood as your late husband, Emperor Sha’ant, and the princes Adri and Shvate. That makes us family, whether you like it or not. For my daughter’s sake, and for the sake of this family’s future, I ask you respectfully, Dowager Empress Jilana and Prince Regent Vrath, is not her claim upheld by Krushan law? Is not her seniority over Adri and Shvate evident to anyone present here today? She is elder to them and has passed the test of fire. The Burning Throne has accepted and embraced her. She is a daughter of queens and champions, a proud inheritor of the great tradition of Reygistani warrior queens for seven hundred years. She will make a great queen, a fine empress, and the worthy successor to great Kr’ush himself. Give her her rightful due, and I predict the Burnt Empire will flourish. But deny her, and you will bring down the wrath of the gods themselves upon this dynasty.”

Prince Vrath spoke into the heavy silence that followed. “Krushan law—”

It was as far as Jilana allowed him to go. “Krushan law demands that the lineage of any successor be made known to the world, that there be no doubt about the parentage and right of any aspirant. This law was laid down by Krushan himself to prevent any counterclaim or dispute. By failing to identify the father of her child, Princess Aqreen has forfeited her claim under Krushan law.”

King Aqron spoke, tempering his obvious outrage for the sake of his daughter. “The Burning Throne has identified the father’s bloodline. If little Krushita were not of Krushan blood, she would not be alive right now. She passed the test of the stonefire. She has been declared fit to rule and a worthy successor. That is also Krushan law.”

Jilana turned to address the king of Reygistan. “Then we are in conflict, and as dowager empress, I have the sole right to break that conflict with my decision. And I say that your granddaughter is unfit to rule. That ends the matter. Now take your bastard grandchild and whore of a daughter and return to your desert rat hole.”

King Aqron’s fist clenched the hilt of his scimitar, the knuckles whitening with force. “Jilana, you dare speak to us in this manner? Why, you yourself are nothing but the daughter of a fisherman! You ferried travelers across the Jeel River for pennies a crossing! And your own son Vessa was born out of wedlock, from a casual night spent with an anonymous stranger of Krushan blood. And yet you, the pot, are now presuming to call the kettle black! My daughter is a princess and the daughter of queens. You were nothing but a common fisher caste. They say your skin reeked so much of fish no man would touch you. It was that Krushan stranger who magicked away that smell, making you desirable and seductive. It was with that magic that you seduced Emperor Sha’ant when he happened to board your ferryboat, and enticed him into taking you for his wife. From a ferryboat to the Burning Throne! What a long way you have come, Jilana. How dare you criticize the morality of my daughter when you yourself had your own first child out of wedlock. Indeed, when your two sons by Emperor Sha’ant died tragically in their youth, you summoned your own bastard son, Vessa the mage, to force himself upon your two daughters-in-law, seeding their wombs with offspring of Krushan blood. Did you announce that today? You presented Princes Adri and Shvate as the heirs, but you did not name their father, did you? Such hypocrisy! You did not name their father because that would have meant acknowledging the fact that he was your son, and of Krushan blood. Moreover, it would have meant naming the Krushan stranger who fathered Vessa himself upon you, even before your marriage to Emperor Sha’ant. Who was that stranger, Jilana? The mystery has been kept for decades. You will not name him, yet it is of his son Vessa that these two heirs apparent were seeded. And yet you have the audacity to claim that my daughter, an honorable and brave warrior princess who is a shining exemplar to the women of our nation, has no right to take your place as Queen Mother? Your hypocrisy and duplicity are an insult to Krushan law and an affront to the people of the empire! You, Jilana, are the one who is not fit to stand where you stand today. By the same token that you dismiss my daughter Aqreen, I dismiss you!”

“Enough!” Vrath thundered.

The thousand and eight staggered back, their ears ringing from the deafening bellow. For when Vrath spoke in anger, it was with an impact to match a thunderclap. While Jilana could only posture and pout, Vrath was the real power. It was not for nothing that his name kept any dissenters across the vast and unruly span of the empire in check. A demigod in full temper is not something any mortal can withstand and still survive.

“I will not tolerate anyone speaking to my stepmother in such a manner,” he said, his eyes dribbling fire. Behind him, the dark throne glowed a deep scarlet, sensing the mood of one of its own. “She has already communicated her decision. Her word is final. If you wish to complain or protest, you will follow the usual protocol. There will be no more mouthing of cheap insults by anyone.” At this he paused and turned to glance briefly at Jilana, including her in his stricture. “The Burning has concluded, and this matter is over. The people expect a jubilee, and they shall have it.”

7

“The people expect a lot, but they get very little.”

The words came from the entrance, spoken by a voice as quiet and smoldering as a banked fire. Heads turned to see which new character had entered the stage of this imperial drama. The figure that stood there resembled a life-sized version of a child’s stick-figure drawing. Tall, a whole foot taller than seven-foot Vrath himself, and with angular shoulders and bony limbs jutting at sharp angles to the rake-thin torso, he loomed above the imperial guards who held their short spears pointed at him. By some trick of the light, his features remained clouded, shrouded by a miasma that seemed to move when he himself moved. All one could see was theimpression of a face, and there was clearly something not quite human about those features, yet one would be hard-pressed to say what it was exactly that it lacked. Though the figure’s face was a mystery, his mouth and tongue were very visible and constantly motile; indeed, his tongue flickered in and out of his thin lips, punctuating his speech with sibilance.

“Least of all, justice,” he added. “This reputation you have earned, Vrath, of being the great pillar of Krushan law, upholder of the great tradition of Kr’ush himself . . . it is ill-deserved. Today, you put the lie to the claim that Vrath the Oathtaker always upholds the law. Today, all of Hastinaga witnessed firsthand that Vrath was confronted with a clear matter of law and even voiced his agreement, only to then dissemble, bluster, and bully his way out of his own decision. Does your father’s widow have such sway over you that you forget your first loyalty is to the law? Has Empress Jilana completely corrupted your moral code? Has your legendary vow of celibacy weakened your adherence to law? Are you too distracted by your unfulfilled lust for the three beautiful widows with whom you share a household?”

“Silence!” Vrath thundered, fire spilling from his eyes and mouth now. Tiny motes of flame fell from his eyes and lips, turning to bits of coal as they cooled. His boots crushed them underfoot, smearing the pristine white marble. “You are out of order, stranger. Sentries, clap him in irons and drag him down to the dungeons.”

The sentries moved to comply, a half dozen strong men with short spears converging on the insolent speaker.

One sentry, in his zeal to comply with his prince regent’s command, put the point of his spear to the waist of the stranger.

Like a coiled whip unleashed, the tall man’s hand shot out and struck the sentry’s forearm. The sentry collapsed, gagging as froth welled from his open mouth, eyes rolling up to reveal their whites. Before he had touched the ground, the stranger’s hands had whipped around, striking at each of the other sentries in turn. The strikes were minimal, barely a pinprick; the effect, instantaneous. All six sentries fell to the polished floor of the great hall, writhing and kicking in their death throes.

The stranger stepped over their flailing bodies as he approached the dais. Kings and queens parted to let him pass, eyes wide with awe.

A name rustled through the air like a dry leaf in an autumn breeze.

“Jarsun.”

Jilana’s voice was quiet, her temper banked now, her face guarded.

As a hundred more sentries sprang forward, willing to die rather than let a stranger trespass, she gestured sharply. “Let him pass.”

They paused as one man, and retreated to their posts.

“It has been a long time, brother-in-law,” she said, visibly regaining her composure as the tall stranger reached the foot of the dais. Even standing three feet lower, his eyes were at the same level as hers. “But I don’t seem to recall inviting you to this occasion. Why is that?” She snapped her fingers in a mocking pretense of absent-mindedness. “Because you were banished from Hastinaga thirty years past! It was my own father-in-law who banished you, as I recall.”

“You speak as if you were there when it happened,” Jarsun said, placing a foot on the lowermost step of the dais. “You were still a ferrywoman on the Jeel River at the time. I sat in your rickety little boat once, though you had no idea who I was, and to be fair, I had cloaked my identity to appear as a Gujwari merchant. What King Aqron said was true. You reeked of fish. It was difficult enough to endure the river crossing. If my father had not used his power to eliminate the odor at your request, I doubt my brother Sha’ant would have endured it when he sat in your boat. Let alone have wooed you. More likely, he would have jumped overboard.”

The stone-dead silence that met this drew a smile from the visitor.

He turned to look at the assembly.

“Why? Did you not know that the Krushan stranger that your Empress Jilana dallied with on the banks of the Jeel was none other than the former Emperor Shapaar? Does that shock you into silence? I see even Prince Regent Vrath looks a little taken aback. Vrath, were you not aware that your beloved and highly respected stepmother Jilana first mated with your grandfather Shapaar and bore him a son, before mating with and then marrying your father Sha’ant and bearing him two sons? Of course, she probably knew you would react thus when you knew the truth, which is why she kept it a secret for all these years. It must be a terrible shock to you personally, Vrath, to learn that Vessa is in fact your uncle as well as your half brother.”

