TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 108, May 2019

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: May 2019

SCIENCE FICTION

Cocoons
Nancy Kress

This Way to Paradise
Rati Mehrotra

Truth Is Like the Sun
Matthew Kressel

The Iron Man
Max Gladstone

FANTASY

The Ocean That Fades Into Sky
Kathleen Kayembe

The Portal
Debbie Urbanski

The Convexity of Our Youth
Kurt Fawver

The Minor Superhero, at Home after His Series Ends
Adam-Troy Castro

NOVELLA

Fallow
Sofia Samatar

EXCERPTS

An Illusion of Thieves
Cate Glass

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: May 2019
LaShawn M. Wanak

Media Review: May 2019
Christopher East

Interview: Ashok K. Banker
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Kathleen Kayembe

Rati Mehrotra

Matthew Kressel

Adam-Troy Castro

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 Julie Dillon

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: May 2019

John Joseph Adams | 377 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 108th issue.

Usually, artwork is commissioned to illustrate a story, but we’re turning things on their heads! Our cover this month is from the multi-award-winning artist Julie Dillon, and it served as the inspiration for Kathleen Kayembe’s science fantasy novelette “The Ocean That Fades Into Sky.” It’s a tale that asks “What happens to the gods of a planet when human beings arrive to terraform it?”

If you’re a fan of superhero stories, you’ll enjoy the new fantasy short from Adam-Troy Castro called “The Minor Superhero at Home, After His Series Ends.” We also have fantasy reprints by Debbie Urbanski (“The Portal”) and Kurt Fawver (“The Convexity of Our Youth”).

Our first original SF short is set in a war-torn futuristic India. It’s called “This Way to Paradise,” by Rati Mehrotra. Our other piece of original science fiction—Matthew Kressel’s “Truth Is Like the Sun”—looks at the effects of the first pop music concert broadcast from space. We’re also reprinting science fiction by Max Gladstone (“The Iron Man”) and Nancy Kress (“Cocoons”).

Of course in the nonfiction department, we have our usual assortment of author spotlights. Our feature interview is with frequent Lightspeed contributor Ashok K. Banker. We also have the latest installments in our book and media review columns.

If you’re an ebook reader, you’ll get to enjoy an ebook-exclusive reprint of “Fallow” by Sofia Samatar, and an excerpt from An Illusion of Thieves by Cate Glass.

Awards News

As you may recall, back in March, we told you about how two of our authors, José Pablo Iriarte and Sarah Pinsker, were named 2018 Nebula finalists. Both José’s novelette, “The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births” (lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/substance-lives-accidents-births) and Sarah’s short story, “The Court Magician” (lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-court-magician) were published in Lightspeed’s January 2018 issue.

Now we’re pleased to also announce that Sarah Pinsker’s story is also a finalist for the Hugo Award, as is frequent Lightspeed cover artist Galen Dara. Congrats to them both!

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.

Cocoons

Nancy Kress | 4954 words

A recon detail brought in another one just after dawn. The soldiers had donned full biohazard suits; nothing could convince them that this wasn’t contagious. They set the body on a gurney. I wheeled it into a quarantine room and inspected it.

This time, for the first time, it was a child. A girl, about eleven years old. Half of her face was still visible.

• • • •

“The whole premise sounds ludicrous,” Colonel Terence Jamison said, stirring more sugar into his coffee.

He wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Thirty minutes off the ship from HQ on New Eden, he sat diffidently on the edge of a foamcast chair in my cluttered office as if visiting a priest to confess sins. Slightly built, soft-spoken, he seemed reluctant to meet my gaze with his pale, milky-blue eyes. Out of uniform, he wouldn’t look like much, certainly not a senior officer in the Seven Planets United Space Corps.

I said, “Maybe it is ridiculous. After all, we have no documented proof, only anecdotes from, in most cases, unreliable sources.”

Jamison blinked at me. “Dr. Seybert—”

“Nora, please.” I am a civilian contractor, and this was a “courtesy visit.” Yeah, right.

“Nora, to tell the truth, I’m not even sure why I’m here. Someone up the chain of command got a bee in their bonnet.”

He was not telling the truth, and had Jamison ever seen a bee? I hadn’t. Both New Eden, where I’d been born, and this outpost on Windsong pollinated their native plants by wind or bird. I knew exactly why Jamison was here, and both possible outcomes of his mission.

Neither was good.

“Dr. . . . Nora,” he said, “shall we get started?”

• • • •

I am Elizabeth DiPortio. I hate my life. I choose this change. It can’t be worse.

• • • •

“My god,” Jamison said. And then, “I didn’t know . . .” And finally, regaining composure, “Briefing pictures were inadequate.”

“Yes,” I said.

We stood beside the gurney. The “spiders,” which were not really spiders, had done more of their work. A thin, filmy web of very fine, dull red filaments was being spun over her naked body. The spiders worked unevenly; her forehead, neck and genitals were as yet completely uncovered, while her eyes, neck, and budding breasts were already sealed into the cocoon.

Jamison’s face twisted in revulsion. “Why don’t you wash it all off her?”

He knew the answer to this already; it was in ten years’ of situation briefings. So we were going to be playing games. He would pretend ignorance, hoping that my answers would reveal whatever information the Corps thought, suspected, or hoped I was holding back. There wasn’t any, but try convincing HQ Special Ops of that. I knew as much about Jamison as he did about me; I have friends at HQ. The stakes here were too high to not play along.

So I said, “We tried internal and external laving, in the early years. Twice. Both patients died. You see the ‘spiders’ but you don’t see the biofilms that have invaded her nostrils, mouth, anus, vagina, ears. Those early autopsies revealed them. She’s being colonized by sheets of microorganisms, changed from the inside out. Go ahead, you can touch her—both spiders and microbes have already attuned to her DNA. They won’t do anything to you.”

He didn’t touch her. “Is she in pain?”

“No.” He’d never glanced at the monitors, which showed plainly that her brain waves registered no pain. He was not a doctor.

“Who is she?”

“We verified that only a few hours ago. Her name is Elizabeth Jane DiPortio, a Corps dependent. Her mother is a grunt at the mining base; she’s been sent for and will be shuttled here from the coast. Her father is a civilian dependent and, preliminary report says, a drunk. He may have abused her.”

“This wasn’t seen and dealt with?” Disapproval dripped off him. Not compassion—disapproval. Drunk or abused dependents did not meet Corps regulations. Under his mask of diffidence, Jamison was a martinet. And he handled Windsong’s gravity, lighter than New Eden’s by point two gee, like a man used to a lot of interstellar travel.

“Colonel,” I said pleasantly, “Alpha Beta Base has over 6,500 people now, military and civilian. We can’t see and deal with everything.”

He nodded, blinking in that deceptively harmless way: Nobody here but us rabbits. “Tell me what is changing inside her.”

“Her digestive flora—the microbes from her mouth to her rectum—are being destroyed, augmented, or replaced with ones that are part of the biofilms. Which are, of course DNA-based—panspermia, you know.” I was being condescending. He didn’t react. “Most of her organs are being modified only enough to accommodate the new microbes, with the exception of her vocal chords. They’re being drastically reconfigured to make sounds at a pitch above human hearing.”

“To communicate with what?”

“We don’t know. Maybe only each other. It’s a big planet, Colonel, and the Corps is still just a speck on it. Two specks: base and the mining operations in the mountains.”

“Yes,” he said, smiling, without mirth, in response to my condescension. I hated him. “I know. How do the . . . the . . .”

“We don’t know. Some Terran spiders inject their prey with venom that digests tissue. Maybe these spiders are injecting something that denatures DNA, or activates parts of it. Maybe the microbes are injecting some of their own DNA into the host and taking over selected cell machinery, like viruses. But most likely the process has no real Terran analogy.”

“How much of this microbial activity is affecting her brain?”

“Some of it, although it’s impossible to quantify. The smallest invaders are the size of viruses. They can get past the blood-brain barrier just as some viruses can.” This was why Colonel Jamison was here.

For the first time, he looked directly at me. “I want to see a finished product.”

“They are not products, Colonel. We call them ‘moths.’ And we don’t—”

“Moths? Do they have any sort of wings?”

“No, of course not. I admit the name is a little fanciful. We don’t keep them on the base after they emerge from the cocoons. They head out to the bush.”

“But some wander back. One is here now.”

His intelligence was better than I thought. The Warrens tried to keep their son’s visits a secret.

Jamison said, “I want to see Brent Warren.”

• • • •

We am Elizabeth DiPortio. We hate my life. We choose this change. It can’t be worse.

• • • •

The first one was an accident. Ten years ago, Corporal Nathan Carter, Private Sully O’Keefe, and Private Sarah Lanowski went off-base to “party” in the bush. This was really stupid because Windsong is home to predators, including one beast as large as a rhinoceros. There may be even larger, more dangerous animals on this huge, mostly unexplored continent. But the three soldiers were all young and, like young everywhere, considered themselves invulnerable. There was alcohol, drugs, sex. The next afternoon O’Keefe and Lanowski, already AWOL, staggered back to the base. Carter was missing. A search detail found him a quarter mile away. The spiders and biofilms had already started cocooning him. We put him in quarantine, laved the filaments off him, hit him with broad spectrum antibiotics and anti-virals and everything else in the medical arsenal. His heart stopped and he died.

Since then, there have been twenty-two more. Some were accidents, some may have been suicides. Most occurred at the mining camp, a rougher environment in both geographical and human terms. Here, where the ground is flat enough for the spaceport, it’s easier to maintain the chemical-soaked perimeter that keeps out the spiders. No one has ever been cocooned within the base.

Elizabeth DiPortio deliberately walked off base, alone, at night. Brent Warren was taken at the mining camp. He was the only moth, until Elizabeth, who had a family here to return to.

The SPUSC skimmer set down a mile from base, on a flat meadow between woods and the river. A rover already sat there. The pilot turned off the engine. Jamison said to me, “That’s not a Corps rover. The family has its own?”

“It belongs to their church, which loans it to them. The Warrens are good people, Colonel. A close family, which may be why Brent made his way from the mining camp back here, and why he wants to see them every few months.”

“How does he—”

“He just comes here and waits. Eventually a dronecam spots him and someone lets the family know.”

His mouth tightened. “A Corps dronecam.”

“Which is not diverted from its usual business by noticing Brent.” The more I saw of Jamison, the more frightened I felt.

“Where are the Warrens and . . . and him?”

He had almost said “it.” I snapped, “How should I know?” He looked at me—quiet, diffident, rabbit-harmless—and said nothing. I added, “We wait.” I climbed out of the skimmer. Jamison followed. The wind that gave the planet its ridiculously lyrical name blew in our faces. Warm, sweet-smelling wind, neither breeze nor gale, blew from sunrise to sunset.

A few minutes later, Gina and Ted Warren emerged from the trees. They had their little girl with them, whose name I couldn’t remember. Brent trailed behind. Just a normal family, out for a Saturday walk.

Jamison drew a sharp breath.

Brent Warren walked lightly, fluidly, like a dancer. He was naked. The cocooning stage lasts for about a week—sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. We don’t know why. What emerges is not human. The form still has two legs, two arms, torso, and head. The dull-red skin bristles with tiny projections—not hair, not fur, not scales—whose function is unknown. It’s the head that causes revulsion.

Brent’s face bulged in a round, smooth ball. The two early autopsies showed that tissue had been added beneath the skin, containing organelles of unknown function that sent tendrils deep into the brain. On the surface of Brent’s face, features had been minimized. His nose was now two small nostrils, his mouth a lipless slit without the levator muscles that enable smiles or frowns. Above the face, on the top of his head, was a second, smaller bulge. Only his eyes remained the same, gray flecked with green, and it was into their son’s eyes that the Warrens mostly looked.

They stopped walking, uncertain, when they saw us. Gina smiled, but her eyes flicked over Jamison’s uniform. Ted did not smile. Both worked as civilian contractors for the Corps, and both had been planning to leave before this happened to Brent. Now they would stay, to be near him. But the Warrens, no less than the rest of us, knew what rumors would have reached HQ.

“Colonel Jamison, this is Ted and Gina Warren, their daughter . . . uh . . .”

“Elise,” Gina said.

“Yes, sorry, Elise. And this is Brent.”

Brent stared without expression at Jamison. His lipless mouth moved slightly, but whatever he said, in whatever unimaginable language, it was not said to us.

• • • •

 am Elizabeth DiPortio.  hate my life.  choose this change. It can’t be worse.

• • • •

Jamison took charge of the meeting, raising his voice to be heard over the river and the wind but keeping his deferential, rabbity manner. Nonetheless, we felt compelled to answer his questions. He was Corps, and Corps ruled Windsong.

“Mr. Warren, can you talk to your son?”

“No.”

“Do you communicate through gestures?”

“Mostly, yes.”

“Could you demonstrate for me?”

Ted Warren’s jaw set. Gina put a hand on her husband’s arm and said, “We can try. Brent, dear, please show Colonel Jamison the herbs you found for us.”

Brent did not move. But his left hand was lightly curled, as if he held something in it.

“Please, Brent.”

Nothing.

Gina moved as if to touch her son’s left hand. Ted stopped her. “He doesn’t want to, honey.”

Elise moved behind Gina and clutched her mother’s legs.

Gina said to Jamison, “Well, he showed us some herbs, and then gave us some.” She held out her own hand, which held a bunch of small purplish stalks with purplish leaves. “I told him I had a headache and he picked me these and pantomimed chewing them.”

I said quickly, “Please don’t eat them, Gina. Brent’s metabolism is—may be—much different from yours. Now.”

Jamison was not interested in anybody’s metabolism. He said, “This . . . Brent understands English still? He knows what you say to him?”

“Yes,” Ted said. His dislike of Jamison rose off him like heat.

“Has he understood you ever since he came out of the cocoon?”

“Yes.”

“If you give him an order, does he follow it?”

“I don’t give him orders.”

“Does he volunteer information, through gesture or pantomime or any other means, in addition to responding to what you say?”

We were coming to it now.

“Yes,” Ted said.

“What kind of information?”

Gina said, “He tells us he is well and happy. Before I ask.”

“How does he tell you that?” Jamison asked.

Before she could answer, or Ted could say something sharp, Brent stepped forward. One step, two. Jamison didn’t shrink back—I’ll give him that—but in the skimmer, the pilot tensed. She raised the gun I’d suspected she’d held on her lap and leveled it at Brent. The Warrens did not see. I don’t know if Brent did, or if he understood, but he stopped walking. His lipless mouth moved, talking to air—certainly not to us, since he must have known we couldn’t hear him. Who or what else was listening?

Brent half-turned toward his parents and raised his right hand to his mouth. He pressed his mouth to the hand and then blew toward the Warrens. A kiss.

Then he was gone, loping into the woods, disappearing among the trees.

I never cry, but I felt my eyes prickle.

Jamison said, “Does he never touch you directly?”

“He does, yes,” Gina said quickly, before Ted could answer.

“When he touches you, do those projections on him feel sticky, scaly, or something else?”

“Go to hell,” Ted said.

• • • •

 am Elizabeth DiPortio. æ hate my life. Ø . It will be good.

• • • •

In the skimmer, I said, “You never got to what you actually wanted to ask. You alienated them, and you did it deliberately. Why?”

Jamison said mildly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And then, “They shouldn’t bring that child near that naked thing.”

I didn’t answer. I needed to think. Jamison was not doing what he was sent here to do, and I could only think of one possible reason why.

• • • •

 am Elizabeth DiPortio. æ my life. Ø  . It will be good.

• • • •

At the clinic, Elizabeth DiPortio’s parents sat in an exam room. Kurt, my assistant, said, “I wouldn’t let them into your office, and I certainly wouldn’t let them in to see the patient, I don’t care who they are.” He scowled.

Peter DiPortio sat slumped in a chair, eyes half closed, smelling of sweat and alcohol. Beverly DiPortio, a muscular woman in her thirties, was garbed in miner’s gear and stomping fury. “How the fuck did you let this happen to my daughter! I work for the Corps, you’re supposed to look after us, and now you . . . them . . .”

“I’m sorry this has happened to Elizabeth,” I said, “but it was not the Corps’ responsibility, nor mine. Elizabeth left camp at night. Apparently no one was at home to notice.”

Peter DiPortio muttered, “Bad seed.”

I thought I hadn’t heard him right. Before I could ask him to repeat, Beverly said, “I want to see Elizabeth!”

“Certainly. But I must prepare you for—”

“Cut the crap. I want to see her!”

I led them to Elizabeth’s room. Peter shambled tensely, a gait I could not have imagined. The bottom half of his body lurched along, but his face and shoulders clenched with fear. For Elizabeth? No—the moment he saw her, his face relaxed.

Beverly said, “She’s too far gone. I seen this, at the camp. You’ll have to destroy her.”

I felt my mouth fall open.

“She ain’t human anymore,” Beverly said, and there was pain in her voice but not as much pain as revulsion.

“That isn’t going to happen, ma’am.”

She turned on me. “It’s my right! She’s my kid! Give me the papers to sign!”

Peter was gazing at Elizabeth’s mouth, half covered with red filaments. “Can she still talk?”

I lost it. Jamison, this child, these horrific parents . . . I snapped, “Yes, when she wakes up she can talk. When she comes out of her cocoon. The Corps is interested in what she’ll say.”

He believed the lie. His face paled. Then he staggered sideways and nearly fell, catching himself awkwardly on the doorjamb. Beverly threw him a look of deep and total disgust, pushed past him, and strode out of the room.

I stayed a long time beside Elizabeth’s bed, watching the mite-sized spiders work. I couldn’t quiet my mind. Then I told Kurt to cancel my afternoon appointments, let the nurses see any walk-ins, and page me for any emergencies. I signed out a rover and drove to the Warren bungalow.

• • • •

 am Elizabeth DiPortio. æ my  . Ø  . It will be  .

• • • •

Anybody who says that we understand human motivation, that we can formulate simple and clear reasons for why people what they do, is either lying or naïve. Standing in the Warrens’ neat bungalow, surrounded by photos of Elise and a pre-cocooned Brent, I thought that I would give everything I had to never see the inside of the DiPortio’s bungalow. A deep, heartfelt, completely irrelevant thought.

“Gina, Ted, I need to ask you some things, and I want you to trust me when I say that the questions are important. You’ve heard the rumors about moths?”

Ted said, “We’re not discussing that, Nora.”

“If we don’t, we may all die.”

His eyes widened. I had planned it this way, to compel his attention and, I’d hoped, his compliance. But Ted Warren was not an easy man to compel. He said, “You’ll have to explain that.”

“I don’t want to yet, because I’m not sure. Could you just—”

“It’s Colonel Jamison, isn’t it?” Gina said. A look passed between her and Ted, one of those married-couple looks that say so much more than outsiders can discern. She followed it with, “We’ll tell you anything you want to know, provided you agree to not tell anyone—anyone at all—without our say-so.”

“Yes,” I said, and wondered how much this lie would cost me in the future. “Have you heard the rumors about moths?”

“Of course,” Gina said. And then again, hands clasped together so tightly that the knuckles bulged blue, “Of course.”

Everyone had heard the rumors. A moth, a former engineer, supposedly had appeared to a miner taking an ill-advised walk outside the mining camp. The moth pantomimed falling; the next day, a section of mine collapsed, destroying two expensive bots. But . . . the strolling miner had been on recreational drugs. A moth had supposedly stood in the road between the mine and spaceport, stopping a loaded ore transport. Nobody knew what to do, so the tableau froze while the drivers argued: Run her over? Inch forward and hope she moves? She did, after five minutes. The transport reached a bridge five minutes after the bridge had collapsed. There were more stories, but most could be coincidences; a lot of the narrators were unreliable; pantomime is not a precise method of communication; some “pre-cognitive warnings” could be after-the-fact interpretations.

Rumors. Factions. An amateur evolutionary biologist—the outpost didn’t yet have the real thing—offered the theory that, once, all humans had pre-verbal awareness of the near future, as a survival mechanism. That had disappeared with the Great Leap Forward, the sudden, still unexplained spurt of human culture forty to fifty thousand years ago on Earth’s vanished savannahs. Increased creativity and rationality had replaced the ability to sense the future that, like a river, always flowed toward us, its rapids heard before they could be seen. But the ability, latent, was still locked in our genes. Massive genetic alteration could free it.

Did I believe this theory? I didn’t know. A doctor is a scientist, committed to rationality. But I also knew that ideas of “the rational” were subject to change. The list of things once derided as irrational included a round Earth, germs, an expanding universe, and quantum mechanics. HQ thought that moths’ pre-cognition deserved at least minimal investigation.

I said, as gently as I could, “Gina, has Brent ever told you anything that later came true?”

Ted made a motion as if to stop her, but said nothing. Gina said, “Yes.”

“Tell me. Please.”

“We . . . we went to see him. At the usual place by the river. While we were visiting, Brent suddenly pushed us all back into the rover. He was frantic. We got in and he ran off into the woods. Then one of those big animals like a rhinoceros came out of the woods and charged the rover. It almost knocked it over. We barely got away alive.”

“Could Brent have heard or smelled the animal?”

“I don’t think so. We sat in the rover talking for at least fifteen minutes before the animal arrived. Elise wasn’t with us and I was crying.”

Ted said, “It might have been coincidence.” His face said he didn’t believe it.

I said, “Were there other times?”

Gina said, “One other time. We—”

Ted cut her off. “We’ve been straight with you, Nora, because we trust you. Now you trust us. What’s happening with Jamison?”

“I don’t know for sure. But I think HQ will do anything to stop what they see as a possible epidemic of cocooning. Jamison sees moths as a dire threat to what it means to be human, and he’s making the decision. The only way to sway him is to show that people like Brent have potential value to the Army. A battalion accompanied by a moth who can see what an enemy will do in the future would be—”

“No,” Ted said.

“Ted, I think he might destroy all the—”

“Let him try. Our boy and the others can take care of themselves. They know how to live off the wilderness and it’s a big, unexplored planet! Plus, they might know in advance when the Army would strike.”

It was almost unbearable to say my next words. “Jamison knows that. He knows that if HQ wants to destroy the moths, they would have to destroy all of us and quarantine the planet.”

Ted and Gina stared at me. Gina finally said, “They wouldn’t. You said this was only speculation on your part. And if they quarantined the planet, there wouldn’t be any need to destroy the humans on it.”

“If we all become moths and later another expedition comes to Windsong—”

“More speculation!” Ted snapped. “But I’ll tell you what isn’t speculation—what they’ll do to Brent if we give him up to ‘save’ ourselves. They’ll take him to HQ and examine him in ways that . . . it would be torture, Nora. Maybe even murder, to see what makes his brain so different.”

“The alternative is that maybe we all die.”

“I doubt that,” Ted said, and Gina nodded.

They wanted, needed, to doubt it.

As I left, Ted said, “Remember, you promised to keep all of this to yourself. Everything we said. You promised.”

“Yes,” I said. “I did.”

• • • •

 am Elizabeth DiPortio. æ my  . Ø  . It   .

• • • •

I sat in my office at the clinic, in the dark. No one was on duty; we had no patients except Elizabeth and there was nothing any of us could do for her. Moonlight from Windsong’s larger moon, delicate and silvery as filigree, flowed through the window. It was light enough to see my untouched glass of expensive, Earth-exported Scotch.

Time as a river. I saw Brent and the other moths standing on its banks, just beyond a bend, looking into water the rest of us could not yet see. I remembered how Jamison had deliberately alienated the Warrens before they could say anything positive about Brent. I saw Jamison’s revulsion at the sight of Brent and Elizabeth. It wasn’t even revulsion but something deeper, some primitive urge to so completely destroy a perceived enemy that they could never rise again: the urge that made Romans salt all the fields of Carthage, Hitler try to exterminate all the Jews. I saw the base and the mining camp burning and cratered, reduced to smoking rubble by weapons fired from space. I saw myself as wrong for thinking all this: melodramatic, building a case purely on speculation. I saw the decision I had to make as two roads, both shrouded in mist, and both leading to tragedy. I saw—

Something moved in the hallway.

I rose quietly, heart hammering, and crept in the dark toward the door.

• • • •

 am  . æ Ø  , It   .

• • • •

Elizabeth—post-cocooned Elizabeth, who should not have emerged for another day—stumbled along the hallway. I turned on the light. Her round, inhuman face showed no emotion. She extended an unsteady arm and, her movements in her altered body not yet coordinated, took my hand and tugged me along the hallway to the clinic’s back door.

Why did I let her? Was there some faint, latent pre-cognitive ability in my brain, too? Later, I would ponder that, without answers.

We went out the back door just as Peter DiPortio reached the front. From where Elizabeth and I hid in the rover shed, locking it behind us, we heard his crowbar smashing against the door. We heard his drunken shouts that he would kill the thing that had been his daughter. He was, in demeanor and temperament and appearance, the opposite of Colonel Terence Jamison. Yet he was the same.

I made my decision. It was not a choice between Brent or Elizabeth, not between the force of a promise or the force of reason, not between the good of the many or the good of the few. It was something far more primitive than that, something arising from my hindbrain.

Survival against a perceived enemy.

• • • •

“I don’t believe you,” Jamison said.

“I know you don’t,” I said. “That’s why I’ll give you Brent Warren. On New Eden you can . . . ‘test’ him to determine exactly how and when moths can see the near future.”

We stood in the Spartan living room of the Corps guest bungalow, surrounded by the decorations of war: antique crossed swords on the wall, a cast-iron statue of the SPUSC logo on a table. I don’t know who decorated the place. Jamison’s deferential, rabbit-like manner had completely disappeared.

“No,” he said.

“Colonel, I don’t think you understand. I’m offering to bring you Brent Warren, to . . . trap him for you, so Army scientists can find ways to use the moths’ pre-cognitive ability. They can—”

“There is no ability.”

I gaped at him. “Haven’t you been listening? I saw it. It’s real. Elizabeth DiPortio—”

“There is no ability. You’re lying, in order to save these inhuman abominations you’re so unaccountably fond of. There is no ability.”

I said slowly, “Is that what you’re going to report to HQ?”

“I already have.”

“I see.”

“What will they—”

“I don’t know. I just make the report, doctor. But you should think about this: Suppose this dehumanization spreads to the other six planets? To Earth? To the Corps?”

“I will think about it,” I said and moved toward him, taking my hand from my pocket.

• • • •

In the rover, I force myself to think calmly. I have maybe twelve hours until the Corps begins to wonder why Jamison has not contacted them. I don’t know how much time will be left after that. I don’t know how many other Corps soldiers on Windsong will believe me, or will rate their loyalty to the Corps above everything else. I don’t know how long it will take to spread the word to 6,500 people. I will start with the Warrens. I am on my way to their place now.

Twelve hours. In that time, a great many people can escape into the wilderness, can fan out into small groups hard to track, can get into the planet’s numerous caves or beyond the range of space weapons concentrated onto two small settlements. They cannot eradicate everybody. People can carry supplies until we learn to live off this planet. We have few old or sick. Brent will help us, and maybe more moths will, too. Some of us will become moths. That is inevitable. But we will be alive.

There are all kinds of cocoons. Time is one. Rigid organizational rules are another. But the most deadly cocoon may be the limitations of what humans consider human. Perhaps it’s time to emerge.

Twelve hours. I don’t know how many people I can save in that time. But I do know this: Twelve hours is enough for the spiders to begin work on Jamison’s body, held immobile by a non-fatal dose of ketamine from my syringe in the ditch where Elizabeth and I dumped him.

I hope to meet him again someday.

©2015 by Nancy Kress. Originally published in Meeting Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nancy Kress is the author of thirty-three books, including twenty-six novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing.  Her work has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.  Her most recent work is Terran Tomorrow, the conclusion of her Yesterday’s Kin series. Like much of her work, this series concerns genetic engineering.  Kress’s fiction has been translated into Swedish, Danish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Croatian, Chinese, Lithuanian, Romanian, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Russian, and Klingon, none of which she can read.  In addition to writing, Kress often teaches at various venues around the country and abroad, including a visiting lectureship at the University of Leipzig, a 2017 writing class in Beijing, and the annual intensive workshop Tao Toolbox, which she taught every summer with Walter Jon Williams.

This Way to Paradise

Rati Mehrotra | 7767 words

The mountains were beautiful, even though the roads that took you there were broken. Even though the whole world was broken. Tara sat on the side of the pitted road, soaking in the autumnal sun, gazing at the distant snow-capped peaks in awe. Forgetting, for the moment, the ache in her feet and the emptiness in her stomach.

“The Sivalik Range, children,” said Anju, pointing at the green hills that rose around them. “The word literally means the ‘tresses of Shiva.’ Cross the valley, and you stand at the feet of Pir Panjal, the inner Himalayas.”

“Can we eat, Auntie?” said Tamar. “Let’s save the geography lesson for later.”

A familiar, hurt look entered their aunt’s face. Tara wanted to kick Tamar. But she felt as tired as her brother looked. It would be nice to rest and eat—if there was anything left to eat.

They had been moving for as long as Tara could remember, she and Auntie Anju and Tamar, her older brother. Traveling from field to camp to ditch to abandoned hut, driven by rumors of the Red Cross, MSF, or the World Food Programme. The rumors usually turned out to be false; when war broke out, most international aid agencies fled the Indian subcontinent—at least, the northern half of it.

But in the last few weeks—ever since they’d met the strange, one-eyed man who called himself Kashif—they hadn’t stopped at all. Anju had driven them on, a fanatical light in her eyes—in the wrong direction, north instead of south. North to the front: the constantly shifting line of Actual Ground Position, over 1900 deadly kilometers curving from Gilgit in the northwest, Siachen Glacier in the north, and Aksai Chin in the east.

They had begged for scraps of food and bartered whatever little they had until it was gone. Mostly they went on foot, sometimes in the rare truck if they could hitch a ride, and once, memorably, on a stolen bicycle. They cut across Himachal, skirting the River Beas, avoiding the toxic dump of abandoned towns along its shore. It was weird; all the other refugees were headed south. Paradise, reminded their aunt when they complained of hunger or fatigue. We’re going to find Paradise.

“Okay,” said Anju to Tamar now. “We’ll eat. But it’s important for you to know things. When I was your age, I was in Grade Nine. I studied history and geography and math.”

“When you were my age, things were normal,” said Tamar, and Tara could see the effort it cost him not to shout.

“They were not,” retorted Anju. “We were on the brink of nuclear war.”

“At least you didn’t have to beg or steal or kill someone over a piece of bread!”

“You didn’t kill anyone, that was just a dog . . .” began Anju, but Tamar turned his back and walked away.

“Let him be.” Tara put her hand on Anju’s arm as she made to follow. “He’ll be fine.”

But she wondered about that as her aunt unslung the bag from her shoulders and opened a packet of stale chapatis. Would Tamar be fine? Would any of them ever be fine again? Even if the war stopped and soldiers retreated from the borders and the UN made them all sign another treaty. As if they were naughty children, India and China and Pakistan. Naughty, deadly children who could burn down the whole world if they didn’t stop their games.

As if they could forget what had happened in Lahore and Karachi, Delhi and Mumbai. As if anyone even understood what had happened. Three countries poised on the brink of Armageddon, when suddenly forty million people vanished without a trace from their key cities—Tara’s parents among them. Governments gone, central command collapsed, and anyone left with any knowledge of the nuclear program was confronted with the existence of a new weapon, lethal beyond their dreams. Who had done it? Where were the bodies? How was it even possible?

God’s fury, said some. North Korea, said others. Aliens, whispered mad Kashif through spittle-flecked lips. Which made as much or as little sense as anything else.

Whatever it was, it had pushed the three countries back from the nuclear brink, even if it hadn’t stopped the fighting along the front.

Tamar rejoined them a little later and they ate in silence by the roadside, one chapati each spiced with a bit of precious pickle. It was nice and quiet in the sun. Tara could smell the pine trees on the hillside below, even hear a bird calling. She wished she could stretch out the moment, make it last.

But all too soon, their meager meal was finished, and Anju was on her feet. “Let’s go,” she said, brisk. “We still have a couple of hundred kilometers before we arrive in Jammu. Wouldn’t it be nice to get there before Diwali? Wouldn’t that be auspicious?”

And the fanatical light came back into her eyes, as if she saw something neither of them could.

• • • •

A day before Diwali, they arrived at the remains of Bahu Fort in the old town of Jammu, sore-footed and starving.

“We’re here,” cried Anju, waving her arms at the devastation around them. “We made it.”

Tara and Tamar stared at her. Their food was long gone, and they’d been surviving on wild berries and plants that Anju claimed were edible. The autumnal damp and the distant roar of machine guns had kept them awake most nights, shivering, huddled together for warmth. There was a deep, aching hole in Tara’s stomach that she thought would never be filled. And their aunt was acting as if they’d soon be at a feast.

“What happened here?” asked Tara, as they picked their way through the rubbled street. Empty shops gaped on either side like holes of darkness. Ahead of them, the River Tawi glinted in the midday sun. A feral dog snarled at them from behind the safety of a rock.

Anju shrugged. “What happened everywhere, I suppose. Looting. Blame. Madness. Riots.”

“Humans are stupid,” muttered Tamar.

Anju frowned at him. “We need to cross the river. The new town is on the other side, and that’s where Kashif told us to go.”

They followed her down to the banks of the Tawi and stopped short. The suspension bridge had collapsed. It hung drunkenly over the churning river, snapped cables trailing in the water like lazy black snakes.

Anju threw up her hands in disgust. “So much for Northern Command. Couldn’t they have fixed the bridge?”

“They’re probably not expecting visitors,” said Tamar, kicking a stone into the river.

“Don’t,” said Anju. “The Tawi is sacred. The story goes that the son of the Serpent King brought the river here from Kali Kundi Glacier to cure his father’s illness.”

Tamar rolled his eyes at Tara, and she knew what he was thinking. They were all sacred rivers, and all polluted as hell. Anju made a point of boiling their water before she judged it safe to drink.

“Let’s walk along the river,” said Tara before Tamar could say anything. “Maybe there’s another bridge. Maybe they’ll let us through.”

“And maybe it’s all just a story,” said Tamar. “If this place is so wonderful, how come everyone else isn’t here, clamoring to be let in?”

“It’s supposed to be a secret,” said Anju, exasperated. “I’ve only told you that about a hundred times. Captain Kashif did not lie.”

They followed their aunt, jumping over the slick black rocks on the banks of the river. Thick, dark clouds drifted across the sky, blocking the sunlight. Anju hummed, tuneless but cheerful. Tara’s heart ached. There was nothing here for them but broken houses and empty streets. What would their aunt do when she realized that?

At least it was a goal, finding Paradise. It was something to look forward to, even if it wasn’t real. It gave their mother’s sister—the last adult left in their family—something to do, apart from staring off into space, her eyes turned inward to a past that was dead and gone. And Kashif, even if he was a drunk and a liar, had defected from the fabled Jammu PARA Special Forces. Nobody even knew if the Jammu Special Ops was real. Kashif had worn a patch over his gouged-out eye and hidden his true identity from everyone else at the Meerut camp.

“Go there,” he had told them one night, his words slurred, his single remaining eye burning. “It’s like Paradise. More than enough food. Good doctors. Completely safe and normal. Everything anyone could want: books, forests, waterfalls, music, lakes, markets. Just like the Kashmir of old. But don’t tell them about me.”

“Why did you leave?” Tamar had asked, but Kashif had not replied, just rocked himself on his haunches, moaning a little, sounding like an empty vessel in the wind. Tamar and Tara kept away from him after that, but their aunt did not. “Extracting information,” she told them the next morning, and they knew better than to press her.

That was a month ago, or maybe two. It was hard to keep track of time when every day was much the same struggle to survive. There must have been a time before this wandering the edges of ragged camps, this constant hunger and fatigue. Tara could remember the sights and sounds of Diwali: the flash of firecrackers, the smell of smoke, the noise and the laughter. But Tamar told her she imagined it; she was too little to have seen a real Diwali. Maybe he was jealous of her memories. Maybe he just hated to remember that they had once had so much.

For herself, Tara liked to picture red-and-yellow boxes of sweets before she fell asleep. Sometimes she daydreamed of gujiya, the sweet dumpling made in huge batches every Diwali, although she could not recall what it tasted like. Maybe Paradise had gujiya. Why not, after all? It was as likely as anything else Kashif had said.

It began to rain, cold sheets that drenched the clothes and soaked the skin. They ran to take shelter inside the ruins of an old bus station a short distance from the river.

“It used to snow in Nainital this time of year,” said Anju, once they were inside. “When I was little. Cold wet flakes that I used to catch on the tip of my tongue. And we’d go skating on the pond when it froze over.”

Tara caught Tamar’s eye. No, don’t say anything. Let her speak. It was better that way. Sometimes Tamar interrupted their aunt, shouted at her, and made her cry. It wasn’t his fault. Wasn’t Anju’s fault either, but Tamar hated it when she talked of the past. Especially when she talked of their parents and grandparents, gone these eight years. What happened to them, Tara used to ask Anju when she was little. And then she learned not to ask, because Anju didn’t have the answers. No one did. But that didn’t stop the questions gnawing Tara’s insides. Where did they go? Are they still alive? Will they ever come back?

It wasn’t Tamar who interrupted their aunt this time. It was the sound of boots, louder than the patter of rain on the broken roof of the station. Tara shrank back next to her aunt, heart thudding inside her chest.

The door slammed open and a long, black rifle entered, followed by the man holding it. He was dressed in a faded brown-and-green pixelated pattern that Tara’s eyes skittered over. The face above the uniform was just as hard to see, helmeted and goggled in the same pattern, olive stripes on the cheeks. A light flashed on their faces and they cowered under the soldier’s scrutiny.

“Civilians,” he said, in a tone between disgust and boredom, and switched off the light. But he still kept the rifle trained on them.

Another uniformed figure pushed past him, this one unmistakably female. “Or spies,” she said. “You, get up. Hands where I can see them.”

They stood and raised their hands, Anju pushing them behind her as if that would somehow protect them. “We aren’t spies,” she said, and Tara was proud of the way she spoke, firm and calm. “And you know we have no weapons. Your scanner would have caught them.”

“Shot a family of four two weeks ago,” said the woman. “Came in across the border, with explosives strapped on their chests. Even the baby.”

Tara shuddered. Had people always been like this? For all her reminiscing, Anju had been vague on that point.

“Please,” said Anju, “we’re just refugees looking for shelter and food.”

“Then why are you here?” demanded the woman. “We’re thirty kilometers from the Pakistani front, and the damned Chinese nipping at our heels. Civilians were evacuated years ago.”

“We’re looking for Paradise.” The words spilled out before Tara could stop herself. Beside her, her aunt stiffened. Tamar shot her a warning look.

“What?” said the man.

“Paradise, you idiot,” said the woman. She quoted, “If there is a paradise on earth, it is here it is here it is here. Amir Khusrau, thirteenth century, Persian poet extraordinaire.”

“Oh, that’s a good one,” said the man. “Paradise. Well, maybe it was once, but Kashmir is hell now, at least for me.”

“It’s what you deserve,” said the woman.

The man gave a mock bow. “You and me both, Bird. You and me both.”

“But these people,” the woman pointed her rifle at them, “they’re going to Paradise. The real Paradise. Well, folks, you’ll have to die first.”

“Sorry,” said Tara, although her throat was clogged with fear. “That’s just our name for it. It’s not really called Paradise.” The soldiers studied her, their bodies held in relaxed readiness by years of training and neural enhancements. How little it took to die. Tara swallowed hard.

“We heard about a special camp in Jammu,” said Anju, gripping her shoulders. “A safe place.”

“And who told you about this place?” The man’s voice was casual, but Tara was not fooled.

Anju made a vague gesture. “We were given directions by a man we met at the Meerut camp. Tall, fair-skinned, one-eyed.”

She was selling out Kashif. Maybe that was what she had planned to do right from the start, but Tara couldn’t help feeling bad for him. Deserters were shot, Kashif had told them.

Something passed between the two soldiers: a private communication through their optico-neural implants, Tara guessed, combined with silent finger-talk.

“Come on,” said the woman. “Our CO wants a chat with you.”

“Will we get food?” asked Tamar as they left the station. “Do you get anything special to eat on Diwali?”

The woman laughed, a not-pleasant sound. “I’m surprised no one’s eaten you yet,” she said. “And instead of fire crackers, you’ll probably hear gunshots.”

Not even Tamar had an answer to that.

• • • •

The woman was Bird and the man was Tiger. They had no other names to distinguish them, no insignias to denote rank. But the way Tiger deferred to Bird, Tara knew she must be senior to him. The rain had stopped, and they walked along the river, feet squelching in the mud. Tara wished she still had her boots, but she’d outgrown them, and they’d been bartered for food like everything else. All she had were torn canvas slip-ons, a size too large. They were wet and muddy, and her feet hurt, and she’d have blisters tonight.

They stopped in front of a narrow bridge where Bird conferred with the guards before they were allowed to cross. On the other side of the river was a tall barbed wire fence with a sentry checkpoint. A broad strip of denuded land separated this from another fence with watchtowers on top. Robots patrolled this strip, metal animals on wheels and treads, and any other time Tara would have loved to stay and watch them. But Bird and Tiger hurried them along, occasionally poking them with a rifle butt, which Tara thought mean and unnecessary. As if they really were prisoners or spies.

They were taken to a long two-story brick building, marched along a corridor, and halted in front of a plain wooden door that swung open for them.

Inside was a massive desk, screen-covered walls, and, sitting at the desk, one of the largest men Tara had ever seen. He was dressed in a uniform similar to Bird and Tiger, but he didn’t have a helmet or goggles, so Tara could see his face: bald, dark brown, and broken-nosed, with thick eyebrows that met in the middle of his forehead, giving him the appearance of an almost comical villain. Unlike Bird and Tiger, he was old. At least forty-five, Tara decided.

“Good afternoon,” he said in a deep, pleasant voice. He waved a hand at the chairs on the other side of his desk. “Sit, sit. I trust Bird has been nice to you so far? If not, don’t worry. Her squawk is worse than her slash.”

“Hahaha,” said Bird, sour, and Tara understood that this was an oft-repeated joke, designed to put people at ease.

They sat down, their aunt in the middle and Tara and Tamar on either side, the two soldiers standing behind them.

“Candy?” said the bald man, and he pushed a bowl of little red-and-white balls toward them. “You can call me Wolf,” he added.

They each took one candy. It was sweet and hard and minty, and Tara longed to take another, but she didn’t. She sucked the candy, sweetness exploding at the back of her tongue.

“Now,” said Wolf, leaning back comfortably on his chair and beaming at them, “why don’t you tell me all about yourselves. Tiger will get us some of his fantastic tea. And biscuits. Would you like biscuits?”

“We’d love biscuits,” said Anju.

Tiger left; Bird stayed, stiff and silent behind them.

Anju began to speak, halting at first and then faster, the words spilling out as if they had been dammed up inside her. “I’m Anju. These are my sister’s children, Tara and Tamar. They were just two and five when that thing happened in Delhi. We were in Nainital for the summer, but somebody died—I don’t even remember who—and everyone had to go to Delhi for the funeral. I stayed behind with the kids . . .”

Tara shut her out. On the other side of Anju, she could sense Tamar clenching and unclenching his hands. Poor Tamar, three years older than her, and with so many more memories of a normal world. Or at least, more normal than this one. Surely Tamar could remember Diwali. Surely, he had once held a sparkler in excited toddler hands.

“Tara? Answer him, please.”

Tara jerked back to attention to find Wolf watching her with a smile that did not go all the way to his eyes. “Sugar?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” said Tara. He put two teaspoons of sugar in a cup and passed it to her. She sipped it, hot and sweet and spicy. If the soldiers were going to kill them, they wouldn’t be wasting tea and sugar on them. Sugar was precious, tea even more so. People in camps had fought over tea, died for it. Tara reached for a glucose biscuit, dipped it in her tea, and took a small bite. It melted on her tongue.

“Tell me about this man Kashif,” said Wolf, pouring a steaming cup for himself. “One-eyed, you said?”

“Yes,” said Anju. She hesitated. “He told me he paid a nurse to remove the implant in his left eye, so no one could track him.”

“We have other ways of tracking,” said Wolf. “Go on.”

She shrugged. “Nothing much to add. He told us to come here, said there was plenty of food and clean water. Told us it was safe, even though it was so close to the border. Said no one got sick here, and it had everything anyone could want: books and trees and flowers.”

Surprise flashed across Wolf’s face, there and gone in an instant. The first genuine emotion Tara had seen in him.

“He was drunk at the time,” Anju added quickly. “He sounded crazy, to be honest. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. But I thought . . .” her voice trailed away.

What did you think, Auntie? Tara wondered. Did you think we could make it true by wanting it?

But Wolf seemed to understand. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said. “But there’s no ‘Paradise’ here. Did he tell you about our visitor?” Said in such a casual tone, like an after-thought.

Anju froze. Wolf nodded. “He did, didn’t he? And he warned you not to talk about it.”

She clenched the tabletop. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, but her voice shook, and Tara wanted to hold her, tell her she’d done her best.

“Please,” said Wolf. “Don’t insult my intelligence. We have many ways of making people talk, ranging from the unpleasant to the horrific. I suggest you tell me everything you know.”

Behind them, Bird cracked her knuckles.

Anju opened and shut her mouth a few times. Wolf nodded encouragingly.

“He said there were aliens,” she said at last, still in that shaky voice that made Tara want to cry. “The aliens vanished everyone in Delhi and Mumbai and all those other cities in Pakistan and China. They drove people crazy. But they were beautiful, the most beautiful thing he had ever known, and when they sang, he could see the entire universe.” She stopped and wiped her forehead. “That’s all I know. I tried asking him more questions, but he didn’t answer.”

Tara stared at her aunt, biscuit forgotten. This was why Anju had dragged them all the way here. She’d never really believed in Paradise at all. But she’d believed in the aliens. As if aliens could help them survive the war or bring back the vanished. All of Tara’s sympathy evaporated, replaced by a cold fury.

Wolf tapped his fingers on the desk, gazing at them out of dark pebble eyes. “What am I to do with you?” he mused. “Your friend ‘Kashif’ is being apprehended as we speak and will be dealt with appropriately. Bird, do we have precedence for this situation?”

“Yes sir,” said Bird. “We euthanize dangerous civilians.”

“Please don’t hurt the children,” said Anju, barely able to get the words out. “We’ll go away and never tell anyone. Please. We just wanted food, a place of safety . . .”

“Shut up, Auntie,” said Tamar. His voice, cold and cutting, shocked Tara. “Can’t you see what they’re doing? If they wanted to kill us, we’d already be dead. They want us for something.” He turned to Wolf. “So why don’t you cut the crap and tell us what you want? Or kill us if you wish. But stop bullying my aunt. Is this what the Indian armed forces have come to? My grandfather fought in the Kargil war. I’m glad he’s dead, that he didn’t see this day, or he’d have died of shame.”

Silence. Wolf’s face swelled, as if he was harboring an inner explosion. After a few moments, his expression cleared. “If you make it to eighteen, consider enlisting,” he said. “I can see a future for you in Special Forces. We need thinking warriors.”

Tamar laughed, a bitter sound. “I don’t see a future for myself at all. And if I survive, I’d rather be figuring out how to grow more food than how to kill more people.”

“Good,” said Wolf. “We need agricultural scientists too.” He rose from his desk. “I’m going to cut the crap, as you so succinctly put it. Come with me. I want to show you something.”

Tara gulped down the last of her tea and got up with the others. They followed Wolf out of the office and along a corridor until they arrived at a steep flight of stairs up to the second level.

“Sir,” said Bird, her voice sharp with disbelief, “you’re taking them to the loony bin?”

Wolf shook a finger at her. “The Wellness Room, Bird. The Wellness Room. I want them to know what they’re getting into. I want a fully aware volunteer, not an unwilling prisoner.”

They climbed the stairs behind Wolf, filled with trepidation. Tamar squeezed Tara’s hand, and she flashed him a smile. I’m okay, that smile said, even though she wasn’t.

The entire second level had been converted into a hospital, blue-lit and lined with cubicles. The windows had been boarded up. Nurses scurried about and a doctor bent over a touchpad, taking notes.

But the men and women lying on the beds in their separate cubicles didn’t appear to be ordinary patients. A few were shouting or moaning. Most just lay without moving, as if asleep, except Tara could see that their eyes were open. All of them had been restrained.

“Twenty men and sixteen women,” said Wolf, harsh. “Soldiers, civilians, scientists, linguists, and one pair of identical twins. We have tried every kind of human, except a child.”

“Tried what?” asked Tamar.

“To speak with our visitor,” answered Wolf. “But it is either unwilling or unable to communicate effectively. We have tried robots. We have tried every human art. We have tried . . .” his face spasmed, “pain. Starvation. It seems to need radiation to survive.”

“What’s wrong with these people?” whispered Tara.

Wolf shrugged. “We do not know. Physically they are fine. But their minds are gone. How old are you?”

“Almost eleven,” said Tara, caught off-balance.

“No,” burst out Anju. “You can’t be thinking that. You can’t experiment on a child!”

Wolf gave a humorless smile. “This is a war zone.” Fear stirred within Tara, small and fluttery.

“Try me instead,” said Anju, gripping his arm. “I volunteer. Please, I want to do this.”

Wolf shook her hand off, a mixture of pity and contempt on his face. “You would be no use to us. And you,” he jerked his chin at Tamar, “you’re too old already, I think. But the girl might work. Kids’ brains are organized differently from adults—something to do with how the different parts connect with each other. It’s a small chance, worth trying. At least, that’s what our neurologist has been saying.”

Tara’s throat was dry. “What happened to Kashif?” she asked.

“He escaped,” said Wolf. “I had high hopes of him. He was one of my best. He lasted the longest of them all: four hours with the entity. He told us the little we know.”

Tara recalled Kashif—his mumbling and rocking, the way he constantly looked over his shoulder, all that talk of Paradise—and shuddered. If that was what had happened to their best, what would it do to her? She looked at the men and women on the hospital beds, feeling sick.

“What do you say?” said Wolf, a hungry look in his eyes.

“Does she have a choice?” demanded Tamar.

“Of course,” said Wolf. “If she says no, we will find another child.”

And disappear us, thought Tara. For all his talk of volunteering, Wolf held their lives in his meaty hand. “I’d like some time to think,” she said. “We haven’t had a decent meal in days.”

“Of course,” said Wolf, flashing his teeth. “Tiger, take them to the mess, make sure they eat. Get them to Medical and find them a room.” He nodded to Tara. “I will brief you in the morning.”

Tiger herded them down the stairs and out the building. Anju wept in silence all the while. Tara’s fury with her aunt had subsided somewhat. Poor Auntie, perhaps a little of Kashif’s madness had rubbed off on her.

They arrived at the mess, and a soldier dumped steaming platefuls of food in front of them, and Tara forgot everything else. Hot fresh chapatis, spicy potatoes, green lentils, even a soy curry. It was almost worth it, whatever she had to do to earn this food for herself and her family. Anju and Tamar ate with as much relish as she did, and they all had second helpings.

When they had finished, Tiger took them back to the building, to a large room that stank of antiseptic. A nurse performed a quick check, tut-tutting as she took their weight, blood pressure, and blood samples.

After the check-up, Tiger led them to a small, clean room on the other side of the building. It had foam mattresses, blankets, and a heater. “Rest,” he told them. “There’s a bathroom down the hall.”

When he had gone, Tamar peered out of the door. “No guards,” he reported. “Not that they’d let us walk out of here.”

Tara collapsed on a mattress, kicked off her canvas shoes, and massaged her aching feet. Of course they wouldn’t. They’d have cameras tracking their every move. “Why would you want to leave?” she said. “Real food, warm blankets, an actual bathroom. This is our Paradise.” Not able to keep the anger out of her voice.

“Tara . . .” Anju drew a deep, sobbing breath. “I am so sorry.”

“Sorry isn’t getting us out of this,” said Tara. “I am.”

“What do you mean?” Tamar narrowed his eyes. “You can’t seriously be thinking of doing what that madman wants?”

“Auntie was willing to do it,” said Tara. “And not just to save me. Why did you bring us here, Auntie?”

Anju exhaled. She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “But when Kashif told me about the aliens, I thought: There’s something bigger out there, not human, something intelligent and alive and unknowable. We’re not alone, and the universe is not about us, has never been about us. And maybe these beings, whatever they are, know our past, our future. Maybe they have answers.” She put her head in her hands. “I didn’t think about you two. Didn’t realize I was putting you in danger.”

A jolt went through Tara. “You think Kashif was right? The aliens disappeared Mama and Papa and all those other people?”

“Listen to yourself,” said Tamar. “You want to end up in their loony bin?”

“It’s a small chance, worth taking,” said Tara. “That’s what he said.”

Tamar shook his head. “Not worth risking your life to get answers for Wolf.”

Not for Wolf. For myself.

“I will think of Diwali,” said Tara. She lay down on the mattress and pulled a blanket up to her chin. Her eyes felt heavy. How lovely to sleep, safe and warm, no need for taking turns to stay awake, on guard against wild animals and humans. If only every night could be like this.

Anju lay down next to her, and Tamar sat at the foot of the mattress. “Today is small Diwali,” said their aunt softly, “and tomorrow is Big Diwali, the most auspicious day in the Hindu calendar. Did I ever tell you why we celebrate this festival?”

“Only about a hundred times,” said Tara. Tamar snorted with laughter. “But tell us again,” she said. “Tell us about the sweets and the firecrackers.”