Vrath’s face gave no hint of his inner turmoil. Aloud, he said only, “By Krushan law, you are banished from Hastinaga.”

“Krushan law.” Jarsun’s laughter was as sibilant as his speech. It filled the chamber and spilled out into the crowded streets, making mothers draw their babes closer and causing even the least religious to make signs of appeasement to their gods. “Krushan law is a joke. Your stepmother here has made a mockery of Krushan law. She violated Krushan law when she slept with one Krushan, then went on to bed and marry another Krushan. That is unacceptable, and you know it.”

“The veracity of that allegation is as yet untested,” Vrath replied stiffly.

“Listen to yourself! You speak as an officer of the court, using your formal legal language. But it’s all a sham and a show for the sake of the world. The truth is, my daughter Krushita has proven her right to rule the Burnt Empire. She has been tested and has passed the test. I am here now to demand that you comply with the law. Step down from your office as prince regent. Ensure that Dowager Empress Jilana steps down as well. Accept and acknowledge Princess Krushita, daughter of Princess Aqreen and myself, Jarsun Krushan, as the legitimate heir to the Burnt Empire and let her claim her rightful place upon the Burning Throne. Do this now and without further prevarication and prove that you are truly a man who abides by the law of our ancestors.”

Vrath was a man torn apart by loyalty and law. Despite his demigod self-control, he could not conceal the war within himself. He turned to look at the parties named: Jilana. Aqreen. And lastly, the cheerful babe, Krushita, now contentedly asleep at her mother’s breast, the nipple still in her puckered mouth.

Finally, he turned back to Jilana again. But before he could speak, she shook her head slowly from side to side. “No, Vrath.”

“Mother . . .” he said.

“Do not listen to Jarsun’s forked tongue. It spills only poison. He seeks to finish what he started thirty years ago when he defied his father and attempted to kill his brother, Sha’ant. He is a being filled with hatred and venom. He wants nothing more than to see the Krushan dynasty fall into ashes and dust. Do not let him poison your mind with his talk of law.”

“But the law favors his argument,” Vrath said. “You demanded that Princess Aqreen name the father of the child, and he has presented himself. On what grounds do we deny the child her inheritance now?”

“On the grounds that she is the daughter of a banished criminal. One whose name was stricken from the annals of Krushan history. Go look through this palace, through all our thousand and eight palaces and fortresses across the empire. Search all your life. You will not find a single bust, portrait, etching, or document that mentions his name or bears his likeness. He has been erased from history. He is no longer Krushan, and as such, any offspring he may bear, legitimate or otherwise, are not Krushan either.”

Jilana turned and pointed to the sleeping babe in Aqreen’s arms. The mother had moved the child to her shoulder and was adjusting her blouse; she glared at Jilana through half-lidded eyes. “That bastard child is not Krushan and will never be Krushan. It is forever cursed by the sins of its father.”

Vrath turned back to Jarsun, still standing with his foot on the lowermost step of the dais. “You have your answer.”

“All I hear are the prattling words of a power-hungry widow who has not accepted the fact that her husband died a decade ago. These are the desperate ravings of a woman who refuses to let go the reins even though they are no longer hers to grasp. Break her fingers, pry them apart. It is the only way. If you will not do it, Vrath, then I will.”

Vrath stared down at the man who was still his uncle by blood, if not by law. “Is that a threat?”

Jarsun took a second step up, then a third, then a fourth and final step. He stood upon the dais now, towering a full head higher than Vrath, and above the entire room. “Why threaten when I can simply act?”

“You cannot take the throne by force,” Vrath said, the fire in his eyes showing itself. Smoke trickled from his pupils, curling around his blue-tinged locks.

“I do not need to,” Jarsun replied, his multiple tongues slithering in and out of his mouth, lingering at the corners of his lips. “The throne has already chosen. My daughter Krushita is the rightful heir.”

“You heard my mother. The child is no longer Krushan by our laws.”

“Laws are mere words. The stonefire speaks a tongue older than language itself. You heard what it said when it tasted of each of the three children. Only my daughter is whole and capable of governing this empire. A whole that is superior to those two halves.” He indicated the two newborn boys in their mothers’ arms on the far side of the dais. “It is called a Burning for good reason. The throne knows who truly deserves to sit upon it. It has delivered its decision, and its decision is the oldest law of all among our clan. That is the true seat of the power of the Krushan. Respect it, Vrath. Respect it and uphold it.”

Vrath was silent for a long moment.

In that silence, the world hung in the balance. History forked. Time bifurcated into multiple pathways, each leading to a different possible future.

A deep growl sounded from the throne, like the rumbling from the belly of a volcano.

Hastinaga waited.

Then, with a single word, Vrath changed everything, dismissed the alternative futures, aborted the possibilities before they could even be conceived fully.

8

“No,” Vrath said.

Jarsun hissed.

“No,” he repeated. “You tried to kill my father. My grandfather banished you. You are no longer Krushan. Your child is not Krushan. She will never sit upon the Burning Throne.”

“You deny your heritage,” Jarsun said. “You deny the test of fire, the voice of the stonefire.”

“You denied them all the day you tried to bring down the House of Krushan. You left here swearing hellfire and destruction upon my father and his descendants. Today, you come back here asking to place your own daughter upon the throne? What about the time you swore you would break the Burning Throne into pieces with your own bare hands? I was not born then, but my father and grandfather told me all I need to know. You only sought to destroy us, to destroy everything, and now, after thirty years, you come back to claim it all? You are the hypocrite, Jarsun. You are the one who makes a mockery of your own claims.”

Jarsun raised a clenched fist, and beneath the fabric of his robes, the arm that held that fist appeared to writhe and wriggle, like a dozen separate cords moving individually. “The blood that moves in me moves in you as well, Vrath. The power of the stonefire is as much mine to command as it is yours. I ask you one last time, give me what I demand peacefully or face the consequences. I can still fulfill my threat. I can tear apart that throne with my own bare hands. If you will not permit my daughter to sit upon it, then I will bring it all down, and the world will fall with it.”

Vrath’s eyes flared fire then, great gouts of burning coals that skittered and fell, steaming, at Jarsun’s feet. Flames began to seep from his arms, his corded muscles, his coiled back, his every pore. The throne blazed red-hot and flamed, answering his demand for power. “Not while I still stand.”

Jarsun’s robes writhed, his head flattening, his voice shrill, his very shape changing into something other than human.

Before he could change completely, Princess Aqreen stepped forward and placed a hand upon his shoulder—or the place where his shoulder had been a moment ago.

“Husband,” she said.

Jarsun’s body stabilized and grew still. He stood as a man again. He turned his eyes to his wife. Multiple nictitating pairs of eyelids opened and closed, revealing triple, slitted pupils.

“Let us take our leave,” she said.

He stared at her. A soft questioning hiss escaped his lips.

“What will you do?” she asked. “Fight your own family? Kill, maim, burn? Destroy your daughter’s legacy? How will that help anyone? This is not the way. Let us return to Reygistan. In time, Prophetess willing, we will find a way. Krushita’s claim will not be denied forever. Her time will come. When that day comes, these will be her cousins, her aunts, her great-aunt. She will play at their feet, she will clasp their hands, and she will dine with them. This is her family too. For her sake, we must leave now without spilling any blood. You promised me when we first lay together that you would forsake vengeance. Fulfill that promise now. No good can come from killing one’s own, Jarsun.”

Jarsun looked at her for a long, hard moment.

Then he let her lead him away, down the steps of the dais, and back to the entrance he had entered through. King Aqron followed after them.

After an appropriate pause, during which throats were cleared, feet shuffled, and the thousand and eight waited, Vrath exchanged a glance with Jilana, who nodded once, curtly.

Vrath addressed the great hall.

“The stonefire has chosen, and the elders have spoken. Princes Shvate and Adri shall rule jointly. There is a new heir upon the Burning Throne.”

He gave the prearranged signal to the waiting courtiers.

“Let the jubilee commence!”

9

The celebration that followed, enhanced by a royal edict granting free access to the granary reserves and soma stores of the palace to one and all for the entire duration of the traditional feasting period, was as lavish as befitted the greatest dynasty of the known world. Runners leaped aboard their wagons and carriages and mounts to carry the news to the farthest ends of Arthaloka. Men dueled in the streets. Gamblers won or lost fortunes. Men conjoined with their wives in the hopes of fathering princes themselves. The wives countered, mischievously, that they had better, or else Mage Vessa would have to come and do it for them!

Few stayed to hear the shocking afterword to that proclamation, delivered by Jilana to a select inner group of trusted familiars after the main assemblage had departed. These select few could be depended upon to spread the news cautiously, with care and empathy, among the people at large, downplaying the unfortunate defects of both newborn sons and emphasizing the fact that they were, nonetheless, heirs to the Burnt Empire and destined to sit upon its throne. A throne still defended and protected by none other than Vrath. Jilana was a wise enough stateswoman not to harp on the specific limitations both boys had been born with, mentioning them in passing as if it were quite natural for one son to be born blind and the other son to be born white-skinned in a race of dark-skinned people.

What she did emphasize, in that iron tone that had made her a formidable figure in Krushan politics, was that Vrath remained firmly in control of the kingdom itself and would continue to steward it for as long as he was alive. The same held true of her, maintaining her position and influence over the governance of the kingdom for as long as was foreseeable. She was at pains to ensure that everyone understood and spread the message clearly that nothing had changed in the balance of power, and regardless of the afflictions of the two newborn heirs, Hastinaga itself remained as powerful as ever. Let none challenge that power, or they would face the fury of Vrath himself.

The message was understood and passed on, through the circuitous routes that political messages traveled, reaching the bejeweled ears of every king, emperor, tribal chieftain, bandit lord, and horse master in distant kingdoms.

Hastinaga had two newborn sons that day, both destined to follow the line of succession.

One was born blind.

The other was malformed in appearance.

It was questionable whether either one would be fit to ascend the throne and, even if he did, whether he would be capable of staying seated.

Yet the essential balance of power had not changed.

The reins of power still remained firmly in the hands of the son of Sha’ant, Vrath.

The seat of power was still occupied by the wife of Sha’ant, Jilana.

Nothing had changed that day in Hastinaga, she insisted.

And yet, as those who knew politics well understood, everything had changed.

10

The empire was already prosperous, powerful, and growing by leaps and bounds. The arrival of two new sons invigorated it. In many ways, a new age had dawned.

But too many chieftains, traders, kings, farmlords, and other ambitious allies doubted the dynasty at crucial times, thinking that without a king, it was a leaderless horse team that would go astray or stumble over a cliff. “Hastinaga is an elephant without a head!” some said and plotted to secede, cheat, deceive, steal from, deny, or otherwise dupe the dynasty of the Krushan. Some thought that without a king upon the Krushan throne, a few years’ failure to pay tribute would not be noticed; others presumed that they could use it as an excuse to raid their neighbors’ grazing pastures and steal their water and horses and kine at will. Some chose the opportunity to declare themselves as rajan—kings in their own right. An astonishing variety of transgressions were committed in those early years after Sha’ant’s demise by those who believed that the power of the dynasty had waned and they could now do as they pleased.

They were all proven wrong, bitterly wrong.

Even when young, Vrath was a formidable prince and administrator. He was no young spoiled scion, seeking pleasure in wine, women, and princely pursuits. He considered the kingdom’s welfare to be his foremost mission, and put his entire energy into upholding it.

After he became prince regent, he served only that purpose. And he did so with the single-minded determination of a demigod on a mission of Krushan law.

There was a popular saying: Greatest of mothers, Jilana. Greatest of empires, Krushan. Greatest of cities, Hastinaga. Master of law, Vrath.

Even priests feared his austere vows, for while priests were sworn to celibacy, they were permitted to make exceptions to sire heirs upon childless warrior caste women. Some seers even took the forms of other creatures in order to perpetuate species: in one case, a seer took the form of a deer to balance the population depleted by the growing human density in the Krushan forest. The great mage Vessa had emerged from his decades of solitary meditation to further the Krushan lineage.

But for Vrath, the word was the law. His interpretation of Krushan morality was literal and uncompromising. When he had sworn himself to lifelong celibacy, he had meant it. Such unwavering adherence to a vow only added to his legend. Some believed, incorrectly, that it was the source of his indomitable prowess in war.

Celibacy had nothing to do with Vrath’s prowess as a warrior and general, however. It was his fierce nature that had caused him to take that vow and, more importantly, adhere to it without once straying; that fierce nature did in fact reflect the ferocity of his will.

Vrath was a force of nature unto himself.

He rode down cattle thieves, trampling them into the very dung of the cows they had stolen. Land thieves were buried alive in the soil they had presumed to encroach upon. Water polluters were treated the worst: for to Vrath, water was the mother of life itself. They were fed, piece by living piece, to the giant turtles and crocodiles and gharials, while their kinsmen watched. Terrible was his vow, and terrible were his punishments, which no wrongdoer escaped. No transgressor received mercy. No quarter was given to any lawbreaker. No excuse accepted for the very rich, the powerful, or even the pious. He treated—and punished—all equally.

Those who assumed that the young prince who had been away with his mother for all his childhood and youth would surely be as soft and relenting as the very water of the Jeel River (which he worshipped daily) learned the truth the hardest way imaginable. Even when young, Vrath was formidable. But after Sha’ant was gone and the foolish ones began to presume that the demise of their king was an opportunity for personal gains, Vrath soon corrected any misimpression that the kingdom was kingless.

As immovable as his grandfather Coldheart and as relentless as his mother, the river goddess Jeel, he soon demonstrated that he was like no king anyone had ever known. A king would at least take time to tarry with his queen or his concubines, go hunting every now and then, travel for pleasure or to accept social engagements in other kingdoms; at the very least, he would fall ill every once in a while, or require a respite from kingly affairs.

Vrath, however, seemed never to rest. His vow was upheld so strictly, no woman was permitted to come within reach of him: even serving girls scurried to move out of his way when he strode the long, vaulting, marble-floored corridors of Hastinaga palace. The question of dalliances never even arose. He took no holidays, went on no hunts for pleasure, never accepted social engagements unless they were combined with Krushan business.

He never once fell ill and remained in robust virile health, needing barely any time to recover even from the most grievous wounds received in battle, to the consternation of the royal healers. He seemed hardly to require sleep, or rest, or nourishment. Like a relentless juggernaut, he roved the kingdom, unstoppable and incorruptible, dispensing terrible unmitigated justice to the transgressors of Krushan law.

Thereafter, Hastinaga became renowned as the kingdom which had virtually no crime or transgressions. For no matter where a crime was committed or what manner of transgression it might be, the terrible Vrath would somehow arrive there and ensure that justice was meted out without mercy or delay. Yet, to those who committed no crimes and applied themselves to concerted efforts for growth, he was magnanimous to a fault. Those whose conduct proved their loyalty to the Krushan dynasty he rewarded with lenient taxes and a share of any new bounty they assisted in procuring, whether by means of invasion of other kingdoms, or through the exploitation of natural resources.

By the time the two sons, Adri and Shvate, were born to the princesses Ember and Umber, every caucus of power in Hastinaga was unambiguous in its loyalty. Every last denizen of the land, even those sworn allies in far-flung corners of the empire, raised their voice in celebration and joy. For the greater prosperity of the Krushan meant the greater prosperity of them all. Such was the promise of Vrath’s regency and administration. Having two additional heirs to the throne could only mean that this prosperity was now guaranteed even after Vrath’s eventual demise, if and when such an event ever occurred.

Even those who secretly resented the power of the Krushan throne and wished and hoped for their downfall were effectively shut up by Jilana’s announcement. The last vestige of hope for the naysayers and dissenters was crushed.

So they all did as any sensible player in the game of kings must do: they bowed down to the Krushan dynasty, celebrated its continuance with the birth of the two new male heirs, and occupied themselves in building their own fortunes, setting aside for now all thought of secession or rebellion.

The period that followed the birth of the two boys was a golden one in Krushan history.

The kingdom of Hastinaga, the vast holdings of the Burnt Empire, all grew in prosperity and repute. The gods showered their blessings, spawning bountiful crops and rich harvests. Flowers and fruit colored the landscape, providing fragrant garlands and sweet nectar. Beasts of burden undertook their labor without complaint; animals mated and littered and were content; birds filled the air with cheer. Traders prospered; artisans found ample work; bards were rewarded well enough that they composed odes of joy.

Prosperity, gainful employment, and the absence of local unrest changed the character of the citizenry. Even the commonfolk of the kingdom gained a reputation as being honest, fair-minded, jovial. Soldiers were brave; gurus more learned than ever; students better behaved and eager to gain knowledge. People respected one another and upheld Krushan law. Rites were performed as prescribed; charity was given without complaint; robbers and thieves found more opportunities to earn lawfully than through criminal acts. Pride receded, anger was quelled, greed was shunned: when all was plentiful, no man had reason to covet another’s wealth, possessions, or stature. People aided one another in their rise to success. What use was competition when partnership benefitted both parties more profitably?

Across the country, it seemed as if the Age of Prosperity had dawned anew. It was as if the sun of history had traveled backward in time and the world was young and fresh and full of hope once more.

It was only as the boys grew old enough to be seen and heard by one and all, once the public ecstasy at the royal issue had faded, once the heirs stepped out into the public view, that the kingdom and the world realized to their shock that the rumors were true after all.

11

Prince Adri, the younger of the two princes, was as blind as a stone. He was gifted from the outset with an extraordinary number of compensatory abilities. He could hear, smell, sense, and feel far more sensitively than most. With the help of Palace Guru, he learned from a nascent age to develop these abilities and use them to cast a kind of sensory net around his body, moving and maneuvering with astonishing grace and agility in the trickiest of settings. He was even able to fight in this fashion against sighted warriors, and often offered up worthy opposition.