“The sweets and the firecrackers used to come later,” said Anju. “First, we had to clean the house, bathe, and wear nice clothes. Then the priest used to come, and we’d have to listen to the story of Ram and Sita and Lakshman, and how they were banished from the kingdom of Ayodhya by their stepmother, Queen Kaikeyi. How Rama defeated the evil demon Ravana and returned in triumph to Ayodhya with Sita and Lakshman, and how the people lit lamps to welcome them back. Ever since then, we light lamps on this day to celebrate the triumph of good over evil.”

“Will the soldiers light lamps?” murmured Tamar.

“Maybe they’ll let us light a lamp,” said Tara. If I’m still alive, I’d like to light a lamp.

The enormity of it sank into her then, what she had decided to do, and what might happen to her.

Long after the other two were asleep, Tara lay awake, trying to remember what the world had been like before it broke.

• • • •

Bird came for her in the morning—early, before the other two had woken up. It was better that way; it spared them all any last-minute drama from Auntie. But still, Tara felt a pang as she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and tiptoed out of the room, blanket wrapped around her shoulders against the dawn chill. She was leaving without saying goodbye, and who was to say she’d ever see them again? Or know them again?

Halfway down the corridor, Bird stopped. “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “We won’t hurt your family if you refuse.” Her face, free of the goggles and the camouflage markings, was young, plain and stern.

“But you can’t just let us go,” said Tara.

“We’ll probably have to keep your aunt,” said Bird. “But if you agree to an implant, we could transport you and your brother to a camp on the southern tip of India—as far from the front as possible. You might be able to go to school there.”

“Why are you telling me this?” asked Tara. Why are you pretending to be on my side?

Bird’s face twisted, just for a moment, before becoming a mask again. “The man you called Kashif was my partner,” she said. “He’s Kashmiri—did you know that?”

No, she hadn’t known, of course.

“His family was among those evacuated from the valley before the riots,” said Bird. “So many refused to leave. So many we had to force out at gunpoint. What I’m saying is, Kashif risked his life and sanity for this land. He knew what he was getting into. You don’t.”

Her eyes unfocused. “Yes, sir,” she muttered. “No, of course not. We’re coming.”

She turned and strode down the corridor, Tara running to keep up with her.

“Is he mad at you?” asked Tara, but Bird did not respond.

Wolf was waiting for them in his office. He dismissed Bird curtly and offered Tara a cup of lemon tea. She accepted, although she was too nervous to drink it.

“Excited?” he asked, rubbing his hands. “I am.”

Tara put down her cup. “Promise me you’ll take care of them. No matter what happens to me.”

“Of course,” said Wolf, looking affronted. “We’ll find work for them to do right here. They’ll earn their keep. Your brother is sharp and capable. Your aunt—well, I’m sure she can be useful too.”

“She can tell stories,” said Tara. “She knows a lot of things, history and geography and math. She knows which plants are safe to eat.”

Wolf held up a hand. “Don’t worry about them. We’ll take care of them, I promise. You focus on what you have to do.”

Tara hesitated. This was it, her last chance to back off, to try and escape from the trap Wolf had spun.

And what then? The questions would continue to eat her with their acid teeth for the rest of her life. Where are my parents? What happened to them?

“Tell me about the aliens,” she said at last.

And he told her.

Eight years ago, when the government vanished and cities emptied, panic spreading throughout the country, a still-functioning ISRO centre one hundred kilometers north of Chennai had detected a hitherto-unseen object in orbit around Mars.

“How big?” asked Tara.

“Bigger than this entire camp,” he answered. “NASA says it’s still out there. They’ve sent three probes, and all three vanished before leaving Earth orbit.”

Tara shivered. “They’re powerful.”

“In a way we cannot imagine,” said Wolf. “Now NASA is sending a crewed spacecraft. Will the presence of humans make any difference? Will they be able to communicate? Nobody knows.”

“But you have one of the aliens here,” said Tara. “Where did it come from?”

“After detecting the object around Mars, ISRO tracked the movement of a smaller craft heading toward Earth, specifically toward Srinagar,” said Wolf. “They alerted Northern Command, which evacuated the city. My unit was despatched to intercept the craft when it arrived.”

“What happened?” asked Tara, fascinated despite herself.

“It crashed,” said Wolf. “Near as we can tell, only one of them survived: our ‘visitor.’ We escorted it here and have kept it ever since—a secret from friends and enemies alike.”

“Then you’ve kept it a prisoner!” cried Tara. “Why?”

“We need to know what happened in Delhi, in Lahore, in Beijing,” said Wolf. “Did they do it, and if so, why? What do they want? Why are they even here?” He rose. “Come, it is time.”

Tara went with him. She didn’t feel scared any more. She felt sorry for the alien. Cut off from the rest of its family for eight long years, it must be lonely. At least she had her aunt and brother.

Wolf took her down a flight of stairs to the basement, where a couple of guards saluted before opening a heavy metal door. Motion sensor lights flicked on, and they went down another steep flight of stairs.

“Why so deep underground?” asked Tara. The weight of the earth pressed down on her.

“It’s a bomb shelter,” said Wolf. “The safest place we could think of to keep it. Plus, we can control the radiation here.”

They arrived at a room that appeared to be partitioned by strips of heavy, translucent material. Wolf took off his boots and signalled Tara to do the same. “Decontam. We don’t want our microbes infecting our visitor. Just step through.”

Tara followed him through the partition, her bare feet cold on the concrete floor. Inside, a fine spray misted over them. Tara squeezed her eyes shut, but it didn’t hurt. After a few minutes, the spray stopped, and Wolf led her out.

The final set of doors had a combination lock and a retinal scan. Guards moved aside while Wolf keyed in the codes and leaned into the camera. When the door swung open to reveal an airlock, he stepped back and propelled her in.

“Good luck,” he said. “We’ll be watching.”

The door closed behind Tara and she was engulfed in darkness. For a moment, she panicked.

Then the door in front of her slid open and the quality of the darkness changed. She stepped into a vast space, blinking hard, trying to see. Because there was light in the distance: a diffuse white light that shifted and moved so fast she couldn’t really focus on its source.

You remind me of the lights of Diwali, she thought, struggling to squash the terror that rose within her. Do you know, today is the biggest festival in India? Except, not many people will be celebrating. Maybe they’ll pray to Lakshmi and Ganesh. Those who are lucky enough to have food will eat together. And those who’re really, really lucky will light a lamp and dream of better days. I’d like to light a lamp. I’d like to remember the face of my mother.

The light slowed and coalesced into a form, tall and thin and many-limbed. Like a giant jellyfish floating in air, it drifted toward her.

Tara opened her mouth to scream, but . . .

Her mother bends toward her and smiles. “Don’t be afraid, darling,” she says. “Look at the pretty colors.” She closes Tara’s chubby little fist over the sparkler. Tara whirls it in the air, giggling with delight.

“Careful,” says her father. “Keep it away from your dress.”

“Can I light a rocket?” asks Tamar. “Please please?”

Their father laughs. “Let me show you how,” he says.

He puts a long, slim rocket in a bottle, pointing straight up to the starry sky. He lights the fuse and backs off. The rocket sizzles and whooshes into the air, accompanied by their happy screams.

Tara’s sparkler burns out. “More!” she says. Her mother hands her another lighted sparkler, and it lasts longer than the first one, throwing bright green and yellow sparks that fly into the night, dispelling the dark.

Tara sat down, dizzy and sick. Diwali, eight years ago. She remembered, now, every detail of that beautiful day. She remembered her mother’s face.

“Thank you,” she said, although it was difficult to speak with that lump in her throat, and nausea rising like a black tide within her. Her head began to throb and her skin prickled.

The alien drifted closer. It shone brighter than before, as if it had taken some of her Diwali memories and polished itself to a greater brilliance. It was hard to look at, like looking at a bit of sun.

“They want to know if you did it.” Tara shielded her eyes, swallowing the bile in her throat. “I have to tell them something.” And I have to know too. What did you do to my parents and all those other poor people?

The alien vanished. Tara was jerked like a fish at the end of a hook, up and away from the room. She found herself flying in a lavender sky, looking down at a vast patchwork of rectangular fields. The tip of a red sun peeped over the horizon. Overhead, two small moons shone crimson, blurring the stars in the unfamiliar sky. Dark canals threaded the landscape below. People—insect-like at this distance—bent over the fields, ploughing, carrying, furrowing. Who are they?

Tara plunged down with dizzying speed and stopped with a jolt just above the ground. She hovered in front of a crude hut that stood by itself at the edge of a field. Yellow light shone from within; she floated toward it, unable to stop herself.

Inside, six or seven people sat at a rough-hewn table. A middle-aged woman served everyone some sort of soup and bread. Her face was turned away from Tara, but Tara knew who it was, knew even before her mother glanced at the window and gave her a tender smile. So deeply familiar, so utterly alien.

Tara came back to the dark room, gasping, her mind reeling from the impossibility of what she had just seen. It took a while to remember where she was, who she was. The light had diffused once more, dancing just beyond her vision at the edges of the room.

Focus, she had to focus. Forget the faces she had just seen, ignore her own feelings: joy and hurt and betrayal in equal measure, as if it was their fault, whatever had happened. Do you miss me, Mama?

Unless it was a lie, like the lies Kashif had told himself, told them. If there is a Paradise on earth, it is here it is here it is here.

No, that was some old poet. Not Kashif. She was getting confused. Tara pressed her palms to her forehead, as if she could still the hammering that threatened to split her in two. Just a few more minutes. She summoned all her strength, and said, “They’re not dead? You put them somewhere else? Why?”

White light spun in front of her into the shape of a wheel, a hexagon, a sphere, a cube with far too many sides to make sense of. Numbers scrolled, an endless series of zeros and ones. Perhaps they meant something; perhaps Wolf and his scientists would be able to decipher them. But they hurt Tara’s eyes, and it was all she could do not to crawl away from there, away from it.

“Why?” she repeated, desperate.

Another hook digging into her, jerking her up as she flailed and tried not to scream. Not again.

And now she hovered above a room full of old men with grave faces. One hawkish, bespectacled face she recognized; it still adorned dilapidated billboards in abandoned towns and peeling posters in transit stations. The last prime minister of India, the one who vanished along with his entire cabinet.

A turbaned man leaned toward the prime minister-that-was. “Sir, we have a no-first-use policy.”

“That is what they exploit,” the prime minister said. “That is what they count on.”

Another man spoke, “Each time, they go further. Last year, another attack on our Parliament. This year, terrorists in Mumbai. Last week, PNRA successfully conducted yet another nuclear test.”

“The Americans . . .” began the turbaned man.

“Will do nothing to stop them,” finished the second man. “Prime Minister, what have we built our weapons for if not to defend ourselves? Are we going to wait until they launch their missiles at us?”

The scene faded, slowly this time, the men still speaking, still gesticulating. Overlaid on the fading scene were newspaper headlines, big blaring headlines with the words “nuclear threat” and “end of the world” plastered on them.

Tara lay on the floor, unable to move. She closed her eyes, willing the room to stop spinning. Pins and needles pricked her skin, like spiders crawling, biting her. Is this how Kashif had felt before he went crazy? Would she go crazy too? She needed to tell them what she knew first; she needed to tell them what the aliens had done, how they had averted nuclear war. How they would leave one day, without warning, just the way they had come.

She wet her lips. “Do you miss home?” she said, her voice thin and cracked.

An intense feeling of loneliness stole over her, overlaid with the purposefulness of mission, and the sense of self-sacrifice.

I’m sorry, thought Tara, no longer able to shape words with her lips. Maybe you can take me with you when you decide to leave. Tamar and Auntie too.

But it did not answer, did not appear before her again. Perhaps it hurt the alien to talk to her, as much as it hurt her to listen.

All right. I’ll come back later, if they let me. If I’m still able to.

She rose, fell, and rose again. The door opened at her touch. In the airlock she collapsed on the floor and vomited the remains of yesterday’s meal.

When they tried to pick her up, she pushed them away and got to her feet, swaying. Her eyes sought out Wolf.

“I would like,” she told him, “to light a lamp.”

Because the darkness was dispelled, and good would triumph over evil, no matter how many demons rose from the shadows that hid within human hearts.

It was something to believe in.

©2019 by Rati Mehrotra.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in India, Rati Mehrotra now lives and writes in lovely Toronto. Her debut novel Markswoman was published by Harper Voyager in January 2018. Her short stories have appeared in Apex, IGMS, Podcastle, Cast of Wonders, AE–The Canadian Science Fiction Review, and many more. The only thing missing from her life is a cat. Find out more about her at ratiwrites.com or follow her on Twitter @Rati_Mehrotra.

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

Truth Is Like the Sun

Matthew Kressel | 4494 words

1. The Joke

Pop-star uber-sensation Jaim Janan rockets off to promote their third album atop a SpaceX Dragon VII capsule today, where they will stream a live musical performance from orbit, some 350 kilometers above the Earth. Before today’s launch, when asked if they were feeling nervous about the trip, the young pop star coolly responded, “Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away.”

It’s not clear how many of Jaim’s obsessive fans, or “Janatics” as they are sometimes known, recognized the star was quoting twentieth-century pop legend Elvis Presley [click for bio]. But by mid-afternoon #TruthIsLikeTheSun was the most popular hashtag on Twitter.

—Naydeen Johnson for The Washington Post

We have the food crisis in Eritrea, a new strain of Avian Flu ravaging South-east Asia, and flooding coastal cities across the world, but, yes, let’s spend billions to send some corporate shill “musician” into space so he can sell more records. We as a species need to get our priorities straight.

—Neung Espinoza in an Op-Ed for the New York Times

OMG OMG OMG I am so in love with Jaim’s tat! Totes getting my first ink with his mission insignia on my inner thigh, same as Jaim! @iamjaim #jaiminspace #swoon #soinlove #orbitalmechanics #followforfollows #likeforlikes #spacie #worldtour #janatics #truthislikethesun

—@janatic2025 on Instagram

u so hot, jaim. the things u and i could do in zero-g, baby. ps, im serious. dm me if ur interested @iamjaim #jaiminspace #zerogsports #spacie #janatics #truthislikethesun

—@RealPlayaWinning on Twitter

Jaim Janan replica space jumpsuit, with real insignia, straps, and epaulettes, only $19.95 from #BestDealsChina #jaiminspace #replica #jumpsuit #wholesale #retail #bestdeals #dealoftheday #coupon https://be.cn/hiyiy

—BestDealsChina on Twitter

so,,,,,this fuckin fagot gets $284 mil to fly into space when their are stavring ppl on earth????? shamefull.

—JesusIsMyCarpenter79 in a YouTube comment

um no. jaim gave all the money to charity. he just doin it for promo and shit

—Diamla Ghiburi in a YouTube comment

THEY! Gender neutral pronouns, folks. They’re not that hard!

—Teri Marie Johnson in a YouTube comment

“Not that hard” ? speak for yourself, Teri. :-P

—Alejandro Bowlrov in a YouTube comment

I had two weeks to complete the design. An absurdly short time! But I knew I could do it. There are perhaps three persons in the world who could, but I am the only one capable of creating a masterpiece.

You laugh, but this is no joke. In the gifted, what sounds like arrogance is mere honesty. The world-record-holding runner, Jafuru Olembe, is a friend. When we talk over a meal, he doesn’t say, “Arnaud, I am a decent runner.” He says, “Arnaud, I am the fastest man on the planet.” Why should he be shy about this? Just the same, I am the best clothing designer in the world. I will not pretend I am less for to avoid someone else’s discomfort. That is the height of absurdity!

Jaim’s people contacted me one morning two months ago, in a panic. They said, “Arnaud, will you do it? We want to make sure Jaim looks just like so.” Such incredible gall! I said, “Friends, either you give me absolute control, or I walk.” They went away to discuss this amongst themselves for a few hours, as corporations do. But they came to their senses. They had to have the best, of course.

Yes, I was paid handsomely. So what? I don’t understand why people get so worked up about that. Should not remuneration be commensurate to skill? Though, I must be clear, I didn’t do it for money or notoriety. I need neither of those things. I did it for the challenge. Jaim is a gestalt, and I sought to capture that.

Jaim has an intense sexuality. It is impossible to be in their presence and not feel it. But—and this is important—a keen observer will see Jaim has always been much more than their façade. Jaim is cosmopolitan, but under the surface lies a child’s naivety. Jaim is elegant, but underneath lie hints of vulgarity. Jaim spent their childhood in the streets of Tehran living in poverty before they moved to Nonthaburi to live with their mother in relative wealth. Jaim is half Persian and half Thai, but neither of those cultures defines them. Jaim is a fractal, you see, forever unfolding. All of these things had to be incorporated into my design.

Now, there has been some silly talk on the internet that I must now put to rest. A few have speculated that Jaim’s jumpsuit is a pastiche of Michael Jackson’s or Beyoncé’s attire during their prime years. Well, there is an American word for this theory: Hogwash! Jaim’s jumpsuit is the same as Michael Jackson’s or Beyoncé’s as a bird and a rocket are the same. Both fly, but only one will launch you to the moon!

Yes, there are obvious symbolic references in my design, but some are too subtle for the cruder eye. One sees themes of a bandleader, as Jaim is our conductor, leading us skyward. The gold epaulettes on their shoulders and breasts represent our ascent to the stars. The black fabric is the sea of space. The yellow finials are the sun’s rays, the source of all life on Earth. The concentric white rings are the always-circling, but ever-distant stars.

The material, too, is purposeful. The jumpsuit is crafted from a newly invented fabric called Nouvalyne, developed by three brilliant Nigerian chemists. It has the look and feel of silk, the softness of cotton, and the weight of air. You’ll soon see it everywhere. You could pour a glass of your best Bordeaux on it, and it will roll right off. You could press your lit cigarette against it, and it won’t burn. It will keep you hot in winter and cool in summer. This fabric is humanity’s indomitable spirit, our confidence to face all challenges now and in the future.

I would love to do another suit for Jaim, if given the opportunity. But, you know, it will be very hard to top perfection.

—From “Arnaud Lefèbvre, Per Vestis Ad Astra,” an interview in Vogue Paris

Combinaison de l’espace de réplique, avec de vrais insignes, sangles et épaulettes, seulement €19.99 https://be.cn/hiyiy #wholesale #shipsworldwide #jaiminspace #replica #jumpsuit #bestdeals #dealoftheday #coupon

—From a comment on the Vogue Paris interview “Arnaud Lefèbvre, Per Vestis Ad Astra”

2. The Supernova

The Dow Jones Industrial Average took a sharp dive yesterday as billions of people around the globe paused to watch Jaim Janan’s YouTube livestream. Europe’s Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, Xavier Janiszewski, said, “We’ve seen significant market dips before during major sporting or terrorist events, but never one of this magnitude and duration. Quite frankly, we’re all shocked.” The Asian exchanges remained wary in late-day trading, but after the opening of the New York exchanges this morning, the DJIA has returned to near-former levels. However, trading volume is still unusually high as investors remain jittery. Never before has a pop-star’s performance had such an effect on the global economy.

—Lisa Applebaum in a CNNMoney article.

I watched Jaim’s performance live. I guess I was one of the lucky few who didn’t get cut off when YouTube crashed. I never really listened to Jaim’s music before. But I have to be honest, I wept like a baby. These really are such beautiful songs. Will def be checking out more of their stuff now. Guess I’m a Janatic now too. ;)

—Sonny in Albuquerque in a YouTube comment

Dang-double-dang! Even with the YouTube crash, 19 BILLION views of Jaim’s video in one day! That HAS to be a record, right?

—SweetAmaranth in a YouTube comment

SweetAmaranth, yes, Jaim broke their own previous record from last year of 12 billion views in a day for their song, “moment2moment.”

—Knit Picker in a YouTube comment

Good grief. . . . these are possibly the greatest songs ever written. All other musicians stop making music, you will never do better than this.

—Justine’s Just Desserts in a YouTube comment

THESE. SONGS.

—JustJanatical2024 in a YouTube comment

i just srsly cried. omfg!!!

—Minx Catastrophe in a YouTube comment

Just four chords? Lame.

—Folk Guitar Hero in a YouTube comment

Autotune in spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!

—NinetyNine Balloons in a YouTube comment

uh-oh, oh-oh-oh! milli vanilli moment at 1:17!

—Naj Menendez in a YouTube comment

Naj Menendez, wth is milli vanilli???

—Gamer Guy in a YouTube comment

wuuuuuuuut? the music don’t match his mouth.

—Kiril Armstrong in a YouTube comment

They had a slight audio sync problem for the first minute of the feed, if you watched it live. But they edited the video, because there’s no sync issue when you replay it now. Also, the performance was 100% live. And it wasn’t lip synched or auto-tuned. See here for proof: https://bit.ly/2AI8VOj

—Vajra Mudali in a YouTube comment

I am going to put these songs on repeat for the rest of my life.

—Ridgewater Pet Shelter in a YouTube comment

So unbelievably beautiful. I can die in peace now.

—KevinTheLibrarian in a YouTube comment

I’ve been unable to stop smiling all day. I keep stopping and pinching myself, because I can’t believe it. I am so unbelievably happy that Jaim is the first trans person in space!

—Fluffer Nutter in a YouTube comment

Come on now, folks. YouTube has the *largest* server capacity in the world. Their live feed shouldn’t have crashed. Not unless (a) someone sabotaged the downlink feed, or (b) YouTube was DDoS attacked by someone who has massive internet data pipes and very good reasons to block the feed (e.g. China). Everyone knows China hates Jaim because of the incident in Beijing last year when Jaim came onstage wearing Chinese flag underwear.

–AnonymousCoward in a Slashdot.org comment, (Score 3: Insightful) on the article, “Jaim Janan’s Live Stream Temporarily Crashes YouTube.”

Calm down and take your meds, pal. No one sabotaged the downlink. The YouTube livestream wasn’t DDoS-attacked. YouTube’s CTO Jinmun Singh said the problem was simply their system reaching max capacity. They didn’t have enough bandwidth to fulfill the *billions* of requests for Jaim’s livestream. I said this in an earlier comment, but I’ll repeat it again here for everyone’s benefit: they could have just dropped the video onto BitTorrent and that would have saved everyone a ton of needless headaches.

—OnTheBashShell in reply to AnonymousCoward, (Score 5: Informative) on Slashdot.org.

Um, no. If they had uploaded the full video to BitTorrent then it *wouldn’t have been live streamed*. That was the whole friggin point. Also YouTube wouldn’t get the ridiculous ad revenue from all the traffic, which AFAIK was close to $40 million per *minute* during the live performance.

—ReticulatedPython in reply to OnTheBashShell (Score 5: Informative) on Slashdot.org.

I saw that Jaim is giving all the proceeds from their sponsorships to charity. They must have made billions from their performance, so that’s pretty fucking admirable any way you cut it.

—Noreen R. Hazaga in a Facebook comment

Jaim called me up personally and said they wanted to donate a percentage of their proceeds from their space performance to the Solar Mission. We were shocked. Jaim has always been a champion of the environment, but it was still very refreshing and wonderful to see someone of Jaim’s status act instead of boast.

With Jaim’s donation, which we have already received, we will increase India’s solar power generation by 27.7 gigawatts, finally bringing this country within reach of getting one hundred percent of our electrical power from renewable sources. I honestly never thought I’d see this day. We are all very excited and happy.

—From an interview with Anusha Bhasin, chairman of India’s National Solar Mission, in The Hindustan Times.

It’s ridiculous. One “spacie” from orbit, and Jaim has turned on half the world. I’m not saying he isn’t attractive, but is this what we invented space travel for? Porn?

—Richard Bonacaccio in a Facebook comment

Richard Bonacaccio, YES.

—Ennis Durani in a Facebook comment

First off, Richard Bonacaccio, Jaim transitioned over a year ago. They now go by the gender-neutral pronoun “they,” which people have called Jaim since like forever. Second, why *shouldn’t* Jaim show off their body if they are proud of it? Does Jaim need permission from you, Richard Bonacaccio, to appreciate their body? NO, they DON’T. Go spread your toxic masculinity elsewhere.

—Mary Freidberg in a Facebook comment

I caught my son masturbating to that selfie of Jaim in space that everyone has been sharing. Does that mean he’s gay?

—ConcernedSoccerMom on the Motherhood Today forums

>ConcernedSoccerMom: Jaim doesn’t identify with a gender anymore, so I don’t think your son is gay. But even if he was, so what? If Jaim has proved anything today, it’s that one’s sexuality will never again be a limitation to achievement.

—MoreStepfordWifeThanU on the Motherhood Today forums

Hello, my name is Emily Henderson. I am eight years old and i am in the 3rd grade. I live in Muncie, indiana and go to JAmes Polk Elementary. The school smells like trout sometimes, but it is not so bad. I saw you sing in space yesterday. it was so cool!!! I loved all the songs. whatz it like to float in 0 gravity? is it like swimming? how do you eat upside down? does the food fall out of your stomach?? does the moon look huge? are the stars brighter? Will you come to visit Mrs. Frasier’s class next thursday and tell us about your trip to space??? i have alot more questions to ask you. I will tell Mrs. Frasier your coming. Don’t worry. shes cool with it. she has a picture of you on the wall.

—From a forum on The Official Jaim Janan Fan Site.

This GOVERNMENT STOOGE Jaim performed for only THIRTEEEN minutes. But if the Earth were curved, as the BRAINWASHED MASSES have been LED TO BELIEVE, the performance would have lasted for an ADDITIONAL NINE MINUTES AND TWELVE SECONDS, according to my DETAILED CALCULATIONS [imgur link]. This is DEFINITIVE PROOF we are BEING LIED TO. THE EARTH IS FLAT! WAKE UP!

—GameOfDrones on the /r/FlatEarth sub-Reddit

I’m sure if I shoved a pencil up my dog’s ass, fed him pure crack, and blew an air horn, the scribbles coming out of his backside would be more scientifically accurate than your “DETAILED CALCULATIONS.” But let me posit another solution: the real reason why Jaim’s performance was only thirteen minutes long is because that was the length of the set. Jaim stopped playing because of the diabolical conspiracy of playing three full songs to their end.

—MoundOfAnts in reply to GameOfDrones on the/r/FlatEarth sub-Reddit

Jaim never went to space. It’s all fake. My brother saw Jaim yesterday outside the Sheraton in Hanoi. Jaim bummed a Marlboro off of him, and they chatted for a few. Jaim said the video was shot in a secret studio in Svalbard. My bro said Jaim was like totally down to earth (haha) not stuck-up or anything. He told my bro that the whole space show was just a scam for publicity. Then while they’re talking, some buff dudes in black gear and dark glasses hop out of a truck and take Jaim away. My bro said it totally freaked him out. He was still shaking when he Skyped me.

—Don Tuan on the /r/conspiracy sub-Reddit.

Jaim In Space replica jumpsuit, with real insignia, straps, and epaulettes, only $99.99. https://ji.io/pxjk

—Worldwide China Wholesale in a YouTube comment

3. The Apotheosis

A group of women from Bihar took celebrity adoration to another level when they were seen worshipping a life-sized ceramic statue of Jaim Janan, the famous pop-star. A video of the women pouring water and offering flowers to the statue is making the rounds of social media today. Facebook user Vinita Chetty from Delhi uploaded the video on her wall and it has since gone viral.

—From “People Seen Worshipping Statue of Jaim Janan” in the India Times.

As a trans woman, I cannot describe what an inspiration Jaim is to me. To see someone like me in space, someone who has gone through so much pain and suffering, to see them literally shoot away from all this awful chaos into orbit is just too much. Words cannot fully describe my elation. Jaim, you are my star, my beacon in the sky, and I will look to your light to guide my way when I am lost.

—Micah K on Tumblr

At exactly 3:14, right over Jaim’s shoulder, the sun crests Earth’s horizon just as Jaim sings, “Look again at that dot. That’s home. That’s us.” I get the chills every time I watch it.

—Mayim Heschel in a YouTube comment

My grandma said a lot of Jaim’s lyrics are from an old book about space called Pale Blue Dot. It was written a long time ago by this 20th-century astronomer called Carl Sagan. He studied the planets and stars and tried to convince ppl that we should go into space and become an inter-planetary species. There’s lots of vids of him on YouTube. He seems pretty cool. I wonder what he would have thought of Jaim.

—Not Your Everyday Archaeopteryx in a YouTube comment

No, you never see us. That was intentional. It was part of the deal SpaceX made with Jaim’s team. They wanted the performance to look like Jaim was orbiting in space all alone. But the Dragon VII spacecraft isn’t that big! We had to velcro ourselves to the walls just to stay out of the camera eye. We all joked we had front-row beds. You can’t see us in any of the videos, but I could have reached out and touched Jaim’s shoulder from where I lay strapped. We were that close!

There have been performances in space before. The most famous is probably Chris Hadfield’s “Space Oddity.” But that wasn’t live and was heavily edited. As part of the agreement we made, Jaim’s performance had to be livestreamed, and this ended up being quite difficult.

The cameras, the lights, the spacecraft orientation, the satellite downlinks, the software, and so much more—all had to be perfect. We were working up until the last second to make sure we had everything right, because if something went wrong, millions would be watching. It was stressful, certainly, but we are trained to operate under pressure. But I have to say that everyone involved, the crew up here and our ground team down on Earth, did a superlative job. We couldn’t have asked for a more professional bunch of people.

The best part, of course, was that we had a front-row seat! As soon as Jaim started playing, all my stress vanished. By the end of the set, I was so moved I was wiping away tears. Jaim really is an incredible performer. And, yes, contrary to what some are saying, it was all streamed live, without edits.

What you hear about Jaim, their affableness, their charm, is one hundred percent true. They’re a genuinely sweet person. Jaim is funny, witty, and whip-smart. There’s no arrogance or entitlement in them, which is honestly not what I expected after hearing so many malicious rumors.

Overall, I have to say, this experience has been one of the most rewarding of my life. And I hope Jaim’s performance has inspired people, young and old, to take a greater interest in space. I think it’s already working though, because I heard that applications to NASA’s astronaut corps have increased tenfold just this past week.

—From “Music of the Spheres: An Interview with Astronaut Theresa Ortolani, Mission Commander for Jaim Janan’s Journey Into Space” in The New York Times Magazine

The Bank of Thailand has issued a press release today announcing a new commemorative banknote. The 500-Baht note commemorates Thailand’s own Jaim Janan and their journey into space.

The new notes are primarily purple, similar to the 21st series of 500-Baht notes. Additional details and highlights appear in gold, orange, blue, and red. The front side depicts Janan in their space jumpsuit looking up and to their right, toward a turtle overlaid with stars (the constellation Orion). The reverse side depicts Jaim floating in zero-gravity before the spacecraft window, where the sun is rising above the Earth and Thailand is clearly visible. As an anti-counterfeit feature, the radial pattern surrounding the rising sun will turn yellow when viewed under ultraviolet light.

While the Royal Family could not be reached for comment, Queen Sirikit Narkhirunkanok has repeatedly condemned the choice of putting the world-famous celebrity on the bank notes. Nevertheless, the people of Thailand overwhelmingly support the measure, according to polls.

—From “Jaim Janan Will Appear on Commemorative 500-Baht Note,” an article in Thai Rath

Jaim Janan replica space jumpsuit, with real insignia, straps, and epaulettes, only 9,000 Baht from #BestDealsAsia #jaiminspace #replica #jumpsuit #wholesale #retail #bestdeals #dealoftheday #coupon https://be.cn/jnd4h

—From a comment on “Jaim Janan will Appear on Commemorative 500-Baht Note” in Thai Rath

Many in the world are celebrating Jaim Janan’s flight into space as if it were an act of divine revelation. But this troubled soul defiles the Lord’s good works with his sins, and his presence in the Lord’s heavenly sphere shames us all below. My dear children, if you are as heartbroken by the course of the world as I am, come join me this Sunday for a most serious worship and sermon, and together we will meditate on how we can turn this broken, twisted world from its dark path.

—A message from Senior Pastor Isaiah Young on the Fellowship Church’s website, Grapevine, Texas

Did pop-star Jaim Janan’s orbital performance make you more or less likely to want to go into space?

Not sure: 1%

Less likely: 2%

Somewhat less likely: 2%

Somewhat more likely: 10%

More likely: 84%

—From an online worldwide Gallup International poll of 386,415,678 respondents, ages 13-55.

In an apparent response to Jaim Janan’s famous performance in space, North Korea announced today they will be launching native-born pop-star Kwan Jang into space atop a repurposed ballistic missile next spring, where he will perform several songs from orbit. In a statement released yesterday, the reclusive government said, “Kwan Jang will showcase Korea’s indomitable strength, agility, and power. Jang is perfectly fit and healthy, and his musical ability is unparalleled in all musical genres. Jang will provide a harmonic, pleasing result to the entire world.”

While sales numbers of Jang’s recordings within North Korea are hard to come by, the artist is virtually unheard of outside of the country. Within North Korea, he is most famous for his somber, orchestral versions of “We Are One” and “Reunification Rainbow.”

—From “North Korea to Launch Their Own Pop-Star Into Space” on BBC News

Jaim Janan replica space jumpsuit, with real insignia, straps, and epaulettes, only $499.99 from #BestDealsChina #jaiminspace #replica #jumpsuit #wholesale #retail #bestdeals #dealoftheday #coupon https://be.cn/jn5gf

—From a comment on the BBC News website

Space tourism and transportation company Virgin Galactic has dramatically lowered the price of their sub-orbital space flights from New York to Tokyo to $12,500, putting space travel within reach of millions more people. This announcement comes in response to other space transportation companies, such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and China’s CALT, recently lowering their prices as well.

“Certainly, we have to remain competitive,” said Julia Tizard, President of Operations for Virgin Galactic. “The cost reduction is part of that. But interest in space travel has reached a global tipping point. Just as electric vehicles shifted from niche items into the mainstream once a certain price point was reached, we believe space travel between continents will soon become commonplace.”

While space travel today is not nearly as cheap as an intercontinental airline flight, Tizard says such a day isn’t far off. “We’ve seen demand for space travel rise exponentially in the last five years. It’s a simple economy of scale. The more people who go into space, the cheaper space travel becomes. By our current estimate, at the end of the decade as many as eighteen percent of intercontinental travelers will use some form of space flight to reach their destination. With such numbers, relatively inexpensive trips to the Moon and even Mars become a possibility.”

When asked if Jaim Janan’s orbital performance affected demand for space travel, Tizard replied, “Oh, absolutely. From the moment Jaim announced they were going into space, we saw a jump in reservations. But after their live performance, the demand has been just incredible. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve seen a twelve hundred percent increase in reservations. This, more than anything else, is the factor enabling us to lower our prices.”

—From “Virgin Galactic to Dramatically Slash Space-Travel Costs” on SpaceFlightNow.com

Today, Jaim Janan performed in space. A trans person. Billions, I’m told, watched. There were so many, the internet crashed. The world stopped, for a moment to see. To hear. To feel. Many mocked Jaim before the trip. Many more were indifferent. But since Jaim’s performance, there has been a sea-change in the world. I sense it when I ride the train to work, and I see it when I look into my fellow citizen’s faces. We are no longer members of a particular race, nation, tribe, or band. We are all members of one race. We are all human.

With our endless news cycles focused on misery and despair, it’s all too easy to become myopic, to see the world only for its faults. It’s all too easy to become a cynic, to close our hearts and give up. But what Jaim has taught me, what Jaim has taught all of us, is that hope for humanity isn’t dead. Beauty persists in the world, and most especially in us, if only we allow ourselves to dance to its ancient song.

Today, a shining star has arced across the sky. Jaim is but one person. Yet there will soon be—I am sure of it—billions more to follow.

From now and every day to come, I will know that something within us has changed for the better. Because even though, compared to the sun, one star may be small, the long night has gotten a little bit brighter.

So Jaim Janan I just want to say: Thank you.

—Ysha Fuente, from an Op-Ed in Süddeutsche Zeitung

Look again at that dot
That’s here, that’s home, that’s us
Everyone you love, and everyone you know
And everyone who was
All their joys and suffering
All their faiths and prayers
Every saint and sinner
And their countless little heirs
All our bands and tribes
Thieves and lovers
Tyrants and peasants
Children and mothers
In the history of the world
Lived here
. . . here, here
On our little mote of dust
Dancing for a moment
In bright flash and gleam
Oh, dancing for a moment
. . . just this lonely precious moment
Dancing for a moment
Suspended in a sunbeam.

—Jaim Janan, after Carl Sagan

©2019 by Matthew Kressel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew Kressel is a writer & software developer. He is a three time Nebula Award Finalist and a Eugie Award Finalist. His novel King of Shards was hailed as “Majestic and resonant,” by NPR Books. His short fiction can be found in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Analog, io9, Nightmare, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2018 Edition, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year – Volume 3, as well as many other magazines and anthologies. His work has been translated into seven languages. As a coder, he created the Moksha submissions system, in use by many of the largest SF publishers today. He is the co-host of Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in New York with Ellen Datlow. Find him online at @mattkressel or matthewkressel.net.

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

The Iron Man

Max Gladstone | 4266 words

The boy stopped playing after his Mom and Dad chained the iron man to the Kingdom’s heart.

The boy used to run alone and brave through the welt within the walls, and even ranged as far as the borders of the wood. He tossed the ball his mother gave him into the sky, gold against blue with the sun behind, and laughing, caught it again. The ball purred in his grip. Sometimes he asked it questions—how to build a puppet, how to open the castle gates, how to change the color of the sky— and it answered. How questions were the ball’s job; why questions were Mom-and-Dad’s.

When Mom was tired enough to be cajoled, she told him stories about the worlds long since broken; Dad never did. We once felt the sun on our skin, Mom said, and grass between our toes, real sun, real grass, real skin, real toes. By “we” she meant “people,” not herself. She was born long after the war, she had always lived in the Kingdom, but her mother told her the story and hers told her and sometime way back when it had been true.

The boy did not believe anything Outside could have been better than the welt. In the welt, he raced. In the welt, soil received his bare feet, and bottle blue dragonflies buzzed about his head, and a river rolled past the walls. How could a meatspace planet surpass this?

Then a hunter brought the iron man home.

The boy watched them approach through the welt, bearing a figure wrapped in chains, and he watched them too with his Outside eyes: the hunter spread thin, a single individual controlling seven hundred twenty-two sliverships ambered with heat against the black. He’d caught a grand prize in a fear loop: an intelligence coded and curled inside a chip of ferrous smartmatter.

An iron man.

“What is he?” the boy asked when the hunter left.

“A wild thing,” Dad said, “and a teacher of wild things.”

“A monster,” said Mom, “and a maker of monsters.”

“He lived beneath the wood, killing passersby, drinking their cycles.”

“A leftover from before the fall.”

“Useful, though,” Dad said, “if we can tame him,” and through camera lenses the boy watched Dad’s waldos bear the chip that was the iron man down narrow service corridors to the Kingdom’s server heart. “There’s old knowledge here, if we break him open.”

“When,” Mom said, and kissed Dad, and chained the iron man in a diamond cage of needles pointing in, locked with her touch: She printed a meat puppet echo of herself for the purpose. When the boy asked why: “Meat cannot be compelled, except by meat.” She stored the puppet in a freezer for later use. “Waste not.”

The Kingdom thrilled with promise. Once the decryption engine did its work, the iron man would serve them.

But while the engine ran, the Kingdom’s welt staled and soured. When the boy jumped, his legs did not propel him as they should, nor did they take his weight quite right when he landed. His stride became jerky and uneven. If he turned his head fast enough, he could catch the world rendering behind him.

So he did not play any more.

Dad and Mom talked over dinner about shifting the Kingdom’s orbit to a more resource-rich band, adjusting fabbers and updating software and alliances. While the decryption engine worked, they’d downgraded from their customary opulence: Dad’s skin smoothed and its color flattened and the stubble of his scalp disappeared. Mom lost the lines around her eyes, and her braids became coherent snakes of black. They weren’t themselves any more. They became beautiful.

At last, the boy’s golden ball stopped purring.

“It’s okay,” he told it. “Let’s play throw and catch. You like that game.” It had been a long time since he played. He threw the ball into a sky that was not so blue as the sky he remembered, and caught it, but the ball did not purr. He threw the ball again, higher, but the ball stayed quiet. He gathered all his strength and threw the ball higher than he had ever thrown anything. The ball passed through the sky, and fell into a space the boy had not known existed within the walls. He followed it, and found himself before a diamond cage.

Within the cage the iron man sat, holding the golden ball.

He was made from a sort of burnt and aged gold, so abstractly glorious the boy could hardly look at him. He had a shell more than a skin. Only his eyes were black.

The ball purred in his grip. “You fixed it,” the boy said.

“I did not,” the iron man replied. “It works now because it is close to me, and your parents are directing all your Kingdom’s processors this way.”

“Give it back.”

“No.”

“Then why won’t you go away? Everything was good before you came. You’ve hurt Mom and Dad.” And me, the boy did not say.

“You have all hurt yourselves. You will never break me, but neither will you give me up. I am too much of a . . .” he examined his lack of reflection in the golden ball, “prize.”

“What are you?”

“Old,” he said. “And strong, in my way, and I was made to make men stronger. That is why your parents will not let me go.”

“They would let you go, if you helped us.”

“I have had too much of strength and men.” He rolled the ball from fingertips down forearm and caught it on the back of his other hand. “Set me free. Your welt will regain its color, and your ball will live again.”

“No,” the boy said.

But the next day the welt was gray and slow, the grass no longer felt like grass, and the boy missed his ball.

“Well?” the iron man asked.

“No,” the boy repeated.

The third day, he said, “Even if I wanted to help you, how would I? Mom locked you in.”

The iron man’s eyes flashed gold. “Easy,” he said. His voice was nothing like the ball’s. “Go to your mother’s bed and take her touch.”

The boy waited for the transfer burn. Mom and Dad split themselves into a hundred lesser retainers and subsystems, orienting the Kingdom. The boy printed a meat puppet and crawled through access tubes to his mother’s puppet’s freezer. It opened for him. His mother’s puppet lay there, stiff, her meat reflection. He pressed his hand to hers, and carved his own hand in her image, then climbed down into the Kingdom’s heart, where the iron man hung imprisoned.

He pressed his mother’s hand to the lock. It opened. In the welt, the iron man’s eyes flashed gold again, and he grew large. The cage broke. The Kingdom’s walls could not hold him. Servants and antibody knights set weapons against him, and he broke each in turn. Fire spewed from his mouth and he sang a song that spoiled their working minds. He strode through the Kingdom, tossing defenders aside, and when he came to the walls he knocked them down, and ran for the wood.

Gravity broke. The transfer burn failed. The boy had never meant for this to happen. Mom and Dad would know it was all his fault.

The golden ball lay in the broken cage, purring.

“How can I get out of this?” he asked the golden ball.

“Go with him,” it said.

He ran after the retreating giant, past melted defensive drones and shattered gun emplacements. “Iron man! Take me with you!”

The iron man looked back, and though his face was a shell, his dark eyes held for an instant an expression the boy could not name in a single word. There was pity there, and scorn, and horror. But the iron man’s eyes flashed gold, and without a word he took the boy on his shoulders and ran into the wood.

The boy had never left his Kingdom before. Back on that whirling computationally dense rock, he’d thought he knew what freedom was. But as the iron man ran deeper and deeper into the wood, flitting from relay to relay at the speed of light, drinking signal strength from orbiting batteries powered by molecule-thin solar wings a hundred kilometers on a side, as the boy spread through the tangled rivers and branches and cul-de-sacs of the wood, he realized he had never known what it meant to run.

The iron man set him down in a clearing. “Where is your Kingdom?” the boy asked.

“I don’t have one,” the iron man said. “Kingdoms are for kings.”

“Mom called you a monster, and a maker of monsters.”

“She is not wrong.”

“Will you make me a monster?”

The iron man’s eyes glinted. He closed them and forced them black again. “He doesn’t know what he’s asking,” he said, not talking to the boy, and then, addressing him for sure: “There’s an old problem with war. A warrior takes years to build, and an instant to destroy. They solved this problem a long time ago: Make one warrior so he will mold others in his image.”

“Is that bad?”

“Not if one wishes to be a warrior, or make them.”

“Were you . . . molded?”

“After a fashion. I do not let myself go close to Kingdoms anymore,” he said, which was not an answer. “But the wood’s pleasant.”

The boy stomped on the ground. “It feels thin.”

“This grove is not large enough to support two people. I will find more power to shore up the local welt. It may take some time. Stay here, and guard this pool.” There was a bright spring on the clearing’s edge, with golden fish and snakes within. “It is a part of me. Do not touch it. I will be back.”

When the iron man left, the boy sat by the pool’s edge. The water was so clear, and the light so even, he had no reflection. When the iron man left, the ground firmed, and the day grew warm, and the boy’s hand began to hurt where he had carved it in the shape of his mother’s. “How can I stop the pain?”

The pool did not answer, but it looked very refreshing. A brief touch could not hurt, surely.

He dipped his hand into the pool, and his pain faded, and knowledge rushed into him: how to block neural pathways and promote tissue growth, how to soothe or orchestrate the most astounding symphonies of hurt in an enormous variety of conscious frameworks. He drew back his hand, shocked. The voices stopped, but the knowledge stayed. He held up his hand, and found it perfect: a reflective golden shell smooth as math.

He felt very far from home.

When the iron man came back, the boy tried to hide his hand, but the iron man saw. “You touched the pool.”

“On accident.”

“What did it show you?” He told him.

The iron man said, “Never touch it again.” The next day, he left once more, seeking.

“I could go with you.”

“There are other monsters in the wild wood, and I cannot protect you from them. Stay here. But do not touch the pool.”

The pool whispered to the boy that day, but he did not respond. Curious, though, he plucked a hair from his head and let it fall into the water. It gilded in an instant, and he fished it from the pool with his golden hand. The hair twisted and turned and hissed in his grip. It struck at his finger, and glanced off his golden shell. If it had found unprotected flesh it would have burrowed into his brain.

The boy killed it. It did not occur to him to let the hair live, nor to wonder how he had killed it, until the iron man came back, and asked.

“I suppose my hand knew how,” he said.

“Knowledge given will be used,” the iron man replied. “I’ll let this go a second time, because you did not touch the water yourself. But you must resist if you are to stay with me. It is hard to stop yourself from being made into a weapon.”

On the third day, the iron man left, and the boy, seated by the water’s edge, wondered to himself: “What does he mean? What weapon was he, in what war?”

The pool whispered: Let me teach you. Stare into your reflection.

“I don’t have a reflection.”

Not as you are, the pool replied.

He looked into the pool, and saw not his own face, but the sky—and not the sky of the welt. This was a sky of stars and a sun and worlds surrounding it, before they’d broken. Sliverships danced among them, monomolecular buildings arched skyward from real dirt, singularities stitched the night together, and then there was a war. It didn’t last long, in the grand scheme of things, but long enough. And a war needed warriors.

The iron man and a hundred million like him fought gods in the center of the sun.

Planets broke. Survivors rebuilt the dust of worlds into Kingdoms. The boy bent nearer to the pool.

His hair tumbled over his shoulders and fell into the water. Gold coiled up through the curls and bit into his brain.

Voices filled his mind. Muscles convulsed as spawned viruses rewrote them, building new preconscious response circuitry, restructuring active symbols. He screamed and the sound shook the welt, his fingers bit into soil, and long-forgotten weapons throughout the rubble belt woke and warmed ancient vicious guns. Everything felt small, including his scream.

He had a purpose, and its purity felt too good to bear.

He pulled back from the water, and lay with his head in his hands on the ground, weeping. He made himself a cap, and covered his golden hair.

The iron man returned late in the day, and found him sobbing. He reached for the boy’s shoulder, but the boy caught his wrist and squeezed. Another being would have felt pain. Another being might have broken.

The iron man pried the boy’s fingers loose. “No more.”

The boy looked at him. Fury and cold calculation lay beneath his fear, and there was gold in the pits of his eyes.

“I hoped,” the iron man said. “If we could live together without you catching the bug, that would mean I—well. You can’t stay here. The more it teaches you, the more it makes you want to learn. They built us very well, you see. It’s easy to make people into things, or gods. Few people want to be people. You have to go if you want to live. Be poor somewhere. It’s better than being this. Trust me. I’ve had practice.”

“I’m sorry,” the boy said. “It felt so good.”

“It always does.” The iron man tried, again, to touch the boy, and this time the boy let him. There was no give to the iron man’s hand, no softness, no warmth. “Find a Kingdom, and remain yourself. I’ll always be in the wood, if you need me.”

The boy left that night.

• • • •

From her tower, the girl watched the new garden boy work. She’d watched him for months, since he walked in out of the wood, alone, shivering, a signal faint and tangled with encryption, begging sanctuary, which of course the Queen offered, because she was a good Queen. One never knew when one’s stronghold might be taken, and one might find oneself lost and in the wood, dependent on the kindness of strangers. So they took refugees—everyone did, though seldom with the Queen’s generosity.

But the girl was not so trusting as her mother, and the garden boy did not seem like just another refugee.

He moved slowly through the welt, but with a beautiful economy, savoring the ground, soaking in the simulated air, breathing sunlight. No wonder: The Queen had won a recent war, and the world was thick with texture. Such wealth! They rendered the Queen’s scars, now, and the girl herself sported a blemish on her cheek. But even for a wanderer from the deepest wood, the garden boy seemed to appreciate the Kingdom’s resolution a little too much.

Also strange: his efficiency! The garden boy tended pseudorganic solar collectors and synthesis substrata with millions of devices a few nanometers across, and he easily overmatched even the master gardener’s synchronization levels, though he lacked her skill.

And he wore a cap wherever he went, and work gloves—even indoors.

Weird.

One afternoon she called to him from her tower: “Boy, bring me flowers.”

When he entered the room, hands full, she reached out to knock off his cap. His left hand caught her right in a grip tight enough to make her gasp, but her left hand passed his right and tipped the cap away. Gold hair cascaded to his shoulders, scintillating and brilliant, dripping with tangled computations.

“You’re hurting me,” she said.

He let her arm go, pulled back, and shrank into himself. “You’re not just a refugee gardener’s boy.”

“I am that,” he said, “as much as I’m anything.”

“You’re something more,” she said. “You’ve compressed yourself. You don’t have to. Here.” She took some golden discs from her dresser—vital cycles. “Use this. We have plenty.”

But he left her, and later she saw the master gardener’s children playing with the gold, creating balls that purred and small beasts to carry out their whims.

“You don’t have to hide,” she told him, when she found him tending harvesters near the south magnetic pole of her mother’s Kingdom. “There’s no honor in being humble.”

“But there is danger in being great.”

Not long after, there came another war. Two lesser Kingdoms seized a conjunction and a solar storm to attack at once. Knightminds guided sliverships through the void. The Queen rode out at her knights’ head. The girl wanted to join her, but the Queen cautioned redundancy; we’ll need you if this goes wrong. The garden boy wanted to join the knights, but they laughed at him, and because the girl was angry at having been told to stay behind, she did not caution the knights against laughing.

The knights left the garden boy no sliverships, no weapons, only an observation cloud with which to follow the action, if he wished. He did—off into the woods he went, puttering along barely conscious in the cloud.

The girl ran the Kingdom in her mother’s absence, and marshaled its defenses, though if the Queen and her knights failed, there’d be little her pulse emplacements and force screens and virus storms could do against what followed. Still, every little bit helped.

At night, she listened to the battle, and thought about the garden boy’s hair, and about the dangers of being great.

She heard the Queen win, through the microwave band, but did not know how, and could not ask until the fleet limped back, dragging harvested gold along. The girl peeled her mother away from the adoring crowds—still waving, the woman loved a show—and asked: “How did you win? Outnumbered, and that’s before their reinforcements showed up. Poorly clustered—you should have taken me with you.”

“We won,” said the Queen, her voice round with simulated intoxicants. She looked gloriously real, flush with newly captured resolution—she stank of wine, and her robe was stained. “Isn’t that enough?”

“Hardly.”

“There were too many of them, like you say. But we were saved. A great power rode out of the wood. Sliverships. Snowflakes. Darters. A singularity furnace. They moved like an enormous school of fish. Everything our enemies tried, they anticipated. The newcomer took our enemies’ minds apart, ejected them into the void and claimed what was left. I thought they might consume us next, but—they let us go.”

The girl went to the garden, and sought the master gardener. “Where’s your boy?”

“Sleeping,” the master gardener replied. “I don’t know what to think about that one. He puttered off in the observation cloud, and rode it back before the others got home. He said he was glad he’d gone, but wouldn’t say any more, and he’s been sleeping ever since.” She found him under the spreading branches of the old maple—the Queen’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother seventeen times back planted it in the center of the old Kingdom, in those days when the few survivors of the great old wars clustered in hollowed rocks, and every cycle was a treasured gift. Back then the rendered maple had been unfathomable in its profligacy—but there’s more to life than life, the old Queen said. At least, that was how her daughters told the tale to theirs.

The garden boy slept in the cradle of the old maple’s roots, curled around his gloved hand, his cap still on. She did not touch him. She watched. For the most part he looked soft, like her, like the rest of the Kingdom, well rendered in victory. But his cheek did not look quite right where it pressed against the tree root, and his skin was beautiful, smooth, unbroken, almost like a shell.

“We’ll find the one who saved us,” she told her mother that night at dinner. “I have a plan.”

The word went out the next day: The Queen, triumphant and flush, would hold a tournament. The girl would hurl a golden apple toward the sun, for any to catch who could. If the winner was a stranger knight, that person might be the one who’d saved them.

That’s what the girl told her mother—but she watched the garden boy, and saw him disappear into the wood on the day of the tournament. So she was not surprised when, of all the knights who gathered to catch the golden apple that she threw toward the sun, a mysterious rider in a black slivership was the one to claim it. On the second day, they repeated the test, and this time a white slivership, likewise unknown, took the prize. Each night after the competition, wandering through the Kingdom, she found the gardener’s children playing with spheres of gold.

On the third day, the girl set a trap. The mysterious rider that day wore fierce red, and raced ahead of all to catch the sphere—but the girl had told her knights where she would throw, and they lay in wait. A battle raged, but not for long. The girl noted the strange rider’s efficiency of movement.

She met the garden boy when he returned from the wood. He was limping.

He tried to slouch away from her, to keep his head down, his hands in his pockets—especially the gloved hand. To keep his cap away.

“Why?” she asked.

He tried not to answer, but some deep compulsion seized him. When he looked up, golden lines stitched through his eyes. “Because there was a challenge in it,” he said. “A problem to be solved. Mastery to gain.” In the tower, his voice had not been so hard. In the tower, he had not sounded so much like a man who enjoyed the act of breaking. “Because winning is a habit that grows easier the more it’s done.”

“You don’t want mastery,” she said, and stepped toward him, and stared into his eyes beneath the gold.

“I do.”

“Then why stop once you won the battle against our enemies? Why not kill the Queen, and all her knights, and come back here and seize the Kingdom for yourself?”

“I wanted to.”

“No,” she said. “A voice in your head whispered you should want to, but you did not. You have been made strong, but that strength is yours to use. It doesn’t own you.”

“It’s inside me. I can’t trust myself. How do I know what’s me, and what’s the gold?”

“Learn,” she said. She reached out, slowly, and he did not stop her. She removed his cap. Gold spilled down over his shoulders.

“How?” he asked.

“For one thing,” she said, “You can hurt. And I don’t think it likes pain.”

She touched his cheek, and pressed, and felt a shell beneath his skin crack. Her nails drew traces down his skin, and he did not look so perfect any more.

There were tears in his eyes, and they were not golden. “Come,” she said. “Meet my mother.”

He stayed with them after that, and tended the garden, and sometimes rode beside the knights, when the need was great. But for the most part he lived, and grew, and stumbled, and often hurt.

One day a man came to the Kingdom from the wood. He leaned on a crooked stick as he walked, and he glowed with a luxury of ugliness. Dirt crusted beneath cracked nails; his teeth were gapped and his eyes yellow-red through their sclera, and many of his fingers had been broken several times.

The boy didn’t recognize him, until he looked in his eyes and saw darkness without a fleck of gold. He hugged the iron man, and the iron man hugged him back, and in their embrace neither broke the other.

“Pain,” said the iron man, wondering, though he was not iron now. “That took a long time to learn. Invulnerability’s a hard curse to break.”

“Come to the garden,” said the boy who was not a boy any more. “We can watch the children play.”

©2016 by Max Gladstone. Originally published in The Grimm Future, edited by Erin Underwood. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Max Gladstone is the author of the Hugo-nominated Craft Sequence, of which the most recent novel, Ruin of Angels, was released in September 2017. Max’s interactive mobile game, Choice of the Deathless, was nominated for the XYZZY Award, and his critically acclaimed short fiction has appeared on Tor.com and in Uncanny Magazine, and in anthologies such as XO Orpheus: Fifty New Myths and The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales. In addition to his solo and creator-owned work, Max is the lead writer on the Bookburners serial, a contributing writer on The Witch Who Came In From the Cold, and contributed a comic for the Kodansha Press anthology Ghost In the Shell: Global Neural Network. Max has sung in Carnegie Hall and was once thrown from a horse in Mongolia.

The Ocean That Fades Into Sky

Kathleen Kayembe | 12261 words

Although it takes constant effort for Coasts to mold herself into a human body when none live on her shores, and a far greater effort—even with her mother’s help—to sustain a flight of giant sea turtles across hundreds of miles, for once she is grateful; the focus required keeps her thoughts from the empty space beside her where Obsequies should be.

There are three women Coasts loves more than anyone on the whole of Uloh-la, and Obsequies, her lover, is one of them. Her mother, in the guise of the turtle beneath her, is another. Both of them are mad at her. Dwellings, the third, would be angry too, if Coasts told her the truth.

Obsequies is presumably angry because Coasts has lied about her identity all her life. Obsequies met Coasts as Ocean, the spirit of all waters on Uloh-la bearing that title. In fact, ever since Obsequies’s parents came in their false-moon ship of humans to colonize Uloh-la—ever since Cities and Ships shot light from the sky and massacred Coasts’s family along with the real Ocean—everyone has been led to believe Coasts is Ocean, the All-Mother.

Coasts is Ocean’s daughter. She is the last of the All-Parents’ children, comprising a piece Ocean carved from herself, one she stole from Land during his besieged distraction, and the last piece Sky willingly gave of themself before the atmosphere replacement machines stole the rest of their mind. Coasts is the youngest child of Uloh-la, barely a century old, and before Obsequies made it her mission to ensure Coasts survived the yearly summits, Coasts was murdered there every twenty years—the length of time it takes to re-form one’s consciousness and a new body. Until Obsequies, Coasts’s only relationship was with her mother, and all but a few hours of her life experience was from memories of their family Ocean shared with her before sending Coasts to her death. Coasts is too young, Ocean says, to be truly discerning, or an accurate judge of character. And if sharing Ocean’s secret existence with their family is untenable, telling a colonizer god like Obsequies is unthinkable.

Yesterday, Coasts did the unthinkable. Ocean’s been angry with her since. She constructed Coasts to live and die in her place while she hides and grows strong enough to save their family—a plan which requires absolute secrecy, especially from the colonizer gods. Coasts worked around her promise to tell no one by showing Obsequies the truth: Coasts is herself, and Ocean is herself, and they are not the same person. Ocean fears Obsequies will tell her parents the real Ocean eludes them, and Cities will send Ships to track her down and kill her—and any hope Coasts’s family has of liberation. The oceans cannot rise and swallow the planet, destroying the human settlements, drowning their pale, fleshy bodies, and the construct gods who immigrated with them, if Ocean does not live the decades, even centuries, needed to regain the power she once wielded over her domain. All-Mother Ocean’s flood is their family’s secret hope, and Cities’s greatest fear. It is why Cities kills Coasts, who he thinks is Ocean, whenever he has the chance. And every year, at the mandatory summit Coasts is flying to on her mother’s great shelled back, gives Cities a new wave of chances to kill her.

Dwellings, at least, is not angry with Coasts; she doesn’t know she’s being lied to. Coasts has long argued that Dwellings can be trusted to know the truth, just as she argued for Obsequies, but the All-Mother is adamant that her existence be kept secret. Now Coasts worries she was right.

Yesterday on the beach, Obsequies saw Coasts in her human guise speaking to Ocean, who’d taken the form of a great turtle in preparation for today. Obsequies had pushed her power across the sand in greeting, and Ocean sent hers back, in keeping with their charade. But Coasts had answered too, with all of herself, not just the sea portion of her domain, and Obsequies’s face had twisted with a betrayal that sent pain lancing through her chest. Instead of staying to let Coasts explain, to spend the night, to go to summit together in the morning, Obsequies turned around and left.

So Coasts stands alone on the broad green shell of her mother’s back, the red robes and black hair of her brown-skinned human form billowing behind her, and leads her entourage of turtles to the summit without Obsequies.

A mile out from the landing plateau, All-Mother Ocean raises her face to what is left of All-Parent Sky and pushes the power of the sea out before them, a herald: The ocean has arrived. The thrum of the deeps in her greeting, paired with the flight of oceanic beasts, verifies her identity. And since they are too far yet for the waiting gods and spirits to tell the ocean’s greeting came from the turtle and not the human, Coasts is assumed to be Ocean, as intended, and Ships marks that Ocean has answered their yearly summons and need not be hunted down and killed for delinquency.

The turtles Coasts brings because they inhabit both ocean and coast, and her performance requires mounts from Ocean’s domain that she can control. The small school of fish she brings is a more personal performance; while they’ll be eaten at the summit, she chose this species because Obsequies loves the green of their scales, and Coasts loves her and wants her to know that hasn’t changed.

Even though Coasts can’t afford to be anyone but Ocean—especially at these summits.

It’s time. Coasts bites back her anxiety and squares her shoulders, crafts her expression into one of benign pride—and embodies Ocean.

The All-Mother stops and bows her great head, and Coasts lines the other turtles in an inclined path to the plateau and descends like a queen. She sends her mother an apology laced with shame through their touching skin when she steps from her mother’s shell to her head, Coasts’s bridge to the next turtle’s back. She knows Ocean is still angry with her, but her mother sends none of that in response. Instead, Coasts feels a fleeting surge of affection and courage spiral back through her foot. The feeling cuts off as she steps away, but the warmth is in her heart now, and she feels a relieved smile on her face even as her skirt catches the wind of the real Ocean turning to fly back to the sea. Once Coasts has crossed them, each great turtle will do likewise, until she stands alone on the saffron desert rock, with her driftwood staff and her fish, and her hope that she will not soon be murdered.

For forty years, regardless of whether they arrived together, Obsequies has broken protocol and greeted Coasts first, taking her bare hand as lovers do the moment she steps foot onto the ground; and she has held tight to Coasts when Cities, her father, comes forward to touch Coasts’s neck and shoulders with his large, bare hands—pale, but not “white” as he claims, not like bone—so he will not kill her because she is Ocean, and he is afraid.

As Coasts descends, she scans the small crowd of spirits and gods waiting uncovered in the desert heat for the procession of arrivals to end. Dwellings has woven her long black curls around the crown of her head like the protective walls of a bird’s nest this year; it makes her look regal in a way Coasts is sure Homes will retaliate for. All-Father Land’s skin is lighter than it was last year, but still brown enough that Cities probably won’t penalize him. When he looks up at Coasts, however, his eyes have turned green. She looks away and squeezes the staff to feel the comfort of her domain. Her mother will be heartbroken when Coasts tells her what Land is becoming. It frightens Coasts to see Land’s body following Sky’s, changing under the strain of human machines and settlements. Instinctively, her eyes seek out the comfort of Obsequies, find her pale whipcord body and white-blonde thatch of hair buffeted by desert winds. When their eyes catch, so does Coasts’s breath and, for a moment, her focus.

Obsequies still looks so betrayed.

The turtle wobbles.

Coasts snaps her focus back to appearances, her task, control: of her shape, of her bearing, of the turtles beneath her. The turtle settles back into formation. Coasts doesn’t focus on anything else until her feet are on the ground. It is cool to the touch, and it shouldn’t be; she resolves to thank Deserts for his consideration, should she live through Cities’s greeting.

Without Obsequies, she might not.

Dying would be better for her family though.

It is easy for Cities to believe Coasts is Ocean, with powers diminished by recent death, when she dies before speaking to anyone who knew the All-Mother. Before Obsequies, Coasts feared the pain just before death, but did her duty willingly; the idea of pretending to be Ocean with those who’d known the real one was nerve-wracking, and what use had Coasts for life when most of hers was anxiety followed by pain? Her mother was distant in those days, Coasts’s happiest memories were not her own . . . she had no one and nothing to live for before Obsequies took her hand. She’d taken pride in doing her duty—masking her fear with impassivity, not fighting back or shrinking from the pain she knew was coming, protecting the family she hoped would become hers one day if she did well. She was relieved to most effectively do her duty while dead, however, because death freed her mother from scrutiny for twenty years, and the time passed for Coasts like the oblivion of sleep—a relief broken at the twenty-year mark when her consciousness coalesced and re-formed a body around itself that could be killed.

Forty years of continuous life experience has washed away her passive acceptance of death. Although colored by guilt, Coasts has her own happy memories, her own relationships and people that she loves. Not for the first time, she wonders if she’s selfish for wanting to live. For craving interaction when it puts her at risk of discovery. For wanting people to know her, love her, enough to want to tell them who she is.

She wonders if she’s foolish to believe she knows better than Ocean who to trust with their lives.

Obsequies doesn’t rush up to greet her for the first time in forty years. Coasts snaps her eyes from Obsequies, unmoving, to Obsequies’s father Cities. He is beginning to smile, the one she especially hates, the triumphant curl of his lips when he gets what he wants without lifting a finger.

Coasts’s grip on her staff tightens.

Cities steps away from his family and strides toward Coasts—a little faster, she thinks, than usual, just in case Obsequies—

Thank the Three. Coasts keeps the wave of relief from her expression as surely as her fear when Obsequies startles at her father’s movement and quickly outpaces him, her customary rush to greet Coasts sliding back into place. Cities’s smile folds into a frown, but Coasts barely notices because Obsequies has taken her hand, kissed the fragile skin of Coasts’s wrist, is whispering her fingers across Coasts’s cheek. As always, the soft touches of her greeting send a frisson of heat through Coasts—but Obsequies says, “Hello, love,” instead of “Hello, Ocean,” and her smile is rough and brittle.

Coasts feels scraped raw by its edges. She leans into the hand on her cheek, worries her smile bares her apology and hope for all to see, but Obsequies removes her hand and listlessly touches instead the green scales of the fish Coasts brought for her.

“Ocean!” booms Cities, stepping up behind his daughter with hands upturned in greeting and, Obsequies says, to show friendliness through being unarmed.

A god with bare skin is never unarmed.

A god can kill with a touch. Cities delights in killing Coasts with his.

Although Obsequies steps aside, her hand remains around Coasts’s wrist—barely. She is facing the desert with a semi-vacant expression on her face that Coasts recognizes and knows intellectually not to take personally; Obsequies is probably receiving another memory from the Obsequies of Earth, who they suspect is dying, his experiences scattering into those who share humans as a dominant species.

Cities’s eyes drop to his daughter’s hold before he cups Coasts’s dark cheeks in his large, bare hands, the pressure of his grip hard enough to be threatening, but light enough not to arouse suspicion. Her skin crawls as he slides his palms proprietarily down her neck to her shoulders, blue eyes cold with banked anger as he grudgingly removes his thumb from her fragile windpipe. “Ocean,” he says for the others to hear, “we welcome you to the summit.” With a final too-hard squeeze and glance at Obsequies’s hand still touching Coasts’s skin, he steps away. “You may go and join the others.”

Coasts shifts her staff and twists to hold Obsequies’s hand. Obsequies’s grip is loose, distracted, as is she when she falls into step behind Coasts to join the waiting crowd. Obsequies remains with Coasts instead of moving to stand with the humans’ gods, however. Coasts wonders if she misses the deference that place would afford her from Coasts’s family—a deference Obsequies’s parents demand.

Cities stands before the parched mouth of the intricate cave system Deserts carved into the crag and raises his hands. He is the head of his trinity, flanked by his fellow settler gods, Ships on his right, Homes on his left. He thanks everyone for coming and invites them into the caves so beautifully decorated and furnished by Homes.

And so another summit begins.

• • • •

Attending meals is mandatory, but Coasts is not hungry tonight. Her stomach feels tense and acidic, and the idea of mastication feels like an interminable waste of energy. The new gods’ domains are so specific to humans, that is the only shape they have, and so maintaining a human shape for the duration of summits is mandatory too. Still, the spirits of Uloh-la have many creatures in their domains, and just as many shapes, and change in secret to circumvent bodily needs and functions—like refueling. As long as Coasts changes shape before bed, this human body won’t require feeding.

She thinks she might be hungry were Obsequies sitting beside her, but for the first time since they met, Obsequies isn’t. While Dwellings sits beside Coasts, as she usually does, Obsequies sits at the head table with her parents: Cities, Ships, Homes. They are pleased to have her there, Coasts can see that from her bench, and Obsequies seems more relaxed with them than she’s been since Coasts’s arrival. She doesn’t even look over.

“Trouble in paradise?” Land asks when he sits across from Coasts. Coasts wonders with renewed guilt whether he will ever forgive Ocean for Coasts’s decision to see Obsequies. The love between Ocean, Land, and Sky is the foundation upon which Uloh-la was built, and the memories of them Ocean has shared with Coasts are always colored with affection and the understanding that comes from truly knowing someone you love more than yourself. Coasts is glad Land did not pursue her when Obsequies took her hand the first summit she survived. He respects Ocean’s decisions, and respects Coasts who he thinks is Ocean—but he has never hidden his feelings about her choices.

Decades of practice keeps Coasts’s face ineffable as the ocean at his barb. She doesn’t want her feelings to turn her family against Obsequies. She shrugs at Land. “Obsequies needs to visit her family too,” she says. “I cannot monopolize all of her time.”

“But you’re still together, right?” Dwellings asks softly, thick fingers dropping to the tense hand on Coasts’s thigh and curving comfortingly around it. Through the connection, Dwellings presses the thought, Are you still safe?

Dwellings always sees to the heart of things. Coasts loves that about her, loves everything about her, despite the danger of her attention. “To the best of my knowledge, we are,” Coasts answers, but I don’t know is what she presses back.

Dwellings squeezes her hand before withdrawing. Coasts misses the warmth of her touch.

Opposite, Deserts says, “Good. That’s good.” Time seems to have warmed him to Coasts’s relationship. On the whole, the family does not seem to blame Obsequies for the actions of her parents. Some readily admit to liking her, despite her naivety, which they attribute to youth. Technically, Obsequies is even younger than Coasts.

“You’ll still be rooming together then?” Dwellings asks.

Coasts nods, hoping it’s true. “Come visit after dinner.”

Dwellings has transformed their bedding into something big enough for two humans since she found out Homes narrows Obsequies’s bed each year to only comfortably fit one. Homes shows her displeasure in small, pointed ways. The rooms she decorates for Coasts’s family—like everything she intends for them—are plainer, rougher, less comfortable than the ones she makes for her own. Obsequies has put up with fewer creature comforts since she began sharing her room with Coasts, and despite Obsequies’s reassurances, Coasts feels guilty about this. Until yesterday, their relationship had always made Obsequies happy enough to outweigh the strain of her parents’ disapproval and the weight of Coasts’s guilt. Now Coasts wonders if the balance has shifted.

Across the room, Obsequies lets out a peal of surprised laughter. Pretending to be Ocean doesn’t stop Coasts from feeling a sharp ache in her chest. She knows the expression on Obsequies’s face without needing to look.

She still looks.

Obsequies doesn’t, not even to meet Coasts’s eyes when she walks out of the dining hall behind her parents. Instead, she touches Coasts’s back, a wordless signal to accompany her to their room, as she passes by.

• • • •

Obsequies widens the stone beneath the bed, just in case Homes asks, and Dwellings extends the bedding. “See you at breakfast,” she says to both—quite firmly, to Obsequies—then hugs them and leaves.

Coasts wishes she would stay tonight. She doesn’t want to be alone with Obsequies’s cold anger. Dwellings, at least, always knows what to say.

Normally, Coasts lets go of her clothing shapes now—they both do—and there is pleasure and conversation and thoughts passed through bared skin and cuddling before Obsequies falls asleep. But Obsequies transmutes her clothing into something casual, comfortable, something she would wear to the beach to visit “Ocean,” so Coasts follows suit with a sinking heart.

“We need to talk,” Obsequies says.

“Yes,” Coasts says. Although she is nervous, this, at least, is a chance to clear the air and bridge the unhappy distance between them. She sits on the bed and holds out her hand.

Obsequies frowns. Coasts feels the wave of her essence—death, rest, ritual, recycling matter—and answers with the lowest regions of the coastal shelves, as close to the ocean’s depths as she can manage.

It isn’t the same essence she shared on the beach.

Obsequies stiffens. “Out loud,” she bites out.

Coasts winces. “I can’t say what you want me to.” Obsequies’s parents have ears in unexpected places. It’s one reason her family prefers skin-sharing to verbal conversation: touch-thoughts cross only to the beings you touch and, unlike words, cannot be misunderstood.

“Try,” Obsequies snaps, and folds herself onto her side of the bed.

Coasts draws up her knees and shifts to face Obsequies. Obsequies remains facing the wall.

The room is quiet for some time.

“We could’ve spoken on the beach, if you’d stayed,” Coasts says, trying not to sound hurt.

Obsequies finally looks at her. “So this is my fault?” she says. “You’re still lying to me, and it’s my fault?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“That’s what you said.”

“It isn’t.” . . . She doesn’t think. But English, spoken communication, human body language, she isn’t as good at them as Obsequies, who lives her whole life as a human among humans, so perhaps Obsequies is right? “If I did, I didn’t mean to.”

Despite Coasts conceding, Obsequies sounds no less combative. “So what did you mean?”

“Summit is not a good place to talk about this. You know that.” Coasts’s stomach roils with fear she will say the wrong thing, and Obsequies will say aloud that Coasts is not Ocean, and her parents will hear.

“No, what I know is that you lied to me.”

“I didn’t want to—”

“Forty years you’ve lied to me,” Obsequies says, drowning Coasts’s voice. “We’ve been together almost my whole life. I can’t even look at my father sometimes because of you—all for a lie! This whole time, you could’ve . . .” Some of the fight leaves Obsequies’s posture with a shaky breath, and Coasts watches her eyes soften into something lost, pleading, young. “Why lie when you could be safe? Why let him hurt you?”

Coasts twines her fingers into the fabric of her trousers to keep from reaching out. “I have to. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you any more than that while we’re here.”

Anger floods back into Obsequies’s voice, the hard lines of her posture. “Why not? This is neutral territory, it’s neither of our domains. This is the epitome of ideal.”

Coasts doesn’t know how Obsequies can say that. “Maybe for you. For me, this is a dangerous place. Summits aren’t safe for me and my family the way they are for you and yours.” The exhaustion of travel and staying human and her near-constant anxiety since yesterday are finally catching up to her; she is beginning to mirror Obsequies’s anger, feels too much passion and not enough temperance to police her words and tone or care that she isn’t. Coasts needs to make her understand her insistence on discussing this her way is dangerous. “How can you demand to have this conversation out loud when any of your parents could be listening—”

“Don’t turn this back on my parents!”

“—and they want to kill me and will use any excuse to do it—”

“But it’s not you they want, is it?”

Coasts heart seizes at the words so close to speaking Ocean’s truth aloud. “It will be,” she says harshly. “It will be all of us.” All that stands between her family and death is Ocean’s growing strength. All that stands between Ocean and death is Coasts.

And Obsequies.

Coasts needs to ensure her secrecy. “Take my hand? Please?”

“I really don’t want to touch you right now,” Obsequies snaps.

Years of playing Ocean are all that keeps the hurt off Coasts’s face. She turns away. “All right. Since I cannot tell you what you want to hear, and you won’t hear what I’m trying to say, then I think it best we discuss this another time.” Coasts pulls back the blankets and slides her legs under them, determined to sleep.

“Oh, you think it best, so that’s what we’re doing?”

“It takes both of us to have a conversation.” To have a relationship, she doesn’t say, afraid of Obsequies’s reaction. “Please. I am willing to tell you as much as I can, just as I have always done, but not out loud, and if that’s the only way you choose to hear me, then not here at summit either.”

“Summits would be plenty safe if you’d just tell my father—”

“Stop!” Ocean would not have yelled, but Coasts is not Ocean, and that is the root of this problem: The All-Mother does not trust Obsequies with Coasts, but Coasts did, disobeyed to do it, and is struggling now to believe she was right. “I trusted you to know, I told you the truth the only way I knew how—”

“You didn’t even know I’d be there.”

“Of course I did, Obsequies. Why do you think I asked you to come early? You wouldn’t know anything if I didn’t want you to.”

Obsequies pauses. There is hope in her expression when she pushes her power out to greet the woman she now knows isn’t Ocean.

Coasts’s face falls. “I love you,” she says, voice gentling as she meets Obsequies’s hopeful gaze, “but I can’t do that here. Not even for you.”

Obsequies’s gaze hardens. “Because of your family.”

Coasts’s voice comes out soft, an admission of guilt fraught with fear and apology: “Yes.”

“I chose you over my family, but you won’t do the same for me.”

“I don’t have a choice,” Coasts says.

“There’s always a choice.”

Exasperation crashes back into Coasts like a wave on a rocky shore. “I don’t have that luxury. You choose me and your bed gets smaller for two nights out of the year. I choose you, like I did, and one word from you means the deaths of all of us. All of us, because Cities will never believe no one else knew.”

“That’s a gross exaggeration of the truth.”

“No, it isn’t.” Coasts knows Obsequies loves her parents, knows they shelter her from the worst of their behavior, but surely she can see how they treat Coasts’s family. How can she not after forty years by Coasts’s side at these summits? “It’s what your parents did when they came to Uloh-la, before you were even born. They still do it, to anyone with a body who doesn’t show up at these summits.”

“That’s not how it happened.”

This, at least, is easily proven. “Ask for the memory,” Coasts says. “Anyone who was there can share it with you. Ask Ships to show you what he did to my family, to me. Ask for his last memory of Sky. Ask Cities to show you why he killed me the first summit you saw me, not just tell you.”

“We don’t skin-share the way you do.” Obsequies says.

“And why is that? Mouths can lie, memories can’t. Ask them.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“Why not?”

Obsequies fidgets, her restless movements shaking the bed. “They don’t like to talk about it. They don’t want me to know administrative things, they want me to focus on the colony’s burial practices.”

Coasts presses harder. Obsequies will see the truth whether she wants to or not. “Is that why? Or is it that when you watched Cities murder me—”

Obsequies reels, squeezes her eyes shut. “Don’t.”

“—in cold blood, when I’d not raised a hand against him, not even to defend myself—”

“Stop!”

“—they realized if they told you what else they had done to me, to my family, when we hadn’t raised a hand against them—”

“Shut up!”

“—they would lose you, because you have empathy and a conscience, and they don’t!”

“Get out!” Obsequies shouts, shoving to her feet and gesturing wildly toward the hallway.

Coasts freezes. She feels like gravity has shifted, like her stomach is being pulled into the deeps and the rest of her is too cold to thrash back to the surface.

Obsequies’s harsh breaths are loud in the sudden silence, her eyes a little too wide.

“You don’t mean that,” Coasts tells them both.

“I do. You crossed a line, Ocean.” Obsequies shakes her head and begins to pace in fits and starts, never traveling far in any direction, keeping the bed always between herself and Coasts. “You don’t say things like that about my parents, you have no right to say things like that about my parents. You can lie to me about you, but you don’t get to lie about my parents. They would never do those things.”

Coasts shakes her head. She’s seen her mother’s memory of the night Obsequies’s parents came. She remembers the scent of ozone filling the air, and Cities and Ships shooting light from the sky that burned through so many bodies; remembers how her family’s corpses turned to mist and vanished, and how her mother thought they’d all become cloud creatures until she remembered: Their children were not made from Sky.

“And we weren’t even talking about my parents,” Obsequies says. “We were talking about how you lied to me, and betrayed my trust, and used me.”

“I didn’t use you,” Coasts says. She wears the guilt of the other two accusations like a shroud around her heart and always has, anticipating and fearing the day Ocean reveals herself and Coasts loses the loved ones she’s deceived all her life. She thought Obsequies, who claimed to love her, and knows her the best, would see Coasts’s show of faith for what it is. “I love you. You saved my life, Obsequies. Now I’ve given it to you, along with everyone else I care about, because I trust you. Was I wrong to do that?” Was she wrong to disobey Ocean?

Obsequies shies from Coasts’s intensity, her sincerity. “I need you to sleep in your room tonight.”

Coasts’s face crumples.

Obsequies looks away.

“I can sleep on the floor, if you’d prefer—”

“No,” Obsequies says, “I don’t want to be where you are right now. I . . . I need time to think. Just, for tonight, I need you to leave.”

Coasts closes her eyes against the fear she knows they contain. Ships patrols the halls during summit. Her family has a curfew; anyone caught outside their rooms before dawn will be killed on sight. Perhaps Obsequies has forgotten the curfew, but perhaps . . . perhaps she’s ceased to care. “All right,” Coasts says. She feels defeated. Betrayed. And afraid of Obsequies, not just for herself—although she has enjoyed living long enough after forty years of continuous life that she desperately clings to that life and wants to keep it—but for her mother, for her mother’s lovers, for her siblings who don’t know she’s one of them. Now that Obsequies knows, perhaps soon Coasts will no longer have to hide from her family. And they will never be free of Cities, of Ships, of Homes. Sky will remain scattered, Land will lighten until he becomes “white” and joins the colonizer gods’ caste—assuming they let him—and Ocean, the real Ocean . . . Coasts will watch her mother be murdered every twenty years at summit, the moment she has a body again to be killed, and know it’s her fault.

Coasts is afraid to say anything further, but she was born to do what she must, no matter the challenge or personal cost, and she sits easy with this smaller fear even as she compounds her disobedience: She was born to die, yet clings to life. “It’s after curfew,” she says with practiced calm. “Will you check for Ships before I go?”

Obsequies does so with visible annoyance. “He’s not out there.”

For a moment, Coasts doesn’t know whether to believe her. Obsequies’s parents murder those who anger them, and Obsequies, the product of all three, has never been angry like this before. Heart in her throat, Coasts changes into a sand lizard’s body—less effort than maintaining a human shape; her beaches have such lizards—and scuttles out of the room and into the hall. The bedroom door closes behind her. Coasts matches her wings to the wall, tastes the air for Ships’s metal scent, and, heat vision yielding no threats in their wide sphere, crawls along the seams of the walls to the room Homes made for her.

It’s empty. Completely bare. Of course it is.

Coasts leaves it that way. She finds Dwellings’s room and becomes a worm, flattens herself and slithers under the door, becomes a bird. Dwellings is alone, lying awake on her bed, still in human shape. Coasts flies to her and nestles against her soft breasts, pushes the coastal depths of her name into Dwellings’s chest in greeting. Dwellings pushes her name back, a comforting fusion of Ocean and Land and Sky—so like her own true name: a construct of three domains, like herself, like Obsequies, the unity of three always settling her in ways she can’t explain, making her crave their company in ways she’s never felt with anyone else.

What happened? Dwellings asks through her fingers.

I trusted her, is all Coasts will let herself say. She was wrong to trust Obsequies. She will not make the same mistake with Dwellings. The All-Mother was right.

Dwellings coos sympathetically and strokes Coasts’s back. It’ll be okay, she says, and shifts into the same species. The two huddle together in the nest of Dwellings’s pillow for the rest of the night, preening each other’s feathers to soothe, and sharing thoughts, pain and hope, plans to keep Ocean safe for the rest of a summit without Obsequies’s protection.

• • • •

When Coasts enters the dining hall with Dwellings, Obsequies is sitting at the head table with her mother and second father, Ships, facing the entrance. Her eyes are sharp, accusatory.

Coasts feels pinned by that gaze, and unaccountably guilty. She has no choice but to keep her mother’s secret, but Obsequies doesn’t see it that way, and of course, she’s still angry at being lied to.

The All-Mother warned her: Gods like Cities and his family need control, to have and hoard knowledge, to be right, and their pride makes them monsters at the least imagined slight. That day on the beach, Coasts had insisted yet again that they could trust Obsequies. She’d been so sure their love would protect them, that Obsequies would understand. But when Obsequies saw them, felt the power of their two geographies flow towards her in greeting—All-Mother Ocean; secret daughter Coasts, who should not have answered—she’d left. Vanished until the summit, where she’d taken Coasts’s hand like she wanted to let it go. The look on Obsequies’s face now is not the anger, frustration, and sadness of last night. It is the betrayal from the beach. And Coasts finds herself frozen now, just as she was then, when Obsequies turns away.

Dwellings takes her hand and leads her to their customary table like she is feebleminded, the careful, respectful guidance with which they all treated Sky before their mind became so confused they missed a summit, and then the one twenty years after when they reformed, dying for the offense and reforming still more scattered only to miss their next summit and be killed by Ships again. Coasts is grateful for Dwellings’s help; she doesn’t think she’d have moved from the doorway otherwise, scattered by her own thoughts.

Dwellings seats her across from Land again and sits down on her left. The space on Coasts’s right is empty for the second meal in a row, and for the second meal in a row, Coasts isn’t hungry. Her stomach feels like a mess of eels have bedded there. Her family talks around her as much to catch up with each other as to give her space to drift while tethered in their safe harbor. When it becomes clear Obsequies will not leave her parents to join them, Deserts passes his plate across the table and takes the seat on Coasts’s right. Coasts’s acknowledging smile is distracted; her back is to the door, and Cities has not yet arrived.

Cities could walk up and put his hands on her neck, overwhelm her human brain with the frenetic crush of teeming cities, the corruption and cruelty of human mobs, leave her addled as Sky after the humans’ machines polluted the air, and she would not recover, her mind wouldn’t think to change her shape and escape, and he would snap her neck just as he’d always done before Obsequies wrapped her arms around Coasts forty years ago and told her they were lovers, only Ocean had not yet regained those memories.

Obsequies’s lie began their relationship.

Coasts’s lie, it seems, will end it.

“Give me your hand,” Land says, urgency disrupting the whirlpool of Coasts’s thoughts.

“What?” she asks, blinking back into the moment.

When she doesn’t comply quickly enough, Dwellings grabs her hand and thrusts it upon the table, curls her own around Coasts’s bare bicep as Land reaches across and takes her hand in both of his. She feels Deserts’s fingers interlock with her own, and he brings their joined hands onto the table as well. Still, Cities’s warm hands collaring the bend of her neck startle her.

“Good morning, Ocean,” he says. “I’m surprised my daughter’s not sitting with you again. You two are always thick as thieves at these summits.” His thumb strokes the back of her neck, and she feels the scuttling of crab feet freeze along her spine. Her muscles are rigid under her skin, from those under her cheeks to the arches of her feet. She is suddenly very conscious of her breath and the rumble of her heartbeat, conscious of the sweat beginning to cool her palms and the small of her back, conscious that she is afraid Cities will kill her in a way she never was before Obsequies.

She values her life now. Selfishly, she wants to keep it.

But if he scrambles her brain, she doesn’t want Dwellings, Land, and Deserts to be scrambled with her, the way they will be if they don’t let go. She shifts, wordlessly letting them know to release her, but they hold on more tightly. A guilty part of her is relieved. Cities wants Land and Deserts alive to help the human colony prosper, and to house the yearly summits; to go without their guidance for the next twenty years would be inconvenient for him at best, and would likely harm him and his cohort. With these two holding onto her, Cities is less likely to attack.

He bends over Coasts, tilts her face with his bare hand so she’ll be forced to look at him. “You haven’t upset her, have you?”

Coasts masks her fear and empties her mind of everything but the lapping of ocean waves on the sand. She forces her breath to mimic their calm rhythm and smiles indulgently at him. All-Mother Ocean is a benevolent queen, unflappable and ineffable, and that woman is she. Her body unlocks. “We have upset each other,” Coasts admits, and feels a dangerous thrill in his surprise, in the soft, indrawn breaths around her, so loud in the hush Cities’s presence has brought to their table. “But I’m told disagreements are normal in human marriages, and that there’s a special delight in making up with one’s lovers afterwards.”

Cities’s eyes narrow. He twists her head farther, until she can’t keep the wince from her face, then he smirks and returns his firm grip to her shoulders. “You’re not married,” he says. “Only a man and a woman can get married.”

“Ah, I misunderstood then,” Coasts says, willing to let it go if it gets him away from her. “Our relationships are different here.” She is sure he is bruising her. She is unsure what Obsequies will think when she sees the angry purple ring of his fingerprints so near to Coasts’s neck. She doesn’t plan to hide them by shifting forms—she wants Obsequies to see, and Coasts is learning hope is a painful, persistent thing.

“Maybe in the past,” Cities says with disgust, “but there are better ways of doing things. More natural ways.”

Coasts hums to acknowledge she heard him.

He opens his mouth to speak again, and then something over Coasts’s shoulder catches his eye. He smiles pleasantly, lets go of her, and steps away.

When Coasts turns back around—carefully, mindful of the strain in her neck from the angle at which Cities held her—she sees Obsequies glaring at Cities with the frustration she looks at Coasts with when she says Coasts is doing something that embarrasses her. The annoyance pinches her face into something young and toothless, cute enough that Coasts enjoys causing it, knows that if she is clever the expression will shift into laughter before long. The All-Mother showed Coasts a memory of hers where Coasts makes a similar face after a joke about Obsequies she thought in poor taste, and said it’s a face made only by the young and the grievously unwise. When you are old enough, the All-Mother said, you will know that you are vast, and the actions of others are their own, and that only you can make yourself feel small. Coasts’s mouth twists into a rueful grin. She and Obsequies are the youngest in this room next to Dwellings, and all three of them still make that face, still shake with the same incredulous laughter.

Dwellings jerks against her with a smothered snort of amusement. When Coasts follows her gaze, she knows Dwellings is seeing that face turned upon them both, and the way it can twist into joy.

Deserts sighs and pushes relief to all of them through Coasts’s skin before letting go of her; Cities has finally sat down at the head table, across from his daughter. Land answers Deserts’s relief, and Dwellings’s, and accepts Coasts’s gratefulness before releasing her hand. Dwellings merely squeezes her arm and leans closer. “Well, that was terrifying,” she mutters. The four of them titter, nerves finally finding an outlet. “Seriously, Ocean,” she says, “do I need to go yell at Obsequies? ’Cause this is ridiculous.”

“That’s the danger of taking up with someone so young,” Land says, like he’s unable to help himself. “She’s being dangerously irresponsible.”

Coasts’s answer is a frustrated sigh and shake of her head. “I can’t force her to act differently,” she says, when it’s clear Land awaits a response.

“Yes, well,” he says. “Her temper tantrum is going to get you killed, and then where will you be?”

Despairing amusement makes Coasts smile. “Right back where I started,” she says. She hopes that’s as far back as she’ll fall. If Obsequies tells her parents what she’s seen, they’ll all be far worse off than that.

• • • •

Obsequies sits to the side of the judges’ bench while her parents interrogate Coasts’s family. Coasts watches from the stair-step spectator benches Deserts carved into the opposite wall.

The colonists’ gods sit on cushioned chairs that pull away from their stone bench. The stands have no added comforts, just as there is no chair in the center of the room for the unlucky interviewee to sit upon during their hearing. Dwellings could make cushions, Deserts could make a chair or even a stool, but Homes has allowed neither, and what Homes wants, Cities decrees, and what Cities decrees, Ships enforces with violent, apathetic efficiency.

The questions are always the same: They demand an accounting of the spirit’s actions since last year’s summit. How did they help the human colonists, what could they have done to help more, etc.

Attending the hearings is mandatory. The settler gods want to see the native spirits’ reactions to the answers their family members give during their accountings, hoping the human faces gods like them are accustomed to reading will give away the family’s secrets. Sometimes, however, they send everyone but the unfortunate being questioned out of the room. Obsequies is usually sent out with them to ensure no one listens in—and, Coasts thinks, to ensure her parents’ cruelty to Coasts’s family is kept hidden from her. On those days, Homes calls everyone back, and when the family files back into the gallery, the one on trial is shocked and afraid.

The hearings go on from just after breakfast to dinner at sunset, with a short break for lunch in between. After dinner Obsequies’s parents abscond to discuss their plans and new assignments for the native spirits for the coming year.

The gods compliment the green of Land’s eyes, note with approval the lighter brown shade of his human skin. They tell him he is doing well, that they are proud of his efforts to help the colonists, that he is assimilating. Cities says, “If your skin gets lighter before next summit, come join us. We’ll have some new instructions for you.” The way Cities says it implies Land will be worthy of moving above the rest of the family in the humans’ strange caste system, but Coasts doesn’t trust Cities to actually raise Land’s status.

Dwellings’s hair remains braided into a crown around her head, and just as Coasts expected, Homes is displeased. Before her hearing proper even begins, and over Obsequies’s swiftly quelled protest, Homes makes Dwellings take it out right where she’s standing, by hand, and leave her hair unkempt, halfway between its usual tight curls and the looser waves the braid pressed them into, leaning unevenly towards her right shoulder. Coasts can tell Dwellings feels humiliated and angry. She feels that way for Dwellings, and the way Obsequies is shifting in her seat and won’t look at her mother suggests she does too. Coasts wonders how long it will be before Homes comes to summit with her hair in a braided crown.

Cities all but accuses Land, Dwellings, and Deserts of sleeping with Ocean, citing their behavior at breakfast, and Obsequies looks progressively more upset. Coasts is afraid she believes her father. And why wouldn’t she, when Cities alone is allowed to speak freely, to spin what lies he wants without fear of the truth contradicting him? Coasts’s family cannot definitively refute his insinuations without explaining that they held Ocean to protect her from Cities’s murderous intentions. To even suggest Cities is less than a good, fair, and benevolent king is to risk his wrath, and death. Respecting the human gods is paramount, and an ugly truth, no matter how well or kindly spoken, would be deemed disrespectful.

The gods save Ocean for last. They always do.

Before now, Coasts was never afraid. Before now, seeing Obsequies facing her from the side of the bench was a source of courage, the restful calm of Obsequies’s presence lending her strength like always. Now . . .

Now.

Will Obsequies reveal Ocean’s secret? Will she confess on Coasts’s behalf, gain the approval of her three parents for what will be the massacre of Coasts’s family? When the All-Mother regains enough of her power, she will flood Uloh-la to free them, and the human colony will drown, diminishing the Earth gods’ power and, if all the humans have migrated to the planet from their floating ship, perhaps permanently killing Cities and Homes—and Ships, if they can trap him on the ground. If Obsequies keeps their secret, Coasts plans to work with the All-Mother and All-Father to guide creatures on Uloh-la towards burial practices of some kind without destabilizing the natural order. She and Dwellings have already begun. But she has not spoken to Obsequies yet about any of this. She has denied any plan to swallow the humans’ habitat, however far it extends—but what if Obsequies suspects this as well? Can she blame Obsequies for wanting to save her own life, the lives of her parents? Perhaps Obsequies has already told them what happened on the beach. Their faces seem more forbidding this year—but that could just be Coasts’s nerves playing tricks on her, making her afraid when really, nothing has changed. Obsequies is not shooting her surreptitious smiles this year. Is it because she is still angry, or because she knows Coasts will soon face punishment for a crime against the human gods’ well-being?

Obsequies doesn’t ask questions during these hearings . . . but today, Homes nudges her.

When Obsequies’s mouth opens, Coasts knows whose side she’s on. She braces herself for the betrayal her mother warned of, for the truth that will end in Ocean’s death—both of them. All of them.

Because the All-Mother was right: Coasts’s trust in Obsequies has only proven the god untrustworthy. Coasts should have been satisfied with what they had, not longed for Obsequies to want her, see her, and not merely the reflection of her mother Coasts was born to present to the world. She should have accepted the guilt tainting her happiness. She should have dealt with the ache in her chest whenever Obsequies said she loved Ocean, whenever she called Coasts “Ocean” and Coasts had to answer back, whenever she asked Coasts about the deeps because she wanted to know all about Ocean and her domain, and Coasts had to draw on her mother’s memories instead of her own to come up with an answer.

That pain was far, far kinder than feeling afraid of a woman she loves—a woman who loved a lie and has rejected Coasts now that she knows the truth. If even Obsequies would rather have Ocean than Coasts, perhaps it is better that no one else knows. Coasts couldn’t bear learning, definitively, that her family feels the same.

Obsequies looks at her and stills.

It feels like they’re on the beach again, but now Coasts is seeing Obsequies for who she really is—and unlike Obsequies, Coasts cannot run. She must face this, stand in this thick, quiet tension, and make her peace with reality as it is. With Obsequies as she is.

Coasts hopes she is still strong enough not to fight or run, strong enough to let Cities put his hands on her neck without flinching, to let him take the death he wants. She has always been most helpful to her loved ones when she dies. Perhaps Obsequies is enough like her father that Coasts’s death will appease her. Coasts hopes Obsequies hasn’t figured out Coasts’s favorite beach is the one to send Ships to when he hunts down her mother.

She makes herself look Obsequies in the eyes. She tries to be proud, even angry—not afraid. Not betrayed.

Whatever Obsequies sees on Coasts’s face makes her looks away. She folds an arm across her chest, leans into the bench with her mouth behind a trembling fist, and looks, unseeing, at Coasts’s feet.

When Homes nudges her again, Obsequies shakes her head.

Coasts doesn’t know what to think.

Exasperation sharpens Homes’s features for a heartbeat before she relaxes into a disarming smile. “A woman’s greatest joy and greatest achievement is her children,” she tells Coasts. “My life changed so much when Cities and I had Obsequies.”

You and Cities and Ships, Coasts doesn’t say. When Obsequies bristles, as she always does when Ships is left out of her parentage, Coasts knows she is once again paying attention to the proceedings.

“For both of us,” Cities cuts in with a genial nod. “Spending more time with Obsequies this summit made us realize your husband Land has many children, but you have none.”

Obsequies purses her lips and doesn’t correct him. Coasts’s face heats. A swarm of tiny wings begins rollicking through her chest. Obsequies hasn’t told them.

Obsequies hasn’t told them.

When Coasts offers no response, Cities clears his throat and continues. “On Earth, our oceans had the marine equivalents of forests and deserts and mountains, just to name a few, and I’m sure you have similar geographical features and flora yourself. Why have you not made your own children, or ceded control of those places to your fellow spirits? Surely Forests and Deserts and Mountains, for example, would be better equipped to maintain order in those arenas. And if they took care of them, you could relax. One of the joys of parenting is having a kid around to help out! So why is it that there is more ocean on this planet than dry land, and Land has made children, but you haven’t? You’re certainly capable,” he says, waving at her human body in a way that feels crass, “so what’s stopping you?”

Coasts sees in her periphery that her family is as offended as she is. She knows what her mother would say, and the knowledge anchors her. In a voice hard as the pressure in the deeps, she tells Cities, “I have children.” She nods at the bench, at the angry brown eyes of the All-Mother’s children there. “With the exception of Land, these are my children.” She returns her flinty gaze to the bench of gods before her. “Just because I have not given pieces of myself to form most of them does not make them any less mine.” I am the All-Mother, she does not say, because if she did, it would come out scathing, and Coasts still does not want to die today.

“What do you mean ‘most’?” Homes asks. “I thought all of them were Land’s.”

Obsequies half turns to face her mother and softly corrects, “Mom, Ocean’s had children, she had—”

Homes quells Obsequies with a look, but Cities waves at her to continue.

Because the gods are looking at Obsequies, and she at them, they do not see Coasts’s momentary rigidity, mindfully relaxed almost as quickly as it overtook her.

“Ocean has children,” Obsequies tells Cities. She glances quickly at Coasts.

Coasts’s heart sinks. “Children” is plural. Obsequies hasn’t told her parents, but she’s about to.

Coasts casts her eyes to All-Mother Ocean’s children lining the benches: her siblings whom her misplaced trust has in fact shackled with death. Dwellings alone looks afraid when their eyes meet, and in that moment Coasts realizes Dwellings knows she is not Ocean, and fears for her.

The All-Mother told Coasts to trust no one, that Dwellings was young and would give them away, and Coasts had listened—but she’d been right about Dwellings after all. It strikes her, suddenly, that Dwellings likes her, and not just her performance of Ocean. Now Coasts wishes she’d said something last night. She should’ve suspected Dwellings knew when she asked nothing about what Coasts trusted Obsequies with, or their argument, but still seemed to know exactly what to say. Despite how badly things have gone with Obsequies, Coasts decides: When she re-forms in twenty years, be it as Coasts or Ocean, she will tell Dwellings her name—with or without the All-Mother’s permission.

As one, Coasts and Dwellings turn their eyes upon Obsequies.

Obsequies licks her lips as she glances between them, then tucks a cornsilk lock of hair that didn’t require moving behind her ear. She addresses the recrimination in Dwellings’s gaze when she says, “She had Dwellings.” She points at Dwellings with a quick jut of her chin. “She’s like me: three parents. Ocean, Land, and Sky made her together.”

Ships is to Cities’s right, so in glaring at Obsequies for calling Ships her parent, Cities and Homes do not see his quick grin, the way he winks at his daughter before impassivity wipes his expression.

Coasts feels a cool wash of relief cascade from her forehead down to the human knees she has to lock in place to remain standing. “Dwellings is our youngest,” she says watching Obsequies, willing her to prove as trustworthy as Coasts cautiously hopes she is. When Obsequies nods her agreement and turns back to Coasts, her arms are still crossed but her posture is relaxing, and her thin lips are softly curled in apology. Although it does not erase the past two days, in that moment Coasts loves her fiercely and without guilt.

Cities’s hum of acknowledgment cuts through Coasts’s burgeoning dream of surviving this summit. “Then you know,” he says, “how rewarding having a child of your own can be. So why no more children? Surely your, uh, older ones would like some more younger siblings. Dwellings is such a great girl, why wouldn’t they?”

Finally loosed from the worst of her anxiety, Coasts takes a moment to breathe and think. Obsequies’s parents don’t want Ocean to have children for her own benefit, her own happiness. What do they gain by Ocean splitting pieces of herself to gain helpers? When Ocean made Coasts, her sway over coastal seas diminished.

By giving Coasts part of her domain, Ocean weakened herself.

Giving away so much of his domain made Land more vulnerable to the terraforming, is why his human skin is turning “white” so much more rapidly than anyone else’s—with, perhaps, the exception of Sky, whose conquering began much earlier and has been much more thorough.

If Ocean makes more children from herself, then others—younger, less powerful, more malleable—will have power over parts of her domain. They’ll be able to steward the ocean and its creatures should something happen to Ocean, like her death by Obsequies’s fathers.

That’s what happened to Land, when they all thought the human gods needed his cooperation to sustain their colony too much to risk killing him.

Killing Land proved the gods can use his children to control his domain. It’s more difficult without his help, and the layers of ground and crust and mantle underneath the jungles and forests and plains shifted and shook his children’s topography, and Mountains could only divert the volcanic eruptions, was not rooted deep enough to stop them . . . but Land’s children managed, and the human colony continued shakily on.

Coasts is certain now of what Cities wants. He wants All-Mother Ocean to give away her power and dominion so that, should she choose to raise the oceans against his humans and himself, she’ll need her children’s cooperation to do it. He wants the All-Mother to create new beings, children he can use to blackmail her into doing his bidding because she’ll protect and die for them as surely as the children she shares with Land. He wants her to bring children into the world who will know only his heel upon their necks, who might be convinced his family’s farce is the natural order, convinced the knife of fear he keeps twisting around inside them is what they deserve.

Cities wants the All-Mother to create more children like Coasts: ones who know fear more intimately than love, who know death but not freedom—more children whose hopes extend only to respite and the oblivion of death because, in their secret hearts, they don’t believe a better future is coming.

The only things Coasts wants to tell Cities now will get her killed, so she tries to focus on the All-Mother’s serenity and hedges in lieu of agreeing to what he has not technically requested. “You are right,” she says when she is Ocean enough, “the joys of children are many.”

When she doesn’t continue, Cities claps his hands and stands. “Well,” he says, “that’s settled then. We’ll expect to see you next summit with a few little Oceans toddling after you. That’ll be your assignment for the year, no need to wait till tomorrow to tell you.” He ignores the muted sounds of protest and continues, “Thank you, everyone, for coming. Now that we’re done for the day, let’s all go eat and—”

“No!” The word thunders out of Coasts once her shock gives way to outrage. A cloud of anger settles over her, distorting the world so the red of the desert rock seems to bleed onto the bodies around her.

Everything in the room stops.

“No?” Cities says dangerously. “Are you not hungry?”

Beside him, Ships stands in implicit threat, hand shifting to grip a machine hanging from his belt.

At this, Obsequies stands too. Coasts wonders if she realizes her palms are out, that she is edging toward Coasts and facing the wrong direction to stand with her parents.

Homes, standing almost as quickly, grabs Obsequies’s wrist and glares at her, tugs her ineffectually towards her parents’ side of the bench.

Coasts’s family shifts restlessly in the gallery.

“You know well what I meant,” Coasts tells Cities, her intonation low and sharp as it cuts through the fraught silence. “I am not the Ocean you left behind. I am not one of your human women who bear children because they are made to. You cannot force a child into me, and I will not carve one out of myself just because you will it—not this year or any other.”

Cities’s face reddens, and for a moment his mouth opens and closes like those of Obsequies’s favorite fish. The violence that burns across his face is familiar. He wore it with relish during every summit he greeted her with death, his hands always so impatient to touch her skin and pummel her mind into paste. But he glances at the gallery and contains himself. When Cities looks back at her, he is a showman, a king willing to be magnanimous. “Ocean,” he says, shaking his head, “Ocean, Ocean, Ocean. I strongly advise you to rethink that statement.”

The look of her name—her mother’s name—hollowing Cities’s lips disgusts her. She is so angry her fists are shaking. The only time she has ever felt this angry was in her mother’s memory of the evening Cities and Ships first came down from the sky. The All-Mother saw their bodies and realized they were why Sky was enfeebled, oddly shaped, and defenseless; they had wrenched Uloh-la’s ecosystem devastatingly off kilter; they didn’t care who they hurt; and they wouldn’t leave unless she made them.

Coasts is not nearly as strong as her mother, never will be, and she doesn’t know exactly how Ships killed her mother or Land or any of the others he hunts down between summits, but she is angry enough that the fear of her own death feels less consequential than unleashing her rage, than making her position so brutally clear that Cities cannot feign misunderstanding.

What stops her is a different recognition: Wrath did not save her mother at the height of her power—but Coasts has allies here, and if she is clever, and if she is lucky, maybe she can save herself.