But his opponents soon learned that while his senses and training could compensate for his blindness, Adri had a fatal weakness: his temper.

All an opponent had to do was whisper the word “blind” in any combination of insults—”blind fool,” “eyeless wonder,” and “owl prince” were among the less offensive epithets—and Adri was lost. Overcome by anger at first, later by frustration, then by despair, and finally by a crushing, debilitating paralysis of mind, will, and body, he would lose the bout. This weakness grew into a canker, which in turn blossomed into a condition in its own right. One day, the blind prince threw his weapon aside with a clanging finality and went to his chambers, from whence he did not emerge for either food, water, or conversation for a whole seven-day. After that, he was never the same, reduced to a rail-thin, dark-souled shadow of his former self. He never touched a weapon again or tolerated being asked, however kindly, to consider taking up arms again.

12

Prince Shvate was, just as his name suggested, “white colored”: an albino with milky pale skin and colorless eyes that could not withstand bright light. The light of the sun was so torturous to him that from a tender age, he fell into the practice of sleeping by day and emerging at sundown. This in itself was regarded as scandalous, and indeed was even considered by some to be against Krushan law. Yet he was a prince of Krushan. And no one dared speak ill of this or any other habit of the princes of Krushan. By night, his milk-pale complexion seemed to glow in pitch-darkness, frightening many a soul that glimpsed him in the hours of the owl watch. His condition rendered him able to see sufficiently even in the dark, like a predatory animal, and so he trained under cover of night, requiring only the faint gleam of shielded lamps for the benefit of his instructors and sparring partners. In time, this disadvantage turned into his keenest advantage, enabling him to fight when no other warrior could. Even so, the stricture against raising weapons after sundown rendered even this unusual skill a fault, and armed the bows of his detractors who spoke ominously of Krushan law being violated. The fact that the stricture against fighting after sundown was intended for those who could not see by darkness meant nothing at such a time; to most, the letter of the law was more important than the intent of the law.

In a world which scrutinized every facet of a royal heir mercilessly, accepting nothing less than the most rigorous standard of genetic perfection, neither prince was fit to rule. How could a blind king face an attacker, let alone lead an army into battle? How could a paleskin command respect from his opponents? Strong though he was, and sound of body and mind, the very sight of him would undermine his regal stature, people argued—and, also, how could he fight effectively when the bright light of morning was unbearable to his sensitive eyes? A weakness of any kind was unacceptable. And thus both princes were deemed unfit to rule by Krushan standards.

And yet, they were Krushan princes; sons of Virya and Gada under Krushan law, regardless of the fact that they had been surrogate-fathered by Vessa—he was, after all, Jilana’s son and a renowned seer-mage and, as such, acceptable as a sire under Krushan law. They were conceived, carried to term and successfully birthed by the late kings’ wives, Ember and Umber, in the presence of hundreds of palace faithful and preceptors, who monitored every stage of the process as custom demanded, confirming the biological lineage beyond the shadow of a doubt. Nobody could dispute their legitimacy.

For their naysayers, it was a quandary.

And one that would lead to a dangerous spiral of events.

If the seeds of war had been sown when Vessa fathered progeny upon the princesses Umber and Ember—and also, incidentally, upon their maid—then the coming of age of the princes Adri and Shvate represented the first green shoots of that seed, poking their way up thornily to emerge from the rich soil of Hastinaga into the gloam of the northern sun.

The seeds of war were about to sprout a great tree of violence, one that would tower above hundreds of millions of lives in the Burnt Empire. And the fruit of that great tree would be a terrible dark and cankerous thing, bitter as heart’s blood.

Copyright © 2019 by Ashok K. Banker. Excerpted from Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker. Published by permission of the author and John Joseph Adams Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

Book Reviews: April 2019

Chris Kluwe | 1968 words

Salutations, everyone, and rejoice—spring is finally upon us! Unless you live in the Southern Hemisphere, I guess, in which case—prepare for impending winter doom! Or something.

Anyways, now for something completely different.

This month, before we get to the books, I’d like to talk a little bit about the ancient Greek maxim, “Know thyself,” not just because it’s advice I’ve always tried to live by, but also because it’s a central theme to each of the stories in this review.

First, though, we have to determine: What do these two simple words actually mean? While the Greek playwright Aeschylus uses the saying as a caution, warning Prometheus to stay in his place, and Emerson regards it as an injunction to seek the divine within, my favorite attribution comes from Socrates (and The Matrix!), who admonishes us to understand ourselves, fully and completely, and that in doing so, we can start to understand others.

For me, “know thyself” is the journey of self-discovery, of learning how to be honest with yourself. To know thyself is to identify your flaws and reconcile them, identify your virtues and enhance them, and to never stop asking, “Am I the person I wish to be?” Most importantly, if the answer to that question is, “Not yet,” what steps do I undertake to become so?

“Know thyself” is understanding that some things are out of your control, and that’s okay. No one ever has total command of their circumstances. “Know thyself” is realizing that sometimes doing the right thing hurts, but that the consequences are worth the result. If it were easy to fix the world, it’d already be done. “Know thyself” is acknowledging that the present is all we can ever live in, no matter how much we’d like to change the past or predict the future.

“Know thyself” is not an easy maxim to live by. No one likes to be wrong. Change can be scary. A lifetime of habit is hard to break, but discovering who we really are is a reward beyond compare, a solid foothold that allows us to stand in the whirling chaos of the world and say, “Here I am. Now let me try to make some sense of all the rest of this.”

“Know thyself,” reader, and know you are not alone on that road.

Now it’s time for me to step off my soapbox, and on to the reviews!

The Deepest Blue
Sarah Beth Durst
Trade Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780062690845
Harper Voyager, March 2019, 368 pages

Our first book today is The Deepest Blue, by Sarah Beth Durst, and is set in her Queens of Renthia universe (sidenote—the Queens of Renthia trilogy is excellent and you should read those as well, it starts with The Queen of Blood). In this world, humans co-exist with elemental spirits, but these spirits are less Studio Ghibli whimsies and more ravenous forces of rage that try to murder every human they find, which, as one can imagine, keeps humanity on its toes.

The main character, Mayara, lives on an island separate from the mainland where the Queens of Renthia trilogy takes place, but like the protagonist in those books, is one of the rare humans who can control spirits by her will alone. Unfortunately for Mayara, this power is definitely more of a curse than a blessing, since those who show it are seized by the ruling government and thrown onto the Island of Testing, which is basically the Thunderdome cranked to eleven. Mayara, with no previous training in how to control her powers, has to figure out not only how to survive the spirits infesting the Island of Testing, but also how to deal with her marriage being cruelly interrupted and the decay of her country due to ongoing spirit attacks.

I really enjoyed this book, not only for the vivid imagery (which, fair warning, involves some pretty gruesome deaths set amidst the picturesque island scenery), but also for the excellent character development that is a hallmark of Durst’s writing. Mayara grows and changes throughout the book as she learns more about herself, and it’s not just her—secondary characters are treated to their own emotional arcs as they push beyond what they thought themselves capable of, and face multiple challenging scenarios.

You don’t have to be familiar with the Queens of Renthia trilogy in order to understand what happens in The Deepest Blue, as Durst does an excellent job of explaining vital information without it feeling expository, but there is one secondary character that might seem odd without having knowledge of her backstory, and the world as a whole felt more fleshed out knowing the events that came before. That being said, The Deepest Blue is still an excellent stand-alone story that will have you looking at the ocean in a whole new light, and one I highly recommend.

Read if: You like inspirational female protagonists; you thought Island of the Blue Dolphins could do with a lot more violent deaths; you want to unleash the kraken.

A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World
C. A. Fletcher
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780316449458
Orbit, April 23 2019, 336 pages

Our next book, A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World, also starts on an island, but one firmly rooted in reality—a small, wind-blasted spit of land off the coast of Scotland, in a dystopic future where ninety-nine percent of humanity has been wiped out due to a mysterious plague that rendered almost everyone sterile. On this island a small family lives, grappling with their own personal tragedy, and they possess another rarity—a pair of dogs, a species that followed humanity into ruin.

For the protagonist, Griz, life is hard, yet still worth living, but that all changes one day when a traveler appears, ostensibly to trade, but in actuality with a far more nefarious purpose—he steals Griz’s dog. Armed with nothing more than a bow, some arrows, and raw determination, Griz begins a journey to track down the stranger and retrieve their missing family member, a trek that takes Griz through the crumbling remnants of the world that was, and into the empty loneliness of the world that is.