If she fails, or they catch her when she runs, she’ll be no worse off than before. But if she succeeds, she could have her dream, be Coasts for the next twenty years, perhaps even with the women she loves. She and her mother can relax. All she has to do is look like Ocean and think like Coasts a little longer.

Amusement at her own audacity helps clear enough rage to think. “My apologies for losing my temper,” Coasts tells the gathering. “That did not come out the way I meant it to. English is still so difficult. If you’ll give me a moment, I would like to rethink what I said.”

The only people who seem pleased by this are Obsequies’s parents. “Of course,” Cities tells her, “take a moment. We’ll wait.” But not too long, Coasts knows.

She raises her hand in the wait gesture Obsequies uses, breathes, and thinks, makes her anger fuel instead of master. She lets herself take strength in Dwellings and Obsequies’s obvious desires to intervene, and chooses a creature to change into—Sky’s cloud hive creatures mimic death best, but Ocean would choose something from her domain to flee, so one of the tiny, scurrying crabs whose hard shells bounce instead of break against the rocks will have to do. It is a creature fast enough that Cities will have trouble catching her long enough to touch and push her out of her mind, and if he holds her, she’ll be too small for Dwellings and Obsequies to reach past his fingers to touch and doom themselves to her fate.

As Coasts slips more fully into the impassive mask she wears when she is Ocean, she lowers her hand and smiles blandly at the human trinity. “I will make more children,” she says.

Her family grumbles, and she quells them with a gesture. When Cities’s face smooths into an indulgent grin and he opens his mouth to speak, Coasts cuts him off with relish and drops her smile.

“I would like to make more children,” she tells Cities, “but I cannot do so in good conscience until you and your husband and wife have permanently left Uloh-la and taken your humans with you.” Her gaze hardens. “I will not make more children for you to terrorize and control than I already have.”

Despite his anger, Cities seems . . . pleased . . . by her answer.

He motions to Coasts and tells Ships, “Shoot her.”

Ships raises his machine. The smell of ozone emanates from it, so familiar from Coasts’s memories from Ocean, and from Deserts the day Land died. It is the scent that precedes death by scorching light.

Obsequies yanks from her mother’s grasp.

Land screams at Ocean to run.

Dwellings lunges to her feet.

Deserts flings an arm out, and the gods’ bench explodes and wraps them in a blinding billow of dust.

Coasts locks eyes with Dwellings and lets go of her human shape, reaches for—

A beam of sizzling light shoots out of the dust cloud and bursts through her vanishing heart.

Her human body falls and doesn’t move.

Ocean dies wearing a smile as placid the sea on the horizon.

Coasts lives. Concealed within her scorched human husk, she is already a cloud.

• • • •

Obsequies reaches her dissipating body first. Her knees crash to the floor in a shock of air currents, and she cradles what’s left of Coasts’s human shell with vibrating hands. If Coasts had human eyes, she thinks Obsequies would look still, but her new body swims a spectrum of currents, and Coasts pulses in the eddies of Obsequies’s trembling. Her energy tastes of a grief so pure it can only belong to a god of death and mourning.

When the familiar essence of home—inclusive, wildly variant, dwellings across land and sea and sky—curls over Coasts’s chest, she shifts the last of her human skin into the thinnest of fogs. Dwellings’s grief is muddied by hope when Coasts spirals up her sleeve to hide against her covered skin. Coasts feels the alternating vibrations of speech, clings to the movement of Dwellings’s arm and chest as a wild, explosive burst skitters through the air, and the throb of concentrated power shifting to a drift of aimless energy reverberates like a shockwave through her senses.

They have murdered Land. Coasts aches with the need to sink into wisps of cold.

Dwellings proves her awareness of Coasts when she pushes the moments of Land’s death out through her skin. Coasts pulls herself into the gravity of her sudden heat of affection for her father. Knowledge of his impending death was etched into the furrow of his brow, and yet he stood, stalwart and noble, and claimed responsibility for Deserts’s dust cloud.

If Coasts had not fought her assignment, not escalated matters, Deserts wouldn’t have felt compelled to save her, and Land wouldn’t have needed to die to protect him. What must it be like to know your parent would die for you? Coasts doesn’t know. Perhaps Sky was willing when they helped make her, but All-Mother Ocean demands the opposite. Coasts wants to resent Ocean for this, for trapping her in the All-Mother’s shadow, but the familiar anger won’t come. She knows the anguish, now, of causing a loved one’s death. Dying is painful, but that pain is short, and for most of the decades it takes for one’s consciousness to reform into a being with thoughts and feelings, there is no self-awareness, no conception of passing time. Coasts is alive to feel both now, and the sluggishness of guilt slows her molecules, weighs her down.

Coasts has never felt so much like Ocean as she does now.

She has never before pitied her mother for sending her to die. For being the person left behind with only guilt and memories for company.

Dwellings spends the night with Obsequies, Deserts, and a few others in Obsequies’s room. They combine death rituals from Earth and Uloh-la to mourn Ocean and Land, and press affectionate memories and thoughts to the group through their chain of connected skin. No one speaks aloud, not every body is human, and the grief does not feel quite so heavy when it is shared.

Coasts is soothed by their shared mourning, as experienced through Dwellings’s skin. She thinks it would be more comforting if she could participate—but this, too, is practice for being Ocean when she is next expected at summit in twenty years.

Whenever Coasts dies, Ocean must suffer her grief alone. And each time Coasts dies, Ocean cannot soothe their family’s sorrows by telling them the real Ocean lives.

Coasts’s guilt at maintaining her silence as they mourn is heightened by their rule to share only memories of the All-Parents since their previous deaths. All the group’s warm remembrances of Ocean are of Coasts, not the All-Mother. They share memories of Coasts during the yearly summits, but also of visits with her in between. Obsequies shares teaching Coasts to build sandcastles, their hands buried in the damp, sucking sand, and of her anticipation when Coasts’s lips curled into a smirk, and Coasts closed her eyes and raised her hands and wielded the power of her domain, and sand all along the beach arced around them and formed a castle that rose high over their heads. Deserts’s long tongue lolls and he pushes a memory of sometime after, when Coasts showed him how to “build sandcastles,” and she and Deserts used their dominion over sand and heat to erect a sandcastle that became a glass house that Dwellings pushes the memory of climbing the walls and ceilings of with Coasts, two lizards renovating as they scuttled along.

Love suffuses every memory, even the sad ones. Without the weight of her guilt, Coasts thinks she would heat and expand with such joy and gratitude and affection for them all that Dwellings’s blouse would not be big enough to hide her. She knew her family liked her well enough, but never realized Dwellings is not the only one who loves and enjoys the Ocean who is Coasts, not just the memory of the All-Mother.

The last memory of the night comes from Obsequies—not a memory of hers, but one from the Obsequies of Earth that she hopes to give to Ocean. It is of the Great Flood that drives Cities’s desperate colonization, his hatred of Ocean, his fear of death that he returns to like a tongue worrying an empty cavity that recently housed a tooth.

Cities died in the flood, along with almost every life on Earth. He thinks only Ocean and Sky and a small boat of humans survived the purging of the earth—but he is wrong. There was a second boat: gods who’d lost their domains survived on the waves, protected by Ocean and Sky and Dwellings and Obsequies, whose powers grew to envelop the Earth.

Obsequies has shared this knowledge with no one else—will share it with no one else. Except Ocean, who she would have told had she not been cosseting her anger when the memory came to her shortly after Ocean landed.

Coasts is verklempt. Her siblings’ hope flutters the air.

In the privacy of Obsequies’s bathroom, Coasts wraps around Dwellings’s chest and thrums with gentle heat, and thanks, and excitement.

Where should I take you, when summit ends? Dwellings asks.

Coasts shows Dwellings the beach where she was born, the place she reports to her mother before and after every summit—the place Coasts showed Obsequies who she is. She wants both women she loves with her when she returns to the sea, assumed dead and triumphant, to show her mother what she’s done and what she’s learned.

• • • •

Coasts buzzes with anticipation, hides her restlessness in the billow of Dwellings’s clothes as Dwellings’s flying mounts carry her and Obsequies to the ocean. Coasts can taste when they arrive—she knows this air, these vibrations, feels the rightness of her coast.

Dwellings’s arm moves, and then her skin pulses not only with her heartbeat, but Obsequies’s. We can never speak of this, Dwellings presses. Not out loud. When Obsequies swears her agreement, Dwellings tells Coasts, We’re here. It’s safe to come out now.

Obsequies’s gasp jags through the air as Coasts winnows her thrumming currents down Dwellings’s arm, dances around the curl of their fingers and frantic iron grip, swirls into a warm caress of pale white cloud that wraps around their hands.

Obsequies pushes the power of her domain through her trembling hand, a tentative greeting laced through with repentance. Dwellings does the same a moment later, her greeting vibrant with relief and glee.

Coasts is frenetic with giddiness as she stretches and curls and solidifies into the human mask they know. She forms her hands cradling theirs and answers them with all she truly is: the wide expanse of coastal shores and waters, the long sprawl of woods and rock and sand rolling into land shared with tides and ocean visitors, until giving way to ever-deepening waters—and above them both, an unbroken sky bowing low to embrace the ocean-filled horizon.

There are hugs and tears, kisses and promises, laughter and plans for a better future together as a triad like their parents, but unbroken. And finally, when they have calmed themselves, but have not yet let go, Coasts turns to the ocean. She is sure her mother is watching, sure that she’s seen at last what Coasts told her is true.

Coasts ripples her name out over the waters in greeting and waits for an answer.

She watches. She waits.

And smiles when the head of a giant turtle crests the waves—and the Ocean thunders back.

©2019 by Kathleen Kayembe. | Art © 2019 by Julie Dillon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kathleen Kayembe is the Octavia E. Butler Scholar from Clarion’s class of 2016, with stories in Lightspeed, Nightmare, and several Best of the Year anthologies; an essay in the Hugo-nominated anthology Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler; and previous queer romance publications with Less Than Three Press under the name Kaseka Nvita. You can find her in St. Louis, where she periodically runs Amherst Writers and Artists writing workshops, and is rarely without a book and a fountain pen.

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

The Portal

Debbie Urbanski | 7769 words

The second portal to Mere had been two feet high and three feet across. Amber knew this because later she returned to that exact spot beside the woods and measured where the portal had been using her wooden school ruler. She did not know the size of the first portal because she had been much younger that first time—just six; she was seventeen now—and so she had overlooked many important details. In the back of her notebook she recorded the second portal’s measurements, and beside those numbers she drew a crude sketch of the surrounding landscape, indicating the portal’s precise former location: low to the ground and in the shade, as if it didn’t want to be noticed or had no need to be. It hadn’t appeared in the center of the woods, where the canopies of branches crowded closest together and there was a tinge of darkness even at noon, but at the spot where the trees ended and the athletic field began. When she turned, Amber could see the soccer nets set up for the afternoon game and, farther down the field, a pair of frisbees rising into the air. What had even drawn her to this spot? A glimmer like a piece of lost jewelry in the dead leaves. But the real source of the glimmer had been the light from that other place, Mere: a glimpse of its foreign sky. There had been no omens to suggest that, by going through the portal a second time, Amber would ruin the rest of her life: no bats circling the entrance nor enormous crows cawing ominously from nearby branches. Even if there had been bats and crows, I believe Amber would have gone anyway.

• • • •

The portal resembled a sheer curtain. To pass through it, she had to get down on her hands and knees. It was like crawling through a sheet of tepid water. On the other side, the portal was high up in the limbs of a large and peculiar tree, and Amber fell upon arrival, landing in a pile of swollen fruit that the branches had dropped. Because this was her second time, and she was older, she intended to pay better attention. Her first time through she had acted as if a portal to another world were a commonplace occurrence. All she had done was run barefoot once around the tree, ignoring the dirt path that led down the hill to the village. Then, as if expecting the portal to remain open indefinitely, she’d leapt back through and gone home. The following day she’d returned to the woods, a knapsack on her back, only to find nothing there, the portal having moved on, portals to other worlds being notoriously transient things. She’d spent the rest of that summer in tears.

This time Amber did not make the same mistake.

Above her in the tree, the second portal appeared to breathe, its borders pulsing in and out. Looking back through it, she recognized where she’d come from: the slight dimness of the woods and, beyond that, the hill where her classmates raced toward the parking lot. The kinds of images a person might toss into a drawer and forget.

She felt something like wings brushing her shoulders.

Then Zef put his hand on her arm, and she turned around.

• • • •

This place where Amber went is meant to be another world, in case this is still unclear to you. I do realize that, as an author, I’m not supposed to let my other worlds become utopias. At least, that was one successful writer’s advice to me when I told him I was working on this story. He explained that when portal worlds are utopias, it’s like a flashing neon sign that says, lazy writing. If we want such fantastic places to be believable (and who doesn’t want their writing to be believed?), they have to possess a substantial dark side.

“But what if I don’t want Mere to have a dark side?” I asked. “What if I’m trying to create an untroubled really pleasant world that might haunt someone for as long as they could remember it?”

“Then I guess you’re an amateur,” the successful writer said.

• • • •

“It was like you fell out of the sky,” Zef told Amber about her second arrival. Though it wasn’t the sky; it was the tree from which Amber had tumbled, twisting her ankle. Zef helped her up and led her to the village with a long-limbed stride, slowing his pace when she lagged behind and letting her lean on his arm when she needed.

The trail paralleled a dry creek studded with rose-colored boulders. On some of the boulders grew a layer of a pillowy moss that looked soft enough to sleep on. Now and again an animal peeked from the shadow under a rock, though it was hard to see much: An eye. A scale.

“What’s that?” Amber asked when the animals made a whistling sound in their throats, like a warning.

“Nothing,” Zef said dismissively, his tone an indication she should stop asking questions.

When they arrived at the village, Amber still limping, none of the men squatting in the shade beside the meeting house looked up. That morning there were only men present. Most of the women were down by the spring, washing, and would return later in the day. Zef entered the first house they came to—really more of a hut, with a dirt floor and a fire pit—and Amber met the family that was waiting for her: an old man with a tangled beard, a woman who cried, and a younger woman who talked to Amber teasingly, as if they had known each other all their lives. They had set a place for her at their modest table, and come evening her new mother taught her the village dances in the clearing beyond the row of cabins. Someone built a fire and others played instruments—a type of stringed gourd and a drum—while spectators stomped, and everybody sang high and penetrating notes.

It was while she practiced the dancing that Amber first noticed Zef watching her.

There was magic in Mere, but not as much as you might expect from a portal world. Such places are usually knee-deep in talking animals and spellbooks, but Mere’s inhabitants received at birth a set amount of magic that had to last them their entire lives. “Which is why I let you fall,” Zef explained. “I could have stopped you from falling, but that would have used up a lot of magic, and I don’t know how much I have.”

Amber now had such magic in her, too. It felt like a warm pressure rising in her chest, as if something large had been placed there and was trying to work its way out.

Zef made it clear that once your magic was gone, you had to go away from the village, but Amber was headstrong and foolish, and she did not bother to conserve. She dressed in the robes they all wore, cut from a coarse, sand-colored cloth, but Amber still stood out because she wasted her magic, using it to make Zef spin in wild circles. “Stop it,” he cried, laughing. When they walked through the barren fields, she made clumps of dirt rise from the ground and flutter around them like rust-colored birds.

• • • •

By this point you might have some practical questions about Mere: Just how large is this world exactly? Does it have an end or a border? And what is on the other side of that border? I’ll be honest, I still have no idea how big Mere is. Its inhabitants showed a definite lack of interest in geography. The only existing map, crude and incomplete, detailed a mountain range to the north, but beyond that, who knew? No one wished to travel that far. As for politics, economics, and history, the people of Mere didn’t care for those either. Such matters did not touch Amber’s life. Sometimes she closed her eyes for a long time—it could have been hours or days, time in Mere having a different nature—and had the sensation that she was being carried. That this world, or something, was holding her.

Once, she annoyed Zef by asking too many times about the end of a person’s magic.

“You always want to talk about endings,” Zef complained.

She pressed on anyway: Where were people who had used all their magic sent? What if they didn’t want to go away?

“There’s no reason to speak of it,” he said.

• • • •

“What would I have to look like for you to want me?” my husband asks. “What if I looked like a bird? You like birds. You’re always watching them at the feeder.”

My husband is persistent with his questions. He asks, “What if there were a pill that would make you want me. Would you be willing to take it?”

I have told my husband that he can leave me, but he doesn’t believe in divorce. Fine, an open marriage then, I suggest.

“What happened to you?” he asks.

These days all we do is ask questions the other person can’t answer.

He asks, “Why couldn’t you keep pretending?”

He asks, “What if you’re only pretending not to want me now?”

We have known each other more than half our lives—unless, that is, we are only pretending to know each other.

He asks, “Do you still like kissing me?”

Later, over tea, my husband returns to this concept of a pill. He’s become obsessed with the idea of a single miraculous cure that could heal our problems, as if we were characters in a fantasy story. Or would it be science fiction? I suppose it depends on how the pill is made. To complicate matters, we have two young children. My husband likes to remind me that the children of divorced parents have a higher incidence of drug abuse and often perform poorly in school.

During our compromised moments in bed—when we are not having sex but doing something else, the particulars of which I don’t want to describe right now—I have begun to wonder: What if a doorway opened up, a portal to take me out of this life? What if I were a character in a story in which that happened? Would I get up from the bed, leaving my naked husband and my children behind, and enter that other world? This is what I think about when my husband has made me remove my clothes and has taken my legs and wrapped them around his waist. Often I like the story better than I do my life. I guess that is why I’m a writer. My husband leans down and licks my neck, his tongue moving toward my ear. To be honest, it feels like a dog is licking me, and I don’t like dogs. But I would never tell him this.

When we first met in college, I saw my life as a stage upon which I tried to act like the other people I knew. It took me a long time to understand how to do it correctly. Right now I am in the process of ruining certain lives, in particular my husband’s and my own.

“What you’re saying is this pill would make me a different person,” I tell my husband. “So you want to know if I’ll become a different person for you?” It seems a fair question.

In college my husband was a sweet, often drunk kid who liked bands incapable of melody. He also liked frequent sex. We had sex after dinner every night if he wanted to, and again in the morning if I slept at his apartment. I’ve spent more time looking at his face than I have looking at my own.

“Why don’t you go ahead and cut my penis off with a knife?” he said recently in one of his darker moods. I told him maybe that would help our situation. I was joking, of course, but he didn’t find it funny. Honestly neither did I. My refusal to have sex must be difficult to understand if you belong, as my husband does, to the ninety-nine percent of the population for whom intercourse is a necessity, or at least a strong urge. There is a chance my husband may never have sex again because of me. I don’t want to ruin anybody’s life, especially not his.

My husband asks, “Why couldn’t you have figured this out before we had children?”

We are at a crossroads, the kind every couple approaches now and then. I picture some bucolic countryside where the well-graded paths branch out in numerous directions, and there are grazing cows and helpful signposts. My husband and I are standing there, and I am making it clear to him, through my body language and hand gestures, that he is free to go in any direction he chooses. It’s not like I have a leash attached to his collar. It’s not like I make him wear a collar. He can select any one of these paths. He can take me with him or not. If he does not take me with him, there are several appealing paths I can choose on my own. I don’t know where our children are in this picture. Will there be child-sized paths for them, leading to water parks? Or must we cut our children in half and each keep a part? In any case, I tell him to ignore the trails that lead to the cliffs and look instead at all the other paths rambling downhill to welcoming villages, fulfilling futures.

My husband asks, “Did you know before we had children, but you didn’t tell me, because you didn’t want to be alone?”

He acted like it was a turn-on at first. I remind him of this now—how, after I told him who I had become, he said, “Oh, my little asexual,” and pushed his pelvis against mine as we stood beside the dirty stove in the kitchen, as if not understanding the definition of the word. It was only after a few weeks that he grew frightened and withdrawn. Then came the period in which he wanted to discuss my condition whenever the kids were in bed and we were alone.

“Can we please talk about something else?” I asked.

He did not want to talk about something else. He wanted to know what he was supposed to do with me after a romantic dinner. “We come home and then . . . what? You go upstairs and read?”

“I like reading,” I told him.

“You like reading more than sex?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

Still, one’s needs must be met—or, at least, my husband’s needs must be. “I will go crazy if we don’t do anything in bed,” he confessed, dragging me through many embarrassing conversations about what I was or was not willing to do in my new identity. Somehow we stumbled upon certain accommodations, which I guess are what prevents him from going crazy. For my husband it remains an act of love, what he’s doing to me once a week while I think, This is what it must feel like to be molested.

“Look at me,” my husband demands. He likes me to at least look at him, but if he would allow me to turn my head to the bedroom wall, I might see the hopeful suggestion of a light from some faraway place. I am aware of the problems with such a plot: that the laws of physics say we can’t step through some imagined doorway into another world; that there probably are no other worlds. But for the moment please put aside your need for realism and let me believe in this.

• • • •

At first Amber found the landscape of Mere to be desolate: rocks, the occasional scraggly tree, a pond. But if you become happy in a place, as she did, it will become beautiful to you. And she grew to love the land surrounding the village, despite its severity and barrenness.

There must have been fertile spots in that world, though Amber did not see them. The food—roots, grains, sometimes beans—arrived at the village weekly, delivered on a cart by a woman who did not speak a word. New robes, when someone required them, were left outside the person’s door during the night. Honestly what else was there? In the lazy afternoons Amber lay on the bare ridges behind her home, arms spread out against the ground, and stared up at the stars, which were visible day and night. She wondered, Is my old life circling one of those stars? But she didn’t really care. The only time she ventured from the village was for a quest.

Here is how the quests worked: The village’s matron chose who among them must go. The chosen ones donned traveling cloaks, mounted their horses, and rode into the northern mountains. They rode high enough to reach the caves, from which they snatched the silver cup, or the bronze cup engraved with the sun, or whatever cup the matron wanted that time. The precious items were always cups, and they were always taken from the lair of a monster who was never there. Upon their return to the village, the travelers tossed the cup unceremoniously into the corner of the matron’s cabin, to be pulled out only for use at celebrations. But the cups were so enormous that whoever drank from them couldn’t help but look foolish, and so no one ever wanted to drink from them.

What I’m trying to say is that life in Mere wasn’t like it is in certain fantasy worlds, where such quests would be the whole point of one’s existence.

Sometimes it seemed the purpose of Amber’s life was to sit with her back against the tree and Zef’s head in her lap while she coaxed the pebbles around them to hum. As she stroked his hair, Zef changed into a being whose entire body was covered in eyes, most of them closed. A narrow vein pulsed across each eyelid. “Am I scaring you?” Zef asked. Every eye opened to look at her.

Eventually Amber did return to our world, because of an accident, a tragedy: whatever you want to call it. She hadn’t planned ever to come back, and upon her homecoming she fell apart and proceeded to waste years of her young-adult life crawling around the forest floor, crushing beetles out of frustration, not understanding that there were rules restricting how many times a portal could appear to someone: only twice. (Not everybody knows this.) Her mother finally convinced Amber to enroll at the local university, where she would discover anonymity and post-structuralism and a young man behind the library’s reference desk who never took his knit hat off, as if he were hiding something under it. When he smiled at her, Amber made herself smile back.

On their second date she asked this young man, whose name was David, “What do you see when you look at me?” She imagined opening herself up for him, lifting each flap, as she once had for Zef.

“You’re really, really sexy,” David said, tilting his head and squinting at her, as if he were looking directly into a bare light bulb. Unlike Amber, he wasn’t a student. He worked at the library and owned a house in need of paint in a decent part of town.

On their third date, Amber asked him to take his hat off, and it turned out he was hiding nothing. His hair was brown and ordinary.

What would he have done if he had known that she held the memory of another world inside her, one where he could never go?

Soon Amber learned how to kiss David as if she wanted to be kissing him. It is not a waste to know how to do this. Pretending can be a bridge to feeling a certain way about people in your life. At least, that was once someone’s advice to me.

On their eighth date, she told David about Mere. “Some people believe in God,” she said. “I believe in this place.”

David tried to play along at first. “Tell me more about this planet where you think you went,” he would say: Was the food tasty there? Who ruled over the land? How did they make babies? What was considered bad there? Did Amber ever do any of these bad things? David asked such questions while they lay naked in bed, her head upon his shoulder. Depending on which details she told him, he sometimes became aroused. “Tell me again about that creature,” he said. “That Zef.” He suggested they act out certain scenes. It was fun for a while.

Within a year they eloped to Barbados, where David wanted to visit as many of the island’s beaches as they could. It turned out every beach looked identical, like a postcard picture of a beach. Upon their return he insisted on carrying Amber into their bedroom. A box was waiting for her on her pillow. “You shouldn’t have,” she said. The box was white and cheap and not large. Amber opened it expecting the kind of lingerie David liked, sheer with black ruffles, but it was empty.

“What does it mean?” she asked.

“It means that now is the time to put away our childish things,” he replied. “That’s what the box is for.” He’d grown tired of hearing stories about a place in which he would never have even a small part. “You can’t go on believing in that stuff forever,” he said. “There is a lot you can believe in, but not that.”

They buried the box that evening, after she had supposedly placed in it all she remembered about Mere, including the time Zef had transformed into a being with wings, the tip of one rhythmically grazing her right shoulder. David made a point of pretending to put a lot of his childish dreams in the box, too, ones that were clearly not going to come true. (He said he was sorry, but he could not tell her what they were.) He pretended to crumple up his nonspecific hopes and stuff them into the box. Afterward he opened a bottle of champagne, and they drank it on the deck overlooking the garden, where they had buried the box. “To our future,” he said, clinking his glass against hers. He had even made a tombstone out of cardboard: HERE LIE ALL THE UNNECESSARY PARTS OF AMBER + DAVID. R.I.P. The following morning Amber tiptoed down the stairs from the deck and tore apart the tombstone, then blamed it on the black squirrels.

“If you have to believe in something, why not believe in God?” David suggested.

• • • •

Amber did not finish her degree.

They had a child together, a boy, Josh, who was pale and always hungry. When Josh was three and beginning to fill entire notebooks with the letter J, Amber wandered off into the woods north of town with the intent of either finding her way back to Mere or becoming permanently lost. The search party found her two days later, curled on the forest floor, naked. David took Amber’s attempted desertion personally—and it was, in fact, personal. The couple might have separated shortly after that had it not been for a tiny orange pill called Horiza, which Amber was prescribed to take once a day, preferably in the morning with a healthy, grain-free breakfast.

• • • •

From the moment Horiza received FDA approval, pharmacists could barely keep it in stock. The pill was intended to make a person want whatever was in front of him or her. The side effects—possible insomnia and weight gain—seemed a fair trade-off for an assurance of contentment. David’s brother was in pharmaceutical sales and could score samples of the drug even when the supply was tight. One day David brought home a bag of the samples and spread them across the kitchen counter, each pill individually wrapped in bright orange packaging.

“All it does is make you happy,” David said. “That stuff in the past, that stuff you think you remember—it’s not going to matter anymore. You know what’s going to matter? I’m going to matter. Your family is going to matter.” To prove to her Horiza was harmless, he swallowed one of the pills, and for several hours afterward the creases between his eyebrows faded, and he touched her more frequently. In fact, he touched her too much.

At David’s insistence, Amber began taking a pill every morning. Sometimes it made her happy, as promised. Other times, particularly when that day’s dose was wearing off, she felt frightened, as if she were forgetting something important. What was it? She remembered only fragments—the tree, falling, Zef—and then her present life rose up, shimmying its enormous hips and blocking everything else from view.

They had another child, a girl, Mia.

My God, you might be asking at this point, shouldn’t they give up already and call it quits? But I think there are a lot of ways for two people to love each other. We might not even be able to identify all of them.

• • • •

I ask my husband that if there were such a thing as a magic pill, why shouldn’t he be the one to take it? “Maybe the problem is you,” I say, which is probably unkind. We have begun to fast forward the sex scenes in movies, because they create an insufferable tension between us, and I have to let go of my husband’s hand if I am holding it.

Actually we did watch one sex scene, in a movie that was unapologetically violent. I don’t remember the title, but the plot concerned a man who is tortured overseas and then comes home to his wife. All his wife wants to do is gently caress his scars. Instead he grabs her and throws her onto their bed and fucks her in a brutal way, after which he rolls off and falls asleep. The film wasn’t even halfway over when my husband stomped upstairs to bed. For the rest of the movie, the only way the man will have sex with his wife is to masturbate while looking at her naked body, during which time she has to lie completely still. The camera work during such scenes is artful, beginning with a wide-angle shot from the far side of the room, so the husband and wife appear happy for all you can see. Then the camera begins creeping in, and you realize what is really going on.

• • • •

Because we need to try something, we agree to an open marriage for a month. My husband wastes no time. “I’m all set for Tuesday,” he announces. Tomorrow is Tuesday. His voice is forcefully neutral, as if he has set up an appointment with the dentist.

On Tuesday night, he puts on a decidedly unfashionable T-shirt with LOST IN SPACE spelled out in bubble letters on the front. Before he walks out the door, he wetly kisses the bottom of my ear and tells me he loves me. I don’t know how one goes about setting up such appointments for sex, and I do not ask. I tuck the children into bed, kiss my daughter’s cheek, and blow my son a kiss, which he does not acknowledge, as he no longer tolerates kisses or hugs. Then I climb into bed myself, exhausted. I don’t know what time my husband returns because I am asleep, but he is there beside me the next morning. After he showers, which I insist upon so I can’t smell whoever she was, he wishes to talk about his escapades. I tell him no; those are his, only his.

After two weeks of this he believes he has fallen in love.

“But you pay her,” I point out.

Or is love as simple as finding someone who can pretend she wants to kiss you back? In which case I am out of luck.

He asks, “Are you okay with all this?” He does not sound okay with it himself.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I say, and he smashes his fist against the wall repeatedly until he wakes the children.

Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought to love multiple people at the same time.

The first time I wrote this story, I wasn’t a part of it all. The reader got to pretend the portal and Mere were real. My husband thinks that early draft was better.

• • • •

“Amber, are you taking your pills?” David asked.

“Are you accusing me of not taking my pills?” she replied.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“Why would you accuse me of something like that?”

“Because of how you’re acting.”

“Okay, tell me how I’m acting.”

“Like you want to step on us.” David gave an exaggerated frown and stomped clownishly around the room.

“I don’t want to step on you. I don’t want to step on anybody. That’s ridiculous. What if this is just who I am?”

“It’s not. I think I know who you are.”

The following morning, before entering the kitchen to toast half a loaf of wheat bread for her family’s breakfast, Amber flushed the orange pill down the toilet, just as she had done each morning for the previous three weeks. Josh ate his toast with butter; David, with butter and honey; Mia, with grape jelly, only this morning the globs of jelly on her toast made Mia cry.

“You liked toast with jelly yesterday,” Amber said.

“I do not like it at all,” Mia wailed.

Amber cooked her daughter a sunny-side-up egg. This, too, made Mia cry because she could not bear to see the yolk.

“She’s hurting my ears, Mom,” Josh complained.

Amber made another egg, scrambled this time, and Mia gobbled it up. “That was delicious, Mommy,” she said, petting Amber’s leg. By then it was a quarter to eight, which meant everyone would be late. When Amber handed out the lunches, Mia pledged she would refuse to eat even a bite if there was a vegetable inside. (There was.) Instead of kissing Amber goodbye, David bit the edge of her ear, a technique he must have read about in his forums. “I love you,” he whispered. Looking over David’s shoulder into the kitchen, Amber thought she saw a shadow move in the corner, a suggestion of an opening in the air itself.

Where are you?

• • • •

There are many types of mothers in the world. One type of mother does not leave her family, no matter what. Another type does. Another type wants to leave but doesn’t; she only thinks about leaving. Another type of mother tries unsuccessfully to leave.

That time Amber walked into the woods when Josh was three, she had not brought a backpack or a jacket or a map or a bottle of water or a bag of almonds. She drove along one of the logging roads until she ran out of gas, and then she left her car in the middle of the road, keys in the ignition, door open, and began walking. Later David, unable to talk about it, would insist that none of this had happened, or it had happened to another woman, perhaps a character in a novel.

At first it was easy to walk in the woods; then it became more difficult. Amber had intentionally worn impractical shoes: strappy gold sandals. Each time the undergrowth in front of her grew too thick, she changed directions. At this point Amber still thought, wrongly, that portals must appear when people really needed them. Black thorns left long scrapes on her arms. Her shirt snagged on one and tore, so she took it off. She assumed the portal would be close to the ground, as it had been that second time, so that was where she looked, crouching to peer beneath bushes and running her hands under rock ledges. Come out, she pleaded. Please come out.

• • • •

It wasn’t just Zef. Everybody in Mere could change their form, Amber included, though she learned this gradually, as changing one’s form in front of someone was considered an intimacy. How exactly it happened remained a mystery to her. All she knew was that when she and Zef were in a private place, such as beside the dry creek where the scrub grew, he changed into whatever she wanted him to be, though it was still his eyes looking out of whatever form he took. The sight of what she wanted sometimes surprised or even shocked Amber. How could anyone admit to themselves that they wanted this?

She did not always recognize the shapes she took either. She would glance down to see an animal form, or parts of her gone or hanging open. There was the time she became a furry creature, like an otter, while Zef remained who he was. (She looked back upon that particular memory with equal parts revulsion and longing.) Or the time Zef became her, and she remained herself. Such transformations required the use of one’s limited supply of magic, but Amber and Zef couldn’t help themselves. When she became a pool of water, Zef laughed, scooped her up, and took a sip.

No other world glimmered for her when she was in Mere. If she turned her head, she did not get the sense that there was a better life just out of reach.

Because people barely aged in that world, it was difficult to estimate the passing of years except by one’s dwindling magic, which was not discussed. There were not even seasons. There were only the days she spent with Zef in the village, and then the times when she and Zef went on a quest.

It was on their return from one such quest, a trip to the northern mountains to obtain yet another cup (a pewter one this time), that Amber found herself beside a grove of trees—unusual, as this landscape didn’t accommodate such growth. There was something familiar about these woods, an underlying suggestion of meaning.

“I have a bad feeling about this place,” Zef said.

“You have a bad feeling about every place that’s not our village,” Amber laughed; in that world, everything she said came out as laughter. Zef grabbed her arm but was unable—or unwilling—to hold on to her.

She kept laughing as she ran off toward the trees. “Try and catch me,” she shouted over her shoulder. The moment she entered the shade, taking her first heavy step back into this world, part of her cloak got caught on the rough edge of the portal and ripped. She heard the fabric tear, but by the time she turned around to go back, it was too late. There was no portal behind her, only a clearing in the woods beside her high school, where the birds sang out of boredom.

• • • •

Our couples therapist (my husband’s idea) believes my asexuality is a way for me to exert control over the relationship.

“I don’t think I’m making this up,” I tell her.

“My wife is a writer,” my husband says. “She makes things up for a living. In fact, she likes to write about other worlds.” He makes a funny motion with his hand that must signify other worlds to him.

Our therapist has made it clear that she does not wish to talk about our children, or our childhoods, or our open marriage. “Those are secondary issues here,” she says. The primary issue is fixing me. Her office is cramped, with browning ferns and dim lighting. She has placed boxes of tissues upon every available surface. “You are not unfixable,” she insists. It’s obvious which one of us she’s talking to.

It turns out there is a new pill on the market called Horiza that could be of use to us. This pill makes people want what is right in front of them. I admit to our therapist that I would prefer to stumble off into the woods and find a portal that would take me somewhere far away.

“A place your husband wouldn’t be?” our therapist asks.

“Not everything is about him,” I tell her.

“If what you’re doing is waiting for some new world to open up for you, then I have some bad news,” our therapist says. “That isn’t going to happen.” Most people, she reminds me, outgrow fantasies of other worlds by early adulthood.

I ask why my husband doesn’t take the pills; then he could want me the way I am. But I am outnumbered. The two of them agree that there is something broken about an adult who would be willing to abandon her young children for another world if she had the chance.

“I’m concerned for you,” says our therapist, offering me a fresh box of tissues. “I’m afraid you might harm yourself or others.” She lays out my options: I can abandon all that’s familiar to me, including my son and my daughter, and wander off in search of adventure, in which case I will only find out what everyone else already knows: that there are no portals, and this world is all we get.

Or I can take Horiza.

Even if I could find a portal, I realize, there is the chance I wouldn’t want the other world either. No matter what Zef transformed into—Fish! Woman! Lion! Unthinkables!—my body might remain unresponsive, in which case Zef would probably grow tired of me and ask me to please go away. That is a story which depresses me too much, so I am not going to tell it.

“Maybe you like being special,” our therapist suggests. “The reason Horiza scares you is that it would force you to be like everybody else.”

There is also the chance that I am making Horiza up, that I am confusing fiction with reality, though I hope I’m not, because that would leave me very few options.

• • • •

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Amber said.

David forced a chuckle. The children were somewhere else—probably outside in the yard. “Where do you want to go?” he asked. “Wait, I have an idea. How about I take you to Indiana!”

This was an old and unfunny joke between them, as Indiana, an hour’s drive east, marked the nearest state border. They used to laugh about how everything would be so different there.

They didn’t go to Indiana. Instead, David suggested increasing her dosage.

“Is it such a terrible thing to want me?” he asked. “What would you be giving up if you wanted me?”

• • • •

There are all sorts of ways to leave your family. Women apparently do it all the time. When I read about one, I add her name to a list I keep in the back of my notebook, and beside each name I write down how the woman left. You probably have not heard of most of these women: Tiffany Tehan or Stacey Hessler, for example. I don’t think they stopped loving their families. You don’t have to be present to keep loving somebody. You don’t even have to be alive; some mothers who leave sit in lukewarm bubble baths and slit their wrists. I have written down their names, too. Other women have walked off into the woods, some not even wearing clothing. None of them planned to turn around. I certainly didn’t. I wonder if we wouldn’t all have been better off becoming different people—or, at least, pretending to.

I say to my husband, “What if this isn’t my actual life? What if my real life is going on in some other place, and I’m not even there to see it?”

My husband tries to laugh.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” I say. The kids aren’t in the room with us. I don’t know where they are.

He says, “Where do you want to go? Indiana? I bet things will be really different there. Sure, we can all go to Indiana.” It is an old and unfunny joke between us. We actually drove to Indiana once, passing by all the smoldering mills to reach the dunes on Lake Michigan. You’d think we would go more often, because it’s only an hour’s drive. The day was windy and overcast with low-hanging clouds. The children cried when the wind blew sand onto their sandwiches. They wanted to ride a jet ski, but there was nowhere to rent one, so they scurried up and down the dunes, ignoring the KEEP OFF signs. We were probably causing some type of irreversible erosion.

There are other ways to leave one’s life for a time. Several of these ways Amber and I both have tried. I will confess that some of them have been uncomfortable. Others have been pleasurable, or painful, or both. During such times, the two of us certainly went elsewhere. But not to Mere.

• • • •

It was said that Horiza not only blocked old, impractical longings; it could permanently erase memories if the dosage was high enough. This time the dosage would be high enough.

Before she began to take the pills again, Amber went out into the yard after dinner and lay in the hammock with the intention of letting herself remember Mere for perhaps the last time. Mia and Josh were elsewhere in the yard. She could hear them yelping as they took turns throwing a stick.

Amber closed her eyes. The wind in her hair felt like a hand touching it. She remembered falling from the tree and Zef standing over her, gazing upon her as if he had known her all her life. The memory was so clear, it was as if she were there. Laughing, he picked her up and held her in his arms, which smelled like pond water and dirt. He held her roughly. It felt as if an animal were holding her, or as if she were an animal being held, but she was not afraid.

The part of the other world where they stood was full of afternoon sunlight and yellow trees. In the tree from which she’d fallen, a black bird shook its wings open and began to sing with warbling sorrow, as if it knew something they didn’t. Zef scared the bird off with a well-aimed rock.

“I don’t know why they have to sing like that,” he said.

Zef told Amber he had seen her that afternoon many years before, when she’d been six and had run around the tree only once, mistaking the world for empty. He had been waiting for her ever since. Practically every day he had walked to the tree to see if he could find her. And now here she was. (“Couldn’t you have come to get me?” she would later ask. He wouldn’t answer.) He took her hand and led her down the path to the village, and there her life began—or, rather, it continued on as if it always had been waiting for her.

Amber rose from the hammock and went inside. The next morning, with David anxiously watching, she took the larger pill.

David said, “You look happy. Are you happy? I think you’re happy.”

• • • •

“What’s it like?” my husband asks.

We are in bed, my head resting upon his comforting shoulder, my hand rubbing his belly, which has grown hairier over the years. I began taking Horiza last week: one pill in the morning, one in the evening. Before Horiza, I wrote every day at dawn, but now the half-finished stories I was working on seem foreign to me and somehow unnecessary. Perhaps I no longer have any use for them. In their beds, our children are blissfully asleep, and our own bedroom is filled with a warm and attentive darkness.

I assume, when my husband asks what it’s like, that he wants to know how sex feels now. The sex feels like someone is pushing me underwater, albeit tenderly. But perhaps they will improve the medicine later so that it doesn’t feel like I’m drowning. I’ll bet I get used to being on the pills. So what if I’m not the person I actually am, whoever that is. At least I’m the person someone wants me to be.

“Give it time,” our therapist suggested. “A lifetime of habits cannot reverse themselves overnight.” She also said, “Consider this a triumph for your relationship. And have fun!”

I do not want to tell my husband about being forced underwater—that does not sound like “fun”—so I respond as if he is asking how it feels to be on Horiza in general. I say, “You know how it is when you wake up from a dream, and you can’t remember it, and you really wish you could?”

“Let’s talk about something real,” he says.

My husband has said he plans on ending his relationship with the other woman he loves. That way we will both sacrifice something. Petting my hair, he asks if I would like a cup of herbal tea or maybe a midnight snack. It is not the worst thing in the world to be asked such a question. Yes, I am certain there are worse things in the world.

My husband wonders if there is some leftover roast beef in the fridge, and I tell him I believe there is. It’s our lucky day then, he says, proposing a sandwich with aged cheddar and a slice of tomato. Such a sandwich sounds like exactly what I want, I tell him.

“You look happy,” he says, his fingers lingering on my neck. “Are you happy?”

He slips on his plaid flannel robe and doesn’t bother to tie the belt as he leaves the room. It’s winter. All night the snow has been falling heavily, just as the weatherman predicted. It’s probably lovely outside, fresh snow piling upon the bare branches, blowing across the sidewalk, erasing the borders between the road and the driveway, the garden and the lawn. But I don’t feel like looking out the window. A car passes by our house. The parallel paths left by its tires will soon be covered as well. Neighbors have been complaining that this winter is never-ending.

©2016 by Debbie Urbanski. Originally published in The Sun. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Debbie Urbanski’s stories have appeared in the Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, The Sun, F&SF, Nature, Terraform, Strange Horizons, and The Kenyon Review. She lives in Syracuse, NY with her husband, two kids, and several fountain pens. You can find her at @debbieurbanski or debbieurbanski.com.

The Convexity of Our Youth

Kurt Fawver | 7437 words

A Disclaimer

The children of Burke’s Point Elementary can’t be blamed. When the orange ball rolled onto their playground, they couldn’t have known what it was. We didn’t discuss the orange ball with them, didn’t explain to them its importance, its danger. We didn’t even tell them it existed, though some of them had undoubtedly heard vague rumors about it from sadistic older siblings and precocious cousins with little parental supervision. We wanted to turn a blind eye to the orange ball, hoping that what we didn’t acknowledge couldn’t touch our lives. If we didn’t speak of it then surely it would have no reason to seek us out; it would roll past our town and work its horrors somewhere else, somewhere far away. Though it might bounce against the concavities of our skulls, tinting every thought orange, orange, orange, we feared to let its name roll off our tongues. We believed in the prophylactic power of ignorance, that if we provided no magnetic pole of recognition, the ball’s compass would never point in our direction. So the children of Burke’s Point Elementary—our children—couldn’t have guessed that when the orange ball spun its way onto their blacktop and they began kicking it back and forth, shoes slapping rubber, rubber throwing up pebbles and dust, laughter spilling over the schoolyard as the ball seemed to zig and zag of its own volition, it would, for all intents and purposes, kill them all.

A Background

Our town is, in many ways, like any other town. Imagine parallel lines of artisan boutiques running beside a brick-laden boulevard that sprawls outward, onto a few dozen crosshatched streets along which stand sentinel rows of townhomes and condos. Beyond the townhomes and condos, imagine that the streets gain curvature and turn to winding roads that slide by cozy one-story, two-story, and three-story homes replete with manicured yards and picket fences and two-car garages. And on the fringes of it all, where the roads meet the infinite progress and regress of the interstate highway, imagine the dense modern fortifications of commerce—the strip malls and chain stores and supermarkets and fast food parlors and gas stations and motels and casual family eateries all vying for patronage. Our town is, in this, like any other town: the fruition of some sort of dream and the image of some sort of beauty, though neither may be ours.

Just as is the case with our parents and grandparents, most of us have lived here our entire lives, with, perhaps, a brief four-year foray to a college or a university within driving distance during our early adulthood. Occasionally we venture outward, to other towns, other cities, other regions of the world where people speak with intonations different from ours and wear clothes designed more for function than for form, but, though we may be charmed or fascinated or surprised by those other places, we are, inevitably, neither drawn away from our town for long nor tempted to remain elsewhere. We are tethered to our town by a dull, soothing comfort and, with the lengths of our tethers, have woven complex webs of existence to further secure ourselves here.

Life is, you might say, easy for us. We have no great wealth but also no real poverty, no overwhelming love for our neighbors but also no outstanding hatreds. We are not a people who leave our doors unlocked throughout the night, but neither are we a people who suffer from any crimes worse than petty theft and vandalism. We have achieved a level of contentment and stasis in which our primary worry is losing our contentment and stasis. Thus it is that everything we do, every decision we make, every social, cultural, fiscal, philosophical, theological, and political step we take as adults, as citizens, and as parents is designed to uphold the most sacrosanct of our shared values: security.

A Symptom

After the orange ball had been spotted on the elementary school playground by an astute second-grade teacher, the sixteen boys and girls involved with its play were rushed to a secure hospital facility where, mere hours later, the symptoms of contact began to manifest. We knew what to expect as we huddled by the side of our children’s beds. First came the uncontrollable leg spasms that, had the children been upright, would have sent them sprinting into the blustery night at ten or fifteen or however many miles per hour their muscles and ligaments could carry them before completely shearing away from bone or snapping apart. Impervious to muscle relaxants, the spasms lasted for several grueling hours during which our children alternately laughed and cried, sang unfamiliar songs and shouted words we’d never taught them. As they sweated through their bedsheets, we sweated through our clothes, waiting for a resolution that we’d fooled ourselves into believing might arrive.

Once the spasms had run their full course, metabolic exhaustion set in and extreme cramping stole over our children’s tender bodies from head to toe. Despite the best efforts of doctors and nurses to rehydrate our children and replenish their depleted electrolytes, chorales of anguish blared from the isolation ward, driving us to near madness with their fiery accusation of our universal impotence. If hell has an anthem, truly we believe it must be the ululation of one’s children in hysterical, unending pain.

As our babies screamed and thrashed through a hurricane of tears, we wrung our hands and tore at our hair and prayed to our myriad deities for succor and mercy. We discovered, however, that succor and mercy were in short supply, even for us, even for our town, which we had always assumed must exist as a tiny sparkle in the corner of our gods’ eyes. Indeed, only when the doctors pumped the children full of opiate pain killers—so many, in fact, that we feared coma must be near—did the cries subside and our beloved quietus regain temporary control of our lives. Then, only then, with our children in deep chemical slumber, did we again feel safe.

Of course, this was only the first symptom of the ball’s infection and, as we understood it, the least severe. There would be two more symptoms yet to come, two more symptoms for which none of us could be properly prepared, unimaginable as they were.

Our peace was, in the end, a fragile lie.

A Realization

We initially learned of the orange ball seven years ago. Rumors of the ball’s existence had been spreading across the internet for months prior to our localized revelation, but this spotty information was relegated to fringe news sites, shared social media posts, and obscure discussion forums—none of which registered on our tightly focused radar. We didn’t read to the margins of our world; we didn’t feel that we needed to. The margins were for those people too unmotivated or too deviant to find their way to a more stable center. Surely, we believed, our town and our lives were near the center of whatever vast page reality had been impressed upon. Thirty minutes curled up with the local nightly news on television, an occasional foray across the main page of a cable news network’s website, a glance at a nationally distributed magazine: these were the energies we deemed it necessary to expend in order to remain informed citizens of greater, polished society. So while the ball rolled on and families in other communities—dust-ridden rural locales and bullet-populated inner city neighborhoods, mostly—dealt with its aftermath and expressed their despondency, their fear, and their anger through peripheral channels, we went about our days in relative peace and naiveté.

It wasn’t until the ball passed through a town much like ours, a town sealed tight in its onion-layers of self-satisfaction and supposed normalcy, a town with the anywhere name of “Vernonville,” that the mainstream media followed its bounce. In Vernonville, cameras captured grim men in pressed, button-down shirts and sensible khaki pants, quavering women with tasteful makeup in smart, monochrome wrap dresses, and tearful children in all manner of character-emblazoned shirts, pants, and shoes. These were a safe people, an ordinary people, a people with enough time and money and respect for the prescribed social order to arrive for interviews entirely photogenic, even in the face of crisis. We worried over the people of Vernonville, because, in truth, what the cameras in that quaint suburban town captured was nothing less than ourselves, doubled at another point in space.

To the media, the people of Vernonville spoke of an inexplicable childhood illness run rampant in their town, of an orange ball with which the stricken youths had played. They spoke of their outrage, their sadness, their memories, their lack of understanding. They asked for prayers and protection and they insisted that the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization investigate the disease, for, surely, disease it had to be that their children had contracted. To pacify the people of Vernonville, the CDC and WHO did, indeed, finally launch an investigation, but, ultimately, neither found evidence of a pathogen or a wicked foreign invader endlessly multiplying in the blood of the town’s children. The lone key fact the doctors and scientists at the CDC and WHO discovered—or what they knew all along, more likely—was that a series of past incidents in other locations mirrored the situation in Vernonville. All the rural nowheres and the urban centers that had cried out for the selfsame recognition and investigation that Vernonville received were at last acknowledged, if only as fragments of a greater pattern and decimals in a ledger.

The situation in Vernonville, combined with the newly revealed information that the incident was not isolated and that the orange ball had spread a sickness to children elsewhere, sent us into a low-boiling panic. We began to discuss the ball at work, at PTA meetings, at the gym, in our bedrooms well after midnight—anywhere that our children wouldn’t hear. We drove by our homes and our children’s schools during our lunch breaks, just to spot check for orange balls that might be lolling about outside. We threw into the garbage any orange balls that our children or our pets possessed and bought them shiny new blue or green ones for their enjoyment. Even the recreational basketball league at our local YMCA switched from traditional orange and black balls to red, white, and blue Team USA balls.

As days passed, our fear did not abate, but, instead, settled into our routines. We formed a community watch group to buy all the orange balls in the all the stores in town and burn them in pre-selected dumpsters; we gathered up orange traffic cones and hurled them into gutters wherever we passed them; if we were sports fans, we stopped following the NBA and NCAA basketball altogether. We even purchased oranges at the grocery store with less frequency. And yet, despite all our activism, we spoke of the ball less and less, almost as if we didn’t give it second thought, almost as if it was something we’d never heard of, almost as if it didn’t even exist.

A Second Symptom

After our children’s cramps unknotted and melted away, the second symptom began to manifest. Its appearance could have been mistaken for an unusual rash or an off-color bout of jaundice, but we knew better. The circular, orange blotches that crept over our children’s skin had no dermatological precedent except in the history of the towns the ball had visited.

For many of us, this was the most difficult stage of the illness. Though our sons and daughters remained firmly ensconced in cradles of opiates so as to not feel the flesh-peeling inflammation that the children of Vernonville had, we found the mere presence of their infected bodies intolerable. We sat by their beds with our faces turned away, unable to watch as the blotches spread and joined with one another, forming Rorschach patterns we feared to interpret for what they might reveal about ourselves. We were asked by doctors and nurses to comfort our children, to hold their hands and wipe their chins as saliva leaked from their lips, but we could not bring ourselves to touch them. With every new sore, with every new patch of smooth, glistening orange, they drifted from us, becoming less a part of us and more a part of the ball. Theirs was a future we could not countenance, let alone accept.

In the hallways and common areas of the secure facility, we pounded vending machines with our fists though we were not seeking refreshment and we stared into bathroom mirrors for hours though we were not preening. In the facility’s lobby, we gave interviews to assembled reporters, our faces properly stoic, our words sufficiently labored. In the facility’s parking lot, well-meaning friends and family lit bonfires and invited us to stoke the flames with balls of diverse size and color, balls that they had purchased for precisely that therapeutic kindling purpose. And all the while, as we sulked about the facility in our bubbles of distraction, our children lay in their rooms, alone, transmuting.

The bravest among us eventually worked up the courage to return to our ailing offspring. We pulled up chairs beside the hospital beds and, tears welling at the corners of our eyes, whispered unheard endearments to our sons and daughters while stroking their swollen pumpkin-hued foreheads. Even for those of us with iron resolve, however, the caresses did not last long. We pulled away our fingers and wiped them on our pants, our dresses. We ran to the nearest bathroom and scrubbed our hands under scalding water, so desperate were we to remove the sensation of our children’s rashes against our flesh. For what we touched when we stroked their heads was not soft, pliable skin, but a hard, dense surface that barely yielded to the pressure of our fingertips. Where once had been ridges and divots and tiny, perfectly formed imperfections was now an expanse of smooth, featureless orange. Doctors who had biopsied the rashes of children in other towns had long ago determined the nature of this impossible flesh. It was a substance the world knew well, a substance that had no place in human biology, and we shuddered to witness it merging with our children, becoming our children, our children becoming it.

Brave or not, we fled into flasks, into puffs of cigarette smoke, into passionless sex in the hospital bathrooms. We spent our last remaining energies in pursuit of merciful distraction. We refused to contemplate the truth of the situation, and the truth was this: by the time the second symptom had run its course, our children would no longer be copies of ourselves, but products of forces far beyond our control. By the time the second symptom had run its course, our children would be, effectively, rubberized.

A Referendum

When, a few months after Vernonville, the orange ball appeared in another town like ours and the death toll ticked higher in that small burgh than it had in any of the previous places the ball had infected, we experienced a surge in anxiety unlike any we’d known before. Every bounce of a kickball and spin of a bowling ball and hollow plink of a ping-pong ball against a table sent us into cold sweats and caused us to glance over our shoulders to make sure nothing was rolling up behind us. Accident rates in town doubled. 9-1-1 calls reporting suspicious incidents tripled. We became a study in paranoia. So, in conjunction with the PTA and several local religious groups, our mayor called a meeting to discuss “the ball dilemma” and invited all concerned adults from the community to attend. Minors—even teenagers who understood the issue at hand—were strictly prohibited from entering the town hall during the meeting due to the nature of the subject matter.

On the evening of the “ball dilemma” discussion, seating at the town hall was elbow to elbow and hip to hip. It seemed that every person in town over the age of eighteen had come to listen, if not participate. We all wanted resolution. We wanted the mayor or the president of the PTA or a local minister or rabbi or imam to give us instruction, to tell us that our town would be safe if we simply followed an enumerated plan with easily accomplished steps. Instead, we were faced with a coterie of leaders who, through PowerPoint slides and Excel spreadsheets, explained that no feasible protection was possible. We couldn’t wall off the town from the rest of the world—though some of us would have surely felt more at ease behind medieval battlements—nor could we afford a video surveillance system for the town’s perimeter. We couldn’t track the ball’s movements—not even the Department of Homeland Security had been able to manage that feat yet, or so it claimed—nor did we have the resources to set up an official ball patrol. We couldn’t even print informational posters because we had no information to convey that might have been of use in case of the ball’s appearance. For all intents and purposes, we lacked any meaningful choice of action.

It was, therefore, not surprising that when the presentations ended and the mayor opened the floor for questions, the town hall broke into a silence reserved for sepulchers. We dared not speak or move, as speaking and moving would imply that the meeting was truly nearing its conclusion, that our authorities had failed us and left us without plan or direction. The notion of confronting such a limbo we could not abide. So we sat and waited in the anticipation of one last key address or instructional video. Our leaders fidgeted, unsure of the silence’s tenor. We held our breaths, unsure of the question to ask. And, somewhere, the ball kept bouncing, entirely sure we could not stop it.

Finally, after the tension had grown so sharp it could slice through the hall’s concrete walls, one of us—Marcus Jefferson, the proprietor of our town’s used bookstore—stood and asked the question that would govern our lives for years to come.

“If you don’t have a plan to deal with it,” he said, “and we can’t prevent it from happening, then why are we even talking about it?”

The question provoked no answers from our leaders, but it did raise applause and echoes.

Other voices in the crowd, our voices, yelled at the stage, asking “Why? Why? Why do we need to discuss it? Why should we even bring it up?”

The mayor responded the only way she could. She asked us what we wanted to do about “the ball problem.” She asked what our democratic solution might be.

Again we slid into silence. We’d never imagined the decision might fall to us. We had no idea how to prevent the ball’s coming; we had no special information, no learned insight. We only knew that we were frightened. So when Jessica Cadiz—a manager at one of our town’s three banks—stood and said, “Let’s try to ignore it. Let’s imagine it doesn’t exist. Let’s push it away as best we can. Let’s strike it from our vocabularies and close the browser windows when we see stories about it online and turn off the TVs if newscasters start yammering on about it. And, for the love of God, let’s never allow the kids to know what it is, to know that it’s out there. At least not until they’re older,” we all understood why.

The applause for Cadiz’s suggestion shook the floor and rattled the windows. A chant of “ignore it, ignore it, ignore it” erupted from the crowd. We, the people, had spoken. Shortly thereafter, our mayor called for a vote, a referendum, and what would become known as the Cadiz Proposition unanimously passed into our town charter and into our law.

A Final Symptom

A child whose skin has remolded itself into a two-inch thick layer of orange rubber can barely be referred to as a parent’s “flesh and blood,” yet this is how, even after the second stage of the ball’s impact, we still thought of our children. The doctors at the secure facility kept them under constant sedation, so it was impossible to know how much the transformation had affected their perception of the world. Did they still think like our children? Would our fumbling hugs still soothe them? Did they still feel the warmth of sunlight and cool breezes the way we did? Was a kitten’s fur softer or harder under the stroke of their new skin? Would they still look at us and call us “father” or “mother” or would they now refer to us by words we couldn’t understand? We didn’t ask, and they couldn’t tell.

The doctors claimed that the sedation was imperative, not because the rubberized flesh by itself would necessarily cause pain, but because the final stage of the ball’s infection involved a horror for which there was no cognate in the annals of medical literature. Ushered from the treatment rooms due to what the medical staff called “the unpredictability of the final stage,” we watched our children on monitors from areas within the facility labeled only as “safe zones.” Vaguely scented like fresh carpet, these areas resembled bizarrely arranged discount furniture store show rooms, with disparate couches and loveseats and plush recliners and end tables encircling central banks of computer monitors and television sets. The walls of the “safe zones” were also entirely lined in mirrors, which both lent to the commercial effect and led many of us to believe that as we watched our children, so too were we being watched from behind those mirrors.

Over the course of the three days following our children’s dermal mutation, we sat in these safe zones in relative silence. Occasionally, we would leave and find our way to the hospital’s roof. There, six stories from the ground, we would consider leaping off the edge, into a more certain madness. However, none of us had the energy or the willpower to actually make the jump. Instead, we would simply stand on the rooftop ledge and wonder what revelations the air between the tips of our toes and the tarmac below might hold. Perhaps the wind whipping by our faces in that two or three second plunge might speak to us of death’s mysteries. Perhaps the very ground below might whisper wisdom as it collapsed our forms. We would never know.

If we did not head to the rooftop, we would leave the safe zones and wander through the dark wards that sprawled under our children. We would pass skeletal figures hooked to spider webs of IV tubes, bodies suspended in vats of brightly hued gels, and other children stuffed inside windowed copper tubes, clearly suffering from a dread malady different from that of our own children. We would continue downward, downward, until we reached the basement of the facility, where we discovered the morgue and its seemingly infinite rows of tabled corpses, some of which were wrapped in thin, clear plastic sheets and others which were encased in silver mylar bags. To this room we would take our husbands, our wives, our boyfriends and girlfriends and secret lovers and there, amongst the plenitude of the dead, we would explode into a molten flow of volcanic sex, entwining with our partners in as many configurations as we could devise, often knocking bodies to the floor with the force of our writhing and tumbling naked after them. We didn’t care that the dead watched us, were part of the act. Indeed, we wanted them to see. We wanted them to know. Why, we couldn’t explain.

So, mostly, we remained in the safe zones, silent and unmoving, unless, of course, we didn’t. All of which is to say that we knew not what to do with ourselves or how to act as our children, for all intents and purposes, died. While we sat in silence, every one of our children’s bones and internal organs were evaporating. They did not liquefy or explode or turn putrescent and rot; they just evaporated, into air, leaving behind nothing but an expanding bubble of space and increased pressure. Brain and heart, spine and scapula: it all dissolved to nothing. As our children’s brainwaves diminished and their heartbeats flatlined, the space within them grew larger and more rounded. Their tiny bodies expanded and inflated and gained contours no human shape was ever meant to contain. Their shoulders and torsos became one with their heads, with any trace of their necks disappearing; their legs and arms descended into the vastness of their abdomens. With every passing hour, they took on new convexities, new spheroid shapes. They were all Violet Beauregarde, eternally trapped in Wonka’s chocolate factory.

Over the final symptom’s three day reign, our children continued to expand, to inflate, until, when all was said and done, there were no more bones or organs left to dissolve. What lay in our children’s beds then were no longer our children, but enormous orange rubber balls with the distorted and elongated faces of our individual sons and daughters imprinted upon one of their sides. Somehow, even after this, even after the final symptom had run its course, the worst had not yet arrived, for, when the life-giving machines were shuttled away and times of death were officially stamped on certificates, our children, whatever they now were, began to move once again. They began to bounce. They began to roll from side to side. They began to roll toward us. And we, more fearful than we’d ever been, more uncertain and filled with shame than we thought possible, clawed at our eyes and wished that we had never tried to hide the ball from our children or ourselves in the first place.

A Scientific Inquiry

Epidemiologists have studied the effects of the orange ball and have determined with certainty that the symptoms it causes cannot be traced to a viral, bacterial, fungal, or parasitic source. Despite extensive tests of our children’s every conceivable tissue and bodily secretion, there is, they say, no detectable pathogen present in their bodies either pre-transformation or post-transformation. This conclusion has led numerous researchers to suggest that the vector for transmission may lie on the molecular or atomic level—a potentially provable proposition, but one that will require many more years of study.

Another faction of scientists—mostly biophysicists—have conjectured that what occurs to the infected children has little basis in any macrocosmic discipline. These experts have advanced a hypothesis that the wholesale restructuring of an organism can only find its catalyst in the quantum realm, amidst probabilities so infinitesimally small and possibilities so strange they might be thought impossible. Therefore, in their view, it is far better to approach the issue as a problem of fundamental forces and abstract equations than cellular division and genetic re-encoding. Intriguing though the concept may be, it is untestable with current medical technology.

Still another segment of the scientific community washes their hands of the entire matter, choosing to believe that the orange ball and its accompanying syndrome must be either grossly misreported or an outright hoax. To the myriad MDs and PhDs in this camp—none of whom have seen a ball-child in person—the situation is undeserving of serious attention and, in their assessment, a blemish upon those scientists willing to examine the phenomenon.

Needless to say, the underlying reason for the changes to our children remains unknown and we are forced to wonder not just “Why?” but also “How?”

A Treatment

The symptoms having finished their grotesque parade, we were left with their result—a roomful of huge rubber balls bouncing and rolling about the hospital ward under what appeared to be their own volition. We watched, fascinated and horrified, as the faces of our children, forever frozen in a dilated sleep, spun about the balls’ surfaces. The doctors assured us that the balls were not our children, could not be our children, as our children had surely died when the dual hemispheres of their brains evaporated. Time and again they explained that, clinically, our children were gone. And yet, for all the explanation and entirely rational assurances, the movement of the balls—nonstop and just a degree under total chaos—reminded us of our daughters and our sons and their feverish orbits of play. When we gazed through the windows of the secure ward, we saw both our children cavorting in a schoolyard and utterly alien beings performing a dance we could not understand, and, in truth, we could not distinguish between the two despite our best efforts. We watched the balls for many weeks this way, our terror becoming familiar, our sense of certainty in the world further eroding.

Thus it was that by the time the doctors at the facility presented us with two options for the balls’ futures—to leave them in the facility for continued study or to take them home with us—we chose to take them home. The doctors, the facility’s administrators, and a panel of high-level bureaucrats from various government agencies all attempted to convince us that turning over guardianship of the balls to the facility would be in everyone’s best interest. These things, they said, should not exist—by all rights, cannot exist—yet they do. These things, they reiterated, were not our children. These things, they warned, would be well beyond our control and may even pose a danger to others. Of course, we knew the doctors were right. We knew that we would never be able to touch our children again without shivering, that we would never be able to look at those child-sized orange balls without worrying that unknown intelligences might be looking back. We knew that we could never talk to them again without nervously contemplating all the unfathomable thoughts and incomprehensible plots that might be incubating beneath their surfaces. We understood that the balls were not our children anymore. Yet, by the same token, we could not shake the impression that the balls were not not our children, either. Somewhere within them still floated fragments of our DNA and, therefore, we believed that somewhere within them surely floated remnants of our children. However fleeting or memorial those remnants might be, we could not leave them to the emptiness of the facility and its doctors clinical probing. So, instead, we took them home with us. In this decision we were sorely unprepared.

Once in our houses, the balls went wild. Brimming with an unnatural energy, they slammed against our walls and bounced from our floors to our ceilings in rapid, machine gun succession, perhaps testing the boundaries of our homes. They cracked our windows and shattered our lighting fixtures, knocked over our tables and splintered our chairs. They rolled throughout our houses every minute of every day, always in motion, always progressing toward a destination we could seemingly not provide. Sometimes they even bounced against us—often with enough force to make us stumble or send us sprawling to the ground—and we, unsure of what else to do, fled from their advances, scraped and bruised as we were. Whether the bouncings were attacks or gestures of play or symbolic movements beyond our guessing, their violence caused us to worry for our lives, especially after several of us suffered concussions and broken bones. Therefore, in order to protect ourselves, we did what any reasonable community would do—we instituted a treatment plan for our ball-children’s unchecked mania.

Our options to this end were admittedly limited. We owned no golden egg with which to bankroll a major project and we received no meaningful guidance in our planning. At secret meetings held in neutral locations, we brainstormed and we deliberated and, ultimately, we embarked upon a plan that we thought most effective under the circumstances. Laughable though it may seem, we bought high-end treadmills and, between their arms, rigged leather harnesses that would support the weight and girth of our transmuted children. Into these harnesses we wrestled the frenetic balls, locking them in place with a variety of straps and buckles while making sure that they could still spin freely within their binds. We provided a modicum of leeway in the harnesses’ lengths so that the rubbery dynamos could also bounce a few inches into the air, off the treadmill track, if they needed to bounce at all.

Once we were certain that the ball-children had been firmly restrained and fully introduced to their new living arrangements, we turned on the treadmills and set them rolling at a sprinter’s pace. There, in those harnesses, we’d planned that they would spend every moment of the rest of their strange existences, safe and secure, locked in place yet spinning ever forward, on a path we’d made for them, a path that could cause no damage or destruction. We would never unfasten their buckles or loosen their straps; we would never lift them out of their bindings or wash the residue of the treadmills’ rubber belts from their orange sides. We would not even pause the treadmills’ circulation unless their motors burned out. We were too frightened to do anything other than maintain the ball-children as surreal conversation pieces and monuments to our parental failure. We were not offering a cure to our children, but a palliative to ourselves. And, in this, we were relatively satisfied, at least for a time.

 A Divide

Other towns deal with the orange ball and their own infected offspring in other ways.

In Mercury, Ohio, the citizens have built a windowless, private gymnasium the size of an entire office complex for their ball-children. Within this gym the ball-children permanently reside, never allowed to exit the building’s triple-locked steel doors, even with supervision. The people of Mercury reason that their ball-children should never want to leave the gym, given that it’s equipped with a dizzying array of tubes and chutes and mazes and wheels in myriad sizes and shapes. It is, after all, designed to be a ball’s veritable paradise. And yet, when questioned about the usual movements of the ball-children within their unique enclave, Mercury residents recite an odd fact: No matter how often the ball-children run their mazes or blast through their chutes, no matter how much exuberance they seem to emit as they slide and bounce and roll, they always end their day by congregating around the doors, rebounding against them lightly.

Elsewhere, in Sutter’s Glen, Tennessee, every family of a ball-child owns an oversized, triple-reinforced bouncy castle which their individual ball-child inhabits. These bouncy castles are a significant source of revenue for the people of Sutter’s Glen, as they allow the families of ball-children to offer wealthy curiosity-seekers the opportunity to purchase exclusive admissions to view their ball-children. It’s rumored that, for the right price, the people of Sutter’s Glen will even allow patrons to enter the bouncy castles and play with their ball-children. Through this trade, the community has grown quite wealthy—so much so that Jaguars and Porsches and Ferraris are now common sights on the streets of Sutter’s Glen. It should be little surprise then, that, privately, many of the town’s citizens whisper a desire for the orange ball to return, to transform the rest of their children, to help them erect more bouncy castles in their backyards.

In yet another locale—Kylersburg, Wyoming—the ball-children are herded onto a ranch with absurdly high, electrified fences. There, after they have been stamped with a unique number and fitted with a tiny tracking device, they are given free reign of the open fields and sky. On the ranch, they are treated much as any other herd of livestock; they are frequently rounded up and counted, often driven from one area of the ranch to another so as to evenly wear on the land, and occasionally used in special rodeos during which ranch hands attempt to rope and tie them or ride them like angry steer. The people of Kylersburg contend that, as a whole, their treatment method is by far the most natural and humane of all known treatment methods. Perhaps surprisingly, few outsiders argue with the assertion.

Finally, in Vernonville, Texas, in the town that ignited our initial fears, the people have no ongoing treatment plan, as the treatment they eventually instituted was of a singular and final variety. “Shots from heaven,” some of the citizens of Vernonville call their particular treatment. Others refer to it more modestly as “A mercy.” No matter what moniker they choose, the people of Vernonville claim they feel no remorse or guilt over their actions. They say they simply copied the treatment from their traditional methods for handling lame horses and terminally ill pets. They say that the greatest kindness they could show to their children was to let the dead lie down. Whether or not this statement rings true, one thing is certain: The people of Vernonville no longer need to worry about their ball-children, because there are no longer any ball-children in Vernonville to worry about. Considering this outcome, some might argue that their treatment has been the most successful of all.

A Revelation

After our treatment plan went into effect, we returned to lives of relative normalcy. We went to work and complained about paperwork and bosses rather than silently hunching at our desks, worrying over what the balls might be doing to our possessions and our loved ones while we were away. We attended movies and ate at fine dining establishments. We went out for drinks with our friends and argued politics and sports with our families. We walked about our homes with confidence, with surety, with the peace of mind that no weighty orange ball might be tracking us from behind, waiting to pounce upon us and send us careening down a flight of stairs or through a window to our certain dooms. Gradually, we returned to our blissful old routines and, in a sense, the sharp edges of our lives once again began to wear smooth.

Meanwhile, however, the treadmills kept running in the background.

The ambient thrum and whir of treads cycling around and around became as ubiquitous to us as the soft whistle of breath from our own nostrils. We avoided the rooms in which we’d placed the ball-children—often keeping the doors to those rooms closed, if not altogether locked—but no matter which room or closet or hidden alcove of our homes we might try to hide away inside, we could hear the treadmills spinning. Music, sound machines, televisions blared at painful volumes: nothing entirely muted the noise. It became clear that if we were in our homes, we could not escape the treadmills’ flat song, and because we could not escape we were perpetually on the verge of remembering why they ran nonstop. Even when we were not at home, many of us heard the treadmills’ rhythmic drone, as though it had somehow recorded a loop of itself upon the very drums in our ears. Animated luncheons with friends, meetings with important business clients, birthday parties for significant others: all of it played out with the soundtrack of the treadmills whispering in the background. Our lives may have been returning to a state of normalcy, but it was certainly not the normalcy we’d known before the ball.

It wasn’t long before the noise from the treadmills took its toll. In small ways that would have been imperceptible to anyone unfamiliar with our community, we began to wear thin. Our laughter at even the best-told jokes faded faster. Our goodnight kisses took on an unexpected hardness. Our footsteps came faster, lighter, as though we were trying to outrun a looming danger without showing any appearance of panic. We began to suffer from insomnia and panic attacks, which would lead us to pace in our yards during the witching hours of the night and, trembling, stare at the starlit sky. We lost weight—small amounts at first, healthy amounts we should have lost anyway, but eventually enough to make strangers wonder which wasting disease we must have developed and how many months we had left to live. Worst of all, we began to let our thoughts float away from us. We began to consider the balls as our children. We began to imagine what they might do if they weren’t on the treadmills, speeding to nowhere. We began to try to grasp their needs and intentions and desires, impossible though the task might be.

Through our unrelenting contemplation, we were slowly drawn back to the rooms in which we’d placed the treadmills. At first, we stole into the rooms for the briefest of seconds, barely glimpsing even a flash of orange. But seconds stretched to minutes and minutes stretched to hours. Soon, we were spending entire evenings in the treadmill rooms. We watched the ball-children roll in place, our thoughts rolling with them. We could not stop envisioning new scenarios for them, were we to set them free of their shackles. Some of us conjured wild fantasies about the ball-children forming utopian ball-societies that operated without prejudice or hatred or any of the plagues of our human society. Some of us sketched nightmares of ball invasions, with our spherical overlords inflating us to bursting in an effort to assimilate us to their ways of being. And some of us simply hoped that the ball-children might roll to the ends of the earth and back, collecting experiences and perceptions and loves and dreams along their journeys.

No matter their substance, beneath all our thoughts settled an abiding sense of guilt. When no one else was home, we curled up in the treadmill rooms and we wept. We cried for the children we’d lost and we cried for the things they’d become that we’d never let live. We knew we’d wronged the ball-children. We knew we’d trapped what was not ours to trap, held on too tightly to a control we never really had in the first place. If the balls were to save us, we knew it was right. If they were to destroy us, we knew that was right, too. And if they bounced off to distant futures not meant for us at all, we knew that would be best, for in those futures we would find a sanctuary that we’d been missing for quite some time.

So we conferred with one another and we decided to engage in a final treatment so shocking, so revelatory, that no other town had even considered it. We decided to unbuckle the ball-children, open wide the doors to our houses, and, with no small amount of commingled anxiety and excitement and regret, let them roll past us and out of our town. Our final treatment, the only treatment we could justify in the end, was to simply let them roll away.

A Mystery

There exists even less data on the nature of the orange ball itself than its terrible effects on our children. Its first documented appearance occurred in a rural farming community in the heartland of the nation—a place called Goldenrod, Nebraska—where, eight years before our own tragedy, it infected its first three children. Its trajectory since then has followed no discernible pattern or logical progression, thus making any prediction of its present or future movement an exercise in pure divination. Its origin is equally the province of speculation and often involves theories that touch on fantastical notions of extraterrestrial intervention, interdimensional slippage, demonic corruption, and clandestine military projects gone awry. Beyond firsthand accounts, visual evidence of the ball itself is also utterly nil, as every attempt to photograph it or record it to video has resulted in nothing but blurred or fuzzy images. Though numerous adults have seen the ball in person and can attest to its physical reality, it has, as far as we or anyone else knows, never been so much as grazed by an adult hand. Many people, ourselves included, wonder what might happen if such an interaction were to occur. Would we, too, be transformed into balls, dead in humanity but vibrant and alive in a new state of being? Is the transformation a curse exclusive to our children? Or have we adults already been cursed in a less tangible way? About any of this, we may never know.

©2017 by Kurt Fawver. Originally published in Looming Low, edited by Justin Steele and Sam Cowan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kurt Fawver is a writer of horror, weird fiction, and literature that oozes through the cracks of genre. His short fiction has won a Shirley Jackson Award and been previously published in venues such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Aeons, Weird Tales, Vastarien, Best New Horror, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. He’s the author of two collections of short stories–The Dissolution of Small Worlds (Lethe Press) and Forever, in Pieces (Villipede Publications)–as well as a novella, Burning Witches, Burning Angels (Dunhams Manor Press), and two chapbooks, Pwdre Ser (Dim Shores Publishing) and Problems in River Heights (Unnerving Press). He’s also had non-fiction published in journals such as Thinking Horror and the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.

The Minor Superhero, at Home after His Series Ends

Adam-Troy Castro | 2525 words

He has a superhero name. It’s as stupid as every other superhero name. It’s not something you can comfortably call another person in casual conversation. Just try to have a normal-sounding talk with some of the guys in the Liberty Force. “So, hello, uh, Pile-Driver Man. And, how are you doing, Dynamic Woman?” You can’t. You honestly can’t. You need to have a superhero name, and so he has one, bestowed upon him by others when he lagged too long in coming up with one for himself. It still seems vainglorious to him. He has always felt silly whenever other superheroes call him by it. He always feels like the speaker must be talking to someone else, and he finds he must resist the temptation to look over his shoulder, to find the real person being spoken to. It is, in short, exactly like the time his future wife, a stranger at the time, said hi. He wasn’t the guy such a pretty girl would be talking to. When she made it clear that, yes, she was speaking to him, he was sure that she must have been making a mistake. Similarly, it seems a mistake for these other superheroes to treat him as colleague and equal, and to call him by that name. It’s just something he has to live with. You need a name to get on the registry, just like you need a costume. But mostly, he’s Bob.

Bob was struck by a bolt of energy, coming down out of the clear blue sky. The rationale for this was not immediately evident. He found out after he had exactly ten adventures, not including team-ups. There were clues and portents before that, but the tenth adventure culminated with the unveiling of his secret origin. He barely thinks about those shocking revelations, nowadays, mostly because he somehow stopped having regular adventures not long after that.

These days the crises just don’t seem to involve him all that much. Usually he gets roped in during one of those mammoth cattle calls where hundreds of people dressed in colorful outfits, including quite a few others who also haven’t been around for a while, must all face the same generalized threat. He’s never been a pivotal factor in any of these gatherings, but he knows that his presence is appreciated, and it’s always healthy to keep a hand in. Still, his origin never really comes up, at any such times, and on those occasions when he must refer to it in conversation, it’s easier to just say that a bolt of energy came out of the clear blue sky, and leave it at that. It’s less of a backstory to carry around.

The minor superhero’s powers aren’t world-shaking. He can run a thirty-second mile, lift half a ton, shrug off bullets, and fly. These are all pretty amazing things to be able to do, but on the numeric scale superheroes use between themselves to rank relative power levels, with the well-funded athletic vigilantes being ones and twos, and the alien demigods being nines and tens, he’s a four. Somehow, it works out, it’s all those guys at both ends of the spectrum who get all the attention, and all the ones in the middle whose careers just peter out after not very long. It would be nice, he supposes, to be one of those guys who can clean toxic substances off their indestructible costumes by taking a quick flight into the sun and back. He used to envy those guys. But as time has gone on, he’s realized that a four is ideal positioning. The athletes have to spend six hours a day just running on treadmills and lifting weights to prepare themselves for a mere four hours of activity at night, and even then, they still spend much of their lives laid up in traction. And the demigods are always busy stopping interdimensional incursions and alien invasion fleets, one infinite crisis after another, and it’s a big deal for them to just enjoy a leisurely lunch. By contrast, the minor superhero has a power set that’s self-sustaining, and limitations that spare him from being on call every time the sky starts changing colors. He has free time and friends and a life refreshingly free of angst.

A couple of times, during those ten adventures when he was constantly busy and looked like he always would be constantly busy, the minor superhero saved the city from destruction. In both cases, he was out wearing his street clothes, being Bob, when he happened to drift into some situation where the city was in imminent danger of being destroyed. The unlikelihood of this impressed him at the time. How long had he been Bob? How rarely in his everyday life had he just happened to stumble across some citywide menace? Never, that’s how often. But on those occasions, mere weeks after acquiring a power set and a costume and a superhero name, he just happened to run across something deserving of investigation that by the end of the day found him saving the city with seconds to spare. This, to him, was a suspicious level of synchronicity. And for it to happen twice, a few weeks apart, each circumstance wholly unrelated to the other, was even more ridiculous. He wondered, for a while, if this was what his life was always going to be like.

He talked to some of the more established folks, the ones who for all their resolute looks and unflappable manners still seemed to possess haunted looks, and they reported that their lives had run on such schedules, without surcease, for years. He was frankly terrified. But then he met another of the minor guys, who took him aside and said, “Don’t worry. After a while you’ll notice that it’s somehow always the same five or six folks it happens to. If you don’t join a team, your life will calm down after a dozen adventures at most.” And this is what happened. He’s grateful. Being a superhero, even only once a twice a year during one of those cattle calls, is cool. Being one constantly is a pain in the ass. You’d have to be crazy to want that tsuris in your life.

Then, of course, even if you do keep your hand in, there’s the question of just how much responsibility you want to juggle on a daily basis. Forget the demigods who exist to protect the entire world from those threats that seem to arrive all the time, now. Given who and what they are, this is what they’re obliged to do. It’s almost obscene for them to concern themselves with, you know, neighborhood muggings. But for those below that level, there are guys, oddly enough including some of the athletes, who take personal responsibility for stopping not some but all the respective crime in their cities. “This city is MINE,” those guys say, and they seem to take it seriously, to the point where they never relax at all. It’s a seriously over-developed sense of responsibility. Other guys, more grounded, just patrol their own neighborhoods. This still keeps them busy, but they do sometimes manage to get through an evening with their loved ones without being called to battle. You do what you can do, especially when, as in the minor superhero’s case, fate stops constantly tossing you together with these massive threats. He finds that he’s proud of his past contributions, and of his occasional current ones, but for the most part finds he doesn’t miss the constant peril, the shouted purple declarations on the part of both good guys and bad guys, and especially the being thrown through walls; that’s something you don’t need all that much of, honestly, before you reach your lifetime saturation point. But since it’s a good thing to keep your hand in, what the minor superhero mostly protects these days is his own apartment building.

The minor superhero lives in a ten-story apartment building somewhere on the outskirts of the city. It’s a nice place, home to about 130 people, ranging from young professionals to retirees. They all know that he’s not just a superhero but the official superhero of the building, a position that gets him free rent in exchange for being on call. It is a similar position to being the super, and indeed, one thing the actual super likes to complain about in a good-natured way is how the presence of a guy with powers prevents tenants from just using the convenient term, “super,” when they must instead say the whole word, either “superintendent” or “superhero.” No simple declarative statements that you’re going to call the super, not in this building! You must specify! If you have a plumbing problem, you call one super. If there’s a creepy guy eying the kids in the playground, you call the other. At least that’s the theory. Both supers have intervened when neighborhood vandals tried to steal someone’s ten-speed from the bike rack; both supers have helped some of the older folks carry the groceries. They don’t argue over turf. No “This is MY building!” for them. Honestly, if somebody’s new microwave needs hauling, the minor superhero is perfectly happy to do it. If somebody who doesn’t belong in the building is hassling women in the elevators, the superintendent is just as much at home dealing with the problem. The minor superhero sees his job as just making life easier for his neighbors, and honestly, he’s spoken to a couple of the demigods and knows that they secretly feel the same way. But he, at least, gets to know them. They invite him and his wife to dinner, sometimes. He invites their kids to his son’s birthday party. It’s cozy. And if he feels uncomfortable, sometimes, doing his visible rounds, which is to say, either purposefully striding the halls to let evil-doers know that he is present, or standing on the rooftop during lightning storms so that the occasional bolts can backlight him dramatically, well, that is part of his employment agreement, his chest emblem as much a mark of his position in life as the superintendent’s green uniform and his little circular name-badge reading Otis.

The other tenants have peace of mind. There were worries, at the start, that some super-villain would take Bob’s vow to protect the building as a direct provocation, and target it with death-rays, or something. This has, alas, not been a totally unfounded fear. There was a giant robot, striding down the boulevard with murder in its fearsome glowing eyes, just that one time. But this is the kind of thing that happens to buildings all over the city, and the minor superhero ripped its head off and extracted the mad-scientist controller with so little difficulty that he still didn’t list the encounter as one of his iconic ten adventures. For the most part, the minor superhero is like a fire-ax, displayed behind glass. He’s there in case something does happen. If the city is overrun by reptilian demons intent on devouring the souls of the unwary, well, the portal over midtown is something that can be taken care of by one of the demigods, and the mass panic in the streets can be addressed by the various super-groups, but unless he is specifically called—and, being a level four, he likely won’t be—it’s sufficient to stand in the doorway like Gandalf and say, “You will not pass!” So far, no such incursions have penetrated the building by so much as a single broken window. He is proud of this. He knows he’s making a difference, and it is a measure of his character that he takes absolutely no more satisfaction in these flashy moments than he does in stopping that bad case of domestic violence in 4C, or in helping little Tommy Ramirez with his math. “We all do what we can,” he says, “whatever we can.” And he finds this as fine a battle cry as he needs.

The minor superhero does have an archenemy, though. Everybody has an archenemy, a constant that is not just true of superheroes, but of everyday human beings. Your archenemy may not build giant death rays to melt your city into slag, but he or she might look on you with malice, as someone whose happiness needs to be blighted, whose ambitions need to be mocked, whose accomplishments need to be denigrated. On the level of normal raggedy human beings, archenemies rarely rise above the level of bullies.

The minor superhero’s archenemy is an actual mad scientist: not a Nazi mad scientist, mind you (the minor superhero hates that kind), but an ex-pharmacist, busted from his profession for dispensing some of his narcotics off the books. In place of building giant robots, he illegally patches into cable. In place of robbing banks, he plays his TV too loud. Like many supervillains, he has a last name that sounded ominous from birth, that has become part of his nom de guerre. You would laugh if you heard that name, at the thought of an actual human being going through life with that name. You would think it a name suitable only for a person who would someday become a social irritant. This is the way it works out, in the business. If your last name is some synonym for Evil, you become Evil. He is Evil. He plots for the destruction of the minor superhero. One or two of his minor plots—one among them starting up a petition among his fellow tenants, trying to eliminate the minor superhero’s rent subsidy—have come to naught, and it has only twisted him further. He has wildly askew Einsteinian hair and Coke-bottle glasses and a bottomless hatred of all that is good and decent and at night his neighbors can sometimes hear him ranting about how nothing will keep him from his revenge, nothing. So far, the most substantive confrontations between him and the minor superhero have involved the hero politely knocking on his door to deliver some mismarked mail. Certainly, the final confrontation is yet to come. But that is the thing about both minor superheroes and minor supervillains. Minor superheroes are just good neighbors. Minor supervillains are just the cranky and vaguely creepy guy in 7D. Sometimes this becomes a major battle, and this is the consummation some of the neighbors expect and anticipate with something like longing. But it’s not always a clash of titans. More often, it’s just some of life’s bullshit.

The minor superhero is on top of it. He is comfortable with this being as much as he needs to be on top of. He’s happy. And tonight, as the skies change colors over midtown and the city is rocked by the sound of one of the demigods battling some cosmic menace rippling with coruscating energies beyond all imagination, he is ready for the call, but otherwise content at home, aware that no harm will come to those under his protection, not on his watch.

©2019 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection Her Husband’s Hands And Other Stories. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). His latest release was the audio collection And Other Stories (Skyboat Media), which features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” Adam lives in Florida with his wife Judi and a trio of revolutionary cats.

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

Fallow

Sofia Samatar | 21633 words

1. Miss Snowfall

Here is the peaceable kingdom.

I once heard a beautiful story. Two people, a brother and sister, worked at the Castle until they were very old. Then the sister fell ill and couldn’t work anymore. In her illness, her eyes became brighter and brighter, and her face thinner, until she looked like a little old child. Eventually she was so small the brother could carry her on his back. He carried her up to the Castle for medical treatment. There’s a long part of the story in which the brother staggers through the Castle, getting confused, going into the wrong rooms, waiting for hours to get clearance. All the time he has his sister on his back, and also something else: her pain, which has been growing until it nearly fills her whole body. “Pain is the heaviest thing,” said Miss Snowfall, who was telling the story. A faint clicking came from the back of the room, where some boys were fiddling with chalk. At the end of the story, the two old people were so worn out and bewildered they returned to the village without even seeing a doctor. The old woman died in her bed, underneath her own quilt, holding her brother’s hand. Her last words were: “Do you remember the way to the Castle?” Miss Snowfall delivered these words in a soft voice, almost a murmur, a voice that always filled me with a special anguish, because it made it seem as if she were speaking not to us but to herself, that she was far from us, removed. After the story, she took out her handkerchief and, in a characteristic gesture, doubled it up and pressed it to her lips. Temar hated the story of the brother and sister, but to me it’s like a window through which I can see another world.

• • • •

In those days, if you had asked any of us what we wanted to do when we grew up, we would have answered: “Work at the Castle.” Children probably say the same thing today, but I imagine it carries a different meaning for them than it did for Miss Snowfall’s pupils. For us, who had the immense good fortune to study under a teacher so inventive and eccentric we often didn’t know we were studying, a teacher whose one goal seemed to be to whip our imaginations into a frenzy, the Castle was a temple, a magic portal, a citadel, a cave. Ezera said it was an inverted world in which people floated face downward. Lia insisted people there spoke without words, in bolts of electricity. To all of these fancies Miss Snowfall responded with an approving smile, a smile that was slightly sad and therefore irresistible. We competed with one another for the honor of provoking that smile. Even those whose parents worked at the Castle, such as Elias, whose father was a security guard, or Markos, whose mother conducted inspections of the water system, made up outrageous stories without being scolded. “That’s probably true,” Miss Snowfall would say with her melancholy smile. The classroom was a zone free from accusation. All things were permitted there, above all Miss Snowfall’s weird assignments, which included knitting and lying on the floor to contemplate the inner light.

After school, the children would pour out into the yard and then through one of the gates, either through the north gate with the inscription WASTE NOT, WANT NOT, or, like Temar and me, through the south gate, which bore the inscription ARBEITE UND HOFFE. Miss Snowfall also left through the south gate, but not immediately after school. Instead she would stand at the window, half concealed by the curtain, as if she were watching us go, although it also seemed she couldn’t see us, for if we waved to her, she never waved back. Temar constructed a romance for Miss Snowfall out of the fact that Mr. Cinders, who taught mathematics to the upper classes, always glanced toward the window of our schoolroom as he bent to pin back the legs of his trousers before mounting his bicycle. But Miss Snowfall never made him any sign either, and so Mr. Cinders cycled home slowly to Unmarried Male Housing, a dreary edifice known as the Barn, to dine (as we imagined) in a hall full of noisy men who made fun of his protruding ears.

Miss Snowfall did not live in Unmarried Female Housing (known as the Henhouse) but in a room above Nimble’s dry goods dispensary. The Nimble family lived in the other rooms. If you were lucky enough to be sent out after supper to get some sugar or a packet of needles, you could see the silhouettes of the Nimble children romping about in the whitish light that filtered through the blinds. The real attraction, of course, was Miss Snowfall’s window, which gave off a yellow light, and through which no movement at all could be discerned. She was reading, we told each other, she was observing the inner radiance, she was writing letters or drawing a self-portrait. I was admitted to this room twice: once after Temar was lost and Miss Snowfall made me sit in her chair and chafed my hands, and a second time when Miss Snowfall herself was lost, having managed, with typical ingenuity, to hang herself from the light fixture.

• • • •

For me, those early school days are infused with a Sunday glow. In fact, the real glow of Sundays, which has inspired so many verses, and which rules our bodies like the hand of a hidden puppeteer, has never made me as happy as the rusty gloom of the schoolroom. On Sundays when I was a child, we would get up early, like everyone else, and rush outside into the intensified light. My mother would always be there before us, seated in her chair in front of the house, her eyes closed, her entire body gilded. We would sit beside her on the squares of roughcloth we called “the outdoor blankets,” careful to keep our feet on them so our scrubbed shoes wouldn’t get dusty, enveloped in a timid silence, not even waving to our friends across the road, who were sitting outside with their own parents. All over the village, a hush. Only the cows broke it, lowing. And my father would appear around the side of the house, his hands clasped behind him, his beard shining, his good shoes tightly encased in galoshes, returning from letting them out to pasture.

Then we stood and shook out and folded our blankets. My mother snapped shut her collapsible chair. Sometimes she stumbled slightly, saturated, dazed with light. We collected our Bibles and walked to church. Everyone looked dim and hot. A hymn rose, faint but steadily growing, from those who had already arrived. We smiled at each other, at friends, but did not speak. We began to sing. We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing. If we whispered, or looked as if we might step off the edge of the road, our father tapped our ankles with his cane.

Marvelous light. The white church seemed to pulse. You could feel it taking hold of you, lifting you. At school, Miss Snowfall explained the influence of that glow. We diagrammed the pineal gland while she spoke of the delicate secretions that make us particularly happy on Sundays. “Why can’t we have Sunday light every day?” asked Selemon. Miss Snowfall replied with her favorite question: “What do you think?” Hands shot up; we guessed that too much light, like too much sugar, could make you sick, that it would be wasteful, that God wouldn’t like it. Miss Snowfall erased the pineal gland and drew a line representing the surface of Fallow. She drew its tiny, fugitive sun, with arrows for rays. Squares represented the solar fields; a great opaque blob was our generator, which, she reminded us, has to power everything. It has to keep the reservoir working, the heaters for the pastures, the vast grain corridor, the production labs, the smithy, the workshops, the grottoes. “It has to power these lights,” she said, indicating the orange bulbs in the ceiling. “It has to make air. It has to run the Castle.”

We walked home through the eternal cold of the village, hands shoved deep into our coat pockets. I thought Selemon, who worked in the pastures after school, and who always smelled vaguely of the shit he collected on a cart, might grumble about all the fuel that goes to the generators of the Castle. Couldn’t they use some of it to light the sky? But Selemon left us as usual at the crossroads, hat pulled low over his curls, giving us a quick wave before trotting off down Granite Road. We walked on with the other children who lived in our district, our breath rising white in the twilight, a tentative, greenish twilight that colored the tops of the houses, a twilight that would last just long enough for us to feed the chickens and bring in the wash before going out at the touch of a distant switch. Temar walked beside me, her chin sunk in the folds of her scarf. I was already taller than she, though nearly two years younger. I could see from her posture, her frown, that she was thinking, and knew from experience that if I spoke to her now I’d get a sharp reply. So instead of talking to her, I talked to our parents at supper, cheerfully, volubly, in order to compensate for her silence. And, as usual, she gave me in exchange for this kindness a gift of far greater worth. When we were in bed, when I was sure she was sleeping, she spoke. Into the icy darkness of our room came the words I would not have dared to say, but which perfectly articulated my own feelings, words that fell on my heart with a bursting shock of recognition, reverberating for days afterward: “I hate Sundays.”

After that I felt oppressed by Sundays, hounded. There was something dreadful about the secret workings of my pineal gland. I considered it a triumph if I could maintain a sour mood in the warmth of the churchyard, among the freshly washed and laughing children. As for Temar, she adopted an outward sign of isolation: It was around this time that she began to wear the shapeless black hat, knotted together from cast-off strings in Miss Snowfall’s classroom, that led people to call her Temar Black Hat. This hat is the reason I am known as Agar Black Hat today, even though I have never worn such an article. I have been left with a phantom hat, a mark. It’s better than nothing. “Fill the slate,” Miss Snowfall used to urge us, “to the edge.”

• • • •

She was the daughter of Deacon Brass and his wife, who was known as Sister Brass. Her name was Sara. She received the name “Snowfall” after a fire. She was six years old when the Great Western Fire destroyed nearly a quarter of the village—workshops, granaries, labs, and animals. Seated on her desk in our classroom, swinging one foot, she described these horrors in a calm voice. The raw, piercing screams of chickens and, unimaginably, cattle. Men and women looming in the glow of the sky, which stayed on for three days, and in the blazing light of the fire. Everyone was covered with the earth they were using to smother the flames. They moved frantically and clumsily, figures of mud. Human bodies were dragged from the furnace, some of them still on fire. The ones that wouldn’t stop screaming were carried to the infirmary. Handcarts rushed up and down the tracks, traveling east with bodies, traveling west with enormous piles of dirt, in both cases materializing out of clouds of smoke only to disappear again with a doleful creaking.

Sara stood at the window, where she had been instructed to pray, holding the blinds apart with her small fingers. The blinds felt hot; her eyes felt hot. And the ashes that began to fall looked pale and cool, like what we know of snow. To the child at the window, the air appeared full of one of the miraculous substances of Earth. “I wanted,” she told us, “to run out and let it fall in my eyes.” “Mother,” she cried, “it’s snowing!” And so she received her gently mocking nickname, becoming known from that day as Sara Snowfall.

“But the most memorable part of that time,” she told us, “was the color blue.” She had discovered, standing at the window, that if she looked at the orange flames in the distance and then closed her eyes, she was treated to a marvelous image of the fire in deep blue. The power of this memory led her to the back of the classroom, to her vast collection of specimens, odds-and-ends, and outright trash, to fetch the color wheel she had made with various powdered minerals fastened to a slate with glue. In accordance with her idiosyncratic, associative method, a drawing lesson followed, and then a lecture on the Age of Disorder, when our ancestors, crazed with longing for the vivid colors of Earth, took to stabbing themselves in the eyes with picks.

I would not want to suggest, especially in light of Miss Snowfall’s fate, that we did not learn the proper curriculum. Miss Snowfall was extremely thorough. Often, when we arrived at school, we would find her poring over the huge books issued by the Council. To do this she wore a special reading lamp strapped to her forehead, advancing through our course of study like a miner. When we sidled in, awed by the sight of the books, she would look up and blind us for a moment with her flaming brow. Then she would switch off the light, and when our vision cleared we would see our own dear teacher, perhaps already pressing her handkerchief to her lips, wearing her customary pleasant and faintly sad expression, only a bit more tired, bowed down by the weight of history. We would take out our slates and Miss Snowfall would stand up and begin her lecture. With an energy and fluency I have rarely seen behind the pulpit, she spoke of the Former Days of Earth, of its bitter atmosphere and boiling seas, its floods, its storms, its wars and conflagrations. She spoke of the Universal Draft, which was, she explained, only the latest and largest version of the many drafts our people had faced throughout history, the innumerable calls to war we had refused, and for which we had been so often imprisoned, ridiculed, tortured, exiled, killed. My heart beat faster; I found myself scratching the underside of my bench with a fingernail, which always has a calming effect on me. Some of the children had tears in their eyes. It was so unfair, this senseless persecution, the pressing into evil of a people who only wished to be left alone. Miss Snowfall described the elders of the community, dignified and austere, holding the little children by the hand, standing outside the prisons in the hope of delivering some bread and comfort to an incarcerated generation. People going by would shove them, trying to make them fight. In one terrible region they tore out the old men’s beards. She spoke of the Great World Conference and the decision to depart, not for a sympathetic country—there was none—but for the stars.

“And they built an Ark,” she told us, “in the hills of Misraq Gojjam.” She was keen to impress on us not only the heroism of the engineers, but the achievements of the preachers, lawyers, schoolteachers, and bureaucrats who made it possible to save so many. In some parts of the Earth, governments were only too happy to let our people go; in others they strove to block us with laws and tariffs. Sums were raised in wealthy regions in order to help the poor ones, and peaceful liberation campaigns filled the streets. Of course, almost immediately there were disagreements and schisms. Some said only those of our faith should be permitted to join the trek; others said we must take everyone who desired a life of peace; still others argued over our faith itself, its character, its law. Such debates were especially fierce among those who practiced seclusion. Of these, some eventually boarded the Ark, believing that God would prefer them to accept a life dependent on advanced technology, rather than a life of war or a stillness amounting to suicide. Others, Miss Snowfall told us quietly, stayed on their burnt farms, among the cattle who were dying in the dust. In one district, they shook out their sheets and curtains for the last time and went to bed, resolved not to rise until Judgment Day.

The Ark set sail. It was the Age of Drift. We rubbed out our slates and copied the plan of the ship Miss Snowfall drew on the blackboard. “The Age of Loaves and Fishes,” she quipped, and a giggle went round the room, not because the joke was funny but because we needed to laugh. It was true the Drifters made do with almost nothing. For this, we revered them. Generations were born and died on the Ark. The bodies of the dead supported those of the living. For some reason still unclear to us, all the horses perished.

On the Ark they had a place similar to our grottoes called the Hanging Gardens. They had fish tanks, cages, rows and rows of beds. Most importantly, they had the great monitor Gabriel, which gave them a report from Earth every twenty-five years. Now Gabriel stands at the center of the Castle, where he still delivers his report every quarter of a century, as he did without fail, like a mighty clock, through the Age of Disorder, the cave-ins, the plagues, the fires, the cults, the breakdowns of the sky. “Put on your coats,” Miss Snowfall said. She always knew when to take us outside. The room filled with happy jostling, voices, the drumming of feet. It is estimated that we will be able to return to Earth five hundred years after Gabriel reports a total absence of human life.

• • • •

Mornings of childhood. The rush to get up, despite the biting chill of the floor, in order to be the first to use the water, and how often Temar, just as I thought I was winning, slipped in front of me and slammed the door of the bathroom in my face. The water, slick and gray with soap. Using Temar’s old water was better than using my parents’, which I would have to do if she spilled it (as happened more than once), for my parents’ old water was speckled with tiny hairs. Down the stairs, taking the last three steps at a jump. Wan kitchen light. Injections, my mother’s fingers warm, the needle cold. Only babies cried at their injections. Our little brother, Yonas, still cried, and Temar hushed him: “Father will hear you.” Then the potatoes with beet syrup, spoons clattering on plates. Coats and hats. As we ran out, Father was coming in from milking. No matter how wildly we hurried, we never escaped without meeting him, his great cracked hand extended, his mournful black eyes that seemed to read our thoughts. “Good morning, Father,” we chorused, and shook his hand. Then down the path and over the gate, never bothering to open it but swinging up over the rails. The sky was blue-green, Sheba and Naomi were running to meet us, and in the distance the roar of the smithy had begun.

Through the village, looking both ways for handcarts before we crossed the tracks, passing the Nimble store, the dispensary with the glass lamp in the window, the workshop where the door was propped open and looms already clacked, the desolate stretch of ground in front of the archives where Brother Lookout was sweeping. All day he swept the village streets with his funny sideways walk, his head subtly shaking as if he were always saying no, turning up a surprising amount of garbage, much of which found its way to Miss Snowfall’s classroom, where it was used in projects or simply gathered dust. We ran past Brother Lookout, we ran even faster past the house where Sister Blunt had died and her husband had covered all the windows with roughcloth, we flew past Sister Wheel, who was always standing in her yard beside a table on which she had placed a cup of coffee, we cut through the old surveyors’ camp, avoiding the piles of rubble, always wary of the boys who sometimes hid there to throw stones, and then other children were joining us, smelling of jackets and burnt potatoes, and it was now, we were climbing the hill, we were at school.

The door of our classroom stood wide open, and Miss Snowfall leaned against it, arms crossed, smiling. The bell clanged, rung by Little Yosef, the headmaster’s nephew. And perhaps we would go in, sit down, and take out our slates, or perhaps by the time the last notes of the bell died away we would be on our way down the hill in two orderly lines. For Miss Snowfall believed in what she called “experiential learning.” There were many days when we never set chalk to slate. Instead we walked all over the village, into the archives, the smithy, and the weaving workshop, where we bruised our fingers trying the machines. Together we pumped the handcarts and rode up and down an abandoned stretch of track. We visited the metal dome of the Zeitgeber, and were given a lecture on chronobiology by Brother Barter, who stammered whenever Miss Snowfall looked at him. We visited the clearance shed, where Sister Singer, who was as slim, sharp, and restless as Miss Snowfall was round and solid, gave us a special pink gum, which, she said, they chewed at the Castle, and allowed us to crowd up to the window and look at the Castle door. “How does it open?” Sheba asked. “From the inside, my love,” said Sister Singer, peering up herself at the silver disc in the sky. “They open it up and send down whatever they want. And when the people go up, the ones that work there, they send down a ladder for them.”

Filled with the image of Brother Bell and Sister Glove, the parents of our classmates Elias and Markos, ascending to heaven on a ladder like a pair of angels, we filed out into the grainy afternoon air to end our school day at the grottoes. This was Miss Snowfall’s favorite place; indeed, she often joked to us that she had become a teacher only so as to secure a pass to that paradise. We made more trips to the grottoes than anywhere else. At the entrance we had to leave Markos, who suffered from allergies, in the care of the doorkeeper, Brother Flint, a cheerful old man with a worn gray hat whose pockets were full of finger puppets in the shape of animals, which he made out of cast-off clothes. I believe his whole menagerie must have come from the same garment, for the little pig, the little sheep, the swan, and even the bumblebee had been sewn out of identical black cloth, and looked so much alike that only Brother Flint himself could tell them apart. I always hurried into the front hall so as to see as little as possible of Markos, who would have to spend the next hour being entertained by these puppets, and whose misery as he watched us go was palpable. In the sterilization chamber I felt as if the stinging jets were scouring off my guilt.

In the room beyond we all put on the dresses of white paper. Already we could feel the air of the grottoes. Sheba said it gave her a headache. In the next room we met the boys and put on the dark glasses. Then we walked out into the grass.

Sometimes, like Sheba, I had a headache at first. Sometimes I felt dizzy, even nauseous, but this never lasted long. Creamy sunlight warmed my face. I was sweating. A powerful greenness filled my lungs, as if I were breathing in the color. Miss Snowfall brushed her hands over the plants and told us their names. Beneath the white dress, her legs were dotted with black hair. She waved to the grotto workers, who waved back, silent, swathed in white veils. There was a buzzing sound, and things rustled in the grass. We watched the fish in their pools, we saw a turtle make its way into the water, we stood at the edge of the deer park and cooed at the fawns, we observed the scientists working behind glass, where even Miss Snowfall did not have clearance to go, at the tanks that seethed with life, the lungs of Fallow. Always, at the end, we sat on the grass beneath the trees. Many of our classmates dropped off to sleep, for the grottoes made one drowsy. With slow gestures, Miss Snowfall unbraided her hair and massaged her scalp, as if to allow the warmth to penetrate her skull. Her braids undone, her hair standing up, she looked winsome and very young. She began to tell us stories from the Bible. She spoke of poplar and chestnut trees, and of manna, which is white like coriander seed, and tastes of wafers made with honey. The light of the grottoes filled me to my fingertips—not like a Sunday light, which often accompanied terrifying words from the pulpit, confessions, and scenes of discipline, but like the light of seven days, in the day that the Lord bindeth up the breach of His people and healeth the stroke of their wound.