First off, let me enjoin you, the reader, to avoid absolutely all spoilers about this book. You should read A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World without anyone else telling you anything about it, because Griz’s journey is one best experienced with the same sense of discovery and fascination as the book’s protagonist. Fletcher writes with an elegantly descriptive style, one that brings this melancholic world to bittersweet life, and each location Griz visits is almost immediately visualizable. Whether it’s the rusting remains of an amusement park, or the dusty floors of a tucked away sanctuary, Fletcher makes the reader feel like they’re standing there, right beside Griz, desperate to find out where to go next.

Another aspect of the book that I really liked was that in a world shorn of people, the few that Griz does meet are memorable, distinct, and multi-dimensional. There are no throwaway characters or encounters in this story, and Fletcher does an excellent job of bouncing back and forth between moments of tension and those of quiet contemplation. Throughout the trip, Griz faces challenge after challenge, and none felt forced or unbelievable—a frequent stumbling block in dystopian fiction. Overall, I felt A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World was well worth the time spent reading it, though I’m glad I don’t live in that world.

Read if: You like Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory; you like your dystopian journey with a smidgen of hope; you like dogs.

Empress of Forever
Max Gladstone
Trade Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780765395818
Tor, June 2019, 480 pages

The last book in this review, Empress of Forever, is one I’ve been particularly looking forward to ever since it was announced, as I’m a huge fan of Max Gladstone’s Craft series, and was eager to see what he would bring to a space-opera type setting. I’m happy to say that he did not disappoint.

Empress of Forever is about as much of a departure from the intricate, more methodical legal-system-as-magic of the Craft series as you can get, but this isn’t a downside. Instead Gladstone takes us on a high-octane rollercoaster through the width and breadth of a fantastical universe, introducing settings and characters that feel as if Simon R. Green’s pulp Deathstalker novels and Iain Banks’ Culture novels had a glorious, star-smashing baby, one filled with amazing set-pieces that wouldn’t look out of place on a big-screen blockbuster, but also one filled with insights on sacrifice, fate, and friendship.

The book starts with the protagonist, Vivian Liao, the richest and most powerful woman on Earth, engaged in a desperate plan to escape the political noose closing in around her neck, one involving faking her own death—and then the real story explodes into gear. A strange woman in green appears, defying all laws of physics, attempts to kill Vivian, who then awakens in the midst of a battle between killer robots and zen-fu monks on a space station orbiting a ring of constructed black holes, and if I haven’t sold you on reading Empress of Forever at this point, then I don’t know what else to do, because I haven’t even gotten to the deadliest pirate queen in the universe, the sentient swarm of nanomachines, or the pilot who was literally born to fly.

The book isn’t all action and no thought, however. Gladstone does an amazing job of fleshing out all the characters in his book, Vivian included, and who they are at the end of the book is nowhere close to who they were at the start. In addition, the universe itself is a marvel to behold, full of bold worldbuilding and a sense of scale epic in scope, but not so large as to detract from the complex relationships between Vivian and those she meets. This is the type of book perfect for getting lost in not just once, but multiple times, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Read if: You like Thor: Ragnorak and Guardians of the Galaxy; you like introspective treatises on the nature of self; you like awesomeness.

Books I Read And Liked But Didn’t Have Space To Review:

Ancestral Night, by Elizabeth Bear; Finder, by Suzanne Palmer; No Country for Old Gnomes, by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne; Seven Blades in Black, by Sam Sykes.

That’ll do it for this installment, and I’ll see you all next time. Know thyself!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Media Review: April 2019

Christopher East | 1205 words

Russian Doll
Created by Leslye Headland, Natasha Lyonne, and Amy Poehler
Produced by Universal Television, Paper Kite Productions, Jax Media, and 3 Arts Entertainment
Released February 2019

Writing about Netflix’s brilliant new series Russian Doll is inherently challenging. Is talking about it at all an automatic spoiler? Do expectations mar its impact? Is it weird that I loved it but also hope it gets cancelled? That it felt derivative and wildly original at the same time? Russian Doll practically cries out for discussion, but it’s also so captivating that it’s tempting to just clam up, let it wash over you, and simply bask in its dazzle and humor and feels.

The “Russian doll” of the title is Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne), a feisty, foul-mouthed video game software developer in New York City. The series begins at midnight on her thirty-sixth birthday, at a raucous affair thrown by her friend Maxine (a delightful Greta Lee). Nadia’s trying to enjoy herself, but it’s a fraught day, for many reasons. Perhaps not the least of which is simply that it’s her birthday, a celebration of self she’s not naturally inclined to join in on. Essentially she’s having a midlife crisis, and for all her swagger, she’s not handling it very well, burying her despair in a blanket of attitude and unhealthy choices, including smoking a cocaine-laced joint and having sex with a skeevy stranger (Jeremy Bobb). Throughout, Nadia projects her emotional distress onto the plight of a local deli cat named Oatmeal, who’s gone missing. Later in the night, when she spies Oatmeal near a park, she races to retrieve him, and gets run over by a taxi. She dies instantly.

A moment later, she wakes up. She’s back at the party, at midnight, turning thirty-six again. She wanders back out into the crowd with a disconcerting sense of déjà vu, unsure if she’s just experienced a memory or a premonition. Something odd’s going on.

Of course, seasoned genre fans will know exactly what’s going on: Nadia’s caught in a timeloop. This trope, notably popularized in the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day (1993), has become something of a staple of timebending SF shows and films in recent years. It’s an enticing premise, enabling characters to run through multiple iterations of the same scenario, deploying the accumulated knowledge of their experience in an attempt to shape an optimal fate. Films like Source Code, ARQ, and Edge of Tomorrow have run engaging variations on the idea, and the concept has worked its way into one-off TV episodes as well (12 Monkeys springs to mind).

At first, Russian Doll basically appears to be taking the Groundhog Day concept to series. Lyonne, boosting her edgy Orange is the New Black persona to another level of comic bluster, delivers a riveting performance from the get-go. And the show gets plenty of mileage out of her hilarious, increasingly frantic reactions to an inexplicably recurring experience. But Nadia is smart, crafty, and stubborn, and she starts trying to figure things out. In so doing, she shifts trajectory on each cycle, which brings her into entertaining contact with a memorable roster of characters, whose reactions to her escalating desperation lend humor and comic momentum. Along with Maxine, Nadia encounters and occasionally enlists the aid of another quirky friend named Lizzy (Rebecca Henderson), Nadia’s pining ex John (Yul Vazquez), an enigmatic homeless man named Horse (Brendan Sexton III), and a close friend and therapist named Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley). Unfortunately for Nadia, no matter what she does, she dies, which plays out in a sequence of comically shocking sight gags.

Fortunately, Russian Doll doesn’t just beat its timeloop to death; the show evolves. Its transformation kicks in with the arrival of a new character, Alan Zaveri (Charlie Barnett), who is experiencing his own frustrating timeloop. When the two discover each other, it shifts Nadia’s investigation in a new direction, and provides her with a partner in crime. Here, the show separates itself from the Groundhog Day formula, and starts to feel like more than just a variation on a theme. Like Phil Conners in Groundhog Day, Nadia’s cyclical fate is a journey of self-discovery. But Phil’s experience is an overly forgiving, of-its-time masculine affair, allowing its hero unlimited attempts at self-improvement that ultimately win him the prize of a new life. Nadia is no less flawed, but more complex, rewarding viewer sympathy with her competence, determination, and growth—which, in her case, involves learning to let other people in. Her prize isn’t to win; it’s merely to get another chance to figure herself out and move forward. The messaging is more mature, healthier, and more feminist; notably, the series is written and directed entirely by women, and the results are refreshing.

In terms of genre content and storytelling techniques, Russian Doll is an ingenius contraption. Seasoned SF fans will appreciate its many clever “aha” moments, skiffy twists, and sense-of-wonder visuals. But the show stands out more in the way it converts this genre machinery into emotional power. It’s an irresistable mix of the cerebral, the silly, the chilling, and the heartfelt. The tone is so rich and varied that it should feel scattered, but the elements all work together, creating something uniquely coherent and true-to-life.

Ultimately, Russian Doll provides hope there may be other heights to which the “new Golden Era” of television may ascend. Prestige TV of the twenty-first century has long been dominated by the stories of the reprehensible—antiheroes, criminals, villains—in shows like The Sopranos, The Shield, Mad Men, Deadwood, and Breaking Bad. Even as these shows deconstructed, commented on, and criticized their people and their worlds, they also celebrated or glorified them. Russian Doll is part of a new breed of positive, progressive visions in TV, which might be exemplified by the work of Michael Schur (Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place). The medium seems to have figured out that as the real world gets darker and more difficult, our fictional worlds need more light, more hope, more role models.

That isn’t to say that all of these shows flinch from darkness, or thorny subject matter. The Good Place, Maniac, and Bojack Horseman, among others, are all solid examples of shows confronting the challenges of living ethically in a systemically broken and injust world. This is art that makes sense of the cruelty, chaos, and disappointment of being human. Russian Doll, in its briskly clocked, beautifully executed way, is an exquisite example of this new type of emotionally realistic but uplifting show. It plays out so perfectly in its streamlined eight-episode run that while the world surely needs more of it—and I would welcome it if it comes—there’s part of me that wants it to end here, because it’s pretty much perfect.