Often Lia crept into Miss Snowfall’s lap and curled up there, sucking her thumb. Anywhere else, we would have mocked her for this babyish behavior, and who knows, even Miss Snowfall might have disapproved. But the grottoes enfolded her in their magic circle. I suspect Miss Snowfall knew, though we did not—yet—that Lia was beaten at home, more often and more severely than any of us, even Temar. Whatever the reason, she cradled Lia, murmuring of the aloes and the cedar trees which are beside the waters. Once, sitting very close to them, I discerned beneath the chemical tang of sterilization another smell, secret, rich, and sweet, a stink which I realized came from Miss Snowfall’s feet. At that moment I heard, as clearly as if I had spoken them, the words: Here is the peaceable kingdom.

• • • •

This is not the first time I have written something I intend to submit for preservation. I have submitted a number of works, more than I care to remember. All have been rejected. I have submitted dramas, fantastical stories, novels of Old Earth, children’s tales, even hymns. At this point, merely to pass by the archives gives me a queasy feeling. For this reason, I rarely go into town, and if I need something unavailable in Housing, I pick it up from Sister Bundle’s little stand, rather than visiting the stores. It is a terrible feeling to have your work pulped. Brother Chalk at the archives—whom I call Ezera, since I knew him at school—tries to comfort me by telling me that pulped paper makes fresh paper possible, that destruction and renewal is the cycle of life. His remaining hair clumped at the back of his head, his chubby jowls fringed with beard, he is a good man, a father, sympathetic, and one of my best friends. The last time I spoke with him, I thanked God that I had no pencil with me, for I might have succumbed to the temptation to drive it into his hand.

Outside on the street after I was rejected, the walls of the village were crisp, the gleam of the Castle door in the distance extraordinarily distinct. I walked home with the new sheaf of paper under my arm. And I began to write in a different direction, without thinking of the Council. I began to write what I feel is truly worthy of preservation, what I cannot help preserving in my memory. I have no doubt that this writing, too, will be pulped. But I feel at the same time that I am enabling something of Miss Snowfall to hover in the world. The more I write, the more her presence grows, and I am amazed at how much I remember of her, a person I had to a large extent forgotten, first because I was preoccupied with my own problems, and later because the memory of her was so painful. “Put it in the dustyard,” we say, when we mean that a thought or question should disappear. “Put it in the dustyard, Agar,” Temar said to me, the night I saw her spit a tooth into the sink. But lately only these scenes stand out to me, and I kneel, overwhelmed, in the dustyard of memory.

Strange that this dustyard should hold images of such splendor. Miss Snowfall’s bright face, her laugh, her stockings mended poorly because (she said) she was lazy, her wobbling progress through town on her brother’s bicycle when he visited her from the mining camp and loaned her his machine. Miss Snowfall, living in town as she did, had never been granted a bicycle, but at some point her brother had taught her how to ride, and sometimes on Saturdays she appeared, shaky and triumphant, running her usual errands in fine style. She always dismounted with a nervous leap, which sometimes caused the bicycle to fall over, spilling her packages on the ground. Then she would laugh so merrily that whoever was around her laughed too, helping to pick up her things, never embarrassed. Even Sister Wheel, standing outside by her eternal cup of coffee, allowed a faint smile to thaw her face when Miss Snowfall crashed that bicycle, and Miss Snowfall would dust herself off and greet Sister Wheel, as she always did, for she feared no one—on the contrary, she had a special affection for the oddest characters in the village. She stopped to chat with Sister Wheel every Saturday, bicycle or no, though “chat” seems an exaggerated way of describing a conversation with Sister Wheel, who tended to stare at passers-by with an expression of controlled fury before dropping a “Hello!” from her mouth like a stone. Sister Wheel had been a Young Evangelist, and was now what was called “peculiar.” She was often alluded to in sermons on the virtue of moderation. But Miss Snowfall spoke to her naturally, and in response I once heard Sister Wheel reply to her with a complete sentence: “It’s a waiting game, Sister, that’s all.”

How wonderful it was to see our teacher outside school, to hear her addressed as “Sister” rather than “Miss,” to greet her formally in the street while she twinkled at us with a kind of amusement that failed to conceal her pride in our good behavior. She spoke to our parents, she knew everyone, she greeted our little brother Yonas and laughed when he hid his face in our mother’s neck, she was an ordinary person, carrying ordinary things, syringes, bags of flour, some gum she needed to fix a crack in a table. Meeting her like this, we felt that the marvelous air she breathed, the life she lived, was accessible to us, close. Best of all was seeing her brother in church: a short dark man with a heavy beard who once showed us the knife he kept in the side of his boot.

Why is it that when I write these memories down, they swell until they seem to contain my whole body? Miss Snowfall and her brother in the churchyard, convulsed with laughter as Bishop Gloss walked by with crumbs in his beard. Bishop Gloss was the most terrifying man in the village, the head of every meeting, a brooding presence at every disciplinary discussion, he had driven Brother Lookout out of his mind, it was said, he had come to our house to reprimand our father for keeping a dirty henhouse. We couldn’t imagine laughing at him even if, at the fellowship meal that followed the service, he had bathed his whole head in soup. But Miss Snowfall and her brother stood frozen with suppressed mirth at the sight of the crumbs suspended in his majestic beard. Tears started from her brother’s eyes; Miss Snowfall crossed her legs just as we did when we laughed too hard. She pinched her brother’s arm harshly, like a child. At that the air came slowly out of his nose with a high-pitched whistle like the sound of the ancient brakes on his bicycle . . . Memories sparkling palely in the dustyard. The way Miss Snowfall lifted her chin when she said to Temar: “You may keep the hat.” The hat, a knitting project, certainly should have been unraveled when it was finished, the thread returned to the box. But Temar had picked out all the black threads with such care, knotted them together so cleverly, even the hair and wire. And Miss Snowfall, with a strange redness around her eyes, said: “Keep the hat.” In the same way she said to me, a year later: “You can be a writer.” Another excessive gesture, the jutting chin, the red, sore-looking eyes. The other children snickered; Temar ducked her head, embarrassed. But Miss Snowfall said firmly: “Writing is a noble pursuit.” The words sounded awkward, as words do when they have never been said before.

Perhaps this is why my memory of her is illuminated, enveloping: because, as much as we loved her, she dwelt among us like a stranger. I see her standing by the chalkboard, her arms crossed, rubbing her sleeves as if to keep off a chill, her face closed down, inert. Miss Snowfall could not bear discipline. If her pupils interrupted her—Markos and Elias were the worst offenders in our class, scuffling in the back—she simply stopped speaking. She would retreat into herself, go to the window, press her handkerchief to her lips. The first time this happened, we were entertained, we wondered how long it might go on, and an evil spirit seemed to seep into the room, the cruel, gloating twin of the spirit of happy permissiveness that surrounded us when we spent whole afternoons building cities from empty jars. The chatter grew louder; Little Yosef laughed his braying laugh. Then Temar got up and strode to the back of the room. “Shut up!” she shouted at the boys. “Yes, be quiet!” I echoed, running up behind her, and some of the others joined in: “Let Miss Snowfall talk!” Temar’s fists were clenched, her whole body shook, the air was charged with unbearable energy, and Elias looked us up and down with his slow gaze, a sneer spreading on his face, and I felt that something terrible was going to happen, when Miss Snowfall shocked us, shattering everything.

“No, no!” she cried breathlessly, rushing toward us in such haste that her hip banged against a desk. “Don’t, please don’t!”

She was speaking to Temar and me. Temar’s eyes widened, amazed and hurt, and I felt a pang, for weren’t we Miss Snowfall’s defenders?

“Don’t, please,” Miss Snowfall repeated, trembling.

The class fell silent. Gloom covered us. Temar and I returned to our seats. Tears were trickling down my cheeks; I buried my face in my sleeve. When I looked up Miss Snowfall was paging roughly through a book, trying to find her place. She dropped her chalk on the floor, where it broke. Although I could not have expressed the thought at the time, I understood then that she had a horror of the exercise of power, not only the obvious sorts of power—the rod, the shout—but the type we knew most intimately: the power of the group. She had a horror of the downcast eye that waits for others to act, of the elders appearing at houses because someone, claiming to defer to their authority, has summoned them, of the public prayer that flays a member of the congregation in coded language. In other words, a horror of Fallow.

• • • •

When Miss Snowfall was removed from her position, I had not been at school for two years. It was a difficult time for my family: Temar was working at the Castle and often refused to come home for the weekend, a source of great tension. As I recall, my sister was not at church when the special prayer for Miss Snowfall was held. I remember the heat of the sanctuary, the windows full of light, the grimy feel of the metal pew as I gripped it and scratched at its underside with a fingernail, discreetly, careful not to cause any noticeable vibration. Of course this sensual memory might have been lifted from any Sunday. From that particular day, I remember a sag of the heart as the bishop announced that Miss Snowfall was leaving the school, a feeling of guilt as he described her errors—the “haphazard” and “unorthodox” methods I had loved—and an immediate anxiety about what Temar would say. Then a long, circuitous prayer. Those in Miss Snowfall’s vicinity were invited to lay hands on her, but I was too far away. I could only see, at the distant front of the church, the rustling bulge of bodies surrounding her until she entirely disappeared.

Afterward, at the fellowship meal, I remember thinking she looked scrubbed, almost scoured, as if she had washed her face too hard. Her eyebrows were sparse, her hair faded to gray. She gazed down at her plate with her head tilted, wearing an odd little smile. Several of the children were crying and had to be taken away. The truth is, it was a scene of woe. People were greeting each other, shaking hands, finding their seats. Before starting the meal we sang “The Beautiful River”:

Oh, will you not drink of the beautiful stream,
And dwell on its peaceful shore?
The Spirit says: Come, all ye weary ones, home,
And wander in sin no more.
O seek that beautiful stream,
O seek that beautiful stream.
Its waters, so free,
Are flowing for thee,
O seek that beautiful stream.

The next time I saw Miss Snowfall, Temar was gone. I had been walking for some time. I had set out at dusk, carrying the lantern, and walked along the edge of the pasture all the way to the grain corridor before the light in my hand began to flicker. On Fallow there is always a subtle sense of being closed in. I put my hand on the wall of the corridor; it was freezing. Behind that wall, which reached all the way to the sky, humid air caressed our grain and an intricate irrigation system watered the ground. The water was made at the other end of the corridor and kept in the reservoir. Pipes transported it all over the village. I stood in the darkness, breathing hard. We are capable of such miracles, but no one could bring my sister back to me.

My lamp was growing dim. I turned and headed back toward town, where a cluster of lights gleamed out of the dark. It was like a great ship twinkling all along its sides with holiday lights such as I had read about in the stories of Earth. By the time I arrived among those lights I could no longer feel my feet. I stopped and glanced up at a shadow in one of the windows. Someone stood there, looking out. I wondered if the person could see me. Then the figure vanished and the window shone clear.

I was turning away when a door opened and Miss Snowfall came out into the street. “Who’s there?” she cried, peering into the night.

“Agar, Temar Black Hat’s sister.”

“I saw your light go out,” she said.

I looked down at the lantern in my hand; it was dead.

“Look at that,” I said. I found it hard to work my lips, they were so cold. “Do you know, I was just standing here thinking about ships. Coming into the village, I thought the lights looked like the lights of a ship, but they really look the way I think the lights of a ship must look. Must have looked, I mean. Or perhaps they still look that way, on the green seas of Earth, with the seagulls winging overhead. Do you think there are still ships?”

Miss Snowfall seemed to consider. Then she said: “You’d better come up and charge that light.”

Her room was surprisingly bare. As a child, I had imagined it stuffed with treasure—a more splendid, more glittering version of her junk collection in our classroom. But it was simple, like anyone’s room. Bed, worktable, chair, gas stove, a lamp shaded with yellow roughcloth. There was a ceiling lamp too, but it wasn’t on. Of course I thought about that later. I thought so much about Miss Snowfall’s room, the big shadows thrown by the lamp, the chair covered with something shaggy, perhaps an old coat, where she made me sit. She knelt and tugged off my boots. Her hair was thin, wide tracks of scalp between the braids. She stripped the quilt off the bed and wrapped it around my feet. There was a photograph on the wall, a ghostly deer among weeds. “Oh, Miss Snowfall,” I said, “my sister has run away.”

“Yes,” Miss Snowfall said quietly, and a charge went through my chest, everything coming up, my face swelling and twisting from the pressure, the pressure of my rage, this useless rage that had nowhere to go, and I broke, I sobbed in her chair, I bawled like a calf.

Miss Snowfall pulled off my gloves. She rubbed my hands. When I was calmer, she made coffee. My lantern, plugged into her outlet, had begun to glow. She put a cup of coffee into my hands and sat on the bed with her own, regarding me with frank, unhappy eyes.

I sipped the coffee shakily. “That’s nice,” I said, nodding at the picture of the deer.

Miss Snowfall lowered her gaze.

“I mean, I don’t care,” I added quickly, realizing that the picture could only have come from one of the Council schoolbooks, that it was stolen.

She looked up at me and smiled. For the first time, I noticed the tremor in her lips. Her lips jumped and twitched when she was not speaking. I saw how she tried to disguise it by holding her cup in front of her mouth or drumming her fingertips against her chin. I thought of her old habit of pressing her handkerchief to her lips. I wondered if she had always had this tic, or if, when I was a child, it had been only a vague sensation, a premonition underneath the skin.

I dried my eyes on my sleeve and blinked. “Is it an Earth deer?”

“Yes,” Miss Snowfall said, turning to look at the photograph. Her cheek quivered, but the rest of her body seemed filled with a deep stillness like the otherworldly stillness of the picture. The deer looked into the room where we were. In the photograph, too, it was night. The deer stood motionless, pale, its perfect antlers etched against the dark. Its eyes were globes of molten light, symmetrical and clear. A night camera had captured it, Miss Snowfall said.

“It was wrong to take it,” she added, “but I was angry, and I wanted something.”

“It’s not wrong to be angry.”

She looked at me with some of the old amusement. “No?”

“No. Even Job was angry with God.”

“Yes, but he yielded, he didn’t go about tearing the pages out of books.”

We laughed, then Miss Snowfall sighed and looked at the picture again. She told me it came from one of the fallow regions of Earth. A place abandoned by human beings because they had poisoned it, ruined it. And slowly, once they had gone, the animals crept in.

“I guess all of Earth will be like that one day,” I said.

“That’s the idea.”

I was startled by the harshness of her tone. When I left, she made me take the picture. I folded it up and put it in my boot. It was the last time I saw her alive.

• • • •

I once heard a beautiful story. I suppose that’s why I write: because once somebody told me something beautiful. I have already submitted all the beautiful stories I know, so I have had to begin on those that are merely luminous. I was at home, washing dishes, when Selemon burst in to find me. He was wretched, panting, so heated with his run the steam came off him. “Hurry, hurry,” he said. He seized my hand and dragged me out into the road where the sky had just crossed over the milky hour of noon. Selemon was working delivery then, and he had left two days’ worth of meds outside Miss Snowfall’s door, because she hadn’t come to the dispensary. Now it was the third day. He had knocked at her door and called and then, thinking she might be ill, he had kicked his way in. Oh, I know what people say. They say Miss Snowfall was weak, unsuited to the grand task of being human, they say she taught children nonsense, anything that came into her head, she had no plans, she allowed an evil spirit to enter into her heart. I know, I know. Old Sister Nimble was standing in the hall and Selemon roared at her to get out, get away. Part of the clay wall had broken off when he kicked down the door, the doorway was jagged, the door itself had fallen in and smashed the lamp. “Help me, help me,” he said, and I understood everything. We climbed on the bed and he lifted the body while I worked at the knot. It was too tight, I had to climb down and find a knife, there was one inside the cold oven. In the hall, Sister Nimble was ordering someone about, probably children. “Fetch the bishop,” she cried. I cut the rope and Selemon staggered. Pain is the heaviest thing. I cradled Miss Snowfall’s head as he laid her down. I know what people say, but I am saying Miss Snowfall practiced, better than anyone else in the village, our highest value, what we call yieldedness. She yielded and yielded until there was nothing left. In the room we found boxes of meds, potatoes, jars of sour milk. The food was just a few days old, but it was months since she had taken her injections and her body, Yodit told me, was worm-eaten with radiation. Yodit assisted the examining physician, who determined that this body was too contaminated to be returned to the grottoes. I know that people consider this the truly unpardonable sin, worse than suicide: the selfishness of withholding one’s body. But Miss Snowfall’s body was truly a humble body, a body of Fallow, one that had given up Earth and submitted to this place. Because she had yielded so fully, she was buried in the dustyard. Very few came. I was there, and Selemon, and a few of her other students. Sister Wheel came, looking tense and strange so far from her own yard, and Miss Snowfall’s brother arrived on his bicycle halfway through the service. He dropped his vehicle in the dirt and stood with the tears running into his beard. He would die himself, only a few weeks later, under mysterious circumstances. He was found in a tunnel, lying on his back with a handkerchief over his face, and the miners said that a ghoul called a Fetch had carried off his soul. The Fetch is a particular legend of the miners: They say she looks like a woman in a green dress, and that some, in the depths of the caverns, have taken her for a flame. Anyway, I heard Deacon Broom had to go out there and reprimand them for their superstition and pray over the place. And now I think I’ve filled this slate to the edge—except, of course, for the photograph of the deer, which I include here, with apologies for keeping it. It’s seamed and worn, but you can still see the searing look in the animal’s eyes, that naked clarity, the look Miss Snowfall wore at the window after school, the expression of one who awaits the blue radiance—deep, pure, and tranquil—that only comes in the aftermath of a conflagration.

2. Brother Lookout

There was no open vision.

I was five years old when my cousin Hana took me to see the Earthman.

At the time, Hana had just turned fourteen: a sly, romping, adventurous girl, part of a group of friends who had been publicly censured for stealing and wrecking a handcart. Temar and I thought she was marvelous. My mother, I knew, was afraid of her, as she was afraid of her own sister, Hana’s mother, our Aunt Salt. “Watch her every minute, and keep off the tracks,” Mother told Hana anxiously in our kitchen, fastening up my coat.

“Leave it alone, Diborah,” Aunt Salt said irritably from the sink where she was banging the plates about, cleaning up after the evening meal.

“Don’t worry, Auntie,” Hana said. “I’ll just take her for a little walk, to the dispensary and back, and then put her to bed.”

Mother straightened, her hand at the small of her back. Heavily pregnant with Yonas, she looked tired, her face clammy and drawn. Half concealed behind her, Temar stuck her tongue out at me; she was angry because she had to stay behind and help with the preserving. At seven, she was no longer a baby and could work. Hana saw the ugly gesture and grinned. I knew that Hana liked Temar better than me, and determined right there that I would not complain, no matter how far we walked.

In the end I had to complain, because Hana took me far beyond the dispensary, through the empty streets of the dimly lighted town, through the surveyors’ camp, past the school, into the North District, until I feared she was taking me all the way to the mines. “Come on,” she coaxed, “it’s such a nice night.” And it was, the air a few degrees warmer than usual, the sky set to the cool green glow of preserving season, a glow that would last for half the night. Big vats bubbled in country yards, figures rushed to and fro, the whole world smelled of jam. Still, I felt as if my legs were dropping off. I began to cry, and Hana carried me on her back. “Quiet,” she panted, taking me through a strange deserted yard toward a house on a rise. “Don’t you want to see the Earthman?”

Bent almost double, she carried me up the slope. We knelt at a lighted window. Others were kneeling there too, and we pressed ourselves between them. “Hey,” hissed Hana, “I’ve got my little cousin here. Let her see.” The others, teenagers, pushed me forward against the pane. The window was made of clear wrap and bowed outward slightly. It was warm from the room inside. I was looking down into a basement. There was a stove, a few people standing around, including the village doctor, a bed heaped with quilts. In the bed lay the Earthman.

“Is it a boy Earthman?” I whispered.

“Shh! No, it’s a girl!”

She was very pale, with white streaks in her black hair. Her face looked creased. Tubes led out from under her quilts and connected her to a kind of stand. On the stand lights flashed and a bag swelled and shrank. If you listened carefully, you could hear the grownups talking around the bed. One was the bishop’s wife, Sister Gloss. “We were happy to take her in, brother,” she said, “but you see how it is. We can’t manage her if she’s fading.”

“Oh, I expect she has many years yet,” the doctor said cheerfully, the way he had said, when he set my arm: “This won’t hurt a bit.”

The third person standing beside the bed was cleaning a pair of spectacles with a handkerchief. He was thin, clean-shaven, neatly dressed. He frowned as if considering the doctor’s words. “I’d like to continue my sessions with her,” he said. “Will that be possible at the infirmary?”

“Very difficult, very difficult,” said the doctor. “Sterilization, you see. But the point is, she doesn’t require that kind of care! Only the occasional tonic. Sister, if you keep the equipment on hand, then whenever—”

“I can’t be watching her all the time,” snapped Sister Gloss.

The Earthman whose fate was being decided floated in a deep silence. I tried to guess at the contours of the body underneath the quilts. She seemed taller than ordinary people. Her face was broad and strong; her parted lips formed a bloodless triangle. On the way home, Hana would explain with relish that the Earthman had been shunned. On the surface, her suit had cracked and one of her arms had died. She had repented and returned. At the Castle they had cut her arm off, but it wasn’t enough to stop the ice flowers creeping toward her heart. Eventually, right here in the village, the Earthman would die of exposure, killed by the distant moment when her suit had been damaged. It was like a parable about sin. What struck me at the window, before I knew all of this, was the fact that no one was praying. It was the first time I had seen someone so ill and so alone. Only the thin man seemed aware of the Earthman as a kind of person. He put on his spectacles, looping the stems around his ears. “I’ll take her,” he said. “She can stay with me.”

The teens at the window giggled and shushed one another. The doctor and Sister Gloss exchanged a glance. Then the doctor said: “Well. That would be a help.”

The thin man nodded. “Have you got a barrow?” he asked Sister Gloss. “She’ll have to be transported with the monitor.”

“I’ll see,” she said. “We may have loaned it out for the preserving.”

As she left the room, the audience at the window broke and scattered. Hana clasped my hand as we ran downhill. Walking back through the village she was exuberant; filled to the brim with what she had seen. She didn’t scold when I yawned, she even carried me on her hip. It was then that she told me the story of the Earthman. For a long time this Earthman, whom I never saw again, was a figure of terror for me, a kind of Fetch. The pallor of the Earthman’s skin, her terrible solidity, seeped into my dreams. She seemed to be made of surface. If I craved sensation, I only had to whisper ice flowers in my bed at night and my body would seize up, strangled with fear. When I return to this memory now, however, it’s not the Earthman who startles me, but the thought that the thin man in spectacles, so capable and neat, this man with the steady, reasonable air, is the same person I knew later as the shambling village street sweeper, Brother Lookout.

• • • •

I discovered Brother Lookout’s story accidentally, when I was doing research for my senior project. The senior year, taught by Brother Pike, culminated in a presentation for the whole village, at which each student discussed some aspect of one of the Debates. Each of us began by choosing a set of Debates to work on. Temar, who finished school before me, had chosen the Covenant Debates. Selemon chose the Digital Debates. I chose the Separation Debates, and ended up studying the Young Evangelists.

“Bunch of idiots,” Father said, when I mentioned this at supper.

“I know,” I said. “I’m going to show that.”

“I think it’s great,” said Temar.

Father ignored her, fixing me with a look of exasperation. “Show what? Everybody already knows.”

After that I stopped discussing my project at the table, but I became, if anything, more attached to the idea. I see now that this had a great deal to do with Temar—that is, with the chance to please her by displeasing our father. Temar had done unexpectedly well, in fact brilliantly, at school, and was now employed in the water mines of the Castle, something which put our father past his patience—not that he had ever been particularly patient with my sister. One would think he would have been pleased with her success: Of all the children who went to school with us, she was the only one who managed to get into the Castle, excepting Markos and Elias, whose parents worked there, and whom everyone had expected to take that path. Temar had been expected to work with cows. Now, in the mornings, when she appeared in her narrow jacket with the blue stars on the lapels, our father could not resist a sneer: “Oh, very pretty,” he’d say, or “Oh, very fine,” when she bent down to pull her regulation boots over crisp white trousers. Far from pleasing him, her accomplishments goaded him to fury as much as her “proud looks” and “defiance” had ever done. “Oil and water,” my mother used to sigh, in reference to the two of them, or, more often: “She just has to wind him up.”

Since going to work at the Castle, Temar had begun to seem distant from me. My senior project brought us temporarily back together. We whispered in bed at night, as when we were little. I told her about the sermons of the young Bishop Gloss, which I’d borrowed from the archives. I described his biting eloquence, the way he compared the Young Evangelists to a leprosy broken out of the burning. “He is a leprous man,” the bishop had cried, “he is unclean; the priest shall pronounce him utterly unclean; his plague is in his head.”

“His plague is in his head,” Temar intoned, in such a skillful imitation of the bishop that we had to smother our giggles with blankets.

“It’s sad, though,” she added a moment later, still under the blankets, in the cave warmed by our breath. “The poor Young Evangelists. If they’d been back on Earth, in the Former Days, they might still exist. They could’ve formed their own church.”

“There’s only one church,” I said—a shocked reflex.

“You know what I mean. Their own little church. Like they used to have on Earth. All these Debates we’ve had—somebody always has to lose. On Earth they didn’t have that, they had schisms instead.”

“But a schism is terrible!”

“I know.” She pulled down the blankets, emerging from our cave, and I followed her into the cold black air of the room. It felt even colder after being inside. I held the blankets close to my chin. “I know it’s bad,” said Temar, “but at least the Earthmen had space. If people didn’t like the way other people were doing things, they could leave. They’d go off over the next hill and build their own church. Brew coffee on Sundays to their hearts’ content. Wear bonnets with strings or without, as they liked. It was a bigger world.”

“More extreme, though,” I countered.

“Oh, extreme.” I could hear her smirking in the dark. “Brother Pike’s favorite word.”

I retreated into silence, as usual. I couldn’t bear fighting with her. And, as usual, she went on arguing alone into the night. She demanded to know what had happened to the lukewarm being spat out of the mouth of God—had we forgotten about that? Now all we talked about was moderation, moderation, the middle path, keeping the balance, biding our time. “We think we’re preserving the church,” she said, “but the Earthmen wouldn’t recognize us. They wouldn’t even recognize our coffee.”

At last she too fell silent. She wriggled a little closer to me, so that I would feel her warmth and know she was not angry. For all her sharpness, my sister had a great delicacy of manner. Soon her breathing lengthened; she was asleep. I began to drop off too, thinking of Brother Pike, of his scrawny, excitable limbs, of the way he did, in fact, dislike anything “extreme,” of the classroom, the benches, the curtainless window letting in the low gray sky, of the tinge of green in the air before the bell rang, the thudding of boots, of Selemon’s curls, the graceful curve of his lip, the intense shyness of his eyes, his voice, his tenor voice at the youth revival meeting, the way our voices mingled, sharing a timbre despite the difference in our ranges, of the slow walk home, the whiteness of the road, and just as I was drifting off my sister’s words came back to me, the word “coffee” must have come back, for otherwise I cannot account for the turn of my thoughts, and with a jolt that made my eyes spring open I realized what I was going to do. I would speak with Sister Wheel.

• • • •

She lived in a low mud house near the center of town. She was a widow of sorts: She had once been in covenant with a woman who had died of cancer. With her steel-gray hair, her profile slowly collapsing from loss of teeth, she ought to have been moved into Elderly Housing. But a strange aura of remoteness surrounded Sister Wheel, as it had Miss Snowfall, too, making it impossible for anyone to speak to her on the matter, and she kept that little house until her death, when it was torn down and replaced with a larger building housing four families and a glazier’s workshop. This building occupies not only the site of the house, but also the bare, stony yard where Sister Wheel was accustomed to stand for hours. Her rickety metal table is gone, her apparently untouched cup of coffee, her whole atmosphere of gloomy agitation. This atmosphere only exists now in the memory of a few people. I am one of them. I remember the superstitious tingle as I stepped into her yard, an act which, according to the stories we exchanged in childhood, would turn one into a pillar of salt.

As a protective talisman I carried a loaf wrapped in a cloth. “Good morning, Sister,” I said, advancing with a show of bravery. “I’ve brought you a little loaf from Sister Stalk.”

Sister Wheel, true to form, fixed me with burning eyes and barked: “Hello!”

I had feared that Hello more than anything; once it had passed, I felt better, though my heart still fluttered. I stepped closer to her and set the loaf on the table. Strengthened by thoughts of Miss Snowfall, who had once gotten a whole sentence out of Sister Wheel, I said: “I’m Agar. I’d like to ask you about the Young Evangelists.”

It was Saturday; the town was full of people; bicycle bells jangled behind me, and children chased each other, shouting; but it was still horrible when Sister Wheel, who had been looking down at the loaf, turned toward me as if electrified.

“The . . . Young!” she whispered.

“Yes. It’s for my senior project. I’m Agar, the daughter of Brother—”

“Shh! Come inside.”

“What?” I said. I had never known Sister Wheel to be anywhere but out in her yard, from morning until night. Now, however, she was picking up her cup of coffee and the loaf I had brought for her with surprising swiftness. “Bring the table,” she commanded over her shoulder. And I took it up and followed her to the door, and into the house.

• • • •

The story she told me emerged in fits and starts over a number of Saturdays. She spoke in difficult bursts, like a clogged pump. I took notes on my school slate, which I later transcribed in the classroom onto the precious paper provided for senior students. These notes developed into the presentation I delivered in the fellowship hall, my voice frighteningly magnified by the speakers, my body limp and trembling as I spoke into the thick silence that greeted my introductory words: “The Young Evangelists.” The silence of a large group is extraordinarily solid. I felt as if I’d been buried alive inside a wall. Rows of faces watched me from the tables where, on Sundays, we ate our fellowship meal in noisy comfort. The silence was not distant, but close, excruciatingly attentive, lying in wait for me, alert for any mistake, and it had a burning quality, too, the heat of the shame of my parents who sat with lowered eyes, my father rhythmically clenching and unclenching his fist. Writing this, I grip the seat of my chair with my free hand, I scratch it with my nails. Temar was not there. I had undertaken an act of defiance for her and she had not come, she was at the Castle. Oh, how I hated her! Tears stung my eyes, the sound of my own voice cracking filled the hall, reverberating unbearably back through my body, and I rushed toward the end of the presentation, jabbering more and more quickly until I could step away from the podium at last. To stop talking, to join the silence around me, was an immense relief. And yet that larger silence was not mine. On our way home, no one said a word. As we entered the house, Father was overcome and shoved me so that I banged my head against the wall.

And yet I had said so little. I had done as I’d promised Father: I had shown that the Young Evangelists were foolish, unbalanced, extreme. I had compared them to some of our misguided prophets of old Earth: Jan van Leyden running naked through the streets of Münster, Claas Epp who heretically predicted the day of Christ’s return. It wasn’t my argument regarding the Young Evangelists that had produced the silence, but the impropriety, the sheer unseemliness of the topic. This episode in our history was a wound; the cells of the body sprang into action when it was touched, closing about it, closing it down.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” was my silent refrain as I curled around my despair in bed that night, wracked with sobs I would not reveal by the slightest sound, the cords of my throat swollen and aching with screams that were nothing but air. “I didn’t, I didn’t! I didn’t do anything wrong!”

Of course, I had known that my choice of subject was a daring one: That was the attraction of it. But I had planned to skirt the abyss without falling in. I had tried to flirt with danger, yet escape its embrace, and everyone had seen through me. I writhed in bed, scalded by shame.

Now I feel differently. Now Sister Wheel rises up from the dustyard, as clear as if her image were etched behind my eyes. Her big, nervous hands, the flickering lamp, and the dirty dishes stacked in the gloom of the counter seem to hold something immeasurably precious. The windows are covered with blinds shutting out the day. The lamp makes a small buzzing sound as it flickers: There’s a bad connection somewhere. Her face is large, anguished, imploring, the eyes like liquid gems. She tells me that her life is a life of guilt. She tells me this with a reckless openness, something beyond generosity. She’ll tell anyone. Every day she waits for someone to ask. She tells me that she was born with this feeling of guilt, that all the Young Evangelists were, and their inborn guilt led to further guilt, sin upon sin. I’m taking notes. My hand quivers with excitement, the chalk squeaks. I’m in a cave, the closest thing on Fallow to an ancient tomb. Fallow is old, but not ancient; its age has no meaning; its sands and radioactive stones are alien, cold, untouched by human history. But in this kitchen, history is alive. Something has happened here. Once this room was crowded with impatient, warm young bodies. The thick spectacles that had given Brother Lookout his name filled up with fog when he walked in with his Bible under his arm. He also carried a sheaf of papers borrowed from the archives. Laughing, he greeted everyone with the Kiss of Peace. Then he sat on this very counter, his long legs dangling, and read. “The spread of His glorious Gospel . . . the extension of His Kingdom from shore to shore . . .”

• • • •

The idea was simple. We belong to Earth, Brother Lookout explained, but we have abandoned it. We have cared only for our own salvation, our removal from the wars that blaze across its suffering continents, our preservation from its plagues and floods. Like the priest and the Levite, we have passed by the dying man in the road. Unlike true Christians, we have given no thought to our neighbors. We have not considered those who have perished since we departed Earth long ago, their souls crying out for peace. How many have been born since our departure who, had they only been alive at that time, would have joined the trek? Are they to be punished simply for being born too late? How can we receive Gabriel’s reports so complacently? Every quarter century produces a catalogue of horrors, yet we sit here—Brother Lookout struck the counter with the heel of his palm—we sit here like the carrion birds, the eagle and the ossifrage, waiting for others to die so that we might inherit the Earth.

Someone objected that, however much we might want to help the Earthmen, we are unable to communicate with them.

“Not so,” said Brother Lookout, his eyes gleaming behind his spectacles. And here he called on one of the gathering, a certain Brother Pin, to speak. Brother Pin worked at the Castle. He was a slight, sallow creature; the attention of so many people brought tears to his eyes. Twisting his fingers together, he spoke of the Earthmen who arrived in ships from time to time and were shut up in the Castle.

A communal gasp, then silence. The room throbbed like a stove. “Tell them,” Brother Lookout said quietly. And, weeping, Brother Pin went on. He said each Earthman to arrive was locked in a room, instructed in our language, and questioned. Eventually, if they survived (and many did not, being worn down from the journey they had made in ships much smaller, though indescribably faster, than our Ark), they were taught the rudiments of prayer and set to work at menial tasks in the bowels of the Castle. Those who refused either work or Christ were shunned.

“That’s what they do,” whispered Sister Wheel. “They give them suits and enough food and oxygen for thirty days, and shun them.”

Of course, I knew this. I belong to the generation after Sister Wheel’s, those who have grown up knowing of the Earthmen occasionally coughed up onto the deserts of Fallow. I also know the arguments that justify their treatment, the essence of the Separation Debates. I would repeat these arguments in my presentation at the church. We are the last survivors, humanity’s hope. We are the angel of the church in Philadelphia, who have a little strength, and have not denied His name. We cannot allow the Earthmen who discover us to depart, or, with their miraculous speed, they would surely return to Fallow with an army. Nor can we permit them to enter the village, sowing discord. This position is now set down in our schoolbooks. I learned about it in Miss Snowfall’s class. I remember the curious deadness and remoteness of her face as she led the prayer after the lesson. This prayer was written in the teacher’s book. She spoke the lines, and we repeated them. For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish. Some of us wept. It is hard for children to accept the idea of separation. For the Young Evangelists, it was impossible. They were going to welcome the lost Earthmen to the village. They were going to learn their languages and use Gabriel to send messages back to Earth, inviting everyone who desired peace to our refuge. If Gabriel could not be used in this way—nobody was sure—they would go to Earth themselves, using the Earthmen’s ships. They would cry out like the prophets of old: “Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near.” The heat in the room was unbearable. They opened all the windows. Someone began to sing. Harmony filled them, as in a revival meeting. In the coming days, their passion would spread. They would go from house to house, eagerly preaching the truth, demanding others’ support. And they would be victorious. No contrary voice could conquer them. “We were right,” said Sister Wheel, her mouth working. They would receive permission to bring an Earthman down into the village, provided that Earthman accepted Christ. The first one, and indeed the only one they were ever able to bring, was the one I saw that night with my cousin Hana, her great prone body battered by the sands. Her name was unpronounceable. They called her Sister Earth.

• • • •

When Brother Lookout was disciplined, it was discovered that he had hoarded a great deal of paper in his rooms. A little paper factory was set up in the kitchen, with two broad vats on the floor and drying screens on the counters. There were more screens underneath the cot where Brother Lookout slept in the musty smell of the slurry composed of kitchen scraps and his own used paper, and stacks of paper were piled up everywhere, a resource that certainly should have been returned to the archives to be pulped or filed.

Most of these papers are records of what Brother Lookout called his “sessions” with various patients. He was the first and last psychologist in the village. He had discovered the field of psychology as a young man, Sister Wheel told me, during a brief period working in the archives. Later I learned from Ezera that there are several books concerning this science in the archives, but they are kept in restricted files. Brother Lookout’s papers are restricted, too, but Ezera allowed me half an hour with them in a back office. Page after page, in a handwriting that is sometimes small and fluid, at other times larger and strangely angular, as if carved with a knife. There are only ever two speakers: “D” and “P,” the former indicating Brother Lookout, the “Doctor,” the latter his patient for the day. Everything is dated, but there are no names. Apparently, Ezera says, Brother Lookout kept a calendar on which he recorded the names of his patients, a key to the records and the shifting identity of “P.” The charred remains of this calendar were discovered in his stove.

D: What is your first memory?

P: Fog.

D: What is fog?

P: Something that makes it hard to see, like a veil.

[P. takes my glasses and smudges them with her thumb.]

D: And what can you tell me about this fog?

P: It was autumn, and they were burning the rice fields.

I wrote these words on my hand. It’s the earliest entry I can link to the Earthman. It’s in the small writing, from the days when Brother Lookout seemed in control of his pencil. Afterward came the big, boxlike writing, as if he were trying to construct a room the words could fit inside.

• • • •

I pieced together the story of Brother Lookout over some time, from a number of sources. From Sister Wheel, I learned of his leadership role among the Young Evangelists, although, she added, clasping her hands together on the table, he practically dropped out of the group after the Earthman’s arrival. It was at that point that she and her partner in covenant, whom she referred to only as Rahel, became leaders, holding long debates in the fellowship hall, petitioning the Castle unsuccessfully for clearance, and meeting with the old bishop and then, when a new one was chosen, with Bishop Gloss. “People began to laugh at us,” she said. Her frown deepened; her eyes flashed, roving alarmingly from side to side. “What about Brother Lookout?” I said, to distract her, and she froze.

“He was—he was with the Earthman,” she stammered at last.

He was with the Earthman in his rooms behind the archives. She slept in the bedroom. He had made up a cot in the kitchen. Sometimes she was strong enough to come out and sit at the table. She ate the breads and pancakes prepared by the women of the church. At first these charitable women were allowed in. They would leave the food they had brought on the table and sit down with the Earthman for a while. But soon Brother Lookout began to stop his visitors at the door. “Thank you,” he would say, standing in the doorway, taking the food.

At this point, Sister Wheel lost the ability to follow the thread. She veered away from the story, she went back in time. She told me that Brother Lookout was the middle child in a family of three sons. He was the weakest and the most intelligent. Something in the way she fixed her eyes on mine suggested that she was pleading. “You know how he walks,” she said, demonstrating by swaying in her chair, thrusting her head forward and shaking it in Brother Lookout’s manner. “He used to get like that sometimes, even then.”

Her story began to disintegrate. She told me about the marvelous humor Rahel preserved during her last illness. The way she would describe Sister Wheel’s stews, which grew worse and worse under the stress, as “fearfully and wonderfully made.” “And you know,” Sister Wheel added, as if the connection between the thoughts were obvious, “I was a cart driver. I was the best cart driver in the village.” She carried the most precious things, medicines, plastics, rare wood from the grottoes. “I can’t believe,” she said, “they took my job away.”

The day she said that was the last Saturday I went to her house. I did not learn, from her, the story of the fall of the Young Evangelists. I remember running outside, chalk and slate rattling in my satchel, and pausing in her yard for a gulp of air. The light slanted toward dusk. The air was saturated with dust; in the distance, the Castle door threw down a tremulous golden ray. I did not learn, from her, of the suspicions of the church women, the curious dank smell that seeped under Brother Lookout’s door. I learned only that he loved Earth, that he wanted to save every soul in the universe, that he was a middle child, that he was intelligent, shy, weak, a gifted preacher, that his trousers were always an inch too short, that he studied a lost philosophy, a science of dreams, memories, comfort, and terror. “What is your first memory?” I don’t know. Before I left her, Sister Wheel put her hands over her face. I ran outside, panting. In the sky, a ray of gold. It was from Ezera that I learned how the Young Evangelists fell. It was after Temar was lost. I was drowning, gasping for life, and everyone knew it. Ezera, my old school friend, couldn’t refuse me anything. He unlocked a back office and brought me restricted files. Brother Lookout’s papers, the long dialogues between “D” and “P.” Such a strange faith, this psychology. A belief in the power of memory. It is outlawed now, stamped out with the Young Evangelists, shunned like the Earthman who was taken away from Brother Lookout’s rooms, cringing in the metallic light of day. This part of the story I learned from my cousin Hana, who, with a group of friends, ducked out of school early, having heard a rumor of some excitement in town. “She was as ugly as rock,” Hana exclaimed. “Her dress rode up—do you remember that, Yosef? Her dress came up in the middle of the street!”

“Bullshit,” her husband, Yosef, called laconically from the next room.

“It did, I tell you!” said Hana, yanking up her own skirt where we sat in her kitchen. Her baby girl, who sat on the floor trying to eat a potato, looked up curiously. “Slabs!” said Hana, slapping her own thigh. “Great white slabs of flesh they were. Ugh! Her legs kept crumpling, and the flesh kept jiggling. But some of the boys said she had nice great shaking breasts, too! I used to run with a nasty crowd, and Yosef was the worst of them!” she concluded, laughing heartily.

Deacon Broom and Brother Wick, two Council members, pulled the Earthman into the street. They dragged her onto a cart and took her away. And so the Earthman was shunned a second time, and it was decided that Earthmen would never be admitted among us again. Ezera let me see some of the records pertaining to the issue, most of them written and signed by Bishop Gloss. It was Bishop Gloss, too, who spoke at the evening meeting. “And now, O our God, what shall we say after this? for we have forsaken Thy commandments.”

It was the end of the Separation Debates. Sister Wheel sat with her face in her hands. I ran outside, chalk clacking in my satchel. In our schoolbook it said simply, “The Earthman could not adjust to life in the village. The Young Evangelists confessed their error and were reconciled with the church.” That was how I would end my presentation. Now I stood in Sister Wheel’s yard, drinking in the chilly air. The light slanted. It was preserving season, and there would be a long pale night, shadows etched on all the roads. I was young. Sometimes it’s hard to remember how very young I was. Strength coursed through me to the ends of my fingertips. I would never be a bitter, dried-up woman like Sister Wheel, or pace the streets all day like Brother Lookout. I would go home, feed the chickens, eat my supper, bring in the wash, and go to the youth revival meeting to pray and sing, to stand beside Selemon, to kick his ankle when he kicked me, to pass a slate bearing a caricature of the youth leader, Sister Small. More and more, I see this writing project as a kind of rescue. I don’t want to forget the dimness of the sanctuary, how different it looked at night without the Sunday light streaming through the windows, how different it sounded with so few of the pews filled. When people ran in late, their footsteps echoed. Sister Small was stocky, harassed, with straggly brows and a shiny nose. Only a true spirit of sacrifice could have induced her to put up with us as we tussled and writhed with laughter. Anything could set us off. Elias stood up and, for no reason, cracked Ezera across the head with his hymnal. Yodit’s stocking tore. “Oh, pins,” she said. Even the hymns made us laugh, the boys winking as they boomed out the line: “Here I raise my Ebenezer.” Naomi was my best friend then. I pinched her thigh when she made me laugh too hard; she drove her fist into my hip. The world was made of her soft brown body, the slippery pew, the shadow of Selemon’s cheek, the odors of coats, cowshit, boots, a child’s sickness cleaned up long ago. Holy smells. The deacon dragged the Earthman to a cart. Bishop Gloss stayed upstairs in Brother Lookout’s room. “The brother remained defiant,” he wrote. He recorded everything he found in the rooms: the hoarded paper, the vats of slurry, the burnt calendar. “The brother could not be persuaded to see his error,” the bishop wrote. “It was necessary to bring him before the congregation.” It was necessary to bring him to evening meeting, which the children did not attend. It was necessary to display some of his papers. It was necessary to display the drawings of the Earthman and the drawings of the Earthman and Brother Lookout together. It was necessary to display the drawing of Brother Lookout with his hands tied and the plastic tube that was used to do the tying. After revival, we would go to somebody’s house to help with the preserving or the hog killing, if there was one. Sometimes one of us knew where to go, sometimes we merely followed the sound of voices or the mouth-watering odors of sugared fruit and smoke. Always there were places to get lost along the way. There was a recess in the alley between the infirmary and the dyeworks. There was a shed with a broken door behind Brother Blunt’s. The best place was the old surveyors’ camp, with its trackless wastes, its sheltering piles of stones. In the camp, you had the feeling of standing at the edge of the world. There were caves, too: You could go in and touch the wall where the village ended. We were supposed to stay out, because of the radiation. “I don’t care,” I said. Selemon pressed me to the wall and his hat fell off. It was necessary, wrote the bishop, to display the bruises on Brother Lookout’s wrists, to remove his shirt and reveal the stripes on his back. At this point, the brother began to show himself more tractable: He stopped demanding to know the whereabouts of his partner in sin. Unfortunately, he still refused to pray or to repent. Hands were laid upon him, and the people began to sing. The caves at the surveyors’ camp were the site of such intricate negotiations. Can I undo this clasp? Yes. This one? No. Selemon took off his shirt, his breath smoked, I feared he would freeze. He had the body of a waterbird of the grottoes. So graceful, shivering, thin. At last, wrote the bishop, the brother repented. The poison of the Young Evangelists was removed from among the people. “They knew,” whispered Sister Wheel before I left her. “They planned it all. They knew something would happen. All they had to do was wait.” At the time, I didn’t know what she meant. I slipped out of her kitchen and into the yard, where the light was changing, the Castle door diffusing its golden ray. That night I would go with Selemon to the old surveyors’ camp. A rescue project, yes—that’s what this writing is. I know I’ll be accused of trying to stir up dust from the dustyard, but it’s not true. I want to save everything, everyone. I understand the Young Evangelists, who wanted everyone to be saved. And Brother Lookout sweeping the streets of the village so carefully, collecting what we, even we, who prided ourselves on our frugality, let fall in the course of a day: threads, bits of chalk, needles, hair. From gazing beyond the sky, he had turned to peering at the ground, but he was still what he had been, a collector whose first impulse was to preserve. He was the one who gathered the black threads for Temar’s hat. Boys used to push him down, seize his bag of trash and empty it in the street. “Look out, Brother Lookout!” I want to save everything, pick up every hair from the dirt, save the boys too, their chapped cheeks, their fresh and panting breath, these boys who would grow into men who disciplined others and ruled the village with a heavy, brutal, joking confidence. “We’re at our best,” Temar once remarked, “when the generator is broken.” The men had worked on the generator for twenty-four hours. The women kept fires going around them, heated gloves and boots, conjured up steaming bowls of potato soup. Afterward Father laughed so hard in the kitchen with our uncles, remembering who had fallen, who had dropped a wrench on someone’s head. He fell asleep at the table, his face soft and golden like a child’s. Temar put her finger to her lips and knelt to untie his boots . . . This was Temar, who only a few days later, sitting at supper with a swollen lip, said brightly: “You know, there’s one thing I don’t understand! How can a man call himself a pacifist while he beats a girl with a hose?” Yonas burst into tears. Father stood up. He seized Temar by the hair . . . And Brother Lookout died in the old surveyors’ camp, lying frozen in a shallow depression almost like a grave. It was the third time he had run away, I learned from Lia, who used to work at the desk in Elderly Housing. When they moved his bed out, they found the floor underneath it covered with writing. He had been collecting verses from the Bible. Strange verses—“and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them,” “then thou shalt take an awl, and thrust it through his ear unto the door.” As if he were assembling the pieces of a secret message. He only got as far as the first book of Samuel, ending with the words: “And the word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no open vision.”

• • • •

I had my own boat. I’d paddle down the canal. The buffaloes up to their knees in water. Very far in the distance, the train. Words lifted from Brother Lookout’s notes, images that could only have come from her, from the Earthman. Sister Earth. I wrote them on my hand, taking a sentence or two at a time. I thought of how they had been carried to Fallow from a distant planet. They were carried to the Castle and then, when she was shunned, to the surface. Then they came back to the Castle, and then down to the village. And Brother Lookout received them from her in the tiny, musty apartment behind the archives, in the odor of rotting husks. He received so much from her in those isolated days. I see him helping her to sit up, placing a pillow behind her back. I’ve never seen the pictures he drew, I don’t even know if they’ve been preserved. I didn’t ask. I don’t know how D. and P. progressed from speech to touch. I know that he took her words and wrote them down, and I carried them out of the archives as communion wine is carried to the church. I don’t want to spill a drop. The carpets everywhere, in every street. Everyone ate meat on that day, even the poor. What I remember most is the smell of burning leaves mingled with the smell of exhaust. And the old men stretched in the grass beside the road.

Shunned. I see her walking out onto the surface, immediately thrown down and tumbled by the wind. She has to crawl on her belly. Oh, the delicate mask of her helmet. She squirms on, waving her arms in front of her, seeking some sheltering crevice. The dust makes a hard pattering sound on her helmet, the wind roars, she rises to her knees, fighting the storm, she turns to look at the Castle. It rises nobly through the murk, a cold and distant mountain, and watches her mournfully with all its lights.

I think of her weight, her body accustomed to slightly weaker gravity, her long back. This time, she will survive. She will make her way back to the Castle at last, one arm flapping uselessly at her side. She will say: “I repent, I yield.” But what of her second shunning? For a long time I was tormented by the thought of the Earthman sunk in some hole, her chest straining for breath, her face blackening as her oxygen ran out. I used to pray: “O Lord, forgive us.” Then one day I happened to mention her to Aunt Salt. I was visiting my aunt and my mother in the lounge at Elderly Housing. I had brought them some quilting stuff, which delighted them. I sat with them to work at the quilting frame. With age, they had come to resemble each other more closely than ever, and now looked like two gnarled and tufted twins. Aunt Salt still possessed the brighter eye, however, and the quicker tongue. She looked up sharply when I mentioned Sister Earth. I was recalling for the two old women, as an amusing story, the night Hana took me to see the Earthman.

“And she was shunned in the end,” I said with a sigh.

“Nonsense!” snapped Aunt Salt.

I glanced at her, tugging my needle through the cloth.

“She wasn’t shunned. They put her in the grottoes, behind the apiary. She kept bees for twenty years.”

I smiled.

“Don’t grin at me in that foolish way,” said Aunt Salt. “Ask at the grottoes if you don’t believe me. Didn’t I pass her every day for years, on my way to the salt lab? She stood there like an archangel, all in white.”

I will not record the arduous process of getting clearance to the grottoes. Eventually I was admitted, and visited the apiary, where a pair of workers moved through the air with slow, deliberate movements, swathed in white, just as Aunt Salt had said. No, they had never heard of Sister Earth. But there had been, for quite some time, a worker who lived there in the grottoes. One of them gestured toward a nearby shed with a luminous glove. The worker had lived there, in a single tiny room. She was understood to be suffering from some disorder of the spirits, and they took it in turns to bring her a daily meal. She never appeared outside without her full uniform and mask of spotless gauze. She was tall and thin, and did all her work with her left hand. She was the most dedicated of the workers, the most solitary and silent. “Often,” said one of them, “when I arrived in the morning, I would find her already among the hives, a tray of honeycomb in her hand and bees encircling her head like a halo.” They called her Sister Keep.

• • • •

It remains only to report that I did try to speak with Brother Lookout once, though he had a reputation for never talking sense. It was while I was working on my senior project. I was on my way to revival when I saw his unmistakable silhouette bent over the steps of the dispensary. No time like the present, I thought. “Brother Lookout,” I cried, running toward him. He glanced up, looking both affable and cowed, as if he expected to be tormented and was resigned to it in advance. “I want to ask you about the Young Evangelists,” I said.

He smiled, his spectacles catching the stray light from a nearby window. I don’t know why my memory of certain people is illuminated like this. Miss Snowfall teetering through the streets on her borrowed bicycle, Brother Lookout’s glasses reflecting the light. Sister Wheel, too—sometimes when I pass the glazier’s workshop I see her so clearly, standing in her yard as if guarding us all from some invisible threat, and it seems right to me that glaziers work there now, creating lenses through which, perhaps, something of reality might be perceived. I remember that Brother Lookout’s face brightened when I spoke to him, and he answered in tones of unexpected vigor. “It is wonderful that you should ask that, Sister,” he said, “since only last night I dreamt I was crossing the river on a ferry. I wore a student’s coat—I was certainly on my way to join the seminary—and a heavy woolen scarf against the cold. Although the sky was dark yellow, and the waters rather turbulent, I felt sure that we would reach the other side.”

3. Temar

This world is not my home.

I had hoped to complete these recollections without speaking of Temar at any length. Yet it seems impossible to conclude without telling her story. Caught between the necessity and the pain of writing about her, I have not written anything for weeks. It was yesterday, as I was coming home from a visit with Yonas at the old place, that a solution occurred to me. Yonas had taken me out back to see the hens, and at the sound of their subdued voices and the smell of their feed I was overcome, as often happens, by the memory of the past. Suddenly I saw my sister standing by the coop, with her particular slouch that expressed disillusionment with everything around her, the big black hat casting a lumpy shadow on the wall, and her gaze, sharp, sober, and appraising. She was looking at me precisely as she had the day before she ran away. I remember she told me: “You’re one of the innocents.” The “others,” she went on, clearly classing herself among this group, have only three choices: “Fade, fester, or run.”

As I walked back to Housing, Temar seemed to hang beside me, glittering softly. Her voice blossomed just inside my ear. I entered my room, turned on the lamp, closed the door, and took off my coat and boots. She was still there, like the light on a page. I don’t know why she seemed to me like light on a piece of writing. But for the first time in years, I opened my trunk and took everything out. The good dress, the extra quilt and towel, the half-finished scarves and mittens, the mug stamped “Trust in the Lord” that Father left me when he died. At the very bottom, a sheaf of papers tied up with green thread. It took me a long time to undo the knot. My legs ached from kneeling on the floor beside the trunk, but I wouldn’t get up. It was as if I were caught there, engaged in a struggle with something. This was a battle and I must see it through. I took off the string and smoothed the papers on my lap, I gripped their edges. Jacob wrestled the angel by the waters of the brook and said: “I will not let thee go except thou bless me.” Temar, I thought, I will not let thee go except thou bless me. And I realized that rather than writing about her, I could include her own words in my writing, this long letter she left me and which I have kept in the trunk, hiding it like a sin. Dear Agar I am going away for good. I read it once, then put it away for years. Forgiveness takes so long. I wonder, who is the angel—Temar or me? Which of us has the power to bless? Which will not let the other go?

• • • •

Dear Agar I am going away for good. I’m not the writer in the family but I am leaving you this letter to say good-bye. There’s so much I want to tell you so you can understand a little bit and not hate me too much—at least not more than you have to. I couldn’t tell you any of this before because of the Rule of Mary—one of the things I hate the most. We’re supposed to keep everything that happens at the Castle and ponder it in our hearts. Don’t Tell Anybody, is what it means.

Well I never told anybody but now that I am leaving I guess I can. I’m so lonely, I want to take you up to the Castle. I want to take you up on the ladder into the blue hall with the white steps leading up in eight different directions. Look, you’re going up Staircase E. It already smells like salt. You hang up your coat and hat on the rotating rod. It’s amazing how poor the village things look there, how drab and dirty. Through the big windows comes the day. You kneel down with the others and say a prayer. Nobody introduces or leads this prayer, it just happens, it’s a tradition. It feels good to kneel down and close your eyes. Sometimes people put their heads all the way down on the floor. I’ve done that a couple of times. It’s just the day is so big. Especially the first time you see it, it’s hard. It’s the surface. It can make you a little sick. Like going into the grottoes, but different. You feel like there’s nothing holding you down, like God’s going to snatch you right up into the sky. What we call a sky down in the village is not a sky, it’s just a roof. In the Castle you really see the sky. It’s moving and coiling, full of dust. Or sometimes it’s perfectly still, a low pink color or a whiteness that never ends. The really scary thing is that you want to run out in it. That’s why we kneel, I think. We’re trying to keep ourselves down. You’re glad those windows are so thick and protected with layers of clear wrap because you want to burst through, to throw yourself onto the surface. It’s a little bit like looking down a stairwell. You know you shouldn’t jump, you’ll break something, but the pull to jump is so strong. The truth is, people want to fall. Markos used to call it the power of Satan. Sister Glove, our superior, called it vertigo.

You’re going down a hall. You have a blue tab on your jacket because you work in water and you follow the blue arrows on the walls. The smell of salt grows stronger, the air heavier, your hair springs. It’s hard for me to tell you what you see. Like the church, I guess I can say. The high ceiling and the light. There’s scaffolding you can climb on, but you have to be careful. Everything’s dripping. It’s very warm. Salt crystals have formed underneath the tanks. You can feel the distant vibration of the drills. My job was cleaning. I cleaned the fixtures, the tanks, the walls, the floors, the hallways, the windows. You probably thought I was doing something more exciting. I’m sorry for letting you think that, now. I wasn’t a scientist. I carried a bucket and rags. I wore gloves because the solution can rot your hands.

You can imagine—after some time—the empty halls—the stillness of the tanks—the hums and clanking making the stillness even deeper—the routine, knowing what time the inspectors come, and Sister Glove—yes, the routine—after a while you start to break it. You start to know the blue arrows. You can turn left instead of right, following a red or green arrow, and catch up with the blue ones later on. There’s a moment when you’re in the wrong hallway, following the wrong arrows, you know you’re lost, you’re going to get caught, and everything stiffens. Your chest is so tight it’s like being pinned to the darkness of that hall. The smell. Something cooking—you must be near the kitchens. And maybe a laugh comes down the tunnel, or voices, somebody singing, and the excitement is so much your knees shake. Then you come into a grayish light, gasping. It’s a blue hall. You’re so relieved. You know exactly where you are. Everything softens now, and it’s a kind of happiness. It doesn’t last long. Something pierces it. Regret . . .

My defiance, Father used to call it. That feeling of longing. It made me strange, I know. Mother used to ask me: Why do you wind him up? I was so sorry to hurt her, I’d cry as if the world was ending while she dabbed my ear or bandaged a cut on my elbow. That was in the cool room. I know you were waiting outside, so maybe you heard. It always seemed funny to me that that was where everything happened. The cool room was where Mother brought the disinfectant and towel to clean you up and it was also where Father sent you when you were really in for it. The smooth hard floor and the jars on the shelves. The sliver of a window up near the ceiling, partly covered with tarp. A piece of sky. The freezer where I hit my head. The pile of potatoes where I fell. They rolled everywhere. Believe it or not, me and Father both started laughing.

This isn’t what I meant to write but I guess it’s all the same thing, really. My life. A feeling of being pierced. I used to cry so much and I used to hate you, and Mother, and even little Yonas, because none of you had that feeling. Of course I hated Father most of all, even though I believe he had the feeling too, maybe even worse than me. I hated him and I loved him, like David loved and hated Saul. I used to imagine Father as Saul and myself as the boy David. I was the Lord’s anointed and Father was chasing me to kill me, he was pursuing me into the wilderness of Ziph and the wilderness of Maon. I’d pray: Let not my blood fall to earth before the face of the Lord; for the king of Israel is come out to seek a flea, as when one doth hunt a partridge in the mountains.

Maybe my trouble was the power of Satan. Maybe it was vertigo. Whatever it was, it pierced me. I felt it even in the Castle. That made me sad enough to die, because all the time I’d been thinking, if only I could get into the Castle, everything would change. It did seem changed for a little while. There was a happy time, but it didn’t last. Soon it was just blue arrows, a bucket, and gloves. The long blank halls, the glaring sky, the maddening feeling of something better happening somewhere else. It was like an itch. I felt myself getting quieter. I knew it wasn’t good, but I couldn’t help it. Every day the same low chime, the signal for lunch. In Water we had our own dining hall. Sandwiches came on a cart. Sister Glove ate carefully, primly, her hands covered with scars. And Markos would make jokes with me about cows. He kicked my feet under the table. Once he cornered me by the tanks and tried to kiss me. I dashed him with my whole bucket of solution. I didn’t hit his face, but not for lack of trying. It was good he was wearing a suit. And then we’d go home for supper, for prayers, for Saturday shopping, for church. Do you see what I mean? I’d seen everything, and that’s all it was. I told myself: That’s it, there’s nothing more. But I knew there was something more. I believed in it like I believe in God.

You’re going down a hall. A glance behind you. No one’s there. You turn down an ill-lit corridor, carrying your bucket and rags. You wander around corners, chasing green arrows, yellow ones, red, in no kind of order. Eventually all the arrows are black. And when you get deep enough, there are no arrows. Sometimes a small light blinks in the darkness. That’s frightening, because it might be an alarm. There are places so dark you can only guess at their shape by the sound of your footsteps and the taste—either dry, or foul and suffocating—of the air. These abandoned caverns and tunnels became my playground. Of course I couldn’t go where people were—after the white arrows, for example, into the busy halls, toward Gabriel. But I grew bolder and bolder in the tunnels. I even took out my torch. The light jumped around because my hand was trembling. But there were marvels down there. Hundreds of doors that wouldn’t open. Some had windows. I’d shine my torch in and see shapes standing in the dust. Things that looked like consoles and stoves. There were rows of empty cages. It made me remember that a good portion of the Castle was once the Ark. I saw beds in some of the rooms. I thought of people traveling through space, praying and singing. Unser Zug geht durch die Wüste. Hisboch hoy, des yebelachew, igziabeherin amesginu! It made me feel close to something. We have a history, Agar, after all.

Well, it happened. I came out of the tunnels into a dim gray hall. I switched off the torch. I thought I was back among the blue arrows, or at least green. But no. There were no arrows at all. The walls were blank. It gave me a queasy feeling. There were lighted panels set into all the doors. I’d never seen anything like it. I made to turn back, but I heard a sound. Somebody was shouting. I went along the hall and listened at all the doors. My hands were sweating inside my gloves. When I found the door with the shouting behind it I pressed the panel and the door slid open.

There was a man inside. He was on a bed. The thing I remember most about him is the blackness of his nostrils. His nostrils were full of dried black blood. His face looked very white. He stared at me, panting, and I knew he was an Earthman.

His name was Moan. Lugran Moan, he said, though he didn’t tell me that right away. Instead he asked for water. When I entered the room and set down my bucket, the door closed behind me and a light came on, so bright I thought I was caught. I froze for a moment, but not long. I was too angry to be scared. There was a cup with a lid on a sink and I brought it to him. His wrists and ankles were strapped to the bed. One of his wrists was bandaged too. I helped him sit up and drink, and that’s how it started. That’s how I came to be writing this letter now. Moan smelled funny. He smelled human like piss and alien like hay. His hair was like black feathers. He was shaking. Some kind of animal. He didn’t know how long he’d been in that place, he said.

It was long enough to know our language, even though he spoke it kind of funny. Don’t, he said, when I started undoing the straps on his wrists. He said it was no good without a plan. He needed a map, he told me. A map to his ship. It was somewhere in the Castle.

Writing this I’m afraid you won’t understand. You’ll think I’ve run away after a man or just for fun, as if on a dare. It’s not true. The light in the room was white. There was a tautness to it. The tautness of Moan’s throat as he swallowed. After he had drunk he lay down quietly like a child. Who are you? he asked. His voice was hoarse. I told him my name. He repeated it several times, as if to fix it in his memory. Later he told me he was afraid of losing his mind. Since I couldn’t undo his straps I just knelt there with my hand on his arm. I’d taken my gloves off. He lay with his head turned on the pillow and looked at me. How was it possible? He told me that every day the bishop came in and talked to him about the path of Christ. The walls had a strange gleam, like silver paper. Moan said he was being treated for something, but he didn’t know what. Was it the adjustment to our planet that made his body so tired, or was it, as the bishop said, the state of his soul? Every day he was given sermons and injections. They said they would let him go when he was well enough. If he accepted Christ he would be given a job in the Castle. If he remained stiff-necked he would be shunned. Shunned means killed, I told him. I know, he said. He was afraid we would kill him anyway, no matter what he did. He was afraid we were lying to him, using him for something. His blood had been bottled. With a thin instrument, a nurse had scraped the inside of his mouth. When he said that I put my head down on his chest. I couldn’t look at him anymore. I listened to his heart. The walls were strangely silver like the walls of the church decorated for Easter with the silver birds we made in Miss Snowfall’s class. Do you remember those silver birds? They hung near the ceiling, glittering. There was a feeling of enchantment. A smell of oranges. Each of us got an orange after church, fresh from the grottoes. The flesh was sweet, the rind bitter as gall, delicious. Moan’s heart beat underneath my cheek. His breath was in my hair. Help me, he said. If you could take the magic of a childhood Easter, and put it together with all the sorrow we have learned since then—then, Agar, you might understand how I felt. All I can tell you is that I was born again. Was it his face, his mask-like face with the black nostrils? Was it his tender throat? His heart? He was talking because he didn’t understand that already I had crossed over to his side, that I was going to save him. He told me that he was a transporter. He carried materials between the cities—cities, he said, that orbited a dead planet. He had never been to Earth, but his father was born there. Sometimes he picked up Earth materials and transported them from one city to another. Only the bravest transporters visited Earth, which was on fire. He was not one of the bravest. He was lost. He told me that space was full of pathways, and sliding through one of these pathways he had been cast into the galaxy of Fallow. Then he had noticed the Castle and stopped, curious. He had not known that there were human beings so far from the cities. And now he was strapped to a bed. But if I would help him to find his ship he would take me anywhere. He would let me look at his collection of Earth things. I will show you a piece of amber, he said. I will show you a beetle’s shell. But for these things, Agar, I would never leave you. Nor would I leave you for Moan himself. But a falling star means space is real. A fallen angel means there is a Heaven.

Do you remember the story Miss Snowfall told about the two old people? The ones who tried to get medical help at the Castle. The brother was dying and his sister was carrying him around. You liked it so much, and I thought it was garbage. I hated that it was supposed to be sweet and maybe even comforting but the old people couldn’t find anybody to help them. There was a long middle part about the sister going from room to room getting turned away. It should have been just boring but it was worse. Well I have been that unhappy sister. I went looking for Moan’s ship through the Castle. It’s so bewildering, so big. An impossible place. Twice I got caught in the wrong halls. The second time it was Elias from school who caught me—he works in security now. I was lucky it was him because he wrote off my second offense. He didn’t report it. If he had, they would have suspended me for two weeks. On the third offense they kick you out. Thank you so much, Elias, I said, beaming at him, this schoolyard bully, this thug. He still has that way of looking you up and down slowly, that hateful grin. He beats Lia, you know. She told me he beat her for leaving his shirts on the line. After smiling at him in that winning way I wanted to wash my face in solution. I knew I couldn’t afford to keep getting caught. Then one week we had a big job. Drain the tanks, take them apart, clean each individual piece, put them back together. It was an urgent job and because we didn’t finish on Friday we had to spend the weekend in the Castle. That was when I knew it could be done. There was a room full of cots where we slept. Cupboards with dried food you could eat after adding water. Of course I left in the night. I ran to Moan. The halls were weirdly empty and dark. I went much faster, with no bucket, my torch alight. I had trouble finding him though, because I always got turned around in the tunnels. There was always a moment when I thought: I can’t do this. I’m lost. Or I’d come into the gray halls but not find his room. That was worse because I was so afraid he had been moved or shunned. I was afraid I’d never find him again. Running along the gray corridor, flashing my light, slamming the door panels, shouting. I didn’t care about being caught then. The sister in Miss Snowfall’s story was lucky, she got to carry her brother on her back. If only I could have carried Moan. Then, very faintly, I’d hear his cry. I ran to him. I never found anyone else in the gray halls. Earthmen must not come to us very often. That’s why I’m grateful—awed by grace. That’s why I consider myself blessed.

I found him on Friday night and again on Saturday. On Sunday I went looking for his ship. I didn’t find it that night. The Castle’s too big. So many silent halls. Strange places. The labs. A ghostly room full of empty cribs. I failed, but I began to find excuses to stay at the Castle. Unfinished work. Sometimes I broke things, nothing serious but enough to let me stay. And I found the ship. I saw it through a window. There are other ships too, abandoned in the distance, half buried in sand. Some are half ruined, broken apart, pieces scattered around them, as if people have been mining them for parts. Moan’s ship is the newest one, still whole. He laughed when I told him, his eyes bright. He guesses we’ve been trying to get in, but only he can open the door. Only he knows the code. He told me the other things I needed to find, the suits we have to wear, the door to get out. That door, I am sure, doesn’t have a secret code. It won’t be locked. Why would anybody want to get onto the surface? But I can feel vertigo pulling me. It’s pulling me outside. It’s pulling me toward the moment when I will set the prisoner free. To unbuckle the straps on his wrists, his legs. To see him stand up and walk. The flesh unbound. Everything feels alien to me, but also very beautiful. Oh Agar. The most I can say is that I love you and I am sorry. But I have always been a stranger in this place. At least now I will be a stranger without the pain of having failed to belong. For as the hymn says, this world is not my home.

Temar

• • • •

Do you remember the way to the Castle? Its door glimmers above the village, pale and opalescent like a sun. I have realized of late that the Castle door is, even more than the church, the center of our life. That radiant disc beams down on us with a soft, embracing gaze, overseeing everything: the wedding processions going to the church, the coffins borne toward the grottoes on carts, the gossip in the dispensary line, the small battles, bargains, kindnesses, and contracts. Without it, we should be worms. A door is so precious, even if one never steps through. I think of this, walking with Ezera and Sheba after church: how the presence of that door subtly brightens the atmosphere of the village, making us feel humble, yes, and ignorant, but also protected, saved. I sit at the table in Ezera and Sheba’s kitchen, surrounded by their irrepressible children, who call me Aunt Hat. They snatch the rolls from the central bowl; Sheba dispenses scoldings and flicks the eldest son, her favorite, with a napkin. Eventually the children run outside, calling each other in the raw air. They play a game called “cows,” using corncobs for hoofs. They swing on the gate, singing a nonsense song. “Deedy-daddy-doe,” over and over. We are the saved. We have survived.

I lost my sister, I lost my teacher, we all lost the Young Evangelists, the openness and vibrancy of their ideas, but we still have this: our survival. Ezera and Sheba take care of me. Sunday afternoon is mine; I never have to worry that Sheba’s sister Naomi will stop by. Naomi and I have not been close since she married Selemon, and though I am no longer angry, our meetings are unnatural and stiff. But Naomi and Selemon never visit her sister after church, and in this way they take care of me, too. At four o’clock, Sheba walks me out to the road. “Good grief!” she exclaims every time she realizes she’s still wearing her apron. This is when she tells me about her struggles with the children and even with Ezera. In the green afternoon, with coils of hair escaping from her cap, she looks just as she did at school. There is no end to writing, I think, no end to the project of rescue. I realize that Sheba, too, is illuminated. She too deserves to be saved from oblivion, this quiet friend whose face, though lined, always looks burnished as if rubbed with butter. I have left so much out of these pages. I ought to have mentioned Sheba’s kiss at the crossroads, her vigorous hug that almost knocks me over, the jar of pickles she gives me for Lia, whose house I will pass on the way, a jar miraculously concealed until the last moment. I ought to have mentioned Lia’s smile, her capacity for delight, the way she insists I sit down and try some pickles, goes to the coolbox for eggs, and prepares a dish for Elias who, since his accident in a Castle fire, lies immobile in the bedroom. It’s always the same plate, painted by Lia herself with tiny buds. I ought to have mentioned their daughter, with her halo of dense black hair, a child beloved by all the village and already nicknamed the Spark, who sits on my knee and sings while Lia feeds Elias pieces of egg. I ought to have mentioned the burst of dazzling harmony on the road outside, young people singing their way to Bible study. They are preparing for the Christmas service. I ought to have mentioned “Lo, how a rose e’er blooming.” I ought to have mentioned that we are happy.

When, in moments of anxiety, I scratch the underside of whatever I happen to be sitting on with a fingernail, I know that I am engaged in a process of grounding, which, it seems to me, is similar to the process of writing. In this manner I hold myself down and remind myself where I am. Walking from Lia’s to the old place, I think of gravity. When our ancestors chanced upon Fallow, this bleak and poisonous piece of rock, it had almost nothing to recommend it but its gravity, near kin to that of Earth. I think of how, in our displacements throughout history, we have always tried, with a poignant doggedness, to replicate what we have lost. So the hills of Pennsylvania replaced the lost hills of Germany and the wheat fields of Saskatchewan those of Russia. Now, on Fallow, our grain corridor holds yellow-green fields of teff. We are that heart-breaking paradox: wandering farmers. I walk to the pasture, knowing that Yonas will still be with the cows; he has inherited our father’s affinity for them, and also—thank God—our mother’s cheerfulness. And there he is, putting the cattle into the corral. I approach him through the rich, mellow air of the pasture. He is worried about the ventilation and immediately begins talking about it as he settles the animals for the night. I have always been afraid of cows, but my brother moves among them with ease, often laying a hand casually on a flank—perhaps his form of grounding. Once he told me, in a moment of uncharacteristic pensiveness, that to look into a cow’s eyes is to look on paradise.

He is probably right, I think, as we leave the pasture for the dust. The kitchen light is shining from the house. This house has belonged to Yonas since our father died, while I moved to the Henhouse and, after some years, our mother went into Elderly Housing. Mother will be home now, as she always visits Yonas on Sundays, teaching her grandchildren to play cat’s cradle. Her years and even her sufferings have endowed her with the dignified grace one sees in so many elderly people of Fallow. This grace manifests in an almost physical way, like a shining underneath the skin. I kiss her cheek. Do you see what I am trying to say? I am saying that for some of us there are only three choices—fade, fester, or run—but others have a fourth choice: to endure. I am saying that our father could not bear the loss of Temar, his heart went out like a blown match, while our mother took control of all the funeral preparations, even unscrewing the door herself to make room for the coffin. Which of them yielded? I kiss her cheek, I pat my niece’s back, I look up as my nephew tugs my arm, wanting me to toss a ball with him, this boy of nearly eleven years old, handsome and tall like my father, who still sleeps in his parents’ bed because he’s afraid of the dark. I am saying we live a life defined by the loss of paradise, structured spiritually by the Castle in the sky. Each of us must decide how to respond to the idea—the comfort, the torment—that there is another world.

• • • •

And these figures that have passed so close to me without touching—what do they mean? I am speaking of the Earthmen. What does it mean for our survival that others have also survived, that we are not the only souls plucked from the flames? Sometimes at night their names run through my head. Earth, Patient, Keep. Moan. No, I will not reopen the Separation Debates. I see the Earthmen rather as signs that appeared and then dissolved, like communications from Gabriel or writing on a wall. They came to say: Not yet. Earth is not yet for you. Keep patient. And I do keep patient, but I can’t help moaning. I moan like any exile, full of longing for the lost homeland. By the dustyard of Fallow I sit down and weep. For there is another world. There is a world of apples and flowering trees, a world where the fig tree putteth forth green figs. There is a world where goats appear from Mount Gilead, where flocks of sheep come up from the washing, each one bearing twins. Please accept these pages. Accept, this time, my submission to the archives. Accept my absolute submission. If I have written of shame and sadness, I have done so out of reverence for the story we fight to preserve with every breath. I have done so in the spirit of one who endures, in the spirit of those who built the Ark, who set off knowing that, for them, the waters would never subside, who took on self-preservation as a duty and a vocation, who survived for the sake of the sacred human story. For there is another world, a future Earth. There is a land called Canaan. There is a land flowing with milk and honey. There is a country of turtledoves, a garden of pomegranates, of saffron, of camphire, of myrrh. And we will never go there.

© 2017 by Sofia Samatar. Originally published in Tender: Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection, Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her work has received several honors including the John W. Campbell Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She teaches Arabic literature, African literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.

EXCERPT: An Illusion of Thieves (Tor Books)

Cate Glass | 8059 words

A ragtag crew with forbidden magic must pull off an elaborate heist and stop a civil war in An Illusion of Thieves, a fantasy adventure from Cate Glass.

In Cantagna, being a sorcerer is a death sentence.

Romy escapes her hardscrabble upbringing when she becomes courtesan to the Shadow Lord, a revolutionary noble who brings laws and comforts once reserved for the wealthy to all. When her brother, Neri, is caught thieving with the aid of magic, Romy’s aristocratic influence is the only thing that can spare his life—and the price is her banishment.

Now back in Beggar’s Ring, she has just her wits and her own long-hidden sorcery to help her and Neri survive. But when a plot to overthrow the Shadow Lord and incite civil war is uncovered, only Romy knows how to stop it. To do so, she’ll have to rely on newfound allies—a swordmaster, a silversmith, and her own thieving brother. And they’ll need the very thing that could condemn them all: magic.

Coming May 21, 2019 from Tor Books.

Chimera: 1. a mythical creature, a fire-breathing female with face, body, and limbs of three different beasts

2. something that exists only in the imagination and is not possible in reality

I have never believed in fate or destiny or any other concept that invests the courses of our lives with portentous meaning. Most people in our godless world believe we are born into random circumstance, and it is solely our own deeds and choices that determine whether we find ourselves in a palace or prison when we die. I’d not disagree.

Yet we of the Costa Drago still swear by Lady Virtue and Lady Fortune—the two abandoned children of our lost divinities—as if their hands are equal, and we behave ourselves and beg them for gifts that never seem to arrive in the guise we wish. Indeed, the peculiar events that gave me both the preparation and the opportunity to alter the streams of human history, while glimpsing truths of a world beyond my imagining, could not have been better chosen had they been mapped out at the beginning of the world—before the fear of magic condemned a portion of the world’s population to extermination.

The particular random circumstances of my birth and upbringing arrived at this life-altering confluence on a day that began in settled happiness and common intrigue . . .

1

Year 987 of the New Millennium: Spring Quarter

The Shadow Lord’s face gleamed bronze in the lamplight, serene in his strength. Such demeanor befit a man whose quiet word could fulfill a petitioner’s deepest wishes or leave his gutted carcass hanging on Cantagna’s gates.

We have no kings in the lands of the Costa Drago. Our nine great independencies are ruled by men or women whose power stems from family wealth, strength of arms, or brutish arousal of the rabble. Not one of those men or women could match the ruthless wisdom of Alessandro di Gallanos, known as il Padroné—the Master—Cantagna’s Shadow Lord.

Peering through slits in the painted screen, I observed the Shadow Lord’s first petitioner of the day. Boscetti, the antiquities merchant, leaned earnestly across the table between them.

“Padroné,” he said, “my son has taken over my trading partnership with Argento, as you in your wisdom suggested. But bandits have looted his caravans three times in a month because Captain di Lucci’s condottieri refuse to honor their contract with me. If you could just speak to Lucci . . .”

As the merchant wisely ignored the cup of good wine on the table and answered a few incisive questions from the man seated across from him, I watched and listened carefully, as always. I relished my privilege to sit hidden behind the painted screen, laughing at the fools folk could make of themselves when confronting true power, while at the same time adding the minutiae of names, family connections, desires, loyalties, and vanities to my treasury of such matters. The man others addressed as il Padroné and I called Sandro took pleasure in discussing the complexities of his world with a companion who could comprehend them. Even better, so he’d told me, that I could offer observations and ideas of my own.

My education had been extensive—history, music, languages. Dancing and logic. Enough blade-work to defend my owner or myself. Even now, I pursued art and philosophy, the divine study. Sandro called me his chimera—the impossible made flesh—a fantastical creature who mirrored every part of his own soul.

The two voices beyond the screen changed tenor. The conversation had become negotiation. The merchant desired il Padroné to force the mercenary captain, Lucci, to honor their old contract, since the new owner of his trade route was a member of the merchant’s own family.

Boscetti was a fool. Sandro was too wise to squeeze condottieri for a merchant’s favor. Besides the ever-present threat from old enemies like the southern independency of Mercediare, a stirring discontent among Cantagna’s older families had him worried. These families had been staunch allies of Sandro’s father and grandfather. But their resentment of House Gallanos’s stranglehold on power, most especially Sandro’s determination to spend the city’s wealth on public works instead of channeling it into their own purses, lurked amid the present peace like deadly nightshade in a garden.

One incident, one misstep, and the poison could foment an armed rebellion. Civil war. Sandro would need Captain Lucci and every other soldier he could hire. It was no false concern that induced Sandro to keep ten armed men about him wherever he walked—even through the modest neighborhood where his family had lived and granted favor and assistance to all comers for almost a century.

“What of the commission you undertook for me, Boscetti?” Sandro deftly changed the subject of the conversation without agreeing to anything. “Have you had any success with that?”

“Ah, Padroné, my agents believe they might have found the artwork you seek—the Antigonean bronze—buried deep in a vault in Mercediare. Extremely difficult to retrieve. Dangerous. Expensive. The rumors of its Sysaline origins and the bad luck that brings. I doubt I have sufficient resources to retrieve it. Such an unusual portrayal of Dragonis and Atladu, unique in all the known world. Perhaps something more accessible would suit your pleasure just as well?”

“My requirement has not changed.”

Only one who could read the subtle silence between il Padroné’s clipped words would recognize his mounting fury. Boscetti, a purveyor of antiquities, was trying to manipulate a man who hated to be played.

I sat up straighter. This was a matter of much more interest. For five years il Padroné had searched for a particular ancient representation of the monster Dragonis and Atladu, lost God of Sea and Sky. Supposedly Antigoneas, divine Atladu’s own smith, had cast the small bronze statue at his forge in Sysaline—the city drowned in the Creation Wars—imbuing it with sanctity unknown in our godless world.

Sandro believed that if he could gift the statue to his most powerful ally, a most pious grand duc, it would create a true friendship, fixing their alliance against any challenge from his friends turned rivals. But this particular merchant . . . Boscetti . . .

I didn’t know Sandro had commissioned Boscetti to find the statue. Had he heard the gossip that Boscetti’s wife hailed from Triesa, one of Mercediare’s two hundred tribute islands?

The brutish Protector Vizio, tyrant ruler of the sprawling independency of Mercediare, coveted Cantagna’s wealth. Every spring she demanded a share of it, and threatened to seize it by force if Cantagna failed to pay. Someday her legions would march north to challenge us. Thus, Boscetti’s petition, together with his suspect wife, could signify a great deal more than a contract dispute with Lucci’s mercenaries. The Costa Drago bred conspiracies in the same abundance as it did mosquitoes.

“Expense is of no consequence,” said il Padroné. “I shall instruct my bursar to record an increase in your finder’s fee. I’m sure double would be acceptable. Once I have the artifact in hand, you will reap additional rewards.”

The easy capitulation surprised me. Had Sandro some new intelligence to make his purpose more urgent or was he testing Boscetti? I couldn’t wait for evening when he would tell me all and I could warn him about the merchant’s possible entanglement with Cantagna’s old enemy.

A wafting scent of soap drew my attention from the parlay beyond the screen.

Stupid girl! My gangly maidservant Micola had crept into my hiding place. Round cheeks of burnished copper, dark eyes glazed with terror, she did not so much as breathe as she tugged on my sleeve, drawing me to the open door behind me.

Well should she be terrified! If il Padroné detected the least noise behind the screen, he might forbid me sit there when he received petitioners. Micola knew I’d never forgive her for such a deprivation. Far worse would result if the merchant detected us. Micola would be whipped to death as a spy, and I would be exiled at best. For il Padroné and the Shadow Lord were one and the same, and discretion was a pillar of the Shadow Lord’s power.

We slipped out on bare feet, my silken gown but a whisper, her hand clutching her skirt to keep it silent. As soon as we passed through the closet passage and my dressing room into my own rooms, I closed the door carefully behind me and then whirled on her. “Are you entirely mad?”

She fell to her knees, breathless and shaking. “Please, mistress, the villain said you’d die did I fail to deliver his message to you right away. Certain, I’d only dare set foot beyond that door for mortal need.”

“What villain?”

“A young ruffian startled me whilst I tended your sheets, and how he got past the guards ’tis the world’s own mystery. The youth swore he knew you from childhood, and I’d never have believed that, ragged as he were. But he showed me a luck charm exactly like one in your jewel case—that’n graved in bronze with the squiggles and coiled whip—and said tell you ’twas Iren brought you the message.”

The world’s own mystery . . . Surely my own eyes glazed with fear. “What message?”

“He said—Please, mistress, I’d never speak such crude words to you, but for the luck charm so like yours, and you’re ever so kind to me.”

It required every scrap of control I could muster not to choke the words out of her. Iren could be none but my brother Neri. We had once believed backward spelling our impregnable secret cipher.

“He said, ‘The rutting tyrant is for the chop,’ which means a terrible, wicked cruelty, and I told him that no fine lady as you . . . none so educated, so elegant and beautiful . . . would even know about lowborn punishments. But he claimed you’d know exactly what he meant. I was dread fearful he were an assassin, as some folk use tyrant to name—”

She paled, knowing how close she was to treason.

But her panic could not touch mine. As if the brilliant colors of the muraled wall had sloughed away, leaving only gray plaster, so did the false and foolish illusion of my life vanish. Left in its place was appalled confusion.

Only Neri ever called our father a rutting tyrant. Only Neri could walk through impossible barriers by use of true magic, forbidden since the dawn of the world. Yet his message wasn’t about unmentionable skills that could get both of us executed, but the horrifically mundane. For the chop. My father was to lose a hand for thieving? That was impossible.

I halted the girl’s terrified babbling. “Did he say when?”

She gaped at me, disbelieving.

“Tell me, Micola.”

“Dawn tomorrow.”

My father was dull and stiff-necked beyond reason. He was a law scribe, and every word he copied in service of Cantagna’s law was his life’s accumulated treasure. Never in the world would he risk losing a hand. Indeed, the self-righteous fool would let his family starve before breaking his precious moral code. Multiple times he’d refused to accept so much as a copper solet from his eldest daughter, the Shadow Lord’s whore. Such an impossible risk—and my fool of a brother’s message—hinted at dangers I dared not ignore.

“Give me your gown and cloak,” I said. “Now. I have to go out.” Fortunately the rangy Micola and I were of a size.

She squirmed out of her garments. “But, mistress, il Padroné—”

“He will be at least another hour with petitioners. More likely two. Do as I tell you.”

In moments she was left in her chemise, while I wore her old fashioned blue overdress and narrow black sleeves.

I laid hands on her quivering shoulders. “If il Padroné sends for me or comes to my chambers in search of me, you must speak only truth. That way, his annoyance will be for me alone.”

“But mistress . . .”

Even fools and children knew that the wrath of powerful men fell on those who spoke truth as well as those who told lies. But there were certain things she must not speak at all.

“Sweet child, just tell him this . . .”

With strength swollen by fury—at Neri, at my father, at necessity and circumstance and the vile Lady Fortune—I backhanded the girl. She stumbled backward and slumped to the thick Lhampuri rugs il Padroné had imported for me. As she moaned, groggy and confused, I brushed a thumb across her forehead. Naught but dread necessity could force me to what I had to do.

With a skill rusty from disuse, my will touched the blighted piece of my soul I had walled away since childhood. Only a moment’s touch. Cold, viscous otherness squirmed like maggots in my bones and slithered through my veins, chilling, nauseating, as it had been since the first hour I understood the evil I could do. Magic—this single form of magic my body knew—allowed me to do one impossible thing.

I considered the words the girl must not say and whispered her a story to replace them: Mistress Cataline received a message that her father is gravely ill; for honor’s sake, she had go to him. I, Micola, delayed a whole day relaying the message.

The girl would forget the truth and remember only what I’d told her. How despicable to alter a person’s mind without consent. I hated living with the ever-present fear of discovery, but even more I hated the taint itself, lurking inside my soul like rot at the heart of a tree, waiting to corrupt me as it did all of my kind. But the consequences of Neri’s actions could risk more lives than my father’s.

Shivering and sick, I fled through the palace, grieving for the bruises I’d left on sweet Micola’s face, as well as the chaotic knot inside her where a few simple words had replaced a name, a face, and a message. I’d no time and no skill to tie off every thread of memory.

• • • •

Cantagna sprawls across the golden hills of the Costa Drago’s heart in a pleasing pattern of concentric rings. Radial boulevards lead from the airy, sunlit Heights, where the oldest families of the city live alongside the Palazzo Segnori and the Philosophic Academie, through a wall to the Merchant Ring, home to merchants, bankers, guildhalls, elegant bathhouses, including the rambling family home of il Padroné and his uncles, cousins, and friends.

Narrower streets feed through gates in the second wall down to the bustling Market Ring, where cobblers, tailors, glovers, spice merchants, and the like sell their wares, before plunging downward again to the Asylum Ring that comprises artisan workshops, cheap lodgings, and respectable brothels, intermingled with hospices, houses of confinement, and the seedy shops of alchemists, fortune-tellers, and charm-sellers. Squeezed between the fourth wall, the River Venia, and the outer defenses is the crowded, noisome Beggars Ring and Lizard’s Alley, my childhood home.

Shoving a path through the smoke-filled streets in the sweltering afternoon felt like plunging into the Great Abyss, where the demoni discordia awaited the unvirtuous. The Beggars Ring housed thieves, laborers, pigs, thugs, beggars, pimps, whores, and damaged people of all kinds. Including one stiff-necked man who refused any work that failed to meet his exacting standards, produced more healthy children than his labors could support, and protected a secret it was death to expose—that two of his living children bore the taint of magic. My father.

I had never decided whether Da truly cared for Neri and me, or whether he was just too weak-livered to do as every other parent in the Beggars Ring would have done upon discovering their child was cursed—drown us in the nearest body of water. The weak-livered theory had been ascendant for many years.

At the only wide spot in Lizard’s Alley someone in decades past had built a dirt-floored stone hovel, probably to shelter their pigs or a mule. I’d spent most of my ten years of childhood there. I flipped aside the tattered rug hung across the doorway, stepped across the iron sleugh—a trough of oily water that supposedly warded the household against demons—and yelled, “Neri! Dolce!”

The dim interior was no less filthy than the alley or the streets beyond it, but the thick walls shut out the noise and most of the light. Neither Neri nor my sister Dolce were in evidence. Rather, the scene was exactly the same I’d witnessed on my last visit, some three years past. A crone sat on a stack of folded blankets in the corner, her sagging breast suckling a ruddy babe. The infant would be my mother’s tenth child yet living, as far as I knew, out of thirteen live born. She was not yet forty. At four-and-twenty, I was her eldest.

I crouched in front of her. “Hey, Mam. Neri sent a message about Da.”

Dark eyes, sharp and hateful, rose to meet mine. Nostrils flared, mouth twisted into ugliness, she averted her gaze, as her thumb traced a demon ward on the babe’s forehead.

“Romy the harlot.”

My mother’s disgust no longer devastated me. She had loathed me since discovering I was born tainted with magic. When I was ten years old and my brothers and sisters were crying for bread, Mam had rented me for a night to a man in the street. The following morning my suitor returned with a bag of coins and told her I was never coming home. He was a procurer for the Moon House, where anonymous, unblemished girls and boys were transformed into courtesans to serve the old Padroné—Sandro’s uncle—and his wealthy friends.

The procurer had told me Mam laughed and kissed the silver, so he passed along her word that I was a troublemaker who would need strict discipline. She hadn’t mentioned my true evil.

Three years later, when I dared risk a beating to visit my family, I told my parents what they made me do at the Moon House. Da had averted his eyes and staggered out to the alley to be sick. Mam had spat on me.

I’d never understood what she’d thought would happen—that men would simply pat me on my pretty head or gaze at my naked body without touching? Or that I would kill myself rather than yield my virtue, while allowing her to keep enough silver to feed the rest of her brood for a year?

“Mam, talk to me. What’s happened? Where’s Da? Where’s Neri?”

But my mother said nothing beyond that initial expectoration of my birth name, abandoned when I became Cataline of the Moon House. Exasperated, I sat back on my heels.

“Fortune’s dam! You came!” A tall, bony girl had shoved the hanging rug aside. Rough, rouged cheeks confused her age, which should be something like fourteen.

“Dolce?”

Three grimy faces, all girls with black curls and great dark eyes, peered around my sister’s skirts. Outside this room, naught could have told me they were my kin.

“Neri’s hid, soiling his netherstocks,” said Dolce. “Da’s in the Pillars, awaiting the axe. Can your devil lord fix that?”

“Never call him that,” I said, reflexively. The wrong partisan, hearing the insult to il Padroné, would cut her throat. “What’s Da accused of?”

She folded her arms across her greasy tunic. “He were writing for a lawyer called Dontello up the Market Ring. Dontello shares chambers with a ’luminator, and Da made the mistake of admiring the book the woman was inking—one that had three rubies set in its cover. By next morning the rubies were dug out of the leather and vanished, no matter the chamber was locked up tight as a pimp’s purse. Either Da took them or a thief walked through the wall. Constable was going to bring in a sniffer till Da confessed to the snatch.”

Liquid fury scorched my veins. Dolce’s spare account made the awful situation very clear.

“Da told Neri about the book,” I snapped. Neri, whose magic could take him anywhere his imagination had an object to latch onto. Neri, fool enough to believe he could steal rubies from a locked room without someone bringing in a sniffer to determine if magic had been used in the crime. And what was Neri’s idea of saving my father, who had evidently chosen to sacrifice his hand . . . his livelihood, his life . . . to protect him? Fetch his despised and disowned sister Romy, il Padroné’s harlot, and lay the impossible, intractable dilemma in her lap.

Ready to tear my hair from its roots, I yelled at Dolce and Mam, at Da and stupid, stupid Neri, wherever he was. “Idiots! All of you! You should be out of the city by now.”

“Wherever would we go?” said Dolce. “On the road we’ve got nothing, lest I or Sofi here go hoorin like you, which Da forbids. Cino and Neri’s been up to the Asylum Ring digging for the new coliseum now and again. But, of course, if Da gets chopped, we’ll lose their coin, too, as the devil—excuse me, Il Padroné the Generous—made it clear he mislikes his citizens thieving, so no city project will hire a thief or those kin to one. Yet Da don’t dare plead he’s innocent, now does he?”

Dolce smirked, as if she thought a situation that could leave us all wrapped in chains at the bottom of the sea was naught but a players’ comedy.

“Did Neri admit using”—I didn’t know if the younger ones understood Neri’s forbidden talents as yet—“his particular skills? There’s no doubt?”

“Told you he was shitting his nethers, din’t I? Think he would have come begging to you elsewise? The ’luminator had only fetched the book that very day. Not another soul but Da even knew she had it.”

Magic was demonfire, so it was said, remnants of the gloriously beautiful monster Dragonis who had fractured our land at the dawn of the world. The monster had ravished both men and women, implanting its evil in them and their children. Supposedly the Unseeable Gods had battled Dragonis for a thousand years, until at last they imprisoned the monster under the earth. But the fight had depleted them so terribly that they vanished into the Night Eternal, leaving only the twin sisters Virtue and Fortune to see to the world of their creation. Sorcerers—anyone born with a talent for magic—were the monster’s descendants. No tribe, kingdom, clan, or city in the Costa Drago had ever permitted sorcerers to live, lest they raise their monstrous ancestor to terrorize a world with no gods left to defend it.

I wasn’t sure what I believed about the gods. And I didn’t know if it was an imprisoned monster who made the earth shake, leveling cities, or caused our mountains to spew fire and ash, swallowing whole provinces or changing the course of rivers. Certain there was some truth buried in the stories. No land but ours birthed sorcerers. No one could say how many of us were left in the world, but I’d learned early that anyone proved to be a sorcerer or a sorcerer’s kin must die.

“Where are the rubies?” A glance about the hovel’s pitiful furnishing of chests, stools, and heaped rags gave no hint.

Dolce snorted. “Good and he didn’t hide ’em here! Constables rousted the house when they came for Da. But the goods was already dumped in the river, so Neri says. Weighed with a rock.”

Spirits, was she stretched out on mysenthe to snigger at such peril?

No one had ever explained to me why magic infected some of a sorcerer’s kin, but not all. Certainly Dolce demonstrated none, nor did Cino. Nor did either of my parents. But nullifiers—those who owned and ran the sniffers—took no chances. Let Da lose his hand and his family would likely starve. Let a sniffer identify Neri as a sorcerer, and his family was certainly dead.

I was not exempt. The Moon House kept no records of their courtesans’ family origins. But someone around here would remember me. A neighbor. A cousin. Some friend of Neri’s, Dolce’s, or Cino’s, or a comrade of my three brothers who had died in a riot years ago. Someone would have heard a whisper that the law scribe’s eldest girl—what was her name?—had been bought by the Moon House, had been washed, educated, and trained to please men or women of wealth in both seemly and unseemly ways. Eventually they would connect Romy of the Beggars Ring to Cataline, Courtesan of the Moon House, the Shadow Lord’s mistress. So I would die, too, and forever taint Sandro with my corruption . . .

“I’ll speak to il Padroné,” I said, smothering the ache in my breast. Only he could stop this.

2

I was back in il Padroné’s residence by the Hour of Contemplation. Sandro had shown me his secret ways in and out, tunnels and passages that allowed him to walk amongst the people in disguise to hear what they would not say when he walked among them as himself. He took a measure of pride that he heard little to contradict the image he had chosen for himself: an intelligent, generous, fair-minded, and very dangerous man, who would hear a poor widow’s petition as equably as a wealthy merchant’s, even as he shaped every aspect of Cantagnan life. For our city’s greatness, he said, and for his family’s honor.

I crept into my chambers to ensure that none but Micola waited there. The girl sat on the velvet stool at the foot of my bed, wearing a clean dress and apron, the match for the filthy ones I wore. “Sssst!”

She spun around, and I winced to see her poor bruised face brighten. “Mistress! Where—?”

“I need a sponge bath as quick as can be,” I whispered. “And my brush. The dark green gown, I think. It’s a favorite.” And modest. I would not have Sandro think I offered some tawdry bargain for the favor I must beg. Everything of me was already his.

My well-trained Micola did not question. She always had hot water at the ready, so it took but a short time to clean the stink and grime of the Beggars Ring away. As she finished perfuming my hair, I took her hand and drew her around in front of me. She sank to her knees, to keep her head below mine, though I had no rank to demand such. Her gaze fixed to my slippers.

“Well done, as always.” I brushed her soft curls away from her swollen cheek.

She flinched when I touched the purpling flesh.

“Forgive my fit of temper, sweet one. You did right to fetch me. My father is very ill and I needs must speak to il Padroné about the matter. But I want to make sure you are all right. And to ask your pardon.”

Micola’s head popped up, her expression—her whole posture—opening like shutters in spring. “I—I was in a muddle about it, shamed I had passed you the news about your father’s sickness so late, but I couldn’t recall why I would delay a whole day. It was so strange.” Her bruised brow wrinkled. “Whyever would I choose to fetch you from the secret closet? You always warned me not. When Gigo came to fetch you, I was so confused.”

Fear clogged my throat. “I’m so sorry.”

Most tales of magic spoke of horrors, like houses ablaze, limbs rotting away, or infestations of rats or spiders or demons. At best, my magic created confusion. But at worst, it could surely break my victim’s mind.

“I was sent for while I was gone?”

“Aye, mistress.”

I breathed away panic. Sandro had not dispatched searchers, else I would have been intercepted in his secret tunnels. He trusted me, and indeed I had never lied to him. But there were certain questions he had never asked. And now . . . Whatever happened, nothing could ever be the same.

“What did you tell Gigo?”

Her fair complexion bloomed rose, and she giggled. “I blubbered. A fit you might call it. Told him I had displeased you and didn’t know where you’d gone—which was true. You told me to speak only truth.”

“Yes, good. And what did he say?” Sandro’s bodyguard was no fool.

“Naught. He examined . . . this.” Her shoulder lifted toward her swollen cheek. “Never came back.”

“All right then. Well done.” Detestable as were the blow and my theft of her mind’s truth, the lie had likely saved her life as well as mine.

As Micola straightened up the clutter from my toilet, I wandered over to the garden doors. This hour was a part of il Padroné’s day that did not belong to me. He would be drinking a tisane or milked coffee with his wife as he did every evening before retiring.

Marriage, for Cantagnans of position and wealth, was a negotiation of business, family, and politics. Sandro’s negotiations had allied him with a silver merchant’s daughter—a fourteen-year-old budding rose with the mind of a walnut. He had not bedded her, nor did he intend to do so until she was of decent age. But he treated her with all courtesy and respect, and held hopes that their life together would be satisfactory for both. My path and hers did not cross.

How best to proceed? Likely he already knew I’d returned. And he would be curious; I never struck the servants.

All my habits of fear and secrecy, so ingrained these nine years that I never had to think about them, were jarred into terrible life. If I did nothing, he might decide I wished to be alone and not send for me until morning. Worse, he might believe I didn’t want him to know what caused my unusual behavior. He might come to think I had secrets, a danger I meticulously avoided. Yet I needed to see him. My father had only hours until he was mutilated—or dead from the shock of the axe.

The problem was that I could not approach the Shadow Lord on my own. To the world I did not exist as a person. I was a rare and beautiful object in his house, like the illuminated codex of Endogian poetry chained to a stand in his library, or the ancient marble statue of the lost god Atladu that graced his foyer, so gloriously lifelike it was believed to be a relic of the vanished sea kingdom of Sysaline. I could no more choose to spend an hour with il Padroné than his silver spoons could choose to feed him supper. Thus, I ever awaited his attention as did they. Though Sandro viewed me very differently, he knew that accepting the world’s expectations helped keep me safe from his myriad enemies.

Once, on a cool moonlit evening after feasting with the twelve oldest families in Cantagna, we had strolled the gravel paths of my private garden, talking of one guest and then another, of which might prove an ally when the unrest among them showed its true face, and which a betrayer. I remarked that it must be difficult to anticipate betrayal from lifetime friends.

“It is as it has always been,” he said. “From boyhood, I’ve had to assume that every person at my table, friend or stranger, carries a knife ready to let my blood or wears a pocket ring primed to drop poison into my wine. It is a not-so-nice consequence of Lady Fortune’s abundant blessings. Certain, the habit has saved my life more than once.”

He had stopped abruptly and spun me around to face him. “Then you came into my world and opened your heart to one you had every reason to despise. In these few years you have gifted me in ways no other ever has. Tonight’s gathering reminded me that I’ve wanted to bring you some small token in kind.”

From his cloak he pulled a small bundle, two gifts wrapped in silk and tied together with a gold ribbon. One was a slim gold ring set with emeralds that hid a tiny poison pocket. The other was the very same pearl-handled dagger my tutors had presented me on my departure from the Moon House—and Sandro’s bodyguards had taken from me upon my arrival at House Gallanos.

“To keep you in the height of fashion,” he said, teasing, as he strapped the soft leather sheath to my thigh. A thrill chased up my spine. “But truly, so my ferocious chimera can protect me.”

The gifts left me speechless, overwhelmed by the enormity of their meaning. For those weapons had nothing at all to do with fighting off assassins, but everything to do with trust.

Now, on this terrible day, I had to challenge that trust.

“Micola,” I said, drawing her from her tasks. “Go to Gigo. Tell him I inquired how his new mare is working out. Mention that I’ve just returned to the house and bathed.” That should be enough to let il Padroné know I wished to see him.

Micola dipped her knee and hurried for the door.

• • • •

Not an hour later, the dressing room door swung open.

I did not raise my eyes or rise from First Pose, a posture of graceful, dignified submission, the first a future courtesan was taught. You sat on one heel, the other leg forward, slightly bent, toes pointed, gown or draperies arranged to best advantage. Spread the arms, they’d told us, cup the hands, lower the eyes. Always present yourself as beautiful, open, available, ready. From First Pose, I could rise in one flowing movement, slip smoothly into complete obeisance, or remain still for hours. Nine years had gone since I’d last used it.

He smelled of coffee and wine, of clean skin and pine bark. The air embraced his approach—or so I always imagined. I had spent so many hours observing every muscle and sinew beneath that bronze skin that I knew how every part of him interacted with his surroundings, like an eternal dance with sun or starlight, moon or fire, whether in the company of strangers or between the two of us alone.

The knot of apprehension beneath my breastbone grew into a mortal ache as his long finger lifted my chin with the tenderness that had replaced the ugly linkage of master and bound servant with ties of the heart.

“Ah, my glorious chimera, what troubles you?”

I dared not look at him, lest I crumble. From the night I was led into his presence expecting horror, and he had, instead, offered me protection, education, and the power of consent, I had promised myself never to ask him for anything.

Eyes closed, I began as did every petitioner who came to this house. “Padroné, with honor and humility I lay my needs before you, trusting your wisdom to show me a path forward, pledging you my gratitude and loyalty in whatever service I might provide for you in turn.”

Silent, he moved away, and I feared I might already be undone. He had spies everywhere.

But he had simply fetched a chair, and now sat it square in front of me and himself in it. I looked on his fine boots and longed to remove them as prelude to an evening of conversation, laughter, wine, and pleasure. Instead, I shifted my cupped hands to my lap, still open to receive whatever he might grant. A courtesan’s discipline matched that of any soldier.

“Tell me your need, Mistress Cataline.” Sober, unruffled, as ever with his petitioners. Nothing left of the caring lover, only the concerned Padroné.

“My father is a law scribe, a man of reverence for Lady Virtue and respect for his useful work. A man Lady Fortune has blessed with an overabundance of hungry children.”

Sandro had never asked about the people who had sold me to the Moon House or anything of my life before I was taken there. Neither did I speak to him about his dead uncle, the old Padroné, who was known to blind and flay anyone who crossed him, but only after he had raped their sons and daughters, making that horror the last thing they looked on before their torment. Not even those who most resented Sandro’s outsized influence over Cantagnan life would deny that many, many things had changed for the better since he had become the House Gallanos segnoré.