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.

Interview: Rebecca Roanhorse

Christian A. Coleman | 2696 words

Rebecca Roanhorse is a Nebula and Hugo Award-winning speculative fiction writer and the recipient of the 2018 Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has also been a finalist for the Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. Her novel, Trail of Lightning, was selected as one of the Amazon, B&N, Library Journal, and NRP Best Books of 2018, among others, and is a 2019 Nebula Finalist. Her short fiction can be found in Apex Magazine, New Suns, and various other anthologies. Her nonfiction can be found in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and How I Resist: Activism and Hope for a New Generation (Macmillan). She lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and pug. Find more at rebeccaroanhorse.com and on Twitter at @RoanhorseBex.

Trail of Lightning and Storm of Locusts are the first two novels of your debut series, the Sixth World. Tell us about what the term Sixth World refers to.

In Navajo traditional stories, similar to other Indigenous cosmologies, there have been multiple iterations of our world. We now live in the Fifth World (some say Fourth, depending on regional differences). It made sense to imagine that when our world essentially ends after apocalyptic climate change, we would be entering the Sixth World.

In your series, you have a supernaturally gifted monster hunter named Maggie Hoskie who kicks ass in this post-apocalyptic setting where the gods and monsters of Navajo legends walk the earth. How did the premise come together for you?

I’m an Urban Fantasy fan, particularly the stories centering badass women, whether they be private detectives solving supernatural mysteries or vampire hunters. I wanted to write a story like that with a Native woman at the center, living in a Native world surrounded by the gods and heroes of an Indigenous cosmology. That was the first seed of the idea. And I knew I wanted it set in the future, since Natives are so often relegated to the past when we are still here and will continue to be here in the future. Monster hunting was an obvious fit, since Navajo stories already have a tradition of monster hunting in the Hero Twins stories. I didn’t want to write about the Hero Twins directly but thought it would be interesting to focus on a woman who was trained by one of the heroes and what that would entail, emotionally and physically. And the story kind of took off from there.

Your Hugo Award-winning short story, “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian ExperienceTM,” shows the effects of settler colonialism and cultural appropriation on Indigenous peoples reaching as far as virtual reality. Your Sixth World series, however, shows a future where the Navajo Nation has reclaimed its land and is in better shape to survive the apocalypse, because their ancestors have lived an unending one for centuries. I was wondering if the direction you decided to take with the series—one showing a reversal of settler colonialism through apocalyptic climate change—was informed by the direction you’d taken in your short story.

Actually, the first book in the series, Trail of Lightning, was written before the short story. Trail was bought in August of 2016, and I didn’t write the short story until the spring of 2017. Yes, “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian ExperienceTM” was published almost a year before the novel, but that’s because publishing is slow. The novel actually came first. So while the topic interests me and shows up in different ways in my work, there was no deliberate connection between these two.

There’s a Book Riot article about the inherently sexist tendency to classify SFF written by women as YA or middle-grade fiction, and Trail of Lightning appears as an example. Did you have any response to that?

Well, I think it’s undeniably true, and my book was and still is often labeled as YA, despite my gentle corrections. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate my younger readers, but I didn’t write the book for a teen audience, and the protagonist is not a teen (although she is young . . . more like twenty, but to be fair, I am purposely vague about her age), so I don’t want readers to come to the book with a certain set of expectations and be disappointed. And certainly, the characters don’t make decisions like teens. But, on the other hand, there is some excellent Fantasy being written right now in YA, so perhaps we should stop using YA as a way to dismiss women SFF writers and see it as a compliment to our creativity.

Good idea! Were there particular books or other sources of inspiration that guided the overall storyline, characters, and writing style?

I mentioned my love of Urban Fantasy. That was definitely my template, and I consciously incorporated a lot of those familiar tropes. As for the style, I wanted it to feel post-apocalyptic. I joke that there are no semi-colons in the apocalypse, but I think that gets to the idea that I wanted the prose to be short, choppy, and feel sort of sharp-edged and unfinished, like the main character herself. No flowery descriptions allowed. It’s also just the style that I gravitate to, generally.

Speaking of the main character, what have readers’ reactions been like so far to Maggie Hoskie?

Just like Maggie herself, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. I think most readers love her and identify with her, but there’s certainly a subset of folks who find her unlikeable, to the point of putting down the book. I always laugh a little when I see that and think, “That’s my girl! Alienating the best of them.” Because she is definitely a prickly character who makes bad decisions and thinks violence is the answer to most problems. And she’s not exactly wrong. But, through the course of the book and the series, she learns other, better ways to deal with her problems, and I think that’s character growth. It’s a tough hand she’s been dealt in life, and she’s doing her best.

That tough hand includes trauma and violence. Maggie’s clan powers—superhuman speed and hunting skills—spring from both. In Trail of Lightning, she debates with medicine man and sidekick Kai Arviso, also supernaturally gifted, about whether any good can come of her powers, given how dangerous they are. In the second book, Storm of Locusts, she becomes the guardian of Ben, a young girl with a strange clan power she hasn’t seen before, and gains a new perspective on her own. At one point she says to Ben, “Clan power seems to want to fix things for us.” Is this a sign that she’s on the road to healing from her trauma?

One of the themes of the book is this process of moving past survival and into flourishing, both on a nation-building level for Dinétah—formerly the Navajo reservation—and on a personal character level. Maggie’s not there yet. She still sees things in terms of “survive or die,” with no room for happiness or family. And yes, she sees the power she has as a curse instead of a blessing, like many women do at some point in their lives, at least in my generation. Hopefully, she will come around, but that’s not guaranteed. Just like real life, it’s easier to stay the same than to change, and it’s often one step forward, two steps back.

I hope she comes around, too. Other characters process trauma in their own way. Take her friend Caleb Goodacre in Storm of Locusts. Along with Kai Arviso, he falls in with a mysterious cult led by Gideon, the Navajo legend also called White Locust. When Caleb is rescued and talks about his time in the cult and his experience of having huge wings grafted to his back to make him fly like a locust, it sounds like he’s in denial of being in an abusive relationship. He says Gideon didn’t hurt him, which is messed up for the poor guy.

Trauma in its many forms manifests in my work. I think it’s fair to say that it’s probably a solid through-line of what I feel compelled to write about. Same with abusive relationships of all kinds, not just romantic.

So, about those locusts: The locust/angel image comes up frequently throughout the book. Does it have any significance in Indigenous traditions?

None that I’m aware of. That’s more my theological background probably bleeding through. I have a BA in Religious Studies and a Master’s in Theology, so feel free to blame my interest in cults and biblical beings on my education.

As a monster hunter, Maggie has seen the worst, supernatural-wise and otherwise. But she’s terrified of locusts because of “the mindlessness of the horde.” Why are insects the one thing that really creeps her out?

Because they creep me out. Actually, I find locusts very interesting. I learned lot of locust facts that didn’t necessarily make it into the book, but I do love this idea of regeneration and cleansing that they represent for Gideon, the villain. And power in numbers, which is something loner Maggie needs to learn, too. Those two, Maggie and Gideon, have more in common than they realize.

It looks like she’s starting to learn the power in numbers. She’s brought into the fold of family when she becomes Ben’s guardian and when her friendship with Caleb and his twin siblings, Rissa and Clive, deepens. Her relationship with Kai Arviso appears to deepen, too. This is after Trail of Lightning introduces her to us as an isolated character because of her role as a monster hunter—ostracized from her community. How intentional was it to give her more familial bonds when her adventures take her outside of Dinétah in book two?

Those walls around Dinétah are both physical and metaphorical for Maggie, is that what you’re saying? I believe that a person can’t grow into their full potential self unless they push past boundaries, so that’s what Maggie has to do, literally and otherwise. As I say in Trail of Lightning, those walls may keep the people within them safe from the outside world, but they are holding the monsters (physical and metaphorical) inside, too.

Tell me if I’m wrong, but Storm of Locusts seems to have more comedy, or more comedic moments than Trail of Lightning. Coyote seems to be the comic relief of the first book, whereas there appears to be more characters, including Maggie, making droll asides, even in dire situations, like when she and Rissa Goodacre are in the den of the body harvesters in the second book.

Absolutely and purposefully. I will quibble and say Coyote is not meant to be comic relief—he’s dangerous and a trickster, even in Trail of Lightning. But yes, I wrote Trail during the Obama administration and felt free to delve deep into trauma, abuse, and other heavy topics. I wrote Storm during the first year of the Trump administration and I needed something lighter and with a little more humor. Still post-apocalyptic, but not quite as bleak, since reality was feeling bleak enough. I think Storm is much more hopeful and fun overall.

One of the fun aspects of it is the scenes where Maggie has to bargain and trade with the gods, including Coyote. Is this a common feature in Native American traditions that you’re bringing into the series?