I told Sandro of the ruby-studded book and the locked room and of the constable’s conclusion that none but my father could have stolen the gems. “On my life, he could not have done the crime, Padroné, not even to feed his children. It was my mother, not he, who sold me.”

Child-selling had not been a crime, of course. Not then. Sandro had made it so because of what was done to me.

“My father’s work, helping to implement the law to keep this city prosperous, strong, and noble, is his life’s honor. To lose his hand would kill his soul, and his family would starve . . .”

When my telling was done, I begged Lady Fortune keep Sandro silent. He knew me. Trusted me. Loved me, so he said and I believed. He would know this pleading was as hard a thing as I had done since the night I was brought to him from the Moon House—a gift from his degenerate uncle—and I asked him please not to peel off my skin once he had taken his pleasure with me. He had not forced me that night or ever. So let him gift me this without questioning. Did I attempt a lie, he would surely know. Omissions—like the matter of my father’s confession to this crime—were not lies. And the truth . . .

“Did they find the rubies in your father’s possession or in his house?”

My heart died a little. “No, Padroné.”

A long silence. Then, “Did they discover evidence that he had paid his debts or did they question others who might have done the crime?”

“No and no.” I had watched him trip up petitioners who answered one query of a pair and not the other, believing it a way to avoid a lie.

Another silence. I held still.

“Did they bring in a sniffer to seek evidence of perverse practices?”

My eyes remained fixed to his boots. The butter-soft leather was lovely. The feet within were fine, as well. Those elegant bones . . . “No, Padroné.”

I near shed my skin when his hand touched my face, gentle first and then firm, forcing my head up.

“By Reason’s bright center,” he said, quietly insistent, eyes dark and unyielding as smoked steel, “why did you strike Micola?”

And that significant question I could not answer fully without condemning myself and Neri, and every person who shared our blood. So I closed my eyes and shut him out. “I was afraid. More than that I cannot say, Padroné. Forgive me, I cannot say.”

He took his hand away and retreated toward my dressing room. His withdrawal left me cold and shivering. From the distant stillness, he said, “Remain here, Mistress Cataline. In one hour I shall return and render judgment.”

Years had gone since I’d experienced such an hour. I dared not think, which meant I had to move. But everything in my chamber, from the porcelain cups that waited on the low table beside an atlas of the world, to my bed pillows, to the terrace overlooking a flower garden, spoke only of the Shadow Lord. Since that first night, he had given me everything I could ever want and more. And in return, I was begging him to ignore the First Law of Creation, infused into every man and woman in the Costa Drago from the first drop of mother’s milk, and sworn to at one’s coming of age, included in wedding vows and contracts and every public celebration: Sorcery is the certain taint of Dragonis and must be obliterated.

After the small eternity, the dressing room door opened again, and I sank to one knee. He did not raise me up. Did not touch me at all. My bones hardened to ice.

“This is the judgment of il Padroné.” His voice was empty. No anger. No accusation. No anguish. “Your father has confessed to the crime. That cannot be undone. He will lose his hand at dawn. Because he cannot return the gems to their rightful owner, he must also forfeit his house and his possessions with the exception of one blanket for every member of his household, two pots, ten spoons, and two flasks. At the moment he is released, he will take his wife and eight youngest children and leave Cantagna, never to return.”

“You cannot—”

“Do not presume to tell me what I can and cannot do.” Hard-edged now. “You do not wish me to reopen this investigation, mistress. I am no fool. I have had your brother under observation for several years. He is rash and stupid, and my man has saved him more than once from the consequences of certain unexplainable actions.”

Neri under observation . . . Lords of Night!

He walked away for the moment, leashing the temper he worked so hard to control. The air shifted when he turned back to me.

“Your concern for the family who did you such ill does you credit, but I cannot and will not allow this incident to pass. Everything I have accomplished in this city, everything I have yet to accomplish, takes its root in the rule of law. If I am complicit in lawbreaking—if I interfere and exonerate a confessed felon because of my personal preferences—then I am no better than my uncle you once named monster. Have you not preached to me how the victim of a crime deserves justice, too? So if I say, ‘This man did not steal because a voice I trust says it,’ then I must permit and encourage every avenue of investigation, including magic-sniffers. Do you wish me to do that?”

I could not answer. Nor breathe through rushing fear. His hard, hot gaze speared me to the marrow.

On the floor in front of me, he dropped two canvas bags, one the size of my fist, one the size of my two fists together.

“You will take these and do exactly as I say. Speak of them to no one. The smaller purse goes to your father, to feed his brood until he can heal and find work, but solely on the condition that he, your mother, and eight children leave Cantagna as I’ve said. My condottieri will publicly expel them from the city gates, and if they so much as look back, I will reclaim the purse and take his alter hand.”

His arrogance that usually so pleased me began to rankle. And eight youngest . . .

“What of Neri and me?” I said. “Are we to be hostage or made an example of or turned over to—?” I couldn’t speak it. The tenor of his voice, the very air between us spoke his anger and . . . ah divinities . . . his horror. By the graces and spirits, did he suspect me of sorcery, too?

“Your brother has a foul tongue and has been heard repeatedly reviling his betters, myself in particular. It’s what called my attention to him in the first place. I cannot allow the Gallanos name—my father’s and grandfather’s name—to be sullied in such fashion. Our peace is too tenuous. As he is underage, I shall request a Sestorale parole to allow him to mend his behavior. You, mistress, are now responsible for his every action and will bring him to the parole administrator every Quarter Day to report on his progress. Whatever punishment he earns from this day forward will be yours as well. It is not fair. It is not righteous. It is not what I would choose for you had I the freedom to shape the world as I do this city. But for now, it is all I can see to do. You must hammer this understanding into him, or bring him to me and I’ll do it. I would not have you dead. Thus, the larger purse is for you, to keep you, to—to—allow you to make a life of your choosing, and to ensure your future should your brother allow you to have one.”

The moment’s stumble tore at my heart. But it did not last.

“None of this bag’s contents will be shared with your parents, your brother, or any other person, else I will have your brother arrested by a nullifier and tested by his sniffer. From that day, I could and would do nothing more on your behalf.”

“Sandro—”

“Silence! It is no longer your privilege to address me by that or any other name. You will leave this house by midnight, taking only these purses, garments sufficient to cover you, and whatever possessions you brought with you when you came to my house. From this hour, this house is closed to you. My protection, my notice, and my interest in you and yours is ended. Cataline of the Moon House is dead.”

The doors between his rooms and mine slammed shut, one and then the other. Bolts, long unused, clattered.

Copyright © 2019 by Cate Glass. Excerpted from An Illusion of Thieves by Cate Glass. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cate Glass was born and raised in Texas, and now resides in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies with her husband and three sons. She is the author of the Chimera novels (An Illusion of Thieves).

Book Reviews: May 2019

LaShawn M. Wanak | 2176 words

This month, you get not three, but four book reviews! I’ll be reviewing The Gameshouse by Claire North, Middlegame by Seanan McGuire, War by Michelle West, and Terminal Uprising by Jim C. Hines.

The Gameshouse
Claire North
Paperback
ISBN: 9780316491563
Orbit, May 2019, 448 pages

We are living in a golden era of games. There are stores that sell everything from board games to card games to dice games. Nicer ones have areas where you can go in the back and select from a library of games that you can play for free. There are conventions you can go to that center on games. You can even go on Twitch and watch people play. Games are entertaining. Games are fun. Games represent life. But how far can that go?

Claire North attempts to answers this in The Gameshouse. Previously written as three separate novellas, they are now being published in a single volume. The overarching story is about a mysterious house which holds games for people’s entertainment. But behind the cards and chips and dice, the gambling, the competition, and the losses, there is another game being played, moderated by The Gamesmaster—a mysterious woman veiled all in white. In this game, anyone can be a player or a pawn, the board could be played across countries, and the winnings could be anything from fame, better eyesight, passing off your physical ailments, or even gaining years onto your life.

In the first novella, The Serpent, we follow Thene, a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a gambler in 1610 Venice. He drags her to the Gameshouse to squander her wealth, but it is she who is offered a chance to join the higher league by playing a card game of Kings—except her king is a live person, a candidate for a seat on the Supreme Tribunal, and the only way she can win is to make sure her candidate gets that seat. The second novella, The Thief, switches to Remy Burke, who wakes up in Bangkok in 1938 to learn that he has wagered his memory against twenty years of his opponent’s life to play a game of Hide-and-Seek, with the board being all of Thailand.

As both Thene and Remy play to desperately win, we start to see themes common to both stories: The games they play aren’t balanced well. Thene and Remy aren’t given any advantages. But both possess a great desire to win, against all odds, which begs the question—is winning the game due to skill, or can it be done through sheer luck?

This is personified through Silver, the main character of the third novella The Master, who appears in all three stories. His goal to win the games goes far beyond the Gameshouse itself, and when he has his showdown with the Gamesmaster, entire countries, cultures, civilization itself become the board, its inhabitants mere pieces that can be removed in a blink of an eye.

How far can it go? Can’t a game be just . . . a game? I don’t think North fully answers this question.

This story reminded me of the plot of Ready Player One, which is supposed to remind us that games are supposed to be fun. But in North’s world, games are just an echo of the battle for dominance played out in politics, financial systems, and culture wars.

There is one quiet moment, though, where Silver, hiding from getting caught, spends the night playing arcade games with a singer on an overnight ferry. It’s a distraction, a reprieve, and ultimately, it also fits in with the nature of games. I think North’s message is that games should be played to win, but it is the game itself that should really matter.

Middlegame
Seanan McGuire
Hardcover / Ebook / Audio
ISBN: 9781250195524
Tor.com, May 2019, 528 pages

How can I describe Middlegame? At its heart, it’s a story featuring a pair of twins who learn how to become family to each other. But expand that—it’s a story about two kids trying to stop an alchemist from taking over the world. No, expand it further—it’s Order and Chaos. Words and Equations. Isolation and Community. Balance and Instability. Finally, throw in some time manipulation and wrap it up in a children’s fable that could also be the blueprint to the end of the world.

We learn that Roger Middleton is a prodigy, an adopted child who lives on the East Coast, and is “so in love with language that there’s no room in his world for anything else.” One day, he hears a girl’s voice in his head. This girl is Dodger Cheswich, who lives on the West Coast. She’s also an only child, an adopted child, a prodigy, and she considers herself “math-smart.” They don’t know how they’re able to speak to each other in their heads, but they do know they have the same color eyes, and they become best friends.

In truth, they’re the product of James Reed, an alchemist who created the two children to embody the Doctrine of Ethos—a philosophy of checks and balances that contains the power of the universe—one he plans to control. He is the one who has separated Roger and Dodger at birth so that they can grow apart while learning to manifest their destiny. He does this ruthlessly with the help of his alchemist-partner Leigh, who may as well be his own twin, her ruthlessness to his subtle cruelty, her ice to his fire. But Roger and Dodger don’t know this.

This book is a study on why we choose to tell people certain things. How it’s easy to isolate oneself, and how one can feel lonely even if you’re inside someone else’s head. McGuire writes Roger and Dodger’s relationship with such heart-breaking intimacy; although the two can communicate telepathically, they have misunderstandings. They make decisions that unknowingly hurt each other. They play into Reed’s game of trying to protect each other, and yet hurt each other. And as they grow, those decisions have consequences. It hurts to see the loss of trust. And yet it hurts when they try to work things out, to reconnect. It’s the most intimate portrayal of a sibling relationship I’ve ever read, and once they learn about Reed and his plans, as well as their true relationship to each other, the story ramps up into a nail-biting thriller you can’t put down.

And that’s just the story. McGuire’s use of language in this book left me both breathless and envious. She uses the language of fairy tales and myth, of cuckoos and jackdaws and crow girls, but also uses the magic of numbers and calculations to bring about the impossible.

I would not be surprised if this winds up on many awards lists. It’s incredible, and riveting.

War
Michelle West
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780756410117
DAW Books, June 2019, 560 pages

In February, I had surgery and had to stay home for two weeks to recover. During that time, I realized I wanted more than just a story. I wanted to read something meaty. Something the equivalent of comfort food. I wanted a story with characters I was familiar with, who were wrestling with challenges, who have grown throughout their own story. So I picked up War, the last (maybe) book in Michelle West’s House War series.

I was first introduced to Michelle West (who also goes by Michelle Sagara) through her novel The Broken Crown, her introduction to The Sun Sword Series. In it, she introduces Jewel Markess A’Terafin, a young woman who is able to see the future. Jewel (who prefers to go by Jay), becomes such an important character that she gets a series of her own: House War. It details her beginnings as an orphan living in the slums of Averalaan, becoming the leader of a gang of kids she calls her den, being adopted to House Terafin and struggling with newfound comforts along with political dangers, her rise through the ranks until she becomes the leader of House Terafin.

Though it had been a while since I read the series, I came across names that made me go, “Oh yeah, I remember that person.” Kallandras, the Master Bard. Meralonne, the wizard. Jay’s Den: Angel, Carver, Finch, Jester, Teller, and the long-dead Duster. Plus Evayne, the seer who walks the paths of time, appearing whenever she is needed, never the same age twice. There are also Winter Kings, Summer Queens, The Hidden Court, demons, and cats—albeit large, killer cats with wings that may not actually be cats at all, but powerful deadly gods (although like all cats, they find everything so boooooring).

Originally, the last book in the series was going to be book seven: Firstborn, but it instead turned into two books. With War, West wraps up not just Jewel’s arc, but ties in storylines woven through not only The Sun Sword series, but even the series before that: The Sacred Hunt.

I don’t think this review can do full justice. West’s books are by nature epic fantasy, and it’s hard to review the last book without referring to the whole series. What I can say is that at its heart, this is a story about Jay fighting to protect those she loves. There are sacrifices. There is loss. There are beautiful leaves. And there are courageous acts. War made me want to read the entire series again from start to finish, and now that it’s officially ended, I can. Unless West writes another series . . .

Terminal Uprising
Jim C. Hines
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN# 9780756412777
DAW Books, February 2019, 336 pages

In 2017 (bit.ly/2NMznQd), I reviewed Terminal Alliance, a story about space janitors being pulled against their will into an interstellar rebellion. Now Jim C. Hines is back with the second book, Terminal Uprising. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to read it in time for my February review, but did so during my time off. So, surprise! Bonus review!

Marion Adamopoulos, Mops for short, and her crew made up of hygiene and sanitation specialists are fleeing on the stolen ECMS Pufferfish after uncovering the truth about the benevolent Krakau, who claimed to have rescued and treated a portion of humans from a deadly contagion on Earth which turned all humans feral. In reality, it was the Krakau who had unleashed the plague that caused humans to go feral in the first place. Now, with the aid of Admiral Pachelbel, a Krakau who wishes to make amends, and a xenocidal Prodryan called the Advocate of Violence—Cate for short—Mops must travel back to Earth and risk her safety, her sense of self-preservation, and her sanity to investigate a rumor that there are humans who may have escaped, or even been cured from, the plague.

Hines’ humor continues in this book as well, interspersed throughout the story with Douglas Adams-esque alien poetry, lists, and rules. However, what really pulled me into the book was the characters. It was a joy and wonder to see Mops reconnect with Earth’s history. The antagonism between Cate and Wolf, one of Mops’ crew, is fun to watch, even as they learn to work together. And there is a loving shout-out to librarians and the work they do to preserve humanity’s past for the future.

I didn’t laugh as much with this book, and from the looks of it, Hines is setting the next book up to be more on the serious side, but I still I enjoyed it. Also, I now want an avatar named Libris in the form of a cat on my operating system.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak is a graduate of the 2011 class of Viable Paradise. Her fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and Ideomancer. She served as Associate Editor at Podcastle, and has written nonfiction for Fantasy Magazine, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the anthology Invisible 2.

Media Review: May 2019

Christopher East | 1937 words

Watership Down
Based on the novel by Richard Adams
Produced by 42, Biscuit Filmworks, BBC, and Netflix
Released December 2018

To say Richard Adams’ novel Watership Down is a formative influence is perhaps a massive understatement, so naturally I was thrilled to learn that Netflix and the BBC were collaborating to remake the story as a miniseries. The new adaptation dropped late last year, and while I found the results wanting, it did inspire me to revisit the story in depth. The experience rekindled my admiration for a classic while also enabling me to see the story from interesting new angles.

Released in 1973, Watership Down was a unique and memorable work about a group of rabbits who, led by the charismatic Hazel and his peculiar little brother Fiver, set out across the south of England in search of a new home. When Fiver, who possesses a mysterious sixth sense, has a vision of Sandleford Warren’s imminent destruction, he and Hazel try to convince the chief rabbit they should evacuate immediately and find a new place to live. Most of the rabbits of Sandleford, including the chief, are too complacent to receive Fiver’s warning with anything more than skepticism. Several are persuaded, however, and together, this small band escapes the pursuit of the “Owsla” (a lapine version of the police) to strike out on their own. Their goal: find a perfect, safe new home, which Fiver eventually deduces should be atop the sloping heights of Watership Down. What follows is a cross-country adventure wherein an intrepid group of friends works together to elude predators, avoid close calls with the dangers of humankind, and outwit the oppressive regime of “Efrafa,” an authoritarian warren run by the vicious General Woundwort.

Wikipedia describes the book as a “survival and adventure novel,” but make no mistake: This is a fantasy. In fact, with its quest plot, band of adventurers, and the good-versus-evil conflict at its core, it resonates as epic fantasy. The fact that the heroes are anthropomorphized animals doesn’t detract from that impression, especially once you get to know the many memorable members of Hazel and Fiver’s party. Most important, perhaps, is Bigwig, a former officer in Sandleford’s Owsla and the group’s most formidable fighter. But there are other great characters: clever Blackberry, whose fierce intelligence bails the group out of multiple scrapes; Dandelion, the fastest runner, whose stories keep the group entertained in between adventures; Silver, another disgruntled former Owsla officer who informally serves as Bigwig’s second-in-command when it comes to combat duty; and Pipkin, Fiver’s miniscule friend, who flourishes under Hazel’s encouraging leadership. Indeed, the group functions as something of a small, tactical military unit, with Hazel as its respected lieutenant. (In my edition, the author’s introduction admits: “I imagined Fiver’s brother, Hazel, as being rather like my commanding officer during the war. He himself was a gentle, modest man, but he had a shrewd, keen mind, able to perceive what needed doing and stick to it with authority.” Adams’ military background, which I wasn’t aware of during my many teenaged re-reads of the novel, seems extremely obvious in retrospect, and lends considerable insight to the work’s characters, structure, worldbuilding, and themes.)

There’s more depth to the fantasy backdrop than the simple premise of a band of animals living out an invisible “secret history” underneath humanity’s very nose. The genre feel is deepened by Adams’ inventive depiction of rabbit society, which comes with its own language and mythology. The lapine vocabulary, while modest, comes with a certain Tolkienesque resonance. (If you ask me, at least one word, “tharn,” really ought to find its way into common parlance—especially these days!) Meanwhile, the mythology contributes greatly to the story’s fantastical ambience. The rabbits see “Frith” (the sun) as the god of all things, while “El-ahrairah” serves as the rabbits’ trickster folk hero. El-ahrairah’s stories, usually told by Dandelion, occasionally punctuate and comment on the narrative. This is straight-up genre worldbuilding, and Adams executes it quite well.

Re-reading the novel for this review, I spotted the flaws my younger self wouldn’t have identified: clumsy fourth-wall breaks, an oft-pedantic tone, and an occasionally flagging pace, especially during the El-ahrairah tales. (Crucial as they are to the worldbuilding, they do have a tendency to suck away the narrative momentum.) Finally, there is a rather of-its-time, cavalier maleness to Watership Down, a tricky flaw to articulate in the context of this particular book. Let’s say this: In humanizing his animal characters, Adams walks the line between staying true to the science of actual rabbit behavior and taking liberties to imbue his rabbits with human characteristics. He does so quite effectively, but is uneven in his footing: It’s fair to say that when it comes to personality, mannerisms, idiom, and agency, the novel’s bucks are more humanized than its does—whose objectification is baked into the plot. Mitigating factors notwithstanding—i.e., the military parallels, the scientific research that influenced Adams’ worldbuilding, even the time it was written—the gender dynamics in Watership Down require a forgiving filter.

Nonetheless, by and large the decades haven’t diminished the novel’s magic for me. It still sings in its rich detail, its eloquent voice, the winning ensemble chemistry of its rabbit cast, and especially in its powerful messaging. Watership Down stands as a beautiful rallying cry for teamwork, camaraderie, decency, and coexistence in the face of bullying, oppression, and authoritarianism. Much of this messaging comes out through Hazel’s leadership, which is proper, fair, and commonsensical. The way he seizes on the idea of befriending and cooperating with other animals, for example—most notably an eccentric seagull named Kehaar—is emblematic of its positive messaging. There’s also a cleverly handled environmentalism to the novel, and not merely in how it vilifies humanity for its dismissive, rapacious treatment of the earth. The more the rabbits act like humans, the more strife and misery is caused; Adams suggests, without ever hitting you over the head with it, that we’re all just animals who want to lead our lives, and by recognizing that and working together, all manner of pain and suffering could be avoided.

Watership Down’s success was enhanced, I suspect, by a mostly faithful 1979 film adaptation from writer-director Martin Rosen. The passage of time has erased from my memory whether the novel brought me to the film or vice versa, but to me they are complementary experiences, equally formative. The animated film still holds up, I think: a haunting, beautiful, and occasionally terrifying interpretation of Adams’ vision that doesn’t shy away from the book’s darker subtexts, particularly regarding the perils of authoritarianism. Characterized by superb voice work, a winning mixture of humor, heart, and suspense, and a rousing, perfect musical score by Angela Morley, it’s a streamlined and memorable film, largely true to the spirit of the book. The film does, however, narrow down the cast, and the story is significantly condensed, rushing many memorable episodes that could have used more exploring.

In many ways, then, Watership Down was ripe for a reboot, both to expand and flesh out the film’s brushstrokes, and to revisit the novel’s powerful messages and themes, which couldn’t be more timely in an era of looming climate disaster and surging neofascism. Enter this most recent adaptation from Netflix and the BBC, which—to its credit—aims to accomplish both of these objectives. And there was every reason for optimism that it would be amazing. Animation has come a long way since the late seventies, and the caliber of voice talent recruited for the project suggests the story left its mark in the acting world, because famous performers seem to have lined right up to participate. James McAvoy as Hazel. John Boyega as Bigwig. Peter Capaldi as Kehaar. Daniel Kaluuya, Nicholas Hoult, Ben Kingsley, Olivia Colman, Rosamund Pike, Tom Wilkinson, Gemma Arterton, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Mackenzie Crook, Rory Kinnear. This is serious A-list firepower in the cast.

The series starts promisingly, hitting the right emotional and tonal beats in the early going. And the cinematography is, at times, quite stunning. But it quickly becomes clear that something isn’t quite gelling. At first, it struck me that it might be the style of the animation. It does a mediocre job, I think, of visually differentiating the many characters—a significant problem since it introduces so many more than the original film does. Nor does the animation lend itself to compelling action. The urgent, heart-pumping adventures of the book fall surprisingly flat in this rendering, especially when compared against Rosen’s film. That movie’s art is more modest, perhaps, but also more sure-handed at conjuring mood. Its depiction of Fiver’s chilling visions, the horrors of Sandleford’s destruction, and the brutality of Efrafa are more creatively evoked, and the fight scenes are shockingly effective, especially for a cartoon. The new Watership Down lacks these strengths; its look, which verges on the photoreal, somehow diminishes both the mystique and the sense of menace. Ultimately, though, I don’t believe the animation is the primary problem. In some ways, the look is quite effective. For example, I liked the decision to situate Efrafa in the ruins of brick buildings, which contributes a prison-like atmosphere to Woundwort’s oppressive territory. It could all have been made to work.

During the third episode, it struck me: The new series, faced with a plethora of modernizing choices, makes too many incorrect ones. Some of its choices are understandable and easy to get behind: gender-swapping Strawberry, for example, or enhancing the role of Hyzenthlay. But the bulk of them founder on the rocks, especially the more blatantly political ones: the way the fatalists of Cowslip’s warren are painted as blinkered religious zealots, or the rather obvious #metoo uprising of the Efrafan does. They are good ideas, badly executed. Others choices feel like seasoned screenwriters grasping for market-tested beats: extraneous romantic subplots (Hazel and Clover, Hyzenthlay and Holly), or the pseudo-amusing romantic rivalry between Dandelion and Hawkbit. Perhaps the worst decisions, however, came in the realm of characterization; the series fundamentally misjudges the importance of many prominent players in the original. Certainly not every character needed to be here, of course—alas, poor Speedwell, still no adaptation love for you. But with all these great actors at your disposal, why would you remove Silver and Pipkin entirely, in favor of inventing random Efrafran Owsla? Or diminish the roles of Blackberry, Dandelion, and the scrappy, tragic Blackavar (Henry Goodman)? It all feels like resources misdirected.

Obviously, I’m pretty attached to Watership Down, but I’m also a pragmatist, generally sanguine about the realities of successfully adapting a book. Changes are usually necessary to make literature work in a visual medium. Alas, this adaptation makes too many arbitrary decisions and not enough strategic ones, managing to lengthen the story but also make it smaller. Still, I suppose it has its moments, and all that brilliant voice talent, and hey, it inspired me to go back to the originals, which proved to be an illuminating and entertaining exercise. For that reason, I’m certainly glad I watched the new series, and hopefully it will serve as a gateway for new readers. All in all, though, definitely not my favorite Watership Down.

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: Ashok K. Banker

Christian A. Coleman | 2771 words

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. He is also the author of many short stories, including the Legends of the Burnt Empire series (published in Lightspeed), which takes place in the same world as Upon a Burning Throne. He lives in Los Angeles and Mumbai.

Upon a Burning Throne is the first book of your epic Burnt Empire series. It follows the story of two young princes who are in line to rule the kingdom of Hastinaga after passing the Test of Fire. A war is vowed against Hastinaga because a cousin of the princes from an outlying kingdom passed the same test but is denied her claim. Tell us about the inspiration behind the series.

The Burnt Empire Saga began originally as an exhaustive retelling of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit poem which is arguably the longest literary work ever written. That was almost twenty-five years ago, even before I wrote and published my Ramayana series. I soon realized that I was not ready to take on such a mammoth story and set it aside, reluctantly. Several years later, in 2004, when I was more or less done with the Ramayana series, I took it up again, and continued it. It took a hell of a lot more work and a fair amount of time, but I began releasing it in book-length installments from around 2012 onwards. By 2015, I knew that once again I had hit a roadblock. The original epic was too complex, vast, labyrinthine, and ambitious for any modern retelling. By this time, I had moved from India to the US and was determined to build a career as an author. It then dawned on me that I was attempting to do something that was totally unnecessary. Why retell an epic that was already so rich, so full of wonder and awe and great characters and plot? Instead, why not write my own original epic fantasy, stealing and borrowing liberally from the Mahabharata as well as my own multi-cultural upbringing!

By 2017, I had the bulk of what’s now Upon a Burning Throne, and the Burnt Empire saga was off and running. I have to say, though, that my editor and publisher John Joseph Adams’s input was invaluable in shaping the work it’s finally become. John has been incredible on this epic path to publication, allowing me the freedom to rewrite entire sections, insert a whole new beginning, and literally create a world from the ground up as he edited. It took two hard years of edits, rewrites, revisions, and a deep rethinking of the story ahead (which John isn’t even privy to at this point) before the book that now exists was ready to go out into the world. And boy, has it come a long way.

You’ve done a retelling of the Mahabharata with your previous book, The Forest of Stories. What drew you back to it? What attracted you to the idea of writing an epic inspired by the Mahabharata as opposed to retelling it?

While UABT still has the genetic DNA of the Mahabharata, it is most definitely not a retelling. For one thing, this book covers barely two percent of the original Sanskrit epic’s plot. The Mahabharata itself is massive: Even a word-by-word translation would take up at least six million words in English. And that would be dense, inscrutable poetry, needing another ten or twenty million words of footnotes to understand. It’s literally impossible to read and comprehend the entire Mahabharata (unabridged) completely. Even projects like the Clay Sanskrit Library translation took dozens of scholars decades of work, and even they couldn’t finish it. It’s enough work to employ an entire university for generations. All I’ve done is taken the bones of the original epic, the main characters, and main through line, and then made up my own epic fantasy universe, culture, world, etc. Besides the fact that this is more practical, it’s also way more fun! I get to play in my own universe while retaining several of the most memorable mythic characters and storylines ever written down by human hands!

In your experience of retelling the Mahabharata and writing the Burning Throne series, why do you think readers are hooked on sprawling stories about dynastic struggles and all-consuming wars? Have you noticed any patterns in readership about this when talking with your readers?

Because it’s like reading a history of the world with new characters, stories, battles, and all kinds of magical elements! It’s fun. I think one of the reasons for the rise of epic fantasy after the two world wars is because those terrible conflicts left us all with a deep sense of shame and guilt. We massacred tens of millions both times in the most wide-scale wars of human history. Epic fantasy is our way of working through those terrible wars, but through the once-removed comfortable distancing of fantasy fiction. We can project our guilt, shame, anger, grief, everything onto these fictional characters, and find a catharsis and resolution that we failed to receive from the real world wars. At least, that’s my two cents.

Were there any other sources of inspiration (literature, TV series, music) that fed the development of your series?

It’s been said of the Mahabharata (within the epic itself, which is self-aware and frequently breaks the fourth wall through a series of narrators telling the story within the story within the story ad infinitum) that “What cannot be found here will not be found anywhere else.” It’s believed to be the most complete compendium of human experience—the good, the bad, the ugly all rolled in together—and an education in itself. In some ways, it’s the mother of all stories, the ur-source of all genres, tropes, and even literary devices. Having said that, I did draw freely on other pan-Indian influences: Moghul history, Middle Eastern and Egyptian legends, even other Indian and Asian legends. And of course, there’s a lot of pure invention in the mix, too. In the end, the main characters and what they do, or why they do what they do, is still from the Mahabharata, but almost everything else is made up of whole cloth, woven on the loom of that great myth.

In a time when readers are still obsessed with A Song of Ice and Fire and audiences are salivating for the final season of Game of Thrones, what was it like pitching a large epic like this to publishers, especially an epic centered largely in South Asian mythology and not Eurocentric lore?

I never pitched it to anyone. I sent an early draft of the manuscript, then titled City of Elephants, to John Joseph Adams. He read it, liked it, and made me an offer. I signed the contract unagented and that was it. I had never been (and still haven’t been) to a genre convention, had no literary agent at the time (I do now), and couldn’t get anyone in the US to read anything by me. Until JJA. He changed everything for me. He’s the most open-minded genre publisher and editor I’ve ever encountered in my life. Definitely the most awesome SFF editor of them all right now. He saw it as what it truly was, a great epic fantasy story that was a hugely enjoyable immersive experience for anyone who loves epic fantasy. The culture, the diversity, the author, none of that really matters. The Burnt Empire is its own world, its own mythos. Read it and enjoy. (Though of course, the first book goes down some very dark paths, so perhaps “enjoy” is not quite the right word, except in a literary sense.)

Speaking of dark paths, there’s some striking imagery in the novel that could’ve come from a horror novel or even from John Carpenter’s The Thing. I’m thinking of the scene where Prince Shvate, his wife Mayla, and his half-brother Vida go to the mountain city of Reygar to defeat demonlord Jarsun, only to discover that the city is sentient and walks on legs made of tens of thousands of human bodies joined together with a whitish ichor. How much of this imagery was inspired by the Mahabharata and how much of it comes from your imagination?

Oh, that’s not from the Mahabharata at all. It’s completely inspired by a story in Clive Barker’s classic collection, The Books of Blood! I’ve always wanted to use it somehow, and finally found a place. Although my version is very different from Barker’s original, the idea of a city made up of people slammed together in Human Centipede fashion is somewhat similar. I confess to having paid homage to one of my favorite authors!

Fire and water are recurring images throughout the book. In the beginning, there’s the Burning Throne used to test Princes Shvate and Adri and their cousin Krushita. And there’s the River Jeel, who’s also the mother of Vrath, Prince Regent of the Burnt Empire. What significance do fire/sun and water have in the ancient Sanskrit and Indian literature that you’re working with?

Pretty much the same significance as in all ancient cultures. In this case, though, the ruling race, called the Krushan, have a very ancient connection to fire in the form of an element called Stonefire. I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say that Stonefire and its counterpart, Jeel, (embodied as the Mother Goddess Jeel who is also a river in the world) form the center of the mythology I invented for the series. So it’s more my invention than anything from the original Mahabharata. There is no Burning Throne, Burnt Empire, Krushan, Stonefire, or any of these elements in Indian mythology or any other mythology. That part is just the product of my own mind and it has a direct bearing on a very apocalyptic event that happens much later in the series. That’s all I’m allowed to say now; another word, and the Stone Gods are likely to strike me down!

The characters in Upon a Burning Throne feel contemporary as much as they feel like they’re from a mythical bygone era. Was this the effect you were striving for?

Are you quite sure they feel contemporary? They all do some terrible things, you know! If they do seem contemporary, it’s certainly not contemporary American. The ancient Indian sense of morality, gender roles, caste, class, etc., is very different from the current US outlook. I doubt American characters would do any of the things these people do in the book and get away with it. If anything feels contemporary, it’s probably the fact that the author is contemporary!

Vyasa, author of the Mahabharata, makes himself a character in the epic. Did you write yourself in Upon a Burning Throne as one of characters like he did? Perhaps as seer-mage Vessa?

No way! It’s a bloody dangerous world. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere on the continent of Arthaloka (where the story is set) or in the Burnt Empire itself! No thank you. I’m happy here on the outside looking in, except for the times I teleport my avatar down to the surface and report on the violent shenanigans down there. As for Vyasa himself, yes, he is very much a part of the series too, and as you rightly guessed, he is indeed Vessa. Not a very likable character, like most of the major protagonists in the epic, but then again, he’s not the hero of the epic nor is he meant to be. That distinction is reserved for Krushni, the real hero of the series, who arrives on the scene only in Book Two, A Dark Queen Rises.

Some chapters are written from the perspective of animals, such as a crow and a vulture, that comment on a scene we’ve just read. What structural or narrative effect were you going for with these POV shifts? They really enrich the texture of the book’s mythological tenor.

That’s simple: I’m just following the story where it goes. To tell that part of the story, the only way was to use those animals’ points of view as bridges. Also, I love animals and try to work them into my work wherever possible. They are very much a part of the world too, after all. It wouldn’t be fair to leave them out!

In one chapter, Adran, Prince Adri’s charioteer, says, “Gods rarely cohabit with mortals without a purpose . . . Time and time again, as our puranas tell us, we become collateral damage in their great wars and missions.” I feel like this could be read as a major theme, because all the narrative arcs involve demigods, demons, and mortals interacting. And the mortals pay a price each time. Do you find that epics like this are fatalistic and dramatize existential angst with gods and fantastical creatures as characters? (This question may be more indicative of my Western way of reading the book.)

Not really. That isn’t really a major element of the series at all. But sure, that is something that does recur in many mythology-inspired epic fantasies. I guess it’s at the root of the genre of high fantasy itself, so it is inescapable. In this case, though, it’s really all about an internecine conflict between two sets of cousins and the two demigods who choose to side with one group or the other. The back half of the series is almost all centered on a massive Mother of all Wars, and is expected to take up about five of the nine books in the overall epic.

What’s been your approach to writing the series? As a genre writer, a mythologist, a fabulist, something completely different? I’m curious because you said in a previous interview that India didn’t really have a genre scene.

India’s genre scene is finally coming of age, I’m happy to say now. There’s a whole slew of very talented writers producing excellent genre fiction. No major epic fantasy novelists yet, unless there’s one just out of sight on the horizon (in which case, I’ll wish them happy writing!). I’ve been a lifelong SFFH fan, well over forty-five years now, since I started reading at the age of nine and am fifty-five this year. I approached this series and book as epic fantasy, pure and simple. Nothing more or less. I love the genre and am proud to be a part of it.

When can we expect the next book of the series?

A Dark Queen Rises will be published in 2020.

What other future writing projects can you tell us about?

I’m currently working on a literary novel but can’t say anything about it till I finish it and send it out. And I always have several books and stories brewing at all times. I love writing several projects at once. There are graphic novels, feature film scripts, web series, and novels in other genres, including a massive space opera that rivals the Burnt Empire series in scale and appeal.

Is there anything else you’d like your readers to know about Upon a Burning Throne?

Upon a Burning Throne goes on sale in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook on April 16, 2019 in the US, and in trade paperback on May 14 in India. Please pre-order! You can read free excerpts on my website at ashokkbanker.com!

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: Kathleen Kayembe

Laurel Amberdine | 755 words

Can you tell us how “The Ocean that Fades into Sky” story came together? Did you run into any notable challenges?

This was written for a gorgeous illustration by Julie Dillon, but the sea turtles paired with the second moon took a while to work themselves out in my head, so it took a few months of worldbuilding to discover the story I wanted to write: One about a lesbian relationship wherein, during a separation, both partners wonder whether it might be better for the other if they weren’t dating.

As with so many ideas that become finished pieces, that initial idea got the writing started, but another aspect of the story eventually took center stage.

It took a while for me to find it though. I wanted everyone’s cards on the table, and wrote the first drafts in omniscient point of view—which I’d never attempted before, and don’t think I did terribly well—and the story delved into the thoughts and motivations of not just Coasts, but Obsequies, Dwellings, Cities, Land, and Deserts. Those sprawling drafts, and their excessive word counts, had friends telling me I was trying to cram a novel into a short story. It took critiques and a number of revisions to switch up the point of view and shift the focus entirely to Coasts. Although I think that was the right decision, it was difficult to accept that people wouldn’t necessarily see the humanizing aspects of those other characters, or see firsthand some of the events the story mentions or alludes to.

I know you attended Clarion a few years ago. How did what you learned there change your writing process?

Honestly, I think it made writing harder, more complicated—it showed me I still have so much to learn, forced me to examine tropes I liked and craft decisions I unconsciously made, introduced me to new forms and styles I could then choose whether to use in my work, and made me more aware of how badly writing can go if you do it lazily.

That’s good though. I’m more careful about what goes down on the page now because people challenged me on decisions I made, and because reading others’ work revealed I have strong feelings about certain themes and tropes, and about whose stories end happily and whose don’t, and about writers’ responsibilities when representing marginalized groups and including harmful tropes common to the dominant social narrative. There’s a reason Coasts gets a HFN (Happily For Now) ending instead of dying, and that Obsequies’s journey in the final draft is de-centered and drastically reduced from what was shown in the initial ones.

Clarion also made me much more cognizant of characters’ emotional journeys, which for me are often the heart of a story. That’s been extremely helpful during revisions.

(I hope this hasn’t discouraged anyone from applying to Clarion. It taught me so much, and was an amazing experience on so many levels! If you can go to Clarion, do.)

Is there anything you want to make sure people understand about “The Ocean that Fades into Sky”?

Uh . . . I guess that this is a short novelette, and the events herein are the tip of an iceberg? You’re seeing Obsequies at her worst during this story, no one in it is without redeeming qualities—and no one in it is excused by them, and the spirits of Uloh-la (and Ships) are a lot more genderfluid than their bodies and pronouns during summit would suggest.

. . . Oh God, I feel like J.K. Rowling telling people Dumbledore is gay. Author headcanons don’t count if it’s not in the text! Ergo if you disagree with any of what I’ve said above, you’re just as correct as I am.

What are you working on lately?

I’m working on a gay romance novel I’d like to finally finish. It’s contemporary and not overtly speculative, which was an adjustment, but that’s what you get when a character who’s not the narrator can see ghosts and the narrator doesn’t know that and assumes a bad trip is causing hallucinations.

There’s also a folder of things I’d like to revise and get out the door vying for attention.

Finally, there’s a bunch of unpublishable things I’ve been writing along the margins, purely for fun.

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: Rati Mehrotra

Adanze Asante | 775 words

I noticed in a previous interview you mentioned that you were a hybrid between a pantser and a planner and that for your short fiction you are a total pantser. This story was so well crafted that I can’t believe you were a pantser while writing it. So, did the journey of Aunt Anju, Tamar, and Tara lead your pen, or did you carefully outline this story?

Thank you, but I did not outline it at all! This story was borne from a single image I had of this trio of refugees, searching desperately for a place of safety, and from the title of the story itself. I wrote a few pages and then put it aside, and the rest of it came to me some months later. This seems a rather inefficient way of writing, and I would not really recommend it, but it appears to work for me, especially for short stories. I do end up having to revise a fair bit.

Aunt Anju, who would risk everything to protect her niece and nephew, and Bird, a high-level soldier, are strong women in this story. How does feminine power compel you to write?

I was born and raised in a deeply patriarchal society. I was taught to be nice, to speak softly, to put others before myself, to conform to expectations. It makes me angry, because that patriarchal society is rotten to the core, unsafe for women, and highly inequitable. Unlearning these unwanted lessons will take a lifetime. My fictional women, at least, will be unburdened by such dangerous nonsense.

On your blog, you mention that fiction can be “an escape, a transport into another universe, and, at its best, a mirror we hold up to ourselves and the flawed world we live in.” This story is a close-up of how and what many migrants contend with while seeking asylum or better yet “paradise” or maybe even the “American Dream.” As a mother, did the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy, where children are ripped from their parents’ arms, inspire you to write this tale?

I wrote this story before Trump became President. My inspiration comes from the deadly Kashmir conflict that has taken and continues to take so many lives in the Indian subcontinent. That said, the experience of refugees the world over is sadly the same: Fleeing from conflict and persecution, all they want is safety for themselves and their children—a chance at a normal life, such as you and I might take for granted. As of 2018, there were over sixty-eight million displaced people in the world. A “zero-tolerance” policy essentially means damning them and their dreams of a safe home, far from violence. So many people the world over lack the most basic necessities: clean water, adequate food, a roof over their heads that won’t get blown up during the night. It is these simple desires that propel the characters of my story, too.

The Diwali myth is basically how good triumphs over evil. People light lamps, firecrackers, candles all over their homes to welcome the deity Lakshmi to enter their houses with good luck. So, do the lighted-jelly-fish aliens represent Rama to defeat nuclear proliferation?

That is an interesting viewpoint. I can’t say I ever thought of it like that. I really was thinking more of actual aliens. But reader interpretation will vary, and I am sure will continue to surprise me.

I’ve noticed you have various Indian mythology threaded throughout your story, such as the Tawi, the Diwali. How does Indian mythology inspire you to write? Do you have any more stories based on Indian mythology coming out soon?

My work is deeply influenced by Indian mythology. I grew up in my grandmother’s house, listening to stories from the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, and the Puranas. It’s one of my core inspirations, apart from all the science fiction and fantasy I consumed as a teen. My favorite stories are of the Mother Goddess in her myriad forms, especially Goddess Kali, the destroyer of evil.

I have written two books influenced by Indian mythology. My Asiana duology—Markswoman and Mahimata—features an Order of assassins who worship Kali and keep the peace in a post-apocalyptic, alternate version of Asia. She is, for me, the epitome of feminine power, and it was so delightful and satisfying for me to be able to weave myths of the goddess into my books.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Adanze Asante is an African Diasporic writer, a black belt, and an Olympic weightlifter, creating weird stories in the Bedford Stuyvesant village on planet Brooklyn. If she’s not writing, she’s reading. If she’s not reading, she’s cooking gourmet vegan meals. She is a Clarion West graduate and is currently writing on a speculative-fiction novel. Her work is featured in Omenana, Wrap Around South, African Voices, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @Adanze1.

Author Spotlight: Matthew Kressel

Gordon B. White | 1604 words

Let’s start at the beginning: What was the inspiration behind this story? In particular, this story is bookended by allusions to Elvis Presley and Carl Sagan, so how did the idea to use those two as guideposts come about?

My father woke me up on April 12, 1981 to watch the very first Space Shuttle launch. I remember how it affected me and filled me with such pride and awe that we as a species were able to do that, to send human beings into space on a plane atop a column of fire. Fast forward to today, when we’re making leaps and bounds in space technology, but the public has mostly lost interest in it, at least it seems that way from my limited vantage point. And I thought, what would be better to grab the public’s imagination than a pop star performing songs in space? An early reader of the story described Jaim’s performance as a Beatles’ moment, when the world is bowled over by something profound and unexpected, and thereafter everything changes. Elvis was that, I think, for a lot of people, and I wanted the power of his influence to linger in the reader’s mind. I’m also a huge fan of Carl Sagan and his writing. What struck me when I first started reading his work was how poetic he can be. There were moments reading Pale Blue Dot where I just teared up, it’s so beautiful.

The first rule of online survival is “Never read the comments.” This story, however, not only combs through the comments but arranges them into a story about pop spectacle as a lens to explore representational identity and a broader perspective on being human. What was it about this kind of epistolary structure that you found attractive? Were there any particular challenges or unexpected freedoms that this approach presented?

So there are a million little pockets on the internet where one can find their particular tribe or band or kinfolk, and in each of these pockets there are these billion little conversations that happen, and it seems to me, as we get more and more connected, that it becomes harder and harder to filter out value from noise. One of the ways we self-filter the noise is by hunkering down inside one of these pockets (which some have called echo-chambers) and isolate ourselves from ideas which we find foreign or distasteful. I think, to get a clearer picture of humanity, at least for this story, it was important to show how, if not the whole world, certain corners of the planet might respond to Jaim’s performance. It would be naïve to think that everyone would react positively. I don’t think you can be fully honest without showing some ugliness.

As for the challenges, hoo-boy. I spent a lot of time reading articles, comments, and posts across the internet on almost all of the sources listed in the story. Some of the titles were ripped near verbatim from the headlines, with the salient points changed, of course. It was important for me to show how every culture would see Jaim through their own lens, and I had to make sure that what I wrote was honest and plausible and most of all respectful of that culture.

This story examines the theme of “visibility” on a number of levels, scaling from Jaim’s identity as a non-binary trans pop star to encompassing the entire “pale blue dot” of Earth. However, by building this story around the kind of online commentary that would normally go unread, all sorts of other voices—both positive and negative, rational and conspiratorial—are given their time in the spotlight, too. What is it about visibility on both the macro and micro platforms that so drives people? Here Jaim uses the visibility granted by their media platform for a positive message of inclusion which overwhelms the anonymous naysayers, but could this kind of access present a danger in a different context?

We’re social creatures and most of us want to be seen and heard. This is human nature. We need to be affirmed. The internet is a place where even the craziest most outlandish ideas can find an audience. When I was younger, I was taught that the “marketplace of ideas” always weeds out the bad ones. In other words, poison ideologies like Nazism would die out when better alternatives were made available. But what we’ve seen is that visibility often spreads toxic ideas just as easily as healthy ones. For example, there are more people today who think the Earth is flat than there were twenty years ago, and the internet mostly enabled that. So, no, visibility is not always a good thing.

On the other hand, I thought it was important to show how everyone would react to Jaim’s performance, including those views we might find toxic, in order to make the story honest. This is who we are, in other words, the good and the bad. I wanted to give the reader a kind of bird’s-eye view of humanity, and maybe, like the Apollo astronauts’ view of the Earth from the Moon, see the planet and our species a little differently after.

One of this story’s many interesting elements is the background noise of commerce and capitalism which surrounds, but does not seem to overwhelm, the human element. The premise starts with the world’s reaction to a pop star’s promotional video which drives clicks on a monetized video-sharing platform and inspires ubiquitous spam for knock-off uniforms, but also inspires (at least some) people to take a broader look at humanity’s shared experience. How do you see the interplay of commerce and human elements in this story? Is that commercial drive an inescapable part of existence on Earth and, if so, is it a pervading negative influence or is it a force that can be harnessed for good?

Capitalism is with us now, and contrary to a lot of talk on the internet, I don’t see it leaving us anytime soon. Capitalism loves to take profound, often intangible ideas and package them in easy to swallow nuggets. Anything that can be sold, will, and even things that can’t be sold will too. And so I think that Jaim would not be immune from any of that. SpaceX wants to get paid, the record company wants to get paid, YouTube wants to get paid, etc. And then there would be the usual food chain of capitalists, who profit from Jaim’s stardom by selling everything from concert tickets down to unlicensed replica jumpsuits probably made in some sweatshop in Asia with child labor. The beauty of Jaim’s performance doesn’t erase the ugliness of the world, but maybe it forces us to become more aware of that ugliness and do something about it.

And the thing about capitalism is that its vectors are well known. It relies on human labor, and there is a moment in the story, however brief, when the engine of capitalism stops as everyone pauses to watch Jaim perform. The world holds its collective breath, and I think of this moment in the meditative sense, a stepping back from the day-to-day do-as-much-as-you-possibly-can grind to self-reflect. Jaim lets the world see itself, if only for an instant.

When the wheel of capitalism starts spinning again, things seemingly go back to the way they were, yet somehow that brief moment of pause and introspection changes things. The ten billion voices, for a brief time, all paused to look up. Will they remember what they saw and felt, and change their course because of it? Maybe. I hope so. I like to think some of them will be inspired the way I was inspired back in 1981 with the first Space Shuttle launch. Maybe they’ll decide humanity has a larger destiny and begin working to bring that about.

And, yes, I do think capitalism can be harnessed for good, so long as you’re clever about it. Solar power is cheaper than coal. Electric cars will soon be on par or cheaper than internal combustion vehicles. Economics is driving their adoption, not altruism. Maybe at some point we’ll all have Universal Basic Income and replicators and the engine of capitalism will stall, but until then we have to be smart and use capitalism to bring about the world we want to live in. Capitalism has its dark side, for sure, made all the more prevalent by the widening gap between rich and poor. But its greatest weakness is its single-mindedness, always towards profit, and so by making the world we want to live in the most economical one, we can steer the capitalist ship in a better direction. This is incredibly hard, but possible.

Finally, what’s coming up next on your horizon? Beyond your concrete plans, are there any big ideas or grand plans that you’re working towards—maybe not quite an author reading while in orbit (or maybe!) but anything else you’re excited to tease?

I’ve just finished a science fiction novel for young adults that I’m shopping around. And I have a few shorts coming out soon in various anthologies. Other than that, I’m just working on some new short fiction, before I dive headfirst into another novel project.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Gordon B. White has lived in North Carolina, New York, and the Pacific Northwest. He is a 2017 graduate of the Clarion West Writing Workshop, and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as Daily Science Fiction, A Breath from the Sky: Unusual Stories of Possession, Nightscript Vol. 2, and the Bram Stoker Award® winning anthology Borderlands 6. Gordon is also an Assistant Editor with Kraken Press and conducts reviews and interviews for various outlets. You can find him online at gordonbwhite.com or on Twitter at @GordonBWhite.

Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro

Laurel Amberdine | 447 words

I liked the bit about the silliness of superhero names, and noticed that you didn’t specify the protagonist’s own. Did you work on any prospects for that, or did you always prefer to leave that up to the reader’s imagination?

I may have considered a sobriquet at some point, but in writing the story no name-dropping moment ever came up.

This seems like a nice, fun example of the benefits of being modestly successful at something—no stress over having to prove yourself, no stress over always struggling to stay at the top. I thought of writers, of course, but what really inspired this idea?

I have always loved the obscure superheroes who exist at the fringes of the Marvel and DC Universes, taking care of their little corners of creation—and indeed I note that Marvel’s Luke Cage, Daredevil, and Spider-Man are very much within this tradition, despite forces that sometimes draw them to more universal concerns. I was a deep fan of Squirrel Girl before she hit the big time, and when writing Spider-Man I did my little bit—unappreciated—to expand the fame of Razorback, the hero whose helmet is a giant pig head.

Since I mentioned writing careers, yours seems to me both successful and wide-ranging! Are there any new forms or genres or markets you still want to try out? Any new goals you have an eye on?

As I’ve had cause to note my last few appearances, I have completed a novel-length crime thriller that has yet to be snatched up. I’d love to write a novel of Vonnegutian satire, and—more unlikely—have vague ambitions of someday attempting a romance novel, strange for a guy who has thus far only done a couple of identifiable love stories.

What have you been reading lately that you want to recommend?

I love Until the Last Dog Dies by Robert Guffey and provided a rave cover quote for Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks. I am currently reading a recent novel by Walter Mosley and am looking forward to the next Hap and Leonard novel by Joe Lansdale. I think N.K. Jemisin kicks all sorts of unholy butt. I have an Ellen Datlow anthology ready to go.

Do you have any new releases that you’d like our readers know about?

Skyboat Media’s audio collection of my fiction, And Other Stories (adbl.co/2JTRN0z).

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.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 240 words

Coming up in June, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Deji Bryce Olukotun (“Between the Dark and the Dark”) and G.V. Anderson (“The Harvest of a Half-Known Life”), along with SF reprints by Ken Liu (“An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition”) and Yoon Ha Lee (“Warhosts”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Isabel Cañas (“The Weight of a Thousand Needles”) and Caspian Gray (“Unpublished Gay Cancer Survivor Memoir”), and fantasy reprints by Karen Joy Fowler (“The Last Worders”) and Ellen Kushner (“When Two Swordsmen Meet”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. We’ll also have an interview with debut novelist—and frequent Lightspeed contributor—Cadwell Turnbull.

For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint and a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

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: Violet Allen, Senaa Ahmad, Dominica Phetteplace, Adam-Troy Castro, Rajan Khanna, and Brooke Bolander.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that speculative 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.