No. That’s more of an apocalyptic tradition. Although there is that famous Smoke Signals joke: “We’re Indian, remember? We barter.”

I’ve seen some people on Twitter saying that Netflix should turn your series into a show. It’s even been suggested in one of the blurbs. I agree: The story lends itself so easily to a visual rendering. Do you have a dream cast in mind that would play the characters in a TV miniseries adaptation? Do you have a dream team of screenwriters and director?

I would love to see my story on the screen but I don’t really have a dream cast and crew. I’d want as many Natives in front of and behind the screen as possible. And I’d want it filmed on the Navajo Nation and in the larger Southwest. New Mexico has a booming film industry, so it would be perfect. It would also be cool to have someone who understood horror and genre but was also aware of how important Native representation is, since we don’t get much of it outside of Westerns.

So true. These being your first published novels, did you always know they were going to be a series?

Yes. The world was too rich and the characters too complicated to get it all done in a single book. I wanted time to explore this world and different places and people within it. The first book keeps us in Dinétah and very focused on Maggie. But the second book takes us out into the larger post-apocalyptic world and expands the cast as we get to see what’s become of the larger world of what was formerly Arizona. The third book will take readers to the Burque (the former city of Albuquerque, NM), where powerful land-grant families rule in what are essentially city-states, controlling the water and other resources. I wanted space to develop a complete post-apocalyptic Southwest, as I saw it.

When can we expect the third book? And what other future writing projects of yours can you tell us about?

Book three won’t be out for a while. In the interim, I have a new series starting, an Anasazi/Ancestral Puebloan/Indigenous-inspired Epic Fantasy. The first book is titled Between Earth and Sky and it will be out in 2020. I also have a middle-grade novel coming this fall in the Rick Riordan Presents imprint which is sort of like Trail of Lightning for the eight- to twelve-year-old set with Navajo gods and monsters aplenty, called Race to the Sun. And, lastly, I have a secret project that will be out in the winter of this year that I can’t give details on. I’m really excited about that one, and it should be announced in April or May, so stay tuned! Oh, and lots of short fiction in both adult anthologies like New Suns (Rebellion Press) and The Mythic Dream (Saga Press) and some YA anthologies, too.

Cool! Is there anything else you’d like to say to your readers about the Sixth World series?

I hope people enjoy the books. I think they work on different levels, depending on what the reader is looking for. If you just want a bloody adventure with a badass monster-hunter set in the post-apocalyptic American Southwest, that story is there. If you want something more about trauma and survival and healing, that’s there, too. I especially hope Native readers see positive representation and dig it, but I hope all readers love the story and maybe get curious about the rich homegrown Indigenous cosmology of the Americas and seek to learn more about Native cultures, both contemporary and futuristic.

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: Caroline M. Yoachim

Laurel Amberdine | 618 words

Can you tell us about the origins of this story?

I spent one summer in college doing an archaeological dig at a colonial site in Virginia as part of my minor in Anthropology. The surface of the site was littered with artifacts from the present and recent past—beer bottles and assorted other debris. Scraping away the dirt revealed the foundation of a building long gone, bits of broken pottery and tiny glass beads. Archaeology, to me, has always felt a bit like digging backwards through time, and I’ve been wanting to write a story about it for a long time.

I really liked how the interspersed parts change in their assumed meaning over the course of the story, but that seems like a difficult feat to pull off. While writing, did you run into any snags, with those or with anything else?

The interspersed bits changed quite a bit as I wrote the story. I didn’t figure out what they needed to be until I was nearly at the end, which is pretty typical for my process. But the most challenging thing about the story was that I was pushing myself to include more characters—if I’m not paying attention I tend to have only a single character wandering around the world alone. In this story, I wanted to show a variety of characters with different relationships to the protagonist—so I gave Saki a son, a student, some colleagues, and a lifelove.

I know you write at a lot of different story lengths. Do you have a particular preference nowadays, and has that changed any over time?

I have less of a preference than I used to. For a long time, my natural length was flash, so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to write things longer—adding threads, having more characters, sometimes playing with the structure to force myself to draw out the story more.

The two projects I’m currently working on are relatively longer lengths—I’m currently finishing up a trio of inter-related short stories (which in some ways is like a novelette in three parts), and when that’s done I have a novella that I drafted last year and need to go back and revise.

Is there anything special about this story that you want readers to know?

This story draws from bits and pieces of inspiration across a long period of time—it started from that archaeological dig in 1999; the iridescent blue bases of the alien artifacts were inspired by a beetle of that color that I saw on a trip to Japan in 2007; the campus quad came from my graduate school days at University of Washington. Other elements of the story had more recent inspirations. I always find it interesting the different images and moments that stick in my brain over time and get mashed together into stories—sometimes it makes a lot of sense, but other times it can feel very random!

For the readers who loved this story, what should they look for of yours next?

I have a couple stories that I’d recommend to people who loved this one and want to read more of my work. The first is my Clarkesworld story “Five Stages of Grief After the Alien Invasion,” which, like this story, features weird aliens and an interesting structure. For readers who want a time travel love story, I have a Lightspeed story from a few years back called “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death” (lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/rock-paper-scissors-love-death).

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Ashok K. Banker

Alex Puncekar | 1089 words

“Seeds of War” begins right where “A Hundred Thousand Arrows” leaves off, and I think “Seeds of War” feels very different in tone from the rest of the series, in that that the repercussions from the events told in this story lead right into Upon a Burning Throne, so there’s this sense of foreboding here. How did you come about writing this particular tale?

The ancient epic Mahabharata inspired the Burnt Empire series. The Sanskrit title refers to the great internecine war fought by the Bharata clan, and if we believe the numbers listed in the descriptions of the war, it was probably the greatest war ever waged between humans. The story “Seeds of War” is quite literally about the seeds of that great conflict. The repercussions of certain choices made in this story will reverberate through the coming series of books and legends within the series. You can already see some major effects in Upon a Burning Throne, the first book.

I simply had to write this story in order to help me understand the entire story and the motivations that drove the characters to later actions and choices. I’m so pleased that Lightspeed is publishing the Legends of the Burnt Empire in the run-up to the release of the book because they help throw light on everything that happens thereafter. Having said that, if you’ve already read Upon a Burning Throne before you read this spotlight and the story, that’s good too. You’ll be able to contextualize the characters and their motivations better now.

“Seeds of War” is the last story out of the Legends of the Burnt Empire series, and you have Upon a Burning Throne coming out soon, but is it possible that we could see more Legends of this nature sometime in the future? Like a Burnt Empire-verse of some sort?

I actually have several more Legends already written. Hopefully, if enough readers have liked them and want more—either before or after reading Upon a Burning Throne—Lightspeed will want to release them as well! So if you’re reading this and you enjoyed reading “Seeds of War” or any or all of the other Legends, do post a comment encouraging Lightspeed to run the rest.

We’re introduced to Vessa, who fathers two very important characters in Upon a Burning Throne. His knowledge about the future seems almost like second nature to him. You’ve mentioned before that many of the characters in these stories are inspired by characters in the epic Mahabharata. Who is Vessa inspired by, if anyone?

Vessa is qute transparently inspired by Vyasa, whose full name was Krishna Dweipayana-Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata epic, as well as one of its key participants. While several other characters are only inspired by various figures in the Mahabharata, and still others are entirely woven from fictional whole cloth, in the case of Vessa, he is almost exactly like his counterpart in this Legend as well as in the first book, Upon a Burning Throne. But later in the Burnt Empire series he deviates quite dramatically from the original Vyasa, as readers will see.

As with all other characters and events in the Burnt Empire series, I deliberately play with readers’ expectations. If you’re familiar with the Mahabharata, you will be surprised, and hopefully even thrilled by some of the ways in which the Burnt Empire saga deviates or subverts expectations. And if you have never even heard of the Sanskrit epic or aren’t aware of its details, then you’ll enjoy it even more!

What’s next, now that these stories are all finished? Upon a Burning Throne is coming out soon, but do you have any other projects in the works?

I’m just finishing up A Dark Queen Rises, the sequel to Upon a Burning Throne. I think it’s very important for an author to finish the next part in a series before each book’s release. That way, I can relax and take in all the reactions to the published book without them affecting the next one; at the same time, with publishing lead times so leisurely in the US, it’s easy to go back in and tweak or even revise stuff if needed.

And as always, I continue to publish books in India which I don’t submit to publishers in the US. In fact, while Upon a Burning Throne is my seventieth published book in India, it’s my first to be properly published in the USA. That’s partly by choice. US readers (and publishers) aren’t really open to or interested in books about other cultures unless they appeal to sizeable part of the US population. Since Americans of Indian origin are a micro-minority accounting for barely 0.9% of the population, it means that we don’t count as a readership in our own right. (If you’re thinking that’s not true because you can name so many Indian origin authors who sell well here, remember that most of them write stories not set in their own culture and country of origin.)

The only books featuring Indian culture, mythology, legends, and fantasy are highly Americanized or Disneyfied versions which are really more American than Indian; this is especially true of YA and middle grade fantasy by Indian-American authors. They’re wonderful authors and books, but they’re not representative of what Indians are reading back home, and in fact, many of these same Indian-American authors and books are not read at all for these same reasons. My goal is to write stories and books that remain true to my culture and country of origin without Americanizing or Disneyfying anything. There are only two genres and categories in which an author can do that in America—epic fantasy and literary fiction. So those are the two main areas I am writing in. Apart from the Burnt Empire series, I am working on a very ambitious, big literary novel. I don’t expect to finish it for another year at least, so you won’t see it out anytime before the end of 2020 in India, and who knows when or if it will be out in the US. Fingers crossed! 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: Matthew Corradi

Arley Sorg | 1005 words

How did this piece start for you—what was the inspiration and the process?

I’ve always wanted to write some sort of homage to the many science fiction/fantasy authors and stories that have influenced me personally, especially as a kid. That notion kinda evolved into an exploration of the ebb and flow of “the sense of wonder” in various stages of life. Plus, my writing generally tends to be heavy and tough to read, so I reached a point where I just wanted to write something lighter and more fun for a change. All that merged into “Gundark Island.”

There’s something about the pacing here that I can’t quite figure out. The story is longish in terms of “word count,” but it really zips by. It’s an effortless, smooth narrative. I received a call around page twelve and had to come back to the story immediately. I was done and thought: Huh, that was actually fast, but worked really well. How did you do that?

I tend to overwrite. Believe it or not, early versions of the story were actually much longer. It was an homage to the ’80s as well as science fiction. But the word count was definitely too high, so I took most of that out and just trimmed and condensed over and over and over. Even so, the final word count is still “longish.” In the end, I guess the story covers such a long arc in the narrator’s life that there is not much time to linger in any one spot—so hopefully that helps move the pace along quickly.

One of the best parts of the storytelling is the wonderful autobiographical feeling of this piece. Were you just getting in character and nailing the voice? Or does this touch on a lot of aspects of your childhood and life? Do you see yourself as similar to the POV character?

Perhaps not surprisingly, this story is extremely autobiographical. The voice is definitely my own. Which is a little awkward I suppose, but I think I wrote it mostly for myself anyway. The story is about letting go of the details and embracing the fun, and that applied to me, the main character, as well as to me the author.

A key concept here is the sense of wonder, awe, and adventure in stories. Not to mention, the ability to get lost in a story. Do you feel like genre, or fiction in general, has strayed from that sensibility?

I definitely see a long-standing trend towards realism and anti-heroes and flawed characters in all fiction and genres. In some ways, that is understandable and even commendable because every one of us lives in the real world with a list of flaws that we deal with daily. These types of characters are more relatable. Pulp fiction heroes who are inherently good and maybe even one-dimensional can be unrealistic and unattainable as role models.

But at what point do we start glorifying flaws or personal failings and start denigrating the ideals of the pulp hero? In the end, I think there is certainly a time and place for the dark and the heavy and the realistic, but sometimes it’s still nice to have a Captain Picard, Luke Skywalker, or John Carter to come in and save the day.

Is it possible for mere humans to help each other develop/maintain oro’nahtoo?

As a kid, I never had a questionably imaginary alien hand me a copy of A Princess of Mars to read, but I did pull it off my dad’s bookshelf one day when I complained I was bored and he told me to go find something fun to read. My wife and I saw The Fellowship of the Ring in theatres when she was eight months pregnant with our first daughter, and to this day the Lord of the Rings soundtrack is my daughter’s favorite music. So I think there is a window in childhood that can set the stage for adulthood, and I have to admit that as a parent I have not been above exploiting that myself. I’ve tried to expose my kids to all the classic stories that influenced me.

In adulthood, though, it seems easier to lose oro’nahtoo. Young kids are so accepting, and adults are so judgmental. As an adult, and especially as a writer, I know I tend to over-analyze stories, which detracts from the sense of wonder to be found in them. So I try hard to read more from the reader point of view, and even the kid point of view, and not so much the adult or author point of view.

It’s been a while since your stories appeared in F&SF (not to mention one of Rich Horton’s Best of the Year’s). Is this piece also, in a sense, about a return to writing? Will we be seeing much more from you (and what are you working on now)?

I suppose, just as a reader of science fiction can go through different phases of oro’nahtoo, so too can a writer of science fiction. The gaps in my publishing don’t necessarily mean I’m not writing. In fact, I’m always working on my requisite epic fantasy novel, and maybe someday I will actually finish it. Or not. But while I would love to be a professional writer, that just isn’t in the cards for me. For various reasons, I am the opposite of “prolific,” and writing doesn’t come easy for me. So when my “creative” oro’nahtoo does kick in, I am happy to finish an occasional story that might see the light of day somewhere. Luckily this time it was in Lightspeed. Thank you for the opportunity!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Arley Sorg grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado. He studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and usually writes in local coffee shops. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he is an assistant editor at Locus Magazine. He’s soldering together a novel, has thrown a few short stories into orbit, and hopes to launch more.

Author Spotlight: Shweta Adhyam

Jude Griffin | 692 words

How did this story come about?

When you’re in America, trying to write fantasy in English, you’re so often referred to The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the source of everything good and perfect. But while reading it I, as a woman, felt almost deliberately pushed out into the cold. I wanted to write something that would illustrate just how dismissive it is of anyone who isn’t a straight cis man . . . and decided that I could do it as a 1000-word flash to make my life easier during week three of Clarion West. Uncountable months, four drafts, and a 150% increase in length later, I hear the universe laughing at me.

The first line of this story is so, so good. Did it come first or somewhere along the way?

Even “along the way” might be stretching it: The story’s current form is its fifth and none of the first four drafts contained this line. All the other opening lines were more ornate—and much less functional. In the end, I reached for a simple declarative sentence—and hey, looks like it might have worked.

I did not see that ending coming—did you? From the start of the story-writing?

No, definitely not. From the beginning, I wanted to write an ending where any choice Shai makes will result in her paying a large price. In most other versions of the story, she ends up continuing a life with Var, just with all illusions stripped away. While that’s certainly the more realistic ending, eventually it dawned on me that if heavy prices were to be paid both ways, I could have a more dramatic ending while underscoring Shai’s lose-lose situation.

Can you talk about the decisions you made around gender roles?

When I started thinking about how best to critique the Hero’s Journey in a story, I found so many distinct ways in which it elbows out anyone not straight cis male—“Woman as Temptress,” “Atonement with the Father”—that I found I couldn’t tackle all of them at once.

It got me searching for the root of this narrative, and eventually I found it: adventure itself. I started thinking about how so many fantasy stories were all about those who go off adventuring; and how when there are stories of those who stay behind, holding up society so there’s a home for the adventurer to return to, they’re still about work outside the house—buying, selling, growing, governing—still the work associated with men; and how there are never any stories about “women’s work,” i.e.: all the important, foundational tasks without which nothing would ever run. How we’ve collectively decided that “women’s work” has no value.

Even as we diversify our ideas of who can do what, they’re usually stories of people deviating from the straight cis male descriptor doing what was reserved for the straight cis male. Stories of people doing “women’s work” still remain inaccessible. But I’m holding out hope: Maybe in a decade or three, I can read (or write!) that epic fantasy doorstop about changing the future of a community/city/country by doing “women’s work.”

What else would you like readers to know about “A Conch-Shell’s Notes”?

I’d like to talk about the cultural markers in the piece, mostly because it’s kind of a departure for me to write anything that is not heavily steeped in Indian, largely Hindu, culture. And while there are markers of this—coconuts, a temple, the conch-shell itself—they are equally weighted with Western fantasy tropes—dragon, wizard, spells. This is because both these cultures I’ve lived in have the same, idiotic, attitude towards gender roles and I wanted to call them both out. Names are deliberately monosyllabic and belonging to neither, because (given that millions of Indians have Latin names) I thought using actual Latin/Sanskrit names would tip the setting—and thus the blame—over to Indianness.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 232 words

Coming up in May, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Rati Mehrotra (“This Way to Paradise”) and Matthew Kressel (“Truth Is Like the Sun”), along with SF reprints by Max Gladstone (“The Iron Man”) and Nancy Kress (“Cocoons”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kathleen Kayembe (“The Ocean that Fades into Sky”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“The Minor Superhero at Home, After His Series Ends”), and fantasy reprints by Debbie Urbanski (“The Portal”) and Kurt Fawver (“The Convexity of Our Youth”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights and a feature interview with Ashok K. Banker. We’ll also have the latest installments in our book and media review columns.

For our ebook readers, we will also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint and a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Dominica Phetteplace, Adam-Troy Castro, Senaa Ahmad, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Isabel Cañas, and Brooke Bolander. So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed 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)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado) [Forthcoming Oct. 2019]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey) [Forthcoming 2020]

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)

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

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse [June 2019]

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

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

The Chosen One by Veronica Roth

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.